Is "Cosmetic Neurology" ever going to take off?

[Thumpar]

Went down a rabbit hole the other night looking into this. Read a few interesting articles about this topic. Most of them were 10 years old, but they all talked about the "promising future" cosmetic neurology has. There were a lot of ethical considerations too. One article ominously concluded "Can you be more than you can be? Should you?"

The impression I got was that potentially in the future a physician could use transcranial magnetic stimulation on a patient to cause a variety of effects. Potentially increase intelligence, alertness, decrease fear, and many other possibilities. The whole thing sounded very sci-fi to me, like Blade Runner or something. Cyberpunk stuff.

If this ever did take off, I wonder who would be allowed to offer these kind of services. Neurology sounds obvious, but maybe other subspecialties would also be able to. This just seems like a very marketable treatment and I wonder who would benefit the most.

Does anyone know the current state of this field?

---

Members don't see this ad.

 

[flapjack3d]

Just an M1 here so don't know anything really, but seems like "nootropic interventions" would fall in three categories:
1) very effective, but not reimbursable (getting better sleep, more micronutrients, regular cardio exercise, etc.),
2) pretty much ineffective, and mostly untested (common and uncommon nootropics like racetams, methylene blue, etc.), or
3) very effective, probably dangerous, but also illegal for those purposes (adderall, modafinil, phenibut, etc.)


I think that "cosmetic neurology" is more of a thing in Russia and East Europe. AFAIK many of the new drugs (or newly repurposed drugs) with supposedly cognitive enhancing effects like Semax have come out of there.

 

[Nonphysiologic]

You know what I was VERY interested in this and partly went into Neuro because of some of this stuff and what I thought was huge potential. The reality of the situation is there isn’t much good evidence for any of the stuff, people don’t want to pay cash for anything, it’s really easy to come off as a quack if you’re not careful, people would much rather just take a pill and call it a day (adderral, modafinil, etc). I was heavily interested in SPORTS NEUROLOGY as well because of this and some overlap with getting athletes back to performing well after Concussion but it doesn’t seem like it fits well with the current medical landscape I don’t see how sports neurology practices can make money besides also doing general Neuro still. Maybe in a university or large hospital system setting it makes sense with a research wing.

I think this cosmetic neurology field is better left to people who do just that such as Bulletproof Labs in Santa Monica and not necessarily by clinicians. I definitely still have an interest in cosmetic neurology but I don’t think it’ll take off as I thought it would have.

Oh also another thing I noticed is a lot of people legit interested in spending the money and time (TMS takes many sessions spread through weeks) in these endeavors are often times super type A and have really high expectations and or some anxiety and stress overlap so they are hard to please. That being said I have seen some pretty incredible results from TMS outside of just pain and depression but like I said it takes a lot of commitment to come in and pay cash. Hard to find patient population that’s ok with that.


Sent from my iPhone using SDN mobile

 

[Thumpar]

I could see it being the sort of thing that eventually would be restricted to only neurologists, since they are clinicians.

I don't know much about Bulletproof Labs, but I could see someone making the argument that non-physicians should not be performing procedures on patients. If it becomes revealed that there is something dangerous about incorrectly using TMS then restrictions would definitely start being made.

We could be living in the "Wild West" era of cosmetic neurology right now, just like we just moved on from the Wild Era of private drones. For a brief period there were no laws, no restrictions, no permits, no nothing. Now there is a lot of legal red tape to navigate through. I could see the same thing happening to cosmetic neurology if it becomes effective at treating something and if dangers start becoming clear.