Ashok Gupta argues that brain-retraining can reverse the hypervigilant nervous system response that drives chronic illness. His studies show an 8-week fibromyalgia program cut pain by half, and a Long Covid trial found brain-retraining reduced fatigue four times more than lifestyle changes alone.
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Ashok Gupta — founder and CEO of the Gupta Program.
~40% reduction in fibromyalgia; pain, anxiety, and depression halved; perceived health increased by ~50%.
Brain retraining was reported as four times more effective at reducing fatigue and twice as effective at increasing energy compared to lifestyle interventions.
A clinical audit across 16 conditions found significant improvement in 14 conditions after three months of brain retraining (uncontrolled audit).
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Now we go from the microbiome to our other brain, right? And really, really retraining that in the most amazing way possible. And the best person I know to talk about this is Ashak Gupta. Let's give him a hand. Let's stand up and.
Yeah. Welcome, everybody. How are you all doing? Good. You picked the right room. Just to let you know, some fantastic talks here. So great. So let's start with a game. So, first of all, my name is Ashok Gupta. I'm the founder and CEO of the Gupta Program, and we do neuroplasticity and brain retraining. And I've met a lot of you already. But we'll start with a game, okay? I'm going to prove to you my psychic powers. All right? So first thing that comes into your head, think of a fast food restaurant. Oh, you feel sick? All right, now think of a soft drink. Okay. All right, so let me see if I can read your mind. Here we go. All right. In the room. And bear in mind, this is a room of health practitioners, so it may not quite work, Right. Some of you probably came up with Whole Foods or something, Right? But who said McDonald's? Raise your hand. Okay, so most people in the room kind of. Who said Coca Cola? Most people in the room. Now, isn't that interesting? You involved in the health industry, and yet that was the first thing that came into your head. That is the power of neuroplasticity. Look at all these companies. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars to train your brain to think of their product when you are hungry or thirsty. Now imagine if we leverage the power of neuroplasticity to actually improve health outcomes of patients. How amazing that would be. Now, what is neuroplasticity? It's the idea that our brains are not fixed, right? So our genetics are not our destiny. We already know that from epigenetics. And same with our brains. Although we may feel that, you know, our younger years fix our brain. Our brain is inherently malleable, changeable. It's constantly changing. And this brings us on to what I think is the future of healthcare, where it's actually understanding that a lot of these chronic illnesses that we see in our clinics, these complex cases. Absolutely. You know, like our speakers talked about, the microbiome, the toxins, these are all components. And we're trying to bring all of these different wedges together to try and deliver truly integrative health care. That we came into this industry because we were disillusioned with mainstream medical care, and we wanted to become More integrative. So let's live that vision by also incorporating some of the brain aspects of this. So let me just walk you through a hypothesis that we have that may be causing many of these different conditions. So we believe there are genetic components. Absolutely. And secondly, lifestyle, psychosocial and environmental factors. So of course the microbiome, of course our food, the toxins, the environment that we are around us, and also stress being a huge factor, and then finally some kind of acute traumatic assault. So that might be external stress, or it could be physical stress in some way, or most commonly a virus or bacterial infection. And a combination of these factors then causes a conditioning effect. We believe in the brain, specifically the amygdala and insular parts of the brain, where the brain believes that as a result of that insult, it needs to now chronically trigger the immune system and nervous system continually. And that's when we start getting autoimmune conditions, inflammatory conditions. And lots of recent research is showing this is now in the insular part of the brain. And they've proven it now in rat studies, and they're now working with human studies as well. So it's very, very exciting that we may have located where it's happening. And it causes this vicious cycle where the brain stimulates the sympathetic nervous system, the immune system causing that dysfunction, which then causes the symptoms, a lack of natural detoxification, which then causes buildup of toxins. And therefore those symptoms are detected by a hypervigilant brain. And around and around we go in the vicious cycle of illness. And many of us also understand the brain gut interaction, and it's about changing that particular feedback loop as well. And so a lot of us came, as I said, into this industry because we wanted to live that vision of integrative healthcare. And I've noticed that in integrative and functional medicine, often we're becoming just as reductionist as mainstream medicine. Because someone comes in, we do a bunch of labs, we see, aha, that's abnormal. Then we shift and change the supplements, the diets, the medications, the lifestyle, and some things improve. But don't we all find that patient might improve, but the moment they get stressed to have a life event, wham, everything shifts and changes. They come back into the clinical environment and then we have to look at how we can improve on that. So I call these illnesses software problems, not hardware problems, where the wiring of the system has become hyperactive and hyper defensive. Because we are survival machines. We are here to pass on our genes to the next generation. So our immune system is very easy for the immune system to get into that hyper vigilance state. And to show you some of the studies that we've done with brain retraining, a recent study on fibromyalgia showed that just after eight weeks of brain retraining, there was a 40% reduction in fibromyalgia and a halving of pain, a halving of anxiety, a halving of depression, 50% increase in perceived health. So this was a study using neuroplasticity in brain retraining compared to a control group. And then another randomized control trial. This was on Long Covid. So this was a study comparing brain retraining to lifestyle. So this was diet, supplements, exercise, sleep. So the whole suite of different things you would give to a patient. And it showed that after three months, brain retraining was four times more effective at reducing fatigue and exhaustion, twice as effective at increasing levels of energy. So this was a landmark study. And we're doing more studies now on Long Covid, a suite of different conditions and even Ms. And autoimmune conditions as well. And finally, this is a recent published clinical audit on 16 different conditions. And we found that in 14 of these conditions there was a significant result. And this is the percentage improvement in health after three months of using brain retraining and neuroplasticity. This wasn't a controlled study, but a clinical audit. So I hope that you see that this could be an incredible thing to include in your practices, and people are including it before, during or after their traditional intervention. So let's live that vision of integrative healthcare. Let's actually change the world and change patient lives. And I hope that this makes an impact on your delivery. Thank you, everyone.
