Decoding Health Secrets with Dr. Stephanie Canestraro: The Vagus Nerve, Detox, and Longevity

The vagus nerve is a really important nerve in our body, and it's in charge of like our rest and digest side of our nervous system. The vagus nerve goes kind of everywhere. It starts from your brainstem and it literally innervates every single organ all the way down to your colon. It's always taking in information and bringing up to your brain, telling you how safe you are, helping your immune system be robust, bringing down inflammation. And it's when people are feeling calm and they can socialize, that's when their vagus nerve is nice and active.

My guest today is Stephanie Canestrero. Dr. Stephanie is the CEO and founder of The Vegas Clinic and a healthcare visionary who embarked on a remarkable journey that began with a personal health crisis, leading her into a transformative world of functional medicine. Specializing in elite athlete care, she combines her chiropractic skills with comprehensive functional medicine testing and tailored interventions to optimize performance and address health concerns. Her particular focus is also including in areas such as concussions, degenerative neurological diseases, and gastrointestinal health. Welcome to the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast, Stephanie. It's such a pleasure to have you on today.

Thanks so much for having me.

I'd love to start with the vagus nerve. Your clinic's called the Vegas Clinic, right? So it's not Las Vegas, right? It's quite far from that, actually. Where did the name and the focus around vagus and vagus nerve come from?

Yeah. So the vagus nerve is a really important nerve in our body and it's in charge of like our rest and digest side of our nervous system. So, you know, the vagus nerve goes kind of everywhere. It starts from your brainstem and it literally innervates every single organ all the way down to your, your colon or your large intestine. It ends in your large intestine and it's, it's always taking in information and bringing up to your brain, telling you how safe you are, you know, helping your immune system be robust, bringing down inflammation. And it's when people are feeling calm and in there, they can socialize. That's when their vagus nerve is nice and active, right? And so my vagus nerve, I felt like got hijacked. I went from like a completely normal functioning human in 2010 to all of a sudden, like, severe anxiety, panic, you know, my heart rate was irregular. I started having nervous system issues, my gut. And, you know, through a lot of research and playing around with my body, I realized it— my, my vagus nerve was hijacked. So it's, it's one of the most calming nerves in our body. And once it can be infected with different infections, it can be just based on what's going on in your body, it's going to give you signals and you're going to start to feel uneasy when your vagus nerve isn't functioning properly, or you low vagal tone and higher vagal tone and how you measure your vagus nerve is through something called heart rate variability, which a lot of people talk about these days because that's what you're trying to get to when you're meditating or, you know, when people are using deep breathing, they're actually affecting their heart rate variability. And it's all the one thing that you can measure with it. It, it, it can increase your longevity if you have like better vagal tone, it can, it can increase literally it blocks you from having multiple diseases. Like, the list is just so long. So, you know, I just thought if there's ways I could get my vagus nerve to be functioning properly again— and I can talk about how we do that— but that's why the vagus nerve and the Vagus Clinic. And I mean, the vagus nerve is trending right now, so a lot of people know about it. And, and our clinic was named the Vagus Clinic since 2015. When not many people were talking about it. And so a lot of people are getting diagnosed right now with, you have autonomic dysfunction. So they're like Googling vagus nerve and coming to our clinic. So we're having people from all over the world with all these different issues. So yeah, most important nerve in the body. That's how I kind of got into it. I mean, there's so much more I can go into about the vagus nerve and yeah, but that's a couple of notes.

Yeah. I'm excited to dig into it as well because obviously I think people listening might have heard it before, etc., but to really deep dive into it, we haven't had one of these episodes yet, so I'm excited to look at it with you as well. Can you talk about what happened back in 2010 that really triggered your vagus nerve? And like, did it come out of the blue? What, what happened there? Can you share the story with us?

Yeah, I had already always had kind of like gastrointestinal issues, which, you know, was brushed off by conventional medicine is you have like an irritable bowel, like just, you know, there was always like some weaknesses there. And even as a kid, there were some signs that, you know, something wasn't really right. And in 2010, it's always like a perfect storm, right? I was in end of chiropractic college, so I'm doing my board exams. My grandfather had a major surgery of which I had helped him connect with the surgeon that did it, and he almost died afterwards. And so it was like this very crazy stressful time, right? It's always like a perfect storm. Um, you know, probably not eating as well, living in kind of student housing, you know, just like partying a little bit at that age. And, and literally I was sitting in a movie theater and I went from like a normal person to all of a sudden this wave of anxiety and kind of like electricity came over me. My legs felt what, like what people explain restless leg to be. My heart rate increased. I literally had to leave. And it was the start of this year's battle with what I didn't know was going on. I was tense. These symptoms turned into neurological symptoms. I had Bell's palsy, so my half my face was paralyzed. It was transient, thankfully for me, but still there were some deficiencies. My eyeball would be bulging one day. I would have the feeling of bugs crawling all over me. I actually threw out my mattress in the middle of the night. I had stroke-like symptoms. Um, I was rushed to the hospital, injected with gandolidium, which they have to use to see if you're having a stroke. But then I reacted to the gand— and it was just this. And then I started just bleeding from my bowels. Like, I was actually like a complete mess and no one could really help me. And as things settled down, things that stayed with me was I had like severe fasciculations in my muscles, right? And sometimes to the point where I had a full contraction. And it was literally driving me crazy. And I, they started taking me seriously because they're, oh, you're normal, sent home, sent home. Never had been to the emergency room before in my entire life. And, you know, just like kind of like that gaslit thing where you're old, you're having a panic attack, you know, this, we hear it a lot. And I was, I took my health into my own hands, but, you know, finally they sent me to a specialist where they did an, an MRI of my brain and oh, they're like, oh, you have some plaques, but you don't have multiple sclerosis cuz you don't have 5 plaques, you know, but you have like this autoimmune going on. And I had autoimmune markers and I had, so essentially my nervous system was being attacked by my own body, but no one could ever explain to me why or why it turned on like that. And so that's when I dove into functional medicine. I actually found Dr. Terry Wahls at that time, and she was in a tilt recline wheelchair, so she had full-blown MS and she had reversed it with diet, et cetera. So obviously my gut had always been a mess. I then found out I had celiac disease, cut out the gluten, still was having problems but improving. And then that's when I really dove into like fixing my gut, eradicating parasites, and actually didn't even realize what I actually had at that time until 2021. So like what really kind of turned it on, which I'll talk about, but the whole thing was that that's how I got into like really trying to find the root cause of what's going on and, and help people that were hopeless or, you know, told these ridiculous things like, we're gonna watch and wait and see that you don't end up in a wheelchair. You know, that doesn't sound great, like a great option to me at all. Yeah. So that's what happened then. And then my story continues, but I got really healthy for 10 years. Yeah. And then, so that's kind of how I got into functional medicine, interested in the vagus nerve because of that severe anxiety, you know, and fixing my gut and all of this stuff that the, the different pathways where the vagus nerve takes information from the gut, because the gut literally is, has more nerve endings in our enteric nervous system. That's the nervous system around our gut. We have more nerve endings in our gut, in our enteric nervous system, than we do in our entire spinal cord. So, you know, people don't really realize that so much anxiety can be coming from the gut, and it's that whole gut-brain connection. And the vagus nerve is just one of those direct connections, but there's multiple ways where our gut— our gut is communicating with our brain through even the bacteria that are living in our gut or parasites. So at that time, killing parasites in my gut was a game changer for me. And that's what I do with a lot of people. So that's how it started.

Thank you for sharing that. And we're going to jump into a few different things, but I just want to pick up on the point around parasites because a lot of people are like, parasites, like what? Or I don't travel that much. And I mean, I was even— I do, and I've lived in third world countries as well. So when I had my first full-blown gut health test and I was in boarding school when I was a teenager and I was vegetarian at the time, they would give me white toast. They're like, we don't know what to do. We have meat on the menu, so I have white toast. Yeah, I mean, total—

like, yeah, the most damaging for your gut. I know, that's what I thought too. I was like, I just need something plain, like, like this, this will do, you know, not even vegetables, like, I have white toast anyway.

And, um, hopefully it was grass-fed butter at the time, but I don't know.

Anyway, I doubt it was destroying things.

But, um, let's talk just briefly about parasites and what should people look out for for parasites.

I mean, you know, one of my mentors and close friends, he kind of coined the term, if you have a pulse, you have a parasite, right? So, I mean, these things are not rare. They are 100% part of your body right now. There is nobody that doesn't. There is something that can be said about parasitic load though, and why parasites are present and thriving in higher loads. And that's usually the terrain, heavy metals, lots of, you know, PH in your gut should be a certain level. If it's off, parasites can thrive. So our body has to— we have to create an environment that makes them not want to be there, first of all, or thrive there. But so parasites live, and they live in your small intestine. So everyone's like, oh, I had a colonoscopy, or— and you're— you— we have this coiled small intestine that is like, no one's ever been in there, you know. People do endoscopies, and they can go in from the top, and they can see like a small amount. And you can go in from the colon, and you don't even see the whole colon. They embed in the, in lining. Some, most of them are, a lot of them are actual microscopic, right? But I mean, like, and they're hard to detect. So especially when you don't have an overt infection, right? Which, you know, North America, one of the most common parasites is Giardia. Giardia is like in the water. If you go in rivers, you can get it. It's like so easy, you know, and we should know more that that can go chronic. It's not just an acute thing. It can stay there at a low level. Affecting your health. You don't really know. You have— it can be. And some people are like, oh, but my bowel movements are normal. But like, you know, they have rashes all over or they have acne or something like that because like their liver is sluggish and backed up. And that's like parasites like to live in the liver, the gallbladder. Like there's just so much that like is so obvious now that like isn't talked about at all. And, and I think like, like a parasite cleanse totally changed my life, like totally changed my life doing it properly because the first time I did a parasite cleanse, I didn't do it properly, which means I didn't work on drainage first. I didn't have binders to bind up the toxins as you kill off the parasites. And even just that in itself, people will see they get severe anxiety when you kill off a parasite, but you're not getting rid of the parasite junk because they're toxic. They hold their weight in toxins.

Yeah. Can you walk through the protocol that you would recommend for that? And would you say anybody could try it from home with the detox?

Yeah, I'd say, you know, The thing is, is like, okay, so things have changed in the last 3 years. So people used to do this parasite cleanse that were healthy and just like be fine. But everyone's liver is a little bit more stagnant. Everyone's nervous system is a little bit more activated. So you really— it's better to have guidance, even if the guidance is like someone who's just made videos for you. And anyways, but we use, we use based on testing and based on what we find, different parasite cleanses. But I'd say our general one and the one that helped me at the time, and I didn't and I didn't do a specific test at— yeah, no, I did. I did a test at that time, but this was just— I was going to do it anyways. And it's, it's Cellcore, so you need a practitioner to access their stuff anyways. And it is, you know, you start off with draining, so supporting the kidney and liver, um, and, you know, making sure people are pooping, you're emptying your colon every day, right? Because you recirculate those toxins when you're constipated. So And constipation is a big cause is parasitic load. So just side note on that. And constipation is a sign of your vagus nerve not functioning properly as well because it's in charge of that migrating motor complex. So yeah, you want to increase drainage and you also want to take a binder. So we use their little black pills like people. I compare it to, you know, if people go to the hospital and they have to get their stomach pumped from some sort of poison, they put like a charcoal in there, an activated charcoal. So it's a black pill like that. Like it binds. It's like a sponge. So you're giving your body that little bit of a— you're taking the load off the body for a little bit. And these— so we use humic and fulvic acids, not charcoal. Charcoal we use again with acute poisonings and stuff like that, like activated coconut charcoal. But we're using humic and fulvic, sometimes different clays. It depends what people can handle. But as part of that cleanse, it's humic and fulvic. And there's different types that bind up different toxins in your body. Some are better at binding metals, some are better at binding biological toxins, which are our own body's waste that we make just from breaking down food, from our own processes. We have our own waste. And then there's biological toxins from Candida, parasites, mold, bacteria, viruses, right? The damage they do to our body. So we just are taking a load off with different binders, and then we're killing with, um, something called Mimosa Pudica, and then, uh, and then a blend of different cloves and different herbs, neem, um, artemisia, wormwood, all like a kind of blend that are known to eradicate these parasites. And people pass flukes and worms if they actually go through their stool. In like, I mean, 80 to 90% of cases, there's visual parasites, so they can see them. And so, you know, that, that's obviously powerful for people to see, and you feel better. And there's all— there's often like a release, like when people have the bowel movement where a lot of worms are coming out or something, they feel very anxious for a moment and then it passes and they're so calm, you know? And then in the toilet is all of this, these, you know, beings that are living off of us. And the thing with parasites is the reason we have a high load of them, and that's why the binders are important, are because we have some sort of toxin, something's not right in our terrain in there that they're thriving and our immune system's not getting them right. So there's, there's things to look at, but that's why the binders are important because you change the terrain, right? So that they're not having the fuel that kind of feeds them. And in that way, maybe they're protecting us in a certain way by, because they house a lot of the heavy metals that could be very detrimental for us, right? So, you know, obviously getting that out and flushing it out is, is hugely powerful. So yeah, it's all about— you're never going to get rid of all of them, and nor do you want to, like, you know, so you want balance.

And yeah, yeah, no, thank you for, for sharing that as well, because I think people hear parasite and they're like, oh, you know, horror. And as you said as well, like, not all of them are that detrimental, but it's, I guess, getting on top of which ones are. And then thank you for walking through the protocol, because I— it's just not common knowledge. Um, I'm actually going to speak to my functional medicine doctor about it too and see what she knows. I just think it's a good— probably, would you say it's like a protocol for once a year, once every 5 years?

Yeah. So depending on like how sick someone is, it's like we'll do it more often and we'll do little short ones over the full moon because it's becoming more common knowledge that parasites are more active over the full moon when our melatonin is lower. And, you know, there's always been that thing where like paramedics are like, oh my gosh, people are crazier on the, on the full moon. Right? What happens on the full moon? Well, they hijack our brain because they're more active. They're making more toxins and they're doing it like they're more active and parasites are most active through the night. So we do like usually a dose of killing before bed. I hate saying killing, whatever antimicrobial, like we do it before bed to kind of get at them. But yeah, so, so there, yeah, it's hugely, we do it. We think that you should do it at least once a year. And actually in 2021 when all of a sudden I got sick again, or let's talk about them, we'll talk about it. But that was the first year that I skipped my parasite cleanse because I was just like busy and I was like, oh, whatever, I don't feel like taking that many. Like I was just, you know, and not that I'm saying you get dependent on them, but a lot happened in 2021. A lot of people got a lot sicker, right? And yes, there was COVID. Yes, there's a vaccine that is has the spike protein of COVID Those two things are inflammatory, but there's also a release of a man-made frequency called 5G, which, you know, is supposed to make everything faster and more efficient, like as if it's not fast and efficient enough. But, um, I think because we're energetic beings, right? We have a frequency. Yeah. We have like a measurable frequency. Our heart is electric. Our, all of our nerves, our brain, Okay. So now if you stress the system, so just for a little bit of history and sorry, I'm kind of going into kind of some EMFs because this is a topic of the show as well. So yeah, I really feel like it's important to start to open people's eyes to, to that because frequencies can be healing. And if anyone's ever seen like a, you know, bioregulatory medicine practitioner or, or people that understand frequency, they use frequency a lot. To try to heal people. There's Rife frequencies, which have been used to even to eradicate parasites, because there's a frequency, the parasites, that kills the parasites, right? So you can put, you can hold on to something, get a frequency through your body without taking any pills, and you can kill parasites and pass them in your stool. Okay, so that's the power of frequency. You know, everyone, if you look at quotes from Nikola Tesla, if you want to know the future of medicine, look into frequency. Einstein talked about frequency. But you can't really— well, you can sell frequency machines, but you can't sell them at the rate that you sell different medications and, you know, keeping a population unwell. So, and people are very powerful when they have strong frequencies, right? So now we've had 3G, 4G, whatever. Those were introduction of new waves at some point. And, you know, I'm sure when they first brought those out, there were people getting sick because at every kind of turn of the century, when they introduce a new or harness a new frequency and it gets concentrated on humans, there are changes in their health because of the way that people can't adapt or other things that they have in their body, which I'll get into. But 5G is very, very different. It's a man-made frequency. It's a direct wave. So 4G, 3G, they're called radio waves, right? So radio waves already existed and they were harnessed, and then we were, we were getting exposed to more of them. And I'm not saying it was even good or or, but, but they're scalar waves. So they come at you in different, you know, they're not like a beam. So picture, that's what 5G is more like, this direct beam wave. And there's been people studying it for years, waving a red flag going, do not, do not emit this to humans. We need more studies. We've only studied animals and it doesn't look good.

Yeah.

Okay. So, and what they were seeing was cardiac symptoms, neuropsychiatric symptoms, infertility, increase in prolactin, like the milk-making hormone in males, right? You know, like just, and you know, the argument is, is that it only absorbs like into your skin. Well, now they've kind of showed, well, what it does is it, it can affect your sweat glands and your sweat glands are like a little antenna. Into the rest of your body. And so these direct waves through these antennas, through the sweat glands, are actually being able to access our cells through our voltage-gated calcium channels. Now, I have worked with athletes for 13 years. I look at their blood work twice a year because they do it with their teams. I have never seen increased calcium in their bloodstream at the amount I am now. Calcium is the most tightly regulated molecule in our body. When it goes high, it stresses our body. It screws up the electricity because our cells communicate through minerals. And calcium is the— you could argue the most important, right? Like, it has the tightest range even when you look at blood, blood work of minerals, because it can kill you either way. Same with other ones, right? But So your body is going to do whatever it has to, to regulate calcium. Okay. Calcium, extra calcium overheats the body from the inside. So we're almost getting like microwaved. And that's what I'm seeing. And that's what I saw in myself in November 2021. And I just happened to be in Las Vegas where they had just released something called 5G Plus, which was only released in 40 states over top of different arenas. And because I was there, You know, I actually went to a game, like, you know, and I'm bathed in this. And another thing that I had the week before was a severe black mold exposure. Okay. And I was not feeling well from that, but I was getting over it, you know, and 2 weeks before that, I had said, I feel the healthiest I have in my adult life. Okay. So now I'm in Las Vegas. I'm at dinner with people because I feel fine. I chase someone's kids around. The, the table like a cute little, like, 3-year-old. And then all of a sudden my heart rate goes up and does not come down. Okay. Tachycardia. I had chest pain, pain down my left arm, all of this. I get blood work for the first time in my life. I see my calcium's overdrive. My— I feel electric, by the way. My hair's standing on end. All of my organs start hurting, my kidneys, my liver. Like, I'm in severe anxiety, the same I felt back in the day. My muscle twitches are back for the first time. What I learned retrospectively after that is that also these waves make mold and mycotoxins in our body 600 times stronger. 600.

Wow.

Mold is known to be neuropsychic, causes neuropsychiatric neurological symptoms, it, it decreases your immune system. It slows, slugs up your liver, which your liver needs to drain for you to be healthy. And then because of those changes, it can reactivate something in your body called stealth infections, which are my main focus. And it's what I'm trying to turn off in people along with get their mineral balance right, get them detoxed from, you know, all of this electromagnetic frequencies that we're going to have to learn to live with and adapt to. But first it needs to be addressed and people need to be told that it's part of the reason that their health is changing. Right. And, and by the way, all of these symptoms that you get from people who are EMF sensitive or electro sensitive are things that you would equate to Vagus nerve being hijacked, right? So all of a sudden again, I now am having severe anxiety, sense of impending doom, fear of everyone dying, fear, like fears that I cannot quell, and crazy vivid dreams. I am just like, my nervous system is like this, like, and you know, and I'm taking the things to try to calm it down, and I know something's been turned on. So I test my, my blood But I can't test it fast because I don't have the labs here. I have to send it to the States. I had to get home first of all, which was terrifying with my heart rate waving, you know. And I go to a cardiologist there and he's like, oh, you're fine, just some tachycardia. Go home and check your thyroid. You know, I was having heart palpitations. They were painful. They were taking my breath away. Heart palps have been huge. I was having feeling of like crushing my heart, which I found out is the lymph because so much waste is created in your body that your whole lymphatic system gets blocked up. And then this is where everything has to drain under your collarbones. This is where your vagus nerve is. So all of this is coming up and swelling. All of this. I had visual swelling and bogginess here. It was the lymph. I was terrified. I got home on a 5-hour flight somehow. I warned the, the flight attendant that I was feeling terrible. And I went straight to emergency where they told me I was fine because my heart rate wouldn't go down, but it was coming in waves. So it was almost going into a heart block. And that's what can happen if your, if your heart goes below 30, which mine was at 40, like you can just drop dead.

Wow.

So, but it was going to like 40 and then it was going to 140 and staying there. My body was just trying to keep itself alive. I was static electric. I was terrified, terrified. Like I could cry talking about it right now. But then, you know, I got my stealth infection panel back and Lyme had been turned on. And I say turned on because I had evidence that I had fought it off in the past, right? Lyme disease. But I'd never been bit by a tick. Not that I know of. Everyone's like, it could be a nymph tick. I'm like, trust me, it's not a tick for me. Like that is not it. And that got me even diving into Lyme more. And that's what I'm seeing being turned on in people a lot, even that are told like post-COVID, which they do. They have like the high spike protein, but they also have Lyme turned on. They have different viruses that were stealth in their body because our bodies house and keep a lot under control at all times, surveying if your immune system's robust enough, these things stay in your body at low grade. Some people understand things like herpes because, you know, herpes is a stealth infection. So think about it. You don't have a cold sore and then you have a cold sore when your immune system drops. Those different infections like that are in our body, right? And, and people think Lyme is from a tick, but it can be from a mosquito bite. It can be passed on in utero and you can not have an acute infection of Lyme and it can just be stealth. It can live in your mouth. And then after you get some sort of dental work, it can enter through those cavitations in your, in your teeth. Um, you know, which that I had had a root canal right before all of this turned on. Right. So it's that perfect storm. Any vector, any stinging insect can unfortunately carry Lyme. And, you know, Lyme has these co-infections that are parasites that people think are rare. But honestly, when you read like these symptom patterns of some of these co-infections and some of the co-infections, they call them Lyme co-infections, but you could get them from like a cat, like, you know, Toxoplasma or this. So, you know, it sounds complicated, but, and really our body's doing all of this uncomplicated stuff without us knowing. And the thing is, is, and this is where I come back to, if we can keep our nervous system, if we can keep our liver not getting stagnated, if we can lower our toxic load like once a year, if we can go outside and ground, if we can, if we can have circadian rhythm where we, you know, go to bed at proper times and rise with the sun and get sunshine, and light is so healing, and, you know, it creates different microbes turned on that help to kill these other things. So without overcomplicating but still being aware of the situation because everyone has smart meters in their house now, which, you know, you can get a cage for that to help. That's giving off— that's pulsing electromagnetic frequency. You have to realize you are a frequency being. It is so important for you to understand that, that you need to protect yourself from, from dirty electricity, from these new radio— not radio waves, new man-made waves that are detrimental. No matter if you Google it and they say it's 100% safe, they have not studied it. So how can you say that?

Yeah. And there are these beautiful devices. I've had the CEO of Somavedic, which have these beautiful EMF mitigators.

Yeah, I have one over there somewhere.

Yeah, I have one on my desk as well. It makes such a difference because especially if you live in a city, you can obviously control, you know, they say like turn off your Wi-Fi at night, you know, turn on your phone in airplane mode, etc. But obviously if you live in an apartment building or something like that, you can't control your neighbors, right? So trying to find the different strategies to mitigate it as well.

Yeah, but you lower it as much as you can, right? And that's, that's like the dose makes the poison. Like people understand that. So any way that you can lower your dose, especially sleeping is a good time. Like don't have your phone close to you, but people don't realize too, like baby monitors, um, fans, fans should be 8 feet from you. Your phone should be 5 feet because it doesn't actually reach very far, but you hold your phone all day. So a lot of people's symptoms are in their arms and they're getting lymphatic drainage problems through their arms. They're getting swelling. They're getting what's called carpal tunnel. You're literally electro— like, frequent radiation's going through your hands, like, all day long. So put it down. You know, I have one of those pens. I don't have it here that has the thing that you can touch your phone, and I'm trying to touch it less. If you download something on your phone, put it on airplane mode to read it. If you're writing a long email on your phone, put it on airplane mode. Turn airplane mode off to send it. You know, like, the dose is making the poison, so just lessen it as much as you can.

And I think a key thing there is also just to be aware if you put the phone in your pocket, or even if you have like a handbag for women, just put it in airplane mode unless you're expecting an emergency call. Yeah, you can just take it out again, turn off the airplane mode, and you can catch up with whatever messages when you choose.

I even have it like this and I'll put it in airplane mode, but if I can't, like, I can hold it like away from me, right? Like, I have it on a strap for the point that I can like not have it on me, right? So I don't know, there's just, it's just little things. But I mean, I'll tell you, when I was finally could fly again, and it took me 2 years to heal, but that's short for when Lyme and all this stuff is turned on because I'm seeing people who are, they're at the 3-year point and they haven't gotten better at all and they are living in absolute torturous situations from inside their body. It's insane.

It sounds so horrendous. I'm so sorry you went through that. And it's just so incredible how quickly everything kind of flipped. Right. And so, you know, have you seen many cases like this? Would you say you're a more extreme case of it, or is this like a typical scenario that many more and more people are having?

No, more and more people are having it. And so it's different triggers. Like I have, like I work with a healthy population. So it's interesting because I've never seen these symptoms with them before. I've worked with NHL players for 15 years and it's turning on in them. Completely healthy. Everyone sees them as a picture of health, which, you know, no one is, right? You have to get interested in your biology. There's a lot to dig down into. But I'll tell you, the people that are the healthiest are those people that let everything kind of roll off their shoulder. You know, those people, they don't like stuff, doesn't get— it's like a personality type. They're just But these guys, they're high-strung already because they're in the media. They are performing at a high level, which obviously, you know, usually takes— there's a few of them that just are just like easy peasy and it just comes to them naturally. But most of the time it's not like that. And for them, it's turning on after a big night of drinking alcohol. So think about it. Your liver's doing what it can. They're highly active. They're under these fluorescent lights with— I mean, I can't even imagine how much dirty electricity is coming at them in those big arenas, right? And then, you know, plus they're on their phone, they're playing video games. Like, that's kind of their lifestyle, the way they wind down, whatever. They're staring at screens, this blue light. So, but their liver is like— and they have these stealth infections. No one's, no one's immune to these stealth infections. And so what my theory is and what I've seen and what I'm helping people is like, their liver is stagnated, right? So that's what got me. I'm like, okay, it's always— there's alcohol involved. And I was even having like a glass of wine at this time, not that I drink a lot, but like it's bogging down. And it's that straw that breaks the camel's back. It's usually for them, it's like a big night of drinking. One guy, it was like a night of espresso martinis, and he was, you know, on a first date, and this girl was like— he was trying to keep up with her, like something crazy, and it turned on for him. Heart rate went up, never went down. All the symptoms, all the gastrointestinal symptoms, pain, liver pain, kidney pain, like damage to his kidneys for how much it was filtering. Like, I mean, severe anxiety. The team was just trying to medicate him with anti-anxieties, um, which obviously wasn't helping because he never had anxiety before, right? So if someone never had anxiety before and now they're telling you that they want to jump out of their literal skin, like, then just like take them seriously, like try and find out, try and help these people. So anyways, and then we have to like peel back the layers, they get better faster. Like I got in contact with this guy kind of close to when he started feeling his symptoms by chance, because when I'm treating these guys, I talk a lot about my own symptoms. And so it pops in their head. Oh, that sounds like what Steph was saying happened to her. And so I'm getting these people. And I mean, I've had severe cases. And I mean, And I mean, some people, some people are vaccinated, some are unvaccinated with the COVID vaccine, which, you know, at first I was like, what is it? I hadn't had COVID yet. I hadn't been exposed to that vaccine. So I, that's why I was like, can it be something else? Could it be? I like, because like COVID inflames the heart, right? So does Lyme though. And I hadn't had COVID yet, but I'll tell you, I started getting better in February. I got COVID and then my heart got inflamed again. So that was really annoying. And I had to, you know, really kind of treat that aggressively and flush, make sure my, my lymph was moving and really focused on my liver. So the huge thing that I can tell people is that your cells need more oxygen when this is happening and when you're getting exposed to all of this. So that's why breathing techniques or anything to oxygenate, because there's a case, there's, there's hypoxia. There's minerals. Your minerals need balanced if you're going through this.

So there's minerals, functional medicine perspective, right? So people are aware.

Yes, yes. Sorry. There's like lowering your dose of these exposures. There's all that. And then there's, you know, getting at these stealth infections, but the liver, like the, the fluid mechanics in your body, if they are flowing, you're not going to have these crazy symptoms, right? So it's like a stagnation. So get that lymph moving, get someone who understands the liver and the gut and how it all ties together. You know, even activating your vagus nerve helps fluid mechanics. There's lots of ways that we teach people to do that. But part of the way that you heal your vagus nerve is you get rid of these stealth infections, right? You, you give your body a break, you get rid of, you lower your heavy metal load because that's another thing. I think people who are reacting more to like the EMF, they have a higher load of metals already, right? So they're attracting more. So Yeah, it makes sense, right?

Yeah. And I had a biological dentist on Dr. Dome as well, and we were having conversation, um, not specifically on EMF, but just metals in the mouth. The mouth is the beginning of the gut. We know the gut's a second brain, right? And he's talking about metals in the mouth, and I'm of course thinking mercury fillings, which we were discussing as well. But then I realized, like, I have a metal wire behind my tooth, and this is like an antenna. And if you think also for women wearing bras with metal wires in them, for example, I mean, these are all things that we need to be super aware of. You know, smartwatches I have, but it's on airplane mode, Wi-Fi off. Like, I'm not having this as an EMF field. I— my Oura Ring I wear at night, it's in airplane mode as well. So it's just really reassessing because we're so used to so many things, we forget what it is as well. But to just really, really pay attention to what is actually happening within our body and our system. And for people listening that say, okay, I haven't had this full-scale attack, let's say, but I'm not feeling 100% optimal. Maybe it's my sleep, maybe it's my gut health. I'm not really sure. What are some steps you would say to, like, look out for? How can people get started in this optimization so that they don't end up with these full-blown attacks?

Yeah, I mean, obviously my case was extreme. I almost feel like I get these things so that I can figure out what's going on in the bodies. And it's obviously opened my eyes to a whole new side that I didn't even quite understand. Um, so, and when I talk, it's like, I don't want to scare people, but just people who have like generalized anxiety or even depression or, you know, even insomnia, like that's like a big sign of parasites. Like you don't have to have all the symptoms. It's honestly, for me, what happened was like every symptom I've had in my entire life came into like one moment, one moment, and it was like I had to figure out each of them. And so find someone with insight, like, not that your practitioner has to have been through exactly what I've been through, but often what gets people into like an alternative style of treating is some sort of close family member, or, you know, they really cared and they've been working with lots of people and they're like trying to actually figure it out, but You're going against a whole machine here when you get into an alternative care. You're going against like a norm, a whole societal norm. So like there has to be some sort of reason that they got into it and maybe understanding their backstory or, you know, I think, and finding, I mean, even accounts on Instagram, like a lot of my colleagues, like they're just like, we're posting stuff that like It seems like simple in the simple post, but that took years of learning or their own pain and suffering for them to put out that little tidbit, that aha moment that can be a game changer. So I mean, it's out there. So just start getting interested. I tell people like, get biologically interested, like don't put your whole body health in the hands of somebody because like they don't understand like what you're actually feeling, right? I mean, the strange symptoms that I had that sound like you're actually crazy, like, I mean, I felt crazy at times. Like, I don't understand how I can have shooting pain from that. I feel like I'm having a heart attack, but then all of a sudden I have shin pain and like, you know, and now I understand all that. And it's like these aha moments that took pain and suffering or take lots of experience. Like you just got to find someone. And if that person, that you're working with that you, that they're like, oh, I'm functional, but they're still like not getting to the root or like, or they're trying to and it's not really working, you know, get another opinion, not in a bad way, always in a respectful way. Because if that practitioner is caring enough and they want to know, like if someone goes and they do something and it helps them, what did you do? What did you do? Because I want to be able to use that on someone else has that symptom and we're a little bit stuck because it's— there's some intricacies sometimes when you get into it, right? When, when you're not just doing like the blanket stuff that's going to help when you only have— because prevention is worth what, a pound of the cure? And again, I'd like to think I was doing a lot for prevention, but I didn't know what was hidden in my body that turned on. When I look back at 2010, I had acute neuroborreliosis. You know what that is? That is Lyme in your brain. Acute Lyme in your brain. If you read a textbook of neuroborreliosis, that is what I had.

Wow.

It took me, what, another decade to figure that out, but my body was keeping it at bay. But something stressed it a little bit too much, and all of that got unwound. If I could have nipped it in the butt in that moment, Right? And like, it's not that even like my— I work with other practitioners, I reach out, they're like, it sounds like Lyme carditis or Lyme around your heart. And it did, but it just took so long to get the real answer and to get like— I was treating it naturally, but I ended up having to take an antibiotic because it went so acute and it was so high. It was actually a good time for me to take it. When you understand Lyme, there's 3 phases of it, and when it's in that active form You can wipe out those when it's in the spiral shape form, which it's a spiral shape bacteria when it's not embedded in your tissue, because it's a very stealth, because it hides in your tissue. It goes in the cell. It doesn't stay in the serum. It's not easy to find, right? And that's why it's eluded so many people, but it reared its ugly head and it, and when Lyme activates like that and creates trillions of other Lyme in your body, a lot of other stuff gets turned on. So I don't want that to happen to you. And that we check for stealth infections in perfectly healthy people now because we want to know if it's there. We want to know how much we have to support the immune system. Like, we want to know your weak spots. And I think that that is important along with the metals, the mineral balance, the liver, like looking at regular blood work. The gut is huge. I mean, again, I fixed myself without knowing I had Lyme. By, by working on my gut, by getting rid of— I only worked on gut parasites. I didn't even know about like live blood cell and looking at like the, um, you can see in a live blood cell, by the way, parasites swimming in your, in your bloodstream. A live blood cell is just your blood on an electron microscope put onto a screen. And you— and this is important for people because they think that you're crazy when you're talking about parasites, but when they see that little microscopic worm swimming in the serum, I go— they go, oh, when they see the different red blood cell, because it's got an egg in it, they're like, oh, right. Yeah. So people need that sometimes.

Yeah. No, I think it's so fascinating. Sadly, it's not more widespread that people around the world could, you know, all have access to this. I think it's really finding someone because you went through this. I think you've gotten to such a level that you, you know exactly what to look for and are aware of it. But, you know, I think the healthcare profession, or I mean, the typical one is more the sick care profession, let's say. But even for those that are trying to go above and beyond and to be more informed of the latest research, etc., it's just having that time constraint, which is why it's the empowering people to understand, to know themselves. Like you said yourself, like you knew you weren't going crazy. You said you felt like you were, but you knew this is not normal bodily practices. And that's, I think, where the tricky thing is, that we should always be very much aware of I know myself, um, is there stress? But like, what's the underlying— there's something underlying going on. And just to listen into that, like, we're so much wiser than we give ourselves credit for. And just following it down, especially if we're not in a good place. And you said yourself, you know, if, if one person's limited in their experience or knowledge in an area, keep looking, you know. And, um, I think part of the beauty of technology in the world is that it is potentially possible to have telemedicine conversations with an expert in another country. Um, also, um, I'd love to ask you for vagus nerve, there's all these like new devices out, right? There's like Sensate and Pulsetto. I don't know if you've tried that as well. I have a few of them here. What is your view on using some of these devices to stimulate the vagus nerve?

Um, so I mean, I like them. I, one of the things when I was studying the vagus nerve was like, there was research on, you know, they did an implantable device before they had these ones where you could do it externally in really sick people. They did a study and they put like an actual electrode like onto the vagus nerve and the person could stimulate their vagus nerve. And they were reversing autoimmune diseases. They were taking away seizures. Like, it was crazy. So obviously, like, I started to try to do things naturally. I do acupuncture. I'm a chiropractor by trade. You know, we were putting stim on needles and kind of stimming and like calming people down. So, you know, it's electroacupuncture and we're putting it on and, and people were getting zen. I was doing it on myself, but I was like, one day I was having kind of panic and it was because of my gut and I was on a plane. So I took a toothpick because it has a small surface area, right? And I started tapping points that I knew were controlled by the vagus nerve and over my vagus nerve and over my sternum. And I was able to kind of calm myself down. So then I did get interested in, okay, is there an external stim that actually works? And there's the ones that I started off with, the one that you clip on your ear, right on the tragus of your ear, because the vagus nerve is most superficial there. And it was minimal. And then they started getting stronger on like the frequencies they had, and then they started getting, you know, different machines. So my favorite is the HUlist. And the reason is because So it has, every time you electrically stim through the skin, you need gel, right? You need some sort of gel and it goes on a thing. So they, the, what they created was like the gel is part of the electrode, so it just has to be a tiny bit wet. And so that's the best, that's the one I suggest because to my, my players and even people, you can just like grab it and, and, and take off the, the lid and you can just stim right away. You don't have to put gel on.

Wow.

It's, it's literally, yeah. So I mean, that's, that's the one I use. Holist V-Relief. V-E-R-E-L-I-E-F. Um, yeah. And so, cause I had the GammaCore, which is the medical one, and the Holist is a much better price point and it's more convenient. So yeah.

H-O-L-I-S-T, or how do you spell it?

H-O-O-L-E-S-T. It's the gentleman's last name. Um, okay, so that one I would say is the most user-friendly, right? And, um, and, you know, be careful when you're stimming because some people are sensitive to electricity. And if you have had abnormal, like, heart electricity and stuff like that, you just start really low and see what your, your body can handle. Most people can, but like, you know, when people are really sick and you just go to stim your vagus nerve, it's— you need to like even start with the tapping first or something, and then, or a very low frequency, which you can start at like nothing and just like slowly work your way up, but see how you respond because, you know, electrical stim, like a direct kind of stim like that, it can sometimes like jolt. Your body's trying to do some stuff, right? Like your body's trying to, yeah, the one, that's when you use the cervical one when it pulls down your lip.

Yeah.

But, but the Hulis is closer to the ear, so it's using their auricular branch. Which is a little bit more gentle and less troubling for people. But, um, yeah, so that, like, PEMF mats can help calm the vagus nerve. Red light— I have a red light that you can put topically on your body, and you put it over top of here because the vagus nerve travels from your brainstem, comes out behind kind of your jawline, goes in and behind your collarbones, and then starts to innervate your heart and all of the things, and it innervates the back of your throat. So gargling, gagging, all of that. So, you know, there's natural ways that you can activate it. Eye movement. So there's a lot of fascial connections for the vagus nerve where it exits the foramen, which are the little— the way it exits our skull, right? So it's a cranial nerve. It comes through a foramen, which is a hole, but it shares a sheath with a few other nerves, right? So one nerve, you know, the accessory nerve, it shares some, some fascia with. So people, when they're really stressed, they get those tight traps because that's innervated by a cranial nerve. So working on that can help calm someone down. If someone's in panic and you massage the top of their shoulders, not only does it help for lymph drainage here, and, you know, massaging here can help, and thumping your sternum can help, but also eye movements, so extreme eye movements. So getting someone to move their eyes, keep your head straight, but you move your— you go— it's called far gazing. And that can help calm down your nervous system. Tongue, a lot of the tongue muscle, the glossopharyngeal nerve is another cranial nerve. So like tongue stretches or like humming, all of that stuff with your tongue, sticking out your tongue, like doing that, whether any like different movement, puffing out your cheeks, different sounds you can make, listening to different sounds turns on your vagus nerve. So there's different ways if you can't handle a direct stim or if you don't want to purchase a direct stim. But like I said, lowering that toxic load, getting the lymph so it's like draining and not the toxins aren't sitting right where your vagus nerve is, right? Then, then those are, those are key things that are going to help you. And then anytime that you can get yourself into that rested, like, high vagal tone, the more that you can heal.

Yeah.

That's when you're in that state. So, you know, work on that meditation, breathwork, right? Breathwork, they've shown, like, people don't have this time to meditate. You can, with breathwork, mimic what an advanced meditator can do just by, like, focusing on the exhale. Like, the vagus nerve is in charge of the exhale, right? Um, anything that increases, like, acetylcholine— acetylcholine is the— like, that's cold showers and increase acetylcholine. That's, um, the neurotransmitter for the vagus nerve. You know, anything that increases GABA— I use GABA a lot, GABA chewables— like, anything that— that's your relaxing kind of— we're all too hyperstimulated, right? We're in this like glutamate pathway, which is the more hyperstimulating. So, you know, just like helping people with that. And actually, GABA also helps you regulate your calcium levels. So, you know, all of that helps because that's overstimulating the nervous system. I mean, there's so much. We have a vagus nerve guide where we kind of go over all the things and tell people to pick a few that kind of help them more. So yeah, that's obviously, obviously huge, but human touch, being around humans, community, like, I mean, it doesn't have to be complicated and it doesn't always have to be a machine either. But yeah, exactly. It's like back to basics.

Exactly. Grounding, etc. I just wanted to touch on your detoxification. How much have you used sauna and maybe hyperbaric oxygen therapy. Yeah. For the—

so I love sauna and I do everything I can to increase oxygen. If it's breathing, I have an oxygen machine that makes oxygen water. I have— I send people to oxygen baths because there are certain places that have these hyperoxygenated baths, which I like better than hyperbaric because your skin absorbs way more than your lungs have a capacity where it breaks off. Right. I think hyperbaric is great, but I would I would say that the baths, and that's from me doing both, were like much more effective. I send people to oxygen baths to recover even when they're athletes. So oxygenation is huge. We had an oral oxygen supplement that we had, but there's lots of other supplements that increase your oxygen that are super helpful right now. Like even those, you know, those things with deep green pigments like chlorophyll, chlorella, all that. But when you lower your toxic load, you get better oxygenation. We do things that increase nitric oxide, but not using arginine and citrulline. We don't use that because what we've found is that creates more free radicals because a lot of people have too low of a certain enzyme. So, but if you use things like beet powder and everyone's like, people, some people are scared of beet powder because it has oxalates. But I'm telling you, your oxalates and your kidney stones were not from beets. Beets, they're from mold and Candida in your body. So just get that out of your head, get rid of the parasites and eat the beets. But things like that, that's going to help your oxygenation, right? Because that gets the blood flowing. But breathing can do that too. Like, just—

yeah, yeah.

There's something called the LiveO2, which is a bicycle where they deprive you of oxygen and then they shoot oxygen in and you're doing exercise and it it causes this expansion of arterioles and it gets blood into those, those small areas that are hypoxic. Yeah, there's lots of different tools that increase oxygenation. But yeah, if hyperbaric is what you have access to, any way to increase oxygen to the cells is, is, is a yes. And then sauna, I mean, you got to read the literature on sauna. I mean, it is just protect yourself from cardiovascular disease. You cut it by 50% if you go in like 4 times a week and get your— like, oh my gosh, if you add infrared, you can add ozone into there. Oh my— like, I, I don't know, it's just like so powerful that like I can't believe I didn't talk about it yet. You're sweating out the toxins. We get people to take a binder like before and after or during sipping on a binder. We get them to make sure they shower afterwards. To get those, you know, some people even say shower before, but if you're, yeah, saunas are, are a no-brainer. I mean, if, if you're gonna invest in a tool, I'd say sauna. They have like some really cool like in-home saunas, the pop-up ones, whatever. Like, you know, I would say that, that they're phenomenal.

That's a good tool.

Yeah.

They're really, really good. And it's so funny cuz it's like a biohacking tool, but my like, then 94-year-old grandmother used to go like every year and do the sauna. And then you go to the cold plunge and then you rest and then you repeat about 3 times and you're like, like a newborn baby again. So, and then just these old school spas in Europe that they've been doing this for hundreds of years.

But that's what we have to look into, right? Like what we've been doing for hundreds of years. And unfortunately they've buried a lot of that, but like the frequency machine, the Rife machine was created Gosh, they figured that out in the '30s, I think, or maybe it's the '50s. '50s. Anyways, whatever. They're like things that have been buried. I mean, there was even tradition around food. Everyone, every like traditional people that still work with like a traditional diet, there's always some sort of purge or some sort of like, I mean, Greeks chew mastic gum after meals. Like, you know, there's like like in Japan they have that whole, like, you know, they know they're eating parasites, so they have the ginger and the wasabi, the spice to kill it. And then they have like the unagi or whatever it's called, or the stuff after that's full of probiotics. Like, you know, there we have it. We've lost all this like powerful knowledge that like, you know, sometimes the easiest answer is like the proper answer, you know, or the, it's like go back to the basics for a lot of things because like even like what's making us sick, like all these processed foods, all these chemicals added to everything. Like, you know, we're being sprayed with chemicals. We're like, or there's heavy metals in the air. Like there's, it's just crazy.

So yeah, back to basics, back to the roots at least a few times a year. Um, I think my, for me it's a replenishing by the sea and just those beautiful negative ions and thing as well.

Yes, I mean, happy place. Yeah, so that's the thing with EMF. I scare everyone. I don't want to do that, but go and ground and you get the— you know, you just need to recharge your body. So it's like, because we can see some people can cope with this. Obviously I was sensitive and there was stuff in my body that made me sensitive, but this is going to keep coming up because they just— now 5G Plus, which was only on like 40 stadiums, 5G Plus is now getting released to everyone. So that's the next, and then 6G is there. So it's like clearly they're not going to change and start to do the studies like that they need to. So I guess we have to adapt. But yeah, but you can go and the sea is so powerful with helping you recharge and just grounding in general. But if you can add the ocean and the sand, I mean, yes, here's to more of that as well.

Um, I think before we finish up today, what excites you most about the future of health and well-being and longevity over the coming years and beyond?

I mean, I think I have to go back to like, if you want to think of the future of medicine, then think in terms of frequency, because I think there's all these new frequency machines and I've experienced them. And I think it can be really powerful and non-invasive. And if we can find ways to negate what's coming at us, I think that that, that's really exciting.

Yeah.

And I, and I'm just excited to see how the body can heal. Like, I mean, we're having some very profound changes and it is, it's empowering. I don't ever want it to be not empowering to people, right? People get scared to get results from us. And I said, no, this is the information you need. You're already having these symptoms. It's already happening. Like we're uncovering what can help you heal and live your best life. So yeah. That's exciting. It's exciting.

Yeah. For my listeners interested in understanding the vagus nerve, gut health, etc., where are some good online resources and where can they follow what you're up to? Where would you point them?

So we have now our YouTube channel starting. Like, the videos are very— they're not that professional, but I'm just trying to get all of these little insights out. So we're going to be opening that up because it was just for, um, our patients. But now, so there's that, there's our, our Vegas Clinic, uh, Instagram where we're posting a lot of stuff. There's my Instagram, Dr. S. Canestrero. Um, we have our website, vegasclinic.com, and we're coming out with more and more, more and more resources. And I'm trying to think of other people that talk really well about it. There's Dr., uh, the Lymphatic Mojo guy. He has actual courses on the vagus nerve, which eventually we will do. But, um, you know, there's just type in vagus nerve and lots of stuff starts to come up now. It's, it's trending.

Yeah. Beautiful. Do you have a final ask, recommendation, or any parting thoughts or message for my audience today?

Yeah, it's, I've said it, I think already, but it's just get biologically interested. Don't give your power away. Start to learn about your body. I think it, it's something that should have been part of our education and there is information out there. And funny enough, it's on Instagram and TikTok and social media, but, you know, find people that are talking something that goes, ah, that makes sense. Cause it just, it should make sense. So back to the basics, make it all make sense and find people that support you in helping you make sense of what's going on in your body.

Beautiful. Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you everyone for watching and listening around the world. Such a pleasure. I'll see you again soon. Thank you so much.

Thank you.