Adapted from episode 127 of The Perfect Stool podcast with Ashok Gupta, founder of the neuroplasticity, “limbic retraining” recovery program and app known as the Gupta Program and Lindsey Parsons, EdD, and edited for readability.
Lindsey:
I understand and I shared in the intro how your personal story of illness and recovery led to your creation of the Gupta Program*. So can you share that story?
Ashok Gupta:
Yes, of course, like many of us who work in this field, we’ve been through our own challenges. And we’ve healed, we’ve survived, and we’ve gone on then to help others. So my journey started in the mid 90s, when a lot of these types of illnesses, conditions, gut issues, they weren’t really recognized. And I was studying as an undergrad at Cambridge University. I got some kind of virus and I wasn’t sure what that was, but I didn’t think much of it. I kind of healed from the virus, but my physical body just deteriorated to the point at which I would open up a textbook and I couldn’t read the words on the page, or I had to crawl to the bathroom, just really intense fatigue. And for people who don’t know what chronic fatigue syndrome feels like, what ME feels like, I would describe it like your worst day of flu times five. Literally, you’re just wiped out. And it doesn’t matter how much you rest, it doesn’t seem to alleviate whatever you do. And I went from doctor to doctor and they would say, we don’t know what you have, we don’t even know what to call it. We don’t sometimes even think it’s real, there’s nothing we can give you to treat it, you might have it for the rest of your life, goodbye. And that for a young man, you can imagine, was a death sentence.
I met hundreds of others who were suffering from it. And I just know in my worst moments, in my darkest moments, I made a contract with the universe. And I said, If I can just get myself 50% better, ideally 100% better, I will dedicate the rest of my life to solving this condition and helping others with it. Because there’s so many people who are suffering and so much untold suffering from it. And so I managed to find some amazing work on brain neurology and physiology and I studied that. And I came up with a hypothesis as to what causes these types of conditions. I then retrained my brain and had myself 100% well, and then set up a clinic to treat others and then since then have obviously published medical papers and studies and published an app as well. So yes, that’s been my journey over the last 25 years, 30 years.
Lindsey:
That’s awesome. So just in case people don’t know the abbreviation ME stands for?
Ashok Gupta:
Well, it’s a long convoluted title. Essentially, it’s seen as a more severe form of chronic fatigue syndrome, and it’s stands for myalgic encephalomyelitis, if I said that correct.
Lindsey:
Okay, so this is like inflammation of the brain?
Ashok Gupta:
Yes, inflammation in the brain, the body and then going on to cause fatigue.
Lindsey:
Okay, and can you explain what the limbic system is?
Ashok Gupta:
Sure, yep. So some of these treatments and therapies have sometimes got put into this pigeonhole of retraining the limbic system, which isn’t quite accurate, but I can describe to people what the limbic system is. So we have different areas of our brain. And the limbic system is the part of the brain that is known as the mammalian brain, which includes certain brain structures that are responsible for our emotions, and emotions themselves are defensive. So it also includes defensive reactions. And it used to be believed that the limbic system was just in control of our emotional reactivity.
But actually, our physiology, our immune system, the systems that keep our body functioning, are also mediated through the limbic system part of the brain. And that includes structures such as the hippocampus, which is our short-term memory retrieval, the thalamus, which is a part of the brain that accumulates all sensory data from our body, and especially the amygdala, which is the core part of what we retrain, which are two almond shaped structures, which sit behind the eyes. And their role is to defend us from dangers. And traditionally the amygdala has been implicated in PTSD and anxiety disorders. But actually, they’ve now found the amygdala is involved in sensitivity reactions, and also immune reactions and causing immune storage in the brain, or immune reactivity in the brain. And so let’s say you go to a hospital, and there’s a separate immunology department, separate physiology department, separate neurology department, but the brain does not separate between physical, emotional, biological, it simply says: “What is the danger of a threat? And what reaction do I need to perform?” So essentially, that’s what the limbic system does is it defends us from all kinds of threats that compromise survival.
Lindsey:
Okay, so I saw, scanning the Gupta Program website, that it has been used and studied in gut health conditions like SIBO and IBS and food intolerances. So can you tell me more about that? Because that’s obviously what my audience is most interested in. And I’m also particularly interested because I have autoimmune SIBO, which means it just keeps coming back. And of course, I have lots of clients with a wide range of gut health issues and food sensitivities.
Ashok Gupta:
Yes, so in our hypothesis, we believe that a lot of the gut challenges that people face are essentially as a result of a dysregulated nervous system and a dysregulated immune system, which as a knock on effect causes massive imbalances in the gut in terms of, obviously dysbiosis, tightening of the gut, imperfect absorption of nutrients, etc., etc., etc. And so a lot of our studies have been more focused on the main illnesses we treat such as chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, long COVID, mold illness, but we recently conducted a clinical audit of our patients, about 400 patients were involved in this clinical audit. And we found that actually many patients were seeing significant benefit for food sensitivities, SIBO, irritable bowel syndrome and, of course, those symptoms are very prevalent in a lot of the other conditions that we treat as well. So for instance, in IBS, after just three months on our program, patients reported 64% improvement in IBS symptoms, they reported 56% improvement in food sensitivities. So we have many patients, who now as a result of exclusion diets, or whatever, have gone down to three foods. And obviously, it’s a maze to try and understand what’s going on.
And we believe that brain retraining is a core component of this, because actually, we can train the brain that these foods are safe. We can actually bypass the need, or certainly work in tandem with some of the more downstream treatments of food sensitivities, and in combination, we can train the brain to no longer react. So there are 56% improvement in food sensitivities, 46% improvement in SIBO, after three months of using brain retraining. So I think it’s a really promising treatment for gut health issues in combination with obviously the great work that you do as well.
Lindsey:
So I know that people might feel and there might be this perception that in some way, you’re suggesting that their issues are all in their head? Can you correct that misinterpretation of what brain retraining is about?
Ashok Gupta:
Yes, of course. And we get this time and time again. And we say, it’s not all in the minds, but we believe it’s all in the brain. And it’s separating and differentiating between those two things. So the way to think about our brain is, imagine that you look at a car. And traditionally, medicine would look at our body like a car. So if something went wrong with the door, you fix the door, something goes wrong in this part of the engine, you fix the engine. But in modern cars, what tends to go wrong, is the electrical system. And the electrical system of the car is like the electrical system of our body, the nervous system, and the central processing computer in the car, that’s the equivalent of our brain, that’s the most intensive collection of neurons in the entire body. And that’s where is a kind of central processing unit.
And so when we have these types of conditions, we’re not saying that it’s in our conscious mind, we’re not saying that we’re consciously aware or that we’re choosing these conditions. But we’re saying that in this processing unit of the brain, these electrical systems, they sometimes maladapt to our environment. They sometimes over defend, over survive. If you think about it, the number one priority of our brain is survival, it’s not wellness, funnily enough. We think, “I’m sure my brain wants me to be well.” Actually, it’s survival. And so when we realize that our brain then errs on the side of caution, and therefore, it’s not something that we choose, it’s not something that we want, it’s happening unconsciously without our awareness. What brain retraining is, is actually we can influence what the brain does, even though it wasn’t cognitive in the first place. There are specialized techniques that can potentially reverse some of these effects and get us back to health.
Lindsey:
Can you give me some examples of the kinds of things people do within the Gupta Program just so people can understand a little bit what it’s about?
Ashok Gupta:
Yes, absolutely. So the Gupta Program essentially has been developed over the last 20, 25 years or so. And it involves a whole suite of different techniques that I can only call brain retraining, neuroplasticity techniques, but they’ve been drawn from a number of different areas of therapy, coaching, etc. and unique twist put on them or, you know, reinvented. And so we first of all teach patients to recognize some of those danger signals. So as we said, at the beginning, the brain is highlighting dangers and over emphasizing dangers, and therefore, the body and the brain reacts and creates these defensive responses, which cause all the downstream effects. So we teach the patient to recognize those signals. And instead of just letting them go, to actually retrain the brain, to tell the brain that we are safe.
Now, of course, the brain isn’t going to listen to just a cognitive thing. Like you can’t say to your brain, okay, you know what, I want you to cause my saliva glands to salivate right now. Your brain will say, no, I’m not going to do that, because I don’t take instructions in that way. But if I was to take a slice of lemon, and imagine I was to place that slice of lemon on your tongue, a really tangy lemon, and the juices are flowing in your mouth, and your saliva glands are stimulated now, and now you bite into that lemon. Now, I don’t know, Lindsey, but do you have any excessive saliva in your mouth right now?
Lindsey:
I do have some saliva.
Ashok Gupta:
You do have some saliva? So isn’t that incredible? I managed to trigger a physiological process in you, even though you knew it wasn’t real. Now, so it’s sometimes been glossed over how monumental that idea is that actually we can influence our physiology, when we’re able to train our brain that a certain experience is going on. Now, of course, brain retraining is far more than visualization. But that’s just an example of a technique where we can access your limbic system, access your unconscious brain, and cause physiological responses.
So in a similar way, if your brain has learnt to overstimulate your nervous system and immune system unnecessarily, imagine if we could find the right key to the right lock, and actually calm down those systems and bring us back to homeostasis. And so that’s some examples of how brain retraining works. And it has three components. The first is the three R’s of the program, the first R is relaxing the nervous system. So our brain is not very neuroplastic in its normal state when it’s aroused. But if we calm it down, that makes our brain more neuroplastic and easier to rewire. The second R of the program is retraining the brain. And that’s the core techniques. That’s what’s unique about the program. And the final R is what we call reengaging with joy. So that is saying, actually, we need to understand more about our stress responses in life, and why we respond in a certain way. Because there’s no point getting well, and then having some incident in life and all the symptoms come flooding back. So we teach a patient to recognize when they become dysregulated. And find coping mechanisms or retraining certain parts. So we use a lot of parts therapy, which we find very powerful, and a whole suite of different tools and techniques to enable a patient to stay well for the rest of their lives.
Lindsey:
As you’re talking, it made me think, well, this seems like something that would be really useful for anxiety, is that something it’s been used in?
Ashok Gupta:
Absolutely. So we have many patients that come to us with chronic anxiety where they’ve been down so many pathways, tried so many things, and they just haven’t been able to heal. And they’ve come on to our program. And in fact, it’s in our Clinical Audits, in terms of anxiety, a 68% improvement in anxiety after three months, and that’s a documented, published study. And we’ve actually had some studies internationally, which haven’t been published yet, which have showed very large effect sizes for depression.
Now, of course, we don’t formally recommend our program for depression, because that requires much more specialist attention versus someone using a self guided program. But we can see the potential of a program like this, which is that a lot of these illnesses are essentially the wiring of our brain, at the core of it. And if that’s the case, it opens up a whole world of healing, to previously difficult-to-treat conditions. And I’m sure Lindsey, in your practice, we will see patients who initially do really well on these types of protocols, whether it be supplements or diet changes, etc. But then a stressful event comes in their lives, or some change happens. And it’s so easy for all of the symptoms to come flooding back. And then there’s a whole pathway of new diagnosis and new treatments that we try at that moment in time. And that is, once again, because I believe that a dysregulated brain is going to cause a dysregulated nervous system, immune system and gut. And then that gut through the gut-brain axis feeds back to the brain that we’re in danger, there’s something wrong, which then causes effects at an emotional level, at a cognitive level, but also in the brain, which then causes these feedback loops. And we got to break those loops and get people back to health.
Lindsey:
I also imagine this is really useful for people who are just super sensitive to everything, like there’s no supplement you can give them that they don’t have a reaction, and they’re just like, “I can’t do that. I can’t do that. I can’t do that.” And they can barely eat anything. And you’re like, “I’m not sure there’s anything left.” In fact, I did suggest it recently to a client who’s very much in that sort of situation.
Ashok Gupta:
Yes, and it’s fascinating for us because we work with a lot of functional and integrative doctors, nutritionists and naturopathic doctors. And now a lot of them are prescribing our program first. Because what they say is that, actually once the patient has calmed down their nervous system, then whether it’s binders, whether it’s supplements, whether it’s enzymes, those are then more effective because the system is now in a better state to handle something new. But it’s when we’re in a sensitized state, the system is now in shutdown mode. It believes that everything in the environment is a threat. Anything new is a threat, any new food, any new supplement is a threat. And that’s why people have reactions to what would be otherwise neutral pharmaceuticals or supplements. And therefore, we work in combination with many practitioners to create that balance and work from both wedges, so working both from the gut’s health and the downstream effects and then also the upstream.
Lindsey:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So we’ve talked about ME/CFS, we talked about anxiety and gut health issues, you mentioned mold illness. What other types of situations or conditions might the Gupta Program be good for?
Ashok Gupta:
Well, we’ve found it very powerful for pain. And in fact, we published a randomized control trial on fibromyalgia, which is the most common widespread pain condition. And that was published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine. And that study found that after just eight weeks, which was a very short intervention, the Gupta Program reduced fibromyalgia scores by 40%. And there was a zero effect in the control group, which was relaxation and self awareness and that kind of thing. And there’s a halving of anxiety, a halving of depression, halving of pain, and a doubling of functional capacity after eight weeks, and those effects were continued for six months. And so pain is one area that we also treat. And recently, we found a lot of people with autoimmune conditions getting benefit from the program, even reversing symptoms. And we are looking at even conditions like MS and Alzheimer’s where, once again, it’s not saying that this is going to be the core treatment necessarily, but can really impact. Practitioners are anecdotally telling us that they’ve reversed Alzheimer’s using this approach in certain patients. So I think the future is very exciting for this type of approach.
So, in summary, there are sensitivity reactions: mold illness, food sensitivities, gut sensitivities. Then there’s what we call neuroimmune conditions. So that would be your long COVID, which is huge right now, and I think we all know somebody who’s still got lingering COVID effects, and then chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia. And then we’ve got pain syndromes and you’ve got autoimmune conditions. And what is the root? So these are all branches of a tree. But we believe they all share the same root, which is that because of the way we live in the modern world, and you’re obviously an expert in that, we are creating too many threats for this system, there’s too much of an allostatic load on the system. And therefore when it gets pushed over the edge, it goes into survival mode, which is then hyper stimulating the nervous system and immune system to protect us. And that then causes a complete dysregulation of our bodies, everything will go wrong, because the nervous system and immune system connects to every cell, every organ of our bodies. And that, to me, is the root cause of all of these branches of the tree all these different types of conditions.
Lindsey:
And so you’ve mentioned two and three months, what is the typical length of time that somebody needs to do the Gupta Program before seeing results?
Ashok Gupta:
Generally, people find results within two to three months. Sometimes within weeks, sometimes within days, people can notice the difference. And we always want patients to not be complacent. So our mantra is always minimum six months. Because, of course, you can use the program, retrain your brain quite fast and think, “Hey, I’m feeling amazingly better.” But then if you go back to the old habits and go back to a 60-70 hour week, or some crazy stress that you’re experiencing, of course, then the symptoms will come back. So it’s pacing yourself slowly back into normal life. And the nervous system is sensitive for a while. So if you’ve had a dysregulated system, your nervous system has got overstimulated and got used to being in that state, it’s habitual, as a protective mechanism. Therefore, even once you’ve healed, the system can be sensitive. So it still takes time. And that’s our number one challenge is patients wanting to too quickly go back to normal life when they’re still dysregulated.
Lindsey:
And so how much time per day do you spend doing this?
Ashok Gupta:
We recommend to patients a minimum of 30 minutes a day. And of course, like any investment, the more time you invest, the better your results will be. But we think that everyone can invest at least 30 minutes a day in their health. And something which has been an absolute game changer is a treatment called daily Guptacise. Now what this is, is we know that a lot of our patients are quite lonely, and they’re isolated and it can feel quite demotivating to think, “I’ve got to try and put this program into practice and figure it out.” So we created daily Guptacise, which are daily Zoom calls that our patients can come on, that are hosted by our trained practitioners, where the trained practitioners take them through the nervous system regulation. So that’s somatic work, breathing meditation, and then a daily brain retraining. And that has been an absolute game changer. We only started it in September. But it’s been a game changer for our patients where suddenly, within weeks, they’re noticing differences, because now they’re committed. They’re just tuning in every day, like 20-25 minutes of nervous system regulation, 20-25 minutes of brain retraining. And it’s in a group and we have 200-300 people a day joining live. And it’s been fantastic. And of course, we can’t underestimate the powerful effects of healing in community and meditating in community. It magnifies the depth and power of how much we can regulate ourselves.
Lindsey:
And are these offered at different times of the day for your time zone?
Ashok Gupta:
At the moment, we’ve just got one time slot each day, which covers our US and European friends. So that is 7am Pacific, which is 10am Eastern, 3pm UK, 4pm Europe, so we cover most of the globe where our patients are, but of course in the future, we’d love to have multiple timezones.
Lindsey:
So is the conventional medical community embracing this at all? Or is it pretty much stuck in the in the functional medicine area at the moment?
Ashok Gupta:
I would say we’re making inroads. Absolutely. It’s taking time. And originally, you know, 10-15 years ago, we were the only treatment out there of this kind. And it was seen as very woo woo. Whereas now, there are other programs, there are functional and integrative doctors. We have about 5000 health practitioners recommending our program now, on our database, and it’s gaining traction. And for us, it’s about the science. So the only way we can try and improve this is to do these randomized control trials. So we’ve done two or three randomized control trials, we’ve done Clinical Audits, now we’re looking at larger scale trials. And that is what I think will eventually persuade the mainstream medical community.
And actually, even the mainstream community, they recognize that their existing treatments have been absolutely ineffective in the longer term. I mean, I went to a chronic fatigue syndrome conference, and one of the leaders there said, you know, “It’s great, we’ve been meeting for 30-40 years, we’ve had these yearly conferences, it’s great. But over that period of time, we’ve not found a single biomedical treatment showing any consistent effect over all of that time.” You know, which is shocking, really. And for me, what that means is that we’ve got this kind of great future ahead of us where this type of treatment approach will become more mainstream. And my hope is in five to ten years time, if you have one of these dysregulated systems, you will see someone for brain retraining, or you’ll have a brain retraining approach and you will also have someone who will look at your holistic health support, so that’s the diet, the supplements, etc. And you have that coordinated approach. And that would be my hope.
Lindsey:
Yeah. So I actually, a couple years ago, someone had the DNRS, which is a similar type of program, I guess, Dynamic Neural Retraining System, andit was on a bunch of CDs or DVDs, and my only DVD player was in my guest house. It was very inconvenient to try and do it. I imagine it’s gone online too at this point. But are you pretty similar to them? Or do you know?
Ashok Gupta:
Oh, yeah, so we were the first program to publish in 2007. And let’s just say there have been other programs that have come along after that. And so we are aware of their work, but we have a very different approach to them. So, of course, we’ve got a similar outcome, which is to retrain the brain. But we believe in a kind of different approach. And therefore there’s a lot more deviation in how we work. And now we’re also an app, because I think having an app is super important, because people are busy, they want instant access and not log into a screen. So with the app, that has also been a game changer for our patients.
Lindsey:
That does make a difference. I can think about like if I’m sitting next to my bed, and I’m ready to spend 30 minutes doing something, I’m not going to go upstairs to get my computer, bring it down, hook it up, all that’s not going to happen. So an app does make a difference. So can you give a story of some client who maybe had a gut health issue or some constellation of issues that might have included gut health, that you can share?
Ashok Gupta:
Absolutely. So my favorite story I like to share is we had a client in New Zealand and he was in his early 80s. And I used to think, well, someone in their early 80s, it’s very difficult to figure out what is dysregulated in their systems versus what is a natural product of being at that age. And he had fibromyalgia. He had gut system dysregulation. He had chronic fatigue. He had a whole suite of different problems, and he had it for 30 years, so almost half his life, adult life, he spent in this state. And I said to him, “Okay, look, I’d like you to try the program, you know, give it your best shot.” But I wasn’t sure what results he would get. And within three months, he’d got up to 80-90 percent recovery. His gut system had been restored, his fatigue was much lower, he was just feeling much, much better. And I said to him, “What are you going to do with your life now, I mean, it’s incredible that you are now having this opportunity.” And he said, “Oh, I’m going to travel the world, I’m going do all of the things that I’ve always wished that I could have done. And now is my chance.” And I thought to myself, “Isn’t that incredible that if someone at that age, can first of all have the motivation to put this program into practice, secondly, enough of a neuroplastic brain to actually shift some of these responses, and then have the joy to want to go and travel the world, then all of us can do this. All of us have the ability to retrain.” And that was a really inspiring story for me.
And, of course, we have many, many people, I’d say, the vast majority of our patients have gut issues in some shape or form, because that is just a natural consequence of this dysregulation. And I had a client who had long COVID, and had been floored by long COVID. He was a marathon runner. And so he was super fit. So we can’t say that his system wasn’t ready for COVID. He had a mild case of COVID, but then was just floored. He was on his sofa. He was lying on the sofa for a year, couldn’t do anything. And he came into our program. And within three months, he was back to running half marathons, at least, and cycling 100 kilometers day. And once again, he had a very dysregulated gut.
And most of our patients have this kind of IBS oscillation between constipation and diarrhea, not good formed stools. And they have tightness in the gut, they have the wrong absorption of nutrients, they feel more exhausted after a meal, all of those classic signs of hyper dysregulation. And a lot of people find that with brain retraining, they’ve done a lot of the other stuff, now they’re on a good diet, they’re eating the good supplements, they’ve done a lot of that work themselves. And this final missing piece of the jigsaw is so important for that. And you know, we know it in the average population, if someone suddenly has a surge of anxiety, has a panic, what do we know? We know the gut instantly gets dysregulated. But normally, they can then bring themselves to balance. But if the system doesn’t come back to balance, there will be then chronic dysregulation of all systems.
Lindsey:
Yeah, I know that obviously while a good portion of IBS is SIBO and it’s a distinct dysbiosis, that there’s a good portion of it as well that’s not explained by that. I think the recent numbers are something like 60% of IBS is SIBO. But the rest can certainly be something going on that’s dysregulating them.
Ashok Gupta:
Absolutely. And even with the SIBO, in functional medicine, we always go back to that question, don’t we? But what’s the cause? But what’s the cause?
Lindsey:
At the end of the day, there’s dysmotility.
Ashok Gupta:
Yeah, exactly. So, then we have to say, “What’s the cause of dysmotility?” And I’m sure, it’s multifactorial, so I’m not dogmatic in that sense. So, of course, it’s how many toxins are we exposed to? How much pollution is there? What foods are we eating? All of these different wedges in. And that key component of our emotional state of being is also a really big factor, if not the biggest factor into that bucket of the allostatic load. All of these different threats that our system is perceiving, which then once again can tighten up the gut, stop our gut from being able to absorb and process foods. All of these things are kind of interconnected.
And I think, you know, I always remember when my gut wasn’t great, many, many years ago. I used to notice that when I’m in a busy clinic, there’s lots of things going on, I have to be very careful about what I eat to make sure I exercise and meditate all those good things. But I go on holiday and I’m sitting on a beach for two weeks, right? I can eat all kinds of nonsense, all kinds of rubbish, that I wouldn’t dream of eating, have late nights, you know, and my gut is completely fine. I’m thinking, “What is going on there?” And that gives us a clue to it’s really the overall load. And what’s hopefully going to come out of this research is that for all practitioners everywhere, working at that holistic level, the mind, body, spirit, physiology, all of those different levels is super important.
Lindsey:
Yeah, I have had that exact same experience and I kept thinking, “Is it something?” because I often was at my parents house when I would have just really good periods where I had no struggles with my SIBO and I was eating a lot more gluten and dairy and, yeah, I took my pills to digest it and stuff, but I was like, “Is it the water there, because they don’t filter the water? Maybe I’m getting more calcium in their water? Like what is going on?” I just thought, “What could be happening? Because I’m eating less ‘healthy food’ for my body and doing better.” And I’m sure that stress question plays into it enormously. And people have this theory, “I go to Europe and I can eat all the pasta, and I can eat all the bread and there’s no problem at all. It must be the American wheat.” And maybe that’s part of it. But I’m sure the bigger part is you’re on vacation.
Ashok Gupta:
You’re on holiday, you’re on holiday! And we see it time and time again. And what it is, is often our patients think stress is a word that’s judgmental to them, or that they’ve caused the stress. And actually, it’s just about your nervous system regulation. So what happens is, we can actually be encountering quite mild stress, but if our system has a background of let’s say, trauma, for instance, or dysregulation, it can very easily become dysregulated, even by small amounts of stress, which then means that it has knock on effects on our digestion. And therefore, even if we think that we’re not stressed, it’s just our day-to-day, busy lifestyles can impact on the gut, and therefore, going into a deeper and deeper level of relaxation can really impact.
Lindsey:
So is what you do in the Gupta Program different by what your condition is? Or is just what’s in your head going to be different, based on your condition?
Ashok Gupta:
We do give people adaptations of how they use the program for different types of conditions, so neuroimmune versus sensitivity reactions versus pain. But essentially, it’s used in a very, very similar way. Because we believe it’s the same brain networks. I’m sure, Lindsey, you have this kind of observation where you’ll have a chronic fatigue patient, and they’re far more likely to have mold, and also have the SIBO. And so it’s a collection of symptoms, which just vary amongst patient to patient. I was asked, “Is it someone with mold who’s got fatigue? Or is it fatigue with mold? What is the core issue here?” And so in a similar way, these particular treatments are very similar because they’re getting to regulate our overall systems. And you might ask, “Well, why is our system dysregulated?” And of course, we’re not living according to our genetic inheritance.
So rewind 300-400 years ago, the vast majority of human civilization lived in small farming communities or small fishing villages, apart from those living in the city. But the vast majority lived in villages. We were outdoors, we were getting fresh air, we were eating organic food, we were exposed to sun and red light. We were living in community, we had much lower levels of stress actually in the past. And therefore, our guts were at a better absorption rate and better regulated. Fast forward to the modern world. We put ourselves in boxes for 90-95 percent of the day. We sit in front of a screen, in sedentary lifestyle. We expose ourselves to food toxins and pollution. We stress ourselves out by comparing ourselves to everyone else on the planet through social media. We spend most of our time looking at the screen and never resting our nervous system. We don’t sleep according to the rhythms of nature and the sun. And then we expect to be healthy. The way we’re living modern life is a recipe for our nervous system and immune system to be in threat survival mode, and so therefore causes exhaustion and fatigue and depression and anxiety. We’re breeding people for these conditions, unfortunately.
Lindsey:
Yeah. Can you tell me a little bit about the clinical studies you’ve done?
Ashok Gupta:
Sure. So the fibromyalgia one I already mentioned. We also just did a study on long COVID. And that was a published RCT, so randomized control trial. So we compared the Gupta Program to a wellness program, because we wanted to compare something which was equivalent, because people always say, “Well, of course, people are going to do better on the active treatment versus waiting list.” So we compared our programs to a wellness program that included sleep, diet, supplements, all the good stuff that holistic therapists may support people with, and we compared them over three months. So after three months, the Gupta Program was four times more effective at reducing fatigue and exhaustion in chronic fatigue/COVID patients and twice as effective at increasing levels of energy, which was an incredible result. I mean, whenever in a medical study do you get a 400% result compared to a control. So that was a published study. And that’s obviously gone on to breed more studies.
So we did more studies on long COVID. Some of those results have been really good as well. So that’s what we’re doing in that area. And of course, we had that recent clinical audit, which I mentioned earlier. And we found that across 14 different conditions, the Gupta Program was significant at increasing health and functional capacity. Anywhere between 60-70 percent improvement to 116% improvement in the case of Lyme disease. Lyme disease is another one that we have great results with. And just after three months 116% improvement health, which was fantastic. So those are some of the studies and we’ve got more studies in the pipeline, as well.
Lindsey:
Awesome. So I know I’ve got a link for the Gupta Program, that’s an affiliate link so that if folks are interested in trying it out, they can follow that link and support the podcast. Anything else you would like to mention or share?
Ashok Gupta:
Yes, so one of the clinical audits we did, chronic fatigue syndrome and fibro patients, showed that 92% of patients improved and two thirds of patients went on to make a full recovery. Now we define a full recovery is 80 to 100% of pre-illness levels. So that’s also a proper study, people can read on our website. So on our website, there’s a whole summary page of all the different research studies and a timeline, and people can read all the published studies there.
Lindsey:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being with us. This is a really interesting new direction, I think that will help a lot of my listeners and a lot of my clients.
Ashok Gupta:
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me on. And we’d also like to mention that we give a lot of free resources as well. So we’d love for people to come on to our app or the in the show notes and links you put. And even if you don’t take our program, at least watch some of the free videos and the free things on there. Because they really learn so much, people have healed just by watching our videos, the free ones, because they suddenly realized, “Ah, now I understand what’s going on in my body.” So I really encourage people to take the free trial. And with our program, until we get large-scale phase two and phase three trials, we’re one of the only programs that offers a one-year, money back guarantee, which for us really makes it low risk for people to try this type of approach, because it can seem very strange or unusual. But actually it’s quite logical in our minds.
Lindsey:
Great. Well, I’m sure people will be checking it out. Thank you so much.
Ashok Gupta:
Thank you so much.
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