Note: This video transcript has not been edited. Please excuse any transcription errors.

Hi, I am Dr. Heather Sandrson. I’m a naturopathic doctor, and the essence of my work is helping our seniors so that we can benefit from intergenerational wisdom transfer. I believe that currently our seniors who are relegated to senior living facilities parked in front of TVs, fed cake and cookies for breakfast, lunch, and dinner are really a squandered resource. They’re at the height of their wisdom and experience, and they have so much to share with us. I know that we could, as a society, be getting so much more value from integrating our seniors with our, the young ones among us but also keeping them engaged in work, in church and community for much, much longer than we currently do. And I know there’s a way to do this. When we protect the brains of our seniors, of our elders, they have the resources, they have the capacity to continue to contribute for decades into their nineties and beyond.

Protecting Cognitive Function

The steps to get there, I think, are simple. It’s a matter of just protecting their cognitive function through doing the work of lifestyle management, including diet, exercise, sleep prioritization, stress management, and then also doing the medical side of things, doing the workups to assess if there are toxins, if there’s anything interfering with cognitive function from a biochemical or biophysiological perspective, including toxins, nutrient imbalances, infections, sleep apnea and trophic signaling, including bioidentical hormones or the absence of them. And so, going through all of this systematically, we see in the science that most of the time we can actually reverse cognitive decline. I originally got into this work after listening to Dr. Bredesen, Dr. Dale Bredesen, give a talk at a conference. I was very intrigued by what he had to say. It made common sense to me, but it wasn’t common practice.

I had heard over and over again from very well-meaning instructors, very bright people, that if I were to suggest to a patient that they could reverse their cognitive decline, I would be giving them false hope and that that would be irresponsible as a provider. What I’ve seen now is that it’s irresponsible to tell anyone there isn’t hope. I have seen miracles happen over and over again. The most inspiring miracle to me was my very first dementia patient who I saw after being trained by Dr. Bredesen. So I went to Dr. Bredesen’s training skeptical. I wasn’t sure that this would work, but Linda walked into my office with her husband, and they were passionate about what they’d read in Dr. Bredesen’s book, and they were ready to take this on. Linda had a MOCA score of two. So a MoCA score is a, the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and it’s out of a score of 30, so 30 is perfect, and she had a two.

This represents very severe disease. She was losing activities of daily living. She was completely dependent on her husband. Her handwriting had been affected, and she could basically answer my questions sometimes with yes or no answers. I could see that she was processing the question, but by the time she went to answer, she had forgotten what it was. This was heartbreaking to watch. I could see that Linda was a vibrant human being. She dressed in colorful clothes, and she had a huge smile. And I could see how heartbroken her husband was with how affected their relationship had been. It she was a fraction of herself, so they were, again, very enthusiastic about the Bredesen Protocol, and they had more confidence in it than even I did at that time. So we chatted about what was going on in their lives and the risk factors that set her up for an Alzheimer’s diagnosis.

Making Changes

And they included that she was living in a moldy building. She was living in a moldy bedroom. She still had many amalgams in her mouth and lots of dental work that hadn’t been taken care of. She was on a standard American diet. She wasn’t getting much exercise, and she hadn’t done any hormone replacement. So we did all of these things. We got her on hormone replacement. We got her on all the best supplements that we know, support cognitive health. She got all of her dental work done, and she moved out of that moldy bedroom. They started ballroom dancing three days a week, and they got into ketosis within a few days of seeing me. What happened next was an absolute miracle. I remember the moment that we got her second MoCA score, and it was a seven. Just six weeks later, she had improved her MoCA score from a two to a seven, the natural history of dementia.

What we expect is that people will go down by three points per year if you don’t do any intervention. What we saw with Linda wasn’t supposed to be possible, and her experience of the world had completely shifted. She was bickering with her husband about something that had happened the night before. She was able to answer my questions. And her beautiful, she’s a school teacher, and her beautiful handwriting had come back. She wasn’t going back to work, but her experience of the world had completely shifted.

And when I saw what was possible for Linda, I thought, what’s possible for everybody who doesn’t have dementia yet, who knows they’re at risk, but could prevent this disease? What’s possible for everyone who’s noticing that their brain isn’t quite as sharp as it was 10 years ago? What was possible for people who maybe didn’t have a two out of 30 on their MoCA but had a 16 out of 30 on their MoCA or a 22 out of 30 on their MoCA, could we reverse that disease in six weeks? And what we found over and over again since I met Linda, is that we can, not everyone, this, these aren’t guaranteed results, and it does take work. But if you can work with a a well-trained provider, there is access. And we know enough to get you reversal of cognitive decline. No one should be told that there’s nothing you can do. In fact, sometimes it’s almost overwhelming how much you can do to support cognitive health, both in prevention and reversal.