https://www.washingtonpost.com...icine-mental-health/
From the back of the room, PE researchers glowered at Roy: Way too good to be true, dude....
Roy’s final, unblinded results are expected later this year, and they will likely mirror those of four previous clinical studies. Many people in the trauma care community aren’t waiting: More than 300 therapists from private practices to local health centers to Vet Centers have already adopted the RTM protocol to treat PTSD. It’s currently in front-line use in Poland as well as in besieged Ukraine, which has a 160-person waiting list of therapists scheduled for training....
Up to 20 percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans still suffer from PTSD in any given year, and the federal government estimates that, since 9/11, more than 30,000 lives have been lost to suicide. Established treatments such as Cognitive Processing Therapy and Prolonged Exposure have limited capacity to achieve symptom remission and loss of diagnosis, require prolonged sessions, and have dropout rates of 50 percent and higher.
In contrast, RTM requires only three to four sessions, totaling about five hours, and involves no drugs or re-traumatization. Therapists can be trained in three days, and treatment can be conducted online. Best of all, the effects last. As one veteran put it, “Who knew that you could retrain your brain in a few hours, without medication, to remove yourself from the traumatic events that have been crushing you and making you wish you would just die?”
How does RTM work? Bourke explains it like this: “The technique is actually a neurological intervention that takes a traumatic memory and restructures it using several exercises like visualizing it as a black-and-white movie. The revised memory updates the original — reconsolidation.”
That’s pretty much it. But what sounds simple is, in fact, very sophisticated and has been continuously refined over the years. Reconsolidation was initially discovered in the late 1960s by neuroscientists studying the process by which memories are stored and retrieved. What differentiates RTM from previous treatments is that it is not psychotherapy — it is a directed intervention that takes 89 discrete steps, and it has been manualized. This formal sequencing is what makes it so easy to train practitioners....
Of particular interest to lawmakers should be the tremendous savings in PTSD treatment costs for military populations — over $25,000 in annual costs per individual with traditional therapies versus RTM treatment at $1,000 per individual.
Secondly, Congress should appropriate funding to the Defense Health Agency to stand up comparative effective field studies, train therapists and put them to work relieving the suffering of afflicted active duty service members and veterans. While large-scale, randomized control studies such as the one taking place at Walter Reed are scientifically necessary and should be expanded, there’s no reason to deny service personnel the relief they need now.
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