Veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder can be treated with silent meditation, says a leading U.S. expert on the practice.

Fred Travis of the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa has won a $2.4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense for research on the use of meditation to help veterans from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts cope with stress.

Travis said three U.S. studies have shown that meditation can have remarkable results.

There are concerns that, when the troops pull out of Afghanistan at the end of the year, there will be a higher number of veterans with PTSD.

A DOD spokesman said that, by the end of last year, roughly 28,300 veterans of all wars, conflicts, peacekeeping and other eligible services had an accepted disability through Department of Veterans’ Affairs for stress disorders, including PTSD.

Travis said meditation helped to reverse the effects of PTSD in Vietnam veterans after 30 days. Symptoms went from severe to non-symptomatic.

“The very foundations of the problems of PTSD are turned off,” he said. “Trauma is a specific type of experience and, when the mind settles down to silence within, you feel complete, you feel in control, which is the opposite experience of trauma.”

He said meditation could help people where more conventional treatments hadn’t worked. “There isn’t as much stigma attached to it as there might be for people having to go into a psychologist’s or a psychiatrist’s office,” he said.