Healing with Dr Helena

Today’s Brain Booster is: Look after your eyes to stay sharp and wise. Maintaining good eyesight, and treating vision loss, can help reduce the risk of developing dementia. Conversely, the greater a person’s vision loss, the greater their risk of dementia. Fortunately, this does NOT include long and short-sightedness. Needing reading glasses is not a dementia risk. Even with eye diseases, if you c...

Today’s Brain Booster is: Improve your mind by being kind. Being kind to YOURSELF lowers stress hormones, and lights up the brain’s reward centres to improve brain function and overall well-being.  The brain’s reward system is a network of brain structures designed to ensure our survival. When we do something beneficial — like exercising, socialising, or practising self-kindness — this network is...

Today’s Brain Booster is: Visualise to actualise your healing. Have you ever imagined something so vividly that your body responded as if it were real? You imagine your child falling off their bike, and your heart skips a beat. You picture success, and your posture lifts. You visualise biting into a lemon, and your lips pucker. Nothing has happened, but your brain activates the same neural circuit...

Today’s Brain Booster is: Calm your fear, and pain will disappear. Last week I did a deep dive into pain, and the key points were that there are two types of pain, classified by their cause: Physical pain — caused by being punched in the nose (or some other kind of injury). Neuroplastic pain — caused by an over-protective brain circuit. There’s no physical damage, no broken nose, and no pulled mus...

Today’s Brain Booster is: Retrain your brain to release chronic pain. Since starting my podcast I’ve received a lot of questions about how to manage chronic pain, including back, neck and shoulder pain, migraines, fibromyalgia and RSI (repetitive strain injury). This is not surprising because chronic pain is one of the biggest public health challenges globally. Worldwide, 1 in 5 adults live with c...

Today’s Brain Booster was prompted by a whether question from Maya: My doctor said that the shingles vaccine can reduce the risk of dementia. I’d like to know whether this is true, and if so, why? Yes — there is strong and growing real-world evidence from major epidemiological studies  showing that the shingles vaccine is linked to a significant reduction in dementia risk.  Shingles is a painful,...

Today’s Brain Booster is Elevate your expectations! Last week I spoke about how our beliefs become our biology — especially how negative ageist stereotypes actually drive how we age. Today we’re going to build on that and discover how our mind can mend our maladies . When you let go of limiting labels and assumptions about symptoms, pain and disease, you boost your brain’s ability to activate heal...

Today’s Brain Booster is Think bolder, not older — because our beliefs influence our biology. In fact, our beliefs BECOME our biology. In the Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging, people holding negative beliefs about ageing demonstrated significantly worse memory performance after 38 years than those subscribing to less negative age stereotypes — and this was after adjusting for education, depre...

Today’s Brain Booster is: Yearn to learn . In order to powerfully boost your brain through learning, look for something that fulfils the following criteria: It’s something you genuinely love doing, it keeps you intrinsically motivated, and it makes you lose track of time. It requires effort, and pushes you to learn new rules, acquire new skills, or continuously stretch your abilities. It takes you...

Last week I finished with the question: what drugs, other than antibiotics, disrupt our gut microbiota — the trillions of micro-organisms that live in our digestive tract? An obvious contender is antacids — also known as heartburn medications — which are drugs that reduce stomach acid production to treat reflux. Decades of research have established a strong link between acid suppression, gastroint...

Today’s Health Headline is: Microbes mess with our genes! (The Brain Booster will come later.) Did you know that you have a gene called ‘The Guardian Gene?’ It’s official name is TP53, and it encodes a protein called p53. The reason for its colloquial name is that this protein protects our DNA, spots damage in our cells, and stops mutations in their tracks. These processes help to shield us from c...

Last week’s Brain Booster was Go with your gut — a deep dive into all things gut health. It was another very long segment so I ended it after the Health Headline . That means if you haven’t watched or listened to last week’s episode, I strongly recommend you do so before you listen to this one because last week I explained the rationale for what I’m talking about today. When it comes to gut health...

Today’s Brain Booster is: Go with your Gut . Is your gut sensitive, irritable, leaky or inflamed?  Are you into: Prebiotics Probiotics  Postbiotics  Synbiotics  Psychobiotics  Pharmabiotics Antibiotics Penbiotics  Or Panbiotics?! (I will explain all those terms over the next few episodes.) Why does it matter?  For most of modern medicine, the brain and gut were treated as separate organs, with sep...

Today’s podcast episode was prompted by a Whether question. So I’ll give you the question first, and then I’ll answer it in the context of a Brain Booster, Health Headline, and What’s Missing from Modern Medicine?  "Can you tell me WHETHER it’s better to tackle high blood pressure with western medicine or alternative medicine? I have never smoked, do not drink alcohol, I weigh 73kg at height of 1....

Last week’s Brain Booster was Turn up the heat! — a deep dive into how using a sauna more than 4 times a week can reduce the risk of dementia by over 60%!  Given that this is a very bold claim, I spoke for longer than I’d anticipated, in order to explain the mechanisms by which heat exposure brings about health benefits.  So I decided to end the episode after the Health Headline because the feedba...

Today’s Brain Booster is: Turn up the heat!   For thousands of years, humans have deliberately exposed themselves to heat : Roman baths, Turkish hammans, Finnish saunas, indigenous sweat lodges, and Japanese onsen (natural hot springs).  And it turns out that sweating it out in a sauna on a regular basis: Lowers blood pressure Improves overall heart health and blood vessel function Reduces the ris...

For today’s episode, I’m sharing an interview I had with the dynamic and inspiring Sarah Rusbatch on her podcast Stronger Bolder Wiser. Sarah is an accredited Grey Area Drinking Coach and the author of the best-selling book Beyond Booze — How to create a life you love, alcohol-free. Sarah and I immediately clicked because her approach to alcohol is the same as my approach to healthy eating in my b...

Welcome to my podcast, ‘Healing with Dr Helena’, where I challenge the limiting way we currently view disease, and offer a new paradigm for vibrant health and true healing. If modern medicine isn’t providing you with enough answers, and you want to come alive and thrive , rather than merely survive, this podcast is for you. It’s also for people who want to boost their brain to perform at their pea...

Welcome to my podcast, ‘Healing with Dr Helena’, where I challenge the limiting way we currently view disease, and offer a new paradigm for vibrant health and true healing. If modern medicine isn’t providing you with enough answers, and you want to come alive and thrive , rather than merely survive, this podcast is for you. It’s also for people who want to boost their brain to perform at their pea...

Welcome to my podcast, ‘Healing with Dr Helena’, where I challenge the limiting way we currently view disease, and offer a new paradigm for vibrant health and true healing. If modern medicine isn’t providing you with enough answers, and you want to come alive and thrive , rather than merely survive, this podcast is for you. It’s also for people who want to boost their brain to perform at their pea...

Welcome to my podcast, ‘Healing with Dr Helena’, where I challenge the limiting way we currently view disease, and offer a new paradigm for vibrant health and true healing. If modern medicine isn’t providing you with enough answers, and you want to come alive and thrive , rather than merely survive, this podcast is for you. It’s also for people who want to boost their brain to perform at their pea...

Welcome to my podcast, ‘Healing with Dr Helena’, where I challenge the limiting way we currently view disease, and offer a new paradigm for vibrant health and true healing. If modern medicine isn’t providing you with enough answers, and you want to come alive and thrive , rather than merely survive, this podcast is for you. Here’s a glimpse of episode 6.  * * * * * Today’s Brain Booster is: Skip t...

Welcome to my podcast, ‘Healing with Dr Helena’, where I challenge the limiting way we currently view disease, and offer a new paradigm for vibrant health and true healing. If modern medicine isn’t providing you with enough answers, and you want to come alive and thrive , rather than merely survive, this podcast is for you. It’s also for people who want to boost their brain to perform at their pea...

Welcome to my podcast, ‘Healing with Dr Helena’, where I challenge the limiting way we currently view disease, and offer a new paradigm for vibrant health and true healing. If modern medicine isn’t providing you with enough answers, and you want to come alive and thrive , rather than merely survive, this podcast is for you. It’s also for people who want to boost their brain to perform at their pea...

Welcome to my podcast, ‘Healing with Dr Helena’, where I challenge the limiting way we currently view disease, and offer a new paradigm for vibrant health and true healing. If modern medicine isn’t providing you with enough answers, and you want to come alive and thrive , rather than merely survive, this podcast is for you. It’s also for people who want to boost their brain to perform at their pea...