This Cell Can Find Every Damaged Tissue In Your Body

You're not going to do anything to maybe change the course of medicine, but in regenerative medicine, we're at a point where anybody in that audience potentially could make some significant changes and really do— we can biohack our way to better health.

Dr. Joseph Currida, uh, but he just told me I can call him Joe, so maybe you guys can call him Joe too. He has come up on my radar recommended by a few people as somebody who's kind of at the forefront of thought leadership and practice in regenerative medicine. He's the chief medical officer at Pure Form. He's a board-certified orthopedic surgeon. He is somebody who I've actually seen publish some very interesting work on the science and clinical potential of stem cells, including a form of stem cell I've personally been very interested in lately called Muse cells. And he practices— you're in Florida, right, Joe?

I'm in Florida, Boca Raton, about a half hour north of Fort Lauderdale and south of West Palm.

Okay, got it. And by the way, for those of you listening, I'll put a link to Joe's clinic and everything else we talk about if you go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/Muse. Purita, P-U-R-I-T-A. Joe, how long you been doing this?

Uh, longer than I want to think about it. No, about 40 years more or less I've been in practice, but I was always into the cutting edge ever since I was in my residency.

Really? What do you mean, that you were always kind of like into like newer machines that were coming down the pipeline or new forms of treatments or biologics?

A little bit of everything. So 40 years ago I was doing laser discectomies. 40 years ago, I was using collagenase to dissolve discs and things like that, because I'm being an orthopedic surgeon by training. So I was always intrigued by, hey, what can we do to make this better? And, you know, people would laugh at me, and I got used to it and said, okay, fine. And then of course, the people that laughed said, hey, can we come and train with you now? And that kind of has been the, uh, express of my life, so to speak.

Yeah, you almost sound like an early-day, uh, biohacker or something like that.

Yeah, I guess so. I mean, you know, and I said all of a sudden One day I came, biohackers, isn't that sort of what I'm doing? Okay. So, there you go. We have a little bit of a kinship.

Yeah, in a way, if you consider it to be the use of science, technology, and self-quantification to enhance human potential above and beyond what it might be able to achieve in its native state, it sounds like that's a lot of what you do.

You hit it right on the head. And, a lot of it is self-taught and I'm sure most biohackers are self-taught. I mean, you just can't find this in regular formal training.

Yeah. Is it just me or does it seem like the field of what you might call regenerative medicine as a whole seems to have really exploded lately, like in the past 10 years, you know, anti-aging and longevity and joint rejuvenation, or has it always been like that?

You know, it's kind of been in the background, but now it's, as you say, it's exploded and the genie's out of the bottle. I mean, even regular medical schools now are talking about having a department of regenerative medicine. It's no longer kind of boo-hooed and not thought to be science. It's very much scientific. We basically are mimicking what nature does and we're just doing it in a different way.

So what kind of things do you have in your clinic? Like if I were to walk in there, what kind of therapies are you utilizing?

Well, one thing that we really utilize and we feel that we're kind of the leaders of this is something called EBO2, extracorporeal blood oxygenation and ozonation. What does it mean in everyday English? Well, the blood basically leaves the body on one IV line It goes into a dialysis filter that's flipped upside down. It then mixes with ozone gas, and no ozone ever enters the body because as soon as the ozone comes in contact with the blood, it becomes other compounds including oxygen, hydrogen peroxide, etc. The second part of this procedure, which is very unique, is that we then put the blood in something called a HemaLumina machine, which subjects the blood to 6 different color lights. And then it goes back into the body. Now remember, your circulatory system is the superhighway of your immune system. So we're really revving that immune system up. We're basically reducing inflammation. We're getting rid of viral loads. We're getting rid of molds, toxins, forever chemicals, petroleum products, et cetera. And not only do we do that here, but we basically teach this technique all over the United States, the Caribbean, Europe, Turkey, you name it. My head nurse is no longer in the office anymore. She's literally on the road during the week teaching other doctors how to do this.

Man, what's a machine like that cost to have in your clinic?

I believe it's more or less around $32,000 total is what, what we would charge other clinics, but that includes, you know, very precise training. What we're going to do is we're not interested in just selling a unit. We want to make sure it's being done and being done correctly, or we don't want to have those people involved with us.

Yeah, what do the lights do?

Another very interesting topic. It's called photobiomodulation, meaning that the light therapy can affect the cells in very, very good ways. It can go down to the molecular level and the cellular level that it has those effects. The lights are basically red, infrared, which is an interesting blue, green, and ultraviolet A and ultraviolet C.

And does each spectrum of light act on a cell in a different way? Is that why there's 6 different frequencies?

That's exactly correct. I'm actually the medical director of that company too, the Homi Lumen Company. So for instance, many people know about the benefits of red light. Now what does red light do? Well, it stimulates an enzyme or a coenzyme in the, what we call the electron transport chain, which is basically how the mitochondria produce energy. It's called cytochrome c oxidase. That's red light. Now infrared can do the same thing, but another very important aspect of infrared light is its effect on the cell membrane. Now the cell membrane is the eyes and ears of the cell. I'm actually giving a talk on the cell membrane next weekend, I believe, at the A4M meeting in West Palm Beach.

Oh yeah, okay. You know, I was actually supposed to give a talk there and I had a conflict, otherwise I would meet you face to face in a week.

Well, listen, you have an open invitation to come visit us. So anyway, the infrared light can affect something called cytochrome c oxidase. It basically affects the membrane and that cytochrome c oxidase, again, not to get too technical, is a, is a signaling factor. And then you have green light, which can basically affect some of the circadian rhythms, and same as blue, they can also help healing of tissue. Now, Ultraviolet A is a very interesting wavelength of light. Does is it can help cause the formation of what we call heat and cold shock proteins, mainly heat shock. Now these, these are important things because they are acting like little helicopters. They basically hover over the protein to make sure it folds properly in the cell. Misfolded proteins are responsible for many bad diseases such as Alzheimer's and many other neurodegenerative diseases. And Ultraviolet C, which most people don't have and our unit has, basically can go after viruses and things like that. So the viruses and things like that, they get damaged by two things. The ozone itself damages the lipid membrane. Once that membrane of the virus is damaged, the DNA and RNA exposed, and that virus is not gonna survive. And whatever is not damaged by the ozone is then damaged by the ultraviolet sea light.

So yeah, the UVA piece, you know, a lot of people will do the sauna, either infrared or dry sauna, to produce heat shock proteins. But you're saying like a certain spectrum of light can do that as well?

Absolutely. You know, heat and cold shock protein is a misnomer. You know, I gave a lecture on that at A4M a couple years ago. It should be called stress shock proteins. And I'm gonna give you a little pearl now. There's a compound, it's from Japan. It's basically for ulcer medicine. I believe it's called Celbex. You can get it online. I had no trouble getting online, but it's a potent stimulator of the heat and cold shock proteins. And remember, so that's something I recommend to my patients when they come here. I said, "Hey, you're gonna do cold shock or heat shock protein or the saunas, take these medications. It'll much enhance the effect." Oh, really?

So, you're not just using that as say a substitution for someone who thinks that ice baths suck, you're actually using it as an enhancement tool.

You hit it right on the head. It's an enhancement tool. And, that's what we always look for here, how to make things work better.

Sell Bex or sell Bex.

I can send you an article I wrote about it.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I would love that. I'll put it in the shownotes. You were talking about filtration, but obviously kind of a hot topic for a lot of people right now is this issue with microplastics. Does, does the EBO2 address that at all, or do you have like a different filtration mechanism for something like that?

Well, we use a dialysis filter. Again, it's flipped upside down, so we are filtrating a lot of different things. We suspect— and I have to be honest with you— we suspect that we're going to find that there's going to be a lot of microplastics that are going to be trapped in the filter itself. We haven't analyzed that yet, but we, we did send for an analysis the fluid that we're getting from the patients, and it would show high levels of mycotoxins, high levels of forever chemicals, petroleum products, you know, the glycol phosphates that we have unfortunately in our food chain and things like that. So those we know we're removing.

But theoretically, what you're going to be able to do is test what's kind of trapped in that filter, send that off, and then you'll get an answer about whether EBO2 could assist with microplastics.

We will do that. We're literally going to be doing that probably within the next couple of weeks.

Yeah, interesting. Like I mentioned earlier, I noticed that you've written some things about stem cells. And one of the articles, I think this was on LinkedIn that I saw, you described a mechanism of action via which these stem cells called Muse cells can kind of home in to an area where they're needed most, which I think is kind of like a new thing in the field of stem cells. I'm curious to hear about your take on how they might do something like that?

Well, you know, I've been doing stem cells for 20 years or so, so I'm very intimately involved with them. You know, initially I was doing a lot of the autologous, meaning from the patient himself, but I've now, you know, kind of do hybrid. I'll use the patients, I'll use cells from the umbilical cord, etc. But, you know, it's interesting, I've always been intrigued by the Muse cells. Now, Muse cells were discovered by accident You know, a lab tech forgot them in some, in some experiment he was doing, and all of a sudden they came in over the weekend, after the weekend came in and they said, wait a minute, all the cells died except one certain type of cell. And lo and behold, they discovered the MUSE cells, which means multi-lineage stress-enduring cells. So these cells are like the supermen of stem cells. You know, when we talk about stem cells in the world of regenerative medicine, we're talking basically about most of the time what we call mesenchymal stem cells, which are, you know, kind of the real meat and potatoes of stem cell world. And these were described initially by Dr. Arnie Kaplan, who I consider the grandfather of stem cell therapy. He was calling them not stem cells. He said, "Now, these are really what we call medicinal signaling cells," meaning they're sending out a whole bunch of signals that what we call in this field, the paracrine effect, where they're basically sending out signals to other cells to do certain things, and they can help repair tissue. Now, a Mu cell, on the other hand, yes, it can repair tissue, but more importantly, it can regenerate tissue. And that's one of the big distinctions, right? And we can get into that a little more. Now, another thing about stem cells, you know, many times I would give them into the joint itself without a problem. But we would also use them intravenously. Now don't get me wrong, we've had good results using them intravenously, but what happens is typically these cells, these MSCs, these mesenchymal stem cells, pretty much get trapped in the lung. Two reasons: the size and the fact that the, you know, the capillaries within the lungs are kind of sticky and they kind of hold the cells in place. Now the cells, and there's a lot of good literature out there that says for these cells to really work they need to undergo a process called apoptosis, meaning they have to die. Now, when they die, they release certain growth factors, exosomes, and things like that, and they go into circulation and they can do a lot of their magic. And some of them also gets converted into something called T-reg cells. Now, a T-reg cell is a cell that can last a long time and it can significantly reduce inflammation in the body. So that's how these cells would work, but this conception, and I never would really— could never buy into it, that these cells go and they start regenerating the tissue. That's baloney, okay? They don't do that. They don't really last.

That's baloney with like a normal MSC.

Yeah, a normal MSC is typically not going to— it basically can help repair things. It gives exosomes and other compounds, other growth factors that can hopefully call in other cells. Now the big difference is the way that these things home. Now, what do we mean by homing? Homing is basically the ability to get attracted to something. And this is where we start looking at the cell membrane. That's why I said to myself, I have to learn about the cell membrane. Hence, I'm giving the talk next week on the— that. But, but on the cell membrane, there's certain what we call receptors and things like that. Now, the, um, Muse cells, they basically about the same size as an MSC, but when you give those intravenously, they don't really get trapped in the lungs. Because they have such a strong homing ability that they just get pulled out of the lungs, whereas MSCs will stay there.

So it's less about the size and more about something on their surface that's causing them to be pulled like a magnet?

That's a great analogy, just like a magnet. 'Cause remember now, MSC, you know, a, a, a, a B cell is sort of a specialized MSC. I call it the Superman of the MSCs. They're in the same general population, same size, more or less, but the ability for them to leave is dramatically better. You know, you, you get way less than 1% of the MSCs incorporating into tissue and things. MuCell, it's at least 15 or more percent. So significant in the world of biologics, that's a major difference.

Yeah, so, so if a regular MSC is getting, uh, stuck in the lungs, for lack of a better term, is that just an issue of a patient perhaps wasting their money on stem cells because they're not going to where they need to go, or is there an actual risk, like, you know, uh, some kind of vascular obstruction or something like that that might occur if these cells are in the lungs?

Well, let me give you a couple— there's a couple different answers we have here. So first of all, it's not a waste of money. It's still very beneficial because of the fact that these cells are gonna, you know, they're gonna die essentially, but that's how sometimes they work. Once they die, they're releasing exosomes, they're releasing other growth factors. Some of them get converted to T flag cells. Now, the one thing you have to be careful about though is when you give these cells, you know, somebody— and I was talking to someone a couple weeks ago, they said, oh, I want to just use a much higher number than they normally use. I said, well, when you start using too many cells and too many of them get clogged, that you could potentially have problems with your lungs and things like that. So you got to be a little bit careful, and you have to use, you know, a reasonable dosage. But they will still do good for you. So don't get me— I don't want to have this misconstrued that, no, they don't do any good for you, because they can. Not as good as a Muse cell will though.

Yeah, okay, you said, you said there's a difference between repair and regeneration. What do you mean?

Well, repair is, it's just like, okay, you have a problem with your roof. Eh, let's go do a little repair on it. You know what? I just want to get a new roof. So basically, you know, MSCs typically can't really reproduce that tissue. And this brings us to another fact of how the Muse cells work. So what Muse cells do is they go in and they do a process called phagocytosis. Now, what does that mean in everyday English? Well, it's kind of like they go in and grab pieces of that diseased cell or that dead cell. But here's the beauty of it. What they do then is they basically take that cell in and they basically analyze its what we call transcription factors. These are factors that actually give the genes instructions of what to do. So what they do is they analyze it. You know, a good, good way to to maybe think about it, think of them as, as the immune cells as Navy SEALs. They get put into a very hostile environment. They have to basically read the local intel to really figure out what to do, and then they get their job done. And that's kind of what immune cells are doing. They're basically with this phagocytosis going after the bad dead tissue, taking it in, analyzing it, looking at its basically transcription factors, and they can become that cell. MSCs cannot become the cell that you put it in, no matter How much you try, it's not going to happen.

That mean that when you say— sorry to interrupt, but when you say they could become a cell, I mean, the one thing a lot of people think about it, you know, I have a lot of athletes and exercising individuals who listen in, is collagen, you know, collagen breakdown leading to like an arthritic joint. Is there any evidence that it could regenerate something like that?

Well, we think so. I mean, you know, listen, I tell patients all the time when I do stem cells, I do it from bone marrow, I do it from fat, I do it SVF. I mean, I do the allogeneic stuff. I tell them, look, we're not going to cure you, but we hopefully can arrest the process and maybe regrow something. But again, it's because you're calling in other cells. You— that's why you want to really kind of get that ground, so to speak. You want to really till the ground and really make it so it can help repair and reduce things and get, get things better.

Yeah, I know a lot of times the mesenchymal stem cells, or what do you say Kaplan calls them, something messengers, medicinal signaling cells, medicinal signaling cells, let's just say MSCs are harvested from birth tissue, like, like umbilical cord. Is it the same thing with Mu cells?

As a matter of fact, yeah, it is, because that's probably the most reliable source of really vibrant, you know, vibrant cells. So what they're going to do, they're going to harvest it from the umbilical cord, and then they're going to culture expand the cells. You know, what happens is you, you can't do too many what we call passages, too many generations, because then they may lose some of their ability to be mu cells. Remember, mu cells are again a form of MSC.

Okay, so, so when you extract the, like, the mu cells from something like umbilical tissue, are they in there along with all the other MSCs and somehow need to be like filtered out?

Yes, and that, you know, that's a process that, that they'll do. They'll filter them out and then they'll culture expand it. Now typically when you're giving the mu cells, you're also gonna have a certain percentage of MSCs. You know, we, again, looking at the cell membrane, we look at something called the SSEA3. This is a marker on the cells, and that's what tells us what's truly a mu cell, 'cause otherwise, just looking at it, it's hard to say. You can't necessarily say, oh, well, this is a cell that's a mu cell. It's gonna do this, this, and this. You have to really look at these markers. So it gets rather technical. But you have to be technical to get success when all's said and done.

I know this is probably a difficult question, or it might be, but because they can turn into any cell, is there potential risk of cancer?

No. Title of my lecture was "Mew Cells," cells with pluripotency, meaning they can almost form any cell without any tumorigenicity. So the Mew cell does not have high amounts of what we call telomerase, which is a basically something that keeps the telomeres from shortening. They don't have much telomerase, number one, and they don't have the ability to really form tumors. They don't form teratomas or anything like that. Now, there's another cell that's similar, iPS cell, induced pluripotent stem cells, and one of the problems we find with those is they can form tumors. So I think that Mu cells are gonna replace those cells. Now, we're gonna use those cells still to do drug studies and things like that, but I, you know, they're still using use clinically, but I think Muse cells are going to take their place. Much safer cell. Why would you want to do something that potentially could be a cancerous cell?

Yeah, more and more these days I hear people who are thinking about getting whatever, like plasma or stem cells or anything like that, talk about, well, how do you know that the person who they came from is clean? You know, you even hear people nowadays talking about like, you know, was that person vaccinated?

Like protein? Absolutely. I, I'm asked that a lot of times. Yeah.

So what do you do about that?

Well, you know, you basically have to go by the laboratory. And in this case, we're using, you know, the, I think the number one source right there that we're using from Dr. DeWaza herself. So there you are.

So is that, is that, what do they got? I was talking with another guy last week, MCI, Musel.

Same company, yes. Musel and Ray. Yeah. So they're, you know, they're basically looking at all these cells and most of the companies out there that are using regular allergenic cells. They really scrutinize these things. You know, most of them are FDA-compliant labs and things like that. So I'm not really too worried. I have no qualms of giving it to myself or my family, and that's usually what I use to determine what I'm going to give to a patient. Would I do it on my own self or my family? If I would, yeah, then I'll give it to a patient too.

Okay, so if, so if you were gonna— if somebody listening was gonna go get mu cells and ask their doctor about mu cells, they might have to go one step further and actually ask where they came from?

Well, I think, you know, you might wanna see where they came from. I mean, look, there's some sources, but I would do that with any cell, not just the Mu cell, because, you know, there's some unreputable people out there that are, you know, just trying to make a quick dollar and maybe not taking the sterility aspect, you know, seriously and things like that. So you gotta be very careful, find out where they came from and if it's a compliant FDA lab. I'm not saying that the FDA has approved these cells for use, but at least the laboratory has been approved to be a very strict protocol.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of stacking protocols. I have a red light bed and it makes PMF, a little hydrogen inhalation thing added to it, so you're doing 3 treatments at once. And, I'd imagine in a clinic like yours, I do want to hear more about some other cool tools you have there, but you do have to choose the order in which you do certain therapies correctly because, you know, you were just describing the EBOO2. You wouldn't want to like do that and then— or you wouldn't want to get stem cells and then do that like in the same visit or during a series of treatments at your clinic, right? Because it'd pull out the stem cells.

What you want to do, again, you want to prepare that soil first. So I'd recommend you do EBOO2 first, kind of get rid of a lot of the junk, a lot of your viral things, a lot of inflammation. Give them a better chance to survive. Remember, the body is a very hostile area to begin with for these cells, and anything you can do to make them be a little healthier, why not?

Yeah, okay, this is going to be fun because I know you've got other, other toys there. Let's say you could wave a magic wand and somebody was gonna— let's say somebody was gonna come in and do stem cells. Uh, sounds like you'd have them do EBO2. What else are you using to kind of like prepare the body, uh, before? And I'm also kind of curious what you might do after.

Okay, so basically what we would do then is once we kind of do EBO2 or something like that. We may give some different IVs sometimes, you know, NAD or niagen. We like that. Now what we do with all the cells, anything that I inject into a person initially gets photoactivated. We have a little light that I more or less invented. It's called the Pure Light, where I can get syringes of maybe 10, 20 cc's, and I can put bone marrow aspirate, I could put fat in there, I can put umbilical stem cells, and we photoactivate it maybe 3, 4 minutes. We hit them with different color lights. Because we know, for instance, that red light can make the mitochondria more healthy and more ATP. But interestingly enough, for stem cells, if we hit 'em with a blue light, we can actually increase the amount of exosomes they're producing. And another thing that's very interesting is we're actually photoactivating our exosomes and things like that, which I can defy, I defy you to find anybody else that's doing that 'cause that's our own little invention.

You mean before somebody gets like an exosome IV or injection, you're using light therapy on the bottle of exosomes?

On the bottle that we put into a syringe, we mix it with other things, and we have it. And I've worked with some light engineers and things like that. So we really designed this to the— I mean, I was crazy when I was first working with photomodulation. I 3D printed these little boxes and I'm basically with little mirror tiles cementing them into this box and then running a line of blood through there. But it was a primitive thing, but what we have now is way better than everything.

Yeah, is it true that photobiomodulation can also act as a sort of signal to draw stem cells into an area, um, where you'd want the most?

Well, I think you can maybe say that because again, it's, it's not the photomodulation itself, it's what it does, basically the growth factors releases. And one other thing, when we talk about photomodulation, we have to— it's very important to mention this— you basically want to use the pulse light rather than continuous. Pulsing in, in the biologic world is so much better. Now one other thing I want to mention about the the photoactivation, because there's photomodulation, a photobiomodulation, and photoactivation. We're also activating a lot of our IV therapies here too. We do, for instance, before we use methylene blue, it goes into a red light.

Oh, I've done that. I did that at, uh, you heard Dr. John Laurents in Sarasota, Florida. I did a methylene blue IV at his clinic, and he hangs like a, like a red light panel next to the IV bag.

But they're trying to copy us, more or less. But we do it basically before it even goes into the IV bag. Then it's really photoactivated because we're putting in that little syringe. Then we put it— we do that with curcumin. We've even found that it seems to help, believe it or not, the tolerability of NAD intravenously.

When, when you expose the patient or the IV bag or the NAD?

No, before he even goes into the bag. You know, we get it from the pharmacy.

That's interesting. You ever theorized about the mechanism of action that, that someone might tolerate NAD better?

Oh, absolutely. I have an article I wrote about it, but basically What we're doing is we're kicking some electrons into an outer shell more. It's making the NAD more tolerable. And patients say, man, it cuts the time down by about 50%. Now, the other thing we do is we give TMG, trimethylglycine, which is exercise in a pill. And the other trick with intravenous NAD is have the patient sip on coffee, because coffee, basically the caffeine, has an enzyme that works against something that makes the body be able to take the NAD a lot easier. So that makes a big difference. Unless you're using niagen, then niagen, you're not really getting too much away symptoms other than a little jaw pain here and there.

Yeah, I know I'm throwing you a few curveballs, but I've also heard about some doctors who will give their patients some kind of methylating compound like trimethylglycine or SAMe before an NAD IV because apparently it speeds up the methylation process, and that also contributes to the kind of like discomfort you get with NAD.

No, as a matter of fact, it's the— well, you have TMG just to basically diminish the discomfort, not the other way around.

Right. Yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Yeah, yeah, we do that all the time. That's standard. And I also give SAMe at the end. It seems to potentiate the NAD a little better.

Yeah, this is super interesting. Okay, so you would do something like the NAD, um, with something like photobiomodulation beforehand. Sounds like the EBO2 beforehand. Uh, what other things do you have in the clinic that you might use to, to prepare someone for stem cells?

All right, so another, another interesting topic that I've Actually lectured at A-Forum and a couple other places, intermittent hypoxia therapy. I'm a firm believer in that. So basically I have a little machine, put my mask on, and it drops my— the oxygen level that's given me to 9%, and it can bump it up to 40%. And there's a couple of studies that show that that dramatically increases, among other things, stem cell output, especially some— another interesting cell that I've been using for years is called a V-cell, very small embryonic-like stem cell. Kind of a cousin of mu cells, very similar. So I'm assuming that that's also going to probably increase the amount of mu cells in the body because I'm putting some in. But if I can get some more mu cells to be stimulated, why not?

So what's the difference between the V cell and the mu cell?

They're both pluripotent. There's a lot more research that's been done on the mu cells than the V cells.

Okay.

Now the V cells we basically get from the blood Couple of interesting things. We basically stress them at 4 degrees centigrade in low oxygen conditions overnight. So we get them from the blood. We typically do an EBO2 first. Then when the IV is still in there, we take about 250 cc's of blood. We then make a platelet lysate. So what does that mean in everyday English? Well, we get the platelets, we make a PRP, and then we put the PRP in something called an ultrasound bath. Now ultrasound is sound waves. And what they do is they break open the— they crack open the platelets. Now we now have platelet lysate, so we have all the great growth factors from those platelets, and then we can give those intravenously, and that can be a really good boon to things.

Interesting. With the, uh, kind of like the preparation or the, or the post-treatment for stem cells, do you ever use PEMF? I, I ask because I've heard that it may help with mobilization of stem cells, uh, and, and reduction in inflammation.

You know, I, I have, but I I just haven't been that impressed by it. I mean, what I do all the time is I'll do shockwave therapy, you know, extracorporeal shockwave therapy, like little jackhammer, and I do red light therapy on them. We are big believers in peptides, you know, the triple stack, BPC, TB500, and GHK copper peptide.

That's the one they call the Glow Stack?

Yeah, some people call it Glow. I just, you know, call it, you know, what it is basically. That's very good. I mean, that seems to work exceptionally well also. And then, you know, another thing that I do that is pretty much on most patients, I give them— I'm not sure if you're familiar with the supplement Neo40.

Uh, is that a nitric oxide precursor?

Exactly. To me, that's key because I like the idea— I'm not sure, you know, a lot of people don't know it, but the mechanism of hyperbaric oxygen is two things. You know, we know it supplies more tissue, more oxygen to the tissue, which is very important, don't get me wrong. But the other real key, according to the work of Dr. Tom at the University of Pennsylvania, he said, hey, you know, if you do these nitric— excuse me, you do these oxygen treatments or hyperbaric oxygen, what it's really doing is it's increasing the amount of nitric oxide in the body, which is then stimulating the bone marrow to release more stem cells into the circulation. So 20 treatments of hyperbaric oxygen increases stem cell output by about 8 times. So to me, I tell these people, take nitric oxide, take these Neo40s. Firm believer in that.

What other machines do you have there?

Well, let's see, we have, uh, we have cryotherapy, whole body cryotherapy. We have, you know, the cold plunge pool. We have hyperbaric oxygen. We have two, two different ones. One you kind of crawl in, one you just open the door and walk into. Okay. Um, just trying to figure out what else I have. A lot of different IV therapies here.

Yeah, let's, let's talk about that for a second. You brought up peptides, but when it comes to IV therapies Are there any lesser-known compounds or things that you think are underrated when it comes to intravenous therapy?

Well, you know, that's one thing I kind of pride ourselves in. I think we have a lot of different IV therapies. We have IV curcumin, we have IV EGCG, which is the main ingredient of green tea, IV spermidine, IV—

uh, so instead of drinking, instead of drinking your green tea, you just mainline it?

Yeah, these are all good things, but typically the thing is you can't really get good bioavailability of You know, it's the pharmacokinetics. But when you give them intravenously, much different story. So we can really target. And we've had some, you know, I have to kind of, in case the FTC is listening, we anecdotally, we've had some good results with cancer patients and things like that. And that's what I tell the patients. I said, look, there's a lot of good research there. Now what we do is we basically, for instance, on the methylene blue, we photoactivate that. And that seems to be very anti-cancer. When it's photoactive. Same with curcumin and things like that. So we like to combine these things, like you say, we like to stack them together. And I think another thing with some of these people is we would give them some copper peptide, GHK copper peptide, very anti-cancer. BPC, no, not, not so good. And the other thing is TB500, not so good. But those other things, yes.

Now copper peptide, is that, that, uh, injection, like a subcutaneous injection?

No, yeah, injection. Yeah, it's just like the regular peptides that we do.

Yeah, are there any other peptides that you use regularly in your practice?

You know, I have some guys that do my adult health and I have them do it. You know, they'll do some of the ones that'll stimulate the pituitary and things like that. And then of course the GLPs, you know, the GLP-1s we do, retutide we have, things like that. So those are good. And those, you know, that in itself you could spend the next couple of days on talking about.

Yeah.

Because they probably will be very beneficial to help various stem cell procedures because of how they reduce inflammation and all the different effects. I've had patients, I had one patient of mine, her husband is a transplant surgeon for livers and things. He says, "You know, that's really getting rid of fatty liver and things like that. It's gonna cut down a number of transplants dramatically." Yeah, yeah, that's what I understand.

I don't know if you've come across this at all, but have you seen anything like a decrease in liver enzymes?

I myself, no, but I'm sure it does. It just makes sense.

You know, a lot of doctors, uh, don't practice what they preach. I don't know what category you fall into, but I am kind of curious, like, what your own personal protocol looks like. I know it's not this, you know, what you do isn't going to be for everybody, but do you have certain dietary and exercise protocols you follow?

The one thing that I do 7 days per week, 365 days a year, or 66 depending if it's leap year, I wake up at 4 o'clock every morning. I read for a little bit, then I go out and I do about 4-mile walk, come back. I do about a half hour on my elliptical, getting my heart rate close to 140, watching some TV, and then I'll swim for a little bit. Then I get to the office. That's 7 days a week. I take a handful of supplements 5 days a week, and then I take my Neo40 7 days a week. And, you know, kind of, you know, and I do silent walking when I go the 4 miles. I just kind of just don't listen to music or anything and it's in the dark.

I'm curious about this. I kind of ask people about their morning routines quite a bit and I rarely hear someone mention this, but I think it's a legitimate question. And, Ayurvedic medicine has some theories on this regarding timing, but the morning bowel movement, the morning bathroom time, do you think there's a best time for something like that?

When I wake up.

It's just like right when you wake up before you go out and do anything? Yeah.

I read a little bit and then it seems to come out and then sometimes, It's not going to come out. I said, "Right, when I'm done with my walk, it'll come out." So, there you go.

Yeah. And, I missed that. Did you say you do any strength training?

Oh, yeah. I do lift some weights too. I do my elliptical and things like that, but I do some strength training too. But, I'm more, I think, I'm more inclined to do more cardiovascular than I am strength training.

Yeah, yeah. There was one guy down in Florida who's been on the podcast a couple of times, Dr. Joe Mercola, and he does the morning walk quite a bit, but he wears blood flow restriction bands to allow for a little more lactic acid and a potential growth response in the muscle.

Well, he's absolutely right. Again, that's localized intermittent hypoxia. I mean, that's part of my lecture. A very good thing to do, and it's fairly inexpensive. But when you're doing the intermittent hypoxia, one thing I want to just let the audience know is, you know, somebody says, "Well, I can do the same thing by holding my breath." No, you basically can't. You know, you basically have to get, you know, hypoxia inducible index. You basically have to stimulate that. Now, what it does do also is it increases erythropoietin, which is going to increase my blood count and things like that too.

Yeah, the only other thing that I think you could do to do that significantly without an IHHT machine is freediving where you kind of compress the spleen and it produces some EPO. I interviewed James Nestor who wrote this book called "Breathe." He kind of gets into the science of how Olympic athletes who aren't necessarily competing in freediving do it just for that EPO release. The IHHT, that is like a machine I'm assuming that you use?

It's a machine, exactly right.

Does it have a name?

I think Go2 Altitude. It's from Australia.

Yeah, got it. I just asked because I have a machine in my gym that alternates from hypoxia to hyperoxia. It's kind of designed and it's manual. You got to flip it from hypoxia to hyperoxia, but I have it next to my cardio equipment. So, I just wear a mask when I'm doing my cardio and I'll alternate from hypoxia to hyperoxia.

Sometimes what we'll do when they undergo hyperbaric oxygen, I'm sure you're familiar with it, taking an air break. You know, that's from that famous Israeli study where they said, hey, it's really when you're doing hyperbaric oxygen, if you take that mask off and have them breathe regular room air, it's tricking the body and it's actually causing lengthening of the telomeres.

Did they, uh, did they, when they did that, make any recommendations about kind of like the frequency of taking the mask off?

At 5 minutes, 15 minutes on, 5 minutes off. That's what we do.

Geez, I like to nap in the hyperbaric. That, that ruined my nap.

Okay.

Do you guys use a hard shell or soft shell?

Uh, just hard shells. We have one that's kind of like a, you know, the typical one that you kind of, you know, open the hatch and you crawl into it. And then the other one, we just open the door and it's like, you know, being in a, uh, a business class seat in an airplane and kind of very comfortable. And you have a TV in there and everything.

Yeah, a lot of people in the, uh, excuse me, the regenerative medicine space who I talk to now are looking into hydrogen therapy. Do you have any thoughts on that?

We basically have two units here. I mean, I'm a big believer in hydrogen because what does it do? It's the one of the most potent antioxidants and anti-inflammatories that we know about. It can cross the blood-brain barrier, as by the way, Muse cells can do. And the other thing with hydrogen that I like a lot, you know, when you look at a lot of the antioxidants like vitamin C and things like that, they have trouble getting into the mitochondria. Hydrogen gas has no trouble getting into that, and that's what you want. You want to basically get there. So I'm a big fan of that. Now what I'd like to do With our procedures at the end, I usually have one of my nurses bubble some of that hydrogen gas into a little bottle of water and have the patient instantly drink that water. That's true hydrogen water. I mean, a lot of hydrogen water you see there, by the time the people are buying it, the hydrogen is long gone.

Yeah, I've added a hydrogen inhalation machine, uh, and a hydrogen bath to my lineup. But we were talking before the show, I have a family member who's not feeling well right now and having some musculoskeletal soreness related to that. And, I literally just drew a hydrogen bath for them so they can do transdermal absorption.

Yeah, yeah, good thing.

Yeah, super interesting. I'm a little jealous that you'll be at A4M. They have their show down there. They have the one in December that's the Disneyland for all the new things. Yeah. So, I know you get around, you see this stuff. Is there anything coming down the pipeline that you've got your eye on?

Well, there's a couple things. I just talked to someone the other day I think cleft protein is going to be something we're going to hear a lot more about. I'm a real big believer in that, and I, and I think that that's something that's going to be beneficial.

So tell me a little bit about that for a second. For people who haven't heard of the cleft protein, you know, it's basically—

it's made by the kidneys, but we know it's really associated with a lot of longevity. It seems that people that have lower levels of it don't seem to live as long. Much more inclined to maybe get neurodegenerative diseases and things like that. So it's a very important peptide and, excuse me, a protein. And I think that we're gonna, yeah, and I think we're gonna see that they're gonna do a lot of gene therapy maybe for that. And that's another thing, gene therapy itself I think is gonna be something.

Yeah, I'm on the fence about the clothofer gene therapy. I think, you know, I've at least seen some data that there might be a little bit of cardiovascular risk. Follistatin gene therapy. I don't know if you're looking at Follistatin. I think Follistatin seems pretty safe right now. Klotho seems like one of those things you should look into your cardiovascular health first. I think it's related to arrhythmias and the way that it modulates some of the calcium receptors.

It's interesting you say arrhythmias. I came across an interesting thing, kind of a totally different thing, but fish oil. I was taking 3,000 a day and then I read some articles that You got to be careful because it can cause atrial fib in people.

I think I saw that, and I believe it was like pre-existing cardiovascular issues. It didn't, it didn't like manifest it, but I believe it aggravates a pre-existing condition potentially.

Yeah, you— I think you're right. So I was a little there. So now I'm down to 2 a day.

Gotcha. Uh, so you mentioned Klotho is one thing coming down the pipeline, uh, the warning about fish oil. Anything else you've got your eye on?

Well, you know, I think how we're going to use more and more of the Muse cells and how we're going to stack all these things together I think that's gonna be important things. And who knows? I mean, tomorrow I could come across something and say, "Oh my God, this is the next best thing." I think Muse Cells to me are really gonna be something. I think we're gonna see it overtake. I've been doing this field a long time. And with Muse Cells, I'm at the point where I was maybe 20 years ago with MSCs. It's gonna revolutionize things. And I think we're gonna see this now. You're gonna still see some people that are gonna be against it. But they're going to be in the minority.

Yeah, and I think it's important we set expectations. If someone gets a Muse Cell IV, how long does it take to notice the effects? And if they get an injection, uh, how long does it typically take to notice improvement?

I can tell you, one of my— I, you know, I go once in a while to the Cayman Islands, and, um, I have a clinic down there, and one of my partners from there, she had a hip problem that we just couldn't figure out what was going on. She had a hip replacement a number of years ago, and she was complaining on the side of the hip, not in the— typically in the hip itself. But, you know, we tried giving her some diagnostic injections of lidocaine and things like that. Nothing helped. I said, look, she wanted to try some uses. All right, try them. And lo and behold, 2 weeks later she was better.

Was that, was that intravenous or injection?

Intravenous. And I'm going to be honest with you, we were giving her a lot of her own cells that she had culture expanded intravenously. Didn't seem to touch it. So it's a, it's, you know, it's a group of one, but pretty significant.

And is there anything to the idea of using them proactively, or I suppose I should say preventively, meaning you don't have an existing issue but you want to do something like that as a longevity play?

You know, kind of let me twist that around a little bit. You're not aware of the problems, but they're there. Okay, and that's why you want to do it a lot of times, to be proactive. You're being proactive, but by the same token, you're actually treating problems you're just not aware of yourself.

And are there any guidelines or gold standards if someone were to do that, uh, for frequency of infusion? Like, would someone do like an annual mucosal infusion or something like that?

Maybe annually, maybe every 6 months, depending on the age of the patient, their overall condition, etc. For instance, like with our EBO2s, we recommend, you know, maybe once a quarter, once every 6 months, once a year, depending on the patients.

Yeah, this is fascinating. I mean, you really are kind of, uh, kind of a thought leader in the space. You've been doing it for a while, so I'm really glad we got a chance to chat here. Uh, anything else you want to— anything else you want to share with folks before I let you go?

You know, I— it's hard to say. I mean, like I say, this is an exciting field. You know, one thing I tell when I lecture to other docs in this field, I said, you know, you may be a cardiologist, orthopedic surgeon, or something— you're not going to do anything to maybe change the course of medicine. But in regenerative medicine, we're at a point where You know, anybody in that audience potentially could make some significant changes and really do— we can biohack our way to better health.

Yeah, I tell you what, I've been playing in the space for a while. I'm 44. I feel like I'm 18 years old still. Just gotta have 18-year-old sons. I can keep up with them.

I'm a little older than you, but I feel pretty young, and I, I can hold my own out in the garden and stuff when I work in my garden.

Ben GreenfieldLife.com purita, P-U-R-I-T-A, is where the show notes are. You can check out Joe's clinic, you can check out resources to everything else we talked about. Joe, thanks so much for doing this, man.

It's been my pleasure and an honor. You think— and you're welcome to come here and get some treatments.

All right, folks, have an incredible week.

Thank you.

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