"I'm a big proponent of alternative therapies as a bridging therapy, therapies like acupuncture, stellate ganglion block, yoga, dog therapy. Elspeth Ritchie, a psychiatrist with the Washington, D.C., Behavioral Health Department, says more research is needed on alternative therapies to improve outcomes for troops with war-related psychiatric conditions. The patients have paid for little besides a hotel room in Chicago for appointments, he said.Īccording to a new VA study of 60,000 post-9/11 veterans, 13.5 percent screened positive for PTSD.Īnother VA-funded study, the National Vietnam Veterans Longitudinal Study, estimated the prevalence of PTSD in combat Vietnam veterans at slightly more than 11 percent, even 40 years after the war.Ĭurrently accepted treatments for PTSD at VA include medications, including two drugs approved by the FDA for PTSD - Paxil and Zoloft - and prolonged exposure therapy and cognitive processing therapy.īut studies show these treatments are effective in fewer than half of patients with combat-related PTSD. To date, Lipov has treated 40 military or veteran patients with PTSD, he said, largely financing the $1,000 cost per treatment through donations or out of his own pocket. If I hadn't gotten this treatment, I would be either drunk right now or dead," he said. "It's hard to put in words how much it's done for me. The euphoria lasted for a while," he said.Įventually some of his symptoms returned, so he received a second treatment and has felt better ever since.
SGB has been studied by physicians at Naval Medical Center San Diego as a potential PTSD treatment and was found to improve symptoms in patients who had not benefited from the standard therapy of medication and psychological therapy.Īfter he learned about SGB from an acquaintance, he called Lipov. As a pain management specialist, I knew SGB relieved problems related to the sympathetic nerve system and thought it could work to relieve the hyperarousal characteristic of PTSD," Lipov said. "This was not something I just stumbled on.
Lipov, who uses the nerve block to treat patients for facial and neck pain, knew SGB relieves menopause-related hot flashes and theorized that because it seems to "reboot" the body's temperature-regulating mechanism, it might reset a PTSD patient's overreaction to stimulus - their "fight or flight" response - by interrupting connections between the sympathetic nervous system and central nervous system. Eugene Lipov, a Chicago-area pain management specialist. First developed to address shoulder, neck and face pain caused by the Herpes Zoster (shingles) virus and complex regional pain syndrome, SGB has been used to treat PTSD since 2008, initially tested by Dr.