Neuroplasiticity Program Effective For Fibromyalgia | Ashok Gupta | Gupta Program|

Hello and a warm welcome to our Facebook Live event. My name is Ashok Gupta. I'm the director of the Gupta Program. And I'm very excited to share with you today what we'll be talking about, which is our brand new study, which has been published on fibromyalgia. And this study was published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine just last week. And essentially I want to describe more about what that study involved and how we treated patients with fibromyalgia and results that came out and how it can give inspiration to millions of people around the world now who are suffering from chronic pain syndromes such as fibromyalgia, chronic unexplained pain syndromes, or localized or generalized pain syndromes that don't seem to be treated effectively by mainstream medical options. So this study was published, as I said, last week, and it showed that when we took 45 patients and split them into two different groups, all of these patients suffered from fibromyalgia. And this study was conducted in Spain. We split them into two groups and then one group just got relaxation techniques. So generally things that we know can support people with pain or other types of illnesses, general relaxation techniques. And the other group received the Gupta program, which is a combination of what we call amygdala and insular retraining as well as mindfulness techniques and a whole holistic approach to health. But the core of it is these neuroplasticity techniques, ways of retraining the brain out of stuck responses. And we followed both of those groups for eight weeks, which is an eight week intervention. And then the results were as follows. I'm going to share my screen and I'll share with you some of the results that we found from the study. So the study was called Mindfulness Based Program plus Amygdala and Ancillary Training for the Treatment of Women with Fibromyalgia. A pilot randomized control trial, as I said, published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, which is one of the top 10 journals in the world. And essentially we found that just after an eight week intervention, there was a almost 40% reduction in fibromyalgia scores on the FIQ scores, but 0% in the relaxation control group, there was a 47% increase in perceived health, which is pretty incredible really for such a short intervention. Only 16% in the control group, there was almost a 50% reduction in pain catastrophizing and only 9% in the control group. And there, as you can see in terms of anxiety and depression, once again, almost a halving of anxiety and depression in patients with fibromyalgia. And so for us, this has been a fantastic result and really a kind of confirmation of all the hard work that the team has put in over the last 10, 15 years or so to finally get a study like this which confirms that, that neuroplasticity is an effective way of treating fibromyalgia, but also me and chronic fatigue syndrome and other types of environmental illnesses such as mold illness and chemical sensitivities. So we're very excited here at the clinic that finally, after many years of hard work, we finally got this study published. And our aim is now to get larger studies done to finally prove to the mainstream medical profession that the way that we've been treating pain syndromes the last few decades is simply treating the symptoms. And look at what that has caused. The opioid crisis in the US where thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people die each year across the globe by overdosing on steroids, pain medications, opioids, and other types of pain drugs. And we also know that those pain medications only have a short term effect and eventually there is an addiction, an addictive quality to them, and the brain ratchets up its pain responses. So those pain medications are no longer having an impact. And then when someone tries to come off those pain medications, of course they experience increases in pain, increases anxiety because of the withdrawal effects of those types of medications. So I can't underestimate what a groundbreaking moment this is, that finally, for the first time, an independent randomized trial has been published to show that neuroplasticity techniques can be superior to pain medications in reducing pain, especially for something as complex as fibromyalgia. So what I'd really love for you to do, whether you're watching us live on Instagram or live on Facebook or even watching the recording, what I'd love for you to do is please do share right now, click the share button and share this live event or share the recording on your Facebook groups, on your own feed or other pain groups, fibromyalgia groups, because we really want to get this information out there. There are, there is a way through whatever you're experiencing, whether it's chronic fatigue syndrome or it's pain and the doctors haven't been able to help. We finally have scientific evidence that these illnesses, I truly believe, are in the nervous system and in the brain. They're part of a kind of brain on fire, as it were. A brain that is overstimulated over responding. Okay, so if you'd like more information, please do visit our website@guptaprogram.com fibrostudy and if you go to that page, you'll be able to find out more information, our press release, and also the medical paper itself, which is open source, so you can actually read the medical paper and see the evidence for yourself. And a big thank you goes out to Virginia Gasion and Javier and all the team in Zaragoza who conducted this study and pushed hard to get this published in the jcm. So thank you to everyone who's been involved in this. And as a special celebration of the publication of this paper, we're offering actually 15% off the Gupta program this week. So if you use the code study, go to our website, guptaprogram.com you can join, obviously, the free trial. And if you choose to purchase the program, you can have 15% off using the code study just to celebrate the publication of our paper. And I want to thank all the team at the Gupta program and all the coaches, you know, who've tirelessly worked hard over the last 10 to 15 years. In fact, we've been running the clinic for 20 years now. And often we would come up against skepticism, people saying, well, actually, are you saying it's in the mind? Or how can just retraining the brain possibly heal complex conditions like fibromyalgia? Or me? And we just believed in ourselves, we believed in the work that we were doing and the results that we were getting with patients. And now it's a vindication of all that hard work that we can finally prove to the medical profession that this is a viable treatment, if not hopefully to become the standard treatment. Because from the results that we've seen, if we do larger studies, perhaps longer studies, where the intervention is carried out for six months, we do believe that this could potentially become a gold standard for treating pain syndromes. So it's very, very exciting. Now, what I'd love to do now is to really give you a background to neuroplasticity. What does neuroplasticity mean and how does it impact on chronic illnesses? And the chronic illnesses that we've mentioned are when people feel incredibly exhausted and tired and perhaps have chronic fatigue, which then can evolve into chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. Or me. Or it can be where people have food sensitivities or environmental illnesses, where they are sensitive to mold or sensitive to certain chemicals. And these illnesses are far more widespread in population than we realize. Then there can be things like Lyme disease, pots, chronic and severe anxiety, all of these conditions I believe start in the brain and are due to faulty wiring as a result of a chronic, stressful experience that people go through, Even things like chronic back pain. We can now see there may be a vicious cycle that's going on that causes these types of pain in the body. And. And how can neuroplasticity approaches and brain retraining help us heal? That's what I'll spend the next 10 to 15 minutes talking about. So what is neuroplasticity Now? Neuroplasticity is this idea that previously in previous generations, they thought our brain was fixed. So they knew that as we grew up, from a baby to a toddler to a child, our brain was very flexible and very rewirable. And that meant that we had accelerated learning in our youthful years, as it were. And then when we become an adult, that is fixed. So those particular neurons, our personality, the way we respond to certain illnesses, our immune system was all then fixed. And recent studies over the last few decades have shown that, in fact, there is this concept of neuroplasticity that continues into adult life, which means that our brain is not fixed, our personality is not fixed, our physiology is not fixed, that the brain keeps evolving and adapting. And the more actually we use our brains, the more neuroplasticity or neuroplastic effects have been shown. So even exercise has been shown to make our brains more plastic. Meditation has been shown to make our brains more plastic. So when we look after ourselves, that has a direct impact on the flexibility. Now, that flexibility is not just in terms of learning new things, but also in terms of shifting and changing aspects of our personality that we choose to change? Or then, as we're talking about here, chronic illnesses. How can chronic illnesses actually evolve and change so they're not stuck in our system so that we can go back to a balance where we are healthy? This is incredibly important information, no matter what we're experiencing in our lives. And one way of looking at this is in nlp, there's a statement, the map is not the territory. Now, what does this mean? It means that our brains make a mental map the world around us, but that mental map is not an accurate map of what the situation actually is. Now, let's take an example. Now, for instance, let's take the example of a fear of flying, which is very common in the population. Now, the brain makes a map of what's going on here. So we're stepping into a metal capsule which then takes off at 20,000ft and flies around the world. And for the brain that doesn't make any sense. Or certainly for the unconscious brain, it doesn't make any sense. So the brain comes up with an idea that actually this is a dangerous experience. And when there is turbulence in the flight, this must mean that we are in mortal danger right then and there. So a map is created that flying is dangerous, turbulence is dangerous. It indicates that we are possibly going to be in physical danger. And yet there is another part of that mental map that says, actually, when we look at the evidence, flying is 10 to 15 times safer than driving. And yet the brain still responds with its own map of the territory, its own interpretation of events and situations. Let's take trauma. So let's take the example of war veterans returning from a war zone like Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere else, and they come back to their host countries or their home countries. And anytime a car backfires or they hear a loud bang or a firework, their whole system reignites that defensive response as a, oh, dear, I'm in danger. And yet the person is no longer in that dangerous territory. But that territory has made an impact on the map, the internal representation of the world around us. And so the brain, in its own enclosed consciousness, creates mental maps of the physical territory, the emotional territory, the chemical territory, and responds appropriately. So that's our kind of first starting point. And, you know, if you want to go deeper into this at a philosophical level, well, does the physical universe actually exist? And there's many physicists who believe that we actually live in a hologram created within a state of consciousness, the holographic universe, and in fact, the entire universe is simply being experienced through our own consciousness, and the territory itself does not exist. But we aren't going into that level of depth of the philosophical aspects of this, but simply looking at our mind's reaction to the world around us. So the map is not the territory. Now, how is this relevant to fibromyalgia and pain? What it means is that as far as the brain is concerned, we may well be experiencing physical injury or physical danger in the body. And those signals from the body may become magnified. And when they become magnified, they then go into our brain. And the brain says, right, we are in physical danger as a result of this pain. And then the brain initiates responses signals back to the muscles, the joints, to perhaps cause more inflammation, or signal to those parts of the body that we are in danger of releasing other types of chemicals, for instance, cytokines, aspects of the immune system, which then increase that pain, and that pain then doubles back to the brain. So even though we aren't in physical danger, the brain has created its own map to say we are in physical danger and therefore we need to do something about this. So this is where the brain makes little mistakes. And because of it's actually, this is actually as a result of its neuroplasticity. So because the brain is plastic, it can get stuck in novel and new ways of representing the body which are incorrect. And once it is stuck in that incorrect processing of the body, then we get a vicious cycle. And I'm going to describe that more now. And we know that neurons that fire together wire together. That's another aspect. So if 1% of neurons is firing related to pain, another set of neurons are firing in results of stress. If they keep firing at the same time, eventually stress itself could be triggering a pain response. Which is why many people report that when they experience stress or anxiety, they actually get physical symptoms. So some people get symptoms of pain, some people get IBS or stomach problems. So the stress goes directly to the stomach. So neurologically, if neurons that fire together wire together, if we go through a traumatic experience where we're experiencing pain, we just happen to be experiencing pain as well as stress at the same time, or there may be other symptoms we're experiencing. They could wire together and then mean that stress itself could be a trigger for physical manifestations of that. But that doesn't mean that it's psychosomatic. It means that these are could conditioned responses in the body. And here at the Gupta program we call these neuroimmune conditioned syndromes. Neuro because they're in the brain and the nervous system, immuno because they often involve the immune system and inflammation in the body. Conditioned because they're learnt responses in the brain, and syndromes because they're a collection of different symptoms. So whether you're suffering from me or chronic fatigue syndrome, or from fibromyalgia or some other complex pain that you can't seem to get rid of, or a sensitivity to food or light even, or some other kind of physical response to a chemical or mold, all of these conditions represent mistakes that the brain has made when a traumatic experience has happened. And let's have a look at this in this diagram here. Oh, sorry, before we go into that, just in terms of pain syndrome, something else that confirms this idea that pain is actually potentially part of the map in the brain rather than the physical territory. It's something called phantom limb syndrome, which many of you may have heard of. There's a very famous book I Think it's called the phantom limb. And many doctors have found that even once they had amputated someone's leg, the brain still received signals as if the leg was present. And patients would report that they can feel pain in their right leg, just like here, even though the actual leg itself did not exist. And they could feel pain in their toes. Which indicates that although the physical territory of the body has changed, the map in the brain is still responding from an old state of being. It still has the almost muscle memory of how the body felt before. So that's another bit of evidence that the map is not the territory and the brain is simply creating its own illusory map of our bodies and the world around us, which is fascinating, really, isn't it? So this is a very complex map of the brain and how it processes pain. But just to show you how complex pain actually is, the pain on the right hand side of this diagram goes into the periaqueductal gray and the peribrachial nucleus. So these part of the brainstem and those signals then go into the rest of the brain. The amygdala, the thalamus, the insular prefrontal cortex. And all of these brain structures are involved in processing and mediating pain signals, interpreting them and deciding the best response. For instance, if you put your hand on a hot plate immediately, the hand moves off the hot plate before you're even consciously aware. Because these processes and these signaling to the brain is designed to protect you with responding in milliseconds before you have conscious awareness. So how does something like fibromyalgia or a pain syndrome potentially start in the body? And how can we use neuroplasticity to solve these issues? Well, often there can be some predisposing factors, like genetic factors, but more often than not, we find that there are acute psychological stress or chronic stress combined with some kind of pain trigger. So often people develop fibromyalgia as a result of a localized pain, perhaps in one part of the body, that then generalizes to the entire body. Or it could be an accident. So people have some kind of injury or accident or car accident, which then triggers their fibromyalgia, and then that impacts the brain. And we believe here at the clinic, and we published a medical paper on this, that that trauma or that conditioning in the brain occurs in some brain structures called the amygdala, the insula, and the hippocampus, potentially. And that dysfunction in the brain teaches the brain that we are in danger and we need to do Something about this immediately, which then at number four, triggers chronic sympathetic arousals. That means triggering our stress system, our nervous system, unnecessarily, and then immune dysfunction. That means triggering aspects of neuroinflammation. So we have more inflammation in the brain, but then also inflammation in the muscles, which can then lead to build ups of lactic acid and fibromyalgia, causing the pain, chronic pain in the body, various other abnormalities, which then causes the symptoms at number six, muscle dysfunction and pain, cognitive problems, sleep issues, and all the other symptoms that many people experience. And this is where it gets interesting. We know then that the brain, because it believes we're in danger, it will magnify signals in the body. So it then magnifies the pain that people are experiencing in their joints, in their muscles, in their head. So this model can also be relevant for headaches. And because those signals become magnified, there's more input into the brain. And the brain gets emotionally hijacked and overwhelmed and thinks we are in danger. There is a physical danger in the body that requires our attention. Let's overwhelm all other cortical networks and just get the brain to focus on this, because the person has to do something about this. They're not dealing with the source of this. And the unconscious brain thinks, what can I do? Well, I can trigger inflammation in the body, maybe that will solve the pain. I could trigger the nervous system, perhaps that will help in some way. But ironically, that very response at number four causes then the symptoms at number six, which then feed back to the brain at number eight, causing this vicious cycle. And that's where many of these modern illnesses that doctors can't treat or can't treat effectively are essentially treating the symptoms is because they're not a hardware problem, they're a software problem. Let's take the example of a car. So in traditional medicine, we treat the body like a car, and this goes wrong, we fix that, this goes wrong, we fix that, the engine goes wrong, we fix that very reductionist philosophy in terms of how we treat body. But we know that in modern cars, what's the problem that we always get, it's often the electrical system. And we'll get a warning light flashing on the dashboard saying there's something wrong with the engine management system, or there's something wrong with the door or whatever it may be. So a malfunction flashes on the warning dashboard. And that electrical system is just like our electrical system. It our bodies. That electrical system controls the rest of the hardware in the body. And just like in the car, once that flashing light comes up, there's an error code. And often we have to then take our car to the mechanic and he resets the error code and the body goes back to normal. And that analogy is exactly what's happening here, that there is now a system which is malfunctioning in the nervous system doing what it thinks is best, but it's now an error. It's almost like there's a virus in the. In the nervous system. But it's not actually a virus. It's just an error code which has been created, and that system needs to be reset. And that's what we do here at the Gupta program, is retrain the brain, reset the nervous system back to its normal state of balance by training the brain to realize that we aren't in danger. And the very systems that it is stimulating is causing the very symptoms that it is responding to, causing this vicious cycle, which is why people can have chronic illnesses for years, decades, because once the system is set up in this way, it's very difficult to break because the input and the output of the system have been connected in some shape or form and are going around and around. Yep. Another diagram just describing these pain syndromes are being caused by conditioning in the brain over responses by the brain, creating those symptoms. And many of these different brain structures are involved. And in terms of how we map the brain, we believe that those symptoms, those signals of pain, are being magnified in the periaqueductal brain and the peribrachial nucleus by the amygdala. Okay. So the amygdala is telling these parts of the brain to magnify signals which then accumulate in the thalamus. And all of these brain structures which are normally designed to process pain, modulate pain, create the appropriate response, they're all being overwhelmed. And the amygdala itself is actually creating fear and that emotional context of those signals. And normally, what happens is pain signals are supposed to be switched off through inhibition systems from the prefrontal cortex and the orbitofrontal cortex to inhibit the signaling up to the brain. And we now know that the amygdala itself is supposed to directly inhibit the peribrachial nucleus to stop it from sending all these pain signals. But it can no longer fulfill that role because of the overwhelming number of signals being processed. And so brain retraining is all about creating inhibition systems or artificially inhibiting those signals. So eventually, the brain is retrained to create that own inhibition itself. And then the system Comes back to balance, because if you're no longer receiving signals from your body or you're no longer magnifying them, then your response also is inhibited, and we get onto a virtuous spiral of health, getting back to normal health, which is what we see time and time again in our clinic. So we call this amygdala and insular retraining, because we believe that we are training the amygdala to reduce its conditioned fear responses and instead to inhibit the periacreductal gray and the parabracial nucleus. And we're also retraining the insula. So the insula directly tries to calm down the amygdala, and then the insula and the anterior cingulate can modulate and calm down those pain signals and bring a state of balance back to the brain. And we know in animal studies that the insula, the amygdala, and all of these brain structures are involved, and certainly in immune responses. The insula has been confirmed as a source of conditioning in animal studies. And there's many different lots of evidence supporting the idea of brain dysfunction. We have decreased gray matter in certain areas of the brain and increased activity in brain structures like the insula and the amygdala and the interior cingulate, as well as the prefrontal cortex. And so is this idea of smoke alarm going off unnecessarily. So you're making toast, and it's nothing dangerous, but the smoke alarm has become primed to say, anytime I detect smoke, I am going to create this emergency response. And this very poignant story. The last person to be taken off duty at the end of the second World War. When do you think that was, this Japanese soldier? 1946, 1947? It was actually 1974. So there was whole battalion of Japanese soldiers on an island and still defending the island against the enemy for decades. Even though the original danger has passed, even though the initial sensitizing event or the trauma was over, those soldiers kept defending, kept up their duty to defend, no matter what. So if you want to find out more information about brain retraining, the brain becomes conditioned to react to pain and then create it. So the illness is not the pain. It is the conditioned response of the brain itself or the condition networks. But the brain is inherently rewirable. If you want to find out more information, please do visit our website@guptaprogram.com and if you want to read the study itself, it's fibrostudy. And as mentioned, we're offering a 15% discount to celebrate and honour the publication of our new fibromyalgia study. So you just use the discount code study and you can get 15% off. And please do share this information on fibromyalgia groups on me, CFS groups or friends or family where you know that somebody has some kind of pain or pain syndrome that the doctor hasn't been able to do anything about. And perhaps they've had it for years or decades. And now we have confirmation that neuroplasticity approaches and mindfulness approaches can make a massive difference in the health of people. And imagine how many millions of people around the world are suffering unnecessarily from this. And for those people who have felt that they're lost, they don't know where to turn, that pain has overwhelmed themselves in their lives. This is the hope that I want to give you. There is a way through. No matter what you're experiencing. Your pain is not your destiny, that suffering is not your destiny. And when we recognize that there's a perfectly normal and natural process the brain has gone through to keep creating this pain, it's just a little error, little error code that needs to be reset. And when we retrain the brain with that commitment, that positivity that we can get better and that enlivens a human spirit to say, I can do this, I can heal. And then everything changes. So thank you so much for watching today. Hope you can perhaps join us at the Gupta Program, join the free trial, surf around and have a look at all the free videos we have there and our program that comes with a one year money back guarantee. And what I'm going to do now is go on to questions. So what we're going to do is we're going to end this particular Facebook Live. Okay. And then we'll start another Facebook Live on our Gupta Program Facebook page and then we'll go to a Q and A. So thank you so much for watching and thanks once again. Good luck with your recovery from fibromyalgia, whatever pain syndrome you're experiencing, and we look forward to seeing you here at the Gupta Program. Thank you and goodbye.