Ep 184: The Hidden Companions of ADHD: Anxiety, Learning Disabilities, and More

Opening and office move announcement 0:00

Hi everybody, it's Dr. Laura with Connect My Brain. So glad that you're tuning in. I have so much to tell you today. This will be my last podcast from this office. Connect My Brain is moving to Marietta. Really, it's only seven miles from where we are right now on Roswell Road, but it is considered a different county. So that's why I say it Cobb, Marrietta. There's Bittersweet. I love this place where we've been practicing for the last five years and really have made a home out of it. And it is a house.

But unfortunately the landlord doesn't want to continue renting. He wants to sell it. And wow, the sticker price on it is way out of my league. So we're going to have a new beginning. Especially with what I focus on in my practice, I think it's great that I can have personal experience with you while I go through a season of change. It's not only that, I don't know when you'll listen to this particular podcast. But a couple of days ago, I had to admit my mom in hospice and I'm really having some up and down emotions with that.

There's really something when you lose your mom. So if you hear this soon and she's still with us, just keep us in your prayers. Even if it's long after this time, say a prayer for her. Her name is Mary. She's 93 years old and she really impressed life on me on so many levels. So there's a lot of change going on and change sometimes is really difficult for all of us because it means we have to break through a pattern and do something different. And sometimes the very first step is to just realize that change is needed.

The other night, I hosted an event at my current office, a dinner talk. I used to do them before COVID all the time. And I was testing some waters and seeing about casting a bigger net. I feel so fortunate for what I have come to know over the last 30 years, and especially going through my mom's healthcare challenges. And you really can get to a place that sometimes it is too late. That's where we are, her and I, in this journey. My only hope while she's been with me is to see her walk again. My mom had a very bad trauma in 2018 that landed her in a wheelchair.

And it's the only thing she would ever talk about, how she wanted to walk, again, and I really wanted, to help her accomplish that goal.

Hospice, change, and the need to adapt 3:34

the hospice care person helped me realize that I at least kept hope alive in her heart. But when we think about our own life, are we really hopeful that we can make a change? So the other night, like I said, I hosted a dinner talk. And it was geared towards adults. And the title of my presentation was Preserve Your Brain. A lot of ads went out there about brain health. We had about eight people show up. And it was interesting because I get very excited and I got very passionate about everything that I do.

And I would say there's a small percentage of adult patients that do come to connect my brain. When people find out that we do neurofeedback, oftentimes adults reach out and say, hey, will you work with an adult and do a neuro feedback? And absolutely. And we've put together a really wonderful management plan for adults. And it's very different than our pediatric patients. We still have our three tier approach, mechanical, chemical, brain. we still push movement. It's so important. Chemical, look at the labs, Look at what your chemistry is.

and of course the brain map. But with an adult patient, we really work to push them to follow like a curriculum on really learning the steps and executing the step so that for once and for all, you can actually get to where you want to be before it's too late. So we highlighted things, especially about our healthcare model today. And in fact, I'm gonna bring something up in the middle of this and I want to read it verbatim. And so this was the presentation that we did the other night. One of the things that I read was what Medicare actually says about your health.

and what that really means for how people are looking at the insurance model and expecting it to be able to pay for everything. So bear with me. I know this is kind of interrupting things in the middle of it. So I apologize for that, but let me bring this up because I really want to read it verbatim of how Medicare frames this and so that we can understand really what, what you are up against. This is the Medicare model 2251.3. Care that seeks to prevent disease, promote health, and prolong and enhance the quality of life is not considered medically necessary and therefore not payable.

Did you hear that? And honestly, Medicare kind of sets up the platform of how all the other insurance companies work. And so often when people come and say, hey, do you take insurance? And I say no, we're happy to create what's called a super bill for you to submit for yourself.

Adult brain health dinner talk 7:54

But over the years, We've been completely reduced down in value, and it's not just my kind of a practice. Many providers feel this way today, more today than ever before. And then you may want to go in another direction, but because it is not what is typically listed in that diagnostic statistical manual, they don't consider it payable. Case in point, my mom had to go in the hospital at Christmas time for seven days, and then she just recently was in hospital again, this time, for eight days. And that number is significant.

When the very first time she went into the hospitals after relocating here in Georgia was within the first year of being here. And I was absolutely stunned to learn that there is a seven-day Medicare rule that if a person is in a nursing home, they must be back in their bed by the seventh day or you have to pay out of pocket to keep their bed. And on that eighth day, if you don't agree to play, they're going to go in there and they are going pack up your person's belongings. Then if they get out and there's space, then you can maybe go to a completely different part of a nursing home.

Now, this is a really big deal. Maybe you're listening to this and this might feel very different than what I typically talk about, but I'm going to bring it all home, so stay with me. Could you imagine managing your health and wellbeing based on a seven-day rule and what that does to the family to coordinate this? So on that eighth day, we're getting charged $310 a day to keep her bed. Now, I did reach out to Medicare because I really thought, is this proper? Is this the proper way to really manage someone's health?

And they did call the nursing home on our behalf. And I learned then there is flexibility, but it wasn't given. So we'll have to pay that. Then I come back and that very same day, My mom isn't doing well and those are the options that I get. She either goes back to the hospital or she has to go to hospice. Now, I am now very comfortable with my decision because my mother is 93 and all the things that have been happening to her every time she's in the hospitals, the feedback from the doctors is because of your mother's age, we will not do, I don't want my mom to be a pin cushion anymore.

If you could see the amount of bruising all over her body from IVs, needles, et cetera, you might feel the same way. It's so hard to watch. I'm building this picture because I want you to realize you can get to a point that you're out of time. And that's where doctors like me step in and really try to educate that as long as you are living and you move and you can feed yourself and dress yourself, and drive your car and do all those things, you have time. Because of neuroplasticity, that word can be positive or negative.

You can put a lot of good things in and go in a great direction. but you can do something. I'm 65 years old.I actually got my Medicare card this year. Hope I never use it. And I intend to put the quality of my life first. One, I love what I do and I want to continue to help people. But I also have children, adult children. And I want to enjoy them, I wanna go through the journey of life with them. I don't want them to be standing beside me while I lay helpless in a bed. You have to think about your health in this manner.

Medicare, insurance, and preventive care limits 13:00

So I did this presentation and I really thought, wow, we're talking about some great stuff. We're tying it back to children because everyone in the audience had adult children and had grandchildren and remember things from when their children were little and they could connect the dots when there might have been a learning struggle, an attention struggle. I also brought up that a lot of adults that we do work with, when I get into that intake form and asking questions and I go, how long have you been dealing with this?

I can tell you 99% of the time, I have been told my whole life, ever since I was a kid. So, are you struggling with something? Is it something that you consider is all in your head? Is there physiological things that are going on and you are on medication? Do you want to get off? Our job is not to tell you to take it or not take. Remember, here at Connect My Brain, we really do focus on preserving the choices that people make. But where are you today? Because in the traditional healthcare model, and you have a problem, the focus, what's in their doctor's bag?

What diagnosis do you? Have what are the treatments? what Are the medications, surgeries, et cetera? And the amount of money in 2025, Americans spent over $550 billion on pharmaceuticals. And the statistics actually said the number was expected to be 20% higher. So where are we putting our emphasis? Now, I understand there are absolutely medical conditions. That's why I started with the stuff about my mom. I literally have to stand back and allow the medical model now to completely govern her life.

So it's not that I don't believe in it. It's not that I think you should never be on medicine, but I can tell you there is other ways. And that was the purpose of the dinner gathering was to introduce different perspectives. And that's what I did as I talked about Connect My Brain's three tier approach, mechanical, chemical brain. In many of these podcasts, Mechanical, let's just highlight a couple of things. Movement. When you come into this world, you are moving, You are expected to move. You're not reading, writing, and doing arithmetic.

children that have organic disabilities. that are a year, year and a half delayed. You still got to go back and look at those milestones. What is the child missing? What can the children not do for themselves? And then it has to be put in there if you want that child to move forward. Now, this was the example that I gave the other night. Can you touch your toes? So if don't have the flexibility, to actually touch your toes without bending your knees, then I can also tell you you don't have cognitive flexibility, brain flexibility.

And that's specifically driven by an area in the brain called the hippocampus. We've also talked about the hippocampus for long-term memory and personality, as well as cognitive flexibility. I've mentioned on other podcasts too, if you decided to get a COVID shot, that spike protein is targeting your hippo campus. We did a podcast on this and gave a book review where they are predicting that we will have an epidemic of Alzheimer's and dementia. Notice how many memory care facilities, not just nursing homes, are actually being built and coming up in your community.

We are in serious situations and it is time to have serious conversations. If you desire more, if you want the quality of your life to improve, you have to do work. even moving, getting on a treadmill, walking 20 minutes. Now, it's perfectly fine if you can't, but you could start somewhere.

Why adults need movement, chemistry, and brain work 18:38

You can start with five minutes and work your way up. But this is the problem that I see. We're either complaining that, I can do it because it hurts too much, or I don't have time. Well, already established we're running out of time, And if it hurts too much, then you start further back. You know where you want to get to, but you started furtherback. Maybe it's sitting in a chair and marching and working on some flexibility. There is always someplace where can start. That second tier, the chemistry, If we are just going in a medication route, that medication has to go through your liver and eventually it is going to change the gut balance and you're going end up with dysbiosis which is imbalances in bacteria and it's going just start a cascade of symptoms.

I brought up two lists at this presentation and I'll just read a few. And I asked, what stressors do you have? Chronic stress, no time, poor diet, headaches, memory issues, feeling tired or sluggish, anxiety, depression, prescription. There's about, I would say 20 on each slide. So I'm just reading a view of them. slow to start in the morning, fear, cold hands, cool feet, feeling bloated, weak immune, shaky with missed meals, unstable behavior. When we start being able to give it a name, it's been there too long.

And that chronic situation is taking up real estate in your brain. And here's the example. Let's say when you were younger or whatever age, you played a sport or you are a dancer or a gymnast or, whatever the case may be, maybe you've played in band. It's not always has to be a sports. But you developed these incredible connections in order to do whatever it was that you did. If you're not doing it anymore, you are not using those connections. And when we get into these patterns of chronic problems, your brain goes, oh, okay, You want to keep this stress going.

Therefore you aren't using these other connections, so you know what I'm going to do? I am going take those and I will direct them to go to that chronic stress pattern because you want keep it. Now you may not, in your heart of hearts, want to keep it, but you're going to have to transform your mind. And that's what gets us into the brain part. If you don't bring the Brain into dynamics of what you are doing, then you only changing from the neck down. And I try to tell other chiropractors this all the time.

When I used to speak for this orthotic company many years ago, I would speak to chiropractors and I always ask them, all right, let's take a little survey. How many of you have been working with a patient with chronic pain for a year and lots of hands would go up? And then I would change the number to five. And so just a few would drop. Then I will go to 10, a fewer more. When I started getting to 15 and 20 and 25 years of chronic paint, there would usually be somewhere about maybe five to seven hands remaining.

What's the personality of those patients that have been dealing with chronic pain for 20 to 30 years? And every single time they would say, well, they're not really happy and they really have no range of motion. And you could see that life had really been diminished because every year that you are in chronic pain, physical pain. You are losing 1.3 cubic centimeters of gray matter in your brain. Now, I do. I primarily work with children. And I'm really glad I did this dinner the other night with adults because my passion for children grew even deeper.

Because children, they will change right in front of me. We can educate and we can prevent and that the families are open to learning more. Not always 100%, but a good amount. And the children, boy, when they master something, they come up and give us hugs like so deeply felt. But it really encouraged me to stay in the pediatric realm because I want to influence a generation. What I came away from the other night, we gave a wonderful offer. And you know what? I hadn't planned on this, but I'm gonna give that offer to you.

But we give a wonder offer for somebody to dip their toe in and see what Connect My Brain is all about. We don't make you feel like you've got to buy this horrendous package from the first minute you meet us. I wanna meet you, I want you to meet me, i wanna explore what has happened and i want to tell you what i think it's going to take and then i wanted to

Chronic pain, neuroplasticity, and brain decline 25:10

know your level of commitment What I walked away from the other night, even though everybody participated, everybody told me they had at least five to six of those things under the stressor tab, but no one committed. That really was surprising to me because we were giving you an opportunity to see what's going on in your brain. and help you understand that even if you are on medication, and if choose to do neurofeedback with us, neuro feedback makes your medication work better. And we even expressed to the guest, tell your provider that you're going to neuro-feed back.

Because if truly want to get off these medications and that's what they said, then you will be able to tell whoever prescribed that for you. Hey, I'm starting to feel better. Can we reduce this down? What a concept. We would help you with labs so that you could really understand what do you have to do in order to make some lasting changes inside of your body and then by all means get you moving again. That is the way that this fabulous body is divinely designed to work. We are given clear instruction on movement, on the types of foods to eat, and we have to sit back.

And how to think, you know, that's our tagline, transform by the renewing of your mind. You have, to renew your, mind so that you can take another step. but the only way that the brain knows how to change. There has to be an intensity, there has be a frequency, and there have to a feedback mechanism. so that your brain knows, okay, this is what it means to do it in this correct way. Like, be organized in your, brain waves in the right place and getting that feedback. is what changes the brain. It's an exercise.

If I want to lose weight and I'm walking on the treadmill and reducing my calories and lifting weights, and I get feedback because I'm not bloated. I give feedback, because my bowels are working really well. Well, the brain needs it too. We can't just do things from the neck down. We have to use the body. I'm really appealing to the adults right now because our children really need you. They need you to be the role model. It's not just enough to have the kids come in here and do something, but it's for them to see that I can too.

So I'm not asking them or telling them, okay, you have to do this. They see me. The other day, one of our little boys that comes here, we have to face some pretty harsh realities when it comes to his chemistry. So children that have a positive folate receptor antibody, what does that mean?

Pediatric focus, family role models, and nutrition 29:38

Okay, so the B vitamins need to get in the brain, not just circulate in blood. So if I have an antibody meaning I fight it, then it's not getting in brain like it supposed to. And that can have a lot of impact on your whole system because your B vitamins are everywhere and part of every connection and every chemical circulation going from one structure to the next. And so one of the things that is known about this particular antibody is that if you drink or eat animal-based dairy, you create more antibodies.

So you could be taking these B vitamins, but because you keep eating dairy, you're blocking more of them and people aren't going to see the results that they're really looking for. Mom was struggling. What am I going feed him? We thought we had gotten to another place and I said, do you know what I'm going do? I am going go to the store. I will get the brand that I get. And I mean, I love chocolate milk to be quite honest with you. And the Malk milk, no gums, it has like three or four ingredients in it and I bought it.

I got the cashew and got almond chocolate. and I also got dairy-free cheeses, and got cauliflower crust pizza, pizza tomato sauce made locally, vegan pesto. I came back to the office and that day I was going to have seven boys and one girl at the same time in the And I made two different pizzas, one with the traditional red sauce and the dairy-free cheese, and other one the pesto and dairy free cheese. Now I'm going to tell you, Even five years ago, it wasn't as easy as it is now. And these brands are really working on creating better consistencies and I know what it's like to feed kids.

I can tell you right now, I had no pizza left. and had children that actually liked the pesto one. So we've got to keep our minds open Here at Connect My Brain, we are so committed into building this community, creating more adult role models to help bring in the kids. We have our... Mom's Corner, dads are welcome too. It's a private Facebook group that patients that are active in the office or remotely, they get access to this. We have little memberships that also give you additional access, to resources.

we are trying to bring this information into every home. I think this is why Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is so passionate about improving the diet, improving what we're feeding children at school. But this may have been your role model growing up. I can't even begin to tell you the role-model I grew up in. Everything I do now, I've learned. It is not something that I was brought up on. And I believe that is why the quality of my health is where it is. Let's take action. Don't believe that you don't have time.

don' believe you can't get to a place that would actually allow you to have freedom of movement with no pain. If any of this is connecting to you or a loved one or someone with a child We want you to reach out to Connect My Brain. You can go right on the website, connectmybrain.com, and you can write us and tell us what's going on, ask for a phone consultation,

Call to action and closing message 34:28

And I will be the one that calls you back. And we will talk. I'll hear your story. and I tell you if I believe that we can help. Now, don't think that I tell every single person, I got you, we can do it. There's lots of times I do say to families based on what their child is going through or what the adult is doing through. And I will say, you know what? We're gonna give it 90 days and we're going to see where we get. If we establish good working practices, and you can do the things that we have to offer.

And you begin to feel better and your are committed. Then at the end of that 90 days, we both see it and we move into a different or a traditional management plan that offer here at Connect My Brain. We take your health incredibly serious, but we need you to do that too. if it's for yourself or for your child. Time is of the essence. I don't ever want anyone to experience what I've experienced with my mother. If I could have done it differently. And sometimes things go on and you can feel that way.

And you do get the opportunity to do it differently. And sometimes you don't. So thank you so much for listening today. I hope you will reach out. If you feel like Connect My Brain is the place for you to go, do something. Take action. Don't get on that sinking ship because there are no lifeboats and there're no lifepreservers. Remember what I read to you. Medicare 2251.3. Care that seeks to prevent disease, promote health, and prolong and enhance the quality of life. is not considered medically necessary and therefore not payable.

Take action. Be blessed.