Surgical Biohacks, Anesthesia Myths, Future Cosmetic Procedures and More with Dr. Cameron Chesnut

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of The Boundless Life Podcast, sometimes you've chosen your surgeon very carefully. Yeah.

And you show up at the surgery center or hospital and you quite literally have no idea who your anesthesiologist is going to be, which is— yeah, kind of like mind-blowing when you really think about that being the truth. You have no idea.

Well, a lot of people are blissfully unaware of what you've just described and just assume anesthesia is anesthesia, right? Welcome to The Boundless Life with me, your host, Ben Greenfield. I'm a personal trainer, exercise physiologist, and nutritionist. And I'm passionate about helping you discover unparalleled levels of health, fitness, longevity, and beyond. Ben Greenfield: Hey, everybody. Today's podcast is with my friend, brilliant cosmetic surgeon with a deep understanding of all things beauty, hair, anesthesia, flow states, and more. Enjoy this discussion with Dr. Cameron Chestnut of Clinic5C in Spokane, Washington. And the URL for the show notes is bengreenfieldlife.com/CAM2025, C-A-M-2025. Hopefully, this doesn't get too off the hook. I just put in the first nicotine pouch I've put in my mouth for 2 months. Oh, yeah. I was filling up the truck.

How's that doing?

Well, so far so good. It's only 3 milligrams.

Oh, man.

I had to put 25 gallons of diesel in the truck and was bored at the gas station and there it was. So my head explodes during this show, I've got water.

Highly beneficial slash highly addictive.

I mean, yeah, nicotine, highly beneficial, highly addictive. The— there's a new variant kind of going around called cytocholine, I think it's called cytocholine, or no, not cytocholine, aconitine. Some company called Set, they had sent me a bunch of pouches of that. It's non-FDA approved, apparently, like a less addictive form of nicotine, but Um, like, my, my philosophy is I don't like to be beholden, right, to anything. And I got to the point where I was probably like throwing in like 4 4-milligram patches in a day. Interesting. And for me, it's just like, you know, you're addicted once I think you've gotten above like 10 milligrams.

So yeah, anyways, uh, was getting off of that difficult then? No, no, just no willpower, basically.

Yeah, I think part of it is your mentality. Like, you do a lot of like, you know, I mean, we'll talk about this, like you do cold thermo and you do hard workouts and you do jits and you swing kettlebells. I think if you understand blood, sweat, and tears biologically, it's pretty easy to just like stop anything and shut up the inner bitch in the same way that you do when you walk into a gym sleep deprived and know that you just gotta hit it anyways.

Yeah, so I've been thinking about incorporating it post-surgically for anesthesia recovery 'cause there are certainly benefits to those sort of receptors, but I'm concerned with, well, the way it makes people feel when they first take it, myself included. And, how to dose it, and then of course the—

What would be the benefits, like post-surgically?

Well, so this is very new to me. This is like, as we talk in things I'm excited about, is all the post-anesthesia. When we talk about post-operative cognitive dysfunction and things like that, it really gets into neuroinflammation, microemboli. And so there's some evidence that nicotine can have some neuro anti-inflammatory benefits and activate some inflammasome or like inhibit some inflammasomes that are important to neuroinflammation. So it could potentially, potentially decrease post-operative cognitive dysfunction beyond just the stimulant effect of—

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Have you messed around at all with like any of the neural anti-inflammatory peptides that kind of cross over into the neural piece like KPV or PEA or even BPC to a certain extent?

Exactly right. So my— I do have a peptide stack that I cocktail or alter a little bit and pre and post-operative, and the post-op addition is a KPV. Yeah, for that reason.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, leaky gut, leaky brain, crosses blood-brain barrier. Exactly. Um, that's in— I don't want this to turn into like a commercial, but there's, um, uh, Level Up Health has like a neural anti-inflammatory peptide mix that's got all of the things that help to quell neural inflammation, and they've got all those peptides in it, which is great if you're sleep deprived, or I don't know about post-surgically.

Well, that's like the— it's even more pertinent in that period for sure.

Yeah, I want to talk about the post-operative— what do you call post-operative cognitive dysfunction? Okay, I want to talk about But back to shutting up the inner bitch. Okay, you convinced me that when I come up here, uh, today that you want to do a pool workout. We haven't done it yet, so I guess that's for dessert after the podcast. So, uh, is this like a new thing for you? Well, I mean, the whole like Laird Hamilton, Gabby Reece pool thing came full—

shout out to Laird and Gabby. You know, they're the, uh, the father, the king and queen, let's say, of this for sure. Um, and I definitely got into it through them, and we just built a new home and moved into it. You know, this this summer, a few months ago, and the pool—

the home you've been building for the past 12 years?

Yeah, something like that. Uh, yeah, not barely exaggerating, but the pool is purpose-built for these sort of—

oh really?

Oh yeah. You mean like purpose-built, like the depth or depth, the shape, the structure, how the bottom is shaped, how the outside is, where the workout space is? It's— it was purpose-built for this.

What about— because when I've done the workout at Laird and Gabby's, and people who might not be familiar with this, you're like hoisting dumbbells at the bottom of the pool and you're up and down and there's some breathwork hold components and proceed at your own risk and have a partner around. While we're saying this, we should probably get that, that out of the way. Um, the, the bottom of the pool though can be slippery. Did you—

oh yeah, it's very like add some kind of attraction or like treat the concrete sandy? Okay, you have like a sandy finish to it to be really grippy but comfortable on bare feet.

Yeah. So for people who haven't done a workout like that and who haven't had the pleasure of just like going to Blair and Gabby's on a particular weekday morning. Yeah. What's it look like when you hop in there?

Well, there's a, I would say there's, depending on what you're doing, there's a few main components to it. The real one is like forced breathwork. I would say that's the most unique part of it is like we all try to control our breathing when we're lifting or doing yoga or something anyway.

Yeah.

But I would say personally, I wasn't very good at that or I'd lose focus on my breath and you can't do that when you're in the water because your breaths only come at very specific timeframes in the workout. And then there's just the, you know, going to your dark place a little bit and kind of suffering through knowing like, okay, I'm gonna get a breath, but it's gonna be 4 seconds from now, whatever that may be. Which builds a whole bunch of metabolic flexibility, specifically like a hypercapnic tolerance. We think of hypoxia, low oxygen. Yeah. And interestingly, much more of it is about building up CO2, not getting low on oxygen.

So building up CO2 tolerance would be an effect of the pool workout.

Exactly. Exactly. That's like probably for me the main effect of what I'm after. So I'm not, blowing off CO2 and then trying to hold my breath as long as I can. That's where you get shallow water blackouts and things get dangerous. And that's also not applicable to real life generally because carbon—

the presence of carbon dioxide would be a signal for your body to take a breath. And when you breathe it off, you're able to do the whole Wim Hof hold your breath for a long period of time thing.

But that's also dangerous if you're submerged in 12 feet of water, if you're underwater. Yeah. And, you know, with it even going back to Laird specifically, like, the birthplace of this was to improve his, I guess, making him harder to kill in the ocean.

Right, like if you're at the bottom of the ocean with a surfboard like tangled around your feet or whatever.

And you don't get to hyperventilate before that. You go down and then you're struggling. And I love, my favorite question that I've ever seen Laird get asked was, you know, how long can you hold your breath? And very classic Laird answer was like, I don't know, long enough so far.

Yeah. Yeah.

I was like, oh, beautiful.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The interesting thing about the CO2 tolerance I interviewed this guy named Anders Ohlsen. He's, he's one of the guys out there who's written a breathwork book, and he's one of the breathwork physiology guys who has a lot to say about it. And we talked about CO2 tolerance, and he talked about how the ability to withstand CO2 can, uh, be correlated positively to stress resilience, right? Your ability to be able to just like not freak out when a problematic email winds up in your inbox.

Sure.

And he developed like a a machine that attaches to a carbon dioxide tank with a mask that allows you to breathe anywhere from 3 to 7% CO2 just while you're at your desk to build up CO2 tolerance passively while you're in your office.

Yeah, that's interesting. That's a, an extreme way of doing it, you know. I mean, with my kids even, you know, we talk about how to breathe properly through their nose whether they're sleeping or exercising, but that's one of the benefits And I try to get my patients to do this too, is, you know, in their weeks leading up to surgery, they don't need to be murdering themselves, but I want them to build up their hypercapnic tolerance. It makes their anesthesia better, makes their recovery better, makes their brain more protected. But it's sometimes it's simply just like light zone 1, zone 2 walking, but breathing through your nose while you're doing it instead of breathing in.

Yeah.

Mouth tape.

Have your kids mouth taped, your patient's mouth taped.

Yeah.

Do you do that? You mouth tape?

I do. Yeah. Yeah, I do. I've also gotten to a point where I don't really need to as much anymore. It like changed, broke that habit loop for me a little bit. But I'll still find myself sometimes like, oh, I definitely was mouth breathing and then kind of switch over.

Yeah. Well, what happened to me was I did— so I, I've done podcasts on mouth taping before, so inevitably, you know, the Hostage Tape and Inhale and Respire and all these companies just like sent boxes of nasal strips. And, and so I felt like I had to use them because they were around the house. So now every night, like right after Jess and I finish our evening prayers, I, I already have the nasal strip on, which actually I was surprised because I did mouth taping for a while, added the nasal strip, and you feel more oxygenated during the night and when you wake up just with the presence of the nasal strip. And there's a new one that's like a, um, it's like a couple of magnets that you apply to either side, and then there's a plastic piece that expands the nostrils. It's the most effective Yeah, it's the clunkiest to put on, but I found one that I really like too that's different.

I use this when I sleep, but I think the most unique place I use it is I put it under my surgical mask because I'm tuned into surgery and I'm hyper-focused flowing for 8, 10 hours, and I have glasses, my loops they're called, sitting on my nose. I've got a mask sitting on my nose. I'm covered up, and I find myself mouth breathing doing that sometimes because everything's compressing on my nose. And so there's an intranasal stent which actually comes from the this is something I don't do, but the rhinoplasty world to kind of hold the nose open after surgery. And there's an ear, nose, and throat doctor. I'm completely unaffiliated. I have nothing to do with this. It's called Hale, H-A-L-E, I believe. And they, they're these like little intranasal stents that you put in there, rubbery plastic kind of hold your nose open. They're very simple, very straightforward. They have 3 different sizes. And I now have them sitting next to my bed. I have them in the operating room. It's sort of like I kind of hide. It's the last thing I do before surgery.

Outside, it's on the inside. This is like the turbine that Chris says, Chris Flume, the Tour de France cyclists. He used those during the Tour de France one year. And it's like a little yellow plastic piece that goes inside the nostrils and shoves them apart from the inside.

Yeah, 'cause when we think anatomically, again, this is not my world as much, but when we think about nasal flow, we have what we call the external valve at the very bottom where the air comes in. And then there's an internal valve that's a little bit higher up. We can define the anatomic walls of that. The traditional nasal strips are focusing more on that internal valve. And this one's kind of more focused on the external valve.

So you're saying all of the overachieving biohackers out there could do both?

Uh, whoo, I hadn't thought of that, but I guess you could try.

Somebody's gonna do it. Cameron Chestnut has been a guest on this podcast, uh, 3 times. This is his 4th time with me. I'll link to all of our previous shows where we take a deep dive into his history in cosmetic surgery, how to grow your hair and keep it from graying and get the face more beautiful. He's done extensive work with my wife Jessa. Um, so I will link to all that if you go to bengreenfieldlife.com/cam2025, like C-A-M 2025. So You guys don't get a deep dive into Cameron's whole backstory on today's show. You just gotta go listen to those other shows. But back to the pool workout, Cam, you use that as a way to build up CO2 tolerance, but what's it look like, like boots on the streets when you jump in?

Yeah, so a little light warmup. First thing we'll usually do is go into something light where we're really getting into the rhythmic breathing part of things just to get facile and used to that because there's certainly a bit of even a technique to exhaling on the way up to the surface so that you, every second or millisecond your mouth's above the water is inhaling. You're not exhaling and inhaling at the same time. That's very much a like basic, you know, thing.

Yeah. Similar to like free diving or spearfishing, you surface with empty lungs.

Exactly. Yeah. Same idea. Exactly. Yep. And so that can be hard to wrap your head around at first for people to like purposefully let their air out underwater before they're getting a breath. And so that's usually like first things first, kind of going over some basics about not hyperventilating and things like that. Little rhythmic warmup like that. And then the way that I said my pool's purpose-designed, there's different depths that are all about 18 inches different descending from 10 feet all the way up to 4. And using, I like to like kind of use those different stations for different amounts of weight. Like let's say today we might do a hip hinging workout, right? So in the deepest sections, you're using a little bit lighter weights, but you have more distance to cover. And by the top, you know, where it's 7 feet over our head or whatever, Or maybe holding 50-pound dumbbells and doing like single leg pistol squats or squat lunges or something, but trying to get those breaths each time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then there's the component of, and those are like very, those could be very traditional types of workouts, but then there's just the very unique underwater components of just like taking weights distance underwater without breathing. That's the hypoxic part or the building up CO2 hypercapnic part.

So, really old school, like I'm gonna carry a rock on the bottom of the ocean.

On some level, this is where all that comes from. Surfers have been doing this. It's— those are the coolest images, right? They're holding a rock between their arms, running on the sandy bottom. It's all, you know, that's the grandfather of it all. Flair's the father, for sure.

Yeah, there's, there's like this link between, um, you know, being in an anaerobic, acidic, or glycolytic state and that being unfavorable to long breath hold times, and being in a state of like fat oxidation, ketone utilization, maybe a little bit more alkalinity being conducive to burning through less oxygen or having higher CO2 tolerance. So diet is like kind of a component of this. I mean, when I went down and did a freediving course in Fort Lauderdale, I tested this with a bottle of those like exogenous ketones, and my static breath hold time absent of ketones was about 20 seconds lower than when I kind of like artificially induced a state of ketosis by by drinking my blood ketone levels up. Um, do you mess around— I mean, either for your surgical focus like you were talking about, or these pool workouts? Like, what's the, what's the dietary component for you?

Yeah, those all tie together. I first became aware of this via, I think, a mutual acquaintance of ours, Justin Lee, who lives in Hawaii and is like a free diver, is incredible. Have to check out his stuff.

Great everything hunter.

He's epic, right? He swam with the University of Washington And so he was like a Division I athlete in a very traditional sense, but is now remarkable, knows Peter Attia very well now. They were looking at ketones in his breath-hold time. That was like a really cool interlink of theirs. But so I became aware of it then. And the root of this for me is all, when it really boils down to it, is all peak performance for me in the operating room. That's where everything boils down to. That's why I'm getting in the pool to be at my best. That's why I go to jiu-jitsu on some, like I just wanna be a good human and a good father and hard to kill, but it all boils down to like how I can be at my best in the OR. And ketosis as part of that is, it's a noticeable difference in a workout, especially underwater or an endurance workout or something like that. But in the operating room, that's the state that I wanna be in. When I'm in ketosis going into surgery, it's that sense of like, this is how I'm supposed to be, clear, crisp, making good decisions, which obviously you want your surgeon doing. It's just really hard to get into or stay in ketosis without a lot of exogenous use, you know. Yeah.

Why did I see a video of you on Facebook or Instagram or something a couple weeks ago eating sardines? Oh yeah, in your scrubs.

Yeah, very much so. I'll usually, going into a surgical state, like, I, I have a big routine that I do from getting in a flow state the day of surgery, but in the days leading in So I know my surgery schedule next week, I'm already preparing for it with when I'm timing workouts, how I'm doing everything, but I'll use a fasting protocol, something simple like a 48-hour fast leading into surgery. And then when I refeed, I'm doing things to stay in ketosis at that point. And Dominic D'Agostino, the king of ketones, I would say, when I spent some time with him, really got into this idea of, sardines and olive oil, which are actually pretty delicious. Yeah. And 22 grams of protein.

Unless you're sitting next to you on the airplane.

Well, yeah, maybe. They're a great airplane snack though. But that's a great way to get the protein that it needs to stay in ketosis and kind of be in that performance. Yeah.

Do you mess around with the exogenous ketones? Yeah. Obviously Dom has his variety. For sure. There's a lot of them out there.

Yep, yep. So I do. I use one called KetoStart. That's the one that I'll take preoperatively. Even if it's the time where I'm not in ketosis, I'll take those leading in. I like those for my patients as well.

Yeah, do you know what that is?

Like, what— it's a ketone tablet, it's a salt, it's a beta-hydroxybutyrate.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. Um, and salt versus an ester, right? That's a whole other thing. But, um, I like my patients on those going in as well, even if they're ketone naive. And that gets into a little bit— we keep like hinting at this, but this is—

ketone naive meaning they could be having Cheerios for breakfast and a sandwich for lunch and sweet potatoes for dinner. But if they have those ketones are still able to maintain some semblance of ketosis.

Yeah, yeah. Whether— and I'm encouraging metabolic flexibility before they come in so that they can use ketones if they're—

yeah, yeah. You know, an egg with your Cheerios, right?

Yeah. If your body's unfamiliar with those. I think I have a sampling error where most of my patients are not, um, I would say ketone naive, or they're very metabolically flexible, just because the world that I live in is very like a high performance, and a lot of them are. And so they've figured out that you can't eat you know, right, Cheerios and cereal.

And then typical patients swinging by Taco Bell on their way in.

No. Yeah, absolutely not. And so having them with ketones on board pre-surgery helps them recover from their anesthesia via some of those same mechanisms we'll talk about with neuroinflammation, which is what, you know, Dominic kind of built the whole world around, is understanding how much ketones can stabilize us neurologically.

Yeah. When you're looking at the effects of anesthesia Um, just because I, I feel like, um, at least from my perception and the few discussions I've had with surgeons, even that alone, you know, the diet and the, the post-surgical interventions aside, does the type of anesthesia you use like kind of fit into the equation at all? And this is like how good someone feels or how bad someone feels after the surgery.

It's the biggest factor, is the biggest. Oh, 100%. The anesthetics used. And, you know, I am a surgeon, not an anesthesiologist, but I'm a surgeon in a setting where I'm operating in my operating room, my space. I purpose-built it. You know, I'm hiring the team. I'm not just like at a hospital or something and get assigned who I'm working with. And so, I get to choose very carefully who I'm having administer my anesthesia, people of a similar like, like mindset, right? And so, I kind of have approached this the same way that I would with Jessa or with my wife, which is like, this, if I were having surgery with a family and it was something like elective or non-essential, but important to me, this is what I would want it to be. And so it's been an evolution, honestly, over time. The first steps were getting rid of narcotics or opioids, you know, better said opioids and benzodiazepines, which are generally for small procedures, the staple anesthetics used.

Benzodiazepines are like Valium. Does that fit into that category?

Yep, exactly. So the diazepam, lorazepam, these are like the generic names of those types of drugs, but in the anesthesia world, people under, oh, fentanyl and Versed. These are like the opioid and the benzodiazepine mixed together. You give them IV and you get your colonoscopy or whatever it's gonna be, like very standard, but also habit-forming, not great for your respiration. Cause significant amount of neural inflammation and cause a lot of what everybody knows. We call it post-operative cognitive dysfunction, that fogginess afterwards, difficulty finding words, not feeling like yourself, super disrupted sleep, which is completely under-talked-about. That's a whole nother part of it. But those are like very big culprits in that thing. And it's supposed to be a very simple, gentle anesthesia. You're getting a colonoscopy. It's easy. It's twilight sedation type of thing, right? Yeah. On the other end of that spectrum, we have these inhaled gases And these would be like the general anesthetics, the very classically used things, still used very much now, which cause same thing, like a ton of neuroinflammation and little microemboli postoperatively.

Is that like laughing gas? Like same concept?

No, not nitrous. These would be like more volatile types of inhaled gases, which are, you know, they work beautifully for what they do, you know? And so you have these two ends of the spectrum with like this very, global general anesthesia that metaphorically sort of like just pushes you to the bottom of the ocean. You are out, you're unconscious, you're not breathing, you've got things breathing for you. Like it's a whole, you're just completely shut off. And then you've got the ones that are supposed to just kind of like sedate you or make you unaware so that you can have your procedure done. But both of those have cognitive issues or at least take some little tax on our brain. We all have a cognitive reserve that, You know, if you and I get anesthesia, we're gonna get it and we're gonna recover and we're gonna be fine afterwards. But there's a period in there where we will have this, you know, essentially metabolic insult to our brain that we have to recover from. And we know that that is not transient and temporary. There is some long-term, you know, price tag to that. And if we are 85 years old when we get it done, that price tag can push us out of budget. We're over and, you know, people— we all hear stories of people getting anesthesia, never recovering. They were never the same afterwards. You and I get it and we recover, but that doesn't mean that we didn't, you know, take this metabolic insult along the way that, you know, essentially could have cost us some neurons along the way.

Right. Almost the same type of mentality you'd have about, I don't know, like the radiation from a CT angiography. It's like, how many of these do I want to do over the course of a lifetime? Can I space them out? And would like like maybe I want to get a carotid intima-media thickness score ultrasound instead for the majority of procedures I get. You've got a similar approach to anesthesia. It's like, well, yeah, like a certain variety or flavor will allow you to get the procedure done pain-free, but there's still a biological cost that you should be thinking about if you're going to be on this planet for like 70, 80, 90 years.

100%. Very, very well said, and a good way to think about it. Because, you know, I don't mean to also make people fearful of anesthesia because 'cause it's incredible. Like you need a hip replacement or an appendectomy or like these are incredible drugs and it's an incredible process that we can get those types of procedures done. Yeah. Where I cross into it a little bit is that I'm doing elective cosmetic-based things and it's not worth kind of tapping into that reserve for something that's so elective, especially when there's other options that exist in the sort of area between, you know, the opioid and benzodiazepine and the inhaled gas general anesthetic. There's this whole world in between that I live in and play in, and I have some freedom to do that because of all the things I mentioned before about controlling it. But also, I'm not functioning in an insurance-based environment.

You're not amputating legs, you're doing like earlobe lifts.

Thanks, Ben. Uh, but yeah, I'm functioning in a world where I— it's, it's facial-based, and I can be really great with local anesthesia and do nerve blocks, and then I can control consciousness and comfort in a way that I don't have to have this big neurologic insult. And there's some very specific drugs in there that are more difficult to work with, maybe more expensive, whatever it may be. And that's why I kind of mentioned this insurance aspect is like, it's really— to do the way I do it is very intensive and challenging and focused. And in the world of reimbursement for anesthesia for regular procedures, it's just not reimbursed. It's like, why would you do that? You know, human nature. Why would you do the hard thing? You can do the easy thing, right? But where I'm living is, you know, kind of like, this is what I would want. And so I'm gonna, you know, do it and further it and talk about it and pay more money to come see you, right? Exactly. Well, and again, it's like, uh, it— there's more to it. But yeah, you know, getting back to it's the agents that are the real thing, and, and it's really complex and interesting and complicated. And you can get a bunch into the neuroanatomy and the neurotransmitters involved, but there's a few key players, some of which are familiar to people that they've heard about, like ketamine and propofol. But then some are very unfamiliar.

Ketamine and propofol would fit into the category of something you think is less damaging.

They, they for sure are less damaging. But interestingly, there's a dose paradox to both of those ones. And then something that not a lot of people, or at least lay people, have heard about called dexmedetomidine, which we call— Presidex is the brand name— which is very fascinating. Fascinating from, you know, in our world, I would say, because it's a very central-acting alpha-2 agonist, very specific for a— alpha being a sympathetic mimicker, but central nervous system, and alpha-2, not alpha-1.

Anybody who's ever had like a muscle cramp has felt an alpha motor neuron reflex.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yep. And in our central nervous system, when it's hitting that, it's basically telling our brain to kind of chill, like, and it puts a— it causes a sleep-like state, like non-REM delta wave type of sleep. So it's super relaxing and you're out, but it doesn't affect your peripheral blood pressure or your breathing or anything like that. It's, it's mimicking. And it, and if we look at what it does from a restoration standpoint, it mimics this non-REM type of sleep, right? So if we can focus on that as our main anesthetic, we are not having those neuroinflammatory issues. In fact, it downregulates some very important inflammasomes in our brain and the inflammatory cascade that follows, which is what causes a lot of that post-operative cognitive dysfunction, is neuroinflammation. And I, like I said, some microemboli. And so it's a great sort of like, that's the base, if you will, of your cocktail that you're choosing. This— and it's, it's more challenging to work with, like a little bit of a slower onset. And so you have to be really comfortable and diligent working with it. And then sprinkling in ketamine, and ketamine being dose-dependent in low dose ketamine is very neuroprotective. It works on a completely different system. We talked about alpha here. When we get into ketamine, we're getting into more like NMDA, like the glutamate receptors, which is an excitatory neurotransmitter, right? Right. And so in low doses, and this is really important, in low doses ketamine is very neuroprotective. It's a little bit of a dissociative, has— helps with like pain and awareness and consciousness types of things. So it's beautiful in that sense, doesn't really mess with your respirations, actually kind of helps your lungs dilate. But in high dose, flips over and becomes very pro-inflammatory. So you got to be careful about that. And this probably carries over into the other parts of the therapeutic and recreational world.

Yeah, especially when you take into consideration like the pharmacogenetics of ketamine and the fact that like some people are toast from a neuroinflammatory standpoint on like 20 mgs.

Exactly.

And then others will not feel anything on 100.

Right. Yep. And that would be, you know, again, usually dosing per kilogram, but that would be like pushing that, like, uh, you know, more of a more upper limit. When I'm using it, it's like a drip or a sprinkle kind of along the way, um, or certain aspects of the procedure. And then propofol, which, you know, everybody is— propofol, a lot of people have heard of, is famous. Michael Jackson, all kinds of things like that. Interestingly, the reason that Michael Jackson was using it was for sleep, because in some low doses, propofol has been shown to improve some sleep architecture. In high doses, it can be more like a general anesthetic, have that neuroinflammation. But when I'm using propofol, I'm sort of using it to like kind of turn us into like almost like a low-power mode to decrease the oxygen needs or capacity of the brain a little bit because then we're protected a little bit in our needs. So there again, that's probably the order of which they're prioritized in my operating room. 'Cause I get, I talk about this and often get asked, well, how do you do it? What agents do you use? You use, especially from my colleagues. And in a short, you know, social media type of form, it's difficult to talk about those things. But in like more of a long form, like we're out here, that would be a very general recipe as to how I like to use them.

So if somebody was going to get a procedure done and they're listening, they're not going to get a procedure done by you, right? Is there something they can say to their doctor or like some kind of advocacy they can, they can take to ensure they're not risking as high a level of post-operative cognitive dysfunction?

Such a good question. And, and I, I should have said this at the beginning, but these are applicable to every single type of surgery. Like, there is nothing along the spectrum where these, at least principles, wouldn't be worth asking about, right? If you are having a brain surgery or a huge orthopedics, like, okay, you're probably going to be into the general anesthetic part of things, but You can certainly let your, this is the challenging part to navigate, your doctor and your anesthesiologist know that you're interested in these types of things and that you're aware and that you're wanting to minimize these afterwards. Can I have a regional nerve block instead of a general anesthetic or something along those lines? A regional nerve block being local anesthesia, which is the dream, 'cause then there's no pain signal ever sent, right? Because I should mention this, with my area too is a lot of what I'm doing is really good local anesthesia. You just can't feel anything in the first place, which really helps. This is a whole nother conversation with post-operative pain, because if there's never a signal sent from the periphery to the central nervous system to start with, that those pathways never get primed. And then post-operatively, when, you know, the anesthesia is worn off and sort of the pain stimulus is gone, there's not as open a pathway for post-operative pain. So it's better, right? And we know this even with general anesthesia.

Crazy athlete who gets a regional nerve block and decides you're gonna go and do heavy squats the next day because you can't feel anything. Have you heard of people doing this? Be careful. I have also been guilty of messing around too much with a regional nerve block and, you know, thinking—

yeah, yeah. Um, that's a different story, but yeah, you push yourself into rabbio that way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, but with any, you know, going into any procedure, sort of navigating who to talk to, um, because sometimes you've chosen your surgeon very carefully. Yeah. And you show up at the surgery center or hospital and you quite literally have no idea who your anesthesiologist is going to be, which is kind of like mind-blowing when you really think about that being the truth. You have no idea.

Well, a lot of people are blissfully unaware of what you've just described and just assume anesthesia is anesthesia, right?

Right. So if you can find somebody who's a little bit more progressive, I find that if you have somebody who's curious enough and you talk to them about this, they're kind of of willing to like, let's play, let's figure out the best way to do this.

There's not like some website collective of anesthesiologists that you can look up who are trained in your ways or— no, no, preach what you preach. Exactly. It's just send your doctor this podcast, basically.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's not what— the way I do it is not common. Yeah. Um, and it is, uh, you know, like I said, it's just a little bit more involved. Yeah. More challenging to do it that way. But it's definitely worth asking if it is a situation where your surgeon's getting involved with anesthesia, it's much more likely to happen. Yeah. Versus just who you get assigned to that day type of thing. And this is the other crazy thing, and like, I don't know, some hospital settings, the person administering your anesthesia will likely rotate out throughout your procedure, like who's on shift kind of coming on. So it's difficult. Yeah. But these are— they're best had preemptively.

So this— I'm going to save myself a lot of syllables— POCD, right? That's the cognitive dysfunction thing. Correct. Maybe a loaded question, I don't know, but what else do you do besides the pre-metabolic dietary suggested modifications, the anesthetic modifications, um, to mitigate that?

Yeah, so just to summarize, those pre-things coming in are everything from peptides to something like creatine, which is an interesting and fun discussion, to ketones. I've been using creatine preoperatively for years for a decade. Um, and you were ahead of the curve on that then. Well, it's— this is the crazy thing. I would say over the— and at first it would be like, you know, 10% of my patients came in on creatine, predominantly working with women, right? Um, you know, there's a 15-20% of my patients are men, most are women. So I found that, you know, 10% were on creatine coming in. Now I would say over the last 18 to 24 months, I probably— the ratio is flipped.

It's 80% plus Rhonda Patrick and Andrew Huberman, the public science educators. And, and are you, uh, modifying the doses or suggesting that based on the idea that like once you exceed 10 grams or so you see a little bit more of the cognitive enhancement?

Exactly, yep. So I'm usually trending towards 15. Okay, um, coming in again, I find most people now are sort of on that, um, and just like 15 grams creatine powder spread throughout the day. Exactly, yeah, yep. And even like which brands we're recommending here, kind of spaced into it. But I think that one's fascinating 'cause when we think back to our youth of creatine, it was athletic performance, muscle gain.

And it was 5 grams.

Right.

Unless you're doing a loading phase.

Unless you were loading and you have a little glucose with it or whatever we used to do. Then the more recent discussion of the cognitive benefits, right? Which sort of makes sense. Sense. It's not isolated in our muscle. We know it's in our neural tissue, central nervous system. And this is, I think, part of the future is now I see it benefiting like skin changes. So this is going to turn into a beauty supplement as well. Wow. Because our fibroblasts, the cells that are creating and healing our skin, are energetically demanding, especially after what I'm doing, like let's say something like a laser resurfacing. So if I can help those cells cells metabolically, you know, be more efficient, they're gonna— where I'm gonna get better results. Yeah, there's studies right now looking at creatine and skin and no stimulus and showing improvements in skin structure. So that's going to be a really, really fun evolution over time. We're just going to find out more.

As opposed to what? As the opposite of no stimulus?

Uh, well, I'm stimulating. I'm using like a laser resurfacing here, like a laser cocktail. That's part of what I'm doing.

Gotcha. So you would load someone with, with creatine, collagen, and then aggravate with—

Exactly. I'm making—

I'm creating even more metabolic supplement line, like the CCC Cameron Chestnut creatine collagen cocktail.

You're not going to catch me getting too into selling supplements and or skincare. Not my areas as much, but okay.

I do appreciate it. So creatine, ketones. What was the other thing you said?

Peptides, dietary things.

Peptides would be like the PEA, KPV.

BPC, common anti-inflammatory peptides, TB4, okay, and GHK, copper. And the post-op is often where I'm adding more of the KPD and types of things into the, to the pre-operative stack. This pre-operative stack might be 2 to 4 weeks before. I get this question a lot, depends a little bit on the procedure of the patient. If we're doing, ideally, if we're doing an injectable form versus a sublingual form, because if we get to sublingual of the peptide. Yeah, then we lose bioavailability, but it's also someone's not poking themselves, right? So I—

this is all customized, like the gastric neural anti-inflammatory effect.

Exactly. And, and, you know, that's going to be different with different peptides as to what ones have benefit there. So then afterwards, then I'm talking about neuroinflammation a little bit with, um, you know, something like KPV mixed in there. And then this is the— I think the coolest part— I'd have a very regimented post-operative— I call it my optimized recovery protocol— that I have my patients do after their surgeries or procedures, whatever it IV. All of my patients are traveling to see me. So we, you know, where we're sitting, just down the street, we have 3 homes on the water, beautiful views.

Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, by the way.

Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

Yeah. And Spokane, Washington.

Yeah, yeah. Where my patients stay after their procedures. It's a retreat. They're, you know, it's just a beautiful, wonderful setting for them. But then they're doing things like hyperbaric oxygen every day, targeted IV nutrition, and some of that's targeted towards the healing from surgery, and some of it's targeted the anesthesia, like glutathione afterwards, or, you know, CoQ10, or whatever we're doing, uh, very specifically.

You mean almost like detoxification from the anesthesia, even though what you've described is less damaging? You still want that, right?

Yeah, I want any neuroinflammation taken away and taken care of. Even the hyperbaric oxygen, which has a wild benefit to just soft tissue recovery— fat pads, skin, muscle— after an injury, it also helps with the neuroinflammation, which is why it's used in traumatic brain injury or people are exploring it with autism spectrum types of things. And, and so, you know, you— it's this wild, beautiful double benefit. And I kind of love to talk about this, just is that everything meets in the mitochondria at that point. Like, we just really— whether you're healing from surgery, whether you're recovering from anesthesia, all of these things become really beneficial. And again, this is not unique to the types of surgeries that I'm doing. If you have any type of procedure, you soft tissue and sometimes bone healing that needs to happen afterwards, and you have to— your brain needs to recover from the anesthesia.

Yeah. What about red light therapy?

Yeah, I like red light therapy, um, and different, different benefits to it. One of the things I'm targeting often is skin or skin of the face. And so again, I've created more metabolic demand in that particular tissue— let's go to that word— and I love red light for that particular purpose because I've You know, I— the more efficient that tissue is metabolically, just like what I talked about with creatine, we know that red light's enhancing that in the mitochondria. It's going to get better healing, and we can read better healing in this case as, um, a better collagen structure. Not necessarily more— we want collagen, but what we really want is elastin. Elastin is the other fibril in our skin that gives our skin its elasticity. We talk about collagen, collagen, collagen, which is great, but that's That's the structural strength of our skin. And that's often not what's failing as much as a skin losing its ability to recoil after it's stretched, which is hanging skin basically. Yeah.

Yeah. I would be remiss then not to ask you what you think about the overpriced Asian imported red light face masks that are all the rage nowadays. Yeah, it's hard.

I mean, well, this is like, how do you separate the pearl from the poo there a little bit, right? There's so many out there and what's doing what? You know, it's a big challenge to know, like, to really get into the science of the wavelengths and the irradiance and the spectrum, you know, 'cause you'll see all these individual wavelengths listed, which is cool, but these aren't lasers. They're not individual wavelengths. These are just peaks in the spectrums, right? And so you dang near have to have a physics degree to understand the photons to know what's best. And that, honestly, is like kind of look for the reputable brands and you're not shopping for a deal as much with your red mask.

I, I have one. I use it. Well, Jessa has one too, and I haven't taken a deep dive into these brands in terms of putting on the physics hat, but when I look at the radiance, at the wavelengths, and at the power, they seem like they should work. Um, she has one. She uses like the face and the neck one by, um, what's it called, Mito Red. Yeah, I think. And then I have one called iRestore, and it does like a purple wavelength, the blue wavelength, red wavelength.

Yep. And that iRestore has a lot of hair data behind them.

Yeah, I have their helmet too.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep. And, um, you know, I like— again, no affiliation with any of these brands, but I like, you know, there's one called BonCharge. Therabody makes one.

Actually, you know what, no, I take it back. BonCharge is the one Jesse uses.

Yeah, they have that neck attachment to theirs. Yep, that's a great one.

Okay, good.

Therabody or Theraphase Therabody. That's obviously a brand.

Yeah, I think there's Theralight. I think is the same company as Therabody, I think.

Um, their latest line is called Theraphase. So then a Canadian company called Kala, K-A-L-A, Kala Therapy makes a really great red light. And I, I like them because in my sauna, which you'll see today, um, those are the red lights that I put in my sauna. Um, very— I dove deep, deep into like what are the best sauna red lights.

And oh, for people who aren't going to be in your sauna later today, What'd you do?

Um, so I put 8 big panels in my sauna.

My sauna— so this is a dry sauna?

So it's a— I have a beautiful Hume Hive, like, dry sauna heater.

Yeah, the Hume heater.

That's like beautiful, wonderful. It's like maybe the best balance of aesthetics and function of anything, you know. They're so pretty. Um, and then I have infrared panels as well against sort of one of the walls, and then I have the red light sort of like domed around it. So you can have the infrared, you can have the red.

You have the heat of a dry sauna, but then you have put red light and infrared light in the sauna as standalone lights.

Exactly. And you can work out in there, so it's built to work out in. Yeah. Yep.

Oh, I can't wait to see it.

That's cool. Okay.

All right, cool. Um, is there, uh, not to belabor this point too much, but for the home engineers, do you have to look into like, um, heat resistance of the bulbs and choose specific brands? This is where you've written about this, or can you just like tell people?

Well, this is where Kala came in, is looking at, um, because with any red light device, there's really great ones out there. The, the issue is dissipating heat. They get hot, right? So how do you function in a sauna that's 200 degrees and have the light function enough to be beneficial?

Safety goggles just in case they shatter, right? Yeah.

And not turn off, right? Because if they can't dump heat, they'll just shut themselves off. That's where the Kala ones came in. Kala, like K-A-L-A. Okay. Kala And they're really great in the heat, and they put out enough irradiance to be like, you know, wildly beneficial. And yeah, it's honestly just where they came from. I have no, no affiliation other than they're really great.

And they do red and infrared?

They do red, near-infrared. Yep. Okay. And, uh, you know, they have a peak at about 660 for their red. 660, 670 is usually ideal for what I'm looking at, my purposes of surgical recovery.

Yeah.

And then, you know, lots Lots of them will have multiple kind of peaks in their spectrums.

Yeah, is there anything else that is high up on the priority list from a recovery standpoint?

Yeah, yeah, so in addition to those basics of like very targeted IV nutrition, which I kind of just mentioned some of the ingredients of, but most of the time when my patients are coming in, I have a relatively robust laboratory and often genetic profile for them as well that they're coming in with. And so I can see how they methylate. And look at, okay, what are we putting in their IVs? Do they have any micronutrient deficiencies, things like that? So their IV nutrition's very targeted to them. We have hyperbarics, we have red light. I love PEMF. Mm-hmm. I think PEMF is underutilized in all types of surgical recovery. It's one of the things from a data standpoint that has like FDA indications for healing from non and malunion of bones. So in an orthopedic setting, like your bone doesn't heal after a break breaks, the PEMF helps it heal, which is incredible. But it's not unique to bony healing. It happens in our soft tissues as well because the way that the electromagnetic fields work is by stimulating the extracellular matrix outside of the cells to heal better. So it does great with soft tissue healing, helps with swelling and things like that. And then I have a few other little things I'll use like a BioCharger and a NanoVie and those, you know, kind of down the line of like getting a little bit more esoteric into the, like, you know.

So when is the PEMF face mask gonna come out, right?

Yeah.

So that seems like that should be a thing.

The PEMF I'm using now has a large focus on the face when we're doing it. There's like kind of different, you know, paddles you can use with it.

Okay. Are you— do you have the Pulse Centers one?

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. That's, I think, the most powerful.

Well, yeah, the first time I ever experienced that.

So you can take like the paddles from that and kind of like put them pretty close to the face.

Exactly.

Yep. Those.

Yeah. Yep.

But you still need like kind of like an apparatus to hold them up there, so I wasn't going to hold them up to their face.

Exactly. And, and we got that pretty invention idea.

Yeah, we have like a little bracket that we're just like license whatever, whatever it is you've made.

We just kind of group it, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then from a dietary standpoint, are you just maintaining the whole like ketone, creatine, collagen-rich foods, um, anti-inflammatory type of approach?

Exactly. I try the anti-inflamm— I try to get the anti-inflammatory set before people come in if they're not doing it already. But again, sampling error, like that's one that people are pretty dialed with already. Postoperatively, I usually just kind of base this, I love nutrition, right? I was a nutrition undergraduate. I love that aspect. I forgot about that. Yeah, and I just kind of will go with what do you do before? I'm not changing people's diets per se to, if they're a vegan, I'm not trying to convince them to be a carnivore and vice versa. I believe just looking at my teeth that we're meant to eat a lot of different types of foods, you know? And so whatever you're, you know, sort of used to, we're gonna optimize that in the post-operative period, which is, you know, predominantly making sure that we have enough protein, right? Yeah. And when we get into the micronutrients and things like that, we're testing for that beforehand. We want our vitamin D status, very basic things to be good. That's maybe the most basic supplement before anybody having any surgery. Vitamin D optimized going into your surgery, your risks of all the bad things of surgery are so much lower afterwards, like post-operative infection, the way you heal, things.

Really? And you're not just saying that, like, there's actual research?

It's like the most— it's like so basic overlooked. Like, every, you know, people who are maybe not in the same space that I am, who like love this to the degree that I do, every surgeon knows or should know that, you know, vitamin D— like, yeah, most, you know, rural general surgeon doing everything in the world, every procedure, like vitamin D, vitamin—

yeah, and assuming pre-testing doesn't indicate levels are already elevated or even excessive, um, you know, most of the time the recommendation is anywhere from 2,000 to 4,000 IU. Are you increasing that going into a surgery?

Yeah, so I'm looking— I usually have those numbers before. Again, this is one of the luxuries of my practice. And so I'll do 5,000 to 10,000 IUs, um, with K2, you know. Yeah, for people going into it just depending on where their baseline levels are. And I honestly find that I don't really need to do that that much anymore. This is one of those fun, you know, more than a decade of evolution of looking at those things. And it's one of the things that I notice, like vitamin— people's vitamin D levels in my world are getting better. I'm not saying globally that's reflective, but as people have become more aware, and again, in the selective high performer group, people are kind of doing better with their vitamin D supplementation.

Yeah, yeah. You said that, that the sleep is going to have some— it's going to be impacted, sleep architecture, to a certain extent with, uh, the traditional anesthetic methods. I'm assuming there's still an impact on sleep from something like ketamine and propofol. Yeah. Uh, are you doing anything as far as sleep goes, like melatonin or anything else?

Yeah, thanks for bringing it back. That's a really good point, um, because the— of those agents, those unique things I talked about, really only the dexmedetomidine and the Presidex is the one that's really helping sleep architecture. Ketamine and propofol are neutrals to negatives.

Okay.

More on the negative end still. They're not, you know, depending on the dose, but Presidex is the one that's really protecting, right? But no matter what in that cocktail, we're still disrupting sleep to some point. We just want to disrupt it as little as possible so that we can get back on a normal sleep architecture. If we 30,000-foot view, zoom out, We know for any stress, metabolic, you know, emotional, whatever it is, that sleep's wildly important to that healing. Yeah. And so to ignore that as part of a, a huge lever to pull in the surgical recovery period is just missing it, right? So anything we can do to start thinking about it, from the anesthetics we're choosing to something very simple like melatonin beforehand at, you know, 10 milligram dose of melatonin or 5 milligram dose, you also get an antioxidant benefit too to it as well. So it's kind of this like double benefit to it. I don't love relying on sleep aids afterwards. Um, I have patients coming from different time zones all over, so we're taking that into consideration even like when we're doing their surgery and planning their follow-up, because we want their sleep so optimized afterwards. Um, and, and, you know, some people are good sleepers coming in and some aren't, and we're, we're trying to make that a really strong part of our recovery.

Yeah. So when you're talking about the time zones, distance thing, do you mean like you wouldn't do like a later afternoon or early evening surgery for someone who's coming like 3 or 4 hours from back east?

Yeah, exactly. Yep. And again, it's all the same thing. Like, you know, we'd love to start everybody's recovery at 8 o'clock in the morning because the day that they come— the days that they come in, basically every day after surgery, they're with us for maybe 5 or 6 hours to get through this whole sort of regimen and process every day. It's very passive from a physicality standpoint, but it's very committed.

Right?

Yeah. And so, you know, but if 8 o'clock is, you know, midnight your time or 2 AM, someone's coming from, you know, Europe or something like that, we're trying to like be thoughtful about when we're planning that on their circadian rhythms.

Yeah, yeah, we've talked a lot in other episodes about some of the, the different protocols that you do, you know, probably the, the what you call it, the laser resurfacing, right? It's the correct terminology being the one that I people are the most curious about. Maybe it's because my wife's been very vocal on social media that she did it, um, and that seems to be the one that, that turns the most heads like a month or two later once the effects have kind of kicked in. For sure. Um, but as far as like future advances in cosmetic surgery, I know you go to a lot of the conferences and events and have your finger on the pulse of this. Yeah. What's coming down the pipeline that you think is cool?

So I would say it's interesting because when I think about this from what I see coming in the cosmetic world as a whole, right? And I think of then where I'm at and where, you know, kind of maybe thinking a step ahead of that in the cosmetic world right now. I just went to our big national American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery conference, and I gave a standing room lecture only on peptides and regenerative medicine, which for your audience is going to be very like ho-hum, like, yeah, of course, peptides and regenerative medicine. We got to remember we're talking about an entire academy, an entire world catching up with it. And we're talking about a dynamic, cash-based, you know, free-flowing, not relying on insurance type of academy catching up with it. Facial plastic surgery, that's not happening in a lot of other surgical specialties yet. You might find a few orthopedists or general surgeons who have hopped onto that, but they're so far away from that happening. Yeah, right. Okay. So, and, and a world tipping scale, that's what's starting to happen. Regenerative medicine is, you know, beyond buzzword, and we're starting to get into like what, why, how, how do we use it best, what's it doing, things like that, right? And then in my world, you know, I start getting into, you know, with— if I start subdividing that out, for me, a lot of my regenerative medicine is using somebody's own stem cells for their surgical healing and recovery, because I'm already accessing their fat to do facial fat.

Oh yeah, you're doing like the whole liposuction, put the fat in in the face. So you've already got access to the stem cells.

Exactly right. Yeah. Yep.

And so autologous, like somebody's own stem cells.

Their own stem cells. Uh, the liposuction— just to clarify, the liposuction is very gentle, very small. It's not like what people think of with liposuction. This is very like focal, you know, minimal, leave no trace type of thing, right?

But you don't have like a lightsaber and a chainsaw.

Yeah, which I think is what people think about because they're thinking about this person like doing this and sucking out like massive amounts of fat. I'm using— it's very low quantity, um, high quality types of things. But now for me, it's like, okay, I have these stem cells, um, who are they from, where are they from, how are they performing, how can I make them work best, where can I use them? It's beyond just rejuvenating fat pads with fat, which is cosmetically incredible, right, that we can replace like for like and make your fat pads stronger, more structural, age better. But then it's also, well, how can I use this to help from the surgical healing process? How can I use them to help from the laser process, make the skin better, um, via all these paracrine-mediated communication effects? You know, that's like one thing, and I'm always working to improve that. And then, you know, in this— in the world as well, like, just as an example, recently went down this like microplastics rabbit hole in the operating room, realizing like we are using a lot of plastic in the operating room.

Well, did you, did you see, um, it was like last year there was several news reports and research coming out showing that like just intravenous administration alone from the tubes, right, was such an issue that they were encouraging physicians to like run the first, I think like 30 mL or so, before they actually, right, like put it into the patient just to get rid of some of the plastics in the tubing.

Exactly. That's that. This, all of that was the original impetus to be like, oh yeah, yeah, think of, think of all the plastic we're doing. This goes back even to me to like my first surgeries in medical school when I was like a kid basically, and you're just like, shut your mouth, you know, don't touch anything, just like be in the operating room. But I remember at the end of these surgeries being like, there's 4 garbage cans full.

It's like the Barbie theme song.

Fantastic. Yes. Life in plastic. And you're just like, I can't I can't believe all this waste and all this plastic. And then, you know, in my upbringing, it's a little more efficient than that, but same story is like, you know, getting into like, okay, hearing this, thinking about most of the plasticizers we're worried about are softening, making things like plastic softer, more pliable, like an IV bag or IV tubing and going like, okay, what am I using?

Kinda like the worst kind. Right.

Yeah. Like, what am I using? What's in them? How can I get around them? Which this was a deep dive. And I always thank my operating room staff for this because With most places, if I was at a hospital like this, everybody would've quit. Yeah. Like, "You're just making our job so difficult. We're outta here," right? But this is, again, sharing a mindset in my own private space where everybody's like, "Yeah, all right. Oh yeah, this is good. Let's do this." And diving into where are the microplastics? Where are our main sources? How do we get rid of them? Throwing away tens of thousands of dollars worth of like pre-purchased supplies, being like, "Okay, now that I can't use these, now that I know what's in 'em," finding ways around it. And then also learning that, that some of the, you know, specific plasticizers we're using in the United States aren't even legal in Europe, right? Or that the US knows that like high doses of these things in kids, like exposure with kids with, you know, to these via IV for a long time is detrimental. But for you and I getting our procedures, it's like, ah, you'll be fine. You know, so. You're an adult. Yeah, right. So I wiped all those things out, which was really huge in learning how to do where I was finding them 'Cause to be in full disclosure, I found some in my OR that I'm like, I wouldn't want this.

And then they're difficult via standard detoxification methods, whether it's the bowels, the sweat, when you're looking at the Dalton size, being like up to 1,000, like you're gonna pass that through a sweat gland.

Right. And then it's just such a world that once you learn like, well, what's it really doing anyway? And you're like, no matter what it's doing, it's inhibiting the cellular efficiency, the cellular optimization. Optimization that I want for healing no matter what. So they've got to go, you know. Yeah. And, uh, even if it's a 1% better result for me in the long term, totally worth it in my world. And so these are all these little things. And this kind of— it's, you know, funny that I'm talking about plastic surgery and microplastics. It's in every type of surgery, but it just takes a— I think we're— I think we're so far away from that becoming like adopted.

I think remediation of microplastics is going to be a hot topic in the health industry for the next decade. I mean, one of the things I do, as I said, on, you know, calls with companies who are looking for money— and I had a very interesting one a couple days ago, uh, and they're doing bacterial remediation, like looking into bacterial engineering of bacterial strains that in the gut could cause remediation of plastics via the postbiotic compounds that the bacteria make. And I think, you know, that's just the gut, right? There's a lot of other places that they accumulate because you get lung exposure, you get transdermal exposure, but the gut is a significant source. Yeah. So I think, I think we'll see a lot more people and companies looking into how do we just like engineer this stuff out of the body.

Yeah, that's super, because this, that's where my head goes next is like, okay, well now what can we do? Um, even I'm thinking in this more acute setting of whether healing to eliminate them, because it's, you know, you mentioned traditional detoxification. It's hard. I'm not putting somebody in a sauna day one post-surgery. You know, so it's like, okay, what can we do?

So that's really interesting. That's true. You can't do that because of the surgical wounds or whatever you call them. Everything. Wounds probably isn't the word you use.

Yeah, I don't use the word wounds, but I mean, in the sense of like, you know, it's a hormetic stress that we don't need a hormetic stress right now. We got enough other stresses going on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Super interesting. Well, I'm ready to go try this pool workout. Let's do it. Folks, bengreenfieldlife.com/cam2025. Listen to Cameron's other episodes. 'cause I get asked all the time, like, my hair's turning gray, or my hair's falling out, or my skin's regrowing. Like, 75% of the time, I'm like, go listen to my episodes with Cameron Chestek. 'Cause I'm being lazy and just sending people to listen to you, 'cause I know you're on top of this stuff. So thanks for being a 4P guest.

Yeah, do you remember when we had your like hair Jesus looking for a while there? You were getting long, you were growing everything out. That was during your hair growth phase when you did a little experiment and we went kind of nuts on your hair.

Yeah, and I kind of had to clean up a little bit, but that's right, that was years ago and it worked. Yeah, yeah, still again, we should do that.

Jesus thinks— and we did it, we did some laser on your skin, your skin looks great.

Yeah, yeah, awesome. I'm down. Yeah. All right folks, again, BenGreenfieldLife.com/CAM2025, check out the great Dr. Cameron Chestnut.

Thanks for watching.

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