You are not “stuck” with the brain you have. That is what Dr. Daniel Amen, founder of Amen Clinics, says. While it doesn’t mean you can get a new brain, it does mean that our brains can become healthier, which can help with a number of emotional and behavioral issues.
Dr. Amen is one of the most visible and influential experts on brain health and mental health, with millions of followers on social media. His brain-based approach to healing goes beyond traditional psychology. He is a physician, adult and child psychiatrist, and founder of Amen Clinics with 11 locations across the United States.
His multi-modal approach to treatment uncovers the root cause of a patient’s issues or challenges that are not discovered by traditional psychiatry. He believes it is critical to look at the brain within the context of your life, which includes biological, psychological, social, and spiritual influences. This approach takes the guesswork out of psychiatry, and allows the team at Amen Clinics to get to know as much as possible about each patient’s brain and overall health.
The patient healing journey centers on brain SPECT scans and other neuropsychological assessments as part of a comprehensive evaluation, which also includes laboratory testing (as needed), a detailed personal history, and more. All of this helps to provide a personalized treatment plan.
What Is Brain SPECT Imaging?
Brain SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) is a state-of-the-art brain imaging tool that can give psychiatrists more information to help their patients more effectively. SPECT is a nuclear medicine study that is proven to reliably evaluate regional cerebral perfusion (blood flow) and activity in the brain. SPECT allows physicians to look deep inside the brain to observe three things: (1) Areas of the brain that work well, (2) Areas of the brain that work too hard, and (3) Areas of the brain that do not work hard enough.
Since the 1970s, brain SPECT has been used to evaluate strokes, seizures (epileptic foci), and brain tumors. Since then, it has been used for the evaluation of much more. In 2021, the Canadian Association of Nuclear Medicine (CANM) unanimously endorsed SPECT imaging for the assessment of:
- Neuropsychiatric disorders, such as ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
- Suspected dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, frontal temporal lobe dementia, vascular dementia, and mild cognitive impairment
- Traumatic brain injury
- Substance abuse
- Strokes
Amen Clinics has found that SPECT is also helpful in the evaluation of brain toxicity, infections (such as Lyme disease), and more.
The research on brain SPECT is vast with over 15,000 scientific research articles on it listed on PubMed.com. The experts at Amen Clinics have studied and used single photon emission computed tomography to help with complex psychiatric patients and have published 80 peer-reviewed scientific studies on SPECT. In 2012, they published a study in which seven psychiatrists were asked to evaluate 109 consecutive charts without brain SPECT scans and then with scans. Eight times out of 10, adding the scan into the review changed the diagnosis and/or treatment. In over 1 in 5 cases, the scan revealed an unexpected brain injury, and in another 1 in 5 cases, it revealed unexpected toxicity. And 60% of the time, it changed the medications or supplements recommended.
According to Dr. Amen, brain imaging works. It shows that we’re not dealing with mental health issues, but rather brain issues that steal your mind.
Brain Health, the Foundation of Overall Health
The brain-imaging work at Amen Clinics shows that brain health is the foundation of overall health, wellbeing, and success. When the brain is healthy, people are happier, physically healthier, wealthier, and they make better decisions, which helps them be successful in every area of life.
Your brain is involved in everything you do. How you think, how you act, and how well you get along with other people is related to the moment-by-moment functioning of your brain. “When the brain works right, people tend to work right. When the brain is troubled, people tend to struggle to be their best selves,” says Dr. Amen.
Unfortunately, psychiatry remains the only medical field that rarely looks at the organ it treats. How can you know what’s going on inside your head if nobody ever looks? Experienced psychiatrists evaluating patients can tell if someone is likely to have ADHD, OCD, or bipolar disorder without the benefit of these tools. But without functional brain-imaging tools, clinicians will never be able to know the underlying brain patterns of the patients they treat, so they are forced to throw medication-tipped darts in the dark at their patients.
Dr. Amen and his team specialize in an innovative brain-body approach to diagnosis and treatment for a wide range of emotional, behavioral, learning, cognitive, and weight issues for children, teen-agers and adults. Emotional issues include anxiety, depression, and bipolar disorder. Behavioral issues treated are addictions, weight control, and anger management. People also seek treatment for cognitive problems such as memory issues, Alzheimer’s Disease, and dementia. For parents of children with learning challenges, Amen Clinic offers treatment for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) also known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
The most important lesson the mental health specialists at Amen Clinics have learned from over 250,000 brain scans is that we are not stuck with the brains we have. “Change your brain, change your life,” says Dr. Amen. The clinics’ unique, well-researched process results in higher than average success rates. Of their patients, 85% have reported a better quality of life.
Achieving their mission to boost brain health not only helps individuals prevent or alleviate suffering, but it also helps everyone around them – family members, friends, and co-workers.Dr. Amen is also the founder of Amen University, an education platform with online mental health courses. He is also founder of Brain MD, a science-based nutraceutical company.