Dr. Kyle Warren:

For people who've done functional medicine education- have you ever realized that a lot of people who achieve great things are just kind of jerks?! Like Steve Jobs, not a nice guy. Right? Now nobody’s like “Steve Jobs, so nice! Oh he's just the nicest person I've ever talked to!” No, a lot of people who are just these trailblazing, genius-level people are not, you know, gentle and kind, and always say everything nice.

I remember I was at a seminar being led by one of these people, and he said, we were at kind of a mixed [event], he's like “Okay, so you Hormone people, you think every problem is hormones. Every time you come in it's all hormones. All hormones, every problem’s hormones. Hormones are the most important. And you Neurology people, you think neurology is the most of all. The brain. You just fix the brain, it’s just the brain just this.” He’s like, “then you got your, you know, Gut people. Oh, just fix the gut. Just all about the gut- do the gut. And you got your Metal people. Just detox everywhere. It's all about metals. Its metals, it’s metals.” He goes, “you guys are all so prejudiced. It's like, everything is just what you do.” He goes, “this is not a good system!” So he really challenged us; I think he was trying to offend people, to try to wake people up, right? Because when you're in this lecture with you know hundreds of other medical professionals, he's trying to shake the boat a little bit.

So, I came to the realization of, although I love functional medicine, it has some limits. And what was interesting was functional neurology really was where I was hitting a lot of these limits. So let's use chronic fatigue for example. We started putting step counters on people with chronic fatigue. So, you know, how many steps are these people taking? And, you know, goal for a lot of active people's 10,000 steps a day right that's a pretty good, a lot of workplaces will do that they'll work for that. And we would put our chronic fatigue people on the step because I remember I had someone at 300 steps a day, right, and most of my chronic fatigue people honestly were lower than 1,500. So they were very, very low steps. And I realized that if you're not getting the neurological signal to “Go,” your body… I can give you all the nutrition in the world and your body doesn't do anything with it! We came to this realization with so many problems in functional medicine, there comes this time where, okay the basic equation for health is eat some good food, put some good things in your body, and supplements are really just a form of food, but put some good things in your body, move. Go do something, go have a purpose with both physical movement and, you know, cognitive movement. And we were hitting all these obstacles with trying to implement these parts of the program. What happened is, we found with functional neurology, we just got better results. 

I started referring to a colleague of mine who did some functional neurology, working with people on their balance, working with people on some of their brain functions, especially unconscious brain function. If your unconscious brain function, your balance, your eye movement, all those sort of things, are off what happens is your brain works so hard to try and fix it, you feel exhausted. And you can't really think about anything else so you feel brain fog, you feel like you you're not smart because your brain’s literally using all its power to correct all these, you know, subtle kind of behind-the-scenes things that used to work perfectly well. So I started just referring back and forth to Dr. Paul, and I found that my people with functional medicine got great results with, when I got stuck with them that they started to do neuro and they saw these new improvements, that we got to better levels of health and better levels of function in their daily life. Similarly, Dr. Paul was frustrated because he was doing some rehab with people, and some people he just couldn't get progress on, he couldn't get him to hold things. And he says that, well you know, if I try to do this exercise with you but you literally don't have testosterone. To have healthy testosterone levels when you work out, you'll get more muscle growth. If you have no inflammation and good nutrition, your brain is going to work so much better when you try to do brain therapy. And that's what he found too; we found that there's this nice interaction between, “I need some nutrition, I need some good things happening in my body, and then I need to ask my body to do some things.” And there's this play back and forth between the two you kind of need. So, in our clinic we really find that the neurology and the nutrition work beautifully well together for our people.