novapsyche (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
novapsyche) wrote2009-12-18 02:14 pm
novapsyche) wrote2009-12-18 02:14 pm
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Rx syncronicity
It appears that one of my medications, propranolol (a beta-blocker), is quite popular these days, for wildly different reasons.
Imagine my shock one night, watching The Rachael Maddow Show, to see propranolol implicated as the means by which Ramin Pourandarjani, a 26-year-old Iranian doctor who acted as a whistleblower on Iranian torture, was poisoned. In his salad, no less. (Check the transcript to see how many distinct manners of death were attributed to this doctor by the Iranian government.)
Today, in the library, I read "The Tireless Soldier," an article in a back issue of Adbusters (May/June 2008), wherein Clayton Dach states that the US military may soon use the med to counteract PTSD before it even starts:
Imagine my shock one night, watching The Rachael Maddow Show, to see propranolol implicated as the means by which Ramin Pourandarjani, a 26-year-old Iranian doctor who acted as a whistleblower on Iranian torture, was poisoned. In his salad, no less. (Check the transcript to see how many distinct manners of death were attributed to this doctor by the Iranian government.)
Today, in the library, I read "The Tireless Soldier," an article in a back issue of Adbusters (May/June 2008), wherein Clayton Dach states that the US military may soon use the med to counteract PTSD before it even starts:
Chief among the new horizons is the alluring notion of psychological prophylactics: drugs used to preempt the often nasty effects of combat stress on soldiers, particularly that perennial veteran's bugaboo known as post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome. In the US, where roughly two-fifths of troops returning from combat deployments are presenting serious mental health problems, PTSD has gone political in form of the Psychological Kevlar Act, which would direct the Secretary of Defense to implement "preventative and early-intervention measures" to protect troops against "stress-related psychopathologies."
Proponents of the "Psychological Kevlar" approach to PTSD may have found a silver bullet in the form of propranolol, a 50-year-old beta-blocker used on-label to treat high blood pressure, and off-label as a stress-buster for performers and exam takers. Ongoing psychiatric research has intriguingly suggested that a dose of propranolol, taken soon after a harrowing event, can suppress the victim's stress response and effectively block the physiological process that makes certain memories intense and intrusive. That the drug is cheap and well tolerated is icing on the cake.
Propranolol has already been dubbed the "mourning after pill," largely by those who argue that its military use amounts to medicating away pangs of conscience. For the time being, though, we can set aside our dystopian visions of zombies with guns, since the tranquilizing effects of beta-blockers are unlikely to permit their widespread use on the battlefield.
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And no, I don't think you had mentioned it. Thank you for sharing that.