2026 | A Call to the Most Important Mission of Our Lifetime

James Maskell:

2026 the year of the brain, a call to the most important mission of our lifetime. So that’s why here we’re naming it clearly. 2026 is the year of the brain. There could have been many ways to reverse cognitive decline or cure Alzheimer’s. So one by one, the root causes of cognitive decline are being opened up at a national level, at a policy level, to discuss, really, what’s going on. Hello and welcome to the evolution of medicine podcast. It is 2026

and for the first episode of the year, I’m wearing a tie because I’m excited about a transformational year for the functional medicine community. You know this has been it was 2014 when we started the functional forum. So here we are in 2026 and there’s a lot to be excited about, and we’re going to be getting into some of that a little bit later. Today, we’re going to be sharing some of the updates from some of our mission partners and some of the cool stuff that we’ll be doing in 2026 and just updating you on what this year looks like for us, for you, for the community and for the movement.

So I want to start this episode by talking about the year 2026 and I’m calling it the year of the brain. And today I actually launched a sub stack article on the blog that I’ve been writing for a year about the 2026 the year is the brain. And I want to start by reading this out. Reading this out to you, because I feel like this is an important piece of writing. This is an important way to set out why we’re here and what we’re doing.

So you can see all of the writing that I’ve been doing at truneura.substack.com you can find it on the website as well. But this is called, this is the blog that came out today, January 1, and it says 2026 the year of the brain, a call to the most important mission of our lifetime. And here we go. We are living through the most significant chronic disease crisis in human history. Six in 10 adults in the United States now live with at least one chronic disease.

Four in 10 Live with two or more and while cardiovascular disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease and cancer dominate the conversation, there is one category of chronic disease that sits upstream of all the rest brain diseases. Alzheimer’s disease is now one of the leading causes of death. Dementia rates are rising globally. Cognitive decline is showing up earlier and earlier, often misdiagnosed as anxiety, depression, ADHD, burnout or just stress.

What was once considered an inevitable part of aging is increasingly being recognized for truly what it is, a slow systemic breakdown driven by modern life. At the same time, we are running an unprecedented experiment on the human brain and our nervous system. Never before have human brains, especially developing brains, been exposed to this combination of ultra processed food, environmental toxins, chronic inflammation, sleep deprivation, loneliness, digital overstimulation, social media, comparison and meaning deficit. Attention has been monetized.

Nervous systems are dysregulated. Connection has been replaced with scrolling, and this matters, not just medically, but existentially. Brains are how we make decisions. Brains are how we love. Brains are how we regulate emotion, cooperate, create culture and imagine a future. If we are going to meet the challenges of this century, environmental, social, technological and moral, we do not do it with broken brains. So that’s why here we’re naming it clearly 2026. Is the year of the brain.

There could have been many ways to reverse cognitive decline or cure Alzheimer’s. It could have been a pill, it could have been a device. It could have been a gene edit or a single breakthrough molecule. But what is emerging through real clinical outcomes, lived experience and a growing body of research is something more demanding and more hopeful. The way to heal the human brain is to heal the human being.

The approaches that actually reverse cognitive decline are grounded in the principles of functional and precision medicine, time, presence and relationship, listening to the full story, helping people understand how their body and brain broke down over time, addressing root causes across metabolism, inflammation, toxicity, infection, hormones, trauma, sleep, movement, nutrition and connection and supporting people through overwhelm and helping them rediscover hope.

This is not transactional medicine. It’s relational medicine. A few weeks ago, at a forum Dr Kat tubes, who’s the lead investigator of the avanthia trial said something that stopped me in my tracks. She was speaking about a patient who had gone through the journey of reversing cognitive decline and came out the other side. And she said, this is the best thing that I’ve ever done in my life. They would sell their house 10 times over to go through this journey again, not because the journey is easy, but because reclaiming your mind.

Is everything, and here’s the most important truth about it, there is a role for everyone in this mission. If you’re a physician who feels burned out, constrained or disillusioned by a system that doesn’t allow real healing, this is your invitation to fall back in love with medicine. I wrote the evolution of medicine as a call to arms for doctors who knew there had to be a better way, functional medicine offered a path not just to manage disease, but to understand it and to heal. Even if you’re not a physician, you’re not excluded. This model requires coaches, mentors and guides.

Every effective brain health program needs people who can walk alongside patients as they change their lives. If you’re a pharmacist who wants to help people reduce medication burning, then de prescribing is essential work. If you’re a dietitian or nutrition professional, then food is one of the most powerful levers we have in brain recovery and resilience. If you’re a health professional of any kind, there is a place for you.

And even if you’re none of the above, you’re still part of this, because when someone loses their cognitive faculties, the costs ripple outward to families, communities and systems already stretched to the breaking point. Caring for someone with Alzheimer’s can give you Alzheimer’s. Choosing to protect your brain health is not selfish. It’s an act of responsibility. I’ve seen this personally with my father. It was one thing to reverse the cognitive decline. It was another thing to sustain that reversal over time.

What made the difference wasn’t just protocols or labs. It was psychosocial, health, connection, purpose, the will to live, the feeling of being needed and belonging. That’s what gives healing longevity. If this mission is going to succeed, if 2026 truly becomes the year of the brain, we also need to be honest about what it will require. It will require learning together. No one has this fully figured out, yet. Brain Health is complex, non linear and deeply personal.

The path forward is not rigid protocols or lone wolf heroics, it’s adaptive teams, shared learning and collective intelligence applied to healing. This is where something truly new is happening. As you participate in this work inside Truneura, whether as a patient, coach, practitioner or caregiver, you’re not just helping the individual brain. You are contributing to the largest real world brain health learning system ever assembled every hour logged, every activity tracked, every intervention tried, every recovery, sustained, each one adds to a growing body of real world evidence about what actually helps human brains heal across different ages, environments and life stories.

This is a worldwide problem. No single study, institution or expert is going to solve it alone. What will move us forward is collective participation. By stepping into this system, you are contributing to something bigger than yourself, something designed to accelerate understanding, refine care, and leave behind a better map than the one we inherited. This work will outlast us, and we’re already seeing where it can live. We’re seeing this model work in private practices, reclaiming their purpose and confidence.

We’re seeing it now in senior living communities, where it may matter most, using group visits, shared routines and community to restore cognition, purpose and belonging. These are places where brain health becomes sustainable. If the evolution of medicine was a call to arms for doctors to get on the right team. Then the community cure was how we actually implement this medicine at scale together. Healing the brain was never meant to happen in isolation.

To support all of this, to make it scalable without losing its humanity, we built true neuro not as a replacement for clinicians, but as an amplifier, a way to support teams, organize complexity, track progress and make it possible to deliver precision, brain health sustainably. The early proof is clear. The community works, the models work, the technology works. The seeds of success are already here. The practitioners are here. The communities are forming. The locations exist. The learning has begun.

This is not a speculative future vision. It’s already happening. What’s needed now are people willing to step forward, to learn, to lead and to participate? You don’t need to have all the answers. You just need to be willing to be part of the team that figures them out together. Because let’s be honest at what’s at stake if we do nothing, we can sign future generations to a world where losing your mind is treated as normal, where families are hollowed out by caregiving burden, and where entire health systems are overwhelmed by preventable decline.

We can do better than that. 2026 is the year of the brain healing the human brain is the most important work of our lifetime. Everyone is invited, everyone has a role, and the impact will last far beyond us all. Well, I hope you enjoyed that, and hopefully it gives you an idea of the purpose of what we’re doing in 2026 and it’s not just us, you know, this is a whole team approach, as you hear every. One has a role, and our mission partners have been specifically chosen to play this role.

We actually were at a 4m where we had a booth together. And, you know, obviously true. Newer you hear about what we think is possible with that business and why it exists, and what we’ve done in 2025 to set up 2026 but our other partners are of equal importance with freedom practice coaching, we have a company that is helping a growing number of doctors who want to build the brain health center of the future but need help with the practical application of entrepreneurship to actually execute on that. And if you want to join the group of practitioners that are doing truemura

And FPC together, get in touch with us. Get in touch with FPC. You can book a call. You can do the scalability assessment here to see, how do you build a scalable delivery system for this? The whole point of true neuro is to allow you to build a scalable team. And if there’s one thing that we see in the marketplace today, there’s a lot of individual practices with one doctor because it’s difficult to scale. And ultimately that’s a big part of our effort in 2026 and why we bought the group together that we have.

And with big boost marketing, we have someone in Uli that is on the cutting edge of really understanding what does it take to market effectively in 2026 and if you haven’t seen the video that was in the blog that I wrote about the mastermind. There’s a video there that shows you his expertise. And if you’re any sort of practice, you should watch that video and implement it because it is the way that you can bring patients from Ai search into your practice.

And fullscript is going to play an important role. You know, we’ve been in partnership with fullscript for over a decade, and when it comes to running the logistics, the complex logistics of functional medicine, you know, fullscript is a significant partner in that area, and there’s a lot of exciting things coming in 2026 with fullscript. And in q1 we are going to be launching a how to get the most out of your fullscript account challenge, because there’s a lot of cool things that they’re going to be bringing to the table.

So that’s a big shout out for our mission partners. We’re super grateful to all four of them. And you know, in today’s clinical segment, I want to do something a little bit different in the true neuro methodology and in brain health generally, one of the things that contributes to brain health, or not, is biotoxin illness, and you can see that mold could be a part of that. But ultimately, there’s also another part of it, which is Lyme and chronic Lyme disease.

Now this is a issue that has been in my world for 20 years. When I first started in this industry, I lived in Connecticut, only, you know, an hour’s drive from Lyme, and so there were a lot of practitioners in Connecticut who had been treating Lyme and treating Lyme effectively in their practices. And I got to work with a number of them, because the products that I was selling were used by those practitioners, using things like no sods and drainage and, you know, herbs to help with working at the deepest possible level, to work with these chronic infections.

And as you get into functional medicine, you start to see that this is something that functional medicine doctors are good at, and this is what set us up very well for covid and long covid, particularly because we already have an example of an acute infection leading to a long term issue or chronic issue. And so what I wanted to share today is actually something that happened on December the 15th of this year.

You may have missed it because it was right before Christmas, but this was a Health and Human Services Roundtable on Lyme disease, and it included Bobby Kennedy as the head of Health and Human Services, but Dr Oz and a number of other people that you might be familiar with could be you know, were involved. And so I want to do is, I want to share the opening statement that Bobby Kennedy gave. And I also just want to you may not have time to watch this,

because it the whole thing is over two hours, but what it says to me is that many of the things that he is going to discuss here, I have only ever heard about, talked about in functional medicine conferences, on the functional forum at ILADS, you know at other conferences that deal with this clinic population, people are dealing with these chronic infections. And ultimately, what’s amazing to see is that if we’re going to solve this, if 2026, is the year of the brain, and we’re going to get to the root cause of healing the humans.

We have to get at this area, because a large percentage of the people who have cognitive decline have some sort of biotoxin issue, and this is one of the areas that fits into that. So let’s listen to a little bit of this beginning and tell me whether you’re excited about this. My family has been directly affected by Lyme disease. I live for 35 years in Bedford, New York, which is within the epicenter of Lyme disease. I Every member of my family has had Lyme disease. I got Lyme disease in about. 1986 when it was still very, very difficult to even get it diagnosed.

Luckily for me, I got the classic bullseye on my arm, and I was able to anybody a treatment that was successful, so I have not actually gotten sick from it. I had a son who, that same year, had Bell’s Palsy, so his face was paralyzed for almost a year, and you can imagine the heartache that that caused a parent. I have another son who’s had chronic Lyme disease and has gone through many of the very rage. Variations and experience, the kind of difficulties and the invisibility that patients who suffer chronic Lyme disease all across this country have invariably suffered.

It is an invisible illness. For many years, this agency had a deliberate policy to refuse to engage with the Lyme community. For many years, this organization had a deliberate policy not to engage with the Lyme community. The Lyme community exists. There are many people that I know in my world have become advocates for it across the community. So there was a policy to not engage with the Lyme community, and there were top officials in this agency who were saying that Lyme disease did not exist, that who dismissed patients as the symptoms of psychosomatic and Send Lyme disease patients to psychiatrists, which you can’t imagine.

A worse combination. These are people who genuinely are ill and and are directed to find a psychiatric problem that explains their symptoms. And so, because of where I lived, I’ve known many, many people whose lives have been destroyed by this disease, who go to doctor after doctor after doctor, trying to find somebody who will treat it. And one of the problems is that none of the conventional tests that are administered by physicians offices in this country, whether blood tests or MRIs, whatever test will not detect Lyme disease and and the physicians community,

at least recently, has not been well educated about it, I would say the functional medicine community has the Lyme literate community, the Environmental Medicine community, have all gone above and beyond, and I want to give a shout out to you as you’re listening to this, if you’re one of those physicians who have or practitioners that have gone deep to learn about this, because what you’re seeing in your patients deep bow.

I think we’ve all felt that we ahead of the science and all this, or certainly ahead of public perception, and now this is being shared to the community that we’ve got to do something about this. One of my sons recently, again, went to the Mayo Clinic and was again told to see the psychiatrist. And I can tell you this, this child does not need a psychiatrist. He needs help for his illness, and the same thing happened with chronic disease epidemic during the 1980s where where millions of people were told that they were not sick, even though they had clear symptoms of injury and disease.

This agency, this this eight marks and miles on in this agency, where we are recognizing that this is an illness. It’s an illness that affects 35 million Americans. 35 million Americans. That’s one in 10 Americans. There’s been certain, you know, guesses about how many people have been affected. Ovid, also long covid, which we had a consortium recently, also affects 35 million Americans, and many of the same things that have happened, and we need to take the same approach that we’re taking now with long covid, which is to go to the physicians who are treating this effectively.

That’s you talk to the patient, to listen to people, and then to do gold standard science, and to develop tests or diagnostics, and then develop methodologies for treatment that are working. One of the things that we’re going to do is start a series with under HRSA, a series of Centers for Excellence around this country, where we will identify the best diagnostics and we will identify the best protocols that are successful in the field and on the ground that patients who come in with these symptoms, we’re going to do our best also to educate the physicians community.

That they will be able to direct patients to people who can help them. And that sounds a lot like you. I mean, that sounds a lot like a directory of functional medicine practitioners or environmental medicine practitioners who are trained in dealing with Lyme and like, that’s what we’ve wanted all along. I mean, ultimately, the rest of medicine is not going to get it straight away, but it is a big moment to recognize that there is a huge opportunity here, if you are in this space, to be involved in this in some ways.

And that’s why I wanted to bring this up, because ultimately I can see that this is just the first disease that this is going to happen for. But you know, cognitive decline is another one, mold illness is another one all of these different areas we’ve already had the changes with hormone replacement therapy. So one by one, the root causes of cognitive decline are being opened up at a national level, at a policy level, to discuss, really what’s going on.

And so this is an encouragement to you to stand up and participate and be part of this. And that looks like being effective what you do but tracking your outcomes and organizing yourselves. One of the biggest things about, you know, the study with cognitive decline is that now we have real we will have real evidence of the success of reversing cognitive decline. There are already examples of success, like the Journal of Alzheimer’s in 2022 that showed precision medicine way, way outperformed leketamab demena and all of the other standard of care for cognitive decline.

But this is another area, because there’s a there’s there’s an understanding that not only are there no protocols that work, but the industry, or the the governing body that is meant to be looking at this has been not just asleep at the wheel, but ultimately, you know, possibly actively covering up, you know, an area of medicine that, if you’ve listened to the people and you’ve sat in the chair of functional medicine doctor, you realize that this is a real thing that’s happening.

One of the exciting things is that we’re seeing many of these clinics. Any individual physicians have decided to specialize in this illness or actually treating patients very, very successfully, and the patients and the physicians are reporting excellent results. We want to standardize that. We want to make sure that every physician in this country can recognize the symptoms of Lyme disease and test for it, and then to direct patients to the best possible treatments.

You know, I’ll say another thing. I spend a lot of my time my life in the woods, and that experience has now become hazardous across this country. I remember one day in 1987 when I stood in my bathtub and picked 29 ticks off myself. And that was typical in Bedford. If you went out woods and you were active, you would get covered with ticks. I was in Martha’s Vineyard recently, and I learned that half the adult population of Martha’s Vineyard now has Alpha year round population,

so it’s become hazardous now to go into the woods, and the MaHA movement is trying to get children to be active, to get them to go outside. There’s a lot more there from Secretary Kennedy, but let’s listen to a little bit of a Dr Oz now, you know, when I was first coming up in the industry, in the early 2010s

Dr Oz was the place that you could go as a functional medicine doctor or as a practitioner. If you could get on the Dr Oz show, you could actually talk about these kind of topics to a massive audience. And so many of the leading lights in functional medicine.

We’re on that show talking about all the things that we’re talking about here. So let’s see what he has to say now that he is in the critical role that he’s playing for Medicare and Medicaid. First off, let me make it clear all of you, if you didn’t always realize it, that the sentinel event roundtable online would never happen. Wasn’t for Secretary, Kennedy, sitting calmly next to me, not being so calm all the time, taking a he looks mild mannered here, but you get him going on things like Lyme, and it gets them agitated for very good reason.

The massive ship that is, HHS, even with the great captain, cannot change direction unless he’s barking about it all the time. I learned early on that when you mix medicine with politics, you know what you get? Politics, there’s no medicine left. I learned this on the show when I began talking about chronic Lyme. And I’ve had many of the folks around this table, around the show or interview around it. Others have come and joined in with blue chip pedigree, with great efforts to try to explain what’s happening.

They get no respect from academic centers, frequently, but generally from the medical community. The question, why is that there’s a court as you walked into this building with. You to Humphrey is the moral obligation of government to take care of those living in the shadows. And folks who suffer from chronic Lyme are indeed living in the shadows. Many of you have witnessed that I certainly have, but when I began to recognize that the boards and the other groups that drive this process, insurance companies, of course, are incentivized by these boards taking a quick stance with a limited amount of time for treatment, thus forcing people to diagnosis that might not very represent them.

If you begin to realize you need powerful allies to make change happen, friends of mine and Alex actually born at my hospital many years ago, a few years ago, but she’s even been very supportive of this. But takes people like that, I’ll tell you, going to those events, you realize there’s a volcano of activity ready to erupt amongst people who are frustrated, angry that this has not been addressed. Just said, when you’re talking to the wall, nothing happens. After a while, you realize that it’s not an accident. There’s an active desire not to hear the story that loud, and so we began looking into this a little bit that the instruction of Secretary Kennedy and those a few things.

First off, in the chronic disease categories, especially with Lyme, there’s a general short circuiting of the system so it becomes a condition that resembles other conditions, makes it hard to put it into a bucket. So isn’t that true with all of chronic illness and all of functional medicine? Is that you can get the same symptoms from different causes. Think about cognitive decline, mold, Lyme, metabolic inflammation, hormones, all of those things can cause cognitive decline, and that’s why we need to have a medical system for chronic illness built of function and not built of symptoms,

because the symptoms can be the same in different patients with different etiology. So if you don’t want to put it in a bucket, makes it that much easier to avoid managing it. There are about 90,000 cases of Lyme disease reported by the CDC. Now, you heard a much larger number from Secretary Kennedy, didn’t you? Others will probably reflect that. Well, we only know about 90,000 because only 90,000 fit into one of those buckets. That’s data from 2023 by the way, it is still the most common tick borne disease in North America.

But it’s not nearly what it truly represents in the impact it has, including economic impact on our country. When college students can’t show up in class, get educated, go to school and become contributing members of society, which is one of the values of investing in healthcare, all right, so I’ll let you watch the rest of it. But ultimately, I think the point is made that we got the highest people in the highest seats of power who have been on this for a long time, who have personal reasons to try and make this happen.

And ultimately, we have a practitioner community in you listening to this at home, ready, probably to help patients like this. So I think it’s a huge moment. I’m super excited. You know, if you look at 2026 think about some of the the education events we have coming on, and maybe this is a good place, you know, for us to share some of the things that we’ll be involved in this year. You know, Dr Christine Burke is speaking at cognition fest from a forum that’s just in a couple of weeks from now, in Orlando. That is the A forums brain health conference that they’ve been looking to put on and put on once last year.

Second, you know, the plmi conference is all going to be about the brain in the 17th and 18th of April in Chicago. And there’s an incredible lineup for that. I’ll definitely be at that as well. And then the day before, IFM annual conference down in San Diego, we’ll be putting something together there. And then obviously you have, you know, in the environmental medicine, there’s the Society of environmental medicine, there’s the American Academy of environmental medicine. That’s happening in March.

So many opportunities to be ahead of the curve on these particular issues. And you can see that something is going to happen here, something tremendous. It looks like is going to happen here, and this is an opportunity for the community to step up and play a part of it in your community, to be the leading clinic in your community at addressing these environmental issues. So this is the year, hopefully you’re as convinced as I am that 2026 is the year of the brain, if you would like to get involved in joining the true neuro mastermind.

You get all of last year’s content. You’re going to get all of this year’s content. We’re going to be going over cases it starts again for the 2026 season next week, that you could join anytime. If you go to truneura.com/demo, you can get on a call with one of our team and come about joining it if you want to get on a concierge call, if you go to goevomed.com/concierge, you want to talk about your practice, what’s going on, how you can set yourself up for success.

Here, think about how you can build a practice with multiple practitioners so that you can build the capacity to really make an impact in your community. This is it. This is the time. This is the moment. Don’t sleep on it. There’s a reason why you got all of this education and why you’ve been at this place at this time, right now in history. And I hope that whatever your vision for the community transformation of medicine, whatever the vision for your practice and the role that you want to play in healthcare, we would love to help you amplify that. So welcome to 2026 It’s going to be a great year. Thanks so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you next time you.

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