On 1 Jan 2011 at 15:53, don allen wrote: > > Second: I just had a call from a psychiatrist friend of mine who is > doing an Independent Medical Exam (IME) on a patient who is claiming > severe post traumatic stress disorder. The patient is being "treated" > by Dr. Paul Swingle (http://www.swingleandassociates.com/)using > "Observed & Experiential Integration Therapy". A search of > PsychAbstracts turned up no useful hits in the literature. <snip>
> So my questions are: > > Has anyone else heard about this "therapy"? > Does it have any standing within the clinical community? A number of years ago I was asked by a former student to look into another therapy carried out by Dr. Swingle, neurofeedback or neurotherapy for the alleged hyperactivity (ADD) of my student's daughter. It took a supreme effort to locate my reply, which turned out to have been sent in 2000. According to my letter, Dr. Swingle is a former academic psychologist (at McMaster, as it happens, when I was a graduate student there) whose specialty was social psychology, in particular, game theory. He published a number of articles in this field in the 1960's, then nothing for about the next 30 years. Then he published a paper "Neurofeedback treatment of pseudoseizure disorder (Biological Psychiatry, 1998). The paper was a report of three cases of "pseudoseizure activity" in which he was able to modify some index of their brain activity, with little evidence that this helped their seizures. He noted "Due to the rare nature of this disorder, however, control groups are difficult to obtain, which in turn limits the extent of these findings". I felt that if this was his best evidence for neurofeedback therapy for ADD, it was not impressive. Nor did I find evidence published by other authors advocating neurotherapy to be any more convincing. In addition, I had reservations concerning the use of brainwaves as a means of diagnosing the ADD of my student's daughter's in the first place, a method which seemed unorthodox and insufficiently validated. I suggested to my student that she should be extremely cautious in accepting the claims of this controversial therapy. A glance at Dr. Swingle's web page suggests that he continues to be a advocate of neurofeedback for a variety of conditions, and "Observed and Experiential Integration Therapy" is likely the same stuff or similar. Perhaps he has managed to obtain better evidence since I last looked at the matter. Stephen -------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada e-mail: sblack at ubishops.ca --------------------------------------------- --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [email protected]. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=7608 or send a blank email to leave-7608-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
