How Do You Talk to a Toxic Brain?

Do you have any of these annoying, tolerated signs of brain impairment? Stiff, sore joints, high blood pressure, digestive distress, fatigue, and brain fog with anxiety.  If you have an impaired or toxic brain, how did it happen?  What do you do about it?  How can you take on healthier habits if your brain is stuck in a toxic state?  It's not all bad news.  Learn how to move, feed, and talk to your brain.

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The Many Layers of Stress Adding Up to a Pandemic

Sickness is a result of many layers reaching that breaking point. What's changed in society that has impacted the world in such an alarming way? How can your own brain health be a positive ripple effect? Taking a look at Dr. Sherry Rogers' cancer assessment.



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Doctors Who Jumped Ship (Part 7: Jennifer Daniels)

Jennifer Daniels, MD, MBA this week
and Andrew Kaufman, MD next week

This video below is a special treat of two local peeps near my town who got together via zoom to chat about their ethical challenges regarding medical standards and how they stepped out on their own to provide healing care to their patients.  

Who else made the list?  Click Here. 

I met Jennifer Daniels when I was an intern in my outpatient clinic during my last year of chiropractic college. It  was the year 2000.  She was gathering information about her practice in order to face a state board complaint regarding a patient who wasn't on insulin but ended up in the emergency room after returning from a celebratory vacation, drinking heavily and ignoring dietary advice Dr. Daniels had given him.  Her patients were rallying behind her writing testimonial letters explaining how much she helped them.  

She was aware that she was on the outskirts of the medical community.  She knew that pharmaceutical reps were not pleased that she wasn't prescribing their latest and greatest, heavily marketed drugs.  Hospitals were upset that her patients weren't needing admittance.  She also informed her neighborhood of a back room political deal that would have financially harmed the tax payers  and defraud a local bank.  

At first glance you would be relieved to hear patients were not needing hospital care.  Dr. Daniels even noted her decrease in prescribing also decreased the death rate in her patient population.  People were healthier and enjoying their lives. 

But, in the medical business world, every doctor's professional actions are tracked.  It is now common knowledge that doctors who do not write a certain number of prescriptions are audited and forced to pay back insurance reimbursements.  

Countless medical doctors who offer natural treatments have anonymous complaints lodged against them even when no patient is harmed. 

In the end after much legal juggling, Dr. Daniels decided to move on with her life and gave up on getting her medical license reinstated. She was subjected to unfair rules and other professionals were afraid to risk their own professional livelihoods if they offered to supervise her.  The agreement that would slowly allow her to regain her medical license was financially burdensome.  

The biggest lesson for me as a health care practitioner who watched this happen is how regimented and oppressive the medical industry is with so much controlled by government policies.  In a profession where a second opinion is promoted as your right, the options are very limited.  In America you have so many choices of homes, clothing, cars, etc., yet your ability to choose what kind of health care you prefer is nothing of the sort.  

This doesn't bother most people until they are dealing with an unexpected health problem.  There is also a strong belief that insurance plans owe you a high quality health care experience.  Sadly, this is not the case.  

If  average private citizens don't want the surprise of an untreatable disease, or many long drawn out years of decline, they have to educate themselves on the stark difference between prevention and intervention.

This is what medical doctors like Dr. Daniels are doing now.  They spend their time educating the public on how to maintain control before a hospital experience takes away someone's ability make his or her own assertive decisions.

If you're interested in listening to Dr. Daniels' podcasts, look for her videos on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/user6590984 or her Facebook page titled "Healing with Dr. Daniels."

Next week, look for Dr. Andrew Kaufman's biography.   

When Good People Repeat Lies

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Covid Wake Up Call - But You're Still Asleep?

BFA Coaching Opportunity

Can You Embrace Anxiety?

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Doctors Who Jumped Ship (Part 6: Gary Fettke, MD

Cancer survivor barred from talking about diet to save his diabetic patients

Who else made the list?  Check here.

In Australia, the Medical Board of Tasmania told Dr. Fettke he could not give nutritional advice to his patients.  Why?  Was any of his patients harmed? No.  The complaint was delivered anonymously. 

Dr. Fettke is naturally a intriguing person.  An orthopedic surgeon, he also survived brain cancer.  (Read his cancer story here.) He says himself that he was tired of amputating the legs of diabetic patients are began promoting a low carb high fat diet to them.  He then hoped to improve the food offerings at the hospital where he worked.  

Hospital food guidelines recommend two desserts with biscuits and other carbohydrate foods as part of a normal meal for diabetics.  This is not actually healthy for anyone, diabetic or not.  If you recall in a previous blog I explained Dr. Joseph Kraft's findings that more than 90% of teenagers are already prediabetic.

When a hospital dietician made a complaint, he was informed that he was speaking outside of his scope of practice.  He soon made the decision to leave the hospital and not renew his contract.   He stated in interviews that he could not be the best physician under the rules put on him and accused the board of  bullying.

When my patients share with me their medical chart notes I still see the outdated advice of low fat, low salt diets.  Food manufacturers still add huge amounts of sugar to make low fat foods taste good and we wonder why obesity is such an epidemic.  People still think Dr. Atkins was fringe and that saturated fat will kill us. 

Old habits are hard to break.  And old lies are hard to give up.  Dr. Ancel Keys, a physiologist who was given a number of conscientious objectors to experiment on during his starvation studies during WWII, gave us the poorly studied hypothesis that saturated fat was harmful. 

It took a couple of years, but eventually Dr. Fettke was completely exonerated and given a flimsy apology.

His wife, Belinda, documents some of his story in the blog http://www.nofructose.com.  She discusses the risks imposed on free speech as well as the potential harm to patients who get progressively worse on outdated food pyramid, especially the terrible effects it has on children.  

Follow Dr. Fettke's story here.  And also check out his talks on the YouTube Channel: Low Carb Down Under.  He has remained very busy as a speaker and teacher spreading his mission to reduce suffering with simple food changes.  

The Failure of Medical Education: Why is LCHF not being shouted from the rooftops?

Too Fried to Figure It Out?

Image: Is Your Brain On Fire: https://drbrucekehr.com/brain-on-fire/

Call to Action:  Whatever it is that is holding you back, acknowledge it and enter the 3 three doorways for brain health. 

The most challenging aspect of brain health is getting people to make the life style change needed to experience a positive turn around. 

Why?       

When the brain is significantly impaired, a person has  a tremendous difficulty instituting the positive change needed to enhance the healing response.  

In the mainstream-modern world we call it "non-compliance."  It becomes a common term dictated into medical notes when someone continues to exhibit the same symptoms over and over without improvement, especially when someone says, "I don't like how that medication makes me feel and I don't want to take it anymore."  Wham-o!  Bam-o!  Someone has just been labeled as non-compliant distrustful patient.  

So, allow me to back track a little bit and describe how brain impairment prevents someone from getting healthy.  When the brain is energy deprived, that also means the body is energy deprived.  At the smallest level, the cells are dysfunctional, unable to complete a cellular metabolic process resulting in toxic build up and a severe energy crisis.  

The book Change or Die, by Alan Deutschman, helps me answer the question why people are stuck and unable to make a change.  I has become a classic on my bookshelf.  

Check out a book summary here: Change or Die.

He delved in to the stats that showed heart patients after a surgery will not change their life style habits even when told they will die if. Ninety percent of these folks do not follow through and end up going in for repeat surgeries. 

People who feel hopeless and not in control feel so demoralized that they believe there is nothing left out there in the world that will work for them.  Alan Deutschman came up with three core attributes of practices that help people change and discussed three types of success stories.

From the BFA: Brain First Always approach: We look at nutrient deficiencies, toxin overload, and especially early-learned behavior patterns which are basically attitudes becoming physically expressed in the body as a state of health.  

1- People are so sick and weak, they don't have the mental or physical energy to take on new behaviors.  New learning requires the pre-frontal cortex to be ready to go. Remember learning to ride a bike?  You were shaky and uncoordinated.  You didn't trust yourself.  You felt a little anxious.  That means the pre-frontal cortex is working hard.  It takes a good bit of energy and a heightened sense of curiosity to engage like that.  You must feel shaky and uncoordinated because you are trying a new activity that is not comfortable because it is new.  Something new is very threatening whether it is speaking in public, trying out gym equipment for the first time, going to a job orientation,doing a nutritional detox, trying a new diet, enrolling in college, etc.  

New activities "kick in" the Fight or Flight brain response.  The sympathetic nervous system releases adrenaline to help you along.  In adequate amounts this hormone gives you a sense of excitement and inspiration so you can learn new things. In the right amount, we call it the zone where someone "kicks butt," during a job interview, they "hit it out of the park," during a music performance, or they don't hesitate to help someone in a crisis. 

On the opposite end, too much Fight or Flight/Freeze or Faint from the Limbic System (emotion and memory portion of the sympathetics) is very distracting and blocks concentration. 

How do we heal the brain in spite of sickness and weakness?  

Understanding Leaky Brain will help.  Datis Kharrazian, author of Why Isn't My Brain Working? offers great insight to the workings of the brain.  He teaches his clients how to address the signs of a failing brain that most of society will blame on aging.  Yet, he underscores how important it is to be very deliberate in choosing healthy behaviors since our modern life style, chemical laden processed foods, etc. has been very disruptive.  Health recovery is not on auto-pilot.  We have to acknowledge the down side of modern life and find a better balance. 

Ultimate Healing Podcast: Leaky Brain
Repair a Leaky Brain

2- The new behaviors are so different from current habits, that limbic system emotions of fear and distrust pop up causing someone to exhibit a very strong hesitation.  

3- Peer pressure is very powerful at holding people in their stuck states, which is another aspect of limbic system fear. 

4- Fear of confrontation in an imbalanced relationship (such as a doctor, or spouse), community peer pressure, also incites the limbic system to stay in a holding pattern.

5- A dopamine imbalance (the motivation neurotransmitter) prevents someone from  starting a new life style habit. 

6- Lack of appropriate and sometimes correct information leads us to "spin our wheels," wondering why our current actions are not helping, not realizing they are actually hurting.   This is challenging because many wrong ideas about diet, health, medical procedures end up in peer reviewed journals and it is taken for granted that the information has been under appropriate scrutiny.  (Check out my series on Doctors Who Jumped Ship to learn about the attempts to reform the disingenuous aspects of medical care.)

7- Time also proves to be a serious block to healing.  How we fill our daily plate of life, devote hours to our jobs, etc., certainly gets in the way of health.  Sometimes I hear people say, "I hope I can make to retirement...."  We all have the same hours in a day, as the saying goes, but our time choices also matter. 

I invite you to set aside some time to start a coaching relationship with me so you can reorganize your life in ways that help you approach the nagging concerns you know are impacting your brain health. 

My calling is to help you live your calling, and you cannot do that with an impaired brain.  

Do you want a performing brain?

Check out the BFA Coaching program.  I promise it is meaningful and rewarding. 

You already have the tools.  Learn how to use your tools proficiently.