Understanding Functional Neurology with Dr. Julie Brown

Chiropractors use adjustments to restore joint function and support the nervous system. In severe cases like a nasty car accident where the patient suffers a concussion, there is only much chiropractic can do. They can move the bones out of misalignment and allow the CSF, blood, and majority of the nerve information to transmit the way they should, but they don’t have the skill or the tools to fix the concussion specifically. This is where the fine tuning of functional neurology comes in. Functional neurology, simply put, is the intricate understanding of the nervous system, what looks normal and what doesn’t. Dr. Julie Brown is a functional neurologist chiropractor whose vast training and passion for helping people enables her to offer help to those who suffer from concussions and have been told by the medical field nothing else can be done. Dr. Brown strives to give the best health care possible, and she is an advocate of functional neurology and the importance of understanding brain health in treating patients.

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Our guest is Dr. Julie Brown. She’s a chiropractor and she also holds a Diplomate from the American Chiropractic Neurology Board. She attended the University of Washington then started a career as a massage therapist. She went on to go to Southern California University of Health Sciences and earned her Doctor of Chiropractic with a Magna Cum Laude honor, and she is now Board Certified Chiropractic Neurologist and a Fellow of the American College of Functional Neurology in Traumatic Brain Injury. It is my pleasure to have Dr. Julie Brown on my podcast talking about functional neurology and the importance of understanding brain health. I’m excited about my guest.

Listen to the podcast here:

Understanding Functional Neurology with Dr. Julie Brown

Good morning, Julie.

Good morning.

I was thinking about you because I watched this incredibly intriguing thing on Netflix. It was the post mortem autopsy of an obese person.

What is it called? I want to watch it.

It was called The Post Mortem. It’s these British forensic investigators that do autopsies on people who have had disease. This one was about obesity. It’s pretty gruesome. I told my husband, “Are you squeamish because you don’t want to come in the room if you don’t want to see what the inside of a human body looks like.” They did this interview with some people that struggle with obesity. The reason why I thought of you, not because of anything other than the fact that this woman who was struggling with obesity, her pupil was this big on the left and this big on the right and she had suffered from epilepsy. They put her on some medication that made her gain weight and messed with her endocrine system. I was like, “Brain injury. I wish I could get this girl to call Julie.”

The interesting thing is with epilepsy, some of the best things to do is a ketogenic diet. You have to starve those neurons so they don’t just spontaneously fire.

From all the training that you’ve given me over the last couple of years, our conversations and sharing patients, she had these little saccades and this twitching eyeball and her pupil was this big. I was like, “She is in a lighted room. Her pupils should be almost not visible,” or the same. That leads me into the whole topic. I want to talk about functional neurology because I am fascinated by it. If I had three years of free time, I would go and study this, but I prefer to refer to people like you who took the time to do it and are masters and living this world full-time. I know enough to refer. Give me the basic understanding. What is functional neurology?

Some of the easiest thing to do is to say it is not a technique because in chiropractic, we go to school and we learn these techniques. It’s not a technique. It’s an intricate understanding of the nervous system, what looks normal, what looks abnormal, what sensory motor and thought function needs to happen to affect different parts of the brain or to affect multiple parts of the brain to bring a neuron to fire what it needs to make a change. To me, that is chiropractic. What you do with functional neurology is with that understanding of that evaluation, you can then go apply your technique, whatever that may be, that is appropriate for the patient. No two are the same, so it’s an evaluation of the nervous system, not a technique.

Technically, because we’ve gone to chiropractic school, we’ve been exposed and had a tertiary level of understanding of the nervous system. It allows us to be able to then apply the things you’re talking about. For example, I practice the Blair technique and I do my analysis with the X-rays in the way that I’ve been taught how to do that and then I apply that to each patient. Somebody who actively uses their technique and somebody that uses Thompson does their technique, but what you’re saying is the nervous system is the nervous system. To be able to understand how the nervous system is working is what your chiropractic is. I don’t disagree with that at all. That’s the baseline understanding. When I talk to my patients about what is chiropractic, I say chiropractors are trained to determine if the nervous system is functioning. We just happen to use the spine as our portal of entry.

We are missing a hundred other things by just looking at the spine because you cannot fix that if it’s not a “spine issue.” If the spine is out of “alignment” or not moving appropriately, it’s because of a suprasegmental issue, meaning above the spine. There is no amount of adjusting that’s going to fix above the spine. We have to look at the whole thing. That’s what frustrates me about chiropractic education. We are totally missing the boat by narrowing our view of the nervous system and how it affects everything. If you stack bones up, they’re not going to move on their own. Something has to apply, pressure or movement, to make those bones “move.” That’s going to be muscles and those muscles don’t just spontaneously fire. There are very few diseases in which there would be muscle disease where that can happen, but it’s purely neurological. There’s no way you’re going to get disease at one segment and not everywhere else in the spine.

Somebody asked me a great question on that and I was like, “That’s not quite how it works.” You have to understand the nervous system. When you’re putting the tension, for example, on a muscle and you’re overriding these Golgi tendon apparatus or muscle spindle response, which are neurological organs, you need to know where those fire in the brain. Can that brain accept that neurological barrage? Will it fix what’s going on because we have to override those to move the bones or get motion to happen again? It’s not a static thing, so to not go into detail of those in chiropractic school is infuriating with me.

I went to Palmer College. I had a 7:30 AM class on my first day. It was central nervous system and understanding the brain and the spinal cord. If I could go back and learn from the amazing Mr. Lau Allen, who’s been an inspiration to so many people that went to Palmer, sadly he’s passed away, but he was an outstanding professor. I didn’t know what I didn’t know and I was like, “It’s early. I just need to pass this class,” but if I could go back and sit in and sit through it again, that’s what’s happened. The Carrick Institute, isn’t that where you studied?

Yes.

What he’s doing is amazing and he’s training so many people to have a deeper, very solid understanding about the brain and the spinal cord. Can you give me a little history on how it got started with him specifically?

I’m not him, so I’ll do the best thing based on my understanding. When he was in chiropractic school, he had a couple mentors and they ended up passing away sometime in the ‘80s.He felt inspired to go down this route of what we are missing. We’ve talked about in chiropractic school in class, they teach you the name of the pathways. They don’t teach sensory integration. We look at the anatomy because that’s what’s tested on the boards. It’s a joke to me and it happens in medical school as well. He went down this road and felt an obligation to do it. When he got out of chiropractic school in the early ‘70s, he had a practice for three years that got huge somewhere on an east state. He got so good at what he did that people encouraged him to start teaching and start the institute because this is totally missed in all medicine. It started from there. It’s gotten bigger and bigger. One thing I admire about him is it’s not about the naysayers, he just keeps going. This guy is 66 and a Senior Fellow at Oxford, Cambridge, somewhere along those lines as a chiropractor. He’s well respected in what he does and he wants chiropractic to be valid. That’s his main goal. Functional neurology is chiropractic. That’s what it is.

It blends perfectly with what I do because I would love to be able to spend three years studying this. It’s this season in my life, it doesn’t allow or I’m not making time to do it. I love that I can refer to a functional neurologist because when I do an upper cervical correction with Blair, I have put the structure into alignment and then everything else has the opportunity to flow the way that it should.

Yes, unless there’s something else, like you’re not hitting that loop in inappropriate time.

That’s where you come in. That’s where you being able to identify, “There’s something amiss here. Let’s do this thing and make it happen.” I’ve been to your office in Los Alamitos. Tell me the name of your clinic.

Southern California Brain Center.

I’ve been up there and I’ve got to play with some of the fancy gadgets you have. It looks completely different. You’re a chiropractor just like me, but your office and the way that you treat patients is totally different from what I do and that’s cool.

It’s fun. I do love what I do.

Talk to me about the most interesting case you’ve seen.

This is not necessarily chiropractic neurology. My first year out of school, I was working on this woman. I did functional medicine before I did functional neurology and having learned the functional neurology after I tapered down a lot of my functional medicine because you can overdo it with functional medicine. There’s this happy medium and people are usually swinging one way or the other. I’m one of the oddballs that did functional medicine first and then went func neuro and added functional medicine. I have a little different advantage or viewpoint. I had this woman and she was coming in for pain and we’re just talking. She felt fully inflamed. Gritty is the only word that I can think of to describe what her tissue felt like. I started talking about gluten sensitivity and went down this road.

She went home and started looking this all up. She comes back with her son, who was between one and two, and not thriving. The doctors had been doing everything. He wasn’t gaining weight. He had all this stuff and she goes, “When you talk about gluten sensitivity, this described everything that my son is currently going through.”They did the biopsy or blood, I can’t remember how they tested it at that point in time, and he had the highest level this particular pediatrician had ever seen. There was a waiting list for this doctor and they’re like, “You need to bring him in on Friday.” To this day, I have never met the kid, but the mom figured out that he had gluten sensitivity and that changed that kid’s life. It’s awesome and had nothing to do with an adjustment. It had to do with being aware and educating patients.

How did you get into this? You talked about how you did chiropractic school, you were in practice, and you did functional medicine. Briefly give a quick understanding what that is.

[Tweet “Not having curiosity is not a good thing.”]

Functional medicine is not waiting for things to get out of the lab range. It’s looking at systems in the body who feeds into what and the best way to approach that. A good example is diabetes. The normal fasting that we want in a functional range. A lab range is 65 to 100. Functional is 85 to 100. If my blood sugar is at 70, I am delusional. We’re looking at a much narrower range and when it comes to diabetes, a positive test is a fasting blood sugar of above 127. If the normal is 100, what happens between 100 and 127? What’s in that world? It’s this functional range. That’s just an example for diabetes. We have thyroid, inflammatory markers, and immune. It’s understanding the systems and it’s what a clinician is.

I talk about this with my patients a lot. Most of the time, people that come in aren’t pathological. They come in because they’ve been to the orthopedist and they say, “There’s nothing wrong with your knee. You don’t have arthritis. I’m not sure why you have pain, but here is an opioid and you can take that and live pain-free.” The consequences of that, however, are astronomical.

This is where I would love for the professions to come together and say, “You don’t fit my model. Try this other model.”

That’s what I have wanted to do in Orange County, working in the CCA, is promote this collaboration between chiropractors and between other types of professions. I thankfully have a great network of medical doctors, surgeons, neurosurgeons, orthopedists, acupuncturists, nutritionists, naturopaths, medical doctors that refer because they know that this is what I do. This is my wheelhouse and we can work together.

That’s why I love making a referral to you because when I have a person come in that was in a nasty car accident, they have a concussion, I don’t have the skills or the tools to fix the concussion specifically. I can remove the bone out of misalignment and allow that CSF, blood, and majority of the nerve information to transmit the way that it should, but the fine tuning is where you come in. It’s pretty fun working with you on some of our patients because we get to have a little dialog back and forth, “Do this test. Check this side. Do this thing.”

Were the eyes this way when you were doing your adjustments?

You did func medicine and now you’re in func neuro. Tell me what got you into that.

I do both. I don’t do one without the other. I look at the whole patient. There was a student in chiropractic school. His name’s Aaron Newman. He was recruiting. He wanted the Carrick Institute to come to LA. They do have a building I believe, and they do offer classes there, but it’s not how they’ve always done it. They go from city to city and not offer the whole program. It’s once every four weeks or six weeks that there’s a class and it’s a weekend. They have on‑demand. It’s great and you get the hours towards being able to sit for the diplomate exam or the fellowship exam.

I went to the first class because I was wanting to get a diplomate. I was about five or six years out of chiropractic school and I wanted to do more. A diplomate in clinical nutrition was one of the things I was looking at but I talked to a mentor and he goes, “You got to go to the Carrick Institute,” so I went. It happened to be that Aaron Newman came at about that same time and they were starting 801, the first neuron theory. I went to the class and I was like, “Mother Mary.” I feel like I’m hurting my patients because I don’t know this stuff. This is basic. How did we miss it? I’ve gone through stages of, “I shouldn’t see anybody.” That’s the story of practice is learning and applying as you know. I hate to use the word ‘obligation’ but I did, I was like, “I have to learn this.” I felt compelled. Nobody was making me, but I needed to. I’ve been curious my whole life. I like to know how things work. I YouTube things if I wanted to change brakes on my car. I love to do things and know how they work.

I had that discussion with Dr. Leslie Hewitt and we were talking about the labels that people had given us. Ever since I was little, I was always told I was nosy and I’m like, “I’m not nosy. I’m interested. I’m curious. I want to know why.”

I get concerned when kids come in and they are not curious. Not having curiosity is not a good thing. I was compelled to do it and I dove straight in. I was about ten classes in the basic, the 800 program for the diplomate program and TBI started. Carrick had taken years off of teaching and all of a sudden, he was coming back to do this TBI. I was like, “I got to learn from the guy,” so I did both. I was flying to Atlanta about every month to go take these classes while still taking classes in LA. It was a lot of work. I went head first and I wouldn’t recommend it any other way. You can’t halfway do it. It’s 300 hours to sit for the diplomate exam. You need a lot more than 300 hours to grasp it to sit for that exam.

When we invited you to come speak at the Orange County CCA, continuing education meetings that we do, I sat there with my jaw open. I felt terrified that I was doing a disservice even though I know I’m not. I know what I’m doing is making a huge difference in a lot of people’s lives. It put this fire in my belly. I’m like, “I need to know more.” The thing that was so terrifying to me was I have a husband and three kids and a full-time job and I’m on three boards. Where am I going to find time to do this? What gave me peace and comfort is knowing that I can have them go up the road a little bit and see you.

I like to be funneled. I like referrals from other chiros or other professionals. That is my ideal. That’s what I love, to do what I can do, and then send them back to their doctor to live their life, maybe check in with me every once in awhile.

What does it look like when somebody comes into your office to get a functional neurological exam? Give me an idea of some of the equipment that you’re using.

There are three things that use the entire brain. Your vision system, and we have six different types of eye movements. They have different pathways and different ways in which they fire and we know what’s normal and not normal. I record eye movement. The machine called VNG, videonystagmography, records eye improvements. I test five of the six different types. One, I just do at bedside, which is the near-far movement. Balance is the other thing that uses the entire brain, so I challenge people on a flat plate on foam with their head turned in different directions to look at their stability, their sways.

These are things you couldn’t see from bedside. Gait is another one. How you walk is all brain. You may have decreased leg swing on the right, but it has nothing to do with your hamstring being “tight.” It does technically, but your hamstring, that tight muscle is controlled by the brain. We call it the gain tonicity to where you are, we call it the gain. The gain is inappropriate. Can I do an eye movement or a head movement and change the firing of that gait? More than likely, yes, without having to dig into a muscle that’s actually going to perpetuate the problem, which is what we’re taught in chiropractic school and is mortifying.

I’m excited for the audience, whether it’s a chiropractic student, another doctor or somebody that is interested in learning about what functional neurology is, getting these little nuggets of information so that they know that they can go find somebody that does this or they can ask a question and if they don’t answer it the way that you’ve just heard it, then that’s probably not the right practitioner for you.

[Tweet “It’s about the patient, not about me, not about whether they like me or not.”]

If somebody doesn’t like my personality, I would never tell them to be my patient because it’s going to create a different frontal lobe aspect and your ability to get better. It’s about the patient, not about me, not about whether they like me or not. If they don’t like me, but they can hear me and do what they need to, that is fine as well. I do the same. If you are looking for a talk therapist, because I’ll use that as well, go until you find someone that you like. That doesn’t mean somebody who tells you what you want to hear and can perpetuate your bad habits. It means trying to be objective, “Do they hear you? Do they want to help you?” and not, “Do they agree with you?” If somebody agrees with you and you’re doing things correct, you wouldn’t be seeking anybody out.

You went through how many hours of post-doctorate training and then sitting for this board? How many years have you spent getting to the wood of it?

I started in about 2011 and I tried to count up hours. I’m somewhere close to 13,000 or 14,000 hours and that includes class time and grand rounds with Dr. Carrick three different times. Being able to see these complex cases, because he funneled the more challenging cases, and getting to see how he interacts with patients. His entire exam is planned, meaning the way he talks to a patient, the way he interacts or how long he stays looking at the paperwork when he’s observing what this patient is doing and not paying attention to the paperwork. It’s these intricate little things that no computer is going to be able to do.

We can’t recreate an amazing human or being able to be a clinician or just observe. That was the first thing I learned from him was observation all the time. The second was in regards to chiropractic. We speak this crazy language and no wonder other professionals are like, “What are they talking about?” No, it’s an axon. It’s neurological firing. It’s not energy. Technically it is energy, but people use the word ‘energy’ in this weird way. There is physics, there’s an energy to it, but we know the pathways in neurological firing. With chiropractic neurology in particular, we speak the same language as other medical professionals, which is anatomy and physiology.

What you’re saying is that if I go in and I talk about innate intelligence, about subluxation, about the power that made the body, heals the body, if we get right down to it, it’s structure and function and we have the language. It’s just that we don’t speak it all the time. Because to me, if I were to go in and talk to somebody who came in for low back pain and I started talking about the neural pathways with them and trying to get them to understand how come this muscle does this, they would zone out. If I say, “I adjust your neck, your body’s going to translate gravity better, and your low back is going to stop hurting.” They’re like, “Cool. That’s what I want.”

The neurons are going to change firing. Imagine we have set up this world of, “You have a bone out of place, which is not dislocated.” That’s what people think. They come in and they’re like, “Can you just push that bone?” You’re not dislocated. That’s an emergent situation. That’s the hospital down the road, not me. We’ve ruined it and there is no kink on a hose. You can have a “pinched nerve” and there’s anatomical pressure on a nerve would be technically a pinched nerve. You can have suprasegmental changes that make other nerves not function as well. There’s a research, if you cut the forearm, for example, and you cut off all those nerves, all the information that goes from that arm and docks into the left parietal lobe starts to neurodegenerate. Those neurons are not getting stimulation. You don’t use it, you lose it. For a functional neurologist, we say, “They don’t have this arm. How can we activate that parietal lobe in a different way that doesn’t have anything to do with that arm moving?”

Maybe you can speak to this, but this is that whole phantom pain thing where somebody gets an amputation and they still feel pain in the leg that isn’t there or like people that had their gallbladders out, they still have gallbladder attacks, but they don’t have a gallbladder. It’s the neurology.

The whole point is those B vitamins and ability to methylate and break things down. It comes down to nutrition for that gallbladder for sure. You can remap these things. People can have their whole entire arm and they have pain at the wrist, but it’s expanded. Say I am touching their elbow, but they think I’m touching their wrist. We have maps in our brain and these are not an esoteric word. We have visual maps, auditory maps, sensory maps, motor maps, the cerebellum controls, all of that, and those maps can get expanded and screwed up so people don’t perceive things correctly. We want to go in and remap and we can do that with eye movements, with imagination, with head turns. Imagination is frontal lobe activation. Meditation is frontal lobe activation.

You said something that I don’t even know if you realize how profound. The perception is screwed up. A lot of people in relationship perceive things incorrectly. When I’m talking to my eighteen year old and I say, “Did you get your schoolwork done?” she perceives that as, “You think I’m a failure.” “No, I just literally want to know did you get your schoolwork done.” It’s all of these perceptions that we have. I am guilty 500,000 times for perceiving things incorrectly and that’s because of all the life experiences that I’ve had from trauma and otherwise. That’s where I want to go into this concussion discussion because I feel like that’s the people that I refer to you, these concussion patients. I love that I have you because when you get a concussion, every aspect of your life is altered.

How you perceive the world and how the world perceives you is screwed up.

I’m part of these discussion boards where these people say, “My husband left me because…,” and lives are being destroyed because of brain injury. Talk to me about concussion and what you do. Is that your favorite thing to take care of?

It is my favorite thing to take care of. A colleague of mine presented in Nebraska at the Brain Injury Association and he took a picture of a slide that somebody else wrote or quoted, “People are two to four times more likely to commit suicide after having a concussion.” Here’s the big thing, and this I heard from an attorney, which I was like, “This is great verbiage,” because they’re all about selling the verbiage. MTBI, mild traumatic brain injury, is a concussion. It is not seen on film. It’s all these subclinical things, but when you think of a jury or how this comes across, if you say, “I have a mild traumatic brain injury,” they think it’s mild, that it’s not that big of a deal. Mild only has to do with what you see on the film.

It means that you didn’t have a skull fracture.

It has nothing to do with how bad it is in your daily life and your function because you can still have severe issues from concussion that don’t show up on film.

That’s the thing that you and I run into all the time in med-legal world when we take care of people that have been in car accidents. It’s an invisible injury and then the insurance company will say, “It’s just soft tissue.” Your brain is soft tissue.

We measure. What I do is objective. When I’m looking at eye movements and balance, people cannot fake it. It would look like you were faking it, but there are tests. For example, pursuit where you’re following something. You cannot do a pursuit without following something. While I’m testing that, you would be able to notice that this patient is not keeping their eyes. They’re actually going to have different eye movements and not be in sync with the dot that they’re following. It’s a whole thing. What I do is objective in the measurement and the function of it.

[Tweet “There is disservice to not telling the truth about what’s going on with someone.”]

It’s cool when I came up there and I feel like I’m pretty healthy. I feel like I have healed a lot from the different things that I’ve been through and I’m left thinking, “I need a lot more help.”

The goal is not to make you feel broken, but my job is to point out and it’s to validate how people feel because they don’t feel heard. This is why you feel this way because this, this, and this, so then I apply a therapy. The therapy can be different. Somebody may not be able to do a pursuit, which is eye movement. If you put your thumb out in front of you and you start the thumbnail and you move your thumb from side to side while watching it, that is a pursuit. If those are broken, it’s not necessarily appropriate for me to do more pursuits because you can’t do them to begin with. I need to know other parts of the nervous system that feed into those neurological pathways that would allow a person to do a pursuit in real life.

That’s what I appreciate about being able to co-treat with you. I’ll send them up for an exam and you do your thing and you find out all these objective things. Then you come back and say, “When you’re checking this person, have them look up into the left when you have to do an upper cervical correction” or “When you’re doing this thing, have them look down into the right.” It’s outstanding how you can fire these different pathways in the brain and make a big change. It’s not a thing where if people want to come see Dr. Brown, I don’t want you to think that you’re going to feel defeated at all.

I was thinking that with you and I notice that about myself. I have to tell the patient, “This part looks good, so we’re going to use it to help fire up this other part.” It’s not to make people feel defeated, but this is me as a doctor. This is what I try to work on. It’s like having a food allergy. The test doesn’t mean that you have the food allergy, so not doing the test doesn’t mean that you’re not going to still have those reactions. The test does not give you the food allergy. There is disservice to not telling the truth about what’s going on with someone.

Truth is power, and power and information help make informed decision. That is important. I’m so excited about having you on my podcast, learning more about what functional neurology is. How can people find you?

They can find me, Julie Brown, chiropractor. There may be others, but I’m in Southern California in Los Alamitos. There’s an MD near me named Julie Brown, which was funny, but I’m a chiropractor. My website is SoCalBrainCenter.com. You also asked about people in other parts of the country. The ACNB.org is the diplomate site. It’s not very user-friendly, but you can go to find a provider. When you go to that, you cannot put too much information in. I would recommend clicking on the Zip code and typing that in and then there’s another button you have to click “within so many miles” and that alone, you can find someone in your area. You’re also welcome to contact me and I’ll try to put you in contact with someone in your area. There are a few different directories. The other thing is that the American Chiropractic Association recognizes both of my subspecialties. One of their goals is to list everybody in every state that has the subspecialty, so the American Chiropractic Association website will have that information as well. The Carrick Institute, they know who has taken their courses and whatnot.

Julie, it’s been a pleasure having you on my podcast. The audience is thankful for the information. I want to say thank you so much for being awesome and being the neuro diplomate that I love to refer to and thanks for helping me be a better chiropractor.

Thank you. Thank you CCA for allowing me to meet you. Go to CCA, join, and be part of it. Whether you believe in everything they’re doing for our profession, somebody has to do something for our profession.

CalChiro.org, that is the California Chiropractic Association. Go on there and check it out. It will have a list of all the people that are members of the California Chiropractic Association, so if you’re interested in finding a chiropractor who is about supporting their state organization, that’s how we met and it has been a cool thing to get to know all the different docs in the area, in Orange County specifically.

Thanks for taking some time with me and I can’t wait to get this out there. Audience, if you have any questions, comments or concerns, email me through WellConnectedChiro.com and I will be happy to address them. I hope that you do look up Dr. Julie Brown in Los Alamitos, Southern California Brain Center. I love it. Thanks so much. Talk to you soon, doc.

About Dr. Julie Brown

Dr. Julie Brown D.C., D.A.C.N.B (Diplomate of the American Chiropractic Neurology Board) has been involved in body work for sixteen years. Her passion for health care began as a child when she took part in gymnastics, an activity where keeping a healthy lifestyle was pertinent. Growing up with a parent having health issues peaked her interest in this field even more.

She attended the University of Washington and followed up and started a career as a massage therapist. Following that job she worked with a chiropractor, Dr. Chris Barney D. C, who became a big role model that led her to her current profession. This inspiration helped her earn another diploma from Southern California University of Health Sciences with a D.C. with Magna Cum Laude honor. Dr. Brown is a Board Certified Chiropractic Neurologist and a Fellow of the American College of Functional Neurology in Traumatic Brain Injury. She achieved these though her studies with the Carrick Institute and by attending grand rounds with Dr. Ted Carrick DC, who is a leader in concussion therapy and rehabilitation.

Dr. Brown strives to give the best health care possible, not “sick” care, to her patients. She treats each patient’s care for what it is, an individual case that needs focused attention and unique treatment. For this reason, she always continues her education with the latest up-to-date research. Functional nutrition has become an important focus of hers for the past six years, specifically autoimmune diseases, such as thyroid disease, diabetes and gluten free lifestyles. Her mentor in function Nutrition is Dr. Datis Kharrazian D.C, who wrote the best-selling thyroid book in the world called “Why do I still have thyroid symptoms when my lab tests are normal”.

Besides body work and nutrition, Dr. Brown’s passions include eating right and working out, mostly weight training. She has also worked as the team chiropractor for the nationally ranked football team, at Servite High school (2010-2013) and traveled as one of the chiropractors for the US National Bobsled team (2010).

Important Links

• Julie Brown
• Carrick Institute
• Southern California Brain Center
• Leslie Hewitt
• SoCalBrainCenter.com
• ACNB.org
• American Chiropractic Association
• CalChiro.org

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