UAGC | Case studies in non evidence based treatment Part one-1 UAGC

Hello, and welcome to this discussion. My name is Dr. Steven Brewer, and this is the first of two audio files that will introduce casestudies in non evidence based treatment. But first, what is evidence based treatment? Evidence based treatments, or evidencebased practices, are generally those that are supported by peer reviewed scientific literature.

This definition may lead you to assume that non evidence based practices are those that have been disproven by peer reviewedscientific literature, but that isn't the case. Non evidence based practices are simply those practices that have not been supportedby peer reviewed literature yet. Joining me to talk more about non evidence based practices is Dr. Erick Cervantes, AssistantProfessor and Chair of the Complementary and Alternative Health Program at Ashford University. He'll be sharing with us somefascinating cases where evidence based practices fail to completely help a patient's concerns.

Thank you Dr. Brewer. I appreciate this time. A little bit of background first, I have a relative by the name of Ivan S., and so Ivan isa Navajo descent individual born in the area of the Navajo reservation in Arizona. And in his early years, between the age of 20-years-old and 26-years-old, he was deployed to Iraq for a couple of tours in that war. In any event, the point is that the first timethey returned from that war, Ivan came back with a lot of anger management issues at home and began to have a lot of squabbleswith his wife and children, which was very different than what he was before.

He did another tour thereafter. Of course, there were other problems in the household prior to his next departure, but when hereturned it was very apparent that he was very much affected by the war. He was taken to the Naval hospital here in SouthernCalifornia. His mood became stoic, but his behavior continued to be very, very aggressive.

He began to beat his wife, began to beat his children, recurrent nightmares at night, night sweats, and many, many, manyproblems. And he continued on to go into the Naval hospital with no– here in Southern California with no apparent relief of hissymptoms or his behavior. He began to drink, began to have issues with the law, and so to no– again, no rescue from conventionalpractice with the medications and the treatment. He began to also go to see a counselor, but that also didn't do very well.

OK so, a little bit of background on what we'll call patient M.D., so at a very– she grew up, basically, in a very poor town, aagricultural town of many, many migrants. Migrants of Mexican descent as well as Central American descent. Mother and fathermarried at an early age. Probably, I think there was seven children in her family, if I remember correctly of this case, and she wasone of the younger females of the family.

At that time and at this place, there were rival gangs that were part of her life, but as she began to go into her teenage years, shebegan to experience a lot of attention from a lot of her male peers. But one time, at one point, she began to have problems withthese peers that were gang related, and then experienced gang rape from the age of 14 to 16. She belonged, actually, to one ofthe rival gangs, so therefore, it was very apparent that her collusion or her involvement with the rival gang brought her into moreat risk for these things to happen.

Not that– not as a justification, but more of how these gangs relate to each other. She began to– then from that point, after 16,she began to use more heavily both marijuana, meth, heroin, alcohol, and she expressed that, more than anything, she was tryingto drown out the anxiety, the fear, the panic attacks that she would experience on an everyday basis due to her belief that thiswould happen again at any time soon. She at the age of 18, she disbanded from these gangs and began to have her own life,trying to go to school, finish high school specifically.

She finished with the GED and was in and out of college between the ages of 19 and 24. And her family life, she dissociatedcompletely from her mother and father because she felt that she felt abandoned by them, specifically when she was trying toaddress the trauma that she experiences so young. As a matter of fact, she even expressed to them that she was raped and thatshe wanted some people to go to jail for it, but the parents did not proceed to help her out with any legal ramifications that wouldcome from that.

So she felt also disregarded, especially for what she wanted to do. Her parents actually blamed her for the rape, so she carries alot of rancor and a lot of anger towards her parents and manifest that in many ways towards her parents. She's disrespectful. Shereports that she's very disrespectful. She doesn't really visit them that often, she has a lot of fights with them for many, many littlethings.

She's been in and out of relationships, very short term relationships. Mostly been intimate relationships, rather than more of awhole relationships with peers, specifically male peers. She identifies as bisexual, but she prefers men, but still has a lot of issueswith men and constantly fights with men, physically fights with men and especially her partners.

Socially, now her focus is she's an activist. She does a lot of work with migrant families trying to educate them, trying to empowerthem. She also goes to rallies too for migrant rights and also undocumented rights, so she is very much like a social worker, as wellas an activist, and believes that she's doing this because she, you know, she's trying to give back for people that are also abusedand disregarded in this society.

She is very youth oriented, so she's– a lot of her focus is educating youth and also preventing youth violence, specifically sexualviolence against youth and especially females. However though, on the other side of the spectrum, she's so ardently a zealot,actually, with these ways of being because she can't take no for an answer. She does things by force, so in essence sheencompasses a very strong male, almost patriarchal attitude about things and she demands things to be done in a certain way,which hampers a lot of her relationships with people. She can't really form very good social bonds and really alienates a lot ofpeople with her force or with the way that she is in forcefully pushing her agenda on folks and forcefully pushing a lot of her–yeah, mostly her agenda of helping youth, et cetera.

So I guess what I'm saying is that there definitely would be a better balance if she was a little more in tune with how she manifeststo people. Right now, you know, she would probably have more allies if she wasn't so harsh in manifesting what her agenda is.Again, as previously said, I said she suffers a lot from anxiety, she suffers from insomnia, she currently takes medication foranxiety, and she continues to self-medicate with marijuana to also decrease the anxiety. She has some social phobia, but also veryoutgoing, interesting enough, so she has both of those polarities, and suffers from panic attacks on a constant basis.

Really even more interesting from a kind of holistic way of looking at this is that she was recently diagnosed with uterine cancer,and what that does from my perspective as a clinician and naturopathic doctor, what that tells me is that the energetic imprint ofthat trauma obviously is well imprinted in the uterus, and the manifestation of that trauma is still there. So if she goes on to doother work, specifically spiritual work or other forms of therapy, I think there's a possibility to lift that cancer growth. And not froma chemical perspective, you know, not from chemotherapy or radiation therapy, but more from a very intuitive, very mental,emotional, and spiritual practice, so other recommendations will be given from that. So that's the background on M.D.

Well, thank you Dr. Cervantes for that fascinating case study. Students your challenge as individuals looking at these cases is toprovide a provisional diagnosis for these patients, and then propose the treatments as discussed in the discussion forum.