Dr. Adam Gavine on Injury, Recovery, Athletes & Everyday Healing: Unlocking the Wasabi Method

Introduction and personal success story 0:00

Like you imagine the change that means for these people for the rest of their lives. Cause you know, when we're newborns, we adapt a hundred times faster than we do when we're older. So if we can get in there straight away and cause these physiological changes and that's permanent without surgery, without drugs, you know, that's really powerful in my mind. This is Doctor Talks, real talk from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most. Well, thanks for joining me today. And I'm excited to talk to you being the co-founder of Sabe method.

And you know, it's been fun getting to know you a little bit. It's been just the last couple of months. I actually ran into your method at a conference and I'd had this injury here that just wouldn't go away. Yeah. And I have access to a lot of tools. I personally know different kinesiology methods, rehab methods, chiropractic methods. I have access to friends at conferences and I have been getting worked on Buy a bunch of them. How long? For six months. And I'm a guy that likes to work out. I threw shop in college, so I know a lot of rehab for the wrist, the elbows, and just wasn't working.

So I bought your machine. And have it at my house, because I call it my little toy, because although it's a device that can be used in a medical practice, I was like, I want this for me, much less I still want to use it on my clients. And I'm using it every third day. And in a matter of two weeks, it reduced the pain and gave me back the ability to work out by about 80% in two weeks after six months. So thank you. You're welcome. So I'm excited to talk to you. What makes the Wasabi Method work? Just dive.

Yeah, well, there's a bunch of things that make it work, but the primary thing that helps most people is the blood flow. So not only does it create increased blood flow just from tapping the area, kind of like a jackhammer, which is mechanical blood flow. So if I just did that to you with any type of percussion, you would have increased temporary increased blood flow. But what we're doing is we're stimulating a lot of growth factors and enzymes and a lot of pathways. So one in particular is called VEGF.

And it helps your body create new blood vessels. So I'm actually telling your body, lay down new capillaries and veins and stuff in the area to help get more blood flow. So I tell people, think of it kind of like a plant. If that plant's not getting enough water, it starts to wither, right? And our muscles kind of do the same thing. If it's not getting adequate blood flow, it's not going to thrive. It's not going to grow. It's not going to work the way it should. So by changing the blood flow to the area, we're causing a real big change in the physiology.

How shockwave therapy works 2:51

And then all of a sudden it comes back to life, just like if you started watering a plant again. That makes sense. I guess we kind of skipped over the whole thing. What is it that I'm talking about that I'm doing with? What is the machine? How does it work? Yeah, so essentially, they're just acoustic sound waves. So originally, they discovered it during the Second World War. Soldiers and stuff were coming back with injuries to their lungs, and they couldn't figure out what was going on. But eventually, they figured out when explosions go off, they create these shock waves.

And shock waves, if they're large, they have lots of energy. They cause destruction. So they break tissues down. So that was causing damage to the lungs of these guys. And then they thought about how can we use this process in a medical setting. So they started using it to break down kidney stones, a process called lithotripsy. They started that in about 1980, the first one was done in Munich, Germany. And after a few years of doing that with patients, they started to notice some of these guys that had kidney stones for maybe only like six months, they were like saying that their back pain, which they'd had for like 10, 20 years was getting way better.

So then they started to notice it was having all these other physiological effects on other tissues. So if you decrease the energy of the shockwave, it will have a healing or reparative process instead of a destructive process with the kidney stones. So you've got to pick at what level, depending on what you want to do. If you want to break down kidney stones, you go really high. If you want to go to help with tissues like your arm, for instance, you use medium to low energy shock waves. OK, so what I've been doing at home is his device and little handle that you take and you can put on your arm and it makes clicking noise.

So there's your percussive wave comes out of the end of it goes into my arm. I can feel it. You know, I can feel it on the muscle. Pretty well, but there was this nagging little pain. If I shot right through the elbow, it would get right in the back, right on the head of the ulna on the inside. I'm like, there's no way I could have got to this. There's no muscle group I can work that I know of. There's just nothing I could do to get there. No matter how many different rehabs I did, I was being creative.

I was like trying to think of every possible way to move and that machine could hit it and I could just feel it would be inflamed the next day, just a little bit, not overly, but I could feel it was inflamed and then two days later I'm like, oh man, like more function. What got you into this? Why develop this technique? So I worked for one of the biggest shockwave therapy companies in the world for about 12 years. They had me as one of their lead instructors in Australia. They would send me around Southeast Asia to teach room full of doctors and stuff like that.

Two years ago, I went to China and they had me go to seven cities in seven days. Went to 14 hospitals and taught thousands of practitioners how to use the device. So I'm well versed in how the technology works and I've been using it for about 16 years now. So after that, I've been talking to Dave Asprey through coming to the biohacking conferences and whatnot. And I showed him the device that when I was working for that company and he was like, yeah, let's do something with this. And so we had some talks with this company.

They didn't want to go forward with us, unfortunately, but that was a blessing in disguise because we found another distributor who really wanted to go with us. And now essentially we have our own device called Wasabi Method. And we call it Wasabi Method because What this company that I worked for was lacking was the education.

From medical origins to the Wasabi Method 6:54

They, you know, they would give you like, when I bought my device, I had a salesperson show me how to use it for like half an hour. He didn't have any steeping and anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, anything. And he was like, this is how you turn it on. You just put it on spot and there you go. This is how you clean it. And that's how you turn it off. And I was like, okay. So I kind of had to learn all on my own. And then I did my own research and then becoming a lead instructor. I got properly taught how to use it.

Yeah. And the kind of rest is history. Now we're doing our own thing. And one of the big things that we do that these other companies won't do is we sell to non-medical practitioners. Well, non-medical people, laypeople. Because like the company I work for, they would not sell to, even though in the United States, the FDA deems it okay. It's a class one device. So anyone can use it. They said, we still won't sell to people that aren't medically trained. So you actually sell this to non-medically trained people to where they can use it on themselves, have it at home, which is honestly what I'm doing.

And it's been a game changer for myself. I went through your training. You make sure that you talk about any contraindications and, you know, funny story for all those listening. I was waiting. I don't even remember my three weeks to get the shipment in the night before I get an email. You have to fill out your your waiver, your training. And I'm like, ah, dang it, come on, you're gonna make me wait another day. Unfortunately, I just dove into training and got it done. But like, he's serious. He actually wants you to learn and understand how to use the machine.

We won't even sell you the machine. We won't give it to you until you've done the test, the safety test. so that you know all the contraindications so you can't we don't want you to hurt yourself that's first and foremost but we don't want you to hurt others as well so we give you all this education so that you know what what it does and what it doesn't do and and so that you can use it safely and effectively so i finally got my machine and you've heard my story but yeah i'm so excited about this because i've been using it on my dad's plant fasciitis yeah making a big change I mean he comes in hobbling yeah and walks back up the stairs yeah I'm like okay all right so I've seen some big changes there yeah what are you seeing because I know we talked about sports a lot yeah there are some stories some applications that you're seeing it being really effective for Oh, one that's amazing that I get with some runners, particularly older runners, is for bunions.

It is crazy effective for bunions. I had an old guy, 80 years old, came in a few weeks ago. And he, you know, he'd been suffering with it for years. And he was like, there's no way. He's like, there's no way this will help me. And I'm like, okay, let's give it a go. So I've been treating his son for years. And the only reason he basically came to see me was because his son told him, dad, do this, it'll help you. So I worked on his big toe and it was quite painful for him. And then he comes back like two weeks later and he's like, it's gone.

He's like, I have no pain. He's like, I didn't believe you. And he's like, I can walk without pain now. So things like that, it's amazing because like one treatment. You know, this guy hadn't seen physios, had rubbed every cream there was, taken popping pills. You know, and so the beauty of it is it, like you said, a lot of the time it's instantaneous. And you don't have to go back for treatment after treatment after treatment, right? Like if he's taking pills, he always has to take pills. Never ending, right?

Whereas this is like, okay, we essentially resolve the problem. Because we pinpoint the inflammation in the joint, and we kind of stop that from that cycle it gets stuck in. So let's talk about that a little bit. You know, you mentioned to me, one of the things that was happening was it was operating in the realm of substance P, a pain substance. You've mentioned it's decreasing inflammation, it's bringing blood flow. Yes. I've heard lay people that they just call it a stem cell machine because it can generate what feels like a response like stem cell injection.

It actually does cause proliferation of stem cells. So if it's on a bunion or if it's in my elbow hitting that spot, what is the process of physiology that's going through? We're bringing blood flow. What else? So another big one is, so it stimulates the proliferation of ENOS and NNOS. So endothelial nitric oxide synthase.

Training, safety, and home use 11:48

So that causes, vasodilation. So again, we're having a big effect on blood. That's why I was saying so much. A lot of it's about blood flow. Just getting that blood flow into that area. And then N-NOS is neuronal nitric oxide synthase. So again, it's stimulating blood flow to those areas. You get another process that's called neurogenesis, which I'm sure you're aware of. But for those who don't know, neurogenesis is basically in the peripheral nervous system, we can cause nerves to grow and new nerves to develop in an area.

So if you have if you have an area that's been damaged at a neurological level, we can actually help with that. So people with like diabetes that have have diabetic neuropathy, we can actually help with things like that. That's amazing. A lot of people come in with neuropathy post injury post surgery post not doing something about the problem they've had for far too long. I get some of those people that have come in. Is there any application with this technology for for different other things like growth, like skin issues, are you using it for skin issues?

Yes, you can. One of the really cool ones that it helps with is you can actually treat wounds. You can do wound healing, you can treat burns, so people that have third degree burns, it can help with that because it stimulates collagen. So your skin will make more collagen when we use the device on that area. And again, like we were saying before, it helps with the pain. The process there is it stimulates the area to release, the nerves release what's called substance P. which causes pain, but your nerves only have a certain amount of it.

And once I've, basically if once I've stimulated an area, it releases all the substance P, it gives you a local analgesic effect. Kind of like when you eat something really spicy, your mouth kind of burns and then it goes numb. So that's what we call neurogenic inflammation. So one of the main pathways it works on is neurogenic inflammation, which is a different pathway than most applications for other devices do. Most of the other devices work on like the COX-2 pathway. So like lasers and stuff like that, they work on the COX-2 pathway.

So another really cool thing about the device is you can use it synergistically with like a laser. So if someone, say I'm working, I had a patient, she couldn't tolerate the shockwave on her plantar fascia, even at the lowest setting. she was still like, this is killing me. So I use my laser on it and about five, you gotta wait about five minutes for that Cox two pathway to kick in. And then I could use the shockwave on her and she could tolerate. So you're getting these cool synergies as well. Stacking technology, stacking.

Yeah, I call it biohacking, stacking. Dave would approve, I'm sure. Yeah, he likes that. The ultimate stacker there. You were telling me when we were talking in training that you had some guys that were professional athletes that had people come in with high ankle sprains. Yes. And they kind of were starting to change the game on how the device is being used. Because originally, treatment plans like do it once a week, allow the body to heal. And then after that, you go back and you do it the next week, allow the body to heal.

And you're getting some of that that neurogenesis, you're getting some of the blood flow development, the angiogenesis.

Applications for plantar fasciitis and bunions 15:30

But yeah. You were saying they're doing it every single day to these pro athletes because they're getting paid to be on the field a day. Time is money, yep. And they don't have weeks and weeks and weeks to wait. So what are you seeing with new development of treatment plans? Well, we still haven't got a lot of clinical evidence for this. So this is a lot of it's anecdotal, but one of the guys that I worked with that worked with one of the Bundesliga football clubs in Germany, that's the story I was telling you.

And some of these guys had, it was just a normal ankle sprain, not the high ankle sprain, but normally it would take like, how long would you say an athlete would be out? You had an athlete that had just done a grade two ankle sprain? I could see him for four to six weeks pretty easily. They had these guys back playing in two weeks, which is more than half the time. A guy was going to take six weeks. You imagine if you were the owner of a team and I told you I could get your players back on the field in two weeks instead of four to six, how happy would you be about that?

That's a lot of money made back. Yeah, exactly, because you got to pay these guys regardless, right? And not only that, but if they're one of your key players, that can make the difference between you making the playoffs, things like that, winning one of these trophies or tournaments or whatever. So it's a big deal. It's a massive deal, especially just thinking through The number of injuries that are occurring today just seems like they are. Yeah, it's increasing skyrocketing and they say it's because of bigger, faster, stronger athlete and I'm going.

Yeah, I think that's a component, but I also think there's. like synthetic, you know, grass and stuff like that. Like I saw one Super Bowl a couple of years ago and they were on synthetic grass and you saw like three guys in the game blew out their knees. Like in one game. Like that's ridiculous. And they're all like, yeah, they knew it was because of the synthetic grass. You know, another piece that I'd be curious to take your opinion on. A really great friend of mine, Alan Linsley, has been doing a deep dive for about four years on research and he's just always in the research and the chemistry and he's finding that glyphosate, which is a chemical that can get into all of our food supply, is replacing glycine and collagen Which is not good, which is leading to a lack of elasticity and the tissues Yeah, so now we've got these bigger faster stronger athletes that are asked to do more move these big bodies ram into each other whatever sport you're looking at whatever their asks are and Now you have a lack of elasticity in the ligaments.

So they're weakening Yeah, and now we're seeing a massive increase in blowing out because his theory is and I do think bigger faster stronger the part I agree with you. Yes But we're seeing in high school athletes where he's just like, sure, there are some bigger, faster ones, but there's also plenty of that are just not. And they're getting non-contact injuries on a football field off, running down the field below an ACL, running down a field below an Achilles. And he's like, these are not that big or fast or strong kids.

And that's happening to them. So that's where he went down his rabbit hole. And just with my experience, He's developing a cream that is a topical cream because he says that it won't work orally. Any of the stuff that's taking away glyphosate because there's not blood flow to joints. Because you're not getting it into the joint properly. And I'm sitting here thinking to myself, what if I took and did wasabi, which is gonna bring blood flow, not necessarily in a joint per se, it's gonna decrease inflammation, it's gonna bring it to the muscles, get it to the tendon more, but maybe not, because you just can't get inside of the synovial joint as easily in some cases.

Well, you can still treat the joint itself. It's like the bun, you know, I was talking about earlier.

Pain relief, inflammation, and tissue repair 19:30

Adding that but then removing the glyphosate and bringing back the glycine through some copper molecules now I'm just getting all excited because I mean I've had my fair share of injuries. Yeah, and plenty of people coming in to me, but You know are is there things that you can do with wasabi that you think are? advantageous to do alongside of it nutrient-wise, because if I'm bringing more blood flow to a joint, I need to be able to feed that the proper things. Yeah, it's got to have the right building blocks to repair it, right?

Yeah, so what are you doing there, people? Um, like what one I like to do is, is just make sure people are getting adequate protein or amino acids just to help, especially if it's a muscle, you know, um, but just, just anything, it just gives you the, the, the right building blocks to, to help repair. So that's, that's one thing I do, but often it's, it's just identifying what's going on for that person. You know, it's. As you know, being a practitioner, I try, I always try and make it bespoke for the person.

I go, okay, if, if you're not sleeping well, you know, we all know that's when your body repairs and heals things the best. So if you're not sleeping well, you know, I can do all these wonderful treatments on you, but it's still not going to get you there kind of thing. If you're not, if we don't work on your sleep. So things like that, I'll work on people's sleep, um, hydration, you know, just, you know, getting out in nature. things like that it's like get out of the crappy lights inside you know breathe some fresh air you know get your bare feet on the ground real simple things actually the cool thing about doing stuff like that is it's free too you know and same with the sleep it's like okay don't look at your iPhone just before bed you know don't eat an hour before bed, things like that will just help people get to, it's all about recovery in my mind.

We don't focus on recovery enough. And again, with these professional athletes, like if I was working with a professional team, I actually have a friend who works with a professional basketball team. And we were talking about some of this stuff and she's like, yeah, some of these guys, they just bugger off after practice. And I'm just like, Like if they were, if I ran the team, I'd be like, that doesn't, that's not on. You do all these things to recover because you only, you can only train as much as you're prepared to recover from.

Cause otherwise it's not, you're not getting the effect. I've worked with chronic illness clients for a long period of time and it's a whole different population, but the basics are the same. You have to have the proper amount of energy, recovery. You've got to be able to clear the amount of waste that your body produces so that you can move forward. And as I've been delving into the Wasabi method and the technology, I'm thinking to myself, if I'm working with these chronic clients and they have babesia and infections that have ate away at joints, I don't necessarily want to go mobilizing those infections in the moment that I'm working with them while they still have an active infection.

However, afterward, bringing blood flow to these joints, is there a time where you would say just as a biohack, just go and work over each joint Once a week just to bring health to joints or you do oh yeah yeah and that's and that's why we say it like if you read the back of my shirt was it say whole body tissue upgrade right so it is essentially because a lot of these areas if we don't move them in specific ways they don't get the blood flow. And not only that, if we talk about neurology, we got a 3D map of our entire body and our brain.

That map starts to become a little bit blurred. So all of a sudden, you can't ever your foot because you haven't been doing that movement. And that might have been because you sprained your ankle like four years ago or something like that.

Athletic recovery and injury prevention 23:30

And your brain's just, so it's not getting that input. So that part of the brain just doesn't work very well anymore. Right? So it's working on all these processes, getting them back online. And a lot of people are just aren't aware. So when I work on people, I'm not just, if you come in with a knee problem, I check the whole lower limb. I'm making sure everything's working properly. Like I had a lady in the other day, she didn't know her glutes were inhibited. And then I showed her. I'm like, look, you have no strength.

On the other side, she had lots of strength. And I'm like, that's going to affect. And she came in with a really sore knee. And there was nothing wrong with her knee. It was a little bit hypermobile in terms of rotation. But it was her hip and her ankle that were the problem. So I'm curious now with Wasabi, I mean, obviously, yes, you need to make sure the full spectrum is looked at. I'm always talking about, you can't just look at lab work and its basics. You have to deep dive it, you have to know that there's levels of this is really bad, this is suboptimal, this is optimal.

So doing that for the body, but I'm not curious, you said, if you can't move your wrist in and out, or if you can't do something because you haven't been doing it because there's an injury, Is wasabi something that can bring appropriate sets of stimulation to any part of the body that maybe you can't get on your own? So people even say like a stroke victim. Yeah. Well, we have clinical trials on stroke victims. It's quite effective for that. So spasticity specifically. And they've done some amazing, cool stuff in China where they worked with um, kids with cerebral palsy, like infants, like newborns, um, changing, like getting rid of spasticity in these, in these kids.

Like you imagine the change that means for these people for the rest of their lives. Cause you know, when, when we're newborns, we adapt 100 times faster than we do when we're older. So if we can get in there straight away and cause these physiological changes, and that's permanent, without surgery, without drugs, that's really powerful in my mind. So just things like that, you can increase the blood flow for a lot of these people, even older people. So it doesn't matter how old you are, it's still gonna have all these really amazing physiological changes on people.

My grandma thinks she's 96 years old and I was doing it to her shoulder the other day. She couldn't sleep on anymore after she separated it from near fall. But are they doing any research with, I'm just thinking through all the things that I work with, MS and numbness and tingling. I haven't seen anything specific on that condition, but they are adding new indications all the time because people are trying out these new things.

Whole-body effects and neurological applications 26:30

Yeah, things like Parkinson's and stuff like that to help with the tremors and all that. They're actually doing ones with the focus device where they're doing that on the actual brain and finding it has physiological changes on the brain flow, like blood flow. So then all of a sudden, if you know exactly where to go, you can find the limbic system and stimulate the, what is it, the substantia nigra, where the dopamine is made for Parkinson's. All of a sudden, you don't have to take your dopamine drug anymore, because we're just going to stimulate endogenous, which is way better, as we all know, than taking anything.

Absolutely. You're just telling the body, hey, go make some more of this. Turn that factory back on. That's pretty incredible. Yeah. Well, I'm loving this because as a former athlete, maybe you call me a current athlete, but not for any purpose, just for fun. Well, we're all athletes. That's what I tell patients. I think taking the view of an athlete, I tell that to patients like, pretend you're an athlete, we're going to get you back in the game as soon as we can. So a lot of them like that because they're like, oh, I got to do my exercise.

I got to get back in the game kind of thing rather than, yeah, yeah. Because if you work with a sports team, time is money again. Like we said, every game you miss is a missed opportunity. Life, the same thing applies. So to all the people you're telling it to, if you aren't moving, honestly, you're slowly dying. That's sadly to say. But if you're not able to move, I mean, what is one of the most common risks that they teach you going through school for elderly? It's falling, breaking a hip pulse.

And it's because of a lack of the ability to move your ankle. Yep. They truly come down to finding. So keeping that ankle mobility and strength is key for elderly. Yeah. And if this device can help just keep people proprioceptively moving, whether they've had a stroke or a lack of movement or just too much time sitting on a couch. Yeah. Well, the other cool thing too, it helps with bone density. So it causes a proliferation of osteoblasts and it actually inhibits osteoclasts. So you can actually have a systemic effect.

So if I just worked on your femur, you're still going to get a systemic effect on your osteoblastic and osteoclastic activity. Have they done osteoporosis trials now at this point? Yep, they have. So I did a podcast a few months ago about it. So we'll be having just this at your new local shop that needs to pop up for all the people with osteoporosis. Come in, we'll just treat now. I'm curious, knowing that when we talked, you want to find that three square inch area, that would take a lot of time to cover whole femur, wouldn't it?

Well, it doesn't really matter. You just gotta pick a bone. It doesn't matter. You could do your radius, you could do your ulna, you could do your humerus. It doesn't really matter. You're just telling the body, hey, It's a signal. I always tell people with physiology, it's always, we're just putting a signal in. So if I tell your, your bone here, okay, make more bone, make more bone. Okay. It doesn't just happen in your elbow where I'm touching, just like if you work out, you don't just get growth hormone in your biceps when you do bicep curls, right?

It's a systemic effect. Ah. So if I just work on this femur, the whole body is going to go, I need to make my bones denser as a whole. Yeah, because it inhibits osteoclastic activity, which is for those at home, it's osteoclasts break down bone and osteoblasts make new bone. So if I inhibit how fast bone is broken down, you're going to have greater bone density. That might be one of the coolest things you said today, and that's not even a problem that I currently have. I definitely never do.

Closing thoughts on recovery and health 30:30

Well, a lot of people do. A lot of people are, especially with osteoporosis, usually the first sign of osteoporosis is a fracture, right? That's the first sign or symptom that people have. So it's often too late when they get that. Well, this has been really cool information. I'm super excited about this technology. I've been looking at potentially buying it for quite some time and I really fell in love with some of the work that you were doing, which is why I went and got yours. And I had some extra motivation over here in this forum.

Yeah, Vane's a good motivator. Yeah. So thank you so much for coming in. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today's episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health. Each day is a new opportunity to make choices that empower your well-being. For more insights and strategies, subscribe to our podcast and visit our website, www.doctortalks.com. Stay connected, stay healthy, and join us next time on Doctor Talks, real talks from real doctors on the issues that matter to you most.