•September 7, 2016•

By Jim Nowlan
NP Guest Columnist

My friend Beth Smith asked me to write about this. Beth is community health educator for the Henry-Stark County Health Department. She has personal family experience with what I discuss.

I feel a bit self-conscious, but here goes.

I have recently begun traveling to Chicago by Amtrak Monday to Friday, where I go to Rush Medical Center for what will be 30 daily treatments for depression.

The transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) treatments are considered by many psychiatrists a “last resort” therapy for patients who have not responded to medications, talk therapy and other approaches to ameliorating chronic low mood.

The relatively new therapy is FDA-approved and covered by my insurance. I think of the treatment as electro-convulsive shock therapy-lite. In that old treatment, strong electric shocks were administered to the brain to cause a seizure(s) in a patient.

I sit in a chair like that in a dentist’s office, lean back a little and a figure-eight covered coil about the diameter of a baseball is placed against the upper left side of my skull.

The coil zaps me with four electromagnetic pulses per second for 10 seconds, followed by a 20-second breather, then more pulsing, and so on, for 40 minutes.     Login or Subscribe to read the rest of this story.