Page 62 - Total War on PTSD

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 options for alternative medical treatments. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) was somewhat successful but was difficult to deliver in the way that it was needed. To be effective with CBT, you have to do a lot of therapy and you have to do it quite often...and there generally weren't enough therapists or time available to make that work. So, we started trying to educate the VA about the benefits of acupuncture and other somatic therapies for Veterans. Because the VA is a big bureaucracy and it's also controlled by Congress, it meant that the hoops that we had to jump through to even be considered...for acupuncture to even be considered as a valid therapy...were nearly impossible to overcome.
It wasn't until 2017 that acupuncture is really started to be introduced into the VA medical system as a whole. It is also only within the last year that professional, credentialed acupuncturists have been hired to work for the VA. It took 14-15 years for that to finally happen. In the regular military it was faster because the Department of Defense is in charge rather than Congress. One of the limitations hindering acupuncture within the VA is a lack of physical space
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