Brain Stimulation Is the Future of Medicine
Personalized shockwaves can be an alternative to medication
Laura Soloway tried to end her own life for the first time when she was 12, using her childhood chemistry set. She remembers lining up all the bottles that read “fatal if swallowed,” but she couldn’t open their childproof caps. She tried again at age 18 and was rushed to the emergency room by her parents.
After years in and out of hospitals and on and off various medications, Soloway and her doctors finally settled on a cocktail of drugs that kept her stable. But, she says, “it worked just enough to keep me functional. I never felt like I could ever really be happy about anything or even be extremely sad about anything. I was just a zombie sleepwalking.”
It wasn’t until she was 40 that Soloway found a better solution for her depression: transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The procedure involves zapping the brain through the skull using a high-powered magnetic burst. After three weeks of the treatment, Soloway says she no longer considered suicide.
“I constantly had this thought in the back of my head that if I swerve the car this way, I’ll die, and that’ll be fine,” she says. “It wasn’t until after TMS when that thought was gone.”
