In 2017, Justin Coffeen left a clinical practice in chiropractic medicine and enlisted in the United States Air Force. He served in a medical unit until his honorable discharge in 2020. The transition from practice to military service to clinical research was not a series of separate careers. Each period shaped how he approaches the next.
What Military Service Requires
Military service, particularly in a medical unit, requires a specific relationship with procedure. Protocols exist for a reason, and that reason is not bureaucratic. In high-stakes environments, standard operating procedures are what prevent individual judgment errors from compounding. A team that follows a checklist is more reliable than one that trusts experience alone — not because experience is unimportant, but because checklists catch the things experience overlooks.
That orientation toward procedure is not intuitive for everyone who comes to clinical research from a clinical background. Clinicians are trained to make judgment calls. A practitioner who has spent years adjusting treatment based on patient presentation can find it uncomfortable to follow a protocol that does not account for what they are observing. But the whole point of a clinical trial is that the protocol reflects the study design — and deviation from the protocol, even well-intentioned deviation, is a protocol deviation.
The Discipline of Documentation
Military environments also require a discipline around documentation that translates directly to clinical research. In a medical unit, records are not optional. They are the mechanism by which care is transferred across shifts, providers, and locations. Incomplete documentation is not an administrative inconvenience — it is a gap in the care record that the next provider has to work around.
Clinical research operates on the same logic. Source documentation is what allows a monitor, a sponsor, or a regulatory reviewer to reconstruct what happened at a site visit. If the documentation is incomplete, the data is not credible — and data that is not credible cannot support the safety and efficacy conclusions a trial is designed to produce.
Working Under Hierarchy and Across Teams
Military service also develops the ability to work effectively within hierarchical structures while collaborating across teams with different roles and priorities. A clinical research site involves a similar dynamic: a principal investigator, a research team, a sponsor, a contract research organization, an IRB, and the participants themselves all have legitimate roles in the process, and those roles sometimes create competing pressures.
The ability to communicate clearly within those structures — to escalate appropriately, to document concerns, to work through chain of command rather than around it — is not something that comes automatically from clinical training. It is something military service develops deliberately.
What It Adds Up To
Justin Coffeen came to clinical research with a Doctor of Chiropractic Medicine, a background in clinical education, and three years of military service. None of these is sufficient on its own to make someone an effective research professional. Together, they produce someone who understands clinical medicine well enough to engage meaningfully with protocols and participant data, who has the documentation discipline that military service instills, and who has spent time in structured environments where following procedure is a professional value rather than an inconvenience.
Read more about protocol adherence and lessons from a military medical unit, or about what GCP compliance looks like in practice. Learn more about Justin Coffeen.