Page 74 - Total War on PTSD

We don't, for example, just advocate the use of acupuncture. Ideally, you would have acupuncture and then you'd have a really good psychological counselor so that you can actually process some of what you have experienced. We like to use acupuncture as an immediate intervention, often in concert with other therapies. There are other kinds of somatic treatments that you can use like somatic experiencing, certain types of meditation, craniosacral work, some of the Yoga practices including Qigong. These are all physically based practices that help re- regulate the system when it's dis-regulated. Then you have a better chance of being able to process your trauma emotionally. So, that's our role, as an organization.
We started in earnest as Acupuncturists Without Borders (AWB) after Hurricane Katrina, then, after we started doing the work in New Orleans, for a couple years it was kind of the high point of the Iraq/Afghanistan conflicts and we were seeing a lot of people coming back from those places with a lot of PTSD. That has always been the case with war, if you go back and look at historical writings you can see that there's always been PTSD. Emergency and military medicine has been better and better at saving people's lives through the years. But then you are left with military personnel and Veterans with a lot of damage, including things like Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) and PTSD. So, you see a lot of people who lived through very difficult situations but can end up very challenged. The use of drugs to try to manage the symptomatology was obviously compounding the problem for many of the Veterans. This is because a lot of the drugs we do have available for mental health treatment have very limited effect on PTSD.
Often PTSD doesn't exist by itself. You will have other things...pain...TBI...substance dependence. It just becomes a more complicated situation. What's good about acupuncture is, like I said, it started as a drug treatment, and it works well for pain. A lot of it has to do with the
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