Page 73 - Total War on PTSD

being developed by some creative practitioners in the South Bronx; but also due to Nixon and James Reston coming back from China.
The person who really worked with this at Lincoln Hospital was Dr. Michael Smith. He was an MD, and he worked with other practitioners in the drug rehabilitation unit of Lincoln Hospital. It was really a team approach of numerous practitioners who kind of distilled the NADA 5-NP into what we use today. This protocol has been used for 30 years now. Again, it was initially used as a drug rehabilitation treatment, then as a pain treatment, and more recently (maybe the last 15 years or so) as a trauma treatment. The reason acupuncture in general is useful for PTSD as well for pain and drug addiction is that it works with the brain's chemistry...it works to regulate the system...and when I say regulate, I mean that very physiologically. This is because, in trauma, the nervous system and the whole body is dis-regulated. And so you can't process the experience of trauma when you're in a dis-regulated state. Literally, you can't process something if the frontal cortex of your brain isn't getting any blood. When you are in a trauma state, that part of your brain is not getting any blood. The blood is going to the part of your brain that is involved with emotional development, emotional memory formation, and survival (the limbic system part of your brain). When you have a traumatic experience or cumulative traumatic experiences you tend to be in a dis-regulated state and things like acupuncture have a regulatory effect and help you to reset the body...using the body's own chemistry to do so. As a result, you don't have to use drugs. With this kind of somatic (or physical) treatment, you have to do some sort of somatic or physical intervention in trauma treatment so that then, the brain as well as the rest of the body, regulates and can actually function normally enough to process the experience.
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