Brain Dysregulation with Guy Odishaw

This guy Auto Show is the co founder of cerebral fit. It’s a bio Electric Company translating medical research into optimal brain health and working to take on chronic conditions like dementia, anxiety, depression and ADHD, helping people to train your brain guy excited to have you on welcome.

Guy Odishaw 0:22
Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

george grombacher 0:25
Tell us a little about your personal lives more about your work and why you do what you do.

Guy Odishaw 0:29
Sure. So I’ve been a practitioner for little over 30 years, started off in what’s called integrative manual therapy. And then I’ve always had kind of a parallel track, just kind of in the entrepreneurial side of me. So I, you know, also worked creating integrative clinics along the way worked as a consultant. So I, you know, University of Minnesota, created one of the first integrative clinics in the student healthcare system, but at the same time, kind of maintain a private practice and then eventually left the you started my own clinic bhakti Wellness Center. COVID Actually, we grew into be one of the largest integrative medicine clinics in the country, kind of largest and most diverse in that we had MDs, chiropractors, mental health, traditional Chinese medicine, massage, bodywork, acupuncture, you know, coaches hypnotherapy, a very eclectic group of people, all working together in an integrative manner to support, you know, optimal patient outcomes. So that’s been my, my, my baby for about 18 years, as has been that. And then again, kind of back to my personal career as a practitioner, integrated manual therapies to bio electric medicine, and then more specifically into brain health. And working in neuroimaging, Neurofeedback neuro stimulation, and brings me roughly to today.

george grombacher 2:08
Here we are. So what was I imagine you are a very, very curious person who’s always pulling strings and following where they go and interested in learning. What was it about? Or what was it that said, you know, what, it’s time to, it’s time to start this company.

Guy Odishaw 2:28
You’re so Cerebro fitted, you know, really the where that came from was my partner, Dr. Jeff robots, BioMed Center there in Arizona. He and I just as two veteran clinicians, you know, he’s got a couple of big clinics, I’ve got a couple of big clinics. And he was interested in what I was doing by electric medicine. And so he flew some of his clinic staff up to my clinic, and we spent some time together looking at processes and but in that conversation was, was just our own kind of acknowledgement of the challenges of working with large staffs some of the inefficiencies of a brick and mortar clinic. And then what technology has brought us today in terms of ability to do health care at home, in with many, you know, often more efficiencies than what we can do in the clinic. So, between the two of us just seeing that we, you know, have this very similar path and set of frustrations and visions. We, you know, collaborated form cerebral fit, where we use bio electric medicines and mostly devices to put together treatment plans for people to do it at home care. And then that’s, that’s really what we do. So that was the the impetus was, how do we make healthcare more efficient? And then how do we as practitioners, lower the stress level in our lives? And those two ideas lead to cerebral fit?

george grombacher 4:04
Excellent. So for people who are experiencing chronic conditions, walk me through what they put something on their head?

Guy Odishaw 4:14
Sure. Yeah. Yeah, great question. So we will just quickly say, like, what our products are, so talk about putting it on your head, so we have our near infrared helmet. And then we have an audio visual entrainment system. So glasses for photic entrainment headphones for auditory entrainment, and then transcranial stimulation, so three modalities in one device, fantastic little device. Then we have a nasal laser and IR lasers. So that’s in one device, nasal laser, laser, one device, and we’ve got a series of red light mouthguard so we can work on oral health as well. So getting light into the oral cavity, and then microcurrent therapy, and then we have panels for red infrared light for them. body. And so that’s kind of the array of devices right now. I imagine that that will expand over time. But this is our we have seven devices that we use. We focus primarily on the brain, but we also do bodies but but with cerebral, what we really are front facing is brains, and primarily neurodegenerative conditions. So dementia, Parkinson’s, dystonia, things of that nature. And then that extends to say, for example, macular degeneration, which you could say is dementia of the eye. And one of the earliest places that, that dementia can be assessed or predicted is on the retina and what’s happening in the retina. And a person might be presenting with something that seems like macular degeneration, but it’s really the prelude to, you know, a full on dementia. And so, so yeah, so we’re our primary target is the brain neurodegenerative disease, but also traumatic brain injury, anxiety, depression, ADHD, you know, from our side, when we talk about the brain, way we think about it is, rather than in terms of these conditions, these diagnostic labels, we think of it as dysregulation, like for us everything is just dysregulation, and if you can regulate the dysregulation, we can often ameliorate some of these symptoms. And, you know, in a way, it makes complete sense to think about it in this kind of simple form. But it’s not how our healthcare system looks at it, it will take something like schizophrenia, and ADHD, and see them as completely different, when from a brain standpoint, they’re actually not that different in terms of the nature of the dysregulation where it’s happening. The areas that are involved are different, but the nature of the dysregulation itself is actually remarkably similar.

george grombacher 7:05
So dysregulation if you would give me a quick definition of that.

Guy Odishaw 7:09
Sure. So, um, we, so there’s why how do I say, so there’s factors, there’s kind of a standard model of the brain, which very quickly is becoming to be seen as not so much incorrect but but grossly limited. But it’s handy in that it simplifies things makes it easier to talk about, but it’s also what people who are even somewhat familiar with the brain are, it’s the model they have. So I will use that model, and then kind of correct myself. So we’re gonna think about is the there’s the brainwaves kind of the language of the brain data, delta theta alpha, beta one, beta two, beta, three gamma, so we’ve got the language of the brain. And we think about it in terms of parts of the brain talking to each other. So your frontal lobe will talk to your occipital lobe, it’ll talk to your parietal lobe, and then we can break that down even further into the Broadman areas. So they get much smaller. And so you got, you know, Broadman, area 22, talking to Broadman, area 47. And in this conversation, so dysregulation might be that we’re supposed to have a conversation happening from one area to another area, at seven Hertz. But for whatever reason, maybe we don’t know that conversation is happening at 10 hertz instead of seven Hertz. That would be a little bit like if all of a sudden in the middle of this conversation, I started to talk, you know, in Greek, and assuming you don’t speak Greek, you know, you would have a difficult time understanding me, even though we are still talking to each other, I’m now speaking a different language. So the same thing, if, if one area that’s, that’s usually talking to another area at seven hertz, so in theta, all of a sudden is talking and alpha, it’s changed its language, well, the other area can understand it. So so now we have a breakdown in information flow in the brain. And a way to think about is this incredible multi dimensional information processing system, energy and information is moving around at incredible speeds and multiple layers in multiple forms all the time. And you know, what, what we think of this computation or information that is being data that’s being crunched in one area that is then forwarded to another area that is then forwarded to another area. And then at some point that makes up part of our reality, right? And we often we talk about the brain we think about the brain in terms of thinking, right, but the brain is equally running our metabolism. So it’s, you know, what is our hormones doing? What is our blood sugar up to what’s our temper? to regulation that was, what are you know, are Oregon’s what are they producing as our intestines digesting or so the brain is running all of it. So breakdown in in the brain processing isn’t just about errant thinking, right whether whether like think about my memory or you know what I was thinking, again, we think about the brain in terms of cognition, but it’s running everything. So when we have this kind of breakdown in communication, it erodes the information that’s moving through. So then the system and whether it’s thought, executive function planning, or digestion is operating on degraded information. And and the way I like to think of it is, you’re listening, you know, for those of us who are old enough to remember radios that you turn the dial, right, and a little thing moves along the copper wires. Yep. So if you’re, if you’re, if you’re a little bit off, and the station is a little bit fuzzy, so you’re missing, like maybe every third word, it doesn’t take very long and you you’ve lost the plot of the story you’re listening to, right? And so it’s the same thing, you know, in our brain, if even a little bit of the information is getting dropped out because of dysregulation pretty soon, that system loses the plot. And so this is this is dysregulation? Yeah, that

george grombacher 11:22
makes a ton of sense. And I imagine that this is a process which maybe our brains naturally it happens as I age. And then obviously, if I have some kind of an injury, that that will just screw everything up. And you are now working to apologize for being so crude, but I think you get the idea.

Guy Odishaw 11:43
No, absolutely right, there’s, there’s any number of things that can can knock up to the brain, again, it’s a very, it’s a very robust, resilient with multiple levels of redundancy. So it’s incredibly resilient, but also incredibly sensitive. So something like a high fever, could throw off our thalamic cortical loop the timing mechanism, certainly something like concussion, even a mild concussion a few miles an hour, could be enough to throw off the time mechanism, or again, how two areas are communicating with each other. And so it can, it can take very little to do it. And on the other hand, we know like in some of the the kind of non neurotypical side of things, whether it’s in psychology or neuroscience, there can be people who are living a completely normal life, even a highperformance life and find out they have a condition called microcephaly, where they have compared to a, you know, kind of a neurotypical brain, they only have a fraction of the amount of a brain, yet they’re living a completely normal life and never would have known unless something had happened that led them to have an MRI find out that they have this condition. So again, this the conundrum of the brain, and its complexity

george grombacher 13:17
is fascinating. So should everybody be paying attention to this? Or just what I noticed things are going wrong?

Guy Odishaw 13:27
There? That’s a fantastic question. So many of our devices I refer to as the toothbrush of the brain says, we brush our teeth twice a day, every day for as long as we want to have teeth. And when you’re done with your teeth stop brushing, right? And the brain is the same way. Right? We should be doing something to directly take care of it. And for the most part, for the longest time in medicine, the brain has been kind of this lockbox, we’ve had to go at it indirectly. So we talked about diet and lifestyle, which is still a big part of say the Bredesen protocol for addressing dementia. There’s primarily focused on diet and lifestyle, which is important, but it’s an indirect approach, or take psychology, an indirect approach to the brain through the mind. Fantastic. It’s great, but it’s indirect. Here now we have technologies that are allowing us to have access to the organ itself. So we can work directly with the brain and not try and go indirect through other systems. So something like transcranial photobiomodulation, for the helmet with near infrared light that we can get, you know into the brain for the audio visual entrainment device which speaks the language of the brain in that it uses the brain waves through pulsed light to change neural firing patterns. So this is I think of it is like exercise for the brain or nutrition for the brain those as models to think about right So again, if you go to your nutritionist and say, hey, you know, I’m feeling kind of sluggish, I maybe like to lose a little bit of weight, I’d like to have more lean muscle mass and less adipose. And so your nutritionist puts together a great plan for you. And then you ask them, Well, how often should I eat this healthy meal? Should I do this once a week? Like, would that be good? And, you know, your your nutritionist might say, well, you know, maybe we could get, you know, one good meal a day, right? Could you do that? Well, boy, that seems like an awful lot. But what do you really want is you want to have three good meals a day, every day for the rest of your life, like that just intuitively makes sense. So it’s similar for the brain. If you have the technology, to be able to directly exercise the brain and have all these kind of healthy benefits to the brain. One would want to do that every day. And that’s kind of my general prescription is, we should do something good for our brain every day, because it’s our brain.

george grombacher 16:06
Because obviously, we should but if I’m not, if I’m not if I’m not thinking about being mindful and see how many more puns I can throw in there about my brain. So it’s it’s it’s light sound.

Speaker 3 16:20
You’re we’re getting it through our ears or eyes.

george grombacher 16:25
I heard you say orally.

Guy Odishaw 16:27
Correct. Through that through the skull through the helmet, the transcranial photobiomodulation. Yeah, and then the transcranial stimulation part of the audiovisual entrainment device, which is, so you’re usually done with your clips, put on ear clip clips, and deliver basically on microcurrent, alternating microcurrent in to the brain, which has a very, very, very mild like, you don’t feel it. But what’s great about transcranial stimulation is the fancy term here, it normalizes the resting membrane potential of a neuron, right? Like, what does that mean? So, so a way to think about it, and this is really overgeneralizing the way I apologize for that. But you can think about anxiety, as neurons that fire too easily. And depression, as neurons that don’t fire easily enough, it takes more stimulation to get the neurons to fire in depression, and anxiety, too little stimulation makes them fire. So we can roughly think of these conditions in this way. So if you have something that kind of normalizes the resting membrane potential, it brings anxiety down, and it brings depression up, you know, you know, very simple, non invasive, no side effects, you know, just a gentle trickle charge to the brain and great research to show that say something like transcranial stimulation, when compared to SSRIs for anxiety, depression, OCD, it’s about three times as effective. So, it was great, you know, kind of a statistical power in the in the research to show its efficacy, and, and no negative side effects. Amazing. Yeah.

george grombacher 18:25
So how do I how do I know? How do I get started? You’ve got seven devices and all these different things. And I don’t know, I’m just, if I’m feeling like I have, there’s something wrong with me, or I’m just feeling like I want to optimize?

Guy Odishaw 18:39
Yeah, great place to start as we offer consults. So we can do a free 15 minute consult for somebody who’s just kind of curious when generally know if they’re heading in the right direction or not, if they’re a good candidate, and then we do a longer console 45 minute console, which allows me to go through a person with their health history, what’s going on? What have they tried? What’s been successful, what hasn’t been successful, put together a treatment plan for them go through that treatment plan of what what’s the cost going to be? What’s their actual day to day lived experience of of compliance going to be? What can we anticipate for outcomes, that if a person feels like yeah, that sounds like something I want to do, I’ll put together then a device or a suite of devices, shipped them to the person, we’ll hop on a zoom call, when they get them we’ll go through how to set them up, how to do their treatment, what protocols to run, and then I you know, I stay with them and monitor them over time. And whether that’s, you know, in two weeks, we’re talking again, or in six months or in three years. You know, we’re always here to have those conversations to modify based on what’s happening, you know, in the person’s health in their life, like that, but a great place to start is just with The console and find out if a person is a good candidate.

george grombacher 20:06
Excellent. Well, guy, thank you so much for coming on tell us where we can learn more about everything and where we can schedule that console.

Guy Odishaw 20:14
Your cerebral fit.com. So Cerebro fit.com That’s our, our website. You can people can reach me there, it’ll have our phone number, it’ll have my direct email address access to the schedule to schedule the consults. Everything they need to know is mountains of research there. So if people want to find out what are the effects of near infrared light, what are the effects of audio visual entrainment? What are the effects of transcranial stimulation? Mountains of research available there so that you can see that these are legitimate areas of research and of medicine, and find out their safety and efficacy. And then if that all feels good, move forward with a console.

george grombacher 21:05
Love it. Well, if you’re enjoying as much as I did, show your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas, go to cerebral fit.com See REBRAL fit.com And check out everything that guy has been sharing with us. Take advantage of that 15 minute consult and find out if there are ways to make life better, and train your brain. Thanks, Ken guy.

Guy Odishaw 21:32
Thank you. Great to spend time with you.

george grombacher 21:35
Likewise, till next time, remember, do your part by doing your best