Episode 379: What Everyone Needs to Know to REHAB THEIR BRAIN with Dr. John Hatch

Today’s episode is a true game-changer because Dr. John Hatch joins us to talk about brain rehab, a subject that is not mentioned enough and has the potential to literally change lives. Dr. Hatch is a Neuroplastician, Functional Neurologist, Speaker, and Author of “The Basis of Brain Rehab” and “Brain Rehab and The Patient Experience.”

Rob Shallenberger: Welcome back to our Becoming Your Best podcast listeners. My name is Rob Shallenberger. So excited that you joined us today because this is going to be a game changer. I’m confident that most people listening will have really heard nothing about this, they don’t know very much about it. I didn’t. A lot of people listening may be familiar with my background and my story because I’ve shared it in the past. And this is what led me down the road to how I met our guest today. My mom passed away from early-onset Alzheimer’s two years ago. And as she was going through that journey, she was diagnosed at age 55 and then passed away at age 65. Well, obviously, there’s a concern, do we have the same thing that she might have? And we had her genetically tested and all of these things. But that took me down a path of studying all kinds of things around the brain. What can we do about the brain being proactive? And this led me ultimately to find our guest today, Dr. John Hatch, who has become a great friend. I’ve been seeing him for the last two months. And it’s just fascinating what he’s doing. And again, I think for most people, this will be new. I’ve read countless books on the brain, neuroplasticity, and neurology. And this was a completely new thing, even amongst all the books that I had read. So, we’re going to jump into this today, I’m going to be confident this is one you want to listen to from beginning to end, and probably one you’re going to want to share with others. I feel like anybody who’s in their 30s or 40s, anybody who’s had a concussion or trauma of any kind should really carefully take a look at what Dr. Hatch is doing and the impact it can have on their lives. So I won’t give too much of his background away, but I will say he wrote a book called Brain Rehab and The Patient Experience, it’s on Amazon. He’s a father of four children. He started what’s called The Brain Rehab Clinic. And we’ll share where that’s at later, you can see it brainrehabclinic.com. So, with all of that being said, John, welcome to the podcast. Glad to have you here. 

Dr. John Hatch: I am so excited to be here, and I love rehabbing brains. As most people know, I started out as a chiropractor, and got a degree in chiropractic, and just didn’t feel it was enough. Adjusting and making manipulations I felt was very similar to PT, massage therapy, good mobility, and good movement. But I just had this burning inside of me to rehab complex issues that no one was solving for. There’s this big gap between the medical world and their medication or surgery, and the holistic, healthy alternative medicine. People feel like they can’t coexist. And I felt like my big goal was to bridge this gap, get in the middle and help both sides improve the quality of life. And it was actually really interesting, as you mentioned about Alzheimer’s, my grandfather passed away from Alzheimer’s. And I look so much like him that I’ve been this little bit of fear in the back of me, “Hey, am I gonna get Alzheimer’s like my grandfather?” And I watched him progress so quickly. So I vowed myself to begin to understand the true pathways within Alzheimer’s, dementia, depression, and anxiety, and started rehabbing brains not only for myself but patients. And I watch people in Stage 1, 2, and 3 of both Alzheimer’s and dementia, not only stop the progression but reverse the progression. There is a limit that when the brain degenerate, it’s degenerating faster than it can regenerate and we’re past the point of brain rehabilitation. But if you catch things early, I believe you can prove the quality of life at every level neurologically. And this is like a round that Norman Deutsch coined a ‘neuroplastition’, someone out there who’s rehabbing brains, in his book, The Brain’s Way of Healing. And I took that and I coined myself that title. I’m no longer a chiropractor. I don’t care if people call me Dr. Hatch or not. I’m a neuroplastition, I rehab brains. Hence why the clinic’s name is Brain Rehab, why the book is called The Basis of Brain Rehab, and then the clinical experience is because I want to educate people on how the brain actually rehabs and how the brain is actually governed because we learn so much and people dabble in it, but then they don’t know how to apply it, or they focus too much on the nutrition, or physical exercise, or mental self-talk.  

Dr. John Hatch: All the self-talk in the world is incredible, but if you have a broken breakdown in your brain that I can discuss and assess and figure out, no amount of self-talk is going to push you out of a breakdown in a brain function. And there are brain exercises now that can rehab those pathways. And you can do enough pre and post-testing to get changes that most people didn’t think possible. When I started this journey, my first patient was a Parkinson’s patient. She had been in a car accident three years prior and had been on every medication, chiropractic, and everything that she could try, and she still had a really bad tremor, she was 54 years old, which was early onset for Parkinson’s at this severe of a tremor. And I was like, “I think I could change it.” So we started doing some brain exercises, and in three weeks, her tremor was gone, she was riding a bike again, and she started to see life change. And I realized then that there’s more to this brain than we understand from a rehab standpoint. And that’s what started this whole journey. And ever since then, I’ve been working with complex concussions, migraines, autoimmune disorders, things that people think that they’re hopeless, neuropathy is a big one, POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), or the chronic, long-lasting post-COVID syndrome, the long-lasting kind. These things can change. We do not need to live in a world of continual perpetual suffering just because we have a broken brain. We have to remember, the hierarchy of the brain is about survival; it’ll do whatever it takes to survive. So, if it feels like, “Hey, I don’t have enough of this. I’m going to drop that pathway and I’m going to focus on these because this keeps me alive.” But that’s going to give me anxiety, it’s going to give me gut issues, it’s going to cause my brain to degenerate. The brain does not care. It has a law of survival. We see that in survival mechanisms, how people defy the impossible and then they survive. And they don’t just come back to normal life, the brains is still in that stuck phase, unless you rehab the brain, which is why I started working with a nonprofit organization with Reborn Heroes, treating post-vets with PTSD, and now they’re part of first responders as well — firefighters and police officers.  

Dr. John Hatch: Anybody who has PTSD, there’s a vestibular concomitant. Basically, in simple terms, you have a balance issue, equilibrium inside your inner ear. And these little receptors create a host of problems. And I have found in our office that insomnia, sleep issues, anxiety, are actually a neurological problems and not psychological problems. Even I have a supplement that’s deep sleep for people that have sleep issues, but I think my brain exercises works better than even the supplement. The supplement just helps if someone’s chemistry is off. So, that’s why I’m always pro medicine, pro supplement, pro diet, nutrition lifestyle, but we also have got to rehab this brain correctly. And we just didn’t know anything. Even when I started this whole journey, because I had got a concussion at age 13 years old and I blacked out 18 hours of my life. And I went from being a 4.0 student in all the gifted after-school classes, just kind of like a bookworm, and then I I was just this athlete, and I didn’t want to do any school, and I could barely survive getting a 2.7 or 3.0 to barely hold on so I could play sports. And it wasn’t until I rehabbed my brain that then education became a new horizon for me and I can’t get enough absorption. But like you said, Rob, I have read so many self-help books, I’ve read all of your books, I absolutely love them, I believe so much in your principles: start with the vision, start with a plan, and create these different 12 steps and different characteristics. Those work so well, and yet all the books that I read, there was nothing about “Hey, you should do this crush crawled tap to prevent Alzheimer’s. You should do carpet angels if you have sensory problems. You should do balance and challenge your balance and eye vision to help with coordination and movement.” We’ve started to get into functional training where people are not just doing that benchpress, push-ups, and pull-ups; they’re going into these kettlebells and all these off-balance stuff. So, we’re starting to move the engine, but it’s not always moving at the speed that I want or patients need for their care.  

Rob Shallenberger: I’ve been showing this with a lot of friends and family. I told John before we started that we’ve been sending a lot of people his way. And when I tried to explain this to others, it is kind of an unfamiliar territory when we’re talking about the brain. So the way I relate it, I’m like, “Hey, have you ever had a knee injury? Have you ever had an ankle injury?” If it’s a substantial injury to a knee, we don’t have to do physical therapy, but it’s going to have a residual lingering issue throughout our life. It may heal 98%, but there’s gonna be this little residual that may cause us to start to limp a little bit now. And over the course of time, that’s going to start to impact us as we’re walking unevenly. And then all of a sudden, it starts to have this ripple effect. So nobody would have any issues with doing physical therapy to a knee or to a hip. And I almost call this physical therapy for our brain if we’ve had a concussion, if we’ve had trauma, other types of injuries or whatever it might be, just life experiences, PTSD, then why wouldn’t it be important then to also do physical therapy, essentially, for our brain, and let’s rehab and heal that particular area of the brain that is not functioning because I think, to your point, John, in our conversations, the brain is very good at rewiring itself to compensate, and it works until it doesn’t anymore. And that’s why we may be able to get away with 20 years after concussion, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not going to show up down the road at some point. So, here’s my question: For someone that’s listening that doesn’t know anything about this, walk us through, first of all, why this works and why this is so different than maybe the traditional approach. What actually do you do? I know not everyone’s going to have the ability to go to your office that’s listening to this, that’s why it’s nice that you have the book as an option. But let’s say a person comes in, walk us through the nutshell version of the process, and then what you’re looking for, and why this does then have such a big impact on the brain. 

Dr. John Hatch: I’d love to because I developed my own assessment tools, they’ve already existed out there, but I’m trying to get this to eventually go to every place in the world and open it up in every country across the world where what we do in the office is we have a headset, it’s like a VR headset, that tracks eye movement with cameras, and it measures eye movement. And the research on all the eye movement and all of its findings have been studied since the late 1980s and 1990s, they really developed it. And then the most recent book in 2011, The Neurology of Eye Movements, it’s the gold standard of all differential diagnosing imbalances in the brain. And what’s funny is you read these books and their treatment is “this drug, this drug, this drug, or surgery.” Not one in this book is, “Well, drive this pathway and you correct that same finding,” or “Give some physical therapy to this area of the brain.” Because everything is governed in the brain. The rebalance receptor system is the only dual sensory system. So what I mean by that is, when I touch something like a hot stove, it sends a signal to my brain for withdrawal reflex, we all have it, we all know it, and it all exists. But if that is broken or something is not functioning, how do we reconnect it and get it to reengage? There are hardwired reflexes and pathways in your brain that can be stoked up. Like what you said, the brain’s survival mechanism. And that’s why a concussion, when you’re 18, cannot even have a side effect for you for 20-30 years later. And all of a sudden, you get a small ear infection, it alters your equilibrium, and adaptation and adaptation is an unstable thing. We see that in building a house. If you made a little adjust, “Well, we’ll do this to support it now,” and then in the second and third support, the moment one of those breaks, the whole thing goes down. And that’s kind of like how the brain works; it’s constantly building support systems. The brain can’t heal itself, the brain repairs. And we get that figured in the wrong because we think the brain can heal itself, but that’s why we have scar tissue even on just a little cut. That scar tissue is never the same tissue as the real tissue. But with the correct movement, it can still, even with scar tissue, function the same.  

Dr. John Hatch: So a lot of these patients that I have with anxiety and depression, they’ll be really good, they’ll get a concussion, they adapt, they’re fine. And then later, they bump their head right as they’re getting into a car, or they get an ear infection, or COVID happened and they got an infection and the brain altered. And then all of a sudden, three or six months later, they’re having anxiety or depression or feelings that they never had before because they had a pre-existing issue that was just waiting. So, at our office, we look at the eyes because the eyes are the only sensory organ that activates every part of your brain. I go into great detail in this in the book and how the eyes work, and what they’re governed and controlled by. But then the next step that I’ve developed in the last little bit more than anything is how gravity works on your brain and your brain is constantly adapting to gravity. And that’s why people have sleep issues, it’s a gravity equilibrium issue. And if you can fix these balance systems, even someone like you who’s been a fighter pilot and has gone G-forces at highest level, your brain is still sensory, and it’s still adapting, and it’s still developing. And if you don’t use it, you lose it. And it’s a similar thing with our balance system; the more unbalanced we get, the older we get, we watch our legs get a little wider, so our balance is wider, so we’re more stable, and we don’t move as much, we’re not as aggressive. You’re still not doing roles in your fighter pilot at a 2 or 3 G-force. So your brain is still calibrating, and it keeps adapting and keeps adapting. But with high amounts of activation, it stays stable.  

Dr. John Hatch: So, what we do is we assess, find where the weakness is, and it’s all based in laws of neurology. It’s not like I have some random theory that’s just made up. These theories are backed in all the neuroscience research, I just apply pathways. So I bring in a brain exercise. And I have a bunch of YouTube, I actually have a YouTube channel, Brain Rehab Clinic, there are about 30 videos or so on there, people can go and watch and I give exercises that can help you. Because if you’re just listening to this, you’re like, “Oh, I want to see what cross-crawl taps looks like.” Because we developed that exercise here at the clinic. I have created over 2300 brain exercises. We just this year alone have already inked and videoed 53 new brain exercises based on different balance equilibrium things that we’re seeing on the assessment tools that tell me where the problem is. And then if they don’t change, I have to apply a different brain exercise because no two brains are the same. You could have two people come in with anxiety, and one of them has an otolithic issue on the left and the other one has a canal issue on the right, or someone has a cranial nerve 12-ton muscle that’s moving just a little bit different that causes the brain to feel uneasy and now the anxiety is coming from not feeling comfortable in their own skin, which is where I probably treat more things than anything else is anxiety — to me, that’s a homerun if I find the pathway, and it’s just finding the right pathway. So wherever you’re at in the world, know that there’s hope, you don’t have to chronically suffer neuropathy, whatever it may be. 

Rob Shallenberger: John, I just want to pause right there because that is a great point that people need to understand is there’s hope. And one of the challenges to so many of these things is I’ve found two things, whether it’s Alzheimer’s, anxiety, depression, or whatever it is, two things really make this difficult. Number one, where does someone even start? You go to Google and you type in “anxiety,” how many responses are there going to be? There are millions. So, someone is completely overwhelmed with information of “where do I even start?” Same with any disease, really. Alzheimer’s is the same, it’s completely overwhelming. So that’s one issue that I know everyone is faced with is how do you sort through all this information to find something that can work. And in many places, there are people who say, “You just have to deal with this the rest of your life. I even heard that as recently as this weekend, someone said to a family member, “Hey, this is something you’re just gonna have to deal with the rest of your life. You have to just manage it. You just have to figure out how to handle and deal with it.” So there’s a lot of information out there, and in many cases, it’s misinformation. And then number two is, once a person does have a pathway, where to start, is it really something that can address it? And that’s where you’re comment of hope is a big deal. Man, when people lose hope, I think all of us have experienced what it’s like to have hope and maybe sometimes not to have hope. And I hope that our listeners can have hope that there are some solutions to things that maybe they’ve experienced headaches, anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, brain fog, whatever it is that there is hope that these things are solvable. I’ve gone through exercise for two months now and I’ve seen a major shift in just where my well-being is now versus even just two months ago, applying these brain exercises. My wife has totally different ones.  

Rob Shallenberger: I’ll just throw one more thing out there. Again, I don’t want to say that you have to go to John’s office. If you can, it certainly is worth it. But if you’re in Rwanda, I know that may not be feasible. In his office, you have this big gyro machine that can spin you upside down, not everyone’s going to use that. My wife didn’t, I did. There are these different laser therapies and things like that. But it’s really the home exercises and it’s the rewiring of the pathway. So I’ll just summarize this again, at least from our journeys perspective. We went in, he did this analysis and tested all of our eyes, our movement, memory, etc. So this quick set of tests that were very easy. And then based on that, we sat in this chair in his office and we looked at all the different eye movements, and what that indicated with what was happening behind the scenes. And based on that, he gave each one of us a specific set of exercises to target those areas of the brain/vestibular system or whatever it was. And that’s exactly it. And if I understood correctly, that’s then the approach is we come back every month, we check-in, we see how it’s doing, and we can make tweaks as necessary. But the whole point is we’re targeting those areas of the brain that are deficient, not firing correctly, or just not working as they should have. So, let me ask you this, John, we talked about the pathway that someone goes down if they were going to go to your office. Let’s say, some of our listeners in Russia, the Philippines, Rwanda, or South America, what’s the starting point for someone that’s not in Utah or not in a position where they could come to the Utah office? I know your vision is to get this to everywhere in the world, which I’m thrilled about, because I hope it does get to that point sooner than later. In the meantime, what’s something that someone in those countries or in that position that can’t necessarily travel to Utah, what’s something that they can do right now where they’re at?  

Dr. John Hatch: That is my favorite part of what we do. It’s challenging, like you said, when people say, “You’re gonna live with this for the rest of your life.” That’s their way of trying to make you feel, “Okay, I’m just content with this because it can’t get any worse. I’m just going to live with this for life. And let’s go from there.” What they’re trying to do with that is hope. But in my mind, I don’t think it’s hope. I think someone should always have the drive to say, “I can always improve, I can always make this better.” So, if you’re out of the country, if you’re in the Philippines, or you’re in Russia, or wherever you may be listening to this, I would start by doing three fundamental brain exercises that are some of the most simple and yet complex for the brain; they’re kind of my gold standard. One of them is drawing a figurate with your jaw. It’s called Jaw Figurates. Again, I have a YouTube video that explains and shows you how to do it if you’re just listening to audio, you’re drawing a figurate with your job. The other one would be cross-crawl taps. These are two exercises I give to almost everyone that walks into my office because they’re fundamental to the midline cerebellum system, which if that is broken, you can’t fix anything. You can try to go to the extreme and the vestibular. But if you don’t have a midline cerebellum stable, you’re going to be fighting yourself uphill. This is kind of how I work with stroke patients. They’re like, “I want my arm to work.” And I’m like, “Well, I gotta get your brainstem to work before I can get your arm to work. You gotta work midline out, not out in.” So the Jaw Figurare, the cross crawl taps, and a half. Yes, divergence. And again, all these videos are on YouTube, you can just search, “Dr. Hatch’s brain exercises,” and you’ll be able to find enough information, and I would start there. Again, in the book, I actually do an assessment of which area of the brain you might be struggling with based on a symptom. I don’t like that as much as I like diagnostics because that’s very subjective. Someone can come in and say, “I have severe depression.” And I see every finding and anxiety. Another patient comes in and goes, “I have debilitating depression and/or anxiety.” And I see every finding in depression. It’s where’s the finding in the brain? So, the best case, yes, is to fly here, let’s assess it and get you going.  

Dr. John Hatch: Hopefully, in the next five years, I should have these in every country across the world. And you won’t have to wait or guess. But in the meantime, there are certain brain exercises that are universal, that we can all improve ourselves. There’s also a little app called Cognuro Tap, you can actually do the cross-crawl. It’s the number one exercise I have for preventing Alzheimer’s. It actually has an assessment on there that helps you find your speed. I’m trying to make tools for everybody across the world to get right now until we get the systems in their country. So, we start with brain exercises and challenge ourselves to do something we haven’t done before. So, if yoga is not something that you like or tai chi, start doing tai chi and yoga; the more you work on your balance, the better your overall health gets. And that is a gold standard for all neurology. 

Rob Shallenberger: That’s interesting. And by the way, while I’m thinking of it, do you remember, just off the top of your head, the actual YouTube channel that you have? Anybody that’s looking and wants to find him, make sure you spell this correctly, it’s John Hatch. So, if you’re typing in “John Hatch brain exercises,” they should come up. Here’s one thing that I found interesting too, John as you were talking about this, and as you’ve walked us through, we’re two months into this journey. As we started this journey, you do an interesting graph. And this is why you suggest that it takes two or three months because the brain is defaulting back to its state of survival, this fight or flight mode that it’s in, that’s anxiety. In a lot of other cases, what’s actually physically happening in the brain here? You walked us through that and you said, “Hey, in the first few weeks, it’s going to default back.” And you do this graph and said, “Is the brain serious? Are you serious? Is this the safe place to go?” So I don’t know that I’m doing this justice for our listeners who are just listening to this, but what is actually physically happening in the brain as a person starts to do these things? 

Dr. John Hatch: Great insight. So the YouTube channel is Brain Rehab Clinic, that’s the best place to go to find your exercise. And you can scroll through all the videos. I have a ton of education on there, but also the videos. But what you’re saying is amazing. It’s probably the most important thing I can teach people because the consistency of your exercises is what gets the results. If you do exercise for five days and expect it to change, it’s just not happening. And you did it perfect justice because I understand it. But for those listeners, think of it like weight loss. If you go sugar-free for a day, do your abs look great? If you go sugar free for a week, do your abs look great? Now, a lot of times, it takes three or four days before your sugar cravings decrease. But then sometimes you see results in the first week and then nothing for two or three weeks because the brain is like, “No, no, I’m used to this high sugar, I need this high sugar.” And then you’re learning to have no sugar. So the brain has to adapt and goes, “Okay, I guess I’ll start breaking down these other things.” And then it gets so efficient at that that it’s like, “Oh, I don’t need to store fat. I’m getting really good at this.” And people understand it really well from a weight loss standpoint, but they don’t realize that it has nothing to do with weight loss, it has everything to do with how the brain is working. That is brain training, the way someone diets. It’s the same thing when you’re doing a brain exercise; you’re doing an exercise and this brain has survival mode hierarchy safety, “I’m going to live. Okay, you did that exercise for three days, that’s great. But I’m not going to jump my whole system onto it if it’s not stable and you’re not going to keep giving this to me.” So it’s kind of like a little trickle of water into a tree; it’s not going to pull its main source from it, it’ll enjoy it, it’ll start to say, “Thank you. I’ll take that.” But until it becomes the standard, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I’m strengthening that root. Put all my root on that because it’s unstoppable and it’s constant, and I can make a 10 times better tree with it.”  

Dr. John Hatch: It’s similar to what the brain is doing; it’s always a level of hierarchy and are you balancing and stabilizing it? And then we’re pushing it so it’s like a marathon runner that starts running one or two miles and eventually gets up to 20 miles. And it feels no different to them than running the one or two miles. At first, it’s very taxing. When I give brain exercises with the people, they’ll say, “Five times a day? I’m exhausted at the end of the day.” And then three weeks later, they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I do these super fast. It’s no problem.” And then as the brain gets more efficient, they actually decrease the brain exercises because it just needs that steady little drip system, like on your roses out in your garden or something. It just needs the steadiness of it, not the intensity of it. But the intensity is what first kick-starts this change because the brain is stuck this way. It is stuck in this fashion for survival. And that’s what they talk about, “We only have control of 10% of our brain. The other 90%, we have no control over.” And I’m grateful for that. I don’t want to think about re-healing my liver enzyme and re-changing my gut enzyme, and, “Oh, I cut my little elbow and I have to replenish all my cells.” You wouldn’t have enough time to think about anything else, anything emotional, and enjoy life. And that’s what happens when someone feels so anxiety; they don’t know where they are in space, so they can’t think of anything outside of their world. And then once their brain starts to feel stable, they can think of anything and everything outside the world, and they’re like, “Oh, I can be in a really scary complex situation and still feel safe.” Absolutely, because that’s your brain.  

Dr. John Hatch: I learned that from Victor Hugo’s Man’s Search for Meaning as he studied those that were in the concentration camps. I’ve always been fascinated about how a brain will do whatever it takes to survive. And the more you can give the brain, it doesn’t have to be in a survival mode, it can be in a thriving mode. So instead of survival, it’s being in ‘thrival’ as a made-up English word. But I mean, being in a state of becoming something better than yourself. And because you are giving the brain more opportunities to grow, reach out, experience life, and learn more, there is no limit to our capacity; it’s just whether we give the brain something to do with it. And that’s where we have all this opportunity and we focus our lives into this thing, and we’re like, “Well, that’s just who we are.” No, that’s what you chose. But that doesn’t mean we can’t choose other things and open up these doors and these windows to so much more. 

Rob Shallenberger: And that’s why I love what you’re doing is because if we look at the traditional past, it’s really been medicine as an option, surgery is an option, not a whole lot else we can do. But let’s go back to our physical therapy example, if it’s the knee, we have physical therapy, we don’t need to go right to arthroscopic surgery, we can do physical therapy. There are things we can do. This is the exact same concept as the brain. So I hope we go back to that hope concept because there are a lot of people out there listening that says, “Man, I kind of lost hope. There were really no options for this. I’ve exhausted all my options. I’ve done everything I could do and now I’m just resigned to this is how it’s gonna go.” And the other thing that I just want to highlight for our listeners, as we get ready to wrap up, I can’t believe it’s been 30 minutes. This applies across the board to all kinds of things that you may not think it does like Lyme disease, you mentioned Lyme disease to us. You said the difference is I need a year instead of three months because this is a much deeper and more significant thing maybe than some of these other things that are going to be rehabbed in the brain. It’s physical therapy, again. You need to go way longer on physical therapy, retraining different parts of the brain that aren’t quite firing correctly. What that reminded me of it’s not just concussions, it’s not just anxiety and depression, Lyme disease no one would really ever associate with the brain. That’s something totally different. And I’ve watched these Lyme disease groups that I’ve just been part of just randomly one time looking through it — no hope. They’re like, “Yeah, I’ve just been told I just have to deal with it the rest of my life.” 

Dr. John Hatch: So many of those Lyme patients we have worked on and they get incredible results. They can’t believe that their life is literally normal to them again. And even complex autoimmune disorders — most people say, “Well, it’s just your statement in life.” That’s another one that the world of the medicine goes, “We have nothing for you. You just gotta live like this.” And the reality is no, you don’t. You can rehab your brain and get your own brain to change even an auto-immune response. 

Rob Shallenberger: And I just feel like, and I know you and I have talked about this, I feel like there’s this increase in light in the world, and that this is another tool that you’ve been inspired by God to bring to the world. And there are just so many things right now in the world that are opening doors that have never been opened, and this is one of those. So I hope people will seriously not only share this podcast to create awareness because, again, most people don’t even know where to start. They would never know you existed or that this is even an option. So I would hope that people would share this, share your book, share your website, or whatever, just like I’ve done with many people, as I referred them to you. Obviously, I get nothing from it. I don’t care. I just want to see them heal. I want to see them get better. This is one more powerful tool that we can add to our toolkit or arsenal. So, John, before we wrap up, any final thoughts that you would like to share with our listeners? 

Dr. John Hatch: My final thought is, as you’re going through your history and you say to yourself, “Oh, well, I haven’t had a concussion. I haven’t had a severe infection.” Like we’ve been talking about the knee, “Oh, I injured my knee, I tore my ACL.” There’s a fall involved in that. You don’t always have to hit your head to distort where your brain thinks you are in space. Many people get whiplash injuries with no head hit, and have more complex issues than if you had gotten a concussion and blacked out. And knowing where your body is in space, and the best way to do this, stand up right now, put your feet together, close your eyes, and see if you feel stable. Stay there for 20 seconds. If you start moving and lifting your arms, your brain does not know where you are in space. If you felt great there, stand on a pillow and see if you still know where you are in space in balance and you’ll know right away, yes, my brain needs work. And that’s the best assessment you can do all day every day and know where you are.  

Rob Shallenberger: That’s really interesting and it’s true. That’s part of the test we did at your office. You first stand on this. It’s not a scale, but you stand on this device. And then they put this soft foam cushion and you stand on that, and sure enough, you feel good, and then all of a sudden you start to drift one way or the other. And it comes back to that gravity discussion which we could talk a lot more about. Well, John, it’s has been fabulous having you here today. I hope our listeners will go to your YouTube site, Brain Rehab Clinic. You can go to Amazon and get his book Brain Rehab and The Patient Experience. Lots of places to start. Obviously, if you can go to his office, I would highly recommend that. If that’s not an option, these are some great alternatives that you can use right now until he has some of these other tools available for the rest of the world, which I’m really excited about that those will be coming down the road. So, a great guest, John Hatch. Thank you so much for being here today. And I hope our listeners have a wonderful rest of your day.