Neuroveda Podcast for Complex Health #13: Dr Daniel Krashin talks headache treatments with 'electroceuticals', pain, addiction and our mission in life.
Dr Daniel Krashin, MD, Psychiatrist, also board certified Pain, Addiction and Headache Medicine brings his extensive experience and uncanny ability to make science understandable and applicable to this widely ranging conversation (my favorite kind!). In the first half, we review how pain and addiction are driven by the reward system in our brain. While this can get called the 'pleasure center', we really feel 'good' when we are 'rewarded' for life working, which has evolutionarily been eating and staying safe. This is akin to PacMan eating a pellet. Life is essentially running around, eating pellets for points, getting chased by ghosts and intermittently gaining powers to chase the ghosts back. Within all of this, we have learned how to short circuit this, like a cat with catnip, with substances. When the life is too stressful, our time horizon can shorten from what's best for us in the future to what will help us survive in the moment and the pressures can be shockingly minimal that drive us to think against our best longitudinal survival. Now in the time of COVID-19, these stressors are even more intense. This is a critical podcast for understanding how your brain works so you can think more clearly about making future choices. In the second half of the podcast, we dive into specific headache treatments especially highlighting 'electroceuticals' like GammaCore (which you can try in our clinic and/or be prescribed), Cefaly, H-wave and others which can be both preventative and abortive for chronic and/or debilitating headaches. Join us for this conversation that is both broad & deep.