The Steps to Becoming a Brain Warrior and Protecting the Most Important Part of You!

My wife Tana Amen and I want you to know that you are not stuck with the brain you have. With a little work, we know you can make it better and we have the story to prove it. This is the story of how my passion for brain health made me the warrior I am today, while helping thousands in the process. It all began with a simple idea: How do you know unless you look?

Have you ever wondered what compelled me to become a clinical neuroscientist, double board certified psychiatrist, brain imaging expert, multiple New York Times bestselling author and founder of the Amen Clinics? In this video, Tana Amen and I share my personal journey. You’ll learn about brain SPECT imaging, the revolutionary diagnostic tool my colleagues at the Amen Clinics and myself have used to amass the largest brain scan database in the world with nearly 100,000 scans from patients from 111 countries!

You’ll also understand how the ability to see the brain’s physiology helped me help my patients to better health and healing. Most importantly, you’ll find hope.

My story will show you that you can change your brain and you can change your life.

Listen to and download the mp3 for free: http://bit.ly/1C4yiG4

Early Days

I grew up with six siblings – an older brother and sister, and four younger sisters. My father called me a “maverick,” which, was not intended to be a compliment! While in the military, I became an x-ray technician where my love of imaging and photography began.

I recall my professors repeatedly stressing one important idea: How do you know unless you look?

Later, in medical school at Oral Roberts University, after a dear friend attempted suicide, I recall taking her to the department of psychiatry where I met her psychiatrist – a kind, compassionate and caring man named Dr. Stan Wallace. During that visit, it occurred to me that if Dr. Wallace could help my friend, it wouldn’t just help her, it would also help her husband, her children and, someday, her grandchildren as she became happier and more stable. I realized that psychiatry had the power to affect generations to come. And with that, my desire to become a psychiatrist was born.

The Use of SPECT

I first learned about SPECT imaging in 1991 at a lecture given by nuclear medicine physician Dr. Jack Paldi. SPECT combined my two loves – imaging and psychiatry. While MRIs and CT scans show anatomy, the SPECT scan shows physiology and how the brain functions.

In 1992, at the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting, there were researchers that told others and myself that SPECT imaging should be for research only, and had no place in clinical practice. Already a double-board certified psychiatrist for nearly 10 years and having had a year of solid experience using SPECT imaging to help my patients, I strongly disagreed. The maverick in me prevailed and I continue to use SPECT to this day with life-changing outcomes for my patients.

Looking, Not Guessing

For years, psychiatrists have been making diagnoses by talking to people without the benefit of any biological information. I compare Dr. Anson Henry’s 1840 depression diagnoses of Abraham Lincoln to the same methods used today – talking and looking for symptom clusters. This prompted me to pose an important question: How is it that psychiatry is the only medical specialty that does not look at the organ it aims to treat?

There is too much guesswork in psychiatry that ultimately ends up hurting people. Before I used imaging, I admit that I guessed too. While my diagnoses and prescriptions worked well for some, for other patients, it worsened their condition. SPECT scans give me more information, which allows me to be more effective in helping my patients.

Important Lessons from SPECT

I began to understand the nature of the diseases I treated in a new way with the added information I received from the SPECT scans. Here are two of the many lessons I have learned from SPECT:

• There’s No Single or Simple Disorder

We discovered that ADHD, anxiety, depression and addiction are not single or simple disorders. In fact they have multiple types, all requiring different treatments.

• Traumatic Brain Injuries Are Major Cause of Psychiatric Illness

We discovered a correlation with traumatic brain injury and psychiatric illness that was also reflected in statistics and research.

Brain Rehabilitation and Society

Judges and defense attorneys have sought our help in order to understand criminal behavior for many years. After scanning more than 500 criminal brains, we at the Amen Clinics learned that people who do bad things often have troubled brains, but perhaps more importantly, that these brains could be rehabilitated.

What if we evaluated and treated people with troubled brains, rather than simply warehousing them in toxic, stressful environments? I pose the idea that rehabilitating damaged criminal brains might be a way to reduce recidivism and help society in the long run.

Football and Concussions

In 2007, the Amen Clinics conducted the first and largest study on active and retired National Football League players. SPECT scans on 100 players showed widespread damage in their brains. In general terms, their brains showed a massive reduction of blood flow. The great news is that 80% of players showed a high level of improvement after treatment with the Amen Clinics brain rehabilitation plan.

Reversing brain damage is an exciting new frontier. But the implications are even wider than just brain injury.

Consider Andrew’s Story…

He was a 9-year-old boy who attacked a girl on a baseball field for no good reason. His mother discovered two drawings in his room—one of himself hanging from a tree and the other, of him shooting other children. Andrew was Columbine, Aurora and Sandy Hook waiting to happen.

When I scanned Andrew’s brain, I observed my first case of a missing left temporal lobe, and a cyst the size of a golf ball. While most other psychiatrists would have put Andrew on medication or in psychotherapy, I convinced a UCLA doctor to drain the cyst. After the surgery, Andrew’s behavior returned to normal. Today, twenty years later, Andrew is doing great! He works, owns a home and is a terrific young man. (He also just so happens to be my nephew.)

The most important lesson I have learned from helping close to 100,000 people is; when you have the privilege to change someone’s brain, you not only change their life, you actually have the opportunity to change generations to come.

--- Begin Transcript ---

Dr. Amen: Hi, I’m Dr. Daniel Amen.

Tana: And I’m Tana Amen. Welcome to Change Your Brain, Change Your Life.

Dr. Amen: You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. We can prove it. In this episode, I’m actually going to be the one that talks about why I care about what we do, and in the process we’re going to give you the single most important lesson we’ve learned from nearly a hundred thousand scans that we’ve done here at Amen Clinics over the last 23 years on patients from 111 countries.

Tana: Right.

Dr. Amen: So, Tana fell in love with me because I was so cute. I’m actually in the middle of seven children. I have an older brother and an older sister and four younger sisters, so surrounded by estrogen my whole life.

Tana: I often say that you came housebroken and fully trained. I am grateful to his sisters.

Dr. Amen: So, but my father called me a ‘Maverick’ growing up and to him it was definitely not a good thing. When I turned 18 in 1972, the draft was still going on. There was the draft lottery. My number was 19 which meant ‘bye, you’re going to get drafted,’ and so I joined, actually to be a veterinarian’s assistant. I thought, “Oh, maybe I could have a choice in the kind of job I had.” And I was thinking about being a veterinarian.

Tana: They lied, don’t they?

Dr. Amen: The recruiter totally lied to me and I ended up as an infantry medic but I loved being a medic and that is really where my love of medicine was born but very quickly I learned I didn’t like sleeping in the mud or the idea of being shot at.

Tana: So is that why I still cannot get you to go camping? He still cannot camp.

Dr. Amen: It was not that much fun. And so I got myself retrained as an X-ray technician and what our professor used to always say is ‘How do you know unless you look?’ I loved being an X-ray technician and I love taking pictures. I mean it’s just, it was awesome and fun and interesting and it really solidified my desire to be a doctor. And so when I get out of the military in 1975, I changed my major in college to be in a pre-med and I was fortunate enough to do really well in school and then get in to medical school. And during my second year of medical school someone very close to me tried to kill herself which just horrified me. And so I brought her off to the Department of Psychiatry at Oral Roberts University where I went to medical school and just fell in love with the doctor that she saw. His name was Stan Wallace – I mean, kind, compassionate, caring and I realized if he helped her it wouldn’t just helped her, it would end up helping her, her husband, her children and even her grandchildren as they would be affected by someone who is happier and more stable. So, I really fell in love with psychiatry because I realized it had the potential to change generations of people. I’ve not regretted it one minute. I love being a psychiatrist. Now fast-forward to 1991, I’m a psychiatrist now nearly 10 years and I go to my first lecture on brain SPECT imaging. SPECT is a nuclear medicine study that looks at blood flow and activity. It looks at how the brain works. Dr. Jack Pouldy was the nuclear medicine physician who gave us the lecture and he said SPECT was a tool to give psychiatrists more information on their patients to help them so we will become more effective in helping our patients. That one lecture combine my two loves, right – imaging and psychiatry – and really created a revolution in my life, and over the next 23 years my colleagues and I would build the world’s largest database of brains scans related to behavior. The six Amen Clinics now are the most active imaging centers in the world when it comes to brain imaging for psychiatry. So, behind me are two SPECT scans; image on the left these are healthy scans shows the outside surface. So it’s the same person. We’re just looking at their brain in two different ways. SPECT is different than a CAT scan or an MRI. Those are anatomy studies. SPECT looks at how the brain functions. So the image on the left full, even, symmetrical activity, the color doesn’t mean anything; image on the right shows the most active areas which are typically in the back part of the brain.

Tana: So I have a lot of people asked. They don’t understand why an MRI or CT scan is any different than this. I love this analogy because I think it’s very clear, if I could quickly just throw this out there. So if you take a computer, because I have mine, two of them recently crashed. If you take a computer and you drop it on the floor and it crashes and it will not turn on but you were to get an MRI or CT scan of it in essence, it would look like it was in perfect shape, right?, because it’s in one piece. All the parts are still in there. Everything’s fine. But if you try to turn it on, it’s not going to run right and that’s what a SPECT scan does. It shows you how it’s functioning. So that’s the difference.

Dr. Amen: Well another analogy, if you took a car engine and you got an MRI of the car engine it would look like all the parts but it wouldn’t tell you anything about how it works. So an MRI will tell you, you have a brain but won’t necessarily tell you how it’s functioning.

Tana: It’ll tell you if you have a tumor but it’s not …

Dr. Amen: and SPECT really tells you three things – good activity, too little, or too much. So if we compare healthy scan on the left to one of the first scans I did, this was on Geraldine who came to a hospital with resistant depression. She had two huge right hemisphere of strokes or if we look at someone who has Alzheimer’s disease, the back half of their brain is deteriorating and what we’ve now know, Alzheimer’s actually starts in the brain decades before you have any symptoms or if we look at someone who had traumatic brain injury, I mean you can really easily see the difference in the scans and often in traumatic brain injury, the MRIs and CT scans are normal because the anatomy ________ physiology or the function that’s not.

Tana: Well what’s so interesting is you can actually see where it’s at which tells you a lot about behavior.

Dr. Amen: Right.

Tana: And I just find that fascinating.

Dr. Amen: And when I first started doing imaging work we do, I was the director of the Dual Diagnosis Unit. It’s a psychiatric hospital unit that deals with drug addicts. So when I saw a healthy scan versus drug addict scans and went, “Okay, the real reason not to use drugs is they damage your brain.” In fact, at the time I have three children and I brought the drug-affected scans home to my three kids and effectively induced the anxiety disorders in all three of them and now that we have Chloe she …

Tana: and now four.

Dr. Amen: She totally gets that drugs are not a good idea for your brain. Sometimes we see brains that worked too hard. I mean oftentimes. And if it works too hard in the front, it’s in the image behind me, that often goes along with people who can’t stop thinking, who might have obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD. Seizure activity usually shows up as a focal hotspot – one area of the brain and that’s why we’re using anti-seizure medicines to calm things down. In 1992, so now I’m doing the scans for a year. I’m so excited and when I graduated from medical school, I had two goals. One would be a really good psychiatrist. I loved what I was learning and what I did and I wanted to be a writer. And my goal was actually to write articles and books to translate the research of other scientists for the general population. So, now we say, you know, I’m not that bright, so if I can understand things and explain them then other people can too. And so that was really my gift – to take complex concepts, really sort of take them apart to understand them and then translate that for the general public and I had already written my first national book before I ever ordered a scan. And so as I start doing the scans, I started writing about them because I’m getting pretty excited about this, and in 1992 I go to the American Psychiatric Association’s annual meeting to an all-day conference given by physicians at Creighton University on Brain SPECT Imaging in child psychiatry. And then there was another all-day conference on Brain SPECT Imaging in psychiatry and I’m so excited because by then I already ordered hundred of scans. I found them helpful and I loved that my profession is moving forward. But at that meeting, there are researchers that told me and other people ‘we shouldn’t be doing this. You shouldn’t use imaging in clinical practice. It was just for research.’ Now think about what my dad said about me.

Tana: That makes no sense.

Dr. Amen: Think about what my dad said about me and when I heard them, I no longer look up to them. I begin to think there is something the matter with them because I’ve already found them helpful. They’re helpful in so many ways.

Tana: Right and we use these scans in the hospitals, it’s not like they don’t work.

Dr. Amen: They decrease, the scans decrease stigma. They increase compliance. They give me more information to help my patients and the ivory tower people would go, ‘No it’s for us. It’s not for you.’ At which point I become furious because it’s just a bad position to take to not use technology to help your patients.

Tana: When it’s available and you know it works.

Dr. Amen: And so I’m like, “You’re kidding, right?” Psychiatrists make diagnosis by talking to people without any biological information. They actually make diagnosis like they did in 1840 when Lincoln was depressed. So, for a long time I loved Lincoln because he failed and he failed and he failed and he failed and then he became a wild success and so he was very persistent. But Lincoln suffered with depression and a lot of people don’t know he had a bad head injury when he was ten years old. So he was actually kicked in the head by a horse and unconscious all night long but throughout his life he had several serious bouts with depression. In fact, in the winter of 1840 he was suicidal and his friends took away his knives and then he went to see his doctor, Anson Henry. And how did Dr. Henry diagnosed Lincoln with depression? He talked to him. He looked at him. He looked for symptom clusters. That’s how he diagnosed him. That’s exactly the same way people are making psychiatric diagnosis in 1992. Tana: Right.

Dr. Amen: For that matter, for most people in 2015 …

Tana: Right. And I want to interject something here because you know psychiatry doesn’t have a great reputation in general. It doesn’t. I know it sounds as a surprise to you. In fact, I almost cancelled my first date with you when I found out you’re a psychiatrist, but there’s a reason for that. It’s not just because many of us including me have had really bad experiences with psychiatrist for that reason because of the guessing; because you get hurt and I personally got hurt by it.

Dr. Amen: So guessing is not innocuous. So in 1980 when I decided to be a psychiatrist, I told my dad, and I mean you probably get the sense to our show, that as much as I love my father he was difficult.

Tana: I love his father. Okay.

Dr. Amen: My father had two favorite words – ‘bullshit’ was the first one and ‘no’ was the second one.

Tana: I love his dad. I don’t know what that means but …

Dr. Amen: They have similarities. And when I told him in 1980 I wanted to be a psychiatrist he got really angry at me and he said, “What? You want to be a nut doctor? Why don’t you want to be a real doctor?” And it hurt my feelings and at that time I really didn’t understand but now I sort of get it, it’s because we don’t act like real doctors. What other medical specialty makes diagnosis based on symptoms without any biological interventions?

Tana: And I guarantee you. Somebody watching right now has a family member or they themselves have been made worse by someone doing that. I guarantee.

Dr. Amen: Not a question. And so my comment back to the people who criticized me was, “Well, don’t you know that psychiatrists are the only medical specialists who rarely look at the organ they treat?” It’s like, well, Cardiologists look, neurologists look, your orthopedic doctor looks, gastroenterologist looks, every other medical specialty looks, psychiatrists guess and because of that they hurt people. Before I started imaging and I’d hurt people, you know, they come with the classic symptoms of depression, and I’d put them on Prozac or medication like Prozac. Some people would get better, other people would get worse. They’d become homicidal or suicidal. I had somebody that met all the criteria for ADD or ADHD. On Ritalin, some people, be like a miracle. They go from Ds and F stage and Bs and other people would now become anxious. They’d start picking at their skin, they couldn’t sleep, they’d become paranoid. And I was like, “Well how the heck would I know?” So I really felt like I was throwing darts in the dark at people. There is a reason most psychiatric medications have ‘Black Box’ warnings. Give them to the wrong people and you’ll hurt them. So you can see I’m passionate and I’m persistent because I have personal experience that it would help with the people I cared for which, or my patients. And I wasn’t about to let some researcher tell me what I could or couldn’t do. At that time, still, I’m a double-board certified psychiatrist. So that means I went to medical school for four years. I did five years of psychiatric residency and fellowship. I took the tests and all the trainings. So I’m board certified in General Psychiatry and also in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. So I’ve all the credentials and so the fact that someone at the university or the ___________ said ‘No, no. You shouldn’t do that,’ you know it just didn’t cut it with me because what it left me with is guessing, and that’s wrong when I could have more information.

Tana: I thought it was so interesting so when I did not cancel my date with you. When I actually met you, so I’m a neurosurgical ICU nurse, and so when I met you and you started telling me what you did, my first thought was, “Okay, well that’s really different. Why don’t all psychiatrists do that?” It made no sense to me. So I couldn’t sort of wrap my brain around why you were, you know, letting more people didn’t do that because this was very different but it made perfect sense to me. In fact, I couldn’t figure out why everyone wasn’t doing it. So from a standpoint of somebody who works in the hospital, deals with scans all day, we do SPECT scans so it didn’t make sense to me that more people weren’t using them.

Dr. Amen: Well, and one way you get someone to fall in love with you, I mean, you know, people go, “How did you get a pretty girl?” is you do something nice for someone they love and Tana told me about her dad who had been diagnosed with dementia, who was a recluse.

Tana: I did move him in with me. He wasn’t answering his phone. He wasn’t coming out of his house. He wasn’t taking a shower, and he’d been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

Dr. Amen: And so I’m like, well we have to look. How do we know what he really has unless we look? He’s also diagnosed with depression and when I scanned him, he didn’t have Alzheimer’s disease. And in fact, he was on …

Tana: I mean what a shock to us.

Dr. Amen: He was on a toxic cocktail of medication and so I changed his medicine, added some supplements, worked with him and this “demented recluse,” five or six months later is now giving all-day seminars at the church.

Tana: Yeah. Seven-hour seminars and holding Bible study at my house.

Dr. Amen: But if you don’t look, you don’t know.

Tana: Right.

Dr. Amen: One of the big early lessons I learned is that illnesses like ADHD, anxiety, depression, addictions, are not single or simple disorders in the brain – that they all have multiple types. So if we look at two people with depression, what you’ll see is one has really low activity in the brain, the other has really high activity. Do you think they’ll respond to the same treatment? Of course not and how would I ever know unless I actually look? So now I’m pretty passionate about this. Another early lesson is that mild traumatic brain injuries are major cause of psychiatric illness and nobody knows it. Why? – Because they have bad behavior. So think of the football players, you know depression, suicide, domestic violence and they end up seeing psychiatrists who as a profession as a whole never look at the organ they treat. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh we should scan these people.’ So here’s an example. This is a fifteen-year old boy who had failed three residential treatment programs. He kept getting kicked out. So his behavior is so bad at home they have to hospitalize him or, you know, put him in a special program and his behavior is so bad there they can’t contain him. And so they ended up coming to our clinic and the whole left side of his brain is damaged. I’m like, “When did he have a brain injury?” and the mother just got so sad, she said, “I knew something was wrong with him.” When he was three years old he fell down a flight of stairs and he was unconscious for half an hour and the doctor at the hospital diagnosed him with mild traumatic brain injury but if you look at his brain, there’s absolutely nothing mild about what had happened to him. So yes, his behavior was troubled and people judged him as a bad boy but in fact he had a damaged brain and that just wasn’t fair.

Tana: You know it’s interesting. I’m the first person to think and say that people should be held accountable for their actions. I mean I’m not kidding about, you know, protecting innocent people but what I love about our work is that we have the opportunity to really help people and prevent so much of this with the early signs and I love that. I mean it frustrates me and it excites me because when I think about some of the people, you know, the batman sugar, right, there were signs early. There were early signs. You know if you have the opportunity and you were able to look …

Dr. Amen: But as a profession we don’t look and if you think of all the mass shooters …

Tana: It’s just so frustrating.

Dr. Amen: Almost all of them were seeing psychiatrists. They had seen psychiatrists and almost all of them had been on medication in the dark. We’ll talk about that in just a little bit. So as I got really interested in the idea of traumatic brain injury and psychiatric illness, the literature’s actually very clear. The scientific literature is very clear. Undiagnosed brain injuries are major cause of homelessness. 58% of the homeless men in Toronto had a significant brain injury before they were homeless.

Tana: So that means it’s huge. 58%.

Dr. Amen: It’s a major cause of drug and alcohol abuse. Brand new study says children who have a brain injury; they are three and half times more likely to have problems with addictions. It’s a major cause of depression. It’s a major cause of panic attacks, ADHD and suicide. And the sad thing is, is that living with the condition that no one knows about that is treatable. That is a crime.

Tana: And when you think of all the other people that may not have had to suffer as a result.

Dr. Amen: Right. And so as I went along in my career I got so much criticism. I got reported to the California Medical Board. I was investigated for a year. Thank God at the end of the year they said, “We didn’t find anything you did wrong. We just hope you’ll publish your research so that other people can learn from you.”

Tana: And so you started publishing.

Dr. Amen: And so we’ve now published 72 studies. But as the criticism grew louder, so did the lessons. Judges …

Tana: But you have to understand too. You’re not a very conflict-seeking person. So he’s sort of conflict-avoiding for the most part.

Dr. Amen: Yeah. People really knew me. You know I come out with really strong statements because I believe this.

Tana: Yeah.

Dr. Amen: But I don’t like to fight.

Tana: No. He does not. That would be me. You don’t like to fight.

Dr. Amen: That would be you, I guess.

Tana: So that was hard for him and I used to sit there and go, “I don’t understand why this bothers you” because, you know, someone’s criticizing him and you know just screaming him in an article but on the same day we’re walking and some mother comes running up crying, throws her arms around him and she’s like, “You saved my son’s life.” Now to me it’s a big brainer. It’s not a no-brainer. It’s a big brainer. Which one is more important? You know I wouldn’t care so much about the guy that’s criticizing me that has no idea. He was clueless about what I’m doing. It’s the people that you’re helping that are important. But he doesn’t like that kind of conflict for the most part.

Dr. Amen: I wondered you know why God would put me in that situation but I mean it was just so clear. The message was so clear. So the lessons went up. Judges and defense attorneys sought our help to understand criminal behavior. So we have scanned more than 500 convicted felons, 90 murderers and our work taught us that people who do bad things often have troubled brains. Okay. That’s not a surprise. What did surprise me – they often have brains that could be rehabilitated. So here’s a radical idea. What if we evaluated and treated people who have troubled brains rather than simply warehousing them in toxic, stressful environments?

Tana: Okay. Let’s clarify.

Dr. Amen: Let’s not lie to ourselves. See I like that verse in the New Testament John chapter 8 – Know the truth and the truth will set you free. When you put people in prison you are not rehabilitating them, you’re punishing …

Tana: Well there are a lot of people like me out there watching. Let’s be very clear about one thing. We’re not …

Dr. Amen: I mean we’re just telling you the truth is we are getting retribution on them. We are not rehabilitating them to warehouse someone in a toxic, stressful environment. Now I want to keep our society safe. That is really important.

Tana: You’re talking to mama bear here so …

Dr. Amen: But shouldn’t we also be scanning, because most of the people that go to jail go home …

Tana: Now that’s a good point.

Dr. Amen: And if you don’t work on rehabilitating their brain, recidivism is anywhere from 40 to 70% and so you’re not investing in the health of our society. So my experience …

Tana: So to your point …

Dr. Amen: Let me finish. My experience is that we could actually, by investing in rehabilitating the brains in people who do troubled things, is that we could be making people more functional. So I actually and I live in Orange County. It’s a very conservative community and I think this is the most conservative idea that some people will think I’m a bleeding heart liberal and that’s just not how I feel because if we invest in people that, and their brain health, what we’re doing is we’re investing their ability to stay out of jail, to work, to support their families and pay taxes but, you know, our society got the wall street mind setup, you know, well how much money do I have now as opposed to investing in the future.

Tana: Let me say something to your point, to your credit because I’m not about …

Dr. Amen: We’ve had this fight.

Tana: Well, but this is to your credit. This is to your point. Now I am mama bear. I am not going to make excuses for that. You hurt my kid I don’t want to hear any excuses. It’s over. But that’s it. There is a prison, it was a prison at Idyllwild somewhere in _____________ and they did something similar to what you’re talking about. Now they didn’t scan. They didn’t go to this extreme but just by making changes by including therapy, they changed their diet radically. I mean they served literally no processed food or junk food at all. Changed it to primarily plant-based diet and they, what they did is they actually separated the prison into two sides and they allowed the prisoners to choose. The ones who wanted to go through therapy, do gratitude and have all these different, you know, aspects out of their lives, job training, as well as a healthy lifestyle, exercise, diet and then they allowed the other side to do with their work, the traditional prison system. On the side where they actually changed their lifestyle, recidivism dropped to 2%. They closed it down. Now why I have no idea it’s ridiculous. Of course I’m sure it had something to do with cost but the point being …

Dr. Amen: Well in a prison industry is a big industry that lobbies, I mean it’s …

Tana: Well in part of that complain …

Dr. Amen: it’s criminal on how many people that we incarcerate with this mindset of ‘let’s be tough on crime’ without really trying to understand it and rehabilitate it.

Tana: But to your point these were people who were going home. Okay. So whether we like it or not they’re being let out.

Dr. Amen: Right.

Tana: And so recidivism dropped.

Dr. Amen: And nobody thinks about the brain in the criminal justices and my work says it should be planted right in the middle of it. Dostoevsky, one of my favorite Russian authors, once said, “A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens, but by how it treats its criminals.” And as you know he wrote Crime and Punishment so I say instead of just crime and punishment, we should be thinking of crime evaluation and treatment. So let me get to the single most important lesson we’ve learned from looking at nearly a hundred thousand scans. It’s the theme of the show. You can literally change people’s brains and when you do you change their lives. You are not stuck with the brain you have, you can make it better and we’ve proven it. I get so excited about this. So, Amen Clinics did the first and the largest study on active and retired NFL players. We started in 2007. The NFL was actively saying, “We don’t know. We’re studying the issue.” Roger Goodell was in front of congress in 2009 saying, “We don’t know. We’re studying,” And Maxine Waters, the congresswoman from Los Angeles said, “Commissioner, haven’t you say you’re studying traumatic brain injury in football? It’s a conflict of interest.”

Tana: But my favorite part is the little mice wearing helmets. It was crazy.

Dr. Amen: They were, they’re actually doing studies where they were putting little helmets on mice and whacked them into the head going we can’t tell.

Tana: How crazy is that?

Dr. Amen: Our study demonstrated, on a hundred players, damaged everywhere in their brain. I mean it’s really global reduction of blood flow to their brain. But, and this was the exciting thing, we put them on a brain rehabilitation program. We’re going to talk about it in many of our shows. So, lifestyle interventions, natural supplements, and what we found is 80% of our players showed high levels of improvement when they followed the plan. You have to follow the plan. We’re so excited but we’ve known that for a long time and we’ve known that for decades. You’re not stuck with the brain you have. We can make it better but reversing brain damage is an exciting new frontier but the implications are much wider than just traumatic brain injury. So here’s a, one of the girls, a teenage girl who was running away from home. She was cutting herself. She was suicidal. She was failing in school. She had really low blood flow to her brain and on treatment her brain was fuller, fatter, much more active …

Tana: And oh by the way she is now a junior and the top three in her class in a private school.

Dr. Amen: I mean it’s just awesome, the difference that you can make by changing someone’s brain. One of my favorite stories, so one of the journals I’ve wrote about an article on this. Some of my colleagues criticized me. I hate that. And an hour after I read the article, I saw Nancy’s follow up scans. So this is Nancy’s first scan, ten weeks before. Her husband is one of our football players and Ray White played for the San Diego Chargers and he joined my study so I would see his wife who’d just been diagnosed with frontal temporal lobe dementia, bad dementia. And you would see her scan, the front part of her brain is deteriorating, it’s dying and I said, “You know I agree with the diagnosis but if she was my wife and I like my wife I would do these things.” So I put her on a very aggressive brain rehabilitation program and so I wanted to see her back in ten weeks. Ten weeks later her brain is much better as she is better. So I just read the article criticizing me and then I see these two scans. I mean this is why I do this work because it changes people.

Tana: But see I love what one of your players said. They only go after the guy with the ball. If you weren’t making the difference, if you weren’t shaking stuff up, nobody would be talking about you at all. So you know, they go after the guy with the ball.

Dr. Amen: So, (I mean it’s just), you’re not stuck with what you have. You can make it better. It takes work but it’s possible. I have to tell you the story that is my passion story. What has really kept me doing this all these years is Andrew. So Andrew is a little boy who at 9 years old attacked a little girl on the baseball field for no particular reason. His mother called me crying and she said, “Dr. Amen, he’s just different. He’s mean, he doesn’t smile anymore. I went in to his room today and found two pictures that he had drawn, one of them he was hanging from a tree. The other picture he was shooting other children.”

Tana: See? These are what we see in the news.

Dr. Amen: Andrew was columbine Aurora-Sandy Hook waiting to happen. Now 999 psychiatrists out of a thousand would have put him on medication or put him in psychotherapy.

Tana: The hospital.

Dr. Amen: In my experience I had to scan him. How the heck do I know why a sweet little boy would do something so awful? That I had to rule out or rule in that he had a brain issue. And in fact this is the first case where he was missing his left temporal lobe. He actually had a cyst the size of a golf ball.

Tana: Now so people understand, the left temporal lobe is the part of the brain that’s associated with behavior and temper.

Dr. Amen: It certainly can be and we’d already correlated so this is actually in April 1995 and it’s the first time I’ve seen this but I’d seen many left temporal lobe problems involved in aggression and violence. And so I was sad but sort of glad I could explain his behavior but then trying to get somebody to actually take it seriously and drain the cyst, turned out he had an arachnoid cyst occupying the space of his left temporal lobe was a challenged but Jorge Lazareff at UCLA drained the cyst and when he drained the cyst, Andrew’s behavior completely went back to normal. And this was Andrew after the surgery and now Andrew who is my nephew, who is my godson, 18 years later, he works, he’s a great kid, he owns his own home, he pays taxes. When you do this work, I mean for me it is always been a privilege. I mean when you have the privilege to change someone’s brain, you not only change his or her life, you actually have the opportunity to change generations to come. You are not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. God bless you.

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