GeneSight has transformed how I practice medicine

My name is Mindy Rosenbloom and I’m a psychiatrist, a board in adult and geriatric psychiatry, although in my practice, I treat adolescents and up with a variety of mental health conditions. I think the challenges are getting enough information in a short period of time. We really want to take care of our patients. They’ve been suffering the very symptomatic but there’s a lot to do in every appointment, so we’re trying to streamline the process but deliver good results.

I would say that GeneSight pretty much transformed completely the way I practice medicine to the point when a patient is hesitant because they’re anxious, like I said, about confidentiality, or what will it mean or how will it change things, that I don’t feel true to myself when I try to explain the other med options, because I don’t feel like the data that I’m using or the reasoning is really truthful, because it’s based on a large population and for a variety of reasons, we all have genetic differences. And I’m going based on a very vanilla palette, and we’re not vanilla. We’re Ben & Jerry mixins.

I would say that my experience has been like an educational joy ride. This is just either how certain pathways in the liver are going to metabolize the medicine or as we know the cytochrome P450 the main metabolic medication pathways, but also some key transport mechanisms or key enzymes, some as simple as how folate or folic acid is metabolized. And if we have a mutation at that very last enzyme, it’s like being all dressed up and no place to go. We’re not going to have the final product that goes into the brain and turns on some cofactors that helps us make the norepinephrine, dopamine, and serotonin that our bodies need to respond to the medicines we’re going to prescribe. That one little ingredient is missing, how am I going know that without GeneSight testing?

So last Friday, I did a second opinion for a gentleman who’s probably been chronically depressed for literally decades, some of it, life circumstance, very disappointing. And you know, you’re the Monday morning quarterback, I mean you’re doing a second opinion. So when he filled me in a little bit about his decades of difficulty and his attempts at therapy, then medications, he just never had anywhere near a response, let alone remission. So I told him when he was coming, please check out this website, think about it. It was simple in this case, from an insurance point of view, because he had Medicare, so I could reassure him, if you sign a paper, we’ll make a photocopy of the front and back, no cost to you, when I told him what it would deliver, he said, “This was the missing ingredient, GeneSight’s the missing ingredient.”