Cars and Brains

Spent last Sunday at Laguna Seca race track watching cars go around these turns at incredibly high rates of speed. It was a lot of fun and a big thanks to Shy, one of the functional medicine students that sent me free tickets and pit passes, much appreciated. Saturday, I was in Phoenix all day at the Neuroresearch conference presented by Dr. Hinz. It was, as always, valuable to have a full day in class with other doctors focused on brain related issues. Many interesting things came up, for one we learned there are regional differences in brain function we can measure, literally by zip code, from these neuron function tests. In other words since there is a single database maintained by the lab we can see how different practices in different areas display vastly different patterns of brain dysfunction. In LA there may be, on average, massive dosing needs to maintain normal brain cell functions while in Steamboat Springs, Colorado the numbers can be even worse (bet you thought I was going to say better in Steamboat Springs!). Even though Steamboat is a small ski-town in a pristine area of the Rocky mountains, and it looks a lot cleaner and less risky for the things that damage brain cells like neurotoxins and stress than an obviously polluted area like LA, in fact Steamboat, before the luxury homes and ski lifts were built, was a mining town and the area's groundwater and soil are contaminated with heavy metals that you'd never know were there. These metals get into your body and then your brain quite easily. In fact, the brain has very poor protective measures against environmental toxins, it's simply not something the design team was anticipating when the human body was developed. Anyhow, if you live in LA or in the mountains of Colorado, New York City or Dallas, there is no where to go to hide from the environmental toxins we have dumped through coal burning and manufacturing processes. Interestingly, you can even see patterns that follow rivers that are polluted, for example, the rivers that flow down from the industrialized areas of the mid-west carry a heavy toxic burden into the communities below and you can see the devastating effects on the brains of people along the way. Protect your brain; you only get one. Imagine you were given one car at birth and told you could only have that one car the rest of your life. You would maintain it really carefully. Ok, this is more serious than not having transportation, so get on it, test your brain, fix it, protect it with an amino acid based program. Take care, Dr. Dan