The Benefits of Grounding: An Interview with Clint Ober

What follows is a transcript for the podcast: The Science of Grounding: How Earthing Improves Sleep and Reduces Inflammation

Topics within the interview:

1. What is Grounding?
2. How was Grounding Discovered?
3. What Causes Inflammation in the Human Body?
4. Grounding and Sleep
5. Chronic Stress and Grounding
6. Blood Circulation Improvement from Grounding
7. The Earthing Movie
8. The Science Behind Grounding and Earthing
9. Products for Grounding
10. Is it Possible to be Grounded too Much?
11. Humans are Electrical and Chemical Beings
12. What’s Next For Clint Ober?
13. Grounding: Fibromyalgia and Lyme Disease
14. Grounding School Floors for Special Education Children

What is Grounding?

Dr. Heather Sandison: Welcome to Collective Insights. I'm your host today, Dr. Heather Sandison, and I'm joined today by Clint Ober, the founder of Earthing. Clint, thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.

Clint Ober: Well, thank you so much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it and it's a real opportunity. Thank you.

Dr. Heather Sandison: So tell me what is grounding?

Clint Ober: Okay, grounding. Anybody that has children kind of knows where grounding is, getting your kids to settle down and get back to normal, and in a sense, that's what grounding is. Earthing, grounding, the concept we're talking about here is the earth maintains a slight negative electrical charge and everything in the world electrically is grounded to the earth to prevent fire and to maintain electrical stability in buildings, homes, and all of your appliances, anything that's electrical.

And the grounding that we're talking about is the human body is the most electrical thing in the environment and throughout all time where we used to be barefoot or lived in contact, wore leather-soled shoes or we lived in contact with the earth, we touched the earth with our hands, we dug in the earth, we slept on the earth. And so when the human body is connected to the earth, it's electrically grounded, meaning it's at earth potential.

And I hate to get real technical, especially in the beginning, but it's like the earth has a certain we'll call a negative charge, so the body when it's not connected to the earth would probably have a more positive charge, because the atmosphere is positive. So when you put shoes on, you're no longer grounded, you're insulated from the earth, so you become positive. As soon as you take your shoes off, put your feet back on the earth then your body becomes grounded. So, we're talking about the human body being reconnected, electrically grounded, electrically connected to the earth.

Dr. Heather Sandison: It sounds like a form of balance, right? That these electrical charges need balance and kind of recalibration occasionally?

Clint Ober: Yes, very much so. It's like you always have to remember in the beginning, we were never insulated from the earth. Sixty years ago, we could barely get off of the earth and out of the dirt. We were either barefoot, in the '50s, we were barefoot. I'm 76, so when I talk I talk historically. But we were barefoot or we wore leather-soled shoes and if you wore a leather shoe then if it rained, you had to take them off and carry them, so they didn't get wet, otherwise, that would ruin them. But the last thing you ever wanted to do is wear shoes. I mean, you wore them to school, you wore them to church, you wore them to special events and that was it. You come home and you lose the shoes. So, it was before 1960, we were always naturally grounded or close to being naturally grounded. 1960 along came the rubber-soled shoes, the athletic type shoes, and we invented the plastics, so everybody could have very inexpensive shoes.

Carpets, remember, well, I know you wouldn't remember when carpets came along in the early '60s and it was that old shag green-type carpeting and they carpeted all the homes and put shoes on everybody and then television became very popular and everybody started spending more time in the home, not grounded. When we were children, you couldn't get us in the house. Now, you can't get kids out of the house because of the screens. And so we've changed our environment. I mean, here's an electrical unit, everything, every cell in the body, everything in the body is electrical first, chemical second. It takes a movement of an electron in order to create energy or to change one thing.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Now that's a profound statement you just made. Repeat that one for me.

Clint Ober: Okay, I'm sorry.

Dr. Heather Sandison: No. We are electrical first, chemical second. I think that, like a light bulb went off for me because as a naturopathic doctor spending time with my patients, we focus so much on the chemicals, right? Any doctor, the pharmacology, right? You're talking about introducing chemicals. Drugs are one of the primary tools that they use and then in my practice, where hopefully as icing on the cake, we're using things like supplements, but also even just talking about food. And what you're describing is in our biohacking, in our foundational guide to biohacking, we talk about how the environment, our outside environment is such a big component of our overall health, of our baseline health. And what you're describing is just these foundations, right?

Clint Ober: Right.

Dr. Heather Sandison: That we should be exposed to the earth relatively regularly.

Clint Ober: And when you are connected to the earth... well first of all, the entire health community and I have a lot of family in the health world. My oldest daughter's husband is Head of the Radiology Department at the Mayo Clinics in Rochester and, and it goes on and on, so I'm exposed to a lot of that. But anyhow, the point is, health is our most natural state and if you look at the animals in the wild, they have none of the modern health disorders that humans have. And it's like animals who live indoors with their owners manifest the same health disorders as their owners. So there's an environmental issue here.

Now, the word electrical is not something that people really tune into because if you have an issue, you want something physical. You want somebody to touch you. You want to take a pill if you want one. So, let's back up. So, food, if you eat live food, you're eating electrical energy. The reason you're eating food is to get electrons and nutrition and dead food has no electrons. I mean, the live enzymes, the electrons and so on, so it's about... I kind of get lost sometimes in my own language here, but it's really about everything is electrical. I don't know how to describe it with not getting too technical, but the food we eat, we're eating energy. When we touch the earth, the earth has its own energy and so, you're like a little capacitor or a little battery, so when I say you touch the earth, then you charge your battery up.

And the most important thing about grounding is very simple, the only reason we ground anything in the electrical industry, communications industry is to prevent charge and to maintain electrical stability. Now, in the 1960s, there is this thing called... I mean, we started wearing shoes and then there was a curve that began to develop in autoimmune disease, inflammation. We now call them inflammation-related health disorders but before they were the body eating itself like lupus and MS and so on back in the '60s and so on. So anyhow, as soon as you disconnect the body from the earth, then it becomes positively charged. And I can get into how neutrophils and how the immune system works, but I wanted to say one-

Dr. Heather Sandison: Please do.

How was Grounding Discovered?

Clint Ober: I want to say one thing first you can't have inflammation when you're grounded. The animals in the wild don't have inflammation. Cancer doesn't exist in the wild. Animals who live indoors with their owners have the same cancer death rate as their owners.

Dr. Heather Sandison:There's a couple of really great concept here. And one of the things I appreciate about what you're pointing out is that instead of looking at what's wrong with people who have disease, you're making a great point, let's look at what's right. What is it that animals who don't get sick are doing? What is it that people who don't get sick are doing versus focusing all of our attention on the pathology and what's wrong.

Another piece that I'm hearing you say, I discussed with my patients all day long, right? This idea of inflammation we can measure an HSCRP or sed rate clinically, but that doesn't tell us anything about the why. And I've heard people over and over, they say, "Inflammation is the cause of all disease, inflammation is the cause of all disease." And I go, "Wait, what? But something caused the inflammation." We're not actually answering the question until we say what caused the inflammation. So, you're speaking directly to that, that this absence of grounding, this inability to recharge is causing inflammation.

Clint Ober: Yeah, 20 years ago, I don't know how much time we have, but I need to put a little preference here to makes sense for your viewers is I spent 30 years in the communications industry where everything has to be grounded to the earth. So, grounding, I have a working knowledge of grounding. It's an electrical phenomena and it works. You can't see it, but it works. So one day, I accidentally discovered that I had chronic pain, but when I would ground myself the chronic pain would go away and this was back in 1998, '99, back there, a little over 20 years ago. But with my background in electrical, I couldn't understand exactly what it was and why. But when I went to look at medical literature, there was no information, whatsoever. In fact, the word inflammation didn't even exist back in '99 or 2000. It was about 2004 when the word inflammation started coming into the language and it was your body on fire and body in flame, the slow burning fire in the body.

So anyhow, I didn't understand any of it, but I went on a search because I was retired at that time. And I went on a search to try to figure out why pain goes away when you ground the body and nobody knew. And the more I tested myself and a few friends, the more I realized that it's a very real phenomena and nobody knew about it. That was really exciting on one day, but the next day was very concerning because I was the only who knew it, nobody else did and everybody thought I was nuts. But anyhow, so I can just tell a couple of stories here to give some understanding, but this is an accidental discovery. I didn't set out to discover. I mean, my background is in communications and distribution of information, those kind of things and I had no background in Biology other than paying medical, putting kids through medical school, which was quite interesting.

But anyhow, so once I learned this, I was living in Arizona at that time, went down to the University of Arizona in Tucson, visited with a few folks there, no answers, and so I kept playing with it and I kept experiencing it. And no matter what kind of pain a person had like arthritic pain, ground them and the pain would go away and it was just kind of unbelievable, it was kind of magic. And so I went out to UCLA, I figured they would know what is going on. And I told them what I was doing, and went ground around north ground and put a patch on somebody's point of pain, an electrode patch with a wire connected to the ground and the pain would disappear and it would happen rather quickly.

And so, nobody understood it. I didn't understand it. They didn't understand anything electrical, I did not understand anything biological and so it was very interesting. That's why it took 20 years to get this to where it is. But so anyhow, as time went on, they wouldn't do the study. They wanted me to go do some more preliminary work to help them understand better what I was talking about. And I still to this day, people do not know that the earth is negatively charged. They do not know that when you put your bare feet on the earth that your body becomes negatively charged. Now, when you put a negative charge on the body, it's for instance, I don't have all my charts here.

But anyhow, it's like as soon as you ground the body, the red blood cells become more negatively charged, more like the earth itself, the negative charge of the earth, so they become grounded. So, the more negative charge you have on the red blood cells, they begin to repel each other. They can't stick together, like in [inaudible 00:17:19] formation, and so on. So animals and wild have thin normal blood. Animals and people who live indoors have thick sticky blood because they don't have a negative. They have a reduced negative charge on their red blood cells. 

What Causes Inflammation in the Human Body?

Dr. Heather Sandison: I wonder if part of the resistance to this is around the semantics, right? What I'm hearing you say is that we need to be more negative and I wonder if there are people that are just a little bit resistant to that, right? You're saying we're mostly positive, earth is a negative.

Clint Ober: Okay.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Yeah, go ahead.

Clint Ober: Okay, so I need to explain what that is. Negative means no charge, just think of it that way and positive means charge and so it's really they're both charged. What it is you have a stack of electrons over here and you have a stack of electrons here, there's more electrons here and less electrons here, so you're going to discharge, so that they're equal, so you equalize, that's what we're talking about. So the negative, everything is negative when it's grounded, everything connected to the earth, the trees, the animals, anything, the water.

Anything touching connected to the earth that's conductive is negative. Anything above the earth or insulated from the earth because of breathing oxygen and so on, become more positive. And so yeah, so negative and positive, these are electrical terms, they do not fit into the normal language, people will say, "You're nuts." So anyhow, that's very basic, so we have that to work with now.

I think in order to explain this inflammation. The way I came across the inflammation was when I met Dr. Stephen Sinatra from back in Connecticut. He came out and was attending a convention. I told him what I was doing. And he's a cardiologist, so I figured well, they would know something about electrical because they're dealing with the heart, and the brain and so on. So anyhow, he sat down and he listened to what I was doing. And he says, "Clint," he says, "if you're reducing inflammation, I mean pain," he says, "you need to be looking at inflammation." And back then this is 2001 or '02, nobody knew what inflammation was.

And so I started looking and then all of a sudden, I began to discover how the immune system produces reactive oxygen species, they go and oxidize pathogens like a neutrophil. If you have a pathogen or an injury, a neutrophil will come over and release reactive oxygen species and it will come over and wrap itself around a pathogen or a damaged cell and release these reactive molecules and reactive means they're electrically charged, they're positive. They'll rip an electron from an adjacent, whatever comes in contact. That's why it's called reactive.

So all of a sudden, I began to understand that these neutrophils are electrical. They operate with electrical charges. Then I began to understand that the body was more electrical than, nobody thinks of it this way. But so then, I started working with Stephen a little bit more and then he came along, he says, "Well," he says, basically what's happening here is the neutrophil is obviously oxidizing a pathogen, but there's some remaining reactive oxygen species that are left over after the oxidative burst. And they will within a few nanoseconds feel an electron from an adjacent tissue, then it screams out to the immune system and then the immune system sends another neutrophil metaphorically speaking, and takes care of that problem, so you're setting up a chain reaction, you're setting up a fire, you're lighting a fire.

And so, this oxidative process is the underlying cause of inflammation, so this does not occur in grounded animals and it does not occur in grounded human beings because all the body is negatively charged. So, now there's an abundance of free electrons to mop up those excess reactive oxygens from the oxidative burst. Does that make sense?

Dr. Heather Sandison: Yeah. Some inflammation is a positive thing, it's a good thing. I'm going to stop using positive and negative because it's an entirely different context here, but so some inflammation is a good thing because it helps us to heal, it helps us to fight.

Clint Ober: That's an oxidative burst, yes.

Dr. Heather Sandison: An oxidative burst and what you're describing is that transition that's unhealthy where that initial inflammatory response that's good for us becomes bad for us and becomes chronic inflammation.

Clint Ober: Because the excess radicals are not neutralized after the event, yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Which a generation or two ago would have happened because we were exposed to the earth.

Clint Ober: Oh, yeah. You were grounded, so it was never an issue. When you're grounded, your red blood cells are negative about 20 millivolts. When you're not, they'll go up to about 5 millivolts. Okay, so now it doesn't have enough free electrons to reduce all of the oxidation that's going on in the body. It's not just neutrophils, I mean, there's everything in the world going on in the body, I mean, it's just endless. So, you need to be grounded at all times in nature in order to prevent what we call inflammation.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Do I understand correctly from your experience working with electricity in buildings and stuff, we need to have that grounding wire and that is for the purpose of preventing things like fire from the positive electrons accumulating and then creating or protons, right?

Clint Ober: Yes.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Protons from accumulating and then causing a fire, so we do that for a building, but for this current generation for the past 50, 60, 70 years, we haven't done that for the human body.

Clint Ober: No, we put shoes on the body 60 some years ago, we moved indoors 60 some years ago, 1960, yeah, 60 years ago. That's when the mass movement, the mass change in our environment, we put shoes on and we carpeted our floors, and we've put synthetic flooring in our homes and we stopped going outdoors. We need more-

Dr. Heather Sandison: Yeah, so you talked a bit about how this affects neutrophils, which are active in the immune system.

Clint Ober: Yes.

Grounding and Sleep

Dr. Heather Sandison: Can you talk about how grounding changes our sleep patterns?

Clint Ober: Yes, we did one study. One of our first studies was we measured circadian cortisol. We had a group of ladies, this is a study done by anesthesiologist and we grounded, we made sure the sure to cortisol every four hours for 24 hours and that was their profile to start with and then we grounded them for six to eight weeks. So before their circadian cortisol profiles were kind of like spaghetti, but afterwards, everybody's cortisol profile synchronized into a nice band and in that band, the thing that was most striking was that there was this uniformity. And these were subjects that they didn't know each other, they weren't living in the same town even, but to see that occur, the only thing that could have caused that was the earth, something in the earth.

One we were putting out the fire of inflammation, so they were definitely going to sleep, but the other thing we learned was at 4:00 in the morning, cortisol begins to spike. It's going along, at midnight it drops to the lowest, goes along and then at about 4:00, it just spikes and goes way up until about 6:00 in the morning, and supposedly that's what gets you out of bed. You have to have that cortisol to get going in the morning, but if you can't sleep at night, that's because your cortisol is elevated. There's no other reason you can't sleep. It's part of your fight or flight system. There's a bear in the woods, your cortisol is elevated, your body's going to be on alert.

So, anyhow, the cortisol study was we learned that the earth is turning like this, and you're sitting on the earth in a fixed location, so you're turning with the earth, the sun stays constant, so wherever the sun is hitting the earth, that's where the electrons on the surface of the earth are the most excited. So at noon, when it's the hottest, that's when the actual head electrons, energy of the earth is the most excited, the most energetic. At night at midnight, that's when it's the quietest. That's when you will supposedly be asleep.

But like at 4:00 AM, as the earth is turning, so those electrons that are being excited by the earth, they create four huge eddies on around the globe, and they're constant to the sun when you and the earth are turning within them. And so, at 4:00 AM as you first go into that phase, then all of a sudden cortisol begins to spike. There's no daylight, there's no sound, there was nothing else. The only thing in the environment at that time is a change in the amplitude of earth's electric field.

Dr. Heather Sandison: How fascinating. So, I'm curious about the intervention. You and your colleagues, did you have these women go and walk on the beach? Did they change their sheets into their earthing sheets? Did they get a new mattress? Did they have a band? What was the intervention?

Clint Ober: We took a carbon matte, black type carbon matte, and it was like 12 inches wide, 24 inches long and it was conductive material that we would use for shielding in the electrical environment. But anyhow, so we bonded it to a felt pad, put it under the sheet where they were sleeping, put a wire outdoors and connected it to a ground rod, and so all they did was lay on that at night and sleep on it.

Dr. Heather Sandison: So, it was an intervention that was happening when they were sleeping and then you saw effects on them sleeping.

Clint Ober: Yes.

Chronic Stress and Grounding

Dr. Heather Sandison: What three things that comes up for me as you described this is that many of my patients who are in chronic pain have abnormal cortisol rhythms because that pain is a chronic stressor, so I'm wondering if part of the mechanism is that when you reduce the pain, the body can go back into these natural cortisol rhythms just because that chronic stressor has been resolved?

Clint Ober: Yes, that's what this is all about. So, I tell a little story sometimes because that helps. I grew up on a ranch in Montana and sometimes in the summer, there would be these infestation of jackrabbits, they would be everywhere. The grass was tall then the jackrabbits would come and then would come to the coyotes. The coyotes ate the jackrabbits, the jackrabbits ate the grass, and the grass was gone, and so on. But in the meantime, coyotes lived on jackrabbits. So, a jackrabbit would be sitting there, eating grass like normal all day long, and then... I've got to see what's going on here. I'm sorry about that. Okay. I can't.

But anyhow, the jackrabbits will be sitting there eating grass like that's what they do. That's what they do all day long. Coyote will be sneaking up on them, and so as soon as the rabbit sensed the coyote, the coyote would jump, their ears went up, the jackrabbit would spring, so his cortisol skyrocketed. It was just fight or flight mechanisms. And the jackrabbit would run zigzag back and forth across the pasture, keeping one eye on the coyote. Coyote most of the time would run out of energy and he would lay down and just stop chase because he was exhausted. He only had so much energy.

And so the rabbit would run just a little bit further conservation of energy, and then rabbit would be sitting there and you could just see that he had a visceral response. He was just sitting there shaking, quivering. Then all of a sudden, it'd have a huge big shake and then it would go back to eating like nothing ever happened. So what happened in my mind, I didn't know this at that time, but now the jackrabbit was grounded and they discharged the cortisol, they discharged the stress from the trauma of the chase.

And so the reason I tell that story often is because I've worked with a lot of primarily women who have MS, lupus and the autoimmune diseases. They are the ones who showed up. They are the ones we can get for subjects because the doctor said, "Here you can have them, we can't help them."

Dr. Heather Sandison: But there's so little that conventional medicine can do.

Clint Ober: Exactly. And so, anyhow, I work with a lot of them. And one day, I asked one of the ladies with him, she was like 34 years old, and I said, "What happened? You weren't born with MS were you?" And that's how little I knew about it and she said, "No, I wasn't." And I said, "Well, what happened to cause this to show up in your life or manifest? Did you inherit it or whatever?" She says, "I don't know. It just showed up." And so, I was grounding her environment for a test in everything that we were doing. And all of a sudden she said, "You know that was the year that I lost my son and we lost our house, and just everything went wrong for us." So, she went into a very traumatic stress, state of stress and then MS showed up.

So basically, when you become stressed for a long time and you don't discharge this trauma or this stress, then your cortisol remains elevated, then all of a sudden anxiety starts showing up and then anxiety, irritability, and then, it leads to depression. And in the meantime, your immune system is compromised because the cortisol and just, you're not grounded, so the inflammation is building in your body. The immune system is now spending all this time fighting the inflammation rather than doing the things that it normally does every day, all day long and every night, especially night, when it repairs and restores the body.

So, anyhow, we all live in this, we all have these coyotes. You get up in the morning if you have kids, those are coyotes, they're after you. You have a husband or a maid or a wife, you have to get them off to work to school or now, things are really traumatic and then you have to go set about to do your things and the phone rings, that's a coyote. You go to the mailbox, the bills, those are coyotes. But when I say coyote, they all promote a stress response, they create a fight or flight response, and that promotes cortisol. And the longer you stay in an elevated sympathetic state, meaning you're in an elevated fight or flight state, then your adrenal, which are hormone based they normally modulate and dampen the sympathetic response, but if the sympathetic response is relentless, then the adrenals are going to become exhausted and then the cortisol and the pain, I mean, it's going to create more pain.

I describe that as fibromyalgia. That fibromyalgia girls taught me all of this, but anyhow, so that is what causes that phantom pain sometimes and that state of stress. So anyhow, now they become high anxiety, irritability, depression, all these things, so it is just a vicious circle and the immune system can't maintain because the cortisol is relentless, you have to stop. You have to discharge from the coyote from the attack. At the end of the day, you have to, no matter. If you can't do anything else in your life, you have to go outdoors, take your shoes off, put your feet on the earth for 30 minutes and discharge all the coyote attacks, all the adrenaline, all the cortisol.

So then, once you put the inflammation out in the body, then the immune system can go back to doing what it normally does, repair and restore and maintain health. Health is the body's most natural state, that's how we all got here. When you compromise the immune system, then you get sick, but if your immune system is healthy, you can't get sick. You can't have all of these health disorders. You have to get ungrounded you have to live on it. You can eat the best food in the world, but if you're electrically ungrounded, if your body is electrically charged, that's distressing your entire system. And food, you need all these things, you need good food, you need exercise, you need good relationships and family and all these things. But look at the people who are in trouble, they're full of inflammation. Why are their bodies on fire?

Dr. Heather Sandison: You bring up such a great point. A recent podcast guest of ours, Dr. Keesha Ewers, she focuses a lot on autoimmune disease in her practice and what she experienced and talks about now publicly, is that she had an early childhood trauma. She was sexually abused by someone in a position of power and what she told herself was that she wanted to die essentially when she was experiencing that sexual trauma as a child. And so then as she got older, her body was basically getting that signal from her brain. And you are describing a mechanism for this that that early trauma that sticks with us, it creates this high cortisol state and then in our society, we don't have a container, we don't have a way to discharge that, we're not encouraged to go outside and walk around barefoot. In fact, we're discouraged from that.

Clint Ober: Yes.

Dr. Heather Sandison: And so, we don't have this ability like you said to shake off those coyotes that come that are inevitable. And of course, like these intense childhood traumas are one thing, but also a lot of us grow up in a society where we're discouraged from talking about them, so from discharging them at any level, not just going outside and walking barefoot, but from processing. And so here, this is an incredible explanation for why that happens and why that shows up so much later in life. It precipitates this pattern in the immune system. This is absolutely fascinating. So, go ahead.

Clint Ober: Well, yeah. It's really, in nature, health is the body's state. I mean, you have infectious disease, you have bacterial infections and so on, but these degenerative inflammation-based health disorders do not exist and they affect the family. It's like you can go from all the way, I mean, even autism was listed as an inflammation-related health disorder just a couple of years ago at Johns Hopkins, but then you can go to diabetes, you can go to all of them and less cancers, Alzheimer's, they're all inflammation-based, but they interfere with our entire family, our communities, our world.

But the thing that I learned most of all over all these 20 years and I have spent many of time taking a person outdoors by the hand and say, "Please come with me, take your shoes off and stand or sit in a chair and put your feet on the earth for 30 minutes". Children, it doesn't matter, especially autistic children, and you just take them out there and all of a sudden, their demeanor changes.

All of a sudden, I mean 30 minutes, they're in that tension, they have that tension in their body, but as soon as they get outdoors, they release, it begins to release, then pain starts to come down and then the circulation improves, the energy improves. And then you see the changes in the face. I mean, the demeanor changes, the circulation improves. The main thing is the circulation of course. But I always tell people, you can't be unhappy if you go outdoors and sit on the earth for a half hour.

Blood Circulation Improvement from Grounding

Dr. Heather Sandison: This is so incredible, but you described what's going on with those red blood cells, so circulation is so important for every organ system in the body. I mean, this affects absolutely everything. So can you just go back to that? Tell me again why do those red blood cells circulate better after grounding?

Clint Ober: Okay. Most people have thick and sticky blood today, especially older people and most older people take blood thinners. The reason is because the surface of their red blood cells they have an electrical surface charge and if it's negative like the earth, then like little negative magnets, they'll repel each other. They can't stick together. They don't stick on top of each other. The blood can't get thick and sticky, but as time goes on when you're oxygenating the tissue, the blood is going in and contributing, I mean, delivering oxygen and delivering and giving up electrons in many cases. And so, as the red blood cells lose their electrons, then they start sticking together and sharing electrons. It's like electroplating chrome on a bumper or anything else. You put a negative and a positive and then they stick together.

So, as soon as you ground, the earth has a universal negative charge. It doesn't matter where you are and electrical is that speed of light. It's not like taking a vitamin, I mean, where it has to be ingested and circulated and all, but it's speed of light. So within a very short time after you're grounded, your red blood cells... I have a photo here somewhere. At the end of the movie, there's lots of pictures of all that, but it actually shows the movement of blood before grounding and after grounding. But what happens is, so now, when the red blood cells, when you connect the body to the earth, the earth, the whole body becomes negative, meaning an abundance of free electrons. I think every cell in your body becomes more negatively charged. That's why it's easier for older people to get up because of the electro repulsion. When you have two negative things, they push each other apart.

But the red blood cells they become negatively charged equal to the earth. You're grounding your red blood cells is what you're doing. This is described well in the movie, it's described well in the book, and-

The Earthing Movie

Dr. Heather Sandison: And the movie's name is Earthing? Just Earthing?

Clint Ober: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison: And where can you find it? Where could someone view that?

Clint Ober: The Earthing Movie is on YouTube. It's free. There's no commercials. I kept it that way. I didn't license it. I said this belongs to whoever wants it, and they need to be able to see it, how they want, and-

Dr. Heather Sandison: And the name of the book is just the Earthing book?

Clint Ober: Yeah, It's the Earthing, Earthing.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Earthing.

Clint Ober: It's the most important health discovery ever and the reason I gave it that title is because grounding has the most profound results on the body and it's free. All you have to do is go outdoors and connect yourself. I mean, sit on the earth for a while.

Dr. Heather Sandison: And I'd imagine it feels like common sense to you, right? You made this discovery accidentally when you touch the grounding wire to the point of pain on your body. Yet, we all I think experience I'll speak for myself if I can go out for a hike, if I can go for a walk on the beach, if I can get outside, then I feel like a different person afterwards, particularly after a period of stress. That's I know exactly what I need, I just have to get outside and being in nature and I think that's what I always say is, "Oh, I just need to be in nature." But what you're describing is there's actually this physiologic mechanism that we can point to, and it's about this electron differential and this change.

Clint Ober: Yeah, so you're discharging, like the coyote, like the rabbit, you're discharging the stress of the cortisol. I mean, you see everything, I mean, the cortisol, this is all electrical phenomena. I mean, it's chemicals, but I mean, the only thing that makes this chemical, this chemical, and this chemical, that chemical is the amount of electrons. And so everything is electrical and cortisol is kind of like an acid. And I mean, it's good, but if you don't have the adrenals functioning properly, then it's going to just like oxidize and create inflammation and pain in the body.

Dr. Heather Sandison: But the theme is balanced, right? We need both positive and negative, but whether one of them gets accumulates and it becomes out of balance, that's when it leads to disease.

Clint Ober: Yes, yeah. You have to live in harmony and balance with nature. You have to find your place in nature. And it's always like I tell everybody, I grew up on a ranch, so I'm a naturist by nature. If I don't see it in nature, I don't believe it. I don't believe anything. I have to see it. But once I see it in nature, once I understand it, then it's real. Anything else is okay.

But it's like, okay, I can tell you another quick story. It's like when I was very young, I would sit on a horse and go out and babysit cows. And what you're doing is, we had like an 800-head and you had like four or five, six sections in a pasture, and so you keep the cattle in one area. And then what a cowboy does, and a cowboy is not likely Western cowboys, these are kids who sit on horses and just look at cows, very boring. Fortunately, I have a nice dog. But anyhow, so what you're looking for is a cow. If it's glassy eyed or if it's making some balling or if it's not looking like the rest of the animals, you take it out of the herd.

Then you go check the water in the tanks, they have alkalinity and then you go check the stream to make sure there's not a dead animal upstream. You check the grass to make sure it's not too short, and then you check to make sure there's no noxious weeds starting to come up in the pasture. So one of those things is wrong, something is wrong, that's what made that cow sick. So, the cowboy's job is about protecting the pasture or making sure the pasture is pristine and clean. The environment for those animals is pristine and clean because if they get sick, you have to call the bank and the vet and toss the keys up and said, "You guys figure this out. We're out of here because there's no money."

And so, that's kind of where I come from. I mean, I just look at everything differently. It's like if you're not feeling well, what you're eating sometimes is what's eating you, it's your mental. I mean, and I do a lot of work with Deepak Chopra, and the reason I connected with Deepak was because we can ground people and teach people about how to put the fire out. But again, what's feeding that fire? It's coyotes and it's coyotes that people need to learn to ground themselves mentally, the things in life that are important, not important, the things you can do and the things you can't do. Find that balance in there and keep backing up in life until you can put a smile on your face and get up in the morning and feel good. And if you don't feel that way, then you've got to change something. 

The Science Behind Grounding and Earthing

Dr. Heather Sandison: This observation of nature, that's really like the foundation of a good scientist and it sounds like there's a bit of skepticism in how you approach things as well. I'm curious, what is the current state of the science that you guys are doing around grounding and earthing?

Clint Ober: Well, what we're doing now, I mean, we've done a lot of, I think we have 24, 25 peer reviewed, published, I call them proof of concept studies where we test everything, and we have. We've tested literally everything. All those studies are available at the earthinginstitute.net and it's free to anybody and everybody. And so, what we're doing now is more clinical and just supporting people who are doing clinical studies. We're not doing them directly ourselves sometimes. We're just giving them the supplies, the tools, whatever they need, giving them all of our knowledge as best we can.

I tell these stories that's about all I can rely on sometimes. The biggest problem that we have with sharing grounding is if somebody gets sick, they go to the doctor and so I have a lot of friends who are cardiologists, especially in Southern California and they're good people. I like them. They're enjoyable. They're really good friends. But I remember one of them one day, called me and he said, "I need another half a dozen of these mats." And so I said, "Well, I'm going to be driving by, I'll drop them off" because I just wanted to meet him. And I stopped by his office because he'd been buying them for a couple of years. I said, "What do you do with these mats?" And he says, "Well, we use them here for staff to stay off our hypertension meds."

And I said, "Why don't you give them to your patients?" He said, "Well, unfortunately, there's a couple of issues." He says, he pointed out the door and he said, "Every time a new patient walks through that door, they're worth a certain amount of money to me just to run tests and to do what I do, which is essential, and then if I don't put them on a script, they're not going to come back. They're going to go to somebody else because today, everybody would because of TV and everything else, a lot of them, they want script." But anyhow, he said, "Basically, it's worth about $10,000 in revenue every time a new cardiac patient comes in." And the problem is, he said, "I'm married to a woman who's married to a doctor, me. She lives like she's married to a doctor. I'm still paying off my schooling. I have this office. We have the staff. We have all of this overhead." He says, "And it doesn't matter what this does. I can't tell people to go home and get well for free."

And I don't say that demeaning medical profession. It is a situation that we have created over the years where people are dependent on, I mean, the medical industry is dependent on making money.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Yeah. These systems that have been put in place that really prevent wellness, right?

Clint Ober: Yes. And in many cases fees-

Dr. Heather Sandison: And some kind of disease.

Clint Ober: Yeah. It's like, he said, "After I get my overhead and I get everything covered," he says, "you can have them, but right now I have to take care of them and I have to do what I do." And they have to be because the other side of it is, people are not going to go out and just get grounded and the other piece of it is, in grounded in nature, they're grounded 24/7, so they can't have inflammation. But how many humans and pets are going to ever be allowed to be grounded 24/7, only the woman who have MS and lupus or cancer or people whose health is extremely compromised, they get grounded, they stay grounded, they won't get ungrounded because they know the consequence because of the pain and so on.

But the day to day people we can't, it's our society, it's our culture, so that's why I like to work with children. I like to work with the school, so I like to work with the teachers. I like to work with somebody that's going to carry this on. The older people, they're going to hit ground soon enough anyway, so I don't need to worry about them.

Dr. Heather Sandison: In the ground, which is a little bit discouraging.

Clint Ober: They're going to be in. No, but anyhow, it's not discouraging. Anytime you figured you identify something that most people are not aware of, the challenges of education, so we're not in the business of doing anything except educating. It's 100% educating. We do sell products. All the products were accidentally discovered. We never went in the business of saying what we wanted to make bed pads. That's crazy or mats or whatever, but on the other hand they need to be supplied. Now, our average customer is 35 years old, 99% female. And the first thing she does is gets grounded herself and then she grounds her mom next, grounds her children, and grounds her girlfriends and her crazy sister. So, that's what the business. It's a word of mouth [crosstalk 00:52:27]- 

Products for Grounding

Dr. Heather Sandison: What are your most popular products? I'm curious. We don't usually make this show about selling products, but I'm just fascinated by what people are most drawn to.

Clint Ober: Depends on, the number one thing that if their health is like surgery or these kind of things and they can't take the Vicodin or these kind of pain pills, then you can take the little electrode patch, EKG type patch with a coil cord connected to the electrical ground, cord has a resistor in it and you don't experience the oxidative Vicodin-type pain when you're grounded. So, you put the patch there and it floods the area with free electrons, so now, the neutrophils are in there cleaning up all of that damaged cellular tissue, then the excess radicals are instantly reduced and so you have no hot burning pain. You will have the healing pain, which means, "Leave me alone and let me heal."

Dr. Heather Sandison: So, some people might be familiar if they have chronic pain with like a TENS unit, whether this is the gate's theory where you're interrupting that nerve conduction to the brain, so that your brain doesn't get that signal that your arm or your hip or your ankle is in pain. This is an entirely different mechanism.

Clint Ober: Yes.

Dr. Heather Sandison: So, you put a patch on and then you would need to be connected to an outlet through the grounding wire?

Clint Ober: Pure ground.

Dr. Heather Sandison: So, most people would do this at night?

Clint Ober: Whenever they're in pain.

Dr. Heather Sandison: I see, so it's like an as-needed thing.

Clint Ober: Yeah, as needed and as long as. A lot of women go to work with a patch on, on their side or whatever, and they use it all day long, just unplug it and plug it back in, because they have so much pain in their bodies. A lot of people, athletes, we take care of a lot of athletes' recovery and injury, and you'll see some of that in the movie also. Because your healing is 70 times or 70% faster when you don't have that oxidative stress going on.

Dr. Heather Sandison: And do you put the patch on the area of pain?

Clint Ober: Yes. You can- 

Dr. Heather Sandison: Directly there?

Clint Ober: And what I do like if I'm dealing with fibromyalgia or lupus or MS or things like that, I'll ground the feet or the hands because in nature, those are your ground paws and they are the most conductive parts of your body.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Did you say ground paws?

Clint Ober: Yes.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Like P-A-W-S, like an animal? I love it, like the rabbit.

Clint Ober: Right, like the rabbit. But on the other hand, if your body's got lots of inflammation, that inflammation is going to use a lot of that energy up before it gets to here because it takes time for the body to heal and recover. So it's a shorter path to ground than through the hand or the foot, to put it right where the injury is. But what you're doing, think of it this way, there's a fire inside and you're taking a water hose and pouring water on it, it's going to put the fire out. And it's natural phenomenon, there's no mystery. It's pure physics. It's charge, reducing charge, can't have charge in a grounded object. It's just-

Is it Possible to be Grounded too Much?

Dr. Heather Sandison: So, you are talking about balance with this positive and negative, again and is there a way to get too much, how would we dose this? If I were talking to a patient and I was suggesting using one of these things. You said you can use it all day. You had people in your study subjects using it all night. Is it possible to get too much?

Clint Ober: The animals in the wild are grounded 24/7. You cannot be grounded too much. How you know that you need to get grounded is you have pain in your body. It doesn't matter what kind of pain. You have pain in your body. If you have pain in your body, your body is screaming at you, "Please get me grounded. Get me out of here. Get me back to normal." Because the younger you are, the more longer you can go on grounded, but we see a lot of children today with lots of health issues.

Any amount of grounding is good because it is cumulative because you're putting the fire out for a period of time, then it has to rebuild, the inflammation has to rebuild. But if you can routinely ground and if you can't do anything else in the world, spend 30 minutes a day at least, maybe twice, once in the morning, once at night. This goes back thousands of years. This has been taught thousands of years. Ground yourself for 30 minutes at a time before and after and then you're going to feel a lot better and you're going to sleep through the day and sleep a lot better at night.

But if you have any of the common autoimmune-related health disorders, your health is really compromised, so then you have to look at it differently. You'll see, "What is the time of day that I can ground myself, the simplest easiest with the least amount of effort, that's during sleep. So, sleeping on something that is connected to the earth grounding and what your body is restoring and recovering, it's the best time to be grounded. That's why we ended up going that path.

We have grounded yoga. We have grounded lots of things, but those are all good, but the things for people whose health is compromised, first of all, you need to do just a little bit of experimental grounding, so that it's not a belief system, it's a knowingness. You know that when you are grounded, you feel better, you sleep better, you have less pain. Then with that knowingness, you can make the changes in your environment or in your life to make it work for you, but grounding alone is not going to solve all your problems.

You still have to have good food. You still have to have happy people around you. You have to be a part of your community, of your family, of your friends, you have to be a contributor. You have to be doing something. That's another thing I learned about these ladies and most of our customers are ladies. The men just say, "Well, if these are true, I'd know about it. Nobody knew." But it's like medical industry like 80% of all prescriptions sold are female. Over 80% of all practitioner visits are female, maybe 90%.

The other thing I've learned is 60, 70 or more women sleep alone at night, because of pain, because of health issues, because of stress and that's mind bending. You don't see these things. The only reason I would see them is because I've grounded thousands of people and in their home doing-

Dr. Heather Sandison: Do you think that this is because women are more sick or because they're looking for an answer? They're more likely to go out and look for an answer.

Clint Ober: Yeah. No, they're going out because they want to be healthy. They're going to take care of their problems. Yes, absolutely, when they can find them. I mean, I'm not saying that that's negative. Men are no pain, no gain. They won't go to a doctor until they have the first heart attack. That's just the way it is. They've been trained that way. But no, women are just the opposite. They take care of their children. They are the caregiver. When their health is compromised, then everything goes to hell in a handbasket in the family. So yeah, they take care of themselves. Women are different women are caregivers, they're mothers, that's what a mother does, takes care.

Dr. Heather Sandison: So, it's almost like the cowboy you described, right?

Clint Ober: Absolutely.

Dr. Heather Sandison: He'd make sure the environment is right, so that everyone in the family can stay healthy.

Clint Ober: Yes. And she's the one who takes care of her husband's medical situation, so but yeah.

Humans are Electrical and Chemical Beings

Dr. Heather Sandison: This has been absolutely, so informational, so fascinating what you're learning at the Earthing Institute. I love what you said about how grounding is this return to normal in electrical terms, and like that we really are electrical beings first and chemical beings second. And I guess I might argue I might push back a little bit and just say that we're equally both.

Clint Ober: Well, we are both, but I mean-

Dr. Heather Sandison: But we ignored the electrical component.

Clint Ober: Yeah. But it's about electrons.

Dr. Heather Sandison: I guess that's true if you can distill the chemistry down to electrons. You talked about redox reactions, right? That's-

Clint Ober: Yeah, it's redox potential.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Yeah, that's all-

Clint Ober: You have a shortage of redox potential.

Dr. Heather Sandison: So incredible.

Clint Ober: Your pH is out of balance. It's all electrons.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Right, right. And so, you talked about cortisol almost like an acid right? So, it is going to all be about balancing these components.

Clint Ober: Yes.

Dr. Heather Sandison: And I so appreciate also that you put earthing back into the whole system that you still need to have relationships that you still need to eat well, you need still need to get exercise, but this is one of the foundations but not the only one.

Clint Ober: No. It's base. It's kind of fundamental because its nature and earth, but you can't have a happy family, you can't have happy anything, you can't have success and health, anything if your body's on fire, if you have inflammation in your body.

Dr. Heather Sandison: And your call to action is to go outside and put your feet in the grass, put your hands in the dirt.

Clint Ober: Don't do anything less than that. You can do more, but do that for sure. That's kind of like, earthing, "Hey, you got to watch this. You got to do this. You got to." And yeah, that's... I don't know what else, I mean, how to answer your question specifically. I spend all day talking. I can barely talk, I'll be 76 tomorrow.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Oh, happy birthday.

Clint Ober: And I should be retired by now. I did. I retired 27 years ago. And then there's a whole another story with this. It's like I almost died from I had an abscess in the liver from a dental infection and it destroyed like 5/6 of my liver and they didn't know if I could survive, but I did survive it. And when I did survive it, I realized that life is about more than making money because, and I kind of disengaged from making a living or money in business and all that kind of stuff. And then I set about I wanted to go find something to make my life worthwhile, something that I felt good about. So next time I come close to dying, I can be a little happier with myself. Not what anybody else because it's a very personal thing.

Dr. Heather Sandison: And now here you are, approaching a birthday and do you feel satisfied? Do you feel like you've done that?

Clint Ober: Well, no, I feel very much. Now, I still have all these other little things I want to push on and get done because 80 is going to get here way too fast. 

What’s Next For Clint Ober?

Dr. Heather Sandison: What else is on the horizon for you? What's on that list?

Clint Ober: Getting grounded flip-flops. I want the least expensive shoe that's the most effective, so everybody can have them, so they can experience grounding right exactly. And then if they want fancy shoes, let the fancy shoe people know that there's a market. It's about educating people enough, so that they will go to the store say, "I want a grounded shoe or I want a grounded yoga mat or I want a grounded couch, I want to grounded." But until the consumers, they are well-enough educated that they know that they need these things, will they ever begin demanding those things, and the market will never change until the consumer goes in and makes their voice known of what they need what they want. Nike, I work with them a lot. They said, "It's very simple. As soon as the people come in, tell us they want to we'll make them, but we're not going to go out and educate the market."

Dr. Heather Sandison: Interesting, so that's your job. That's what you've taken on.

Clint Ober: That's my job, yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Yeah, and hence the movie and the book.

Clint Ober: Yeah, and-

Dr. Heather Sandison: And I think going on at the Earthiness Institute.

Clint Ober: Yes. In 1972 or '74, late '70s, first person ever put data over satellite and feed it to a personal computer.

Dr. Heather Sandison: You did that?

Clint Ober: Yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison: That is incredible.

Clint Ober: Wire services from around the world, so I have a huge background. I only do things that I know are important and it's like every 40 years something comes along that enters the environment that it's going to change everybody's life. And it's going to take 10, 20 years to dig it out of the dirt, 10, 20 years to educate everybody, and then 10, 20 years for industry or whatever to incorporate it into their lifestyles, because nothing ever happens overnight. I'm just filling in my little piece of it, but I've been involved really into television, cable computers, satellite distribution, communication. I've done it all.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Yeah. You've been in a lot of earth changing things.

Clint Ober: Yeah, but it's all about education. Now, later, there are big companies come along and they make all the money, but the entrepreneurs, it's like they're all the same. They go out there. They're not working for money they're working, they want to change the world, whether it's Bill Gates or anybody else. They did what they did for the money.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Right. They do it to have influence, have an impact and make the world a place they want to see, live it.

Clint Ober: Yeah. They can see it has to be done for the benefit of people.

Dr. Heather Sandison: And it sounds like that's your mission with everything.

Clint Ober: Yeah. It's purely, "What can I do to help this next generation?" We have autism. When I started grounding people 20 some years ago, autism was like one in 5,000, then it went to one in 500 and now, it's down to one in 50 in just 20 years. So, I keep asking people, "I wonder when somebody's going to do something?" They said, "There's no insurance codes." "What can we do for an autistic child?" "There's no money in it. Nobody's going to address it."

And yet, here's families being destroyed, mom's going to jail, husband's leaving, all the issues that go with autism. I mean, it's absolutely criminal and it's an autoimmune disease. It's an inflammation-related health disorder, so what's causing it? What's happening to these children? When and how? It's not for me to determine, but-

Dr. Heather Sandison: Something needs to be done.

Clint Ober: Something needs to be done. 

Grounding: Fibromyalgia and Lyme Disease

Dr. Heather Sandison: Fibromyalgia, you mentioned, Lyme disease, these are all things that are being diagnosed, it's much, much higher rates because there is a higher incidence in the population, yet there isn't a lot of effort or energy going into figuring out why.

Clint Ober:  Yeah. I've worked a lot with the Lyme's girls and Alex Meyer, I don't know if you've heard Alex. She was head one of the Lyme's blogs, Spirit Chicks, I think was the name of it. And yeah, I worked with her for several years and it's a process. It's poor circulation, but when you get grounded, then it normalizes the blood viscosity. It gets in and when you first get grounded and have Lyme's you have to go slow, because the spirochetes will die off, it will be too massive and then they'll feel like they have the flu. But that's the first thing that happens when you get grounded. Then you have to just slowly and continually ground, keep your body, keep your blood normal, so the immune system and their inflammation low, so your immune system can clean this up.

Dr. Heather Sandison: And do its work. I do a lot of work in the detox space with my patients, and we talk about circulation so much because that's the pathway that toxins that are, if they're stored in fat cells are in the brain or in the bones or wherever they are, they're going to have to go through circulation in order to be eliminated.

Clint Ober: Yeah. Right.

Dr. Heather Sandison: This idea of grounding and getting that flow, just more efficient makes a whole sense.

Clint Ober: Yes. That's all that it is. I mean, animals in the wild don't have cardiovascular issues, they don't have inflammation-related health disorders.

Dr. Heather Sandison: They don't have access to Oreos either, but-

Clint Ober: That's true, but I've learned one thing over the years, in all my years is I spent a lot of time traveling around the world. I can take you to countries where they don't eat anything except fish. They've never eaten a piece of fruit in their life. I can take you to other places, they've never eaten a piece of meat in their lives, some of the other cultures in the equatorial regions. But some people's diets are so poor, but yet they have health, they have healthy immune system. The immune system will get you through anything. You will take whatever food you give it and convert it to whatever you need in many cases.

Your gut bacteria are most important because it makes your vitamin Bs and produces these things, but there's so much more to the story. Going to the grocery store and eating at Whole Foods alone is not going to solve the problem, but it's certainly going to help if you eat, the closer you can eat raw food.

Dr. Heather Sandison: And juicing, are you a fan of juicing?

Clint Ober: Oh yeah, absolutely, especially celery and cucumber and berries, things like done make my own little concoctions. Yeah. 

Dr. Heather Sandison: Right, because they have a lot of electrical charge with all of those minerals.

Clint Ober: Minerals and all the enzymes are electrical.

Dr. Heather Sandison: The enzymes.

Clint Ober: Yeah. So, it's all electrical. I mean, your color comes right up as soon as you drink some good juice, but you're drinking electrons, just like the electrons were grounding you, but the grounding of electrons is produced more to produce for prevention and protection against oxidative stress, maintaining the immune system electrically stable. Nutritious electrons, they go into the body and the electrons and protons are separated and go down the ion channels and you create energy by putting them back together in one form or another.

I used different terms, but it's the systems. You have to have food, you have to have all these things, but it's like the well-balanced diet is not alone the answer, so I'm never going to say anything other than eat the best food you possibly can and if you can't eat, eat things that are closest to. You only have so much money. You only have so much, whatever, a lot. I speak, I work with a lot of people that don't have a lot of money, especially in the school systems. And so getting those kids to school and getting them a meal is a big deal. Today, it's a problem. But-

Grounding School Floors for Special Education Classrooms

Dr. Heather Sandison: What do you mean in the school systems? What's your role?

Clint Ober: We put grounded floors in special needs classrooms, kids on the spectrum. Remember when they used to take the children and tape them to chairs and the autistic children when they'd have meltdowns, they take them to chairs or tie them chairs and call the police and all the craziness that went on. So, we put together calming rooms, so we have a grounded carpet and we have grounded beanbags, and there's no wires. Beanbags are laying on the carpet, so they're automatically conductive. And so the kids go in there and it's like, as soon as they walk into that room, they just calm down then they'll lay down and hug a beanbag or lay on the floor do whatever, until they feel better, then they'll get up and want to go back to the classroom.

Dr. Heather Sandison: So, can they just go in there when they feel the need?

Clint Ober: Mm-hmm (affirmative). 

Dr. Heather Sandison: Oh, how amazing.

Clint Ober: Yeah, in fact-

Dr. Heather Sandison: And what have they seen in the schools? Are they seeing changes in the child?

Clint Ober: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Yeah, I bet.

Clint Ober: Yeah. It's big changes in behavior and attention, maintaining their kids. The kids, a lot of them they want to be a part of the class. They can't be because their bodies are so stressed, their bodies are on fire, their bodies, they're just full of, they just panic. I mean, they have to get it out. And in fact, in one class, where we were doing just an experiment, we didn't do it, the teacher did it. One of the teachers, she took a grounded yoga mat that we had given her for another reason, and she took it to their classroom, put it in the corner, and just plugged it in, laid it on the floor. And she took one kid there one time, and just had him sit on it. It's in the move and teacher said, "This is the first time that kid sat for so many minutes, just sat there and stayed in one place."

But after that, the autistic kids when they were getting ready to meltdown or whatever, they would run over and just lay on that mat and they would stay there and then they would get up and come back when they were more composed, naturally. No direction. Teachers can't direct them because they're just babysitting this group of kids that are pretty compromised. But anyhow, so working with those, I mean, somebody's got to do something about this autism. And these school system, things have to change, but it's not the school. It's the parents, it's the environments. I mean, absolutely, I have to be very careful and keep very narrow and do what I do and stay focused.

Dr. Heather Sandison: It can get overwhelming.

Clint Ober: Otherwise, it's so overwhelming. You can only do so much in a day. You only have so much money and it can evaporate fast when you try to care for other people. And, but yeah, so what you do is you find a place where you can focus and start a little fire and hope that it grows.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Right. Again, it sounds like these autistic kids are where you're really focusing right now.

Clint Ober: Yeah. Well, I've always done that one. And then the latest with MS, lupus, and these type of health disorders. It's like I can take a lady with MS, they'll be holding their arm because they can't control it. Otherwise, it will be wandering all over. And I can just have them sit down and put a patch on it because they're in pain and they're stressed, they're totally stressed and they're scared. And so, you put a patch on them, and then you just carry on a conversation with them and explain grounding and then all of a sudden, their color starts to change, the pain surfaces, subsides and starts to reduce, and then they start feeling better.

In fact, we had one gal come in one time, and we didn't know she had MS and she wanted to be one of the studies. We couldn't let her be in this study because she couldn't sit for more than 15, 20 minutes, because she had to get them go to the bathroom all the time. That's what she told us. So, because she came in ahead of time, I grounded her anyway and just explained to her what the study was. Anyhow, after about an hour and a half, she sat in a chair, put patches on her hands and her feet and she sat down on the chair and we're just listening to the story and about an hour and a half went by, she didn't have to get up and go to the bathroom. But when she did, I mean her color changed, but the arm stopped because there was...

And so basically what I told her, I said, "What's happening now is we're flooding." We had patch on the hand. I said, "We're flooding your body with free electrons, and now the neutrophils that are eating up the myelin sheath, those excess radicals, they'll stop oxidizing the myelin sheath, the immune system will calm down. And so as soon as we ground you well and keep you grounded, you no longer have MS. You won't have MS until you get ungrounded again. And if you stay grounded for a long, long time, then you will recover. You will heal."

Dr. Heather Sandison: That's fantastic. Clint, it's been an absolute pleasure having you today. Thank you so much for taking the time, sharing your wisdom and knowledge with us and thank you so much to our listeners for being with us.

Clint Ober: Well, thank you. I appreciate the opportunity, and if anybody has any questions, let me know. And but do check out the Earthing Institute and do watch the movie if you get a chance because it's authentic. It covers several years of people and actual experiences and we even have a person that is a 30-year veteran at the FDA in the movie, so it's the most important thing that ever came across this desk.

Dr. Heather Sandison: That's intriguing. We're all going to go watch it.

Clint Ober: Good. Thank you.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Thank you so much for making it, putting it out there, making it accessible.

Clint Ober: All right. Thank you, Heather.

Dr. Heather Sandison: Thank you.