How To Support Neuropsychiatric Symptoms Caused By Chronic Infection

Episode Transcript

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Hi everyone, welcome to the show, I am Dr. Nicole, and on today’s episode, we’re going to talk about infectious issues for kids. Things like Lyme disease, PANDAS, PANS and how they can cause neuropsychiatric symptoms in children, and also what kids and parents can do to support these issues. This is something that I’m seeing more and more in practice, and my colleagues across the world are seeing it more as well. These infectious kinds of issues and how they’re not only impacting kids and young adults from a physical health standpoint, but also from a mental health standpoint. So these are important things for us to understand, whether you already know that you have a child with one of these issues or you don’t have a kid with these issues, but want to be aware of what you might need to watch for, especially as we’re in the midst of summer now, tick season, all of these kinds of things. So to help us sort through all of that and give us some really tangible things that we can focus on in this area, I’ve invited Dr. Tom Moorcroft on the show today. Let me tell you a bit about him.

He is a board-certified Osteopathic physician, and a global leader in solving complex medical mysteries. He’s an expert in the treatment of chronic infectious and autoimmune diseases, including viral illnesses, Lyme disease, mold illness and pediatric acute onset neuropsychiatric syndrome, often referred to as PANS. He has over two decades of experience in the hospital and private practice settings, helping his patients regain their health. Dr. Tom’s personal and professional medical philosophy focuses on optimizing the body’s self-healing systems in order to achieve optimal health with simple, natural interventions. Dr. Tom believes the true source of health is within each of us, and his goal is to empower each of you to take the necessary steps to get in touch with your inner source of health so you can experience optimal health.

I love that! Dr. Tom, welcome to the show!

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

Thanks, Dr. Nicole! It’s a pleasure to be here today!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

So at the opening, I said this is something we’re seeing more and more in kids whether it’s kids coming into my clinic with behavioral or mental health symptoms, and then as we dig into it, we find there’s a history of Epstein-barr mono, or we find Lyme or these other things. I know many of my colleagues on the physician side of things are seeing more and more kids coming in with physical impacts of this. Are you seeing more of this as well? Do you think this is a real trend that we’re seeing more of these things in kids and then, what are the potential impacts of these kinds of infections on a child’s mental health and their behavior?

Dr. Tom Moorcroft: 

I definitely am seeing more. So the question that always becomes to me: Is it just because we’re more aware? Or is it because we’re just seeing more and there’s more exposure risk? In my experience, it’s really shown that it’s a little bit of both. I think awareness is really good because the more aware we are of the potential that infections could trigger behavioral changes in our kids, and even as adults in ourselves, we can be on the lookout. So if something were to happen, we connect quickly. And typically, the sooner we recognize and we diagnose someone, and the sooner we get them appropriate treatment, the better they do and the quicker their response. But then also, we are sort of seeing more exposure. From habitat and landscape changes, the more we build, the more we change the environment. Unfortunately, when you think about Lyme disease and tick-borne illnesses, in particular, the ticks really inhabit a thing we call the edge, and it’s literally what it sounds like. If you think about the edge of a meadow or the edge of a forest, it is 10 feet into the woods and the 10 feet out. So if we take it away from the woods and we think about our yard, we make nice little gardens and we make nice flower beds and we create edge, and we see a lot of chipmunks and mice and these are primary vectors for holding Lyme and getting the ticks infected. So as we modify our environment so we can enjoy more people on the planet, and more people living, we’re creating an optimal environment for the vector of Lyme disease and these other tick-borne illnesses.

Certainly we’ve seen that there’s been a kind of creep of the ticks northward. I think they’ve always really been there. I went to school at the University of Vermont for my undergraduate. You almost never saw a tick in upstate Vermont. But now, with climate change and crazier different winters, we’re not having that really hard cold snap, we’re starting to see that we have migration of these ticks, so we’re having more exposure as well. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

That’s really interesting. It makes so much sense when you talk about the edge of that and how habitats have changed and all of that. One of the things I think about with this too is things like tick-borne illnesses, things like strep, like Epstein-barr — these things have been around, right? These aren’t new. These things have been around. Do you feel like there is more susceptibility now on the part of us as humans and children in particular, where kids may be — when you and I were growing up or even in our parents’ generation, they would come in contact with these things and they would sort of maybe not contract them, or they would get them and move through them, and now, kids are being really more severely and chronically impacted. Do you feel like there is something on the part of kids in the internal terrain that’s causing a problem there?

Dr. Tom Moorcroft: 

Yeah, I think dead-on, Nicole. It really is a thing where it’s totally different now than say, 15 or 20 years ago, because it did happen, but I agree. The thing I’m seeing is — I have to say, the most important thing to me here is there is so much more negativity on the planet in terms of what we’re exposed to. I don’t even know that it’s that much different than before, but our ability to consume negativity is much higher. I had to read the newspaper when I was a kid, or wait for the news to come on. Now it’s like we have news constantly. With social media and stuff and these gaming situations, I don’t have any problem with them in and of themselves, but kids are exposed. They can just go on a game anonymously and start talking trash to other people. The thing is there’s this negativity that does definitely impact the nervous system and there is a suppressive effect. We also know that through live red blood cell analysis and other types of studies that this constant screen time can actually lead to inflammation which suppresses the immune system. Then we start to look at our diets, going more into the internal terrain from the microbiome perspective, it’s crazy. I used to have somebody that worked for me who said that they could eat for $1.20 a day if they ate ramen. 

You are literally being incentivized to suppress your immune system and become chronically ill by our food industry and it’s becoming harder and harder to get higher quality foods without paying pretty substantial healthy nutrition tax, if you will. I do think that what we’re seeing is a combination of a lot of things: The negativity, the screen time, we’ve got a lot of sugars and processed foods that our bodies don’t really know what to do with those. I think it was Supersize Me back in the day, our bodies will adapt, but they are not made to fully adapt and evolve to this kind of eating. We see breakdown of the gut wall, which leads to different particle sizes of foods going in, increase in food sensitivity, increase in inflammation, we see insulin sensitivity. The problem with a standard American diet from the behavioral perspective and the immune system perspective is: The gut is one of our primary immune organs, and when we break that down, then our immune system is not doing as well. But we also see that the standard American diet leads to break down of the blood brain barrier and inflammation. It actually is almost like a precursor and an easy setup for a thing like autoimmune encephalitis like PANS or PANDAS.  

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah, and that’s just a trend that I’ve noticed too, in children across the board, is that the stage is set more and more for kids in this generation where when they come into contact or contract one of these infectious issues, they’re much more likely to have significant problems. It’s interesting because we’re recording this in the time of COVID-19, during the pandemic and now we have articles and information coming out about how this virus is starting to impact kids, and even kids who haven’t necessarily gotten the severe physiological effects of that are starting to see neuropsychiatric effects. So it begs the question, is this going to be the next viral piece or infectious piece? 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft: 

And what’s interesting about that is, and I think there is the “What can you do to prevent all of these things?”, which I know we want to talk about, but you look at it and you say, “Okay, why are some people so resilient and some people aren’t?” We look at where that setup is. In the autoimmune kids, we get this trigger, where we have essentially what’s molecular mimicry. I like to break it down. At the top show, you said pediatric acute onset neuropsychiatric syndrome, it’s like what the heck does that really mean? If you’ve seen a kid with PANS or PANDAS, most of us know what it means, but if you haven’t, I break it down into three main pieces, and it’s basically an infection or a toxin-triggered autoimmune inflammation. So it’s really important to understand: There is a trigger, and it could be infectious, but we’re also learning it could be environmental exposures, it could be food exposures, and usually it’s a combination of, then you have a triggering event. What’s different than just getting an infection is that autoimmunity, where your body starts to actually — because it’s exposed to the toxin, it goes, “Wait!” and it starts attacking your body, and it actually starts to see your body as not itself. So in Lyme disease, as an example, the tail on the bacteria that causes Lyme, genetically, is very similar to the insulation around the nerves in our brain and the rest of our body. 

Because they’re genetically so similar, once you are exposed to Lyme, your body may go: “Oh wait, our nerves!” That’s Lyme disease. We’ve seen evidence that you can actually trigger something like multiple-sclerosis-like illnesses because of an exposure to Lyme. The problem is you can treat the Lyme and still have that autoimmune thing going on. So we then have two things, not one thing to deal with. With the autoimmunity, because there is so much of this molecular mimicry, so much that has to do with the integrity of your gut — so when people want to prevent issues from COVID-19, or if they are exposed to Lyme and they want to be as resilient as possible, it starts with a strong foundation. That last piece of this three-pronged puzzle is inflammation. 

If I already have inflammation — I have this set point in my body, I can handle 100 units of inflammation. So if I’m already at 90 units of inflammation before I hit one of these other things, and now I’m at 190 units, you want to give yourself the best chance. I always say you want to be the world’s worst viral host or the world’s worst bacterial host. You literally want to make yourself as impervious — so if Lyme sees you, it’s like, “No, no, no, I’m not going to make it there. Let me go find somebody else.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

That’s a great way to think about that, and I love that way of thinking about threshold, that if you have a child who already is pretty inflamed, is having some of things just bubbling under the surface, and they’re already pretty close to that threshold and then they get one of these illnesses, it’s going to push them way over and they’re going to have a really tough time with it. That’s a great way to think about it. 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft: 

And then think about this too: Let’s say that we do. Our kid gets exposed to strep or Lyme and they’re a big setup, and now we have this PANS autoimmune thing that leads to behavioral issues: So now, you have a kid who is more irritable, maybe they’ve regressed in their mental capacities and behavioral capacities, so now, you’re going to ask a kid not only to allow you to help them fight Lyme disease and the subsequent-triggered psychiatric behavioral issues, but you’re going to say, “Oh, by the way, now you need to clean up your sleep, now you need to clean up your eating, now you need to clean up your physical activity”. And everybody is like, “Do you really want me to do all that?” And I’m like, “Well, if you want to get better, you need to do all this. But it would be much better if you came in needing one or two things from me, rather than 10.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Yeah. So at the outset of the episode, I said for those of you who don’t have a child with these issues or aren’t aware that you do, boy, this is an important episode for listening to what we can be doing to help make it less likely that our kids can develop these issues. I want to have you clearly just articulate for a moment some of the common neuropsychiatric, or what we might call mental health or behavioral issues that can come up for kids.

 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft: 

So if you go back to the beginning of all this, the research out of The National Institute of Mental Health, pediatric division really was looking at these acute behavioral changes in children. They initially found it after strep. So anybody hears PANDAS, it’s basically PANS, but specifically caused by strep. What we say was the children would be exposed to strep, then they would really quickly develop OCD, anxiety, rage. You might have a child who is 10 or 12 who now is bed-wetting, but they haven’t wet their bed since they were 5 or 6. There are children who will regress. I’ve had kids who were in their preteens and young teen years who start acting like they are a 4 year old. Some of them, it’s this big life-altering thing, and some of them it’s actually episodic. So they behave one way for a day or two, then they’re kind of normal-ish, and it’s cyclic. So you see a lot of behavioral changes. Then also we see ticks. Not the actual insects that give you Lyme, but the ticks where you’ll see vocal tics, you’ll see grunting, you’ll see nose clearing, lots of eye blinking sometimes. Coming at which comes from the strep exposure, it’s kind of where this all got started, where you see these really intricate and sort of almost flowy physical movements. Is kind of where it first got started, but you’ll see kids who kind of do these things with their hands, almost like somebody with Parkinson’s, but they are 8 and they were fine two days ago. You do get this anxiety. The problem is you’ll see children with anxiety, who have family histories, but this is obscene. I’ve had children who won’t go upstairs to the bedroom by themselves, but they’re 12 and they’ve been sleeping on their own since they were 4 or 5. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I think this is such an important point, because unfortunately, still, in our healthcare system and particularly in our mental health system, there is a lack of recognition about this, and so what often happens is kids and parents present to a mental health provider or they present to their primary caregiver, and they’re told “Well, this looks like anxiety, it’s a tick”, goes to a mental health provider and the psychologist or the social worker, or whoever, starts down the path of “Well, this is anxiety/Tourettes/whatever” and nobody is looking at the big picture here of the health history and recognizing the onset of this and what the pieces of that are, so unfortunately, what I find many of the times when kids get to meet, they’ve already wasted years of being in the typical mental health system and being treated like they have anxiety or a behavioral disorder or Tourette’s and I’m going, wait a second! We’re missing the fundamental piece here that really started all of this, and that is so frustrating that this continues to go unrecognized. 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

One of the important parts too, to remember to include, and it’s actually one of the classic symptoms is food restriction. I have several kids who get diagnosed with severe eating disorders, but it started after an infectious exposure in a child who was otherwise never restricting food. I’ve had kids who have to go and get inpatient eating disorder help because they have metabolic abnormalities, but it’s not until you treat them for their underlying infection that you can get them to get out of that thing. So there’s a lot of multi-disciplinary work here. The thing that got me when I was about to say food restriction, I paused for a second, you reminded me of that we’re all in this together. I did some work for years on the Connecticut PANS and PANDAS advisory committee. What we did was we got school nurses and patient advocates and we started working with the hospitals and the nurses and the school nurses to the point where within two years of doing this, we had our local pediatric hospital treating PANS. Sometimes, the lab tests are negative because it’s been such a long time, or the child had a partial treatment and now they’re negative. And there’s really not always the best lab testing, but what’s great was the heads of infectious disease and pediatric inpatient medicine were going “These kids have PANS, we’re going to start treating them”, and if they get better, I’m trying to find as bulletproof a diagnosis as possible, but I can’t find the numbers, but clinically, they look like this: Clinical diagnosis is always supported by lab data, not the other way around. I always want to give hope to parents. When we are doing this advocacy, we are seeing doctors on the front lines, including at pretty conventional institutions seeing this and making the change. 

The other thing I think is really important too is to talk about the things that cause this because this goes into the awareness and the recognition. We initially talked about strep and we’ve seen other triggers too, like you’d mentioned several viral illnesses. We don’t know if COVID will trigger this, but it could. I will say, in my experience, most of my kids who are getting treated for other things and they get exposed to COVID are doing spectacular, and I think it’s because we’ve done all of the things we’ve already talked about. So Lyme disease can do it, strep can do it, candida, albicans, yeast, mold exposure. The other things that are really interesting to me are mycoplasma and chlamydia pneumonia. These things are community-acquired bugs just like strep. One of my first food-restricted kids, the only thing we saw was very high levels of mycoplasma in her antibody levels. It took me almost 10 months of multiple treatments to get this kid fine. And she walked in eating McDonald’s. I was like, “You are the only person in my life I will not chastise for that, eat away!” But the other thing that’s really important, especially for parents and for teachers to understand and even school nurses is Bartonella henselae, which most of us think is the causative agent of cat-scratch disease can do it from cat bites, but also other Bartonellas — Bartonella henselae maybe transmitted by ticks and that’s a whole big argument, but we usually can find another exposure source so we don’t have to get off and argue with people, because the science is really out on that one. But we do know that some of the other bartonellas can be transmitted by things like fleas and lice. I very commonly am talking to school groups and the school nurses are like “Whoa!”, because you will see lice go through the classroom and you’ll see 3 or 4 or 5 kids have acute-onset OCD, acute-onset ADHD, acute-onset anger and rage problems, or just panic. And you’re like, wait? How can that all happen at once? The likelihood of 3 different kids all of a sudden having OCD at the exact same time after lice went through your classroom has probably less to do with their likelihood of developing OCD out of the blue and more to do with the infectious exposure. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I’ve never heard anybody talk about that before. That’s fascinating, and I’m thinking back to my days in the school system and going, yup. That’s really interesting. 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft: 

It’s crazy!

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Absolutely, so you have started to talk about ways that we can help our children be more resilient to infection, so sort of on the proactive end. These infectious things are out there. It’s actually a normal part of the environment that we live in, these are a normal part of the world around us. How can we help make our children more resilient if they haven’t had these issues, but even if they are having these issues, what are some of these underlying things we can do to really foster resiliency for them?

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

Nicole, that’s my favorite topic! I could talk about the other stuff, but this is the best because it’s like let’s make yourself the most resilient host, live our best life. The number one thing as parents we can do for our children to help them become more resilient is to actually model the behavior we want to see. Our kids are not going to do what we’re not doing. So all of these thoughts and recommendations really apply to you and your children, and it starts with your gut. It really does in a lot of ways. So we want to look at moving to plant-based whole foods as much as possible, learning how to cook at home. And by plant-based, I don’t mean become a vegan, what I mean is lots of vegetables and then a little bit of fruits first, then add in whatever else you like. You can put in meats, you can put in other things, healthy fats, but really it is eating that rainbow. I know that people have heard this over and over and over from everybody, but I was talking to a friend of mine the other day. He wrote a really awesome book on how to heal Lyme. We were having this conversation and he said, healing Lyme — then you look at the people who do autoimmune diets and you look at the people who do pediatric diets for mental health, and you look across the board, almost every diet helps heal things, says eat plants and eat a bunch of them. So there is a reason. It’s because your gut likes it. It helps regulate your bowels, it gives you great micronutrients, the other thing is in the beginning of all this, even with all the other things we’ll talk about in a second, I always like people to add something first before they take it away. So if you’re not eating a lot of veggies, maybe add a small salad or some carrots or some pepper, whatever it is, before you start trying to remove things from your life. It’s so much harder to add something that you start to enjoy. I didn’t know all this. I didn’t grow up in a family — we drank Coca-cola and ate processed food left and right. I started doing yoga and my body was like, “Oh, what is that stuff?” And I just listened. So before I even took a nutrition class, I literally just listened to my body saying, “Oh, I don’t think I want that anymore.” So I added some good stuff and supported my body, and then it told me it was time to start removing. The other part is, sleep is critical. We talk about gut health: Your gut is not going to work if you’re not sleeping. And if you’re not sleeping — it goes back and forth. So your sleep will be better if you eat better food. Sleep is really important for a lot of reasons, and COVID actually did some good stuff for our knowledge of sleep. When we sleep, we release a lot of melatonin and we also consolidate our memories and we heal, we do a lot of really great things. The cool part about the melatonin release is that melatonin is anti-inflammatory. It very directly blocks specific inflammatory pathways that COVID turns on and a lot of our other infections turn on. So it’s like, if I want to be really good at fighting off any of these potential infections, why not optimize my sleep so that I naturally have this high level of melatonin? 

People are like, “I can’t sleep!” Well, you can turn off your Wi-fi so you don’t have that interference while you’re sleeping, you can turn down the lights an hour earlier or at least wear blue blockers so you can get sleeping. The other thing about sleep is the morning starts at night and the night starts in the morning. So if you want to sleep at night, get up in the morning and get some sunshine and fresh air, because when you get that sunshine in the morning, you actually trigger your body to make more melatonin in your brain. That way we set it off, we create it during the day, we release it when it’s dark at night. So light in the morning and dark at night, and you’re going to be an anti-inflammatory, deep-sleeping, high-memory machine, basically.  

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

I love that and I love that you’re explaining the process of where that’s helpful because I think that people go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I’m supposed to sleep, I know I should have my kids get better sleep”, but you’re really explaining why that is, particularly from the standpoint of being more resilient to infectious things, that melatonin is a powerful way of boosting our internal resiliency and here is how to support melatonin levels. 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft: 

A ton of it is made in your gut too! The other part that is interesting is how many people listening don’t want to get Alzheimer’s? Almost everybody I know, right? So we have to talk about changing what we don’t want because our body doesn’t process not’s, it only sees in pictures. So if we don’t want Alzheimer’s, we actually are creating Alzheimer’s possibilities in our lives. But if you look at sleep and why it’s so critical, we have this system of drainage throughout our body called the lymphatic system and a lot of people have heard about it. We want to support lymphatic drainage and all of this stuff. It’s really the process of getting out the stuff we don’t want. 

In the brain, the process is done a little differently, so the term they use is called glymphatics, it’s essentially the toxic drainage out of the brain. The vast majority of the function of that system occurs while you’re sleeping and most of it — they’re not 100% sure, but the research is emerging, but they think it’s deep slow-wave sleep. So we really need to get large quantities of maybe 20-25% of our entire night needs to be in that deep sleep in order to help detoxify the brain. So if you want your kid to do better in school and you want them to focus better and remember more, they need to sleep more. If you want to perform better at your job, you want to make sure that your brain is functioning as well or better now, when you’re 90, you’ve got to sleep because that’s when you clean out your brain. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens: 

Love it. So important. So we’ve got these food pieces and basic things we can do there, we’ve got these sleep pieces. What else, when we’re thinking about building this resiliency. Any other key starting points?

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

Yeah. The fresh air is critical because we saw from the flu pandemic of 1918 that osteopathic physicians had two-thirds less mortality or death rates than other physicians, and their trick was: Get outside and move your body so that you get that full lymphatic movement and then also get fresh air. If we couldn’t get fresh air because we were too sick, we had already been struck by it, they would instruct family members to open the windows several times a day, and then they taught them a thing called lymphatic pump, and these were things where you basically shake and rock their feet, we would shake and rock their chest — it’s very simple to teach, but the idea is we’re going to move all of these fluids. The next thing I would say is we need to chill out. We just need to take some time to relax. What’s really interesting about relaxing is a lot of us will use some form of breathing to do that. When you look at the drainage of the lymphatics and the arms and legs, you need to move them. As I said, in the head, you really need to sleep, but in the chest and in the belly and in the pelvis, we need to breathe deeply and change pressure gradients to move that. 

So a lot of times, when you’re listening to somebody about breathing and they are like “Breathe deep into your pelvis so you feel your pelvic floor push into the chair”, there’s a lot of nervous system benefits, but there are huge immune benefits to doing that. The part of it is a lot of people have studies this, whether they study meditation with breathing or other sort of exercises, they have found in several different studies that you can boost your salivary IGA levels, and IGA is just one of the types of our antibodies, by 100% in 7 days. The cool part is they’re having people do stuff for 10 minutes. So literally, if you sat on the corner of your bed and focused on your breathing and allowed yourself to relax, or heck, even lied down and just helped yourself relax for 10 minutes a day for 7 days, you can boost your immune system function in a week. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Incredible. 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

Yeah, so I always say with the chill out, find something you love and do it. Meditation is focusing on something. When your mind gets distracted, go back to it. It doesn’t have to be prayer, it doesn’t have to be a flame, it doesn’t even have to be your breath, some people like art, some people like reading. Do something that just brings down the nervous system so you can chill out and it will help you sleep better. 

 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Fascinating, and again, so helpful because I think it’s not that people don’t know the things that are healthy to do, but one of the reasons we don’t do them is because we really don’t have a good understanding of why or how they’re helpful. So it’s sort of like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I’m supposed to do that.” So what I love is that you are really getting into the “Here’s why this is really beneficial”, in general, but also from the standpoint of supporting immune function and supporting health, and I think that really motivates people to take action on it when they understand here is what that’s actually doing. 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

And one of the things that’s really interesting too: I very much believe in a positive mindset. I get COVID is not good, I get PANS isn’t good. But what do I want to do? Do we want to use this as feedback that we can improve our lives or do we want to just be sick? One of the other things, when you look at inflammation and melatonin, it’s also come to the forefront that nitric oxide blocks the same pathway. Nitric oxide is a substance that helps you dilate your blood vessels. So people with things like Raynaud’s and circulatory issues really want to pay attention here. Think about it, even athletes are people who are going to want to optimize circulation, and I think all of us do from brain health to gut health and especially our extremities, but nitric oxide being a vasodilator, so it really helps improve our circulation, as soon as we start changing our diet and we add in things that we get into our salads, like beets in particular. But there are tons of different veggies that will help promote nitric oxide release, that’s a way to get it through your food, but interestingly, you can get it through breathing. The Buteyko breathing method was first developed by Dr. Buteyko to help asthma and now athletes are using it, people with chronic sinusitis are using it, and part of the reason is — and he tells us to breathe more slowly, essentially. There are tips and tricks, but it’s really just breathing less and taking your time doing it, so carbon dioxide builds up, which is very natural. When that carbon dioxide builds up, the sinuses that are in the face will create and release nitric oxide, and then that will circulate through our whole body. 

So the beauty of releasing vasodilating things in our face is that our sinuses open up. The things I didn’t mention earlier is, if you want to drain your brain the best, depending upon the research you look at, somewhere between 15 and 30% of the draining out of the glymphatic system in your brain that helps clean the dirty water in your brain, actually goes through the nasal lymphatic pathway. So if your nose is blocked, you could be blocking as much as the third of the drainage out of your brain. So it’s interesting to know, the nose and the gut and the brain are all very interconnected in the way this works. The other thing is a lot of people know Wim Hoff breathing, there are a lot of YouTube resources about that. There are all kinds of breathing out there, but for anybody listening who wants to try it, square breathing is a really great way to start. What that means is think about a square: Inhale for 2 counts, hold for 2 counts, exhale for 2 counts and then hold it out for 2 counts. Just play around with it. But most people are breathing 16, 18 to 25 times a minute. If you even just get down to 8 or 10 by focusing on just letting your breath be more relaxed, you will increase your carbon dioxide level, which actually helps in a while bunch of ways, but particularly in this nitric oxide, your nose will open up, your brain will drain better, your hands and your feet will warm up and you’ll get circulation on top of that. It’s another way to become an anti-inflammatory machine and protect yourself. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

So awesome. I’m such a proponent of teaching good breathing strategies to kids and to teenagers. This just adds to the list of why that’s so helpful, and probably explains some of the research of what we see in the research of why this deep breathing and these different patterns and forms of breathing have such a positive effect on mental health, it’s actually because it’s shifting the underlying physiology in a really positive way that then allows the brain to function better!

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

Yeah, and we talk a lot about the gut-brain connection and there is so much research on that showing the balance of the nervous system and the gut health and brain health and mental health. The part that we often leave out though — I should say that we always talk about the brain being connected to the gut through the vagus nerve, which is such an important nerve for gut function, but there is also two-way communication. So there is communication from the gut back to the brain from a nervous system perspective, not just inflammation and nutrients. But the other part that we often leave out is there is a gut-brain-heart connection. The gut and the brain directly communicate with each other through the brain, but there is also energetic communication more directly. What’s really important, the vagus nerve that talks to the gut also talks to the brain. I’m sure you are familiar with Stephen Porges and the polyvagal theory stuff, but there are different mental states that we can be stuck in and if we understand that one of the things we want to do is to get your brain and your gut back in harmony with the feelings and the emotions in your heart and feeling gratitude, gratitude is one of the strongest ways to improve your life, improve your longevity and focus and really heal from these things. Like you were saying, now we’re taking the science of why all this woo-woo mumbo jumbo is — there’s tons of medical research on why this works. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

But again, I think that’s so important for people to understand is because it makes people more likely to actually implement these things. So I want to shift here in the last bit of time that we have together and I want to take that line of thinking a little bit further because we just started talking about the thoughts that we have, the emotions that we have, and certainly, we know that mindset and the ways we think about things and frame things for ourselves have a powerful impact on all aspects of our health, particularly though when we are talking about children. To me, the parents’ mindset and the thoughts and the emotions of the parents play such a pivotal role in outcomes for children, whether we’re talking about kids with chronic infectious issues and the fallout from that or really any child, and I know you have a similar way of thinking about it. So talk to us about that. Why that mindset piece, the way that kids, but also parents are thinking about this, why that’s so important as part of the healing process?

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

Your mind is kind of like a paradigm. It’s a set of habitual patterns that you follow, and you run and run. Like you had mentioned, a lot of people want to do these things, they want to make the change, but they don’t understand why, and then they don’t do it. Part of it is, if you’re not doing it, you have a paradigm that says that you don’t do those things, otherwise you’d already be doing them. So we know what your thoughts and your paradigms are based upon your results. One of the most important things I ever learned is that I have influence over everyone around me. Tons of influence, especially my child. 

All of us have so much influence over our kid, even our teen who says they hate us is still looking around the corner at us and paying attention to what we do. They pay attention to what we say and how we phrase it. You know this because they start to act like you.I have a lot of habitual patterns from my parents. So we need to model the behavior we want and then we also need to teach our children about this too. Recently, we were doing a mindset weekend, one of our teachers had a weekend workshop and my daughter who is 10 said, “Can I bring over my cousin?” at the time, we were like, “Definitely.” We did 9 hours one day, 11 hours the next day, 9 hours the next day, with a 10 year old and a girl who just turned 12, who has narcolepsy. At the end of the weekend, the two of these kids who most people would say won’t have the attention span, won’t have the health or the energy or whatever, they were there, riveted to this program. At the end they said, “Can we do a testimonial for this person? Because I want to let them know that we stayed fully focused and engaged with all these adults and participated in all the breakouts.” Then my niece that has narcolepsy goes “I want everybody to know I was told I couldn’t do this by everybody except my aunt and my uncle, and I could do it. And I have narcolepsy, so I am not able to stay up all weekend, but I stayed up the whole time, and I’m pretty sure I’ve already cured my narcolepsy.”

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Love it. 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

The idea being is we are thinking of all of these things, right? But emotionally, we’re like, “Oh, that’s too hard, I can’t do it.” Our results are driven by our emotions. So I tell people all the time: What you want to do: Get clear on what you want, not what you don’t want. It’s like the Alzheimer’s example. It may be better for our kids with behavioral disorders. What I want people to do is literally take out a piece of paper and write down, “I am so happy and grateful now that ________” and then write out in vivid detail what your life is with your child when they are the way you and they want to be. And then you look at that several times a day and feel that emotion and start putting that out there as your goal and your big dream. I’m not saying don’t understand that there are challenges today, but start acting like the person who has a normal child or whatever you want to call it, because that word bothers me. 

So what that will allow you to do is start to treat them like they are already at that place of the goal. In your mind, you will resonate with that higher frequency and then you’re going to actually be able to make better decisions in your child’s health. You’re going to make better decisions in your life so that you can be the leader who has influence over them, and you are going to tell them, “You know what? Let’s sit down and do this together.” So you have to have your own, and then as your child starts to see you change, there is going to be an opening, and you can do it with them. 

And it sounds crazy, but everybody who has made a massive impact on the globe from Mother Teresa to all these entrepreneurs, Steve Jobs — They’ve all done this. You can apply it to health. It doesn’t mean pretend it’s not happening, that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m saying, by being alive, we’re creating results. Do you want your results to be by default or do you want to design what your life looks like? I prefer to design it. So if you want to go on vacation, we’re plugging in our GPS, but back in the day, we would plot out the roadmap. Create a roadmap and it will shift how you’re acting, it will allow you to make better choices in your own health and then it will allow you to model those behaviors for your kid. It blew my mind that this 12 year old whose family is very different from ours is now leading everyone in her family who is older than her because of the opportunity. And if you give your child the opportunity to understand that they can change — I mean, it is literally impossible to heal narcolepsy like that, but it happened. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Right. And I love that idea of, look at the way that we conceptualize this in our minds as parents impacts how we behave with our kids, which then impacts how they feel about themselves and about their situation. So when I’ve got a parent in the clinic, who is like, “This is terrible, they’ve got this issue, it’s never going to go away, this is so unfair that this happened”, and on and on, that colors every interaction they have with their child and every emotion. The child then picks up on it and sees themselves as this chronically-ill, deficient, dysfunctional person who never is going to heal, who is never going to be able to do anything, and that is the biggest detriment to healing and progress, in my opinion. 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

That is spectacularly well-said. You have a concept of your kid as sick, and you recreate that concept over and over. How many parents, even if they are like, “I do this in front of my kids.” The way you talk to your child, the way you talk to the doctor: I expect my daughter to achieve greatness, and I expect greatness in everything. I also treat her like a 10 year old. Well, I actually probably treat her like a 15 year old, because what you find out is your preconceived notion of a 10 year old — we think 10 year olds are essentially just little blah, blah, blah — No! Children will excel, if you give, the sky’s the limit. It’s interesting, I think about the placebo effect. We’ve all heard about this. It’s really responsible for approximately a third, 33% of all medical outcomes, including surgical outcomes. So if you take a cholesterol-lowering medicine, it will lower, statistically, your bad cholesterol, your LDL by 42%. The sugar pill that you think is that, the placebo will do 33%. So I’m like good, use the medicine and use the mind. Use them together, not separate. Use them together and you are going to see amazing things happen. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Love it. You and I could talk for hours about this. This has been fantastic! I’ve learned a lot of really important connections and pieces, so thank you for that. I want to make sure, as we wrap up, that people know where they can find out more about you, your work and what you’re doing. 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

Thank you, and I had a blast. This is so fun. I really appreciate the opportunity. My practice is called Origins of Health. I tried to very conveniently keep it www.originsofhealth.com and the same thing on YouTube and Facebook, Origins of Health, or they can find me at Instagram @drtommoorcroft.

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

Awesome, and we’ll make sure we’ve got all those link with the show notes so people can click on that, and I know that not only are you seeing patients via Telehealth, through your practice, but also doing lots of teaching and lots of other things for people to be able to access this information, so I want to really encourage all of our listeners to seek out more of that information, check out what Dr. Tom is doing, particularly if you are dealing with some of these issues right now with your child. Tom, thank you so much for being here today, it really was a pleasure. I appreciate you taking the time. 

Dr. Tom Moorcroft:

Thank you so much, Nicole. 

Dr. Nicole Beurkens:

And thanks to all of you for listening, we will catch you back here next week for our next episode of The Better Behavior Show.