The February 2006 issue of Psychology Today reports on a study at Boston University.
Professor Glenn Saxe that giving children large doses of morphine following a serious burn or accident will reduce the number of post-traumatic stress disoder (PTSD) symptoms.
Researchers are uncertain if it’s just the morphine or if anything that reduces pain will do the trick.
Saxe suggests that undertreament of pain because of a fear that patients will become addicted could lead to greater rates of PTSD — which ironically, in children, gives them an increased risk of substance abuse as an adult.
All I know is that all lot of folks (mainly men) who I suspect of having PTSD (from a little event called WWII) chose to self-medicate with alcohol. The end result: alcoholism in my family of origin, stress, abuse, and PTSD in the children (well, at least me).
Too bad folks in the 50s and 60s and even the 70s didn’t know about PTSD. Maybe, there’d be fewer fucked up people today.
