Dr. Kevin Tracey

And so it raises all kinds of important questions where you began this.

If you have a damaged vagus nerve from COVID or some other post-viral syndrome or from probably not trauma, but if you have this kind of problem and the vagus nerve can't work, well, there's no evidence that exercise is going to restore it.

There's no exercise that a cold shower is going to enhance it or fix it.

And so it really does come back to a plea for more research and a plea for more understanding in some who are treating POTS patients that we don't understand that condition.

And it's not a simple on and off necessarily of autonomic, whatever that is, on and off between autonomic balance.

But we really should be studying these neural mechanisms underlying POTS because some of those POTS patients may have damage to their vagus nerve, and some of those POTS patients may have damage to their sympathetic nerves.

We don't know.

Well, it's been brilliant work that he did and has been celebrated by neuroscientists and now also by immunologists and physiologists around the world for the reasons that you implied.

The nerves are sensitive to vibrations through these receptors.

And we and others are now using focused ultrasound, which is a form of ultrasound, very similar, slightly different, but very similar to what is used to visualize a,

a fetus in the womb or gallstones or kidney stones.

And this focus ultrasound can be used to go through the scan and through the tissues.

And in contrast to a,

a TENS unit, which stimulates and sends electricity across the skin and in all different directions and places, the focused ultrasound can be focused, as its name says.

And you can focus it on the vagus nerve in the liver or on the vagus nerve controlling the splenic nerve in the spleen.

And as I said, we and others are looking at this as a way to vibrate or activate these nerves with non-invasive devices.

These are still early days, but my colleague who runs the lab with me at the Feinstein Institute, Sangeeta Chavan, and our other colleague, Stavros Zanos, they just a couple of years ago published a paper in brain stimulation showing that you can use focused ultrasound to activate the inflammatory reflex in human volunteers.

And when they did this, they suppressed

inhibited cytokine storm in these volunteers using a painless, non-invasive ultrasound handheld probe.

You could imagine a day in time.