What Is Functional Neurology? Is It Legitimate?

What Is Functional Neurology?

Functional neurology works on how well the brain and nervous system are working. A practitioner measures a function, gives a targeted input and checks whether the measurement improves. It sits alongside conventional neurology, which rules out and manages disease.

How I Got Into Functional Neurology

It started with a friend. In college, a good friend of mine got sick, and I got tired of watching her go from specialist to specialist and get no help. It was always try this medication, then try that one. Some of them made her feel terrible and changed her moods. She eventually went the holistic route, and as soon as you do that, it's the wild west.

I was looking for answers and came across a trailer for a PBS special about a chiropractor. The only thing I knew about chiropractors then was that a friend who played football got his back adjusted and it stopped hurting. This one was different. The program followed 3 cases of profound problems, like vertigo and fear, the kind of thing we all assumed people just lived with. I was in college, and it took me aback. It made me incredibly curious. I ordered the videos, watched them and thought, "This is what I'm going to do."

I didn't know what functional neurology was yet. I knew that for people who needed chronic help, this looked useful.

Getting to the point where I could start practicing chiropractic neurology took a 12-year process: 4 years of college, 4 years of graduate school, 3 to 4 years in the neurology program, and then the board exams. I'm still learning today. It also gave me a different way to look at problems. We weren't focused only on chemistry, or on what medication or surgery we could use. We asked how the body is already built and what receptors it has.

What Is Functional Neurology Based On?

Functional neurology says it works through neuroplasticity. Neural plasticity itself is believed to be the basis of learning in the intact brain and of relearning in the damaged brain through physical rehabilitation (Kleim, 2008). Our team explains it with how kids learn math. A child learns counting first, then stacks each new skill on the last, and practice builds the new connections between neurons that each skill depends on. Our team's approach to concussion rehab follows the same order, starting with the simple skills and building up.

The word "functional" also appears in a different diagnosis. Functional neurological disorder (FND) describes genuinely experienced problems with movement, sensation or thinking that come from how the nervous system is working, such as weakness or tremor (Hallett, 2022). As chiropractors use the term, functional neurology is a rehabilitation approach. A 2024 paper argues that POTS and other common autonomic disorders aren't functional neurologic disorders (Blitshteyn, 2024). A separate article explains how FND and POTS are linked and how to tell them apart.

What Does a Functional Neurologist Do?

A visit has 3 steps. The practitioner measures a function, gives a targeted input for the area that measurement points to and retests the same measure. Published functional neurology papers describe inputs such as proprioceptive reflex work, trigger point desensitization and a blink reflex technique (Escribano-Colmena, 2025). If the measure doesn't move, our team changes the approach. In the video below, our team puts it this way: "we put it to the test and if it works then we'll see a change in our diagnostic tools." Patients with vestibular dysfunction often don't feel themselves making progress, and objective numbers show them the small wins they'd otherwise miss.

Functional neurology tends to get lumped in with PT and vestibular rehab, which are wonderful, and what sets it apart is how fast the feedback comes. Say you're dizzy and see an ENT, who sends you to vestibular rehab. The diagnosis happens in one place and the therapy in another, and you don't know how well the 2 will merge. If you check back with the ENT 8 weeks later and say you're still not feeling well, nobody knows what happened in rehab. You don't know if they played pickleball or did head movements.

In our clinic the bulk of the process goes into a nuanced diagnosis, and then we recheck it with the therapy. We measure something, give an input and measure again, and we want to corkscrew that loop all the way up into improvement. We see what works and what doesn't, and we move quickly.

Measure improves Measure doesn't move

Measure improves: in the field's description, the targeted input lights the intact circuit and the signal spreads to the neighboring one. Here the retest bar rises past the baseline, and the loop continues to the next round.

Measure doesn't move: the neighboring circuit stays dim and the retest bar stays level with the baseline. Our team changes the plan, then gives a new targeted input.

Replay

Our team decides what to measure using the process in how this works, and eye movement testing is one of the tests it uses.

What Does a Functional Neurologist Do Differently?

Think of symptoms on a continuum. If you've had a stroke or you have Parkinson's disease, there is damage in the brain, and by the time we get to damage there are fewer things you can do to use the body's own system to help. With concussion and dysautonomia, we're not in that space. There's usually no irreparable damage. The system just isn't working as effectively as it should.

Conventional neurology is built to manage disease and keep you alive, and once you're stable the job is done. That standard of care matters. Our team works alongside it, and the 2 answer different questions. Ours is how well a system is working and whether a targeted input improves it, and the day-to-day gains in how people feel and operate are the part that gets less focus in conventional routes.

A DACNB-certified functional neurologist holds a Doctor of Chiropractic degree plus post-graduate training and isn't a medical doctor. Our team includes a board-certified chiropractic neurologist (DC, DACNB, FABBIR), and medication decisions stay with your prescribing physician. Functional neurology doesn't replace a medical workup, so new or sudden weakness, speech changes, severe headache or fainting need a physician first.

What Training and Tests Does a Chiropractic Neurologist Have?

How Does the Training Compare With a Neurologist's?

The American Chiropractic Neurology Board certifies practitioners. Eligibility to sit for the Diplomate exam, which earns the DACNB, requires a Doctor of Chiropractic degree or its equivalent, a license to practice and at least 300 credit hours of postdoctoral instruction in neurology from a program approved by the Commission for Accreditation of Graduate Education in Neurology (American Chiropractic Neurology Board, 2025). The board runs an annual computer-based exam and an annual practical exam (American Chiropractic Neurology Board, n.d.). Our team includes an Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurology at the Carrick Institute who counts FR Carrick, who founded functional neurology, as a mentor.

A neurologist is a physician with an MD or DO degree. An accredited neurology residency accepts graduates of accredited US medical and osteopathic schools and qualifying international graduates, and the accrediting council states that "a complete neurology residency requires 48 months of education," which includes broad clinical experience in general internal medicine, such as a 12-month year before 3 years of neurology (ACGME, 2026). The 2 paths train for different jobs. Neurology residency covers "diagnosis, treatment, management, prevention, and investigation of nervous system disorders," including neuroimaging and inpatient care (ACGME, 2026).

What Does Our Team Test?

Our team describes the job as finding where in the brain an error is happening when the scans look normal. In the video below, our team compares the approach to a mechanic who takes the car "for a ride" instead of only reading the codes. The exam watches how a hand moves, whether it moves cleanly or with a tremor, how a person walks and how the senses tie together. Vestibular therapy, vision therapy or physical therapy then becomes the input, aimed at the area the exam pointed to.

What Are the Limits?

A medical neurologist uses CT, MRI or EEG to find a stroke, seizure activity or a growth in the brain, and our team describes its own work as looking for errors below what imaging shows. That makes functional neurology something to add to a medical workup. Proof is the other limit: a 2019 systematic review rated the spinal manipulation studies it included "generally of 'low' or 'medium' methodological quality" (Meyer, 2019).

What Does the Evidence Say About Functional Neurology?

Our short answer is that it's a real practice with a real credential, and the brain plasticity science it builds on is well supported (Kleim, 2008). Its own methods haven't been shown to work in independent controlled studies, and the independent reviews say so (Demortier, 2020; Meyer, 2018).

Studies of functional neurology methods themselves are small. They're mostly single-session studies in healthy volunteers and case reports, and the 2 recent ones cited here come from 1 research group whose authors are affiliated with NeuroReEvolution, a proprietary functional neurology method (Escribano-Colmena, 2025; Rey-Mota, 2025). A single session in healthy volunteers, or in 1 child, can't show that a method works.

Independent reviewers have looked at the field. A 2019 systematic review of 18 studies of spinal manipulation, which the authors say functional neurology promotes, found inconsistent effects on "brain function" and concluded: "It is therefore premature to promote the use of spinal manipulation as a treatment to improve 'brain function'" (Meyer, 2019). A 2020 overview of the 121 published texts by FR Carrick, who founded the approach, which critically reviewed his controlled studies, concluded: "We found no acceptable evidence in favour of effect/benefit of the FN approach" (Demortier, 2020). A 2018 review of the journal Functional Neurology, Rehabilitation, and Ergonomics concluded that it "contains no acceptable evidence on the effect or benefit of FN" (Meyer, 2018). A 2023 scoping review found support for the idea that conservative care may affect the "neurophysiological lesion," and found evidence lacking for targeting therapies to distinct neuronal areas to treat specific disease states (Taylor, 2023).

The video at the top of this page is our team's view. It admits that research from private clinics is "mostly case series," because a private clinic more worried about the patient than the study finds it hard to fit every patient into the same study design.

Our team's position is that the plasticity science is well supported and that proof for functional neurology's own methods doesn't exist yet. Because of that, our team retests each patient after an input, so each person can see whether their own numbers move. A change in 1 person can still have other explanations, such as practice, the placebo effect or natural recovery.

Who Can Functional Neurology Help?

The published evidence doesn't show who benefits. Our team uses functional neurology when testing shows a system working poorly with no structural damage to explain it, such as dysautonomia and lingering concussion symptoms. Our articles on post-concussion treatment and how the brain controls the autonomic system go further on those 2 areas.

Functional Neurology: FAQ

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