Larry,
Before you assume that someone is deleting your posts – did you check that your long post actually became visible on the forum? If not, please read the forum FAQ about “Your Internet Connection - Losing Your Writing”, and remember that there are many pieces of computer and network software between your computer and this forum. Long posts run a real risk of being lost due to Web browser, operating system, or Internet connection problems, none of which have anything to do with this forum and which the forum's admins cannot influence in any way.
I deemed this post of mine likely to become a longish one, so I wrote it in a word processor and saved it as a file locally, so if something goes wrong in the posting, I don't have to rewrite everything. You can take that as a friendly suggestion.
About the issue itself:
From what I have observed, the growth of the medical body of knowledge quite often follows this type of a trajectory for an issue:
- descriptions and observations of a problem, which is deemed to me medical in nature and which may or may not be a new phenomenon (e.g. some women die of childbed fever soon after giving birth)
- hypotheses – quite often more than one - about what causes the problem (e.g. breathing night air, wrong diet prior to giving birth, sin, wrong position while giving birth, “something” that causes the disease moves from an already ill person to a healthy one, the evil eye...)
- more or less thoroughly tested suggestions for a cure - usually more than one (e.g. Ignaz Semmelweis' systematic observations that mortality from childbed fever goes down from 10-35% to under 1%, if midwives and doctors wash their hands with a solution of chlorinated lime when they move from one maternity ward patient to another)
- isolation of and proof for at least one cause of the problem (e.g. Louis Pasteur's observation of that bacteria exist and are connected to illness)
- connection between cause and cure (repeated statistical proof through controlled tests that bacteria X causes a certain type of childbed fever and that antibiotic Y kills bacteria X effectively enough to cure that type of childbed fever, both in petri dishes and in real patients)
Based on the above and if I am not grossly mistaken, to convince any person who is capable of critical thought, you need to at least establish the following:
- what hypothesis of the cause of PTSD the treatment/cure you advocate is based on
- what objective, peer-reviewed, widely enough published research results exist that support that hypothesis for the cause
- what the main components of the treatment/cure you suggest are (described in enough detail)
- how those components of that treatment/cure are related to the proposed cause of PTSD
- what objective, peer-reviewed, widely enough published research results exist that have sought to measure the effectiveness of that treatment/cure for PTSD
- what objective, peer-reviewed, widely enough published research results exist that have sought to measure the ineffectiveness and/or unwelcome side-effects of that treatment/cure, if it is used for PTSD
My credentials? Both parents - though they sucked as parents - were capable medical clinicians and researchers and good teachers, and I was and still am quite interested in their work. Also, I graduated with a nurse's degree and worked in the field 1983-1987, before I discovered computers.
Athena