Guy Odishaw - Bioelectric Medicine: It's Powerful Impact on Dementia & Parkinsons, and Overall Brain Health

Speaker 1: 0:35

Welcome to Open Minded Healing. Today we're going to be speaking to my guest, guy Odisha, about bioelectric medicine and how it affects the brain. Welcome, guy.

Speaker 2: 0:48

Good to late to be here. Thanks for the opportunity.

Speaker 1: 0:51

I've been waiting all week to hear what you have to say about this topic, Anything that can help someone, possibly with dementia or Parkinson's or any of those seemingly hard to treat conditions. So what you have to say I'm sure will be of great interest to the listeners today. Do you want to start off by giving an overview of what bioelectric medicine is?

Speaker 2: 1:19

Certainly. Yeah, let's start with an overview. What is bioelectric medicine? So we're generally familiar in allopathic medicine or Western medicine the idea of the chemical side of medicine. It's a pharmacy, pharmaceuticals are chemicals and they treat the chemical side of our biology. But in a simple way we could say we are chemical, electric beings. Now there's a lot more to us. We have an energetic self and a theoric self, a soul. It's many dimensions as a person wants to bring in. I'm open to that. But in the simplest form we think of being a chemical, electric being at a biological level. So Western medicine, really leveraging pharmaceuticals, has worked on the chemical side of the equation.

Speaker 2: 2:07

Bioelectric medicine is then coming in and saying well, there's another side to this equation, it's the electrical side, and we can work with biology through different forms of electricity and have a very similar effect to when you treat on the chemical side.

Speaker 2: 2:24

And so we're really using different forms of electrical fields, whether it's an electrical field or a magnetic field, or we use light, so a photonic field. We're using some type of electrical field to change the electrical gradient at the cellular level to move biology in the direction that we wanted to go in, towards health and away from disease. So the paradigm is similar to what we're all very familiar with take a pill, so we call that a pharmaceutical, and our side it's taken electroseutical, and that is using an electric device to shift the electrical gradient at the cellular level, or at the tissue level or the organ level, depending on where we're applying it. But in a nutshell, that's what bioelectric medicine is. And then there's many, many, many forms of bioelectric medicine in terms of, again, whether we're delivering an electric current, whether that's a direct current or an alternating current, or a magnetic current, or using light to optogenetics when you use light. In a nutshell, that's bioelectric medicine.

Speaker 1: 3:34

So this bioelectric medicine, before we get into the details of what it looks like and the process someone would go through what types of ailments are you finding that you're treating with success?

Speaker 2: 3:48

Yeah, great question. So for the kind of bioelectric medicine that I do and many of us do those of us not on the allopathic side but on a bit more of the kind of, let's say, the traditional medicine approaches we really think more about vitalizing the system. Regenerative medicine how do we help the body be healthy Versus how do we combat disease. It's a shift in paradigm and Western medicine for the most part has focused solely on the fighting of disease and doesn't have, and though this is beginning to change within allopathic medicine, they're starting to acknowledge that maybe we should have a positivistic medicine, something where we address and treat health versus just fighting disease. But that's new. The very new idea like functional medicine is the beginning of that. But even most functional medicine doctors find themselves drawn into the allopathic paradigm where they're using diet, lifestyle and supplements to fight a disease, instead of using diet, lifestyle and supplements to add vitality to the system and help deliver more health. They're still fighting a disease. So it's a paradigmatic mindset, more than anything else.

Speaker 2: 5:15

I like to say it's kind of the difference between managing debt and managing wealth, and I think there's reason for both, and so I'm a fan of allopathic medicine and a more positivistic medicine. There's an emerging field called biological medicine, which is kind of growing within the Western paradigm but is something that looks more like what we might think of as Ayurvedic medicine or traditional Chinese medicine or homeopathy or things of this nature. So biological medicine is much more of a positivistic approach to health care. Naturopathic medicine is another good example of this idea. So I would say bioelectric medicine could be used in the anti-disease model, because that's a mindset. I use it more in the positivistic set. So I tend to talk more about how we revitalize rather than fight a disease.

Speaker 1: 6:11

But that's sad.

Speaker 2: 6:13

Happy to answer the question in the way that all of us think, because we think about our symptoms and what most people will say is I have back pain. I have, if we're talking about the brain I have anxiety, I have depression, I have mild cognitive decline, macular degeneration talk about the eye. So people tend to think in terms of their disease or their symptom and what they want is their symptom to go away. And then some people want their disease to go away, but we've all been trained to think that way and what we don't think about is the other side of it, which is what I'd like is more health.

Speaker 1: 6:54

So you're saying. My question perhaps should have been how can we revitalize ourselves, rather than what diseases. Does this help?

Speaker 2: 7:03

Right yeah, You'd like to frame the question. That way, I think, is the better fit, but we struggle with this. I struggle with this as a clinician, as an owner of a practice that needs to communicate to a market my market which is people who have symptoms, think of themselves as their symptom, and what they want is their symptom to go away. And so I find myself having to be in that same kind of trap of talking symptomatically, even though what I really do and what I want to talk about is about cultivating health. If we restore health, symptoms go away even if we address them.

Speaker 1: 7:48

So it's more about balancing your body for health and vitality rather than diving in and focusing on these symptoms. We'll label it this. These symptoms will label it. That it's like let's not worry about every diagnosis, but let's focus on re-energizing ourselves and coming into balance and perfect health.

Speaker 2: 8:09

Exactly Like in our brain health clinic. We get asked this question do you treat anxiety? Do you treat OCD? Do you treat depression? Do you treat autism? Do you treat ADHD? We get those questions all day long and I really do my best to try and stay in the frame that I'm sharing with you, which is I will say yes. But so the person says do you treat anxiety? Yes, but to us anxiety is just dysregulation in the nervous system. So what we do is resolve the dysregulation, the thing that is your symptom that you've labeled anxiety. That goes away. You feel like we treated your anxiety but all we did was regulate the dysregulation. And then we apply that across. Same thing with ADHD. Adhd is a dysregulation in the brain. So if we can regulate that dysregulation, the symptom ADHD goes away. Even if we never dealt with the thing that looks like ADHD, the behavior, we just regulate the dysregulation. So that's kind of how we've come to talk about it is. What do we do? We regulate dysregulation.

Speaker 1: 9:22

Well, I like that. It simplifies it and it also has you focusing on something positive rather than something heavy and negative, correct, and that, I'm sure, helps your health as well.

Speaker 2: 9:35

Absolutely. I 100% think if part of the problem with our health care is that we have a negative system, we talk in terms of disease and we measure health in terms of absence of disease. This is one of the interesting findings to me is a large survey done by a health care provider across many years, across many populations. Whenever he would be doing a medical lecture, he would survey the crowd and say how many of you have taken a course in health? And just repeatedly zero, zero, like talking to doctors, nurses how many of you have taken a course anywhere in your education on health? Can you give me a definition of health like write out your definition of health? Part of the survey and almost to the person, the definition of health is the absence of disease. Right, and again, that's a mindset that says health is the absence of something, not the presence of something. And if a person doesn't know what health is well, then you can't possibly orient towards it. Like there's no target for you to go at. Your only target is getting rid of the thing you don't want. You can't go after the thing you do want.

Speaker 2: 10:51

So I started off in pre-med and did not enjoy it. Switched over through just a series of coincidences and not intelligently, wisdom, informed choices, more like. I just don't go back to school, I'm going to go and run off and play for a year, but I ended up going into alternative medicine by accident, but what I found was it was everything that my medical education wasn't. We took classes about people and about health and wellness and restoration instead of pathophysiology and anatomy. Physiology was great, but it was all in the form of pathology. All we talked about was pathology, and on the other side, all they talked about was healing, and that resonated for me, and it gave me this side-by-side comparison of the two models, one that is chronically negative and one that is chronically positive, and, of course, what we need is both. We need a healthcare system that does both. Excellent, right.

Speaker 1: 11:54

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 11:55

So that's what we want to have. I just happened to fully own that I'm on the positivistic side and I'm glad that we have the other side, because when I need that kind of healthcare, I want to be able to go to my doctor, I want to go to the hospital, I want to get that kind of care.

Speaker 1: 12:11

Yeah, that's a good thing just to be aware of and conscious of, I guess, when you're talking about your health or symptoms, not sitting and dwelling in that, because that kind of holds you there as well. Now I'm trying to be very careful not mentioning all the things that people have that will draw them to this conversation. Go for it. Key words out there, I feel like, are the Parkinson's, the dementia, the macular degeneration, and I'm sure there's so many more, because all these things are when your body's out of balance, right. So when someone comes into your office because they have one of these I'll just call it a diagnosis what are you doing? Do you go straight to the bioelectric medicine? What all does that entail? And are you also doing anything else in conjunction with that?

Speaker 2: 13:05

Sure. So I have three different clinics that deal specifically with bioelectric medicine in brains and then I have some other clinics but we use bioelectric medicine but they're not 100% focused on that. So I have a Bredesen clinic where we do the Bredesen protocol and Dr Bredesen's program for the end of Alzheimer's and really taking on neurodegenerative conditions straight on, and he recently published a study showing that they had about an 85% efficacy rate in treating Alzheimer's, whereas regular allopathic medicine has about a 0% success rate in treating it. I don't want to say nothing, that's not true, but in producing reliable life changing outcomes they don't really have anything to offer. But if you look at the Bredesen protocol amazing. And so we have a Bredesen clinic and we see the same types of results that he is. We're implementing his protocol. His protocol is primarily diet, lifestyle supplements and then he adds some bioelectric medicine.

Speaker 2: 14:09

But the bioelectric medicine is a little bit like oh yeah, there's that, it's a bit of an add-on. So what I started then was cerebrofit, which is a clinic that is really primarily about bioelectric medicine. Do we do diet, lifestyle and supplements? Yes, but you're hard pressed to get me or my other clinicians to talk about that upfront, because we really frontload with the bioelectric medicine. And then the opposite is true in our Bredesen clinic, where we follow a bit more of the Bredesen model, where it's testing diet, lifestyle supplements, but then of course, because we have a full complement of bioelectric medicine, for us it's right up there on the same line as the diet and lifestyle and bioelectric medicine. What we found is on the Bredesen side, if people do the diet, lifestyle and supplements they do well. On the cerebrofit side, if people just do the bioelectric medicine, they do better.

Speaker 1: 15:12

Even without the Bredesen protocol.

Speaker 2: 15:14

Right, without them necessarily doing diet, lifestyle and supplements, but just taking them as they are, making no other changes, and just adding bioelectric medicine. That population does better than taking somebody who, again, these are just random people from the population coming in. So we're not selecting a population for one group or the other, so we basically have random groupings of people. They're self-selected into the two groups. But the people who come in and do diet, lifestyle and supplements on the Bredesen side, they also show improvement, just not as much improvement and not as quickly as those who do just bioelectric medicine. So that has showed me that the bioelectric medicine does a lot. It's important in the process. Now, of course, we want to get in both of our clinics. We want to get all of our patients doing all of the correct things. That's always the goal.

Speaker 2: 16:19

But people pick and choose what they're willing to do and that's based on resources. I think of it as resources. Time, money, energy and attention are primary resources and people have however much of that resource that they have and they're willing to invest however much of that resource in whatever the activity is. So even people with an abundance of money don't always spend that money on their healthcare Right. And I have people say this it's like, well, the infrared helmet, that's kind of expensive. I'm going to go with the nasal laser and make that my treatment choice. And you're like, okay, right, that's them allocating resources for their healthcare. And that doesn't simply fall along the line of just how much money a person has, because I have people who have very, very limited financial means, but they will invest whatever they have into their well-being.

Speaker 1: 17:19

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 17:20

People with an unlimited amount of money who aren't interested that much in investing in their well-being. So money isn't always a factor. And it's the same thing with lifestyle. We all have people who just won't change their lifestyle, no matter what. They're eating too much sugar, too much processed food. They may well know the science of it, but they're just not motivated to change. But they'll do the bioelectric medicine and it's like okay, that's what we can get you to do. You'll do 60% of the program Great. Somebody else they'll do 100% of the program Fantastic. Somebody else, they'll do 10% of the program.

Speaker 1: 17:58

Yeah, it's all very individualized, so why do you have two separate clinics? It seems like such a perfect combination to bring them together.

Speaker 2: 18:07

Sure. So a couple of things. One, the Bredesen Clinic is more of a brick and mortar because the way it's designed to function is a little bit more physician-centric Go in see the doctor you're testing, don go back at your results. So it's more defined by a brick and mortar clinic and serving a local population. And so Cerebro Fit came out of it, with me and my partner in the business, dr Jeff Grobot, talking to two veteran clinicians who've been he's been at it 26 years, I've been at it a little over 30 years and really just coveching about the clinic and the expense of the clinic and the challenges of staffing and all of that. And our old man complaining was like we need something simpler to do. And we had a virtual clinic where we didn't have to have a brick and mortar, we didn't have to do the expense of a brick and mortar, we didn't have to have a large staff in all the complexities of running a large facility. Wouldn't that be nice in terms of our quality of life and we could serve more people? And if we're using technology which is what Cerebro Fit is, it's 100% technology-driven we can offer better care than in the clinic at a fraction of the cost and less of a headache to he and I as the clinicians. Cerebro Fit came out of. How do we make our lives less stressful but at the same time make delivering healthcare better? So Cerebro Fit is really a virtual clinic. There's no brick and mortar.

Speaker 2: 19:38

I do Zoom calls with people, do the consult, take a history, come up with a treatment plan, talk them through the treatment plan. If they sign on, I send them a device or a suite of devices. We get on Zoom, I take them through how to use it, monitor them over time virtually, and they're doing their treatment at home, which means they can do it multiple times a day, every day, versus if it's in the clinic, they're doing it as often as they can make it to the clinic, usually in one hour increments. So that's inefficient Because at home it's much more efficient and better outcomes.

Speaker 2: 20:18

So why do I have two clinics? Is we want to take care of our local community in a kind of traditional healthcare facility way. But we also wanted to be able to take this to a much broader audience and bring the efficiency to people In the case of, say, dementia or Parkinson's and some degree macular degeneration. Those things all happen in a very similar population in terms of age. One of the things that it affects is their mobility, so that person having to come into the clinic is fairly onerous. If they can treat at home, that's just easier for them, for their family, less costly in terms of resources and, again, having treatment every day is better than having treatment once or twice or three times a week in the clinic, and so that's the model we've designed as a way to deliver clinic level treatment at home.

Speaker 1: 21:13

That's good that they have choice. That's there In your right, especially as you get elderly or if you were just incapacitated in any way. Whatever prohibits you from getting to the doctor's office very often that would be a very effective tool to have just be able to do it right in your own home.

Speaker 2: 21:30

Absolutely, and they do a lot of post-surgical work. So knee replacement, hip replacement, a couple of clients now that have had full hysterectomies, so anybody who's gone through a surgery. We can get them devices to start using before surgery. So we really try and optimize the vitality in their system before the surgery. They have the surgery we advise, we recommend start treating right after in the hospital. Now that can be tricky, some hospitals don't allow it, some do, so you've got to negotiate that. But then certainly as soon as you get home, start treating. What we find is our patients get off their pain meds sooner. They can go through a surgery in a day, two days, no pain meds, no pain.

Speaker 1: 22:18

So this device that people would get from you? The main purpose is it to regulate inflammation in the brain. Does it also help with the nervous system? You said mainly for brain type of injuries or, I guess, brain health in general.

Speaker 2: 22:38

Yeah. So maybe what I'll do is just quickly run down the devices that we have in our lineup and that'll give us some talking points. So we have a near-infrared helmet, so that's primarily for treating the brain. We have an audiovisual entrainment device, so that's also primarily for treating the brain, but also the autonomic nervous system. So there we go, from brain and body through the autonomic nervous system. We have a nasal and ear laser. So nasal laser is nasal passage. Eyes, brain, ear lasers are really auditory canal.

Speaker 2: 23:12

And then we have a red light mouth guard various light colors for mouth guards so we're able to treat the oral cavity. So let's say somebody who's going through chemo and you get oral mucositis. So we put light into the mouth to help regenerate the tissues and what it does is those people tend not to get oral mucositis, which, if you're going through chemo, it's just one less horrible experience to have in the midst of a horrible experience. We have our infrared light panels and then frequency-specific microcurrent. So those are our devices that allow us to deliver light into the body or brain, to do what's called entrainment and then to do microcurrent therapy as well. So those are kind of our modalities that we use. We don't do a whole lot with pulse magnetic. We have a device in the lineup but I rarely use it. I find light and current do better than pulse magnetic. But that's getting a little bit into the nitty-gritty of the details of how it works at a cellular level and the pros and cons and whatnot. But those are the devices we use.

Speaker 1: 24:20

Can I just ask real quick are those devices that you mentioned? Is that what every person would get? They get all those devices and use it for all different things. Or you say, oh, you have, say, cancer, so we'll give you this mouth guard, or they don't need all the components.

Speaker 2: 24:39

Correct Yep. So that's why, in the virtual consult, I'll go through their underlying health. What's going on? Is it an acute condition? Is it a chronic condition? Is it an acute condition riding on top of a chronic condition? Everybody is different in terms of how they have ended up in their current level of health or lack of health, right?

Speaker 2: 25:01

So, whatever it is, we just look at okay, you've got this, this device is good for that, you've got this, and we might come up with maybe four devices. And then it's a conversation about resources, energy, attention, time and money. It isn't a matter of just money. It can be like hey, that sounds like a lot. I don't think I have the energy and the mental capacity to get my head around all of that technology. So how about if we just did two? Could we start with two? Sure, here's what I think are probably going to be the most helpful two devices for you in this phase of your healing journey. Great.

Speaker 2: 25:39

So then I'll pack up those devices, ship them off, hop on a Zoom call, walk them through how to use them, give them their treatment plan, they start using them, and then we sell the devices. We also rent the devices, and so, for some people. If it's an acute condition, they might rent a device that they use for the first few weeks while they're in a certain phase of healing, then send that back and then I send them the next device, which is really for the next phase of their healing, and then they may rent or buy that, depending. There's reasons for all of it, and so it's very customized to the individual person to get them. I don't want to just say what they need, because that sounds as if it's objectively true what they need. To me, the best treatment plan is the treatment plan that the client will do.

Speaker 1: 26:28

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 26:30

And so that's why it's kind of a negotiation around their resources, and we allow that to change over time, and so some people will layer in the devices, one at a time, building towards having four devices, but that might take us six months or a year to get them there. Great, that's what we do Versus the other person who just says no, send them all, and they scale up and in the first Zoom call they got them all on and they're using them, and they do that every day, fantastic.

Speaker 1: 26:57

Yeah, well, that's good. You have all those different options and it's really tailored to each person and, like you said, to what they will actually do. That's important. So, as far as what this looks like, do you have one with you right there?

Speaker 2: 27:11

Yeah, you know what? I usually keep a number of the devices handy, but I think between my wife and I we wandered off with a few of them, because we do these every day here at home. I do my infrared helmet every morning and my wife does her audiovisual entrainment. So here's one. So this is the nasal laser. So that's literally like two lasers that I just put in my nose and then I turn that on and you can see.

Speaker 1: 27:36

Oh, it turns your whole nose red, or you see the light. So it's two things that go right in your nostrils and then there's a red light glowing all around his nose. So that is not something you would go out on public with. I will just tell people right now.

Speaker 2: 27:50

Yeah, I mean you know since you are both my wife and I, and we have a few clients now who do the same is you know you're always looking for time when you can do this? Yeah, and I do a fair amount of the easy treatments, like the nasal laser in the car. So it is not unusual to be driving down the road and have the person look at me and be like what, the what? Because I got my nasal laser in and my nose is glowing, or I'll have my mouth garden and my mouth is glowing red, so now I'm going to pop in the ear lasers.

Speaker 1: 28:23

Okay, it looks like a regular headset.

Speaker 2: 28:26

They're just yep earbuds Okay.

Speaker 1: 28:28

Yeah, and they just glow red. The buds glow red.

Speaker 2: 28:31

Yeah, so now I've got my ear lasers and my nasal laser in and I could just tuck this in a pocket and go about doing the dishes, or you could walk around with the earbuds.

Speaker 1: 28:41

Yep, this one is easy enough.

Speaker 2: 28:43

And then I'll grab my next one here, and so this one, this is the mouth guard, and this one you just pop into, say, a smartphone, like I'm just plugging that into my iPhone, and then oh so it's like a teeth whitener.

Speaker 1: 28:57

I mean it glows white. Put it in your mouth. It looks like a retainer type of thing. Mouth guard, yeah. Exactly Okay, the mouth guard yeah.

Speaker 2: 29:07

I find them comfortable and even soothing. It's probably one of the top reports we get back. Probably the device we get the most positive feedback from our clients is the mouth guard. It's the least technical of all of our devices, but people love them. One of the reports is people say they find it very soothing. It calms their anxiety, which is a quality of what Red Light does. It's quite comfortable and quite soothing. This is the visual entrainment.

Speaker 1: 29:34

It just looks like a cool pair of sunglasses.

Speaker 2: 29:37

Cool pair of sunglasses, exactly In this case, ones that you can't see through. Then another pair of not so cool glasses, but you can see through them.

Speaker 1: 29:46

Looks like what Batman and Robin will wear.

Speaker 2: 29:49

Yes, it's a good way to put it. That's the photo entrainment. Those have lights in them that flash and that stimulates the optic nerve. A lot of our brain is dedicated to visual processing. You stimulate the optic nerve, which goes from the eyes, passes through the center of the brain, the optic chiasm around the thalamus, and into the occiput. When you do entrainment you're stimulating a nerve, in this case the optic nerve. That's getting the neurons and the occiput to fire the visual centers. The process of entrainment is when a group of neurons start firing, their neighbors will tend to start firing with them. That's called entrainment, because the visual system is a lot of cortical real estate. You get a lot of cortical real estate pulsing at, let's say, 10 hertz. The other neurons around start pulsing at 10 hertz. This allows us to speak the language of the brain and to shift neuronal activity or drive activity in the way that we want.

Speaker 2: 30:56

Let's say, for example, people have a form of anxiety where they have ruminating thoughts. Their mind gets stuck in a track and maybe it's just negative self-talk. We have protocols that will drive the hemispheres differently. We can slow down the left frontal lobe and speed up the right frontal lobe, which switches this pattern of anxiety, ruminating thought pattern and just break the brain out of that. For people who have that form of anxiety, they can find immediate relief with this. It takes about three minutes for the brain to start responding to this input and then continues over time for a more robust response. When we do neuroimaging we can see the brain is responding within about three minutes of putting the device on. And so when people come into the clinic in our mental health department and they could be in a full-on panic attack and we'll put the audiovisual entrainment device on them and within minutes they're starting to settle and maybe in 30 minutes they're able to sit and have a conversation with the therapist, versus just being in a full-on panic attack that leaves them basically disabled.

Speaker 2: 32:10

So the devices are effective in acute care, although we use them more again for long-term generation of regulation and health and being kind of a counterforce to these negative forces of degenerative condition, something like dementia. In the case of dementia, my ideal setup would be for my dementia clients. They would have the infrared helmet, they'd have the audiovisual entrainment device, they'd have the nasal laser and they would do all three of those devices at one time. 30 minutes twice a day. That's my kind of gold star treatment plan for my dementia folks, my Parkinson's folks. Dystonia is to do that. So two 30-minute treatments a day, which is not that much considering the nature of the condition, and we see amazing results.

Speaker 1: 33:03

What are some of the results you've seen, say with Parkinson's?

Speaker 2: 33:06

Sure. So one of the things that we've been able to affect most reliably, most predictably, is tremor. There are other aspects of the condition that we can treat as well, but one of the earliest symptoms and one of the most distressing symptoms is the tremor, and so often that's when we will get a call, is somebody's at that point? And we're often able to regulate the system to a point where the tremor is essentially gone. And I've taken people with just kind of relatively small, maybe a single hand, single leg tremor, to people with essentially whole body but mostly this shows up in the appendages but who are basically bedridden with tremor, and be able to get them back to a point where they're able to get up, get dressed, move around the house, go about the activity, daily living. And we've accomplished that primarily just with audiovisual entrainment. We can use the helmet as well, but I find we get the best tremor regulation with the audiovisual entrainment.

Speaker 2: 34:07

But of course there's a whole disease process and I really prefer to do treatments that are about the whole process and not just a symptom, but to say we've had an effect in extreme cases. And again, what it returns to the person is quality of life and in many of these cases often it's the spouse who is the caretaker, and so when their partner is able to kind of take care of themselves, get up, get dressed, feed themselves, that takes the pressure off of the spouse, who's then able to also get back a quality of life. And so there isn't just the treatment of the disease or the symptom, there's restoration of function, which adds to quality of life. But that extends beyond that individual person. It often extends to the environment, the family, and even if it's not family, even if it's a caretaker, we find that our clients that use the equipment and they get a restoration of function, their care team also gets a relief of a burden of stress and they're happier and the whole environment becomes kind of happier, more well-regulated.

Speaker 1: 35:16

Yeah, and that, what about tremors people have? It's called something else. It's not Parkinson's, but maybe.

Speaker 2: 35:22

There's like a central tremor as one and there are non-Parkinsonian tremors.

Speaker 1: 35:28

Does that help with that as well?

Speaker 2: 35:31

It can, and so, when possible, I like to know what is the diagnosis, what's our best sense of, where is this dysregulation in the system, so that I can identify the proper tool that best delivers a regulating treatment to that part of the system. Sometimes with tremor, it's more brainstem based, and so we end up doing something like heart rate variability breathing to regulate the brainstem and that has an effect on the tremor. So part of it is knowing that and the other part of it is doing a broader treatment. So we might say, okay, we have our best luck with audiovisual entrainment for tremor, but in this one person's case, maybe they have an idiopathic tremor, we don't know the cause. So we might say, well, here's what I want you to do. I want you to do audiovisual entrainment and we're going to add in the heart rate variability breathing and you'll just do both at the same time.

Speaker 1: 36:31

So the devices also include. You said the helmet. Do you have that? I do so. Now we're looking at the helmet. Oh, so that looks like a bike helmet.

Speaker 2: 36:42

It is a bike helmet with the internal mesh removed and in the place of what would it be the protective mesh of a bike helmet? It has near infrared LED lights in the electronics. But yeah, it's basically a bike helmet and so if somebody was to go to our website, so cerebralfitcom, they would see on our front page. They would be there with the whole thing on. We do like to just put it right up front and, yep, you're going to look ridiculous, that'll into it. Let's laugh about it. I have a lot of fun with families when I get them doing this and they get, you know, mom or dad, all loaded up with all the devices, and then I'd either have the earbuds in for the laser or I would have the earbuds in for the audiovisual entrainment because we might have sound in the ears, or we might have a laser in the ears, depending on which is needed for the finer points of their treatment plan.

Speaker 1: 37:39

All right and you could sit in a chair and with those glasses with the see-through part, you could watch TV or something like that Exactly. Well, it's great to see it all put on and see what this actually looks like. I would say the biggest thing if it was me looking at it might be awkward would be the nasal one, just because you're not used to having something stuck up your nose. But the other is just like a headset, a bike helmet and some sunglasses. So it's not bad, so it's comfortable enough when you have everything going at once.

Speaker 2: 38:09

Absolutely. Yeah. I would say the biggest challenge for people when this arrives in the mail and they open it up, that there is a sense of overwhelm of, oh my goodness, this is a lot of technology, you got a lot of cords and wires and there's that. But I would say by the end of our first Zoom when I take them through, here's how you put this together, and everything comes with instructions. I have how-to videos online that walk people through putting it together, every button push that they have to do to program it. So we give them all of the resources.

Speaker 2: 38:42

But still people like to be walked through it, especially like clients that are more on the dementia park inside, because they tend to be 60 to 90 years old and technology isn't necessarily their friend. That varies, but in general. And so walking them through how to use it, getting it set up them, having a written out treatment plan I anticipate the first two weeks is going to be a lot of texts hey guy, how do I turn on the nasal laser again? How do I know if the helmet is on? So the helmet is near and for red light which you can't see, and so people will be like it's not working.

Speaker 2: 39:21

Now see that little light there. That's the indicator light saying it's working. But all those other lights are invisible so you can't see them. So there's a lot of that. But by the time they get to the third week and by the next month and six months and a year, all of that is water under the bridge. And it's no different than the day you got the new TV and you didn't know how to work the remote, because the power button's in a different place or the volume button is on the side instead of where it was on the old remote and yeah, well, I would say the TV is harder than what you show.

Speaker 2: 39:53

Yes, yes, exactly.

Speaker 1: 39:55

But if you can handle your TV, you'll be all right.

Speaker 2: 39:58

Yeah, yep, and then once people get through that first couple of weeks, we'll have another zoom and I take them the next level. We're going to shift this protocol, we're going to add this in Okay, we've made a little nuanced shift, but they can handle it because the technology's old hat at this point and all of that is tailoring the treatment plan more specifically to that person and what they're needing. What's changing, what's not changing? And probably my longest time with folks on this equipment is two years. So those folks, two years out, are doing great. Oh, my goodness, what they've regained in terms of function and quality of life. And, like one of my ladies, she really wasn't doing anything. She was basically homebound in a chair all day or bed at night, like that was it. That was her life. She's driving, golfing, going to the grandkids, hockey games.

Speaker 1: 40:53

That's great. And what was her diagnosis? Even though we're not supposed to talk about it, what is?

Speaker 2: 40:58

it. She was diagnosed with dementia and was getting good allopathic care. She had a very attentive doctor. She has a super attentive husband who was leaving no stone unturned. So she was getting good quality standard of care and that was where she was.

Speaker 2: 41:17

And I would say within a month of starting with bioletric medicine that started to change. It started with her getting out of bed and coming down for breakfast. Well, that hadn't happened in years. Then it was her coming down and making breakfast. That had happened even longer. And then, like she used to do the cooking and the cleaning a very traditional household Her husband had been doing that for years she just started picking up where she left off and by six months she was probably for the most part back to just living.

Speaker 2: 41:54

There would still be more capacity to come in the next six months but by that point again she was up in the morning doing all of her routines. Her husband could go back to the office and work and she could be at home on her own without anxiety, without any there being any problems, and eventually they got to a point where they could leave the house, they could go out, she could start driving again. I remember the night I got a text from him saying you know, my wife and I just went on a date for the first time in five years. It was so sweet, I mean it literally started to cry.

Speaker 1: 42:30

Yeah, that's incredible, incredible result.

Speaker 2: 42:33

Yeah, and it's not like she's a one-off. I just have a new lady probably 83 in that range who just started care about a month ago and we just did a check-in with the family and they can't believe how much better she is in a month. They're just like this is impossible.

Speaker 1: 42:52

What have they?

Speaker 2: 42:53

noticed. So a couple of things. So her cognitive function was dropping, so short-term memory, a lot of bouts of confusion, so just kind of the standard things. But what comes along with this is usually anxiety and depression. Because the world becomes a scarier place, people retreat from the world and then, because there's a social awkwardness to it, person can become aware that that's the case, they withdraw from relationship and then they suffer the consequences that happen when they're not being active, they're not being engaged, they're not being social. There isn't just a loss of function, there's a loss of human contact and joy and connection. That comes with it and that brings the anxiety and depression.

Speaker 2: 43:38

So one of the first things that they noticed was her kind of coming out of her shell, from being withdrawn within the family and not really wanting to do anything. And it was just that, just her moving back into relationship and saying yes when she'd been saying no before, and so that was the first kind of progression of it. They were just saying how the whole family and then some friends of the family went on a bike ride and that mom was willing to leave the house and willing to get on a bike, and then again that was social. So she was great. She saw friends and now she's been willing to have friends come over to the house for visits, which she hadn't been willing to do. And they're noticing also her short-term memory is getting better and so some cognitive changes, but a lot of it. Right now they're just noticing just behavior changes and then the social piece.

Speaker 1: 44:29

Yeah, and that's only a month in, that's great yeah. So people, no matter what the sort of diagnosis is, they are doing this 30 minutes twice a day In general. Is that kind of a typical protocol?

Speaker 2: 44:41

That's my ask. And then we're back to people or people. People will buy a treadmill. I'm one of these people. Don't tell me.

Speaker 1: 44:51

A lot of people are that person with the treadmill.

Speaker 2: 44:56

I haven't been on the thing in three years. Right there, I stare at it every day and I don't get on it, but I do walk the dogs. So that's my own kind of negotiation is, I didn't get on the treadmill but I walk the dogs twice, so I'm good, but we all do that. It's like I know I'm supposed to go to the gym three days a week but I don't always make it three days a week and sometimes I don't make it to the gym for a month and I know that I'm supposed to eat three healthy meals a day but sometimes I get in two healthy meals and one bad one. So people are the same with these devices, but my recommendation in my neurodegenerative clients is that 30 minutes twice a day. Now could they do more?

Speaker 1: 45:37

Yes, but it doesn't harm to do it more. Or it doesn't harm to do it if you don't have, say, dementia, you just want to revitalize yourself. Someone can use it.

Speaker 2: 45:49

Yeah, yep, I call it the toothbrush for the brain. We should brush our teeth twice a day for as long as we want to have teeth and then, when we're done with their teeth, stop brushing them. Is same thing with your brain. You should brush your brain twice a day for as long as you want to have a brain. When you're done with it, stop brushing it. All of this is really peak performance. Yeah, so from the research, you can take a peak performer, an executive, an athlete, a surgeon who is top of their game and put them on these devices and they will improve, because what we're doing is we're enhancing the system, we're giving it more resources and when the body has more resources, it utilizes them in maintenance and regeneration. It's good for peak performers. It's good for people who are struggling with disease.

Speaker 1: 46:38

Is there maybe one more story you have of someone that's been helped with something different? Sure, you talked about it one-point macular degeneration.

Speaker 2: 46:48

Yeah. So I was going to tell you a story of one of my near and dear clients diagnosed with cancer. I had full hysterectomy, went through chemo, came out the other side of chemo had a stroke. It's a very common unfortunate arc that happens chemo induced stroke, it's not yeah? So I'll tell that story while we're here, and then the macular degeneration story, because those stories are wonderful as well. So this particular client we started her off with microcurrent pre-surgery and then she had surgery and then she used the microcurrent post-surgery for wound healing. They wanted to do it orthoscopically but they could not in the end because she had adhesions and so they had to open up, take it out, and so we used the microcurrent for healing of that. One of the biggest post-surgical complications is adhesions, and if we can prevent or minimize the formation of adhesions, we are problem solving for the future.

Speaker 1: 47:47

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 47:48

But we use that. It also speeds wound healing. It minimizes scar tissue overgrowth. It makes for better scars Scars are what we call like. Electrically they're noise producers. They put noise into the sympathetic nervous system and so if we repolarize a scar we stop it from being a noise generator and that just helps that person's nervous system settle and be at more ease, versus a scar that is constantly yelling at the sympathetic nervous system because electrically it is depolarized and that interrupts the electrical flow in the body. So there's a lot of reasons why we do so. We did that. We also had her on red light, which again speeds healing. It's great for reducing pain. So she was another person who needed almost no pain medication post-surgery, even for surgery of that significance. And then the next thing was she was going to go on chemo. So there again it was staying on microcurrent and then we added in the red mouth guard for the oral mucositis. So she went through her full chemo, had no oral mucositis, which was great.

Speaker 2: 48:56

Then, maybe four months into her recovery, six months into her recovery, she had a stroke and fortunately it was a fairly minor one. I saw her six weeks post-stroke and three weeks into her PTOT for recovery. So when I saw her, she couldn't form a sentence. She could really just do filler words, like maybe get a word out, and then she just couldn't speak a sentence. So what we should do here is the infrared helmet. That's going to be our number one post-stroke remedies infrared light, great. So we get her started.

Speaker 2: 49:38

Two weeks later she could mostly speak in single sentences. So that was a huge leap from can't form a sentence to she could formulate kind of single sentences. And then I saw her the next week and she was speaking fluently. Yeah, it was really amazing and she had no doubt and she would tell you to this day that that was the helmet, because she could feel herself getting better every day.

Speaker 2: 50:06

And then what we realized once she could speak is how much of her short-term memory she had lost. So then the next thing we worked on was her short-term memory, and there again, that took us maybe two, three weeks and we got her to a point where she wasn't doing what she had been doing, which was she would just loop through stories. In a 10-minute conversation you might hear the same story or comment three times. And then we got her to a place where you can have an hour-long conversation and it's coherent, like you're not talking to somebody who's recovered from a stroke and has this. She's just more of herself and this is somebody I've known for 30 years, so I know her well and she is almost back to herself.

Speaker 1: 50:49

Well, that's amazing. So for something like cancer, when you go through the chemo and then you come out of it, do you use these things long-term, or is there a stopping point where she's regained her health and things look good and so she doesn't need to keep using those tools?

Speaker 2: 51:06

Yeah. So from her standpoint, from stroke recovery, she's feeling like she has recovered from the stroke and so we talked about it. It's like, okay, are you ready to return the helmet? We could just call it a rental. And there you go and she's like you know, I'm pretty sure I can tell, because once she kind of recovered from the acute phase, her usage would wax and wane, as we all do.

Speaker 2: 51:29

And I said, when I don't use it for a few days, I notice I'm not quite as sharp, and then I start using it and then I get that little boost back. So I think I want to keep it, but I don't think I'm treating my stroke anymore. I think I'm just treating my brain. Yeah, and I agree with her because that's what we see, that's what the research shows us. But it's also my experience when I'm using my helmet daily. I get used to that level of functioning. Then I get off and then I start to notice like I'm not functioning quite as well and then I was like, oh, my helmet, I'll dig up my helmet, start using it, and then that little extra bit of performance enhancing comes back and I find that value. Yeah, like my life is better if I'm operating that three to five percent better.

Speaker 1: 52:21

So before we get into where people can find you, I did want to touch on the macular degeneration.

Speaker 2: 52:28

Macular degeneration. Thank you. How can I buy sight? Yeah, thank you for that. So a couple of things about macular degeneration. I'll say this as quick as I can.

Speaker 2: 52:35

Many years ago I bought an existing eye health practice from a local acupuncturist who had been doing. It's called AcuNova. It's a form of acupuncture for degenerative eye conditions, and so he was running the program in a very, very traditional AcuNova way, which was primarily just acupuncture. When I brought it into my clinic, we continued with the acupuncture part. We added in herbs I'm a big fan of herbs Then we started to add in the bioelectric medicine. So at first it was microcurrent and then, as we evolved, then it was also light and our program became. It was a very robust program acupuncture, herbs, microcurrent and light and we were having fantastic success People coming in with significant vision loss and getting back to essentially 2020. We even had people who had so much reversal that they would no longer qualify as a diagnosis of macular degeneration. There was no visible sign of the disease. Now, those were the more rare people, but still our mantra is slow, stop, reverse, and we never know in anybody's case. Will we slow the progression of the disease? Will we stop at where it is, or will we be able to reverse it and recover? And more often than not we get some amount of reversal.

Speaker 2: 53:57

One of my favorite stories is a lady. She'd had it for about 40 years. By the time she came to us she was not coming for treatment for macular degeneration because in her mind it was untreatable. Because that's what everybody thinks, because that's what every doctor tells the patient is it's untreatable. Yeah, she was in for treatment related to pain condition but said, hey, we could also treat your eyes for your macular degeneration. She was like, sure, since I'm here, why not? So in her case, the biggest change for her was her color vision came back. She'd not been able to pick out her own clothing for 20 years, and so her daughters would mark her clothes black, maybe blue.

Speaker 1: 54:38

She was colorblind.

Speaker 2: 54:40

She was colorblind, yeah, so she would rely on the tags on her clothes to coordinate an outfit when she get dressed in the morning. Well, one morning she went to her closet and she could tell the difference between black and navy blue, and she was ecstatic that for the first time in 20 years, she could just pick out her clothes on her. That's awesome, yeah, and it turns out for her. We were able to improve her vision by one diopter, which was enough for her to get her driver's license back, and so then she was able to start driving.

Speaker 1: 55:13

That's a huge life change. If you can, yeah, get your license back.

Speaker 2: 55:17

So that was again. We weren't able to fully reverse her condition, but we were able to push it back significantly and maintain her there over years, again in a condition that's supposed to be untreatable. That is supposed to be impossible, but it's not. We see that on a regular basis in the clinic, and so I have many, many stories of people who have had some or complete restoration of their vision. One of my happiest stories is a lady.

Speaker 2: 55:45

She's our longest eye health patient, so we treated her originally about 17 years ago. When she came in. She was not technically blind, but she was functionally blind. There were so many compromises with her eyes. She couldn't see effectively enough to drive, to read, to watch TV, even to do a puzzle, and so we treated her for about six months, so daily for six months. All the way along from about month three to month six Her vision was returning, like she only had six months of treatment. 17 years later her vision is as good as it was 17 years ago when we did the treatment, and so it stayed. But it was all about giving that part of her physiology like revitalizing it, giving those cells and tissues back the energetic capacity to function as they were naturally intended to.

Speaker 1: 56:41

Yeah, a lot of fantastic outcomes, and I'm sure there are so many different illnesses or diagnoses that you have treated successfully. So for people that want to learn more about this or possibly schedule a consultation or look into ordering these products, where could they go?

Speaker 2: 56:59

Sure. So our website is cerebralfitcom, so cerebralfitcom, so cerebralfitcom. That's where they'll find my direct email, my direct phone number. There's a booking button to be able to book. We have a free 15 minute console. People can call. We'll talk about whether or not they're a good candidate for our program. All of that is available. All of our products are available with information about them. There's a lot of research. I really believe in putting the research out and letting people become informed consumers. One of the biggest things that I get is people will say well, there isn't any research, and that couldn't be further from the truth.

Speaker 1: 57:42

So they'll find that research on your website there, yep.

Speaker 2: 57:45

We have many pages dedicated to different conditions or different technologies. We kind of do it both on a condition basis and the technology Somebody wants to learn about photo biomodulation or light therapy. There's a whole page that is just the best of the best research Harvard, mit, princeton, tufts, durham just the best of the best from around the world presenting the research on this. And that's what people don't understand is there's decades of research showing the efficacy and safety. In hundreds of thousands of trials there's been no adverse effect Not a single adverse effect.

Speaker 1: 58:26

How long has this been now your specific product? Yeah, our devices.

Speaker 2: 58:30

So the audiovisual entrainment device has actually been around for probably close to 40 years and has hardly changed in 40 years. It's not our product, we use a third-party product, but it's best in class. That's why we use it. We're not obligated to use this, but across the market of audiovisual entrainment devices, this one just outperforms every other one. But it has this great history 40 years history, safe, effective, love it. The infrared helmet although infrared light therapy has been around forever, this particular helmet and manufacturer is probably something like five years that it's been on the market. We keep iterating so we're making more functional, more features. In terms of the technology, the nasal laser is ours. This is manufactured to our specs, so it hasn't been around that long. But nasal lasers themselves, as a consumer product that you could just go and buy, I would say at best 10 years, maybe a little bit closer to five, that it's been around. So it's fairly new delivery of an old therapy.

Speaker 2: 59:34

Light therapy has been around as long as there's been a sun, so that's a while, and all of us evolved in the sun. Our bodies are adapted to use light to drive our metabolism. Like we think about vitamin D, people say, oh, you got to get sun. For vitamin D, there's about 1,400 chemical constituents that we produce because of sunlight, and so sunlight is essential, and the biggest component of sunlight that does this is red and near-infrared light. So all we're doing is taking out a little spectrum of the sun and delivering that to the body without the harmful blue and infrared and the ones that too much exposure would do harm. We're just giving the healthy ones.

Speaker 2: 1:00:20

So although our device is new, what it's delivering is ancient.

Speaker 1: 1:00:25

Well, that's incredible. Thank you so much for your time today and going through all this, and I love seeing the visual of the products. Hopefully people understood from the description a little bit, but they can always go to the website and learn more and see more. Thank you for this really interesting, exciting conversation and technology that can help so many people.

Speaker 2: 1:00:48

Well, thank you, marla. One other little piece of people really want to dig in. I should have said this sooner Michael Levin at Tufts University. Go to YouTube, type in Michael Levin, bioelectricity, and you'll find a whole bunch of his talks. Look for the newer talks. He is the leader in the field of what's happening in bioelectric medicine and regenerative medicine. Go and watch one of his talks. It will blow your mind. What he's doing. It doesn't seem possible. It seems like science fiction. Only he's doing it. He's actually doing it, not once, but thousands of times. What he's doing in the world of biology is mind blowing. So Michael Levin, tufts University, bioelectric Medicine absolutely worth a watch.