What Doctors Aren't Talking About With Our Brains, Guts, & Parkinson's: Martha Carlin
by Kevin Danielson July 15, 2025
We've been told Parkinson's is just a dopamine problem. It’s not.
This week on the podcast, we’re joined by Martha Carlin—systems thinker, microbiome expert, and someone who has spent the last 20+ years trying to understanding the brain and the gut after her husband’s Parkinson's diagnosis in his 40's. ⠀ In Part 1 of this series, we go beyond what doctors are asking—and dig into what really matters for our brains: stress, the microbiome, mineral balance, and a newly discovered protective layer you’ve never heard of (but need to know about).
When most people think about circadian rhythm, they think about sleep. But your circadian rhythm is much more than a sleep-wake cycle. It is a master biological timing system that influences nearly every aspect of health, including metabolism, immune function, hormone production, digestion, detoxification, and even how your gut microbes behave.
Let’s be completely honest: When was the last time you actually looked inside the bowl before you flushed? If your immediate reaction is to cringey-laugh and say, "Ugh, never," you are throwing away the single most valuable health report your body produces daily.
A chronic diagnosis is almost always delivered as a final sentence, completely devoid of hope. In the conventional medical model, patients are given a label—whether it’s Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, or chronic fatigue—and told, “There is no cure. This is progressive. Take this pill.”
The path to vibrant health is rarely a straight line. Often, it takes a deeply personal disruption to force us to look at the human body through a completely different lens. For Martha Carlin, a former corporate auditor and turnaround expert, that disruption came in 2002 when her healthy 44-year-old husband, John, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.