Why Most Dysautonomia Treatments Don't Work

So when we look at the difference between things like functional medicine versus conventional medicine, there's a lot of tension for people. A lot of times this idea of treating the body as a whole is kind of like, all right, fine — relative to "let me stomp whatever symptom you're feeling."

But if you can actually hold both of those things in your mind at the same time, that middle ground is actually really useful. Because if we can say "this person in front of me is feeling poorly, something probably happened that created a problem, and now they feel this way" — that gives us somewhere to start.

The Dishwasher Problem

There was a time that we came home from visiting my wife's family up north. We were gone for a week, summertime. We came back and we noticed there was a smell in the house. Smelled wet. So that's number one — that's like the symptom, right?

So then you start to look around. I go in the kitchen and I realize the floor is wet. Our wood floor is wet. And then further examination — dishwasher has malfunctioned and dumped all the water through the floor, it went under the floorboards, and that's why we have this smell.

Now think about this in terms of a person. You wouldn't say "OK, we need to just rip all the flooring out everywhere. It's a water problem, so we should just take out all of the plumbing." We don't do any of that. We say "OK, let's put our energy, let's put our money into fixing the dishwasher." And then from there, we solve the problem of the wet floor.

We started with a smell. That led us to a problem we can measure — the floor is wet. But ultimately we have to solve for the dishwasher to be able to fix it.

And I think if we understand that in a person — rather than trying to fix all the things, what if we focus on the one core problem? That dishwasher.

Shooting Into the Wind

Whether it's conventional medicine or functional medicine, there's going to be critiques of both paths, right? People critique conventional medicine by saying "I know I'm going to get an opportunity to solve this symptom, but I don't know that I'm going to get the chance to solve the underlying problem." And there's probably going to be a medication that has tradeoffs in that equation. We can get you something that takes care of the pain, but there might be other stuff that comes with that, and we might not fix the thing underneath it.

On the other end, with functional medicine, the criticism might be that we start to get into testing that starts to feel esoteric. Starts to feel fringy, right? And you end up looking scattershot at a whole human trying to pick apart all the things that aren't optimum, and then hoping that if you address enough of them, you'll solve the problem.

So one is squishing symptoms. The other is shooting into the wind and hoping you hit something.

But what error can we find and measure that, extrapolated, would cause that person to feel this way?

The Mold Example

Here's one we just saw recently — someone's diagnosed positive for mold. So what do you do? The solution is detoxify, get rid of the mold.

But then you look at their spouse. Same age. Similar upbringing. Lives in the same house, works out of the same house. Their environment is the same. Except he eats Cheetos, does whatever he wants, drinks some beer, isn't particularly active — not like a pillar of health. But he's doing fine.

So then you're forced to the question: is it a problem with just this external environment, or is there something going on within the way that this person operates that is preventing them from being able to deal with that environment?

I'm not hating on mold. Believe me, we've seen our share of people with mold and that's definitely a thing to address. But rather than getting hyperfocused on "I see this panel, I want to solve it," we can back up into — what is going on within this person that would prevent them from being able to handle it?

It All Comes Back to One Substrate

So I'd actually think about the whole problem from a whole different angle. Because all of these things come back to one substrate. It all kind of comes back to the brain in the end.

The brain is what's going to control the amount of immune response that you have. The sensitivity of the immune response that you have. So how do we bridge that with these other systems so that we can maximize potential for someone?

And here's what's really interesting about healing in the brain. It takes three parts. Number one, you have to have oxygen. Full stop. You have to have oxygen to stimulate the brain. You've also got to have glucose — that's where we generate the energy from, that's how we make ATP to be able to use our brain.

But the third part — the part that always gets left out but is the most important — is that it has to be stimulated. It has to be stimulated within a threshold that it can tolerate to grow.

And this part's really interesting because it turns out you can add glucose and you can add oxygen into the system, but if you don't stimulate the actual neurons, nothing changes. The stimulation is the thing you need the most. And unfortunately, it's the thing that gets left out the most.

Why This Changes the Treatment Conversation

And the good news is you can measure this. You can measure in the brain how different areas work, how the pathways work, how they work together. You can measure how well you're able to get blood flow into the brain, how well that whole system works.

And for many people, there's an unlock there. There's a way to use that as a catalyst to actually start to stimulate the brain in a way that allows it to improve functionality — in the immune system, in all those downstream things. We can make that conventional medicine or functional medicine work in your favor better.

If you find the thing that's going to have the biggest effect on the overall function of the body — the thing that's related to the symptoms — now you have a bridge between "where does this symptom come from" and "how do we get past just trying to squish the symptom and actually let the body function fully so that symptom doesn't have to exist anymore."

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