In this episode, Erin and I discuss the neurofeedback process. We touch on some salient points such as brain mapping and its technology, the possible reasons why not all medical practices use it, solutions made for everybody to benefit from this process, and many more. It may be an overwhelming topic, but we tried to explain it as simply as possible.
Stay tuned for more exciting and insightful episodes! Follow and subscribe to our podcast using the links below ⏬⏬⏬
Website: https://themedicalinsider.buzzsprout.com/
Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3FVK4IU
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3NkufxH
Youtube: https://bit.ly/3lnlbMo
In this episode, Erin and I discuss the neurofeedback process. We touch on some salient points such as brain mapping and its technology, the possible reasons why not all medical practices use it, solutions made for everybody to benefit from this process, and many more. It may be an overwhelming topic, but we tried to explain it as simply as possible.
Stay tuned for more exciting and insightful episodes! Follow and subscribe to our podcast using the links below ⏬⏬⏬
Website: https://themedicalinsider.buzzsprout.com/
Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3FVK4IU
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3NkufxH
Youtube: https://bit.ly/3lnlbMo
Intro
Welcome to "The Medical Insider" podcast, where we highlight real-life solutions to your health challenges, encorporate new technology and proven solutions from the past with a healthy dose of common sense while resisting the pitfalls of idiopathic classifications and economically-based medical doctrine. This is your host, Dr. Thomas Santucci. Let's get started.
Dr. Thomas
Good morning. This is Dr. Santucci. On today's podcast, we have a special guest, Erin Meldrum from NewMind, and we're going to be talking about brain scans and neurofeedback. So, the big question is, what's a qEEG? And originally, I made a little picture of a Martian and figured out that was a cube, and that's what most people think, but it goes way, way, way beyond that. So, one of the things that I thought I'd do is just do a little beginning, and it's a Wikipedia-ish kind of thing to say what we're talking about here. And what we're talking about is quantified electroencephalography. And so qEEG, it's a procedure that processes the recorded EEG activity from a multi-electrode recording using a computer. An EEG is, for those of you who don't know, is that the lines that go across the page like this, and there's a dozen or so, and it takes a genius to read them. We were trying to interpret those, and then we found a technology that Erin's company developed, and that is in the qEEG world with the so-called brain scans and the neurofeedback. And it not only simplified it, it made it so that we could attach the functional neurology to an actual map of the brain. And, you know, in neurology, if you know where a problem is, you probably have a chance of fixing it. So continuing. The process, the EEG is commonly converted into color maps of a brain functioning called brain maps, and some of you have seen those. The EEG and the derived qEEG information can be interpreted and used by experts as a clinical tool to evaluate brain function and to track changes in the brain due to various interventions such as neurofeedback or medication, which means you can actually tell where you are, where you're going, are you achieving your goals? I received my initial training in electro diagnosis to explain the delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves, how to scan for them, and later, how to alter into patterns most commonly associated with normal or optimal functions as well as pathology. In those days, I thought the hardest thing in the world was to pick a protocol and frequencies to improve another person's brain wave. Erin was the guy that first gave me my first real understanding of regulating brainwaves and helped me obtain what turned out to be a pretty clear set of tools for intervening a neurocognitive disorder. So welcome.
Erin
Thanks, Dr. Santucci.
Dr. Thomas
Erin is a technical guy, so we're going to bear with him, and he's going to bear with us because he has a level of detail that is mind-boggling sometimes. But he's also the only one that kind of made any sense of it. You know, when you go to a new company and you're training in them and you're telling them about this technology, what do you say it's for?
Erin
I say it's for just a process to look at, you know, what is going on in the brain. We know basically, we have norm data that shows us, you know, what an average brain should look like as far as electrical activity. So, what we're doing is just looking at brain activity and comparing it to that normed outset and then finding out what's irregular, what's normal. And then from there, the whole process can help to just kind of redirect or coach the brain back into a more normal state. And when that happens, we generally see symptoms start to alleviate, health improves, and the person getting back on the right track.
Dr. Thomas
Great. So, one of the things that people want to know is how accurate is the electrical signaling that we're getting on the outside of the scalp to what's actually going on in the brain. Are we recording everything that's going on in the brain or just a little bit of it?
Erin
We're recording surface activity that we can read at, you know, the skin level. Granted, there is a lot going on in the brain, of course, you know, we've got the brain producing hormones and a multitude of other things going on. But with measuring that surface activity, we can get an idea of not only what we would call magnitude or power. So you can think of that like the volume of your stereo. And then in that volume, we're also looking at different frequency ranges. So you can think of that like a radio station.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
So kind of looking at each individual station, how loud is it, how soft is it? And then just trying to normalize that and bring it back to, you know, a level that is easy to listen to, you know.
Dr. Thomas
Right. So it turned into a vernacular for us that was delta, theta, alpha, and beta waves. And where, you know, delta waves we would characterize. All these things can be said in a much more complex way. But we basically had them as sleep waves. And then the theta waves we had as deep emotions. Alpha waves we had is what we were doing now. You know, kind of just easy having a conversation, but we're alert, like living our life. And then beta waves are like intense study or whatever. And then gamma waves, which we don't really talk about, but that might be clairvoyance. You know, that's the next level beyond what anybody's measuring. And the amazing thing about the technology to me was being a functional neurologist is, you know, if we look at electrical impulses in the brain, you know, you have the invaginations of the brain, and it's the only signals that we can actually measure the ones that escape, you know, the three levels of the meninges inside the skull, the skull, and then the skin on top of it. And then we're putting diodes on top of that with some goop and measuring that. So, it's pretty spectacular technology that takes these tiny little signals and then blows them up. And none of it would be worth anything unless you have some huge database to compare them to. So can you talk a little bit about that? How old is the database? Who owns it? What's going on with that?
Erin
Yeah. So the database we use was designed by Dr. Richard Soutar, a pioneer in the field of neurofeedback, has been in the field for decades now. And that database was started with what we call just normed values.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
You know, so we've got enormed values, well over a thousand of normed out brain activity, all age groups from age five to 90 that we have certified through not only, you know, emotional battery tests, but cognitive emotional battery test to say, you know, this type of brainwave pattern is what we see with somebody with no diagnostic, you know, no dysfunction that we can diagnose.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
So all of that information is put into the database. So when a clinic is doing qEEGs in their office, they're able to then take their client's recorded brain activity, they upload it to our normative database, and then through a series of complex algorithms, that brain activity is compared to the norm group of their age range. And then in return, what we get is kind of like a weather map. It just shows us areas of the brain and all these separate frequencies, delta, theta, alpha, and beta--
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
Of what would be considered to be a normal range for that age, what may be excessively high in power, what might be low in power. And it's those highs and lows in powers that we can see causing, you know, the symptoms that that client may be having issues with.
Dr. Thomas
Right. So then the clinician gets this information, they get this very colorful brain map, and there are different kinds. The LORETA maps go deeper on the back of the head, and, you know, obviously, some of the other maps go much deeper into the brain. But this is a surface level, and it gives us this kind of analog of brain activity. So how do you then fix it? What is the process where a clinician takes this brain map and turns it into neurofeedback sessions?
Erin
The nice thing about a normative database, you know, is the way our system works is it's always starting with the areas of the brain that are the farthest away from what we consider normal. You know, so it might be similar to going to your local doctor and you tell them, you know, I've got a pain here. You know, so they start looking at what's going to be the most obvious reason to cause that pain, and then what are we going to do to treat that specific issue? And we're kind of doing the same thing in the field of neurofeedback where, you know, we're looking at these qEEGs, we're looking at what's the most abnormal thing we're seeing in this brain activity, and then we're using neurofeedback to guide them back. And that neurofeedback process is basically where, like you said, using some conductive pace and goopy paste, we're sticking sensors over certain areas of the brain. And then it's a very passive process. Our client would sit in front of a computer screen. They're going to be watching a movie, generally. And as they watch that movie, the software is monitoring what their brain activities doing. And we've programmed the software to say we want to increase certain frequency ranges, like maybe delta or beta or alpha or we want to decrease those. So as the software monitors their brain activity, we're giving them feedback so that feedback comes in form of changing the brightness of the movie. So I think a lot of the listeners out there probably heard about Pavlov's study with his dogs.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
You know, operating conditioning. The process neurofeedback uses is exactly the same. You know, we reward the brain when it's doing what we would like it to do. We're taking that reward away when it goes back into an unhealthy pattern. And over time, the brain learns to change its patterns to something that's more healthy. As that happens, we generally hear from our clients that they're starting to feel better. Symptoms are starting to decrease. That process is generally repeated for about 30 to 40 sessions, in most cases, to get somebody back to a state that they're happy with.
Dr. Thomas
Nice. Our feedback from patients is they don't like it when the music-- when the volume and the picture fade away. So the brain does not like that. So they tried to-- the brain like subconsciously goes in and tries to correct that symbol signal. And it's kind of fun because especially the people who don't think there's a change, there's you know, perception is difficult because it's such a slow process, but they don't notice something, but the rest of the people in their family do, you know. And then that guy's like, oh, I could always think clearly, and my judgment was always fine, and my memory was fine, you know, and everyone's like, oh, my God. You know, so what we found is that the gradualness evaded some people, but the end result didn't. The other thing that I think is amazing about this technology is you can see what's going on in a session. You know, so a good practitioner can say, I want to see these two lines converge, and he can actually see that he's doing it. And then patient frustration levels can be monitored and you can alter that depending on, you know, pretty much how much you want to challenge the person or what's going on. What is the most difficult you've seen people-- you can't say cure these days because God forbid any of us should ever cure anything. But what's the most dramatic, spontaneous remission you've ever seen with this technology? Probably a few things.
Erin
Yeah, well, I can talk about a few. There's a generalized case of a gentleman who had suffered a massive stroke. He was bound to a wheelchair.
Dr. Thomas
Yeah.
Erin
He couldn't feed himself, couldn't walk, and had to be taken care of by his wife. He went through-- now, granted, this is a very complex case. He went through about a year of neurofeedback at a clinic in Florida--
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
And over that year process was able to regain all function, motor function, and speech, to the point where we actually had a training class down in Florida for new clinics. And we noticed this older gentleman had walked into the room. Nobody recognized him. And as he walked up to the podium, he introduced himself to Dr. Soutar.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
And he just said, I drove myself here today to personally thank you. And he told us his story. You know, to see somebody come from a position, you know, that they're potentially going to waste away in a wheelchair or bedridden for the rest of their life.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
People going through some series of brain reeducation to just kind of teach the brain after suffering something so traumatic--
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
And being able to bounce back on its own. You know, my wife, you know, suffered from depression for decades, multiple medications to manage it. And in her case, we did a combination of some post traumatic stress work and standard neurofeedback. And I saw her come back from a state of severe clinical depression to what we would consider, "normal".
Dr. Thomas
Wow.
Erin
All medications were taken off. You know, we titrated pretty quick with her, and she handled it very well, you know. And then, you know, even cases of autistic children coming from a state of, you know, very low function, you know, up to a point of, you know, high function, where they can actually now start expressing emotions to their parents, and, you know, all of a sudden, the parent makes this comment of, you know, there's my child.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
You know, there's that child that's hidden behind this veil for years that's now emerging. And I mean, the stories can go on and on but, I mean, it's--
Dr. Thomas
Yeah. It gives you chills. It's got to be the silver lining. You know, so by doing cutting edge medicine, by doing things that are this far ahead of the pack, there's a lot of criticism, there's a lot of pushback. But one of the things-- and we get this in regenerative medicine all the time with stem cells is we can fix our own families. And, you know, you look at it and you just go, wait a minute, I'm 70 and my wife is 65. Let's compare. You know, and just see how we're doing. I had a post concussive state that was pretty severe with reflex sympathetic dystrophy, and this is why I did internasal stem cells, which is something I like for brains. But then I did the neurofeedback, the brain scan and the neurofeedback. And at one point when we were doing a lot of it, I said, no one has ever met themselves and no one has ever met another person until they do qEEG. That you just cannot understand the basics of how your brain is operating. And I've done a lot of work right brain, left brain, you know, I have a degree in, you know, quantitative analysis, and hypothetically, my left brain works really well. When I did my brain scan, it said it didn't work at all and, you know, I never would have gotten there. And so now, I was like, oh, no, longitudinal level of the lesion. I know where the problem is now. Fix my left brain. And, you know, coincidentally, it made the emotional part of life much easier. And I love this because we're in a world where there's so much guesswork and there's so much overlay of individual attitudes and whatever. And my father was a psychiatrist in the last part of his life, and I look at that and what they were doing 50 years ago with basically biochemistry and a lot of stereotypical, kind of like designations of behavior in people. And I just was like, oh, my God, you know, my front desk can now do a neuropsychological assessment that's superior to what they could do. And then, you know, it begs the question, like, why hasn't this technology just taken off? Why isn't every psychiatrist, every psychologist, every single person in this industry, like, why isn't it part and parcel just the same way we'd use a stethoscope or a stem cell or a piece of rehab equipment? Why doesn't that industry embrace this technology?
Erin
I mean, I can give you my opinion on it. And, you know, that opinion is I think it comes down that we don't have lobbyists that are working on behalf of the neurofeedback community, you know, sitting in Washington trying to explain to everyone that, you know, is building the laws, you know, especially in the medical community, to say, yes, this is, you know, a good approach. This is viable. It's backed in research. It's getting its footings. You know, American Journal of Pediatrics marked neurofeedback as a level one treatment for EDD.
Dr. Thomas
Yeah.
Erin
Then, you know, we've seen it out here and there, you know, in the media. There's the neurofeedback community as a whole. You know, we're kind of this small subset, and we really don't have the backing like the big pharmacy does.
Dr. Thomas
Sure.
Erin
So, you know, that kind of goes where, you know, a lot of conditions are just managed with medication.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
First is looking at the root cause, you know. And that's, you know, kind of NewMind's approach now is, you know, we're really into this functional neurofeedback, you know. We're looking not only at the brain, but we're looking at body, realizing that, you know, the two play this intricate dance together, you know.
Dr. Thomas
Sure.
Erin
And of course, your clinic, you know, you guys knew that. You followed that approach to that biopsychosocial. You know, and I think as time goes on, neurofeedback will gain more and more interest, the more, you know, people like you and I can sit and talk about it and, you know, expose people in the world to, you know, what its potentials are. I think it will make, you know, a huge leaps and bounds over the next probably two decades, you know. But it's just getting people to understand that, you know. And maybe it's just a lot of things I've heard in my career in neurofeedback is this is voodoo.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
You know, this isn't real. You know, it's getting rid of those misconceptions, you know, that it's hocus pocus medicine, you know. No, it's backed in research. And, you know, you can go back to Barry Sterman in the 70s, you know, discovering that, you know, adjusting what we call the sensory motor rhythm.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
Had the potentials of lowering the intensity and frequency of epileptic seizures. We're not going to say it cured people with epilepsy, but in some cases it got those people completely off their medication and seizure free, you know.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
It's just, I think a matter of educating, you know.
Dr. Thomas
Clearly. One of the things that we're seeing-- this is sort of a microcosm of the bigger picture in functional medicine. There isn't great knowledge, and the people that are assessing the new technology are the ones that own the old technology or no technology. So when we go to go up against that inertia block, it's really, really difficult. And then, you know, a lot of times it's-- the kiss of death was it's not scientific. And now we're going, wait a minute, here's the bundle of science supporting this, and where's the bundle of science supporting the current, you know, scope of practice? And there isn't one. And so, they've got history on their side, but they don't really have very much else. So, as I get into my old age, I actually think that the answer at this point is political. I'm as much of a staunch individualist as anybody, but I actually think that it's the Hannah Arendt's you know, powers, the ability to coordinate. And I think one of the things that I'm personally working on is rewriting the scope of practice for generalized medicine, that we need this middle person who is an informed generalist, who actually knows some stuff and takes responsibility. And then we have the side protocols where it's not-- I give it to a neurologist, but I literally give it to someone to do neurofeedback, because the neurologist is going to, you know, diagnose a pituitary tumor or give you neurontin. He's not going to do very much else other than that. We already know this. You know, we know when we send people down that pathway, it's going to be talk therapy or, you know, what was wrong with your childhood. I'm finding most people's childhood problems go away after we fix the rest of their problems. You know, I think it's a correlative, not a causal thing. And I think we went way too far down that kind of road. Not that it doesn't exist. Everything has a piece. But if I look at kind of the pieces that you know, if I was going to make a perfect clinic, like we're getting an invitation to maybe set up a clinic in St. Thomas. So we're looking at saying, okay, so how do you improve infant mortality? How do you make the people-- you know, how do you address autoimmunity? How do you fix orthopedic problems? How do you make sure people don't die of heart attacks? And then how do you make sure the neuropsych part is in place? Well, you would do a brain scan. Scan, you know, so meaning a test that goes across the population and see what was there. You would head off so many problems it's not funny. Take out gluten and dairy to the region on the orthopedics and the rest of the stuff, you probably just fixed the population. And I'm looking at it and going, okay, that took me two minutes to say. It'll take 50 years to implement, and a lot because, you know, you go into a regular person and just take a cocktail party in Las Catas and say any of the things you and I are saying now, and you'll just close the room down because there's so little information in the existing medical community. And so, it's still frustrating hard. My wife still wonders why we never make it to the end of cocktail parties, but, you know, it's still frustrating and hard. But there's so little information and so much misinformation. You have a very, you know, patient and, you know, kind of appropriate, you know, long term view, and that's what I think you have to have. On the people point of view, it's really frustrating sometimes to go, you know, if your mom has Alzheimer's and, you know, we fix the autoimmune concomitant, and then we do neurofeedback with a brain scan, which is going to be really aberrant. It's going to, you know, a person with Alzheimer's or schizophrenia or ADD or any of the neurocognitive neurodegenerative at the diseases is going to show a very bad brain scan, and it's pretty easy to fix. Then, you know, you're going to go through that, and then we like regenerative medicine as you know, like that's got to be a gift from the universe. So we were doing internasal stem cells for Alzheimer's patients with the neurofeedback and had the same experience as you. The patient showed up in my clinic fully, you know, dressed to the nines and had her hair done and her nails done, and I didn't recognize her. I had treated her for two months. You know, it was a different person sitting there. And so these are the mini miracles. And regular medicine doesn't like any kind of miracles because everything should be, you know, one step at a time. But the reality is these are reproducible results. What would you say-- you know, in terms of the industry, there seemed to be a consolidation, you know, I don't know if it consolidated, if it coincided with Covid or whatever, but it seems like a lot of people in the industry aren't there anymore. So, is that because it's a lot of small players and, you know, whatever, and there isn't this industry presence you've talked about or what's going on that, you know, like if I go to buy a neurofeedback unit right now, qEEG, there's 50% less vendors than there was 15 years ago when I first did it.
Erin
Yeah, you know, I think what happened-- you know, Covid, yes, that was a big part of it. And a lot of companies manufacturing neurofeedback equipment weren't forward thinking enough to kind of anticipate the need that-- you know, potentially you weren't going to be able to have a client in your office for whatever reason that may be. Maybe it's a psych patient, you know, that can't leave their house.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
Maybe it's a massive pandemic that, you know, people don't want to get out because they're afraid they're going to, you know, catch a disease and hurt themselves or hurt, you know, a family member. The company I work for, NewMind, you know, maybe it was luck, maybe it was good thinking, but it was about a year before the pandemic. We put in place a full neurofeedback home training program, which, you know, kind of prior to that, a lot of home training came in the form of photic light and binaural beats, you know.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
You know, not actual neurofeedback, but just something that could guide brain activity and with NewMind, you know, our home training system allowed our clinics to still administer full neurofeedback training sessions on their clients, even in the midst of, you know, a raging pandemic that lasted you know, for a couple of years. So thankfully, for us as a company and our customers, you know, we were able to make it through the pandemic. We saw very little clinics that utilize our equipment suffer. I mean, in actuality, there was a lot of clinics that actually grew their practice during the pandemic.
Dr. Thomas
Nice.
Erin
Just because they could make this process so easy for a client. You know, they didn't have to drive two hours to a clinic or an hour to clinic days a week.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
They could sit at home in their pajamas, they could do the session. And I think that's some of, you know, the equipment manufacturers and clinics that didn't make it, you know, and aren't around today, we're just due to that fact that, you know, because for years neurofeedback had to be done in an office, in a clinical setting.
Dr. Thomas
Sure.
Erin
You know, the patients had to drive, they had to be there, you know. And then you get a state or government that says you have to close your clinic because you're nonessential.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
And unfortunately, I heard that, you know, especially in the Chiropractic community, there was a few specific states that deemed Chiropractic as a nonessential modality.
Dr. Thomas
Right.
Erin
And therefore they had to close their practice temporarily, which means, you know, they lost all their clientele and whether or not they came back was a whole another story.
Dr. Thomas
Yeah. So we're a medical clinic, so we've got, you know, two MDs, an Osteopath, two nurse practitioners, bunch of medical people. My original training is Chiropractic, but I haven't done that in probably ten years. But we ended up-- not being forced to sort of being invited to do to telehealth thing. And I mean, at this point in, you know, both sides of our clinic we've got six different Zoom stations. You know, it's like it's as big-- from a patient facing point of view as the rest of our clinic. And, you know, so in 8,000 sqft you know, 2,000 of it is set up to talk to people from distance. In some of this stuff, like advanced diagnostics, I need to look at the person. You know, like, I've had patients that showed big screens from India and show the guy, he walked in, and I was like hemochromatosis, you know, I had him just like that. I can't do that on a screen, but you can do neurofeedback on the screen and, you know, it's such a great idea. And then there is so much set up and so much of that. I love the home units in the day. I thought the thing that worked was to do a brain scan in the clinic and then send a person out home with a home unit and it was something the patient could own. It was two or $3,000. You know, it was not over the top. And a lot of these people, especially in California, we get these people that, you know, are really kind of in a place they can't get here, you know, like hypothetically, as the crow drives or flies, it's an hour away, but it's really three hours away in traffic. And then when Covid happen, they just weren't going to do it. So, we did almost all our biochemistry, you know, over the phone or over the TV, and now I'm looking at this technology and go, you know, you guys figured out the telehealth thing. And, you know, that's just going to be something-- I think it was a necessity in the Covid world. But I think it's great. You know, I think it's really a thing that people can-- it's much more respectful of patient times and actually it's more respectful of doctor times and clinic times. I find that when people schedule a thing, you're going to have a very productive 20, 40-minute session, whatever that thing is. A lot of times they come in with a specific agenda. They're not anxious because they had, you know, no lunch or traffic or whatever the thing is. You know, especially in kids, we found-- you know, sometimes we'd have to feed them before we did the neurofeedback sessions and, you know, that kind of thing. So, I think that's really a great thing. Does your company have a completely kind of at home solution? What does that look like?
Erin
Yeah, I would say it's about 95% at this point. We're actually working with piece of technology right now where we're looking at being able to do actually, you know, a modified, mini queue, you know, home setting.
Dr. Thomas
Wow.
Erin
So it's a wireless style headset. It's running dry sensors so the client at home wouldn't need to worry about, you know, the electrode gel, which is just the conductive medium we use to monitor that with a qEEG cap. So it would be a dry cap they would put on. It interfaces with our software. It gives us enough image of the brain where we can see what's disregulated. Of course, it's not going to be anything to the extent of what we would do in an office or what you would have done in a hospital setting, but it's enough where we can pick up the major areas of the brain. We can read all those frequencies. You and I have talked about it up till now. So that's kind of the next evolution. And once that comes online, yeah, we'll be able to pretty much be 100% telehealth where a clinic could box this unit up. They could, you know, send it off FedEx to the client. You know, few steps, you know, walk them through, helping them get that linked up to the equipment via WiFi, and then the client just needs to put it on. You know, the clinic could remotely record their brain activity, you know.
Dr. Thomas
Nice.
Erin
And then they send it back. And from that point, the clinic can then just look at the activity they see, start designing a treatment regimen, you know, and then build those protocols. And then the client can easily, you know, run those sessions. And, you know, with us, our big thing has always been we are a company that's, you know, built by clinicians for clinicians. So we understand, you know, in a clinical setting, you know, doctors, their staff, they want something that's simple and easy to use, and we made sure of that in our home training to where, you know, when a client does this remotely at home, it's literally about four clicks of a mouse, and they're in the middle of a session running, try to make it absolutely as easy as possible. So, yeah, to answer your question, we're 95% tele right now. Probably within the next three to six months, we'll be able to do full 100% at home, where a client never would have to come into our clinic. They can do all their surveys, their progress trackers, you know, all that biopsychosocial approach that we incorporate and then, you know, administer the neurofeedback accordingly to what we see.
Dr. Thomas
I think that's really a fantastic progress. About eight years ago, I wrote a comic book, medical information being controlled by, you know, these cartels and all this kind of stuff, and it was just sort of a doodle until after Covid, all of it came true. And so, I'm sort of like doing a thing, so I wrote a thing on neurofeedback, and that is that you could have a helmet that you put on a dog and prove that the dog's brainwaves were the same as your brainwaves. That's one of my theories in life. I look at my German shepherd and I look at my bulldog and I look at them and I go, I'm pretty sure they're thinking exactly what I'm thinking. So, one of the things that this technology allows us to do, if we got some big acrylic helmet that would just be easy to put on a dog, you could do that without the diodes. It sounds like you guys are making progress, but at the same time, that's kind of what we need for people. We need it to be not complicated. It can't be, you know, the ten, 20 map over the head with all that stuff, and you can't do it on yourself anyway. But I think at the point where we get something that's an easy apparatus that just goes over a head, like a football helmet or something, you know, and then we do that thing and we kind of get away from our level-- you know, I think there's a trade off in our level of specificity, you know, so we don't want to get it to where we're not getting enough information to act, but we don't really need as much as we're getting as in a regular brain scan. I think, you know, if we can sort of gently move toward that side and I know all the dog lovers would really love it. So, you know, that's something to [inaudible]
Erin
[inaudible]
Dr. Thomas
Your to-do list. So, Erin, it's been a pleasure. It's so good to see you again after-- it's been a while, and I wish you guys all the luck. We're going to put Erin and his contact information and company information on the link, and we'll put it on our site, and then anyone interested in more information, you can either contact us or you can contact Erin directly and we can, you know, see about getting neurofeedback in your life. So, again, thank you so much.
Erin
Thank you, Dr. Santucci. Take care, everyone.
Dr. Thomas
Take care.
Outro
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