Beat Brain Fog with Functional Medicine

Hey everybody, Duncan McDonald here, and we're gonna get started here in just a sec. So, I have done many a webinar, however, this is my first time using this particular software. As Dr. Dan Kalish and the Kalish Institute was nice enough to invite me to come talk on a subject that's very near and dear to my heart. But if you guys wouldn't mind, if somebody would type into the chat box, "Can you hear me and see me?" Just want to make sure that I'm not talking to a blank computer screen here.

And it looks like we still have some people showing up as well. I can see more people showing up. So, if, if, if you guys can hear me all right, if someone would please just type into the chat box that they can hear me, that would be great. Yes, okay, cool, awesome. Looks like, looks like we're fine. Okay, I was actually looking at the wrong chat box. Oh, there may be a few little awkward moments as I figure out this software, but as long as you can see me and hear me, we should be all good. I'm a little bit in like a cat in a sweater with this particular software.

Okay, so I want to welcome everybody and I want to thank you for taking time out of your, out of your evening. Maybe just got off work if you're here on the West Coast, or you know, might be after dinner for you if you're on the East Coast. But I really appreciate it. Our goals for today is, I really want to introduce you to how functional medicine can get to the root of brain-related issues like brain fog, for instance. But this could also equally apply to, you know, cognitive decline or memory issues or almost, almost any brain-related issue. And once again, with functional medicine, we're always looking for the why. Like, what is it the root of the problem?

So let me get this little slideshow going here, and I'll probably turn my camera on and off at different times. I don't want to like block all the slides and everything, but let's, uh, let's just get this started here. And if you have any questions as we're going along, just feel free to, you know, tap them into the, the chat box or the question box. And I'm aiming to talk for only like thirty-five minutes or something. I don't want to totally overwhelm you guys with too much detail, but if questions come up as, as I'm talking, feel free to type them in and then we'll get to them as we, at the end here, when we have a Q&A period.

Okay, so here I am, as you can probably see. So my name is Duncan MacDonald, and I'm a licensed acupuncturist and a certified functional medicine practitioner. And I am now a senior faculty member at the Kalish Institute for Functional Medicine. So I have, kind of the, you know, the honor of taking a lot of this information that I've learned from, from Dr. Dan Kalish and helped to train the next generation of doctors to, to stop thinking just about symptoms, but to really look at what the, the root of, of our health issues are. And, you know, I would say also that I've been in practice for twenty years now, which seems crazy to me. And it was, and I've been in practice in San Francisco, practicing both functional medicine and Chinese medicine. It was about eight years ago that my own health crisis actually had me kind of circle around and engaged with Dr. Kalish and his, his training in order to help me figure out what was happening with me. And I'm gonna use myself as a little bit of a case study as we go on here, a little, so you can see what I'm talking about. But I'm also going to show you a couple other case studies that are, are really interesting and really point out just how profound some of these underlying causes of brain fog or cognitive dysfunction can be. And also, just let you know, for everybody who is on the line now, or maybe you're listening to this as a replay, I do have a little bit of an offer that I'm going to give you guys at the end here.

So, for some of you, you may be new to functional medicine. You may be new to systems-based medicines like Chinese medicine or Ayurvedic medicine. And the way that we differentiate these is that functional medicine is really a root cause medicine. So in Chinese medicine, we have this principle called root and branch. And that basically means that we always want to find the root of the problem, the underlying sort of driving factor that's causing a physiological imbalance. And then the branches are like all the little symptoms that can show up. And, you know, this is why, for instance, there is no one answer for brain fog. I am gonna go over, and actually, I made a little handout for you guys. And it looks like there is a section here where you can download it. But if we have trouble with that, I'll make sure to get it to you. But there are a lot of lifestyle things that we can do to help our body heal from brain fog. But if we don't, if we don't find that underlying physiological reason, then, you know, you're really just kind of like putting your finger in the dam all over the place.

So functional medicine is a systems-based medicine. In functional medicine, we test, we don't guess. So, you know, I'll have patients come into the clinic all the time who may appear as though they have the same problems. Like, "Yes, I have a brain fog issue," or "My memory is getting much more poor in the last year, and I don't really understand why." And when we run the labs that are necessary, we often find that those people have dramatically different issues underlying their problem. It's just that the, the branches, those symptoms, ended up looking the same. So we test, we don't guess. And that testing, that getting to the root cause of the physiology, of the pathophysiology, is what allows us to be corrective in the medicine. So, you know, once you take care of that root cause of the problem, the symptoms often take care of themselves. Now, we do have a lot of tools to help with symptoms, and obviously symptomatic relief is something that's, you know, super important for all patients. You know, and I certainly don't want anybody suffering from, from symptoms of brain fog. But it's correcting that root problem, and that will often allow the brain to restore its normal function.

Another tenant of the type of medicine we're practicing is that it's natural and safe. So, you know, I guess the "do no harm" is something that we take very seriously in functional medicine. And the last thing I'll say is that for my particular practice, which is called Origins Medicine in San Francisco, and I'll give you guys my info in a little bit here, you know, Chinese medicine and functional medicine are both systems-based approaches. We're looking at body systems, how do we test and correct the systems so that the whole physiology is working together? And if, you know, if these, if these really advanced lab tests that we have today, if they'd existed five hundred years ago, then they probably would have just been part of Chinese medicine. You know, so it's, it's almost like this functional medicine movement is coming along at the perfect time to be that bridge between all of this incredible knowledge and lifestyle knowledge that was developed through thousands of years of traditional medicines, and then blending that same strategy with this incredible cutting-edge lab testing and, and really time-tested protocols that we, for, for reestablishing health.

So, you know, just, dude, there's always these scary slides, right? In every single presentation. I'm not trying to, to, you know, scare anybody. But we are seeing increased cognitive problems in actually all age brackets. You know, ten percent of Americans over the age of sixty-five have Alzheimer's. But that is rising at a really disturbing rate. And by 2025, it's predicted to be almost up around forty-four percent, which, you know, is really scary. However, we are, as a population, living sort of more and more out of sync with our biological rhythms. There's been a lot of talk about how Alzheimer's is almost a new expression, perhaps, of diabetes or situations where our body is getting so hormonally dysregulated that its own blood sugar is starting to damage the tissue. So this is going to obviously be an incredible burden on our healthcare system as a whole. So this is something that we have to figure out. And it's something that was very near and dear to me and really kind of freaked me out a few years ago, you know, about eight years ago when I met Dr. Kalish. And it's been, it's been a real interesting journey since then.

So, one of the other things I'm gonna say here, just as a little aside, and, you know, it may, y'all, well, as long as, as long as the camera is okay and it's not bugging you guys, and I'm not taking up a room and you can't see the slides or something, then I'll, uh, I'll keep it on for a few minutes. But if my camera is like getting in the way, just type it in to let me know. Yeah.

So let's, uh, let's move on here. So the systems-based approach to medicine means that we're going to be looking at all the systems of the body, right? We're gonna be looking at the neuroendocrine function, like the stress response of the body, how hormones like cortisol and DHEA are functioning. You know, we have this ancient biology that really has existed for millions of years, and probably was great for almost all that time because something really stressful would come along, and these hormones would surge, and we would either survive and live another day, and the physiology would return to normal, or we wouldn't. And other problems, I guess. Well, in that case, I guess the problem would be solved. So we're not really lined up with our day-to-day life that we have now for this sort of, you know, our biology is out of line with the way that we live.

And, you know, any of the systems of the body, whether it's the stress hormones, whether it's something going on with the gut, there's a lot of talk now about this gut-brain axis, and we're learning more and more about the connection between our brain and what's happening in our gut. And this is via some of the neurotransmitters, it's via some of the other things that affect the nervous system, like the vagus nerve. There's all these, there's all these incredible interconnections. And this is something Chinese medicine always recognized, but we're really learning how to test and measure these things now. And when we correct for them, it can make a profound difference.

And so, you know, the brain is just completely related to our overall health. Like, you know, let's say one of you guys was maybe we set up an initial appointment after you saw this and you're interested in figuring things out. And maybe you're just having brain fog all day long. You're worried about being able to, you know, you're worried about being able to engage with your family. You feel like you're not performing in your work. Maybe you feel like you're not living the kind of life in your retirement that you would, that you would like to be living. Anyway, when, when you would come to me, I would absolutely be looking to sort out what is happening with the cognitive issues and the brain fog. But the only way I can do that is by creating a healthier version of you. And the only way I can create a healthier version of you is by testing and correcting the root causes of what's happening. So the brain and our, maybe our muddled thinking or our poor memory, that's just an example that, that something is happening with our overall physiology that needs to become, that needs to be addressed.

And, you know, the problem is becoming worse, as we saw in that scary previous slide, because basically the population as a whole, although we are living longer, basically we are becoming, you know, more chronically ill. And this is just a massive burden on both our healthcare system and just a massive burden on our happiness. You know, like we don't want to work our whole lives to then retire into some kind of hazy sort of cognitive picture that just doesn't, I think, sound appealing to anybody. And I think that's probably why a lot of you guys are on the call right now. So functional medicine and the protocols therein can help at any stage of this type of cognitive issue because we're really looking at the person as a whole organism. Get the organism healthier, the brain will naturally become healthier as well.

Okay, so what do I mean by body systems? Okay, now this is one of the areas where I have to give Dr. Dan Kalish the props that he deserves. For many of you who are on this call, you have probably been to functional medicine doctors before. You've probably been reading a lot of blogs. Most functional medicine patients that come in my door tend to be a pretty educated population. They tend to be really diving into the information that's out there, and that's great. But it also causes a kind of large and potentially very confusing situation, right? We read that vitamin C is good for this, so no, no, don't take too much vitamin C. Or, you know, vitamin D seems to protect against cancer, and then the next thing you know, they're telling you vitamin D might cause cancer. And how do we sort all this? How do we sort through all this noise? We're getting to a point technology-wise where we have such incredible ability to test biomarkers, but there's also so many biomarkers that if you just keep testing everything, what are you gonna do with it? What is the, what is the clinical plan?

And one of the things that Doctor Kalish did that I think is just a phenomenal sort of step forward in this medicine was to actually create a logical systems-based approach to address, to diagnose and address, you know, any type of health issue. And so when we're talking about these body systems, we're talking about, let's see here. I'm going to try this fancy little drawing tool. See if I can draw in here. Oh, no, that didn't work. Okay, never mind. Okay, well, I guess I'm not going to draw on it. But anyway, right here we see our brain, right? And the different aspects of things that can affect the brain, which is our adrenal health, which is the function of our stress response and the stress hormones. The balance of the neurotransmitters in the brain. The brain requires energy. Cell of your body, energy production has to be proper for us to have clear thinking. In the situation with women, female sex hormones are also very important for brain health. And I'll say that, actually, you know, I probably should have changed this slide a little bit. Male sexual hormones are also pretty critical in order for us to have clear cognitive thinking.

So we've always looked at this overall, this overall sort of neurotransmitter and adrenal picture first. The stress response to the body, like it sits at the apex of our health. So we always need to test and correct the stress response. If the stress response is functioning properly, then it can help stabilize things below it. But if that capstone of the stress hormones is not tested and corrected, then nothing else below it will ever permanently fix itself. It's just bandages at that point. So we look at this, and we also check the gut. And we're looking for infections in the gut, which is so prevalent. It's, it's really unbelievable. And this is, this is an area that's getting a lot of attention now because we're starting to identify that a lot of these infections that don't seem to have any gastrointestinal symptoms have profound effects on inflammation in the body, on immune function, and autoimmunity. You know, there's, there's all of these connections between a balanced gut biome and proper cognitive health. I mean, it's really, the amount of information that's coming in is huge. But one of the things that we always want to do is look for any type of sort of bad infection in the gut and correct that. Because all those infections are, is they are just little vampires that are sitting, sucking sort of energy off of us, causing inflammation, and driving an improper cortisol response.

And then finally, we want to test for, basically, test the liver for toxicity or toxin issues. And, you know, we hear about this kind of stuff often, you know, with twenty-twenty hindsight about how, you know, very common toxins like lead and, and other things that get into our food and water supply have, have really profound negative effects on our cognition and can cause brain fog. So if we were to ignore any of these body systems, it would be to our detriment. There is nothing worse in the world than, well, I mean, there are worse things in the world, but it's extremely frustrating to work with a patient for six months or something, you know, working on their, their adrenal health, trying to restore proper function there, and maybe they're just not getting as better as I would expect. And then finally, we run a GI pathogen test on their gut. And, you know, lo and behold, they have Blastocystis hominis, or they have some other type of infection that's been sitting there, irritating the stress hormones the entire time that we've been trying to restore them. Same thing can happen with toxicity issues of the liver. So we always want to, as best we can, test all three of these body systems so that we get a complete picture of what's happening in this person's health. Because we see here, you know, there will be stress, and that will lead to inflammation, which will eventually overwhelm these body systems.

Now, the last thing I want to say on this, this slide, and I know I'm talking a little fast, I'm just trying to get all this information to you guys. But when we talk about stress, we're not just talking about emotional stress. You know, we're not just talking about, you know, a fight with your spouse, or, you know, a toxic relationship, or a toxic job situation that's given, you know, fulfillment. We're talking about what's called the allostatic stress load. And this means all the stressors, the ones that we're aware of, and the ones that we're not aware of, that are affecting the body at any given time. And I like to think of this when I explain this to patients, I usually sort of explain it that the allostatic stress load is almost like a bucket. And the body has a capacity to sort of take all these stressors into the bucket. But once that bucket is full, it's full. And you may have a couple of gut infections that are driving inflammation in the body and causing brain fog, and they may be taking up two-thirds of that bucket. And that leads you with just one-third with which you can, you know, you can try to, to deal with your day-to-day life.

And so as these stressors build up, especially these hidden ones, you know, sometimes as functional medicine doctors, we'll be referred to as sort of health detectives because what we're doing is we're looking for the hidden stressors. Now, there's a lot of things with lifestyle, like meditation, and, you know, management of your relationships, working with therapists, other things that can, can be done to really, really help your emotional stress. But I really want to just get across that we are only ever cognizant of a small amount of the stressors that are affecting us at any given time. And so it's finding those hidden stressors and correcting them that's what creates resilience within that, that allostatic stress response and allows us to, you know, live a more engaged and happy life.

So, and here's another idea of that allostatic stress load, right? We have emotional stress over here, which is what all of us think about when we think of stress. That's, you know, and this can be enough to completely drive the train off the rails, like a bad divorce, or toxic relationship, or death in the family. You know, all of these things are profound, and sometimes we never feel the same again on the other side of them. And those unrelenting, unresolved stressors will absolutely dysregulate those stress hormones that are, that capstone to the rest of our health. And once that, those stress hormones are disrupted, then the body is open to all kinds of inflammatory issues, and brain fog is just one of, one of the expressions.

Dietary stress, I also put on here because dietary stress is interesting. You know, obviously, we're living in a more convenience-driven kind of world. We're all looking to hopefully nourish ourselves, but in the quickest amount of time that we can. And unfortunately, food is becoming more and more processed. And I'm not telling you anything that you don't know here. But, but the one thing that I want to stress is that that is one of the places where we absolutely can take a meaningful sort of role in that stress and how much room it's taking up in our allostatic stress bucket. So by cleaning up our diet and getting rid of, you know, all the processed food and coming back to a healthy diet, that's one of the, like, from a lifestyle standpoint, I wish I just, you know, I wish every patient would, would hear those words. And, you know, we all deserve to have a little treat from time to time, but it's more about what we're doing with the majority of the time.

Okay, so here we go. Case study number one. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where I can really show you guys what I'm talking about here. Okay, so I've got an eight-year-old son, just one child, new year old boy. And, uh, you know, he was, when he was born eight years ago, I was kind of a wreck. Early parenting was very difficult for me. I'm not gonna lie. It was not a stress-free period of time. It's, you know, difficult on our relationships. He was not a great sleeper. I was getting very little sleep. I couldn't take that much time off of my practice. I had to be at work. There was a lot of emotional stress. But for some reason, you know, even though my son had started to sleep pretty well, I just was not doing well. Like I was having a real hard time having the focus that's necessary to provide good care to my patients. I was having a terrible time sleeping. I would, I would wake up literally, like I could look at my watch, and it would be like 3:02 AM, and doink, my eyes would open. And every single night, and I would be alert and unable to go back to sleep until about 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning, when all of a sudden I would get really tired again. But then, you know, I would have to get up just an hour later. You know, and, and this was happening so cyclically. It, you know, there was clearly some physiological issue that was underlying this. And I was just super tired. I mean, nothing sounded good to me. I dropped all my hobbies. I had put on some weight. I wasn't exercising anymore. And I was staring down, you know, this new brand-new baby and wanting to be the father that I wanted to be. And nothing I was doing was, was helping. And I was getting incredibly frustrated. And this was when I started looking at functional medicine as an addition to my practice because I knew that something was off. I just didn't know how to measure it and how to discover it. And that's when I first started studying with Dr. Kalish.

And back then, so first of all, let's talk about real quickly about cortisol because once again, capstone, right? This is up at the top of our health. If this is not okay, nothing is going to be okay. So cortisol, right? Produced by the adrenal glands. And cortisol is a glucocorticoid. So gluco, meaning sugar. So it, along with insulin, helps balance our blood sugar. Cortisol will also free up sugar to get us out of, to give us energy to get out of, like a dangerous situation. But cortisol has many other functions. It's a corticosteroid. So cortisol is like cortisone, like they would shoot into your elbow or something at the doctor's because you had tennis elbow or something. It is the primary hormone by which our body manages inflammation. And this is absolutely true of the brain as well, and our ability to think. So in terms of brain-related issues like brain fog, cortisol is almost, it is our, our hormone of alertness and our hormone of connectedness. It governs our mood and our energy level. The body likes to blast cortisol out in the morning. That's what, like, opens our eyes and wakes us up, you know, and hopefully without the need for multiple cups of coffee. And then cortisol should drop down and be really, really low in the evening, and melatonin comes up, and we're tired. And that's what creates our circadian rhythm. Cortisol is directly connected to the body's ability to sort of manage its memory and alertness. So it's pretty critical. And when it, when it goes, we just, we suddenly become like a cluster of syndromes. You know, we'll go to the doctor and say, "Oh, I feel tired, and I have shoulder pain, but then my hip also hurts, and my knees aren't feeling good when I try to exercise. I'm getting super tired at 3:00 in the afternoon and craving sugar. But then I'm waking up hot and sweaty at 3:02 AM every single night, and no sleeping pill or anything else seems to make any kind of difference." And the doctor just kind of shrugs his shoulders, right? And says, "Well, you might have chronic fatigue syndrome, or you may, you know, have fibromyalgia, or, or any one of these syndromes, right?" Because they're not looking more at a deeper level. And that's, that's the difference between functional medicine testing and standard conventional medicine testing. And this is an important distinction, I think.

So conventional medicine is testing for disease states. Like, if they were running a test on cortisol, for instance, they are looking for whether you have like Addison's or Cushing's disease, these huge, like, sort of fundamental problems with the hormones. They're not looking at the function of the body, how well the body functions at different levels of those hormones. So, you know, your blood sugar can be bouncing up and down within the normal range, and it would not test weird on a standard lab test. However, that bouncing around of blood sugar is extremely stressful on the body because it requires cortisol to manage it. And so, once again, we'll see that reflected sometimes on our cortisol labs. So there's just, there's just like a difference between the types of testing. And this is why when you go for your standard physical, you know, getting that blood work done, understanding where some of your basic biomarkers are is super helpful and fundamental to, to the practice of any type of medicine. But what we're doing here is just something a little bit different in terms of of sleuthing out these problems.

Okay, so what we're seeing here was my adrenal test. And what we're testing here is cortisol, and we're also testing a hormone called DHEA. And as you'll see, there are results for the morning, noon, afternoon, and nighttime. And this is because you have to take multiple samples that are done in, it's a salivary test. You just kind of like spit into this little test tube, and then you wrap it all up and send it to the lab. And the reason we use saliva and not blood is, A, doing for blood tests would probably be super stressful moving day. I don't think you could, I think you can do that without affecting the results. But also, we're testing what's called free cortisol, which means we're looking for the cortisol that is not yet bound to a protein, like in the blood, because that is the cortisol that is biologically active. That's what we're testing for. And you can do it via saliva, you can also do it with urine, is another decent way to test for it. But saliva is just pretty easy and usually gives us the info that we need. And on this graph here, we see sort of the upper and lower reference ranges, and then we see me kind of coming in on this orange line in the middle. And so, whoops. When we look at these tests, what we want to understand is that we, people feel their best. Cortisol is like a Goldilocks hormone. People feel their best when they're up towards the higher end of the reference ranges. So, you know, I was waking up at a twenty-two point three, like I was waking up decently alert. But then you see that I plummet, and I'm basically scraping the bottom of the barrel of the normal reference range for the rest of the day. And this was my experience. I would wake up and be like, "Okay, all right, I think I can think I can handle this parenting thing. I think I can probably, you know, get into work and, and see my patients and hopefully make a difference." And then by noon, I basically had the cortisol levels with someone who is asleep. So my brain fog was just constant, just unrelenting. I would have a tiny window in the morning where it would clear, but then it was just constant. And this is a, you know, this can be a scary situation. And one of the things that's so wonderful about doing these types of tests is that we have protocols that are extremely reliable for retraining the body's ability to normalize this cortisol output. You know, when cortisol is low like this, and we have this brain fog, it also comes with just like depression and a feeling of not being connected, a feeling of not caring. I sometimes tell patients that, that this kind of picture, it's almost like even going out to dinner with friends seems like a pain in the ass, you know, like, like nothing, nothing is fun in this situation. And if we can pull that cortisol back up to the normal levels, then, you know, our brain starts to fire again. I sometimes tell patients that it's almost like turning the lights back on in the brain. And my lights had been really dimmed. There was a dimmer switch. It was like almost as dim as it could be.

After about, however, well, we always have to ask ourselves is why, why, why, why now? New parenting, that's stressful. So I had that going on. But I had also noticed that I was, for about a year or two prior, even to my son being born, I was having this stomach discomfort. And it would usually happen, you know, if I went on vacation to Mexico or something, you know, after a couple of days, I would be really uncomfortable, bad heartburn, inability to sleep because I'd get really bloated. And I would have to almost like take a vacation from my vacation. And like, you know, no more Coronas, please. Like, no more tacos. Like, I need to just like fast in order to reset myself. But, and I also developed this like rosacea skin issue on my face that I had never had before. And the doctors just wanted to treat it with cortisone cream, right? Cortisone is a type of metabolized cortisol. So my body was not making enough to manage inflammation, and therefore it was showing up as severe brain fog, and then also this skin issue. And the skin is just really interesting because it's just a big organ that we can look at, right? So, so whenever we see inflammatory issues of the skin, you can be pretty sure that it's not just the skin that's flamed.

So I got these results back, and I absolutely knew that something was wrong. Sorry about that. I am, like I said, I'm trying to figure out some of this new software. But we had to go deeper. We had to figure out what was going on. So then we ran what's called a GI pathogen screening. Like I said, testing our second body system, the digestive tract, looking for infections. And most things were negative here until we got down here to H. pylori, and that was positive. And H. pylori is, it's what causes ulcers, actually. There was this famous scientist who won the Nobel Prize for medicine by chugging a like a thing of H. pylori to prove that he could cause ulcers, and then he cured himself with antibiotics. So I had this infection that was sitting there, driving inflammation in my body, and it was taking up room in that stress bucket, and I just did not have the room within that bucket to be a father and enjoy my life. So right there, we see a big cause of inflammation, and we know that's something that we need to take care of.

Then we ran what's called an organic acids test. And this is the test that we use to look at, like, a lot of health markers of the body, but really the detox systems of the body. But we can also measure the brain chemistry. And this is what is super relevant to our discussion today, is this ability to measure neurotransmitters. Because if we're going to get a glimpse into the brain and measure neurotransmitter activity, we have kind of two options. We can do a spinal tap and draw a cerebral spinal fluid and measure dopamine and serotonin through there, although that sounds pretty terrible. Or all of these neurotransmitters are recycled in the liver, and when they're recycled, the body will kick off these organic acids into the urine. And by measuring these acids, we can see what's happening with the brain. So I was having this incredibly hard time sleeping. And when we look at these markers, so marker number twenty-two here and twenty-three, these are our markers, man, oh man, too late in, uh, man, too late. These are our markers for dopamine. And dopamine is like our feel-good neurotransmitter. It's the neurotransmitter that gives us reward and makes us feel connected to parenting, or allows us to get pleasure when we watch a movie, or these other things. And my body was just really struggling with, you know, on one hand, the van, oh, man, the late was low. On the other hand, marker twenty-three was high. And then very interestingly, marker number twenty-four, five hydroxy, and alas, at eight, that is the marker for serotonin. And serotonin is just completely linked to our ability to sleep. Serotonin and melatonin share a pathway. And this was looked like the turnover that was happening in my brain because of, you know, both the infection and the stress I was under, my body was, was turning over serotonin at a rate that was actually above the detectable limits of the test. And that's not good. Like, in order to have normal serotonin function, my body needed massive amounts of the precursors for serotonin that I was not supplying it. And so there's this connection between the stress response and the stress hormones and the stress response in the brain and our neurotransmitters, and they just kind of feed on each other. So I had this inflamed and poor cortisol and hormonal picture, and then I had this just agitated brain response because of it. My body, it could not figure out how to relax, how to restore it, how to sleep. And there's, there's a lot of other really important ways in which the gut infection also threw off these brain markers, which I'm not going to get into right now because it's, it could take up a whole lecture on its own.

The other thing, if we look down here at marker number twenty-eight, that is a marker for oxidative damage in the body. And that is being inflamed, and that's not a great thing to have. This oxidative damage, marker twenty-eight and twenty-nine, they are actually measuring the breakdown products of our DNA, you know, and so these markers are incredibly important to have within range for future health. You know, this is probably the big guys that determine degenerative health issues like, you know, dementia, Alzheimer's, stuff in the future. And that raging gut infection that I had of the H. pylori was inflaming my whole body and driving this oxidative stress picture. So this just created this whole situation where, you know, I needed a protocol that was going to prop up and restore proper cortisol function. Cortisol also manages our immune function in the gut. So we needed to support that. Then I needed to do a protocol to get rid of this H. pylori infection. And, you know, you can use antibiotics to get rid of some of these infections. But a lot of them have a weird cystic phase where they will go dormant in the gut lining tissue and almost like capsulate within the tissue. And so it's kind of better sometimes to use some of these more botanical-based approaches. They take longer, but they go through multiple life cycles of the bug, which, you know, I think you can understand why that would be pretty relevant. And I'm not going to belabor this, but, but when it comes to brain fog and cognition in general, you know, if our brain cells are not producing adequate energy within the cell, then we are not going to have adequate cognition or brain health. This is one of the other things that we measure with this organics test. Is it gives us a deep dive into what's happening at every stage of energy production. And as you can see on my test, I had, you know, seven, eight, nine, all were down on this low side. A thirteen was below detectable limits of the test. Like, you know, my physiology was not doing great. And once, once I did a proper adrenal protocol and got my hormones sorted, got rid of that infection, which was driving a bad stress response, and gave my body the precursors that it needed, it was seriously like turning the lights back on in my head. Like I felt like I was restored back to, like, my factory default settings, pre-child. You know, and I don't know, I almost wish I could just do this with every single new parent. You know, it's like, we go through these incredible stressful periods of time, and then they come to an end because perhaps your child is born, or a divorce ends, or something. And then everybody just thinks you're gonna go back to normal. But that's just not the way stress physiology works. And we can have profound brain fog, profound memory issues, profound, you know, just feel like a wet blanket is over our head. And unless we can take care of those things that are sapping our stress response, that's, that's basically what happens.

This is measuring my liver detox markers. And I'm not a huge drinker. However, when the body is inflamed, then there are a lot of inflammatory toxic byproducts from these infections that go on to the liver. And so, you know, I had some detox work that I had to do in order to restore myself as well.

Okay, so we're forty-five minutes in, and I've been really yapping at you guys. So I'm gonna kind of start to wrap this up. Once again, I wanted to thank Dan Kalish and the Kalish Institute. It's been wonderful working with DES, and I'm super excited to now be teaching at the Kalish Institute. I wanted to extend a little bit of an offer to people who are here on the call. If you are struggling and you've been trying to figure this stuff out but not really having success, and if you would like to work with me, I think we have five or six openings in, in the clinic for new patients. And that can be done via telemedicine, or if you're in San Francisco or in the Bay Area in California, you can come to me and see me face to face. But either works just fine. And so for people who maybe are watching this now or watch the rebroadcast of it, as long as I have open slots on my monthly schedule, if you just mention that you came to this webinar, I'm gonna give you $50 off of your initial consult.

Okay, there was one more thing I wanted to show you guys. Okay, so let me turn my little camera off here. So this is available as a download for you guys here. And there should be, there should be an area here where you can download a handout. I actually uploaded a different version of this. And this is gonna lead you through some lifestyle things that you can do to help create room in that bucket, in that allostatic stress load. How can we take pressure off of it? The programs that we do and the restoring of these systems is critical, but let us never forget that lifestyle is the strongest medicine that there is. And I can help put you back together, and I can help steer that ship back onto course, but it's through proper management of our lifestyle that we keep it there. Through things like eating right, proper exercise, proper connection and love to people who are around us, you know, meditation and spiritual practices. All of these things are, are incredibly important. And there's actually a lot of really strong research on, you know, the ability for these to help us cognitively and actually to repair damaged brain cells through the secretion of this, this growth factor called BDNF, which I'm not to get into right now. But, you know, these have truly profound effects at restoring proper brain health.

Okay, the last thing I wanted to show you guys, just real fast here, is I had a patient come to me a couple of weeks ago, and we ran some labs. And his chief complaint was basically brain fog, an inability for him to focus, and he was worried that he was going to lose his job. He was a high, very sort of upper-ranking computer programmer here in Silicon Valley, and very complex programming challenges that needed to be engineered. And he could not, he could barely string a sentence together. He had been on an antidepressant for a number of years, but he was getting more and more tired, and he would sleep like sixteen hours a day. So he weaned himself off of the antidepressant, and then this just profound brain fog plus kind of anxiety ensued. And I just, you know, I showed you my labs because I wanted you to get a sense of, of what some not great labs can look like. But for this guy, you know, we look at his some cortisol. And I like to see patients up, you know, forty-two is the upper end. People feel really good when they're thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, something up around there. Like something that is close to our upper range, that's where we feel engaged, we manage inflammation, we are, we have cleared thinking, we have good mood. This guy's some cortisol was twelve. So, you know, he was coming in really, really low. And his readings during the day were practically like he was asleep. I mean, this blue line here is him, and these X's and diamonds for the upper and lower reference ranges. He was, for all intents and purposes, he was asleep. And then his cortisol was always rising at night, and he would wake up with his heart beating at about 2:00 AM every single night, with this heart beating, like, sweaty, wake up, agitated. And, you know, it was pretty obvious that we were gonna have to do something about this if we were gonna repair his thinking and his cognition.

But then we went looking for what could be wrong. And so this, this test, this GI Map test by Diagnostic Solutions, it's called a PCR test, which means for measuring genetic material of these infections. So almost like a crime scene, it's like crime scene technology, right? We're looking for the villains. And as we get down here, so he had some norovirus, I guess he, it had a little bit of the stomach flu. But it was when we got down here and we saw that his normal gut biome was just all over the place, like just not good. But then we have to ask ourselves, well, what's disrupting the bio? And then we come under opportunistic infections, and Balantidium, and Enterococcus, and Streptococcus, Klebsiella, Proteus. This poor guy has just almost every infection under the sun, you know. We came and we measured his secretory IgA, which is like the immune barrier of the gut. It was really, really low because it had been beaten on by these infections. So a big part of the work that we were gonna have to do with him is support his stress hormones, but restore this proper function of the gut. Otherwise, there's really no way that he's going to get better.

So anyway, I know that I talked longer than I said I would, and I apologize for that. If, and Cherie, I see that you don't see the diagram. I'm, I'm, I really have to apologize. I'm not super familiar with this particular, with this particular system. But I'll make sure that we, we email that document out to all of our attendees because it does have some really good lifestyle information on there that is stuff that you can do right now to, you know, start to heal your brain and feel better and get out of this brain fog. And I'm going to open it up for questions right now. If anybody has any questions that they want answered by me right now, in these few minutes, we'll sort of open it up there. And I know I blasted you guys with so much information that you might not even know where to start with your questions. But anyway, you can reach me at originsmedicine.com. Once again, that's www.originsmedicine.com. You can also get hold of me through the Kalish Institute, and they can pass along, you know, any comments or questions you have to me. Definitely feel free to reach out. If any of you are looking to sort through all of this, and, you know, if you're looking to sort through this stuff and you want to work with somebody, I would be more than happy to work with you. And you can just book directly through my website and take advantage of that, that savings on an initial consult. Or you can also get hold of me through the Kalish Institute. So I hope this gave you guys some idea of the fact that brain fog is a symptom, and there can be many underlying root causes. And unless we sleuth out those root causes, there really is no way to properly heal the brain. Okay, so thank you very much. And just let me know if you have any questions or comments later. Okay, all right, you guys take care. You.