How steroids can accelerate your ADHD with Brittany Panico

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: [00:00:00] Come join me May 1st through the 6th, so that you can rest, rediscover your strengths, reconnect yourself and those physicians like you who are ready to leave, work at work and re-energize. This is the invitation for you. 2023 your year. Join me in Costa Rica in this really amazing, non-judgmental, intimate decision community.

I am gonna show you how to rest and how to recharge. Let's transform your brain up so that you can start to dream the life that you always wanted this year in 2023. I can't wait to learn all about what kind of year you're gonna have after this conference. Take care. Hello, hello. Welcome to Beyond ADHD, a Physician's Perspective.

I am Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh. I'm a family medicine physician practicing in rural Texas. I used to be hindered by my adhd, but I now. See it as a gift that helps me show up as a person. I was always meant to be both in my work and in my personal life. In the past two years, I've come to realize that unlearning some of my beliefs and some of my habits were just as important as learning the new set of.

Well, hello. Hello everybody. I am so excited today. I have a very special friend with me, Dr. Brittany Panico, and she is from Arizona and she's a physician. She's a rheumatologist. She's an. Autoimmune guru. Okay. A guru. Okay. So she's gonna talk to us about all the things but I wanna tell you about her because it's very special.

She is a board certified internal medicine doctor, and she's an also adult rheumatologist with experience both in inpatient and outpatient. And she is, Her platform is that we need to make sure we are doing this together. So she's an advocate for shared decision making and she really wants you to realize that we're a team here that you know, while I might not know everything, you might not know everything, but when we put our heads together, Everybody wins Your health wins.

And she is the chief of rheumatology at Summit Rheumatology and Gilbert, Arizona. So today we're gonna have a really cool talk about how sometimes steroids can make her A D H D misbehave a little bit . . Also, we're gonna talk about how sometimes we need to be aware that, again, when we are deciding that the course that we are getting from using certain medications are not, Exactly what we want.

We have to have this conversation about decision making so that we can pivot or figure out what the next best thing could be. So, without further ado, I wanna invite Dr. Brittany Panko today to share with us how she got excited about rheumatology.

Dr. Brittany Panico: Thank you so much Dr. Mercado. So Yeah, I'm really excited to be here and basically, like Dr.

Mercado said, I practice adult rheumatology and really, really want my patients to be a part of the team. So when we talk about medications, when we talk about diagnosis and what that means to you as a patient, , it's really important that we're all on the same page together. So excited to chat about different things that can contribute to either A D H D exacerbation or more trouble concentrating or trouble at work or at school or at home.

So yeah.

Dr. Diana Mercado-Marmarosh: So how did you land with ad with rheumatology? Like is that something you knew you wanted to do all the long, when you were in medical school or, or did just come about once you were like deciding towards the end?

Dr. Brittany Panico: So I became interested in a rheumatology actually, after a dermatology rotation.

I noticed that a lot of patients with psoriasis were coming in and really struggling with wanting to talk more about their condition, about more about how they felt, how their bodies felt. And in dermatology it was about treating their rash, their psoriasis, and we would see patients. You know, talk about medications, talk about prescriptions, and then the attending would often say, now you go see your rheumatologist.

And I didn't really know what rheumatology was at that point, but it really triggered me to think about. Okay, if, if this specialist is sending you now to this person, what is so special about that team that can fix the things going on? So I really started paying more attention to the way that rheumatologists kind of fit a lot of the pieces together.

And we're often kind of referred to as the problem solvers when things don't seem like they're going right or when we don't have an answer. Patients will often be sent to rheumatology to try to understand the puzzle of what's happening. So I really, really enjoy that problem solving approach. And then also it's just a really exciting time in the time of biologics, the time that so many new medications are coming out and really can change the way.

Patients feel and we can see it happening. So it's really, really exciting just to be a part of a field of medicine where we can really impact somebody's way of life for the better.