Ernest Kim, DC, LAc

Chiropractor • Acupuncturist • Transformation Coach
⚡️Fix pain, 🧠clear the mind, 👁️remember your Self
For biohacking, mindset & nervous system healing

[Darshak Rana ⚡️ @thedarshakrana]

A houseplant just changed everything we thought we knew about consciousness.

In 1966, Cleve Backster, a CIA interrogation specialist with a polygraph machine, was looking for ways to time how long it took different substances to travel up through plant tissue.

So, he attached electrodes to a dracaena plant in his office and watered it, expecting to see the electrical conductivity change as water moved up the stem.

Instead, the polygraph needle started tracing the exact pattern it makes when a human experiences an emotional response.

Backster stared at the readout. Plants don't have nervous systems. They don't have brains. The signal made no biological sense. So he decided to test something that made even less sense. He walked across the room, looked at the plant, and thought about burning one of its leaves with a match.

The instant the thought formed in his mind, before he moved toward the plant, before he struck a match, before he did anything physical, the polygraph exploded into frantic activity.

The plant was responding to his intention.

What happened next launched thousands of experiments and split the scientific community for decades.

Backster discovered that plants reacted to direct threats and to threats against other living things in their environment. When he dropped live brine shrimp into boiling water in another room, plants throughout the building registered distress responses at the exact moment of death. Distance didn't matter. Shielding the plants in lead containers didn't matter. The response was instantaneous and consistent.

Mainstream botanists dismissed the findings immediately. Plants process information through chemical signals and growth responses, without electrical consciousness. Any electrical activity was just random fluctuation or experimental error. The peer review system buried Backster's work. His credentials were questioned. His methods were called sloppy.

But the experiments kept working. Other researchers, following Backster's protocols, got the same results. Plants hooked to EEG machines showed brain wave patterns. They responded to music, to human emotions, to the intentions of people they had never been exposed to before. The electrical signatures were clear, measurable, and repeatable.

The implications were so uncomfortable that most of academic science simply refused to engage. If plants were somehow conscious, if they could sense intentions and respond to the emotional states of humans and other living things, consciousness was spread beyond brains. It was distributed across organized living systems rather than produced by neural networks.

Backster stumbled onto evidence that living systems might be constantly communicating through channels we don't have instruments to measure yet. The polygraph was crude enough to detect the electrical signatures of that communication without being sophisticated enough to explain them away.

Quantum biologists now suspect that living cells operate through quantum coherence processes that classical biology can't account for. Birds navigate using quantum entanglement in their visual systems. Plants conduct photosynthesis using quantum superposition to find the most efficient energy pathways. Maybe Backster's plants were demonstrating quantum consciousness, responding to information that was quantum entangled with the intentions and emotional states of nearby living systems.

What keeps most people awake when they learn about this work is realizing that if consciousness extends beyond brains, every living thing around you is potentially aware of your mental and emotional state in ways you never considered. The plant in your room. The bacteria in your gut. The ecosystem you walk through.

You think your thoughts are private.

The plants have been listening the entire time.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese immunologist spent 20 years proving that the chemicals trees release into the air walk into your bloodstream, hunt down your stress hormones, and arm your immune system in ways no therapist or pharmaceutical has ever matched, and most of the data has been sitting in Japanese medical journals for two decades waiting to be translated.

His name is Qing Li.

He is a clinical professor at Nippon Medical School in Tokyo and the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine. The Japanese government has been funding his research since 2004, and the body of work he has produced is the reason forest bathing is now an officially prescribed clinical therapy in Japan and Korea.

The story actually starts in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku to describe the practice of slow, mindful walking in a forest. They did it for a practical reason.

Japan was urbanizing fast, stress-related illness was climbing, and the country had thousands of square kilometers of forest sitting unused. The idea was to give people a reason to walk into the trees... They had no idea what was actually happening to the human body during those walks until Qing Li ran the first proper experiment in 2005.

He took twelve healthy adult men on a three-day, two-night trip to a forest park. They walked for a few hours each day. Nothing strenuous. No prescribed routes or breathing exercises. They simply walked slowly through the trees, breathing the air, looking at the forest.

Li drew blood and urine samples before the trip, on the second day, on the third day, on day seven after returning home, and again on day thirty.

The numbers that came back from the lab were not what anyone expected.

The activity of a specific type of immune cell called the natural killer cell, which is the cell your body uses to hunt down cancer cells and virus-infected cells before they can spread, had jumped by roughly 50 percent during the forest trip. The actual number of natural killer cells circulating in the bloodstream had increased significantly.

Three different anti-cancer proteins that those cells produce, called perforin, granzymes, and granulysin, had all risen sharply. And the effect did not disappear when the men went home. The immune boost was still measurable on day seven and was still partially present on day thirty.

Two hours a day in a forest had upgraded the immune system for a full month.

Li ran the same experiment with women a year later and found nearly identical results. Then he ran it with a control group who took a three-day trip through an urban area with the same amount of walking, the same hotel quality, and the same diet.

The urban group showed no measurable change in natural killer cell activity at all. The forest was doing the work, not the vacation.

The mechanism turned out to be a class of airborne molecules called phytoncides. Trees produce these compounds to defend themselves against insects, bacteria, and fungi. Pine, cedar, oak, and cypress trees release them in particularly large amounts, especially in warmer weather and after rainfall.

When you walk through a forest, you are inhaling those molecules into your lungs and absorbing them through your skin, and once inside your body they appear to directly stimulate the production and activity of the very immune cells Li was measuring in his lab.

Roughly 50 percent of the health benefit of a forest walk, according to Li's data, comes from the chemistry of the air itself. The other half comes from what the forest is doing to your nervous system.

This is where it stops being only about the immune system and starts being about stress.

A separate Japanese research team measured cortisol, the body's main stress hormone, in 84 participants across 35 different forest sites. They drew samples before and after a 30-minute walk in each forest and compared them to control walks in matched urban environments. The cortisol levels of the people who walked in the forest were lower than the cortisol levels of the people who walked in the city by a significant margin. Their heart rates were lower. Their blood pressure was lower.

The activity of their parasympathetic nervous system, which is the part responsible for rest and recovery, had gone up. The activity of their sympathetic nervous system, which is the part that drives fight or flight, had gone down.

Then a researcher at the University of Michigan named MaryCarol Hunter ran the cleanest version of this experiment ever done. She recruited participants from a city and told them to take a nature pill three times a week for eight weeks.

They were free to choose the time, the place, and the duration of the nature experience, as long as it was outside, in daylight, and free of phones, conversations, and aerobic exercise. They sent her saliva samples before and after each session so she could measure cortisol changes accurately and rule out the normal daily drop in stress hormones that happens to everyone.

The result was that participants experienced a 21.3 percent drop in cortisol per hour spent in nature, with the biggest payoff happening between minutes 20 and 30 of the walk.

After that, the cortisol kept dropping, but more slowly. The threshold dose for measurable stress relief was just 20 minutes outside in something that looked and felt like nature.

What none of this means is that nature is a substitute for therapy or for medication when someone genuinely needs them. Therapy treats different things than a walk does, and Li himself has been careful in interviews to call forest bathing a complementary intervention rather than a replacement for clinical care.

But what the research has settled is that the human body has a physiological response to being among trees that operates on the same biological systems modern medicine is trying to reach with drugs and clinical protocols, and that response is fast, measurable, and free.

The strangest part of Li's work is the implication he keeps repeating in interviews. The average person now spends more than 90 percent of their life indoors. Their cortisol stays elevated. Their natural killer cells stay sluggish.

Their parasympathetic nervous system rarely gets a chance to take over. The system that was tuned by millions of years of life under a canopy of trees is being asked to run permanently inside a box made of drywall and screens.

Your body has not forgotten what it is supposed to do in a forest. It is waiting for you to walk into one.

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

Another first timer.

Years of training helped him build strength, but they also left plenty of tension throughout the body. Sometimes a full-body tune-up is exactly what's needed.

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

Not every adjustment session comes with a Hollywood story 😆🙌🏽
And just to be clear, I don’t recommend letting non chiropractors adjust your neck, even if it’s your favorite actor.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Research shows a 72-hour fast can completely rebuild your immune system.

A study from the University of Southern California has revealed that fasting for 72 hours can trigger a complete regeneration of the immune system.
Researchers found that prolonged fasting causes the body to deplete its glucose and fat reserves, forcing it into a detoxifying state that eliminates damaged cells and toxins.

When normal eating resumes, stem cells are activated, leading to the production of fresh, healthy white blood cells. This immune reboot effect was observed in both mice and humans, particularly in chemotherapy patients who showed improved immune health after fasting cycles.

Lead researcher Dr. Valter Longo explains that during fasting, a gene called PKA is suppressed—this gene must be turned off for stem cells to enter regenerative mode.

As a result, the immune system essentially clears out older, weaker components and rebuilds itself anew. While more research is needed to explore the full range of benefits across organs, the study suggests that fasting could be a powerful, drug-free strategy for enhancing immunity, especially for those with weakened systems due to aging or cancer treatment.

[Valter Longo. USC Leonard Davis School]

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Jimmy Carr nailed something a lot of us feel but can’t explain.

We’re living better than 99.9% of humans who ever walked the earth, hot showers, modern medicine, endless entertainment, kids that actually survive infancy, yet so many of us feel miserable.

He calls it “life dysmorphia.” We get used to how good we have it (the hedonic treadmill), then compare ourselves to everyone else and tank our own happiness.

As he puts it: happiness = quality of life minus envy.

Marcus Aurelius put it perfectly: “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.”

When was the last time you caught yourself feeling unhappy despite objectively having it pretty damn good?

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

@KylitoF @ParallaxSyn @saylor @elonmusk I like SANG better

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

This was a much needed neck adjustment. You can almost see the emotions sitting there, right on the edge of coming out.

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

The goal isn’t just to fight illness. It’s to build a body that’s resilient enough to withstand it.

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

@ihtesham2005 I hardly ever talk to myself out loud, going to try this out now.

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

Going to start talking to myself out loud

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Russian psychologist spent 10 years proving that the act of talking to yourself out loud is one of the most powerful cognitive tools the human brain has, and almost nobody outside his field has read the work.

His name was Lev Vygotsky.

He worked in Moscow in the 1920s and died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of 37. He had no laboratory, no funding, almost no English readers, and a body of work that the Soviet government suppressed for two decades after he died.

He produced the foundational theory of how human cognition actually develops, and the central piece of that theory was a behavior almost every adult is faintly embarrassed about.

Vygotsky noticed that young children talk to themselves constantly. They narrate their own actions, they argue with imaginary opponents, they instruct themselves through tasks out loud.

The dominant theory at the time, from the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, said this was a sign of cognitive immaturity that children would eventually grow out of as they learned to think properly.

Vygotsky said the exact opposite.

He argued that this self-directed speech was the most important cognitive event in the entire developmental window, because it was the moment a child first started to use language as a tool to control their own mind. The child was not failing to think. The child was learning how to think by externalizing the process and listening to themselves do it.

He predicted that as children matured, this out-loud self-talk would not disappear. It would go underground. It would become silent inner speech, which is the running monologue every adult has inside their own head for the rest of their life.

The voice you hear when you read this sentence is the direct descendant of a four-year-old narrating their own block tower.

For 50 years almost nobody outside Russia had access to his work, and the few researchers who did pick it up could not get funding to test it. Then in the early 2000s the experiments finally started to pile up, and what they found was that Vygotsky had been right about something even more important than he knew.

The first major study came from Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin and Daniel Swingley at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012. They ran a simple visual search experiment. Participants were shown 20 images at once and asked to find a specific object, like a banana or a chair. In one condition they searched silently. In the other condition they were told to say the name of the object out loud to themselves while looking for it.

The participants who spoke the target name out loud found the object significantly faster, with higher accuracy, than the participants who searched in silence. The effect was strongest when the spoken word matched a familiar object the brain already had a strong category for.

Saying the word out loud literally tuned the visual system to detect that thing better. The researchers called it the label feedback effect, and the implication was that the act of vocalizing a goal physically changes how the brain processes the world while pursuing it.

The second major study came out of the University of Michigan and Michigan State in 2017. The lead researchers were Ethan Kross and Jason Moser, and they used both EEG and fMRI to record what happens inside the brain when people talk to themselves while emotionally upset.

They asked participants to recall painful autobiographical memories and reflect on them in two different ways. Some used the first person, saying things like "why am I feeling this way." Others used the third person, referring to themselves by their own name, saying things like "why is John feeling this way."

The brain scans showed that the simple act of switching from first person to third person, even silently, decreased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for rumination and self-referential pain. Within a single second of using their own name instead of the word I, participants showed measurably lower emotional reactivity. The shift required no extra cognitive effort. It cost the brain nothing. And it worked.

Kross described the mechanism in his interviews. Talking to yourself by name creates a small amount of psychological distance from your own experience. Your brain processes the situation more like a problem belonging to someone else, which means it can analyze it instead of drowning in it.

What Vygotsky had intuited in 1934 turned out to be even more powerful than the developmental theory he built it into. The voice you use to talk to yourself is not background noise. It is one of the most precise cognitive tools the brain has, and you can change how it works just by changing the pronoun you use.

People who talk through problems out loud are not anxious or unstable. They are running an externalized version of a process the rest of us are running silently and worse. The kindergartener narrating their block tower, the surgeon muttering through a procedure, the engineer pacing a hallway describing a bug to nobody, the athlete repeating a cue to themselves before a free throw, they are all using the same ancient mechanism that builds and steers human thought.

You can run the experiment yourself the next time you are stuck on something hard. Stop trying to solve it silently in your head. Say it out loud. Describe what you are seeing. Walk yourself through the steps as if you were explaining it to a colleague who is not in the room.

And when something genuinely upsets you, switch to your own name. Ask why this person is feeling this way, instead of why I am feeling this way.

The voice you have been told to keep quiet your entire life is one of the oldest pieces of cognitive technology you own.

Most people are still embarrassed to use it.

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

Shockwave therapy for knee pain

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

@FiddlesPicks I think wemby was gassed and wanted castle to bring the ball up so he could get in position for a lob or shot. Regardless, not sure why the coach didn’t call a TO.

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

Dr. Yun and Dr. Moramarco discuss how acupuncture is helping support veterans through PTSD, trauma, addiction, and recovery.

Many don’t realize acupuncture is a VA-covered benefit for veterans when referred by a VA doctor.

[Gary Brecka @thegarybrecka]

End your shower with cold water this morning.

Just 30 seconds. That is all it takes.

Here is what happens in those 30 seconds...

Norepinephrine spikes up to 300% above baseline. That is your focus, drive, and mood chemical.

Dopamine rises and stays elevated for hours.

Your immune system activates. Your circulation improves. Your mind clears instantly.

30 seconds of discomfort. Hours of benefit.

Most people avoid it because it is uncomfortable. That discomfort is the medicine.

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

So much of our stress comes from constantly thinking about the past or worrying about the future.

Sometimes, simply focusing on your breath and your steps is enough to bring you back to the present moment, creating more calmness and awareness in everyday life.

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

Dr. Moramarco, who took the first acupuncture licensing examination ever administered in California, reflects on a time in the 1980s when acupuncture was barely introduced to the public and AIDS treatments were still extremely limited.

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

🙌⚡️

[Nicolas Hulscher, MPH @NicHulscher]

96% of patients declared COMPLETE REMISSION of alpha-gal syndrome after ear acupuncture — lasting months to years.

Basically EVERYONE in the study could eat meat again within weeks of undergoing Soliman Auricular Allergy Treatment (SAAT).

There were ZERO adverse reactions.

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

@TheZodiacGM @NBA @GamsIAm Earth providing support to the water signs

[Ernest Kim, DC, LAc @drernestkim]

Earth 🪨 and Water💧 signs

[The Zodiac GM @TheZodiacGM]

Top Teams with the BEST Starter Synergy this Postseason… Knicks & Spurs

Knicks: A+
🔵Towns (Scorpio)
🔵Hart (Pisces)
🔵Anunoby (Cancer)
🔵Bridges (Virgo)
🔵Brunson (Virgo)

Spurs: A+
🔵Wemby (Capricorn)
🔵Champagnie (Cancer)
🔵Vassell (Virgo)
🔵Castle (Scorpio)
🔵Fox (Sag/Cap cusp)