Michael Roesslein: And thanks to Zoom’s announcement, we are recording in progress. Hey, I am back here today for another episode this time with Dr. Jared. How are we doing my friend?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

I am great. Like I said, you totally separated those two syllables, Ja-red.

Michael Roesslein:

Dr. Jared Siegler is a doctor of chiropractic and he’s been a, what is a CFMP?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Certified functional medicine practitioner.

Michael Roesslein:

Certified functional medicine practitioner. I don’t know all my abbreviations. He’s a functional medicine practitioner for the last eight years. He’s trained in over 600 hours of functional neurology and helps to promote the healing of the central nervous system. Dr. Jared is someone who I send people to that they have tried everything and it doesn’t work. And I refer them to him.

He’s one of my go-tos with complex cases and complex chronic illness. And I also highly recommend you follow him on Facebook because your Facebook posts are really educational. You put a lot of value out there and I always learn something and actually stops my scroll whenever I see one of yours. And I usually read it twice and then gather the nugget, and I always learn something from it. Also, it’s fun when we hang out, so this will be good.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

That might be a thing. Actually on that note, I’ve seen kids diagnosed what’s called cortical blindness actually looked me in the eye after we’d be lasering their head, doing some primitive reflexes because I walked in on a buddy, I was shadowing him. And doing rehab intensive, those are pretty cool.

And I was just helping with this kid. He was in an anoxic brain injury. He fell asleep and his head was a little crooked, fell off the side of the bed against the wall. And so if you know anyone that’s had something like that, it’s real bad. They lose blood supply because their neck is at a funny angle. It’s part of their brain. So it’s like a massive brain injury basically.

Anyways, or just sitting there and I’m doing some Babinski’s on his foot and getting some of these primitive reflexes going and everything. And he just looks at me and he is smiling. And I was like, “Hey, yo man.” And he is like, “What’s up?” I was like, “I thought this kid was supposed to be blind.” And he’s like, “Yeah, cortical blindness.” I’m like, “Why are we looking at each other right now?”

So, when you hear things like that, you think, “Wow, that’s a miracle.” But I would say that’s the body and brain healing. Give it what it needs. Slap some butter on it, call it a biscuit. So I’m from Oklahoma, so if there’s a lot of southern twang and weird things, that’s-

Michael Roesslein:

Oklahomaisms are part of the interview.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

But to me, that’s why I love it so much is because the impact that you can have on somebody’s life. And when you think about it, we’re all wanting to live longer. It seems like forever ago, so four years ago when I was at this neuro seminar, I remember them saying, “If all of you live long enough, you will die of neurogeneration. We can replace your heart. We can’t replace your brain.”

And I was thinking like, “Holy crap, they’re right.” Because everyone wants to live longer. So for me, when I saw my wife holding my daughter and I remember my grandma dying of Alzheimer’s, that gruesome eight years that it was. And I thought they can’t see me this way because I do functional medicine. I’m like, I’m apoE4. I’ve had head injuries. I smoked methamphetamines. So I have all these cards stacked against me. High school was rough, which you see sometimes-

Michael Roesslein:

I have almost all the same cards.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. So I think of these things and then in the back of my mind, it’s like, well there’s also 247 drug trials of Alzheimer’s that have failed miserably. Most of them make it worse actually.

Michael Roesslein:

That new super expensive one.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

56K to not even make a statistical significant change, sounds about right. I think that’s par for the course for all the drugs, man. And then you realize-

Michael Roesslein:

I’m connecting with Dr. Bredesen on this season of the podcast.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Very cool.

Michael Roesslein:

So that should be interesting. I’ve never interviewed him before. You got any questions that I should ask him?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Not really. He seemed not to … And not to dismiss what people do or anything because I love his work, I’m like, “Cool, functional medicine.” He really tied together a lot of the mold and neurodegeneration, which a ton of people were missing that before because when we think of neuroplasticity, questions I would have for him would be, would he upload his brain into a robot if he could?

Michael Roesslein:

Okay. I’m going to ask him.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah, that would be consciousness almost. So anyways, that’s a whole another conversation because that interface is supposed to happen relatively soon. People are chomping at the bit to try to plug in brains and computers and make them interface.

Michael Roesslein:

So you got into functional neurology because you watched some miracles happen and it lit you up and you were like, “Man, I got to learn how to do this.” I can relate to that, not necessarily with neurology because I have a second filter. My reactions like that go through when I know it’s outside my scope of things I would be good at.

So I see things and I’m like, “That’s awesome.” And it’s like, “You suck at this part of that thing. You can’t do that thing.” But then I still get lit up by it. But the things that light me up are that I’m in two trainings on it, that I’m in this. People look at my bio and they’re like, “Dude, you have a degree in history and a master’s degree in exercise science.”

Heads up to the strength coaches out there. I did that too. Yeah. I had my CSCS, but-

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Like a fire from golds for having an old lady deadlift man. And they were like, “She’s really going to get hurt.” And I’m like, “Isn’t that why she’s hiring me?”

Michael Roesslein:

Isn’t that why she’s deadlifting?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

They didn’t have insurance on the freeway because they’re only on the machine. You know how it goes.

Michael Roesslein:

But I went from like history to exercise physiology. Then I started learning holistic health, functional nutrition. Then I went fully to left field and went over into trauma work and somatics and spirituality and energetic things. And I see something. I did two full-time years of training recently in energy work and states of consciousness and awareness because I met someone once who did something in front of me that I couldn’t explain.

And I was like, that doesn’t fit my worldview. And it was really cool what I just saw and I’m sure that just happened. And it changes the way that I see things. I need to know how to do that because that was too cool to not know how to do that.

So when you saw that person crawl or they put the knee in the ground and his hand opened up, it was like, “That’s awesome.” And for some of us, and there might be people out there listening who can relate to that, my first reaction to that is I need to know how to do that.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. So I go to a seminar and I’ll just use the name. I went to a Carrick seminar and that’s a lot of big words, anyone that’s ever gone to them. And I was just like, “I can’t do this.” I was like, “I’m not smart enough.” That was actually my first thought. I was like, “I have no idea what they’re talking about. These words are way too big.” Felt like I just kind of wasted a lot of money on a seminar actually because I was like …

But then once they got to back to those, oh-my-god moments where you just see the potential, the intervention I found to stimulate the brain, it wasn’t always easy. But it was technically, usually very simple.

We do a position or a reflex or we’d do a cognitive task with a couple to an eye movement or we’d mix in some vestibular rehabilitation with that. And then proves someone’s anxiety goes down, their pot starts to get a little bit better and stuff like that. And you’re just like, “Oh, cool.”

And you try not to lose it because when it becomes routine, when you see it happen all the time, you want to make sure it doesn’t lose its magic.

Michael Roesslein:

You’ve mentioned neuroplasticity a couple times. Obviously, we know what that word means. Everyone out there might not. So I want to backpedal just a little bit. I think we’re throwing around some language between us that might be best to be defined. So neuroplasticity does not mean turning your brain into plastic.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

No.

Michael Roesslein:

What is a working definition of neuroplasticity? What are you talking about when you mentioned that?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. So take that kid’s hand that was kind of like a stroke called a flexor contracture. So neuroplasticity is the brain is trying to find the road to tell his arm to hang normal at his side like his other arm. And I just say the main road is closed, we’re finding a detour. Can we find another way to get to that part of the brain to activate it basically? So we use very specific stimulation to try to grow connections.

One of the big fancy words is called pre-neuronal pooling. I mentioned vestibular rehabilitation. So we know, for example, those are the ear canals and we think of the ear canals usually like, “Oh, I feel really dizzy. I have Meniere’s,” or something. Most ear canal issues are actually anxiety, motion sickness … Anxiety in loud crowded areas, so like driving through a big parking lot to Black Friday, super crowded. If that’s like your kryptonite, you probably have some sort of vestibular thing going on. Maybe there’s a lot going on.

But anyway, so we’ll do this thing called pre-neuronal pooling where it’s like, hey, if I have somebody stare the target and I turn their head different ways and make them activate different canals, I know their ear canals will suppress my amygdala, my anxiety center, pre-neuronal pooling. So I know where one area is going to fire into.

When we teach doctors how to do this, I just tell them you got to know the maze. If you don’t know the maze, you can’t find your way out of it. You can’t find those detours. But the more you know that maze, the more you know those big words where things are going to go, the easier and easier it becomes.

Now, those aha moments start to become routine. You almost expect those connections or that neuroplasticity to be made unless something metabolically is happening. And I find very few things that you can say that about like, “Hey, this usually happens most of the time,” because that’s the way the brain operates. All it needs is oxygen, sugar, reason to fire, poof. Hear a sound, see a site, feel something on your skin, that’s all it needs.

So if we can just do different things and the interventions would typically be easy, like we’re talking about. We’ll use a lot of eye movements, head or just stuff people can do at home. You don’t have to have all this super fancy equipment, but that does help.

I just got a lady reached out to me. Her father has had seven strokes since [inaudible 00:16:54]. Just stroke after stroke, after stroke, after stroke. And she is like … Of course, it’s a Facebook message. So it’s like, “Hey, what do I do?” And it’s like, how do you fix seven strokes in a few sentences? Nobody can do that.

And I’m just like, “Hey, the honest answer is, I don’t know. I don’t even know your dad. It sucks that he’s there. I hate imagining what everybody’s going through for that.” But A, something metabolically is going on. We can keep retraining the brain to try to like, “Hey, use your tongue, use your lips,” get all these kind of quality of life back so you can swallow and do all this stuff that people want to do after a stroke.

But if you’re just going to go have another stroke next month, dude, we got to fix that, whatever is happening metabolically. And that’s where … The reason I love the brain so much is I found it’s usually just the biggest victim out there. It’s so secondary to, I would say stress, because we can go through the list like, here’s mold. Here’s aluminum. And it’s antigen-presenting cells and get super science-y.

But I just think of the brain as this very delicate punching bag. And once it gets hit once and it doesn’t have to get hit hard again to really feel it.

Michael Roesslein:

Got you. So in summary there, the actual mechanisms by which a lot of these changes are really complex. When you were in that conference and if you really want to break it down, if somebody wanted to explain exact how and why that guy’s hand opened when his knee touched the ground, we’re going to get into some crazy words that are really long that don’t make sense to a lot of people and processes that science, frankly, probably right now doesn’t even fully understand.

But the actions that you take to cause the responses and the matching of this type of exercise or activity or stimulation with this type of brain problem, that doesn’t have to be complex. People aren’t going to have to do rocket science in their house to fix their brains or to help their brains. The thing you do is usually pretty easy. The way it works is complex and you don’t necessarily need to know the way it works.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Exactly. Kind of like, I actually use the strength training analogy. I’m like, “You don’t have to know exactly all your hip biomechanics to know how to hip hinge and squat right. You can look in the mirror, you can have someone spot you.”

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. I taught people how to do that, who didn’t know any of that stuff.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

And you didn’t have to go into like, “So at 37 degrees of flexion, now your acetabulum is going to start rotating along the Y axis.” Nobody cares about-

Michael Roesslein:

Unfortunately, I had to learn that. Gratefully, I never had to regurgitate it again.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah, just as I got my CPT done.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, done.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

And that would be kind of the same thing. I just say, think of it like a personal trainer for the brain. And to me, that neuroplasticity is the same concept as the strength. My muscle is bigger, stronger, faster. We do the same thing for those regions of the brain, and super kind of gratifying.

Actually not kind of gratifying, it’s super gratifying, but that’s where I want to have it stick. I equate it to back to that hip pinch analogy. When someone learns how to actually move at their hips instead of their lower back, you can kind of groove that pattern, but you don’t have to keep redoing it every training session. You got to move forward.

So when we’ll start doing these things, people will start saying like, “Gosh, this exercise is boring. My balance is easy now, doc. I don’t get anxious at all. I drove myself like two weeks in a row.” And we’re like, “Cool. Now that it’s easy. Now let’s get it hard. Now that you can hip hinge, now we’re going to start putting weight on the bar. We’re going to start demanding more and more of that area of your brain without exceeding that metabolic capacity.”

We don’t want to be like, “All right, you squatted 50 pounds. Now let’s go for 500.” Who would do that? So kind of the same thing. We’ll see metabolically maybe how fragile someone is, how much stimulation can they have, not annihilation. I always tell my patients that I’m like stimulate don’t annihilate.

We start doing these brain exercises and you’re like, “Feeling kind of tired today. Whew. I don’t know if I really can handle these five minutes of …” And I’ll say, “Well, then maybe don’t do it that day.” I would sell the same thing if I had a client and I was their strength coach. And they’re like, “Hey, I was sick yesterday. I don’t know if I should come in.” I’d be like, “You’re damn right you shouldn’t come in. You’re sick yesterday. You need to heal. You just trying to get under the bar is only going to make healing harder now for you. Let’s just wait, knock the dust off those weights a little bit later.”

So we want to metabolically make sure somebody is good. That’s what’s called fatigability. Pro-tip, usually fatigability, when you exceed that in somebody’s brain, they get a sympathetic or fight or flight response. Palms get sweaty, heart starts racing. They’re like, “Is anybody else nervous all of a sudden.” And it might be something weird. They’re like, “All I was doing was like stimulating. I had maybe a cold pack on my left arm for too long.” You’d be shocked.

Those usually aren’t the things. It’s usually the ear canals. We’ll notice if we get someone, they’re like, “I turn my head too fast and I get dizzy.” I’m like, “Well, quit turning your head too fast. Come on.” Stimulate, don’t annihilate it.

Michael Roesslein:

Man, I’m pretty guilty for that. If I do this thing, it hurts. Well, why are you doing that thing? I’m guilty. So if anybody out there falls into that trap, I feel you. My wife makes fun of me pretty often for that. I injured my knee recently and I was like, “Well, if I just walk normally and I don’t twist or lean or do anything in a transverse or sagittal play like twisting or sideways, it feels fine. But if I do this, it hurts like hell. If I do this, it hurts.” She’s like, “Then why are you doing that? Don’t do the thing that hurts.”

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah, let me do a medial meniscus twist just on my own.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, that’s what I was doing, to test it and it hurt so much. And I was like, “I think it’s …” Then she’s like, “Stop. Stop doing it. You already … Just don’t.”

Dr. Jared Seigler:

I remember I did a meniscus test on my wife’s dad at the time. And this was when I was in chiro school. He was like, “I fell and hurt my knee.” And I was like, “I’m just going to do some tests.” And I just let his knee drop, kind of straight leg drop. And he was like, “Oh, my God, did you try to adjust me?” I’m like, “No, man.” I’m like, “It’s called an orthopedic test.” I was like, “I think you tore your meniscus.” I was like, “You need to go to the hospital, dude. They’ll do some imaging.”

Anyways, he was turned off on chiropractic after then because he was like, “He adjusted my knee.” I’m like, “No, I didn’t, man.” Anyways, so practicing without a license stuff. And that’s where pain is one of those things. That’s your body trying to tell you, don’t do this.

And the reason why we want to try to strengthen an area of the brain, it basically becomes a race against time. Back to nerdy generations, people in the know, know you don’t develop Alzheimer’s. My grandma didn’t develop Alzheimer’s since she was 68. She developed Alzheimer’s when she was 28, when she was 38, when she was 48.

Michael Roesslein:

The symptoms came when she was 68.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. Her brain just couldn’t do it anymore. She lost more than she could gain. And once that kind of seesaw flips now, because I work with people with neurogeneration like back to Dr. Bredesen’s thing. I tell my Alzheimer’s patients, your plane is going down. We’re trying to just level it off. If your life cannot suck more than it does, that’s starting to be a win.

If we can increase function, that’s even better because I never want to have somebody think like, “Oh, if I do this, I’m just not going to have Alzheimer’s.” I say, “I don’t know if I would be so brazen as to say that, but we can keep things going a lot longer and a lot better than they would be if we didn’t do anything at all.”

Michael Roesslein:

I think it’d be good right here to pause for a second and ask. You mentioned she didn’t develop Alzheimer’s when she was 68, she developed it when she was 28. Both of us have done a very good job of attempting to develop Alzheimer’s in our twenties and teens and thirties too as if it were our goal that we were racing to.

When I say that, when you say that, what are the things in her life or ours or in general like normal life in this country that contribute to neurodegeneration? How much is … I know our medical system, the western medical system likes to throw genetics at everything and be like, “You have this gene or your family had this, so you’re for sure going to get that.” And I’m sure there’s some higher susceptibility or you’re more likely to have problem clearing toxins from the brain or something like that.

But in general, what are the contributing factors most responsible for neurodegeneration in modern life? I know there’s a lot. We can stick to like the winners.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Sedentary and eating. And I would say some form of chronic stress typically a poor relationship.

Michael Roesslein:

So chronic stress, poor relationship, sedentary life. And when you say eating, what kind of foods are-

Dr. Jared Seigler:

She was a diabetic. But when we think of what we do now, what me and you do now to not do that when we’re 68, everybody listening, the best thing you can do for your brain later, 30 years from now is periodically go out without food. Just stop, just crying out loud.

If you derive pleasure from food, A, that’s a big problem. If they’re like, “I can’t give up this little Debbie.” I’m like, “The little Debbie is just the symptom. The rest of your life must suck if that’s the only thing you derive pleasure from.” Not to cast stones, but sometimes people just need that. Oh, you’re like, “Yeah, you’re right.”

So that’s where we’re chronically overfed because when we think of all those side roads, those are called synapses. You got to do a thing called pruning. You got to trim your bushes or now nothing’s going to work. And that’s what Alzheimer’s and all these neurodegenerative diseases start out as, and they just started and there’s too much junk because we’re constantly growing and eating and eating and eating and eating and eating. And insulin grows more than just fat cells.

So when we think of her diet, her lifestyle, she was pretty sedentary, not to throw stones. She’s dead, but it was dry eyes at my grandfather’s funeral. Living under that roof was my adverse child event. So she had a poor relationship with that guy, married to a mean man for forever. So, if we think like, “Oh, if I’m just going to like take this nootropic and do this, that and the other. And it’ll magically erase my entire lifestyle and memories and baseline of stress.” That’s not going to get too far.

The Oklahoma thing would be, it’s like farting in a tornado.

Michael Roesslein:

Speaking of tornadoes, this week was that tornado rampage for you guys south of that in Oklahoma?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. They’re around us now still in spring and summer. But yeah, they were-

Michael Roesslein:

I was so confused. It’s December, I had to double check the calendar when I saw that. I’m from Illinois and I don’t remember ever hearing of tornadoes in December. That would end in like September, October, the latest. And I was confused. But-

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Every Saturday, they shoot off the alarms at noon just to make sure they work. So we always have the tornado alarms going off every year.

Michael Roesslein:

I remember those.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

Usually, we’d go outside when I’d hear them so I could try to see the tornado.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. But I’ve been seeing some of … Because yeah, it’s flat ground. We would actually not chase them, but we could see them in fields miles off and it’d be like, you want to go kind of like get closer to it?

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah, I always wanted to get closer to it. Now that I’m older. I don’t want to be where it is. So you mentioned sedentary living, stress or largely harmful relationships, chronic stress, like stress every day, hate your job, hate your life, hate your partners, hate your family situation or people are abusive to you. And then overeating/poor blood sugar regulation, which if you have sedentary and stress and eating, then you’re going to have blood sugar dysregulation. So, that is only about three quarters of the country.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Half of all young adults are now considered obese. And it’s not to sound-

Michael Roesslein:

Why did you mention sedentary? How does that factor into the brain?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Everything improves with exercise, proper exercise. Again, stimulate not annihilate, but we got blood flow. We got hormones that tell the brain to start growing those connections with those dendrites called BDNF, brain derived neurotrophic. It’s like growth hormone for the brain.

Michael Roesslein:

BDNF increases with exercise?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. And that’s necessary for that-

Michael Roesslein:

Strength or cardio or either?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Either. Some people will say this, that and the other. And I would say there’s nuances, but I just tell my Alzheimer’s patients like-

Michael Roesslein:

Move?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. I’m like, “I want you to be physically active every day. You got to kind of actually be huffing and puffing, whatever huffing and puffing is for you. You’re 88 and walking up the stairs with a load of laundries, huffing and puffing, do it twice but rest a little bit.

Michael Roesslein:

But don’t sign up for an ultra marathon.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Exactly.

Michael Roesslein:

I’ve seen that so many times and I just want to mention that anytime it comes up, that whenever I used to … I worked with clients for six, seven years and I would make a recommendation like, you need to move your body every day. And then the next time I talk to them, they can’t move their body anymore because they ran four miles the day after I told them to move their body the last time. And they hadn’t run in seven years. And now they’re injured.

And I’m saying this out loud because I’ve recently done this to myself twice. I couldn’t go to boxing anymore because COVID shut everything down. So I bought a thing for my garage about a year into that. And then I hit the bag in my first training session, the same way I would’ve a year prior.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

How’s your wrist tapping?

Michael Roesslein:

My shoulder. And it still hurts and that was nine months ago. So I couldn’t use it very much anymore. I bought this thing, used it like two or three times and then I was too injured to use it. And then I went to yoga a couple weeks ago for the first time in a number of months and did something. It hurt a touch the first time I did it, like the first cycle through, but I did it. And I was like, okay.

Second time through, it should have been like that hurt the first time, I should modify that. I know how to modify that. I could easily modify that. Instead, I was like, I’m going to just do it harder and then I might have a partially torn something in my knee. So I’m not judging anybody out there.

But especially I’ve noticed after I hit 40, this becomes even more important. I like what you said about whatever huffing and puffing is to you.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

I would just tell people, “I want you to feel good doing it.” That means, A, you like doing it and the odds of you doing it are higher. So something you like to do. I want you to feel good while you’re doing it. The odds of injury go down. If something feels good, if we’re stressed and hurt and not going to be bad … It’s like super bad news. I just say, “I want you to feel good after it.”

Usually, if you have to psychologically force yourself into a workout, “I’m really going to do this today. It’s going to be good for me. I don’t really want to, but whatever,” that’s your brain saying, “Please don’t do this. I can’t heal.” Then you have to struggle through it. You’re slower. You’re breathing harder. Nothing feels as good as you thought it would. I’ll say those are your actual muscles and cells screaming, “Please, I can’t heal from this,” because we know fatigue is like a warning.

When I used to work with athletes, of course, we would train them hard. I was responsible for a lot of the collegiate level in my undergrad. And of course, we’d get ahold of them in the off season. Our first thing is like, “Well, we got to make you stronger, but we got to let you rest at the same time.” It’s super hard to do. But if it was the day before a track meet, I would bet on the better rested athlete more than the over-trained athlete, guaranteed off the blocks.

Because when we think about it, something like explosiveness, fatigability, all that sort of stuff, endurance or metabolically being able to do something like a sprint, super high intensity. The problem is the brain is so delicate. When we think of super high intensity, the only downside … Because usually we get more of the good stuff. We get more BDNF, better blood sugar handling, we get all this good stuff the harder that exercise is, but we get more oxidative stress.

So if somebody has Parkinson’s, gut infections, all these things that are causing oxidative stress, true they need to exercise but can they also heal from the exercise on top of what’s causing their Parkinson’s to begin with? So, we always kind of wonder about stuff like that. Here, I will throw stones at this. So everyone does a lot of vagal nerve stimulation, motor or vagal nerve stimulation, I’m going to gargle. Well, if we activate the vagus nerve, we know there was what’s called a retrograde. Proteins start to get pulled up.

If somebody has a gut infection and we know that those toxins are climbing up the vagus nerve, then I dare ask would something like motor stimulation cause more retrograde proteins to be pulled up the vagus nerve, deposit it inside of the brain?

Michael Roesslein:

Probably not.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Right. So, because that’s the thing like, “Oh, just vagus nerve stimulation and-“

Michael Roesslein:

Probably not a good idea. And my curiosity around vagus nerve is there’s so many of these, and I’m sure there’s validity to a lot of the exercises and things and it’s a problem. And for some people, they don’t have infections and this would be great, so we’re not speaking in absolutes. But I feel like there’s all these half-baked recommendations in functional medicine where something gets figured out but not totally understood. And then there’s recommendations made based off it and the not totally understood part comes to light later.

And then it’s like, “Oh wait, maybe this wasn’t the best call,” because it’s my understanding that if something gets shut down, like a process in the body gets shut down or slowed down or frozen or isn’t being used or whatever the right term is … Take thyroid, for example, when the thyroid gets downregulated and then now I have a thyroid problem, let’s take thyroid hormone. To me, it always makes the most sense to really just follow the trail back to what downregulates vagus nerve tone and what downregulates thyroid function and what downregulates thyroid hormone conversion.

And the things that usually downregulate those things are stress, our circadian disruption, our trauma, our blood sugar regulation. It’s usually the body being like, “Oh, I’m in a bad situation. I’m in an unsafe situation or I’m overloaded or I’m this, I’m going to shut down all of these things to try to slow this person down.” And then we’re like, “Oh, caffeine is this, that …” And gargling to force the nerve back on and doing these things.

I’ve always been curious about the vagal nerve situation that, why is there lack of tone to it, why did that happen, how did that happen? And are we messing with the body’s own feedback mechanisms when we try to override them and then what happens then?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

And that’s exactly it and I wish it was as simple as, I stimulate the vagus nerve. My sympathetic nervous system shuts off. But that’s actually where we’ll use more of the other side of the coin for somebody like if I have a Parkinson’s patients in front of me. Of course, we’re going to work on their motor system and things like that because your cortex is going to inhibit your sympathetic nervous system.

Think of a baby’s brain developing. They’re born, they first open their eyes. Now they can see, now they can hear, now they can feel. That all starts to develop the cortex. Their cerebellum is now sensing gravity. Where is my body, where is my head and everything in relation to gravity. That starts feeding into the cortex. Then their cortex develops, their heart rate starts to go down. All these things start to go down. If you ever listen to a little baby like my son’s going to turn one tomorrow, his little heart is just like …

But anyways, so we’ll start activating their cortex. And I activate their motor system and their basal ganglionic things, maybe even their cerebellum, get their hand to quit moving, get their leg to start walking better so they’re not falling or whatever. And they can actually get up from the couch to go to the bathroom. Now we can inhibit their sympathetics by activating their cortex, which that’ll in turn increase sympathetic tone.

I’d probably tell them to … Well, I had one guy with Parkinson’s. The best thing for him wasn’t a brain exercise. We were just back to eating all the time. He intermittent fasted, but he only had a two-hour eating window. He did not starve to death. I had to reiterate to him-

Michael Roesslein:

Two hours?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

… caloric. Yeah, he would eat from four o’clock to six o’clock.

Michael Roesslein:

The whole time?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Basically-

Michael Roesslein:

If I was only eating for two hours …

Dr. Jared Seigler:

He would get still the … So I had to tell him like, “We can’t starve slowly,” because a lot of people try to intermittent fast. I’m like just continuously missing breakfast is intermittent fasting. I hate to break it to you out there. You truly need to be intermittent, kind of allowing the body to switch. You always got to keep the body guessing back to training, the SAID principle. And that’s something I’ll always try to apply to someone’s metabolism even from a functional medicine standpoint.

So the SAID principle is there’s a specific adaptation to an imposed demand, S-A-I-D. So if I can make that adaptation like, “Hey, we’re going to start cleaning the junk out of your brain because there’s too many toxins and proteins up there. And the easiest way to do that is you just quit eating for like 22 hours a day,” because we were waiting on test results for this guy. His main thing was his legs would just move all night. He’d be kicking his wife all over the place because we know Parkinson’s kind of affects the legs too.

So I’m like, “Hey man, let’s do this intermittent fasting thing.” He was a good old boy. And while we’re waiting on test results, we get back speaking after a few weeks. I’m like, “So how are things?” He’s like, “Well, me and my wife are sleeping in the same bed again.” He’s like, “We don’t have to sleep in separate beds,” because his love language is personal touch. And I was like, “That’s cool, man. What did that?” He was like, “The eating thing.” He’s like, “Yeah, I was hungry at first around breakfast.” But he said, “I could add coffee.” For him, coffee was okay. I’m not going to vilify …

Again, we can’t ever talk in absolutes. As soon as somebody says all or none, you really don’t understand how the body truly works. You just want to generalize and put a pretty bow around something so that seems easy.

But anyways, so I said, “We’re not going low calorie. There’s a difference between low calorie and intermittent fasting. For you, we’re just tapping into certain things.” But yeah, he’s like, “I would eat at four. My wife would basically I’d eat seconds. Then I’d just eat a totally different meal about 5:45 and polish off with a little bit of …” His dessert wouldn’t be actually sweet, but we would allow him sweet tasting. I didn’t like to do it, but I don’t want to make someone’s life suck. He already has Parkinson’s. If he has a little monk fruit flavored chocolate a couple times a week and like, “Dude, that shouldn’t unravel everything.”

But anyways, so whenever we hear something like that, I’d say that’s clinical gold. Because when patients tell me that magnesium or that thing or that thing, they’re like, “That was what I needed.” And I’m like, “That’s really great, but that’s not going to translate,” because then their knee-jerk reflex is, “Well, if it worked for me, that means other people with Parkinson’s need to only eat two hours a day. What if somebody else maybe has massive blood sugar dysregulation?”

Michael Roesslein:

Then they’ll not do well with that.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

Or like shot adrenals so they can’t … I see a lot of protocols that have been branded or trademarked or something by various books or doctors or things. And people will be like, “What do you think of this? Should I live off celery juice?” I’m not going to name any names with that one. “Or should I, like this thing or this thing.” And I get that. I don’t think there’s a nefarious motivation behind a lot of that.

I think that for a lot of practitioners, a lot of people which I learned in the first season of this podcast was mostly practitioners who went through a health crisis, who made it through themselves. And then they learned all this stuff. And then they’re like, “What do I do with all this knowledge? I’m going to be a doctor. I’m going to be a health practitioner. I’m going to help other people.” And that’s amazing. And a lot of practitioners, I think what happens is they do some stuff that helps them a ton.

And then they turn that into a structured protocol thing that then they give to everyone because it helped them a ton or they had one patient or client early in their practice who had a certain condition and they did these things for them. And then that person was awesome. So then they’re the expert in that thing, and they do this same thing for all the people. And it’d be so much easier if that worked.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

No, and that’s like I made a post on Facebook about the seesaw analogy and the immune system. And I was like, “I wish it was that easy like crime in Italy.” If it was only two sides to worry about for the immune system, that would be so incredibly simple.

I personally like … I have a love-hate relationship with … So I’m autoimmune. My wife’s autoimmune. I know what genes my kids have. So, I don’t want to say I live autoimmune because we don’t identify that, but I’m very familiar with that whole kind of realm and world. And I just think … Oh gosh, I kind of forgot where I was going with the autoimmunity thing.

Michael Roesslein:

We were talking, I’d mentioned how like practitioners do cookie-cutter things and it’d be so much easier if it worked the same for everyone. But something that helps you maintain remission in an autoimmune symptom situation is not going to be the same as somebody else.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. I use the fair analogy like that octopus ride that had the three arms also spinning.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. I think I threw up on that.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

So again, your vestibular system. But I say that’s more of an accurate analogy because the immune system, there’s always an exception to the rule. There’s always more than a couple things going on, which is why I cringe when people are like, “Oh, I have this protocol.” I’m like, “For auto immunity? Good luck with that.” Everything works until it doesn’t in that scenario.

But that’s why I love the brain. The brain is yes-no, yes-no, yes-no. It’s like just a circuit diagram. Again, that pre-neuronal pooling, either it goes there and it makes it successfully or it doesn’t and then we’re like, “Okay, it didn’t go. So that’s a no.” Can we find a yes for maybe a different area? For someone’s cerebellum, we might do core training. We might do balance training. We might do eye training. We might do hand training. We might do vibration stuff.

So then we’ll just kind of … We might do facial sensation. I’ve had people balance better just like this Alzheimer’s guy. He was worried about falling down the stairs. We just put ice pack of peas on the side of his face and he could close his eyes and stand on one leg. That was one of my first neuroplasticity moments a long time ago. I watched it happened, I was like, “Wow, it happens that fast.”

Michael Roesslein:

So you just stick frozen peas on everybody’s face now?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Sometimes, yeah. So again, it doesn’t have to be simple. They’re like, “Well I have this $50 gel pack.” I’m like, “Or, there’s like some pork chops in the freezer.” What was that one movie? Oh gosh, Sandlot. He got the black eye and he just like put the steak on his head.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. That kid, I saw an interview with that kid. That was the redhead kid. Right?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

He was the main character.

Michael Roesslein:

Oh, was he?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

I saw an interview. They did the baseball game last year at the Field of Dreams with the White Sox and Yankees. They did it in Iowa with the cornfield and all the things. They built a stadium. Well, they improved the existing tourist stadium that was there to host a major league game and the outfield head corn and everything. It was really cool. And the actors from The Sandlot made a bunch of social media posts around then lobbying major league baseball next year to do a Sandlot Major League Baseball game. And so those kids were all adults now and it was very strange to see them.

Anyways, totally irrelevant. But anybody out there who grew up when we did will appreciate The Sandlot reference. So, Major League Baseball is considering doing a game in a dirt field with hopefully a giant dog in the outfit.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

And that’s like stuff for back to … If we think about exercise through the brain, like unstructured play time for sports, better than the gym, I would say for somebody. You’re interacting with people, it’s not so … If we think about … As you know back to that drive, if someone’s like, “Oh, for my Parkinson’s, my doctor told me to do isometric contractions. So I’m going to go in the gym and do a bunch of isometrics but I hate it.” I’d be like, “Well, that didn’t get too far,” because again, if we have this mood and emotion around it. We’re, in my opinion, completely negating it. Probably worse than if we just didn’t try to force them to do it at all.

Michael Roesslein:

I run into that a lot personally. I’m pretty open about it. I hate going to the gym. Weightlifting and that type of training, I had to do it for so long because of sports and it was forced on me and it was part of practice. And some of it would be used as punishment by coaches and things like that, so I have a really negative … It’s like going to a job I don’t like, or like a chore I don’t want to do. I equate going to the … I have the same reaction to go to the gym as if I had to do laundry or wash the car or do some sort of thing.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Take an ice plunge?

Michael Roesslein:

Never. You could tell me I’d lived to 200 and have perfect health if I did one of this plunge, and I’d be like, “Oh, sorry.” I don’t like it but I’m trying to find stuff that I do like because there’s a neurochemicals involved in doing something that you hate doing for an hour versus doing something you enjoy doing for an hour, you’re going to get physical activity either way. And there will be different neurochemical responses, right?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Oh, yeah. And back to, we were talking about increasing vagal tone and that gentleman we actually discussed cold showers. He was like,” For my brain?” I’m like, “Oh, yeah.” If we think on some of the best things we can do is, A, sleep on time. If anyone told anyone listening, staying up late is like so 1990s. It’s all about like that good quality sleep. I fall asleep on the couch.

I have patients that are embarrassed. They’re like, “Oh, I got tired at like 8:30.” I’m like, “When did you wake up?” They’re like, “Five.” I’m like, “Sounds about right.” How else are you supposed to not be tired until midnight or something, five hours of sleep? Because just one night of sleep loss, ouch. Even after three nights of good sleep, your brain and your body do not behave the same.

I would always get made … Not made fun of because they would get it, but we’d be at these neuro seminars and all the speakers would be like, “Hey, we’re going out after this. You want to come?” I’m like, “Guys, it’s like 9:30. I’m going to bed. I got to get up early tomorrow. I got to speak.” And I just thought this is so weird. The exact people that should be like, shouldn’t up late, blue light, alcohol.

Michael Roesslein:

I’ve been to the conferences. I’ve seen it.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. And I’m just like, “Okay.”

Michael Roesslein:

It’s pretty prevalent.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. And a lot of the conferences I go to, they don’t even have food that I would eat back to autoimmunity. We’re actually about to try [inaudible 00:49:28] corn just to see if we can get … I’ll be like the first Guinea pig. Is it true gluten or is it like modern wheat type stuff?? But I’ll just practice my fasting then if I just look at it and I’m like, “Cool, they got like taco bell for lunch and I’m at this health seminar.” Then I’d be just like, “Aren’t you going to get something?” I’m like, “No, my intermittent fasting is kicking in.” Didn’t plan on not getting food but my body can switch metabolisms as necessary because we want that metabolic flexibility.

I was raised Southern Baptist, but I love when Darwin said, the survival of a species isn’t necessarily strength or intelligence. It’s adaptability.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. The ones who can adapt to change, it’s not strongest. We’ve changed the language of Darwin to include the strongest or the fittest or the whatever, it’s not as the most adaptable.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Exactly. It reminds me of that meme I saw because back to Joe Rogan in MMA, you see this picture of this guy and he’s maybe my size, 160 pounds, just skinny dude. And he’s got this big guy rear naked choke and it was like that moment when you realized your max bench doesn’t mean anything. I’m like, “That’s true,” because I would’ve be … Another way off base, but I’d be like way more afraid to fight a wrestler that knew what they were doing than some guy that outweighs me by like 90 pounds of muscle because I’d be like, “Okay, all you do is work out, obviously.”

And that’s okay. But you just spend time in the gym like-

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. That doesn’t give you any sort of skill in an activity. It just makes you, you’re really strong at doing the thing you’re not very good at. I boxed on and off for a long time. And when I was sparring, it was probably about four or five years ago. There was a guy that came in and he was huge. He walked in and everyone was like, “Oh, shit.” Nobody wanted anything to do with that guy. And I was like, “Can he box?” And like, “Oh, he’s never tried before.” And I was like, “Cool. I’ll spar with him.” They’re all like, “What?” He’s not going to be good at it.

And I was very careful and he was terrible. You could see everything coming a mile away. It was very telegraphed. He was very wide with everything. It was very easy, slow. And I’ve never been the quickest, most elusive. I’m not Floyd Mayweather-

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Like 40-0 record or something.

Michael Roesslein:

… defensive fighter, but he didn’t touch me because I stayed away enough and he was very slow and easy. And they were like, “Dude, I can’t believe you sparred that guy.” And I’m like, “He’s the easiest guy in here to spar.”

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Then you get the guy that’s big and knows what he’s doing.

Michael Roesslein:

No, there was a couple of those and I stayed away from them. But I got beat up by guys half my size in there who were quick and skilled and experienced and all of that. When I first got into it, I was naive and was like, “I’ll spar with the little guys.” And then the little guys beat me half to death. And I was like, “Okay, I need to find the beginner people, not the smallest people.”

Well, I think we covered a great deal here. All my questions are good. Talked about a lot of things you can do for the brain. We talked about a lot of things that cause neurodegeneration, which is basically normal modern life. And we can pull ourselves from that routine and start incorporating some intermittent fasting, some movement that we actually enjoy doing that feels good, that we can do consistently.

Because I’ve heard all the best people that are still in fitness and exercise and training where both of us used to be, the ones that are the best when I ask them what’s somebody’s ideal workout program, every single one of them says it’s the thing that they’ll do. It’s the thing they’ll be consistent with. Being consistent, and then I agree with you on the bedtime. I think it took me until I was about 35 years old before I ever went to bed before midnight.

And I was a night owl. I was in the service industry. I couldn’t do it. And I didn’t know all the tips and tricks and solutions to resetting circadian rhythms. So when I started to read about the importance of that, I just got hardcore with myself and I decided I’m going to go lay in the dark in my room at 9:30 every night.

And the first month, I laid there for hours because I’d be watching the TV right up until that time. I would’ve just eaten. I would’ve been at the gym. I didn’t know anything. So I’d be like life, life, life, life, life, go lay down in the dark.

And that didn’t work and there’s better ways to do that. But now that I’ve adjusted to like, I’m asleep by 9:30, 10 o’clock every night, I’m up at 6:00 every day or earlier. Now if I stay up till 1:00 in the morning or something, which rarely ever happens but if I do that, I feel like I drank like a million beers. I feel hungover. I’m confused. I’m dumb. I don’t want to do anything. I’m in a bad mood. I’m depressed.

And what people don’t realize is a lot of listeners, you might be in that state all the time.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

And people live that way, man.

Michael Roesslein:

And everything is hard and you’re frustrated and confused and you don’t feel good and whatever, and that’s a baseline then. And so the brain doesn’t like that. And so the nighttime is when the brain gets clean and does all the good maintenance things and clears everything out. So the sleeping, the moving, some intermittent fasting, if you can do it and start conservative with that, I would guess, to manage-

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Without knowing more, I would say reps, reps, reps, reps, reps. I just feel-

Michael Roesslein:

Consistency with all the things?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. And whatever somebody needs. Because I would say the brain is good at what brain does. So if the brain is good at hating being stressed, it’s only going to get good at it. If the brain is better at staying up late, because of sleep loss and neurodegeneration, that’s a dangerous place to be because the brain, the hippocampus and Alzheimer’s, it’s not just memory. It also sets that circadian rhythm. So I was like, man, if you have someone’s hippocampus degenerating, they can’t go to sleep. It’s like fuel on a fire. Things start to go way faster for them.

So for some things, I just tell people back to why nootropics might be worse. Hopefully, people learn fatigability. Don’t try to trick your brain and force it to do stuff. It’s maybe not the best long-term strategy. I get it. Deadline’s got to be met. I got kids. I’m small business owner. But man, there is just no way that that can be maintainable for anything close to long term.

Michael Roesslein:

No. And I’ve gone down that route. I used to take like tons of stuff for energy, for brain, for focus, for concentration, for mood, for all these things. And it would help a little bit. I would get a little bit more energy. I’d be able to focus a little bit better, but then my crashes would be worse. My mood swings would be worse. Now that I sleep better and I eat better and I move a little more and I have better tools like meditation and breathing and things like that, I occasionally take a nootropic. It’s actually Quicksilvers. It’s called NanoFuel, I think. It tastes bad. I don’t like it.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Dr. Shade is more worried about efficiency and working than flavor. I love that guy.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. And that one, I like that one. I take it a couple days a week probably. I don’t take it as a crutch. I just take it periodically and it seems to like improve things. I don’t take it because I can’t make it through today if I don’t take this thing. And that’s the difference with a lot of these brain and energy things.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

That’s actually how they should work. Because a lot of the times, so one big fancy word is called homotropic modulation. Homo meaning same, right? So the same neurotransmitter can regulate the sensitivity and feedback of itself. Acetylcholine is one of those. A lot of nootropics are acetylcholine. You should, if your brain is working good, notice benefits for longer than having to take it daily.

Michael Roesslein:

Interesting. Yeah, I do. And I’ve noticed that too with some other brain enhancement things that are less regulated or legal along the microdosing lines, that I’ve had people come to me with questions about that because it’s a subject area I’m pretty knowledgeable in. And they’re like, “I’ve been microdosing this psychedelic every day for three months and I’m starting to feel like really burned out.” That’s because you’re not supposed to take it every day.

And so if you’re living off nootropics, and by the way, we keep using this term. Nootropics are supplements and things you can take that are marketed to improve brain function and focus and energy.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Like performance enhancing drugs, but for the brain.

Michael Roesslein:

Yeah. It’s usually like the neurohacker or the health hack, like the health biohacker community.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. I have a patient, massive TBI. And they do the microdosing, but I actually had to talk them out of it. “Hey, it’s winter. You’re always go, go, go.” I’m like, “A tree sheds its leaves in the winter.” I’m like, “We need to focus,” because we distinctly have a summer and a winter metabolism. We are genetically so far from the weather now it’s kind of sad because it’s like 72 degrees in my house right now. I don’t know what’s winter outside if I didn’t step outside.

But anyway, so we have this metabolism. So I try to always look at nature like [inaudible 00:59:20] and all these things that are in life. We are life. So anyways, it’s cool. I just told her like, “Have you ever thought of just doing less for your husband? Let’s just chill on some of them … Let’s focus on healing instead of expanding for right now.” I understand it’s traumatic brain injury. There’s a lot that needs to be done. But he’s already four years out from his injury. So now we’re in it for the long-term game.

So we’re doing more of those lifestyle things, less supplements. More like now that your husband’s brain can regulate blood sugar better, let’s start fasting a little bit more. Let’s start doing this a little bit more. We got to get to sometimes running the marathon, like you said. And you’re like, “Oh, don’t go run up a marathon.” If that’s their goal to be a marathon, then our job is to get them there. Can I get someone’s brain able to do that long enough and just keep going? But all things in due time, right?

Michael Roesslein:

Sorry, my screen just froze. Yes. And I think that can bring us to a close. We just covered a ton of stuff about a million different subjects, most of which was reasonably related to the brain, and ’90s movies and some other things and some shoutouts to our supplement friends. But if people want to check out working with you, what’s the best way to do so? We’ll have some buttons below on the show notes and things so it’s going to be easy to click and find. But what’s the first step if they want to do that?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

My website’s drjaredseigler.com. I’m on social media. This is my face, but people can’t see that on Spotify. So that’s usually how most people … I joined Facebook back when it was like a dot-edu, which was good times. Man, it’s a different world back then, but yeah. I like to do what I call a discovery call where I just say, “We’re not going to like …” Back to the guy with seven strokes, we’re not going to fix it in the 20-minute phone call or video chat. But do I like somebody? Do they like me? Can I help them? Are they going to do what it takes?

As long as there’s kind of those big yeses, when you’re like, “Hey, I just send people to you that are really sick.” I kind of laugh on the inside because I’m like, because all these marketing people are like, “What’s your avatar?” And I’m like, “I seem to attract the people that have been to nine functional medicine doctors already and can’t find what they’re looking for, so I’m number 10.” I was like, “That just seems to be like who I attract,” I don’t know.

So anyways, but I would say like if you have these chronic health things and then I’m done, I know my ADD keeps going. Before you get super-duper complex and always reach out, we can chit-chat. I say just make sure you’re not missing something basic, men or women, whoever’s listening. I actually work with more women. More women typically care about their health than males. We’re tough guys.

Michael Roesslein:

That was sad too. They’ll go to the doctor when they’re dead.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah, basically. And that’s just where I find if we tried all these complex things and someone’s been to nine doctors and they’re coming to see me, I’m like, we must have missed something just so basic that we’re kind of like, “Oh, duh.” It’s not all the time there. Sometimes, we’ll get super complex about stuff and we have to when we have to. But I like Occam’s razor, let’s get rid of unnecessary complexity, all things being equal. The simplest solution tends to be the right one.

Michael Roesslein:

Cool. I dig that approach and I know and can vouch that Dr. Jared can get complex when needed. So, it’s kind of like find the simplest thing and if we need to go here, we go here. But it’s not jump to the most complex protocol possible, the most lab tests possible, the most supplements possible.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. Usually don’t even have to go there. I’ve had people do like you only want to run two tests. I’m like, yeah. Sometimes that’s all we need. [crosstalk 01:03:12] they’re like, “I’ve made 10 tests and I ran this and ran that.” And I’m like-

Michael Roesslein:

That’s $11,000. Let’s spend that on some stress reduction and a nice comfy bed for you to sleep in.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. Or unless you think you got Lyme in the past three months from last time you took it, sure.

Michael Roesslein:

All right. Well, go there. Sign up for a discovery session if you’re interested. We’ll have all the buttons below our website, the discovery call button. Check out Dr. Jared on our brain and neuro masterclass. We did also a bonus like training program that we have on the site with him. We have all kinds of things. There’s even some posts on the blog that he contributed.

So, head over, just do a search on our site. You’ll find a bunch of stuff with Dr. Jared. He’s got his buttons below.

Thanks a lot, man. I always enjoy our conversations. I know we get to sprinkle in fun anecdotes and pop culture. And we also so have a similar background in a lot of ways with the PT type training and the strength coaching and the similar trajectory, and the attempting to give ourselves neurodegeneration for a long time that we’ve been-

Dr. Jared Seigler:

My brain owes me big and I’m going to make him pay.

Michael Roesslein:

Yes. It did something to me earlier in my life that I wanted to punish it for. I haven’t figured out yet what that was, but I’m going to spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to it. So, thanks for everything you share also on social media. Again, check out his Facebook page. There’s just really good posts there that I actually find more worthwhile than most content that I pay to read.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

I appreciate that. Well, have a good day, everybody. And I love you too, man.

Michael Roesslein:

Take it easy.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

See you.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

I do like to promote critical thinking. I train a lot of docs to do this stuff and I just tell them parroting is easier than thinking. Thinking’s actually hard. We were just talking earlier before we hit live, just having mercy on the people that we think like, “Oh, my gosh, how are they not finding this link? How are they not doing this? How are they not doing that?”

And we’re just like, that’s every day for them. That’s how bad it is. They can’t find the store. They can’t find the email. They can’t find the text. And at that point, you have to sit back and just think, “Wow,” and that’s why I love the brain so much, just quality of life.

Like I just say, if you’re tired, you can drink coffee and wake up a little bit. You can grind through that stuff, but once your brain goes, if it’s really going, I don’t want to say it’s over, but you can’t fake that. You can’t try to compensate for it or anything.

Michael Roesslein:

No piles of nootropics or caffeine or hacks and all that stuff is going to help if-

Dr. Jared Seigler:

I would argue that stuff might make it worse because then you’re trying to force the brain to do something it’s not trying to do. I’m just going to take this nootropic and force acetylcholine for my frontal cortex to fire. And I’m like, but if your frontal cortex is shot, you’re trying to just iced a sprained ankle so you can run on it more.

Michael Roesslein:

Well, I’m going to add that to the questions. We’ll chat about that at the end how nootropics could possibly make things worse. So to follow some sort of format, we’re going to be talking about the brain today. He mentioned when I trained docs, Dr. Jared has trained a lot. I don’t know how many practitioners over the last eight years.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

[inaudible 00:03:05] or so.

Michael Roesslein:

So mostly in functional neurology type stuff. And he was part of our brain and nervous system masterclass and one of my go-tos for anything related to the brain. So that’s going to be our focus today is talking about neuroplasticity and does the brain have the ability to heal and what kind of stuff can we do? And how would we even notice if this is necessary? We’ll just riff on all things brain and see where it goes.

I guess my first question is why the brain? Or how did you, because when you went to chiropractic school, was it like, “I’m fascinated with the brain and I’m going to go learn all the things about the brain that I can,” or was it your normal … I put normal in quotes because I know all chiropractors are unique, but were you going to do adjustments and normal chiropractic medicine?

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. I was an athlete. I knew I was going to work with athletes. I spent a decade of my life, like strength coach going through these sports rehab clinics, all this stuff. And then I learned about functional medicine and my wife was able to get pregnant and that was really cool.

But then I learned about functional neurology. I remember the first time I was exposed to it. I didn’t even know what neuroplasticity was, but I see this kid with cerebral palsy and that’s where their hands kind of up in that fist, almost like a stroke. And he had this slurred speech, just like a stroke victim would because most people don’t know a lot of people with cerebral palsy, but a lot of people know someone’s had a stroke typically.

But anyways, we put him in this cross crawl pattern. My teacher pushed on the outside of his ankle or one of the teachers did at that time and drove his knee into it called a plant point. Because a lot of how the brain develops is like crawling all this cool, cool, cool stuff.

And immediately his hand that was in this kind of flexor contracture just opened up and he was just like, he started crying. And he’s like, “My hand’s never done that.” And his mom was like, “Oh, my God.” And I’m just sitting there thinking like, “God, I wish I would’ve had my phone.” But then my next thought was, what the hell did I just watch happened? Because we were trying to do traditional stuff like, “Well, let’s do some counter strain, strain like get these extensors fired up. Let’s try to do some Graston on the flexors.”

Traditional, like what I call the outside in model rehab of the brain. We’re going to try to peripherally stimulate the brain to change the way this arm is.

Michael Roesslein:

Most physical therapy would be if people have gone to conventional physical therapy.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah. And there’s nothing wrong with that. You do need good sensory input, good motor output. But when I learned about neuroplasticity and for example, just reflexively making the brain to say we’re going to fire some extensors and his hand just opened up and I was like, “Wow, that’s what I need to do. I need to learn that stuff.”

And I didn’t know it at the time, but unfortunately, chiropractic has been like bastardized into low back pain, extremities, because that’s what insurance pays for.

Michael Roesslein:

Car accidents.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah.

Michael Roesslein:

Sports injuries.

Dr. Jared Seigler:

Yeah, but when you look at schooling like neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, only true neurologists have actually more hours in school for that than a chiropractor. We learned about the … And I hated clinical neuroanatomy. That class was insanely hard. One of the hardest classes we took and I got like A in anatomy. To me, school is always easy because I’m left brain, getting a date for prom was that’s insurmountable odds right there.

Then when I saw what that could do, just changing somebody’s life like, bam. I was like, “That’s magic.” Not quite magic, but I got that tingly butterfly and I love getting those tingly butterflies. I see it all the time. At first, it’s kind of like back to the prom date. You’re stumbling around the first time. You find that neuroplasticity, you see someone’s brain change right in front of you. And you’re like, “Holy crap. That’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen.”

Then you miss a few times, but then you get another one. So it starts to become routine. And then you realized, “Wow. Basically, if I can make sure the fuel has enough brain, if I stimulate it, it will respond.” There’s typically … And of course, there’s always like a ceiling, right? If somebody’s blind, you can’t be like, “All right, I’m just going to like shine brighter lights in your eyes.” It doesn’t always work that way.