Let’s talk neuroscience! 

Who is Garrett Salpeter and why is he on the podcast?

I first met Garrett through Dr. Terry Wahls, MD when she gave a presentation at Neufit’s headquarters in Austin, TX. Terry is a friend and colleague whose innovative approach to treating the physical ailments that come along with neurological autoimmune conditions like MS is unparalleled. She is a walking, talking, and bike riding example of the power of nutrition and functional movement in overcoming debilitating conditions.

After Terry Wahls’ presentation, she introduced me to Garrett, the owner of Neufit and creator of the Neubie device. He and I talked about neurology, technology, and neuroplasticity. Garrett knows his neuroscience! 

I was blown away by his knowledge of neuron theory and principles of neuroplasticity, and even more blown away by how he was applying these principles with the Neubie device and the Neufit Method to restore function. He was also blown away by my application of these principles to heal myself, and we became fast friends.

AC vs DC in The Body

AC (alternating current) rapidly changes direction, while DC flows consistently in one direction, and when it comes to e-stim, understanding these distinctions is crucial.

Most e-stim devices, like transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) machines, use alternating current (AC)… mostly to reduce the sensation of pain. But I have been studying human physiology since my injury, and I know that the human nervous system operates on its own intricate electrical system based on the movement of charged particles across cell membranes…

and the electrical signals in our nervous system are based on direct current (DC).

This is literally in contrast to alternating current (AC), which is constantly changing direction.

And… with DC-based e-stim, this communication can be harnessed to achieve remarkable therapeutic effects, in both the central and peripheral nervous systems.

First of all, we have known how DC is the electric signature of the body for quite some time. In the mid-1900s,  we began using e-stim and realized that DC creates an electric field gradient, which can orient cells to heal, regenerate, and remylinate. We also saw that AC does not do this because it rapidly changes directions instead of creating an electrical field gradient.

So why did we even bother with AC? 

Well…. In the primitive DC e-stim devices, there was one big problem: When we turned DC up enough to bring neurons to threshold so that it made meaningful change in the nervous system, it burnt the skin!

We don’t want to burn people, so AC became the main e-stim for a long time.

While AC electrical stimulation devices can be beneficial for certain therapeutic purposes when used appropriately, when external AC electrical stimulation is introduced to the human body, it can also interfere with the normal bioelectric function.

These are some of the ways that AC e-stim can interfere with the normal bioelectric function:

1. Interference with Nervous System Signals: The introduction of AC electrical stimulation can disrupt the natural electrical signals within the nervous system. This interference can cause confusion or misinterpretation of signals by the body, potentially leading to abnormal sensations or unintended muscle contractions.
2. Changes in Cellular Membrane Potential: The electrical stimulation can alter the normal electrical potential across cellular membranes. This can affect the balance of ions and disrupt the normal functioning of cells, including those involved in nerve conduction and unintended muscle contraction.
3. Unintended Muscle Contractions: Because of both of the items above AC electrical stimulation can trigger muscle contractions in an uncontrolled or inconsistent manner. This can lead to discomfort, muscle fatigue, or even muscle damage if not properly managed or applied.

Today’s DC e-stim devices (like the Neubie) use direct current in a safe manner, which is extremely powerful in affecting neuroplastic changes and even to completely overcome chronic pain and learned limitations!

By leveraging e-stim techniques that utilize direct current (DC), we can effectively stimulate the nervous system and enhance neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to reorganize and form new neural connections. It’s like putting neuroplasticity on steroids, enabling accelerated rehabilitation, recovery, and functional improvements. 

Why Does Garrett Salpeter Earn Dr. Terry Wahls’ (and my) Support?

Garrett’s passion for neuroplasticity and the role it plays in helping people to live healthier and happier lives is found in the Neufit method and Neubie device. The application of Neufit ranges from chronic pain to injury recovery to strength training and even enhancing muscle hypertrophy. He also wrote a The NeuFit Method Book that’s phenomenal. This guy knows his neuroscience.

Neufit is a method that uses e-stim to affect neuroplastic change; enhancing and restoring function in the body. But the e-stim device used by Neufit (the Nuebie) is no ordinary e-stim device.

The Neubie is a DC e-stim device that stands for “neuro-bio e-stim.” It was created by Garrett Salpeter and uses DC with a signature frequency profile to amplify neuroplasticity in the central and peripheral nervous systems. 

Personally, I had an amazing experience with e-stim that I am excited to share with you in this podcast as well as many clinical pearls and neurological takeaways!

and…

if you’d like to learn more about Neufit or scheduling a phone call with them, click here.

Enjoy!(transcript below)

 

AI Generated Transcript

CAVIN  

Welcome to the adventures in brain injury Podcast. I’m Cavin, Balaster, severe traumatic brain injury survivor, and thriver. And I’m here interviewing my good friend Garrett, who’s just phenomenal. We had him on the empowerment series back in 2020. Because he is an expert in neurology. Yeah, he developed the NeuBie device and the creator of NeuFit. He also wrote a book called The NeuFit method. That’s phenomenal. This guy knows his neuroscience. So I’m really excited to talk talk neuro with you talk nerdy, here we go. What’s up, Garrett?

 

GARRETT  

Thank you, Kevin. It’s great to be here. I’m honoured to to be on the show. And it’s great. Great to catch up with you. It’s been a few months since we last spoke. So I’m glad we got to talk a little bit here now and grateful, grateful to be on.

 

CAVIN  

Definitely. Yeah, it’s been a little bit been been travelling around. I’m currently in Florida and can be pretty close to USF. I’m pretty close to USF gonna move even closer. And you were telling me that you had somebody on your show? The, the undercurrent podcast, right.

 

GARRETT  

Yeah, that’s our podcasts. You know, we’re talking all about applying neuroscience in the trenches and daily practice of physical therapy, physical medicine, rehabilitation, across the board, from sports injuries to neurological injuries, neurodegenerative conditions, and then for health and fitness and performance as well. So we’re talking to clinicians, we’re talking to patients, I’m teaching on different topics, but that that the guest in that episode was a professor at the University of South Florida, who actually conducted the first peer reviewed scientific research, first published articles that that looked at the newbie, and specifically, they were looking at the effect on muscle hypertrophy. So we basically found that the using the newbie can create as much muscle recruitment and get as much muscle building effect without lifting any weight at all. So just using the machine can create as much muscle muscle building effect as lifting, like 75 or 80% of one rep max. So like the amount of weight you would lift, where you’d be fatigued in, say, eight or 10 repetitions. So he did he did that work that are really, really cool guy who’s a professor there named Sam Buckner and funny fact about him, he actually, I don’t know if he still does, at one point, at least, he owned the Guinness World Record for doing the most handstand push ups in in some period of time. So cool, really cool guy. Man, like you

 

CAVIN  

Nice, nice, nice.

 

GARRETT  

Mark. Get physically, you know, physically inclined all of it.

 

CAVIN  

Thank you, man. Yeah, yeah. And and like, you’ve like you, you have a pretty, I mean, you have an awesome story that brought you into all this when you actually saw the benefit of V stem. And specifically, direct current stem. Join, tell that story a little bit.

 

GARRETT  

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, my, my entry point here was definitely as an athlete, and, and kind of, you know, sports medicine, that injury type of realm. And, you know, I grew up playing hockey, I played in college in New England, and I had several injuries along the way. I was always frustrated and disappointed with the approach, it just seemed to me like it didn’t quite add up. And when that really became clear, is when I saw the opposite. So you know, a lot, a lot of great stories are, you know, of course, have an element of adversity and I had an injury free my last deal toward the end of my time playing hockey in college, I had some torn ligaments, I was told I was going to have to get surgery. And I thought that would be that until I met another doctor who was doing functional neurology, and using older versions of direct current, like more primitive analogue devices. And I worked, worked with him. And in three weeks, I was blown away by my ligaments healed, I avoided surgery. And it was so cool to see you know, this, this approach of, of functional neurology of looking not just at the hardware or the tissues that are damaged, but looking at the software looking at the nervous system and how the nervous system responds to injury and how that response actually delays or impedes the healing process. And working at that level, and then using direct current to create these electric fields, they can help orient and align all the cells that control the healing process. Going through that. I was just amazed. I mean, of course, I was grateful, you know, as a You know, early 20s, young man might, you know, of course, I was grateful to be able to get back out on the ice and not have to get surgery and all that. But what really stood out to me, what really got me excited was that I was also a physics major, I was set to go to graduate school in engineering. And so to find something that actually made sense to me, scientifically, from first principles, that’s where I saw this huge contrast between what I was doing in my previous experience with injury and traditional physical therapy. That was fine. Some of that made sense for first principles, I was just so I was I felt like I was on fire with passion and enthusiasm for this. And I going through that experience, I felt called to share that work with as many people as I could. So you know, of course, that at the time we’re sitting here was 1617 years ago or so. So it’s been a different journey since then. But yeah, that experience really just ignited this, this, this passion within me, and I was so grateful to have found it, you know, as when I did even, you know, at a relatively young age,

 

CAVIN  

It’s also really awesome means of of application, you know, yeah, what you’ve done is really take these these neurological concepts and apply them. So that’s that’s the other aspect with with neurology, and before we were talking about how to postulate right neurons that fire together wire together. And and let’s see you also what is it says, Set sets was?

 

GARRETT  

Said the principal Yes, said yes. cific adaptation to imposed demand.

 

CAVIN  

Exactly. Could you explain that? And then how the newbie fits into that?

 

GARRETT  

Yeah, absolutely. So if people are wondering, we mentioned the newbie a timer to it, this is the this is it, right. So it’s newbie for Neuro bio electric stimulator. That’s a direct current as opposed to alternating current, just so you can have a little context for what it is. But that that principle is very important. I would say it kind of kind of falls under this umbrella of neuroplasticity. And it’s, you know, neuroplasticity is important if we’re talking about sports, injuries, orthopaedic surgery and stuff like that, it’s even more important if we’re talking about recovering from a traumatic brain injury, or spinal cord injury or trying to restore function after someone lost it, you know, because of Ms or other neurodegenerative diseases, people dealing with neuropathy, all these things so, so neuroplasticity describes I know, you talk about it, and there’s other people have talked on here. So you know, I don’t have to go into it other than to say, it’s how we adapt to the inputs of our environment. So like, you know, one of my favourite ways to describe it is think about, think about a child growing up here in the United States, you know, in Texas, where I am, or Florida or you are, they might grew up hearing English or Spanish, and they will naturally come to understand the words of that language, they’ll come to hear and speak in the various like accent or dialect and use the intonations of that language, whereas a child who grows up in China is going to understand and speak with the intonation of Mandarin Chinese, you know, for example, so So it’s clearly an adaptation to the inputs of the environment in that case, specifically what they’re hearing on a regular basis. And so we adapt to you know, specifically to what those inputs are and that you know, of course, can be good or bad you know, if I if I sit hunched over at my at a desk all day long, for eight hours a day, eventually I’m going to adapt to being in that position, I’m going to get so good at it that I will earn the right to stay in that position, even when I get up from my desk. So neuroplasticity, and there of course, it’s both the nervous system and the signals to keep muscles but it’s also the connective tissues will adapt as well. It’s both a software and hardware adaptation. But neuroplasticity describes how we adapt. And the good news here and the part that’s relevant if we’re talking about, you know, brain injury, for example, or trying to restore function. The good part is that the good news is that it’s not it’s not the case that everything is hardwired in, you know, a few decades ago, we used to think science used to tell us that you know what, once you you know, you never rebuild any new neurons you only have what you have, so if you lose any You’re screwed, you can’t get any new ones, we were told that you’re basically, you know, after a certain age you have what you have, and you can’t really change it. And, you know, fortunately, we you can teach an old dog new tricks, you know, we’ve learned that neuroplasticity is possible. And it’s especially relevant for people who have neurological injuries or neurodegenerative diseases, because they’re, you have to either stimulate the nervous system to rebuild and repair tissue that’s been damaged, or to functionally reorganise to, to start using detours, right, using other pathways in the brain or other other areas to complete the same tasks that were originally handled by an area that may have been injured. And so specificity of adaptation tells us that we’re going to as we go through the this therapy process and try to help someone harnessed the power of neuroplasticity in order to improve their function, we want to make sure that the inputs that we’re giving are specific to those goals. So So like, if we’re trying to help someone, you know, walk again, sitting around doing hand dexterity exercises is only going to take us so far, it’s at some point, we’re going to actually have to work on standing, loading the hips, loading the knees and ankles, we’re gonna have to work on foot plantar flexion, and dorsiflexion, hip flexion, extension, etc. So there’s there’s specificity, and very closely related to that is, if we’re trying to create neuroplastic change, we need the specificity of the input, and we need to be essentially giving it in the right area, I think there’s a good a good analogy to medication like you need to be give, you need to give the right the right medicine. So in this case, it’s the right right movement, the right input, the right stimulus in the right area. And you also need to give the right dose when you’re talking about medication. And so for us, it’s the specific input. And then you need to give it enough times within a session and in enough sessions over time, so that you reach this critical mass because one interesting part about the brain, you know, talking about these powerful neuro neuro neurological concepts, our brains are oriented toward survival and protection. And so our brains, they don’t want to get us to do more quite the opposite. They want us to do less, they want us to conserve energy, in case there’s going to be a famine tomorrow, they want us to make sure we don’t move too far and overstretch and get injured or move too fast, or create too much force and get injured. Because if we’re injured, our brains are wired for survival. They’re concerned that if we get injured, we might get eaten, right, they our brains evolved during, you know, previous prior generation 1000s of generations ago, so 10s, hundreds of 1000s of generations. So, so our brains want us to want us to do less. And only if they see this input enough times, if it’s intense enough, and they see it in the brain sees enough times over a long enough period of time, will the brain get the point that Oh, yes, this is actually an important input, we need to pay attention here, this is relevant, we need to adapt, and it is worth investing the energy and resources to make these long term adaptations to build up these neurological pathways. And to invest the energy to maintain them over time, you don’t just build them once you have to constantly maintain them, it takes a lot of metabolic activity to fuel nerve conduction to fuel that that communication highway of the body. There’s specificity of adaptation. And there’s also the amount.

 

CAVIN  

That’s beautiful. Yeah, and I really was so much of that, like, when you were talking about occupational therapy, basically, like what we’re doing with our hands when we’re trying to walk. So I was I had my left hand entirely flexed inward, as well as my left toe, pointed down, right. So both completely flex, and this specific adaptation are the the imposed demand that was done was was really brilliant. What they did is they gave me a, a brace that would put pressure on my palm, just lift my wrist a bit. And I would do therapy with that handle, like, you know, still totally flex in Word. And then a week would pass and they do a little bit more pressure they because I would start adapting to that demand, like hey, we’re gonna bring it back this way, you know, and the reason it was flexing to begin with was probably a, a spinal reflex reflex arc that that basically is a stretch reflex we have that just got confused when I bring it when I bumped my head, you know, they got a little confused and they thought that I needed to be like this. So so as we basically showed it, that that’s okay, like you don’t need to be doing that and nothing’s being stretched, this is where you want to be able to change the setpoint each time, you know. And this, this also makes me think of have the brain kind of been able to call these shots, especially when it comes to pain, you know, and then like, basically telling you, you can’t do certain things, but you can do them, your brain is just trying to survive. So it’s saying, Don’t do that. And these are some of the things that we see in brain injury a lot is where the brain has, has decided that’s not okay to do. But your hardware actually is capable of doing whatever it might be. And this is where the newbie comes in really powerfully. Do you want to talk about an example of of what I’m saying here?

 

GARRETT  

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s it’s such an important point. And I love how you’re drawing that distinction between the hardware and the software, because we may have, you know, the hardware, of course, being bones, muscles, tendons, ligaments, etc. And they might be capable of, you know, exerting 100 pounds of force in some movement. But the brain might say, you know, what, if we go, if we go past 50, we might get hurt. And so the brain might limit you at 50. So you’re trying to go to 50 and a half or 51. And the brain says no, and you can’t do it, even though the tissues there are capable of it. And that is so common, it’s common in even people walking around who don’t have any brain injuries, because we learn from, from bad habits from from incomplete rehabilitation of previous injuries are these protective mechanisms that do have value and prevent us from getting hurt, they ended up getting set to conservatively. And this is especially true after brain injury or other neurological injury. Because there’s this dark side of neuroplasticity, we talked about that a little bit like if you’re in a you know, hunched over position, all day start to adapt to that there’s a neuroplasticity, you know, is just describes the capacity to adapt, we can adapt in positive or negative directions. And the negative direction. You know, another example of that is learned disuse, where if if it becomes difficult to to use an area of the body, we end up using it less and less. And that becomes this kind of self fulfilling prophecy or negative downward spiral where less activity breeds less activity, which eventually limits, you know, to causes the brain to think it’s sort of like the elephant who has a leash tied around it with a transit CB, where it it can’t, you know, it thinks that it can’t do and then it grows, and it gets big enough to, you know, to pull the tree out easily. And yet, it doesn’t do it, because it’s learned that it’s incapable of writing that,

 

CAVIN  

right. And this, this, I want to, I want to jump in, because this is exactly what happened with my left hand, you know, like, I don’t want to use my left hand, it’s uncoordinated like neurological tests, you do this as quick as you can. For those who are just watching him, basically, duck building my head together as quick as I can. And then this is as quick as I can do it on my left hand. And it’s way slower on my left, and it’s even less coordinated and all that. And so I don’t really want to use my left that much. But I’ve I’ve, I’ve, I’m working on kind of forcing myself to use my left more often. One of the one exercise that I did was actually wearing an oven mitt on my right hand, forcing myself to use my left hand, way more. And this was over. This is something my functional neurologists told me to, to do. And I gave it a name in a post that I did constraint therapy and strain therapy. There you go. Yeah. Yeah, and I did a post called technology and the brain actually should put puts, we should talk and get some some new fit in there. Because it’s really awesome technology for the brain. And that was one one, you know, simple technology is constrained therapy that actually makes a huge difference in getting us to use the affected limb. And, and and that’s the thing, what we what we practice, we get good at, whether that’s practising something we don’t want or practising something we do want, right? And that’s my understanding of negative and positive plasticity is subjective to like what we want, and I say, you know what’s functional? on what’s not functional? That’ll be negative and positive. But But yeah, your practice makes perfect. I had a martial arts instructor that said, no, no, no. Practice doesn’t make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect. It’s

 

GARRETT  

a good thing that I’ve heard is practice makes permanent. So

 

CAVIN  

yeah, but the thing is, that’s not really true either. Because we know with neuroscience, nothing’s permanent. And neuroplasticity always happens. So I say, someday, I semi permanent. I’d say practice makes pathways.

 

GARRETT  

Yeah. Oh, that’s even better. Yeah, like that. That’s that is that is even better.

 

CAVIN  

Yeah, it is that happiness is

 

GARRETT  

waiting for waiting for the word there. Yeah,

 

CAVIN  

there it is. There it is. Yeah, so we’re talking about physical therapy a bit. And, and with so, so, as far as therapy? How is that useful for? How can we use the newbie in physical therapy to, or occupational therapy for that matter? To improve outcomes?

 

GARRETT  

Yeah, excellent question. And I’ll, I’ll get there. Also, just to close the loop on your last question for like, you know, how this works, you know, a little example or something like that. So, you know, we talked about the concept difference between hardware and software. There’s, there’s so many stories that we see, you know, 90% of people who use the newbie, notice progress in their first session. And that could be a little bit of more sensation, or a little bit of more movement a little bit looser, sometimes it’s someone who can’t lift their arm up all of a sudden can lift it up, you know, sometimes it’s more dramatic, sometimes less so. But what you know, just by way of example, one of the things that we’ve that one of my favourite stories actually used to start the introduction of my book. And it was about a woman named Amy who had a spinal cord injury. And she was in this learned disuse, dark side of neuroplasticity situation, she could be the poster child for that, because she had 25 years before we met, she fell off a horse, she had a spinal cord injury. And she had adapted to life in a wheelchair. And everyone had written off the possibility that she could make any progress now 25 years after her injury, and she ended up coming in working with us. And in the first session, she got a little bit of movement back in her feet. And she had this interesting thing happened where, you know, a night or two after the treatment, she actually woke up in the middle of night. And it was like, Oh, my gosh, I feel like I could move and she actually like with with elbow, her hands, she picked up her leg a little bit, but was the first time she had any movement at all, in 25 years. And you think like, Okay, what what happened there? Obviously, your spinal cord didn’t reattach in result in response to one treatment, right. But the the cool thing that happened there is she actually had a little bit more ability, like it was just lying dormant, it was unable to be expressed, her brain wasn’t letting her do it. Because if learned to think that it wasn’t possible, it was like the, the the large elephant that didn’t think it could pull the tree out, because it couldn’t do it when it was smaller. And so we were able to show her that she could do that and actually make a little bit of progress very quickly. So that was cool. And then in to your question about how how does this impact the physical therapy process? One of my favourite ways to describe it is to think about a journey you’re trying to take, say, we’re going from Texas to Florida, or let’s say you’re going from New York City to Los Angeles. So you have you have that journey. That journey is the equivalent of the amount we talked about you need, you need a critical mass, you need enough input to drive neuroplastic changes. So there’s an amount of work that you have to do, there’s not there’s not a shortcut, there’s, there’s an amount of work you have to do, just like there’s a distance that you have to travel to get from New York to Los Angeles. But even though there’s a fixed amount that you have to travel a fixed distance, you have to travel, there are different ways that you can make that trip, you could walk, you could ride horseback, right? You could do a horse and buggy, you could you could take a car, you can also take an aeroplane. And so there are more or less efficient and more or less safe ways to travel that distance. And what the newbie does is allows us to reach that critical mass of input that we need to do it faster. It’s the equivalent of taking an aeroplane instead of driving or walking across the country. And so using this allows us you know, you know, we need to get hundreds of 1000s of repetitions of these specific movement inputs in order to drive change. In order to drive these neurological neuroplastic adaptations, and this allows us to get, you know, this, this is not exact, but just for illustration purposes, you know, imagine that every rep that you do is normally one bit of input. Whereas if you do that rep with the machine on, because it’s creating this, this greater this direct current is providing more sensory input into the nervous system and brain, imagine that each movement now becomes five bits of input instead of one. So so you’re getting every every 100 reps that you do, you’re getting the equivalent of 500 reps. And so it allows you to reach that, that distance from New York to California reach that critical input, that critical threshold, reach that faster, more efficiently, more safely. And another another just little related point to that is, you know, sometimes we’ll be starting work with someone, and we’ll tell them that, you know, look, it’s during this type of recovery here is going to require that you adopt the mindset of an athlete, you might not think of yourself as an athlete now, but but as it from this moment onward, Gosh, darn it, you are going to think of yourself as an athlete. So an athlete trains, you know, an hour or more every day, or most days, you take a rest day, of course, here and there, but you know, what, not just a day or a week, but for months at a time, you know, for years on end to adapt to those levels. And that’s, that’s what it’s gonna take and also recover in between sessions, you got to be responsible in what you’re doing outside of the outside of the office here, too. And so, so we tell people, and they say, you know, well, I understand I have to do you know, hundreds of 1000s of reps of a hamstring curl, or hip flexion, or some of that, but, but I can’t even do one yet. So how am I going to get to 350,000? And the answer is, well, we’re gonna give this, we’re gonna give you this input on these pathways, as if you’re doing the movements, you can start to build those early reps, and then eventually, everything else will adapt and catch up, and you’ll be able to start doing it, and it will amplify and we’ll get this, you know, positive compounding effect, but it can allow people to get some activity also where they where they can’t generate any, which is a big boost, especially in the beginning, if you’re trying to train to start that journey out of New York over across the country.

 

CAVIN  

Absolutely, man. I, I mean, it’s when, I mean, I liken it to, basically, when we’re, yeah, exactly. It’s Rob. So if you’re, if you’re on this road, like when it’s the first road you’re going to do if you’re going through a forest, right, and you need to get from like one side of the forest, like to a couple miles away or something, right? You need to go through this whole like Forest cross, you know, creeks, like move over, like falling over trees and whatnot. And then you make that, that trip over and over and over again. And now a Pathways there, and it gets easier and easier. And so what what the what the newbie does is basically paves that road way quicker by getting the movement to happen over and over and over and over again, where a groove gets created.

 

GARRETT  

And practice makes pathways. Yes, it

 

CAVIN  

makes. Exactly, exactly. It’s practising really, really quickly. It’s, it’s, it’s pretty phenomenal. And I know there’s there’s other eastern devices out there. What I really love about about new fit, and the newbie is that it’s using direct current, whereas like, say, a 10s unit is using alternating current. And I did a training for the newbie for new fit back in 2020, I think, and might have been 2019. And you really, you really drove so many amazing neurological concepts home. And let’s let’s talk about what happens with alternating current and direct current because like when I take a 10s unit, it just makes my Muscle Flex. And that’s it. So So why is that? Because the newbie doesn’t do that.

 

GARRETT  

There are there’s two main categories here to try to try to build out an answer. So one is the effect on the hardware of the body, you know, the muscles, bones, connective tissue, nerves, etc. And then the other part of you know, trying to build an answer. The other part is the functional piece of it. And so, the functional pieces actually, I think what we’re what we’re better known for everything. We’ll talk about that even longer, but let’s touch on Make Your Own We try to touch on the hardware. So don’t forget about it. So the the cool thing about this direct current is that when you have a direct current electric field gradient, it helps to orient all the cells that control the healing and regeneration of these tissues of the body. And so a gradient is like, like, if, if you have, if you have a hill, you look outside, you have a hill and you put a ball on top of the hill, it’ll roll down. That’s, that’s a gradient of potential energy and gravity gravitational force. So an electric field gradient is the same thing, if you have an electric field charges in the middle will move, you know, in a certain direction based on that, and so that that gradient, that electric field gradient helps basically orient the cells and optimise their function to accelerate and improve the overall healing process. And we’re seeing examples of this, for example, in a study we have going on right now with neuropathy patients where we’re seeing the newbie in the experimental group compared to 10s unit in the control group. And we’re seeing significant improvements in how effectively the newbie in the direct current is able to help those patients literally rebuild, remodel, and eat their axons or create new axon collateral sprouting like, you know, literally nerve regeneration and some regrowth there, even in patients in their 60s and 70s, when it’s been written off, then that they can make any progress. So so there’s that issue there. Because with alternating current, you don’t get, you don’t get that electric field, you get the charges go back and forth, back and forth, alternating positive, negative, positive, negative, so you don’t get any sustained electric field there in a way that taps into any of this. And so you might be wondering, like, well, knowing that why why do people use alternating current? And the answer is that a lot of these benefits of direct current were known back in the 1960s 1970s. But there was also one big problem. And that problem is that direct current, if you turn it up to a high enough level to make a difference in in these functional instructional domains, if you turn it up to that level, it actually would burn the skin. And so it was a case of the baby being thrown out with the bathwater where people said, okay, you know, we can’t use it because of the burning. So they went to alternating current. And not, you know, is what we have today, we have the 10 units, Russian stem, interferential, Fe, s, NMBS, et cetera. And that, you know, there’s there’s benefits there. But there’s also some limitations. So one of them, of course, is that electric field gradient and the hardware healing side, the functional side, to the point that you made there about, you know, you turn on a traditional 10s unit on your arm, and it just makes you lock up, that is a big difference, because what’s happening there, as that signal goes back and forth, positive, negative, positive, negative, positive negative, it sends a signal to your nervous system to contract one side, and then the other one side in the other. So it’s like your bicep and tricep fighting against each other. It’s like you’re driving your car hitting the throttle and the brake pedal at the same time, you’re resisting your own movement. And what we can do with direct current is, is bypass a lot of that sending a signal in one direction, like the brain, like the nervous system sends naturally, there’s one lane of traffic from the brain down to the body called the southbound lane, and then there’s one lane of traffic from the body up to the brain called that the northbound lane. And so we can tap into, you know, one of those at a time in a way that allows us to activate, you know, a lot of times we choose to activate that northbound lane, sending signals from the body up to the brain. So the brain better knows more clearly sees what’s going on where that area of the body is, and can can better learn to send its own signals down there, but, but we’re able to bypass a lot of that protective co contraction and CO contraction being like opposite muscles fighting against each other. We can bypass a lot of that to get this more powerful and more precise message into the nervous system in a way that helps us accelerate that process of neuromuscular re education. 

 

CAVIN  

So yeah, efferent and afferent signals northbound and southbound? Yes, yes. And neuromuscular re education, that’s, that’s us re educating, and that’s happening at the neuromuscular junction. And so, so all of this is really important for, for brain injury survivors with physical things, but also this neurology. I mean, the same principles in in neuromuscular junctions and our neurology is all governed by the same principles, which is largely what we talked about with neurons that fire together wire together. I say it’s principle right. And this also It comes into our thought patterns and aspects of that sort. Where when we when we, when we continue thinking the same things over and over again, it can be a we programme that in. And this also happens with with pain. I was reading Norman Doidge the brains way of healing and I think it’s Michael Moscowitz there was something i Have you have you? Have you heard of him? Yeah, this this is the though the brain’s way of healing. Okay, so it is. Yeah, it’s great. And, but, but Michael Moss, who was basically, he was an anesthesiologist, and he, he made a boo boo, and basically jumped off of a tank, who lives in a, in a, in a junkyard or something like having fun and a gas can hook caught his pant leg and like, snapped his femur. Like, we’ll talk about pain. My God has the biggest bone in the human body, you know, snapped. And he was like, hey, and because he was like, you know, anesthesiologist and stuff he, he went from, you know, town of 10 on a pain scale to nothing because the body wanted to shock. And this is another aspect of like, if the body can go into shock, and decide no pain, right now. There are ways for us to harness that and utilise it as well. And I’d love to talk with you about using the Nuby for chronic pain, and how, you know, and and also how chronic pain plasticisers itself or becomes, it becomes chronic?

 

GARRETT  

Yeah, yeah. 100%. One, just one quick comment. So you have, of course, neuromuscular education, you know, there are changes at the neuromuscular junction. And I think there also can be changes more broadly. And all the structures above that, that are going to be sending signals down to the neuromuscular junction and things like that. I think, even even when we’re working at the level of the muscle, that that input of stimulation can create changes higher up just one just try to close a little loop there. But that’s a really good question about about chronic pain. So I think it helps to kind of understand the framework for pain here. Because pain, you know, we often still think what science was telling us decades ago, we often think that like there’s a pain signal here, and we you know, if I hit if I tap a hospital or attack with my fingertip that triggers pain in my finger, and that pain gets reported up to my brain, I just experience it, but it’s coming from here. And we know that now that the pain is actually and experience created by the brain, it’s a signal that the brain creates as essentially the brain’s way of telling us to try to change our behaviour. And so there is something that happens down at the level of the finger, that is called nociception, or the perception of threat. And then the brain can receive that along with millions of other bits of information every second. And the brain chooses whether to create a signal of pain or not, based on the totality of the inputs at that moment in time. And so there’s times where something might happen. But it’s only a little a minor nuisance, you know, compared to something else that’s more important. And so the brain may not create a signal of pain in that moment. And that can even go so far as I mean, like, you know, the example of a broken femur is a dramatic one. There’s examples of, of soldiers of Special Operations soldiers that have been shot, and not actually noticed, because they’re so focused on what they’re doing on the current battle or the current situation. And they until it’s later when they calm down, do they only do they only then realise, like, oh, shit, I have, I have a gunshot wound. And so there’s, the brain will prioritise what is most urgently needed for survival protection. Sometimes it’s, you know, sometimes the brain will think, Oh, hey, we just rolled our ankle, and we need to create a signal of pain there so that we don’t use that and injure injure it worse. So sometimes there is a one to one correlation between pain and damage. But sometimes, especially when we talk about chronic pain, sometimes the pain lingers on, even after an injury is already healed when there’s or when there’s no reason Why anything should hurt in should in air quotes right there. Yeah. And so, you know, there’s examples of this where, you know, sometimes people have pain that kind of, ebbs and flows. And it’s not always related to like, you know, moving in a particular direction or something like that. So, so that speaks to some of that, which you talked about, like the plasticity around pain and how it becomes chronic and how it changes, the wiring, things like that. And so, so there’s an interesting phenomenon, the biopsychosocial model of pain, that leads to this metaphor that we call the right bucket, where we have various threats, tissue damage, could be one of them, but also not not sleeping well, or, or, you know, fearing that we might, you know, lose the job that we’re at right now and lose that source of income, reactions to food, drinking alcohol, there’s all these different things that are, that are stressors on the body, and when that bucket reaches a certain threshold, sometimes the output would be pain, sometimes the thing that causes us to reach that threshold might be a poor night of sleep, or it might be an argument with a significant other or might be stress at work. And so something that kind of trips the alarm to cause pain, you know, is, is something that we wouldn’t think necessarily causes pain, but it’s interesting, because when you talk about the plastic changes, I mean, there can be increases in different nerve fibre, like over time, people with chronic pain can develop more C fibres, and that sends more of that perception of threat there. But there also there’s this interesting phenomenon where you know, if, if your source biggest source of stress right now is the risk of losing a job and losing that income and the ability to pay your bills for example, there’s not a oh my gosh, I might lose my job muscle in the body that your brain can make hurt. So instead, it’s going to leverage it’s going to use an existing pain pathway so that it doesn’t have to invest the energy and resources to build a new one. And so that’s a big part of why when people have pain like hopefully if you’re listening to this you don’t have pain right now but if you do there’s a good chance that when you do have it, it often or perhaps always is in the same place or the same one or two places because sometimes the pain is a response to something else that’s not physical and your your brain and your nervous system are going to want to use that well established well rehearsed pathway like like you talked about going through the forest, you can you can try to go through the dense trees or you can take the path that someone has already paved over and carved out right.

 

CAVIN  

The path of least resistance exactly yes. Yeah. Yeah. You know, i i We have a lot of physical therapists, occupational therapists, chiropractors, all sorts of practitioners who listen to this podcast as well and, and curious where would like if people want to learn more about new fit and for patients as well where patients would find a practitioner who utilise this technology? Well, you can go to foetal brain.com forward slash new fit. And then on this page, I’m going to be putting a lot of information as far as technology in the brain and aspects like that. But yeah, where can people go to learn more about the new vet? If they’re if they’re interested in getting the newbie or if they’re interested in using one?

 

GARRETT  

Yeah, great question. And we’re happy to of course, collaborate with you and making that landing page and things like that. But on our on our website, we have which will link to their website, new WWW dot new dot fit any you like neurological dot fit. We have links or sections for patients and for providers. So if you’re a patient, you can go on there, you can certainly read up a little more and also find a map of, of physical therapists, chiropractic offices, other medical professionals, other movement professionals that have a device if there’s someone in your area, someone you can go see we wholeheartedly enthusiastically encourage you to go see them. If there isn’t, or you want to work with us directly, you can reach out to us through through the website, we do have a team of physical therapists that do some remote support for people if there isn’t anyone nearby or it’s more time or time or cost prohibitive to go out if you can’t arrange transportation or you know, stuff like that, but and then if you’re a if you’re a provider, if you’re a any sort of clinician and you’re interested in potentially using this in your practice, there’s a whole link for clinicians with information talks about the type of training and we have a whole sort of occasion programme that’s included that will share with you some of these powerful neurological principles and how to use the newbie and these various strategies to harness the power of neurology and really supercharge daily practice and make these these you know, wonderful, transformational stories, even even even a more regular thing in your practice.

 

CAVIN  

Nice. That’s awesome. Yeah. Cool. So I’m gonna have a landing page here, you’re gonna find it feed your brain.com forward slash new fit. That’s an EU like neurology fit fit. And, and yeah, I’m, I’d love to build that out. I love how your website set up to help provide providers and and and patients. Both right there. Yeah. Where else can people learn more about your Is there anything else you want to leave your listeners our listeners with.

 

GARRETT  

So if if you’re on social media, we are definitely most active on Instagram. My few members of our team and I are all on there, posting and interacting and everything. So Instagram is at at New fit RFP for rehab, fitness and performance, new fit RFP, and then I will invite anyone who’s interested to check out my book, The New fit method totally on Amazon. And I put a lot of a lot of hours into that one. But I think it does a good job of making a lot of these principles accessible. And I’ve certainly had good, good feedback on it. So I love that

 

CAVIN  

book guy like you really spelled out a lot of things and just really be if you want to learn about neuroscience, that’s a great book. Awesome, thank

 

GARRETT  

you. Thank you so much. Yeah, man. Let’s say the same thing about your book. I mean, feed a brain we’ve got several copies, you know, in our clinic over here, just out on display and I mean, you know, feel it feel the same way about about you and your work.

 

CAVIN  

Awesome. Appreciate you my friend. So good to see you man. And, and thank you all for for staying here to the end. We will see you next time. Take care. Bye

 

 

 

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