Dr. Kristin Hieshetter explores the science behind the powerful benefits of laser therapy for concussions and other brain-related health issues. If you want to hear some amazing and miraculous stories from the trenches, you will not want to miss this episode. Join us as we explore concussions and lasers with Dr. Hieshetter.
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Transcript:
Dr. Chad Woolner: What’s going on everybody, Dr. Chad Woolner here and this is episode 24 of The Laser Light show and on today’s episode we have with us Dr. Kristen Hieshetter and we’re going to be talking about lasers for concussions. So let’s get started.
Growing up in Portland, Oregon, I used to love going to laser light shows at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. They would put on these amazing light shows with incredible designs synced up to some of my favorite music. From the Beatles to Pink Floyd to Jimmy Hendrix and Metallica; they were awesome. Little did I know then that lasers would have such a profound effect on my life decades later. As a chiropractic physician, I have seen first-hand just how powerful laser therapy is in helping patients struggling with a wide range of health problems. As the leader in laser therapy, Erchonia has pioneered the field in obtaining 20 of the 23 total FDA clearances for therapeutic application of lasers. On this podcast, we’ll explore the science and technology and physiology behind what makes these tools so powerful. Join me as we explore low-level laser therapy. I’m Dr. Chad Woolner along with my good friend Dr. Andrew Wells and welcome to The Laser Light Show.
Dr. Chad Woolner: All right, welcome to the show. Dr. Wells, how are you doing? Good.
Dr. Andrew Wells: Doing great. Thanks. Awesome. Yep.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Welcome Dr. Kristen Hieshetter. How are you? Good to have you here with us.
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: Thank you for having me on board. I think this is going to be a fun little snippet of my day.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Yeah. So tell us a little bit about yourself where you’re from, what you do, and what you love about lasers. Let’s start there.
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: Thank you so much. I’m originally from Michigan, I practiced in a very small town called Newbury, Michigan for about 11 years. And that was where I first began working with low level laser therapy. I bought an XLR8 handheld device. And at the time, my clinic was located in a specialty clinic of a hospital so they ran all my labs and all my X-rays. It was a really neat setup, but I only had two treatment rooms.
And after purchasing one laser, I fixed a patient who was a rather prominent figure in the community. He had had a stroke in 2013. I lasered his brain using Dan Murphy’s cranial protocol in February 2016. And by April that year, he was walking and talking and picking up rocks in his 60 acre field, which he hadn’t done since his stroke. So when people in the small town saw what we had done for this gentleman, my clinic became so busy that I had to relocate. I purchased a building across the street from the hospital, I was still an affiliated physician, so they still ran all my tests for me. But in the purchase of that building, I had to get the FX 635. The 405 hadn’t been invented yet. So I got the 635 and a base station. And from there it was lasering everybody that came through the door.
We fixed so many different conditions, not just related to spine but related to pain because I was a hospital affiliate and I had a registered nurse who worked with me. If a medical doctor had written a prescription for a certain treatment protocol, we were able to legally do it – Michigan’s quite restrictive in their scope.
So that clinic did very, very well, for a number of years. And my husband, he was a chemical engineer, I was offered a position down in South Carolina. So that’s where I now practice. We started our clinic in August of 2020. So during the middle of a global pandemic, yeah, we opened up in a hyper saturated, basically hyper saturated area, as far as chiropractic goes. And we were still able to grow, survive the pandemic, and create a really amazing clinic in a town where nobody knew who we were. And it was because we’re doing things with lasers that no one around here is doing, which is thrilling for me, you know, I love it. And as we were talking before we came live. I love teaching other doctors to use these protocols, because I can’t put my hands on every person. I can’t show the protocols to every single person. But the more doctors who truly understand the power of these devices, and why you would want to put a laser on every patient. That’s my passion. We can’t possibly reach everybody by ourselves. But as chiropractors we’ve seen over the past decades, that as long as we team up and have a clear concise message and deliver care that goes above and beyond. We do very very well. So that’s pretty much why I love lasers. I will never practice without them.
Dr. Andrew Wells: Yeah, I wanted to bring up an interesting point, and thank you doctor for mentioning a little bit about your background. I didn’t know where Newberry Michigan was so I looked it up as we were talking here, and you, it is a small town and that’s in the U.P. (Upper Peninsula), correct?
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: Yes. I had over 8,000 patient charts. There were only 2,000 people in the town. So basically, I had people traveling hours to come to me.
My most interesting patient case was, well I had a lot of them, but I became reputable. I had one patient who was very old, she had horrific scoliosis and she had a compression fracture. And on Monday, she was able to walk into the clinic. By Wednesday, she was in a wheelchair. So they had just wanted her to go to the ER and put her on pain meds and do all the ridiculous stuff. Well, her neurosurgeon was at the University of Michigan, and we called his PA, because he was operating at the time. The PA texted what was happening with this patient, and I said, she’s not going to get better with laser. This is what happened. He then, because we were so rural, you had to airlift these people. So we airlifted this patient to University of Michigan, she got emergency surgery, but the respect that I had earned by being a very good clinician, and by being able to articulate what I was what I was doing with these low level lasers, gave me the professional latitude to call up a neurosurgeon at U of M and say, Hey, she’s got a compression fracture, it’s only visible on the left posterior oblique, the radiology team missed it, I have to get her to you. And so he said, “okay.” And she flew down, and she was walking again in three months.
Dr. Andrew Wells: Wow, that’s an amazing story. And the interesting thing I wanted to bring up about being a reputable doctor in a small town is we’re going to segue in a minute to talk about concussions, which is what this episode is about, but you help somebody with a stroke. And then those people talk, they hear things, and then all of a sudden, you get, I imagine, I’m just guessing you’re getting now back pain patients, you’re getting patients with other things, probably saying, Hey, can lasers help with XYZ?
And the interesting thing about lasers is it can help with concussions, but they also help with lots of other conditions and things that patients are suffering with. And so I just find that, I find that really, I find that small town communication process really fascinating. And then here you are with this amazing tool to help a lot of different people with different things. And you said what, eight, you had 8,000 files with 2,000 people. That’s incredible.
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: It’s pretty wild. It was pretty wild. And it’s my joy. And I still keep in touch with a lot of folks from that region. I’ve been doing telehealth all through COVID. I drop shipped all of our brain protocol supplements to these people. Six of them have become chiropractors now. So it’s been a fun ride. It’s been a fun ride. Yeah. Cool.
Dr. Chad Woolner: For me the question as you were sharing all this the question that you kind of touched on a little bit, but I’d like to maybe probe a little bit deeper here. Is the relationship dynamic in a small town like that between you and other health care professionals, particularly the medical community, right, obviously affiliated with the hospital? What was the response that they were seeing, not only from that pretty dramatic, stark experience with the post stroke, but just in general, lasers for these other patients where they were they were they open to it? Were they just indifferent about it? Or were they actually starting to take notice of it as well and be like, “Wow, this is a legit service that she’s, you know, a resource.”
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: I think there were perhaps a couple of physicians that were almost standoffish, okay. But 90% of them would send me their pain patients or patients that they just couldn’t fix. And one of my dear friends is a cardiologist in that region. His wife is a physical therapist. He was getting chronic headaches because he was a, you know, seven foot tall former javelin thrower for Michigan State University. And he was a concussion patient. He is a cardiologist who’s seven feet tall. When you’re in the ER trying to put the defibrillator on the patient and trying to do CPR. He had hit his head on some of the low hanging equipment. And sustained a concussion himself. Yeah.
So of course as a concussion patient is a seven foot ER doc cardiologist, brilliant guy and his wife’s a physical therapist. I’d worked on them before for other things. I’d adjusted their baby and their daughter and so they said, “What do you do for concussion?” I said, Well, we maximize brain health, we maximize brain energy and ATP. So in chiropractic that means low level laser, medium chain triglycerides, acetyl, l carnitine, alpha lipoic acid, magnesium to plug the calcium channels. And so that way we take the brain astrocytes that are sick from getting clocked in the head and make them healthy again.
So as a cardiologist, well, how do the astrocytes get sick? Well, when we get hit in the head, we throw the plug on the NMDA receptor, we’ve got to replug that or too much calcium is going to rush into this cell, the cell is going to become a sick brain cell, and that sick brain cell is gonna become a dead one. If we don’t stop that neurometabolic cascade. Well, how do we do that? We pop a laser on it, because the laser, not only is it going to help close that calcium ion channel, but it’s going to upregulate the metabolism, metabolism of the brain so we can pump out those metabolic byproducts that have already built up.
We know that if the mitochondria get too backed up, you’re not going to be able to clear those toxins as efficiently so the excess glutamate, the excess sportaid, those are all going to continue to make your brain cells sick if we don’t pump them out. So then he says, “Okay, well, what about the fatigue of concussion?” And I said, Oh, buddy, this is the best part.
So we know that you hit the back of your head, when you were doing CPR on your patient, all of the energy that your brain is producing is going to the back of your head right now to heal the damaged area. Correct. And he says “of course.” This is why you can’t think this is why you have brain fog. Your brain is not devoting any energy to your cortex, your prefrontal cortex and your homunculus and your temporal lobes, we’ve got to get the energy back in those areas.
How do we make a meaningful upregulation in ATP? Number one, medium chain triglycerides, right because the brain can function 60% better on those than it can on sugar or carbs. And then we put a laser on it because now we’re getting that cytochrome c oxidase activation, we’re getting 36 ATP per electron transport chain cycle, and we’re knocking out the free radical production. So I’ve thrown out enough of the big fancy words where my buddy was convinced. We used it to treat his concussion, and his was severe. It took about two weeks before he wasn’t dizzy.
But at that time, we were also adjusting the cervical spine and working on other places in his body. And it was really neat because he had been driving from Northern Michigan all the way down to Grand Rapids for about an eight hour trip to get Botox injection in his suboccipital musculature. After working on him with chiropractic care and low level laser, he stopped doing that. And his wife was so excited that they didn’t have to make this crazy trek down to lower Michigan in the wintertime with two little teeny tiny kids. They ended up actually purchasing a laser. Wow. So they still Yeah, yeah, it’s really cool. So we’ve made a lasting impact on these health providers who really understand what it’s about. They don’t want to be without it once they see the value of what these devices can do.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Yeah, that’s amazing.
Dr. Andrew Wells: We’re, as we’re talking about this, Dr. Hieshetter, Chad and I just had a conversation this last weekend about and looking at some of the really sobering statistics that the CDC is putting out in terms of brain health. So not just for concussions, and TBIs. But when you look at neurodevelopmental problems, when you look at cognitive decline, dementia, Alzheimer’s, I think the stat was and correct me if I’m wrong, Chad, that by the year 2050, which is 28 years from now, that half of children born in the US will will be born with an autism spectrum disorder. Is that I get that right Chad?
Dr. Chad Woolner: That’s what I’ve heard. Exactly what I’ve heard. Yeah.
Dr. Andrew Wells: And similarly when you look at older folks, is that half of the population I believe would die with a neurodegenerative disease. Yeah, so we’re talking about half the population just born and half the population who are in their older years. And think of the personal impact of those conditions but also the global impact on everybody in society. What that’ll have, it’s a very scary, very sobering statistic. And as you’re talking about brain health, you seem to light up a little bit and get excited about that because as it exists right now, in conventional medicine, there are literally no tools for this. I mean, you’re mentioning like how, and no offense to the cardiologist but how insane it is to have to go and get Botox injections in the musculature right like I understand there might be some therapeutic value for that but probably is doing literally nothing to help the brain heal.
And just in here, you have probably a very brilliant doctor, a cardiologist, probably very passionate about what he does and, and like, what do you do for, you know, what do you do for somebody suffering with a brain health issue. And so no doubt that this is probably why you’re busy practitioner and why you’ve been successful in your practice in Michigan and South Carolina, just you’re helping people with with problems that are conventionally very difficult to solve, or just having no like, no, literally no tools in the tool belt, in terms of solving these problems.
Dr. Chad Woolner: So yeah, the the point that I was gonna bring up too sorry, I was just gonna say the point that I was gonna bring up too, that you made mention of is this whole idea of, you’d said, you know, if we don’t intervene with something, the sick brain cells are gonna die. And it’s frightening to think that one of the standard protocols associated with concussion is just kind of this watch and wait mentality of just kind of let’s just wait it out, you know, when what you were hinting at is that time is of the essence, right? If you’ve had a head injury and a brain injury, timing is critical. We know that with things like stroke, and yet, for whatever reason, that hasn’t yet, kind of permeated in terms of concussion, either. You know, concussion, the standard is like, oh, you’re okay, you’re not dead. So let’s just kind of wait. And what you’re showing there is like, you can get on top of this, and you should get on top of it as quickly as possible to start kind of stopping some of the, you know, detrimental effects that will take place.
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: And we did that too, you know, for our football players, or hockey players or soccer players. They were coming in for prophylactic laser treatment all throughout their seasons. And I was very fortunate, because I could offer treatment packages that were very affordable for these patients. And so what I would do is say, okay, during your season, you can come in, and for $300, you have unlimited access to the laser all season long. Every athlete, so two to three times a week, as often as these kids could get in, they’re getting under the laser. Because we know that upregulating ATP ahead of a concussion helps. We know that taking omega 3 fatty acids ahead of the concussion helps. Taking adequate magnesium so that your body can run those metabolic pathways is going to be preventative. Adequate vitamin D is going to be preventative, a good iron free copper free multi, without any preservatives or titanium dioxide, you know, come get the multis from us because they’re better. So we would package it up and give the jocks 20% off your vitamins and a discounted laser package to continue to keep your brain healthy through your season. Because you’re right, you won’t notice the symptoms right away. But you’ll be a person who wakes up at age 35 and can’t find your car keys anymore. You forgot where this is, you forgot where that is, or your spouse may notice that you’ve got personality changes, because the brain neurons, the mirror neurons in particular, the neurons that say, oh, yeah, I can tell my wife’s a little bit peeved at me, I think I’m going to dial down my response or formulate an appropriate response when those neurons become sick and damaged. Now we’ve got a spouse whose personalities are different from the person we married.
And you see this time and again, I don’t know if you remember the story of Mike Webster in the Philadelphia or Pittsburgh Steeler who had gotten a concussion. But when they figured out what he had, and Dr. Bennet Omalu wrote on his death certificate brain disease instead of suicide, and all of the newspapers blew up, and everybody was freaking out, and they’re saying, wait a minute, he committed suicide. And that was what the coroner wanted on the autopsy report. Well, Dr. Bennet Omalu was this very religious guy. I don’t know if you’ve read his book. It’s beautiful. But he would pray over every patient and he would say, “Okay, I’m sorry that you came to be here this way. Mike, show me how you died.”
So he does this autopsy on like Webster, physiologically, he’s banged up. He played football, but he’s normal. And when they get to his mouth, they see that Mike Webster had been pulling out his own teeth and super gluing them back in his head. And in the movie, they open in that scene. So Bennet Omalu says, “Okay, why in the world would somebody be pulling out their teeth and super gluing them back in? That makes no sense. He’s an American football player. He’s on a throne. They’re like gods, why? Why would this happen?”
So he covered up Mike’s body, went home, came back the next day, and prayed again and just decided to start slicing through brain tissue. And this man had a brain that looks like an 85 year old Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s patient. There were plaques, but he was only 50. So it didn’t fit the profile. And Mike Webster (sic) then writes on the death certificate that he died of a brain disease.
And it blew up the news. And he refused to change his clinical diagnosis. He refused to back down and the NFL didn’t like that. But now Mike (sic) starts getting all these calls from all these NFL players wives, saying, “My husband flipped the crazy switch. He’s an alcoholic, he’s become violent. He’s doing this. He’s doing that.” You know, they tried to silence him, but he refused to back down on this issue. When you look at statistically 210 out of 211, NFL football players autopsied back and want to say 2013, this study was they all had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, all but one.
And if we can offset that, and give these guys a normal life, why wouldn’t you want to do that? And so there are ways to love your game, and protect your brain doesn’t mean you’ll never develop it. I have no idea. But we can do better than we’re doing. And when you look at the fact that our government defunded research for Alzheimer’s medicines in 2018, because they couldn’t find anything that targeted all 36 separate and distinct causes of Alzheimers, what am I going to do? I’m gonna put a laser on it. I’m just gonna grab up my laser and laser my brain every day to keep those ATP pumps going, I’m going to use my supplements every single day. Anything we can do to offset our risk is something that we should all be doing because like you guys said, These statistics are staggering. If 50% of our adult population is going to have a brain disease. And 50% of our youth population is going to have brain diseases too, where are we going to go? And what direction we’re going to point ourselves in.
And when we look at brain health and concussion, there was a study that came out in 2019 on using low level lasers for seizure and for autism. They found that the overactive brain could be slowed down by using a red and violet laser together. And they did EEG so it was amazing. They did the EEG before the laser. They did an EEG during laser treatment and showed that they had synchronized beta waves in the brain. And then 10 minutes later, those waves were still synchronized. So they basically halted the seizures in these patients using a red-violet laser combination. So if we look at the capacity for just red to upregulate, run the metabolic pathways, get the ATP production, get the mitochondria healthy, and then take a violet with it to synchronize brainwaves. The sky’s the limit in terms of what we can do with these devices. And in my opinion, every single chiropractor in America should have one of these. Every single medical doctor should have one of these. Yeah, I can fix a fracture in two weeks with these bad boys. I mean, it is so fun. It’s just so fun. Yeah.
Dr. Chad Woolner: The question I have for you and I don’t know if you know this or not I have an answer to this. But I’m just curious with all of what we’re seeing with this. Is the NFL taking notice of this? And or even high school or college teams taking notice of this and saying every NFL team should have a laser that they’re using with every single player that’s playing?
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: You know, I don’t think that they are, I wish that they were. I have a couple of colleagues who I know are team doctors for these athletes. We had a patient who had an Avulsed hamstring tendon and pulled the growth plate off with it. So we had sent him to the Packers surgeon, the Green Bay Packers surgeon. And the surgeon said go ahead and play your whole football season on this bum leg because when I have to fix you at the end, I’ve got to tear the muscle completely off the bone anyway. Wow. So he had only evolved the common hamstrings tendon and pulled the growth plate with it.
So he came back to me because he was given the greenlight to play his entire football season. And Mom and Dad said “hey, can we just keep the laser?” I said you better keep the laser and because he was coming in for brain health anyway. Yeah. So we put him in a category one sacred simple technique blocking position to approximate the femur head to the ischial tuberosity. We plopped the laser on it. And I also put the laser in the lumbar spine, not down the leg, right because the cell bodies are where the lasers do the magic. The cell bodies where the mitochondria is the cell body makes ATP the nerves are just branches.
So as clinicians we have to remember the nerves for that area. The terminal end is the phylum terminally in the spinal cord so you’ve actually got a laser about T 12. If you really want to target that hamstring glute area. So you’ve got the effects we plonk one on the T 12 area. One is just going over the lumbar spine and then one was directly on the ischial tuberosity. We did that three times a week. At the end of his football season. He went back to the Green Bay Packers surgeon to see what it looked like they did a second MRI, the growth plate reattached. The hamstrings tendon reattached. And the kid plays college. Yeah, it’s awesome. He plays for Finlandia University now. He’s going into his senior year, but we have those pre and post MRIs. If you’re practicing without a laser, you gotta get in on this stuff. I mean, the stuff that you can fix is the unfixable. And that’s, to me, there’s nothing better. And there’s no risk, there’s no risk, the worst we can do is nothing. So hey, if I can’t fix you fine, then go get the surgery. But let’s try. He’s gonna make you wait anyway, let’s just try.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Yeah, that’s exactly what I’ve been saying in terms of from day one, since we’ve gotten these lasers, and that was kind of the cool thing for me. Realizing this, like, when you look at the body of literature, not only does it show how effective they are, but also equally as much, showing just how safe they are. And so for me, it’s like, what a very liberating feeling. That is to know like, anybody who walks through the door, no matter, virtually, I mean, I shouldn’t even say virtually anybody, regardless of the complaint. You can do no wrong here in terms of, you know, using laser. There’s, there’s only upside, there’s zero downside here to it. So. And not only that, but that’s the thing, too, that I have seen firsthand is just the versatility in terms of being able to offer people some sort of answer and or hope for, again, such a wide array of different things that may or may not have fallen within the purview or abilities of a traditional practice, right. In terms of what you can offer. There are probably practices out there who have a wide range of tools, right? We do chiropractic, we do massage, we do rehab, we do Graston and ART and any number of these other modalities that we offer in our practice, but laser, I would I would argue hands down, trumps them all in terms of the versatility of and wide range of things that it can treat, you know, such a indispensable tool really
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: Well with concussion too. You can use it as a diagnostic. We had a lady who fell in the shower. She had a slip and fall, she had brain fog. So her daughter came to see me, and they rented a laser. She brought it to her mom’s house, put the laser on her mom’s head and her mom’s head pain got worse. The mom had already checked out of the ER two days before, but she’s got a concussion and her pain got worse. So they called me and I said to my friend “Kim, I said okay, you need to go back to the ER, she has a brain bleed. Laser doesn’t make people worse. Go back to the ER, I think she has a brain bleed.” I’ve never met this lady. But yes, she had a brain bleed, and she would have died if she had not rented that laser. Wow. But that’s the cool part about this. That’s what I love the most. Is that okay? She had a concussion. Concussion patients don’t get worse. They get better. Why did she not get better, get back to the ER, and lo and behold, that’s why so again, as a diagnostic tool, that’s what I love about what you said, Chad, these can’t harm you. So if a patient gets worse, there’s something else going on. Yeah.
Dr. Andrew Wells: And good on you Dr. Hieshetter for I think a lot of doctors are using lasers, therapeutically for injuries once they’ve happened. And you mentioned that you’re also using them prophylactically to help in the inevitable head injury that most high school and college athletes are just going to go through if they’re in some sort of contact sport. But also I think the genius in what you’re doing is you’re using, you’re creating an affordable package for athletes to come in. And I would imagine there’s some performance enhancement in that as well. Because in Chad, Chad brought up the great question of like, well, why are we in like all of these professional sports teams, because it just makes too much sense. It’s easy to do, you could put it in the hands of any, like any athletic trainer. But I think the window into the team’s sports teams, I just thought of this is not from an injury, post injury standpoint is from a performance standpoint. And that’s one of the really cool things about lasers is there’s a huge component aspect to it. I think there is some debate on whether lasers should even be used in sports because it gives you somewhat of a competitive edge on because of the benefits of lasers but really like what you’re doing whether that was a planned business strategy or not is get in front of athletes before they actually have the injury and you may not have actually been able to help that that football player with the growth plate issue had you not been in the position to have helped him before that?
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: Certainly, certainly. And to that point to the number of concussion patients from that town that we worked with and worked on. That same football player, his younger brother, had gotten a bad concussion; his head was rotated to the left and someone fell on it. And his left eye, yeah, his left eye would not track. It was so creepy and he had been to the eye doctor and the eye doctors like yeah, you your brain damaged. Good luck with that. So mom and dad had brought him to me. The optic nerve was a little bit implicated as pupils wouldn’t dilate nicely, but cranial nerves three, four, and six, they’re all found in the brainstem. So we laser through the open mouth. And then of course, we did the whole head concussion protocol with the diode on the forehead, top of the head back and ahead for about 10 minutes. And then I also lasered through the temple area to try to target the optic nerve. And within four treatments, he was perfectly fine again.
Dr. Andrew Wells: But that gives us like miracle stories that Edie chiropractor would like. I just want one of those in my entire career and you’re just rattling off these crazy stories. That’s amazing. Well, and for next week.
Dr. Chad Woolner: I was just gonna say I you know when you say these, and I want to highlight this because I’m not I’m guessing you’re not saying it in like this nonchalant arrogant way. You’re saying it in this nonchalant way. Because you have seen it so many times that you just know the result. You know what the result is? It just so matter of fact is the way you stay at it, you know, here, here, a kid whose eye is not tracking here, like, yeah, and then in for treatment, it was all resolved. I’m like, holy cow, that’s incredible, you know, but again, that’s the thing is when you start to see it, you start to recognize the pattern that, you know, yeah, we can fix this, you know, you got a really, really powerful tool that can do a lot of really incredible things.
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: I appreciate that, you know, it is a very powerful tool. And when I can’t fix somebody, I don’t over treat either. You’re out in two weeks, you know, and it’s, it’s, I do realize now I’m just like, oh, yeah, it’s nonchalant. Just, we’re going to put a laser on that nerve and that nerve and see what your body’s going to do with it. And I have yet to, to have an instance where we don’t make some sort of lasting change.
I’ve got my work cut out for me next week, I have a person traveling a couple hours to get here because she was walking her dog. And the dog ran; they’re on the beach, and she had the dog leash, pulled something that paralyzed half of her diaphragm. So she’s going to come see me next week. It sounds more like phrenic nerve than anything else. And I’ll let you guys know how that one goes. But these brain injuries, the brain wants to heal. The brain wants to function. I’ve got an Alzheimer’s patient right now who we’ve been working with both gut and brain because she had had so many massive symptoms. And we know that for every nerve that goes from the brain to the gut nine go back up. And that the guts’ nervous system, the enteric nervous system is completely separate from the brain, but it controls so much of the neurotransmitter distribution, that in a lot of these concussion athletes, we don’t just do the brain will do the gut as well and will do the vagus nerve. And it’s because of that gut brain axis that we see tremendous results. I have an entire gut reset program that we do with patients. We run some tests to find out who’s living in the gut. Are they friend or foe? Are they driving any chronic diseases like autoimmunity? Are these microbes allowing you to produce the right neurotransmitters? Are they messing with your hormone balance? You know what, what’s really happening physiologically ties in a lot to the gut. And if we can’t get a concussion patient better, it’s because we missed something in the gut. So I tend to just do it all at once. Now, I’ve evolved in my practice that way. Just because it’s so clinically important. I don’t want to miss anything.
Dr. Andrew Wells: Yeah. I think Dr. Trevor Berry said it eloquently. He said you don’t have a neurology program if you don’t have a functional medicine program. And he was saying the same things. If you’re not looking at the gut, if you’re not looking at immunology, you can be missing some really key pieces that affect the brain and affect neurology. And that’s, I think that’s important for doctors to recognize, too, is that lasers aren’t always the fix all cure all for everything. The brain doesn’t live in a vacuum in your skull and is not affected by other things. And that’s the other cool thing about lasers that you’re using, obviously, lab testing, and you’re using certain supplements, I imagine and from a nutrition standpoint, to fix a lot of those gut issues to repair brain gut access. But also, you can use lasers for gut issues as well. So that’s a whole other spin off of helping the brain via the gut.
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: Yeah, and a great read on that particular topic is by Dr. Tom Verni. The Er and why he’s an MD. His book is called the Embodied Mind. And he’s got a very large portion of it, that ties in gut health. But what I found really thrilling about his book, and I just got back from teaching in Wisconsin. I dedicated a lot of my lecture to the gut brain axis. And what Verni writes about are these studies where the bad microbes that we don’t want in our gut, you can knock them out with pulsed violet laser, the good microbes that are supposed to live there, love pulsed red lasers. And this guy’s a medical doctor, right? So I’m reading this and I’m sharing it with his class. Look, if you’re doing brain health, if you’re doing concussion, if you’re doing gut, you’ve got to have a red-violet laser, because now we’ve just opened the floodgate on so many more ways to help your patient, it thrills me. So this is I guess I’m kind of geeking out now I was nonchalant before but now knowing that somehow in nature’s perfect design, violet and ultraviolet kill the bad guys. And red is where the good guys shine. The low level laser therapy that Erchonia keeps cranking out just continues to thrill me and makes me want to keep going and practice and up my game and learn more and keep chasing all this information that’s just pouring out of pubmed.com Right now, because people are finally getting it.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Ya know that you know the thing I keep thinking and all of this that has been so cool for Andrew and I is like we get to glean all of this collective wisdom from these doctors. And I think that’s, we again, we have Erchonia to thank for that because Erchonia has done such an incredible job of curating such a phenomenal panel, if you will, will call you a panel of experts, you know, docs who just really, and so for me what I feel like and I’m saying this selfishly, I feel like we kind of have an accelerated, you know, path of learning through through this podcast, because we’ve been able to kind of get the Cliff’s Notes version, so to speak of each of these clinicians experiences here, we’re hearing just a snippet of your experiences, and yet, you’re just sharing so many cool insights from not only the research, but also more importantly, I think your own personal hands on clinical experience that you’ve had. And so it’s great to hear these stories, and I think highly beneficial for you know, those listening doctors and patients alike. And so all the more reason to tune in and listen to these episodes, not for my sake or Andrew’s sake, because we’re, we’re just facilitating the conversation is all we’re doing. And so it’s really cool to be able to hear firsthand from you, and from so many other incredible people. So yeah, it is exciting. And I feel the same way when you say that, like, it’s kind of cool to geek out and dive down some of these different holes in terms of the Science in the specifics. And what’s really cool is that we live in a day and age now where we can start to really dissect and dive deep into what’s mechanical, from a mechanistic standpoint, what’s actually happening. And now we’re at a point where we have the means to, you know, really figure those things out and not just be like, “Hey, this is this cool phenomenon. When we do this thing. It appears that this is happening.” But really we can in a very sophisticated way explain in detail what’s actually happening. So that’s a really, really cool thing, I think.
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: Yeah, and I appreciate what you guys are doing too because as I said in the beginning, when I teach I come from a comprehensive standpoint, I want everybody every doctor out there to have a laser and know what to do with it. Because you’re gonna save somebody some major hurt and major heartache and major suffering if you know how to properly use these and even my daughters. They’re, they’re 12 and nine, but they know how to grab the laser program and pop it on there. I mean, we go to the beach, we bring a laser to show why their friend got a jellyfish sting. We pull the kid out of the ocean, zap it with a laser and 10 minutes later, the kids are fine and running around playing again. But we’ve put lasers on just about everything in our house. We’ve got a German shepherd with Lyme disease. I’ve got a husband with multiple head injuries and a family history of MS. So every day, my poor husband, I’m like, “Hey, just take your supplements?” He says “No, I just got up!”
Dr. Chad Woolner: So if for no other reason, you go to the beach with Dr. Kristen. So that if there’s a jellyfish thing you can avoid getting urinated on and instead have a laser I would I would much prefer a laser. Because isn’t that the standard care treatment? Is you pee on the leg or pee on the arm or whatever it’s not. That’s what I’ve heard anyways, right? You’re supposed to urine.
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: The NH four in the human urine is like the anti venom, apparently, but we’ve never had to do that.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Yeah, you could just you’re you’re more dignified and sophisticated than all those other savages. No peeing on jellyfish stings.
Dr. Andrew Wells: So a couple questions for you, Dr. Hieshetter we get we’re finding that we’re getting listeners on the podcast that are providers, and we get listeners who are just interested in using lasers for different issues. Because of the title of this podcast, I imagine we’re gonna get patients who are like, “Wow, I really need this!” Or they know somebody who’s had a concussion. How do they find you? Or if they live somewhere that’s not close to you? How would they get access to Erchnoia lasers?
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: Oh my goodness to gain access to Erchonia laser, if you just call the company, I don’t know their number off the top of my head because I just tell Siri to call Joe or David or any of the guys. But go on the erchonia.com website. There you could find a list of providers in your area who have the lasers.
You can also call the company directly. They can help you purchase a laser, they can help you find a provider.
If there are patients laypeople, or doctors today who are interested in, for instance, I’ve got the University of Michigan neuro sport protocol as we had mentioned earlier, a lot of places don’t restrict activity or they don’t know when to turn people loose again, after they’ve had a chronic repetitive impact situation or one huge blow that knocks them out of the game. I’ve got all of that information available. If you email, ihsflorencesc@gmail.com. And just request the concussion stuff. My office manager can send it out. But it’s beautifully depicted. I mean, it talks about, “Can you ride a bike? Can you run? How’s your agility? Are you in the red mentally or physically? Can we clear your BI doctor went to restriction level?” And the U of M protocol has a pyramid that you go through, an algorithm or flowchart if you will. And it’s nice as clinicians to give it to your patient because they say, “Well, Billy is fine. He can go back and play football.” And you can say No, he can’t because he can’t stand with his feet together and close his eyes without tipping over. He’s not ready yet.
And so now I work with mixed martial arts, like Brazilian jiu jitsu fighters and these guys, they look fine. They’re big and strong, but they can’t stand on a vibe without getting motion sickness. And that’s just standing still. So we know that they’ve got chronic traumatic encephalopathy. And because they can’t stand on the vibe plate without wanting to puke, even though they’re big and strong and look good and aren’t bleeding anywhere. They’re not okay. They’re not okay, neurologically. So we’re working on these guys a few times a week, using low level laser on the brain while they’re on the vibe plate to try to upregulate those places that have been damaged from concussion, and it’s working. But these guys have to commit to it. And we have to keep going until they’re all better, or they are going to end up incurring really nasty brain disease down the road.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Yeah, that’s incredible, incredible work that you’re doing. Yeah, Dr. Kristen, thank you seriously, so much for taking time out of your schedule to be here with us. You’ve shared some really, really valuable insights. And it’s really fascinating. I’ve really enjoyed this interview, really enjoyed hearing what you’re, what you’re sharing, it shines through just how passionate you are about, first and foremost helping patients, but also utilizing these tools in just a variety of different ways. And obviously, particularly on this episode talking a lot about concussions. So it’s great to hear the great work that you’re doing there for patients and how you’re helping so many different people. Was there anything else you wanted to add? Dr. Wells?
Dr. Andrew Wells: No, just other than, yeah, thank you for sharing what you’re passionate about. Thank you for being one of those people that we need in the health care system, because there are people like you who are few and far between. And my hope is that other health care providers can listen to this podcast and learn from what you’re doing and hopefully follow in your footsteps and help people with issues that nobody else is helping with.
Dr. Kristin Hieshetter: So thank you very much. That’s yeah, my hat’s off to you so much, guys. Appreciate your time today, too. I know that you’re busy doctors as well. So we in the chiropractic community are very blessed to have this type of venue and format for sharing all the good that we do. Thank you.
Dr. Chad Woolner: Yeah, you bet. Thank you so much. Docs, and patients alike hope this has been a valuable episode. We’ve really enjoyed this. Share this with others, we will make sure that we put all the resources that Dr. Kristen talked about here in the show notes so you guys can access that. And so we appreciate her being willing to share those resources as well. And we will talk to you guys in the next episode. Have a good one.
Thanks for listening to The Laser Light Show. Be sure to subscribe and give us a review. If you’re interested in learning more about Erchnoia lasers, just head on over to erchonia.com. There you’ll find a ton of useful resources including research news and links to upcoming live events, as well as Erchonia’s e-community where you can access for free additional resources including advanced training and business tools. Again, thanks for listening and we will catch you on the next episode.
