Dr. Dan Stickler
speaker
120 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Dan Stickler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So this woman, instead of getting hormones, she was placed on a little bit of Adderall to help with her brain fog that she was having. And then it wasn't quite enough. So they added a little bit more Adderall. Then she couldn't sleep. So they put her on some benzodiazepines to help her sleep. And this crazy ups and downs threw her into some depression.
They put her on SSRIs, which those are the hardest to get people off of. So when she came to us, she was looking at just retiring because she could not function anymore. And what we did is we set her on a gradual waning protocol for the polypharmacy that was – pharmacy to treat the pharmacy side effects of the other pharmaceuticals and got her on hormones.
And it took us about six months to finally wean the last of the SSRI off of her and the benzodiazepines. And during that time, her hormones were coming up. We were working with her lifestyle, her exercise, relationship aspects with her family, relationships at work, her work environment. And by the end of the six months, she was at the top of her game again. And she actually got a promotion.
It was beautiful to see the transition that happened. But we weren't taking a pharmaceutical approach. Well, with the hormones, we were using hormones, but they were bioidentical hormones and And overall, it just really turned her life around.
Well, system science. System science really started coming on in the early 90s, even though I think in the psychological world with IFS, it was actually in the 1980s that it was being recognized. Then in the 90s, systems biology, systems science, this all started to pick up.
But we also didn't have the ability to... I mean, in systems, looking at relationships and massive amounts of data on an N of 1 basis is daunting for the human brain to do. So you can dabble in it and computers can only hold so much data, but their ability to see these things and predict is limited.
AI now is a whole different story, especially with agentic models of AI and knowledge graph systems that you can develop where the agents can communicate with each other and interact with each other. And you can create agents to do each individual thing, but then interact with one another. So agentic models in AI have opened a whole new world for systems approaches.
A lot of people ask me, you know, is AI going to replace physicians? And the answer is yes, if physicians don't change their mindset a little bit, because the majority of physicians using AI use them as research assistants. They're not interacting with the AI. And this is where, you know. We don't want to give up all of our agency to the AI.
We don't want to give up all the decision making because there are aspects of the human, just empathy, intuition, all of that, which you're not going to get from the AI. When AI is used in that way, it's going to change the landscape dramatically. I use AI throughout my day in treating my clients, just asking it the questions. Am I missing something here?
Based on these symptoms and these labs, is there something that I could potentially be missing that's interconnected in this? And it'll find these things for me. So being able to interact with the AI, I think, is the future of medicine.
Yeah, the psychedelics have a big impact on the default mode network. I mean, when you look at brain mapping of people on psychedelics, there are massive amounts of interconnections being made. So the brain's communicating with areas that it normally doesn't communicate with, and it's looking for new pathways. Someone once described this, and I thought it was the best explanation.
I'm sorry, I can't give them credit for it, but... They said the default mode network is where patterns are created to kind of conserve brain power. We use a lot of brain power on a daily basis. We're faced with massive amounts of decisions. But the default mode network is this steady flow of a routine that we have.
So the brain says, I don't have to do much thinking power on this because this connects with this, this connects with this, and this connects with this. And imagine it like a steadily flowing riverbed. And You have all these rocks in the base of the riverbed and the water flows and it's flowing at the same rate. So you get the same eddies, the same whirlpools and the same flow patterns.
And so, you know, if I'm doing this on a daily basis, it becomes a routine. I don't have to think about doing it anymore. you have patterns of like depression and anxiety that can become a pattern in the default mode network as well.
And it gets locked in there. That's why the medications aren't that effective with it. But what happens is when we take like a tryptamine, like psychedelics, or even MDMA will slightly disrupt this.
Ketamine does a really good job of it, but it will temporarily shake up that riverbed and the rocks get dislodged and they're trying to fall back in place, but the brain all of a sudden has this option to look at alternatives. to that pattern. Is this the best pattern? Is this working for me? And those rocks settle back in.
Some of them are going to go back into their same positions, but others are going to say, wait a second. Maybe this is a better way to look at things. And this is what we see. I mean, these default mode patterns that people have, they suddenly change after a psychedelic experience.
Yeah, and Nicole Dolan did a lot of work with MDMA on this where she found – so we have this social reward window development. And this comes online I think around age nine and then kind of shuts down in the late teens, early 20s. So we're basically learning our social – that are going to kind of lock in on us. And that window of plasticity closes down.
And what she was finding is that a single dose of MDMA reopens that social reward window for up to two weeks where you have the neuroplasticity reprogram that social reward system.
Yeah, we spend a lot of time in the follow-up sessions for integration. So we'll do the immediate integration work. We'll do... The day after and then generally a week after assess how they're progressing and decide whether any more sessions need to be done.
Showing 61–80 of 120 · page 4 of 6
← Previous
Next →