“To be honest, I hardly care about my cancer. What’s killing me is my depression. I’ve been struggling every day for 30 years to keep myself from getting hung up,” a patient told us in September. He has been hospitalized in the hospital countless times, is always with the psychiatrists but it doesn’t help.
This case happened to us shortly after we returned from the 2nd training session with Petros in Cyprus in September (there we learned this therapy with brain stimulation).
We then treated this patient – a local farmer – “as a test patient” for free with the tDCS neurostimulator against depression in order to gain experience.
After the 4th treatment with the neurostimulator he laughs at us and gives us a thumbs up “30% better” he says, after the 7th treatment he says, that the depression had disappeared.
If we hadn’t experienced this ourselves, we wouldn’t believe it….
This is what happens to us again and again with the treatment-protocols we learned from Petros Kattou in Cyprus.
I have a hard time writing this up now because it sounds so much like “advertising” or “making us important”, which is completely frowned upon and forbidden among doctors – but given our long waiting times for an appointment and my extensive unpaid work to spread this great therapy among my interested colleagues, this accusation falls short.
…. the phone rings …….
I just now spoke to a colleague, Dr. Wolfgang Komorzynski (Berndorf), who trained in Cyprus last weekend.
He tells me the same as Dr. Walter Surböck (Mariazell), who has also just returned from Cyprus.
Both are shocked and incredulous about the cases they experienced there: “it nearly seems impossible” they say.
Both colleagues are now 70 years old and still working full-time and very experienced in “advanced conventional medicine”, both of them “have never experienced anything like this”. It happened to me exactly the same way!
Next month I’m flying back to Cyprus for my 4th training with Petros, and with me more of my friends will be there too to learn the protocols that Dr. Petros Kattou developed:
- Prof. DDr. Wolfgang Köstler from Vienna,
- Dr. Simon Yu from the St. Louis / USA and
- Dr. Atel Hemat from Cologne
and we will have then almost 20 doctors who have learned this!
v.l.n.r. Dr. Kattou – Dr. Retzek/Ö – Dr. Skarja/Ö – Dr. Adel Rayess/LIbanon
In Cyprus I experienced another difficult case of depression…..
The woman was beaten almost every day by her former husband over 30 years and was held over the cliff on which the house stood “he is now letting her fall down because she offended him so much.”
Only then did she leave him and later met a loving, caring man.
A few years later, a severe depression with psychotic features occurred, he was suicidal, heard voices, was completely sleepless, cried and had convulsions…
8 weeks after the brain stimulation she was in a good mood, as she told me herself.
2 years later she relapsed again and this was a few weeks before my first visit to Cyprus, where Petros introduced her and her new – protective husband – to me.
If I hadn’t spoken to them myself, I wouldn’t have believed her story at all!
Petros even provoked her:
“think of youe cliff story when he almost dropped you”.
She just laughed, it was completely unreal that someone could recover from such a severe PTSD !
Important: all of these patients had been ill for years and had always seen appropriate specialists and enjoyed appropriate “standard therapies”.
Neurostimulation is only and exclusively an “adjuvant” additional therapy and in no way ment to replaces appropriate specialist medical control and treatment.
My son Julian is an important testimonial for me….
Julian is a typical “millennial” – very productive when something really catches on him, but compared to our “boomer generation eagerness” he has low ambition, something that always kind of bothers me!
We ‘old generation’ simply had to create permanently, achieve something above average, be better, outdo the others, learn, further, faster, more optimally – until we collapse or burned out.
It’s only now that I notice that when I compare our live to that of my my children, who clearly insist on a work-life balance and “mediocre results are good enough”.
So following regularity and consistency amazes me:
Julian comes to our practice EVERY evening to use tDCS neurostimulation on himself for 1 month already.
- “Dad, I notice that I want to do more things again” – he says and says goodbye for the weekend because he is flying to Amsterdam with a friend. Wasn’t he in Malaga last weekend?
- “Dad, my energy isn’t really any better with the brain stimulation, but it doesn’t bother me anymore. Somehow I don’t care anymore and that’s much better.” Aha?!
- “Dad, I’m listening to YouTube again now, which hasn’t pleased me at all since I finished my studies. Dad, you’ve often mentioned in the past that everyone stops learning and reading at some point – depending on when he has reached his “level” in life. I had to think about that often and I was frustrated, but didn’t have the energy to change anything. But now I even listen to the YouTubes at 1.5 times the speed because of the brain stimulation can absorb things more quickly and I can remember most of it!”
Bernhard – a CEO with the first signs of decay
I’ve been treating Bernhard for many years, he’s in the meantime much more of a friend than a patient.
As CEO, he actually doesn’t have the optimal job role for his genetics:
Because he’s very nice, a do-gooder, he plays as a hobby in a band in the rhythm group and not as the front man, someone like that would be “best second” for me but not “first”.
Accordingly, his career choice as CEO is employed head of a million-dollar company. Nevertheless, the job is challenging because he always has to perform at 150%.
He can do “CEO” because his company is successful and he has doubled sales in just a few years, but that takes up his nerves.
That’s why he doesn’t sleep well, wakes up very often at night, thinks about his job all the time and can’t switch off, and is now starting to “forget” at the age of 55. His father suffered from dementia, which worries him.
Of course we have been doing everything for years: 5HTP, melatonin, homeopathy (Staphisagria works best), VitC infusions, amino acid infusions, ozone, lecithin, choline, etc.
–> this is helping him and we are able to keep his health and performance high,
otherwise he wouldn’t always come, but his memory is still getting worse.
He’s been mentioning this over and over again for 5 years.
He now forgets entire sessions that took place a few weeks ago, they are as if wiped out, and things are getting worse and worse.
Bernhard doesn’t care what it costs, the main thing is that his performance remains the same.
That’s why he persuaded me to fly with him to Cyprus to see Petros. There he was given a tDCS neurostimulator about 6 weeks ago and he told me now:
- “I can’t say that memory has helped much”.
- “Now I actually sleep through the night, so I’m much more refreshed, yes, before I woke up up to 10 times every night and had a hard time falling asleep, now I almost never wake up and only when 1 x and quickly fall asleep again.”
- “But I notice that on longer car journeys I don’t meI was ‘surprised’ by a car that suddenly and unexpectedly appeared in front of me. These are cars that have overtaken me and are in front of me. It was the case before that I somehow didn’t notice it and the car was there in front of me ‘suddenly’ and ‘unexpectedly’, that hasn’t happened anymore.”
In short our own expierience
tDCS brings a lot – probably not in all cases as fantastic
- as with the farmer that I described at the beginning
- or the abused woman from Cyprus.
Such “first experiences” are given to you by God to get you interested in something, they are introductory gifts.
What we didn’t have yet was a complete “non-response” to this additional physical therapy.
How does this neurostimulation work technically
I will write an article about it in the next few days. You can summarize it very briefly:
1. The effects can probably be achieved primarily through the neurovascular coupling.
Parts of the brain need better blood flow “for work”. The direct current stimulation stimulates the blood flow in the stimulated regions, which then works better.
I’ll leave here at the link one of the fantastic YouTube lectures by Prof. Marom Bixon start at exactly this point where he describes this connection.
Neurovascular improvements are the highlight of brain regeneration
- Comparable improvements can also be seen, for example, through hyperbaric oxygen therapy –> Here I wrote a great article with lots of photos by Prof. Chaim Efrati from Israel.
- According to studies, improvements can also be experienced with IHHT; here, too, the neurovascular blood flow situation is improved.
- This is also how Wim Hoff breathing works.
- Orthomolecular with GINGKO, Aspirin or Piracetam (Trental) ……
2. A partial effect can be explained by the electrical polarization of the neurons with training
A part of the neurons placed under “microcurrent” can learn EASIER, another part is more likely to be “inhibited”.
Depending on how you apply the polarization to the head, you can minimally stimulate or minimally inhibit certain brain centers.
But surprisingly, research shows that activity alterations only work for those neurons that are currently being “used” or stimulated.
Therefore, appropriate exercises must be carried out during brain stimulation, which improve and strengthen exactly those neurons that are now in use – which in turn leads to long lasting “neuro-plasticity” and “neural-retraining”.
Transcranial brain stimulation – extensive research available
over 30,000 entries on tDCS and depression, 23,000 for “Major Depression”, 24,000 for “clinical study”, almost 7000 study entries in Scholar only in the last 2 years.
There are now numerous meta-analyses (7000 reviews) exist and they are mixed in their results
practically every one of this studies – except the following Lancet study – shows benificial results – but it is described that “sham control” also shows improvements or that it is “unpredictable who responds and who doesn’t.”
Well, welcome in my life !
a typical example – the abstract shortened
2014 meta-analysis on the effectiveness of tDCS as a treatment for major depressive disorder (Major Depressive Disorder). The research results and meta-analyses to date have been inclusive. That’s why seven randomized controlled studies with a total of 259 participants were evaluated here. tDCS has been tested either as a sole treatment or as an adjunct to other therapies:
The results showed that active tDCS treatment was significantly more effective in reducing symptoms of depression compared to sham treatment.
However, no factor was found that could predict who responds particularly well to treatment. Although tDCS was statistically more effective than sham treatment, its role as a clinical intervention remains unclear due to the variable results and differences in previous studies. Study 2014
Well, I am a practitioner and committed to the patient, not to studioology. What I experience is clear: in all cases treated in this way so far, we see improvements, even if not always so spectacular.
Exception: Lancet claims: tDCS doesn’t help, better just use antidepressants
What impresses me again is that one of the very best and most famous medical journals – the LANCET – has published a large multicenter study that shows that tDCS has no effect at all on depression.
Summary
In several cases of patients who have been previously treated psychiatrically and with medication, we see amazing improvements with transcranial brain stimulation. There is extensive research on the topic – the extent of the studies alone confirms that this can be an interesting additional option.
Colleagues who are interested in learning this method – in Cyprus with Petros Kattou, DO – please contact me (I will organize this free of charge).
