What Does Amphetamine Do to Your Memory

Memory is not one single skill. It is a chain of small jobs that your brain does all day without you noticing: taking in a new name, holding a phone number in your head while you look for a pen, remembering what someone said five minutes ago, finding an old memory when you need it, and learning something new so you can use it tomorrow. When that chain works well, life feels smooth. You can follow a conversation, finish a task, keep an appointment and trust yourself to remember the things that matter. When it starts to break down, even ordinary days feel harder, because you have to work twice as hard to do things that used to come easily.

Amphetamine is a strong stimulant. It speeds up the brain and the body, raises alertness for a short time, and pushes the brain’s reward and attention systems much harder than normal life does. Some people take it because they want to stay awake, focus for longer, or feel more energy. But the price can show up in the very thing they hoped to improve: memory. This article explains, in plain words, what amphetamine can do to memory, how the harm builds up, and why it matters in everyday life. It is general information only, not individual medical advice. It does not tell anyone how to use amphetamine, and it does not offer personal treatment. If you are worried about your memory or your health, a qualified health professional is the right person to talk to.

How Memory Normally Works

To understand the harm, it helps to know how memory works in the first place. Your brain does not store memories like a camera stores photographs. It builds them in stages. First comes attention: you have to notice something before you can remember it. Then comes short-term memory, which holds a small amount of information for a short time, like a shopping list you are trying to keep in your head. Then comes the step where the brain files that information away for longer, which is called forming a memory. Later, when you need it, the brain has to find it again, which is called recall. If any one of those stages is disturbed, the whole chain becomes weaker.

Sleep plays a large part in this process. During sleep, especially deep sleep, the brain sorts through the day, strengthens the memories that matter, and clears away some of the clutter. That is why a good night of sleep often makes things feel clearer the next morning, and why a bad night can leave you forgetful and slow. Food, rest, mood and stress matter too. A tired, hungry, anxious brain does not learn as well as a rested one. Memory is not separate from the rest of your health. It depends on the brain having enough sleep, enough energy, and enough calm to do its work properly.

Amphetamine disturbs almost every part of that chain. It can make attention jumpy instead of steady, so you notice many things at once but hold on to none of them properly. It can push the brain into a wired, restless state where new information goes in one ear and out the other. It often breaks sleep, so the brain loses the quiet hours it needs to file memories away. And over time, repeated use can wear down the brain systems that handle learning and recall. The result is not usually one dramatic moment of forgetting. It is a slow, creeping change: more slips, more repeated questions, more moments when a name or a fact is just out of reach.

What Amphetamine Does Inside the Brain

Amphetamine works by increasing the activity of certain chemical messengers in the brain, most importantly dopamine and noradrenaline. These chemicals help with alertness, attention, motivation and reward. In small, short bursts, higher levels can make a person feel wide awake, focused and full of energy. That is the effect people notice first, and it is also the effect that misleads them. Feeling alert is not the same as thinking clearly, and feeling awake is not the same as remembering well.

When those chemical systems are pushed too hard and too often, they start to struggle. The brain tries to adjust by becoming less sensitive to its own chemicals, which means that ordinary things — a conversation, a meal, a quiet evening — can start to feel flat and uninteresting. The person may feel they need the stimulant just to feel normal, and without it they feel foggy, slow and unmotivated. This is part of how dependence develops, and it is also part of why memory suffers. A brain that is constantly waiting for its next chemical push is not in a good state to learn, store or recall information calmly.

Amphetamine also raises heart rate and blood pressure and keeps the body in a state of high alert. That state is useful for a short emergency, but it is a poor state for memory. When the body is on edge, the brain gives priority to immediate survival — scanning for threats, reacting quickly — and gives less priority to the slow work of forming lasting memories. Over time, the stress hormones that stay high during repeated use can also harm the parts of the brain that handle memory, including the hippocampus, a small curved structure deep in the brain that plays a central role in forming new memories. None of this happens in a single day. It builds up, quietly, use after use.

Short-Term Memory Starts to Slip First

For most people, the earliest memory problem is with short-term memory. This is the memory you use to hold something in mind for a few seconds or minutes: the number someone has just read out, the point you were about to make, the reason you walked into a room, the instruction your boss gave you a moment ago. When short-term memory weakens, life becomes full of small frustrations. You ask someone to repeat themselves. You lose the thread of a conversation halfway through. You read the same paragraph twice and still cannot say what it said. You put your keys down and cannot remember where, even though you only just had them in your hand.

These slips are easy to dismiss at first. Everyone forgets things sometimes, and a single slip means very little on its own. The warning sign is the pattern: the slips become more frequent, they happen in more situations, and they start to affect work, study and home life. A student may find they cannot hold the steps of a problem in their head long enough to finish it. A worker may need instructions repeated three times when once would have been enough. A parent may forget a school time, a medicine time, or a promise made that morning. Each slip on its own is small. Together, they add up to a day that feels harder and less reliable.

Part of the reason is attention. Amphetamine can make attention feel sharp at first, but as the effect wears off, or as use becomes regular, attention often becomes scattered. The mind jumps from one thing to another, it is easily distracted, and it struggles to stay with a single task long enough to learn it properly. If you never really attend to something, you cannot remember it later, no matter how hard you try. That is why people in this situation often say the information went in and then vanished. It did not vanish. It was never properly stored, because the brain was too restless to take it in.

Learning New Things Gets Harder

Learning is memory in action. When you learn something new — a skill at work, a lesson at college, a route to a new place, a new word in another language — your brain has to pay attention, practise, and then store what it has learned so it can be used again. Amphetamine makes each of those steps harder over time. The first problem is focus. Learning needs steady, patient attention, and a brain that is wired and jumpy cannot give it. The second problem is sleep. Without proper sleep, the brain cannot consolidate what it has learned during the day, so even a lesson that seemed clear in the afternoon can feel gone by the next morning.

The third problem is repetition. Learning usually needs a person to return to something more than once, to practise it, and to build on it slowly. When memory is unreliable, that building process keeps restarting. A person may study the same material again and again and still feel as if they are starting from the beginning. That is deeply frustrating, and it can make people give up on study or training altogether, not because they lack ability, but because their brain is not keeping what they put into it. Over months, that lost learning adds up. Skills are not built, qualifications are not finished, and chances at work or study quietly slip away.

It is worth saying clearly that this is not about intelligence. A person can be bright, capable and hard-working and still struggle to learn when their memory system is under strain. The problem is not that they cannot think. It is that the brain’s filing system is not working as it should. Blaming yourself, or being blamed by others, only adds stress, and stress makes memory worse. What helps is honest information, rest, and support from a health professional who can look at the whole picture, including sleep, mood, appetite and any other health problems.

Remembering Names, Faces and Conversations

Some of the most painful memory problems are the social ones. Forgetting a name in the middle of a conversation, failing to recognise a face you have seen before, or asking the same question twice in one chat can feel embarrassing, and the embarrassment can make the problem worse. People start to avoid conversations, or they nod along and pretend they remember, because they do not want to admit they have forgotten again. Over time, that avoidance can damage friendships and family relationships, because other people may think the person is not listening, does not care, or is being rude, when the truth is that their memory is letting them down.

Remembering faces and names depends on the same brain systems as other kinds of memory, and it is especially sensitive to poor sleep and high stress. When you meet someone new, your brain has to link a face, a name, a voice and a context together, and then store that link. If attention is scattered, the link is weak from the start. If sleep is broken, the link is not strengthened overnight. The next time you see that person, the face may feel familiar but the name is missing, or the name comes to mind but you cannot place where you met them. That half-remembered feeling is common, and it is one of the reasons people describe their memory as playing tricks on them.

Conversations suffer in a similar way. A good conversation needs you to remember what was said a minute ago, to hold the other person’s point in mind while you form your reply, and to recall what you talked about last time you met. When that thread keeps breaking, conversations become shorter, more repetitive, and more tiring for everyone. The other person may feel they are not being heard. The person with the memory problem may feel they are failing the people they care about. Neither side is at fault. The harm is in the brain, and it needs understanding, not blame.

Sleep, Appetite and Memory Are Linked

It is impossible to talk honestly about amphetamine and memory without talking about sleep. Amphetamine keeps people awake, often for far longer than the body can cope with. A person may stay up through the night, then through the next day, and then crash into a long, heavy sleep that still does not feel refreshing. That pattern — long wakefulness followed by broken, shallow sleep — is one of the worst things for memory. The brain needs regular, deep sleep to sort and store memories, and when sleep is repeatedly lost, that sorting simply does not happen properly.

Appetite is part of the same picture. Amphetamine often suppresses hunger, so people eat less, skip meals, or forget to eat altogether. The brain runs on energy from food, and when it is underfed, it works less well. Low blood sugar, dehydration and poor nutrition all make thinking slower and memory weaker, and they make the brain more vulnerable to stress. A person who is tired, hungry and dehydrated is not going to remember well, no matter how hard they concentrate. Over weeks and months, that combination — little sleep, little food, constant stimulation — wears the brain down in a way that a single night of poor sleep never could.

Mood matters too. Anxiety, low mood and irritability are common with repeated amphetamine use, and each of them affects memory in its own way. Anxiety fills the mind with worry, leaving little room to take in new information. Low mood makes it harder to care about remembering, and harder to find the energy to try. Irritability shortens patience, so a person gives up on a hard task sooner. When sleep, food and mood are all under strain at the same time, memory does not stand a chance. Fixing memory, where that is possible, usually means looking at all of these together, not just at memory on its own.

Why the Harm Gets Worse Over Time

One of the hardest things about this kind of harm is that it does not arrive all at once. It builds up slowly, and the brain adapts to the change, so the person may not notice how much has been lost until the gap is already wide. Early on, the slips are small and easy to explain away: a busy week, a late night, a stressful day. Later, the slips become the normal state of things. The person starts to rely on lists, reminders and other people to get through the day, and they may not remember a time when they did not need that help. That slow slide is why family members and close friends often notice the change before the person does. They see the difference between how the person used to be and how they are now, while the person inside the change feels it as normal.

Repeated use also means repeated strain with too little recovery time in between. The brain, like any other part of the body, needs rest to repair itself. When it is pushed hard day after day, without proper sleep or food, the damage accumulates faster than the brain can mend it. Mixing amphetamine with other substances, including alcohol, can make the harm worse, because it adds extra strain on the brain, the heart and the liver, and it disturbs sleep even further. Using more often, or over a longer period, generally increases the harm for the same reason: the brain gets less chance to recover, and the systems that handle memory have less time to return to normal.

There is also the question of what else is going on in a person’s life. Poor health, existing mental health problems, head injuries and older age can all make the brain more vulnerable, so the same pattern of use may cause more harm in one person than in another. That is why no article can predict exactly what will happen to any one individual, and why a personal assessment by a health professional matters. What the research does show, again and again, is a consistent pattern: the longer and more frequent the use, the greater the risk to memory, attention and learning.

When Memory Problems Need Urgent Attention

Most memory slips linked with amphetamine use build up gradually, but some situations need help right away. If a person becomes suddenly confused, cannot recognise people or places they know well, cannot speak clearly, has a severe headache, chest pain, a very fast or irregular heartbeat, or becomes very agitated or distressed, they need urgent medical help. These can be signs of a serious problem that needs treatment immediately, and waiting is not safe. The same is true if a person has taken amphetamine and then becomes very hot, very sweaty, vomits repeatedly, or loses consciousness. In an emergency, call the local emergency number and stay with the person until help arrives.

It is also worth seeking help sooner, rather than later, if memory problems are affecting work, study, safety or relationships. A health professional can check for other causes of memory problems, look at sleep, mood, nutrition and general health, and talk through what support is available. That conversation is not about judgement. It is about getting a clear picture and making a plan. Many people put off asking for help because they feel ashamed, or because they worry about what will happen. In practice, the first step is usually a calm conversation, and it is the step that makes every later step possible.

How Memory Problems Affect Daily Life

Memory problems do not stay inside the head. They spill into every part of an ordinary day, and that is where their true cost becomes clear. At home, a person may forget to pay a bill on time, miss a child’s school event, or leave the cooker on because the thought of turning it off slipped away. None of these are dramatic on their own, but they create a household that feels less safe and less reliable, and they put extra work on the people who live there. A partner may start double-checking everything, a child may start reminding an adult about things that should be the adult’s job, and slowly the whole family rearranges itself around one person’s forgetting. That rearrangement is tiring for everyone, and it can breed resentment even when everyone understands the cause.

At work, the same pattern plays out in a different setting. A job that once felt manageable starts to feel like a test that is getting harder every week. Instructions are forgotten, meetings are missed, and the quality of the work drops in ways that are hard to hide. The person may work longer hours to make up for lost time, which only makes the sleep problem worse, which in turn makes the memory worse. It is a circle that is very hard to break from inside, because each part of it feeds the next. Colleagues may be patient at first, but patience wears thin when the same mistake is made again and again, and the person may end up being moved to simpler work, or losing the job altogether, not because they lack skill, but because their memory can no longer be trusted to carry the load.

Study is affected in a similar way, and for younger people the cost can last for years. A course that is not finished, an exam that is failed, a qualification that is never gained — these are not just disappointments in the moment. They shape what jobs are open to a person, what income they can earn, and how they see themselves. A student who keeps forgetting what they studied the night before may conclude that they are simply not clever enough, when the real problem is that their brain has not had the sleep and the calm it needs to store what they learned. That wrong conclusion can stay with a person for a long time, and it can stop them from trying again even after their health has improved.

There is also a quieter cost, which is the loss of confidence. When you cannot trust your own memory, you start to doubt yourself in other ways too. You hesitate before speaking, because you are not sure you remember the facts correctly. You avoid new situations, because you worry you will forget something important. You write everything down, and then you forget where you wrote it. That loss of confidence can make a person withdraw from social life, from work, and from the very activities that would help their brain recover, like conversation, learning and exercise. It is a reminder that memory is not just a practical skill. It is part of how we see ourselves, and when it weakens, our sense of who we are weakens with it.

The good news, such as it is, is that daily life can also be where recovery first shows itself. A person who starts sleeping better may notice that they remember a name they would have forgotten a month ago. A person who eats regularly may find they can follow a conversation without losing the thread. These small wins matter, because they rebuild confidence, and confidence makes it easier to keep going. Recovery is not a single moment when everything is fixed. It is a series of small, ordinary improvements — a remembered appointment, a finished task, a conversation that flows — and each one is proof that the brain is starting to work better again.

My Take:

When I think about memory, I do not think about exam scores or clever tricks for remembering lists. I think about the small, ordinary moments that make a day feel like your own: remembering that your daughter asked you to pick something up on the way home, recalling a joke a friend told you last week, knowing where you left your glasses, following a recipe without having to read every line twice. Those moments are so small that we hardly notice them when they work. We only notice them when they start to go wrong, and by then the loss feels bigger than the moment itself, because it is not just a forgotten name. It is a feeling that you cannot trust your own mind in the way you used to.

That feeling is what stays with me about amphetamine and memory. The drug promises focus and energy, and for a short time it can feel as if it delivers. A person feels wide awake, quick, able to keep going when everyone else is tired. But the price is paid in the quiet hours afterwards, and in the weeks that follow, when the brain cannot file away what it has taken in, cannot hold a thought long enough to finish a task, and cannot find yesterday when it needs it. It is a cruel trade, because the very thing a person wanted — a sharper mind — is the thing that gets worn down. I find that hard to read about without feeling angry, not at the person, but at the trade itself, which looks like a bargain and turns out to be a debt.

I also think about how lonely this kind of harm can feel. A broken leg is visible. People can see it, they understand it, they offer help. A damaged memory is invisible. You look the same, you sound the same, and yet inside, the thread keeps breaking. Other people may think you are not listening, or that you do not care, when the truth is that your brain is struggling to hold on to what they just said. That misunderstanding hurts, and it can push people apart at the very time they need each other most. If I could change one thing about how we talk about this, it would be that: memory problems are not rudeness, laziness or a lack of love. They are a sign that the brain is under strain, and they deserve patience, not blame.

Families notice first, in my experience of reading about this, and that matters. A partner notices the repeated questions. A parent notices the missed appointment. A child notices that the same story is told twice in one evening. Those observations are not accusations. They are early warnings, and they are often the most honest information a person will get, because the person at the centre of the change is the last one to see it clearly. The brain adapts to its own decline, and decline starts to feel normal from the inside. That is why I would always listen to the people around me if they told me, kindly and consistently, that my memory was changing. It takes courage to say it, and it takes courage to hear it, but hearing it early is what makes change possible.

I am not going to pretend that stopping is easy, or that memory comes back overnight. Anyone who has tried to change a habit that is tangled up with sleep, appetite, mood and daily routine knows that it is not a matter of one decision. It is a matter of many small decisions, made day after day, often with setbacks. Sleep has to be rebuilt. Meals have to become regular again. The wired, restless feeling has to pass, and the flat, foggy feeling that follows it has to be endured. That is hard work, and I think anyone who does it deserves respect, not lectures. What I would say, plainly, is that the work is worth doing, because memory is not a luxury. It is how we keep our promises, do our jobs, look after our children, and stay connected to the people we love.

There is a part of this that I find hopeful, and I want to be honest about it. The brain is not a machine that breaks once and stays broken. It can recover, slowly, when the strain is removed and when it gets what it needs: sleep, food, rest, and time. The recovery is not always complete, and I will not pretend otherwise, because some harm takes a long time to heal and some may not fully reverse. But improvement is real, and it is worth working towards. People do find that their thinking becomes clearer, their sleep becomes steadier, and the small slips become less frequent when they stop and give their brain a chance to rest. That slow return of clarity is one of the most satisfying things a person can experience, because it feels like getting yourself back.

I think about students and young workers a lot when I write about this, because they are often the ones who turn to a stimulant in the first place. They are under pressure — exams, deadlines, long shifts, the need to earn money — and someone tells them a pill or a powder will help them focus and get through it. At the time, it feels like a practical answer to a real problem. Months later, the same person is struggling to learn the very material they wanted to master, and they cannot understand why the shortcut has stopped working. The answer is painful but simple: the shortcut was borrowing from tomorrow to pay for today, and tomorrow has arrived. If you are young and under pressure, I would ask you to think about that trade before you make it, and to look for help with the pressure itself — a tutor, a manager, a friend, a health professional — rather than a substance that will make the pressure harder to bear in the end.

Work is another place where this harm shows up, and it shows up in ways that are easy to miss. A person may still turn up every day, still do the hours, still look busy, and yet the quality of their work is quietly falling. Mistakes creep in. Instructions need repeating. Deadlines are missed, not because the person does not care, but because the chain of remembering has broken somewhere in the middle. That can lead to warnings, lost jobs, and lost confidence, and the loss of confidence makes the memory worse, because stress and shame do not help anyone think clearly. Employers and colleagues who understand this can make a real difference, not by ignoring the problem, but by responding with honesty and support, and by pointing a person towards help rather than simply towards the door.

I also want to say something about shame, because it keeps so many people from asking for help. There is a story we tell ourselves that memory problems, or drug use, are a sign of weakness, and that strong people do not need help. That story is wrong, and it is dangerous. Needing help is not weakness. It is the normal result of a brain that has been pushed too hard for too long. A health professional has heard this story many times before, and their job is not to judge you. It is to listen, to check your health, and to help you make a plan that fits your life. If you are reading this and recognising yourself in it, I would ask you to consider that conversation, not as a confession, but as a practical step, like going to a mechanic when your car starts making a noise you do not understand.

Children are the reason I feel most strongly about this, as I do about most health harms. A child who lives with a parent whose memory is unreliable learns to cope in ways no child should have to learn: reminding an adult about appointments, checking that promises are kept, covering up slips so the family looks normal from the outside. That is a heavy load for a young person, and it can shape how they feel about trust and reliability for years afterwards. If you are a parent and you recognise this pattern in yourself, I would ask you to think about your children, not with guilt, but with honesty. Getting help is not just for you. It is a gift to them, because it gives them back a parent they can rely on, and it shows them that asking for help is something strong people do.

Finally, I want to leave you with a simple idea. Your memory is not a filing cabinet. It is a living part of you, and it needs the same care as the rest of your body: sleep, food, rest, and a life that is not lived permanently on high alert. Amphetamine offers a shortcut that looks like energy and focus, but what it really offers is a loan, and the interest is paid in forgotten names, lost learning, broken sleep and strained relationships. No shortcut is worth that price. If you have not started, do not start. If you have started and you are noticing the slips, do not wait for them to get worse. Talk to someone, get your health checked, and give your brain the time and rest it needs to heal. That is not a slogan. It is the most practical advice I can give you, and I mean it.

I think it is also worth talking about what helps, in a practical sense, when memory is struggling. Simple routines can make a real difference while the brain is recovering: keeping a single notebook or phone calendar for appointments, putting keys and important things in the same place every time, breaking a task into small steps and finishing one before starting the next, and telling a trusted person when you are struggling so they can help you keep track. None of these are cures, and none of them replace professional help, but they reduce the daily strain and they give the brain fewer chances to fail. They also give a person back a feeling of control, which is valuable in itself when so much else feels out of control.

I also think we need to be honest about how hard it is to ask for help, especially for men, and especially for people who have always prided themselves on being strong and self-reliant. There is a voice that says asking for help is admitting defeat, and that voice is very loud when you are tired and ashamed. But I would ask you to listen to a different voice, the one that says getting help is what strong people do when they face a problem they cannot solve alone. A doctor, a counsellor, a trusted friend — any of them can be the first step. The first conversation is the hardest, and after that, the path becomes clearer, because you are no longer carrying the whole weight by yourself.

There is one more thing I want to say, and it is about the people who are reading this because they love someone whose memory is changing. You are in a difficult position, and I want to acknowledge that. You can see the change, you are living with the consequences, and yet you may feel powerless to stop it. What you can do is real, even if it does not feel like enough: keep notes of what you notice, speak kindly and specifically about the changes you see, encourage the person to see a health professional, and look after your own health too, because you cannot support someone else if you are exhausted yourself. Your patience matters more than you know, and your honesty, offered with love, can be the thing that finally makes a person seek help.

I will finish with this thought. Memory is the thread that ties our days together. It is how we know who we are, who we love, and what we have promised to do. Amphetamine frays that thread, slowly and quietly, until the days start to come apart. But threads can be mended, and days can be tied together again, if the strain is removed and the brain is given what it needs to heal. That mending takes time, and it takes help, and it takes the courage to admit that something is wrong. If you have that courage, use it. Talk to someone today, not tomorrow, not next week. Your memory, and the people who depend on it, are worth that conversation.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Amphetamine affect memory?

Amphetamine can weaken memory by disturbing attention, short-term memory and the brain’s ability to store new information. It pushes the brain’s dopamine and noradrenaline systems hard, which can make attention jumpy and restless, so new facts are not taken in properly. It also breaks sleep and often suppresses appetite, and without regular deep sleep and enough food the brain cannot file memories away or recall them reliably. Over time, repeated use can wear down the systems that handle learning and recall, so slips become more frequent and learning new things becomes harder.

How soon can Amphetamine start harming memory?

Some memory problems can appear quite early, especially when sleep is lost and attention becomes scattered. A person may notice more forgotten names, repeated questions and lost threads in conversation within days or weeks of regular use, particularly after nights without proper sleep. Deeper harm to learning and long-term recall usually builds over weeks and months, growing with how often and how long the substance is used. The exact timing differs from person to person, depending on their health, their sleep, and their pattern of use.

Can the harm Amphetamine does to memory be reversed?

Some effects, such as broken sleep, poor concentration and a foggy feeling, can improve when use stops and the brain gets time, regular sleep, food and rest. Other harm, especially after long or heavy use, may take much longer to improve, and some changes may not fully reverse. A qualified health professional can assess an individual situation, which is the only safe way to get a personal answer. Whether the harm to memory can be reversed depends on what has been damaged and for how long, and no general article can answer that for any one person.

Who notices the harm of Amphetamine on memory first?

Family members and close friends often notice the harm first, because they see the small daily changes in mood, sleep, appetite and reliability. The person using Amphetamine may be the last to see it, since the brain adapts to the pattern and the change feels normal from inside. Colleagues, teachers and neighbours may also notice, in missed days, shorter patience and work that is no longer steady.

What makes the harm of Amphetamine to memory worse?

Mixing Amphetamine with other substances can multiply the danger, especially for breathing, the heart and consciousness. Poor sleep, skipped meals and existing health problems can also make the harm worse, because the body is already under strain. Using Amphetamine more often, in larger amounts or over a longer time generally increases the harm, because the body gets less chance to recover.

Where can I read reliable information about Amphetamine and memory?

For questions about a specific person, the right step is a conversation with a qualified health professional, not an article. Those sources explain harms, risks and patterns of use in plain language, without selling anything or offering personal advice. Reliable general information about Amphetamine can be found from public health authorities such as NIDA, the NHS, the WHO, the CDC and the DEA, listed in the sources below.

Sources

This article is general information only. It is not personal medical advice. For questions about a specific person, speak with a qualified health professional.