Stress therapy may help car crash victims

Dear Tom and Ray: Your recent column about the person experiencing trauma after her Toyota was rear-ended by some guy going 70 mph invited me to add my thoughts: I am a psychologist in Minnesota and have treated a number of car crash victims just like your reader. They are indeed suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, and can easily be helped by a therapeutic procedure called EMDR - eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. Don't ask me to explain how it works, but believe me, it does. I have treated car crash victims, carjacking victims, rape victims and holdup victims with the same method of EMDR. They were symptom-free - and stayed that way - after just one session of the procedure. Pretty amazing. It wasn't me; it was the procedure that did the work, along with the client's own brain - which helped reprocess the trauma memory. So, tell this woman to go to the EMDR Web site, www.emdria.org, and click on the link for Find an EMDR Therapist. She should get relief from her symptoms quite rapidly - and they'll stay away. I wish her the best. - Ken

Newspaper

English

Tom Magliozzi
Ray Magliozzi

Magliozzi, T., & Magliozzi, R. (2005, July 8). Stress therapy may help car crash victims. Seattle, WA: Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Final, Wheels, F1