Unlocking Brain Health: Insights from NeuroCon 2025

In this podcast episode of Stance for Health, Dr. Rodney and Karen Worth explore the exciting developments they encountered at NeuroCon 2025. 

They delve into the benefits of chiropractic care, especially in treating addiction and mental health conditions, based on insights from various speakers such as Dr. Russell Surasky. 

The conversation shifts to the critical role of sleep in brain health, highlighted by Matthew Walker's groundbreaking research on the glymphatic system. These insights reinforce the importance of addressing neuroinhibition and optimizing our daily habits to improve longevity and overall well-being. 

Links to podcasts mentioned:

Sleep and the Glymphatic System

10 Ways to Unlock the Secrets to Better Sleep

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Transcript

[00:07] Dr. Rodney: Welcome to Stance for health podcast with Dr. Rodney and Karen Wirth, where becoming healthy is not complicated. Control your health by focusing on six areas of life that we teach you so you finally have the energy you have to do what you want instead of being a victim of your age. I have over 20 years experience working as a chiropractor and Karen is an author, speaker, and longevity coach. We've seen how a tiny change in your habits today can open up your life to a powerful future. Start today and take your Stance for Health.

[00:51] Karen: Welcome to Stance for Health. I'm here with Dr. Rodney and we are so excited because we learned so much at Parker University NeuroCon 2025. We want to share with you. Some of the highlights will also come with quite a few links to podcasts we've already done. Because I think for me, the most exciting part was that we're on the right track when it comes to neurology. Dr. Rodney is a postural neurologist and I do neurorehab. It wasn't a foreign language. They were speaking from the front of the room. And to me, that was incredibly exciting. But we did pick up so many things that we want to share with you in a future podcast, but today's just going to be about all the highlights, the top things that we took away.

[01:35] So our first speaker was Dr. Russell Surasky. Tell me what you got from that.

[01:41] Dr. Rodney: Well, first of all, I want to go back on what you said a little bit with regard to Neurocon in the first place. It sounded a little heady. The reality was exactly what Karen said. It really focused more on neurology. What a beautiful way to present it. Some of the best stuff I've seen from Parker Seminars since, really since I've been going to Parker Seminars. Russell Swarovski was a huge surprise to me.

[02:05] His dad has been a chiropractor for 40 years. And Dr. Suraskky is actually a DO with an emphasis in neurology and addictionology. He's board certified both ways.

[02:18] If you've ever heard of the Green Books, you'll know that's how deep this guy went. Doesn't say it, doesn't mean he's read all of them. But he earned a lot of points in my book when he started talking about the Green books because BJ Palmer was so far ahead of his time and developed chiropractic.

[02:35] Karen: It was research, very, very detailed. This adjustment did this. This adjustment did that. But his best specialty is an addiction. Tell us more about that, Dr. Rodney.

[02:48] Dr. Rodney: I'm glad you asked that because BJ had the foresight to actually address this type of brain disorder of addiction and even some of the things that a lot of us don't consider anything could help, let alone chiropractic, bipolar disorder, multiple personality disorder, all kinds of disorders within the context of what used to be sanitariums.

[03:08] I think it was a 200 bed hospital.

[03:11] Karen: Yeah.

[03:11] Dr. Rodney: In Davenport, Iowa that actually addressed that for 30 or 40 years.

[03:14] Karen: Yes. And the research around that, all the different things that addiction is a brain disease. And it's not just that you're a terrible person.

[03:24] Dr. Rodney: Right.

[03:24] Karen: The brain, the limbic system versus the prefrontal cortex and all of that getting all scrambled through the drugs or the alcohol.

[03:33] Dr. Rodney: Right. And we'll talk more about this later. Kind of a spoiler alert with the last person that we heard from and how that actually connects to addiction.

[03:40] Karen: So remember that addiction frontal cortex.

[03:44] Dr. Rodney: They're actually going to get a test.

[03:46] Karen: No, not at all. Not at all. All right, so the next one is mine to talk about because I talked us into getting this book and it's called Happier Hour. Cassie Holmes is an author, mom, PhD speaker, busy lady. And so she decided that she was going to write down the four top things that bring her joy. And I remember this example probably well for a long time because she was talking about 30min coffee dates with her little one. And so she put the picture of the little one sitting there with her hot chocolate. She counted how many of those coffee dates she had had and then counted how many she had left before her daughter left for college.

[04:29] And that was probably the biggest takeaway for me. Poignant that what I am doing that's going to be remembered, that makes my life meaningful is what I focus on. And what will that focus be? It was a fun thing for me to consider yesterday after two days of sitting, which by the way is the hardest work you can ever do, sit in one of these seminars because you know they're going on and on and they might be really good.

[04:57] Dr. Rodney: Your backside is like, oh, please, back to the backside. The mind can only handle what the rear end can endure.

[05:03] Karen: That's right. But I made sure that I went to see my littles. But because this summer's almost over and hoped that I could go swimming with them, but it didn't work out. I just waited there with them and gave the gift of time. So this Happier Hour is something we're going to explore more later. Like Dr. Rodney said, this is very suspiciously like hope,

 [05:30] Dr. Rodney: This stuff like you said, it reignited the things that we've already been doing. And that's good for us, but also good for you because we can dig it a little bit deeper and speak it in a more intelligible way so that it can take you deeper and understand more about why we do what we do and why it's beneficial in the long run for you to do the same things.

[05:54] Karen: We'll talk more about what she referred to as time poverty, that at the end of people's lives, it doesn't matter how much money they made, it was how they felt about how they'd use their time.

[06:08] Dr. Rodney: One of the things that I've had joy of or over in the past is gaming. I put five of the things that bring me joy immediately and it wasn't in the top five that surprised me. In reference to when you look back in your life, what will you have been glad that you spent time on? And I couldn't say that that was anything other than a semi selfish pursuit and maybe something to do when everything else is done, as opposed to gaming neurologically anyway, as an end to itself.

[06:39] When you consider the subject of sleep, Matthew Walker, why We Sleep, probably one of the best of the lecturers, and he took longer to answer questions than he did to lecture, and both were amazing. The big takeaways there was to hear him say something about groundbreaking information about the subject of a system that we didn't even know was in place, that we've heard about now over the last maybe five or ten years is not the lymphatic system that cleans the body, but the glymphatic system because of the glial cells in the brain,a large number of glial cells that aren't necessarily about neurotransmitting, but cleaning off the brain is the glymphatic system. And then some of the takeaways that you might have had, I think one that you were talking about really excited you or really impacted you.

[07:31] What were some of those things?

[07:32] Karen: It was in the question and answer time and it was about shift workers and the suggestions of how to make that easier for them. Because those nocturnal workers, especially with the shifts, they go back and forth and back and forth. Oh yeah, that if they were going to shift, switch it, switch it forward and not backwards. But I think just the point part about that is the increase in dementia because of that. And it's exactly what you're talking about. Glymphatic. And we have a podcast link below both on Sleep Secrets and on glymphatic.  So it was very affirming to us.

[08:08] Go back and look over our list of podcasts. We've covered that in great detail. That was what impressed me the most with sleep.

[08:17] Dr. Rodney: He opens up by really saying that sleep isn't in part, just something we get out of the way. We are diurnal. In other words, we're meant to be adjusted to both darkness and light, light and darkness. And that's part of the circadian rhythm. We're meant to have that again. And this goes right back to it. That's the diurnal part. That's the part of us that needs to sleep. It's not a luxury, it's a necessity.

[08:43] Karen: You're not lazy.

[08:44] Dr. Rodney: Right.

[08:44] Karen: You are basically increasing your longevity and.

[08:47] Dr. Rodney: You're making your life better for those around you. Yeah.

[08:51] So it's unselfish, too. You'll be more productive for the people that you work around. You'll be easier to get along with with those people, too.

[09:00] Karen: Absolutely. And I love that because basically, as we make sure that every day I get out and water the plants on the front porch in the morning and watch the sunrise and then the ones in the backyard for the sunset because the powerhouse is set up. It was really, really fun. I enjoyed it. The final one we're going to talk about in this podcast is going to be someone named Dr. Heidi Haavik. I don't know if I pronounced that correctly.

[09:32] Dr. Rodney: Sounds good to me.

[09:33] Karen: She has a research facility in New Zealand and she has devoted herself to fund finding the results, studying the results of adjustments. And so I was so impressed as a non chiropractor with the fact of what the adjustment does. And we know that it helps to have better messages sent to the nervous system. That's what we've been telling them. But there was some exciting new breakthroughs as to what happens to the spindle muscles. Did I get that right?

[10:07] Dr. Rodney: I think what you're talking about is the paraspinal muscles.

[10:11] Karen: Okay. By our spine on the. Would you explain that?

[10:14] Dr. Rodney: So you have these muscles around your spine that connect one bone to the next throughout your spine. And they have different names, but they're designed to actually sense movement from the larger skeletal muscles and can actually blow out. And it's almost like blowing a fuse when you have what's called the neuroinhibition. And neuroinhibition then will cause those muscles, instead of sensing to become, over time, more like muscles that will cause tension, like this red area. It doesn't move as well so the longer that stays like that not performing its function, the less likely the brain is to sense that area properly. And the organs that it innervates, in other words the, the eyes, ears, nose, throat, sinuses, thyroid, heart, lung, stomach, so on, so forth, all the way down to the bowel and bladder. So those muscles become scarred and infiltrated with fat. The longer it stays like that red area there. But the map of the brain, both sensory and motor, meaning that the sending information changes but also the external environment, sensation changes, the ability to, to sense your external environment, we call that proprioception changes. There's also a fancy name for that. I won't go into the detail of it at the moment, but the. I loved what she said about the story that your brain tells itself that.

[12:07] Karen: It'S your perceived reality and it may not really be what is. And that's what is so extraordinary about this.

[12:16] Dr. Rodney: So think of it like the story that your brain tells itself is that you're a 20 year old volleyball player, but then you go out on the court and your body tells you something else different from what your nervous system thought it was.

[12:32] Karen: Can I tell on you, doc?

[12:34] Dr. Rodney: Please do.

[12:34] Dr. Rodney: That's why I said it. I opened, I opened myself up for it.

[12:38] Karen: The said the story his brain was telling him when he went back to play volleyball at the gym that we go to. And you have to be 50 in order to play it to be take part. And he was the only one out there diving for the ball, trying to spike it over the net. I mean he was just going for it. And what happened?

[13:02] Dr. Rodney: My tissue plasticity started talking to me after a couple weeks. Plasticity, meaning I took it further than the, what we call the anatomical barrier of integrity would endure.

So I have pain in my left foot and an increased pain in my right hip.

Don't need to go into a ton of detail.You know, previous injuries and things like that aside,those are the things that I'm getting over.The map of the motor and the sensory is different from when I was 20 so it, I didn't perform nearly as well on the court and my brain didn't either.So that's tantamount to what happens in your spine when the inside information isn't matching the outside information, there is a disparity.And that neuroinhibition,the gap actually then causes your body to malfunction or there's a malfunction that happens as a result.

[14:07] Karen: And I think that's why this book is called the Reality Check. And remember when we first started. Our first point, we were talking about Dr. Russell and remembering the prefrontal cortex.

 Well, the other research that she shared, and I'm not even sure if it's in the book or not because it was so recent, is that they were able to detect a change in the prefrontal cortex after an adjustment. We will be sharing more from this on the Reality Check, but it really was a good time. It just was inspiring. We're on the right track and we want to continue to help you to.

Dr. Rodney: Take your stance for health. So long. We'll talk to you next time.