The Dr. Hyman Show - New And Innovative Therapies To Slow Aging And Improve Cellular Function
Episode Date: December 25, 2023View the Show Notes For This Episode And Links To Full Length Episodes Featured In This Compilation Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal Get Ad...-free Episodes & Dr. Hyman+ Audio Exclusives In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Scott Sherr, Dr. Bob Hariri, and Ben Greenfield about why hyperbaric oxygen is a great choice for brain health conditions and how stem cell therapy helps with chronic pain relief, reduces inflammation, and increases energy. We also discuss sauna and red light therapy. Dr. Scott Sherr is a Board Certified Internal Medicine Physician Certified in Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy and Health Optimization Medicine (HOMe). He is the founder of Integrative HBOT, a worldwide telemedicine practice where he consults and educates patients and clinics using his novel approach to hyperbaric therapy that includes cutting-edge and dynamic HBOT protocols, comprehensive laboratory testing (using the HOMe framework), targeted supplementation, personal practices, synergistic technologies (new and ancient), and more. Dr. Bob Hariri is an accomplished surgeon, biomedical scientist, and serial entrepreneur in two technology sectors, biomedicine, and aerospace. He is the chairperson, founder, and chief executive officer of Celularity, Inc., one of the world’s leading human cellular therapeutics companies. Dr. Hariri pioneered the use of stem cells to treat a range of life-threatening human diseases. Ben Greenfield is a human performance consultant, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author of 13 books, including the wildly popular titles, Beyond Training and Boundless. Ben hosts the highly popular fitness, nutrition, and wellness website BenGreenfieldFitness.com, a site with over a million monthly visitors, featuring articles, podcasts, and product reviews. This episode is brought to you by Rupa Health, Paleovalley, and FOND. Streamline your lab orders with Rupa Health. Access more than 3,000 specialty lab tests and register for a FREE live demo at RupaHealth.com. Paleovalley is giving listeners an additional 15% off their first order. Just visit Paleovalley.com/Hyman to save on clean snacks and supplements. Get FOND's amazing bone broth today. Just go to FondBoneBroth.com/DrHyman and use code HYMAN20 to get 20% off your purchase. Connect with Dr. Mark Hyman on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
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Coming up on this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.
What hyperbaric therapy really does is just rev up the whole healing process to make it work better.
It increases blood flow, increases stem cell production, kills zombie cells.
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episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Fee and one of the producers of The
Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. The aging process can be slowed and the healing process accelerated when
we focus on cellular health. Today, exciting
new and innovative therapies such as hyperbaric oxygen treatment, stem cell therapy, and red light
therapy can help improve cognition, reduce pain and inflammation, and increase energy. In today's
episode, we feature four conversations from the doctor's pharmacy about supplemental therapies
that address dis-ease at the cellular level. Dr. Hyman speaks
with Dr. Scott Shearer about using hyperbaric oxygen to heal chronic health issues. He then
talks about new advances to optimize health and increase longevity. Next, Dr. Hyman speaks with
Dr. Bob Harari about using stem cells and exosomes for cellular repair. And finally, he talks with
Ben Greenfield about the benefits of red light therapy
and sauna. Let's jump in. So hyperbaric therapy, the definition is relatively simple. It's the
increase in atmospheric pressure combined with increased inspired oxygen. So I'll take oxygen
first because most people know a little bit about oxygen. So oxygen is something we breathe in the
air at 21% at sea level. That's how much oxygen is in the air.
The rest of it is mostly nitrogen.
At 5,000 feet above sea level, where I live here outside of Boulder, Colorado, we're about 16% oxygen.
So what happens is oxygen comes into the body.
That's okay.
I wonder why there's trouble climbing the mountains out there.
Yeah, I know.
That's why, right?
So you get this.
And this actually comes to why it's so important. So we carry oxygen typically on red blood cells, red blood cells carry this molecule on it called hemoglobin and hemoglobin
binds to oxygen. And then oxygen gets to our tissues and then it goes all the way through
our cells. And then at the end of our, that whole process, it helps you make ATP or your cellular
energy currency. So oxygen is really important without it. We don't live for very long.
Now we have a certain amount of oxygen carrying capacity and that oxygen carrying capacity is relegated to
how many red blood cells we have in circulation typically so you have a certain amount of oxygen
that could be carried you have a certain amount of oxygen that can get into your tissues now there's
a couple ways to increase the amount of oxygen carrying capacity that you have you can increase
the amount of red blood cells you have in
circulation. You can do that by altitude training. So when you go to altitude, for example, come to
Colorado, what happens is that your body stimulates a hormone out of your kidneys called
epigen or EPO for short. And EPO, what that does is it increases the number of red blood cells you
have in circulation. Now you can short circuit this by taking the drug itself. This is like
cyclists like Lance Armstrong and others would do this. Yeah, doping, the doping part.
Exactly. Or what you can do is actually you can auto-transfuse yourself. So one of these guys,
some of these guys will do this. They'll actually take blood out maybe 90 days because it takes
about 90 days to make new red blood cells, 90 days or even more time than that, like 180 days
before a race, and then transfuse yourself a unit of blood before you do
a race, and you're going to have extra red blood cells in circulation so that you have increased
oxygen carrying capacity. So that's typically what's done in the doping world, right? You have
EPO, you have auto-transfusion, so you're just transfusing yourself your own blood. But there's
another way to increase oxygen carrying capacity, and that's by increasing pressure. So we talked
about hyperbaric therapy was increasing atmospheric oxygen. We can increase that up to a hundred percent. But if you're looking at a pulse
oximeter, most pulse oximeters for most people are going to read between 96 and a hundred percent,
right? Which means that your bound amount of oxygen on your red blood cells is about 96 to
a hundred percent once they leave the lungs. So there's not like a lot amount left for you
actually to bind any more oxygen
there. So if you put a face mask of oxygen on your face and you breathe a hundred percent oxygen,
there's not going to be a whole lot more oxygen you can carry because there's only about 4% more
of those sites. Maybe that could be bound. So the trucks are already loaded, right? Yes, exactly.
So the pulse ox is something you guys can check. Everybody knows about a pulse ox now from COVID,
et cetera. So if you add pressure,
though, if you increase atmospheric pressure, which means that you simulate the pressure you
feel under a certain amount of seawater, that pressure changes your physiology and allows
oxygen to drive into the plasma or the liquid of your bloodstream. The physics law that's around
is something called Henry's law for people who like physics. The only physics law I'm going to
talk about today is Henry's law. So the more pressure you put on a gas, the more of that gas
is going to go into liquid form. And as a result of that, you get more oxygen into circulation and
drive it into the plasma of the liquid of the bloodstream itself, getting up to 1200% more
oxygen in as a result of that liquid O2 combined with that pressure with oxygen together.
So that's how hyperbaric therapy works.
Incredible.
So what are the benefits?
Because it sounds like a great idea.
Okay, more oxygen, oxygen is good, or maybe not always right.
You mentioned oxygen toxicity, so too much is not always good.
But what, you know, what are the benefits that we're seeing,
both from the perspective of diseases that we can treat with hyperbaric medicine, as well as health optimization,
longevity research. And I think there's been a number of studies out there. And I think we're
still learning, but I'd love you to sort of unpack, you know, how is this used in traditional
medicine? And how is it used outside of traditional medicine? Sure. I first learned
about it in a trauma center in medical school and they were using it for really bad wounds.
They were using it for carbon monoxide poisoning. They were using it for acute infections like
necrotizing fasciitis, which is also known as flesh eating bacteria. That's a nasty one.
That's a nasty one. Yeah. So the way I like to think about how hyperbaric therapy works is that
you have all this oxygen circulation and then something happens acutely or
many things happen acutely or all of a sudden, as soon as you have all that oxygen in circulation
and you have what I call more the long-term benefits of a hyperbaric protocol. And that's
related more to what's called epigenetics, which I'm sure you've spoken about many times in the
podcast. The idea that you can change your expression of genes to help you with healing, with optimization, with the various ways of
rebuilding the scaffolding, as I like to say, of the tissue itself. So when you get into a
hyperbaric chamber, you acutely infuse 1200% more oxygen. What's that going to do? That's going to
reverse low oxygen states. So if you have tissue that's at risk of dying, if you can get more oxygen to that tissue faster, it may not die. And this has been studied in
strokes. It's been studied in traumatic brain injury. It's been studied in acute heart attacks,
acute spinal cord injuries. If these people get hyperbaric therapy very quickly,
they're going to save tissue because you're getting more oxygen infused into the body. So
you have more liquid O2 and it's going to diffuse out more into the tissue. You're getting more oxygen infused into the body. So you have more liquid O2 in,
it's going to diffuse out more into the tissue. You're going to prevent it from potentially dying
as a result of getting all that oxygen in. Yeah. Just a quick anecdote on that. And then
I want to continue on the disease thing. My partner fell off a golf cart and had a concussion,
smashed her head and had real bad post-concussive syndrome. So I contacted a local hospital that had a hyperbaric
and I convinced them to off-label, we call it off-label, give her hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
And it was a game changer. She really like came out of there and her brain woke up. It was really
quite stunning to see, you know, in person as opposed to, you know, in a scientific article
that I read. Yeah, no, it's always nice. I appreciate the anecdote. I mean, it happened to
me. I gave myself an acute concussion maybe four or five years ago and I did my whole protocol,
got into the hyperbaric chamber and I felt like a million bucks after three days. And what's going
on when you have an acute injury like that is you have acute inflammation, you could have some
swelling, you have some tissue that's at risk of dying depending on the severity of the injury,
and you have hyperbaric therapy that's coming in here now, reversing low oxygen states, decreasing inflammation, immediately
decreasing swelling, starting the release of stem cells, which are the baby cells in our body that
can make new tissue and help mature the tissue in the various areas so that you can make new cells
in the area. So you always have these sort of backup cells in all the tissues that you have in
your body that are kind of waiting in case they're
needed. And hyperbaric therapy can help stimulate the maturation of those. So you start getting them
to start healing that area at the same time. And so you have all these things happening along with
you have all the immune system cells starting to start getting involved very quickly too. So your
immune system starts revving up as well. And you have the immune system cells like your neutrophils and your macrophages,
which are really important when you're starting to clean up tissue to help be able to do this.
So from an acuity perspective, you have an acute issue. What hyperbaric therapy really does
is just rev up the whole healing process to make it work better.
Yeah. Actually, I also had another patient who had
a stroke and it was a hemiplegic stroke, meaning paralyzed on half and couldn't move that side of
his body. And we did a lot of things, a lot of nutritional things. We gave him IV and AD and
other things. But I was pushing him to do really aggressive hyperbaric treatment and he did and
he's fully recovered. It was really quite shocking because you don't see people recover from a stroke like that.
You don't. No, you don't. I mean, that's what I always say. I mean, obviously,
if you have an acute issue, go to the hospital. Don't try to find your local hyperbaric facility
if you have a heart attack or a stroke. No, no, no. You know, your ABCs would call them.
Yeah, exactly. But as soon as possible. Yeah. Yeah. But,
but truly as soon as possible, if it's possible for you to get into a hyperbaric chamber,
now the data is still, you know, controversial. Let's call it that. These are off-label
indications, right? We have certain on-label indications for hyperbaric therapy, which are
covered by insurance that are, that will be covered by Medicare and all your private insurances. But the things that we're talking about, which are very limited, by the way,
which are very limited indications like wound care, you know, diabetic foot ulcers,
radiation injury from cancer treatment. This is delayed radiation injury. So if you have an
injury from radiation six months or later after the, your radiation exposure, you can get hyperbaric
therapy covered by, by your insurance companies.
There is sudden hearing loss,
sudden sensorineural hearing loss.
This is when you lose hearing.
It's gonna be pretty devastating for people.
Hyperbaric therapy is covered for that.
Chronic bone infections,
something called osteomyelitis.
If wound care hasn't been helpful,
then hyperbaric therapy may be something that you can use.
And then at-risk flaps and
grafts, this is in plastic surgery. So if you get plastic surgery, then you could potentially get
hyperbaric therapy covered for that reason as well. Yeah. But it's very limited. Very limited.
And compared to actually what it does, it's like, you know, it's such a powerful medicine and it's
like, it's only approved for, you know, nosebleeds, but nothing else. I know. I know. And so when it comes to it,
it's all the baseline physiology stuff that we're talking about here, like decreasing inflammation,
reversing low oxygen states, stem cell release. It's an anti-infective. If you have an infection
that does not like high oxygen environments, like your Lyme infections, like your Clostridial
infections, like your staph infections, like these do not like high oxygen environments,
they don't do well. The infections don't do well in these environments too.
So you have that as another piece.
So I always go back to the physiology of it and how we're thinking about hyperbaric therapy
in that more global context, as opposed to just for a specific indication, usually.
So you mentioned the approved indications, which for most insurance companies and Medicare, Medicaid will reimburse.
What about all the non-approved indications that there's evidence, science for? Kind of give us
the landscape of what are the kinds of things people are treating? And I have many anecdotes
myself, but you've been in this medicine a long time. And I think it's really quite striking how
powerful this medicine is when it's applied for a certain condition. So can you kind of take us
through the off-label indications and where it's most effective? Yeah, sure. So when hyperbaric
therapy is typically used is in more chronic indications. And these are things that have
been going on for long periods of time. And when we're not looking at just that acute infusion of
hyperbaric therapy of oxygen to really help, but also the long-term benefit of what I would call an oxygen infusion
protocol, where we're shifting on the epigenetic side, expression of various genes, at least 8,000
different genes that are responsible for growth, for healing, for decreasing inflammation, and
preventing cell death. And so there's been a lot of research that's been done in multiple different
conditions out there looking at it from this perspective.
And we mentioned a couple of them as we've been discussing in the podcast so far, but
one of the major ones is stroke, for example.
So people with strokes do very, very well if they can get into hyperbaric therapy immediately
or very close to it.
But also there's a study that was done three months to three years post-stroke, people
getting significantly better even three years after a stroke which is just unheard of you just don't
see that happening you also have traumatic brain injury so we talked about concussion here with
with your with your partner mark um but also with uh with people that have post-concussive syndrome
which is this is people three months or longer after a concussive episode like we see people
with reversal of symptoms a year later which is not possible like if you longer after a concussive episode. Like we see people with reversal of symptoms a year later, which is not possible. Like if you've had a concussion, it's three months
after your concussion, the, the channel, the, the chances that you're going to get completely
better if you're not better at that point are very, very low. And so, and we know that this
is the case. We can see, I mean, we see it in hyperbaric facilities all over the country,
all over the world. And the words that, excuse with and the clients that I work with as well. So you have
stroke, you have concussion, you have the dementias. So we're talking about vascular,
Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's-associated dementia. There is some evidence that hyperbaric therapy
can be effective in these patients as well. Now, especially when used in
a functional context, of course, we're not, and that's a big thing with a lot of these
indications. It's not just about getting into a hyperbaric chamber. It's about what are you doing
before, during, and after your hyperbaric environment? Like much before, right before,
what are you doing during hyperbaric therapy? What are you doing right afterwards? I know that's a
big thing for you too, Mark. I mean, it's not just one single therapy, but especially with all these indications,
it's much more of a broad swath of integration that we're looking for.
Yeah, I mean, you can't be eating an inflammatory diet and then, you know, not taking care of
yourself and then just expect it to fix you.
But it's really powerful.
So stroke is really clear.
Traumatic brain injury is really clear.
And these are big problems.
You know, obviously, these are also being used, you know, for athletes. A lot of this is for recovery.
We'll get into the performance thing in a minute. But what other health disease sort of indications
do you see this being most effective for? So we're using it a lot in Lyme disease and
co-infections. I think it's something that can be very, very effective, but it's something that has to be done in the context of working with
a Lyme expert as well, like a Lyme literate doc or a functional doc that has expertise in Lyme.
Because what I found with Lyme disease especially is that for most people, I need to get them about,
they need to be about 60 to 80% better already before them to significantly benefit from
hyperbaric therapy and have long-term
benefit after hyperbaric therapy is completed. That's been my experience there. But that's why
the ground game, the foundational stuff is so important and working with a provider that has
expertise. So Lyme is one of them. Another one would be complex regional pain syndrome. So
also known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy. It's a very difficult to control difficult pain syndrome, so also known as reflex sympathetic dystrophy. It's a very difficult to control
difficult pain syndrome that's unfortunately not uncommon and very difficult to treat.
Hyperbaric therapy can be fantastically effective at recalibrating the whole tissue bed that was
injured. Typically, it's an injury that causes this to happen, and then there's a dysregulation
or the area, the tissue itself
becomes dysregulated. The nerves get all confused and the blood vessels and everything else,
they constrict when they don't constrict. And what we think hyperbaric therapy can do
is actually help with what's called blood auto-regulation, basically helping
re-regulate how the flow of blood is getting into tissue. Because we talked about that pressure, it's that squeeze that's happening on the microcirculation, on the flow of blood is getting into tissue because we talked about that pressure.
It's that squeeze that's happening on the microcirculation on the very small blood vessels
that the pressure itself from a hyperbaric chamber is helping exercise those blood vessels
and helping recalibrate them. It happens in the brain. It happens in the heart. It happens in
the genitals. We know that there's anti-aging studies for all those places, including your
natural Viagra, maybe hyperbaric therapy, and if it's a vascular issue, at least. So we know that hyperbaric therapy has this
anti-inflammatory capacity. It actually down-regulates or decreases some of these
major inflammatory markers that you see in autoimmune disease as well, like some of the
interleukins, for example, or TNF-alpha, which are some of these cytokines is what they're called.
So hyperbaric therapy down-regulates or decreases those. So that's another type of condition or group is
the autoimmune conditions as well. We know hyperbaric therapy can be very helpful in those.
On its own, maybe not as much as being in more of a holistic perspective.
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And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, people are going to want to buy one now that it fixes erectile dysfunction.
That's how the Israelis got everybody to sign up, actually. It's kind of funny you mentioned it.
They show all the guys pictures of... It's actually one of my favorite things to show as a lecture
slide when I lecture is a functional MRI of the penis before and after hyperbaric oxygen therapy.
Whoa, that's fun. Okay.
Nobody knows what it is. It just looks like a tube and there's colors on it. And then there's
more colors on the other one. But I just like to tell everybody it's a penis that I'm putting up
on my lecture slides, talking about how hyperbaric therapy regenerates blood vessels. That's one
thing that we haven't talked about is that what hyperbaric therapy does immediately is reverse low oxygen states by getting more oxygen in the tissue.
But over the long term, it's actually rebuilding and regenerating blood vessels, something called
angiogenesis. So if you have more blood vessels, you're going to get more oxygen to the tissue
over the long term. And that's important. And then we can see functional MRIs of the brain,
of the heart, of the genitals here. And you can see how you can rebuild this tissue. And then we can see functional MRIs of the brain, of the heart, of the genitals here,
and you can see how you can rebuild this tissue. And that's where it comes into sort of the
anti-aging, reverse aging world. But yeah, the Israelis would have been the main people that
have done a lot of this research on the reverse aging side. So they did studies on the brain,
the heart, the genitals, and showing that you could see new vascularization, new blood
vessels growing in the brain and the heart. And so in the heart, it gives you more exercise
tolerance. And in the groin, it gives you more sexual tolerance, I guess, or sexual, you know,
possibilities. And then they've also done studies looking at senescent cells and telomere length,
which are, you know, fancy words for things that get bad as we get old, basically.
Yeah. Zombie cells, we call them. They're cells that don't die, that spew out inflammation, telomere length, which are fancy words for things that get bad as we get old, basically.
Yeah. Zombie cells, we call them. There are cells that don't die that spew out inflammation,
and your telomeres are the little things at the end of your chromosomes that tend to shorten as we age. And so actually, in those studies, it seemed to lengthen telomeres more than any other
treatment and actually kill zombie cells more than any other treatment, which is important.
Those are just part of the hallmarks of aging we talked about. Right. Yeah. The zombie cells are a big one too. I mean, I think of all
the research that came out, the senescent sellers of the zombie cell decreased population by about
30% after 30 treatments was pretty impressive. There's no other treatment out there that we're
aware of that can do something like that. But you mentioned chambers at the house, Mark, and I
probably should mention a little bit about the different types of chambers out there because I think people get confused.
Before you get in, we're going to get into what chambers, we're going to get into how to use them,
how long to be in them, what atmospheres, we're going to get into all that. I'm getting ahead of
myself. You're getting ahead of yourself. I want to just linger a little bit more on the treatment
side. Please. On the things that actually it can help. And a colleague of mine, a functional medicine doctor,
I'm sure you know David Perlmutter,
who was a neurologist,
was into hyperbaric medicine 30 years ago
and had a whole series of hyperbaric chambers at his clinic.
And he found it worked for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
Can you talk about its role in neurodegenerative disease?
Is there any evidence?
What do we know?
Does it work?
Is it helpful?
Should I be thinking about this for that?
Yeah.
David is one of the pioneers of using hyperbaric therapy for neurologic injury.
There's a couple other clinics that were in Florida doing very similar things.
This guy, Dr. Neubauer, one of the older guys that kind of took hyperbaric therapy from the wound care world and started using it for the brain.
And it's always like the happenstance kind of thing right you have somebody go into
a hyperbaric chamber for the bends but their stroke symptoms get better or their diabetic
neuropathy improves or their traumatic brain injury that they've had for a year uh suddenly
improves or their their nightmares from ptsd from vietnam suddenly disappear and don't come back
so and these are the things that happened in the in the early 1990s. And so the pioneers of this world were a guy named Dr. Neubauer and
Dr. Paul Harch. Paul is still practicing in Louisiana and has been doing this for a while.
And along with Dr. Perlmutter, they were all looking at how specifically the brain worked
under hyperbaric pressure and how hyperbaric
therapy could potentially be a modality to help in the ways that we've discussed, decreasing
inflammation, improving blood vascularization. And we know that this can happen. We know that
brains can start lighting up again, even if they've been degenerating because of cognitive
impairment. I mean, you and I both know, Mark, that after about the age of 50 or so, if you put
somebody under an MRI scanner and you look at their brain, even with just a regular MRI,
it's going to have something called microvascular ischemic changes of the brain,
which just basically means that blood vessels themselves, the vasculature is just starting to
deteriorate. And so we know that if we can get somebody into a hyperbaric chamber and start
rebuilding those blood vessels, they're going to have more tissue that's not going to die, right? Because as the brain gets older, it shrinks because the blood vasculature starts
to shrink around it and degenerate. So we think that hyperbaric therapy works in these contexts
for cognitive impairment, for Alzheimer's, potentially, especially in the early stages,
by decreasing inflammation, by increasing the
vascularization of the brain, by actually helping more stem cells populate that area,
and then also helping with flow. The one thing that we forget in hyperbaric therapy, actually,
most of my colleagues forget, is that pressure is actually the main thing that's happening.
Of course, oxygen is important, but it's pressure that's driving everything. And pressure itself is driving flow
and it's driving vascular and lymphatic flow. So it's the pressure itself that's helping with the
brain's actually detoxification systems and helping you actually get some of that cerebral
spinal fluid to flow out and help rebuild and regenerate after getting all that garbage out
too. So I think it's a garbage collecting capacity as well that's happening in the chamber. So if you just scuba dived at 60 feet or like for an hour a day,
would that do the same thing? It's a lot of work to go scuba dive every day because, I mean,
that goes into protocols. We're not usually just talking about just going once, but there's
actually a funny story about that, Mark, because they published a study on these veterans that had traumatic brain injury and ptsd and they took them diving for five days something like 60 feet a day and they all
said that their tbi symptoms were dramatically better their concussion symptoms their ptsd all
ptsd all were better and they attributed to going diving and looking at the fish
how about the pressure guys how about the oxygen but they said no no it wasn't that it was just
because they got to look at fish so okay a couple other things on the on the other end of the age
spectrum um i've seen people use it for autism uh what are your thoughts on that so or cerebral
palsy uh yeah yeah so my father who's a chiropractor, his name's Alan. He runs a facility in New York called the Northport Wellness Center. And he's actually the guy that got me into hyperbaric therapy in the early 2000s because he was looking at how you could use hyperbaric therapy in the context of autistic spectrum within the functional context that you're very much in, in the sense that could you
optimize blood flow to the brain and help with blood flow, what I would call regulation,
in the sense of oftentimes in autistic patients, the way that blood flow is regulated, the way it
kind of goes to various areas of the brain is abnormal. And if hyperbaric therapy could help
regulate that, would it help with actually helping the brain work better? And the answer is that it seems like it does. And there's been some small studies
in Canada, in India, in other countries, and even in the US, looking at how it does seem to help
autistic kids. But it's not a treatment in and of itself without doing all the other work that
really is required. Yeah, but it's an adjunct amazing and so okay uh in terms of you
know the mechanisms of action to recap you know it increases blood flow it stimulates angiogenesis
regional blood cell formation it increases stem cell production it increases telomere length it
kills zombie cells it helps with wound healing it helps reduce inflammation it's an anti-infective
kills bugs did i miss anything no you did well that was a good look of everything
wait maybe i don't have too many microvascular changes yet i'm gonna be 64 this year maybe
my brain is still working well you've done some hyperbaric therapy you do a couple other things
not enough i'm like desperate to get one honestly honestly. I'm like, I just wait until I've been stationary enough long enough to get one.
Well, once you get stationary, I can help you. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. I think you did a good
job with the overview or just the rundown there, Mark. I think the key for people to know,
and it's something that I'm very emphatic about, is that I don't think that hyperbaric therapy is
right for everybody right now, but I do think that at some point in your life, hyperbaric therapy will very likely be helpful for you. So it's not an if
thing, but it's a when thing. But the when thing is important because what happens a lot in my field
is that if you own a hyperbaric facility, everything looks like you need to go in a
hyperbaric chamber right now. Yeah. All you have is a hammer. Everything looks like a nail, right?
Exactly. So I got disinvited from a lecture because I said, please, my lecture, my lecture title was, please do not put them in
the chamber. So, and it's a provocative, right? But the idea here is that it's not if, but when
ladies and gentlemen, right? Don't take this pill. Yes, exactly. So what I often find, if you have a
chronic issue, Mark, I need them to see you first. I need them to get optimized first. I need them to
start working on their, their vitamins minerals their nutrients their gut health um now
but if you have an acute issue then you know do not pass go do not collect your 200 you know find
a local hyperbaric facility and start getting treated if it's safe to do so because it's going
to help the whole process but if you have lyme disease if you have a chronic concussion, even if you have a chronic stroke or dementia or chronic pain, like these things screw up your cellular metabolism and
they need to be addressed.
If I put something in a hyperbaric chamber, I flood their body with oxygen.
That's awesome, except if their body cannot tolerate all that oxygen.
And what does that mean?
Because if you have a lot of oxygen in circulation, you're also causing something called oxidative stress. This is the buildup of free radicals and
reactive oxygen species. That's okay. That's what exercise does. That's what heat does at high level.
Temporarily.
Temporarily, right. But if you're going into hyperbaric chamber every day,
you're not going to be able to potentially neutralize that oxidative stress,
and that could be a problem. So it's not like it's a cure-all for everybody right now. One of the things that happens as we age is our
stem cells get pooped out. It's called stem cell exhaustion. It's one of the hallmarks of aging we
talked about. And our stem cells age as we age. So their ability to regenerate tissues, cells,
repair, heal our bodies just kind of declines a little bit. So emerging science tells us that we
now can start to use stem cells as a therapy for degenerative conditions, whether it's arthritis or
broken down joints. And this is being used in sports medicine for athletes. It's being used
in longevity medicine. So it's starting to happen. I think the question is, you know,
how do we get more of this?
And I think the more research we do on this, the more it becomes acceptable, the more we'll
be able to innovate around this.
Right now, these stem cells are a little challenging to get because you can't grow your own stem
cells and give them to yourselves in America.
You have to go to a different country right now because of the regulatory environment.
But I think that'll change.
But I want you to think of your stem cells as sort of the memory of your youth. They have the capacity
to renew, to repair, regenerate cells. And they also secrete factors that regulate the immune
system, that reduce inflammation. They stimulate healing throughout the body. And they produce
these things called exosomes. We're going to talk about those in a little bit, but these are like
little packets of healing factors that contain proteins and peptides and microRNA, all these things that teach your body what to do
to repair and heal. Now, studies have shown that stem cell therapy and exosome therapy can reduce
inflammation that's associated with aging and also increase energy, physical performance,
and it's just moving so fast. So let's just talk about the kind of stem cells, what it can help with, and what might be on the horizon.
So really two major types.
The first is from your bone marrow.
We talked about that a little bit.
They're called hemopoietic stem cells.
They make red blood cells, white cells.
And then there's the mesenchymal stem cells, which come from our tissues.
Our mesenchym, which is basically what we're made of.
And these come from our organs and so forth, fat.
And these can be harvested from bone marrow if they're the hemoplastic stem cells or from mesenchymal stem cells can come from fat or other places. And then they can be injected
intravenously into your whole body for systemic healing or into particular body parts for
repairing local issues that are broken down. And they won't be rejected by your immune
system because they're immunoprotected because they're your own cells. Now, we're learning also
you may be able to get umbilical cord stem cells and placental stem cells. And there's all this
kind of stuff that's sort of happening on the horizon, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
Now, why might you use them? Well, if you're a longevity biohacker, you might just want to get them injected in your
bloodstream.
You might want to use them if you have a chronic illness to help with renewing the brain, the
heart, the immune system, your mitochondria.
They might help you improve the frailty of aging, the loss of muscle mass, improvement
in endurance, energy, organ function, all may be influenced by giving stem cells.
We still need a lot of research. It's not quite prime time yet, but it's going to become a routine intervention
in medicine and the treatment of abnormal aging. Okay, next topic, exosomes. Exosomes we briefly
touched on, but these are how stem cells do their work. They have these little packets of repair,
regenerative healing factors,
and they actually can be given in a much easier way. You don't have to suck out your bone marrow.
You don't have to, you know, get a liposuction to kind of draw them out, and you don't have to grow them in a lab. And you can actually get them from either amniotic fluid or from placental
fluids, placental material stem cells that are then grown in a lab and then
they can be grown in a way that's very sterile and clean and safe. And they can be extracted
and there's no DNA in them. So they're not identified as foreign. Your body can handle
them and they actually don't get rejected. So they're really kind of cool. They're, as I said, little packets of growth factors, inflammatory, anti-inflammatory compounds, lipids, proteins, micro-DNA, RNA, and they basically are powerful therapeutic agents for regenerative medicine. heal back problems after COVID when I had brain fog. And they've been quite remarkable. I had
inflammatory bowel disease after an infection with Clostridia difficile where I got colitis
and I used it to cure that. So I think there's a lot of research emerging around this. We still
need more research, but these exosomes are quite amazing. They act like little messengers and
communication systems between cells.
They reduce inflammation. They cross your blood brain barrier.
That's why my brain fog went away when I basically took them after COVID.
They also improve muscle and brain function.
They regulate cellular cleanup, repair. They help with autophagy.
They play a role in regulating potentially autoimmune diseases, obesity,
lots of things, infections. And they can also help regenerate bone, cartilage, soft tissues, heart, brain.
So I've had them injected into my back where I had terrible arthritis and pain, and it's
just gone.
So it's pretty amazing stuff.
It's a little expensive.
It's not available for prime time for most people yet, but it's really impressive.
I've used them, as I said, to cure my own autoimmune issues from my back. I mentioned the COVID with brain fog, fatigue, depression, and basically with just one treatment, it all went away.
So now I use this with many patients, not just myself.
And I found for tough cases, it can be extremely effective and it's very safe and it's a lot cheaper than stem cells.
So how are they made?
Where do they come from? Well, we've talked a little bit about that, but they're from the stem cells that are grown in a lab that come from
placenta or maybe from amniotic fluid. And then they're cultured in a lab. And then the exosomes
are basically extracted, they're concentrated, and they're made available for treatment. So
while you might only be growing a few hundred million stem cells, if you extract them from your bone marrow or your
fat, you might get billions and billions of exosomes that can be given in a way short-cutting
that whole process. A lot of clinics offer this for chronic diseases. A lot of clinics offer it
for longevity. They can be given intravenously. And we found them very helpful
in our clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center. And they're really pretty simple to give,
just a simple IV push. In the quest to get access to these remarkable stem cells,
scientists, clinicians, and the general public have looked for alternatives to actual whole cell therapy. And so they have said, well, how do stem cells effectuate the benefits we see clinically?
And you mentioned it before, the little microscopic nanovessicle nanoparticles that are broken off of stem cells that carry inside the payload, they carry information, information
in the form of genetic material like RNA.
They also carry growth factors and other small molecules and other biologic materials that
can be transferred to your cells and in some cases signal processes that are beneficial.
So exosomes are kind of a poor man's way of getting the benefits of cell therapy,
but in a micro-dosable way that will have effects, but those effects will be somewhat transient.
So it's a way to deliver the power of stem cells in a dosable manner.
Are you saying that exosomes give you a short-term benefit, whereas the stem cells give you a longer
term benefit? That's right. So the exosome, if the objective in using an exosome is to treat your
back pain, okay, the exosomes that are delivered that have anti-inflammatory payloads will actually
lower inflammation and give you benefits, clinical
benefits that will have an effect for a period of time. And depending upon what the origin of your
back pain is, is it a chronic injury or was it an acute injury that you simply want to get under
control? The duration of effective exosomes will vary. And so let's say you overdid it,
you strained your back, you have inflammation
in the paraspinal muscles and maybe in the disc spaces of your vertebral column. Exosomes will
deliver the materials to control inflammation and stimulate repair, but it'll stimulate repair by
calling upon your own stem cells, okay? Exosomes also are exciting
because they are a relatively scalable
and ultimately economical tool
that can give you the benefits of cellular therapy
without having to deliver the living cells.
So that's why there's a lot of popularity
and a lot of work going on.
And by the way, you know, arguably,
every cell is making exosomes all day long.
So if you have a cultivation system and you're producing cells,
those cells will dump exosomes into the soup,
and it can be collected and delivered as a therapeutic.
Not just stem cells, but all cells.
All cells.
Stem cells are particularly good at producing exosomes for obvious reasons, right?
They're highly synthetic and so on.
But you touched upon something which is near and dear to my heart, which is what's going on in the natural killer cell world.
So, you know, we hear it all day long. All the different approaches to longevity have evolved into what are the mechanisms
or the processes of dysfunctional aging you want to correct.
One of the processes that's been well recognized is that as we age, some of our cells become
senescent.
They wind up becoming defective.
They accumulate problems. And they are, you know, some people, you refer to them as zombie cells, right?
And these zombie cells are kind of walking around your body.
They're doing their job, but they're doing it less and less effectively and efficiently.
And eventually, they start to do things abnormally, and that contributes to the accumulated problems we see as the signs of aging.
Now, we know that the body under normal circumstances has a system to clear away those zombie cells, those senescent cells.
And so there's an entire field called senolytic therapy where what you're trying to do, you're trying to hasten the removal of those cells either by
stimulating a normal biologic mechanism or by specifically killing those cells and getting
them to be cleared away. Well, nature figured out how to do this better than we do it. And the way
nature does it is to use a cell called a natural killer cell, and natural killer cells are part of what we call the innate
immune system. They are pre-programmed, they're pre-programmed to identify and destroy threats
that occur generally in biology. So when we were first studying the placenta and we were so
intrigued by this incredible organ,
one of the observations that was made was, you know, it's interesting,
but one in every thousand women who's pregnant has some form of cancer during pregnancy. It's a pretty high frequency.
But the incidence of a mother transmitting her cancer to a developing fetus essentially is zero, right?
I mean, there have been some ice case reports, but they're not linking the mom's cancer necessarily to the newborn's cancer.
So we were intrigued, and we asked ourselves, you know, why is it that the fetus is protected?
And obviously, our attention was directed to the placenta.
So about 12, 13 years ago, I set my research team on the mission to find out what is it about the
placental immune system that is defensive against the transmission of cancer. And we identified
this unique natural killer cell from the placenta. So it's a white
blood cell that is specialized to be pre-programmed to identify things that are common threats.
So what are some of those common threats? Well, viral infections, right? Fungal infections.
So it turns out that we learned that these newborn placental stem cells are pre-programmed to attack and destroy cells that express things called stress antigens.
So one of the things our cells do when they're in trouble, when they're sick, is they express on the surface of the cell molecules that signal stress. Those stress antigens actually recruit and allow
natural killer cells to target and destroy very specifically those old senescent cells.
And the mechanism is common to the way we react to viral infection, cancer, and senescent cells. So upon that observation and discovery,
we decided we were going to take placental natural killer cells and use them as a tool
in all of those clinical areas, treating viral infections, treating cancer, treating age-related
senescent cells. And here's the beauty of it. The NK cells are very, very well tolerated.
They can be administered by systemic infusion, and they are really, really good at hunting down
and clearing you of your senescent cell population. And there's a lot of work ongoing. You've probably seen publications now.
NK cells may, in fact, be the cornerstone of therapy to treat movement disorders like
Parkinson's disease because it appears that they actually identified the defective cells
in the part of the brain that's damaged in Parkinson's disease and clean those out.
So I'm very hopeful. Yeah. So I'm, I'm really hopeful
that natural killer cells from placentas will be a tool we use to, to enhance the senolytic
processes that cull the herd and clean up our biology as we age. And I do, and we, and I think
we know senolytic, effective senolytic activity benefits us biologically.
Now, are the actual natural killer cells from your body that have been cultured and grown and then given back to you, or are these coming from the placenta as well?
So if you isolate the cells from the individual, you can deliver them back,
and they'll have a benefit.
But like we were talking about,
if they're old, if they're old cells, they may not be as effective as cells from a newborn.
The beauty about the placental natural killer cells is that we can manufacture them
to very high quality standards. We can subject them to very rigorous controls,
and we can deliver them as a one size fits-fits-all product. So we've taken these
natural killer cells into clinical trials in cancer and ultimately we want to take them into
degenerative diseases as well as age-related, senescent-related phenomena like, you know,
our hair loss, skin changes, potentially even things that occur in the brain.
But the beauty of it is that it's nature's tool, right?
This is what these cells do naturally.
This is what they're pre-programmed to do.
So we're just basically using them in their normal function.
This is exactly what I sort of said at the beginning, is the body has its own innate healing system.
It's way smarter than our medications.
And a lot of the cancer immunotherapies are actually taking advantage of the body's own military self-defense system to help go and find and kill cancers.
And it's working better than any therapies we've had for a number of different things.
It's not universally effective across all cancers, but it's very promising. And what you're talking about, whether it's stem cells,
whether it's natural killer cells, exosomes, these various kinds of cell therapies,
they play a role in basically kind of being this sort of globally effective therapy for all sorts
of different problems, because it treats these common underlying problems of degeneration
and aging that happen in the body that have universal causes. And so you're attacking these
universal causes at the root, whether it's inflammation, whether it's the breakdown of
tissues. So you're seeing these can be a key part of medicine in the future. Right now, it feels like
these are inaccessible. They're still part of large research trials. You can't really go and get them easily. There's clinics here and there where you
can try to get them or you can go out of the country to get them. But how far are we away
from having this being part of regular medical practice? So your books explain to everyone
exactly what you were alluding to, which is that we should go to the root cause of the problem.
And in many cases, nature has already developed a should go to the root cause of the problem. And in many cases,
nature has already developed a system to address the root cause, right? I love it, man. Nature's
a lot smarter than we are, right? And the beauty, if you have a teleological approach to things,
the beauty is evolution and the natural selection process leads to the use of those tools that are most effective,
the ones that are effective, the ones that stick around,
and the next generation and the next generation will have them.
So the truth is what we're doing in cellularity and in the cellular medicine industry, is trying to produce a product that
can be delivered in the conventional healthcare system reliably, logistically, conveniently,
and economically so that we can enhance all of the systems that nature built to keep us healthy.
So at Cellularity, you know, we have spent decades, two decades,
on figuring out what the placenta is all about, what we can get out of it, and what the clinical
value of those cells could be to treat some of the things we've been discussing today.
Serious diseases like cancer, all the way to improving the thickness and the quality of our hair.
And I can tell you that this is now kind of the hottest game in town in many areas.
You know, there are parts of the world, the Gulf States, the Middle East, parts of Asia,
you know, clearly some areas of Eastern Europe where a progressive receptive approach to cellular medicine has created an explosion of applications of this technology to treat diseases.
Cellularity recognizes that the global opportunity is vast, maybe the biggest, maybe the most lucrative opportunity in all of healthcare. But what's great about it is it's going to drive us to sort of proactive treatment rather than reactive treatment. If we know the reason that we develop joint problems is that as we age, chronic
inflammation damages our joints, maybe what you do is you treat it before it becomes symptomatic and you deliver a cell therapy product that helps
to build your cartilage back better, control inflammation in the joint, and you never get
to the point that degenerative disease actually affects your life. So cell therapy has the
potential of transforming healthcare because it can be very proactive. And companies like ours are working to
deliver these products at scale, conveniently, and with the economics that fit the healthcare
system. I'd much rather prevent somebody from getting joint disease than have to replace them
three times in their lifetime with prosthetics. So that's the promise of cellular medicine. And, you know,
I think obviously cellularity is at the forefront of this because our source material is abundantly
available, right? There's almost 200 million placentas thrown away a year in the world.
By collecting this biological waste material, isolating the cellular components, and then
producing them to scale. For example,
one placenta can produce tens of thousands of doses of cells. And so the incredible scalability,
the logistic ease of getting that raw material, and the economics of it ultimately, I think,
are going to help drive this to being the tool that we use proactively as well as
reactively, you know, in response to disease.
And so, you know, the promise is enormous.
Light in general is fascinating.
I don't know how much you've looked into light.
I'm reading this book right now called The Human Photosynthesis.
It actually gets into how the human melanin pigment actually operates very similar to
the chlorophyll pigment in plants
in terms of being able to accept photons of light and generates, I think, for each molecule of water,
it's about four electrons, which can then be used to move through the electron transport chain
and technically generate ATP-based energy.
That's how our body makes energy.
It's human photosynthesis. Yeah,
the electron transport is how we make energy, but normally you'd feed glucose into that cycle,
right? You can feed light to make energy. You can use the combination of light and melanin to
produce energy. And I had already known a little bit about that idea of some element of human
photosynthesis. I think it was Sire G who published an article on, on green men,
like maybe five years ago. And it really caught my eye. He was talking about how upon ingestion
of chlorophyll rich compounds, you saw a similar effect, chlorophyll rich compounds combined with
sunlight. So like, um, you know, phytoplankton or green, blue algae or chlorella or spirulina
or something like that. But it turns out that just melanin alone, you know, even in the absence of a
lot of these green, blue compounds combined with sunlight can shift you into a state of producing electrons so it's basically
a mitochondrial therapy charging the body's battery yeah and so for those people who don't
really understand mitochondria are these little energy factories in your cells and they take oxygen
and they take food and they burn them that's how you have energy to run everything but
what you're saying is that light also can contribute to the rejuvenation of your mitochondria,
which is central to aging.
We're going to get into that in a minute.
The discussion of melanin aside, we know that certain spectrums of light can activate an element of the mitochondria
called cytochrome C oxidase.
And so anything in about the 600 to 850 nanometer spectrum of light, and this would be like red light, infrared light, some parts of far infrared light can fall into that spectrum, but it's normally near infrared and red that are going to target cytochrome C oxidase.
It's actually wonderful for the mitochondria.
You get a nitric oxide production.
You can trigger collagen and elastin production. No really good human clinical studies that I've seen,
but a lot of anecdotal evidence,
and I think Juve has put out some articles on their site
about upregulation of mitochondrial activity in latex cells in the testes.
So there's an amplified total testosterone response.
Wait, wait, wait.
So you're saying as you shine this red light on you and your testosterone goes up?
Yes.
So you take off your clothes in front of these red light panels,
and so you get the skin effect, and you also get the endocrine effect.
Wow, that's pretty amazing.
The testosterone effect, yeah.
So, I mean, nothing's— So you have to shine it on your private parts?
You got to shine it on your guys.
And there are multiple ways to do it.
Like, I actually travel with one of the little mini ones,
and I'll just lay in bed at night, read a book,
and kind of tuck it in my crotch and shine it for about 10 minutes. Wow. At home actually travel with one of the little mini ones and I'll just lay in bed at night, read a book and, you know, kind of tuck it in my crotch and shine it for
about 10 minutes. At home, I have one of the, one of the big panels and it's at my desk. So I can
stand at that while I'm working on my desk. You don't want too much. So, um, you know,
10 minutes a day. Yeah. Excess stimulation of some of those nitric oxide synthase pathways
and that excess stimulation of cytochrome C oxidase in the mitochondria can generate
excess free radicals.
So this is something you could overdo.
And same way you could overdo UVA and UVB from sunlight.
So it's a little too much charge and that creates secondary damage to the body,
is what you're saying.
Yeah, excess.
In this case, it would be reactive oxygen species.
So like free radicals.
Yeah, in response to excess metabolic activity.
So we know any of these things that might induce a mild hormetic effect from cryotherapy to exercise to heat,
they would be unfavorable in large amounts.
Okay, wait, wait, wait.
Stop, stop, stop.
So you just said something that was a very cool concept, which is hormesis, hormetic.
People have no idea what that is.
Most people have never heard of the word.
And what it means is that when there's a stress to the system, it activates
a healing response. So a little bit of stress, like if you exercise and lift a weight, it's
going to create a little bit of micro damage in the muscles, but that makes them stronger.
Yes. Assuming you allow them to rest and recover. And the same could be said of radiation. There's
even, there's one study that showed that the rodents around Chernobyl were living longer than non-irradiated rodents.
So there's some evidence even mild amounts of radiation may be beneficial.
This might be partially why earthing and grounding and going outside barefoot and getting exposed to that type of radiation is beneficial.
Lower risk of skin cancer with frequent, sane exposure to sunlight due to that hormetic effect and building up. And the cryotherapy you mentioned, which is cold shock therapy.
Yeah. With the cold, uh, you know, that, that can, that can excessively activate the sympathetic
nervous system. It can stress the immune system. It can be too much, but in small amounts, right?
You get nitric oxide production and you get that activation of the Vegas nerve and you get a little
bit of conversion of your adipose tissue into metabolically active
brown fat and so small amounts of cold good large amounts as anyone knows who's maybe not dressed
right for a day of skiing it can be it can be stressful um you know heat same thing we know
from like the finnish longevity study the men's longevity study that sauna is four to five times
a week in the sauna and and uh you you see a distinct increase i do that i do
both like a hot steam really hot and then i jump in an ice bath well that's that's what they left
out in that study i think is you know because i've gone to finland and i've gone to the men's
finish also say they jump in the ice they'll they'll go in the sauna and then they'll go
jump in the baltic sea stand outside to dry off shivering and then go back in the heat and do a
few rounds of that and then of course there's the social component right there with their with their
buddies hanging out even when they go in the sauna you're quiet you're breathing you're not
on your phone so there's there's some components that i think go beyond the sauna yeah and i
remember once i was i was in maine i had a friend of mine had a wood fired sauna and we literally
sat in there for six hours. Yeah.
And we'd go back out into the snow and roll around in the snow.
Oh, it's amazing.
And then get back in the sauna, roll around in the snow.
It was, I'd never felt that good in my entire life.
We do that at our house.
My kids call them snow angels, and what we'll do is do the sauna.
Then as you're walking out, trudging through the snow,
out to the hot tub, you stop, you do snow angels,
you get in the hot tub, you get that tingling in the skin, all that nitric oxide, and you go back out and do snow angels.
And yeah, the idea of hot cold, you know, again, for the hormetic effect is fabulous.
Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and
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who is trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes,
especially when it comes to your health. Keeping this podcast free is part of my mission to bring
practical ways of improving health to the general public. And in keeping with that theme, I'd like
to express gratitude to those sponsors that made today's podcast possible.