I'm interested that they did not touch on ADD medication there.
Pretty sure everyone knows speed changes your personality!
Medications that change who we are
121–130 of 289 posts
Re: Medications that change who we are
#122I had never heard of this link between statins and aggression and Tylenol and lack of empathy before. Interesting. Maybe this is why Boomers act so strange now. “Former flower children lost their empathy and caring for the world and the next generation when their doctors put them all on statins and they started gobbling Tylenol” would be quite an interesting story. Both my parents are on statins, it seems every perso…
> Both my parents are on statins, it seems every person past a certain age is, the doctors think statins are something everyone should be on. In my experience, modern doctors are well aware of the risks of statin treatment. I'm sure you can find trigger-happy doctors who over prescribe statins, but that's definitely not the recommended best practices. According to one of the first studies I found, only about 1 in 4 p…
> only about 1 in 4 patients who fit the criteria for statin use are actually prescribed
That’s not of much help, when the criteria is very close to “everyone”.
Re: Medications that change who we are
#123I am very curious about how transgender HRT affects personality. In a sense, HRT is supposed to change who one is, but the personality changes people undergo on it seem underappreciated and not really understood or studied clinically. At least I have not been able to find a published study specifically about about how HRT changes personality. I think not all of it can be attributed to decreased gender dysphoria or pe…
I think most people don’t have the context to understand half of what’s being said there.
Re: Medications that change who we are
#124Intra-system communication and control isn't limited to the brain. The gut for example, plays a part. What's concerning about this article is that the researchers (?) we're not open to the possibility.
i believe this is taking a little bit too far. it’s about actually measuring/quantifying the effects. when this is hard/really expensive to do I’m sure the decision not to pursue it is made at several levels. in research (and especially in cutting edge research) you don’t get to explore everything and you have to carefully pick and choose what you do if you want to be around more than a few years.
Many modern studies have shown that not everything related to behavior is governed by the brain, some of it is offloaded to other subsystems. Seems to me that this should be considered when talking about the effect of medication on these behaviors, as the parent commenter pointed out.
Re: Medications that change who we are
#125Definitely 100% true, first hand experience here. I had mild medication prescribed for regulating blood pressure. Supposedly without psychological side effects. I found out a year later that it dramatically affected my personality. More or less like in the article, but in the opposite way. The frightening thing is, I didn't know !!! I found out a year later when temporarily stopping the medication, my kids started to…
Why aren't you calling out the name of the medication given your story of warning?
Re: Medications that change who we are
#126This article provides no meaningful references (but some useless ones).
This is a really interesting question, but essentially left unaddressed.
Re: Medications that change who we are
#127I've been on high-dose statins since 1995. I still feed birds and squirrels in my yard, and most of my so-called neighbors are still alive and seemingly well. I must be doing something wrong :-)
Your point being?
This is a very sad attempt at dismissing an entire study by personal anecdote, just to feel better about yourself. Truth is nobody cares, and you just made yourself another obnoxious commenter on the internet :-)
Re: Medications that change who we are
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> In the Asian world, traditional Systems of Medicine focus on "holistic" treatment and the general public often calls Western Medicine, "Allopathy with side-effects". I had intuitively felt that these medicines must have an overall effect on behaviour which may always not be obvious to the observer unless the difference between the before and after were stark and noticeable. Many traditional herbal medications also…
You make some good points. However that is not what i meant when i said "holistic". As an example, in Ayurveda/TCM, "prophylaxis" is given greater importance than symptomatic treatment. We are what we eat and how we live. The beauty of Western Medicine is that it is highly targeted and therefore provides immediate relief. However, people go overboard with no thought to other factors, consequences and ramifications. T…
It is amusing to me the sort of detached love people have for Eastern medicine. It's really a feeling of grass is greener on the other side.
In India and a few other SE Asian countries, the predominant killer disease is heart disease. There is no "Eastern" medicine for that.
"Eastern" methods work really well on innocuous diseases and symptoms because they really aren't medicines nor a treatment. Sure Ayurveda and other "techniques" tackle a few simple problems. But people actively seek such treatment for important medical problems: "a little knowledge is dangerous".
The troubling fact is none of the Ayurveda nor Eastern medicine is based on a deep understanding/exploration of human beings: instead they rely on folklore and guesswork. Very dangerous after seeing the amazing progress vaccines, statins and so on have contributed to the world.
This article talks negatively about "statin" painting it as some sort of a bad word based on one potentially problematic drug: the number of lives saved by the simple Atorvastatin-like medicines is really astonishing. I really hope a nuanced discussion about important life-saving drugs can be had in forums such as this instead of quickly reverting to the tropes of Eastern magic medicines.
Re: Medications that change who we are
#129>"It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains." I feel like perpetuating this mindset is the ultimate sin of modern psychiatry and the entire industry of psychiatric pharmaceuticals - your brain is your body. It's not some special thing that sits apart from it. It is an integral part of the whole, no different than your kidneys or liver. People think they can take an a…
I think the problem goes at least as far back as Plato and the allegory of the cave. Plato spread this concept that there was a difference between the body and mind or soul, and Western culture has never really recovered from the stupidity of that idea. There's really no evidence or justification for it. Your mind and your body are the same thing.
> Your mind and your body are the same thing.
That is incorrect, but unfortunately a very common misunderstanding.
The mind is highly correlated with the brain but it is not the brain. It’s easy to see this is the case because the brain is made up of a qualitatively different material than the mind. While the brain is composed of biological cells / chemistry / atoms, the mind is composed of things like sense-perceptions (like colours, smells, sounds, etc), emotions, etc.
Which is to say that the mind is composed of material that is fundamentally different from the brain. Of course they’re highly correlated but they are in fact separate entities composed of different materials.
You may say that the fundamental materials of the mind are reducible to the same things as the brain, but that would be confusing correlation for the thing itself.
Take for example the colour red, which is present in the mind but not the brain. Yes the brain enables the perception of red but it is not red itself. Eg a photon with a wavelength of approximately 620-750nm is often confused for red but in fact it’s just a photon which, when it hits the back of our eyes causes a chemical cascade from the relevant cone cells. So it’s abundantly clear this photon in itself is not red because it just causes a specific chemical cascade at back of our eyes. So is this chemical cascade red? No it’s just a chemical cascade that is highly correlated with red appearing in our mind.
The right answer, I believe, is simply that red is highly correlated with specific pathways of chemical cascades in our brain. The point remains that the brain and the mind are separate and distinct entities made up of qualitatively different material.
If you disagree with this assessment, please tell me what is red?
Re: Medications that change who we are
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I found out a year later that it dramatically affected my personality. More or less like in the article, but in the opposite way. So the blood pressure medication made you more calm? You didn’t specify the medication they prescribed, but that’s a common effect of certain types of blood pressure medication. In fact, certain blood pressure medications are prescribed off-label for their calming properties. One blood p…
Blood pressure medicine does make you more calm and this is known anecdotally among the medical community. I know this because I know of medical students taking it before giving a speech. Literally the medicine is well known for making you perfectly calm. You know that magic pill that can get rid of your approach anxiety? I hear, this is it, though I never tried. I'm wondering if anyone more in the "know" can comment…
> You know that magic pill that can get rid of your approach anxiety ... wondering if anyone more in the "know" can comment on it.
BLUF (bottom line up front):
Try biofeedback to regulate level of emotional arousal before an anticipated stressor or critical decision or event.
COMMENTARY
You may be referring to “Propranolol”
“Propranolol is occasionally used to treat performance anxiety... benefits appear similar to benzodiazepines in panic disorder with potentially less side effects such as addiction. Experimentation has been conducted in other psychiatric areas... Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and specific phobias...”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propranolol
It is a beta blocker:
”Beta blockers (beta-blockers, β-blockers, etc.) are a class of medications that are predominantly used to manage abnormal heart rhythms... also widely used to treat high blood pressure (hypertension), although they are no longer the first choice...“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_blocker
HYPOTHESIS
When taken before something like a Ted Talk, perhaps what’s happening is pre-treatment of not anxiety but indicative symptoms of anxiety, damping your biofeedback signals.
Perhaps it’s not doing anything direct for your anxiety, rather damping the racing heartbeat and increased blood pressure you usually experience in anticipation of stress (PTSD style association), and without that biofeedback sensor, your metacognition of anxiety doesn’t ramp up as much.
No citations, pure anecdata from 5 years in hedge fund sector.
CONTRAINDICATIONS
More than a few contra-indications:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propranolol#Contraindications
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_blocker#Contraindications
ALTERNATIVE: BIO-FEEDBACK / MINDFULNESS
Bio-feedback mindfulness exercises are likely to be able to have the same effect after practice, not just in general, but in the immediate short term preceding an anticipated stress:
”Financial decision making : Financial traders use biofeedback as a tool for regulating their level of emotional arousal in order to make better financial decisions. The technology company Philips and the Dutch bank ABN AMRO developed a biofeedback device for retail investors based on a galvanic skin response sensor.... financial decision makers can learn how to effectively regulate their emotions using heart rate measurements.”
”Stress reduction : A randomized study by Sutarto et al. assessed the effect of resonant breathing biofeedback (recognize and control involuntary heart rate variability) among manufacturing operators; depression, anxiety and stress significantly decreased.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biofeedback#Financial_decision...