The Dr. Hyman Show - This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah

Episode Date: January 8, 2025

What if the future of medicine isn’t about managing disease but erasing it? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Darshan Shah to explore cutting-edge therapies like plasmapheresis and their potential to transform health and longevity. Together, we discuss how this innovative treatment reduces inflammation, supports recovery from long COVID, and improves aging biomarkers. Discover how personalized care and functional medicine could redefine how we approach healthspan and lifespan. In this episode, we discuss: An overview of plasmapheresis, an advanced medical procedure that replaces plasma to reduce inflammation and aid recovery from chronic conditions. The potential of therapies like plasmapheresis to alleviate conditions such as Alzheimer's, autoimmune diseases, and long COVID. Leveraging natural stressors like heat, cold, and oxygen therapy to enhance mitochondrial function and extend lifespan. Exploring the critical role of reducing inflammation to improve overall health and prevent age-related diseases. The importance of diet, stress management, and environmental stressors in maintaining health and preventing disease. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by BonCharge, Timeline, Big Bold Health, and Sunlighten. Order BON CHARGE’s Max Red Light Therapy device today and get 15% off. Visit BonCharge.com and use code DRMARK for 15% off. Get 33% off your order of Mitopure while supplies last. Go to Timeline.com/HYMAN33 today. Your future self will thank you! Try Big Bold Health's HTB Rejuvenate and get 25% off by going to BigBoldHealth.Com and use code DRMARK25 at checkout. Visit Sunlighten.com and save up to $600 on your purchase with code HYMAN.

Coming up on this episode, This is directly removing inflammatory biomarkers from your bloodstream and directly reducing inflammation. You can see it, you can measure it. And so from there, if we provide your organs the milieu in which to thrive and you remove the inflammation, all your organs are going to get better, right? And so therefore you're going to avoid chronic disease and reverse chronic disease as well. you're going to avoid chronic disease and reverse chronic disease as well. When I'm with my patients, I see how busy lives can make it difficult to prioritize our own wellness. Balancing work, family, and personal health can leave little time for appointments,

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Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for real-time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Hymen Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website,

Supplement Store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products. Care about living long and living well. You're going to love this conversation with a brilliant physician, one of my good friends, Dr. Darshan Shah, who is the guy who founded Next Health, which we're going to talk about on this podcast, among other things, including something called plasmapheresis, which you probably heard me talk about, but essentially it's like an oil and filter change for your body. He is an extremely well-chained physician.

He's trained at Mayo Clinic. He's a surgeon. He's done over 20,000 surgical procedures, but he, through his own health journey and through his own sickness at 40 years old, having five diseases, including diabetes, hypertension on five different medications, realized we have a sick care system and we got to fix that and change to a health care

system and he started something called Next Health which is a place that you can go to create health not treat disease but by the way when you do that disease goes away as a side effect. So Next Health is a cool place and we get deeply into the science around I think one of the most promising things now in the space of health and medicine and longevity and treating even chronic diseases like Alzheimer's and long COVID and many other things which you probably haven't figured out yet

because it's such a universally effective treatment for dealing with inflammation, which is the root cause of so much of what's wrong with us today, including mental health, chronic diseases, aging itself. So I think you're gonna love this conversation with Dr. Darshan Shah. So let's jump right in.

Well, Darshan, it's so great to have you on the podcast. We've been friends for a long time and I'm excited to talk to you about some of the most amazing advances in healthcare and longevity medicine that you are at the forefront of. It's just, it's great to have you. Dr. Hyman, I can't tell you.

Mark, Mark, Mark. Mark, I have tremendous respect for you because, you know, for, I told you this story before, you kind of set off my journey into this new field of medicine. I started my career in Western medicine and when I heard you speak, I think it's been over 12 years now I heard you speak for the first time, you inspired my entire new journey. Oh my God. So it's an honor to be here. That's amazing. It's a be here. That's amazing.

That's amazing. You never know. You're going to speak to a bunch of thousands of people in some audience, and somebody gets like the light bulb goes off. Yes. That's great. So you were a traditional surgeon.

You were trained at Mayo and all the top institutions, and you were top of the game. Why did you shift gears and go into a different field, which is very different from what you were doing, which is a chance to cut is a chance to cure, to heal with steel, to heal with what you're doing now. Yeah, so I think a few things happened at the same time in my life at that moment when I first heard you speak.

One of them was being in the Western medical system for so long, I was getting really burnt out, not with surgery. I love doing surgery, but I was getting really burnt out seeing people never get better. And then you're always seeing them when they're at the end of their rope, they're seeking surgery to turn back years and years of accumulated damage in many different ways, all the different surgical procedures that we have. You can only address these problems one patient at a time. You just felt like not only were you on this treadmill where you can never really catch

up, you're actually going in reverse. There were more people getting sick than we could ever operate on. Yeah. Right? And so it was just, it just felt like this was leading nowhere to me. Both me personally as a surgeon and a doctor, but also the entire system was just getting nowhere. In fact, things were getting worse and the problems were accumulating. Yeah. And then I saw looking in the mirror, just working 12, 14 hours a day in the operating room, like I would get, I would wake up after four hours of sleep being completely stressed out

as soon as I woke up in the morning because I had to get to the operating room by 6 a.m. for a 6.15 cut time, right? Yeah. And then I would basically stand there in the OR with minimal breaks for hours and hours, probably 12, 14 hours a day sometimes. You had a full catheter in there?

Yeah, you know, as a surgeon surgeon you're not allowed the catheter. I was listening, that's a catheter you put inside your penis so you don't have to go to the bathroom. Exactly. You put a little bag on your leg. Sometimes you wish you had one of those. It depends. Exactly.

But like you're there for hours with your cortisol levels up to here and you're just eating whatever's in the nurse's lounge. You use a combination of like donuts and bagels, right? All the pharmacy, uh, pseudo companies bringing all that crap, muffins, bagels, donuts. Exactly. Exactly. And then, you know, you're like drinking coffee in between every single case. Coffee and sugar. Coffee and sugar, right. That's what medicine runs on. Exactly. So I found myself in my early 40s in the sickest possible state that I could be in. I was at five different diagnoses.

Personally. Personally, yeah. I was five different diagnoses, uncontrolled hypertension. I had an autoimmune disease. I had diabetes, not even pre-diabetes anymore. I was diabetic on my hemoglobin A1C level and I was on multiple medications, which then I saw my personal concierge physician, okay,

and expensive guy in Beverly Hills, and his solution was to put me on Prozac because I was depressed about all of this stuff. Oh yeah. And all the latest. You're on five medications for Crohn's and you're depressed. Okay, I'll just give you Prozac. That's exactly what happened. Pill for reveal a pill for every ill. Right.

And so I was super sick and I personally was not getting anywhere in the treadmill of my own health. Yeah. So I decided that moment there has to be a better way. But as you know, you were 40 going on 60. Yeah. 40 going on like almost 70. It was crazy. I was I was getting like decrepit at 40. It was not good. And so I was at the end of my rope

and I was looking for alternative methods and seeing what else was out there. And that's when I happened upon an IFM conference where I heard you speak for one of the first times. It was either the IFM conference or it was this big event out in Phoenix that was going or in Scottsdale where you were speaking as well I saw you speak like a couple times in a row and yeah light bulb went off

Like you said like I need to address my own health from the root cause. Yeah Amazing that's quite a story and and now you're sitting here. No medications my hypertension. No diabetes, right? I mean, I'm not a prozac exactly What's great about is not only- Not on Prozac? Exactly, and what's great about it is not only do I not have diseases, but I feel incredible. The vitality and the energy and just the drive and what I see in the mirror, I just feel great. And so that's, for me it was like, yeah, it's so great

I don't have all these diseases, I'm off all my medications, but also just being able to wake up in the morning refreshed, attack a 12-hour workday, and then still feel great after that and be happy. I mean, it's just monumental. It is. You know, Darshan, you know, what you're talking about is something sounds like, oh, well, I got these diseases, then I got off them, and that's not something that happens in traditional medicine.

These are one-way streets. As we're trained, these are progressive chronic diseases that we have to manage. We even have a whole term. We have chronic disease management systems. There's whole companies devoted to chronic disease management, managing your medication, managing your disease.

Who wants to manage it? Why don't we get rid of it? Well, the pharmaceutical companies want us to manage it. Yeah, of course. There's a subscription revenue for them, right? But you know, your own life story is just an example of how these things are not inevitable, how they can not only be prevented, but also reversed even after you have them. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And so that journey of, you know, seeing what was wrong with our healthcare system from the inside out and seeing how you were essentially a victim of our modern society and the food system and the medicine that we actually practice, which is really not focused on creating health, it's focused on treating disease. We have a sick care system, not a healthcare system. Exactly. And so you decided you wanted to create a healthcare system that was different and you called it Next Health. And actually we're sitting here in Next Health headquarters in West Hollywood, California,

doing this podcast. I'm about to go get a procedure, which we're going to talk about because you're so gracious to offer me this treatment, which I've had a number of times called plasmapheresis, which is essentially cleaning your blood like an oil filter. But you had this vision of something different. And Next Health was really the thing that got birthed out of what you saw was wrong with traditional healthcare and what your own personal challenges were and how to get better. Exactly. And so during this time when I was transforming my own health, I was going to multiple different

places all over Los Angeles, right? I was seeking out sauna therapy here. I was seeking out hyperbaric oxygen therapy at a different place. I was seeing like three different practitioners at different places to get the things that I needed to get myself healthy. And it just was very frustrating.

And then what was incredible too is I was able to get myself healthy, even though I had to go to all these different places. And I saw myself getting healthier. Like this stuff works. Like you can get on a good nutrition, exercise, sleep program, and do a few things that most people now have access to that we didn't have access to.

And you can get healthy really quickly, actually. Yeah, it's crazy. Right, it's quite amazing. It's like your body wants to be in a state of health, not in a state of disease. And so I was talking to my patients about this because they were seeing the transformations that I was having. And I was telling them how to do it. And for the ones that could have the time and the energy to do this,

they were getting healthy and avoiding surgery themselves. And I saw myself like becoming an evangelist for functional medicine, becoming an evangelist for the nutrition and like doing something opposite for our regular system. And I was like, you know what, there needs to be a place where people can go where this is the system. They don't not cobble it together all over the place, right? And so Next Health really came from the idea

of let me just make one place where we could basically hit the reset button on the healthcare system. Yes, and on people's personal health. Exactly, exactly. I was like, you know what? The healthcare Western medical system, that's a massive monstrosity that it's gonna take, you know, we got ourselves into this after five decades,

it's gonna take 10 decades to unwind this. Well, you and I are working on shortening that time. Well, exactly. I said, let's just hit the reset button. Let's make a new place where we can start all over again. And that's what Next Health is. We approach it completely differently. I remember starting Next Health,

I got together with my business partner and we got a whiteboard and we wrote down all the things wrong with traditional healthcare. And we wrote down, what is that 180 opposite? What is the exact opposite? People hate going to the doctor's office because it's like on the 10th floor of a building and you have to wait eight hours

and you're in this tiny dingy waiting room. What's the opposite of that? Let's make a beautiful space that inspires people to wanna go and get their health in order and visit on a regular basis. Like you go to a doctor once a year, we want you to come in once a week. It's like an Apple store, instead of like going into a corner bodega,

which is a mess, right? Yeah, exactly. That's what people call us, the Apple store of wellness. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it is beautiful. I've been there and I've been treated there. And this approach you take is really trying to put together

some of the innovative therapies that have been sort of marginalized in healthcare that often have been studied and have been researched but are still neglected and often ignored by traditional healthcare, whether it's just intravenous nutrition with IVs or whether it's more advanced treatments like ozone or peptides or exosomes or plasmapheresis or hyperbaric oxygen. There's so much out there. I wrote a lot about this in my book, Young Forever,

because these are the things that seem to be really affecting the trajectory of our biological health. And one of the things that we're both focused on is how do we understand the science of aging? Because aging itself is not the problem growing older. It's the biological aging that's the problem. You can reverse that. A lot of the therapies that you do and you built within Next Health are the therapies

that actually help to do that. I've been on this personal journey myself. I never had all those diseases. I had different diseases. I didn't have lifestyle disease. I had mercury poisoning and mold exposure and I had C. diff from an antibiotic that I took and I had colitis and I had just one thing after the other, Lyme disease, Babesia. I don't know why I got these things so I could figure this whole mess of medicine out personally because I had to re-engineer myself from the

inside out. I had to reverse engineer what is health, how do I create that. A lot of these therapies are really important and we're going to talk about them because they actually provide a pathway to change, not only improve your health, but to actually reverse this phenomena that is at the root of all chronic age-related diseases, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's. And some of these studies have more research or less research. But the problem with a lot of these therapies is there ain't no money going into researching these. Right?

There's literally – have you been paying attention to the amount of money and research being published on the GLP-1 agonists, the Ozempics and Wigovies and Manjuros? The amount of money. They're studying it for everything. You know, if you have a pimple, they're going Manjaro's, the amount of money, they're studying it for everything. If you have a pimple, they're gonna use it. If you have depression, they're gonna use it. If you have autoimmune disease, whatever they can think of, they're gonna try and they're spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars, I'm guessing,

on this research. But nobody's spending hundreds of millions of dollars to really look at these other things. There are a few places, like Altos Labs, and Sam Altman founded the lab. But there's a lot of billionaires, like the Google folks with Calico, and Jeff Bezos with Altos, and Sam Altman's initiative,

where they're looking at a lot of these things. They're looking at plasma freezes. They're looking at various therapies that we're doing. But it's really only the billionaires that are funding some of this now, not the NIH, which should be studying this. And it's so unfortunate because these therapies really have a profound effect. And I've been doing them for the last few years as I've been learning more about them. And I did my biological age when I started two years ago.

I don't know if I told you this. I was 43, which was pretty good. I was 62 at the time. I did all this stuff that we're gonna be talking about in a few minutes, and over the last two years, I've gotten four years younger. Even though I've gotten two years older chronologically, I got four years younger, so now I'm 39.

That's incredible. So I don't know if I'm gonna hit my 20s, but I'm gonna still keep going and see how far I can get. And the point of this is not to brag, the point of this is to sort of explain that the things that we think are inevitable as we age are not. Exactly. And so why don't we sort of dive into

some of the options and therapies that are available out there. And I wanna start with plasmapheresis because I think it's a really important innovative therapy. It's been around in medicine for decades for treating various kinds of diseases that are autoimmune diseases or neurologic diseases, and it's very effective for those conditions.

But it's only done in academic centers. It's only done for very, very rare cases. It's not part of traditional medicine. It's not reimbursed for general health. And yet, it's only done for very, very rare cases, it's not part of traditional medicine, it's not reimbursed for general health, and yet there's incredible research on it around Alzheimer's, around long COVID, around longevity itself. So first, why don't you explain what was the origin of the science that kind of began to let us think about this particular medical procedure as a potential treatment for aging itself? Absolutely.

So let's take the story way back to just even the ancient Romans. They were using a technology that they called bloodletting, right? Because they believed a lot of the bad stuff that causes some disease lives in the blood and bloodletting, removing some of this blood would minimize some of the symptoms of disease. And as we all know, this didn't really work or pan out because there's other things in blood that you really, really need.

Exactly. Although leeches have had a comeback in medicine for wound healing. Leeches are having a comeback. Because you put them on wounds that don't heal and it makes two blood vessels. It does, it does. We use leeches a lot in surgery, actually.

It's venous congestion and things.. I'm very familiar with leeches, but we're not talking leeches. But you're not doing trepanation. You're not playing drill. You're not drilling holes in people's brains to let out the bad humors. So fast forward, apheresis was a technology that was developed to treat a disease called Waldenschorms disease, where you have immune complexes that make the blood too thick, and that thickening of the blood causes blockages in your blood vessels, and people would die from this,

traditionally, and then some very smart scientists in IBM, I think, figured out how to actually separate the plasma from the blood cells. What is plasma? So plasma is the fluid portion of your blood. It's 45% of your blood. And if you've ever seen someone do PRP, which is take some blood in a test tube

and they put it in a centrifuge and they spin it down, the blood will separate to a white layer on the top of the test tube and a red layer on the bottom. The red layer is your red blood cells and the white layer is your plasma on top. And it's like a little. But it's also your white cells, it's all your cells. Right, exactly.

So basically you're separating, it's the soup in which all of your cells in your blood flow around. So it's like the red cells, the white cells, the platelets, you take those out. Exactly. And you separate that from the soup. And this soup, what's in this soup?

So the soup is where all of the. In other words, what's in the plasma. Yeah, exactly, what's in the plasma, right? So this is where all your cells are living and this is what they're exposed to on a day-to-day basis. It's the growth factors, it is cell signaling molecules, it's nutrients, it's a lot of the factors of your immune system live in this soup.

So it's basically where all the signaling in your body kind of lives inside of this plasma. And what's good about it is that it carries these signals throughout your entire body. So if you have something going on in your gut, your brain can hear about it. If you have something going on in your heart, your gut hears about it.

So it's the communication superhighway. Exactly. One of the functions it has is being a communication superhighway for your entire body. And so there are all these molecules in there that are regulating all these things. Exactly. So why do we then want to kind of take out that plasma,

throw it in the garbage, and put in a replacement fluid called albumin? Exactly. Like what's bad in there? Because why you just, it sounds good. Right, right, right, exactly. So let's take it back a little bit more also to the convoys with the parabiosis experiment.

I think that's interesting to talk about, where they hook up a young mouse to an old mouse and they found that the old mouse got younger and the young mouse got older. And so for a decade, people were looking for like, what is the substance in the young mouse that makes the old mouse younger? And so they did all these studies and substance like GDF-11, TNF, and nothing really panned out. And then 10 years later there's a story, I don't, I think it's a true story but I hear it all because I hear it all the time.

Someone at a conference went up to ask a question to the scientist doing all the research on this and they kind of knocked on the microphone and they said, you know, I think you guys are looking at the wrong mouse. It's not what's in the old mouse. It's not what's in the young mouse making the old mouse younger. It's the opposite. It's what you're taking out of the old mouse. So it turns out inner plasma is also where all the cytokines and all the signaling molecules that

lead to inflammation accumulate. It turns out that's where all of the toxins that we're exposed to also accumulate. It turns out where senescent cells, the SASP, the negative products that senescent cells secrete also live in our plasma. The zombie cells, which are part of the hallmarks of aging, which are essentially these phenomena that happen.

These cells that don't die, but just become zombie cells that then secrete all these inflammatory molecules that make us age faster. Exactly. So if you look at all the root causes of aging, most of the molecules that signal the root causes of aging live in our plasma. From inflammation to toxin buildup to senescent cells, all of that is inside our plasma. Damage proteins. Right. Because one of the other things that we...

Damage proteins. Exactly. One of the other hallmarks of aging is damaged proteins. Exactly. And so all these damaged proteins just float around and they create more problems, more inflammation, more dysfunction. And we sort of degrade and our resilience decreases and we age faster biologically. Exactly, exactly. So it goes to reason from there that if this is all living in your plasma and your body

is unable to eliminate this with its own elimination mechanisms, what if we just remove the plasma? And so some very smart people started doing experiments using a technology that's been in hospitals for literally five or six decades. Yeah. It's FDA approved, we've been using it, like you said, for five years.

Yeah, I've been a doctor for 41 years, so I know I'm old, but I remember it even back then. Right, right, you use it a lot, and even for drug overdoses, because that lives in your plasma too. And it works, as FDA approved, it's super safe. We've been using it forever. And it just highlights.

There's so much incredible technology locked up in the sick care system that if we just bring it back 30, 40 years, you could eliminate chronic disease. This is one of those technologies. So the treatment like you've experienced it is super comfortable. You just basically sit there with an IV in your arm and your blood is removed like about 200 cc's at a time. So it's a

small volume put through this giant centrifuge, the plasma separated from the red blood cells, red blood cells go back into you through the same IV or a different IV. And then you get a big bag of plasma that's basically thrown away and inside of that we've basically eliminated one entire plasma volume of all of these negative factors that have been built up over time. One of the most important tools when it comes to living a long healthy life is improving the quality of our food. But why? Research shows that a group of molecules called polyphenols may be a key. Polyphenols are made naturally in plants. When we consume them, they may target key metabolic and immune pathways within our

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try this amazing product today. About 10 years ago, I discovered my 120-year-old home was infested with mold and it took a serious toll on my well-being. What started as a persistent cough escalated to a point where I could barely get out of bed. I felt like my mind and body were failing me. After seeing several doctors, I learned mold toxicity could be the culprit, as certain molds produce mycotoxins that can seriously impact health, causing symptoms like brain fog, fatigue, and even muscle weakness. I was determined to deal, so I dove into research and found sunlight and infrared saunas. I began using their saunas daily, and they became an essential part of my recovery. The gentle,

penetrating heat and precise light energy helped detoxify my body, boost my energy and restore my health. Each session felt rejuvenating, supporting my journey back to feeling like myself again. If you're looking to enhance your health or tackle challenges of your own, I highly recommend Sunlighten. To learn more and save up to $600 on your purchase, visit sunlighten.com and save up to $600 on your purchase with code Hyman. So you then throw the stuff out. And has anybody actually studied what's in there? People are. When you get the stuff, it's like when you get an oil change, your car, you throw out

the old oil, what's in that? It's the same things that you measure when you do a blood test. Like with the function health blood test, you get a lot of biomarkers and blood results basically back. And you're basically measuring those whenever you do a blood test. It's the same stuff, but you're just totally removing it and you're throwing it away, right? And so I think people haven't really looked exactly like at the discarded plasma.

People are looking at it right now. It'd be fascinating to do. Like, what are the toxins in there? What are the immune cells, cytokines? What are the senescent cells in there? What's going on that we're taking out? Yeah, and basically, it's all being removed. Exactly.

So we've actually done a lot of patients now, and we've measured their total toxicity levels in their urine, all the toxins. We measure things like mycotoxins. We measure exposure to heavy metals. We're measuring exposure to even microplastics and all of these toxins. And we've seen significant reductions in before

and after treatment toxin levels. We know toxins are in the plasma. And when you remove them, your body gets a chance to catch up. Now it's able to say, whew, I've lost a lot of the stuff I'm working overtime to remove. And it gets a chance to clean up. And like you said, it's like an oil change for the body.

For all of us that have had cars forever, we know that if you don't do an oil change every 3,000 to 5,000 miles, your car's not going to run as well. Well, your body's the exact same oil. Yeah. It's interesting. I read a study recently that came out of Germany, where they used plasmapheresis for long COVID.

Absolutely. And what was interesting was they looked at a lot of people who have long COVID have autoantibodies against their autonomic nervous system, which is your, you know, regulates all the things that are sort of automatic in your body. You know, all the parasympathetic sympathetic nervous system. And it basically affects your blood vessels in many ways and your blood pressure regulation.

And a lot of people have, with long COVID, they have what they call POTS, which is, you know, they get postural hypotension. They stand up, they get dizzy. They have all these other cognitive symptoms. There's all these other cytokine markers and antibodies, and they were able to actually measure them before and after the plasmapheresis, and it showed significant reduction or elimination of these and improvement clinically in these patients with long COVID.

And the stats are always variable about how many people have long COVID, but it's probably five to 10% of people had COVID. And I think it might be more. I mean, how many, you think how many hundreds of millions of Americans had COVID? You take 10% of that, it's still 20 million people, you know? A lot of people don't even know they have it. Yeah. And it's like little brain fog, not feeling as good, just not as good as they were before COVID. And, and was even more, more frightening as I was talking

to Jeremy Nicholson, who's been on the podcast, who's a, a phonomic researcher from Australia, who's doing deep phonomics, which means looking at all these, not just the regular blood tests, but metabolomics and cytokines and thousands and thousands of proteins and molecules. And he says everybody's had COVID has something going on. Like they're all a little out of whack in terms of their immune system, inflammatory system.

Like my wife says, I never used to get sick. Now I get sick more because I have COVID. So I think plasma freezes is an fascinating treatment for that and I think it has a lot of promise. Yeah. I can tell you a couple stories of patients that I've seen with COVID. I had one guy that was coming to us with tinnitus in his ear. And he was at his wit's end. And as you and

I both know, some people, when they suffer with tinnitus, depending on how severe it is, it can be severely... It's like ringing in the ears. Yeah, the ringing in the ears. Severely, even just mentally debilitating. I mean, people end up, you know, just at home, not able to do anything with this. And so we had a patient. I heard even people committing suicide as a result.

So I wasn't gonna say it, but yeah, you're right. Absolutely. There is a suicide rate associated with tinnitus that is not, you know, it's more than the normal population for sure. And so we had a patient with this and he was suffering with it for about a year, two treatments and his tinnitus went away.

Amazing, it's incredible. Exactly. And so he's still in the treatment process right now, it remains to be seen. Was this post-COVID or was this? This is long COVID, yeah. Post-COVID, long COVID symptom tinnitus, right? And so we're still in the treatment process,

we're gonna see how long it stays away. We're trying to expand between plasma exchanges for him. I'll tell you a story about me. So when I had COVID for about six months after having COVID and getting it treated, my heart rate variability was down in the dumps, which happens to a lot of people with long COVID. But my heart rate could consistently elevate

all night long, right? Heart rate variability really down and my regular resting heart rate was very elevated. And then I started doing plasma exchange, just to test it on myself and have the nurses practice on me really. And complete change around. And most people will see their heart rate variability improve.

And especially if you have long COVID, if you're suffering with heart rate elevation, you'll see that improve. So heart rate variability, for those of you listening, don't know what he's talking about. It's basically the complexity of your heart rate, which is a sign of the resilience of your cardiovascular system and your nervous system.

So when you're highly stressed, and your heart rate variability goes down. So you're highly stressed, your heart variability goes down. So you want more complexity in your heart rate. More complexity in your health means more resilience, more redundancy. It's like a rainforest, which has got redundancy to complexity versus a monocrop cornfield, which

is if you have one bug or one blight or something, it's done. So this is really important measurement around your overall well-being and health. And that's a profound thing. I also personally had an experience with COVID, and I didn't get to long COVID, thank God, but I had a severe case of COVID. That was my third time getting it.

And my hand just swelled up. I got severe arthritis two weeks after. I'm like, this is terrible. And it happened to be a place where I could get a plasma freezes. And literally within hours, it was getting better. And the next morning, it was completely gone. Just never came back.

And I was like, damn. This is incredible. And with the heart rate variability, like you mentioned earlier, COVID makes antibodies to your autonomic nervous system. If you have antibodies to your autonomic nervous system, your heart rate can't be variable. That's right. And so this is the mechanism by how this stuff works. And you know, I think there's always a tendency when we talk about like novel therapies like this to think

that it's woo-woo and it's not really proven. But what I can say about plasma exchange is it really goes back to the fundamentals of medicine, right? We know why people get into a disease state. Inflammation is one of the root causes of disease. This is directly removing inflammatory biomarkers from your bloodstream and directly reducing inflammation. You can see it.

You can measure it. And so from there, if we provide your organs the milieu in which to thrive and you remove the inflammation, all your organs are going to get better, right? And so therefore, you're going to avoid chronic disease and reverse chronic disease as well. And we see that with Alzheimer's too. Yeah. I think I'm just going to highlight what you said because it's so important. Inflammation is something people have heard about.

It's in the news now. I mean, we've been talking about it in functional medicine for 30 or 40 years. But it turns out it's the sort of final common pathway for aging and almost all age-related diseases. In fact, they're calling aging, inflammation, right? Heart disease is an inflammatory disease. Cancer is an inflammatory disease.

I mean, I literally had a patient recently who had Hodgkin's lymphoma. One of the ways that I figured it out was we were having certain symptoms and we checked his blood levels of inflammation and they were extremely high. I'm like, something's going on here. Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's, all inflammatory diseases. Not just that, but obviously all the other inflammatory diseases we have, the autoimmune diseases. Mental health is an inflammatory disease of the brain. Depression, OCD, bipolar disease, schizophrenia, mental health that we think is psychological

is often biological. And we miss that. And I wrote a book about this 15 years ago called The Ultramind Solution about how the body affects the brain. And so what we're talking about here is this underlying process of inflammation that cuts across all diseases and it's one of the hallmarks of aging. So this technology of plasmapheresis seems to be an incredible way to help reduce the body's inflammation.

Now, of course, you have to do all the other stuff, right? You're not just saying eat your McDonald's and come in and get your blood cleaned, right? Exactly. And so you've got to eat right, exercise, sleep enough, manage stress, take the right vitamins and so forth. But as an adjunct, it's a very powerful tool for helping to reverse some of the phenomena that causes all these age-related diseases. And it also helps to just feel better.

I mean, I've done it a number of times, and you just feel like you get like a car wash, a brainwash, your brain feels clear, you have more energy, you just feel lighter. It's quite an interesting experience, you know? And you're like, what the hell is in my blood that's so crappy? You know, like that.

And I think, you know, I had it done a bunch of times in the first few times, like my blood was like cloudy. And then now it's like more clear. And do you see that? You can actually see it in the bag of plasma that we get. You can see how cloudy it is, dependent on the number of things

floating around in there, right? And especially if they have high lipid levels too, you know, it gets really foamy. You can see that in the plasma as well. Yeah, so you mentioned Alzheimer's, and cardiovascular disease too. We'll talk about that. Let's talk about Alzheimer's,

because some of the research on that is just so fascinating. It's fascinating. And here's a condition, just as background, where we spent billions of dollars, hundreds and hundreds of studies, no good outcomes. Like, I mean, if there's drugs out there for Alzheimer's, they're either harmful or they might delay your entry

into nursing home by a couple of months. That's a success. Not reversing it, not really slowing it dramatically. So there's really bupkis we've gotten. And yet, now there's this treatment, which is extremely safe, which is relatively inexpensive compared to these Alzheimer's drugs that are out there that are gonna cost,

I don't know, $50,000 a year or something. And it's showing real promise, and not just to sort of slow it down, but to actually reverse it. So can you talk about the science that we now have around Alzheimer's and plasmapheresis? Yeah, and this is where I'm just so mind blown at how approaching a problem differently

can make such a tremendous difference. And we know Alzheimer's, more and more of us are suffering from Alzheimer's. There's research out there showing that up to a third of us will suffer from Alzheimer's in the next few decades. And it's just too high of a number. By the time you get to 85, it's almost 50%. Yeah, exactly.

It's just mind blowing. And so the way it works, well, we don't really know how it works. I think there's multiple different ways this is working. Number one is by reducing the baseline level of inflammation. Number two is by reducing the overall toxic burden to our brain. Number three is by actually removing some of these malformed proteins. So we can detect the amyloid protein, we can detect the tau protein in our blood now. That's actually blood tests for the use of detectives.

Yes, with function health we're actually having what we call AD-Detect-240, which is a marker of amyloid and also P-tau-217, which is another important marker. And those actually change with lifestyle changes. And Richard Isaacson, who's been on the podcast, is really quite an amazing scientist, has shown actually reversing these blood biomarkers with reversing lifestyle changes, reversing the cognitive decline and actually improving it. So, you can now measure before and after imagining this plasmapheresis, what's going on. Absolutely. And we're doing the study right now, measuring these before and after plasmapheresis. And I can tell you from my own personal experience

measuring my markers, I have almost 80% reduction in the post markers. Now that's biomarker change. There's also studies that have been done by Dr. Kiproff up in San Francisco where he showed a 61% reduction in the rate of acceleration of Alzheimer's symptoms in Alzheimer's patients. So he's showing the actual clinical relevance and we're seeing the biomarker relevance for using plasma exchange to treat Alzheimer's disease. And I think that there still needs to be a lot more science done around this, but it's just mind blowing to have a treatment

that can cause this much of a reduction of symptoms without having to give a drug that could potentially have horrible side effects. Like some of the Alzheimer's drugs, you get brain bleeding, right? And this has almost zero side effects. I mean, it's just a needle poke, basically. Exactly, it's a needle poke.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And it's one of these treatments that has been around for a long time and is having new applications, right? Long COVID, Alzheimer's. Now they're looking at it for something called lipoprotein little a, which is a genetic lipid condition that puts you at high risk of having a heart attack and for which there are

no good drugs. So can you share some of the research about lipoprotein little a? Which by the way is something we measure with function health and I literally just saw a patient this morning, she had 37 years old, healthy, looked relatively good, I mean she's not overweight, she's got no real issues

but she has a family history and she had a really high lipoprotein little a. So I'm like thinking, oh's not overweight, she's got no relationship, but she has a family history, and she had a really high lipoprotein little A. So I'm like thinking, oh, this is interesting. So how do you treat these? Right, right. So I love what Function Health is doing with measuring LP little A. I can't tell you the number of patients I see

that still go to their primary doctors and have never had an LP little A done before, and they're wondering why they have so much heart disease. When up to 15 to 20% of people have the genetic malformation that causes LP little a. And LP little a, just for the listeners to know, is a particularly aggressive form of cholesterol that causes plaques in your arteries,

but also can cause deposition of calcium on your blood valves. It can cause plaques in your arteries going to your can cause deposition of calcium on your blood valves, it can cause plaques in your arteries going to your brain. It's really dangerous. It can cause heart attacks quite easily and strokes quite easily as well, and valve damage. And so if you have LP little a, you want to get it treated. Guess how you treat it?

There's no treatment right now. There's no drug. Lifestyle changes, actually, this is resistant to lifestyle changes. Some supplements I've found lowering it like 20, 30%, but it doesn't go back to normal. Yeah, natokinase I think is good. And there's other supplements.

And there's kinase, and it's cysteine, some other things we use, yeah, but it's not easy. It's not easy, right? People struggle with it. So we have two or three patients that we're treating with Lp little a. Just like the toxins and the other things that we're talking about,

all cholesterol also lives in your plasma, including the Lp little a particles. And so this is removed in that bag of plasma that we're throwing away. And so what we're finding in these two particular patients is that their Lp little a actually stays too close to normal levels for about six weeks after a plasma exchange. And so look, I mean, I think it's one of treat therapies that as it becomes more ubiquitous more people can use it For control of Lp little a until we find a therapeutic that works Yeah, there's a lot of research being done for therapeutics that works But this is a great way to temporary control that sort of brings a question of like you said six weeks like for Alzheimer's

How often you need to do it? Do you need once a day once a week once a month once a year like what what kind of frequency for? You know treating conditions that are more serious and then? What kind of frequency for treating conditions that are more serious? And then what kind of frequency for aging itself? Is it once a month? Is it every quarter? I'm asking for a friend here. I want to know, what do we know about this? So I'll tell you what the research shows and I'll tell you what I think. So the research that Dr. Kiprov did in Alzheimer's patient was a once a month treatment. He did that six treatments in a row for six months and measured

various markers of symptoms before and after using the Mocha score. Mocha is a Montreal cognitive assessment tool. It's basically a quick screening tool for your memory that we use to check for Alzheimer's. Exactly. And these other tools as well. It's not like a mocha latte or anything. Yeah, exactly. Give a patient a mocha and see how they like it. So anyhow, he did it once a month for six treatments. Now, that worked for Alzheimer's.

What we're seeing in our clinic is probably about the same, once every four to six weeks. We're tracking biomarkers, so we're seeing in our clinic is probably about the same once every four to six weeks is what, we're tracking biomarkers, so we're seeing biomarkers change right after the treatment and changes lasting for six weeks. And then some patients, not all patients, the biomarkers start reverting, okay? And a lot of this has to do

with each individual patient's lifestyle. It's the lifestyle, their level of exposure to things like ultra-processed food, lack of sleep, all inflammatory lifestyles. And so it really goes patient to patient. And so what I'm a huge advocate of is this whole concept of end of one, right? I don't think there's one particular protocol that applies to everybody, every patient's individual biology and psychology, and we need to custom, every patient's an individual biology and psychology and we need to custom tailor the protocol for each individual patient.

So that's kind of where I end up with it. There's a lot of research being done for Alzheimer's and for age-related diseases as well. So just as a regular monthly cleanup? Well, I don't think it's monthly for everybody. I think that- Because I'm way behind if that's the case. Age-related, I would say, is probably gonna end up being quarterly.

Okay. But once again, it needs to be customized to you, right? So I think for you, if we were to measure your biomarkers, because you live an incredibly healthy lifestyle, of course. I try, a little too much travel and stress, but yeah, I try. My guess would be for you is once every four to six months actually

And so we just have to see where your biomarkers are with our function labs You can tell me when you're ready. Well, that's another question is you know Are there unique biomarkers that can be tracked that are specific to the benefits you see from plasma freezes? In other words are there should you have these panel of ten biomarkers to tell you oh before and after this is what's changing like the you know AD detected 42 40 or the p-tau or cytokines or lipids or what what what are the things that we should be actually measuring on a consistent basis before and after so we can scientifically track what's happening right so or do we not know we do know

it's all the biomarkers that we not know? We do know. It's all the biomarkers that we're testing, like with function health, for example, for your biomarker panel. And it depends on what you're targeting. So for example, I have a patient with extremely high HSCRP, and a lot of it is due to gut health issues. And so one plasma phoresis, and her HSCRP went from nine to two. Okay, so for her we're tracking HSCRP.

I have another patient that we're tracking mercury levels. This person has been struggling with mercury toxicity for literally a decade, has not found anything to get it better. Even chelation. Even chelation. Chelation did not work, EBO treatments did not work. So all kinds of alternative therapies. EBO is ozone therapy.

Ozone therapy, right. Which we'll also do in next health, right? Yes, we also do ozone as well. So for her, we're tracking toxin levels, okay? And so, like the LP little a patient I told you about, we're tracking LP little a levels. What's really incredible about this technology is it addresses so many different factors

of poor health and also aging. Some of the research is being done around tracking markers of senescent cells for aging. Zombie cells. Zombie cells, right, exactly. There's no really commercial test for zombie cells, no? Not yet. But it's research. Exactly. Yep. We're also tracking mitochondrial health now as well. We just found some new panels to track mitochondrial health, so we'll be tracking that. For people that are experiencing mal-cognitive impairment or symptoms of Alzheimer's or even Parkinson's, we're measuring the beta tau protein and other biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease and we're tracking those, right?

I mean, p-tau and beta amyloid, yeah. P-tau and beta amyloid, sorry, yes, exactly. And so we're tracking those, we're tracking, based on what we're going after, we're tracking those biomarkers individually. Interesting, yeah, so it's customized. It's customized. It's fascinating, and you know,

this is not really accessible at very many places, though. That's the problem, right? It's hard to find places where you can get this that are not part of an academic medical center and they won't do it for off-label reasons. You can't just go and say, hey, I want to get my blood cleaned and they're like, sure, come on, let's hook you up. They're like, forget about it. You know, healthcare is not going to do this for you. Even hyperbaric oxygen is like that if you want to go. Exactly.

And it's unfortunate, but these are therapies that have a lot of science behind them, but that are only reimbursed for certain indications. Exactly. And so it's not widespread, and there's not a lot of clinics. And Next Health is one of the few places where you can actually get plasma freezes. Yeah. So when I worked at the Mayo Clinic, we had literally,

I would say, I think we had like three dozen plasma freezes machines in the entire Mayo system. That's a lot of plasma freezes machines sitting there doing nothing, right? We also had 10 hyperbaric chambers sitting there doing nothing a lot of the times too. And it's like, why is this stuff just sitting here? This can be used for aging-related diseases

and preventing disease. And so look, these machines, they're everywhere, but they're not being used outside the Western medicine system. And even if you ask a hospital to let you do plasma freezes, they wouldn't even know where to start because they don't know how to build the insurance for it. Right. Right.

And so I think it's really important. Um, well, we're trying to do it next south as all of our locations will have a plasma freezes machine. So anyone can come in and do it basically with an appointment with one of our doctors, and I think more and more centers are going to start doing this once. And I'm going right after this podcast, go get one. Yes, yes. Yes.

And you've had it done before, you know it's very comfortable, you know it's very safe. You know there's one more thing we should probably talk about with plasma phrasis. That's the use of albumin. Yeah, I wanna talk about that because before we get into that, albumin is what you actually put back in,

but you take out the plasma. It's the main protein in your blood. And there are health benefits to it, which seem also really interesting. I wanna talk about that. Before we get to that, how much of the plasma are you removing? Because you have about five liters of blood,

and probably one liter of that's probably blood cells, and the rest of it's plasma. I'm just making this up, but I'm guessing that's probably blood cells. And the rest of it's plasma. I'm just making this up, but I'm guessing that's about the amount. It's about 45% of your blood is plasma. Okay, so 45%. So a full cleaning would be what? Two to three liters.

Two to three liters. And you remove all that, and then you just put back in albumin. And fluid. And fluid, and fluid, like saline, right? Well, and we also replenish all your micronutrients as well. So what we're doing is taking out the bad stuff, putting back in all the good stuff.

Oh, so you don't do normal plasma freezes. You do like an upgrade. Yes, this is an upgrade. So you put in albumin, plus you put in IV nutrients. IV nutrients and nicotinamide riboside we put back in you as well, which your cells need. We're doing also glutathione, we're doing albumin, and some patients will use immune globulin as well, IVIG.

Amazing. So the amount you take out is about three liters. You put back in albumin. So can you talk about what is albumin, why do we put it back in, and what health benefits does it have besides just reconstituting your blood? Right, exactly.

So you and I have used albumin in the hospital since the beginning of residency training, right? So albumin is not like a novel compound. We've had it forever. And a lot of times... Like people are malnourished or have low protein. Yeah. Low protein, even like trauma situations where people lost a lot of blood and you get a volume

right away. That's why I used it a lot as well. So albumin is basically a protein. It's a highly purified protein that our bodies normally make and when it lives in the plasma. And so, when you remove the plasma, you have to replace albumin because your body is what's called an oncotic pressure and needs to maintain. It needs to have protein in the blood so that the fluid doesn't leave your blood vessels and go into all your tissues. And that's why you have that protein there. And so you have to replace it.

But there's a big side benefit to this, because albumin is one of the most stickiest proteins out there in our biology. And what it does is it goes throughout your body, sticking to toxins, malformed proteins, sticking to dead cell material. And this is what actually brings the this all these materials from your tissues to your bloodstream so that your kidneys and

your liver can eliminate it. Okay. And so by replacing fresh new albumin that doesn't have anything bound to it, now you have all these binding sites available for your body to further eliminate these toxins from your tissues. It's amazing. Well, if anybody listening out there, it has a lot of money. We got to study this more because this is one of the most promising therapies I think that exists out there for longevity based on the data I'm seeing.

And I was talking to Eric Verdon the other day who's the head of the Buck Institute on Aging and they're very focused on this as a therapy. There's also Sam Altman's lab is also focused on this as well. So there's a lot of really interesting science going on around this, not funded by academic medical centers, not funded by the NIH, but funded by a bunch of billionaires who don't want to die, which is great for us because we're getting the benefit of the science. Exactly. But it's unfortunate that traditional academia and the National Institute of Health, which should not be called that, it should be called the National Institute of Diseases.

Disease, right. They don't study health at all. I took the words out of my mouth. Right. But this is really tremendous research. And I personally benefited, you've benefited from it, and I see the benefits from my patients who can get it. Now the challenge right now is it's not cheap because it's an expensive machine, the technology

is expensive, the product is expensive. So do you see a world in which this comes down in price because for example at Function we've figured out how to get $15, worth of labs for four hundred nine nine dollars a year Right with twice a year testing is plus reasons gonna be able to be done more inexpensively Well, I mean and and what do we have to do to get it covered by insurance? so here's Here's why it's expensive right now is albumin is expensive because it's just not enough of it out there Right now and And so the other

big problem with the therapy is it's hard to get the machines. The machines are super expensive and the people that run it need to be highly specialized as well. It's not just like an IV nurse sticks an IV in. You got to know what you're doing. Exactly. It takes a lot of training. So all of these problems are solved with scale, right? The more machines that are out there, the more people that get trained, and the more of the albumin product that's available, the lower that drives the price. And that's exactly what we're working on in Next Health. We are, you know, we're expanding Next Health to all the states and also around the world.

And each location, like my imperative is to have a plasma freezes machine at every location, and we're gonna drive down the price as quickly as we can because I feel like it's probably gonna be a mainstay of treatment for avoiding chronic disease and also reversing chronic disease. And I wanna make it available to as many people as possible and then we wanna do the studies

that show the insurance company how this saves lives and saves them money as well. And once we show them this is what you need to be doing, there's a world where insurance is coming in. Yeah, if you get this once a quarter, you prevent all these chronic illnesses, right? And I think that's why I asked you the question about what are the metrics that you use to determine success, right? If we can measure proteins in the blood that are elevated when you have starting to progress

towards Alzheimer's and you can reduce those and you can show that Alzheimer's is the most expensive disease out there in America because of the collateral damage on the cost of caregivers not being able to work and the cost of caring for these people long term. I mean it's an incredible economic drain in society and the number of people getting it is going up and up. But I'll also just point out that don't expect that you just get plasmofresis and you're gonna prevent Alzheimer's or retreat it you know there's some other data that needs to be talked about which is I think really

exciting is the finger trial the pointer trial which are large studies looking at aggressive lifestyle intervention and risk factor management showing that not only we slow the progression but that we reverse the disease itself. Richard Isaacson, his work who was at Cornell and I was down in Florida, has also done tremendous work showing that we can use aggressive lifestyle and personalized care to actually do exactly what you're saying. It's not everybody gets the same treatment. It's really what's wrong with your particular biology and how do we correct that?

That's what functional medicine is. It's really identifying how to create personalized care that actually is preventive and actually gets people down the trajectory from illness back to wellness. Right, exactly. And I want to just double click on that because it's so important. You should never sit in a plasma freezes chair if you're not willing to first undergo aggressive lifestyle intervention concurrently with the treatment program, right? Because you're just chasing the tail.

It's like putting horrible gasoline in your car and changing the oil later and it's just like the car is getting worse and worse and you're just trying to keep up with oil changes. It's not going to work. That's right. You have to be committed to aggressive lifestyle intervention and learning what they are. So a commitment to education on what is real wholesome good food, what is ultra processed food, what is a good night of sleep really mean,

what is... I got 90 and 90 on my score last night. I was really happy. Well after you apply the freezes you're gonna get even a hundred probably tonight. Oh really? Oh god I've never gotten a hundred. Brian Johnson gets a hundred. I've never gotten a hundred. If I got a hundred I'm gonna give you a hundred bucks. Okay there we go. Or maybe more. But yeah I mean I think I think a commitment to aggressive life-out intervention should be a part of any longevity protocol but it's a requirement before you start doing things like plasma freezes.

I think we're gonna put in the show notes, references to studies, and the research on this. Because we're not just talking about some wacky thing, we're talking about something that's being really well researched that has tremendous promise, that I personally benefit from, that my patients have benefited from, that I think is one of the most exciting

longevity therapies out there. Yeah, I'll send you a paper, I'll send you another paper that just came out. It's a preprint. It just came out. It's not peer reviewed yet, but it's in peer review process. But I'll send it to you, and you can maybe link it in the show notes, too.

You know the TrueAge omic testing that they do? Yes, yes, yes. They do the symphony test, which is organ aging by system. What is your biological age? PlasmaFresa's study with omic age and symphony testing showing major reversal of these markers. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I went four years backwards as I went two years forward, and I

probably had four or five plasma phoresis treatments over the last two years. So I think, I don't know if that's what did it. I've done a bunch of other stuff too. I just threw the kitchen sink at it, but I wanted to see how far I could get. I feel good about myself. But I think the studies are gonna just be more and more,

and I think we're gonna learn more and more. Okay, so Next Health is really pioneering some of these therapies. It's offering things that were really not available. What are the other promising therapies that you guys offer at Next Health that are, I think, important to consider as we look at treating this chronic disease epidemic

and also helping people optimize health and achieve a longer health span and a longer lifespan. Yeah, so one of the things I try to focus on with my patients in addition to the basics, nutrition, exercise, sleep, is using some of the natural stressors that are in our environment on a regular, consistent basis to push health in the right direction. So these are things like heat therapy, cold therapy, light therapy,

and oxygen therapy through hyperbaric oxygen. So we have what we call the longevity circuit. And I really believe that... Like in a gym, instead of like a circuit. It's a longevity circuit. It's like circuit training, but at a cellular level. And so I encourage my patients to think of health as not a once a year or once a month or once a quarter thing.

It's a weekly thing. It's something that you have to make health a habit. So we have people come in to do the longevity circuit on a weekly basis where they do the hyperbaric oxygen for about 45 minutes, a sauna for 20 to 30 minutes, and then cryotherapy and then light therapy as well. And so this gets people, gets your mitochondria slightly stressed, which allows them to make new mitochondria and make energy more efficiently.

When your cells, the mitochondria are the powerhouses of our cells. When they are functioning well, every cell gets to do its job better and you just become healthier and you reverse chronic disease. So I think that's another mainstay of therapy that we do at Next Health. Well, I just want to double click on that one too because what you didn't say was that these are therapies that often fall under the category of something called hormesis. Hormesis is a medical word, it sounds like a lot, but essentially it means a stress that doesn't kill you that makes you stronger.

And we're all familiar with it, right? Fasting, we know, and calorie restriction is an incredible stress on the body, but it actually makes you live longer. We look at the Holocaust survivors who were basically starving. They actually have incredible longevity, and it's not genetic. You look at certain data that you can animal studies, it's hard to on humans, but a third of your diet is restricted in terms of calories,

you eat a third less calories, you live a third longer. For humans that would be living to 120. Of course you're gonna be miserable, hungry, you don't have sex drive, you'd be too skinny. But there are ways to actually mimic that. Exercise is a form of hormesis because you're stressing your muscles and then you get sore because you're carrying muscle fibers

but then they come back stronger. So it's like build back better, right? So the idea is these are all therapies that are available to us that we can use to upregulate these pathways in our body that I call the longevity switches. So I talk a lot about this in my book Young Forever, but the body is a built-in healing machine.

It actually literally has a healing system, which when you cut your skin, how does your body heal? When you break a bone, how does your body heal? Well, it has a healing system. But we mess it up all the time. And the ways to activate this healing system is that regenerates, repairs, and renews our body is through some of these practices,

hyperbaric oxygen therapy, ozone therapy, light therapy, red light therapy, and cold therapy, heat therapy. You know, I definitely find that for me, if I do a sauna and a cold plunge every day, I just feel like a million bucks. It's the best thing. It's my morning routine, I wake up, I work out,

I do my, or I might do a hot and cold first, then I work out, and then depending on where I am, and it's just an incredible way to do it your day, but it actually has all these other benefits. Yes, yes, I do mine at night. I do a 30 minute sauna and then a cold plunge at night and I just, 100 sleep score. Come on.

I'm telling you try it at night. I wanna see. Give me your phone. Try it at night. I'm gonna show you. What is my phone? Show me after. That's insane, okay.

Yeah, yeah, I try it at night. Okay, I wanna try it. So, okay, I wanna say one more thing for everyone listening is a lot of this stuff might not be available to you or might, you know, there's not a lot of centers offering any of this all over the country yet, but they're coming. All of this stuff can be done for free very easily

for in your day-to-day life. Just going outside in the morning, first thing in the morning, exposing yourself, maybe with no shirt on, to the sunlight. You're getting your light therapy, you're getting some cold therapy if you live in a colder environment. Cold showers, all of this stuff is available to everybody.

You can buy a little sauna blanket or you can buy these little fold-up saunas that you can stick your head out of. They're very inexpensive. And then I have a bathtub I just fill with cold water. I mean, that's why I did it for years. I had a seam put in my shower, which wasn't that expensive.

And I've had it for 25 years. And have a bathtub filled with cold water. And I just go back and forth. And I've done that for years and it's not that expensive to do that. And the plasma exchange kind of correlated that too is another way to do this same kind of therapy but at a much smaller dose is by donating plasma. Just go donate plasma.

They'll pay you to remove some of your plasma. Amazing. And then your body will make new plasma. Now that's at a much smaller volume of course because your body has to make new plasma your plasma. Amazing. And then your body will make new plasma. Now that's at a much smaller volume, of course, because your body has to make new plasma, but it still works. If you're young and you're healthy, that's something to consider as well.

So it's kind of hacking the system a little bit. It's gonna hack the system. Like giving the blood, yeah. Right, exactly. That's a good one, okay. So in your vision for healthcare, where do you see all this going? Because there's so much happening so fast right now

in terms of what's happening on the margins of healthcare, like Next Health and Function Health, the company I co-founded, that are really trying to push healthcare in a different direction and are actually just intermediating a lot of the traditional healthcare systems, operational ways that we kind of work. So where do you see all this going?

Okay, I thought about this a lot, and I think that we are at this incredible inflection point where we're actually gonna develop two separate systems. You're gonna have what is considered right now the healthcare system, which we know is more disease care, Western medicine system. That's gonna be its own system treating the end result of all this chronic disease, right?

And trauma and other... Yeah, if you need surgery or whatever, fine. And then there's going to be a health system. That's going to be developed by people like yourself, giving people the empowerment to manage their own biomarkers, take personal responsibility for them with Function Health, with places like Next Health, giving people a place to go to do some of these therapies and to talk about their health with practitioners. I think we're gonna have a true health system

and then the current system will be a disease system. These will be in parallel, which is the way it all should have been done in the first place. Interesting, yeah. And that's what I'm really excited about. I'm not so negative about the health system because I think it has a function.

Of course. It needs to always be there. But we need to have dollars funneled towards health versus that disease care world. so negative about the health system, because I think it has a function, and it needs to always be there. But we need to have dollars funneled towards health versus that disease care world. Well, I mean, listen, all of us are gonna have something. For example, I have a genetic risk for atrial fib. My mother had it.

Tall, thin guys who are athletes, when they're older, tend to get it. I got atrial fib. I needed heart surgery, okay? Thank God they could map out my heart with electrophysiology and figure out which little places to zap, and now, you know, a week later I was playing tennis.

So that's amazing, right? I need that. That's great, but there are so many things we do in healthcare that are just like, trying to plug a hole in a sinking ship with your finger and it's the size of a football field and yet we got our finger trying to hold the dam together. It's not working.

So we do need a true healthcare system and I think what we have now, people call it health insurance, we don't have health insurance, we have disease insurance. And so I see Next Health and Function Health as true health insurance. Exactly. And yes, you have to pay out of pocket, but now with health savings accounts, so anybody can start a health savings account. There's literally billions of dollars in health savings accounts. People are not using them properly.

TrueMed is started by a friend of mine, Callie Means and Justin Merrill. They actually are now enabling you to be able to use your health savings account dollars for things like plasma savings account dollars for things like plasma freezers, for things like ozone, or things like your vitamin supplements or hyperbaric oxygen therapy. So you can actually start to use pre-tax dollars for this. You can start your health savings account and you have to invest in your health because if you don't pay now, you're going to pay later.

You know, I had this one patient, she was on $20,000 of copay at 66 years old for all the medication she needed for chronic illnesses that three months were completely reversed. Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, fatty liver, renal insufficiency, all gone. And you know as a doctor, you don't reverse heart failure. You manage. You don't get an injection fraction which is how much of the blood you pump out with each pump of your heart. It should be about 50%.

You know, when it goes down under 50, you're starting to trouble, this one was like 35%. Went back up to 50. You don't see that with traditional medicine, but when you use, this was just lifestyle and diet. It wasn't even all these fancy things we're talking about. So I think we have the ability to really treat disease completely differently.

And one of my kind of thorns in my side that I get always really irritated about is when people talk about prevention. They talk about lifestyle as prevention. I'm like, no, it's treatment. And it works better than traditional medication. If I need a drug, I'm going to use it. Like if there's a drug, certain patients have genetic

lipid disorders. They might need medication like a PCSK9 inhibitor. They might need a statin. That's okay, but not 75% of the prescription is being written for people for prevention with a statin that they don't even need. I had a patient just today who had a doctor tell him he needed to be on a statin.

It was a 54-year-old guy who had some abnormal lipids. They did a coronary angiogram with a CT scan, and they saw a little something. It was in the circumflex artery, which was a little bit, it was a narrowing, and it probably was just a kink or something. And they're like, oh, we need to put you on statins right away.

And I'm like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. You're super healthy. You eat perfectly. You exercise all the time. I don't think, wait a minute. Wait a minute. You're super healthy. You eat perfectly. You exercise all the time. I don't think this is a problem. Let's do an AI heart scan on you. Right.

It's called Clearly Health. And you can look it up, clearlyhealth.com. There's centers all around the country where you can get this done. But you can get it at just a regular CT engingram, which they do in any hospital, and you can just have your data read by this AI. He was zero. I don't think I've ever seen a 54-year-old that gets zero. He had zero plaque, zero soft plaques or hard plaques or any kind of plaque.

His arteries are pretty clean. I'm like, you do not need a drug. And so I think we really need to start looking at treating people really differently and being very personalized and doing deep biomarker analysis, deep phenomic analysis, and using therapies that are going to actually create health. Because none of the therapies that you offer, I would suggest, are disease treatments. They are health treatments. They're helping you elevate your health,

and when you create health, disease goes away as a side effect. Exactly. So you don't have to treat the disease. Right. You're just creating health and removing the things that are impediments to health, right? Very well said. All the shit in your blood.

And you're adding the ingredients for health, right? The nutrients and vitamins and all the other stuff we talked about. Exactly. So it's really quite simple. You take out the bad stuff, you put in the good stuff. The body is healing machines. The body's healing machine actually just knows what the heck to do.

So it's quite incredible. You're just such a beautiful man. You're such an enthusiasm for making the world a better place. You're doing such great work. You're doing so many other things too. We didn't even get into. But I think everybody should learn about these therapies.

We're gonna put links in the show notes to them. We'll put a link to Next Health, you can check it out. Unfortunately, it's not in every town, in every city, in every corner, which it should be. I want this to be the Starbucks of health. Yes. Where you can get in an airport, and go everyone get this done.

And I think we're gonna change healthcare together. So thank you, buddy. I appreciate it. I'm so glad to be on this journey with you, Mark, Dr. Hyman. And I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk about this. Well, it's exciting.

It's very exciting. Well, till next time, we'll do this again. And I'm excited about my plans for you today. I'll tell you all how it works. And we'll see you next time on The Doctors Pharmacy. Let's do it. Thank you. Thanks for do it. Thank you. Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe

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and I'll never share your email address or send you anything else besides my recommendations. These are the things that have helped me on my health journey and I hope they'll help you too. Again, that's drheimann.com forward slash marxpicks. Thank you again and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health where I'm the chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests opinions and neither myself nor the

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