The May 2012 issue of Scientific American has a piece on “Erasing painful memories” which some of you might find useful. Interesting to me because Mr buffy has PTSD resultant from too many distressing ambulance jobs over too many years. This link is to the summary. You have to buy the whole article:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=erasing-painful-memories
In brief, the bit I found interesting is that it seems you need some way of stopping the consolidation of the memories. You only have a small time window (a few hours) for this though and it would appear to be related to finding some way of lowering levels or norepinephrine. Propranolol will do this and it’s a pretty commonly used drug for blood pressure control. It’s difficult to do research on this….and it seems some research says it works and some says it doesn’t. And there are a lot of paperwork problems with trying to do this sort of thing with trauma victims when there are more pressing physical concerns. The article says they are looking at propranolol, mytarapone (cortisol inhibitor), alcohol and morphine. Obviously the last one would be difficult to arrange.