Strategies For Preventing And Reversing Dementia And Alzheimer’s

Heather Sandison, ND

Thanks for having me.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This is a good one. I can’t believe it. I just realized this is the first time I’ve ever interviewed you on one of my summits, and I can’t believe it. Just yet, our schedules haven’t worked out but it’s so good that you’re here on this one. Our audience is in for a treat. You’re a dementia and Alzheimer’s expert. You’re the founder of Solcere Health Clinic and Marama. Those are the first residential care facilities for the elderly of their kind that focus on helping people with cognitive decline, dementia, and Alzheimer’s. Your work in the dementia field has been noticed. You were awarded a grant to study an individualized integrative approach to reversing dementia. You’re the primary investigator on a clinical trial right now. I’m excited to dive in and have you shed some light on this. The topic of our project here is silent killers. There are a lot of silent killer root causes that lead up to dementia that lead up to these neurocognitive disorders. I’d like to dive into that today, talk about some solutions, and talk about your way of helping people with dementia, because I know that you have extraordinary results in your clinic and your centers, and you have helped people reverse this process, right?

Heather Sandison, ND

That’s right. It’s been a privilege to get to work with people who are pioneers in this space. But our patients are going against the grain at some level. Many neurologists still tell people there’s nothing you can do about Alzheimer’s, and that’s just inaccurate. At this stage, we are almost overwhelmed by how much we can do to reverse cognitive decline. At any stage, we can even optimize it for people who are in their twenties, thirties, and forties, and they’re. You mentioned silent killers as the topic of this summit. We know that the changes in the brain are taking place—sometimes decades, sometimes 20 years—before anyone ever starts to notice lapses in their memory. We can get ahead of this. My mentor, Dr. Dale Bredesen, calls it a cognoscopy. Like getting a colonoscopy when you turn 50, the idea would be that you get a cognoscopy or the workup looking at all of those group-cause factors that can contribute to cognitive decline and the destruction of neuronal health over time. Then if we do this a decade before you start to notice a decline or two decades before you start to notice the decline, we can get ahead of it and at the very least prevent or delay a decline, and some people will never even have to experience the suffering associated with Alzheimer’s and other dementias.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This is amazing. What I’m hearing you say is that this is a preventive game right out of the gates. Also, which may be shocking to our audience, is how many people are expected to have cognitive decline and dementia in our generation. Just look at our generation. I think I’m a little bit older than you, so I’m 50. I think you’re still younger. Let’s talk about my generation right now. Gen X, right? That we’re still in that space of, in our fifties, maybe early sixties, and we’re not quite there yet to that full cognitive decline. But what we’re doing right now with our health will prevent that from happening. What is the projection for the number of people in my generation right now and the generation ahead of us who will have some dementia?

Heather Sandison, ND

There are about six million people—between six and six and a half million people today—living with Alzheimer’s and dementia in the United States. That number is expected to rise because of how many baby boomers are approaching the age of 65, where you have the highest risk of an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Now, Gen X, like your generation and my generation, should be able to call Alzheimer’s optional for that generation. Your generation has parents who are in that category, like the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties, and they are suffering. There are a ton of them who are suffering from dementia. I hope that that makes people our age wake up and look for solutions. We know there’s something better out there. We don’t have to suffer it. We don’t have to wait on the magic pill or the ivy that’s going to save us all. We put billions into society. We put billions and billions of dollars and decades of research into finding a magic bullet cure for Alzheimer’s and dementia. I think that what it’s going to take is more of a shotgun approach where we have to put everything on it. We need to optimize sleep. We need to optimize stress. We need to get rid of toxins. We need to get rid of infections. We need to optimize nutrients. We need to make sure that we’re doing everything that we can to support neuronal health, not waiting for that one thing that’s going to fix this. I think if we do that for people in their fifties and sixties who are not experiencing significant cognitive decline right now, Alzheimer’s is optional.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This is an interesting concept because I don’t think people who have been integrated into the Western medicine world will accept it; in that world, it’s not optional. There are no great treatments or preventative measures for it. and many of us have watched our loved ones go through this. and then there was just no way to stop it. It’s like, once that train gets going, you can’t stop it. At least people perceive that. They can’t stop it. This is such an interesting concept of option. I got chills in my body when you said that. This is good. We don’t have to end up like this. Let’s now talk about the overarching situation here, you touched on some of the things that are creating this neuronal decline, this brain decline. One of the biggest complaints that my community and the people that I work with say is that I’m starting to notice I’ve got brain fogginess. I can’t concentrate as well. I can’t keep myself organized like I used to. The clutter is starting to fill up. I can’t rely on my brain anymore. I’m not going for the promotion at work because I’m not sure I could handle the work, but they’re not quite to the point where they’re in full dementia, forgetting from moment to moment what’s happening. That’s not what people are experiencing generally in my community. Let’s start by unpacking what’s happening here, the underlying reasons, and maybe even a little bit of the physiology of what’s happening in the body from an inflammatory perspective. What’s the main culprit here?

Heather Sandison, ND

Part of the idea is that there isn’t one main culprit for everyone, but lots of people arrive at a dementia diagnosis or even a brain fog feeling this experience of, like, my brain isn’t working as well as it did ten years ago, and if that’s the case, now is the moment to get started. On doing the detective work, how did I get here? What are the causal factors? Because it’s not the same for everyone. We mentioned toxins, nutrients, stress structure, infections, and signaling, and they’re not mutually exclusive. One person might have experienced traumatic brain injuries—multiple traumatic brain injuries that lead to inflammation. Somebody else might have a diabetes diagnosis that’s causing glycol toxicity or sugar. Sugar and insulin are both becoming toxic to the brain. Somebody else might have gone through menopause and noticed that their brain hasn’t worked as well since they went through menopause. Part of it is because they don’t get as much sleep. So there’s this signaling imbalance where the drop in progesterone and estrogen when they hit menopause led to changes in the brain that were detrimental for somebody else. It might mean that they have an APOE e4. They have a genetic predisposition, and because they haven’t had enough B12, they don’t have the right energy to keep everything optimally functioning in the brain. then somebody else might have all of that or three or four of those things, right? So what we want to do is we don’t want to waste our time supporting your detox pathways and getting rid of mold if you never were exposed to mold and you don’t have mold but have high levels of mold toxicity in your or mercury or environmental pollutants like glyphosate, phthalates, or PCBs can lead to neuronal degradation. But we want to be precise. We want to understand what was going on and how we can support that pathway to correct it and optimize it so that your neurons have enough resources. Essentially, it can boil down to resources. Are there enough resources coming into the brain? It uses 20% of the energy we produce every day, but it only makes up 2% of our body weight. This is a huge energy set now. If we are fighting off infections, we’re defending ourselves from invaders, whether they’re toxic or infectious. We’re going to use a lot of resources to defend and attack. What we want to save our resources for is these neuronal connections for creating a neuron, neurogenesis, which is the creation of new neurons, and synaptic genesis, the creation of new connections between them. That takes resources, too. If we don’t have enough resources to get into the brain because we’re not eating the right foods or we’re spending them on attacking and defending, we’re not going to have that. We’re not going to make those memories. We’re not going to create those neurons. We see brain atrophy. We see the brain shrinking over time; the other pieces show inflammation. So, again, this is like attacking, defending, or recovering from something like a traumatic brain injury, or also the infections and toxins, or not having enough resources to resolve the inflammation. things like COVID or herpes infections, pigeons develop that cause gingivitis, and oral inflammation can lead to brain inflammation. We see Lyme and Lyme co-infections, and they also deposit in the amyloid plaques in the brain so we know they play a role in creating inflammation. Anything that’s going to cause inflammation in the body or the brain, whether it’s leaky gut, parasites, or anything like that, although it might not be directly causal to dementia, it’s going to rob us of resources and increase inflammation, which, over time, if we are predisposed, increases the likelihood that we develop dementia.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

What I heard you say here is that precision matters. Of everything you just said, the thing that stuck out to me—I mean, every bit of that was so enlightening compared to what we hear in the Western world. But that piece of working with somebody to figure out what your root causes are precisely—is it mold for you? Is it an infection? Is it some other toxin? Is it like all the things you just mentioned—blood sugar? What is it? That is critical. Can you talk just a little bit about the Western world? What are Western neurologists saying is the cause of Alzheimer’s and dementia? What’s their approach to it? I don’t think their lifestyle is much different.

Heather Sandison, ND

I always am excited when I see somebody come in with a treatment plan and it says, Change your diet or increase your blueberries, or something like, okay, it’s finally catching on. I think that Western conventional medicine can’t ignore this for much longer because the results that we’re seeing in the research are just profound—people are reversing cognitive decline, and it’s working better than any drug out there. What we hear from conventional medicine is, oh, it’s not enough acetylcholine. So there are medications like donepezil. Memantine works on glutamate, but essentially there’s a neurotransmitter problem, and we need to use a medication like Memantine or TNF to change the acetylcholine or glutamate in the brain, and then we’ll get better cognition. Well, unfortunately, when you look, there was a JAMA article from November 2018 in the Journal of the American Medical Association that showed that when you use those medications five years later, your cognition is worse than if you never started them. So this is disheartening. I think a lot of neurologists say that they’re like we have these medications, but they don’t work very well, so go ahead and get your affairs in order. I don’t think that we realize just how detrimental they could be until I don’t. I certainly didn’t know that until I read the article. But again, for anybody listening who’s on those medications, do not stop them cold turkey. It’s very, very dangerous to do that. I wrote, If I have a patient who comes in and they’re on those medications, I don’t stop them. We make sure that people are getting better. If they’re getting better over 12 to 18 months, then we start slowly tapering them. Because I’ve seen people say or hear that those medications weren’t good for you, I just stopped them. That will lead to cognitive decline. It’s very stressful on the brain to do that; to change any of those medications that affect neurotransmitters, to just stop them cold turkey, or to do that quickly without support from a provider can be very detrimental. Please don’t take that away. But if you’ve never started them, talk to your provider about this research. It’s relatively new. Not all providers had heard this, especially primary care providers. With so much on their plate, they’ve got to be out there keeping up with so much. They might not be aware of this research. You can point to it and say, considering this new information from 2018, what do you think? Is it worth it for me to start that? It’s a discussion that’s worth having. You mentioned there’s not always something we can do when people make further progress. A lot of that has to do with the dynamics in the family. Like, how much effort are we willing to put in? How many resources do we have? How much support does this person have? That’s different for every family. So the conversations about risk and benefit are going to be different in each family. So I want to acknowledge that I think sometimes when people hear there’s so much you can do, they go, I’m guilty of not doing everything. That’s not the case. What we want to do is arm you with information so that you’re not in the dark. But how do you pick and choose what to do? depends on your family and your circumstances. If you’re here listening to this, I want to just acknowledge that you are doing the best you can, and that is enough. To go back to your question, like what are the causes of dementia from a conventional perspective, there’s this acetylcholine GABA-like glutamate and neurotransmitter hypothesis. It doesn’t work that well. Then there’s this other beta-amyloid hypothesis, which most people may have heard of a couple of times, and it’s like beta-amyloid Alzheimer’s in that world. It’s like, if you’re not studying beta-amyloid, you’re not studying Alzheimer’s dementia. However, what we’ve seen over and over again is that when we try to attack beta-amyloid and some of the new medications are Aduhelm, Aducanumab, and Lequembi, these target beta-amyloid and they pull them out of the brain. What we see is that when we do that, we don’t get meaningful improvement. You get some slowing of the progression of the disease. However, the risks are quite high, and the cost is quite high. These medications, this class of medications, have a risk of brain bleeding and brain swelling, and not everybody has those. They’re relatively rare. If you live two or 300 miles away from a major medical hospital or major medical establishment, like getting MRIs, you need to have those visits with providers to make sure that you’re not having those side effects happen. So it requires a lot of medical management, and you’ve got to go in and get these IVs regularly. What you get is that only people who are in the mild stages or the earlier stages of dementia are eligible. If you’re late, you’re not eligible for those. They don’t seem to work at all. It’s interesting that even though Alzheimer’s affects women, about two out of every three patients with dementia are women. Then, on the caregiving side, women are more likely to be caregivers for someone with dementia. However, these particular medications seem to work slightly better in men. They are not without risk. They don’t seem to help women as much as men. They don’t help all that much. What they do is draw on this torturous process. So please don’t rely on conventional medicine to help here. There’s not a lot that they can do, according to the research, and it comes with a high cost. What we are recommending comes with a high cost, but there’s so much you can do for free. It comes with effort. I want everybody to know you don’t have to spend a penny. Of course, you can. You can do precision medicine. You can get all the labs. I love when people can put the icing on the cake. But so much of this is lifestyle medicine.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This is a great pausing point for this first part of our talk. Dr. Sandison, I want to thank you so much for joining us today for this enlightening talk on what’s happening in the world around cognitive decline and dementia. To our audience, I hope you enjoyed our conversation thus far. Insightful, helpful. If you’re a summit purchaser, stay right here, because I’m going to dive even deeper into this with Dr. Sandison, and we’re going to go into all the natural strategies that you can do to help stop this process from happening to you and your loved one. This is going to be an enlightening second half of our talk. If you’re not a summit purchaser, click on the button on this page to get access to a continuation of the conversation and many others, and get the tools you need to reclaim your health. 

If you’re watching this continuation of my talk with Dr. Sandison, thank you for being a valuable member of the community. We’re going to dive right back in. Can you start by talking about some of those free strategies you just mentioned that people can do at home right now? These are the same strategies that you are using in your centers, where people come in live and receive healing treatment for their cognitive decline. It’s not that you’re not doing this with a bunch of prescription medications. I mean, this is a lifestyle center.

Heather Sandison, ND

In Marama, the residential care facility, we have these four pillars. Just to be clear, everyone at Marama has a Bredeson-trained provider. So we’re trying to get the most out of all of it. Some people have moved in without a Bredeson-trained provider. What we’re doing is calling them the four pillars. If you want to change your health, a diet is a great place to start. What we recommend is an organic ketogenic diet. Now, if you’re not ready to go into ketosis, then a paleo diet is also very helpful. Essentially, going towards Whole30 is another way that you can describe this, but what you want to do is eliminate things that come out of packages, and if you can get your body metabolically into ketosis for people who are suffering from cognitive decline and noticing changes in their cognition, I want them in ketosis more than they’re in glycolysis or burning sugar for fuel. What is ketosis? Ketosis is a metabolic state where you’re burning fat, or ketones, for fuel instead of sugar. When we can get you there, we get a lot of brain healing. As we age, we are less sensitive to sugar, glucose, and carbohydrates. You can put them all in the same category. Insulin is used to help us shuttle sugar from the blood to carbohydrates, sugar, and glucose from the blood into the cells, where it’s turned into energy and we become resistant. The insulin doesn’t work as well, and the sugar doesn’t work as well when it gets into the neurons to be created, to be turned into ATP, or that energy. So what’s amazing about the human body and the human brain is that we are like hybrid vehicles, right? We can go from burning gas to burning electricity. We go from burning sugar to burning fat. When we do that, we burn energy more cleanly and more efficiently. So we want to take advantage of that. many people because we have sugar available, it’s highly marketed, it’s easy, it’s filling, and many people are addicted to it. We eat some sugar every day, and when I say sugar, I mean even things like pasta and bread and cereal and oats. That is, by the time it hits our gut, it is turning into glucose or sugar. You don’t have to be eating Skittles every day to consume a lot of sugar. I think a lot of people don’t realize that.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

They don’t think I don’t eat sweet things, so therefore, I’m not sugary, which isn’t a problem for me. It’s almost like I still haven’t figured out a clear and clean way to help people understand that your pasta, your bread, your cereal, and your rice—you’re like, this is sugar. It just isn’t sweet. It’s like savory and sweet sugar, right? It’s like their sweet sugar in their savory sugar. You’re addicted to savory sugar, but your brain is not, and your body is not efficiently burning fuel at this point if that’s the majority of your food. It’s a whole thing. We could stand on our soapbox about that.

Heather Sandison, ND

But it’s free. It’s free to change your diet. It’s profoundly helpful in reducing inflammation and increasing the resources available to your brain to burn all that energy and get all the energy that it needs to burn. So an organic ketogenic diet is one of the primary things that I recommend. Second is exercise, a great diet, and exercise. It’s what this comes down to. But there are specific types of exercise that you can do that will help your brain. The first thing I turn people’s attention to is something called dual-task two. two things. Dual means you’re engaging cognitively at the same time that you’re engaging physically. The classic example here is walking and talking. Another level is ballroom dancing, where you are their sensory inputs: auditory, music, visual, your partner, and the space you’re in. There’s a cue, maybe from an instructor, about how you’re supposed to dance, and you’ve got to remember the steps so you can do this in lots of different ways. I’ve had a patient, whose granddaughter was living with her, so they would go for walks, and her granddaughter at first would quiz her on important dates in their family like birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries, and what was coming up and what she could remember. Then, as her grandma got better, they switched to identifying birds, trees, and flowers in the neighborhood. Then they would go through the neighborhood, and they would say who lived in each house. These were things that were meaningful to her. As she got better and better, they started talking about nutrition and biochemistry, and they started talking about more and more complex things as Grandma got better and better. There are different ways to do this. But as you would in a Pilates class or a yoga class, were you being cued by the instructor? If it requires cognitive engagement while you’re getting physical exercise, you’re going to potentiate. You’re going to get more from the exercise that you’re already doing. So, yes, walking is great, but if you can add this to it, you’re going to get more benefits. You can also find a variety of examples on YouTube by searching for dual-task exercises.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I love this, and I know I’m well. I call it multitasking in my life, and I like to stack habits. If I can benefit from different things, if I can do two different things and get extra benefits from them, that’s my love language for myself.

Heather Sandison, ND

I love it. Efficiency queen right here.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Efficiency gains. movement, exercise, stimulating your brain while you’re moving, and food. What are some other strategies?

Heather Sandison, ND

Stress management. What we see in the literature around dementia is that meditation has profound benefits. There’s one particular meditation. It’s a 12-minute meditation you can find for free on YouTube. It’s Kirtan Kriya. There is “Sa Ta Na Ma,” where there’s a point where you have to use your fingers and go in a certain pattern, and then there’s a vocalization. So there’s a vibration in the body, and there is great literature. Meta-analyses like double-blind, placebo-controlled, or double-blind trials. No controlled trials because you can’t blind this because people either do it or they don’t. There are controlled trials and meta-analyses on these controlled trials, very high-level research that shows that this is beneficial for both people suffering from dementia, with mild cognitive impairment and full-blown dementia, and for their care partners. At Marama, for example, we have everybody there stop and do the meditation together because, for the caregivers, there’s always a dish that needs to be unloaded. In the dishwasher, there’s always laundry that needs to be folded. There’s always a bathroom that needs to be cleaned, or there’s always something to be done. But it helps everybody in terms of mood and stress management if they can just take 12 minutes and do this meditation every day. The other thing that we notice with people in retirement is that if you’re in prevention mode, you want to make sure you have purpose and meaning in your life. I think some people think, I’m going to retire, I’m going to kick my feet up, I’m going to watch the daytime TV shows, and I’m going to just relax and eat whatever I want and go on cruises, and this is not where we want to be. We want to be engaged. If it doesn’t work anymore, then grandkids, church, whatever is meaningful and important to you—we want to see you double down on that and create these. Sometimes it’s writing an autobiography, or it’s making something, mentoring others, or finding purpose and meaning. It’s a reason to get out of bed in the morning, which is so crucially important. We want to manage stressors, but we also want to make sure we have enough motivation and enough stress that we’re showing up and staying at our edge.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That is a yes. Don’t ever stop being productive in your life. Don’t ever stop creating, thinking, contributing, giving back, whatever it looks like.

Heather Sandison, ND

And connecting. We know that social isolation is one of these known modifiable risk factors. When we’re more connected to others, we protect our brains. We’re a social species.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Right now, to my point, what you just described is a whole bunch of free things that you can do. Are there any other things in the free bucket? I want to touch on the biohacking things that we do. 

Heather Sandison, ND

I mean, there are so many things in the free bucket; we can talk about this for a long time. I mean.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Sunshine.

Heather Sandison, ND

Yes, sunshine. It means getting your circadian rhythms to sleep. I mean, sleep is another huge free thing; make sure that you’re getting enough high-quality, good, deep sleep. Sleep is when our lymphatic system rinses the toxins out of the brain. If we rob our bodies and our brains of that space, of that time, when we do that, we see that people in their twenties and thirties, forties, and those decades of life, just one night of sleep deprivation, leads to a measurable accumulation of beta-amyloid. After just one night, you can imagine that over decades, that accumulation becomes very significant. So make sure that you just get enough sleep and then hopefully, if we want to go towards biohacking like I’m wearing my Oura ring right now, I’m sure of my sleep and the quality of my sleep. Then, if you have any reason to think that you have sleep apnea, get a sleep study. Now, those are covered by insurance. If you have Medicare, there’s a great way to do this. Watch Cat is a company that we’ve used for a long time. That is, they send you an at-home sleep study device; it’s not the gold standard of an in-hospital, but it can rule out sleep apnea and get you the CPAP, the dental device, the oral device, whatever. You need to keep your airway open at night because if you’re not, if you have apnea events at night, even if it’s considered mild sleep apnea, that means mild brain damage every night. You’re not getting enough oxygen to your brain. Sometimes even mouth tape can be helpful in terms of reminding your body how to breathe through your nose at night and during the day.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I think so many people don’t want to deal with their sleep apnea. This is where we start to talk about how there’s some effort that needs to be put in. We have a savvy group of viewers here. I bet there are a lot of people watching right now who are thinking to themselves, I don’t have a sugar addiction. I don’t eat carbs, I’m paleo, I do wear an Oura ring, and I get sleep every night. I’ve worked with practitioners, and I’ve tested my mold. I’ve tested for metals, I’ve tested for environmental toxins, and I’ve done parasite cleanses. I’ve got a group of people here watching right now, and even a group of practitioners watching. What would you say to the people who are doing everything right? They’re doing the things you already recommended, yet they still do not have what they would perceive as a strong brain and cognition, and they’re worried that they’re headed down this road. What are some of the other things that they need to be focusing on, looking at, and touching on in biohacking? Because I know that at your Marama Center, you’ve cut signs, red lights, and all these amazing things. One time I remember asking you when I was doing the mitochondria that make due to cold punching there, and you’re like, no, they don’t like it. No, but it would be good. But people don’t like to make older people don’t want to go.

Heather Sandison, ND

I mean, I don’t want to get cold, but I still turn my shower to cold before I get out of it.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It ain’t better than me.

Heather Sandison, ND

I feel so much better. I get so,  I get the benefits. I get sick less frequently. I’m warmer during the day. Yeah, I love cold plunges. Then, I mean, I’ve talked to people, patients, and friends who are like cold plunges; that’s the reason I’m off antidepressants, right? It makes a huge difference. I think even women have great qualities like that. She went through a stressful divorce, and that was why he turned to cold clenching, breathwork, and the stuff that he does. There’s a huge, huge space for that. Yeah, we have a red light. We have the V-light, which is specific to the brain and has both an alpha and a gamma setting. Alpha is super helpful for anxiety, and a lot of people with dementia suffer from anxiety and depression, rate depression, and treat depression again. This is a modifiable risk factor for dementia. It’s a chicken or egg thing. people have depression and it leads to anxiety and depression, and it leads to dementia, or does the dementia cause it? I think it’s because they perpetuate each other. So treating that, whether it’s therapy or, I mean, even people are talking about psychedelics for dementia, there is ongoing research looking at how we can support those people who are suffering from depression, anxiety, and dementia using psychedelic therapeutics like psilocybin or ketamine, and this is very cutting-edge stuff. We’re not doing this at Marama, but we are doing the red light, very low-risk, and just 20 minutes, maybe five or six days a week. You can put this cap on for 20 minutes. You can be doing the meditation at the same time. You can be chopping vegetables, and at the same time, you can be doing other things. But we notice it immediately helps people who are having anxiety. Then you can put on the gamma setting, which is more helpful for memory, and this builds over time. It’s not as a parent, but we have seen people with more severe dementia where they’re in an episode, in terms of short-term memory loss or confusion, or an altered state. If we’ve ruled out a urinary tract infection like some of the other things, we can put them in the gamma setting, and they will return to baseline. We know it’s doing something now. We don’t do any of these things at Marama in isolation. Of course, we’re doing the diet; we’re getting them involved in crafts and cognitive and physical exercise. We’re prioritizing their sleep and all of those things at the same time. But there are patients at home where they start doing live O2, which contrasts oxygen therapy, where they’re exercising and they’re going from breathing 20% oxygen day to day. That’s what’s in the atmosphere. then, if you go to 80%, which is concentrated oxygen, and then sprint, you sprint like whether you’re running on a treadmill or on a bike or trampoline or whatever you’re doing, you go and sprint 8%, a little less than half of what we typically are breathing in. We go back and forth between 80% and 8%, sprinting on 8% and recovering on 80%. This contrast oxygen therapy can be super beneficial for mitochondria, for senescent cells, for detox, and for optimizing just our perfusion of oxygen. We get this chromatic effect. This is a great biohacking tool that I think is way underutilized, but it is a great thing to look at. Then, of course, we like that chip machine for lymphatics but also nervous system regulation. I like the biomed. It’s amethyst crystal heat. I don’t know how much the amethyst crystals are doing, but it’s like just lying on a heated mat. We see that it helps with anxiety. We also see in elderly folks that they’re more upright afterward because it relaxes the muscles in the back. If they’ve been hunched, it can help them posteriorly. There’s so much that we can talk about and do. Supplements are a whole category in and of themselves. Nootropics: the quality of my product is one of my favorite nootropics. I think it’s a very sophisticated formula. We point people in that direction quite often.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I love this. We could go down the road of supplements to just realizing, oh my gosh, in the time we have, I have so many questions for you, but in the few minutes we do have left, I mean, we’ll make sure everybody knows how to get a hold of you so they can find the information that you have out there in the world because you have a lot of this out there for people to get support from. But I want to talk a little bit about what I mentioned at the beginning of this talk: that you can measure improvement in people who live in your centers, in your facilities, and in the people that you’re helping. This is quantifiable. So I wanted you to just touch on that for a quick moment. How are those people getting better? What are you measuring?

Heather Sandison, ND

This is also great for people to ask if you are concerned about yourself or a loved one. We use a MoCA score and MoCA. I love MoCAs because they’re accessible. There’s a PDF that’s available for free online. It’s called the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and it’s research-validated. It’s a Brant Blunt tool, right? It’s not a four-hour neuro-psych evaluation. I have my opinion about those. A lot of people are like, I did this. My mom got this incredible four-hour no, thank you. But I’m like, how stressed out was she? What did you change in terms of treatment? We use MoCA scores to know if we are getting better. Are things getting worse? They take about 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the severity of someone’s cognitive decline. You can have someone trained. If you go online, you can see there’s training to be able to administer this. You don’t need a medical degree to administer it. It’s relatively easy, simple, and inexpensive. I have people who, like the wife of a patient, are psychologists. She just went online, got the training, and was able to do this for her husband. Every time I met with him quarterly, I knew what his focus was. This is available, so you can ask for a MoCA score, a Slum score, or a mini mental status exam. These are three different worksheet-style assessments that can be administered in a clinic, or some people will even get them at home. Now, seeing vital signs is something that you can do online. Those other three are on a 30-point scale, and it’s a great way to communicate with providers. You can do that, or the CNS Vital Signs is another great way to do an online cognitive assessment that can be helpful as well. then you can do a more robust assessment. For a more robust assessment, we use the Cambridge Brain Sciences Assessment, which is like a 45-minute versus a four-hour neuropsych evaluation. It’s a 45-minute-ish computer thing, a computer game, and it goes through a battery of cognitive testing so what’s my verbal ability? What’s my focus score? What’s my social score? You have these different types of scores, such as the overall memory or overall cognitive composite score.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Yeah.

Heather Sandison, ND

Not covered by Medicare.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

I remember you saying at one point, I can remember a time when we were just on the phone chatting and you’re like every single person. It took the MoCA to my center this month, and every single person improved. Like, that was an exciting moment.

Heather Sandison, ND

It’s exciting when that happens now. It doesn’t happen every month. I don’t want to give anybody that impression. We know people fall and lose loved ones, and I think aging happens. It’s not like it’s all rainbows and unicorns, but it’s there a rough month, too, and rough quarters. Yet I don’t think there’s any other way. Our goal is memory recovery. I would suspect that there’s not a single other memory center in the world; probably that’s the case, and everybody there got better. Over a quarter, it’s been a miracle. I don’t want to give people false impressions or false hope that that’s always the case. It was worth celebrating when it happened because it’s new. What we’re doing and what I’m very committed to is, as we expand, how do we make it even better? How do we make it so that everybody gets better every quarter? So that’s what I’m excited about, and that’s what I’m doing professionally. It’s just trying to optimize this and get it better and better and better and more reliable for people.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

This is what I love about you: you’re so honest, and you have such high integrity. Here I am saying, Let’s celebrate this. You’re like, well, it’s not always like that, but of course it’s not. Thank you. Just being so transparent about the work means there are going to be setbacks, but overall, people are getting better. I’d love for our audience to be able to know, okay, how do we get more of Dr. Sandison? You’ve got online courses, and you have residential care facilities. I think you’re opening more in the country; there’s a demand for this, and honestly, there’s not enough of you or beds to go around. There’s probably a waitlist to get into one of your facilities. Talk about how you do that, and then talk about how they can get home support as well. If you just want to take everything that you just learned into consideration and have an outline to do this at home on your own, you’ve got that for other people too.

Heather Sandison, ND

Just joining the email list at [email protected] is a great first step. I’ve got a book coming out in June of 2024 as well, so if you want to get updates about that, and in the meantime, we have, yes, we have the Marama At-Home Course because not everybody can make it to Marama and there’s not always space, but if you are interested, it’s in the senior living facility. You can contact us through maramaexperience.com. There’s an application form, and we can see if it’s a good fit. Part of what we’re doing is wanting people to be able to move home or regain cognitive function so that they can live independently. That’s our goal. So we do have people moving out and moving home, and that’s always a huge success.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

That never happens in care facilities. Once you go into a care facility in the Western world, that’s where you stay. People don’t make it back home. I mean, just the fact that people are getting well and moving home is remarkable. That’s remarkable. That is a huge celebration.

Heather Sandison, ND

We always celebrate that. So, getting on the waitlist—if we do have a waitlist—sometimes becomes fast. because a lot of people are getting better at home or circumstances change. Don’t hesitate to get on the list. We’re happy to have you and work with you. Our team knows now at this point, like, maybe this is the best thing for you considering your circumstances. We’ve heard every story. Well, I don’t know. They’re all unique. We’ve heard a lot of the stories out there and the different challenges and constraints that people face. So our goal is to meet people where they are and get them the support they need that’s going to help alleviate some of the suffering associated with this awful disease.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Spell marama, so people know how to find that.

Heather Sandison, ND

It’s Marama. It’s MARAMA, and it’s maramaexperience.com.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Then your other main website to get on your mailing list.

Heather Sandison, ND

drheathersandison.com. SANDISON

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

Excellent. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom, and I just want to acknowledge you for being such a guiding light and a bright light in the world. You are doing work that most people aren’t willing to do. I mean, this is where people’s lives transform. This isn’t a quick fix—take a pill and solve a problem. This is helping support people on a deep level. I also just want to acknowledge you for figuring out a way to get this to people’s homes who don’t either have the resources, don’t live near you, or can’t get into your clinic. You’ve made it possible for people to get the support they need. You’re taking this to a whole new level. I’m honored to be your friend. I’m thrilled to watch your success and to see what you’re doing in the world, so thank you so much for contributing here.

Heather Sandison, ND

Thank you. Write it back out. You’re doing wonderful work, and I am celebrating you and thanking you for putting this summit on. It’s going to be so helpful for so many people, and I can’t wait to see you again soon.

Laura Frontiero, FNP-BC

It’s going to be good. Until next time, everyone. Take good care. Bye now.