As Americans continue to endure the COVID-19 pandemic, mental health has moved to the forefront of the conversation.
A Niskayuna-based mental health practice recently introduced two technologies to better help patients.
Center for Solutions has provided mental health services in the Capital Region for over 10 years. During the pandemic, owner and psychiatric nurse practitioner Tammy LeBlanc began offering hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) and neurofeedback.
Margaret McMahan first experienced HBOT at the Center for Solutions a year and a half ago. As an avid runner, HBOT helped speed her recovery time from meniscus surgery and helped manage her thyroid issues.
It also had other amazing benefits.
“My average pace is nine and a half miles, and it’s down to seven and a half. I felt like my legs just wanted to go,” McMahan said.
An HBOT chamber is pressurized like an airplane. With an oxygen mask inside, the patient receives 100% pure oxygen in the cells.
“Undergoing hyperbaric treatment itself is extremely relaxing and I always look forward to it,” said McMahan.
HBOT has been proven to help reduce inflammation, aiding physical recovery, but it also helps improve mental health. That’s the main reason LeBlanc brought it into his practice.
When a patient does not respond well to medication, he will order lab tests to check for inflammation.
“If they have a higher level of inflammation, I’ll do a hyperbaric chamber treatment and usually we try to get them in for at least 20 hours and then we redesign the labs. But I’m seeing her response to the medication really start to improve because the inflammation goes down. And that’s basically the etiology of a lot of mental illnesses,” LeBlanc said.
McMahan said he has experienced a higher level of calmness throughout his treatment.
“That has improved my life tremendously in all aspects: professionally, career, fatherhood, personal relationships and my marriage. That calm has really helped me live a higher quality life,” McMahan said.
Neurofeedback is another therapy added to the practice in the last two years, which helps treat patients with anxiety, depression or ADHD.
“Neurons in their brains don’t fire like they should, so when we wire neural feedback, it stimulates your brain to fire other neurons and create new pathways in your brain,” said Sarah Christopher, certified IASIS technician.
Tammy was researching alternative modalities to treat her 12-year-old daughter, who suffers from ADHD and anxiety, when she came across several studies on the effects of neurofeedback.
“When I saw those studies, I thought this is something I want to treat my daughter with, but no one else in the area had it, so I went to the course, got certified, bought the machine, brought it here, and we started. implement it with our patients,” LeBlanc said.
Before stimulation, you will normally see high levels of brain activity. Neurofeedback measures output from different sections of your brain and then sends information to encourage better functionality.
“So we’re turning off those racing thoughts, the obsessive thoughts, things like that, and we’re leveling you off,” Christopher said.
The therapy is adapted to the needs of each person and usually lasts about 15 minutes. All the patient has to do is sit there.
“With my daughter, she is much calmer, she doesn’t have a lot of social anxiety when she goes to school right now, and I was able to get her off her anxiety medication because she was doing really well. And she was able to reduce her ADHD medication by two doses,” LeBlanc said.
There are over two dozen adult and child patients seeing neurofeedback and HBOT results at Center for Solutions.
HBOT has also shown promise in treating long-distance COVID, removing brain fog and restoring taste and smell.
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