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Ep 26: How Lara understand the mind through the brain

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Ep 26: How Lara understand the mind through the brain

Lara Schultz, a practitioner in psychophysiology, joins the Healthy Ageing Institute podcast to discuss her work using brain mapping and transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) to treat a range of conditions, including PTSD, dementia, ADHD, stroke, and Parkinson’s. She explains that her approach is holistic and data-driven, analyzing the five main brain rhythms (delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma) to identify deficiencies and tailor treatments. Schultz entered this field after overcoming her own childhood learning difficulties through neurofeedback, which inspired her to help others, especially children and veterans. She emphasizes that her methods provide tangible, statistically significant results (p < 0.001), yet face systemic barriers in Australia, where they are not recognized by Medicare, NDIS, or DVA, unlike simpler approaches like TMS. She cites cases where she has helped non-verbal children speak, stopped Parkinson’s tremors, and restored sleep by stimulating specific brain regions. Schultz trains with US pioneers and is one of the few in Australia offering tACS. She expresses frustration with a healthcare system that fails to support innovative, evidence-based treatments, but remains committed to treating one patient at a time to drive change.

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English
Welcoming Lara Schultz and Her Holistic Approach You're listening to the Healthy Ageing Institute podcast, your trusted source for expert insights, practical strategies, and inspiring conversations that help you live well, move well, and age well. Let's please welcome your host and leader in the field of movement and healthy ageing, Ken Baldwin. Speaker 2 Hi everybody, it's Ken from the Healthy Ageing Institute and welcome to another podcast where we delve deeply into movement, fitness, Wellness training and seeing what people do, how they do it and how we can relate to what they're doing and improve our lives and hopefully assist those around us. I'm talking to a special guest this afternoon who was referred to me by another friend that we're doing some stuff with and I was absolutely amazed by her story. First, I had to get my head around what she actually does and her title, which I'll get her to tell you about very shortly, but gives me great pleasure to welcome Lara Schultz to the podcast this afternoon. Lara, thanks for your time. Really appreciate it and looking forward to having a chat about anything and everything Wellness related. Speaker 3 Yes. Thank you for having me, Ken. I appreciate it. Speaker 2 So we got introduced through a friend who when we were talking about supplementation and natural supplements, because this is quite a a hot topic, you know, and how a lot of supplements are filled with lots of fillers and other things and aren't very good for you. So that's where we got started from and then we also started to chat about alternative treatments and, and how some are not recognised, some are recognised, but breakthroughs and and things that are doing and the frustration that we have following a directional approach just for doctors compared to Chinese or Asian medicine and other diagnostic approaches. Unpacking Psychophysiology and Data-Driven Brain Insights So before we get started in our little chat, tell me a bit about your background and how you became involved, what you're doing and and why you're so passionate about what you're doing. Speaker 3 OK, so it's a lot to answer. I, I work in the field of neuroscience, that's all brain based behaviour. So I essentially look at the brain and understand how it's how it works and how it behaves and why to an extent. So in traditional talking therapies and in mental health, you've got psychology and psychiatry. Now I'm moving in this space in called psychophysiology. I don't call myself a psychophysiologist because I don't have the the high levels of degrees yet. I'm working on that. But the field of psychophysiology is an area that has been really undervalued over the decades, or probably longer really, because it understands how the brain behaves. So psychology is human behaviour, psychiatry is the biomedical aspect of that. And and So what I do is psychophysiology is I understand how the brain works and behaves. So when you put all three silos together, that's where the magic happens. And we get some quite profound shifts when we're dealing with patients with anything to do with depression, ADHD, autism, schizophrenia and dementia. Also like anything to do with mental health is, is, is is where I'm sort of, I'm working at the moment now, I don't do any talking therapies. So, so my job is when I cap a patient up is to understand how the brain's functioning and working. And so we're working with the five main rhythms of delta, Theta, alpha, beta and gamma. And to really understand, you know, these different states gives us a massive insight into the human being as a whole. So not just looking at human behaviour or the psychiatry, the biomedical aspect, but really understanding everything in a holistic profile for use of a better word. So, you know, it takes a lot of the guesswork out. Like psychology, there are a lot of box ticking exercises and whilst they're great and they had their place, I prefer to get the data and information from, from source, right from, from the, from the person's brain because you can't hide from that. You know, they're quite a lot. Quite often I'll be doing a brain mapping on someone and I'll say, oh, do you experience depression? And I've had men say, Oh yes, how do you know, 'cause it's not something I talk about. And I'll say I can see it in your, in your brain. I can see it in the frontal part of your brain, like right here at F3. And they'll be quite shocked because they don't, you know, this is really private deep dive that we're doing into someone's system. So, you know, you gotta be quite delicate and, you know, and how you sort of approach this stuff. So in a nutshell, that's sort of what I'm doing. From Personal Struggle to Helping Veterans with PTSD Why, why am I doing this? I was born hypoxic, I was born blue and had to spend quite a few number of days in under the light 'cause I was also jaundice. And so growing up I had some significant learning issues up and well, well, and I think up until I was like 18 until I, I'd got some intervention of some, some neurofeedback through one of my mum's colleagues. So my mum's a doctor of psychology and you know, she's always been deep into this space of trying to understand human behaviour and, and always wanting to help others. And so, you know, my mum could see that I was struggling at school and it wasn't fun. And so I sort of failed the HSC miserably. But you know, I got into, into this work because I went and had this intervention and had this therapy and it changed my life completely. And I thought I never, ever, ever want another human being to experience what I experienced growing up because it was, it was, it was awful. It was really, really, it was, it was tough, you know, And so I, I work with a lot of these little kids and what they make up about themselves is that they're dumb and they have all this shame, shame based issues. And I just don't, I just don't think it's fair for little human beings to have to grow up in that space. So I, I went back to university, I went and did my psych, my psych degree. I'm looking at doing, moving away from psychology training 'cause I don't have any desire to be a talking therapist and get more into the neuroscience space on a deeper level. So that's kind of why I did it and why I got into this. And then, you know, I'm, I've also got a husband who has had a very interesting military career. I work with a lot of veterans, a lot of SF guys with their complex PTSD, and so that's also another area that we're sort of moving into, especially with traumatic brain injuries and concussion and all that sort of stuff. So that's a little little background in into what I do and why. Speaker 2 I want to touch a little bit more on that because one thing that we haven't said, and when I was talking to you recently, you said, I said, you know, I, I had an idea of this of, of your work and your more simple terminology is brain stimulation. And you create the brain mapping along those lines, your defence horse background and with the things that you see. And I'll come more to the HADHD and things, but you, you briefly touched on it when you're talking to males in particular who then become cranky old men because we are not good at talking and sharing feelings. Speaker 3 Or even identifying feelings I find. Speaker 2 Yes, but add trauma on top of that to create another wall or another barrier. And especially being a female again, and not trying to be put that down in any way, but from a from a speaking perspective, you know, blokes talk to blokes, they don't talk to women. Did that create a barrier or did that actually help you? Because you will create creating science saying I can see these conditions with what's going on. And then they broke down the wall. So to speak to more with you. Speaker 3 Yes, so because, because what we do is not talking therapy and because I can, it's essentially like having this, like this, this crystal ball and the, the patient doesn't have to say anything to me. In fact, what I actually like doing sometimes is having the patient come in, I'll cap them up, I'll read their EEG and then I'll tell them what I'm saying and they'll just be like, oh wow, I don't have to tell this person anything. She can see me and, and, and that validates them. And so, you know, especially with these military guys, because I'm a military wife and I have this different experience and understanding of what these boys have been through. They feel more comfortable, I think, talking to someone like me versus a man or a therapist who is just a therapist who has had no experience, who doesn't understand what rotations are like, who doesn't understand what it's like to reintegrate because they haven't deployed. So I think I've got a bit of an advantage there and I don't judge. I've got no desire to have an opinion on anything. And I swear like a trooper half the time. So they feel really comfortable around me, which is not great all the time. But yeah, you just gotta pick and choose how you sort of work with these these guys. Lara's Pioneering Work in Australian Neurostimulation So you mentioned you went back to university and you you did your degree there and you explored. When we last spoke, you spoke about the treatment that you're doing. Brain stimulation and mapping the brain is widely recognised throughout the world. Yeah, but it doesn't seem to be doing. You're the only one in Australia doing this. Speaker 3 So typically I have been, there are a couple of little places now starting to dabble who've only just started training and, and getting into it. But typically, yeah, I've, I've been doing this for the better part of a decade. Look, I've had patients come to me saying that there are trials being done in the universities, but they don't want to go and do the trial in case they get the placebo effect. But there there really is nothing available doing transcranial alternating current stimulation, which is what I have been doing for such a long time. Speaker 2 So where did you get that training from you travelled to? Speaker 3 This yeah, so to, to America in to Santa Barbara, where my mentors live, Doctor Dogris and Dr Thompson, they're they're pretty much pioneering a lot of the transcranial alternating current stimulations, the advanced pink noise stimulation and a lot of these phase amplitude coupling protocols, which we we'll probably talk in, at in depth later on, in and around pressing pause on Alzheimer's and dementia and, and the phenomenal results that I'm having in, in creating individuals being reconnected with themselves again. And so husbands have got their wives back or wives have got their husbands back because they're more connected and, and present. And, you know, we're really showing the brain how to get back into phase. We're showing the brain how to speed up its processing speed. And this is all stuff that we can measure and we can we can show. So we've got tangible results to prove that what we're doing is actually having an effect. Whereas most therapies today in Australia, you cannot, you cannot prove that they're working. Whereas I've got statistically significant changes to the P value of .001 that I can show patients on paper for the changes that we've made through using all of these different. Speaker 2 Tools. Overcoming Systemic Barriers to Holistic Brain Health Let's talk about. I'm going to get you to give me some case examples afterwards, but I want to talk about the frustration you had and I was absolutely gobsmacked when you told me that you know it. It's not clinically recognised from a payment perspective. Like DVA may pay for some of it and NDIS may pay for some of it. But again, there seems to be a stigma towards it and we having recognised Dodge and having recognised results, that should be enough in itself to prove why. And what is the frustration from your perspective? Because traditional medicine, which is is could be a placebo, but generally it's, it's a pill or it's a pharmaceutical that deadens things to make things easier. It doesn't go to the really the. Speaker 3 Problem totally. So you know, things like transcranial TMS for instance, that's that's recognised and that's paid for under Medicare. What we're doing is more specialised than TMSTMS is like A1 size fits all right. But a psychiatrist can prescribe it. They don't do a deep dive. They don't understand the psychophysiology of the brain. They don't understand what's going on in someone's system. And so, you know, through DVAI have had my patients go and have TMS and have really bad adverse reactions because they don't understand what's happening up here. And if anyone had come to say to me, oh, we're thinking of doing TMS for this patient, I would have said absolutely not. It'll be, it'll be too, too much for this patient's system, but you know, they, they do it anyway and caused a lot of harm. NDIS thinks what I do is neurofeedback, but it's not. And so you've got, you've got people in government agencies who have zero education or understanding of the technologies that we're using or the science behind it or the fact that it has been evidence based for decades, right. So you're dealing with a structure that is inadequate to understand the intricacies and, and the science and the research and, and, and, and everything to do with this technology and how rich it is and how valuable it is making decisions on patients that they're probably not qualified to make those decisions for. Even insurance agencies. I mean, I've got Gio at the moment paying for one patient to have treatment and it's been a very, it's been life changing for them. But until you get probably a lot more people and this becomes standard treatment, you're never going to be like little old Lara on her own cannot affect change because it's just me up against the government and, you know, and I'm never going to win against the government. So all I can do is treat one person at a time, demonstrate the phenomenal changes and results we get. And the more that I do that, the more people are going to talk and the more we're going to get a shift. But yeah, there's only so much really I can do. I mean, in WA when I was over there a few weeks ago, there was a, a young family, 2 parents took the lives of themselves and their children and all their animals. And that was basically, from my understanding is because the NDIS just was not prepared to step up and help them and fund them and give them the, the, the support that they required with their really high needs children. Now, if I had known about that family, I I would have traded them for free and and I would have shown them how different their life could have been. But there seems to be this. It's not that no one cares, it's just that I think everyone's bogged down in a system that is so flawed and broken and it just fails everyone. Speaker 2 It's interesting that you say that. From our perspective at the Healthy Ageing Institute, we feel that we are looking at the whole person lens. So we're looking at before we exercise. We know that exercise is a magic pill and that it changes all the physiological effects of the body. But you can't load somebody up with exercise if they they, they physically don't have the capacity to do that. Last week I interviewed the the CEO of AUS Active, who is our governing board, and he had a, a nursing background and he used to work with the nurses. And he was saying exactly what you said about the system. The emergency and trauma system is great at fixing car crash patients. But it was identified and it was put into place the same as Medicare over 30-40 years ago. And it's not even looking at conditions and it's not placed to to do what we need to do from a, from a holistic approach. Speaker 3 Yep, I know it's heartbreaking because I see, I, I see people, I see the worst cases and I see and people find me once they've exhausted every Ave modern medicine has to offer. And then we get results. And usually by that point people are just so downtrodden and so depressed and just almost at the point of giving up. It's heartbreaking. It's really sad. Speaker 2 So based on the treatments that you're talking about, what sort of changes do our effects? So we'll go, I'll get you to give you a couple of examples of of patients later. But you know, are we talking about change in sleeping? Are we changing activity, so on and so forth. How does, how does the brain stimulation sort of map that? So from a from a non technical perspective, somebody listening, what does brain stimulation do to improve those areas? Customised Brain Treatments for Parkinson's, PTSD, and ADHD OK, so if you've got, if I've got a patient that's not sleeping, then I need to understand why #1 they're not sleeping 2 where the deficiency in delta is in their brain. And then I would start giving them delta on on a very basic level. So for example, I had a patient with Parkinson's disease, had the tremors. By the time I finished with him, he no more tremors, was getting date restorative sleep and the Parkinson's result was put on pause. So he didn't have any symptoms of the Parkinson's simply because I was giving him a rhythm that the brain was deficient in. So if I can see that the brain is creating not enough healthy delta and the patient doesn't sleep and they're in a deficit, I will give the brain what it doesn't have and I will show the brain how to create healthy rhythms of delta so that patient can get into deep sleep, deep restorative sleep. You've. Speaker 2 Spoken to me about several cases, one being a stroke, one being a a dementia person, and one being somebody who was literally beaten to within an inch of their life. How does this treatment change in regards to chronic injuries or chronic conditions that the medical profession have said we can't help, we can't do anything about? Speaker 3 Well, the the medical profession is not trying to understand how the brain functions essentially in in the psychophysiology, right so. Yeah, quite often I'll get patients coming in saying, well I've been told that there's no help for me with this stroke or you know, I'll never walk again or I'll never do this or I'll never do that. Or, you know, I'll have the mum come in and say this child's non verbal, they can't speak and they've got autism. I'm like, OK, I'm like, cool. Or you know, I have a child that comes in with a speech impediment and they, and they, the speech is really bad and this child just wants to sleep all the time. I'm like, OK, so I've, I've gotten children speaking that were non verbal after a few sessions because we, we stimulate the language centre of the brain. Or, you know, if someone's had a stroke, we will do a rehab type profile or, or protocol on the brain and target the regions around where the stroke was. Because I don't want to go straight directly where the stroke was, because I don't want to create another bleed. But we can, we can gently massage the areas of the brain that require rehab and we can get those regions working in conjunction with the physiotherapist. So just say for argument's sake, the left arm doesn't work. So I would work the right side of the brain. I would have a physio in helping the patient move that limb and get some exercise going at the same time as we were doing the neurostimulation and practitioners over over in the US will say that they will get patients back to better than what they were before they've had the stroke. So it just depends on the parts of the brain that are that are needing life sort of breathed back into that part of the brain where it's a little bit offline. We we just essentially show it how to work again. Speaker 2 Is there a difference in the treatment, say for example, somebody that has PTSD compared to kids that are have ADHD, Is it because of the state of the brain at that age and the brain signals is is just the frequency changed or how how do you address that or how is it addressed? Speaker 3 So they're addressed quite differently. So with trauma, with PTSD, what I'm looking at is at T6, so it's on the right side and sometimes T5 the left side, but it's more more predominantly on the right side of the brain at T6 behind the right ear. You will see over activation happening here. And that to me is a trauma marker. Sorry, I'll retract that. It can be over activation, which is hyper vigilance, or it can be under active, which is what we would then refer to as alpha blocking. And that's trauma blocking. So that's essentially the brain being deficient in healthy alpha at T6, which means the brain is preventing the patient from accessing the trauma so that the patient doesn't continually be living in this loop of of, you know, bad pictures at night time or memories coming back or lots of, lots of different things that patients report with PBSD. So my job would be to understand if there's too much activity or a lack of activity, and then to gently start showing the brain how to create healthy activity in that space. So that when it is healthy and the patient's ready to do some brain spotting or some EMDR, then we can do that safely and help that patient transform from being stuck into. So I'm fumbling around with this wording a little bit, but essentially, once the brain is in the healthiest space to be able to process, we can do it in a safe environment where the patient's not being further traumatised from the trauma that they've previously experienced. So when we're working with PTSD, like the brain is really an amazing piece of kit because it will protect the person from being further traumatised. And then it's quite complex. Like there are a lot of different other rhythms that the brain will create it, you know, the person can disassociate. We need to make sure that we don't allow that and that we can show the brain how to stay connected to self. Yeah, there's like a lot of different PTSD profiles, but yeah, that the deficiency at T6 or the overactivation at T6 is just one example. But for ADHD there, because there are so many different ADHD profiles, it's identifying which profile it is that we're working with. Is it a hyperactive? Is there beta spindling happening in the frontal lobe? Is there too much Theta, which is, you know, a big slow wave rhythm happening in the middle of the brain, which is causing the the child or the adult to want to fall asleep every time they have to concentrate. If that's the in case, then yeah, I would use like a really lovely SMR 13 to 15 Hertz beta rhythm to show the brain how to decrease Theta and increase beta so that they can be actively engaged and listening and retaining information instead of wanting to go to sleep. Speaker 2 Very nice. How do you how does this relate? So obviously the body relies and the brain especially relies on vibration and neural feedback. Is that different from a touch and a feel perspective compared to just the send receive signal as such? Speaker 3 Yes. So when, when you, when you've got like a sensory overload, right, that's the sensory motor cortex that's overactive. You won't be able to really go near someone if they're in sensory overload, right. I can show you the brain how to reduce that sensory overload and to stabilise. And that's essentially working CZ C3C4 in this sensory motor cortex so that you can then go and do some sensory work with with an individual. Yeah, it really has a really lovely flow on effect. But what I'm doing is not a feedback loop. What I'm doing is I'm placing electrodes on the scalp, I'm identifying where the deficiencies are and I'm putting stabilising rhythms into the brain. So I don't do anything to the brain that the brain doesn't naturally already do on its own. I'm just putting the healthy rhythms over the dysregulated rhythms and the brain mimics what I'm asking it to do. That's why I'm so successful at creating healthy change that's drug free. Speaker 2 That's a really good definition because people are when, when you, when you say stimulation or zapping the brain, people look at horror movies and they think, oh, you know, shock, shock. Yeah, treatment. Speaker 3 She's doing ECT. I'm like no, no, no, no, no. And I would never do ECT on anyone that's that's done under a general anaesthetic and it's 800 milliamps of energy. I, I work to 2.5 milliamps of energy. So what I do is so gentle and so healing, and the brain just responds so beautifully to it. Speaker 2 How do people come across you? So obviously it's you, it's your site. I know how busy you are, but how do people find you? Do you have a network of specialists that refer to you? Or do people just start coming to you because they've exhausted every other Ave? Speaker 3 Yeah, people will just Google dementia treatment or ADHD treatment or neurostimulation and I come up. Yeah. So essentially you just look for neurotherapy clinics Australia and you find one of our clinics around Australia and, and you come in, Will you just give me a call and we have a yarn and have a chat and see what's going on and see if they're a good fit for me or for our work and what we do? Neurostimulation's Role in Reversing Cognitive Decline That's pretty important to us at the Healthy Ageing Institute, of course, because we want to look at healthy ageing and obviously that comes back to a healthy brain. Yeah, you mentioned that you're on, you're doing a bit with dementia and Alzheimer's people and you're having some results along those lines. Tell me a little bit more about that. Speaker 3 Well, so it's quite an exciting space at the moment because Doctor Dobras took a piece of research written back in, I wanna say 2012. So it's old research, right? And he just loved this, this piece of science and he thought, right, we can replicate what this piece of research is, is essentially saying. So it's saying it's, it's, it took a a young brain, a control and then an old brain. And we essentially want to replicate what the young brain looks like in the old brain. And to do that, this piece of research says for the brain to be in phase between Theta and gamma, it needs to oscillate. So if you think about, if you think about driving a vehicle and you've got your foot on the clutch and the foot off the accelerator, if you want to have a nice even transition between moving forward and driving instead of Bunny hopping, you need a nice, you need Theta and gamma. The rhythms Theta and gamma to be oscillating in harmony with each other. Now when the natural ageing process happens, these rhythms between Theta and gamma get out of, get out of phase with each other. And so part of our brain mapping process is we can see what Theta and gamma are doing and if they're in phase with each other. And if they're not, then our AI tool does a deep dive in, in all the data that we collect in the, in the assessment process. And it will map out where the deficiencies are between Theta and gamma in different regions of our brains. It will then give me a phase amplitude coupling protocol that I can then start working with my patients with. And, and what that does is it shows the brain, shows the different part, different regions of the brain, how to get back in phase. So you like that, the driving analogy with the, the clutch and the accelerator, you've got that smooth transition happening again in the brain. And, and essentially you're getting the brain into phase when it's been out of phase and you're getting the regions and the networks of the brain communicating properly again, when with the natural ageing process, those, those networks start to sort of disappear essentially. So we are, we are with, especially with Alzheimer's, you know, like what I see with patients is they come in their, their, their eyes are open, the lights are on, but no one's home. Essentially you've got this vacant look. And so I had a woman come in last year for treatment. She came in for three weeks. She did 2 sessions a day for three weeks. And she went from a tiny little school girl holding onto the back of her husband's jumper, being LED around everywhere that he would go, to being an independent woman walking around in David Jones, having conversations in the clinic with other patients and just being completely independent. And her husband just could not believe the difference. And he basically said, I've got my wife back. She she, she has not had an independent conversation with a stranger in two years. And she's now doing that. She was showering on her own. She was drying herself. She was helping out around the house. She hadn't done that in years. And that was all from three weeks worth of neuron stimulation and showing the brain how to get back in phase again and act like a young brain instead of an old brain. Speaker 2 That's pretty amazing stuff. It comes back to the analogy, if you're you're brain is not well in your body isn't able and the biggest fear of the ageing demographic is I can't control my brain. I want to do this but my brain won't allow me to. And their biggest fear is fear of of losing their mind, so to speak. Speaker 3 Absolutely. And it must be terrifying. I would. I would hate that. Yeah. And so, you know, I, I get a lot of people wanting me to work with their parents, but I do also have to say, like I always make sure that I'm doing it for the right reasons and not for the wrong reasons. And, and I don't want to sound mean, but a lot of the time in the natural ageing process, like who we, who are we doing this for? Are we doing this for the child or are we actually doing it to give the person a better quality of life? Because sometimes if we're too far down the ageing process, like I don't want to, I don't want to be pressing pause on this issue if it's going to prolong their life and they're not going to be really happy either, if that makes sense. So there's a bit of humanitarian issues that with with all of this too, right? Societal Responsibility for Healthy Brains from Birth So if somebody wants to find you or just needs to talk or would like more information, how do they get in contact with you? Speaker 3 Just go to my website www.nfinellicau.com dot AU. So it's just Neurotherapy Clinics Australia and yeah, just send a send a contact request. But I was actually thinking like yesterday when we were organising, well, the other day when we were organising this and talking about healthy ageing and I was thinking like when does it actually really start? I actually think healthy ageing starts from the day we're born. Speaker 2 Absolutely right. And our philosophy is there age is just, is not just a number because it makes so much difference in every way to every person. It used to be, you know, 50. So 50 was a clinical and a physiological age where most of the body and physiological symptoms start to change. But we know now that, you know, even with early onset dementia and stuff like that, that that can be starting in the 30s. So our goal of the institute is, is to look at things from, you know, 4045 plus so that we can start to prepare ourselves for life moving forward. You know, not the what if. It's what I can do now and what I can do better later on. Speaker 3 Totally. And I, I would even say we need to start looking younger. We need to start understanding these children and their brains and the fact that there's this pandemic of GPS and paediatricians just pumping all these stimulants into these children's bodies. Because these children are going to going to grow up as adults and their brains are so deficient in creating delta wave, deep restorative rhythms in their brains because they've been on uppers every single day of their lives, right? So from a very young age, we have this entire generation of children who've been on medication who aren't getting healthy, deep restorative rhythms of sleep at night. So they're going to be in a higher risk category for dementia and Alzheimer's later on in life, right? Especially if they're not getting into the deep delta sleep early on. So I really feel society has a real responsibility to understand our entire system earlier and not leave it too late. Speaker 2 Absolutely. We need to remain inquisitive because that's how we were born and that's how we are, you know, find information, read research. Don't just get given a piece of information and and accept it. Look at other resources where it's come from. Get another opinion as you've suggested and dive deeper, because there's always something else happening that we need to know about or should know about. Speaker 3 Yeah, absolutely. It's just, yeah, I find it quite scary. Speaker 2 Very much so. Speaker 3 Something is a status quo. I I just won't do it anymore. Speaker 2 For sure. Well, Laura, thank you for your time today. I know how busy you are. You are based down in in Tumit. So it's a little bit cooler there today than what it is. Speaker 3 Jindabyne. Jindabyne, not Tumit. Speaker 2 Sorry. So that's where you can get a hold of Laura and via her website. Thank you so much for the chat today with an overview of the brain and things we need to look at and be aware of. Speaker 3 Yes, thank you very much, Ken. I appreciate having me on the show. Speaker 2 More than happy and we shall talk again soon. Thank you so much.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Lara Schultz works in psychophysiology, using brain mapping (EEG) and transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) to treat mental health and neurological conditions by targeting specific brain rhythms (delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma).
  2. She entered this field after her own childhood struggles with hypoxia and learning issues, which were resolved through neurofeedback; she now focuses on helping others, especially children, veterans with PTSD, and those with conditions like dementia, Parkinson’s, ADHD, and stroke.
  3. Her approach is data-driven and holistic, allowing her to identify issues like depression or trauma from brain activity alone, without relying on talking therapy, which helps build trust with resistant patients (e.g., military veterans).
  4. Despite having statistically significant results (p < 0.001), her treatments are not widely recognized by Australian healthcare systems (e.g., Medicare, NDIS, DVA), which she attributes to systemic flaws and lack of education among policymakers.
  5. She trains with pioneers in the US and is one of the few practitioners in Australia offering tACS, which she customizes per patient (e.g., providing delta rhythms for sleep or stimulating language centers for non-verbal autism), often achieving results where traditional medicine fails.

Summary:

Lara Schultz, a practitioner in psychophysiology, joins the Healthy Ageing Institute podcast to discuss her work using brain mapping and transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) to treat a range of conditions, including PTSD, dementia, ADHD, stroke, and Parkinson’s. She explains that her approach is holistic and data-driven, analyzing the five main brain rhythms (delta, theta, alpha, beta, gamma) to identify deficiencies and tailor treatments. Schultz entered this field after overcoming her own childhood learning difficulties through neurofeedback, which inspired her to help others, especially children and veterans.

001), yet face systemic barriers in Australia, where they are not recognized by Medicare, NDIS, or DVA, unlike simpler approaches like TMS. She cites cases where she has helped non-verbal children speak, stopped Parkinson’s tremors, and restored sleep by stimulating specific brain regions. Schultz trains with US pioneers and is one of the few in Australia offering tACS.

She expresses frustration with a healthcare system that fails to support innovative, evidence-based treatments, but remains committed to treating one patient at a time to drive change.

FAQs

Lara works in neuroscience, specifically psychophysiology, which studies how the brain functions and behaves. She uses brain mapping and neurostimulation to understand and treat conditions like depression, ADHD, autism, and PTSD without relying on talking therapies.

Lara caps patients to read their EEG and analyzes five main brain rhythms: delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma. She then uses transcranial alternating current stimulation to give the brain deficient rhythms, helping it restore healthy function and improve conditions like sleep, movement, and cognition.

Lara was born hypoxic and jaundiced, leading to significant learning issues as a child. After receiving neurofeedback intervention that changed her life, she became passionate about helping others avoid similar struggles, especially children and veterans with PTSD.

No, it is not widely recognized. While DVA and NDIS sometimes fund it, Medicare does not cover it, and she has been the only practitioner in Australia for nearly a decade. She faces systemic barriers despite proven results.

Results include improved sleep, reduced tremors in Parkinson's, restored speech in non-verbal children, and enhanced recovery after strokes. Lara provides statistically significant data with a P value of .001 to show tangible changes.

Lara's method is more specialized and personalized, using deep brain mapping to tailor treatments. In contrast, TMS is a one-size-fits-all approach that can cause adverse reactions if the brain's psychophysiology is not understood.

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