Louise C. Transcript

My name’s Louise Cork. I’m a clinical naturopath based in Australia. A clinical naturopath in Australia is a slightly different qualification to what it is in other countries. But basically it is a holistic science degree, and we deal with the whole person physiology. And our tools are things like herbal medicine, nutritional medicine, diet and lifestyle modifications, that kind of thing.

So when I first became a naturopath, I just practiced general practice. I saw anyone and everyone and, you know, to a degree I still do because naturopathically we always see the whole person. But I was doing some training with another naturopath in adult ADHD, and she started talking about chronic low-grade neuroinflammation. And as she was talking and I was reading the research that she had presented, all of these pennies started dropping. You could literally see the pennies dropping from the sky.

I was like, “Oh my goodness, this is what we see in CTE posthumously. Chronic low-grade neuroinflammation that has not been able to be seen on scans, so it’s just simmering away in the background.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh, if we know about this posthumously, we know that’s what’s happening, why are we not doing something about this,” basically. So that’s kinda how it started.

Concussion has always been something that’s been spoken about in our house. My husband had concussions as a younger kid and man when he was playing Australian rules football. My brother coaches AFL football at a fairly high level. So it’s always been something that’s been on my radar, but I didn’t really fully understand the ramifications. And then this kinda led me to go deep down a bit of a research rabbit hole, and I was like, “Wow, okay. We actually know a lot about the physiology of these injuries, but nobody’s piecing it together.”

And a part of that is because no other modality pieces together a picture like naturopathy does. You know, something that I always say is that everything is connected and nothing is random. And we largely view concussion injuries as a head injury, but it’s actually not. It’s a full systemic physiological cascade. The entire body becomes involved.

And then when you start talking about post-concussion, we start talking about people’s whole lives, their economic ability to survive, their ability to live a full, healthy, and happy life. You know, it just ripples out and out and out. Starts in the brain, goes everywhere. That’s a really long nutshell of how I arrived here. But the small nutshell is there is a huge gaping hole in concussion care that I believe needs to be filled, and the work that I do does a great deal to fill that gap, and I have further studies in neuroscience now as well.

And even in studying neuroscience — because that’s separate to a naturopathy degree, right? It’s very isolated. You’re just talking about the brain. But like I said, nothing’s random, everything’s connected. So naturopaths love working from the gut, because the gut is so centric to everything, and I’ll tell you how that works in concussion and why it matters.

So within hours of an impact to the head, you have increased intestinal permeability. So the blood-brain barrier loses its selectivity, so that increases in permeability, as does the gut. Leaky gut, leaky brain. So what happens then is that your preexisting health now comes into the picture. So the very bacteria that are living in a person’s gut now have the opportunity to cause mischief if they’re not favorable.

So we have favorable species of bacteria in our gut, and we can have some unfavorable, and that’s fairly normal. Like, you wouldn’t see a gut that didn’t have some unfavorable species. But this impact to the head and the physiological cascade that happens after that shifts the ecology of the gut. So species that were perhaps not prevalent all of a sudden have the opportunity to take up more space.

The other thing about bacteria in the gut is that they produce substances. So we call it postbiotics. We hear about prebiotics and probiotics, and then there’s postbiotics. That is the byproduct of the bacteria, what they produce, and that can be favorable or unfavorable. So you might hear about butyrate or IPA being beneficial, and they are signs of a robust gut, and they are anti-inflammatory in the brain because they cross the blood-brain barrier.

Then you have unfavorable substances like hexacetylated lipopolysaccharides, or Hexa-LPS — it’s a really big word — propionate and trimethylamine, and all of these other substances. So they are pro-inflammatory, and they are implicated in many things. They’re implicated in things like endometriosis. They are implicated in dementias and, you know, major neurocognitive disorders. So of course, when you look on a logical level, if they exist in the gut and all this stuff is happening, they play a role in a person’s concussion recovery trajectory, and they are what can keep someone stuck on the hamster wheel of neuroinflammation and not recovering.

So there’s obviously the actual damage to the brain, which could damage centers of the brain that are responsible for our mood and personality and all of those kinds of things. Then we have neurochemical things happening in the brain. So we have a big glutamate dump, and we have ionic flux and things like that happening, which put a huge tax on the brain’s ability to produce energy. And then in the gut is where the majority of our neurotransmitters start their life.

So for example, serotonin — the brain makes 5 to 10% of total serotonin, and generally it doesn’t cross the blood-brain barrier. The other 90 to 95% is made in the gut. Now, we often talk about the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system, our fight, flight, freeze, fawn, and our rest, digest, safety. But then in the gut we have the enteric nervous system. So this is the communication between our gut and our brain.

And so those neurotransmitters do play a role in the gut, so we don’t discount that. But for the purpose of today’s conversation, neurotransmitters are also communicating via the 10th cranial nerve, the vagus nerve, up into the brain. So if there’s a production issue with neurotransmitters in the gut, then there can be a transport and receptor issue as well. Plus we already have ongoing damage in the brain as well. So it’s a bit of a complex puzzle when it comes to mental health.

And of course, then you have the fact that these injuries can change so many aspects of a person’s life. And standard care — as you pointed out before when we were talking initially — there are so many gaps in what people are told. And often, even though it’s 2026 and we have stacks of research and lots of knowledge, people are still often told, “Just rest, just wait. You should be better now.”

And then what I see clinically — and it could be years down the track, decades down the track — is that concussion injuries can be an incident in time where you’ve never been better since. So never better since impact to the head. Or I had repeated impacts, and then this one happened and I’ve never been better since. And then when you timeline out their health history, you will see things pop up, and none of it is random. Yet constantly people are told that all of these other things are completely unrelated.

So the mental health issues are unrelated. Now, I’m not sure about in America — I’m sure it is very similar in contact sports. We have many instances and examples of professional athletes who’ve played in contact sports like AFL or rugby that have struggled post-career. It’s been veiled as mental health, and then they have taken their lives, and then we discover CTE. And I just can’t let that go. That really deeply upsets me.

And it’s not just athletes, and I really wanna make that clear — it is not just athletes, but they are a very good example of what happens, and we see it more. So no matter the person’s situation, I hope that they can feel seen, that there are things that we can do. But it is directly and intrinsically related to that injury. So we very much minimize concussion injuries by calling them mild, but they are not. They really have the opportunity to change a person’s life.

And it might not be mental health. For someone else it might be skin issues, sudden onset of rosacea or eczema. It might be autoimmune. It might be, you know, any number of things. But then of course there’s the common things like persistent headaches and migraines and visual disturbances and things like that. And it really is a team effort to move someone through a concussion injury.

I can’t do what a chiropractor does or a vestibular therapist. I can’t do what a physiotherapist does. But on the other hand, they can’t do what I do either. So it really is a collaborative and collective team effort, and your healthcare team might be different to the next person’s healthcare team. But generally speaking, there’s going to be a physiological aspect that needs to be dealt with — resolving the neuroinflammation, resolving the gut, resolving detoxification, that kind of thing.

I recently asked some of my clients, including retired AFL players, after seeing a reel of a couple of people — I think they were parents of an NFL player who died at 23, and he had CTE, so very, very young. And they said, “People always say to us, ‘Oh, I bet if he could do it all over again, he would.'” And they said, “No, you know, the way he had to live the last three years of his life, I don’t think he would.” And I was like, that’s a really interesting question.

And so I asked a couple of my clients, and I got a really broad range of responses, but essentially they would say, “If I knew what I know now from working with you, then I would know that I was in a better position to recover and heal at that time. But I wouldn’t do it again blindly.” And one of my clients, when I asked the question, “Would you do it again?” He goes, “You know, people say that all the time, I bet you’d do it all over again.” And he said, “But I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do it all over again because I can’t remember winning two premierships. I can’t remember most of the good times.”

He retired early so that he didn’t have to have knee replacements and lower limb injuries post-concussion — that’s another discussion. But the way he communicated that, he said, “You know, the way it’s affected my relationships and my ability to provide for my family.” And I was like, that’s when I really realized — you know, because I’ve always said it’s a systemic injury, but that’s when I realized it’s so much more than that, you know? It’s every aspect of someone’s life that can be impacted negatively, and I just really can’t let that rest when I know that there are so many things we can do to help people.

I have made it my mission to share that as much as I can. Because, like you said, you’ve never heard anyone speak like that about it — there is no one really speaking about it like this. And I’m not afraid to say that there are big sporty organizations around the world who don’t necessarily want to see it like this. They don’t want to acknowledge how far reaching the impact of these injuries are. But also, if you’re working from a gut-centric model and optimizing the gut, that’s also a competitive advantage to these sports. You know, beneficial bacteria thriving in the gut is actually beneficial to someone’s athletic performance, but, you know, I digress.

I really hope that we can change the paradigm, and I really hope that we can start to communicate to people that there is always something you can do to feel better if you have the right support. First thing I do when I see a concussion client or any client is that I wanna understand everything about you. My job is not to dish out protocols or anything like that. My job is to become the expert in you and your individual health, because you are not the next person. Two people can be involved in the same impact and have a completely different response, and that is because right from conception, you have completely different stories.

So first we, of course, go through all the safety questions. We make sure we’re always doing due diligence. But we take a thorough health history. We cover every body system. We cover your family health history. We’ll often go into your pregnancy and birth story, childhood, all of that kind of stuff, because it all matters. How many times did you have antibiotics as a child? Did you have eczema and other gut issues as a child? You know, was there already something preexisting there?

And then we talk about the injury. So what happened? What were the symptoms that you experienced? What did you do at that time to help yourself? And then what is the trajectory after the injury, whether that’s weeks, months, years, decades — we map it out. What happened afterwards?

Because a lot of — you know, even recently, my three-year-old hit the corner of his eye at kinder, kindergarten. I’m not quite sure what you call it there. And he split his eye open, and they were like, “Ah, he hit it pretty hard,” and he needed a bit of glue to stitch it back together. And so we went to the urgent care medical center, and they were so — like, “Oh, he hit his head. Oh, yeah. Do you need a handout on what to do for head injuries?” And I was like, “That’s the advice you’re gonna give me? You’re gonna give me a piece of paper?”
That made me think, right, I need to create a resource that people can download for free on what they can actually do in the first 72 hours after an injury that will potentially make a positive difference. Because if you think about people playing sport, whether that’s amateur or professional, what are the things that they’re doing directly after they finish that game? They’re drinking isotonic drinks, high glucose. They’re drinking protein, which is probably whey or casein — big inflammatory proteins. And in a vulnerable gut, you’re not just adding fuel to the fire, you start creating a bonfire.

And then amateurs — I’m not sure about in America, but certainly in amateur football here — they might be going back to the bar and drinking beer. So actually, clear strategic advice on what to eat and drink, and what does rest actually look like, and what do I actually need to do in exact terms to better my chances of recovering from this injury, is a huge gap of information.

I guess the other thing is, you know, that example’s probably more relative to sport, but what if someone’s in a car accident? The head impact, depending on what else is going on, is often the very least of concern. You know, I had a client once who was in a significant car accident 20 years before I saw them. And they were in a coma for 10 days — it was a long time. Lots of broken bones, all that. All that mattered was putting this person back together. The head injury was not even a thought.

So they had tons of antibiotics, tons of pain medication, you know, all of these other things going on at the time of the injury. That matters, and it needs to be taken into consideration. You know, one course of antibiotics can wipe out 20 species of bacteria from your gut. So that’s happening at the same time as the whole ecology of the gut has changed. So it really is important to know what happened around the time of the injury — what did you do, and what did you not do?

It’s not right or wrong because people don’t know what they can do. But now, you know, I’ve got clients who are active athletes. And some of them race motocross, which is motorbikes, and so they have a high tendency to re-injure. But at least now they know, okay, I know exactly what I need to get started on. And it changes the trajectory of their recovery significantly. So it does really matter, and it is worth always asking the next question, I think.

I absolutely have a mission to continue to share the ins and outs and the actual science behind what I’m talking about. And I would love to — and I am — planning, but I’d love to train other naturopaths to do what I do. But I’d also love to train and work with allied health professionals on what they can do, what they can recognize, and what they can do within their scope of practice to support their clients better as well. Because you will start to see — or you probably are starting to see — there are some physiotherapists and some chiropractors who are like, “Yeah, there’s something going on in the gut,” and maybe some of them are starting to talk about it.

I know there’s a chiropractor — I feel like he might be in Canada — and he talks a little bit about it. But again, the level of detail that we can go into is still outside their scope of practice. You know, we can test the microbiome and find out exactly who’s living in there and whether we want them there or not, basically. And then we have the tools to do something about that — to heal the intestinal permeability, to support the mucosal layer and immune function, to optimize the way neurotransmitters are able to be produced, and things like that. That’s what’s in the naturopathic toolkit. That’s what we do best, really.

What I would say is that there is always hope to improve your outcomes, and I hope that I can continue to produce resources that are helpful for people. Don’t accept “everything’s fine” as an answer from a medical profession of any kind, any health professional, when you don’t feel fine. Trust your body. You know your body better than anyone. You are the expert in you. If you don’t feel fine, I can guarantee there’s something that’s not fine.

And as for what can I do right now — think about what you feed yourself is what you feed your microbiome. So focusing on lots of color, lots of variety of fruits and vegetables, nuts and seeds, all of that kind of stuff, closest to nature. And also, none of this has to be complicated. It doesn’t have to be protocols that last for three years. Yeah, maybe for some people there’s a lot of work to do, but keep it simple, whole food, close to nature, and make sure you’re getting enough. Most people are not eating enough of the right balance of foods — not getting enough protein, not getting enough healthy fats, and probably too many refined carbohydrates, things like that.