Change Your Brain Every Day - Dr Amen Q&A Session 2 Part 1

Episode Date: December 31, 2016

Enjoy today's two-part Question and Answer session where Dr Amen was asked a variety of questions, from the relation of PMS to brain health, which is better hypoglycemia or hyperglycemia, and more. Be sure to subscribe to this podcast so you can get notified of part 2 and the future episodes of Brain Warrior's Way Podcast.  Have a blessed and brain healthy new year! 

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to the Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amen. Now, in this podcast, you're going to learn that the war for your health is one between your ears. That's right. If you're ready to be sharper and have better memory, mood, energy, and focus, well then stay with us. Here are Daniel and Tana Amen.

Hi, Dr. Amen. My name is Leah. My question is kind of interesting. Could you associate memory loss with PMS, or would you say that that's a sign of an actual brain problem? Leah, that's such an interesting question. And I could go on and on. PMS, their brains are different. Your brain is different if you have PMS during the good time of your cycle versus the challenging time of your cycle. What we actually found, now I have five sisters, so I've been interested in this for a long time. And what we found is during the tough time, so the last 10 days of a woman's menstrual cycle, if she has PMS, her cingulate gyrus flames. And that's why she worries and becomes more rigid. And if things don't go her way, she gets upset.

And her prefrontal cortex drops. So she has more ADD-like symptoms. And so if you have PMS-like symptoms, it can clearly affect your memory, your mood, and your concentration. Now, if your memory problems tend to cycle with your menstrual cycle, then odds are it has to do with hormone balancing, and that will help you. But if you have memory issues the whole month along, that probably is indicative of a brain problem that you should get help with. Although I think people need to be treated for PMS because it causes divorces. I'm not kidding. It causes great turmoil and stress, not only for the person that has it, but for everybody else in the family. Doctor, my name is Marsha. I have a question in particular related

to diabetes, which is the most healthy? I know a person, of course, wants to keep as level blood sugar as possible, but if you could say one or the other, which does the most harm, low blood sugar or high blood sugar? And what can a person do for, say, each time they have go into a hypoglycemic coma? Does that damage the brain? And is that, can that be undone? Yeah, Marcia, that's a fascinating question. And with diabetes, you can have really low blood sugars or you can have really high blood sugars, and they're both nightmares for the brain. So it's not like one's worse. With really low blood sugar, you can go into a coma, and that's clearly bad for brain function. But with high blood sugar, it can trigger off seizures. And high blood sugars damage these small blood vessels that then make healing

harder for every aspect of your life. So getting your blood sugar as balanced as you can is critical. Exercising, eating right, seeing the doctor, taking your medicine as you need to do it, and decreasing the stress in your life. Because what we found, stress dramatically disrupts blood sugar regulation.

And so having that 10 minutes a day to meditate can really be helpful in getting your blood sugars under control. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Hi, my name is Jennifer. I was thinking of asking you about, we've looked at different brains as far as male and female, but have you had any statistics as far as different ethnic groups and how maybe there'll be a variation in what you're wanting to apply to each other's lives. Is there like a variation in the diet and I guess what kind of action plan for brains of different ethnic groups? Tell me your name again. Jennifer.

Jennifer. You know, Jennifer, my work has been considered really controversial by some of my colleagues. I'm a psychiatrist that looks at people's brains and they're like, oh, no, you shouldn't do that. So to then try and answer the question that you asked me, you know, what would different brains from different ethnic groups need? I would get clobbered. My sense is, is we are so much more alike than we are different. And they've actually looked at the incidence of mental illness among different ethnic, and they haven't found any difference, really. That the same number of Hispanic kids or Black kids or Caucasian kids have ADD.

That it's really not a racial issue. It's a brain issue. Now, often one of the things that I've seen, I did my training in Hawaii. So I dealt with a high Asian population. But I think this is true for many Hispanics and African-Americans, is that when they struggle, they don't get help, is they don't trust the system. And so they end up struggling longer because it's like, no, no, it's the system that's a problem, not my child. Or I don't need help. I can do this on my own. And that's the thing that I see is the differences between the different ethnic groups. Thank you for your question. It's a great question. Hi, doctor. I'm Donna. In my job, I do a lot of intelligence testing. And I was just wondering if you've done any studies or have any opinions as to whether a person would do better on an intelligence test after they've changed their brain as opposed to before.

I mean, we saw the pictures of what they look like when they're imaged, but actually on an IQ test, I was wondering if... It's a fascinating question, Donna. It's really interesting. And the answer is absolutely. When your brain works better, you can concentrate. If you just think about intelligence tests, they're measuring things like concentration and reaction time and your ability to put complex concepts together. And when your brain works better, you are smarter. I'll tell you this story. I had a patient, a little six-year-old boy, Christopher, came to see me from the San Joaquin Valley.

So that's the part in California where they produce a lot of foods and, you know, fruits and vegetables for the world. And when he came to me, he had an IQ of 63, which isn't in the mentally retarded range. And when I looked at his brain, it clearly looked toxic. And being around pesticides is very bad for your brain. And so we cleaned up his environment.

I put him on a brain healthy program. The next year, we tested him again. So this is 12 months later. He had an IQ of 103. Now, can you imagine, which is drop dead normal. Can you imagine the difference in his life between living with an IQ of 63, not being able to learn, not doing well in school, being frustrated, not being good socially, to having a normal IQ where he can have a normal

life. Change your brain, change your life. Thank you. You're welcome. My question is more geared towards the holes or the empty spaces that we saw in the brain. Now, when we like create a wound or break a leg, they tell us that we are healing it, but it's not 100% or you may get 80% back. What type of healing are we doing? Are we healing it or just patching it over once we decide to change our brain and change our life? It's a great question. The holes in the brain, what they really indicate is low activity, not no activity. And many people can get a much healthier brain, but it depends on how much you used, how long you used, what you used was laced with. And what's really interesting is your own genetic vulnerability. Some people I've seen have really hardy brains. They've been

really bad to their brain and their brain doesn't look that bad. And other people have fragile brains. And for them, even a little bit of doing something bad to your brain shows it. So it really depends. But it's sort of like playing Russian roulette. You don't know. So you want to err on the side of being good to your brain. Thank you. Doctor, my name is Greg.

I want to kind of give you a little preface to give you an idea of where the question's headed. I spent a number of years as a children's minister and dealt with a lot of situations and dealt with ADD situations, extensive over the five or 600 kids that I dealt with on a weekly basis. And one of the things that I saw that was almost textbook was when someone would introduce a new child to me and they'd say, he's got ADD. In almost every case, that child was in a single parent home with a single mom trying to work one or two or three jobs. And many times when we'd see that change, that woman got her life straight, got married,

something happened in a positive way, the ADD would change. Am I thinking in the right direction when we're talking about that? Maybe stress on a child is causing a problem in the brain of that child and therefore causing the ADD? You know, Greg, that's a great question. And stress clearly makes everything worse. Children have more behavior problems. They have more learning problems. And that may be the source of their learning and behavior problem. At the same time, ADD is a real disorder and you can inherit it. And if you don't get it treated, it can ruin your life. My son is 30 years old and I adopted him

when he was two and a half. His biological father grew up in a very stable, wonderful home, but had terrible ADD. In fact, his mother said she used to have to not literally, but figuratively chain him to the chair so he could sit down, get his work done and finish high school. He then went into the military where he thrived. And many ADD people thrive in the military. Why? Because of the structure, right? But when he got out, he worked for the sheriff, but then got fired because he stole something. And it just went through three wives and at the age of 36, shot and killed himself. And it's just the classic untreated ADD life where if somebody would have treated it appropriately, that he wouldn't have

had to suffer. Now, you also wonder with single parent families, okay, why do they have a single parent family? Does the dad have ADD? And the dad now has problems with substances, or he's not very responsible, or he's impulsive, and that has been passed down genetically. So it's a complicated question, but I think we always have to look at it in what I call a biopsychosocial way. We have to look at, okay, what are the genes? How do people think? What's their development like? And what are the social stressors that they're under? And when we treat people in all three of those ways, we get people well. But you have to sort of think of it like that. Well, thank you.

Hi, doctor. My name is Vance. And you mentioned earlier about the painkillers and the Vicodin earlier in the segment. I was wondering, is there any natural supplements that you can take to not have to take painkillers for the pain that you have in your body? You know, Vance, that's a great question. And through looking at the imaging work, the painkillers have made me a lot more nervous for my patients. And so what we found that fish oil helps decrease pain for many people. The supplement SAMe, which also tends to work for

depression, has been shown to be helpful for pain. Acupuncture, acupressure has also been shown to be helpful. And it's so interesting when they do before and after scans with acupuncture, it actually helps to balance brain function. So I would look to what can be some of the natural things that you can do, including seeing a pain specialist. Now, some pain specialists are just into giving injections, but others really take this holistic approach so that you can significantly reduce or eliminate the pain medications you take. Thank you very much. Thank you. Hi, Dr. Amen. My name is Jane, and I believe you said you were 52. So I was babysitting you by the time you came along. I'm a little bit older than you, but we didn't have these problems, you know, when I was a child with ADD and all of this.

How much effect do you think the food we're giving our children today with all these artificial preservatives and everything is affecting this change? You know, Jane, that's a wonderful question. And, you know, I think the fact is we did have those problems. We just got labeled as bad. We got smacked in school rather than someone sent us to the doctor. Now, it is true. So when I was growing up, maybe there were one or two or three ADD-like kids in our classroom. Now there's eight. I mean, clearly there's an increased incidence. As there is increased incidence of almost every medical illness in children, including diabetes. And I think some of the culprits are diet, that we're feeding kids things with these terrible preservatives. Red dye, for example, has just been shown in a huge study to cause learning and

behavior problems in children. And we're not only feeding them worse, they're not exercising. And so, you know, kids are having trouble, so we take PE out of school. Now, how the heck does that make sense? Or we take music out of school because learning music actually helps to enhance brain function. So they're not exercising, they're not learning the right things. They're playing computer and video games, which I think are a disaster for brain function. And we just willy nilly let them do it. And I think, no, no, no, take them away and get them outside shooting hoops, doing something where they're aerobic. They're not putting them at risk for

head injuries, but doing things that are smart for them. It's a great question. Thank you, Jane. Thank you. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's a great question. Thank you, Jane. Thank you. Thanks for listening to today's show, The Brain Warrior's Way. Why don't you head over to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. That's brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, where Daniel and Tana have a gift for you just for subscribing to the show. And when you post your review on iTunes, you'll be entered into a drawing where you can win a VIP visit to one of the Amen clinics. I'm Donnie Osmond. And I invite you to step up your brain game by joining us in the next episode.