New Age Treatments for a New Age of Warfare: Army Seeking Alternative, Holistic Therapy Research Proposals

Noah Shachtman at Wired (and cheers back to you, Noah, for the 'special thanks' mention and link to PTSD Combat) looks at the Army's obviously necessity-inspired opening-up of minds and pocketbooks regarding the use and exploration of alternative treatment options for wounded returning troops:

The military is scrambling for new ways to treat the brain injuries and post-traumatic stress of troops returning home from war. And every kind of therapy -- no matter how far outside the accepted medical form -- is being considered. The Army just unveiled a $4 million program to investigate everything from "spiritual ministry, transcendental meditation, [and] yoga" to "bioenergies such as Qi gong, Reiki, [and] distant healing" to mend the psyches of wounded troops. ...

The Defense Department "is dedicated to supporting evidence-based approaches to medical treatment and wants to support the use of alternative therapies if they are proven efficacious," notes a recently-issued request for proposals.

But many of these treatments haven't been held up to much rigorous scientific scrutiny before. So the Army is looking to hand out $4 million in "seedling grants" to "conduc[t] rigorous clinical studies" into all sorts of "novel approaches." Projects "containing preliminary data" will be eligible for up to $1 million. But even "innovative but testable hypotheses without preliminary data" could get as much as $300,000. Proposals are due May 15.

Full Defense Center of Excellence for Psychological Health (PH) and Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) program announcement for the Military Psychological Health Research – Complementary and Alternative Strategies grant is available online as an MS Word doc. Grant instructions and application forms are available, too.

PTSD Training Arrives in the Pacific Theater

From Stars & Stripes:

YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — Training in a new therapy touted to cut recovery time for U.S. troops suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder will be brought to the Pacific for the first time next month.

The therapy — Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing — allows troops to tackle trauma in brief sequential doses while moving their eyes back and forth. Positive imagery is introduced and reinforced during the eye movement, and eventually replaces the trauma in eight sessions, according to the EMDR Web site. ... “EMDR tends to be fast-acting and does not require [the] client to disclose the details of the painful event,” Smith said. “EMDR is cited for its potential rapidity, efficiency, and well-tolerated treatment effects.”

It is one of four therapies recommended in the 2004 Veterans Affairs/Department of Defense Clinical Practice Guidelines for Management of Traumatic Stress report. However, many mental health professionals have not been trained in EMDR nor in the top three other methods (cognitive therapy, exposure therapy and stress inoculation), said Cmdr. Mark Russell, a psychologist at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni. “Out of 133 mental health providers I surveyed, 90 percent of them had no training in the top four treatments the DOD recommends for PTSD,” Russell said in September in a speech given to the Multinational Medical Conference in Yokosuka.