Heal Chronic Disease with Ashok Gupta's PROVEN Method!

Welcome. Today everyone, we have Ashok Gupta with us. And Ashok is an internationally renowned speaker, filmmaker and health practitioner who has dedicated his life to supporting people through chronic illness and achieving their potential AS suffered from ME or chronic fatigue syndrome around 25 years ago when he was studying at Cambridge University. Through neurologic research that he conducted, he managed to get himself 100% better. He then set up a clinic to treat others and then published the well known Neuroplasticity Limbic Retraining Recovery Program and an app known as the Gupta program in 2007. He has published several medical papers including randomized controlled trials on long Covid me CFS and fibromyalgia, showing that the treatment is effective and is continually researching these conditions. You can find out more information@guptaprogram.com thank you for joining me today, Ashik. I look forward to this conversation since we discussed it briefly in Boston and again recently.

So.

Maybe, you know, since I take care of breast implant illness patients and we're dealing with a lot of chronic inflammation and fatigue, why don't you kind of for the audience, introduce to us, you know, how you view the, the neural component or as we discussed briefly, the psychosocial component. Yeah.

Oh, well, thank you, Rob, for inviting me. Delighted to be here with you. So I think what we really start off with is really going back to first principle. So I always like to start my interviews with the biggest question of all, why are we here? So I'd love to have a philosophical chat with you about that at another time, but right now let's focus on the scientific aspect of that question. Why are we here? We're here because over millions of years of evolution, this nervous system, this brain, this immune system has evolved to be able to adapt to our environment, survive, so that we can pass on our genes to the next generation. Yeah. So we are essentially survival machines if you look at the raw science of this. And we have evolved not only from our kind of human lineage and ape lineage, but actually right through to plant life. So I love this statistic. We share 40% of the same DNA as a banana. Right. So it shows you we've got millions of years of that evolution and adaptation in our system. So that shows us that's the number one principle. So that's the first jigsaw pieces. We are survival machines and our brain cares more about our survival than it does our well being, which gives us a clue to breast implant injury and a whole bunch of other conditions. And the second step of this is if we actually experience some kind of insult. So that could be a toxin, a bacteria, a flu, a physical injury. Our system goes into threat detection mode. So it detects the threat, comes up with an appropriate response, that's threat response, and then hopefully resolves that threat and then goes back to baseline. But we know that in a number of different conditions, and let's take first of all the example of breast implant injury. Sometimes what happens is that even once that threat has been resolved at the human level. So let's say the breast implant has been removed. Yeah. Or perhaps it hasn't been removed. It's still there. In either situation, the system starts believing that the threat is still present. Because, remember, we go back to our first principle. The number one priority is survival. So then the brain can err on the side of caution and think, just in case this is still a threat, let me continue to stimulate my defensive responses and also anything that reminds me of the original threat. So let's take the example of a fox in a field, and a rabbit sees the fox, and in that field there happens to be a whole bunch of bluebells, let's say. Now what we know from conditioning responses is if that rabbit becomes deeply traumatized by that experience of being chased by the fox in a field full of bluebells, the next time that rabbit experiences bluebells in a field, it, it may suddenly get into threat detection mode and think, oh, wow, I need to be super careful. So in a similar way, our brains can become conditioned to otherwise meaningless events or meaningless situations. And so the brain can learn these conditioned responses during a particular traumatic event. And in this situation, we're saying the traumatic event may well be. And this is obviously your expertise, whatever impact, toxin wise, that implant has had on. On the body. And so from that point onwards, whether the breast implant is still there or it's been removed, we believe that part of the reason why then continual inflammation and problems continue is because the brain has made that decision to keep responding.

Right.

And Rob, I don't know, are you a fan of Game of Thrones by any chance?

Yes, I've watched all of it.

You watched all of them? Okay, well, if people listening at home are fans of that, or let's say fans of a fairy tale. Let me give you this analogy, which I think really brings it home to a lot of people. Let's imagine that you are king Rob of your kingdom. Now, that kind of has a. Has a nice ring to it. So imagine you're king Rob of your kingdom and your castle, and you have an army, which is your Nervous system, that's the electrical system. And then you have a navy, which is your immune system, and it responds to invaders that come over the hill and try to take over the kingdom. Now that's how the system works perfectly normally. So we have an inflammatory response, a defensive response, and then we go back to baseline. But let's say there's a drought in that kingdom, for whatever reason. So now because of the drought, the kingdom is weaker. The army isn't weaker, the navy is weaker. Now in comes an incoming threat over the hill, an incoming army. And that can be a breast implant. That could be toxins from that implant, that could be mold, Lyme virus, bacteria, whatever it is. Now, the army and navy, because they're weaker, they really have to fight much harder than they used to be able to have to to fight off this invading army. So they fight valiantly, and they just about manage to get rid of that invader, but they're traumatized by that experience. So they come to their weekly meeting with yourself, King Robb, and say, dear King Robb, we now need all the resources of the kingdom to keep defending because we don't know if we've fought off this invader fully. So now all the iron, the metal, the clean water gets channeled to the army and navy, and especially the navy. The immune system is now firing off its weapons of war at the slightest provocation. So if a man on a horse comes over the hill, they think, what happens if that's a spy, Let me trigger off our weapons of war, which starts causing the inflammation. And some of that, some of those arrows and war machine products start falling back into the kingdom, causing the inflammation in the body, perhaps even things that mimic autoimmune effects in the body itself. And now opportunistic infections flourish because we know that when the army and navy are galvanized, so that's your sympathetic nervous system are aroused, your immune system is aroused unnecessarily, Actually, our detoxification systems start shutting down. So you have a secondary problem, which is now opportunistic infections. Viral, whether it be bacterial, can start flourishing in the kingdom. So the spies, as we say it, start flourishing. And now you have this dysbiosis in the gut, because now the gut is getting inappropriate stimulation and inflammation. So you then get a body which is in this imbalanced state where you've got dysbiosis, you have chronic inflammation, you have lack of detoxification, you have chronic mycotoxins start developing or other toxins, and the system keeps hyper responding. And then you get this illness, the chronic illness. So it goes from the acute phase to the chronic phase. And that's how we kind of look at these conditions. And brain retraining is saying the next time you have the meeting with the army and navy generals, we say to them, as King Rob, dear generals, you've done a fantastic job at defending the kingdom, but the war is over. You can stand down. And by standing down, we allow the system to come back to recovery. Detoxification becomes better, mitochondrial dysfunction starts evening out, and the system can gradually begin to heal in parasympathetic and come back to normality. So in a nutshell, that's how I describe this.

Yeah. And we had a recent discussion about the gut brain axis and how once, as you mentioned, I like the terminology imbalance, because that's really, you know.

The.

Systems work if things are in balance. And once they become out of balance and you have this, what you're describing is very serious negative feedback loop regarding, you know, that, that almost learned response, I guess, and the gut, it means certainly, you know, that is as paramount as we know, you know, the quality of the food and the fluid and the air and everything that goes into those basic, you know, needs that we have to stay alive if they're off. The imbalance of dysbiosis, the gut brain axis, the fight or flight system, is revved up. And getting into a parasympathetic state like we've talked about, is much more difficult for our patients. And I tell everybody you can still have chronic inflammation without an implant, but when you add an implant into it, you even, you can turn that system on as you've described. So it's, it's constantly on it, it can't shut down. And I've had patients 3, 6, 9, 12, 16 months out who have difficulty even though their gut biosis is better. They've had improved liver function, kidney function, things are, are getting better, they're sleeping better, their hormones are balancing out, but they still have this, this element of, as you described, it's not neural inflammation, it's. It's a, A loop.

Well, yes, yes. And that's the interesting piece of neurology that's so fascinating is that when our systems, as you describe, get into this dysregulated state, this imbalance, why does something become chronic? Why doesn't the system just return back to normal abnormality? It's when the output of the system and the input of the system get caught in a loop. That's the fascinating piece. And so what happens is the Brain is, as we've mentioned, this survival machine. It's always detecting threats. It then starts detecting that, hey, the body's inflamed, we're feeling unwell, we've got exhaustion, the mitochondria aren't functioning correctly. That information gets fed back up through the vagus nerve back to the brain. And the brain says, are we still in danger? Do we still need to initiate threat response? And if it perceives that we still are, it then creates this chronic inflammation, even neural inflammation, bodily inflammation, dysbiosis, all those effects which then create symptoms in the body that loop back to this hypervigilant brain. And round and around we go in that system. And the amazing work that you're doing, and so many practitioners are doing is looking at those downstream effects. If we can get the system back to balance a bit more in terms of the guts, in terms of detoxification, through all the great work that you do, the brain is detecting less of those threats. And in a complimentary way, if we can also get the brain to dampen down its perception of the body, those two processes can work hand in hand and hopefully accelerate healing.

Right. That was, I, I thought that was extremely well put. It's such an interesting topic because, you know, globally, when I first started talking to you, you know, I said mindset is such a difficult, you know, aspect of this because if things, we'll just take pain, for example. Pain is basically a third biologic, a third psychologic. And although it doesn't seem like it should be social, and we're controlling and working really hard to help on the biologic side, but as you're describing in the psychological. And then obviously there's all this social, environmental stress that goes on that exacerbates a situation. And many times you can see the patients and how uncomfortable they are, and then when they're describing the situation at home, the tension rises. You can tell the temperature is going up in the room. And that's a complicated situation where we've not had solutions that were evidence based like yours. So maybe touch on, from programming standpoint, what's your strategy? What are the tactics to help in that setting?

Yes, and I'd like to clarify something in terms of what we actually are doing on the psychosocial side. So you're absolutely right. We know from studies that the psychological aspect, social aspect, has a massive impact and it's actually both a direct and a direct impact on this inflammatory response because the mediator for there is the sense of safety. Yeah. So traditionally in medicine we Will separate different departments. So if you go to a hospital, you will see a separate immunology department, a separate psychology department, a separate physiology department. But obviously, our nervous system and our being doesn't differentiate in that way, and neither does the brain. And what we noticed is that the same brain structures that were implicated in psychosocial responses are actually now being implicated in immunological and biological responses, which I find fascinating because this is really living. That vision of truly integrative health, that the amygdala and insular parts of the brain, which we'll talk about perhaps later, traditionally were associated with those psychological responses, but now we know they mediate the immune system, they mediate pain. So they are integrally linked. And so therefore, our strategy is to say, let's look at three key components of what can improve health. And to help patients, we talk about the dove analogy, that the dove, in order to fly, has three types of wings, two wings and tail feathers. So one important wing of recovery is regulation of the nervous system. That's super important. So we start off with that piece through whatever techniques improve for each person. We look at breath work, we look at somatic and somatic techniques. We look at meditation, visualization, and we allow patients to pick the tools that help them regulate their nervous system. That's the first R of the program. That's the one wing. The second, I guess unique wing is retraining the brain. Now that we've regulated the nervous system, our brain becomes more neuroplastic because when it's hyperstimulated, it it's not very good at changing because it's in survival mode. So now we can retrain the brain and create new neural pathways that are neural pathways of safety versus neural pathways of danger. So that's the second strategy. And the third strategy is, well, how does a dove fly? It needs tail feathers to create direction and purpose. So the first, the third r of the program is what we call re engaging with joy, which essentially means how can we become more and more aware of what keeps us from our joy and happiness, which is our stress, our fear, our worries, our reactions to our environment. So we use a bunch of different coaching and therapeutic interventions that we find most powerful, such as POTS coaching, many other different kind of therapies, self coaching and look, even in a child work and help people become aware of their own stresses and strains and dampen those down because we want people to get well and stay well. There's no point another eruption in their lives emotionally, socially, that then once again stops detoxification. Which then causes inflammatory response and so on and so on. And therefore, Those are the three Rs of the program, the three core strategies that enable someone to get back to balance, get back to homeostasis that they had before this condition arose. And I would love to give the analogy of a field. So imagine you have a field and there's a river flowing through that field. That river represents the brain perceiving we're in danger. So that's like a stimulus, interpretation, response. The stimulus is symptoms in my body. The interpretation is we're still in danger. The response is chronic inflammation and nervous system sympathetic response. Now, in order to redirect that river, we want to redirect it in a different direction, which is the stimulus is still symptoms in the body or perception of toxins. The interpretation is actually this does not represent danger to the body. The responses shut down. Sympathetic responses trigger parasympathetic and heal and detoxification responses. Now, shifting that river means that every time it rains, we need to dig a new channel on the right hand path. So we need to thaw the ground, make the ground loose and soft, and that's where the relaxation comes in and keep diverting the river. Until now the river is flowing on the right hand path and the old riverbed is, you know, covered over. There's grass growing. It's no longer a channel. Now, what's interesting about the brain, from what we know from neurology, that left hand channel, the old channel never fully is extinguished because the brain always says, I never know in the future when I might meet that same threat. And therefore I'm going to keep that channel slightly exposed. And archaeologists know this, they can dig up a riverbed that's 5 million years old, and they can still detect the pathway. And so what's important is that once we dig that right hand path, patients recognize that this is almost, I wouldn't say a lifelong practice, but it's certainly something that moderating their nervous system responses for the rest of their lives is important. And that's why we give people exercises once they finish the Gupta program to enable homeostasis and prevent the river from once again diverting along the left hand path.

Yeah, I feel like when you're describing what once we take care of our patients, we have this lengthy program in terms of nutrient dense supplementation and diet and lifestyle modification, a long period of focused detoxification based on specific testing parameters, and then, just like you're describing now, is adding a very structured but flexible structure for the brain to recover. And then to give strategies that become then habits that you can compound over time and use just like we're describing with, you know, the other parameters. So this is yet another, you know, behavioral technique that they can use to help themselves. Because ultimately the hardest thing to do is change a behavior once it's ingrained, once it's a, a habit, you know, breaking something. What, what the adage, obviously it's, it's much easier to develop a good habit than break an old one. And you know, the, the as simple as getting up and instead of having coffee, you go out and you do grounding or you meditate or you go for a walk, something specific that you do and it's, it becomes your non negotiable. So this is how you're going to help yourself, center yourself or focus on yourself for that period of time. Especially those who are in my instance, you know, the leading caregivers for children and they're taking care of their homes and, and working and doing all the things which is obviously a super stressful type, you know, situation. So that, you know, do you see that the, the women, which obviously I'm seeing predominantly have a significantly more level of stress or this negative loop that they're in, is that a more frequent occurrence in what you've seen?

Yes, it is. And I would say that across the different conditions we treat, which include things like long Covid and chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, mold, I would say 95% of our patients are women. In fact, in fact, we had a webinar last week and it was on our first webinars and a gentleman turned up and said, oh, is this webinar just for women? Because they seem to be the only guy on this call. And I assured him that no, it is actually a difference in the way the brain and the nervous system and the immune system work. And actually I believe that women's brains inherently are more prone to these conditioning effects in the immune system. And we can debate as to why that might be. And my personal hypothesis is that in ancient times, because a woman during her adult years would mainly be pregnant or looking after young children at that, you know, those positions at those points. Actually having a more defensive immune system for her was more important than it was for a man. And therefore the immune system learned over many years to be more conditioning prone because it's a more protective response and overly protective response essentially. I mean, that's just a hypothesis, but I think to go back to your, you know, your question, I think that generally habit formation and keeping those Good habits is about regularity and having that social component. So something which has been a game changer for us has been something called daily Gupta size. I think I might have mentioned to you before where we were finding that we were giving patients these tools and techniques, and of course, we were relying on them to engage with them. But then we said, hey, if you don't have the time or the energy or the motivation, just come on a zoom call each day whenever you can. We'll take care of you. We'll take you through everything you want. And we have like a couple of hundred patients a day coming online, joining the zoom call. And we go through somatic work, breath work, relaxation, and then the brain retraining. And that truly has been a game changer for many of our patients. Whereas before, it was taking them months and months to heal, now sometimes within weeks, couple of months, they're seeing those results because of that regularity. And so, as you say, digging that right hand channel. The whole point of neuroplasticity is repetition, continuous repetition of digging that right hand path, digging the right hand path again and again and again and forcing the water down that right hand path. And that becomes a new, learned response. And that is both behavioral. That ultimately becomes neural in this regard. Yeah, yeah.

You have to make, you know, small or tiny changes if you're ever going to get big results. It's super difficult in a, you know, behavior like you're describing to automatically shut that down and just take a different, take a different path. I think that's, you know, I'm pretty realistic. I've been taking care of people for several decades, and behavior is always the hardest thing to change. And without, you know, without trying. There's a drug that came on the market, Ozempic, that's changed behavior in a way that, that behavior modification there's going to have some downstream consequences. But it's, it's definitely something that in my career, very few, if any medications have done what the GL1P agonists have done because they've modified binging behavior. They've, They've, you know, changed. Just like we've been discussing a behavior. I mean, you're talking about changing behavior and you know, how difficult that is in general. And you have to have obviously very motivated patients. And you're teaching them patterns to make it more consistent. You're asking them to make small changes, hop on when they can. You're doing all the things to make it a. Make it possible. And then these drugs now are actually changing their brains In a way that may make it even more possible because now you, you've seen a big shift already. Like fast food in the United States, which was the predominant, you know, probably meal for a bunch of people is now changing. There's less fast food consumption. They already know this. And relatively soon, you know, you would, you would tend to think like things that obesity, diabetes secondary, you know, type 2 diabetes secondary to, you know, insulin resistance, and that is coupled to, if not, you know, large, in large part from obesity will diminish. And then, you know, when diabetes diminishes, then dialysis is going to diminish because kidney failure is going to diminish. And then organ transplantation for kidneys, and I'm just speaking about kidneys will go down because there's less people who need to have organ transplantation. So then you'll have something that we never thought in my career we'd ever have, which is a behavior modification that actually led to something.

Yes, it's fascinating, Rob, that you bring up that, that system because, well, I mean, what you're describing, I hope we can get there and I hope there aren't any, you know, longer term effects of these particular drugs. But what's really fascinating is, so I've been in the US the last month or so, as you know, and watching US television is fascinating because the adverts here, compared to the UK are very, very long. So you have long advertisements here and essentially you can see what's going on because most of the adverts offer fast food. So pizza, burgers, chips, etc. And then the other half of the adverts offer medications to help you with all the bad diet that you've just consumed from the adverts. I mean, literally it's 50, 50. So I'm watching an advert saying, eat pizza, eat burgers. And then another advert going, hey, are you overweight? You obese? You need to take this weight loss drug. And I'm like, wow. I mean this, you know, this is quite an incredible situation. So you can see how hard behavior modification is because we live in a society where both of those things are being thrown at you that it's not, you know, eat all of this food and now take a drug because that's the fastest way that you're going to get to be able to deal with what you've gone through. There's nothing about behavior modific or how you can do this naturally or in your own way.

No, I think that, right, they did it with the drug. So they, yeah, they Basically just gave you. And I'm sure, to be honest with Shook, I'm sure when you go back, this was not the intended consequence at all. Right. Weight loss. Yes. Not this type of behavior modification.

No.

Because look at what it's doing now. Like, there'll be some downstream effects that aren't good. But you now are doing what you just highlighted. The food and pharma industry are gonna lose. The food industry is going to lose money because the people who they cater to are going to stop eating their garbage because it's not really food. Like, the things you're describing are not actually food. They're ultra processed, really grotesque things that they're labeling as food. It's not whole foods, which obviously are different. And those are the things that help our patients and help their guts and help their brains and overall give them the balance as you described.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I hope we have a vision of this future where, yes, there's less side effects, people are losing weight. They are this massive behavior modification as a result of these drugs. And that could be a great boon for society. But at the same time, I think what we're talking about in terms of this behavior modification, what we found has been really powerful is community. That when people heal in a community and you see it, whether it's drug addiction or alcohol addiction or it's losing weight, actually when there's a community around it built around a common purpose, that can also fuel behavioral change. Because you're seeing people around you do it, you're working not in a vacuum, but with that kind of social concept with it. And so that's working really well. Where on our webinars we allow people to go into small groups and communicate and we have small group coaching. And then obviously people each day can see each other on camera, they can find buddies. And all of that community support has been very powerful in that behavior modification as well.

Absolutely. I think as we talked about it before, I feel like that is lacking because in many instances the community or the resources they're trying to utilize are not coming from the correct. They're not using the correct lens. So you're trying to be extremely holistic and help them heal themselves. And we're trying to be extremely holistic and help them use tools to help them heal themselves. In addition, obviously surgery is an example where removal of the device with its accompanying scar tissue can reduce the biofilm. And the interaction of the biofilm with your body in those instances where that's part of the equation, and then working with and understanding Their genetics and how they detox and what are their toxic exposures, whether it's from the environment and the food they eat, or do they have metabolic syndrome from ultra processed foods and liver dysfunction and non alcoholic fatty liver disease because of that, or do they have just extreme gut dysbiosis and leaky gut from whatever caused it? It could be a host of things at this point, and food sensitivities and hormonal imbalance and all the things that, to a dysregulated nervous system and in.

A.

If you will, ramped up fight or flight response instead of a calm, healing, parasympathetic response.

Yeah, yes, exactly. And I think, as you say, these are multifactorial. So what we know from the work we've done with the amygdala part of the brain, which is our kind of defensive structure, just behind our eyes, there's two of them. That's one of the structures that we think the conditioning of the sympathetic response is stored. And we believe the immune system response is stored in the insular part of the brain that is also involved in autonomic responses. And what we know from brain neurology, certainly in animal studies, is that when the brain learns a particular defensive response against a toxin, it generalizes that response to all toxins. So we deal with a lot of patients who have chemical sensitivities, food sensitivities. And what we will notice is when they first got that toxic exposure, and that might be mold, it might be paint thinner, they had a massive response and they suddenly had an allergic reaction. And then what happens is they find that other things that they were completely non responsive to, now they have an allergic response to those things as well, or a sensitivity response at least. And that shows us that once the brain is in that defensive state, it starts finding new things to react to. Which is why along the spectrum of different diseases, you will notice people will have accumulation of toxins, they will have sensitivities and new allergies that start spreading. Because the system in this mode is always looking for new things to react to. That's, that's the key thing, new things that it can find. And, and then when we. Then what happens is the reason these illnesses become chronic is because even when you remove the original source. So in analogy with removing a breast implant, same with mold, even once you remove someone from the original toxic trigger, they keep responding because the system is now generalized to anything it perceives as dangerous. It's become hyper vigilant, as it were.

So that hypervigilance is there. So that's acting as a responder, like an, almost like an auto response, it's still on. And then we always talk about like helping turn that off. And then with the brain retraining the other techniques, you can break that loop of response. But to get it sticky so that it's working, like what are the three takeaways that the audience should understand that you feel are important in terms of yes, we go through and we do all this work and we help you with diet and lifestyle and supplementation and sleep and all the things. But then this ends up being, and playing such a big role that to make it sticky, I guess to make.

It sticky, I mean, it's an obvious response is just the regularity of it, the consistency, the commitment, first of all. And that's why we say to people who come to the program, look, some of you may be super motivated, some of you may not be because you might be skeptical about this. But for the next six months or three months, we want you to suspend your disbelief, suspend your skepticism and throw yourself into this healing environment. Because that is, those are the people who get the best results, are the ones who've been consistent. And we know from our studies and clinical audits that we've conducted people who commit for at least three months, sometimes ones who do it for six months, they're the ones who get the best results. You know, the 80, 90, 100% recovery. So I think that's the first takeaway is the, the consistency. I think the second thing with this is shifting away from the mainstream medical model. So the mainstream medical model is very good at treating what I call hardware problems. So we take the analogy of our computers, right? So the hardware and the software. And often it used to be that the hardware and computers went wrong, but now that rarely goes wrong. It tends to be the software that then causes malfunctions downstream in the hardware. And in a similar way, for us to heal from these modern diseases, as I'll call them, that traditional medicine finds it very difficult to treat, we have to shift our model to taking responsibility for our health and enacting good lifestyles and good habits that promote that long term health versus relying on mainstream medicine to come up with a pill to heal these diseases. So the diseases I've talked about, so chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, long Covid mold, Lyme, you know, they've been studied for decades and yet there's no consistent treatment for any of these conditions. And the reason is, is because I believe they're Software issues, not hardware issues. So therefore rewiring of the brain, getting the software to shift, is a completely new way of thinking for mainstream medicine. And we're seeing that a lot in pain now. So we're a lot of great pioneers are treating pain through neuroplasticity as well. Because before we just used to numb pain with drugs and that caused the whole opioid crisis where now the cure became worse than the illness. And in a similar way, this is the second point is the shift, the shift from thinking a pill is going to solve this to actually I'm responsible for my own health essentially with good new habits, as you describe. And I think the third point here, when people are going along this healing journey is belief is belief in my ability to heal and recover. And so many times, and I think, Rob, you know, we talked about this, people can go online and there can be support groups who say, oh, you know, if you're gonna have this for life, you'll never heal from this. Or, you know, they can start coming up with all wacky crazy things that people do. And it's letting go of the noise that we might see on social media and online and not being distracted by all that and just focusing and believing in one's own recovery. And that's super important as well.

Yeah, I've often told our patients and I've remarked candidly about social media and the Internet. And I am old enough to have been in medical school at a time where the entire journal base was on a disk, a multi disk platform. So I predate what, you know, you would consider a search engine. It's how old I am. And so, you know, the things that are, you know, written about, blogged about, videos are made about, I mean, it is very frustrating because depending on, you know, the quality, it can be very, very scary to a patient. One, it's nobody wants to have surgery. And I don't tell people to have surgery. They've, you know, experienced, you know, like you and your clients, a set of symptoms that have gotten so bad that despite their best efforts, they can't break that loop. And part of the break, you know, breaking that loop is, you know, having this breast implant removed with its scar tissue and having it tested to make sure they don't have a bacterial infection or a cancer, because those can be found. I found all those and then do all the work that it takes to recover and get well, which through testing, through just looking at genetics and the gut microbiome and toxin exposures and sensitivities to Foods and, and hormone imbalances. There is a lot to unpack and then obviously explore this neural plasticity as we've seen it over time. Patients respond differently in different situations. A patient will come in here like they did earlier today, have a really, you know, from an attitude perspective, super strong, really not experiencing much in the way of discomfort, really able to communicate as a very supportive spouse. And they're, they're on their way. They're going to have their ups and downs. But, you know, we want to have more ups and a lot fewer downs. And so we're very interested in adding work for neuroplasticity and seeing how much more that really can accelerate because we're always trying to find the most efficient ways to help our patients recover. And certainly neural recovery is a huge important aspect that we can always and want to do better with.

Yeah, yeah. And I think that complementary approach is super important because as I described that cycle, both components are important that the downstream effects in the body and alleviating and supporting the body in dealing with that inflammation, but then also the brain component which is detecting all of that. So both processes and treatments are important in working in complementary to each other, I think. And as you say, there'll be some people where sometimes just dealing with the downstream effects in the body and detoxifying the body and getting the right nutrients in the body can be enough. That can be enough to get someone to healing because that breaks the cycle enough. The brain thinks, hey, we've, we're not in danger anymore because things are improving downstream and that's enough of a buoyancy to get someone back above water. And in some cases, as you say, where there's a lot of stress in the system, the downstream effects are continuing and there's not enough of a buoyancy to get them above water. They're still drowning, as it were. And that's where then working on both components I think is super powerful.

Yeah, I agree, I agree. Well, this has been great. I'm glad we were able to meet in Boston and then I was able to get you on the show before you had to head back to the UK and where tell everybody where they can find you.

Sure. So they can go to our website, which is Gupta program, so G-U P T A program.com or they can indeed go to App Store or Play Store and download the free app and start using exercises, watching videos straight away for free. So there's lots of great materials on there. And I think what I'd also like to add is There can be a lot of stuff that people read on social media about this, that and the other fancy cures, but what we focus on is the science. So we've published three randomised controlled trials and two clinical audits, all of them showing very promising results for this type of approach. And for example, with fibromyalgia, we found that after eight weeks there was a 40% reduction in fibro scores compared to 0% in the control. And we were able to be four times more effective than a standard wellness program with diet and supplements and sleep. We were four times more effective at reducing exhaustion in long Covid and fatigue in long Covid. So these are published studies that people can read on our site and we're doing more larger scale phase 2, phase 3 trials are in the pipeline and therefore once we have those published, then hopefully this becomes something which becomes part of the pun, a no brainer for medicine because we now have something that can treat these previously very difficult to treat conditions.

Yeah, I agree. Well, that's great. I want to thank you for appearing on the show and look forward to connecting with you again soon.

Yeah, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.