Imagine relearning how to walk — and learn — in your senior year of high school. For this episode’s guest, Sharik Peck, that was reality. 

Mr. Peck’s battle with chronic pain began when he was only two years old. As a young child, he fractured his second cervical vertebrae. Years later, he crushed multiple spinal vertebrae in his thoracic region. Finally, he experienced a vertebral artery dissection that forced him to relearn how to walk and learn. Instead of allowing his injuries and pain to defeat him, Mr. Peck used them as inspiration. His goal was simple: Help others who experience life-altering events and chronic pain.

With this aim in mind, Mr. Peck became a physical therapist and earned his master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling. Later, he realized that he wanted to increase accessibility to chronic pain treatment by creating a device that anyone could use. This resulted in Rezzimax. 

Rezzimax is a handheld device that helps decrease chronic pain by recalibrating your body’s nervous system using vibration frequencies. 

To understand why this is effective, first, you must understand the relationship between the vagus nerve and trigeminal nerve. The vagus nerve is in charge of keeping your nervous system healthy and happy whereas the trigeminal nerve is integral to your fight or flight response. Mr. Peck likens these two nerves to the two ends of a seesaw. For your body to work well, they need to be balanced. 

By moving Rezzimax to areas of the body where you can reach your trigeminal nerve and changing frequencies, you calm down the trigeminal nerve so that your vagus nerve can better function, thus decreasing pain. 

Access a 20% coupon to purchase Rezzimax today. 

💡 Featured Expert 💡

Name: Sharik Peck

What he does: After being a physical therapist for 28 years and receiving his master’s degree in rehabilitation counseling, Mr. Peck invented the Rezzimax to treat chronic pain by targeting the vagus nerve. 

Company: Rezzimax 

Words of wisdom: “The vagus nerve’s entire job is to get the nervous system healthy, happy, sleeping well, in great relationships with others, and creating families. … One of the main nerves that is responsible for the fight or flight response in the nervous system is the trigeminal nerve. ….The relationship between the trigeminal nerve and the vagus nerve is a delicate seesaw. In order to get that vagus tone improved, we've got to get that trigeminal tone to calm itself down.”

Connect: Website |  LinkedIn 

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Back Talk Doc is brought to you by Carolina Neurosurgery & Spine Associates, with offices in North and South Carolina. To learn more about Dr. Lakhia and treatment options for back and spine issues, go to backtalkdoc.com. To schedule an appointment with Carolina Neurosurgery & Spine Associates, you can call us at 1-800-344-6716 or visit our website at CNSA.com.

Welcome. You're listening to Back Talk Doc, where you'll find answers to some of the most common questions about back pain and spine health. Brought to you by Carolina Neurosurgery and Spine Associates, where providing personalized, highly skilled, and compassionate spine care has been our specialty for over 75 years. And now, it's time to understand the cause of back pain and learn about options to get you back on track. Here's your back talk doc, Dr. Sanjiv Lakhia.

Welcome back to another episode of Back Talk Doc. As you all know, I'm always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to help you with your health, and in particular, help you with your pain. And that has involved discussions with some of my partners about evolving surgical techniques in the field of spine care. I've been able to speak to thought leaders in the field of spine rehabilitation, and really just covered a lot of material the last several months.

Today we're going to shift gears and start looking at some new technology. If you ask around, I love toys, I love gadgets, I have an engineering background myself. And I like technology that evolves, that empowers people like you who's listening and myself to be able to take care of ourselves at home. And I stumbled upon this device called the Rezzimax. And today we're going to have a great conversation with the inventor, Sharik today. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. This is an honor to be here with you.

Yeah, so Sharik Peck, right? It's P-E-C-K? Did I get that right?

That is correct, yeah.

Yes. So Sharik is a physical therapist by training, and has a real unique background. Let me open it up for you. I want you to go ahead and introduce yourself to the listeners, and then we'll dive in today and talk a lot about the scientific basis for what you've done and how it can help people.

You bet. By background, I was a... I became a physical therapist 28 years ago. And somewhere midway through my career, I decided I didn't have enough education. So I went back and got a master's degree in counseling. And really, my desire with the degree in counseling was to try and start understanding the brain and the mental aspect of the injury, and the psychology of disability. So my master's degree is in rehabilitation counseling. And I've used both of those, the background in physical therapy, the background in counseling, and my own desire to help a huge number of people in this world suffering from chronic pain, myself included, to try and create some things that would really help the world out.

And your story is really unique. You had, in your youth, you had a significant life altering event. Do you want to share that with people?

I had several significant life altering events. The first occurred when I was two years of age and I got dropped on my head and neck, and it fractured the second cervical vertebrae, fractured off my [inaudible 00:03:12] process. So I've lived my life with chronic instability of the cervical spine. In your practice, you've seen with chronic instability of the cervical spine, every other muscle in the region is contracted all the time to try and keep that part stabilized. And so you develop a lot of chronic problems.

I developed a lot of chronic neck pain, chronic shoulder pain. But years later, I was jumping a three-wheeler, and I accidentally fell 12 feet, and that three-wheeler landed on top of me, so I crushed a couple of spinal vertebrae in my thoracic region. So I've learned how to stabilize and re-stabilize parts of my spine through a few of these big injuries. But then you fast forward another year and I suffered a vertebral artery dissection, which means essentially, I ripped an artery, one of the four main arteries that go to my head, I got caught in a bad headlock wrestling, and as the gentleman was pulling and forcing on my head, and because of my instability in my neck, it caused excessive laxity between my head and the cervical spine. Well, something had to give, and it ripped one of the four main arteries that go up to the brain back in the part of the cerebellum and the right side of my brain.

So I ended up learning how to walk again, and learning how to learn again, which was a life alteration when you're heading into your senior year of high school. So I've had a number of injuries that have helped define what I wanted to do and become in life. You can imagine, learning to walk again, that was one of my very first big passions was being able to give back and help others like me learn how to be able to walk and function again after life altering injuries. That was my start into a life of chronic pain and trying to undertenant how to help others with chronic pain.

I love that. I love how you've taken some challenges in your life and used them as a springboard to help yourself and help others. And it's like the fundamental basis for your technology and what you've created. When you talk about pain, in particular chronic pain, you can't separate it from its connection with the autonomic nervous system. And one of the things that has drawn me to the work you've done, I've been on the prowl for a while looking for what are the good ways to stimulate the vagus nerve in our system? And we're going to touch on that for listeners who don't have an understanding of the importance of the vagal tone, and the vagus nerve. But in your research, you're the first person I've seen also speak about the importance and interconnectedness with the trigeminal nerve, the fifth cranial nerve. So let's start off today, set the stage for people who just aren't aware or are starting to learn a little more about pain, and stress, and how our body responds to it. Can you give us some insight?

You bet. We understand well that there is a relationship between chronic stress, and pain, and every other disease known to man. Diabetes has a strong stress related component, and cancer certainly has a very high stress related component. And every other condition, headaches, just everything does. And I was starting to really dive deep into understanding how exactly does it work. I mean, we know stress is related to all of these terrible conditions that we face. But often times there's a little disconnect between understanding how it were.

And in my research, I stumbled across this understanding of the vagus nerve. And we know that the vagus nerve, it's entire job is to get the nervous system healthy, happy, sleeping well, in great relationships with others, creating families. These are things that that vagus nerve seems to have as a high priority. And it just mostly responds to things in the environment. In fact, 81% of the messaging of the vagus system is simply taking information from parts of the body like the stomach, and the digestive system, and the spleen, and the liver, and areas that we don't even know talk to the brain. But it's job is to take all these pieces of information up to the brain, and then the brain regulates what it should do with all that information.

Well, that vagus nerve is... If it's not functioning well, your body is not producing serotonin, which is critical to helping you feel good about the life you're living. And if that vagus nerve is not functioning well, you're not sleeping at night.

As I started studying this whole system that's got to be running well for a person to be able to sleep well at night, and recover from all the stresses of the day, I started to understand that it's got this unique relationship with the fight or flight processes in the body. So you got to think of it this way. It's just like a seesaw, or a teeter totter we used to call these in grade school. And when one side of the teeter totter is up, the other side is down. And if you're not balanced somewhere in there with your teeter totter, well you're either up way high in the air or you're down on the ground and can't get off of it. That is how the functioning is with that vagus nerve system. If the fight or flight process is in high demand, vagus nerve doesn't function.

Well, one of the main nerves that is responsible for that fight or flight response in the nervous system is another one of those cranial nerves. Cranial nerve number five, we call it the trigeminal nerve. And it has everything to do with all of the... It works extremely closely with all of the facial nerves, all of the expressions if you will, and the clenching response. And it's a strong driver in the whole fight or flight process.

So it goes like this, if you happen to be walking down the road and your ear, which is another cranial nerve that goes straight to the brain stem and takes messaging to the brain, well, if it hears a gunshot, immediately, your jaw will clamp down, and as the sound and the clamping of the jaws, as that takes it floods our body with adrenaline, and our eyes go wide so that we can take in more light, and we can see around us, and see what might be happening, assess the danger.

And this whole process of the fight or flight response is kicked into high gear by our very fast paced life that we live. As you're driving down the road at 60, 70 miles per hour, all the little pieces of information that your eyes are taking in, that's a stressful relationship that the brain is saying, "Wow, I've got a lot of pieces of information, I better start shutting down that vagus tone a little bit and I better kick in the fight or flight response, because who knows when we're barrelling down the road if I've got to get ready to punch somebody or get out of the car when it gets flipped over."

So the stress response is really what's wreaking havoc in our health today. The stress response is accompanied by high adrenaline levels, high epinephrine levels, high cortisol levels. And the cortisol is what gives us an upset stomach and keeps our brain from functioning very well. But that makes sense if you think of the fight or flight response as the normal response in the body that when we're in stress your body should not be digesting, and it should not be thinking about creating a family, and it shouldn't be thinking about all of these things that the vagus nerve is supposed to do, right? Shouldn't be sleeping when we're getting ready to get away from a tiger.

This relationship between the trigeminal nerve and the vagus nerve is a delicate seesaw. And in order to get that vagus tone improved, we've got to get that trigeminal tone to calm itself down, take a person out of that clenching response, out of that fight or flight stress response.

Let's pause there for a moment and summarize that. And really, it sounds like one nerve can be the gas pedal and the other one could be the brake. And being able to have those work in balance or activate one over the other sounds like it's key to health because of the broad effects of stress on our nervous system and our body. And I think what happens now particularly if you're in pain, let's say you have chronic disk disease in your back, and you just live in constant pain, that is going to be [inaudible 00:12:31] to almost always having your foot on the gas. You're going to be in that stressed out state, slightly higher cortisol state, higher catacholamines, adrenaline. And that just isn't good for your health.

And I think that's where people struggle with not able to drop weight, elevated blood pressure, elevated blood sugar, and some of these chronic states that also then can transition to where they're almost burnt out, and now they're very fatigued, and they're very weak, which is a much different type of scenario than being in a rested, recovered state. So what you're saying is, by addressing both, we're able to really optimize the nervous system. Is that correct?

Absolutely. And the effect is that we start sleeping better, recovering better, digesting better, and our chronic pain starts backing off notch, by notch, by notch. Absolutely wonderful.

That's very interesting the trigeminal piece, which, and I'll have to review my cranial nerve anatomy. But is it not mostly a sensory cranial nerve? It does have some autonomic function with it as well, right? Versus controlling all the facial muscles and motor fibers.

It actually is primarily from a motor standpoint, primarily a clencher.

Okay.

It runs the temporalis muscle, the masseter muscle, all of the muscles of mastication, or jaw movement are primarily driven by that trigeminal system. But you're right, it has, for example, the branch... One of the branches is the super orbital branch or the trigeminal nerve. And that, of course, doesn't deal in chewing or anything, but it goes above the eye, and it's actually part of the calming down mechanism for the rest of the trigeminal system.

There are inherent calm down mechanisms within the trigeminal system. The problem is that that fight or flight response, it trumps everything else. And so as soon as the brain perceives that we're in acute distress, everything else shuts down because that drive to survive has got to be higher than every other function within the nervous system. And because it plays such a strong component of that drive to thrive, it shuts down a lot of the other branches that it deems not quite so necessary to survive right now. I've got to survive today. That's the only important thing for the nervous system. Where the vagus nerve in that system is very much geared towards what comes after that, how to get us back on track, how to get us to survive to the next decade of life.

So in addition to things that most people know about, getting good sleep, meditation, being in nature, you have created a tool that you believe can empower people to really take the relaxation practices, and healing practices to the next level. And you've described the Rezzimax and that's R-E-Z-Z-I-M-A-X. And we'll link to the website, which is rezzimax.com, we'll put that in the show notes. And you describe it as a specifically designed resonance tool with varied frequencies that work with your body to promote relaxation and healing. And we were going to do... For those of you listening, we were going to do a video piece to this, but had a little technical difficulty.

But I feel like the information is something I want to get out there. But definitely go to the website so you can see the tool. It's literally a handheld tool. Some may call it something similar to even a massage vibrational tool. But he's invented this with some different attachments that allow you to use it quite uniquely. So again, for the podcast purposes, create a picture for someone who's wondering what this looks like.

Well, those who created it in a factory here in the US, they looked at it and said, "That thing looks like a flying squirrel. What is it?" So we didn't create it so that it looked exactly like you would know what to do with it. We created it so that it would function well.

Picture, if you will, a device fits fairly good in the palm of your hand, and is comfortable to hold, it's got a few buttons to help you increase the intensity or decrease the intensity, as well as creates these patterns or algorithms. The device has wings on it. The side wings that we use to rub areas of the body that send messaging to the brain to tell it to pay attention to that area where maybe all it's been listening to is chronic pain, we wake it up and give it a new sensation to look at and pay attention to.

So we go further, and the device has two points that attach to it at the top, or one end of it, where you can hit both sides of midline at the same time with exactly the same frequencies. This becomes very important, because you can use, for example, that branch of the trigeminal nerve that I was talking about that comes out above the eyes, you can use these tongs to hit exactly those points on right and left sides of your body, which brings balance to right and left hemispheres of your brain through a branch of the nervous system that is designed to calm it down.

We put several things into the body and shape of the device that are simply there to help provide this messaging into the nervous system. The vibration itself is very different than any vibration tool that people have used. In part, because we create a spinning mechanism for the vibration, which is just using an offset weight, if you will, and the resonance, the energy that is created is in the cat purring harmonic range. That cat purring range is something that we've studied, or that has been studied by researchers, and has found to increase stem cell activity. It increases bone healing, for example, it increases blood flow. But it also happens to be at the same level that your vocal cords function.

In essence, we created an energy that allows your vocal cords, which are a direct branch of that vagus nerve, to interact with it much like you're tuning your voice to a beautiful choir and you're tuning the nervous system to be able to calm down that fight or flight mechanism, improve the tone of that vagus system. The net result is improved sleep, and improved function.

The design is very unique. And I like what you said that it's designed to be applicable and usable to hit these certain points. I want to circle back. I think what's really unique about this approach is that you're taking advantage of the fact that these cranial nerves are easily accessible. We don't really even think about it. But the super orbital branch, and the infraorbital branch, these are ones that anyone can palpate, anyone can find, and put the stimulation on.

And even the ear, which you mentioned earlier, I do auricular acupuncture, and battlefield acupuncture, and we have debated the mechanisms of it, and I've always felt there's certainly cranial nerve connections, part of the ear is vagus, part of the ear could be trigeminal, part of the ear may have just some direct brain stem innervation from our embryologic development. But even that, I've got my Rezzimax, and I've been playing around with that as well, I'm just putting it on some traditional acupuncture points like shenmen, which is supposed to be one to really calm and relax the nervous system.

And I think the applications are pretty limitless. Okay, you talked about the design of the device, and hit a little bit on the purring frequency. Can you speak a little bit about the work you've done in terms of the different frequency patterns that you've programmed into the Rezzimax?

Absolutely. I should probably take one step back and tell you, I didn't understand a lot about frequencies until I had a middle of the night experience one night that I woke up from a deep sleep, about 3:00 in the morning, and just had this understanding that vibrations had a very unique power, and ability to help people, and I needed to figure out how and why it worked.

Well, another night, eight or nine years later, I woke up with this understanding that if I could put that vibration into patterns, it would be much like singing a song to the nervous system. And if you could repeat those patterns, the nervous system would learn it. In particular, I understood that I needed to develop four different frequency patterns. And those frequency patterns are like complex piano pieces, or musical pieces that could be played by an orchestra. And their notes, if you will, in this particular harmonic range, the cat purring harmonic range, and they follow these very distinct patterns.

So one of the patterns is like waves of the ocean, and it just rolls up, and up, and up, and up, and crashes, and then drops back down slowly. And another pattern that's very much related to it, is the exact identical pattern, but it's three times faster. What's really unique about these patterns is we took the energy levels of our device, and there are 10 basic frequency levels that we designed into it. Well, we took each of those levels and we cut in between them, we cut about 300 individual points out, and calibrated these.

So now when you go through an algorithm, instead of just 10 levels that it's cycling up and down through, you have about 3,000 energy points, or notes on the musical chart that your brain is interacting with every couple of minutes. So it creates a very unique way to place the device on a part of the body that maybe has been feeling a lot of chronic pain, and wake up the brain's connections to that part of the body, in essence, through creating a song that helps it remember how to interact with that area.

It's quite a fascinating concept. And I didn't understand it at all, but I just woke up with it, and I've been playing with it until I've understood it. Now that I've seen it work on thousands and thousands of individuals, it's more brilliant than I'm capable of developing on my own. It's just really, really an inspired way to interact with the nervous system. These patterns are beautiful.

Let's pivot to discussing a little more the clinical applications. I know when it first came out geared towards people with headaches and migraines. And certainly, you've expanded the range of conditions that you think it can be helpful for. So let's start with the headache though, because that seems to be the fundamental condition that this started out with. Walk someone through... Let's say someone is listening, they have neck pain and headaches, what would a daily routine with the Rezzimax look like?

Approximately 10 minutes would be enough for most individuals. And we would, in essence, have them hum to... For 10 minutes, they would hum while using the device. The humming is something that we've used in yoga, and things like that for years. But while humming with the device, it engages directly the vagus nerve, and it slows down the breathing, two very critical activities that need to occur to get your nervous system headed into home, rest, and digest, right.

So after we start you with the humming and the breathing patterns, we'll place the device maybe first at the back of your neck where it will take the tension out of the C1, C2 muscles, the rectus capitis posterior minor and major primarily, because they have a unique relationship with the brain. They have what is called a myoneural bridge. Meaning, muscle and dura, or the covering over the brain, there's a connection between the dura and the muscles at that spot that we don't see at other places in the body.

And because of that unique relationship, when a person feels stressed, they will always feel tension in the back of their neck up to the top near the head. So we place the device right back here, in fact, we put pressure right on those muscles, and turn it onto its resonant patterns that is also delivering messaging to the sternocleidomastoid muscle, the big muscle at the side and below the jaw, the side of the neck that is a big tensioner as well.

So within two minutes, we've taken a world of tension out of the back of the neck just simply by placing the device on them, having them hum to it, and putting that tongue in between the teeth. Then we'll put the device on the front of the head for another minute or two, and we'll put it up on those eyebrows, right at those acupuncture points of where that trigeminal nerve comes out, the super orbital branch of the trigeminal nerve, right in the eyebrows.

And then we'll hit some points down lower like inside the mouth, and we'll take all the tension out of the jaw muscles by having them open and close their jaws repeatedly while running this resonant frequency through the strong connections with the trigeminal nerve. And then we'll also do the underside of the jaw.

By the time we've hit all of those points, and maybe even run it over the top of the head a few times, most headaches will shut off just in the course of that process. And then teaching a person how to be able to keep it turned off, that's another matter altogether, which we ask people to just simply think of things they're grateful for during the 10 minutes that they're performing those treatments. So if you're humming, breathing out slowly, engaging the vagus nerve and hitting these pressure points around the head and face, and thinking of things that you're grateful for, it just puts the nervous system into this calm down mode that helps them shut off all their migraine headaches, or chronic headaches. And it works over, and over, and over in people that have chronic headaches.

I don't know if you've been able to see this, Dr. Lakhia, in your practice, I don't know if you've seen this work on headaches, but it's almost miraculous that it works on almost every headache.

Well, mine is more focuses, I see mostly spine, but I do get some people that come in wanting some acupuncture for headaches, and this definitely... I'm on the lookout to add this in and see how they respond. So it sounds like you can use the tool, number one, for direct cranial nerve stimulation to balance the nervous system. But there's also, it looks like, another application where if you go through your website and some of the materials you've sent me, you're taking advantage of the frequencies and vibration almost to stimulate proprioception, and rewire the brain to limb connection. So for maybe actual rehabilitation of injuries. Can you elaborate a little bit on that for people?

That would work even in your headache [inaudible 00:28:20]. You could take the wings of the device and scrape along those neck muscles, and just take all kinds of tension out of them. And the brain immediately says, "Wow, I've got a new relationship with my neck that's been so locked up with all those painful trigger points in it, and you just took them out of there. Thank you." And that's how the brain responds, I think, to this wakening of its parts and pieces so that it senses again.

I'll give you an example. With a person that has peripheral neuropathy, there's a big disconnect between the hands, or the feet, and the rest of the brain. So we'll use the wings on our device, turn the device up on high so that it has this strong connection with the area, and we'll start running at the toes, rubbing at the feet and at the legs, and helping the brain reestablish its map that helps it recall exactly where the left leg is, exactly where the right leg is. And this recalibration that it gets helps it take a lot of the stress and pain messaging that it's been getting, and shuts those messages down, which is part of the way that it helps with someone that's got chronic sciatica pain, which you're dealing with a lot of the spinal components.

But a lot of the messaging that the brain is getting comes clear down from the tips of the toes and goes all the way up through that connective tissue. So reestablishing the communication line is a wonderful thing to help with many, many conditions.

Yeah, it's very similar, it strikes me, a condition like... And you might have done this in your just traditional PT work, RSD or complex regional pain syndrome where the individual has an affected injured, let's say hand or arm, where it's so painful to even touch it. But the therapy is to touch it a lot. Rub it, desensitize it, activate the proprioceptive fibers. And the more you use it, the more you stimulate it, the less irritated, and less pain people have over time. So it sounds like you're using that similar principle to reactivate dormant neural networks and neural pathways.

It's true. I will tell you that in particular with CRPS and some of these trigeminal [inaudible 00:30:45] and some of these really, really difficult pain, chronic pain messaging processes, we do have to open up the back door to communication first. Meaning, we've found it much more successful to find every other part of the body that is not hurting, send messaging up through every other part of the body to the brain in those areas that are not overstimulated, and therefore, tune down, or turn down the tone of those super, super painful areas.

So for example, if a person's got CRPS of the left lower leg from an accident, injury, surgery, whatever, and they can hardly touch it, we'll use the other leg, and the hand, and the arm, and other parts that don't send that message of chronic pain up to the brain as the primary treatment points in the initial phases. As soon as we've gotten the brain to start calming down its own messaging, then we can start going in and treating the active area of CRPS much, much easier. And it's true, you do need to use it, and you do need to be very active.

But we've found that if we can, for the first few weeks, really get the brain to start focusing on messaging from other parts of the body, it makes that job so much easier of calming down the area of the complex regional pain.

It occurs to me that a lot of these principles that you're working from, you can find them in the world of traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture where we do contralateral limb treatments for an affected limb. You do techniques like [inaudible 00:32:35] and scraping. And it's like you've taken those ideas, and you've sprinkled in modern science, and maybe some ancient science and wisdom in terms of the frequencies that you're using with the cat purring frequency, and developed a one stop tool to activate these things on your own. So that's really unique.

That was exactly our goal in creating this. We didn't know that when we started. But over the 13, 14 years since we started playing with different vibrational frequencies, it was our goal to be able to create a way to get the Eastern medicine and the Western medicine talking together and get the nervous system to start remembering what it's like to feel and sense again.

All right, well I think that's a pretty thorough initial breakdown. Sharik has a ton of material online. You guys have a company YouTube channel I believe.

We do. It's just Rezzimax on YouTube. And you can go to that channel, R-E-Z-Z-I-M-A-X, and look in the search bar for that channel, and type in just about any condition, the low back pain, the neck pain, the shoulder pain, and see a video on how it interacts with that part of the body. Or you can go and look at a vide on how it works for horses, and we've got over 130 videos on our YouTube channel outlining all kinds of things, and problem cases that we've worked through to help give people, I guess, food, or ammunition to be able to help their own chronic case.

If you're listening and you're wondering if the tool is for you, definitely check out their website. If you want to start even more basic than that, I think it's important when you're suffering with back pain, or pain of any type that you almost have a bit of a daily vagal nerve routine. And it can involve things like a breathing practice. And with the breathing practice, I would focus more on techniques that emphasize the exhalation. I've talked before about the 4-7-8 breath. I think that's one valuable tool. Just taking walks out in nature and connecting with nature can be very therapeutic and grounding for our nervous system. Sharik mentioned humming. So singing, gargling, all of these things that can activate the cranial nerves within the oral cavity can be very helpful as well.

And just finding moments of gratitude throughout your day. He's exactly right, you can't be angry and thankful at the same time. It's hard to be in pain and be in gratitude at the same time. So there is a physiologic shift when you adopt these very simple, free practices into your lifestyle. And if you want to learn more about the technology that he's created, it's rezzimax.com. I'll close with, Sharik, asking you, just because you seem to be so attuned to holistic healing, you've lived through pain, share with the listeners maybe some of your daily health tools, or your routines that you go to, to keep yourself on top and healthy.

Well, one of the first things that I do is try and make sure that I'm not harboring that tension in my jaw on a regular basis. If I'm feeling that it's locked up in there, I know that my fight or flight processes are on high alert. And so I'll immediately take the tension out of the back of my neck, take the tension out of my jaw. I also use a technology called FocusBand out of Australia, which is a way of getting feedback on my brainwave activity. It can also tell me if I'm in an up regulated state, and I can very quickly start through the breathing processes, as you've mentioned, start humming, start bringing that tension out of the system and start improving my vagal tone.

Sometimes I'll put the device right on my stomach and get the vagus nerve through it's longest reaches down into the abdominal cavity to start communicating better with everything in the brain stem. And it's helpful. It's not helpful just for me, but for my grandchildren, for my children, for my wife. It's been a tremendous help for the chronic tension that we all seem to feel. Boy, it's a fast way to recover from injuries. But it helps support everything else that is good, that we can do to try and help ourselves heal. It's just a great supportive tool.

Well, thanks for that. I really appreciate you, number one, sharing some of your own personal story, and then secondly, coming onto the show and laying down the groundwork on the basic science behind stress, the importance of incorporating techniques into your life to balance your nervous system, and then of course, sharing some of the information about the technology that you've created and your mission to help others. Look forward to speaking with you in future months and years about... Let's see how this thing evolves. I do think from a research basis, I would love to see some data at some point on people who use the device and it's effect on objective measures like HRV, salivary cortisol, or even if you have any... If you get any functional MRI data, that would be really fascinating to look at.

Boy, those are my hopes too. We've just got to find the right partners to help us do that. Unfortunately, it takes a lot of money to do research these days, and I haven't been able to find the deep pockets to initiate a lot of that. But we do have some research happening. We've got some doctors that have already been doing some studies on cortisol levels, salivary cortisol levels in the morning, and use of the device, and that's quite remarkable. And we do have some research going on that will yield that information in time. It's hard to get the information right upfront, because it takes, as you notice, a lot of scans, and a lot of very expensive diagnostic tools. But eventually, all of that information will be available to the public, it just takes time. Research is a little bit of a lagging indicator.

Oh, for sure. I understand.

But it's getting there.

Yeah [inaudible 00:38:51] the challenge with that. All right, well thank you so much for coming on the show today, I really enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Back Talk Doc, brought to you by Carolina Neurosurgery and Spine Associates, with offices in North and South Carolina. If you'd like to learn more about Dr. Lakhia and treatment options for back issues, go to backtalkdoc.com. We look forward to having you join us for more insights about back pain and spine health on the next episode of Back Talk Doc. Additional information is also available at carolinaneurosurgery.com.