← The School of Greatness
The School of Greatness
This Is The #1 Most Powerful Tool You Have for Health & Longevity
01:34:31
Renowned neurosurgeon Dr. Kevin Tracey reveals how the vagus nerve controls inflammation and chronic pain, sharing breakthrough research on electrical stimulation that's helping patients with severe autoimmune diseases walk again. Discover the mind-body connection that could revolutionize how we treat everything, from rheumatoid arthritis to depression, through targeted nervous system interventions.
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- [00:00]
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There is one main thing that is blocking you from reaching your full potential and it's all because you're trying to do everything alone and that's a big problem because real growth happens when you build a community when you're in a room full of people who want to see you thrive who support you becoming your best self and if that's something you're looking for then make sure to join me at the summit of greatness live at the iconic dolby theatre in in los angeles down in hollywood september twelfth and thirteenth because this year is a powerful lineup of incredible speakers and performers like gabby bernstein like doctor tara swart like brenda bouchard amy purdy and so many more inspiring surprise guests you'll experience a couple days of transformation and inspiration and deep connection with a community that actually gets you and wants to see you thrive tickets are selling fast so go to lewishouse dot com tickets right now to get your seats bring your friends and family and i can't wait to see you there at the summit of greatness very soon if you are looking to improve the quality of your health if you feel like your health has been out of whack you feel depressed overwhelmed you feel like you're just dragging physically emotionally mentally there might be something off with your immune system and in this episode world renowned neurosurgeon and medical innovator doctor kevin tracy is here to explore the profound role of the vagus nerve what ancient physicians once called the great nerve and how it's key to both your health and healing again doctor tracy is gonna break down for you the science in a way that's accessible and powerful explaining how this critical nerve in our body connects your brain to every organ in your body and place plays a central role in emotional regulation inflammation and inner harmony again the key to ultimate fulfillment in life is the ability to emotionally regulate our emotions and if we have inflammation if we have discord and dis ease in our body it's probably because the nervous system and the the vagus nerve is out of alignment and he talks about the different strategies on how to improve this so you can have ultimate peace and ultimate harmony in your life fascinating research fascinating science and strategies to improve the quality of your life and your health right now i hope you enjoy this make sure to share this with a friend and without further ado let's dive into this episode.
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This well first let me say thanks for having me on it's great to be here and congratulations on all the success you have had and are having your success is great thank you thank.
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A
You the great nerve and greatness you.
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B
Know so the name the great nerve comes from the fascination that the world has had in this nerve for two thousand years galen arguably the first physician scientist in ancient rome used to call this the great nerve so maybe we should start by what it is first.
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Of all so what is the vagus.
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Nerve what is the vagus nerve what is the great nerve first you have two of them like two thumbs and two kidneys one on each side it runs down here starts at about the level your ear runs down your neck across your chest into your abdomen and it touches all the organs in your body that you don't think about all day long all the organs that are operating when you're healthy in complete harmony because their reflexes are being controlled by the brain and the vagus nerve to balance the function of all these organs so why is it great because it's the only nerve in the body that if you cut it on both sides sides up high you die wow it's required for life it's required for health.
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A
What if you just cut one side.
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Then you suffer the reason that the vagus nerve cut on both sides leads to death is because it's critically important in sending signals that coordinate the function of the heart and the lung if you only cut one side that you can accommodate that interesting but it's not.
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A
Good okay so that's the vagus nerve well and does it connect to the brain and goes through the heart as.
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Well it runs so that's the next important point it runs from the brain to the body and back so it's a two way highway in fact eighty percent of the signals that travel in the vagus nerve go from the body to the brain only twenty percent give or take run from the brain back to the body now the key to this we keep talking about the vagus nerve and i already said you have two so it should be vagus nerves on each side you have one hundred thousand fibers so much it's much more proper what we understand today to say that you don't have a vagus nerve you have two hundred thousand vagus nerves and what we've learned my colleagues and i in the laboratory at the feinstein institute and now in dozens if not hundreds of labs around the world is we've learned that each and every one of these fibers two hundred thousand fibers has a job description it has a beginning and an end and the signals that it carries are incredibly specific so some you asked about the heart some go to the heart and the fibers that go from the brain to the heart tend to slow heart rate some go to the spleen and other organs of the immune system and my colleagues and i discovered that the fibers that go to the immune system slow inflammation or inhibit it or stop it other fibers go to the pancreas to control insulin other fibers go to the intestines to control the processing of your food so you don't have a vagus nerve you have two hundred thousand vagus nerves and when someone says to me i want to do something to stimulate my vagus nerve i say oh really which one and that's important and you've done.
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A
I mean as a neurosurgeon you were telling me you've done over a thousand either brain surgeries or spinal cord surgeries over a decade of time what was the greatest lesson you learned about the nervous system and how the brain and body connects or works in unison through all those surgeries you did that it's.
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Complicated that's the main lesson the main lesson i learned about how complicated it is is rooted in the fact that when two neurons interact let's take let's go from one hundred billion neurons in your brain and nervous system with trillions of connections when you realize that each and every one of those neurons interacting interacts reflexively a signal into one neuron from another neuron means i'm going to do this a signal in from a different neuron to that neuron means i'm going to do that well one of the fathers of neuroscience explained it in the nineteen tens very very simply and in a way that i that can't be better explained charles sherrington said if you understand a simple reflex so that's when the doctor hits your knee the doctor hits your knee with a reflex hammer your leg goes up and you say who did that basically what happens is there's a sensory activation there's a sensory neuron into your spinal cord and that activates one of these connections called the synapse which sends signals back down through a motor neuron to the muscles in your quadriceps femoris and your leg goes up charrington said if you understand a simple reflex then you realize if you put two reflexes together or three or four or more on and on and on till you get up to however many billions you can assemble a nervous system but the basis of what's happening is reflex the third thing he said so you understand a reflex you can build a nervous system and the third thing he said was there's no such thing as a simple reflex because they are all connected so that's what i learned is the most complicated thing we as researchers as scientists as doctors we tend to reduce complicated things to simpler and simpler component parts and you have to do that to figure out how things work but at the end of the day they're all connected everything's connected everything's connected so the brain as the source of your mind and your body as the part of your nervous system is in fact all connected plato was right you can't cure a disease without also curing the soul interesting what does that mean that means that the networks that control your brain and your mind are inextricably linked to the networks that are controlling the health of your organs wow and back to where we started the principle i like to call it a transatlantic cable connecting the brain to the body and all its organs is the vagus nerve people call it a highway but a highway is full of traffic and is messy it's more of a transatlantic cable and so you can imagine you've got the server in new york transmitting movies to wherever paris or london and the submarine comes along and decides the submariners want to watch a movie so they patch onto the cable and they listen in and they project the movie up on the wall and they watch whatever gone with the wind now some today in the billions of web impressions keep pointing at the vagus nerve and saying as if the movie's in the vagus nerve the movie's not in the vagus nerve it's not in the cable it's on the server in new york the information is being transmitted through the transatlantic cable so in.
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This case which is the vagus nerve.
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B
Which is the vagus nerve it's the.
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A
Great and there's something you said about a quote from plato what was that.
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B
Quote again that you can't heal the body unless you also heal the soul.
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So if someone is feeling some type of pain in their body or inflammation in their body or chronic illness that's been going on for a long time or whatever something's going on they have anxiety depression they have irritable bowel syndrome they have something happening where it's like how do i get through this eczema some type of condition that they don't know where it's from am i hearing you say that when you can start to heal the soul or the mind that's connected to the soul the thinking the intention behind the soul then you can create harmony within the body and heal the body is that what i'm.
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B
Hearing you say i think what plato meant is that they're the same thing and it depends so let's break it down to like something first principle something so pick one of the conditions you.
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Listed call us like an eczema or something or inflammation in the body and.
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B
The joints how about inflammation in the joints there you go inflammation in the joints like an arthritis or like arthritis inflammation in the joints can come on very noticeably with pain inflammation is pain swelling redness heat so that can come on and it can be quite noticeable and the pain and the presence of inflammation activates all of that activates sensory nerves to send signals into the brain in a case of mild say inflammation of a joint because you jammed your finger catching a football that inflammation is usually self limited and self resolving because the signals that go into the brain and through the autonomic nervous system activate signals that come back down to the body to slow down the inflammation when the joint is in healed or healing now let's imagine for a second in that simplest of cases that the wires going in or out aren't working properly for whatever reason if the signal to turn off inflammation doesn't come the inflammation can persist and persisting inflammation now can cause damage to the tissues it originally started to protect so that's the simplest of examples and that's just right now focusing on the body we haven't said anything about the mind now let's put the mind in place the arrival of a pain signal in the brain activates reflexes to protect the body yes some of those quote unquote they're called stress reflexes or fight or flight or sympathetic reflexes have significant benefit if you need to run away from attacker a lion or a bad guy then it's clearly clearly beneficial to have the energy and to not be worried about the pain forget about it that's what happens it's.
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A
Flooding adrenaline into the body so you don't feel the pain for that period.
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Of time right the young woman who picks the car up off her injured child so these signals coming back down acutely in large amounts will tend to dampen and slow down inflammation acute fight or flight inhibits inflammation interesting but let's say the wires are broken again now the inflammation's not inhibited okay because the signal didn't get there now what do you have now you have pain day after day after day after day now you don't have massive fight or flight now you have chronic low grade activation of fight or flight that's pro inflammatory so chronic stress chronic anxiety actually is an inflammatory condition where the presence of inflammation gets worse not better so it's complicated but if you walk through it step by step you can break down.
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A
The components but doesn't the inflammation i mean obviously it's in the body but what i'm hearing you say is that there's a strong connection to the way we think the intention behind our thinking the emphasis of the quality of our thinking that is influencing i guess the electricity to send or not send or flow or not flow whatever it needs to actually heat heal or am i.
- [16:51]
B
Off there no you're not off but you're correctly paraphrasing what billions and billions of web impressions and web recommendations say really absolutely so many of these things are being repeated over and over like mantras when you break down to what are the reflexes what are the neural circuits the that underlie this that we can put under conscious control you kind of run you come you run up against a wall very quickly what is it you can consciously control you can consciously control your breath rate you can slow down your breathing if it's not some you can't always but in this example you can slow down your breathing have you just stimulated your vagus nerve well maybe right maybe you calmed it right you haven't really calmed your vagus.
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Nerve you've calmed your mind which impacts.
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Your vagus nerve yeah it impacts maybe a few hundred fibers of the two hundred thousand okay okay we're back to like what is it we really understand and do we know that slowing breathing one way you know let's say in on three out on seven or box breathing four four four in on four hold four out four hold four these are all there's and how many techniques are there tons hundreds dozens hundreds do we know what each of those methods does to the vagus nerve fight no.
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No it might help us feel better in that moment it might help us.
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Calm our mind yeah great here's what we do know if in general these activities and we can go through them one by one but the cognitive behavioral therapy prayer some breathing modalities not others because what i'm going to say will make sense cold exposure not cold exposure and we could talk about that that's complicated but let's do just relaxation meditation that's what i couldn't think of so you've got these states where you induce relaxation they almost always slow heart rate if your heart rate slows from something you did then you did stimulate arguably stimulate the fibers in your vagus nerve that go to your heart because that's what it does but you may have also inhibited the fibers in your sympathetic nervous system that accelerate your heart rate right which did you do nobody knows you don't know nobody knows interesting so you talked about the book i wrote this book not to say that these things that are being promoted some with all good intention and some less so these things that are being promoted many of them are grounded in some basic science facts but to extrapolate it further than that first of all it's no way to be proven true or false but second of all in the case of a patient with an illness it runs the dangerous risk of putting the blame on the patient let's go back to the example i gave before if you have an infection that damaged your vagus nerve and you have arthritis and you go online and someone tells you to do ten extra push ups because stuff that'll stimulate your vagus nerve and stop your inflammation no it might not for you so i as a physician scientist never want to be in the situation where we say we know this to be true therefore it will work in you that's not always the case.
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A
It may or may not work you have to try it out it may.
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Or may not work at all it may or may not work in you it may or may not work in somebody else so how do we get past that in the modern era with all of our powerful tools we did discover that you can put a computer chip on the vagus nerve of people with severe inflammation from rheumatoid arthritis and that can make many of them better really yeah and that's based on twenty eight years of work in the lab first in my lab and now in literally dozens as i said before hundreds of labs around the world and what we discovered are of the probably one hundred thousand vagus nerve fibers on the left side of people of humans several hundred maybe one thousand of them travel down into the area of your spleen and your abdomen which is one of the major organs of the immune system and when these signals arrive there and we can activate the signals with this little computer chip these signals arriving in the spleen are a calm down signal to the white blood cells that pass through the spleen so the spleen gets twenty percent of your cardiac output every minute that means a huge percentage of your circulating white blood cells go through that spleen every hour if the vagus nerve signal is sending a calm down signal to the cells that are passing through the spleen spleen they get pacified they get calmed down now when they arrive at that injured finger they don't attack what they see they actually switch into a more tissue reparative mode so it's as if rather than a soldier arriving at the front and shooting it's a team of medics that come and start patching things up interesting that's what you want that's what you want and that's that's what we know that works if you directly stimulate the vagus nerve with a chip.
- [22:47]
A
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- [24:55]
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Sometimes.
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B
There are patients with very famous widely publicized stories there are stories of people as you say who were unable to walk up a flight of stairs and are now riding their bicycle several miles every weekend can you send some of.
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A
These case studies or visuals if there's any after this and we can put some in to show people or link.
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B
Them up the visual i would send you is in my office okay i met a patient named kelly who was one of the first patients implanted in a study that we did in europe years ago and kelly was one of these patients who couldn't walk up a flight of stairs she was told by her physicians that she had to retire as a teacher and she and her husband sean were out of options they had been nearly bankrupted by the expense of her drugs that weren't working they sold everything they owned kelly talked her way into the clinical trial in europe she moved to amsterdam wow how old was she when she did this not sure exactly late twenties early thirties young.
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A
Very young was it arthritis or was it like inflammation in her feet or.
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B
It was actually inflammatory bowel disease but a complication of crohn's disease that she had affected her joints to the point that her father for one of her birthdays gave her a cane oh man because she was in and out of wheelchairs in her twenties yeah yeah so kelly and sean moved to holland kelly received one of the first i call it a gen one implant it's not it wasn't the small chip we have today and she had to stay there for a few months afterwards for her follow up check and they were running late to the doctor's appointment and there was an elevated train and kelly saw it coming and this is a few weeks or a month post op and she ran up the stairs no way and she's about to get on the train she realizes sean's not with her so she stops and she looks at sean like what the heck and sean's at the bottom of the stairs crying oh my gosh she couldn't remember when she did oh wow gets better i didn't know any of this until i got an email and i invited kelly like i never met her didn't know who she was she came to see me and she gave me a gift and it it's still it's in my office it's her cane oh my gosh wow that's powerful i left the bow on it i have a picture i can get to that oh that's beautiful.
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Wow man how old is she now.
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When was or how old she's in her thirties she is now restoring guitars tell your listeners to look up kelly owens guitar restoration in connecticut she worked she worked in connecticut yes wow she worked for us at the feinstein institute for several years after that she was a patient advocate that helped us collect the hundreds ultimately more than a thousand emails we were getting for patients that want to participate in these kinds of things and she retired from that to move on and make guitars to restore all the restore guitars yeah and other.
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Artists and what is her i mean.
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I guess and her husband's an amazingly skilled carpenter woodworker yeah so is this.
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A
Five ten years ago or when was.
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This like this well the trial she was in was down was in the mid the mid twenty teens okay so she's now ten years ago right yeah the last time i looked i think she's i think she's eight years out she takes no medications and she can.
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Walk upstairs she can use her hands fine i mean maybe there's she goes.
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B
To the gym and works out on.
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The treadmill come on does she have pains anywhere today or is it like.
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Minimal i haven't talked to her recently i'm sure as we all get older we all get some aches and pains.
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A
Of course yeah yeah but that's interesting but she's able to move walk and do all these things and yes pretty normal lifestyle yes all from one little implant or maybe that one was bigger.
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B
But it was bigger all from an implant here that one we i call gen one it was it's like a cardiac pacemaker and it goes under the collarbone okay and then a lead goes up to the vagus nerve in the neck interesting that device has been put in at least a quarter of a million people really for for for to treat we come back to the mind again at some point to treat depression and epilepsy interesting and it's been fda approved in the united states for decades and we know the complication rate we know that it's quite safe we know that at least a quarter of a million people have been studied i estimate that somewhere over a half a million maybe a million people have had this surgery worldwide this is with the large device that fires on for five minutes off for five minutes twenty four hours a day at a ten times higher amount of current than we use in this little chip so when people look at the side effects of vagus nerve stimulation for depression and epilepsy they're going to see things like twitching of the lip buzzing in the vocal cords when they speak and of course with any surgery you can have a very small risk of a wound infection or potentially damage to the nerve but when you look at the side effects of the small chip that was put now in two hundred and forty two people in the united states in the last couple years the side effect the severe adverse event rate it's called was eight times less than the severe adverse event rate.
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A
Of the drugs interesting of the drugs.
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Yeah of the drugs which are also on basa and have to be injected.
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A
Yeah painful yeah so if someone's had chronic arthritis for years and it only seems like it's getting worse is that a soul healing or is that a vagus nerve healing and total body healing you know and it sounds like no drugs can really heal something like this maybe they can help some people sometimes but it doesn't seem like there's a drug that can help reverse arthritis or.
- [32:34]
B
Certain conditions so let's talk about again rheumatoid arthritis which is one one type of arthritis and what we know and what we don't know we know that rheumatoid arthritis is a very common condition affects up to perhaps one percent of the population or one and a half percent of the population worldwide it's very common it tends to affect younger people more women than men and it's not sort of like the old football injury my knee gets sore when it rains this is a serious illness that affects all the joints and many of these patients can't pick up a pencil can't ride their bike can't sometimes button their shirt yeah and we also know that we have powerful drugs that have treated very well many many of these patients these drugs go by the names of dmards for disease modifying antirheumatic drugs or biologics which are typically antibodies you see them advertised on the nightly news you see them advertised on all the sports on tv these are very powerful drugs they work because not because they cure inflammation but because they suppress the immune.
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A
System do you want to suppress your.
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B
Immune system you don't want to suppress it too much yeah if you suppress your immune system too much you leave yourself open to secondary infections even to cancer so many of these drugs what.
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A
Are the side effects of those then.
- [34:00]
B
Many of these drugs the side effects have the most serious label that the fda can give which is called a black box warning and many patients even though let's be clear millions of patients have benefited from these drugs millions of patients have benefited from these drugs but many patients despite the benefit don't want to take them yeah they have many of them have to be injected so they're invasive many of them cost between thirty and one hundred thousand dollars annually.
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A
Oh my goodness many if not all.
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B
Of them have dangerous side effects and so people are reasonably concerned there's no.
- [34:35]
A
Guarantees for healing and it's like you have to stay on these things forever.
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B
It sounds like not only is there no guarantees but in most studies these drugs are effective about half the time so despite the fact they're invasive have side effects and are expensive they work.
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A
Half the time they may not work.
- [34:51]
B
Yeah so what's the point of all this the point is yes some people are benefited they don't need anything and that's wonderful but a lot of people want other options and what this vagus nerve stimulation which by the time this airs may be approved by the fda in the united states if not hopefully it'll be approved in the coming months after this airs what that will allow is patients who have tried these other therapies but as you said are not getting better in their body or their mind that they now will have an option of having an implant the implant will be put in it's about the size of a fish oil pillow it'll be put in through about a one inch or one and a half inch incision in the neck by a neurosurgeon right about the level of your adam's apple down deep where you feel the pulse in your neck you won't be able to see it and it will operate for about one minute a day wow and many of the patients i've met many of them many of the patients sleep through the therapy at four thirty in the morning or something like that other patients told me that it's like a little alarm clock for them but when it goes off they smile because they realize immediately their hands don't hurt anymore really yeah so it's a.
- [36:14]
A
Little chip that they implant other side left side right left side this is where the pulse is right here on the left side next to the pulse and you've had over two hundred and some people already go through this in.
- [36:26]
B
The last year so i exactly so the company's called setpoint medical it's not far from here in valencia and they completed a clinical trial last year they reported the results these are people that.
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A
Were having extreme pains like for years.
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All of these people were out of.
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Options they tried the drugs they've meditated for years they prayed they've done everything they can and they're just feeling painful.
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B
Yep pain stiffness swelling and many of them had symptoms in their mind of either anxiety depression sleep disorder cognitive abnormalities and what the results showed is not only did a significant percentage a statistically significant percentage of the patients with the implant have improved pain and swelling in their joints many of them also had improved quality of life less anxiety less pain better sleep less depression and it.
- [37:28]
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Doesn'T require taking any drugs or invasive therapies except for one invasion i guess of putting something in your neck so.
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That'S going to remain to be seen many of the patients were able after the chip was implanted to reduce the drugs they were taking but many of the patients continued to stay on some of the drugs it's been two hundred and forty two patients there are millions of patients that will be eligible for this worldwide it will take years to have a clear simple answer to what you said what patients will be able to take fewer drugs what patients will have to continue taking drugs what patients will have no response to this and what patients will live their life not taking any drugs anymore how those numbers shake out has to be studied in much larger populations but i've met some patients who were taking several drugs and are now taking none really yes and having no symptoms what has been the.
- [38:31]
A
Biggest thing you've seen over the last three plus decades of research hands on experience and the science that you've been studying what's been the biggest breakthrough you've seen in the last three plus decades of just healing the body or body.
- [38:49]
B
Optimization i think the biggest breakthroughs i'm seeing today are actually coming from understanding the linkages between the brain the nervous system and the immune system the vagus nerve insight which we started twenty five thirty years ago was just the tip of the iceberg right now the field which is called neuroimmunology is probably one of the fastest growing if not the most exciting fields in all of science young people want to study this because the tools are so powerful and just again in the vagus nerve story we can go in a laboratory mouse and we can put tags in the neurons of the brains of those mice and we can shine a laser beam on a discrete part of the mouse's brain and activate a few hundred neurons in the brain and follow the signals down into the spleen and we can look at the molecules all along the way we can look at the electrical signals we can look at the individual steps those kinds of experiments are now being applied to all kinds of conditions ranging from not only autoimmune disease but diabetes metabolic syndrome and obesity we're seeing studies looking at understanding how things like glp one ozempics how these things work these things are now all being broken down to signals traveling in individual neurons not only in the vagus nerve but but in the sympathetic nervous system and in the neurons in the brain itself we're living in an era where we can map the starting point the origin and the destination the origin and insertion of all the nerves in the body first in mice then in larger animals and ultimately in humans and with those maps we will be able to design devices and someday even drugs perhaps nanobots that can target the individual fibers in an individual patient to give the treatment that.
- [41:00]
A
That patient needs specific without side effects probably just to that thing wow that's.
- [41:06]
B
Where the world is headed is it going to get there tomorrow no is this some pie in the sky everyone's going to have a flying car one hundred years from now no this is happening some of the things i said said are already in clinical development wow.
- [41:22]
A
Now even though you're not a psychiatrist have you seen any research on how trauma impacts the brain whether it be psychological or emotional or sexual trauma how it impacts the brain the body and the nervous system and how we could stimulate the vagus nerve to actually start.
- [41:40]
B
Healing that trauma so it's complicated at this point again at the simplest level we have seen now if there's trauma in the vagus nerve or damage or injury that you can have problems in the body because signals traveling in the vagus nerve are not getting where they.
- [42:01]
A
Need to go it's blocked somewhere yeah.
- [42:03]
B
It'S like imagine going down a mountain and the brakes in your car someone cuts the brake line in your car.
- [42:08]
A
That'S happened to me before i mean it didn't cut like someone didn't cut them but i was in an old cadillac a nineteen ninety seven cadillac going up a mountain to big bear in california and on the way down the brakes gave out and this is like an old car where it's like pumping the brakes and i was there was a guy next to me i was driving and i was like we're gonna die we're gonna i was like it's not breaking and i just shifted it down into like first gear or whatever and slowed it down and it came back a little bit around these curves going down and luckily got to the bottom of the hill but it was it was scary you're lucky to be here it was scary but it was like this is probably twelve years ago but it was terrifying so imagine that in your body all day long like the brakes not working and your vagus nerve is experiencing that it's probably what.
- [42:54]
B
These people with rheumatoid arthritis felt like interesting the brakes have failed they have excessive inflammation in their body the inflammation in their body is changing the way their mind is working and how they feel and their level of anxiety all day long day after day year after year it's exhausting it's exhausting so that effect we understand you asked about similar things in the brain that gets complicated and is an area of active research but it has come together very recently in studies of post traumatic stress disorder so post traumatic stress is an example a war fighter sees sees a horrible or experiences sees or feels some horrible scene and continues to relive it and relive that horrible event day after day after day even in the safety of their home here in california or somewhere else very recent study they implanted vagus nerve stimulators in those subjects and timed the activation of the nerve now focused on sending signals up into the brain not down to the immune system they time the signals so that the therapy being given either by an app or by a human therapist which is reasonably successful reasonably successful therapy i'm sorry i forget what it's called again i'm not a psychiatrist but this therapeutic modality has been reasonably successful and maybe helps half or two thirds of the of the subjects with post traumatic stress which is pretty good but not one hundred percent when they added the vagus nerve stimulation to the clinical trial they had one hundred percent response rate what does that mean well what happens when you stimulate the vagus nerve and we're back to the mind body connection again signals presumably going up into the brain increase neuroplasticity what is neuroplasticity neuroplasticity is the ability for those connections that we talked about the very first minutes of the podcast which are called synapses neuroplasticity means that the brain can form new synapses when you learn something you form new synapses when you unlearn something you form new synapses by driving these signals up the vagus nerve increasing neuroplasticity these post traumatic stress patients many of them had significant benefit from their therapy and it was lasting is lasting it's almost like they.
- [45:24]
A
Have to unlearn the memory absolutely that's.
- [45:26]
B
What the point of the therapy is.
- [45:28]
A
Because the memory if you're reliving it five times a day it's almost like your body's in that trauma now it's.
- [45:34]
B
A new experience when you live a memory again isn't that interesting this is i mean trial lawyers have known this.
- [45:39]
A
For decades so you could be living in a war that you went through ten years ago but your brain is reliving it rethinking it over fresh fresh and so you're in that heightened state it's going to be chronic illness right absolutely and so it's really more about is it about eliminating the memory changing the memory reinterpreting the memory and creating meaning behind that memory so there's a benefit to it like what even though you're not a psychiatrist what is that process so we can actually heal the mind the thinking of the mind that's causing the stress in the body yeah.
- [46:19]
B
I think psychiatrists psychologists and philosophers are talking about this now and trying to figure out the answer to that you know how much is unlearning how much is relearning how much is adapting but at the level of the synapse which charles sherrington taught us if you understand the synapse you can assemble an entire nervous system even with one hundred billion neurons at the level of the synapse vagus nerve stimulation enhances neuroplasticity i mean this has been known for decades years ago there was a fascinating study subjects patients who had had an implant for their epilepsy so in these cases these are people with serious disorders with seizures epileptic seizures that are not well controlled by medications and some of these subjects were having ten twenty thirty seizures a.
- [47:10]
A
Day oh my gosh you can't go.
- [47:12]
B
Out of their house that's exhausting so as a attempt to treat that vagus nerve stimulators were implanted in some of these and about half of them had significant benefit now you say at first well half's not a lot well it's a lot if you're having thirty if you're one of the people having thirty seizures a day and you go down to having two or none or three life changing life changing so during the course of those experiments those clinical trials some subjects didn't get significant benefits so they had their device turned off but they left it in so researchers called them in for a clinical experiment and they gave them a cognitive test and they wrote down the answers and then they turned the device on they gave the test again and their scores went up interesting that was one of the early signs of the fact that vagus nerve stimulation can improve cognitive function through enhancing neuroplasticity it's very interesting wow that's now been fda approved for the treatment of rehabilitation increasing rehabilitation from in patients who've had a stroke affecting the arm so what's done is the therapist does their therapy but the delivery of the therapy is timed with giving vagus nerve stimulation through the left neck through a surgical implant and for patients who've had paralysis of the hands and arms the disabling thing is not being able to use the hands to feed themselves hold a newspaper hold a book and the results from adding vagus nerve stimulation to that are absolutely remarkable really where people.
- [48:57]
A
Are paralyzed in an arm or a.
- [48:59]
B
Hand and are significantly better with their rehabilitation combined with the vagus nerve stimulation.
- [49:04]
A
Maybe it's not full range and function.
- [49:06]
B
But it's like improved exactly it's not necessarily full range of function but it's significantly improved enough that the fda has approved it and it yeah it's coming in.
- [49:23]
A
Too many people finish their workday feeling frustrated drained and unfulfilled the good news is that's not how it's supposed to be and it's a problem that can be solved patrick lencioni author of the classic book the five dysfunctions of a team has created a new assessment that more than a million people have already used to identify what he calls your working geniuses it helps you identify the kind of work that gives you joy and energy and just as importantly it also allows you to pinpoint the work that often drains you of joy and energy the whole greatness team over here took the assessment and it's super quick and easy we are so eager to look through all of our results so go to workinggenius dot com right now and take the assessment which takes just twelve minutes and you'll immediately receive a report that gives you a new and profound insights that will transform the way you work whether you're a ceo a newly hired employee a podcast host like me a volunteer in your church or even a stay at home parent again take the assessment at workinggenius com you ever walk out of the grocery store or fill up your tank and just think how is everything this expensive feels like prices are going up everywhere and how great would it be if just once something actually just went down in price well at metro that's exactly what's happening they've lowered their prices and are giving you a five year price guarantee on talk text and data one line now twenty percent lower family plans also lowered oh and you also get a free five g phone all with no id required and no activation fees stop by your neighborhood metro store visit metrobyt dash mobile dot com or call to find out about their amazing offers bring your number not available if currently at t mobile or with metro in the past one hundred eighty days guarantee covers monthly price of on network talk text and five g data for customers activating on an eligible plan exclusions apply details at metrobyte dash mobile dot com i mean for me i'm all about trying to find holistic solutions to heal the mind and the body that's what i want for myself the people in my life the people watching or listening around the world is there are people that have so many different either conditions pains stresses overwhelms and i think a lot of these things stem from the way people think and how they respond to their environment that impacts the fight or flight tension tightness in the body which causes inflammation pains things like that which then could cause into irritable bowel syndrome or eczema or whatever it might be and my whole vision is to bring harmony and healing to humanity so they have the tools to do this for themselves and the people that they love because i think when people heal themselves and they heal their families the world is healed it's like there's so much more harmony in the world there's less anger resentment wars fighting competition it's more collaboration and more community and that's my entire mission is to bring people like you who have the decades of research the knowledge the literal hands on surgical knowledge and the research and the data and so i'm curious how can we going back to the soul how can we learn how to heal the soul with the different therapy strategies and techniques that you've learned as a neurosurgeon.
- [53:09]
B
I think you said it best one person at a time so everybody's different and i think we can approach this with realistic optimism okay again a first principle approach the vagus nerve is transmitting reflexes when those reflexes are functioning optimally you have a harmonious function of the organs in your body in a healthy state with your brain in a healthy.
- [53:40]
A
State and we want brain heart organ coherence is what i'm hearing you say.
- [53:45]
B
One hundred percent so we need the.
- [53:47]
A
Coherence of just a smooth flowing machine right throughout all three systems i guess.
- [53:54]
B
What emerges from that coherence in all three systems is an emergent property you can't predict plucking one string on a violin what the whole symphony will sound like but the one string on a violin gone bad can make the whole orchestra sound terrible right that's what the vagus nerve is like interesting it's like one of the two hundred thousand vagus nerves yes yes is like two hundred thousand violin strings it's the difference between playing the piano if the piano had two hundred thousand keys and sitting on it so that's the role of the vagus nerve now that's a fact but let's not get carried away let's not say that the vagus nerve is the answer to solving all those things it's a violin string it has a part if it goes bad it can affect all those things so what do we want to do with our interventions is we want to do our best to help keep the violin in tune in tune yeah yeah now you can do that it gets complicated quick right it gets complicated quick you can do that by making sure you have the best.
- [55:07]
A
Conductor yourself your mind i guess well.
- [55:11]
B
Way up there your mind your mind your mind and you can do that by making sure you keep the instrument in tune yes which would be the level between your mind and the violin strings it would be the middle of your brain where you want to your emotional brain okay which if it gets all fired up it's going to put everything out of tune so once again i just don't want to rush into any answer and say well if the conductor has a heart attack the orchestra is going to go out of tune.
- [55:45]
A
Exactly.
- [55:48]
B
If anxiety or some other emotional interfere anxiety fatigue hunger dominates cranks the key too hard on the top of the violin you're out of tune yeah if if the if you've got damage in the vagus nerve from an infection or an injury you broken violin string you're out of tune yeah and at the other end don't forget the body if you got that inflamed finger again which is now pulling on the other end of the violin string you're out of tune yes so which one do you want to talk about first it's.
- [56:27]
A
All going to work in unison it.
- [56:29]
B
Has to all work in unison and the reason i spend so much time on this in this book is because there's so many quick fixes on the internet and they're all not all many of them are rooted in one of.
- [56:43]
A
Those things but you need all of them all those things to be working.
- [56:46]
B
Together maybe you and me three out of four are working right now we only need to worry about one of them but we don't know which one.
- [56:52]
A
So how do you self become self aware on which which one is off how do you know what's out of.
- [56:59]
B
Tune well i don't i mean obviously if if you're if you're if you're if you're feeling stressed and anxious you could start with that first yes what.
- [57:09]
A
Would you say then is the if someone is living in fear throughout their mind constantly they just have fearful thoughts at work or in their relationship or their home or whatever it might be or you know they're watching too much chaotic news and they're just living in fear and stress or they're overwhelmed constantly or they're just feeling like these heightened stressful thoughts and emotions how much is that impacting the vagus nerve and the nervous system and blocking us from feeling in harmony with our total body health.
- [57:42]
B
A lot really a lot yeah no the evidence for that is clear so first of all i'm not a psychiatrist i'm not a therapist i'm not recommending any sort of therapy for someone who has that much fear and anxiety and they should be talking to someone you know second because it impacts the body.
- [57:59]
A
In a big way the nervous system.
- [58:01]
B
The vagus nerve absolutely what we know is patients who experience that kind of emotional or mental anxiety fear and stress tend to have increased heart rates and decreased heart rate variability now those are functions of those patients tend to have increased heart rate and increased heart rate variability heart rate and heart rate variability are the product are under the control of the autonomic nervous system heart rate heart rate is slowed when the vagus nerve is active and it's sped up when the sympathetic nervous system is relatively more active that variability in speeding up and slowing down is measured by heart rate variability which many people now millions of people are looking at all the time on their wearables heart rate variability is very complicated.
- [58:54]
A
Where do we want our heart rate to be at most.
- [58:57]
B
Of the time in general we know from the framingham study which looked at thousands of people and an even much larger study out of france in general you want a lower heart rate at rest rather than a faster heart rate at rest at rest at rest what we know from these huge population studies is that populations with a slower heart rate tend to live longer than populations with a faster heart rate now before all your listeners run and check their pulse my pulse is eighty it doesn't mean that they're going to have a short lifespan span because you can't take a population statistic and apply it to an individual if you could do that you would buy the right lottery ticket statistics from a population cannot be reduced to a single individual but it's still very interesting that at a population level slower heart rates meaning more vagus nerve activity relative to fight or flight tend to live longer than those with faster heart rates why is that well no one knows one possibility it's because if you have a slower heart rate you tend to have healthier vagus nerve function that may also be slowing inflammation we don't know there's two hundred thousand fibers it could be that the fibers to your heart are working fine and the fiber is working right to our immune system or not but that kind of logic leads people to hope that if they can slow their heart rate through healthy habits like regular aerobic exercise eating a balanced diet getting enough sleep all the things your grandmother and your doctor tell you to do avoid too much anxiety and stress meditate if you have a lot of anxiety and stress prayer yeah prayer cognitive behavioral therapy all of these things slow your heart rate isn't.
- [60:48]
A
That interesting yeah good tools if you.
- [60:53]
B
Use them if your doctor says it's okay those are all safe good tools in most patients and if you use them and if it slows your heart rate you're probably doing a good thing for your body you ask me what i do i do those things yeah.
- [61:09]
A
Interesting so what's the difference between the vagus nerves system and the nervous system.
- [61:19]
B
The vagus nerve is part of the nervous system so one way to think of the nervous system is that you have a brain and a spinal cord the spinal cord of course runs down from the base of the brain in the back through your spine and it's principally involved in coordinating all the muscles that you can put under voluntary control when you want to throw a basketball hit a golf ball sign your name button your shirt these are all this is the voluntary nervous system because when.
- [61:51]
A
You think something it's connecting i guess the wiring throughout your body to move like my hand movements right now it's like it's just automatically connecting it correct.
- [62:00]
B
When you think nerves in your brain generate the thought and the intention because that's what a thought is it originates in nerves and those nerves are connected to the voluntary nervous system which sends signals down your spinal cord to control your muscles under voluntary control but if.
- [62:20]
A
Something is not being transmuted smoothly you're saying it's not necessarily the cable or the nerve it's the network it could.
- [62:29]
B
Be either or both and that goes back to your first question so if you think for a minute about one example would be what happened with COVID we know from COVID that many of the patients that died and this is work out of spain towards the end of the pandemic pathologists and researchers looked at the vagus nerves of people who died from COVID and they found two things they found inflammation and damage to the vagus nerve and they found virus in the vagus nerve now knowing what we know today that signals in the vagus nerve are like the brakes on your car that suppress inflammation and knowing that the signals that travel up and down the vagus nerve are critically important in controlling heart rate and blood pressure and breathing part of the autonomic nervous system which we haven't gotten to yet those are two of the major complications that occur in long covid or in post covid syndromes so we don't have the answers yet these are real interesting scientific questions that did damage or does damage to the vagus nerve contribute to or even cause long covid which is characterized by excessive inflammation and malfunction or dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system and.
- [63:55]
A
What is the autonomic nervous system okay.
- [63:57]
B
So we talked about the voluntary nervous system the autonomic as an autonomy is the involuntary nervous system and it's the part of your nervous system that first of all you never think about it but it's controlling your kidneys and your intestines and your heart and your lungs and your pancreas right now all day long every second every day of your life the signals from say glucose levels in your liver are going up the vagus nerve the sensory vagus nerve into your brain the autonomic part of your brain the autonomic nervous system receives that input and says oh this guy needs a little squirt of insulin now or a little squirt of glucagon if your glucose levels are low those signals come back down some of them in the vagus nerve which is the parasympathetic part of your autonomic nervous system and some of the signals come down your sympathetic nerves which is the other part of the autonomic so the autonomic as sympathetic and parasympathetic but they work together got.
- [65:07]
A
It okay i need to go back to science class you know biology and science it's not that bad i know.
- [65:14]
B
If you put it in the context.
- [65:15]
A
Of this stuff you're interested in exactly it's fine fascinating to me now as someone who's done over a thousand brain and spinal surgeries i guess of the ones that weren't through some type of force or impact where you had to repair something like a car crash or some type of injury in that way more of just oh there's a tumor or there's something off with the spine how much of those in your either scientific research or personal opinion how much of that is caused by someone's lifestyle someone's thinking someone's mindset of those tumors.
- [65:55]
B
Spinal issues occurring there's no evidence that brain tumors or cancer are caused by mindset there's no evidence of that but.
- [66:05]
A
In your personal opinion do you feel like there could be i don't think.
- [66:08]
B
So no it's a chance it's just.
- [66:10]
A
Like oh there's something off in the system and it's just oh that just.
- [66:13]
B
Well i think there's a lot of evidence that cancer originates from genetic mutations in dna of replicating cells that now just keep growing when they're not supposed.
- [66:27]
A
To grow where does that come from.
- [66:30]
B
Well it can come from a beam of ionizing radiation from outer space that hits you in the head really absolutely it can come from some exposure to something in the environment when you were two years old they hate it's a whole it's a whole field of its own and i am not an expert in that field however it's pretty clear that the origin of cancer has a basis in genetic changes interesting and that doesn't mean inherited it can be but it doesn't mean it is so it's not there's no evidence from the activity of the nervous system what's really interesting is that there are some new therapies that are used to now treat brain cancer that are treating the cancer by putting in modulating electric fields that actually slow the replication of the cancer cells really and so there you have another example of bioelectronic medicine which is what we call putting the chip on the vagus nerve in the neck because we're using electronics to treat the nervous system here you see this is possible in some patients with brain cancer interesting how.
- [67:44]
A
Influential is the nervous system versus the immune system within the body they're the same thing it's the same thing the nervous system and the immune system is.
- [67:55]
B
The same thing they talk to each other they use the same molecules so so for years i joke about this a lot but back when i went to medical school and in several decades since when the immunology professor was giving a lecture she would tell the neuroscience students they could take the day off and when the neuroscience professor was giving a lecture vice versa he would tell the immunology students they could go home why is that because there's a blood brain barrier which separates and filters things that can travel through the bloodstream to get into the brain and it's like a firewall now the immune system for centuries was thought of as white blood cells which float around and are not attached to nerves and the nervous system of course is about nerves so okay two separate things nothing to do with it well it turns out that white blood cells in the spleen in the liver and many other organs come in contact on a regular basis with nerve endings right what happens there well white blood cells it turns out have receptors meaning they can respond to neurotransmitters which are made by nerves okay oh by the way it turns out nerves can make molecules like cytokines like cytokine storm from COVID things like tnf and il one and il six those were thought to be only made by immune cells so they're using the same molecules to send signals back and forth nerve to nerve nerve to white blood cell white blood cell to white blood cell white blood cell to nerve you tell me where to draw the line in two separate systems right by the way the nervous system makes memories so does the immune system you talk about muscle memory when you train and train and train and train and you can do something like without thinking about it that's actually in your nervous system the nervous system makes memories you get exposed to a virus or an infection the first time and chaos breaks loose in the defense you have massive amounts of inflammation the second time the immune system not so much because it's made a memory of that attack so that's the hottest area of science i think in all your.
- [70:18]
A
Years kevin of science of surgery of research you know you're an inventor you have all these patents you're one of the most cited scientists in the world right now with all your success what would you say has been the key to your success from a researcher a doctor an entrepreneur an author what has helped you create abundance in your life what would you say are those factors.
- [70:49]
B
Having a strong personal philosophy what is that philosophy that i wanted from a very young age to spend my life working on things through science making discoveries that would help people and you're right i've had the good fortune the privilege of working on lots of different things but as you know when you do that sometimes things get hard sometimes things don't work out sometimes it takes a hundred experiments to have one that works sometimes you have to write twenty drafts of a book to get one that's published in those times if you don't have a powerful personal philosophy a guidepost a mission an objective and a plan to get there no matter what then i don't know how people do it without a strong personal philosophy and i talk about this with sincerity with you because i worry that young people today you talk about how much anxiety there is i think a lot of that stems from the fact that young people today are not spending enough time developing a strong personal philosophy what does life mean to them what do they want to accomplish in the time that we have here on this earth who do they want to help and benefit and why and without that it's just i can't imagine getting through it with that you can do anything.
- [72:21]
A
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- [75:05]
B
Two deaths really yeah i mean the death of my mother which you talk about in the book yeah yeah when i was five she died unexpectedly very suddenly of.
- [75:16]
A
A brain tumor she was twenty nine i think or in her late twenties.
- [75:19]
B
Late twenties and my father had me and my brother and sister tim was three and a half and my sister sharon was an infant wow and you were five when i was five wow my grandfather my mother's father was a professor of pediatrics at yale medical school and i remember sitting on his lap and and saying you know why didn't the surgeon take the tumor out and he said well because it was growing in her brain and it had almost had like legs that were stuck in different parts of the brain and if i had pulled the tumor out it would have damaged multiple areas i said well grandpa somebody should do something about that and he said maybe you will wow and i remember that like it was yesterday and then the second death that influenced my career was a little girl named janice when i was training to be a neurosurgeon at the new york hospital in the upper east side of new york and janice had been crawling across the kitchen floor when her grandmother was cooking dinner and just as grandma turned to drain a pot of boiling water in the sink she tripped and spilled all the boiling water on janice and it was horrible it was absolutely horrible her face wasn't burned she had this angelic beautiful face the rest.
- [76:44]
A
Of her body her back was burned.
- [76:45]
B
Her whole body ninety percent eleven month old eleven months oh man her chances statistically of surviving we knew when we met her were almost zero but we started calling her our miracle baby because after almost a month in the hospital she kept battling back she was incredibly resilient and i won't go into all the details but we got to thinking about sending her maybe we'll get to send her home it would be a miracle i was standing in the doorway to her room and she was rocking in the arms of a nurse who was giving her a baby bottle at lunchtime and janice's eyes rolled up in her head i ran in the room i put her in in the crook of my arm her heart had stopped i gave cpr i gave her mouth to mouth and called the cardiac arrest the whole hospital was there in minutes and the code went on for it felt like hours but but everything everything was perfect in the code and she was gone so i had to tell her mother and and it was horrible it was absolutely horrible i didn't know why she died did not know why she died couldn't explain it we all thought there was no reason she should.
- [78:03]
A
Have died she was improving it looked.
- [78:05]
B
Like right she was improving and there was no evidence of infection but i had to write on the death certificate cause of death septic shock which means some unseen infection had caused her heart to stop and so pretty much then and there i decided i'd go in the laboratory and try to understand the inflammation that led to janice's shock and that's what i've been doing since nineteen eighty five wow still working on it.
- [78:32]
A
Still working on it really because there's no i mean if someone's getting better from something like that but i guess septic shock can still kill someone like.
- [78:42]
B
In a moment septic shock can kill can kill very quickly really it's less septic shock can kill very quickly it's less lethal now than it was in nineteen eighty five we have better ways of treating it but there's still no clear understanding of who it will affect and when what we know today are the molecules that some of the same molecules actually that cause inflammation and rheumatoid arthritis are the molecules that in large amounts massive amounts cause septic shock but it can come on so quickly we can't always prevent it in janice's case i'm not sure even today we could prevent it but i'm pretty sure that the molecule that killed janus is called tnf and that's the molecule one of the molecules now that is the target of the biologic drugs that are used to treat rheumatoid arthritis which is also stopped by vagus nerve stimulation wow.
- [79:44]
A
Doctor tracy i want to acknowledge you for your personal philosophy and your mission and your purpose over the last three four decades of getting into the field of medicine neuroscience and trying to understand how to heal the body and the mind and all these things how they're all connected which is a symphony of nerves and cells that we still don't really understand a lot of it sounds like but you've committed your personal philosophy and your mission and your purpose to figuring these things out and bringing healing hope inspiration and tools to provide better lives for people so i want to acknowledge you for everything that you've created up until now your new book the great nerve the new science of the vagus nerve and how to harness its healing reflexes is out people can pick up a copy i'm curious what is your personal philosophy now after all the success you've had the impact you've had what is your personal philosophy now after this book in the next decade or two.
- [80:49]
B
That you're working on collaborate don't compete that's number one i counted recently i have more than one thousand one hundred co authors wow and co inventors that's pretty cool it's a blessing to be able to work with brilliant people and collaborate with brilliant people around the world there's no this is not i and me in this story that you just summarized this is us it's huge numbers of people who like me have committed their their lives to science and to medicine and to helping other people and when you work with people like that you can do anything and the second group that has to be acknowledged are the thousands of patients millions who are suffering and the thousands who step up and the thousands who step up to participate in clinical trials and in clinical research because first of all you know you acknowledge my colleagues and me with this praise and these kind words and thank you however they're the ones that need the help and they're the ones that need the acknowledgement and they're the ones that take the risk i get to try to do things with my brain and my colleagues and my lab and clinical trials i enjoy it it's my passion it's my life's work i love it they suffer and they participate and they volunteer and they step up anyway so if anyone deserves credit in this it's the teams that do the work and the patients that step up and participate it's a big risk for.
- [82:33]
A
Them yeah it's a big risk for them they don't know what's going to.
- [82:36]
B
Happen we don't know and they don't know i mean albert einstein said it best if we knew what it was we were doing it wouldn't be called research would it yeah so patients step into this into a research trial and we honestly say this is what we think this is what we hope this is what we want but we don't know and they say i'm in wow.
- [82:58]
A
That'S scary but you have to come from a desperate place essentially to say i'm in because the pain is so great that you're like anything that could potentially help this is worth the risk.
- [83:08]
B
And some people who are arguably not quote unquote suffering that much they step in because they want to help other.
- [83:15]
A
People wow man that's powerful what would you say is the biggest personal challenge you're faced with at this season of.
- [83:22]
B
Life i think we're entering an era of anti science which is going to be a challenge the idea somehow that you can do science quickly and for free is is on the rise there's an idea of cutting this and cutting that because we've solved all the problems i just think you can look back for a minute at the nineteen twenties the world was coming out of a pandemic that killed tens of millions of people really wow tens of millions look at the numbers versus the last pandemic it's orders of magnitude more deaths worldwide we were on the heels of a massive disinformation campaign in the media because during world war one news of the pandemic was suppressed by the countries that were fighting in the war because they didn't want the enemy to know that their young healthy men were dying and cutting into troop supplies they didn't want the troop numbers known there was a rise in the united states of eugenics and the sterilization of tens of thousands of women and some children mostly because of either low iq poverty or the color of their skin disproportionately women this was sanctioned by the supreme court and this all culminated in a trial which became known as the scopes monkey trial in which a teacher in tennessee was arrested for teaching evolution the judge at that trial testified that scientists could not testify because it wasn't a scientific question interesting dozens of other states adopted those laws banning the teaching of evolution in school this lasted for ten years this anti science anti intellectual period lasted for ten years on the heels of the pandemic what brought us out of it and why am i realistically optimistic that we'll come out nineteen thirty two the discovery of sulfanilamide the first antibiotic that was widely available was given to winston churchill who was critically ill perhaps dying of pneumonia he survived obviously and led great britain through world war two soon after that penicillin blood banking came on board in the nineteen thirties and during the coconut grove fire the disaster in boston the availability of a blood bank saved dozens of lives this spawned the regionalization of blood banks eventually worldwide that enabled transplant surgery so why did we come out of it because everybody is going to need a new cure someday everybody you know the person who's healthy has ten thousand problems and the person who's sick has one problem you have a politician's son or daughter or spouse or grandparent or best friend gets a critical illness and we don't have a therapy all of a sudden science and research are going to look pretty darn important again yeah we're in a cultural period now where all the forces seem to be aligned against that there's a major pushback against doing science that takes years to make the cures that we're using today never mind the ones that we're going to use in a couple years the cures we're using today were invented ten twenty thirty forty years ago we take them for granted we're going to have diseases that continue to injure and disable and kill people and at some point the pendulum will swim back and when that happens hopefully the united states and the global medical science research infrastructure will have survived this period and come out even stronger that's powerful as.
- [87:22]
A
A neurosurgeon who's done over a thousand brain and spinal surgeries what is the number one skill you wish every human being could learn to master to help them improve the quality of their life.
- [87:40]
B
I think be in the present and listen to the person you're talking to the person you're talking to will always tell you how you can help them if you listen carefully enough you think.
- [87:51]
A
A lot of people are not living.
- [87:52]
B
In the present i think most people are not living in the present do.
- [87:56]
A
You i think they're living in stress or overwhelm or like but that's not the present exactly yeah yeah i know they're like living in like some type of fight or flight or stress or like thinking about the future what they.
- [88:09]
B
Need to do or remembering some terrible thing from the past that's not the present yeah i mean yeah no it's not easy you know i don't think you can go on a website and get a quick fix i think it requires once again a commitment to a personal philosophy to decide what it is you want to do and why you want to do it and pursue that.
- [88:36]
A
Are you someone that practices meditation or prayer or what are some of the therapies that you practice that are non surgical or non medical related i guess i try to support you staying in.
- [88:49]
B
The present i think the advice that grandma gave you and hopefully your primary care physician you know eat a balanced diet get enough rest exercise regularly be engaged in your family community friend groups have a hobby read these are all critical things i think to having balance homeostasis in your life i mean if the vagus nerve is anything it's a symbol of homeostasis and balance in addition i think you can supplement those things with meditation i do try to meditate every day once or twice just five or ten minutes i do i do mindfulness meditation or breathing meditation i try to take a cold immersion several times a week not because it's relaxing but because it's a massive stimulus to fight or flight which is anti inflammatory i mean when you fall in the cold water or switch the shower to full cold and you feel that i gotta get out of here and this hurts and i don't want to do this that's fight or flight and that's a good thing high levels of fight or flight as long as your doctor says you don't have a heart condition high levels of fight or flight are anti inflammatory and then i'm fascinated by the process because if you stay there you've done this of course i did it.
- [90:14]
A
Yesterday yeah yeah what happens it's like.
- [90:18]
B
Everything slows down and you feel almost like you're watching somebody else do it it still hurts right painful it is it doesn't stop being painful but it's a weird place watching that's parasympathetic that's vagus nerve that's when your heart rate slows down that's anti inflammatory yeah.
- [90:42]
A
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- [93:14]
B
Knew who he was back a long time ago like twenty twenty ten he visited the lab i had i had met with his holiness the dalai lama up at phoenicia new york he has a property there on top of a mountain and it was a it was a meeting that the dalai lama had hosted of scientists and researchers and so through the dalai lama's network at menlo house in new york they introduced me to they said we really want you to meet this guy wim hof i said fine bring him to the lab so he came and the lab i run with my colleague sangeeta shivan sangeeta and i run the lab together and we said well you know what are we going to do we had to get an irb protocol which is institutional institutional review board a human subjects protocol they did that for us on an emergency basis and we decided we would study wim hof's immune response after he did his whatever breathing techniques well we didn't know yeah you're like all we knew is like he says he can control his immune system that's all we.
- [94:29]
A
Knew this is fifteen years ago this.
- [94:32]
B
Is not now not when everybody died yeah so he went and we brought him into our clinical facility and we drew his blood and then we shut the door he said okay do your thing and we went and got a cup of coffee and we came back like two or three hours later and drew his blood again and he said what what happened i said we have to analyze your blood come back in.
- [94:54]
A
A week he's like tell me now.
- [94:56]
B
Yeah he's crazy tell me now yeah so he comes back in a week and he goes and we said what did you do when we left you he said i breathe like a mother.
- [95:10]
A
Yeah it sounds like him.
- [95:13]
B
He said why and i said because you lowered your your inflammatory response which we measure through a very specialized assay in our lab you lowered your inflammatory response by like seventy five percent he goes are you going to publish me i said i'd love to but i can't publish you he said why i said i can't publish urine n of one i have to do san gideon i have to do a proper study with like.
- [95:42]
A
One hundred people at least or something.
- [95:43]
B
Or maybe who said twenty he said get get twenty people teach ten of them your breathing method and then ten of them not and then switch the groups and do all the tests and see what happens and did you guys do that so he said what would that cost and i said probably you know three quarters of a million dollars something like that it's expensive to do these things and he said well i said can he's there with with a with a group of businessmen i said you know and they said we'll get back to you well they didn't get back to me but that's okay because a couple years later i was reading the scientific journals and i saw an article from my colleague in amsterdam peter pickers who runs a big research lab he did it he did the study in amsterdam there you go not amsterdam in holland but in a different city i forget which city and he did the exact study with ten people and the ten people that breathed lowered their inflammatory response what's that mean they lowered their inflammatory response so what we did was we took the white blood cells we took the whole tube of blood that has white blood cells and we added an activator that makes the white blood cells inflame to make lots of cytokine cytokines storm in a test tube tnf il one illinois six so you.
- [97:06]
A
Almost inject it with like the tube the blood tube yeah yeah the tube.
- [97:09]
B
So we we didn't have to inject sure sure sure him we just injected his white blood cells with like a.
- [97:14]
A
Like a a toxin a virus a.
- [97:16]
B
Toxin bacterial toxin called endotoxin lipopolysaccharide and and the results were remarkable in the subjects that breathed they they lowered their cytokine release in the blood by seventy.
- [97:29]
A
Five percent meaning they were more resistant to getting an infection or they were.
- [97:35]
B
More resistant to having a damaging amount of inflammation so inflammation in small amounts for the right period of time is.
- [97:47]
A
Good for you you sprain an ankle you want to have a little inflammation.
- [97:50]
B
You need inflammation to heal the ankle sprain you need inflammation to fight off the infection in your finger or your arm you need some inflammation people with no inflammation because they're immunosuppressed they can have serious complications you want inflammation inflammation is not all bad it's all bad when it's excessive so the wim hof breathing gave a reduction of inflammation why that's the next question well it turns out in peter picker's study where they injected the endotoxin into the people not into the oh my gosh so the people that got injected got fairly sick the people that breathed first got much less sick much less headache much less nausea much less fever and peter measured hormones in the blood of those people and found that there was a massive fight or flight response so breathing in the wim hof method it's breath holding it's like a it's like a is it called tantratic yoga yeah it's like.
- [98:53]
A
A system it's like you can you try to do it for like a minute or two deep breaths in and out intensely and then you breathe all the way out and you hold at the end and i've done this many times where i've held for two two and a half three minutes a couple times with no breath in my lungs so i guess you're oxygenating the blood.
- [99:12]
B
And you're what you're doing is i've done it too and i've gotten up to three and a half minutes also but it's what's weird is the three and a half minutes you you're still not really sure you really need to.
- [99:20]
A
Breathe yeah you're just sitting there you're vibrating your whole body's vibrating you're just no air in your lungs but what.
- [99:26]
B
You do have at that point is you have very high high carbon dioxide.
- [99:29]
A
Levels what does that do to the nervous system or to the vagus nerve.
- [99:33]
B
Well the carbon dioxide the rise in carbon dioxide is what's screaming at your brain to breathe it's not the fall in oxygen it's the rise in carbon dioxide and as carbon dioxide rises it also increases the ability of your hemoglobin to carry oxygen more efficiently but that wasn't the main effect on the immune system it was in fact the fight or flight response so with the massive urge to breathe with the accumulation of carbon dioxide that horrible feeling you get the shaking that's catechola beans that's epinephrine and norepinephrine from fight or flight that massive amounts we talked about before massive amounts of fight or flight turn off inflammation that's one of that experiment in wim hof breathing people was one of the proofs of it another one my colleagues and i in new york years ago we infused those hormones and volunteers in sailors and marines on shore leave and we infused them with those hormones epinephrine norepinephrine and even cortisol and and then we injected them with endotoxin to make them sick and the ones that got infused first were less sick interesting yeah wow so so i i think wim hof breathing which by the way you did it on a couch i saw your podcast or your youtube i did it i do it not every week but every few weeks i do it after a workout and i lie on my gym floor you shouldn't do it in a pool you shouldn't do it driving a car you shouldn't do it doing anything dangerous don't do it any condition you should check with your doctor and do it with a colleague.
- [101:17]
A
Or do it minimal you don't have to push yourself that far so you still do it today every now and then oh absolutely yeah and you see the benefits you know the benefits i.
- [101:26]
B
Don'T know the benefits i like the way it makes me feel i mean mister hoff says it's a great time after you do that to do an extra ten or twenty pushups yeah i've.
- [101:37]
A
Done it i have too yeah yeah it's crazy you have more push up strikes it's crazy it is very he had me do push ups first and then do the breathing and then do push ups after with no air in my lungs and you could do more do more yeah isn't that interesting yeah.
- [101:52]
B
It'S very interesting so you could breathe.
- [101:54]
A
And do as many as you can then sit stop then do the breathwork for three minutes and then do blow all the air out of your lungs hold it and then do push ups.
- [102:03]
B
You can do more i mean you talk about a personal philosophy and a guy who's compassionate and really wants the world to be better that's it i remember after i told him i couldn't publish them he said what should and i said i did say if you do this experiment with the ten or twenty people and publish it you'll make the world a better place and he's repeated that story on several other podcasts around that's cool that's cool and it makes me feel good it is good.
- [102:32]
A
That'S amazing doctor tracy i appreciate you being here i have two final questions for you this is called the three truths so imagine it's your last day on earth many years away you get to live as long as you want but for whatever reason all of your written work your publication your scientific research for whatever reason we don't have access to it anymore but on your last day you get to leave behind three things you know to be true whether it's from your personal experience in life your personal philosophy your lessons anything you can think of what would be those three lessons you would share with the world.
- [103:20]
B
You find love and true meaning and joy in your family every day that we number one number two is a single person working diligently for a lifetime can change the world and we all have the opportunity to do that that would be that's the second truism and number three is probably related to that but humans human beings people don't have any problem accomplishing their goals they have problems but any goal can be accomplished the hardest thing for a person to do is to pick the goal if everybody knew that and spent more time picking their goals the world would be a better place.
- [104:21]
A
Doctor kevin tracy the great nerve make sure you guys get a copy of this book if you want to learn how to optimize your health and learn how to harness its healing reflexes of the vagus nerve final question for you what's your definition of greatness.
- [104:41]
B
Leaving the world better than you found it kevin thanks for being.
- [104:45]
A
Here thanks for having me i really appreciate being here amazing i have a brand new book called make money easy and if you're looking to create more financial freedom in your life you want abundance in your life and you want to stop making money hard in your life but you want to make it easier you want to make it flow you want to feel abundant then make sure to go to make moneyeasybook dot com right now and get yourself a copy i really think this is going to help you transform your relationship with money this moment moving forward i hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's episode with all the important links and if you want want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally as well as ad free listening then make sure to subscribe to our greatness plus channel exclusively on apple podcasts share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on apple podcasts as well let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review i really love hearing feedback from you and it helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward and and i want to remind you of no one has told you lately that you are loved you are worthy and you matter and now it's time to go out there and do something great.
- [106:15]
B
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