Slow Down Aging with Stem Cells – Dr Harry Adelson & Dr Amy Killen #578

Bulletproof Radio. A state of high performance. You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today's cool fact of the day is that news recently made headlines across the world about a second HIV patient who went into remission after a stem cell transplant. That's kind of cool because it's two people on earth who've done it. This patient was positive for the virus since 2003, got a blood stem cell transplant in 2016 because he had Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is a lymphatic system cancer. And the blood stem cells came from a donor with a mutation that makes stem cells resistant to HIV infection. And subsequent testing over 12 months showed that the patient's HIV had fallen to undetectable levels. So 16 months after the procedure, they stopped taking antiretroviral medication with the doctor's permission and has remained in remission ever since. With HIV levels less than one copy per milliliter of plasma, which is pretty much not there. And when that patient decided to do the stem cell transplant, which is an accepted procedure for Hodgkin's lymphoma, the physicians said, well, why don't we try finding a donor with a defect in both copies of the CCR5 gene? And that means that the donor's T cells couldn't make the protein, which means HIV really can't get into the cells. And they thought it might work on hiv. It was one of those times where there was no additional risk to the patient. So they did gasp and experiment on a patient, and guess what else? It wasn't double blinded or anything like that. They knew that it might work, and they tried it, and it apparently, apparently did work. And the first patient who had an HCV remission in 2009 had a cancer treatment with two blood stem cell transplants from a donor with the same defect, along with two rounds of full body radiation. And this is now a cure from just one. You might have heard about CCR5 because the doctor in China who just allegedly and probably truthfully, genetically modified human embryo was introducing the same defect in order to make a baby that was resistant to HIV for life. Now, here's what they didn't tell you in the research. That same CCR5 gene is associated with intelligence. By deleting that gene, whether it's to cure HIV or maybe just to make a super baby, well, you. You could be making a super baby. There's a lot we don't yet understand about genes, but we do know that stem cells can do some amazing things in humans. And it's critically important that you maintain your right to get access to stem cells, because countries around the world are now doing this to speed healing and to prevent things as big as organ transplants or joint transplants, or at least to push them off for many, many years. And even more importantly, for broad numbers of people, if you have old injuries that hurt, that pain sucks energy because of those old injuries for long periods of time. And as someone who's had arthritis in my knees since I was 14 and just thought it was supposed to hurt when you walked or when you moved, it was just a condition of living. I didn't realize other people didn't have that. I can tell you, living without pain throughout my body is kind of a good deal. I. I really appreciate that. And you may not even know the extent of the pain you're experiencing if it's been there for most of your life. Speaking of which, you guys know that foreshadowing is now one of my core human skills. We might be talking about, what do you think? Is it super babies or is it stem cells? If you guessed stem cells, you were right. We are going to talk about stem cells. And that's because stem cells are one of those massively impactful things that were not possible 25 years ago. We just didn't know about this. People say, dave, how are you going to live to 180? How's it even possible? How are stem cells possible? You can actually pull cells out of your body, put them back in. And so I've gone down that rabbit hole very deeply. And I actually recently did a full body stem cell makeover at Docera clinics in Park City, Utah, which I did with the help of, well, we call it six hands. So we had three doctors, two of whom were in the room with me today, who did the procedure. We had a Johns Hopkins neurologist and a cosmetic specialist, anti aging specialist, and an ortho specialist. So what I did was I had my stem cells put everywhere in the body. And we're going to talk about what stem cells can do for you today. The two guests in the room with me today are Dr. Harry Adelson, who spoke at the bulletproof conference and is mentioned in Game Changers. He's one of the very early adopters for using stem cells for chronic musculoskeletal pain. More than 5,000 stem cell procedures under his belt and has injected into more than 700 intervertebral discs. Harry, did I say intervertebral right? Vertebral.

Yes.

So there you go. See, now I know what the word looks like. I don't know how to say that. It's one of those words. Even as a professional biohacker, I didn't go to medical school. That's why I have these doctors in the room. Right. And I would say he's one of the top guys out there for spine pain, and he invented that full body stem cell makeover that I underwent. And joining us in the room today is Dr. Amy Killen. She's a former emergency medicine doctor like my wife, Dr. Lana, but she became more interested in preventative medicine and changed career course, so she focuses on prevention and regeneration, and she partners with Dr. Harry Adelson at Docera Clinics. And Dr. Adelson, Dr. Killen, as I'm going to call you. Well, Harry and Amy, welcome to the show.

Great to see you again, Dave.

Thanks for having us.

Now, Amy, on stage at the bulletproof conference last year, I introduced your alter ego.

Yes.

Because your middle initial is B. So you have the. Well, you have the best rapper middle name ever. Amy B. Killen.

Dr. Amy B. Killin is in the house. Yes.

All right, that's cool. The only other person who's ever been on the show who even came close to having a name that cool was Mark Divine, the Navy SEAL who has the name of a porn star. Now, I told him that on the show, and I was happy he didn't kill me when I said that. So, Mark, if you're listening, love you, brother. Now, if you are really into stem cells, you might want to check out episode 332 or 412 or 407 where we've talked about erectile dysfunction with stem cells, and we talk about pain and we talk about healing in general. So this is a core part of biohacking and something that you might say, oh, that's expensive. Here's the deal. Harry has pioneered ways to bring the cost way down from where it was even three years ago. And if you look at things like your iPhone or if you're one of those Android people, maybe your Android phone there, I just pissed off half the world. That is an example of you go back five, 10 years, and those phones were garbage compared to what we have today. Yet the phones today are about the same cost, but they're so much better. And I think we're seeing a drop in cost and improvement in efficacy. That's ridiculous. Now, what I want to focus on in this episode is some of the specifics around. Okay. What happens if you do the most extensive possible stem cell procedure. And there's some cool videos we're putting up about this. So we'll go through the, the experience of that, why it matters. But at a broader level for people listening, I want to talk about the stem cell theory of aging and how important that is. And let's just open with that. What is the deal with aging and stem cells? Harry, you want to start off with that? Sure.

Dave? Well, you know, as we discussed in the prior episodes, any sort of musculoskeletal pain, really, whenever you have healing after injury, that that is a stem cell mediated event. And the focus of my practice is the treatment of musculoskeletal pain. But if we broaden that to look at tissue aging, I mean really, this is entirely a stem cell mediated event. The two main contributors to aging are inflammation and oxidation. And then your body's biologic aging really is a response to how well you can cope with and respond to inflammation and oxidation. And really both of those processes are entirely controlled by stem cells. They're controlled specifically by the vesicles filled with growth factors that are called exosomes. Exosomes are filled with the items, the very items that communicate with all of your organ tissues to, to control inflammation and control oxidation. And as those things spiral out of control, that is what causes the aging process of all the organ systems.

I've been working on anti aging technologies in a nonprofit world for 20 years, just educating people about what's causing aging and gotten to know the leaders in the field. And my next book is around aging and what I am specifically doing to live to at least 180 stem cells are part of it because inflammation underlies pretty much all of the things that are likely to kill you. And inflammation happens in different people's bodies at different times for different reasons. But if you get on top of handling oxidation, which is important because that's how you make energy, oxidation is good. Too much oxidation is bad, or oxidation in the wrong place at the wrong time, not a good thing. So balancing that is cool. But you talked about something we haven't covered in other episodes in detail about exosomes. And I like to call these stem cell juice. Is that a good definition?

Yeah, magic juice. Neil Riordan calls it magic juice.

And what the stem cells are doing when they go in is they're sticking to a site of injury or inflammation and then they secrete these exosomes for a while. But when we did the full body stem cell makeover, we did, was it 11 vials of exosomes.

It was a huge quantity of exosomes. So, you know, with stem cells, Stem cells essentially have two superhuman powers. One is that what makes a stem cell a stem cell. The very definition of a stem cell, a stem cell is a cell that has the ability, when it divides, to either self renew, turn into a new version of itself, or differentiate, turn into a target tissue cell. When used therapeutically, we used to think that was the main mechanism of action. We'd put these stem cells where we want them to, and then they would turn into the type of tissue that was required. In fact, that's not at all what's happening. It's the second superhuman power, which is the paracrine effect. The paracrine effect is the stem cell's ability to sort of direct traffic. They're able to recognize that they're in the presence of, of damaged stem cells. Damaged, or I'm sorry, damaged tissue. Damaged normal tissue cells. And then they release these vesicles filled with growth factors called exosomes that actually trigger the growth of new healthy connective tissue. They kill invading microbes, they control inflammation, and they launch the growth of new healthy blood vessels. So this is precisely what, what needs to happen for normal tissue healing to occur. Now, in the realm of sort of anti aging medicine, there's a very interesting paper that was just published in this last year by a doctor named Joshua Hare out of University of Miami. And in this study, he's actually proven the use of stem cells for frailty associated with aging. And this is fascinating because aging, anti aging medicine, age management medicine, this is a huge field, but there's really very little in the scientific literature proven to actually reverse frailty associated with aging. So what this doctor did is he took culture expanded bone marrow stem cells from young donors and then he gave them to elderly patients. Now, first of all, frailty associated with aging, there's several different ways to classify that, but basically it's loss of grip strength, slowing of gait, involuntary weight loss, loss of energy and decrease in activity.

When does that normally hit people?

Well, it can hit. Well, I think with you, it hits you early in life.

23.

Yeah, I mean, it can hit, but, but it's, it's sort of those sort of main five things usually combined with some degree of cardiovascular disease. And that's, that can be measured with, with plasma markers, C reactive protein interleukin 6 and yeah, tumor necrosis factor alpha. So what he did is he took these patients who I believe they were over the age of 70, who displayed these elevated serum markers and had at least three out of the five of the physical characteristics administered culture, expanded stem cells. And he found that in pretty much every person they had improvement in all of those areas. I mean, this is really a landmark study because this is one of the first sort of really evidence based approaches to anti aging medicine.

It's interesting. If you look at Captain America, he gets in this weird metal contraption machine and then they plug in some sort of gastronomy electrical current and he comes out and he's two feet taller and full of muscle, et cetera, et cetera. That's not particularly realistic. But you can take stem cells now in someone who's aging and you can give them their brain back and you can give them, what is it, several more years of functional movement with a treatment, assuming it goes right, assuming they're a good candidate and things like that. Are we at the point where you would feel comfortable medically saying this is a common or at least a possible outcome?

Well, I mean, that is certainly been my experience, having done stem cell medicine for nearly 10 years now. And that's really how full body stem cell makeover came about. Full body stem cell makeover. Over the years, I've sort of developed a reputation as the guy who does big treatments. I get a lot of farmers, I get a lot of ranchers, I get a lot of oil fill workers. I get these people who have arthritis throughout their entire bodies.

They're kind of wrecked.

Yeah, they're people who've just really, I, I affectionately refer to as having exceeded the terms of their warranty. They've worked very, you know, led very hard lives over many years and you know, they've, they've paid the price. And so because I've never billed insurance and just because I've, I've this, I've just never said I want to help people. I sort of. And then on top of that, because I work with such good anesthesiologists who put people to completely to sleep so I can do big treatments. Over the years I started doing these big treatments, these big stem cell treatments, the entire spine, both hips, both shoulders, both knees. And then in 2016, early 2016, when I first treated you, and then we started getting more and more biohackers in, I started getting people saying, well, can't you just treat my entire body in a single sitting me? Right, yeah. And I thought, yeah, sure, let's do that. So a couple of years ago, we rolled out this full body stem cell makeover and Amy and I Do it together. So I do every moving part in the body. So first we start fate. We take a large volume of bone marrow, concentrate it down to bone marrow, aspirate concentrate.

You took about a half a liter of my bone marrow.

That's right. Yeah, that's right.

Now, the first time you took my bone marrow, it was in 2016. And I didn't do the whole body thing there. We did actually pretty close to whole body thing. We did a big treatment that was about the four hands, right. In terms of we did what the two of you together could do. And I remember I walked in the door, I said, I don't have a lot of time, so could we just do everything possible? You're going to go to the trouble of getting my fat derived cells, my bone marrow. And so you guys are like, all right, we're going to do that. And I was awake the whole time. We didn't use sedation, I didn't even take.

You had the option to be sedated and you chose not to because you wanted to film it.

I wanted to see what it was like. And I also don't like what nitric oxide does for my specific genetic mutation in my Nos 3 pathways. I feel like crap when I get nitrous oxide for several days, actually, which is why when people are doing that at Burning Man, I'm like, I'm out. But those little whipped cream containers of nitrous oxide, so that stuff, for me, I don't want to take the hit, even though it probably would have felt better. So I actually, without anything other than a local anesthetic, I experienced bone marrow aspiration and I was a little bit scared. But. But here's the deal. It's not particularly painful, it's odd. And you feel things rattling in your skeleton that really should never sound like that. And you feel that, er, eee, er, sound, which wasn't particularly fun hearing it come from inside my skeleton instead of from outside. But you know what? I've had a lot worse things but way more painful happen to me in the overall scheme of things. The fear of fear is worse than fear itself. And so I would say it wasn't that big of a deal. It was nicer when I went in for the six hands though, to just like wake up and say, oh, it's done. And you took quite a lot of bone marrow out. So I'm a fan of the sedation without general anesthesia, which has its own set of risks, but all right, so now you've got half a liter of Bone marrow. You go in with liposuction, you pull some of my fat out.

We have the option of additionally doing a lipoaspiration, isolating stem cells from your fat. And, and then we use these exosomes, which we've talked about in prior episodes is exosomes are the growth factors from placental derived stem cells without the actual other person's stem cells, without the other person's DNA. So you're getting the active ingredient of culture, expanded placental derived stem cells without the other person's DNA. So we supercharge your own stem cells with these exosomes. What we think, you know, the extra. The exosomes, the membrane of the exosomes are identical to the membrane of your stem cells. So we think that your own stem cells actually absorb them into themselves, thereby turbocharging your own stem cells and effectively making them that of a younger person. So then I do essentially all my injections. We inject from the base of the skull down to the tailbone, both sides, all the facet joints.

We, we do every vertebrae on each side.

We do epidurals in the cervical spine, the thoracic spine, and the lumbar spine. So we put stem cells into the epidural space. And this is to help, hopefully to help prevent central stenosis in the future. Then flip you over, inject stem cells into both shoulders, both elbows, both wrists, both thumbs, both hips, both knees, both ankles, both great toe. And then I pass it on to Dr. Candler.

And I also work at the same time as him, but I do the hair injections. So for both men and women, I do scalp injections to try to improve the health of the hair and possibly restore hair, depending on what's going on with the hair.

Can I just say, I would rather have bone marrow aspirated than get those hair injections because those things hurt.

They do.

Jesus.

But not if you're asleep.

This time I woke up, I couldn't even tell you did anything. So my hair was messed up. In fact, I look pretty. Pretty amazing when I got out of that.

Yeah, you did. But no, the hair injections can be uncomfortable. And I do facial injections, so I do injections with a needle under the skin as well as the microneedling with the little tiny needles on top of the skin. And topical application again of the stem cells from fat as well as PRP and exosomes. And then the sexual injections, which are the penis injections for the men, and so the P shot for men, and, and the oshot for women. And I do all of those things kind of while Dr. Adelson is finishing up with his injection. So we're working simultaneously, and so you're not actually under sedation very much longer.

Amy, are there any cosmetic procedures I could have done that I didn't do with you?

Well, there are a whole bunch of things you can do cosmetic procedure wise. You know, there's lasers of all different types.

There's fillers, there's Botox, stem cells specifically.

But with stem cells, as far as I know, we did most of the things that were. That are being done right now.

Most. What are the ones I missed?

The only things else that I don't do currently are the. Like, the fat transfers, where you. You add stem cells to the fat and you actually directly transfer both the stem cells and the fat. And some doctors do that. It's just not something that I do.

Sounds kind of icky because then you actually. It's a fat transplant.

It's a fat transplant. It's different. Yeah, it's a different procedure. So what I'm doing is concentrating your stem cells and using those directly, you know, as injections, as well as in topical applications and microneedling. And I find that that is great for, you know, all kinds of things like improving the texture of your skin, the tone, the color. You know, hyperpigmentation or dark spots can be improved. Fine lines and wrinkles can be improved. And just generally, patients tell me they just kind of feel like they have, like, a glow to their skin that wasn't there before. Their skin gets healthier, which is what we're trying to do.

It takes about six to nine months for this all to kick in. Right. In terms of the new layers of skin and all that. Mine was what, three months ago when I did closer to six? Was it closer to six months ago? My calendar in my head, is entirely inaccurate. One of the other things that I definitely noticed is in addition to reduction in stuff going on in the body, and already from the first treatments, I really didn't have a lot of residual pain, except I had two things going on, both of which are substantially improved now. One is I had a separated left shoulder from the last. I think it was the last bulletproof conference. I never even felt the injury, But I think I picked up someone at the conference just under the arms, and I lifted them up, but instead of pulling them towards me and lifting them up the way you would, intelligently, I lifted them up kind of at the end of my arms. And just that amount of leverage on My shoulder gave me a bone on bone shoulder separation that was partly healed, but I think that this treatment totally nailed that. And the other one, I finally figured out what's going on. I go through airports a stupid amount of the time and I've got a rolly bag because you don't want to carry everything on your back, which is what I used to do, because that compresses all the nerves in your upper back. The problem is if you're pushing a heavy backpack on those carpets in airports for long periods of time. I actually had weird pain, like really substantial upper back pain just on the right hand side from holding the handle and pushing a heavy bag over carpets for God knows how many miles. That's one of those repetitive stress things. And so you went in there and worked on that and it took about maybe a month and it's gone. That stuff completely healed. And that had been bothering me for like a year. And I didn't really know what it was until after the injections. I said, that must be the trigger for it. So thanks for that. And then on the cosmetic side, Amy, it's hard to say. People are commenting quite a lot on social and also just friends who've known me for a long time. They're like, what's up with your skin? And I want skin like that. And I'm hearing it more from guys my age because I grew up in New Mexico, where, well, you wash your face every now and then if you get around to it, but it's really more important that you brush your teeth and you're going to look distinguished no matter what. And now there's a whole bunch of people saying, you know, I actually would like to look healthy and actually feel healthy and I'd like to have healthy skin and what's up with that? So I like to think that it's made a difference. I don't. I think it's too soon to say and it can take time, but I'm definitely looking really good. And people have commented. And then on the hair side of things, that's also one of those. My hair is less gray than it was before, and that's something that's been noticed with these before. I started turning gray in my early 20s, my mom was gray by the time she was like 25, 26. Seems to run in the family. There's a genetic component there. But I noticed in the last three years mine had started turning more gray, possibly from some mineral things that I also changed. But post stem cells, it's way less gray than it was, but there's still a few little streaks of gray in there. But the deal is it should be fully back to its normal color. Have you seen stem cell patients restore their color?

We've had patients who have definitely commented on that. The gray is getting better, right? Both Harry and I have. And that may be from the hair injections as well as from some of the IV injections. We don't know for sure, but we've definitely had feedback from patients that the hair is not only just healthier and maybe thicker, but it's also not quite as gray.

Someone told me the other day that I had CEO hair. Is that what it does?

Yes, it does. It turns you into a CEO. Come get your stem cells.

It's funny because some of the stuff, it's just cosmetic. You say it's just vanity, but part of aging doesn't have to be kind of falling apart, which is the way a lot of us visualize it. And I've worked really hard on changing my picture of aging, which for almost all of us, it's some combination of tubes, monitors, wheelchairs, forgetting your own name, and probably diapers to be really straightforward. And that is not actually what aging looked like throughout almost all of history. That's the very recent things, and I'm just rejecting that outright. Where age, when you do it right, means that, or aging, when you do it right means that you have the ability to walk around under your own power. You have the energy to play with your grandkids and do what you want to do. And you actually get to step into that position of the village elder, where you've got the experience and you are willing and able and happy to share it, to make the world a better place. And death looks more like what happens in your bed when you're done with everything, versus that picture that we've created of just this long convalescence. And I think stem cells are one of the things that's going to change that reality, which is really cool. But along the way, wouldn't you like to look like you were 50 or 60 instead of 150? That's my plan anyway. And I'm very happy to say I'm not going down without a fight. In fact, I'm just not going down.

I think it's important I tell patients that for me, for my procedures, I'm working with them on trying to help their confidence and help them feel better. It may be something that doesn't seem that important, but so you know, whether. Whether your hair is falling out or Your skin is not as youthful as it used to be, or, you know, you're having some sexual problems or dysfunction. It could really affect how people, how they feel about themselves, how they present themselves, how they, you know, kind of go about their day. And, you know, if I can improve just a little bit, then it can really change how they're interacting with the rest of the world. And it, you know, it's. It may not seem like a big deal, but it actually can be a big deal for people.

I've got several really close friends who are in their 70s or 80s, and I started making a habit of having much older friends in my twenties when I started running this anti aging nonprofit group. That guy's in his late 80s, he's dating someone in her 40s, and he's full of energy, wants to call me 11 o' clock at night and talk about his latest idea. I think that's the path that I want and I've learned so much there. So even today, or not today, but this week I had a conversation with a good friend who I think has actually been on the show a while back anyhow, and he's like, Dave, this old age thing totally sucks. I think he's pushing 80 and he's like, you know, my, you know, what doesn't work all the time, but, you know, works most of the time. And, you know, I've still got my hair but I'm always fighting to keep it and, you know, things hurt and, you know, this kind of sucks, but like, I'm generally positive but now just blah, Right. And so there are frustrations like that. And we have this mindset that says you shouldn't age, you shouldn't look old. But there's something called healthy aging. You can look at someone and say, that's someone who's really healthy, but they've got mileage. And that's the thing that I'm looking for. The idea that we're all going to look like we're 25 forever, we'll probably get there, we're just not there now. But the idea that it's normal and healthy to have the wizened look of age, but it doesn't mean you look like a truck ran over you with aging. Right. And that's what I think you're doing, Amy, now is you're saying, you know what? I have healthy, flexible skin at whatever age I am. And you're probably going to, when you look at me, say you're going to guess within 20 years of my age, but you're probably going to guess 20 years in the proper direction. What is sort of the biggest transformation that you've seen on the cosmetic side from doing stem cells in people's faces?

I mean, it's a lot of, you know, people look like themselves, which is, I think, is important. I'm not changing the way that they look. They're still themselves, but just a lot of people just come and say that their family and friends have commented on the fact that they look very, very well rested, that they look very vibrant, that they, you know, that their skin is, like I said, is glowing and looks really healthy. The procedures that I do, you know, we're increasing your own collagen production, your own elastin production, hyaluronic acid. These are all things that start to go down at about age 25. So 25 is like when their peak skin happens, and then after that, it's all downhill. So we're trying to get your own, you know, your own skin to increase production of these things that are really healthy and to make your skin look healthy and behave healthy. But it doesn't change the way you look as far as, you know. It's not like filler where you have, like, you know, fake lips or you have, you know, weird things in your face. It's you. You just look like a better version of you. And that's what people tell me all the time.

And this is a different thing. There's. You get anti aging. The vast majority of this going back 20 years ago was we're going to just do a nip and a tuck and a facelift here and a little bit of sticking some plastic in your, in your forehead here or whatever the heck else they did, which was purely cosmetic, but it wasn't really anti aging. It was sort of like tattooing makeup on or something like that. And what you're talking about there is restoring it from the inside out so the systems of healing are turned back on. And this is that revolution that I think a lot of people haven't internalized yet. And I'm happy I got to get that done during the whole body stem cell makeover because I was unconscious the whole time. That stuff does hurt because the first time we did some of that stuff, I think halfway through, like, let's not use that stuff because it burns. I'm gritting my teeth here. But when you grit your teeth and scrunch up your face, when there's a needle in your face, it's not a good idea. So I think you guys went down a really Good path. Doing the whole body thing. Harry, what's the biggest sort of, I'm going to call it, miracle healing you've seen, but tell me about a case or two of people who've done the whole body stem cell makeover who had unusually good results.

Well, usually that's for people who already start with some degree of pain. So we've had a number of people who we've done full body stem cell makeover on who really are for the most part pain free. And they're doing it entirely for anti aging purposes and because they want to remain pain free well on up into advanced age.

I'm a prime example of that. I have like 5% of the pain I used to have.

Exactly, exactly.

Like people getting out of wheelchairs and stuff like that.

Well, where we really see the most dramatic outcomes now, I only treat musculoskeletal pain, so I don't treat spinal cord inj, for instance. But where we really see some amazing outcomes is with dehydrated discs, desiccated discs. And these are frequently people, it's usually young people who've had some sort of injury. A very common injury is from deadlifting. And their MRI shows that one or several of their lumbar discs are dehydrated. And that shows up as black on MRI. So when you look at the T2 weighting MRI, white, white, white, black. You know, it just, it's, it's like.

A tooth with a cavity sort of.

Right now it's normal size and shape. There may or may not be some degree of herniation. Frequently there isn't. And you, and this is, people describe this as a midline pain, dead in the center, usually right about belt line or slightly lower. And leaning slightly forward makes it much worse. So like holding something out in front of them and leaning forward, especially like putting a baby in a crib, is just like the worst thing they could do. That's something that surgery has nothing to offer. I mean, they're really the only surgery that really would be at all helpful would be fusion, which is a terrible option because that's a permanent solution. And you know, it can, it can permanently make you worse. And what we found is that putting this combination of bone marrow with fat stem cells with exosomes directly into the intervertebral disc using X ray guidance has in many cases resulted in a complet cure of pain.

Okay, so that's pretty profound. How have you found things like ozone injection or MSM cream or some of the other things like that when it Comes to back pain.

Yeah, I have much less experience with those things.

I mean, have you seen patients who've had those and then come in for stem cells and. Sure.

Oh yeah. I mean, we've had people who've, the people who come to. We're usually the last stop. I mean, we are very. It's really unusual that people are saying, yeah, you know, I started getting this back pain and I haven't really tried anything. So I came to you first. Usually I've tried this, I've tried that, I've consulted with the surgeon, I've done. I've been to the chiropractor, I've been to this and you know, nothing. Chiropractors. A good chiropractor can help 90% of.

Their place to start.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And exactly. I would rather be the last stop because if something else, if MSM cream or something is going to work, then they should just do that. Usually where the people, you know, we get the people who've tried everything and, and nothing has helped them.

That's definitely going to be the case for chronic pain. When it comes to the anti aging side of things, my strategy is I'm going to do everything. So I'm eating a diet that doesn't cause inflammation. That is the bulletproof diet. I take tons of bulletproof collagen stuff and you could say, dave, stop plugging your products. But there's a reason I do what I do. It's because I don't want to die when I'm old. I don't want to die actually when I'm young either, come to think of it. And I believe that stem cells systemically are one of the many things that we can do that maybe aren't when we're at the very end of what we can do. It's just cheaper and easier to stay young than it is to get old and reverse it. And I spend so much time with older people who are reversing their aging and are doing things they're not supposed to be able to do. It just comes at great expense and cost compared to doing stem cells or changing your diet or exercising or doing all the things that you can do now just to hold the line for a while. So it seems like just a fantastic shift in who's doing stem cells. Let's talk about the big gun that took it from the normal whole body stem cell makeover to the six hands one. And I'm the first person to do that. And I think it's definitely a little extreme, but also living to 180 is a little extreme as well. And what we did there is. When I was unconscious, you had a Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon on hand who flew in for the procedure. Walk me through what Marcela did. Well, Harry, you were injecting all my various joints. And Amy, you are sticking needles in places that few people have seen.

Sure. So Amy and I have been doing four hands full body stem cell makeover for about two years. And when, Dave, when we finally set a date for you to come in, I thought, you know, here's the opportunity to do something special. I mean, for the. The original biohacker, we gotta. We gotta come up with like, something really over the top. So I invited my dear friend, Dr. Marcela Madera, who is a John, as you say, John Hopkins trade neurosurgeon, fellowship, trained in spine surgery. She got her Utah license. And for your procedure? I did my normal portion. Amy did her normal portion. And then Marcella injected stem cells, your own stem cells, directly into your cerebral spinal fluid. She did an intrathecal injection in order to deliver stem cells theoretically directly to the brain. She also did some more advanced epidural injections along the entire length of your spine. And then, of course, this six hands full body makeover includes some. All three of us are on call for you, and there's some other perks that go along with it, but that was just about six months ago, and you look great.

One of the things that I noticed after this was a really marked change in my sleep quality. And I've been tracking my sleep for a long time, and my percentage of deep sleep just shot up. And it stayed up to the point if I get less than an hour, even if I only sleep five hours, if I get less than an hour of deep sleep, it's unusual. Now, before, that's where I would pay first. And my REM sleep was. Some days it was high, some days it was low. And now my REM sleep is always substantially high. And I. I have found some more herbal things that are helping to improve that. But nothing has shifted my deep sleep the way I think the six hands procedure did for me. It's really hard to say that that was the cause, but when I look at what else did I do that would be likely to do that? The other thing that I think it contributed to. And so again, I'm a guinea pig. In this case, I'm n of 1 versus having tested this on 1000 people or something. But I noticed that I just naturally go to bed earlier. So it shifted my circadian rhythm to be more like most humans. Ever since I was maybe 10 years old, I've been stay up till 2. It's just my natural time. And I write all my books. I wrote Game Changers, Headstrong, all of them. There's this cool thing that happens after 11. You just go into writing mode. And now like I could actually go to sleep at 11. And before this procedure, that was one of those things that was just so uninteresting to be able to do so. I like to think that I'm sleeping like a 20 year old and my sleep numbers are like a 20 year old sleep numbers, which is remarkable. Last night I had a new record, I think three and a half hours of REM sleep and seven hours of sleep. So. Wow, that's great. Now, Harry, have you had a six hands procedure? Even though you're normally two of the hands?

I want one. I'm trying to figure out which of my friends I'm going to talk into coming out to Park City to do it. But no, I would. I definitely want my entire spine treated. And you know, the people that we've treated, because a lot of times we'll get people who really just have low back pain, but they've got a little bit of neck stiffness and they've got a little. And then they have sort of this long laundry list of minor injuries, but, you know, no major problem areas. But the people who decide to do it, the way they describe it is, you know, you know when you get a really great full body deep tissue massage and you feel great for two days after and then you kind of normalize after that. Well, what people are saying is that they, they have that terrific feeling that lasts, you know, months and years later.

All right, so you haven't done it yet, but you've definitely had some stem cells.

Oh, for sure. I've had lots of little injuries treating.

Okay, so you, you normally treat them that way. How about the cosmetic stuff?

I haven't had any done.

I've had. Yeah, I've done, I've done some procedures on myself, not infrequently.

You do stem cells on yourself?

I've done. Well, not the actual stem cells because I can't do my own liposuction.

That's what I was thinking.

I have done, I have had it done. And I've done exosome, exosomes and PRP injections on myself. I do microneedling on myself fairly frequently. A couple times a year. Yeah, I've tried to kind of build up a tolerance to and needles in my own face.

I have pretty good tolerance for needles almost anywhere and even in the face. I've injected my own face a few times, but it's just not that comfortable.

It's not comfortable, but it's worth it.

It definitely flies in the face of self preservation.

And both of you, though, look very, very healthy. And people who watch the video short on YouTube, you can check it out. These are two very healthy looking people. And having access to stem cells, I think is one of those things. That's a good move. Now let's talk about the hard stuff. A lot of people say stem cells are for rich people. What's your take on that, Harry?

Well, it depends on my experience is that this treatment is for people who have their priorities straight. This is for people who value their own bodies and. And value their quality of life. We don't necessarily get rich people. We get people who want to be out of pain. So at our clinic, we have two price points. We have the price point to see me. We have the price point to see my associate, who is excellent. I mean, you know me, I'm enough of a perfectionist that if I didn't have complete confidence that my associate would do an excellent job, I wouldn't let him do anything. He's almost half the cost of me. And then starting this June, we're rolling out a tithing model. We're going to be dedicating one day a month to doing stem cell procedures. Not at no cost, but it's going to be people who are in who have financial need, who can demonstrate that they are in financial need. And we are going to do stem cell treatments in exchange for documentation of community service hours.

I think that is so epic. So people who need the stem cell procedures for their quality of life can't afford it. Police officers, teachers, people like that.

60 hours of community service will buy you a treatment of your joints, and 100 hours of community service will buy a treatment of your spine.

That's awesome. So you're giving back to local community. And it seems like over time, even since we first started doing procedures together, the costs have come down just in general. And I feel like that Moore's law of stem cells is happening. Have you seen fundamental changes in the technologies? Is it easier to get stem cells out than it used to be? Is it cheaper? Is it faster?

There's just more people doing it.

Got it. Okay, so there's more supply now. All right. It's a big part of my goal in doing Bulletproof radio is to increase the demand for stuff that works and therefore to increase the supply of it. So there's more people doing it and some with more experience, some with less, but that's making it just more accessible to everyone. What's the starting cost for someone who comes in to say, do knees or something like that?

With my approach, I do a kitchen sink approach. I do stem cells from your bone marrow combined with stem cells from your fat combined with a little bit of amniotic fluid combined with some exosomes, all done under sedation. So this is sort of a big treatment, you know, usually starts around 12,000. If we're doing very complex procedures, it can get up to 20. If we are doing full body stem cell makeover, it goes on up from there. If my associate is doing it, it's half that point. Now people have the option of just doing bone marrow. So like if my associate, if somebody has arthritic knees and they need their knees injected and they just want bone marrow done, which is very effective, just doing bone marrow on its own, to have my associate do it, I think is currently just just under $5,000.

Compared to the cost of a knee replacement or the cost of not being able to work for a while. This is still a lot of money. We'll make no bones about it, but it's not $50,000.

Yeah, well, $5,000 is about half the industry standard for bone marrow.

And I'm excited about that because there are a lot of people who will say, you know, I've had enough of being in pain. It's affecting everything I do and I'm going to save up for this, I'm going to do it. And maybe at some point we'll get insurance companies to realize it's cheaper for them to pay for that than it is to pay for a much more expensive procedure later. But that isn't happening. Now that I'm aware of. Are you hopeful insurance companies are going to cover this at some point?

Well, I mean, the thing is, insurance companies aren't really interested in making healthcare less expensive. They're interested in controlling the flow of money.

So.

I think eventually it will happen. It's hard to say how it will happen or when, but we'll. We'll just sort of wait and see. I don't think it's going to be anytime super soon.

Yeah, that's one of those things where maybe one insurance company is going to say, oh, we'll do this, and they'll get all of the insurance business from the people who get a choice of where they get their health insurance because it's one of those things where this is less risk than joint replacement surgery. And it seems like you might as well try this first. And that's something that actually I did some of my parents to you as a Christmas present or birthday present, one of the two. And my dad really thinks that he was able to delay hip surgery for a substantial amount of time just because of this. My mother thinks it really saved her knee. Right.

That's great.

And all right, thanks. Thanks for doing that. I want to see a world where every retirement home has someone saying, all right, it's time to get all you guys upgraded. I would love to hear from both of you if you put on your 10 year what's in the future hats for stem cells. Why don't we start, Amy, with your take on the cosmetic and anti aging and regenerative side of things. Where do you think it's going to go?

Well, I think stem cells will just continue to become more available to people. I think there'll be more stem cell options, maybe kind of off the shelf options, so you can, you can buy sort of allogeneic, so stem cells from someone else who are healthy, umbilical cells, exosomes, things like this. So maybe we don't do a procedure on every patient, but we can get some of those products off the shelf and, and we'll find different ways to use them in the skin and hair that maybe are less expensive because it's not quite so invasive, you know, and it'll just become something that we're doing much more frequently. Cellular medicine is on the, you know, we're doing so much more of it and we will continue to in the next five years or 10 years. So much so that it's going to change the way that we practice medicine, just in general. It'll replace a lot of the medications and surgeries, whether it's for aesthetics or hair or joints or anything different diseases. It'll really be quite the sort of revolution.

All right, Harry, what's up? So essentially, Amy, before we get to your answer, Harry, you're really saying it's going to be cheaper, more available, and you won't have to pull someone's bone marrow to get it done. All right.

And that's, you know, I pretty much have the same thing to say. It's all going to be about regulation in this country, in the United States. It's all going to be about figuring out the regulation because we know really the fountain of youth here is using culture expanded stem cells from very young sources, either placental or umbilical cord or even bone marrow of very young people. But having the ability to culture, expand them, and then legally administer them therapeutically, which currently we cannot do. Currently you have to go out of the country for that.

Now, culture expanding means just taking your, your cells one time and growing a lot more of them in a lab.

Right. But we're talking, we're talking about using like umbilical cord cells or placental cells because, you know, for me, as a 50 year old, I would much rather have much younger stem cells. But, but you need very large quantities. There are umbilical cord stem cells available commercially currently, but in very low doses. So it's really. I mean, you could do huge doses, but it would be astronomically expensive. Culture expanding them makes it affordable.

So you could take umbilical stem cells from one donor and you could grow hundreds of millions of cells from those and use those from many different people. But today we have this whole thing set where we're harvesting all these different umbilical cords, taking out about what, 3 million cells and then just using them directly instead of growing them.

Yeah, it doesn't make a lot of sense for a single dose. You really need more in the neighborhood of 100 million, which you can do very easily with culture expanded cells. But so really, I mean, I think that's, that's what needs to happen is we need to work out the regulation, which is going to take a very long time because it's going to be a huge. It's not just a, it's not a scientific battle, it's an economic battle.

Are there countries where you can go out and spend $20,000, get your own culture expenditure cells or get someone else's cultural expenditure cells?

Just about any other country in the world.

Okay, so we're a little bit behind on that.

Yeah, you bet.

All right. There's still good reasons to get your stem cells done in the US I've done the vast majority of what I've done here just because despite the higher expense and all that stuff, there are definitely some safety regulations that are useful. Where can people find out more about stem cells or about the whole body makeover stuff that you guys are doing?

Well, on our website, docereclinics.com-o c e r e clinics.com one word and we have a tab full body stem cell makeover.

It's right there. All right. And if you are attending the 6th Annual Biohacking Conference, you are definitely going to Be able to see Dr. Harry and Dr. Amy there. They'll be speaking. And I think. Do you guys have a booth there as well? All right, good deal. So you'll be able to talk to them there. That's April 5th through 7th at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles. And xp.upgradabs.com has that info. And the URL where they talk about all these procedures we just covered is at D O C E R E clinics dot com. Now, I've got one more question for both of you. You both listen to the show. I know because we're friends and you've heard me ask this three things. People want to perform better, everything. You've actually answered that question. This is going to be a different one because I'm working on my anti aging book. We'll start with you, Harry. How long do you want to live?

Oh, I'd say I'd be happy with 110.

110? Why?

That seems like a reasonable number to me.

That's it?

Yeah, that's it.

You're a stem cell guy and you think that's the best you can do?

I don't know. I think I could probably run it out further than that, but I don't know. That number works for me.

That's your number. All right, I'll try to call you a wuss. Just kidding. Amy, what's your answer? Now that we have death shaming, I.

Would like to live well to about 130, I think.

Okay.

Where I'm just super healthy. And then at the very end, I just fall off the cliff and that's it.

All right. What else are you doing, Amy, to get you there besides stem cells?

Stem cells are a big part of it. I mean, just general, you know, good lifestyle choices, I think, is the other part of it. I do a lot of sort of mind, body work, yoga. I try to eat healthy, exercise regularly, you know, have a lot of good close friends and family connections, which I think is really important for. For longevity. Those are the main things. I don't take a ton of supplements right now. I try to just eat healthy. But right now I'm really just focusing mostly on sort of keeping my mind healthy and surrounding myself with sort of positive people and good influences. And I'm working on that part of it right now.

All right, Harry, what are you doing.

To live to just 110 under promising and over delivering.

Oh, he's sandbagging. He's like, I'm going to beat you, Dave. I just don't want to say it all right, now you. You've earned some respect back on that one, Harry.

I have the most fantastic family at home.

There you go. Having a good family will always help. All right, there you go. I think that you learned some more about stem cells. And we went deep on the really unusual procedure that I just went through. And I want to be the guinea pig for you so that you can figure out whether the return on investment for you is. And eating a different way, exercising a different way, sleeping in a different way, doing any of the other things that you might choose to do is worth it, including stem cells. And I'm 100% convinced, having done several different rounds, that these have been a really big, really big change for me. And I'm in my mid-40s, granted, I had a lot of these sort of aging associated conditions way earlier in life than the average person. And I'm. I'm beyond them now. But I'm truly grateful for that. And I just want you, when you're listening to this, to say, number one, it's possible. Number two, I don't have to spend nearly as much as what Dave did getting there because I've done everything I can possibly find, and a lot of it just didn't work or didn't work very well or we didn't have the knowledge when I started doing this 20 years ago. It's about the best time ever to decide you want to get younger or you want to stay young, or you just want to perform better because you're already young, you want your career to work right, and you want to be able to do more than you're supposed to be able to do. It's more possible now than it's ever been. And talking about cool stuff like exosomes is part of the path of getting there. If you like today's episode, you know what to do. If you're interested in stem cells, head over to dossiericlinics.com and check out what's there. There's photos and just other good information for you. I think it's worth your time, worth your energy. It's worth investigating.