Insane in the Brain

I enjoyed learning more about how the brain and drugs interact. Since people are driven by more impulsive parts of the brain until about 25 when it is fully developed, it made more sense to me why phrases like “Yolo” or “full send” become so popular with my age group since people’s brains are still developing and they’re more prone to do those risky behaviors. Those phrases can lead to people doing reckless things like excessive drug use or dangerous acts that could lead to brain injuries. I currently work at Chrysalis so I know how serious those brain injuries can be. Two of the individuals that I work with closely have experienced traumatic brain injuries, but they affect the individuals in completely different ways. One client is not very physically impaired, but he experiences extreme mood swings and gets angry easily. The other client is always very happy and does not have mood swings, but he is paralyzed on his left side, so he is physically impaired. I also have a cousin that experienced a brain injury about three years ago and she still experiences some migraines and trouble concentrating but her moods have been unaffected. This just shows how individualized each brain injury is and how they affect each person differently. The clients I work with will have frequent doctor visits and sometimes changes to their medication since their conditions are very fluid and shift often. I think that it is good that treatment for brain injuries is very personalized because sometimes that gets lost in modern medicine. I appreciate that the treatments for brain injuries are similar to concepts in Ayurveda in that way with individualized treatments.

            I found the reading about drugs to be very interesting because it listed the top four reasons college students use drugs as reducing stress, getting high, social pressure, and experimentation. Some of the adults in their 30s or 40s that I have talked to have said they experimented with drugs in college, so I was surprised that reason was not higher on the list. I also learned that prescription drugs are usually given orally due to the difference in how they are processed by the body compared to other ways like injecting or inhaling. The oral administration of drugs leads to longer effects and less of a harsh high and come down compared to inhaling or injecting which have a quick high and drastic come down. The combination of how different drugs affect the body and the ways that they are administered can lead to very different experiences making them unpredictable. The media also shows a lot of recreational drug use but does not show the risks that can come with that use which is dangerous because they downplay the danger or consequences that can come with prolonged drug use or mixing drugs. Because of that, I was not very surprised to learn that many of the hospital visits associated with drugs are when they are used in combination with another drug, often alcohol. I had not known that drug tolerance is a survival mechanism. It makes sense to me that the basic needs for survival such as getting food would produce a reward response in the brain in order to encourage that behavior. Drugs just mimic that response in the brain. Over time that would lead to more of a desire to obtain that reward feeling from the drugs instead of from those necessities for life which would lead to possible negative consequences like decreased appetite or malnutrition because they get a stronger brain response from the drug than from those survival tasks. The extended use of drugs also leads to a decrease in the number of dopamine receptors due to the excess of dopamine from drug use. I found it interesting that the body has ways of regulating that imbalance of neurotransmitters.

            Learning about diseases that directly affect the brain was interesting because many of those diseases affect other parts of the body as well which shows the interconnectedness of the body and that when one system gets altered it leads to problems in other systems. I recently took genetics, so it was cool to apply some of that knowledge since some of those diseases discussed such as Huntington’s or Tay Sachs are caused by duplications or insertions in the organism’s genetic code. Many of the diseases that were discussed have some genetic component which made me wonder why some people may be diagnosed earlier than others if they have the same mutation that causes the disease. The difference in when Tay Sachs is diagnosed could have a big impact on the life expectancy of the person which made me wonder why that is since it’s the same enzyme that gets affected in people with the disease. Could it be environmental meaning that people that did not require the enzyme as much in their younger years are less affected by the disease and have a better chance of living?

            The article that discussed Ayurveda and drug discovery was insightful because I had not realized how many of our modern medicines and medications had come from more natural and older ayurvedic practices. I appreciate that Ayurveda focuses on each individual and their needs since each drug can have different effects on people. My Grandma goes to a woman who has studied different ancient ayurvedic type medicines, so all of my Grandma’s medications are individual to her. I’m glad to know that some of those more ancient practices are adapting to modern-day and still being used since we have derived so much of modern medicine from those practices it would be harmful to get rid of them completely.