Re: Nutritional Treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

 Hi PM #58606, Yes, I was a victim of PTSD from he 2nd WW, but in the 1960's , when i was under "treatment", there was no term for this. It was then called "neuroticism". I was in the hands of psychiatrists and psychologists and they made a real mess of me.Yes, I studied psychology and Clinical Nutrition and I treated and cured many PTSD patients very succesfully by nutritional and psychotherapy means. The fact, that many if not most PTSD people are hypoglycemic is not very well known, because hypoglycemia is still denied by the medical profession and of course the public at large, as a disease quite separate from  diabetes. This is one reason why conventional medicine has such a poor success rate in treating mental illness. See here. The association between insulin resistance - part of hypoglycemic syndrome - and depression of which PTSD is a sub-branch, is very well documented. See here and here and here.. Hypoiglycemia, like diabetes which is its follower, is a silent disease and you would not know whether you are hypoglycemic or not. It needs a special test to confirm you have hypoglycemia.

If you want to understand the connection between hypoglycemia and PTSD, you must understand that hypoglycemia causes you to obver-produce stress hormones that triggers your mind into thinking that the memory of a traumatic event causes you to have anxiety and nightmares etc. This is called "psychological projection" assigning an outside cause when you are struck by an endogenous biochemical phenomenon.

Adrenaline functions to convert glucose stores in the body (glycogen) into glucose when the brain is starved of biological energy called ATP. (Normal biochemistry information you can get from any book on biochemistry.) Hypoglycemia causes the brain to be starved of normal level of energy and hence trigger the release of adrenaline and cortisol. Hence you are bombarded with stress hormone from within and out of the blue. We are genetically programmed to believe - like most mammalian animals - that when you suffer anxiety there must be an external cause.

It is true that meditation, yoga or many other "psychological" techniques may reduce anxiety but these are merely management techniques that may mask symptoms temporarily but have to be repeated on  daily basis without CURING the underlying biochemical disorder responsible for symptoms.

In short if you are going to ignore hypoglycemia as a major contributor to mood disorders,  you are only fostering the idea that PTSDD is untreatable and incurable.