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Dr. Heather Sandison is the founder of Solcere Health Clinic and Marama, the first residential care facility for the elderly of its kind. At Solcere, Dr. Sandison and her team of doctors and health coaches focus primarily on supporting patients looking to optimize cognitive function, prevent mental decline, and reverse... Read More
Gregory Eckel has spent the last 20 years developing and refining his unique approach to chronic neurological conditions. In addition to his experience in clinical practice using a combination of Naturopathic and Chinese Medicine, he has a deep personal connection with chronic neurological disease since his wife Sarieah passed of... Read More
Heather Sandison, N.D.
Welcome back to the Reverse Alzheimer’s Summit. I’m your host, Dr. Heather Sandison. I’m thrilled to have Dr. Greg Eckel with us now. He has spent the last 20 years developing and refining his unique approach to chronic neurological conditions. In addition to his experience in clinical practice, using a combination of naturopathic and Chinese medicine, he has a deep, personal connection with the chronic neurological diseases since his wife, Sariah passed of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a condition with no known cure.
As she was the love of his life, he took a deep dive into research and uncovered regenerative medicine and the development of a brain regenerative program. In loving memory of his wife, he has continued to help others with neurodegenerative diseases improve their quality of life and find natural solutions. Dr. Eckel is a highly respected international lecturer, author, and expert in integrative care for neurodegeneration. Cofounder and owner of the Nature Cures Clinic in Portland, Oregon, Dr. Eckel was also appointed by the governor of Oregon and served as the board president of the Oregon Board of Naturopathic Examiners. He has been featured as an expert on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox Television Stations. Dr. Eckel, it is such a pleasure to have you.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
Well thank you so much.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
So you were an obvious A-list on people to invite because I think our interests are so aligned, both being naturopathic doctors, both really, really inspired and deeply passionate about neurodegenerative disorders and getting people the solutions that they need. I think one of the things that I’m talking to all of our guests with is how, we see it every day, we almost take for granted that there are solutions whereas many of our listeners haven’t heard that there’s hope before. So I’m just really thrilled to dive in to the depths with you on everything that you’re seeing clinically and all of the new and exciting things that you’re helping people with.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
Oh, I love it. You know, it is so important. I know firsthand, in my bio, you shared some of my story there. Being in medicine for 20 plus years, I saw that the system was broke, but when you go through it with a loved one, you really feel it and it hits you hard of like, oh, this is really so fractionated and there isn’t a lot of hope. You know, I’m now talking to patients around the globe and you kind of get a diagnosis and you get parked, especially in this neurodegeneration realm. And there’s no, people get really isolated and overwhelmed and depressed, right? Because there aren’t, there’s no solution in Western medicine.
And really I swung for the fence and unfortunately what I discovered did not help Sariah, but it is helping thousands of patients now. And so I love that you have this summit and we’re gonna talk about my FAN-C approach to neurodegeneration and brain health and really provide a lot of options, things to pursue, consider and hope. You know, I like to say, I treat heart-centered beings moving through time and space. So it’s not disease, pieces and parts. And when you treat a heart-centered being, because that’s who people are, as a heart-centered being, that is really where the magic happens. That’s where there’s so much synergy and intuition that can come into play. But also by listening deeply, you can really figure out what’s the exact path for this person sitting in front of me?
Heather Sandison, N.D.
Right, it’s so individualized, what is best for that particular person. And that requires understanding their history, really listening and hearing that story. I’m curious about your approach. You call it the FAN-C approach to neuro and brain regeneration. Can you break that down for us? How do you approach a patient?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
Yeah, so F stands for functional and that’s that component of helping heart-centered dynamic beings, like deep listening and really individualizing a program to them. Now the framework gets set up in the A. That’s for assessment. N and is for nerve health. That’s different information that we put into the body to help the nerves. And then it’s a dash C and C is for cellular regeneration. So we’ll unpack each one of those as we go forward here, but I really do, everybody wants to know what can I take? What is the pill? What’s gonna make this go away, doctor? And we’re seeing that system doesn’t work, it doesn’t work for chronic illness and disease.
So that functional approach really, it’s the naturopathic, Chinese medicine, functional medicine, integrative medicine, whatever the moniker or label de jour, I call it naturopathic medicine, which is treating whole dynamic heart-centered beings moving through time and space. And that aspect is really, it brings the heart back into medicine and you really, you get to sit, you’re empathetic, you’re listening and you’re understanding what’s going on. We could have 10 people in the room and develop 12 different treatment regimes for them because they’re so unique.
They’ve got their heritage, they’ve got their genetics, they’ve got the epigenetics, they have the environment, they have their early childhood components. They have their adolescence, they have their adulthood. I kind of give the analogy as how full is your cup? And then they have their diet, they have their mindset, they have their exercise. They have certain traumas throughout their life. That all pours water into the cup. And when your cup is full, it runeth over and that’s where the symptoms come in. So we want to address, well what’s in that cup for them? So that’s the assessment. And in the assessment in particular for neurodegeneration, people are just not getting worked up. In Alzheimer’s, mild cognitive impairment, dementia, Alzheimer’s, some of the background stuff that really needs to get discovered are Lyme is the great masquerader, mold toxicity are big things, chronic viral issues.
So that would be in assessment. Now the three main pillars that I look at for everybody with a brain are heavy metals, the microbiome and hormones. Now these are the three legs of the stool in the FAN-C approach. Now, those first ones that I mentioned, those are things to consider if it’s in the history, not everybody. We don’t need to do a seven to $10,000 workup on everybody coming in to see us. A lot of folks in the functional realm and allopathic realm will just say, “Well, we’re gonna throw the kitchen sink at it, at them.” And basically them is treated as it, right, as a product in the machine. And so I really stress like we want to make a program for you. So it is individualized. But the three starting spots, heavy metals.
When I learned in environmental medicine, in the NHANES data in North America, that the levels of toxicity of metals are through the roof, and when I graduated, I tested everybody and I had to stop doing that because I discovered, oh, we all have metals in our system. And I always get patients that ask me, “Well, where did they come from doctor?” And it is so ubiquitous. We’ve got mercury in our amalgam. So if you’re in your ’50s or older and you have any fillings, you have mercury fillings in there from your childhood.
We have mercury in the fish. Mercury gets burnt in coal-fired plants and put up in the plumes and then rains down in acid rain. On the west coast where I am, we get a big plume of dust every summer from China. And we have coal fired plants in the Midwest that rains down on the Northeast in the United States. So we have ubiquitous kind of in our environment metals. The top four that I see that is in most of my patients, it’s not everybody, but when it is there, it’s cadmium, mercury, arsenic and lead. Those four are the top four. Now we do test for 13, but it’s a stone to turn over. You got to turn that stone over because if you don’t look at that, then you’re basically building on quicksand. So things like glutathione, acupuncture, Chinese botanicals, all of the great neotropics, those aren’t going to be as effective if you’ve got basically this big bucket, hole in the bottom of your bucket, you’re trying to fill up. So they’re not as effective. So metals.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
We see this, so we’ve seen this at Marama actually, at the residential care facility, where we’ve had a couple come in, and they did great, they did very well, they were improving, but they didn’t have a trained doctor like you. And so sure enough, we encouraged their family members to get them seen by a well-trained doctor and there were heavy metals there that we didn’t know about. And so now it’s so exciting to see, all right, as we put all the pieces together, both the lifestyle and the really good medicine, what’s their potential?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
Yeah, so it is amazing. And once you get those cleared out of the way, then we look at the microbiome. So it’s still in the assessment because I know everybody wants to get to what to do, right? But you got to start with a strong assessment because the microbiome, we’ve all heard the gut is the second brain. And there’s so much research coming out on this. I just saw, there’s research on a probiotic that was decreasing Parkinson’s symptoms in patients and definitely we’re seeing certain probiotics associated with different neurodegenerative states. So looking at it, the gut is the second brain.
Why I have the walls yellow in my clinic is I come from the spleen and the stomach camp in Chinese medicine. It’s also the overlay with naturopathic medicine is treat the gut. Healing starts with the gut, right? We dig our graves with our fork. You run the Bredesen protocol out of your clinics and one of those subtypes of the Alzheimer’s is diabesity of the brain. So looking at sugar imbalances along those lines. So we want to see though do you have inflammation in the gut? Do you have any pathogenic bacteria? Do you have any opportunistic bacteria? Are your beneficial gut bugs in proper balance? So there’s a whole slew of information we get from a microbiome test. And so it’s very important, again for foundational work, because if you have inflammation in the gut, you have imbalances in the gut, you have worms or parasites in your gut, we need to clear that stuff, because that is a total drain on your vital force and your vitality.
I like to say I do a lot of nothing all day. I give, basically we hold the space, it’s your body, and it’s the information coming into the body that creates the healing potential, but we have to remove obstacles to cure. And so the microbiome is a crucial kind of frontline assessment, especially with mild cognitive impairment, dementia, Alzheimer’s. These are huge imbalances. If you have leaky gut, guess what? You have a leaky brain, the blood brain barrier is not working as well. And so the integrity of your vessel and your innate ability to heal is compromised if that’s off, right? So that’s the second leg of the stool. The third one is hormone testing. And some will say, “Well that’s funny. Why for my brain health do I need to look at my hormones?” And we do know all of the information of our body comes in through the periphery, in our nervous system.
And we are set up with some amazing sensors for vision and sound and taste and light and sensitivity, pain. And so what we’re looking at, all of that information comes into your central nervous system, comes up to the brain stem and it goes to a small, I call it a tiny little operation called the hypothalamus. And in there, I imagine this little switchboard operator connecting the signals to the right region of the brain. Well, sometimes that operator gets really confused. If you have brain fog, confusion, memory issues, they’re just not connecting the signals in the right spot. Well, what else comes in there? Your hormones also come into the hypothalamus. And so you’ve got your nervous system, your sympathetic, your fight or flight, like the saber tooth cat coming to eat you. And then the parasympathetic, which is your rest and digest and heal, that’s your nervous system, autonomic nervous system. And then you have your hormones that get organized in there as well. And so there’s a lot we can do if your hormones are out of balance.
And I see, it’s amazing what environmental toxicity is doing to our hormones with kind of the plastics that are estrogenating our bodies, creating a lot of estrogen response in our bodies, for men in particular, but also for women. Men’s testosterone levels are dropping after the age of 35, so much so that they just changed the reference range on the labs. It used to be total top end of 1,200 for an average. Now it’s down to 900. So you see these reference ranges and they change and they’re not normal ranges.
So people, here’s a little kind of asterisk pro tip, your reference range, it’s a reference range on your lab, it’s not a normal number. So a lot of times you don’t understand that and your providers don’t understand that and that, “Oh well look, you’re on the reference range, you must be fine.” But we have some optimal levels that we’re looking at there for you. In particular, I call them the healthy levels because it’s much tighter controlled on the labs. I’m gonna get back to the hormones. So the hormones in particular, we’re looking at progesterone, estrogen, the breakdown products of estrogen.
We get to see what your liver is doing with them because that is a big part of hormone metabolism and regulation is in your liver. We look at some of your snips, the single nucleopeptide snips of your genetic snips to see, well, what’s the platform that your body’s playing on? With a big asterisk around that, just because you have the snip doesn’t mean you’re expressing it. So that’s a whole component on those three. Now I know that is a ton of info. So let me just pause there and see what comes up.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
Well I think it’s really exciting for me to hear that you also don’t take those ranges as this is the Bible of what’s good or healthy. If we’re comparing ourselves to a sick population, that doesn’t mean that we’re healthy if we are the same as them. Right so what we really want is this optimal level. And doing this assessment with a well-trained provider is so important because you’re not gonna get those pro tips. You’re not gonna get that added benefit if you’re seeing just some run of the mill doctor, that’s not giving you answers.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
If you ever hear, “Get used to it, you’re getting old”, or, “Oh, that’s a senior moment”, please run the other way. I will call absolute BS on that because that is not healthy aging. I saw what healthy aging was was in Austria. I lived in Vienna, Austria as an undergraduate student and I was hiking mountains with 80 and 90 year olds. The only difference between me and them was I got to the mountain top faster. They were hiking with poles and it just took them a little bit longer to get to the summit to have a pint of beer with me. So that is the type of aging that I want to promote.
In fact, I’ve said I want to live to be 150 years old because I’ve had the privilege of sitting with my 90 year old patients saying, “You know, doc, had I known I was gonna live this long, I would’ve taken a lot better care of myself.” And I’m humbled and honored that they’re sharing their, trusting me with their health. But to have that, it’s a responsibility of you hear that from a 90 year old, you better wake up and start listening, right? And so the folks on The Alzheimer’s Summit, my guess is either you have it or a loved one has it or you see your loved ones going through it and you’re looking at what can you do to prevent it?
And all of the things that we’re talking about and that I will share in this interview are the things, it’s the treatment, it’s also the prevention of how to live to 150. So with your brain and with your brawn and with community because we don’t want to age like the typical American ’cause you’re so right, Dr. Heather, they are sick and diseased.
I mean the average life expectancy in the US has gone down the last two years, right? I was talking to another physician and she was telling me on the Blue Cross Blue Shield, their actuarial data showing for mild cognitive impairment, the average age you’ll never guess is 47 years old. This is the data in 2019, average age of beginning mild cognitive impairment. So this is not just 65 and older. This is really affecting all of us. And that assessment that I laid out, that’s the beginning part, but that is a big piece of the puzzle to really get an adequate and proper next step. And then also, what is the right program for you to be on?
Heather Sandison, N.D.
Great, I love it when someone comes in excited about prevention because you and I know that we can prevent it. In fact, we know we can reverse it. But it’s so much easier to prevent. It’s so much less expensive to prevent. And not only do you get the benefits of cognitive function, but you are stronger, you’re healthier in general. When we treat the brain, it’s not separate from the rest of the body. And our approach is very much something that enhances cellular function. And I know you’re going in that direction. So tell me, well, nerve health first, so let’s talk about nerve health nutrients.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
So nerve health. So you have heard all of these, but you start with the B vitamins, right, B12? I had a patient come in from New York City after getting discharged from the hospital. He had hepatitis B and hepatitis C and basically was really wiped out. He was in his 80s and really had accelerated into dementia after this episode. And you know, wasn’t dying, so got checked out of the hospital and they didn’t really have much more for him. So his son brought him out to the clinic here and we did multivitamin mineral nutrient drips for him.
And we did four of them in a week. And at the end of the week, in addition to other therapies, but these big IVs, people will call them a Myers cocktail, but I don’t like that term because there wasn’t really a lot of nutrients in a Myers cocktail. So I call them a multivitamin mineral drip because it is a lot of information coming in as far as a multivitamin mineral. And this is not what you get at the IV bar. This is really medical grade, physician-derived medicine. And in that week, he came back, he knew what time his flight was, he was sharp, he got his mind back and his stamina, when they got back to New York City they were able to walk four blocks without any pause.
Before that, he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know what time it was, what year it was, who the president was, none of that. And that was just a simple nutrient deficiency. In particular, we had B5, B6, B12, B complex, magnesium, potassium, calcium, selenium, multiple trace elements, vitamin C, a typical multivitamin mineral drip in a naturopathic office. But those nutrients are specific for brain health. Of course, the mushrooms are, I love mushrooms. So you got the chaga mushroom, you’ve got boswellia is another great nutrient and herb. I can laundry list them.
I think a big component that a lot of people don’t look and was not even known about when I was in medical school was the endocannabinoid system. And Professor Meshullam out of Israel who really named a lot of these molecules is one of my heroes. And so I like to mention him as many times as I can on the internet. We have him to thank for this discovery of the endocannabinoid system and that underlays, there are more receptors for endocannabinoids. So this would be like CBD, black pepper is in that family. I like the CBD and I’ll stick with that. There are other endocannabinoid substances, but in particular, CBD is a great one for decreasing neuroinflammation and helping underlay all of the hormones that we were talking about, those imbalances. So that one often times goes overlooked and not really considered a neotropic either.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
Yeah, there are so many fun ones there. And how do you decide which patients should get which one when we go into these neuro nutrients or neotropics as you mentioned? Do you use a combo product or do you kind of individualize it? How do you not overlook something as great as CBD?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
Yeah, so we really, we do, I call it the jung of the formula or direction. And so it’s not the MeToo Movement on extra supplements, right? It’s concentrated, meaning there are high concentrations, which is the general, and then there’s some assistants and then micro assistants, everybody moves you in a direction so that I’ll see people, they’ll come in on 30 different supplements and they’re super well-researched and thought out and there’s some great research behind it, but I kind of give the analogy of like you’re treading water, you’re keeping your head above the water, which is important, you’re not drowning, but you’re not really moving anywhere if you were doing like the freestyle moving in a direction.
And so that’s the jung of the formula. So you want all of the therapeutics to be in the right order at the right time and what’s the next step? And so then you take them long enough to get to a point where you can reassess. Oftentimes people will abandon ship, like, “I didn’t notice anything different after two days.” It’s like, “Well, Mrs. Jones, it took you six decades to get to this state. What was the expectation after two days of news?” So sometimes it does take a little while to kind of backfill those patterns that we’ve made over time.
And so we’ll, the big guns, vitamin D is a big one that I use for brain health. So a lot of folks don’t really utilize it that way or don’t think about it that way, but it is a great one. You know, it’s misnamed. It really is a neuromodulator and hormone precursor in addition to all of the other benefits that vitamin D does for our immune system, our mood, et cetera. I developed a nasal spray called Clear Mind. And this one was specific where my expertise really out of bare necessity with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, this condition is a rare condition. This is what my wife passed of and how I really just went deep in this topic and develop this FAN-C approach and really am talking to people around the globe now is CJD, it’s a prionic activity, it’s prions. And prions are misfolded proteins.
And when you read about them, they all say that they’re infectious prionic activity. It’s like well why do they call it infectious? It’s not a bacteria. It’s not a virus. These proteins get misfolded and then they start signaling other proteins to misfold. Well, CJD is what it looks like is rapidly progressing dementia. And it’s nasty. I mean within, it was like within two months, Sariah lost the ability to communicate. And I mean, it was an 18 month run that we had with her and it’s just not fun, it’s not a fun condition. And it’s rare, one in a million. So you really don’t get the diagnosis until your loved one dies and then they give you a brain biopsy to make sure it was that. And lo and behold, that’s what she had. I mean, you kind of go through the differential and you wind up with some ominous ones at the end of the road and you’re like, “Oh, I hope it’s not that.” Well, it was that. So I was looking at, and I had very high suspicion because I had never seen anything, the way that she progressed, she was very high functioning, super dynamic being on the planet and just for that much of a rapid decline, it wasn’t like a psychotic break, it wasn’t hormones, it wasn’t mold, it wasn’t a hormone imbalance, like those are the starting spots in a dementia realm that you do. That’s what I put into my assessment.
Then it started getting into this like, well maybe it’s an autoimmune condition that rapidly progress like that or it’s prionic activity and CJD. So I went like, “Okay, well I got everything going for autoimmune with her. So I better make sure I’ve got my bases covered with the prionic activity.” And I put together, and I have a patent pending on the nasal spray now, which is called Clear Mind. It helps with brain fog, focus, memory issues, speech for, I have my patients with Parkinson’s are using it and their speech is improving. So I know it’s taking care of these prions in the brain. Now for Sariah, unfortunately, it was just too late. And it may have never worked for her, but we’re getting really great clinical results with my patients now. So that has a DMSO and HOCL and I’ve put some essential oil blends in there too, but the DMSO is dimethyl sulfoxide and it’s a carrying agent, it’s called a chaperone molecule. And then HOCL is what our own immune system surrounds bacteria and viruses to disassemble. But it’s also shown to deactivate prionic activity.
So there’s over two million dollars of NIH research on that molecule there for prions. Prions are really, they’re ubiquitous in our environment. If you’ve heard of Mad Cow Syndrome, that’s what this is in people. It’s also called Sharpie, yeah Sharpie in goats and sheep, no in sheep, Scrapie, sorry Scrapie in sheep. And then there were some tribes in New Guinea, they don’t do this anymore, but they used to eat the brains of the elders that passed. And that was, they were just eating prions from their loved ones and then getting Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease from that.
So that’s a big addition and it was an amazing find. I was asking every day for intuitive hits on what can I do for Sariah and how can we help more people with this? And the whole event, the loss, it was pretty, it’s a tragic story and I didn’t want my tragedy to be for naught. So I’m really putting it to good use and want to serve as many people as I can. So that nutrient, the brain spray or the Clear Mind nasal spray is what we call it, is really unique to our practice, but I really want to help get the word out.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
Get that out, that’s really exciting and so beautiful. You see these horrible things happen to people, certainly as a doctor, I’m hearing stories of people losing loved ones or diagnoses of cancer or dementia, and really what you model here is that there’s a choice. You can choose to make it the worst thing that ever happens to you or you can choose to make it the inspiration to show up in the world in a way that serves others and really make it part of the best thing that happened to you, not that I would ever suggest or wish that on anyone. But I think you understand right, that there’s this choice in any horrible situation that we’re given or dealt, that we can choose to make it something positive and make an impact on the world. So I just want to acknowledge and thank you for showing up that way.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
Thank you. Yeah, in such the odd way, it really cracked me open as a human being and reinstated my faith in such a beautiful way. So I’m forever grateful for that.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
Yeah.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
Yeah.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
So you also get excited about some of these like techie, nerdy, I don’t know how you want to describe it, but like the lasers and I do too, the lasers and the stem cells and all those fun kind of things we can start to add. You talked a lot about the foundations is kind of how I’m gonna think about it with the FAN-C approach. It’s like we got to go through the fundamentals. But then, when we’ve gotten that, what can we do to even optimize a little bit more or what is the research telling us about the latest?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
So this is so exciting and we live at such an amazing time. What just came out in December was this discovery about VSELs, which are very small embryonic-like stem cells. And these were, I did not know about these as a student or a graduate in 2001 when I graduated from medical school. They were discovered in 2005 by Dr. Ratajczak in the University of Kentucky. And these VSELs are what we were created in mama’s belly, in utero, of how the fetus and how the baby develops, are these very small embryonic-like stem cells. So they can turn into any tissue in the body. And they lie dormant. We thought in our kind of arrogance in medicine and science was, oh, those are just dormant cells, they’re garbage, we could just get rid of them. Well, it was discovered that you can actually turn them back on.
They lie dormant and they’re ready to go to work, but you just have to get them turned back on. So how do they turn back on naturally is if you have a heart attack or some damage to the heart, they will get activated in that sense, but then they go back to dormancy. So what we have discovered is you can turn them back on with a laser. And we all have these VSELs in our body lying dormant, but then you turn them back on and then you can direct them with the laser for where you want them to go. So it’s a laser activated and guided stem cell procedure and it is phenomenal. We’re seeing really great results. Now, I want to be clear, we are not treating any diagnoses or conditions. So I treat people and I give their body the information and then the body in its innate wisdom heals itself with the information.
So because it’s a big deal, I want to be really clear on the semantics and on my language around that. That said, we are seeing amazing things, not in the neurodegenerative front. Now one, had a Parkinson’s patient, 30 minutes after the procedure went from full on tremors and advanced Parkinsonism to smooth gait, face came back, no tremor, you couldn’t even tell, like he was just stunned on the video that we have on that. On my brain regeneration program, so I also do full body IVs and hyperbaric oxygen and photobiomodulation, which are pulsed electromagnetic frequency and low level lasers, PEMF, and LLLT, it’s a mouthful. But lights, really the future of medicine is in sound and light and we’re seeing it clinically really accelerating response time where things that should have taken months or years, we’re seeing some results in 30 minutes to four hours now. It’s really phenomenal.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
So incredible. So the laser, I think when you started mentioning laser guided stem cells, in my mind, I was thinking of photobiomodulation, so using like red lights to help with mitochondrial function and the cyclooxygenase enzymes. So what color light is the laser? I have so many questions.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
Yeah, it is a red light, it is a red light laser but it is, Dr. Todd is the inventor of this, and it’s a whole patented process, and just big kudos to Dr. Todd, because he is sharing this with the world and discovered this. So he created a laser that has a coherence factor, so a filter, that creates a specific wavelength that we think is breaking a ligand bond, a salt bond, that frees of the VSEL, that activates it. And so it’s the frequency of that laser. So the red lights, like a Joovv or red light therapy, those are really important as well. You know, Weber technology makes a helmet that’s really awesome for folks. You can do laser guided IV therapy and beam different colored lights in the body that way as well. And all of those are very effective. Just in this FAN-C approach, this is what we’ve got in our kind of cutting edge methodology.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
How exciting. I was actually reading a paper, it was a review paper by Mike Hamblin, who’s at Harvard, who writes a lot about photobiomodulation and he, I didn’t read the full Russian paper ’cause I think it’s in Russian, but he refers to it, and what they did was pretty invasive. Through the femoral artery, they took a light, and there were 96 patients I think, and they cut them in half, they controlled it. And in half the patients, they took a light through the femoral artery and shone a red light in the brain. And then on the other half, they did the same surgery, but didn’t shine the light. And sure enough, in 100% of the treated patients, there was a reversal of their cognitive decline that lasted for one to seven years.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
Wow.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
Just phenomenal. And you think this is just light, like it’s pretty and it kind of seems crazy and Russian and invasive, but it also is like, wow, like the potential of light, especially when I’m sure a lot of your patients are like mine, their guts are kind of sensitive. So I can’t throw a bunch of supplements at them, but we can shine light and it can be really, really, really powerful.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
Yeah. You know, we truly are light beings. We now can measure light emitting diodes off of our DNA, like out of our cells. So it makes total sense to put it back in for healing.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
And that we would get these signals. And of course we’re diurnal, right, so there’s light that comes up with the sunrise and then down with the sunset and a lot of that is those reds and oranges and that there would be benefit to being exposed to it. It’s so exciting. So when someone comes to your clinic, what they call and talk to your staff and get a chance to talk to you, where do you point them to start? ‘Cause this can feel overwhelming.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
You know we do, we offer consults for our patient base. I really try to produce a lot of online offerings too for like brain foundations and kind of just like the basics foundational stuff to do at home, environmental components. We do a lot of education as well. So at my website and even just calling the office. I have a full team here, so it’s not just me. So I have a lot of heart-centered practitioners showing up and helping me to get the word out and carry on these therapies because it is, there are so many people suffering with these conditions and need a lot of support and I don’t want people to feel isolated or alone. Now that said, not everybody can come to Portland, Oregon.
Now, one of the lovely things is we do a lot of remote consulting now for folks. So coming to our website, is it okay if we mention that here? Yeah so that’s naturecuresclinic.com, nature singular cures with an S, clinic.com. And we do have a book a call. We do a 30 minute consult for folks. So you’ve got to qualify for care. We only want to work with folks that really want to make a difference. So we do offer that too.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
That’s incredible. That’s wonderful. And you know, I’m so curious about the Clear Mind nasal spray. Like, could I use it? Can I use it? Can it help me feel a little clearer and a little more present every day? And so where do we get that?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
You know that one currently, we’re building the store online, so currently that’s through the office. So you can send an email to [email protected] and in the subject line put “Clear Mind Nasal Spray” and just inquire right there, yeah.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
Fantastic. I’m so excited to learn about a few of these other things that I hope I’ll be able to share with my patients. Now you were also the host of a Neuro Region Summit, and I’m curious, you know, I’m having so much fun talking to people like you, but I’m just so curious, what was a standout, what did you learn from interviewing the experts that were on your summit?
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
You know, so this is a relaunch and I really on my second year running, I really wanted to focus in on this frequency and light healing and also the components of environmental toxicity. So we really brought in a lot around EMFs, mounting, mounting evidence that it is not good for us as beings and our brains, et cetera. Now that doesn’t mean I’m a Luddite, but we do provide a lot of great solutions on minimizing your risk, turning it off, getting your wifi off at nighttime, like you don’t need to bathe in it all the time, putting your phone on, only checking it certain times and putting it on airplane mode ’cause you don’t need to be reachable 24 hours a day, even though you feel like it. But I am before the internet times here people and you do not need it all the time, I will tell you that.
We also, one of the big things just in that vein, I got to speak with a neurologist, Dr. Chaudhary, and she got to go in to the ancient texts, the Vedic textbooks in India, and she pulled out some of the oldest mantras that are sound healing for all of our seven chakras. And she actually has a great iTunes recording of it that you can sing along with her, and you don’t even need to have a good singing voice, you can just tone with the sound. It’s not religious at all. And it’s the sounds that help balance the chakras. And it’s one of the oldest mantras on the planet and it’s such a gift to us all.
Heather Sandison, N.D.
Wow, wow. Thank you for tuning us onto that. So much value. Thank you for sharing your wisdom, your expertise, your experience. It’s been an absolute pleasure getting to learn more about you and your practice and all you have to offer. Thank you, Dr. Eckel.
Greg Eckel, ND, LAc, MSOM
Oh, you are welcome. I’m humbled and honored that you had me on. And I just want to, last words of encouragement, just know there are tons of heart-centered practitioners looking for solutions for you all out there and just connect, connect with us. You know I’m really grateful for this summit and the opportunity to reach you in your living room. So thanks for listening.
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