45: The Hidden Link Between Trauma and Autoimmune Disease: A Crohn’s Survivor’s Story with Mark Nicoll

Welcome to my podcast called you Must Be out of youf Mind. My name is Dr. Don Wood. Everyone has experienced some trauma at times during their life. These traumatic events and experiences create a significant impact on how your mind works on a day to day basis. At the same time creates long term effects on your emotional and physical health. It will interfere with your ability to stay present and in the moment. After years of research, I used my knowledge of neuroscience to create what I.

Call a memory reset.

This memory reset reduces and eliminates the impact of the trauma and allows you to experience peace and clarity. My podcast will share many stories of people experiencing similar symptoms to you and how their lives have been positively impacted.

By our TIP program.

I can't wait to share with you how the impossible is possible and why you must be out of your mind. And there it is.

So welcome to another episode of you Must Be out of youf Mind. My name is Dr. Don Wood and I'm your host. And I always bring on great guests that bring some real insights into what we're doing and what they're doing. And today's a perfect example. Mark Nickel from painkation who is going to share with us what he does, which really aligns with what we do at the Inspired Performance Institute. So, Mark, welcome to. You must be out of your mind.

Thank you. I must be.

You must be out of your mind.

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Great to be here, Don, and hope your audience kind of, you know, gets a vibe of what we're doing at Painkation. And yeah, great to chat.

So the name Painkation, where did that come from? Like, how did you come up with that name?

Originally I designed a product for virtual reality that would allow an individual to self triage and treat themselves for muscular, you know, MSK injury using digital twins, that kind of thing. It was way too early really for that kind of thing. And there's the business models don't align either. Under FDA laws in your country, you have to provide headset as well as, you know, the actual software solution. So kind of doesn't work, you know, further down the line. It will, I've got no doubt now Apple are in the game and Google are following close behind. But the concept for Pancation was around that whole kind of pain distraction therapy. Yeah. Years ago when I was 30, I literally died from Crohn's disease. Yeah. I'd had probably 10 years of excruciating pain where literally all my organs around the small bowel had literally just fused together. And I can remember kind of taking a Load of painkillers, you know, opioid painkillers. I managed to get in the car, drive to the ER room and crawled up on the counter and basically said, I don't feel well. And I woke up six weeks later with a crowd around the bed, not expecting me to pull through, but fortunately I did. So paincation really was born out of that experience, which repeated itself a decade later when I was 40. Fortunately, I'm fine now. The main problems with autoimmune diseases, which Crohn's being just one of a hundred, is, is because you're constantly in pain. You get separated from friends, sometimes family as well, and you get lonely, isolated. And that brings on lots of mental health problems. Anxiety leading to depression. And then if you do get a period of decent health, you kind of get agoraphobic and are too scared to go outside because it becomes not the normal thing to do. So this is the, this is kind of what paincation solves in. In its kind of first iteration, of which we're starting to build soon, we're using Apple Vision Pro, the new VR headset, mixed reality headset from Apple. And it's very much a social platform where we're matching people up with the same autoimmune illness so they can kind of chat and self support. Yeah, there's some funky stuff going on there as well. You know, we've got equine therapy, so you and your friends can look after a horse in a headset in the same kind of room. And then when you're on your own, you can go ride it. We've got lots of different kind of animal, let's call them AI pets that do specific things. A polar bear that will bring you down from a panic attack. What we found is with a lot of young women with endometriosis, for instance, before a period for their menstrual cycle, they get a big buildup of anxiety because they know the pain is about to arrive, you know, so it's providing things that help, you know, bring people down from that panic attack. And what better than the giant polar bear and the driving ice and snow, which is conversational, so the bear will talk to you and all of a sudden you forget about the panic attack and you're having a conversation with a polar bear. And that's basically what it boils down to.

That's fascinating.

Or Kundalini yoga with a ring tailed Lima, or mindfulness with a tiger called mango. So all of these things are designed to help as one. I've got a lot of academics that I'm working with through public health nutritional epidemiologists as well. So what we're looking at doing is creating really easy to follow augmented reality kind of recipes that can be followed actually while you're cooking. So think about that Tom Cruise film Minority Report where you're kind of, you know, swiping these kind of virtual things in front of you. It's very much like that. It really is convenient. And there you go. So that's what Paincation does in its kind of second iteration, Paincation dtx. We're looking at solving more mental health problems and the pain distraction therapies through medical device. So that's kind of where we're going with that in the kind of longer term.

So, yeah, really interesting. I don't know if you know much about what we're doing at Inspired, but the genesis of Inspired Performance Institute was my daughter's Crohn's.

Really? That's very interesting.

So she had, she was diagnosed with Crohn's at 14 and they told us there's no cure for Crohn's. We don't know what causes Crohn's and that she's going to have to manage this for the rest of her life. So very similar to what your story was. She went through all kinds of pain all the time. She was high functioning. She's an actress. But the problem is being an actor, you can't tell the producers that you have Crohn's because they won't hire you.

No, exactly. Yeah.

So she had to keep it hidden. And yet she's going through flare ups at times. They ended up taking out 24 inches of her intestines.

Yeah.

Four different operations. So she kept getting sick and then would, you know, work through it. So they had her on anxiety meds, they had her on depression meds, they had her on steroids and then painkillers because of all the. The pain. So she was really struggling with that. And then she lost her SAG insurance because she ended up with a flare up. She couldn't work. So we're dual citizens, so Canadian and American. So she went back to Canada so she could use the socialized medicine up there. And there's a lot of acting. So she says, so I've got the best of both worlds. I'll act up there. And then we got a call saying that she's been rushed to the hospital. She started coughing up blood. And so they had her in ICU for three and a half weeks and came back and diagnosed her with idiopathic pulmonary hemosiderosis, which is another autoimmune disorder. And they said the same thing. There's no cure for it. We don't know what causes it. She's going to have to manage this. She should live close to a hospital because her lungs could fill up in 15 minutes. So that was, you know, a potential death sentence for her because only 1 in 1.2 million people ever got that disorder. So it was so rare, there was really no research into it. And again, they told us, it doesn't matter. There's just no cure for it. So that's what set me off. My wife said to me, you need to figure this out or we're going to lose our daughter. So I started to put the research together and to sort of make it a little, little shorter. What I discovered through my research is that unresolved trauma creates inflammation. Inflammation compromises the immune system and the neurotransmitters and neuroplasticity. So I kept meeting different people, talking to different people, and there seemed to be a connection between autoimmune disorders and trauma. So my daughter then disclosed to us that she had had sexual abuse when she was 6 that we didn't know about. So now I'm definitely piecing the dots together. And when you look at that, even for mental health, what do they teach you in mental health? Manage, live and cope with it. And I'm saying, what if we could fix it? What if we could get in there and actually reboot the system? Because I say it's a glitch, it's an error message. So what's happened is that when we have traumatic events in our lives, we store that information in high definition. So your subconscious mind is constantly referencing this traumatic memory to respond to incoming data. Now, but every time it uses it as a resource to look at, it activates the nervous system. And if it activates the nervous system, inflammation is the response, right, to physical or emotional trauma. So I'm doing a study right now, Mark, which you'll find fascinating, is I'm showing that this unresolved trauma, the genes that regulate inflammation upregulate, the genes that regulate the immune system downregulate. But it's supposed to be a temporary situation until the danger's over. But the problem is memory keeps running, so the danger's never over. So they stay in that state. And so that's going to have a major effect. So my daughter was always getting different illnesses, different flus, colds, throat infections, ear infections constantly. But it was coming because the immune system was downregulated. So what I'm showing is, is I developed a program to basically resolve trauma. And when we resolve the trauma, the system comes back into balance. The genes that regulate inflammation come back down. The genes that regulate immune system come back up. Neuroplasticity comes back up. So it's a reset. And so I'm doing this study on that. We're going to publish a study probably at the end of the year, which is going to be amazing. And I love what you're doing as well, because you're teaching people that there's another way. They just don't have to live with it. Right. You. You can do something about it, which gives them hope. Yeah.

I think one of the. One of the things that I disliked the most was the long period of not being diagnosed. I been ill 12 years. I mean, you're going back to your daughter's story. She was extremely lucky to be diagnosed at 14. It wasn't 30 years old. And living with it for 12 years in increasing excruciating pain. That's. I know that's a really extreme case, but it's a common. It's a common thing.

Very common.

And again, going back to your daughter, Everyone that I've ever met with Crohn's is an actor. We all put on this kind of brave face. And when I got ill, people didn't realize I'd been ill. Yeah, because I didn't lose weight. You know, I'm quite a strong person physically. I was an athlete. I threw javelin at school and always kept this kind of, you know, decent build. Whereas generally with Crohn's or ulcerative colitis, you generally get absorption problems. So you don't get, you know, the gut doesn't absorb the minerals that you need, so you end up losing weight. But I didn't. So, yeah, it's very interesting.

And that was the same with my daughter, because she was an actress. Yeah, she put on a very brave front, even with the abuse. So we had no idea that she'd experienced a abuse, but it showed up physically. So the system doesn't hide it. It'll. It'll pop up somewhere. So it popped up for her, right, with Crohn's. And people will get different types of disorders, but these autoimmune. There's usually a connection between, I believe 80% of the illnesses that we're dealing with in the. In this country and around the world are psychological. 20 are physical. And so definitely hers was psychological. So how about you, did you have trauma when you were younger?

No, I had a, I have to say I had a great childhood, but I guess I was adopted when I.

Was probably so was I adopted at birth?

Yeah, yeah. And so was my mother, which is quite a rare combination. But I had the most amazing parents. You know, we didn't have a lot, but we, I had a fishing rod and I had a river down the road and a lake up the top of the road. That's therapy. Yeah, that, that's my therapy basically being able to kind of zone out and, and just fish because you don't think about anything apart from catching that fish.

So yes, you're in a very calm state.

It's a pain distraction, it's whatever distraction, you know, that's kind of what it is. And really the theory around, and the science around distraction therapies is exactly the same. Most of the pain distraction therapies out there currently are led by physiotherapy type of interventions. You know, there's, there's a couple of companies in the US that do it, there's one in Holland and, and you know, the obvious ones as well, children and cannula insertion, stuff like that. But we can go way further. We can really go way further. And the more wacky the better really. So, and, and now we've got these kind of, you know, these game engines where we've got mixed reality and we've got, you know, multiplayer games as well. If you're a kid sat in hospital, you know, let's say you're an 18 year old in hospital and you've just had this massive operation. You can have your friends around the bed with you because you've got this headset on and you can talk about anything, catch up on daily life, who's, who's, who's been expelled from school. All of, all of the minutiae that kids talk about, you know, which is their world, they get to still experience that world through, you know, through mixed reality. That's one of the things that I'm really kind of bullish on is that kind of social network and bringing that back because, you know, obviously it's important.

No, I love that. That's a great idea. I think that's why we see kids so hooked on social media because they're all in a lot of emotional pain and that's their distraction is to connect to other people and feel safe. I believe a lot of it is coming down to that safety message that we need that's so important to our Survival, and they want to feel connected. You know, if you're in a tribe, you're safe. If you're not in a trib tribe, you're not safe.

Yeah.

You know, a thousand years ago, if the tribe expelled you, Right. That was probably certain death, because now you're going to be exposed to animals and other tribes, and you. You won't survive. So I think that primitive instinct is still driving inside of us the formation.

Of wolf packs or chimpanzees and primates. You know, if you're expelled from the group, you're more likely to get attacked by another group because you fit nowhere. So.

Yeah. Yeah, so we're seeing that all the time in hockey. I could play through injuries, so I could have an injury, but when I played hockey, I didn't feel it. Yeah, because the same kind of thing, distraction. Right. So I'm trying to. I'm trying to survive. Not only survive on the ice so somebody doesn't create a new injury for me, but at the same time, I'm focused on performing. And so it distracts from the pain.

Well, you know, if you've ever done any boxing or anything and you've been punched in the face, you know, it doesn't hurt.

It didn't hurt until a couple of days after because it's that initial shock, you know, and then you're kind of either defending yourself or you're on the attack. So that, again, is another form of distraction.

We had a great coach when I was younger, when I was playing, he played professional hockey. So he taught us at 10 years of age to fight. And the parents at first were like, I don't know if this is a good idea, promoting fighting. And he goes, would you rather them learn the hard way or learn from me? And he says, I'm going to teach them not to be afraid to get into a fight, which will keep them out of more fights. And at the same time, if they get into a fight, they're going to realize they're really not going to get hurt. So he trained us to fight. We would do a few different drills where we would have to take each other as hard as we could into the boards. And what you learned is it really didn't hurt. What was more dangerous is if you tensed up or you hesitated, that's when you could get hurt. So we got to a point where, like, we were not afraid to get hit. We're not afraid to go into the boards. And that lack of fear is what gave us the sense that I can do anything. I Don't have to worry about it. You know, I'm a kid, I'm young and I'm strong. I can take that hit. And so I think that really was a big. A big factor and teaching us something that, like, he was right. Would you rather me teach them or them learn the hard way?

So. Yeah, very true, very true. What's. Have you done any kind of research on nutrition and anything around that for your. Your practice at all?

Yes. Yeah, we haven't done any studies on it, but we are going to. But what I believe happens is because if it's a trauma based, which I think 80% of these illnesses are trauma based, if you're punching me in the arm, what's going to happen to my arm? It's going to swell up. The purpose of that inflammation isn't the problem. It's chronic inflammation. That's the problem. The inflammation is designed to protect the system, so it's fine that it becomes inflamed. It's designed to do that. What's not good is when it stays on. And what I'm believing is traumat memory keeps it turned on because it keeps running the loop. So what happens, though, is if the immune system is downregulated, then even the ability to absorb the nutrients and vitamins and everything. So you're saying, well, I'm eating really well. Why am I not getting healthier? It's because the system is focused on survival. We will do maintenance when we get away from the lion, but we're not going to do maintenance until we escape, because there's no point in doing maintenance. We're going to be dead if we don't escape from the lion. So maintenance goes way down. So I had the same kind of life you did. I had an idyllic childhood. I was adopted from birth. No trauma parents that never raised their voice, never yelled at us, never hit us. So my nervous system was regulated, which regulated my immune system. So I've been healthy my entire life. I never get sick. I didn't take the vaccine because I said, I don't know a better immune system than mine. If I'm never getting sick, why do I want to introduce something? Right? And there's no way that Covid didn't hit me, but I dealt with it. I never felt it, but my system basically kicked it. And I think a lot of people were capable of that.

Yeah, exactly.

I was at the Miami boat show, which I mentioned before the podcast, and about two days after I got Covid when I got home. So, yeah, that was the first time, and I probably had it, I don't know, six times since it just came. Seems to spiral round and round and round and round and round.

But, yeah, because that immune system is compromised, so now it's more susceptible to that kind of stuff. I didn't. I didn't have that. So if Covid hit me, my system is very quick to respond. I use the analogy of the US Military is the strongest military in the world. It can defend our borders. But if we took that military and we spread it over 150 countries around the world and then got attacked, we may not be able to defend it. Yeah. So the idea is to keep your immune system so strong that no matter what comes at it, it's more than likely able to connect and take care of it.

Yeah. One of my board members, he's an associate professor of public health and a nutritional epidemiologist. He's doing a study shortly with the Einstein foundation on gut microbiome and effect on adhd. He's an open kind of sufferer of adhd, and when you spend time with him, you kind of know he's got it because he's always fidgeting, he can't sit still, but he's one of these kind of giant brain boxes. Absolutely fantastic guy. I've never known such a skinny person eat so much pizza in all my life.

Nice. That's lucky guy.

Yeah. So that's an interesting thing, because I did see on your site you mentioned adhd. I read a paper today, a scientific paper on. On ginger and inflammation and how. How it's kind of like a real superpower. I mean, it's. I've kind of read half of it, but it's kind of, like, obvious. We know that ginger is really good as well as for seasickness, but that's another story. I did know a couple of scientists in London that were extremely successful, and one of them said to me, cancer cannot live in an alkaline body. And so obviously, inflammation is causing acid all of the time, which exacerbates the problems. So. So I've found for me personally, when it comes to diet and Crohn's, I don't get any problems as long as I steer clear from cow's milk. You know, if I had cow's milk today and had a glass every day for the next two years, I'd be in hospital.

What's interesting, because that's one of the things that I talk about in. In the program. So, yeah, back to adhd, what I say about ADHD is, I believe, it's a coping mechanism. And so if a child is growing up in a very stressful home, regardless if the stress is, you know, obvious or if it's just two professional parents stressed out about their lives and they don't know that they're having an effect on their children. The ages between 0 and 7 are the most brain formative years. So if a child is growing up and even if the stress is intentional or not, the child is growing up around this stress, how do they have no options? Like you and I as adults, if we get into a disagreement, you can fight with me or walk away. You have fight or flight options. A child growing up in a home doesn't have either. So how do they protect themselves? They tune it out. So they shut down listening to the noise and tried to distract themselves with other things, almost what you're talking about with the pain. So that stress is their pain. So what have they been doing during the most brain formative years is teaching themselves not to focus on it. And then at seven years of age, we put them into a class and say, now you need to focus. Well, they can't because they train their brain to do the opposite. And then what do we say is, oh, there's something wrong with this child. They can't, you know, they can't concentrate. They can't focus. Well, of course not. They train their brain not to do it. So I say retrain the brain, teach it to be able to focus again, put the child back into a safe environment and their system will adapt to it. It just didn't feel safe. It's a very different way of looking at it.

Yeah, it's very much the same with virtual reality pain distraction as well. There's kind of like an inertia flywheel effect on that. The more you do it, the more it kind of stays with you. So again, you're retraining the brain to exactly not feel that pain. I mean, when I had injuries, you know, with throwing javelin or playing cricket or something, you know, we'd always kind of dig our fingers where it, where the muscle really hurt, because that's kind of dissipating the up the information a bit. And if you're kind of pushing it in hard, your finger in hard, you're causing more pain. So when you do release it, the pain isn't. And again, that's another kind of form of, you know, not distraction, but it's kind of an illusion to the brain that actually wasn't that bad. I've interviewed Hundreds of people that have got various kind of autoimmune diseases. I mean there's, there's kind of a core that, that bring more pain than others, obviously, but, but there is a kind of a marked usage of games for young girls. When I say young girls, I'm talking about kind of like 18 to 28 years old that have got endometriosis or fibromyalgia. They kind of, you know, they kind of get into gaming because they're at home a lot and it's a great way to connect. So really I'm not breaking any barriers here, I'm just making it more specific so people can meet and chat and help, help and share stories and empower themselves through community, I guess, you know.

Oh, I love it. I, it makes total sense what you're doing, combining what you're doing and we're doing could be very powerful because, you know, it's just another tool for them while they're healing. Right. To be able to distract and let the system heal. Because I believe when you get the nervous system into regulation, right then the maintenance can happen. But the, the brain isn't going to want to do maintenance if it's feeling fear. It's just not a natural process. You could run on jagged rocks and bare feet and not feel the pain. Yeah, because your mind's not going to bring it to your attention. Right. Because it's focused on survival. So you're using the same kind of thing. Instead of survival being the focus, the focus is something else. So the brain will exactly do that and follow. I don't feel the pain when I'm looking at this or experiencing this. That's the same kind of situation.

Yeah, yeah. The other thing as well that interest me is environmental factors as well. Pollution. I think more for women. I definitely think there's a correlation there. I've, I've spoken to too many, too many women to, for it not to be real. I'll give you a point in question. There was somebody I interviewed who was a nurse in the UK and she'd had probably 20 operations to remove different parts of uterus and fallopian tubes and all this sort of stuff. And she went to Bali for two years where there's kind of very, very low pollution. There's no pollutants in the food. It's all organic. They pull it off the fields. It's served to you. Yeah. He didn't get any flare ups for two years. And yet within two weeks of coming back to the uk it all started again. It's like she'd never been away, you know, and then the cycle continued. So there's. There's definitely something to think of there for pollution. And, of course, the more and more we move away from kind of like fossil fuels and stuff like that, I'm sure that. Yeah, I'm sure it'll die down a bit. So.

So I think, yeah, there's a direct correlation between all of those things. But the other thing that I say is that if your nervous system is dysregulated, those things have a bigger effect.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so I've been healthy all my life. I don't eat a perfect diet. I'll have pizza, burgers. I'll have fries. I drink Diet Coke. So if you looked at my diet, it's not terrible, but it's not this amazing. Eating kale and all these things that would be super healthy. But my system is able to deal with it because the immune system's healthy. So I could. If I wanted to, I could eat really better, but I don't think it would make the difference. But for some people, if they don't do it, it would make a difference. And so I think that's the difference. So I always keep coming back to the nervous system that if that is regulated, it will start healing the body. So my daughter's Crohn's, for example, after she went through our program, we reset, got the trauma out of there. She's never had another flare up. And her lung disorder's also gone. So the overuse of steroids, because they kept using steroids, they had her on it for way, way too long. The overuse of steroids for some women creates polycystic ovarian syndrome. Pcos.

Yeah. Yeah.

So. So she had a cyst form on her ovary, so the doctor removed it. And then after the operation, he comes in and my wife and I are there, and he says to my daughter Ashley, he goes, I'm confused because your chart says you have Crohn's. And she goes, yeah, I have Crohn's. He goes, well, I operated. There's no evidence you have Crohn's. And she goes, no, I haven't had a flare up in a long time. And he goes, but you're not on medication for Crohn's. She goes, no, I don't take medication anymore. And he said to her, he says, I hate to tell you this. You've never had Crohn's. You were misdiagnosed. And she goes, no, I've had four operations, like, I've gone down to 90, 95 pounds. She goes, I had Crohn's. And he goes, well, Crohn's doesn't go away. It's either active or suppressed by the medication. And so I explained to him that my idea is that I believe it was coming from the trauma which created the inflammation. And he said to me, he goes, that's imposs. Possible. If that was true, you'd have a Nobel Prize. And I says, and you tell me what Crohn's is? He goes, crohn's is a lifelong debilitating disease with no cure. And I said, I disagree. I think Crohn's is inflammation. And when we resolve the trauma, we resolved the inflammation. Right. And the system came back online. That made no sense to him. So he says to my daughter, you'll probably be discharged Tuesday or Wednesday. I'm going to make you an appointment to come back into my office. I'm going to put you back on your medication with zero symptoms, because they're not trained that way. So if that's what they're trained in. And then another area, like the psychology or the brain or the nervous system, they've never learned about that, so they're never going to make that connection. The advantage for me is I'd always been an entrepreneur. So I came into this thinking like an entrepreneur. We have a problem, I need to figure it out. And it's not in one area.

Yeah, same here.

Yeah. And so we have to figure it out. So I looked at multiple different areas and that was the advantage, and I started connecting the dots. That's not the way. And it's not to say that the not smart people are caring people. I believe they are. But if you are only trained with one manual, and then somebody says, but there's a mistake in that manual, you're not going to believe it. Because that's what you were trained in.

Yeah, yeah. My. With Crohn's, it's kind of. First time I had it when I was 30. What they do is they basically. They cut the bad bit out and then literally join you together like that.

Yeah, that's what she had.

Four times stitch round like that, which then gets smaller and smaller and smaller, that you've got no peristalsis. So second time I had an operation, they kind of cut it like that, and then they cut it at an angle and layered it over. So the circumference of the stitches was like that. Yeah. And I've never had another problem since. He said it's a loss 50, 50 if we cut it all out. Then you start again from a healthy bowel and you might be lucky. But you probably know your body now. What you shouldn't, shouldn't eat, what you should do, you shouldn't smoke because obviously that's like the most acid forming thing on the planet and dairy. But I have, I have goat's cheese and like lots of it. I mean I absolutely love cheese, you know, and, and I can have goat's cheese, but if I had say parmesan or something, it's because it's got rennet in there. Cows, rennet. It's just like I can smell of dairy internally for two months. So you kind of learn, you know, you kind of learn. But keeping a diary is a good thing as well, I think.

Yeah. And I think it's, it's interesting. When did you start doing your research into the virtual reality and all of that? When did you.

Three years ago, but.

Three years ago, what were you doing to manage your Crohn's before? Just staying off gluten and dairy And.

I've got no problem with gluten, it's just the dairy. It's just literally cows products, you know. Yeah, I can eat sandwiches, I can eat pizzas. I mean most pizzas have got buffalo mozzarella cheese on there. And of course it's not actually a cow, it's a buffalo. It's absolutely zero problem, you know. And yes, I could have a little bit of cheddar, wouldn't be a big, big problem. But it's like a buildup of things that can then bring you down and it takes a long while for that to come out of your body or the effect of it. I have lots of chilies, lots of capsicums, lots of lime juice. You know, I, I kind of eat like a Mexican, really like a Texas.

Tacos with you know, chili, salsa, all of that sort of stuff. And you would just probably associate that with acid forming but that things like lime juice turn to alkaline in where it's the most important, where it hits your system, it needs to be alkaline. So. So a lot of, a lot of foods that are acid, when you eat, you know their ph value, by the time they go through, they kind of flip, you know. So I've been kind of into that, you know, talking to Gianluca, the nutritional epidemiologist. We're always talking about this. He thinks there is no such thing as an alkaline diet. He thinks it's Hocus pocus. And I kind of. Of believe him, but I think there are some foods that can help. There's a lot on the Internet about alkaline diets, but they're not really based in any science.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this. The stomach is acidic to begin with, so that's how it works. So it has to get through the acidic environment first.

Yeah, yeah. The other thing that I found as well, not just for Crohn's really good pro and prebiotics.

Absolutely. And the problem is they never tell you that. So my daughter was never told to get on because they had her on antibiotics constantly and never told her about, you know, probiotics.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, this was my big problem as well with. With antibiotics. I. Basically. Because I. My. My organs are fused. Everything was passing through, so I had sepsis on a regular basis because I was undiagnosed. It was constantly antibiotics, which made it even worse because you had no healthy gut bacteria, and it was literally pouring fire on a fire, you know?

Yeah.

So. So once I'd learned which ones to use, everything got better. I went for a period as well after the first operation, whether it's trauma, whether it's whatever, but I suffered from really bad anxiety. You know, I mean, I've never been depressed a day in my life, but I. I had a period where I suffered from really bad anxiety because of the chemical imbalance of not eating for six months. No nut at all. And what that does to you. So, you know, you kind of train yourself to get out of that, but in that moment, it's like the whole world's crashing in, you know, and it's terrible. I found reflexology really good. There's. There's definitely something in that, but. Yeah, well, the number.

The number one fear for the human mind is uncertainty.

Yes, of course.

So that. That's what's going to create the anxiety. You know, there's been a lot of studies done on women when they find a lump on their breast. Right. And then they go in to get it tested, the cortisol levels are higher while they're waiting for the test results than they are after they get that. Even if it's a positive. Yes, you have breast cancer. The cortisol levels are not as high then as they were pre. Because now at least they have a strategy. And they said, okay, here's what we're going to do. So. But. So it's the same thing. So with your Crohn's, right, all of that anxiety is coming from here's what I'm going to go through again. And your mind is going to go into an anxious mode.

Yeah, exactly. One of the other things that we're, we're doing with paincation as well is there's a therapy marketplace there. So you've got the kind, let's call it the well being product, which is social with those wellbeing tools. You've also got this marketplace where you've got, you know, sleep coaches. Sleep is really important. Nutritionist and behavioral therapists as well, psychologists. So you'll be able to kind of pass straight through what we're looking at the moment. I'm working with a team of people to see how we can train unable body people. Yeah. That are generally overlooked in society. How can we take this demographic of people and train them to be mental health first aiders. Yeah. So if there's a situation where the well being platform is not quite enough, you know, therapy's probably a bit too much and someone just wants a chat. How can we do that? And if, if people are going through real bad trauma, we can then use that as a triaging system into behavioral therapist or it might just be a nutritionist that they need. Yeah. So because in VR everybody's able bodies, you don't know someone's missing a limb or they're in a wheelchair. And again, you know that that portion of society is kind of overlooked. So we're going to try and empower those people as well, you know.

So how does your program work? So somebody wants to sign up for your program. How does that work? What do they do?

Well, we're in the process of building it at the moment.

Okay, so it's not ready to go out it?

Yeah, no, not yet, no. So I mean, Apple Vision Pro, it's a very new headset. It's only been out five, six months I think. So so essentially you would put the headset on, go to the App Store and you would download our app like you would on a phone. It will be available for a phone as well. Yeah. So you'll be able to have an experience on a phone. It's not as great, but it's still, we think, brilliant. Right. So you still get benefit. So you download the app on, on Vision Pro and you basically go in there, you can, you can create your own groups, you can be invited to other people's groups as well based on illness and then kind of like share experiences. So I'll go back to that Kundalini yoga with a ring tailed Lima if you're doing that. And you want to invite your friends in. You just like click a couple of boxes and they just appear. And then you can all do yoga together with this ring tailed lemur, you know.

Interesting. So when do you think you're going to be launching?

We're looking for about January. It's quite a heavy build. We've got eight different AI therapy pets in there that does, you know, specific things based on which autoimmune you've got. Of course there is a commonality across a lot of, of autoimmunes but you know, there is a hundred. So it's going to take us a while to get everywhere.

Yeah, I'll bet. But again, a lot of it just like you said, there's a lot of commonality between them.

Yeah.

So even just having the ability to have some solutions is a, is a big thing. And I do believe that we actually have the program that I do is about a four hour program that I sort of reset the nervous system and then there's 30 days of audios. But we also have that program shot in VR. We haven't launched the VR version of it yet. That's what we're doing. But the online program, even if it's not VR, is very successful. It's helping a lot of people. So that's the whole idea is give the people some tools to reset their system and then train their system. I'm a big believer. And the brain is brilliant. It's designed to heal. What I've done in our program is create the optimal conditions for healing, then let the system do what it's designed to do. So I never take the credit for these people healing. I'm just providing the optimal conditions for your system to do exactly what it's designed to do do. But if it's in a constant fight or flight state, those are not optimal conditions for healing. So that's why they stay sick, which was what my daughter's situation was. But when we get the trauma out of the way now the system right, can stay in that optimal condition and do its own healing. And I believe that's, that's really good. So it's the same kind of thing. I think that you're doing just a different approach. But I'd love to, to look at a little bit more when, when you're ready to go and see if there's a way to implement it.

One thing about what you're doing with your VR application is any kind of educational content where you might have somebody in front of you in a class is that Everyone gets eye contact with the tutor. So the learning curve is so fast. People absorb more information and retain more knowledge through VR education. You're definitely on the right track there. And the engagement, I'm sure, will be through the roof. So I wish you the best with that. That. Yeah.

And like I said, I'd like to stay in touch and see how if there's an opportunity to implement something that you're doing in there. Because I'm a big believer in the more tools that we can give them. Right. To help them. Especially for the people that if it's not a trauma related thing, which even though I think a large portion are, there's a lot of people who are suffering because of either environmental conditions, genetic conditions that, you know may be outside of their control. Like, let's give them all the tools we can.

Yeah, exactly like.

Yeah. Perfect. Well, Mark, I really appreciate you coming in and sharing your information. I'm sure we'll continue to talk and figure out how we can help each other.

Right.

And if people want to get in touch with you, what do they do? How do they reach out to you?

They can go to the website, which is painkation.com.

Great. There's a lot of good information on there. So anybody who's dealing with this, definitely, you know, check it out. And, and the good news is, is what Mark does and what we do is give you hope. And as long as you've got hope, right. There's a better way to do things that you can heal. We're going to help you to do that the best way we can. So thanks, Mark, for all your knowledge and all the great work that you're doing. And thank you everybody for listening to another episode of you Must Be out of youf Mind. And there it is.

Great to meet, Don. We'll speak soon.

Take care.

Thanks.