The Great Nerve

The New Science of the Vagus Nerve and How to Harness Its Healing Reflexes

By: Kevin J. Tracey MD

Narrated by: Mark Deakins

New science reveals the groundbreaking potential of the vagus nerve to regulate your body’s vital systems and heal a wide variety of medical conditions without drugs

The vagus nerve is fundamental to our health and vitality, coordinating critical functions from the precise heartbeat we need to exercise or rest to the balance of appetite and digestion. Made up of 200,000 fibers, the vagus nerve sends thousands of electrical signals every second between your brain and your most important organs. Yet despite its essential role in life, important vagus nerve functions have eluded centuries of scientific investigation. Now neurosurgeon and researcher Kevin Tracey has discovered the previously unknown power of the vagus nerve to reverse inflammation, balance the immune system, treat chronic illness, and keep our organs humming together in harmony.

In The Great Nerve, Dr. Tracey shows us how stimulating the vagus nerve with a tiny electrical implant has the potential to reverse life-altering diseases like rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, lupus, MS, diabetes, obesity, stroke, depression, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. If this sounds too good to believe, Dr. Tracey shares stories of patients who have gone from being nearly bedridden to running and dancing, along with the science that makes possible these recoveries. He also explains the evidence for lifestyle strategies like ice baths, meditation, exercise, and breathwork that can maintain and improve vagus nerve function.

By opening the door to the new field of neuroimmunology, The Great Nerve not only revolutionizes how we understand and treat disease, it gives us unprecedented hope for our health. This is the story of your body’s ability to heal itself.

Informational

Lots of good information about the current state of vagal nerve research. The first half of the book is very technical, but the author says that you can skip ahead. Hopeful that much of the research will turn out to be true.

Must Read for DOCTORS!

Every physician regardless of specialty should read this book. I was practicing anesthesiologist/pain specialist it is eye-opening

Inflammation

This is my first introduction to the vagus nerve and the benefits of a stimulator to help control inflammation due to chronic disease such as rheumatoid arthritis. I suffer from RA along with Hashimoto’s in many surgeries including wrists, elbows, knee replacement, back surgeries to control pain and ultimately inflammation. I am looking for a less surgical way and less pharmaceutical way to control pain. This book gives me hope there are other ways to control the inflammation and pain besides pharmaceuticals. It is quite technical, but the background information is necessary to give you an overview of how the nerve works and why it would work on a whole body treatment. Thank you so much for writing the book and all the explanations hopefully someday rheumatoid arthritis will be one of the benefits of a VNS.

This book is an advertisement for the author's medical devices

The author continually touts his own brilliance, the work is overshadowed by his narrow minded Christian bias. Apparently we have only done medical research for 2000 years. It's is frustrating, VNS is a gift for those who would benefit. It would be easier to listen too if the tone of the writing was less pompous. The listener needs to listen between the rhetoric to get anything from this book