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Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

None of these treatments has a 100% success rate. You can try EMDR on Youtube and if it worked all the time, psychiatrists would be out of a job.

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Yeah I said it was dhit when my ex-wife said she was going to do it, but it definitely did something.

And I am well aware of the placebo effect.

But just because something is not provable or falsifiable under current scientific knowledge, it does not mean it is neccesarily quackery, there's a Venn diagram there where some things may be effective.

Automatically discarding something that even occasionally gets results, because it doesn't fit current "knowledge" is the height of arrogance.

Sadly it made my ex-wife worse off than before - she went from a functioning anxious person to being completely overwhelmed by anxiety all the time.

Unfortunate, the whole landscape on this is littered with mines and finding truly knowledgeable help is difficult, most seem to just push their favourite flavour, regardless of the patient.

Any successful form of trauma treatment will first make it worse, because you open the can of worms and begin to go deep. Unfortunately, many therapists are not very good at explaining that up front. If you only have a few sessions, it is basically guaranteed to make matters worse. That's a sign that it is working (but maybe a sign to switch therapist if it wasn't explained well and cautioned about; making sure the environment and person is ready for it should happen first...).

> But just because something is not provable or falsifiable under current scientific knowledge

Do you mean unproven instead of "not provable or falsifiable"?

Something not being falsifiable would mean that we can't detect if it's doing anything even if we tried, which doesn't bode well for its effectiveness.

Not all licensed therapists or psychiatrists provide EMDR. Or did you mean psychiatrists specifically as they prescribe ssri’s?

Psychiatrists oversee treatment and give medication. They don’t do psychotherapy, so they are not in the business of offering EMDR. Easily confused but very distinct jobs.

Many psychiatrists only prescribe, some also do psychotherapy, and of those, some do EMDR. This is less common today than it used to be due to insurance and time and how they get paid, but some of those in private practice or academic settings still provide physiotherapy.

Sorry, I should a put a source: partner is a therapist.

Edit: autocorrect changed psychotherapy to physiotherapy.

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