The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - 112. How to Heal Your Toxic Brain ｜ Dr. Daniel Amen

00:00:00.000 If they're the right medicine for you, they can actually help balance your brain.

00:00:05.680 If they're the wrong medicine, and this is where I learned to stop prescribing benzos,

00:00:12.980 they can hurt your brain.

00:00:15.880 And let me just be clear, I'm not opposed to psychiatric medications.

00:00:20.620 Some people need them.

00:00:22.220 I'm opposed to that's the first and only thing you do.

00:00:25.200 because many of them change your brain to need them in order for you to feel normal.

00:00:37.140 Welcome to the Michaela Peterson podcast, episode 112. Dr. Daniel Amen is one of America's leading

00:00:43.920 psychiatrists and brain health experts. He's authored or co-authored over 80 professional

00:00:49.420 articles and more than 40 books, including New York Times mega bestseller, Change Your Brain,

00:00:54.540 change your life. In his newest one, your brain is always listening. He's appeared on Dr. Phil,

00:01:00.600 Larry King, Dr. Oz, the doctors, and The View. He's treated Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus. He

00:01:06.640 studies brain scans and how to heal brains. Super cutting edge stuff. I'm going to go get my brain

00:01:12.220 scanned in November to see what's wrong with me. Hopefully nothing too obvious. We spoke about

00:01:17.520 SPECT scans, the type of scan he does, testing neurotransmitter levels, what causes a toxic

00:01:23.100 brain why psychiatry is failing the worst things you can do for your brain hyperbaric oxygen

00:01:28.140 supplements to increase serotonin a good diet for your brain and more please hit subscribe if you

00:01:34.160 enjoy this content this episode was also filmed when my dad was not doing very well and he's doing

00:01:39.360 much better so take that into consideration while watching it and don't be too worried about us

00:01:43.620 please enjoy this episode

00:01:53.100 Dr. Daniel Amon, welcome to my podcast.

00:01:57.020 Thanks so much for having me.

00:01:59.760 So I brought you on because of your work on brains and the problems I've had with my brain

00:02:07.160 and my dad has had with his brain.

00:02:09.860 And I thought I could take this time to learn a whole bunch of things from you.

00:02:13.180 So that's the goal.

00:02:14.000 But before we get started, this is your book.

00:02:16.760 I have it here.

00:02:17.900 Could you give a brief background about who you are and what it is you do?

00:02:23.100 Well, again, thank you for having me. I'm a psychiatrist by training, but I learned early on that psychiatrists are the only medical doctors who never look at the organ they treat.

00:02:35.980 And so for the last 30 years, I've been looking at brains.

00:02:40.600 We do a study at Amen Clinics called Brain Spect Imaging.

00:02:44.760 Spect looks at blood flow and activity, looks at how the brain works.

00:02:50.160 And we built this database of about 186,000 scans on people from 150 countries.

00:02:57.860 And it just informs every aspect of my life.

00:03:01.760 Um, and it's been quite the wild ride to do something your colleagues don't do.

00:03:10.200 So that's been fun.

00:03:12.980 Uh, but I'm also a dad and a grandfather and a husband, um, and an author.

00:03:19.080 And I love teaching people about the cool things the brain has taught me.

00:03:24.660 Okay. So before we delve very deep into that, what exactly is a SPECT scan?

00:03:33.340 SPECT stands for single photon emission computed tomography. It's a nuclear medicine study that

00:03:42.740 looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how your brain works. And it basically

00:03:50.140 shows us three things. Is it healthy, underactive, or overactive? It lets me tell the health of your

00:04:02.280 brain, gives me a sense of how old your brain is. Are you a girl or are you a boy? Because girls

00:04:09.700 have wildly different brains than boys do. And it teaches you to actually fall in love with your 0.99

00:04:19.560 brain because you want it to be better. So do you basically bring somebody in,

00:04:27.320 scan their brain, and then compare their brain to the average brain?

00:04:32.080 Well, if you came to see me, we would take a really good history because we'd want to know

00:04:38.640 the story of your life. And then we would scan you twice, once at rest and once when you do a

00:04:45.620 concentration task and we know what a healthy brain looks like right when you've seen as many

00:04:54.560 as we've seen uh we also did a large study on healthy which is actually rare um yeah i just

00:05:03.180 tell people make a list of 10 of your friends and half of them um need to see me or are medicating

00:05:12.100 themselves. So, um, we, we have a really good idea what a healthy brain looks like. And then

00:05:21.700 that informs both the diagnosis, what we think is the problem and then how we target help for it.

00:05:33.400 Okay. Have you seen, okay, this is just way out in left field, but have you seen any evidence of

00:05:41.580 psych meds causing brain changes yes okay okay so if they're the right medicine for you they can

00:05:51.400 actually help balance your brain if they're the wrong medicine and this is where i learned to

00:05:58.180 stop prescribing benzos uh they can hurt your brain um and many of the psych meds and let me

00:06:08.340 just be clear, I'm not opposed to psychiatric medications. Some people need them. I'm opposed

00:06:14.740 to that's the first and only thing you do because many of them change your brain to need them in

00:06:23.500 order for you to feel normal. And I'm not okay with that. I want to teach my patients skills

00:06:30.020 and not just give them pills. And I want you to love your brain because when your brain works

00:06:37.980 right. Your mind works right. People often miss that central point. Your brain creates your mind.

00:06:47.920 And so if your brain is not healthy, your mind is not going to be as healthy as it could be.

00:06:57.900 Okay. Okay. So you think brain impacts mind and not the other way around?

00:07:02.740 Well, if you're an undisciplined thinker, that'll have a negative impact on how your brain actually works. But I often think of it like hardware and software. You got to get the hardware right first and then work on programming it.

00:07:22.140 And too often, in my new book, Your Brain Is Always Listening, I actually have a brand new 12-step program because the 12-step program was developed 85 years ago and there's no neuroscience with it.

00:07:36.880 And I'm like, step three for me is get your brain right.

00:07:41.520 And then it's just so much easier to get control over the addictions in your life.

00:07:47.020 okay so you had an um i'm a fairly i said this recently on a podcast i'm really open but i'm

00:07:56.500 also fairly skeptical and your stuff is so interesting i find it and i i believe i i mean

00:08:05.220 i believe in what you're doing but there i have some questions and some of the questions are

00:08:09.720 you'll you'll do a scan on say somebody who drinks a lot and then say you know the brain

00:08:17.120 looks different from the average brain they drink a lot and that's impacting their behavior

00:08:23.340 is it possible that the behavior is what changed the brain like that and not the drinking

00:08:29.600 or is that just not likely at all

00:08:32.280 well i mean you can act for all sorts of reasons the reason i've not been a fan of alcohol

00:08:42.200 is it makes your brain look older than you are and all the problems i'm seeing

00:08:50.620 as a psychiatrist for the last 40 years alcohol just tends to make worse you're more likely to

00:08:56.500 make bad decisions you're more likely to beat your spouse you're more likely to drive when

00:09:00.880 you shouldn't be driving. I mean, you know, ultimately our success is a sum of all the

00:09:10.040 decisions that we make. And I just don't want things polluting your decisions that you make.

00:09:19.960 And I wrote a blog last year. It was our number one blog of the whole year. And it was called,

00:09:25.200 I told you so. And so I've not been a fan ever since I started ordering scans. And I saw they

00:09:31.820 looked older than you were. And last year, the American Cancer Society came out against any

00:09:40.700 alcohol. I mean, for a big prestigious body like that to say you shouldn't drink, because it

00:09:47.460 increased the risk of seven different types of cancer. And I start the blog with when I dated

00:09:54.480 my wife, she told me she would never tell me, I told you so. And she lied. It's like her favorite

00:10:01.080 thing to say. And so, and then I go, but I did tell you that alcohol is not a health food.

00:10:11.640 Yeah. Okay. Is there any, is there anything you can do infrequently that you can get away with?

00:10:18.100 Like, what if this is once in a blue moon and that goes for not just alcohol, but any

00:10:22.720 drug people would be using like are one-off times okay sometimes or is that just you know is it

00:10:30.240 never okay and people are just not telling you about it well you know i can't say you can never

00:10:37.240 have a drink because that's probably not rational but the more you do it the worse it gets and

00:10:46.880 ultimately it's about love like we just finished a 30-day happiness challenge and one of it's based

00:10:56.840 on these seven big ideas and one of them is only love food that loves you back it's a relationship

00:11:04.360 with food and I don't know if you've ever been in a bad relationship but I've been in a bad

00:11:10.060 relationship and I'm not doing it anymore I'm just not and I'm for certain not doing it with

00:11:16.600 food or with alcohol or with other things does it mean i never have an ice cream cone um well

00:11:25.600 mostly only if i go to italy but um it's i just want to do the right thing because it's about love

00:11:34.400 and i have brain envy i often say freud was wrong penis envy is not the cause of anybody's problem

00:11:43.700 I've not seen it once in 40 years. 0.96

00:11:46.800 It's brain envy. 0.99

00:11:47.780 We need to get focused on love, the three pounds of fat between your ears, and you're

00:11:53.780 going to love your life a whole bunch more. 0.92

00:11:56.300 Oh, yeah.

00:11:57.960 Okay, so I've got some random questions to throw at you.

00:12:00.780 Is it possible to test neurotransmitter levels?

00:12:03.880 Because I know when people are told they're depressed, sometimes they say, oh, you have

00:12:07.380 a deficiency in serotonin, or there's something wrong with your brain, you're not getting

00:12:11.200 enough of it.

00:12:11.800 can you actually test if somebody's low in GABA or serotonin or any of the neurotransmitters?

00:12:18.000 You know, not with urine that, you know, there's a lot of people that do urine neurotransmitter

00:12:23.420 testing. It just doesn't seem to relate to what's going on in your brain because you have this thing

00:12:27.980 called the blood brain barrier and what's in your blood is not highly correlated to what's in your

00:12:35.000 brain. I mean, yes, you can do a spinal tap and directly measure, but that's a little invasive.

00:12:40.800 you know i often think if you have add likely you have low dopamine if you have ocd um or you have

00:12:49.740 the worried kind of depression your serotonin could use a jump start if you're anxious raising

00:12:57.380 gaba does seem to help um i'd prefer to do it in natural ways at least to start see if i could get

00:13:05.860 away with that. But yeah, there's some truth to neurotransmitter abnormalities can cause us to

00:13:14.080 feel funky, but not easy to measure in your blood or your urine. Okay. So when somebody, well, take,

00:13:24.020 I mean, people are all aware of my dad. He was on antidepressants, then he was on benzodiazepines,

00:13:29.420 and then they just like ruined his life um and what you're told when somebody's on

00:13:35.920 benzos or ssris is that when you take them away so if you end up having a dependency on them

00:13:42.800 you take them away and then your body has a problem with say gaba how do how do any scientists

00:13:48.420 know that that's the case so they really infer it so from the scans what we see is low

00:13:58.080 So GABA goes with excessive activity in the limbic or emotional parts of the brain.

00:14:07.800 And so giving things that raise GABA, GABA pen would be one, tends to sort of calm that down.

00:14:18.160 Magnesium tends to calm it down.

00:14:20.820 And so in this country, we pass out benzos like candy, and it's just insane that someone can go to the emergency room for a panic attack and end up with Xanax, and no one ever taught them diaphragmatic breathing.

00:14:40.620 And it's like, really?

00:14:43.280 No one ever taught them simple hypnotic or meditation techniques.

00:14:48.700 They're giving them a drug that changes their brain and they can become dependent on it.

00:14:55.680 And that's insane.

00:14:59.000 I mean, it's really insane because all of us in medical school learn the first year,

00:15:05.900 first do no harm.

00:15:11.600 From what I've learned from the doctors I've spoken with, especially ones that are purely

00:15:16.320 mainstream, is that most doctors aren't aware that these kind of medications actually cause

00:15:21.300 brain changes. They didn't know that. They assume that, well, I don't think a lot of them know that

00:15:27.180 they're dependence forming, especially something like an SSRI, but I didn't realize that you could

00:15:31.080 do scans that could show brain. Do you have brain changes before and after medication?

00:15:35.980 i do and i have positive changes for people who are on the right stuff and negative changes for

00:15:43.740 people who are on the wrong stuff and so when i met tana when i met my wife and i looked at her

00:15:51.740 scan because if i'm dating you and i really like you i'm looking at your brain it's the most

00:15:57.420 important part of you i want to see and um and she told me when she had thyroid cancer in her

00:16:05.100 20s that she got depressed and i looked at her and i said i hope they didn't put you on prozac

00:16:09.960 and she goes why why do you say that because they put me on prozac and it disinhibited me

00:16:17.700 she did things yeah there's no way she would have done uh without it and she has sleepy frontal lobes 1.00

00:16:28.380 So the front part of her brain is low in blood flow. 1.00

00:16:32.600 What Prozac does is it lowers it further.

00:16:37.440 And so for the right person who starts with a busy frontal lobe, you know, they're worried

00:16:43.260 and rigid and inflexible, and if things don't go their way, they get upset.

00:16:47.660 Well, Prozac tends to calm that down, and they feel better.

00:16:51.540 But if you start with sleepy frontal lobes, it comes that down, which basically takes the break off of your behavior, and you end up doing or saying things you wouldn't normally do or say.

00:17:10.060 And she has a new book out called The Relentless Courage of a Scared Child, and there's a whole chapter on how Prozac made her a different person.

00:17:19.140 that's wild okay uh my my background i've got a weird health history but i was on ciprolex

00:17:28.480 a ridiculous amount of ciprolex for almost 12 years and i had the same um disinhibition you'd

00:17:36.040 say for sure um it did seem to help but like it totally messed me up and i haven't been on it for

00:17:41.920 about five years getting off of it almost wrecked me like i had two and a half years of just like

00:17:47.780 I had some visual hallucinations.

00:17:49.520 It was absurd.

00:17:51.360 And I'm fine now.

00:17:52.460 I fixed things with diet.

00:17:53.980 But Ciprolex was crazy.

00:17:57.320 I remember trying an SNRI, and I only took it for two days because I was absurdly angry.

00:18:04.220 I had Welbutrin.

00:18:05.100 I ended up having a seizure.

00:18:06.840 It was really interesting to hear about after going through some of these things.

00:18:10.420 So no one ever looked at your brain, I assume?

00:18:13.180 No.

00:18:13.460 i had well i've had after i had a seizure that's not true after i had a seizure i had a scan but

00:18:20.420 they're like no everything's normal but it was what a cat scan probably right so which is an

00:18:27.340 anatomical scan which are very rarely useful in psychiatry but what i'm trying to do see i hate

00:18:38.200 the words mental illness hate those because they shame people they stigmatize people call someone

00:18:46.460 mental that's not a good thing and they're wrong because these are brain health issues that steal

00:18:54.740 people's minds and that idea everybody wants a better brain nobody wants a mental illness and

00:19:06.420 And, you know, with a lot of celebrities coming out, I have a mental illness.

00:19:10.620 I'm like, that's not going to be helpful. 0.97

00:19:12.940 What's going to be helpful is I want a better brain.

00:19:16.920 And when I got a better brain, my mood was better.

00:19:20.140 My focus was better.

00:19:21.260 I was less anxious.

00:19:22.700 So I wrote another book called The End of Mental Illness because we need to have a different

00:19:28.620 discussion about this.

00:19:31.200 We want people to develop brain envy and the habits that get them a better brain.

00:19:36.420 because that's how you treat depression. That's how you treat anxiety disorders. The new fads of

00:19:43.980 ayahuasca and magic mushrooms. And I'm just like, come on, we can do better than this.

00:19:54.100 I like magic mushrooms, but it wasn't what transformed my health. What transformed my

00:19:59.120 health, I think, was diet and mindset and getting off of medication. That's what changed

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00:21:11.080 Okay. What do you do? So you must deal with a lot of people who have dependencies and addictions and

00:21:16.340 brain injuries, and that's why they're coming to you. What's the kind of person that comes to see

00:21:20.600 you? People who want a better brain. They've read one of my books or seen me on television.

00:21:28.660 people who failed so on average our patients have failed 3.3 providers and six medications

00:21:38.380 and they just they want a different approach and we do a formal outcome study on everybody we see

00:21:47.040 um because that's our core value is outcomes we want people to get well yeah 85 percent of people

00:21:56.320 come to see us at six months or better. And we're really happy about that. Not everybody. And we

00:22:02.760 clearly don't know everything, but if you don't look, you don't know that the traumatic brain

00:22:11.080 injury may have changed your life. Steven, uh, as an example, he's a musician and he gives me

00:22:17.720 permission to share this. He and I did a Facebook video that got like 8 million views, Steven

00:22:24.620 Hilton. And he's depressed his whole life and found methamphetamines. And he said that turned

00:22:31.640 his brain on when he was 16. And then he found alcohol. But even when he went to treatment and

00:22:39.100 got rid of those, he had struggled with depression his whole life. When I saw his brain damaged to

00:22:45.120 the right front, damaged to the right temporal low. Now he'd seen like a dozen psychiatrists,

00:22:51.920 psychologist therapist and no one had ever asked him so when did you have a brain injury

00:22:57.500 because you can see it on the scan and he said no one's asked me that before he said i was three

00:23:04.500 years old and i fell down a flight of stairs onto the hospital and he said do you think that fall

00:23:11.520 could have caused a lifetime of depression i'm like absolutely could have undiagnosed brain

00:23:18.200 injuries are a major cause of homelessness, addiction, depression, panic attacks, suicide,

00:23:26.400 ADHD. Put him in a hyperbaric chamber, put him on some supplements, taught him not to believe

00:23:32.840 every stupid thing he thinks. His brain is better. He's better, which means his marriage is better, 1.00

00:23:38.880 which means his ability to be a parent is better. And if you don't know, you're flying blind.

00:23:46.680 and why is that okay i just don't understand why that would would be okay i mean why do we treat

00:23:56.080 the brain with less reverence than we treat the heart right you have chest pain

00:24:03.460 they're looking at your heart in five different ways

00:24:06.660 okay definitely so do you have a ridiculous waiting list

00:24:15.860 well we have nine soon to be 10 clinics uh wow around the country and we're just crazy busy

00:24:25.360 but you know there's 40 of us are psychiatrists and we love what we do

00:24:33.160 and why are you guys where um i'm i'm in canada not forever but in canada yeah so i think i mean

00:24:43.660 I feel most people aren't aware. Like I wasn't aware you could go somewhere and get scans that

00:24:48.320 showed brain activity. I've seen that in documentaries. I didn't realize that was

00:24:51.760 something you could do other than, you know, an MRI or a CAT scan. Yeah, no, we did. In fact,

00:24:57.420 the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine. So I've been at war with my colleagues for 30 years

00:25:04.620 because they've been telling me I'm crazy and I can't see what I see. And I've been called every

00:25:12.100 bad name you can think of. But when you see, you cannot unsee. And so to go back to making

00:25:22.820 diagnoses based on symptom clusters with no biological data, no, I can't do that. That's

00:25:29.380 just ridiculous. Recently in May, actually, the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine wrote 0.88

00:25:35.960 new procedure guidelines for brain spec imaging basically as if i wrote them and they said it's

00:25:44.640 time to use this and i'm thrilled about that i mean it's like one of the happiest moments of my

00:25:52.940 life when you know i had a group of a professional scientific body go come on let's start looking

00:25:59.660 because if you don't look you don't know okay so when someone comes in you show them their brain

00:26:07.200 and you show them how it lights up differently than the average brain because you've scanned

00:26:11.780 hundreds and thousands of them that's correct right and then you change their like you talked

00:26:21.020 a little bit about how you told him not to believe everything he thought which i think is really

00:26:26.100 important. So how does that end up changing your brain or does that end up changing your brain or

00:26:32.000 so when you come to see me, so if you came to see me history, look at your brain and then develop

00:26:40.780 a plan. And I always think of people in four big circles. It's like, what's the biology?

00:26:47.340 What's the physical function of your brain and body? Got to get those right.

00:26:51.240 what's the psychology how are you thinking what's your development like what's this social

00:26:58.540 circle how are you getting along with the people you care about and the spiritual circle which is

00:27:05.580 why the heck do you care what is your deepest sense of meaning and purpose so biology change 0.92

00:27:13.140 your diet going to probably supplement your brain if you're schizophrenic or brittle bipolar 0.98

00:27:20.960 I'm probably going to add medication in as well. Psychologically, I'm going to teach you 0.72

00:27:26.080 to kill the ants, the automatic negative thoughts, the thoughts that come into your mind automatically 1.00

00:27:33.140 and ruin your day. There's nowhere in school where they teach us to manage our minds. And so

00:27:40.800 whenever you're sad or mad or nervous or out of control, I want you to write down what you're

00:27:46.300 thinking. And we're going to investigate it to see, is it helping you or is it hurting you?

00:27:52.980 I was 28 years old and in my psychiatric residency before I learned, I didn't have to 1.00

00:27:59.640 believe every stupid thing I thought. And there's also a fun technique I give my patients called 0.98

00:28:07.640 give your mind a name. So gaining psychological distance from the noise in your head, it's

00:28:15.580 Actually, there's a great scene in the new Disney movie, Luca, where the main character,

00:28:22.220 you know, his friend teaches him to give his mind a name and tell it to shut up.

00:28:27.020 It's really fun and fascinating.

00:28:31.380 But really working in those four circles, it's what I want you to be a whole healthy,

00:28:37.440 happy person.

00:28:39.660 And that doesn't come from taking this or that medication.

00:28:45.580 I think I was in grade five when I decided that some of the thoughts I was having didn't make any sense, but I was having some pretty wild thoughts.

00:28:54.060 Have you seen brain scans on people with akathisia?

00:29:02.060 I have.

00:29:04.720 Is there a pattern?

00:29:07.460 Low basal ganglia activity.

00:29:10.340 The basal ganglia is involved in smooth motor movement, and it's not healthy in people who

00:29:18.520 have akathisia. Why do you ask? My dad from taking psych meds has akathisia.

00:29:26.260 We've been battling it for a number of years. One of the things I think is when you have a

00:29:32.880 neurological condition, whether it's akathisia or aphasia or Parkinson's disease or even early

00:29:40.900 Alzheimer's disease, it's critical to then put the brain in a healing environment. And too often,

00:29:51.580 doctors never talk about that. They don't talk about your diet. They don't talk about things

00:29:57.460 like hyperbaric oxygen therapy, they're like, here, take this medicine or that medicine.

00:30:04.720 And that's it. And that's insane. Because the brain is an organ like your heart is an organ.

00:30:13.720 And it's going to get better or worse, depending on what I do today.

00:30:19.480 have you seen things like alzheimer's and dementia and parkinson's improve after looking at scans and

00:30:28.200 changing diet and adding supplements i have in fact i wrote uh preventing alzheimer's in 2004

00:30:35.560 and i did a follow-up to it um recently called memory rescue it's one of my most popular books

00:30:43.460 And if you have Alzheimer's disease, you need to look at the brain because there's so many different roads to Alzheimer's disease.

00:30:57.080 It's not one thing.

00:30:59.480 And, you know, Michaela, if you said, hey, Daniel, what's the single most important thing you've learned from 186,000 scans?

00:31:07.680 Mild traumatic brain injury ruins people's lives and nobody knows about it.

00:31:11.720 The second thing I learned is all psychiatric illnesses, all of them are not single or simple

00:31:20.300 disorders. They all have multiple types. So giving someone the diagnosis of depression is like giving

00:31:26.780 them the diagnosis of fever or chest pain. It's ridiculous. It's like, well, what's causing it? 0.97

00:31:33.580 It's not telling you what's causing it or what to do for it. And Alzheimer's disease, I have this

00:31:39.180 great case of this guy who was diagnosed by a neurologist with alzheimer's disease from seattle

00:31:45.220 he came to see me and i scanned him the pattern for alzheimer's disease was described in 1989

00:31:52.160 bilateral parietal top back part of your brain temporal lobe decreases classic well he didn't

00:32:01.520 have that what he had was big ventricles something called normal pressure hydrocephalus

00:32:08.080 and draining the extra fluid in his brain gave him his memory back but how would you know

00:32:17.920 unless you looked and so alzheimer's can be caused from you have the genetic tendency

00:32:27.740 to it and you have too much buildup of a sticky plaque called beta amyloid

00:32:33.280 could be caused from head trauma, from infections like Lyme.

00:32:37.740 And I know now, because I have hundreds of COVID brains,

00:32:42.280 COVID is not good for your brain.

00:32:44.840 And for some people, it can damage their brain.

00:32:48.800 So infections, toxins.

00:32:52.700 I just recently doing a program with firefighters.

00:32:56.120 Almost all of them have toxic brains because of the toxic fumes.

00:33:00.380 they how do you test what is sorry i i don't mean to interrupt um what how do you what does

00:33:06.780 a toxic brain look like so it looks like the alcoholic brain so if people go to my instagram

00:33:12.760 and they can see the shriveled bumpy brain but what if i see it and you're not a drinker you're

00:33:20.540 not a drug addict oh my god i did dave asprey's brain the founder of bulletproof and his brain

00:33:27.620 just terrible and it turned out he was living in a mold filled home so mold can do it things like

00:33:36.580 Lyme disease can do it anesthesia can do it for vulnerable brains near drownings can do it it's

00:33:46.540 like if you don't love your brain um so many things can hurt it that people just aren't aware

00:33:53.340 of and I'm like a psychiatrist why do I care whether or not you live in a mold filled home

00:33:57.480 because it'll make you depressed if i don't fix that you know prozac isn't fixing your mold-filled 0.97

00:34:04.780 environment i'm so horrified right now like partly because if you have a brain problem or a

00:34:14.140 neurological problem looking at a brain seems like a really obvious option and i didn't realize you

00:34:19.020 could look at the brain like that i how did how do people not know about spec scans and why is that

00:34:26.340 not the first step in diagnosing a neurological or psychiatric disorder.

00:34:31.820 That's insane.

00:34:33.240 Oh, my God.

00:34:34.960 Wow.

00:34:35.560 You've been doing this for 30 years.

00:34:37.240 You must be so frustrated.

00:34:38.280 Not for lack of trying on my part.

00:34:42.820 But, you know, the reason it didn't sort of take off when I got fascinated by it is it

00:34:49.720 directly opposes the diagnostic system. So the diagnostic system is you tell the doctor your

00:35:00.520 symptoms and he puts it together in a diagnosis. Like when Lincoln was depressed in 1840,

00:35:09.400 he went to his doctor, told him what was going on. His doctor said, you're depressed,

00:35:14.120 and then treated him it's the same thing that happens in 2021 and when you look at it through

00:35:22.620 my eyes you go oh that's insane because how do you know why they're depressed is their brain

00:35:28.340 working too hard is it not working hard enough is it hurt is it toxic and if you don't know 0.99

00:35:36.540 you fly blind and that's why psychiatry is diminished and it's what i it's their own damn

00:35:45.040 fault because they're not embracing what other medical specialties do which is imaging what 0.85

00:35:52.260 what other medical specialists wouldn't look yeah at the problem not one

00:35:59.040 so what do you do for somebody who's already brain damaged i mean most people listening to 0.98

00:36:05.140 this podcast are like shit i fell down that i like i fell down the stairs broke my head open 0.93

00:36:09.880 when i was two i was like was that the cause of all my health problems maybe like i feel like 0.99

00:36:14.480 everybody has something who doesn't have a concussion doesn't everyone have a concussion

00:36:18.740 so i did a big nfl study when the nfl was lying they had a problem and i've scanned and treated

00:36:28.540 300 NFL players, high levels of damage, right? That's not a surprise. Nobody's surprised by that

00:36:36.280 anymore. 80% of my players get better when I put them on a rehabilitation program. So if you see

00:36:44.440 your brain, if you learn to love your brain, well, you can make it better. I mean, every day by your

00:36:54.040 behavior you're making it better or you're making it worse and if we can see it then we just get

00:37:02.360 serious about okay let's do these things i'm in a new movie uh called quiet explosions it's on

00:37:10.200 amazon prime and we took athletes and soldiers and just everyday common people who were struggling

00:37:20.540 with their moods um their behavior their emotions and put them on a rehabilitation program and it's

00:37:28.200 so exciting I mean it's been my life the last 30 years I mean why would I do something where my

00:37:33.820 colleagues hate me I don't like it when people don't like me I mean I'm not I hate conflict

00:37:41.040 and now all of a sudden I'm in a war and but you go to war because you believe

00:37:48.280 um and it was always the stories it was the stories of transformation um i have a story i

00:37:57.040 tell and somebody posted it on um online and it got 40 million views and i tell my hero story it's

00:38:06.280 like so why do i do this well i do it because i love it and it's interesting it makes me a better

00:38:11.860 doctor. But in 1995, my nine-year-old nephew, Andrew, attacked a little girl on the baseball

00:38:18.300 field for no reason. And I'm horrified because I love this child. He's also my godson. And when I

00:38:25.700 scanned him, it turned out he had a cyst the size of a golf ball occupying the space at his left

00:38:31.580 and blow. And when they drained it, his behavior completely went back to normal. So was he bad?

00:38:42.740 No, he was sick. And if we don't understand that, we just continue to hurt people,

00:38:50.640 shame people, label people, we can do better.

00:38:54.500 how do what's the type of scan people use to look for cysts or brain scan or brain tumors or

00:39:02.300 something what's that so an mri or ct you're great to look for tumors spec to give you an idea about

00:39:09.240 it but it's not the right study for it okay okay so mris for actual physical masses but spec for

00:39:17.580 activity? For activity, you want to see the pattern. So I published a large study on 21,000

00:39:25.420 people showing I could show the difference between emotional trauma and physical trauma.

00:39:32.800 And that's really important because emotional trauma actually leaves a signature pattern

00:39:38.980 in your brain. So if you grew up in an alcoholic home or unpredictable parents, or you were robbed,

00:39:46.840 raped in a fire earthquake or a hurricane, it actually takes your emotional brain and heightens

00:39:56.680 it. Well, for a lot of people, it stays that way. And so they're always looking for something bad

00:40:05.620 to happen. And I did a study, for example, with police officers who were involved in shootings,

00:40:12.200 And they couldn't go back to work because they were so upset.

00:40:15.380 So I scanned them.

00:40:16.580 And then we treated them with a psychological treatment called EMDR, the Specific Psychological Treatment for Emotional Trauma.

00:40:26.260 And after eight sessions, they all went back to work.

00:40:29.420 And their emotional brains had calmed down.

00:40:36.720 Okay.

00:40:37.660 This is very interesting.

00:40:39.160 um I'm dealing with so I'm trying I'm kind of on a search to help this akathisia and I've been on

00:40:46.200 this search for a few years and I have done everything I could possibly find hyperbaric

00:40:50.900 NAD every supplement that I thought maybe could work talk to a whole bunch of people

00:40:57.820 EMDR I don't know like I don't know what else but we've never done a brain activity scan

00:41:05.580 because i oh my god i don't know why no one suggested that that's insane here i am doing

00:41:12.060 mris yeah that probably won't help um it's definitely not let me send you my book memory

00:41:20.420 rescue because that's i would think okay how can i get my dad's brain to be in the most

00:41:28.500 healing environment and then a scan would totally be helpful um to see you know is there any lasting

00:41:38.680 damage and what can you do to repair it yeah how much can you actually repair a brain like how

00:41:47.580 damage does it have to get before you're like you you see a scan you're like you know what you're

00:41:51.780 gonna have some of these forever and there's nothing you can do like how much recovery can

00:41:55.780 somebody with brain damage get? Yeah, it depends on what they started with and how bad the damage

00:42:02.380 is. I once treated an 18-year-old girl who had a door fall on her head when she was two,

00:42:10.240 and it killed her frontal lobes. She said, well, I wasn't going to get her that much better.

00:42:15.900 But 95% of the people we see, they get better when they do the things we ask them to do.

00:42:24.500 you know compliance is really important uh yeah how important is belief

00:42:32.280 well i think belief is central to they've actually studied this

00:42:41.300 that if you believe in the doctor and the doctor believes in his method everything is better

00:42:49.840 um yeah but if you really have pictures and you have direction um another thing i'd think of with

00:42:58.920 acesthesia is there any um toxic load you know things like heavy metals or any infections

00:43:07.220 going on as well and i have this mnemonic you'll read about in the book called bright minds you

00:43:16.300 going to keep your brain healthy or rescue it so with akesthesia we're going to rescue it if the

00:43:22.600 brain's headed for trouble we have to prevent or treat the 11 major risk factors that steal your

00:43:29.980 mind and we know what they are and you know part of it so it's not just a scan it's a scan and then

00:43:39.120 we go through these 11 things and go okay which of them do you have and which can we attack so

00:43:48.220 bright minds is the mnemonic the t is toxins when i think about casthasia i think of toxins oh yeah

00:43:55.140 you know the b is for blood flow and r is retirement and aging and i is inflammation

00:44:00.740 and g is genetics h is head trauma and so on we're just like going okay how do i put the brain in a

00:44:07.940 healing environment can you tell me what mine stands for too so the m um is sorry mental health

00:44:19.280 issues so add anxiety depression the second i is immunity and infections who knew and there's

00:44:28.280 going to be a whole subspecialty of psychiatry in 30 years on infectious disease and covid is

00:44:34.180 going to lead the way for that. COVID and Lyme. The N is neurohormone disorders. So if your

00:44:42.640 hormones are right, your brain isn't right. D is diabetes, overweight, or have high blood sugar.

00:44:51.220 The S is sleep. And so getting those right is essential.

00:44:58.400 So do you diagnose sleep disorders as well by looking at what areas the brains aren't

00:45:03.420 active or are too active? Can you see that on brain scans?

00:45:06.400 You know, what we can see is if you're not a good sleeper, because overall blood flow will be lower.

00:45:11.920 And if you have sleep apnea, where you snort loudly, stop breathing at night,

00:45:18.440 it actually shows what almost looks like an early Alzheimer's pattern in the brain with damage to your parietal lobes.

00:45:27.320 Wow, this is, this is crazy.

00:45:29.940 okay do you ever give out advice like what are the top three worst things you can do for your brain

00:45:36.620 well number one is not care about it um that's or think it doesn't matter yeah what you're what

00:45:45.360 you know and i live in newport beach where we have more plastic surgeons than almost anywhere

00:45:50.720 in the world and i'm like we care more about our faces our breasts our bellies and our butts than

00:45:56.400 to our brain. And that's just insane. So it's being oblivious. That would be number one, 0.98

00:46:05.720 not caring, being oblivious, having a sad diet. So the standard American diet and

00:46:16.060 allowing your children to do brain damaging sports. It's just dumb to let a child hit a 0.98

00:46:24.400 soccer ball with their head. Just do anything other than that. Yeah. Okay. When you give diet 0.99

00:46:33.680 advice to people who come in, what are the overarching themes? Real food, colorful. Well,

00:46:44.880 so number one is high quality calories. Calories matter. When 72% of us are overweight and 42%

00:46:51.900 of us are obese. Let's not forget chemistry. Valories matter, but quality matters as much or

00:47:00.300 more. Water, because 80% of your brain is water. 70% of your body is water. Healthy protein at

00:47:11.280 every meal, because it helps balance your blood sugar. Healthy fat, lots of it in your diet,

00:47:17.140 because 60 percent of the solid weight of your brain is fat, colorful, low glycemic, high fiber

00:47:25.600 fruits and vegetables and get rid of the bad stuff. Things that are artificial, things that are

00:47:33.720 sprayed with pesticides and learn to take care of your gut because your gut, you know, it's sort of

00:47:42.500 a tie. It's really not the second brain. It's part of your first brain. So food really just

00:47:49.940 matters so much. Okay. What kind of recovery have you seen using hyperbaric oxygen? You mentioned

00:47:56.960 that. You know, I published a study on it in soldiers who were involved in blast injuries

00:48:03.440 and significant improvements to blood flow to the brain.

00:48:09.380 I've seen a lot of great results from it.

00:48:14.200 Anybody has low blood flow in their scan,

00:48:16.720 it's one of the things I'll recommend for them.

00:48:21.200 What about, do people have high blood flow?

00:48:24.300 Sometimes.

00:48:24.980 Oh, people have OCD.

00:48:27.800 Often they have too much activity in their brain.

00:48:31.480 And sometimes with seizure disorders, we'll see a focal area of increased activity.

00:48:40.760 And so do you not recommend that those people do hyperbaric oxygen or is it still a healthy thing to do?

00:48:47.140 Well, if your brain is healthy and has good blood flow, I don't see hyperbaric oxygen making things better.

00:48:55.180 um now it's approved for a whole bunch of wound healing indications you know like you have a

00:49:04.020 diabetic foot ulcer i've also seen it help with wounds in the brain like head trauma or strokes

00:49:12.060 okay interesting do you know anything about saunas and brain health well if i flip my camera around

00:49:21.720 I actually have an infrared sauna in my office here.

00:49:24.660 Do you have a clear light sauna?

00:49:25.700 What kind of sauna is it?

00:49:26.460 I do.

00:49:26.980 I have a clear light sauna.

00:49:28.180 I'm so jealous.

00:49:30.480 Saunas made such a difference to my mental health when I was coming off of SSRIs.

00:49:35.680 It was like diet was first, but I had this horrible impending doom feeling and getting

00:49:42.820 in the sauna would eliminate it for a number of hours.

00:49:46.780 I had no idea why.

00:49:47.940 Because it activates heat shock proteins and it tends to calm you down.

00:49:53.780 There's actually a study in JAMA psychiatry where just one sauna session had antidepressant effects.

00:50:01.880 And people who take the most saunas have the lowest risk of Alzheimer's disease.

00:50:09.000 How could that be?

00:50:11.660 I know there's heat shock proteins, but do you think there's more to it?

00:50:15.660 Have you thought about that at all?

00:50:16.800 Well, you know, if you want to get rid of the toxins, you can drink more water, you can stop drinking alcohol, you can eat more fiber.

00:50:26.300 But one of the best ways is to sweat with exercise or with a sauna, getting rid of the toxins in your body.

00:50:36.740 Okay. Well, that makes sense. Maybe lowering inflammation.

00:50:40.760 Okay. This is fascinating.

00:50:43.120 How much, because my audience said this is going to be a question asked,

00:50:46.360 how much are these brain scans and everything you do to treat these people?

00:50:51.940 It depends on what we do.

00:50:54.540 We have all sorts of different packages.

00:50:57.160 We have our most popular package is our six-month package.

00:51:03.660 It's about $4,500, two scans, history, seeing the doctor a number of times.

00:51:10.300 That's our most popular package.

00:51:12.500 over a period of six months yeah that's pretty good with the scans okay interesting okay let

00:51:19.400 me see that thank you very much that answered a lot of things i might have to come over there

00:51:25.180 and see what this looks like um how you use supplements in part of your treatment so

00:51:31.920 how do you how do you increase something like serotonin with supplements so i have two

00:51:39.880 supplements that I love, one called serotonin mood support that has 5-HTP and Satorial, which is a

00:51:50.420 saffron extract. And then we have something that I take every day called Happy Saffron. Saffron,

00:51:58.540 zinc, and curcumins, all of them independently have studies showing it decreases depression

00:52:06.640 and improves mood, and rather than steal your sex drive or your ability to function.

00:52:15.580 I always hated that about the SSRIs. They come between people in a bad way,

00:52:21.840 that saffron has actually been shown to enhance mood, memory, and sexual functioning.

00:52:28.620 I'm like, well, why wouldn't I do that first?

00:52:32.900 It doesn't cost as much.

00:52:34.600 yeah that the you know first do no harm which is why i got excited about supplements about 30 years

00:52:44.260 ago i think people just don't believe it right you've been taught one thing for so long that

00:52:50.200 like well no drugs work supplements are for californian hippies yeah and who would benefit

00:52:56.360 with that message it's the pharmaceutical industry so they'll perpetuate it yeah um but you know i

00:53:04.520 I mean, the benefit of supplements is you never have to tell an insurance company you're taking them.

00:53:10.500 As awful as it sounds, taking psychiatric medication with your insurability to get life insurance and long-term care insurance, disability insurance, they're less expensive.

00:53:25.660 They have dramatically fewer side effects, but not no side effects.

00:53:31.440 um and the downside is well they may be more expensive for you because insurance companies

00:53:38.940 don't cover them um and your consultant for supplements is usually the teenage clerk at

00:53:46.260 the health food store so you might not get really great information so on pub med today there are

00:53:54.600 15,000 scientific references on SPAC.

00:53:59.360 And let's just take St. John's War.

00:54:03.540 There are studies.

00:54:06.880 There are 29 randomized controlled trials

00:54:10.120 showing it's as effective as antidepressants

00:54:12.520 with, you know, like a quarter of the side effects.

00:54:16.380 So let's just not say something to play to the media.

00:54:21.120 You know, let's, you know, talk in truth.

00:54:24.600 And there's a lot of science.

00:54:27.020 People just don't know it because that's not their job.

00:54:30.740 So they believe when their doctor says, oh, there's no science.

00:54:36.160 Yeah, fair.

00:54:37.740 If you're on something like an SSRI, too, you're told not to take St. John's wort.

00:54:42.540 So obviously there's something to that, or 5-HTP for that matter.

00:54:47.140 Yeah, because, you know, you may end up with too much serotonin.

00:54:51.800 Um, so you, you want to have a practitioner you trust to give you guidance.

00:55:01.540 Okay.

00:55:03.280 Did I read, is it possible that I read something online about EMFs and SPECT scans?

00:55:10.140 Um, you know, it's possible.

00:55:11.800 I don't know a reference off the top of my head.

00:55:15.000 There are a lot of people that are very concerned about electromagnetic fields and that's on

00:55:20.740 the brain.

00:55:21.800 and, um, 5g and all of that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm concerned. I'm not sure what we can do about it, 0.95

00:55:31.380 except if you're going to be in a vulnerable state, uh, protect yourself as much as you can.

00:55:41.520 Hmm. I was hoping I didn't have to be concerned about EMFs. 1.00

00:55:45.980 I was like, that seems too far. I don't want to worry about that. 0.54

00:55:49.100 okay i think it just depends if you're doing great do the simple things you know and brain

00:55:59.540 help basically these three things brain envy got to care avoid things that hurt it know the less

00:56:05.360 and do things that help it when you're suffering you have to really ramp that up

00:56:11.880 and that's where things like emfs might come into play

00:56:19.100 Okay, that makes sense. If you already have some damage and you're super sensitive. When I had SSRI damage, I would say, I was very sensitive to fluorescent lights. They were horrible. And now they don't bother me as much.

00:56:31.520 that's interesting well there's this funky thing called erlen syndrome i-r-l-e-n.com

00:56:38.540 very common and people have had concussions um and people become light sensitive and certain

00:56:47.720 colors of the light spectrum can actually give them headaches can give them depth perception

00:56:53.320 problems or reading problems and putting on colored filtered lenses makes a huge positive

00:57:01.000 difference for them. So if that anybody in your audience relates to that, Erlen, I-R-L-E-N.com,

00:57:08.880 they have some self-tests. And I've had so many great victories from helping people by sending

00:57:17.060 them for an Erlen screen. And so they're wearing colored glasses, not just something like a red

00:57:24.300 light a blue a blue light filter that like that kind or everyone i have a hockey player now who

00:57:31.860 had a wicked concussion when you see a guy hitting him and then his head hitting the ice

00:57:38.460 is awful and then he was very light sensitive and putting on the glasses his headaches went away

00:57:47.240 wow brains are insane okay brains um that that's crazy do you also do okay last question we're

00:57:58.540 running out of time when you bring people in do you do like micronutrient testing and vitamin

00:58:02.800 testing to make sure they're not low in vitamin d or something like do you do kind of an overall

00:58:07.280 search or is it mostly the um okay because if your vitamin d level is low you're going to have

00:58:15.260 a harder time getting well. If you're testosterone, even as a woman, if that's low, you're going to

00:58:21.140 have a harder time being happy. We'll check your iron level, for example, it's critical, low. 1.00

00:58:30.560 Iron goes with ADD, goes with anxiety, goes with insomnia. High iron goes with premature aging.

00:58:40.300 So there's a whole list of labs we generally order on our patients.

00:58:45.260 Wow. Okay. That's really, that's very cool. Well, I guess my last case, last, last question.

00:58:55.080 What is it like? I've looked you up. I've followed you for a while. I know you deal

00:58:58.860 with a lot of celebrities. What is it like being a celebrity doctor?

00:59:06.760 It's just like being a doctor with, I mean, all my patients are cool.

00:59:12.560 um some of my celebrities um like i'm in justin bieber's docuseries seasons and

00:59:22.160 like many celebrities he'd show up he wouldn't show up you do what i say wouldn't do what i say

00:59:29.720 and then um one day came into my office and he said my brain is an organ like my heart is an organ

00:59:41.580 he said i think i get it if you told me i had heart disease i'd do everything you said

00:59:47.940 he said i'm gonna start doing everything you said and he got so much better so

00:59:54.480 at the beginning of the pandemic miley cyrus called me up and she was freaking out like

01:00:00.580 everybody else and as i helped her she goes will you go on instagram with me tomorrow and

01:00:07.580 help my followers and the thing I love about that is it expands the message yeah and so

01:00:18.140 if you can get people like Miley and Justin saying I suffer it normalizes other people

01:00:27.040 who suffer um so um so it's been a blessing for me

01:00:38.580 Okay, well, if people weren't aware of who you are, where can they go to find you and

01:00:45.060 follow you?

01:00:47.560 Amenclinics.com.

01:00:48.960 So, Amen, like the last word in a prayer, imagine growing up with that last name.

01:00:55.520 Amenclinics.com, or they can follow me on Facebook at Dr. Daniel Amen, or Instagram

01:01:01.780 at Doc underscore Amen.

01:01:07.580 Okay. Thank you very much for coming on. That was very interesting.

01:01:12.320 Well, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed getting to talk to you.

01:01:37.580 You

The Mikhaila Peterson Podcast - September 10, 2021

112. How to Heal Your Toxic Brain ｜ Dr. Daniel Amen

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