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

Episode Date: January 7, 2017

Today's Q&A session is great mix of different topics but one thing that really stood out was a case where a lady lost her memory that takes care of the simple mathematical skills like addition and subtraction. You might think it's a weird case, but if you'd like to learn of the full story on this, be sure to listen to this episode. 

Hi, I'm Donnie Osmond, and welcome to The Brain Warrior's Way, hosted by my friends Daniel and Tana Amon. 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 Amon.

Hi, Doc. My name is Jill. I have rheumatoid arthritis. So a lot of the things that you listed that are bad, taking pain medicine, being stressed, it's difficult for me to exercise and all of that. What things do you think that I could do to help that out? Perhaps diet change or anything else so then I can eventually start or stop taking the pain meds and start exercising and all of that. What way could I work my way up to changing? Okay, so there's some very simple things that you can do. One, you can start meditating every day. Meditation is great to calm down some of the pain centers in your brain. You can also take things like fish oil. Now, you have to check with your doctor to make sure it goes with your medication, but it's a very simple,

easy thing to do. If I was you, I'd also see a nutritionist and have you self-tested for food allergies because sometimes they can really contribute to inflammation in your body. And then hopefully with those simple kinds of things, and maybe even taking SAMe, because a lot of people have rheumatoid arthritis. I mean, yes, they have pain, but they also have problems with their mood because it sucks to hurt all the time, right? So those are some of the things that you can do. And one of the things before I did brain imaging work, I spent a lot of times using hypnosis with my patients, especially my pain patients. And what I found is the emotionally healthier they were, the more it worked. So, you know,

I'm thinking meditation, acupressure, acupuncture, hypnosis, SAMI, fish oil are all things you can do to try to improve the health of your brain and decrease the pain medicines that you take. And I'm not opposed to pain medicine because I have to tell you, if I'm hurting, if I'm like really hurt, like after surgery or something, give me pain medicines or kill me. I mean, so I'm with you that, you know, I need it if I'm in pain, but if I can do without it, it's better for my brain. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Hey, Doc. My name is Chris.

I've had 10 back surgeries, and I've been told with having surgeries, being on anesthesia, you can lose a lot of memory. And I don't know if that's true or not, but I have severe memory loss. I mean, I can't remember high school, elementary school. And of course I've taken pain medication for years. But my question to you is if, when you start to change your life and get back and stuff, I can imagine what my brain scan would look like now. But if I was to improve that, would that stuff come back? I mean, do you get it back? Do you get the memories back? Do you get, I mean, how does that work? You know, Chris, that is such an important question and nobody knows it because anesthesiologists don't tell you that for a certain group of the population,

having general anesthesia damages your brain. And I've seen it. The first time I recognized it, one of my patients who was an alcoholic. And so I had her brain before she had knee surgery. She calls me up from Oregon in tears. I can't remember anything. I'm worse. And when I scanned her, she was in fact worse. So general anesthesia can change your brain. And if you've had 10 back surgeries and you're vulnerable, there's no question that that can damage your brain as well as being on the pain medications. The exciting thing is, and you're somebody I would say, you should go get scanned. You should know what you have in your brain. But the exciting thing is, is if you do the right things, you can get some of this back because I'm sure your brain's not dead, right? But it's struggling and you want to make it not struggle. And there's even things like

hyperbaric oxygen treatment have been found to boost blood flow to the brain and often help people with their memory. You want to for sure get my book, Making a Good Brain Great, because in it, I talk about all the supplements and all the ways to keep your brain healthy like we did tonight. That could be really helpful for you. Okay, great. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Hi, Dr. Amen. My name is Cheryl, and I would like to know what the effects of excess sugar does to the brain in adults, but especially in children. Cheryl, sugar is not good for your brain. It is pro-inflammatory. Now, if you have a little bit of sugar, it's not a big

deal. But if you have a lot, it actually increases the inflammation in your body, which is going to decrease blood flow and overall not work very well. Plus, your blood sugar is going up and then it's going down, then it's going up, then it's going down. No wonder kids have such a hard time with their behavior. You know, one of the reasons that things like the Atkins diet and all the other sort of variations of it work is they get rid of the simple sugars in your diet and people feel more level and even. Now, I don't really like the Atkins diet because there's not enough blueberries in it. I mean, there's not enough eat from the rainbow stuff. This is like eat from the dead meat stuff.

And that's not good for you. But the good part of it is it gets rid of all those food dyes and food additives and simple sugars and so on. Well, is brown sugar better? Not much. This one? Sort of like brown rice. It's not that much better for you. Thank you. You're welcome. Hi, Dr. Amen. My name is Jamie. You touched on how certain health issues

can cause damage to the brain. Well, I've been a migraine sufferer since I was four with the vision loss and everything. The headache lasts about two to three days afterward. Just wondering, is that causing damage to the brain? You know, having a migraine headache, and actually we talked about earlier, and you had told me something very interesting, which was red dye, which we now know causes behavior problems in children, was the cause of your headaches. Having migraine headaches are so stressful that the release of stress hormones is hurting your brain. Plus, you end up on a lot of pain-killing medications because otherwise you're going to shoot yourself

because the pain is so awful. That's clearly not good for you. What we think causes migraines is vasoconstriction. So blood vessels constrict and then they over-dilate and that over-dilation is what causes the pounding, throbbing headache. Clearly not good for your brain. But I have treated many

people with migraine headaches. And over time, as the headaches go away, they get better. There's another very interesting cause of migraine headaches that nobody knows about. And that is they have a visual processing problem. Their eyes are too sensitive to light. And if they wear certain colored, filtered lenses, their headaches go away. It's so interesting. And for people who are interested in this, if you go to Erlen, I-R-L-E-N dot com, you can actually learn about this thing called the Erlen syndrome or scotopic sensitivity. And I've done before and after brain scans on people who are sensitive to light. And it's just stunning.

Just putting on blue lenses or yellow or red, whatever your color is, just makes a huge positive difference for you. Thank you. Thank you. Hi, my name is Tina. My question is about a problem that I have had. About 15 years ago, I had a brain injury and an auto accident. The MRI that they did following said that I had an unusually healthy brain.

And yet at the same time, I do have memory problems still. The MRI that they did following said that I had an unusually healthy brain. And yet at the same time, I do have memory problems still. I lost all my ability to perform simple math functions. I've relearned how to add and multiply, but interestingly, not subtract or divide. I still also have difficulty with spelling. So that leads me to wonder, is there something that either didn't show up in the MRI or is the scanning that you do a different sort of thing? The scanning that we do is very different. Think of MRIs like an anatomy study. They show what the brain actually physically looks like. SPECT is a functional study. It shows how your brain works. It's very common in head injuries to have the MRI be normal

and the spec scan be very abnormal. I mean, let's just think if we took my laptop and we dropped it, well, it might look just fine, right? But you might not be able to boot it up. So the anatomy is fine, but the function is not. And so for you, your brain is not going to be normal, right? If your brain was healthy, then you would be able to do math like you've always done. You'd be able to write like you've always done. Your memory would be like it would always be. And the fact that it's not indicates to me that you have a brain problem. And too often when people have head injuries and they go to the neurologist and the neurologist orders an MRI and the MRI is fine, they basically go, you're faking. And now you've been traumatized twice. One, you get traumatized in the accident and losing

function. That freaks you out. And now all of a sudden you have somebody calling you a faker. And I have seen that repeatedly happen. And when I scan them, I'm like going, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong. We need to fix this and, you know, get to the business of fixing things rather than labeling people. Hello, Doc. I'm David. I'd like to know the name of the scan. How affordable is it and would insurance cover it? The name of the scan is called a SPECT scan, S-P-E-C-T, sort of like respect. It's actually for single photon emission computed tomography. It measures blood flow and activity patterns.

Insurance companies about half the time pay for it because it's still considered fairly new. It's about, it's a little more than a thousand dollars scan. But, I mean, just think of relative cost. What does it cost you to have an ineffectively treated brain versus a brain that works right? So, I mean, in the context, it's actually fairly affordable. One of the things that you can look at on our website at amenclinics.com, we actually have a list of people around the country who do this. Thank you. Thank you. Dr. Amen, I'm John. One of the beautiful parts of coming at the last, I hear all these things that I want to respond to. I was married to a nurse

anesthetist and believe me, after 60 hours of anesthesia a week, she can't even remember how to get home. So, but we had a beautiful daughter who's 17 now, and this is a concerned parent question. In the last six months, she's been diagnosed with and started on medication for ADD. Her quality of life has changed. She's a 4.0 student, looking forward to going to college, wants to be an MD. What I've heard tonight is negative things about ADD, and the implication I get is it's all bad. Can you comfort me in this? Is it good that she has her ADD treated? John, that's a very important question because I don't want to leave anybody with the impression

that we shouldn't treat any psychiatric illness because having something like ADD untreated ruins your life. When you get it treated effectively, I mean, you can go from B's and C's working your brains out to straight A's. I mean, it's the difference often between getting into the college you want to get to or getting into the graduate school that you want to get to. So I'm not opposed at all to treating people with ADD. What I am opposed to is giving Ritalin out like candy, which is so often we don't do the simple things, the natural things that we could do. But many of my patients take medicine. I just want them to take it in the most thoughtful way and change their lives as well as just giving them medicine. Because I think

we shouldn't be giving pills without giving people skills. We shouldn't be changing their life. But I want you to know, of all the psychiatric illnesses, if I got to choose one to have personally, I'd choose ADD. Why? Because it's the most highly treatable. I mean, I've changed so many people's lives by treating them effectively for that disorder. It's actually fun, right? And some people think one of our recent presidents, actually maybe two, have ADD. I mean, Clinton was famous for starting his meetings late, having impulse control problems. Hello, Monica Lewinsky. Time magazine in 1996 said Clinton was only a pill away from greatness, meaning if he got his ADD treated, maybe he would do better. Don't you think we should scan political candidates? I mean, we should see Hillary's brain.

Maybe Rudy's brain, see what happened. Anyways, thank you for the question. Thank you, sir. Hello, Doug. My name is Irene. And I'm wondering, you said how many times we can have sex a week and how many drinks we can have. What about people that smoke?

They just can't quit. I'm a social smoker. I smoke maybe one a week or, you know, how many cigarettes can a person have to try to, you know, to keep from your, you know, what you're saying? You know, Irene, it's an interesting question because I think all of us do some bad things. Right. And, you know, at some point I probably won't completely give up ice cream, right? Smoking is not good for you. It's poisonous and you should stop. I mean, I don't know how else to say that. When I was an intern at Walter Reed, that's where I did my psychiatric training. Every patient that died on me that year was a smoker.

And so it left this very lasting impression. This is really a bad thing for you. But if you smoke one cigarette a week, I mean, one, I don't believe you can't quit because you actually quit six out of seven days. So, you know, I'm like, you know, let's be honest. It's just on the weekend when I have a drink. Is it true? But, you know, we all do bad things. And if you're going to continue to do bad things, like periodically, I'm going to continue to eat ice cream.

It means you need to do the other things so that you get a balance. So you're not losing 85,000 brain cells a day. You know, you're making as many or more than you lose. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. 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. you