Re:cool web site

From: QuackwatchSM Your Guide to Health Fraud, Quackery, and Intelligent Decisions
Operated by Stephen Barrett, M.D, http://www.quackwatch.org/index.html

Mental Help: Procedures to Avoid, Stephen Barrett, M.D.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)
EMDR is promoted for the treatment of post-traumatic stress, phobias, learning disorders, and many other mental and emotional problems. The method involves asking the client to recall the traumatic event as vividly as possible and rate certain feelings before and after visually tracking the therapist's finger as it is moved back and forth in front of the client's eyes [6]. EMDR's developer and leading proponent, Francine Shapiro, Ph.D., received her nonaccredited doctoral degree in 1988 and established the EMDR Institute to train mental health professionals. She and her associates have trained more than 22,000 clinicians worldwide in workshops that in 1997 cost $385 [7]. EMDR resembles various traditional behavioral therapies for reducing fears in that it requires clients to imagine traumatic events in a gradual fashion in the presence of a supportive therapist. However, controlled research has shown that EMDR's most distinctive feature (visual tracking) is unnecessary and is irrelevant to whatever benefits the patient may receive [8]. Recent reviews have concluded that the data claimed to support EMDR derive mostly from uncontrolled case reports and poorly designed controlled experiments and that the theory of EMDR clashes with scientific knowledge of the role of eye movements [9,10].

6. New PTSD therapy: Innovative or smoke and mirrors? Psychiatric News, May 15, 1998, pp 14, 42.
7. McNally RJ. EMDR and Mesmerism: A comparative historical analysis. Journal of Anxiety Disorders 13:225-236, 1999.
8. Pitman R. Emotional processing during eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy of Vietnam veterans with chronic posttraumatic stress disorder. Comprehensive Psychiatry 37:419-429, 1996.
9. Lilienfeld SO. EMDR treatment: Less than meets the eye. Skeptical Inquirer 20(1):25-31, 1996.
10. Lohr JM, Tolin DF, Lilienfeld SO. Efficacy of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing: Implications for behavior therapy. Behavior Therapy 29:126-153, 1998.

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