Prescription for anti-depression

HEG feedback is a simple way to increase blood flow to the frontal lobes of the brain.

by Dr. Martha Grout — 

For some people, the world is often gloomy and depressing. For others, the day-to-day routine can cause anxiety and stop them in their tracks.

Depression drugs have a 50/50 success record; a 50-percent decrease in symptoms is about as good as it gets. If you are extremely low on serotonin — the master neurotransmitter hormone — the drugs may not work.

Most often, depression and anxiety have an organic cause. You may have very poor neural function, meaning your brain doesn’t work very well because some wires are crossed or don’t even exist. Your neurotransmitters could be misfiring because of low levels of serotonin and dopamine — your brain could be functioning like a truck running on two cylinders instead of eight.

For some people, food allergies trigger the blues. For others, a body burden of heavy metals inhibits neural functions to the point where nothing works and you feel depressed.

You can desensitize environmental and food allergies with smart testing and homeopathy, and you can remove heavy metals with chelation. How is the omega 3/omega 6 balance in your diet, as well as your levels of vitamin D? Are you getting exercise? The body does most of its healing as we sleep, so adequate sleep is important, too. In sum, we want to create a good terrain from the neck down.

So we must go to work on the brain. We can increase the brain’s processing speed by increasing neural connections with HEG (hemoencephalography), and then teaching it to make new connections.

The brain operates on a use-it-or-lose-it principle. Blood brings oxygen and the basic nutrient, glucose, to all parts of the brain. The more blood flow you have, the more oxygen and glucose you will have on board. The lower the blood flow, the less processing power you have.

HEG feedback is a simple way to increase blood flow to the frontal lobes of the brain. Then add exercises, using special sounds and pictures to exercise the brain on different levels. After about 20 HEG sessions, a person achieves permanent gains in brain function. HEG is proving to be much more rapidly successful than the older style of qEEG feedback training.

Using HEG feedback, you can literally increase the processing speed of the brain. This has proven to be beneficial not only for depression and anxiety, but also for ADHD, memory loss and more. It works so well because brain malfunction is usually a processing issue. We can give a patient more serotonin, for example, but odds are that the brain wouldn’t know what to do with it.

“Just pull yourself together!” is not a realistic demand of someone with depression and anxiety. Exploration of body chemistry and retraining the mind can make the world brighter for those who have suffered with these problems.

Martha Grout, M.D., M.D.(H), has two decades in emergency medicine and a decade in homeopathic medicine. The Arizona Center for Advanced Medicine in Scottsdale, Ariz., specializes in diagnostic tests for chronic illness and HEG for brain training. www.ArizonaAdvancedMedicine.com or 480-240-2600.

Reprinted from AzNetNews, Volume 27, Number 6, December 2008/January 2009.