JMA Podcast: Functional Brain Health with Dr. Wes Center

Dr. Johnson (00:00:08) Good morning. I’m Dr. Johnson with Johnson Medical Associates. I’m happy to have with me this morning Dr. Sinner. Dr. Sinner is a person that I’ve known for a long time with great expertise in brain health and a background with functional medicine. He was a marine, combat marine, went on to get his Ph.D in psychology and has been practicing psychology now. For how long?
Dr. Wes Center (00:00:40) Almost 20 years.
Dr. Johnson (00:00:41) 20 years. And so I’m also very proud to have his son work for me and do similar things as to what we’re going to talk about this morning. His son’s name is Cameron Center, and Cameron was to be with us this morning, but he’s not feeling well, so you will get his dad, along with myself, to talk about how we can have better brain health, how we can feel better, function better in today’s environment. Today’s environment is quite challenging, as most of us have experienced with unsurity in many, many areas in our life. Constant bombardment with social media, not knowing who to trust and what to really rely on as far as factual information. And then this, in its totality, then causes mental stress, sleep problems, and eventually it affects our health and our daily function. So in your background, you’ve worked with functional medicine people. You have your own clinic where you work and focus on brain health. What should a person look for if they aren’t feeling well, having trouble with their thought processes, having trouble with their mental acuity? So many people just come in and say, I have brain fog. They can’t get their thoughts organized. And a lot of what I see is they’re just overloaded or they aren’t getting good sleep, or they’re having reactions to different foods they’re eating, and their brains do not function well. In our clinic in Johnson medical associates, we do qegs, neurocognitive assessments, and we also assess for food sensitivity, concussions that have occurred in the past, brain injury, which all hinder our sense of well being and our ability to function. When patients come to you, how do you approach them, and what do you look at to help them get organized and how to approach better health.
Dr. Wes Center (00:03:16) So we kind of view the journey to health as part of the overall life journey. So we’re always doing things that affect our health. The foundations of health are really the pillars of diet, sleep, and exercise. And so when we want to understand why people are struggling, the first thing that we’re going to want to assess is, where are you in terms of diet, sleep, and exercise habits? It’s important to know things like your genetic vulnerabilities so we do functional genetic testing. We do neurotransmitter stress hormone testing. We do food sensitivity tests. We also spend a lot of time talking about sources of stress. And any aspect of our life is the potential source for stress. So diet, sleep, and exercise can be stress points, but so can financial stressors, educational stressors, relational, emotional, spiritual, all of those things can be sources of stress. And so in order to understand why a person might be struggling with this, that, or the other issue, and how can we restore them to health, we really have to know what’s going on in the background. And many people are unaware of the things that they’re doing that actually are working against their health. They may not recognize that using smart devices within 45 minutes of going to bed is going to affect their ability to go to sleep, or that having pets in the bed with them is going to affect their ability to maintain sleep. Because our pets have sleep cycles that are well inside of our own, and as they move around, they’re waking us up. Same thing with kids. I mean, that’s why we discourage having children in the bed, even for young adults, that we need to keep those things separate. When we’re not sleeping well or when we’re fatigued, many times we will eat the things that exacerbate, that make it worse. So simple and refined sugars, simple carbs, that using a coke in the morning to wake yourself up is a terrible idea, as is that vente sugary drink that you get from your favorite dispenser of caffeine. Those things are actually working against health. Most of us that attain the age of 30 have had one diagnosable mild traumatic brain injury, whether we remember it or not. So TBIs are really common, and if they’re not properly treated, and if you’re not exercising, and if you have poor diet, the consequences of those head injuries can last for years. We’ve seen people who’ve had head injuries 30 and 40 years in their past that are continuing to cause problems in terms of attention, focus, concentration, attention, stamina, the ability to stay on task, complete a task. And so our model of assess, address, and reassess is a constant. Going back to those fundamentals of health and saying, what’s going on with diet, sleep and exercise? What are your current stressors? How are you handling those stresses? And then where may you not be doing things that are particularly helpful for you, that are going to affect you in terms of your mind, will, emotions, energy, and things like that?
Dr. Johnson (00:06:49) Wow, that’s overwhelming.
Dr. Wes Center (00:06:51) It can be. It can be very overwhelming. And that’s a common response amongst our patients. Right. Is that, oh, my gosh, you’ve told me all these things. I just feel overwhelmed. I don’t know where to start. So we generally have people start at the easiest thing to address. And so if the easiest thing to address is making some simple dietary changes, well, then we encourage those. Or maybe it’s to take a supplement like an antioxidant nacetylcysteine or alpha lipoic acid, or some of the very easy things to do, or it may be to eliminate something from the diet, maybe cutting those two sodas a day down to maybe one or two sodas a week. And to do that gradually, we don’t want to do anything drastically because generally drastic changes don’t last. We want to start low, go slow, so that we can maintain the gains that we get from making these changes. Because if you try to change too many things too quickly, generally it all kind of crumbles.
Dr. Johnson (00:07:51) Yeah. So what I’m hearing is it’s important to focus on what the individual that comes in that’s having problem, what their main issue is that they come in with. So if they come in with a problem of focus or come in with a problem of fatigue, then to approach a diagnostic modality or modalities that will help them. I know at my office, if someone comes in and they’re tired and fatigued, one of the first things is to look at their diet, look at their habits. Do an overnight oximeter study to see whether they’re desaturating with low oxygen levels during the night, which does affect their sleep.
Dr. Wes Center (00:08:38) Absolutely.
Dr. Johnson (00:08:39) And then there’s different devices that a person wears that can look at their sleep patterns. And we were talking about that before the show about which ones are the best and what ones work well to kind of help us look at our sleep patterns. So when a person comes in and wants brain health and they have a certain pattern, are there certain initial screening assessments to help get focused, to help you focus on what the patient is concerned about and then how to assess whether that’s the real problem or whether there’s an underlying problem, which we deal about in medicine on a daily basis, looking at the underlying. The triggering causes.
Dr. Wes Center (00:09:29) A lot of people come in, they want a diagnosis, right? They want to tell me what’s wrong with me and then give me something to fix that. And so I don’t know that’s particularly helpful when we’re talking about a functional perspective, because many things that we’re going to give you are things to do, not things to take. And I think one of the things that’s been a consequence of technological innovations and the medical field just broadly is the idea that there’s a pill for everything. And so what we want to do is disabuse people of the notion that there’s a pill for this. Many things are going to be directed at making lifestyle changes that you can do. One of the things I like about, there’s a popular author out there by the name of Jordan Peterson right now, the psychologist. And one of the things he says is, what’s one thing that you can do that you will do today that will make your life better? And so there’s a whole range of things that we can ask our patients to do that they can do, but it’s a different question altogether is, will you do that? And so when I ask people to stop drinking sodas, they can do that, but a lot of them won’t do it. They’re just not willing to. Part of the assessment is, what are the things you can do? What are you able to do, and what are the things you’re willing to do? I’m not going to ask you to do something you’re not willing to do because it’s going to frustrate you and make you angry at me. And then that puts me in a position where I can’t help you anymore. And so our assessments are going to be oriented toward finding out what a person’s strengths are, what their current abilities are. And most people, when they come to us, feel like they don’t have any strengths. They don’t feel like they have any.
Dr. Johnson (00:11:17) Resources, just out of control.
Dr. Wes Center (00:11:19) Right. And so part of what we’re trying to do for them is to reestablish. No, there are things you can do. You may not feel like it right now, but there are things that you can do. They’re going to help you get better, and many of those things you already know how to do. So we’re just going to remind you of those things you already know how to do that work and then remind you to implement those as a part of a daily strategy. So we start with some just basic questionnaires. I’m an amon method professional, and Dr. Amon has taught us to ask some very good questions about diet, sleep and exercise. We ask about a head injury a minimum of five times because most people who have a mild traumatic brain injury actually will forget that they had it. And it’s not until you just probe incessantly, they go, oh, you know, I fell out of the high chair when I was two and then down the stairs when I was four. Does that count? Yeah, that counts. Or I was in an injury on my bicycle and I cracked my helmet when I was 14. Does that count? Yes, that counts. And so we assess with questionnaires. I do a protracted interview. I’ve just found out that being lavish with my time up front saves me in an ordinary amount of time later and trying to figure out what’s going out. So my interviews with my patients can last anywhere from an hour and a half to 2 hours, where we go over all of those questionnaires that we gave them. And then from that, I can select what instruments I want to give in terms of cognitive test, neurocognitive tests, do the EEG QEG, take that whole head recording, then do functional genetic tests, neurotransmitter stress hormone test. And sometimes when people are not able to afford all that testing because it can be quite expensive, then we’ll do, like, a zytoscan, which is a way of using galvanic skin response or our body’s natural electrical communication system, and to assess what the body is wanting or needing, or maybe some of the things that are going on in terms of viral load, bacterial load, heavy metal load. It’s not nearly as accurate as the lab results, but it may give us a little bit of quick insight and also be able to help those that may not be able to afford that. So those are the kinds of things we do to assess.
Dr. Johnson (00:13:45) You were talking about head injury. I had a patient this week that came in and said, oh, I haven’t had a head injury. And I sent him down to get the QEG to look at brain function, and it also looks at traumatic brain injury and whether you’ve had traumatic brain injury. And sure enough, it showed traumatic brain injury, and came back in, said, no, I never had it, and didn’t realize that I had a traumatic brain injury until I went to get my hair cut, and the person was washing my hair and said, what’s this lump back here in the back of your head? And then it dawned on him that he had fallen. Well, he had been struck in the back of the head at age three and had to have staples in his head, and that the head injury that was showing up was from age three, which was very significant in the diagnostic Q EEG exam.
Dr. Wes Center (00:14:43) Yeah. So as a retired military guy, combat vet, having spent over 20 years in the Marine Corps, that’s a head injury rife environment. I mean, you just stay in long enough, you’re going to get one. And things like dynamic overpressure from explosions or ids, you don’t have to have shrapnel on your body to get a closed head percussion. Right, exactly. And the concussive forces are incredible. But we live here in Texas. I mean, we’re the football state. Right. And so almost all of our young adult males have played football at some level. A lot of our girls are playing soccer. And so if you had one or two wet footballs or soccer balls, you’re going to sustain subconcusive forces. And if you get enough of those, they equal a head injury. And we tend to live lifestyles now that are head injury inducing lifestyles. And so we can’t mitigate against every risk, but we can wear helmets and things like that.
Dr. Johnson (00:15:44) But it could be as simple as raising your head up underneath a cupboard.
Dr. Wes Center (00:15:47) Exactly right.
Dr. Johnson (00:15:49) And banging your head or on the mantle.
Dr. Wes Center (00:15:51) Absolutely right.
Dr. Johnson (00:15:52) And then it affects your brain health, your function aspect of it.
Dr. Wes Center (00:15:57) Absolutely. The thing about head injuries is that, and we’ve been researching this now for a good 40, 50 years, really intensively, and that we found that there’s 1.5 million Americans that are going to get a TBI this year. So it’s pretty much common. Yeah, it’s really common. So of those 1.5 million, 80% to 90% are mild traumatic brain injuries. Very few are moderate or severe. And if you’ve had a moderate or severe head injury, you’re likely to remember that because you spent some time in the hospital, you had positive neuroimaging, you may have a gray matter leaking onto your shoulder. I mean, you’re going to know it. The mild ones, however, the further you get away from, less likely are to remember that you had one. And if you’ve had several of them, you’re even more likely to not remember that you had one of them, because one of the effects of a head injury is it affects your memory. Right. So head injuries are incredibly important for us to understand how they’re playing a role in your sleep. Attention, focus, irritability, all of those things in short term memory, really important.
Dr. Johnson (00:17:13) So the message to the audience is that if you’re having these problems, as you just mentioned, which is focus, irritability, memory, it pays to look back, think about your history, what has happened to you from banging your head, being knocked out, falling off your bicycle and then getting assessed. And that assessment is really pretty easy with a QEG, and it’s quantitative, it’s factual and it’s based on very good science, and it’s non invasive. And we do that at Johnson Medical associates. You do that at your practice in Fort Worth. Cameron, your son is an expert at this, and he works for me. And thanks to you, you got us hooked up, and we are able to evaluate that. And it’s a very valuable part of an assessment for health in general, because your sleep patterns and how your brain works determines what you do each day.
Dr. Wes Center (00:18:25) Yeah. The reason I got into this field of very beginning with was I was working in the hospital doing hospital based therapy intake assessments with the psychiatric patients, and I just became really disillusioned with the kind of, here’s your label now. Here’s the pill that goes with that label. And I was told by the medical director of the hospital I was working, hey, why don’t you read this book, change your brain, change your life, by Daniel. Amen, and see what you think. You’re apparently disillusioned with the way we’re doing things. He’s got a different way. And so when I was reading that book, there was one sentence in there that just really hooked me, and that was well over 20 years ago that I read that book. And I still remember to this day reading the statement, why are psychiatrists the only physicians in all of medicine that don’t image the organ that they work with? And I was like, wait, I had to read that again. And so Dr. Amon had also been doing neurofeedback, which is the interventional side of QEG, not the assessment side. And he actually started in that before he got into spec imaging. And so since I’m not a physician, I couldn’t do spec, but I could do the EEG QEG. And so that’s actually what launched me into my career. And so being able to look at the EEG having a symptom pattern, then I can go back into the EEG and look and say, well, where does that thing live? So, attention tends to live in the frontal lobes and then the anterior cingulate. Those are the things responsible for attention. Our mood, temporal lobe, frontal lobe, visual processing, occipital lobe, and then there’s more discrete areas within those for more discrete functions. But when we start looking at the brain from a functional perspective, then we start getting rid of all these labels about depression, anxiety, whatever. The deal is, if your brain doesn’t work right, you can’t work right. It’s not like you don’t want to. You just can’t. And so we want to remove those labels that tend to be debilitating just in and of themselves. I can remember working in the hospital, and I have somebody, a new patient, come in and go to interview them, and I’ll say, hey, I’m Dr. Center. I’m here to work with you. And they go, well, I’m bipolar. And I said, well, it’s funny because the chart says your name is Bob Smith, not bipolar, and so you’re not your label. And so let’s get rid of the labels and find out what’s going on. What’s going on genetically, what’s happened with your life and circumstances, what your diet, exercise, and sleep patterns look like. What are some substances that you may be taking that are not necessarily good for you? We know that alcohol can be a mild sedative, but it can also tear up your sleep. Take too much of it. It’s intoxicating. A lot of people think that marijuana, particularly the active ingredient THC, tetrahydrocannabinol, they think that it’s not harmful. But if you start taking that in your early teen years and you continue to take it, you’re going to have a ten point permanent loss of IQ. And I don’t know any of us who can afford to lose ten points of IQ. I certainly can’t. And so these things that we are ingesting are going to affect our brain health, and we just need to be really careful of what we’re taking into our bodies.
Dr. Johnson (00:21:56) Well, you see so many people now having trouble functioning in the workplace or have anxiety. And what we’re talking about today is how to look at the underlying stimulating factors that create this in an individual, whether it’s their brain hormones we talk about measuring, those are neurotransmitters like serotonin, epinephrine, norepinephrine, dopamine, pea, which involve your mood, your sense of well being, your focus, your energy level. So it’s important that we look at brain function as we do with q eeg.
Dr. Wes Center (00:22:38) Yes.
Dr. Johnson (00:22:39) And then we look at brain hormones, which affect our mood. In standard type medicine, a lot of people are placed on different mood altering medications. Well, typically, we don’t have a Prozac deficiency or a Xanax deficiency.
Dr. Wes Center (00:22:58) Precisely.
Dr. Johnson (00:22:59) We have brain dysfunction from whatever underlying reason, whether it may be injury, as we’ve been talking about diet, whether it’s an actual food allergy, or whether it’s a food intolerance. I see many people that are gluten intolerant or close to having celiac disease. And there’s a genetic test that we do for gluten intolerance. And I find that people are much more compliant with a diet of gluten free diet if they know genetically that they can’t tolerate it.
Dr. Wes Center (00:23:37) Absolutely.
Dr. Johnson (00:23:38) And so I use not only the test as a diagnostic tool, but also as an incentive and understanding process so that they are more compliant and understand what will happen if they are not compliant.
Dr. Wes Center (00:23:52) And we don’t assume that any of our patients want to feel badly. I mean, if you knew that this thing was making you feel bad and you knew that that was the source of it, you probably wouldn’t do that. So we approach our patients with the information that what we’re going to give you is going to give you some insights as to why you may be feeling this way. And there may be a combination. It’s almost always a combination of something that you’re doing or not doing in combination with your genetic makeup that’s causing these things to happen. So if you have the gluten intolerance or celiac that has a genetic basis, and it may be different from siblings, children or parents, maybe one parent that had it, but the other one didn’t. And so there may be things that people in your household can eat that you can’t. And that becomes a challenge, particularly if you’re the mom who has the issue and you’re trying to feed these people, and yet there’s things that you’re having to make for them that you can’t eat, or vice versa, becomes very difficult to meal plan for a family around the individual variations. And yet it’s what you’ve got to do.
Dr. Johnson (00:25:01) Well, I find it’s the easiest that the mom has the problem.
Dr. Wes Center (00:25:04) Yes, mom just makes everybody eat what she eats.
Dr. Johnson (00:25:07) Exactly. But also the offspring then have one of her genes. And so if she has quite severe gluten intolerance, then most likely the offspring, or the offspring will have one of those genes. If you really ask the question, well, what are their bowel habits? Do they have abdominal pain?
Dr. Wes Center (00:25:26) Exactly.
Dr. Johnson (00:25:27) Are they getting sick frequently? Then they’re having the problem, too. And a lot of times, mom gets her diet straightened out, and the kids do a lot better in their attention. Less hyperactivity, sleeping better.
Dr. Wes Center (00:25:44) Well, actually, we’ve kind of wandered into accidentally, but maybe on purpose, really. The root of all diseases we think of disease is inflammation. And so when we look in the brain, for example, everything that you can think of as a brain health diagnosis, whether it’s depression, anxiety, PTSD, all the Alphabet soup, OCD, odd, all that stuff is pro inflammatory. And so if we look at the source of inflammation, diet is right up there, but also lack of sleep is inflammatory. And once you get an inflamed system, the brain is actually at the tail end of that. That means the rest of the system is already inflamed. There’s very few things where the brain is the primary source of inflammation. Encephalitis is an example of where you get a bug bite and it goes to your noggin, or you get something that affects the central nervous system in terms of inflammation.
Dr. Johnson (00:26:43) Yeah, well, that’s like when West Nile virus came through.
Dr. Wes Center (00:26:46) Precisely.
Dr. Johnson (00:26:47) And they had encephalitis from the west Nile virus, and people have had long term effects from that. And so that’s where the brain is affected.
Dr. Wes Center (00:26:58) Right. But the brain has its own immune system. It tends to do a pretty good job of keeping inflammation down. But the way that the brain and gut communicate, there’s nine times as many pathways coming up to the brain as there is going back down. And so if the gut’s not happy, it’s telling the brain that there’s an issue.
Dr. Johnson (00:27:19) Exactly. And that’s the vagus nerve, just for people who are wondering. And it’s the longest nerve, the biggest nerve from the brain to our body.
Dr. Wes Center (00:27:27) The 10th cranial nerve, the word vagus actually means wandering in Latin. It’s the wandering nerve, and it innervates everything north to south. And so one of the things that we’ve done for chronic constipation, particularly our kids with autism, is use vagal nerve stimulation to improve vagal nerve tone, because low tone results in constipation. And there are certain medications and other kinds of interventions that will induce constipation. And we found that coffee enemas will straighten that out really quickly and keep people away from taking the medication for this problem and then taking another medication for the symptoms that the first medication caused and then another medication for the second medication’s side effects. And so we try to use as many of these natural approaches, and some of them come to us from traditional chinese medicine and others come from traditional western folk medicine. But there’s a lot of good plants and dietary interventions. Just staying hydrated will help you keep from being constipated. So there’s a lot of things that we can do in that regard.
Dr. Johnson (00:28:41) Yeah. Well, just a side note, you talked about constipation and irritable bowel and that. And of course, we see that in autistic kids, we see that in adults and children and so forth, that many people assume that if you’re celiac and the gluten picture it’s all loose stools, where what we find clinically is that if you’re gluten intolerant, you’re more likely to be constipated.
Dr. Wes Center (00:29:10) Exactly.
Dr. Johnson (00:29:11) Versus those with true celiac disease, which have uncontrollable bowels. In a lot of cases.
Dr. Wes Center (00:29:18) Yeah. Rapid transit.
Dr. Johnson (00:29:19) Yeah. So it’s amazing how the body works and how that nerve feedback works from your brain to your gut, because the vagus nerve innervates your stomach and the diaphragm and all your bowels. And then the return feedback to your brain is tremendous from that, because there’s a communication both ways.
Dr. Wes Center (00:29:44) Yeah. And again, the central nerve system, we would hope, is the director of all that. But sometimes it gets dysregulated. When the vagal nerve gets dysregulated. When vagus nerve gets dysregulated, then the interventions have got to be aimed at calming that down. And there’s easy things to do. I mean, you can take a cold shower, just turn off all the hot water for the last 30 seconds of your shower will increase vagal nerve tone. You can sing out loud in the car as long as you don’t have anybody in there with you. You can scream and yell. You can put your face in a bowl of ice water for as long as you can hold your breath. There’s lots of things you can do. Stimulate the gag reflex while you’re brushing your teeth. Before you brush your teeth, you can put it on the back of your tongue. You stimulate that gag response.
Dr. Johnson (00:30:33) That’s before breakfast too.
Dr. Wes Center (00:30:35) Yes, before breakfast as well. Before you’ve eaten. But those things can induce that vagal nerve tone. Essentially, what we’re trying to do is in people with low tone, the sympathetic nervous system is dominating. And what we want is to increase the parasympathetic nervous system, para alongside. That’s what it really means to come alongside, to keep the sympathetic nervous system from dominating. And most of us know people who have low vagal nerve tone, they tend to be very irritable, have that short fuse. They tend to go into chest wall muscle breathing when they’re anxious. So instead of breathing diaphragmatically, they do rapid, shallow breathing. And all of those things are the sign of poor vagal nerve tone.
Dr. Johnson (00:31:25) Well, that’s why one of the simple things that you teach, Cameron teaches at my office, is proper breathing to help control that sympathetic parasympathetic system, calm the sympathetic down, increase the parasympathetic exactly.
Dr. Wes Center (00:31:42) If you want to see what the picture of low vagal nerve tone is, look at a two year old or a three year old in a temper tantrum. That’s precisely what that poor nerve tone is. They haven’t learned to control their own vagal nerve tone. I don’t even know what it is, but they immediately go into rapid, shallow breathing, out of control, physical externalization of their stress, screaming, crying. But if you want to see great vagal nerve tone, watch a baby sleeping. Those deep, deep, deep breaths and the very relaxed body posture. And so we know how to do these things, we just have to remember them.
Dr. Johnson (00:32:30) Give us an example of how to calm that sympathetic nervous system down with your breathing techniques.
Dr. Wes Center (00:32:36) So one of the things that we had people do is to place a hand on their chest and another on their belly, just right below their rib cage, and to breathe naturally or normally. And watch what hands move. If that top hand is the one that’s moving and the bottom hand isn’t, well, then you’re using your chest wall muscles to breathe and you’re going to be predisposed to poor nerve tell. It’s a sign of that. So the way to overcome that is to do a little bit of plank in your chair and to take some deep, deep, deep breaths. See that top hand move, our bottom hand move, and that top hand stay still. And then to increase your breath cycle length so that you’re going all the way in, you hold it for account generally, of 20 to 30, and then let it out slowly, slowly, slowly let it out. And then hold there again. And do that for about ten or 15 breath cycles. And do that throughout the day, and you’ll feel yourself being calmer coming out of that.
Dr. Johnson (00:33:35) So you count, how long do you count on the inhalation part of it?
Dr. Wes Center (00:33:41) So it depends on how long you’ve been doing that. So I’ve been doing diaphragmatic breathing now for about 40 years. I learned to do it in the military, believe it or not, when I was learning how to shoot, because you can’t shoot if you’re breathing erratically. And so I can do maybe two breath cycles a minute. We recommend people do more like five to six breath cycles a minute. So they’re not holding their breath to where they’re gasping at the end of it.
Dr. Johnson (00:34:10) Right.
Dr. Wes Center (00:34:10) And then to just let it out slowly in through your nose, out through your mouth. That’s kind of like one of the keys.
Dr. Johnson (00:34:16) Well, one of the things I’ve heard, into the count of four, hold for the count of four and out for the count of four.
Dr. Wes Center (00:34:23) So it depends on how you count to four. Right? Are you doing 1001, 1002, which is what most people do when they’re doing a count of four.
Dr. Johnson (00:34:35) So 4 seconds in, how long to hold?
Dr. Wes Center (00:34:39) Again, you want to hold until you feel the urge to exhale.
Dr. Johnson (00:34:43) Okay. Yeah, that’s the optimal.
Dr. Wes Center (00:34:45) That’s the optimal. And it’ll take you. Well, the longer you do it, the longer it’ll be before you have the urge to exhale. So as soon as you feel the urge to exhale, then exhale. Exhale through your mouth and blow it all out. You want to feel like you’re getting it all the way out. And when you’re breathing in, you want to draw it like you’re feeling like you’re pulling that breath all the way down into your toes. Pull it as deeply as you can, and then hold it. And initially, it’ll give you a little bit of a burn sensation. You’ll feel like you got a little bit of lung burn going on there, but eventually you’ll be taking it. There’s an estimation that Americans probably only take 25% to 30% of the lung capacity as they’re breathing, they don’t take full breaths. And again, one of the things that we have with smart devices like Apple watches is that it’ll measure your breath cycle, and it’ll give you an estimation of your vo two max. It’ll give you an indication or an approximation of how much air you’re actually getting in when it is that you do breathe. And it’s a measure of breathing efficiency.
Dr. Johnson (00:35:51) So I often wonder, and you may have the answer, how much focus, like on the Apple Watch for these vital signs or the monitoring of your breathing is healthy and how much is getting into the OCD type realm.
Dr. Wes Center (00:36:12) Right.
Dr. Johnson (00:36:13) Because I see people come in really focused on just one area or another area, and it’s really caused imbalance in their thought process. So how do you help those people and help them to get focused on the right amount of knowledge, monitoring versus being overly concerned?
Dr. Wes Center (00:36:35) Well, you raise an interesting point, and that is, can we focus on our health to the neglect of our health? And the answer is, yeah, we can focus on anything to the neglect of things that are really important. We encourage tech breaks, even from your health monitoring devices. And so I know that people want to track their sleep, and then they want to track their steps, and they want to track their calories, and they even have programs now where you can take pictures of what you’re going to eat with your phone and estimate your calorie intake based on the picture, you can go overboard with that. We would suggest that you monitor those things once a day, not all day. And the best time to do it is just before you go into your evening mindfulness exercise, where you’re getting rid of all technology. The last thing you close out is that health stats. Just take a perusal through it. Notice what you notice about what you’re doing amongst all the things that it measures. And don’t focus on any one to the neglect of the others, and then put it down. If you’re spending any more than five to seven minutes a day looking at your health stats, you’re misusing the tool. The tool wasn’t designed for you to focus on for any significant part of your day.
Dr. Johnson (00:37:58) So we just talked about how to kind of calm yourself down if you find yourself becoming anxious, kind of irritable, that type of thing. And the breathing exercises during the day is a super easy way to do that. You can do it wherever you are.
Dr. Wes Center (00:38:12) Exactly.
Dr. Johnson (00:38:12) Just take a couple of minutes, do the breathing exercises that will help calm the brain, calm your whole body system down. You just mentioned about using smart devices, watching tv, and that’s helping to calm your brain down at night, is to give your brain a rest. What do you perceive as a healthy type pattern during the day on how you structure a healthy day and then how you get yourself set up for a healthy sleep at night?
Dr. Wes Center (00:38:49) Well, one of the things we tell people is that smart devices will make you stupid. You got to be really careful with how you’re using your smart technology. First of all, don’t introduce it to your children in an all at once fashion. So we don’t hand them a smart device at elementary school and then have unlimited access to that device during the waking day. There should be limits on it. And again, kids, we’ve seen it. We’ve gone into rooms with children who all have smart devices, and they can be sitting next to the person that they’re communicating with, but they’re doing it over their smart device. They’re not even talking to one another. We’ve seen adults do that, all be in the same room together, but they’ve got their phones out. And so we need to disconnect from those as often as we can, as much as we can, so that those things don’t dominate our lives. Part of the problem is that many of us have busy schedule, have moved our schedule over there. We get our email there. We get our text messages, our phone calls, our directions to get to and from places. And so we are interacting with them a lot, and sometimes it’s healthy, and at other times it’s not. So the question is, well, when is it not? Well, when it’s keeping us from being able to interact with people because we’re having to check our phones and we’re having to attend to what’s going on on our smart device instead of the person that’s right in front of us. So I recommend you have a place to park your device when you don’t need to have access to it. A lot of corporations die. Are recognizing that there’s a significant loss of time and dedicated effort to the company due to smart devices. And so they now are requiring employees to lock them away in a central location. And you have to come check your device out. You can’t use it all the time because of time lost. And so the devices themselves have the ability to track your usage of them. And if you find out that during the waking day you’re using those devices more than three or 4 hours, you’re probably in the danger zone of too much usage. In the 45 minutes before you go to bed, you should eliminate all of those devices altogether. A lot of the devices, you can now take the blue light away from them so that they don’t affect the onset of sleep as much and get smart device induced insomnia. But people think that, well, if I just use my filters, then I can use it all the way up until bedtime. No, because you’re still stimulating yourself with the information that you’re consuming. I say, well, I can read a book on it, get a paper copy, and read it the old fashioned way. Go old school with your nighttime reading. Use yellow lights or incandescent lights or those that can mimic warm light. The leds now can be tunable to warm lights. Do that again in the 45 minutes. Turn the tv off. Put your iPad away. Don’t sleep in the same room as your smart devices. So I hear people say, why use it for my alarm clock? Go to target and get you a $5 alarm clock. You don’t need to use your smart device to wake you up. Now, I think the exception would be and where I would be willing to fudge a little is if they’re using an Apple Watch to track their, you know, you can have that tech because it knows to silence itself from know texts and things like that, phone calls. So that would be maybe one exception is the smart warn devices that help track your sleep. Otherwise, get them out of the bedroom for one of the things, you get an EMF from them. The electromagnetic fields are all around us, and if we have cell phones on, iPads on things like that, those things are radiating us, particularly if they’re within 6ft of our heads while we’re trying to sleep. So it’s best to get those in another room, plug them in, turn them off. That’s the best thing to do with those.
Dr. Johnson (00:43:12) Exactly. So we’ve talked a lot about assessment, being aware of your own body, how you’re functioning and what you’re doing to cause dysfunction, whether it’s food you eat, the devices you’re using, putting yourself in situations where it creates anxiety or stress. And then we’ve talked about how to assess the individual, whether it’s with food sensitivities. QEG to assess your brain function, whether you had TBI, and as you’ve stated, anybody that has played sports to any extent that requires a helmet or heading the ball, or you’ve fallen and hit your head or fallen off your bicycle, it’s important that assessment be made to see about TBI. And the easiest, most economical way to do that is with a QEG.
Dr. Wes Center (00:44:19) Absolutely. It’s got great facility. It’s relatively inexpensive when compared to other neuroimaging techniques. It is a functional brain study, it is not a structural study. So you think of structural studies as being like mris, ct scans, x rays. Those look at the structure of the body. Functional imaging, like spec, single photon emission computer tomography, functional MRI, fMRI, PET scans, positon emission tomography, or QEG, quantitative electroencephalography. Those are specifically looking at brain function. So how is the brain working? Or not? And of all of those, EEG is by far the least expensive. You don’t have to climb inside a tube and listen to loud sounds like Woody Woodpecker banging on your skull. It’s passive. We’re sensing the electrical activity that’s coming off the scalp. So we’re not talking about anything that’s going to. We’re introducing any radioactive isotope into your body, like we do with spect or pet or fMRI. We’re just looking at what’s coming off the head. It can be done in an hour. The results are almost immediately available and we have some great insight into how you’re functioning. The only caveat about QEG that differentiates it from the other studies is that we cannot use it diagnostically. In other words, we don’t diagnose a head injury with QEG. We have a head injury either by diagnosis or history. Before we do the test, and then we see what are the functional deficits as a consequence of that?
Dr. Johnson (00:46:06) Well, none of the other functional tests actually are diagnostic of a head injury, unless you have a significant traumatic brain injury where it’s actually killed the brain cells.
Dr. Wes Center (00:46:20) Right. FMRI, being a hybrid, can do a little both the structural and functional, but it’s rarely used that way.
Dr. Johnson (00:46:29) Exactly. And it’s quite expensive and most insurances.
Dr. Wes Center (00:46:32) Won’T pay for it. Exactly.
Dr. Johnson (00:46:34) And early on, I used spec scan quite a bit, but the cost of spec scan has just gone up astronomically. And so for a person that is cash pain, or their insurance won’t pay for it, a spec scan can cost $4,000.
Dr. Wes Center (00:46:50) Right. And unless we’re expecting Parkinson’s or we want to differentiate it from maybe Lewy body dementia, then we would do a spec scan, just the dat of the spec, just to see whether or not we might have a.
Dr. Johnson (00:47:03) Exactly.
Dr. Wes Center (00:47:04) Barrier case.
Dr. Johnson (00:47:06) Yeah. And that’s generally paid for by insurance. If you suspect Parkinson’s, that test is indicated? Yeah, that test is indicated with it. So as we go through, we’ve got made some diagnostic testing or done some diagnostic testing, kind of focused in on what the person’s goal is, then what treatment modalities are effective or available out there that you use. And I’ll talk about some of what I use to help the person actually heal. We talked about the breathing techniques for just the anxiety part or calming your system down. What other techniques, then you talked about neurofeedback as a technique. Can you explain a little bit on how those are used and how you use them, what you see as results?
Dr. Wes Center (00:48:01) So I’m going to back up just a hair. So I told you, the process we use, we kind of label it, assess, address and reassess. And so the point of the assessment is to find out the what and where. And we hope that we have convergent validity, which is a technical term that all that means is that all the tests that we’re doing are pointing to the same thing or things. And so our neurocognitive test is point to memory, mood, and maybe attention issues, and then our QEG is pointing to that. And our neurotransmitter and stress hormones are saying there’s a phenyl ethylamine pea deficiency. Well, that’s going to affect attention, and there’s a dopamine deficiency. It’s also going to affect attention and mood a little. And serotonin and gaba may be low, or glutamate may be high. Those things can affect mood and memory and also attention and focus drive, so to speak. So now we have all these tests that are saying, hey, we’ve got issues that are going on in the brain and body that are related to mood, memory and focus. So our interventions are going to be related to mood, memory and focus. And so we may do neurofeedback and work on the frontal lobes and the limbic lobe to reregulate that chain. We may be doing photobiomodulation, which is infrared, near infrared, and red light therapy, to increase cerebral blood flow and oxygenation and mitochondrial dna activity. And it’s been shown through research that if you can increase cerebral blood flow and oxygenation, you do two things. You give the brain more of what it needs, oxygen to burn for metabolic things, but you also increase the trash hauling capability of the bloodstream to move toxins out of the tissues. Our brains are 80% glial fat by volume, so our brains are mostly fat. Well, toxins love fat. That’s where they hide out. And so the toxic burden of the brain is dramatically impacted by the fat and the toxic burden of the brain. And so you’ve got to find out a way to oxygenate, and you can either do it through increasing exercise, through photobiomodulation, or for those who really have acute issues, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, as you well know, is the best way to get at that, because we can saturate those tissues with oxygen.
Dr. Johnson (00:50:30) Well, typically, all the modalities that you’re talking about require oxygen to be carried by hemoglobin.
Dr. Wes Center (00:50:38) Correct.
Dr. Johnson (00:50:39) And so whether exercise, which just increases blood flow, increases oxygen delivery to the cells by hemoglobin, where with hyperbaric oxygen, which we use, and I use in my office all the time, to enhance healing, you saturate the whole blood vessel, the serum as well, so that you have ten to 15 times more transport than you normally would, regardless of what you’re doing of oxygen, it’s a supercharging to the tissues.
Dr. Wes Center (00:51:10) Right.
Dr. Johnson (00:51:10) And so we see enhancement of repair and enhancement of recovery in all kinds of different areas, particularly brain health. When it comes to recovery from concussion. Typically, people may take up to 30 days to recover from a concussion with hyperbaric studies that showed 80% recover within five days.
Dr. Wes Center (00:51:35) So some of my patients struggle with post concussions equally for as long as two, three, five years.
Dr. Johnson (00:51:42) Oh, yes.
Dr. Wes Center (00:51:44) One of the things that we found is that doing red light therapy over the carotids while a person is laying down not only increases that oxygenation, actually increases blood flow, you also get a boost in the function of the glymphatic system. And the glymphatic system is incredibly important for healing from injury and from reducing toxic. So, and things like red light therapy are becoming more and more accessible. You can buy those things off Amazon now and really are helpful. We’ve also discovered with photobiomodulation this red light therapy, that your body position actually has a lot to do with how well the intervention works. And so using a neck wrap with a red light or infrared therapy while you’re laying down is going to have a significantly greater effect than if you’re sitting up or standing. And so how to use these devices really can be enhanced by consult with a functional medicine professional who knows how to use that particular technology. And unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of us out there. And so patients really don’t know. Well, who do I talk to? I’ve seen this thing advertised. I get it on my facebook. I get this red light therapy thing on my face, but I don’t know how to use it.
Dr. Johnson (00:53:14) That’d be excellent. Another session to have together to bring in some of the devices, show exactly how they should be used, what’s the best way to use them, and what’s underuse or overuse. Because more is not necessarily better in a lot of cases, if not most.
Dr. Wes Center (00:53:35) Right, exactly. So we talked about hyperbaric, and I’m a big believer in hyperbaric. Dr. Aman actually is the one that turned me on to hyperbaric. And I know the Amon clinics here in DFW sends their patients to you for hyperbaric because they recognize the value of hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Neurofeedback, which is EEG biofeedback, is a wonderful way to get at this. I have found that using it in combination with any other intervention is generally better than using it by itself. So we can combine it with photobiomodulation, we can combine it with targeted nutritional supplements, we can complement it with an exercise program. But we very rarely do neurofeedback by itself. And many times we need to do counseling or psychotherapy because as the brain changes, then the person becomes aware, and sometimes more acutely aware of other things in their life that are causing them stress or discomfort. And so having the ability to talk to somebody about how to make changes and implement them in their life, in relationships or job environment, things like, and having somebody to be able to talk about and process those things is really important. And so brain health coaching is a great way to do that. You don’t necessarily need to talk to a licensed psychotherapist, although there are times when that’s absolutely essential. But being able to talk to a brain health coach or a health coach in general can be extremely helpful about how do I incorporate these changes that are coming as a result of all these good things that I’m doing? Because you’re going to find resistance. I mean, you think about couples. Anytime one of the spouses decides to get healthy, there’s going to be pushback from the other spouse who may not be ready to be healthy. They may not be ready to take on diet, sleep, and exercise changes. And so being able to talk to somebody who can keep you encouraged to keep doing those things that are making you feel better and not feel like you’re leaving your spouse in the lurch. But when they’re ready to get healthy, and maybe when they see me feeling better, happier, more engaged with life, then they’ll, hey, I want to do that, too. And then you’re in a better place to help, but you don’t want to conflict over that.
Dr. Johnson (00:55:51) Yeah. The other day, a patient brought in a workbook that they bought off the Internet. I looked it up, and they have all kinds of workbooks now you can buy to help with your behavioral problems, whether it’s borderline personality disorder or whatever. Have you looked at those workbooks?
Dr. Wes Center (00:56:15) Some are better than other. It’s kind of like the old joke about the guy that goes into the bookstore and he asks for the self help section, and the person in the story says, well, if I told you, that would defeat the purpose. The idea of self help is it can be empowering, but all of these things come with a philosophical underpinning or a perspective that they come from. And you need to be aware that there’s baggage with all of those things. So be a smart consumer. You certainly, if you’re an evangelical Christian or a Catholic, may not find a particular book that comes at it from shamanism or from the perspective of Zen Buddhism is going to be particularly helpful, although it might, there might be some things in there that you find are very helpful. Generally, we encourage people to stay within their faith system or belief system, their framework for their worldview, and get not too far outside that because that can induce other anxieties that can then become a problem in and of themselves.
Dr. Johnson (00:57:26) Exactly.
Dr. Wes Center (00:57:26) Be careful.
Dr. Johnson (00:57:27) The message is, it is important to get guidance as you go through with this. And I find that that’s very important because people come in asking me all the time, well, I want to do this therapy or I want to do that therapy. Well, is that therapy appropriate?
Dr. Wes Center (00:57:44) Exactly.
Dr. Johnson (00:57:45) And so you have to go back to the basics, as we’ve been talking about, of what is the underlying cause, what is the main issue? And then once you define that, just as you pointed out here in our discussion, then you can have a plan to help for improvement and hopefully healing and cure well.
Dr. Wes Center (00:58:10) So as folks are searching, if you get on the Internet and you’re looking for who can I find to help me with this? I’ve heard about neurofeedback. I want to do Neurofeedback, be a really wise consumer. There’s a lot of people out today who put on their websites that they’re a neurofeedback provider, but they may have gone to, bought an equipment from a vendor. The vendor did a weekend workshop and said they’re certified to do that. Well, that is not the kind of certification that you want your provider to have. You want a nationally or internationally recognized board certification that’s connected to a clinical license in some way and get your neurofeedback or biofeedback or other interventions from that person. So, for example, for neurofeedback, there is one certifying body in the United States for biofeedback and neurofeedback providers. It’s the Biofeedback Certification International Alliance, BCIA. And they have different certifications. They have certifications for neurofeedback, for biofeedback, for pelvic muscle floor dysfunction and for heart rate variability. If you’re going to have the most complicated system in the universe, which is your brain trained, you don’t want to do it by somebody who went to a workshop one weekend and then decides to start sticking electrodes on people’s heads. You want somebody who’s had documented, supervised experience and training and have passed a rigorous certification exam and gone through mentoring. And for many people, it takes two years to get the certification. That’s who you want working with your brain. You do not want somebody working with your brain who just bought equipment and may not even have a degree in a brain health field, who’s working with, again, the most complicated system that we know of in the universe is a human brain.
Dr. Johnson (01:00:07) That’s very important because you hear people coming in and say, well, I tried that and it didn’t work, or I’m worse in some cases.
Dr. Wes Center (01:00:16) Precisely.
Dr. Johnson (01:00:17) And the next question is, well, who did you see and what did they actually do? And so many times you hear equipment used inappropriately, they’re working on the wrong thing. They’re following a cookbook protocol which has really nothing to do with. What is that individual’s problem.
Dr. Wes Center (01:00:42) Exactly.
Dr. Johnson (01:00:43) So at our office and in your practice, we focus on looking at the main problem, having the appropriate test done, then having the appropriate prescribed treatment for that, and having people do it that are well trained, like yourself, like your son, Cameron. That makes all the difference.
Dr. Wes Center (01:01:08) It does. And if you don’t see those letters, BCN or BCIan or BCB, if you don’t see those certification, the credentials behind a person’s name, you really should be careful. And it’s a caveat. Mtar buy or beware. If you’re not going to a certified person, you really can’t expect much. And there’s a lot of things you can do when you’re researching, you can look and see, is there any research been published with the equipment or software that’s being used? And do they say there’s a potential for harm? Because if there’s a potential for good stuff, if it’s used correctly, there’s also potential for harm if it’s not used correctly. What are the experiences of this particular clinician worth working with? What you have. So if they’re an ADHD specialist, you may want to consider going to somebody else if you have a mood or anxiety issue, if they’re a general practitioner, how long have they been doing this? How many years of experience do they have? If you’re doing Neurofeedback? Every neurofeedback intervention should be preceded by an EEG assessment. It can be done with fewer than 19 channels. You don’t have to do the whole head, but some sort of assessment needs to be done prior to the intervention. We prefer the quantitative 19 channel EEG, so we can see everything in two and three dimensions. But not everybody has that latest, greatest state of the art techniques, but they should proceed whatever they do. We have a little moniker that we use at our practice. We don’t move anything before we measure it first. And anything that we move, we continue to measure to make sure that we’re headed in the right direction. So it’s kind of like moving your furniture in the house. You may move it 2ft to the right, but your wife comes in and goes, hey, I wanted that move 2ft, but I want to move 2ft to the left. And so we want to make sure that we’re moving things in the correct direction. And the only way you can do that is to measure frequently and your practice and my practice, because we follow the same standards every five to ten sessions. We’re remeasuring to make sure that things are headed in the right direction. And we do that with all of our interventions, not just with neurofeedback.
Dr. Johnson (01:03:26) Yeah, exactly. And that’s so important because people then can see what their progress is. And one of the things that I see frequently, and you’re talking about toxins earlier, is mold toxins. For years and years, I’ve dealt with toxic exposures affecting individuals. Back in the early eighty s, it was more solvents, volatile chemicals. Then it became herbicides, pesticides, and as people became aware of the toxicity of those, government has labeled them, made people aware, made msds sheets available, which is what’s in the chemical in the workplace. So we see a lot fewer workplace exposures or inadvertent exposures to, like, pesticides and herbicides.
Dr. Wes Center (01:04:20) Right.
Dr. Johnson (01:04:20) But now we’re seeing exposures to mold and mold, certain molds, the black molds, produce toxins, which are lipophilic, which you were talking about, fat. Loving that. They stick to the fat. They stay in the system, in your body’s system, and they’re hard to get out.
Dr. Wes Center (01:04:40) Right.
Dr. Johnson (01:04:40) And they affect the nervous system. So I see that every day in the office of people that have had their brains affected by their indoor environment from the mold toxins. The molds produce a chemical, and the mold can grow behind the wall, under the counter, behind the shower, and you can’t find the spores necessarily, but the chemical is in your air, and you breathe that chemical, you bioaccumulate it, and then it sticks to the cells, and it’s hard to get out. And they show up with abnormalities, as we’ve been talking about, from the toxic effect where people are fatigued. Brain fog have gastrointestinal problems because it affects the vagus nerve, the digestion process. They get joint pains and aches, and then you have to treat the neural toxins. And as you were talking about, you got to use antioxidants to help with that. We look at the brain dysfunction with the techniques you’ve been talking about, and then many times we have to treat those people with hyperbaric to really force the systems, because oxygen and glucose are the two main ingredients needed for mitochondrial function, for detoxification process to occur.
Dr. Wes Center (01:06:07) Yeah. And your brain consumes 20% of your resting state oxygen, but it also consumes anywhere between 20 and 40% of your blood glucose. And so the brain is an energy resource pig. It’s only three pounds of glial fat and water. And yet it consumes a disproportionate share of the body’s resources. One of the things that you said reminds me another one of our sayings at the office, of which we have many, and one is that we don’t remodel the house while it’s still on fire. And so until we put the inflammation out, we don’t really do very many remedial interventions. The first thing we do is go after inflammation with a vengeance, because if we don’t, all the good things that we’re doing will just get burned up by the inflammation. So we got to find the source of inflammation, address it, and then we can start the remodeling process. But it’s a great analogy. If your house is on fire, you wouldn’t call the remodeling guy, you’d call a fire department.
Dr. Johnson (01:07:08) Exactly. And I see people all the time that have mold exposure, that they’ve been trying to fix themselves or get healed, still living in a damp, moldy environment, and that just doesn’t work. The same thing with GI problems. People have come in with chronic complaints of gastrointestinal problems, and they’ve seen different gastroenterologists, four or five different ones. They still aren’t better, and they’re still putting the same allergic foods down their intestinal tract.
Dr. Wes Center (01:07:38) Or they’re taking, you can’t heal it.
Dr. Johnson (01:07:40) With the inflammation being created from what you’re eating.
Dr. Wes Center (01:07:44) Or they’re looking on the Internet and they’re seeing all these advertisements for probiotics. And then you look at it, and the probiotic and prebiotic are packaged together, and they don’t realize that their probiotic is actually getting in. The prebiotic is getting away with the probiotic in many occasions, particularly if they’ve got small intestinal bacterial overgrowth to begin with, or sibo. So they’ve got a little bit of this irritation going their gut because the acid loving birds of the small intestine have been outnumbered by the alkaline loving large intestinal bacterial flora. And so they’ve got this dysbiosis going on, and then they’re putting prebiotic in with a probiotic, which just makes things worse. And if they would separate them. But they’re not talking to functional medicine folks, and so they don’t understand that that thing that should be doing good for them isn’t going to do any good for them because an assessment wasn’t done to begin with to say, what’s the right strategy here and how do we handle that?
Dr. Johnson (01:08:54) The strategy is the most important because even the test that we do for gi, whatever it is, function will not tell you what the problem is unless you have a safe food diet to begin with.
Dr. Wes Center (01:09:10) Exactly.
Dr. Johnson (01:09:11) And so it has to do with that initial exposure. You’ve been most helpful today.
Dr. Wes Center (01:09:18) It’s been fun.
Dr. Johnson (01:09:19) Your insight in how to approach brain health and just a healthy lifestyle and what we can do, some simple things that we can do to get started. Pay attention to the foods that we are eating. If you notice that your stomach’s upset after dairy or after spice, I see a lot of people that are sensitive to onion or garlic creates a problem.
Dr. Wes Center (01:09:50) Or the night shades.
Dr. Johnson (01:09:51) Or the night shades. A lot of times the two biggest things are dairy and gluten. From the food standpoint, then appreciate all you’ve said about the sleep patterns, how we think about our day, getting our day organized, and then what modalities are present and useful that are readily available at your office. At my office to help people with their brain health in getting through each day in a healthy, be joyful manner. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Dr. Wes Center (01:10:29) Thanks, Dr. Johnson. My folks at brain behavior associates and I really appreciate the invite. Thank you.
Dr. Johnson (01:10:34) Well, you’re welcome. Thank you for all your information, your time today.
Dr. Wes Center (01:10:37) Thanks.
Dr. Johnson (01:10:38) You’re welcome.