Adapted from episode 73 of The Perfect Stool podcast and edited for readability.
Dr. Corey Deacon is the co-founder and Medical Director of Neurvana Health in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He has a Masters 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. Dr. Deacon’s work with traumatic brain injuries led him to working with the gut.
Lindsey:
Let me start by just asking you what the connection is between traumatic head injuries or concussions and the gut?
Dr. Deacon:
Great question. 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. We have a nerve fiber that runs from the back of the neck, down the left side of the neck, underneath 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. It’s called the vagal nerve, or the vagus nerve. There’s two divisions of the vagus nerve: the dorsal and the ventral. It actually regulates gut motility. It regulates what is secreted in the gut in terms of enzymes, in terms of our bile acids, stomach acid or everything we need to break down things in the gut so that they can be absorbed. The vagus nerve also plays a role in regulating the immune system. This is a very fast connection, because it’s electrical. This vagus nerve runs in an electrical fashion.
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. Actually two of these are my two favorite hormones in the entire body. One is called VIP; I call it very important peptide. It actually stands for vasoactive intestinal polypeptide. 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. It’s basically when the cells of the gut open themselves up and this is typically for the immune system to come in and deal with a problem within the gut. The gut is only one cell thick; it’s very easy for components to move from the gut into the bloodstream and into the immune system. This VIP is actually responsible for keeping those tight junctions sealed. Typically, what you’ll see and you’re seeing a lot of research published now on this phenomenon of leaky gut triggered by a brain injury. This happens because these peptide hormones get thrown off and so all of a sudden, you’re going to see the levels in blood of a VIP dropped very low and now the gut can’t seal up properly. This is a big problem.
The other hormone that’s really big, there’s a handful, but I’m going to just focus on these two. The other one is MSH. MSH stands for melanocyte stimulating hormone. It’s a hormone that gets released when we have sun exposure and UV exposure penetrates the arterioles in the skin. MSH is incredibly important for regulating the mucosal immune system. All the mucus layers in our body within our sinus cavity, our oral cavity, our entire gut tract, vaginal tract and urinary tracts are all coated by the mucosal immune system, typically it’s driven by an antibody called IgA or immunoglobulin A. This can be measured in saliva and in stool as Secretory IgA. This MSH, when it drops low from a head injury will now typically cause a low response of the secretory IgA. Now, we run the risk of overgrowing microbes that shouldn’t be there; dysbiotic microbes that we don’t want to be growing. Long story short, there are two connections between the brain and the gut. One is electrical and one is chemical. This is how head injuries can drive problems within the gut.
Lindsey:
Okay, so all this sunscreen… is that hurting our gut lining?
Dr. Deacon:
Sunscreen is hurting our gut lining. Not just because 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. UVA light is now found to activate insulin. Right? So what happens if our insulin is not activated? Well, now it can’t join into the receptor properly and we get blood sugar regulation issues. 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 you’re blocking ability to produce vitamin D, which regulates our mucosal immune system as well as this MSH. So yeah, typically what I tell people is: it’s not necessarily the UV light that’s bad. It’s how we approach the sun. We’re not out in the sun when it rises and getting this whole preparation process. We just jumped out there at 11 or 12, when the sun’s at the highest, and you’re going to get burned, 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. We do not have a sun exposure problem right now, in terms of sunburn. We need that proper sun exposure. It’s really interesting. You look at the use of sunscreen and when you actually dig into the literature, you’re not even seeing a reduction in skin cancer.
Lindsey:
Not of any type?
Dr. Deacon:
Of melanoma.
Lindsey:
I see my father. He’s got his arms are covered with 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. At the same time, I’m thinking I’ve got his genes, and I’m going to end up with arms covered with skin cancers if I don’t watch it.
Dr. Deacon:
You have to be responsible with your exposure for sure. Yeah, for sure. So there is a guy who I love. 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 a lot of complicated biophysics going on, where we do have to be aware and conscious of our light exposure. Yes, we need sun. We don’t want to burn so we want to do it responsibly. So yeah, 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,
Lindsey:
Okay so go out. Get a light tan, but don’t let yourself burn.
Dr. Deacon:
You got it because it’s also a big problem not getting in the sun and that’s actually a risk factor for melanoma. I know a guy, one of my patients, who ended up getting melanoma on his chest. Ever since he was a kid, he always wore a shirt in the sun because his mom was terrified that he would get cancer. 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, it’s important to be spending some time in that sunlight. If you look at 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, our mucosal gut immune system. It’s really important and you start linng up and seeing, okay, this is why a lack of sun exposure can cause all the problems that it causes including cancer.
Lindsey:
Interesting. Okay, so back to the topic related to the brain and gut. So tell me about electrogastrograms or EGGs?
Dr. Deacon:
Yeah, so this is something that I’m incredibly excited about. Electrogastrogram is a way to actually look at the function, the electrical function of the gut. I’m certified in functional medicine. We’re very adept at looking at stool testing, breath testing, certain urine tests and saliva tests to 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 gut, the brain, and actually every cell in our body is electrochemical, which means without an electrical current or voltage, it doesn’t function. We got this chemical side kind of locked down. Then what we’re missing is this electrical side. I see the same thing with people dealing with brain issues and nobody’s looking at the electrical function of the brain. We’re getting MRIs, ETs, questionnaires and neurotransmitter testing, but I’m not seeing a big component of the electrical analysis. What the electrogastrogram 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 is working. You’ll do this see the same thing with an EEG where you look at the electrical function of the brain. The EGG, or the electrogastrogram is electrical function in the gut. What you can do is put this electrical array overtop of your gut. You can run it through an app 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. From that we can actually look at: how is this you know, how is this gut functioning and how is it moving things through the gut. You’ll start seeing interesting things in people that have IBS, that have inflammatory bowel disease. They may have gastritis, GERD or reflux, they may have small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, chronic parasites or fungal problems. What you’ll notice is their EGG isn’t smooth, it’s not moving things in the proper rhythm. The proper motor rhythm is about .05 hertz. 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 slowly throughout the entire tract. We tend to call this dysmotility or slowed gut motility.
Lindsey:
Are we talking about the speed of the villi moving things through the gut?
Dr. Deacon:
You got it. It’s called the migratory motor complex. It’s the motor flexes essentially that are happening. It’s like the muscle flexing that happens through that gut tract to move things along the cilia, because of course, different parts of the intestine are made for different things, right? Whether it’s breaking things down, absorbing things, absorbing water; 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 the microbiome. When the movement gets disrupted, you get into trouble. You will sometimes see where there’s just little areas that are firing improperly. Sometimes you’ll even see them firing in the wrong direction. We all for the most part have heard of acid reflux, where we get heartburn, right? 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, in the throat. You’ll sometimes get 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 and bacteria releasing lipopolysaccharides, aggravating that immune system and actually even affecting our detoxification.
Lindsey:
So with the EGG, can you then tell the difference between somebody who has 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 I’m not sure that’s actually true.
Dr. Deacon:
Yeah, in terms of in terms of pH levels, 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. Acid composition. 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 that burning very easily and your acid may still be low. What I describe to people as 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. What happens when our mucous layer breaks down in our gut is now we feel the acid. I know you’re very up to date on this research 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.
Lindsey:
So if you actually have Barrett’s Esophagus, that would be indicative of the fact that you have high stomach acid, right?
Dr. Deacon:
Well, 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. There’s 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. Then on top of that you likely have low mucosal immunity as well. There’s a very high correlation between decreased mucous secretions and Barrett’s esophagus. Because the mucus is what protects us, right? It’s what protects us from that breakdown.
Lindsey:
How can we help that mucus?
Dr. Deacon:
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, H. Pylori and then I’m looking at how are the brain and the gut are communicating on an electrical level because a lot of times you’re going to get this, what’s called a phase reversal, where all of a sudden things are traveling backwards and muscle sphincters aren’t as tight as they should be.
Lindsey:
Yeah. Well, let me back up just a second and ask you about the HCL challenge test because some people may not know what we’re talking about. I have done one, so I know but…
Dr. Deacon:
With betaine HCL, it’s a supplement that is essentially stomach acid. You take a capsule before each meal in a day, and if you don’t get any reactions, the next day, you take two before each meal and then three, four, etc. I tell people to go until they get a reaction or until they hit five capsules, which if you’re at 500 milligrams a capsule, you’re around 2500 milligrams. If you’re still not getting a reaction, it’s pretty obvious you have low stomach acid and you should keep it at dose until you start getting reaction in the form of an acid or burning sensation. What I’ll find, it may take less than the morning, more at lunch and more at dinner. Other people need to take more in the morning, less at lunch and more at dinner and it’s just going to fluctuate. Some people will find they need to take two in the morning, or three at lunch and two in the evening with dinner. That’s the stomach acid challenge. If you have to take more than one or two, you typically have low stomach acid and you’re going to want to be replacing that stomach acid when you eat. If you don’t, you’re not going to break down your proteins properly, which causes them to inflame your gut. You’re going to get malabsorption issues of your proteins and you run the risk of having microbe, bacterial, fungal overgrowth in the small intestine, which causes all sorts of problems. I just had a patient today who 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. It can have a profound effect on the body.
Lindsey:
Okay, so you were talking about the EGG and how it could turn up, in the case of reflux, it would turn up something showing the electrical signal going the wrong direction.
Dr. Deacon:
You got it.
Lindsey:
So what can you do about that?
Dr. Deacon:
There’s a few things. You can actually do neuro and biofeedback techniques to train the nervous system to reorganize that signal. So neurofeedback, 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. It allows us to look at functional disruptions in brainwave activity that can contribute to problems with anxiety, depression, epilepsy, sleep problems, pain, fibromyalgia, ADD and ADHD. It’s really come a long ways. It was actually developed in the 70s for epilepsy. What they were actually doing in the 70s was inducing epilepsy in cats. Then they were training this rhythm called the sensory motor rhythm, we call it the SMR rhythm, that is kind of in the central part of you. If you draw a line from your right ear over top of your head to your left ear, that’s your central somatic sensory motor cortex and that’s where this rhythm comes out of. It actually goes and talks down to the top of the brain stem and the cerebellum to elicit motor movements. This is also includes motor movements within the gut. They were actually training this rhythm and it was it was completely reversing epilepsy in cats. It was then taken and transferred into neurofeedback and now it’s blown up into this whole world of assessment and training. 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. Then you can do SMR techniques at the brain if the brain is what’s affecting the gut. What’s really fascinating is when you 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. What you’ll sometimes see, 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. 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,
Lindsey:
Is it possible that it starts as a psychiatric condition, then changes are induced in the gut based on the behaviors like vomiting after eating and that sort of thing, that then cause the problem go in that direction?
Dr. Deacon:
Yes, 30% of the time but 70% of the time, what we’re seeing, because you can actually see what is having an effect on the other. With the brain and the gut, it’s kind of like a healthy marriage. 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. 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. Actually in 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.
You’ll see this with fungal overgrowth sometimes. I don’t know if you ever run into this problem. I do quite quite frequently, where somebody has a fungal overgrowth and they’re just craving sugar, like crazy. It’s the last thing that they should be eating but it’s making their brain feel good. It turns out that aldehyde molecules that come as fungal metabolites (after fungal fermentation happens, they release aldehydes) they make their way up to the brain and they stimulate dopamine release. These aldehydes actually make us feel good at the level of the brain, so it drives our behavior to eat more. This is an example of the fungal pathogens influencing our brain and behavior, to give them a more suitable environment to continue living.
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 will find in this in eating disorders as an example, that now all of a sudden, the brain has been influenced by the gut and the behavior continues. The reason why we actually came across this is we had a couple of people with eating disorders. Typically, we’ve always had good success with them. We had a handful of people we just couldn’t seem to get effect with. We’re looking at copper and zinc problems. We’re looking at the gut and the neurotransmitters. We’re working with neurofeedback and typically, there’s a lot of trauma and emotional regulation problems as well. We’re working with everything, doing all the right things and we weren’t getting anywhere. All of a sudden, we come across the research on EGG and we went, “Okay, you know, let’s take a look at this.” It turns out that the problems were being influenced and it’s actually the gut influencing the brain at too high of a degree. When we actually went and focused on biofeedback and retraining the gut rhythm, all of a sudden, then we started seeing the shift. It was 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. We’re at the point now where we can actually filter it out with technology that we have now. We can filter out the abdominal muscles and see directly what’s coming in from the gut.
Lindsey:
When you’re talking about the biofeedback and retraining the gut and such, what does that actually look like? What is the process?
Dr. Deacon:
Yeah, so what you do is you hook up sensors onto the gut or under the brain, wherever you need to intervene. You will play either a game, a movie, music, or you might just have a little animation that plays when your gut or your brain is facilitating the rhythm that we want to see. One thing 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. There’s what’s called a normative database. We have these databases of people that don’t have any health issues or any major health issues. We can compare the assessments to these normative databases and then we can look at how far out of that normal range somebody might be. Then what we can do is we can train them back towards that range, so 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 game, that they’ll perform better when they’re playing a game. You can even do cool things like dim a screen when a child’s playing a video game, so you can make it really interesting.
But there’s these couple of regions in the brain called the superior and the inferior colliculi. We don’t call it superior because it’s better than the other, it’s just higher up in the brain. They respond to the audio and visual information. They will then send it to the limbic system, which sends it to the reward system in the frontal lobe or the punishment system in the right frontal lobe. 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 would have thunk, right? 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. When we give the brain stimulus, it’s happy, whether it’s bad or good stimulus. We know this because we see bad news, bad media and these bad things that happen yet, we still want more of that, we want to have more of that feedback. When we remove the stimulus, the brain doesn’t like that. 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. When the brain and gut come more into sync and are on a more even relationship instead of one trying to control the other, this is something we call brain-computer interface. The brain learns how to drive the machine; it learns the algorithm and the code that you’re giving it. 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.
Lindsey:
How long do you have to do that to retrain the brain and gut?
Dr. Deacon:
We tend to do about 45 minutes to an hour long sessions. Typically, we’re going to do it two or three times a week. We run people generally through a minimum of 16 to 24 retraining sessions. In most cases that are of mild to moderate severity, that is quite sufficient. The way that we describe 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. We get that foundation and then typically, people will maybe do one every session every week or two to four weeks. 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, when we do have a lot of wear and tear on our on our gut as well in terms of environmental toxicants, in terms of dietary contaminants, biotics, medications, etc. We do typically put people through maintenance sessions as well. We’re hoping in the next year to two years for us 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. We hope to have something like that to be able to bring it to an app and the cell phone. And people can do this type of training at home. There are actually options for neurofeedback at home training right now. If it is a brain driven issue, people can get units that they can actually do at home as well. We know that health is a long-term maintenance policy. That’s sometimes what’s required.
Lindsey:
When might people develop these kinds of problems in their gut with the going the wrong direction or wrong speed?
Dr. Deacon:
What we’ve seen is emotional and physical trauma. Emotional trauma triggers long-term issues with something called the dorsal-vagal nerve division. We have two divisions of this vagus nerve: one is the ventral and one is the dorsal. It means that the dorsal is higher up and the ventral is lower down on the brainstem. When we’re in a joyful, exciting, motivated type of a rhythm, we’re happy; 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, this could be an emotional trigger or 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 fainter, the play dead response. 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 (encephalopathy is just a fancy term for 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 mold toxin problem. Stealth chronic infections will cause this as well, so you’ll see it with Lyme and coinfections. I particularly see it a lot with a Bartonella infection in the gut. What happens is all of a sudden, the gut doesn’t have the energy that it used to. The energy resources are being directed elsewhere. It only has so much; it’s kind of like it’s living off of scraps. The energy is directed to parts of the gut that are needed. Typically higher up in the gut, lower down in the gut for bowel function 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 did from an energy perspective. One of the things that I’ve found with phase reversal, which is a fancy term for when things are traveling the wrong direction in the gut, back up the gut instead of down, is head injury. 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. 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 in the gut, typically I’m looking at the physical injury phenomena.
Lindsey:
These ares where it is is something you would know from the EGG, right?
Dr. Deacon:
You got it; you got it.
Lindsey:
You couldn’t just feel like, “Oh, I always have a problem here in my gut”?
Dr. Deacon:
You can, but we like to measure it so that we can actually have something objective to go off. Then we can see if we’re actually improving. There’s a point you start working with people and you might not see improvement in four weeks; subjectively where symptoms are getting better, but you might be able to see that you’re at least on the right path. Sometimes it does take a little bit of time and so we always want to know: 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. Yeah, it’s something you could tell. Like I remember when I dealt with all my head injuries, it was always lower gut right in the middle of my abdomen. You could tell that it was lower small intestine, 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 there’s different approaches depending on what is actually triggering those problems.
Lindsey:
If somebody came to you with IBS and no history of head trauma, what would you start with in terms of testing? Would you start with the EGG or would you start with a stool test or something else?
Dr. Deacon:
We always start with an EEG, and if it is a gut complaint, an EGG. I want to see what the electrical function’s doing because the chemical problems that go on have an effect on the electrical system and we can predict that. 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 do that in my intake: have you ever had an injury, and I’ll usually ask about four or five different questions: ever had a whiplash injury, ever had a car accident, etc. No. Then I asked, when you’re little, did you ever hit your head? It’s like, oh, yeah, 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, it does count as a head injury.
Lindsey:
I don’t think anybody’s not had a head injury by falling down and hitting your head while you’re little.
Dr. Deacon:
That’s right. Little things like that they can add up and they don’t always trigger issues right away. Personally for me, I played football and hockey and I had never formally been diagnosed with a concussion. 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. It actually only takes about a 10th the amount of energy or force to injure the neck as it does to get a concussion. If you have enough injury, enough force to injure the neck, you have enough for us to actually mess your peptide hormones up and your vagus nerve. I actually just had somebody come 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 to tell her that she’d never had a concussion. It was not a head injury; it was only a neck injury. She’d kind of gotten away completely from even thinking that this could be a head injury problem. Migraines triggered a month after and gut problems triggered six 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 can tell that neck injury triggered a vagal nerve dysfunction and you could see from the EEG and the EEG exactly what was happening. 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 for us to cause the problem.
Lindsey:
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 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 here in the US, in Arizona, should I should I him in for an EKG… what’s the one for your head?
Dr. Deacon:
Yeah a quantitative EEG. That’s what you want to look up. If you go to bcia.org, you will be able to find practitioners in your area that are board certified in neurofeedback. They may even be diplomats of quantitative EEG. You want to go into there and then look at the clinics, look at their websites, give them a call and make sure that they’re doing a quantitative EEG. That will compare his brainwaves to other boys his age and you’ll be able to start seeing if there are communication problems. We use software called neuro navigator that actually can see cerebellum. The cerebellum is an area that sits kind of right behind the occipital lobe just above the neck, really important for balance and coordination. If there’s an asymmetry in the cerebellum, it is almost 100% the chance that this is brain being affected by a head injury. These things 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 a machine that reads what’s happening in the environment and then creates perceptions and reactions. 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. It doesn’t have that feedback. All it does is it 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 is not how it should be functioning. 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. It’s like to say to people, it’s kind of like trying to shave without a mirror or try 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, your brain gets that exact feedback. It’s like looking in a mirror and it goes, oh, okay, I’ve got to adjust myself this way, and you can actually get to get that those pathways to reorganize themselves. Then there’s usually less of a need for medications as well, if anybody’s on medications, which is very cool.
Lindsey:
Okay, so back to the gut. If you go through the neurofeedback process, you fix the migrating motor complex and everything’s running smoothly, will that take care of SIBO or Candida overgrowth and things by itself or will you still need to use medications to get rid of those?
Dr. Deacon:
Yeah, great question. Some people yes; that is enough for them to get it under control. Other people depending on how well it’s laid itself down, if you’re speaking particularly about SIBO, it may still require treatment. 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. Now, there’s still stomach acid and that sort of thing. 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 head injury tends to drop low. The gastrin regulates; so now your stomach acid, your natural production actually starts working better.
Lindsey:
Do you use the IBS smart test at all that can tell you about the antibodies to vinculin and anti CDTB antibodies that cause problems to the migrating motor complex?
Dr. Deacon:
I’ve seen the test itself and I’ve seen some of the research. I haven’t actually started utilizing it yet but I am meaning to. I just like to really dig deep into things and know as much as I can before I start integrating them. I’ve seen it. I think it’s great.
Lindsey:
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.
Dr. Deacon:
Yes, and so this is interesting. It depends. What I see is what I call illness trauma. When people all of a sudden lose their health, it’s traumatizing. 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 to fall out of balance. 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 is off balance, and if it gets way too long, or way too short, the stool falls over. 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. I investigate what might be throwing that out, because oftentimes a head injury or food poisoning is the trigger but there’s something else within the terrain of the body that’s allowing that reaction to continue. 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 it’s keeping that immune system out of whack. One of those things that will do that 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. I’ve seen some interesting cases of this. I haven’t run the smart test for IBS yet to see if this is happening, but I have seen cases of Hashimoto’s, which is the autoimmune thyroid, where when we address the emotional component of their illness (they worked with a psychologist doing some trauma-centered therapies), their autoimmune reaction went away. They’re very interesting but if you look at 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 beta, C3A’s, C4A’s and now you can get all sorts of activation of microbes. Your immune system, if it’s not balanced, you’re going to be in trouble.
Lindsey:
It’s all so complex. I’m sure that people listening are thinking, wow, now there’s 1000 different ways I thought I needed to approach this problem. And here’s one more. For people who are interested in maybe getting an EGG for themselves, you’re in Calgary, do they need to come see you?
Dr. Deacon:
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 do the initial assessment and initial testing. We can ship things to people, test kits, EGG machines, etc. 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 EGG; there’s very few people doing it; we can get the raw data and we can help people work out different protocols and things that can be done. We do offer, if anybody’s interested, a 30-minute complimentary phone consult with a health care advisor in our clinic. They can actually just book a 30-minute comp. call and we can talk about what they’re dealing with and maybe help them figure out what a good direction is for them; maybe decide are they the right fit for us 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. Retraining, though obviously, it would have to happen up there over an extended period of time. It would be pretty tough to do if you lived far away. Yeah, so again we’re trying to coordinate with clinics that are near them.
Lindsey:
Yeah, who else does this in the US? Do you know? The EGGs?
Dr. Deacon:
Neuro and biofeedback is pretty much everywhere. There’s 1,000s of practitioners within that realm. If you go to www.bcia.org, you can see where all the practitioners are. Some people are doing biofeedback, neurofeedback, and different types and there’s a lot of different software and that sort of thing. We can help find someone that might be appropriate for them. The other thing that people will do too is come down maybe for a week, 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 an option as well.
Lindsey:
But the EGG, are there other people in the US who are doing those?
Dr. Deacon:
The only place that I actually know of and this could be obviously there’s others, but the only people I know of is at the University of California, San Diego. 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 would just run a run a search electrogastogram or EGG in your area. 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.
Lindsey:
Is this prohibitively expensive test or what’s the cost on that?
Dr. Deacon:
It’s not at all actually. We include it in our initial assessment. I mean, it probably has a base cost of around $50 to $100. It’s really not overly expensive. We weighted it around the $100 Canadian mark, including time spent going through the data.
Lindsey:
Yeah, so if somebody wants to order it from you, it costs how much.
Dr. Deacon:
I would essentially price it at $100 Canadian.
Lindsey:
Okay, well, yeah. Not bad at all. Okay, so I think this is a lot of information for people to absorb in one podcast. We should wrap it up, anything else that you wanted to mention that we didn’t talk about?
Dr. Deacon:
Lots of things, but not on this topic. I always I always find it fascinating just how interconnected everything is. We started 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.
Lindsey:
This is interesting, because you’re the first guest who’s talked much about the brain with regard to the gut. This was good new material for our listeners.
Dr. Deacon:
Great. Yeah, I would just add, if you’ve had injuries in the past, 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.
Lindsey:
Okay, great. Well, thank you so much for this information and I hope maybe to have you back on some time to dig in deeper.
Dr. Deacon:
That would be great. Thanks so much for having me. I had a great time.
If you’re struggling with from IBS, SIBO or other gut health issues, you’re welcome to set up a free, 30-minute breakthrough session with me (Lindsey). We’ll talk about what you’ve been going through and I’ll tell you about my gut health coaching 5-appointment program in which I recommend lab tests, educate you on what the results mean and the protocols used by doctors to fix the problems revealed. Or if you’re ready to jump in right away or can just afford one appointment at a time, you can set up an 1-hour consultation with me.
