Paula Hello Everyone and welcome to The Courageous Journey. I have an exciting episode with for you today. I am actually going to be talking with doctor Mike Hennes from The Neural Connection. He is the doctor that if you've been seeing any of my social media, or you've listened to me talk about in any of my speaking engagements, I often refer to him as doctor Mike.
And the person that I have worked with, I had get a lot of questions about my care with him, so I brought him on, especially since I'll be speaking at the National conference on the hotline Conference against Domestic Violence here in a couple days. So I want to say this. I gave him a bunch of questions, and I know that we have a limited time, so I'm going to kind of just frame it as this in what a lot of my, my talks are about.
So as a survivor of childhood trauma, a score of nine domestic violence, I had a near-fatal strangulation and had multiple, you know, diagnoses when I first went to functional medicine in 2019. So I'm going to doctor Mike was the third doctor that I saw, and I have seen him three times. I know that one of the things, Mike, that people ask is like, what exactly is functional medicine?
And one of the things that I think that I have a really hard time explaining to people is that like that I can that you can heal and kind of like what you guys actually do. Like, how did I go out? How do I come out there so symptomatic? And then I come back in just a few days with you guys so much better.
And I think the other thing that I have a really hard time conveying to my audience is that can emotional trauma cause physical symptoms. So and I guess I'll say one more thing. I used to think that I was a unicorn, you know, with this DV hit to the head chronic illness thing. And I am not there are so many people that are getting lost in the medical system.
Can you also kind of help address that? Sure.
Dr. Hennes So let's take a one at a time. What is functional medicine? Functional medicine is more or less a different way of thinking about health care. So instead of trying to tailor treatment based on an individual test and something you find on that test, it's about looking at the whole picture and really tailoring care toward one person. And we're optimizing for function rather than looking for the deficit.
So blood tests are a classic example of this. I'm not looking to see if you're sick. I'm looking to see how far away from perfect something is working and function. And then my specialty is a subset of functional medicine we're in specifically. So I'm very concerned about brain health brain function. And how do we make the individual parts of the brain work better.
And how do we make all of the parts of the brain communicate with each other and your body as a whole, so that you can tell what's going on around you? And then there are a bunch of questions in there. The one I remember was emotional trauma. Interestingly, the brain, there's part of the brain, the that works specifically on emotion.
But what's really interesting about the brain is that you can. If you think something your brain doesn't really know, the difference between what's in front of you or just your thought process. So stresses the classic example if you're anxious, if you're stressed, if you're thinking about that all the time, your brain is going to be stressed out. You're going to have physiologic changes, things that you can measure and see those things.
If you wear any kind of fitness tracker, you'll see these things. When you're stressed, your sleep is going to be, or your heart rate variability is going to be not doing as well as it should. Your heart rate is probably gonna be higher. All of those sorts of things. So emotional trauma, damage, stress, whatever realm that you currently fit into is certainly going to impact physiology.
And that's not necessarily going to show up on an MRI, right? If you have a long term and your blood pressure is high and you're having a lot of construction of blood vessels, you might end up with some microvascular disease. It would have to take a very long time. But, you know, long term down the line, you might start to find some of these things.
You had a couple more questions in there, but we had a bunch at a time.
Paula So for women listening to this and yes, men have the same things, but this is predominantly a woman thing. So there's women out there who have been victims of domestic violence. They've been hit to the head. They've had, you know, strangulation in those types of things. And they're being told, oh, you're hormonal. You know, your your seat looks fine, your blood works fine.
Oh, you probably got anxiety, depression. And, you know, they just they have chronic illness. They just can barely get out of bed. And I try to explain them like neuro fatigue. But why is, you know, I think that I, my title is often invisible injuries because that's what it was for me. They people couldn't see it. And so what does that look like for the women that are listening to this that like maybe they're there, they've heard me talk somewhere and they're like, could this be me?
And how can all those things, those hits to the head and maybe those, you know, things where they've had something placed around their neck lead them to start having being misdiagnosed, I guess I would say. And where can they go to, like, how do you get those answers?
Dr. Hennes Sure. Let's talk on a lot of levels, because in healthcare in general, your goal is to measure something. And a lot of the injuries we're talking about, there's just not unless there's bruising or there's outward sign, you're exactly right. It's invisible. And even if you run something like a CT or an MRI, you're not necessarily going to find anything.
One of the things we worry about in the concussion space, the brain injury space is the sub concussive impact. So you got hit in the head. Maybe it wasn't a catastrophic injury, you weren't conscious, etc., etc. but it happens frequently. Or you become hypoxic. You're strangled frequently, but not enough to cause outward sign. Now we're starting to worry about prolonged function being declined in the brain as far as what you do about it, or why it gets dismissed.
Women's physiology is generally just more complicated. Your hormones are more complex than men's, and there's a lot more that goes into keeping that normal. So it's very easy to dismiss things as hormone. And I think that's part of it. The other part is.
There's a there's a, an aspect of we just we don't know how to deal with it as a society.
The other thing is that as a provider, talking about things like domestic violence or abuse, or if we lump this into the realm of mental health on both sides, is we just we don't know how to talk about this yet, because to the average person, I've been guilty of this in my own very personal relationships is I don't you just leave and it's never that simple.
And if you're not in it, you will never understand it. I don't pretend to understand it. And that, I think, makes it hard. So as far as getting resources, if someone's not in a position to leave or they're not ready or they don't think they mean to, it can be very difficult. Especially if you have someone looking over your shoulder or going through your phone or and things like that.
Right? I can't consult with someone that can't talk to me open and freely without fear of retribution. So I think that's also a piece of it is as providers, we're not equipped to have that conversation or just as people we don't have the emotional intelligence to. And then likewise on the flip side, not being ready to seek that help or admit there as a problem or assuming things will change or.
Misguided notions of of what's fair and what's not. And I think that's that's probably the bigger piece of it, is realizing when things can change, realizing things when they won't change, and being okay, getting help.
Ever want to get into the point of sounding like I'm victim blaming? And that's not it at all. But it's it's it's tough to force help upon someone.
Paula So going along with that is so you and your colleague Doctor Reese have both like, explained this and you've done so well. But me explain it to people about like the three friends, the three parts of the brain. I've learned by working with both of you that when one of those parts is not working well, I don't have a cognitive function.
Like that's when I start not trusting myself as a paramedic, and I try to explain to providers that are taking care of, you know, the police advocates, those type of people who are talking with these survivors that they're kind of like just trying to stay upright when one of those pieces are off and they don't know that those pieces are off because they haven't been evaluated like you were.
And I think that that is probably you guys explaining that to me. It's probably been the pillar in the foundation of my healing. Can you kind of some that up here for maybe the people that are working with victims or the survivors themselves that are kind of listening to this and how important that really is?
Dr. Hennes Sure. So brain is essentially built on layers. Everything has to communicate back and forth so that different parts of the brain can make good decisions. If we make this on a most basic level, the brain's job is to tell you where you are, where your body is in space, how you interact with the world. And if you can't do that, you can't make good decisions.
This is obvious if someone has something like a head tilt or a lean, or they walk with a limp and they don't know how to control that body part appropriately, and you end up with bad biomechanics, right? So you don't know where you are. You have a forward lean, you're trying to lift a heavy gurney or something like that.
You've got bad mechanics and you hurt your back. That makes perfect sense to most people. What becomes more abstract is when your vestibular system is off, or something along those lines, and there's no outward sign of it on a on a.
Simple first glance. So the three friends we really talk about are the eyes, the singular system which is your inner ear, which is your ability to tell when you're moving, when your eyes are closed, and then your muscles and joints and all of those things need to give. You give your brain similar information about what's happening. So we explain it as three friends that went to a party.
If three of your friends went to the same party, they should tell you the same story. And if one of your friends tells you a different story than the other two, you're going to start to wonder if they were really there. So who's at the party? What kind of music was playing? The kind of food is that? How late did everybody stay?
Was it a good party, was it not? And the brain works the same way. If my eyes tell my brain one story and the muscles of my neck tell my brain a different story.
Who's telling me what really happened? And the longer your brain has to decide which information is the good set of information, that takes a lot of energy, and it takes a lot of thought away from higher functions. So instead of thinking about the complex problem in front of you, your brain is now spending time trying to keep you upright and interacting with the world.
And that just becomes exhausting, especially in a high stress career where you're driving a two ton vehicle at 70 miles an hour down the road with life threatening emergency in the back. Been there, done that. And if you're not concentrating on what you're doing, that becomes dangerous. So what our job is, is to make the things that you shouldn't be thinking about become automatic again, so that you can actually work on higher brain functions.
Paula Yeah, I can't believe. So I came out to I thought I was doing so well, and I came back out to you guys in May, the end of April, beginning of May of this year, in 2026. And I didn't realize how much that input was. We found out it was more the muscular. When you start talking about that and what a difference that has made.
And I literally, you know, do that stuff every day. And I can tell and I don't know if maybe you can can explain this to people, or maybe I'm just imagining it. But when those muscles get tight, I almost start feeling like anxiety, I, I quit, not that I'm questioning myself, but like I'm not as strong on my feet.
I can really feel it in the back of the ambulance and so like it. And you. I just was so tired. And that's just something that was so simple that you made can like, can you kind of talk just a little more of that? And I think that the other part is people do not understand the difference between tired, oh, I worked a lot of hours in neuro fatigue like I wanted.
There were days like when I have neuro fatigue, man, I'm in bed for days and there's not enough sleep. So I think that those three friends really not telling that story. I think that that's probably why I got the the major depression diagnosis. Yeah.
Dr. Hennes There's two parts to that. So the most of us have had the experience of knowing we should work out. We don't do it. And so finally we we work up the motivation to go do it. And we go to the gym and we try to work out like we did when we were teenagers or in her early 20s, and you just push too hard.
And that workout felt amazing. But before you even get sore, getting solar takes about two days, but the next day you're just tired. You're fatigued, you sleep for three hours. The reason that happens is neurologic fatigue. Your brain is not used to coordinating that much movement in a day. And so now if you amplify that because you did that voluntarily, you amplify that by that is your daily life because you're not able to process that information.
Now you are starting your day with half a battery, right? I don't know about you. My cell phone battery doesn't make about the day. If I only had half a battery, I'd be done by about noon, right? And that's essentially what you're dealing with as far as we know. You also talked about muscles. We talk about muscles and joints.
And really we always think about muscles and joints is things that generate and absorb force. But really the sensory aspect of them tells us where we are in gravity. Gravity is constantly pulling down on us, and our muscles send signal up to our brain to tell us where the where those forces are being applied. And if you look at the way a spine is actually made, is there's hundreds of little tiny joints and hundreds of little tiny muscles in the spine.
And if you look at each one of those as a sensory organs sending information onto the brain, it's really a mess of just a neurological motor for your brain telling you where it is. So if you are at a point where your neck is moving, it's stiff. You're constantly got your shoulders glued to your ears, and you're just not getting those degrees of motion.
You're no longer getting that information to your brain. So effectively your brain is now being under stimulated. Even though your muscles are tight, you don't know where you are anymore because you're just not getting that information. So sometimes something as simple as getting adjusted or getting a massage, or doing some sort of on yourself, or doing some stretching, getting out and moving away from your computer.
Or I know you like to garden a lot and there's a lot of movement involved in that, so having a hobby that gets you moving will actually help you.
Keep that information heading up to the brain like you should, so that you're never deficient in it. Right? So many of us live behind a computer, live behind a computer during the day, and then you go home and sit and watch TV and scroll on your phone all night. So you're getting all of the stimulation that's visual. There's really nothing muscular to go with it, because the work on a computer, I can type all day long without ever moving my shoulders.
I can type all day long without ever getting out of my chair and movement. Nothing in the brain happens until something moves. That's a remember where I picked that up, but it really makes a lot of sense in every aspect of neurology.
Paula So for survivors that could be watching this, who maybe aren't able, you know, to afford to come see a functional neurologist or aren't even able to get out of their place right now. What what things are important for them to do and till they can kind of get out there. So I know, like for me, sleep is is my like that's my Kryptonite.
Stress management, like nutrition, like alcohol is one of my Kryptonite. Those things like what could they do at home?
To kind of just help get them, you know, get them going on the right direction. Until they can kind of, you know, get to better answers.
Dr. Hennes Yeah. So I have a cute little picture that it's a pyramid. And like the it's kind of like the hierarchy of needs in neurology. And the base of that pyramid is everything metabolic. Right. So think of this like putting gas into your car. If you don't have any gas or you put bad gas in your car, that road trip is going to be very, very short, right?
And so that's where we find biggest bang for the buck. And then once we move up we can get into autonomic systems. We can reflexes visual systems, stabler systems, cognitive systems and all those things are rehab based. And they're very cool and we're very good at them. And that's what we do when you come on to the office.
But if that metabolic foundational layer isn't there, that rehab is going to be really hard. The other thing to say about that is you're never going to biohacking, rehab your way out of poor lifestyle. So being able to recognize things you're doing that are bad for yourself and making small changes so that they stick is how we're going to make traction.
So first things first. The easiest thing to implement is the lowest cost. The highest return is by far sleep. Right. And we've talked about this at length. If you are in a profession where a regular sleep cycle is not possible for you, right, you're an EMS, there's on call, there's overnights, there's high stress situations at three in the morning from a dead sleep.
Like that's real life that is not conducive to good brain health. That's a that's a conversation that gets had. But if you're able to control your sleep and get to bed at the same time every night and wake up at the same time every day, 90% of the time, 80% of the time, more strict when you're starting.
And then you can get some flexibility as your brain becomes plastic or flexible. Then you can you can maintain better after that. Then we start looking at a couple of things. Are you well hydrated? Do you have a decent diet? Do you have vitamins and minerals that are efficient? Right. This isn't complex stuff. Do we give you a multivitamin?
Do we make sure you're staying hydrated with things that aren't caffeinated, that aren't sugar, that aren't full of colors, that aren't just sticky for you? And you can accomplish a lot with basic nutrition and sleep beyond that. Then you can start looking into things like mindful practice, right? And learning how to meditate. I forget the exact numbers on this, but over a very short period of time, 8 to 12 weeks, I believe it was.
You can actually see on MRI thickening of gray matter in the brain. If you know anything about MRI, seeing a change on an MRI in that short time frame is really difficult to do. And so having a meditation or mindful type practice that you're good at and religious with can be very, very good for reconnecting different parts of the brain.
You mix that with sleep and decent nutrition. You're well on your way to being able to start some of this recovery on your own. And then all of the technical stuff that involves rehab and knowing which pathways to activate and which ones don't. That's where we come in. But again, none of that is going to matter if that foundational stuff is really interrupted.
Paula Right? Sounds like you're kind of telling me that I should probably work on that getting out of me a little sooner than later. Oh, no.
Dr. Hennes It's your passion. It's.
Paula I know. Okay. So for anybody that is working with survivors or victims that may be listening to this, what is something what is some advice that you as what you do would give to them? I know that I always tell them there's nothing that you could have done to make me change my mind, but like as far as maybe helping them understand that they probably could potentially have a brain injury, they, you know, it may actually be neuro fatigue.
They may be using everything that they have just to stand up straight. Like, what would you say to those people?
Dr. Hennes The biggest thing is you're never I am never going to change your mind. I can ask leading questions, I can.
I can kind of lead you to drawing your own conclusion, but I can't I can't change your mind for you. Now, if someone is up front about the trauma they've had, whether it be recent or in the past, then and, and we're open to talking about it without causing too much emotional turmoil. I'm not I'm not a mental health provider.
I'm not qualified to do that. So this is something that we have to tread relatively carefully. But if we're willing to take an injury apart and look at it, physiology physiologically. So for example, you had a near-death strangulation injury. We know you were hypoxic for a certain amount of time. We know you had massive stress responses in that moment and leading up to that moment.
So there are things that I can draw conclusions about about that injury. And knowing it was a near-death hypoxic strangulation, we know that there was brain damage that occurred in that moment. And so for me to draw the conclusion that there was brain injury involved is pretty straightforward. It becomes a lot more complicated if I've got a pretty good inkling that there's trauma, but we're not ready to talk about that yet.
We're not ready to admit to that yet. We're not ready to be that vulnerable with another provider, a male provider at that. And so for me, at that point, my job is to try and navigate and.
Maybe I bring it up as sleep apnea, where you just stop breathing for a few minutes at a time. Or we talk about high stress scenarios at work. And I kind of allude to things that are more everyday life for the average person and let you draw your own conclusions from that standpoint. And it's really tough. It's really hard because I, I'm never going to get someone to admit something they don't want to, and I'm never going to change someone else's mind.
So really, just drawing a parallel without ever knowing for sure what we're after is something that's really tough. I have a lot of patients that I've been doing this long enough that I can tell that there's some trauma somewhere in the past. I don't know what level, who the perpetrator was, et cetera, etc. but knowing it's there and just realizing that either somebody's guarding something.
And that there's other factors going into this injury that you can't necessarily put your finger on, but that doesn't mean that they're making it up either. That's probably the biggest takeaway for other providers is just because you can't see it and it's under the surface, it doesn't mean that you can ignore it, right?
There's kind of a paradigm. If you don't tell me about it, I can't fix it. But at the same time, if you're actively not telling me about it, it's my job to pay attention to it. Right? It's it's it's not so difficult to tell when someone's holding something back either.
Paula Yeah. So to the survivors that may be watching. So I try to direct them because you guys have some amazing. Between the three of you doctors inside the office, you guys have an amazing amount of information out on like TikTok, Facebook, that type of stuff. So a where all can they kind of go find you? And can you tell me a little bit more about how somebody, if they want to talk to you and follow up with you, like where they can get a hold of you at the clinic and if they would reach out to you, like, what is that first initial step look like?
Dr. Hennes Yeah. So the clinic is the connection and you can find us on, I think every platform except for maybe Twitter X at the normal connection for everything, and everything's got links to come into a console page and everything like that. And then we all have our own Instagrams and Facebook's. I think everybody's got a website, mine's doctor. Com you can email me.
Hello, doctor. Otherwise, as far as what it looks like, we will talk to anyone and either help point you in the right direction or figure out how to get you in the office. Or is there something that we can do remotely that's going to push you along the way? And we meet people where they're at. We have people come from all over.
We have people come for any length of time. And really my job is to figure out, what do you need? Am I the right provider to give it to you? And are we in a place to be able to work together and actually accomplish something? Right? If we're not in a place yet, then maybe I have some free resources for you that you can work on on your own, right?
We already talked about fully. We already talked about the basics of diet. We talked about some stress reduction techniques that can really go a long way. We have a huge blog library with all sorts of information, and same with social media. There's all sorts of stuff that we have out there that if someone is motivated and has to know how to do it all, you can actually accomplish quite a bit on your own.
Otherwise, consultations are well as long as they need to be, but generally 15 to 30 minutes. We talk about you. We talk about what's going on. How did we get here? For as much information as you give me. And then we come up with a plan that might be to come to the office. That might be to come go to someone that's closer to you.
That might be to go get some lab tests done, or go get that MRI or get the heck out of Dodge if you're not safe. Right. And we just kind of take that conversation based on how that consultation goes and what we need to do.
Paula So for my for my one last question that I want to ask is, so in my a lot of my presentations, I have two videos of you and I working together. And, you know, for the people listening, just a reminder that Doctor Henderson was the third one to see me. But it was my first time seeing you, and you put me on this little foam mat, and you turned my head and I could barely, like, I started swaying.
I look like a drunk person. Then in the video right next to it. I'm actually standing on a ball or whatever you call it, and you have a weight on my head with a light and I'm, you know, kind of doing some eye exercises and you're actually pulling me with a band. I mean, I went from before I saw the first doctor not being able to drive, not being able to function as a paramedic to you, doing all of that stuff to me.
Paula And I'm living the best life. I don't think that I'm the unicorn. Like, I feel like the brain can heal, correct for anybody. I mean, like, it's been a hard work and stuff like that, but like, truly, if somebody is listening to this and, you know, whether they're stroke survivor, I mean, really anything like you guys kind of see about everybody and the brain can't heal, right?
Dr. Hennes The brain can heal. And the, the biggest, biggest misconception is that you're born or you develop all the neurons that you're going to have in your brain at a young age. And that is true. You do grow new neurons in the brain, but it's so slow that it more or less doesn't matter. What can change is those neurons can grow connections between one another, and that happens relatively quickly.
Right? You can do it very fast. We do it in the office and it takes repetition. It takes targeted therapy, and it takes those foundational things to be in place before we start. Right. If you're under slept, dehydrated and haven't had anything to eat for three days, and you come in and try and do rehab, it's going to be a bad day for everybody.
But if all of those things are in place, in case you haven't had your multiple cups of coffee, there's going to be a fear of day. But if all those things are in place, then it's about figuring out which parts of the brain aren't communicating and forcing that communication in a controlled manner so that we don't overdo it.
And we don't always tend, but at the same time pushing hard enough that it's stressing the system out.
Paula So I just want to say first of all, thank you. Like you have. You guys have changed changed my life. And I absolutely love the things that you do. I know that this that this episode was kind of more survivor centered, but I am absolutely fascinated with functional neurology, the brain. And so for those people that are listening, if there's my doctor, harness doesn't know it yet, but I'm going to try to be bringing him back.
So if you have something that you have questions about or something that you would like to ask him, you know, put a comment in wherever you're seeing this. And I would love to invite him back and have some more conversations with him. I know that I sent you a bunch of questions. Is there anything that you feel that would be great or needed for the audience to hear?
And I guess if not, what's the one thing that you think is the most important for people to know about brain health?
Dr. Hennes Sure. The biggest thing I think people need to know is if you're being told that this is just the way it is now, or your test is negative, or you're just gonna have to wait it out, or you're getting answers that just don't seem to make sense. You know something is wrong, but you're getting dismissed. What that really means is that you've exhausted the doctor you're seeing.
You've exhausted the skills they have in that area. That doesn't mean they know how to refer. They probably don't. Otherwise they would have done it by now. And I don't pretend to know everything. I refer out all the time for things that I don't understand, and that's a hard thing to do. And so if you're not getting the answers you want, or you feel like your doctor's gaslighting you into thinking that everything is mental health related, then it's time to find another provider.
It's okay to use up a doctor's skill and go looking for another one. The problem is there is a very wide world of, we call it alternative health care out there, and it's very tough to navigate if you don't know what you're doing or how to get into it. And most allopathic providers don't, and that is the problem.
The other thing is, if you're doing the wrong therapy at the wrong time, that's when you're not going to see results. So it's not that you weren't doing the right thing, you just did it at the wrong time and maybe at the wrong intensity. So biggest takeaway is don't give up. Don't be afraid to go looking for other providers.
Dr. Hennes Ask questions. Advocate for yourself and don't take no for an answer.
Paula Yeah, definitely. I you know, I still to this day, even though I saw, you know, Doctor Cassie in 2019, I still to this day after working with five functional neurologist have some of those diagnoses on my charts about mental health. And I cannot get them. I cannot get I cannot get Ms. still off my, you know, in until sometimes, you know, you just got to go elsewhere and advocate for yourself like, I'm a fighter and I'm going to, you know, keep fighting for myself.
Paula Thank you so much for joining me on this on this podcast. Thank you for everything that you've done for me. You have truly changed my life. I get to fly out to Texas tomorrow, and I get to stand on stage and tell people, survivors that like, hey, it is possible after everybody tells, you know, you talked about gaslighting.
And I think that of all the types of, you know, things that I've been through in my life that is probably one of the hardest to navigate is the medical system making me feel like I was crazy because I think in that craziness is where I really started struggling with addiction and mental health. Not so much in, you know, just because they made me believe that I was wrong about my own body when I was trying to tell him, I don't, you know, I don't have those things.
Paula And so thank you for, you know, telling people to advocate for themselves because I think that that's important time because I think some of us as survivors, we are taught that we are less than and that we don't have a voice, so we don't fight for ourselves. And who am I to say something against the doctor, you know, like doctors are supposed to know?
And sometimes I think that we need to remember that not you guys can't know everything. So thank you very much for everything you do. And again, doctor, hence it is at the neural connection. You can look him up. Amazing information on all their socials. Thank you so much for having us. And again you guys reach out if you have anything that you would like to hear more about.
And thank you for being and joining me on this courageous journey. Thanks.
