What are the opening hours?

Monday 9am - 5pm Tuesday 9am - 5pm Wednesday 9am - 5pm Thursday 9am - 5pm Friday 9am - 1pm

https://www.peakbrainandbody.com/

Dr. Spencer Zimmerman, 2404 Creel Lane, Ste 101, Wesley Chapel, FL (2026)

05/27/2026

Have you been diagnosed with POTS, dysautonomia, myalgic encephalomyelitis, or long COVID? If so, you've probably been sent to neurology specifically for your headaches and dizziness, but the question that keeps coming to my mind after talking to so many people is why doesn't neurology want to treat this?

This video will likely change the way you think about these diagnoses.

05/25/2026

Happy Memorial Day Everyone, I hope everyone is able to do something they find meaningful today.

05/21/2026

Stress is often part of daily life when you live with the diagnoses of POTS, Myalagic Encephalomyelitis, Long Covid, or MCAS.

Do you really understand how stress is impacting your gut-brain axis and why that actually matters?

05/21/2026

If you have both a concussion and POTS, you probably think one is more important than the other.

Either the concussion is the real problem and the POTS is just there — or the POTS is the primary diagnosis and the concussion you know happened but not sure it matters. What almost nobody is doing is looking at how deeply these two conditions overlap, and why that matters for how you actually get better.

Here's what the research shows, and what I see clinically every single day.

The symptom list for chronic concussion and POTS is nearly identical. Chronic fatigue. Headaches. Dizziness. Poor concentration. Mood changes. Neck pain. Visual changes. Light sensitivity. Noise sensitivity. Sleep disruption.

Many are diagnosed with mood disorders, fibromyalgia, adhd, insomnia, chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) and more.

Outside of the orthostatic changes that define POTS, and the fact that POTS tends to carry more systemic symptoms while concussion tends to be more brain-centered — these two conditions share far more than they differ.

That's not a coincidence. That's biology.

When you look at both sets of research, the same systems are impacted in both.

✅ The vestibular system is significantly disrupted in both.
✅ The oculomotor system is significantly disrupted in both. ✅ Cervical spine proprioception — the position signals your neck sends to your brain — is routinely affected in both.
✅ The brain's immune cells, the microglial cells, are overactivated and driving unchecked neuroinflammation in both. ✅ There's a breach in the blood-brain barrier in both.
✅ A leaky gut in both. Impaired brain energy metabolism in both — which is why busier environments make symptoms worse, why symptoms build as the day goes on, and why both groups tend to be sensitive to glucose changes and often feel better with ketones.
✅ And blood flow and oxygenation to the brain is dysregulated in both — just through different mechanisms.

They have far more in common than they have different. Which means the approach to treating them is often much more similar than most people realize.

What I also find clinically is this: most of you didn't suddenly develop an entirely new set of symptoms when the second condition entered the picture. What you experienced was amplification. The symptoms you already had got louder, harder, more relentless. Maybe you added a few new ones — but mostly it was a magnification of what was already there. That makes sense once you understand how much these two conditions are pulling on the same systems.

Both groups get misdiagnosed. Both get symptoms blamed on mental health and are misunderstood by the medical community, friends, and society as a whole . Both have what's considered an invisible injury — imaging doesn't show it, which means too many providers act like it isn't there. Most providers have no training on these. But objective findings on balance testing, vestibular testing, oculomotor testing, and cognitive testing show up consistently in both. This is not in your head. It is measurable. It is real.

The question isn't which diagnosis matters more. The question is how these two conditions are interacting in your specific case — and building an approach complete enough to address both, because treating one while ignoring the other is exactly why so many of you are still stuck.

05/20/2026

Visual dysfunction is very common in those with POTS, Long COVID, concussion, Lyme, and chronic fatigue syndrome.

In this video, I show you what abnormal looks like as well as improvements that can occur within one month of treatment.

05/20/2026

If you have POTS, your diagnostic journey almost certainly led you to a cardiologist. 👇

And that appointment probably ended one of two ways.

Some of you left validate as you finally have your POTS diagnosis, which is exactly what you came for. After years of being dismissed, someone put a name to what you have been experiencing and that mattered enormously.

Others left frustrated and feeling gaslit. Despite how bad you feel every single day, you were told you do not have POTS. Or testing was normal. Or you were handed a vague explanation that left you no closer to understanding what is actually happening. Sometimes that is true gaslighting. Other times it is a provider who is simply not a strong communicator, which is not unique to cardiology. It is a recurring theme across medicine. Either way you walked out with less clarity than you deserved.

Before talking about where cardiology falls short, it is worth being clear about where it does not.

- What cardiology is excellent at

Evaluating heart structure, electrical conduction, valvular function, and true cardiovascular pathology. When those things need to be ruled out, cardiology is exactly who you want.
When that workup comes back normal, which it does in the overwhelming majority of POTS patients, that is actually important information. It confirms the heart itself is not the source of the problem. The cardiovascular symptoms are real, but that system isn’t the cause.

- What the standard workup looks like

Echocardiogram, EKG, Holter monitor, Orthostatic vital signs, and often Tilt table testing in many cases.

Appropriate tools for the questions cardiology is trained to ask. The problem is not the tools. It’s what to do with the results of these tools when everything is normal but orthostatic/tilt table testing.

- Where treatment falls short

Once POTS is identified and structural pathology is ruled out, the treatment conversation looks like this.

Salt, fluids, electrolytes, and compression stockings. Trialing a variety of medications: Fludrocortisone, Midodrine, Beta blockers or ivabradine, and Pyridostigmine. IV fluids may be recommended but most have to fight to get them.

Who has already had this treatment and what were the results? Who thinks if they could get some of these they may feel better?

The honest reality the research confirms: there are no FDA-approved medications specifically for POTS. Every medication on that list is off-label. A systematic review of every available randomized controlled trial for POTS concluded there are no well-powered studies guiding treatment.

Every one of those treatments is aimed at the same target, even if how it works is slightly different. The cardiovascular numbers: heart rate and blood pressure. Every one of them is treating the downstream effect of the problem, not the problem itself.

This is why heart rate can improve on medication while dizziness, brain fog, fatigue, and post-exertional crashes remain completely unchanged. The heart rate was never the source. It was the compensation. Treating the compensation while the source goes unaddressed is why managing rather than recovering becomes the norm, and why so many people eventually stop trying altogether. That is heartbreaking and my goal is to empower people to finally get help.

- Why this is not the cardiologist's fault

As annoyed as you are with your cardiologist because you want them to do something more, they are also frustrated. They just do not do a great job conveying it.

They are being asked to help hundreds of thousands of people being sent to their offices, and they know they do not actually have a solution for you. Because they know, time and time again, from doing extensive testing, it is not a cardiac issue. They are being handed a problem that does not belong in their lane, with no clear path to refer you somewhere that can actually address it, and no tools available to them that meet what is actually happening.

POTS was classified as a cardiac arrhythmia until 2022. Of course the treatment model is cardiovascular. The entire institutional framework was built around the wrong classification from the start. That misclassification is still failing people today, even though it’s known to be a type of dysautonomia.

The next posts in this series get into what the research actually shows is driving POTS at a neurological and physiological level, and what a more complete approach looks like when the right questions finally get asked.

💬 What was your cardiology experience like navigating POTS? Did you leave validated, frustrated, or somewhere in between?

📌 Steinberg RS et al. US Cardiology Review. 2023;17:e13. doi: 10.15420/usc.2022.35 Lau DH et al. Heart Lung Circ. 2026;35(2):171–185. doi: 10.1016/j.hlc.2025.09.004 Wells R et al. Systematic review of randomized trials for POTS. Autonomic Neuroscience. 2025.

05/20/2026

Is this your daily life with POTS, chronic fatigue syndrome, migraines, and EDS? (this may be you or your teenager)

You wake up and the first thing you do is take inventory. How bad is today going to be and what aren’t you going to be able to do? Because there's no such thing as a good day anymore — there are just days that are less brutal than others.

The dizziness is always there. Turning your head, standing up, walking across a room and changing direction — it doesn't take much. The headaches are daily. The nausea is daily. The exhaustion isn't the kind that sleep fixes — you know that by now.

And then there are the flares.

Every four to six weeks, you get sick. And when you get sick, it's not what normal people mean when they say that. It takes you down completely, and every symptom you already live with gets way worse. Illness lasts a week and when you are better the flare takes another week before things quiet back down to whatever your baseline is.

If you're a woman, your cycle does the same thing — a flare every single month for 5-8 days, and another 5 to 7 days after it ends before your body settles again.

So there's really no such thing as two good weeks in a month. There are just two weeks that aren't as horrible as the others.

You've been the person who always gets sick. For as long as you can remember.

You've seen ten, fifteen, maybe twenty providers by now. You have the diagnoses, and yet nobody has actually moved the needle. You've been told your labs are normal. You've been handed another referral. You've been made to feel like you're exaggerating something that is very, very real. You don’t even want to talk about it anymore and honestly are ready to accept your life isn’t going to improve.

You are not imagining this. And you are not out of options.

These aren't separate problems running alongside each other — they're layers of the same broken system. Your immune system isn't recovering cleanly, so every illness destabilizes your nervous system all over again. Your cycle triggers the same immune response, so that's another hit every single month and then layer low ferritin on it. And your brain is trying to process movement and balance through a system that's been inflamed and dysregulated for years — which is why even gentle head movement makes you feel unstable and disoriented.

To actually help someone like you, all of it has to be addressed in the right order.

That means starting with what keeps making you crash — rebuilding your immune system so that getting sick means two bad days, not two lost weeks, and stabilizing the hormonal triggers that send you into a flare every month. That foundation has to come first. Because doing vestibular and sensory retraining before that foundation is stable doesn't just fail — it can make things worse. Your brain cannot recalibrate inside a system that's still on fire.

For local patients, the first two to three months are dedicated entirely to that foundation. Only then do we layer in the targeted work to retrain the systems driving the dizziness and movement sensitivity. For patients who travel to us, we still expect improvement as we can address it all together at the same time but there still may be some small flares as the immune system and cycles are being sorted out.

Most of our patients have been everywhere before they find us. We're often told, "You're the last place we're trying." The hardest part is knowing many of them could have been helped years earlier — if someone had just looked at all of it together and had a complete enough plan to match what they were actually facing. Others won’t become patients because their spirits are broken and won’t try again.

Those who try get their lives back 80-90% of the time and no longer let their symptoms run it for them.

There are answers. There are solutions. It just takes a different and more complete approach than anything you've tried before.

05/19/2026

When you hear dysautonomia, you likely think about changes in blood pressure and heart rate.

In this video, I explain what you need to know about the autonomic nervous system and why you get so many of the other symptoms as well.

05/19/2026

Did you accumulate a lot of diagnoses after being diagnosed with POTS? Or did you already have several before? 👇

Maybe your list looks something like this:
🔹 Ehlers-Danlos syndrome or hypermobility
🔹 MCAS
🔹 Myalgic encephalomyelitis or chronic fatigue syndrome
🔹 Fibromyalgia
🔹 Long COVID
🔹 Chronic Lyme disease
🔹 Post-concussion syndrome

If you are reading that list and nodding at multiple, you are not alone. And what most people are never told is why these conditions show up together so consistently, because that explanation changes everything about how you should be thinking about your care.

This is not a coincidence and it is not just genetics

When people receive multiple diagnoses at once, the first instinct is often to ask whether it is genetic. Whether they were simply built this way and there is nothing to be done about it.

Here is what is worth knowing. Hypermobile EDS, despite being a connective tissue condition, has no confirmed genetic test. There is no gene that explains it. Myalgic encephalomyelitis has no known causative gene either. These diagnoses are clinical, meaning they are based on symptom patterns and examination findings, not on a genetic blueprint or specific lab that predetermines your outcome.

Multiple diagnoses do not mean you are beyond help. They mean there is an underlying process, or several overlapping processes, that are not being addressed as a complete picture. And when that picture does get addressed comprehensively, something interesting happens. It is not just one symptom or one diagnosis that improves. Multiple things improve simultaneously. Which makes complete sense, because if you searched each of these conditions in isolation you would quickly notice they share an enormous number of symptoms with only slight differences between them. Same biology. Different labels.

The most common conditions that travel with POTS and why

These are not separate diseases that happened to show up at the same time. They share underlying mechanisms and in many cases the same root drivers.

🔶 Hypermobile EDS and hypermobility spectrum disorders affect blood vessel walls, joint stability, and the structural support of the autonomic nervous system simultaneously. Not just flexible joints. The connective tissue that is supposed to provide structure to blood vessels and nerve pathways throughout the body is compromised, and the autonomic consequences of that are significant. (Depending on the type it impacts individuals differently)

🔶 Mast cell activation syndrome directly destabilizes the autonomic nervous system. When mast cells activate inappropriately the histamine and inflammatory mediators they release affect vascular tone, neurological stability, and gut function all at once. Many people notice their POTS symptoms flare during MCAS reactions. That is not coincidence. That is mechanism. Same thing happens in reverse, impaired nervous system leads to increased mast cell response.

🔶 ME/CFS overlaps with POTS to a degree most people are never told about. Up to 90% of ME/CFS patients experience autonomic dysfunction and 20 to 30% meet full POTS criteria. The post-exertional crashes, cognitive dysfunction, and unrefreshing sleep are not separate problems layered on top of POTS. They are expressions of the same underlying neuroimmune dysregulation.

🔶 Fibromyalgia shares the same pattern of central sensitization, neuroinflammation, and autonomic dysregulation. The widespread pain that defines fibromyalgia and the autonomic instability of POTS are driven by overlapping neurological mechanisms.

🔶 Long COVID has driven an enormous surge in new POTS cases and made this entire conversation impossible to ignore. The viral trigger, immune dysregulation, and neuroinflammation that follow COVID infection produce the same neuroimmune disruption underlying POTS in ways the research now documents clearly.

🔶 Chronic Lyme disease and its co-infections follow a similar neuroimmune pattern. The persistent immune dysregulation and neuroinflammation that characterize chronic Lyme directly impair autonomic function and produce a symptom picture that overlaps significantly with POTS and ME/CFS. The same underlying process. A different initial trigger.

🔶 Post-concussion syndrome deserves particular attention here. The systems most commonly injured in a concussion are the vestibular system and the oculomotor system. Those are the exact same systems that are impaired in POTS and dysautonomia. This is not a coincidence either. The vestibular system directly regulates blood pressure and heart rate responses during positional changes through the vestibular sympathetic reflex. When it is damaged by a concussion, the autonomic instability of POTS follows naturally. Many people in this community had a concussion years before their POTS diagnosis and never connected the two. That connection matters enormously for how recovery gets approached.

Why this matters for your care

If your providers are treating each of these conditions in isolation, with separate specialists who are not communicating with each other, you will keep hitting a ceiling.

A cardiologist managing the vascular effects of POTS. A rheumatologist managing the EDS. An allergist managing the MCAS. A neurologist managing the migraines. An infectious disease doctor managing the Lyme. None of them seeing the full picture and understanding how their part influences the rest. None of them addressing what is driving all of it simultaneously.

These conditions cluster together because they share underlying drivers. Vestibular and oculomotor system impairment. Neuroinflammation, immune dysregulation, autonomic regulatory dysfunction, resulting in impaired cerebral blood flow. Metabolic and hormonal contributions further weaken the system.

Treating one while ignoring the others produces partial improvement at best. And partial improvement after years of effort is exactly what keeps people in this community believing they will never fully get their life back and prevents them from trying again which is heart breaking.

That belief is understandable given what the current system produces. It is also not accurate. It is the outcome of an incomplete approach, not a prediction of what is possible when the full picture gets addressed.

It is not about collecting diagnoses. It is about getting your life back.

Next post we go into how cardiology evaluates and treats POTS, what that process looks like, and where it starts to fall short for the overwhelming majority of people who go through it.

💬 How many of these diagnoses are you managing alongside POTS? Did anyone ever explain to you why they tend to show up together?

Citation: US Cardiology Review 2023;17:e13.

05/19/2026

Do you struggle with POTS and are wondering what medications can do for you, or maybe you've already tried medications and were a little disappointed by the results?

This graphic is from a research study that looked at the benefits of ivabradine, which is probably the most talked about medication for POTS, and propranolol, which is a beta blocker.

Here's what they found: while the heart rate did improve and tachycardia wasn't as bad, there were no significant changes in symptoms at all. This reinforces what many of you have experienced and what I see clinically. Just because you improve a vital sign does not mean you're truly helping someone.

This further reinforces my thoughts, which are based off the research, that the overfocus on cardiac mechanisms is hurting people. We really should be focusing on nervous system regulation and identifying what factors impact it, versus evaluating the effect of an issue. This is like trying to clean up something without figuring out where the mess is coming from in the first place. You will never win if you're not asking the right questions and focused in the right area.

If you tried these medications did you find it helped?

05/18/2026

Blood pooling is a common symptom that so many individuals who've been diagnosed with POTS, dysautonomia, Myalgic encephalomyelitis, Ehlers-Danlos, and long COVID experience.

In this video, I explain to you why this actually happens.

Dr. Spencer Zimmerman

05/27/2026

05/25/2026

05/21/2026

05/21/2026

05/20/2026

05/20/2026

05/20/2026

05/19/2026

05/19/2026

05/19/2026

05/18/2026

Address

Opening Hours

Website

Alerts

Contact The Practice

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Monday	9am - 5pm
Tuesday	9am - 5pm
Wednesday	9am - 5pm
Thursday	9am - 5pm
Friday	9am - 1pm