Hi everybody!

As the consulting neurologist-in-residence for Nourish Balance Thrive, I want to share with you a new addition to the Elite Performance Forum that we're excited about.

But before I do that, let me briefly share with you how I got here.

You see, about a year and a half ago I was going through a major career transition.

Having worked as a neurologist full time for over a decade, I was leaving my practice to pursue a growing business I'd started a couple years prior. In part, this was because I realized long ago that it wasn't in my nature to spend a lifetime doing the same thing day in and day out.

But it was also because I knew the traditional healthcare system was no longer the place I could make the kind of impact I wanted to make. Unlike the neurologists of a century or so ago, almost all of the patients I saw in my daily neurology practice were suffering from diseases of civilization, the product of mismatches between our modern and ancestral environments.

In other words, not the kind of problems the US healthcare system was designed to solve.

No surprise then that I had hardly any tools to relieve that suffering, or that many of the tools I did have - pharmaceuticals - harmed more than they helped.

To make matters worse, the growing misalignment in the incentives of doctors, patients, hospitals, and insurance companies meant that, with each passing year, more barriers were erected between me and the patients I was trying to serve. Plain and simple, I'd channeled my interest in neuroscience into becoming a neurologist so that I could help relieve suffering, but the system I was in made fulfilling that mission impossible.

Even more frustrating was that the way out, the way to make a serious dent in the conditions that have brought our system to the breaking point, seemed clear to me.

The way out demanded a synthesis of ancestral health principles and modern diagnostic tools with a skeptical spirit of scientific inquiry to understand what works in this largely unexplored terrain.

And while efforts were already underway to make that happen, this was still a wide open field, filled with booby traps and blind alleys.

On the one hand, the growing popularity of paleo, ancestral health, functional and integrative medicine meant that those ideas were continuing to gain traction, and that this movement had legs. But that popularity mixed with the tools of the information age also meant a growing challenge in finding credible information.

The plummeting signal to noise ratio is the central challenge of the internet, and nowhere is that problem more acute than in the world of health and wellness. Even with an extensive background in biology, a medical degree, and years of direct patient care experience under my belt, I don’t find navigating these waters to be easy.

Fortunately, my search for a reliable source of information, and a team to align my own efforts with, led me to Nourish Balance Thrive.

Which brings me to back to the Elite Performance Forum, the newly launched resource for Patreon supporters of NBT.  

The Elite Cognition Forum

As a neurologist, I’m especially excited about how we can leverage insights in this new field into improvements in the health and function of the brain.

I’ve recently launched a podcast, Intelligence Unshackled, that explores this subject (click here to go check it out and subscribe).

In addition, we’ve also just created an Elite Cognition section inside of the Patreon forum, a place where we can discuss and learn about all matters pertaining to optimizing the health and function of the brain.

Together, along with the rest of the Nourish Balance Thrive team, our goal is to discover what’s true, and stay abreast of the latest in what promises to be a rapidly changing field.

Finding, vetting, and understanding the applicability of new research as it unfolds is a more than full time job. Moreover, I don't have the relevant background and expertise to make sense of it all on my own- no single person does.

That’s why we’re building a community of experts, to help each other make sense of this exciting and emerging area, and continue the search for truth together.

We are not gurus. Nor do we believe such a thing exists. But we do care deeply about the future of human health, and we each bring our own unique areas of expertise to bear on the subject.

We also bring our own unique set of unconscious biases, which we do not want to stand in the way of understanding what’s true. And building a community like this, one of open mindedness, humility, skepticism, and critical inquiry, is one of the best ways to guard against that.

Needless to say, I think that the Elite Performance and Cognition forum, and the growing community inside of it, is a tremendous resource. An example of internet magic at its best, as having access to this kind of network of expertise at your fingertips would’ve only been a fantasy a decade or so ago.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have found my way here. And if this stuff matters to you too, consider taking advantage of this fantastic opportunity to become a member of this community. In addition, you'll be helping to ensure that this all-important project continues.

As a fan of NBT, you clearly have an interest in staying up with the latest research in human health, and have cultivated a commendable spidey sense for finding the signal through the noise. So you’re exactly the kind of person we’d like to continue the conversation with.

Click here to learn more about and become a member.  

Hope to see you inside,

Josh Turknett, MD

elitecognition.com