Dr. Matt Walker

All of the hairs on the back of my neck stood on a sharp end because he was saying, we've got this data and we don't quite understand it.

We've been treating our patients.

for blood pressure, for hypertension, using a generic drug called Prazosin.

And Prazosin blocks the adrenergic response in the body because you're trying to sort of tamp down that sympathetic activation in the body.

So it's a beta blocker?

So it's an alpha adrenergic antagonist.

So it's not a beta blocker, but it's blocking the adrenergic system.

And so, and it's a, you know, it's a generic, pretty cheap drug, but it turns out that it crosses the blood brain barrier.

So it doesn't just stay within the body, it goes up into the brain.

And he said, we don't really understand it because I've been giving patients this medication and it works to a degree, but something else happens.

They come into the clinic and they say, doc, I don't know.

I'm not having those nightmares anymore.

They seem to have gone away.

And these patients seem to start to show signs of resolution.

So all of a sudden, I had had a model, a clinical model that was in search of data, and he had data that was in search of a theoretical model.

couldn't believe it because it's exactly what I would predict, which is that if noradrenaline is too high in PTSD, you're not processing and stripping the emotion from the memory.

So it keeps coming back over and over like this repetitive nightmare.

But then if you block and help bring back down that level of noradrenaline to that, which would be seen in a normal healthy

In other words, completely blocking it.

All of a sudden, the emotional memory gets the chance to be processed and you finally start to get symptom resolution.