News & Blog

Sometimes our most inspiring moments appear when we are least expecting them.

For me recently this came at the end of a rather dull day of diabetes and cardiology updates when the key note speaker was Simon Weston talking about living with PTSD.  www.simonweston.com

He captivated the room of over 300 doctors and indeed brought a lump to the throats of many of us with his account of the blowing up of the Sir Galahad in 1982 and his subsequent struggle back to health. After no less than 85 operations he was physically able to do many of the things that he wanted: drive a rally car, fly a plane, marry and have children. However, for 24 years his life was overshadowed by the nightmare and flashbacks of PTSD. He encouraged us, as physicians, to look at alternatives, especially NLP. He emphasised that the last thing patients need when they are suffering from PTSD is to be drugged up and that a lot of conventional therapies are slow painful and ineffective.  He and a number of his friends and colleagues have been treated with NLP and are now free of their nightmares. He described it as feeling as though the elastic round his chest had snapped and he could finally take a deep breath and breathe properly again.

What really hit me that day though was the statistics: 255 killed in the Falklands, 300 lost to suicide afterwards. Simon himself admits to very low times including a suicide attempt.

Talking to him afterwards it appears that the armed services still do not recognise NLP as an effective treatment of PTSD, if indeed they really admit to the existence of PTSD in the first place. Whether like the Americans they are frightened of the potential scale of litigation and payouts I am not sure.

A recent advert in the medical press for a civilian doctor for the army wanted someone who will help to get soldiers back to the frontline as soon as possible.  With this goal in mind, I think that they need to improve their treatment of servicemen’s mental health and seek the services of experienced NLP practitioners in order to achieve this.