Daniel Amen

Daniel Gregory Amen is an American celebrity doctor who practices as a psychiatrist and brain disorder specialist as director of Amen Clinics. He is a five-time New York Times best-selling author as of 2012. Amen has built a profitable business around using SPECT (single-photon emission computed tomography) imaging for purported diagnostic purposes. 

His marketing of SPECT scans and much of what he says about the brain and health in his books, media appearances, and marketing of his clinics have been condemned by scientists and doctors as lacking scientific validity and as being unethical, especially since the way SPECT is used in his clinics exposes people to harmful radiation with no clear benefit. Amen has studied brain injuries affecting professional athletes and has consulted on post-concussion issues for the National Football League.

Daniel Amen was born in Encino, California, in July 1954 to Lebanese immigrant parents. After attending the University of Maryland, West Germany Campus from 1974 to 1975, he attended Orange Coast College, where he received an AA degree in 1976. He subsequently obtained a BA degree in biology from Southern California College (now Vanguard University) in 1978 and an MD degree from Oral Roberts University School of Medicine in 1982. 

Amen did his general psychiatric training at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and his child and adolescent psychiatry training at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu. Amen is board certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in Psychiatry, with a subspecialty in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry? 

Amen is the chief executive officer and medical director of the six Amen Clinics. Amen's practices use single-photon emission computed tomography, or SPECT scans of brain activity, in an attempt to compare the activity of a person's brain to a known healthy model. Amen prescribes both medication and non-medicative courses of treatment, depending on the case. He also performs before-and-after SPECT scans, which claim to assess the effectiveness of treatment. 

Amen's clinics claim to have the world's largest database of functional brain scans for neuropsychiatry. As of 2009, Amen said he had scanned 50,000 people at an estimated cost of $170 million. John Seibyl of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging has stated that it is settled that SPECT is of no value for diagnosing psychological disorders. A 2012 review by the American Psychiatric Association found that neuroimaging studies "have yet to impact the diagnosis or treatment of individual patients significantly." 

The review also states that neuroimaging studies "do not provide sufficient specificity and sensitivity to accurately classify individual cases with respect to the presence of a psychiatric illness." The American Psychiatric Association has concluded that "the available evidence does not support the use of brain imaging for clinical diagnosis or treatment of psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents." According to cognitive neuroscience researcher Martha Farah and psychologist S. J. Gillihan, "the lack of empirical validation has led to widespread condemnation of diagnostic SPECT as premature and unproven."