EPISODE #933 Relieve Your Back Pain in 4 Steps Dr. Marcella Madera

You're listening to the Human Upgrade with Dave Asprey. Unless you're a brand new listener to the show, you know that I always tell you what you're going to get out of the show so you can do this weird thing that we don't do often enough. You could decide whether it's worth your time and energy to consume a piece of content. I am asking you for about an hour of your life right now. Yeah, you might be doing something else that that's also valuable. I encourage you to stack things like that. But honestly, if this is of no interest to you, then seriously, there's almost a thousand other episodes and I'm queuing them all up. So you know what you're going to get on this show? You're going to meet Johns Hopkins trained spinal surgeon who is moving away from cutting on spines because she's found stuff that works way better. You're going to learn about how to tie together things to take care of your spine. And you might say, I don't care about my spine. My back doesn't hurt. The odds are that over the course of your life there will be meaningful amounts of time where your back does hurt. Whether it's because you fall off your mountain bike, because you overdid that rainbow pose and yoga, or because you ate something that caused inflammation and it turns out that your vertebra are probably some of the weakest links that feel inflammation first. And we have a world class expert on to talk about that and some really cool new things, in fact, something called the Aqua method, which is a brand new treatment that includes photo biomodulated PRP with functional movement and functional tissue mobilization. And our innovator and guest today has been on the show before. She has seen the inside of my spinal cord and who knows what else. I was unconscious for a lot of that. None other than Dr. Marcella Madera, who is a full on conventional doctor neurosurgeon who has switched to functional medicine to get better results. Marcella, my friend, thank you for being on the show again today.

Thank you for having me. It's such a pleasure and honor to be here.

Do your surgeon colleagues in their really expensive German sports cars, do they look down on you for having gone functional? Are you a pariah?

You know, I was really, really fortunate to be able to start my integrative functional holistic practice alongside my conventional practice for a period of time as I was figuring out what it was and my partners at the time were cocking their heads like, huh, I wonder what that Is and over time I have been really blessed, have received referrals from them now that I'm fully in my integrative, holistic space and doing biologic and cell medicine. And what we're finding is that patients really want the truth about back pain. They really want to know the root cause. And when they go in asking a lot of questions that my colleagues are not answering, or they think, well, maybe Marcella has an answer, why don't you go check that out? And I, I am myself surprised and honored when it continues to happen that I get their referrals.

So what happens here is when a conventional spine doc comes across someone who doesn't get better and doesn't respond right, and is the so called hard case, they send them to you even though you're not doing the let me just fuse your entire spine, don't worry, it won't hurt kind of practice, right?

Correct. 100%.

What percentage of people come across back pain in their life? I made up some statistics earlier, but.

You probably actually know it is between 80 and 100%. I think the last time I looked at that, it's close to 100 because it's so varied. I mean, again, the root cause thing, conventional medicine doesn't really know fully. We know some things. We know the very obvious red flags, tumors, infections, but the broad, broad swath of people that have back pain, which is pretty much everybody's going to experience at least one episode at some time in their life. We don't really know fully what's causing it, or at least we're digging into it now at what we're doing here.

At my practice, it can be really debilitating. When I was in my early 20s, I felt like there was a candle burning between my shoulder blades all the time because I had a rib head out and it would just go out. It turns out that was caused largely by my environment and my diet. But I just, for five years straight, it was just constant mean pain. And I thought that was really bad. And it was. And then, oh, maybe three or four years ago, one of our pigs had escaped. Yes, the life of a farmer is tough. And we're working on getting back in. And I'm pushing on this pig and suddenly it just moves. And so I'm going to faceplant in the mud. Fortunately, there's no video of this. And I'm like, okay, I got this. So I kicked one of my legs back really strong to counterbalance me. And I sprained my spine when I did that. And I didn't know I sprained it, but for the next eight months, it was like the kind of pain that makes you turn kind of green. And you guys didn't see it on the podcast here, but sometimes I was wearing like a back brace and I mean, just walking, riding a bike, anything, it was nasty. And that's the sort of thing that can just hurt forever. What would you do with someone who sprains their spine like that? Because this happens to a lot of people.

Great question. It happens to a lot of people. And one of the key interesting things that I discovered in my conventional practice was there are people who can have an event like that and they're down for a couple days, they take some Advil, and then they're back to their life. And their body's natural healing systems are robust and they just go on and they're fine. And. And then there are other people that that happens to and it never gets better or it gets better for a little while, or they try this, they try that, and it's just this ongoing thing. So in our practice, when we have an acute injury and sometimes we'll see people right away when it happens, sometimes they've done other things before they come. The first thing we look at is overall body inflammation and where they're at with their whole health. And so, so my patient base is broad. We have some people who are biohackers, like you, who are doing everything tip top, anti inflammatory diet, great exercise, stacking different things at home, cold plunges and all different kinds of things. And then we have other patients who have never heard that your food can increase inflammation in your body and can cause you to have pain. So we do a history and we discuss deeply what are their different things that could be contributing. We look at what, what their mind, body practices are like. We look at how much stress is in their life. We look at what was going on in their life at the time of the injury and why the injury may have happened. And we look at again, diet, as I just mentioned, and then put that all together and come up with a treatment plan that is specific to where they're at in terms of their whole health. That's step one.

Now, your clinic is called Austin Integrative Spine. But I went to see you recently not for my spine, which fortunately fully recovered. Thank you. Stem cells and biohacking and red lights and all the crazy stuff that I do. But I had surgery and I'm still working on the documentary about how to heal really rapidly. I had surgery on my foot for a really old yoga injury that I just never actually took care of. This is a classical functional movement problem. In the world of biohacking, you don't make enough energy in your cells to do stuff that's a core. Like, that's one of my big contributions, I think, is just highlighting mitochondria in the brain and all these things. But even if you make enough energy, if you still walk like a duck the way that I did when I was young, and probably still do to a certain point, you're not using that energy to move your hardware. Right? So when you get the system right, your cells make energy with near perfect efficiency, and then you move your body like a martial artist or a dancer, with near perfect efficiency. Right. And that means tons of extra electrons that would have been used wastefully are now available for, I don't know, folding proteins, detoxing, thinking good thoughts, restraining the urge to strangle any politicians near you. All of those things are really, really important parts of it. I miss functional movement, and I'm still working on that on a regular basis. So when I went to see you, I'm like, yeah, it's Austin Integrative Spine. We know each other, but I wasn't interested in my spine. You actually did stuff on my leg. And the method that you're just pioneering is called the Aqua method, something you created. So it's not a spinal thing, it's a whole body functional movement thing. Tell me what the Aqua method is. I think I know, because I just did it and it was really cool. But walk me through it.

Yes. So we came up with the term aqua to really give a description of what we're trying to create in the body. And that is more fluidity and also water. Aqua is pure. It's intense at times, depending on the form, and it is soothing at times, depending on the form. And that is how our treatment goes. So we've divided it into four sections, and I can go through those one at a time, or I can go through them and we can pause in between. The first section is what we call reveal. And the whole treatment is composed of me and two additional practitioners. One is a doctor of chiropractic medicine, incredibly gifted in functional tissue mobilization. And then the other is a personal trainer, elite performance trainer as well, with a rehab capability and also a massage therapist. So all of that wrapped up into one guy, and That's Matt Lindemood, Dr. Joey Mattina and Matt Lindemood. And so in the first phase of the Aqua method called Reveal, you get the three of us in a room together with our varied expertise, looking at your whole body, looking at. So for you, you have a toe that has been injured abnormal for significant amount of time. And what we see with your movement is you have these patterns that have developed over a long period of time of dealing with this toe. And that pattern is across your entire body. It's not just the toe, as you said, it's the knee, it's the hip, it's the core, it's the back. So the three of us are looking at your structure, what I know about the anatomy. We're looking at your movement patterns and then we're looking at what tissues are involved, putting that picture together to make a treatment plan for the next phase.

Okay, so reveal is figuring out what's going on that isn't. It hurts here. Let's cut that out.

100%. Okay, 100%.

I like that. So reveals the first step and that's functional movement elite movement analysis. So what we figured out when I was there is that I wasn't firing certain muscles in my shin because my body learned not to do that probably when I was, you know, in my late teens, early 20s because of an earlier injury. Right. So then the body says, I'm going to protect this. And it never stops protecting. And physical therapy is supposed to do that, but it doesn't really. So you guys are able to spot that for me. All right, so that was the reveal. And then what's the next step of this?

So the next step is called restore. And in this phase, we do the photobiomodulated platelet rich plasma treatment, which is an iv. We draw your blood cell, spin it down, get the PRP fraction, shine a very specialized laser with a very specialized waveform through that to activate the prp and we can talk more about the science of what's going on there and then some basic science of what might be going on there as well. Then we re inject that activated PRP into your IV and then shine the same very specific laser over the different body parts of interest that we have identified in the reveal phase. At the same time that we're shining the laser to target the anti inflammatory effects of the PRP. We are also with Dr. Mattina, doing that functional tissue mobilization. So you're getting the benefit of a molecular biologic treatment of the activated PRP and the tissue compression, pushing out the inflammatory molecules through the lymphatic system and creating another way for the biologic activity to be drawn to that place. As he's doing the Tissue mobilization. So it's a combined effect of a biologic going in through the veins as well as the external compression and just frankly the healing nervous system changes that happen with manual treatment. It's very powerful at one time.

Okay. And the idea of a special laser could be triggering for some people say, but that's not how it works. But the reality is that photobiomodulation, 25 years ago you could only do it on racehorses. And the history of all the cool biohacks if it wasn't from like the Russian military in the 50s and 60s. A lot of it really did come from racehorses because you have a multi million dollar thing there. Little injury, any little performance. So my first medical laser was only approved for use on horses and it fixed my whiplash in like two or three sessions. Just amazing stuff. That was why I bought it. It was actually cheaper than going to a chiropractor a hundred times. And by the way, I support chiropractors, but the ones with lasers are my favorites. So lasers just work. LEDs work trulite. My light therapy company has all kinds of stuff. Like actually it's probably off camera, I have our new clinical device right here that I'm dropping on the floor. So what's going on is there is tons of science to say that that's real. What Marcela's got with the Aqua method is a very unusual thing. And I've actually seen photos of cells lining up and all sorts of crazy stuff happening. So I'm just going to say that more than passes the credibility test at this point. You can buy FDA approved lasers for use on humans with approved claims. And it's just this is a new world and it wasn't always like this. It did go through a big phase of resistance from doctors like Marcela, whatever, 20 years ago or something, but it's just real. How did you become convinced that this laser treated PRP was any different than PRP where you blow fairy kisses on it?

Great question. In my training to use this new technology with the creator of it, we experienced some really profound healing examples when I was working with him with patients. One particular example is a patient who came to me with a herniated disc, a lumbar disc, and was pretty far along in his healing process. He had improved from the beginning in terms of his symptoms, but his scan was very clearly surgical. He had a very large disc. He still had symptoms. That guy would walk into any surgeon's office and be offered an operation. And that's not wrong. I mean it was totally a reasonable thing, but he was very convinced that he wanted to try absolutely everything first. And he had an incredible result with one treatment with the, with the inventor of this laser, Dr. Todd Ovokitis. So, so in my initial experience with it, I saw impressive results, not just with back pain. That doctor has also studied cardiomyopathy in patients that need cardiac transplants and show an improvement with his laser activated PRP on cardiac output. And I mean, I've seen those results. So there's a myriad of data that he's been collecting for several years. And so I reviewed that and then had some hands on experience and then once I started using it myself, we've now with the Aqua method, we've treated several patients who have been recommended surgery and we're getting them better without surgery. So I'm sold.

I am not opposed to surgery. However, it should be a last line, not a first line. And I regret to this day the three knee surgeries that I had because none of them were necessary. Knowing what I know now about functional movement. And in this podcast, guys, you're going to learn about functional movement and you're going to learn about some new stuff that's possible. You don't necessarily have to do everything that we talk about in the Aqua method in order to get some results. In fact, if most listeners just said, you know, I'm going to go find a functional movement person and I'm going to do five sessions, it's going to completely change the quality of your life. It's that big of a thing because you just don't know the muscles that are turned off. And in sometimes one session you can activate a muscle and all of a sudden your brain's like, oh, I didn't know I had that. And then it's available to you. It's really weird. Yoga can kind of do it, but it takes a long time. Functional movement people are very, very powerful. And what you're doing that I haven't seen before with the Aqua method is having that functional awareness as you're guiding the cells and as the body is in massive healing and transformation mode, rather than just, oh, body, heal what you know you've got. Like maybe we could show, show you what you've got. So the body will then heal the things that need it. And that's a new innovation. So given that preamble, what is the cost of the Aqua method? Like, where does it start?

20,000 is the start and that is a three day immersive experience. We do the PBM PRP on the first day. And there's also a mind, body, spirit component which we can dig into the second, second day. And so there's pbm, prp, Mind, body, spirit, functional tissue mobilization, functional movement. That's all day one. Then day two and day three we continue with the functional tissue mobilization, the laser and the mind body spirit decoding piece. So again, first day we do the pbm, prp and the second two days we continue everything else. And then after that we also include two more sessions via Zoom with our functional or with our gifted rehab and movement specialist trainer. So it's not just those days that you're here with us in the office. We really empower you to carry it forward, teach you how to maintain your results in your own environment.

So this is three full days with two MDs and a high end functional trainer, which is why it's, you know, meaningful amount of money. You can use HSPS and hsas for this, I'm guessing in the us These are the health savings accounts. And it's not insurable though, right?

Right. So no insurance, but you can use your hsa. And just for clarity, it's a md, dc, a doctor of chiropractic.

Thank you.

And then a trainer. Yeah, elite.

One thing I totally love is how like real MDs like to talk down to naturopaths and chiropractors. Like, do they teach you that in medical school? Marcella?

I'm just wondering, you know, actually, I mean they don teach it obviously, but there is an undercurrent and it's unfortunate because I can tell. I mean, Dr. Harry, he's like my, my, one of my earliest mentors and I adore him. And you know, he's a naturopath and I've gotten incredible knowledge base from my.

Harry Adelson who's been on the show lots of times. Right. He's one of the early stem cell innovators who I, I see quite often as well. So a mutual friend and, and source of knowledge. So I was just teasing you. My wife is a medical doctor as well and there's always this. Well, I went to school for longer than they did and they're like, yeah, but we actually treat people and you just give them drugs. So it's a long standing friendly rivalry that sometimes is unfriendly. When the American Medical association, which is basically the trade union for doctors, when they get involved and try and destroy acupuncture and chiropractic guys, there's room for everyone. There's lots and lots of people who are not well and there's lots of ways to fix them and we can all just chill. So you're actually very, very open to that. I was just putting words in your mouth because that's my latest hobby.

It's all good. We're in a space of collaboration and that one of my or my trainer actually introduced me to the Medici Effect, that wonderful book that talks about great ideas come at very, very from very people getting together from very, very different perspectives. And that's what we've created with this process.

There are a few people from the Upgrade collective saying, can you do this remotely? I would say it wouldn't even. I mean, there's injections and spinning of blood and lasers do not shoot through zoom.

You can remember 20 years.

There you go.

That's a goal. Thank you for the question.

Your iPhone will be implanted and have a little glands to secrete 3D printed molecules. It's going to be kind of weird, especially if either Apple or Facebook is in charge or Microsoft or Google. Geez, we're screwed no matter what we do.

We could do it in the metaverse, maybe. I don't know.

And is this kind of laser something that anyone would buy or could buy at home? Or is this specifically for treating blood and tissues?

Great question. Right now it is extremely limited. I think there are 10 or fewer practitioners in the world with it and we're very grateful to have one. The creator of it is working on a way to have a higher number of practitioners have the availability to have has to do with the optics and how specialized it is and being able to build multiple ones. So right now, very limited.

There's also a whole bunch of medical devices that are out there where it's just not reasonable. A lot of the stuff you can use for your skin starts at $150,000 and you go somewhere and you use it. And this is that kind of laser. For most home therapy, LEDs work really well, especially when they're well made. That's the whole reason I started Trulite. But they don't do what this does. Like this is a medical laser versus something you could use at home for inflammation. So you do that and you also do some energy medicine work. That's pretty out there. I mean, you're like, I'm holding space and there's some. Is there a trauma tied in? So tell me about some of the woo that's in here because I actually think it makes a huge difference.

Yes, thank you for the question. So I have an extensive history of studying an ancient Chinese energy technique. That's energy for success. Dr. Barry Morguelin, who I know you've interviewed several times.

This was the first podcast he's ever been on, by the way.

Oh, that will. That's even better. Dr. B. Dr. B. So I started studying under him personally just for my own growth almost eight years ago now. And over time, I got such a great benefit from it myself that I started introducing it to. To my patients who are interested in mind body optimization. And so over time, that evolved into adding some of those practices to our treatments. And so as it exists right now as part of the AQUA method, what we do is as soon as a patient arrives, we have them do a guided visualization or breathing exercise so they really get their mind and body ready, get in that calm nervous system. You know, there's always. Even when we're talking about something wonderful and healing, there's anxiety before you have a procedure. And so we really try to create a peaceful environment for the person to get ready to accept the treatment. We also include a goal writing session as part of the treatment. So it's not just, I want my knee pain to go away. It's like, okay, if you had your knee better than you could imagine, if your knee was perfect, what does that mean for your life? What would you imagine yourself doing? How would that support you in whatever goals you have in your Life? And Amy McIver, who works with, with us, who's our chief guidance person for this process, she has a master's in health education. She has a Reiki experience. She has energy for success experience. She has a wide variety of mind, body, spirit abilities. She walks you through what you're trying to get out of the procedure beyond just pain. And that is one of the goal writing practices, one of the Chinese energy things. And then in addition to that, during the procedure, we read aloud your goals as we're activating the PRP and during the restore phase, as well as the revitalize phase over the next two days, when we're doing the functional tissue mobilization with Dr. Mattina, and as I'm shining the laser, we are talking through a possible psychological route of what is going on with you. And this is a process called biologic decoding. And. And my interest in this came from over many, many years into my conventional practice. Everybody knows when you have a stress in your life, something hurts, and you might have an old injury that perks back up, or you might have something new that happened. It just happened to happen at the same time as you were going through this massive breakup, or the same time a loved one dies the next month you have this, you get a cold, for example. Your body reacts to psychological stress. And this is something that I knew for a long time instinctively. And then I found that there is actually a field of somewhat esoteric medical science that has studied this. And so we've incorporated this discussion during the treatment. So by the end, the patient has experienced a release of whatever that thing possibly that was contributing, as well as an action plan for in the future, how to take what we discovered to make it work for them.

I really appreciate that about the Aqua method. And again, if you're listening to this going, wait a minute, I have a Johns Hopkins trained neurosurgeon who is licensed to go inside your brain with an egg beater if necessary, whatever you think is medically required. Who's talking about this stuff? Yeah, any massage therapist will tell you, just take the average person, especially women. But it's true for men and women, and work the hips really well, and people start crying for no reason, right? Because we sore emotions, especially in our hip joints. Why? Who the hell knows? The human operating system is still largely opaque to us for where we're sitting. But there's two people, one Western, one more esoteric, that support what you're doing here, aside from Dr. B, who's a UCLA surgeon and Chinese energy master. But what is Dr. Sarno from Harvard, who wrote a very famous book about pain, and he's well known for taking people who've been in chronic intractable pain for years. He'll talk to them for an hour and their pain is gone forever. Now, if that's possible for even a dozen people, there is something else going on than, you know, deficiency in opiates and surgery. It's just how it is. And he's got really fantastic evidence, like clinical trials for what he does. And so there's one proof point for you. The other one is more personal development. But Louise Hay has a series of books that say, oh, if you have pain here, look at these emotions, and then you do trauma release work or emotional work on those. And sometimes we get into that at 40 years, as in my neuroscience practice, and wow, there you go again. You see these weird results. And why, if your knee hurts, does it mean mommy didn't love me? I don't remember what knee pain particularly means, but there's some kind of a mapping, and you just look there and you might find something, or that might not be why, but the idea that you're taking functional movement, which is Its own beast and this energetic. Hey, maybe there's something else going on here that's environmental. Not physical environmental, but energy environment. And just saying let's throw everything at it all at the same time while you're in a massive healing thing from the laser and the activated PRP cells. This is exactly the biohacking approach. What you learned in med school would have been, well, let's test the energy, let's test whether functional movement works, and let's test whether the activated PRP works. And, well, none of them worked. I guess you're sick for life, but instead you're saying, let's throw everything at it that might be in there. And that's what I do with all the stuff that made me better. So kudos for being an MD who broke through that single cause, dogma and religion that's driving a lot of big pharma and a lot of western medicine where there must be one thing. There is no proof that it must be one thing. None whatsoever. We just make that assumption, then proceed as if that's the way the world was. That's just a false lens. So you totally broke through that, which is really cool. And you can feel it when you go in to do it. It's not like a normal procedure. I've had probably more stem cells than most people alive, if not anyone alive at this point. And what I really see is you go in there and it doesn't look like a normal procedure because you literally have people meditating and people, oh, you move this the right way. And what feeling is coming up here? It's a different beast. That's why the Aqua method was worth a show, because it's really cool. I'm seeing a couple of questions here. Old spinal cord injuries. What happens if you apply this to one of those?

Yeah, great question. So the results that we're seeing with this activated PRP in spinal cord injury have been really impressive. I will say incomplete injuries, meaning a complete injury is where at the level of the lesion, there's no motor sensory function. An incomplete lesion is where there is some. And even if it's small, we are seeing a stronger result in the completes. I'm sorry, a stronger result in the incompletes than the completes. That said, we're at about, I would think, about an 85% response rate in all comers. So there are some. Then what that response is, is variable. So in our completes, it might be just a sensory. In our incompletes, we've had people that, you know, 10 years out from an injury have done everything else, have had iterative progress along the way, and then they get this procedure and they have a big jump in their recovery. And we see that over and over with the incompletes. It's a very nuanced discussion. It's very patient specific, it's very injury specific. But we do have a series of spinal cord patients that we're actually thrilled to hopefully present to the conventional medical community once the data is fully collected. So thank you for the question.

So you're only getting an 85% response in people with spinal cord injury. That's like the B. That's not even an A. Marcel, I thought you were like this board certified spinal genius and you're only getting a B. Yep.

And there are some non responders and I think that's, that's really, really, you know, important to say. But, but honestly, for people that have nothing else, it's. It's frickin over the top. We're over the top and happy about it.

That's unprecedented compared to anything else you've done as a surgeon. Right?

Yeah. For, for a non. Yeah, because these are patients that are, are past their surgical. Most patients, when I have a spinal cord injury, they've had surgery, you know, at the time of their injury.