I have been wanting to have Dr. Julie Brown on this podcast for a while. She is a functional neurologist, a chiropractic diplomat, and one of the most clinically sharp people I know. We met through the California Chiropractic Association and have been sharing patients and trading clinical insights ever since. When I watch a documentary and notice a patient's pupils are two different sizes across the room, that is Julie's influence. She has made me a better chiropractor, and I am grateful for her every time I sit down with a complex case.
Functional neurology is one of those topics that sounds intimidating until someone explains it clearly. Julie does that better than anyone I know.
What Functional Neurology Actually Is
The first thing Julie wants people to understand is what functional neurology is not: it is not a technique. Chiropractic school trains us in techniques, activator, Thompson, Blair, and many others. Functional neurology is something different. It is a deep, intricate understanding of the nervous system itself: what normal looks like, what abnormal looks like, and what needs to happen neurologically to create real, lasting change in a patient's function.
Think of it this way: if you stack bones up, they will not move on their own. Something has to move them. That something is muscles. And muscles do not fire spontaneously, they are driven by the nervous system. So the nervous system is always at the root of the conversation, whether we are talking about a spinal adjustment, a balance problem, or a concussion.
What functional neurology does is evaluate the entire nervous system and then apply whatever technique is appropriate for that patient's specific neurological picture. No two patients are the same. And in Julie's world, the evaluation always comes before the treatment.
That is exactly how I practice Blair upper cervical chiropractic. The imaging, the analysis, the precise engineering of a correction specific to that individual's anatomy. Different tools, same foundational principle: you have to understand what you are working with before you touch it.
The Eye Tells the Story
One of the things I have learned from Julie is how much the eyes reveal about the nervous system. Eye movements are neurologically complex and they are incredibly hard to fake. They require multiple pathways in the brain to be functioning correctly and in sync. When something is off, it shows up in the eyes in ways that are objective and measurable.
Pursuits, the ability to follow a moving object smoothly with your eyes, are one example. If someone cannot do a smooth pursuit, it tells you something specific about which part of the nervous system is not firing correctly. And critically: if someone cannot do pursuits, having them practice pursuits is not necessarily the right therapy. You need to find the parts of the nervous system that feed into that pathway and work from there.
This is why co-treating with Julie has been so valuable. She will evaluate a patient and then tell me: when you are doing the upper cervical correction, have them look up and to the left. Or: when you check this person, have them look down and to the right. Those specific instructions fire different neurological pathways in the brain and make the correction land differently. It is outstanding how much precision is possible when you understand the nervous system at that level.
Concussion Is Not Mild
Here is something I feel strongly about and Julie confirmed completely: the term mild traumatic brain injury, which is what a concussion is classified as medically, is misleading in ways that do real harm to real people.
Mild refers only to what shows up on imaging. If there is no skull fracture, no bleed visible on MRI, it gets labeled mild. But the functional impact, the way a concussion disrupts a person's daily life, their sleep, their cognition, their mood, their balance, their relationships, has nothing to do with what does or does not show up on a scan.
People who have had concussions are two to four times more likely to struggle significantly in the aftermath than people who have not. The injury is real. It is just invisible on conventional imaging. And when the insurance company says it is just soft tissue, the answer is: your brain is soft tissue.
Julie's evaluation of concussion patients is objective. Eye movements cannot be faked. Balance cannot be faked. The tests she runs produce measurable data that documents what the patient is experiencing and why. That matters enormously in a world where invisible injuries are routinely dismissed.
If you or someone you love has had a concussion that never quite resolved, please do not accept that as the permanent story. There is more that can be done. Get evaluated by someone who knows how to look at the nervous system, not just the scan.
The Test Does Not Give You the Allergy
Julie said something in this conversation that I want every patient to hear before they are afraid to get evaluated: the test does not give you the food allergy.
Choosing not to test does not mean the dysfunction is not there. It just means you are living with it without understanding it. And understanding it is the first step toward doing something about it.
She is careful about how she communicates findings. Her job is to validate what patients are experiencing, not to make them feel broken. This part looks really good, she tells them, so we are going to use it to help fire up this other part. That is the clinical mindset I appreciate most: honesty paired with hope.
Find Dr. Julie Brown
Dr. Julie Brown practices in Los Alamitos, Southern California. Her website is socalbraincenter.com. If you are not in Southern California and you are looking for a functional neurologist in your area, she recommends the Carrick Institute directory (carrickinstitute.com, c-a-r-r-i-c-k) or the ACNB diplomat finder at acnb.org. She is also happy to help connect people with someone in their area if you reach out to her directly.
She is downtown Julie Brown, as she says, without the British accent. And she is one of the best referrals I can make for anyone dealing with a complex neurological picture.
Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Julie Brown on the Well Connected Podcast: Live Your Life in Alignment. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
Find Dr. Brown at socalbraincenter.com. To find a functional neurologist near you, visit carrickinstitute.com or acnb.org.
