Brain Imaging: 2 of the Best Ways to Look at Your Brain
Medically Reviewed by Dr. Nicole Avena
Your brain is the hardware of your soul. You cannot be who you really want to be unless your brain is working right.” – Daniel G. Amen, M.D.
Your brain is involved in everything you do. How you think, how you act, and how well you relate to others is directly tied to the functioning of your brain.
When the brain works right, people tend to be at their best. When the brain is troubled, people tend to struggle in different areas of their life.
Talk It Out
Many people with troubled brains end up working with a counselor. While talk therapy can temporarily relieve emotional or psychological distress, the root of the problem may still persist, especially if a patient struggles with extreme focus, memory, or mood issues. In many cases, progress is slow because patients don’t receive tangible, visible evidence of what’s affecting them.
Sadly, psychiatry is the only medical branch that rarely looks at the organ it treats. Without functional brain imaging tools, clinicians can’t accurately determine the underlying brain patterns of their patients. In fact, how can they really know what’s going on inside a patient’s brain without taking a look?
Imaging Changes Everything
Imaging removes the guesswork from the standard psychiatric approach of prescribing high-powered medications to treat symptoms, which is like throwing darts at a dartboard in the dark.
By contrast, the approach at Amen Clinics is to look inside the brain to identify the root of the problem and to treat it with as natural a regimen as possible.
If you’ve hit a wall with traditional psychiatric care or are just curious to know what’s going on inside your brain, here are two effective technologies that can provide accurate images of your brain…
Brain Imaging: 2 Ways Technology Is Changing Mental Health
Brain SPECT Imaging
SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) is a state-of-the-art brain mapping tool that can give trained medical professionals more information to help their patients. SPECT is a nuclear medicine study that’s proven to reliably evaluate blood flow and activity in the brain.
How Brain SPECT Imaging Can Help
SPECT allows physicians to look deep inside the brain to observe three things:
- Areas of the brain that work well
- Areas of the brain that work too hard
- Areas of the brain that don’t work hard enough
With the help of brain imaging, doctors can see if there are physical or chemical imbalances, vitamin deficiencies, low neurotransmitter production, and many other factors. SPECT imaging is a clinically valuable tool for looking at brain function to help target treatment.
In addition, SPECT scans help families see their loved one’s problems as medical not moral, which helps increase compassion and understanding while decreasing shame, blame, and conflict. Brain SPECT imaging can help get to the core of a wide variety of mental health conditions and cognitive issues, so you can find the best solutions to get your life back.
Why Choose Amen Clinics for Brain SPECT Imaging?
For over 30 years, Amen Clinics has performed over 200,000 scans on patients 9 months old to 105 years old from over 155 countries. In addition to diagnosing and treating patients with psychiatric symptoms such as attention challenges, mood issues, addiction, head trauma, and many other complex or resistant psychiatric problems, Amen Clinics also has scanned many health-conscious individuals interested in learning more about their brains and how to keep them optimized far into the future.
The clinic performs outcome studies on all its patients. At the end of 6 months, 84% of complicated patients report improvement in their condition. Also, scores for quality of life increase in 85% of patients.
qEEG
A qEEG (quantitative electroencephalogram) is a diagnostic tool that measures electrical activity in the form of brain wave patterns. It’s sometimes referred to as “brain mapping.”
Brain waves are the rhythmic electrical impulses generated when the millions of neurons inside your brain communicate with each other. Brain waves can convey important information about your overall brain function, including stress levels, thought patterns, and emotions.
A qEEG can reveal brain wave patterns that are associated with impulsivity, cognitive inflexibility, and other issues.
How a qEEG Can Help
A qEEG is a valuable component of the comprehensive evaluation at Amen Clinics. It helps trained practitioners understand the cortical electrical activity in the brain. It can show if activity in the brain is too high or too low, and it can reveal how your brain cells are communicating with each other.
A qEEG can help:
- Identify cognitive and psychiatric problems
- Show how your brain wave patterns can be improved
- Predict medication response, such as how you’re likely to respond to antidepressant medication
- Offer valuable information in creating a personalized treatment plan to help balance your brain
- Provide objective information that can be used to create a personalized neurofeedback program or guide other therapies to strengthen your brain
In conjunction with brain SPECT imaging, a qEEG can give additional information about how your brain functions and can be used as a baseline to track progress with treatment.
We can use the information from a qEEG as a guide to determine the most effective solutions to help you change your brain and improve your memory, boost focus and attention, minimize mood issues, and enhance overall mental performance.
Why Choose Amen Clinics for qEEG?
Over the years, Amen Clinics has performed over 10,000 qEEGs on patients of all ages from many countries. With the information from a qEEG, we’re better able to create a personalized treatment plan for your needs.
Take a Look
While Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has helped many people with their struggles, brain imaging technology has changed the way healthcare professionals evaluate and treat the brain.
Amen Clinics uses brain imaging technology to identify your specific brain type, so they’re able to tailor a targeted treatment plan to address your symptoms and enhance your quality of life.
If you have additional questions about brain SPECT imaging or a qEEG, or would like to set up an appointment, call 888-288-9834 today!
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