Kelly Miller, NMD is the Author of Saving Your Brain and 7 other health books, Speaker, Brain Health Coach, and Founder of Saving Your Brain Training Centers in Florida and Kansas City. Dr. Miller is certified in the Melillo Method and is well-known for brain training and balancing the brain to address neurodevelopmental issues and diseases. Miller’s clinical practice covers over forty three years, treating over fifteen thousand patients. Miller is an international lecturer on the genetic, nutritional, and hormonal considerations related to heart health.
Kelly Miller, Brain Health Coach, Naturopathic Doctor
Please tell us about your life so we can get to know you better.
I was born in Denver, Colorado, on December 10, 1955. My father was career army, enlisting at age 17, from 1929 to 1959 and my mother was a schoolteacher. When my father decided to go to college after retirement, he finished his Bachelor’s degree in 2 1/2 years. He taught history at middle school after that. I had two siblings- my brother Bruce Miller, who has a Masters in Mathematics and taught in middle school, and my sister George Ann Gregory, who has a PhD in teaching English as a second language. She has multiple books on Amazon. She was also the editor for my books.
In 1959 we moved to Fort Smith Arkansas. I was 4 then and my brother was 11 and he had lived in 14 different cities by the time we moved to Fort Smith. My brother and sister lived in Panama and Puerto Rico during their lives before I was born.
Growing up basketball was my passion. I had shoulder length hair in high school and the basketball coach didn’t allow that, so I did not play. I walked on my freshman year at College of the Ozarks in Clarksville Arkansas and made the team but left to transfer to University of Arkansas, Fort smith. Later I played basketball at Logan University of Health Sciences in Chesterfield, Missouri while in graduate school. In 1974 I discovered rugby and that became my new passion and hobby for the next 20 years retiring in 1994 at age 39. It was a wonderful ride. Many of my lifetime friends came through rugby.
I attended graduate school at the University of Arkansas, Fort Smith and University of Arkansas, Fayetteville after leaving College of the Ozarks. During Christmas 1976, I ran into an old friend in Fort Smith and he told me he was going to go to Chiropractic school in January. I was intrigued and immediately applied, and I was able to join the January class because school had been delayed for two weeks due to snowstorms throughout the MIdwest.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
In a few days I knew I had found my calling and now had two passions in my life – Chiropractic and Rugby. I started playing rugby in Arkansas, but when I moved to St. Louis for graduate school, I joined the St. Louis Ramblers, the second oldest rugby club in the United States. I loved my time there and was fortunate to be their captain from 1978 to 1981. In 1982 I moved to Kansas City and played for the Kansas City Blues for the rest of my career till 1994. In 1978. I was selected to the Western United States Rugby team, one of 4 territorial teams in the United States and was selected from 1978 through 1982. I went to the Territorial Trials in Chicago for selection for the United States team during those years and was fortunate enough to be selected to play for the Western United States against many touring sides, such as London Welsh and played against England’s National side in Dallas, Texas in 1981.
I married in 1983 and soon had two beautiful daughters, Lauren in 1984 and Abby in 1986. Today Lauen lives in Greenville, South Carolina and has a daughter, Parker, age 4,. Abby has two children – Monroe age 7, and Milo age 5, and now lives in Bradenton, Florida near me.
Can you share insights on how your training in functional diagnostic medicine has enhanced the effectiveness of your patient care?
Furthering my education was always a part of my DNA. I became Certified in Industrial/Occupational Health in 1991 through Northwestern University of Health Sciences in Minneapolis Minnesota. I became certified in acupuncture in 1996. In 2001, there was an opportunity to become Certified as a Naturopathic Medical Doctor by submitting all the continuing education I had accumulated since 1980. In 2013 and 2014, I matriculated a Fellowship in Aging Regenerative Medicine through the Brazil American Academy for Ant-Aging and gave my dissertation on Heart Health in San Paulo, Brazil at Sao Paulo University in 2014. I acquired a Certification in Functional Medicine from Functional Medicine University that same year. During this time, I decided to sell my Kansas City practice and begin a new chapter in my life in Florida. My last day in Kansas City was October 13, 2013.
Early in my career, I discovered that I always wanted to be different than the majority of practitioners. Nutrition has always been a part of my practice since day one – the use of whole food diet modification, raw food juicing, and whole foods supplements were part of my patients' treatment plans. I did a unique non-forceful sensory updating technique called Bio-Energetic Synchronization Technique, B.E.S.T.. Later I learned Sacro-Occipital Technique, S.O.T., and Acupuncture to my arsenal. I discovered the more I stacked modalities, acupuncture, diet, stress-coping skills, and acupuncture, the better results I got and the more chronic and unusual cases I attracted.
The stacking of therapies culminated in a multidisciplinary office where Chiropractic, Acupuncture, Physical Therapy, Medicine, and Podiatry were all under one roof. At this time, we had 22 different staff and serviced 60 to 80 new patients every month. We had all state-of-the-art technologies to deal with severe and chronic spinal problems and peripheral neuropathy. We had three acute spinal decompression units, six synaptic electrotherapy units, infrared light therapy, red light therapy, cold laser therapy, Videonystagmography, and VNG for assessments for balance, vestibular, and dizziness complaints.
In 2012, I decided I wanted to simplify my clinical life, so I decided to sell this Practice and start a new one, and I was able to do that in October 2013. After having 22 employees I decided I wanted two things in the new practice – develop a model that needed less staff and one that did not deal with insurance.
One of the observations I had when I was treating these hundreds of neuropathy patients is the vast majority of them seem to be suffering for some degree of cognitive decline. Many times, it would take the husband and wife combined to get a decent history. Many of these patients were on multiple medications, including gabapentin, blood pressure medication, and often statins. I recognize they had cognitive problems, but I did not have a solution for them yet.
In 2014 I began applying more of my knowledge of the hormone system in my practice and began using Bio-identical Hormones. We would analyze the hormones by taking saliva samples five times throughout the day. We also began using more sophisticated Functional Medicine testing for analysis of the physiology and chemistry of our patients, including micro-nutrient testing, allergy/inflammation testing, organic acids testing, and environmental testing. As we did this, we continued to attract more chronically sick individuals that standard Allopathic Medicine seemed to have no solutions for.
One of the most common findings dealing with people in a Functional Medicine practice is that most have a “leaky gut”. When we tested these patients for food sensitivity, they would always have a few foods that they reacted to that they rarely ate, but the vast majority of the foods they were reacting to seemed to be whatever they were eating the most of at the time of testing. These foods weren’t the usual offenders, such as gluten, dairy, corn, etc. These were foods that you would think were healthy – multiple fruits and vegetables. We would recommend supplementation to heal the gut and avoid positive foods, but it often seemed a short-lived fix. The questions I had was, “Why are all these people having problems with so-called healthy foods and why do all these people have “leaky guts”? Is it the foods that are causing “leaky guts” or because they have a “leaky gut”, they are reacting to everything they are eating? It was like the old adage, “What came first the chicken or the egg? “
What inspired you to write your series of health-related books, and how do they complement your practice?
2015 and 2016 were very productive years. I’d always wanted to write a book on the hormone system, and I decided to write one. This was called 13 Secrets to Optimal Aging and is available on Amazon. After the first book, I wrote five others. Although I was being very productive, I was aware that I seemed to be having increasing memory problems. This was especially true for new information. But I was also having trouble recalling details from the past. I would look at a photograph of a place I had visited in France while on vacation, and could not recall the name of the town. I was also having difficulty remembering technical information, like in chemistry, what “cis” versus “trans” meant. This was information I had been using for over 30 years.
Soon after I finish my first book I met Dr. David Brownstein, the guru of the thyroid and author of multiple best-selling books at a medical conference and asked him to read my book and he was kind enough to do so and write the forward for me. He is a true gentleman. After I wrote my first book I decided why stop there, so I continued writing 6 more. Some of my books have not yet been published. They are still in long hand. Writing the books was an exercise of putting my cumulative knowledge into a written format.
All my books were written from the perspective of my observations of the 15 000 patients I saw in that 35-year period. I would write what I felt was true in long hand. I would then scour Google Scholar and PubMed to find supporting evidence on my observations. Even when I was writing and looking up references. I had this feeling that there was something not quite right with my memory. With self-preservation as my motive, I started researching things that affected your memory, things that affected brain function, things that affected your brain as we age. After three years of research, this became my next book, Saving Your Brain: Causes, Prevention, and Reversal of Dementia/Alzheimer’s.
In my search, I was looking for things that could affect my memory. There was no family history of dementia or Alzheimer’s. I did not have the ApoE4 gene which half of Alzheimer’s patients have. I did heavy metal testing on myself, I had high levels of Mercury, Cadmium, and Lead. All of these can have adverse effects on the brain. I can remember playing with liquid mercury as a kid in school. I used to paint houses in the summer during college and could’ have accumulated lead from the paint I got on my body. Growing up I lived near a smelter so I could have gotten the Cadmium through in inhalation. I started a slow chelation protocol on myself over the next 2 years to reduce the heavy metals in my body.
What else could cause problems with my brain? My teenage years were in the late 60s and early 70s and I was extremely experimental during these times. “If one of something was average then three should be even better” was my mentality then. Fortunately, I never fell off the cliff. I drank too much alcohol in college and in early adulthood. I was in a car crash where I was not in a seatbelt and cracked the windshield with my head and was knocked unconscious. Finally, I played 20 years of rugby and was involved in about 10,000 tackles, either in the delivery or receiving side. I suffered several mile concussions, including one in the game we upset the London Welsh in Dallas in 1978. I can remember I had to change my tackling style from chest level to below the waist because I was getting dazed after every tackle otherwise.
I had quite a list of potential contributing factors that could cause brain dysfunction. The question was, “What to do about it?” That is really what my Saving Your Brain book is about is what we can do to make our brains healthier, keep our brains healthy, and things that can help us repair an injury from trauma or environmental stress to our brains. I chose only natural ways to address repairing the brain because (1) I am a natural healthcare provider and (2) there was absolutely no research that supported that any drug therapies help dementia or Alzheimer’s.
After three years of what I felt had been exhaustive research, I published my book Saving Your Brain: Causes, Prevention, and Reversal of Dementia/Alzheimer’s. This book was released in August, 2018. My book came out about two weeks after the popular book, The End of Alzheimer’s by Dr. Dale Bredson, MD, Alzheimer’s researcher, was released. His conclusions were the same as mine were. There is no single drug or group of drugs that will arrest reverse Alzheimer’s and that causes for this disease or multiple and cumulative.
Just when you think you know everything there is to know about something you get a reality check. Mine came within six weeks after I published the Saving Your Brain book when I was attending an A4M Academy for Anti-Aging conference in Florida. I visited a booth and there was a medical clairvoyant there. He told me I had a Mold/Mycotoxins infection in my sinuses. He told me how to test for it and how to remediate it. The whole time he was talking to him I was thinking to myself “this guy is so full of sh_t! “The next day at the conference one of the speakers was Jill Carnahan, MD and guess what her topic was about – Mold/Mycotoxins. Every thing the clairvoyant had said to me was repeated by Dr. Carnahan regarding the prevalence, danger, testing, and remediation. This time I listened. I tested myself, and sure enough, it was there. It was amazing to me that in all my research on environmental causes for dementia/ Alzheimer’s that I had not run across the Mold/Mycotoxin connection. There is a saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know!” How true this was in this instance.
This inspired me to study the brain more. I initially took several classes at Carrick Institute and then began studying Dr. Robert Melillo’s work, I have become Melillo Method Certified and am now eligible for The Fellowship in Neurodevelopmental Brain.
Since that time, I have found that about 75% percent of my patients who come to me for chronic brain conditions have mold/mycotoxin infections. I have found this in every early-onset Alzheimer’s patient. Early onset is considered before the age of 65. I have found it in 90% of autistic spectrum individuals, and I also have found it prevalent in ADHD-diagnosed individuals. In particular, Ochratoxin, which comes from water damaged buildings, inhibits the production of dopamine. Dopamine is in a deficit in ADHD individuals. Dopamine is necessary for initiative and sustained focus and attention. Many of the stimulant medications prescribed for ADHD individuals stimulate dopamine. However, this is only one aspect of ADHD. There are many others, including retained primitive reflexes, right hemispheric networking weaknesses, and multiple sensory immature brain development.
You see, one in four people have a genetic predisposition to not being able to mount a proper immune response to Mold/Mycotoxins. That is why it is so prevalent. Unfortunately, 99% of healthcare providers are oblivious to assessing this in people with brain problems. I find it shocking!
In fact, after seeing hundreds of people of all ages – 2 to 95, suffering from academic, behaviorial, psychological or mental health challenges, not only do many have mold/mycotoxins and other environmental body burdens, 100% of them have retained primitive reflexes or re-emerging primitive reflexes and hemispheric imbalance.
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
The $64 million question is, “What are primitive reflexes, and what is their significance?” The presence of primitive reflexes is, in my opinion, the most significant neurological finding in a person and has a profound impact on their academic performance, behaviors, psychological profile, mental health status, physiology, and chemistry. Let me explain further. In fact, this is going to answer the question, “Why do so many people have “leaky guts”?, the question that baffled me for years.
Primitive reflexes develop in utero and are used to facilitate the birthing process and movement in early life. Some of these reflexes are the rooting reflex used to find the mothers breast for milk, and the Palmer reflex, the grasping mechanism that occurs when you put your finger in a baby’s palm. There are about 10 main primitive reflexes. In normal neurodevelopment, these reflexes should be integrated by about 12 months. This means they should go away by 12 months. However, if they do not, it indicates that there was a lack of normal neurodevelopmental in the brainstem. The brainstem is where the primitive reflexes integrate. The presence of primitive reflexes cause multiple issues in an individual. The first is that retained primitive reflexes are associated with “hardwired “ negative neurobehaviors that do not respond fully to behavior modification methods. The second is that the brainstem is to the brain as a foundation is to a house. If your brainstem is immature, it is like an unlevel foundation for your house. What happens if your foundation is off? Your floors are sloped and crack. Your walls and ceilings crack. Similarly, if the brainstem is immature, the three primary sensory systems – the balance/postural system, the vestibular system (where am I in space at any given time?), and the oculomotor system (eye tracking and fixation functions) are often immature as well. One or all three systems will be immature and this will adversely affect neurodevelopment of the brain. The immature brainstem will cause an asymmetrical brain growth in one of the hemispheres. You see we are all born right brain dominant, and about age 3 there is a shift to the left brain development. This is when the hippocampus develops and we start recording audio and visual memories. However, this shift can come too early and cause a right hemispheric weakness or too late, causing a left hemispheric weakness. A right brain delay can be associated with conditions like ADHD, OCD, ODD, or autism spectrum in early life, and in severe cases schizophrenia later in life. Anxiety is a very common concomitant symptom with ADHD. The left brain delay is associated with dyslexia or dyscalculia early on in life or, if it becomes severe later in life – bipolar symptoms.
The last significant problem created by having primitive reflexes and an immature brain is that the Vagas nerve, which controls the parasympathetic nervous system, or the “rest and digest”, “healing”, “down-regulating” part of our autonomic nervous system is under functioning. That means the counterpart, the sympathetic or “fight /flight part of our autonomic nervous system, is hyperfunctioning. The vagus nerve goes to every organ in the body. It also goes to the right basal ganglion and is involved in the indirect loop to our right brain. This is the part of our brain that controls the “Should I say or Do that?” and helps us filter out audio and visual input and stay focused on what we need to be focused on.
The vagus nerve function is necessary for us to secrete adequate hydrochloric acid, pancreatic enzymes, and bile from the gallbladder to properly digest our protein and fat. Carbohydrate digestion starts with saliva in our mouth. Excess sympathetic influence, “fight/flight”, and lack of parasympathetic influence via poor vagal tone causes a dry mouth. A dry mouth can cause indigestion of carbohydrates. The Vagas nerve and parasympathetic nervous system influence the circulation to the gut and reduce gut permeability. So you see, if you have primitive reflexes, you have an underdeveloped brainstem, you have an underdeveloped vagal and parasympathetic system, and you have an excess of sympathetic influence. Therefore, you will not secret adequate hydrochloric acid, pancreatic enzymes, and bile to digest your protein and fats, and you will have an increased gut permeability. This is the reason for the “leaky gut”. There is an autonomic dysfunction associated with the lack of vagal tone and parasympathetic influence. Therefore, whatever you are eating is not digesting properly, and you have a leaky gut. undigested proteins and fats are getting through it, and our body is attacking these like we would a foreign invader.
When I got this concept, it was one of the biggest “ah ha” moments in my life because it helped explain so much about the chronic inflammation and allergies so many people have. A patient may benefit temporarily from supplementing hydrochloride, pancreatic enzymes, ox bile for digestion, and supplements like L-glutamine or colostrum to help heal the leaky gut. However, it will only be a temporary fix, unless the vagal tone is improved. The primitive reflexes have to be integrated which will improve vagal tone which will improve the parasympathetic influence of the autonomic nervous system, the “rest and digest” system.
Once the primitive reflexes are integrated, the brain stem is matured, and the sensory systems – balance/postural, vestibular, and oculomotor systems mature and function better. The hemispheric imbalance can be addressed by doing specific sensory/motor activities while co-activating sensory inputs like vibration, electrical stimulation, smells, and sounds on the weaker cerebellum side. The simultaneous activation of the primitive reflexes, coupled with the co-activation of the sensory systems to the weaker cerebellum side, has proven to be successful in all kinds of academic, behavioral, psychological, and mental health issues. It has also been successful in helping auto-immune cases and many other chronic inflammatory conditions.
The significance that primitive reflexes adversely affect our autonomic nervous system, physiology, and chemistry cannot be undervalued. It is something that should be taught and emphasized to all healthcare providers. It is amazing to me that pediatricians do not routinely check for their presence in neurodevelopmentally delayed children after the age of 1, and it is incomprehensible. I have spoken to three different presidents of Chiropractic universities and pounded the table that testing for primitive reflexes should be part of the core curriculum at an early stage for all chiropractors. Hopefully, this will change in the near future.
Neurodevelopmental problems are on the rise in the adolescent and adult populations. ADHD is now 11%, dyslexia is at 10-15%, and Autism Spectrum is up to 2.5% in children. Conservatively, that is 1 in 5 children today have developmental challenges, more boys than girls. In the adult population, 1 in 3 college students have an anxiety diagnosis. Alzheimer’s is now the 5th leading cause of death, and Parkinson’s is the fastest growing neurodegenerative condition for the aging population. It is time we start saving our brains.
Contact here and get a free PDF copy of Saving Your Brain: Causes, Prevention, and Reversal of Dementia/Alzheimer’s. The website also contains a telehealth link to connect with the doctor.
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