#1 Neurosurgeon REVEALS A Revolutionary Medical Discovery! How To Live A LONG & HEALTHY Life!

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 are linked to the networks that are controlling the health of your organs. If the signal to turn off inflammation doesn't come, the inflammation can persist. Chronic stress, chronic anxiety is an inflammatory condition where the presence of inflammation gets worse, not better.

President of the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, the father of bioelectronic medicine. Generations of people in the future will say, "I was saved by the work that Dr. Kevin Tracy did."

We're living in an era where we can map the origin and the destination of all the nerves in the body. And with those maps, we will be able to design devices and someday even drugs that can target the individual fibers in an individual patient to give the treatment that that patient needs.

Specific without side effects, probably. Wow.

This is happening. 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. Without that, it's just I can't imagine getting through it. With that, you can do anything.

What is the number one skill you wish every human being could learn to master to help them improve the quality of their life? I think what is the biggest thing that's blocking people from creating harmony within their internal system and also the difference between the vagus nerve and the nervous system. So we can kind of start there and talk about some of 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 is great.

Thank you. Thank you. The great nerve and greatness, you know.

So, the the the name the great nerve comes from uh the fascination that the world has had in in this nerve for 2,000 years. Uh Galen, the arguably the first physician scientist in ancient Rome used to call this the great nerve. So, so maybe we should start by what it is.

So, you first off, so what is the vagus nerve?

What is the vagus nerve? What is the great nerve? Yeah, you have 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 of 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 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 up high, you die.

Wow.

It's it's required for for life. It's required for health.

What if you just cut one side?

Then then then you're 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 good.

Okay. So that's the vagus nerve.

Well, and is it connect to the brain and goes through the heart as well?

It runs. So that's the that's the next important point. It runs from the brain to the body and back. So it's a it's a two-way highway. In fact, 80% of the signals that travel in the vag nerve go from the body to the brain.

Only 20% give or take run from the brain back to the body.

Okay.

Now, the key to this, we keep talking about the vagus nerve and I already said you have two. So, it should be vag nerves.

Okay.

On each side, you have a 100,000 fibers.

So much it's much more proper what we understand today to say that you don't have a vagus nerve. you have 200,000 Vegas nerves. And and what we've learned, my colleagues and I in the laboratory at the Feinstein Institute and now in in dozens if not hundreds of labs around the world, is we've learned that each and every one of these fibers, 200,000 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 Vegas nerve. You have 200,000 vagus nerves. And when someone says to me, I want to do something to stimulate my Vegas nerve, I say, "Oh, really? Which one?"

Right. Right. Interesting.

And that's important.

And you've done 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 complicated? That's the that's the that's the main lesson. Um the main lesson I learned about how complicated it is is rooted in the fact that when when two neurons interact, let's take let's go from a 100red billion neurons in your brain and nervous system with trillions of connections. Uh when you realize that each and every one of those um 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 19s very very simply and in in a way that I that can't be better explained. Charles Sharington said, "If you understand a simple reflex," So that's when the the do the doctor is 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 and that activates one of these connections called the syninnapse which sends signals back down through a motor neuron to the muscles in your quadriceps forous and your leg goes up. Sharington said if you understand a simple reflex then you realize if you put two reflexes together or three or four or more and on and on and on till you get up to however many billions you can assemble a nervous system. But this the the the basis of of what's happening is reflexive.

This 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 that's what I learned is the most complicated thing. We as as as researchers, as scientists, as as um 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 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 you you you can't cure a disease without also curing the soul.

Interesting. What does that mean?

That means that the 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 uh back to where we started, the principal um 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 and and is messy. It's it's more of a transatlantic cable. And so you can imagine you've got the the uh the server in New York transmitting movies to wherever, Paris or London, and the submarine comes along and and decides the sailors, the submariners want to watch a movie.

Mhm.

So they patch on to 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 some today in the billions of web impressions keep pointing at the Vegas nerve and saying, you know, as if the movie's in the Vegas nerve. The movie's not in the Vegas nerve. It's not in the cable. It's on the server in New York.

It's the information is being transmitted through the transatlantic cable. So in this case, which is the vagus nerve, which is the vagus nerve. It's the great nerve.

And there's something you said about a quote from Plato. What was that quote again?

That you can't heal the body unless you also heal the soul.

So if 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. 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 hearing you say?

I I think what Plato meant is that they're the same thing and it depends.

Mhm.

So, let's break it down to like something first principle something. So, pick one of the conditions you listed.

Uh, let's call it like an eczema or something or like or inflammation in the body and the joints.

How about inflammation in the joints?

There you go. Uh, inflammation in the joints, like 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 and and the pain and the presence of inflammation activates all of that activates sensory nerves to send signals into the brain. Uh in a case of mild say inflammation of a joint because you jammed your finger pl catching a football that that inflammation is usually self-limited and self-resolving because the signals that go into the brain and and and through the autonomic nervous system activate signals that come back down to the body to slow down the inflammation when the joint is 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 the if the 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 orflight or sympathetic reflexes have have significant benefit if you need to run away from a attacker, a lion or a a bad guy. Those then it's clearly clearly beneficial to have the energy and the and to not be worried about the pain. Yes. Forget about it. That's what happens.

Flooding adrenaline into the body so you don't feel the pain for that period of time.

Right. The the young woman who picks the car up off her off her injured child. Yeah. Yeah.

So this uh these signals coming back down acutely in in large amounts will tend to dampen and slow down inflammation. Acute fight orflight 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 lowgrade um activation of fight orflight that's pro-inflammatory. So so chronic stress, chronic anxiety actually is an inflammatory condition where the presence of inflammation gets worse not better. So it's it's complicated but if you walk through it step by step you can break down 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 heal or am I off there?

No, you're you're not off, but uh you're you're you're correctly paraphrasing what billions and billions of web impressions uh and web recommendations say.

Really?

Absolutely. So there's there's this is many of these things are being repeated over and over like mantras. When you break down to what is the what are the reflexes? What are the neural circuits that underly this that we can put under conscious control? You kind of run you come you you run up against a wall very quickly. What what is it you can consciously control? You can consciously control your breath rate.

Mhm.

You can slow down your breathing. You know if it's not some you can't always but in this example you can slow down your breathing.

Have you just stimulated your vag nerve?

Well, maybe. Right.

Maybe you calmed it, right?

Well, you haven't really calmed your vag nerve. You've calmed your mind.

Uh-huh. Which impacts your vag nerve.

Yeah. It in fact, it impacts maybe a few hundred fibers of the 200,000.

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 um in on three, out on seven or box breathing.

Uhhuh. Uh four four in on four hold four out four hold four I 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 fi?

No.

No. It might help us feel better in that moment. It might help us 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, um prayer, um some breathing modalities, um not others because what I'm going to say will make sense. Um, cold exposure, not cold exposure. We could talk that that's complicated, but let 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.

Uhhuh.

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.

Interesting.

You don't know. Nobody knows.

Interesting.

So the I wrote you talked about the book. I I wrote this book not to say that these things that are being promoted uh some with all good intention and some less so. uh these things that are being promoted many of them have are are grounded in some basic science facts but to extrapolate it further than that. uh first of all it's no way to be proven true or false but second of all it puts in a in the in the case of a patient with an illness it 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 a if you have an an infection that damaged your vagus nerve and you have arthritis and you you go online and someone tells you to do 10 extra push-ups because that'll stimulate your vag nerve and stop your inflammation. No, it might not for you. So, I I as a as a 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.

Right.

That's not that's not always the case.

It may or may not work. You have to try it out. It may or may not work at all. It may or may not work in you. It may or may not work in somebody else, you know. So, how do we get past that in the in the modern era with all of our powerful tools?

We did discover that you can 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 uh 28 years of work in the lab. uh 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 100,000 Vegas nerve fibers on the left side of of people of humans several hundred maybe a 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 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 20% 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, they get they get pacified. They get calmed down.

Mhm.

Now, when they arrive at that injured finger, they don't attack what they see. They actually switch into a a more tissue repairerative mode. So it's as if rather than a soldier arriving at the front and and shooting, it's a team of medics that come and start patching things up.

Interesting. That's what you want.

That's what 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. There are patients with very famous, widely publicized stories. Um 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 these case studies or or visuals if there's any after this and we can put some in to show people or link them up?

The visual I would send you is the in my office.

Okay.

Um 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 uh 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 as a teacher. Uh and she and her husband Shawn um were out of options. Uh they uh had been nearly bankrupted by the expense of her drugs that weren't working. Um 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?

Um not sure exactly. Late 20s, early 30s.

I was just young. Yeah.

Very young. Wow. Was it arthritis or was it like inflammation in her feet or?

It was actually um inflammatory bowel disease, but a complication of of Crohn's disease that she had was affected her joints.

Mhm.

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.

Oh. So, in her 20s. Yeah.

Yeah. So Kelly and Sean moved to uh Holland. They um 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 um she she had to stay there for a few months afterwards for her follow-up checks and they were running late to uh 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 posttop and she ran up the stairs.

No way.

And uh she's about to get on the train. She realizes Shawn's not with her. So she stops and she looks at Shawn like, "What the heck?" And Shawn's at the bottom of the stairs crying.

Oh my gosh.

Cuz he couldn't remember when she did.

Oh wow.

Gets better. I didn't know any of this till I got an email and I invited Kelly to 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. Wow, man. How old is she now? When was or?

She's in her 30s. She is now restoring guitars. Tell your listeners to look up Kelly Owens Guitar Restoration in Connecticut. She

She worked in Connecticut.

Yes. She

Wow.

She uh she worked for us for uh at the Feinstein Institute for several years after that. She was a patient advocate that helped us collect the um hundreds ultimately more than a thousand emails we were getting for patients that want to participate in these kinds of things. And um she retired from that to to move on.

And make guitars.

To restore old guitars. Yeah. And and other and other artistic.

And what is her I mean I guess.

And her husband her husband's an amazingly skilled um carpenter woodworker. Yeah. So, was this 5 10 years ago or when was this like?

Um this Well, the the trial she was in was down was in the the mid the mid 20s. So, so she's now.

10 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 walk upstairs. She can use her hands fine. I mean, maybe there.

Goes to the gym and works out on the treadmill.

Come on. Does she have pain anywhere today or is it like minimal?

I haven't talked to her uh recently. I'm I'm sure as we all get older, we all get some aches and pains.

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 then.

Yes.

All from one little implant. Or maybe that one was bigger, but it was bigger.

All from an implant here.

That one we I call Gen One. It was It's like a cardiac pacemaker.

Uhhuh.

And it goes under the collar bone.

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 to treat depression and epilepsy.

Interesting.

And it's been FDA approved in the United States for decades and uh we know the complication rate. We know that it's quite safe. We know that um 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, 24 hours a day at at a 10 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, um, 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 242 people in the United States in the last couple years, the side effect uh the the severe adverse event rate it's called was eight times less than the severe adverse event rate of the drugs.

Interesting.

Of the drugs.

Of the drugs.

Which are also invasive and have to be injected.

Yeah. Painful. Yeah.

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So, if someone's had crotic 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? uh 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 certain conditions.

So let's talk about again rheumatoid arthritis which is one one type of arthritis and what we know and what what we don't know. We know that rheumatoid arthritis is a very common condition. Affects up perhaps 1% of the of the population or one and a half% 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 uh pick up a pencil, can't ride their can't ride their bike, can't sometimes button their button their shirt.

Yeah. And we also know that we have powerful drugs that have treated very well many many of these patients. Um these drugs uh go by the names of demarss for disease modifying antiatic drugs or biologics which which are typically antibodies. You see them advertised on the nightly news. You see them advertised on on 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 system.

But do you want to suppress your 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 even to cancer. So many of these drugs that are.

Side effects of those then.

Many of these drugs the side effects have the most serious label that the FDA can give which is called a blackbox 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 30 and $100,000 annually.

Oh my goodness.

Many, if not all of them, have dangerous side effects. And so, people are reasonably concerned.

There's no guarantees for healing. And it's like you have to stay on these things forever. It sounds like.

Not only is there no guarantees, but in the 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 half the time.

They may not work. 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 uh Vegas nerve stimulation uh which uh by the time this airs may be approved by the FDA in the United States uh if if not uh hopefully it'll be approved in the coming months after this airs. Uh what that will allow is patients who have tried these other therapies but as you said are not getting better in their um body or their mind um 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 pill. It'll be put in through about a 1 inch or one and a half inch incision in the neck uh 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 1 minute a day.

Wow.

And many of the patients I've met many of them um many of the patients sleep through the therapy at 4:30 in the morning or something like that. Other patients told me that uh 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 little chip that they implant.

Other side.

Left side. Right. Left side. This is where the pulse is, right? That you here on the left side, next to the pulse.

And you've had over 200 and some people already go through this in the last year.

So, I Exactly. So the the the company's called Setoint Medical. It's not far from here in Valencia and they completed a clinical trial um last year. Uh that they reported the results.

These are people that were having extreme pains like for years.

All of these people were out of options. They had had. They tried the drugs, they've meditated for years, they've prayed, they've done everything they can, and they're just feeling pain.

Yep. Pain, stiffness, swelling. And many of them had symptoms of uh in in their mind of uh either anxiety, depression, sleep disorder, um cognitive um 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. M

Less anxiety, less pain, better sleep, um less depression, less so.

And it doesn't require taking any drugs or invasive therapies except for one invasion, I guess, of putting something in your neck. But.

So that that's going to remain to be seen. Many of the patients were able after the chip was implanted to uh reduce the drugs they were taking, but many of the patients continued to stay on some of the drugs.

It's been 242 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 to take fewer drugs? What patients will have to continue taking drugs? What patients will have no response to this? And what patients will uh 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 biggest thing you've seen over the last three plus decades of research, uh, hands-on experience and 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 optimization.

I think the the the the biggest breakthroughs I'm seeing today are actually coming from understanding the linkages between the the brain, the nervous system and the immune system. Um we you know the Vegas nerve insight which we we started 2530 years ago was just the tip of the iceberg. Right now the the field which is called neuroimmunology is uh probably one of the fastest growing if not the most exciting uh fields in all of science. Young people uh young people want to want to study this because the tools are so powerful in in in just again in the Vegas nerve story. We can we can go in a laboratory mouse and we can put tags in the neurons of the brains of that 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. 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 um not only autoimmune disease, but diabetes, metabolic syndrome and obesity. Um we're seeing studies looking at understanding how things like GLP-1, OMPICS, 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 in the sympathetic nervous system and in the neurons in the brain itself. You're we're living in an era where where we can map the the the starting point, the origin and the the loc the destination, the origin and insertion of of of of all the nerves in the body. First first in mice, then in larger animals, and ultimately in humans. And with those maps, we will be able to design um devices and someday even drugs and perhaps nanobots that can target the individual fibers in an individual patient to give the treatment that that patient needs.

Specific without side effects, probably just to that thing. Wow.

That's that's where the world is headed. Is it going to get there um tomorrow? No. Is this some pie in the sky everyone's going to have a flying car 100 years from now? No. This is happening. Some of the things I said are already in clinical development.

Wow.

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 vag nerve to actually start healing that trauma.

So, it's complicated. Um at this again at the simplest level if we have seen now if there's trauma in the vag nerve or damage or injury that um you can have problems in the body because signals traveling in the vag nerve are not getting where they need to go.

They're block it's blocked somewhere. Yeah.

Yeah. It's like imagine going down a mountain and the brakes in your car someone cuts the brake line in your car.

That's happened to me before. I mean, it didn't it didn't cut like someone cut them, but I was in an old Cadillac, a 1997 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 that was driving. And I I was like, "We're going to die. We're going to 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, man. It was like this was probably 12 years ago, but it was terrifying. So imagine that in your body all day long, like the brakes not working and your your vag nerve is experiencing that.

It's probably what these people with rheumatoid arthritis felt like.

Interesting.

The brakes have failed. They have excessive inflammation in their body. the inflammation in their body 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's that effect we we we understand. You asked about similar things in the brain that 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. Um a war fighter sees sees a horrible or experiences sees or feels a some horrible scene and continues to relive it and relive that horrible event day after day after day even in the safety of of of their home you know here in California or somewhere else. It uh very recent study they implanted Vegas 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 the therapy being given either by an app or by a human therapist um which has 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 twothirds of the of the subjects with post-traumatic stress, which is pretty good, but not not 100%.

When they added the Vegas nerve stimulation to the clinical trial, they had 100% response rate.

What does that mean? Well, what happens when when 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 form new synapses. By driving these signals up the vagus nerve, increasing neuroplasticity, these post-traumatic stress patients, many of them had had significant benefit from their therapy. And it was lasting is lasting.

It's almost like they have to unlearn the memory.

Absolutely. That's what the point of the therapy is.

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 a new experience when you live a memory again.

Isn't that interesting?

This is I mean trial lawyers have known this for decades.

So you could be living in a war that you went through 10 years ago, but your brain is reliving it, rethinking it over fresh.

Fresh. And so you're in that heightened state. There's going to be chronic illness, right?

Absolutely. And so it's really more about is it about eliminating the memory, changing the memory, um 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, 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 uh level of the syninnapse, which Charles Sharington taught us, if you understand the syninnapse, you can assemble an entire nervous system. Even with 100 billion neurons, at the at the level of the syninnapse, vag nerve stimulation enhances neuroplasticity. I mean, this this has been known for decades. Years ago uh there was a fascinating study um subjects patients who had had a implant for their epilepsy. So in these cases these are people with serious disorders um with seizures epileptic seizures that are not well controlled by medications. And some of these subjects were having 10 20 30 seizures a day.

Oh my gosh.

You can't go out of their house.

That's exhausting. So a as a uh attempt to treat that vag 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 30 if you're one of the people having 30 seizures a day and you go down to having two or none or three.

It's lifechanging.

Lifechanging. So, so, so during the course of those experiments, uh, 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 and they gave the test again and their scores went up.

Interesting.

That was the 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.

Wow. So what 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 is not being able to use the hands to feed themselves, hold a newspaper, hold a book. And the the results from adding Vegas nerve stimulation to that are absolutely remarkable.

Really where people are paralyzed in an arm or a hand and are significantly better with their with their rehabilitation combined with the Vegas nerve stimulation.

Maybe it's not full range and function, but it's like improved and.

Exactly. It's not necessarily full range and function, but it's significantly improved enough that the FDA has approved it. Uh and it's uh yeah, it's coming in. 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 orflight tension, tightness in the body, which causes inflammation, pains, things like that, which then could cause into irritital bowel syndrome or eczema or whatever it might be. Um, 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 I think when people heal themselves and they heal their families, the world is healed. It's like there is so much more harmony in the world. There's less anger, resentment, wars, fighting, competition. is 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 the literal hands-on surgical knowledge and the research and the data. And so I'm curious, how can we going back to the the soul, how can we learn how to to heal the soul with the different therapies, strategies, and techniques that you've learned as a neurosurgeon?

Uh I think you said it you said it best one person at a time. So everybody's different and um I think we we can approach this with realistic optimism. Okay. Um again a first principle approach. The vagus nerve is transmitting reflexes. When those reflexes are functioning optimally, yes, you have a harmonious function of the organs in your body in a healthy state with your brain.

Yeah.

In a healthy state.

And we want.

Brain, heart, organ coherence is what I'm hearing you say, 100%. So you want, so we need the coherence of a just a smooth-flowing machine right throughout all three systems. I guess 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 one string on a violin gone bad can make the whole orchestra sound terrible. Right. That's what the Vegas nerve is like. Interesting. It's like one of the 200,000 Vegas nerves. Yes. Yes. is like 200,000 violin strings. It's the difference between playing the piano, if the piano had 200,000 keys, and sitting on it. Right.

So, that's the role of the Vegas nerve. Now, that's a fact. But let's not get carried away. Let's not say that the Vegas nerve is the answer to solving all those things. It has its part. It's a violin string. If it goes bad, it can affect all those things. Mhm.

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 conductor. Uh-huh. Yourself. Your mind, I guess. Well, way up there. Your mind. H 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 your emotional brain. Uh-huh. 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. Yes. And say, well, if the conductor has a heart attack, the orchestra is going to go out of tune. Exactly. If your anxiety or some other emotional interference, anxiety, fatigue, hunger, dominates, cranks the key too hard on the top of the violin, you're out of tune. Yeah. If you've got damage in the Vegas nerve from an infection or an injury, you've broken a violin string, you're out of tune. Yeah. And at the other end, don't forget the body. If you've 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 all got to work in unison. It has to all work in unison. And the reason I spend so much time on this in this book is because there are so many quick fixes on the internet. And they're not all, many of them are rooted in one of those things. But you need all of them, all those things to be working together. Yeah. But maybe, maybe in 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.

So how do you self-become self-aware on which one is off? How do you know what's out of tune? Well, I don't. I mean, obviously, if you're feeling stressed and anxious, you could start with that first. Yes.

What would you say then is the I, 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 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 Vegas nerve and the nervous system and blocking us from feeling in harmony with our total body health? 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 in life. They should be talking to someone, you know. Second, because it impacts the body in a big way, the nervous system, the Vegas nerve. Absolutely. What we know is patients who experience that kind of emotional or mental anxiety, fear, and stress tend to have increased heart rate 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 or under the control of the autonomic nervous system. Heart rate is slowed when the Vegas 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.

Where do we want our heart rate to be at most of the time? You want, 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. If, 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 and say, "Oh, my pulse is 80." It doesn't mean that they're going to have a short lifespan 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. Okay? Statistically, 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 Vegas 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 is because if you have a slower heart rate, you tend to have healthier Vegas nerve function. That may also be slowing inflammation. We don't know. There are 200,000 fibers. It could be that the fibers to your heart are working fine, and the fibers working to your immune system are 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. Meditation. Prayer. Cognitive behavioral therapy. All of these things slow your heart rate. Isn't that interesting? Yeah. They're good tools. If you 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.

Interesting. And so what's the difference between the Vegas nerve system and the nervous system? The Vegas nerve is part of the nervous system. Okay. 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 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. When you think, nerves in your brain generate the thought and the intention, and 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 something is not being transmuted smoothly, you're saying it's not necessarily the cable or the nerve, it's the network. It could be either or both. And that goes back to your first question. Uh-huh.

So, 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 Vegas nerves of people who died from COVID, and they found two things. They found inflammation and damage to the Vegas nerve, and they found virus in the Vegas nerve. Now, knowing what we know today that signals in the Vegas nerve are like the brakes on your car that suppress inflammation, and knowing that the signals that travel up and down the Vegas 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 Vegas nerve contribute to or even cause long COVID, which is characterized by excessive inflammation and malfunction or dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system?

And what is the autonomic nervous system? Okay, so we talked about the voluntary nervous system. The autonomic, as in 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 Vegas nerve, the sensory Vegas 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 Vegas nerve, which is the parasympathetic part of your autonomic nervous system. Okay? And some of the signals come down your sympathetic nerves, which is the other part of the autonomic. So the autonomic, sympathetic and parasympathetic, but they work together.

Got it. Okay. I need to go back to science class. You know, biology is science. Yeah. Yeah. It's not that bad if you, if you put it in the context of this stuff you're interested in. You know, exactly. It's fascinating to me.

Now, as someone who's done over a thousand brain and spinal surgeries, um, 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 at 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, spinal issues occurring? There's no evidence that brain tumors or cancer are caused by mindset. There's no evidence of that. Um.

But in your personal opinion, do you feel like there could be? I don't think so. No. I, just chance. It's just like, oh, there's something off in the system and it's just, oh, that just. Well, I think there's a lot of evidence that cancer originates from genetic mutations in DNA of replicating cells. Okay. That now just keep growing when they're not supposed to grow. And where do those, where does that come from? Is that? 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. It can come, there's a whole field of its own, and I'm 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 that it's not, there's no evidence it's 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 cell. And so there you have another example of a bioelectronic medicine, which is what we call putting the chip on the Vegas 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 influential is the nervous system versus the immune system within the body? They're the same thing. The nervous system and the immune system is the same thing. They talk to each other. They use the same molecules. So for years, I joke about this a lot, but you know, 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. 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-1 and IL-6. 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? They, by the way, the nervous system makes memories. So does the immune system. Those are those, you know, you talk about muscle memory when you train and train and train and train and you can do something 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, and 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 years, Kevin, of science, of surgery, of research, of 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? 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 20 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. Yeah. Without a purpose or a vision or a mission or a game plan, even for the next six months, you're kind of asking yourself, what am I doing every day? Why is this happening to me? Why am I not getting what I want? When you're not clear what you want, it's hard to go create what you want.

What would you say then is one of the hardest things you've ever personally been through in life? Two deaths. Really? Yeah. I mean, the death of my mother. Mhm. Which you talk about in the book. Yeah. When I was five. Um, she died unexpectedly, very suddenly, of a brain tumor. She was 29, I think, or in her late 20s. Late 20s. 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, my grandfather, my mother's father, was a professor of pediatrics at Yale Medical School. And I remember sitting on his lap and saying, "Why didn't the surgeon take the tumor out?" And he said, "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 of her body, her back was burned. Her whole body, 90%. 11-month-old. 11 months. So 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'd 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. Janice's eyes rolled up in her head. I ran in the room. I put her in the crook of my arm. Her heart had stopped. I gave CPR. I gave her mouth-to-mouth, and called a cardiac arrest. The whole hospital was there in minutes, and the code went on for what felt like hours. But everything, everything was perfect in the code, and she was gone. So I had to tell her mother, and it was horrible. It was absolutely horrible. But I didn't know why she died. Couldn't explain it. She, we all thought there was no reason she should have died. She was improving, it looked 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 1985. Wow. Still working on it. 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 in a moment. Septic shock can kill very quickly. It's less lethal now than it was in 1985. We have better ways of treating it. Um, 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 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 Janice 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. Wow. Which is also stopped by Vegas nerve stimulation. Wow.

Dr. 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 Vegas Nerve and How to Harness Its Healing Reflexes, is out. People can pick up a copy. Um, 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 and the next decade or two that you're working on? Collaborate, don't compete. That's number one. I counted recently, I have more than 1,100 co-authors and co-inventors. Wow. 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 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 to participate in clinical trials and in clinical research because, first of all, you acknowledge my colleagues and me with 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. Yeah. 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. And yeah, it's a big risk for them. They don't know what's going to happen. We don't know, and they don't know. Albert Einstein said it best: "If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?" So patients step 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. 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." And some people who are arguably not quote-unquote suffering that much, they step in because they want to help other people. Wow, man. That's powerful.

What would you say is the biggest personal challenge you're faced with at this season of life? I think we're entering an era of anti-science, which is going to be a challenge. Um, the idea somehow that you can do science quickly and for free 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 1920s. 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. Um, we were on the heels of a massive disinformation campaign in the media because during World War I, 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 10 years. This anti-science, anti-intellectual period lasted for 10 years on the heels of the pandemic. What brought us out of it? Why am I realistically optimistic that we'll come out? 1932, 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 II. Soon after that, penicillin, blood banking came on board in the 1930s, and during the Coconut Grove fire, a 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 10,000 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 of years. The cures we're using today were invented 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago. We take them for granted. Yeah. We're going to have diseases that continue to injure and disable and kill people. And at some point, the pendulum will swing back. And when that happens, hopefully, 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 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? 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. M. You think a lot of people are not living in the present. I think most people are not living in the present. Do 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 some type of fight or flight or stress or like thinking about the future, what they 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. Uh-huh. 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.

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, to support you staying in 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 to having balance, homeostasis in your life. I mean, if the Vegas 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 10 minutes. I do mindfulness meditation or breathing meditation. Um, I try to take a cold immersion several times a week. Um, 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 got to 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 yesterday. Yeah. Yeah. What happens? It's like everything slows down. Yeah. And you feel almost like you're watching somebody else do 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 Vegas nerve. That's when your heart rate slows down. That's anti-inflammatory. Yeah.

And you told me before that you were one of the scientists that studied Wim Hof's who drew his blood at some point when he was meditating or doing breathwork, is that right? Like 15 years ago. Yeah. Back before he was Wim Hof, before anyone knew who he was. Back a long time ago, like 2010. He visited the lab. 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 meeting that the Dalai Lama had hosted of scientists and researchers. And so through the Dalai Lama's network at Menla House in New York, they introduced me to him. 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 Sangita. Sangita and I run the lab together. And we said, "Well, what are we going to do?" We had to get an IRB protocol, which is an 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 breathing techniques. Well, we didn't know. All we knew is he says he can control his immune system. That's all we knew. This is 15 years ago. That's probably. 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 a week." So he's like, "Tell me now." 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 breathed like a mother." Yeah, it sounds like him. He said, "Why?" And I said, "Because you lowered your inflammatory response, which we measure through a very specialized assay in our lab, you lowered your inflammatory response by like 75%." 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. You're an N of one. I have to do a proper study with like a hundred people at least or something." We said, "Get 20 people, teach 10 of them your breathing method, and then 10 of them not, and then switch the groups and do all the tests and see what happens." And did you guys do that? So I, he said, "What would that cost?" And I said, "Oh, probably three-quarters of a million dollars, something like that. It's expensive to do these things." And he said, "Well," I said, "Can he was there with a group of businessmen." And they said, "We'll get back to you." Well, they didn't get back to me, but that's okay, because a couple of 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. He, not Amsterdam, in Holland, but in a different city. I forget which city. Um, and he did the exact study with 10 people. And the 10 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 from the whole tube of blood that has white blood cells, and we added an activator that makes the white blood cells inflamed to make lots of cytokines, cytokine storm, TNF, IL-6. So you almost inject it with like, the tube. The blood tube. Yeah. Yeah. The tube. So we didn't have to inject him. We just injected his white blood cells with like a toxin, a virus, a toxin, a bacterial toxin called endotoxin, lipopolysaccharide. And the results were remarkable. In the subjects that breathed, they lowered their cytokine release in the blood by 75%, meaning they were more resistant to getting an infection or they were more resistant to having a damaging amount of inflammation. So inflammation in small amounts, for the right period of time, is good for you. Yeah. You sprain an ankle, you want to have a little inflammation. 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 Pickers' study, where they injected the endotoxin into the people, not into 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 system. It's like 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 you're oxygenating the blood 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 what's weird is at three and a half minutes, you're still not really sure you really need to breathe. You're sitting there, you're vibrating, your whole body is vibrating, you're just no air in your lungs. But what you do have at that point is you have very high carbon dioxide levels. What does that do to the nervous system or to the Vegas nerve? Well, the carbon dioxide, the rising carbon dioxide is what's screaming at your brain to breathe. It's not the fallen oxygen, it's the rising 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 catecholamines. 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 the proofs of it. Another one, my colleagues and I in New York years ago, we infused those hormones in volunteers, in sailors and marines on shore leave, and we infused them with those hormones, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and even cortisol, and then we injected them with endotoxin to make them sick. And the ones that got infused first were less sick. Interesting. Yeah. So, I think Wim Hof breathing, which by the way, you did it on a couch. I saw your podcast or your YouTube. I do it, not every week, but every few weeks I do it after a workout. 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. Any condition, you should check with your doctor or do it with a colleague or do it minimally. You don't have to push yourself that far, but.

So, you still do it today every now and then. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. And you see the benefits. You know the benefits. I don't know the benefits. I like the way it makes me feel. Mr. Hof says it's a great time after you do that to do an extra 10 or 20 push-ups. Yeah, I've done it. I have too. It's like, yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. More push-up strength. 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. You could do more. Do more. Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah, it's very interesting. So, you could breathe and do as many as you can, then stop, then do the breathwork for three minutes, and then blow all the air out of your lungs, hold it, and then do push-ups. 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 he is. Yeah, he's. You know, he, I remember after I told him I couldn't publish him, he said, "What should?" And I said, "If you do this experiment with the 10 or 20 people and publish it, you'll make the world a better place." And he's repeated that story on several other podcasts. And it makes me feel good. That's good. It is good. That's amazing.

Dr. 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 publications, 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? Find, you find love and true meaning and joy in your family every day. That would be number one. Wow. 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's the second truism. Um, and number three is probably related to that, but 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. Mhm. If everybody knew that and spent more time picking their goals, the world would be a better place.

Dr. 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 Vegas nerve. Final question for you. What's your definition of greatness? Leaving the world better than you found it. Kevin, thanks for being here. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate you being here. Amazing.

We think something's a problem, and it could be, but we can find the answer. But if we get stuck in that loop, we get all confused and chaotic, and then the anxiety builds, and then it starts distorting. So then the anxiety flips, and then everything in your body, all the stress response which goes with anxiety, which is supposed to make you alert, now makes you confused. So too much.