The Low‑Voltage Brain: Hidden Energy Problems You Can’t See

A low-energy brain can hide in plain sight, and sometimes the EEG tells the story before symptoms make sense. We sit down with Dr. Michael Pierce, a chiropractic neurologist at the Human Condition Lab, to connect EEG brain mapping with the metabolic drivers that can make healing stall or speed up. If you care about neurofeedback, neuromodulation, concussion recovery, peak performance, or brain fog relief, this conversation helps you think beyond “train the brain” and toward “power the brain.”

We walk through how Dr. Pierce approaches assessment with a wide lens: EEG plus targeted lab testing, functional measures like balance posturography, and imaging when needed, including higher Tesla MRI for subtle injury patterns. Then we zoom in on how to interpret EEG findings responsibly. First, we put on the medical hat and look for high-risk patterns like seizure activity or epileptiform discharges, and we talk about how sleep issues can leave fingerprints even on an awake recording. 

From there, we break down one of the most important functional red flags we see: globally low voltage EEG patterns. Dr. Pierce explains why “squashed” brainwaves often point to mitochondrial strain and impaired oxidative phosphorylation, and why your next move should start with a thorough history that guides smart, cost-effective labs. We cover common drivers like insulin resistance, inflammation from diet and chemical exposures, and head or neck injury, plus the symptoms that get dismissed as “just aging.” 

If you found this useful, subscribe so you do not miss the deeper intervention talk coming next, share the episode with someone dealing with fatigue or brain fog, and leave a review to help more people find the show.

To learn more about Transformative Neurotherapy visit:
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Transformative Neurotherapy
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412-204-7397  

Transcript

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Show Open And Promise

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Welcome to the Transformative Neurotherapy Podcast with your host, Dr. Heather Putney, founder and executive director of Transformative Neurotherapy. This is the place where healing happens faster. Because let's face it, your brain doesn't come with an owner's manual until now. Here we take a holistic approach to brain health, bringing together science, mind-body harmony, and the tools you need to optimize your well-being. Whether you're a high performer, executive, athlete, longevity hacker, or just someone tired of your brain working against you, Dr. Putney is here to help you unlock your full potential. From brain fog to chronic stress, we're covering it all so you can finally experience brain health, mind harmony, and total well-being. Ready to get unstuck? Let's get started.

Metabolism Drives Faster Healing

SPEAKER_00 0:56

When you understand the metabolic drivers behind healing, you stop chasing symptoms and start supporting the body in ways to create measurable and lasting change. Welcome

Meet Dr Michael Pierce

SPEAKER_00 1:05

everyone. I'm Dr. Heather Putney, founder and executive director of transformative neurotherapy here in the studio with Dr. Michael Pierce, a chiropractic neurologist with the Human Condition Lab. And I'm looking forward to hearing more and picking Mike's brain about how we can integrate EEG and metabolic supports to help people here. So, Mike, we're gonna uh kick it off. I know this is kind of your specialty.

SPEAKER_01 1:29

Well, um so um you're talking about assessing people's brains with EEG, and I like to add lab testing. I like to add lab testing, and I like to add some functional tests like um, you know, maybe balanced posturiography, where you stand on a plate and it tells your computer and draws a map of your sway and your wobble. I like to look at imaging like MRIs, especially high Tesla, strong magnet MRIs instead of the usual MRIs, like a three Tesla or seven Tesla MRI, which shows more changes like axonal shearing. If you've ever heard of somebody getting in a car accident and they have some shearing of the axons and injury. And then um, of course, all kinds of lab tests. Lab tests about blood and urine and saliva and hair, looking at not just your metabolic markers, but also things like toxins, things like glyphosate or or phthalates or or forever chemicals, if you've heard of those.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Very good. So it sounds like um you like a comprehensive view of you know the clients when they come in. I know for my part, uh, you know, and for you know, other clinicians that might be listening to that that are in the world of like EEG, whether they do neuromodulation or neurofeedback, you know, the first thing we see, and we don't, you know, don't necessarily have access to those other things, the first thing we see is the EEG. So how can can you please help myself or maybe someone else that got an EEG a little uh to understand what type of markers we're looking for to know when we might want to loop someone with your expertise in?

EEG Safety Checks First

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Sure, sure. Well, the whenever you're looking at an EEG, the first thing we want to do is put our medical hat first and then kind of look at it through the eyes of what's the most dangerous or the most threatening type of thing that could be on the EEG. Oh, just like when you're reading ITRA, you look for broken bone first before you look for other stuff. So you look for things that are really serious first, and then after that you take off your medical hat and you put on your holistic hat, and you look at it through the eyes of a of a trained therapist and try to figure out the nuances of emotion and subtlety and mood and sleep. So um the first things we look for is are there any seizure signs? Are there signs of of epileptiform discharges, which are little kind of almost mini seizures, but not really? They're kind of like a warning sign that a person could have um unstable electrical charges in their brain that we can fix with natural methods in many cases. Sometimes we use drugs too, but we also look for sleep disorders. Now you can see a lot of sleep disorder signs in somebody that's awake, but a proper sleep study would be ideal. And that would be where somebody goes to a sleep fellowship trained physician and they sleep overnight in a lab and they get an EEG of their brain waves while they're sleeping. But you can still get a real good idea just from somebody awake if if they've been really drowsy and if they've gotten really poor sleep, it'll show up and you'll see it in the brain waves many ways.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

So, what are some other um things that we need to be looking for? You mentioned epileptiform content and and whatnot to maybe indicate that there might be a metabolic issue going on here that we need to be looking a little deeper than maybe our first level interventions that we do like with neuromodulation and so forth. Because I know I know from having worked with you in the past, there are a couple of red flags for us. So I'd like for you to help explain, you know, to our population what what kinds of things are red flags of like maybe we need to do this first before we proceed with some of these other interventions.

SPEAKER_01 4:44

Sure. Well, after the neurologist or the epileptologist has cleared the MR the EEG and and we can we can wipe our brow and say, it's not anything that's medical, it's it's not not anything that's that's got a medical problem, like a stroke or a or a or an epileptiform uh type of of problem, then we go on to things that are much more clinical in nature that are much less serious as far as as like being threatening to us.

Low Voltage Points To Mitochondria

SPEAKER_01 5:08

And the first one that pops up is probably low voltage. What we see quite frequently is where across the board everything is just low voltage. And that means that the height of the waves, we're not talking about the frequency of the waves, how fast or slow they go. We're talking about the height of them. So if you're looking at the chart, you'll see how tall the waves are, how or how short they are. And almost universally, uh across the whole brain, every electrode and every frequency from low to high is just squashed. And it doesn't have the robust form and shape that a normal EEG would have in different wavelengths. And you just see, like, wow, it seems like somebody turned down the power, almost like when you turn down the volume knob of a of a stereo. And that's a that's a problem of metabolism. That's a problem generally, very generally, of oxidative phosphorylation, which is a thing that takes place in your mitochondria. It's about producing energy. And so somehow, for many, many different reasons, it's our job now to figure out why that person is having low energy? Why do they have low power? Why are they not making voltage in their cells? And they should be. And so we we set about trying to solve that problem. And it could be carbohydrates, it could be problems with minerals, it could be vitamin deficiencies, it could be autoimmune disease, it could be injury or inflammation. There's a million reasons why that could happen. But that's the first thing we look for is those squashed brain waves.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

Okay. And so if we do find those squashed brain waves, um, I know you mentioned when we first started that there's a whole lot of, you know, um, you know, testing in that you would be interested in getting and so forth that kind of understand that. So what's the next step? So we identify it's a low voltage, um, that there's probably a metabolic condition, there's not enough energy, which creates, you know, a power differential. So what's the next step? We we get some labs that you'd mentioned before, and we can list some of these things or put a you know, put puts a link to some of your stuff to kind of like what you would maybe want to look at. But what's the next step? Let's say we get back some information, what do we do not?

SPEAKER_01 7:00

Yeah, yeah. The

History Guides The Right Labs

SPEAKER_01 7:01

the first step really is to take a very accurate history. Every medical textbook in the world on diagnosis in the first chapter says the 90% of diagnosis comes from a wise history. That means a doctor is somewhat like a cop or a detective in a detective show, asking good questions and trying to figure out what are the factors. And so a history is the best way to do it. So asking lots of questions about how you sleep and what you eat and how how energized you are at different times of the day, whether you wake up tired or you go to sleep well or not well, or you wake up in the middle of the night and what time, all those questions about when you're exhausted, when you're energized, how you how you digest, how you poop, everything. And so those questions are important. And that leads to then deciding which labs to do. So you take the history and you decide what labs and imaging to do based on that. So you're not going to order every lab in the world, you're gonna order certain labs and you'll start with things like blood and urine and saliva to look for those things that I mentioned earlier. And um, and that's how you don't spend everybody's money all at once because you could spend tens of thousands of dollars ordering every lab test in the world, and that's just not efficient.

SPEAKER_00 8:04

So, what are some of the common like metabolic issues or potential you know injuries or problems that uh that you know might create this like low voltage um EEG that we see? Just to help people understand, like, oh, maybe this is a risk factor. I need to maybe look more into this. What are what's a common precursor to give us that EEG?

Three Big Causes Of Low Power

SPEAKER_01 8:24

Yeah, anytime you've got a low voltage EEG throughout the brain, eyes open and closed, you've got a problem with your mitochondria. So that makes you automatically populate a list in your brain of what could be the factors affecting it. Now, in the United States, the most pro common problem is insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is caused by excess carbohydrates compared to the ratio of their fats and their proteins and their minerals and their vitamins. Um, that's one. Another one is inflammation, which is often caused by chemicals in food and by excess simple carbohydrates, rapid oxidation and burning of simple carbohydrates, um, maybe seed oils and oils that are not uh highly saturated. So those are all things that can cause inflammation. There's also uh injury. Sometimes a person is injured. If you get an injury to your brain, like a concussion or a whippelash where your brain gets sloshed around inside your skull, you can have an inflammatory cascade released by the cells because that's what they're supposed to do. They're supposed to release inflammatory chemicals that signal the immune system to come and heal the injury, and that's a good thing, but it's also creates a lot of symptoms. So those are the big three. There's there's a bunch of others, but the general ones are those.

Symptoms Often Mistaken For Aging

SPEAKER_00 9:30

I think you just mentioned a good thing. What are some of the symptoms that we might be looking for? Like I said, that might make us say, hey, we should do an EEG, and then we confirm some of this, and then maybe we do the metabolic interventions as well. So what symptoms might be related to, you know, neuroinflammation or a metabolic condition?

SPEAKER_01 9:47

Oh, yeah, a lot of times the symptoms are very much mimic aging because age is not a pathology, and there are many, many healthy people that are older. So when we start seeing things that we ascribe to, oh, they're just getting older, very often that's a problem of metabolism. So things like fatigue, things like poor sleep, things like poor wound healing, things like, you know, sagging skin and and rapid increase in, say, wrinkles or gray hair very suddenly. Many of you know people that have suddenly gotten it seems like overnight and they got gray hair, or overnight they got ring tests. That's not a natural process. It's a much slower process of oxidation. And so those are symptoms, um, problems with hormone balance, where they can't balance their thyroid or their sex hormones or their periods. They can't get their stress hormones under control. They feel stressed out all the time and they didn't used to. So we often just call this aging in the United States because if it doesn't respond to a drug, we kind of pass it off and say, well, it's just aging. And that's not really true.

Closing And Free Consultation

SPEAKER_00 10:42

Wow. Well, thank you so much for this overview of some of the things we might be looking for in the EEG and for the teaser about some of the things we might do. I know we have you luckily back in the office for the next podcast. We're gonna dig a little bit deeper into some of these interventions and how you've applied them to certain types of cases to help them heal. So we're looking forward to talking with you in the next episode and kind of pursuing this path. Thank you so much for joining us today.

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Thanks.

SPEAKER_02 11:12

You've been listening to the Transformative Neurotherapy Podcast with Dr. Heather Putney. Remember, your brain isn't supposed to hold you back, it's supposed to power you forward. So stop letting it crash your party and start letting it do its job. If you're ready to optimize brain health, sharpen your focus, and age like a fine wine, schedule your free consultation today at Transformative Neurotherapy.org. Or call us at 412-204-7397. Because here, healing happens faster. See you next time.