Dr. Kevin Tracey

And he felt so much better playing ping pong, he went out and started playing tennis.

Promptly injured his knee because he was completely deconditioned from being on the couch for years.

So now, because of the swollen knee,

impacts your clinical assessment in an arthritis trial, his doctor said, take it easy, no more sports until the trial is over.

So I called, in the course of writing this book, The Great Nerve, I called his doctors, and I spoke to them about a year ago, and he also is doing great.

He's taking no medications and has no symptoms.

He's driving a truck.

He's unloading cargo, and he's in, we would say he's in remission.

Yes, you're absolutely right.

My part and the part of hundreds of people in laboratories, my laboratory and other labs around the world, but also hundreds of people who work directly or indirectly with Setpoint, who developed the device for the trial and raised all the money to pay for everything and did all the regulatory work.

So, yeah.

It's really important to point out that there's been two clinical trials.

The first one was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences around 2016.

I was a co-author on that.

And that was a smaller open-label trial that was led

by Paul Peter Tack and his colleagues at Amsterdam Medical Center under the support and sponsorship of Setpoint Medical and the chief medical officer then was Dr. Ralph Zittnick.

Now, my colleague Sangeeta Shivan and I studied the first patients that were implanted at our hospital here at Northwell.

Health in New York.

And Ash Mehta, the neurosurgeon, implanted these patients.

And the first question in that first trial, 2016, was, if we turn on the vagus nerve stimulator, can we activate the inflammatory reflex?