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Research Opinions And Feedback Needed - Grad Student Work On Pts Community

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I'm curious - are you examining 'traditional' vs. 'alternative', or 'traditional' plus 'alternative'? Those are two very different things, as I'm sure you know. But here, you referenced:
There have been a few studies published in various medical magazines that promote the benefit of breathing based yoga that has shown to have better results than traditional psychotherapy alone...
And here, you say:
Absolutely, I wanted to get a sense of what people in this forum feel about the current offerings in treatment, the more traditional versus alternative. The studies I came across seemed to point that alternative methods are producing better results. In one case study, traditional therapy led to relapses in PTS patients where a group that tried SKY yoga seemed to see better long term results.
(bolding mine for emphasis)

There's a great deal of data starting to emerge on the overall benefits of things like mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and their connections to neuro-plasticity and the support of cognitive function, improvement, overall brain health. But whether or not these things are a complete replacement for other types of therapy that are more directly targeted at the trauma event itself (PE, EMDR, TF-CBT) - that's a different question, and I'm just wondering which one you are examining.

Also, when you say 'traditional', what do you mean - how broad/narrow are you defining it?
And, do you have the same parameters defined for 'alternative', or are you still developing those?
And (last one!), how does medication factor in - both typical med mgmt strategies and atypical/'herbal'/supplement/mineral?

I hope this doesn't sound like grilling - I'm genuinely curious.
 
Echoing some of JL's head scratching...

Yoga is exercise. If you take almost any illness, mental illness or otherwise, and compare a group having 'treatment' against a group doing 'treatment plus exercise', the group doing 'treatment plus exercise' are going to have better short and long term outcomes.

There doesn't seem to be anything blowing my mind about the suggestion that if you add exercise (in pretty much any form) people are going to have better outcomes...?:tdown:
 
alternative methods are producing better results.

I would be very cautious about this one.

The "why" is that I've done many things that have provided instant to short term relief of symptoms. Some of them healthy (like exercise), others -ironically ones that often work better in the short term- are clearly unhealthy. The healthy symptom management tools helped work to get me to being symptom free for over a decade. But here's the rub; I didn't do any kind of traditional trauma therapy my first run through being highly symptomatic with PTSD. It took me about 5 years to learn to manage my symptoms, and then I had a virtually symptom free decade. But the first time I was hit with new trauma? All of the old stuff that I'd never dealt with came flooding back.

Symptom management, in my experience, is "just" a piece of dealing with trauma. One of the bigger pieces, for certain. But only a piece. The actual trauma... The pieces I've already dealt with? Granted, on accident, but that were well & truly processed through? Don't still gut me. They haven't destroyed my life all over again (and I'm not being dramatic there but pragmatic; from successful in all definitions of the word to losing almost everything). It's all the parts of trauma that I never dealt with that have brought me back to being completely unmanaged, again. Having to relearn everything I learned the first go-round. ((And, yes, I'm 4 years into this run...and in many ways far less functional than I was the first time around.))

So, when looking at results? I would be very careful to look at long term results, and what happens when re-exposed to trauma, and not just immediate or short term relief from symptoms.

Even people who have well and truly processed their trauma can expect a symptom spike when new trauma hits. Nature of the beast. What I've noticed, however, is that it doesn't tend to knock them all the way back to the word Go. They have new trauma to sort, manage that, and move on. They don't have new trauma piled on top of old trauma. So it may be a few months of dealing with new things, not years and years of being just as f*cked up as they were way back when.
 
I'm curious as to why you're comparing alternative treatment methods to traditional psychotherapy. From all I've read, traditional psychotherapy isn't in the top preferred therapies for trauma/PTSD. I guess it just seems like such a comparison would yield somewhat useless results. Not trying to be rude or anything-------but why compare alternative therapies to what amounts to a fifth rate type of therapy that isn't cutting edge in the trauma world (and hasn't been in quite a few decades).

I think if you wanted a study with more validity you'd compare alternative therapies to the top trauma therapies out there------EMDR, exposure therapy, CBT, DBT, and so on.
 
Yes, and to add to what Eve just said, transcranial magnetic stimulation. That sounds like a promising therapy from what I've read on here, but there still needs to be a lot of research to really pinpoint the area of the brain that needs it for various mental health problems.
 
Hi Amanda.

I'll try to come back to this over the coming days - It's midnight here and I've had a long day, so my thoughts are probably going to be developing a bit more after I've slept.

First of all, we've a huge question about paradigms for what defines a disorder, as compared to "normal" functioning, and normal reactions to events

and within that, questions of how much of psychology and psychiatry consists of falsely medicalizing social control (It's not many weeks ago that one of the members here commented about their sexual orientation (bi/pan) being seized upon to support a diagnosis of "borderline personality",

It's well within my lifetime that Homosexuality was still listed as psychiatric condition, and I notice that Drapetomania is here again, on its second re-brand https://www.myptsd.com/c/threads/alternative-dictionary-of-therapy-humor.54567/page-2#post-917825
)?

How much of the definitions and thresholds consists of a cosy relationship between psychiatric associations and big pharma - both rent seeking looking for secure incomes?

and how much the influence of a state sector, which at the individual level, enjoys contributions, consultancy, chances of directorships and jobs for the family, at the bureaucratic incentives level wants to justify its existence and grow departments, and on the accountancy side, tries to avoid the economic outcomes of excessive state sector spending seen in Japan, Venezuela and the PIIIGS.

Do we have big etiologies, such as CPTSD/Developmental Trauma, or lots of little overlapping co morbid ones, eg PTSD, BPD, ADD, ADhD, Bi Polar, GAD, Drapetomania, cats and dogs living together peacefully?

Then there are the rival paradigms for what causes the problems once identified ; chemical? wiring? cognitive? genetic? behavioural? spiritual? hermaneutics/neuro-linguistics? social?
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Breathing certainly has a long history as a method for grounding and controlling stress in dangerous situations, Many of the martial arts use breathing either implicitly or explicitly, and some use voice too. At least one school was making very extravagant claims about the health benefits of its breathing exercises (the people making the claims had previously tried to market their school with reference to special forces, then to a church... both of those claims were later shown to be bullshido).

I'm fond of Porges' idea that breathing is an indirect route, and probably the only route from the conscious brain, to the viscera, and back up the vagal nerve to calm the completely not conscious and non verbal limbic brain.
I also like Sebern Fisher's idea of using neuro feedback (operant conditioning) to calm and regulate the right limbic brain.

I'm not entirely convinced about how non verbal the parts of the brain associated with traumatic stress are - what I suspect was one of my early traumas occured when I was about 6 months old. I didn't start speaking until about 9 months.
At about 7 or 8 years old, hearing mention of subjects associated with what happened would cause me to dissociate and de-realize, sometimes for several days. So words could trigger - but according to some people, they cannot calm.

One of our members was in contact with one of the American researchers (guy who lost an eye and likes mountain biking). Anyway, it seems that most, if not all people who are into extreme sports have PTSD. The sports often require mindful focus and develop a sense of self agency
Some also have a big element of self endangerment, so there is a question of whether the practice is healing or self harming.
@
 
I've used CBT, EMDR, acupuncture, mental imagery, art, EFT (emotional freedom technique), prayer, mindfulness, journaling, meditation, essential oils, membership on this forum, breathing awareness (relearning really), chiropractic, Western Medicine and Reiki to address healing my PTSD.

For me PTSD operates on the levels of physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual. I use what I have/can/need at any given time for the symptoms I am dealing with. It's taken a lot to put myself back together.

I have consistently seen a therapist and an acupuncturist throughout my treatment.
 
I forgot IFS - Internal Family Systems.
My therapist is taking the classes on Somatic Experiencing so we've done a little of that as well.

Does it come down to treating PTSD exactly or treating trauma?
It ends up being hard to categorize but I can see the value of studies showing proven treatments.
 
I'm going to outright say, I do not believe alternative therapy such as yoga is having the same, and better, results as trauma therapies in treating PTSD. I want to see the data please, and the quality of these studies and whether they stand-up empirically. Are there blind studies, double blind? What placebo is being used? What are the numbers studied?

Yes, alternative studies are certainly complementing trauma therapies in treating PTSD effectively, but I have not seen valid claims where yoga is having the same effect as trauma therapies within empirically validated studies.
 
I'm curious - are you examining 'traditional' vs. 'alternative', or 'traditional' plus 'alternative'...
Thanks for your feedback! From the items I've come across (and I haven't even scratched the surface yet) there are researchers that are making broad statements that I understood as "SKY yoga worked better in the long term for PTS patients than did psychotherapy". Amy Cuddy's book is written for the ley person, but this retelling of the research struck me as a bit...fantastical? My professor actually recommended I reach out to a PTS community to see how these sweeping statements are taken from those dealing with it, or how they've shaped perception of the PTS issue. If researchers are communicating this way, I feel it's oversimplifying the issue and should not be reported as such to the general population . In essence, I think that's what I am trying to get at now, having seen all of the replies here. Are the studies being reported even reflecting the reality of the community?
 
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