THE ACCRESCENT™ PODCAST EPISODE 236

Leigh Ann Lindsey (00:01.314)
Well, Dr. Bakman, welcome.

Dr Tom Bakman (00:03.734)
Hi, thanks.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (00:05.59)
We were just chatting off air. think there’s so much crossover, so many exciting things I think we could get into, but a little bit for myself, selfishly, but even more so for the audience. Can you give us just a little bit of your origin story? How did you get here? How did you get to neurology, helixana?

Dr Tom Bakman (00:24.3)
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of different pathways we could take. And if you need me to expand on any of it, I’d love to. I grew up in Fresno, California. I always say, hey, I got out. My family started farming there in 1929. And so it was a good place, but it gave me a really strong work ethic and really time to think. My grandfather, who I was really close to,

Leigh Ann Lindsey (00:40.462)
Okay, wow.

Dr Tom Bakman (00:53.248)
when he was passing, he asked me, says, what do you want from me? I said, I want your diaries. And he had kept a diary since 1928 and he died in 93. And so what, and I don’t want to go too much into the detail about it, but what it, in my own reflection, you know, he was an educated farmer. You could see where he had time to think, reflect and journal.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:20.919)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:21.576)
And it is fascinating. So I picked it up. I’ve journaled for about 27 years. And so someday there’s a box up in the garage. It says Tom’s legacy. My daughter will get it. Find out stuff about me she never knew, right? But just kind of growing up, I did great in school. A typical thing, I didn’t really get in trouble. I was into sports and I loved to exercise and…

and being competitive. I went to UC Irvine for my undergrad. And I think it’s because of the beach. I don’t think it’s really because of the school. And it was, yeah, yeah, it was such a far world away from Fresno. The people were more stimulating. They had different conversations. And I really like that. And so I did,

Leigh Ann Lindsey (02:01.55)
It’s not a hard sell, yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (02:09.901)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (02:15.725)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (02:20.502)
three years in the pre-med. And then they asked me, they said, hey, it’s time to like start looking at med schools. Which one do you want to go to? And I said, I don’t, I want to go to chiropractic college. And you could hear a pin drop. There was no resources. This will age me, but that was back in the early 80s. There was no resources at the university at all about chiropractic curriculum or anything, right?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (02:36.056)
Totally.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (02:48.814)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (02:49.598)
So I went on to apply to LACC. They offered me a dual degree in my bachelor’s in human anatomy and then my DC degree. And just a side note from that, I was in a fraternity. The last count we had, was 22 of them that came through that became chiropractors. Yeah, yeah, it’s so, well, something in the water and I think it attracts kind of a personality to be honest with you.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (03:10.498)
No way. my God, there was something in the water at the frat house.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (03:18.773)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (03:21.366)
Don’t want to comment too much about that, but super good. I got out of chiropractic college. I went into a practice that I was going to buy and the lead doctor who was older did a, he did his annual at the Mayo Clinic and actually found a cancer behind his kidney and he died three months later. So here I am a young guy.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (03:45.461)
wow.

Dr Tom Bakman (03:50.988)
I don’t know, was 24, 25. And there was other doctors there and I was in charge. And so it made me grow up real quick. Unfortunately, he had a younger wife that she stepped in and said, you’re no longer buying the practice. And I went on and I left. I gave my notice and got fired same day.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (03:57.198)
Wow.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (04:05.102)
Hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (04:10.306)
Mm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (04:17.289)
Hahaha

Dr Tom Bakman (04:18.984)
And so I went in and did just single chiropractic work. And then I met a kind of a mentor, an older Cairo. He goes, no, I’ve heard about your practice. Let’s get together. And so we had this dream. We had this dream of a real dynamic healthcare model that brought Cairo PTOT and MD together. This was in the early nineties.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (04:46.796)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (04:49.012)
And so we ended up opening a clinic in Fresno, I was back there now, and we had a urgent care center that was staffed with medical doctors. And then we had the rehab floor and we said, what is the best playing field for us to play in? And so we did workers’ compensation from the employer standpoint, not from the, like the attorney and all that.

And the reason why is because it had to be performance based. You had to get that patient better, return to work without an injury or disability. So hence the psychology came in.

Most of them, the system forces them to have an external locus of control where they’re really in a victim role. They’re really in a permission-based healthcare arena. Everyone’s telling them what to do and they’re asking and they’re kind of pawns. Well, we flipped it and we empowered them. And we said, hey, look, here’s the stats. If you go out on disability, what’s gonna happen?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (05:45.432)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (05:48.962)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (06:09.228)
to your pocketbook, your family, a lot of them have substance problems. And we ran it. And we competed against like the big guys, like the concentras. We grew pretty big. And it just started getting traction. And we started really looking at integrative pathways. And one of our mottos was whether you’re an MD, a DC, an OT or PT, it was like,

Check your ego at the door, bring your skill set in, and what can we do collaborative together to get this patient independent and vital. So anyway, that’s a little bit of background on that. And then I sold and actually came to Southern California again and was the third owner of a orthopedic surgical group and surgery center.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (06:50.627)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (07:09.148)
And I thought, man, I’ve really arrived. Here I am, a young guy, right? And what I came to find out is that we just weren’t aligned. We weren’t aligned with what we wanted to do with the patient. So I did that seven years. I went into another model where it kept getting better. And this is kind of where the teeth gets into it. It was a medically supervised rehab clinic, PT sports medicine, but we had a…

Leigh Ann Lindsey (07:18.925)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (07:40.01)
a surgical suite where we could do pain injections and we could see whether that disc was really a problem or not. it really was clinically, it was golden. I did that for another seven years. And what I saw was these incredible, we’re in Southern California, Newport Beach, Huntington.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (07:50.636)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (08:07.242)
and you had these ex Olympians that were now, they aged out but they were great athletes with a lot of pain.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (08:15.103)
huh. yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (08:16.618)
And so in fact, some of them were on fentanyl patches and they’re still like cycling and surfing and all of it. And I said, there’s gotta be something more to it. So I really dug into a couple of things, looking at the physiology side of how do we make them regenerative and rebuild and keep them functional. And it worked. And unfortunately the group that

Leigh Ann Lindsey (08:20.201)
man.

Dr Tom Bakman (08:46.06)
I was with, had no clue, and I walked and I’d saved enough money and I bankrolled another group, Restoration Healthcare, that I started in, I started planning it in 2014, opened it in 15, I found a physician and let her earn in as a co-founder. And that’s where we really got into the complex chronic of it. And so along the way,

Leigh Ann Lindsey (09:11.605)
Uh-huh.

Dr Tom Bakman (09:16.626)
I ended up having the ability. I was called in to Southern California Edison, believe it or not, power company, half day a week. They wanted just consulting on how to get their injured workers returned. And so I spent about three years with them. And now I’m in, you I’m on the C-suite at Southern California Edison and they’re listening to me. I’m like, my God.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (09:46.007)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (09:46.048)
What is going on here? And they just said, you’re so refreshing. I said, it’s really pretty easy. It’s about systems and it’s about people. And so we need to bring them all together. And that led to creating an insurance company. So I created an insurance, helped create an insurance company, a private one that was owned by Jolly Green Giant. That’s who you guys know them. They’re called Growers Express.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (09:50.37)
Hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (10:12.943)
Mm.

Dr Tom Bakman (10:13.44)
And we ran the model and did super, super well with their future medical and their work injuries with little litigation. And I’ll bring this to a close here. It did so well for them. We took a…

an $11 million expense down to two and a half with happier people and less litigation. And so we created a whole, we were gonna create a network and go big. And I remember specifically being on a phone call, our crew was in Chicago with the loss control department for United Airlines.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (10:40.667)
my gosh.

Dr Tom Bakman (10:59.712)
and they were facing like a billion dollars in future liability of injured workers. And they looked at it, there’s a lot of questions being asked, and then you could almost hear a pin drop because it was like, my God, if they do what they do, we lose our jobs. And so it was almost like finding the cure for cancer. It was economically detrimental for the cottage industries.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (11:20.419)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (11:29.039)
Hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (11:29.63)
And so that just kind of got put on the back burner and I’m here.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (11:36.397)
Yeah. Give us a little introduction to Helixona. And then I’d love to start to get into neurology, functional neurology, how this relates to chronic illness, even more than that complex chronic illness. But maybe let’s start there. Cause that’s, that’s where we’re at. six months in to Helixona.

Dr Tom Bakman (11:52.78)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So at the other clinic restoration, I believe I’ve had seven businesses and there gets to be a maturity in it where you just hit barriers that you didn’t know between partnerships and all of it. And no one does anything wrong. It’s just it’s time to say, you redefine and you align or you say, hey, we’ve got to go separate ways. So

It was one partner buying out the other partner. And so I ended up being bought out and I didn’t have a non-compete. And so I opened Helixana and it’s, you know, the acronym, right?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (12:44.513)
Yeah, the audience might not.

Dr Tom Bakman (12:46.11)
Okay, healing, energetics, light, infusions, X is for therapies unknown, O is for oxygen, N is for nutrition, and A is for awakening to the healing within you. And so it’s a really cool acronym, right? And so what we wanted to do on that is take the model that was at

Leigh Ann Lindsey (13:05.315)
Mmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (13:15.22)
restoration, which did great. was systems based functional, whatever we want to call it. We’ll get into deep medicine here in a minute. And it started adding the energetic side that have really shown people getting better. What we what we found was people had been in the conventional frustrated using part of conventional using functional, and then they were using energetics. And, you know, from

Leigh Ann Lindsey (13:21.933)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (13:41.197)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (13:44.918)
from all of it that we were talking about, you know, before we came on, the energetic is really what resets the body. After you get it to a certain point and it helps someone reach a threshold where they can get over and start to have it. This amazing body we live in take care of itself, and that’s the goal.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (14:12.917)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Can you, I do want to differentiate because we, you guys talk about complex chronic illness and I think that’s worth taking a second to define. I think chronic illness is a very widely accepted term. Complex chronic illness isn’t something I’m even hearing that much of and I, you know, I’m in this integrative world. I follow a bunch of integrative pages.

And don’t know if you guys coined that term or if it’s just not widely known yet, but can what is that? How is that different from chronic illness?

Dr Tom Bakman (14:47.294)
So imagine a diagnosis that is just a label and it’s an expression of the body breaking down or certain symptoms, but it doesn’t trace back to the root systems that broke down to cause it. like a…

Dr Tom Bakman (15:12.05)
Someone can have a thyroid problem and autoimmune, which is so common now because of the world we live in, especially women with Hashimoto’s.

Okay, so it’s thyroiditis or Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. But if you really dig deep, how did that spark get thrown into the stack of hay? They could have had a gut problem before that breached the system allowing the pathogens to get in and kicking off the antigens. They could have a poor genomics.

contributed to it. They could have an environmental factor with you name it from the food we eat, the dirty airwaves.

mold and it’s never picked up on. And so it’s only labeled as a Hashimoto’s, there’s so much more to it and there’s a different nuance for everyone on it. It’s not just a thing. You’ve got to unpack it. So in the integrative functional world, it’s kind of like the Wild West right now. There’s this massive learning.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (16:24.665)
Totally.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (16:35.695)
you

Dr Tom Bakman (16:38.646)
There’s massive, undeniable new points of perspective for physicians that are like, man, I wasn’t taught everything. One system affects the other system. So in the search to do the good, they’re reaching for all of these things. And you get kind of a little tribalism that goes on the internet, whether it’s methylation, right? That everything can be cured with methylation.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (16:47.161)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (17:00.141)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (17:07.914)
What’s really interesting about that is that the ones that fit the model and get better hang around, but the other ones that don’t resolve, they’re not going to be there. And that model is not faced with what do I do when this doesn’t work?

So complex is exactly that. What do you do when these patients have tried everything conventional, all the different specialties haven’t gotten better. They’ve tried a outlet of a certain part of functional medicine or integrative and they haven’t gotten better. And so it’s kind of like a CSI thing. You got to like unwrap it.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (17:48.217)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (17:51.906)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (17:54.964)
And then you got to not be prejudiced about having it pull you into one thing that you really like and it’s really fun to do and just listen and look for kind of, we call it the lead actor in the play. What is the lead actor in the play for that patient right now that might be dysregulating everything? So complex chronic is multiple layers on it.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (18:12.185)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (18:22.666)
with kind of a Rubik’s Cube thing you gotta figure out.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (18:27.459)
You know what I hear in that is the lead symptom might not be the lead actor.

Dr Tom Bakman (18:33.736)
Exactly. Exactly.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (18:35.223)
And so we, but we have to have that lens framed towards, think sometimes conventional medicine is, and it’s not to demonize them, but goes lead symptom, lead actor, there it is. You know, let’s go after it. So be, so being able to zoom out and go, here’s, here’s the lead symptom. And that alarm is blaring loudly. We have to be discerning and go, where else are there alarms blaring that we might not have noticed if we didn’t look.

Dr Tom Bakman (19:00.704)
You know, that’s exactly right. In the medical education, you know who Casey Means is, right?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (19:08.961)
Is she a social media? No.

Dr Tom Bakman (19:10.964)
No, she, well she is, but she’s our surgeon general now. She is the young, I think she’s not even 40 yet, had a neck surgeon out of Sanford. And her mom got cancer, it’s a great book, right? It’s good energy, it’s all, it breaks it down to a cellular level. But basically she talked about her education. And she made a statement that goes,

Leigh Ann Lindsey (19:15.368)
okay.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (19:24.355)
Okay.

Dr Tom Bakman (19:39.24)
something like this, I can’t quote it exactly, that a physician that doesn’t have more extensive training in how to treat chronic should not be treating it.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (19:51.669)
Yeah, completely.

Dr Tom Bakman (19:54.376)
So take that a step further. It’s always a reflection of the provider. We have to have, we have to be so gathered in who we are that we’re not prejudiced. can bond with the patient on it. And then the experience one-on-one should shift from a transactional experience into a professionally relational where you share.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (20:24.129)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Something I would think about often is when you’re going through med school, how old are those textbooks? Are they the most up-to-date recent textbooks? And then how many doctors the research stops, the learning stops once they get the degree? And I know there’s continuing ed, so there’s some level, but a lot of that is pretty gimmicky and a bit of a joke. And so it’s…

Dr Tom Bakman (20:24.384)
and you’re learning from one another.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (20:52.687)
with the medical field and how much we are learning every single day, the thousands and thousands of research articles that come out every year, in my opinion, I think there’s an argument for medical malpractice or negligence if we are not continuing to stay educated. And that’s a whole different conversation. But the point of it being the people I’m drawn to, the people my patients are drawn to, the people I refer my patients to are the ones who at the core of it

are endless learners.

Dr Tom Bakman (21:25.426)
It is and it’s I have a lot of good friends who are MDs that are awakened, whatever you want to call it, right? And one of them said, you know, I was top of my class, I did everything right. And I had seven patients that were the picture of health and they all died. And so it was not a measure of health or prevention or anything else.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (21:50.948)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (21:53.108)
And they go so far as to say, I was kind of gaslit. And so the patient gets gaslit too sometimes, not knowingly. And it’s so, so sad. One of the first things I like to do is really read the patient when I get to do my time with them. And sometimes I go, can I just apologize to you on behalf of the healing professions? You’ve really been beat up.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (21:57.507)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (22:17.219)
Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (22:21.104)
And they have, you know? And it is just, it is changing. It is changing in my career. I’m 38 plus years in. Man, I am more hopeful than any other part, any other time in my career. It’s fascinating.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (22:38.052)
Yeah.

So exciting and so refreshing and you know, hopeful and encouraging. So let’s talk about neurology. And to your point, this isn’t about neurology is the missing piece for everyone. But what we are talking about is this is a piece of the puzzle. Here’s how it might be contributing to chronic illness, complex chronic illness. Here’s what it looks like to support that from a functional lens. And this is coming from someone by the way, who

professional soccer player, I’ve had six severe head injuries. Three of them were classified as concussions. I think arguably the other three were too, but I was so young and they didn’t really care about concussions then. So I’ve had a lot of head injuries. It’s something very, very top of mind for me.

Dr Tom Bakman (23:15.724)
There you go.

Dr Tom Bakman (23:20.544)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (23:29.632)
We can compare head injuries sometime too.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (23:31.375)
I mean, I’m not like an American football player with maybe 30 head injuries, but I’ve had my fair share.

Dr Tom Bakman (23:37.322)
No, no, no, no, there’s so much to be said about it. So, okay, so let’s back up. Let’s talk about neurology. It has been looked at as a specialty. That neurology doesn’t talk to gastroenterology, doesn’t talk to endocrinology and all of it. When it’s, I don’t wanna sound real Cairo, but I’m just saying reality. It controls everything. That the autonomic nervous system is 85 % of the activity of your nervous system.

And it has been deduced, reduced down to you’re either within normal limits or outside normal limits. sometimes to get a positive finding, you’ve traveled all the way right next and past the line where you’re broken and pathology where there’s not a lot of turning back.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (24:18.34)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (24:36.244)
And if you’re just two tiny steps back from that line, you’re told you’re within normal limits, you’re fine. And so you gotta look at the nervous system as something that’s dynamic.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (24:45.668)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (24:53.741)
bio individual.

Dr Tom Bakman (24:53.95)
And you have to test it that way too. For example, the difference between conventional neurology and functional is functional will stress the system, the pathway, and see if it fails. Meaning that a quick neuro exam doing one part of the exam one time

may show that it’s fine.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (25:25.071)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (25:26.764)
But if you repeat it, get, if they have a lack of neuroendurance or they’re going into, you know, if you want to call it chronic fatigue, whatever, a mitochondrial crisis, the neuron is the connection of communication that you’ll see it. And so it is a very sensitive way.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (25:49.817)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (25:55.572)
of getting feedback of globally looking at the patient to see what their overall health is and to localize.

neuropathways that are weakened that may have shown no big deal with a one-time eval and one-time exam. It makes you listen to the patient differently. For example, someone will say, I’m so tired. I just, have chronic fatigue.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (26:21.219)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (26:34.386)
And as you start figuring it out and retooling it, one of the things I learned that you can do is say, okay, you’re gonna help collect me data for me. You’re gonna have your favorite big fat book and you’re gonna start reading it same time every week. And I want you to count the pages that you can read, the number you can, until you can’t concentrate or you start falling asleep.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (27:01.443)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (27:02.954)
And then every week as you’re treating, I want you to do it again. And their endurance increases. There’s some studies that show that a two hour exam depletes the body of its 80 % glucose reserves. So the brain and the neurology system is massive energy consumer. It is not a Prius. It is a jet fighter.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (27:09.603)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (27:26.798)
Mm-hmm.

Yes.

Dr Tom Bakman (27:32.402)
It needs fuel, right? And so when these people get different things affecting them, the supply chain feeding it, toxicity, infection, you can start looking for the patterns and put it together. My job is to baseline the patient and give back to one of our treating physicians ideas of what I think the lead actor, the lead

layer is. And then we check it periodically with diagnostic testing and neurologic testing too.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:03.234)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:10.687)
Here’s a question I want to understand better. And I think it’s maybe a two-parter. One is when a patient comes in, is that neurological testing automatically a part of this assessment for you and the team at Helixona? Or is it, it only becomes a part of the equation when I see these blank things? And if so, what are those things? And then I’d also really love to understand

neurological testing from that functional medicine lens? What does a conventional neurological assessment look like and then how might yours go beyond that?

Dr Tom Bakman (28:41.386)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s, it’s hard to show you through the computer. I’ll do my best. I’ll do my best at describing it. So in was the first question again.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:47.424)
No.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:57.967)
Is neurological testing just a baseline of initial assessment?

Dr Tom Bakman (29:01.45)
Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, it can be. But in the helix on a model, what I saw over the last 10, 11 years was there was kind of categories of patients. A level one for us is that they have failed numerous doctors, specialties, self care, all of it. can’t get ahead of it. That’s the patients and

Leigh Ann Lindsey (29:14.351)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (29:30.528)
I’ve been online, I’ve done it, I’ve treated my SIBO, I’ve done everything and I have no answers. That patient, it’s passed to me, before they see me, they’re getting some testing. They’ve got a pretty detailed body composition that gives us a lot of information. That’s the InBody970.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (29:38.521)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (30:00.163)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (30:00.946)
and it gives us inflammatory markers, cell health markers. It’s more than just the ratio of body composition. Visceral fat is really super important. And then another test is an autonomic nervous system test. It has cardiac leads, blood pressure cuffs, pulse monitors, finger in the toe. And basically it’s tapping in and monitoring and giving us an idea

of how safe their autonomics feel and how fit they are. And if they’re stuck. Exactly, it’s all neuro, okay? And my dog’s growling, it’s not me.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (30:34.766)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (30:38.721)
Okay, neurologically. Okay, uh-huh.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (30:49.239)
I can’t hear it, so you’re fine.

Dr Tom Bakman (30:51.036)
Hold on one second. Honey. She’s a Bernadoodle. She’s precious, but okay, honey.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (30:54.191)
She’s so cute, you’re totally fine. I’m just gonna make a note of the time stamp.

Dr Tom Bakman (31:01.46)
Yeah, I’m sorry. No growling. Thank you. Are we back on? And so the autonomics, I can get a lot of different information from the neuro. I can tell if someone, and this is back in your field, are they regulating in their window of tolerance? Okay. And basically what it does is it gives us an input.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (31:08.591)
Yep.

Dr Tom Bakman (31:28.138)
And it doesn’t say how stressful their life is or stress less their life is, is do they have the internal capacity to regulate in the sweet spot that stimulates it enough from mental, emotional or spiritual stress that allows it to repair, but it doesn’t kick it too high where it’s up regulating a sympathetic reaction causing an inflammatory issue to the body.

And then the other one is pure physiology. If they’re stuck with chronic infection or toxicity or nutrient uptake or you name it, it’s gonna give us an idea that it’s not regulating really well. A lot of times patients will get a paradoxal parasympathetic syndrome, meaning that it shows that their parasympathetics are overboard.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (32:11.769)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (32:24.781)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (32:25.416)
In reality, they have such a need for the sympathetics that’s kicking on that Stephen Porges is Mr. Polyvagal and I’ve met him many times. And so he is like Moses, man. He is just like so bright.

And some will describe like you’re in the car, you’re pulling up on the stop sign and you can’t take your foot off the accelerator, you hit the brake extra hard so the car looks like it’s doing an inactive activity or it’s relaxed parasympathetic when it’s really not. There’s no flexibility. So it’s really interesting. Patients can get stuck either way.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (33:05.487)
Totally. Totally.

Dr Tom Bakman (33:18.662)
when if they’re very chronic, it’s a neuroplasticity model. When they start to break loose, they kind of go crazy until they can self-regulate, right? And then I’m like, hey, it’s good. We broke it free. Okay, so that’s the autonomics. And then the last one is sensory neuromotor control of eye movement. It used to be done in a

Leigh Ann Lindsey (33:26.667)
Yes, absolutely, because there’s a recalibration.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (33:34.275)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (33:47.456)
dark room before we had computers and it was mapping eye movement and control and predicting patterns in the brain or areas in the brain and what could be happening to it. But and so since it was so expensive and so hard to do, it was safe for people that really had like a cerebral vascular accident, a severe TBI, and it wasn’t used in the lower level. Now we have right eye and it gives us

Leigh Ann Lindsey (34:15.311)
Okay.

Dr Tom Bakman (34:16.872)
that it can show it can show me an autoimmune pattern, can show a hyper inflammatory pattern, it can show me signs of head trauma, which means

Leigh Ann Lindsey (34:25.123)
Now, what is this? Is this a scan? Is this a, how is that test happening?

Dr Tom Bakman (34:27.914)
Yeah, so you’re sitting in front of a computer and it has an infrared camera that’s mapping and recording digitizing your eye movement. So there’s three things it does. It’s following something moving. So circle side to side, up and down. The other one’s scanning. It’s what your eye does when it’s facial recognition or it’s looking at an object. It’s the little micro movements of going point to point to point to point.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (34:39.151)
Mmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (34:57.644)
pull in the data so we can recreate in our mind. And then the last one is just holding it still so you can do detailed work. In each of those, the neurologic signal comes from a different part of the brain and different things can happen to it. And so you can deduce and look at it and you want good control, smooth patterns and accuracy. And when it isn’t,

Leigh Ann Lindsey (35:13.903)
Hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (35:27.168)
you’re consuming, you’re getting poor gas mileage. You’re using, yeah. So all that being said, those three things is kind of the entry that I go over with them and explain to them what it’s doing, but it determines if I’m gonna examine them or not.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (35:29.869)
Yeah, totally.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (35:46.531)
that those couple tests or that first test.

Dr Tom Bakman (35:48.468)
Yes, yes, yes. And the reason are.

or a couple different things. They could be so wiped out they can’t handle my exam. It drains them. I’ve had them do an epileptiform activity or actually go into a seizure because I drained them early on. Now it’s what the gray hair helps, right? You know where that edge is, right? So it’s like, they’re not ready for it yet. And I let them know it.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (36:01.88)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (36:09.653)
Ugh. Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (36:23.026)
Others, I can press it. And I can back to the pattern.

I can have them walk and I’m looking at their gait pattern. And I’m looking at from more of a neurologic than I am orthopedic. And then we’ll do a thing called double task. I’ll have them walk and I’ll have them say the alphabet out loud a tricky way. I’ll say start at B and skip every other letter. It’s not a cognitive test.

But you’re really engaging certain areas of the brain that if it isn’t working, it changes their gait pattern.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (37:05.862)
wow. Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (37:08.042)
And then we do it with numbers too. And so what you’ll see in the follow-up as they start to build, this is a big word, reserves, where they’re functioning better, they can tolerate it. And so that’s kind of an inside look at the difference between functional neurology versus conventional. They’re looking for pathology alone.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (37:22.2)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (37:35.577)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (37:37.558)
We’re looking for pathology, but also what isn’t working right and what is fragile.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (37:44.181)
It’s not just, it’s not working right and that’s it. There’s a hyper specificity to it. You know, I’m thinking of, I told you I’ve had six severe head injuries and I’m thinking of all the neurology appointments I had and it was like, you know, clicking by my ear, tracking my eye movements, all manual. And I remember going to a neurologist because after my fifth head injury, I had a lot of lingering symptoms.

Dr Tom Bakman (37:54.592)
Yes.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (38:13.699)
And I came to him and I was like, so what can we do? What can we do to recover from this? I feel a lot slower. My memory isn’t as good. And he literally was like, well, there’s nothing. You just have to give it time and let yourself recover. And I remember being like, well, that’s not an answer I’m accepting. I am very confident that there probably are a lot more things I can do to support recovery. But it really shocked me because the level of

Dr Tom Bakman (38:25.995)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (38:35.617)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (38:41.507)
Coming from someone who is, you know, top performing athlete, straight A student, could manage so many things at once to feeling like I can barely do two things at once.

Dr Tom Bakman (38:51.232)
You know, the brain is fascinating. When I was first taught in school, it was like, once you have injury to it, it’s done. We didn’t even understand neuroplasticity. And now we do. And it’s very, very hopeful. It’s encouraging that we can create new pathways. There is the physiology side of feeding the brain, proper nutrients, proper internal environment in the brain.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (39:01.174)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (39:20.146)
oxygenation, all of that. If it’s been injured, it’s just like a sprained ankle. Once the swelling’s gone and the pain’s down, it needs to be retrained.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (39:32.631)
Hmm hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (39:34.122)
And the patterns is you can retrain the pattern so that it’s more efficient and the patient gets better. A lot of times it’s reducing anxiety, bringing up injury and all of that. So here’s kind of Tom’s divergent off of my fellow functional neurologists who I love. I don’t do a lot of neuro rehab.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (39:43.929)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (40:02.656)
because I’m using it different. Hopefully one day I can have a whole suite of neuro rehab people, right? That’s kind of where it wants to go. So you get the best of both worlds. But a lot of times in the functional neurology world, they’re training something that has abnormal patterning that may need to be cleaned up from detox, from nutrient to getting the growth factors going. So then they will accept.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (40:08.938)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (40:32.599)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (40:33.463)
the training and that’ll stick.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (40:35.927)
You know what this is making me think of that is so interesting is we hear the same model with other body parts, right? Like we need to detox the gut of parasites and then put in the good bacteria again. And I feel like what you’re speaking to is it’s the same thing with the brain. Does maybe not with parasite, but the brain needs to be.

Dr Tom Bakman (40:48.15)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (40:52.949)
Absolutely.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (40:55.701)
is the brain before we try and retrain it, has it been detoxed of the things that it needs to are the right nutrients there so that whatever we’re trying to give it can actually be integrated. And I don’t feel like I’ve heard the brain spoken of in that way.

Dr Tom Bakman (41:07.252)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (41:10.804)
No, it definitely can. And what’s really cool how it’s designed is that let’s say you’ve got some level of decreased nutrient absorption, toxicity or what have you, training it may be enough to clean it up.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (41:26.632)
okay, so it can kind of go both ways.

Dr Tom Bakman (41:28.108)
So you can go both ways. Now, a lot of times our patients, there’s no way they could do it in the beginning because they’re so sick, right? But it’s fascinating to look at. Now, I’ll digress to my head injury, right? At 15, I was playing baseball and I caught a pitch in the sun and it hit the helmet and it broke the helmet. Drop me.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (41:36.494)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (41:45.357)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (41:57.292)
didn’t knock me out. It rung my bell. And I’m like, they take me out of the game, which, you no 15 year old guy wants to be pulled out of the game, right? And so two days later, I started throwing grand mal seizures. And it was a hospital ride to the, it was an ambulance ride to the hospital. And I lost speech. I could make noise.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (42:13.798)
wow.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (42:27.215)
Mmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (42:27.912)
I could read, I could write, but I couldn’t articulate words. I had a subdural hematoma, which just means a pooling of a bruise between the skull and the area in the brain that broke a speech center that brings all that together so you can vocalize it. And so I was 10 days in intensive care. They’re giving me drugs and I was this far from having a craniotomy, but they opened it up to relieve the pressure.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (42:57.866)
Ay, yai, yai.

Dr Tom Bakman (42:59.398)
And by the grace of God, I’m here. And I say I’m almost normal. But what’s really interesting, and maybe that’s why I got pulled into this. I don’t know, right? But I can tell you my mark, you know, you say, that’ll leave a mark, right? Is that if I get really tired, or if I’m a bit sick,

Leigh Ann Lindsey (43:20.06)
Hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (43:26.058)
I do an adaptive strategy, I will enunciate my words even more. So the brain is fascinating, it masters at compensating, and it will find a pathway at all means to get what it needs to get done.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (43:30.155)
Uh-huh.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (43:36.239)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (43:42.703)
But to your point, and this is where I want to start to talk about how this connects to complex chronic illness and how if it is a missing piece of the puzzle for someone, how not addressing it can keep them stuck or not being aware that it needs to be addressed can keep them stuck. Because a tiny piece I’m hearing in that ever so quickly is you’ve spoken to energy consumption and how much energy consumption the brain takes up even when it’s healthy.

Dr Tom Bakman (44:00.019)
Okay.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (44:12.047)
So when it’s not detoxing well, it doesn’t have the right nutrients compensating in all these ways. It’s using up even more energy. And so my mind goes, Oh, is that contributing to the chronic fatigue to then we only have finite amounts of energy. if 80 % is going to this malfunctioning brain, I don’t have as much to fight the mold or to fight the cancer or whatever. And this is maybe how it starts to all be interconnected.

Dr Tom Bakman (44:42.474)
Yeah, there’s a lot of different ways we can go on that one. So let’s.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (44:45.431)
Okay, so maybe I’ll zoom it out back out and go, if neurology is a piece of the puzzle for someone and they don’t realize it, it’s not a piece they’ve addressed, what does that look like? What type of healing might never be possible for them if this piece isn’t addressed?

Dr Tom Bakman (45:07.188)
You know, it could be a slow slide down where they don’t notice it. It could be anywhere from, they’re getting older, they’re not as sharp, okay, and we just accept it. I don’t believe that. It could be high anxiety. You know, all…

Leigh Ann Lindsey (45:20.708)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (45:31.744)
Let me give you some examples. In the NFL, when they did all the studies on chronic traumatic encephalopathy, right? We learned a lot. We learned more about the supporting cells to the neuron called glial cells, which is 90%. And when they get injured, they go away from their good task.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (45:33.219)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (46:00.232)
of regulating the internal environment of the brain, blood lane, barrier, immunology, decrease inflammation, cleaning up the brain, and they become hypervigilant and inflammatory. That’s a mass cell reaction.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (46:11.663)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (46:16.042)
And what you’ll see is they’ll have an exaggerated response to a minimal provocation. And so that’s what you’ll see in that sometimes. So.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (46:27.428)
Yep.

Dr Tom Bakman (46:35.124)
successful man, 70 years old. He’s building a really cool home and he’s in and he says, I get anxious. And I said, okay, I did the workup and I’m not gonna tell you what I saw yet. I’ll leave it to the end. And he said, I get anxious. I go, what do you do for it? And he goes, well, I kind of smoke some weed every night with my son. Like, okay.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (47:02.753)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (47:06.218)
Nothing wrong with some recreation, but you’re medicating something. Let’s figure it out. So, you know, I ordered a Cyrex Alzheimer’s Lynx test and Cyrex, great lab. Aristo Vujanyi is an immunologist on it. And basically the blood test has five categories of immune markers for different systems that can be a predictor if someone’s going to get early dementia. But you can do something about

So oral pathogens, he’s fine. Gut, he’s fine. Plaques and tangles in the brain, he’s fine. Environmental exposure of causing a cross reaction in the brain, he’s fine. What he wasn’t fine was blood brain barrier.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (47:38.201)
Wow.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (47:51.886)
Yeah.

Meaning things that shouldn’t be getting into the brain are. Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (47:58.572)
That’s right. And so he, he’s a retired pro hockey player. So how many head injuries did he have? And he had a breach in the blood brain barrier. So we got a plan, got him up to speed. He’s doing fantastic. Okay. So, so he could have been labeled at early onset of dementia and, and just let, you know, allowed to slide in.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (48:16.344)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (48:21.904)
Mm And then that’s it. That’s where it goes. Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (48:27.292)
had another guy who he came into the practice, a retired NFL player, player, everyone would know him quarterback. And he depressed, anxious, about to blow up his marriage and his work. And so our team worked him up. And it showed that he had high mold. First of all, he goes, I go any head injuries? He goes, no, not many.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (48:48.644)
Mm.

Dr Tom Bakman (48:57.004)
I go to the internet, I turn my computer around and goes, this you?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (49:00.207)
Totally. Yes.

Dr Tom Bakman (49:01.996)
So they’ll forget them and they’ll repress it, right? So anyway, what his issue was is he had high mold in himself from the urine test. His home wasn’t bad. And so one of our docs sent him to a biologic dentist. He had a dental bridge in his mouth when he was 19 and he got drafted. He didn’t worry about it.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (49:27.981)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (49:29.15)
So the gum grew over it. had a pocket of mold in his mouth. And so they did surgery on it, cleaned it out. And that was the thing that got him better. So it’s those types of things. He would have been medicated forever and who knows what would have

Leigh Ann Lindsey (49:32.333)
Wow.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (49:39.502)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (49:49.667)
Right. Okay, there’s so many places, there’s so many questions I have. They’re all gonna take us down different paths, so I’m gonna try and prioritize. Neurological issues, we’ve talked a lot about head injuries. Is that the only way we can have neurological issues? If not, what can contribute to neurological imbalances, issues, et cetera?

Dr Tom Bakman (49:58.614)
Okay.

Dr Tom Bakman (50:13.766)
Easy. Decrease nutrient absorption. If you’ve had a gut problem and your supply chain’s not getting into the bloodstream, up to the cell, what is the most vulnerable system that you can see it in? Neuro.

Get it? So they’re not being fed. Oxygenation. If they’re not able to have the oxygen O2 into the red blood cell and carried across the blood brain barrier and in to feed the cells, the glial cells and the neurons, you’re gonna have a problem.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (50:36.825)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (51:00.916)
Heavy metal, mercury, lead, thallium and uranium straight from the textbook it collects in the cerebellum, which is the great filter gator. There’s a lot more that can affect growth factors, BDNF, all of that. So it doesn’t have to originate in the neuro, but you can pick up on it.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (51:13.7)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (51:20.557)
Right. Right. It’s interesting because I’m also currently working on detoxing from mold. My old office that I was in for three years tested tons and tons of symptoms and I started working with a mold doctor and she was like, your head injuries are exacerbating this a lot and maybe why it’s affecting you so much more. And so the two can kind of go hand in hand and not just mold, but anything, but maybe because of my head injuries,

Dr Tom Bakman (51:29.92)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (51:49.8)
that mold caused even more inflammation for me than for someone who maybe hadn’t.

Dr Tom Bakman (51:55.538)
Absolutely. I put it the other way around. I’ll say that the mold is neuro-excitatory. And since you’ve had some trauma, it’s going to show your weak links.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (51:57.667)
Okay.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (52:06.403)
Got it. Yep.

Dr Tom Bakman (52:08.652)
And sometimes what will happen, even a patient will come in, even with an infection. Let’s say they’ve got Lyme or a co-infection, but it’s screaming mold. This is when we get into the sequence of care. Everybody’s different. And so they may not, they may have been doing everything at one time. It’s like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Let’s thoughtfully, systematically,

do a sequence of doing mold and let’s try to pick up on the little green shoots early if we’re heading in the right direction and not live on defensive hope.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (52:50.285)
Yeah. Yeah. To your point, it can sometimes feel like a catch 22. I was actually just talking with a doc friend about this, where she was like, to be able to get the body in a place where it can start to clear mold, we need to regulate the nervous system first, but to regulate the nervous system, we got to get rid of the mold.

Dr Tom Bakman (53:10.218)
So that is a good question. And so sometimes from the diagnostics and reading the patient, I had a woman in who she trained healthy all her life. Her phase angle on the in body was really high. She had a lot of, if someone has a lot of skeletal muscle mass and they’re holding onto it, you know, which is high mitochondria.

It helps regulate a lot of other things. There’s a chance you can press on them and get them to detox, get them active.

than someone who’s really broken down. And so you gotta really choose to see how hearty they are. Like, I mean, if you read the literature on a 36 hour fast, it’s amazing. If you can do it, it goes into from hour 24 to 36, your apoptosis or your cleanup surges by 300 % and your visceral fat comes down. It’s awesome. Yeah. But some people can’t start there.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (53:55.374)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (54:00.815)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (54:06.51)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (54:17.807)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (54:23.489)
No way.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (54:24.429)
Right. It’s so interesting because it just does lead to if I think there’s a lot more talk around the nervous system now and how what is the essence of a chronically dysregulated nervous system? It’s I’m not safe. And so if I’m not safe, there is only a certain level of health that is going to be available to me mentally, emotionally, spiritually. But

Dr Tom Bakman (54:33.455)
yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (54:40.524)
That’s right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (54:51.191)
To that end, I think this takes us into the nuance of addressing all these different facets and where do we start? And that’s where the bio-individuality, and also I will say the intuitive experience of you as a practitioner going, know this is pointing to this way, but I’ve done this enough times. I know it’s actually over here that we’ve got to start. again, I think maybe it takes me back to this Catch-22 of

What do we do? Yeah, I don’t know. I think I’m getting lost in my thought here.

Dr Tom Bakman (55:24.524)
That’s okay. What came to my mind when you were saying that I, I, I mean, I’m an AI fan. It’s made me a better writer. It’s done everything is like, where were you when I was in college, right? And so I write things and I just put them in files. And, you know, when do you know that a body

Leigh Ann Lindsey (55:27.759)
As I was rambling.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (55:34.361)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (55:39.841)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (55:53.522)
is starting to not be as vital or healthy as it can be. Energetic resonance of the cell. Okay, you can get into frequency and great story about that that patients are really getting into. I’m not gonna be political here, but I’ll say that there was reports that when we went into Venezuela,

Leigh Ann Lindsey (56:03.875)
Hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (56:21.622)
That the Venezuelan soldiers said that the Rangers came down and they were like superhuman. They did some frequency thing that paralyzed them. Some of them said that I bled a little bit about my out of my eyes and my ears. It was the Havana effect. It was a frequency weapon. So if. That’s been used in warfare and it’s powerful. Why isn’t it used in health care and except?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (56:38.797)
Hmm.

Wow.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (56:50.508)
Mm-hmm. Totally.

Dr Tom Bakman (56:51.946)
And so you get into Rife where, you know, it knows the frequency of it. So the frequency goes off and then the physiologic function starts going off and then more global patterns go off. And then over a longer period of time, maybe a blood panel will change. And then maybe over a long period of time, you’ll see

Leigh Ann Lindsey (57:16.227)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (57:22.4)
pathology on a CT scanner MRI.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (57:25.508)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (57:26.698)
And so it’s like, why are we waiting for it to get to the point of no return? Or, you know, it’s left something. So you’re right. We’re so complex and beautifully made in that way. And just knowing of going through that, it’s super, super important that the patient understands this conversation today with the patient about

Leigh Ann Lindsey (57:30.073)
Totally.

Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (57:57.056)
They can’t be stuck in the lower part of their brain, amygdala, their limbic system all the time. It will not serve them. And so you know better than I do. I’ll just say, hey, look, grieving is the pathway to health, right? And I say, but you can’t do it all the time. Set your calendar, whatever you can handle, twice a week, an hour, and go in and just get into the grieving, how sad it is, write it out, whatever.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (58:02.063)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (58:15.566)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (58:26.518)
Burn the page, I don’t care, right? And then when you come out of it and those thoughts pop up saying, I’m gonna take a note and I’m gonna go into that at my next grieving session. But what the work of Henry Cloud and John Townsend has really helped me that when we connect with someone, it is just, they say body language, in John’s book, People Fuel, the first quadrant is you connect by just being present.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (58:56.58)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (58:57.686)
That’s energetics. That’s co-regulation. And when the brain starts saying, hey, she’s a safe person, then you can give them words of affirmation or words of encouragement or all of it. So now we’re working our way to the higher centers of the brain. And then you get to a category three, which is

Leigh Ann Lindsey (59:19.875)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (59:26.174)
helping get a new perspective, that’s a higher center. And then you get to level four, and that’s the advice, that we can really take it in and improve and all of it. The problem is, I’ll just say for me, as I can think of relatives, they go right to four. I’m gonna give you advice. My nervous system’s going, stay out, I don’t wanna hear you.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (59:29.007)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (59:45.687)
Yes, totally.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (59:52.323)
Right, well, I’m actually just needing safety. The advice can come later, but actually in this moment, I’m just needing safety and regulation. But we don’t know how to verbalize that for ourselves. Our friends and family don’t know how to attune to that within us. So it’s all kind of.

Dr Tom Bakman (59:56.074)
Yes!

Dr Tom Bakman (01:00:03.531)
Yes.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:00:10.548)
Attunement is huge. You know, I’ll give you, this is the weirdest example, but it gets a point. I had someone explain it to me. It’s kind of like coming up on a dog that’s hurt on the side of the road. If you rush in to help it, it’s gonna bite you. But if you sit there and you’re calm and you talk pleasant and low, and then you earn the right to.

touch and pet an uninjured part, eventually you’ll earn the right to help them with their injury. That’s who we are as people, right there.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:00:45.003)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, completely. This leads me to the last thing I really, really want to make sure we touch on, which is I see it’s really exciting how much talk there is around the nervous system, especially on social media and podcasts. And it’s become kind of this end all be all or just, my nervous system so messed up. I got to do all these Vegas nerve exercises. And what I try to sit with my clients and talk about is

We have to ask a bigger question. Why is my nervous system chronically dysregulated? If we’re just doing these regulation techniques, we’re still not getting to the root of it. Now, part of why my nervous system is chronically frazzled could be mold and parasites and heavy metals. But in my world, a huge part of that could be the unmetabolized trauma from 20 years ago.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:01:39.26)
So I had a profound experience last year with a patient. They teach us so much, right? And late 30s physician, very sick and a Muslim woman. And so she came to me and I did my work up and to be honest, I take good notes but I forget all of the corollary stuff we talk about, right?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:02:05.71)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:02:08.062)
I saw her six months later. This brings tears to my eyes. She had an accent and she said, doctor, you were right. I’m like, okay, about what? She said, if I worked on my family of origin issues and she said, my culture has not been very kind to me. I said, That it would help me get better. And I found this book.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:02:22.415)
you

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:02:30.991)
Mm.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:02:38.252)
And the serendipitous about it is I know the author. He’s a friend of mine. It’s called Changes that Heal. And so she goes, I dug into it and I’ve been working on it. And she goes, I’m better.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:02:44.783)
Mm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:02:52.749)
Yeah

Dr Tom Bakman (01:02:54.484)
And so the beauty is we got to do all of it. None of us, know, Henry Cloud told me one time, he said, all of us didn’t get what we needed from mom and dad, and it’s our job as adults to figure it out. And so we need to be lifeline learners and curiosity and say, why do I react like that? What’s that about? And have a good tribe around us.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:02:58.243)
completely.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:03:22.634)
that will lovingly point it out and reflect back to us.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:03:24.515)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, think it’s nervous system work is amazing. It is a way that we can give our mind, body and spirit safety signals. And the metaphor or the analogy I sometimes give people is I have a cancer patient sitting in front of me who were working on sitting with those emotions, the anger, the grief, the sadness, the fear, and they just want to do the tapping exercise or the Vegas nerve exercise. And I kind of go, Hey,

Dr Tom Bakman (01:03:32.097)
Yes.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:03:57.377)
If your best friend came to you and said, I just got this breast cancer diagnosis. Are you going to immediately turn to her and go, you know what? Don’t actually tell me about it. Just do this vagus nerve exercise. No, we’re going to sit down. We’re going to listen. We’re going to witness them and hear them.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:04:09.228)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:04:14.582)
Yes.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:04:16.289)
And we’ve got to be able to do that for ourself, maybe in conjunction with the nervous system exercise. But are we using these things for me? The essence of it is, are we using these things as just another form of emotional bypass? And if we are, it’s just going to keep us stuck and be a bandaid like all the other things.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:04:21.354)
Yes.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:04:36.566)
Human, good human connection is one of the most powerful tools of healing. Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:04:43.343)
And I think that comes to ourselves too. think the essence of my work is are you connected to you? Are you your best protector, caretaker, friend, all the things.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:04:47.403)
Yes.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:04:51.786)
Yes.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:04:55.275)
Yes.

Yeah, no, I am wholeheartedly on that. And it is a journey of knowing ourselves. you know, as I age, I like it because I’m very selective at who I spend time with. And the ones I do, it’s so rich. It’s just so rich. You know, it’s good.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:05:10.971)
Yeah

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:05:21.185)
Yeah, what it adds to, I mean, it’s, it is such a core facet of safety. And again, if we bring it back to its simplest form, a chronically dysregulated nervous system is a mind, body and spirit saying, I’m not safe. Connection is a primal foundational form of safety, but that takes us down a whole road of, and if I’m not receiving safe, nourishing connection, why?

Dr Tom Bakman (01:05:29.962)
Yes.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:05:41.075)
Absolutely.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:05:49.844)
So all are we wrapping here or are we? Okay. Okay, good. No, this is super, super fun. Patients sometimes think that you got to get the A, the 90%. And you don’t. You just have to get things heading in the right direction over a threshold that they’ll do fine.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:05:54.468)
You, I will take as much of your time as you’re willing to give.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:06:18.156)
It’s another story another time, but I’m an older father, my daughter’s 16. Okay, and she was adopted, we got her out of the system as a preemie. And so I’m, you know, parenting her and all of it. And I read a study one time, and it said, for her to have earned secure attachment, I only have to get it right 40 % of the time. I’m like, Oh, great. Awesome.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:06:47.641)
you

Dr Tom Bakman (01:06:49.694)
Right? So we can take the pressure off. We don’t have to get it. Perfection is not the goal on any of it. Right. It’s just are we headed in enough? Are we heading in the right direction of what we’re doing? And are we far enough along? Will it stick and can we build on it?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:06:51.737)
Totally.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:06:56.525)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:07:08.545)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that’s so powerful because I will say as we close I think sometimes one of the things I see a lot with cancer and chronic illness is and I think this is a part of the protective defense mechanism the perfectionism To heal I must do this. Perfect. I must eat perfectly. I must supplement perfectly that in and of itself becomes a source of dysregulation and all the things

Dr Tom Bakman (01:07:23.03)
Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:07:35.518)
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:07:37.165)
So that is a really powerful message, I think, for us to close on that. And what I will say too, and I think you’ve already spoken to this in different words, is all we really have to do is get the downward spiral, we’ve got to stop it first, and then get that spiral moving up. And as we go up and up, the body can start to do so much of this on its own without tons and tons and tons of effort.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:07:41.557)
Awesome.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:07:56.62)
That’s right.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:08:06.002)
absolutely awesome. Yes, yes.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:08:07.075)
the momentum starts going the other direction, so.

Well, Dr. Vaikman, thank you so much. Just so the audience can hear it. Where can they go to learn more, to connect with you?

Dr Tom Bakman (01:08:13.601)
my goodness. Yes.

Yeah, they can go to the website, which is helixona.com. We have kind of, if they want to be a patient, they can put all of the data that we ask. We’ve worked real hard on the intake so that they get the most appropriate level of care.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:08:42.658)
Mm-hmm.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:08:43.208)
And so, yeah, they can go there. They can message it if they want to email me. It’s tom at helixana.com. And I just, I enjoy what I do so much. I feel very blessed.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:08:57.559)
Yeah, yeah, we’re lucky to have you guys here locally. I think it’s really, really special. Yeah.

Dr Tom Bakman (01:09:01.96)
Awesome. Thank you.