Earlier this year Dr Phil Maffetone (www.philmaffetone.com) recommended I see Dr Trevor Chetcuti in Melbourne, (who he has had a lot to do with over the years), as although I had improved, I hadn’t improved as much as most of the population would when following Dr Phils advice like I was. I visited Trevor Chetcuti at his practice in Melbourne for four days straight in April. Here is his info http://www.spinewise.com.au/Our-Team.aspx
We went through a lot of adjustments structurally and neurologically, doing the amount of adjusting he might do with a patient once a week over four weeks, in just four days. The results in the pre examination HRV tests, recent blood and saliva tests, and from my physical examination, all showed major hormonal and nervous system dysfunction. But what was the primary cause
Dr Trevor discovered my main problem is an issue in my vestibular system, and that I present symptoms of someone who has been concussed. My symptoms started 20yrs ago…I don’t remember any major accident, but I had a very active life as a kid, so who knows how many trees I fell from, or bikes I crashed off jumps..
If you google Vestibular system, you will see the canals around the inner ear, and read about how they work to let your eyes and body know where you are moving comparative to where you are looking, and to gravity.
When I met with Dr Phil Maffetone in person a year ago, he picked up that my eyes where not aligned in where they looked, as my head was slightly tilted, but without time for a longer clinical exam we weren’t able to investigate beyond trying to activate my neck muscles.
Dr Trevor gave me one simple (but specific to me) exercise to retrain the connection from my vestibular canal to my eyes, every few hours, and hopefully the next tests show improvement.
All my tests also showed low vagal tone. The vagus nerve (google it) controls parasympathetic responses from the gut, heart, lungs, brain, just to name a few of the major ones. Good vagal tone (vagus nerve function) helps your body recover from stress, and switch out of fight/flight stressed (sympathetic) mode so your nervous system (and hormones) can come back to the state that you are meant to spend most of your life in (para-sympathetic) so you are healthy and happy and able to respond and recover from stress easily. For example, your response in the gut to certain foods is lower if you nervous system has better vagal tone.
A predisposition to low vagal tone can also be inherited through genes. The fact that my mum has similar health issues to me suggests that I may have this gene. But that doesn’t mean I can’t improve my vagal tone.
I have been doing my eye exercises for about 6 weeks now along with vagus nerve exercises, and have noticed a clear improvement in my health. I’m free of aches and pains upon waking for the first time in years, I’m able to eat foods that gave me a inflammatory reaction, my skin generally is much better, my guts are better, I am more mentally functional (although a long way to go still as hormones will take a while to recover from the state they were in), and my blood glucose is much closer to acting in a healthy/normal way.
So that’s it. Now I just do the exercises, get to bed early, eat a clean diet (no gluten or sugar), take a few supplemental vitamins/minerals, keep eating low carb foods high in good macro and micro nutrients, no caffeine, easy physical exercise, and wait for my body to adapt and get out of it’s old nervous system and hormonal patterns.
I’ll head back down to Melbourne in a few weeks to check in and give the system another tune up.
Cheers
Fingers crossed.
Pete