Stellate Ganglion Block No Better Than Placebo for PTSD

The VA has been spending millions on useless PTSD research It isn't as if they just discovered the price being paid by servicemen and women. They discovered it about 100 years ago and all hands on deck were called in the 70's.

Stellate ganglion block offers hope for PTSD treatments was one of those "projects" that was supposed to take care of servicemembers but as reported today, it didn't work.

Stellate Ganglion Block No Better Than Placebo for PTSD
MEDSCAPE
Nancy A. Melville
March 26, 2015

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — While promising preliminary research has shown some benefits of stellate ganglion block (SGB) for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new randomized controlled trial shows the treatment is not superior to sham injection.

An increasing number of case reports showing benefits from SGB for PTSD for several months after treatment has generated much buzz in the popular press, and the treatment has recently been featured on various TV programs.

One of the largest studies of the treatment to date was a case series involving 166 patients at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in which 70% of military service members with PTSD reported significant improvement of their PTSD symptoms, with benefits persisting beyond 3 and 6 months after the procedure.

Robert N. McLay, MD, PhD, lead author of the new study, said such improvements were seen even in a small case series of patients with PTSD at his center, prompting the placebo-controlled study.

"We were hoping for a benefit," Dr McLay, of the Naval Medical Center, in San Diego, California, told Medscape Medical News.

"We tried this out informally in our clinic and did see some benefit in about half of patients, but in this more formal study we were not able to reproduce those results."
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This is from Eyewitness News 2010

Dr. Lipov says when a traumatic event is experienced, nerves in the brain sprout like flowers. By applying the local anesthetic, the nerve growth factor returns to normal.

In a recent study at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, doctors found the shot provided "immediate, significant and durable relief" for two soldiers who didn't respond to pills. Other doctors say more safety studies need to be done before the treatment is widely used.

The real questions we should be asking is, "If any of this worked, then why didn't it work? If it didn't work then why did we still have to pay for it? When do we get the tax funds back so we can invest in what does work? Who is being held accountable for all this wasted time and money? The biggest question I have is, who is going to bring back the lives lost after all these years?