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Emrys Goldsworthy on the Vagus Nerve/Tone, Detox, Microbes, Dysautonomia, Nerve Functioning, and so Much More!
505 Plays10 months ago
In this week's episode, we are joined by Emrys Goldsworthy, a luminary in this field who truly connects the dots. We discussed everything about the vagus nerve and its connections!
We started the conversation talking about general health, tying in the idea of cytokines and cytokine storms. Then, we delved into a discussion on the vagus nerve and its role in various bodily functions. Emrys eloquently explained its connection to the lungs, digestive organs, and more!
We touched on the notion of dysautonomia, an emerging field. We specified the ideas of low and excessive vagal tone, ensuring that we covered the causes of dysautonomia, ranging from compression to chemical to electrical factors.
Emrys provided insight into why the polyvagal theory is flawed, shedding light on future studies and mentioning Joseph LeDoux.
I asked Emrys about his view on the modern understanding of nerve conduction, a topic briefly covered in our introductory episodes (Episode 4). He explained the workings of nerves concisely through the structured water lens. Lastly, we brought it back to detox, where Emrys touched on the role of microbes, bioremediation, and their connection to the vagus nerve.
This was a brilliant episode that left me motivated to learn more!
I know you all will enjoy this episode.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Episode
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of the Beyond Terrain podcast. This is going to be a cool episode, guys. I'm really looking forward to this. We're going to talk about a topic that we haven't really touched on too much today. I think it plays an important role. I think we'll be able to tie it into a lot of topics that we have been talking about.
What is the Vagus Nerve?
00:00:22
Speaker
I think I found the right guy to talk about this as well. I've been trying to find someone to dig into the vagal, vagus nerve discussion. I'm not well versed enough in it, but I think today we'll get a
00:00:38
Speaker
great overview and maybe go into a little depth here and see if we connect it back to the topics we've been talking to. This guy's great. I was doing a couple of his podcasts with other people like Daniel Roytuss. They have some, I think, two great episodes together.
Health and the Body's Natural State
00:00:55
Speaker
Yeah, so we have Emrys Goldsworthy on, guys. Emrys, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. I'm really looking forward to it.
00:01:03
Speaker
Yeah, me too. So I always ask it to start an introductory question. What is health? And this is kind of like what health means to you. What does it look like? How does it manifest? And this also always gives us a good baseline on moving forward. So what, what does health mean to you? I think
00:01:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's a very difficult question. I think when we use the term health and also even disease, I think we run into some problems. I think we're looking at this like in a very binary way, we're either in health or not. And I think the best way to kind of explain what health is, is in two ways. One is how it feels, but also how it probably is in the body.
00:01:52
Speaker
And for me, we will get onto the vagus nerve today. It's probably a big part of this explanation, but health is where your body is in its optimal state to detect, capture and eliminate toxins efficiently and without too much harm to the host or to the organism us.
00:02:20
Speaker
We, as much as we can stay out of trouble as far as trauma is concerned, although a little bit of discomfort, a little bit of difficulty in our lives makes us stronger and more resilient. So I think that's important part of being healthy.
00:02:39
Speaker
And as much as we can achieving, this is a very difficult thing in this world of new biology and terrain because we don't really know exactly how digestion works and absorption of nutrients. But let's just say we get what we need from our environment in order to thrive.
00:03:02
Speaker
And thriving goes back to being able to achieve our goals. You know, our main two goals are to survive and to procreate. I do believe that. I know it sounds a bit banal to just talk about it in those two ways.
00:03:15
Speaker
We're going to get on to the autonomic nervous system today. And I think the key is a healthy, really efficiently functioning autonomic nervous system that will basically give us the keys to being able to quickly identify and eliminate toxins. And how it's perceived is difficult because I actually think in many ways, people who are getting colds and flus are doing the right thing. Their body's doing the right thing. They are actually healthy.
00:03:43
Speaker
I don't think that that's unhealthy. Constantly being sick doesn't mean that you're unhealthy. It just means that your environment is not good for you. And I will talk about it today with a Vegas note. I really do believe that people who are in the wrong environment and don't get sick are actually less healthy because they're not actually eliminating
00:04:07
Speaker
So eliminating the toxins in their body and that can lead to further so-called quote-unquote diseases that are further downstream, just failures to eliminate. So I think that it's a bit ambiguous. I can't, I've, I've, I've heard, I actually listened to Daniel's podcast and I heard his explanation. I totally agree with everyone's explanation generally.
00:04:35
Speaker
But I think that that's what I would add to the kind of landscape of what health means. And I think some people do also obsess with what like trying to be healthy, whereas they actually don't know what healthy really feels like. And sometimes it's contrary to what they feel is good. You know, like the classic one is.
00:04:55
Speaker
someone has corticosteroid and they feel like they are really healthy, but of course they're not. They're very unhealthy at that. So it's, but the perception of health is very deceiving. And I think that that's something I've been trying to teach people. Um, I run groups of, of, um, groups on social media to try to educate people on this. And it's a, it's a rough world out there. There's a lot of very, very indoctrinated people.
00:05:24
Speaker
And they're not willing to give up that ideology of what health is to them. But I think we'll get there one day, I think, with many of them. It's not really an answer. I think that there is no one answer, but I think that's my two cents of it. Yeah. Well, if anything, this podcast has proven that.
00:05:45
Speaker
Everyone has a different perspective on what health is. We've had a very different answer. This is episode 21. We've had a different answer for every episode. I would answer it differently. I'm sure that every single guest that I'll have on will answer it differently as well.
00:06:04
Speaker
Yeah. Like even just how, even what you're indoctrinated with, right? Even if it's not like classical indoctrination, but even what your, what your focus is, right? You're going to tailor that definition to what, what you're focused on too. Um, but no, I really appreciate your perspective, especially like, um, I think a great point that you made was
00:06:29
Speaker
that just because you get sick doesn't mean you're necessarily unhealthy. This is a cyclical part of nature as the seasons move and the leaves fall from the trees. If you want to consider that a disease, that's essentially what's going on in our bodies. We're shedding our leaves once a year. It's like a cyclical part of nature, I think. You said that the indication is more so an unhealthy terrain.
00:06:58
Speaker
I think that's good as well. That's a great perspective. You know, if you're constantly sick, you know, every month or two months, right? Maybe that's not the cyclical nature of, of our detoxing process. But, uh, maybe that is a better indication of, you know, you need to change up your train. And, um, you said beautifully that if you're not actually getting these detox symptoms, disease, whatever you want to get the flu, right. And if you're not getting that, that's going to be problematic down the road. I always kind of thought that.
00:07:28
Speaker
You know, whenever you stop getting sick all the time is when you start getting chronic illnesses, right? And, you know, if you're not actually going through these detox periods, then it will build up in the body. And I think that's really, really important.
00:07:43
Speaker
I think that's a great note. And you know, symptom suppression is another part of it too, right? If you're going to have symptoms and then suppress them, that also leads to more chronic illnesses, I think. You just you're pushing it to another time or to another way, you know, and you could say that's what cancer is. You could say that's what all these different really really chronic health conditions really are in different ways. And I really want to add my
00:08:06
Speaker
Two cents about how the values never is involved in that, but coming back to just generally TDOCs. You know, a lot of people during this COVID-19, whatever you want to call it, real or not real event, I'll just call it hysteria. They, there was many people who were hospitalised.
00:08:28
Speaker
Maybe there was a bit of psychogenic illness involved without a doubt there would have been. But there is this phenomenon you do hear about where people so-called die of a cytokine storm, this sort of overwhelming effect of pro-inflammatory cytokines. And I wanted to just mention that because it's something that I've been getting my head around, like what really is a cytokine storm from my perspective, not from the
00:08:58
Speaker
medical perspective because I don't see cytokines in any way as being harmful, zero harm. There's no experimental study where they inject cytokines into someone that are like human cytokines in the right context that causes harm.
00:09:12
Speaker
just doesn't happen. Just like with viruses and bacteria and things like that. If you disturb the solution enough, you're going to eventually create some level of disease or discomfort in the person. But truthfully, cytokines are not toxic. They are messengers. So when you hear about, look, my inflammation is really high. It just often is reflected in there.
00:09:35
Speaker
C-reactive protein which is analogous to interleukin 6 or interleukin 1 beta or TNF alpha the more prevalent one that's talked about TNF alpha. And one of the things that I would say with this is that as someone's getting sicker and sicker they're not getting better. Remember this is disregarding the effect of the drugs they're on because that's a whole other thing. The TNF alpha interleukin 1 beta tends to rise and rise and rise and rising higher and higher and higher.
00:10:06
Speaker
And often they'll say it gets to the point where their whole body just shuts down from that. Trying to fight the virus as if TNF-alpha does that, which it doesn't. The TNF-alpha is like a communication between so-called immune cells in the defense of the system, they would say. Of course, I see it as a toxic problem. Just remove the word virus and put in toxin.
00:10:33
Speaker
And there you have the problem. Someone has actually got toxic, has toxin exposure. They're not well equipped to deal with it. Mind you, more than likely they have all those comorbidities which come back to the same common denominator. And I'll explain the vagus nerve in relation to that today.
00:10:49
Speaker
Then a bunch of things happen to them which may make this whole process worse but generally their body is trying to communicate to eliminate and it does that this communication of we've got to get this out we've got to get this out we've got to remove this we've got to remove this through its system of different cells and different structures to eliminate neurological and quote-unquote immune interfaces. It needs to keep communicating this if it's failing
00:11:18
Speaker
to do so, if it's not actually eliminating through all the different pathways, which I'd love to talk about, it will eventually just keep raising up that cytokine level, which looks bad on the bloods and is reflected in the severity of their condition. They are getting worse, they're not getting better, and their cytokines are going up and they put those two together. They're classic firemen at the fire. Oh look, there's more firemen at this raging fire.
00:11:46
Speaker
Every time another fireman comes, the fire gets worse. Yeah, well, that's it's not it depends on the order in which you look at it. Fire gets worse, more firemen come. And that's that's in a way what's going on. But it's actually the fact that the body is not eliminating is not adequately eliminating.
How Does the Vagus Nerve Affect Lungs and Digestion?
00:12:03
Speaker
So therefore, it will keep trying to initiate that response and it fails to do so. And therefore, it keeps rising. And I think that's the reason why we see these so-called cytokine storms.
00:12:17
Speaker
Awesome. That's amazing. Yeah. Something I haven't really thought of before. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Super cool. Great explanation too. Um, so maybe now's a good time. Uh, get right into the
00:12:31
Speaker
Yeah. Vegas nerve. Maybe just give you a little introductory spiel. What is the Vegas nerve? What is that tone? Maybe disautonomy up. Um, whatever you think is necessary here. I'd like to just give you the Florida, maybe kind of introduce the topic and tie it into what we were discussing just there. And yeah. So look, the Vegas nerve is cranial nerve 10 and it's part of a 12 cranial nerves that come out of our brainstem, uh, particularly in Eric or the medulla oblongata.
00:13:00
Speaker
It has a bunch of areas where it produces neurons or nerve cells called nuclei and there is four main ones There's ways of dividing that that are known in the popular media But generally speaking the best way to explain is that two are output and two are input So they receive information and put out information
00:13:24
Speaker
We'll get to that if we need. Then there's pathway of the vagus nerves. This is actually more than one, of course, it's one on each side, but then it divides into lots of different nerves. It goes into the back of the throat to elevate our uvula to give rise to taste receptors at the back of our tongue, also to assist in swallowing. It has innovations to our larynx for so we can speak.
00:13:50
Speaker
So often an effect of having a problem with their vagus nerve is having changes in vocal tone, hoarseness of voice, loss of voice, things like that. Loss of swallowing, reflexes, things like that. Loss of taste is another one, particularly bitterness. And sometimes umami flavors get lost. And then as it further goes down, it also beyond before this, it divides into what's called a cardiac vagus nerve and a cervical vagus nerve, which essentially is just everything else.
00:14:20
Speaker
And it goes down into our organ systems. Lungs, it invades the lungs, it goes to the heart, it changes the heartbeat rhythm. It can affect how much contractility is in the heart and also how much blood pressure there is at any given moment. We'll get to that. Its effect on the lungs is pretty cool. It actually is incredibly important for detoxification of the lungs.
00:14:46
Speaker
So I will mention that now because we're on it. So in the lungs, you have these things called irritant receptor. So when you breathe in something toxic, whether it be smoke with particulate matter in it, or it might be any number of other things, your body is generally pretty well tuned to what it tastes toxic to our system. And it will initiate a cough reflex pretty early in as it comes into our upper respiratory tract. And that upper respiratory tract is vagal,
00:15:14
Speaker
sensory irritant receptors, they are vagal and they are going to respond by a cough and that's appropriate responses. Some people don't and therein lies one of the problems from the first problems is they don't cough and they don't initiate elimination. So if the vagus nerve has a problem, sometimes you'll see a poor cough reflex, insufficient cough reflex. The other thing that happens during this time is that mucus is produced.
00:15:43
Speaker
And mucus is produced in the back of the throat, in the lungs, and those goblet cells are innervated by the vagus nerve. Again, part of the same system, but it's the next line. So we're going to then send out mucus to capture these so-called toxins, which they are in this context, and not the bacteria. Not the bacteria, it's all the so-called viruses. No, it's our toxins. And then our lungs are really cool. They have these things called hair cells.
00:16:12
Speaker
and they're like little projections, they're like little hairs and they have a little contractile element that goes oh contraction, contraction and every time it contracts it flicks and it flicks mucus upwards towards our throat against gravity. Obviously it's a lot easier to cough out mucus if we're lying on our like lying forward
00:16:32
Speaker
And it will do gravity. It allows it to come up to the throat and we cough it out. As gross as that is, that is important to eliminate toxins, first line elimination pathway of the lungs. And it's all vagally mediated. That flicking is a vagal input. And then the other thing that it does really cleverly is it actually constricts the lungs. So you get like asthma like symptoms, bronchoconstriction.
00:16:59
Speaker
And that's to protect your lungs. So when you breathe in a bit of smoke or something like that, your lungs go constrict and they don't allow for the absorption as much as possible. So you don't feel good. You know, you feel pretty crappy at that point. You've got asthma and you're coughing it up. This is appropriate, by the way. None of this is bad. This is all appropriate for the situation. But what's inappropriate is not getting that.
00:17:24
Speaker
the eye can breathe in all sorts of smoke and I don't get any, you know, negative effects from it. Well, don't you? I mean, that's the, the truth is it's this lying in weight kind of toxicity. It's getting through that, the side door. It's not, it's not able to deal with the front gate. So it goes through the side door and it, and our body doesn't have good defenses at that point, truthfully, because we're so obsessed by the bacteria and the viruses that we just forget that the mostly people are getting sick because of these toxins.
00:17:54
Speaker
and their inability to recognize it. Further down, the esophagus is innervated by the vagus nerve. So the contraction of that esophagus to push food through, down to the bottom of the esophagus at the lower esophageal sphincter. As pressure increases lower down, the esophageal sphincter opens and relaxes. As the pressure increases, the food going through that esophagus and that slow esophageal sphincter, and it releases it, there's no more food in there, it closes.
00:18:23
Speaker
But if you have a dysfunctional vagus nerve, it wants to not close properly. And that is one potential cause of reflux, is that the vagus nerve is not adequately closed that lower esophageal sphincter.
00:18:36
Speaker
In the stomach, I hope this is okay, it's a very long explanation. In the stomach, food is then stimulating locally and when you are eating. When you're chewing food and you're tasting it, you're stimulating your vagus nerve, by the way. When you chew food, the longer you chew, the more you stimulate your vagus nerve. The more you taste your food, the more you smell your food, things like that. The slower you eat. And then by the time it gets to the stomach, there's already been a response. You're going to get the release of hydrochloric acid.
00:19:06
Speaker
going to convert pepsinogen to pepsin and you're going to start to get the breakdown of proteins in that food through enzymatic and through pH change. And I do think that pH sometimes in certain circumstances, pH change
00:19:25
Speaker
is protective, actually, against toxins. And I'm not sure yet, it was very early days for my research with this, but it seems the body has lots of mechanisms to either eliminate, by remediate, change the structure of whatever it is so it doesn't harm us. So it's got lots of lines of defense, right? So once it gets through one of the early dial-ins of defense, it goes up. We can't easily eliminate it now, we could vomit.
00:19:52
Speaker
which is one of the things it can do, or we could start to produce more acid, lower the pH, and this could denature it in some way and allow it to be less negative on our body. It depends what it is, of course. And I don't think the body can always determine what it is.
00:20:09
Speaker
necessarily and have exactly the right response. But that might be another reason to get reflux. It might actually be a way of flushing out the esophagus of toxins. It's hard to say because I don't think that it's always, I don't think every so-called bad response is inappropriate. I think it can be inappropriate and appropriate.
00:20:31
Speaker
And this is all relative to if they have a vagus nerve problem. If their vagus nerve is working well, you can still get reflux. And it may be because of the fact that the body is trying to eliminate something in the esophagus that's trapped there. Could be. Okay. So once it's been through that stomach, it's going to go through contract, the stomach contracts and it pushes everything through to the duodenum.
00:20:54
Speaker
You can get pyloric. The next sphincter is the sphincter after the stomach or the pyloric sphincter. And that has to have the same effect. So it has to close properly, but many peoples do not. And so it allows the acid to leak through and changes the pH in the duodenum. That's a problem because you can't really absorb food properly at the wrong pH. So the body produces bicarbonate that's released there. That's a vaguely mediated process.
00:21:23
Speaker
CCK, cholecystokinin, and a bunch of other different hormones and different enzyme releases as well from the pancreas and the duodenum itself. Biol gets released. But the bicarbonate is to change the pH so the food is able to be broken down more adequately. Enzymes allegedly perform better in that environment.
00:21:50
Speaker
So we change it back to a different pH once it's been through the acid, goes through the acid breakdown.
00:21:56
Speaker
And then, okay, now let's protect the duodenum from acidity, because it's not really accustomed to doing that, but it might, you know, deal with some problems of acidity with the vagus nerve is not adequately functioning. And then we get our motility. So all that function of moving it through the digestive tract after that is vaguely initiated. There's conjecture over whether it is completing the entire task.
00:22:20
Speaker
But for me, it is a vagal process. Any other nerve that's involved is mostly just like downstream nerves that are being commanded by the vagus nerves. There's different ways that neurology and neuroscience divide things.
00:22:37
Speaker
The pancreas behavior is all vaguely mediated. The spleen in some ways is too, although that's very controversial. The liver is 100% innovated by the vagus nerve and it's likely that every detoxification process has a neurological component. If you don't have the nervous system involved, organs are inert. They don't really do anything without the nervous system's involvement.
00:23:00
Speaker
Uh, is that everyone says, Oh, you've got to, you know, the gut brain, it's its own thing. It's not really true. You know, you could just cut the vagus nerve and the sympathetic nervous system to the gut. And you just get this like crazy mess of activity. It's not really in any way productive. So it's kind of like, it's kind of like cutting the cord and then all of a sudden you get really confused, but you can't, your brain is actually active.
00:23:28
Speaker
But you're unable to use it. And that's pretty much what the gut brain is. It's a coordinated system of nerves, but they are coordinated by the vagus nerve and sympathetic nerve system. There are other innovations, but they're the predominance of innovations. The big thing that I think gets really interesting is detoxification. And because nearly every single interface of toxins in the body, nearly every single one,
00:23:56
Speaker
vagal irritant receptor sites. The vagus nerve is then involved in the mucus production in nearly every single instance, including the gut. The vagus nerve is involved in the vomiting reflex. It is the vomiting reflex. It's the cough reflex and it's the diarrhea response.
00:24:15
Speaker
So you can see how I would presume the vagus nerves involved in detoxification. It's pretty important. Right. Absolutely. And there is, there is the whole brain detox component, but we can get to that later. But that's really what the vagus nerve is. It's our survival nerve. Wow. It was fantastic. So this autonomy is just,
00:24:44
Speaker
you know, maybe you could explain that a little bit. What I'm going to assume is that it's just, you know, poor, vagal functioning, right? You don't have things responding when they should. That's, that's the main drivers. What I'm kind of gathering here, but please doubt. Yeah, so just like, I'd like to maybe talk about autonomic nervous system. I think there, this is a new area relatively. So there's not really specialists in that they are, they're reported to be specialists.
00:25:12
Speaker
And they've categorized so-called conditions, syndromes. So these are the classic syndromes or conditions you'll hear under the term disorder nomia. One's called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome.
00:25:27
Speaker
pots. And what's interesting is that although I know that it's a vagal problem, and I'll explain why, it's not very well discussed. It's not even really, if you look at the Dysautonomia papers on pots, they never really discussed the vagus nerve. It's insane. It's like completely ignoring the fact that the vagus nerve could have a neuropathy, which we'll talk about.
00:25:55
Speaker
leading to said problem. Now, I don't think POTS is beneficial at all. It's quite debilitating. What POTS really is, is someone, when they're upright versus lying down, they test it when you're lying down, you go upright quickly. If someone gets dizzy from that or is constantly in a dizzy state or lie-headed or that kind of anti-gravity kind of symptoms, the reason that they have that is that when they sit up,
00:26:24
Speaker
their blood pressure is normal and their heart rate goes up and their blood pressure might go up a little bit, which is all normal. And that's because we're trying to get blood to the brain against gravity. But then what happens is that heart rate skyrockets and it doesn't get controlled and it doesn't get suppressed. And the reason it doesn't is because the vagus nerve is not suppressing it.
00:26:46
Speaker
Right, so the vagus nerve comes in when things go awry, when your blood pressure is all of a sudden too high, it suppresses it and adequately dilates blood vessels, reduces heart contractility, sometimes reduces heart rate to lower your blood pressure. But when it comes to pots, your heart rate is skyrocketing. So what it does is says, no, no, no, that's too high. Let's bring it down a bit. And it brings it back to normal so you can go about your daily life.
00:27:13
Speaker
It's very different to hypotension, postural hypotension, when you sit up and your blood pressure drops. That's actually excessive vagal activity, right? We get to that. That's somewhat considered disorder nomia.
00:27:29
Speaker
But POTS really is not ever talked about like the vagus nerve. They'll mention things like, oh, you know, you've got autoimmunity or something. You've got, you've got all these ambiguous, unprovable things. Like, oh, you just haven't got a lot of water in the system. And that's true. You can have people who have a lack of system wide water. So they're just dehydrated and it's what causes it, but it's an aggravating factor. I don't think it's causative. So basically the vagus nerve is not working.
00:27:57
Speaker
They stand up. The heart rate goes up above 30 beats per minute. So you might start it at 65 and it's gone to 95 or above. Now they're a positive case for pots. What should have happened is they got up and that heart rate raised up and then it came down. It didn't get that far. That's appropriate. That's what we all should be having.
00:28:21
Speaker
but these people don't. That's one type. The other one is gastroparesis. So that's stomach weakness, you could say. But really what it is, is that as the food moves through the stomach, it doesn't adequately get into the duodenum in an appropriate speed. So they do this thing called a gastric emptying test to see the speed at which things move through. And they'll say that it doesn't, or it doesn't do at an adequate time.
00:28:50
Speaker
And so then they'll give people prokinetics, things that stimulate through drugs. And that's a famously vagal, because you can imagine, I've already mentioned that the vagus nerve stimulates the activity of that gastric of the stomach motility. And so without the vagus nerve, you don't get stomach motility. So I mean, it's no wonder what causes that. And it can happen due to surgeries, they'll cut the nerve,
00:29:19
Speaker
Gastric sleeve surgery is the biggest one. Then you get any number of cervical surgeries where the vagus nerve is running through here. You cut the nerve there and you get gastroparesis. You can get vagus nerve damage from lots of different things which we'll talk about. Gastroparesis is another one that's termed. I would just call that, you could term it that, but it's not really a condition, it's a syndrome.
00:29:44
Speaker
And then another one you'll hear is this sort of thing called autonomic neuropathy. And it's essentially autonomic nerves have some level of neuropathy leading to symptoms of dysautonomia, like excessive sweating,
Understanding Vagal Tone and Health Impacts
00:29:59
Speaker
like
00:29:59
Speaker
elevated sympathetic activity. And look, to me, it's classic medicine. They're just trying to refine things down to one thing, and it's not even very accurate. All of these can be explained by either low or excessive vagal tone. And so with someone with a vagal tone, let's explain that. So vagal tone in context to a nerve is the amount of electrical activity per unit time relative to what it needs in that moment. So let's just say your vagus nerve is meant to activate,
00:30:29
Speaker
And there's a relative number of electrical impulses per unit time that is required to achieve the goal. So good tone means that's high. Low time means that's a bit slow. Instead of being electrical activity going out, it's as an example, that's low tone. Excessive tone is like through the roof electrical activity. Now, low and excessive are both bad.
00:30:57
Speaker
And they can both be caused by the identical thing. Wow. So there are people who actually do have both. You'll see this on one of the measurements we use in clinical practice called heart rate variability. Everyone's probably heard of this. It's the gold standard of autonomic nervous system function. And essentially just tells you how flexible your autonomic nervous system is. How much flexibility do you have to go into sympathetic, fight or flight and back into parasympathetic
00:31:27
Speaker
And it's a good measurement for cardiac vagal tone, not a sorry gastrointestinal vagal tone, but cardiac. So these people will be like one day they're at 30, 25, the next day they're 180. Like, it's crazy. And all this has to do with is to do with values of compression. So yeah, as far as
00:31:53
Speaker
there's this term dysautonomia. It really just means low vagal tone or high excessive vagal tone or see soaring. And that's how I look at it. Sure. Awesome. Maybe I should explain some of the other symptoms of low vagal tone. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Just a lot of contents. So I'll explain that. Well, what is low vagal tone? You know, picture in the heart looks like tachycardia, high blood pressure.
00:32:23
Speaker
In the gut, it's poor motility, bloating, malabsorption of food, fat malabsorption, carbohydrate malabsorption, all these different macronutrients, deficiency syndromes. Then you have a little more kind of anything to do with the brain.
00:32:45
Speaker
The vagus nerve actually innervates a lot of brain structures. It's involved in the release of serotonin, dopamine and noradrenaline or norepinephrine. And it's incredibly, it's very interesting that so people who have low vagal tone tend to have brain fog.
00:33:02
Speaker
not because they have brain inflammation necessarily, but because they have low frontal lobe, consciousness, monoamine systems are not as active in those areas. So monoamine meaning dopamine, serotonin or adrenaline. And those are called neuromodulators. So when you have low vagal tone, you just can't focus.
00:33:29
Speaker
Because, and you can get it with excessive, but it's because everything is disorganized, it's disturbed in some way, but most people have low vagal tone. And that low vagal tone, those nuclei I mentioned earlier in the medulla of the vagus nerve, they have connections. All the way up to all these different other nuclei that send out neurons to the frontal lobe, and other areas of the brain, of course, but one key one is dopamine.
00:33:58
Speaker
So our ventral tegmental area, VTA, this is our dopamine producing nerve cells. They come out of our brainstem and around our diencephalon and go through to the frontal lobe and they release dopamine there and make it wired to activate. Essentially, it's like putting the plug in the wall, right? You need to plug it in. It's not on necessarily. We haven't turned it on yet.
00:34:24
Speaker
but it's plugged in. So these are plug-in chemicals. They don't turn the brain on per se. That's glutamate. Yeah, it's something you might've heard of glutamate.
00:34:36
Speaker
So we need our brain to function well, we need good activation. We need to be wired to activate in our frontal lobe to be able to complete our daily task, to be able to do things, calculations, things like that, computation. But if we don't have good dopamine levels in our frontal lobe, we just can't do that. It's the same for noradrenaline and serotonin.
00:34:55
Speaker
And we don't fully grasp how they all work in conjunction with each other. There's lots of theories. But the vagus nerve is critical to that. And it's found that in animal models, when you stimulate the vagus nerve, you get a huge increase in tonic outflow, meaning electrical activity in the dopamine nerves, in the serotonin nerves, and in the noradrenaline nerves to the frontal lobe.
00:35:16
Speaker
Pretty cool. Basically, that's all about improving your executive function. So everyone's trying to do breathing techniques for, eating well for, but you can actually just do vagus nerve stimulation, it doesn't have to be electrical, and you actually can improve it too. Coming back, low vagal tone is just generally often seen as systemic inflammation.
00:35:40
Speaker
The vagus nerve has a big role to play with detoxification. So when it's not detoxing, the inflammatory markers appear to rise. And when it is activated, they seem to drop. So everyone in the literature says, oh, the vagus nerve suppresses inflammation, just like a corticosteroid. Of course, it doesn't do that. That's absolute junk science. It's just presumption based on the current bias that they have for how things work. Yeah.
00:36:07
Speaker
But how excessive vagal tone is briefly mentioned that so that's generally seen as a relatively low blood pressure, low heart rate. They tend to be have really fast gut motility. So they go to the toilet lots throughout the day, diarrhea, they might have constant or intermittent nausea, nausea is the most common problem that they will say because it affects them more than anything else. They might also vomit all the time.
00:36:35
Speaker
the early days of clinical practice, I didn't really understand the symptom. I thought, well, I didn't understand it at all. Why were these people constantly vomiting, constantly getting nausea? I thought they must be really toxic. You know, the boys trying to eliminate all the time. But it turns out through my own experiments and my own clinical experience is that if I find the area of the vagus nerve that has been compressed,
00:36:59
Speaker
and I treat that and I also can do these things called vagus nerve suppression techniques where you basically just compress the vagus nerve flat compress it just stop it from releasing doing anything lower down you can completely turn off that feeling it is absolutely phenomenal like you can hold the vagus nerve flat compressed
00:37:21
Speaker
nausea gone. And that's enough evidence for me. Like the fact that that it is so so obviously excessive vagal activity if you compress a nerve normally if you compress a nerve you get pins and needles numbness.
00:37:34
Speaker
you know, if you rest your arm on something, eventually your hand goes numb. That's the same thing, right? But in other nerves of the hand and arm. But when it comes to vagus nerve, you don't really have that perception because it goes to the organs, you don't feel them per se. So how would you know you would know because your heart rate increases, because when you hold your vagus nerves and compress them, you'll actually feel like your lungs are dilating. It's true. It's actually a great way to stop asthma attacks.
00:38:02
Speaker
And there's all these weird things. So I'm still coming to terms with the best way to approach some of these cases, because if we can't find the zone of damage or compression, then there's no way we're going to fix it. So they're the main two, you know, there's excessive vagal tone and low vagal tone. Interesting. Okay, I think a good time to get into maybe what the causes are, like, I would have trust that we're looking at real root causes here.
00:38:32
Speaker
You know, a couple of things that just came to mind is poor breathing patterns. Um, you know, and, um, excitotoxins, you said glutamate turns the brain on MSG is huge additive. Yeah. Um, yeah. Um, those are just things that popped in my mind. I feel like EMF got out of something to do with it. Non native. Um, okay. So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I want you to expand on that. Those are just things that popped into my mind there.
00:39:00
Speaker
So this is a burgeoning fear. We don't have all the evidence yet, but there are some clear things, right? They're likely the list of things that cause damage to the various nerve is so long that it's, you know, there's never enough time to mention them all. But let's talk about the defined definitive ones like without a doubt. Okay.
00:39:17
Speaker
So firstly, before we get to damage of the vase, we got to talk about compression. Now compression is analogous to something like you've probably heard of carpal tunnel syndrome, right? That's the median nerve and it gets trapped here. There's other types of syndromes of nerves in the periphery. And those are, I treat them too. That's my area. I treat nerves. That's my main professional work is all nerve problems.
00:39:42
Speaker
which is pretty much everything to be honest. That's another topic. But compression of nerves is well established in the literature. What is not is vagus nerve neuropathy, or no vagus nerve compression. And it has only a few areas of which this can occur. So it could theoretically occur in the brainstem. They're pretty sick people and then normally to do it with tumors. It can occur as it exits the skull through the jugular foramina,
00:40:13
Speaker
normally tumors. It's not common. It can happen. It can certainly be damaged in these locations. Let's not talk about damage. We're just talking about compression. And as it comes down, it goes through this very vulnerable area called the carotid sheath. This is where it shares a pathway or a little tunnel with the artery and the vein. And as it comes down, it has lots of areas where it can be compressed.
00:40:42
Speaker
One is through local structures that are enlarged like a goiter. It's not about whether goiters are appropriate or not, but just goiters can push on the vagus nerve. I've seen it clinically, they get room, they remove the goiter or they make the goiter become smaller and their symptoms alleviate. You can get tumors in the neck, it's not uncommon. And as far as tumors are concerned, of course they are uncommon generally.
00:41:09
Speaker
bony prominences, so a lot of people have generative cervical spines and they have these little, they're called exostosis or spurs and they put pressure forward onto the vagus nerve here. Some people have alluded that it's to do with alignment, but that evidence is pretty lacking. There's a better explanation for so-called alignment problems causing vagus nerve pressure and that's instability.
00:41:36
Speaker
Now this term instability comes up a lot in vagus nerve niche world. And there's lots of solutions, apparently. So instability is the perception that your firstly, this perception of what instability is. And that's where your neck is weak, often tight, and unable to hold your head up.
00:41:59
Speaker
and it fatigues and it's tiring. You can't really lift your head appropriately when you're lying down. So you got to lie down, you got to lift your head and you like have to hold it to lift it. It's just straining all the time. Those are very quite common causes. That is quite a common cause. And one of the things that happens there with those people
00:42:18
Speaker
is that you'll see that the vagus nerve is running between a lot of muscles in their neck. So there's muscles at the front side and the back of the vagus nerve. And when they're moving around upright, particularly upright, this goes back to pots.
00:42:35
Speaker
their vagus nerves get compressed because those muscles in their necks are at full contraction because muscles that are really really weak tend to have to contract harder to do the same jobs and often that causes a problem so it's guarding due to weakness due to maybe some instability in the area but this is not a complete picture it is very strange some of these cases
00:43:05
Speaker
because they shouldn't have instability, but they do. And one way of looking at it is that they've got more than one nerve affected. They've actually got multiple nerves that have been damaged in some way. And they don't adequately innovate the muscles of the neck. And in their arms and their hands, they just ignore it. But when their neck's a problem,
00:43:28
Speaker
It really is obvious. So one of my theories is that they've got neuropathies everywhere. They're low grade and it leads to weakness in the neck and guarding of that vagus nerve. So that's a bit of a long winded way of explaining it. Some people recommend you use thing called prolotherapy. That's an injection of dextrose into the joints to stimulate collagen production and stabilization.
00:43:54
Speaker
I actually, I think that's fine. I don't see any natives per se with using it because it's just dextrose, but you know, with a lot of these injections, they're never just one thing in there. Who knows what else is in this injection? I use a thing called shockwave therapy, uses pressure. And one of my beliefs is yes, that nerves are crystalline structures that are made up of structured water. And I see that neuropathy really is a de-structuring of water.
00:44:22
Speaker
That's why the information can't get through. And the shockwave creates a pressure wave and a vortex and micro bubble formation, which is exactly what happens when you try to structure water. So the shockwave, which was originally designed to break kidney stones, it's been repurposed. It's used to be called lithotripsy. And now you can apply it to nerves and you can restructure their water in my view.
00:44:49
Speaker
which is a great way to improve nerve function. And I see results immediately. That's why we're still trying to get our heads around the idea of de-structured water, structured water within nerve cells, how that actually creates electrical current, allows for it. So that's in my view on the side here. But as far as the mainstream perspective, the way I would talk about it is different. I would say that shockwave decompresses the nerve by shaking it loose from adhesions and built up pressure.
00:45:18
Speaker
and creating a localized area of pressure which expands it and decompresses it. And you could look at it that way too. Sorry to go on all the wild tangent here, but this is a bit of an area of interest for me of how to deal with these problems. So this is a common area of compression. There's a few other ways that we deal with it, but that's the most common way I find the most effective. You can get it compression of the vagus nerve as it goes into the area of the heart and the lungs and the gut.
00:45:48
Speaker
but that's normally from tumors. The other one, which is really common is hiatal hernia. So your diaphragm has a little area in it like that that allows the esophagus to go through and the vagus nerves. And a hiatal hernia is where the stomach content, the stomach itself has moved up because the back gap is too big. It's herniating, right?
00:46:16
Speaker
And it's heavily linked to things like heart mobility syndromes and drugs, certain drugs. Don't know how the drugs cause it, but it's linked. And it goes up and it gets squashed because it hits basically loggerheads. It gets locked in there. And the vagus nerve kind of gets trapped like that.
00:46:34
Speaker
And people do actually get, it's true. Yeah. I mean, that is a really common cause. Very hard to diagnose because it doesn't happen all the time. Like you're breathing. So it comes in and out. So it's kind of, and the one of the most common symptoms is reflux for hiatal hernias. So they get heartburn. Makes sense, right? Because the stomach's going up and it's putting pressure upwards.
00:47:00
Speaker
and then the sphincter opens. But it could also be because of the vagus nerve. So what I do with people with that in that regard, because I don't necessarily recommend hiatal hernia surgery, because that can even damage the vagus nerve. I've got patients that had hiatal hernia surgery to fix the vagus nerve problems, end up damaging it further and getting worse. So first do no harm principles, but
00:47:20
Speaker
I get them to do really, really intense diaphragmatic breathing to strengthen that diaphragm so that that hole closes by the contraction of the diaphragm. So the diaphragm has more tone in it, therefore that hole should theoretically be smaller. And it does work. It does work.
00:47:40
Speaker
But a lot of these people I see, they don't just have vagus nerve neuropathy. They have phrenic nerve, which goes to the diaphragm neuropathy. They have radial, median, ulna, everything. And they often get diagnosed, in extreme cases, with gilean barre. But that's, I don't believe in that term, but it's garbage.
00:48:04
Speaker
It's better to say that something they've had or been exposed to has created neurotoxic effect, widespread, has to be something that's either breathed in or swallowed. It's somewhere gone into the blood and it's affected nerves widespread. Yeah. And you know, with vaccines are one cause. So let's get into the damage ones, right? Sorry, I'm talking so much. It's a big topic. So the damage ones, let's talk about them.
Factors Damaging the Vagus Nerve
00:48:29
Speaker
So damage to the vagus nerve can be through something chemical.
00:48:34
Speaker
So VOCs, huge category, one of the main causes. Fluoride, very much so. And you know how it affects IQ. Well, the lower your vagal tone, the lower your IQ. Interesting. And that's not the only thing because it's also affecting brain structures. So it's cognitive as well. Anything that's termed neurotoxin is a potential source.
00:49:02
Speaker
It's likely benzene, dioxins as well, anything like sunscreen use, particularly in and around the neck, affecting the vagus nerve, anywhere really. It gets into the blood, so it can get to anywhere. Another cause is drugs. So the most common one is chemotherapy, obviously. So a lot of people will get all these symptoms after chemo, and they're some of the hardest people to treat.
00:49:32
Speaker
They take, it's trying to find where those damage centers are, where the damage has occurred. And I, you can actually get repair of nerves. They do repair and you do things that stimulate repair. So I use a combination of shockwave because it activates repair enzymes and light therapies, red, near infrared, infrared. You can use other colors too.
00:49:54
Speaker
There's not much else out there. You can do all sorts of things to improve blood flow to the area, needling, things like that. You've got to get those nerves functioning back, again getting their myelin repaired and everything and the internal structures repaired and the structuring of the water again. It is feasible.
00:50:17
Speaker
Another reason is alcohol use. So alcohol very much damages nerves, demyelinates, alcoholism in itself is a neuropathy causing toxin. So alcohol can severely suppress your vagus nerve leading to high blood pressure or any other thing you want to say that I've already mentioned. So that's really common.
00:50:47
Speaker
Smoking can but not because of the nicotine, actually nicotine is a vagal stimulant but everything else in cigarettes is terrible for you so any heavy metals that you consume can because most metals are neurotoxins.
00:51:02
Speaker
So metal consumption, metal ingestion, inhalation can lead to vagus nerve damage. Because remember, the gut lining and the lung lining are all vagus nerve lines. So anything where the vagus nerve is, this is why the vagus nerve is more commonly injured. Interesting. Because it's the interface. The other one that's commonly injured is the trigeminal nerve.
00:51:26
Speaker
is the nerve of the head and the face that supplies the skin and the head and the jaw muscles. And so people often have problems there. They're often seen as headaches. Trigeminal nerve is the main nerve involved in headaches and it's the lining of the sinuses, the mouth and the upper back part of the throat. So it often gets
00:51:52
Speaker
toxic exposure, and then you get neuralgias from that. Yeah, but of course they don't blame it on that. They blame it on other things. So there's lots of ways that the vagus nerve can be affected. One other thing that I will mention, it's very interesting, is it's in utero damage. So babies, we know that if you're a preterm baby, your heart rate variability is much lower than a term baby.
00:52:21
Speaker
And that's generally been explained that you just haven't had enough time to develop your nervous system. But by then your nervous system is very well developed. It's mostly your lungs that aren't. And what's the deal? You know, like, well, I actually think there's value sort of damage in these children. And you say why? Because if you look up causes of preterm,
00:52:46
Speaker
premature babies. You'll see that it's toxin exposure. They've even say environmental pollutants are an actual common causative factor of preterm growth. And that is one of the potential causes of vagus nerve damage.
00:53:04
Speaker
Then things like alcohol consumption, obviously, smoking, drug use, but also abusive partners. So relationships that are abusive during the birth, sorry, during pregnancy can lead to preterm births.
00:53:24
Speaker
Wow. And I think that's because of the stress factor as well. But I think that that huge stressor on the mother can not necessarily damage the vagus nerve, but it can tune it towards being of low status and that the stress system is more important. Because when we come out of this womb, we're going to have to deal with a lot of stress. So we want to be really good at that.
00:53:49
Speaker
And so I think that's, there's not all of the stimuli or the things that so-called calls preterm damage the nerve. They, they tune the nervous system to being better at one thing. Yeah. There's some people who had the opposite effect. They, they actually have this so-called like low sympathetic response. So they go limp in stressful situations rather than like, oh, I'm fighting. You know, that's the, you know, low vagal response to stress is.
00:54:18
Speaker
I'm going to fight you no matter what. Like it's always, and they just get sweaty and they get really agitated and run away or fight or, you know, just get aggro too much more, much more than they should. And that does come in with the fact that their brain is not able to say that's inappropriate. You know, when we're dealing with stress, we have cognition, we have the ability to go,
00:54:43
Speaker
What's appropriate right now in this situation? How do I deal with this stressful situation to get out of it? And our brain is very active. It doesn't just shut down. Some people will like up reporting to say that the vagus nerve is the be all and end all of the response of stress. It is not how that works, in my opinion. We'll come to that. But we need our frontal lobe active. The vagus nerve is involved in that. We need the vagus nerve active during a stress response.
00:55:12
Speaker
If we don't have it active, you will exaggerate your stress response. If you have too much vagal activity, you won't be able to mount a stress response. You will go all limp. You'll lose tone. You'll have what's essentially like a vasovagal response. I think you've lost my video. Video seemed to freeze there. Maybe just restart the camera.
00:55:40
Speaker
Yep, I'll just restart it. You can't edit this out, can you?
00:55:49
Speaker
All right, some camera issues there, but we're back. You were saying low vagal tone. So low vagal tone is this hyper responsive stress response. So you just get too much of a stress response and you don't tone it down adequately. And that's partly because our vagus nerves are adequately connecting with our frontal lobe. That's my opinion. So our frontal lobe can't make cognitive decisions about the situation. So you can't keep cool in stressful times.
00:56:16
Speaker
you can't make correct decisions. So you make exaggerated or inappropriate decisions in times of stress. And this can be expressed as chronic stress. And you'll often find that these patients that I have that chronic stress aren't even that like their environment isn't even that stressful.
00:56:35
Speaker
Okay, there are some who have chronic stress and it's appropriate, their child has died, they just their husband just left them is also their mother died, you know, there's things that are obvious that are that are stressful. But, oh, you know,
00:56:49
Speaker
work works really stressful and it's actually not. It's just that they're not able to deal with the stressful situations. They experience stress much more readily because they're unable to have good cognitive activation during stress.
00:57:07
Speaker
Then it comes to a thing called excessive vagal tone leading to an inappropriate or not enough of a stress response. And this is seen as low sympathetic or high vagal activity during stress. And it could be really, really extreme responses such as vasovagal responses, where they just faint.
00:57:28
Speaker
And that's the vagus of trying to control the situation, but it goes too far. And it leads you down just like it would with postural hypotension. And because that response is too excessive, it's too much in that situation, you actually get no sympathetic response. So you get a drop in your heart rate, you get a drop in your blood pressure, and you just go limp or you freeze.
00:57:53
Speaker
And there are a group of people who believe in this thing called the polyvagal theory. You might've heard of it. I have real problems with it because its basis is on the idea that we have this kind of hierarchical order
00:58:10
Speaker
of vagal systems, ventral vagal, dorsal vagal, and in some ways how they're kind of divided phylogenetically because of our evolution. You know, at some point we developed different parts of the vagal system, how parts of myelinated, non-myelinated. Most of this is not based on any credible evidence
00:58:31
Speaker
The truth is it's completely integrated. There is no division. These nucleus ambiguous, so-called ventral and dorsal vagal, these are not isolated systems. They are interconnected wired. They are going like fibers from each are going to the same structures. That does not sound very phylogenetically divided to me.
00:59:02
Speaker
So I think that the truth is that the principles of, when I read the papers on Polyvagal, I realized that what it really is,
00:59:16
Speaker
And this is in a counter-ence because I like Ladue. I think it's L-A-D-O-U-X. His idea about how the brain works with emotion. It's more about cognition. It's more about the amygdala, neural circuits. It makes much more sense to me because I work in the neuroscience field. Whereas porges is in psychiatry and psychology. So they talk about neurological structures in a way to back them up.
00:59:43
Speaker
But truthfully, they're not accurate descriptions. So they don't back them up. They just prove the foundational understanding of what they're saying. And then they extrapolate by building on that flawed foundation. So everything is based on that flawed foundation. I mean, there is so many critical reasoning errors in the polyvagal theory that for me, I just can't accept it. I can't accept it. And I recommend people read about it. It sounds good, but not everything that sounds good is real.
01:00:13
Speaker
And truthfully, one of the key problems in it, and you'll read this, it will say that there is some level of ability for the vagus nerve to determine, or at least the autonomic nervous system, to determine the severity of the threat, right? So if it's too severe, we all have this response. If it's medium threat, then we'll have this response. That's cognition.
01:00:43
Speaker
That is the ability to determine things based on previous experience. That is not innately in us. A baby doesn't really have great threat detection, has some threat detection, but truthfully, we're trying to keep them at
01:01:00
Speaker
away from harm, right? Because they don't have the threat detection. It is a learned thing. It is stored in our brain. We have a great threat detector called the amygdala. It is our alarm system, right? Part of our limbic system. And it does have heavy connections throughout the body, including the autonomic nervous system. And our autonomic nervous system has the ability to communicate with it.
01:01:25
Speaker
to make suggestions and suggestions, kind of input about what's happening in time. But at the end of the day, what is stated in this theory is that there's some kind of autonomic brainstem based non conscious which there's no there's no such thing as non conscious processing, really cognitive, there's no cognition in the brainstem. So how are we supposed to believe it?
01:01:52
Speaker
when the basis of it is completely flawed. Now I'll get a lot of hate for that, you know. People love this theory and I just can't buy it. There's too many things, there's too many flaws and it's too many holes in it. But I do recommend, I think it's Ladoo, I'll just get the name of the author. I recommend this paper. Let me get the name of it.
01:02:19
Speaker
what emotions might be like in other animals. It's cool. Sounds funny. Joseph LeDoux, L E D O U X. It's a great paper. Um, and highly recommend it. Um, because I think that it explains things at a much
01:02:38
Speaker
more appropriate level. Now you can add in the vagus of and say that the values of influences emotions because it does. But I would say that it's the workhorse of the control of the stress response rather than it being like determining the stress response.
01:02:55
Speaker
from a cognitive level. It's look people in neuroscience will understand what I'm saying like the cognition is not something that happens in low order structures. You sure human beings have all mammals have and other animals as well have cognition to certain extent humans have the greatest you know this ability to almost like
01:03:17
Speaker
understand things at a very, very abstract level. You know, words of abstractions of words, abstractions of meaning, things like that, very complicated concepts that others we aren't, we can't appreciate them that they can obviously like possibly could we just can't measure it in them. But that is so that just means that the vagus nerve is not the determining factor. Yeah, amazing. I appreciate you sharing that. And I guess on
01:03:48
Speaker
the topic of disagreeing with maybe the majority, um, the classical understanding of the nerve. I already know your answer because you did mention it earlier. Um, you know, the ion transport, um, you know, model and, um, kind of the classical explanation for how
01:04:09
Speaker
how information and energy travels through nerves. What are your thoughts on that? You mentioned structured water and how the nerve is a structured water. And maybe if you could just explain kind of what your perspective is on that and don't worry about time, we're doing great here. So. Okay. So the kind of classical idea of how a nerve works is a nerve is like a tube or like a wire, not a wire, but a tube is filled with water.
01:04:37
Speaker
that water has electrolytes in it and electrolytes allow for the transfer of energy because well they are electrolytes okay so they have a current flow gradient. The ability for it to maintain this so-called resting membrane potential is that it's able to be in a state where inside that nerve cell that tunnel that tube there is a certain voltage
01:05:08
Speaker
yeah it normally sits around minus 70 millivolts or minus 80 it depends on the nerve and when the stimulus comes in
01:05:19
Speaker
we get so-called neurotransmitter release from one nerve to another through what's called the synapse, which I don't hold dear at all. It is the fundamental structure of neuroscience. But anyway, the synapse, let's just say it happens, that neurotransmitter, a good example is glutamate, then gets released onto a receptor
01:05:48
Speaker
And that receptor is normally what's called an ionotropic receptor, which is a pore receptor, which there's a little receptor cell on the outside. And as soon as it binds to that, that neurotransmitter, it opens and allows in sodium, for example. Okay. So it does then change the voltage of the inside to be more positive. And at some point, it gets to minus 55, minus 50 millivolts, I think 55 from memory.
01:06:19
Speaker
bang, that initiates this cascade of opening of voltage-gated ion channels all the way to the other end. And somehow, if there's myelin, it just skips those parts that are myelinated. This is a complicated picture. I used to be an lecturer in neuroscience for nine years.
01:06:40
Speaker
And so teaching this and talking about it now is kind of like talking fiction. It's a good story. The truth of it is when you watch this concept about the way that current flows and these channels opening all the way, you go, it's pretty inefficient, eh? And these so-called unmyelinated nerves called C fibers,
01:07:03
Speaker
They're one of the types of pain, nociceptive nerves, neurons. They actually allegedly propagate information without the myelin. So they have to constantly be opening those channels to keep increasing the sodium levels inside the cell. And it's just mind boggling that that is the system of which we are getting current flow. When all we really need is electric current,
01:07:32
Speaker
and conductive surface. We don't need to go chemical electrical, chemical electrical all the time because that's the system at the moment. The system is you release a chemical, you get an electrical response.
01:07:45
Speaker
It's like transference of energy. It's like change of energy from chemical potential energy into kinetic electrical or electrical energy and all the way it goes and then it becomes chemical again. It's pretty inefficient, right? So I'm not convinced by the idea and the resting membrane potential is critical to this because without an appropriate resting membrane potential, we can't produce a current.
01:08:09
Speaker
So yeah, and that the idea of the transportation of ions in and out to maintain that using ATPase transporters, things like that, that is definitely rubbish. There's no doubt in my mind, there's not enough ATP. And the rate of like, it's so inefficient. It's like it's burning wood or not burning rubber for heat. It's just
01:08:31
Speaker
I just don't appreciate it's, I've always read it and gone, well, that's what we think at the moment. This is what I'm going to teach. When you're an academic, you can't really go off script. You can say a bunch of things that you feel that might not be quite right. But this is what you have to learn kids. And these transporters, these sort of maintainers of the risking membrane potential, I think that you can be completely theoretical.
01:08:59
Speaker
I think that's all that it's purely hypothetical, not theoretical. There's no good evidence for it because the maths don't add up. Yeah, I agree. But I think that the system could be crystalline, structured water and allows for the flow of current. But there is more to this than that because it seems that nerves also have a language. There's these studies that are done in the brain of, I think it's animals, not humans. You'd hope so.
01:09:28
Speaker
And they can read the frequency of a neural activity. So a nerve cell is releasing, the electrical activity is quite high and then the frequency changes and the behavior of the second nerve changes. And it's not necessarily what you think.
01:09:47
Speaker
This one might go from being slow to fast, but then another speed is a third speed because mostly two speeds would represent maybe on or off.
01:09:59
Speaker
but there's a third or a fourth. And this is very strange. I can't, I don't know where that paper is. I read it in a neural circuitry textbook that is this thick. So it's known out there that the nerves do have sort of a language that they are talking. And that would make sense because things aren't linear in the brain. They're just a mess. There's just so many activities going on. There's no way we would understand that.
01:10:24
Speaker
But I think that the best way is to say that our brain can communicate to structures in almost an, in a non-binary way. Like, so not yes or no, it's, it's more than that, but I'm, I'm not sure how. And I think that's one thing to add to the whole concept of, of re-understanding nerves, re-imagining how nerves work. Awesome. All right. The last topic of the day, I want to bring it back to detox. Yeah. Yeah.
01:10:54
Speaker
And we're doing great for time. Don't, don't worry at all. I want you to get your off here. So I'll, I'll revisit. So there are, um,
01:11:05
Speaker
I'll reference, I've got my little note here just to make sure I don't forget something. The first thing with anything with elimination in my view is that one, we have to understand that in my view, low vagal tone causes impaired elimination detection problems and dot detoxification. Okay, so the main thing that we need to have in our bodies to be healthy is good detection systems.
01:11:32
Speaker
And that happens in our sinus, our mouth, our back of our throat, our esophagus, our trachea, our lungs, and our gut. Our skins too, skin as well, I didn't mention that much, but that is another area of interest. Vagus nerve stimulation is being shown to improve psoriasis. So there's something going on with the skin interface, but disregard that for now. Once we've got detection, we then need isolation or capture.
01:12:00
Speaker
mucus production, whatever it might be, there might be other mechanisms that we're not aware of. Then we need to, in some situations, bioremediate it. We need to change it to eliminate it. We may not be able to eliminate it in its structure, because it, for whatever reason, may not be water soluble, or it may not be able to be vomited in the adequate way, right? So it'll just sort of do its own thing if we produce a vomiting reflex. So we might need to bioremediate it. And the body can do that possibly through a few different ways.
01:12:31
Speaker
I've mentioned already that it can eliminate through the vagus nerve, through vomiting, diarrhea, through coughing, mucus production, coughing, things like that. But then it can bioremediate. There's no doubt about that. So there are studies done with, and I'd highly recommend you look at this. This is my area of main interest right now, is bioremediation transformation in soil studies.
01:12:57
Speaker
you look at the bacteria that need to be in the soil for there to be no cadmium in the plant. Listeria, for example. Listeria is needed to be present. As one example, Listeria is a highly potent bioremediator of cadmium. And if you look at the symptoms of cadmium exposure, they're the same as Listeria
01:13:21
Speaker
What a surprise. There we go. This is actually what raw milk, it's because it's laced with cadmium. This is why it's a problem. And this doesn't mean we shouldn't heat it up because maybe heating it does bioremediate it.
01:13:36
Speaker
So it's not like things are being done that's incorrect. It's just being done for the wrong reasons. You know, and it might be the case that one day we'll give people probiotics with listeria in it. It sounds crazy, but it's not crazy at all. So anyway, so I think that the bacteria
01:13:53
Speaker
the parasites, the fungi, these things, these all bire mediate different things in different ways. I think we can say that for sure, with heather metals and parasites, like diantamebra and blastocystis that probably just work horses of detoxification, hence why they're there.
01:14:12
Speaker
And fungi like, for example, different yeasts, you know, that's probably why Saccharomyces bouladii can be very effective for some people as an actual supplement. But also, you know, Candida gets worse in some people, it's probably just a way of bioremediating an entire gastrointestinal system, or other orifice, so like Genito urinary.
01:14:39
Speaker
temperature. So the body can increase temperature. I think that's by remediation. I think that if you increase the temperature of the system, you may be able to change the structure of the toxins possible. That's one reason, but also sweating. And we now know that constituents of sweat are toxins. So that's not pseudoscience anymore. Papers coming out every year about this. So sweat is definitively a detox process.
01:15:08
Speaker
Okay, well, that's cool. And the vagus nerve is actually linked to our thermoregulatory center in hypothalamus. So I don't know how much it's involved in that, but it has to communicate that there's a toxin. So where's it going to tell? It's going to tell another part of our elimination system. So we get a fever. But a lot of people get a fever and they don't actually sweat. I think that's unhealthy. I think you need to sweat it out. I think you really need to get it out of the system.
01:15:33
Speaker
And, you know, you hear about these so-called febrile seizures in children from temperature being too high. There's got to be some kind of evolutionary benefit to a febrile seizure in a child. I don't necessarily think you should promote it. I'm not saying you get what you say these days. But I'm investigating what all these so-called bad things are and whether they actually have a
01:15:56
Speaker
unknown benefit. Enzymes could probably do it too. There's certain enzymes of the body could produce that break down structures and toxins that would, you know, just know the bioremediation effect. You know about plyomorphism. So obviously it could even happen with parasites for all we know, like parasites might just form through that as well.
01:16:17
Speaker
The body, some believe that the body makes the parasites. They're not actually coming in, which I'm open to. It makes sense because I don't really know where they're getting these parasites from half the time. And all these different, you know, different types of bacteria. I recommend you look up soil studies, bacteria, bioremediation, and you'll be, blow your mind. Like even on the first page of what Salmonella bioremediates, mind you, there are many other things that are bioremediates.
01:16:48
Speaker
The first thing that came up was TNT explosives. So salmonella bioremediates explosives. Now obviously that's not going to be one of our main toxins, but my point is who's thought that this so-called awful avoid this thing at all costs bacteria actually has a bunch of positive effects potentially.
01:17:14
Speaker
So there is that. And I think that that's going to be critical in developing the terrain theory, understanding bioremediation and transformation. So the other cool thing is that it's clear to me that this whole orchestration of change of bacteria may not be bacteria alone. It actually might be neurally mediated because there is this weird thing in studies where they found that if you get a head injury,
01:17:43
Speaker
your microbiome changes within two days. Now, how would it do that? Why would it do that? Well, it could see any kind of injury as a threat. So threat systems increase. It goes towards a pathogenic type bacteria in the gut.
01:18:01
Speaker
Sure. I believe that my belief at this point, and I might be wrong, I'll be happy to be wrong, is that the vagus nerve determines what bacteria are in the gut. That's what determines it. Everyone's like, you know, the gut to brain access, like the guts communicating with the brain and then the brain changes because what's in the gut. I'm like, no, no, no.
01:18:18
Speaker
It's the brain to gut axis. The brain determines what's in the gut. The brain says, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is not right. We need this bacteria. Please change. And it has a conformational change towards what's appropriate at the time. And I think that's probably more likely because it makes more sense. It's kind of like we're still at the burden of these bacteria if they're constantly controlling us. I don't believe that. I just don't
01:18:43
Speaker
I do not believe that in any way. The other interesting thing is that you cut the vagus nerve and then the effects of gut bacteria on the brain are gone. Now, I think they misread this stuff. I really do.
01:19:07
Speaker
When you give someone certain bacteria in these studies, right, and they put them in their gut, it's not all they put in there, right? Remember, you know, these studies done with viruses, they put all other cuts of crap to cause symptoms that may not, and probably just detox anyway.
01:19:19
Speaker
So, they put this into the gut of animals and they cut the vagus nerve and the animal doesn't have the cognitive mood changes that an animal would have if the vagus nerve was there. So, for example, this rat gets no vagotomy, no loss of vagus nerve. They put something in their gut and they get depression or at least they sort of rat-type depression.
01:19:42
Speaker
the next rat cut the vagus nerve, they put the same stuff in the gut and they get no depression. I mean, what does this really prove? I mean, it doesn't mean
01:19:53
Speaker
It's very hard because it suggests that depression is bad, firstly, and that somehow depression is like a disease state in these rats. But it actually might be that it's reducing their like it's making them less wanting to move so they can actually help with elimination of whatever they've got in their gut that actually they've introduced because the likelihood is they've actually introduced a bug plus a bunch of other toxins in that solution.
01:20:19
Speaker
So these studies aren't very helpful, but I do think that the head injury causing changing gut bacteria is very informative. I think that's very interesting. And there are some preliminary studies being done that I've met some of the researchers showing that when you do vagus nerve stimulation, your gut bacteria changes towards so-called beneficial bacteria. And so the way I would say envisage the gut bacteria is you have certain gut bacteria that are really good at producing nutrients.
01:20:48
Speaker
are really good at farming. I call them the farmers. My analogy is like a medieval keep, castle. Outside the castle are the farmers. They're there ploughing the fields, producing what the kingdom needs. Invader. They come inside the keep and out come the soldiers. But these soldiers, they're a little bit
01:21:11
Speaker
A little bit bruisey, you know, they're a bit, you know, violent, but they're really good at killing off this thing coming in. Not meaning pathogen, meaning toxin.
01:21:20
Speaker
And they do that job, right? That's their role. But in the meantime, a lot of these sort of other things like nutrient absorption, things like that that these other bacteria do is kind of put on the side, put to the side because the main thing is we got to protect the host, got to protect the kingdom. And so I still don't think that they cause disease. I think that the absence of the good bacteria is a problem because it means we're not producing the same amount of nutrients or whatever else is going on. We don't really fully understand.
01:21:50
Speaker
And you talk about vitamins, so it's all up in the air now with Daniel. So I think they're so defensive. I think that's what their main role is. And I think as we, I'm putting together a list of toxin and all the different bacteria. Toxin, bacteria, the OCs are being listed in a lot of them, particulate matter, plastics, the list goes on. So I think it's pretty cool. And it's going to be the next big thing, I think.
01:22:19
Speaker
But like anything in this world, I think everyone's going to come to this conclusion in the field, which they already are, that we need this list so that we can then better remediate and possibly use the bacteria to our own advantage. Yeah, agreed. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And you laid that out beautifully. That's awesome. Cool. We're going to need to do part two.
01:22:48
Speaker
Yeah, I think people just misunderstand diarrhea. If you get it, go, great. I'll drink some more water. I'll have some more salt. I'll have some more good nourishing foods.
01:23:04
Speaker
I think it's very hard these days. I think our food is laced with toxins because of the synthetic fertilizers. I think because the soil is depleted of the bacteria. So therefore the heavy metals are getting into the foods. I think that meat is probably the cleanest food. Don't hold me to that, but I'm, I favor carnivore and fruit, meat and fruit. That's my favorite two foods that I'll go to. I feel better on them. Not sure why other than my, you know, bias beliefs.
01:23:34
Speaker
But I'm, I have a seeking suspicion that vegetables, nuts and seeds and grains are probably, they're not the best, they're not like, not how they used to be. But it's just, but then on top of that, I think that it matters how you eat, you know, how slow you eat. Are you with friends and family? Are you isolated? Things like that. I think these all play in a lot.
01:23:58
Speaker
And it's very hard to say it's one thing. People like to do that. You know, they're trying to isolate one cause of one thing, but it's... Yeah. And
Lifestyle Choices and Their Impact on Health
01:24:06
Speaker
like you've said in some of your videos, you've just lost contact with nature. And I think that is a big part of it as well. Like, look at me, I've got like devices everywhere here. Like, it's just an electronics room.
01:24:17
Speaker
And we do feel better when we're moving. We do feel better when we're dancing. You know, my actual background is ballet. I used to be a ballet dancer with the Royal New Zealand Ballet Company. And I completely understand what it's like to get joy out of movement. That's why most dancers continue the, you know, the day in, day out slog of destroying your body with ballet is because they do love it.
01:24:42
Speaker
And sometimes a lot of dancers are smokers and heavy drinkers and drug users, unfortunately. And yet still, they can be really healthy. I don't know how this is possible. I think there are a lot of things that can make us so-called healthy. Like I said, I don't know what that really means anymore. But for me nowadays, I do my best to eat organic.
01:25:12
Speaker
99% of what I eat is organic. I drink distilled water.
01:25:18
Speaker
I try 100% clean. I don't the minerals I've read Andrew Calvin's videos on mineralization of water versus distortion. I think that's pretty compelling. So I don't think the need is there to have mineral water or mineralized water. The air is always really tricky to clean. I have air purifiers. It's tricky.
01:25:43
Speaker
Being active every day, try your best, get sunlight. These are the main things if you can do that. And also don't obsess about your health either. If you obsess about it, you can create problems. Like I can tell you now, there are some patients, they are not fit, you cannot fix them. They are convinced they're going to die. They're convinced they're unwell, but they're not. They're actually just detoxing or just doing normal things. You just, they've exaggerated the catastrophized unfortunately. And that's the sickness in itself.
01:26:11
Speaker
So we've got to be careful about being too obsessive. Just live your bloody life. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. Well that I couldn't agree more, man. Like I think you're hitting the nail on the head here, um, with everything today. I think this was fantastic discussion. Um, like I said, we got, we're going to have to have you back on. I want to go for another hour and a half right now. Yeah. Yeah.
01:26:39
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Sounds good. Yeah, we'll definitely line that up again now. I want you to tell a listener how they can help support you, how they can find what you're doing, just whatever is best for you. Okay.
Learning and Resources on Vagus Nerve
01:26:57
Speaker
Yeah, so my website is just emerisgoldsworthy.com.au. I live in Australia. Beautiful country. I'd recommend it. And I wrote a book now this book is called the vagus nerve unleashing
01:27:11
Speaker
the body's secret weapon against disease. And in this book, I use terminology that's for the mainstream. I don't use new biology, terrain terminology, per se, although there is a sneaky section on detoxification, which I added in there to sort of just throw people once they get to it. And it talks about what we've done. We've gone through all of that today.
01:27:33
Speaker
But in it, it explains the vagus nerve from a medical perspective, from kind of a functional perspective, and it goes into detail about it, like almost too much detail. It's not light reading. It's a great reference text for a clinician, but it also goes through some of the protocols I use to improve heart rate variability, improve vagus nerve tone, and it doesn't go into detail in all the hands-on face-to-face therapies because that's what clinician training's all about.
01:28:01
Speaker
So I do clinical training with people as well for people who
01:28:08
Speaker
from physiotherapists to doctors to psychologists have done my training. Any number of people, and it does depend on your field as to how much you can do of it. Some of it's hands-on therapies. Some of it's the thing called transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation. It's an electrical form of vagus nerve stimulation. And it's very effective. It's where most of the studies, we didn't talk about that today, we can do that another time if you want.
01:28:35
Speaker
You learn that in the course. So on my website, I'm running a three-week cohort, a three-week course in late March. And there'll be some live videos and descriptions of everything of how to do all things that I do. And everyone, every field will have kind of a slightly different take on it because from their perspective, they see these problems. From this person's perspective, they see these problems and so on.
01:29:03
Speaker
And yeah, we get all number of people. I even have had dentists do it, interestingly. Yeah. And people who are involved in speech pathology, which makes sense because a lot of the speech issues that people deal with are vagal. I'd love to talk to speech pathologists more because I have a feeling that vast majority of their problems are all vagal.
01:29:22
Speaker
hence why a lot of these speech problems come about from stress. That's another topic. It's too many. So I didn't get to everything in the book because there's just too many things. But additional to that, I am doing as many podcasts as I can to get the word out. And I run a Facebook group under the same name as my book. So check that out. That's my way to contact and communicate with people.
01:29:51
Speaker
through the name, the vagus nerve, unleashing the body's secret weapon against disease. That's a Facebook group for that. And on there, we just basically talk about the vagus nerve and there's a lot of people who just aren't ready to accept the terrain theory. They're just still in the belief that their problems are caused by COVID.
01:30:11
Speaker
by other bacteria, Epstein-Bart, all sorts of other things. It's always a microbe, I tell you now. And it just ain't, just ain't. There are so many other things that cause their disease. And, you know, I hope to convince people eventually. So they're the main things. And I do work clinically with patients in Australia and internationally. Awesome. Well, I think you're doing a good job so far. Thank you.
01:30:40
Speaker
Um, yeah, amazing. All right. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Yeah, certainly. Yeah. All right. I want to thank you all for listening. You should all know that it's not medical advice. Uh, this is for your information informational purposes only. Uh, but remember we're all responsible, sovereign beings, capable of thinking, criticizing and understanding absolutely everything and anything that comes our way.
01:31:04
Speaker
We, the people in the grade four, start together self-healer, self-gutterable, self-teachers, so much more. Reach out if you have any questions, comments, criticism, concerns, you know where to find me. If you enjoy the podcast or kind of informative in any way, give us a like, comment, share, whatever you got to do. And I hate ads on podcasts more than anything.
01:31:25
Speaker
And I don't ever want to put ads on my podcast. I may promote my own stuff, but I will never, ever put ads on it. So I did actually create a little donation platform, buy me a coffee. The link's down below if you guys want. It's absolutely not necessary. But if you do, all proceeds will go directly into my vision, like our vision here at Beyond Train.
01:31:47
Speaker
Um, so yeah, I'd really appreciate that, but not necessary. I want to get this information out here too. I love talking about this stuff. I really enjoy doing the podcast. So, um, I love it. It'll always be free and ad free. Um, so that's great. On that note, there are two types of people in the world. Those believe they can, those believe they can't, and they're both correct. Thanks for listening guys. Take care.