Post-Concussion Syndrome: Seeing the Big Picture of Concussion Recovery | E1

Sophia Bouwens and Dr. Ayla Wolf DAOM discuss their new podcast, "Life After Impact: The Concussion Recovery Podcast" focusing on concussions and brain injuries. Dr. Wolf shares information on her soon-to-be-published book, which includes a 48-question questionnaire to categorize symptoms into eight meaningful categories, such as post-traumatic headaches, cognitive symptoms, vestibular disorders, and visual or oculomotor dysfunction. They emphasize the importance of comprehensive testing and individualized treatment plans. Sophia discusses how her background in neuroscience and acupuncture helped improve outcomes with her own brain injury recovery.  Dr. Wolf describes her experiencing with multiple sports-related concussions and current work with patients suffering from post-concussion syndrome. 

This episode celebrates the power of curiosity and collaboration, illustrating how innovative therapies can enhance our understanding and treatment of nervous system conditions, all while encouraging listeners to personalize their healing journey.

Future episodes will delve into specific topics like post-traumatic headaches, traumatic neck injuries, cognitive symptoms, vision and eye movement disorders, sleep disorders, mood and personality changes, autonomic dysfunction, neuro-inflammation, dizziness, vertigo and balance issues.

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Transcript

Sophia Bouwens: 0:00

Welcome to the life after impact podcast, where we do a deep dive into all things concussion and brain injury related. We'll talk about all the different symptoms that can follow a brain injury, different testing methods, different practitioners out there, and different therapies available. I'm Sophia Bouwens. I'm here with Dr Ayla Wolf, and we will be your guides on the journey to living your best life after impact.

Ayla Wolf: 0:27

Sophia, what's new?

Sophia Bouwens: 0:30

I'm super excited to be here. We have worked so hard to get to this point, and we have so much to share that I'm just bursting with excitement about all the content and topics that we'll cover and how we're going to help reach people out there. How are you feeling?

Unknown: 0:50

I'm excited as well. This has been a project that we've been talking about for a long time. There's been so much leading up to this, and at the end of the day, everything that we've been working on, the book that I've been writing, it's all meant to try to get information to more people. Because right now, up until this point, we've been treating one patient at a time, often telling each person, similar things, similar information. And I just want to bring all the information to the masses.

Sophia Bouwens: 1:22

Yes, your book! You've been working on this book for a long time, and I'm really excited about it. Why don't you talk about it for a moment?

Unknown: 1:29

Okay, I think it took me a while to figure out how to organize the information in a way that was going to be most helpful to people. And I thought back to what the common experience is of being on both sides of the equation, being both somebody that has had lots of concussions, has had all the symptoms, and now being on the other side of it, where these people are coming to me, and what I realize is that when people come to see me a they've usually been to like, 10 other doctors, right? They've already done a lot of other therapies. I'm kind of their last hope. But when they come in, they start describing their symptoms, and usually people start bouncing all over in their timeline, right? And they're like, Well, I tried this, and I did that, and I have this symptom, and, usually there's tears and there's frustration, and you just feel all of that, right? You feel all the suffering, and 90 minutes could easily go by, and the questions that I have haven't been answered, right? So, so over the years, I've developed a way of really getting a lot done in that first appointment. And so the first step is understanding how this concussion is manifesting for this individual person. And so my book starts out with a questionnaire that is 48 questions. It's not short, but what it does is it allows people to make meaning out of their symptoms, and to put their symptoms into these eight specific categories that then allow people to read the chapter that corresponds to that category. Because it hasn't escaped me that people that have brain injuries and concussions often have visual symptoms. They have cognitive fatigue. It can be hard to read a book. I mean, there was a time when I would start to read a book and I'd, you know, fall asleep within three minutes, right? I know what that feels like for me. Writing a book needed to be the medium that I started with, just to get all the information that's rolling around my head onto paper in an organized way. And eventually, I was like, once the book is done, then maybe I can turn it into an audio book, and then we can do the podcast, and we can start getting the information out in other ways, but for the purposes of the book, people will fill out the questionnaire, and then whichever categories they have the most symptoms in, they can go read the chapter that corresponds to that category. So we have chapters that focus on post traumatic headaches, chapters that focus on traumatic neck injuries, on autonomic nervous system dysfunction, which can cause things like nausea and dizziness and chronic pain and exercise intolerance. POTS, Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. We have a chapter specifically on cognitive symptoms, a chapter on vestibular disorders, so dizziness, vertigo, what we call non spinning, vertigo, symptoms of rocking, bobbing, swaying, and things like disequilibrium, poor balance. A chapter on vision, eye movements. Eye movement disorders that can cause a lot of problems with people being able to be in front of a computer screen, right. And then a chapter that gets into mood dysfunction, and a lot of people will experience things that they might not even trace back to the brain injury or the concussion. Sometimes depression can come on a year after, you know, or anxiety can kind of slowly develop as people have one concussion or multiple sub concussive hits to the head. On top of that, maybe

Sophia Bouwens: 5:13

they recovered fine from two, but now this third one, which wasn't even that much, is like totally going off the wall, and they are really anxious all the time

Ayla Wolf: 5:21

Exactly, yeah. So sometimes these symptoms, in terms of even irritability and short temper, people don't even trace back to their head injury. So we get into that topic and then sleep, because brain injuries can definitely affect people's circadian rhythms, their ability to fall asleep, their ability to stay asleep. So that's huge. So we get into all these different factors. And so with each of these chapters, I break down what are all of the different tests that are out there, not just kind of basic conventional tests, but all these other kind of functional tests that people can do. And then we talk about different treatment strategies that people may not have even heard about or even considered, and so the whole book is meant to really introduce a meaningful way of categorizing their symptoms, understanding what tests are available, and learning about all the different therapies and options that are out there that can help them to heal. And then lastly, I have a big chapter on brain inflammation.

Sophia Bouwens: 6:23

You love to talk about brain inflammation? Yes,

Ayla Wolf: 6:28

know, preliminary evidence to look at the presence of chronic inflammation that might be playing a role in some cases, of people that have chronic, persistent post concussion symptoms as well. And I've certainly clinically experienced a huge improvement in people's symptoms like brain fog and cognitive fatigue when we work with people on that inflammation front.

Sophia Bouwens: 7:03

this book isn't just about like, here is a bunch of conditions after injury. It's more about, here's what they are, here's how they can be tested, and here's some options for treating them and working them that you might not know about, or your therapist or your care team might not know about. Maybe this will empower you to access them. You don't know what you don't know. So this book helps bridge those gaps.

Ayla Wolf: 7:26

Exactly. This is a book that I'm hoping people will buy and write all over it and highlight things and bring it to their doctor. There's tons of questionnaires in the book. There's lots of tests that are in there. So my goal was to just give people all the tools that they can hold in their hands, and I said, bring with them to their doctor's appointments, ask

Sophia Bouwens: 7:45

It's a huge number of people. And every about different tests, try different therapies. I just wanted to get the information to the masses. You know, the research says 50 million people around the world have a brain injury, and every year, that's a lot of people. single injury can look different or manifest differently. And so it can be really confusing to dive into these things. Your book starts to explain that or unravel that.

Unknown: 8:18

Yeah, there. You know, at the end of the day, I think what we do, obviously, we treat everybody as an individual, and we create these highly customized treatment programs for people. And so my book is kind of my attempt to show people how they can create their own individualized treatment plan and go find what they need in this very confusing world of medicine, and for

Sophia Bouwens: 8:41

the people out there who are having difficulty with reading, or maybe don't learn so well by that, you can listen to the podcast, or there'll be an audiobook version coming down the pipeline. Yeah, we want to be neurodiverse in who we reach

Unknown: 8:57

Exactly. And, you know, hopefully maybe some videos out there, too little snippets, but yeah, I think this podcast was really the way that we could bring the information from the book to people in a different format, if reading is just too much of a struggle. But I think before we kind of dive into all that heavy stuff, people don't know who we are, so I think that we should introduce ourselves a little bit give people our background on why we're doing what we're doing and how we got there. So why don't you start?

Sophia Bouwens: 9:27

Well, I found my way to studying the nervous system in my undergraduate degree on in neuroscience, and I was looking at pain, and decided to study acupuncture effect on the nervous system in regards to pain, and so I designed this study. We were giving acupuncture to rats and testing there.

Ayla Wolf: 9:49

How old were you at this time? I think I was like 19 or 20 years old. I was a young pup. It was like my third year of undergrad.

Unknown: 9:56

Okay, so when you're 19, what makes you decide? I'm studying pain, and I want to try to use acupuncture as my therapeutic tool.

Sophia Bouwens: 10:05

I never thought I'd find myself in a lab testing rats with this, but I started out wanting to go to medical school, and was a pre med student, and had kind of in that journey, decided I don't want to do surgeries, and I don't want to manage medications. I don't want to have lives in my hands. I want to help people just live a better life, like functionally and operate better. I want to improve quality of life and activities of daily living. But I kept finding in the medical field, as I was finding my experience there that wasn't necessarily what I was getting into with going to medical school, was more life saving technologies, and that, for me, was hard. So kind of my third year, when I had done all my pre med work, decided, like, maybe I don't want to go to med school. So I turned tracks to study neuroscience, and in this same period of time had the onset of Bell's Palsy. Come on. Okay,

Unknown: 11:04

okay, so that was your first foray into acupuncture - Bell's Palsy.

Sophia Bouwens: 11:09

Rewind back to when I was 16 and I fell snowboarding and took a really mean, nasty fall, cranked my neck. Had felt like really weird on my face for a while after that, got on a plane to go to Mexico with my mom the next day, and by the time I landed in Mexico, I had a total paralysis on one side of my face. My mom was like, Oh my gosh, are you having a stroke? Here we are in Cancun for a week. Like, what are we gonna do? So because you were in Cancun, we found an American trained chiropractor and went to see him not knowing, like, what to do for medical care. He ruled out that they had a stroke, and just said, I had this condition called Bell's Palsy, which is a paralysis of the facial nerve, which is a cranial nerve. And he said, I can adjust you, and probably when you get back to the United States, you can go to your doctor and they might give you steroids, and they'll just tell you, like, six months to three years and you'll be better. But I haven't seen chiropractic work for this so much as I have seen acupuncture. So also, when you get back, you should go see an acupuncturist.

Unknown: 12:13

Okay, so the chiropractor on the beach in Mexico told you to go see an acupuncturist once you got home.

Ayla Wolf: 12:18

I thought this was off the wall. I was like, Oh my gosh, how is acupuncture gonna help me? That's so weird, but I'm glad I didn't have a stroke, and the facial paralysis, cranial nerve injury made sense to me, because my neck hurt and I had all this other stuff with my shoulder anyway, so I got back to United States and did exactly what he said, went to my doctor, who gave me a steroid. After about three weeks of staring at me, my mom got really sick of seeing me suffer with this facial paralysis, like I couldn't taste on one side of my tongue, my eye wouldn't blink. I had like my smile was like one side was bright smile, the other side was just stone face, right? Yeah, pictures from this time were not cute, so she made me go get acupuncture because I was a minor she's like, Sophia, it helped my frozen shoulder. Maybe it'll help with your frozen face. So I went and I got a treatment, and the acupuncturist was phenomenal. Later that night, I could kind of start to feel my lip, and was asking my mom, like, can I I'm thinking, I'm moving my face. Is it moving? She's like, No, it's not. Within three days, I was fully recovered, knowing what I know now. I know that's your laugh. Like, can be really stubborn. She told me to come back in a week for follow up, and I didn't go back. We didn't even need to - just one and done, one and done. I was cured in three days, one treatment, which is totally not normally how that happens.

Sophia Bouwens: 13:47

it's great. It's a miracle. So fast forward. Here I am in undergrad, third year, stressed as heck, thinking like I'm not gonna go to med school after all this work I've done and I got Bell's policy again. Oh, so as a neuroscience major getting a neurological condition, knowing I'm not going to go see a medical doctor, I'm going to go to an acupuncturist, it reframed my thinking about how acupuncture was working in a neuroscience lens. And so I got interested in that and started doing research on it. I had my advisor had was a big pain researcher, so I used his research to frame a question about acupuncture and how it was working the nervous system. A lot of the research wasn't very good quality. It had terrible bias. A lot of was coming out of China and not structured the way that studies are now. So I couldn't answer any questions like, how this was working, but just that it did work because we did this testing in rats and saw the reflexes change, which is a big deal if you're a neuroscience person, but that just led to more questions which made me really understand, like, if I want to understand. And acupuncture have to go understand the language and the framework which they're studying it from. So instead of going to grad school for neuroscience, I decided I would go to grad school for acupuncture and then go on to get a PhD in neuroscience, using acupuncture as my framework my thesis to show the world how amazing acupuncture was at neuro recovery.

Ayla Wolf: 15:21

Okay, so that's your plan for world domination.

Sophia Bouwens: 15:24

Still on that track, just a different way. So went to school for acupuncture, got my masters started practicing. Six months later, was hit by a drunk driver on my way home from work and sustained a severe brain injury. Woke up six days later from a medically induced coma at Regions Hospital, they asked me what day it was, who the President was, what year it was. I wasn't really sure. Then they tried to explain to me, Well, the reason you don't know is because you've had a severe diffuse axonal traumatic brain injury. What that is is, I stopped him right there. I was like, I know what that is!

Ayla Wolf: 16:02

so you knew the answer to that question!

Sophia Bouwens: 16:03

I knew that one. And they were just, they kind of looked at me. I still remember the look on their face of like, what I was like, I have a degree in neuroscience, and I've studied brain health and injuries. This is going to be a journey, but I know something you don't know. I know acupuncture is a great neuromodulator, and it can help the nervous system recovery. And this is going to be a long journey, but I'm going to do better than you think I will. Let's go.

Unknown: 16:33

All right. So day one, wake up from a coma. You're told you have a diffuse axonal injury. You say I know exactly what that is, but I can get through this because I have insights into all kinds of other therapies that maybe aren't the first go to therapy that's being offered to people in a hospital.

Sophia Bouwens: 16:53

Yes, well, that being said, I was also young. I was super healthy. I was working out multiple times a week. I had just finished acupuncture school, so it's like this elite, pristine health component, because I had all my systems

Unknown: 17:08

right? I like to say you're in your mitochondrial underway, prime.

Sophia Bouwens: 17:11

Yes, I was in my mitochondrial prime. And I was also with, like, one of the best rehab teams in the region. So that was a big component as well. I'm not saying acupuncture was the only thing, but tailoring it into my experience helped me avoid things like Tracheotomies or recover bowel movement function, start my gait training better, faster, stronger, and then my cerebral blood flow improved. My inflammation came down like I just I did have better outcomes. Eventually, the team was so impressed by outcomes, they hired me. So now I work for that team.

Unknown: 17:45

I love that full circle story of the fact that you did your rehab at the Neuroscience center and Regions.

Sophia Bouwens: 17:51

The neuroscience center wasn't built yet. Oh, okay, it opened the next year.

Unknown: 17:55

Got it. So that was, like the beginnings of it.

Sophia Bouwens: 17:58

It was during that time all my therapists were like, hold on, hold on. You're a neuroscience background, like undergraduate background, you're an acupuncturist and you're a brain injury survivor, using acupuncture to really get through this. You should talk to them when you're better and stronger and you feel ready, you should talk to them about adding acupuncture in at the new neuroscience center opening next year, because we're seeing this is really helping you, and we want you to do more with it. So I did. I reached out to the director after my last appointment. I saw this phone number on the wall. Questions about the neuroscience center. Contact this number or send an email. So I sent an email and got connected with the rehab director at the time, Marnie Farrell. Shout out to Marnie, who met with me. She was interested and open, and sat down with me and was interested and proposed me to have this position, eventually set me up with the research team there, which we conducted this research study we just published last month. And it's kind of went off from there. Yeah, that's

Unknown: 19:00

From day one of kind of meeting you and hearing about your connections with the neuroscience center, I have just loved how open they have been to incorporating a lot of different therapies into recovery. I think it's rare to have a team of people that are all equally open minded and willing to explore and it's been a great it's been a great relationship.

Sophia Bouwens: 19:24

I agree with you in the openness. It really is the hallmark of a good practitioner, whether it be a medical doctor or a physical therapist or an acupuncturist, someone who understands they don't know everything and are open to learning more to improve gains. I think that's one of the missions I want with this podcast, is to just explain and share how everybody is different. Every nervous system is different. It might respond to different things in different ways. So you need a team who's open to exploring those options with you. The team I work with is that which is super cool. I

Unknown: 19:58

I think curiosity is one of the most important character traits of a successful clinician.

Sophia Bouwens: 20:05

I agree, but I want to circle back to when I found out about you after this journey, right? I'm walking around the lake, and I hear you talking about the nervous system and acupuncture in this profound way that finally connected these dots that no one had connected before, and that sparked my curiosity, and I have to give a like a shout out to you, because when I reached out to you, telling you who I was, knowing that you were coming to Minnesota, and asking if you'd meet me for lunch, you said yes, and you were open to exploring options and talking, and that led us to where we are, which, given your background, I was like, she's never gonna like, who am I? This little acupuncturist in Minnesota, I was taken to, like, listen to me, or meet with me, and you did. So I want you to share a little bit about who you are, because I know all about your amazingness, but who are you?

Ayla Wolf: 21:00

So my journey, we have a lot of parallels in our journeys. Although you've had kind of one single intense traumatic brain injury, I've had many, many, many sports related concussions, and probably numerous sub concussive hits, hits to my head, but we both started out in pre med, and so when I was doing my kind of undergrad, I basically was doing pre med. However, I knew that I wanted to do something in the kind of natural medicine world. So my goal was, was not to go into med school. It was to go into something like naturopathic medicine. And there was a school in Australia that had a naturopathic program. I ended up going to that school for a year, and that's when I got highly fascinated and drawn into the world of Chinese herbal medicine. And so when I came back from my time in Australia, I ended up enrolling in the master's program that we both ended up doing, and I was always fascinated with being able to explain acupuncture and herbal medicine from a scientific perspective. So even going back to, like, the age of 13, I remember studying herbs, and whenever I would get my hands on a paper that would explain the scientific reason for why this particular plant had the ability to have some kind of healing effect in the body, I was fascinated by that. So I don't know what it was with that, but my entire life and career, I've always been extremely fascinated with the scientific explanation for how things work. I can get a little woo, woo as well. But, you know, I've got one foot in the Woo and one foot in the science. It's a good balance. Keeps you curious, keeps you involved.

Unknown: 23:00

Yeah, yeah. So both of us, after we graduated from our master's degrees in Chinese medicine, went into fertility. And so I think that's another interesting parallel. But while I was treating people and helping people get pregnant, I was racking up my own concussions, and so, no, I trained jiu jitsu a little bit. I trained MMA a little bit, but I didn't, I ended up not fighting because my concussion. I had a couple of concussions close together, and at the time, I was 36 I was training every single day, I thought I wanted to fight in the ring, and I ended up having to stop all my high impact sports because my concussions were causing a lot of problems backing up. You know, we talked about this a little bit before the this idea that when I was specializing in fertility, I would see people come in and they would go to people who were not specialists, and they would maybe have, like, one test here, and then try this one thing when that didn't work, they'd have another test, and then they'd try that one thing when that didn't work, then they'd do another test, and then try this other thing. And it was a very hodgepodge approach. So I saw this play out in the world of fertility, and I actually see this same phenomena playing out in the world of concussions right now, where people will get a concussion, they will have many, many different symptoms, and they might go to a doctor for one thing, and then a doctor might say, well, let's try this, this medication. And then they try that, and it doesn't work. So then maybe they go and they see a chiropractor, and maybe one or two symptoms get better, but they still have these other 10 symptoms. And then they maybe, you know, go back to their other doctor, and then they try a new medication, and it's this very hodgepodge approach to healing. What my approach. Has become. And what I've really recognized is you need to do all the tests up front. And so, in an ideal world, when somebody has a concussion, you would run them through all the systems, almost like when you bring your car in, right? And you get your car checked, they plug it into, you know, everything's electronic these days, so they can plug it in.

Sophia Bouwens: 25:23

If only we could do a plugin for us, like run this through the computer, right, exactly.

Unknown: 25:27

Well, that's kind of what we are doing, it's a lot of different tech involved. So, you know, you plug your car in, you run a diagnostics, and then it spits out, here's what's wrong. Well, basically that's what we need to do with the brain. So, bringing it back to the podcast, that's really what this podcast is about, right? Is helping people to understand what are these tests that should be performed? Why do we perform them? What does the test tell us? And so the more people can ex can describe their situation, explain their symptoms, categorize their symptoms into meaningful ways. That's what I think, allows people to be able to get the better care that they need and all the tests that they need.

Sophia Bouwens: 26:10

Well, the testing is helpful, because, you know, when the nervous system kind of starts to break down, think of the nervous system or your brain as like your super computer that runs everything. It has a pulse on everything that happens in your body and everything that happens to your body. If there's one little section that starts to kind of not work so well or is injured, it can be really debilitating for all the other systems that are connected to that section of the nervous system or the brain, and you can have a like constellation of symptoms that show up and with brain injury, this is one experience where you don't realize how important the tissue between your ears is until something happens to it, and it doesn't work super well. Absolutely,

Unknown: 26:59

I had multiple concussions, and never knew that my symptoms were from my concussions, because I was I walked away from every crash. You know, when you're on a mountain biking trail screaming down a mountain, your adrenaline is soaring. So when you crash, you don't feel pain, you don't you don't feel brain fog, you know. So it's like, you just get back on your bike and you keep riding. And so with all of my concussions, you know, I never knew that I was concussed in the moment, and even afterwards, when I would develop things like brain fog or difficulty focusing, you know, I just thought that I was like, Oh, I just have ADHD. I didn't realize that it was the symptoms were from the concussion,

Sophia Bouwens: 27:43

well, because sometimes they don't show up right away, because this arm is down, but you have a compensation happening, and it can't compensate as well very long. And so then you have symptoms that show up days or weeks afterwards that are related to an injury. Yeah?

Unknown: 27:58

And there was a study that was published in 2019 that was looking at blood flow to the frontal lobe, and they actually found that after people got cleared to go back to their sport, blood flow to the prefrontal cortex continued to decline over an entire year after the concussion and after they had gone back to doing whatever they were doing athletically. And so I think a lot of people don't recognize that their depression might come on a year after their concussion, and they're not making that correlation between the concussion and the depression because

Sophia Bouwens: 28:31

of this injury to the blood flow to the prefrontal cortex, which has a lot to do with our limbic system and our motivation, our drive, and it might be more of like a a poor irrigation of the soil that leads to a decline of a plant's vitality, versus like this, chopping off of a branch, right? Exactly. So that's a way that it's super important to do this, like whole global nervous system testing to really see what is intact, what's functioning well, what's not working well. And how do these things tie together to use what is working well to help restore and rehabilitate what isn't working well? And that is the work we're doing in our life with our patients, and what we're excited to share with our life after impact. Yes,

Unknown: 29:16

this is all about giving people the tools that they need to find the right people, get the right tests and move forward on their journey. So

Sophia Bouwens: 29:25

why did we choose the name life after impact?

Ayla Wolf: 29:28

Life after impact came to me back in 2015 actually, I know I wanted to start a business in 2015 that was actually at the time, I envisioned it almost more of like a life coaching business, where I could help people that have had concussions figure out how to you know, how to get help, how to get better. But at the time I was so I was in school, working on a doctorate degree. I was still owning my own clinic, treating patients. Ones, and I was conducting research, and so trying to manage a research, a small pilot study looking at cerebral blood flow, seeing patients full time, running a clinic and being in school life after impact just never got off the ground. And then, you know, fast forward all these years. In 2020 we talked about life after impact again,

Sophia Bouwens: 30:25

COVID times, right? That was before COVID. Yeah.

Unknown: 30:28

We were you know, trying to plan how to, like, resurrect life after impact and then COVID hit, and so that, you know,

Sophia Bouwens: 30:37

we're gonna do an episode or five on COVID and brain fog and the dysautonomia that can come from that,

Unknown: 30:43

I'm sure. Yes, we definitely need to do that. Yeah, so that got put on hold again, and here we are 2024 almost going to 2025 and we are finally getting this podcast launched and off the ground.

Sophia Bouwens: 30:58

But we've learned so much so you you've taught classes to practitioners as part of grad school programs, also as continuing education programs. You've done research. We've conducted our first study that will be published on

Unknown: 31:12

post traumatic headaches. It was, it was published, yeah, the Journal of Neurotrauma.

Sophia Bouwens: 31:16

I know our first publication on post traumatic headaches, which our next episode. Episode Two, we'll really dive into post traumatic headache.

Unknown: 31:24

Yes, we'll, we'll focus on just that specific piece in the next one.

Sophia Bouwens: 31:29

We have so many good topics. We're going to post traumatic headache, neck injuries, dysautonomia, or this like equilibrium between fight or flight or rest and digest that can come up with this disruption

Unknown: 31:41

and so much more. I mean, the autonomic nervous system controls our sleeping cycles. It controls so many things that people just take for granted, you know, like the fact that we don't have to think about breathing. We just do it. And, you know, things like, if I'm laying down and then I stand up, it's my autonomic nervous system that, you know, is picking up all these subtle changes on my position and altering my heart rate and my blood pressure so that I don't pass out when I'm standing up. Because if gravity had its way, blood would not be going up to our brain, it would be going down to our feet, right?

Sophia Bouwens: 32:14

And this neural control that shifts all of those components right. So this is a nervous system has an impact on everything that goes on in our body, everything. We'll talk about neck injuries and how those play into things, because sometimes it's not just a concussion, it's a traumatic neck injury, and

Unknown: 32:32

those neck injuries can cause a lot of the same symptoms as a concussion. So just a neck injury alone can cause dizziness and nausea and changes in death perception. So it's important to be able to tease out, you know, how much of an injury is coming from the neck versus what's happening in the brain, and how those two are connected and communicate with each other. Because

Sophia Bouwens: 32:52

how does blood get through the to the brain, through the neck? Right? It's all connected. We'll talk about cognitive symptoms that can come up from this, that's

Unknown: 33:01

a huge one. I think that's brain fog is one of the complaints that I hear so often from people, and in my book, I actually talk about this interesting study where they were using the mental clutter scale to assess for brain fog severity in people with concussions and traumatic brain injuries. And it was a it was a scale that was originally used for fibromyalgia patients, and so that's one of the only kind of like questionnaires out there that is very specific to brain fog. It was such a great study to talk about for the fact that people experience brain fog. But there's not a whole lot being done to quantify it, and so that mental clutter scale was actually a really great way to do that. It's

Sophia Bouwens: 33:48

great so many things have been developed, and you tell them about me about them, so I'm happy that we can tell other people about them too. What about like vestibular dysfunction or dizziness? Feelings of being off balance can be so common after head injury, whether it's absolutely driven to the inner ear, eye or neck, there's just so many components. We'll talk about eye movements in relation to head injuries and just function of eyes as well. We'll get into moods, sleep, inflammation, components that can really wreak havoc on the brain, the body overall.

Unknown: 34:22

I love talking about inflammation, brain inflammation. The reason being, I think the reason why I love talking about brain inflammation is because at some point in time, there are probably going to be blockbuster drugs that address brain inflammation, that are, you know, make companies trillions of dollars, but we don't have those yet, but what we do have are some very high quality herbs that can do the job and do it well. And so I think that's why I actually really like this topic, is because there are things out there. People just don't know they exist.

Sophia Bouwens: 34:58

And I'm excited we get to. Share about what we know about what's out there that might not be very widely known. I think that our experience in Chinese medicine really helps us frame this question. As far as all the difficulties with like some medical care, as far as standard care goes, there's no denying some of the issues that modern medicine has, as far as with recovery or limitations, there's tons of life saving things that come from it. Though, I wouldn't be sitting here right now if it weren't for the doctors and the therapists in my hospitalization and posts that really helped me recover. That being said with some of the deficiencies, or the symptoms where they say, this is kind of as good as it can get, or, like with my Bell's Palsy, three months to six years, and you'll be better. There's so much more out there. But Einstein said one of my favorite quotes of all time. He said, a problem cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created it. I think our background in Chinese medicine, this whole other way of looking at the body that requires a lot of translation in understanding the paradigm and the framework offers a new way of thinking that's just as valid and just as true as what we know in the biomedical framework, but a different way of thinking about it that complements and helps where all those deficits in modern medicine are. When I have learned about functional neurology and neuroscience, and what I've learned about traditional Chinese medicine and how the organ system is played together in that framework, they mirror each other so well, right? Well,

Unknown: 36:39

I mean, Chinese medicine is a functional system of medicine like that. It's, it's one of the oldest systems of functional medicine that exists. I would say Ayurvedic medicine and Chinese medicine are the oldest functional medicine systems out there. And the thing that they excel at is that they see every single person as an individual that needs an individual treatment plan. And I think you know, mainstream medicine excels in acute care and in emergency care, but once things become chronic, and once people have had symptoms that are chronic for months and months and months, people often need a very individualized approach that takes into account their background and all of their pre existing issues and situations and mental health and and then current situation, current living environment, current stressors, current diet, current lifestyle. And so I think that you know, where Chinese medicine and applied clinical neuroscience come combined together is this really powerful intersection of taking the most cutting edge neurological rehabilitation strategies and pairing that with one of the oldest systems of functional medicine in the world that can see people in this individual way and see what they need that is specific to this one unique person, one at a time. Yes,

Sophia Bouwens: 38:04

no, the best way I've heard it described, or I think about it, is a functional precision medicine, because it's precise and it's based on the function of somebody's system. And the overlap between biomedical advances we have and these functional components that come whether it's from the traditional Chinese medicine lens or the Ayurvedic lens, or just what we're seeing in our testing functionally and neurologically, is really cutting edge, and it takes a different framework. That's one of the things I loved about hearing you first talk about dysautonomia and Yang Wei disharmony, and translating this, like classical Chinese medicine, diagnostic of Yang Wei disharmony, into this modern biomedical, known condition called dysautonomia, and showing the parallels of how the ancient Chinese were literally describing dysautonomia without knowing it 2000 years ago, yeah, before the microscope, before the understanding of what a neuron was, what the autonomic nervous system was like, they didn't have this framework to see the world the way we do now today's day and age, but they were master observers, and they still describe the function perfectly, right? Yeah, well, and

Unknown: 39:19

it's crazy to think that 2000 years ago, they had that level of understanding, even if they didn't have, you know, all the fancy terminology of what we have today with the field of neuroscience. But what I always come back to is the concept that every single system of medicine is evolving. You know, obviously mainstream medicine is evolving so fast it's hard to stay on top of everything. And when it comes to the brain and the study of neuroscience, I mean, that's one of the fastest evolving parts of medicine. I mean, they keep saying the brain is kind of the final frontier. There's so much we don't know, and so the fact that we have information from. 2000 years ago that's still relevant today, is pretty profound, and I think that pairing that with all of the advances that we have is so powerful. And again, it just comes back to that concept of being curious and being open minded and being willing to see what works.

Sophia Bouwens: 40:18

So I'm excited for our listeners to get to learn a lot more, and for us to share some of these exciting, fascinating things with people who might be suffering or knowing loved ones who are suffering from symptoms help them understand them and recover from them. Ayla, do you want to talk about our affiliate purity coffee and what we have to offer for our listeners.

Unknown: 40:42

I do. I started buying purity coffee over two years ago, and one of the reasons was because, with all of my concussions, I became very sensitive to mold, and I would notice that there were times when I would go to a coffee shop and I'd order a cup of coffee, and as soon as I drank it, I would feel so tired, and my brain fog would just get, I mean, off the charts bad. And so I'm like, Okay, what is going on? Right? Why is it that I can have coffee one day I feel fine. The next day I have coffee, and I feel like someone just drugged me. And so I started to do some research. It turns out coffee beans are a huge source of mold toxins if they're not dried properly. And so when you have coffee that hasn't been dried correctly, hasn't been processed correctly, you can develop mycotoxins in the coffee. And a lot of coffee that is not organic is also sprayed with pesticides. Pesticides also are not good for your gut or your gut brain axis. In my research, I discovered that I needed to start buying coffee that was free of pesticides, free of mold, and so I switched over to purity coffee, because they are organic. They are getting their coffee beans sourced from people who practice regenerative farming practices, and so the soil quality is good. They're not spraying their beans with pesticides. They test for mold to make sure there's no mold or mycotoxins in their coffee. And as soon as I switched over, I noticed that I don't feel tired, I don't have brain fog, I don't feel jittery, I know that I'm not dumping pesticides in my body. And so I loved the fact that I had gotten these little satchels the travel packs, and they were just piling up at the office. And so one day, you text me when you're at the clinic, and I think I was at home, and you said, Can I try this coffee? I

Sophia Bouwens: 42:40

didn't believe it. You've been talking about this coffee forever. I was tired that day. I think I didn't have coffee before I left the house, and I was like, I gotta just take one of these satchels. And it was the best coffee I've had. I've had a lot of coffee. I've, like, even been in Guatemala coffee bean picking and, oh,

Ayla Wolf: 42:58

I know we're both coffee snobs!

Sophia Bouwens: 43:00

and this coffee it, you can taste it, you can smell it. You feel like, I feel clear when I drink it, not jittery or like rushed. It's coffee as it should be.

Ayla Wolf: 43:11

yeah, it, it tastes amazing. And so I've been drinking for two years the Flow brand, or like the flow flavor,

Sophia Bouwens: 43:15

I've done coffee enemas for liver health and which I think is their original and then just recently, they had sent a free sample of something called Protect and it's a different kind of blend of their coffee. And so it's supposed to help improve your liver function. And if you know me, I'm constantly taking herbs for my liver. So when I was like, I can drink coffee for my liver. function. There's coffee can be used in all good. Coffee has so many applications, but there's interesting discussion about coffee and brain injury recovery, because some people are more sensitive to it. Do you think that the primary driver of that could be some of the mycotoxins in there?

Unknown: 43:59

Well, I mean, that was definitely my case. There's a lot of research looking into the blood brain barrier. And after people have a concussion or brain injury, the blood brain barrier opens up to allow for aspects of the peripheral immune system to enter into the brain and help heal the brain. But if that doesn't resolve after, you know, an appropriate couple of days to a couple of weeks, people can have chronic leakiness of the blood brain barrier, if that happens over time, that can create a lot of chronic neuro inflammation. And they're looking at this kind of, quote, leaky blood brain barrier as a mechanism that's involved in other neurodegenerative conditions as well. The reason we're talking about this is because, if any of our listeners would like to try a cleaner, healthier coffee, you can go to purity coffee.com and enter promo code life after 20 for 20% off your first order. I

Sophia Bouwens: 44:59

was glad you had in the office and I could try it out. It was delicious. Thanks for listening. We'll be back with episode two on post traumatic headache. You.