The Silver Tsunami: The Coming Epidemic of Alzheimer’s and What You Can Do to Prevent It

Introduction to the Silver Tsunami 0:00

The name of this talk is the Silver Tsunami. I don't know, has anybody heard that term? Well, I'm on my way to being silver-haired. There is going to be a huge wave of people, older people silver and white- haired people that we are expecting to have Alzheimer's. And it will drain our families, our finances, the medical system if we don't do something about it. Until recently, it was thought you couldn't anything about. And we're coming to find out that, yes, there are a lot of things that you can do certainly to prevent it and even if you're in early stages to halt the progress and in some cases turn it around.

So I know you are here because you have an interest in that. You're concerned about your future or the future of somebody you know. or maybe somebody in your family has suffered with Alzheimer's. There's hardly a person I talk to that hasn't had some connection with somebody with dementia close to them. And watch that agonizing, slow, sad decline. I'm here because I've had my own life issues. I had experiences personally that made me realize that I was going to burn out and lose my health. And I don't want anyone else to suffer the things that suffered.I had medical care that was standard of care, but it wasn't what I needed.

It didn't provide a solution for me. I was diagnosed as having colitis and for probably almost 20 years was treated for it without really relief of my symptoms and put on all kinds of medications, things that kept me up all night, I didn't even want to go into it. But I finally took things into my own hands and this was about 20-years ago, so people weren't talking about gluten. I thought, let me try going on some kind of elimination diet. So I knew that dairy and gluten were two of the biggest bowel irritants and offenders.

And it was like there was no colitis. That was my issue. I had colonoscopies regularly because I was still labeled as having colitus and increased risk of colon cancer. When I would get my colonoscopies once I stopped the gluten, they were virtually normal. And my GI doctor, I would have thought she would've said, gosh, what are you doing? This is so incredible. You're not on any medicine. The nurses were shocked. When I went in for my colonoscopy, What are taking? I'm not anything, really? Like, nope.

I don't need it. So I thought, she said gosh what you're doing, this is great.

Hormone Safety and Medical Myths 2:51

Maybe I can learn. All she did was she literally patted me on the shoulder and said just keep doing what your doing. Like okay. You could have really maybe helped some other people, but anyhow, so that's kind of what I went through and we want to help people so you don't keep going through experiences like that. So tonight we're going to cover three different main objectives. One is how we in restorative and functional medicine see Alzheimer's differently than the conventional medical establishment, how lifestyle impacts your brain health and what you can do about it, and also how hormones are really key to having a healthy brain.

So I can't put everything I've learned in all this, you know, last 10 years in a short half hour talk, but I'll try to impart as much as I could. And later you'll have an opportunity to find out more, to become a patient, so you will have opportunity delve deeper. So one thing that's always on the minds of people as soon as we mention hormones is, oh no, aren't they dangerous? So I want to address that so that it's not running through your mind while I'm talking to you and trying to give you new information.

Certainly the information on women, which largely came from a big study that came out actually 15 years ago this July, the Women's Health Initiative, in July of 2002. And I won't ever forget the date and the month because it created havoc. in the world of gynecologic care. Women went off their hormones wholesale, and it's estimated that there were 50,000 unnecessary deaths a year from women going off there hormones and losing the protective effects of their hormone. So the Women's Health Initiative came out with some bad news.

Woman who were taking Purimarin and Provera, which is a synthetic progesterone, had a 30% increase in breast cancer incidence. So they halted the study early. This came out all over the news. It was the NIH in cahoots with the media. And so it came in the medial before we ever saw it in a medical journal. A Sunday night it was all the over news and Monday morning I had people calling me and I was like, what, where do I read about this? The study didn't come out for a week or two later. And what they did was give women products that were common on the market then, which really should not be used.

And there are some places where it is still being used, you should be on Provera. If you are on prover, that really needs to get changed because truly it does increase your risk of breast cancer. This is women, if you're on estrogen or another oral form, If you're on estrogen in a pill form, it gets metabolized differently than when you put it on your skin, and it increases your risk of blood clots. So the things that you've heard about estrogen and progesterone are true, but you have to look at the details.

And once we look those details and know how to address them, use bioidentical hormones, which are exactly the form of hormones chemically that your own body makes, we can give them safely without an increased risk of breast cancer and without increased risks of blood clots. So I hope that takes care of some of the concerns about estrogen safety. And then for men, the issue comes up about testosterone. It is such old mythology that testosterone causes prostate cancer. That has been disproven over and over again.

Somehow a small study of four men from the 1940s who were on testosterone and got prostate has created our understanding for the last 60-some years or 70 years. And when we look scientifically at the literature, it is not true. Testosterone does not cause prostate cancer. For men, testosterone is tremendously health-giving. We'll talk a little bit more about hormones later. So I want you to listen with an open mind and listen to what happened that forced me to see things differently because I didn't always have an opened mind.

And you see books here by Suzanne Summers. When I first started getting into this area of medicine, I said to my friend who kind of told me what conferences to go to and how to set up my practice. I was like, do I have to mention Suzanne Summers? And she's like I don't know how people are going to understand what you're doing if you don' mention Suzan Summers. And I thought, oh my gosh, she looks like such a thing bad.

The Functional Medicine View of Alzheimeru2019s 7:49

She was not Chrissy on Three is a Crowd. Like how can she be, you know, a medical authority? Well, I finally read her book and it was one woman's story of her menopause journey. That's all. How she got help and who she get it from. And it really opened the public up to the understanding of that you don't have to suffer when you go through menoppause. There's help, and there are ways to do it safely. So no, I did not always have an open mind. I don't fault my fellow physicians when they don' understand what I'm doing.

It took me many, many years of practice. And I was in an OB-GYN practice for 25 years before I saw the light. So it takes doctors a while. What can I say? So the silver tsunami, I told you what it means. It's the coming epidemic of dementia, and we need to do something about it. And we gave you a list of things. We'll be going over a number of them that you can do right now. You have to get serious about, it you have, to take your health into your own hands. and you, have spend time and effort doing it, you are not going to maintain your, health if you just keep doing what you're doing and hope it turns out okay.

So this is a very active process. you've got to, get yourself involved. So right now there are 30 million people with Alzheimer's globally and we are predicted by 2050 to have 160 million with people Alzheimer. Lots of people are at risk and these are certainly the people that we can impact the most. And we expect to spend over a trillion dollars in care for Alzheimer disease by 2050 and who knows where the money is going to come from. It's the third leading cause of death in the United States. It is very prevalent.

And women really take the brunt of it. They are 65% of the patients with Alzheimer's and 60% percent of caregivers. This is more common than breast cancer. And it's certainly, Alzheimer is certainly more feared than cancer by people. Because you have a hope with cancer that you can get treatment and maybe have the cure. Previously, we thought there was no cure with Alzheimer's. That was just a death sentence. So people really fear that even more than cancer. There have been studies, there have president's councils on combating Alzheimer's.

There's been a ton of money put into pharmaceutical studies. None of them have worked. One drug had marginal benefit, a few have approved. They're continuing to pour large amount of monies into the pharmaceutical study. Preventing Alzheimer's does not require billions and billions of dollars. It requires things that you do for yourself with your lifestyle every day. So the real facts is previously we thought there were no cures at all. And this was from the Alzheimer's Association website. They've changed it.

This was last year. And they said this is the only cause of death in the top 10 in America that cannot be prevented, cured, or slowed. One in three seniors is going to have Alzheimer's. So this is the very typical view. And it really impacts what people, what patients, families, and doctors do when they start seeing mental decline. If you think it's unstoppable, if you thing it is progressive, If think nothing can be done about it, What are you going do? You'll go into denial. You try to pretend like it's not happening until things get really bad.

Family members don't want to think that you're not functioning as well. And so what happens is patients don�t seek help. Doctors don't refer. And when somebody finally goes to their doctor, says, I'm having significant memory problems, maybe gets an in-office test, then gets referred to a neurologist, what happens? The neurologists does an exam, does more cognitive testing, and says great, we'll watch it, come back in six months. They document this slow unfolding decline month by month, year by year.

And so you end up with a very late diagnosis. And this is really the truth. We don't have a health care system. we have the sick care systems. You wait till you get sick. I'm telling you, don' wait until you sick if your brains are working well now, do these things. you will keep your brain healthy. and our medical system is largely, I mean you go to the doctor, What do you expect that you're going to walk away with a prescription? There's not care. Where is somebody? I actually had an incident recently where, oh, this is too much information.

But anyhow, I had a urinary tract infection. And my doctor said, Oh, great. I'll just call some antibiotics in for you. You know, and I was having pain. We'll send you for an ultrasound. Where's the care? I wanted to go see her. I want to have an exam. Want to leave a specimen. wanted get taken care of. And so I was like, you know, telling my husband, I had this experience I'm very unhappy about. He's like get over it. This is medical care now. She didn't do anything out of the ordinary. It was, like what I Iwanted to get take care.

So really, we have a very different approach here. It's patient-centered. it has to be. We really look at root causes. And with Alzheimer's, this is where it's at. Its not mysterious. There are things that cause it. Your genetics are not your destiny, because everything that you do makes a difference in whether your genetic plays itself out or your genetics don't play itself. So don't just give up and say, well, my mother had Alzheimer's. I think it's genetic. And I don' think there's anything I can do about it.

There is so much you can about. We're all individual. And what we're learning more and more is we are working a lot with people with toxicities, with mold toxins. How can two people live in the same house that has water damage and mold and one person is horribly sick with memory problems, fatigue, and decline and the person living right with them is fine? It's biochemical individuality, and so we're finding out there's a lot of individual genetics that we need to analyze so that can figure out how you individually get rid of toxins and process things.

This is where things are at, because if you don't process toxins well, you accumulate them. They make you sick. One of the places you get sick is in your brain. We look at lifestyle factors. I know doctors say you should eat better. You should lose weight. They have a number of things that they recommend to you. But do they actually sit down with you and say, this is specifically, here's your shopping list. Here's some recipes. That's what Jessica, our functional nutritionist, does. What do you like to eat?

What you don't like eat. If you do like vegetables and we want you to be vegetables, how can we make that happen? You can't just be on your own with somebody saying, make a big lifestyle change. We really take it step by step and personalize it to you so that we take how you function and how feel about things into account. We look at environmental factors, and some of conventional medicine is starting to look these things. But really in isolated, separated groups. I went to a wonderful presentation of the Department of Gerontology at USC.

And it was on air quality and dementia. So there are some really well-known researchers there who have very good evidence that living near freeways, what are we going to do? We live near the port. Are you going move? Contributes to dementia, but most of conventional medicine does not look at environmental factors. Where did you work? We had one patient who grew up in Sacramento and her husband said, oh, you know, we both grew there as kids and they used to take jet fuel and pour it on the ground to get rid of it, to dispose of and it seeped into the groundwater.

So you're getting all of those horrible organic pollutants in your water and then they get into your body, they're hard to get rid of. We have people who are affluent, live on golf courses, that's great. All the pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, rodent killers, a lot of that seeps into groundwater or is in the air. We also look at the role of stress because we see a lot of people with brain decline that gets worse with stress or people that brain declined that began

Root Causes: Inflammation, Toxins, and Gut Health 17:20

at a really horribly stressful time in their lives. They were diagnosed with cancer, somebody in the family got murdered, you know, these really incredible life stresses that we know the physiologic mechanisms. You make a lotta cortisol when you get stressed and cortisol literally shrinks your brain. The less brain volume you have, the worse your brain works. And we really see the patient as a partner. So we work with people, we don't just lay down, you know, this is what you got to do, take it or leave it.

We want you to be effective. we want to change your health and so we worked with you where you are. And Jessica, our nutritionist, has really gotten compliments from people who previously were just told just do this and she started where they were and it keeps them coming back and keeps some changing. This is a visual of what functional medicine is, looking for the root cause of the malfunction. So all of things that you see on top, hormone imbalances, thyroid issues, depression, Alzheimer's, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune disease.

Irritable bowel, chronic fatigue. Those are the symptoms. Those aren't the disease and the causes. The causes are down below. And there are things like inflammation, stress, poor diet, lack of sleep, trauma, nutrient deficiencies, pour digestion, and lack exercise, toxins, even toxic thoughts. So your brain controls your biology. We are always looking down here because this is what we can correct to change the things that are up above. And we have a new view of Alzheimer's. Have people heard of beta amyloid, the deposits that happen in the brain of people with Alzheimer?

A lot of the drug investigation for Alzheimer has been aimed at trying to remove beta-amyloids. And what they've found is that even when you remove it, a person still has Alzheimer. So when look at why somebody has beta Amyloide, you understand things a lot better. Beta amyloid is actually a protective thing for your brain. If your has been invaded by bacteria and is very inflamed, beta amlyloids is antibacterial. It's anti-inflammatory. And our systems work in a way that we will tend to shut down slowly if we can't sustain ourselves rather than, boom, die.

We see that with thyroid. We have a thyroid mechanism that will slow our bodies way down if we are without food for a long time. It's a way to keep us from dying quickly. it's away to keeps us sustained until maybe we get our next supply of food. And a similar situation happens in the brain. Its called metabolic downsizing. So rather than your brain just shutting off and that's the end of it, it slowly downsizes so that it can keep going. So it looks like beta amyloid is a protective response to something.

And it's that something that we want to find so that you don't continue to deposit beta-amyloids. The new view of Alzheimer's is that it is caused by metabolic and toxic damage. This is really where our investigation and treatment goes. So this is not just a brain problem. We have people with problems in their intestinal tract that are affecting their brain function, with problem elsewhere in there bodies that then impacting the brain. And so we're very connected, and it's one of the problems with conventional medicine is that there is the psychiatrist who deals from here up, then there's the cardiologist that deals here, the GI deals there, GYN deals in here and here.

And we're interconnected, and the things that affect our GI tract, for example, very much affect your brain. And there's something called leaky gut. I don't know if people have heard of it. It's when you have disruption of that healthy barrier in your intestine. If you have leaky gut, we're learning that you probably have a leky blood-brain barrier. And the blood brain barrier is a protection around your brain. The same things that will give you lekey gut can give your leakey blood, brain, barrier and allow toxins, infections to go into your brains.

So maintaining healthy gut health means maintaining a healthy brain health. A lot of maintaining health intestinal function is what you eat. The other thing we know is that there is a large window for treatment, and if anything has become clear to me, being in this field of medicine, is people need to come in early. Don't wait. People wait years and years, The longer it goes, the more damage there is, and the harder it is to do something about it. So if you have some inklings that things are wrong, at least get checked.

At least try to figure it out. And we were just talking today, who should we really be concerned about with their brain function? Well, a lot of people have minor memory problems, some brain fog. Those are things that are fairly easy to take care of. misplacing things all the time and you didn't before. If you are losing your way or just feel like it's harder to get to familiar places, if you're not recognizing people's faces, having a lot of difficulty with expressing yourself, these are things that are more serious.

But there is a large window, so you wanna, at the earlier signs, try to figure things out. And as I mentioned, there's this downsizing. And I just made a picture of littler and littlier houses. It's when you have the great big house, and then you decide you're going to downsize and get to a smaller house. You could still live there, but you don't have as much functionality. So Dr. Dale Bredesen, and we're going to be giving away one of his books today. His book came out August 22nd. And it is the whole plan that we implement here at the Sklar Center.

I was personally trained by Dr Bledesen. I bugged the heck out of them to get in there. I kept emailing them and calling them, and they finally got back to me and said, we know you want to come. We'll get into touch with you. It's like, I don't want miss this opportunity. And his view of things is that there are 36 holes in the roof. Well, now there's probably 50 to 100. And if it rains, of course the roof just leaks and you have a flood inside. If you can patch up some of them, you won't have as bad of a flooding.

So you don't need to fix every single thing that's wrong leading up to your brain problem. if you could just start working on some them things will change. So we found that we have to be incredible detectives. And really, that's what functional medicine is all about, is being a detective, always pursuing what else could it be? If we thought it was this and we treat it and it didn't work, what could else it could be and digging deeper and deeper. So this is our number one thing to recommend to people.

As soon as they call us and get information about our program and plan to become a patient, we tell them this. You have to stop eating stuff like this, This is poison for your brain. Just look at that picture and think, this is going to poison my thinking ability. Look at it like that until you feel kind of queasy, because you are less likely to eat sweets. Every time you think about it, you'll think this will poison your mind. Resolving inflammation. Some of the inflammation we are not able to see.

Hormones, Detox, and Lifestyle Strategies 25:40

Sometimes we have blood tests that show inflammation, but there is inflammation that we can see. People who have rheumatoid arthritis have joint inflammation significant enough that it increases their risk for Alzheimer's disease. People with periodontal disease have systemic. If you have bleeding gums and gum problems, we do a blood test. We take your blood from your arm, and it shows inflammation, a high inflammatory marker. How does it get from you teeth into your bludstream? It is inflaming your whole body, including your brain.

So resolving inflammation. Getting periodonal disease taken care of. Taking very good care your teeth and mouth. Hormones. So I have some information about hormones that's really impressive. So we learned, we didn't know this until fairly recently, but there are actually estrogen receptors in the brain. That means places where estrogen is meant to land, and testosterone, actually most of the hormones that are listed here. Hormones all have a role in how your brain works. And they do things like dampen inflammation, help the transmission between one nerve and another, help to build up healthy coverings of cells called the myelin sheath.

And we have evidence of that with estrogen because women who have had a hysterectomy, the earlier you had hysterectomy with ovary removal, higher your chances of Alzheimer's. The shorter the time that you've had estrogen in your body, earlier menopause, And we also know that when we do a hysterectomy on a woman before her menopause time, she loses 15% of her brain speed. So estrogen impacts your memory, your brain's speed, and your Progesterone is also really important, and progesteron is associated with, on neuropsych testing, with improved performance.

So progeteron actually improves your brain performance And vitamin D, which people think of as a vitamin. In fact, it's a hormone. It's in the same family as estrogen, progesterone, testosterone. Increases our nerve to nerve transmission by increasing something called acetylcholine. That's an neurotransmitter. It's anti-inflammatory, and it has antioxidant properties. So vitamin D protects your brain against Alzheimer's. And I gave you some guidelines, then we'll go over them a little bit later.

Because what the lab says is an OK vitamin, D. and your doctor, because of that, may think it's an okay vitamin. D may not be an ok vitamin d level. So hormones end up being a really important part of our programs here in general, but also especially our cognition programs. One of the biggest things we've encountered, and I've encounter it in just about every cognition patient that has come to see me with significant brain decline, are toxins. And Flint, Michigan had a terrible problem with lead.

We just talked to a lady today who had very high levels of lead, grew up in a house with led pipes. If your detoxification ability is impaired, you won't clear that out of your system and you'll carry it around lifelong. She was the house she grew The other toxins that we've encountered, I mentioned water damage and mold. I don't even want to think about what's going to happen in Texas and in the South and Florida. Mold creates illness. About 25% of people have the genetics that make it very difficult for them to clear mold toxins.

So a lot of the people are going be very sick after this whole sequence of events. So heavy metals, mold, and there are other toxins. They're called biotoxins because they come from biological systems. Mold is a biotoxin. Lime and other tick-borne illnesses are epidemic. And there is neuro-lime, where the lime bacteria actually get into your brain, and they impair thinking ability. So we, with our programs, we're doing a lot of testing to try to figure this out, but searching for what is in there, We can't look into you brain but we can look at what's circulating in your body that might reflect what going on in you're brain.

The other thing we look is old viral infections. A patient that we saw today had Epstein-Barr years ago. People have mono. It can get reactivated later in life. And it can affect your brain function, and it give you fatigue. So these are the kinds of things we're looking for. We also measure mineral levels, your copper and your zinc. Copper is very toxic to the brain so we want a lower high copper levels. Zinc is essential for detoxifying so you want to be sure your ZINC level is adequate. We look at B vitamins which are very important for healthy brain function and energy in general.

and others. So we're trying to lower the ones that are too high, the minerals that're damaging and too and bring up the one's that beneficial and will help you detoxify and function better. There are some things that I'm going to tell you with lifestyle that you can start doing right now. One of the things that helps your body get rid of cells that are damaged is to starve the cells out. So if you have a 12-hour window between one meal and the next, like supper and breakfast, you will starve out some cells are functioning poorly.

That's a way to cut down risk of cancer and a to help your brain function better. And the other thing is not eating right before bedtime. When you eat right before bedtime, insulin gets released. It suppresses human growth hormone, which is a very healing and important hormone. And so it's important to have a window of three hours before you go to sleep. What you each should look like this. Somebody said, is that a bagel? That's not a Bagel. That is an apple. Yes. They said, is that a bagel? And I was like, what?

Did I make a mistake? No. This is basically vegetables and protein. That's what we encourage people to eat, low carb and definitely get rid of the refined carbohydrates. So that's things with sugar, white flour, it's bread, pasta, cookies, pretzels, crackers. I know everybody says, oh my God, What am I gonna eat? How am i gonna get That's what we help you with and we have a program actually starting in October to help people implement this way of eating. It's going to be a group program run by Jessica, our functional nutritionist.

So what happens when you sleep? You might think you're getting by great on a few hours sleep. I was just telling Dr. Nicole today. When I an intern, we were on for 36 hours and off for 12. Well, during that 36, hours we would divide the night up between 11 at night and 7 the next morning. And if it wasn't too busy, you might be able to get four hours' sleep, either got the 11 to 3 a.m. or the 3 am to 7 am. If I got four hours sleep, I was great the next day. I felt like nothing had happened. Well, it's not good for your brain because what happens when you're sleeping?

We're just learning this. This is brand new information, cutting edge. There's something called the glymphatic system. So I know you've heard of the lymphatic system, and I'm not saying it wrong. There's something called the glymphatic your brain kind of shrinks down temporarily while you're sleeping, and this fluid has the opportunity to circulate much more vigorously and remove all of the waste products, all the garbage that accumulated during the day while your were awake and removed it. So if you short yourself on sleep or you have sleep apnea and you are not using your CPAP, or for whatever other reasons you are not getting good sleep,

Sleep, Stress, Brain Training, and Treatment Plan 34:48

you're not clearing the garbage out of your brain that gets accumulated during the day. So if you have problems sleeping, that's one issue. You need help trying to figure out why. But if your just staying up late and thinking you were getting a bunch of stuff done and burning the candle at both ends, I'm telling you, nothing is as important as your need to get sleep for your health and your function. Then the other thing about sleep, if you short yourself on sleep you have problems with blood sugar regulation.

You have problem with your weight. A lot of things go awry. But we're focusing on the brain tonight. So sleep is really important. Stress reduction. I mentioned before that high cortisol levels. Cortisol is a hormone that is released when we get stressed. High cortisol levels directly shrink your brain. They directly, cortisol directly shrinks the hippocampus, which is where you lay down new memories. It's a particular part of your brains. And when things shrink, they don't work as well. So stress reduction is absolutely essential to a good functioning brain.

And the same thing goes as for sleep. If you think you don't have time to eat right, sleep enough, and meditate or do Tai Chi or prayer, whatever it is that brings those cortisol levels down for you, you are going to put yourself at additional health risk. And there's very, very strong scientific studies on the effect of stress in women and breast cancer. Stress plays a big role in development of breast cancers. So not only cognition, but other health risks are caused by too much stress. And then there are things to keep your brain active and functioning.

Reading is probably one of the best. So read, read read. Crossword puzzles, there was a study that showed if you did crossword puzzle four days a week, you have to do it a lot, that cut down your risk of Alzheimer's disease by 35%. But the thing that was most impressive in that article, and it's more having to with exercise, is that if dance, it cuts down the risk for Alzheimer by 75%. Wow, so yeah, get out there and dance. And you need to constantly challenge your mind. So it can't be the same old things that you've always done.

You need go to a class where either they make you improvise or you're following a leader and you are not sure what they are going to do so you have to kind of keep your brain going. Really innovating is key. Learning something new. And BrainHQ is something that Dr. Bredesen recommends that's a computer game. And there are things that fly around the screen, and you click on them. You try to do it faster. Or you try be more discerning in what you're doing. So for people who like doing things on the computer, Brain HQ, he promotes it because it's the only online brain training that has actually been shown to prevent Alzheimer's disease.

There's Lumosity and some of the other ones, but they don't have the scientific information that BrainHQ has. And it was developed by a guy named Stan Mirzenek, who is considered the father of modern theory of neuroplasticity. What is neuro-platicity? What's something when it is plastic? It's flexible, right? Neuroplasticity refers to the flexibility of your brain that you can learn new things, that can lay down new nerve pathways, even when you have damaged ones. So part of what we do, we lay the fertile ground by correcting the metabolic problems that are going on in a person's body.

But then you need to work to lay new pathways so that have an alternative to damage ones, The earlier you treat, the greater the chance that you can turn things around. Mainly, we've been able to help people with early Alzheimer's and what's called mild cognitive impairment, which is the step before early Alzheimers, at least stabilize and not get worse for the most part. We've had a couple of people that have had some reversal. It really requires working like it's your full-time job. So I won't say it's an easy program, but it can be very effective.

And the fact that we have stabilized most of our patients really is a message that the sooner you get in, the less you're going to lose. So our process is that you call, and we talk to you on the phone. I'll be telling you more about that as a free consult. And then we find out what's going on with you and tell you whether we can help you or not, whether have a solution for you. And if it looks like promising, we ask you to gather information if you're somebody that's having memory and cognition problems so that we can figure out if there's somebody this is likely to work on.

And, if we determine that it is, set up an exam called a comprehensive exam. We just did one with a patient today. She was here for three and a half hours. But we went over her health history, which we spent an hour and half, like, where do you go to a doctor? And they spent and hour-and-a-half delving into your health We spent 45 minutes going over her lab results, and then she's going to come back tomorrow and spend an hour with our functional nutritionist health coach going what we're starting to implement with her diet and her hormones and our supplements.

And that's the personalized treatment plan. So people are on a plan, we usually ask for one year, give us a year. The lady we saw today I think is going to need two years because she has so many toxins, it's going take a really long time to get rid of them. But that is the Personalized Treatment Program where you work with us on an ongoing basis at regular appointments every month. We also treat other types of problems, anti-aging, slowing down the aging process, helping people with fatigue, intestinal problems anxiety and depression.

So there are a lot of realms that we're involved in besides cognition. These are the things that are going to get you on the road toward keeping your brain healthy. Thank you so much. You've been a great group.