Visionary or Voodoo? - Page 11


Now a newly energized Amen charged full-steam ahead. He completed the 1,000-hour training and supervision program to obtain the license in handling radioactive material that's necessary to do scans, bought SPECT equipment, and became, as far as he knows, the only psychiatrist in the world who had then incorporated brain imaging in his own practice. He once again took up the SPECT gospel and began spreading the word, and once again was met with virulent attacks.

In 1996, after Amen gave the State of the Art Lecture in Medicine at the Society of Development Pediatrics, a San Francisco pediatrician stood up and excoriated him for using brain imaging to justify giving drugs to children for AD/HD--in effect, accusing him of shilling for Big Pharma. Shortly after the meeting, he was anonymously reported to the California Medical Board for practicing outside the generally accepted standards of care. The state medical board began an investigation, which took a full year--of lawyers, interviews, questions, reviews of his articles, office visitations. "The worst year of my life," Amen calls it. Finally, after his work was sent to the departments of neurology and nuclear medicine at UCLA, he was exonerated and became an expert reviewer of psychiatry for the California Medical Board.

Amen and His Critics

Today, about eight years later, Amen has no doubt succeeded as a medical entrepreneur. He has two clinics in California, one in Washington State, and one in Reston, Virginia. By any measure, he's a huge success. Besides founding his clinics and cranking out books (another is on the way), he's produced a "Clinician's Toolbox" of brain-related materials for therapists, a brain-scan atlas, and assorted CDs and videos. He's given more than 100 presentations in the United States and abroad, written or been the subject of numerous articles in the popular press, appeared on scores of radio and television shows, testified at numerous trials, and developed a 12-week high school course on the brain to be piloted in 30 schools this fall. There are perhaps 15, mostly for-profit, psychiatrist-run clinics around the country that now use SPECT--a fair number of the proprietors trained by Amen himself. In addition, an indeterminate number of psychiatrists around the country quietly, but regularly, refer their own patients for brain scans.

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