The Science of Accelerated Healing with NeuFit Technology - Episode 338

I totally agree with Dr. Gladden's position that the number one biggest lever you can pull for health is optimizing your nervous system. It is the control system of the body, and it's so cool to see these reports of other things that change, whether it's digestion or reproductive function or psychology, even though those weren't necessarily the intended target.

Welcome everybody to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, and in today's podcast, I'm going to be speaking with the founder of a company called Nufit, which has a device called the Nubi, and his name is Garrett Seltzer. And he's a very interesting guy, a hockey player in college, physics major, who is going to walk us through his story about how he came to find that direct current could be incredibly helpful in rehabilitation. But it goes way beyond that. We're going to talk about topics related to sexual function, pelvic floor, concussion, and really go deep on how to bring your body back into balance, mechanical balance, if you will. I think you're going to love this podcast. It was really fun to do.

He went from saving hearts as a cardiologist to rewriting the entire aging playbook. Dr. Jeffrey Gladden believes 100 is the new 30, and he's got the science to back it up. This is the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Garrett, welcome to the, uh, Gladden Longevity Podcast. It's great to have you here.

Thank you, Dr. Gladden. It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, beautiful. So tell us a little bit about how you got interested in, you know, developing the, the Nufit, the Nubi device. Walk us through that. Where did that start?

Part of the context is my formal academic training in engineering and neuroscience. I think that'll help tie some of it together. And the biggest catalyst really was my experience growing up playing ice hockey and ended up playing in college. And along the way, I had so many frustrations with the traditional physical therapy traditional orthopedic medical models. Of course, I had injuries along the way and those experiences were just so disappointing. And then I had developed along the way a passion for physiology and the human body and athletic performance training and a real effort to make myself a better athlete. So, I got really interested in all of this. And yet, those therapy medical experiences were just so disappointing really until I had an experience my last year in college. I was a physics major. I was set to go to graduate school in engineering.. And I had another injury where I had some torn ligaments. I was told I likely would need surgery. And based on the previous experiences, I figured that would just be that. But I met a, a guy who is a chiropractor who was doing functional neurology and using older versions of direct current. And so he actually treated me and he was the first one to teach me about the importance of the neurological response to injury and how the nervous system actually supports and influences the healing process. And, he was the first to show me. I had used TENS units and different electrical devices along the way. He was the first to show me how it was this older analog device with dials, microcurrent-type device at the time, but he was the first to introduce me to this concept of how electrical fields could actually be harnessed to influence the underlying healing processes in the body as well. And, going through this, this experience was just an amazing— it was like a eureka light bulb going off moment for me because I was able to heal my ligaments and avoid surgery and I was relieved as an athlete. But, as a physics major, as a pre-engineering student to find something that actually made sense scientifically from first principles and was such a strong contrast to the previous experiences I had, that was incredible. And, that created within me a calling to just share this work with as many people as I could.

Well, you're getting the opportunity to combine two of your passions, which is physics and science with you know, athletic performance and healing and recovery. So that's pretty cool. What, what ligaments were, were damaged?

Uh, I had a couple in my wrist. I had one of those collisions in hockey where I got pushed into the glass, you know, body check, and it got jammed in, that sort of thing.

Got it. Okay. And what did the course of therapy look like that enabled you to heal that?

So there were some adjustments, different things for the autonomic nervous system. There was a lot of time spent with electrodes around the injured site of tissue there.

So that's an interesting point. You started with the autonomic nervous system because we, we know that people will heal better if they have more parasympathetic nervous system tone. So was that a piece of what he was doing with you, was measuring and then helping to optimize parasympathetic nervous system tone as part of the healing process?

So at this point, it was nearly 20 years ago, so we weren't measuring in the same way as we are today with all these HRV devices and things like that. He looking at things like differences in muscle tone side to side and flexor tone, looking at pupil dilation and constriction, some of those other measurements of underlying sympathetic or autonomic tone. So it was more, a little more manual, but you know, those same principles that have then led us to the wonderful HRV measurements that you're using in your practice and the different things that we experience. Yeah.

Yeah. So my point is when he evaluated you, did he find that you needed some help to have more parasympathetic tone as part of the healing protocol he was putting you on?

Yes. So we did, we did some work on that for sure.

Okay. And what kind of work did you do? Was it more like meditation or was it more electric fields? Like there are vagal nerve stimulators now and things like that. Was he doing that kind of work early on or what was happening?

So back then it was a combination of some adjustments in certain areas, uh, in the areas of parasympathetic ganglia. There was, you know, there, we didn't have those handheld vagal nerve stimulators or devices like we have now. So there was then a lot of diaphragmatic breathing, just, you know, some meditation-esque, uh, working breathing techniques.

Okay. I gotcha. And then what did, what did he actually do on the wrist itself? He was applying direct current. So just so the audience understands, there's direct current and alternating current, right? And you know, this is Thomas Edison, Tesla, right? Story. Edison was a big direct current fan because it was safe, but you needed needed a, you know, a generator every 3 blocks or something in order to deliver it, alternating current, and send across the country. But of course, if you get shocked by it, you get electrocuted. So, and there are devices out there that include both alternating and direct current. You know, we think of something like CompEx or NUEX. Uh, NUEX has direct and alternating current. CompEx has alternating current. Those are more for training and for muscle relaxation, not necessarily for healing. What you're doing is more related to, I think, accelerating healing. Is that, is that true? Or is there, there's probably a training element to it as well?

There is a training element to it. So, what we're doing and what we're probably best known for is that neuromuscular education type work where, for example, we can take one of our electrodes using the effects of direct current to scan around on the body and find where the nervous system is guarding or inhibiting muscles where there's various guarding and protective compensatory patterns that happen in response to injury or bad habits. So, yes, we're doing that and that is probably what we're best known for, those rehabilitation applications. And then, Because we're talking about neuromuscular activation, there's things we can do also with the autonomic nervous system also that we can do in terms of enhancing motor unit recruitment to get some of the benefits of resistance training without having to lift as much weight. So, if we have someone who say is recovering from a lumbar spine injury and they want to load their legs but they don't want to deadlift or squat heavy, there's a way to— you can put electrodes on and dial up certain settings and get a motor unit recruitment as if you were lifting very heavy weights on the lower body. For example?

You know, one of the big things that happens to people as they go through the aging process is because everybody's sitting all the time and they're crunched over at their computer, you know, there's, there's basically shrinkage of the hip flexors, basically the, the things that allow you to pick your, your knee up towards your chest as you're standing on the floor, right? So your hip flexors get short, but then because of that, the glutes can become deactivated because they're linked together. And so it's really interesting. One of the things I'm doing right now is kind of reactivating my glutes. I realized that some of my mobility was being compromised because my glutes were not dominant anymore. And so I've been working to make myself more glute dominant than, you know, quad or hamstring dominant. And what happens is when the glutes aren't working, you know, the hamstrings, the low back all have to try to kick in and take over for that. And so being able to reestablish that, but also getting the glutes to fire again., right? Because when they, when they become deactivated, you can do an exercise and yet your body will, let's say you're going to do a squat, which, you know, is certainly one, one way to kind of activate the glutes. There are many ways to do it, but let's say you're going to activate the glutes through a squat. If your glutes have been deactivated by the things we talked about, the prolonged sitting, et cetera, then even though you're doing the squat, instead of the glute actually doing the work, the work gets shuttled out to other parts of the body. And so being able to diagnose where are the muscles deactivated, so to speak, and then be able to apply therapeutic impulses there to reactivate them. Are you finding that, that, that's very powerful? So it's really, really powerful stuff because you can bring people back into balance essentially. And so that diagnostic capability, and then I'm curious to hear more about that. And I'm also curious to hear about the people that have deactivated themselves. Through their postures or whatever else, or even an injury, right? So you get an injury, then you compensate for it. Now certain parts overact, you know, take over more work than they should, and you're unbalanced again. Going in and diagnostically figuring that out, but then can you use the device to actually reestablish balance? That's a really interesting thing because it gets rid of a lot of pain. It also gets rid of a lot of secondary injuries. So whether it's back pain because your glutes aren't activated properly, or you hurt your knee and now your right, your left knee, and now your right hip's developing problems because it's compensating and the way your, your gait is and things like that, right? So this idea of getting things back into balance as quickly as possible and accelerate healing, I'm just saying this for the audience's sake, is like a super important thing when it comes to, you know, having a 30-year-old body when you're 100 or living young for a lifetime. So walk us through a little bit on the, how you think about, approach, and accomplish the diagnostic and the therapeutic elements of of what you've developed.

I really like the way that you frame that up because there's sort of two ways that we can have these inefficiencies or poor movement patterns develop. One is the bad habits over time, like you said, of sitting for too long, which virtually all of us are guilty of, at least at certain stages. And the other is an immediate injury where the body responds, it shuts down or braces and guards, creates these patterns around that site of injury in order to protect. And oftentimes those are not fully rehabilitated and people still have those patterns lingering even after the injury has healed. And so state that you're in today is likely a combination of bad habits and responses to injuries and all of that. So I like the way you frame that up. And what I, I like to sort of take two different phases to this approach. The first being doing the mapping process to scan around and find where any of those patterns are being imposed. Because in this example, you talked about Dr. Gladden of the glutes being weaker or more inhibited than would be ideal and the hip flexors being more contracted and that causing, for example, an anterior pelvic tilt where it kind of tugs the body into a little bit of a hunched forward, pitched forward type of posture. So, in that example, scanning around on the body to find any issues that would show up neurologically, it could be in areas of the glutes themselves where we scan around and we're basically sending the signal neurologically that the glute's turning on.. And if you haven't been using your glutes recently, your brain is going to see that and say, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's new, that's different. And the brain likes predictability. Anything that's new and novel is actually threatening, so it'll trigger alarm bells. It'll, it'll feel like a trigger point, basically. But the cool thing is that you'll be able to feel like, oh yeah, there's an issue there. Sometimes the glute may not be able to fire because there's an issue, say, in the adductor or something like that. And if the glute fully engaged and extended the hip, it would tug on the, the adductor where it's tight and it might, might stretch one of the nerves. So there could be a protective pattern. So we can also figure out if there's anything else that's getting in the way.

That's right.

And then, and, and so I would call that the first phase. The first phase is finding the so-called weak links and bringing them up to baseline. And then from there, we have a little bit of a blank canvas to do what we want. And then you can apply your expertise and understand, okay, we need more glute firing. So you can actually do something really really cool and precise with technology like this. You can put one set of pads on the glutes that are causing increased contraction and you can put another set of pads from the same machine on the hip flexors on the anterior front side musculature there on the, on the quad over the psoas, lower abdomen. And you can actually set that to a signal that's going to trigger that preferentially to relax and lengthen. And if you're doing a lunge or split stance or Bulgarian split squat type of movement, You can actually program in very precisely. It's like programming software, programming the software of the nervous system. You can program it to contract on one side while it's lengthening on the other side. So you can dramatically accelerate process of retraining that exact pattern you're talking about.

I love that. That is, that's really magical. If you're listening to this, the way to think about it is that when one muscle is gonna contract, the muscle that's on the opposite to that, let's take the bicep and the tricep, right? If you're gonna do a bicep curl, you're gonna that, that bicep's gonna contract, but the tricep, which sits behind the upper arm, the humerus, has to relax, right? Likewise, if the triceps is gonna contract, the bicep has to relax. So what we're talking about here is with injury or posture issues that have cropped up is that one muscle can be handicapped because it's lost the ability to relax. And another one can be handicapped because it's, it's been almost like unplugged. From the nervous system, so it loses the ability to contract. So being able to treat this isn't just about going straight at the glutes, it's about going at the pair or the pairs, right? There are multiple pairs between the glutes and the hip flexors. But if you go at this as a system where you're relaxing what needs to be relaxed while you're contracting what needs to be contracted, what we're saying, what Garrett is saying, is that you can actually reprogram the nervous system to make that the new norm. And reestablish normalcy, which then gets rid of the hip tilt or the pelvic tilt. And also, you know, it takes pressure off the low back and now your low back pain gets better and, you know, all these other things, right? So yeah, it's super exciting stuff.

Yeah, I think that's beautifully said. And it is, it's one of those things also that when you spend a significant amount of time in that, you know, seated hip flexed position, you have to think about it like a, like a seesaw, like a teeter-totter. You know, you have so much time over here, you need enough input in order to, on the other side, to balance it out if you want to reset that pattern. And so that means a lot of time spent in a hip extended position, or it means a lot of input like we're talking about here, where you can, you can reach that critical mass or that threshold of input faster using technology like this to accelerate the neuromuscular adaptations.

Yeah. Very cool. So the device, um, walk us through the scanning element of it. This is, uh, you have, I don't know if you have a device sitting in front of you, but you're talking about putting pads on. So these are adhesive pads that would stick to the skin over the muscle that would allow it to relax or contract. But you've got something that you're like a wand that you're pushing over the body to read what's happening. Is that what's going on here?

Exactly. Yes. I usually have supplies right here at my workstation. So, what you would do is actually say just because it's on camera for those who are watching. If you're listening, it obviously doesn't matter. But, if you can see, so I would have an electrode, a wand or a conductive electrode, not the sticky one but one that can actually scan around here. So, what I'm doing is I'm scanning around. And, because of the properties of direct current and the way it interacts with the nervous system, What I'm doing is I'm actually sending the same signals that the nervous system receives when real movement happens, when I load or stretch or challenge these tissues. So when I'm on this area, it's like that actual muscle segment is being loaded. When I'm here, it's like that's being stretched or contracted. And it allows us to determine how your nervous system responds to load because that's the question, when you go to walk, if you land on one leg, you have to control and support and balance your body weight on one leg during that portion of the gait phase. And when you do that, if there's a compensation or protective pattern on the inside of your thigh there, the adductor or that medial innermost quad muscle, your weight is going to go shift to the outside. You're going to try to avoid that. You're going to develop a strategy to try to avoid that. And so, this allows us to introduce load, neurologically speaking, in all these different areas of the body to precisely tell where you are willing and able to accept load and there's no protective and compensatory patterns and everything's fine and efficient and good versus where when we stimulate that area and the body fights against it, that tells us that you're fighting against that here in this very safe and controlled environment. So, when you go out to throw a baseball or lift weights, you're going to attempt to compensate around that because your nervous system is telling us it does not like to load that area. And then once we find those areas, then we typically would switch to those adhesive electrodes and stimulate those while going through movement because that gives us the opportunity to perform essentially a form of exposure therapy. You're going to get input neurologically on that area and go through movements. You're going to start learning to incorporate that, that muscle or that segment or that tissue into the movement pattern and give the brain an opportunity to recalibrate, to start to understand that loading it at this level is safe. And then you can load it at this level and that's safe and loaded at this. And you gradually build up until it's able to handle equivalent load and input as all of the surrounding tissues in the region. And you have more balanced and efficient function.

Yeah, that's really exciting. And then I suspect that you would also, you could, if it was required, you could also be lengthening the opposing side while you're putting those increasing loads in so that you're maintaining balance across the limb, right? Or the joint, really. The muscles are there to move joints in a way, or move us across joints. So yeah, I think that's really, really cool. So did you actually develop the technology or you adopted the technology and refined it, or what was your role in all of this?

So I'm the engineering and neuroscience guy. Who started our company. So, I'm grateful to have 4 patents issued so far. And so, technically have some inventions. The way I would describe it is that I had seen and used what was out there in the field. There's a very rich history of electrical stimulation for decades, a lot of scientific publications, a lot of research, a lot of products, a lot of applications. And, where I think the big contribution is, is finding ways to improve on the technology that was out there, and then also to improve on the methodology that was out there. And I think it's a, a 1 1 3 type of scenario where the improvements in one and the improvements in the other create this synergy where there's a really powerful combination. And so we often refer to the Nufit method being the combination of the device and the methodology that with which we apply it.

Okay. So how would you compare yourself to some of the other devices that are out there? You're probably familiar with other things, right? We talked a little bit. I brought up NUEX before we started the program. And then CompEx is another one that's out there that's e-stim. And then there are some of these e-stim suits actually that are coming over from Europe. I think we're looking at one right now with regards to its purported ability to improve clothin levels. So there's some interesting things there too. But you want to just talk us through kind of how you're different from some of the other things that are, that are out there?

Yeah, for sure. So in terms of the broad electrical stimulation landscape, Most of the devices that are out there are using alternating current. And so that's where this distinction of direct current is important. And the history is actually very interesting. Just very briefly, many of the benefits of direct current that we're talking about today and that we know were actually known decades ago. The Soviets did a lot of work in the 1960s, 1970s, and found a lot of these benefits. But there was always a big problem where when you use high enough therapeutic levels of direct current, they would literally sting and burn the skin because you have positive charges building up around the negative electrode and vice versa. And, that charge buildup creates resistance. And, when you try to send a voltage, create a voltage to send current through that, when there's high resistance, you get more heat dissipation and literally burning the skin. And so, direct current fell out of favor for decades. And, in its place came the TENS units, NMES, interferential, FES, most of what's out there in the world today. And there is a bit of resurgence of direct current. You know, it's so, so cool. We work with a lot of professional sports teams, for example, and the athletic trainers often say, man, I haven't seen direct current since athletic training school 30 years ago. And we learned that we could use it for lymphedema and this and that. And I always thought there was more to it, but we just never had a chance to use it. And here we are. So there's a couple other companies like you mentioned one, for example, that also has some direct current offerings. And so within that, there's nuances around the power levels. Like ours, for example, is the maximum power allowed by law and has all the FDA therapeutic indications, whereas the one you mentioned is more just for fitness training, a lot less powerful. So there's, you know, some of what you, what you can do with the technology, and then also the, all of the, the methodology and the training and the education around how to use it. So we have a team of several clinicians and have courses that are approved for physical therapy continuing education and chiropractic and athletic training, et cetera. So it's a whole host of different variables that, that go into it.

Cool. So where do you find yourself positioned? I can imagine that this would be a very sophisticated way to train, quite honestly, just like any e-stim will kind of augment training at lower workloads or lower external workloads. But it seems like using a device like this this, and I imagine you might even want to use, I don't know how many sets of pads you can hook up to one device, but I can imagine you could have more than one device working, covering both sides of the body or, you know, doing something where maybe you could walk us through that where you're actually able to train and utilizing device. If one, if let's say the right side's stronger than the left, where you could bring things actually into, into balance through a training protocol. But I don't know this, I'm just thinking hypothetically here. So you'll have to tell me what, what's really going on.

It's a great thought and it certainly is true in practice. We have our devices, a majority of them are used in rehabilitation settings. And within that, a lot of those practices end up converting their patients into longer-term fitness or training clients after the plan of care is complete because of exactly what you're describing. So yes, there's. 8 pads, you can train a lot of areas here. And, there's actually 2 studies that we did at the University of South Florida. So, Sam Buckner's lab, Bill Campbell's exercise science program there, they looked at comparing activation, muscle activation with the NUBI device compared to traditional resistance exercise. The first study was looking at the acute effects and the second was looking at muscle growth over a full 8-week training cycle. In terms of acute effects, as you know, Dr. Gladden, one of the precursors to hypertrophy is actually muscle cell swelling. So, they image muscles on ultrasound. And, my understanding of it is essentially that the muscle cells are sort of slurping up blood plasma because that's where the nutrients are and the raw materials to rebuild and replenish after they're depleted by exercise. So, this muscle cell swelling is one of the precursors. And, we saw In the acute study, similar swelling, similar movement of fluids from extracellular to intracellular in the muscles that did traditional resistance exercise with 70 to 80% of one rep max compared to the ones that were stimulated by the NUBI device without any external load. And then, in the subsequent of the follow-on study, there was, again, a finding where it was very similar in terms of muscle growth measured over a full 8-week training cycle using traditional resistance exercise compared to this electrical stimulation with little to no external load. So, without as much strain and load on the joints, you can get as much activation in the muscle. So, it can make training safer, more accessible, more time efficient, perhaps in some ways more effective. So, there is a significant value proposition there.

Yeah, no, it's interesting because if you have somebody that's weak and you're using, you know, they're not really capable of lifting weights or whatever, but if you train them to where they're strong enough, then they could start doing things without the machine that would allow them to load the joints. Right. But they would have the musculature to actually help protect that. So you can kind of build the system back up. It's a, it's a really, really, I think, incredibly interesting and effective approach. It's got me thinking about lots of things. Have you done anything where somebody has had, let's say, a, a recent surgery in an area, or, you know, maybe they got stem cells in an area or exosomes, or they're using peptides or whatever else. Have you know, have you combined this with any of those kinds of protocols to see if it accelerates the healing process or the over what, you know, those regenerative technologies would offer?

So to the, to the first part of that, in terms of postoperatively, we've seen tremendous results in recovery after orthopedic surgery. Patients reaching their functional milestones faster after ACL reconstruction, rotator cuff repair, total knee replacement, and, you know, many different, whole variety of surgeries, Achilles tendon repair or reconstruction. And the, the way that I like to think about that is we talk about managing the neurological response to injury. While surgery is controlled trauma, it's like injury times 3 or 4 or 5. And so the same principles apply. And then in terms of the bigger part of that question, does it combine with regenerative therapies like stem cells, PRP, peptides, et cetera? So that's still more in the anecdotal realm. There's a few clinics around the country that are doing similar work as, as you are in terms of stem cell and PRP. And they're, they're combining it with this. And at least anecdotally, they're telling us that the outcomes do seem to be better. It certainly warrants more rigorous study. We've had several published studies in different areas, nothing yet specifically on this, but I do think, I do think there's something there. And perhaps part of it is that when you're doing some of these injections, part of what you're doing is creating purposeful irritation in order to trigger the body's own healing processes to happen.

And yeah, well, that's certainly prolotherapy, right? Where you inject D50, which is 50% glucose into a joint or into an area to basically incite inflammation because then that attracts, you know, progenitor cells and endogenous peptides and exosomes and things like that. So yeah, in fact, you can't heal without some inflammation. You don't wanna wipe out all the local inflammation. You can take out systemic inflammation and improve healing for sure. But locally, you do want to have some heat in there, right? Because it's, it's part of the natural process. So yeah, that's interesting. Really interesting. So how many devices, let's say somebody was gonna work their, you know, from, let's talk, call it their thighs and their glutes simultaneously, both sides. How many device, how many pads would it take to actually adequately do that?

You could do it with, with our device and using all 8 pads. You could have a larger one on, on the belly of each glute max, have one where you're hitting the belly of both at the same time, the medial and lateral hamstring, and then probably have one more belly of the rectus femoris on the quad and another one probably down on the medial quad, perhaps lateral if you need a reason to target that, but two on the quad on each leg. And, we've seen really successful. We have a program here at our clinic in Austin, Texas. We have the Executive Workout where you can come in for 30 minutes and that's one of the pad placements that we use because you can do that. And, in a couple minutes, you've essentially smoked your lower body. I mean, you've stimulated everything you need there. And then you may, may move them down and do, do another minute or two on the calves specifically. But for hip hinging and squatting or, or lunge split squat type movements with that pad placement, you'll get everything you need. And in a few minutes, that's not only is that enough, that's, it's so challenging that you don't necessarily want to go beyond that, even if you had the desire to do so.

Right. So yeah, so this is the great thing about this is you don't end up needing a big weight room. Are you doing these with just bodyweight exercises then at that point with squats or Bulgarian split squats or side planks with, you know, raising the upper leg to activate the glute there. Are you doing those kinds of exercises or are you still require some sort of external load?

We're doing, we're doing all those exercises you just mentioned, certainly doing all those with body weight. And then depending on the person and where they are in their training, what their goals are, we may add weight. If we're using weight, typically it's, you know, a quarter to a third of what they would normally have to lift.

I was just going to say, I would think a resistance band, I can imagine, would be helpful there too. Like, you could— I'm just trying to think of somebody said, you know, I don't really have access to weights, but if I had the machine and I had some resistance bands, I could probably replicate almost everything. I'm kind of thinking out loud here. You have to correct me if I'm wrong here.

But yeah, you, you really don't need much at all. So we have a minority of our device users, but they're substantial enough number are people who have them at home. And I often hear that exact story. You know, I can just do some pushups and pull-ups with this thing on and that's everything, or just some, you know, resistance bands and 5 and 10-pound dumbbells and this machine is all I need. So that is a, a common refrain.

Yeah, that's very, very cool. Great. What's, what's, what's next for you guys? What are you exploring now, either from a research perspective or a technology perspective?

We've got quite a few things going on. So our probably most ambitious and rigorous study to date was published in 2025 in the Journal of Diabetes Research, where we did the first study comparing head-to-head in humans alternating current and direct current. And it was in diabetic peripheral neuropathy patients. And the headline is that we saw significant improvements in function and nerve activity, EMG and nerve conduction velocity testing, using the direct current of the NUBI. So it was really Really exciting.

Wow. That is exciting.

And then with that same cohort of providers—

Let me just say this, or ask this. Sorry to interrupt, but let me just ask this. Did they notice that, you know, with peripheral neuropathy, a lot of times there's associated pain as well as, you know, decreased firing. Was there an improvement in pain for these people as well?

Yes, there were measurements on pain and sensation and function and then the electrodiagnostics.

Okay, so sensation also improved. Pain went down, sensation went up. I was what I'm hearing.

Yeah. And, and in just, in just 6 weeks too.

Oh, wow. Yeah. That's amazing. So was that, was that using a similar protocol where they were hooking it up over the muscle where the nerve ran, or did they try to like put it right on top of the course of the nerve as it went down the leg or, or whatever else?

So this one, if I was treating someone, I probably would like to do some of the mapping we described, but in, in this study, for the sake of controlling the variables, making sure everyone had the pads in the same place, we were going pads from the lumbar spine, so the nerve root where the nerve exits the spinal cord down to the bottoms of the feet. So, everyone had the same pad placement and it allowed that direct current to be essentially going longitudinally along the entire length of that peripheral nerve.

Right. Okay, beautiful. Yeah, I mean, that's super exciting if you can start to rehabilitate that. That's huge.

Yeah. So, so we've seen dozens and dozens at least of clinics that are offering neuropathy-specific programs using there. So that's been a really, really exciting avenue. And we hear some on a weekly, daily basis. We hear these amazing transformation stories. So that, that's really exciting. And then to answer your question in terms of research going on now. So we're doing a follow-up study with the same group of providers looking at treatment for radiculopathy symptoms.

So radiculopathy, for the audience, is where there's a nerve that comes out of the back and will wrap around the body. And, you know, it's like shingles would do that, right? And so you end up with pain along that, the course of that, of that nerve, as opposed to one that, you know, goes from your back down your leg or out of your neck down your arm. This would be considered radicular, more around the trunk. Is that what you're referring to as well?

So this, as I understand it, Radicular symptoms would be anything more, more distal or downstream from a more proximal or nerve impingement or injury. So, so here there's some, some sort of irritation at the lumbar spine and then the subsequent pain or numbness down the leg, for example. We, in this case, we would also call that a radicular symptom.

Okay. Okay. Got it. Okay.

And so what we're doing there is looking at, well, going upstream for a moment. If you have a nerve impingement at the lumbar spine, for example, if that nerve activity is decreased for a period of time, you can actually start to have some atrophy, diminished function in that nerve. And over time, if it's not working for long enough, the nerve tissue can even die. So what we're doing here is using this direct current treatment to stimulate nerves along that pathway where the radicular symptoms are. And then measuring similarly EMG nerve conduction velocity testing, doing those similar actual electrical measurements of the nerve to see what's happening there. So that's finished data completion or data collection and is being written up now. We're presenting a poster at the ACSM, American College of Sports Medicine conference, annual conference coming up a little, little later in 2026. So some exciting things there. So we've got, and then we're doing a concussion study looking at autonomic nervous system, actually using the BrainTap NeuroCheck.

Yeah. We love that. Yeah, we use that here all the time. So tell me how you're using the, the Nübi in conjunction with autonomic nervous system training.

So we have a program or a protocol or a technique that we call our Master Reset. It's our version of a vagus nerve or autonomic nervous system stimulation technique. And we have pads at the suboccipital area and the balls of the feet. So we're getting likely some local stimulation in the, in the cervical spine where there's the highest concentration of muscle spindles and is very dense in terms of these sensory receptors, likely getting some direct vagus nerve stimulation, but also getting these electric fields going longitudinally along the body. And we've seen that when we do these various HRV measurements before and after, we've seen at least as much, if not more significant improvements in HRV compared to diaphragmatic breathing or certain vagus nerve, direct vagus nerve stimulation techniques and other things there. So it's been a really exciting avenue and we've seen tremendous outcomes in terms of even severe chronic pain like CRPS patients where there's clearly a sympathetic overdrive hypersensitivity type of scenario.

Yeah.

And then a variety of off-label things that I don't even know if I can talk about on here, but my nervous system is so relevant.

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's, uh, well, let's talk about erectile dysfunction because people that undergo, let's say prostate surgery or, you know, I've had an injury or something like that. It takes blood flow and a functioning nervous system for erectile function, both men and women. Do you have anything going on there?

So still in the, similarly in that anecdotal realm, but we have seen some improvement. It's very interesting that for men, achieving erection requires parasympathetic innervation activation, and then ejaculation is more sympathetic.

Sympathetic, exactly right.

So we have seen ways to help or, or methods that have been effective, and it's— there's sort of two different parts to it. Sometimes one or both is effective for the person we happen to be working with. So one is doing this global autonomic nervous system reset, just as we were talking about there, and that, that sometimes is the thing that makes a difference and allows Batman to achieve an erection, you know, for the first—

Well, it's an interesting point because if people are sympathetically activated, let's say they're stressed or they don't feel safe, right, in a particular situation, they don't feel safe, then erectile function is diminished, right? Because you've got to have an active parasympathetic nervous system in order to allow blood flow to go in. True for men and women, quite honestly. So yeah, so that's really interesting. That's really fascinating.

And then there's also that second category where sometimes it's more local work. There's pelvic floor therapists who are doing this to stimulate, and sometimes it's not necessarily having to use a rectal or, you know, for women, vaginal. Some, you know, they are using electrodes that actually are inserted so you can get to the deep pelvic floor musculature. Sometimes that's necessary. There's also times where through our process find spots in the glutes, which could be the deep lateral rotators underneath or the psoas or the adductors that are super relevant for function of the pelvic floor musculature and working on those sometimes. So sometimes it's more global, sometimes it's more local, sometimes it's both.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I think it's super exciting to think about this technology. What I love about it is the fact that it has a diagnostic as well as a therapeutic capability, right? So when you're talking about the neuropathies, were you, you were talking about using EMG and other things to characterize the status of nerve conduction in those nerves, right? But does the diagnostic element of the device, the NUBI device, is that able to make any diagnostic or find any diagnostic information about a nerve? Or is it limited to just whether a muscle is innervated or not?

Right now, it's dependent on patient feedback. So sometimes we can see them compensating or the various responses the nervous system would make. Most often we're looking for patient-reported hotspots or areas of interest where they tell us, oh, we stimulate that. Oh, that feels like a trigger point. That, that hurts a little more, that sort of thing. Also, in cases like neuropathy or MS, spinal cord injury, different types of neurodegenerative conditions, we're also very interested in areas where they may report numbness, where even though the current's the same, they don't feel it as much or at all in certain areas. So we pay attention to that as well. There are different to your prior question about what we're working on. I mentioned some research. We're also, of course, we see ourselves as the leader, as the gold standard in using direct current and electrical stimulation to optimize the nervous system. So, we are working on ways to actually get measurements from the device as well and attempting to correlate those with physiological phenomenon and status of issues and things like that. So, that's one of the things that we're certainly working on.

Okay, very cool. Very cool.

And in that, and that would sort of be like, I know you use the N-Body, it would be sort of like that because you can measure electrical resistance and impedance, right?

That's right. That's right. Yeah, I know it's, it's really fascinating. I think it's a tool that has many, many, many applications. When you were talking about the concussion piece and then we started talking about the reset, sort of the global reset where we're activating parasympathetic nervous system tone, were you linking those two together? Where concussion, part of concussion therapy is actually activating the parasympathetic nervous system, or was there something else that, that the device is doing vis-à-vis the brain?

There's two parts to that, similar to, to the conversation we had about pelvic floor and erectile dysfunction. There's the global and local. So as, as part of the protocol for that particular study, there's, yes, there's the, that master reset for the global parasympathetic stimulation upregulation effect. There's also local work, a lot of local work on the cervical spine. Spine because we're seeing more and more connections between cervical spine function, afferent input, and overall brain health. And then of course with concussion, there often is an associated whiplash type of injury and different things like that. So in that study, we're not yet— again, this is another area for future research and interest— we're not yet using our device transcranially directly on the brain, using it more for the autonomic nervous system, and then locally more focused on the cervical spine. And there's a couple other interventions that are part of the overall suite of treatment.

Has anybody put it on their skull just to see what happens?

Yes.

Yeah, okay, I knew that was— I knew the answer was there. So what'd they figure out?

So what we know generally and what we believe is happening is at least in part based on research on transcranial Direct Current Stimulation. There is a body of work in this area, and you can essentially use electrical currents to preferentially increase or decrease brain activity in certain areas of the brain. And that is interesting because there's— whatever the, the situation might be, whether it's anxiety and depression, ADHD, whether it's difficulty sleeping, there often is— there often are brain areas, some that are hyperactive and some that are hypo or underactive.

Right.

So, being able to have— being able to change the polarity of the current or the electrode placement to be able to up or downregulate certain areas is a very interesting. And again, to your question, that is certainly one of the things that I'm interested in, one of the ways that I see this going in the years ahead. Of course, there's research to be done for the safety and efficacy and dialing and protocols and all that.

Yeah. No, that's very cool. We use some transcranial magnetic stimulation here for brain work. For anxiety, which is very cool too. It's kind of a cousin to this in a way. So, yeah.

That's one thing actually to mention real quick just from the basic physics. Whenever you have an electric field, you have a magnetic field traveling alongside it. And, whenever you have a magnetic field, you also have electric. So, oftentimes people do these higher-powered PEMF devices where they send in a magnetic field, then they do our device at a similar frequency that actually feels similar. And, that's because they both are causing charges to move. They're just at right angles to each other. But they have very similar effects, a lot of overlap between electricity and magnetism.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, they're inextricably related, right? So, you can't have one without the other essentially.

Yes.

Alright. Well, very, very cool. Anything else you'd like to cover?

Oh, gosh. I think we hit the main points here. As you listening to this can probably tell, I totally agree with Dr. Gladden's position that the number one biggest lever you can pull for health is optimizing your nervous system. It is the control system of the body. And, you know, it's interesting, we work a lot with athletes recovering from injury or people dealing with these various neurodegenerative conditions. And it's so cool to see, just hear these reports of other things that change, whether it's digestion or, you know, reproductive function or affect and psychology. These other, other things change even though those weren't necessarily the intended target because of the nerve, the nature of the nervous system.

1000%. Yeah, 1000%. I tell my clients all the time that all of life comes down to one thing. And they always look at me sideways like, really? One thing? Yeah. I said, yeah, one thing. It's optimizing your nervous system. Right. And that's it. How you think, what you believe, what you think is true, what you think is possible, the stories we tell ourselves, what we're living in reaction to, how we move, how we, how we sense the world. It's all comes down to that. So yeah, it's very cool stuff. Well, Garrett, it's really been a pleasure having you on the show here. Good stuff. I'll have to come down to Austin and check out your location.

Welcome anytime. Thank you, Dr. Gladden too. It's been a, a pleasure. I'm a big fan of your work.

Oh, appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, likewise.

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