What the Health?!? The Doctor's Chat, Episode 118: The Miracle Molecule with Dr. John Lieurance

Welcome back Everybody. I am Dr. Greg Eckel and this is what the health and I have my esteemed colleague and guest, Dr. John Laurance, who is legendary out there. Actually, I will start out with how I met Dr. John talking about this book on melatonin that I had heard about and I didn't know that the author was sitting right in front of me. He's got the melatonin miracle molecule and I had heard so many good things about it. So he had a nice chuckle on that that we've got the word out, which is awesome. A little bit of background of Dr. John Laurence. After becoming severely ill with Lyme, Epstein Barr virus and mold illness, he began to explore ways to improve his health at a deep cellular level. His journey brought him to discover melatonin as the core antioxidant that supports all systems of the body. The book on melatonin takes a deep dive into healing naturally and using high dose melatonin along with various other practical healing methods to heal the body and live a longer, more vital life, which is very important and near and dear to you my listeners and viewers out there. His life focus focuses on vitality, longevity and enhanced consciousness. His interest is in connecting what he calls the three legs of the stool, vitality of the body, mind mastery and a direct experience of God. Dr. John Laurance, welcome aboard to what the health.

Wow, Greg, what a great introduction. Thank you so much and I am grateful to be here with you.

Yeah, I am so looking forward to this conversation.

Thank you.

From when we met last year and just what you have been up to with melatonin, methylene blue nad you really one of those pioneers and forefront thinkers and those three legs of the longevity component, vitality of the body, mind mastery, direct experience of God. Let's talk about your journey in particular on this miracle molecule, melatonin and your recent book out, how did you get in tuned into that?

Well, I heard it in a conference and then I went to go do an internship with a mutual friend and colleague of ours, Frank Shallenberger, and he was putting all of his patients on a couple of hundred milligrams of oral melatonin and I was grateful enough to squeeze into his schedule and I was still having some neurological problems from all the years of Lyme and he suggested that I take a couple hundred milligrams at night. And so I started doing that and we had already been kind of producing some products in suppository forms with a company that I formulated. And so that was an easy transition into starting to Work with higher doses of suppositories, which I found worked just incredibly for me personally, and bringing those into the clinic, working with my patients. And through mitozen.com, we're seeing a lot of reports back where people are finding, you know, reduced inflammation and, you know, basically melatonin is the ultimate resilience molecule. So it supports us against stress so that our cells don't default into a primitive form of making energy which suffocates the energy of the cell. And so we start losing battles. And some of those battles might be against cardiovascular disease, some of those battles might be against infections, toxic pollution in the body, gut, health, skin. In the book, we break not only each of these areas into a chapter, but we talk about the research. And most of these individual systems in the body have just loads and loads of studies that have been done showing melatonin to be very effective to support the body in so many ways.

So, so most people think about melatonin, you know, you can buy it over the counter, it's 2 to 3 milligrams, and it's sleep oriented right in most of the general population's mind. You know, early research that I was turned on to was at higher doses, coming out of Japan around cancer therapies. But you put together this great resource for all of us on all of the different facets of the research in, in all of the different systems. So maybe start. Let's just start with melatonin and its actions, activities. Like, what have you found beyond just the sleep component here?

Well, we're talking about extra pineal melatonin. So when we talk about melatonin, I think globally we want to think circadian rhythm because it does seem to ebb and flow based on these factors, like, for instance, in the gut. So this is outside of the pineal, there's a circadian rhythm that corresponds to supporting your microbiome and supporting the probiotics, the natural flora in your gut to swarm and to increase in numbers and vitality. But in the pineal, we're really familiar with thinking about the sleep, wake cycle of our nervous system in our body. This is within the pineal. So when we get sunlight into our eyes, what happens is we build up melatonin in our pineal. And when we have complete darkness, that melatonin is released and activated to promote this very powerful parasympathetic resting phase where we go into this deep regenerative sleep that is incredibly important for. I mean, it's so important, Greg, that it's illegal to do sleep deprivation studies anymore. It's illegal because it's just that dangerous for our health.

Yeah, so that component, I mean, right. If you want to mess with a human, you mess with their sleep. Right. And that's the basis of that. Then you add a little stress in there. So the extra pineal components of what you really get and gather right out of the get go with your book is that it's beyond just a molecule. We're talking about health of the human being with melatonin. I mean, you talk about gut issues, you talk about neurodegeneration, cardiac health. So maybe pull in some of these extra pineal physiologic functions of melatonin and what you found in the research.

Yeah, well, you know, I could distill it all down to, you know, this core idea that really is at the core of our practice here in Sarasota, Florida and also at the core of, you know, mitozen and you know, the products that we produce and that is that we, we're a self healing, self regulating machine. And our body has the innate wisdom and intelligence to heal itself. However, what happens is we run out of, we run out of batteries, so we run out of the energy to perform these adaptation responses. And so adaptation responses are at the crux of life. You know, so we're, we're dealing with all these different variations in chemistry and gravity and, and light and no light and water and no water and food and nutrient deprivation, nutrient, you know, excess, you know, there's all these different variations that occur, temperature variations. And our body is constantly having to adapt. And so we have this aspect where we have the familiar zone, right, where, where we look at stresses that are something that don't really challenge the body. So it doesn't really require much of an adaptation response. Then we have something that exceeds that familiar zone where we get into what's called the hormetic zone, where it's a zone where the body has to initiate an adaptation response. And generally when you're in the hormetic zone, it's a growth, it's a good zone. The body gets stronger, it starts to recognize that it needs to adapt and build different strategies to better adapt, whether it's exercise or temperature or could be different types of infections. When you get past that hormetic zone, you get into what's called the danger zone. This is the zone where bad things start to happen. And this is when we've exceeded our body's ability to adapt. And, and I would offer to you that there's A lot of stressors that are hitting our modern civilization that are exceeding that ability to adapt to that stress and wifi. We didn't really talk about energetics, but I see you're wearing something that might be kind of related to EMF protection. I don't know.

Right. Yes.

Yeah, yeah. So these, these are things that actually mimic daylight with the Pineal when we have our WI fi router turned on at night. And so we start to really look at all of these different stressors and what adaption we're able to perform. And so melatonin is important in this narrative because what melatonin does is it allows for us to have a broader hormetic zone. In other words, that ceiling where the body says, okay, I can't adapt anymore, and you start to have a lot of manifestations of diseases. Melatonin sits there and kind of protects the cell from doing that. And what that looks like, Greg, is we had kind of touched on it earlier is it's an actual shift of the way the cell makes energy. And so if we understand that the concept of all stresses is a commonality where they all have inflammation, and it's that inflammation that's the result of that specific stressor that when that inflammation exceeds a certain level, the cell. So mitochondria do not like inflammation. They don't like inflammation at all. So much so that when that inflammation gets to a certain point, the mitochondria says, you know what? I'm going home, I'm done. You do it yourself. Right? And so basically what that means is that the energy gets taken from within the mitochondria, and it puts. It's put out into what's called the cytosol, which is all the kind of space outside of the organelles in the cell. And that only gets you 10% of the energy that you would get otherwise. And so when you start running off, you know, I mean, I don't know about you, but when, when all of a sudden you're, you're. You've got this stressful situation and you're already losing that battle. And then all of a sudden you only have 10%. You're really, you're really looking bad at that point. And so melatonin actually prevents the, the, the energy from making that switch, right? So it's from aerobic to anaerobic glycolysis. This is from inside the mitochondria, where you have what's called the electron transport chain. And the job of that mitochondria is to move electrons, which makes Heat. And that body takes that heat, makes something called ATP. Or when it can no longer do that, it's put out into the cytosol and you have to rely on something called fermentation. And this is exactly what happens with cancer. And that's why I have a whole chapter on cancer and melatonin, because melatonin really has a lot of orchestra when it comes to this whole scenario.

Got it from going into a fermentation or basically energy deprivation and utilizing kind of cannibalizing our own system.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I know that starts to get kind of complex, but it's really hard. I can tell you my explanation now compared to even a year or two ago, is becoming a lot more streamlined because it was very difficult in the early days when I, when I had all this information. I'm like, oh my gosh. And I want to share this with a lot of laymen. I would see a lot of people, you know, kind of phasing off, you know, it's like. But it's like, it's like it's getting easier to explain, but it's still. People need to kind of have some basics as far as stresses, inflammation, and just a little bit on how the mitochondria work. And then they can wrap their head around this and see how incredibly important melatonin can be, especially for people that want to recover from any disease state.

Right. To really help, I think I like that wording around the battery of like you're re energizing or repolarizing the battery of protecting the mitochondria and getting them back up to producing ATP rather than going into a, you know, going home and packing up, figuring out yourself.

Right, exactly.

That is very. That's very helpful. And I think, you know, people can really grasp that. So what are the ideal scenarios here? I mean, can somebody get too much melatonin?

Well, so there's a couple. There's some factors that I think are important and there's a lot of misinformation I think, out there when it comes to melatonin, like the fact the word toxic and melatonin should never be used in the same sentence. And there's some emails and some, I guess, some articles that are talking about toxic levels of melatonin with children and the toxic effects of melatonin, there's an upsurge in the top. Well, they, they've done studies on melatonin and not one scientists have ever found melatonin to be toxic at all. In fact, they, they did studies where they they, they did it with animals, but they found that it would be like giving an, you know, an individual about our size 70kg, 150,000mg of melatonin. And they just stopped the study because they just, I mean, who's going to even get close to that anyway? Right? So, so you can't, there's no toxic, there's no toxicity to melatonin and there's also no negative feedback loop. In other words, when we take this hormone, we don't shut down our own production. So it's unlike a lot of other hormones like testosterone, progesterone, estrogen, cortisol, which incidentally, cortisol is the exact opposite of melatonin. Cortisol regulates the daytime awakeness and melatonin regulates the sleep time. And at the same time cortisol kind of regulates the sympathetic nervous system. And the parasympathetic nervous system is really supported by melatonin. And that's why we see heart rate variability improving quite drastically with people that start taking melatonin in any dose.

So what do you see on that front? Like an increasing of heart rate variability?

Yes, yes. Sometimes pretty drastic.

In what timeframe? I know that's different for everybody, but just out of curiosity.

Well, I've seen it with people just taking it a higher dose for the first time.

Okay, love it on that. Let's talk about delivery methods and models because you have this mitozen company with, has really novel delivery methods for a lot of different basically mitochondrial energy, health promoting molecules we'll call it. You chose suppositories as a major route of delivery. Maybe share a little bit about mitozen and the background there. And you have the Sandman, which is a great delivery method for higher dose melatonin.

Yeah. So we produce what we call bullets and so the bullets can be used as a suppository. And then we also have what's called vertical miss. And then we also produce a lot of products that are in liposomal form. And so with regards to melatonin, we've got one that has a pretty good amount of glutathione in it. We call it Sandman. And so glutathione is one of the sleep promoting substances. And I also am a fan of a bit of CBD and magnolia is a very good calming, it helps to support Gaba. Linal from lavender is also a really important nutrient that can help with sleep. So we put all that in a product called Sandman, which is both a bullet and also in a liposomal that you drink. And then we have the Super Sandman, which is double the amount of melatonin, and it doesn't have the glutathione in it. And so for people that are really looking to go, because we have some of our patients here in the clinic that we dose up to a gram.

Of. A gram of melatonin. Yeah.

So that's 1,000 milligrams.

Yeah. And you also so in. So that's great to hear because I've had some patients that, oddly enough, have a magnolia sensitivity. I don't know if you' found that for your folks. That was new to me, but that came up as we were prescribing some of the Sandman suppositories.

Oh, yeah. Well, then there's a Sandman soul would be the way to go. That was developed for daytime because sometimes doctors want to prescribe the melatonin or healthcare providers during the day. And so we don't have the linal, the magnolia, the cbd. I mean, there's nothing in there except just, you know, your bare bones. Melatonin.

All right, so you wrapped up on the delivery method. But so suppositories, though, will you speak a little bit more? Because somehow in North America, we're a little bit hung up on that delivery method. So why that route?

Well, so, you know, an iv. What's nice about an iv? And a lot of people, I think, would recognize that the delivery of an IV is going to be pretty much straight into the bloodstream. Right. So it's going to be pretty much the best you can get. And I know you and I have experience with IVs. We do a lot of them here at Advanced Rejuvenation, and it bypasses the gut and all of the digestive enzymes and also the liver, which is basically breaks a lot of these things down into smaller components. So what we eat or supplements that we take orally, very little of that actually makes it into the bloodstream, and then even a smaller amount makes it into the cell. Right. Because when we eat something or when we get an iv, there's what's called peak plasma. And what that means is available nutrients to the cell. So you could peak plasma, you could sub that exact phrase. It's the time where it's available to the cell. So if you were to take like, say, melatonin orally, first of all, studies show that there would only be like 1 1/2 percent absorbed orally. And so the peak plasma would be maybe like an hour. Right. So if I took a Pill, There would be an hour where that melatonin was floating around in my bloodstream. And my cells, which are limited in the rate that they can pull the nutrient in. Right. So it's trying to pull as much in at the fastest rate that it can. And then once it's gone out of the bloodstream, it's like it's gone. There's no more absorption into the cell. So the longer that peak plasma can be, can really be much more beneficial than the amount that we're putting in during that peak plasma. For instance, if I put a giant amount of melatonin in the bloodstream in one hour, I may not be able to absorb as much as I put a much smaller amount that's available over say, five to seven hours.

Yeah.

And this is the difference between an IV and a suppository. Because a suppository is a slow release of those nutrients again, directly into the bloodstream over the course of a long period of time. Five to seven hours.

I love it. Yeah. That is, you know, also I think this component of like mimicking nature. Right. We don't get melatonin orally. It is found physiologically in the blood. So delivering through portal vein through that, you know, abdominal, you know, pelvic floor, cavity on up. That's a great, I think it's a great delivery method. I think there's just some, you know, nuances when we're talking to folks in North America. I mean, it's very, it's very widespread accepted in Europe.

Yeah, well, it's like a little, it's like a little bullet and it's made of palm oil. And so it's, it slips in. It's not like you really have to jam it in there or anything. I mean, it really just slips in very easily and then you don't even feel it, you know, so it's like within a moment, you know, you're in the bathroom, it's done. You wash your hands, you don't know it's there. And that compared to going into an IV center and getting stuck and sitting there for an hour, like, let's talk about NAD, right? So we have an NAD suppository and instead of paying $1,000 or however much you're paying and sitting there for five hours and there's this discomfort, you can take one suppository and go about your regular day. So to me, it seems like a complete no brainer. And for anybody that hasn't done it before, once you do it once, you just realize it's really not that big.

Of a deal, right? Yeah, so true. And it is, I think that extended release into the bloodstream, it, it makes much more sense to do it. It's more affordable and as if not more effective as a delivery method. So that's, that's awesome. Other other unique products, and I want to, I want to return to the melatonin discussion as well. But you, you formulated like, what are you most proud of in your, in your line of supplements?

Well, you know, we have the Zen meditation mist that's become extremely popular. You know, people love to use that before meditation or during breath work. We've got the glutastat, which is an antimicrobial mist. And this has become extremely popular with all of the things going on to kind of improve sinus hygiene. You know, getting antimicrobials into the sinus and nasal passage is a much better approach than to take antibiotics orally. You know, and often when we get sick, this is where it starts, you know, so if you've got like strep or something like that, that's kind of going around it. Seeds in the nose. And anybody that really pays attention to the sequence of events that happens when they get sick, they'll notice, you know, the scratch in the back of the throat, a little sniffly, you know, and if you can get it, then, you know, you can kind of quench it and stop it in its tracks before it drips down, it gets systemic, gets into the lungs, really infiltrates into the throat. Got it.

Yeah. Awesome. What other you, you also have, what looptiol. What do you have there? And stem tour.

Oh, the fast track. Fast program. Yeah, we're really proud of that. Basically we're taking the concept of fasting and we're using different key nutrients to accentuate the signaling. So earlier we talked about how stress responses can have signaling that can actually benefit the body. Right. Because the body wants to overcome that stressor and be better apt to deal with that stressor down in the future. And so eating is a stressor, right? It's a stressor to your microbiome. It's a stressor to your system because at one point you're relying on carbohydrates. Usually most people are very carbohydrate heavy or taking in proteins or fats or whatnot to utilizing those to make energy. But then all of a sudden you have a stressor where you remove that and the body has to adapt to that, where it has to take fat from its reservoirs and use that as an energy and most people don't have that flexibility. Right. And so initially it's quite a stressor. And so the more cellular energy that we have, the better adaptation responses we can create. And so I'm a big fan of both methylene blue as well as NAD as very strong, powerful mitochondrial activators prior to a fast.

Cool. Yeah.

So doing that, the lusitol is a, is a signaling factor for autophagy during the fast. Because that's what you want when you fast is to have that cleaning, recycling phase. And so the fisetin and the sterile stilibene and different polyphenols in there, they're plant based, kind of accentuate what you're wanting to get when you fast.

Oh, lovely. So it's stacking your fast with some extra nutrients to get greater benefit.

Yeah. Right. Fast stacking. You've got another brand.

There you go. Love it. I love it. Well, all right, so circling back here because you've got the support for folks to help with delivery method because it is hard to find high dose melatonin components out there. What were some surprises when you were writing the book around what you discovered with the melatonin?

Well, you know, the, the, the one, one of the things I'd already mentioned was that microbiome swarming. I thought that was really just incredible. And just the overall idea of, of how there's this one nutrient that plays such an important role so globally at neutralizing stress in our cells.

Yeah, it is. Will you speak into the neuroprotective components of melatonin? Because I know a lot of our listeners and viewers are really interested in that.

Yeah, well, neuroprotection, I think is something that, that people need to really pay attention to because there's a lot of things that are activating the immune system in the brain. And the reaction of that is a buildup of proteins, right. Like tau and beta amyloid, alpha synuclein. You know, all of these different proteins are correlated to a lot of different neurological problems that people are starting to develop a great deal of in these times. And so neutralizing that inflammation really revolves around settling down something called microglial cells, which are your immune cells in the brain. And I like to call microglial like a Chihuahua with a bazooka. Because, you know, anybody that knows somebody that has a Chihuahua, you walk into their house and that Chihuahua just goes and goes and goes, doesn't it? And so what happens is we want to calm down that microglial and we do that with plant polyphenols primarily and so fisetin is, we had mentioned before, that's in the fast track, fast fisetin and that other nutrient called sterile stillbene, but also quercetin and curcumin. And a lot of these really bright colored polyphenols tend to do a really good job at calming down this microglial activation, melatonin, in its way of quenching oxidation. So oxidation is really at the crux of a lot of destruction in a lot of neurological concomitants. And so when we can have a strong antioxidant response, we can curb a lot of neurostress. Methylene blue, those polyphenols. By the way, again, we have it in that product, lusitol, which originally. Dr. Greg, we formulated for football players, because I had this idea that football players would actually be using suppositories. But we had talked about the resistance to that, I think in the professional NFL, I've run into that a little bit. But it can be phenomenal. For anybody that's had any type of exposure to mold or they're dealing with like chronic Lyme or Epstein Barr or any type of chronic infection is they really want to look at some sort of strategy to calm down the microglial activation, because that microglial activation, that Chihuahua, has a Pizzouka, and it's actually blowing away neurons. So there's a bit of a destructive nature to that. And methylene blue has a long history of showing that it demonstrates some powerful neuroprotective aspects as well.

The components. You are a biohacker extraordinaire and are into stacking a lot of innovative techniques, therapeutics together. You have this unique restorative clinic in Florida. Will you talk about some of the things that you specialize in down there and what you're seeing clinically?

Well, we do a lot of orthopedic regenerative medicine, and we have for many, many years, we also do a lot of work with inner ears. And so we, we started a process called sunove, which is a combination of a laser treatment that was pioneered in Germany called Lumamed, and a stem cell injection out of Korea that's called the Shim Spot. And so we do an injection of. Of a stem cell actually in through that, what's called the tympanic membrane, which gets into the inner ear, and then we laser it to activate it. We're seeing some really interesting and exciting results with that, with hearing loss and tinnitus and something called hyperacusis, which is really sensitive ears to noise. Also, we do a lot of work with vestibular patients with balance issues. I've do a lot of work with functional chiropractic neurology. And as you know, I'm also a naturopath. So we do a lot of, like, nutrition and so forth here and IVs for patients.

Love it. And you also have another book coming up on Naso specific, is that correct?

Right. That's right. So we. There's a procedure I do called functional cranial release, and it's using a balloon that goes in through the nasal passage and there's an expansion expansive force that realigns the bones of the cranium. That's right. I have a book. I'm just actually finishing up the last chapter and turning it over to have it finalized. I'm really excited to put that out into the world.

Oh, that's awesome. Indications for that. I mean, a lot of folks, again, don't really realize their cranial bones aren't fused forever as they become adults. What do people think about that technique for?

Well, we see that helpful for some inner ear conditions that can be helpful for TMJ headaches, visual issues. I treat a lot of patients with Meniere's disease and vestibular issues. Different neurologic conditions with movement disorders are also helpful. Sinus, chronic sinusitis, chronic nasal congestion can also be really helpful.

Awesome. You know, coming down to the tail end here, I like to get people into action. Dr. John, so what would your recommendations be to get into action around this topic of melatonin, the longevity component as well?

Well, I think people want to consult with a healthcare provider. If you're out there in Salt Lake City, I would definitely recommend you. And unfortunately, there's not a lot of educated physicians on especially the higher doses of melatonin. And you're likely to have your healthcare provider dissuade you and tell you it might be dangerous. So, you know, like what you had mentioned before, we have the book, you know, it's on Amazon, Melatonin Miracle Molecule. There is a chapter that discusses dosage in there. You know, I would say for the most part, there's no concern with going higher with doses. Unless you're looking at trying to get pregnant, then that might be something that could interfere with that. But as far as any negative damage that melatonin can do to you, it's not really been shown in the science that that's possible.

I love it. Love it. Dr. John, thank you for coming on. What the health everybody out there. If you got something out of today's show, Think of two people and send it to them. Also get out there and give us those five star reviews. They make a difference. You could be changing somebody's life for the better. Thanks for tuning in, Dr. Greg Eckels. See you next week, everybody.