EMDR is not an empirically supported treatment for combat-related PTSD…yet: A response to Elisha C. Hurley, Dmin, Colonel, USA (Retired)
✍ Scribed by David L. Albright; Bruce Thyer
- Book ID
- 101713212
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2010
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 57 KB
- Volume
- 25
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1072-0847
- DOI
- 10.1002/bin.304
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
As U.S. military veterans ourselves, we respect Colonel Hurley's 30 years of military service to our country. We also appreciate his psychotherapeutic experience. We applaud and wholeheartedly agree with his commitment to ''providing our military personnel with the most effective treatment modalities possible'' (Hurley, in press, p. 1). It is due to this very commitment that we wrote the narrative review (not a meta-analysis) asking whether eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) reduces posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in combat veterans (Albright & Thyer, 2010). We reiterate our conclusion that the evidence supporting the use of EMDR to treat combat veterans afflicted with PTSD does not rise to the threshold of an empirically supported treatment. We also reiterate our recommendation that further research be conducted to determine if EMDR is effective with Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) combat veterans.
We respectfully take issue with the following statements in Colonel Hurley's letter to the editor: