ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP
He wrote The Dopamine Brain. He is an interventional pain and addiction medicine physician in St. Louis, and he prescribes, withdraws and lives with the consequences of the dopaminergic drugs the book examines — worth setting out plainly before you read what he says about them.
Why an addiction and pain physician wrote this
His clinical work runs on one principle: treat the terrain, not the symptom. Most chronic disease he sees is downstream of metabolic, structural and inflammatory failures that are measurable and modifiable, and the complaint that brings someone through the door is rarely the thing that needs correcting.
This book exists because he taught dopamine the wrong way for years, and the correction changed what he does in clinic. Dopamine does not hand out enjoyment. It hands out the urge to go and get something, and it fires hardest when the world turns out better than predicted. Wanting and liking run on separate machinery, and in the patients he sees they come apart routinely.
What he sees in his own patients
The seam matters at the bedside. A person who cannot stop doing the thing they no longer enjoy has an intact wanting circuit and a damaged liking one. Those are two findings with two different answers, and neither of them is a character defect.
The evidence for the split is older than the clinic. Rats depleted of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens and neostriatum by up to 99% still showed normal pleasure reactions to sugar and still learned new likes and dislikes — they simply stopped going to get it (Berridge & Robinson, 1998).
The reverse case arrives in clinic as a prescription. Among Parkinson’s patients followed for five years who started with no impulse control disorder, 46.1% developed one; 51.5% of those who ever took a dopamine agonist, against 12.4% of those who never did (Corvol and colleagues, 2018). That is not a rare adverse event, and the book says so in the chapter where it belongs.
He is an addiction medicine physician, so he sees the same circuit from the other end — people described as weak, noncompliant or unmotivated by everyone who has examined them, including themselves.
The credentials that bear on the argument
The book crosses addiction, pain medicine, metabolic medicine and the nervous system. The training crosses the same ground. Dr. Padda holds five American board certifications:
- Addiction Medicine — American Board of Addiction Medicine
- Obesity Medicine — American Board of Obesity Medicine
- Interventional Pain — American Board of Interventional Pain Physicians (ABIPP)
- Pain Medicine — American Board of Pain Medicine
- Anesthesiology — American Board of Anesthesiology
Addiction medicine covers the wanting circuit where it does the most visible damage. Obesity medicine and his Diplomate status with the Society of Metabolic Health Practitioners cover the terrain the circuit is built out of — the book spends four chapters on how dopamine is assembled from breakfast and braked by insulin. Pain medicine matters because the same loop sets how loudly a nerve fires. He is also a Fellow of Interventional Pain Physicians (FIPP), a Certified Physician Executive, an advisor to the Nutrition Network, and practices at a Low Carb USA certified clinic.
How the evidence is handled
The book runs to thirty-one chapters, and its technical supplements carry 417 pages and 577 references. It flags its own weak spots. Where a widely repeated figure has no primary source, it is dropped rather than softened — the familiar claim that 80% of dopamine neurons are gone before symptoms appear does not survive a search for its origin, so the book prints the measured post-diagnosis figures instead.
Where a popular practice has no evidence, it says so plainly: exactly one article in the literature uses the term dopamine fasting, and it concedes the practice is unproven. Where an elegant model is contested — the clean go/no-go account of the movement pathways — the book writes it as a balance and names the experiments that disagree.
That habit is not editorial modesty. Dr. Padda served as Deputy Director of the Saint Louis University Institutional Review Board and has reviewed for journals in his field, which is several years of reading trials with the specific job of finding what a paper is not saying.
Training and appointments
Dr. Padda took his MD at the University of Missouri–Kansas City, trained in general surgery at Cook County Hospital, and completed anesthesiology residencies at Illinois Masonic Medical Center and at Washington University / Barnes Hospital, where he was Chief Resident in 1991–92. He holds an MBA from Saint Louis University.
He was Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology and of Pediatrics at Saint Louis University and Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital through the 1990s, and since 2024 has been faculty in the Kansas City University and Freeman Health System psychiatry residency — the specialty this book argues with most. He is President of the Missouri Society of Interventional Pain Physicians, and his work is published in Neuromodulation, Pain Medicine, Critical Care Medicine, Anesthesia & Analgesia and Pain Physician. The full record is on his Padda Institute physician page.
Credential verification
None of this has to be taken on trust. Dr. Padda is licensed in Missouri and Illinois, and the record is public.
- National Provider Identifier: 1427035955
- Missouri medical license: MD 100572
- Healthgrades profile
- Doximity profile
His clinical practice
Dr. Padda directs the Padda Institute in St. Louis, an interventional pain and regenerative medicine practice, and holds full staff privileges at Anderson Hospital in Maryville, Illinois. He treats addiction in person at the Addictionology Center, also in St. Louis. He is Chief Medical Officer of Valor Villages, the St. Louis 501(c)(3) nonprofit that houses veterans and children in crisis.
Board certifications and professional affiliations
Dr. Gurpreet Singh Padda, MD, MBA, MHP holds five board certifications and maintains the professional affiliations below.
The book
The Dopamine Brain carries a technical supplement for every chapter — its primary studies, and what each one does not show — and a video of every chapter on the Addictionology Center channel.