A brief history of Vagus & Auricular Nerve Field Stimulation
Like oxygen, stimulation is an invisible necessity of life whose
importance is felt most acutely during times of insufficiency.
Medical recognition of, first, the causal relationship between stress and disease and, second, the centrality of vagal networks in modulating neurological activity throughout the brain and body seeded the initial streams of vagus nerve research that have since swollen into rivers. The vagus nerve provides a network access-port to the brain and nervous system which control virtually all significant life functions, even hemostasis, the regulation of circulation, hemodynamics and blood clotting.
Stimulation is a Neurobiological Necessity of Life
We are biogenetically programmed to give and receive – to exchange – stimulation. The human brain and the nervous system, and all of the organs they regulate and control, depend on stimulation. Stimulation of vagal inputs adjusts the balance of inflammatory-inhibitory activity, unlocks disrupted neurocircuits, and elevates mitochondiral (energy) and macrophage function (detoxification), the key processes needed for stress recovery and restoration (i.e., homeostasis).
The rising incidence of disorders of stress, including disorders of inflammation and immune dysregulation, parallels a 30 year contraction of the human stimulation sphere (or stimusphere), as mass migration to mobile platforms dislocated and disrupted natural (i.e., neurogenetically-programmed, biopsychophysiologically essential) sources of stimulation in human action, connection and behavior.
Contraction and disruption of the human neurostimulation-network (or stimusphere) has unleashed upon millions of unwitting victims a seemingly unstoppable flood of stress that threatens and degrades human health, and weakens healthy, protective immune function. Vagus nerve stimulation is our answer to these developments and our first-line defense against the global stress pandemic.
The 30 year development of Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) technogy comes at a time when inflammatory stress disorders and immune dysfunction are pandemic – just in time to treat and prevent them with Vagus and auricular nerve field stimulation.
Our work in developing transdermal Vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS) has benefitted from energies and inputs spanning many disciplines, practices and cultural traditions, from the empirical sciences to Asian mysticism and philosophy.
MYSTICAL
Stimulation of the Vagus and other nerves in the auricular nerve field is said to have originated with the practice of Chinese acupuncture. The first evidence clearly describing acupuncture practice as a methodical system of diagnosis and treatment is found in The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine, circa 100 BCE. Most if not all schools of acupuncture describe energy flowing through channels in the body termed “meridians” and disease as an energy imbalance or blockage of these energy channels.
Scientific evidence for the existence of energy “meridians” has remained elusive and modern western clinicians now understand “meridians” as a metaphor for the body’s peripheral nerve system. Chinese acupuncture, however, can be credited with inventing needle-piercing penetration of anatomic surface targets (or acu-points) for the purpose of stimulation.
A medical historian recently observed: It took almost 300 years for Europe and 400 years for the United States to finally appreciate the therapeutic value of acupuncture. The slow uptake is more rationally explained by cultural and language barriers, and by infections and communicable diseases arising from the use and re-use of unsterilized needles. Western acceptance was also understandably sensitized by the empirical indigestibility of acupuncture teachings regarding “meridians” and acupuncture’s general epistemological over-reliance on philosophy, religion, mysticism and myth.
Today, Western acupuncture is undergoing a slow motion evolution complicated by the tensions of simultaneously clinging to empirically unfounded epistemologies versus concurrent efforts to selectively reformulate practice to better accord with Western science. Emblematic of this shift is a recent proposal by the Washington State Board of Acupuncture to abandon traditional acupuncture terminologies and dispose of key principles like “energy meridians,” while expanding acupuncture practice into medical neurology. Meanwhile, American schools of acupuncture and “oriental medicine” continue teaching “traditional Chinese” mythology.
MEDICAL
In the 20th century, Chinese acupuncture can be credited with drawing the attention of Western scientists and clinicians to needle-based nerve stimulation. Yet, the ancient Greeks and Romans both used electric eels for medical stimulation.
Contemporary research indicates that modern acupuncture and electro-acupuncture (using electrified needles) can produce a release of endorphins, serotonin, enkephalins, and γ-amino-butyric acid (GABA; a major inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain), norepinephrine, and dopamine – not as a chemical cascade, but more selectively, depending on which auricular “acu-point” is targeted.
Presently, in the United States, acupuncture is well accepted as a “complimentary alternative medical” (CAM) or holistic technique and Americans seek acupuncture treatment to relieve stress-related syndromes, for pain relief, addiction withdrawal stress, immune function normalization, insomnia, to enhance athletic performance, and to address select symptoms of neurodegenerative (Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s) disease, as well as for disorders of the autonomic nervous system (dysautonomia), cardiovascular disease and for post-stroke therapy.
Vagus Nerve Stimulation
Vagus Nerve Stimulation comes from Three KEY DISCOVERIES:
FIRST, that STRESS triggers the body’s Inflammatory Reflex. – Hans Seyle
SECOND, that inflammation is the central phenomenon in virtually all disease, from diabetes and heart disease to cancer.
THIRD, inflammation can be reined in via the VAGUS NERVE, the body’s master control that prompts and curbs inflammation.
– The Feinstein Institute
The father of stress, Hans Seyle also understood stress as a force that produced reverberations within the body, oscilations of pro-/anti-inflammatory nervous system activity representing the impact of stress and the consequent strains of illness, injury and recovery.
Seyle did not know that the term stress had been used by physicists and metallurgists for centuries to describe the elastic property of a material that allows it to resume its original size and shape after compression or stretching. Stress, according to Hooke’s Law, describes both the force applied and the amount of deformation, or strain, e.g., in a pliable metal. Selye is said to have complained that, if his English been better, he would have gone down in history as the father of the “strain” concept–not stress.
Hippocrates said that disease is not only pathos (affliction and suffering), but also ponos (toil or struggle), as the body fights, or more accurately, strains, to recover and restore balance.
A GAME-CHANGING Discovery
The inflammation-stopping power of Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS) was discovered by accident in the early 90s when clinicians reviewing the health records of epilepsy patients with implanted Vagus nerve stimulators (to control seizures) found them free of the chronic diseases recorded in their medical files pre–implant. This discovery spurred new research in inflammatory disease, leading to the development of multiple neurostimulation therapies targeting the Vagus nerve.
Today, the medically recognized health benefits of Vagus Nerve Stimulation are now detailed and summed in over 19,570 professional clinical research papers. No other therapy on earth has ever received the research attention of Vagus Nerve Stimulation in such a brief period.
PHILOSOPHICAL
All life involves energy and stimulation – the transfer of energy. Human beings are energy-seeking and therefore stimulation-seeking by nature, as energy is essential for our survival. Stimulation is the energy received from another person, from nature, food, even the air we breathe, sounds and music, and sometimes through electricity.
The modern world has disrupted our Flow, and scattered our energies (stimulation), as Joni Mitchell’s expressed it in Electricity.
The minus is loveless
He talks to the land
And the leaves fall
And the pond over-ices
She don’t know the system, plus
She don’t understand
She’s got all the wrong fuses and splices
She’s not going to fix it up, Too easy
Inflammation is what happens when the flow of energy – stimulation – is disrupted and no longer balances the energies within, between and among us. The result: polarization. Positive and negative (or, in Chinese thought, yin and yang) energies collide as inflammation overwhelms inhibition, sparking pandemic stress disorders, infecting virtually every dimension of human life.
Modern life has cut us off from the FLOW of stimulation we need from the many natural sources from which we are genetically programmed to receive it. – Stimulation provided by our diets, from exercise and walking safety in our own neighborhoods; from sound and sufficient, uninterrupted sleep, from our work (in more natural, more stimulating settings than cubicles and office suites, in front of eye-fatiguing, brain-draining computer screens); from our families, from all of the people called friends and neighbors; from circadian rhythms (our biological clocks) unperturbed by 24 hour news cycles and crime, violence and insanity packaged as digital entertainment.
With COOLSTIM, we aim to change the end of the story (and Joni’s song) and make it easy to “fix up” the balance of our vital energies, by getting our stimulation back, and Flowing again, this time under our control. And that is why we designed COOLSTIM just for you. Changing the world and extinguishing the pandemic flames of runaway inflammation starts with each and every one of us.