Dr. Katinka van der Merwe is the founder and CEO of The Spero Clinic in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She is known for taking on hopeless and severe patient cases from all over the world who have traveled to her clinic. She has gained a worldwide reputation for her significant success in treating non-retractable pain syndromes, chronic pain, neurologic pain, and symptoms associated with long COVID, using her patented Neurologic Rehabilitation Program by restoring balance to the Autonomic Nervous System. Dr. van der Merwe has dedicated her career to informing and treating patients who have lost all hope in recovery.
In this episode of TechTalk Podcast, Brad Cost, Dr. Jay Greenstein, DC, and Dr. Katinka van der Merwe sit down to discuss:
Complex Regional Pain Syndrome and its common solution: vagus nerve stimulation.
Manual vs machine-guided vagus nerve stimulation - saving someone nonetheless.
How Dr. Katinka van der Merwe's Spero Clinic gives the possibility of hope.
SHOW NOTES:
4:12 – Saving someone from drowning, metaphorically. “My dad always said, it's not the 9/10 that you remember, it's the 1/10 that you couldn’t help that keeps you up at night. I wanted that adrenaline. I wanted to treat the worst of the worst. I found out about this technique that was used with fibromyalgia patients at the time. I was inspired. I knew that it could help complex regional pain syndrome, which is this horrific condition most doctors don't know about. It's basically nerve pain that starts after a normal trauma, like a surgery, but the pain gets worse. It's level 10 pain. 15% of those patients will attempt suicide. It's a lifelong condition. A patient walked in my door, a local, ex-police officer. His wife, who just had their 9-month-old baby, found him with his pistol in his mouth - he had full body complex regional pain syndrome. He had full gastroparesis and couldn't eat anymore. He was spooning chicken broth but would curl up and scream in pain for hours after when the GI tract activated. He told me he didn’t want to live like this. All I had was the Vegas Nose Stimulation, this technique I just learned, so I did it. He left that night, had a full meal with no pain, and came in the next day at 30% better. I felt like I just jumped into the ocean and saved someone from drowning. It was a pivotal moment in my career. I was hooked. He was in full remission 14 weeks later and continues to be to this day. He sent me another CRPS patient. Then he sent another. Then I hit a case that I couldn't help. What was I supposed to do now? Well, I'm a researcher, so I started studying techniques. I was traveling every weekend, finding all these technologies, sourcing anything I thought would help nerve pain. I would try it and, when it was perfect, I made it part of the program that I have today where people come from all over the world.”
9:49 – Recognizing the importance of the vagus nerve. “There is so much evidence available on how important the vagus nerve is for post-COVID cases as well. They always try to take it back to a machine to stimulate it, but in my belief, there is just nothing that beats good old manual stimulation. I think chiropractors are starting to catch on, but they don't know where to learn how to do it. We're so stuck on the atlas, and that is important, but we need more techniques focused on the vagus nerve.”
11:02 – Manually vs machine-guided. “When I send my patients home, I don't have someone like me in their home state. They come from all over the world. I also can’t just send a doctor because they're not going to provide the same care. We've tried a lot of the devices to see if it will do the same thing. I’ve had some of my patients find devices and try to do it at home, but they'll never get some results. I haven't seen a device that is equal to what we do here, but I want to find a device because it would solve a lot of issues for me.”
15:40 - Teaching the vagal stimulation techniques. “I have not been able to successfully teach anyone to do it themselves. I can't do it on myself. It's got to be some kind of weird energy circuit that I don't understand. I give myself headaches when I try to do it and there's no one better at doing it than me. There is definitely an art to it that takes a while to learn because it's energy under your hands. There's a feeling you get when that nerve turns on. We give our patients other tools and technology that they take home that we feel fills that gap. In the first six to twelve months, they'll come back for another week of reactivation. For our long-distance patients that can’t come back as easily, we have therapists that will continue to connect with them over Zoom to help them use some of the technologies we sent them home with.
17:51 – A solution best served whenever! “It is really good anytime you have a patient that's coming in with a high level of pain. It puts them in a parasympathetic state and decreases the inflammation in the central nervous system. It shines most brightly if you have a patient that is in a level 7, 8, 9, or 10 pain (not just related to CRPS) because that's when they can see the biggest difference when they're on the table.
18:52 - The possibility of hope. “Spero means hope in Latin and I am of the firm belief that any healing journey starts with hope. I just talked to a patient yesterday that is suicidal. She's been in pain for eight years, but three weeks ago, she decided she was ready to check out. When we had our Zoom call, she told me I gave her hope that there's at least a place to go to. That's our first step - the healing journey is just opening the possibility of hope.”
20:22 - Measuring the outcomes. “We use the OATS questionnaires throughout our treatment. We do an exit interview with the patients, rate their improvement both pain-wise and function-wise, and follow up in the six-to-twelve-month visit. We stay in touch with a lot of our patients, because if you spend three or four months together, you get really close to them. Using the data we've gathered, our effort exit outcomes are sitting at about 84% success rate in overall pain decrease in our pain population. Recently, we're seeing a lot of very severe pediatric long COVID cases. I'm so excited because those tend to be easier than complex regional pain syndrome so far.”
28:45 - Correlations between long COVID suffers, vaccine vs non-vaccine. “Great question. We just recently took off in the long COVID world. We've treated about 13 severe pediatric long covered cases. For us, if parents are willing to go into the holistic world for health and transplant to Arkansas for three months with their kid, they are already somewhat holistic. I would say most of them did not vaccinate. It's purely long COVID. However, we also treat vaccine injuries and COVID vaccine injuries, but that's a different animal. In some ways they're a lot alike, but we do see vaccine injuries. It's just not all long COVID cases have vaccines. With vaccine injuries, there's definitely a detoxification, toxicity aspect that has to be addressed and it's a little trickier because you know it's not from a natural source. It injures the body in ways we cannot fully understand or comprehend yet.”
30:42 – Resolvable condition? “It can be resolved, but if you've had one vaccine injury, you're going to be prone to other vaccine injuries. Your body does not detoxify well. If you've had one injury or you have a baby that has not done well with the vaccine and then you go put another vaccine on top of that, you're throwing a match into a room with gas fumes. It's going to blow up.”
31:41 - What have we learned from COVID? “There's a segment of the population that's intelligent, can think for themselves, and trust their doctors and our government agencies. Then COVID happened and that population shifted. They knew people that got injured by vaccines or see these young kids dropping dead. That segment is never going to look back. It's never looked as good as it has right now for information about the side effects of vaccines to be disseminated. You also have your segment of the sheeples that are still lining up to get their boosters. You need balance in each society. You're going to have your idiots, you're going to have your really smart people, and you're going to have the middle segment. There has been a shift where we're not as willing to give up our liberty.”
CONTACT KATINKA
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