Dr. Olga Segal

My name is Dr. Olga Segal, I’m a psychiatrist. We are located here in the center of Marin County in Mill Valley and I’m the head of Segal Telepsychiatry Brain Center, mostly treating various mood disorders, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, different substance abuse problems and a variety of mental illnesses.

So the main thing that bought me into offering TMS services to my patients was these multiple frustrating cases when you just can’t move forward with the treatment and you offer various treatment modalities, different anti-depressants and various types of therapy and they simply can’t progress because they don’t respond to medications or they come up with various side effects that stop them from completing the treatment and you really feel stuck. Thinking about that got me into exploring more the area of TMS. I’m really glad that we moved into that direction and about half a year ago, obtained one of those TMS machines. It’s a great additional service to my patients and my practice here.

The greatest success story that I could share with you is of a middle-aged woman who battled depression her entire lifetime. I’ve seen her in my practice for about eight years and we’ve tried every new possible medication that comes up on the market and only to just realize that she has more and more side effects. Very frustrating for her and for me and I attempted to transfer her to a different psychiatrist, perhaps look for other answers. And then now, we completed a course of TMS and she showed a tremendous response. After ten sessions already, her energy was back, she wanted to do more. Depression lifted after twenty sessions and then she’s grateful and it’s so pleasing to see that you could offer help beyond just the medication and that’s gratifying for myself and for the patient.

The CloudTMS is definitely very comfortable for the patients. It’s comfortable for the technologists to use, very versatile, movable, you can move it around your office and with their shape of the coil that they have, it’s easy to find the stimulation point, to look for motor threshold and to use different sites depending on what the protocol is and what the needs are for the particular treatment. Also, of course, their cooling mechanism which keeps the coil not heated and you can see many patients are back to back without worrying that their coil could be overheating.