WaPo's Series on Walter Reed

The most recent series about Walter Reed and the lack of psychiatric care is heartbreaking. The last two pieces I have read have specifically been about PTSD and the lack of care our wounded soldiers are getting when they return. What is particularly frustrating is that when I was at Balticon we had a small discussion at one panel about how effective the eye movement therapy (EMDR) is very promising. My own doctor told me about this several years ago. Why aren't our soldiers getting the option of this treatment?

http://www.fsu.edu/~trauma/a1v5i4.htm

Combat Studies Providing Full Treatment

Only one EMDR study has provided a full course of treatment for combat veterans with PTSD. Carlson et al. (1998) randomly assigned 35 Vietnam combat veterans to a wait list control, or to 12 treatment sessions of biofeedback relaxation, or EMDR. At post-treatment, the EMDR group had significantly lower scores on instruments measuring PTSD and depression than the wait list. At 3-month follow-up, EMDR had significantly lower scores than the biofeedback relaxation group on measures of PTSD and self-reported symptoms. Both treatment groups and the wait list control showed significant improvement on physiological measures with no differences between groups. This decrease in physiological arousal was maintained at 3 month follow-up. Nine of the ten EMDR subjects completed the 9 month follow-up which confirmed the maintenance of treatment effects. Seventy-eight percent of the EMDR subjects no longer met the diagnostic criteria for PTSD. This study controls for the often neglected variable of therapist allegiance (Hollon, 1999), as the non-EMDR subjects received the treatment to which the therapist had allegiance. Because biofeedback relaxation therapy has not been designated an efficacious treatment for PTSD, it could be argued that this study does not compare EMDR to another acknowledged effective treatment, but only controls for some of the nonspecific effects of treatment.

Emphasis mine.