The Dr. Hyman Show - How Do Stem Cells Heal?

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

Stem cells are a major player in the future of medicine. They have the potential to become many other types of tissue—they are essentially like a smart-bomb that we can use to target a specific problem. But the magic doesn’t stop there. Not only can stem cells home in on damaged cells and tissues, they then send signals to those damaged cells or tissues encouraging them to heal. As someone who is always trying to improve my own health, and since I want to live to be 120, I love to seek out the latest therapies and try them myself so I can truly understand the benefits and improve my longevity. 27 years ago I had surgery for a ruptured disk and I’ve been plagued with issues from that as I’ve aged (which I know many of you can relate to); I was excited to try stem cell therapy as a treatment option for my own pain and mobility. So today on The Doctor’s Farmacy podcast, I’m going to share my conversation with the very doctors I trusted to do my own stem cell makeover. Dr. Harry Adelson, Dr. Amy Killen, and Dr. Duckworth sat down with me at Docere Clinics in Park City, Utah to talk about regenerative medicine and what stem cell therapy can do for every part of the body from joints to hair and even our sex organs. Learn more about Dr. Adelson’s work by visiting https://docereclinics.com Learn more about Dr. Killen’s work by visiting https://doceremedical.com

Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy, Dr. Hyman travels to Park City, Utah to receive stem cell therapy for his own pain and mobility issues. Prior to receiving treatment, Dr. Hyman sits down for a conversation with the doctors he'll be working with. We recorded this episode in their clinic, which is the reason for the reduction in audio quality you're about to hear. Now let's dive into this fascinating discussion around stem cells and why they are a major player in the future of medicine.

Welcome to the doctor's pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. This is a place for conversations that matter and that's pharmacy with an F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. And today we have a very interesting conversation about a topic many people are interested in, which is stem cells and something you may never heard about, which is exosomes. And of course, how we can help ourselves age well and not get sick and have all kinds of problems as we age. And we're here with some really extraordinary scientists, doctors, and leaders of the future in the world of stem cells and exosomes and regenerative medicine, which basically means how do you regenerate yourself so you're younger and healthier, which I'm all about because I want to be 120. Dave asked me, my buddy says he wants to be 180. I'm not that competitive, but I don't know what I do all the extra time.

I can't go cross-country skiing. And I'm here because not only do I want to talk to these extraordinary physicians, but I want to get better myself. 27 years ago, I had back surgery for a ruptured disc and ended up with some consequences that have kind of plagued me and now are coming to roost. So I had a weak leg. I've limped for 27 years.

And now my back pain is starting to act up even more. And I really have come here to see the doctors, Dr. Adelson, Dr. Killen, Dr. Duckworth, to get my back sorted out so I can continue to be active and healthy and fit. And I want to give you a little bit of background on these docs because they're a pretty unusual group who have been leading this field. Dr. Adelson Harry is one of the earlier doctors who used the stem cells for the treatment of chronic musculoskeletal pain. He's performed over 6,000 stem cell procedures, has injected stem cells into 1,000 inter-retrieval discs, making him probably among the most experienced in the world using stem cells

that come from people's own bodies, not some other stem cells from another person. And he's the inventor of something called the Full Body Stem Cell Makeover. And it's founder of the Sarah Clinics located in beautiful Park City, Utah, which is where we are right now. And I'm about to go under anesthesia and get all this stuff done to me. So I'm very excited about it. Dr. Killen, sitting next to me here, is a nationally recognized anti-aging and regenerative physician specializing in aesthetics and sexual optimization. We're going to talk about that. Sounds like a good thing.

She merges diet, lifestyle, and integrative medicine with stem cell medicine to give her patients the most effective cutting-edge therapies currently available. And she practices with Dr. Harry Aylson here in Park City. Lucky them. The mountains. His view out of the office is just stunning with mountains and estuaries and just incredible. Not estuary because we're in the middle of the mountains, but it's a lake or wetlands. Dr. Duckworth also is here. He's an anesthesiologist, a dentist anesthesiologist. I never actually heard of him before. He's resident trained. He's trained at the University of Southern

California's Osteros School of Dentistry and in complete residency at Stony Brook University. He's done rotations in cardiology, pain management, ambulance for anesthesia, post-anesthesia care, internal pediatric medicine, pretty much done it all. And he leads our team here in anesthesia. So I'm looking forward to you putting me to sleep. So let's start off first talking about stem cells because we hear a lot of news about it. We hear a lot of hype about it. We don't exactly know what it is. You know, there's a lot of regulatory issues around it. It's highly controlled. There's a lot of promise. It's going to fix everything and cure everything. So what are stem cells and what is the science of stem cells and, and, and what is the promise of stem cells?

Let's just start with Dr. Allison and then we'll go to Amy. And then we'll get it. Sure. So our body is comprised of many different types of cells. Most notably there's tissue type cells such as muscle cells or bone cells or nerve cells. But then we have this other category of cells called stem cells. And stem cells are a primitive cell that have what I say, there's two superhuman powers. One of their superhuman powers is they're

able to, when they self-renew, they're able to either turn into a target tissue cell such as a bone cell or a muscle cell but they also have the ability to to self renew which is just turn into a new version of themselves and that actually is the definition of a stem cell a stem cell can either turn into a new version of itself or it can turn into a target tissue cell then what the second superhuman power which really is much more important in this conversation when we're talking about the therapeutic use, is their ability to exert what's called a paracrine effect.

And a paracrine effect is intercellular communication. A stem cell has the ability to recognize when it's in the presence of a damaged cell or a damaged tissue. And then it releases signal proteins that signal that damaged tissue to heal itself. So in a natural circumstance, when you have any sort of injury at all, and you have healing after that injury, it is a stem cell mediated event. So that's what happens in nature. when you just have an injury and you heal. The stem cells are what are responsible for healing. Therapeutically, what we do is you say you have an injury and you experience what we call suboptimal healing. So you don't completely heal. You don't go completely back to normal. So then what we do in regenerative medicine is we take

stem cells from an area where you still have a robust population, namely your bone marrow and your fat. And then we put those stem cells in this area of suboptimal healing, essentially tricking your body into thinking that you've sustained a new injury without actually having caused any tissue damage, thereby launching the body's natural healing cascade. Amazing. So essentially, it's twofold. First is you get a sperm and an egg, which are two cells. They merge, and they become everything in your body. They become your brain, they become your bones, they become your liver, which is kind of cool.

And so in a sense, these stem cells are like those embryonic cells that then turn into everything. And you said they have this potential to become any other tissue. So they're like kind of smart cells. Right. Well, what embryonic cells are when you have the sperm and the egg and you have an embryo, an embryo is just a ball of eight cells. And those cells have the ability to turn into absolutely anything. But in our own body as adults, we still have stem cells that aren't quite,

they don't have the ability to turn into absolutely anything, but they have the ability to turn into many different types of things. And those are called adult stem cells. And that's what we practice is the use of adult stem cells. And they're also sort of like a smart bomb in a

way they sort of like an intelligent targeted missile that goes to wherever the problem is so you think you just inject stem cells in the blood how do they know where to go well they they're sort of like a heat seeking missile and they go to where the issues are and help the body start to activate its healing mechanisms right they they They do a homing mechanism where they home to the damaged tissue and they exert their effect there. So we continue to make these stem cells. As we age, are they less effective? Would you like to answer that?

Yeah. I mean, you still have stem cells throughout your life. As you age, you begin to have fewer stem cells in certain parts of the body. And then the ones you have don't have quite as much of a robust response. So they don't work quite as well. So you still have them, but maybe they're not working quite as well. And that's one of the things that causes aging as you get older. But what we're doing is moving the stem cells, you know, where you have a lot of them and

putting them in places where you really need them, whether that's your lower back or, or your face or whatever it is so that we can give you extra stem cells in those areas. But I'm 59. Are my stem cells like awesome? Or are they like kind of 59 year old stem cells? You've still got some good stem cells. I mean, certainly, you know, certainly younger probably is better as far as the sort of the vitality and robustness of themselves. Um, but you still have plenty of some cells at this point. So in a way getting it from a baby or a placenta seems like a better idea, right?

That is a good idea. And there's a lot of work being done on like placental and umbilical stem cells. Um, and certainly there's some really cool research being done with those types of cells. This is full term babies is not This is not embryos. You know, full-term babies who are delivered and they just take the placenta or the umbilical cords. So certainly there's a lot of work with that. In the U.S., we can't take those cells and culture expand them to make a bunch of them and give them back to someone. But a lot of other countries are doing that and are having a lot of success. But there's more risk for that because it's not your tissue, right? So there's more risk

for problems. It's not your tissue, but with the types of cells we're using, the mesenchymal stem cells, which is the type of adult stem cell that we're using, you actually don't mount an immune response. That's your own cells. Well, it's your cells, but even if I was to give you someone else's mesenchymal stem cells that are what we call immunoprivileged or, you know, evasive. So you actually don't have an immune response to those cells. So we could put, and we don't do that here, but someone could put other types of mesenchymal stem cells in your body from someone else and your immune system wouldn't really see them. They would be able to just hang out and do their job without your

immune system attacking them. So it's a little different than like bone marrow transplants that you would hear about for, you know, other types of lymphomas and things like that. So it's a little different than like bone marrow transplants that you would hear about for other types of lymphomas and things like that. So it's a different type of cell that it has the potential to be used in all different people. Amazing. Okay. So let's talk about the therapeutic potential in your experience because you've done over 6,000 stem cell procedures, which is just mind boggling.

I don't even know how many years that is how many days six thousand years of stuff and you were one of the early adopters you had tremendous experience so did you get started with this and tell us about your background and why did you start doing this well I started out doing something called prolo therapy which really can be viewed as the predecessor to stem cell therapy so prolo therapy is also called regenerative injection therapy. And I got into it personally because when I was in naturopathic school,

I had a shoulder injury. I was rock climbing and I was doing this hard move and I felt this pop in my shoulder. And I went to a surgeon and he said, "'Well, you've torn a piece of cartilage in your shoulder. "'I can put a scope in there and cut it away. "'It'll help you in the short term, "'but it's gonna cause you problems later in life.

And here I was at the time I was, I think, 24 years old. I was very healthy. And I was in naturopathic school where they teach the healing power of nature. And I thought, you know, this just doesn't make any sense to me. Like there's got to be a way to kickstart my healing response. We didn't have the term biohacking back then. I'm not even sure we have the term hacking back in the mid nineties, but you know, I just, it was really, I, there had to be some way I could biohack this. And I found out about, uh, the man who was to become my mentor,

Dr. Rick Marinelli, who was the first naturopath to do prolotherapy. And what prolotherapy is, is it's the injection of a natural substance, usually a sugar-based solution. Dextrose. Dextrose is simultaneously nutritive and slightly irritating. So you inject dextrose into an area. It basically tricks the body into thinking that it's been re-injured and launches a healing cascade. I did that for a number of years and it worked very well. It worked well in people who are in overall good health. Then platelet-rich plasma came along. Platelet-rich plasma, as the name implies, it's a blood draw. PRP. PRP, right. So you take a patient, you take their blood, you put it in a centrifuge, you concentrate down the platelets. Platelets are what are responsible for clotting after injury, but also they are what release the protein signals to trigger your own stem cells, the own stem cells that exist in your tissue to activate.

Well, PRP worked quite a bit better than prolotherapy. So for a period of four years, that's all I did was platelet-rich plasma then in 2010 I had a patient come to me and she brought me a stack of scientific articles about the use of bone marrow stem cells for the treatment of arthritis and back then it was all animal studies because that's all we had and she said I want you to inject my bone marrow into my knee and I said Laura I don't know how to do that I said I know I've heard of a guy in st. Louis that does it you can go to to him. And she said, I don't want to go to him. I want to go to you. I want you to do it. So I learned how to do it. And I was so blown away with how well it worked that that became her knee.

She stuck a little stem cells in there. We did a bone marrow aspiration, concentrated her bone marrow stem cells, injected into her knee. Well, then I started doing it with all her knee got better and it was and this was a case she wasn't getting better with PRP and before that she wasn't getting better with prolo therapy but with the bone marrow stem cells that actually worked and that's what I found is that bone marrow stem cells work so much better than PRP or prolo therapy that's why I started so early. And then how I got so many numbers in the early days, there were so few people, no one had heard of stem cells.

So I was commuting to Brazil and there they had, I was just doing like hundreds of cases. I'd go down there and they'd line up all these bone marrow cases. So I was, you know, while I was building, while people are waiting for, you know, sort of the, the news to catch up, I was, you know, while I was building, while people, I was waiting for, you know, sort of the news to catch up, I was going down there doing just tons of cases. Wow. And, yeah. Tell us some of the stories of patients that you actually treated and what the response was. talk about is who is a candidate for stem cell therapy because you know as we were just talking about right before we started shooting there's all this data that shows that how bad a person's MRI looks or how bad their x-ray looks

really doesn't give you that much information there are lots of people who have perfectly good looking x-rays MRIs with lots of pain and there's people with terrible looking x-rays and MRIs with lots of pain. And there's people with terrible looking x-rays and MRIs and no pain at all. So it calls into question, what's the pain generator? And what we think of is that for example, nonspecific low back pain is a problem of the microscopic tissue. It has really very little to do with what the x-ray shows or what the MRI shows, but it has to do with the collagen fiber matrices and the microcirculation, which does not show up on MRI. So when you have, you know, when you have

irregular collagen fibers and you have irregular micro blood vessels, then that is what is causing pain. And one of the things that we know that stem cells do is they improve the microscopic health of tissue. And the reason we know that is because one of the areas that enjoys the best scientific literature, the strongest scientific support is in wound care you have somebody who has a non-healing ulcer you know they've got a wound that will not heal will will not heal you inject stem cells and suddenly the wound heals well how does a wound heal two ways collagen lays down in the proper orientation and you suddenly sprout these these healthy blood vessels and then skin grows over

top so that's what we think is happening with people with chronic pain is we're putting stem cells in the area and their, the health of that microscopic tissue improves. So you're using a lot of chronic pain treatments and, um, Dr. Cullen, you're using the same kind of therapies, but in a different way, using it for more healthy aging, for regenerative techniques that improve skin health and hair restoration and sexual optimization. All that sounds pretty awesome. Better skin, better hair, better sex. Right. How does that work?

So it's the same kind of idea. If you think about the wound healing model, for instance, you know, we know that for skin, if we inject some cells in skin, it's kind of idea if you think about the wound healing model for instance you know we know that for for skin if we inject stem cells and skin it's kind of like um like with wound healing it increases your own skin's production of collagen which is important for forming the structure of your skin it improves your elastin which is important for the sort of bounce back of your skin and hyaluronic acid which is important for hydration so the stem cells when we give them to you and your skin it tells your own skin fibroblasts and stem cells hey look we got to get back to work and make some that makes some new skin and so you get healthier skin um which is what we're after um also better blood flow so same kind of thing

so that the mechanism of action is actually similar in all different parts of the body same thing with the sexual injections so we know that when we do we inject for instance penises you know from animal models and humans sounds Sounds like a terrible idea. I know, I know. Tuberculosis, penises, sounds like a scary thing. We do numb, we, I mean me, I do numb at first. Okay, all right. It's actually not that bad. Just clarifying to our pod listeners.

But when you inject it, you may be running from this pod. I'm used to having to terrify, yeah, I know. Come back, come back. But when we inject into that area, we actually see improved blood vessel formation, some nerve regeneration in some studies has been shown, which is amazing, and improved health of the smooth muscle cells inside the corpora cavernosa, which are the tubes that fill with blood.

So it's the same types of regeneration, no matter where we put the cells, but it's different tissues that we're affecting. Amazing. And in terms of just healthy aging, right? What if you don't have a problem and you just want to live a long time and be healthy? Is it something that's worth thinking about? There are actually a lot of studies being done right now, looking at using stem cells, given IV, and we don't do that specifically for that purpose,

but given IV to decrease symptoms of frailty of aging. And they've shown that with giving IV injections of stem cells, you can actually improve things like older people's ability to walk longer distances and brain fog and mood and all kinds of things. So I think that'll be something that we see a lot more of in the future. But for me, like with the skin, for instance, I have some patients who look at stem cells injected into the skin who don't really have a lot of problems. There are actually some studies that show that stem cells are protective against some of the oxidative stress and damage of the sun

or of environmental toxins and things like that. So even if you don't necessarily have things you're trying to correct right now, there's the potential that with these kinds of therapies, you're actually protecting yourself to some degree from some of the other stressors that are out there. Amazing. So I'm going to be a guinea pig today. I'm going to have it all done. My back, my face, all the shots. So my telomeres are 39.

Does that mean my face is going to look 39 when I'm done with it? Sure. So give us a little more explanation about stem cells and how they work to affect biological aging. They just kind of go wherever the issues are. Like what if you have beginnings of Alzheimer's, you have Parkinson's, or you have an autoimmune disease, or you have increasing arthritis, inflammation. What does the future look like for stem cells? Well, one of the things with aging that we know, one of the main causes of aging

is inflammation, chronic inflammation. Of course, that leads, as you know, leads to all different specific problems, whether that's coronary artery disease or Alzheimer's disease or any number of other diseases. And there's also some important information about stem cells and how they affect inflammation. The interplay between your body's stem cells and inflammation is very important and having enough stem cells to keep inflammation at bay and kind of keeping that balance is important. And so one of the things that we think happens and it's been shown to happen as you age is that kind

of gets out of balance and you get higher levels of inflammation, which unfortunately worse by things like diet and toxins and stress and all those other things. Um, and maybe you don't have the right balance anymore with the stem cells. Um, so that's one of the ideas sort of behind. Yeah. And some of these cells. So they're anti-inflammatory. They're anti-inflammatory.

And aging has been called inflammation. Right. So all the diseases that we see of aging are all inflammatory heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's. Right. You name it. You don't think of these as inflammatory diseases, but they're all inflammatory heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, you name it. You don't think of these as inflammatory diseases, but they're all inflammatory. And so maybe the stem cells help with modifying it. Right. And then you also need stem cells to heal. I mean, obviously you need stem cells in every part of your body that's going to have an injury in order to heal it. And those are the cells that are replicating and healing that injury. So as you

get older and you have fewer and fewer stem cells, it becomes harder and harder to heal, which makes sense. If you have a kid who cuts their skin, you know, it heals up in like two days and it's no problem. Whereas if you have like a 65-year-old who cuts their skin, you know, that's one of those things that it doesn't heal that quickly. It's a super slow process. They're going to have a scar. And all of that's because of stem cells and lack of stem cell activity as we

get older because you just don't have as many and you're not as active. Amazing. I just did a big cut on my finger and it's like amazing how it just healed. Wow, crazy. I smashed my nail in the car and now it's grown out, looks perfect. It's pretty awesome. The body is amazing. See, you've got good stem cells.

Yeah. So, Harry, you really have done a lot of work thinking about where the stem cells come from, which ones to use. And I think, you know, as someone who's a physician, I hear the science, I hear the literature, and it's a little confusing. There's umbilical cord stem cells, there's embryonic stem cells, there's bone marrow stem cells, there's adipose or fat tissue stem cells.

Can you walk us through the pros and cons of each of these and what people are using and what you should be wary of and concerns? Because I had a patient once who had somebody else's stem cells injected and had issues with it. So can you tell us a little bit more about that? Sure, sure. So there's essentially two main categories. There's autologous and allogenic.

The word autologous means donor and recipient are the same person. So it's your own steps, your own stem cells. And that's mostly what we do here. And it's really what we could build a reputation on is using stem cells from a person's own body. So there's two sources of steps. But giving yourself your own blood transfusion, it's way better than getting somebody else's. Precisely. Precisely. There's no question at all about the safety.

So there's bone marrow. Bone marrow is the tried and true. It's been around for many years because it's been used with bone marrow. It's been used with bone marrow treatment for cancer. So, you know, you take somebody's bone marrow, someone who has cancer, you take their bone marrow out, you give them chemotherapy to basically destroy a lot of their cells, and then you re-infuse their own stem cells. So that's been around a long time. And it's been used therapeutically for the longest, for musculoskeletal conditions. There's the first appearances of the treatment of avascular necrosis which is where you

have actually the joint starts to die. That's been around for I think close to 20 years at this point and that's really sort of the workhorse of autologous stem cells is bone marrow. The newcomer is fat derived stem cells. Fat is very rich in stem cells. It has a much higher count of stem cells than bone marrow does. The problem is it's more complicated to isolate the stem cells. And there's some question and the FDA has issued a position that they feel that it's beyond minimal manipulation. So there's some question as to the legality and there's there's many people in the unit United States doing it we're all kind of waiting to see what

the final decision is because there isn't really a definitive final regulation exactly so we what I personally use both because I found that bone marrow works very very well but it usually takes several treatments to get somebody where they want to be fat when it works it seems to work better than bone marrow but it has a higher non-responder rate so i started using the two together and i seem to get the consistency of the bone marrow and the augmented improvement of the fat and then you know we'll just see over the next few years which direction the regulation goes and know, I may have to stop doing fat. And if it comes to that, then we'll stop doing it. So those are autologous. Then there's allogenic. Allogenic means it comes

from someone else. So there's, you mentioned embryonic. Embryonic has really fallen out of favor for two reasons. One is that there's a, clearly there's an ethical issue because an embryo is can be argued is a human life. And so it's really not used anymore. But beyond that, beyond just the ethical argument, embryonic stem cells, because they're so primitive, tend to do weird things. And that's where you hear about like someone going to Russia, getting embryonic stem cells and then getting a tumor or, you know, getting a, like a, especially something called a teratoma, which is like a ball of hair and teeth. It's particularly nasty sounding tumor. Um, but because they're so primitive, it's very hard to predict what they're going to do. What is less, uh, what is less of an issue

are these, uh, umbilical cord, they're called birth tissue stem cells, so either umbilical cord or placenta. Now, these do not seem to have the same problems that embryonic stem cells have. As Dr. Keelan was saying earlier, they hide themselves from the immune system. But there are people who, you know, understandably are nervous about taking somebody else's DNA into themselves. So that's why we've used exosomes. And you mentioned it in the introduction. So what exosomes are. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that.

Right. It's a whole new kid on the block here. It is. And they're fascinated. And so what it is, is, um, exosomes are a laboratory takes, for instance, placental stem cells and they culture expand them. So now you have hundreds of millions of them. Then they put them in a, you grow them in a petri dish. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And then they put them in a stressful culture medium. What that means is you trick these cells into thinking that their host is under duress. You give them a lot of emails.

So you basically make them think that their host is under duress and they're preparing for lean times. So they sprout and excrete these vesicles filled with growth factors that are called exosomes. Now, these exosomes are the actual active ingredient of stem cells. When we spoke earlier about the paracrine effect and our own stem cells exerting a paracrine effect, they exert that effect through the exosomes. And the way the exosomes are like the superpowers of the stem cells, and yet they don't have any identity as far as DNA. So they're kind of safe. It's the active ingredient of stem cells without the other person's DNA. So they're kind of safe. It's, it's the active ingredient of stem cells without the other person's DNA. Yeah. And what makes the very, you were asking earlier, what makes your stem cells, 58 year old stem cells is as we age, our stem cells lose the ability to

manufacture these very exosomes. And that is what makes my, my exosomes or my stem cells are 50 year old stem cells. What makes my stem cells, 50 year old stem cells. What makes my stem cells 50 year old stem cells is we lose the ability to manufacture these exosomes. So what we think happens, and this is based on the literature that exists on the use of exosomes therapeutically, is when you give exosomes, when you add them to your own stem cells, the membranes are identical, but it doesn't contain DNA. So we think our own stem cells actually absorb them into themselves, thereby rendering our own stem cells

a younger person's stem cells. So it's sort of like, sort of superpowers your own stem cells when you get them together. That's what we think is happening. Do you ever give them alone? I don't have any experience with it, just because people who come, I've found value in using your own stem cells.

Like what we're going to do with you today is take your bone marrow stem cells, turbocharge them with exosomes, and then, um, inject. We're going to, we'll, we'll talk about this a bit more. We're going to do a full body stem cell makeover, uh, slightly abridged version. Yeah. Amazing. or slightly abridged or burgeoned. Yeah, amazing. So the stem cells have this amazing capacity to repair, regenerate, heal. The exosomes seem to add to that value. If you give exosomes IV, what happens intravenously? Well, we don't because that's too much of a gray area legally.

So we just give it as musculoskeletal injections. Is there any research on that? There is a small body of literature, and it's mostly about renal function, about people's kidney function, and it's very promising. People with kidney failure receiving exosomes. So we're going to hear more about these exosomes.

Oh, I think absolutely. Now, um, you put people under, um, you don't do all their wake, you give them sedation. So why do you use IV sedation for these treatments? Cause I've, I've had various treatments done and they don't put you out and you do. Yeah. How do you do that? Um, well we do big

treatments we do large treatments and my experience has been and I'm gonna let the anesthesiologist explain exactly what it is that we do but my experience has been that since I started sedating everybody my in my outcomes have improved and I think the reason for that is having a bone marrow aspiration having a liposuction having your entire spine injected in a single sitting is extremely uncomfortable and people are mad at me afterwards they have a resentment you know I put them through a very I suppose it take a very long nap and they wake up feeling great exactly as opposed to just taking a nap waking

up and we're done. And I'll let Dr. Duckworth talk about exactly what it is. What happened? Oh, we're done. I'm like, what? That was pretty amazing. Before we get into Dr. Cook, I just want to back up a little bit and ask Amy about why you don't use bone marrow

for some of the techniques you use. You use fat cells and you use PRP. Why do you not use the bone marrow? So you can, and certainly there are studies using bone marrow cells for all the procedures that I do. But I find that with the facial injections, for instance, there's a lot more bruising with the bone marrow cells than there is with just, I usually, I use PRP cells from fat and exosomes. So that's kind of the thing, the things that I use and I can use any combination of those things, but that's kind of what I use.

But it's not impossible. Certainly some of the sexual health studies in men have been done with bone marrow cells. What if you get someone like me who has 6.2% body fat? Yeah, but bone marrow cells are certainly possible. It's just that you just think they're more bruising. But if you don't mind a little bruise, then... And they work as well? We don't know for sure. They haven't done comparative trials between the two of them, at least for skin and sexual function. There are

studies with using each different type of cell and cell products and exosomes and PRP that all are promising and all are good. But we don't know, for instance, how much better is this versus this and that sort of thing yet. Okay. let's come back to my upcoming extended nap. Yeah. And Dr. Duckworth, you're an anesthesiologist. What is the difference between general anesthesia and anesthesia because most people are a little afraid of anesthesia. They go, I'm gonna put a tube down my throat,

I'll be out, there's complications, I've heard it cause brain damage. Would I really, why would I wanna do that? But you do something a little bit different. So can you talk about the difference and what that is? Yeah. So there is definitely a difference between general anesthesia and sedation. Uh, anesthesia is a kind of a continuum on one end. You have mild sedation or anxiolysis, then moderate sedation, deep sedation, and then general anesthesia. Um, and because it's a continuum patients oftentimes can go from one level of sedation to the other and

to be honest it's oftentimes difficult to tell exactly what level of sedation someone would be in just because someone's in general anesthesia doesn't necessarily mean that they need a breathing tube you can still have a general anesthetic where they're breathing spontaneously. During the procedures up here, most of the time we're in the deeper end of sedation. The anesthetics that we use today are ultra short acting, which is very nice because it allows me to kind of tailor my anesthetic to the patient and the procedure. We've done countless procedures up here and I know when a stimulating part of their procedure is coming up and I anticipate it and kind of ramp up my anesthetic, knowing that in five to 10 minutes, what I gave them is gonna kind of come back down.

So before some of the more stimulating parts of the procedure, I'll anticipate those, give them a little bit more. I kind of look at the procedures we do here, bookend by two stimulating parts, the harvesting of the stem cells during the middle, they're kind of preparing the stem cells for injection. There's virtually no stimulating part of that for you. So commonly during that phase, I'll lighten up the anesthetic quite a bit in an effort to give you less anesthetic to make recovery quicker for you

and use less you know drugs um and then when we come back for the injection part obviously there's some stimulation involved with that as well some injections more stimulating than others and we can kind of just we use a lot of aviation analogies we can kind of i can take you up to an altitude here yeah we kind of come down here i got a lot of control over those anesthetics. How do you tell where someone's on that spectrum? You don't say, hey. Yeah. Verbal cues is part of it. Under moderate sedation, by definition, you'll respond purposely to my cues.

You don't mind lifting up your head. And someone under moderate sedation should follow verbal commands. But they don't remember it. No, they won't remember it. No, they won't remember it. And that's kind of the difference. A patient between moderate sedation and general anesthesia, it's going to feel the same to most patients. And then with general anesthesia, you get a tube in your throat, they're much stronger anesthetics. I remember when I had back surgery, I woke up, I was like so out of it, I was vomiting, it was like a terrible thing. These new anesthetics are super light and

you know it's like yeah your colonoscopy you do theics are super light and I, you know, it's like, yeah, your cost could be, you do the same thing. Propofol. Yes. Which is what you use, right? Yeah. Combination of propofol. We use some Remy fentanyl as well, which is a very killer, a pain killer

that's metabolized in the plasma. So it's very short acting. It has a duration of action of a couple minutes. And then it's gone. So before we come up with the stimulating part, I give you a small dose of that. It's going to take away that pain stimulus. And it's worn off. Sounds like playing music. Yeah, sure.

You're an artist. It's awesome. So people shouldn't be worried about IVC. They really shouldn't. Very safe. And then when you think about how many colonoscopies there are, they do the same sort of thing. It's just a very common thing. Michael Jackson died of it, but that's because he had way too much and nobody was monitoring him.

And that's the big issue there. Not the medication. Sometimes propofol gets blamed for that one, but it definitely wasn't propofol's fault. So now let's get into the weeds a little bit. Amy and Harry, what are the conditions that you treat? What are the types of things that really respond to this? Who should be interested in it? Is it something for everybody or is it only a problem?

Give us the lowdown on your home runs and then the shady areas where it's maybe not as much indicated. You want to start? Sure, I'll go first. So I only treat musculoskeletal pain. The full body stem cell makeover is slightly different because that's an anti-aging treatment. But for Mike, the conditions that I treat is musculoskeletal pain conditions. So low back pain, neck pain, joint pain.

Where just in the simplest terms, where stem cell therapy after, you know, really 20 years of practicing regenerative medicine, 10 years of doing stem cell therapy, what I found is that the conditions that respond the best are people who have pain, but they still have decent function. So in the low back, that means somebody who has nonspecific low back pain, or, you know, maybe it's very focalized low back pain, but it's not to the point where they're, they have like foot drop or, and they don't have, you know, they're, they're not incontinent or something like that in neck, you know, it's people have neck pain, but they have, they're not like dropping things. They haven't

lost the use of their hand. Similarly with like a hip or a knee, it's pain in that joint, but that joint isn't like popping, clicking, sticking in place. They don't have full range of motion because the bones actually have changed shape. This works very well for the treatment of pain, but it does not restore function as much. Very good. So Amy, how about you? So mine are a little different. For cosmetic purposes, anyone can be a good candidate, but certainly for the face, it's helpful. These stem cells are helpful for things like improving texture and tone of the skin improving like fine lines and wrinkles um just kind of giving your face kind of a healthy glow and newness um it's

also great for hair i do a lot of hair injections for both men and women to restore hair and areas that it started to thin or even just to make hair thicker a lot of women who come in who have pretty good hair but they just want sort of thicker, healthier hair, and these can be effective for that. And then for the sexual injections, for men, I treat a lot of men with retinal dysfunction, varying degrees of retinal dysfunction, as well as- Can they throw in the Viagra after that, or what?

You know, it depends on where they're starting from. And I also recommend using it in combination with something like the low-intensity shockwave therapy and the Gaines Wave treatment, which is really effective as well. And, you know, it's kind of, I take kind of an integrative approach to make sure testosterone is high enough,

make sure that your diet is good. You know, all the things that are important for ED, it's not just one thing. But if you add all the things together with like some cell therapy and shockwave therapy, then I definitely see improvements in that. I treat a lot of men with Peyronie's disease, which is a scarring disease that can cause ED and some curvature.

But I also treat patients who don't really have a lot of problems. They're just like, could this be better? And that's both men and women. So like enhancement. Yeah, just enhancement. And, you know, people come back and say, yeah, it's better. It actually could be better. And it's good for women too, right?

And for women. So I do sort of an O-shot with stem cells. It's kind of a turbo O-shot, I call it, where I'm using the PRP, stem cells, exosomes, all of those things for women. And same kind of thing, you know, improved sensitivity, improved pleasure, vaginal lubrication can improve. Even stress incontinence symptoms can improve sometimes, which is great for women who don't have a lot of other options out there for them. You guys have created something called the Full Body Stem Cell Makeover,

which sounds both exciting and a little scary. Tell us what that is and what it'll do and who's it for. Sure. So we've sort of developed a reputation as the clinic that does big treatments. Part of that is because we work with Dr. Duckworth, and he's so good, and he's also very reasonably priced. So we started really providing sedation to everybody. The other reason is we have sort of gained traction with Western Canadian farmers, ranchers, and oil fill workers. And we

get these people who literally, I affectionately say they've exceeded the terms of their warranty and they have arthritis throughout their entire bodies. So we would get these people in and, you know, treat their entire spine and both hips and both knees and both shoulders. And I'm sort of jokingly referred to it as full body stem cell makeover. Well, then Dave Asprey became a patient and then we started getting the biohacking crowd. And as we were really sort of, I was getting more and more people that were asking me, well, can't you just inject my entire body in a single sitting? And I was on vacation. I was with my wife and my daughters. And I was looking out at the

ocean. And I was sort of having this pensive moment and thinking about this path that I've taken. And really what set me on this path was rolfing. Rolfing is a type of body work where it's very comprehensive. You massage the entire body over 10 sessions in order to address the entire structure. And I started thinking about that. And I started thinking about these requests that I was getting for these, these full body treatments. And I thought, you know, what if I were, you know, what, what about a full body stem cell makeover? What if we were to sedate somebody, take a large volume of bone marrow, turbocharge that bone marrow with exosomes, possibly also use fat drive stem cells. And then in a single sitting inject the

entire spine from the base of the skull down to the tailbone flip them over both elbow or both shoulders both elbows both wrists and thumbs both hips both knees both ankles and great toe and people love it we've had we've done quite a few work with and it was well and then I started then I thought well then I need to invite dr. Killen and have her do all of her injectors injections, do the skin of the hair and face, do the skin of the scalp for the, to improve the health of the hair, do the face, do the O-shot P-shot. And, um, and you know, sort of, this is the, the concept being that this is the

most comprehensive stem cell upgrade ever conceived. This is really an anti-aging treatment. And what, what if you don't like my neither fine? Like why would I inject my knees? Well, it would only be if you, if you, you know, then like, we're going to do a bit of a modified treatment with you today. We're going to do a full spine makeover. We're going to inject your entire spine.

We're going to skip the entire body just because you have to travel tomorrow. And I think really you need to have two days of rest for a full body stem cell makeover. But the idea would be just to prevent problems later in life. Yeah, yeah. So the idea... I'd like to come back for an upgrade and all that. Sure, yeah.

We can touch up. And the treatment, you know, sounds like a little scary, but do people feel better? Surprisingly, people are fine and i think a lot of it is since we started using exosomes there's much less post-procedure soreness people wake up and they're actually fine amazing all right um so who who should think about it like who like is this for everybody or people you know biohackers people who want to be completely proactive about their specifically their musculoskeletal health at this point in time it's not covered by insurance no uh it's kind of pricey yeah but um eventually that's all going to

come down right just like everything um you know it's yeah i mean all of it is is coming down full body stem cell makeover is pricey. It's a lot of work. It's a huge volume of exosomes. So, you know, the cost of just the exosomes is quite high. It's a lot of work. It's about three hours of solid work for all three of us and the rest of my staff. But a portion of it does go of all the full body stem cell makeovers.

A portion of it goes to subsidize a tithing program that we're launching starting in June. So what we're doing is starting in June, we will be offering a stem cell therapy to P to people who can document that they're financially unable to pay for the treatment. And what we'll do is we will provide stem cell therapy at no financial charge, but rather in exchange for documentation of community service hours. So 60 hours of community service will purchase a stem cell treatment.

That's great. So let's say I want to talk about something kind of interesting, which is how we activate our stem cells on our own. Because there's a lot of research about how to activate your body's own stem cells. It also has to do in a way how to create healing in addition to injections, right? So functional medicine is all about activating the body's own healing systems. And we do that through diet, through lifestyle interventions like sleep and exercise and stress reduction, meditation, nutritional support, supplements. All those things can help to activate the body's own healing response, which you also recommend in conjunction with the stem cells. It's not like you just take someone who's got a horrible lifestyle, give them stem cells and it's going to fix everything.

You have to do it all in concert, right? Yeah. So, I mean, essentially the answer is functional medicine. I tell my patients to read Dr. Mark Hyman's book. Seriously. I mean, honestly, it's, you know, you just named it. It's diet, exercise, sleep, and emotional balance. It's those four things.

Diet plays a tremendous, you know, this is all about this inflammation, in inflammation that you mentioned, that the accelerated aging is a process of inflammation. So how do you reduce inflammation? How do you, how do you really nourish your own stem cell function? And it's through proper diet. It's through restorative sleep. It's through exercise and it's through emotional balance and reduction of stress. Okay. So, so how do we activate our own stem cells? Like what, what does the science tell us about things that we can do to start to activate our own healing stem cells? Well, I mean, it's the things that we just talked about.

I mean, specifically things like intermittent fasting, we know can really give you a big sort of boost in stem cell production. So time-restricted eating, eating within an eight-hour period, 16 hours of not eating, right? Yeah, exactly. Whether you do it over just, you know, just certain hours each day, whether you do several days worth, that can boost, increase stem cell activity. Exercise specifically can definitely do it. Before you jump to exercise, diet also. Other things can help, right? Ketogenic diets. Right.

Maybe the fasting mimicking diet. Dr. Walton Longmore has pioneered a lot of work in this. Activates all the healing, reparative, regenerative mechanisms. It's sort of like regenerative medicine using food. Right. Yeah. It's that, that's getting that balance between, you know, whether it's, you're doing totally keto or whether you're doing a little keto or a little paleo or a little fasting, but all of those things can have good results as far as increasing stem cell activity. And, you know, we always talk to our patients about diets and how important that is. Because if you have an unhealthy patient who's not doing all the right things, these kinds of treatments are not nearly as effective.

We don't do treatments on smokers, for instance. If they're actively smoking, we just tell them, we need you to stop smoking. You're drinking three liters of soda. Yeah, if you're drinking a ton or if your diabetes is uncontrolled. There's all different things. If you have impaired ability to heal, then we know you're not going to heal yourself, even if we give you all of the things that could be useful. So that's really important is being fairly healthy coming in.

Yeah. It's fascinating to say that because I remember being a medical student and resident in surgery. And we used to have this term was called ppp sorry for piss poor protoplasm which is kind of a medical you know inside joke about how people's tissues were unhealthy are not great so you take someone who's eating garbage and junk food and soda they're overweight you know you put you who's eating garbage and junk food and soda, they're overweight, you know, you put your, you're operating on them and their tissues literally fall apart in your hands. They don't, you can't sew it together as well. They're not as healthy and

strong. So it's not just on the outside that you look bad. It's like on the inside. And so in a way, those things can be modified to activate these, uh, our own healing systems. And then you can use stem cells and exosomes as a super boost, right? Yeah, absolutely. Very good. So how do people learn more about what you guys are doing? They want to come and check it out? For just, for the musculoskeletal pain, it's Docere Clinics, D-O-C-E-R-E Clinics, one

word, DocereClinics.com. And for the skin and sex, as I call it, it's Docere Medical, so D-O-C-E-R-inics.com and for the uh skin and sex as i call it it's a docere medical so d-o-c-e-r-e medical.com amazing so um i'm excited i'm about to go under i'm going to tell you all about it maybe another podcast we'll do a rerun for uh showing how i do because i'm really excited about this i'm excited to try thank you for offering this to me and helping me out. And I think this is really the future of healthcare is regenerative medicine. It's what functional medicine is all about. It's about activating the body's own healing systems. It's about using nature instead of heavy duty chemicals and drugs and surgery and activating the body's own reparative and regenerative systems. And science around this is just exploding.

It's so exciting to be in medicine at this time. And we can see folks like you are really pioneering this work and you were in it before anybody knew what stem cells were. So this is a place to go. So thanks for being on the podcast. Everybody's listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a comment.

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