May

PTSD treatment in Buffalo is readily available. Asking for a referral from a primary care physician or other health care practitioner means beginning a conversation about it. To help do that, those seeking treatment by licensed psychotherapists might check out Psychology Today’s online listing.

Fill in the zip code, click on the list of specialties, and then scroll to find “Trauma and PTSD.” That goes to a list of twenty-four local therapists who specialize in it, and a short description of their work. Then ask your own medical practitioners for recommendations.

Recently, a study has yielded information that should help PTSD sufferers understand their own reactions. It showed that they might not distinguish between a stimulus associated with disaster in the past and the same stimulus later when nothing terrible is happening. Dr. Rony Paz of the Weitzmann Institute’s Neurobiology Department says this made sense in the evolutionary past of human beings.

Dr. Paz was quoted on Science Daily as saying, “If you've previously heard the sound of a lion attacking, your survival might depend on a similar noise sounding the same to you -- and pushing the same emotional buttons. Your instincts, then, will tell you to run, rather than to consider whether that sound was indeed identical to the growl of the lion from the other day."

The Weitzmann study corroborated this. Volunteers were given a sound that was followed an unpleasant outcome, like a bad odor. Other sounds were followed by a pleasant outcome or no outcome.

The volunteers became better at perceiving the difference between the sounds if they were followed by a pleasant outcome or no outcome. But when the initial sounds were followed by unpleasantness, the volunteers could distinguish less between the initial sound and another, similar sound.

This was true also of sounds they would have distinguished as different prior to the experiment. They had learned—because of the unpleasant aftermath-- not to distinguish them. In evolutionary terms, every mountain lion roar sounded the same and provoked the same response: Run.

The research is expanding to help identify which areas of the brain set the levels of perception, which in turn will help pinpoint treatments. The study, Auditory aversive learning increases discrimination thresholds was published in Nature Neuroscience.

Linda Chalmer Zemel, Buffalo Alternative Medicine Examiner and Buffalo Books Examiner. Originally published on Examiner.com