Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #36 Dr. Craig Koniver

Episode Date: June 4, 2018

Dr Craig Koniver talks total human optimization through advanced medical, why western medicine is failing, and what we can do about it. Dr Craig Koniver on Instagram  Twitter  Facebook Check out Koniverwellness.com and FastvitaminIV.com Connect with Kyle Kingsbury on Twitter and on Instagram Get 10% off at Onnit by going to Onnit.com/Podcast              Onnit Twitter         Onnit Instagram

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ever used for recovery. And it's something that I'm diving a little bit deeper into in terms of working out with it simultaneously and really getting the most out of my workouts. I think it's a fantastic system. There's 10 preset muscle recovery and performance programs, 25 plus preset muscle groups. That means you don't have to figure out where you're going to put this thing. You're sore in a certain part of your body. You look it up. It tells you exactly where to place these things. You can do it while you're driving or while you're flying in an airport. I mean, it's amazing. It's an amazing product. You can go to power.com and save 25% when you use the code word Onnit at checkout. Welcome to the Onnit podcast. We have an amazing guest, Dr. Craig Conover. Dr. Craig is the leader in health and fitness and wellness. Actually,

he's just pushing the envelope on all things medical. He's created Fast Vitamin IV, which is an amazing vitamin IV push that he does, where it normally would take an hour to take that in via drip. Now he can push through all your B vitamins, amino acids, and essentials that you're missing in your sloppy ass diet right through your veins in the most bioavailable form possible. I've also had the treat and pleasure to do NAD plus treatment with this guy and it is a game changer. So truly being one of the guys that's leading and on the cutting edge of medical and science, We take a deep dive into human optimization in this podcast. And really the origin story of Dr. Craig is pretty fascinating. I think you guys are going to dig it.

We got the clap. Young Ryan Giles. Young Ryan Giles has just saved us. And we are recording. We only missed like 30 seconds. So don't worry. If you're listening to this now, you haven't missed a thing. This is the On It we got dr craig conover in the house what's up kyle and we're going to talk about all sorts of cool shit we're going to talk about the best way to consume vitamins why we need them the importance of them and all sorts of other cool shit plant medicines the whole nine yep and uh but first let's get a good little background on what got you into medicine and how you have this wealth of knowledge that you're going to bless us with. Well, my dad and my grandfather were all physicians, so it was kind of in my blood, and grew up around being with doctors and health and healing.

And so I always had this sense, I want to be a doctor, like helping people, but also like the science of it. So in that vein, I said, when it was time to go to college, I said, I'm going to go to the Mecca. I applied early admission to Johns Hopkins. When I got there, I got in. I hated it. It was so competitive, so negative.

And that was actually an interesting kind of aspect in my life about how do we deal with setbacks and how we deal with, you know, in a way, being able to be adaptable. And I took that lesson and applied it to kind of health later on, I'll get to. But anyway, from there, I went to Brown University, much more relaxed, positive environment. I like that Brown is the relaxed. It is very relaxed, but very, you know, high. I started at Yale and then Stanford, i went to just to kind of decompress yeah and but still you know very strong academics but um i majored in uh old world archaeology and

art i've always been interested in ancient history and and you know again i knew i wanted to be a doctor so i did all the pre-med stuff but really my interest at the time was archaeology and ancient history which i'm still interested in from there i, I went to Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, you know, very traditional medical school. Always been naturally minded, but, you know, my interest, and still to this day, is in relationships with people. So I went into family medicine. You know, I was never into the operating room, the surgery, all that. Too much pressure and just wasn't for me. So I went into family medicine. And from there, you know, kind of bounced around. I'd lived out in Arizona for a little while and then settled down in Charleston where I live now. After I finished my residency,

again, traditional course of everything, I opened my own practice because I wanted to do things kind of my own way. And one of the things that I was quickly drawn to were these nutritional IVs, you know. And I think a turning point for me in terms of the whole natural integrative health was my daughter was born in 2001 and she had colic. And so she was really uncomfortable like 24 hours a day and so we'd have to hold her constantly because she'd be crying crying she had this pain couldn't get rid of went to the pediatrician they said you know what let her cry it out like let her cry it out you know she's a month old and you're saying let her cry it out for several you would never tell an adult let him cry it out for three months four four months. So that caused me to say, you know what?

We got to go outside the box here. There's something else. I came from this very conservative, traditional medical education where, frankly, it's the pharmaceutical model. It's all about drugs and nothing, zero, about nutrition, exercise, fitness, any sort of other health modality. It's all about pharmaceuticals, 100%. And so that was a little bit tough to kind of venture off but once i did i realized oh my goodness

this is almost a joke like there's a whole world of health and healing that we've ignored completely in modern medicine and it and it absolutely sucks and i think what's good is people now are starting to wake up to that, that they don't want to just take a pill. So that kind of got me on that path of being thinking outside the box, at least. Yeah. Let's, let's, let's dive into those vitamins there. Cause you talked about a couple of different things and, you know, in, in this, as people start to realize, maybe there's a different way than just take your pills which is an excellent documentary if people haven't seen it's called take your pills literally take your pills on

netflix about the amphetamine epidemic uh namely adderall and ritalin and what started with children and now is largely prescribed to adults for energy which is like simply fucking move better and eat better and sleep better those kind of things right don't just try to get that from a pill but um i digress um we we have this kind of view when we split off and we think of health and want like oh i the doctor's not going to get me healthy i got to get me healthy right and so in that what are the things that i can do well i i do need to move better i need to exercise something that i enjoy that i'll stick to sure i do need to move better. I do need to exercise something that I enjoy that I'll stick to. Sure. I do need to eat better and that's different for everyone. Sure. Right.

And I do need to have some sleep hygiene. Like I need to, I need to dial that in. Right. And then from there, I probably need to supplement with some things. Right. Including vitamins and minerals because our food supply is shit.

We're so far removed from, right? Yeah. We're so far removed from, from actual food. Right. I mean, none of us really actually kill our food.

We don't gather it. We don't, you know, we're so far removed that the food supply sucks. And, you know, if we even look at soil studies over the last 50 years, our soil is completely, you know, depleted of minerals, right? I mean, that, you could just start there. You could have a whole conversation

about just getting minerals into your body that used to be there 50, 100 years ago. But the way we farm all the toxins we now have with herbicides and pesticides, we monocropping, we leave the same, the same crop in the ground over and over again. It's pulling the exact same nutrients out, you know, whatever plant we like, right? Like kale is a lot of vitamin A and iron. Sure. What do you think it's getting that from? It's getting it from the soil. So if you only grew kale in the same spot 10 years in a row, there's not going to be much vitamin A or iron in the ground left. So true. So number one, our food supply sucks.

But then number two, because we're all so, in a sense, as our society, lazy and we're sedentary, we're not going and making our own food. We're not pushing it where we seek really good food choices it's easy to grab something from the shelf which tends to be carbohydrate laden and as a result yeah the nutrition of most americans absolutely sucks and so we're missing all the vitamins nutrients amino acids you name it that we used to get from food we just don't have it and so okay well that, well, that's fine. I'll just take some pills, right? I'll just take a multivitamin.

I'll just take some vitamin A or whatever so I can replace what isn't there. Problem with that is we only absorb about 20% of those nutrients orally. That's an average. If you take someone who's got some sort of gastrointestinal distress, that number goes way down. And most people do have some sort

of gastrointestinal distress exactly because you look at okay so we look at children right as they grow up children get infections what do we do we give them antibiotics oh well two weeks later didn't work we'll give more antibiotics oh that's not we'll give them some steroids so you look at most children as they grow up we've destroyed their gut lining with this and and we destroyed the gut bacteria from the plethora of antibiotic steroids that they shouldn't really be getting. It's overdone. I'm not saying antibiotics aren't necessary.

Yeah, MRSA, best thing on earth was antibiotics. There's a great role for them. But clearly doctors are overprescribing antibiotics. That's a fact. But that literally translates to we're messing up our GI tract. So now when you're 25 and you want to take a vitamin because you're missing it from your diet, it's not going to work so well. We just don't absorb them.

And so that creates a huge problem for me where most things I relate to the world in a biochemical sense, it all comes back to that, right? Because if we don't have those nutrients, our cells literally can't function at the right efficiency that we need them to so no wonder 50 or greater than 50 of adults tired overweight depressed and taking pharmaceuticals makes total sense actually yeah they talk quite a bit about um how we are overweight overfed and undernourished yeah it's you know very well said plethora of food so much that is not feeding us properly we're not we're lacking all these micronutrients vitamins and minerals and enzymes and things that actually we need at the biochemical

level to have processes work within the body exactly without that we're fucked absolutely yeah it's very well said and and so again what do people do instead of kind of taking responsibility and saying hey i need to make myself fit or make myself healthier we'll go to the doctor and say hey i'm feeling depressed right i'm i'm tired and we'll get an antidepressant that compounds the problem and we don't really address what the core issue is and that happens every day yeah more and more we see uh the numbers are just climbing you know and epidemics rapidly climbing type 2 diabetes climbing. Type 2 diabetes is climbing. Obesity is climbing. Heart disease, cancer, you name it.

Autoimmune disease. Obesity in children. Yeah, Dr. Michael Ruscio was talking about that. If you combined all auto, because autoimmune disease right now is looked at individually. But it's rampant. We don't do that with cancer, right? We don't say like, well, breast cancer is this number. We look at all cancer as a total, right?

And that ranks really high. It's top three, right? If you combine all autoimmune disease, it's right up with cancer. No, if you combine all cancer and all heart disease, we still have more people with autoimmune disease. Wow. Yeah. There's more people with autoimmune disease than cancer and heart disease combined.

Damn. Yeah. And that's because there's so many different variants of autoimmune disease, but it's running rampant. It's taking off like an epidemic. I mean, if you look at just, you know, I see a lot of women with Hashimoto's thyroiditis. That's become a huge epidemic where their thyroid enzyme doesn't work. We're building antibodies to it. And now their thyroid doesn't work well. They can't make enough T3. And then what happens? They get tired, overweight, depressed, right? They get put on antidepressant or said, oh, you need to exercise more, some generic advice, but it doesn't work. It doesn't

fix the problem. The problem is somehow their immune system messed up and now they can't make thyroid hormone. But that's an epidemic. I mean, women starting age of 30 need to be on the lookout for that. It's a huge problem. It's a big one. So what do you, you still work now currently out in South Carolina? In Charleston, right. And you have a practice there. I do. And then you also do fast vitamin IV. Yeah, so to touch on fast vitamin. So I started getting into these nutritional IVs early in my practice.

At that time, this was a long time ago, people who would choose to do this were people who were sick, right? People with chronic fatigue, people looking to do IV chelation, something that wasn't just they wanted to feel better, it's they were really not feeling well. They had the flu, whatever. And I used to do a lot of calcium EDTA chelation. That protocol is a three-hour protocol. It takes a long time to sit there. I got my hands on the European protocol, which called for direct administration of calcium EDTA, no diluting. That's a 10-second push. And when I started doing that, I realized, you know what? People felt better. Their labs were better. And they much rather be in my office for three minutes versus three hours. So that got me thinking, you know, these IVs work, right? We know

that they work and people are familiar with it. If you get an infection like pneumonia, yeah, you'll be put on a Z-Pak or some, you know, outpatient antibiotics. Well, if that fails, what happens? You got to go to the hospital. Why? To get IV antibiotics. Because intravenously, we get 100% absorption 100% of the time. So we know IV stuff works. So I started thinking, there's got to be a role for being proactive with giving people nutrients for people who are well, who want to be super well. And so I started doing testing in my office with my patients, coming up with different nutrient formulas, changing around the different vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and did testing, what works, what doesn't work.

I did that for years. And what I found was interesting. I found that when we, you know, the typical nutrient IV, we take a bag of fluid, we add some nutrients, and it drips in. That's, what, 95% water, 99% water? And it drips in slowly. What I found is if we flip that script, if we give mostly nutrients and only a little water and actually give it quickly, we get a much more robust response. And so that's what we started doing.

And so we give these fast vitamin IVs over a minute or so. And most doctors who I talked about this are like, oh, you can't do that. It's not safe. You can't push things. And it's like, well, we do. And it is safe. We've never had an adverse reaction. Never.

And that's because we've tested this. We've tested these nutrients and these formulas for years and years and years on thousands and thousands of people to know that this actually works and it's really safe. And what we find is that not only do people get a benefit, but they can do it on a routine basis because they come into the office for three minutes. I mean, anyone can find three minutes, right? You're not sitting there for an hour, two hours, three hours.

You're literally in for three minutes. And so what I tell people is if you eat broccoli once a month, yeah, you'll get the benefits of broccoli once a month. But if you start eating it twice a week, all the better. Same thing with these IVs. If you start doing this on a week all the better same thing with these ivs if you start doing this on a regular basis watch out right i mean your health is going to skyrocket

so yeah we basically give ourselves the building blocks for whatever is ailing us to heal and if we're already in a good spot which i'd like to think of myself yeah then we take it to another level totally different level and i've i've had the the great experience of being able to work with you and use some of the fast vitamin iv pushes and i've had a world of difference i mean just yesterday i had the one two punch of the nad plus which i want to get into with you as well as the fast vitamin iv and i had a brutal squat workout for the first time in over a month expected to be limping today yeah and i have no muscle soreness nice i mean i feel like a million bucks yeah you know just an amazing outcome from the workout yeah and it's and it's not necessarily super complicated right it's just giving the building blocks that we need but we're

doing in a way that kind of flies in the face of oh it has to be done and that's like modern medicine right like the whole educational system is built upon well well, someone's got a complaint, then we must give them this medicine, right? And that's time tested over the last 50 years. But I don't know if that really works. I mean, it doesn't really work. We see that with the opiate epidemic, right? It's like malpractice if you don't give someone who's in pain a pain medicine. Right.

Right? It's complete bullshit. Absolutely. Touching on what you said earlier, I forget, it wasdc or somebody published um it takes on average 17 years for medical practice to adopt what was published in in a peer-reviewed journal right like 17 year lag time right for shit that's out that we know to be true right for them to adopt it and actually use it in practice crazy that's too long to fucking wait. Right.

But that's what we're hung up on as a society is, oh, if it's not in some sort of double blind placebo randomized control trial, then it doesn't work. I mean, I hear that all the time when I talk to people, even simple things like vitamin C, they'll say, oh, has it been tested? Yeah, it's been tested for thousands of years. It's a vitamin. Like we don't need to put it through the testing that we're used to that the pharmaceutical companies want us to. Yeah, they're inventing some shit we've never seen before. It's not in nature.

It's alien stuff. Yeah, we should have a deeper look at that. And some of those things like GMOs and glyphosate should probably be tested and held under a little bit more scrutiny. I totally agree. Right? But those, they've got big money. They get pushed through a little quicker.

Right. And then some of these things that we know to work that have already been around for a millennia, they want to make you go through every loophole to get it through. Right. So as a society, we're kind of at this, we're at an interesting fork in the road because we need pharmaceuticals, right? I mean, they work in certain time-limited instances. Great if you've got strep throat or something that you need an antibiotic.

Great in life-saving times that you need things to raise your blood pressure if you're critically ill. But that's not how we're going to get well. And that's not how we're going to push the envelope for really working on our optimal fitness and performance. And the trouble is that our society sees doctors as kind of, oh, they're the ones who are in charge. Most doctors don't know anything about anything outside of the pharmaceutical world. They just don't. So yeah, if you're sick, go to a doctor. But if you want to be well, I don't know if the doctor's the person you need to be seeing. Yeah, it makes sense. Most doctors don't look like you. I don't see a lot of muscle on doctors. It's kind of hard to take workout tips and advice from somebody that doesn't walk the walk it's true right it's really true so what i do is i

just tell people i just think i have more tools in my toolbox right like i'm happy to prescribe a pharmaceutical if we need it but there's a plethora of things that you could try that you you probably should try if you really want to get well and you know most people embrace that yeah i'm digging it yeah well let's jump into nad yeah this is something that i did recently on um one of the biohacks for the week through on its main page and social channels and uh it's fascinating stuff it is with ben greenfield is a buddy of ours yeah and um it is truly fascinating so can you break down yeah this for people in a bit more yeah textual way than i was able to in 30 seconds on

social media yeah yeah so nad is really exciting it stands for nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide it's a vitamin b3 derivative right so two dietary sources of nad are niacin and tryptophan niacin is more direct tryptophan we recycle nad plus was really first discovered in the 1930s and at that time it was found to be helpful for two big things one was addiction and the other So NAD Plus was really first discovered in the 1930s. And at that time, it was found to be helpful for two big things. One was addiction, and the other was schizophrenia. So there was small studies published where doctors would give NAD Plus to patients for both of those conditions and have great results. But like most good things in health and wellness, they were ignored.

There was no profit to be made from a naturally occurring substance. So largely ignored for decades. Revitalized in the 90s in Mexico where people would go for addiction help. They'd get 10 straight NAD plus IVs to help cure their addiction. And what NAD, the main role that most people are going to be familiar with, if you go and Google NAD now, you'll see its role with addiction. And what NAD, you know, the main role that most people are going to be familiar with, if you go and Google NAD now, you'll see its role with addiction. That's only one small piece we're finding, but it really does turn off cravings. I mean, it's quite phenomenal. We've treated people with alcohol addictions, opiate addiction, benzos, Adderall, you name it, tobacco, and within just a

couple treatments, their craving is completely gone. It's amazing that way. So it really does work well for addictions. But there's so much more to NAD, and that's what we're finding. So NAD is the rate-limiting substrate that our mitochondria uses to make ATP energy. And so the way I think about it is, anything we need to do, whether we think a thought, move a finger, we need ATP. We have to make energy. So if we have to make energy, we need NAD. And what we know, what we're learning now is as we get older, as we stress our bodies out, and some people who are more genetically susceptible, we just don't keep up with NAD demands, right? It's just like hormones, right? For men, as we get older, we make less testosterone, right? If we don't have that testosterone, we can't do the things we need and want to do. Well, even more basic than that is NAD, right? Like it is the

stuff we make energy from. And so as we live our lives, we're running out of NAD. It's compounded. If you're a vegetarian or a vegan and you don't eat any animal protein, you're going to have an even harder time because the two dietary sources, niacin and tryptophan, highest in animal protein. So NAD does all those things. But what's really interesting about it, I think, is the way it's affecting our genetics as well. And so we are finding, you know, people are familiar now with the ketogenic diet, intermittent fasting, cold therapy, all of those work at the mitochondrial level. All of those are working to really extend longevity and to help clean out the damaged DNA.

When we give someone NAD, we're doing that at even a higher level of efficiency. And so we're now using NAD for a plethora of things from PTSD, anxiety, depression, brain optimization, performance, you know, treating high-end athletes who want to, you know, get more out of their workouts, get more out of their fitness. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you Google Dr. Sinclair at Harvard, he's claimed NAD plus is the anti-cancer molecule, the anti-diabetes molecule, the anti-aging molecule. And i think we're just getting started yeah it seems like there's there's you know every day especially you know i follow dr ronda patrick and she's big into

ketogenic diets and different forms of fasting hot and cold therapy and things like that which all can help stimulate our natural pathways for nad production yeah um but quite a bit of research keeps coming out on nad and what its many uses are. Yeah. But we can take something. One of the things that really drew me to this, and I was telling you about this, was I did this Teller years test that tells the biological age versus the chronological age. Right. And it showed that I was 41 years old on the inside versus 35 years old having gone around the sun. Wow.

How many times I've been around the sun, right? Right. And Greenfield did this, and he was 36 years old on the inside as a 34-year-old chronological man. Right. So I'm like, if this Iron Man who's done it all right his whole life is two years older on the inside, where am I at? Sure, sure. But there's a ton of stuff coming out in the anti-aging space and longevity space right that shows the direct impact of nad with telomere length yeah and i the way i think about is when we give someone nad and let me clarify you know what most people are going to come familiar with again is an oral supplement so dr sinclair at harvard has created a brand called elysium where they've done some work to say if we

give you an nad precursor we're going to make more nad the data is far from great and the results are not that great so but they've done a good job marketing and people say oh i'm going to get this elysium i'll take it every day i'll help myself out in the most most of their studies have been done on older populations not healthy individuals that are young right right um what we're talking about here is giving intravenous nad plus and again going back to that same you know thought process when you give something intravenously, your absorption is just tremendously higher than oral. So our results are going to be much more profound. And honestly, that's what we see. But when we give someone NAD, we increase the NAD to

the NADH ratio. And that stimulates something called mitochondrial fission, which helps to cleave the defective mitochondrial DNA that we've accured through our lifetime, which is making us healthier and actually leading to turning back the clock. I mean, that's where the anti-aging comes in. That's the exciting part. So when someone gets NAD, it's actually an uncomfortable feeling. And what we postulate, people get stomach cramping, you get a little headache, you get some chest pressure. What we think is happening is that negative energy. We're actually taking that, again, defective mitochondrial DNA and cleaning it out. And as more people, you know, as you do more and more NAD treatments, the treatments become

less painful, less uncomfortable, but we'll never get to a point where we can do it all without any pain, right? We'll never be able to keep up with all the damage we occurred through decades of living. At the same time, when we stimulate mitochondrial fission, it takes about 24 hours. But we also then accelerate what's called mitochondrial fusion, which is helping our cells make bigger, better, stronger mitochondria. And that's where things get really interesting because then we can really make more atp at a higher efficiency which is going to give us much more energy bigger better stronger workforce right yeah absolutely and so um the two cell lines that have the highest concentration of mitochondria are the nervous system nerve cells and the heart

cells and i was reading something just recently that in the nervous system, the nerve cells, they estimate we have to make 30,000 to 40,000 new mitochondria every single day just to keep up. Yeah, that's a lot of mitochondria. So we're not talking one mitochondria per cell, we're talking millions per cell. And so NAD therapy, again, ketogenicogenic diet all these things intermittent fasting are great they're great additions but they're not going to be as robust as doing nad adding nad into someone's therapeutic modality you're going to get much more out of it over time yeah and that's like i like really one of the reasons why i wanted to start doing the the life hack of the week at the bio hack of the week was just to show people you know what some of these are free some of these cost money some of these cost

a lot of money but in that they are little cheat codes on ways that you can really improve whatever the the goal is whether that's a meditation hack like breath of fire which is free or whether that's you know using a machine for meditation versus you know whatever the case may be they're they're just showing people a way where we can get the most bang for our buck in the least amount of time right and because they're that's the one thing that nobody has whether you're the busy guy or you know the lazy guy you never have enough time never shit's done you know yeah and so how can we really piggyback on some of these things because the truth is you could take vitamin shots every day if you eat like shit and you don't move it's probably not going to be worth much but if you're doing everything right exactly you want to really

maximize that this is the way to do it this is the way to do it i mean this isn't all the hard science backs us up you know that everything and everything, but a lot of the focus now from health performance and even aging is about the mitochondria and the most potent mitochondrial therapy is going to be intravenous NAD. I mean, that's just a fact. And so when you, even if you were able to do it once every three months, you know what I mean? Or whatever the frequency you're adding that to the regimen, you know, people who are really serious about it and are serious about, okay, I do need to spend some money and time, energy on this, they'll do it once a month and they'll keep up with it.

And they're having amazing results. Yeah. What have you seen at your practice in terms of people coming in with different ailments and things like that? I mean, it's been extraordinary. I could spend the rest of the day telling you stories. your practice in terms of people coming in with different ailments and things like that um i mean it's been extraordinary i could spend the rest of the day telling you stories um you know i'll tell you a couple quick stories i had a patient she's in her late 30s was on adderall for years and years and years had an addiction to alcohol years ago um busy mom two kids stressed out like most of

us are um so we decided that she should do a loading dose of five and um she started and on her five NAD treatments five NAD treatments um as close together as possible we usually do a loading dose of anywhere from four to ten treatments um that just kind of gets people back on track and then we move to a maintenance phase um anyways the fourth treatment and I walk in and she was crying and I said what's going's going on here? And she goes, I am so overwhelmed. I said, what's happening? She goes, something is happening to my brain. I was like, well, tell me about it.

And she said, I am so happy. And she said, I am so genuinely happy for the first time in a long time. And she goes, I love this. And she goes, I was not expecting this at all, at all. And that's continued. It's little things like that. Another patient who had, she was addicted to heroin in her teenage years. I helped her back. This was over a decade ago. Super anxious, couldn't hold down a job, couldn't hold down a relationship in her late 20s now. Super just not functional is the best way to

describe it she did one nad treatment she emailed me and she said 80 of the anxiety she's had her entire life is gone after one treatment she's a totally different person now she's engaged she built a house she has a job um and she does it you know every now and then she keeps up with it another story is treating a navy seal who'd been blown up 50 plus times. And the data on traumatic brain injuries or neurologic traumas, we're amassing a lot more of it. So anyway, he had been through all types of integrative and conventional therapies, was at Walter Reed Hospital for a while. That's a lot of damage to his brain.

He had a couple main problems. One, he couldn't read because every time he looked at the book, his eyes would wander. Chronic daily headaches, fatigue, couldn't sleep. We did 10 straight treatments out in Colorado with him. After the second treatment, he said he could read again, just like that. And to this day, he's doing so much better. And he does it every now and then. But it just provides, the way I think about it, it provides this healing energy.

You've given these cells energy to finally work, that now your neurotransmitters work more efficiently and literally what people come back and tell you they feel like their brain is getting bigger they feel like their brain is getting rewired and their perspective on life shifts you know um and unlike really any other therapy um it provides a meaningful transformation for people yeah and it's the last thing that's the thing that i noticed because i did eight in a row to start yeah we kind of had a who's who it's a i love to fucking name drop when i can but lance armstrong was here tim ferris a couple of lance's teammates my buddy cal and uh it was really cool to get in not only to sit with those guys for an hour each day but also to go through that treatment because it isn't fun you know the first few are definitely harder than then as you go through the rest yep as it progresses but um yeah it was cool to see across the board because you know i look at

tim ferris is maybe one of the ultimate uh self-described guinea pigs sure you know a guy that's willing to test shit that that's science backed he's gonna fucking put himself under under uh some weird stuff that hasn't been backed by science but but at the same time you know lance has just put his body through the ringer from all the tour to france's and you know say what you want about peds and all that shit doesn't matter like he's everyone in that sport was doing that and so he was the best of the best period and he also put himself through something that is damn near physically impossible to do so to see what his results are and to kind of piggyback and bounce those ideas back and forth off people and i myself have had a tremendous amount of tbi

and and stuff from fighting and football since i was 10 years old so to feel that difference that shift and then also to see it last that's where i think it really makes a big difference compared to other treatments because it's not something where like we look at this difference between uh something that you and i were talking about earlier today the idea that i'll need to take this pill for the rest of my life right every day for the rest of my life versus i can have this a few times and it'll really change me and then i can just do some some upkeep here and there exactly stay leveled up and what i think as a whole what i noticed early on with

iv therapy is it is it makes a shift for people and it gives them momentum you know and when they get that momentum then they're buying into other things that they can personally empower themselves to do and i think that that is what's lacking for most people. They don't feel that sense of empowerment. They feel helpless, like, oh, I've got these bad genes, or oh, I'm overweight, or I've got high blood pressure, whatever it is. And they don't feel empowered. And they say, I got to go to the doctor. He's got to guide my therapy and give me six pills. And that's the only thing I can do. And the doctors are thinking, well, just take your pills and eat better, whatever that means. And it's so non-individualized. What these IVs do is they give people some momentum. I had a patient, another patient, he's diagnosed with chronic

Epstein-Barr virus. He had low testosterone, low thyroid. But I said, before we handle any of that, let's give you NAD and kind of get you back. He did four treatments in one week, came in with his wife and his wife was crying. She's like, he's back. Like, it's amazing. Like he got that momentum and it was very quickly. That's what's so cool about it. That's what's so cool about it. And yeah, you look at, you look at Lance, arguably the greatest athlete on the planet who, you know, those cyclists, I mean, they chew up their mitochondria more than anyone, you know, they just beat themselves up. So wonderful. You're replenishing all of that for them, you know, and it's, but we all need it i mean

we all need these things and i just think iv therapy as a whole is empowering for people it gives people that sense of there there is hope you know and that's awesome yeah and you feel this stuff you know i always i always throw out the quote from wim hof feeling is believing yeah you know like when you feel different and you feel that charge it's like fuck man i feel alive today i feel good and crush a hard workout just to see where you're at and know like oh shit i'm recovering like when i was a teenager right you know it's a whole different ball yeah like you'll never get the same feeling from taking a pill never ever like you'll never take any pharmaceutical and feel like you do when you get a fast vitamin or nad never ever right that tells you and even that taking that to a different level about people being present right

but it forces people to be present like you need to be in the moment and so many of us are distracted with our phones or whatever and thinking oh two weeks down the road just to be present is huge for people yeah that's a massive one something we talk quite a bit about yeah for certain yeah well let's talk let's talk a little little bit about getting outside the box here. Sure. If you're cool with it. Absolutely. You're working with the same company that Willie Nelson's providers are?

Is that correct? It's a company called Cherry. And what we're doing is they make their vaping products, you know, vaping CBD and THC for those states where it's recreational legal. But what we're about to do is make an NAD vape product and then start combining that. So this is stuff that's never been done before. If we take something like CBD, which is potently anti-inflammatory, calming to the nervous system, what will happen when we add CBD and NAD together, right? And vape that. I think it's amazing potential because you're working on the

mitochondria, you're working on the nervous system at the same time. You know, a lot of people like to do like a CBD latte, right? Add some caffeine to the CBD so you're not too relaxed, but you have this happy medium where you are relaxed but energized and and nad does that too i mean most people take any d so there's a calm clarity you're not revved up but you just you're more present so we're working on that with that company and then what we're doing separately is we're doing some things with nasal sprays you know the same type of concept um making a cbd nasal spray combining that with nad you know one of the nasal sprays that's worked very well is we've combined NAD, testosterone, oxytocin that I came up with. And the reason I chose that is, well,

where do we want this to work the most? The brain, right? We want to be focused on tasks. So it makes sense to add NAD. Testosterone, because, well, one reason in the 60s, the Germans gave their Olympic athletes intranasal androstenedione. Androstenedione is the stuff Mark McGuire took when he was hitting all those home runs. Yeah. When he found in his locker. It was all andro. It was all andro.

Well, andro you can't get anymore. Yeah. But what was found more science up to date was we think that the brain gets turned on or is arousable when testosterone is converted to estrogen. So in the nervous system, nerve cells convert testosterone to estrogen. It's like things get turned on. So we added testosterone, added oxytocin, because oxytocin, people are familiar with the social bonding hormone, but oxytocin also increases nitric oxide in the brain. So when you do that, nitric oxide's a neurotransmitter, helps facilitate all neurotransmission. And so we've had so many good results. I have a patient,

he owns a construction company in Charleston, super busy, he's at work by seven, doesn't get home till seven or eight, works six to seven days a week, chronic daily headaches on Adderall, stressed out like most of us. Has a couple kids, trying to manage that part of his life. So I put him on the nasal spray. Three weeks later, came back, literally gave me a hug. He's a big alpha male guy. Gave me a hug. He says, if I can continue to feel like this, I'll be the luckiest man alive. He said, no more headaches, no more Adderall. Relationship with my wife is at an all-time high i'm just feeling on top of the world and that's that was three months ago you know and continues

to this day um so these things you know it's thinking how do we deliver these different nutrients and hormones however you want to do it in different delivery systems i think that's what's exciting like we don't have to stick with the traditional i'm gonna take a pill because it doesn't work yeah and and nasal sprays and vape pens are far more bioavailable yeah and taking a pill and letting your stomach acid just run through yeah everything in there right right and so and so you know critics will say oh this hasn't been tested no but anecdotally we're testing it one patient at a time you know this stuff is safe right we're talking about safe things that we can do and see results does it will work for everyone no but that's not our goal but when you can get off adderall when you can stop having

headaches when the relationship with your wife is at an all-time high i think those are pretty good goals you're meeting yeah and those markers you know that we would normally test for in a study miss all these other things yeah that we're gonna that we're gonna see in everyday life that are vastly important your relationships yeah how you are as a parent absolutely all that shit comes into factor yeah like so people are you know there's a lot of testing a lot of talk about ketogenic diet intermittent fasting time restricted feeding you and i were talking about this yesterday all of that looks to extend life right it looks at extending longevity but doesn't really say much about the quality of life. And so that's what we

need to focus on too. Yeah, we all want to live as long as we can, but I think we want the most quality out of our days here. And to get the most quality, it's those things, being present, the relationships with your family and your friends, how you perform at your job that's meaningful to people. Well, those things are going to be influenced literally by the building blocks in your body, your hormones, your nutrients, and how you get those is going to matter a lot. Yeah, we really can't. It doesn't appear that we're going to be able to fix food anytime soon. You know what I mean?

There are certain ways we can get much better you know there's there's companies like butcher box there's uh state classy meats which you know gets some pasture all pasture raised uh free roaming bison and things like that from montana direct to consumer things like that but i mean the bulk of our vegetables and fruits and things like that have been altered in a way even if they're organic they're not the best you know we're not getting the most nutrients out of those and and really where we're at we're we're it's it's hard to think of this in a way i think i think the way that it makes sense for me is if i look at it like we're coming from a deficit we are and especially if you're in your 30s and you grew up in the 80s or older right odds are you were given a shit ton of antibiotics as a kid yeah i know i was put on sugary cereal yeah i grew up at non-fat milk shitty sugary cereal yep everything was devoid of nutrients they spray some synthetic

garbage right on there and call it uh vitamin fortified right oh yeah total all this kind of crap you know like you're not absorbing any of that and uh and so that's when you're building your brain right i mean that's the critical time the first 10 years of your life. Yeah, we get to this point now where we're older and we run into all these health issues or, you know, like how do we fucking dig ourselves out of this hole? Like it's nice to see people like yourself that are figuring out ways to where we really can not just get back to normal, but push ourselves to a place where we didn't think was possible. Yeah, like I tell patients, you know, think of yourself like an Olympic athlete, right? Like they train every single day for three minutes, four years down the road, right? But they're training themselves to empower themselves to be the best them. Like why don't you, you know, the patient, why don't you train yourself that way?

Why don't you care enough to put the right things in your mouth and to exercise the right way and to think positive thoughts, right? Like that's totally up to each person. Each person consciously can choose that. And I think, unfortunately, the healthcare system is based upon fear and has put people in a place thinking they're helpless. And, you know, and I've been fortunate enough. I just, the way I go about it is I'll read about something. I'll learn about something. I'll try it myself, you know. Then I'll pick some patients, hey, let's try this, and we'll push the envelope. So I'm very comfortable giving high doses of things

that most people aren't, or trying mixing lots of different things together that most people aren't, because I've been willing to try it. And, you know, we're dealing with things that are relatively safe. Does that mean some things can go wrong? Maybe, but that's the only way we're going to learn and innovate. Yeah, and in that, I mean i mean you know you play with something like uh a little bit extra b12 it's going to come out in your piss big deal big deal it's it's not it's not like you overdosed on uh prozac or something you know right you're not you don't really have to worry about too much there you don't and it's but if you look at the mainstream media,

they're talking about both sides of their mouth. They say vitamins don't work, and then they say vitamins are harmful. They're like, which is it? Do they not work or are they harmful? No, they work, but people are wasting a lot of money taking things that they don't necessarily need to. And so if we can just continually test things out and develop these protocols where people can be much more selective and efficient, all the better.

And that's what we're trying to do. Makes a ton of sense, brother. Yeah. What else you got for me? We were talking a little bit about ketamine. Yes. And there's been quite a bit. We've had Rick Doblin here on it.

He spoke on the aubrey marcus podcast i got to show up to the maps fundraiser which very happy that they received the full eight million dollars to continue their phase three trials with mdma for ptsd yeah and so it looks like in the near future we will have the ability for um psychoassisted therapy centers all around all the way around the u.s and hopefully internationally right where we can do a different you know many different modalities not just the ptsd sure and people can go have a guided experience with something like mdma and that's just the first of his goals sure um oddly enough he got he received there was a price match from a cryptocurrency billionaire who price matched

four million to the 4 million raised. Excellent. This guy cured his depression with intravenous ketamine. Yeah. And that's what changed his whole tune about psychedelics and plant medicines. Yeah. And really made him want to contribute to this. Yeah.

Ketamine now is already kind of, because it doesn't have the stigma MDMA does, it's already being used in clinics for depression it is and so what we started doing is and again we wanted we want to do this in a facilitated manner right we're never suggesting that someone just go on the on their own and use ketamine right and i think that's a big stigma uh even plant medicine psychedelics any of this is that oh people just recreationally are going to get fucked up and do it on their own and get screwed up and there are problems with that what we're trying to do is do this in a controlled facilitated manner so we can actually learn from it so we started using with selective patients for sure this is not for everyone uh intramuscular ketamine along with nad at the same time and you, one, the ketamine experience makes the NAD treatment much more

tolerable because again, NAD is an uncomfortable experience. But, you know, what that ketamine does is really help shift the mindset. Like any of these plant medicines, we're just trying to shift that energy so people can have a different perspective, a different perception of their world. And when you combine that with NAD at the same time, which is going to facilitate neurotransmitter conduction, yeah, the results are literally limitless. I mean, really, we're just at the tip of the iceberg for, you know, how can we modulate these different neurochemicals at the same time or stack them together? And so we're having great results. I mean, patients who, again, very selective in who we choose to treat do very, very well with that combination.

We give it as an intramuscular shot. It lasts about 30 minutes. It's very predictable. You know, people come out of that feeling very relaxed. You know, a lot of people are much more productive. They come back and tell me that the next three days after treatment, their efficiency at work was at an all-time high. And it makes sense i mean a lot of you know what psychedelics do in general is quiet the brain anyway right and so we're just you know facilitating some of that process so yeah allows

you to think differently see things from new angles a little bit outside the box right and then coming back also to experiences that may have been harder to process the first go around as you look at those with a different lens, right? Any sort of trauma. Yeah. And so, yeah, I think it can work very well for depression, certainly for anxiety, certainly for chronic pain. But then I think, again, taking that same model and saying, well, what about people who, you know, we've all had some sort of psychological trauma. What if we take people who are well and we're able to get past those, you know, bends in the road a little bit easier so that we can then keep building on that so you take well people make them super well like awesome yeah awesome right exactly the sky's the limit and

it's just being willing to kind of again try out different things and that's where it gets exciting so yeah i mean i think ketamine's a very useful treatment. And then for people with chronic pain, chronic anxiety, we'll do an intranasal ketamine spray that can help disrupt or interrupt the migraine, can interrupt the panic attack, and do so successfully that people feel calm, relaxed. And that's far less psychoactive. There's really no psychoactive component to that.

We're using dosages that are much smaller but you're able to modulate that you know inflammatory process in a way that again you you cause an interruption and a lot of it's just distraction for people i mean people have chronic headaches people who are you know panic attacks anxiety we just need a way to distract them anyway you know get them back in the present moment. Because anxiety, for the most part, is people deliberating on some past event or worried about some future event, and they're never in the present. Because if you're in the present, it's very hard to be anxious. Yeah, yeah. Unless it's something they talk about, why zebras don't get ulcers.

That's right, Robert Sapolsky. Yeah, amazing book. Another one of the main takeaways from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, as well as New Earth. How we draw and navigate ourselves back into this present moment alleviates quite a bit of the mental and emotional issues that people have. Yeah. I mean, probably all. I mean, if you think about it, so few people are able to be present. So few people. And that's because we're so focused on time. We're so focused on achievement're so focused on electronics our phones keeping up responding to messages people throwing information at us um and it's not really good you know and so being able to put down our phones for a while

i mean even if you just did that even if you just for most people i tell people pick a time at night whatever it is six o'clock seven put your phone down and don't look at it again until the morning. You're doing yourself a tremendous service. Because I totally agree. The idea of being present is so lacking for most people. Yeah. What are some of the ways that you've dialed that in over the years? Because obviously being a medical student and coming with that background,

I think you had some wherewithal when you're at Johns Hopkins but yeah but really dialing that in and different practices that you use to help you stay present it's hard I mean I'm certainly you know you know going to medical school becoming a doctor you know I'm type a I'm achievement centered like I want to get stuff done you know honestly for me personally a big turning point was I went through a bad divorce. And having that trauma, that stress, really forced me to kind of reorganize things in my life. That it's very important for me to have balance. So I have to be deliberate. I don't like to, I like to see patients in the morning and not much into the afternoon. Just because I know I'm not good at it.

I get distracted. I lose energy. And so I generally try not to see patients after two or three. And some people say, oh, you need to be working to six. Well, I'm not going to be valuable, right? And it's important for me to be able to put things down. I mean, I struggle with it. But my biggest challenge, yeah, putting the phone down, being committed to downtime, where you're just fictional reading, journalingaling listening to music things like that are really important to me because if i don't have that yeah i can can be

consumed by work i could be responding to patients and working 24 hours a day and we all could right you have to be really deliberate about for me i think the biggest thing is is that downtime if i don't schedule downtime if i'm not committed to it, I will get stressed out. I'll get, you know, anxious about things. And then continuing, you know, I do NAD every couple weeks. I do a fast vitamin every week. I take a handful of supplements here and there that, you know, again, it's more trial things that I want to try out and see what happens. Exercise is certainly a part of it. I'm not, you know, I think with food, I try to, you know, kind of cycle ketosis, you know, try to be as, you know,

in the ketogenic diet during the week, the weekend, I just have fun and eat what I want. Because I think I love food, you know, I'm not gonna, and so staying in that kind of mindset is helpful for me. Yeah, it gives people an out too you know i get that quite a bit but yeah it does pay dividends to stay in ketosis for the first eight to twelve weeks and then start to venture off yeah yeah i just needed you know right right and this this isn't your first walk in the park with that no yeah for most people no you can't cycle you got to be committed and but again i think that's a way to get people empowered like okay let's do two weeks and have you come back and see where you are.

Oh, you can do this. Oh, I didn't know I could lose seven pounds and feel really good and have tons of energy. Well, you can. And you can continue it for another two weeks. And so, yeah, people need to stay there for a while. But all of that, I think, like any of these health modalities, to me, it comes back to being empowered, empowering people. Because I think once people start to feel empowered, the sky's the limit, right? They can make any change in their life.

And I really believe, I mean, people talk about miracles, right? What is a miracle? A miracle is making instantaneous change in something we didn't think that could happen. But those happen. It's like a light switch therapy. It's like the light's turned on. Now the environment's different. Well, how does that happen?

Well, people have connected to that energy plane that they're able to do that. And that happens every day. And one of the problems with medicine is we focus on disease. We never focus on the miracles. You know, and I remember hearing a story of this other doctor who was treating this patient for lung cancer. And the patient was seeing a naturopath who was giving her aerosolized glutathione,

like nebulized glutathione. Well, she went back three months later for a checkup, did an x-ray, and her cancer was greatly reduced. Well, you know, the appropriate response, you would think from the oncologist would be like, what the hell are you doing? Because I need to learn about that. But instead he said, I don't want to know. I don't, you know,

whatever it is, I don't want to know. And it's like that represents the medical model. Like whatever she's doing is working. We should focus on that, you know, but traditional doctors don't. Yeah. If it's in there, I think they're, they're kind of bottlenecked through that, that model of medicine. Right. They are, they're not allowed to figure out shit that works

outside of what's in their wheelhouse yeah that wouldn't go from the top down no the top being big pharma that's right i can allow that shit no there's no there's no modality and then you see that anytime and this is not me saying that cannabis cures cancer but anytime you hear anything along the lines of like joe rogan had talked about this study that came out where cannabis in conjunction with chemo so not versus not one or the other but in conjunction reduced tumor size 300 faster than chemo alone awesome still get fucking pushback about well cannabis doesn't cure can't look we didn't even say that nobody's saying that we're just saying like together right right fasting helps together with sure right like there's things maybe there's some other things we can add in that would be of great benefit to people

but if there's no money to be made there and if it's not coming down from the company that's pharmaceutical yeah it's never fucking getting told it is but i mean we have a we have cannabinoid receptors in our brain for a reason right like that's how we were created so we need to figure that out we don't need to ignore it and say oh you can't use cannabis because it's bad no we have them for a reason it's actually tied into our whole cortisol and stress response and when i think about when someone gets cancer that's a wake-up call, right? Like that's telling you you've stressed out your body to a point where it's no longer working. You need to reset and figure out and ask all the hard questions so that you can, you know, go about your life in a completely different way.

That's what cancer is, you know? It's not just, oh, you took a hormone and you got cancer. No, it's you've been living life not authentically on some level. But why shouldn't we explore cannabis on some level but why shouldn't we explore cannabis right like why shouldn't we explore everything out there on this earth to help us improve prove all of our lives yeah yeah especially with cancer because we're not figuring shit out it's not like we've got this thing dialed in and we're seeing less and less cancer no we're just seeing more and more cancer yeah yeah no and if it's up to the pharmaceutical

companies we'll never figure it out right like it's not in their interest to figure out cancer it's not in the interest to figure out depression it's not it's in their interest to keep you depressed and and just close to baseline like i feel a little bit better but i'm still not myself right cool let's add in one other product exactly and you have to be a part of this medicalized system where you keep taking pharmaceuticals you don don't make any progress. I mean, I see patients literally every week who've been on antidepressants for years. And they're like, I'm like, well, what are you taking? I'm taking Lexapro. What are you taking that for? I was depressed about six years ago. So why are you still taking it? The doctor keeps prescribing it. That's like, they don't even think about it.

Like, how about we try getting you off? Let's give you 5-HTP tryptophan. Let's work on cortisol, testosterone, whatever. And actually get you feeling much better without relying on something that you likely don't ever need again. But you know, you can't talk about that. Well, fuck man. It's been excellent having you here. Well, thank you.

Where can people find you? I know we're going to be, first of all, let me say before we get to the social media stuff and your websites, it has been an excellent, an absolute treat having you here. Oh, thank you. Getting to partner with you guys at Onnit. You know, we have now opened this up to the public. So if you're in town, obviously this is just in Austin, Texas, but we plan on rolling out

quite a few more Onnit gyms and you guys are available at other locations correct yeah so um well i'm in charleston where i see patients and then the fast vitamin we just started partnering with on it which we're super excited about and then we have multiple practices uh across the country that um use the fast vitamin iv and um you know getting to your question you can find us at conoverwellness.com you can find us at fastoverwellness.com. You can find us at fastvitaminiv.com. Those are the two places. We'll link to those in the show notes. Yeah.

And you're on social media, Instagram? I'm on Instagram, FastVitamin. Okay. Facebook, FastVitamin. Yeah. Awesome, brother. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Hell yeah. It's been great getting to know you and working with you. Hell yeah, brother. Much more to come. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Awesome. Thanks for tuning in.

We've got my man, Dr. Craig Conover. You can visit him at conoverwellness.com. Also look him up on the Instagram and the Twitchagra and all that fun stuff. We'll link to that in the show notes. Be sure to give him a holler and thank you for listening.