Re: Initial response

Thank you Dr. Paulsen-Inobe for your thoughtful reply. I will try to comment briefly.

It seems like you're admitting that the procedure used in the study should be effective for a number of reasons. I'm glad we agree on this. I was confused at first because you seemed to be implying that this was not the case. Therefore, this brings us back to, if it wasn't, why not?

About the college sample, you are correct that this analogue research may or may not be the same for a "clinical" sample (I hate using such a term because it goes against my philosophy of refraining from trying to neatly divide people up based on false dicotomies). It seemed as though these people had problems that were real for them, and I know that clinical practice does not dictate that you must meet the clinical guidelines of a research study to obtain treatment (thankfully!). So we appear to disagree as to how big a problem this is. Since many clinicians use EMDR for a number of problems that don't fall into neat categories I would say this fails to support this practice, at least to some extent.

I'm glad that you agree that many people say that EMDR can work well for some symptoms in as little as one session, this is exactly what I was saying (hence my clarification that I wasn't saying this necessarily meant a total "cure"). But I think you failed to address my point. Why didn't we see some better improvement for EMD compared to no bilateral stimulation. Remember, this is a research study, and EMD failed to even show "statistical significance" which may still by no means be clinically meaninful. But you have to see statistically meaningful differences to have a chance of clinically significant differences, which was not the case here.

Finally, I'm glad I wasn't missing anything that showed that EMDR was superior to EMD. I don't think this has even been studied so I can't think one could claim that it is so without such evidence, even if it "looks" different in some ways. But I find it suprising that there has been no research as of yet showing that EMDR works through unique mechanisms. I think we need to be very careful until we have such data to point to.

Thanks.

Replies:

Re: Initial response, by Sandra Paulsen Inobe, PhD, 10/17/02 Re: Initial response, by Tomas Gould, 10/18/02

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