This Is Your Brain On Drugs Psychiatry Podcast

We have finally finished going over lifestyle factors for obesity and mental health, and now if that was not enough to help the patient for weight loss and metabolic factors, we will need to consider using medications, but before we start medications, we need to do a medical assessment. Actually you would do this assessment before lifestyle factors, but I think this is a good time to talk about it right before we talk about obesity medications in the next podcast, so it may not be as exciting of a topic, but we have to screen patients for other causes of obesity as well as factors that will help us know what medication to select because there are contraindications to all medications as well as times when we can kill two birds with one stone, so you definitely should not breeze over this topic!

Today I will be wrapping up the lifestyle factors that contribute to health problems like mental health and obesity. I will briefly discuss getting adequate sleep, avoiding toxins like alcohol, tobacco, and drugs, healthy relationships, lifelong learning, and spending time outdoors. I think many of these are overlooked when trying to lose weight or fix mental health problems. Diet and exercise are all over the internet now, but I think these factors are neglected and ignored and doing so may just be the reason why things are getting better, so in that regard, these could actually be the most important factors. In fact having healthy relationships and socialization is probably the most important lifestyle factor to good health!

Today I will wrap up the last episode on adverse effects of stimulant medications used to treat ADHD. I will be discussing the black box warning regarding abuse, misuse, and addiction. This risk is very much overstated, and it leads to providers withholding potentially life changing medication from a lot of patients, so today I will be going over the scientific research on how risky these medications are, when to worry about it, and what to do when actual concern exists, so you won't want to miss this one!

So we had two episodes on the efficacy of antidepressants and I think I may have been a little hard on them, so I decided to make a part 3 where I instill some hope in these medications. They work great for so many people, yet so many people hate them as well. How can that be? And why do their effectiveness numbers look so abysmal? Find out on this episode!

I bet a lot of you have heard of psychogenomic testing or at least seen one. Maybe you are a patient and you got one or are thinking about getting one. Are these things worse the time and money? Listen to this episode to learn about them and get my 2 cents on the topic!