49: Peter Kan : Neurometabolic Integration

Welcome to Your Health Reset, where we address the real root causes behind health issues today to get you rapid results on your health journey so you can be who you came here to be, mind, body, and spirit. I'm your host, Sinclair Keneally. survivor of complex chronic illness, expert on resolving root causes, and co-founder of Detox Rejuvenation and MeditationRx. Let's get started.

Welcome back. We are continuing our conversation on root causes and the rapid results we get when we actually finally address them. I'm your host, Sinclair Keneally, and today I'm joined by the wonderful Dr. Peter Kahn. who has such an illustrious name in this space. His contribution has just been, he's an expert on the gut-brain axis.

And he also helps folks manage chronic conditions using a comprehensive approach by bridging the exciting advances of functional neurology and functional medicine. What I love about Dr. Kahn is that he has... a really lovely appreciation of Eastern wisdom and Western advances in natural health care. And he is always looking at the picture of chronic health or chronic illness and the road back to health in a super holistic, very systemic way.

Welcome, Dr. Klein. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Wonderful. So I would just love to jump right in because you are so good at unpacking the gut-brain axis. What does this mean for individuals today who might be struggling with their health? Can you help walk us through that?

Absolutely. Actually, I think there's no shortage of information out there in the past decade about the brain-gut axis or the gut-brain axis. People are very aware now in the general public and also in the scientific community of how the brain and the gut impact each other. And the attention I want to bring to it is that I actually coined the term brain immune gut access, B-I-G. I call it the big idea in functional medicine.

And the reason I want to point that out is not because I invented something new. This is all in the literature, by the way. But I think oftentimes people think brain gut, a little microbiome. I take some probiotic, fermented food is going to heal my brain. it's more complicated than that, right? And I think oftentimes the immune system piece is left out of that conversation.

So it shouldn't be said the brain gut axis, it should be said the brain immune gut axis. So I call it the big ass axis or the big idea because when people have chronic health issues, typically this brain-immune gut axis has become dysfunctional. And the way that I see this brain-immune gut axis is that it's actually a three-way triangle. It's not an axis where it's up and down.

like HPA axis, but it's actually a three-way triangle where it's like a domino effect. When one system fails, either the brain, the immune, or the gut, the other system fails with it. It gets dragged down with it. So then people will start to get this manifestation of symptoms in a different area. They get neurological symptoms like brain fog, depression, anxiety, can't focus, can't concentrate, memory issues. They also get immune system problems. They feel inflamed.

They have a chronic infection that they can't clear. And they have like multiple sensitivity to environmental things like chemicals or food. And then they also have digestive issues. They get gas, bloating, reflux, heartburn, bowel movement, trouble, SIBO. gut despises, you name it. So they have this brain immune gut symptoms and they think they got like 20 things wrong with them when they really just have this brain immune gut access issue. So...

What we want to do is we want to bring attention to it so that people are not chasing 50 things and taking 100 supplements, but actually focus on what's the most important things first. That way, they'll get, as you say, rapid results. Yeah, I think that's really well said. We always say to people that the causes of dysregulated health, the causes of chronic illness are few. It's just the expressions of distress that are myriad. So it looks like...

Oh, I'm the only one that has this thing, weird puzzle, but I'm so different from this person over there. But actually, if you trace, if you go far enough back upstream, you actually handle the root causes of dysregulation. There's only a few common themes, right? There's definitely common themes for sure. And then within that common theme, there's individual variability. And so as practitioners and even as individual patients, it's for them to understand the common themes.

And then use that and see how that applies to them and find their own uniqueness in the situation because we can't cookie cutter this stuff. Oh, absolutely. But it's so much easier to understand what went wrong with you if you start actually researching. Absolutely, yeah.

So what in your mind are the top things that actually throw off balance in this brain immune gut axis? Yeah. So the way I go about the brain immune gut axis is not, oh, start with the brain.

Or some people would say start with the gut because it's all disease beginning in the gut. Many disease begin in the gut, but there's also many things that starts in the brain. And there's also other things that starts with immune system imbalance and things like the way that I actually go about it is actually.

using a roadmap, like a guiding principle. And this roadmap is something that I developed. It's not okay, this roadmap, if you don't do it this way, you're doing the wrong. It's just my version of how to approach a problem so we can... We remove the complexity and try to simplify things and have a starting point and know what to do first, second, and third. I think a lot of people, especially individual persons who have chronic illness, they tend to go to online summits.

or go to Google and they collect information and then everything starts to sound good. You get medical doctor disease, medical student disease, where you think you have the very things that you're reading. And then so then you think you, and then people feel empowered by that at the same time, which is good. So then they're taking a supplement because it's recommended if you have the XYZ problem, take XYZ supplement. So this is how it becomes like.

they're not really addressing what's really unique to them. They're just addressing what Google said or somebody else have that similar problem, but not necessarily their problem. So the way I use a roadmap is to address clinically the most important targets. So for me, the roadmap is this building blocks. So the first step to healing brain and gut issue is actually addressing fuel delivery issues. Because if you can't deliver fuel, you can't make energy, you can't produce ATP.

then nothing else is going to work. You can try to detox. We can argue that, hey, detox is causing you to be fatigued and not able to make energy. True. But either way though, you still need to get energy level up. so that you can actually have the wherewithal to carry out detox. Because detoxification and healing and fighting an infection, they're all very energy-intensive processes. So if you don't have energy production or you don't have fuel...

then you're going to have a hard time doing the things that you're trying to do. So then the detox or whatever you do may not be effective or you get detox reaction. You feel like crap. We're going through that when you don't have to. If you have set up yourself.

to have success in that. So I consider field delivery to be like one of the first things that I look at clinically. And that doesn't mean every single person have field delivery issue, but it's pretty common. And if we miss it, one of my teachers... taught me that, hey, don't make bonehead mistakes. Try to do something fancy like detox and you miss someone with an anemia. You miss someone with dysglycemia. Like you don't fix that.

But yeah, you're doing like hormone replacement adult, all the stuff. That's, he called it a bonehead mistake because we're missing like the most important thing for that person.

That's such a great point. Even in functional medicine, we see a lot of people with the best of intentions working on a lot of way downstream effects, tinkering with hormones without looking at upstream. actually become dysregulated and what needs to be tended to there. I totally agree with you. We also start with really assessing mitochondrial support and making sure there's proper energy system because you have to have energy to heal.

Why does everybody else skip this step? And when it comes to mitochondria, of course, mitochondria is really poor in every single cell. It has mitochondria and certain cells have way more mitochondria than others. My big focus is brain as a functional neurologist. And there's many manifestations of brain issues like brain fog and fatigue and memory issue. So people will be tempted to, oh, I have memory issues. So I got to take acetylcholine before. I got to take...

Alpha GPC to get, and that's all good if it works. But many times people take Alpha GPC and it doesn't improve their memory. And the reason for that may be because they have underlying just neuronal instability. So just remember brain cells. So let's focus on the brain and you got actually the brain portion of it. Well, you'd have proper brain function. Neurons require two, really three main things to survive. It requires fuel.

And fuel for neurons comes in the form of glucose and oxygen, right? They're super sensitive to glucose fluctuations and oxygen fluctuations. If you don't have glucose and oxygen, your brain cells will start to become unstable. The first step to brain cell death is actually transneurodegeneration. Transneurodegeneration is like a TIA, but not exactly. It's like transient.

Like brain cells becoming like, oh, it's not doing so well. It becomes unstable. When brain cells are unstable, they start to fire spontaneously. So you get unstable neuron function. So then you might get excitation. followed by just the neuron trapping out. So you get unstable brain function. This may show up in someone with brain endurance issue or it may get sensitive to different stimuli like sound, light, various different things.

So when you get these type of brain issues, your brain starts to lose function. And usually the first thing you look at is, do you have enough fuel, oxygen, glucose? And then we look at activation. Activation means your brain cells have to be activated. right? The brain cells keep itself alive by firing synaptically. If your brain cells are not firing synaptically, they actually go through transnodal degeneration and then they degenerate, they die.

So we have to look at, okay, do you have any type of problem within the brain where you have trouble with firing your neurons? So how will we know that? symptom-wise, okay, for practitioners, there may be other things that we can do through exams and through things that we can assess. But from a patient's perspective, if you have brain symptoms, you have trouble with brain firing, like things like brain fog.

is a classic symptom of decreased frequency of fire of a neuron. So your brain cells fire and they have a certain frequency of firing. Like in EEGs, we know that there's alpha waves, delta wave, beta wave. These are just... frequency of the neurons firing electrical activity. So if that frequency of firing slows down, it's equivalent to like the car's RPM slowing down.

So then your brain's not firing on all cylinders. It's slower. So you get slower processing speed. This is what people interpret as brain fog. So that already is a sign of a decreased frequency of firing, which indicates that your frontal lobe, your cortex is not firing. very well. Now, this could be due to fuel delivery problem. As I say, blood sugar, oxygen issue. It could be due to inflammatory issues. You could have an infection, whatever process that driving that.

But nevertheless, you have to recognize a brain symptom for what it is. You have some type of process within the brain. And the first thing we do is we rule out fuel delivery issues. So we look at oxygenation. This can come in and form a low blood pressure.

This can come in the form of poor circulation, cold hands, cold feet, cold nose, cold everywhere, poor circulation. This can come in the form of anemia. There are many different types of anemia. Not all anemia is due to iron deficiency. So we got to really find out what's causing the anemia.

So that's oxygen. And then the other thing is blood sugar. If they're dysglycemic, whether the hypoglycemia, reactive hypoglycemia, or insulin resistant, this is all going to impair the body's ability to deliver glucose. to working tissue, especially neurons, then they're going to start to experience brain symptoms. So this is just like foundational. It's so easy to hack. And it changes quickly too. If you have a blood sugar issue and you stabilize your blood sugar issue.

You can feel better pretty quickly. It doesn't take you like a year to feel better from fixing blood sugar. You can actually stabilize your blood sugar and feel better just like that. If you're hypoglycemic, you eat something. boom, you're no longer hypoglycemic, you feel better. That's that quick. Now, we obviously have to look at why someone hypoglycemic could be due to adrenal issues, chronic viral infections. There's reasons for those too, but that doesn't mean we don't fix the hypoglycemia.

That doesn't mean, oh, you're hypoglycemia because you have viral issues. Let's go after the virus. No, we got to address the hypoglycemia right now so your brain doesn't go through transneural degeneration. If you're anemic, we can't wait to figure out what the root cause of anemia is. We need to restore oxygenation so your brain is not going through literally neuronal cell death because you don't have enough oxygen.

So that's the priority that we have to take. And when we do that with everything within that roadmap, then we'll come to this place where we're addressing the first things first, the second thing second, the third, not doing the eighth thing or the tenth thing. first, like giving someone thyroid hormone when they're just frankly anemic, that doesn't mean there's not a place for thyroid hormone. They may need it. They may need to do that at the same time as being taking care of the anemiacs.

But if you don't simultaneously address the meaning that they have it, then we're going to be stuck. We're going to be solved. We're going to plateau in our results that we get. Great point.

When you look at these different factors, you started to tell us about stage one and how you focus on fuel delivery first. What would be the next stage in your process? Yeah, the next stage is then I'm looking at digestion. right? Can you digest food? And when I say digestion means breaking down nutrient, that's not absorption, right? Absorption happens in the lower GI and small intestine after the food is already digested.

So digestion goes from north to south. It starts at the top and it goes down. Like swallow food goes down. You don't shop food at the other end and it goes up. And I'm making that point because a lot of people, the first thing you think about digestion, they're thinking, I got to do coffee enema. I got to do colonics. I got to shove something on my butt.

That doesn't mean there's not a place for that, but that's not addressing digestion per se, because digestion goes from this way and you swallow food down. So how far can you go up in a digestive chain? We can go all the way up to the cortex. Because decreased frequency of firing of your cortex will lead to a decreased vagal outflow from your brainstem. So let's say we talk about vagus nerve a lot, but where does vagus nerve get its signal from? So for the vagus nerve brainstem to fire...

You have to have a good cortical function, the top of the brain. Inside 90% of your brain's output goes to your frontal medullary area, the brainstem, which fires the vagus nerve. So if you have decreased brain output.

where you experience brain fog, memory issue, depression, and so forth, you're probably going to have decreased vagus in the function. So we have to look at that and see that connection. That's the big connection you talked about. And then, so we can look at digestion starting with... brain function, vagus nerve, even mastication. If you don't chew, you're not digesting food. We're not snakes. You can't just swallow a piece of steak. You kind of chew it. Now, granted, most of the protein...

What's that? You have to remember how Americans do it, though. Like eat standing up or in the car. There's maybe one or two chews. Just inhale it. But yeah, you have to chew your food. So a lot of people, they eat in a rush way, as you say, right? And when you're eating rush, you're depriving your body of that vagal stimulation. Mastication itself stimulates proprioception in a jaw. And that's hugely vagal, right? And parasympathetic.

So if you're chewing like five bites and you swallow and really fast in a rush way and you're stressed out when you're eating, then you're not stimulating parasympathetic function. So yeah, chewing is part of that process. Oh, people have dental issues, the teeth just not doing well, so they can't chew. Well, that's going to impact the digestion. So we have to look at all of that. And then digestion, of course, the next step after chewing, you swallow.

In that, we got to look at stomach acid. Many people have hypochlorhydria, lack of stomach acid production. So therefore, they can't absorb iron, magnesium, calcium. So they're here, they're taking calcium supplement, but they can't absorb any of it because they have no stomach acid or they're taking a... for tampon inhibitor that's inhibiting that.

So then if you don't have stomach acid, then you don't stimulate pancreatic enzyme release. You don't stimulate bile release because stomach acids stimulate those organs, those accessory digestive organs, so that everything down below starts to get compromised. Because stomach acids are also really important.

in the health of your gut microbiome. So it's all connected. So a lot of times we're going straight for that take a probiotic when we should be focusing on vagus nerve or stomach acid. If you take it step by step, then you're going to have a better outcome.

and not taking a bunch of supplements. That's, oh, I take all the supplements for my gut, but I'm not feeling better. Perhaps you're missing a step or you're doing all the things that you should be doing. You're just doing them out of order. If we just reorder the things that you're doing, maybe we'll get better results.

I totally agree. We see a lot of people using great tools out there as practitioners and as accolades of patients. And yet, if you do it out of order and you don't respect the body's needs in terms of how to unpack. a chronic issue in a way that can actually be dealt with and you're working with the body instead of trying to overwrite it, you can be using all the right tools and actually not making any headway at all.

Yeah, I see people take vitamin A through C, everything under the sun. There's nothing that they're not taking. And yet you still have a problem. So then we have to ask better questions. We have to get critical and analytical about it and say, okay, you take all this stuff. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes they're taking a hundred supplements, but a little bit of everything when they should be.

increasing the dosage of a few that's really going to make a big difference for that particular step of the roadmap that they're actually having a problem with. And when they do that, they actually get to move past that step that they're stuck in and then do the next step.

So then, again, you simplify and streamline the process with the supplements. And remember, supplements are tools. They're great tools, but it's not an end-all, be-all. It's also nutrition, lifestyle, exercise, stress management, all of that. So you've mentioned a couple of times, and remember, we have two audiences here at our summit. We have our newbies who are just taking their health back into their own hands and they're not leaving it in a white coats.

destiny on their clipboard, actually saying, okay, I'm going to be the CEO of my own. I'm going to figure this out. And then we have our summit junkies who... have been watching many talks. They subscribe to all the health podcasts. They read health books for fun. They are deeply committed to their own health journey. And oftentimes they know more than their own practitioners. So I know those guys know all about the vagus nerve.

all sorts of different fun approaches to it. But could you just quickly unpack what vagus nerve function is and how you actually like to support this nerve function and dropping of the parasympathetic state for, say, digestive support purposes? As a neurologist. Yeah, absolutely. And then as I alluded to earlier, vagus nerve, cranial nerve number 10, comes from medulla, which is in the brainstem area. But vagus nerve.

presynaptically, meaning where's the signal coming that feed into the vagus nerve, comes from the cortex. 90% of your brain's output goes to the punctomedullary brainstem area to stimulate parasympathetic function. In fact, much of the brain's output is actually to inhibit sympathetic. Like without brain function, we can't inhibit sympathetic. 90% of the output is really to inhibit sympathetic.

So we have good parasympathetic function. So if you have decreased brain output, you're going to have increased sympathetic and decreased parasympathetic. So much of this vagus nerve issue is not. necessarily just the vagus nerve is weak. Much of it is you're losing inhibition of the opposite side or the sympathetic function. So we have to think about it a little bit differently because people think all the vagus nerves and they think it's like...

this guitar string, they can just go doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, and stimulate it. It's not that straightforward, okay? For some people, yes, we do talk about vagus nerve exercise. You can do different things that stimulate the vagus nerve.

Because VegaServe controls your throat swallowing muscle. So you can do things like gagging, humming. You could do gardening, right? These things all activate the throat muscle, which controls the muscles of swallowing, which is basically your summating.

the vagus nerve for action. So then you're stimulating. And remember, one of the things that neuron required to survive is fuel and activation. So when you activate a neuron, they become more stable and they function better. So when you activate the vagus nerve by doing these...

humming, gargling, gagging exercise. You're activating them, which makes them sunmate. They come to life, which they do better. But that sometimes is not enough because maybe it's not the fact that the vagus are me stimulating. Maybe it's the fact that you need to inhibit. the sympathetics. And the way you inhibit sympathetic may be at reducing stress, maybe meditation, maybe working on the cortex. Like if your brain's inflamed or you have lack of fuel delivery to the brain.

your brain can't summate, can't fire, but you lose that inhibition of the synthetic. So I'm talking neurology here a little bit, but I think it's important for people to have that, just that basic concept down. So they're not just chasing vagus nerve in the wrong way.

right? It's good to stimulate vagus nerve, but there may be other things to consider as well. Now, just keep in mind, within the roadmap, we talk about fuel delivery. Blood sugar is really important. One thing I want to bring to people's attention is that if you have insulin resistance, you can actually inhibit your vagal output. Insulin can actually go to the dorsal nucleus of the vagus nerve. So the nucleus, which is like the center where the vagus nerve starts.

in the brainstem actually have insulin receptors. And when you have way too much insulin because it's insulin resistance, you can actually inhibit that vagal function. So this is a perfect example of you get blood sugar issues and you can decrease vagal tone. And then now you have like peristalsis issue and you have SIBO as a result of that. So is it because you have high blood sugar and sugar seeding the bacteria? It could.

But could it just be like you have decreased vagal tone because you're insulin resistant and you need to fix that insulin resistance as part of healing the vagal tone and as part of healing your SIBO. So it's not complicated. It's simple, but it's not always.

straightforward and i think having that right type of framework having that roadmap really helps people to not get confused and potentially you can still fix it's almost are you fixing the same thing it is but you're going about it with a different intention And sometimes just by understanding the mechanism in the background, you have a different intention about it. And that can give you a different result.

This is such an important point to make because we're talking about a third of Americans will deal with insulin resistance for at least some stage of their life. So this is no small issue. Yeah, insulin, just insulin resistance, not just impact the vagus nerve. Insulin resistance is going to impact so many other things. Really, when you need insulin resistance, your metabolism is broken. You can't deliver glucose to your working cells.

So even though you may have high blood sugar, now keep in mind that some people with insulin resistance don't have high blood sugar. They're just insulin resistant without having high blood sugar yet. Because that insulin resistance can be created by insulin surges. So you just got to be having high insulin a few times throughout the day, shooting way up because you ate something carby or sugary.

Or even if you're inflamed, so you get cortisol release. And so now your glucose levels up because you have high cortisol. Now your body's trying to increase insulin to deal with that high cortisol or high blood sugar. These surges of insulin. can also create a resistance without having a consistent high blood sugar level. Some resistance is a state that your body's in. And sometimes lab doesn't always pick it up. So you have to be able to assess it by...

asking questions, asking about symptoms and put it all together, connect the dots, so to speak. But insulin is basically going to cause a situation where glucose cannot enter the cell. So it looks like you have high blood sugar, but yet you have low... sugar level inside the cell, which means that your cells are starving to death with no energy. And the compensation of that is you get sugar craving, sweet craving to jam more sugar into your mouth so you can jam more sugar into your cell.

It's a futile, vicious cycle. And the way to break that cycle is to break that insulin resistance. And there are many things you can do. You can basically low-carb, low-glycemic diet. You can do intermittent fasting. You can do keto.

address underlying reissue. So maybe it's inflammation. So those are all the things that we look at on the way to fixing insulin. So now insulin resistance is taking on a different light. It's not just, just go keto. Everybody do keto. Not everybody can do keto. And not everybody who do keto.

gets to solve their insulin resistance. It may be a factor, but if this person is inflamed to the 10th degree and is spiking cortisol all the time, then you may have to deal with that inflammation as part of that insulin resistance. In addition to...

cutting out sugar and things like that. Such a good explanation of why some people struggle so much to adapt to keto lifestyle. Yeah, or they have gallbladder intolerance. Many, yeah. Yeah, that's more my willhouse. I obsess. Bladder and liver. That end of the gastric juices. Okay, so let's look at how to walk people through the remaining stages of how you address persistent chronic health issues.

Why don't it really help people walk away with the full picture of your approach? Okay. So the big picture is there's these kind of blocks, building blocks, okay? Building a Lego block, right? If you want to build a four-story building, you don't start building the fourth story.

you start building the first story and then the second, the third, you go up vertically like that. This is how I see Schultz being built. And if you just jump right to the fourth story, doing hormone replacement or something like that, then...

you might miss all the steps down below. So in general, there are four major building blocks. First block, we talk about field delivery. And then the second block is really immune function. And immune system is such a big part of this. Really, when we're talking about brain and gut accidents and... people with chronic health issues, and we say all disease begins in the gut. What we're talking about is immune system dysfunction that happens within the gut.

So really, all disease begins in the gut, but it's really all disease begins with the immune system. Now, some people say all disease is related to, all chronic illness is related to inflammation. That would not be an inaccurate statement. But what is inflammation?

People say the inflammation is thrown around and people just say, I'm inflamed. And what does that really mean? Inflammation really means that your immune system is trying to kill something. That's really what inflammation is. Your immune system is trying to kill something. a pathogen, something that your body deems is bad. That's the job of the immune system, to kill something. Because if you look at it from an evolution perspective, it's like life or death. Pathogens coming in.

They're predatory, pathogens trying to kill you, your immune system trying to protect you, trying to kill the pathogen. If you don't kill the pathogen, take over, you're dead. That's just how mission critical that is. Inflammation, just your immune system lobbing grenades at a bad guy, blowing things up. That's necessary. But if the inflammation doesn't stop, you keep lobbing grenades and there's no more bad guy. You're just blowing up your own.

building, you're blowing up your own infrastructure, you're blowing up your own innocent bystanders, then that's bad. So when we say inflammation, we have to realize it's an immune response. A lot of these things, when we talk about brain and gut access, really it's an immune response. You know, leaky gut is an immune response. Leaky blood brain barrier is an immune response. Brain inflammation is a immune response.

insulin resistance lead to an inflammatory response, which is an immune response. Like all of these are immune response. So this is why I say brain immune got access. Let's not say brain got access anymore because it's making people... miss the importance of this part and they think it's, oh, it's dust. I'm going to take some probiotic. I think that step may be necessary, but is missing.

the nuance and the context of what it's trying to do, what the probiotic might be doing for you. So again, immune system, that means we want to look at sources. We want to dampen inflammation. We want to balance Th1, Th2, immune system. If you have autoimmunity, we need to modulate that. And then part of that immune block is looking at underlying infection. If you have chronic viral issues, you've had dysbiosis.

You have parasites, whatever it might be. We need to clear that infection because you have to take the burden off the immune system. So we're not trying to fight something on a chronic basis. So then that's fuel delivery. That's immune function. The next block is, for me, is detoxification.

So now a lot of people go straight for the heavy notes. Oh, I have amalgams in my mouth. Let me just say that this may not be what people are hearing out there, but I'm just going to tell you, there's a lot of people that have amalgams in the mouth.

And not every single person with amalgams in the mouth have heavy metal issue that's causing their particular illness. I'm just going to say that. Now, does that mean if you take 100 people and these 100 people are all healthy, completely asymptomatic? and you measure the mercury level in the body, I bet you're going to find a percentage of them that have metal in the body, despite the fact that they're healthy. So do they all need to have metal removed?

Maybe not the first step, right? It depends on how their body is handling the metal. Do they have immune reactivity to the metal? Do they have symptoms that correlate with that? So this is why detox for me is a later step because...

Even if we need to detox the metal, if your fuel delivery sucks and you're inflamed and you have chronic viral infection, it goes free for the metal detox. You're just setting up this person to feel worse because they can't handle the metal detox. They're too fragile to do it.

Or are you going to just drag the metal from one place to another so you moved it from the bone now into the brain? Now you're creating more issue and we call it a detox reaction. We have to be very cautious with that because some people just don't do well. Not everybody.

But some people, so this is all case by case basis. People have to learn how to understand that and assess it for themselves. So that's the next step is detox. And then the last step will be. I think it's really essential that we just pause here for a second because. We have a lot of people who are very detox focused on here and it is the focus of our practice. So I totally understand why you're all here. But one of the things that we want to educate people on.

is the order in which things need to happen in order for your body to successfully detox. You have to support the body's detox systems. You cannot override them. So IV chelation or trying to work on heavy metal detox before. you know, the body is ready, you have to understand what needs to happen first. And it's about safety. And it's also ensuring a good final outcome. We have, we inherit so many people who crash.

with other functional medicine practitioners because they don't do what you just described. They charge right into the heavy metal detox. So I'm really glad you said that and I just wanted to highlight that. And I also want to highlight the fact that By no means am I saying metal detox is not necessary or important in people's journey if that's what they need. What I'm saying is that we have to do it in a systematic and ordered way and set up so that...

when they do get to that step of their detox, that they're going to have good success. And I think a lot of people, they just do it themselves. Oh, I think I have metal. So I'm going to go buy something from Sprouts and online and do a metal detox. And then they may know. they may feel no change. Best case scenario, you get no response. But usually in the last case scenario, you feel worse. And this is all said to give people different scenarios to think about because if you're doing this...

and try to empower yourself and take back control. That's very amiable. I want people to do that. Let's get the right information out there so people can start to make more nuanced decisions about it. Instead of just, oh, metal, I'm just going to go do it. Let's think about this. Think through it. Yeah, absolutely.

So step four, I know we're coming up in our time here. I want to make sure. Yeah, last step is neuroendo. Neuroendo means we're looking at brain, we're looking at hormones. And again, people say, aren't you a functional neurologist? Isn't brain the most important? Brain is really important. Oftentimes, what's causing the brain to...

dysfunction is field delivery, poor oxygenation, blood sugar dysfunction, the fact that they're inflamed, the fact that they have chronic infection, the fact that they have mental toxicity. That's driving the brain issues. So if we can address all the other steps of the roadmap, by the time we get to the brain...

Piece of cake. It'll be a lot easier to manage. If you start with the brain, oh, I'm going to give you dopamine support, neurotransmitter support. This person's anemic, their blood sugar sucks, they're inflamed. Then those neurotransmitter support is going to be not that effective, in my experience.

So this is why brain is at that step, we're talking about doing specific support for brain. Now, we may do brain in the background this whole time, right? Stabilizing blood sugar already is helping brain. decreasing the inflammation and the healing leaky gut is already helping the brain. So we're helping the brain along the way, but specifically for brain, that's a later step that we evaluate.

And then the hormones as well. Many times the hormones are out of whack because there's something else throwing off the hormone. So we don't go straight for the hormone. We look for the root cause of the hormone deficiency or hormone imbalance, which many times is toxicity, is blood sugar issue.

It's a gut issue. It's the fact that they're inflamed. It's the fact that essential fatty acid imbalance, omega-3, omega-6 imbalance. These are the things that's throwing up hormones. So if we can address those things, then the hormone, again, it may be easier when we get there or...

Finally, the hormone they take will actually start to work for them where they've been taking hormone replacement this whole time. So don't feel different. As soon as they clear all these other problems, the hormone will start to work for them. Really well said. Wonderful. So just to wrap up.

I think we've given so many gems to the people who are earlier on in the journey. For folks that feel like they have been on this healing path for a long time and they've tried a lot of different protocols and listened to a lot of experts. Are there any final gems that you would share with them and what they can assess next in their health? Yeah, I think one of the things that I do when we work with people is really just...

teach them how to ask better questions. I think that's my advice. And a lot of times people will say, what's the advice? What supplement do I take? What's the one supplement that can help people? That kind of question is not a high quality question. What's the one supplement I can take to get better? We're talking to like...

potentially 100,000 people here. What's the one supplement that everybody will benefit from? There's no such thing. It depends on what your situation is, right? We talk about this roadmap. Not every single person have fuel delivery. So when you do the roadmap, if you don't have problem with that roadmap, you move on to the next step.

You speed through it, right? If you have problems with that separate roadmap, you work on it until you get that under control and then you move on to the next step. So I think asking better questions, teach people how to think for themselves.

is the best advice I can give. And we do that through my YouTube videos. There's free content I provide online. And we also have a program where we teach people how to do that. But I think just training people to be more analytical and think in a more nuanced way.

That comes with you putting on this great event so people can learn more nuanced things about their conditions and for them to think about. And then they can start scenario their own situation. So it's not canned and cookie cutter approach for everybody.

I think it's so well said. I too was one of, as I'm a junkie back in the day, trying to understand my health because I was going from specialist to specialist and nobody could understand what was wrong with me. And I think of every one of these interviews as a love letter.

to the folks who are going through that process right now. What would I have wanted to hear? And I think there are so many gems today that can help inspire people to take that next step. So I appreciate your support. I love the contribution you're making to our space.

Thank you for educating people and thanks so much for being here. Thanks so much for having me. Thanks for listening. Go to detoxrejuvenation.com to find the links in the show notes to everything we covered in this episode. Please subscribe, review, and share with other humans who need this precious information. Let's help each other. Until next time, love Sinclair.