Good morning and welcome to Green Tea Conversations, the radio show that delves into the pages of Natural Awakenings magazine to bring you the local experts who share their progressive ideas and the latest information and insights needed so you can lead you're. Best way. I'm your host, Candi Broeffle, publisher of the Twin Cities edition of Natural Awakenings magazine, and I am honored to bring these experts to you today on the show. We welcome Guy Odishaw, a neuro feedback and bioelectric medicine practitioner, and Dr. Richard Sinda, a preventative aging and functional medicine physician.

 

Dr. Sinda and Guy are co-founders of the Minnesota Brain Health Clinic, which aims to help patients with early dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Welcome to the show.

 

Thanks for having us.

 

This is such an important conversation, and I can't wait to learn more about the natural protocol that you're offering to your patients. But before we do that, we need to learn about each of you a little bit and the work that you do. Now. Both of you have been on our show before, but it's been quite a while. If you don't mind taking a moment to just give us a little bit of your background, tell us what it is that you do, how you came about that and how you serve your clients.

 

So, Guy, I'm going to ask you to start us up. So Guy Odishaw

 

I'm the owner of the Bhakti Wellness Center, and then within the Bhakti Wellness Center, we have the Bhakti Brain Health Clinic, and then as a separate, as you said, collaboration with Dr. Sinda, who started the Minnesota Brain Health Clinic to be able to really focus on this area of Alzheimer dementia, mild cognitive decline prevention. But my background I've been holistic medicine for 30 years. My main thing is integrative manual, therapies and about ten years ago, I got into bioelectric medicine and then more recently into neuroimaging neurofeedback neuro modulation.

 

And that is kind of what brought me to this place was just getting into the research and seeing the promise it was just a must to bring to our patient population.

 

Dr. Sinda, how about you? Why don't you introduce us to your business and how you support your clients?

 

Thank you, Candi. I am the owner of the Innovative Directions and Health Clinic in Edina, and we've been there for almost 20 years now. It's always been a bioidentical, hormone and functional medicine based clinic. I'm certified in functional medicine, but my training was initially in regular medicine. I did a family medicine residency, completed that 25 plus years ago. I've actually worked in urgent care for almost 30 years as well. So I'm very in touch with mainstream medicine, and I have very strong opinions about what we do and don't do well.

 

But researching and studying about dementia, I was astounded how close some of the modern approaches to preventing dementia are, how similar those approaches are to what I'm already doing every day in my office. It was very similar, so maybe even more inclined to learn more, study more and get certified in dementia prevention as well.

 

Well, I think it's so interesting that both the Bots Wellness Clinic and Innovative Directions and Health are both located in the same building in Edina. And you have come together to create this partnership called the Minnesota Brain Health Clinic. Tell us how this all came about.

 

Well, it's funny. I mean, we're actually next door neighbors. We're even on the same floor. Accidental, but a friend of mine who I worked with an urgent care, actually a lady physician who was outstanding. She told me for a good year or two that I must meet guy and we finally connected. One day we started talking about a variety of things.

 

I agree.

 

I heard the same thing on my site. You have to meet Dr. Sinda. Turns out he's around the corner, but also for me, it's very much the spirit of integration. Bhakti has always been an integrative clinic. At our peak. We had 31 providers. I've never presumed that the walls of the clinic will put any boundary on integrative care. So it's perfectly congruent to collaborate with Dr. Sinda and bring his expertise and passion in and form a collaborative around this particular piece. So just an organic outgrowing of what the clinic was.

 

And now we've added this particular piece and an advocacy I have for how I would like to see healthcare be just more collaboration, making the best use out of the equipment and expertise and infrastructure that we have to serve patient population more fully again efficiency

 

Also using the current science. This is not way out there. This is where the current science is taking us. This is not some fringe woo woo thing. This is real, and there's a lot of good science to back up everything we do.

 

So tell us about that a little bit we haven't really discussed yet what the Minnesota Brain Health Clinic is. So what is the science behind what you're looking at creating with the clinic? Who are you hoping to serve and

 

Well. Dementia, as all of us know if your family is big enough or even if you have a small to medium family, chances are you know, someone or you have a best friend or something who has Alzheimer's or is living with that and understands the devastation, the human suffering, but also the financial devastation. It's a double whammy. So the traditional treatments for dementia have been dreadful failures. Unfortunately, mild to moderate improvement at most single drugs, just every one of them just fails one after the next, after the next and looking for alternatives to that, giving hope that's what all of this research has found is that there are multiple opportunities for intervening and preventing, especially early or mild dementia, tremendous opportunities for prevention.

 

It almost seems that when someone gets a diagnosis of dementia or gets a diagnosis of Alzheimer's, they've heard get your affairs in order, make sure things are ready because there isn't much hope after that. And so what you're doing is really showing people that there is hope and that there are things that you can do.

 

All right. So let's start off by really talking about there are different stages of dementia to help us to understand what the different stages are and what people should be actually looking for, because too often people miss the signs. We start to think that things are just because we might be getting forgetful or having trouble understanding things because we're really busy or we're really stressful. So help us to understand what are some of the signs that we should be looking for, especially in those early stages?

 

Well, sadly and scary thing to think about is that dementia actually starts biochemically and functionally before you have any clue that it's happening. So you have either genetic or environmental risk factors that you may or may not know about may or may not realize that are heading you in that direction. Then at some point you develop what's called subjective cognitive impairment sci, which means you know, that something's up. You know, you're having trouble with your memory, having trouble calculating, trouble concentrating, trouble word searching. Often you can't find the words that used to just pop right out of your mouth in conversation.

 

That's subjective cognitive impairment. You know about it. Maybe your partner knows about it. Maybe some people you work with closely at work, it's not obvious you can still perform well on brain function tests. Then that's really the best time to intervene. And really with most people. I mean, you're not going to seek care before that. So that's time to start prevention or treating your risk factors. If that continues and that goes on for ten years, maybe or more before you get to mild cognitive impairment. Mild cognitive impairment is actually not as benign as it sounds because it actually means you have significant dementia going on.

 

It means it's affecting activities of daily. It's starting to affect activities of daily living. You can't function in your job or mentally, anywhere near where you used to. Full blown Alzheimer's is just a worse version of that, where you forget very important things, names of people you know and love. You lose your ability to take care of yourself.

 

Yes. Full blowing dementia. Always Alzheimer's.

 

There are other causes of dementia, certainly. But Alzheimer's is definitely the most common. Other causes of dementia would be trauma from multiple concussions, traumatic brain injury from accidents, Lewy body disease, Lewy body dimensia like we see with Parkinson's type dementia, there's something called frontal temporal dementia, too, which is really scary as well where people have a lot of delusions. Yeah, there are different causes, but Alzheimer's, it's not as specific of a diagnosis as you would think it would be because there are multiple causes. There's several different ways to get the alternative really fascinating and scary all at the same time.

 

So what are some of the deficiencies that you're looking for?

 

Well, hormonal deficiencies, vitamin D, insulin resistance is a huge or pre diabetes is a huge part of what they're looking forward to, because the pre diabetic or insulin resistant state is neurotoxic. It's toxic to your brain cells. It doesn't let you maintain communication between your brain cells. It doesn't let them stay healthy. So anytime you have insulin resistance or high sugar levels, that's toxic, and it's damaging to brain function and brain communication.

 

Well, we have to go into a break right now, but when we come back, we're going to talk about some of the different protocols that you use, including something called the Bredeson Protocol, which you'll introduce us to. That helps to bring hope to people who are suffering from early signs of dementia. So to learn more about the Minnesota Brain Health Clinic and to make an appointment, visit MinnesotaBrainHealthClinic.com or call (952) 222-7960. Again, that number is (952) 222-7960. To read the online version of Natural Awakenings magazine, visit NaturalTwinCities.com

 

You can find a podcast for this show on AM950Radio.Com, on Apple and Google podcast. And anywhere you get your podcast, you're listening to Green Tea Conversations on AM950, the Progressive Voice of Minnesota. And we will be right back.

 

Welcome back to Green Tea Conversations, where we dealt in the stages of Natural Awakenings and talk to the experts who share their expertise and natural health with you. I'm your host, Candi Broeffle, and today we're talking with Guy Odishaw, a neuro feedback of bioelectric medicine practitioner and Dr. Richard Sinda, a preventative aging and functional medicine physician and co-founders of the Minnesota Brain Clinic, which aims to help patients with early dementia.

 

In our last segment, you shared what kind of brought you together to create the Minnesota Brain Health Clinic, and before we go into more of the treatment that you do, I'm curious as to what was the why behind it, Guy, maybe you can share with us. Why did you feel that it was important to bring this vision to life now?

 

Sure, in the Bhakti Brain Health Clinic, we focus on mental health concerns, traffic, brain injury, learning disabilities, ADHD, autism. That's the main focus for our patient population. But reading the research, I would just continuously hear the value of what we do, the technology that we deploy, the methods that we use, the equipment that we have in the Alzheimer dementia and mild cognitive decline treatment space, but that didn't make up our patient population, but just constantly coming across the research showing the efficacy when I looked at it.

 

Well, I kind of have one leg of a three legged stool. I need the other two legs. Coincidentally, in conversation with Dr. Sinda, he happened to mention his interest in work moving into this space and the Bredesen  Protocol, and it was that natural synergy that would bring the other two legs to create the stool. And so that just opened up an area that I couldn't do on my own or the clinic couldn't do on our own without functional medicine as really kind of doing the heavy lifting and then us coming in on the treatment side.

 

Very nice, Dr. Sinda, can you explain to us what the Bredesen protocol is?

 

Yes. Well, there's a neurologist in California named Dale Bredesen. He's an MD. He was or has been a mainstream medicine physician for most of his career. He is a neurologist. He was always interested in dementia research. He actually has done over 30 years of dementia research. And initially, his goal was to find the cure for dementia. And the story goes along the lines where his wife is a primary care doctor and told him a long time ago, something along lines of, Well, Mr. Smarty Pants, you're going to get to the end of this year journey of dementia research and realize that it's a functional lesson approach that really is going to be effective and that you're not going to find a single cure because it's not a single cure type of illness.

 

So he begrudgingly. But it also enthusiastically admits that she was right. And he discovered that it's a multifactorial illness. The best analogy is if you have 42 holes in your roof and you fix one or two holes, it's not going to really keep the rain from coming in right?

 

You need to fix all 42 holes. But really, the reason that analogy is good is because they actually look at around 42 factors when evaluating someone for us in treatment. Usually we find five to seven major issues. Sometimes it's only three, but they're really intense. Sometimes there's a genetic component to it. But if you only fix one or two of those five or six issues, you're not going to make a big difference in the ultimate outcome of the dementia. So he's designed basically a protocol whereby you look for risk factors deficiencies using blood tests, and you then go about fixing those deficiencies or problems.

 

So give us an idea of what it's like when somebody comes in, when they first come in and they're being introduced to you. What is the evaluation like that they go through?

 

Well, the first things we do, both guy and I have consults with them to talk about their history, their risk factors, what's going on with them? The guy will do a brainwave evaluation to assess how their brain is functioning. He'll talk much more about that. I will go through their history, their medical history, their neurologic history, and then talk about basically their health throughout their whole life and any family history of Alzheimer's and any risk factors throughout their life, such as traumatic brain injury or any of that or diabetes or heart disease, anything that will increase your risk also.

 

And then they will have blood tests to assess. On my end, they would have blood tests to assess the risk factors.

 

I think one of the things that's so surprising to people when they come into a naturopathic doctor of functional medicine doctor, is how much time is spent looking through your history, looking through and really finding out where you might be running into some problems. It's very different than going to a regular allopathic doctor.

 

Yes. And I lived that life, and I can tell you it's miserable and I still do urgent care. So it's intense, but, yeah, doctors are getting squeezed for time. They don't have enough time for patients. Patients hate it. They feel rushed, they feel neglected. They feel like nobody's listening to them because they don't have time. Doctors don't like practicing like that either. Even though they end up collaborating with it, they get fried. They're overworked. So it's not working for patients or doctor's current model. So it needs to change.

 

And part of the change needs to be. We need to all take more time.

 

Especially when you're talking about something that's as important as your health as your brain health and your functionality throughout the rest of your life. So, Guy, can you give us an indication of what they do when they come to see you as part of the evaluation? Sure.

 

So often they'll start off with an initial consult with Dr. Sinda, and then he'll refer them over to me for an initial consult where we talk through the process of what do I do on my side with the neuroimaging feedback and modulation by electric medicine. So we just kind of do a general here's the program here's the offerings help orient to somebody around the time and the cost associated with it. And for me to get a sense of where they are at and where they want to enter our program because we have a lot of variation, a lot of modalities that we can offer to really get oriented around this person.

 

And what do they need? Then, one of the first things we do is the QEG, the Quantitative Electroencephalograph. So the neuroimaging. So this is not like an MRI, where we're looking at structure, it's looking at function, what is actually happening in the brain from a functional perspective. So they come in, takes about an hour. We put a fancy cap on them and measure the electrical activity in the brain. And that goes through many, many statistical analysis that allow us to take 2030 different perspectives of the brain so that we can really get a sense of what's happening in the brain and be confident in what we're presenting.

 

The next piece is do a follow up consult where we'll go through somebody's report with them. That report might be over 200 pages of information, immense detail of what's going on. And we call it our roadmap that becomes our roadmap to treatment. And where in all of the things that we can do for a person, where do we want to start? What's going to be a high level intervention in the clinic. What can be what I call the low hanging fruit, which is an intervention they can do at home, very cost effective time effective, really.

 

I think in many cases, the best care option is that thing the person can do every day. That's the initial part of it. QEG, we do a consult with them, go through all the options, make a treatment plan, and then begin to implement the treatment plan. And that can happen in a matter of days.

 

Now we're going to have to go into another break. But when we come back, we'll start talking about some of the different things that you do with the clients in order to help them start seeing better health.

 

To learn more about the Minnesota Brain Health Clinic and make an appointment, visit minnesotabrainhealthlinic.com. To read the online version Natural Awakenings Magazine, visit NaturalTwinCities.com. You're listening to Green Tea Conversations on AM950, the progressive Voice of Minnesota, and we will be right back.

 

Welcome back to Green Tea Conversations, where we delve into the features of Natural Awakenings magazine and talk to the professionals to share their expertise on natural health with you.

 

I'm your host, Candi Broeffle, and today we're talking with Guy Odisha, a neurofeedback and bioelectric medicine practitioner, and Dr. Richard Sinda, a preventative aging and functional medicine physician. Guy and Dr. Sinda are co founders of the Minnesota Brain Health Clinic, which aims to help patients with early dementia. Just before the break, you were helping us to understand what it looks like when somebody first comes into the clinic and some of the initial work that you do and Guy was telling us about the assessment and then some of the things that they learned.

 

Doctor Sinda, you were actually telling us about some of the tests that were given and the information that you seek from people. Once you have that information, so I assume it takes a little while to get back the blood work. Once that comes back, what is some of the information that you glean from that? And what do you do with it? What do you help the patient to do?

 

Well, we find out what their glucose metabolism status is. So do they have insulin resistance? How does their body handle their blood sugar? Are they sensitive to insulin? Is insulin working for them, or is their blood sugar high? That is a huge risk factor for dementia. Blood sugar regulation, blood sugar metabolism, dysfunction, diabetes, prediabetes. Brain cells really do not like either elevated insulin levels or elevated sugar levels. It's toxic in so many ways. So that is probably one of the most important things we find.

 

Other things that are very important. Do they have nutrient deficiencies nutrients like vitamin D, vitamin B12, zinc, magnesium? Those are all very crucial nutrients for brain health as well.

 

Let's break that down a little bit, if you don't mind. So let's talk about each of those in a little bit more in-depth. So vitamin D, a lot of people have deficiencies in vitamin D, especially living in Northern Minnesota or living in Minnesota at all and all over the country. So why is vitamin D so important to brain health?

 

Well, there are a whole bunch of nutrients, including B12, including zinc and magnesium, that all support brain cell health and functioning. When nutrients like those, any of those are depleted, your brain cells go into crisis mode, and they down-regulate your body, stops making new connections between the nerve cells, your body stops making new nerve cells. So you go into survival mode and you get brain cell death. You get the connections between the brain cells, they stop making new connections. Those are all the things that will lead you to an increased risk of dementia.

 

So getting after those things is important. One other thing that I didn't talk about that's extremely important is toxicity, though. Toxicity, whether it be taxes in our environment that we're exposed to, or just the build-up of toxins in your system from the everyday, normal biochemical reactions in your body that your body can't clear, some people just don't clear them very well. Those things are incredibly brain cell toxic, too. They will kill brain cells and they'll cause the same type of situation.

 

Is there any specific toxin that you see more often?

 

There's a ton of Mercury toxicity. Honestly, what I see out there in the world is people coming in from the farms and they're using pesticides and herbicides that are very neurotoxic. And some people are okay at clearing those. Other people are not great at clearing those, and they're extremely neurotoxic. A lot of those things.

 

What else do you learn from the results of the test that they were given?

 

Well, we get specific information to tell us what type of dementia they have. I mean, is it inflammation? Is it mostly inflammation that they're having? Is it mostly a blood sugar issue? Is it toxicity? Is it hormone and nutrient deficiency? Those are some of the most important things. Those are the things we gleaned from the results. And every one of these things that we learned gives us an opportunity to take action to counteract those things, to help get rid of those risk factors, and then let your brain cells heal and let your connections redevelop.

 

So earlier you were sharing with us that there are things that people can do that are kind of like the low-hanging fruits that you can share with people, and then it can pretty much run the gamut. I mean, there's many different things that you and I are helping to introduce people to in order to promote good brain health. Let's talk about some of those interventions that you can provide. And let's start with those more lower-hanging fruits. And I know we're starting to talk about supplementation and that type of thing as well.

 

Well, focusing on the lifestyle, improving insulin resistance. If you're doing some intermittent fasting eating, more of a ketogenic diet to help your body burn ketones better and stop relying on burning sugars all the time. Learning to burn Ketones that helps your brain. Your brain loves when you burn ketones. And a lot of the way we eat in America, it's four or five, two or three big meals a day on a couple of snacks that we just burn sugars all the time. Another low-hanging fruit item would be focusing on high quality and enough sleep.

 

Sleep is extremely important because it's the time when our brain clears a lot of the waste products from a day's worth of thinking. If you're not laying down and getting good quality sleep, your brain isn't clearing those, so it's building up things that harm the cells.

 

And I'm going to add in there. Also, sleep is when we consolidate memory. But it's also when learning happens. And so that's tangent to the part that I do working with the brain waves. For example, if a person isn't producing the right type of Theta, so it's a brainwave. If you're not producing the right type of Theta in the right place, in the right timing, then learning doesn't happen. And learning partly is memory consolidation. Right? You learn a new skill during the day. If the brain ways aren't exactly right, that doesn't get encoded.

 

So sleep has a restorative function, as Dr. Sinda saying around the physiology. But it's also a lot of our activity, like the brain maintenance activity of it as a functional organ is happening at night. When we're sleeping, we're not getting into those sleep states for longer prescribed period of time. We need to the functional piece doesn't happen. And so again, when we talk about the cognitive impairment, we can have a significant amount of cognitive impairment just from not getting proper sleep.

 

Yes, sleep. It's so interesting because sleep is getting so much more press time now, which is great. People have long believed that they can live off 4 hours of sleep. And it's just not true. And it's going to have a huge impact.

 

And for a while, yeah, it will catch up with you.

 

It will catch up with you. What else are they learning through the test that you're taking and the interventions that you can take with them?

 

Well, as I was saying, the restoring or improving insulin sensitivity, your blood sugars, your blood glucose. First of all, knowledge is power right?

 

So using devices that will monitor your blood sugar closely so that you know that you're starting to improve your fasting blood sugars, you're starting to improve. You're starting to burn ketones throughout the day and when you're sleeping to help your brain function better. Also, devices to help you monitor whether you're in ketosis, which means you're burning ketones, you're burning fats. That help. Nourish, your brain. So they have wonderful devices. Now that will let you know these things actually on a moment's notice. So that helps tremendously.

 

There's a lot to drive behavior, right. Because we've been told this for decades, right. There's nothing new here. Right. But part of, I think the brilliance that comes within the Bredesen protocol is putting the pieces together. And it's the power of all of those pieces together. And one is bringing in, say, the glucose monitor. So that a person who maybe thinks they're eating well, right. They might be on a pretty regimen diet, but they start checking their blood sugar and they realize that thing they thought was healthy spikes their blood sugar.

 

Right.

 

But it's that education of like, this food that is maybe healthy, vegan, vegetarian, whatever it is, person thinks it's healthy, but for their body, for their metabolism, it isn't right. And they find out for them that spikes their blood sugar. Well, that person has the objective data. It's not the doctor saying, don't eat that. It's right there. And that drives behavior. We see that in our patient population when people see, wow, what's that doing to my blood sugar? They're much more likely to just stop eating.

 

It very powerful. I agree.

 

Yeah.

 

Exactly right. It's very powerful when they can see it themselves.

 

It really is interesting. We've heard for years and years and years. It's all about lifestyle. It's all about what you're putting into your mouth. And I think people are really starting to pay attention to it so much more now and now. We know it not only impacts our waistline, but it impacts every part of our body. It impacts our longevity. It impacts our wellness and how we're going to age well. And it really is something that can make such a difference in their lives in any of our lives.

 

And it's so necessary that we look at. So even though it's a hard thing to do sometimes to change your lifestyle, it's absolutely going to make the most impact I believe.

 

You guys have an actual forum coming up called the Functional Health Forum, which is coming up on October 28th from 6:30 to 8:00 P. M. at your offices, which is located at 7550 France Avenue in Edina. And it's going to be in the lower level auditorium, which you said that they can follow the sign to get to the auditorium, but it's on the lower level.

 

Why don't you take just a moment to tell us a bit about what people can learn when they come in? Are there going to be things that they can experience that type of thing?

 

There will be? We'll have some of the devices that I've been talking about. So we're going to have the ABE there people can try. We'll have the photo biometrics and helmet, which is kind of a big deal in Alzheimer's dementia prevention right now. The research coming out Durham University just released yesterday, a new study on using infrared light to treat the brain, specifically in Alzheimer's dementia prevention. And the results are fantastic. No downside, no side effects, no harm, but yet delivered in the right dose. Incredibly helpful. There's nothing producing better results than Photo bio modulation in this space.

 

So we have this new technology, the infrared helmet. People will be able to try it. We'll have nasal lasers just sounds odd. But again, the research showing that one of the best ways to treat the brain is actually through the nasal passages. We can get it into the core of the brain and make positive change with something as simple as like to have those devices. We'll have our frequency-specific microcurrent devices there. People can try that. We'll have some of our neural feedback. They can't really try it, but they can see it, see what it is, see some examples of it.

 

So I have lots of show and tell. But then Dr. Sinda is going to do a wonderful presentation on Bredeson protocol and kind of use a couple of case presentations to demonstrate efficacy and what a treatment plan is like and outcomes. And then I will be telling people more about quantitative electro nephograph, the neural imaging, what it is, what we find from it, how we build a treatment plan. And again, through a few case studies, how we've been able to create change for people using bioelectric medicine.

 

Excellent. To learn more about the Minnesota Brain Health Clinic and to make an appointment, visit MinnesotaBrainHealthClinic.com or call (952) 222-7960.

 

Again that number is (952) 222-7960. You can find a podcast of this show on AM 950 Radio.com on Apple and Google podcasts. And anywhere you get your podcast, you're listening to Green Tea Conversations on AM 950, the Progressive Voice of Minnesota. And we will be right back.

 

Welcome back to Green Tea Conversations, where we delve into stages of Natural Awakenings magazine and talk to the professionals to share their expertise on natural health with you. I'm your host, Candi Broeffle, and today we're visiting with Guy Odishaw, a neural feedback and bioelectric medicine practitioner, and Dr. Richard Sinda, a preventative aging and functional medicine physician. Dr. Sinda and Guy are co-founders of the Minnesota Brain Health Clinic, which aims to help people with early dementia.

 

Just before the break, we were starting to talk about some of the low-hanging fruit that we can do, as far as lifestyle changes that can be made and supplementation that can also help in maintaining good brain health. And the other thing that you also help people with is taking a look at their hormones. So tell us a little bit about that, Doctor Sinda.

 

Well, as I started studying the Bredeson protocol and the science behind it, I was happy to see that much of what I had been doing for a very long time with hormones was a large part of his program, so seemed a great fit for what I was already doing, to add the rest of the protocol to what we were already doing because one of the cornerstones of dementia prevention is to properly treat hormone deficiencies. And that, as anybody who does this knows, hormone deficiencies can be very challenging to treat.

 

So I felt well-positioned to manage that. But with all these treatments, though, any deficiency we find or any toxicity that we're treating, our goal is to make the environment in the brain better so that your body wants to make more neurons, more brain cells, healthier brain cells keep the brain cells we have and improve the connections between brain cells. But we can do all of that we want. But once you get the conditions better, you really need to also find ways to basically exercise the brain, the different brain systems, talking to each other, connecting and working in coordination with each other.

 

And that's what Guy is doing is so important with the bioelectric medicine.

 

So Guy share with us what it is that people will do when they come in. What are the protocols that you take with them as well?

 

Sure. We have a pretty expansive program, so I'm just going to kind of run through that quickly, just kind of a bit of an overview. So what we call our Cadillac modality is combination of neurofeedback and neural stimulation. So this is neural feedback. Is brain training. It's a learning paradigm. It helps the brain make the connections, make new synapses rewire itself. It really leverages neuroplasticity to help the brain rewire itself. Optimally, fantastic intervention. It is not necessarily the best intervention in this particular condition. It has its place, no feedback, the nerve stimulation.

 

And there's a whole category of neuromodulation. And that gets us into using what's called Photo biomodulation, which is using light to modulate the brain. We can use electrical current. So transcranial electrical stimulation to modulate the brain. We can use called frequency-specific microcurrent. Then there's a whole area that's developing neural meditation. And we have a device called the Muse, which helps a person to be able to take advantage of meditation, but use it in a very specific way. So we have many categories to choose from and putting together treatment plan for an individual that's what the whole intake and assessment process is to deliver them a treatment plan they will do.

 

We're talking about the low-hanging fruit. We have one of my favorite devices is called the Audiovisual Entrance. We refer to it as the AVE this uses blinking lights in the eyes, tones in the ears, and there are ear clips to do transcranial stimulation. And these can be used independently or altogether any combination. So it's one device with three modalities in it. They're very affordable about $600. We rent them so people can try them and find out if it works for them, if they like it, if they will do it because the technology might be fantastic, but it lives in a drawer and you never touch. It is not helpful.

 

...For you.

 

Exactly I'm all about compliance and helping people build it into a lifestyle in a way that what I aim for is kind of zero impact. Can a person do their audiovisual entrainment while they have their morning coffee? Something they're going to do anyway? In that sense, they're doing something very good for their brain. But it isn't another thing into an already busy and stressful day. So I really work with my clients to try and do create that situation. So compliance goes up, because when compliance goes up, results go up.

 

It's a simple equation. So I do visual entrainment, like I call it the toothbrush for the brain. I say to my clients is like, look, you brush your teeth at least once a day, hopefully twice a day. You brush your teeth as long as you want to have tea. And when you're done with having tea, stop brushing them. Same thing with the brain. You should do the AVE every day, twice a day is better, but at least once a day for as long as you want your brain.

 

We don't want to think about it like a pharmaceutical that you're taking, and you'd like to get away from. All of these modalities are really additive to our well-being, and they should be considered lifestyle.

 

Why is it so effective? I mean, what is it about what you're doing and having the blinking lights and the soft sounds? And that what is it actually doing to the brain?

 

There's a lot of fancies. We can talk about the neurophysiology and whatnot, but I want to start with just the basic so audiovisual entrainment. No matter what protocol you do, it increases cerebral blood flow, so more nutrients in more waste products out. And that's just better for the brain. It's like exercise is for muscles, only for the brain. It increases what we call synchrony. And synchrony is just larger pools of neurons available to do work when needed. Synchrony is a good thing from a brain function standpoint, and the other one is timing.

 

So there's a timing mechanism in the brain called the thalamic cortical loop. I think of it as the conductor for the orchestra. It's just keeping everybody moving along. Everybody's got their job to do. And they're all experts. But somebody has to coordinate that. And that's the thalamus. And when the thalamus in the cortex get out of sync, anything can be off, not just cognition, but hormones can be off. Your temperature regulation can be off. Your digestion can be off because the brain has its fingers in everything.

 

The audiovisual entrainment treats these three core functions of the brain. But then we can get specific. If a person is maybe a little deficient in Alpha in the frontal part of the brain just comes along with frontal dementia. We can increase the amount of Alpha in that region, so we can do some specific neurophysiological treatments to tweak the brain in directions that we want from a functional standpoint. So it's a fairly sophisticated device, but even in its most basic form, it does those three things.

 

And I think we're learning more and more. We want to keep our brain as active as possible. So this makes sense. This is part of exercising the brain of keeping it active, being able to keep those synapses, creating more synapses for ourselves as well. For people who want to learn more. And if they want to reserve their spot at the Functional Health Forum, you can visit MinnesotaBrainHealthClinic.com or call (952) 222-7960. Well, thank you both for being with us today. I sure appreciate your time and sharing with us the exciting news that you have coming out of the Minnesota Brain Health Clinic.

 

So thank you for being with us.

 

Thank you so much.

 

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