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:
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.
