Stem Cell Therapy for Multiple Sclerosis

Foreign. To talk about multiple sclerosis and some of the protocols we've been using for nearly 10 years for helping people with multiple sclerosis live a better life in addition to conventional therapy. And it's really regarding around revolved around our use of stem cells which we started doing in 2014. And there have been some compelling evidence that stem cells at that time, fat derived stem cells or bone marrow described stem cells could cause a cause, an immunomodulating effect on multiple sclerosis and reduce the amount of symptoms or the amount of remitting relapsing events that occur or slow down progression or even reverse it to some degree. That's how I got into interested in it. My, my grandmother and aunt both had multiple sclerosis that had huge impacts on our lives, negative impacts. I've always been interested in it. And multiple sclerosis is a idiopathic cause disease that's autoimmune. But there seem to be a strong correlation to the microbiome and the so called leaky gut and the leaky blood brain barrier that links into multiple sclerosis. There are many, many attempts to identify, you know, the causes of multiple sclerosis. They've seen certain viral patterns and other patterns associated with people with multiple sclerosis. And they've also found in a study when they did a PCR testing on the lesions in multiple sclerosis brains, bacterial DNA in these lesions. And multiple sclerosis was never considered to be an infectious disease, but perhaps there is some, some infectious component. We know that the guts of multiple sclerosis patients, they typically have a poor barrier, you know, again the leaky gut syndrome, sort of a garbage can term where we throw a lot of stuff into it. But a leaky gut does occur where the gut barrier, the mucosal barrier gets impaired and toxins can get into to the system and impact certainly bacteria, certainly bacteria too. And the brain in multiple sclerosis patients has a decreased barrier. There's a blood brain barrier that also gets impaired. They may take stool or poop from humans with multiple sclerosis and embed it into mice. And the mice get a multiple sclerosis like condition. So there's, there's a strong correlation to the gut microbiome which leads to my interest in minocycline for multiple sclerosis. The stem cells seem to work as a immunomodulatory effect on multiple sclerosis. And there's some other things our protocol we'll talk about as well. So I wrote a book on this 2017 or 2018, it's available for free at Allure Medical Books. You Google Allure Medical Books and get download a free copy or you can pick up a copy in our office. And I go through the rationale for the protocol we've been using. We're not taking people away from their neurologists or getting them off their drink drugs or tell them not to use drugs. This is something that's complementary what they're doing now because quite frankly, multiple sclerosis is one of the most expensive diseases to get in terms of healthcare costs. The drugs are extraordinarily expensive and they quite frankly don't work that well. So what can we do additionally? So I talked to you about the gut barrier and the blood brain barrier and the fact that they found bacterial DNA in the lesions in multiple sclerosis brains that were done post autopsy. And we also know that minocycline, which is an antibiotic, seems to have a significant effect on, on multiple sclerosis. There's a condition that's before multiple sclerosis, I won't get into that, but there's a condition that may lead to multiple sclerosis. And they found that putting people in minocycline reduced the likelihood they'd go into a multiple sclerosis. Minocycline has been shown to reduce the frequency of remitting, relapsing multiple sclerosis and you can slow down progression, progression in progressive multiple sclerosis. And it's also been shown to be synergistic with multiple sclerosis drugs that are commonly used today. Yet how often do we prescribe an inexpensive medicine like multiple sclerosis? So until about 2010, there was a lot of research on minocycline for multiple sclerosis, particularly in Canada where they're, you know, pretty much have self insured one one insurance policy, they, they'd have an interest to reduce drug costs. And a big pharma company came in and basically bought out the research and got them researching their drug, showing that their drug worked just as good as minocycline. So let's, let's research our drug which costs 60, $70,000 a year. So this talk is not about, you know, bashing pharmaceutical companies that do a lot of good work, but they're, you know, very expensive and potentially, you know, we can't afford these increasing cost of drugs in the country. So should we look for, you know, practical alternatives that were just as good or in some cases better? So our protocol involves a few Things first, we do a stool specimen and send it to the lab like Genova, who gives us a looks at the microbiome. Microbiome is the types of species of bacteria that live in your gut. There's like 100 trillion bacteria in your gut and tons of species. And a couple patterns exist in patients with multiple sclerosis. First off, there's some signatures of bacteria that occur more often in Ms. Patients than non Ms. Patients. That's one. Another thing is there's less diversity and richness in the stool of multiple sclerosis patients or any patients with autoimmune disease enriches. And diversity could be equated to say the rainforest has got a lot of different species and they're all kept in check by predators and competition makes it a healthy ecosystem. But if there becomes a dominant species that wipes out say the trees or leaves or bacteria that wipes out a certain plant or moss, there's a lot of imbalance. So richness and diversity refers to how many species there are. You want plenty and are they all kind of in check? So that's richness and diversity. We find that autoimmune patients, particularly Ms. Patients, have lower auto rich richness and diversity. There's even some specific bacteria signatures found in the stool of patients with Ms. We also know that there's a leaky gut in Ms. And again, some people don't like the word leaky gut, but it does exist. The gut's got mucin or like snot on it to keep bacteria from in toxins. There's endotoxins and genotoxins, immunotoxins that are coming from our food and from bacteria in our gut that are trying to get into our body. And we're eating this stuff, eating these foods, and if the certain things got into our bloodstream, they could, you know, poison us. So we have a system that blocks things in. So we get, you know, nutrition, fats and sugars or sorry, fats and carbs and protein. But also we need minerals and vitamins to go through our gastrointestinal tract. But we don't want bacteria getting in and killing us or viruses getting in. And we don't want certain toxins getting in. And this gut barrier impedes that. And you know, you're eating and somehow this stuff's gotta get to your blood and it goes through the gut barrier. The gut barrier becomes leaky. In other words, there's gaps in the barrier and stuff gets through. Then we also know in multiple sclerosis and other neurologic conditions, there's a, there's a blood brain barrier that has some impairment. So the brain is a barrier between the bloodstream and the brain. And things do get through. Oxygen gets through and red blood cells get through and other things hopefully cannot. So it's hard for bacteria to get in their brain, for example, because if they did we'd get meningitis. And that's pretty lethal versus getting a strep throat. Your body can handle that. You can even handle it without antibiotics, even though there's complications when not treating it. I. You would live typically or skin infection, dental infection. So blood brain barriers is important. All the Ms. Patients have a leaky gut. They have a leaky brain, more or less. And this is not proven yet, but there may be a link between these bacteria that are opening up these pathway in the gut, allowing other bacteria to get through the gut and into the brain. Because we're seeing traces of DNA from bacteria in the plaques of brains and lesions of brains with, with Ms. In clinical studies. So that's interesting. And we also knew that Ms. Was treatable by minocycline. Doesn't go away, but improves. Improves it. And the assumption was, well, minocycline is anti inflammatory, which it is. It does get through the blood brain barrier. It does and it is an antibiotic. So is there some link there? Who knows? This is not definitely not known what the mechanism for minocycline is. But I do find it interesting that minocycline works as an antibiotic and inflammatory and it also works in Ms. Which has some bacterial component. Additionally, minocycline is one of the only antibiotics that, that improves richness and diversity in the gastrointestinal tract. Typically if you take an antibiotic, it's like setting off a time bomb to your microbiome in your gut. But minocycline improves richness and diversity, which can potentially seal up a leaky gut barrier. So there's potential multiple reasons why minocycline works for Ms. Very inexpensive, very safe drug. There's a study done about 2004 and this isn't off topic, but in 2004, Journal of American Medical Association I think it was.04. But they found that women that had more than six weeks of lifetime exposure to antibiotics had some increased risk of breast cancer. I think it was 25 or 30%. I mean substantial, with the exception of minocycline, which is commonly used in women that are trying to treat acne. Might take it for a long period of time. Whereas other drugs increased risk breast cancer, minocycline did not. Minocycline improves the diversity and richness of the gastrointestinal tract. And minocycline does benefit multiple sclerosis. And we look at a hormone angle. We have a hormone practice. I've written a few books on hormones, a couple books on hormones. And men get Ms. In their 20s and women get Ms. In their 20s. And we also find that men with multiple sclerosis have typically have low testosterone for their age. Unknown why? Unknown why that is. This is an observational study. And there's also a link to estriol, which is a high hormone found in pregnancy and symptoms improving during pregnancy with patients with Ms. So a patient with Ms. Gets pregnant, her symptoms typically get better. There's a huge amount of estriol in her blood. That is not cause and effect. We don't know that's what caused it. But they do get better. And studies looking at estriol replacement in people with Ms. Show improvement of Ms. Symptomatology, which is a very safe, easy, inexpensive hormone to take. There's also been studies with testosterone in Ms. Patients showing some benefit. So part one, we talked about minocycline. Part two, we talked about testosterone replacement for men and women and estriol for women. Part three is stem cells, particularly fat derived stem cells or even bone marrow derived stem cells. We prefer fat because it's a much richer source of stem cells, easier to get, less painful. And most of the stem cells and fat are the right type. Most of the stem cells and bone are. There's actually mixed type, there's blood and different types of stem cells. So fat derived stem cells have been shown to be beneficial for Ms. Patients in limited clinical studies. Again, this is not rock solid science right now. There's this investigational study showing these patients seem to get some degree of suppression of their Ms. Immunomodulation of their Ms. For some period of time appears to be around 9 months or so with autologous or your own stem cells. I'm not seeing that same improvement with umbilical stem cells, but I haven't had a lot of experience with that fat derived stem cells. So we liposuction that out, send it to a lab in Florida that takes the stem cells out and then they bank the stem cells. So you have your own stem cell bank. They can grow them and get you as many as you want. And they send us a vial with 10 million stem cells and we can infuse them IV for patients. And then there is improving the gut microbiome. We send a stool specimen to a lab that you know, looks at the richness and diversity which we talked about earlier, usually diminished. We put people on two prebiotics, not probiotics, they can go on those, but then we don't use that, we use prebiotics. These are food sources that stimulate the beneficial bacteria. Probiotics here use something called beta thylakoids which is a spinach extract, like a spinach powder, it's green. Another prebiotic called lacto oligosaccharide. So those two improve richness and diversity of the gastrointestinal tract. And then of course eating healthy, maybe going more plant based diet than meat based diet and maybe a little bit of fasting, you know, skipping breakfast or something. Those combinations do give some benefits. So our protocol has been to, you know, we do, we not, we're not treating Ms. Primarily. Patients already have their own neurologist that's treating their Ms. And are under medications. They're coming us for complimentary medicine to try to get better. And we do the stool specimen, some labs, then we start them on testosterone, 100 milligrams, I'm sorry, 10 milligrams per pound in men and 1 milligram pound of women is a form of a pellet. It's a little tiny like piece of rice that goes in the skin, brings the testosterone level up. We put women on estriol cream, I think it's 3% as a concentration and then we use minocycline, 100 milligrams twice a day for about six months to improve richness and diversity of the gastrointestinal tract and for the anti inflammatory effects in the brain. And then do fat derived stem cell treatment intravenous. And we've had mixed results but generally favorable. Some people might have advanced disease and they're, they have total axonal transection which means their nerve cells are broken. They're not probably going to get any benefit, at least not from studies currently done. But the people that are on their way sliding downhill have the most benefit. And we've been doing this for about 9 years with mixed success but mostly favorable. It is something that is not covered by insurance. So it's, you know, you have to pay out of your pocket. The minocycline is pretty inex expensive. Testosterone estol reasonably inexpensive and stem cells are a little bit more on the expensive side. That is something somebody can do for quality of life. It's certainly way cheaper than any drug used for Ms. Right now, if you do, that combination is far cheaper, probably, you know, 1/5 or 1/10 the cost. So something could be added on. So please feel free to get a copy of my book, stem Cells for Arthritis. You can Google Allure Medical books. You'll, you'll come to them. And those are, they're free also the books on hormones and stem cells for other areas. So I appreciate your time.