When Memories Are Scars
By Matt Bean, Men’s Health
The report, in a section about mens health, should have been written to cover all human beings. For Tramatic Experiances that bring about PTSD is not unique to Man but also to Women and, in my oppinion, Women can and do have a greater veriaty of tramatic experiances that can alter the brain brought on them by who else but Men.
The lead in to this report is just below.
Harrowing experiences damage the brain. New drugs promise to heal it. Could the end of posttraumatic stress be near?
Could there be a wonder drug that erases Trauma from someones brain activity giving them a better life because they no longer have the memories, I’m Skeptical, though I’m a skeptical person not only about drugs, of which this society takes far too many of, but of most all products brought out, I watch for Long Term Results and if they do as advertised, not creating more problems down the road.
I’m not the only one and this report does touch on that at the end.
The Brain is still a myterious organ in all living creatures, but especially in the Human Animal.
We now know so much about it, but there is still much more to learn.
Roger Pitman, M.D., hunts nightmares for a living. Not the vivid phantasmagoria populated by zombies or disembodied skulls, or even the nude-at-the-podium orations that leave us blushing in our sleep. He’s after the nonfiction variety, the indelible, enduring flashbacks that stick in our heads after reality goes awry: a saw blade meeting flesh {happened to me-js}, say, or an improvised explosive device overturning a Humvee.
I give cuts of each section of the report below. For a better understanding visit the site When Memories Are Scars and read the full 5 page report to draw your own conclusions.
Fade Away
Carney is one of dozens of accident victims that Dr. Pitman and his team have culled from Boston emergency rooms to study a drug called propranolol. The study is double-blind–no one, least of all Carney, knows whether the pill he took was a placebo or propranolol. But the contractor hopes he’ll get lucky and will be able to stop the spiral of substance abuse, irritability, and insomnia that started with the stabbing at the construction site.
PTSD is not new, nor only a phenomenon that happens to Military personal in War Theaters, of which we as a World Population seem to leave out mention and concern of the Citizens of those theaters. PTSD can happen to anyone that has experianced a Tramatic Event in their lives, from little children to adults, at anytime and anyplace. No one can determine who might have the results leading to PTSD and who might not, the report touches on this also.
Surviving Trauma
We all have things we’d like to forget. And some of us have things we can’t bear to remember. According to the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, 61 percent of American men will be exposed to a traumatic event in their lifetimes. And, according to the National Comorbidity Survey, 5 percent of men nationwide will develop PTSD at some point in their lives. These men include 9/11 survivors, Hurricane Katrina victims, and, increasingly, military veterans: According to a 2005 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 17 percent of Iraq war veterans suffer from PTSD, anxiety, or depression.
See what I say about being just about men.
But the disorder also hits closer to home. Domestic disputes, burglaries, accidents, and even surgeries can engrave malignant memories on the brain. One recent study suggests that more than 15 percent of heart-attack victims suffer from PTSD, slowing recovery and increasing chances of a second attack.
Just as cancer researchers have made countless discoveries about how normal cells live and die, so have PTSD researchers used their unique niche to shine a broader spotlight on the delicate interaction between the brain and the body. And what they’ve learned has implications far beyond PTSD. It could change how we think about stress altogether.
I admire and respect the many researchers that have taken on the study of PTSD and other Brain disorders that come about as to life experiances. There has been tremendous learning and work accomplished especially since it was Finally recognized as we returned from the Vietnam Fiasco, some of it resulting in advances that can Help those that develope these disorders/changes of the brain.
I’m skeptical of the now extremely large drug corporations and researchers that have sold out for wealth over health! As it has now developed into the ‘Pop a Pill’ to take care of everything we as individuals feel we have wrong with our bodies. Especially in this country. We have a rarely mentioned ‘War on Drugs’ {what a misnomer} going on while we push more and more drugs at the population that seem to take care of everything with many people jumping on that wagon concerning themselves little about what other damage might be happening in other areas of our bodies, to our other organs, as a result of these many prescribed and over the counter Drugs.
The counters in stores are Full of them. And the large part of the population taking huge amounts of illegal drugs, well that’s another story that many of us see the results of daily.
All in a Day’s Work
Kyle is the sort of solitary woodworker who’d rather fashion the occasional cabinet in his garage workshop than work behind the big-mill, big-money lumber machines that churn thousands of logs into millions of planks each day. But in the winter of 2005, his family short on cash, he went back to the mill, reluctant but resolute.
I found it really interesting that these first two, in the report, follow the profession I’m in. Only for me I’m a woodworker {and many other trades in the construction industry} that ply the trade in the field, both commercial and residential, and like lost professional woodworkers solitary ain’t bad, we do our best work when mind and hands work without outside interferance from others. But team us up and if on the same page, from beginning to end, the results are faster and of the same prideful quality. The minds playing a big roll.
The Role of Adrenaline
Posttraumatic stress amounts to a spectacular breakdown of what is normally a very helpful mechanism. Bundling an emotional component with a memory dovetails with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, says Dr. Pitman. “If you, as a Paleolithic man, happen to be taking a new route to the watering hole one day and encounter a crocodile, you’d better remember that crocodile,” he says. “If you don’t, you’ll be eliminated from the gene pool. Adrenaline not only helps you escape, but strengthens that emotional component to make sure you won’t forget.”
Erasing Memories from the Hard Drive
Propranolol is part of a class of drugs called beta-blockers already being used to treat real-time anxiety disorders, such as performance anxiety in public speakers. Dr. Pitman’s study hinges on administering the drug within 6 hours of a traumatic event. And other researchers have been stretching the window even further–uncovering new revelations about how memories are made and stored in the brain. “The old story was that once memories are stored, they’re stored forever,” says Karim Nader, Ph.D., a researcher at McGill University, in Montreal. Nader specializes in the relatively new field of memory “reconsolidation,” the subsequent revision of a memory after it’s already been transferred into long-term storage. “But what I found is that once you access a memory, you have to restore it. It’s kind of like taking a file off the hard drive and putting it into RAM–you have to save it to the hard drive all over again, or parts of it can get lost.”
Similar to the missing{?} White House E-Mails {just had to put that in}.
For with Age one finds that you have to dig much deeper in your experiances to bring up a memory you might need in the present, and it can be done. For with each passing day more memories are added to our ‘harddrives’ but the head and brain get no larger, just more cluttered, what a wonder.
“Nobody knows when they’re going to be in a car accident, or be raped, or be kidnapped, so trying to give them a pill within 6 hours of the trauma is difficult,” he says. “But we can control the memory now, bringing it back to the point of sensitivity no matter when it occurred. This could have implications for all kinds of problems: drug addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or anything where you need to change the wiring in the brain.”
Stress Resistance
Aikins, a soft-spoken researcher charged with helping the Department of Veterans Affairs plan its approach to treating the waves of soldiers returning from Iraq, designed an experiment to compare how the soldiers would react to two different stimuli: an innocuous pulse of light, and a pulse of light paired with a slight electrical shock. He found that soldiers who overreacted to the innocuous stimulus were more likely to develop PTSD in Iraq if exposed to a traumatic event (95 percent of active-duty members are) than the cool-hand Lukes in the crowd. What could the key physiological difference be? A chemical called neuropeptide Y
.
Flight-or-Flight Response
The consequence of having a brain tuned to change with even minor stress, however, is that it’s extra-sensitive to overload by extreme stress. Over the past decade, molecular biologists have begun to unravel how this happens at the cellular level.
“The brain is like a collection of mobile phone networks,” says Hermona Soreq, Ph.D., a Jerusalem-based neurobiologist who has developed a drug to block PTSD at the DNA level. “They all communicate within themselves, but also within each other. We know that when there is a big disaster, like the recent missile attacks, the network crashes. That’s posttraumatic stress for you. That’s what we see in the shelters and streets every day.”
Will these drugs be long term cures, if you will, for the brains of the sufferer or will they bring on more damage down the road just for a seemingly quick fix in the present?
Playing God with the Brain
“That’s like playing god with the brain,” says Barry Romo, a national coordinator with a Vietnam-veterans antiwar group. “One of the things that keeps us from remaking mistakes is looking back and having regret, as opposed to thinking, Well …, that was a close shave, but at least I’m okay.”
I agree with Barry, not because I’m also a Vietnam Vet and blong to Veterans Anti War Groups, but because I’ve been a long time activist for Veterans of War Theaters, some known many others just known about, who suffer the nightmares and tramatic events in their present lives from what they experianced in these Theaters of Man’s Hell on earth! And as an activist, but not a professional in the fields of study, have read about, talked to those who suffer, and tried to keep updated on what the more intelligent and caring in the professions are finding out.
{“is looking back and having regret”, whom comes to mind when reading those six words? I can picture Many and some are those we hire to lead, especially in the present}
Romo, one of a small but very vocal group of critics of Soreq’s and Dr. Pitman’s research, worries that the way we interpret memories, whether terrifyingly vivid or naive and nostalgic, is part of who we are as individuals. To tinker with that is to step onto unsteady ethical ground.
Whole Heartedly Agree!!
But still carry a Hope that many things can be accomplished with no lasting or lingering damages not known or studied, only to be worse in the future!
Avoiding Abuse
“I think people have a right to have medication, if they need it, but I have to wonder what these drugs will be used for in the hands of police or the military or someone who doesn’t deserve them,” he says. “We don’t want to create a bunch of storm troopers who can do anything they want without having to worry about the repercussions.”
In the directions I’m watching, especially this nation has been taking, this is another fear for the future generations that worry me! Each generation should be even more Skeptical of what they hear and see, and especially listening to what others are saying, others that should be trusted, for are they really trustworthy and honest, or do they have have other individual goals they can only reach through completely fooling the masses!
“Some people go through years and years of torture,” he says. “Should we mess with their memories? Should we be able to take those thoughts away? Absolutely. We want to act as though nothing happened, but it’s never that easy.”
We Must Be Very Careful
These were links that are with the above report:
Read More on PTSD and Trauma:
Would You Take a Pill to Erase Traumatic Memories?
Symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Treatment Options for PTSD
Read More on Depression:
Is It SAD?
Are You Depressed?
Reality Check: Depression
Now, not to just keep pushing Ilona Meagher’s coming book, But:
Moving A Nation to Care: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and America’s Returning Troops
May 1st 2007 starts the selling of it.
Hoping that her Dedication and Heartfelt feelings, having grown on the subject of PTSD and especially the present day returning troops, makes it a Best Seller and hits the Best Selling lists of many publications, something I would really like to see and not only myself but other Veterans of our many Theaters of Conflicts and the Innocents of same, I will Unabashedly Keep Pushing this fine referance work.
Her work, and that of her many Dedicated helpers over at ePluribus Media helped put together a Great Referance book, especially for those who grew up in the Denial Years after this countries Debacle of Vietnam and knew, or heard, little about PTSD.
It’s a Great Starting Point of understanding with a whole host of other referances that should be tapped into to get a much better understanding of what can and does happen to many, and could happen to you or someone close to you!
Visit Ilona’s Site – PTSD Combat, often, for with all she’s got going on she keeps everyone up to date on her findings and thoughts. Like this one A Personal Call to Keep Pushing for Our Veterans which is dated yesterday and found when going in to get her url, full of recent information and links.
Visit ePluribus Timelines for a host of reports that could very well be signs of the PTSD invading others from the returning troops to those who experianced, and lived through, Hurricane Katrina.
Get Involved in understanding better PTSD and other brain disorders that develope because of Tramatic Experiances that many go through that change the minds forever! As I said in the beginning, these can happen to little ones to us adults, many do not escape the memories that Tramatic Events leave behind!</center>
