
Dr. Navaz Habib is the bestselling author of ‘Upgrade Your Vagus Nerve’ and host of ‘The Health Upgrade Podcast’. After graduating as class valedictorian from Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College in 2010 and went on to practice traditional chiropractic for years, until he utilized the power of functional medicine to transform his own health.Dr. Habib is the founder of ‘Health Upgraded’ an online functional health consulting clinic, supporting optimal health by elevating the awareness and function of the Vagus nerve.
In this episode of TechTalk Podcast, Brad Cost, Dr. Jay Greenstein, DC, and Dr. Navaz Habib sit down to discuss:
Jumping into the chiropractic space way back in high school.
Functional medicine is the chiropractic mindset in a medical model.
The power of the vagus nerve and how you can heal from the inside out.
SHOW NOTES:
4:03 – Back pains to pain free! “I had really bad back pain in my mid-teens. It had a lot to do with the fact that I was a swimmer for a long time, but I stopped swimming when I began lifeguarding. The body pains really started to kick up a notch, so my mom took me to see her friend that was a chiropractor here in Toronto. That was the most transformative thing I've experienced - I didn't have the pain anymore. I started feeling like I could do more and function better. That was the real moment where I decided this was the path that I wanted to take. I always knew I was going to be in healthcare in some capacity, but no experience with any other professional put me in that position. Chiro was the one that really did it for me.”
7:21 – Functional medicine transformed his life. “At CMCC, I made some amazing friends. I learned a lot and was able to put into practice this idea of creating health. At the same time, my health was struggling because I had stopped being as active. I had a lot of stress of just being a student and didn't keep up with a lot of the good habits that I had ideally created when I was a bit younger. My weight started to kick up a notch and my overall health started to decline. I got to a point where my blood pressure was high, and my blood sugar was borderline diabetic in my early mid-twenties. I was learning about creating a healthy human functioning life and, at the same time, not implementing it on my own. A lot of it had to do with motivation and lack of dopamine drive… Fast forward, I was working one evening when a gentleman came into the clinic, saying his wife was in a car accident and needed chiropractic care. The gentleman mentioned was a chiropractor, but didn’t practice that way anymore. This confused me because every chiropractor treats physical injuries, so what did he do? He said he practiced functional medicine. While he went into the office with the other doctor to get everything set up for his wife's case, I ran to the computer and Googled functional medicine. This idea of functional medicine started popping up in my head and it was truly a shift in how the world was seeing what health truly was. This gentleman was Sachin Patel, who studied as a chiropractor, went into functional medicine and has created mentorship programs for all health professionals to bring functional medicine into their practice.”
11:11 – Chiropractic mindset in a medical model. “Functional medicine is a chiropractic mindset in a medical model. That's the best way to put it. Chiropractors have always known to look for that root cause of the issue with physical manipulation and whatnot as chiropractors do, but functional medicine adds in nutrition, movement, lifestyle factors, stress management. These are all practices chiropractors will provide, when we look at a body holistically. Functional medicine expanded the scope of what a chiropractor does and supports his patients with. From that moment, my health has absolutely transformed. I ended up losing about 40 pounds, getting both my blood pressure and blood sugar down, and making all of the changes that my health could possibly have asked for. That's my story in creating this functional medicine chiropractic model that I've created.”
16:18 – The power of the vagus nerve. “In high school, I remember being completely in awe of the brain and all its interconnections to the body. The spine being a big component of it, obviously on the physical side with movement of the spine, but the spinal cord was a unique piece to this. There was something else that was very unique and didn't follow any other pattern type of connection - the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is our 10th cranial nerve and there is nothing else like it. There's no other connection between the brain and body like the vagus nerve. It's not even physically supported by anything like the spinal cord is. The spinal cord has the vertebral column connected around to maintain that safety of not severing it. The vagus nerve doesn't have that, but it's connected to every organ. I always heard the vagus nerve is the parasympathetic nervous system, which means it's the rest and digest side of the automatic functions within the body. This just wasn't enough of an information piece to me. The vagus nerve couldn’t just do the parasympathetic nervous system. Well, in the early 2000s, it was discovered that the vagus nerve is the crux of the system to control inflammation within the body. That became the biggest missing piece of this puzzle to me. Inflammation is directly linked to essentially every chronic disease process, metabolic or not. This inflammation piece was always uncontrolled and was a common ongoing piece to the puzzle. I thought about how the vagus nerve controls inflammation, so what if it is the dysfunctional piece that is not able to control inflammation? What if it's just not working well? If we can provide it the right tools to make it work well, maybe we can shift the body from fight or flight into the situation where we can rest, digest, and create that recovery or healing process. Ultimately, that has become the biggest game changer for every single one of my clients. Our bodies cannot enter a healing state when we're in sympathetic fight or flight. We need to turn on the vagus nerve and shift that dimmer switch back to parasympathetic, rest, digest, and recover mode. The body heals from inside and the signals that we send are what's going to create that healing process. That's what brought me to the vagus nerve and that's why this is what I do.”
29:25 – Call-to-action steps in empowering your patients. “If we truly want to know if the vagus nerve is working on an individual basis, this is where tech can really be utilized. Wearable health technology is the wave of healthcare future and every company that's out there completely agrees with me. Google Fit, Apple Health, the Oura ring, Whoop, BioStrap, UltraHuman, Fitbit and Garmin health tracking devices. They're meant to be there to help you understand from a data point what's going on within your body. That's so empowering to my patients.
Step one - if they're not already using a wearable device, I'll have them pick a device of their choice based on their budget and preferences. Then we start tracking some internal biological data points, with the biggest one being for the vagus nerve. Heart rate variability, HRV, is the greatest marker to tell us about that switch between the sympathetic and parasympathetic, or how your vagus nerve is doing. As heart rate variability goes down, we're pushing towards the sympathetic fight or flight state. As heart rate variability comes up, we're pushing towards vagus nerve activated, rest, digest and recover state. Each individual is going to have their individual pattern that drives their HRV. The goal over time is not to compare what your HRV is to anybody else, but to note that your HRV is going up over time on average. Your goal is to increase your average. When you have low HRV, you have low vagus nerve signaling, meaning you likely are not able to control inflammation as much as you want to within your body. Your chances of going down the chronic inflammatory health pathway is significantly increased. We definitely want to make a move towards improving your overall health by understanding where you currently stand and where we can help take you.
Step two - my 10-day jumpstart program, which is primarily things to do with breathing. The breath is the major driving factor in creating heart rate variability. Our breath should be three things: nasal through our nose, diaphragmatic focused on belly breathing/diaphragmatic breathing, and longer exhales. When we're inhaling, we're pushing towards that sympathetic state, fight or flight. When we're exhaling, we're pushing towards the rest, digest, recover, vagus nerve state. If we can spend more time on the exhale, we're pushing towards that parasympathetic state. That's a really quick hack. I like the ratio of three seconds inhale, six second exhale. In your regular breathing pattern, most people's regular breathing pattern is somewhere between 12 and 20 breaths per minute. In an ideal world, we're closer to 12 or 15 breaths per minute as your general resting breath rate, which is also tracked on a lot of wearable devices. That's a good one to look at as a marker that you can clearly change.”
39:52 - Devices for chiropractors! “There are several great devices for chiropractors to keep in stock in their practices. It's $499. It's really not expensive. It's a one-time purchase, unlimited-use device and it comes with an app. It runs directly through their TruVaga Plus App. It's a phenomenal, easy-to-use, easy-to-share device and is a great way to help patients stay in their parasympathetic state while they're away from the office. That's the retail price. They actually have wholesale values that decline based on quantities. They also have an affiliate program. You can go through the affiliate resale option, which is a great option for chiropractors that maybe don't want to deal with stocking and selling a device. If you buy more than, I believe it's 10 devices, you get a significant discount, somewhere between 20 and 40%. To learn more about the TruVaga, can go to TruVaga.com. The best way to get an affiliate account with them is to reach out to me directly, and I'm happy to create the introduction to the company and to the right people in the company.”
40:33 – Effects of stimulating the vagus nerve. “It depends on the person. I will say about 60 to 70% of people will notice a very positive and calming effect within the first five minutes after the device. There's a great fMRI study showing a 15-minute biphasic response on brain function, which is very inhibitory in function (calming). It's pushing our brains to turn on executive function and turn off a lot of the limbic brain functions. It’s very activating for the thalamus, very good for sleep, for memory, for a lot of different things. In fact, there was a really cool study that came out just this past year showing cognitive improvements - it actually increased language learning speed at the Defense Language Learning Institute in San Diego by between 25 and 40%. It's a blood flow shift towards executive function towards prefrontal activation. It's a very, very powerful effect. They compared it against auricular - there's a small branch of the vagus nerve that comes to the ear, the auricular branch. If we stimulate the auricular, we don't get the same cognitive response, and it takes longer to get a response. The cool thing is this is a two-minute stimulation that created that same effect. They're using it in drone pilots in the army for fatigue and for maintaining good executive function. The Defense Language Learning Institute is essentially teaching CIA operatives new languages in four days instead of five because they're adding this device inIt's also beneficial for PTSD. The VA does use a very similar device, the GammaCore, which is actually the clinical version of the device. This is just the easier access one. TruVaga is the tool that chiropractors can accessibly provide to their patients.”
46:47 – Device-use and treatment plan. “That was the additional business model of the GammaCore device, which is the clinical version. The pricing strategy was very similar to medicine. It was a monthly or a three-month prescription. The issue was that it's very difficult for chiropractors and clinics to manage a specific device. It's just very annoying, so they built a less intense model, which is TruVaga. This makes it a lot easier for people to get their hands on. In terms of treatment duration and treatment plans, it depends on the patient. It is a two-minute stimulation on the device. I tend to do, for most people, the two-minute stimulation in both the morning and evening and keep that going for about three months at a time and check in to see how things are going. If they're getting a lifetime device, they can use it for the rest of their lives. I love using it as a tool more actively during the acute treatment care process, three months initially, when we're trying to get things working again in their gut or their inflammatory issues or whatever. It is used to create the positive change towards that parasympathetic state and then afterwards, it can be a less frequent but very intermittently positive device that can benefit. Use it during the holidays or a vacation with your kids. When you're stressed, use it. It can be a tool that can be ongoing but doesn't need to be used every single day.”
CONTACT NAVAZ
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