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Old November 11th, 2005 #1
Agis
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Join Date: Dec 2003
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Default Salon: Eye reprocessing is miracle cure

October 4, 2001. Salon.com senior writer Janelle Brown's "Mystery Cure" is little more than a puff piece for Francine Shapiro's [-ed jew alert] allegedly miraculous technique for curing post-traumatic stress disorder: EMDR (eye movement desensitization processing). All of Brown's data seem to have been provided by Shapiro herself and another interested party, practitioner Uri Bergmann. Brown writes:

It looks quite simple, even simplistic, to the observer: A patient recalls memories of a traumatic event -- over and over -- while watching a doctor's fingers move back and forth, or while listening to repetitive sounds in a headset. That's it -- a drill that looks a bit like a nightclub hypnotism. Yet after just a few sessions, this methodology has helped the survivors of hugely traumatic events, including the Columbine school shootings, the Oklahoma City bombing, [-ed 'multiculturalism'] the Bosnian war and floods in Bangladesh.

Helped survivors? How? Helps and its cognates are the most empty terms in the handbag of doublespeak. The great success of EMDR is touted throughout the article--including it's imminent success in helping thousands of survivors of the September 11th horrors. But no effort was made by Brown to speak to even a single patient who allegedly has been miraculously cured by EMDR. She seems to have simply taken the word for it of the one who invented it and another who profits by it. No mention is made of any of the many criticisms that have been made of EMDR. Nor does Brown note that the treatment is not recognized by the American Psychological Association.

Brown does, however, quote Shapiro in an attempt to explain how EMDR works.

"The 'why' of EMDR is not known, because there's not enough known in the area of brain physiology to know what the underpinnings of any form of psychotherapy are," says Shapiro. One popular theory is that EMDR forces the same kind of rapid eye movements (or REM) that occur when you sleep; and the function of REM is to process emotion. Others believe that the constant sensory stimulation basically bombards the brain, and activates the frontal areas that have shut down.

No mention was made of the fact that Shapiro backed off on the significance of the hand movements being followed by the eyes of patients when it was discovered that the therapy worked just as well with blind patients (where tones and hand-snapping were used) as with sighted ones. Many critics think that EMDR is just a type of cognitive therapy wrapped in new ornaments and jargon. Shapiro at one time had admitted that eye movement is not essential to eye movement desensitization processing.

http://skepdic.com/refuge/bunk18.html#emdr

More here:
http://skepdic.com/emdr.html
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