The Gut-Brain Connection: A Deep Dive with Dr. Corey Deacon

Today I'll be interviewing Dr. Cory Deacon, who's the co-founder and medical director of Nirvana Health in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He has a master's in neuroscience, a doctorate in natural medicine, and is a certified functional medicine practitioner. He also holds board certifications in neurofeedback, holistic health, and alternative medicine. Cory's work with traumatic brain injuries led him to working with the gut, a which we'll hear more about shortly. But before we get to the show, just a quick reminder that I would really appreciate your support on Patreon. You can find the link in the show notes or go to patreon.com, that's patreon.com/theperfectstool. And now on to the show.

Welcome, Corey.

Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Yeah, thanks so much, Lindsey. I'm excited to be on.

So let me start by just asking you what the connection is between traumatic head injuries or concussions and the gut.

Yeah, so great question. Very, very long answer to this question, but there's multiple connections between the brain and gut. There are very fast connections which are essentially a physical connection between the brain and the gut in terms of nerve fibers. So we have a nerve fiber that runs from the back of the neck down the left side of the neck, underneath of our diaphragm, and down into our gut. And it innervates actually on a lot of our other organs, but specifically we're going to talk about the gut. This is called the vagal nerve or the vagus nerve. There's two divisions of the vagus nerve, the dorsal and the ventral, and it actually regulates gut motility. It regulates what is secreted in the gut in terms of enzymes, in terms of our bile acids, in terms of stomach acid, and everything we need to kind of break down things in the gut so that they can be absorbed. The vagus nerve also plays a role in regulating the immune system, and so this is a very fast connection because it's electrical. So there's this, uh, this vagus nerve runs in an electrical fashion, and then we have a slower connection that is a neuropeptide connection. And this is basically a fancy term for really small hormones that come from the brain and feed down to the gut. And actually, two of these are the— my, my two favorite hormones in the entire body. One is called VIP I call it, uh, very important peptide. Mm-hmm. It actually stands for vasoactive intestinal polypeptide and it actually seals the gut up. So we've all heard of this phenomenon called leaky gut or if you look at the research, it's called gut permeability and it's basically when the cells of the gut open themselves up and this is even typically for the immune system to come in and deal with a problem within the gut. And because the gut is only one cell thick, it's very easy for the components to move from the gut into the bloodstream and into the immune system. And so this VIP is actually responsible for, for keeping those tight junctions sealed. So typically what you'll see, and you've seen a lot of research published now on this phenomenon of leaky gut triggered by a brain injury, and this happens because these peptide hormones get thrown off. And so all of a sudden you're gonna see The levels in blood of VIP drop very low and now the gut can't seal up properly. Alright, so this is a big, big problem. And the other hormone that's really big, I mean, there's a handful but I'm gonna just focus on these two. The other one is MSH. MSH stands for melanocyte stimulating hormone. It's the hormone that gets released when we have a sun exposure., and UV exposure penetrates the arterioles in the skin. And MSH is incredibly important for regulating the mucosal immune system. So all the mucous layers in our body, within our sinus cavity, our oral cavity, our entire gut tract, vaginal tract, and urinary tracts are all coated by mucosal immune system called— typically it's, it's driven by an antibody called IgA. Or immunoglobulin A, and this can be measured in saliva and in stool as secretory IgA. So this MSH, when it drops low from a head injury, will now cause, you know, typically a low response of the secretory IgA. Now we run the risk of overgrowing microbes that shouldn't be there, you know, dysbiotic microbes that, uh, that we don't want to be growing. So really, long story short, there are two connections between the brain and the gut. One is electrical and one is chemical. And this is how head injuries can drive problems within the gut.

Okay, so the last one you were talking about— tell me the name again.

MSH.

MSH.

And you said that has something to do with the sun?

It does. MSH is released when we're exposed to UV light.

Okay, so, so all this sunscreen, is that hurting our gut lining?

Sunscreen is hurting our gut lining, not, not just because the, the chemicals that are found within the sunscreen, but even just on a level of light, because we're not letting light penetrate our skin. And, you know, UVA light is now found to activate insulin, right? So what happens if our insulin's not activated? Well, now it can't, it can't join into the receptor properly and we get blood sugar regulation issues, right? Now we create stress on the pancreas. Now we can't break down things in the gut because our exocrine activity from the pancreas is low. So yeah, there's a big connection. And, and you're, you know, you're blocking ability to produce vitamin D, which regulates our, our mucosal immune system as well as this MSH, right? So yeah, you know, typically what I tell people is it's not the It's not necessarily the UV light that's bad. It's how we approach the sun. You know, we, we're not out in the sun during when it rises and getting this whole preparation process. It's like we just jump out there at 11 or 12 when the sun's at the highest, and yeah, you're gonna get burnt, right? You want to spend time in the sun around the times when the sun isn't the highest. Now typically we don't have that problem. I'm up in Canada right now and We do not have a sun exposure problem right now in terms of sunburn, but yeah, we need that proper sun exposure. So there, there is a big— and you know, it's really interesting, you look at the use of sunscreen and you're not— when you actually dig into the literature, you're not even seeing a reduction in skin cancer. Not really going at this— of melanoma.

Melanoma. But, but the other ones, like, I mean, I see my father, he's got— his arms are covered with, you know, the scars from basal cell carcinomas being burnt off. And I'm conscious of what's going on in the alternative health world saying, get your sun. But at the same time, I'm thinking I've got his genes and I'm gonna end up with, you know, arms covered with skin cancers if I don't watch it.

You gotta be, you have to be responsible with your exposure for sure. Yeah, for sure. So there is, you know, a guy who I love, you know, a lot of his translational research, Dr. Jack Kruse, he's a neurosurgeon. He talks a lot about this light exposure and really the biophysics of how that works. I know that's not really our topic for today, but there's a lot of complicated biophysics going on where we do have to be aware and conscious of our light exposure. And yes, we need sun. We don't want to burn, so we want to do it responsibly. So yeah, it's— in terms of the timing of the day that you're spending in the sun is very important. If you're prone to burning, and you're consistently burning, it's a big problem.

Right. So in other words, go out, get a light tan, but don't let yourself burn.

You got it. Because it's also a big problem not getting in the sun.

Yeah.

And that's actually a risk factor for melanoma. I know a guy who— one of our patients of mine— who ended up getting melanoma on his chest. And since he was a kid, he always wore a shirt in the sun because his mom was terrified that he would get cancer. So he was always lathered in sunscreen and he always wore a shirt. His chest never saw the sun, yet he developed melanoma on his chest. So yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's important to be spending some time in that, in that sunlight. And if you look at the, the properties of MSH and what it does in the body, how it regulates cortisol, it regulates our sex hormones, it regulates our dopamine and our serotonin, you know, our mucosal gut immune system, it's really important. And you start lining up and seeing, okay, this is why a lack of sun exposure can cause all the problems it causes, including cancer.

So interesting. Okay, so back to our topic related to the brain and the gut. So tell me about electrogastrograms, or EEGs.

Yeah, so this is, this is something that I'm incredibly excited about. Electrogastrogram is a way to actually actually look at the function, the electrical function of the gut. So, you know, we work in— you know, I'm certified in functional medicine, and we're very adept at looking at stool testing and breath testing and certain urine tests and saliva tests to kind of look at the microbiome and look at the chemical, biochemical makeup, the microbial makeup of what's going on in the gut. What we don't look at is the electrical activity. And the, the gut, the brain, and actually every cell in our body is electrochemical, which means without an electrical, electrical current or voltage, it doesn't function. So we got this chemical side kind of locked down, and, and then what we're missing is this electrical side. You know, I see the same thing with, with people dealing with brain issues, and nobody's looking at the electrical function of the brain. You know, we're running MRIs, ETs and questionnaires and neurotransmitter testing, but I'm not seeing a big component of the electrical analysis. So what the electrogastrogram is, is it's similar to an ECG or an EKG that you would get on your heart where you're looking at how your heart's beating or how that electrical function, function is working. You'll do this, see the same thing with an EEG where you look at the electrical function of the brain. The EEG or the electrogastrogram is is electrical function of the gut. And so what you can do is you can put this electrical array over top of your gut, you can run it through an app on your, on your phone, and you can collect the data over a 24-hour period of time, marking down when you eat, what you're eating, and when you have a bowel movement. And so from that, we can actually look at, okay, how is this you know, how is this, this gut functioning? How is it moving things through the gut? And you'll start seeing interesting things in people that have IBS, that have inflammatory bowel disease. They may have gastric— GERD or reflux. They may have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, chronic parasites, or fungal problems. And what you'll notice is their EGG isn't smooth. It's not moving things in the proper rhythm. So the proper motor rhythm is about 0.05 Hz. So it's a very slow frequency and it's just slowly moving things through the gut. What you'll find is a lot of people, it's actually moving too slow throughout the entire tract. And so, you know, we tend to call this dysmotility or, or slowed gut motility.

Now we're talking about the speed of the villi moving things through the gut.

You got it. It's, it's called the migratory motor complex, right? It's the, it's the, it's the motor, the motor flexes essentially that are happening. It's like the, the muscle flexing that happens through that gut tract to move things along the cilia. Because of course, you know, different parts of the intestine are made for different things, right? Whether it's breaking things down, absorbing things, absorbing water. Like, the large intestine's main job is to absorb water, and then of course to make all sorts of our B vitamins and other things like that via our microbiome. So when you have the, the movement— when the movement gets disrupted, you get, you get into trouble. You will sometimes see where there's just little areas that are firing improperly, and sometimes you'll even see them firing the wrong direction. So we all know, we all for the most part have heard of acid reflux, where, or, you know, we get heartburn, right? And in a lot of times, this is acid coming back up the esophagus. This is actually able to happen all through the entire rest of the gut. It's just very hard to tell that it's happening because you don't get this very obvious symptom of burning in the chest and the throat. So you'll, you'll sometimes get that, yeah, this backwards movement. And then you're always prone to inflammation in that area because you get an overgrowth of dysbiotic organisms that drive inflammation, you know, and bacteria releasing lipopolysaccharides. Aggravating that immune system and actually even affecting our detoxification.

So with the EGG, can you then tell the difference between somebody who is low stomach acid versus high stomach acid? Because I know in the functional medicine world everybody seems to have low stomach acid, but in reality, yeah, sure, that's actually true.

Yeah. So in terms of— in terms of pH levels, you can't— you can't get an idea of whether there's a low or high pH because that is really determined based on your chemical composition or the acid composition. So for us, we typically do a stomach acid challenge. It's not the best because the gold standard is not to just take HCl and see if you get heartburn because there's other factors involved. If your mucosal immunity is low, you're going to feel that burning very easily and your acid may still be low. What I describe to people is it's similar to pulling a hot pan out of the oven with really thick, nice oven mitts. You pull that pan out, you can hold it for minutes without even hardly feeling the heat. Now take that same pan and pull it out with rubber gloves. The pan isn't any hotter, but it sure feels that way. And that's what happens when our mucus layer breaks down in our gut is now we feel the acid, right? And I know you're very up to date on this research is that a lot of people that have this heartburn problem, it actually isn't even a high stomach acid problem. High stomach acid is very rare. It only happens usually with high gastrin levels, which is the hormone that tells acid to be released, it's generally a low stomach acid problem allowing overgrowth of microbes.

So, so if you actually have Barrett's esophagus though, that would be indicative of the fact that you have high stomach acid, right?

Well, that, that isn't— that's indicative of a reflux problem, which is a phase reversal electrical problem up into the esophagus because the valve isn't closing properly. This— the, the sphincter, the esophageal sphincter isn't closing up properly. It's not getting the information to tell it to close, which is a muscle, an EMG, an electrical function. And then on top of that, you likely have low mucosal immunity as well. There's a very— there's a very high correlation between decreased mucus secretions and Barrett's esophagus because the mucus is what protects us, right? It's what protects us from that breakdown.

And how can you help that mucus?

The— well, there, I mean, there's lots of different supplements that can be taken if appropriate. Colostrum, glutamine helps produce secretory IgA, vitamin A. But typically when I'm seeing something like that, I'm looking at infections, I'm looking at SIBO, you know, H. pylori, and then I'm looking at how is the brain and how are the brain and the gut communicating on an electrical level. Okay, because a lot of, a lot of times you're gonna get this, what's called a phase reversal, where all of a sudden things are traveling backwards and, and muscle sphincters aren't tightening up as tight as they should be.

Yeah, let me back up just a sec and ask you about the HCl challenge test, because some people may not know what we're talking about, and I have done one, so I know.

But yeah, so with, yeah, with betaine HCl, It's a supplement that is, uh, essentially it's stomach acid. So you take a capsule before each meal in a day, and if you don't get any reactions, the next day you take 2 before each meal, and then 3, 4, and vice versa. And I tell people to go until they get a reaction or until they hit 5 capsules, which is, you know, generally it's around— if you're 500 milligrams a capsule, you're around 2,500 milligrams. If you're still not getting a reaction, it's pretty obvious that you have little stomach acid and you should keep that dose until you start getting a reaction in form of an acid or burning sensation. And you know what I'll find? They take less in the morning, more at lunch, and more at dinner. Other people need to take more in the morning, you know, less at lunch, and more at dinner. And it's just gonna— it's gonna fluctuate. So some people will find they need to take 2 in the morning, 3 at lunch and 2 in the evening with dinner. So that's, that's the stomach acid challenge. And if you have to take more than 1 or 2, you typically have quite low stomach acid, and you're gonna want to be replacing that stomach acid when you eat, because if you don't, you're not gonna break down your proteins properly, which causes them to inflame your gut. You're gonna get malabsorption and issues of your proteins, and you run the risk of having microbe or, you know, bacterial fungal overgrowth in that small intestine, which causes all sorts of problems. I just had a patient today came in who had small intestinal bacterial overgrowth that was contributing to her migraines. And so when we just worked with that, getting her gut under control, Her migraines went away. So it can have a profound effect on the body.

Okay. So we talked— you were talking about the EEG and how it could turn up well, and then, or in the case of reflux, it would turn up something showing the electrical signal going the wrong direction.

You got it.

And so what can you do about that?

So there's a few things you can do. You can actually, you can actually do neuro and biofeedback techniques to train nervous system to reorganize that signal. So neurofeedback, you know, this is something that's really interesting that I got involved with back in 2013. It's a process of retraining the brain through operant conditioning, which is essentially audio and visual feedback. And it allows us to look at, you know, functional disruptions in brainwave activity that can contribute to problems with anxiety, depression, epilepsy, sleep problems, pain, you know, fibromyalgia, ADD and ADHD. And it's really come a long way. It was actually developed in the '70s for epilepsy. And what, what they were actually doing in the '70s was inducing epilepsy in cats, and then they were training this rhythm called the sensory motor rhythm. We call it the SMR rhythm, that, that is kind of in the central part. If you, if you draw a line from your right ear over top of your head to your left ear, that's your, your central kind of somatic sensory motor cortex, and that's where this rhythm comes out of. And it actually goes and talks down to the top of the brainstem and the cerebellum to elicit motor movements, and this also includes motor movements within the gut. And so they were actually training this rhythm and it was, it was completely reversing epilepsy in cats. So it was then taken and transferred into neurofeedback and now it's, it's blown up into this whole, whole world of, of assessment and training. And so you can do the same thing with the gut. You can actually isolate the dysfunctional signal and train it to function better through operant conditioning. And you can do SMR techniques at the brain if the brain is what's affecting the gut. So this is really fascinating is when you can combine an EEG with an EGG, so the electrical activity of the brain compared to the electrical activity of the gut, you can actually figure out which one is affecting the other. So what you'll sometimes see, and, and I think the best example is an eating disorder, is actually 70% of people with eating disorders actually that the electrical activity in the gut is affecting the brain. And, you know, this is something that we have thought for years is a psychiatric condition. Now we're starting to see it's actually a functional digestive condition.

But is it possible that it comes from the— that it starts as a psychiatric condition, then changes are induced in the gut based on the behaviors like, like, you know, vomiting after eating and that sort of thing, and that then caused the problem go to go in that direction?

So, so this— so yes, in 30% of the time, yes. But 70% of the time, if we're seeing— because you can actually see what is having an effect on the other. So whether the brain is— it's kind of what I say with the brain and the gut, it's kind of like a healthy marriage. It's that it's this, it's this give-and-take relationship that needs to happen. As soon as one starts taking control over the other, There's a problem. And so you can actually see when the gut is taking control over the brain or when the brain is trying to take too much control over the gut. And so in, in actually more instances than not, it's the gut taking control of the brain and causing the brain to dysfunction to the point that then the behaviors of eating disorders continue. So this is— you'll see this with fungal overgrowth sometimes. I don't know if you, you ever run into this problem. I do quite, quite frequently where where somebody has a fungal overgrowth and they're just craving sugar like crazy, right? And it's the last thing that they should be eating, of course, but it's what their brain's making them— what's making their brain feel good. It turns out that aldehyde molecules that come from— as fungal metabolites after when fungal fermentation happens and they release aldehydes, they make their way up to the brain and they stimulate dopamine release. So these aldehydes actually make us feel good at the level of the brain, so it drives our behavior to eat more. And this is an example of the fungal pathogens influencing our brain and behavior to give them a more suitable environment to continue living. And so it's interesting because you're going to see the same thing happen with gut motility problems because of the dysbiotic organisms that build up in these areas where the motor complex isn't working properly. And so you, you will find in this— an eating disorder is an example— that now all of a sudden the brain is being influenced by the gut and the behavior continues. And so you actually— we— when the reason why we actually came across this is we had a couple people with eating disorders. Typically we've always had good success with them, and we had, we had, you know, it's a handful of people we just couldn't seem to get effect. With, you know, we were looking at copper and zinc problems, we were looking at the gut and the neurotransmitters, we were working with neurofeedback, and, you know, typically there's a lot of trauma and emotional regulation problems as well. You know, we're working with everyone, doing all the right things, and we weren't getting anywhere. And all of a sudden we come across the research on EEG, and we went, okay, you know, let's, let's take a look at this. And it turns out that the problems were being influenced— it was actually the gut influencing the brain at too high of a degree. And so when we actually went and focused on biofeedback and retraining the gut rhythm, all of a sudden then we started seeing the shift. So it was quite, quite fascinating. This was something that gastroenterologists back in the '80s were looking at using, but they couldn't smooth the signal out. They couldn't filter out the motor complex from the intestinal reflex. Through the abdominal muscles. And we're at the point now where we can actually filter out with technology that we have now, we can filter out the abdominal muscles and see directly what's coming from that gut.

So, so when you're talking about the biofeedback and retraining the gut and such, what does that actually look like? Like, what is the process?

Yeah, so what you're— what you're— what you do is you hook up sensors and onto the gut or onto the brain, whatever, wherever you need to intervene. And you will play either a game, a movie, music. You might just have a little animation that plays when your gut or your brain is facilitating the rhythm that we want to see. So one thing that's— that happens with the gut and the brain is it's always fluctuating. Okay, if our electrical activity wasn't always fluctuating, we wouldn't be living, we wouldn't be able to function. So there's what's called normative databases. So we have these databases of people that don't have any, any health issues or any major health issues, and we can compare the assessments to these normative databases, and, and then we can look at how far out of that normal range somebody might be. And then what we can do is we can train them back towards that range. So when when they're showing brainwaves that are going back into that normal range, or gut rhythm waves, they'll get feedback in the form of music, in the form of a video, or a game that they'll perform better when they're playing a game. You can even do cool things like dim a screen when, when a child's playing a video game. So you can make it really interesting. But there's, there's these couple regions in the brain called the superior and the inferior colliculi. And we don't call it superior because it's better than the other, it's just higher up in the brain. And so they respond to audit— audio and visual information, and they will, they will then send it to the limbic system, which sends it to the reward system in the frontal lobe or the, the punishment system in the right frontal lobe. And it turns out that the limbic system, which is our system that brings in about a terabyte of information every second to try to make decisions about survival. It turns out that it likes stimulus. Who'da thunk, right? Tech company— tech companies have known this for years. Our brain always wants more stimulus, and this is an area called the amygdala that's typically in charge of this. So when we give the brain stimulus, it's happy, whether it's bad or good stimulus, right? And we know this because We see bad news and bad media and these bad things that happen, yet we still want more of that. We want, we want to have more of that feedback. So when we remove the stimulus, the brain doesn't like that and it actually figures out how it needs to adjust itself to get more feedback. And it turns out that the only way we're going to give it feedback is when it's behaving itself better. And when the brain and the gut come more into sync and are on more of that, that even relationship. Instead of one trying to control the other. And this is something we call brain-computer interface. So it's actually the brain learns how to drive the machine. It learns the algorithm and the code that you're giving it, and it learns what it needs to do to elicit that. And because of neuroplasticity in our brain's ability to change itself, what fires together wires together, and what no longer fires together no longer wires together. This is Hebb's postulate. We actually can break down and extinguish old pathways that were creating the problem and build new healthy pathways that will facilitate health moving forward, facilitate that gut to actually move things through it properly.

Wow. So, so how long do you have to do that to retrain the brain and gut?

Well, what we do, we tend, tend to do about 45-minute to an hour-long sessions. Typically we're going to do it 2 or 3 times a week. And we run people generally through a minimum of 16 to 24 retraining sessions. Okay. In most cases that are of mild to moderate severity, that is quite sufficient. The way that we describe it, it's like you're working out and you're working to lose weight, you're training your body, you're training muscle memory.

It takes time.

It takes repetition. So we get that foundation in and then typically people will maybe do, you know, one every— a session every week or 2 to 4 weeks and can continue that just as a maintenance type program. We do have a lot of wear and tear on our brains through mental emotional stress, through physical stress. I mean, we do have a lot of wear and tear on our, on our gut as well., right, in the terms of environmental toxicants, in terms of dietary contaminants, you know, biotics, medications. So we do typically put through people through maintenance sessions as well. We're hoping here in the next year to 2 years is to actually have an at-home system developed for the gut, particularly. The gut is a lot simpler. I mean, it is complex, but in terms of its motor rhythms, it is a simpler animal. So we hope to something like that to be able to bring it to an app in the cell phone and people can do this type of training at home. There is actually options for neurofeedback at-home training right now. So, you know, if it is a brain-driven issue, people can get units that they can actually do at home as well. So we know that health is a, you know, it's a long-term maintenance policy. So that's, you know, sometimes what's required.

And so when might people develop these kind of problems in their gut with the going the wrong direction or wrong speed?

Or so what, what we've seen is emotional and physical trauma. Emotional trauma triggers long-term issues with something called the dorsal vagal nerve division. So We have two divisions of this dorsal nerve, of this vagus nerve. One is the ventral, one is the dorsal. Basically, it means that the dorsal is higher up and the ventral is lower down on the brainstem. And when we're in a joyful, exciting, motivated type of a rhythm, we're happy, you know, we're content, we're relaxed, we're in a rest and digest state, which is also called the parasympathetic state, also known as the ventral vagal state. When we get chronic stress of any sort— now this could be an emotional trigger, it could be a physical trauma that happens— we can actually head up into the dorsal vagal state, which is actually through the fight-or-flight state into this other division which I call freeze or appease. It's the faint or the play dead response. And essentially when that happens, motility virtually shuts down in the gut, but it doesn't shut down everywhere. The gut will pull resources to where the most important areas are at that time, and the other areas will go sluggish. If you've had a head injury or anything else that can cause a vagal nerve encephalopathy— so encephalopathy is just a fancy term for, for, you know, nerve dysfunction or brain dysfunction. But when there is a nerve encephalopathy or neuropathy, it doesn't function properly. Toxins are notorious for causing this, like a mycotoxin or a mold toxin problem. Stealth chronic infections will, will cause this as well. So you'll see it with Lyme and co-infections. I particularly see it a lot with a Bartonella infection in the gut. And so what happens is all of a sudden the gut doesn't have the energy that it used to. So the energy resources are being directed elsewhere, and it can— it only has so much. It's, it's kind of like it's living off of scraps. So the energy is directed to parts of the, of the gut that are needed, you know, typically higher up in the gut, lower down in the gut for bowel function. And a lot of that, you'll get a lot of areas where all of a sudden they're not firing at all, or they're wanting to fire backwards because it's actually easier for the gut to move things backwards or stay still in an energy perspective. One of the things that I found with phase reversal, which is the fancy term for when things are traveling the wrong direction in the gut, back up the gut instead of down, is head injury actually. There's so many different manifestations of the dysfunction that will happen to that vagus nerve, We don't know exactly where it's going to happen, but we can see where it has. And, you know, if it tends to move around, you know that there's typically a toxicity or an emotional trauma. If it tends to stay in the same place and the problem's always in the same area, the gut, typically I'm looking at the physical injury phenomenon.

This is— these are where it is, is something you would know from the EEG, right?

You got it. You got it.

You couldn't just feel like, oh, I always have a problem here in my gut.

Well, and you know, you know, you can, you can, but we, we like to measure it so that we can, we can actually have something objective to go off and then we can see if we're actually improving. You know, there's, there's a point you, you start working with people and you might not see improvement in 4 weeks subjectively, you know, where symptoms are getting better, but you might be able to see that you're at least on the right path. So sometimes it does take, take a little bit of time. And so we always wanna know like, are we on the right path? Are we actually getting changes or are we just stuck? Because if we're stuck, we need to look under another rock, right? So, yeah. So, so yeah, it's, it's something you could, you could tell, like, you know, I remember when, when I dealt with all my head injuries, I, I was always lower, lower gut, um, you know, right in the middle of my abdomen. You could tell that it was lower small intestine. Yeah, I had a fairly good idea, but what I didn't have a good idea of was, is it just not moving? Is it just inflamed? Is it phase reversing? And so, you know, there's different approaches depending on, on what is actually triggering those, those problems.

So if somebody came to you with IBS and no, you know, no history of head trauma, what would you start with in terms of testing? Would you start with the EEG, or would you start with like a stool test or something else?

I would always start— we always start with an EEG, and if it is a gut complaint, an EGG. I want to, I want to see what the electrical function's doing because there is actually the chemical problems that go on have an effect on the electrical system, and we can predict that. So I can actually start figuring out if it is just something that is gut-centered or whether it is a peptide problem. I never take people's head injury reports as gospel because so many people forget that they've had head injuries. You would be blown away by how many times I've, you know, I do that in my intake. Have you ever had head injury? And I'll usually ask about 4 or 5 different questions. Ever had a whiplash injury? Ever had a car accident? No, no, no. And then I ask, you know, have you, you know, when you were little, did you ever hit your head? It's like, oh yeah, you know, I fell off my swing set when I was little and I landed on the top of my head. Does that count as a head injury? Yeah, yeah, it does count as a head injury.

I don't think anybody's not had a head injury by falling down and hitting your head while you're little.

That's right, that's right, exactly. So, you know, little things like that, they can add up and they don't always trigger issues right away. Personally, for me, I had I'd played football and hockey, and I had never formally been diagnosed with a concussion. And I think this is important for listeners to know is you don't have to have a diagnosed concussion to have a problem with brain injury. So especially if you've had multiple hits to the head, you— it actually only takes about a tenth the amount of energy or force to injure the neck neck as it does to get a concussion. And if you have enough injury, enough force to injure the neck, you have enough force to actually mess your peptide hormones up and your vagus nerve. So I actually just had somebody came in for an initial right before I started talking to you, and she'd had a car accident diagnosed with a whiplash injury. They were very careful that to tell her that she'd never had a concussion It was not a head injury, it was only a neck injury. So she'd kind of gotten away completely from even, you know, thinking that this could be a head injury problem. Migraines triggered a month after, and gut problems triggered 6 months after, and nobody was connecting them for her. So as soon as we did our assessment, I looked at everything. I mean, right away you could tell that neck injury triggered a vagal nerve dysfunction, and you could see from the EEG and the EGG exactly what was happening. And she'd never made the connection because she was told, well, I didn't have a concussion. You don't actually need a concussion to trigger these problems. Subconcussive blows, which is a fancy term for a blow to the head that didn't actually cause concussion symptoms, that is actually enough force to cause the problem.

Well, now that you're talking about this, I'm thinking my son had a concussion about a year ago, and he has periodically had headaches that I think of them as migraines because he'll say they're really pounding hard. And I don't actually know if they're fitting the definition of migraine, but right here in the US, in Arizona, should I— should I send him in for an EKG? I mean, an EKG. And what's the one for your head?

Yeah, a quantitative EEG.

EEG.

Quantitative EEG, that's, that's what you want to look up. If you go to the BCIA, BCIA.org, www.bcia.org, you will be able to find practitioners in your area that are board-certified in neurofeedback, and they may even be diplomats of quantitative EEG. You want to go into there and then, and then look at the clinics, look at their websites, give them a call and make sure that they're doing a quantitative EEG.

Okay.

And that will compare his brainwaves to other, other boys his age, and you'll be able to start seeing if there's communication problems. We, we use a software called NeuroNavigator that looks at— actually can see cerebellum. The cerebellum is an area that sits kind of right behind the occipital lobe, just above the neck, and really important for balance and coordination. If there's an asymmetry in the cerebellum, it is almost 100% the chance that there was a— this is brain being affected by a head injury. And these, and these things don't, don't always reverse on their own. Even though we might get better functionally and symptomatically, the brain doesn't really have an idea of what its baseline is. It's just a, it's a machine that reads what's happening in the environment and then creates perceptions and reactions. So it doesn't, it doesn't always know like, hey, I'm not functioning like I used to be. I should function this way, not the way I am. So it doesn't have that feedback. All it does is it gets, you know, gets shocked, it gets hit in the head, you get shearing of white matter and communication problems., and it just keeps continuing adapting that way because it has no information to tell it that that is not how it should be functioning. And so this is where neurofeedback is incredible because we actually have the ability. It's like putting a mirror in front of our brain and going, here, this is what you look like, right? It's— I like to say to people, it's kind of like trying to shave without a mirror or trying to put your makeup on without a mirror. You can do it,, it just might not look pretty at the end of the day. Whereas when you can use neurofeedback, feedback, your brain gets that exact feedback. It's like looking in a mirror and it goes, oh, okay, I got to adjust myself this way. And you can actually get to get that— those pathways to reorganize themselves. So, and then, and then there's usually less of a need for medications as well if anybody's on medications.

Right.

Which is very cool.

Okay, so back to the gut. If you go through the neurofeedback process and you fix the migrating motor complex and everything is running smoothly how it should, will that take care of SIBO or Candida overgrowth or things by itself, or will you still need to, to use medications to get rid of those?

So, so that— yeah, great question. Some people, yes, that is enough for them to get it under control. Other people, depending on how, how well it's laid itself down, if you're speaking particularly about SIBO or SIFO, uh, it may require still treatment. But the nice thing is it won't recur. The chances that it will recur and come back are very low because you've actually dealt with the reason why it was able to grow in the first place, right?

Yeah.

Now there's still stomach acid and that sort of thing, but that's the other cool thing is you'll see people with low stomach acid all of a sudden their gastrin is working properly, which is a peptide hormone known to be affected by a head injury, tends to drop low. The gastrin regulates, so now your stomach acid, your natural production, actually starts working better.

Okay, so yeah, do you use the IBS-Smart test at all that they can tell you about the antibodies to the vinculin, anti-vinculin, anti-CDTV antibodies that cause—

yeah, the migrating motor complex I haven't, you know, I've seen, I've seen the test itself and I've seen some of the research. I haven't actually started utilizing it yet, but I'm meaning to. I just, I like to really dig deep into things and, and know as much as I can before I start integrating them. But yeah, I've seen it. I think it's great.

Yeah, I'm just wondering if you have that autoimmune post-food poisoning problem in your intestines, whether you could still use the neurofeedback to repair the damage.

So yes, and so this is interesting. It depends if you— if you've— so what I, what I see is what I call illness trauma. When, when people all of a sudden lose their health, it's traumatizing. And if that trauma lays itself down and the switch gets stuck on in the brain, the limbic system, it will actually cause the immune system fall out of balance. And the immune system, I like to say, is like a three-legged stool. If one of the legs gets too short or too long, all of a sudden the stool's off balance. And if it gets way too long or way too short, the stool falls over. And this is what happens with autoimmune reactions, is you get one or two divisions of the immune system cranking themselves up and another division going too low. And you, you know, I, I investigate what might be throwing that out because oftentimes a head injury or a food poisoning is the trigger, but there's something else within the terrain of the body that's allowing that reaction to continue. And you'll, you'll see the same thing in PANS and PANDAS, which is a pediatric autoimmune reaction that's a neuropsychiatric syndrome from strep. Infections, that's the same thing. It's like the strep infection was the trigger, but there's a milieu, or the underlying terrain within the body, something else is going on that's keeping that immune system out of whack. And one of those things that will do that is, is trauma. If the trauma response or the trauma switch is stuck on in the body, that immune system will stay completely out of whack. And I've seen some interesting cases of this. And again, I haven't ran this the smart test for IBS yet to see if it's, you know, if, if this is happening. But I have seen cases of Hashimoto's, which is the autoimmune thyroid, where it was actually when we addressed the emotional component of their illness, they worked with a psychologist doing some trauma-centered therapies, their autoimmune reaction went away. Interesting. Very, very interesting. But if you, if you look at the the effect of the limbic system on the innate immune system, it makes sense. When it's active, it upregulates all these inflammatory cytokines—interleukin 1 and 10, tumor necrosis factor alpha, your TGF betas, C3a, C4a—and now you can get all sorts of, you know, activation of microbes, and your immune system just does if it's not balanced, you're gonna be in trouble. So. Yeah.

Well, it's all so complex. I'm sure that people listening are thinking, wow, now there's a thousand different ways I thought I needed to approach this problem and here's one more.

Here's one more. Yeah.

Yeah. Oh, so, so for people who are interested in maybe getting an EEG for themselves, you're up in Calgary, so.

Up in Calgary. Yeah. They, um, no, no, people do not need to come see us necessarily. A lot can be done through a distance now. We do see people from all over North America. Some people opt to come up here just to kind of do the initial assessment and initial testing, but we can, we can, you know, ship things to people, test kits, EGG machines. We can also coordinate with people who may be able to run and collect an EEG near them. So like you said, you're in Arizona, you know, we're happy to help facilitate with clinics down there, get the raw data from the EEG. Or if somebody is doing EEG, there's very few people doing it, we can get the raw data and we can help people and kind of work out different protocols and things that can be done. So we do offer, if anybody's interested, complimentary, 30-minute complimentary phone consults with a healthcare advisor in our clinic. People, people can access that at www.nirvana.ca/go. Okay. And they can actually just book a 30-minute comp call and yeah, we can talk about what they're dealing with and maybe help them figure out what a good direction is for them and, you know, maybe decide maybe they are a right fit for us. And, and if you are, then yeah, we can talk about how we can work at a distance, or, or like I say, some people are just wanting to come to get the initial assessment and go from there.

And the retraining though, obviously it would have to happen up there over an extended period of time, so it would be pretty tough to do if you lived far away.

Yeah, and that's— and so again, you know, trying to work coordinating with, with clinics that are near them Yeah, where—

who else does this in the US, do you know?

The EGGs? Yeah, or EEGs? The EGGs and the EEGs. So, so neuro and biofeedback is pretty much everywhere. There's, there's thousands of practitioners within that realm. So if you go to www.bcia.org, you can see where all the practitioners are. Now, you know, some people are doing biofeedback, neurofeedback, you know, in different, different types. And there's a lot of, a lot of different software and that sort of thing. But they— we can help kind of find someone that might be appropriate for them. The other thing that people will do too is come down maybe for a week to see— I come up to see us for a week. We just do an intensive program at that point, and then they might do that a couple times a year. That is okay. Good option as well. But the EGG, is there other, other people in the US who are doing those? The— so the, the only place that I actually know of, and this, you know, this could be— obviously there's others, but the only person— people I know of is that are at the University of California San Diego. And the guy actually to get in touch with there is Dr. Todd Coleman. They're the ones who've rejuvenated the research on all of this and are developing some amazing things. But I, you know, I would just run a search, electrogastrogram or EGG, in your area. And like I say, I just— it's not really heavily marketed and advertised, so it might be something you can find. And then we can always take a look at the raw data as well.

Yeah. And now, is this prohibitively expensive test, or what's the cost on that?

It's not, it's not at all, actually. We include it in our initial assessment, but I mean, it probably has a base cost of around $50 to $100. Oh, okay. Yeah, so no, it's really not overly expensive. We waited around the $100 Canadian mark, including time spent going through the data. Yes. Yeah.

So if somebody wants to order it from you, it costs how much?

So yeah, I would, I would essentially price it at $100 Canadian. Okay. Wow. Yeah.

Not bad at all. Okay. So I think this is a lot of information for people to absorb in one podcast, so we should wrap it up. Anything else that you wanted to mention that we didn't talk about?

Lots of things, but not on this topic.

Okay. It's great.

I always, I always find it fascinating just how interconnected everything is. You, you know, you start talking about the gut and all of a sudden you can't only talk about the gut anymore because there's influences from all angles.

So, yeah, well, this is interesting because we have— you're the first guest who's talked much about the brain with regard to the gut. So, so this was good material for our listeners.

Great. Yeah. You know, I would just add, if you've had head injuries in the past, whether, whether or not your symptoms were triggered immediately after. Maybe it took years before they triggered. It's definitely something to keep in mind. It could be affecting the problems within the gut. Okay, great.

Well, thank you so much for this information, and I hope maybe to have you back on sometime to dig in deeper. That would be great.

Thanks so much for having me.

I had a great time. So I found that really interesting, and it opens up a whole lot of other doors in terms of gut testing and healing. Coming up on the show next time, I'll have Dr. Rafael D'Angelo of ParaWellness, who is an expert in parasite testing. So be sure to subscribe so as not to miss that great episode. And my specialty is helping women lose weight without cutting calories or giving up any major food groups, so it's done in a healthy and sustainable way so the weight you lose stays off for life. So if you're needing some help in that area, you can set up a free 1-hour discovery session with me from my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, under Working with Me and then Health Coaching. And I also offer one-off consultations on gut health and autoimmunity if you just need some direction and ideas and a set of recommendations to walk away with. So if that speaks to you, you can find it on my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, under Work with Me. It's called a Functional Health and Nutrition Review. And I'll put both of those links in the show notes. And that's it. So thanks for tuning in and here's wishing you all the perfect stool.