Did you know that your Gut Health can severely affect your Mood? The Gut-Brain connection is crucial to understand for your overall health and function of both your brain and your digestive system! When it comes to recovering your Gut Health, the brilliant team at Restorative Health Solutions can combine Functional Medicine with Functional Neurology for better and more long-lasting results.
Dr. Paul Deglmann, DC, DACNB, FACFN discusses the connection between gut health and neurological symptoms…
"We do the functional medicine with the functional neurology, so we offer both. But with GI-type stuff, functional medicine helps a ton of [people]- a lot of them!
But there are a certain population where, maybe, there's a neurological connection with it. Maybe they have depression, anxiety, maybe they have migraines, maybe they have some memory issues, maybe they have brain fog, mental processing speed’s an issue, decision-making is an issue, maybe they have chronic pain, whatever it is, maybe it's a neurological connection to that pain; if they have stuff like that and there's more of a neurological connection that needs to be addressed directly, you can still get good results of the gut part of it, but the brain might need some stimulation. When the brain needs stimulation it’s kind of like if you have a cast on and the muscles start to atrophy after, if you’re in that cast for six weeks, let's say. And you take it off and you compare arms, but one is significantly shrunk compared to the other side because you haven't used those muscles, in a while. Same thing for the brain. You can reduce inflammation, but a lot of times we have to go and we have to fire those pathways to generate neural plasticity, which is a change in the brain where one neuron branches off to the other and it starts to communicate and then it starts to communicate back with it, and then increasing the network, or the efficiency, of the brain. That's what we try to do, and then that information can further go into the gut to control some of our vital functions.
So there's always, like, in movies and stuff you hear we only use 10% of our brain or you always hear that stat. Well, that's not true because if you don't use it, you lose it and that part would just be gone, right, but 90% of our brain function is used to fire down to, like, the brainstem to regulate automatic, autonomic systems. Is my heart beating? Am I digesting food? Am I breathing? You don’t have to think about those things. If I take something in that's toxic, will I throw it up? All those things are automatic, autonomic nervous system functions that your brain needs to fire in information to regulate those. So, the healthier the brain, the healthier you can feed information into the gut, and then hopefully have a healthier gut. And then the gut sends happy information back to the brain and the brain sends happy information back to the gut. So functional medicine is great and a lot of times it can help gut patients, but there's a certain population of patients that may have neurological symptoms where maybe that's not all you can do for them. Maybe you can do a little bit more as far as specifically going up to the brain and then the outcome is hopefully better for them!"
Key Takeaway:
When it comes to gut health, combine functional medicine with functional neurology for a better outcome. The Restorative Team looks at each patient individually and makes recommendations for care based on their specific situation and needs.
