Yampa Valley behavioral health survey presented to the Steamboat Springs City Council in early September<\/a> showed that despite strong awareness of local resources and a reputation for community support, many residents still face loneliness, high levels of substance use and persistent barriers to getting care when they need it.<\/p>\n\u201cAbout a year ago, I was at a pharmaceutical conference, and in one of the presentations, someone was talking about TMS and how effective it was and how quickly it can treat people, and then they went right back to talking about medications,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd I thought, \u2018I need to learn more about that.’\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
TMS, he explained, is an FDA-approved treatment that uses brief magnetic pulses, similar in strength to an MRI, to gently stimulate targeted areas of the brain without surgery or anesthesia.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Savage said that with traditional TMS, patients are seen four to five days per week for six to nine weeks, with approximately 20- to 40-minute sessions per visit. Savage said traditional TMS can be covered by insurance if the patient meets the requirements.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What Savage is offering is what he described as the \u201cmost modern\u201d approach to the form of treatment: getting all of the treatment done in an 11-hour, single-day stretch composed of 20 three-minute sessions, called \u201cone-day TMS.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
While there are several providers throughout Colorado offering traditional TMS treatment, Rising Psychiatry, which opened in early September, is the only clinic outside of Denver to provide accelerated TMS.\u00a0<\/p>\n
By bringing this intensive form of treatment to Northwest Colorado, Savage\u2019s goal is simple: to make it more accessible and convenient for potential patients with depression in the mountain region.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a lot less travel, it\u2019s a lot less complication,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m just trying to make it accessible and to treat as many people as possible.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Savage charges a flat rate of $3,000 for the treatment and does not accept insurance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
TMS isn\u2019t for everyone. Individuals with depression who have largely seen success from psychiatric medications, for example, are less likely to be appropriate candidates for TMS.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe further you\u2019ve gone down your depression journey, your treatment journey, and things haven\u2019t worked for you \u2014 the more difficult it is to treat, the more likely that TMS will work for you, and the more benefit it can give you,\u201d Savage said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of his primary hurdles, he explained, is public education. He said most people have not even heard of TMS, let alone considered it for possible psychiatric treatment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Savage said he believes TMS represents a \u201cnew paradigm in psychiatry.\u201d<\/p>\n
He traced a history of psychiatric paradigms, from Sigmund Freud\u2019s late-19th-century founding of psychoanalysis and talk therapy, to the advent of psychiatric medications in the \u201960s and \u201970s, to present-day neuro-modulation treatments like TMS.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTMS is the one I feel is the most accessible and most affordable,\u201d said Savage. \u201cIt has the best safety profile, the least side effects, and it\u2019s something we can easily get out to the population really quickly.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
While the technology has been around for decades \u2014 TMS treatment was officially approved by the FDA in 2008 \u2014 recent advancements have given rise to what Savage called an \u201cinflection point\u201d in the use of the technology.<\/p>\n
TMS patients at Rising Psychiatry arrive at the clinic at 7 a.m. and are given a medication called d-cycloserine, which Savage said makes the treatment work more effectively by unlocking the \u201ckey receptors that we\u2019re trying to change in the brain with TMS\u201d and making them \u201cmore malleable, more active.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/RisingPsychiatry-sbt-103126-2-1024x695.jpg\")
Psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner Michael Savage demonstrates how he uses the electromagnetic coil of a transcranial magnetic stimulation machine to treat patients inside his Steamboat Springs office.John F. Russell\/Steamboat Pilot & Today<\/p>\n
The medication takes approximately an hour to kick in. During that time, Savage conducts a \u201cmapping session,\u201d or calibrating the treatment by finding out \u201cexactly how much energy it takes to get your brain to activate,\u201d with every patient differing at least slightly.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cFor the next 10 hours, we\u2019re going to do very short treatments,\u201d said Savage, who added that he provides lunch for patients. \u201cThey\u2019re three minutes each, and we do those on the half-hour. So that\u2019s a total of 20 really short sessions.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
During the treatment, patients wear a special cap that has markings to show Savage the treatment points. Once he starts the machine, the patient will feel light pulses on their head, which can potentially make the patient\u2019s face twitch temporarily depending on the power and position of the equipment.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In the 27 minutes between each session, patients can do virtually anything \u2014 work from their laptop, go on a walk, listen to music \u2014 though Savage said he does ask his patients to avoid doomscrolling on their phones to mitigate negative thoughts during treatment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cOther than that, it\u2019s a passive thing,\u201d he said. \u201cYou don\u2019t have to do anything special. You don\u2019t have to be in a certain mental state. You don\u2019t have to think about anything during treatment necessarily. You can, but you just really need to relax.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
After the treatment, Savage said, patients will most likely feel tired, like they\u2019ve been studying in a library all day.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Savage said patients who see success with one-day TMS should notice positive results within two weeks. In studies of accelerated TMS, he said 70% of patients can tell within a week of treatment that they are having a positive reaction to it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYour brain doesn\u2019t just change on treatment day. It continues to be adaptive for quite a while,\u201d he said. \u201cSo that positive response is building for weeks after treatment because your brain is making new connections, it\u2019s adapting, and it\u2019s getting used to that frontal cortex being active again, where in depression, it\u2019s often really dormant.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Beyond one-day TMS, Rising Psychiatry also offers traditional medication-based psychiatric treatment and therapy to provide well-rounded options to anyone seeking mental healthcare.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ultimately, TMS, unlike medications, treats an individual\u2019s underlying psychology, or the \u201croot cause\u201d of their depression, said Savage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMedications are great, but they\u2019re kind of like hitting a screw with a hammer in some cases,\u201d he said. \u201cWith TMS, I\u2019m retraining your brain to not be depressed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Savage, who has lived in Steamboat for 15 years, is currently working on opening a branch of the clinic in Boulder, also focused on one-day TMS.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rising Psychiatry is located at 1205 Hilltop Parkway, Suite 202 in Steamboat Springs. To learn more, visit RisingPsychiatry.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Psychiatric nurse practitioner and longtime Steamboat Springs local Michael Savage has a mission: getting people out of depression.\u00a0…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663188,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[163,521,85,46],"class_list":["post-663187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663187\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663188"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}