THE FUTURE of WELLNESS TECH | INTELLISKIN | HALO NEUROSCIENCE | HEAL APP

Wellness Force Radio Feelings are essential, but they can't dictate our actions.

We literally infect each other with our emotions.

We came here for a special purpose.

Let the purpose unveil itself.

Knowing without doing is the same thing as not knowing. They're not just trackers.

I'm gonna wear this and it's gonna.

Help me do the right thing.

Wellness Force Radio Episode 117 the Future of Wellness Technology with Intelliskin Halo Neuroscience Heal what's up my friend? It's your host, Josh Trent. And welcome back to another episode for your weekly access to global experts in all things wellness, behavior change and new technologies. In this podcast, together, we'll discover the connections between our emotions and healthy habits to live life well and enjoy the process. Support for this show is brought to you by Perfect Supplements Passionate about non GMO pesticide free real food supplements that fuel us for the wellness journey. If you've been looking for a company to trust with your nutrition, click over to perfectsupplements.com and use code Wellness Force to save 10% off your entire order. Today is a big day. I've been wanting to release this episode for almost four months. I've been sourcing these great interviews, learning from the best of the best companies out there in what I believe will be the future of health and wellness technology. Now this is a topic we've somewhat explored over the past hundred plus shows. But today we're going the deepest we've ever gone to address the most important question, way more important than just technology itself, of how exactly can health and wellness tech, including apps, wearables, smart garments, smart devices, truly help us get more physically and emotionally intelligent so we can live life well. This is a huge question that will affect not just national but global health, so this deserves some big answers. That's why today I'm bringing you not just one but three doctors and industry experts in the fields of Smart Garments with Dr. Tim Brown, founder of Intelliskin in Brain Neuroplasticity and neuropriming with Dr. Daniel Chow, Co founder of Halo Neuroscience and how the future of doctors will care for patients at home is actually here right now with Dr. Renee Dua, co founder of Heal. So if you're a tech focused person or if you're brand new to exploring how technology can help you in your wellness journey, you're equally gonna love this episode because many of the concepts we're discussing today are brand new to the show. I've handpicked these guests out of all the noise out there to get some clarity on what wellness tech we can use right now that will secure better wellness for our future. In this first segment, we're learning how to retrain the body's posture using Smart Gar by cueing your body's natural ability to support itself in the most efficient manner. So if you sit at a desk or you're in a job where you find yourself having body pain from poor posture while working. This is why Dr. Tim Brown created Intelliskin, not just for athletes, but anyone that wants better posture to retrain the muscles that make us stand up tall. Be sure to listen to the end of the segment where you can get your very own Intelliskin today where Dr. Brown gave us a sweet hookup. Okay, let's drop in with Dr. Tim Brown. Intelliskin inventor. Dr. Tim Brown grew to understand his future creation while working as the medical Director on the ASP Surf and AVP Volleyball Tours during the 80s. As an early innovator in functional taping, he developed a hybrid kinesiology technique known as sprt. Used on everyone from Olympians to NFL players, the technique quickly became a staple in the athletic world as it allowed injured athletes to compete despite their injuries. Dr. Brown's instinctive techniques got athletes asking for taping remedies so often that he needed something he could do when the job wasn't there many late nights of trial and error. Using old remnants of wetsuits and rash guards, he devised a wearable technology that mimicked his taping technique. Dr. Brown's goal was to take what he had learned in designing and come up with a comfortable, smart compression shirt that would clinically improve posture and spinal alignment for everyone. Whether you're an elite athlete or a weekend warrior, Dr. Brown's ultimate goal is to help everyone look better, feel better, and perform better. He continues to pursue that goal every day. Dr. Brown, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks so much, Josh. It's just such a pleasure and an honor to be with you this morning.

Let's dive right in, Dr. Brown. There's all these athletes on the website. Everyone from John Cook, John Matthew, and Ernesto Fonseca, who's a supercross racer, to Kelly Slater. I mean, there are some major names that are using Intelliskin. What is Intelliskin? That was birthed from a wetsuit and a hotel traveling sewing kit.

Well, what's interesting about the athletes that you named? Ernesto Fonseca was top five in the world in supercross many years ago. Probably five or six years ago, he was involved in an accident and broke his neck so he's almost a quad, but has some use of his hands and arms. And so Ernesto wears that intelligence to sit tall in the wheelchair, and then you contrast into a guy that's on the PGA Tour or playing in the NFL. Posture is critical no matter what your life condition is, no matter what sport you're in. So I wanted to build something, obviously, that people could wear and put on, take off at will. So I had these 300 different taping techniques to draw from. And the thing that drew me to posture was because it includes so many important aspects of our health when we have good posture. You know, it affects your breathing, it affects your heart rate, it affects your hormone release and moods. It affects your digestion, your immunity, let alone how it aligns your body so it moves with greater efficiency. So with Intelliskin, I wanted to create something that mimicked the aspects of the taping, the sprt taping, or kinesio taping, and put it into a garment where it would actually cause the body to be cued into awareness of where better body alignment exists. So it's not a brace, Josh. It's a system that stimulates your nerves that are in the skin and in some places in the body, we have up to 20,000 nerves per square inch on our skin that read the outside world, that allow us to react to feedback from the world. And so what I was able to do is just kind of create a saddle to put on mother Nature's back. This nervous system is wired to give constant feed back, forward, and back, so from the outside world to the inside of the body, from the inside of the body back to the outside. And then the body reacts to it, and it reacts at hundreds of miles an hour. So it reacts very, very quickly. And so that's really what Intelliskin is about, is it's about retraining the body, making it aware 24 7, 365 of its position in space. As our body is aligned, our efficiency improves, our energy levels improve. We actually work with gravity instead of gravity opposing us.

This is very, very smart compression. It gives the tactile response on the skin to cue someone to stand tall, to stand in their fullest posture. It's something like when we were kids, our parents would tap us on the shoulder and be like, stand up straight.

That's 100%. And that's why kind of our byline is stand tall. It's like mom, you know, walking behind you, tapping you on the back to tell you to get those shoulders to come back and down and get that head back over the shoulders where it belongs.

And I think so many people need this because we have in America, sitting is obviously not just the new smoking. It's really been around for a long time. This knowledge about how dangerous sitting for long periods of time can be, which leads to upper cross syndrome. In your work as the American chiropractic sports chiropractor of the year, you see this all the time with athletes, weekend warriors, people that go to just a regular job. What is upper cross syndrome and how does Intelliskin address that?

Well, yeah, you're right. We call it death by chair. And your body starts to conform. It's like it's a very loose piece of jello and we conform to the mold that we put it in. Most often your body thinks you want to have bad posture. That's why the body moves towards bad posture. It's always adapting. It's Davis's law, it's Wolf's law of physics. Your body will adapt to the stresses put on it. And unfortunately, the contractor that the body hires oftentimes isn't the one that you would have redo your house. It re knits areas to help build support, to support that static position or the movements that you do most often. So, you know, it's not necessarily that just chairs are bad for you. It's a lack of movement. You know, you look at those cultures where people have to move every day to get their food, to get water, to work the land. Those are the people that don't have back problems or posture problems.

Josh.

It's those that are static. And in the world of technology that we live in, where we're developing even new diseases called text neck and computer back and so forth because we are so inactive. So, you know, sitting is bad for you. But also if you were to do a stand up desk and not move all day and just stand there, that's really bad for you too because your vascular system becomes compromised because so much blood is flowing down to your feet and you're not using your muscles to help pump that blood back out. Because, you know, circulatory system is really aided by our muscular system to help pump out. And certainly our lymph system is a passive system. So we need to move to have the lymph system move those out with the old and in with the new throughout our body.

And I'm visualizing someone at a job, postural fitness comes to mind because postural fitness, the way that we sit, the way that we stand and the way that we move with A neutral spine. This is important. So is range of motion and flexibility. But would you say looking across the board, Tim, that most people have a forward flexed head, protracted shoulders, and upper cross syndrome, weak glutes? We see the same thing a lot in the training world. How can people sit taller wearing a smart garment? What does that look like when they're at a job or when they're moving around the house?

Yeah, I think just becoming aware, having that tactile awareness. Look, the more senses that we stimulate when we're doing an activity, the better chance we have to remember it. So what I'm trying to do is create a physiological change in what you feel on your body, how it feels to be aligned, the senses that you get, the sense of well being you get when your body's in better alignment and so forth. So it's a long, slow story. And as we spoke about before, everyone's story is different. Everyone's environment is different. The upper cross syndrome that we talked about, and then it leads to lower cross syndrome and is something that we all have. Josh, there's a doctor named Vladimir Yonda and he's passed away over the last 10 years. But he was really the pioneer and created these research studies that found we all have these imbalances. We all have tight, short pecs, we all have rounded shoulders to some degree. Because our upper back is not toned, the muscles that control our scapula, which is critical for shoulder function, are all stretched and undertone. And Vladimir Yonda was able to document this and come up with the consistencies that we have in all of us. And if your listeners would go online and just simply look up upper cross syndrome, you will see a picture of yourself in there. And it's the imbalances that we all deal with. And so in dealing with sports medicine, not only do we deal with the sports specific issues, but everybody's coming in with this upper cross and lower cross syndrome. So that's our starting spot. And when we as performance specialists take these athletes and we don't do a thorough examination and see where the movement problems are and fix those first, we're actually training and enhancing, increasing the imbalances. So that's why I want to put something on everybody so that their body will give them that feedback. If your body's putting stress on the shirt, that means your body's going in the wrong direction. If there's no stress on your body while you're wearing the shirt, that means your body's in the proper position. So it's like I Said, it's not a brace. It's really a cueing system, an awareness system so that you get stronger every time you wear it, not weaker and more dependent on a bracing system.

And I had the chance to try this product, and I was noticing when I was wearing it working one day, I just noticed that if I was to slump forward, if my shoulders were going to slump forward, it felt uncomfortable. And it was a nice reminder, a tactile reminder for me to just gently take a breath and pull my shoulders back. We look at how long it takes to build postural fitness. 300, 500 reps to see changes. 60 to 90 days to morph a tissue. Someone's wearing a smart garment. They're doing great postural training. They're becoming more aware. Tim, how long does it typically take for someone who's just starting out on getting better posture?

Well, it's a difficult and easy question all at the same time, because it really depends on an individual's posture fitness, what their background, what their history of injury has been, and what their dedication to changing their posture is, because it's a 24 7, 365 thing. So what we do is we have people put the shirt on, and when they start to feel fatigue between the shoulder blades, then it's time to take it off. Just like a workout, you go just a little beyond what's comfortable, and then you take it off, and the next time you wear it, you can wear it longer. Most of the time, within two weeks, people can wear the shirt or the apparel all day long because their posture fitness changes so quickly. Now, the adaptation, the Davis law, how does your body morph and actually physically change? That's when we're talking 60 to 90 days and again, depending on how much effort you put into it. If you've got an hour in the shirt and then 23 hours out of the shirt, and you do everything in poor posture, well, that shirt's going to be very minimally effective. But if you start to change how you sit, sleep, stand, become more aware of the exercises that you do, and if your exercises are curls and bench press and things that work the front of the body, when the front of the body's already too tight, overworked, and under stretched, then it's going to be a real dog fight. But if you do the exercises that really enhance posture, opening the front or the anterior chain of the body and toning and closing down the posterior chain of the body, now we're cooking. Now we've got multiple tools that are working for the same objective. And for me, that's how you get from point A to point B the quickest. You really have to focus on it, dedicate yourself to it. Just like an athlete. You now are a posture athlete. And obviously with athletes in the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, National Hockey League, I mean, almost every team uses Intelliskin either for their whole team or for some of their specialists. So if these guys get paid to use their bodies and they can buy anything in the world to use to enhance their performance, we're just super excited and humbled that they choose Intelliscan.

People have to become aware first and then take inspired action after that. It's not like they're gonna put on the shirt and all of a sudden snap their fingers. Their posture is going to be fixed. This is something where people are going to take that inspired action. These athletes that you talked about, Tim, they have a really clear why they're getting paid to be physical. So somebody who's wearing this shirt, who's correcting their posture, they also have to have a clear why? What do you think is successful for people that use smart garments, that do postural training, that have suffered from pain? What makes them transcend the realization that.

They don't want to be on pills or get surgery? I think it really comes down to that. There are so many options in what we do to take up our time during the day these days. And there's always a band aid, there's always a pill, there's always that option. But, you know, frankly, that is. That's fool's gold. You know, you are always going to be chasing your tail. You know, I tell my athletes, unless you get your body posture right and you learn to control your core, you will be injured every five to eight weeks on average, the rest of your career. Josh, look. James Andrews, the great orthopedic surgeon out of Alabama, speaks to the fact that every sport, every athlete in every sport at every age and at every level of competency has injury statistics that are increasing and not decreasing. There is a missing link here. We are missing the boat with all this functional training that we're doing. I mean, we've done some incredible things in the last 10 or 20 years to improve our knowledge base. But the bottom line is results, Josh, and the results are not good. We continue to increase an injury, though. We have better ways maybe to do surgery on these injuries. My goal is always prevention. It's always prevention because the very things that prevent injury, I have found, are the very same things that improve performance. So if we can humble ourselves and take a few steps back and learn to move the body, learn to train it not only with movement, but with breath and movement in combination. We find that breath is not only a great connector of the mind and the body, but is also the great protector. That's why fighters use specific breathing techniques when they train. It's to protect their body. And for my buck in this juncture in my career, Josh, that connection between breath, the diaphragm, fascia, posture, alignment, core control, and by that I mean being able to move and translate forces through the core, as opposed to thinking that the core is a primary mover of the body, it's not. It's a transitioner. It allows us to move energy from our upper body to our lower body. It allows us to protect our spine. So it just makes sense that learning to move and breathe properly is a huge step for preventing injury and improving performance.

And when we breathe, when we take that deep breath, it's a lot easier to pull our shoulders back and relax. So that is such a great point. Where can people learn more about intelliskin and then also what you're excited about, Tim, for the next 12 or 24 months? There's some really fun stuff coming up, I'm sure.

Yeah, you can get to intelliskinteleskin.net I N T E L L I yeah, go on in there and check it out. And we stand behind everything we do. So if you want to try something out and it's not for you, we stand behind our products and we'll make it good for sure, so. Well, in the immediate term, I'm a little bit crazy right now because I'm hosting a SportsMed Ted talk at my house this weekend, and I thought I'd have maybe a dozen people over, Josh, and it's morphed into about a crowd of 50. And what's cool is that they're all thought leaders, they're all opinion leaders, and they're just super psyched up to come by because they're used to being the ones that are sharing. And now we're going to have kind of a house full of people that are all givers. And so it should be a great body nerd knowledge junkie fest this weekend over here. So I'm excited about that. And I'm also building new stuff. I've got lower body posture or lower body alignment products that are coming out that actually adjust the pelvis and the hips to improve range of motion in those areas, because that's one of the key Areas, Josh. There's three areas that we've all got to keep flexible, and if we don't, we're going down. So here's the three minimal areas. We've got to have good ankle dorsiflexion. So your ability to flex forward on your ankle is critical for the rest of your life. The next area is your hips. If your hips aren't loose, you're going to have a bad back, bad knees. You're going to have a problem moving as you go on through life. So keep those hips loose. And then the third area is thoracic spine mobilization. Really important that your middle back isn't rounding forward and you're losing that range of motion that allows you to not only open your chest so that you can breathe well, but also align your shoulders and keep your head on top of your shoulders. We want that head to weigh about 10 pounds, not 40 pounds as it is when we. We look down onto our phone. So I'm doing those things, and then I'm also building smart socks. So smart socks are socks that stimulate the nerve endings in your feet, and we've got lots of nerve endings in the bottom of the feet. So it doesn't take a lot of pressure to stimulate muscles. That will help build what I call the foot core. And the foot core is an important part of the foot that allows that foot to dome up and disperse energy throughout the surface area of the foot equally, as opposed to someone with a collapsed arch or that pronates turns their feet out, and all their energy is going right through their ankles and into the earth. So we think that the feet are really important. So I'm going to put my mind into the feet and build some smart socks.

Man, I love that you talked about the three pillars. We'll link those in the show notes also to parting guidance for people that are just starting this journey. You know, your goal, as you talked about on your website and all your media, is to have everyone look better, feel better, and perform better. How do you continue to pursue that for yourself?

Moving? You know, I'm working on 61 this year, buddy, so I surf almost daily, and I ride small boards. And one of the things that allows me to do that is my mobility. So I do gymnastica natural, I do foundation training, and then I just do an amalgam of exercises, including the five Tibetan rights, which are something that I hope you guys maybe even do a show on at one point in time. These are thousands of years old, these exercises, and it's a series of five exercises that you do and it's really for your internal health. But quite frankly, looking at upper cross syndrome and lower cross syndrome, it's almost the perfect stretch series for those as well. So you get these incredible benefits and the first time you do this series, and I would tell all your listeners to look at the five Tibetan rites. I even do a series of them on YouTube if you're interested. But it only takes a few minutes. And I would tell you the first time you do them, it's a feeling like I've probably only had a few times in my life when I've done something that I know I have to do the rest of my life or I'm just an idiot. So this is one of those things that's super special.

We'll definitely link that in the show notes too, man. Thanks so much for sharing your knowledge. We'll link Intelliskin, which I believe can make people stand tall. I felt it myself. So, Dr. Tim, thanks so much for coming on the show, man.

Yeah, I mean, we're just getting started. Josh, you're just warming me up, man. Don't tease me like that. Let's do this again.

Definitely. Thanks so much, man.

Yeah, big love. Stand tall.

Dr. Brown was generous enough to give the Wellness force radio audience 15% off all IntelliSkin garments. So whether you're an athlete, male or female, you just want to have better posture at work. Be sure to use code Josh Trent15 to get 15% off your smart garment up to a week after the episode. For our second segment, we're learning about transcranial direct current stimulation, otherwise known as tdcs, through a device called Halo Sport from Halo Neuroscience with a Co founder and CEO, Dr. Daniel Chow. You may have already heard about the buzz between Dr. Chow and Halo Sport. They have this partnership with the San Francisco Giants to train their athletes. But what I'm most excited about in this segment is my personal experience. I got to use the Halo sport and experience what Dr. Chow calls neuro priming in various sessions while I was working out at the gym. The fascinating part about neurostimulation is this is already a 7 billion dollar industry. How it applies to health and fitness though, is through stimulating the motor cortex, we can literally prime the brain for enhanced motor pattern recruitment, which helps athletes and musicians with dexterity and everyday people in human performance. Let's step into this conversation with Dr. Daniel Chow. How can electricity impact our brain and our wellness? And how can we become less fatigued? Dr. Daniel Chow is coming on the show today to talk about his company, Halo Neuroscience, and the Halo Sport specifically. Dr. Chow, welcome to the show.

Yeah, thanks. I'm excited. Thanks, Josh.

Yeah. So excited. We were talking a little bit before we recorded, and I thought, okay, I'm going to hit the record button, because we were already going down the pipeline of things people get to know. Electricity has been used in patient and clinical settings and in athletics for a long time. But why now? I mean, what is Halo doing right now for the fitness and wellness industries? Is there something that came up recently where you just saw it as a gap that needed to be filled?

Yeah, you're right. There's been decades of clinical use of implantable neurostimulators. So these systems require two or three hours of neurosurgery that involve electrodes inserted into the brain and almost like this onboard computer that gets implanted in the body with its own battery computer chip. So it sounds pretty extreme, and, you know, honestly, it is.

Yeah.

We're talking about equipment going into the brain, but the benefits are real. So there's brain stimulators for Parkinson's disease, essential tremor. I come from a company where we built a brain stimulator to treat epilepsy. There's a spinal cord stimulator for chronic pain. So it's actually like a pretty big industry, a $7 billion annual industry of selling implantable neurostimulators to treat DISE. Now, at my last company, my now co founder and I, Brett Wingyer, we became interested in ways that we could do neurostimulation, but from the outside. So, you know, the question is, could we build neurostimulation systems into a package that could be wearable? What we found was this growing body of literature that started in about 2005. So two German scientists were making discoveries using these really fairly elegant, like, neurophysiology techniques where they were able to apply a direct current to the scalp and basically induce these temporary states of hyper learning. Neuroscientists call it hyperplasticity. But, you know, for us on. On this call, we can call it hyper learning. You know, what started as, you know, a dozen foundational papers, it really set a fire. This entire field of different labs across the world using this technology and applying it in their systems. What started as one paper in 2005 has turned into 2000 papers. Fast forward to today. You saw this really explosive growth in interest, and also the quality of the results really improved over time as well. That really caught our eye. And at some point, Brett and I said that there's Real legs of this technology. And we should found a company around it.

Yeah. And there's a demand out there for people that want to live life well, that want to move. Well, we look at the motor cortex on the brain. There's this concept of, I believe it's neuropriming. Can you describe what neuropriming is for people that might not know? And it's probably most people.

Yeah. So neuropriming is our marketing term. I'll just be totally honest with you guys. It's a marketing term that we use for this technology that the long way of saying it is transcranial direct current stimulation.

Neuropriming sounds a lot more fun.

Yeah, well, it rolls off the tongue just a little bit easier. Yeah. So the way the technology works is you have an electrode. In our case, we call it a primer. You place it strategically on your scalp over the part of the brain that you want to get better. A 20 minute application of this electric field that we're creating will induce this temporary state of hyper learning. So it's almost like you're priming your brain for a training session. Now, if you put the electrode over this part of the brain that controls movement in our bodies. So you've already mentioned motor cortex, but that's that part of the brain that helps us move or controls movement. Prime that part of the brain and then did your athletic training, what could happen? The reason that we do athletic training and why athletic training is repetition based. Like a big part of that is for the sake of our brain, to encourage our brain to learn faster, to memorize these movement patterns, which in many cases are very complex and takes a lifetime to learn. So what can we do to hasten that process? What can we do to accelerate the rate at which you basically acquire muscle memory? So that's our first product. You know, we call our product Halo Sport. But you know, that's just a fancy way of saying a motor cortex specific neurostimulator.

Yeah.

That, you know, today we offer to.

Athletes and people that just want to move really well. I had the experience. I just finished the 20x event which we'll link in the show notes today. It's Mark Devine's one of just most incredible things. 14 hours of exercise. You should try it, Dr. Chow.

14 continuous hours.

14 continuous. I mean, you get a little bit of breaks here and there, but you're pretty much moving for 14 hours. Anyways, I was done with the event. I took three or four days off just to recover but then I started this seven day cycle. I was using the Halo sport and I did a baseline of just box jumps because I thought, how am I actually going to quantify my results here? And so what I did was I took a 36 inch box jump. I did it for 20 repetitions after I did my kind of normal movement prep wearing the Halo sport. It's funny, it's like a. Almost like a warm feeling on the scalp. And when I was done, I just. The way I could describe it was I felt like I was in a hallway and my focus was looking straight ahead. All the noise that was on the outside, all the fuzziness, I felt like it just took away the fuzz and I was able to do a lot more powerful jumps. Typically, I'll take a pause when I'm at the bottom of my box jump, but I was landing and jumping right back into it. And this is after doing a lot of these box jumps. So for me it was those two things. It was feeling less fuzz and then more performance on the jumping, on the landing. What actually was that? That's anecdotal for me, but scientifically, what was I experiencing there?

That is your brain being primed. So, like, you know, what typically takes you as an athlete 20, 30 minutes to achieve on your own to like kind of get into this flow? You know, we could really, we can shortcut that process by using neurostimulation. And, you know, it's beyond the attentional benefits that you got. So we get that a lot. And in an unsolicited way, like, I didn't ask you that question, Josh. You just came out and said that.

Sure.

We get that from like just about all of our athletes, that they just feel like this connectedness with their body from a movement perspective like they don't get anywhere else. So there's got to be something real there. But let's, let's talk about the data, because there we could say, you know, from a statistical perspective that there's a clear separation between a control group and the group that got Halo sports. So the way you benefit from these states of hyper learning is that we need you to feed the brain, like, really quality, deliberate, thoughtful training repetitions, which is exactly what you did with your box jump. Now, what you get out of that session, sure, we're exercising your muscles and you're becoming more fit from a cardiovascular perspective. But what about your brain? You know, what we're helping your brain do is build that circuitry so that you can replicate that ideal movement better. The Next time. Yeah, and the next time. And the next time. And with each rep you get a little bit better. You kind of put that neurologic program into a groove so that the next time you call upon that program, it's easier for you to execute. So, you know, there's, there's applications certainly in box jumps, like what you said, there's applications in powerlifting. Strength is a skill and it's neurologically governed. It's not obvious, but it is.

Yeah.

And then on the total opposite of the spectrum, like 10% of our sales go to musicians. You know, we think of musicians as athletes too. Like, think about what a violinist needs to do.

Incredible dexterity is needed.

Absolutely. And that is all movement based training. Like, you know, the six hours of practicing violin is very similar to the six hours of shooting practice for a basketball player. It's all about like grooving that motor pattern so that your brain remembers how to do things quicker.

This is interesting too. I want to bring this up. People talk about muscle memory a lot, but that memory is actually encoded in our brain. We have this myelin that surrounds the axons which then really are firing action potential. Correct. I'm not a scientist. You are the doctor on the show. But tell us about this. Is it muscle memory that's stored in the brain that then sends that efferent and afferent message back and forth? It's not actually a memory inside of our muscle spindle.

Yeah, exactly right. It's. Muscle memory is a kind of a bad word. The memory is not in our muscle, it's actually in our brain.

Yeah.

And a way to think about your motor system is the master controller is your brain and the motor is your muscles. So really the muscles are a slave to the way the brain controls it. Everything from delicate movements like chopping a tomato, typing on your keyboard, to really powerful and explosive movements like a box jump. The brain's role in orchestrating this collection of different, different muscle contractions is everything.

One of the big pieces too, that I felt is when I'm moving and I've done some neuro priming. I'm in a space where I'm trying to perform at my highest potential. How does this, over the course of time help someone to do a specific movement in a sport? An example might be a pitcher that wants to really hone a fastball or a dancer that wants to be able to do plies or whatever sport. Right. Could be a sport of life. How does that actually work? To help groove the channel and send the right kind of electricity and blood flow to the parts that are going to move the right muscles. How does that work from a scientific standpoint?

Yeah, so the brain works by remodeling itself. So, you know, like, if you think of the brain as being plastic, and this word plasticity comes from the brain's ability to change itself. From a circuitry perspective, that is what makes us learn. Makes us learn facts like trivia type, jeopardy type questions, Everything to, like, remembering math problems and doing science. Like, it's the creation of these new circuits that makes our brains better. So from a movement perspective, it's the motor cortex that drives a lot of that. It's about creating these new circuits within the brain that help control these movement patterns that, you know, through athletic training we tried to build. So I guess what we're sympathetic of is how slow this process is. And if you take, for example, you know, let's take Steph Curry, because he's topical, he's the NBA's in their playoff season, and he's the greatest shooter of his generation, and he's kind of celebrated for practicing a lot. But a lot of players practice as much as Steph. In fact, there are some players that practice more than Steph, and they're not as good as Steph. So what is going on here? So, you know, in life, we can only practice so much, you know, at some point, especially athletically, you know, fatigue sets in or risk of injury kind of outweighs the performance gains. And then, you know, for all of us with day jobs, you know, there's time constraints on the amount of athletic training that we could do in our personal lives. So what can we do to maximize the training benefits from a given amount of practice? Yeah, you know, we do stuff already like we fuel the body with protein and different nutrients. You know, we'll stretch and prepare, you know, the muscles and the ligaments, a workout. But what do we do for the brain, which might be an even bigger driver towards athletic performance than all the other things I just mentioned?

Professional teams are looking at this. The Giants. You announced the partnership with the Giants, but I know that's one of many that are in the sports arenas, major sports arenas across the globe. What are you most excited about when you look at professional athletics and using neuro priming with Halo, you know, it's.

Just like, as a fan, as a sports fan, it's awesome to work with these people that I admire and, you know, at the end of the day, this is their livelihood. So, you know, if we can help keep them healthier like by helping them learn healthier movement patterns to reduce the risk of injury. If we can help them with their performance so that, you know, they achieve their personal goals, whether it's to make the hall of Fame or, you know, just to make a pro team to play one day in the majors, like, you know, for a lot of folks, that's amazing. So whatever their personal goals are, like, if we can help them with that and help them achieve their dreams, that's, that's amazing. And you're correct in saying that we work with a lot of pro teams. One tricky part of working with a pro team, especially with a product like ours, is a lot of them think of us as a secret weapon and don't want to talk about us.

Sure.

So that's flattering on one side but frustrating on the other. We're thankful for our hometown baseball team, the San Francisco Giants, for being one of the first teams to just come out and say it. Yeah, it's like, you know, at some point this is going to be like lifting weights. Everybody lift weights. It's how you lift the weights. Same thing with neurostimulation. Like one day it will be ubiquitous. It's more how you use it, not if you're using it.

I think a lot of people that are interested in different parts of fitness or wellness technology are quantified self people. They're people that try on the sweater and essentially see if it itches.

Right.

But then we have this other half, Daniel, where people want to live very primal. They don't want to have anything to do with technology. They don't want to have their technology adverse. What do you think about connecting the bridge between making people that are only interested in primal living and that more natural way of being and then allowing them to see the benefits of integrating technology into their wellness. As we move into this incredible age of wellness technology, there's so many great things that are happening. What do you see that actually could bridge that gap?

Yeah, yeah. So I, I see where you're going. It's not obvious how someone who is a fan of the Paleo diet would also adopt a brain stimulator.

Right.

You know, I think the two can live together. You know, the person that eats Paleo only also has a cell phone and might play VR based video games. So, you know, there is technology in their life.

Yeah.

You know, what started off as a very Paleo community, CrossFit is actually one of our biggest consumer verticals. So, you know, I think that there's, there's an opportunity for the two to code exist. It might not be obvious at first, but, you know, I guess taking a step back, the brain is an electrical organ. And using electric fields to interact with the brain along several different dimensions could be seen as more natural than a chemical approach to the brain.

By chemical approach you mean pharmaceutical intervention.

Yeah. Which I think in western society certainly is commonplace and widely accepted. Whereas electricity kind of of there's this overhang of like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and different things. So I think a lot of people's immediate reaction is like, wow, that's super foreign. For example, the electric field that Halo Sport creates is really a fraction of the electric field that the brain itself creates. So we're really just taking a step back. We're speaking the brain's language, it's an electrical organization and we're using electricity to interact with it.

I believe that people that are adverse, probably are adverse to other things that they're not exactly sure why they're adverse.

Yeah.

So I think the adoption of technology, we're seeing more and more, which I'll link in our show notes. Today, the fitness plus technology show that I also do. I want to learn more about what the future looks like for Halo and the different ways that you're growing the company. Right now it's motor pattern recruitment and it's really getting the right muscle for people that are in pro athletics or that just want to work out effectively. But what does the future look like? There's many things that you're diving into beyond just motor pattern recruitment.

Yeah. So right now we've got Halo Sport and that focuses on accelerating movement based training. The electrode is placed over the motor cortex and that makes perfect sense. Now the future of this company, you know, we see ourselves not as a sports performance company, but as a human performance company. So what happens if we move the electrode to target a different brain region that controls a different functionality within yourself? You know, for us, that's a new application, a new product, a new value proposition to our customers. So, you know, a natural place for us to go would be more frontal. So the motor cortex is right above your ears. Like what if we moved the electrode more frontal to get at more cognitive processing. So like, you know, there's memory, there's attention, there's all kinds of like really interesting and valuable things that happen. More frontal. So yeah, that, that'll like, without giving away company secrets that, that gives you a little sneak peek into our future.

I can see how exciting that could be. You know, maybe we're Getting ready for a big presentation or we're doing something that really demands that frontal lobe participation. If we could get some stimuli there, that could really change the game for so many different things, correct?

Yeah, 100%. So it forecasting into the future. You know, what we want to do is we want to help solve for this 10,000 hour rule. Like we think that's a rule meant to be broken. Like what if we can dial that back to 5,000 hours or 2,000 hours? You know, think about all the things in your life that you would want, but you don't even start because it takes too long to learn.

Like learning Italian, right?

Yeah.

Like what if you want to learn Italian? Maybe that's been a dream your whole life and you've got duolingo on your phone and you're just kind of languishing away and it's just not really happening. So you put it away and you know, it's this dream that you maybe never realize. But what if instead of using duolingo by itself, what if you paired that with neurostimulation of your language cortex? Right. And we could really accelerate the rate that you pick up Italian. When you learn faster, that becomes more engaging. Like learning faster encourages to learn more. So yeah, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy. And you know, in the case of foreign language acquisition, it could be something that you have in your life that you wouldn't have otherwise. And it just goes from there. You know, there's. We've been talking about the performance applications, but there's also medical applications for technologies like this. So you know, what if we could to the same. So going back to halo sports, you know, we could help you train for box jumps. What if we could help a stroke victim with his or her physical therapy?

Much more important than my box jumps.

Well, yeah, I. Not to cast judgment on anything but. But yeah, one could argue that.

Yeah.

But yeah, there's all kinds of different things that we could use to use these temporary states of hyper learning to help remodel the brain. You know, certainly to treat disease and also to help otherwise healthy people get more out of their life.

We'll link some of the scientific literature. One of them that really caught my eye was from pans. This is a peer reviewed study. Non invasive cortical stimulation. It basically proved enhancing motor skill acquisition. And I gotta say, what comes up for me as far as curiosity is other skill acquisitions beyond just this motor pattern recruitment. Where can we learn more about what you're up to for the rest of 2017 and into 2018.

Yeah. So there's you can visit our website. We've got a blog there with a lot of like great content. A lot of it's sports focused and you know, hopefully your listenership will enjoy that. But we also go beyond and touch different aspects of neuroscience and how it relates to neurostimulation and our everyday lives.

And we'll also link those in the show notes as well. Halo Neuroscience and Dr. Chow was nice enough to give us a discount if you want to sample this. If you want to do an n equals 1 like I did, pick this unit up, give it a shot. Especially if you're somebody that goes to the gym quite a bit or if you're looking for endurance performance. We didn't have time to get into that, but this is also helping a lot of endurance athletes as well. So Dr. Daniel Chow, thank you so much for coming on Wellness Force Radio. We appreciate what you're doing for the wellness industry.

No thanks Josh. I really appreciate the opportunity. Pleasure's mine.

So if you're an aspiring athlete or musician, Dr. Chow gave Wellness Force $125 off the Halo sport, which is which is a really sweet deal. Give this cutting edge neuro priming device a test run. If you're curious about increasing athletic performance or dexterity, just use code wellnessforce125 at checkout over@haloneuro.com so coffee is great, but what do you do if you've hit a daily limit for your caffeine and you still require more energy to meet the demands and responsibilities in front of you? Over the past two years, I've personally been doing an N1 experiment while studying what substance supplements work to yield energy and balance in my wellness without a bunch of stimulants. That's why I'm excited to talk to you about Perfect Acai Revive. This energy boosting blend of acai berry, cordyceps, rhodiola, rosea and grape extract which work together synergistically to increase endurance athletic performance and boost cognitive function. This Perfect Acai revive is a 4 in 1 upgrade in one perfect blend of organic, pesticide free real food supplementation that delivers sustained energy and focus throughout the day. Without those jitters and the caffeine crash. Pick up your four in one supplement. Make it easier to get the energy you need for your busy day by clicking over to perfectsupplements.com wellnessforce grab your Asahi revive. Make sure to enter code wellnessforce to get 10% off your entire order. Alright, the final segment for this exciting future of Wellness tax Tech. We're learning from Dr. Renee Dua, renowned nephrologist, whom, with her husband, entrepreneur Nick Desai, have co founded Heal, an iOS and Android app that allows patients to order a doctor straight to their home or office. After this couple spent more than seven hours waiting in an ER room for their son, they realized firsthand how broken the $3 trillion health care system is, and they set out to fix it. Through M Health technology, Heal is transforming healthcare with unhurried house calls through empowerment and qualified doctors doing what they love to do with purposeful innovations that are going to enable so many people to spend less time getting well and more time being well. So we're continuing our featured series, Wellness Technology Best of the Best, on companies who are creating technology that are helping us live life well. Dr. Renee, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me.

You know, I found out about your application through many different colleagues and friends in our space. And I'm curious, for people that don't know, can you share with us a high level of what is Heal? What is Heal doing for our wellness space?

Sure. So Heal is a pretty simple concept. It is an app that you download onto your phone and when you push a couple of buttons and get going, you can have a doctor come to your house to do a medical evaluation. We send doctors for colds, cuts, stitches, and we send doctors if you need a physical exam or you need a wellness evaluation.

And you found out that the industry needed this desperately after spending almost seven hours in an er?

Yeah.

Tell us about that story with your young son.

You know, it was a pretty traumatizing time in our lives. My husband and I, we were new parents and we went to go see a pediatrician on a Friday night around 4:30. She was sort of overwhelmed by what she was seeing, so she sent us to an er and we waited for probably seven or eight hours actually, before we were seen. And after we did get seen, the physician, my son got better. Honestly, we waited so long, and the physician said to me, you know, you're a doctor. He happened to know me from training and work and stuff. And he said, gino, you're a doctor. What are you doing here? You know better than that. And I just remember thinking to myself, yes, this kid looks so good after eight hours. But. But the first seven hours were just, you know, I was beside myself worried about this boy. And it's true, I am a doctor. What would I have done if I wasn't? If I didn't have some of the knowledge that I Do have, you know, and I just thought, God, I don't ever want anybody to experience anything like that or be so scared that they can't actually manage their own health and wellness or their child's health and wellness.

And I think a lot of people can relate to that story because we've all spent time with, with a broken arm or some kind of medical condition in the emergency room. But what we know is we're seeing a shift in mobile focused healthcare not only for injuries, but also I've learned that most of the ER visits, 71% by the way, are unnecessary. Can you tell us about that?

It's very true. I mean, when you go to an emergency room, part of the reason you're waiting is because there are people coming in before you that either actually have emergencies or in fact they don't. And they too are in a queue waiting to be evaluated. When you go to an ER, you should be there for literally 30 minutes if that, if you have an emergency and you should be evaluated within that 30 minute period. But in reality, people have such a difficult time accessing care, whether it's because they don't have insurance or they have a high deductible, or there is no nearby urgent care, or it's Sunday, right? There's no office open on Sunday. You know, Americans source their healthcare from the er and it's a bummer for those people who have emergencies and it's a bummer for those people who don't, but just need attention.

And I think a lot of us who have been to the emergency room wish that we could have been seen faster. Of course, looking at your story, your seven hours of waiting with your son.

So faster and cheaper.

We know that there is a lot of problems that are facing, not just us as consumers, as patients, but really doctors. So you're a physician. Tell us from your vantage point how we're going to to succeed using digital in this world where we all need quicker service.

Right? And so the possibilities are endless. The first thing that HEAL strives to do is perfect the house call. So this means that we're making house call medicine a standard of care. In other words, when a doctor comes to your house, you can expect to have a full evaluation, inclusive of the answers to questions you didn't even think to ask. So I might be showing up for a cough and I might walk out having diagnosed you with a breast. Once we perfect the house call, that routing and that kind of dispatch technology with those sorts of physicians can be used to do anything. We can Send a dermatologist to do fillers. We can send a kidney specialist to evaluate your chronic kidney disease. We can go on and on with the possibilities and from there we can take it to being predictive. So in other words, we're now logging all this information about your blood pressure and you if it's slowly creeping up, do you have the possibility of having heart disease in your future? When we're coming, we're doing a functional kind of medical evaluation as well. Many Heal doctors will open your cabinets and say, look, you are prehypertensive and your kitchen pantry is full of salty products and processed foods. And maybe you need to work on that aspect of how you're eating so that you have a more natural result as opposed to a heart attack wherein you find you actually had high cholesterol and high blood pressure.

I love that so much. I'm visualizing what I believe is the next level, the next phase of a doctor's and a physician's evolution where they're seeing the patient at their deepest needs in their home.

That's exactly right. It is your most intimate relationship. And I always say that, that I have patients who tell me things that they don't tell their spouse or their kids or their best friend. But you know, they'll be open and upfront with me.

One of the benefits I'm seeing. We'll link in the show notes today for moms that are busy. I know a lot of people are listening. They're shaking their heads. They're probably busy right now. We'll link this for stylishly social. It was the benefits of using heal. It was one case study about someone who had a doctor from Heal come to their home on their schedule, right to their door. Can you tell us the feedback you're getting? I know you just opened up in dc. What are the busy parents saying about not having to wait in an emergency room for seven hours?

You know, busy parents don't have time to take care of themselves, let alone their children. So for all of us busy parents, because I am one too, this is a godsend, especially if you have more than one child. So imagine that you have three children and only one is sick. There is no reason to drag all three of them to an office. Imagine that bedtime is at 7:30. Doctors often closes at 5. Kids have school, et cetera. How are you going to negotiate all those different places you have to be? And in this case, you can have a doctor come to the house at 6pm get dinner done on time, get bedtime Done on time. When you're a parent, those things are critical to tomorrow's progress.

Yes, yes.

So this company was very much created by parents. Nick, my husband and I, we're parents too, and we get all the pain points of taking your small kids to the doctor. My sons, when we would go to the pediatrician, they literally know we're on the way there because they remember, you know, they're so tiny, but they're so smart and they see the streets and they know that shots are coming, you know, so it'd be a fiasco in the parking lot to get them upstairs. And all of that is changing with the idea that you have a doctor in your house on the floor, you know, bringing all the kids, the tools and everything is fun. You know, when it's at a child's place, it's fun for her. You're on her terms. It's great.

There's got to be such a great comfort level as well. Because you're seeing someone in their home, you're able to treat them where they actually live. I'm curious, the roadblocks. With every roadblock comes a huge opportunity and a way to serve people. So what are the roadblocks that exist right now? What should people be voting for with their attention, with their clicks, and possibly with their dollars? When we look at using technology to.

Empower health, your question is such a good one. Because when you're creating a company like this, in a lot of ways, our technology is light years ahead of our counterparts. To give you an example, when you book a heal visit, we'll tell you real time eligibility for your Blue Shield ppo. But not every insurance payer's eligibility feature is working on a weekend. A lot of the times an insurance company will use Sunday to do their own tech checks and their own updates to their engineering, etc. So we can't always get an eligibility check on a Sunday. Another one that we have to deal with is, for example, not every pharmacy is open as late as we are. Not many labs are open after 5pm so many of the constructs of healthcare request and require that you actually take time off of your day to achieve the outcome of this visit. I might be able to see you at 6pm, but if your pharmacy closed at 5, then either we're sending you to another pharmacy that you don't typically use, or you're picking up your medication the next day. So those are some of the kind of funny things that I bet you didn't predict. I was going to say, but operationally we run into all the time, actually.

And I think people vote with their attention. You know, attention is the new currency when we look at technology and how people are being tracked off their data. There's an article from cdc, CNN Money, and we'll link this in the show Notes as well about common knowledge in medicine. Doctors routinely order tests in hospitals, patients that are unnecessary and wasteful. How is HEAL and your application saving not only money, but time for both the physician and the patient in that regard?

You know, it's such a phenomenal point that one of the things that happens when you're pressured in an office visit is you're just thinking, I need this patient to be seen, evaluate it, and I need to move on to the next patient, and I need to do that in 10 minutes. So you literally do what pleases the patient without doing what is right by your own medical training. You order unnecessary tests, you refer them, whatever, because you're almost dealing with a person as a customer when you're actually dealing with a patient and you're spending time with that patient. You can have a conversation and you can educate your patient. And so HEAL has these amazing stats on this kind of information. For example, our referral rate and our need for hospitalization is extremely low. Our antibiotic prescription outflow rate, it's less than 15% of our visits because we have the time to tell a patient, listen, this is a virus. You're not going to get better with antibiotics, so you don't need them and we're not going to prescribe them. These are all things that as we're growing as a company we're studying, many people ask me, well, Renee, how are you going to make money in this company? And what I'm really focused on is how much money we're saving. When you call us, you don't go to the er, you don't go to urgent care, and that is invaluable.

And I believe the old phrase, I have to go to the doctor is now changing to the doctor can come and see me. What an incredible service that you're providing for people across our industry space. So I believe that we're gonna see Mobile Health and mhealth radically change not just medicine, but also what we're seeing. We've explored this on the show Dr. Renew with wellness and with training. As we look to the future in this incredible horizon with people being served at home from their doctors, what can people do to support heal? What can Wellness Forest Community do to support what you're doing?

One of the constructs of this company is to create Heal community members. So in other words, if you're in an area wherein you can use Heal and you're talking about Heal to your neighbors, all of you are using Heal and and within time you will have a Heal family doctor who then is going to once again be collecting information about how you all live as a community. When a fever breaks out, can you predict how many kids are going to get sick? How to educate all of you if you're going out and having neighbor type events, how to educate you on wellness, preparedness, diet, vacation, all the things that a lot of families do in their neighborhoods. And that that community medicine piece means our doctor is staying in the car for less time and spending more time with patients. So it's a pretty powerful effect.

And this is something that's affordable for almost everyone. Visits cost $99. They're also being paid by Blue Shield and many other insurance organizations as parting guidance for someone who's looking for medical health through their phone delivered right to their home. Where should they go next? Where can they learn more?

So our website is an awesome source www.heal.com and I would rec downloading the app and registering as a patient and trying it out. We accept all the major PPOs and we really did try to keep the price point as low as possible so that we're way cheaper than an urgent care or certainly an emergency room. And you're not ignoring your health that way.

And I feel really fortunate because San Diego is one of your cities as well as San Fran, Long Beach, Orange County, Silicon Valley and most recently the Washington D.C. area. Are there plans to to go nationwide?

That is the goal.

Dr. Renee, thanks so much for coming on the show. I know people are going to be clicking and checking out Heal because let's face it, who wants to wait seven hours in an emergency room. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

Totally agree. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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