What this curriculum is
Most education on dysautonomia stops at the label. It teaches clinicians to recognize POTS, ME/CFS, Long COVID, or post-concussion syndrome, and then to manage the symptoms those labels describe. This curriculum begins where that approach ends. It teaches the underlying machinery: how the autonomic nervous system regulates blood flow to the brain, where that regulation breaks down, and why the same symptom can arise from several entirely different mechanical failures. The organizing conviction is that a symptom is not a diagnosis, and a diagnosis is not an explanation. Every unit is built to move a clinician from naming a condition to understanding the system that produced it.
The course spans five units, from the cellular hardware of the autonomic nervous system through homeostatic and allostatic physiology, the pathophysiology of regulatory failure, clinical evaluation and localization, and finally the principles of functional restoration. It is sequential by design. Each unit assumes and builds on the one before it, so that by the end a clinician can reason from a presenting symptom back to the specific structure or reflex that is failing.
Five units. Twenty-four modules. More than forty custom interactive diagrams. Over one million words of teaching, written and structured specifically for this course rather than assembled from existing summaries.
Built on the literature, not on opinion
The course is taught at three levels for every concept. A clinical analogy makes the idea intuitive, the structural neuroanatomy grounds it in real anatomy, and the deep mechanism explains, at the level of receptors, reflex arcs, and blood flow, why the system behaves as it does. That third layer is where the course earns its credibility, because none of it is asserted without a source. The discipline applied throughout was simple and strict: every mechanistic claim has to trace back to the primary literature, and anything that could not be supported did not survive into the final text.
The result is a curriculum woven through with the work of the researchers who actually built this field. The autonomic physiology rests heavily on Wilfrid Jänig. The cerebral blood flow and orthostatic intolerance mechanisms draw on Julian Stewart, Marvin Medow, Andrew Ocon, and the orthostatic cerebral hypoperfusion work of Peter Novak and Andrea Del Pozzi. The cerebral perfusion findings of C.M.C. van Campen and Frans Visser are integrated directly into the localization framework, alongside the plasma volume work of Satish Raj and the structural anatomy of Frank Netter.
These are not decorative references. The course contains more than 340 inline citations, and the names above appear throughout the text as the mechanisms they established are taught, applied, and tested.
Audited before it was taught
A course is only as good as the scrutiny it survives. Before any of this material was published, the entire curriculum was put through a rigorous system of review and auditing. Every unit was examined for clinical accuracy and utility by checks built to challenge the weakest claims rather than flatter the strongest, the same demanding pressure a skeptical clinician would apply.
Checks, critiques, and revisions
The auditing surfaced four specific, substantive critiques: that universal training thresholds did not account for age and fitness variation, that the mitochondrial literature in ME/CFS was under-engaged, that a claim about absolute hypovolemia needed the plasma-volume data integrated, and that the course lacked a referral pathway for transcranial Doppler access. Each was answered point by point. Some defenses held, and some did not. Where the review was right, the course was changed: the hypovolemia point was conceded and hemoglobin-mass data was added as a secondary failure mode. Where a defense was unpersuasive, that was recorded honestly rather than papered over.
That honesty is the point. The course is positioned as the most rigorous resource of its kind that we are aware of, while remaining candid that it is a living document under continued review rather than a finished, externally accredited authority. Formal continuing-education accreditation is a separate process that is being pursued on its own track, and this page does not claim it.
Four tiers of mastery, not a video you watch
Understanding is verified, not assumed. Every concept is assessed across four escalating tiers. The first confirms recall of the mechanism at the block level. The second requires tracing a full physiological pathway. The third is a module synthesis exam, and the fourth is a localization lab that asks the learner to reason from symptoms back to the failing structure, the skill the entire course exists to build. Progress is gated, so a learner cannot advance on momentum alone. By the end of a unit, a clinician knows precisely which mechanisms they have mastered and which still need work.
Who built this
The clinical authority and the production are two distinct roles, and the course is honest about both. The medical model is Dr. Keiser's. The curriculum was researched and written by a dedicated content team. Neither claims to be the other.
Dr. Nathan Keiser, DC, DACNB, FABBIR
The curriculum is built on the clinical model of Dr. Nathan Keiser, a board-certified chiropractic neurologist and the founder of the Keiser Clinic, the neurological rehabilitation practice that bears his name and specializes in measuring and training the systems that regulate blood flow to the brain. He holds a Doctor of Chiropractic, is a Diplomate of the American Chiropractic Neurology Board, and is a Fellow of the American Board of Brain Injury and Rehabilitation. Over years of treating patients that conventional pathways had given up on, Dr. Keiser developed a measurement-first, brain-first framework for understanding why autonomic regulation fails and how function can be restored.
His clinical approach refuses to accept a diagnostic label as an explanation. Instead of assuming POTS or post-concussion syndrome accounts for a patient's symptoms, his clinic measures brain function, cerebral blood flow, and autonomic regulation under stress, using tools more often found in research settings, including transcranial Doppler ultrasound, capnography, and video-oculography, to find what is actually driving the presentation. This course is that framework, made teachable.
Chris Giuseppini
The curriculum was researched, written, and produced by Chris Giuseppini, founder of the Dysautonomia Research Registry. His role was to take a working clinical model and an enormous body of neurophysiology research and turn it into a teachable, rigorously sourced curriculum. That meant reading the primary literature, structuring it into a coherent progression, and writing the instruction one mechanism at a time.
The defining discipline he brought to the project was simple: no claim made it through without a source behind it. Every mechanistic statement traces back to the primary literature, and anything that could not be supported was cut.
An open account of the tooling
This course was built with the help of artificial intelligence, and we want to document exactly how. AI was not used to invent medical claims or to replace clinical judgment. It was used as an instrument of scale and rigor: to analyze source material, to structure and pace a vast curriculum, to draft and redraft under constant human direction, to build the diagrams and the website, and to audit the whole thing through layered checks and review. The clinical truth came from Dr. Keiser and the literature. The tooling is how that body of knowledge became more than a million carefully sourced words.
Source analysis and structure with NotebookLM
The raw clinical material and source literature were analyzed and organized using Google's NotebookLM, which was used to map the territory, surface the connections between mechanisms, and inform the structure and pacing of the units before a single lesson was written. A single unit of source material ran to thousands of lines, and this analysis stage is what kept a million-word curriculum coherent rather than sprawling.
Writing, syllabus, and outlines under continuous human review
Every unit was drafted, audited, and rewritten through an iterative process of outlines, syllabi, and lesson-by-lesson revision. This was not a single generation pass. It was a long sequence of back-and-forth between the writer and the tooling, with the human setting the structure, demanding citations, rejecting weak passages, and verifying claims against the literature at each step. The intensity of that revision loop is the reason the final text holds together under scrutiny.
Interactive diagrams built with Claude Code
The more than forty custom diagrams in the course, including interactive figures that let a learner manipulate a physiological variable and watch the system respond, were designed and built in code rather than dropped in as stock images. Each one was authored specifically to teach the mechanism it sits beside.
The platform, also built with Claude Code
The website you are reading, including its navigation, the four-tier assessment engine, the progress tracking, the reading experience, and the user-experience design, was built in code with Claude Code. It is a purpose-built learning environment rather than an off-the-shelf course template.
Hosted on Cloudflare
The platform is deployed on Cloudflare's global network, which keeps it fast and reliable for learners anywhere, and gives the project a clean, modern infrastructure to grow on as accounts, credentials, and accreditation come online.
Checks and balances as a final gate
Before the course was considered ready, it was run through layered checks and audits of scrutiny, a system built to make the material ironclad. Anything that did not hold up was sent back and revised. This was a required step, not an optional polish.