Frequently Asked Questions. We’ll answer some of the most common questions about our psychiatry services. Whether you’re considering seeking treatment or just want to know more, read on for answers!
Insomnia Q & A
Insomnia is a condition where you have trouble falling or staying asleep. You may feel tired and ready for bed, but end up spending hours staring at the ceiling and counting sheep.
You might wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to drift off again, or even wake up before your alarm goes off.
More than 60 million Americans struggle with insomnia each year.
If you’re one of them, Dr. Aina can help. He’s a fellowship-trained sleep medicine expert who takes an integrative approach to wellness. This means that instead of focusing on getting you to sleep, he searches for the conditions and issues that disrupt your rest and focuses on healing your body and mind so you can naturally get the sleep you need.
Many factors contribute to insomnia. You may have a hormonal imbalance that disrupts your sleep cycles or another medical condition, such as:
- Chronic pain
- Gastrointestinal problems
- Neurological conditions like
- Parkinson’s disease
- Neuropathy or restless leg syndrome
The medications you take can also disrupt your sleep. Even an over-the-counter decongestant can lead to insomnia.
Mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression can also interfere with your sleep. For example, many people with anxiety suffer from sleepless nights as their minds focus on their fears and worries.
Your lifestyle can also cause insomnia. If you work at home at night, you may find it difficult to unwind before bed. If you work shifts and keep irregular hours, you may find it hard to sleep when you have the chance.
Also, your pre-bedtime routine may not sufficiently relax you enough to drift off. Many people keep a television in their bedrooms, but watching television in bed not only keeps your attention, but the blue light emitted from screens stimulates brain activity that interferes with sleep.
Dr. Aina’s holistic approach to treating insomnia is highly customized. He provides extensive consultations and sleep studies to identify the issues and conditions that get in the way of your sleep.
Depending on your unique needs, he creates a treatment plan that may include nutritional supplements, hormone therapy, naturopathic remedies, and other cutting-edge medical interventions to restore your wellness and improve your sleep.
Call Tri-MED Behavioral & Sleep Medicine or make an appointment online today for customized care to relieve your insomnia and improve your wellness.
Neurofeedback Q & A
Neurofeedback is a natural, drug-free treatment that helps you to self-regulate your brain activity to control your emotional and behavioral responses.
It is a specific type of biofeedback that monitors your brain activity and provides positive reinforcement to encourage healthy brain function.
With practice, you learn to recognize your emotional reactions and self-adjust. You develop the skills needed to control your thoughts and emotions instead of being overrun by them.
During a neurofeedback session, Dr. Aina places electrodes on your head that are connected to a computer that monitors your brain activity. Your treatment begins with an assessment of your brain activity that shows Dr. Aina any abnormal or dysfunctional brainwaves linked to depression, anxiety, or other mental health disorders. The region of your brain where activity is unusual determines the symptoms that you experience.
Dr. Aina uses neurofeedback to help patients with a variety of mental health conditions, including:
- Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)
- Insomnia and other sleep disorders
- Anxiety
- Mood disorders, such as depression and bipolar disorder
- Anger management
- Addiction
Dr. Aina often uses neurofeedback as part of a comprehensive treatment plan designed to improve your overall health and wellness as well as reduce your mental health symptoms.
Neurofeedback is a natural approach to managing some mental health conditions. It helps you learn to regulate your emotions and behaviors without having to rely on medication. You develop some of the tools needed to improve your health and wellness for long-lasting benefits.
Functional Medicine Q & A
Functional medicine is a patient-focused approach to wellness that considers your overall wellness instead of using a list of symptoms to identify a diagnosis. Instead of focusing on relieving your symptoms, functional medicine identifies and heals the underlying conditions that cause your symptoms.
For example, if you live with depression, a traditional doctor may prescribe antidepressants to relieve your symptoms. However, as a functional medicine practitioner, Dr. Aina considers your overall wellness and provides extensive testing to identify factors in your genetics, environment, lifestyle, and body function that contribute to your symptoms.
Once he understands your current state of wellness, Dr. Aina provides needed treatments. These include supplements and alternative treatments, such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and ketamine therapy, to heal your body and restore optimal body function. This, in turn, relieves your depression symptoms.
Your body comprises a complex structure of different systems and organs that must function at optimal levels for you to enjoy top health and wellness.
In addition to working independently to digest food and extract nutrients or move blood throughout your body, your body systems are interconnected. If you have an issue in one part of your body, it can lead to problems in another, including your mind and mood.
For example, serotonin — one of the neurotransmitters that regulate your mood, sleep patterns, and appetite — is made in your digestive tract. If you have an imbalance in the bacteria in your gut or suffer from diet-related inflammation, it impacts your serotonin production. This then impacts your mood and causes depression and anxiety symptoms.
Everyone has unique needs, and there is no one-size-fits-all approach to improving your mental health with functional medicine.
Dr. Aina provides highly customized functional medicine treatment plans, depending on your needs. He focuses intently on your specific health and needs to determine the best treatments to heal your body, optimize your body function, and restore your health and overall wellness.
If you’re looking for a doctor who considers your overall health instead of focusing on your symptoms, call Tri-MED Behavioral & Sleep Medicine or schedule a consultation online today.
Integrative Treatment Q & A
Integrative medicine is the practice of improving your overall wellness instead of focusing on relieving your symptoms. Dr. Aina practices with a holistic approach, considering all aspects of your health from your mental and emotional state to your overall body function and physical well-being.
Integrative medicine incorporates alternative treatments with traditional medicine to meet all of your wellness needs. Your body is a complex group of closely interconnected systems that work together, and when one aspect of your wellness isn’t optimal, you can develop widespread symptoms and illnesses.
Integrative treatments aim to heal your body and optimize functionality to both relieve your symptoms and restore your health.
Integrative treatments are becoming more prevalent in psychiatric care.
Dr. Aina operates on a philosophy of more health and less medicine. He uses a variety of treatments beyond medication, including nutritional supplements, amino acid infusions, hormonal therapies, naturopathic remedies, and cutting-edge medical interventions such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and ketamine therapy.
Integrative treatment improves your overall health, which in turn resolves many mental health conditions. One area where Dr. Aina helps patients is enhancing and protecting cognitive function, including memory.
While everyone forgets something occasionally, you don’t have to assume that memory loss and cognitive decline is an inevitable part of the aging process. Dr. Aina helps people protect their brain health with customized integrative treatments to boost and support brain function.
For example, there is a link between memory loss and your nutrition. Vitamin and nutrient deficiencies interfere with brain activity. Additionally, a poor diet can negatively impact your hormone levels, sleep habits, and endocrine function, which can all contribute to memory loss and other cognitive impairments.
Dr. Aina’s integrative treatments support optimal function in every aspect of your body, reducing your risk of cognitive decline. Additionally, integrative treatments can improve your sleep and reduce your experience of other widespread mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression.
Call Tri-MED Behavioral & Sleep Medicine or make an appointment online today for highly personalized integrative care.
Ketamine Therapy Q & A
Ketamine therapy is an effective and rapid treatment for depression. Ketamine therapy involves a low dose of the drug given through an intravenous infusion.
Unlike traditional antidepressants that can take months to take effect, ketamine therapy often provides relief from depression symptoms within 24 hours.
The mental health improvement continues and builds throughout a course of treatments.
Ketamine therapy is still being studied in clinical trials. However, medical researchers learned that as your body metabolizes ketamine, it targets glutamate receptors in your brain. Your brain creates new neural pathways that restore the function lost because of the chemical imbalances associated with depression.
Glutamate is a neurotransmitter that affects excitability and other brain functions, such as memory. It’s a critical component in your body’s ability to grow and repair cells.
Dr. Aina prescribes ketamine therapy for patients who have treatment-resistant depression.
If you’ve tried many types of antidepressants and other therapies without finding relief, or if you experience intolerable side effects of traditional depression treatments, ketamine therapy could be a treatment option for you.
Dr. Aina is committed to treating the underlying condition that causes your symptoms instead of using medication to mask them. Ketamine therapy not only provides rapid relief of your depression symptoms, but also restores your brain function.
While Dr. Aina creates treatment plans to address the needs of individual patients, in most cases he prescribes a series of six ketamine infusions over the course of two or three weeks.
You’ll spend approximately two hours at Tri-MED Behavioral & Sleep Medicine for each ketamine therapy session. Following a pretreatment assessment, where a member of the team checks your blood pressure, pulse, and cognitive awareness and function, your provider inserts an IV and settles you into a comfortable chair for the rest of your treatment.
Your infusion takes approximately 45 minutes. You may experience a floating sensation or drift off into a dream-like state. After your treatment is complete, you rest while the immediate effects of ketamine wear off. You will need a friend or family member to drive you home after your treatment.
If you’re interested in learning more about ketamine therapy and if it’s right for you, call Tri-MED Behavioral & Sleep Medicine or schedule a consultation online today.
Nutritional Psychiatry Q & A
The food you eat fuels your body and brain. Unfortunately, the average American diet is sorely lacking in the nutrients needed for optimal brain and body functionality. Reliance on refined grains, sugar, trans fats, and other less-than-healthy choices not only contributes to physical disease but also mental health problems.
Additionally, serotonin, one of the neurotransmitters that regulate your mood, sleep, and appetite, is produced in your gastrointestinal tract. Your diet impacts this serotonin production and the millions of neurons in your digestive tract.
If your diet causes an imbalance in the bacteria in your digestive tract or triggers an inflammatory response, you begin to experience both physical and mental symptoms. For example, many patients who take a probiotic supplement to regulate their gut bacteria find their perception of stress decreases and their overall mental outlook improves.
Studies show that a Mediterranean diet that includes plenty of fresh vegetables, fruits, lean proteins such as chicken and fish, whole grains, and healthy fats like olive oil provides a variety of physical and mental health benefits. Further research reveals that zinc, magnesium, omega 3, and vitamins B and D3 have a positive effect on mood, including for those who live with depression.
Nutritional psychiatry focuses on improving your brain health and function to reduce mental health symptoms associated with depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. Dr. Aina offers comprehensive consultations and blood tests to identify nutritional deficits. He may ask you to keep a food diary for a week or so before your assessment so he can see what your current diet looks like and where there is room for improvement.
Once Dr. Aina understands your needs, he creates personalized meal plans and prescribes nutritional supplements. You’ll have regular appointments to discuss your symptoms and other aspects of your health and wellness. Dr. Aina may order additional blood work from time to time to monitor your nutrient levels.
If you want to improve your mental health, reduce your anxiety and depression symptoms, and enhance your overall wellness, call Tri-MED Behavioral & Sleep Medicine or make an appointment online today to learn more about nutritional psychiatry.
Neurofeedback is a natural approach to managing some mental health conditions. It helps you learn to regulate your emotions and behaviors without having to rely on medication. You develop some of the tools needed to improve your health and wellness for long-lasting benefits.
Integrative Drug Addiction Q & A
Addiction is a complicated brain disease that leads to compulsive use of a substance, even if it leads to harmful or negative consequences.
Addiction often begins with recreational use but evolves to the point where your desire for alcohol or drugs takes over your life and interferes with your ability to perform at work or interact with friends and family.
Some of the common signs of addiction include:
- Intense focus on accessing and using a substance
- Failed attempts to stop using the substance
- Problems at home, work, or school because of your substance use
- Risky or self-destructive behaviors
- Increased tolerance
- Withdrawal symptoms
Fortunately, you can recover from addiction. Dr. Aina offers an integrative approach to treating addiction that considers your overall wellness and helps heal and resolve the underlying issues that led to your substance use disorder.
Various factors contribute to addiction. Many people with addiction have abnormalities in the region of their brain that regulates judgment, mood, behavior control, and cognitive abilities such as learning, memory, and decision making. Many addictive substances change your brain function, further inhibiting this part of your brain.
Additionally, other environmental factors, such as your family background, friends, and overall health and wellness, contribute to your chances of developing addiction. For example, the opioid crisis stems from people living in physical pain and relying on medicine to dull their pain instead of focusing on healing their bodies and enhancing their wellbeing to resolve the condition causing the pain.
At Tri-MED Behavioral & Sleep Medicine, Dr. Aina offers integrative drug addiction treatment. Your treatment plan is highly customized to address your individual needs and begins with a comprehensive consultation.
Your plan may include ketamine therapy to relieve depression and anxiety symptoms that contribute to your addiction, as well as easing withdrawal symptoms. He may also suggest nutritional psychiatry plans to ensure your body has the nutrients it needs for optimal function.
Ultimately, your plan is designed to improve your overall wellness and to help you recover from your reliance on drugs or alcohol.
If you’re living with addiction and want to recover and restore your health and wellness, call Tri-MED Behavioral & Sleep Medicine or schedule a consultation online today.
TMS Q & A
TMS is an FDA-approved, non-pharmaceutical therapy for depression, anxiety, psychosis, and other brain disorders. TMS uses a repetitive magnetic pulse to stimulate a specific region in your brain, boosting the production and activity of the neurotransmitters that regulate your mood.
The magnetic pulse is only as strong as an MRI, and can only penetrate approximately two inches into your body. This allows Dr. Aina to carefully target the specific region of your brain that’s responsible for your mood.
To understand how TMS works, you have to know how your brain chemistry contributes to depression.
The neurotransmitters and receptors in your brain are responsible for sending messages that regulate everything that happens in your body, including your mood. When your brain doesn’t produce enough of the right neurotransmitters, or if those cells don’t function correctly, you develop symptoms of depression or other mental health disorders.
Depression is historically treated chemically with antidepressant medicine that increases the production of neurotransmitters such as serotonin and dopamine. However, antidepressants aren’t always effective and can cause intolerable side effects.
TMS specifically targets the region of your brain that regulates your mood and stimulates neurotransmitter production and function. The magnetic pulse stimulates your brain, correcting the imbalance causing your symptoms.
TMS is noninvasive and provided as an outpatient procedure. Dr. Aina offers customized treatment plans for each patient. In most cases, you can expect TMS treatments five days a week for four to six weeks.
During your TMS appointments, you sit in a comfortable, reclining chair. Dr. Aina or another member of the team at Tri-MED Behavioral & Sleep Medicine positions the TMS coil against your head. When the coil is in place, he turns on the machine to release magnetic pulses into your brain. You may notice a tapping or clicking sound or sensation during the treatment.
Each treatment takes approximately 40 minutes. When your TMS session is complete, you can return to your regular activities immediately, including driving.
Call Tri-MED Behavioral & Sleep Medicine or schedule a consultation online today to discover if TMS is right for you.