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Dr. Melita Petrossian is a neurologist who specializes in movement disorders. When most people hear that term, they think of Parkinson’s disease. But Dr. Petrossian sees a number of patients with what’s known as essential tremor, a condition that’s often mistaken for Parkinson’s.

Claudia Wong is a family nurse practitioner specializing in memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. A few years ago, she trained to teach restorative yoga. After that, she went traveling, and the trip turned into a two-year journey into the contemplative arts. She did more yoga training in Bali, learned about healing with Tibetan singing bowls in India, and practiced meditation in Thailand. When she returned, she brought all those things back to use in her practice.

In this episode of the High-Tech And Neuro Disorders (HAND) podcast from undergrad students at UCLA, hosts Jacob and Hugo interview world-renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Daniel Kelly, director and one of the founders of Pacific Neuroscience Institute.
They run the gamut of topics from tips and tricks of being a doctor and neurosurgeon, to brain and pituitary surgery, to the expansion of PNI into the study of psychedelic-assisted clinical trials for many kinds of mental health and behavioral disorders.

“Voice box” might be the most misleading term in all of human anatomy. It makes a very complex organ sound terribly simple.

When he got out of medical school Dr. Jian Guan wanted to do pediatric neurosurgery, and he found a top-flight residency at the University of Utah. While there, though, his career took a turn, thanks to the Cheyenne Frontier Days, the world’s largest outdoor rodeo. Cheyenne is a small city, and Salt Lake City is the nearest center of excellence for spine surgery, so every summer, Dr. Guan, sadly, would see a surge in back injuries from rodeo accidents.

Strange though it may seem, we can tone our brain tissue the same way we tone our muscles. The fitness of our gray matter depends on how well we take care of ourselves.

In this episode we chat with Karina Sergi, a licensed therapist, trained the old-fashioned way, who has been exploring a new tool proven to help people who are struggling with persistent depression, addiction, and post-traumatic stress disorder: magic mushrooms.

Eight years ago, at age 23, Tatiana Sarkisian was waiting to meet with a professor in her architecture program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She remembers her right hand moving across her body on its own, then her body slumping down onto the floor.

Neurosurgeon Dr. Adi Iyer, knows his way around the branching arteries that feed our brains. He treats a variety of diseases there. When a hemorrhagic stroke patient comes into the hospital, he treats the ruptured artery as fast as he can because time lost is brain lost. Listen to this episode to learn how Dr. Iyer does it, and how he can treat aneurysms before they burst.

Sharmyn McGraw knows as much about pituitary disease as some doctors. She learned about it after struggling for years with a medical mystery that began in 1993.