Holistic Brain Health & Cutting Edge Health Tech with Dr. Elizabeth Harris

Lisa: Well, hey everyone. Welcome into Pushing the Limits. Today I'm super excited. I've got one of my dearest friends and mentors and teachers, Dr. Elizabeth Harris, with me. Welcome to the show, Elizabeth. Fantastic to have you. I'm so excited to share your amazing talents with everybody and knowledge with everyone.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: It's going to be cool.

Lisa: Yeah, it's really going to be cool. So, Elizabeth, can you give everybody a little bit of background on yourself? Where you come from, where you live, where you trained, and all of that sort of good stuff?

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Sure. Yeah. So I originally come from America and my family didn't necessarily agree with the Vietnam War, and so they moved to New Zealand. And I did all my training at the University of Otago here in Dunedin, where I am still living. And so yeah, I just have to say it's such an honour to be on here. I remember when you very first contacted me. So I was driving up and down the road because I work in rural hospitals, and I'd be listening to your podcast. And then when you emailed me, it was like, "Oh my gosh, Lisa Tamati emailed me." And you asked me then — it must have been, I don't know, three or four years ago — if I'm on your podcast, and I was thinking, "Are you kidding me?"

Lisa: Oh, you're too kind.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: No, it's actually the truth. It is really the truth. I was very starstruck.

Lisa: Oh, right. No need to be. Obviously, now you know the truth about my life, you're probably not starstruck at all. No, but honestly, Elizabeth, you've been a fantastic mentor to me over the last few years. You've helped me so, so much. You've taught me so much. And I'm just in awe of your very deep knowledge in so many areas. And we're going to dive deep into some of those things today, especially around brain health and biofeedback and all the training you've been doing with Dr. Mark Gordon, who of course has been on the show, and Dr. Dale Bredesen and people like that that have also been on. So yeah, tell me a little bit more about your history as a doctor, because you've worked in many different fields, but how did you come to be running a brain health and biofeedback clinic, so to speak?

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. So I guess for many of us who are not so enlightened — there's some enlightened people like Dr. Tim Ewer and Maru who get into this field, amazing, who get into this field just because they don't need a great big whack up the side of the head to figure out what's going on. But for me, it was from my experience medically in my family, for myself and largely my son. And so I guess it started with our son. When he was born, he would fall over a lot. So he hit his head a lot. And his balance wasn't that great. And he just had all these behavioural problems. He would be the kid in the supermarket, in the middle of the aisle having a fit because he couldn't have Superman or something.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. And so you knew that this kid just had a beautiful heart and he didn't have ADHD and he didn't have autism. And the question was, what was wrong? And I remember reading about craniosacral therapy — and here I was a conventional doctor — and at that stage you think, well, we're going to try something else. And lo and behold, taking him to a craniosacral therapist really made a huge difference. And from there it was a stepwise progression of discovering a number of things: craniosacral therapy, phosphatidylserine and omega-3s, and then retained primitive reflexes. And so I actually got him on a plane and flew him over to Australia. I guess he would have been about nine or 10. Completely changed our life. We never had our kids — so if they were naughty, they had to go and stand outside the door. And within 20 minutes every morning, he'd be outside the door. And if you could figure out what it was that was going to upset him — don't touch his trucks or something like that — it would have been okay. But it was never predictable.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So it turned out that he had cryptopyrroles, which I only learned later when I started going off to various trainings and things. So there was what went on for him, and being able to see what a difference that made and the volume of information that was there that we never learned about in medical school.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so then for myself, in about 2004, I was tramping the Milford Track, and it was in a family group. I was with my daughter, who was nine at the time, and other parents and children. And in the middle of the night I woke up, and in the end I had a particular arrhythmia called SVT, which I'd never had before, and it's where your heart is racing and you definitely feel like you're going to die.

Lisa: And it's scary.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. And you're kind of way out somewhere where you can't leave. And so the group that we were tramping with, they kind of left myself and my daughter and kept on tramping because they were really keen on tramping.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so we were there for another night. And I kind of was saying to people, when you get out, can you tell somebody I think I'm probably going to need to be flown out or something. And so another night of racing heart. And so yeah, a helicopter did turn up, and the irony of it was that the person that stayed with me was the head of the New Zealand Skeptics Society.

Lisa: The one that stood by you.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. The universe is really interesting, hey?

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so I got flown out, and I honestly have to tell you, if there's anything that you need to put on your bucket list, a helicopter ride through the Milford is —

Lisa: No, it seriously is. It is just gorgeous.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Maybe not in that way.

Lisa: Maybe not in that way.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. So I got off the helicopter with my daughter after two nights of pretty much not sleeping. And immediately, of course, I thought, that didn't just happen. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. But I wasn't fine. And I went back to working and I was having palpitations. And then I started developing weird and wonderful symptoms. I would get numbness in an arm or a leg. I was incredibly tired. I developed incredible anxiety — like from one second to the next, I didn't know how I was going to survive. Joint pain. And it dawned on me that all of this arrived at once. And I thought, hmm, there's got to be something that caused this. And I did cognitive behavioural therapy. I thought, right, I'm going to go — and I did the whole course, I did all the exercises. It didn't work. And I hate to admit, I thought, stuff that, I'm not going to be swallowing those antidepressants and anxiety medications. There's got to be something else.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And I didn't know what it was. And I've got two cousins with MS, and I pretty much figured it was that. And by God, I wasn't going to get into an MRI machine. I wanted to figure out what the underlying cause was. And I had too much to live for and I couldn't figure it out. And this is the honest truth: we went off to Nelson and I pretty much just said to the universe, "Look, if you want me to know what this is, that's great. And if not, I'm just going to keep on going, because I just really trust you." And within about three days, I started thinking about, I'd had an amalgam filling put in.

Lisa: Wow. Yep. Yep.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. And so I had this tooth that kind of broke and I went to the dentist, and he drilled. He said, "You want some local?" And I said, "Well, no, let's try without." And I couldn't feel anything. I was just amazed. It's a little bit like Feynman — if you read Feynman, he's just so fascinated by so many things. And I was, "Wow, that's really amazing. I could have this happen and I don't even feel it." And they told me I needed root canal. Got the root canal.

Lisa: And...

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. And when I was sitting in the chair afterwards, they were filling it, and the guy said he was going to put amalgam in. And I didn't really know very much. And when he said that, I said, "Oh, I thought I'd heard that amalgams are not a good idea." And, "Oh God, no, they're fine, fine."

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So yeah, I was off in Nelson and we got back. There were no computers, you know, on your phone at that time. You get in and you look on the computer, and there it was. There it was. It was amalgams and root canals and how they can cause problems. And I was so lucky, I got onto some forums, and there was a wonderful doctor up in the North Island who had had similar problems. And she talked to me for an hour. And at that time Jacqui Kimber, who was the dentist, the holistic dentist in New Zealand, really — he was overseas. And so I got on a plane, and before that I had a fear of flying. So here I am with massive anxiety.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: On a plane, and I went to Australia, and I went to see Andrew Taylor, who's an amazing dentist in New Rubar. And I got there and his practice is in a paddock, right?

Lisa: Mhm.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And I got there and I thought, "Oh no, what have I done? This is some crazy —"

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And I got in there and there he was with his Zeiss microscope, and I thought, "It's okay. I'm in the right place." And while I was lying there with my mouth open — and yeah, I'm never emotional, but he saved my life.

Lisa: Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And yeah, I don't know if I'd be here, and I don't think that I'd be here.

Lisa: Not in a wheelchair.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Not — yeah. Without MS. Without MS 20 years later.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And what struck me was that this guy, he never knew me. He didn't know me. And before he knew me, he got on a plane. He went to America. He trained. He had a CaviTAU scan. And it was a very specialised scan for telling whether there was infection in the bone, which is actually what I had.

Lisa: Mhm.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And he did all that without ever knowing me. And it was against what the Dental Council kind of thought at the time.

Lisa: Yep.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And I recognised completely that it saved my life. And I was lying there and he said to me, "You've got to do this. You've got to do this."

Lisa: "Get rid of us." Yeah. No, "You've got to go help people."

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah.

Lisa: "You're not the only one, you know."

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Okay, you've got to pay back now.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. Yeah. And he told me — I was in the chair — he told me about... I mean, this sounds wild. It sounds unbelievable. And the stuff that I've seen since then, it's like wild and unbelievable. He had a patient who had a brain tumour and they had an infected root canal. They took it out and the brain tumour resolved.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: You hear that and you think, "Oh yeah, come on, really?" But since then, there's been one thing after another where people are treating things that we usually can't treat and making a difference. So it was a slow recovery from there, learning about mercury detox and things like that.

Lisa: And of course, Dr. Thomas Levy, who's been on the show three or four times — he's written the book Hidden Epidemic, and he's the reason that this year I got all 11 root canals taken out of my mouth, because I had 11.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Eleven! How tough are you? Yeah.

Lisa: Oh yeah. It's been a rough year.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: That takes me out.

Lisa: No, it's been a rough year. It's been a rough year, but I'm really grateful to Dr. Levy to bring it to my attention, because that's the cause, he says — and you read the book Hidden Epidemic — that it leads to a lot of brain tumours and also breast cancer, because your lymph goes right through your breast tissue here, as well as heart disease, of course. And so when I watched his documentary and read his book and had Dr. Levy on, I'm like, "Right, these have got to come out."

Lisa: And it's a similar story — I'd had a scare last year with breast cancer and it turned out to be benign, thank God. It was a lump that was benign, but it put me on like, "Okay, right, sort your stuff out now." And it was extremely expensive and it's extremely painful and it's a long, drawn-out process of getting implants and all the rest of the stuff. But your story just reinforces that I'm on the right track, because the teeth are just so important. We don't know how important these things are.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: They are, really.

Lisa: Yeah, next level.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: My charger.

Lisa: Yeah, okay, your computer charger's going. It is so important.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. And actually, I'd like to explain why that is. What happens is, if you have a look at the tooth, the tooth is made of dentine and then it's got enamel on the top. And the dentine has a whole lot of dentine tubules. A front incisor — this is the truth — if you line up all the dentine tubules in a front incisor, it's one kilometre long.

Lisa: Wow. Wow. Wow.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. And so — I'm going to disappear under my desk here.

Lisa: Yeah, she's got to put the charger in. Forgot to put the charger in in the background.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And then I'll bring this up again. So they did this really unethical study in Japan, where they took people and they got a tooth that was actually infected, which is the reason why most people have root canals, and they root canalled it. And then they root canalled a tooth on the other side. And then at — I think it was like three months — they extracted both teeth, sectioned them, had a look at them under the microscope. And what they saw is, in the tooth that needed a root canal, that was infected before they started, there were all these bacteria tracking up the dentine tubules.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Now, what happens is the bacteria are aerobes and they become what we call facultative anaerobes, and that means that they have to metabolise without oxygen. And when they do that, they produce a huge amount of really toxic materials in nanogram quantities. And then what they also do is they change the nature of the mercury in the mouth so that it's about 50 times more toxic.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So there's reasons why a root canal causes problems. And for some people, if their detox systems are not that good, then they're having issues with these toxins, both the mercury and the toxins that are directly produced by the bacteria. They're trapped in the teeth. And the tooth that they took out that wasn't infected before they root canalled it, on the other side, didn't have all those bacteria tracking up the dentine tubules. The red cells or the white cells are too big to be able to get into the dentine tubules to be able to fight those bacteria.

Lisa: Wow. Wow. Wow. Thanks for that explanation. So people, if you've had a root canal, go to a dentist who has a cone beam X-ray. It's a special type of X-ray. It has to be cone beam. You don't see it on a normal X-ray. And I experienced this — Dr. Levy told me to go and get a cone beam. And I went first and my dentist was not keen on doing a cone beam because of the radiation. I said, "No, I want one." So he did a normal X-ray, it came back normal. He did the cone beam straight after it and it came back, "Oh my God, you've got abscesses right throughout your mouth." And I'm like, "Yeah, and that's why I'm here."

Lisa: So Dr. Levy probably saved my life, because what would have happened in the future? And I've got very poor detox genes as well, so that would put on top of that. So if you have a root canal, go and get it checked. Cavitations are another thing. Can you explain cavitations as opposed to what a root canal is?

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. So that's what you're talking about in terms of a cone beam CT. It's not going to be able to see the dentine tubules — they're too small. But what it is looking for is these things which have been termed cavitations. There was a gentleman in the 1930s who wrote a textbook of dentistry, by the last name of Black, and what he talked about was cavities not only in the teeth but in the jawbone as well. The jawbone is an end blood supply. What that means is that the blood goes up the carotids and it winds around and around, and the hose pressure isn't very high when it gets there. And so the immune system has a little bit of a struggle being able to fight things. Another place in the body where we see this is the head of the femur.

Lisa: Right.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So people, if they have a fractured neck of femur, often we're going to be replacing that because the blood supply is just not going to come back, because it's an end blood supply.

Lisa: Okay.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so for families where there's autoimmunity or any sort of inflammation in the family, then there's a higher rate of this issue happening with poor blood supply in the jaw and infections. A cone beam CT — it's a CT, it looks like a 3D rendition of the jaw. And so we refer to John Hamilton here at Synergy Dental, down in Dunedin, who's just across the road where we live. We've got our clinic in this most amazing place with a lot of really cool people around. And we'll often have people coming — we have patients fly from all over New Zealand. We don't advertise, and people kind of hear about us by word of mouth.

Lisa: Yeah, I send a lot of them to you, and we work on a number of cases.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah, we do. We do.

Lisa: Thank you so much.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so we'll send them off to John. What we can do is we can drive up and down — we call it the volume, so the whole area that that CT has been taken in. And so we can scan through and it'll go through the sinuses and through the teeth, and also you can take a tooth and literally spin around it. And what will happen in some people who have root canals is that they can get a persistent infection around there.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: I've had a patient who I sent off to the dentist and I said, "Look, you need a cone beam." They did an OPG — no, I think they just did a plain X-ray — and it looked fine. And then we got a cone beam. This person had three teeth sitting in a pool of pus. There was pus literally connecting those three teeth, and you could not see it until cone beam.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: I've got another patient in the practice. She came in, she had terrible migraines, and she had been to see her doctor and other doctors, a neurologist, and she had these ongoing migraines. We got a cone beam CT and it showed that she had infection there, and also, looking at it dental-wise, she had a degree of gingivitis. And we used low-level laser — she would do low-level laser every day, I lent her my laser — and that resolved her migraines. So that connection between dental health — the areas where we're often missing things in standard medicine is dental health, gut health, and things like that.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So I guess that brings me on to one of the things that — thank you so much for inviting me to talk here — and I think the message that, if I've got the opportunity to give to people, is that we have this wonderful opportunity, what we can do to change the conversation and the way medicine looks. And I guess one of the people that I want to talk about a little bit is Dr. Peter Attia, and there's Andrew Huberman, and all these people who are talking about basic physiological processes. And Lisa, that's the way that you work, figuring out what's the underlying cause, what's going on for people.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: In medicine, in medical school, we learn about physiology in first year, and then we kind of drift away and we get more into making a diagnosis and treating a symptom. And so at our clinic, what we're doing — and what all functional medicine doctors do, and many naturopaths — is we look at the underlying physiology. That's the name for how the body works, and there's these different areas like the gut and the microbiome.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so right at the moment, Dr. Dale Bredesen talks about a complexity gap, where in medicine we're taking people who are incredibly complex. We've got trillions of cells, we've got nerves and hormones. If you look at a single cell, it turns out that most cells in the body have something called a primary cilia, which is almost like an antenna. This is actually the truth — polycystic kidney disease is a genetic mutation in one of the genes in the primary cilia. So this is not alternative, right?

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so the communication between the cells and how that occurs, it's so complex. And when we get somebody in front of us who's got chronic fatigue, or they've got symptoms like I have had, we do a full blood count, a liver function, a kidney function. We might do iron studies, maybe their thyroid, maybe their antinuclear antibodies for autoimmune disease. And yet the research and all the things that you talk about on your podcast — and why I admire you so greatly — show that there's this great depth and complexity.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And right at the moment we're in a really interesting place, both in society and medicine, where in society it's almost like a perfect storm. The two things that our clinic works on are hormesis and biofeedback. So if I just let you know: hormesis is the process whereby you do something and it makes you stronger. So like if you go to the gym, it kind of breaks a few muscle fibres and your body goes, "Oh, I'd better build more muscle."

Dr Elizabeth Harris: In the way that we lived as humans in the past, we would naturally have hormetic processes in our environment. So exercise, and even diet — some of the polyphenols and things like that — cause a hormetic stress on the body and cause it to be stronger. And so we've kind of engineered a lot of that out of our life with cars. We don't need to walk anymore, and processed food. We're not getting that. And then biofeedback —

Lisa: And cold, and —

Dr Elizabeth Harris: That's right, yeah. And so then biofeedback: in our environment we have things that, if we listen, we learn. But at the moment, say people for example get gut symptoms. So they go to the doctor and what do we do? We give them omeprazole, or we give them a proton pump inhibitor, and we take away the feedback to them that something's wrong.

Lisa: By taking away the symptoms. And it doesn't mean that we shouldn't do that. It doesn't mean that anything that we're doing is wrong. It's not the full stop.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: No, it's not the end point.

Lisa: It's the band-aid.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah, it's that. And so the question is, how can we deliver this wealth of knowledge that you talk about, the wealth of knowledge that's in the research, on the ground? And so I'm on the ground. I work in emergency departments, I work in hospital wards, and I'm a GP by training. Pretty much every week I'm working in hospitals. And actually what I do is I work in the hospital and fire that money into the clinic, because this is what we're really passionate about. We're passionate about, what would it take to deliver medicine 3.0 on the ground? And what do the systems look like, and how do we manage that?

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Because for example, about two years ago I had a psychiatry registrar from the hospital email me, and he said to me in this email, "I've had a look at your website and you say that you address anxiety, and there's not a single thing on your website that's listed in the New Zealand guideline for the treatment of anxiety. How do you justify getting out of bed in the morning?"

Lisa: Oh my God.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: It was — no, really good. No, it was great. It was great. And what was great about it was that I thought, here's a kindred soul. Here's somebody who's really passionate about —

Lisa: You're very kind.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: No, no, no, but he's really passionate about what he does, and that's great. Passion is the base for all drive, right? And it's great that he believes in what he's doing. And then I thought about it, and I thought, so here's all this research, for example, on the microbiome and how that affects the brain and the impact that it has in psychiatry. We're not talking one or two papers, we're talking whole conferences on this — and there is not a single microbiome test done.

Lisa: Yeah. Did you flip that back at him and go, "Well, there's not a single thing on your website about any of this stuff"? That just makes me angry.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: You'll know this whenever you have had family members or people who are convinced of a certain thing, and when you talk to them, what they hear is — they hear a nut job, or somebody that they ascertain to be crazy, because the paradigm is different. And if you're going to come to people, how are you going to come to them? How are you going to have it so that they understand? And we all understand the language of data, which I'll come back to. But for this registrar, I thought about it and I thought, well, if they were going to do microbiome analyses, then they would have to understand about Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, they would have to understand about Akkermansia muciniphila, and what would they do if it was low? And there's this whole — and they're already overloaded. The whole system is overloaded. I go into the emergency department and some days we've got patients in the waiting room, down one hall, down the other hall. I take in patients too, and I go into each room and there's somebody in there. And so what are we going to do?

Lisa: The world in our emergency departments — it's pretty bad.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Well, and that's because of this perfect storm of people who are in environments where they don't have the hormetic stress to strengthen their body, and they don't have the biofeedback to figure out that something's actually wrong. The symptoms are taken away until they develop so many underlying conditions in their physiology that they're actually in quite a bit of trouble. And then we're just dancing over the top of it with lots of different medicines, people coming in with 15 different medications.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Don't get me wrong, people are living longer on those things than they would otherwise, and I would never not give them. But the question is, is there something else that we could be doing? Do we have the potential to be changing the conversation? The answer is absolutely yes.

Lisa: Absolutely.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Absolutely yes. And so I guess if we dive down into a particular area to look at that and what that would look like in our clinic, one of the big things that we're looking at is head injury.

Lisa: Mm-hm.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And that started years ago. I was working in Kurow in the South Island, and I was the only doctor in the practice, which was great — you get to see everything that comes through the door. And there was a family there and one of the guys got punted over a fence by a bull, and about six months later he had to quit work. He came in, I ordered an MRI for him. And it's important to know, 70% of people who have had a head injury and have ongoing post-concussion syndrome have nothing to show on their MRI. That doesn't —

Lisa: Exactly.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: But in this particular case we could see haemosiderin staining. So that means it's like old blood staining in the brain. And he'd had this head injury, and I said to him, "Look, the reason why this has happened, your mood has changed and all of that, is because of this previous head injury." So we were able to get him on ACC. But then I became curious. I was like, there's got to be something more that we can do. And so I went off on this journey, and that's how that started.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so if we're now looking at physiology, because we've talked about that, and how we address head injury, because we have people fly from around New Zealand about long-term post-concussion syndrome — what we're doing is we're applying very much the — I mean, you've had Mark on the programme about hormones, so the Mark Gordon protocol. And then, almost like Dale Bredesen talks about this as well, the six different areas that will cause dementia — there are these different things that will cause ongoing post-concussion syndrome. Dr. Gordon also tests for heavy metals. We do that through tissue analysis. But then we'll be looking at the microbiome. Dr. Gordon's recently been talking about microbiome changes in those with post-concussion syndrome. So it's a matter of going through for a person and saying, what's going on in this pocket of the physiology, this pocket, this pocket?

Lisa: Exactly, for different people.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so I guess maybe if I give you a case history of somebody — and of course I'm going to give you, you know, I was thinking about this before I talked to you and I was thinking, oh well, if I just tell you all the good bits. There are people that you struggle to help, and every day we're busy pushing that envelope of, okay, so this person hasn't been helped, what else is there?

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. Because sometimes it just doesn't work. We throw the bus at it and we're still scratching our heads as to why.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And that's when you learn more. And that's get on a plane, you go overseas, you go visit another clinic. And so, I guess an example would be, we had a gentleman come, I guess in his 60s or 70s. He came with his partner who had left him six weeks before, but still cared enough about him that she wanted to support him. And he was angry, and she had been married to him for about 20 years. He'd always been angry, and she never knew him any different, but he'd gotten worse. And he'd pretty much gone through andropause. They ran a farm and he was kind of yelling at the people that were working for him. And she was worried he was going to lose not only the marriage, but the farm as well.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And his history was that he had played rugby overseas.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: When he was younger. And he'd fallen down a water hole and fractured his skull.

Lisa: Yep.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: When he was, I guess, in his 20s or 30s. And so he'd had this history of head injury. And we did what we usually do. And on this particular occasion — it's different for everybody — I happened to have some plasmalogens in my office.

Lisa: We're both fans of that. Dr. Dayan, who's been on the show — and I use plasmalogens all the time, thanks to you.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. So he had — we run something called the SCAT5. Page three of the SCAT5 is a symptom questionnaire, and a lot of the people that come in with post-concussion syndrome have a SCAT5 of around 70 or something. It should really be zero. And so his was in the 70s, and I gave him some plasmalogens, and literally — I am not kidding — but two or three days later his SCAT5 score was zero. He was not at all — his wife, who was still talking with him and trying to help him, had never even met him like this, who he actually was. And so needless to say, fairly quickly they got back together.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so he stayed on the plasmalogens, but he was still needing them, and we did a few other things. And I was thinking, so plasmalogens are a terminal stop for oxidative damage. Oxidative damaging molecules will break plasmalogens, and then the plasmalogens are needed for the fusion of synaptic vesicles at the synaptic membrane for neurotransmission to occur, and so then the nerves can't work. And so the question was, what was causing the oxidative damage that was consuming his plasmalogens, that he needed so many? And they're very expensive.

Lisa: Yeah, they're very expensive, unfortunately.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: In this particular case we ran something called an OligoScan, which doesn't have — I like to be really honest with our patients about what's got research and what doesn't. Hair analysis has got more research. OligoScan is used by a lot of people who previously used hair analysis, and we do see clinical utility in that. Anyway, we ran an OligoScan. His mercury was off the chart.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And this is not to say that everybody has a dental problem. I'm very careful not to do that.

Lisa: No, no.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so we sent him off. There's a wonderful dentist up in Christchurch, Dentists on Mandeville, and they're holistic dentists and they do a really great job. I've had patients go there and just rave about the treatment, about the advocacy, and how they feel afterwards. And so he went and got that done. And oh my gosh, Lisa. Oh my gosh. Like seriously, he came back and he was sitting on my couch, and it was like — in medicine I often say to patients, I wish that at graduation

Lisa: They handed us out a magic wand. There's so many times that you wish that you could just help people and straight away, like —

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And this was one of those. He was sitting there and he was just a different person. He was the person that you wish for him. He was quiet like a lamb, just so calm and happy and just normal, fine. And he had become a support person in his community. So people were coming over to his house and he had big potluck dinners when things were tough in the farming world.

Lisa: Wow. Just, yeah. I mean, you don't always have those overnight successes. I've used both plasmalogens a lot, a lot with my mum, and they've definitely been a part of her being as well as she is. But they are quite expensive. There's Glia and there's Neuro. And thanks for explaining that, because it's pretty complex science and it's hard to explain what plasmalogens do. But it's in the membranes of the cells, and they're very powerful for things that are going to help with the myelin sheath as well as the transmission between the neurons.

Lisa: So now, coming back to your brain clinic, because you have a whole lot of modalities. You also work with the amazing Louise Bashel, who's a neuro chiro friend of ours. Shout out to Louise. Brilliant person. Tell me about some of the modalities that you use and some of the trainings, and the hormones — because the hormones, and I think thyroid, is another really key place where you have expertise that I'm still learning. Thyroid — there's so much to learn about thyroid. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the modalities that you use? And then maybe we can talk about thyroid at the end, because I'd love to touch on thyroid and how powerful that is. We've got a patient that we're working on together at the moment whose thyroid's all up the whoopsies, which is contributing to the brain dysfunction. It can be very, very powerful when your thyroid's not working properly. So yeah, just tell us a little bit. You've got a CVAC machine that was Tony Robbins', I believe. Tell us what that does.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. I guess to answer your question, when we're looking at a patient, we're looking at them in a number of different baskets. And so one of the baskets is biochemical. Many of the things that you talk about — the microbiome, how that's affecting everything, and hormones — all fall into that biochemical basket. And so I'll see people, I'll take a history, and then we'll be ordering specialised tests. Here in the standard labs you can get a blood count and a kidney function. There are other tests that are available, unfortunately overseas. And it's a bit of a trick — you have to organise a kit to come with the patient. Often they have to go to the lab and get a blood test taken on a Monday, and then it gets sent up to the North Island and it's bulk sent over to Australia. There's a couple of distribution companies in New Zealand that deal with that. And so we're looking at this broader range of testing. So that's the biochemical and the hormone component.

Lisa: And having had Mark Gordon on the podcast and Dale Bredesen, that's what they cover.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. Then there's the structural component. And we're so lucky to have Louise come into the practice. When I took my son overseas and flew him to Australia, I took him to a functional neuro chiro in [inaudible] — changed our lives. And so when I first started this clinic, it was like a dream: oh, I wish that I had a functional neuro chiro. And she contacted me and she said, "I'm coming down." She got on a plane.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: She came down and she's been coming ever since. And so every month pretty much, for six days, Louise is here. And she just makes such a difference. Because when you're looking at somebody, there's the biochemistry, and what I do; there's the structural part. And we're also so lucky to have Rebecca White come. So she's the massage therapist for the All Blacks, and Rebecca is just amazing. And so — I'll talk about some other stuff. We do capnometry, and I'll talk about that. But if I have a capnometry patient where their CO2 is low, I can send them to Rebecca and she'll often say it's just like glad wrap around their chest, and she'll release all that and we'll bring their CO2 up.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So we've talked about biochemistry, we've talked about structural — like there's dural tension and various things that applied kinesiology chiropractors address. And then there's other areas of physiology. So we measure capnometry, that's measuring the carbon dioxide. We get nasal prongs and we run it through a unit. It's about $6,000, which is really unfortunate, because I believe this should be in every single general practice. There's people around the world trying to make these units so that people can measure this at home.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: But when you look at carbon dioxide, it is actually critically important. It's one of the biggest missing pieces that we have in standard practice. We learn about this in first year medicine and we learn about something called the oxygen dissociation curve. The way I explain that to patients is: if you think about it, the red blood cell carries oxygen, and we need oxygen to power our energy systems. And the red blood cell is exactly like a bus. So the oxygen hops on and the oxygen hops off. And the question is, how does the bus driver know when to open the door? It needs to open the door and let the oxygen on when the oxygen is high — sorry, in the lungs — and open the door and let it off when it's low, like in the brain.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so one of the ways that the red cell tells where it is — because being a red cell getting around a blood vessel is exactly like the London Underground. I don't know if you've ever been in the London Underground, but there's no — like in New York, you can tell where you are, there's the graffiti that means that you're at 32nd Street. But in the London Underground it's a tube, and it's only when you come out and all of a sudden there's this sign, Piccadilly Circus, that you know where you are, and then bam, you're back in this tube with no delineators.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so it's like the red cell is like — here in New Zealand, if you want to know where the wind's coming from, you lick your finger and stick it in the wind and you can kind of tell. So the red cell is going, "What's the CO2 like?" So if the CO2 is high, then it must be in the tissues where they're metabolising, producing CO2. So now it's time for the oxygen to hop off. So then the oxygen hops off, and if it's the opposite, then it doesn't.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So what happens when people over-breathe is that their CO2 drops, and then their CO2 is down in their tissues, and then the oxygen doesn't hop off. So if we get somebody and we put a pulse ox on them and they've got a saturation of 98 or 100 — if their CO2, the lower their CO2 is, the less that oxygen hops off, and we can have people who are effectively, at the brain level, seeing an oxygen level of like 82 or 88 or something like that.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: It's something that we do for all of our anxiety patients. If you have a look, there's a website — I think it's just Freespira, freespira.com, so f-r-e-e-s-p-i-r-a.com. This is a company in America where they have capnometer units where they rent them out to people, and it's FDA — Federal Drug Administration — approved. Within 28 days of training twice a day for 17 minutes, you develop what we call CO2 tolerance. So get it so that the CO2 is normal, because people have to get used to that.

Lisa: And I could explain why that is — like breath holding and things like that.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: It's actually extending the exhale is the main thing. But then, if restricted — there's a number of reasons why somebody's CO2 is going to be low, and we're busy looking at all those reasons. And then when they get their CO2 up, the oxygen can actually be received. And so what they show is that they've got something like an 80-something — it's on their website, they've got numbers — so it's FDA approved to address anxiety disorder at about 86% within 28 days.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: 73% of those people remain anxiety-free —

Lisa: Just through breath work?

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Panic attack free in a year. Panic attacks and anxiety. And the reason is — and this is one of the things that I explain to patients — I don't know if you've ever heard of Daniel Siegel, he's got the hand model of the brain. And so he says that the brain looks like this: there's frontal lobe, which is your knuckle if you wrap your knuckles around your thumb. So the frontal lobe, which is thinking, it's rational, it uses words and it's time bound. So you can talk to it, and that's what we do when we do cognitive behavioural therapy. Where your thumb is tucked under your fingers is the limbic system. It's the emotional brain. It does not use words. It only knows what it feels.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so what happens is that in our society, we encourage everybody to emotionally regulate. What that means is that the frontal lobe is telling the limbic system what to do. And if you don't have enough CO2 and you don't have enough oxygen, you don't have enough ATP production to be able to run the fast connection speeds you need between the frontal cortex and the limbic system to tell the limbic system to stand down.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So the example that I give patients is this — and this is for people with head injury and also just generally regulating. I often tell them the story about Joe. So Joe is this gentleman who lives in a small town and he's had a really bad head injury and everybody knows him. He's a bit of a character, and once a week he goes off to the supermarket and he has two people that go with him to just kind of mind him, and they stand on either side of him. And so Joe's at the supermarket and this cute little kid with pigtails comes along and bounces and accidentally jumps on his toe and keeps on going. And so Joe starts lumbering off after the kid: "Hey, what did you do?"

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so for you and I, when somebody like a kid jumps on our toe, inside us we have this response that's a dangerous threat, and we are so fast with our neural speeds that we assess the meaning, and we assess this was unintentional, it's not going to happen again, it's not a danger, and so we stand things down. But that needs power. And when we look at people who have had head injuries, they don't have the connection speeds to be able to regulate. There they are at home, and all of a sudden somebody does something small and bam, they've fired up.

Lisa: I've got that problem.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah, well, that's kryptopyrroles and a few things will do that. I had that problem as well. I've got kryptopyrroles, but my kryptopyrroles only occur and get going if I have dairy.

Lisa: Oh, okay.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And why that's really important is that Sebern Fisher has written a book on neurotherapy in

Dr Elizabeth Harris: PTSD. And what she says is that people who have PTSD, what happens in their brain is that their limbic system refers to their brain stem. So this is the frontal lobe, the limbic — the frontal lobe is your knuckle, the limbic system your thumb, and your wrist would be the brain stem.

Lisa: And what Daniel Siegel said is people flip their lid.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And they get an exposed limbic system when they're not regulated. And so what Fisher says is that people refer to their brain stem, so immediately they're reacting — their heart rate's going up, their blood pressure is going up. And if you can get it so that the frontal lobe is regulating, then you don't get all that autonomic arousal. And having the right CO2 —

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Getting the right oxygen to the mitochondria to make ATP is a really big part of that. And what else is really important about that is that if we don't have enough oxygen actually being delivered, then the frontal lobe regulates the vagal nuclei in the brain stem. And the vagal nuclei — everybody on your podcast will know this — because the vagus, the tenth cranial nerve that goes down past your ears, and the only transcutaneous area is the tragus. So you can use vagal nerve stimulators by skin, transcutaneous vagal nerve. There's implantable vagal nerve stimulators that will actually cure, in some cases, rheumatoid arthritis and various conditions.

Lisa: Rezzimax is another one that's quite good.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Rezzimax, yeah. And so the heart, the lungs and most of the abdominal contents. So when we're looking at the vast number of people now that we've got in our society who've got what's termed irritable bowel, the research shows that 76% of those people have actually got bacteria in the wrong place. And so what I say to patients is that if you look at the digestive system, there's the food tube going down, the oesophagus, and there's the stomach and there we should be secreting acid, and then there's the small bowel. And I said, the small bowel is just like your kitchen bench. You want your kitchen bench to be completely clean, because it's where you chop up your food for you to eat.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So if your kitchen bench was covered in bacteria, that wouldn't be very good, and the bacteria would start eating your food. And then there's the large bowel, which in an analogy is exactly the same as a septic tank. It's full of bacteria. You don't want to strip it in your septic tank because your septic tank won't work. So we have about 2 kilograms of bacteria in our large bowel, and those bacteria help to produce lots of nutrients and various things. So in small intestinal bacterial overgrowth, which causes 76% of irritable bowel —

Lisa: Yeah, SIBO.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: These bacteria have backed up from the large intestine into the small intestine. And the vagus — there's many people who are doing protocols for addressing SIBO. So we have Microbiome Labs and various other companies, and that's really great, but it's only one of four components that are needed for addressing SIBO. So there's the bacteria that are in the gut, but there's also the nervous system and the vagus. So this is why understanding physiology — you get somebody in your room who's got SIBO and you're busy testing their CO2 and addressing that. You can talk to Buteyko breathing practitioners and many of them have got patients who have had irritable bowel that clean up by doing breathing training. And this is why —

Lisa: You're calming.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. So there's the bacteria, and then there's the vagus and the nerve, and then there's actually the nutrition for the nerve. So we need vitamin B1 particularly.

Lisa: Thiamine, yeah. Elliot Overton on that. Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And then there's actually the environment of the gut. So the gut needs to be at about 300 nanovolts — millivolts, sorry. And it has to be anaerobic, not have oxygen. And if there is oxidative damage, then there becomes too much oxygen in the gut, and then bacteria that favour oxygen consumption start growing. And these really love carbohydrates. And then we get into a vicious cycle in our society where we're consuming carbohydrates, which you need thiamine, vitamin B1, for them to be processed. And so we have this number of people who have got gut problems because of breathing issues. I mean, I see a very select group of people, people who've had long-term problems who've kind of been everywhere else and don't have solutions. But maybe 10% of people would have their CO2 above 35, which is the minimum, 35 millimetres of mercury.

Lisa: Wow. So that's something I never knew. I never knew anything about the CO2 side of things. That's all new.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: We were talking about what we've got in the clinic — jumping back, talking about what we have in the clinic. So there's the biochemical things and the structural things, and so we're talking now about other physiology. So CO2. We also do heart rate variability training and monitoring in the clinic, and so we use HeartMath. A lot of people have Garmin watches and things like that that give them a number for their heart rate variability, but if you watch it in real time, you can actually modulate it. And there was published — the number of papers on heart rate variability training is just out of the wall. And for brain, recently — I went to a conference last year in November, oh no, it was in the May, the May conference I went to, AAPB — and they presented a paper that it prevents Alzheimer's and plaque formation, which makes sense. You get the vagus working, because that's what's happening when you're training. It's a way of training the vagus, and then there's less inflammation. And we know from Dale Bredesen's work and all the researchers in that field that inflammation causes plaque formation.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So we do capnometry, we do heart rate variability, we test autonomics more specifically. We have something called Nerve Express in the clinic where we differentially measure sympathetic and parasympathetic. So there's biochemistry and structural and physiology, and I guess also in physiology, in terms of equipment, we have got ShiftWave, which is a haptics chair. Haptics is like what's in your phone when it vibrates.

Lisa: Yep, yep. This has been vibration and all.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. This has been developed in America. There's about 20 or 30 of them deployed in the Ukraine to treat PTSD and pain. And so what it does is it exercises the autonomic nervous system, the fight and flight and the rest and digest, and it gives that a hormetic kind of stress and pushes it one way or the other. And it's a little bit like — I don't know if you've ever done progressive muscle relaxation, where you tense up your hands and —

Lisa: Yeah, yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And what happens when you do that, you tense the different muscles and then you relax them. It's like the brain goes, "Oh, wow." It's a reset. "Oh, I didn't realise I was carrying that tension."

Lisa: Yeah, you let go.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. And so ShiftWave in a way is working like that, and it's got different frequencies that you can run for different problems. And so we run that. The CVAC is cyclic variations in altitude conditioning. And it's the opposite of hyperbaric. Hyperbaric, you just take the pressure up, like 1.5 atmospheres or whatever, and you leave it there and you're driving oxygen into the cells. In this particular case, what you're doing is you're decreasing the pressure and you're creating a hormetic stress on the cells. There's research to show that there's phase differential across the cytosol — that's the internal area inside the cell — and so the kind of liquidity or the osmotic concentration. And so when you're creating this pressure difference, it's almost like the cell's readjusting: "Oh, where am I? And where's my battery?"

Lisa: You're going up and down, up and down. I've been in your machine. It's pretty cool. Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So it goes to like 2,600 — it's American — so it goes to 2,600 feet. It's simulated, so it reduces the air density in the cabin. It's the cabin that hermetically seals and then modulates the internal cabin pressures. So 2,600, and then it oscillates and then it'll go a little bit higher. And so what's happening is it's reconditioning the cells as to where they are. What we know from the research is that what that does is it alters something called phase angle, which is a composite measurement of the cellular membrane differential charge held across all the cells in the body. And phase angle is correlated with outcomes in cancer — and I'm not saying that this, you know, I'm not making a statement —

Lisa: No, we're not making —

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Legally, yeah. But so it's phase angle, and also what it does is it increases — we know this from research — that it increases VO2 max. And so VO2 max again is that ability for the body to consume oxygen and be able to use it. But what we see, and the reason why I got it — sometimes I sort of just get a feeling about things. And I was at a conference and Rick Abbey out of Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, is a neurotherapist, and he was presenting a case that he had of a patient who had dementia. And I don't know what their MoCA would have been, but they didn't recognise their family, so my guessing is they were sort of down around 10 or three, you know, something like that.

Lisa: He pulled them out completely.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: This was seven years ago, eight years ago, first NeuroField conference. And amongst the number of things he used was CVAC. And so I heard about it, and I just thought, this is —

Lisa: I'd love to try that with Mum, because I reckon with her —

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Oh, definitely.

Lisa: Hydrocephalus as well, that could —

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Well, that's the question. So what we think is happening — and we don't have proof for this — is that there is research on the lymphatic circulation. So in the body there's the lymphatic circulation that circulates and kind of cleans up the extra overspill from the veins and the arteries — well, basically veins. And so they discovered that there was a circulation, the glymphatic circulation, in the brain. And the brain — this is what I said to patients — the brain is a little bit like a water-cooled computer. And so the brain is very metabolically active. It only weighs 2 kilograms, but sitting in a chair doing nothing, it's consuming about 25% of your energy during the day. And that's very metabolically expensive. It produces metabolic waste, and that metabolic waste needs to be washed away.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: What we know is that when people go to sleep, the main function of sleep is this glymphatic circulation, and that there's this washing of the brain that occurs in sleep. We also know that in just about all the neurological conditions, whether it's dementia or Parkinson's, and after head injury — not for everyone, but definitely for some people — that there's an impairment of the glymphatic circulation. So that washing isn't occurring the way that it needs to. And when you look at the production of ATP by the mitochondria, ATP being energy production in the cells — this is the most incredible thing — but we produce our body weight in ATP every day.

Lisa: Yeah, crazy. I don't know how to measure that, by the way, but —

Dr Elizabeth Harris: I don't know, like looking at biochemical reactions and how much ATP it needs. And so if you take somebody — and this is terrible, but the way that I liken it to patients is I think that it's pretty much like when you get the plunger in the bathtub and —

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I think the CVAC would might be good for Mum.

Lisa: ...come and see you, as well as long COVID and other things. He's reading on the internet that it is incurable, that it cannot be fixed, and I'm like —

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Oh no, if you want to listen to it, there's a wonderful podcast where I learned a lot about POTS, on FX Medicine. It's an Australian one — it's not the FX company here in New Zealand, it's the FX Medicine podcast — and it's Dr. Donaghue. He talks about POTS. They've got one session and then another session, and that first session is amazing: 70% of POTS is due to viruses, and usually due to long-term EBV, glandular fever. So we use Transfer Factor MultiImmune and Transfer Factor Plasmyc, which you can't get anymore.

Lisa: Actually, Rejuvenate Pro hits a lot of the same.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And it probably does. It's got all the transfer factors and growth factors. I should do a comparison between Transfer Factor MultiImmune and Rejuvenate.

Lisa: Well, I'll start using it with my patients.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: We use both.

Lisa: Maybe if I use it, like, four a day or something like that.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah, I think with someone young who's got nothing else — they're not on morphine or Plavix or any of those things, those blood thinners — you can go up.

Lisa: I emailed Daniel to ask him.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yes, I've answered you. I've sent you back an answer.

Lisa: Most of the patients I've had haven't been on medicine, but yesterday I had a patient who was on medication.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah. So I've written you back the things for that.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And then I was thinking in terms of the message, because everything that we talk about needs to have a point. The point in what we're talking about is that there is this huge body of work. People are getting up, they're having their breakfast — you imagine them, they're in their car, they're going to work, they're doing this research, they're publishing it, and they're hoping that they're going to be able to connect to the people who need to hear it.

Lisa: Yeah, and they can't.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so we can make that connection. Here in the clinic, we've been working on an IT kind of build-out idea, a platform that would allow for the rapid delivery and all-encompassing support for patients. And so I was thinking, as I was driving here, what do I say? I think the first thing for your listeners is that there's hope. A lot of what we're seeing in standard medicine — we can do amazing things in emergency medicine. I've been in the emergency department and had patients where you're in there and you're working as hard as you can and you think, I just don't think this person's going to make it. And then you get back to the ED in the morning and you say, "How did so-and-so go?" And they say, "Oh, they're up in ICU." And you go up to ICU to visit them and they're sitting there eating breakfast and they're about to be discharged. It's just the most incredible thing.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: But when we apply that acute, symptom-based philosophy to chronic illness — often I'm drawing people a graph, that if you look at when people have got a symptom, there's a number of things that have occurred and then they get over the symptom bar. In conventional medicine, what we're doing is trying to get them back under the bar. But health resilience is actually how far you are from baseline. And so when we have a model of medicine where we can measure all these things — a really good example would be Dale Bredesen and the HOMA-IR, insulin sensitivity. So instead of just measuring blood sugar, we measure fasting insulin and have a look at insulin resistance and get in there well before there's metabolic imbalance.

Lisa: Yeah, don't wait till they're diabetic.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Well, when you diagnose diabetes as a disease, then the disease leads to heart attacks and peripheral vascular disease and kidney disease and things like that, but we need to be working further back, and that's what Peter is talking about. So we have this body of amazing researchers that have done this amazing work, and then we've got these amazing clinicians on the ground who are working like crazy and are overloaded. And the question now is, this is our chance as people, as doctors, as a society, to make the connection and to make that available. And it's not just the knowledge, because there's lots of knowledge out there, but what does it look like on the ground? How do we get it into the clinic? How do we get it past regulations?

Dr Elizabeth Harris: We've developed that in the clinic. We've got a really good idea of that, and we are really looking for anybody who's interested in partnering. We don't think it would take very much funding — maybe in the order of $30,000, if even that — to be able to prove that model. And then we have clinics around New Zealand where we prove it. In the head injury space we've got a group that started. Holly came down — you might have seen her, she posted — Shane Christie's partner. Unfortunately, Shane Christie passed from suicide. So now we're jumping into head injury. Shane was involved in the Billy Guyton Foundation, because Billy Guyton passed due to suicide, and then Shane passed due to suicide. So we have these people with head injuries who are just so desperate.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And they don't have any solutions. So Holly came, and now we've got a group — at the moment we're calling it Knock Top, we're kind of looking at what we call it — but we've got a three-prong strategy that we're looking at building out.

Lisa: Yeah, I want to join that.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Oh, sure. Yeah, you're very welcome. So, having kits in all the pharmacies in New Zealand that actually address the inflammation in the brain, because when people have head injuries we don't actually address the main thing, which is inflammation of the brain. We just rest. Another time I can talk more about that, but I guess Dr. Gordon's talked about that really thoroughly.

Lisa: Yeah, I'll cross-link to those podcasts with Dr. Gordon.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So the question is, with what Dr. Gordon talks about, how do we make that available for everybody? And not everybody are we going to be able to give hormones to, because you need to do the testing. So there's this really simple thing: Hoffer, in 2013, a US Army surgeon, published a paper on the amelioration of blast trauma, looking at giving NAC to people within the first 24 hours of head injury, and showed that there was a 44% reduction in those that went on to post-concussion syndrome. And we've used it in the clinic with people who've had post-concussion syndrome three years ago. People walk in with a SCAT5, a SCAT score of like 78, and we put them in the CVAC. They drop to 18, walk out at 18, put them on NAC, they stay at 18, stay like that, they start doing more work, and then we just tune up their hormones a little bit and they're flying.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So anyway, in terms of this strategy, what we're aiming to do is put kits into pharmacies so that people can address neuroinflammation at the time of head injury, and have clinics around New Zealand that are doing this sort of work. So there's that 80/20 rule — most people are going to respond to that. Those that don't, they can come into a clinic like we run. And then having a super clinic up in Auckland — we're talking about that for Louise, and I can travel up there — getting a GyroStim, maybe, or something like that. There's some really even bigger bits of kit that we need funding for. So, funding for this basic IT system so that we can actually deliver medicine through it, and then, in these kits, we're working with Nancy from the Devonport 7 Day Pharmacy. She's so amazing.

Lisa: Oh my gosh, she's so amazing.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: She's such a switched-on person, and within one day she's already talking about how to design the kits and things. So we're all really excited. Anybody who wants to get in behind this — this is in the Billy Guyton Foundation, all the proceeds will be going to the Billy Guyton Foundation. So we're really excited about that. But for your listeners, here we are. Let's go, we can do this.

Lisa: Yeah, and don't put up with it when you're told that something is incurable.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: What does it look like, Lisa? It's the design. Rather than people having to invent it themselves and listen to lots of things and figure out what's wrong for them, we've got a system. We just need some IT backing, and then we can actually plant it on the ground — all the stuff that you're talking about, we can do on the ground. We can implement something, and our goal is to see at least a 10%, if not 20% — I believe it could be 44%, you know, like Hoffer's research — but a percentage actual reduction in the number of people with post-concussion syndrome in New Zealand. And that's where we're going.

Lisa: Yeah. Amen. And this is just such a — everybody can hear the passion in Elizabeth's voice to get this thing going and to help so many more people than we're helping currently. Because when you have a concussion — I've dealt with Mum's brain injuries, and I've had concussions myself, and all of my clients that have had concussions — they're just told to go home and rest. They do a CT scan and they tell them there's nothing wrong, and then they haven't had one. And they're not even given the basic stuff, like your NAC, like your fish oils, your curcumins, your plasmalogens, these things that could be helping from a biochemical point of view. And then the exercise protocols, the eye exercises, the neuro part of the equation, and then all of the fancy gadgets that you have and I have some of, that can really get people back to baseline.

Lisa: We worked together on a case last year of a young man — not able to work, massive concussions, jaw problems, had had many accidents in sport. He's back at work now. He's just loving life again and back into it, after being absolutely on the floor. This is just — love it. And not everybody's a success, but if we can get a good portion of those who are really dedicated — and this young man was really dedicated to getting back, because it cost a lot of money, it cost a lot of time, it took a lot of effort, he had to fly down to Dunedin and all of that type of stuff. But if you're willing to do the hard yards, I do find that there are crazy amazing people out there that can help you, like Elizabeth, or Louise, and many others.

Lisa: So don't give up is the message, and keep learning, keep researching, keep listening to podcasts like this. Elizabeth, I'd better go and rescue Mum. She's been on the bike for an hour, so I'd better go and get her off. But we will do this again and we'll focus in on a different particular area of the brain or something like that, so that we're a little bit more on point, because today we've gone right across the board to give people a bit of a spectrum of the things that you're talking about and the things that they need to think about. And you probably need to listen to this on half speed. But there's some real gems in there, Elizabeth, and I just want to thank you for being such a wonderful mentor to me and for being available to me when I've had Mum emergencies and things like that. You're one of the good people of the world. That's all I want to say — one of the good people of the world. So thank you, Elizabeth, for being on the show.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Oh, no. Thank you.

Lisa: ...as well as long COVID and other things. He's reading on the internet that it is incurable, it cannot be fixed, and I'm like —

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Oh no. If you want to listen to it, there's a wonderful podcast where I learned a lot about POTS — it's on FX Medicine. It's an Australian one; it's not the FX company here in New Zealand, it's the FX Medicine podcast, and it's Dr. Donaghue. He talks about POTS. They've got one session and another session, and that first session is amazing: 70% of POTS is due to viruses, and usually due to long-term EBV, glandular fever. So we use Transfer Factor Multi-Immune and Transfer Factor PlasMyc, which you can't get any more.

Lisa: Actually, Rejuvenate Pro hits a lot of the same things.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And it probably does. It's got all the transfer factors and growth factors. I should do a comparison between Transfer Factor Multi-Immune and Rejuvenate Pro.

Lisa: Yeah, I'll start using it with my patients.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: We use both, you know. I have patients — yeah.

Lisa: Maybe if I use it like four a day or something like that.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah, yeah. With someone young who's got nothing else going on — they're not on morphine or clopidogrel or any of those blood thinners — you can go up.

Lisa: I emailed Daniel to ask him about that.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yes, I've answered you. I've sent you back an answer.

Lisa: Most of the patients I've had haven't been on medicine, but yesterday I had a patient who was on medication.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Yeah, yeah. So I've written you back the things for that.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And then I was thinking in terms of the message, because everything that we talk about needs to have a point. And the point in what we're talking about is that there is this huge body of work. People are getting up, they're having their breakfast — you imagine them, they're in their car, they're going to work, they're doing this research, they're publishing it, and they're hoping that they're going to be able to connect to the people who need to hear it.

Lisa: Yeah. And they can't.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And so we can make that connection. Here in the clinic, we've been working on an IT build-out idea, a platform that would allow for the rapid delivery and all-encompassing support for patients. So I was thinking, as I was driving here, what do I say? I think the first thing for your listeners is that there's hope. A lot of what we're seeing in standard medicine — we can do amazing things in emergency medicine. I've been in the emergency department and had patients where you're in there and you're working as hard as you can and you think, I just don't think this person's going to make it. And then you get back to the ED in the morning and you say, "How did so-and-so go?" And they say, "Oh, they're up in ICU." And you go up to ICU to visit them and they're sitting there eating breakfast and they're about to be discharged. It's just the most incredible thing.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: But when we apply that acute, symptom-based philosophy to chronic illness — often I'm drawing people a graph, that if you look at when people have got a symptom, there's a number of things that have occurred and then they get over the symptom bar. And in conventional medicine what we're doing is trying to get them back under the bar. But health resilience is actually how far you are from baseline. And so when we have a model of medicine where we can measure all these things — a really good example would be Dale Bredesen and the HOMA-IR, insulin sensitivity. So instead of just measuring blood sugar, we measure fasting insulin and have a look at insulin resistance and get in there well before there's metabolic imbalance.

Lisa: Yeah, don't wait till they're diabetic.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Well, when you diagnose diabetes as a disease, then the disease leads to heart attacks and peripheral vascular disease and kidney disease and things like that, but we need to be working further back. And that's what Peter Attia is talking about. So we have this body of these amazing researchers who have done this amazing work, and then we've got these amazing clinicians on the ground who are working like crazy and are overloaded. And the question now is, this is our chance as people, as doctors, as a society, to make the connection and to make that available. And it's not just the knowledge, because there's lots of knowledge out there, but what does it look like on the ground? How do we get it into the clinic? How do we get it past regulations?

Dr Elizabeth Harris: We've developed that in the clinic. We've got a really good idea of that, and we are really looking for anybody who's interested in partnering. We don't think it would take very much funding — maybe in the order of $30,000, if even that — to be able to prove that model. And then we have clinics around New Zealand where we prove it. In the head injury space we've got a group that started. Holly came down — you might have seen her, she posted — Shane Christie's partner. Unfortunately Shane Christie passed from suicide. So now we're jumping into head injury. Shane was involved in the Billy Guyton Foundation, because Billy Guyton passed due to suicide, and then Shane passed due to suicide. So we have these people with head injuries who are just so desperate.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: And they don't have any solutions. So Holly came, and now we've got a group — at the moment we're calling it Knocktop; we're kind of looking at what we call it — but we've got a three-prong strategy that we're looking at building out.

Lisa: Yeah, I want to join there.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: Oh, sure. Yeah, you're very welcome. So, having kits in all the pharmacies in New Zealand that actually address the inflammation in the brain, because when people have head injuries, we don't actually address the main thing, which is inflammation of the brain. We just rest. Another time I can talk more about that, but I guess Dr. Gordon's talked about that really thoroughly.

Lisa: Yeah, I'll cross-link to those podcasts with Dr. Gordon.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So the question is, with what Dr. Gordon talks about, how do we make that available for everybody? And not for everybody are we going to be able to give hormones, because you need to do the testing. So there's this really simple thing: Hoffer, in 2013, a US Army surgeon, published a paper on the amelioration of blast trauma, looking at giving NAC to people within the first 24 hours of head injury, and showed that there was a 44% reduction in those that went on to post-concussion syndrome. And we've used it in the clinic with people who've had post-concussion syndrome three years ago. People walk in with a SCAT5 score of like 78, and we put them in the CVAC. They drop to 18, walk out at 18, put them on NAC, they stay at 18, stay like that, they start doing more work, and then we just tune up their hormones a little bit and they're flying.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: So anyway, in terms of this strategy, what we're aiming to do is put kits into pharmacies so that people can address neuroinflammation at the time of head injury, have clinics around New Zealand that are doing this sort of work — so there's that 80/20 rule, most people are going to respond to that. Those that don't, they can come into a clinic like we run. And then having a super clinic up in Auckland — we're talking about that for Louise, and I can travel up there — getting a GyroStim, maybe, or something like that. There are some really even bigger bits of kit that we need funding for. So, funding for this basic IT system so that we can actually deliver medicine through it, and then these kits. We're working with Nancy from the Devonport 7 Day Pharmacy. She's so amazing.

Lisa: Oh my gosh, she's so amazing.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: She's such a switched-on person, and within one day she's already talking about how to design the kits and things. So we're all really excited. Anybody who wants to get in behind this — this is in the Billy Guyton Foundation, all the proceeds will be going to the Billy Guyton Foundation. So we're really excited about that. But for your listeners, here we are. Let's go — we can do this.

Lisa: Yeah. And don't put up with it when you're told that something is incurable.

Dr Elizabeth Harris: It's the design, Lisa. What does that look like? Rather than people having to invent it themselves and listen to lots of things and figure out what's wrong for them, we've got a system. We just need some IT backing, and then we can actually plant on the ground all the stuff that you're talking about. We can do it on the ground and we can implement something. And our goal is to see at least a 10%, if not 20% — I believe it could be 44%, like the Hoffer research — but a percentage actual reduction in the number of people with post-concussion syndrome in New Zealand. And that's where we're going.

Lisa: Yeah. Amen. And this is just such a — I mean, everybody can hear the passion in Elizabeth's voice to get this thing going and to help so many more people than we're helping currently. Because when you have a concussion — I've dealt with Mum's brain injuries, and I've had concussions myself, and all of my clients that have had concussions — they're just told to go home and rest, and they do a CT scan and they tell them there's nothing wrong. And then they haven't had one, and it's just... they're not even given your basic stuff, like your NAC, like your fish oils, your curcumins, your plasmalogens, these things that could be helping from a biochemical point of view. And then the exercise protocols, the eye exercises, the neuro part of the equation, and then all of the fancy gadgets that you have, and I have some of them, that can really get people back to baseline.

Lisa: We worked together on a case last year of a young man, not able to work, massive concussions, jaw problems, had had many accidents in sport. He's back at work now. He's just loving life again and back into it after being absolutely on the couch, you know. This is just — love it. And not everybody's a success, but if we can get a good portion of those who are really dedicated... and this young man was really dedicated to getting back, because it cost a lot of money, it cost a lot of time, it took a lot of effort, he had to fly down to Dunedin and all of that type of stuff. But if you're willing to do the hard yards, I do find that there are crazy amazing people out there that can help you, like Elizabeth, or Louise, and many others. So don't give up is the message, and keep learning, keep researching, keep listening to podcasts like this.

Lisa: Elizabeth, I better go and rescue Mum. She's been on the bike for an hour, so I better go and get her off. But we will do this again, and we'll focus in on a different particular area of the brain or something like that so that we're a little bit more on point, because