Do you know anyone (maybe yourself!) who is healthy, routinely exercising, has healthy habits but has sleep problems? The problem might not be sleep, rather it may be a brain problem. For someone who suffers from head trauma early in life, no matter how mild the incident was, the brain might experienced disturbances that haven’t been resolved in a long time. Another example is caregivers, they often have enough sleep, but their performance is declining, the brainpower is declining. This podcast looks at the possibility of restoring our brainpower by improving oxygen flow using red light therapy. Red light therapy was known to improve oxygen uptake in the brain and helps with brain recovery, thus helping people to feel and perform better. A head-based specific device has been created by Dr. Joe, who has spent more than 20 years understanding sleep devices. Dr. Joe DiDuro DC MS DABCN is a Chiropractic Neurologist, Clinical Researcher, Cognitive Augmentation Neurotherapist and Brain Fitness Coach, and the founder and CEO of ProNeuroLIGHT LLC, a photobiomodulation device company for home neurorehabilitation. Listen in to Dr. Joe and Mollie’s podcast discussing red light therapy by photobiomodulation and how heart rate variability score is a very important indicator of your wellbeing!
BIO:
Dr. Joe DiDuro is dedicated to helping people live a more fulfilling life. His passion is to help people by teaching them how they can create neuroregeneration and healing in their own lives. He is the founder and president of the nonprofit organization
In his 32 years of clinical experience, Dr. DiDuro has come to understand the very low quality of life that people affected by neurodegenerative diseases experience and that their disability touches every aspect of their existence; personal, social, and family. Dr. DiDuro has made it his life’s work to help end this suffering, initiate their recovery, and restore their humanity.
Dr. DiDuro earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1983. He subsequently received his Doctor of Chiropractic Degree from Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa, in 1986.
Dr. DiDuro lived and practiced in Vicenza, Italy, for 10 years and completed further specialized training in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for the American Chiropractic Association’s American Board of Chiropractic Neurology and has Diplomate Status in Chiropractic Neurology since 2000.
Upon moving back to America, Dr. DiDuro was accepted to Palmer Center for Chiropractic Research. As a chiropractor, working in a field that some call pseudoscience, he worked his way into the world of peer-reviewed research by obtaining a Master’s Degree in Clinical Research in 2006. Since then he has focused on working with collaborators who are leaders in their fields and see the value in evidence-based, client-centered care. He has dedicated his life’s work to research and unlocking the keys for new technology to help create More Brain Power.
Since 1995, Dr. DiDuro has published and presented over 32 scientific papers around the globe. He was lectured to medical groups across Europe and North and South America. He is a collaborator with scientific experts worldwide.
His most recent scientific publications include "Rapid Reversal of Cognitive Decline, Olfactory Dysfunction, and Quality of Life Using Multi-Modality Photobiomodulation Therapy: Case Report,” published in Photobiomodulation, Photomedicine, and Laser Surgery Volume 37, Number 3, 2019. Another is the highly referenced "Therapeutic potential of intranasal photobiomodulation therapy for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders: a narrative review" in the prestigious scientific journal Reviews in the Neurosciences 2020 Apr 28;31(3):269-286.
He is currently Moderator of the tPBMT - Brain Research Consortium (transcranial Photobiomodulation Therapy) and a highly sought-after Cognitive Neurotherapist and Brain Fitness Coach. He is the Host and Moderator of the BRAIN + tPBMT VIRTUAL SUMMIT where 40 of the world's leading scientific research experts in transcranial photobiomodulation present their research to the world. He has been featured on FOX, NBC, and CBS.
He is sought after reviewer for scientific journals including the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease
He is the Developer of a suite of transcranial photobiomodulation devices and the Author of “My Brain Matters - the NeuroMetabolic Solution: A Handbook on How to Increase Brain Power for Your Loved Ones and Yourself” which is due for release this year.
EPISODE LINKS:
IG: my_brain_matters
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/joe.diduro.547
https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-diduro-61747824/
https://www.my-brain-matters.com/summit-registration
SHOW NOTES:
🧠Self-care and Sovereignty
🧠Cognitive Impairment, Neurodegenerative Diseases, and Head Trauma
🧠If You Don’t Have Sleep Problem, You May Have Brain Problem
🧠Transcranial Photobiomodulation: Device to Create More Brain Power
🧠Infrared Light: Increasing Your Blood Flow by Increasing Oxygen Uptake
🧠How to Reverse Dementia
🧠How Does Photobiomodulation Help With COVID-19
🧠Your Heart Rate Variability (HRV) is Your Happiness Score
🧠Tip: Smile as Much as You Can Before Going to Bed
🧠Mouth Guard to Improve Your Mouth Position and Sleep Apnea Prevention
🧠Dr. Joe’s Nightly Routine and ‘Aha’ Moment
🧠How to Connect With Dr. Joe
🧠Book Coming Out Soon: My Brain Matters
QUOTES:
“If they don't sleep and they have to take responsibility for their own health. You know, we talk about self-care and sovereignty. self-care and sovereignty, but you need it to have a good, do you have a good brain? You need good sleep.”
Welcome to the sleep as a skill podcast. My guest today is known affectionately as Dr. Joe and Dr. Joe. I am so grateful that you took the time to be here today from beautiful Costa Rica. Thank you, Molly. It's pleasure to be here. Awesome. I know we had, uh, we put this in our calendar a while back, so I'm excited that the day is finally here. We've had lots of back and forth. Um, you know, you've I felt that you've been quiet. The pioneer on a number of topic, topics that are near and dear to me, certainly sleep, uh, red light therapy, photobiomodulation kind of transcranial work. And so you're going to get into helping us all understand, deeper sense what all of these things are about. I know we got more to discuss too, so I'm going to jump right in and I would love to turn the table to you. And have you share a bit of, how did you get into this line of work? How, Well, are you still mission driven and, passionate about this topic of sleep and, health in general? Well, I mean, what I found when I was coaching people is they would come in and, you know, my, my practice is a client based taking care of people with mild cognitive impairment or dementia. And Alzheimer's, and what I realized was that taking care of Alzheimer's people is that the caregiver needs as much care as the patient, you know, Yeah. you know, the Alzheimer's is a terminal disease and sometimes the patient dies, but a lot of times the caregiver is suffering. So I realized that they needed sleep. And then when you would ask the, the patient with mild cognitive impairment, like, well, how did you sleep? I sleep great. And I was like, ah, we need really, I can't go by that. So we needed the bio data. We needed sleeps, you know, information from these people. And then we'd have to figure out a way to get them better, you know, to help these suites. Problems get better. That was one of the main things that we knew we had to implement, you know, sleep data and let people really in general know that their quality of life is going down. If they don't sleep and they have to take responsibility for their own health. You know, we talk about self care and sovereignty and I just kind of my personal thing, you know, self care and sovereignty, but you need it to have a good, do you have good brain? You need good sleep. Absolutely. Yes. So, uh, you've had a real focus. On the brain in particular for as, um, kind of a Genesis for great health. so I'm excited for you to kind of walk us through some of those ways that, so say if we know that, um, we have either concerns from a maybe genetics perspective of, neurodegenerative disorders or we've a history of some traumatic brain injury. I know we were chatting beforehand that, for myself, I was in a really bad car accident when I was 17. I went through the sunroof car fell on top of me airlifted. I have metal in me from it, you know and, and so from that place that we were discussing, um, you know, that there can be real, actual, measurable fallout of things like that, and then can lead into some of those difficulties with sleep. So, uh, from that place, if you can help us understand, uh, how do we begin to make a difference with this area? I know it's a big thing. Well, that's a G that's a big, that's a big. That's a big chunk right there. So let's just say when I got my BioTracker, when I got my BioTracker that I use, so now use several of them now, but I realized one, my numbers weren't looking too good. And I said, well, you know, you're a scientist. You should be able to figure this out. How come my numbers? Aren't looking too good. Meaning my HRV was low and my sleep was all messed up. And I, you know, sounds like it's an eye opener, so you can easily shake the thing and say, this device doesn't work. Or you can say this device doesn't work. Um, you know, I got my master's degree in clinical research doing test‑retest reliability of different instruments. So I could say, even if there's a lot of variable in the machine, that's measuring it, it's giving us some signal. So that was one thing. And what I tended to realize is that, you know, the people who have a sleep problem, they have, they don't really have a sleep problem. They've got a brain problem in one sense. And, you talked about it though, you know, a lot, and I. Geez. We have a young girl she's bright, she's intelligent, she's active she's exercises, but she had insomnia. I said so many of these people don't have a clue that a traumatic brain injury, it is the basis for many of the low HRVs that won't recover and the sleep problems that won't recover. You know, we did. It's uh, when you think about, uh, at 50% to 70% of people with TBI in 21, studies have insomnia. Present have difficulty maintaining sleep. 49% had poor sleep efficiency, early morning, awakening and nightmares just as, as a little little thing. So they're missing out on this because you, you can't actually, you know, like we said, you can't make yourself go to sleep, right. And, and you can't make your brain better just by what drinking green juice you need. It's a skill you need to be able to do this. And, and what. What we found was that using these new devices, which not too many people even have them, not too many people utilize them. So I'm using them on me and I'm like, Hey, look at this, you got a 60 year old scientist, right. That's not putting in, you know, huge amounts of strain. And my HRV is like one 66, you know, 250 percentile of everybody that's using this device. I was like, Hey, I think I figured this out. And they're like, no, you didn't, you didn't know, you don't know what you're talking about this as possible. I was like, well, Okay. All right. So I had, you know, the science is behind me that when you have a traumatic brain injury and you know, not 80 to 90% of them will get better, but the 10% that don't get better, that's 10% every year that are just hanging around. And, you know, if you see people it's real simple, but it's hard for people to get it through their, your memory that they had. They had a traumatic brain injury. And I said, well, Did you ever get the wind knocked out of you? Yeah. Oh. Did you ever get a headache after years? Yeah. Did you ever have light sensitivity yet? So remember it doesn't have to be loss of consciousness and that's why it's it's you, you're going to have think of it this way. When you're sleeping, you're kind of, nobody really knows what's happening, you know, you're asleep or unconscious. So all that thing is the same thing. With a traumatic brain injury, you go from a little bit of booboo to a big booboo to. Being unconscious or in a coma. But if you have a scar on the outside, you have a scar on the inside. And that sometimes helps people. I look at them and they said, do you ever have a traumatic brain injury? No. And I'm looking at this scar on their head and I'm like, Hmm, how about this? And then they will recall it. So this inflammation in this brain damage, it starts in that part. If you're not resuscitating this brain, you got a very, very difficult time in accomplishing your stuff. Goals or HRV goals and everything like that. Right? Absolutely. I just would, listen, I take care of like extreme ultra endurance athletes and, you know, they, they should them low. Everything's good about them, but their heart rate variability is in the toilet and their sleeps scales are all messed up and you're like, okay, extreme athlete. How about this? How about this? Did you ever have a concussion? Oh yeah. Okay. Well, let's start treating the brain and everything goes up. Okay. So this is exciting because, um, so many people that will reach out to sleep as a skill one it's it's sleep and HRV will often come into the conversation very, very quickly and frustration about how to raise that HRV. We often hear, you know, the same old things that will come running lower, your stress, all those sort of things. And yet your, um, what I would love to go deeper on, uh, cause it sounded like when you first began and you were looking at those measurements, your HIV wasn't yeah. As stellar. And then you've gotten into this great level. So fill us in on, um, in between there, what did that look like? What did you do? Well, you know, the, we haven't designed and brought together a suite of devices for transcranial photobiomodulation. So people don't know what that is. It's sort of like, Oh, I can show you that it's putting light on the head and through the brain, through the skull. So this is like, What kind of looks like if that works, I'm coming out. Very good. Okay. I'm going to helmet my famous helmet, right? Yes. Well, this is a lot of power. This is a really increase your brain car, that little thing over there, but it helps with turning on the brain for the mild cognitive impairments people. He was a real rallied of it is if you had a traumatic brain injury, you have like a 10 times more likelihood to get cognitive decline later in life because. It actually never got better. Your brain never got better. So you're trying to drive the car with the, you know, the tires are flat, the engines ComEd up, you're trying to create more brainpower and more cognition and you just get more and more clogged up. So they don't really get there. So that's sort of the, the scenario. And so the reality of it is I am a DBI survivor, just like, just about everybody else. And remember when I said, you know, you get the wind knocked out. It, think about. So when you're in a, you're a SWAT team or you're in the army and there's a blast, right? And the blast concussion hits you. There's not shrapnel that breaks through your head. You know, you don't bang your head, but the force is transmitted through the food of your body and creates this damaging even a simple car accident. Even when you don't hit anything, the acceleration of your brain, you know, the jello as you accelerate and do. Carers and destroys neurons that deepen inside your brain. So, I mean 60 years old, I think 12 years of context sport, you know what I mean? Two brothers. Yeah. Oh, the blanks. Yep. It's better, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, I realized that, you know, my sleep disorders, which had really didn't even realize that back in the day loud, snoring, you know, Waking up early and thinking it up, I'm full of power, but you know, I started with the Zio tracker back in the thousands. I love that thing. The thing is that the thing about all these trackers is, you know, if you're, if you're curious and you want to, in your competitive, you want to beat the score. Right. That's what you're trying to commute to try to do is increase that thing. And that was a great company because it gave you a real EEG on your brain. Yeah. It's time. Right, but I never got the, you know, the results that I wanted. So if you think about it, you have traumatic brain injury, sleep apnea goes up even in youth, even in young kids. Yeah. And, and that's going to reduce the oxygenation to your brain, your brain, power's going to go down. So you're in a downward cycle. And I know that when we talked before, you have a lot of, you know, menopausal women and everything like that. And you know, as soon as there's a hormone change, your brain functioning starts to dive and it really. Easy scenario is let's increase the circulation to the brain. Let's increase the mitochondrial activity of that brain. Let's get this stuff going and turn the lights back on. Basically. I mean, I don't mean to be a pun, but yeah, no, literally that is exactly right. So then, so for you, what did, um, so you, you start seeing this in your, this you're inspired to start taking new action because all right, your numbers, aren't where you want them to be. And then, uh, did it become like a high. Dosing was this a daily practice? Um, what does this look like for us? Well, yeah, you're so intelligent. You pick up, you pick out the tough questions immediately. And when we talked about dose, you know, okay. So there's light in general for circadian rhythms that we need to have. That's a dose and people aren't getting that. And then people are getting, say like the light panels, you know, that like put red light and. Is that a dose? You know, I think that really what happens when you have red light, you're reducing the garbage light, but you're not really increasing the light absorption of your tissues because really in order to have the red and infrared light, okay. Infrared light penetrates more. You've got to have it right against you because that here you don't have for an led, you don't have much penetration into the tissue here. You have more when it presses against there. It goes in more so that's really what we're talking about is penetration is the first thing that entrance dose, the type of wavelength that you use. Okay. The power of the, of the led or the laser that you're using, right. How much power that thing's putting out. And then actually, uh, you know, how close it is to the tissues. I, one of the things that we do is, uh, actually on another group, we're actually. That's really how you get dos. We're actually modeled modeling how different light gets into the brain and how much gets in there because every different device is going to have a different thing. So this is Oh, through the nose intranasal. So the thing is that this is, uh, does two things. The red light is going to oxygenate the blood, which is going to clean the blood, make it flow better, which is important for our circulation for getting. The blood where it needs to go easily. Cause the blood tends to getting sticky. All these things happen and the blood will get sticky. And if you put the red and infrared, this is dual red light. Mm. Yeah. Well, I'll have to show a clip of this so you can see the visual, the red light is more for the blood tissue and every five minutes, five liters of blood pass through your nose at, so your Oxnard kind of powering up all that blood and it increases the flow. Blood flow. The infrared light has the ability to pass, perhaps because there's no restrictions into the prefrontal cortex, the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. Now, why is that important? Because impact injuries like this hurt the front of your brain. And if you happen to do the neurobiology of heart rate variability, one of the places that the cortical areas or the brain areas work is from the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, right? Here. So my studies showed that, uh, that this is intra‑nasal device will increase the oxygen consumption and the blood flow to the ventral medial prefrontal cortex. That's important because that's really what sending the signals down into your brainstem to kind of power this whole system up. And you're probably not powering the system up if you have hypo functioning here. So this is the whole circle. Okay. So if you hurt the brain, You hurt the heart rate variability, which reduces the function of the cardiovascular function of the cerebral cortex. And that sort of is a downward cycle back and forth. Remember, you have a traumatic brain injury, you really can't think too much better. So it would be smart to not allow a lot of stuff to come in to activate your brain. So it's kind of a fail safe. You follow where I'm going with this, that it's a, it's a downward spiral of, you know, you can't sleep, you can't recover. Your, your brain is not running your, your heart rate, heart rate variability in the way that it could the most optimized way. And you start to have this downward spiral of cognitive dysfunction, emotional dysregulation, that sleep disorders. And you just basically are not what you should be. You're you're, you're not. Pre‑injury level if you thought. Hmm. Yeah. W um, maybe you can help us understand to some of these panels. So they like how you broke down, uh, some of these red light options that are out on the market right now, they will, uh, one, you're making the great point of the proximity to the importance of having that close to you, which not everyone is doing. Uh, but then also for the brain in particular, some of them will actually say that you shouldn't use them on the head. Uh, do you know of why that would be, or why people have the. These call‑outs around that one. It sounds like there's so much importance to doing that. Yeah, I think that's a great question too, but you know, when you do the actual research and talk to the actual people, remember I've been doing neuro rehabilitation with light therapy for almost 20 years. Uh, I'd started doing a lot of neuropathy work, generating nerves, and we realized that, you know, it's only one, a nervous system. So if you got numb feet, you got numb brain and we really. He couldn't turn. I really didn't have the confidence to turn this light pads around and put it up on the head. There wasn't really enough research. And, you know, they were, we were getting in trouble taking care of her opposite, but we actually grew back the nerves and the feet. So I was like, Hey, if the feet get more nerves growing based on skin punch biopsies, you could actually count the nerves that are coming back. If their pain goes down, but their balance improves, you know, it then. What are we doing? We're actually changing the nervous system. So it wasn't until even around 2017 that they, there was enough evidence that says, Hey, put the light on the head. We were telling people to do it, you know, in quiet, we can't say, Hey, take this on your head, dude. Now I can drive the car. I mean, that's what they would tell us, but there really wasn't enough. I couldn't really put my, put it out there to say, Oh yeah, bring, even though it was a brain guy, you know, I just really wasn't enough evidence for me to say, yeah, this is Kunal work. There there's there's evidence now, but we don't have a foreman. We don't have a protocol at this point. I've me and a bunch of other researchers are working on that, but that's the, that's the scenario. That's the scenario. That's amazing. Yeah. I remember I was just pulling up one of our first, um, cause we've been communicating on social media for quite some time and I remember way back when I'm just pulling it up. Oh my gosh. Maybe we have too much. Oh, here we go. Uh, yeah, it was, I remember seeing some of your. Uh, some of your work, even back in, it looks like, I think like 2008, 18 or 19, uh, cause I just had never seen anyone doing what you were doing. So it's really been so cool to follow what you're creating really trailblazing. Uh, so, so a couple of things, maybe we can just, um, further, I know we've already been getting in the weeds on some of these topics, but, um, I know you mentioned beforehand, the glymphatic pump, uh, you know, we, we speak about this, uh, at different points on the podcast and yeah. In our newsletter and what have you, but, um, I liked how you, how you worded it. Glide glymphatic pump. I haven't heard as many people describe it like that. And I think it's a worth hearing from your take on a little bit of a rundown of why that's important for people that aren't as familiar with that and how that relates to this whole conversation. So let's just say, you know, the garden variety, traumatic brain injury, so yes, yes. Yeah. So you had a couple of them and everything like that. Well, no matter what happens in your brain toxic. You know, the trauma, even, you know, ruminating about thoughts can sort of clog up this brain and the glymphatic pump. You need these deep cycles and these big shifts in the, your sleep wave cycles to work that lymphatic pump. Now, the first time I heard about lymphatic pump was actually the best description. So the guy said, so you have the trash collectors. Oh in Manhattan. Right? And then they have to race around and collect all this garbage every night. What would happen? He said if the building's shrunk in the middle of the night so that the streets would get bigger so that the garbage trucks could whip around a lot quicker. And he said, that's basically what happens when you have it in your glymphatic system. And people didn't really even know that that existed back then. And it was like, yeah. So what happens is in the deep sleep stage, your brains slows down. So it doesn't have. Hi, metabolic calling. It's like, Hey, we're cool. Now do your work. So there may be some actual, you know, the astroglia cells and all the stuffs are working like crazy. And you have this pressure change in the brain and zoom is sorta like a power wash in that brain. If you don't get that stuff out, you really can't put anything in. How can you put a good nutrition and how can you put good thoughts? And how can you change this brain? If it's full of dunk, you can't do it. So really what my, you know, coaching. And one of the things that we, you know, teach people about is how to increase the circulation just before you go to sleep so that you have all the fluid that you need up there. So when you get going, you're going to have a good, better flush. That's really pretty insightful because that's really where it's going to start. You can't really put the nutrition in there. You can't really do that. All this stuff quickly and easily. And that's why the research with light therapy or photobiomodulation especially trans creative photobiomodulation. And my own research is rapid reversal of dementia from, from demented to normal in 28 days, without a whole lot of other stuff, just getting the system online. Remember things that people don't really understand is that a photo model.