Regenerative Medicine: The State-of-the-Art in Anti-aging Health Care

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast and another premium member episode. I'm your host, Dr. Joe Casciani. Well, good day to everyone. I'm Joe Casciani, your host for the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Our conversations are all about aging well and doing what it takes mentally and physically to live longer and healthier. Our guests share insights and recommendations about successful aging, stories of perseverance, and inspiration about our future. Our guest for today's program is Dr. Jeffrey Gross. A neurosurgeon and regenerative medicine practitioner. In this conversation, our focus is on regenerative medicine, what it is, how it's different from traditional medicine, and how it contributes to anti-aging actions. Our guest shares his belief and experiences on how regenerative medicine can assist the activation and amplification of our own natural healing process. Stay tuned to learn what mechanisms are available today to help our body heal itself and live longer and healthier. First, a little background. Board-certified and fellowship-trained neurosurgeon Dr. Gross is the owner of Spine and a regenerative medicine practice called Re-Celebrate and seeing patients in Orange County, California, and in Henderson, Nevada, as well as remotely by computer via video conference. A 1992 graduate of the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Dr. Gross went on to complete his internship and residency in neurosurgery at the University of California, Irvine in 1997. He's been recognized as a fellow of the American Academy of Neurological Surgeons and is an active member of both the Neurosurgical and Regenerative Medicine Societies. He's recently authored a textbook chapter entitled Spinal Regenerative Medicine and is working on a how-to anti-aging book entitled Young Again. Welcome, Dr. Gross.

Oh, thank you. Thank you for that long description. I appreciate it. But I hope we can boil it down and—

Sure.

—to some useful tidbits for your audience. Yeah.

Well, it certainly reflects your long list of accomplishments and professional endeavors. So I'm really excited to have you on our program today. I always like to open by asking our guests to tell us briefly about the journey that brought you to where you are today.

Thank you for having me. And I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you and have this interaction. In short, I went to college with this great love of biology and biochemistry and molecular biology and the inner workings of the small and microscopic and nanoscopic portions of ourselves. And what an amazing machinery it is. And then, you know, I got busy. I went to med school and residency and practice, and I look back and said, wow, I really miss that thing that led me here in the first place because I don't get to apply it on a daily basis in my practice of neurosurgery, which over my career has been about diminishing the need for surgery and looking for cutting-edge ways of helping people with mostly with neck and back pain, but also brain ailments and injuries. So a number of years ago, in part because of frustration with the healthcare system, in part I went back and retrained and reread and studied. And now part of my daily routine is to get up and read the latest scientific articles on topics. And I brought back in my love for molecular biology and stem cell medicine. We learned a lot about stem cells in the 23 years I was practicing before going back and re-including these really interesting but already available techniques to help people foster the goals of, you know, less surgery and more healing using their own body's programming. Just, they need a little nudge, a little help. Yeah, I get to employ that on a regular basis, and that's kind of the journey, how I came full circle to where I am now.

Yeah, okay, so we'll talk much more about that. I'm anxious to learn more. So your current practice consists of what, seeing patients?

Are you teaching? So my teaching isn't, uh, doctors and residents directly. And I teach by giving scientific presentations to national and international, you know, regenerative medicine groups. I'm writing the book, as you mentioned, which is for everyone. So hopefully teach everyone very simple ways of slowing down their aging process. And I teach patients every day when I talk to them, and everything's an education. I see patients, I interact with the professional community who's involved in longevity and healthspan and biohacking like yourself. We met through these circles and hopefully can share together and some ideas and some wisdom and create new ideas together. So that then— the most of my time though is patient care related.

Sure. So your practices are in Henderson, Nevada and Orange County? Correct. Yeah. Good. Okay. So let's jump right into the topic. Regenerative medicine. How is it different from traditional medicine?

Well, it may vary based on what we're dealing with, but if we could use, let's say joint pain as a generic example, because it's very common, you know, over a course of a life, old football injuries or what have you, we have knee pain, we have shoulder pain, we have overuse syndromes. Perhaps repetitive work things, and we develop what our doctors often traditionally tell us is arthritis. It might be osteoarthritis, but what they're really saying is you have an inflamed joint, and that inflammation is a smoldering campfire, and that campfire is causing degeneration of the cartilage and tendons and the anatomic elements that make up the structure of the joint. And that can lead to dysfunction, limited range of motion, and pain. So traditionally, we treat that with physical therapy, with ice, with taking it easy perhaps, with anti-inflammatories, and with cortisone shots. And cortisone is a type of steroid that is an anti-inflammatory. So the problem with cortisone is, although it may rapidly reduce acute pain and inflammation, it actually causes long-term, especially if you use them repetitively, degeneration. However, if you are a 3-year-old, and you fall down and scrape your knee, you have a scab. Your mother puts some Bactine on it, washes it off, puts a bandage on it, kisses it, and sends you on your way. 3 or 4 days later, that scab is gone. That 3-year-old heals like crazy. Yet if we're like my age— I'm going to be 57 or older— if we bruise our elbow against a door, we have a bruise and we have pain and discomfort and swelling, and it could be 2 or 3 weeks before that's fully resolved. I ask myself this, and I bring it to the audience because I think it'll help me answer your question. Why do we take so long to heal when a 3-year-old can heal in 3 days? It's the same body, same cells. And it's because that youngster doesn't have chronic accumulation of inflammation, exposure to the environment, foods, not great foods either, perhaps processed foods, too much exposure to sugar or carbohydrates, things over the years that have accumulated inflammation. It's like our body is hoarding this inflammation and we need to get rid of that. And it is that very pathway towards an anti-inflammatory course. That is why regeneration or regenerative medicine is different than traditional medicine because we are working towards regenerating, whereas in traditional medicine we are just working towards stopping the pain, dealing with the symptom, which is typical Western problem response medicine as opposed to preventative and biological reactivation medicine, which is regenerative. Regenerative means can we regrow these tissues? Can we get a healthier cartilage in the joint? Can we reduce inflammation? One quick caveat is using an anti-inflammatory like ibuprofen or the cortisone shot, which is anti-inflammatory, doesn't fix, doesn't make it more regenerative because that only shuts off one pathway of inflammation and makes the others in the cellular response hyperactive. So a truly anti-aging regenerative approach to any problem, using joints as an example, involves no synthetic anti-inflammatories. Has to be a natural approach or biological approach to anti-inflammation or anti-inflammaging.

So instead of using a traditional anti-inflammatory medication like cortisone, you're saying that there are other approaches to reducing the inflammation that steady buildup of inflammation that we all kind of encounter or are exposed to and just adds to the problems of healing. So there are other approaches.

Uh, yes, that's correct. There is a role for ibuprofen or cortisone shots in the right setting on a very limited basis, hopefully. But you're absolutely correct. We have a way to stimulate and bring out our own cellular programming like it was when it was younger. And that's the whole approach of regenerative medicine. Yeah.

Yeah. It sounds like a brilliant approach. I mean, who would, who would object to this? I mean, I'm sure the traditional practitioners are, you know, content to stay in their usual treatment modalities, but if these new approaches can get away from the meds and the pharmaceuticals, has to be better. Yeah.

In the vast majority of cases, I believe that to be the case, and I hope so. I'm here to stand behind that.

Sure, sure. So yeah, of course there is a time and a place for some of those medications, but if this approach is as effective and maybe more effective in terms of our overall health and kind of regenerating our own well-being, let's adopt it. So what are some of the approaches? How do you reduce the inflammation?

Well, it can start out very simply. It could start out with diet. Our food source is very inflammatory. Uh, one of the most pro-inflammatory portions of our diet is sugar. If we think to our caveman days, you know, sugar was not abundant, maybe a piece of fruit here and there. We were really looking for protein for the most part. So in terms of, of sugar, sugar causes this insulin response, and insulin itself is also a pro-inflammatory hormone in the body. So by limiting sugar, we're limiting the insulin response, and then we have fewer problems associated with long-term exposure to sugar. Heart disease, you know, blood pressure problems, obesity, metabolic syndromes, diabetes, of course. All of these are related to, at least in part, to our overexposure to sugar and carbohydrates. Therefore, I would recommend someone who's truly looking to heal something, even a joint, move to a ketogenic diet. A ketogenic diet is one that's low in sugar and carbohydrates and uses the body's own stores of those. And the brain uses these ketones instead of sugar. And the brain loves ketones. It's very useful. It actually improves cognition. So if there are any cognitive symptoms, a ketogenic diet is not only anti-inflammatory to the brain. And remember, a lot of the degenerative, a lot of the dementias have a degenerative component, Parkinson's, or an inflammatory component. Sorry. Even Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's. Alzheimer's is a is an inflammatory response to these accumulation of mis-tangled proteins, which are in part fostered by the inflammatory process. So anything we can do to tell the brain to relax through diet would be one. Number two, real relaxation, restorative sleep, deep breathing, using the lungs fully. There's a direct connection between the lungs and the brain. Another point would be to take advantage of the brain and gut connection to what's called the microbiome, the bacteria that normally live in our stomach and our intestines, and they do help us process phytonutrients, things from fruits and vegetables. They produce anti-inflammatory small molecules and peptides that get into our system. There's a direct correlation between cognition, brain function, mood with the proper use of probiotics. An American population that is not exposed as we used to be. We were kids. Dr. Joe, like, you know, I grew up playing outside, rolling around in the dirt, so I probably had exposure to diverse bacteria. We don't get that now. Even if yet we have yogurt that has active cultures, we're really not getting enough. So I do recommend use of probiotics, and I think we're seeing an explosion in the different types of probiotics. There will be probiotics that are more directed to certain inflammatory diseases. And parenthetically, inflammatory diseases are really synonymous and overlapping with diseases of aging. In fact, you know, a wise person in in the regenerative field said aging is really accumulated inflammation, and they coined the word inflammaging. So the less inflamed we are, the less biologically we age. We may, we may age on the calendar, but that's why you can take, you know, two 75-year-olds right next to each other, and one is youthful looking and active, and one might be a little slowed down and has lost muscle mass and looks much older. So we want to be that younger, active 75-year-old. And that takes work, and it takes weight-bearing exercise— would be another bullet point to add. We know that muscle mass and bone density are correlated with longevity. We need proper protein intake. Most of us don't get enough protein. Part of it's the American diet, so protein supplementation to a limit. And then good use of vitamins and supplements. Most of us take a multivitamin. That's really not enough. Multivitamin might have 100% of the RDA recommendation. RDA just produces numbers to prevent malnutrition. We don't want just treating malnutrition. We want to optimize what our body needs. And then probably the most important thing before we get into actual biologics would be to talk about, let's say, I got the weight-bearing exercise. That's really important. And also for cognition. And we talked about diet. But gosh, there was something on the tip of my tongue. I must need my probiotics today. You're short a little bit. But I think I've hit most of the of the elements that I would— if someone comes to me for an anti-aging visit, we sit down and go over all this lifestyle business, all this epigenetics stuff.

Sure. Yeah. What you're talking about is a very holistic approach to staying healthy. I mean, as you talk about these lifestyle factors, it's probably the preliminary stage of regenerative medicine. Let's get the basics in place first and let's reduce the inflammation as much as we can. So sleep and diet and fitness, probably strength training and, you know, aerobic activity, and of course the fruits and vegetables and all of that. So yeah, that's just good healthy approaches anyway. So that falls under regenerative medicine. That's good to hear.

It really is what our grandmothers taught us, is actually— they, they— it wasn't just an old grandmother's tale. It's for real. It's for real. And the missing part, I, I had just forgot, is to consider bioidentical hormone replacement. Testosterone for the men, and the ladies, it could be some combination of things to the extent that's safe, managed by a physician who does that kind of work. For example, we have a lot of ladies who come in and say, my doctor did a bone density test, I'm developing osteoporosis, but it's okay, doctor, I'm taking my calcium. And that's very nice. I say, that's great, but the calcium is going to go right through you unless you have the right hormones and vitamins to drive the calcium back into the bones. And that requires, it's a hormone-driven process. So if you're not on estrogen or progesterone replacement and you're just taking calcium, it's not going to work. And bone density is important as we get into more of the regenerative medicine because our bones are where most of our stem cells live. It's in our bone marrow. Think about it. Bone marrow as a dinner, as a meal is highly rich. In nutrients. There's a reason for that, that other animals eat bone marrow. There's a reason why our ancestors make chicken soup when we're sick, because it comes from the bone broth, from the actual stock of the bones. And what's in there is very important. I think we're going to get into that here shortly.

Fascinating, fascinating. So these are all fundamentals, these are all basic approaches before we get into the actual biological treatments. Sure. So, um, when we talk about anti-aging, we're talking about approaches with older adults or all ages? Uh, it's for everyone.

And there's some recent literature suggesting the earlier you engage this lifestyle, this anti-aging lifestyle, and the longer you stay with it, the more benefits it will have. So As one of my favorite history professors in high school used to quote, Ogden Nash, he used to say, vote early and vote often. Well, in this case, start your anti-aging earlier and start it often.

So the earlier, we can't expect to start fixing things in our later decades, right? It's really healthy to do it in our middle, middle-aged adults, adulthood, 30s, 40s, 50s.

We can get benefit in the later ages. I don't want to give that idea, but to prevent the need for more aggressive and more acute involvements in the later ages. Start early. Start early. Eat right. Sleep right. Breathe right. Exercise right. Replace the hormones when needed. That kind of thing.

Okay. So, um, in your experience, in your practice and with patients, would you say older patients present with different problems from middle age? Of course, there's more stiffness and maybe arthritis and other sensory losses, but are there other metabolic issues that come into the picture with advanced age?

That's actually a good observation. You are correct. I'd say my middle-aged patients are more likely to have a focal joint problem, like a knee problem or low back pain, because what they have now is probably some past injury and then age accumulated on that body part. And that body part is starting to give them trouble earlier than the rest of their body because it's adding the two components of one injury at some point, plus age-related degeneration. Whereas in the older population, we tend to see reduced organ utility, like mild kidney failure. It's something— the word failure is wrong. We should say dysfunction. The kidney doesn't process as well as it should, or we see lung problems. And that's why these patients are usually more susceptible to something like COVID, which is highly inflammatory, one of the most inflammatory viruses we've ever seen, which fits into this whole aging and long COVID issues. It's the ongoing inflammatory response. You might remember at the outset of COVID everyone was talking about the cytokine storm. Cytokine storm is this huge flush of inflammatory proteins in the body, and that's why the lungs would go crazy and people were having the— they're in the ICUs with the lung problems. So anything we do that's anti-inflammatory to prepare ourselves for these threats is important as well. But it's true, the older patients come in with maybe multiple joints or all their joints, aches and pains and stiffness. And of course, you know, some mild dementias, perhaps trouble with memory, trouble with energy, things like that. Mm-hmm.

So what are some of the biological approaches? Is that stem cell therapy?

Does that fall under this? It does. And there are really 3 levels of types of things that can be done. It's probably important for me to start out with this little disclosure that the FDA does have jurisdiction. They have declared that they can regulate these biologics. And that these are far and wide not yet FDA approved. Having said that, we definitely want to give complete informed consent to all our patients since this is sort of— the FDA likes to call it experimental, although we have significant scientific paperwork to back this up. This has been going on in Europe for 15 to 20 years, Central America. There's a slowness here, and I don't mind telling you, there are governmental and financial pressures to slow it down, even though there's a recent explosion in it. Let you figure out who's behind that.

Uh-huh. Uh, I was just pausing there for a second.

Be that, be that as it may. Yeah. I have wonderful experience with this, both personally and with my patients who are open to it. And there are 3 main levels of biologic potency. The first level is called PRP or platelet-rich plasma. And this is a process that's usually used for joints. It has cosmetic and some other uses as well, by which a physician draws off a number of vials of blood. The blood is sent to a centrifuge and it is spun down and separated out between the white cells, the red cells, and the plasma. And one section from the middle there contains the concentrated growth factors. If we drained your whole body, we could take out all the growth factors, in this case, some of them.. And we could concentrate them in a way and deliver them back to an area that needs healing. For example, a tendon injury in the elbow, like tennis elbow, or could be any area of musculoskeletal or orthopedic need. And these patients tend to need multiple treatments of this PRP. There are things you can add to PRP to enhance it. This is now, because we're not adding anything to it of biologic nature, because it comes from your own body, It's covered usually by most insurances, and FDA is okay with this. So it's basically concentrating your own body's healing powers in one spot, and it's pretty good. And think about those growth factors, what's in there? Well, you probably have a few stem cells, you probably have these proteins, you probably have small, what we call extracellular vesicles, which we'll get to in a moment. And that can be pretty good. And PRP may be all you need. If you twisted your ankle and it's healing, you may need some PRP injections. Now, the next level is actually stem cells. And stem cells can come from two places. They can come from you and they can come from someone else. If you go to Central America, you're going to get it from somewhere else and you're going to get it from someone young. And that's safe and ethical, and we'll get to that. But if it comes from you, it's got to come from your fat or your bone marrow. I'm not a fan of fat-derived stem cells because fat tissue is inflamed. Obesity is an inflammatory condition. I don't want stem cells that are designed to promote fat storage to be given somewhere else. They've shown to be useful, not my favorite. Mm-hmm. The other source is bone marrow, and that hurts. You gotta jab a pretty big size needle into the back of the hip where you can pull out some bone marrow. And remember, if you're an adult and you're older, you're taking out sleepy, dormant, aged, senescent stem cells to put them back into the same body. Doesn't make a lot of logical sense to me. So I don't promote that. There are people that do it and they get decent results and, and that's great. I think we can do better. We have more efficient ways without having to jab you with a needle and suck out your stem cells. So the method of getting stem cells from perinatal source is usually from a mother who is delivering a baby by C-section. They give the baby off to the mother. And they say, "Ma'am, this placenta, this amniotic fluid, this umbilical cord, we're going to throw this away. We've thrown it away for thousands and thousands of years. Instead, can we keep it?" And they take these otherwise medical waste products, they make sure they're sterile, they take out the cells and the fluids and the proteins. Some of that's called the Wharton's jelly. It's a very thick healing fluid., and they make sure it's sterile. They test it for disease, and then they make this available. And this is called heterologous, meaning it's from someone else. If it comes from yourself, it's called autologous. Some fancy medical terms there. But because it's youthful, it has the most potential. Remember that 3-year-old who skins his knee and heals like this? Sure. Now, this observation came to me a few years ago as a neurosurgeon. There's a surgery that's done on fetuses in the uterus for spina bifida, where we go into the uterus through the mother while she's still pregnant and we try to sew up the spina bifida in the lower back of a baby. And those children are later delivered, maybe 6, 8 weeks later, usually by C-section. And when they're delivered, they barely have a scar. So remember, they had surgery, they had a cut and an opening in their back, got sewn up, they got put back in the The bun went back in the oven. It come out without a scar. Something is very magical about that amniotic fluid. Wow. That's what we're tapping into here, and that's why stem cells are so interesting to me. Now remember, stem cells are the type of cell in the body that give rise to all the other types of cell. They can make a liver, they can make a kidney, they can make a brain. And that's why these are so important to us when we're developing, and they later lose their potential as we age. So giving someone a youthful kick in the pants is like giving them a little dose of youth in a way. Mm-hmm. From another donor. Right. That's where the word heterologous, yeah. From someone else. It's different. Presumably. Yeah. Now, interesting thing about stem cells is they really don't have much of an immune response. You know, if you get a liver transplant from a donor, you have to be put on immunosuppressant drugs to make your immune system not react, to reject. We very rarely see that with stem cells. They're called immunoprivileged. They're so special they can evade that system pretty well. The problem with, with stem cells is they're pretty big. Stem cells are a good size. They cannot cross something called the blood-brain barrier. So for those patients who are seeking regenerative options for brain injury, dementia, Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's. Stem cells delivered to the body are probably not ideal. But then there's a third level. May I jump into that? Of course, yes. I'm taking over your entire show and I love it.

I love it. I don't want to get in your way.

The third level, and the one that I have, I feel has the most promise, is called exosomes. I'm going to spell it for you so anyone listening can look this up, but it's E-X-O, exo meaning out of. Somes, S-O-M-E-S, meaning bodies. And these are small vesicles that are given off by stem cells. Regular cells make them too, but stem cells deliver stem cell exosomes. And they are perhaps 1,000th the size of the cell. And what it is, is the membrane of the cell gives off a small outpocketing a small bit of membrane, and within it is a bunch of growth factors and RNA. But it's really a signal. It's information from that cell delivering to neighbor cells, telling them what the programming idea is. Everyone turn to Channel 7. We are now going to go to the anti-inflammatory show, like when we were young. And that information gets into the existing cell or existing stem cell, maybe a sleepy stem cell. It activates the programming. It turns on the DNA repair genes, it turns on the, the genes that, that we need, it turns off the programming that, that was causing and contributing to the inflammation, accumulation, and disease. And that's why regenerative medicine has the potential to reverse disease processes, to work backwards.

I'm guessing these, if they're 1/1000th size of a stem cell, they would go through the barrier, the blood-brain barrier. So they can affect targets.

You've figured it out, but you're exactly correct. They do cross readily into the brain and the cerebrospinal fluid. They cross the blood-brain barrier readily. And these exosomes can be obtained through the same method that you obtain the perinatal donor stem cells. So it's really amniotic fluid and the umbilical fluids that are sent to a centrifuge, spun down, concentrated.. And we can give a significantly concentrated dose of exosomes because we can concentrate so many. I couldn't give a stem cell dose at one time to give the type of dose I can give with exosomes. Wow. Yeah. So this is very exciting. We're just using generic ones. What's coming is designer exosomes, you know, delivered specifically for certain types of problems. Maybe they have more of a certain programming signal. I mean, This is coming to a regenerative doctor near you soon. Wow.

So if they can signal other cells and they cross that barrier, we could conceivably affect deterioration, cortical loss, change, um, whatever's going on there, the Alzheimer's or vascular deterioration.

Yeah. Yeah. All of these things, this is the goal. This is what the research shows. And now we are accumulating more clinical research on outcomes. Not enough yet to convince the FDA, but enough that's incredibly exciting and worthy of looking into as an option for you or a loved one who may be affected by these, you know, potentially devastating neurologic ailments.

Sure. So what's the consequence or risk of not having FDA approval? Is it only because insurance would not pay or other— I mean, the risks are there, of course, but If there's some evidence-based research that shows they're safe, what's the problem with not having FDA approval?

Well, I'm not a regulatory specialist, but we're not allowed to make claims that— or a company that produces exosomes, for example, is not allowed to make a claim that they cure or treat a disease or condition.

Medical. Okay. Right.

And this may just be language and you should definitely, if you see a physician who's interested in talking to you about this, just make sure you get complete informed consent that you know the risks and the benefits. And if they cause us to say this is experimental, I guess to that degree, most things are experimental, but you know, medicine is an art. It's trial and error. Sometimes we try a medicine and see what the result is. And if it doesn't work, we go a different direction.

That's why we call it practice. Yeah, exactly right.

So, and you're right though, insurance, because it's not FDA approved, gives the insurance an immediate reason to say no go. So that has been a barrier to getting people treated that want to try this.

Sure. So exosomes have been around for how long? 5 years? 10 years?

Uh, these have been around 10 to 15 years, probably in a lab. Yeah. In terms of clinical utility, in China they've been doing this for at least 10 years. A lot of work out of China. The European literature is robust. Central America is coming up on a lot of things. And now, you know, there's such a push and explosion in biotechnology and companies that the FDA is now forming a new pathway because these things were forced into the drug development pathways. And I think I saw the average drug is like 4 $1 billion to develop. So they create these financial barriers too, but hopefully there's enough influence now to push these things along because I think they finally woke up and said, you know what, if this stuff works on all these expensive disease processes that we're paying for, then maybe we should take a look at it for real.

Sure. Yeah. And it could be a more expedited pathway and a cheaper pathway too, and could get to the consumer faster. Wow. Well, what an education, Jeffrey. This has been great. It's been great. Yeah. I'm curious about your new book, Young Again. That's great. Yeah. Tell us about it. What's the message for the readers?

Well, I'll be honest. I started out wanting to educate everyone about what stem cells are and what exosomes are, what's out there, what can be done, and what the research shows without getting too scientific or too medical.. But it turned into something more than that. It turned into an anti-aging book from A to Z. Simple things someone can do, breathing exercises. They cost nothing, Dr. Joe. They cost nothing. They can be done every day. Meditation, mindfulness, resting the brain, resting the psyche. These are all anti-inflammatory and therefore anti-aging and therefore anti-disease. Yeah. And, you know, we've always known there's a connection between the mind and the body, not just the brain and the body, but the mind and the body. Now we're finally really seeing some of the biological connecting of the dots between those two through these anti-inflammatory pathways. Yeah, well, that's great. That's important.

That's valuable information. And I, you know, I'd love to cite the, um, the recent research on preventable dementias coming out of the UK, the Lancet Commission, and they're showing that at least 40% of the dementias around the world are preventable because they're caused by these varied lifestyle factors: obesity, smoking, hearing loss, and just a lot of preventable conditions. So we're all talking about the same thing, right? We're just coming to our destination from different, different directions.

Yeah, this is, uh, it's the convergence.

Yes, it is. Yeah, no, that's great. So let me ask you, what one piece of information would you like our listeners to takeaway from our conversation? Don't settle for traditional medical answers.

Get second opinions. Ask about things you've read about. And if your doctor says no, or I don't know, it's okay to get a second and third opinion. This is your body. You only get it once. So, you know, let's do it right. Just because, and I could tell you, I was trained in medical school, for example, we never even learned about probiotics or Chinese herbs or acupuncture. Sure, it was not something they were going to cover, you know. I, I didn't know what a chiropractor did, but now I do. And I— why? Because I went back and said, there are a lot of these guys and patients tend to like them, and what's going on there? And I paid attention and I listened. And there's more than just what we learn in medical school, and doctors sometimes get the blinders on and that's all they can see. So help your doctors open the blinders, or find one that, that's willing to talk. That's great, great advice.

Don't get too stuck on the traditional approach, and there are many alternative approaches, right? Alternative medicine is viable and strong and as effective, if not more effective. Sure. Yeah, exactly. Great. Well, Jeffrey, it looks like we're out of time for today, but before we wrap up, I just want to remind our listeners to visit my website, livingto100.club. Sign up for my email list and download a free copy of my 9 Tips to Make Living Longer Enjoyable. And while you're there on the website, be sure to peruse our library of blogs and podcasts. And also on the website, you'll find my email address and an option to set up a brief call. I'd love to hear your thoughts and let me know what you're thinking. Finally, if you're interested, please reach out to me to schedule a presentation for your group in person or online. I think there's real value in helping older adults feel inspired about their future. Jeffrey, thanks so much for being a guest on our show today. For those who might want to contact you, how can they do that?

Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here. If possible, we could put some links in your show notes. Sure. Anyone listening to your show, because they're listeners of yours, Dr. Joe, I'd be happy to spend a little bit of time on the phone or through a Zoom like this with any of them. Just a quick visit just to get to know them at no charge to them because they're your listener. Unless it takes up 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I'd like to, I'd like to do that for them. So please, I like to get, I like to meet people. If we can give you a couple tips here and there, maybe talk about what you're taking, what your background is, very simple to do. Otherwise, we are on Facebook and LinkedIn and all the fun social things and a website. Just type in the word ReCelebrate because we're taking your cells, C-E-L-L, and we're re-celebrating them. So it's R-E C-E-L-L-E-B-R-A-T-E. Or you can always call us at 1-844-4RECELL. That's 4-R-E-C-E-L-L.

Thank you so much. Well, you're very welcome. That's very generous of you. Thanks so much. Great information. I know our audience listeners will really appreciate and get a lot out of it. So thanks again, and thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in. Hope to see you next time.

It's time to rethink, renew, and reimagine retirement. Hey everybody, Jared Sylvester here, host of Retire Repurpose Now, this podcast is about the non-financial parts of retirement, which many times can be even more challenging than the financial. We believe retirement is not the end, rather the beginning of what could be the most impactful, purposeful, and fulfilling season of a person's life. So don't retire, become repurposed. To listen now, search Retire Repurposed on your favorite podcast platform, Senior Resource, or Life Audio.