Using MDMA to Treat PTSD?

@Six-Two you are mistaken about the mental health "gold standard". Medications are meant to stabilize in order to attend therapy. It's a "bandaid" for the brain. With that, the individual has to want to get healthy and participate in the treatment plan. That's usually where things go wrong. It's not an instant fix. Frankly there's not enough in-treatment during initial prescription treatment. They all affect our brain chemistry different and not all may work for everyone. I know for myself it took 4 or 5 meds before we found the right one and 2 or 3 dosage adjustments. During that time, without my wife around to monitor me; things could have ended badly.


As for the MDMA research, it is only done under strict medical supervision and therapy is required part of the treatment. They aren't just popping pills and sending them on their way.

I think I'm poorly articulating my perspective - had a late one last night letting loose with some female company after two days of MEPS/SI hell. :-"

My point is two-fold: one, that the "guessing game" model of prescription needs to change. How we do that, I'm not learned enough to know, but things like PET and even things like Henry Markram's computer generated brain models (an amazing watch if you have time) come to mind. But the current system of trial and error seems problematically archaic.

My second point is that the onus should not fall on people like your wife to monitor your wellbeing. I'm glad you found the magic number with your scripts, but I'd imagine the days/weeks it took to get there were no picnic. People without that support system are pretty much in uncharted water and it traces back to another big problem, which is that the actual work of emotional management techniques are deemphasized in favor of medication.

And it's a problem that seems endemic to more pathologies than not; to use a different example, my mom has been getting years of epidurals and steroid injections for back pain, but at no point has her doctor referred her to a nutritionist/dietician so she can lose 25-35 pounds and stop putting that extra strain on her body. I'm happy to do it, but I shouldn't be the first person in what's now years of treatment to break down her caloric and macronutrient needs so she can alleviate the load on her sciatic nerve.

Of course you're 100% correct that drugs can be a helpful assistant to getting that person who wouldn't otherwise crawl out of bed to a therapy session, and I'm also happy to concede that in some instances those medications can work absolute wonders. Hope that clarifies my point; I think we're generally in agreement.

No worries. We are a society who expects some sort of pill when you leave the doc's office. The Media and what it pumps out has more and more to do with how medicine is practiced today.

Drug companies are doing the same thing that toy makers do with kids, "Tell mommy and daddy to buy you...... Then there is the flip side of the coin which reads "Bad Drug". The media is too involved with lives of people across the board. IMHO, drug ads should be pulled from the media. Media driven "Bad Drug" adds propel research to find more drugs to add to the "Bad Drug List". It is a gold mine for malpractice lawyers, and the media is providing all the coverage they need to get a case going. FWIW, there is a recent study that has been released implicating every anesthetic agent I have ever used as being dangerous for pregnant mothers and their unborn fetus and everyone else if used for more than three hours. It's akin to banning Diprivan because Michael Jackson died after it was given to him. I will simply stop here before this turns into a 20-page rant. Suffice to say that more and more, the art and science of medicine is becoming harder and harder to practice by those trained to do so.

I think you've hit the nail on the head. We should absolutely be pulling drug ads from public consumption. The notion that a layperson is going to make a qualified, unbiased judgment on his own course of treatment based on a focus-group-tested, emotionally-resonant, Edward-Bernays-approved TV spot is patently absurd. The information about these drugs should be publicly available so that patients can make their own informed conclusions about a given course of therapy, but we damn sure shouldn't be selling them the way we sell Big Macs and Doritos.

I met a guy on a layover in London a few months back who was in medical school - his focus was epidemiology; I think his specific focus was tropical virology. I told him it seemed like a noble pursuit and asked why he picked that. He said, "What, as opposed to, say, being a plastic surgeon? In England, we're all paid the same." His point was that by removing profit from the equation, he was freer to pursue a career with the maximum benefit to humanity.

I don't mean to sound like a card-carrying pinko, but in my estimation, Medicine-as-business is an intrinsically flawed model. It cheapens what is an incredibly noble calling and it's a problem that's uniquely American. And I can't help but wonder if the fact that GlaxoSmithKline doesn't hold the patent to Molly and Cannabis isn't a big factor in why it's taken years to get the FDA to take them seriously.

To be clear though, I agree strongly with your guys' points, and I don't mean to discount the treatments or the doctors that prescribe them. I just think my millennial brain is looking at my overmedicated peers, and the guessing-game treatment course, and wondering when we're gonna find a way to optimize the way we care for our ill.

Thank you for your thoughtful responses to my posts - glad to have been a part of this dialogue with guys eminently more qualified than I.

Cheers,

-6-2
 
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