Dr. Kevin Tracey

And people say, well, I wish it was more than 50%.

Well, some of the people that have benefited from these vagus nerve implants for

treatment-resistant depression have gone from being suicidal or unable to care for their families or unable to work to being back in the mainstream.

And so I wish there was a lot more talk about this, Eric.

I wish a lot more people knew about this.

I wish we knew a lot more about the mechanism.

And I wish we had a really better analysis of the cost-benefit ratio because I think more people should know about this and more should be done.

We could talk about this for two hours, Eric.

I'm not sure we could do that.

I think you have to be really careful when diving.

you talk about what we understand about these physiological responses because it's complicated.

So maybe we could back up for one second to the vagus nerve.

Many of your listeners are physicians and many of your listeners are scientists and well-versed in all this, but for those that are not, we say vagus nerve, but you have two of them.

You have one on each side of your neck.

And we say two vagus nerves, but inside of each of them, you have 100,000 fibers.

So you have 200,000 vagus nerves, technically.

And each and every one of those individual fibers was selected for and subjected to evolutionary pressure for millions and millions of years to have a specific origin, a specific destination from the brain to the body or the body to the brain, and to do a specific function.

And the idea,

When we stimulate in the lab and with our limited clinical evidence, the evidence suggests that when the idea is to control inflammation, we're stimulating a few hundred fibers, and that's sufficient to control inflammation.

Those are not the same fibers that control inflammation.