The Evolution of Hair Transplants - Episode 293

Welcome to the Gladden longevity podcast with Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, where our passion is helping you to become an AJ hacker. On this show, we want to help you optimize your life energy, longevity, health and human performance with impactful and actionable information by answering four questions. How good can we be? How do we make 100 the new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? And how do we live young for a lifetime? Now, here's today's episode of the Gladden Longevity Podcast.

Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, and as always, we're here answering the big questions. How good can we be? How do we make 100 to new 30? How do we live well beyond 120? How do we live young for a lifetime? And how do we develop a 300-year-old mind? And today we're going to be talking with a physician, Alan Bauman, who is a hair transplant specialist, but also is actually more than that, has a bigger purview on life than. A bigger perspective on life than just transplanting hair, if you will. He's really a hair restoration special specialist. And we go down the pathway here of sort of like total body restoration, if you will, to support what he's doing. There's a lot of regenerative medicine coming into his space. I think you're going to find this conversation really interesting. It went beyond the confines of what I thought we might talk about, so hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Welcome, everybody, to this edition of the Gladden Longevity Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Jeffrey Gladden, and today I'm here with Dr. Alan Bowing. Dr. Bauman, welcome to the Glad Longevity Podcast.

Thank you so much. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.

So you're coming to us from Boca Raton, Florida, is that correct?

That is correct. Now, originally, I was born and raised in New Jersey, went to college in California, medical school in New York, but I've been a Florida resident for almost 30 years.

Okay. Okay, great. Yeah, I know Florida pretty well. My parents used to live in Naples for a while. So, yeah, nice part of the world down there. So you give us a little bit of your history, how you got into hair transplantation. Did you go to medical school with that in mind, or was it something you discovered along the way? Or how'd that happen?

Yeah, I did not go to medical school thinking I was going to go into hair transplant surgery. Although my first love was cosmetic plastic and reconstructive procedures. I was mentored at an early age by a plastic surgeon who was a very busy, well known plastic surgery. Plastic surgeon on the Upper east side of Manhattan. And he actually invited me to watch him operate in the years before I could even drive a car. And, you know, back in the day, before you could go on Snapchat, Discovery channel, or even YouTube and see what surgery was like, I had the opportunity to get behind those doors and peer over his shoulder into that world of surgery.

How did that happen? Was that like a family friend or.

Yes. So I was friendly with his children. His kids were my age and my sister's age, and we were vacationing the same place essentially. And he asked me about my interest. My dad is a dentist and still is practicing, but, you know, he asked me, of course I was interested in going to medical school. And he said, well, if you're going to come and if you're going to go to medical school, you should probably come and watch me operate. And I said, well, what kind of a surgeon are you? And he said, well, I'm a plastic surgeon. I'm like, you operate on plastic?

Yeah.

So that tells you how much I knew in those early days. But obviously I learned very quickly what cosmetic and reconstructive procedures could do for the form and function of the body and also how it really transformed people's lives. So I had this very unique opportunity to basically, you know, be in his shadow and shadowed by him and to see the procedures and treatments. So that was kind of my initial goal. Cosmetic and reconstructive plastic surgery was this.

High school or was it college or was it.

Well, I first saw those procedures when I was in high school. Yeah, yeah.

You said before you could drive, so. Yeah, so 15, whatever. Yeah. Okay, nice. Well, that's great. You know, it's. It's really interesting how early experiences like that can have such a big impact. Right.

I knew right away as soon as I saw it. You know, people ask me, you know, even when I came home that day, like, oh, my God, what was the, you know, did you see the blood and everything? I'm like, oh, yeah, it was great. You know, like, I just loved it, you know, and more importantly, really was seeing the patients how they, you know, how they changed, you know, emotionally when they saw their results, even just as they were just being sewn up and, you know, still bruised and whatnot, you could see that they already could expect how those results were going to come in. And seeing his patients afterwards. So through medical school, internship, and residency training in general surgery, I was always interested in that pathway. And it wasn't until I met a hair transplant patient who was in my, you know, in my purview basically for something completely different. I think he was maybe getting another plastic surgery procedure, but on his history it said hair transplants. And I'm looking directly at him, you know, social distance away, trying to figure out where the hair was transplanted, you know, thinking, why should be seeing plugs or something weird or unusual.

Right.

And we got into that casual conversation about his hair transplant and why he went to the surgeon he went to, and he was thrilled that I looked and couldn't tell because it looked natural. And we got into the technology of single follicle implants. And anyway, that kind of started me on the path of looking into hair transplant as something maybe I could add to the repertoire of plastic surgery at that time.

Okay, so you're going, you're going to a general surgery residency actually as a stepping stone to plastic surgery, which is going to be a fellowship. And then along the way, you decided that the hairpiece was something that you were really, no pun intended, that the hair portion of plastic surgery was part of the thing that you were really involved with. So what I'm understanding is that from there it's kind of evolved into being a specialist, slash maybe super specialist in the whole area of hair restoration. Is that a fair statement?

Yes. You know what was interesting, in and around that time, most hair surgeons were either from general surgery or from dermatology, and usually they had done something else. They really didn't kind of dive right into it. But as soon as I started to learn what was needed to really perform hair transplant procedures properly, I noticed right away that I would need to focus on it full time, first of all, to learn it for sure. And after I basically took that sabbatical as a preceptor ship out on Long island with a surgeon who was doing hair transplants. You know, I realized I got to do this thing full time. This is not going to be like, you know, a part time thing. And that's, that's, you know, when I decided really to make the break from the regular paths of traditional medicine, not really knowing actually how that was all going to work out. But, you know, I had this, this vision, I'm going to be a hair transplant specialist. And this is a hair restoration physician, actually, like not just transplants, but protecting people's hair. And that's when I moved with my wife. We were engaged at the time. We moved to Boca Raton, and I started the practice Bauman Medical, 1997.

Nice. Yeah. That's great. Is she also involved with the practice or no?

Well, Karen is a teacher by trade. She has a master's in education and was teaching up in New York. And certainly when we hit the ground here in Florid, she went back into education for some time. But then when I had the practice open, I said, listen, honey, I need. I need you to help. Help out here. We have no payroll, no money for payroll. So Karen answered the phones for a number of years as I did the consults and the procedures, and we had the team, you know, on hand. And really wasn't until just before the birth of my first son did she leave the practice. And so, of course, she's been an amazing partner in allowing us to, you know, both of us to succeed and do what we do, not just with the family, but also with the business. So she's. I always consider her completely involved in the practice, even though she doesn't really have a title.

Right, right. Yeah. Having. Having support like that, a mutual support like, that's critical.

So partner in business and in life and, you know. You know, it's a. It's been a quick 28 years, you know, almost there.

Yeah, it goes very fast. So. So you started this in 97. So I'm going to imagine that there have been, you know, like, I remember seeing people with hair transplants, because you could see the transplants, right? I mean, you could see that they'd had a transplant done. There was a. There was like a row of plugs across the front of their head. And, you know, obviously I've been particularly challenged, I suppose you can say, but I've actually embraced it. It's like, I'm so cool with it now. It's like I would never go back, quite honestly, but I know that's not the case for. For a lot of people. And yet I was. What I was going to say is that it's really almost 30 years. You've seen amazing changes in the field. So can you kind of maybe update the audience a little bit on a couple of things, like, you know, maybe even where it was 10 years ago versus where it is today? I think most people are familiar with the idea that you don't have to get big plugs in your head anymore and stuff like that. But. Right, just from there, take forward, because I know there's been a lot that's happened there.

Sure. So the word hair plugs came from. What you just described was taking a big punch out of the Back of the scalp, which contained 30 to 40 hairs, and surgeons just literally pop them into a row. And unfortunately, that's what I envisioned early on when someone said, oh, you think about hair transplants? I said, well, that's plugging and painful. Why would you ever do that? And then the technology shifted from the harvesting of those punches to a harvesting of a strip excision. So a linear strip excision was how most of us were trained in the 1990s, and that enabled us to take a big swath of donor hair follicles from the back of the scalp, where they're permanent. And then we would convert that strip into individual grafts. And so the gap, or the defect was sewn shut, either with stitches or staples. And then the dissection process would proceed, creating those grafts, which initially contained, like, chunks of hair, and then eventually microscopically individual hairs. And that's kind of where my story begins. Working with single follicle implantation and other grafts that were slightly larger as we progressed into what we call the follicular unit transplant era. And so a follicular unit is a group of 1, 2, or 3 hairs that grow in the skin or the scalp in a close proximity. So you could basically keep those groupings together and get something that would look normal and natural with one caveat. Not only do you have to do it technically correct, but you have to angle and orient and position the hair and the hairline in the right angle and direction and so forth, so it would look normal and natural. And so I started out like everybody else doing those strips, But I always thought in the time when I was in my general surgery residency, we went. We progressed from open procedures, open belly procedures, to laparoscopic procedures right through the belly button with a camera and long instruments. Right. I always felt that there was a less invasive way to do hair transplants, and I didn't know what exactly that was, but I was certainly open to trying different things. And I learned around that time that there was a doctor in Australia. Australia, who was very secretive, but he was supposedly extracting follicles with a needle. And so I started to think about that, well, a small circular item could be big enough to basically pluck the follicle. And so we tried a lot of different small circular items to try to harvest the hairs. You know, with patient's permission, say, listen, I'm going to try these different types of tools. And eventually we got to a point where we could take the follicles. Not simple, not quickly, but we could get the grafts out of the scalp without making that wide incision. And so that was called fue follicular unit extraction. And I can't say that I invented it, but we certainly did a lot of them. And back in the mid to early 2000, that was something that I was trying and practicing. You know, we're talking like, you know, putting in 10,000 hours to try to figure it out. That's what I did in my practice. And eventually my entire practice went towards fue follicular unit extraction. And because it was less invasive, the downtime was less, there was less discomfort, there's no stitches or staples, no chance of a big wound infection or reaction to the stitch. Patients could go back to their regular routine very quickly. And most importantly, there was no linear scar left behind. So you could wear a short haircut, which was coming into vogue at that time.

Yeah, so, okay, so that's, so that's interesting. So is that what you're doing now is the fuel kind of procedure you've perfected? That's where it's not as time consuming as I assume it was initially. There are probably instruments that have been a bit developed or techniques that enable you to do maybe even multiple fue simultaneously, that kind of thing.

Correct. So over the years, let's say 20 years, we've seen a variety of instruments. Originally there were just manual tools that you would spin with your finger, literally to try to get the follicles out. And then they became mechanical. Right. Assisted. So think of it like a small dental drill, if you will. And those technologies progressed to having suction and then eventually robotic. And then robotic came out of favor. And then we have these other devices that enable us to take the hair follicles without shaving actually the hair. So that's a relatively new process called VIP fue that we, that we coined that term. Essentially, it's a long hair extraction. So for folks who don't want to shave their head to get the harvest, we can actually perform the harvesting with the long hair intact.

Interesting. Do you have to cut it to any length or is that you can extract? I have to advantage. There's some limit to how long it could be, but maybe there's not.

Well, it's certainly easier to manage if it's, you know, maybe a couple of centimeters long. But usually, you know, let's say a gentleman is a, you know, high profile patient with a man bun. You know, you're not going to shave his head. It's not going to happen. So we either have to do a combination of a small Shave that's hidden under the existing hair or this, what I call the no shave VIP process. And so it really doesn't matter how long the hair is. Essentially we just manage the hair, but we may implant the hair long to see what it looks like. That, that's another nuanced type of procedure, although it still sheds and regrows later on.

Okay, yeah, interesting. So I would imagine, and we can go into why people lose their hair in the first place, but I would imagine that in a transplant like that, it's a little bit like transplanting trees. Like, my first job at age 15 was working for a nursery and we would, you know, plant trees in the summertime and weed gardens and things like that. Right. So, but when you, when you dig up a tree in ball, of course it's a, it's a shock to the, to the root system. And I suspect that there's maybe some weak analogy between that and what happens when you transplant a hair follicle. So I don't know, is there some shock element to the hair follicle that you need to. But I mean, this is why we would put all kinds of fertilizers and, you know, the right amount of watering and all that stuff to kind of get the, the tree to come through that stage. Is there's probably an analogous sort of scenario here with hair follicles. I don't know. Is that right?

Oh, there's. So first of all, there's so many analogies between agriculture and growing hair. We could go on and on, but for sure, like, if you're taking palm trees out of your backyard and putting them in the front yard, you know, that's basically follicular unit extraction. So we do talk about that. Now, remember that the angle makes a difference, so you can't just drop it right into the soil, you know, and mother Nature takes care of the rest. It doesn't work like that. So that's really important. And yes, the storage of those grafts while they're outside the body is critical. And so for many, many years, patients would always ask me, oh, what's your take rate? What's your growth rate? Because they would try to compare between different surgeons who are getting better growth or less growth, or they knew a friend who had had a procedure and it didn't seem to grow all that well. And unfortunately, it probably had a lot to do with how those grafts were cared for outside of the body. Either they dried out or they were too long out of the body, or they didn't use proper Solutions. I mean, today we have solutions that you could transport hearts and lungs across the country in a Learjet, you know, and so we use those sophisticated storage solutions, cellular storage solutions, at the time of the transplant. And even now, we use things like exosomes to store the grafts, which are doing some amazing things. Not only healing the body faster in and around the grafted zone, but actually stimulating the regrowth of the transplants much more quickly than I've seen in 20 years. So pretty exciting stuff. But yes, so you're absolutely right. And, and then the other analogy is that the scalp health has to be on point because if the scalp is irritated, inflamed, then you're moving those trees into a garden where the soil is just not going to be good. Right, Correct, correct. The inflammation, inflammatory markers can really shut down hair follicles quick.

Well, it gets us back to a point, you know. You know, my background was internal medicine followed by interventional cardiology. Right. So in internal medicine, of course, we're trying to look at things more comprehensively. And in the work we do now in longevity, it's. It's like a factor of 10 or 100 more than that. But the point is that everything is integrated. And so even the health of the hair is a function of systemic health as well as the health of the scalp. Right.

And so 100%.

Right. So yeah, nutritionally, hormonally, mitochondrially, oxidative, stress, inflammation, all these things factor into this. So I would suspect that there's an opportunity to optimize a client prior to a harvest and a transplant. Right. As well as using lots of cutting edge technologies in the course of that. So do you want to talk to that a little bit?

Absolutely. And so over the years, we've expanded, not just treating male or female pattern hair loss, you know, dealing with blocking dht, which is the trigger for male pattern baldness.

Testosterone, he's talking about. So this is a metabolite of testosterone that both men and women make, and it's, it's the hormone that's actually responsible for stimulating involution of the hair follicle. Right, so.

Correct. It's a negative influence if you've got male or female pattern hair loss. So it's not just about the old style, you know, fortify the follicle. But as exactly what you said, we're taking a very holistic approach. The hair follicle is one of the most highly metabolic cell populations in your body, which is one of the reasons why, when you're nutritionally deficient or you're in cancer therapy. You know, it's one of the top three things that gets shut down. And so, you know, the, the clear examples are starving kids in Africa. You know, you always see them, they're protein deficient, they've got, they can't grow hair. Hair is protein. If you're protein deficient, you're not going to grow hair. Now fast forward that into today's American modern society. If you're on a weight loss medication or a sudden certainly a weight loss drug or peptide like GLP1 agonist, and you're not getting a good nutritional intake, you're losing weight, which is, you know, probably the reason why you're on it. You could also be impairing hair growth. And so we often see and associated with treatments like Ozempic and the like that you see some associated hair shedding and then weakened hair quality, changes in hair loss that are basically accelerating the patient through their natural male or female pattern hereditary hair loss process.

Yeah, that's interesting. That's an interesting point about the nutritional standpoint related to protein. So one of the things that we found here is using a product called Perfect Aminos. I don't know if you're familiar with it. It was actually developed by a guy in Florida who is a physician, he's an ironman, and I think he's done over 50 Ironman races or something. But he developed it as a compilation of amino acids, mostly essential amino acids in the right formulation that 99% of that goes into building protein. Whereas if you eat an egg white, which is nature's kind of perfect protein, albumin, only 49% of that consumed protein goes into actually building protein. You know, metabolically, you can take protein and turn it into carbs. So a lot of the protein that we eat goes into carbs. Collagen being, you know, only about 22% of it goes into building protein. It has a unique ability to stimulate protein growth though. So it has another play. But the Perfect Aminos, we like it because when we're working out or we're doing other things, it really enables somebody to build muscle mass. And to your point, if they're taking a GLP1, one of the things that we see is that people will lose muscle mass and bone density on those drugs. So I'm wondering if something like a dietary program that includes something like that, and maybe you have your own formulation to kind of put people into a high protein building mode, combining it with maybe some growth hormone releasing peptides or optimizing testosterone and estrogen, things like that that we know are also anabolic, if that's part of the equation here for you.

No, absolutely. I mean, taking that holistic approach and dealing with, you know, their nutritional status and protein building properties, that's going to certainly accelerate them through the healing phase. It's going to get their skin and scalp back to normal more quickly, which is, of course, a very important cosmetic concern. But also on the back end, you know, if you combine that with some of the other things we talked about, like exosome therapy, you can really accelerate the results of the procedure and minimize issues, because prolonged healing certainly has other problems. Not just it takes time, but you tend to have a little bit more scar tissue. The skin of the scalp doesn't return to normal, maybe even ever. So there are certain things that we want to take a look at way in advance. And, you know, 50% of people come into the clinic who are dealing with hair loss. 50% of them have some kind of scalp issue either at that moment or within the past year or two. And so the itchy, flaky, oily, dry scalp is indicating or even, you know, something more severe like a folliculitis or, or pimples on the scalp or psoriasis. People often say, oh, I've got psoriasis of the scalp. All of that dysregulation of the scalp and the turnover of the, of the, of the skin cells, you know, causing that inflammation or vice versa, can impair the results of a transplant and also can just impair your hair growth, just in general. As the microbiome of the scalp gets dysregulated, you get fungal overgrowth, you get this inflammation, irritation, and that can really impair the whole situation. So, I mean, I've developed an entire scalp clinic specifically for the health of the scalp as a foundational first step in dealing with your hair loss.

Yeah, yeah, you have to. Right. Because that's how you're going to get your best, best results. We have a similar program here when we're doing regenerative things, whether it's a knee, the shoulder or the back, whatever it is. Right. There's a whole process to actually get somebody ready to get their best results. You know, for us, the analogy is that, you know, if you're going to use a stem cell product or exosomes or whatever, those are like Olympic swimmers for us. Right. And if you put the Olympic swimmers into a swimming pool full of lawn chairs and sticks, they're just not going to do very well. Right. And so you've got to clean out the pool, you've got to, you know, change the water. You've got to get everything healthy, support the swimmers, you know, etc, peptides, nutrition, all that stuff. But when you, when you get that right, you can get remarkable results. We get remarkable results for people in the areas we work. Sounds like you're taking an analogous approach here to get what I assume are remarkable results for people.

No, absolutely. And so, you know, to fine tune their nutrition, whether it be supplementation, as you say, with collagen, you know, vitamins, minerals, all those things are working ahead of time. And there's some specific nutraceuticals that can help too, make the body more resilient to the effects of cortisol, like stress adaptogens like Ashwagandha and things like that. And then on the, on the tail end, if patients have the time and the resources to do other things, we do a lot of red light therapy. In fact, we treat the follicles with red light while they're outside of the body.

Yeah.

So the scalp gets treated for increased blood flow and then the follicles are outside of the body, get treated again. And then in the post op 24 hours we hit them with another laser light device and then, you know, they can undergo hyperbaric oxygen alternated with hydrogen, they can do NAD drips, they can do a specific IV that's exactly tuned to the nutritional recovery phase and clearing out the toxins of the procedure itself.

So, you know, one of the things that we've noticed is that if there is an, either an injury or a surgery or an incision or something, that we can pretty much negate scarring altogether using ozonated oils like ozonated olive oil. Like my face, it was really beat up in a mountain bike crash I had a few years ago when I was putting it on my face, I mean it was really torn up and I came out of it was like zero scars. So it's pretty interesting, I think, if you're listening to this, just understand that I think the technologies exist to actually take you through this in a way that really minimizes downside risk. Could be either infection, scarring, you know, disfigurement, that kind of stuff. And actually one of the things if you're listening to this is going through a process like this, you probably come out of this actually generally healthier than you were even going into it, quite honestly. Right. Which is not a bad thing either. So.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I have a friend of mine who is a classmate of mine from medical school came to me for a hair transplant and you know, I could tell that he was just, he was just a different guy, you know, than I knew from, you know, whatever it was 30 years ago. And we had a deep discussion. I'm like, listen, you know, you gotta get your stuff together here, brother. And so I gave him some ideas. We talked about hormones and peptides and obviously we did his procedure. Actually he had two. And when I saw him 12 months later, not only was the hair phenomenal and amazing and great, but you know, his whole demeanor and his whole body had shifted. I mean, he, he really like came out of whatever slump or, or I don't know if he was in a depression or not, but whatever, whatever, whatever phase he was in at that moment. Over the next few months, with some guidance from some colleagues, it was amazing to see his transformation. So these things kind of happen oftentimes in parallel. Sometimes one thing happens first, like, you know, you have a specific ailment or concern or longevity goal that you want to hit. And then all of a sudden you're feeling good, looking good and knowing you're living, going to be living longer. And then it's like, well, hey, what about these, what about this hair? What about these wrinkles? You know?

No, that's right. You know, yeah, it's. For us, it's this idea of living young for a lifetime, right? So I mean, I don't know if you know, but our, I mean, our concept of longevity is that really it's the greatest opportunity for humanity to live and elevate itself to a different playing field. Right? So 30 year old body at age 100 with a 3003000 year old mind. So when you think about that, it's like, oh, wow, that's exciting. I'd like to live into that space, right? So I think a lot of people as they're going through the aging process, it's like, well, yeah, I've had hair loss, I've got this, I've got that. I can't do what I used to. And people are acquiescing to that in certain ways. But quite honestly, there's no need to acquiesce to any of it as the way we see it. Because when you, when you do have that 30 year old body and you can do whatever you want, it's like, oh, okay, well, let's go start another business, let's go help the people in Africa, let's go do whatever it is we're called to do and do it in a Better way than ever. Right. So this idea of living young for a lifetime, and if you want to look young, be young, that sort of thing, Right. Then it's all part of it, right?

No, absolutely. And I think people are learning that too. You know, there are many, you know, if you want to call them longevity experts or biohackers in this space that have now kind of completely feel completely optimized. Now it's like, well, what are we going to do with all this energy and this time that we have? You know, and I look forward to all of that as well. And so whether it be the travel or other things like that, my patient base is very much in tune with all that. They often come in and they're already on that longevity pathway. And it's great because first of all, my patient population is generally very healthy to begin with. But, you know, they're, they're just very well adjusted in those ways. But if they're not, then it's no problem. We can help them along in that regard, too. We have a performance program and we work with a number of physicians around the country, around the world, you know, who can help them, you know, kind of get that, get that issue tuned up. But the exciting thing about the practice is there's always something new, there's always something different that's happening.

And what are you excited about right now? What's, what's the, what's the hot thing for you at the moment?

Well, here, here's how that's all got started. You know, everybody always asks me, you know, cocktail party discussions or business discussions always end up in one. When are they going to have hair cloning, doc? When is that going to be available? And of course, hair cloning is like the holy grail of hair transplant surgery. It would enable us to have an unlimited supply of hair follicles, which for some, and maybe even you would be interested in. If you had an unlimited supply of hair, what would you do with it? Because that's always the, you know, the issue that some, some folks have in terms of how much supply versus the demand when it comes to transplantation. Because, you know, unlike a plant, you can, you know, you could split a plant and get two out of it. You can't do that to a hair follicle. It's, you know, it's a one to one trade from the back to the front, right? So a couple of years ago, a company came to me and said, hey, listen, we can bank your hair follicle stem cells, put them on ice. And so eventually, when hair follicle cloning becomes available, you'll have that ready, ready to go. You'll have your young cells, your youngest possible hair follicles available. So I said, oh, let's do it. So I don't want to be 70 years old and have to clone my 70 year old hair follicles. I want my 53 year old hair follicles. So that's why two years ago I banked mine. But this particular company called Acorn, they came to me before the beginning of the year and they said, listen, we've got something exciting for you. We can actually now take those hair follicle stem cells that you've banked, take a few of them out of the bank and multiply them and create an expanded cell population and collect the secretome, which are essentially the things that are secreted from the cells, right? So it's going to be the growth factors, it's going to be the cytokines, it's going to be the exosomes. All of those growth factors can then be collected almost, you know, not, not expanded up to infinity, but up to a certain point before the cells kind of peter out a hundred thousand times more powerful, you know, than just a single cell. And so they collect that material, they can now quantify it, purify it, concentrate it, freeze dry it and send it back to us. And we can deploy that as a treatment to the scalp in the clinic. And so I'm very excited about that. We call that stem row.

Okay, so is this, this so unclear. So you're doing this as a one off for each client or it becomes a systemic or a generalizable therapy, like you can take anybody's hair there and multiply it and then get the factors and apply it to anybody else. Or is it specific to the individual?

No, this is personalized regenerative medicine. So this is specific to that patient. So you know, Dr. Bauman's hair follicles are sitting in the laboratory and they're being multiplied right now and they're sitting in the soup, if you will, of culture media. And eventually once they reach a certain point, like I said, a hundred thousand or something, that's when they're going to collect that soup and filter it and freeze dry it, essentially concentrate it and freeze dry it and send it to me in a 12 pack. So I'm going to get a 12 pack of treatment of lyfalized, which is freeze dried treatment that I'll then reconstitute and apply to my scalp as a treatment, okay?

So you'll do that as just ongoing prophylaxis, slash nurturing of your current hair, is that what you're saying?

Yes. So that's fertilizer in the garden, if you will take it back to that.

Okay. Because my question was whether or not you were going to save that, which sounds like very special sauce for when somebody actually has a procedure, or if you're just going to use it on a maintenance level, or maybe you're going to do it with both.

Well, there's a lot of things we can do. Number one, according to the research that's been done already, that secretome or product contains already 40 times the growth factor concentration of what you would get in a standard priority erp. So we know there's some power and strength to it. Do we know exactly how well it's going to work yet on every patient? Of course not. This is a relatively new treatment, so we are doing the pilot study, we are doing the clinical trials on that. But because we know it's personalized, it's the own patient, it doesn't require a blood draw or anything like that. It's not like a prp. We're going to apply it directly back to the scalp in the form of either with microneedling, which is one way to do it, or with ultrasonic transepidermal delivery, which is an ultrasound delivery that basically pushes it through the skin. We can also use it in a variety of other ways. You could probably soak the grafts in it like we did with the other exosomes that we have on hand. And you know, there may be things that we haven't even thought about yet, ways to use that product. But here's what I do know also is because they're derived from the hair follicle stem cells, the mesenchymal stem cells, is that they also will cross talk to the fibroblasts of the skin. So you can use that product as a skin treatment also. So that little 12 pack back could also be used to rejuvenate the skin of your face or your neck or your chest or even your hands or elbows or wherever you have a wrinkle, I guess. And a lot of folks are excited about that, that it becomes this source of biologic, personalized biologic treatment material that we can then use for skin and scalp rejuvenation as well as hair and maybe even potentially orthopedics as well. So we'll have to see.

Yeah, yeah. Very interesting. So one of the things that we've been working with is Things that are derived from placenta and cord blood. Right. Because there's a lot of very powerful regenerative exosomes and growth factors etc that are present early in life that aren't present later in life. I'm just, I'm just thinking about. It'd be interesting to see about combining some of that with what you're actually doing here or for the personalized right now, you maybe get the youthfulness with an expanded current state of. I don't know, there's lots of possibilities there. So.

Well, we've actually done thousands of procedures combining PRP with perinatal birth tissue, like placental tissue. Originally back in the 2000s, 2010, I presented results from a clinical trial that we did combining our standard PRP with and without placental tissue, morselized placental tissue. And we showed that when you provide the extracellular matri, which is that scaffold, that biologic scaffold in conjunction with the cellular signals of the prp, you get a much longer and stronger effect of the prp. And that's one of the reasons why our PRP is not a series of treatments, but it's a single treatment, generally for about once a year.

Nice.

Yeah, so we're very familiar with that. I would say the umbilical cord matrix is probably our most popular and, and most powerful extracellular matrix that we have today and of derive exosomes from that as well. So there's a variety of things that you can get from the umbilical tissue or Wharton's jelly, which I think is very, very exciting. And you know, some of the stem cell law changes here in Florida, I'm sure you've heard about, you know, are kind of opening that bridge, opening that door between some of these more experimental treatments and what patients really are interested in trying.

Talk to us about that because, you know, I think people have heard about right to try laws. We have one here in Texas. I've been involved with the state of Montana, which has basically just expanded their right to try to where now instead of having to be kind of on death's door to basically get access to something, you can just want to try it. And as long as it's been shown to at least be safe on some level, you can access it. So there's, there's a movement to get more regenerative technologies available to more people on the continental in the lower 48, 50 than, you know, having to go to Mexico or Costa Rica or other places. Right. So tell us a little bit about Florida. What's the what's the general temperature over there on all this?

Yeah, well, I mean, this new bill, which is Bill 1768, it really opens the door for a number of different applications, orthopedics being one of them for sure. And so as well as wound care healing. So between orthopedics and wound healing, it doesn't really cover necessarily cosmetic procedures and treatments as of yet. Although, again, those are, we could talk about that. Those are kind of excluded when we're talking about cosmetic treatments. According to the federal government, you know, there is some. There's not so much clarity right now. But what I do believe is that people who are in the sphere of regenerative medicine who are doing orthopedic treatments or wound care will now have the ability to use some of these stem cell therapies to a much greater degree without necessarily worrying about, you know, the FDA knocking on their door. At least we'll see how that works. You know, it's a first step. It needs clarification, in my opinion. You know, are the, Are, you know, extracellular matrix products like the ones we talked about? Are they covered under that law or not? There's some confusion on that. Some people say those are not stem cell treatments, but others say, well, in the law it specifically says hctp, which is human cellular tissues and tissue issue products. So that those are actually not typically stem cells, by the way. So I think we're gonna have to wait and see a little bit. And of course, you know, just from a, from our, our perspective at Bauman Medical, I mean, I'm a huge regenerative medicine fan, so any step in the right direction, I love it. I mean, it's just, you know, it's gonna be, it's gonna be great. I mean, that's, you know, I think we're, of course, we're committed to safe and effective treatments and ones that, you know, that we know are going to be healthy for the patients to actually undergo. So, you know, to stay compliant with the law and stay compliant with the federal government and the state law and all of that, but also being optimistic that more things are going to open up to us and open us, you know, to patients that we'll be able to provide is an exciting place to be and it's nice to be in a state as you know, that is forward thinking in that way and not having patients travel overseas where all kinds of, of crazy nonsense happens. And not just in the world of hair transplants and liposuction, but dental restorations and things like that. And, you know, Just this week, we heard about people coming back from overseas, you know, from a liposuction procedure. And these two girls basically came back and they didn't realize that the incision in the back of their. In their lower back was a kidney extraction. And they both came back without kidneys. So without one kid, without one kidney. So we used to make a joke about that. You know, if you're going to, you know, some overseas location, make sure you come back with both kidneys. Well, now it's real.

Yeah. That's amazing, right? It's really incredible. Yeah. So, you know, I think what you've kind of intimated and even stated here is that you've done quite a few trials, and we feel like that's also a way for people to get access to these things is to put them inside of an IRB approved trial, institutional review board, you know, legitimate human and trial, so that people can access them. We have several of those going on right now. So, yeah, I think if you're listening to this, I think there seems to be a shift towards more access, maybe with rfk, you know, pushing on his end of it and other people. States seem to be opening up, and I think it bodes well for. For the health of the country, quite honestly.

So.

So, yeah, cool.

No, I mean, absolutely, I totally agree with you. You know, we got to work within the framework that we're given. The clinical trial work is excellent, and certainly we've been on the cutting edge of that. Some of those clinical trials that we participate in are well known and open to the public, and others are, you know, contract work that we do with some of the biologic companies and such and other, even medical device manufacturers who come to us and want our opinion. We have a huge flow of patients from all over the world that come to us with hair loss concerns. And so I have a unique opportunity to change those folks in terms of their lives and their outlook and of course, their hair situation.

So, yeah, that's great. So how do people get a hold of you, if they're interested, to get a consult or chat with you about something?

Yeah, so, I mean, of course, you know, a short, you know, podcast conversation doesn't cover everything there is to know about your hair loss problem. So I would encourage anyone out there who thinks that their hair is changing, whether it's just the texture or the volume, or they're noticing their hairline recede or more scalp shining through, if it's a woman with a ponytail, volume change, or something else that's going on at the level of your scalp. Definitely check out baumanmedical.com b a u m a n medical.com you'll find thousands and thousands of pages of information that I've written over the past 25 to 30 years. Hundreds and hundreds of hours of video content that you can consume. But if you have a question, the cool thing about Bauman Medical is you could just go to baumanmedical.com and you can type in your question and you know, obviously put some way to reply to you. That would be a phone number, an email or something and I'll get right back to you with an answer to your question. Or if you'd like to start your hair restoration journey, you can schedule and request to schedule a consultation right from the website. And even though we're located centrally in South Florida, you know, that's my headquarters, if you will, 13,000 square foot facility here in downtown Boca Raton. I do have a satellite office office in New York City, but the vast majority of patients today will start their journey online. So it could be as simple as a video call, a virtual consultation. You know, in this world, it's telemedicine. You know, even from folks who are across the street would rather chat with me on the, on the video rather than just come over. Obviously you can't get your hair measured on the video. It's a little bit more difficult. But, you know, so there are good reasons to come into the office, whether it be in the New York location or here in Boca Raton. But, you know, it's exciting time. We have a lot of great technology that we just scratched the surface on today. But the most important thing to take home message is that time equals follicles. So hair loss doesn't get better on its own. You got to take some action and you've got to get the right diagnosis. You've got to find a qualified and experienced and certified professional to help you who can baseline, measure and manage your hair loss situation. So that would be my advice to your followers and listeners.

Yeah, perfect. Well, I appreciate you sharing that. So good. Yeah, great chatting with you.

Yeah, great to be with you, Jeffrey. I really appreciate it.

Yeah, my pleasure.

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