Page 60 - Total War on PTSD

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.
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
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