SPEAKER_02 0:00

Last weekend, the New York Times published an aesthetically beautiful, interactive article titled Inside the Interstitium, the Human Body's Hidden Pathways. The New York Times weekend newsletter said this about the piece. It's all connected. We've long known about two systems in the human body that circulate fluids. A physician in Italy discovered the first one, the lymphatic system, which removes excess fluid from tissues in 1622. Six years later, an English doctor described the second, the cardiovascular system, which pumps blood through our arteries, veins, and capillaries. It was a great decade for science. Now, scientists think they may have come across a third. In 2021, after examining the skin of people with tattoos, researchers saw in their biopsies that ink particles had traveled deeper into the body than they had expected, through the skin into an interstitial space beneath it, and from that space into the fascia, the connective material below. The discovery, a hidden pathway between two layers of tissue not known to connect in this way, was a surprise. It has far reaching implications for our understanding of the human body and for our health. Because that interstitial space doesn't just exist between the skin and the fascia, researchers discovered. There are spaces like it throughout the body, forming pathways between organs and allowing fluids, cells, and molecules to move between them before re-entering the lymphatic and cardiovascular systems. Scientists call this large interconnected network the interstitium. Featured in the article and joining me to discuss it in depth is Dr. Neil Fees. He explains what the interstitium is, why it is important, how it works, and how this marks the beginning of many exciting possibilities. He's performed groundbreaking research on the interstitium with a landmark study published in the renowned academic journal Nature in 2018. Dr. This explains how our understanding of the interstitium changes the way we view the human body and our health, because, as the New York Times says, the interstitial space doesn't just exist between the skin and the fascia. There are spaces like it throughout the body, forming pathways between organs and allowing fluids, cells, and molecules to move between them before re-entering the lymphatic and cardiovascular systems. With this discovery, there are promising possibilities in how the interstitium might inform the treatment of diabetes, gut health, and even cancer, among other disease states. Interestingly, the interstitium also begins to align with and scientifically substantiate practices such as yoga, acupuncture, massage, and energy work, bridging the gap between Eastern and Western medicine. As it turns out, the interstitium is also found in other forms of life, like tiny freshwater invertebrates and plants. Perhaps living beings are all more alike and interconnected than we once realized. I'm Jake Panasevich, and this is the Yoga with Jake podcast. Neil, it's a real honor to get to speak with you today.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

And can you tell us who you are and and what your I know that can be complicated, but Yeah, yeah. That's why I you know I Gemini with Virgo rising. Um I I like to say I don't believe in astrology, but it believes in me. I'm just I'm sort of all over the map and very intense about everything. Um so for most of my adult life, I've been a practicing MD. Uh my sub-specialty is pathology. So the kind of person who um if you get a biopsy of something or if you get uh an organ taken out, I'm the person that who examines it, makes slides, looks at it under the microscope, and makes diagnoses, cancer, not cancer. Um liver pathology was my subspecialty within that. And that had me working with liver transplant teams for most of the last 38 years. Um and just about everything I've done scientifically, um is that true? Yeah, in some way, uh ties back to observations I made in humans sitting at the microscope looking at real-time clinical specimens. Um I retired from clinical work a year ago. Um I was in New York at NYU Grossman School of Medicine for the last eight years. I've been in New York for my practice since medical school and um and now live in Lisbon. Um my husband and I moved here a year ago last week, and um and it lets me focus on writing and uh continuing some of the uh getting data out that I have on what one of the things we're gonna talk about for sure is the interstitium. I've been sitting on a lot of data for uh a few years that I haven't had time to write up into research papers, but also doing things like this, just uh talking more generally and writing things for non-medical audiences. So that's what I'm doing now.

SPEAKER_02 5:56

Okay. Well, that's an interesting transition. Why why make that move? Or was it for personal quality of life reasons, or was it for your general interests in the field or all of the above?

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Politics. Yeah, of course. Basically. Um my uh I have uh I was born in America, but I have a German passport because my dad uh left Germany in 1939 on something called the kindertransport. We're Jewish. Germany wasn't a good place to be back then. And um and this year we felt like, okay, it's time to go to Europe. Um so we did.

unknown 6:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:38

Beautiful. Portugal, Lisbon, because the weather's great.

SPEAKER_02 6:43

Yeah, we have a very nice life here. Yeah, you mean you don't miss the New York winters already?

SPEAKER_00 6:49

Not in the slightest. Oh my god, I was so enjoying looking at like I imagining the needle-like ice crystals blowing into people's faces as we were sitting here in a mild spring rain. You know, it was just like, yeah, no, not not a problem. It was hard not to gloat, but okay.

SPEAKER_02 7:10

Yeah, that's great. I um, you know, like a lot of my uh counterparts, I was very excited to see this aesthetically beautiful um article that was put out by the New York Times magazine weekend edition this past weekend, I believe already, um, titled Inside the Interstitium, the Human Body's Hidden Pathways, where you are featured. And so what is this article all about? And if we start a why don't we start with that?

SPEAKER_00 7:44

Okay, sure. And yeah, it is beautifully illustrated. I I was really kind of stunned by it.

SPEAKER_02 7:50

And interactive, too, kind of like with a beautiful uh even visual, like there's a video almost like a video that goes on with the article. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:59

It's extraordinary movement. It's like a big bucket. If I had to wait 25 years to get into the New York Times for something, this treatment sort of makes it worthwhile. Um the um so the interstitium is uh something my colleagues and I um greatly redefined back in 2018. At the time, uh it sort of went viral for a while that a new human organ had been discovered. And we didn't actually call it a new organ, but in the press release uh from NYU, the press guy said, Well, this is a really big structure. Is it like an organ? And I said, well, it depends on your definition of an organ. And uh depending on how you define it, yeah, it could be an organ. And suddenly new human organ discovered, the 80th human organ, and it sort of went around the world because there was no other science news that week, actually. Stephen Hawking had died two weeks before, and they'd had two weeks of quantum physics and cosmology and the nature of time and uh and ALS. And uh and then suddenly there was this gap, and our paper came in, and it really shocked us. Um three times that week, taxi drivers uh looked in the rearview mirror and uh separately uh and said to me, Hey, you're that new organ guy, aren't you? So that was that was fun. Um but then the real work of figuring out what it was that we were describing in greater detail uh lay before us. And and the Times article sort of brings us forward from that. Basically, uh interstitial spaces have been known for a long time, and they've been called interstitian. Um, but they were always thought to be separate little pockets, tiny microscopic pockets scattered around the body. The smallest um are between some cells, so we're talking, you know, a thousandth of a millimeter thin. Um and between muscle cells in the body, between fat cells, between squamous cells, the cells lining your skin, um, there are these tiny little spaces. And then around all the capillaries, the tiniest blood vessels. Uh so blood comes in through your arteries, goes into the capillaries, comes out through the veins. Um, it's at the capillaries where nutrients coming into the tissue go into the tissue. And waste products like carbon dioxide or lactic acid go out from the cells of that tissue and exit out the venous flow. There's a tiny little space around those capillaries across which the nutrients and the waste products pass between the tissue and the capillary. And that's the most commonly uh and most well-studied form of interstitium. And the way people thought of it is pretty much that it's this space around each capillary. So it wasn't this big structure, um, it's very microscopic, uh, you know, maybe mostly a hundredth of a millimeter thick. So really, you know, tiny, uh not visible with the naked eye. Um a group of my colleagues at that point, I was actually at Beth Israel Medical Center, also in Manhattan. Um, they were endoscopists, and so the the guys who put a scope, you know, to look at your esophagus stomach, you know, check out your if you've got ulcers, etc. They had a new kind of scope that if you it had a little tiny fluorescent microscope at its tip. And so it allowed them to look at living tissue as though it was under the microscope without having to take a biopsy. And so, you know, basically the goal was let's replace the pathologist and bill for what they do, and we'll do it ourselves. Um, it's not going to be that good. But um, they still need us. But they would inject uh uh fluorescent dye in a vein, and within seconds it disperses throughout the body in all fluid compartments. And in most places in the esophagus and the stomach, wherever they looked, they saw pretty much what we see under the microscope with our regular slides, just lit differently, basically. But when they went into the bile duct, um, which is the little tube that drains bile out of the liver, they saw a different kind of structure that they didn't recognize from their histology courses in medical school, which is the last time they worried about what things look at look like microscopically. So they came to me and said, we're looking in the bile duct, you're a liver guy. What are these big, open, bright, fluid-filled spaces we're seeing in the wall? And I said, I don't know. They're not they're not supposed to be there. And um, so this was a puzzle. How is it that I'm looking at the microscope and I see the wall of the bile duct? It's these densely layered bundles of collagen, really stiff connective tissue. Um, there's occasionally little cracks in it because collagen is so stiff, when you cut it very thin to make a slide, it sometimes cracks. And I've known that for decades and taught it to people. But there are no big open empty spaces filled with fluid like they were seeing with their scope. Eventually we figured out a way to sort of close the gap between their living tissue microscopy and our essentially dead tissue microscopy. And we all know who do this kind of stuff that when you take tissue out of the body, fluid drains out of it, and then you process it to make it stiff enough to make slides with things like formaldehyde, um, and that makes it and that dries it out even more. So the process we're removing all the water from the tissue. And what we didn't know is that in the living tissue, there are these big fluid-filled spaces separated by these thick bundles of collagen. And when in the living tissue, that's what you see. But when you take it out and the fluid drains out, the spaces collapse, the collagen bundles stack on each other, and you get this dense wall. So the living tissue turns out not to be what we expected. And it turns out that those little cracks that we thought were artifact are the remnants of the giant spaces. They've been there all along. We just dismiss them. So it's a bile duct. Who really cares about the bile duct? I do. Um, people made jokes about how much I like bile ducts, but still, it's just a bile duct. So it's a spongy wall instead of a thick wall. But I was also doing general diagnostic pathology. So I would get every kind of specimen, stomachs, colons, um, and I would get them over the next few days, couple of weeks, and I noticed that on the wall of the bowel resections we would get, um, there was the same layer of collagen and the same cracks. So, oh, is this maybe not just a bile duct thing? But I didn't know how to get at that question. And then um uh a week goes by and I got a mastectropy specimen. A woman had breast cancer and had the breast removed, and it always comes with a bit of skin, and we always sample every bit of tissue. And so I had a section of skin and I put it under the microscope, just looking to make sure there's no cancer there and there wasn't. But they're the same cracks in the dermis, the second layer down from the surface of the skin. And so I went back to the guys and I said, Hey, if you put your scope on my skin, would you see the spaces? And they said, Well, we don't put it on skin, it's an endoscope. It goes inside people, it doesn't go on people. And I said, Well, why limit ourselves? So they took me to the lab, um, gave me the fluorescene injection, the fluorescent dye, and looked at my skin, and sure enough, in the living tissue of the skin, there are the spaces. So it's no longer just bile duct, it's no longer just a GI tract, gastrointestinal tract, it's the skin too. And we started to realize it's everywhere in the body you see collagen. Um, so some people would call that the connective tissue, some people will use the the term fascia most generally, and a lot of people are into fascia, not an unreasonable term for all these layers. And so what we showed in that 2018 paper is wherever you have collagen in the body, thick collagen, you have this really large interstitial compartment. So there's an unrecognized interstitium beyond what people had seen. There were snarky comments in, you know, online where like, we've been reading about the interstitium for decades. This is not new, but you haven't been reading about this piece. What then developed over time, Becky Wells is my main collaborator in this at the University of Pennsylvania. We figured out that these spaces are not empty as they appear on the slide. They're actually filled with stuff. And the main thing they're filled with is something called hyaluronic acid. Um, the women who are listening to your podcast all know what that is, and I don't have to explain it because it's in every cosmetic, and the cosmetics industry is pushing it because if you put it on your skin, it'll get rid of your wrinkles. It doesn't because it doesn't move through the skin. So it doesn't work. But they all know it. Guys have no idea what it is.

SPEAKER_03 17:23

Yeah, I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 17:23

Um so the reason they pitch it at wrinkles is that these spaces in the skin are filled with hyaluronic acid, and as we age, it diminishes the amount of hyaluronic acid. And one of its special features, this molecule, is it links up and creates this microscopic sponge that holds water. And so with less hyaluronic acid, you have less water in your dermis underneath the surface of your skin, and you get wrinkles. Um it turns out that I can stain that hyaluronic acid in tissue slides. So I can it no longer looks like empty spaces, I can actually see the interstitium. And when we did this, it turns out it's way larger and and um more expansive and more dispersed than we thought. And it's continuous throughout the entire body. So you have a fluid-filled compartment that has very specific properties, it's not just goo. Um and there isn't a part of the body that that's excluded from it. Um so we started to publish about how these are continuous structures. And to give you an idea of the size, it's about 20% of the fluid volume of the body, um, and that's about four and a half times the size of the cardiovascular system. So take your blood, which we think of as being a lot of fluid moving around, now quadruple or quintuple it, and that's the volume of fluid in your interstitium, and that's how complex the interstitium is. And you can actually see it with the naked eye if you're if you you know what you're looking at. Um, because it's large enough. So um there are a lot of implications to this. Uh molecules travel through it, uh cells can travel through it, normal cells, inflammatory cells can travel through it. There are resident cells that just hang out there, macrophages, sort of the the garbage trucks of the body. This is one of the places they live normally. Um there are cells lining it that probably produce the collagen and produce the hyaluronic acid. When you have wound healing and need a scar formed, it's these cells probably that are participating in wound healing, which people hadn't described. Um and in disease, cancer moves through it. It turns out to be a major pathway of cancer spread that we didn't know about. Um and infections can spread through it. People who have flesh-eating disease, um, necrotizing fasciitis, it always gets in the news. Um, how does a skin bacterium spread through the arm so quickly that you need to amputate it? And if you're not quick enough, it can spread through the body because it's going through the interstitium. And it's just got this open highway to get anywhere it needs. And the major thing about it, um, from a Western medicine point of view is that it's a communication network at all scales. So the blood allows communication through fluids, proteins, molecules of all sorts, and blood cells, red blood cells, white blood cells, et cetera. Um, nerves allow communication electromagnetically, um, but nothing that we've known covers all scales, whereas the interstitium, it actually probably produces its own electricity, both electrical fluid flowing through the hyaluronic acid in the spaces and the collagen bundles themselves, when they move, we know produce low levels of electricity. We're trying to figure out just how much. And so that this whole structure body-wide is producing electricity independent of the nervous system. Um small molecules can go through it, like sugars. So when you have a continuous glucose monitor in your skin, the needle is going into the interstitium of the dermis. That's where it's measuring the glucose. Um and cells go through it, as I said, but also uh large-scale mechanical forces are transmitted through the body. So this network sort of covers every way the body can talk to itself, from between organs, between tissues, from one end to the other. And that obviously then starts to raise questions about things where there's communication networks that Western medicine hasn't recognized, like what's going on in acupuncture, and acupuncture meridians, or systems of healing that are based on the idea of these internal channels for which we have no anatomical. Correlates. And so Western tradition says, well, we open up the body and we don't see these channels you're talking about, they don't exist. Oh, we we dissect down in an arm and we don't see a meridian, uh, anything that corresponds. It's not a nerve, it's not a vein, it's not an artery, it's not a lymphatic, so it's not there. Well, they weren't looking for the interstitium, which is hard to look at because if you cut into it, the fluid drains out and it collapses. So some researchers um quoted in in the uh the Times piece who are have been studying acupuncture for a long time, their work converged on our work. And the preliminary studies show that when you um inject, again, a fluorescent dye into an acupint, where it goes in the arm is downward through the skin, into the fascia, and travels through the fascia in an interstitial channel and up to the next point. And so we seem to be revealing anatomy that correlates with some of the expected things you see in acupuncture. And I could talk about qi and prana and Tibetan pulse diagnosis, and there are all sorts of ways in which this crosses over into other fields. Osteopaths are always talking about fluid in the body, and allopathic Western MDs are always going, there's no fluid. I had a uh a dear friend and yoga teacher who was also a Rolfer, and um, I have connective tissue issues. My collagen's not so good. And um, so she helped me a lot, and she would tell me, well, I'm moving fluid through these spaces, and I'm like, there are no spaces and there is no fluid. I can show you on a microscope slide, and she said, but I can feel it. And I said, I don't believe it's there, but whatever you're doing works. And then there's actually in that first paper a picture of musculoskeletal fascia with the spaces for her, because she was right. I just looked, was staring at them, but didn't see them. So that's what this is about.

SPEAKER_02 24:11

Wow, that's it's a lot. Yeah, there's a lot, and it's um it's fascinating. It sounds like a lot more this could open up a whole nother avenue to start developing more research on this premise, the and and its implications and how it could help us in our overall health and our in our bodies. And for sure.

SPEAKER_00 24:37

I mean, people ask me, so how does this affect things? Well, every single normal physiological and anatomic thing about the human body that we know, we know what we know, excluding the involvement of the interstitium. So we're missing things. Whatever you want to look at, whatever topic you choose, microscopically and at the larger scale in the human body, we've left out this piece. So there are things to find. And in terms of diseases, we've left out this piece. So there really isn't anything it doesn't affect potentially. Uh there are um there are some textbooks that are starting to include it, so we start being talked about in medical school. One team that I work with that Becky keeps an eye on me with, but from Fascia World, um, as I like to call it. So the the leading fascia experts in the world, like Carlos Stecko, Robert Schleip, um Antonio Stecko, um, top-tier anatomists Rebecca Pratt and Lori Nemitz, and I have and Alain Langevin, who's also one of the acupuncture researchers in the Times piece, and until recently was director of uh the NIH for complimentary medicine. So we're talking very high-level people. And we have for about two and a half years, we just had a monthly conversation about what is this? What is fascia, what's the interstitium? Is it an organ? How do you define organs? And we went back to very first principles of early anatomy and just batted it around on the phone without any much of a goal. But what eventually we came to is it's not an organ, it's an organ system, which is higher level, like the cardiovascular system, like the nervous system. There's never been a new, there are new organs every few years, small or big. There's never been a new system. So he published a paper saying that the fascia and its interstitium, which are the spaces we identified, together as they interweave, should be considered an organ system. And kind of to our surprise, there's been a lot more respect for this idea than we thought. So it may be a time that's ripe for these things to come together. So we're having serious conversations at the international academic level of what kind of system, organ system would it be? Is it an anatomic organ system? Is it a physiologic system? But they're all now talking about it as a system. So that's pretty cool and pretty quick. Um So I don't think there's anything kind of left out. Um and I don't know, you know, if I knew where it was gonna go, um, I'd be patenting all sorts of really great ideas. It's gonna be for other people to figure out how to use this, you know.

SPEAKER_02 27:41

It's it so you're uh is your sense that we are um so this is an emerging field. And is there enough legs to really get somewhere with this like quickly or start research on this?

SPEAKER_00 27:57

Aaron Ross Powell Well, nothing happens quickly. Right. In in in medical terms. Uh it's amazing that we've gone from talking about potentially a new organ eight years ago to now serious discussions of a new organ system. Um, we already are exploiting it for therapeutic and diagnostic purposes all over the place. We just didn't frame it necessarily that way. So as I said, you know, osteopaths, um, they will approach your body and interact with your body, and they talk about fluid tides in the body. And they've always, by you know, traditional Western-trained docs like me, that's sort of been dismissed because what are you talking about? But they've been helping people for 70, 80 years with therapeutic interventions based on this idea. Um, I was in China um because of my work in liver disease. And liver disease is big in China because of hepatitis B and hepatitis C being endemic. And so I've gone there often to give talks. And one of them was after this first paper came out. And one of the senior Chinese docs stood up and asked me, so how have people been responding to this? And I said, well, generally pretty good, because once you see it, you it's not an experiment that you can argue, did it happen or not. It's a thing. You can look at it. So people are accepting of it, but there was a lot of anger, osteopaths, fascia world, because they were saying, well, we've known about this for 70 or 80 years. This isn't new. And he laughed and said, yes, and we've known about it for 4,000. Um there's a lot of research starting, research papers, concept papers coming out of China now, some in Western very high-level Western journals talking about the correlates of how what they've been talking about in metaphorical terms, but interacting with realistically, but they haven't had their language for it has been poetic. Um, you know, the triple burner. What's a triple burner? There's no triple burner in my body. Um, yes, there probably is, and it's the net of interstitium in between your abdomen and and maybe your thorax. Um people in other traditions are looking to this and going, yeah, this is what we've been talking about, and this is the way to bridge communication. So already in the Times piece, there's this the one of the main pieces of the article is how oh, we have to rethink how we think about acupuncture and how we study acupuncture. Um I wouldn't talk about using this to optimize acupuncture because they've been doing it for thousands of years and maybe it's already well optimized. But we should maybe take what they're saying more seriously. Um that that kind of, you know. And then the, you know, there's a lot of talk about sampling the interstitial fluid. Um we sample blood, we sample urine, we sample all sorts of things to find out what's going on to monitor someone's health or monitor response to a therapy. What's going on in the interstitial fluid? We already monitor glucose through it. What else could we monitor? But it's hard to get at because the moment it's very low pressure and it collapses really easily if you try to suck something out. So those are puzzles people have to work on. But there are people working on it, and I wouldn't be surprised if in you know two to five years we don't start hearing about sampling interstitial fluid through the skin for diagnostic purposes or something.

unknown 31:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 31:50

Does the interstitial vessels that carry the fluid look something like I'm trying to image this in my head and you see this in the article beautifully, but it's kind of reminds you of like when they map out the nervous system, like a tree with branches with these different what what are the vessels? This isn't that.

SPEAKER_00 32:09

Yeah, yeah. What is this? Well, they're not really vessels because they're not round tubes. And it's very hard, you know, if I could show you under the microscope, I could start to give you an idea, but it's it's very hard to imagine what the three-dimensional structure is. Um but imagine like uh perhaps bubble wrap and the plastic is the are the interstitial spaces. So they're not tubes. They're sometimes flat, sometimes wide. They interconnect with each other in all sorts of complicated ways. Um so you know, I'm not sure how to say it in a way that conveys it. I'm not sure how to draw it in a way that conveys it. I think they did a pretty good job with the times piece, but I don't know that people came away, even with that good a job, having an idea of what it looks like. I do have a way of giving people an idea of it, if you want me to lead you through that.

SPEAKER_02 33:12

Yes. I mean, even that description is very, very helpful. I think I think a lot of us and myself as a journalist really attempt to simplify things to the point. But life doesn't lend itself to that level of the science.

SPEAKER_00 33:26

It does and it doesn't, some of it. So yeah, I I like the bubble wrap metaphor. It's it's closer to what it looks like than saying vessels. But imagine um, you know, everyone has an idea of what their heart and all their blood vessels look like. So it turns out that that is completely surrounded by a very thin layer of collagen and interstitial spaces that accompany those blood vessels all through the body. Now, everyone has an idea of what their brain and their peripheral nervous systems look like. You described the trunk of the spine and then the tree of nerves coming off of it. All of that has collagen and hyaluronic acid defining interstitial spaces all along it, including in the skull around the brain. Now superimpose those two things on each other. That's a very complicated structure, but you kind of can imagine it, right? Now add in all your visceral organs above your diaphragm and all the organs below your diaphragm. They're covered with interstitium and they have layers of interstitium and fascia within them. And those, because every one of those organs has vessels and nerves traveling through them, that's all interwoven. So now it's gotten really complicated, but you still have a general idea of where the interstitium is. Now add what we call the musculoskeletal fascia, what fascial fascia world calls the deep fascia. Um, all the coverings of all the bones and of every muscle in your body. Put that into the picture, and now cover the whole thing with your skin. That's the interstition. It's not so simple as a bunch of tubes. It ensheaths a lot of tubes, but it's but it's everywhere. Um, and everything interconnects with everything else. So it's kind of remarkable. And it's kind of remarkable that no one's ever really noticed it before.

unknown 35:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:28

And I didn't, I was staring at it as much as everyone else was, you know?

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Yeah. And it's fascinating that um you bring up how you know this Western medicine is kind of catching up to the Eastern. And through things like acupuncture, you might get a sense more of how it might work. I've heard very intelligent folks, doctors, some debunk the um acupuncture research. I feel like some who love acupuncture have defended it. And um very intelligent people who are doing the hard work, um, know how to articulate things in a very um in a manner that's very convincing, very good at arguing their points. Where do you stand on acupuncture and its efficacy? And this sounds like it bolsters the the those who think acupuncture is worth um trying. But where do you stand on that?

SPEAKER_00 36:30

You know, uh a general thing is I've done a lot of research in a lot of areas that's blown old dogmas out of the way. Um, a prior thing I did was back around the turn of the millennium when people were talking about arguing about adult stem cells and embryonic stem cells, and people were saying adult cells can do what embryonic can do, and everyone goes, no, no, no, only embryonic cells can do that. Um, my group was one of the groups showing that adult cells could do it. Um and our paper that really defined that possibility led to George Bush's address to the nation to eliminate, you know, or severely restrict embryonic stem cell research. You know, that was a political thing that got, you know, and I was unhappy to be involved in it. But the thing is that it turned in part on everyone said adult cells can't do this because they'd never seen it. Or they didn't do an experiment to look for it, or they did an experiment and saw it and said, but that can't happen because we've been taught it can't happen. I've I told my friend Ebbie that, you know, there's no fluid in fascia. But I've been looking at the cracks, which are remnants of the fluid-filled spaces, my whole career. But then I re- I saw something that made me reconsider the dogma. So a lot of people who are critical of acupuncture, one, I'll make you a bet they've never tried acupuncture for any of their problems. And, you know, for example, my colleague Becky, she was, you know, not anti-acupuncture, but not really like rah-rah about it. It was just like people do it, fine, whatever. And then she had an injury, and I said, maybe you should try some acupuncture because she wasn't getting better, and it got better. And now we're talking about Chinese medicine, Sheana. Um so to some extent, you know, you've got really smart people, but that doesn't mean they're being rational. And we all come to everything with our biases. The question is: can you be convinced to take a moment, take a deep breath, and go, hmm, maybe my bias is just a bias. And a lot of people aren't. But things like this are changing it. So 20 years ago, when I was doing integrative medicine kinds of research stuff, in part because of the stem cells, medical students would invite me to come talk to them, but it would usually be like, you know, the integrative medicine club meeting after hours with a box of pizza and five or six students. And now I get invited to to give grand rounds in a medicine department or a surgery department. Um there are, you know, the integrative medicine courses and clinical stuff happening on the floors of our hospitals. So in the last two generations, there's already a huge shift. I think this just feeds into that shift continuing. I don't think of it um uh what was the phrase you used for um this is sort of um I don't remember. You had asked the question specifically about sort of how Western medicine was bolstering the idea of acupuncture. There was a word you used, something like that. Um and the thing is that acupuncture people who hear that often say, and they say to me, even assuming that that's what I'm trying to do, is figure out how their stuff works. They're like, we don't need you to explain our stuff. We know what it does, we've been doing it. Um the the point of I what I'm finding with the interstitium isn't that what it seems to be doing is clarifying Western medicine, non-allopathic Western approaches to healing, like Rolfing or osteopathy, um, which are very different, but you know, and cultures that are involved in energy healing or acupuncture, all Ayurvedic medicine. Um, they've all been doing things. All of them do things that they do well, and some things they don't do well. I was at a conference with the Dalai Lama once, um, because of the stem cell stuff, oddly. And someone said, Why do you have a Tibetan doctor and an American doctor? And he said, Well, some things Tibetan doctors are better at, and some things medical Western doctors are better at. If I break a bone or have an infection, I go to the Western doctor. If I'm worried about chronic inflammation and how I'm aging, I'm going to go to the Tibetan doctor. So we all have things that we're doing well. We certainly all have things we could be doing better. If this structure and our concepts around it and our language allow these different cultures to talk to each other, it's not one helping the other. It's we're all helping each other. And I think, you know, my my ambition for this ultimately, if I had one, um is can we get to a place where there's actually a global culture of healing? Where we know how to use all these things complementary to each other.

SPEAKER_02 42:03

Um I've struggled with this like most people do, where as a health journalist, I want to be evidence-based and accurate and represent folks like yourself the best I could with accuracy. And you know, I'm also very much a big proponent of yoga, and I've had one of the worst cases of uh tennis elbow, or go, I guess it was golfer's elbow. And I either way, it sucks. It really sucks. I mean, to the point where like gripping a hold of anything was sure almost impossible. And I'll say that um through when through Penn Sports Medicine and PT, and you know, it was slowly seemingly getting a little bit better, two steps forward, one step back for a better course of three years. And um there's a really phenomenal sports um acupuncturist out of Philadelphia, um, Chad Bong, his name is shout out to Chad, but he said, Okay, we've got your you know your diagnosis. He took maybe just the even just the languaging of um the the Western side, okay, we've got golfer's elbow. This is what that means biologically, and then here's how we're gonna approach this from an acupuncture standpoint. And I will be uh forever a uh proponent of uh acupuncture because he within he said four sessions and it'll be clear, I bet. And you know, there's a massage, there was uh the needles were hooked up to an electrode. I don't know if there's a specific name for that, but electroacupuncture. Yeah, okay. And you know, there was I I try to like reconcile that experience to that I. had personally with what I hear experts discuss about acupuncture itself. It is a fixing. But it works. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:09

And like I said, how many of those people have tried acupuncture and had a direct experience? Or are they reading, you know, how many of them have truly examined the entire world literature on acupuncture so they could come to a meta-analysis of is there something there or not? And people who do that kind of stuff say there is something there. But I wouldn't send someone for acupuncture if they had an infected finger from a cut. And then I'd say, well, it didn't heal that, so acupuncture must not work. Well, no, that's not what acupuncture is for. In its place, it can it's clear that it can be helpful. The certainty with which people speak, you know back in the days when babies were dying of infection and no one knew what an infection was and people didn't wash their hands. And then some of I said, I think there's an infection here and you should wash your hands and when you do that the babies don't die. And people were like, oh what are you talking about? Wash your hands. That's ridiculous. And then some time goes by and they discover bacteria and it's like oh he whiz. So you know the interstition. Well none of these people who are making these comments have seen this because none of this was around for them to learn about it in medical school. So maybe this is something they need to go who are that harshly critical go, there's anatomy here was never taught could that make sense of things? And it seems that to some extent maybe it can. It's also not an either or situation and a lot of people play it as that on both sides. And someone said to me about treating cancer. A lot of people talk to me about cancer. And I'm like I'm a pathologist. But you know they go, well should I do this or that? And I'm like, why aren't you doing both? Or well I'm going to try the the Western stuff and get the chemotherapy and the surgery and the radiation and if that doesn't work then I'll go to you know Chinese modalities, Asian modalities. And I'm like, so you're going to wait till you're least likely to get any benefit and then pull that out. Why aren't you doing that to start? Even not for the cancer but for all the inflammation and the symptoms you're going to have from the chemotherapy and the you know why aren't the why aren't we working together with these things? And your experience is an exactly perfect example of that.

SPEAKER_01 46:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:48

Yeah like we kind of kind of comes full circle to what why you moved we get we get we get uh as the human condition I think maybe more so now than ever oddly that we want to believe that there's a tidy neat answer and it's only this uh Western medicine is the answer and like that's it that's the goal.

SPEAKER_00 47:12

Well that's what I believe.

SPEAKER_02 47:14

Yes. And it's a belief. Right. And that I see it trust me I definitely see it on the other end as a yoga teacher of 20 years.

SPEAKER_00 47:22

It's sure sure you know what yoga can do and and you know that probably there is a real thing about vagal stimulation or you know by going into a headstand. And why wouldn't there be? It's this cord. You turn it upside down it's going to be different. You know why don't um but the the um uh I don't remember what I was going to say. Well that's but okay yeah but I the the I I you know I like to I want people to be able to be flexible and change their minds. Unfortunately like the shift I've seen in the medical students in New York and how they want to learn about and are ready to hear about and then they become actual attending physicians themselves and professors and now they want me to teach their medical students in a way they hadn't been taught. Unfortunately I'm very fond of the phrase progress happens one funeral at a time because I think unless someone has a dramatic experience of something like your moment of healing with with the acupuncture unless something really knocks you to look in a different direction we tend and I'm the same way, we tend to hold on to you know if if the guys with the scope had said to me I think there's fluid in those little spaces I'd say oh you've been talking to my my Ralf for a yoga teacher over here? I don't think so. But they came and showed me a picture and it was a really intense kind of wonderful couple of weeks when I I knew it was real and I had no idea what to do with it. I had no way with anything I knew to latch on to that and it made me think it made me let go of what my assumptions are about human tissue. And then into that space we figured out a a little procedure to figure it out and it was like oh and then it's obvious yeah why didn't I see that before because you weren't prepared. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 49:34

Yeah it's part of it is burning off what you once thought was a truth to and it's very difficult for folks you know like you said myself included obviously you know it's we want to cling on to what we once thought was uh a hard truth and it's it's a matter of it feels like you deconstruct part of who you are a little bit to restructure.

SPEAKER_00 49:57

Yeah but you as a yoga teacher um part of what that does for you I suspect is you live in a fully Western world where we think of bodies like machines and you fix them um but you also live in a yoga culture which treats bodies not as machines that's not pulleys and levers it's living tissue that moves and adapts and shifts and changes and you have an internal sense of that and you see it in in the students you teach. And so you've got these two competing views all the time. And that gives you a little shimmer in the world that people who live in one tradition don't have. And that's probably where a lot of whatever creativity you have comes from because you've always sort of and it's not everyone's comfortable with having two different ways of seeing things and having to live between them.

SPEAKER_02 51:00

But that's kind of what you do absolutely I was going to say I feel like you could put a lot of different modalities into this um container where you do live in that in-between um that and what we're talking about what does interstition mean?

SPEAKER_00 51:17

The in-between I love that yeah yeah yeah yeah I mean that's literally what it means the between stuff. And that's you know when I talk about how it can be helpful for getting cultures to talk to each other this is you know I'm not thinking that and it becomes something I want to see if I can prove when I've met people because the world the the news went like super viral NYU's that first paper NYU's department uh press department estimated that 4.2 billion people had seen it so and it had been translated into Chinese it was 3.2 billion and then suddenly it was 4.2 billion because it went into China. Awesome. Whenever I've met people who are Reiki therapists or Ayurvedic people or energy healers of one kind or another um and we get onto this topic or they approach me because of the topic, they say that's what we've been talking about. And it's in shamanic healing practices. It's been a repeated sort of thing. And so what I imagine is in some way this anatomy um is actually also a communications interstition between all these different human cultures. And somehow what's happening at the the tissue anatomic level is also happening at the social level which is kind of cool.

SPEAKER_02 52:49

That's so cool. I I love that I um I I get the sense that we will as humans do as we you start to unp folks research this more we'll see where it aligns beautifully with different modalities and maybe some places where it definitely doesn't and I but maybe we just don't know yet maybe there's another in between somewhere there's there's always more anyone who thinks we can as humans get to the bottom of all existence yeah no there's come on yeah the universe is far more interesting than that's a really sweet refreshing view to hear someone like yourself who's so embedded in not just well in the your western medicine but also so open-minded and uh seeing taking a step back and kind of seeing the seeing it through a bigger lens. It's cool this to hear that.

SPEAKER_00 53:48

Thank you. And for me it's the fun part. Or the funnest part yeah is there any other this sounds like it it has implications potentially on all of our understanding throw a disease at me and let me let me riff on how I think it might be different. You know cancer is the big one for for people and the idea that all these years we've thought cancer spreads by eating tissue um by getting by eating its way into blood vessels and spreading it's eating its way into the lymphatic system and spreading to lymph nodes that way and eating its way into nerves and spreading that way. And I've published what we've been doing is organ by organ and the adjacent structures to every organ, we're showing how it's all interconnected. So it's paper after paper building up this interconnected map. And one of the things I have to do in those to make it convincing is sort of make it interesting for you know who's interested in anatomy, not a lot of people, you know so I have to show it has an application. And the easiest thing to show in every organ is find a cancer and look at the slides and you'll see tumor cells moving through tissue and we never stop to think well they're not eating their way through the tissue but there they are in the middle of healthy looking tissue. What are they doing there? They're in the interstitial spaces we couldn't see. And so and the fact is that a tumor if it doesn't dissolve if it's not eating the tissue how is it going to get to nerves lymphatics arteries veins? It's going to have to go through the interstitium. That's the first stop. So cancer spread you know that's a hugely big medical therapeutic problem. How does cancer spread and how we can interfere with it well if you didn't know about the interstitium you're not going to explore how it goes through the interstitium you're not going to be able to stop it. But now we know to look there, maybe there are some simple medications that you know are going to be helpful in keeping tumor cells from moving through those spaces and diminishing how they they spread um my guess is um that's likely. And I know some cancer researchers who are looking into that kind of thing and they're seeing evidence for it and even devising therapeutic sorts of processes. So that's one example of you know it's not that I'm being clever how interstitium could impact on how we understand these things. It's just that anything I think of there's this piece of interstitium stuck in the middle that everyone skipped over um so everything changes. How much of it is useful well everything's useful. You know when you're talking you can't predict this little factoid in medicine is going to be helpful over here but then two or four or ten, twenty years go by and suddenly this is the key to that.

SPEAKER_03 56:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 57:00

Highlights the importance of getting research done in these experiments to look at the interstition I'd be spending millions millions of dollars of year uh millions of dollars a year housing mice, buying mice, keeping them alive, doing the experiments, the staff demand the, you know um but as a pathologist people get tissues taken out every day in hospitals and they come to me. So I don't bother with mice I just go right to human tissue. And it's very cheap because I don't have to keep a human alive in order to get samples. I just go to the files and go, oh I need some normal colon tissue and I found five cases where we had some normal colon because if you're going to take out a colon cancer you take out the normal around it because you want to get around the tumor. So it's easy and cheap to do this kind of stuff fortunately for me because I'm not good at grant getting grant money that's not in my skill set it turns out but to do some of the advanced research people are going to have to turn to animal experiments and very high tech kinds of things and I just want to map it out and you know see what everyone else figures out. Did you coin the term interstitian? No, no and this this is one of the things uh the nasty trolls on the internet were like they're calling it the interstitium we've known there's an interstitium we we'd learned about it 50 years ago yeah but you learned about the little spaces around the blood vessels you didn't learn about this and this changes everything. Um so we didn't coin the word it's been out there and the original paper in 2018 actually the phrase and the title was um you know we called it a novel uh interstition um meaning yes we know there's an interstition but this is an interstition that no one has recognized before so um so we did we had the word a lot of people get hung up on that it's like read the paper you know yeah I know I know we've found the places that connect everything else and it's really big so just yeah okay it's an interstition we all agree yeah right excellent and you know um they bring up in the article to the New York Times that plants also have this interstition small freshwater invertebrates so yeah this this may be beyond even bigger than oh it has to be and so this it took it took years for Becky and I to to sort of get to the point where we were thinking about that she was talking about plants for a while um but then we started to think anytime you get a bunch of cells together in a big enough mound they need to be able to talk to each other so there's got to be a space through which they communicate and so any multicellular organism should have an interstition. And sure enough every multicellular organism you look at has something that functions like an interstition. It looks very different in a hydra than it does in a sponge than it does in a plant than it does in a mammal but it's all the same there's something called convergent evolution where you get different evolutionary pathways all creating a similar structure well at the very get go the minute cells grouped together in clusters large enough that they couldn't communicate with each other by touching them because there were too many neighbors between them, they had to have something to communicate. Otherwise it wouldn't be a single living organism. So yeah the interstitium we wondered for a while so which comes first in the development of the human body does the blood vessels or in evolution was it blood vessels then lymphatics then interstitium or did you know it was interstitium in the middle and now we're realizing interstitium had to be there at the beginning. Blood vessels and lymphatics came later. And if you look in embryos before you develop a nervous system and before you develop a lymphatic system or even a nervous system there are interstitial spaces between cells.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:35

So yeah it's kind of everywhere it's wild yeah it's so wild um this is maybe the yoga teacher in me but when we talk about how you know this aligns like with acupuncture yoga maybe at the energetic body absolutely yeah right it's so so fascinating I like I wonder if the interstiti innerstition is also like somehow contributing to like our sixth sense when we talk about like just intuition and like there's got to be a brain pathway right to well well and what makes you think uh intuition only works through your brain so let's start like that.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:21

So that's where you're sort of stuck between two things you know you came in with yoga and then you went to the brain you know you know there are intuitions in the body too that the brain is like not paying attention to um uh the the the idea of there being an energy body a subtle body a coarse body all of that relates to this too um but it you know that's that's actually how I started getting into integrative medicine I do this other thing called complexity theory and look at the human body through that lens um I have a book on it which I will now shamelessly plug called Notes on Complexity and um a scientific theory of connection consciousness and being woo woo um but a lot of people are reading it and um one of the things it talks about is precisely this question um that there are different natures there are different functionalities and presences of the body depending on how you interact with it. So let's pick two just very simply um at the everyday scale I am bounded by my skin and you're bounded by yours. But we know even without the interstition we know that bodies are electrical you can measure the electromagnetic field of a body feet out from um from the surface of your skin. So at the quantum and that's a quantum scale phenomenon so at the quantum scale where is your boundary it ain't at your skin that would be one way of describing the energy body now you take an energy healer coming into a room coming towards the room of a patient who wants an energy treatment energy healing process before this guy's skin enters the room and sees that guy's skin the energy fields are already merging with each other. And when you're right up against each other and the healer is holding his hand over the patient on the on the the table or the the bed there's just one energy field here. It's not two and it's not this person affecting that person. It's not this energy field affecting that one. It's the two merging and finding a new equilibrium between them so that when the person who's the healer, quote unquote leaves and they separate they're each in an equilibrium that that one of them didn't have before it wasn't one person acting on the other there was a moment of merging of the subtle body and you can't in Western terms argue with anything I just said our bodies are electromagnetic. You can measure the structure and shape and length and width and breadth of our energy fields and yes they merge when they come in and yes they interfere with each other. Not interfere. Yes they communicate with each other so which piece of this can someone argue with you know well you can't possibly hover a hand over someone's body and you know but um two weeks ago there was a really important paper from MD Anderson Cancer Center where they had an energy healer who was recognized as a real energy healer guy and they had him putting his hand over really highly malignant pancreatic cancer cells in a dish to see what would happen. And sure enough their gene expression profiles changed. They divided less they moved less They spread less. And they went in and looked at the biochemical and molecular signaling, and it was all changing because this guy was hovering his hand. And if you do it with intention versus without intention, there's a difference. So the healer has to come in and not only generate the electromagnetic something, whatever is going on, but they have to do it with the intention of healing. And when they do that, and they have controls. And this was published in a high-level journal. They have controls. So, you know, him doing it without intention, less effect. Another energy healer doing it, but not exerting any energy, uh, any intempt to heal, nothing. Just a regular person who doesn't know how to do this, nothing. With intention, the certified energy healer applying an energy healing intervention completely changed the way the cells were behaving. And then they tried it in mice with tumors. And the tumors spread less. Now it's only one paper. But cancer people would be crazy not to want to replicate it and see how this works. It's not a surprise to a lot of people who have had help from energy healers with their cancers.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:23

Cool, right? It's so cool. Yeah, this do you how much of it do you think?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:31

A whole other episode.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:32

Yes, I know for sure. I got my brain is already, yeah, my mind's already going to like, yes, next episodes. Yeah, but we can ask, I'm sorry. Well, I was just gonna ask what you if you think that you brought up intention, intentionality, a belief that it's going to work. That's is that you think a big component of that?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:58

Um You know, it's it's a complex we're talking about very complex interactions um and very different things that were all lumping into a single group. Um So there's the we have to ask about the intentions and the belief of the recipient of the energy healing and those of the person who's giving the healing. What this experiment clearly shows is that intention of the healer is important. And presumably if they have intention, um that comes with uh a belief that, oh, I can actually do this. Although I'm not sure that that's required. Um you know, when you talk to energy healers, they often find out that they have the gift. It's not everyone can do everyone can do it to some degree. Like anyone can play chopstick if you teach them on a piano, but not everyone's Mozart. So the people who do this are the Mozarts. They're adepts. Um, and most of them find out, not all of them, but most of them find out they can do it because it happens by accident. They're not aware that they're an energy healer, they just discover that they do something and someone gets better and says, wow, your hands were really warm there for a moment. Oh, my cold went away. Um for the the person on the receiving end, I think belief is less important. Um, where then we get into issues of placebo effect. But placebo is still an effect. We don't understand either. Um there's uh there's a really good documentary that hasn't come out yet. It's on the way called Phenomena Healing. Um I think it's coming out in August, and that's also shameless self-promotion because I'm in that too, talking about the energy healing stuff and the complexity stuff, actually. Um where it's both people reporting their experiences of having been healed in some fashion, the people who actually do the healing, and then a bunch of us science types coming in and going, how, yeah, I have a way to explain how this might be happening. It's not thorough, it's not definitive, it's not complete. But yeah, you can't dismiss it on scientific lines because I can come up with a scientific hypoth method, it a scientific explanation that is can be tested and is worth testing. And and that's what's and the they actually show the folks who did this MD Anderson um project. And it's that's how I found out about it. Um and it's extraordinary. It's only one paper. But it's the beginning. It's like that SEMAWICE thing. You know, you should wash your hands. Oh, don't be ridiculous. We discovered bacteria. Ugh, they're just small things. Well, they cause disease. Oh my god, they cause disease. Oh my god, we should wash our hands. Step by painful step. And then once you get there, you're like, why didn't I ever you know, Becky and I talking about this stuff, we weren't talking about this in 2018 when we saw the fluid spaces. You know, we it's taken us years of mattering on with each other. It's very boring for our spouses. We just go on and on. And and then suddenly one day it's like, wait a second, is there electricity here? Oh, good question. That took three years to come up with the idea. And then when we looked at it, it was like, of course there is. And now, of course there is. You know, so that's how progress happens. We're idiots.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:53

Yeah. Anything worth doing will take that ideal.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:56

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:11:58

Yeah, exactly. It's it's really fascinating um how it progresses into um something that potentially is yeah, explaining things larger than than us.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:11

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I I'm a firm believer in it it doesn't matter what you do, if you really, and most people don't focus enough or aren't curious enough. Um if you really follow anything you do, whether it's art or service or science or um everything has in it the seeds to explain the whole nature of reality. Because everything is a piece of our writ reality. And so we all have doors to open that can get us there. The question is, do we spend time, do we have the privilege of not being distracted by, let's say, being hungry? Um and uh do we have the curiosity to go, what's behind that door? And the stamina to go, oh, there's another door. What's behind that one? Oh, what's behind that one? Um it's actually the the people who said I was in love with bile ducts, um, it's because where I found the stem cells in the liver, which is how I started with stem cell biology, was in the tiniest branches of the bile ducts. And how I found that is because I noticed that there were the tiniest branches seemed to go slightly further than people thought. Like a hundredth, you know, a tenth of a millimeter further. Um and I don't know why that bugged me, but I'm like, why does it do that? And how does it do that? And it was such a minor thing. But that turns out to be where the stem cells hang out. And then there was one set of experiments that said that the stem cells in the liver didn't seem to be coming from the liver. Where could they be coming from? Could they be in the blood? So we looked at the bone marrow and suddenly there are liver cells in the bone marrow. So we did bone marrow transplants in mice, but my colleague for that, Diane Krauss, we're both pathologists. So, unlike every other stem cell researcher, let's say liver, they would do the experiment, kill the mouse, take out the liver, and throw the mouse away. But we're pathologists. So we did autopsies on our mice and we saved every bit of tissue. And when we looked at them, there were cells from every from the blood in every tissue. Oh, adult cells can do anything. Door after door after door, you know?

SPEAKER_02 1:14:37

Um a willingness to open that door.

SPEAKER_00 1:14:40

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or or a burning, a pathological burning need to open that door. I could have a lot more naps if I hadn't been into this, but you know, I've I've been willing to sacrifice my sleep for it.

SPEAKER_02 1:14:53

Yeah, it's it's really fascinating and well worth that, I feel. And I think um it's really amazing to hear your take on this um and in more in-depth than the article. That's it's created a lot, really opened up my mind. Uh I got so many more questions.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:16

But well, I uh some other time we can do it again.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:20

Yes, I would love, I would love to um definitely follow up and speak with you again and and unpack some of these other avenues and topics that you had brought up during this conversation. It's it's really fascinating work. Um thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for your willingness to explain it to someone like myself in a way that I could really understand and and see the value in it. And um so I really appreciate that. And a lot of that's gonna open up a lot of people's minds who listen to this as well. So I hope so. Thanks for the opportunity. It's been my pleasure. I I'm thrilled to uh talk to you about this. And if folks do want to support you or or find you, Neil, should I point them somewhere specifically?

SPEAKER_00 1:16:10

Um, I have a web page because that's what one has to do. If you have a book out there, so neilfesofficial.com. Because I once had a website, neilfeast.com, and I screwed it up and because I didn't so now I'm neilfeesofficial.com. And you have to spell my name right, but you know, I'll let them work that out.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:30

Well, I will definitely link that into the show notes along with this yeah, this beautifully illustrated um article that was up in the New York Times. And um, and yes, I I would be honored to to circle back with you and and chat again, if that's okay.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:47

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:16:49

Neil, it's been my pleasure. Have a great rest of your day, and um I hope I will talk to you again soon. Okay, bye-bye. All right, take care. Thanks for tuning in. If you found my conversation with Dr. Thiece to be informative, if it got you thinking, if it sparked your interest, please give the podcast a like, a five-star review, and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. You can find me on all social media platforms, especially Instagram at yoga with Jake, and on my website, yogawithjake.com. Until next time, take care of the way.