Your Health Toolkit: The Neurology Sessions

What If Alzheimer’s Isn’t Inevitable

• Dr. Lauren Young • Season 2 • Episode 4

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Memory loss isn’t always a one-way street. In fact, it can be the first sign your brain is asking for help.

In this episode of Your Health Toolkit: The Neurology Sessions, Dr. Lauren Young and Dr. Ashley Burkman sit down with Dr. Heather Sandison, naturopathic physician, researcher, and founder of memory care residential community, Marama, to chart a new path through brain fog, mild cognitive impairment, and early Alzheimer’s. Rather than chasing symptoms, Dr. Sandison focuses on six root causes of cognitive decline: toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure, signaling, and infections. The result is a personalized, humane, and data-driven approach that’s helping patients regain memory, joy, and identity.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • How multi-modal, lifestyle-based programs are producing measurable cognitive gains within months.
  • The six root drivers of brain decline and how to start addressing them at home.
  • What the Bredesen approach reveals about neuroplasticity and brain repair.
  • How focusing on everyday lifestyle changes can improve brain volume and function.
  • Practical testing strategies for toxins, infections, hormones, glucose, and circulation.
  • How caregivers can protect their own health and energy on this journey.

If you’ve ever been told “there’s nothing to be done,” this conversation offers a hopeful, evidence-based alternative - one built on community, daily habits, and the body’s capacity to heal.

Resources & Links:

Your Health Toolkit is a podcast created by the physicians from Collaborative Natural Health Partners (CNHP) – your go-to hub for holistic and integrated family healthcare in Connecticut and New York. At CNHP, we’ve crafted a special blend of expertise, bringing together naturopathic physicians (NPs), osteopathic medicine physicians (DOs), and Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRNs) to offer you a warm, integrative, patient-centered approach to health and wellness. If you’re interested in learning more, head over to our website or follow us on Facebook or Instagram for information, articles, and resources to take the guesswork out of your health.

Your Health Toolkit is a podcast presented for general information and educational purposes only. The discussions presented by Dr. Lauren Young and the show’s guests should not be considered medical advice but rather a conversation starter with your doctor. Everyone’s body is unique, and we recommend having a discussion with your personal healthcare team before trying anything discussed on the show.


Dr. Lauren Young:

Hi there, welcome to your health toolkit. I'm Dr. Lauren Young and I'm Dr. Ashley Berkman. Dr. Berkman and I have been working together for over a decade at Collaborative Natural Health Partners. We've decided to put together a brand new series all around neurology.

Dr. Ashley Burkman:

Yes, thanks so much for inviting me to be part of this series. Brain and nervous system health is something I care deeply about, both in my work and my personal life. I see many patients who navigate through tough diagnoses like Parkinson's, MS, Alzheimer's, either for themselves or for someone they love, and it can feel like a lot.

Dr. Lauren Young:

So over this series of episodes, we're going to be bringing you guys specialists from around the country on functional neurology and integrative medicine to explore what's really going on with nervous systems and brains and what we can actually do about it.

Dr. Ashley Burkman:

These conversations with these experts have been eye-opening, very inspiring, and we can't wait to share them with all of you. So let's dive in.

Dr. Lauren Young:

Hi there, and welcome to your health toolkit. I'm Dr. Lauren Young, and we're so thrilled for you to be joining us today for our Brain Health series. So far, we've explored heart-brain connections and how to power up your brain cells by supporting your mitochondria. And today we're going to be diving into looking at memory, brain fog, and how to support someone with dementia or Alzheimer's, or even talk about prevention for yourself. This conversation is going to give you a lot of clarity and hope. And then I'm honored also to invite Dr. Heather Sanderson to the conversation. Dr. Sanderson is a naturopathic physician and founder of Silcere Health Clinic and Morama, a residential memory care facility in San Diego, California. She is a leading voice in the efforts to reverse cognitive decline naturally, and her work integrates cutting-edge research, functional medicine, and compassion to help patients not only improve but thrive. So, Dr. Sandison, Dr. Berkman, welcome to your health toolkit. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So we're all naturopathic physicians here practicing functional medicine and really know that all conditions have multiple layers to them and aspects to them. One thing that's really awesome about what you're doing is your clinic and everything that you're encompassing really shows a lot of different roadmaps to how cognitive decline happens and how we can reverse it. Do you want to speak to those paths and kind of your experience in the clinic?

Dr. Heather Sandison:

Yeah, so basically I practice what Dr. Bredison has been talking about for many years. He wrote his book, The End of Alzheimer's, in 2017. It was a New York Times bestseller instantly, and I felt super fortunate that right as his book was launching, I was there doing the training with him. And then when I got back into clinical practice after getting the training and I saw miracles happen before my eyes. I was a skeptic, like you, I'm sure I learned in school there was nothing that we could do for someone struggling with Alzheimer's. And then when Dr. I saw Dr. Bettison talk at an IMMH conference before I did his training, I was like, this makes sense. Like even though I've been told this can't happen, this is an impossibility. What he's telling me is basically stacking all of naturopathic medicine, all of functional medicine, doing it all, getting the toxins out, you know, getting the hormones balanced, optimizing the gut and nutrients, getting the toxins and the infectious burden down, all of balancing for stress and treating, you know, establishing the conditions for health, right? All of our tenets of naturopathic medicine. When we add all those up, you actually do get better neuronal function, which and better cognitive function. And, you know, this was like a light bulb went off for me. I was like, well, maybe we'll go see. Like maybe he's there, he's on to something here. I don't know. If I could treat Alzheimer's, then you know, everything else is cake. So I went to the training and then I went back into practice and I watched it work. Like despite my hesitation and my skepticism, people were getting better. And then, so the essentially the Bredison approach, again, is applying functional and naturopathic medicine to the brain. And so there's nuances, you know, we of course need to understand more the medications and the testing that are specific to this. But essentially, what we're looking for is how do we establish health? How do we establish those conditions for health in the brain? So we're getting it. I think of what we're looking for are imbalances, right? Too much, too little in the wrong place at the wrong time. And potentially we can apply that sort of concept whenever there's a complex system, the brain being one of them, right? But any education systems and political systems and financial systems, any complex system in the world, you can apply this sort of framework to that. It's imbalance causing dysfunction, dysregulation. And so what we want is to create, you know, function. And we do that by supporting balance in the system. So in the case of the brain, I would argue that there's six causal level factors. So a lot of people will say, oh, well, all of dementia is caused by inflammation. I say, well, with that, that begs the question, what caused the inflammation, right? So how that's where we want to play is at that primary causal level, not the secondary and tertiary cascade, which is where I would put like amyloid and tau. This is the cascade that is that is a response to some perturbation, some imbalance in the system. So these six causal level factors that we're looking at in a medical setting are toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure, signaling, and infections. And when we can understand what's going on for a particular individual in these different categories, then we can treat more precisely, right? So it's a precision medicine-based approach. We can, you know, some one person will have traumatic brain injuries and diabetes and genetic predisposition, right? That's their molecular structure, has an imbalance. And somebody else, it doesn't have any of those things, right? But they have super high toxic burden and they have some infectious burden, they have Lyme disease and herpes and P. gingivalis, and that is their picture. And those are very different treatment paths, and they're not mutually exclusive, right? You could have all of those things. And some people who are older, like they've had a lifetime to collect all this stuff, right? So that's the medicine piece. And then what we see over and over again is that, again, this ethos from naturopathic medicine. I we were just chatting about, I had been, I was at AAMP and Louise Edwards gave this wonderful talk. And she kept saying over and over again, okay, what is our essential job, our number one job as naturopathic doctors? And she had 300 people in the audience like saying out loud, establish conditions for health. Establish conditions for health. You know, so Mirama was born out of the we had, we were creating sort of a reputation in San Diego for helping people with cognitive decline. And yet it takes work, right? It's hard to change your diet, to change your exercise routine, to socialize more. I mean, it's a full-time job, and it's hard for people with full cognitive capacity, let alone those who are slipping. And so I was getting these inquiries. Hey, my uncle, my dad, my mom has been diagnosed with dementia or is on this slippery slide towards Alzheimer's, and I want them doing everything that you and Dr. Bettison are talking about, but I can't do it all myself. Where do I send them? And so that was the concept of Morama, which was a fully immersive, is a fully immersive experience in Dr. Bettison's approach. It's the lifestyle, it's that foundational lifestyle cake, right? The icing is all the testing, the functional medicine testing and the supplements and the treatment and the hormones and the prescriptions. But just getting the diet, the exercise, the socialization, the creative engagement, the fun and the joy and a non-toxic environment, all of those things and people around you who think that you're going to get better, who expect you to improve. That is what we do at Morama. So um that was really fun and wonderful and exciting. We opened that uh in March of 2020, the week before the world shut down, which is a totally different story. But it was, it was actually in retrospect, it was wonderful. It slowed us down. We got a really good team, we had time to train people, and um it was it was actually a really wonderful experience in retrospect. It was challenging getting through it. But the other thing that happened kind of with COVID happening at the same time, as well as um, you know, just people's feedback that we get along the way trying to create solutions for those who are struggling with dementia in their families or it or personally, is I don't want my mom to move to California. I want her to be here with me. I don't want to separate from my husband. I want him here with me. I'm gonna take the best care of him. And I we're not ready for him to be in memory care. And so then from that was born our coaching program, where essentially we coach 25 people at a time who are all over the country, all over the world, in fact, and we help them create Mirama at home. This the environment, the diet, the exercise, and we we talk through it, we talk through the struggles, we share resources, and we kind of teach the um the components that are in the book and in my book, Reversing Alzheimer's and in Dr. Madison's books.

Dr. Lauren Young:

That sounds amazing. Yeah, the Mirama piece of things just sounds so um blissful and magical. Can you walk me through a day of what it looks like for a patient living there?

Dr. Heather Sandison:

Yeah, so the whole day is designed around how to you know optimize for your brain health. The priority is to be doing something that that supports your brain at any given awake moment, right? And even when you're sleeping. So residents have breakfast around eight, and with that, the staff manages all their supplements and medications. So at breakfast, anything that's and even before breakfast, if you're on thyroid or something on an empty stomach, they'll bring it to you in your room. And the rooms each have on speed. So the Morama where we have space right now is in Kansas, it's in Wichita, Kansas, and it's a beautiful, beautiful community. It's got 16 rooms around two kind of living rooms. So there's eight, eight, uh, eight rooms around two larger living, communal living spaces, and then in the middle is the kitchen and also a big sunroom where we have our brain gym. So eight o'clock is when breakfast starts, and everybody convenes around the table in the middle and has an organic ketogenic breakfast that is prepared by Chef Damien who cooks. He always says, I cook from the heart. It's so fun, and his food is so delicious. Um, and so there's breakfast, and then after breakfast, typically they're going for a walk. So if the weather's good, they'll be outside. If it's not, they have a big um, it's like a basically a track upstairs around there's a library, and it's um it's a big vaulted ceiling, and there's like a loop around that they can do and inside if there's if it's too hot or too cold outside. And then after that, there's a meditation. Um, so after the walk, they meditate for 15 to 20 minutes. Usually we do the kirtan kriya. Um, and then by that time, it's usually snack time, and there's a green juice or some kind of yummy organic keto snack. And then after that, typically we're getting into some sort of creative activity. So whether it's uh, you know, there's a holiday coming up, there will be something related to that, making gifts around Christmas or Valentine's Day, um, there's puzzles, there's things that are challenging. A lot of this is dependent on how, you know, where on the spectrum someone is with their cognitive impairment and what their personal interests are. So we have one gentleman who is very interested in theology and um he and and in personal development. He was a therapist as a profession, and um he reads, he loves to read. So he doesn't always remember everything that he's read, but he takes notes, and that's what he's interested in. Whereas other women are tend to be more interested in the crafts and you know, making Christmas ornaments or you know, making cards to send home to family or doing collages and putting photo albums. We'll have families send photos that we can then they can put photo albums together and like name people and talk about their memories together. So we have different activities like that that are seasonal and you know, tactile. We want to engage senses where there's smell and taste and it's a lot of cooking. There's a lot of involvement in cooking, getting sauces together and doing things like that with Damien. He gets them involved. And then after lunch in the afternoon, um typically while they're digesting, we'll go back to that. It's kind of finishing off whatever the creative activity is. We have this really neat thing called Balavisex, which is where you have a red and a blue ball, and the goal is to like bounce them in unison and it makes this noise. And so everybody there is basically like bouncing right, left. Um, they even throw them back and forth to each other. It sometimes it's just this a chaotic mess, but it usually everybody's laughing and it's fun, and it helps with balance and with coordination and memory to remember which one you're meant to drop and catch and all these things. So that one's really fun. And then there's the brain gym in the afternoon. Um so usually around 2:30, they're headed into the brain gym where there's a circuit, a sauna, there's the exercising with oxygen um component. There is a we have a biomat, which I I had one, and we put it over there because we had somebody who was pretty anxious back in 2020, like early on, and they loved it. And we noticed it was good for posture because it relaxes the muscles in the back. It's kind of this firm mat that heats up. And we noticed that people would like calm, they would be really calm, it puts them in a parasympathetic state, and then they would walk more upright when they got up because I think it was just relaxing muscles, postural muscles. So that we've we've never let that go. We've basically like doubled down, and now we have two of them because it's the favorite spot. So we use red light therapy, we use V light, which is uh a red light specific for the brain, and then we also have Juve lights that are that are more whole body. So we have had a hyperbaric chamber kind of go back and forth on that. We always have a rowing machine and a and a bike and weight, some you know, um lightweights and bands and things like that, so that we can do PT exercises depending on what's going on for people. So we have an activities coordinator who takes people through that whole circuit. And then usually everybody's ready for a nap after that. Uh and then there's dinner, and dinner's all all the meals are organic and ketogenic. And after dinner, it's typically playing cards, doing puzzles, kind of winding down, listening to music. We have had residents who will play music for everyone. That's really fun. Um, and Uno uh is a favorite, bananagrams is another favorite, so just kind of depending on the interests of the of the group, we'll do games and stuff like that. And then tea. There's fasting for three hours before bed.

Dr. Ashley Burkman:

Awesome. I will say, with um personal experience, I used to work as a CNA in a memory care unit um through high school and um undergrad. And it was my very favorite whenever a family member would come in and they would tell us, like, oh, you know, they were really into this, or you learn about their life. Because I as a CNA I didn't have wasn't pervy to their charts. I was just there to care for them. And it was so much fun to like talk about something that they liked, and they would just all of a sudden light up and just like want to share that with you. And so it's cool that you guys incorporate that because taking on what somebody remembers and knows, it was just interesting to see how it's like, wow, you really you need help with all this, but you totally know all this other stuff. It's awesome.

Dr. Heather Sandison:

It's so fun. We we go down to the garden and we have this one resident Roxana, and she, you know, she struggled with short-term memory loss. She did actually did a lot better at Mirama. Um, but we would take her down to the garden and she would be like, oh no, the marigolds need to be here because they need to be next to this, because that's how you keep the bugs away. And you have to have geraniums if we're gonna be planting that. And it was like, I was like, oh my gosh, like you're just a gardening expert. And she just felt so she's contributing, she's part of it. And then, you know, she wants to take everybody down there to see what sprouted and to harvest things and then make sure that they're in the meals that they're preparing. I mean, it's really there's so much life to live. And I think that's the challenge with society these days is we think of these people as like they're just sort of neglected, right? Like, oh, life is just going downhill. Poor them. They're so sick, they're not part of they can't contribute, there's nothing they can do, it's so much work. But actually, there's like so much life to live there. There's so much joy to be had in connection. It just takes a little curiosity and a little bit of effort to figure out how to connect with that person as their brain changes.

Dr. Ashley Burkman:

It's so amazing. Because I feel like disability in general just kind of gets put into that box of like, you're disabled, you're broken, there's nothing you can do, when it's quite the opposite. So it's such a cool story to hear about the gardening.

Dr. Lauren Young:

And and honestly, uh, neurology across the board, right? Like there's just this like there's it's kind of why we decided to put this together. It's just there's this like, oh, well, there's not much to be done, just go down this path. And so it's so exciting to hear about that. And really, you know, it's it sounds like a beautiful, simple day that could happen at any um like nursing facility, but then infused with all these principles and paths that are bringing you this great direction, like right, the ketogenic diet and making sure we're using all our all our monctories are going and and getting all that movement and stuff. It's uh really awesome, really awesome.

Dr. Heather Sandison:

Um Yeah, I think the issue, the challenge is it's labor, right? It's it requires a lot of people to keep everyone engaged. It's very easy to have someone just like walk off and go to their room and take a nap. And sometimes people are tired and they need to take a nap, right? We're not abusive. Um but we if you have an enthusiastic cheerleader who's like, all right, who's ready to get into this? And they know, right? They know how to personally connect and what's gonna light someone up, they can keep people playing the game. They can keep them doing it, but that takes creativity, it takes effort, it takes enthusiasm. And so you can't just have someone who's there to sit on their phone, right? That's not and and so you gotta pay a little bit more and you have to have more people because it's exhausting, but it it can be done.

Dr. Lauren Young:

But I love the idea of an Amarama at home because again, a big piece of all of that is really what you're giving, which is hope, and like telling people, no, this doesn't have to be the answer. There are options and there are tools, and we're gonna give them to you. So that sounds so awesome. Um we're gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we're gonna dive into more of these specifics and your experiences and stuff. And Dr. Sanderson, this has been so enlightening and inspiring. So thank you so much. We'll be right back. If you're a fan of this show, you'll know we talk a lot about conventional and naturopathic medicine and how they can play a role in your overall health. We call this collaborative medicine. And through the work we do at Collaborative Natural Health Partners, we're able to give people the knowledge and tools they need to feel great every single day. If you're interested in learning more, head over to our website, ctnaturalhealth.com, where you'll find articles, courses, and a bunch of resources to take the guesswork out of your health. Don't wait for your next checkup. The doctor will see you now. Welcome back. Um, we are here on your health toolkit with uh Dr. Sandison and Dr. Berkman talking about root causes of memory uh loss and cognitive decline and what we can really do about it. So we just had this great experience at Morama with you, which is awesome to experience a day there. Um, just really, again, going after that foundational um lifestyle medicine for sure. Uh so now I want to do a deeper dive into just the research and the the science and the medicine that you're doing with people who are coming to you for all this.

Dr. Heather Sandison:

Sure. So the research, it's helpful to have sort of a timeline, I guess. So in 2014, Dr. Bredison published the first case series. It was a 10-case series that showed people were recovering their age-related memory loss. And then in 2017, there was a hundred participants, excuse me, not a hundred participants, a hundred person case series published. So it was a larger case series, essentially establishing the that this was happening, that there this was a pattern that we were seeing and able to measure. And then in 2022, he published with Kat Toops is the lead author on the a trial published in the Journal of Alzheimer's disease in July of 2022 that took 25 participants through a nine-month intervention. So they had baseline testing and then testing throughout the process and then nine-month testing. They could compared before and after. So this was a feasibility trial, and there was no control group. It was just 25 participants before and after testing. And what they saw was that 84% of their participants improved after nine months. And they took participants with MOCA scores down to 19. So a MOCA is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and so it's a blunt tool, but it's like many people have probably seen it. It's a one-page PDF where you identify zoo animals, tell people where you are in time and space, do some math that's actually kind of hard. And then you get a number out of 30. 30 out of 30 is perfect, 26 and above is normal. And these participants who were in that trial only could go down to a 19. So it was quite more mild cognitive impairment. And um 84% of them in nine months got better. In 2023, we were able to publish our trial, which was very similar. We took participants with MOCA scores between 12 and 23, and we did not exclude people with a diagnosis of Alzheimer's. So we had more progressed patients, and we had 23 of them complete a six-month intervention. So it was more progressed participants, and we had a six-month intervention instead of a nine-month intervention, but it it essentially replicated what they had done, which was a clinical experience. Like what do people experience when they go in to see a Gretzen trained provider practicing this sort of functional naturopathic medicine? And we had 74% of our participants improve. We had statistically significant increases in memory, overall composite cognition, in MOCA scores. We used Cambridge Brain Science's battery of cognitive testing for our testing to because the MOCA isn't really appropriate for doing before and after testing. It's just not a good enough instrument. And then we also had statistically significant improvements across the mean in uh quality of life and sleep. So this was, and I wish that we had tested the care partners, right, the spouses, because they also report improvements in quality of life. So these are two studies that were done in 2022, 2023, both published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. Then a year later, in June of 2024, Dean Ornish published his trial, which was a controlled trial. They took, I think it was 40 participants. It was a little bit bigger number, split into two, and it was a four-month intervention. So even quicker intervention. It was less of the precision medicine, and it, but it was supplements. It was a vegan diet instead of an organic ketogenic diet. They went plant-based. They had support groups, supplements, exercise, um, some coaching, lifestyle coaching, and they saw a statistically significant difference between the control group and the intervention arm. And they saw improvements in cognition. And these were people with early Alzheimer's disease. So they were, they were also a measurably cognitively declined group. So those three studies, although small, are very, very exciting. And Dr. Bredison right now is working with five different clinical sites around the country from Cleveland and Florida, California. Um and they are have, I think, 70 participants in a controlled trial. And they the preliminary data is showing a big difference. In fact, what they did was with the control arm, they did a crossover. And Craig Tanneo in in um in Florida is one of the people who's just like, it's so the results are so exciting. They're really fun to see because even that control arm is like shifting um after they get the intervention uh when they switch over. So so I I Craig Tanneo, Kat Toops, um, Nate Bergman, um, there's uh David Hossey, um, there's six providers. I'm missing one. Oh, Christine Burke. So there's a bunch of providers across the country who have done this and they know this stuff forward backwards and forwards, and they're you know, getting results with patients both in the trial and outside of the trial. So really fun, really exciting stuff happening in the research world around this. We uh collaborate really closely with Pacific Neuroscience Institute, and they just published a paper which is actually winning an award next week at the Alzheimer's Conference. They looked at Pranovo, do you guys have Prenovo, the um IFL Betty MRI scans?

Dr. Ashley Burkman:

Yeah, I think that's in Boston and New York or something. Yeah, like in the big bigger cities. Yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison:

They took data from Prenovo and it was like 10,000 studies. Um, and they showed that exercise how exercise has an impact on volumetrics, on brain volumes. Cool. You know, just validating again that over and over again that these lifestyle interventions have a huge impact on cognitive function, on brain health as we age. Yeah, for sure.

Dr. Lauren Young:

Um Yeah, it's it's exciting how much is happening in this arena. Um, and uh the validating what we already know as naturopathic physicians always feels good, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Ashley Burkman:

I think it's cool that you mentioned. Oh go ahead, sorry. No, no, no, go ahead. Um, about the caregiver, and like that would have been an interesting piece to have because I've looked at some of the research on that, and the caregiver is at risk for cognitive decline and even Alzheimer's specifically because of the stress and their lack of sleep and lack of self-care. So I think it's really a cool experience to have a marama-at-home experience for the whole family because it's not just for a patient, it's for the whole family. Everyone could use some of this type of medicine.

Dr. Heather Sandison:

Without a doubt, yeah, the data suggests that care partners who care for someone with Alzheimer's are anywhere from two and a half to six times more likely to be diagnosed with diet with dementia later in their life. And the highest risk is in a male uh husband of a woman who is suffering with dementia. So we whenever we have someone join the coaching program or come into the clinic, we always are considering that the care partner is also our patient and that their their sus the sustainability, sustainability is one of our core values for us, for patients, for caregivers, because it is such a hard job and it's a marathon, not a sprint. And so it's, you know, I recommend every caregiver, even if they don't think they need it, take eight hours a week, hopefully continuously. Maybe it's in four-hour blocks, you know, for negotiating. But ideally, it's an eight-hour block that they have to themselves where they don't talk about dementia, they don't, they don't care for grandkids, they don't care for anybody, they just get their exercise, they eat good food, they see their friends, they have an identity outside of caregiving. And then, yeah, when when they're engaging in the in the diet and the exercise and all the lifestyle pieces, instead of being like, oh, she needs it, but I I can still have my cake and cookies, you know, we really try to emphasize, like, no, everybody's gonna be more successful if we have if we're all on the same team and all kind of doing the same same stuff.

Dr. Lauren Young:

I love that. I love that. Um, yeah, you know, we we had a similar conversation with Terry Wall. She said the same thing. Like, I mean, realistically, this is good medicine for everyone in the family. So I love that for sure. Um so I know I want to just, you know, we're talking about when you go and see a Bredison provider, just give a cursory overview of the kind of experience for a patient to go see someone who is trained in kind of these this approach. What kind of testing would they expect? What kind of things would they want to think about, that type of thing?

Dr. Heather Sandison:

Yeah, so there's different levels. And Dr. Bettison works with Apollo Health. Um, and they you can basically do this through like AI, right through them without necessarily having a provider. You can get labs done through them, and then it'll give you an AI printout of the type of Alzheimer's you have. Like, is it more toxic? Is it more, you know, uh resource insufficiency? Like what what type of is it more inflammatory? And you can use that definitely to get started. I think that's a great, really, really valuable resource. And then if you want to see a provider, you know, not providers do this with different degrees of enthusiasm. So um get get a referral. But health coaches, I think, are actually one of the best kept secrets. You know, a health coach is a wonderful way to, I mean, talk about bang for your buck because again, the foundations are so crucial. So I wouldn't want anyone to show up to a naturopath or a Bredison trained provider and drop three to five thousand dollars on lab testing, functional lab testing, if they're not eating well, if they're not getting exercise, if they're not getting great sleep, get those foundational pieces. If they're not socializing, right, get the everything. If you're gonna do detox, if you're gonna do hormone supplementation and optimization, if you're gonna kill any bugs, all that stuff, all that intervention work that the Nash Path or the Bredison Train provider is gonna help you with, it's gonna work so much better in the context of the that foundational lifestyle piece being in place already. So I highly recommend doing doing as much as you can on your own first. But a lot of people need more support than that. So I'll I'll just speak from our how we do it. So a patient comes in and like I saw a prevention patient yesterday. It was really fun. She her mom has Alzheimer's right now, she's living in a care home with her dad, and she has ApoE. And she's 60 years old. She's noticing some small changes, like she has to keep track of her calendar a little more closely. She's having struggling with names and words a little bit more than she used to, but she's definitely subjective, right? We're not picking up anything we can measure in terms of her decline. But I'm gonna spend 90 minutes with her collecting information about her risk factors, her modifiable risk factors as defined by the Lancet Commission report. And then I'm also asking detailed questions about her diet, her exercise, her bowel movements, her sleep, her stress levels, and where that comes from, toxic exposure, infectious exposure, right? We're going deep into a lot of those things. And typically people have, you know, you know, there's UTIs that they get recurrently or something, herpes uh outbreaks, or something that they get recurrently that we want to optimize to reduce that neuroinflammation. So we went through that process and then the labs that we do, so through Apollo, you'll get things that you can get at LabCorp and Quest. Now I like to look a little deeper, and these things can cost money, but here's I know very well how much memory care costs. It can run you $8,000 to $15,000 a month, right? So if we spend three to five thousand dollars on some lab work where we really understand what might be the drivers or the smoking guns when it comes to neurodegeneration, we might actually be saving, like even if we just delay going into memory care for six months. Like you, we you're it's a good ROI. It's a great return on the investment of the labs, right? So, and then there's the supplements and everything. We got to treat it and retest. But what we budgeted for our clinical trial participants was $25,000 for six months. We didn't use that much for anybody. The most that we spent was $19,000 for an extremely complicated patient who got a ton of IVs. So that's with cash pay for all the labs. And that, you know, that price is huge. A lot of, you know, for a lot of people, that's just not accessible. And I, you know, I wish that insurance covered all of this. I think that this should be accessible because I think it reduces the cost long term for people. However, when you're doing the math, oftentimes spending that is a lot less than what it costs for memory care or even assisted living. And for getting care into your home, like one-on-one care, that is that just gets exorbitantly expensive. So people can spend $20,000, $30,000 a month having someone come to the home. So the lab testing that we do is again, I break it down into these different categories: toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure, signaling, and infections. So toxins I think of in three flavors. We have our mycotoxins, our heavy metals, and then our chemical toxins, the environmental pollutants, including glyphosate and usually petrochemicals, styrene, benzene, that kind of thing. So we look at all of those and we're looking to stop the exposure and then to abuse the binders, you know, where we can use specific binders that are preferentially bind the toxin that you have. We we do that too. So we're looking to get those out into a minimum. And then with nutrients, we run a nutrient panel and look for, you know, you genetically, you because of the burdens that you have in your body, because of your age, because of what's going on, you might need more antioxidants or B vitamins or minerals or whatever it is. And so we're looking for nutrient balance. Now you can have too little nutrients, but you can also have too much sugar. It's one of the things that we we see is often connected to dementia and Alzheimer's. Sometimes you'll hear people colloquially say, oh, Alzheimer's is type 3 diabetes. And that certainly we see that elevated blood sugar, elevated weight, elevated blood pressure are modifiable risk factors when it comes to dementia. The vast majority of my patients don't have diabetes, right? But still have dementia, right? So you what we don't want to do is say that all dementia is caused by herpes or all dementia is caused by diabetes. Every dementia patient has a different path that they took. And what we want to do is understand what path took you to age-related memory loss, and so that we can sort of unravel that and and support neuronal function. So we're looking for imbalances in nutrients, we're looking for imbalances and stressors. We talked about the stress of caregiving. We run cortisol levels, we do salivary cortisol levels. And what we're looking for here is that you have enough purpose and meaning to get up and out of bed and show up for something, right? But that you aren't so overwhelmed and burdened by stress that you are are falling apart, right? And you need enough movement and exercise, but not too much. We we want that hormetic effect, right? We want to stress the system so that there's more resilience, but we don't want it leading to frailty or decompensation. So it's that balance that we're looking for when it comes to stressors. Um, and and fasting, right? Having a fasting-mimicking diet is a type of stressor in some ways, but it's a good stressor. So we want to we want to flex the muscle and create resilience without decompensating. And then when it comes to um, so we've talked about toxins, nutrients, stressors, structure. So with structure, we want it's I think of it like plumbing, right? We need we need enough air through the airway to get oxygen to our lungs so that we can make sure that our brain has oxygen at night when we sleep in particular. So here we're looking for obstructive sleep apnea, we're looking for plaques that would keep, you know, anything that's gonna keep blood flow from the brain, we wanna understand. Also, you know, if your hip bone's not connected to your leg bone and you have sci, right, and you have sciatica, this is chronic pain, it can keep you from sleeping. It's a it's a chronic stressor. So we're asking questions about chronic pain and about um, you know, anything that structurally, the way a chiropractor or an orthopedist might think about it, we want to understand that and how that might be playing a role in either preventing blood flow or impinging nerves, creating pain, creating more stress and or or interfering with the ability to exercise or sleep or engage in life. Then the other structural component that's kind of macro, so the micro structure is genetics. There's the genetics, uh, we all for people who have family members under 60 who have had or under 65 who have had severe dementias, which we see, you know, uh I mean that's who comes to us sometimes, unfortunately. But we're looking for the early onset Alzheimer's genetics, which include APP or amyloid precursor protein, and then Prisillin 1 and 2. Those are relatively rare. Um, and so we're we're looking for them only in certain patients. The one that we more commonly are looking for is ApoE, APOE, apolipoprotein E as an elephant. And what we see is that people who have a copy, one or two copies of APOE4 from mom or dad or both have a much higher risk of developing dementia in their lifetime. And so we need to be proactive. We need to be more proactive about prevention. So that's structure signaling. We're looking at sex hormones, thyroid hormones, BDNF, like what are all the signals, right? We want to get out of the, excuse me, we want to get out of the fight, fight, freeze, defend attack mode and into the connection mode, into that rest, digest, heal state at the neuronal level. So at the in the in the brain, we think of the microglia. When we're activating microglia, this is part of that cascade that leads to amyloid and tau. What we want to do is we want to send signals that tell the microglia, the immune system of the brain, you can calm down. You don't need to attack, you don't need to defend. What we want to do is create signals that help with connection, synaptic connection to create new connections in the brain. So that BDNF brain-derived nootrophic factor, which exercise helps a lot with that, whole coffee bean extract can help with that, no tropic formulas can help with this, but we want to be sending those signals, which include testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, pregnant alone, DHEA, thyroid, vitamin D, vitamin K, all of these are hormones that basically signal to the brain to be in growth connection mode. And then with infections, these we want to look for. There's, if you Google H. pylori and dementia, you will find that there's a PubMed article out there connecting them. What we essentially want to do is reduce infectious burden. But there's five or six here that are more connected to cognitive decline and more consistently connected to cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's and that microglial activation than others. And viruses, especially the viruses that live in the nervous system, like HSV1 in particular, which causes cold sores, that has a connection. And a lot of these have been found basically on autopsies in the amyloid plaques and tangles. We see that these microorganisms are there. And essentially what's happening is that amyloid and tau are antimicrobial. They're there to protect us, they're there to wall these off so that the rest of our brain isn't affected. And so we see that there's like an upregulation to protect the brain. The brain is not sterile, right? There's uh Dr. Redison has actually been talking recently about like the um the brain biome, right? That there is that this idea that there are probably some good bugs that enter the brain, and then there's others that are going to activate the microglia. So HSV1, P. gingivalis associated with gingivitis, and some of the other gingivis, gingivitis-associated bacteria are more associated. And then shingles. So we see that when people have the shingles vaccine, that they there was a great study out of the UK and Wales. It was done in Wales where people who were born one week got the shingles, you know, they were gonna turn 80 some or 70 on, you know, one day if they like separated them, right? So there were people born a week apart, and some of them got the sh people born the week earlier got the shingles shot, and the people were born the week later, I think it might be the opposite. Sorry, I'm doing a terrible job describing this. Essentially, there were two groups who were very, very similar in age. Some of them got the shingles shot and some of them didn't. And they saw seven years later the people who got the shingles um vaccine were 20% less likely to be diagnosed with dementia. Um, and that is consistent. We see that with the shingrix vaccine in the US, that 18% less likelihood to get dementia. So those um, you know, vaccines, it depends on the person and the body. There's no one right answer for everyone. That's a whole ordeal. But the data suggests that reducing viral burden is does reduce basically inflammation in the brain. And then the other one is I mean, COVID, COVID is a pretty different mechanism. This is essentially the idea here is that it's reducing blood flow through the arterial system, that that their blood becomes more hypercoagulable, more sticky, if you will, and that we're not getting as much perfusion. And if when you have reduced perfusion, you're gonna end up with atrophy, you're gonna end up with dysregulation. So we usually use a different um, instead of being really aggressively antiviral, we'll be more interested in like how do we reduce cytokines and how do we increase perfusion? And then the other one is the you guys are on the East Coast is uh the tick-borne diseases. For sure. Um, spirochetes, lime spirochetes have been found in the brains of people with Alzheimer's. So and you know, neuro syphilis, neurolime, this is well documented. So um, and we see Richie Horwit, Horwitz, um, he has documented cases of people who are suffering with m age-related memory impairment who have improved with treatment of Bartonella libesia and and borrelia. So something to keep in mind and something that we test for. So we test for all these things, the you know, there's a test for each of these things. So that's essentially what we're doing is we're trying to systematically go through each of these risk factors and and re you know, reduce them, turn them off.

Dr. Lauren Young:

Yeah, yeah. Um, thank you so much for walking us through all of that. I think it's it like really speaks to the depth that you go into every individual and really look at what is going on with them, kind of like you had said, but this really brings us through the whole piece of it. Um, it's really helpful. I didn't mention the stool test. Oh my god. Oh, yeah, yeah. We love our microbiome in our brain, right? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's so much cool medicine out there, and I love how organized you guys are with looking at the whole piece of it. And again, coming back to those like foundational pieces that just need to be there. Because if you're not using your foremunctories, then like where can you go from there type of thing. So um there were five. What's the fifth one? Wait, urination, defecation, perspiration, respiration. What uh what's the other one?

Dr. Heather Sandison:

Wait, okay. Maybe I think of them, I think of them as organs, but I think liver, lungs, skin, and lymph and bowels. Oh, okay.

Dr. Lauren Young:

This is fun. I like yours. Oh, yeah. Oh well, and now we're gonna be the little takeaways. I love it. I'm gonna I'm gonna let everybody know, I'm gonna think about the the five versus the four now.

Dr. Heather Sandison:

The way you said it, like respiration defecation. I I like it has like a ring to it. I want to do, I want to take yours.

Dr. Lauren Young:

Well, thank you for that swap today. That's great.

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Dr.

Dr. Lauren Young:

Sanderson, this has been um so enlightening but inspiring too. Like you really are a bright light in the community for people who are staring at a scary diagnosis, you know. So from a Rama at home through to Rama in person to your clinic, um, thank you for everything you're doing for the community. It's really exciting. And thank you for your time here today. Um, I do want to make sure we give our listeners a plug for your new upcoming podcast because I know I'll be listening to it if you want to speak to it really quickly.

Dr. Heather Sandison:

Yeah, I think we'll age well is our new podcast. Uh, I'm just I'm having the conversations that I want to have. I'm basically interviewing people over 70 who I want to be when I grow up and learning from their wisdom and experience how to age gracefully, how to age well, not to not to like resist aging, but really to lean into those years, those golden years and make them the best yet. I love it.

Dr. Lauren Young:

I love it. This overall goal of like sustainable living your best is just a great message for everybody. So thanks, Dr. Sandison, Dr. Berkman, for your time today. To all our listeners, thank you for tuning in to your health toolkit. We absolutely love talking about health and wellness. So if you have a question or a topic idea, please find us online at ctnaturalhealth.com or on social media. Until next time, it's me, Dr. Lauren Young, wishing you the best in health, happiness, and longevity.

Head Shot

Lauren Young, N.D.

Host
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Ashley Burkman, N.D.

Co-host
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Heather Sandison, ND

Guest