Posted by Pfinstegg on October 13, 2005, at 23:45:19
In reply to Re: TMS - where can I get it?, posted by Pfinstegg on October 13, 2005, at 22:25:11
I should add that Dr. Hutto expects that all his patients will be on medication. He is using the TMS to help people with treatment-resistant depression. He is not offering it as a sole treatment; it can help a lot, but its effects do not last. You may want to do a Medscape search on it- there is a lot of excellent basic research done at Harvard, Yale, the Univ of So. Carolina, Rockefeller University, and in Europe (the German Primate Center), Israel, and Australia. All these studies, in general, show activation of the left frontal lobe and limbic structures, a decrease in overactivity of the HPA axis, with lower cortisol levels. higher levels of serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine, and normalization of cells in the hippocampus. The study which impressed me the most was done on tree shrews, in Germany. Starting with two lines of animals bred for high and low anxiety, the ones with high anxiety went down to normal when given TMS- measured by the amount of time they were able to expend in the forced swim test, which is the way anxiety and depression is measured in animals. The low anxiety animals did just as well before and after TMS.
It is, to me, clearly a very beneficial, although temporary, treatment for brains which have been physiologically altered by some combination of genetics, trauma and environmental stress. It's not a permanent solution, but can be a very valuable part of our on-going efforts to get our brains back to as normal functioning as possible. Medications can be, too. And psychotherapy. I do all of them.
poster:Pfinstegg
thread:565707
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20051010/msgs/566704.html