No more trying medications in the dark

July 10, 2017

Sandra Gomez-Luna, MD
“No more trying medications in the dark.”

Read the transcript

My name is Sandra Gomez-Luna and I’m a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist, adult psychiatrist, and also board-certified addiction psychiatrist. As I started, you know, prescribing the GeneSight test to my patients it was very easy to talk to the people in the company and to have the whole process of the testing done. So that’s made a big difference on my patients.

Some of the patients that have come to my office with an extended history of either difficulties responding to psychotropics or had had significant side effects from that long list of medications and they were still struggling to control their symptoms and how useful it has been for me and for my patients to guide the discovery of the next medication to try it. We’re not really trying in the dark anymore. We basically have a guide and that has been tremendously useful in my practice.

It was an educational tool for us. I think about the most important cases at the beginning when I first starting to become familiar with the testing where the poor metabolizers, you know, the people who come up with the history of, again, having difficulties with a variety of psychotropics then they will have symptoms of depression, they would give me the stories of their trials and tribulations with medications and I started using it, educating the patients and said, “Look, you know, the reasons why you had difficulties with these kinds of medications or with this medication particularly was because you were not really able to metabolize it well.” The selection of the psychotropics once the appropriate diagnosis is made I think has been specifically very useful for that as a parent myself a lot of hesitation to start a child or a young adolescent on medications and having this tool makes it easier for them to go for it.

As you know adolescents are very wary of practitioners. Most of the adolescents that come to my practice have already been to several practitioners. So to be able to communicate to them this time is going to be different, why they understand or believe that? So I think that this actually is very helpful on them being able to understand, trust the practitioner, and continue to be compliant with medication which is basically what they need. GeneSight test has been precisely that, a guide for me and my practice.

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