Bill Shryer of Blackhawk TMS
Bill Shryer of Diablo Behavioral Healthcare and Blackhawk TMS discusses CloudTMS.
An introduction to William Shryer, Diablo Behavioral Healthcare and Blackhawk TMS.
http://www.behaviorquest.com
http://www.blackhawktms.com
My name is Bill Shryer, I’m the clinical director of Diablo Behavioral Healthcare in Danville California and Blackhawk TMS. We began TMS in 2013. We started with the first machine that was approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The CloudTMS coil certainly is far more comfortable for the patient. It’s far cooler because of the technology used in the cooling system. The cooling system actually helps the coil to be far quieter. Earplugs are still required according to the FDA. The Decibel level on the CloudTMS system is far lower than any other system used in the market currently.
TMS is currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration for treatment-resistant depression and there’s a limited approval also for migraine headache. However, throughout Europe, TMS is approved by the CE mark of approval, which is used for many other disorders, such as migraines, neuropathic pain and a wide variety of other pain syndromes and other conditions such as Parkinson’s and age-related cognitive decline to name but a few.
What first got us interested in TMS was we had always practiced a rather innovative model of psychiatry. Our psychiatrists were always integrated with using non-medical and non-systemic approaches. Since TMS is a very localized approach, it’s non-systemic, it doesn’t have the side effects and the side effect profile that medications do. TMS has virtually no side effects and it’s non-systemic, therefore it’s very very valuable for those people that fail to respond to a number of antidepressants. They tend to respond to TMS at a statistical rate far greater than medications. We’re really very hopeful that the studies on addiction and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and others will soon come to fruition and allow TMS to be used in a wide variety of applications to be able to treat and help millions of people.
We’ve had so many successes since 2013 with TMS. That’s one of the reasons why it’s one of the more gratifying treatment approaches for people who like to practice integrative or non-pharmacological methods of mental health. We’ve had patients who spent 20 years of not sleeping well, being depressed, having 15 sessions of TMS. The thing that you hear all the time in this is you’ve given me my life back. That’s a very gratifying statement when a provider hears that from a patient.
CloudTMS is so desirable, well, a couple of things; portability, it’s highly movable, it doesn’t have involvement of a very expensive chair that’s really superfluous and not really necessary and of course, the price is a huge factor, but probably one of the factors for us is the way the coil is designed. The coil is very futuristically designed in terms of shape and fits the head far better than any of the other figure-of-eight coils because they’re very flat plain and the skull is not flat plain, so having a cupped coil is very advantageous for us and far more comfortable for the patient.