Page 61 - Total War on PTSD

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 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
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