Posted by Tomatheus on April 14, 2013, at 19:33:22
In reply to what good are brain scans if..., posted by poser938 on April 14, 2013, at 18:22:15
Poser938,
There is a psychiatrist named Dr. Daniel Amen who uses SPECT scans in clinical practice. Dr. Amen contends that there are seven main types of anxiety and depression, each one being associated with a different type of brain dysfunction as shown by the SPECT scans. Each type of anxiety and depression, in addition to having an associated pattern of brain dysfunction, tends to respond best to certain treatments. I don't know if there are any studies to back up Dr. Amen's contentions that the various types of anxiety and depression that he's identified respond well to certain treatments. My guess would be that Dr. Amen's contentions are based primarily on what he's observed in clinical practice and on what's known about how dysfunctions in various parts of the brain respond to changes in certain neurotransmitters and other chemicals, but that's just a guess.
I don't know what Dr. Amen's success rates are for anxiety, depression, and the other psychiatric conditions that he treats. It would be my guess that Dr. Amen would contend that his approach leads to more treatment successes than the approach of mainstream psychiatry, but I can be sure that Dr. Amen doesn't boast 100 percent success rates. So, even though using SPECT scans may help to predict which patients will respond best to which treatments, I think that the tendencies of patients with specific subtypes of anxiety and depression (as measured by specific SPECT readings) to respond to specific treatments are really nothing more than tendencies at best. In other words, although I think that Dr. Amen's approach to psychiatry (which uses SPECT scans) gives psychiatrists more information to base their treatment decisions on than conventional psychiatry does, using SPECT scans by no means guarantees that patients will respond well to the first (or second, or third) treatments that they try.
Tomatheus
Conditions: schizoaffective disorder & probable idiopathic hypersomnia
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