Unlocking the Brain: The Future of Neurotherapy with Lara Schulz

[Music] Laura Schultz, welcome to the podcast. Thank you Paul. I was just telling you before we come on Earth that when I looked you up and you booked in I looked you up I'm like I've heard about you and your practice from a mead of mine Eric Yeager and I know from the days in SAP and he was really into the stuff that I'm doing and then I'm under again the coaching but he talked about a practice in gender buying doing neuro therapy and it turns out it was you. Yeah, it's a small world isn't it? It is a very small world so tell our listeners let's let's start with the big picture. What is neuro therapy first of all and then why did you get into it? Okay cool so neuro therapy is a brain-based form of therapy where I work in a silo where I understand brain behavior essentially right so you've got three silos now in Australia you've got psychology, psychiatry and now we've got psychophysiology and so my job is to understand the brain behavior psychology is about human behavior, psychiatry is about the biomedical aspect of that and then you've got the psychophysiology which is brain behavior essentially so for forever that silo has been missing in and it's quite a key component right because if we don't actually understand the psychophysiology of how the brain behaves we miss so many vital clues and information when we do the deep dive into the system in and around what's going on so for example I have elderly women or admin sent to me for treatment for dementia and Alzheimer's Parkinson's and so a lot of the time what I see is a is a misdiagnosis essentially of what it is that the individual believes is wrong with them and so when we do the deep dive and we do the EEG and we do the ERPs a lot of the time I'll be like oh you don't actually have dementia my friend you you're what we're dealing with here is actually a trauma profile and so you know I've had geriatricians diagnose patients with dementia and I've seen absolutely no sign of dementia and so I'm not making that assumption on my own I'm taking all of the the eyes open EEG the eyes closed EEG and the event related potentials visual which is a cognitive assessment and I'm throwing it into our database and and it's an AI tool as well now that's just been created in the US and so what this tool does is it measures all of the data that I've thrown into the system and it looks at it across a database full of patients who have a clinical diagnosis of dementia or Alzheimer's or a degenerative issue and it measures what that brain looks like compared to a clinically diagnosed brain with dementia yeah now I know what dementia and the slowing looks like in the brain right when it presents with that and when I don't see those hallmark signs in an EEG or an ERP and then you throw it through the database I will quite often get a tool that gives me a percentage or a measurement which they're in the red so if it's a positive classification for dementia or Alzheimer's or if I happen to throw it through the PTSD trauma box as well and then I'll get a measurement for a trauma profile so for example that woman that I was talking about she got like her her numbers were in the green so there was no positive classification for dementia and there was a very positive classification for PTSD and trauma and so part of what I do when I'm when I'm working with people is I do a really in-depth background in history with a person right and so for this particular woman she lost a child in a car accident all of a sudden and so her entire system shut down she went to the central nervous system was a mess you know so with every EEG so brain scan that I do I always do it an ECG so I'm understanding how the brain and the heart are communicating with each other so I can very clearly see if we've got a trauma profile so the central nervous system is in vital flight yeah or I can see if the patient has a depressed profile yeah yeah can we just stop right I want to go back we will come come come come into the depth here but I just want to take a step back my listeners will have heard me say I'm I'm pretty critical of psychology and psychiatry because there are all of these conditions or or dysfunctions or whatever they label them as that has been ever expanding in each release of the DSM to the point now the DSM five has got that he hundreds and not one of them has a consistent clear biological signature right now and what you're talking about here is biological signatures like every other and when you look at medicine every disease where you got diabetes heart disease or cancer whatever it is there's a very clear consistent repeatable biological signature but my understanding although I recently read a research paper about major depression where there was seemingly a clear biological signature but but the vast majority of people are going in and getting an assessment on a figure me it up questioner with leading questions that has been ever expanding and then they're put on medications that that have wide spread effects and he started on this it just makes me rage it's a box ticking exercise right we all know how to manipulate a box ticking exercise and I mean I mean no disrespect to the field of psychology my mum is a doctor of clinical psychology we work together very closely in my practice there is a place for it I don't deny that but I just from my experience and in over the many years you cannot make a diagnosis of a box ticking exercise alone you must do the deep dive into the psychophysiology of the brain and you know it just it speaks to like especially with children with ADHD and autism I see so many children on anti-psychotic medications because the experts don't actually know what it is that they're dealing with children have misdiagnosed on a daily basis they may have a new presentation where their sensory motor cortex is working overtime so therefore their frontal lobe can't switch on and to this point I had a great conversation with a psychologist yesterday involved in the LaRita academy and they are basically helping our disadvantaged kids but but he he has a background in trauma and trauma and for therapy and rightly point out which I'm sure you'll be all over that that trauma fundamentally changes the brain it puts the central nervous system so the brain and central nervous system goes into a hyper-arized hyper-vigilant state and cognitive processing is very very different particularly in children who've had trauma or to your point an adult who goes through and I'm one I'm say trauma I'm talking big tea trauma not the little tea trauma but an adult who's being through a very traumatic experience like the lady you're talking about you just thought that fundamentally changes the brain the the brain and central nervous system is actually processing things changes everything every single aspect of how you function is permanently changed if you hit the campus shrinks your memory is compromised so and that's why they get why people get misdiagnosed with dementia because through the trauma process if you're in the camp he became hippocampus shrinks your memories is compromised right so we need to understand this and we need to have empathy and compassion and understanding for people who are experiencing trauma and not just overlook it with the box-taking exercise and and do these human beings a massive disservice you know that I interviewed a professor John Reed right who is very critical of psychiatry he actually said to me that psychiatry is is the closest part of medicine to cycle bubble right he talks about the earlier that he specializes in is schizophrenia and he said there are five different um whether it's conditions or or behaviors or I can't remember the correct terminology but there's five different and you need to pick two of five but you could have two and I could have two completely different ones we have no over. up whatsoever. Yep, we are both called sets to get to frenic and put on the same medications, right? Which is just complete and utter harsh shit. I see a lot of guys in the military with PTSD from special forces and the amount of guys that are put on to anti-depressants and anti-psychotics is terrifying because they don't know what to do with it. So the first thing we do is very very safely get them off that and stabilize their brains so that they can then move through the trauma, right? Yeah and I think it's important for people to. Oh sorry, my name is talking about John Reed. He said to me that so they've done big skill service. He's a researcher and in his research only about 25% of mental health professionals ever ask a patient if they've had adverse childhood experiences or history of trauma. Yeah. Which to me is absolutely fucking bonkers, right? It's way worse than going to the doctor and the doctor not asking about your medical history or family history and that's the first thing that they do, right? To try and understand whether genetics in it and those sorts of things, but the fact that adverse childhood experiences fundamentally change the brain, change the nervous system, change how we process things and trauma does it to a greater extent. I mean it is it is professional negligence and to not ask or take it into account, right? Absolutely. It's the first question we ask in our clinic, like the number one question. You know, I had a woman in her 30s who was severely depressed, had multiple attempts of suicide. She came into my clinic, we did, you know, all the assessments. I did the brain mapping. I said, you're not depressed. My love, you're traumatized. And let's have a discussion about your childhood. Let's talk about that and explore that. She said no one's ever talked to me about my childhood. She'd been in and out of psychiatric hospitals since she was 19, right? From the moment her father came back into her world, bang, that's when everything unraveled. At the age of 30, I got my hands on her. We did a lot of treatment. I did a lot of treatment. And then she went in and did some EMDR with my mom. She says two very significant events, completely different human beings, no more on the depressants, no longer depressed. We just had to clear some of the issues from her childhood. Now Dr. Bessel Vanderkulk talks about what he keeps the score. That's what I based my entire practice and work off with trauma. It's sitting in our system. We just got to do the deep dive, figure out where it is, where it sits, how it is coming up to the surface and work with them. So let's take a couple of steps back. You were talking about EEG, QEG, all of these sorts. Let's give our listeners a little bit of an understanding of what they are. So take us through the different measurement tools that you may use, what they actually show you. You've already talked about then. You can compare it to data biases to then to see what this pattern looks like. But just kind of talk us through it. What happens when you come in? What are you stick on the head? What does it show you? Okay. So patient will come in. We do the deep dive into their background and their history. We then pop out like a cap. So it looks like, we joke with kids that they were a surf lifesaver. So they've got a cap on their head and there's 19 electrodes. We fill it all with gel. We start having a look at the wiggly lines on my screen. Now we work with five different brain waves. We've got delta, deep sleep, data, beautiful creative, also an REM sleep. We've got alpha. That's the rhythm that I like when you're at the pub and you're having a few drinks and everything's in the flow and everything's so nice. Nice and chill. And then we've got beta, which is what you're creating right now because you're able to sit and concentrate, throw your brain into second gear and learn. And then we have gamma and gamma is the aha moment with them that Einstein used to create. The neurobiology of the aha moment, right? Love it. Yeah. But sorry, sorry, Loretta interrupt and expand the people at difference between low beta and high beta. Okay. So low beta is like an SMR 13 to 15 hurt rhythm, right? It's a stabilizing rhythm. So what we refer to in my world as a stabilizing rhythm is the rhythm that we use to stabilize the brain. So if the brain is creating too much data, which is a slow wave ADHD in a tentative profile, it's we use that to stabilize the brain. So it's a very present rhythm. Then you've got beta one and beta two. Beta two is more like 15 to say 18 hurts. And then you've got 18 to like 25. And then 25 pluses like you gamma's up to 44 hurts. So you've just got different states of beta. The beta rhythms that I work mostly in are the is the SMR, which is what did I say 15 to 13 to 15 hurts. Yeah. So it's to be or sorry, is it is it true that when somebody's stressed, they're in higher levels of beta and panic anxieties, very high beta. So yes, correct. So when you're looking at a hyperally aroused system, if I'm seeing beta at T5 and T6, which is the part of the brain that is closely associated with associated with our amygdala, that is a hyper aroused system. It is in fight or flight. Yeah. That would then tell me I need to work with the amygdala and show this brain had a chill and relax because they're not creating that nice alpha rhythm of relaxation. And so that's an EEG cap. Do you know how deep do they penetrate into the brain? Or are they the measurement? The neuro stimulation that we do penetrates quite deeply. That's the thing. Right. Yeah. Now EEG is pretty close to this surface, isn't it? But it picks up lots of breathing activity. And what's the difference between EEG EEG and Q EEG? Well, the Q part is the qualitative where it's all put together and I've assessed it all and we've now got all the pretty maps. Cool. Okay. So you're doing an assessment. Any other assessment tools that you use other than the EEG? Event related potentials or EEG and RPs. Now an ERP is looking at how your brain processes information from a visual perspective through your eyes and then we do an auditory assessment. So we're understanding how the brain's processing what you're hearing. So they're really vital tools because I can see in 19 channels of the brain how every spot on your head is processing information that you're receiving two different ways. So I'm looking to see if we've got a healthy P300. Now a healthy P300 means your brain is processing within 300 milliseconds and the research states for a healthy processing speed where after 300 milliseconds. So I can see if we've got a healthy processing speed. A lot of the time with trauma you might see a P150 which is way too fast because you're hyper vigilant. Right. And do you see slower in dementia? Yeah. So then we would see latency which is slow. Right. So the brain is processing at say P500, P600, P700, P800. So what we then need to do is target and understand which regions of the brain of processing really slowly and then we look and then we target those parts of the brain and we show the brain how to speed up. So you know when I'm targeting these regions of the brain I'm not doing anything to the brain that the brain doesn't naturally already do. I'm just showing the brain with the stabilising rhythms if that's what I'm using, how to work in a really efficient manner. So you know the brain or create sine brain waves. I'm then putting a sine brain wave over the dysregulated sine brain waves and the way our brain's function is the brain mimics what I'm asking it to do. That is why we are so successful at creating healthy change that is drug free. That's interesting. No, but before we get into all the stimulation and just finish off the picture of when someone comes in. So you're looking at the whole history, particularly psychological history. You're then doing some measurements of the brain, you're giving them visual stimuli, auditory stimuli, seeing how their brain is actually processing. And then you're putting that information into a big database of stuff that goes this pattern looks like such and such an issue or condition or whatever. Anything else from an assessment perspective before you then start to look at treatments? Yeah, I need to understand if the patients have ever had a heart attack before because if they have then I can't do vagal nerve stimulation with them as well. So that is just a game change you're doing. A lot of the vagus nerve work with with with everybody. I just find like vagus nerve stimulation on top of the neuro stimulation protocols is just like neuro-stim on steroids essentially. Because once you get the gut, the brain, the vagus nerve, like especially nice, nice healthy tone on the vagus nerve that has at least every organ of the body, it's just, it's like watching magic happen. Well you do look at their heart rate variability to be measured in clinic or if they have an upper watch or a garment or an earring or a wound bun, would you look at that historical data? I don't need to. I mean I've got patients that love doing that and we do do that for individuals who are really invested in all of that stuff but honestly the ECG that we do when I'm looking at how the brain and the heart are connected, I can see very clearly if they've got a trauma profile or a depressed profile. Right, I get it. So what's happening? So just so the people understand is that when you're getting them to do some sort of a task or focusing on something not only using how their brain is reacting but you're also seeing how their sympathetic nervous system is reacting whether they're in sympathetic dominance or parasympathetic through the vagus nerve and the most accurate way to measure that is through the chest strap. More accurate than wrist stuff. Okay, so you're getting that combined rhythm and very interesting I was talking to somebody. I'll tell you who I was talking to. Right here Dr. Kevin Tracy, I interviewed him. He's written a book on the great nerve, the vagus nerve. He's an expert and he's been looking at vagus nerve stuff for decades. Right? But he told me that there are shapes. I can't remember the number of neurons in the heart that actually are sending signals back up to the brain. So those neurons in the heart are receiving sensory information from all of your different senses and the heart is actually signaling the brain. And I had always just assumed that sensory neurons were basically straight to the brain. The brain makes decisions and it influences the heart through barri reflex and all of that. But he says actually you can go the other way as well. Well, that makes total sense, doesn't it? Yeah, it does. And then particularly relevant to people who've had trauma, the whole idea of a broken heart. Jesus, there's some shitting in that. People die from a broken heart. Yeah. But there's a bit more science to just know that whole broken heart stuff. Absolutely. Okay, so that gives us a really good picture in terms of the assessment protocol. And so then in terms of an intervention, is all your interventions are you using stimulation, were trans-baginetic stimulation or whatever type of stimulation? No, no, no. So what we're doing is a little bit more sophisticated than that. It's transcranial alternating current stimulation or transcranial direct current stimulation. So direct current being going in from A to B. So it just goes in one way and goes out in and out. Alternating current stimulation is two electrodes and it's bumping from side to side in a sign brain wave. Cool. Okay. And then we've got pulse, de-lectro-magnetic field energy, which has been around forever. And then I use photo modulation, so light therapy and then trans-cranial or vagus nerve stimulation, where you clip some, the little clip onto your left tragus and that runs at 30 hertz rhythms directly down your vagus nerve and that creates a vagal tone. Okay. So what when would you use the direct trans-cranial stimulation and when would you use the alternating one? Okay. So I would use DC as we call it, dealing with people with really severe drug-resistant depression or really any form of depression really. So if we take it back a step, my mentor, the guy that supervises me, Dr. Nicholas Dogeris, he's based in Santa Barbara in the US, he created all of this technology. He runs a program called Shatterproof in Florida at FHG Health, it's a rehab facility. And so they work with a lot of veterans, first responders, a lot of opioid addicts and he's created all of the protocols that we use here in Australia or around the world, essentially. And so through his work at FHG Health, we've essentially adopted a lot of the protocols that he uses. So the direct current stimulation, I use a lot with drug addicts, I use it a lot with depression or they're the main sort of, yeah, even ICD sometimes. And what does that do from a functional perspective? So what it's doing is your understanding which part of the brain is dysregulated. So with trans-cranial direct current stimulation, the standard protocol is to go from F3 to FP2. So you're working the dorsal prefrontal part of the brain or the front of the brain. I should use simpler terms. And so what that's doing is stimulating the front part of the brain and then we put the coils over the top with an SMR happy rhythm and it just readjusts essentially the biochemistry and the brain right so that things start to communicate more efficiently. Right, yeah, because one of the things that you see in depression or in some of these can just particularly the major depression, is the lack of functional connectivity or the changed functional connectivity and the stuff that's coming out. Okay, so you're basically, it's like essentially taking somebody who has been in a car crash and is struggling to walk and you're re-teaching them how to walk essentially. Yes, and so direct current stimulation is very, it's similar but it's not the same to ECT, right? ECT with 800 milliamps of energy, I work to a maximum of 2.5 milliamps of energy. Right, very nice. It is a hard reset on the brain. DC direct current is the same principle because it goes in one end and out the other but it's so gentle on the brain that the brain responds so beautifully. Okay, okay, so you're giving a little nods rather than heading it with the sledge hammer. Which is TMS? TMS is taking a sledge hammer to the brain and it's just one size fits all. Okay, and so, hi, how long is there a standard amount of time that doing that, like doing a session will change the brain, like, is there a typical amount of sessions and frequency that people need to come in with or is it very from individual to individual? It's the million dollar question. It's so individual. Look, I've got a fellow that I'm working with in Melbourne at the moment who has had a stroke and his brain is so so compromised that I can't go above 0.2 milliamps. I think we got him up to 0.3 yesterday but it was just so intense on his scalp. And then he messaged me last night and he said for the first time in two years, after three sessions of very low energy, he said he finally has had glimpses of how his brain used to function. Now this is a highly intelligent, capable young man who had a stroke as a result of having some medication that a doctor prescribed, shouldn't probably have prescribed. And so that took him three sessions and I wasn't even a clinical levels of treatment, you know, that was a 0.2 and 0.3 of a milliamp, which is absolutely nothing but that doesn't matter. Some children report getting a treatment response after one session. I've seen times where patients have had to have 30 sessions before the brain has just let down and gone, oh, this is what you want me to do now. Okay fine, I'll get on with it. And so other than, so if you take people who've had sort of trauma or things that have severely impacted the brain, so that's one use case, depression and another use case, what about ADHD, right? This is the biggest expanding diagnosis this side of the Mississippi. It's so sad when I see these beautiful little children coming in and they're all just like dulled out and ADHD meds. This works so unbelievably well and it's so efficient for dealing with ADHD, either hyperactive or inattentive or an alpha profile ADHD. All we're doing is showing the brain how to regulate so that it doesn't run too slowly with an inattentive ADHD or it's not not running too quickly very high. active type ADHD. And we just don't use stabilizing rhythms. Now I've seen men on ADHD medication their entire and women on ADHD medication their entire life have 20 sessions of a stabilizing rhythm and no longer need their ADHD meds. Wow. And I presume from what you're saying that there is a different profile from the inattentive to the hyperactive right because their opposite ends of the skill. And so can you can you can you like within one measurement session can you kind of tell what that is and can you also go actually probably don't have ADHD. I mean Martin E. M's when I interviewed him he said the research that he's done he said five days of sleep deprivation your brain will look like an ADHD brain. So many kids who are right there who are sleep deprived plus not doing physical activity and and eating a shit diet and we know that ultra processed food consumption increases common mental health to sort of risk by a whopping 53% but for me you put that trifecta in of per sleep like a physical activity and a poor diet. Not me. How do I how is the brain supposed to bloody function properly? Diet rest and exercise really isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. That's what Dr. Dough rest talks about all the time in in in training in the US. Diet rest exercise. If you don't have those three down pat it's it's not great. Sleep is just one one what it's just one of the most important parts of mental health is sleep and getting deep delta restorative rhythms. Look I can I can I can when I I can have someone plugged in and doing an E. E. G. within two minutes if they've got an ADHD hyperactive profile I'll be able to see it because the amount of beta spindling in their frontal lobe like right at the front part of the brain was like super duper really fast rhythms. I'll be like whoa we got a brain that's like ready like rip and roar and like I've got to show this beautiful Ferrari brain how the poppies breaks on you know. Yeah. Well it is and every single child that comes in with ADHD or autism they are so intelligent their brains are just letting them down and it could be from a difficult birth. It could be you know a lack of oxygen at birth where they you know they're the brain's been compromised. It couldn't be hereditary it could be a number of different things. But it's it's it could be a new profile and then they get misdiagnosed with ADHD like I can fight five five times in the DSM where a new profile in the brain gets misdiagnosed as ADHD and then we're giving these children ADHD meds in the morning so they're on uppers in the morning. You put a child on down is it night they're not getting into deep delta sleep right yeah yeah. You're going to set them up for a dementia type profile later on in life because they're so deficient in getting healthy restorative rhythms of sleep at night. It's a recipe for disaster. You're you're mass with sleep at your peril. I always say to people if you're if you have pretty pure sleep and you're not exercising and you're eating the standard Australian diet which is pretty shit. Good luck with your mental health because you need it and it's not I don't say that from a judgment perspective it's just from a few busy physiology perspective like the brain cannot function well without those things and and unfortunately our modern lifestyles are are very anti-brain that's the thing. It's bizarre isn't it I say this to parents all the time would you buy a vehicle and not have it serviced? I know yeah or would you buy would you back our and just drive it in first and second gear like a super high revs all the time. You look at a formula one car that they are high performance machines but the engine doesn't last very long at all right it's lasting for half a dozen races and then has to be replaced because it's running so frequently hot right and people are running their brains so bloody hot and not not servicing them to your point and and it's not like that stuff. The other thing I say to parents is especially with kids with autism and emotional dysregulation when we build a house are we going to put the roof on first? Yeah because there's no foundation for to hold the roof up so what we do is we build the foundation we connect all the neural networks we get the brain communicating the way it should and then you start with OTs you start with speech you start with all the other complementary thing and you watch that child take off. So you mentioned autism a couple of times and so when you measure the brain of someone and on autism spectrum disorder and it is a whole spectrum die and do you see clear biological signatures? Yeah we I will say a really strong new rhythm. So what's new? Sorry you said there's a couple of sentiment to ask you. Mu is just MU it's it's in the sensory motor cortex at C3 C4 you can see it F3 F4 and you can see it P3 P4 but essentially it's in the sensory rhythm it's in the sensory motor cortex so when this part of our brain at C3 C4 is going off and working really hard all the energies there frontal low points switch on so it's a wicked rhythm that is created. Now I see that in 70% of children with autism 50% of children with ADHD create new 50% of people with an effective disorder create new and 18% of the healthy normal population create it. Now when we're dealing with an effective disorder so someone with trauma for example if you've got if you've experienced a horrific trauma the brain will create MU it's done as a protective mechanism to protect the person from being further traumatized because it's a disassociative rhythm in the alpha band range. Gotcha okay interesting and so do you find that you're getting results it would it be the CM with autistic people it's you do patterns of stimulation with their and support of other you know helping them giving them advice around building the foundations correctly which by the way can be very difficult in an autistic children particularly around diet because they tend to be super duper fussy around diet as well. So when when you talk about that I had I've had this one particular child in gender behind who you know we're a ski town right it's all in winter this child was so unbelievably dysregulated would could never attend a school would never wear shoes would never wear a jumper like not ideal living in the snow. I started working with this this gorgeous child like years ago he's now a school captain of year six. Now it's a whole full time like on the debating team like kicking goals but had such a horrific start to life in trauma in and around the school environment that he could never go back to attend a school so you know we just we just worked with that part of the brain we've got a protocol that we have dubbed the MU Buster so we're essentially asking the brain to stop creating MU. So like you know you grab the brain you're like wait knock it off this is not what I want you to do this is what I want you to do and so we are asking the brain to reduce that frontal lobe disengagement and we are engaging the frontal lobe so that children are no longer dysregulated. If I'm doing an EEG and I can see MU in the brain I'll say to the kid we go your fingers movement attenuates Mew right? So we get to see that because movement forces the motor cortex of the frontal lobes to come online correct and so when we're hearing at school from teachers that these naughty children won't sit still it breaks my heart because these children aren't naughty you're such a little right it's it's an uncomfortable rhythm they're trying to get out of their bloody brains and when you look at Finland which is though the PAS education system in the world it also has the highest amount of physical activity breaks in the world and we've just been bringing kids in and especially young boys and expecting them to sit on our arses all very long and pay attention it's like you look at you look at any young animal right they are just balls of movement all the time right all young animals are just just like wrestling running around just doing shitting in but they fall over and collapse but we're trying to get them to sit down and focus without any particular activity it's completely bonkers right it's cruel I really think it's cruel I had a situation with my son's school where they were telling me of all people that my child needed to go and have an assessment and I was like oh okay let's have a chat about this what's your qualification to tell me that my child needs to go see a pediatrician have you do you want understand the psychophysiology of his brain and the teachers are like, no. I said, then don't come to me and tell me my child needs an assessment. You teachers need to go and learn how my child learns. I don't work for you. You work for me, right? So figure out how he learns, come and tell me and start teaching. So I just won't put up with that idea. It's really quite interesting because it tends to be teachers are the initial driver of kids getting assessed and then they get assessed within school psychology and psychologist. Like I'm not going to I'm not going to blank it criticize psychologist like some brilliant psychologists need to do brilliant work. But they look at everything through the lens of condition or a diagnosis. Right. When you're a hammer, everything looks like a kneel. And I actually got slammed on social media because I highlighted that one of the biggest predictors of a kid getting a diagnosis of ADHD is actually their dear birth. The kids who are born early in the year are 38% more likely on average. And this is a systematic review and meta analysis of a number of different studies and it re in somewhere between 20 and 70% in the different studies. But on average, 38% more likely to get a diagnosis of ADHD than a kid who's born later in the year. So little Johnny or Jennifer, maybe they don't have that. Maybe they're just six months dying the developmental timeline. And if you give them that six months, they actually catch up. But the teachers are going, they're inattentive. They got an issue. They go to the child psychologist or they get referred. And then they're looked at through the prism of diagnosis, not from, hey, what do you enjoy? What's your sleep like? What's all of that sort of stuff? It's too. It is completely and utterly bonkers. And so tell me this, what do you think the future looks like in this whole area that you're in? Well, I just I think in EEG, the assessment process needs to be in every single school. It needs to be in every single juvenile detention center. It needs to be in every single prison. It needs to be in every psychiatric clinic and hospital. Because the longer we stop, sorry, the longer that we do not do this deep dive and understand someone's brain function, the longer we are harming people. And I don't say that lightly at all. I see this every single day. People are on the wrong medication. They are, they're just seen as a tool to make money essentially. And I hate that. I mean, my own experience as a child was in with being assessed by some expert that my mum found because I had learning problems. I was born hypoxic, right? Right? Awesome. You have learning problems. So he, this expert got me in the room, told my mother and brother to leave. Now my brother's 16 months younger than me asked me to do an exercise. I couldn't do the exercise. But when he brought my mother and my 16 month younger brother into the room, he explained it differently to my brother. And I remember that. I, I don't get it. Sorry, do I have whether he did that intentionally or not? I don't know. But I was smart enough back then at a really young age to call bullshit on that. And I'm not saying all experts and specialists do that. But you cannot go off a box ticking exercise alone to understand what is what's going on with people and their system. It's just, it's just not right anymore. I'll give you a reasonably similar story. My look, I Oscar ended up with Cushing's disease, which is a pretty horrible disease with the tumor on the pituitary that hypersecretes cortisol. And Crius's Crius had deep, deep depression, weight gain. And, you know, he was a super, super sporty little kid, started putting on me. I got this big, puffy, fierce. And, and you know, when we got the diagnosis and understood, he, he, he wanted, he said to me, I want to be the first Cushing's patient to lose weight before my surgery. So he became quite obsessive around it. He did a lot of exercise anyway, but he became obsessive around his food. I was trying to talk him out of it, but he got very, very stressed. And I realized me and my wife realized he just needs something that he can control here. And so, you know, he was reducing his calories, but it was, it wasn't to the point of danger because we were both nutritionists. And when we were in the hospital, they weighed him and they saw that he'd lost weight. They then, the dieticians, I think he, he might have an eating disorder. But we, and we were like fucking hell. And, and you know what, the minute that he's, and he's, that we, he, where he went to the surgery and they took it out, and when he woke up, he ate and he asked for seconds, right? We were asking for psychological help because that's the biggest thing that Cushing's patients need post surgery. And the only place they could send this to was a, was a local place that was generally around eating disorders. We were supposed to get psychological support. The psychologist who was pretty senior took Oscar into the room, didn't want us in there. And, and actually when they close to do the course of one way door, it was locked. We started going, fuck, this is wrong. And asked for, he had, he was 12 years old, maybe 13, I think, I think he was 12. No, he was 12. And he had two psychologists with masks and peppering him with questions, right? And, and he said, one lady was just throwing questions out of me. The other one was just stirring at him and we came in and, and the psychologist went, he's definitely got an eating disorder. He has anorexia. And I hit the fucking roof and actually put in a complaint. We eventually got the, the senior guy came on and, and gave us an apology around it. But you know what? That is on his medical records forever. Right? And, and it was such a bullshit diagnosis. And this is the problem that when you look at somebody through the lands of a diagnosis. And, and I actually said to the, to the, to the lady, I said, so he's got Cushing's disease. Do you know what Cushing's disease is? And she didn't. I said, so you've done no research on his condition. And she was like, well, no. And I went, well, it is well known that Cushing's disease has obsessive compulsive disorders. Right? You have obsessive compulsive thinking. You have a kid here who was all totally into his sport and then saw himself getting fat. I'm wanted some level of control of that. And you have diagnosed him with an eating disorder and said that he's now under weight. And then they give us this target weight that actually would have made him fat. And I'm like, you people are completely frigging bonkers. Oscar has said to me, if I ever have a mood disorder or any, I'm not going to a psychologist ever. He said, I will go to Barney and do some breath work. Because he went to this guy. We did a breath work session. It was a huge breath work session. And Oscar just just cried for no reason for like 20 minutes. After that was the, he could not talk about his Cushing's disease without tearing up. Before that any time he talked about his Cushing's disease, he would tear up. And that breath work actually did a bit of release. That reminds me, can you just the last kind of question? EMDR, which I think your mom does. Yeah. I have her. Yeah, I've heard like I'm getting lots of reports that I'm here about people particularly if I trauma to EMDR and go, bark me, what a game changer. Talk as long as their brain is in healthy alpha, absolute game changer. If the brain is not, if the brain is deficient, so it's doing what we would call alpha blocking at T6. It won't work. And if you've got too much alpha activity at T6 as well, it's generally not safe to take the patient to the trauma. But it's so this is the combination of brain stimulation, get it in the right steet to then do the therapy. And a kind of a little bit, I would draw the analogy of psychedelics, therapies. I had Paul Libre-Mitsky on who is the Australia's leader in this. And he basically said, it is like a rocket ship for therapy, but you need to know how to steer the rocket. So I've just done a brain scan on a patient who has left to go to Mexico to do some eye again he's got a horrific trauma background. has been doing, I have to be careful about what I say. But essentially he's, we've done the pre-brain map, he's done a lot of talking therapy, when he gets back we're going to do the after-brain map to see what the I began and the psychedelics have done for his brain, and then we'll continue on with more talking therapy. But you know, it's just, like I said, when you put all three of these silos together, psychology, psychiatry and psychophysiology, like the world really shifts a lot for these people. Yeah, when you mix them. So tell us, we'll talk about your practice in a minute. How many people are doing this in Australia? I brought this technology out myself back in 2019. I don't know, I don't really know of anyone else doing it as much. I've got a colleague in New Zealand, Dr Elizabeth Harris, love her. So we work together a little bit. She goes over the US with me. Actually, there is another guy, but he's not doing the neuro steaming camera. I do keep calling his practice and like, can you please hurry up and start. There's a guy down in Victoria, he's doing neurofeedback. There are so many people that do neurofeedback. Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. neurofeedbacks are dirty word in this country, thanks to the NDIS. neurofeedback, I have not done neurofeedback since I was like in my late teens when I first worked in this space. And as much as I love neurofeedback, I can, what neurofeedback takes to achieve in 12 months, I can do in three months with neuro stimulation. So I would just never bother with neurofeedback ever again. What we do is just the gold standard. It is really sophisticated. When I was over in Santa Barbara last year and Dr Douglass is getting so excited, he's like, "Check out my new neurofeedback program." And I'm like, "Oh, I'm not doing neurofeedback with anyone. Nick is gone, yeah, I know." I said, "Why are you releasing it?" He's like, because there are a lot of die-hard neurofeedback fans out there that just love it. And I loved it two decades ago, served a phenomenal purpose, but now like we've just moved on and we get faster purier results to what neurofeedback can achieve. So is there any criticism of neuro stimulation from psychiatrists, doctors, those people? I mean, if you're getting criticism, it's because they don't understand what it is that we're doing. I've got a few psychiatrists now that I'm working with who are just so interested in what we're doing. And I'm getting referrals from them. I've got a guy in Canberra that I work closely with. We're about to start a research trial for TBI for SF, like SAS guys and I commandos in and around TBI, because DBI doesn't recognise that. So just for this, that's traumatic brain injury. So a lot of these guys obviously, you know, are just exposed to blast injuries. Yeah, yeah. And the question is akin to, sorry, opening a parachute is akin to a concussion. DBI doesn't recognise it. So we're going to do some work in that space shortly. What else was I saying? It's just about anybody, anybody else who's kind of doing it around here or whether there's any professions that are critical of it. So what I do get sometimes is psychologists saying that, you know, EMDR doesn't work. And so what I say to them is, oh, that's not a reflection on EMDR. That's a reflection on you as a therapist. And the fact that you don't understand your patient's psychophysiology, EMDR works phenomenally well as long as you understand your patient. And so they don't like, people generally don't like me sometimes because I'm very upfront. And I'll just basically say it as it is. But no, I think the time you get pushed back is when people go, it's not evidence-based. Yeah. If I had a dollar for every time someone said that, I'd be a multi-millionaire. Everything we do is evidence-based. It is all science-based. E.G.s have been around since the late 1800s for crying out loud, you know, like, grow up. So other, no, I published research, peer-reviewed research in Brazil, the efficacy of the interventions. And the safety, like there's decades and decades and decades. It's just big farmer stands in the way of all of this. Big farmer used to pay for the research into this. And as soon as they found out how valuable it was for society, they cut funding. You know, so there is, there is, there is just a lot of evidence-based research. Yeah, cool. So where can people go to find out more about you? Now, presumably, this is not done over Zoom. It's done in the clinic, unfortunately. Yeah. And so, and so, talk to us about where, if they, if they want to come and see you, Gin Divine, New South Wales, Victoria and Porter. Yep. So we've got Gin Divine, New South Wales. I've got a clinic in Tamworth in New South Wales, Country Music State. I got a clinic in Peran, in Victoria, in Melbourne. Yeah. I need some seat. I'm going to come and see you and you can have a look at my brain and you can you can write a research paper on my fucked up head. Mine too. And then we've got a clinic here in West Notice, Australia. So I'm in Perth today at the moment, about to go work with some patients. And we're in West Perth in in in WA. I think that's all the, oh, and Waga Waga. We're about to open on the 20th of April in Waga Waga at the propatrius centre. So again, Waga is a big defence area or a little baby recruits go to Waga. And then for some reason, so many people want to like get out and transition out of defence in Waga and live in Waga. So we're tapping into that space for a lot of the military guys as well. Cool. And somebody, if they're a health professional consular, that sort of thinks are colleges, are just who, who wants to get into this area? Is curious about it. And where would you say, Dan, would that be the your mentor and son of Arbor? Is that the only thing you could do for the training? What I would say is just come and talk to me to start off with. I can then put them in touch with Dr. Doughgris. Dr. Doughgris is actually coming to Australia in September. The answer is conferences on up in the Gold Coast, Tiff and Nick. So Dr. Thompson, which is Dr. Doughgris's wife, Tiff, she's a keynote speaker in and around Transcranial Alternating Current Simulation Technologies. And then Nick and Tiff are running a bootcamp course, which is a five-day in-depth course that you would need to go and do if you're wanting to get into this space. And they're going to run that in Australia? Yeah, in the Gold Coast, invaluable. So I've got so my mum, like I said, she's a doctor of clinical psych. Her one of like family friends that we grew up with, I'm trying to get a lot of them up there to go and do the course. They're all based in Sydney. Because I just get so many people so much demand asking me to open clinics in everywhere, Sydney, Brisbane, South Australia. So we will eventually get to that. But it's a lot of hard work for one person. No, no, I appreciate that. And so five-day course in the Gold Coast, let me get the link off you. We'll put it in the show notes for people who may be interested in going to do that. And one last question, what do you need to be to use this intervention? Presumably you need to be a certified health professional in some description. No, no, no, so it's pretty scary. I'm not registered with anyone because if I get registered with I'll come after me. So I have had to be very strategic and careful. So I have a psychology background, but I, yeah, you can't. Because it's just such brand new technology. Okay, all right. So anyone can go and do the course if they want and want to give them? Well, yeah, as I would be very careful, I would always make sure someone has a background in health. Yeah, yeah, in health or counseling or that sort of stuff. Yeah, nursing mental, health, health and everything, all that sort of stuff. Yeah, cool. Awesome. Awesome. This has been fascinating stuff. So thank you for your time and for your expertise and for being a trailblazer of this industry. I appreciate your time too, Paul. Thank you.