Change Your Brain Every Day - The Future of Stem Cell Therapy, with Dr. Todd Ovokaitys

Episode Date: August 6, 2020

Stopping inflammation, anti-aging, and reversing menopause (!?) These are some of the potentials being explored and realized in the world of stem cell therapy, and because Brain Warriors stay informed on the cutting edge of science, this information gives us clues as to what’s possible now and what will be in the future. This episode, the last in a series with Dr. Todd Ovokaitys, illustrates many of the implications regarding the use of stem cells for achieving human potential.  For more on Dr. Todd Ovokaitys, visit his page at: http://drtoddo.com/

Welcome to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. I'm Dr. Daniel Amen. And I'm Tana Amen. In our podcast, we provide you with the tools you need to become a warrior for the health of your brain and body. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is brought to you by Amen Clinics, where we have been transforming lives for 30 years using tools like brain spec imaging to personalize treatment to your brain. For more information, visit amenclinics.com. The Brain Warriors Way podcast is also brought to you by BrainMD, where we produce the highest quality nutraceuticals to support the health of your brain and body. To learn more, go to brainmd.com. Welcome back. We are here with Dr. Todd Oh, and we're just having so much fun talking about stem cells. Before we get started, please, if you have any questions

or concerns, or just what you've learned, post it. You can take a picture of yourself and post it. You can also go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com. You can leave us a review or questions and we will enter you into a drawing for one of our books, either the Brain Warrior's Way cookbook or Daniel's book, The End of Mental Illness. We just love hearing from you. But I'm just really enjoying this. And we've talked in our last episode about some of the practical applications and off air, Dr. Todd, we were talking about some of the anti-aging implications. Now, for me, I also would love from a health perspective as someone who had 10 medical surgeries, I'm like, I'm thinking going down the checklist. Oh, I could do it for this and this and

this and this. But, but, you know, I'm at that age, I'm 51 and I've, I've every day look in the mirror and I'm like, eh, I should probably get my eyes done or I should get a facelift. But I don't really want to. I'm afraid to because I see some of the botched jobs or I also worry about anesthesia. All of those things, there's many things that can go wrong. We were talking about the anti-aging implications of this. Tell us about that. Then afterwards, I'd love to hear about some of the risks as well. Sure.

Our biggest forte, I'd say, is general anti-aging. And when we do that protocol, when we inject the cells, they do go everywhere from the body through head to toe. However, we focus the cells on the parts of the body that are slower to regenerate. So we focus on the brain and spinal cord, as well as the endocrine system. So we send cells into the pineal, pituitary, thyroid, thymus, and adrenals, plus or minus gonads. Now, what's really interesting is that the V cells have been proven and are the only type of stem cell that would be safely used to be able to become new eggs and sperm. Wow. So if a woman is, say, near menopause or just crossed over,

at least in theory, these cells could repopulate the ovary and turn that back. Wow. And there is work done in this area using a somewhat different protocol than ours, where the cells are actually injected intra arterially into the ovarian arteries with improved fertility. So the overall anti aging potency is is pretty great. And the concept of photo acoustics is just like any other quantum physics is about probabilities. So when we say for anti aging, direct the cells to the brain spinal cord and the endocrine system, the hormonal system, that the cells are circulating everywhere, and they do go everywhere. And they will tend to go more to parts of the body where there is an inflammatory process because that attracts the cells there.

Yet they will also be distributed. So there will be an anti-aging effect from head to toe with an augmented effect where the signal has been given for the cells to increase the probability of going there. How many B cells do you think you're injecting? Because it sounds like you're not growing them. You're just isolating them. And do you have a sense of how many you're actually, you know, what's the size of the army? Well, it's interesting. This is a controversial area, and the numbers kind of differ throughout the literature.

In the work that we confirmed with my colleague in the UK and are about to publish, we're planning to submit this paper potentially as early as the end of this month. The numbers that we got were higher than are reported in the literature. So many of the articles will say the numbers are about a thousand of these VSCLs per milliliter of blood. And when we did our process, what was different is that the cells were also photoacoustically awakened so what we believe is happening is that we gave the cells a stimulus to express the markers typical of b cells so that they're actually more cells recorded in a typical 60 cc a draw of blood the approximate number is about 20 million cells. So you got it before the publication.

And side effects? Are people having any side effects from this? The most common side effect, if you want to call it that, is that, and I'd say it's about 10 or 20% of people getting the procedure experience an increased need for rest. So it can feel like a mild flu. It can be a few days of being somewhat fatigued. It may last for a week or so. And I believe this is a so-called cytokine effect, that the new cells are releasing chemistry growth and repair regeneration factors that may put the body into a state of rest and repair some people experience that other people might actually feel more energized right away and even if people have that fatigue feeling for a few days or a week generally the energy recovers quite nicely and is higher than before.

Other than that, we don't tend to see what you would call an adverse effect. Obviously, they're not going to reject it because it's their own selves. Because it's theirs, right. And what does it typically cost? Or what's the range? I mean, I'm sure it depends on each person and so on, but just to give people a sense. And is it one treatment or do you need multiple treatments? Like what's the protocol? Well, it's a lot of questions. Welcome to the Green Warriors way.

So the full price for those with lots of resources would be $10,000 for a treatment. to a sliding scale concept or, you know, it's actually called Reynolds rule where those act can afford to pay the full price in a sense, subsidize those that don't have the means to pay the full price. So, so often reduce it to 7,500, even less than that, depending on the circumstances. Some cases we do procedures at no charge because there are circumstances for that person and we can assist them and we have the ability to do so. So it ranges. That's sort of a typical fee,

and that allows us to keep doing what we're doing, not only technically providing the procedures, but also continuing with the research and the IP stuff that goes with it, et cetera. And we do have two granted U.S. patents. The most relevant is U.S. 10202598B2, which describes localizing a stem cell and tissue by applying a laser from at least two directions.

That's awesome. So it doesn't require, you don't have to do this like, it's not like you're going to come in and they're going to go, oh, we're going to sign you up for a package of 10. Or do they? Are there some people who want to keep doing it? The key factor there is the individual variation in response. Okay, so that makes sense.

Yeah. And probably our best example is what we've studied with heart failure because there's such a clean, objective measure of the response with the cardiac ejection fraction. So a normal heart pumps out 50% to 65% of the blood when it's at rest. That's the so-called normal ejection fraction. Whereas severe end-stage heart failure, the ejection fraction is less than 30%. And in the study that we did in Armenia, which was 10 subjects, everybody improved, but the local end of improvement was a 15% increase in function. But the highest end was 115% increase in function. So 20%

of the subjects with this one application improved to a nearly normal ejection fraction? So the answer is because of so much individual variability, we usually do one application at a time and give it some time to express the full regeneration effect that that particular application is going to have, and then decide if another one is required. Right. And when I think about the cost of when someone who's had 10 medical surgeries and not been pretty sick at points, I've done some, I've gone out of my way to do some different treatments to feel better. Concierge or, you know, things that are not just mainstream, they're pricey, but feeling awful and not being able to work is pricier. And it's

miserable. And cosmetic surgery is really pricey. So you kind of have to weigh it out. I mean, I don't want to minimize what the cost is for some people. But at the same time, what is the cost of feeling really good and productive and being healthy? Well, we're really grateful to help bring this information to people in our community. We're going to follow your work closely over time. I'm going to follow it really closely. All right. Well, I think she's going to call your office

and make an appointment to learn more about Dr. Todd Overkiats. You can go to drtoddo.com. We're really excited to bring you to the Brain Warriors Way podcast. If you learned anything, please write it down, take a picture of it, post it on any of your social media sites, go to brainwarriorswaypodcast.com, leave us a comment, question, or review. We'll enter you into a raffle to win one of our books, The Brain Warrior's Way Cookbook, or my new book, The End of Mental Illness. Thanks, Dr. Todd, so much. My pleasure. Thank you. If you're enjoying The Brain Warrior's Way podcast, please don't forget to subscribe so you'll always know when there's a new episode.

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