Page 75 - Total War on PTSD

fact that the things that create pain in the body, as well as addiction and trauma; a lot of those system pathways are the same or shared. With acupuncture you have one treatment that works with all of those things together. That's part of why it's very useful. It's because it's one treatment that works on the entire system to re-regulate it. That's our goal with acupuncture...to re-regulate and balance the brain chemistry so that then people can think more clearly, and can be in a better mood, and reduce pain and sleep better, etc. Helping to reduce trauma helps with pain, and vice versa. PTSD is not the event, it is the way we process it. If you can intervene with some sort of somatic treatment like acupuncture right away then you can actually re- regulate the system so that the cascade of chemically based events and metabolic events don't happen. Then the trauma imprint isn't developed in the first place. People will often ask if a single treatment is enough and the answer is yes. If you can treat a person shortly after something bad happens to them then you can change the direction of the body's response. I have treated numerous Vietnam Veterans, and they have dealt with their PTSD for, on average, 45 years. If you're consistent, and especially if you combine acupuncture with other kinds of treatments, after a couple of years you can really see huge differences...so for longer-term or chronic PTSD, consistent treatment is what matters the most.
You can use certain drugs in certain situations, like anti-psychotics and anti-depressants and all these other kinds of drugs and they may only be useful for a certain amount of time. The data is just not supportive of pharmacological approaches to PTSD being very effective. That's why we started a project that would help spread the use of simple ear acupuncture for trauma given that so many people were coming back with issues and they weren't getting any treatment that was working. Meanwhile, in around 2004, some people working in the VA system started looking at
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