“Evidence, treatment guidelines, consensus & harmony”

Disagreements regarding the efficacy and effectiveness of interventions to prevent and treat post traumatic disorders have caused divisions within the traumatic stress field and had a negative impact on its image to the outside world. The emergence of an evidence based approach to management has been considered threatening by some but, in fact, has helped regulate and improve clinical provision. Its detractors have fairly criticised over-reliance on and over-generalisation of the results from some randomised controlled trials but used sensibly an evidence based approach has many advantages. For example, it has allowed effective interventions that have not been widely supported in the past to become accepted. The emergence of EMDR as a first-line treatment for chronic PTSD is an excellent example of this. The use of evidence to determine treatment guidelines for PTSD will be used to illustrate how an evidence based approach can be effectively adopted.

Conference

English

Jonathan Bisson

Bisson, J. (2008, June). ?Evidence, treatment guidelines, consensus & harmony? Plenary presented at the 9th EMDR Europe Association Conference, London, England