Unravel Illnesses: Rewire To Recover With Dan Neuffer

Felicity Cohen: Hello, I’m Felicity Cohen. I’m so excited to introduce you to my Wellness Warriors podcast. For over 20 years, I’ve been a passionate advocate for helping thousands of Australians find solutions to treating obesity and health-related complications. Through surgical intervention and holistic managed care.

My podcast is dedicated to all the people past, present, and future who have helped shape my journey and continue to inspire me to work consistently to achieve a healthier Australia in both adults and future generations. I hope you enjoy.

Welcome to the Wellness Warriors podcast today. It’s my absolute pleasure to introduce Dan to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today, Dan.

Dan Neuffer: Thank you very much for having me on your wonderful podcast.

Felicity Cohen: My pleasure. We’ve got an exciting story to share. Your whole journey is quite fascinating. You were born, first of all, in Australia and moved to Germany. Tell me a little bit about how much time you’ve spent, where and your origins first of all.

Dan Neuffer: Yeah. Well, I’m actually was born in Australia, so I’m an Aussie. But I sound a little bit German because I grew up in Germany and I came over here. So English is actually my second language.

Felicity Cohen: Fantastic. So you were working in your professional life, started out as a physicist. What took you into that area of professional career space and what was it that drove you to that area originally?

Dan Neuffer: I guess I was good at crunching numbers. In high school, I liked maths. I liked physics. I liked the sciences. My favorite show was Beyond 2000, if you remember that one. I was always very interested in lasers and things like that. So I studied lasers and optoelectronics at university. And then I worked in that field for some time.

It’s very narrow in Australia. There’s a limited sort of number of jobs available. I ended up, some years later, going into the financial services industry as a number of cruncher, so to say. Then I became a risk specialist and then suddenly I moved into what I do now, which was unexpected, I suppose.

Felicity Cohen: So you were struck down literally with a whole plethora of a disease profile that included, Myalgic and Stefano, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, Fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, et cetera, this whole group of diseases. And from what I understand, there was potentially an incident or a trigger that involved post a vaccination of some description or an immunisation. Is that correct?

Dan Neuffer: That is correct. I mean two things, first of all, correlation does not equal causation. That’s the first thing I would say. The second thing is, I’m not saying that the vaccine didn’t have an impact. But it wasn’t the sole cause. So because otherwise everyone who have had the vaccination that I had would have an issue and that’s clearly not the case.

So it was a contributing factor. And I guess the way I describe it maybe the final nudge that pushed me over into this dysfunction that is this illness.

Felicity Cohen: So, what are some of the contributing factors that can lead to this group of conditions that you were dealing with?

Dan Neuffer: Well, they’re very varied and I think that’s part of the reason why the medical fraternity has kind of struggled with this illness.

Because one person will get it after a car accident. Another person will get it after like a vaccination. Now the person will get it after they’ve had a virus or after childbirth or after a psychological stress like a divorce or something like this. And so it’s been very difficult for the medical community to come together and agree on what is causing the illness, what is the pathogenesis of the illness. However, the fact that we have such a large variety of triggers of the illness is really the biggest clue as to what I believe causes the illness.

Felicity Cohen: It is really interesting because I think there’s a lack of understanding overall, regarding for example, with fibromyalgia. I often hear people say to me, or there are doctors who are uncertain with regards to diagnosis and that there are people who still brand or label this as a some kind of a psychosomatic type of disease profile. And that there’s a question mark over the validity of this disease and what it looks like. Can you talk me through why there’s so much uncertainty regarding the diagnosis in the first place?

Dan Neuffer: The problem is these illnesses are often called an invisible illness. If I tell you I’m busy, how can you measure that? If I tell you I’m fatigued, how can you measure it? That if I tell you I’ve got pain, how can you measure that? So the doctor has to basically go off what the patient says.

Normally if you say I’ve got heart disease. Doctor will say, well I’ll let me look at your heart. You can do all kinds of tests. If you’ve got cancer, you can do tests. But if you have a disease that has symptoms that cannot easily be verified through medical tests, that makes it difficult.

That’s the first step. The second step is that the patient community and the patient’s disease experience is heterogeneous. And so we have a big variety of symptoms. So in fact, if you look at postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, and fibromyalgia, and I say MECAs, but even some people will differentiate those two. Doctors are even saying that’s one illness. It’s often considered different illnesses. Some doctors say it’s the same illness, but many doctors will say there are different illnesses. And other illnesses like irritable bowel syndrome, in my view also lay along the same spectrum. It’s the same, same illness, but you know, how confusing is it?

One person stands up and gets the cardiac attack. One person says, they’ve got pain. One person says fatigue. And one person says they got issues with. How can this be the same illness? It’s very confusing. And the problem is that in medicine, we tend to look at the symptoms. You don’t do that in an engineering on physics.

You don’t look at the results. You look at the reason for them. And so it’s maybe that was an advantage for me because I was looking at what could be causing all these symptoms as opposed to looking at the symptoms.

Felicity Cohen: So you would classify all of these under one umbrella and they’re all part of a group of one disease really in essence?

Dan Neuffer: Absolutely. Absolutely. And that’s why you see people have multiple diseases, right? They’ll say, oh, I’ve got hypothyroidism and then I had hedonic bowel syndrome. Then I’ve got chronic fatigue syndrome. How unlucky am I? And then I started getting POTS. And then I started getting fibromyalgia. I’m the unluckiest person on earth.

You’d have to be really unlucky to have so many different illnesses, you know, and the list goes on and on. And the answer is that they’re not that unlucky because they’ve got one illness, just lots of different symptoms.

Felicity Cohen: So you’re more, you went on a journey of six and a half to seven years of dealing with being pretty critically unwell and sometimes bedridden. Can you talk me through what that six and a half to seven, I can’t even imagine that is a, to me that sounds like a whole lifetime. How did you deal with that? What did that look like? And how on earth, did you actually cope to survive those? That’s such a long period of illness.

Dan Neuffer: Well, it’s funny. I always thought it was long. And now I speak regularly to people who are sick 20, 30, and 40 years. And I kind of go, yeah, how are they doing that? Cause I gotta be honest. You say, how did I cope? How did I do it? My answer is not very well. Not very well.

I didn’t, I did not deal with it very well. I found it extremely difficult. It was very scary. And it was very confusing. You go to so many doctors. Some doctors just try their best to try and find out everything. I had such lovely doctors to try to help me and they just couldn’t find anything or they’d find something and it ended up sort of being a dead end

And then you find other doctors who almost seem to roll their eyes at you. And then you told the alternative healthcare practitioners and you have similar experiences. You keep trying things and it never goes anywhere. It never goes anywhere. You have periods of being quite ill. You know, like if you’ve got a flu kind of thing, and then you’ve got periods where you’re better and you can almost kind of function and then my baseline sort of seemed to go down over the years.

Yeah. And even then, when you were feeling well, you were still kind of horrible, you know. And then I had the, I guess the last period, about five years in where I suddenly became severely ill. Where I was bed bound. And that was quite a disturbing time of my life. I wasn’t bed bound that long, but it was extremely severe.

Felicity Cohen: I can’t even, and that must have been horrifically frightening for you because you kind of question, am I ever going to recover when you’re faced with feeling that in that kind of situation being bedbound and the chronic fatigue, obviously it’d hit you to the point where you must have had very little energy.

Dan Neuffer: Well, to put it in perspective. Well, I mean, first of all, I would say, well, in my mind, I was not going to recover. I mean, obviously if I’ve been told the doctors and everyone says, we don’t know causes, we don’t know what’s wrong with you, your trial on the treatments that we could think of, nothing works. Sooner or later, you have to accept the reality that you’re just not going to get better.

That’s at least how I thought of it. So my aim was simply to live with it as best as best as I could. And then I became bed bound. And normally when you have these severe flare ups, what I would do is, you know, you struggle even with stimulation, like sounds or people talking to you or lights. There’s a lot in your logical components of the disease, because what I’m saying, that’s what disease is.

And then you kind of want to just hide away from the world. And, but I was so ill. I was lying there. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t communicate really. I couldn’t move my arms. And I remember lying there, feeling my heart like laboring. And I was like, it was the first time that I ever didn’t want to be alone. So it was a pretty scary time.

I was like that for, I don’t know how long. It’s a long time ago now, but I think it would’ve been about a month where it was that severe and I was probably more or less in bed for about three months. And I crawled out for the first time on Christmas. Often tell this story, I crawled out for Christmas.

I had two young kids, two and six, you know, it’s a Christmas at its best. And of course I couldn’t help with anything like the food or anything like that. I was just sitting on the sofa, but I couldn’t even join them at the table for dinner. And, you know, when it came to unwrapping the presence and the big moment for the kids, they were excited, I couldn’t fake a smile.

I think anyone who’s a parent would understand that you can always fake a smile. It’s Christmas and the kids are unwrapping the present. But I was so low in energy. I just couldn’t do anything. And I thought at that moment, no, this is not something I can just live with.

Felicity Cohen: Yeah. So you actually made a conscious decision to then seek out a pathway for recovery.

And that was something that you worked at, you were committed, you were determined, and that was something that you actually sought out yourself.

Dan Neuffer: Yeah, I’ll look, I mean, I’ll be honest. It felt like a little bit of a delusion of grandeur, right? I mean, I don’t have any background in medicine. And I said to my wife, because I didn’t want to try any more treatments because I already tried that, you know, you go through these waves of trying everything and then you get exhausted emotionally, mentally, and to disappointment, and then you just stop again and then you try again.

But I was done with that and I was like, I don’t want to try treating symptoms or these stories of what could be causing. And I said, there must be a root cause for this. And I said to her, I’m going to find what that is. I’ve seen that movie and Lorenzo’s Oil. I don’t know if you’ve seen that with McNulty where the two parents to have a braille son and they seek to find the cure for their son.

I was kind of inspired by that and I told my wife and I don’t know, like I said, it seemed kind of silly, given the fact that I don’t have a medical background, but she looked at me and she goes, yes Dan, I think you will. And I remember that moment going, what have I done? And then I started my research from there.

Felicity Cohen: So what did you find and how did you actually get to that point in time where you felt that you were well again and obviously functioning as you hoped to?

Dan Neuffer: Well, I guess the first thing is I started to look at all the things we know, like you mentioned, you know, there’s all these different triggers and I’m like, how can you have so many different triggers for one illness?

At the time I hadn’t necessarily bundled all of these things together in my mind, just because that was my experience of having these different components of the illness. But then I looked at the disfunctions. Like, you know, people have adrenal insufficiency and people have cellular metabolism problem, and people have, you know, the list is endless of all these hypothyroidism, people have gut issues and like what’s causing that?

And rather than looking at treating, and I was like, well, why is that happening? And then why is that happening? And what I found is that whenever, no matter what part of the illness of symptoms I pursued, at the end, I seem to get to the same point. And so I started to say, well, this must be the root cause of the illness, because when you dig deep enough, that’s where you get to. I’d look at like treatments that we know have some impact like magnesium. I started taking magnesium. I remember I was like a, like a 80, 90 year old man, you know, I couldn’t even stand up, I was so stiff. I couldn’t stand up in the morning. And I started really megadosing magnesium because there was plenty of evidence that this can be helpful for many people. And sure enough, you know, I found myself standing up in the mornings and I could stand up straight.

And the strange thing was because we’re so used to acting like a, you know, stiff hunchback. I’m like, why am I doing this? I can walk normally now, you know, but then I’m like, why would I be low in magnesium? How has magnesium used? What determines how much magnesium you have, right? Are we losing the magnesium too fast.

Are we not getting it? What’s the story? You know, because other people got to supplement, and they’re fine. And the common theme was basically the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system is what controls your heart. So for parts, it is recognized by doctorsthat POTS is dysautonomia, a dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system.

However for CFS and fibromyalgia, that’s not necessarily recognized even though the medical scientific evidence is really building for this. But I looked at it and whether it was your hormonal expressions or whatever it was, it always came back to the autonomic nervous system. And I thought, okay, this is where the problem must resigned.

Felicity Cohen: Where do we get our magnesium from in our normal day-to-day dietary intake? Where do we find magnesium?

Dan Neuffer: Well, magnesium is found in a range of foods. There was an interesting thing found this when you look at the molecule for chlorophyll and you look at the molecule for hemoglobin, I think it is, they actually are this huge, big molecules, and they look identical.

The only difference is that the hemoglobin has the ferritin in its center, an iron. And the chlorophyll has the magnesium. So that was a kind of an interesting experienced, but basically you get it from a range of food. But it wasn’t really about, I was eating the same food as everyone else.

So I wasn’t really pursuing, what am I eating here? And it was really a case of having to supplement to make a difference. And many people treat their symptoms, Felicity, and, you know, like with changing their diet, eating nutritious food, like you were suggesting, and other treatments, but it doesn’t return them to wellness because they have to address the root cause, which is this brain, this function.

Felicity Cohen: Yeah, I totally understand, you know, magnesium is so important for us, but what makes me wonder is that, you know, we’re supplementing a lot and not just with magnesium, but you know, we, things like zinc and selenium. And so often we hear that our soil is so depleted that, you know, you’ve got to make sure that it’s the right opportunity. So Brazil nuts have to come from Brazil so that we get the right amount of selenium in our diets. And it does concern me that maybe certain areas of farming that have changed over decades that are preventing us from getting all of these elements that we need on a daily basis and meeting those RDI of all of those things that we need.

Dan Neuffer: It’s a really, really good point you make, you know, because I was speaking to a doctor some years ago and who was a specialist in orthomolecular medicine and he looked at zinc in particular and the role in health. And the normal ranges that we see now compared to the ranges to 50 years ago are very different.

So you can be not deficient on paper because you’re in the range of what’s normal, but the normal is not in a good place necessarily. And yeah there must certainly be big changes too, in nutrition. And supplementing helps, of course. You know, you could understand that many supplements are not so bioavailable as natural foods.

Even if you look at magnesium, there’s so many different types of magnesium and as opposed to, point in case, I mean if you take magnesium oxide. And you want to take a large amounts, then you’re going to get very familiar with the toilet because most of it’s going to go through you right?

You take another form of magnesium. It’s much easier for your body to absorb, but the question is still, you know, why is it low compared to the next person?

Felicity Cohen: So what was some of the other avenues, pathways and mechanisms for recovery? What did you find?

Dan Neuffer: Well, once this gave me a focus. I was like, okay. I was like, there’s all these dysfunctions, I can start treating those. And I started to work with integrative doctor, started to look at healing my gut. I started to change my diet started all these types of supplementing for cellular metabolism because we know we’ve got, I don’t want to say necessarily mitochondrial dysfunction, but let’s say non-efficient cellular metabolism. There’s a lot of lactate in the body and even in the brain that would be suggested. It’s suggested from research and that all spells to that the energy metabolism is working, which is why people often feel fatigued and the pain. But then ultimately I was like, okay, well, could it be, if the brain is dysfunctioned.

So I’m saying it’s the autonomic nervous system and the autonomic nervous system regulates how you respond to a stressor. So in the morning, you know, it wakes you up, gets you going, right. And then at night it calms you down so you can get to sleep, right. And all of course, none of this works, people can’t get up in the morning and at night they can’t sleep.

So there’s another clue. So my focus was then on saying, okay, I’ll treat the symptoms. I’ve done that before with mediocre success, but I’ll do it anyway. But then I was like, okay, I’m going to treat the brain. And I noticed that there was very strange behaviors that I was engaging in.

One of the things that really helped me sort of make this connection to the brain was I remember brushing my little daughter’s teeth, you know, and as I’m brushing it, I noticed that I was tensed. So it was like I was diffusing a nuclear bomb and I was holding my breath and all of this.

And once I caught onto this, I’m like, what a strange thing to do? Like why would I be doing this? This is such a bizarre thing to do, you know? And I was like, oh, well, don’t do that. And then I find myself doing that all over the place. And all of this led to me going, there’s something wrong with my brain. It was also, of course the smells, you know, I had smells like a bloodhound. You know, my dog, when we opened a chicken, you know, she comes running from the next room. My puppy dog, right. She can smell the chicken immediately in the house. You know what I was not far behind. It was very odd. Yeah. Visual stimulation, all of these kinds of things. And this is very common.

People will recognize this when they have these elements. So I said, okay, well, how can I possibly change the brain? And so I started by developing a range of techniques to change how I responded to stimulus. And I noticed also that I had this crazy blood sugar business, right. Which also can go into that whole cellular metabolism, you know, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome.

Although I think it’s variable, how bad does this with people in this, in this illness? So I started to look at my diet and I noticed that I was also very reactive. You know, a normal person, the blood sugar dips, and the body puts out the appropriate hormones and it responds. It’s not a problem.

Yeah. You can not eat for many hours. But when I didn’t eat, like I crashed, like, and it could, the next day I could be in bed. And so it was like, okay, well, how can I possibly tell my brain not to react to my blood sugar? How do you do that? I don’t even know what’s happening, but what I found is that when I was able to retrain my brain to react to other stimulus, whether it be light, sound or behaviors or even psychological stressors, it appeared that it was translating to two other uncontrolled stimulus, whether it’d be my gut or whether it be my blood sugar.

And one other brain training thing that we’re focused a lot on was mindfulness meditation. And it was very peculiar to me how impossibly difficult this was. I’m like, what is wrong with me? Seriously? Like, you know, you’re supposed to just concentrate. And, you know, we have a lot of cognitive problems with this illness.

Like, I mean, I remember once being in a meeting and someone asked me, you know, what’s the name? Oh, what are your kids’ names? You have two kids. And I didn’t know. I mean, imagine that, how can you make an excuse for not knowing the name of your own children? I mean, can you cannot imagine if that panicked goes on in that moment because you’re liked, there’s no excuses you can make, you know what I mean, you can’t not know my kids.

So a lot of these cognitive problems. But I went to start meditating and I literally couldn’t hold my concentration for one second. I tried to just count my steps, concentrate just on my steps as I walk through the house. And say, well, how many steps can I take? And just count my steps and focus my concentration on that without wondering or whatever.

And I couldn’t get to like two steps, and i’m like, this is not normal, right?

Felicity Cohen: Wow. So in essence, your process or your pathway to recovery and to managing and moving forward was a lot of brain training.

Dan Neuffer: It was a lot of brain training and I think some of these things are sometimes a little bit misunderstood, Felicity. So, many people will look at that and say, some people take brain training as being like a psychological approach.

But if you look at, for instance, a person who’s had a stroke and they have to learn to walk, walk, and after effect neuroplasticity, I mean, you wouldn’t turn that psychological approach. Right. Many people use mind-body approaches who also have come to recognize that ANS dysfunctional central. They will often use purely a psychological approach.

However, you have to understand your brain responds the same way to psychological stressors as it does to physiological stressors. So to me, it didn’t make sense to say, oh, I’m going to work on the psychological side when all this crazy stuff in my body was going on, that was making my brain freak out. Yeah.

And again, this explains why people get the illness in so many different ways and, Felicity, why people recover in so many different ways. So we don’t have a single magic cure for this illness. And you’ll hear stories where people did X, Y, and Z, and then recovered. And you’re like, if that was really the cure, then we’d all know about it, right? Cause you, you try X, Y, and Z, and it doesn’t work for you. And you’re like, well, they must have had a different illness. Yes. Now they haven’t have different illness, but what they’ve had is different predominant triggers. And so it’s about resolving those particular triggers, those triggers. So if one person, for instance, has uncontrolled type two diabetes, Then part of their recovery is likely to be getting it up managed more effectively.

Another person might have post-traumatic stress disorder. And so they will have to resolve that. Yeah. Another person might have infections now, candida or viral infections, so that’ll be part of it. Yeah. So there seems to be two camps in this world, Felicity. There’s the one camp who wants to treat every physical disfunction and fix it, which most of us try for many years until we finally give up. And then there’s the other camp, it’s just do all this psychological stuff or mental stuff. And you know, both groups have some success, but it’s my view that the best approach is of course, to do both.

Felicity Cohen: So the program that you’ve written that sounds like it’s been incredibly effective today. I’ve seen some of the testimonials that are phenomenal. And as you mentioned, some people who’ve been suffering for 20 and 30 years, have seen incredible relief by getting involved and utilizing your program and working with you through that program. How are you training people to get through this kind of condition? What does it look like to do that?

Dan Neuffer: That’s such a good question. And I think that really shows your background because it’s not, in life, about having the answers, is it? Right? I mean, if we look at, you know, obesity, for instance, it’s not about having the answers to obesity, right? Because most people know what the answer to obesity is.

It’s about being able to utilise the strategies. It’s about being able to do it. And obviously that’s not so easy. Right. And when you are physically, mentally, cognitively diminished and there are, say, emotionally, and perhaps spiritually diminished, how do you do anything? So one of the key things about the program is that people can do it from their own home and that they get one lesson per day.

And that lesson is typically 30 to 50 minutes. And it’s an education program where we, first of all, focus on understanding how you got ill, why you got ill and all of that sort of thing. And then we talk about specific strategies and how they can connect with the healthcare providers for better outcomes and move towards wellness. In terms of the outcomes, you know, it’s not done in a clinical setting, so frankly we don’t actually know.

But what I would say is, you know, the overwhelming feedback we have is that people make good progress and we have people who make full recoveries. I don’t, however, want to people to look at my website and see this testimony on this and go, oh, well, you know, because some of these, these testimonials of people who are very enthusiastic sharing this story presented very fast result, you know. Like you see people sick for 30 years, 20% functioning, and 90 days later they’re like hiking the mountains every day, the age of 72. And you go, wow, that sounds like a miracle cure. You know? I have an old saying that I’m sure you know it, if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. But there are reasons why some people do so well and we teach that in the program.

I think a more realistic expectation might be for someone to have good progress in 6 months and maybe a full recovery post in 12 to 18 months. But we can’t, we can’t guarantee anything because if they are the complications, they need to resolve that with the healthcare professionals. But yeah, you know, it’s now being used and I think over 50 countries around the world. We’ve got, you know, an interesting thing about it is that there’s a lot of people from the medical fraternity who are using it for themselves.

Just spoke with a top neurologist from overseas who has been specializing in treating CFS as a consultant. And who’s now referring all their patients to the program as part of their practice, you know? So we have people like that from all over the world. It’s a shame that we’re not seeing it more in mainstream medicine, but the problem is that, you know, it’s, it’s complicated. It’s a complicated illness and it doesn’t have a quick fix.

And many doctors try really hard to help, but they don’t have a magic pill here. Yeah. And so it is a personal process. Recovery is a personal process.

Felicity Cohen: Oh, look, I think it’s amazing that you’ve actually had an opportunity to utilise your own personal experience, to raise awareness of this group of diseases.

And I’ve learned something by, you know, exploring your personal journey. I didn’t actually know myself that all of these conditions were grouped together under one umbrella. So it’s really interesting to see, and maybe it’s, you know, different. Obviously, play out differently in each individual, but under that umbrella. And clearly the solution or what you’re offering in terms of pathway in the course to hopefully recovery is something that so many more people are going to be exposed to.

This is obviously your full-time career right now. It’s supporting people through your program.

Dan Neuffer: For many years, I was informally supporting people all over the world, sort of pro bono work. And that was very difficult to sustain. And people kept saying to me, Dan, we need more, you know, doing this one-on-one, it’s not easy.

It takes too much time. And they kept saying, oh, can you create a program? Can you create a program? And then eventually I caved and I did it. The program is very comprehensive. It is not like, ooh, learn this and it’s a quick fix. It takes, it rolls out over a period of months and it keeps building education, keeps building strategies.

Because we try to do it in bite sized chunks. It’s too hard when you’re ill to do a million things. So you’ve got to get well enough to do more. Yes. And you’ve got to take your wellness and instead of spending it on whatever, you could have said I could have reinvested in my recovery. So yeah, it’s a step by step process.

Felicity Cohen: What is your daily practice look like to self-manage now so that you potentially never have a relapse again in the future? What does a normal day look like to you?

Dan Neuffer: You know this is a really interesting question. And this talks about, you know, what is the difference between a cure or management?

You know, because many people will say that they overcame the illness, but actually what they’ve done is they’ve stopped all the triggers. Because there’s a range of triggers as I shared with you. And they’re basically learned to avoid or less triggers and live carefully. So that they can stay well, right. That’s not the same as somebody who is fully well, someone who’s fully well, he doesn’t have to worry what he eats or whether he doesn’t sleep well.

Right. So I mean, I’ve been well now for over 10 years, and frankly, I’ve had a bit of a health problem over the last few years. I had appendices. Since then I’ve had some issues in my abdomen, some pain that hasn’t been resolved most likely and very stressful time. Very, very stressful time.

And you know, I have managed to stay robust, having a relapsed into the illness. I don’t actually have any specific strategies to maintain my health. I just live my life normally now. But I do recommend people in the program to maintain the strategies they learn for period of time. Get fully well, stay fully well for a year, stay fully well to lose the strategies gradually.

And you know your brain will get more and more used to operating normally and you get more and more solid. But yeah, I think there comes a point where you don’t really have to treat yourself like a delicate Daisy anymore.

Felicity Cohen: Amazing. I’m really excited to have, I feel like we’ve kind of lifted a lead today. Because it’s something that I wasn’t aware of and I guarantee there’s a lot of people out there who are still so on aware of how these conditions are interrelated and that they can be treated holistically and in a whole different approach to self-manage that’s a little bit different. I hope that we can find today, in this conversation, that there’ll be people out there who will reach out for your program.

Cause I guarantee there’s a lot more people to reach who need your program to support them. So thank you so much for that.

I have a final question for you today that I like to ask of all of my podcast guests. Dan, what does wellness mean to you?

Dan Neuffer: Yeah, that’s a great question. To me, wellness means not knowing about it. Not thinking about it.

That’s what wellness means to me. Right. Because I think when you can just engage in life without an awareness of wellness, you’ve probably got it.

Felicity Cohen: Oh, I love that. Fabulous.

Dan Neuffer: It’s quite the opposite.

Felicity Cohen: So much for joining me. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast.

Dan Neuffer: Thank you very much for inviting me. It was great to talk to you today.

Felicity Cohen: Thank you for joining the Wellness Warriors podcast. It’s been a pleasure to have you online with us. If you didn’t join the series, please leave your review, subscribe and follow. And we look forward to sharing many more stories with you in the future.