Veterans finding benefit in Qi Gong.

While many veteran's medical benefits cover medication to mask the aches and pains accumulated in years of service, they do not cover preventative maintenance and other alternative ways to prevent or ease these ailments, including PTSD. Alternative treatments such as Qi Gong are now gaining popularity. Read more: 

From the Columbia Daily Tribune 

Jerry Cupit, 65, said it was by accident that he wound up in a workshop demonstrating the traditional Chinese healing practice of qigong.

Cupit, a Vietnam War veteran, said he was at Harry S. Truman Memorial Veterans' Hospital to be treated for post-traumatic stress disorder on a recent Friday night. When he walked by the door of the auditorium, he saw a group of people gathered and was interested to find out what was going on.

What he discovered was a newfound passion for meditation and qigong, despite initial skepticism about the practice. He came back for a second workshop yesterday and plans to attend a weekly class.

"It was a sense of spirituality," he said. "I feel like there were some things in my life I needed to work on, like concentration, relaxation and the ability to heal myself."

Cupit said he has a lot of bone pain, and the qigong techniques helped ease it. By yesterday afternoon, he said his hip didn't hurt and he was able to stand up straight for the first time. Emotionally, he felt better, too. As he's aged, he said he's started to feel more sad and guilty about surviving a war when so many of his friends didn't. After some qigong, those feelings started to fade.

"I feel stronger, I feel like I'm centered. I feel balanced," he said.

read the original article here: Veterans Learn to Heal With Qigong 

Magnesium intake helps relieve feelings anxiety and fear.

12-06-11

 A new study shows that increased magnesium intake is a key to helping the brain naturally reduce anxiety and stress, reducing fear response and helping with socail anxiety disorder, PTSD and panic phobias. 

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 5, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- A supplemented intake of magnesium is found to enhance the brain's ability to reduce fear and anxiety responses, making way for a possible supplemental treatment for many anxiety disorders such as social anxiety disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), panic disorder, specific phobias and others. In the October 2011 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, top neuroscientists at Tsinghua University in Beijing, University of Texas, and University of Toronto revealed that by increasing the extracellular magnesium concentration in the brain through a new magnesium compound called Magtein(TM), the cognitive ability - an essential facility that controls fear and anxiety - is enhanced. This development becomes extremely significant considering anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in America, affecting 18% of the population(1).

Anxiety disorders can be triggered by fear and thus, affect cognitive functioning. When in danger, fear is essential for survival. This fear triggers the brain to respond with many split-second changes in the body to prepare to defend against the danger or to avoid it. This response is a healthy reaction meant to protect a person from harm.

But in anxiety disorders this reaction is enhanced so that the fear memory continues even when one is no longer in danger, affecting cognitive ability on a daily basis.

"Through our study, we found that increasing brain magnesium with Magtein enhances not only the learning and memory ability, but also top-down inhibition of fear memory of rats," explains Dr. Guosong Liu, one of the study's principal scientists. "When the cognitive ability is enhanced, fear responses such as anxiety-like and PTSD-like behaviors, are controlled."

According to Liu, the use of a high magnesium treatment induces a unique pattern of action on brain regions involved in and responsible for the body's emotional processes. It heightens the function of the prefrontalcortex, a brain region involved in controlling fear responses, without affecting the function of amygdala - the brain's evolutionary conserved region involved in fear memory formation and storage. "By increasing brain magnesium through Magtein, cognitive ability goes up, fear memory remains unchanged".

http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=11979&Section=NUTRITION