Jodi: Hi. I’m Jodi Cohen, and I’m super excited to have my friend, Dr. Kirk Gair, here, who is a trained functional medicine and functional neurology practitioner.
And he works with pain and with lasers and is going to talk a little bit about how the vagus nerve is involved in pain signals and how you can help basically return to factory settings with lasers so that it doesn’t feel as intense.
So, Kirk, I’m super curious if you can just talk about kind of the vagus nerve and how you can work with the vagus nerve with lasers.
Dr. Gair: Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, the vagus nerve is extremely important because we’ve got the whole gut-brain connection. There’s communication going back and forth between the two of them.
And if those signals aren’t moving properly up and down the vagus nerve, that can be a problem for not only just for digestive function but also for overall pain. You can ramp your body up more and see a sympathetic kind of tone.
Most of us are kind of in this sympathetic overdrive, like this stress state and probably even more so right now with the coronavirus situation and people being stuck at home, out of work, et cetera. That’s just going to drive that even more.
And so you can think of it as like a see-saw that you’ve got your sympathetic nervous system and your parasympathetic nervous system, and you want those to be balanced, or you want to have more of the parasympathetic going to kind of calm you down and get the body into a relaxed state, into a state where the body can heal and function normally.
And you get those signals from the brain down to the gut, going properly for good digestion as well. And anytime that gets out of balance, and you’ve got too much of that sympathetic drive, you can now increase what are called nociceptive firing of neurons. That’s just a fancy word for pain neurons.
So, pain is going to increase when you have that going on. We look at the vagus nerve too. We know that a lot of infections can start off in the gut, and they can crawl up the vagus nerve, get into the brain and set up shop in there and trigger inflammation, and now they can start to affect brain function and even neurodegeneration.
So, we look at lasers like this is one of mine that I use from my office, so a handheld version. I also have some big ones that actually go around the body, but we’ll take this one, and we’ll put it directly over the vagus nerve here and have patients do simple vagus nerve stimulation, like tilting their head back and gargling.
And we can start to kind of reset that pathway and stimulate more of the parasympathetic type of pathway on there to dampen pain, dampen inflammation, and also improve that communication between the gut and the brain.
And there’s decades of research, really going back to the 1960s, on how lasers can impact the body, not just for pain and inflammation, but also neurologically. And what I find really fascinating is that people think that lasers are new and experimental, but by 1974, the former Soviets, the USSR had it as part of their state-sponsored standard medical care because they considered it so effective. It saved them money and helped their patients more. So, it’s got a long history.
Jodi: You’ve shared so much information. I want to kind of unpack it a little bit more slowly. So, you talked about the vagus nerve and the perception of pain. And then you also talked about inflammation. Can we land a little bit more on how being stuck in the parasympathetic state of the nervous system can trigger the experience of pain in the body?
Dr. Gair: Yeah. Well, if you’re stuck in that sympathetic nervous system, everything is ramped up, and then you’re going to create an inflammatory state as well, too. So that’s one of the problems there is you’re going to get inflammation that can then go globally throughout the body.
And then you’ve kind of got an easy way to think of it is let’s think of like we’ve all had that car in the neighborhood or at your work that you know the slightest thing happens and that alarm’s going off crazy.
Jodi: Is it kind of the cell danger response, like when the cell thinks it’s in danger, it inflames and it causes pain, so you don’t move so you can heal, and you get stuck in that gear?
Dr. Gair: Exactly. You get stuck in that. And then you get neurons that can get what we call close to threshold. That’s kind of like when that car alarm is set to sensitive, and someone just barely touches it like a leaf falls on it, and it goes off because it’s just firing very quickly.
And that’s how your nervous system can be when you’re in that sympathetic state. Let’s say a nerve normally needs the stimulus to go from here to there to start to fire. Well, when you’re stressed out, and you’re in that sympathetic state, it can be resting right here. So, a little bit of stimulus now can just aggravate it.
You’ve got neurons that are firing too much. If people are eating foods that have excitatory neurotoxins in them like monosodium glutamate, that’s going to put you more into that kind of state where you’re on edge and––
Jodi: Yeah. Like the people that throw their back out and they’re so worried because the slightest little thing, like they live in fear that they’re going to slip back into pain all the time.
Dr. Gair: Exactly. And then it can get looped back and forth to where now you’ve got to where the brain actually changes the way it processes pain information to where you have these pain signals that are going up to the brain and if you move at the same time, the pain happens, then there’s a saying in neurology that neurons that fire together will wire together.
So, if you start to get enough every time you move, say your arm if there’s pain, now if the pain source goes away, just that movement can stimulate your brain to fire pain neurons too. So, our bodies are adapting. They’re kind of rewiring all of the time. And particularly now when people are really stressed out coming out of the COVID issue. You can really have everything amped up and more inflammation and more sensitivity in these nerve pathways.
Jodi: I love that. You explain that so well, and this is kind of–– It’s almost like a vicious cycle where they get stuck in that pain pattern. And what I love about what you do is you help to unravel it and reset the body.
And can we talk about–– I know you work with pretty famous athletes along with just weakened warriors. How do you approach that?
Dr. Gair: So, the way that I approach it, there are basic ones that you can do. So, the simple one is what people can also do at home if they have a laser or a light therapy type of device. It is really, let’s say if you’ve got a painful shoulder, you can do it as simple as–– Let’s say if I had my shirt off. I’m not going to do that right now.
Jodi: Yeah. This is a PG show.
Dr. Gair: Ideally, I would have the laser on the tissue. Let’s say if I had a painful arm, I would have it here. And at the same time, I would just do movements in the range of motion that doesn’t increase the pain.
So that way, we can start to get those pathways to fire in a different way. So, let’s say if they can barely move it with no pain, but I have them barely move it and might have the laser going from here even up to the head to do what’s called transcranial laser therapy.
And that way, it starts to stimulate those nerve pathways to reset. Some fascinating things happen when you get a laser on the body. You’re going to stimulate stem cell production, so you actually get tissue to repair.
You’re going to stimulate nitric oxide, which helps to dilate the blood vessels. And so, you actually get blood pressure to lower, which we know that can help you to come back to more of a parasympathetic state.
Jodi: I think that’s what oils do, too, is they help vasodilate. Anything that you can do basically to increase the blood flow, and the fluid movement helps with the healing. That’s great. So, light does that.
Dr. Gair: Right. Light does that. And one of the things I love to do in my office when let’s say I have an athlete or I just have anybody who’s very stressed out is we’ll get them to smell oils while we have the laser on them transcranially as well.
So, what happens there is there’s breathing in the oil. You get all the benefits of the oil, plus you’re now stimulating the olfactory centers in the brain. That’s going to cause blood to go to that area.
So, if while they’re doing that, we have the laser on them, it’s going to draw more of the energy from the laser that’s gotten into the blood vessels into that particular area because you’re stimulating those neural pathways on there.
So those are some of the things we’ll do. We can get more complicated with the lasers to where we’ll test a muscle and find which one is weak. And then we’ll laser over the nerves that control that muscle while we’re getting to activate that muscle that’s weak, and you can strengthen up an athlete or a weakened warrior or just someone who says, oh, man, my shoulder has been hurting for a long time.
And you can now change the neurology. And then people always will say after they’re done, oh my God, I feel so much more relaxed because now the nervous system is more balanced, signals are going properly to those muscles, so they’re firing right. And there’s less tension throughout the whole system. And that gets them more into a parasympathetic state too.
Jodi: Well, the other thing, a use of that I want to really touch on is this idea of getting them to threshold. You want to challenge the muscle up to the point where you feel pain, but not go beyond that pain. Can you speak to that a little bit more?
Dr. Gair: Yeah. It’s important because especially I played 11 years of football, high school, and college football. And back in the 80s, every time we’d go in the gym, it was like no pain, no gain.
Jodi: Oh, yeah. Isn’t it a gym kind of thing?
Dr. Gair: Pain is weakness leaving the body, all this stuff. And well, now we know that that’s not necessarily the best thing that you can do because again, there’s a neurological loop where if every time I do this if I push it to the point of pain, my brain can now link pain with that movement together.
And it can become problematic in certain people more so than others. Like, particularly if we look at, let’s say you probably have some autoimmune patients that are watching this.
And we know from some of the great research Dr. Datis Kharrazian has done is that if you push a workout too hard and you have an autoimmune condition, you can now crash that system out. And that was something that was hard for me to learn because––
Jodi: Yes, over-exercising. And he talks about that so much, and no one else is really giving it enough airtime.
Dr. Gair: No, they aren’t. And for me, that was really hard as a male coming out of that testosterone-driven kind of thing where you’re trying to push harder and heavier and do a two-hour workout. I started to find that even though I looked good at the time, I felt like crap. I was just crashed out, and it would take me days to recover.
And then I finally had to learn to do less of a workout, like a much shorter time and without the same kind of intensity. So, I didn’t overload my body. I didn’t overload the nervous system too. So, if you’ve got or listeners who have brain fog or different kinds of brain issues, it’s the same thing.
If you do too much or too intensive of an exercise and now you can fatigue different neurons and neurons in the brain and crash them out, and now you’ve got several days. So, again, trying to find them all.
Jodi: Even little kids with homework. There’s a reason they teach simple multiplication before they get into calculus. You need to kind of find that sweet spot.
It’s like balancing on a tight rope. Enough that it’s stimulatory, but not so much that it is a challenge. And I’m curious how lasers kind of help with that because it seems like they expedite or enhance anything you’re already doing.
Dr. Gair: They do. Let’s take, for example. I got my laser here that I’ve got going. This is a combination of red and violet laser. And this one actually has specific research on it. It’s got a patent as a laser that does parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system activity.
Jodi: What’s the name of the laser?
Dr. Gair: This one is the Erchonia EVRL. EVRL stands for Erchonia violet-red laser because we found that like violet lasers will tend to stimulate more of the sympathetic nervous system if done by themselves. Red lasers will stimulate the parasympathetic to kind of calm you down.
And if you do them both together, it actually gets the body to kind of balance that see-saw out on itself. So, what we’re looking at with lasers, one of the things that happen will be as we get it on the body, and this can be confusing to people because they’re going to say, well, that just looks like a barcode scanner or a laser leveler.
Well, think about, if you go on sunlight when sunlight hits your skin, you’re going to absorb the energy. You’re going to make vitamin D., and even if you just get sunlight on your arm, it’s going to go globally throughout your body.
So, there’s a misconception when it comes to laser and light therapy that it’s only affecting that area. You get the most absorption in that area, but it goes globally throughout the body. And you’ll get things like vitamin D production, melanin production for a suntan, or melatonin to affect sleep-wake cycles.
Like I have friends, some doctors who are up in Norway, and they’re so far North, they said they have two days a year. It’s day, and then its night because they get 23 hours––
Jodi: Yeah. I was like that when I was a kid.
Dr. Gair: Was it? Yeah. And so, he said, “Yeah, we’ve got two days.” I say, “What’s that like?” He said, “Well, we’re so affected by light affecting our moods.” He said, “In the wintertime, it’s like everybody sleeps all day.’ He says, “We drink lots of vodka, and everybody’s depressed, and we get nothing done.” So, what’s it like in the summer when you have a lot of light?
He said it’s the exact opposite. Everybody’s happy. We hardly sleep like three hours a day. We get all the work done. And it’s a big party all the time. So, light affects us like that. When we have lasers, when I get a laser on, like, let’s say I put the laser here on my brain.
Now, a lot of people are going to say, well, the laser doesn’t penetrate through the skull. The skull does block a good amount of it. But the Erchonia did a research study on autistic kids showing that the laser does penetrate, and they have functional MRIs to show changes in blood flow and in your neuronal activity. So, when I get that laser on there, one of the things we’re going to do is stimulate ATP production, which is an energy molecule.
Jodi: Right. Light they believe it activates the structured water in cells to keep––
Dr. Gair: Yeah, it does that. Yeah, it stimulates the mitochondria, which is your powerhouse of your cells. When you pulse the light, it also creates–– So let’s say if you took your oil and you put your oil on the skin, and then you put a post-laser on there that pulses between one and 10 Hertz, it creates a pulsing or a pumping in that cell. The cell membrane will oscillate, and it’ll draw the oil or nutrients or some of the medications. It draws them better into the cells.
In my office, I tell patients we’re going to recalibrate your nervous system. We will test each muscle, and then if one is weak, we’ll use the laser in a way to reset that pathway and recalibrate it to get them to function better. Whether that’s the vagus nerve, we do a lot of vagus nerve recalibrations.
I’ll have patients that will come in, and a good way for people to know that their vagus nerve is not working properly is if they have chronic constipation. That’s a big one, slow gut motility.
Jodi: Yes. Because the vagus nerve innervates the whole digestive path and turns on the housekeeping wave.
Dr. Gair: Right, exactly. And another one too is they have difficulty swallowing pills. So, if I have a patient who comes into my office and says doc, I can’t take pills. You need to give me a powder. I learned this from Dr. Kharrazian. If they tell you that, that’s a warning sign number one that they’ve got an issue there of how the vagus nerve is firing.
Jodi: And the other easy thing for us girls, any kind of ridges on the nails because the vagus nerve triggers the stomach to release hydrochloric acid, which helps you break down your nutrients. And if you’re constantly testing low in certain vitamins, or you have ridges on your nails, that means that your nutrients aren’t actually being absorbed and assimilated properly.
Dr. Gair: Yeah. Correct. And so, when you stimulate that, you affect so much in your body: digestion, brain health, overall decreasing stress. We know when you’re stressed out, that leads to neurodegeneration as well too, neurodegeneration, pain, et cetera. So, if we can reboot those pathways and calm the system down, it makes a big difference.
Jodi: There’s a theory that it’s aging. I think Datis Kharrazian talks about this that decline is additive and cumulative. And if your vagus nerve isn’t functioning, it might feel like, oh, I’m just getting old, or I’m getting fat, or I’m getting forgetful.
But no, it’s just that over time the function keeps going down and down and down, and rebooting the vagus nerve allows the information, the energy, the resources to flow to the cells.
Dr. Gair: Yeah, absolutely. And particularly, when you’re using laser devices to try to stimulate those pathways, laser has a lot of anti-aging properties. It’s fascinating if you look at the research in there for regenerative medicine and lasers. I use it on my brain on a daily basis.
Growing up, I had ADHD and also Tourette’s. I had tics. I was blinking. I was whistling. I was grunting, all of these things. I learned how to control it, but there was always that urge there, like that urge to do the tics, but it was using the lasers that really helped to change that.
And then also, Dr. Kharrazian’s amazing advice as far as when it came to eliminating the foods that were also triggering those pathways.
So, stacking those two together made a huge difference. And the reason I’m able to do the things I do with traveling to lectures and seeing patients is because of what lasers have done to improve my brain.
I feel like it’s working a lot better now than it ever has. I don’t need as much sleep as I used to. I can learn things more quickly. There’s just amazing things you can do when you support the system and support its natural pathways.
Jodi: You mentioned red laser and violet laser. Are there other colors that you work with, and what do they do?
Dr. Gair: There are other colors you can go into. There’s infrared ones. There’s green ones. There’s a lot of different types of lasers that are out there. The bulk of the research on lasers and light therapy usually falls within the visible red spectrum and in the infrared spectrum where you can’t see it, but those are the ones where there’s the most research on them.
When we look at green lasers like Erchonia has a green laser that does cellulite treatments and that reduction as well too. So, it has a different effect on the tissues.
Jodi: So, it’s lymphatic?
Dr. Gair: Yeah. And also, it’s lymphatic, and it’s also removing some of the scar tissue there that can create some of the puckering with the with say cellulite. When you look at the violet lasers, there’s a whole bunch of research on infections.
Especially, I talk a lot with my patients about how violet lasers can actually have this antimicrobial and virucidal effect. There’s research on it, both out of the body and in the body to where when you get a violet wavelength laser, there’s studies on it with MRSA showing it has a 92% effectiveness rates against MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant staph infections.
There are some new studies too on it with coronaviruses, with caliciviruses, with novel viruses, all these different things. So, I see that as emerging in the future, that’s where we look at violet wavelength really has a lot of antimicrobial benefits.
Jodi: And for the antimicrobial benefit, would they apply it over their gut? Does it not matter?
Dr. Gair: That’s what I usually do. So, like what I’m doing at home, I have my laser at home right now. I’m out in California, and we’re under that sheltered home. So, I’m using my laser on myself, on my wife, and on my cats as well too. We use it on them.
So, what I do is I’ll go into the mouth so that I can really hit the tonsils. If the tonsils aren’t there still, you think the mouth is an entry point for a lot of microorganisms getting in.
Jodi: Dietrich Klinghardt calls the tonsils the toilet of the mouth.
Dr. Gair: Yeah, basically. So, I like to hit that. Also, there’s a lot of blood vessels there to try to get the energy from the laser up and into the brain. I will then also do it over the neck to hit the vagus nerve.
I’ll do that while I do some vagus nerve stimulation. Either I’ll take some water. I learned these from Dr. Kharrazian, tilt the head back, and try to gargle really hard.
Jodi: Yes. It innervates the mouth. And so, like gagging, gargling, anything that you can do, deep breathing. Yeah.
Dr. Gair: Exactly. There’s so many different things you can do, but like for your listeners at home, try to gargle, and if you have trouble gargling, like when I have patients with a bad vagus nerve at home, they’ll try to gargle, and they’ll be like gurágle, gurágle, and it’s not working.
We’ll do these. I’ll have them do the vagus nerve exercises at home on a daily basis of doing the gargle exercise. And we’ll do it with a laser in the office. And I’ve seen people go from like that to sounding like a motorboat within a couple of weeks. And then they’re like, oh my gosh, my digestion is so much better. So, I hit there. I like to hit over the thymus.
Jodi: What you’re talking about too is vagus nerve stimulation. And it’s kind of like weightlifting. If you go to the gym and lifting five pounds is going to kill you, the more you keep doing it, you can gradually work up to 10 to 15.
It just gets easier with practice. And the more you can stimulate your vagus nerve, the more your vagus nerve can kind of turn on your digestion and everything else.
Dr. Gair: Absolutely. Yeah. You’re a hundred percent right there. Yeah. So I go after the vagus nerve. I’ll go to the thymus, which is mid-chest. Again, I do it without my shirt on. And then I like to sweep over the gut too. Now, some naysayers will say, oh, it doesn’t penetrate to that level.
When we look at lasers and light therapy, it’s not just about penetration. It’s also about creating this systemic effect of this photobiomodulatory effect. The Russians have been doing that since the 1970s of doing things over the gut, doing things over the lungs, over the thymus.
Jodi: And by systemic effect, what you’re basically saying is if you can reset one piece of it, the whole part resets. It’s like a reverberation.
Dr. Gair: Yeah. And it doesn’t stay just there. It’s like let’s think about when people have to put on a hormone cream. You just put it on one area. Does the hormone cream just stay there?
No, it goes everywhere. It gets everywhere. Or let’s say you do your essential oils, and you smell it. Is it only affecting your sinuses? No, it’s not. It’s resetting the whole nervous system. So, it’s important for people to understand the interconnectedness of the whole body that you have these global effects on areas. Even if something doesn’t directly penetrate to that structure, you can still impact it.
Jodi: Actually, to that point, you had mentioned there are some studies on lasers directly affecting the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Dr. Gair: Yeah. So, it’s pretty fascinating. And again, the company whose lasers I use, Erchonia, they spend a lot of money on research. Right now, there’s 21 different FDA clearances for laser therapy devices. Their research has led to 18 of those clearances. So, they do double and quadruple-blind studies. Like the one, they just completed in Cuba on autistic kids was a quadruple-blind study to show the differences between kids who were receiving laser therapy versus a placebo device.
And that’s been submitted to the FDA hopefully, for first clearance for treatment of autism. The interesting thing about that, on a side note, is you see how fast they’ll rush drugs to be cleared, this research has been submitted to the FDA since October of 2018, and they’re still working on clearing it, even though they’ve got all the data in there.
Jodi: What did the research find?
Dr. Gair: The research found that these kids had better focus. They had less behavior outbursts. And overall, the kids just did so much better. It was phenomenal the difference between the control and the placebo group.
And then what they did is six months later, they took the kids who were in the control group and put them through the laser group. And now you saw changes in there. So, they became like their own placebo versus control group on there too.
Jodi: Yeah. And we find that with the oils too. Stephen Porges, who wrote the polyvagal theory, hypothesized that you see kids, autistic kids doing these self-stimulation movements that he believes are trying to activate the vagus nerve because they’re stuck in the cell danger response sympathetic state.
So, if you can get them to calm and for people who are listening the way I describe it if you’ve ever been in traffic and someone cuts you off, and you don’t care, you’re fine.
And then the next day, the same thing happens, and four-letter words fall out of your mouth. The difference is you were in the parasympathetic state when the first thing happened, and outside stressors don’t bother you because you were in resilience.
And so, the lasers basically are helping a really challenged population that really struggles to get into resilience. So, if we can help the most extreme population, those of us that just get hangry, we would be probably in good shape.
Dr. Gair: Exactly. And along those lines, I’m going to, again, quote my mentor, a good friend, Dr. Kharrazian. He really helped me understand some of these loops, so what’s going on there.
So, when we talk about these kinds of populations or let’s say someone who’s just in that sympathetic overdrive, also a big dating area, it’s going to be the cerebellum.
So that’s your balance and coordination area. One of the things you could do to see how well that’s working is just do a balance test: stand up, put your feet together, close your eyes, and see do you sway? And if you do, then you’ve got an issue with your cerebellum.
If you don’t do it there, then close your eyes, put your feet heel to toe and try to stand with your eyes closed. You should be able to stand hands to your side and not wobble back and forth. If you start falling over, you’ve got some cerebellum issues that are going on there. You’re more likely to have that, too, let’s say if someone has Hashimoto’s.
Jodi: Yeah. Kharrazian really correlated a lot of thyroid issues with the cerebellum. This is actually to your point because I have Hashimoto’s, and I started doing yoga, and it made a huge difference in my ability to balance. It’s kind of basically find what you’re not good at and do it to the point of threshold.
Dr. Gair: Exactly. You do that and what a lot of people and doctors don’t understand is that those TPO antibodies can cross-react with cerebellar tissue and trigger damage, and then that can affect your balance. Now, what people don’t understand is how that can affect an autistic kid for controlling movement.
A kid like myself who had symptoms of PANDAS and also Tourette’s, et cetera, because the cerebellum gates some of the firing of those neurons, and so, some people will have their cerebellum not functioning right, and then it can kind of misfire into areas of the brain, into the emotional centers, and now that can amp them up as well too to make them feel stressed out.
So, when we get a laser, and we take it, and we do it over the cerebellum while we do some balance exercises, what we’re doing is a few things. Those TPO antibodies, those steroid antibodies, research by Hoffling out of Brazil shows that laser can decrease those TPO antibodies.
So that protects the thyroid, that protects also the cerebellum. And you can also stimulate brain-derived neurotrophic factor to start to heal up some of these areas too.
And so, that’s one of these different loops that helps in overall keeping you into that more parasympathetic state, where you’re in this more balanced kind of state, where as you said, are resilient. That’s the loop of how lasers can kind of help that whole pathway there.
Jodi: And just a final question because I know you work with a lot of athletes, and I’m curious kind of what your experience has been with the laser and pain and helping people return to healthy movement.
Dr. Gair: Yeah, it’s pretty phenomenal with that because it’s given me–– The area where I’m in Southern California, it’s a hotbed for talent. We have so many players, and especially in major league baseball come from literally like a 30-mile radius from where my office is.
So, I will start working with kids when they’re 11 or 12. And later on, you see them in the major league baseball. One of my patients was picked sixth overall in the major league baseball draft last year, which was so exciting to work with that kid when he was in high school.
Jodi: That repetitive motion, especially for the pitchers, they really are going to need some help.
Dr. Gair: They are and especially when you look at–– Let’s talk about sports in general. So, I’m sure a lot of your listeners right now have kids and kids who are in sports.
The sports world has changed since I grew up in the seventies and eighties to where now it’s this pressure cooker, and kids are starting single sports specialization at the age of five or six.
And they’re already looking as a young kid at the stress of I got to get into college and sports is my ticket into college because the parents want them to do it in a way different than Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman.
Jodi: My daughter does row crew, and workouts are intense.
Dr. Gair: They are. And they’re every day pretty much. They are every weekend, and they are stressed out.
Jodi: Every day for hours. Yeah.
Dr. Gair: I’ve seen kids talking about what college you’re going to go through at 11 or 12, like this pressure cooker. And so, they’re stressed out. So, when we get them in and what I’ve seen is kids coming in who have these because they’re playing all the time, every week of the year, pretty much not shut down, they’ll have chronic injuries, chronic inflammation.
And we get a laser on them, and I’ve had it to where I had one particular kid come in with a knee injury. He was playing basketball at the time. He came in literally on crutches.
I go through the protocol with my lasers to reset his nervous system. And I’ll start them off with doing a squat. This kid couldn’t even do a squat or a lunge. As soon as I got done with him after about 10 minutes of treating him, he gets up and does a squat and a lunge, no pain.
To where his dad even says, “Are you sure you were even hurt, or were you faking it?” Because we can get such a rapid change in what their pain levels are that it’s created this reputation.
I have athletes who go off to college. I have one athlete fly back to see me from Vanderbilt. Another one from a university in Texas, all across the US, where their coaches let them leave mid-season for an injury because their trainers weren’t able to work with them.
They come out to see me, spend a week with me doing the lasers, and go back, and we’ve got them in really tip-top shape. We even see it for enhancing sports performance. There was one particular study in the Journal of Biophotonics that showed that athletes who get laser have unfair advantage over athletes who don’t get laser.
That was basically what the researcher said. They’re like, man, it was as if they had performance-enhancing drugs because the athletes were stronger. They had more endurance. They recovered from their exercises faster. And their conclusion was, they said, we’re not sure this should be allowed in international competition as it is unfair advantage.
So, I actually share that with my athletes, and they love it, unfair advantage, especially if it doesn’t have any side effects, doesn’t have any harm to them. So those are some of the things we’ve seen. I’ve had athletes that were supposed to be out, let’s say in the worst-case scenario where they had surgery.
I had a girl who was called the terrible triad, where she had a meniscal tear, an ACL ligament tear, and an MCL ligament tear. And she was supposed to be out for a year. We literally got her back in four months to where she was able to––
Jodi: That’s amazing. And I really hope it lands with people like when you can kind of put your nervous system in the right gear where healing is possible and then work on specific areas of the body, you can see dramatic improvement.
Dr. Gair: You can.
Jodi: I’m so grateful that you came on, and where can people find out more information about you and your lasers?
Dr. Gair: So, if they want to find out more information about me, they can go onto my webpage, which is Laserchiropractic.net. And that’s laser with an S. I also am on Facebook so you can find me. Just search my name, Dr. Kirk Gair, G-A-I-R. I’m fortunate that I come from one of the smallest Scottish clan, so it’s a very rare surname. There’s literally three of us in the whole world named Kirk Gair, so it’s easy to find me if you search me there. I have a patient group on Facebook. If people want to join that, they’re welcome to do that. And that’s where I’m sharing videos and Facebook lives and information on there. They can just search Dr. Gair’s patient page.
Jodi: And if they wanted to find a practitioner that you have trained, could they find that on your Facebook page or?
Dr. Gair: Yeah. They can find that there, or they can message me there. I also have a site called Cold Laser Practitioner Forum. They can connect with doctors on that one as well. I do have doctors. I train doctors around the world and internationally. I do things both in the United States and abroad, and they can message me online, and I can try to put them in contact with someone who knows what they’re doing to help them out.
Jodi: In their area. This was wonderful. Thank you so much.
Dr. Gair: Thanks for having me. And I think it’s fantastic what you’re doing. It’s going to help a lot of people sharing this information.
Jodi: Thank you.
