 Thirty-six years ago, the first float conference that ever happened was in Denver, so we've in many ways come full circle, and Tom Fine and I were having dinner last night and talking about that first float conference where the keynote speakers were John Lilly and Jay Shirley. Did you imagine that? And having this in the background, I think, is a perfect format for this event, commemorating the full circle here in Denver. So today I'm going to give you guys a few updates. I feel like every year, the past few years, I've been dumping a lot of data on you, so I'm not going to overwhelm you with data this time, I promise, but I am going to give you some updates. And I think one of the important things to recognize as we're going through these updates is research is a constantly evolving process. Whenever you get data, then the next step is replicated, right? That's part of the scientific process. And I think we're starting to get there as a field of floating. Now I come from Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it was really weird getting off the plane yesterday because it's a direct flight. Normally, I would get off in Denver and then catch my connecting flight to Portland. I almost accidentally went to a Portland flight. But it's great to be here, and we're celebrating actually a major anniversary of floating. Does anyone know what happened 50 years ago? And it's linked to floating intimately, the first man on the moon. How many here knew that all the astronauts in training and the rays to the moon were also floating? So in 1957, after spending a few years with Dr. John Lilly at the National Institute of Mental Health, Jay Shirley moved to my state of Oklahoma and built a fully immersive float tank in an 8-foot vat of water where you're connected to breathing tubes and wearing maybe one of the scariest helmets I've ever seen, floating vertically for many hours at a time. And as you can imagine, not many people volunteered for this research study. But lo and behold, NASA was actually doing confidential research that never got reported in all the astronauts in training to the moon. And they weren't just sending their male astronauts, in fact, they were sending their female astronauts, too. And a book came out not too long ago called Promise the Moon. And the female astronauts were actually outlasting the male's two-fold in Dr. Shirley's float tank. Many of them could ask, you know, 10 or so hours in this environment. The males were getting out at about five hours. So I always think if NASA was taking this data seriously, it should have been a woman on the moon first, not a male. And there he is. Dr. Shirley and his room, you could kind of see a tape recorder. That tape recorder note was actually just recording people's stream of consciousness. He was a Freudian, and he was just listening as they would sit there for hours talking to themselves in this vat of water. So we've obviously come a long ways since those days in floating, and we're very lucky to have people like Glenn Perry, who moved us away from this design of the float tank into what we all know now. But there's another moonshot I want to present today, and it involves this moon. It's actually a dwarf planet. Does anyone know what this is? It's floating in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It's a little dwarf planet called Ceres, that's right. And you see that, you see this little area of light-colored brightness. That's one of the world's biggest pools of magnesium sulfate. So I think to myself as Elon Musk is getting ready to try to fly to Mars, if he could just go a little further, maybe he could drop us off on Ceres with some water and we could have the world's biggest float pool. So here's the moonshot. It's this idea that we all have knowledge and experiential access to this unique technology of floating, but the world of medicine, the world of science has mostly not heard of it. We're still in the early days. And so this idea of a float research collective is really about trying to establish a science of floating, and to do this with a whole collection of researchers. And obviously this could be a major educational resource for the float industry. And as part of this collective, there was a website that came out last year, clinicalfloat.com, and it contains a repository of all the peer-reviewed studies that have come out in the domain of clinical floating. So it's just there as a resource for other scientists, for people who are just genuinely interested in floating to learn about it. But beyond that, we need more researchers. And we need more replication in our research. That's the essence of science, right? As you do an experiment and then someone else somewhere could replicate it. And anything we do at my institute will have to be replicated. I don't think anyone in Western medicine is going to take work from one individual laboratory and assume that it's just going to work. So this is actually a very important part of disseminating the researchers, getting other researchers to actually try out the experiment again. And then as a long shot, every day around the world, there's probably thousands of people floating in your centers. Imagine if we could collect thousands of data points. That would be really exciting. We could learn things at a much larger scale. So one of the things that I'm most excited about is the past year has actually changed the landscape for the research collective quite a bit. So we have my lab in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And most of our focus is on mental health. We work with patients who have anxiety and depression, women with anorexia nervosa, people with PTSD. At the same time over the past two decades, research has been happening at Carlstad University in Sweden. And their work has really focused on stress related pain, burnout, insomnia is a new area of study they're heading in. But for the past 20 years, that was it. There really wasn't a lot more research happening in the world of floating. And as you can imagine standing here, it was quite lonely. You're sitting on series. No one else is studying this. Well, let's go through what has happened over the past year. To me, one of the most exciting things is another full circle. Dr. Tom Fine has convinced the powers that be that floating needs to come back to the University of Toledo. And over the course of the next year, he will be building a new float clinic in the hospital. And their studies are going to really focus on addiction and chronic pain, amongst other things. And Hanover in Germany, Florian Bisoner, is actually studying floating in patients who have chronic pain. And he's scanning their brains. And there's a clinical trial that's been going on for the past two years. And hopefully in the next year or two, he'll be able to finish that. And I'm going to try to get him to come out to this conference. This year, you're going to hear from Dr. Josh Hagen, who just opened a float clinic at West Virginia University. And one of the areas he's going to be studying is concussion and TBI, which I think is a very low-hanging fruit, yet absolutely no empirical research yet in this population. So we're finally going to get data looking at this. When I was at RISE this year, float STL had been avidly reaching out to Washington University. And they've established a collaboration to study mindfulness in floating. And that study is just getting ready to launch. Chapman University in California just built a brain institute. And they're very interested in studying floating. They have a float tank. And they're going to look at this in terms of consciousness and also brain processes. Lydia Codwell at Ohio State spoke a few years ago about some of the research she's doing with exercise science. But I'm really excited this year. We got Dr. Matt Driller to come out from New Zealand. And he's going to talk about the elite athletes he's been floating and how it's helped with performance enhancement and recovery from exercise. And then I just heard last week from the folks at Float Milwaukee and Andy Larson, who have reached out to the local researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin and have just received approval to do a study at their center looking at trauma and PTSD. So in one year's time it went from being very lonely on this Planet of Ceres to look at, we actually have the beginnings of a collective of scientists who are trying to study this, trying to understand its benefits and doing quite a range of different types of research. I think this is to me maybe the most exciting update I have to report to you this year. Now all this research, keep in mind, is happening within the context of what I think is really a cultural experiment. All of us are living as human guinea pigs, right? Being the first generation exposed to smart technology. How many of you have looked at the data from your phone to tell you how many hours a week you're using it? I see a lot of people who are scared to look at their use data. Well, guess what? A lot of us are actually on our phones more than 40 hours a week. Could you have imagined 10, 15 years ago before smartphones came out, I would tell you this story that in the next few decades there's going to be this little box that you're going to hold and for about a full-time job each week you're going to just be interacting with it. Would that sound weird? Well, we're doing it. And in many ways floating, I would say, is the antidote to this crazy cultural experiment that we're all undergoing. And the ramifications of what's happening with technology we just don't know yet. We're learning. Each year a World Happiness Report gets published and I always like to read it because what they do in this is they go around the world and they give the same measures to different societies and they try to understand each country in terms of levels of happiness and they also try to look at what is happening to happiness over time in society. And so I just want to share a few slides of data from the World Happiness Report of 2019. So this is the first thing. Over the past decade, as you could see, internet use has just spiked. But at the same time the amount of hours of sleep that we're getting the amount of social interaction we're having with real people not just virtual people in our social networks and our actual happiness is plummeting. They looked at over 150 different countries and looked at the change in happiness over the past 10 to 15 years and they ranked it. And guess where the United States is? Our country. We came in a 112th place. We're right behind Zambia in a few countries ahead of Afghanistan. So if you had to summarize how the state of happiness is in America I would say we're not doing too well. Zambia in Afghanistan and we're right in the middle. Meanwhile, anxiety and depression is escalating. It affects over a quarter of the whole population. It's the leading cause of disability worldwide. The World Health Organization actually came out last year and stated so. Three quarters of patients are not getting treatment. Only about half are improving with the current treatments. And the outcomes are not great even with the best gold standard treatments. Suicide has risen 30% since the turn of the millennium and in teenagers and millennials the ones who are using the technology more than anybody else suicide rates have doubled in the past decade. This is scaring a lot of mental health professionals when you see these suicide changes. When you ask the millennials what are the biggest problems that your peers are facing? 70% of them said the major problem is anxiety and depression much more so than bullying and drug addiction and alcoholism. It's anxiety and depression. And then when you look at what we're using to treat anxiety and depression it's often drugs and these drugs are highly addictive. Benzodiazepines, alcohol, opioids, ketamine these have become how we treat anxiety and depression and in many ways they've become a replacement and everything that's happening right now in our society with the opioid crisis is intimately linked to this story. Over half of the opiate prescriptions go to people who have mental health issues. It's all linked. So it's within this context that last year I presented some ideas and some theories about how floating could help and we received the first NIH grant to study this. And this is it. This is the grant we got investigating flotation rest as a novel technique for reducing anxiety and depression. And it wasn't just me. I wrote the grant but we have a great team of people who are part and parcel of this research and without them none of this could happen and in fact you're going to be hearing from Flux probably tomorrow talking about some of the work he's been doing and he'll be actually spending some of his dissertation really focused on the data in this grant. Now in terms of grants you have to understand this is how research is funded in America. If you don't get grant money you can't do research. It's our bread and butter. So the fact that NIH was willing to finally support float research after 60 years of other scientists trying to get grant money. I think this is a major change which means other researchers could now come into the field and the door is open. They're willing to support this research to understand the benefits of floating. And all of the research we're going to be doing in this grant takes place in our open pool. This was an absolutely brilliant work from Colin Stanwell Smith from FloatAway who spent about half a year living with me and his wife Ginny as well helping me build this laboratory to study floating in patients who normally would never try this. And I could tell you had I not gone the route of an open pool I don't think a single patient with severe anxiety would have even tried to be in my study. This was the key part to getting the patients to actually float is you have to get rid of the enclosure. I have nothing at all against float tanks that have enclosures. I think they serve a great purpose. But I think what a lot of people don't recognize is it creates a huge barrier to entry. A lot of the patients just refuse to float if there's an enclosure. And even the average normal healthy human beings out there the enclosure creates a barrier and it's something I think everyone needs to think about as you're creating your own business around this. If you have an enclosure you're going to have a major barrier to entry. Now when you do a clinical trial you have to have a good control condition. Everything is based off of this. And so we've been devising different ways to quote unquote control for the effects of floating. And I don't know if any one control condition is going to be perfect but the one that we're using in this study involves what's known as a zero gravity chair. You could buy these and relax the back stores. They're very comfortable. And more or less what we're trying to do is control for the effects of simple relaxation. What are you able to do in the comfort of your own home if you're laying in a nice environment you have minimal pressure on your spinal cord you're alone in a quiet and dark room and someone's distracting you and how are the benefits of floating any different than that? So that's the control condition we're actually using in this study. Now we call it the float chair and part of the reason is we're trying to control for the expectancy effects. We want people to actually view this as part and parcel of the treatment. But unfortunately it's not exactly like floating, right? So you're not fully controlling for the expectancy effects. But last year I had the opportunity to meet folks from Italy who have designed I think a very interesting modality that involves dry floating in this zero body bed and it's a thin layer of PVC material on top of a bed of water heated to the same exact temperature as the water in the float pool. And instead of being like a water bed where you're kind of on top bouncing around you immerse into the material and it gives you the feeling as if you're floating. And in many ways the only difference between this if it's in say a room that has reduced light and sound and properly controlled temperature the only difference between this and the actual intervention is are you immersed in the water or are you on top of the water? So I think this has some potential benefits as a control condition but once again it's a highly active control condition. You're doing a lot of the same things that floating involves minus the act of being in the water itself. And we're going to start exploring this in the clinical trial as well. So in terms of the grant we have two primary aims and NIH viewed this grant as sort of a stepping stone to a much larger grant which is known as an R01. So an R34 sort of gives you enough preliminary data to support whether it's worth pursuing this at a larger scale level. So the sort of questions they want us to answer are very basic questions. Determine the feasibility, the tolerability, the safety and the impact of preference for delivering floating in a future randomized controlled trial. They want to know can patients with relatively severe anxiety and depression tolerate floating multiple sessions? If they could, okay great news, maybe we could actually do a large scale clinical trial but show us that they could tolerate it. Show us that they're not having adverse events while they're floating. And that's a key part to getting money and funding to do the larger scale study. And then the secondary aim which is obviously the question that we're most interested in is really about the efficacy of floating. What happens over the both short term windows of say one to two days post-float and then what happens in the long term when you follow these patients six weeks and six months later are they still feeling some of the benefits of floating? So those are the aims of the study, that's it. And the way we set this up, it's about a two to three year clinical trial is there's three arms. We start with 75 patients, they go through a baseline procedure and then they get randomized to what I call the prescribed float group where they get six sessions, one hour session each week. We also have the prescribed control group, the zero gravity chair, same exact setup as the float condition. And then we set up a third group where we call it the preferred group where they get to dictate how long they float for up to two hours and how frequently they float for. So if they want to float every day, they could do it. If they want to float every other week, they could do it. It's up to them and it's going to give us some sense in this patient group what is their preference. So before we set up the larger scale clinical trial we could first learn what is the patient's actual preference. We don't know yet. And so as you can see it's a relatively small clinical trial in a hard to reach target population. I could tell you working with patients who have severe anxiety it's very difficult to get them out of the house. A lot of the patients I work with have agoraphobia which means they have trouble leaving their bedroom. Anything outside of their space of comfort is going to be anxiety inducing. And so we have to find a way to actually get them to come out and float at least six times over the course of six or so weeks. And that's a key part of the study. That's one of our primary outcomes. We have a pretty strict set of inclusion and exclusion criteria for the study. And we are allowing people who are currently in psychotherapy or currently taking medications so long as they're stably medicated. And we are excluding for people who have relatively severe psychopathology so we're not letting people in who have say bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. And all of these people are naive to floating. They for the most part have never floated before. And we're collecting a whole slew of measurements but let me draw you to the main ones the primary and the secondary outcomes. How many sessions out of the six float sessions do they actually complete? That's the primary outcome. Once to see can these patients actually tolerate six flows? What kind of adverse events are happening and how does that say differ from our control condition? And what is the dropout rate? So my sense is if we could answer those three outcomes in a positive manner, NIH is actually going to be willing to support a much larger scale trial to look at efficacy which is really what all the other measures are starting to get at. And I didn't want to just measure self-report. I figured you have a really hard to find group of patients that are oftentimes resistant to other types of treatments. While we have them, let's collect a bunch of other measures. And we're also going to be collecting biosamples. This is going to be part of a fluxes dissertation. And one of the neat parts of this is there's so many things you could do now with blood that you couldn't do even five years ago. So one of the things is we're not just going to be measuring sort of baseline inflammation across CRP and various cytokines. But we're going to be challenging the blood itself and exposing it to what's called LPS or endotoxin. So we'll take a blood sample, we'll put it in a tube that's coated with this challenge and we could actually see how the immune cells are reacting to this. So we could actually test two questions. Does floating affect baseline inflammation? And does floating affect the way your immune system reacts to stress? And I think that latter question may hold a lot of interesting data that really explores what floating is doing. We'll also be collecting cortisol measures and then I'm sure a lot of you are interested in this but we'll be collecting magnesium and looking at not just the effects of a single float which is what a lot of our earlier studies did but what happens to magnesium levels over the course of many floats. And it's a pretty time-intensive study. This is an individual sort of graph of what a subject's going to go through when they're in this clinical trial. So in total, it takes about 33 hours of somebody's time to complete this study. And they float for six sessions, they have pre and post measurements and then they also get follow-up at six weeks and six months. And so normally when you go into a float center if you were to say purchase six float sessions how much would that cost at your center? So you're hearing numbers anywhere from $300, $400. The patients in our study don't pay anything. We're a non-profit research institute, we care about the science of floating but we actually pay them $250 to do this study because they're going to be collecting a bunch of blood work, they're going to be doing various tasks and they're filling out a lot of questionnaires. So that's also part of this is they don't have to pay, we're actually paying them to do this study. Anyone want to volunteer? Got to come to Tulsa. And we're going to answer other questions too like does floating enhance interoception? Does it increase your distress tolerance? Does it reduce markers of inflammation and stress? Does it increase magnesium levels? So above and beyond some of the basic data that we're getting for NIH, we're going to begin to start exploring some of these other issues. And I would say it's going to take probably about two to three years to complete the study and maybe next year we may be able to give you a peek at some of the preliminary pilot data that we've collected in this. So I want to kind of shift gears for a second and go back to something I presented on a few years ago which is our initial work trying to understand how floating is impacting the brain. And actually one of the things that struck me about Glenn and Lee's talk is they were talking about the default mode. And you could actually see, there's the default mode right there and right there. Those are the two hubs of the default network. And we've begun to explore how floating actually impacts the state. And we're working on a paper now. I can't tell you too much about it but it's a major follow-up to the presentation a few years ago. And maybe next year I'll be able to present on this. But I do want to give you an update on another imaging study we did. And remember the way we set this up is it was all unhealthy subjects. We started with a group of about 50 participants. They had their brain scanned for about 90 minutes and then they were randomized to either float in the pool or float in the chair for 90 minutes. And over the course of several weeks they had three float sessions to just acclimate. We didn't want to scan their brains right away because then we'd be just basically measuring novelty effects, right? So what they did is they had three sessions to acclimate and then immediately after the third float session or the third chair session they had their brain scanned again. And we did this task called the monetary incentive delay task. And essentially what happens in this paradigm is you're presented with a little circle and then it could say something like $5. And that means that if you press a button fast enough you're actually going to win $5. And at the end of the study, they would do multiple rounds of this, we would pay them. So you're actually winning this money. It could also say something like, you know, minus $5 which means if you don't press the button quick enough you'll end up losing the $5. Or as a control condition it could also say zero which means even if you don't press the button quick enough you're not going to gain or lose any money. And then this triangle comes on screen and that's when you're supposed to press the button. And if you do it quick enough you could get the money. So that's how the task works. Really trying to look at what's going on in the brain as you're anticipating the receipt of an award. A reward. And the area of the brain that seems to be most responsive to this is very deep in the middle and it's called the nucleus accumbens. It's highly rich in dopamine. Nearly every drug of abuse will activate this area as will anything that's rewarding, whether it's food or sex. And so previous work that's looked at this has found that at those $5 rewards where you really up the ante where the nucleus accumbens really starts to activate. And so the prediction was quite simple. Those who would float in the pool condition would show further enhancement of activation within their nucleus accumbens. So boy this must have been three or four years ago at the float conference. I presented some of the early data on this. We now have more or less the complete results and I'll take you through it. And just keep in mind we're doing the brain scans to see and post float. We are not scanning the brain during the float but if anyone knows how to do that come see me. I would love to. We just don't have an MRI machine that's compatible with the float tank. Not yet. But Colin could potentially resolve that. So let's start with pre-float. What's going on? So there's the nucleus accumbens. We extracted the signal from the specific region of the brain and we look at it separately in the left and the right hemisphere. So I'll kind of be presenting that. And just as a color code the green bars represent what happens in the nucleus accumbens during the $5 reward anticipation and the white bars are when they didn't have any money to win on that trial. So that's what it looks like pre-float in both the chair and the pool groups and essentially there's no differences. At baseline both the chair condition and the pool condition as you would expect is finding a significant activation within the nucleus accumbens to the $5 reward. So let's move to post float. What we found post float actually supported the hypothesis. A significant increase in both the left and the right nucleus accumbens to the $5 reward condition above and beyond the people in the chair condition. And when you look at say comparing this to the loss condition when you could lose $5 there was no difference. It was really specific to the positive aspects of the reward. It wasn't changing from pre to post float for the punishment side. So let me just kind of show you that again. You see a significant enhancement post float to the $5 reward and essentially no change to the negative $5. And when you compare the self-report ratings post float and look at a measure of happiness on the ponus essentially what we found is the degree to which floating improved your happiness was correlated with the degree to which your nucleus accumbens signal was being elevated post float. And the opposite was actually happening in the chair condition. So I think this is really fascinating data providing some really clear evidence that floating is impacting an area of the brain that's highly involved in reward processing and in motivation. Patients who have say severe depression have what's known as anadonia. It's one of the worst symptoms of depression. Things that are normally pleasurable no longer bring you pleasure. And when they do the same exact task in the MRI scanner with people who have depression guess what happens to their nucleus accumbens? It's blunted, it's barely activating and after they get better with treatment you start seeing the signal rise. So I think there's some evidence here that we're impacting this very deep circuitry that's involved in our sense of positivity in reward processing and in motivation. Now moving into the body one of the things I presented last year is this highly significant reduction in blood pressure especially diastolic blood pressure within 10 to 15 minutes everyone we've ever tested seems to be dropping anywhere from 10 to 15 points and we're not seeing anything like that in our control conditions. And so one of the things we started to explore is does the degree to which your blood pressure changes in the float actually relate to how it's affecting your emotions and your mood and we did find an association that I think is interesting. Flex is going to present a lot more about this tomorrow but to just kind of take you through this this is all the data points of blood pressure that we gathered and what you find in this left graph is as diastolic blood pressure drops so does your state anxiety and in the right graph as your diastolic blood pressure drops your serenity increases and so when we looked across all the different measures that we collected whether it be heart rate, heart rate variability or things like blood pressure or even respiration it was the blood pressure signal that seemed to be relating most heavily to changes in anxiety levels and serenity and so we're getting ready to write this up now and try to understand how the bodily changes are actually impacting the emotional changes. I think this is important though about two years ago they changed the definition of hypertension it went from 140 over 90 to 130 over 80 which means millions of people who are mostly healthy are now going to have a pretty severe diagnosis you don't want to have hypertension it's one of the biggest predictors of cardiovascular disease and stroke so if it's true that you could drop say 10 to 15 points and your blood pressure is you know in the 130 over 80 range you could take someone who's hypertensive and bring them into a normal tensive range and instead of having to medicate them which is what's happening right now in our population at a massive scale people are on blood pressure medications it's one of the biggest drugs in the market you might be able to do this naturally so is there any evidence to support this? well you could go back to the 1983 meeting and I bet you Tom was up here talking about this research where he took a group of patients who had hypertension floated them continuously for four months and found that four months later they were no longer hypertensive and if this could be replicated in a larger sample I think this could be a very useful way to envision floating for more than just people who have mental health issues there's a lot of people who have hypertension and that's a low hanging fruit and the blood pressure effects of floating I could tell you are the biggest effects that we're seeing in our physiological data there's another thing that came out actually just a few months ago it's known as the ICD-11 this is more or less the Bible for doctors around the world it lists every single medical condition that's out there and the symptoms that are involved in it and for the first time the ICD-11 put burnout as a condition and for those who don't know what it is this is their definition a syndrome conceptualized is resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed characterized by feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion increased mental distance from one's job feelings of negativism or cynicism related to the job and reduced professional efficacy you know I talked to my colleagues in psychiatry and psychology about burnout and some of them actually laugh and they say well isn't that life? is that really what life has come to? we all have to live in this burnt out way and some of the clearest data we've seen from the Swedish group is floating could really help with burnout so now that this is listed in the ICD-11 someone could get a diagnosis and insurance companies starting in around 2022 are going to be able to reimburse for burnout that's an exciting moment potentially for floating and I really believe that the sooner insurance companies get data to support floating's benefit the sooner they're actually going to be willing to pay for everyone to float at your centers could you imagine all those weekday floats during the say mornings or afternoons where the tanks are normally wide open right? you're going to have patients with pretty severe disabilities and medical issues coming in to float and they're not going to have to pay anything and that could be five or ten years away you know two months ago I actually got a chance to visit Australia and I was really fortunate to have Tony Basil there on the left who hosted me she's the head of the float therapy association of Australia and then some of you might remember Nick Dunn and he was here a few years ago at the float conference but I got a chance to actually see floating in Australia and I could tell you they're even more ahead of the game than America the disability organizations in Australia are already reimbursing patients who are floating in fact I met a patient who had over two months of float sessions completely covered retroactively because of their disability and so I think this is sort of a preview of what is going to happen in the future more and more of the medical providers and the health insurance companies are going to start reimbursing for floating but once again that is all contingent on the data we have to show floating is effective and the whole trip out to Australia was really centered around the international mental health conference where they invited me to come give a keynote talk and once again Australia is extremely progressive because there hasn't been any mental health conferences that have invited me in America to give a keynote talk but what I can tell you is they were very open to the idea that floating could help their patients and a lot of the patients are sick of the medications that was sort of a theme I learned during the trip so maybe we could actually look to Australia as a model of what could be happening already in America we just need to accelerate it a little bit and so I had an idea I said you know maybe we could start creating studies that could really leverage the potential of floating as an effective intervention above and beyond say medication and the one medication that I keep thinking about is really what I would say is the harbinger of what's to come it's what I refer to as the next opiate crisis benzodiazepines these are drugs like Xanax or Ativan or Valium that are prescribed at a monumental level making billions of dollars a year and over the past decade the number of benzo prescriptions has doubled and as of last year one in eight Americans is taking a benzo now I have nothing against a drug that could help you feel better but guess what one of the main side effects of benzodiazepines are you're physiologically addicted to it in other words you could be taking the drug exactly as your doctor prescribes it and then when you try to get off of it you cannot just like with opiates right it's the same issue the immense physiological addiction and it's very dangerous if you try to come off cold turkey you could actually die you could have delirium tremens you could have seizures so we're giving people prescriptions at a monumental rate of a drug that's just like the opiates and I could tell you a lot of the overdoses that are happening now with the opiates are often people who are both using the opiates and the benzos together and when you ask the patients who are taking benzos and misusing it meaning they're taking it more often than a doctor recommends or taking it for a longer period of time why are you doing that this is what they say 46% say they do it because they want to feel relaxed and they want to relieve muscle tension 22% is to help them with sleep about 11% is to help with emotions does anyone in this room know of some modality that could help relax relieve muscle tension improve sleep is there something else that might be able to do this that won't cause you to have an immense physiological addiction well I presented data last year showing that in this group of patients many of whom had tried benzodiazepines floating could significantly drop their state anxiety levels into a normative range and that was a single float session and then we followed them for about 24 hours and even a day later they're still feeling the benefits with the typical benzo it's usually about 4 to 8 hours later where the anxiety starts reemerging so what an interesting idea we could do a head-to-head study where we take the same patient and we float them or we prescribe to them a standard benzodiazepine and we track their anxiety levels pre-to-post float or pre-to-post benzo and we track it over the course of several days and when we get that data now a doctor could go to a patient who's struggling with anxiety struggling with sleep and say, you know I could hand you this prescription pad and you could take this pill or here's an alternative that doesn't require something that you could potentially get addicted to that will have the same effect and I think it's those sorts of studies where you do head-to-head competition within the same subject something known as a within-subject crossover design that is going to get western medicines to start taking floating seriously but in order to do that study we have to fund it and I could tell you Big Pharma is probably not very happy about funding this study so over the course of the next year one of my goals is actually to start raising money to actually conduct this study would that be something you guys would be interested in helping with? To me these are the sort of studies that are so quintessential because until you do those head-to-head comparisons the average doctor is going to say oh it's probably just a placebo it's probably snake oil it's probably one of these other things out there that helps people they think but it actually isn't helping them at all well if you could show them objective data in a head-to-head competition something that is beaten the placebo like a benzo then you could actually start convincing the doctors so my hope is over the next year or two we'll be able to raise enough money to actually do this head-to-head study and with that I'd like to thank my colleagues who I work with every day I want to especially thank Dr. Kalsum my partner in crime and all of this research and I look forward to the future of float research thank you