Dr. Pierce is a chiropractic neurologist who uses brain wave scans and lab tests to guide diets for brain health.
Why Are Chronic Illnesses So Challenging To Treat
Chronic illnesses are challenging to treat because we do not commonly talk about the root causes of them. Humans were gifted with amazing self-healing that is abundant if we can remove our cultural habits of foods, toxins and thoughts that get in the way of natural health and beauty.
Why The Traditional Medical Approach Doesn’t Work For Everyone
Traditional medicine has its place in most people’s worlds. If you’re in an emergency, going to the ER makes sense. But when you’re dealing with chronic illness or other illnesses where a more “traditional” approach hasn’t worked, it’s often because there is more going in your body that needs to be holistically addressed.
You are a whole person, not just your symptoms. And often, your symptoms are affected deeply by all the other things you ask your body to do. Sussing out what is the cause vs the symptom is an investigative approach and one I can help you with.
Also, one common challenge people share with me is the habit they have fallen into of taking medication for every ailment. This approach leads you down a path of taking less responsibility for your health and becoming overly dependent on the “medicine” to solve your problems when in reality, you are the medicine.
It may feel easier to let others fix your symptoms, but it’s really just like putting duct tape on a broken roof. That solution won’t last and often, can’t even fully do the job you’re asking it to.
How Chronic Illness Affects Your Brain
Fatigue, excess unproductive sleep, and cloudy thinking all contribute to making our brains less capable of everyday tasks. Most chronic illness is preventable and reversible through choices you make in your life. The literature is clear on this, but somehow that fact doesn’t make it to the media, or into our ears and thinking.
The brain is an organ that needs to fire all the time, and it gets run down. The choices you make about what you eat, how much you do/don’t sleep, the nutrients you put into your body (or take out of your body) all impact your ability to feel healthy and feel alive. If you’re in a cycle of taking in poor nutrients and experiencing less recovery, overtime your body reacts to those choices making it harder to rest, relax and recover.
Chronic illness, like all illnesses, is directly impacted by the choices you make. But, when you’re already worn down or stressed in some capacity, it becomes even more important to understand your full body such that you understand what is happening to you so you can make the best choices possible to fuel your recovery.
How Chronic Illness Affects Your Mental Health
Imbalances in nutrition and toxic burdens can contribute to mental health and worsen conditions like depression, anxiety, PTSD, bipolar, schizophrenia, stroke, autism, ADHD, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s and other degenerative diseases of the brain. These imbalances can even impair the everyday life of people without these diagnoses, giving them brain fog, fatigue and generalized symptoms that don’t qualify as a diagnosis.
There is a direct connection to chronic illness affecting mental health, and getting into a better mental health state is one of the positive effects that can come out of healing your body.
How My Alternative Approach Can Help You
My approach includes root cause analysis and understanding the causes (etiology) of what happened to you and why you developed your symptoms. This is not classical diagnosis, rather this is true assessment and problem-solving.
Understanding the mechanisms behind how some people feel good, and some people feel bad hinges on biochemical and genetic individuality. That means that the same problem can cause totally different symptoms in different people.
The secret of getting most people well is to understand that a few root-causes lead to a huge variety of symptoms and illness. Often the same handful of treatments can help many people with diverse issues get better.
How I Treat 8 Common Chronic Illnesses:
Concussions & mTBIs
Concussions and mild traumatic brain injuries are fairly common in the United States, and the most important thing is to realize how common they are. Even though 90% of concussions are resolved within 2 weeks many people go on to have debilitating problems from concussions that they forgot about. Concussions not only cause problems with thinking and emotion regulation, they can also cause sleep disorders, menstrual disorders, digestive problems, immune dysregulation, and hormone disorders.
Nutrition plays a huge role in healing concussions. Many people are unaware that small impacts to the head, even whiplashes with no impact to the head, can result in concussions.
Brain Fog, Focus & Difficulty Concentrating
Brain fog often refers to symptoms of fuzzy thinking, lack of clarity, inability to concentrate and poor endurance with thinking tasks. This is a generalized symptom that can be caused by many things.
Food is one common area to explore to determine what is causing yours to occur. There are also all kinds of toxicities that contribute to brain fog and problems with concentrating. The positive thing about healing through food is that it brings a ton of hope to your situation. Between food choices themselves to elimination diets and toxin cleanses, there are many specific food-based solutions to explore.
Hormone Imbalances
The limbic, or emotional system of the brain, plus the cerebellum are the regions of the brain that control your hormone and immune system. That means that brain injuries can cause hormone imbalances. It’s also true that hormone imbalances from other causes can also contribute to brain problems.
We find that there’s a hierarchy in the body of prioritizing different types of hormone and other imbalances of body chemistry. This means that the body will heal in its own order, not necessarily the order that we choose. Knowing how to interpret these signs is not terribly difficult. It just requires observation and a little reflection.
Headaches & Migraines
There are many causes of headaches and migraines that are food related. Inside both your gut and your brain are two distinct barriers designed to protect these vital organs. These barriers can be destroyed by processed foods, plant anti-nutrients, medications, commercial industrial toxins, food additives, alcohol, tobacco additives, excess carbohydrates, and altered gut organisms that are supposed to live inside our bodies in harmony.
Exploring headaches and migraines through alternative medicine is a great way to unearth the sources of your pain and find workable solutions.
Adrenal Stress & Fatigue (Burnout/Exhaustion)
Burnout affects many people and is often a sign of too much stress in combination with not enough nutrition. Sometimes a bit of toxicity is sprinkled in there too. There are scientific ways to assess burnout and adrenal function and to measure its correction using food and supplements. You don’t have to wait until your burnout is at a critical point. If you’re feeling run down for a consistent period of time, that is enough to explore what your body might be experiencing and what you can do to reverse the effects.
Gut Health, Indigestion & Bloating
Indigestion is a huge problem in the western world because of processed food and excess carbohydrates, calories, and additives. We often experience either gas bloating or fluid bloating, which is expansion of our tissues in response to imbalances in our chemistry caused by what we eat or and by imbalances in our gut flora caused by habits that our body doesn’t like.
We don’t always get to choose what kind of diet our body likes but we can Discover it if we keep an open mind. Sometimes this is not the diet that our mind wants but that our body does.
Inflammation & Joint Pain
Mechanisms of joint pain and inflammation are different than you might think.
One theory of inflammation and joint pain is based on the chemistry of joint fluid, called synovial fluid. This theory states that those who have Painful joints have altered chemistry of their synovial fluid inside the joints, and this is caused by diet or toxins. strangely, the natural world has lectins and oxalates and other food molecules that can drive irritation in our joints and make us hurt.
The nightshades have also been known to do this too.
We also don’t really talk about the effects of carbs on gout. Our culture seems to think that rich foods like chocolate, red meat, wine and cheese cause gout, and yet much literature points to the role of excess carbohydrates in promotion of gout chemistry and swelling of joints. There are many types of arthritis, but many of them can be traced back to food-based causes.
One reason there are so many kinds of arthritis is that there are so many kinds of people who respond differently to the same foods. One person may have osteoarthritis from food and another person may develop an autoimmune arthritis from food, and yet their cause may be the same food.
Does that mean that avoiding these foods can lead to reversal of arthritis pain? Sometimes, yes, it does take a while to remodel bone so if bony changes have occurred in joints it could take longer to heal.
One thing the radiologists have always taught us in medical school and chiropractic school is that joint pain is caused by synovial fluid inflammation and not by how bad the joint looks on an X-ray. This means there’s hope even for people who have fairly advanced arthritis on an X-ray.
Obesity & Chronic Weight Gain
America has a health crisis and epidemic of weight gain. This is largely from excess carbohydrates and lack of healthy fats in the diet, in addition to lack of minerals. Remember that minerals don’t show up on a blood test very accurately, so we can’t test for them readily.
We have to take a medical history and have clinical knowledge, which is a disappearing thing these days. Obesity is not just the obvious problem of overweight looking people, but it also includes visceral adiposity, which is essentially hidden liver fat that you cannot test for with blood. You have to do an imaging study to find it.
This leads to inflammatory and degenerative diseases of the brain and heart and blood vessels and is entirely preventable. Consider imaging of your abdomen to see if you have fatty liver, and we can begin reversing it immediately.
Next Steps
How long do you want to live? How well do you want to live during those years? We have found that quality of life improves greatly with these types of choices that include elimination diets that change the ratios of proteins and fats and carbohydrates.
Working In Partnership With Your Doctor
Well yes, there are blood tests that will reveal a lot about a person’s health, diet and brain. We need to work with our doctor to understand both obvious and hidden imbalances in our body and brain chemistry and our diets.
Mostly we have to unlearn what we’ve been taught in school and understand the actual mechanisms of plaque arteries, brain degeneration, quality sleep, and even healthy skin.
Your doctor is trained to help you identify disease conditions and treat them with medication. This may not be your entire goal for your life. If you want more, you may have to have a conversation with your doctor about what else you’re doing to take charge of your life and your health.
Your doctor may not like spending time on that if they just write prescriptions. It’s up to you to decide what role your doctor will play in advising you about what to do with your life and your health. Once you understand the mechanisms involved, you can make more informed decisions about what you can do to truly thrive.
Get Started Today
If you’re ready to dive into alternative approaches to treating chronic illness, I suggest that you visit our YouTube channel here.
Or you can book a coaching session with Michael Pierce here.
