Howard

[00:00:00 ] Brett: [00:00:00 ] This week’s guest is Howard Buddin, a neuropsychologist, and four time guests on systematic. It’s great to have you back, Howard.

[00:00:07 ] Howard: [00:00:07 ] Great to be back. Thanks.

[00:00:09 ] Brett: [00:00:09 ] It’s been, yeah, it’s been about five years since we last talked. So I I’m going to assume a lot has happened. When we last talked, you had finished your postdoc, you had opened up, S C neuro it, I know that’s the web address.

[00:00:22 ] Is there a longer name for that? No, it’s called SC neuro.

[00:00:26 ] Howard: [00:00:26 ] just the neuro I mean, the it’s a short version sort of, of South Carolina. Neuro-psychology

[00:00:33 ] Brett: [00:00:33 ] Yeah. I, I did put that together, so

[00:00:36 ] Howard: [00:00:36 ] when I, yeah, when I was coming up with it, I want it, you know, uh, my, my wife, uh, a lot of what she does involves marketing, um, branding, advertising, et cetera, for small businesses. And so, you know, sort of by association, I I’ve adopted and learned a lot from her.

[00:00:53 ] And one of the things is like, eh, make it easy. Right? Uh, you have, yeah. You have people who have these. [00:01:00 ] Horrible, uh, business names and emails, right. That just take you an hour to type out. And I didn’t want that. So yeah, I seen neuro

[00:01:07 ] Brett: [00:01:07 ] anything with the word neuro-psychology and it would be unmarketable it’s just too hard to say.

[00:01:14 ] Howard: [00:01:14 ] Yep.

[00:01:15 ] Brett: [00:01:15 ] Yeah. So how’s the clinic going?

[00:01:17 ]Howard: [00:01:17 ] Um, it is going, uh, it is going really well by most measures. Um, Of course with the pandemic this past year has made things interesting in a lot of respects. Um, we’ve had to adjust a lot for changing, um, like how we deliver services, right. Um, how we see patients, uh, in addition to keeping up with the.

[00:01:42 ]Governmental and health insurance, billing Like it’s, it’s, it’s been a lot, but, um, we we’ve kept things running and kept everybody, uh, fortunately employed and, uh, had been able to keep, keep seeing patients. But, uh, yeah, we’ve [00:02:00 ] grown, grown quite a lot in the last five years. I went from a. Just one man operation more or less two, um, hiring on, uh, several employees, including, uh, opening a second clinic, uh, hiring a doc doctor, run that one and, uh, you know, fantastic support staff, office manager, et cetera.

[00:02:23 ] So, yeah.

[00:02:25 ] Brett: [00:02:25 ] that’s awesome. You guys doing a lot of, uh, tele health now?

[00:02:29 ]Howard: [00:02:29 ] Yeah. Yeah. Um, in the, uh, early, early days of the pandemic, um, we, we almost Mo we, we more or less kind of shut down if you will, uh, for a couple of weeks and just did kind of limited tele-health as we were kind of getting that stuff set up. Um, and now that we’re sort of in the swing of things, um, we probably do.

[00:02:53 ]Uh, I, I want to say like 70% of appointments are telehealth. Um, sort of [00:03:00 ] the unofficial rule is like, we want all patients to do tele-health and less when you’re calling to schedule the appointment, you know, if they say something like what’s a computer, uh, you know, then we’ll, we’ll, we’ll work it for an inpatient visit, but otherwise, um, you know, we try to minimize exposure like that.

[00:03:17 ] And for in-office visits, they’re set up so that. We’re only, we only ever have one patient in the clinic at a time. Um, and they’re spaced far apart to give us time between patients to walk through the office and do, you know, grab the sanitation wipes and wipe everything down and, um, get prepped up for the next person.

[00:03:37 ] So we’re, we’re doing our best, you know, to minimize the risk of transmission. Um, you know, of course being. Directly involved in healthcare delivery, like, and a lot of our patients being that in that older sort of more vulnerable group of

[00:03:51 ] Brett: [00:03:51 ] sure. Yeah.

[00:03:52 ] Howard: [00:03:52 ] um, you know, the, the risk is higher still. So we want to protect ourselves, right.

[00:03:58 ] Uh, myself, my employees, as well [00:04:00 ] as, um, make sure that we’re not, you know, a spreader kind of node or vector. So

[00:04:07 ] Brett: [00:04:07 ] So how have the types of problems you’ve seen, um, have they changed with the, the pandemic? Are you seeing more certain types of stress or, I mean, there are obvious answers to that, but.

[00:04:21 ]Howard: [00:04:21 ] Yeah. The, the biggest one, um, as far as like, right. So, so people generally are going to be more stressed out because. Almost almost all at once. Um, all of the normal Moore’s of our daily activities and so forth, right. The anchors of stability that we really fail to appreciate, and day-to-day life were just sort of ripped out of the ground.

[00:04:45 ] Right. Um, so when, when, when that stuff happens, right, people are going to get upset and stressed, but, um, we’re seeing in, and you’ve seen in the last couple of months, probably a lot more articles have been popping up online about the mental [00:05:00 ] health side of things, um, as a result of the pandemic. Um, yeah, that’s been going on here and I’ve.

[00:05:07 ] Talk to other doctors or you know, of different, um, specialties around, uh, around and about. And we’re all seeing kind of the same thing, which is, yeah. People are coming in with really people. Who’ve never had problems before on the behavioral or cognitive side are showing up with problems. Um, primarily related to like attention and concentration and memory, um, and, uh, heightened anxiety and symptoms of depression.

[00:05:35 ] Um, those are the big ones. Um, and without getting too, too long into it, you know, you know, there’s a, always a relationship between your mental health and your physical and cognitive abilities and health. Right. Like, it’s easy to think of, right? If you get the flu, you’re not going to be able to do the things as well as you usually do them.

[00:05:55 ] And if at all, it’s the same thing. If you’re stressed out anxious, depressed, right. You’re not going [00:06:00 ] to be sleeping. You know, a lot of people have like severely disrupted sleep, um, that has an impact on cognition. Um, and so yeah, people just show up that are completely out of sorts or, you know, if they’ve been well-managed, you know, like with depressive or anxious, Um, conditions for years, it’s all of a sudden these symptoms have just blown up out of control

[00:06:19 ] Brett: [00:06:19 ] Sure.

[00:06:20 ] Howard: [00:06:20 ] it, it it’s, it’s the wild West.

[00:06:22 ] It’s like hard to manage on our end. We’re kind of like, Ooh,

[00:06:25 ]Brett: [00:06:25 ] Yeah. Um, the anxiety doesn’t surprise me at all, but the, uh, attention and memory is that, uh, correlated with anxiety or is that something specific to kind of pandemic life?

[00:06:38 ] Howard: [00:06:38 ] Yeah, so good. Good. That’s a great, great question. At the best way to think of it is, um, Like like this. Okay. So we’ve got to pay attention to, um, things without him within, in other words, uh, if you’re driving down the road, there’s a lot to pay attention to, right? All the cars around you. And if you go to shift lanes, you’ve got to look over [00:07:00 ] and make sure there’s no cars next to you, et cetera.

[00:07:01 ] Um, so you’re pa