[00:00:00] Welcome to the Tiger Medical Institute, the Future of Personalized Medicine Health Summit. And I have one of my friends, a fellow colleague and a company we're both in together here, Dr. Mark DeBrincat. And he's going to talk about the good news, harnessing neurofeedback for brain health and natural healing at home.

[00:00:32] Let me tell you a little bit about Mark. Mark specializes in brain health and providing neurofeedback therapy to his patients in a home setting where they are the most comfortable and relaxed. Having presented across the country to healthcare professionals and patients, Dr. DeBrincat brings the good news and knowledge of the body's ability to heal itself and live pain free.

[00:00:54] Dr. DeBrincat, welcome. Hey, thank you. Appreciate you, Steve. Good to be here. You bet. And Dr. DeBrincat, talk about this would not be complete if we didn't hear a couple. And maybe you can't do it in two minutes, but talk, tell your story about, the nineties and what happened and what you've had to overcome as a person and how that informs you as a doctor today.

[00:01:18] That's such a, that's a great question. And so I've been a chiropractor. I've specialized in brain and spinal trauma, most of my career, over 30 years now, and back in the nineties, late nineties, my wife and I were in a horrible head on collision. And we were both very fortunate to survive.

[00:01:39] She shattered her neck and had to have it replaced, and 95 percent of the people with her injuries are killed immediately, and the rest are usually paralyzed. So we always said, by the grace of God, he spared both of us. And here it is years later, and she's doing amazing. Never had any neurological deficits.

[00:01:58] I was passenger in the car. Braced on the dashboard when I saw it coming with my legs and split my pelvis in half. I ripped the muscles off my legs, lost a third of my intestines. I shredded my spine in 11 areas and I was a hot mess for a long time. The Best doctors put me all back together.

[00:02:18] We're so fortunate to have such amazing emergency medical care anywhere else in the world. Most likely neither of us would have survived. And so we're really fortunate to have made it through there, but left me permanently disabled in a wheelchair for a lot of years. Seven back surgeries, a computer in my spine just so I wouldn't feel anything from my chest down anymore.

[00:02:39] And my doctors kept saying, just be grateful for where you're at and what you have and what you can do. And I'm like of course I am, but this is unacceptable. My body's always healing. It's always building new cells. So why can't that next version of my new cells be better than this version? And so I was stubborn.

[00:02:59] Didn't take any medications for, gosh, close to 11 years. And then I finally threw out my white flag. And said, all right just medicate me. I can't live like this. And so that was a four year stint. And throughout that time I was concerned because now I wasn't aware of really what I was feeling. It was more like living in a bubble.

[00:03:19] And but I kept fighting to find those healing breakthroughs. And I had been doing neurofeedback for a long time, over a decade. And I tried it originally, but I was so bad that I never really saw any changes on my brain map. And so it just sat in the closet, all the equipment, for years. And then I was inspired one day by a gentleman at a continuing ed class.

[00:03:44] And he says why aren't you just training like every day? I didn't think you could train every day. It's I don't listen to them. And long story short, I started figuring out ways to biohack my brain and be able to train a lot in a very short period of time. And I eventually had a breakthrough.

[00:04:02] I was out of my chair, I was off my meds and then one breakthrough after another. And we fast forward 16 years now. of doing all this aggressive neurofeedback with people and it's been quite the journey. It has been so amazing. We have found some amazing technologies and products to really catapult us forward in getting those healing breakthroughs that everybody's been looking for.

[00:04:28] And so typically when it comes to neurofeedback, so let me just say it's been 11 years now that I'm out of my wheelchair, off all my meds, and regained my entire In fact, so much that I moved my family out to Colorado, which was my lifelong dream, and I spent six years skiing and dirt biking and mountain climbing and golfing and everything that all my doctors always told me that I could never do.

[00:04:53] And funny thing is when I went back to them and said, Hey, do you want to see how I did it? They're like, no, we're so happy for you. But no, because I can't unsee stuff like that. And I'm trapped to what I'm doing in my job and I like my job. And so I'd rather just not know. And I thought that was an interesting viewpoint.

[00:05:09] So none the least but it really has. Turned into, long before this last few years, everybody's doing zoom calls and so forth. I've been managing patients globally for about 15 years doing aggressive neurofeedback, where we literally have most of them doing up to four hours a day, every day of the month.

[00:05:30] Never hitting a wall, just growing new brain tissue and really finding these amazing breakthroughs and getting out of wheelchairs like myself and overcoming all sorts of, mostly traumas, but a lot of them are like strokes and, heart attacks and things like that, that are different kinds of trauma that certainly definitely change brain function.

[00:05:50] And if you're not looking at the health of your brain, there's this big black hole in your care plan of your health. What's happening moving forward, we can predict things 15 years out and not let them ever happen, or at least change the path, the trajectory that you're on right now and do something for you.

[00:06:11] That's going to help change the actual way your brain's functioning. It's only up to us to be able to do that. Nobody else is going to be a supply Sergeant for you. What you know, be accountable to give you this stuff. It's like you have to be accountable for yourself to be proactive towards, preventing a lot of the things that happen aggressively for a lot of people.

[00:06:33] Yeah, it's interesting how so much medical science and we don't look at the brain. It's the one organ. We don't look at and that's what you're saying. You do not to break out. What are the deficits that neurofeedback can address in the brain? Because it's, people have a lot of habituated neural pathways and neurofeedback can actually undo it.

[00:06:53] And just so you know, I think you know this, but for the audience, I've done over 10, 000 minutes of neurofeedback myself. And it had a huge impact on my life, so I want to hear about what you think there. So when we do a QEG of the brain, we can basically reconstruct the entire neurology of your brain into a 3D model of 12, 800 little tiny cubes of brain tissue.

[00:07:21] And we can identify what each one is doing or not doing. And we can see over stimulation of neural impulses, which we call inflammation. And then we can see lower amplitude or slower signals, which is more degeneration, like the breaking down and the oxidation of your brain tissue to the point that it's just stealing your charge away.

[00:07:46] Your brain cells have one job and one job only all day long. Send information. That's what they were built to do. And they're gonna do that just like your cell phone until there's no charge left. And then it looks pretty, but it's really not doing anything for you. So when we look at the brain at idle, under rest, daytime eyes open, and then the processes that are supposed to happen to settle you down when you close your eyes and relax we're getting a look of your vehicle, and it's running.

[00:08:15] And what's that idle sound like? Is it running too high? Is it backfiring? Is it spinning, sputtering and stuff? It's like there could be a lot of things wrong with the car that would make it not sound right. So we can actually see, sorry for that, we can actually see the idle states of the brain.

[00:08:32] And then we can use that information to impact the brain's ability to change. And sorry. No, it's okay. Take your time.

[00:08:46] So we can see those idle states of the brain and see, hey, this area is too high and the back area is way too low. Now we can do what we call neurofeedback training, which encourages the brain to behave differently. And just like the Pie Piper and all the mice following him because they love that song, your brain loves to follow wherever there's music.

[00:09:11] And so when it hears a certain brain wave, it says Oh, I can produce that brain wave. And it actually just starts producing that brain wave. It follows along. And so as a technician, we are trying to calm down the overactive parts of the brain and wake up the under parts of the brain, the under functioning parts of the brain, which is inevitably a lot more harder to do.

[00:09:33] And when we can keep that brain at homeostasis, guess what? You have so much extra neurology and redox chemistry in your body to do healing. Other than that, it's spending everything you can make just to keep you trying to get you to that place called homeostasis, where all of our vital signs are in line and we're healthy.

[00:09:56] Yep. Yep. Interesting. So what, when you do training, what does it look like? Are you listening to music? Are you watching a video? And then whatever it is, how is it working? How does it change your brain? Okay. So that's a great question. There's lots of different. Ways to do neurofeedback, depending on the physical abilities of the person.

[00:10:18] For instance, when we do it on infants and toddlers who aren't going to sit there and watch movies, they can hold onto a teddy bear and the stimulation is a vibration when they're doing everything right in their brain. And they like that vibration. It like tickles. And then when they aren't doing the right commands, it stops.

[00:10:38] Now we could have adults laying in a bed that does tactile. We have eyes closed audio, like Alpha Theta training, which does like a control alt delete in your computer. It does a reset to your brain, and it can really help people all of a sudden feel like, What was the stress I was worried about? I feel like I just graduated college, and the world is my oyster.

[00:10:59] It's it can bring you right back to those places. But for the majority of neurofeedback. It's called fast wave training. And so we will take four areas of the brain through the looking at the raw data of the map, and we will come up with the ideal protocol for each person, meaning which areas do we need to wake up.

[00:11:20] And what areas do we need to wait down? So for an example, let's just say I had an overactive frontal brain and I talk all the time and I'm thinking all the time and I have a hard time, not, and then my memory is getting really bad. So the back of my brain is getting really slow and I'm walking into rooms saying, what was I coming in here for?

[00:11:38] Okay. So for that type of situation. There'd be four commands. Two of them are saying, lower this amplitude and I'll give you a reward. And the other two are saying, wake them up to here and I'll give you a reward. And so it's recording 60, 000 neural synapses every hundredth of a second. And so when you first get hooked up and you watch a movie, we recommend you're watching something that's exciting, that keeps your attention on the screen.

[00:12:06] That's a key part to this because 80 percent of it's a visual effect. And and the screen has built in dimmers to it for each one of those four areas. So it'll read your brain space for the first minute or two, and it'll adjust its thresholds to meet where you're at. And then it takes over and says, Oh.

[00:12:27] We want you to calm down so the front thresholds go, if you can get below here and here, we'll turn your video back on for you. Or we'll take the dimming off. And it seems like clouds are rolling over the screen when they were filming the movie. So it's not like somebody's annoyingly turning a light on and off.

[00:12:43] It's just, if you're not paying attention to it, you don't realize it's happening. If you're paying attention to it, oh yeah, it's still dimming. And so each one of those thresholds controls 25 percent of how dim it goes. So if all four went out of place, it's pitch black. Your brain's so fast at adapting, it doesn't let that happen.

[00:13:03] And so it'll just hold the carrot a little bit and then your brain does that and it stays there. Now here's the thing, it's dynamic, which means you get better at it real quick. And then you wouldn't even get any neural feedback. If it was just locked into the first threshold it set for you, within three to four minutes, it would be bright the rest of the time you were training because it's not hard for your brain to maintain that.

[00:13:26] It'll adapt very quickly. But when it realizes that it's controlling what's happening, it'll keep making, the system goes, let's make it harder and harder. Just you think you're getting better, make it harder. Then all of a sudden you start to fatigue. And you start to fail a lot. It says, Oh no, let's make it easier.

[00:13:41] Don't quit yet. Don't quit. It keeps making the threshold easier. It wants to keep you at that 70 percent of the time where you're growing brain tissue. And 30 percent of the time you're being disciplined. That's the sweet spot for this thing we call neuroplasticity. This is your body growing new brain tissue after you're an adult.

[00:13:59] After 25 years old, that just doesn't happen, unless you're a forever student. It's only when you're learning something and you're really trying hard to learn it, and you're like, one step from getting it. That's the beauty of these BDNF proteins that start being produced in your brain and that's where you're starting to lay down new brain tissue.

[00:14:20] Oh, that's great. So what are the most common reasons people come to you for neurofeedback? Do they have anxiety? Are they depressed? Or are they trying to get peak performance? You're probably going to say yes to all of it. But yeah that's an, it's an interesting question because it really goes where the clinicians intent and passion lies.

[00:14:40] Yep. So when I was living in Georgia, I was doing a lot of children, a lot of autism, a lot of birth defects and developmental issues. And then out in Colorado, I was doing more athletes and peak performance and a lot more sports. And then down here in Naples, Florida, it's really cognitive decline.

[00:15:04] Everybody's wanting to grow old gracefully and they have the means to be able to do what they need to do to turn it around. And we can catch things like sometimes 15 years before it happens and really negate those things from happening. Now, all along, in all three locations, there's always been a lot of brain and spinal trauma.

[00:15:22] So physical traumas, tend to navigate towards me because that's what I've been through and that's what I've walked through to the other side. So people want to go with somebody that specializes in that. And ironically, if you've been through it, that makes you even a little bit more experienced in the outcome.

[00:15:38] And so that's been a big passion for me is seeing people find those breakthroughs. Now, in that, when I say traumas, a lot of times it's strokes, or it's. It's physical car accidents or sports injuries, a lot of concussions and, basically people that, and there are anxiety and depression and ADD and insomnia, those are very common for people that didn't have the traumas.

[00:16:02] And they're refreshing when we get those cases because it's a much quicker to get the bigger results, so they don't have as far to go. Now, part of our evaluation of the brain map, we look at Broadman areas. Now you have looking at a map, you got all these different regions on both sides of your brain, and every one controls very specific neurological functions.

[00:16:26] So we can see, without any shed of doubt, what area is the most dysregulated. And then, what does that control? What symptoms would you be having? And we can also see, how many deviations above normal is that? When somebody comes in, like just one or two deviations, I can tighten that up in a month. And we can have some amazing changes in a very short period of time.

[00:16:49] If it's 17 deviations above normal, we're looking at a year or two, it's going to be a journey. You'll see progress and breakthroughs all along the way, but this isn't something that's easy to fix. There's not some magical thing we do and you're just better. It's it takes dedication. It takes persistence.

[00:17:05] It takes a lot of hard work, but you will get to the goal. Because it's just, it's how our bodies are created to be self healing and self regulating. And we just have to get out of the way and give it the things that can help it input and get there faster. That's technologies, that's resources. There's products that we use that there's no way anybody else could go four hours a day every day for a month.

[00:17:28] Your brain would not be able to handle it. In fact, the normal protocol is 30 minutes twice a week. As you've done a lot of hours. Because your brain is, has more mitochondria in the cells than anywhere else in your body. It's like a little engine that produces oxidative waste, like combustion, okay?

[00:17:47] Your gut cells have three of those engines in them. Your muscle cells have 300. And guess what? Your brain has two and a half million per cell. That's like going to the Superdome and all those cars are racing inside an indoor arena and it's all smoggy and, all that combustion. That's what your inside of your cells feel like.

[00:18:05] And so that's what we need to deal with the most, is take care of your brain. The rest of your body will follow easily. But if you're not taking care of your brain is literally sucking up all your resources. It uses 20 percent of your blood, although it's 2 percent of your body.

[00:18:24] We're the only animals on the planet that have that ratio. And it also uses a lot of In fact, our brains produce 300 times more oxidative stress than a dolphin or a whale or a gorilla. 300 times more oxidative stress than the human brain. Does your feedback help address mitochondrial dysfunction as well, overall?

[00:18:44] I don't know. I don't know that. The mitochondria are not part of our own DNA. They have their own DNA, so they're like little aliens living inside our cells. So there's lots of products and technologies that we can do that we definitely see raise the potential of your mitochondria and help them function better.

[00:19:04] We can even produce, we can even consume products that the mitochondria produces. So as we lose mitochondria, we don't lose our cell signaling, which is a huge part of, our neurology. Everything's about the signal. We call it inmate intelligence, and it's redox molecules, sending information all through your body, like little workers in there doing the job.

[00:19:26] So when we learn to work with our body, and not try to fight it, And not try to just mask the symptom, but get to the root cause of it. There's amazing breakthroughs in freedom that comes with that. It's a reward for all the self discipline and actually caring enough to do the right things enough times.

[00:19:47] You have to be consistent. We say 80, 20 rule, a hundred percent is just not feasible. Okay. That's just not a reality, but every now and then you've got to challenge the system and throw a meal in it. Do some fun thing that you don't usually do, but then the very next meal. Go back to your clean eating.

[00:20:06] Like you don't want to do back to back because then your brain's going to start having to get resources from somewhere else. They can handle one meal every now and then blows the whistle. All the workers step back from the assembly line. Nothing to see here. Let all this junk pass through. Yeah, my, I watched my son, it transformed my son's life. He had ADD, poor grade point average. He was able to turn that around, function very highly, have a 3. 9 in college. I've seen it, eliminate anxiety. A lot of people like me, excuse me.

[00:20:50] Thankfully, we can edit that out of the video. Sure. Okay, I'm good. I was an overworked executive with a tired on fire brain. And there's so many applications of this. If you're 50 and you've got, you're running a company, you got a big career, you really need to do this. And if you get, if you're older and you want, you're worried about cognitive disease, it's another excellent use.

[00:21:14] If you're, if you have a kid in high school who's struggling mental health and with focus ADD, it's another excellent use. It's even good for people trying to overcome addiction. research on that. And then like you said, you specialize, you'll work with all of those people, but you have a specialty in those traumas, Mark, how do people find you?

[00:21:34] Because this is they need to talk to you and find out about this brain training. So how do they find you so that they can learn more? You can go to the goodnewsdoctor. com. And you can pretty much do that any way you want. Spell out doctor or just do DR or just type in good news doctor. They all will find your way back to me.

[00:21:54] I'm also on Spotify and Apple TV. I have a podcast. You can go to YouTube as well. And it's the good news doctor podcast. And I've had some great celebrities and athletes, professional athletes that have been my patients over the years that have come through our program and have really had some life altering breakthroughs.

[00:22:14] And they love to get on our podcast and talk all about it. Yeah. So good. That'll be in the notes. And just so you guys know, if you do seek him out, he's got a bunch of other really cool stuff at his clinic. It's not just this, but we'll let him explain that to you when he reaches out. Dr. Mark, thank you for coming on the summit.

[00:22:32] Hey, thank you for having me, Steve. My pleasure.