Working for Amen Clinic?

[StayOnTop]

Anyone have any experience working for them? Patient/hours/etc. I'm aware of the controversy there, but just curious what it's like to actually work there. Thanks!

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[Atreides]

First, sell your soul. And any shred of dignity.

 

[annoyedpsychiatrist]

you get to go home from work everyday knowing you squeezed someone for thousands of dollars, and in return they received useless imaging and multiple placebos. They charge like 3k that insurance doesnt cover for their baseline imaging and then give you zoloft as well as supplements that they sell themselves such as "liposomal vitamin C".

oh and they offer courses too. "supercharge your brain!". Heal your "ADD" in 30 days! Special enrollment markdown from 1,000 to 150!

It sounds like im making this up but im simply just reading their website. I think I would rather work for a drug company and say that rexulti is superior to every other drug in the world than amen clinic, because at least rexulti works better than Dr. Amens magic pills.

Working for Dr Amen clinic would be a great job if you really didnt care at all about psychiatry and your goal was just to make money off desperate people. He is great at marketing bull**** to susceptible people

 

[StayOnTop]

I'm just curious what the appeal is? Do they actually pay more? If not, what's the draw? Good hours? I know of someone that recently went to work there, but I don't speak with them.. He's a smart guy (the person going to work there, or at least I think), so I just don't know what the appeal is.

 

[whopper]

The stuff they push has no evidenced-based data backing it up. A researcher in brain-scans for use in psychiatry that used to be the head of my department, if you mentioned Amen in a positive light, would roll his eyes.

What's the appeal? Magic Beans. People who want help and then are given a brain image made to look like it's out of a sci fi movie get the magic-bean/Macguffin/sci-fi effect. People who are desperate are desperate and will do desparate things. We live in a society where people thinking it works or thinking they're right is good enough for them.

I had a patient who went to Amen and was correctly diagnosed with ADHD, but really based on a good psychological evaluation also done by Amen. The psychological evaluation only brings in standard money. They also did the brain scan that they touch up to make it look like it's something out of Star Wars/Star Trek/Michael Bay, and then push that the brain-scan diagnosed the ADHD. The brain scan brings in lots and lots of money and it's complete crap in a medical sense.

Why did Face Off have a bunch of computer screens during this scene? Cause it looks cool.


Airplane mocking this same phenomenon.


Star Trek Lower Decks further made fun of this by making fun of the device always seen in a sci fi movie or TV show.

 

[whopper]

First, sell your soul. And any shred of dignity.

You could work at a gentlemen's club dancing and doing tricks. Just get any ideas out of your head that there's a job out there you could be worker in that field and enjoy the job because only extremely sexy and attractive people will want your services.

 

[calvnandhobbs68]

I'm just curious what the appeal is? Do they actually pay more? If not, what's the draw? Good hours? I know of someone that recently went to work there, but I don't speak with them.. He's a smart guy (the person going to work there, or at least I think), so I just don't know what the appeal is.

He wants to make easy money. That's the appeal. They've already got the name brand to be able to charge people excessive amounts of money for stupid stuff.

You could work at a gentlemen's club dancing and doing tricks. Just get any ideas out of your head that there's a job out there you could be worker in that field and enjoy the job because only extremely sexy and attractive people will want your services.

Exactly. Hey if you want to be a snake oil salesman be my guest, it's a free market. Just don't try to pretend you're not a snake oil salesman to the people who are actually working in the field.

It's not just psychiatry, most other medical fields have this stuff too. Recently an article in NYT about how many scamming pediatric dentists see easy money in "tongue tie releases" and charge parents hundreds of bucks to laser their kids tongues in 10 seconds for totally unnecessary procedures.

 

[StayOnTop]

He wants to make easy money. That's the appeal. They've already got the name brand to be able to charge people excessive amounts of money for stupid stuff.



Exactly. Hey if you want to be a snake oil salesman be my guest, it's a free market. Just don't try to pretend you're not a snake oil salesman to the people who are actually working in the field.

It's not just psychiatry, most other medical fields have this stuff too. Recently an article in NYT about how many scamming pediatric dentists see easy money in "tongue tie releases" and charge parents hundreds of bucks to laser their kids tongues in 10 seconds for totally unnecessary procedures.

Is it easy money? I would imagine these are complicated, demanding patients. Amen is the one making the money, how much he's sharing. I don't know.

 

[annoyedpsychiatrist]

Is it easy money? I would imagine these are complicated, demanding patients. Amen is the one making the money, how much he's sharing. I don't know.

Do you think people would sell their soul for a small yearly salary? No self respecting psychiatrist would work for him without the incentive of greed. Think about it. How else would he get other providers? The people he sees are likely highly suggestible people and easy to fool, or desperate people who are willing to believe in anything to get better. If you do a brain scan and give someone zoloft and they get better, how does the patient know they didnt need the brain scan to get the zoloft? They assume the two are connected and they just received a "super accurate" test is all. Confounding bias. He still prescribes regular medications too, so people probably do get better, they just spend an extra 10,000 dollars on useless garbage in addition to real treatments.

He uses a mix of real treatments with placebos so people do get better, he just squeezes them for everything he can and puts a "disney magical spin" on it

 

[Candidate2017]

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

There's a lack of evidence based treatment all around (including chronic daily benzos and stimulants for "adult ADHD"). The worse part of fancy expensive clinics is when their patients run out of cash and come in to see me. These forsaken refugees wave their reports around as if they were delivering the Ten Commandments on how I should practice. No, sorry, I do not practice your religion.

 

[Sushirolls]

^ what @Candidate2017 said.

Add to the list the functional medicine or whatever label the supplement dispensaries are calling themselves. The ones who wish they were Naturopaths.

Add to the list the Pop psychology online outlets, that are similar to mainstream media coming up with click bait topics. Further fueled by YouTube TikToks. I have ADHD. I have Autism. I am neurodivergent. I have bipolar and explains everything. Cannabis is the elixir of life. /sarcasm

 

[PsyDr]

I'm going to regret asking this, but:

1) Who reads Amen's SPECT scans?
2) What is their specific training in SPECT interpretation?

 

[clausewitz2]

I'm going to regret asking this, but:

1) Who reads Amen's SPECT scans?
2) What is their specific training in SPECT interpretation?

I think Amen is smart enough about liability (he's been successfully operating for a while) that I'm sure he has found a pet radiologist or two.

 

[MacDonaldTriad]

I spent a decade working on functional imaging in the 90s and the 90s was considered "the decade of the brain" by research. Almost no grants were funded without including functional imaging. Fast forward a quarter century, we still have found almost no utility in functional imaging in psychiatry. Amen looks like a duck, he quacks like a duck, he graduated from Oral Roberts University's short lived medical school... looks like a quack to me.

 

[comp1]

Oh wow, ORU! There can't be many of those graduates around...

 

[tr]

I spent a decade working on functional imaging in the 90s and the 90s was considered "the decade of the brain" by research. Almost no grants were funded without including functional imaging. Fast forward a quarter century, we still have found almost no utility in functional imaging in psychiatry. Amen looks like a duck, he quacks like a duck, he graduated from Oral Roberts University's short lived medical school... looks like a quack to me.

Not a neuroimager and I agree the field is full of irreproducible crap, probably due in part to averaging of signals that are highly idiosyncratic between individuals, and in part to the enormous number of arbitrary assumptions and choices that are built into the analysis pipelines, in which tiny tweaks to any one of them can yield a completely different result. And SPECT scans specifically for sure have no psychiatric utility.

But I wouldn't say there's *no* utility to functional imaging more broadly.
This is pretty cool.

Resting-state connectivity biomarkers define neurophysiological subtypes of depression - Nature Medicine

Using functional MRI in a large multisite sample of more that 1,000 patients, four distinct neurophysiological biotypes of depression are defined. These biotypes are used to develop diagnostic classifiers that distinguish patients with depression from controls in separate multisite validation...

www.nature.com

So is this.

Psychiatry Online

ajp.psychiatryonline.org

I think any clinical utility will be found more in drilling down to the individual or subgroup, vs averaging over a bunch of individuals and thereby losing the specificity of your signal.

 

[calvinhobbes]

I interviewed with them and they sent me a link (not kidding) of their clinic treating Justin Bieber. They say they will fly you out to SoCal to “teach” you MRI imaging so you can order it in all your patients…including children and adolescents. They basically told me “if you want to make a lot of money come work for us, but you have to practice our way and opt of Medicare for life”. lol. This place is a scam

 

[whopper]

Justin Bieber was on the news years ago being treated for depression in a O2 compession tank. If this was because of Amen I got no idea.

 

[splik]

Do you think people would sell their soul for a small yearly salary? No self respecting psychiatrist would work for him without the incentive of greed.

The advertised salary for jobs is 300-400k. Which is in the average range for psych jobs. They also promise to help you build you brand. Many psychiatrists believe in woo and are dissatisfied with conventional approaches to mental health. That is the kind of person who might work there.

Justin Bieber was on the news years ago being treated for depression in a O2 compession tank. If this was because of Amen I got no idea.

he has been a pt of amens for years.

 

[StayOnTop]

The advertised salary for jobs is 300-400k. Which is in the average range for psych jobs. They also promise to help you build you brand. Many psychiatrists believe in woo and are dissatisfied with conventional approaches to mental health. That is the kind of person who might work there.


he has been a pt of amens for years.

This is my point. Everyone in here keeps saying "people are selling their souls for money", but the advertised salary is the same as most psych jobs. What's the appeal?

 

[annoyedpsychiatrist]

This is my point. Everyone in here keeps saying "people are selling their souls for money", but the advertised salary is the same as most psych jobs. What's the appeal?

300-400k is higher than average, though I guess it depends on location. 310 is around the average, so 400k would be a pretty big jump depending on COL. I dunno how he determines who gets 400k, perhaps based on RVUs. A lot of his stuff people are paying cash for tho...

 

[PsyDr]

They say they will fly you out to SoCal to “teach” you MRI imaging so you can order it in all your patients…including children and adolescents.

What are they teaching? How to write "Z79.899" on a lab order? Or are they teaching psychiatrists how to interpret imaging?


* They have a naturopath on their website too.

 

[calvinhobbes]

I think how to interpret it but also how to sell the idea to patients. I didn’t get that far in the process to even ask because I knew it was all BS lol

 

[MedMan80]

I had a family so focused on brain imaging for their adhd kiddo, they were also the type to have a behav pediatrician try every single psych med known to man on this kiddo. I turned them away. I wonder if they got this idea from Amen.

 

[Merovinge]

This is my point. Everyone in here keeps saying "people are selling their souls for money", but the advertised salary is the same as most psych jobs. What's the appeal?

I briefly looked at one of their job postings before realizing it was an Amen clinic. The brief thing I saw was that you see less patient's per day for similar or higher income. Still a really silly way to sell your soul. If you are lazy and don't want to help people, going to med school was quite the decision...

 

[whopper]

Someone photoshop a pic of Drs. Amen, Oz, and what's that healing crystal BS con artist doc all wearing stripper outfits and post it here.

 

[MacDonaldTriad]

does anyone think this is valid?

 

[calvinhobbes]

To the mods / admins: apologies about what I posted earlier (and then was deleted by you guys). I didn’t mean to advertise at all (was just posting what they had emailed me lol, so I could share the nonsense). Sry again!
Thx ☺️