#99 - Long COVID, Chronic Pain and the Next Big Breakthrough in Rehab with Keith Cronin, DPT, Part 1

Hi there. Welcome to The Factor Podcast, where we dive into the latest innovations in musculoskeletal healthcare, rehab, and performance. I'm Jessica Riddle, your host, and in today's episode, we're bringing you an exciting conversation with Keith Cronin, an expert in cutting-edge patient care technology. Did you know that over 50 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, and nearly 30% of Long COVID patients experience persistent neurological symptoms? Well, what if I told you there was a way that you can tap into the body's electrical system to enhance recovery and improve patient outcomes. Today, we're exploring electrophysiological neuromodulation, a revolutionary approach that's changing the game in rehab and recovery. So, if you're a healthcare provider looking for the next big breakthrough, you won't want to miss this. Grab a seat, turn up the volume, and let's get started!

Well, thank you so much. Well, I didn't— as they said, Jessica and I go way back. I actually used to run Dynamic Tape throughout the world and would do presentations as well as CEU courses here. So it's kind of like being not brought out of retirement but being brought back to the fun that I actually liked in the first place. So thank you so much for having me here. With that, yes, electrophysiological neuromodulation. Yes, that is a mouthful, but you're going to hopefully see here in a little bit Why this is not only the cutting edge of science, but it is the direction that as anyone who handles the musculoskeletal system, your practice is about to be significantly elevated. Now, as part of this today, we're just gonna review some of the things, the current state of neuromodulation. We'll get into some of the things that we talked about with autonomic system dysfunction. I'm also gonna give you the 10 reasons why you've probably never seen this before, and today you're gonna be able to see it for the first time, 'cause again, this is the first presentation that we have ever done on that. So I'm so excited that so many people are interested in this topic. We're gonna dive into some of the mechanisms that we've been looking at, and then finally why this is moving us in the right direction. Now, to start with this, I do want to just be very clear. I wanna give it just a quick shout out to some wonderful people. Dr. Brian Proctor over there at McKinney, he's helping provide patients information, all the things that are happening so we can figure some of this stuff out. Dr. Nathan Kaiser up in Michigan who works with neurological patients, he has been phenomenal. He's a chiropractor up that way. It's helping to guide some of these things, but most importantly, I really want to thank all of the patients who have been providing me information to be able to guide this. It has taken me about 10 months to figure out this since the first time that I used Neuro20, what this is actually doing, what this technology is doing, and I got to tell you, This is probably the most exciting course I've ever put because these people here, they have names. There's Tony, there is Jesse, there is Mark, there is Amanda. These are real people that are offering up their information to be able to guide this because this is where science starts. So we're gonna go start it right here. This is what I'm gonna say, what the heck is this? Because if you've ever been in the wonderful world of treating any patients with either spinal cord injuries or autoimmune, you probably haven't seen this happen before. So what I'm gonna do is I'm actually gonna share my screen really quick, all right, and we're gonna go look at something super fast. Now, this is actually just up on the website here, and I'm gonna scroll down, and we're just gonna talk super fast. This is Chris. Now, Chris over here, and I'll just get it right into frame, this is actually his calf spasm that he's had for 15 years. Now, using this whole body electrical stimulation, all of a sudden, within, I don't know, about 3 or 4 minutes, guess what? It completely Goes away. Now, the crazy part you're going to hear is like, what? Oh, well, it comes back an hour later. What if I told you it stays away for 3 to 4 days? Now, this is, to me, breaks my science brain because it shouldn't be happening like this, right? This isn't how things work. This is, this is almost like pseudoscience. But when all of a sudden he gets up and starts basically taking the first steps without braces that he's had in 15 years, which I'm going to hold in for that, we're A lot of these pictures are gonna be a little grainy just 'cause he was doing them on his phone. But just understand that when we see things like this, it all of a sudden got my brain going like, wait a minute, this is a lot more. This just can't be something like it's mechanotransduction, or it's just like we just simply affected a 1A afferent neuron for just like 10 minutes. It's not that. Why does someone after all of this blood pressure stabilize? How does it go from 150 over 90 and over the course of time, Dropped to 120 over 70. There's a lot more happening. And I really want you to watch this video. Only look at the guy behind him because this guy is a little bit freaked out. Like, whoa, what's going on here? Like, he hasn't done this ever. This started this whole concept of going, there's more that can be done. And with it, once we're able to understand this, we're able to dive back in and then go even further. This individual even just got himself up on an elliptical. He's actually got himself up on an elliptical all by himself. So I want you to just think, just before we continue with anything else, this is where this technology is and this is where it's going. So with it, if it's gate theory, if it's placebo, if it's all this 15 years, this doesn't make sense. So I can let you know personally, I sat here, this is December 12th at the University of Texas Arlington. I had some sort of fever pitch dream and just started writing stuff up on here. And why this is important is because it just started to think, I have my own bias towards why this would be working or why wouldn't it, because I was trained a certain way, but we had to go take it out. And so even recently, I wrote a paper on long COVID, which we'll be happy to send to you afterwards. And my goal of all this is just to spark the community, to get you to think about something we've never had a chance to because we didn't have the right technology to deliver it. Now, with this, I also, I even put this in the paper. The goal of all of this is to get clinicians talking. Everybody on this call today, please, my only call to action is if you find this interesting, great, reach out to us. But if you don't, please, I know someone in your world does. And if someone in your world does, forward this over to them because the only way that we can facilitate— and the promises that I made to those patients that we saw over there was they said, if I give you my story, you're going to help people. So you know what we're going to do? We're going to help people today.

Yeah.

Because also the science— this came out 2 weeks ago. We're gonna be able to send this out as well. I was so pumped about this, I paid $30 to buy this. Now, I don't know when the— remember the last time you all paid to go get some research, but I did it on Monday because what you're gonna see now is the culmination of all of it. But let's dive into the basics. What is electrophysiologic neuromodulation? It's actually pretty simple. It's just anything that actually affects the nervous system using commonly electrical as well as chemical agents. It's to specific neurological sites in the body. Well, we as clinicians do that across the board. We've been doing this for years. We've been doing this in a lot of different realms, whether it's chemical or hormonal, right? This is doing a lot with drugs. Mechanical— this could be anything from just using simple tools, or exercise is mechanical. Doing adjustments is mechanical. Anything that you do physically to actually change and move the body is going to affect those mechanoreceptors, and those are really tied into how the nervous system works. And then finally, There's electrical, and electrical kind of stops sort of between TENS units, using it for like a little bit of wound care, shock therapy. And now we have ability to do a tremendous amount more because if we have the question of this, if when drugs and TENS units and things fail to address pain or to be able to help individuals move, and then our next step. So we all know the next step is let's go stick stimulators within the body, which we do spinal stimulators. We can do this for bowel and bladder. We can do this for sexual health dysfunction that can also occur. You can see the ones down by the sacral nerve, anything that's pudendal, we can have an effect on it, but it does involve putting a device in the body. Well, what falls in the middle? And finally, we now have the technology that falls in the middle. So when things fail to this point, what have we been doing? We've been then saying, if we can't do enough with standard therapy or standard rehabilitation or medicine, the next step is let's start doing surgery and making them the Million Dollar Man and sticking a whole bunch of battery packs in people. There's something in the middle now. So we live in a world, what I call healthcare versus sick care. The reality is, is there's so many things that affect an individual on a daily basis, weekly basis, anything in their life that is going to impact their ability to live the life that they want to live. But just please note that it's almost like there's an internal war going on, and that's where we have a challenge within the healthcare system. That's why cardiovascular disease— $1 in $6 is cardiovascular. Diabetes is $327 billion. Just add up this screen right here, we're already at a trillion dollars. And these are the things that we have the most difficulty dealing with. And to date, we've had this sort of sometimes spaghetti at the wall, particularly in the world of long COVID, which is why I put that paper together, is because we've been looking at it just from a drug and just from a mechanical standpoint. But no longer, because now we have an electrophysiological angle. Because if it's in the war against ourselves, and just going back to our Sympathetics, parasympathetics. We have to go look at this from the autonomic nervous system. This was the one thread that was among all of the patients that we're working with throughout the United States. This one thread came to right here, is that balance between things that make you fight or flight or the things that are rest and digest. And some people on here are like, man, I gotta go dust that off to go look back at the autonomic. I did too. I had to actually go and kind of figure out my way back through it because I hadn't dealt with it in a long time, and once you started to see the common threads, we start to know that it doesn't affect everyone the same, right? Just because everyone— you're overweight doesn't mean everyone has diabetes. And then if you have an enlarged prostate, doesn't mean everyone has difficulty with urination or sexual dysfunction. Spinal cord injuries, muscle spasticity, some have it, some don't. In long COVID, the vast majority of people actually recover from COVID but then why don't others? Because something is happening internally with their bodies that is not getting the balance back. It's not either/or, it's a balance. And by diving into this, why having a whole-body electrical muscle stimulation allows us to be able to tap into that third thing. Remember, we had hormonal chemical, we had mechanical. Today, we can now actually dive into the thing that we need to, which is neuromodulation via electrical. Our bodies are built that way. We are— we can look at this as like it's a chicken or an egg. Did the autonomics fail and that's what made us feel bad, or did we— We have other things going on that made the autonomics fail. It doesn't matter. The reality is it's not working. And now today, we know that people hit a tipping point. They've hit a tipping point where they're constantly growing this imbalance, and essentially they enter a mode of panic. They're in internal war. They're in a sympathetic state constantly. Those are the individuals who have high blood pressure, have high heart rate. The individuals have depressed immune systems, all these things, chronic pain, particularly even chronic back pain. And I'm One of those, I'm mechanical in my sense, but I've also had that and it starts to cause issues other places. Knowing that, it's important for us to realize because we're in this state, we've got to do something to stabilize someone before we push them forward. Because if you go about it and just how you normally would, we're built to protect ourselves. And so that's why we have our sympathetic chain ganglion, that one electrical firing can go to so many places all at once. We have adrenal glands that can pump out stimulants really faster than we can think. Because we're excitable, because norepinephrine in and of itself is twice as long the half-life as more of acetylcholine. When we put all those things together, we realize that we're in a— if we don't treat ourselves well and we get in a constant state of irritation and sympathetic, we never get out of it. Now, it works great because you're all on here just like me. It's like, well, just go exercise. You're right. Let me— let's exercise addresses a lot of these things by actually creating stability in the body. But what if you can't? Like, what if causing exercise either causes you pain problems, you physically are unable? What if it's a situation where it triggers you and then you're down for a week? When we start looking at that, for years, I always looked at patients going, maybe they just don't have enough willpower. And I had even like questioned that of myself. But now when we start diving into the most recent science, what if it's just they actually couldn't even generate the energy to start with?

Yeah.

So you go and tell them, do better, move faster, just actually get up. What if the energy levels were already down? Well, how are they going to be able to overcome that? Well, today we actually have something that can look at that, because if the common thread is unconsciously everything is breaking down, we're in a persistent state of decline, and physically, internally, and mentally we're broken. And if you just say something, just overcome that, but what if there's more? It's not just willpower. There's a lot more going on. And now with the science that we understand and the outcomes that we're seeing with this technology, it means we can do a lot more to address what I call a vicious sphere. It's not a cycle. We can't look at this as a 2-dimensional situation when we're dealing with complex patients. You can use this particular approach for orthopedic and acute and simple things like that, and it works phenomenally. But the ones who need it the most, the ones who are sitting here spending tens of thousands, healthcare spending hundreds of thousands of dollars just to try to keep them moving. Well, in the process of it, we actually cause more problems along the way because it is complex, it is 3-dimensional. And if we can do things to address this 3-dimensional problem, we now can do something to fill the gap where localized and pharmaceutical treatments may have failed. And I want to be clear here, it'll get talked about later, I am not against any of those things. What I'm just saying is today, we now have a new option where before it was either do this one or go to surgery. I'm letting you know today, electrically, there is so much more we can do.

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But we have to get at the sort of the elephant in the room. Why haven't we looked at this? I mean, this question I asked myself like 100 times, Elle. Why have we not looked at this? Well, it's because this is what it kind of turned into. We turn it into sort of electrical butt blasters and ab blasters and losing weight and shock batons, and let's go just zap people left and right for fitness purposes. That is such the tip of this, of the iceberg. It is, it's just so far away from what this can actually do that we just didn't look. So when we get into it, the first one is we just have to get the, that first elephant in the room. Y'all, stimulating electrically is just activating more than muscles because there's more that's happening in there. We have different levels in which you can hit from the peripheral nerve to actually have an effect on the body, but the only issue is we're biased against it because the research over thousands of research studies says we got this far. What I'm telling you today is when you do it over the whole body and you put more in here, you can actually do way more. That's why the creator of this particular system is non-medical. A medical person would never make this device, this approach in 10,000 years because we were already biased. And since we are biased, we wouldn't look at it. It took someone to not be biased, to have to go do something to help themself, to put the right delivery mechanism. Yes, this is like having 20 units in one. Now, think about that. If you took 20 of those individual things, try to piece them together, would you ever do that in a clinic? No, you wouldn't. It would take forever because on top of that, you'd have to go like, yeah, we'd have to go stick 131 electrodes on someone as well. That's the equivalent of what's the surface area of this. 130, we would never do that. And on top of that, maybe we didn't have enough energy. So we know that we are batteries, we are energy, we work off it, we feed off of it. But remember, this one generates a heck of a lot more energy, and it is only because it was able to be cleared to be able to do this that we can now see the effects that if you spread it out through the entire body, what can be done instead of trying to put a ton of energy through a small part? What if you're able to spread it out? How much more effect on the nervous system can you have? Well, we're starting to see that. On top of that, we didn't have the right frequency. So with this system, you're able to actually have some modulation with the modes to be more parasympathetic in nature versus sympathetic in nature. And I want you to think about that because in some cases, you're gonna have patients who don't have autonomic issues. They just need to get up and going faster. Let's get them moving. Let's go to more of a strengthening mode. But what if it's something that's more Subtle. It's something you actually have to stabilize them. Well, we're going to want something that's like a 40 to 7 Hz cycle. Well, this technology then already has it into place, and then it's easy to use. But probably one of the biggest ones is this: it wasn't cleared for FDA use for medical. You are going to go see things that you say, oh, I know this, I've seen this before, but you haven't. Those are not cleared for using with disease state patients. It opens you up for risk. It opens you up for lawsuits, and you cannot deal with that because you're like, well, I'm not going to deal with the technology unless it's actually cleared. This one is cleared for 6 indications, very, very common to the rehabilitation space. And because of it, because it went through the extra effort where everyone else gave up— and I'm even going to send you the FDA links for them so you can see what they actually say on it— because of that, then we were able to go, ha, now let's go start testing this on different people. Who really need it. And then from there, it's like, now that we're targeted, let's go another step further. What can we do to actually create an autonomic risk to say, here's how you are going to create a system of evaluating? From there, what can we do to create protocols to be able to actually address individual depending on the state that they're currently in? And then finally, what if we then could actually put together a system that lets us evaluate the objective measures and subjective measures to make sure that we're addressing the neurological function of this. And you're going to find it's a lot very medical terms that we're using here because this is a medical product that needs to be done by medical professionals. So let's get into the first one. You're going to say I said mechanisms, right? Cool. Let's get into it. Truth is, we actually don't firmly know how this is operating. We know its outcomes and we're seeing it, and we are now about to start our first pilot study looking at long COVID. But I can tell you this, the outcomes are there. We have an FDA-cleared medical device that's also cleared to be able to take home as a DME as of February of this year. But think about that. Since we didn't have this, we have thousands of research studies that say one thing. What are we dependent on? And it was those amazing patients and those amazing doctors sharing this information so we could start diving in and figuring out, oh my gosh, this is a lot bigger than we thought. Because if you have something that's non-invasive, drug-free wearable technology, It allows the body to address the natural circuitry. It creates what I call a positive electrophysiological modulation. This is what we're trying to do. We always think like we got to do targeted in every single place, and it sometimes gets to a point where, yeah, you do. But think about this: our brain and our body, we have billions of neurons. They know how to communicate with each other. The wrong messages are getting out. What if we can do something to actually interface with it and provide it the necessary energy and stimulation it needs to be able to correct itself. And I know it's like, well, that sounds like pseudoscience. Well, let's go like just simple. Electrical through peripheral nerves, right? Afferently into the spine. Spine at a resting state is excitable. It triggers electrical impulses that go ascending transmission to the brain, come efferently back through, and it creates action. We do this on a daily basis. I'm doing it right now, even talking. I'm thinking— I'm not having to think about all the things I'm doing. I'm just doing them because I have a system that's operating and working Correctly. Well, if we can tap into electrical power, what can we do to neuromodulate it? Think about the things that we have with those cycles of fatigue, chronic pain, decreased physical activity, depression, chronic inflammation. You know, they kind of cycle around, but the reality is they don't go like this. It is a 3-dimensional thing that's happening all day long. They're affecting one another. We need to have something that sits in the middle. And so commonly from cascading events, we use mechanical. And the trouble with mechanical is they're going to be more temporary effects because when mechanical is operating, is going to be in the moment. Then we try pharmacological. Pharmacological is going to be working again on those neurotransmitters. Fantastic stuff. Here's the issue. Everyone's body is a lot different from person to person, and we have to take that into consideration even when developing these things. Where this product, where this Neuro20 sits in the middle, is to address those cascading events. Because if we electrically— we can come at it while we still have our mechanical, while we still have our pharmacological, we can get that balance. And I'm coming back to this. You saw this earlier in here. And I'm coming back to it because a properly functioning autonomic employs both sympathetic and parasympathetic. It's not one or the other, and I want to highlight in just one part here, those things that you see— accelerated heart rate, constricted blood vessels, increased cholesterol, having difficulty, sexual dysfunction, inhibiting your ability to actually control urinary bowel and bladder, all of that stuff— those are the trillions of dollars that we're spending right now. We are to the right of the scale. It's because they're dealing with external drivers that are happening all day long, and we're trying to internally create balance. It's not about one or the other. It's about creating balance. I'll give a quick example of it. We've seen this actually with anyone with sexual dysfunction or urinary incontinence. Just think of it by all the coverage that you can see and look at the website. You can see all this is covering by doing something where potentially by going over the inferior mesenteric ganglion to the lumbar and mid-back. So that's gonna get us more sympathetic. But then the parasympathetic is going to hit through the pudendal nerve because it's autonomic. Because we're able to hit those hamstring and glute pads, which have a connection over to S2, we can actually create what I potentially call this an electrophysiological loop. And by doing that, we can't go to the bathroom with just sympathetic or just parasympathetic. They have to interchange. And it was from almost every patient saying this over and over and texting me. I went, oh my gosh, that's what the issue is. That's where this thing is getting to. And why haven't we looked at it before is because we just didn't have enough. But that article I showed you earlier, this is what they're looking into now. This is July 12th, 2024, out of WashU, as well as the University of Florida. I am from St. Louis and actually won the Olin Business Cup in 2008 for a product innovation for healthcare. And I was so excited when I saw this because here's what they're looking at. They're looking at, hey, if you have neural inflammation at a central level, It is looking as a decreasing, not like damaged mitochondria, it's just downgraded. It's causing a signal and they call it a brain-muscle signaling axis because what's happening is, is when you have it at the central level, interleukin-6 that actually is generated from this is negative. It's something that actually can cause damage and downregulate. When you do it at the immune system and it's uncontrolled, same thing. We don't have to just be in an autoimmune, we can be in a state of chronic inflammation and have this same issue. And what they were really trying to say is like, look, it's not motivation. It's like, it's not just feeling well. It's just that they literally, you can't do more. And it's because our system is downregulated. What can we do to balance it? And this is where we've had trouble. If you saw recently, they had the study that they had 156 patients trying to use drugs to be able to address long COVID. Well, it didn't pass. It didn't even change one symptom associated with it. They did it at Stanford. Why was it? Because we were potentially looking at the wrong thing, and not wrong in the sense of, oh, drugs are bad. No, drugs are keeping a lot of this society alive. It's just now with whole-body electrical stimulation, we have something new to bring to the table. So I want to go and show this one here because this is what kind of broke the mold of everything. And let's go overhead and look at this. This Ryan is an amazing human being. He has been Got to a point where he could barely even function. He was on a bad route just from long COVID, and it got to the point he's gaining weight. He's— it could barely walk. Well, what I wanted to go show you this is when you see stuff like this, look, y'all, I, I'm, I'm, I'm all for double-blind studies of everything in the world. You're 100%, I'm with you. But when you see this and you see someone on day 1 who can barely walk, and you put it on them, and within 10 minutes they start walking straighter, And then within just 43 days and just 7 treatments is mowing the lawn. We have to stop for just a second and say, what the heck is going on? What is it that we don't know? We need to be uncomfortable in being uncomfortable with the fact that we don't have the knowledge, and that's okay. That's like that, and I actually, I get excited by that. I get excited by the fact that of not knowing something, but it does at times make it feel like we are In a situation where we go like, oh man, I don't know what to do, so the answer is do nothing. I'm saying here today, we as clinicians right now can do something. We can talk about this, we can look at it, we can go test this, because when things are working, guys, it's great, but the reason the patients end up in our world is because their bodies have failed to overcome the challenges that are hitting it. We need to have a balancing act, and I want to keep— this is a key component here. It is a balancing act, even from this study that they just recently put out. You have to realize, if it's— if you have this chronic irritation at the central nervous system, it's going to basically create an inflammatory and muscle-damaging and degrading activity. If it's done chronically at the, at the straight up of your, your immune system, same deal, it's going to be inflammatory. But here's the kicker, when you do it through your muscles and you get them active and going, it creates an anti-inflammatory effect. We can't keep looking at this as this one way or another. There is a balance, and what we're seeing with this technology is it's giving us the ability to create balance where it was— before, it almost seemed impossible. So, if the immune system is complex and varies from person to person, and neurotransmitters are complex and vary from person to person, just remember, electrically, we are actually all very similar. It may take more milliamps. It may take— make— actually take more of a pad going over, and maybe a different frequency to affect, but We are able to electrically function as human beings because we do it every single day. Our brains at rest are producing 100 watts. We get to exercising, and a human being can get up to 400 watts. We are batteries. And because we are batteries, we now can tap into that. And we know even from the science, if you transect the vagus nerve, guess what? Organs in most people still work. Why are they still functioning? Why, if you push a pre-diabetic to proper exercise and diet, the trend can be reversed? And individuals with irritable bowel and digestive, they hurt, but you know what? They still digest. We keep looking at it as one or the other. It's not. We now have the ability to sit in the middle and as clinicians be able to help modulate this. And that's why I believe when we simply look at this now, we have the right delivery system with the right amount of stimulation to peripheral nerves, the right amount of energy and the right balance of frequency for the right population. And that's why we're starting to see these individuals, even some of them are coming off drugs. Have you ever heard of a chronic heart failure patient coming off drugs? Well, I have now today. It's not— I didn't think that was possible. I thought that was just doomed. There are things you can do to modulate, and we just now have the knowledge to know what to do. We just didn't have the technology to do it. And so that's why I say, is this so far-fetched? If we've artificially done this with vaccines and we artificially do this with chemical mediators, why can't we do the same thing electrically? Why are we seeing benefits that are not only Immediate, but they are lasting. Why are people getting the benefits weeks later in between uses of this for individuals who are healthier? Why are we having spinal cord patients who are able to use this every 3 to 4 days and get away from some of the issues that they've been having their entire life? Electrically, there's so much potential that we have, and we already know this. This is not something new. We've just been dealing with one at a time and doing with $60,000 to $100,000 surgeries. We don't need to do that. We can— some people are going to need this, absolutely. But why is it going from they are having drugs don't work, mechanical doesn't work, so the next thing is a surgery and sticking spinal stimulators in people? We don't need to make that jump anymore. What we can do instead is go back to something that we did a long time ago because we were desperate. We made defibrillators. I know this is crazy to go back to like, whoa, we're gonna shock the body too much. No, just get back to the What we did, we did this because we had to. We had to figure out a way to jumpstart the body, specifically the heart. We had to reset it. Well, you don't reset the rest of the body that way, but it seems by using this type of technology that you have here to be able to spread out, we're coming back to something that we'd already done years ago and we dismissed and we moved on. We don't need to move on anymore because it's here right now. And for everyone on this call, this is probably— if there's any point I'm going to make on this, is this. This technology needs to be in the hands of medical professionals. Right now, there are individuals out there just slamming away with this at home, and I can tell you, now that we know what this technology can do, I can't highlight enough— this is why the FDA has to have this regulated. This is why doctors need to be looking at this. This is why medical professionals need to be monitoring patients, because there are things that they could do to help themselves But there are other things they could do to hurt themselves. And knowing that having a product, having a system that meets cytotoxic standards, that is for the patient comfort, that has met all the standards, that are able to be able to use and everyone feel comfortable knowing that it's the best thing on the market to be able to help them, is critical. We need doctors, we need clinicians, we need everybody involved with this so that this becomes the medical thing. And where can it go? Like, just think about this. What if we could tap in and be able to help patients with diabetes from an autonomic? What, what impact would that have? What if we had individuals who had sexual dysfunction, and right now their only options are a few things? What if all of a sudden we're able to actually just by not only stimulate their body, which can make them feel better just as a whole, but actually be able to correct the mechanism that's causing them issues on a regular basis? What if we were having for spinal surgery? What if we had an option, another one, that we could look at before they start chopping at L2 through L4 and fusing them all together? What if there were more things we could do? Because if we have this in the middle, we now have something else. And this one is even better. What if we could go and address individuals with physical ailments and PTSD because they get locked together? What if we could do something even with counseling and they would be able to allow someone to be in a state where they can communicate and get through the issues that they are? Well, when you have portable, easy-to-use technology that takes all the heavy lifting out of it, all of a sudden you're going to be able to do more. You can deal with the chronic pain patients, you can deal with individuals who have incomplete spinal cord, you can have chronic heart failure patients who are like, there's no way. Yes, if they have pacemaker or defibrillator, we cannot use this product with them, but move that aside. What if you were able to do this? What if you were able to do this with doctor-guided so you could actually see what effect it can have on their life? This individual lost 18 pounds of fluid so far. This one's crazy. I didn't know that was possible. And you think you have to exercise? It's staying off. It's not like they're vacillating back and forth.

That's it for today's episode. What an incredible deep dive we had into the future of a really cool technology, I think. A huge thank you to Keith Cronin for sharing his expertise and insights. And if you found this conversation as fascinating as I did, be sure to tune in for part 2, where we'll explore even more clinical applications and patient success stories. Our next episode drops in 2 weeks, and it's actually our official 100th podcast episode. So I'm very excited to reach this milestone with those of you that have been listening. From the beginning, and we plan on continuing to offer these trainings long into the future. So please be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite streaming platform so that you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed our conversation, if you enjoy learning from us in this method and through this medium, please take a moment to leave us a review. You can leave those directly on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or you can even head on to our website at factorpodcast.com. That's faktrpodcast.com. Tell us more about different topics that you'd like to hear or different guest instructors that you'd like us to feature in our webinars and of course on our podcast here. We read each and every one of these and it is so valuable to have your feedback and your guidance. Be sure to check out the show notes for more details on upcoming hands-on training courses that we have planned around the globe. As well as new certification programs and online courses as well. We have so many different ways that we try to support the many healthcare practitioners and students in our network, and we really value any opportunity to serve you with these new education opportunities and look forward to hearing your feedback. Thanks again for listening. We'll see you next time. Hey guys, if you like what you heard today, I encourage you to visit our website at factor-store.com. That's spelled F-A-K-T-R hyphen store dot com to find out more information about all that we have to offer. We have a variety of online offerings as well as our hands-on Factor Rehab System course scheduled in cities around the globe. Be sure to also check out our event calendar and bookmark any of these upcoming live webinar dates coming up in the near future so you can join us live. And of course, the biggest compliment we can receive. is for you to help us spread the word to your friends, colleagues, and classmates. You'll find all the important links as well as info about our sponsors in the show notes, so be sure to check those out.