Dr. Arwen Podesta, a psychiatrist in New Orleans, discuss how her practice takes a holistic view of the brain and body when treating addiction and mental health.  Her practice, Podesta Wellness, focuses on helping people transition off of drugs and overcoming the damage that occurred during treatment.  Patients who are medication intolerant or who are dealing with addiction come to Dr. Podesta for functional medicine treatment.

Dr. Podesta discusses the power of applying nutrition when it comes to chronic anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder and addiction in her interview.  She mentions that every cell in the body requires micronutrients that can be depleted due to the damage from long term stress.  Being under constant mental or physical stress requires additional nutrition in order to overcome the losses that the stress is causing.  The body should make and regulate its own melatonin, for instance, but if the body is under lots of stress, that cycle can be disrupted.  Providing the proper nutrients in order to support the body in regulating melatonin production is crucial to healthy sleep.  Healthy sleep is crucial to balanced health.

Dr. Podesta discusses a patient with ADHD and video game addiction who was able to overcome his symptoms and thrive using Hardy Nutritionals Free Form Amino Acids and Daily Essential Nutrients.  He is now working on finishing up his PhD.

There are many patients who need to be on medication for life, and that works for some people very well, but some of those medications cause nutritional depletion, so those patients may also benefit from additional micronutrients such as Daily Essential Nutrients.  

"I have many patients who use Daily Essential Nutrients...I have a handful that have been on them for long term who were able to get off of their ADD medications and off of their bipolar medications and still have really good attention and focus and still have no mood swings that are too far up or too far down, so they stay within normal range when they are on this for bipolar, and it's really successful."

When Dr. Podesta sits down with a new patient, she asks about energy, focus, anxiety, mood, sleep and cravings.  She says every one of those categories improves when her patients are on a good micronutrient supplementation such as Daily Essential Nutrients.  The micronutrients refill the depletion that occur from stress, lifestyle or from the medications themselves.  

"People feel sharper.  People feel better focus, people feel more energy...We know that people are constantly depleted in so many micronutrients...If you look at the number of micronutrients that are in Daily Essential Nutrients, i find that people are depleted in so many of those when I do the testing.  I don't need to do the testing on everybody just because I see the clinical relevance of it, so just by filling in the missing pieces, I see the functionality improve."

Learn more at Try.HardyNutritionals.com