Andrew Huberman’s Podcast and YouTube channel has become one of my favorites. It also not so secretly helped me to solve what was a two year misdiagnosis nightmare journey that had me on a ton of drugs that had a lot of bad side effects and were not helping.
As a Stanford Associate Professor in Neurobiology with a PhD in Neuroscience and an Ophthalmologist, I was willing to take him seriously on the one topic he was referred to me for, migraines. I am not a huge fan of people who flip me medical advice from “doctors” on any social media platform because most people have no bloody clue to how to decern appropriate medical advice from the specialty they are receiving it from.
After Covid, my sensitivity to this went through the roof. I ended a lot of friendships over this. MASSIVE AMOUNTS of them. It was a new infectious disease that seemed to be impacting the respiratory system, might be impact the heart and the brain and is incredibly quickly mutating. So listening to those specialties, along with data scientists and of course, epidemiologists who are analyzing large amounts of patient data to find patterns makes sense. Anyone else, immediately is sus without coming to the table with a lot of reputable data to back it up. And antidotal data, unnamed sources and being dressed in scrubs I can walk into any store and by myself doesn’t count.
So, like I said, might be sensitive. But here comes Huberman. And like the man of my dreams, he comes with receipts, I mean cites his sources. Now as a person who also does this when I make a point/argument (everyone assumes whenever I talk I am arguing, I’m not, I’m just loud and excited), this is like a cool breeze on a summer’s day.
But he doesn’t just do this all by his lonesome, oh no. He brings other experts in their specific medical field that specialize in the thing they are talking about.
And THAT is the kicker. See, that, that is special. People do not realize how freaking special that is. But it is. I will probably do a post on my nuance issues with people who call themselves experts versus people who are experts but don’t necessarily use the word expert unless when necessary but given how long that would be, that does need to be another post.
But I appreciate what he does. I like that he is trying to bring medical education to the masses. That he links actual studies. That he then gives an overview of the study and translates the big fancy medical words to normal words so people can understand. That is awesome.
But the fact that he did that, and that his advice on migraines actually worked got me thinking. I have access to this stuff because of my job. I speak healthcare. So I requested my medical records. Like all of them.
And then being me, started to make my own longitudal medical record. I then started to go through his back catalog as a start because he had already done a lot of the work to find me studies. I started to take myself off the meds I believed were doing the most harm and had cross-referenced with friends who worked in pharma along with studies I found that backed it up. I looked at my medical history, my family history and dug in to determine what was the key potential issues and asked for the tests and low and behold, I was bloody right.
Now the med they put me on to fix that was at too strong of a dosage and it put me in the opposite direction and that is a whole other story and yes, I fired almost all those docs and switched over to new docs. But this one, this one reminded me that I had the power all along. And for that I will always be forever grateful.
From having migraines 5-6 days a week to 1 a month with the goal to getting it down to 1 a quarter soon. Love ya Dr. Huberman. Keep fighting the good fight.