Brain Bites is all about broadening your reach with easy-to-digest psych knowledge! Join me for quick, interesting medication and brain science tidbits! Elevate your therapy practice with insight and data from your friendly online psychiatrist!
should you get this test?
|
Jarod was 56 years old and super anxious. He'd been a nervous kid, a stressed out teen, and was nearly incapacitated by his anxiety as he moved through adulthood. He'd worked with multiple different psychiatrists, and I was consulted because he just wasn't getting any better. How much longer can I go on like this? he wondered.
Before we'd met, Jarod paid $400 out of pocket for pharmacogenetic testing. THIS will have the answers! Except... It didn't. Jarod was devastated when his results came back "within normal limits". But I wasn't upset at all! Even though the results didn't give him a clear answer for why he wasn't getting better, now I knew that if we could find a medication he tolerated, there was a good chance he would get a positive effect because his liver was metabolizing medications as expected! We just had to change tactics. Today I'm talking about pharmacogenetic testing and whether you should (or shouldn't) get or recommend it! The video is 7 minutes but it's worth a watch for anyone who's wondering if this is just the test to give you the answers you've been searching for. At least when we're talking about certain psych medications. Here’s a quick list of important points to know:
Jarod was bummed that he paid for this fancy test and got "nothing" out of it. Instead, I felt like it pointed us in definitive direction! We could revisit other meds he'd tried very briefly and given up on because he didn't get relief fast enough, or felt the side effects were too strong. We set up some timeframes for testing meds and created a response + side effect tracker.
AND he agreed not to Google everything negative that was online about whatever med he was trying. We were slow, deliberate, and methodical. If he'd been anxious for 50+ years, taking a few extra weeks to slowly titrate a medication was a small price to pay. It was not a magical transformation. But his subjective anxiety and GAD 7 score both decreased by about a third within the first 6 weeks on the next medication trial and that's not nothing! I can't say if you should test or not Reader, but it's another cool tool that's available for the right person! Cheers to healthy brains, Dr. B P.S. Here's your pharmacogenetic testing video! |
Welcome to Brain Bites with Dr. B!
Brain Bites is all about broadening your reach with easy-to-digest psych knowledge! Join me for quick, interesting medication and brain science tidbits! Elevate your therapy practice with insight and data from your friendly online psychiatrist!
"Warmer... warmer.... WARMER!... HOT!!!" I know you remember the hot/cold game, right Reader? Someone hides something, like a water bottle or a precious heirloom tiara, and there's one person looking for it. Everyone else can give guidance based on temperature where HOT means you're right on top of it!!! (If only it was as easy to find my sunglasses when I don't put them back where they "belong". And I look with my eyes OPEN!) It was a fun game when I was 9 and it was fun to play with a...
I’ve been a psychiatrist for a while. It’s not often that I’m “wowed” by some new piece of information on a topic that has been the bread and butter of what I’ve been doing for almost 20yrs. But reading this article about CBT-i had a fascinating sleep pearl that has nothing to do with the main topic which is how to use CBT-i to help get people off their sleep meds. That magical little tidbit? People who get 7hrs of sleep have lower all-cause morbidity and mortality. Not 6hrs Not 8hrs 7hrs....
He was 23, a college senior, and lit up when he talked about photography, something he loved. But every time his excitement broke through, he crushed it with the same line:“I just need to get my shit together and be more like my dad.” His dad wanted him to push harder, climb faster, succeed bigger. But my patient wasn’t even sure he even wanted that life. And me? I just wrote him another prescription and sent him on his way. I maxed him out on Strattera, watched him become poorly compliant,...