The best PTSD treatment you've never heard of - Garry Trudeau (Doonesbury)

[erronis]

Garry Trudeau is the creator of Doonesbury, where he has been commenting on wounded warrior issues for more than three decades.

All around the conference room in Atlanta last fall, jaws were dropping. Michael Roy, a physician from the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, had just revealed to the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies the preliminary results of a study comparing two treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder: Prolonged Exposure (PE) therapy, long regarded as the “gold standard,” and a novel approach called Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories or RTM.

In such a study, effectiveness is indicated by a complete remission of symptoms, a loss of diagnosis. Roy’s trial was ongoing and still double-blinded, so he could report only the outcomes of the two treatments combined. But the success rate was a stunning 60 percent. Every expert present knew that PE’s known remission rate hovers at 30 to 40 percent, so the 60 percent combined figure could only mean only one thing: The new RTM treatment was tracking dramatically higher.

From the back of the room, PE researchers glowered at Roy: Way too good to be true, dude.

Except it wasn’t. Afterward, the praise from colleagues was effusive, with one top researcher telling RTM’s creator, Frank Bourke, that the presentation was a “home run.” At the same time, a PTSD researcher from the Department of Veterans Affairs approached one of Bourke’s teammates and said coldly, “I don’t think it’s useful to pick fights” — as though RTM’s success had been a provocation.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/ptsd-treatment-veterans-medicine-mental-health/
Archived: https://archive.is/20230710131240/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/10/ptsd-treatment-veterans-medicine-mental-health/

From the post by LymphocyteLover - https://www.democraticunderground.com/100218077551 - thank you LL!

[Pinback]

1. Wow. Amazing advancement!

I hope this holds up and helps a lot of people. Thanks for the encouraging post!

[niyad]

2. Thoroughly disgusted KNR. I cannot write the words that are screaming in my

head right now. Having spent nearly my entire life dealing with PTSD (first my father and his contemporaries, and then the Vietnam era vets), learning that there is an apparently effective treatment that the VA is, in essence, sitting on, makes me want to scream, and do unspeakable things.

I will stop before the suits get upset.

May all involved receive everything they deserve.

[haele]

4. It's still in double blind testing :(

It is aggravating; the VA can't just greenlight a promising experimental treatment like the FDA does, which makes it difficult to get newer or still under testing treatments out to the general Veteran community.

The Elephant in the Room is the politics involved concerning the VA, Congressional whims and funding shortfalls can kill a promising program or limit treatments for a recognized disability; the VA balances keeping their doors open with their testing and trial treatments - and keeping the doors open always wins. While the DoD may want the treatment to help with cost-cutting, Congress doesn't care.
Congresscritters only care about what the VA looks like to their constituents, and if the majority aren't aware there's science going on that can make their lives easier, Congress is perfectly happy to play budget games that will put critical VA studies on hold so they can claim they're making the VA more 'efficient' or accountable to those pesky damaged Vets that aren't dying off quick enough for Red State bean counters.

They still can't allow Vets to use CBD for chronic pain due to Congress. And we can all see the shit Tuberville is pulling because the DoD is trying to provide basic full OB/GYN service to the military member's and dependents in those GOP lunatic states hell-bent on turning women into second class breeding stock.

Yes, I'm mad too. But I'm also resigned.

Haele

[stopdiggin]

5. I don't think 'sitting on' is really the right take here.

This reporting seems to clearly portray the new method as still experimental and by extension unproven. Promising results (thus far), yes ... But ...

Edit: Apparently more track record than first supposed (although still within a fairly small segment of treatment practitioner community?) But article still references 'waiting on full results' which is probably only proper - and doesn't really support a 'sitting on' version or description.

Given the stakes, this fight is one worth picking. Roy’s final, unblinded results are expected later this year, and they will likely mirror those of four previous clinical studies. Many people in the trauma care community aren’t waiting: More than 300 therapists from private practices to local health centers to Vet Centers have already adopted the RTM protocol to treat PTSD. It’s currently in front-line use in Poland as well as in besieged Ukraine, which has a 160-person waiting list of therapists scheduled for training.

Any promising scientific breakthrough should always be greeted with skepticism and intense scrutiny of its supporting data. But it should never be ignored.

[mia]

3. Fascinating article about RTM treatment.

Thank you for posting this. I enjoyed learning more about it. Here's an overview of how RTM works:
https://thertmprotocol.com/content.aspx
https://thertmprotocol.com/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=954411&module_id=383941

[peppertree]

6. As a wise man said: To survive, we must remember everything

[highplainsdem]

7. It's NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) based. Links and video.

https://jmvfh.utpjournals.press/doi/full/10.3138/jmvfh.2996

https://anlp.org/blog/reconsolidation-of-traumatic-memories-an-nlp-based-protocol-for-ptsd-treatment


2013 video from Dr. Frank Bourke, described by Trudeau as RTM's creator:

[erronis]

9. Thank you - so much more to learn!

[Warpy]

8. Interesting

that such a simple set of mental gymnastics can work that well.

[Jarqui]

10. This concept makes more sense than you might imagine to me

In 1997, I suffered speech impediment and words loss from toxic exposure to chemicals including carbon monoxide.
I did a whole bunch of testing and medical efforts.
I was gradually getting better but the rate was far too slow.
In 2005, I tried writing some software automating Roget's Thesaurus to help me play a computer game to find alternate words when I was stuck trying to retrieve the one I wanted. Again, it helped but was taking too long to improve me.
In the early-mid 2000s, I was posting on another forum and this forum to exercise and practice my skills. I made the same error I had made sending an email to my sister. That was a significant realization.
When we get a repeatable error like that in computers, we usually correctly conclude that the hard disk media where the data was stored has a fault - it is damaged. So rather than the brain motor skills to find the word being compromised, it narrowed the problem to the place in my brain where my memory stored the words.
So the next trick was: how do we move the memory of those words to another undamaged location?
I researched it and it was suggested that if one associated an image with each word, more memory area would be required so the memory would be moved to a new and probably healthy location.
The next problem was the English language is over a million words. 100 per day would take 27 years.
But I found a listing of the 50,000 most common words which would cover the vast majority of my language use. I was able to do them in about 9 months.
I did this under the supervision of doctors and a speech therapist who were very interested in the idea.
It worked. The perseverations of 9 years went away. I could think while I spoke rather than be in panic mode trying to find words. I still have some perseverations on the other 950,000+ words but people don't notice and they have gradually reduced over time.

Speech impediment is obviously not the same as PTSD but the concept of what they're talking about makes a ton of sense after my experience. I have also been diagnosed with PTSD from other nasty events in my life. I've initiated efforts to try this treatment.

[erronis]

11. That's a fascinating story - and it seems very pertinent to the methods in this article.

Glad you were able to self-train, along with some doctors' assistance. I'll be there are lots of these types of self-corrections that feed into the general concept.