February 2, 2023
In this podcast transcription blog and video, Dr. Steven Hotze discusses IASIS Neurofeedback with Jason Gourlas, MPAS, PA-C. This is a new modality that we are offering at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. IASIS Neurofeedback has been shown to provide relief from conditions typically associated with brain dysfunction, such as anxiety, depression, sleep issues and difficulties with focus and concentration. You don’t want to miss this!
1:02: He also brings to our practice a new treatment modality, a neurofeedback…and it is called IASIS, which is a Greek term for “healing.” And he’s offering this to our guests.
2:01: Biofeedback is a modality by which we take data from the body, whether it’s your respiratory rate, your heart rate, your muscle tension, heart rate variability. You take that information and you give it back to the body so that it can make changes in its own physiology. That’s the feedback part.
2:20: When you think about neurofeedback, the root word “neuro” comes from brain or neurology. So this is a brain-based type of biofeedback.
2:50: Brain-based neurofeedback is really helpful for things like depression, anxiety, insomnia, focus disorders like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
3:55: Now, IASIS is passive. It doesn’t require action on the part of the patient at all. We measure the EEG brain waves, and then there’s a signal, electrical signal that’s sent back through those electrodes to those different parts of the brain that affect the change that we’re looking for.
4:17: Typically, people who struggle from anxiety, depression, insomnia, a variety of other issues, they’re stuck in certain brainwave patterns. Those brainwave patterns are disruptive, they’re problematic. They engender issues and mental health challenges.
4:38: IASIS measures those brainwave patterns, sends an offset signal, an electrical signal back to the brain, gently moving them off of those stuck patterns, and allowing the brain to reboot, if you will, like a computer does. If your computer is frozen, it continues in that same loop and doesn’t allow you to work effectively.
5:12: And people with anxiety, they think about the future, which they really have no control over. So they get stuck in these loops, these rumination loops, and that causes a lot of the dysfunction that they have.
6:13: ..the brain really runs the show. Every other part of the body’s sort of subservient to the brain. The brain, through the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, runs the endocrine system, which is your hormones, your thyroid, and things like that. Through a variety of different mechanisms, it drives and runs the immune system.
7:00: …we can help the brain to reboot and to regulate itself more appropriately through the development of new neurons, new connections through the modulation of existing neurons and connections, the balancing of the autonomic nervous system through IASIS.
7:58: …we learned recently that the brain has a detoxification system called the glymphatic system. You may pick up on the similarity with “lymphatic,” and that’s the way that our body helps to detoxify the periphery.
8:13: But the glymphatic system is actually more active when we’re asleep. The brain shrinks by almost 60% when we’re asleep. And that lymph, the glymph, moves around, helping us to get rid of beta amyloid plaques that have been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease and tau proteins and things like that.
8:41: …it’s a sophisticated device that delivers something called LIP-tES: low-intensity pulsed transcranial electrical stimulation. And through all the mechanisms that I just enumerated, helps with your brain regulation. And subsequent to that, all the trickle-down effect is beneficial for your immune system, for your hormonal system, for all those things that I mentioned previously.
9:44: …if you have a brain, you would benefit from this type of therapy. It’s not just for mental health challenges, but it’s also for mental health optimization or cognitive optimization.
11:13: Typically the folks that we see that derive the greatest benefit are those who have depression, anxiety, insomnia.
16:44: There’s usually an initial evaluation that’s 90 minutes that includes a treatment in and of itself. A typical treatment session can last up to 45 minutes. And really, most of the treatment session is preparation of the face and the scalp for the placement of the electrodes.
17:10: So during that session, the therapist will move those electrodes to different parts of the face and the scalp that correspond to different areas of the brain that are being treated.
18:37: …typically, it’s seen within the first five to six sessions that you’ll see benefits. Some people see from the very first session an incredible calm that comes over them.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Welcome to our program. I’m Dr. Steve Hotze. I believe that you need to have a provider, physician, and staff of professionals who can coach you on a path of health and wellness naturally, so that as you mature, you have energy, vitality, and enthusiasm for life.
I’m visiting with our new physician’s assistant, Jason Gourlas, who has brought several different treatment modalities with him to our practice when he joined. One of them is experience with dental hygiene and understanding the importance of dental hygiene. Although he is not a dentist, he became interested in that and in work that was done exposing the dangers of root canals and mercury amalgams and periodontal disease, and how that can have an adverse effect on your overall health.
He also brings to our practice a new treatment modality, a neurofeedback…a passive neurofeedback, and it is called IASIS, which is a Greek term for “healing.” And he’s offering this to our guests. And Jason, why don’t you explain to us what IASIS… By the way, that’s spelled I-A-S-I-S.
Jason Gourlas: Correct.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Why don’t you explain to us exactly what IASIS therapy is and what it’s used for?
Jason Gourlas: Okay. I call it IASIS, but IASIS actually makes a little bit of sense because it rhymes with “oasis.” And when you think about oasis, it’s a place where you go for rest, rejuvenation, and for healing. And so it makes perfect sense that people would call it IASIS.
But it’s a type of neurofeedback. And if you were to understand neurofeedback, it’s helpful to understand biofeedback. Biofeedback is a modality by which we take data from the body, whether it’s your respiratory rate, your heart rate, your muscle tension, heart rate variability. You take that information and you give it back to the body so that it can make changes in its own physiology. That’s the feedback part.
When you think about neurofeedback, the root word “neuro” comes from brain or neurology. So this is a brain-based type of biofeedback. It is a little bit different than typical neurofeedback. When you think about neurofeedback, it’s based on operative conditioning. You’re exposing your brain to some sort of information. Then the brain takes that and applies that in changing brain waves.
Brain-based neurofeedback is really helpful for things like depression, anxiety, insomnia, focus disorders like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Well, a lot of people can’t even sit still for that. And so it can take 40, 60 sessions to see significant benefit from conventional neurofeedback.
Dr. Steven Hotze: How does conventional neurofeedback function or operate the treatment system, compared to IASIS?
Jason Gourlas: Conventional neurofeedback measures your brain waves through EEGs; that’s electrical activity of your brain; and it routes it through a device, whether it’s a television screen that plays a movie, or it’s a video game. And when your brain is doing what the operator would like for it to do, like make more alpha waves, which are important for focusing, then the video game is operating, or the volume on the movie is high. That gives that information to the brain.
Now, IASIS is passive. It doesn’t require action on the part of the patient at all. We measure the EEG brain waves, and then there’s a signal, electrical signal that’s sent back through those electrodes to those different parts of the brain that affect the change that we’re looking for.
Typically, people who struggle from anxiety, depression, insomnia, a variety of other issues, they’re stuck in certain brainwave patterns. Those brainwave patterns are disruptive, they’re problematic. They engender issues and mental health challenges.
IASIS measures those brainwave patterns, sends an offset signal, an electrical signal back to the brain, gently moving them off of those stuck patterns, and allowing the brain to reboot, if you will, like a computer does. If your computer is frozen, it continues in that same loop and doesn’t allow you to work effectively.
The same thing happens with your brain when you think about the same things over and over again. Like people with depression – they tend to think about the mistakes that they made in the past. And people with anxiety, they think about the future, which they really have no control over. So they get stuck in these loops, these rumination loops, and that causes a lot of the dysfunction that they have.
IASIS gently moves them off of those patterns and through a variety of different mechanisms, like stimulating neurogenesis and synaptic plasticity. We know, and we’ve learned recently, that the brain can actually make new neurons, certain aspects of the brain. Those that are aspects that are involved in memory and cognition to a certain part. And the limbic brain, which is the emotional brain that is very important for driving our autonomic nervous system, which is either the rest-and-digest, or the fight-and-flight or freeze.
The brain really runs the show. Every other part of the body’s sort of subservient to the brain. The brain, through the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland, runs the endocrine system, which is your hormones, your thyroid, and things like that. Through a variety of different mechanisms, it drives and runs the immune system.
There’s actually something now that’s been studied and come together called the Psycho-Neuro-Endocrine-Immune Super system. If you notice, the first top part of that system is the brain. So if the brain is dysregulated, everything else experiences dysregulation as a trickle-down effect.
When we can help the brain to reboot and to regulate itself more appropriately through the development of new neurons, new connections through the modulation of existing neurons and connections, the balancing of the autonomic nervous system through IASIS. There’s actually objective evidence that that happens.
We’ve had people hooked up to devices that measure a parameter called heart rate variability, which is found to be probably the most impressive measure of autonomic nervous system function, as far as whether you’re in the rest-or-digest or the fight-or-flight response. As soon as that IASIS device is turned on, the heart rate variability goes up, which is indicative of a better balanced autonomic nervous system.
And one of the things that we know, also we learned recently, is that the brain has a detoxification system called the glymphatic system. You may pick up on the similarity with “lymphatic,” and that’s the way that our body helps to detoxify the periphery. But the glymphatic system is actually more active when we’re asleep. The brain shrinks by almost 60% when we’re asleep. And that lymph, the glymph, moves around, helping us to get rid of beta amyloid plaques that have been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease and tau proteins and things like that.
And so this device, like other devices that deliver transcranial electrical stimulation, which is really what it does, it’s a sophisticated device that delivers something called LIP-tES: low-intensity pulsed transcranial electrical stimulation. And through all the mechanisms that I just enumerated, helps with your brain regulation. And subsequent to that, all the trickle-down effect is beneficial for your immune system, for your hormonal system, for all those things that I mentioned previously.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Now you’ve been involved with using IASIS for how long?
Jason Gourlas: Currently about three years. But actually, because of my real interest in this, I’ve done a lot of research and I’ve become a trainer of the technology. My wife and I were actually involved in rewriting the curriculum for the training around IASIS. So we’ve been much more involved than just delivering the therapy.
Dr. Steven Hotze: And we’re now offering it here.
Jason Gourlas: That’s right.
Dr. Steven Hotze: …at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. Now, how would someone know if they would benefit from this type of therapy?
Jason Gourlas: Well, if you have a brain, you would benefit from this type of therapy. It’s not just for mental health challenges, but it’s also for mental health optimization or cognitive optimization. We’ve seen people benefit who ostensibly don’t have any mental health or physical challenges. And that’s really a rarity; just because something is common doesn’t mean that it’s normal, and so it’s very hard to find somebody that’s normal nowadays.
Dr. Steven Hotze: So you think anybody would benefit from this?
Jason Gourlas: I would.
Dr. Steven Hotze: How would you know? You take the therapy. How many treatments would you have to have? Say somebody has anxiety. Now we know that anxiety can be caused by several different reasons, one of which is hormonal, could cause anxiety.
Jason Gourlas: True.
Dr. Steven Hotze: When women have their hormones become imbalanced premenstrually, they oftentimes get anxiety attacks, which are oftentimes, some people believe…natural progesterone resolves that problem. Normally, if somebody’s not feeling badly, they’re not the ones that are likely to come in for getting help. Who are the people that routinely you would see? What type of issues would people have that they’d be seeking help from IASIS from?
Jason Gourlas: Right. Typically the folks that we see that derive the greatest benefit are those who have depression, anxiety, insomnia.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Can they be on all these pharmaceutical drugs at the same time and be treated? How does that work?
Jason Gourlas: They can. Certainly, we would love to have a virgin brain, if you will.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Right. Sure.
Jason Gourlas: But we’ve seen many people on those pharmaceutical agents get significant benefit, and able to come off of those pharmaceutical agents. Now, we’re not typically the ones that are going to facilitate that. And I wouldn’t ever encourage anybody to stop a medication without first consulting with the prescriber and…
Dr. Steven Hotze: Yeah, never stop an SSRI or antidepressant cold, because you can go crazier. I mean, you can go crazy on them, and you can go crazy if you stop them cold.
Jason Gourlas: Right.
Dr. Steven Hotze: So you don’t want to do that. All I recommend, don’t get started on them, ever. They’re knock off. They chemically have a very similar structure to cocaine. They’re highly addictive. And if you stop them, what they do is they absolutely screw up your brain chemistry. That’s what they’re affecting.
There’s no proof that they really elevate serotonin at all. There’s no way to get in and measure the brain to do that. Most of the serotonin, as a matter of fact, which these are supposed to elevate serotonin, 90% of all the serotonin is made in your gut, by bacteria in the gut. You have to have healthy gut flora to be healthy. So some of these people that are having problems with depression, they simply clean up their gut and they get healthy, and they get over their depression or anxiety.
So there’s a lot of different modalities, and we don’t recommend, or I’m sure you probably wouldn’t recommend if you have a problem with anxiety or depression…you need to come in. Not just for IASIS, but to be fully evaluated to see if we have hormonal problems.
A low thyroid can cause depression, very commonly causes depression. People that have gut disorders can have a problem with depression, because they’ve got yeast in their colon. They don’t have enough good, healthy, normal bacterial flora. The yeast produces toxins that makes them sick and they don’t feel well, and they’re sick all the time. They get depressed. So you need a full evaluation to address underlying causes that may be the reason you’ve got some of your symptoms first.
But as an added modality, we have IASIS. So first thing we do is make sure we don’t have some other underlying medical problem that needs to be addressed. We wouldn’t say this is a panacea. I mean, no matter what your problem is, you wouldn’t put somebody and say, “Well, just do IASIS and everything will be well.”
Jason Gourlas: No, no, I wouldn’t think that at all. And I think anything that you build on should start with a firm foundation.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Right.
Jason Gourlas: That firm foundation should start with adequate sleep, although you might have trouble with sleep. And that’s where IASIS can help there. You should have a great nutritional foundation.
Dr. Steven Hotze: That’s key.
Jason Gourlas: You need to have physical activity, which also helps with depression and anxiety. You also need to have some sort of stress mitigation practice, because we all deal with it.
Where I brought in IASIS, into previous practices and this practice, is that even in spite of trying to dial all those things and people were still struggling, there was an inertia that they were unable to overcome, to sometimes even implement some of these things. So what I found is that when you use the IASIS to bring down the inflammation to help with the anxiety, they were able to overcome that inertia to action, and then really start to…
Dr. Steven Hotze: Implement the program.
Jason Gourlas: …embrace and implement the program. That was one of the major things. Then folks that were still lagging behind, we addressed their oral health, we addressed all these other things. They have neuroinflammation. Or they have these rumination loops that they can’t get out of, that are really driving their autonomic nervous system dysfunction, that we found this to be very beneficial. Yes, I totally agree that this is a powerful tool. But it’s not the only tool that’s necessary in order to optimize somebody’s health and well-being.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Right. But it’s an adjunct that we have here that can help improve your overall health and wellness. And so we’re glad that Jason Gourlas has brought this new modality into our practice. Everything that we do or add on is always trying to help those individuals who don’t seem really to get well on the program. There may be some other things going on that we’ve overlooked, and there’s maybe some other modalities of treatment that we need to do that are natural. This is a natural treatment. We’re not using pharmaceutical drugs. So it’s exciting to have this on. Now, this treatment, how long does it last when you get a treatment? And how often should a person get this IASIS treatment?
Jason Gourlas: The actual treatment session is fairly brief. It can last up to about 45 minutes. There’s usually an initial evaluation that’s 90 minutes that includes a treatment in and of itself. A typical treatment session can last up to 45 minutes. And really, most of the treatment session is preparation of the face and the scalp for the placement of the electrodes. There’s a little bit of scrubbing involved. There’s a conductive electrical paste that’s applied to the electrodes, get the information that they need. So during that session, the therapist will move those electrodes to different parts of the face and the scalp that correspond to different areas of the brain that are being treated.
There’s a variety of different programs that can be run, with a variety of different energy levels and time. The therapy is really tailored to each individual person. In between sessions, people will get a self-evaluation form that helps the therapist decide on what the next session of therapy is going to look like.
Typically during the first part of treatment, it’s done twice a week, ideally. Then the duration of therapy, the number of therapy sessions that you would need is really contingent upon the severity of your issue, how sensitive you are to different things. Because people who are very sensitive and haven’t developed resilience may need a more gentle approach to therapy. And if they require a more gentle approach to therapy, it typically requires more therapy to get the benefit they’re looking for.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Right.
Jason Gourlas: We’re not trying to make lifelong patients or clients. So once you’re starting to develop benefit…and typically it’s seen within the first five to six sessions that you’ll see benefits. Some people see from the very first session an incredible calm that comes over them.
We have a patient who was, he called it “chasing normalcy.” He would use marijuana to self-medicate his anxiety. He didn’t get high when he used marijuana, he just felt normal, like a normal person would, in his estimation, anyways. And after his first IASIS therapy, he looked at me, he says, “That was smoking a joint.” It didn’t make him high, it just made him feel calm and normal. So it can vary, like any therapy, we tailor the therapy for each person.
If you have a significantly severe and long-standing process, then you may need 40 sessions. If it’s a relative new insult and you’re well otherwise, maybe 10 to 20 sessions. Which, in contrast to conventional neurofeedback, the active form of neurofeedback, you may typically need 40 sessions as a standard run. Just a rule of thumb for any issue that you’re dealing with.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Well, for those of you that have found this interesting and want to do more research, I’d recommend go to DuckDuckGo online and you can look up IASIS, I-A-S-I-S, and read more in depth about it. I don’t know if we have anything on our website yet?
Jason Gourlas: I think that may still be in the works.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Yes, but we’ll have something. We’re just bringing this on board in the last several weeks. But I wanted to let you know that this is another modality, neurofeedback, that can help you overcome some underlying disorders you may have. Emotional disorders, whether it’s depression or anxiety or panic attacks, or just feeling low or fatigued, and you need to come in and be fully evaluated. But this may be a helpful adjunct to get you on a path of health and wellness naturally, which is our goal for you, so that you have energy, vitality, and enthusiasm for life. Jason, thanks for joining us today.
Jason Gourlas: Sure. Thank you.
Dr. Steven Hotze: Thanks for this very informative discussion today. God bless you. Thank each one of you for joining us.
Call 281-698-8680 to learn more about IASIS and to schedule your appointment for IASIS treatment at the Hotze Health & Wellness Center. It will be our privilege to serve you!
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Since 1989, Hotze Health & Wellness Center has helped over 33,000 patients get their lives back using bioidentical hormones that restore hormones to optimal levels, strengthen immune systems, and increase energy levels. Our treatment regimen addresses the root cause of hypothyroidism, adrenal fatigue, menopause, perimenopause, low testosterone, allergies, and candida.
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