Hi, guys. Welcome to another episode of the Factor podcast. I'm your host, Jessica Riddle. Welcome, and thanks for listening. Today, we unpack a new training with doctor Nivas Habib, a Toronto based chiropractor, acupuncturist, and functional medicine practitioner that has dedicated his career to the study of the vagus nerve. In part 1 of this 2 episode series, we'll explore how the vagus nerve's regulatory pathways impact inflammation, the role of acetylcholine in modulating immune responses, and how these mechanisms can be leveraged to improve conditions such as autoimmune disorders, neurological diseases, and more. I know you hear me say this a lot, but this episode is truly jam packed with great insights that can help you approach your patient care a little differently. Be sure to hit that bookmark or download link so you can listen more than once.

Let's dive in.

Thank you so much, Jessica. I'm excited to be here and excited to share some of the amazing research and findings that I've had in incorporating vagus nerve stimulation into my practice. I am a chiropractor. I'm based in Toronto, Canada. Graduated in 2010 from Canadian Memorial Chiropractic College. Was actually lucky enough to be the class valedictorian of my year, and that was wonderful. I have since and I'll just give you a brief breakdown. I have been an associate.

I've owned a chiropractic practice. I've sold a chiropractic practice and have shifted into working with patients via telemedicine and working more with consulting clients all around the world with regards to their vagus nerve and optimizing their overall health. It's been an interesting shift, and it's been a positive 1. And I'm excited to kinda tell you a little bit about the vagus nerve a little bit more because I think it's something that we tended to scoot by in understanding in our school. And it it's 1 of those things that I think if we give it a little bit more attention, we'll realize just how important it truly is to creating an optimal environment for health. So the vagus nerve, what happens in vagus, not the city obviously, is we have communication, bidirectional communication between many different organs and the brain. 80% of the information on the vagus nerve is actually afferent, meaning coming from all of the organs, sharing status information from the organs back to the brain. That's huge.

That's a big component. We tend to think of parasympathetic as being much more efferent in its pathway, being much more from the brain to the body. And only 15% of the information on the vagus nerve is actually parasympathetic efferent information. This is where we get this rest digest information from the brain to the organs. And and really important area here is the actual inflammatory control via the cholinergic anti inflammatory pathway, also known as the CAIP. This is a really important thing to understand. Because when it comes to chronic health conditions that a lot of our patients are dealing with, whether they be autoimmune or inflammatory in nature, always have the lack of control of inflammation as the pathway to the disease progression. So this is a really important area to fully understand.

And the control of inflammation is the primary job of the vagus nerve within the body. This is where we we have that specific effect of being able to limit the amount of damage that inflammation can do. Inflammation is a necessary piece to the optimization of our body's puzzle, but the control of inflammation is what often needs to be talked about. And that's what the job of the vagus nerve is. For the math people out there, that's only 95% of the roles. So 4% of the information here is motor information, and that's specifically going to the pharyngeal and laryngeal muscles. Those are the muscles of the airway, throat, and vocal cords. So maintaining the openness and pateness of an airway is the job of the motor component of the Vagus Ear.