#009 - Functional Neurology, Traumatic Brain Injury, & Why You Should Be Looking at Your Eyes if You Want to Excel in School, Sports, or Business with Professor Carrick

Vibrant Potential with Dr Chris Frykman: Functional Medicine Strategies for Health, Fitness, and Performance

Vibrant Potential is more than a podcast though. It’s a conversation. It’s a state of optimal living. In the words of the US army, “Be all that you can be.” Whether you’re in the armed forces or not, words to live by. I’ve made it my job to improve the lives of others, specifically in the area of health. If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything but when you’re healthy you can live life to it’s fullest, meet your goals, feel joy and life flowing in you and all around you. To do this, I found out long ago I need some good tools. Some of those tools are functional medicine, functional neurology, applied kinesiology and many others depending on the situation.

Functional Medicine has gained a lot of popularity in the past few years. Because of this more people have heard about it and are seeking it out. If you’re a casual, outside observer, you may think a func med approach means going gluten free and taking some expensive supplements. Those of you more intimately familiar with functional medicine recognize certain tenets among its practitioners. Primary among these guiding principles is personalization - meaning as a functional medicine doctor, I’m not going to be focused on diagnosing a problem in you and then treating the problem. I’m not going to treat you like everyone else that walks in the door. I’m going to listen to you. I’m going to treat you, not your disease or disorder. Speaking of disease, another tenet of functional medicine is taking a proactive approach to health and to life. Gone are the days you need to wait until something is broken and then hope you can still fix it. Personalized medicine, functional medicine, heck, just GOOD medicine is about watching for trends. Whether it’s because I know someone and have been treating them for years or whether its from taking a thorough history, meaning I’ve taken the time to sit down with someone and really unwind their journey up to this point, in functional medicine we want to notice subtle changes before they become life threatening. An easy example is diabetes. Diabetes is a disease that kills 10’s to 100’s of thousands of people every year in the US alone. And that’s going by conservative numbers. The classic way to diagnosis diabetes is to obtain a fasting blood sugar and if it’s 125 you don’t have diabetes - go home, you’re fine - and if its 126 you do have it and we better get you on some meds to manage this sucker. That’s just bad medicine. A good functional medicine doc is going to look at trends, if your blood sugar is 85, that’s probably fine but if your blood sugar has been 72 for the past 5 years and now it’s 85, we want to look at why. Always why. Let’s get to the root cause of what’s going on here people. We need to stop treating the symptoms and start looking upstream to what the causes of disease are in the first place. Be those reasons physiologic, spiritual, mental, or emotional, chemical or bioelectric, there’s a reason your fasting blood sugars are rising. And if the reason is you’re depressed because your mom just passed away and you’ve replaced your daily run with a tub of ice cream, it’s a poor answer to simply through some glucophage at the situation. Do you see it?

We don’t have to wait to be broken. We can seek more now.

I’m not here to tell you what you should want out of life. I’m here when you want, MORE, out of life.

Want More strength, speed or flexibility? check

Looking for improved mental clarity, better memory, or more focus and drive? check

Do you desire Better relationships through emotional wellness and cultivating an inner peace? check

This is the spirit in which I’ve developed Habitat Retreats with my partner, Dr Shamanie. In an up coming episode, I’m going to ask Dr Shamanie to share her story with you. It’s one of cancer and pain but it’s also a story of healing and happiness. If you want more on how habitat retreats came to be, or how to attend one you can visit today’s show notes page at drchrisfrykman.com/drcarrick or www.habitatretreats.com. For now though, Long story short, Shamanie had a revelation along her own healing journey that health only happens in the right environment. A plant can’t grow without light or water. A human also needs certain conditions to be just right for optimal growth and expansion. These Habitat Retreats have become my preferred method for providing care for people looking for improved health and improved function because there’s simply no other way to incite the kinds of changes we see in a week’s time at these retreats. Sometime soon I’ll share some of what we do at these retreats but suffice it to say, I’ve seen patients make more dramatic brain wave shifts in one week than some people see in a lifetime. Brain Wave Shifts equal transformation.

For me, at the heart of functional medicine, is transformation. Everything I do in this podcast, at the clinic, and at Habitat Retreats is about transformation. I want to see function improve. But how do we know you’re functioning better? If you’re a runner, that might mean running an 18 minute 5k instead of a 20 minute 5k. Or it might mean running a 12 minute 50 second 5k instead of a 13. Maybe you’re pushing your VOMax up or your anaerobic threshold up. Or it might mean running a 28 minute 5k and being earnestly happy about that because you’re not out there to compete against others and win, for you winning is about not dying of a heart attack at 52 like your Dad did. So that’s all fine and dandy, if you’re a runner. Those metrics might make some sense and give you some feedback about if you’re going in the right direction. Have you ever met someone that looked fit on the outside one day and the next day died of a heart attack?

There are better ways to measure growth and human performance. And there are better ways to initiate the types of changes you are seeking. Enter Dr Carrick and Functional Neurology.

Prof Frederick (Ted) Carrick has maintained an international specialty practice for 37 years. He has taught clinical neurology around the world to physicians from all disciplines, including myself and is considered the father of functional neurology. He has been the subject of the Emmy award-winning PBS documentary Waking up the Brain as well as countless prime time television, newspaper, magazine and journal articles. Dr Carrick holds professorships in neurology at several institutions. He holds four board certifications in neurology and nine fellowship credentials. Prof. Carrick is a published researcher in the field of neurology and completed his Post Doctoral training at Harvard Medical School. He is the principal investigator in several ongoing investigations designed to improve the diagnosis and treatment of traumatic brain injury. He has special interests in movement disorders, traumatic brain injury and sports concussions and has even treated patients with coma which we touch on in the interview. Prof Carrick is presently a Senior Research Fellow of Bedfordshire Centre for Mental Health Research in association with the University of Cambridge (BCMHR-CU) in the UK. Don’t ask me how he keeps up with all this. He has has assembled the world's largest database of Dynamic Computerized Posturographic outcomes related to traumatic brain injury, neurodegenerative disease and movement disorders assembled from thousands of patients from around the globe. His published scientific articles have appeared in the prestigious journals of Gait and Posture, Disability and Rehabilitation, Frontiers Public Health, Biomedical Science Instrumentation, Journal of Biomechanics, Current Pharmaceutical Design, Brain Injury, Neurorehabilitation, Clinical Neurophysiology, International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health, Journal of Alternative Medicine, Journal of Manipulative and Physiological Therapeutics, Parkinsonism & Related Disorders, Mediterranean Journal of Physical and Rehabilitation Medicine, International Journal on Disability and Human Development and others.

In Today’s podcast I expose just the surface of what’s possible when we really look at the human brain, in all it’s majesty, as Professor Carrick would say, through the lens of functional neurology. We cover topics from TBI (traumatic brain injury) to the importance of eye movements. If the study of the neurology of eye movements sounds boring to you, I hope this brief conversation brings the topic to life for you because as you start to see what can be done, you realize, anything is possible. Enjoy.

For more information on Dr Chris Frykman and Professor Carrick as well as some of the strategies discuss in today's show please visit www.DrChrisFrykman.com/DrCarrick

For more great health information please visit www.DrChrisFrykman.com

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