Magnificent Mind at Any Age: Natural Ways to Unleash Your Brain's Maximum Potential

I retired from the Colorado Mental Health Institute. I watched many expensive drugs being passed out like so many M & M's. I do have to say the drugs and the artists prescribing them worked simple miracles everyday. But I never once heard anyone even consider natural supplements or nutrition to improve mental illness. Drug representatives were a constant. Nutritional support was not. I have struggled with mild depression/anxiety and brain fog for years. I have spent thousands trying to find the right herb or the right supplement to clear my mind. If snake oil was being sold, I was the first in line (a bit obsessive compulsive as well). I tried prescription anti-depressants but the side effects were depressing (no, I should not be a 180 pound eunuch).I read this book and started taking the supplements suggested for my particular issues. I can honestly say this book helped me greatly. It even helped me lose weight. I am more relaxed, happier, and have mental clarity for the first time in many years. I wish I would have had this book two decades ago. Dr Amen also suggests some easy ways to change your inner views and inner chatter. I also found these simple techniques valuable. I have suggested this book to anyone I thought might benefit but truthfully, I think everyone could benefit from a healthy brain. Ya, Dr. Amen has clinics, ya one could say the books are a marketing ploy but on the other hand would a book from a person with no clinical experience and no medical background be valuable? I can find these people all over the net hawking goods. At least Dr. Amen has the experience, wisdom, and medical background to write intelligently on the subject.

This book was easy to read and just packed with information. Once you read this book you will never feel the same way again about what you eat and how you feel. I sincerely wish that this book could be taught in every high school in the country. If this book was a mandatory course in school, our national health costs would drop significantly. This book not only describes the nutritional requirements of our bodies, but it explains: How our bodies work, What our bodies need, What we should eat, How it works to make us healthy, What supplements are available, and what the resulting nutritional benefits are (health, happiness, energy, concentration, improved brain function, and natural nutritional ways to mitigate against autism, Alzheimer's, ADHD, and Parkinson's Disease. We've heard for years that good nutrition will make us healthy, but this book explains precisely not only what good nutrition is (and it names names), but how and why it affects the body (for example, regarding energy, we all want more of it but this book tells us what energy is, where it is located in our bodies (a great surprise to me), and how it works. The information in this book represents a fundamental requirement for how to be happy & healthy as we go through life - Literally a road map for healthy living.

Today, much psychiatry involves deciding which pill to prescribe. Patients with the same symptoms may respond quite differently to the same medications. Most psychiatrists will candidly tell you that prescribing is mostly a matter of trial and error, with the patient often suffering during the process. Dr. Daniel G. Amen has a different idea. Conduct SPECT (single photon emission computed tomography) scans to identify brain deficiencies in conjunction with standard psychiatric diagnostic tools. In this book, he shares examples of how various brain dysfunctions can be identified by such scans. After trying a treatment, he can then test the adequacy of the approach by asking the patient about his or her life and by looking at an updated scan. In these before and after images, the results are remarkably different. As a substitute for such scans, Dr. Amen invites readers to respond to a series of questions that he often finds are indicative of brain dysfunctions. From there, he describes the various alternative (non-medicinal) treatments as well as the indicated meds. In many cases, patients will be helped by an improved diet, exercise, avoiding sources of brain trauma, improving hydration, reducing excess stress, learning how to stop focusing on negative thoughts, getting more sleep, reducing caffeine and alcohol consumption, avoiding aspartame and MSG, eliminating environmental toxins, and reducing television watching, video game playing, computer use, and cell phone calls and texting. After you identify what you or a loved one might be suffering from, he also describes the treatments that usually help. In the course of this, he describes the latest research that describes why these treatments help. As someone who isn't a physician, I was struck by the potential of imaging to improve diagnosis. I know what imaging has done for helping identify cancers, cardio-vascular diseases, and glandular dysfunctions. Obviously, I'm not in a position to judge the quality of Dr. Amen's work, but the theory makes sense to me as someone who often designs new measurements to diagnose the causes and sources of problems. I found that the book's main weakness is that it wasn't always clear to me what Dr. Amen meant by his various screening questions. After I got into the sections that talked about the dysfunctions in more detail, I often found that I had misunderstood the purpose of his questions. I liked the sections of the book that talk about how to improve your brain, even if you don't have a major dysfunction. I think that anyone will be intrigued by what Dr. Amen reports.

Amen writes this book from the perspective of a clinical psychiatrist, with an underpinning of research and clinical expertise. He is not afraid to recommend treatments, which, in his opinion, work well, regardless of whether they are based on medication, counselling, hypnotism, naturopathy, diet and so on. I thoroughly recommend this book for those who have specific disorders, such as ADHD, or autism, to those who simply want to improve the health of our body's most important organ, the brain.