Why “Old-School” Methods For Managing Pain Don't Work, & How To Use The NEW Understanding of Cells & Body Electricity To Manage Chronic Pain Better, With Dr. Stephen Hussey

My name is Ben Greenfield and on this episode of the Boundless Life podcast.

Life is all about gaining energy from your environment. That energy is in the form of electrons. We convert it to electrons a lot of different ways. When you harvest that energy, that energy is then stored in structured water. That's what holds the charge of your body. So if you don't have good cellular unfolding because you don't have good ATP production, because you have poor metabolic health, this is a recipe for poor cell voltage. We can directly absorb energy from our environment in the form of grounding. The more you can put your body in an environment that charges it up and gives it electrons, the better you're going to be. Which is why people may change their diet and they get metabolically healthy and now all of a sudden they're making more ATP, their mitochondria are more efficient, and now they're unfolding proteins more, which means more structured water forms in the cell. We get a better cell voltage, we get less chronic pain.

Welcome to the Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist and nutritionist.

And I'm Pat, passionate about helping you.

Discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity and beyond. I have back today with me in the virtual studio very popular podcast guest. He joined me for a two part episode way back in the day. I think you broke the Internets of the cardiovascular health world, Steven, when I interviewed you about your book Understanding the Heart, a crazy show. If you guys want to hear that one, I'll link to it in the show notes for this episode if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com painsensebook that's BenGreenfieldLife.com painsurebook because my guest, Dr. Stephen Hussey has just sent me this book he's put the finishing touches on. I'll hold it up here for those of you watching the video version called Pain Sense and kind of like Understanding the Heart. It's one of those books that defies the status quo about what many people probably think is correct or believe currently about pain, particularly chronic pain, which is of course a huge issue, whether it be a nagging ache or pain from an injury, or whether it be something more pathologic like fibromyalgia or some catch all term like that. So anyways, I read the book. I knew right away I had to get Stephen back on the show. So Stephen, welcome back to the show, man.

Good to see you. Ben, how you doing?

I am, I'm doing fantastic I'm pain free right now. Besides a pretty intense men's tennis doubles match last night, resulting in very, very mild tennis elbow. But, you know, I read your book. I had a lot of water and threw some PEMF and infrared light on there, and it's feeling pretty good. And, you know, it's kind of funny. I think it was yesterday. Last night, there's some point where I heard people, I think it was on a podcast talking about pain, and they discussed how we're all about killing pain and getting rid of pain and masking pain, band aiding pain, taking a pill for pain. But pain is not necessarily a bad thing. It's kind of like a critical signal is what they were trying to get across. Do you agree with that idea that the goal here as we're talking about pain is not necessarily to completely get rid of pain? Oh, and by the way, I remember what they were talking about. They were talking about lepers. They said that people who have leprosy can't feel pain or have dead and nerve endings, and they don't die from leprosy. They typically die from wounds and things that infect them that they would have known about if they'd been able to feel pain.

Exactly, Yeah. I mean, there's nothing there that shouldn't be there. You know, this pain signal that we have, it serves a very important role. You know, evolutionarily, if you can't tell if something's causing you pain, you can't learn to avoid it in the future. And there's actually people that are born, unfortunately, without a pain signal. And these people do not live very long because they have nothing that teaches them that they should avoid something that's painful because they never get that. So they usually die of, like, injuries or compounding injuries over time because they never learned to avoid it. It's. It's kind of strange for us to think about that, that we would ever get to a point where we can't feel pain enough, that we just go back to the same thing causing pain or causing an injury. But that's what happens in these people. So, yeah, it's a very important evolutionary role. And when you learn about the components of pain, the three different components of pain in the brain, you start to see that a bit more, too.

So would you say then, based on. I know you have a whole chapter about this in the book called the Purpose of Pain, the issue with pain is when it becomes chronic. Is that kind of your argument?

Right. So, yeah, the reason that we think of pain as a bad Thing is, because we have this epidemic of chronic pain, this almost overstimulation of a pain signal, or like I talk about in the book, the brain turning on a pain response without any kind of pain signal from the body and getting into that state, which has to do with mental health and things like that. So, yeah, it's when this, I guess, pain signal has gone awry and is chronically stimulated, and it's not purposeful at that point anymore.

I think what you just said reminds me, I believe, of the back pain guy. Maybe it's Stu McGill. I think he's the guy who argues that sometimes you'll have back pain, but it's not really an issue that any longer exists in your back, even though that's maybe where it started in the first place, and now a lot of it is in your head. He might not be the guy who said that, but there's a back pain expert out there you might know better than me, who kind of makes that argument that a lot of back pain, for example, is in your head.

Yeah, well, I don't know who you're specifically talking about. It could be Perry Nicholson. I'm not sure. But yeah. I mean, I tell my patients all the time because they want the pain to go away. Obviously, that's the goal of when I'm treating them, but it's not always immediate. But they want us to go away right now because they have to go to work and things like that. So they want to take the medications or they want, you know, if they have, like a bulging or herniated disc, they want to take the steroid or the pain injection. And I'm telling all the time that, yes, those things are fine in the short term if you have that much pain and you need to get rid of it. But when you dull a pain signal like that, pain signal is your body's way of saying, hey, something's wrong. Don't move this way. Don't do that, don't do this. And if you dull that pain signal and you move every which way you want, well, guess what? That drug or injection is going to wear off one day. And now it may be worse because you never got the feedback of your body saying, don't do this. So it's kind of like this. You have to find this Goldilocks thing where you're kind of trying to figure out, okay, so how much pain can I tolerate? So I get the signal, but I also want to be able to do my life and do my job with this pain. And then what Do I do long term to get the pain to go away forever?

Yeah, but what I'm asking more specifically is I don't really think you'd call it ghost pain, but basically you feel pain in the area, but the area doesn't have any issues with it anymore. You know what I'm saying?

Well, people can have phantom pain right, where there's a limb that's been amputated and they still have pain in that limb. And that's because the pain signal is generated in the brain. It's not stimulated in the limb or in the extremity. So, yeah, pain comes from the brain. I mean, that's a common saying among people who treat pain, that pain is in the brain. And that's very accurate, because where the physical damage is on the body, that's not what's creating a pain signal. That's their sensory nerves that are picking up that damage and sending a signal to the brain, alerting the brain, hey, something's wrong. And the brain is what sends the pain signal back down and says, hey, pay attention to this area. Does that make sense?

Yeah, kind of. But what would you do? Not that I want to jump straight into prescriptive advice here, but let's say you're a practitioner, and I know that you have a medical practice. You practice chiropractic medicine. You have a host of other medical modalities that you use. Let's say I come to you and my knee hurts, whether it be an ultrasound or MRI or palpation or anything else, you kind of have a hunch that there's nothing really wrong with my knee as far as any damage, chronic inflammation, et cetera. But I'm still feeling pain there. If you were to address it from the brain standpoint, what would you do?

Well, you could try and rewire the brain, but that's going to be more relevant for somebody who has developed what's called cognitive pain or cognitive aspects of their pain. And where the prefrontal cortex and the cognitive centers of the brain are literally too wired to or too engaged in the emotional centers and the sensory pain centers of the brain. And so it's almost like those cognitive centers have learned to initiate that pain response that you would get if you get damaged to a tissue somewhere. But instead it's happening because you're cognitively turning it on. And there's actually studies that show that if you get an injury like, and while that injury is healing, how much you worry about that pain while it's healing, and whether or not it's going to change your life or the injury, how much the injury is going to change your life, and how much the worry the cognitive center of the brain communicate to the emotional and the sensory pain centers in the brain dictates whether or not that pain will become chronic once the injury is healed and there's literally no more damage there anymore. Your cognitive system, if you've wired them together and they're communicating too much, then you can get that kind of reverse action of pain of a pain signal in the body, and then you're having a pain sensation with no physical damage whatsoever. But the other part of it is that physical damage in an area like knee degeneration or spinal degeneration. They've done studies where they look at people with no pain whatsoever, and they just do MRIs on their low back or something like that, and about 50% of them had severe degeneration, but they had no pain. So just because there's degeneration somewhere doesn't mean there's going to be a pain signal. But there may be no degeneration somewhere and you could still get a pain signal. And that's because of this very flexible nature of how a pain signal is initiated in the brain.

Yeah, I have moderate degeneration L5s1. And unless I do really heavy deadlifting with poor form or without warming up or something like a really heavy kettlebell swing. Again, with poor form without warming up, I have pretty much no pain. But I also do a lot in terms of moving that joint through range of motion, activating the glutes, doing traction exercises. And that's kind of my approach with a lot of pain is I try to send my brain a message that it's okay to move a joint through a specific range of motion. And sometimes that requires relaxing it with things like PEMF or hot, cold, or even electrical stimulation, which can be used to kind of remap the area and downregulate pain. But the old school rest, ice, compression, elevation just doesn't seem to work compared to, paradoxically like actively moving a painful area through a range of motion as you retrain, and correct me if I'm wrong here, send a message to the brain that returning to that range of motion is safe.

Exactly. Yeah. So when you look at, like if I get, if I cut my skin or I get some degeneration or any sort of stimulus that can cause a chemical change in a tissue. And when I say chemical change, I really mean like a drop in voltage in that tissue, like a pathologic drop in voltage in that tissue, that's the signal that the sensory nerves pick up on that send it to the brain. And the brain says, okay, something's wrong here. And that signal can be created by physical damage. Like you cut your skin, it could be temperature, it could be a lot of different things that can create that chemical change. And so if you're getting a pain signal, there's been a chemical change in the spot where you're getting a pain, where you're feeling pain, right? So in your low back, let's say you do heavy squats or something like that. And that spot, that's a little bit more vulnerable because of degeneration, it has a chemical change and you feel pain a while, but then you do things like you mentioned all those different modalities, whether it's motion, whether it's the PEMF or all that stuff that helps re energize or re up the voltage of that tissue. And that chemical change stops happening and the signal stops getting sent. And the brain says, okay, we don't need to draw attention to that area anymore. So again, it's not like a degeneration process that that's happening that's causing a pain signal. It's if that degeneration process is causing a chemical change and you can put your body in an environment that despite that degener, takes away that chemical change.

Okay, you talk about the voltage of a cell, and that makes really good sense, your explanation, by the way, and thanks for that. You mentioned the voltage of the cell. That makes me think about something you talk about in the book that I think might serve as a good precursor for people to understand where electricity and voltage fits into the picture here. Because it's really important to understand the premise of your book, in my opinion. And that's the cell and what it looks like and how it operates and whether or not we really know what a cell looks like and how it operates. And you seem to kind of question our current understanding of a cell in the book.

Yeah, I don't think we necessarily understand. So I guess people, I mean, even like 8th grade biology, you learn this little picture of a cell, and there's interplastic reticulum in there, and there's a nucleus and. And there's lysosomes and different things in there, ribosomes that you all learn, you learn these things. And I would call that a hyper reality, something that is more real than what's actually real, something that humans have kind of made up. So an example of that I always give is The Weather Channel. Like, you see the green blobs floating across the screen and you're like, oh, it's raining there. But if you go outside, that's real. Is it really raining or not? The green blob is a hyperreality. And I think that the cell, the picture image we have of a cell is the same thing. And the reason why is because there's a fascinating book. And I say the name of it in the book, but I think it's called the Living Cell. I can't remember. It's by Harold Hillman. But he basically goes after this process of how we've studied cells. And it makes complete sense to me. He says that if you take a cell out of its natural tissue and you then. Which is taking it out of its natural environment, and then you grind it up in a blender so you can get cross sections of it, and then you put antibiotics on it so you can purify it. And then you freeze it and you stain it on a slide and you shine unnatural light on it. And then you say, okay, we're going to study this and we're going to understand how a cell works when we do that. That's very similar to saying, I want to understand how my right big toe works, so I'm going to cut it off, put it in a blender, freeze it, stain it, and then look at it under a microscope. And I'm going to understand how my big toe works. And that doesn't make sense. And so I guess the line of thinking is, you know, if we're going to study something, we have to be very careful to make sure that the thing that we want to. We're not. The process of studying is not changing the thing that we want to study. Which, if you go to the end of that argument, you realize that if I just wanted to sit in the woods and observe things, I couldn't do that without changing the woods. Like, my very presence in the woods is changing how the environment's working there. So we have to question that and understand things from that perspective, that this is a very unnatural way of trying to understand our physiology. We're trying to reduce it down to these things. And in Hillman's book, he very meticulously goes through, you know, all the different things we think exist in cells and how the process of preparing cells for a study under electron microscopy result in artifacts that we have called different cell structures. And so the only. He makes the argument that the only thing we really know exist in cells are the things we can see looking at them from light microscopy, where we don't do that process, we just look at cells under a microscope. And the things that we can see there are a nucleus and mitochondria and cytoplasm and a singular cell membrane. And that's pretty much all we really know exists in a cell.

Okay. So in summary, the current way that cells are usually analyzed is by preparing them in the way that you describe the kind of, you know, at least separates them from their natural function in the human body. And then they're subjected to high intensity energy in the form of an electron beam. And what this guy who wrote the Living Cell is proposing that using a more natural visualization method like light microscopy, which allows you to visualize the cell in a more native or natural environment with less damage to it, allows us to actually visualize the components of a cell that we know exist in their more natural environment.

Yeah.

Okay, so what does that have to do with pain?

Yeah, so, you know, in. In that context, we have to. Then we need a. You know, because we've kind of developed a theory of cell function based on all these different things that we think are in there that we really don't know are in there. The endoplasmic reticulum, the Golgi apparatus, all these different things. And so we really need an understanding of how cells can function without those things, because we've kind of made up roles for those things, trying to explain how we. What we see in cell function. But we have to kind of step back and look at it. And I think the only. I think that modern science has gotten way too reductionist and we're trying to get down to smaller and smaller. I think we understand when really we should be stepping back and observing things as a whole. And like, that's the really only way we're going to understand, like, how things operate is understanding how they interact with other living things as a whole. And so we need a model of understanding cellular function based on just the things we know are there, which we can see through light microscopy and what we can see from looking at just whole cells on a slide. And Gilbert Ling, who's a researcher.

Oh, yeah, I've heard of him. Is it the sodium potassium pump thing? Is that what you're going to get into? Oh, yeah. This is intriguing. I've talked about it maybe once on the podcast. I would love for you to get into this.

Yeah, I was reading his work and he's got four, four or five books, I think, which are hard to get through there's a lot of mathematical equations, but he gives us a theory of or a theory of self function that uses just those things or would require just those things. And so basically, what he challenges his first, I guess his initial thing that he started doing that made him question all this stuff was that he started doing calculations on how much, based on how many mitochondria were in a cell, how much ATP could be produced, and then how much ATP a sodium potassium pump would need to maintain the distribution of ions, the sodium and potassium, and maintain the cellular voltage. And no matter how he tried to do it, the calculations did not add up. He's like, there's no way that our mitochondria can make enough ATP to just power the sodium potassium punch, much less do all the other things the ATP is supposed to do. So the first thing that Gilbert Lang saw in his research was that he was calculating how much ATP it would take to power a cell. And he realized that no matter how he did the calculations, that there's no way that the amount of ATP in a cell could, or the amount of mitochondria in a cell could produce the ATP necessary even just to run the sodium potassium pumps and maintain that ion distribution of sodium potassium in and out of the cell.

Right. Which, by the way, when I took college biology, I think high school biology also, that was the prevailing theory, this sodium potassium pump was how the cells actually maintained an electrical charge.

Yeah. And it's like you're taught, like, the ATP binds to it, and that pumps so many sodiums out of the cell and so many potassiums into the cell. And that when we have an action potential, that it does it differently. You know, it pumps things out so we get this change in voltage. But in reality, Gilbert Lang is saying, based on his calculations, that that's impossible to make enough ATP to do that, much less do all the other things that ATP is required for inside a cell. And so he makes the argument that ATP is not the energy currency of the cell. And then it has a very specific and important role. And we do need ATP, but it's not the energy currency that powers everything. And so then you have to learn that, I mean, the cytoplasm is water, right? It's largely water.

And for people who may not remember high school or college biology, what's the cytoplasm?

It's the fluid in the cells, basically, like the. The medium through which cellular physiology happens, you know, the fluid in there. But it turns out that a lot of it's not actually a fluid. It's actually in this gel like state, which is structured water, which many scientists, including Gilbert Lang, have come across in their research over the last 80 to 100 years. So it's got a lot of different names because lots of different scientists came across at different times and called the different things. But it's basically this idea that water can exist in a fourth phase, which is called structured water, easy water. And it's not ice water or steam, it's more like a gel. So you can think like the consistency of raw egg white, which is why I feel like a gel. If I poke my skin, it gives and it bounces right back, you know, just like Jello or something like that. So most of the water in my cells should be in this gel like state. And so how do we maintain that gel like state? And the what, what water needs to become structured is, is it needs surface area, a hydrophilic surface area, hydrophilic surface, water loving surface. It needs water, the raw material, and it needs energy, some form of radiant energy or various forms of energy, which basically means electrons. And so when we look at what the cells are, what mitochondria are doing, you know, they're passing these electrons down an electron transport chain and pushing hydrogens down the other side. And the hydrogens are going into Complex 5 and they're making ATP. And ATP's main job in the cell is to unfold proteins. Because when you unfold proteins, instead of having like, you know, like let's say you have a ball of tinfoil wrapped up like this, it's very small surface area, it's just a ball. But if you open up that tin foil, you have so much more surface area. And that's what ATP does, is it creates more surface area of cellular proteins of microtubecular lattice. And there's research that shows that water in the cell is no more than 0.5nm away from cellular proteins as long as they're unfolded. And so ATP's job is to unfold the proteins so that water can then structure itself and become this gel. And structured water is very electronegatively charged, which is what gives the cell its negative charge voltage. And then people who are more astute and know more about cellular physiology are probably going to be like, well, what about an action potential? Like how does the cellular voltage change? And Dr. Gerald Pollack explains that very nicely in his book Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life. And that we get phase transitions, and a phase transition is when we get some sort of stimulus that signals for the cell the structured water to become liquid, temporarily losing cellular voltage. We get a depolarization of a cell. And guess what happens when that happens? The distribution of ions goes away, and then we get a repolarization, which is the structured water forming again. It's this phase transition that happens pretty instantaneously and that drives. In Dr. Pollock's book, he talks about how that drives nerve signaling and muscle contraction and different things in the body. So that's a explanation of how cellular physiology works using just the things we know are there. For sure we know are there. Just looking at a cell from light microscopy.

So the excitation signal for that process to occur that you mentioned, what would the actual signal be?

So in Dr. Pollock's book, cells, Gels and Engines of Life, he lists them and it's everything from a change in ph, a change in temperature, a mechanical stimulus can do it. Lots of different things. There's a whole list in his book that have been shown to initiate that phase transition to happen.

Okay, interesting. Electricity, light, movement. Some of the stuff I've already alluded to that I used to manage. Pain. And we'll get there in more detail, I'm sure, as we go along here. But this idea, then, behind the old school notion of the sodium potassium pump and the new school understanding of the cytoplasm containing a large amount of structured water that must be excited in some manner in order for proper protein unfolding to take place, or. Well, actually, it's a protein folding that needs the signal. What does that have to do with pain?

Good question. It leads us back to what we're talking about. Right. But yeah, so earlier I was talking about how a sensory pain signal is started when we get damage or a drop in cell voltage, a chemical change in the tissue of a bunch of different cells. And so when these cells hold that voltage, they can have a very controlled loss of voltage that will give us an action potential. And that's physiology. Whereas if you get a forced loss of voltage because of physical damage or temperature or a ph change or something like that in the tissue, then that's pathology. And so it's not the cell choosing to do that temporarily. It's happening because of some external force acting on it. And so that chemical change in the tissue is not okay, and it stays around too long. And then the sensory nerves pick up that signal, tell the brain, hey, something's wrong here. The brain says, okay, pay attention to this area. Cause a pain signal. So it's all about maintaining that cellular voltage. So, you know, let's Say someone has chronic knee pain and they attribute it to an old knee injury. Like maybe they tore their sail and they had surgery or something like that.

Yeah, or like me, they had an IT band issue and decided to race an ironman triathlon on it.

Yeah, right, with the scar tissue. Yeah. And so let's say they have that. And so now they've developed scar tissue which, you know, scar tissue is dehydrated tissue, which we can talk about fascia and structured water on fascia too, but it's less likely to hold a charge in that area. So now it's more prone to chemical changes from our environment, which if you think about a human's modern day environment, which I'm sure we'll get into, it's not very conducive to us helping us hold this charge in cells. And so that's why we're predisposed to this pain. But if you have an injury to that area, that makes it even more predisposed because you've got scar tissue, you have past trauma to that area. So it's just more likely to reach the point where the voltage has dropped enough that the chemical change happens and it sends the pain signal. And now you've got this chronic sensory pain signaling, which is one form of, one type of chronic pain that can happen is this chronic sensory pain signaling. It's kind of. And that's where people talk about, you know, central sensitization where like the brain almost learns to keep the pain signal on because it's always having to do it, almost wires itself to keep it doing it, you know, and that's something you have to rewire long term. But, but yeah, so it's all, it all comes down to the tissue and how healthy the tissue is, which we already talked about with degeneration and everything. It's maintaining that voltage, preventing that chemical change from happening.

I think in the book you mention the idea of zeta potential. That's how this negative charge is actually described. Is that what it's called, zeta potential?

Well, that's one place in the body where one way we describe a negative charge around certain cells, like in the bloodstream or in the lymphatic system. Zeta potential is the term given to the net negative charge of structured water around the red blood cell or lipoprotein in the blood or in the lymphatic system. Because anywhere there's actually liquid water in the body, because there's still liquid water, like the blood, cerebral spinal fluid, lymphatic fluid, then that water in there can then structure itself onto biological surfaces, because they're all biological surfaces are water loving. And so that zeta potential can form, well, that negative charge or structured water can form. And when they measure that negative charge, they've called it zeta potential. And so it could be an indication like if you have good zeta potential on your red blood cells and things which you can get a sense of like doing live blood analysis or measuring erythrocyte sedimentation rate, things like that.

This would be to look at like erythrocyte sedimentation rate, live blood cell analysis. Those would actually be looking at the amount of say red blood cell clumping or reduce or increase the viscosity.

Right? Because if, if you've got good negative charge around two red blood cells, like charges don't like each other, so they repel. Right? But if you've lost that negative charge because you have low zeta potential, then they can clump together, they can coagulate. And so the, the amount of zeta potential you have in the bloodstream is an indication of how, how well charged your body is, how good your environment is, has been doing at keeping your body charged.

What are some ways that you could actually improve the zeta potential?

The literature has shown directly that grounding is one way. Which makes sense because, well, I mean, it makes sense to me in my head, but you know, like explaining it to people. Life is all about gaining energy from your environment. That energy is in the form of electrons. Well, we convert it to electrons in a lot of different ways. And so when you harvest that energy, that energy is then stored in structured water. That's what holds the charge of your body. So if you don't have good cellular unfolding because you don't have good ATP production because you have poor metabolic health, this is a recipe for poor cell voltage. But you can also absorb energy from your environment in ways that are not food. And we can directly absorb energy from our environment in the form of grounding because the earth is a huge store of electrons. And, and the laws of electrostatics tell us that two conductive surfaces next to each other, the area of higher energy will always flow into the area of lower energy. And I'm never going to have enough electrons to overpower the earth, so it's always going to flow into me those electrons directly. And so that has been shown experimentally to increase zeta potential, increase that net negative charge around the blood cells, increasing our body charge. It's also been shown to be incredibly anti inflammatory, which when I think of inflammation, I'm basically thinking low Body charge. We use these terms like oxidative stress and things like that. Oxidative stress means there's too many things that require an extra electron that don't have them. Well, guess what? We can get electrons in many different ways, not just antioxidants. We can get it directly from grounding. And so when there's experiments that show when you ground, the inflammation in the body drops significantly because we're increasing the charge, we're building the structured water. So that's one way.

Okay. Reduction, meaning when we reduce something, we'd add an electron to it. Oxidation, we'd be removing an electron. Therefore restoration of electrons via basically sucking them up from the skin by contact with the planet, or even the use of say, like a grounding sheet or pillow or mat would allow for restoration of that zeta potential by introduction of these new ions into the body.

Exactly. I'm standing on a grounded mat right now.

Cool. I was, but right now I'm walking on a treadmill. I have one right beside me here on my desk. Sleep on a grounding sheet. I have grounded pillows, Go outside barefoot. I have grounding shoes. And when I read that book, Earthing, I think it's called, I was shocked at the number, largely anecdotal, not large scale, human clinical studies on reduction of chronic pain from that one change alone.

Yeah, because again, you're increasing the charge in the body, which in areas that are susceptible now, they have more charge to hold. They're less likely to get that chemical change happening, sending a pain signal to the brain, making the brain sending the pain signal down. So the more you can put your body in an environment that charges it up and gives it electrons, the better you're going to be. Which is why people may change their diet and they get metabolically healthy and now all of a sudden they're making more ATP, their mitochondria are more efficient, and now they're unfolding proteins more, which means more structured water forms in the cell. We get a better cell voltage, we get less chronic pain.

And also, why flying in an airplane wearing big built up rubber soled shoes, never going outside, traveling in a vehicle with rubber tires, and living in a home without a whole lot of grounding or surface concrete exposure on the first level of the home is not going to do any favors for you if you're trying to deal with chronic pain.

Exactly. And the artificial light, living out of sunlight, things like that. Because sunlight is probably the original way that life was gaining energy and electrons from its environment, which is fascinating.

Okay. And by by the way, real, real quick, we're moving on from grounding and earthing. And now, now you're explaining another way we could increase the edit potential. Is that what you're doing?

Yes, yeah. Which is through direct sunlight exposure because you know, the sun is, there's no mass to, to the energy and, and sunlight. So we have to convert it to something that has some sort of a mass, which means electrons basically. And that's what we have, we have mechanisms that do that in our body. One of them is DHA, the molecule. DHA, which is an omega 3 fatty acid you find a lot in seafood and grass fed meats and stuff. Which is why this is one reason why animal soup foods are so essential. Because the DHA in the skin and everywhere but on the skin where it receives light has this PI electron cloud, which basically means this cloud of electrons around it. And when light hits it, it excites it and turns it into a streaming, streaming electricity. So electrons are generated and transferred into the body that travel through our hydrated ion or hydrated fascia collagen that go everywhere into the body, including all the way down to the level of the DNA and cells. And so that's one way is that direct sunlight exposure can do that.

You know, by the way, that'd be interesting to see if there's any evidence that people living in coastal areas with high seafood intake, high DHA intake, relatively large amounts of sun exposure, not to mention probably more time and surface with the ocean, the beach and the ground would have lower levels of chronic pain. That's very interesting. I mean obviously you could replicate that at home with high intake of omega 3 fatty acids, Mediterranean fast seafood and grounding earthy and sunlight. But it would be advantageous, I would think, to live in a coastal area.

Yeah, definitely. Which, I mean it makes sense. Historically, lots of civilizations were either around a coastal area or at least a river. So they had this access to water bound food, fish, things like that. And life started at the equator. That's where all the sun was. And it wasn't until humans found different ways of achieving these things that they can move off into the colder areas. But yeah, and then the second thing is melanin in the skin, which everybody attributes to what gives us our skin tone, how dark we are or how light we are. But it's way more than that. Melanin is actually concentrated in many different areas in the body. It's in the eye, it's in the, the nervous system, it's almost everywhere. But melanin has These unique properties. And there's fascinating papers on melanin and its ability to absorb many different forms of energy, including sound, vibration, light, electromagnetic fields, all these different forms of energy. It absorbs them and it uses that energy to take water and dissociate it, meaning it makes water into molecular hydrogen. Oxygen and electrons are released in that process. Four electrons every time that happens.

That's right. I was going to say four electrons to be precise. Free energy. Right. Sunlight plus melanin rich compounds in the blood results in electron uptake, which would then, as you've already noted, improve the electrical potential of the body.

Exactly, yeah. So we literally take sunlight and we create electrons from it. We have to. It's the photoelectric effect. That's Einstein. But our bodies do it. And then we can conduct electrons from the earth. We can optimize our metabolism. You can, using electrons and electron transport chain. That's what all these electrons are used to do is to unfold proteins with ATP to build structured water, maintain the body. It's like structured water, like our batteries that we're charging up. That's what it is. And so life is all about harvesting energy from the environment and using that energy, storing it in structured water to basically, you know, create order. That is life while life is alive.

Stephen, beyond DHA rich compounds, which obviously interact with sunlight in a very beneficial manner, what do you think about the idea of compounds that are rich in melanin, like substances such as shilajit, photocyanins from algae, methylene blue, et cetera, in correlation with red light or sunlight as a way to improve the body's electrical potential?

I don't know, I'm not familiar with any research on it, but it would make complete sense to me that we intake those things our body utilizes, incorporates them into us. I mean, I know methylene blue, very potent antioxidant, anti inflammatory. Right. What is that doing? It's helping us charge the body. That's what that means in many different ways. One is providing electrons for things, but it's also doing things to the mitochondria that help the mitochondria again unfold. Proteins build up and create more structured water in the cell. And yeah, I'm not sure if, like those melanin rich compounds, you would ingest that and then incorporate that melanin into you, but I wouldn't be surprised if you did. Just like you eat other things and it does. I just, I. I don't know. But that would make sense. Yeah.

Well, I'm just a case study I do it on a. Almost every day. I'll have either shilajit methylene blue or algae in the form of spirulina or chlorella. And then I've got some form of red light exposure along with grounding and earthing and pemf and dude, I turn 43 tomorrow and I'm crushing it on the tennis courts, the weights, keeping up with my 16 year olds, playing with young guys in men's league and literally feel stronger and fitter and faster than I did when I was 18 years old. And I think a big part of it is my electric potential.

Yeah, you maintain that charge, your body is going to maintain life and your physiology, but it's all about maintaining the charge. And then we've talked about all these things that maintain it. You look at the modern way of life, which you alluded to, it's just draining of that charge.

Yeah. Now, what about a different form of electricity that I believe occurs or is triggered upon compression? You had mentioned earlier the idea of movement. I mentioned it too, as a somewhat paradoxical way to manage pain.

Right.

Like move the painful area. But what's going on with movement and electricity? Is there a link there?

Yeah. So this has to do with collagen. And so, you know, we think of fascia and the collagen is our connective tissue and it's just kind of holding us together. And we, at least I was taught about it in school and stuff, that it was just kind of this thing that kind of connected organs and tissues and things together and held us together. But it's actually this intricate web that goes all the way down. It penetrates the cell walls and goes into the. All the way into the nucleus of the cell. So it's everywhere. And so when you. This, this collagen. The collagen is a triple helix and it usually comes together in these seven triple helixes, you know, and that's a collagen fiber. And collagen is a protein that's a hydrophilic surface. So it has water on it. And there's this fascinating video called Strolling under the Skin by one researcher where they went into live fascia.

Oh, yeah, I've seen this one. It's so cool. I'll link to it the show notes, by the way.

Yeah, yeah, they're like, they're like, you know, change. They're moving the person and the person's. Like the fascia is like changing. Looks like the stairs in Harry Potter, you know, like they change like this. Like it's just recombining but it's also super hydrated with water and the structured water. And so this structured water, if people are familiar with like the myelin sheath on a nerve and it's. It's said to what's create the fast signal from nerve, it creates the speed of that signal. It's the same thing that structured water does for fascia. And this fascia has been shown to be a semiconductor, just like a copper wire in the wall. Like, it conducts electricity and protons proticity. And so when it's hydrated, when it's not hydrated, it can't really do that that well. And it also turns out that when you, when you stretch or compress a tissue that is full of structured water, the compression of it or the stretch of it actually creates a charge separation of that of the structured water. So we get a positive and negative next, the charge separation, and a positive and a negative next to each other. I mean, structured water does that in and of itself when it forms, but when you compress it like that, it does it even more so. And that charge separation is a battery, which batteries, we know, hold energy and create energy. And so when you trade that charge separation, it creates the streaming potential of electricity. And that electricity is then conveyed or communicated directly through this hydrated collagen fascia that we have. And then it goes throughout the body, everywhere. And so things like moving your body, like gentle stretching, like yoga, or even just exercise, like when you do that, when you provide a little strain on the tissue, you get this piezoelectric effect. Or if you're just laying on a table and someone's massaging you, they're compressing your tissue, you're getting a piezoelectric effect. You're creating that energy in that way. And it's all based on how much piezoelectric effect you'll get is based on how much charge is there in the first place. So you've got to put your body environment that stays charged, and then you do this extra thing to it. It's almost like this kinetic energy that's created.

Yeah, that's fascinating. Wow. By the way, the hydration portion of collagen, it sounds to me like you're not saying you got to go buy a structured water filter or drink structured water, but that via grounding, earthing, red light exposure, to a certain extent, movement may assist with this as well. And adequate hydration, your body generates its own structured water.

Yeah, well, we need the raw material, so you got to stay hydrated. Right. But hydration is not just about drinking enough water. It's also about good metabolic health, which has to do with good diet and circadian rhythm. But when you have good metabolic health, people think that since we thought that ATP was the energy currency of the cell, they were like, oh, the most important thing that mitochondria does is make ATP, but it also makes free radicals, which are signaling molecules, and it makes metabolic water. And this metabolic water is the perfect deuterium depleted energetic water. It's structured water. And so when we have good metabolism, we're also hydrating our cells by making water that can then structure itself onto those proteins in the cell. So yeah, and then you drink enough water, you drink enough minerals. Minerals are necessary for the structured water. They make it more likely to form like electrolytes, things like that. And then, yes, you do things to your body that give it the radiant energy to structure itself, because the water needs to hold that energy to hold that structured water property on the proteins in the fascia. So yes, that's the grounding, that's the movement, that's the infrared and red light, all those different things, the mitigating emf, because that's been shown to break down structured water by 20%. And Dr. Pollock's lab, a wireless router, showed that. So all those different things, putting your body in an environment that allows that charge to be maintained.

You're definitely speaking my language because I often in lectures I've said, hey, your body is a battery. How do you keep the battery charged? The earth, the sun, water, minerals, and avoiding xx, exposure to non native EMF and disconnection from the planet. And I mean, there's so much in there that has to do with, with, as you've outlined, the integrity of collagen and therefore pain or even susceptibility to injury. It's kind of like so conceptually easy, but you wish you could get more people to do that instead of ibuprofen. Now what about heat? Where would heat fit in? Is there a way that heat is actually acting on these mechanisms that you've described? Something like a sauna, heating pad, heating back belt, et cetera. It seems to have an effect on pain. But is it interacting with some of these mechanisms that you've described?

Yeah, so I mean, well, infrared heat would be the best, which I guess all heat is infrared. I don't know. There's like an infrared light bulb, like incandescent bulbs I have. They release heat because they're releasing infrared, right? Infrared sauna is releasing heat because it's Infrared, and that's the heat we feel from the sun is infrared light. And in Dr. Pollock's lab, university of Washington, he's found that the far infrared wavelength of infrared is the most structuring to water. It will make the most structuring structured water of any wavelength of light. All the wavelengths of light will generally do it. But in far infrared was the best. So then near infrared, then red, like all these ones coming down from that, they're also very good at it. So all of them will be beneficial. And I think that that's most of the effect that we see with heat. Whether it's infrared, it's directly forming structured water. But also I think just heating a tissue, you're increasing the metabolism momentarily, which making the mitochondria produce more metabolic water. We're creating hydration in the tissue. And then when you get to the point of all the red light studies on helping with scar tissue and heal tissue with fascia, I think a lot of the studies kind of touted the benefits up to we're increasing mitochondrial function, which they very well are. But also when you break down, like scar tissue is dehydrated fascia, meaning it's. It's so tightly packed together that structured water can't really form that well on the fascia. And so when you break up the scar tissue in some way and then you put heat on it in the form of a red light or. Well, not a red light, but infrared light, but then you put heat on it or use a red light, that's actually creating structured water. So that's really important for people who are doing like body work and stuff, or like Graston therapies and all these things that break up scar tissue, like use infrared light, infrared sauna, red light therapy, that type of stuff that will help structure the water afterwards so that it doesn't go back to scar tissue that's tightly bound, it becomes hydrated tissue again.

Yeah. So if you have access to a red light bed or infrared sauna, red light panel, post massage or post foam rolling, it'd be a very good idea. I like how you explain in the book, Steven, how the sweating process stimulated by heat, preferably some form of infrared heat as you've described, allows for a changing of the water in such a manner that toxins are released. And you explain, and I'll let you give a little bit more detail here about how these toxins contribute to inflammation and pain and where they come from. So can you draw a corollary there between toxins, endotoxins pain and the heat sweating effects. Importance on reducing that load.

Yeah. So when we look at toxins, most of them are things that create damage in the body, to tissues in the body. And they do that by breaking down structured water. The reason they can break down structured water is because they're oxidants. Right. So they're stealing charge, they're stealing electrons from things. And the perfect place to steal electrons from is a store of negative charge, which is structured water. So you break down the structured water and that breaks down enough, you can cause damage to tissues, most notably the lining of the artery, which I like to talk about. But lots of different toxins will do that. Heavy metals, plastics, endotoxins, like you mentioned, which comes from poor dental health, root canals, wisdom teeth pulled.

Huge one, by the way. A lot of people don't think about oral care and the link between that inflammation and pain.

Yeah, or leaky gut. You can get endotoxic bacteria leaking into the bloodstream from leaky gut or damaged gut things.

Yep. And those are lipopolysaccharides, by the way. The same lipopolysaccharides you also find in impure peptides, which a ton of people are using now. You can get a huge. And that happened to me. I got a peptide. It came with a laboratory certificate of analysis. I was, all right, this must be good. It was one of those ones that was sold for research purposes only. Did the injection. Massive pain for 24 hours, antiseptic like response. So you need to do your research and be careful, folks. Even peptides can cause this lipopolysaccharide, endotoxin and paradoxical pain response to injecting something you may have been doing to manage pain.

Yeah, exactly. So your body goes to attack those lipopolysaccharides, which it should do. That's good. But when it does that, it releases these endotoxins, which are incredibly inflammatory, and then your liver has to deal with them. So they're causing damage to areas in the body. But then your liver also could be stressed because it's having to deal with them if you can't stop the stimulus of them. And so, yeah, so all these different toxins can break down the structured water. And if they. Let's say your body's doing physiology. Right. We talked about how it's a phase transition of breaking down structured water and then coming back to structured water. Well, when that breaks down like that, if there's toxins around in our body, they can sometimes get caught up in the cell into that structured water. And there's a. There's a really good image. I wish people could see it here of. Because, like, when you. When your structured water forms in your cells, it's not like the whole cell is structured water. There's still these little pathways of liquid water, which is how metabolites can travel through and everything. And there's these little pockets, pockets of those things. And so sometimes those toxins can get stuck in because the structured water is a gel. And one of the properties of structured water is that it's impenetrable. Nothing can really penetrate it besides small hydrated ions. And here's the cutoff. That's the kicker. The cutoff is that sodium cannot penetrate it and potassium can, which is the exact distribution we see in a cell. You know, the sodium's outside, more concentrated outside, and the potassium is more concentrated inside because structured water is creating that solute distribution, not a sodium potassium pump. But since it's impenetrable, when we get structured water formation in certain areas and there's liquid water streams in other areas, the toxins can get stuck, right? And then they can't penetrate, so they can't get out. And so, like I said, Dr. Pollack listed this whole list of things that can cause a phase transition, and one of them is heat, right? So if you heat your body and you activate that mechanism, it's almost like you're melting structured water, so to speak. And then when you melt it like that, you can release the toxins. And so we don't want to, like, melt them too much. That's why getting overheated is a problem. And you can go into shock if you get too hot and things like that, but you heat them enough that it kind of dissolves the structured water a little bit, we release some toxins, and you sweat it right out of your skin. That's the benefit, because when you're. When you're hot, you start sweating. And the liver doesn't have to deal with it now. It just goes right out of the skin. And then if you do that with infrared light, if you heat your body with infrared light, then when you cool down, you've just exposed yourself to so much infrared light that when you cool down and the structured water becomes structured again, there's so much more structured water because you just energize that water with structured. With infrared light. So that's this mechanism of how. Why sauna is so useful at detoxification. And there's studies mainly out of Germany, that show that sweating under infrared light, whether it's a sauna, but ideally outside in the sun too, would be helpful. You release way more toxins than you do if you just sweat under, like in a gym under artificial light.

Yeah. And you've talked so far about exposing the body to infrared light, but it's my understanding that the mitochondria themselves can produce kind of like an ultra weak, super low biophotonic emission of light, and they can almost kind of like engage in some of their own restructuring via light produced by the cells themselves. Is that correct?

Exactly, yeah. So, like, we have all these mechanisms in us that allow us to sustain ourselves if we put ourselves in the right environment to allow those internal mechanisms to keep sustaining us. And so, yeah, there's fascinating research done about this, a lot of it. Roland von Wick is one scientist who put it together very well in a book about this ultra weak biophoton emission. So one of the other things that we are told in 8th grade physiology or high school physiology is that the mitochondria also produce heat, and that heat is in the form of infrared light. We're kind of taught of it as like a byproduct. It's really about the ATP, that's the important thing. But all the other stuff, metabolic water oxidate, oxidants and heat, those are just kind of byproducts. But really they're just as essential as the ATP. But they all play their specific roles. And so when that's what gives us our body heat, is our mitochondria producing this heat, this infrared light. If an infrared light is then charging or energizing the water, that's being produced right there by the micron itself, and that goes straight over to the cellular proteins that are being unfolded by ATP. And. And you get this status quo, which is also why this just popped into my head, which is a whole other podcast maybe why we see in cancer, we see low cell voltage and we see poor mitochondrial function. Right? Because if mitochondria aren't functioning, they're not unfolding proteins, they're not making ATP, they're not unfolding proteins, we're losing cellular voltage.

And if they're not engaging in mitochondrial uncoupling properly, which would be the use of that light to create heat, such as most human bodies do in the winter, the same type of heat that could be used to maintain some amount of water structuring or tissue pliability, then that's also going to cause an issue. And one of the most fascinating parts of your book is how you describe that people who were looked at in an angry or emotionally upset state actually had lower amounts of mitochondrial uncoupling. Greater. I don't know what they were using to visualize this, if it was a gas discharge visualization camera or something else. Greater amount of light visualized from the cells, less amount of heat indicating poor mitochondrial uncoupling induced by poor emotional management.

Yeah, so mitochondrial uncoupling is kind of like the electron transport chain becomes uncoupled, so to speak, or the proteins become uncoupled. What that means is that they get kind of spaced out more. So you can picture it like you're trying to jump across a river. And there's stones across the river that are evenly spaced so you can jump. And that's what the electrons are trying to do. They're trying to jump from complex to complex protein to protein. And if those get spaced out too much, then some of the electrons don't make the jump. And when they don't make the jump and it drops like that, that drop releases heat. And so if you have very pathologic mitochondria, they can get spaced out too much. And the reason that is has to do with structured water. But. But when they get spaced out too much, that's pathology. But there's this normal amount of uncoupling that's supposed to happen. That's normal physiology that is there for us in the winter to uncouple and produce more heat. We get a little bit more lost energy in the form of. Of heat. And when we lose that energy, we lose light. Right. That's what we're losing in that process. Because the, the chemical bonds and the electrons are basically light energy stored from the sun that we're harvesting from metabolism. But yeah, so when we lose that in the winter, it's supposed to happen. We're supposed to uncouple, which is why one mechanism by which cold exposure, especially in winter, trains your body to do that. Uncouple a little bit. But we just end up doing a lot of things in the winter that aren't necessarily great to do when we're uncoupled like that. Trying to create more heat.

Yeah, it's just fascinating. And then of course, if you take a mitochondrial uncoupling agent like grains of paradise, pepper extract is one that I've tried. I believe that the peptide tessofensine also accidentally, you will sweat buckets when you go into a sauna if you want to really feel what activating accelerated uncoupling actually feels like. Hey, Steven. So one of my favorite parts of your book is the appendix where you go through a pain free lifestyle summary. I want a lightning round with you. Okay. You ready for this? Okay. Diet. What kind of diet would you if you were in chronic pain related to what you've explained, particularly when it comes to structured water and energy.

Generally a diet that I think prioritizes animal protein that's going to give you a satiation. That's kind of what your body's going to build and give you good efficient fats to use for fuel and also give you the dha. You need to harvest sunlight energy and then create variety with plant foods, ideally in season. And be very wary of too many carbohydrate in winter depending on where you live. Like if you live in a very cold place. But that's why eating seasonally is important because then you're getting the foods that are appropriate for your environment at the right times.

Okay, Got it. And water and minerals you've established?

Yes.

Okay. Increasing body charge. Quick summary. You said grounding and earthing. We got that one. Or grounding and earthing mats. Any other methods that you like for increasing the body charge?

Sunlight exposure, infrared sauna, red light panels. All these different modern day hacks we can use because we can't go live in the woods. It's not realistic for most of us.

You didn't mention pemf. What are you talking about? Pemf?

Yeah. So pemf just electromagnetic fields that are more harmonious to us. There's bad electromagnetic fields, obviously, but these are the ones that are mimicking the frequency of the earth's electromagnetic field which we're used to.

The Schumann resonance at higher amplitudes.

Yes. Yeah. Which is kind of the hack that the modern technology gives us.

Yeah. Okay. Dental health.

Get to a knowledgeable dentist, which are not all dentists. So you look for a dentist that knows that root canals are not good. Should be avoided. If they can be the dentist who knows what cavitations are and knows that the mercury should come out. Those types of things. Find a dentist in your area that knows that and can do a 3D cone beam scan and get that cleaned out for you.

Got it. Mitigating non native emf. That one's kind of something. It's a horse I've kicked to death on the show before. Let's say you're in your office. Are there a few top things that you do in your office, particularly where a lot of people get the most exposure?

Yeah. Well, I Guess number one is keep it as far away from you as you can because the closer it is to you, the more harmful it is. So if you have to have it on the phone, the wireless router, any wireless signal.

Yeah, dude. By the way, my phone in my office all day, it's just plugged into an ethernet cable. Cheapo ethernet to USB C port. I have an iPhone 15. Plug it in. My phone can be off all day in my office. It's hardwired.

Yeah, perfect. And so the computer's plugged in, there's no wireless as much as you can mitigating it. Turn off the put your computer in airplane mode when it's plugged in because you don't want it sending a signal out. You know, that kind of stuff. Like even like if you have something plugged into the wall but it's not turned on, it's not canceling itself out. So that's creating an electromagnetic field as it travels to the device. And unless the circuit's complete, you turn it on, it's not going to cancel itself out. So if something's plugged in and not turned on, then you want to unplug it because you're not using it. Just a lot of different things you can think about to do. You can go well down the rabbit hole of block emf.

Yeah, there's some great books out there about that. Good resources too. Brian Hoyer is the building biologist that I work with. Brian or Brian Stephen, of all the things that you said, I think the things that move the dial the most in the people I've worked with for pain is the earthing, grounding, the sunlight and red light exposure, the pemf, water, minerals, heat movement, along with massage and emotional management. I think if you could choose anything for me, those are some of the biggies that you should stack on a regular basis. If you're dealing with chronic pain, you get into a lot more of the science in the book. So what I'm going to do is if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com painsensebook I'll link not only to those previous two episodes I did with Stephen on Understanding the heart, which are fantastic, kind of like what we just talked about with pain, but instead applied to cardiovascular disease. I'll link to the book, I'll link to Stephen's website, his socials and the other podcasts that we did and everything else that we discussed on this show. If you have questions, comments, feedback, you can leave them there as well@BenGreenfieldLife.com painsensebook Stephen, thanks so much for doing this again, man.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

All right, folks, I'm Ben Greenfield and Dr. Stephen Hussey signing out from BenGreenfieldLife.com have an incredible week. To discover even more tips, tricks, hacks and content to become the most complete, boundless version of you, visit BenGreenfieldLife.com.

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