“I chose neurology for my love of philosophy, literature and psychiatry; in those years psychiatry did not convince me as an exact science, it seemed ambiguous to me, I saw it as a science of opinion, not even as a science. social and that’s why I decided to lean towards neurology, ”he begins by explaining and clarifying that his postgraduate degree in neurology today is what is known as neuropsychiatry. “I am dedicated to assessing behavioral or psychiatric consequences when there are brain injuries.”
He returned from Canada in 1996 and founded the Private Hospital, the first inland center dedicated to Alzheimer’s and behavioral neurology. Today he directs the Kremer Institute and the Neuroscience Center of the Sanatorium Morra in Córdoba with a body of interdisciplinary health professionals addressing the patient from prevention and developing therapeutic trials with new drugs for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
On what technologies and branches of research are they basing their work?
-Neuropsychiatry has become more complex over the years and we incorporate a lot of technology but also a better handling of theoretical information.
In the last two years I started looking for the philosophical side of all this and together with a group of knowledge scholars like philosophers, religious, mathematicians, physicists and astronomers we are trying to look for the humanist side, or the not so mechanical side of human behaviors, trying to look for the anatomy of the soul in other words.
Does it have anything to do with how our previous generations lived?
-This is related to epigenetics, which takes us to our grandparents. Everything that a person lives changes the proteins in the body so that genes are modified, this is called epigenetics, here comes the ancestral story, but also each of us with our own experiences is changing its current genetic load .
How do they analyze people’s way of life?
-This is in the first chapter, where there is prevention, an area that we developed 10 years ago with an assessment of lifestyles. We saw how by modifying certain lifestyles in terms of diet, mood, physical activity, intellectual activity and social and / or spiritual, positive results are achieved. With studies we conduct in Israel, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Argentina, we have shown that having a spiritual life, I do not mean religious, along with all other habits, can prolong the onset of Alzheimer’s or improve symptoms in 35% which no other drug has achieved.
Do they analyze the effects of any other therapy?
-We are working with yoga, mindfulness and transcendental meditation, and we see that they can help these five pillars of well-being that I mentioned before. Mindfulness is something that is taking effect, because it basically aims to take out a bit of the loads, armor and stuff we carry during the day to try to go transcendental, more than anything in this period of history where we are subjected to so much technology, which is wonderful but nullifies us. The mere fact of walking consciously of every step and every breath you take is already healing in itself, it is already an act of mindfulness; it’s not about thinking about anything, it’s about emptying your head.
Then the goal is a healthy brain …
-That’s right, we coined the concept of brain aesthetics two years ago; it’s not just about being brave on the outside, but about having the ability to convey that beauty, that grace of being alive and being in a good mental, emotional, and spiritual state. That is why our goal is to work to generate the physical conditions of the brain in order to have this aesthetic.
In all these years of experience, how did the evolution of a patient with any of these pathologies change?
-I didn’t think I was going to be able to see the changes I see today, not just from results, but from the results I get on my cell phone. Technology has changed all wonderfully, before the pandemic was in New York and I cared for a patient who had a problem, from the subway, I handled the case from my cell phone as if I were in the office. Within the fright that Covid was, he gave us the benefit of virtual medicine.
When I started we made the diagnosis late, the old joke of ‘I got German’, this old-fashioned because today we make diagnoses 10 years before the memory loss appears, we do it with other symptoms, before it was approximation now we do it with 97% certainty. We are really living the future today.
Advances are also seen in treatments
-Of course, the new drugs we tested evaluate how some substances go directly to attack the malignant proteins that affect Alzheimer’s disease and these will be available in a year or two, we are really living a wonderful science fiction, but I insist, this is useless if you do not apply the humanist side, the personalized, the love of the patient, which has nothing to do with technology.
How do you manage to convey this to young professionals, because maybe in academia they don’t find it?
-It takes me between five and seven years to train a professional. Of the people I train, 5% stay with me the other 95 are lost throughout training either because they don’t have patience, or because I don’t have patience with them and I don’t see this human condition for them.
Dr. Kremer is the second generation of doctors in the family, the grandparents escaped from the concentration camps and escaped World War II, hence his mother, a neuropediatrician and genetic scientist, his sisters are, an infant psychiatrist youth and another Dra. in education. “It’s very difficult for me to separate my life from my profession, I have a 14 year old son who I tried to educate as a free individual, I feel with the same or more energy than years ago, I still feel young but now I have the power of experience. My goal is to bring the Institute to the international arena and expand the humanist side of neuropsychiatry. ”
By Fernanda Bireni