Anxiety & Homeopathy presented by Dr. Payam Hakimi at ACOFPCA44

Sa. Hello, I'm Dr. Payam Hakimi and today I'm going to talk about practical applications of homeopathic medications in the treatment of anxiety and stress. The objectives of this lecture is not to make you a homeopath. Obviously it's going to take a long time because obviously there's a rigorous training as well as, you know, sort of experiencing and working with homeopathic medications. But what I want to show you is the essence of anxiety and stress, especially during these times that we're going through. Anxiety is very important to me and I will speak a little bit about anxiety, then we'll talk about homeopathic treatments of anxiety and then I'll show you some homeopathic research at the end of this lecture. What is anxiety? Anxiety has many different faces. Obviously a lot of our patients don't even show or when they're in our practice, we don't even know that they are anxious. So anxiety disorder and anxious state is the most common type of emotional disorder. And it is under recognized and undertreated, and that's why I like to talk about it. The lecture that you see, you're going to see was presented at the VA Hospital in Miami. And this lecture got me a certificate of appreciation with the VA hospital. We have to appreciate that anxiety disorder, obviously the definition of it has changed, the DSM criteria for it has changed, but it covers a lot of different disorders like separation anxiety, selective mutism, specific phobia, social anxiety, panic disorders, and so on. So when we talk about anxiety, it's a big diagnosis that there are a lot of different sort of symptoms and symptomatology that comes with anxiety itself. And we have to be open to that and be able to help our patients. The pathophysiology is obviously we know some of the hormones that work with the anxiety. We know of norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine, gaba. These are some of the hormones that are there. Obviously there are other hormones that are involved anywhere from the thyroid gland, adrenal gland, and even estrogen, progesterone and testosterone. Changes will create issues with anxiety epidemiology. Anxiety disorder are the most common type of psychiatric disorders in the United States. The lifetime prevalence of anxiety disorders among Americans is almost 30%, which is pretty high. Social anxiety disorder or social phobia is the most common anxiety disorder. And I think its prevalence is just going to increase a little bit because most of us are sitting home, most of us are on our computers and on our cell phones. So it becomes much easier to Sort of disconnect from the society and be sort of in our gadget. So it's important to appreciate that the social anxiety disorder rate is pretty high. The criteria for generalized anxiety disorder, and the reason I put this is because we want to see some of the symptomatology. Restlessness, or feeling keyed up or on edge, being easily fatigued, difficulty concentrating or mind going blank, irritability, muscle tension, sleep disturbances are part of it. And then there is more symptomatology that comes with it, like palpitations, pounding heart, sweating, trembling, shaking, feeling of choking, shortness of breath, chest pain, nausea. So it has a wide range of symptomatology that is actually involved with anxiety. Some of our patients feel dizzy or they get chills, or they get. It feels like they're fearful or even obviously crying and other symptomatology. So it is very important to have a treatment that can actually help them out going through this period of time without necessarily getting them addicted to certain medications. I'm going to talk about homeopathy a little bit so that we see what homeopathy can offer. So we have coffea, which has caffeine, trigonaline and theobromine in it, and the composition is very close to theophylline, with one methyl group different. So we already know the use of theophylline, obviously, in medicine, and we can appreciate that the effects and the side effects of coffee are going to be same as or very close to theophylline. So coffea helps with mental hyperactivity, agitation, anxiety, overexcitement, insomnia, hypersensitivity to noise, physical hyperactivity with tachycardia, extra systole, trembling of fingers and pileuria. And if we look at the symptomatology, we see an anxiety attack in there. Another important medication is aconite, which has aconitine, tyramine and dopamine in it. This medication is used for acute symptoms. So think aconite. Acute, sudden and intense reactions, sensations of tingling and numbness of lips, face and limbs, anxiety with fear of dying, dizziness, weakness of muscles, tachycardia with a hard, tense pulse and red face, and hypertension. So we see the difference between aconitum, aconite and coffea is the fact that coffea has this hyperactivity that's there. Aconite has a severe sort of anxiety attack. Argentum nitricum, silver nitrate has been used obviously historically in medicine, but specifically used with homeopathic dilutions for this specific anxiety that compels the subject to walk Quickly. So that's the sort of pictorial vision that we want you to have, which is a person who's always in a hurry. So they have phobias of being late and they're sort of obsessive to get things done before they need to. And the example of that is our teenage kids who are. Or some of us, we go and sit down in a test and we've studied really hard. And the minute we sit down, we start writing so fast that we forget certain things. And then we come out of the test and say, I don't know why I didn't write it. I knew it, but I wrote too fast. Right. So they're obsessed with fear of being late, nervous agitation, Nervous urination is for your. We have patients that they say before they leaving the house, they have to use the restroom multiple times. So argentum nurtricum, very specific for that. Also spasms, asthenia and tremors. Gelsemium, a very important medication for anxiety, is made of gelsemacene, I'm sorry, yellow jasmine, which has gelsemacine, gelsemine and sempervirenz. And it interferes with cholinergic transmission of the nicotinic and muscarinic receptors, basically at the motor end plate. And this is a research that I'm going to show you. That's one of the homeopathic articles that we have here that I'm going to show you at the end. And gelsemium is used for nervous apprehension with inhibition and memory disturbance. So as opposed to. As opposed to our argentum nitricum, who would go to take the test, they would sit down and write so fast that they would forget things. Gelsemium, or the person who needs gelsemium will sit in a test and they know everything, but they're so stressed out that they can't write, they can't remember it, they can't recall it. So it's a nervous apprehension. They might also have headaches, heaviness of the limbs with weakness and tremor, bradycardia or sensation as if the heart is going to stop sweating. They also have issue with urination and performance anxiety. So this is a. Medications that. Used in performance anxiety. As I said, those are not the only medications. Homeopathy has a lot of medications for anxiety disorders. This is a short list of them. And they all have different symptomatology, they present with different symptomatology. And obviously we can use either of these to help our patients with their anxiety. I'm going to talk about research now. The EPI 3 is one of the largest court studies that has been done recently in homeopathy. And this study had different arms. It had the musculoskeletal arm and then it had the sort of upper respiratory tract arm and then it had the anxiety and depression arm. And it was, it was a really important study because patients were either sort of directed towards medical doctors, homeopaths or medical doctors that practice homeopathy. And that would be someone like me. And the studies showed that in most of these different arms the patients who use the general, and that's why you have GP here, GPs general practitioners who used homeopathy actually did better than the rest of the groups. And that's basically my point here is the fact that you can use a group of homeopathic medications for let's say in this case, anxiety and decrease the amount of medication that you're prescribing. So this is another study on argentum nitricum here. And you can see that the level of test induced anxiety was significantly reduced from the homeopathic medicine when compared to the placebo. And this effect appeared to persist over time. So this was one of the medications that I showed you earlier on argentum nitricum. And then this other one basically was done on rats that showed the anxiety of rats decreases with the dilution of, with the specific dilutions of gelsemium that's used. This other one showed us how and where gelsemium works. And we know that it works in the pathways of gaba. So now we know how homeopathic dilution of gelsemium actually helps with GABA receptors. And that's why I mentioned gelsemium is one of the major medications of homeopathy for anxiety. And if you were to test one medication in homeopathy for anxiety, let it be gelsemium. Obviously this was a short list of the homeopathic medications. I also want to, and I always put this slide everywhere that I lecture. It's important for us to appreciate there are limitations, there's limitation in with allopathy, there's limitations in osteopathy, there's limitations with homeopathy. As physicians we only have as much knowledge and as many tools as we can have. So I don't want to promise you the world with homeopathic medications. Obviously it's not going to happen. You see, it's very specific. You have to find, find the patient that has a specific symptomatology and a homeopathic medications that can sort of help with those symptomatology and then use it and use it properly. But again, having these limitations, being able to combine all these together, obviously is going to give us an edge. And eventually it's about our patients and we can help our patients with these specific treatments. I'm Dr. Payam Hakimi. Again, if you have any questions, you can write to me directly. You can follow us on the social medias as well as YouTube, which is becoming our new hub for bringing out more information about osteopathy, homeopathy and functional medicine to our patients. So I want to thank all of you guys for being here and listening to me, as well as thank everyone at the American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians of California for giving me this opportunity and this honor to be with you.