The Best Delivery Methods for Stem Cell Therapy

Let's talk about the brain. Everyone talks about the blood brain barrier. Yes. There's this barrier that's preventing a lot of things to go across, you know, getting, getting into each other's domain. But we can do things to help open up the blood brain barrier at our clinic. What we do, when people have significant brain pathology, we can give people mannitol IV infusion first. Hi, this is Dr. Joy Kong, and welcome back to my channel. If you. Today, I want to answer the question about where to put stem cells when you get stem cell treatment, because I get asked by patients and doctors. I always say there are only two things that matter in stem cell therapy. One is the cells. What kind of cells they are, how old they are, what they've gone through to get to the point before treatment. And also, where do you put it? That is the art of medicine, because there's so many ways that we can administer the cells. One thing you have to realize is that stem cells, the reason it's revolutionary is because it's different from all the other forms of medicine we've encountered so far. We're not injecting some inanimate molecule or a group of molecules. We are actually injecting something that's alive, in a sense, living and thinking entity that these cells contain the DNA, which embodies the intelligence that can make us. So we are actually utilizing this immense energy and intelligence within the cells. So they're very particular as far as what you can do about it and how they function. Right. So we have to tailor the treatment to how the cells work because of the cell's ability to interact with so many organs and so many systems and their ability to travel. So. So that will give you some, you know, different ways of conceptualizing where to put the cells. So there's so many ways of putting the cells in the body, right? Allowing them to work with your body. You can put them in your veins, in your artery, in your intramuscular injections. You can put in the joints or subcutaneously. You can put it right topically, right on the surface. You can put your eye. You can also inject into the face or scalp or penis vagina, or direct directly into organs, put in the spinal canal for better access to the brain. Or you can inject directly into the brain or the heart or any of the internal organs. So there are many, many ways of doing this. In the old times when we thought the stem cells only work by dividing and replenishing the local tissue, by themselves becoming the local tissue, then people thought you have to put the cells right where you want healing to take place. But now we know that the vast amount of healing is generated not by the cells becoming the local tissue, but by becoming the cells sending signals and telling your body to regenerate. So that changes our approach of where we should put the cells. I can tell you how I approach treating patients because my philosophy is maximum benefit and minimal side effects. So with that in mind, let's say we are helping somebody with autoimmune conditions or something systemic. Then you may want the cells to target your whole body. And if it's autoimmune conditions, you definitely want to target the immune system. Right. So by putting cells in an IV route, then you're allowing the cells to travel to your spleen. That's one of the most dense organs when it comes to where the cells is located. Right. Spleen and the lungs are the most profuse after immediate IV infusion. So this, it's going to interact with your spleen and travel all throughout your body through your vascular system and talk with your lymphoid, peripheral lymphoid system. So they will speak to your immune system and actually modulate your immune response and changing the immune system from an inflammatory to an anti inflammatory state. So for chronic anti and inflammatory conditions or immune disregulating conditions, definitely you want to utilize AV route. But there are people who have specific issues, let's say in different organs, let's say the heart or the liver or the lungs. What I found out, not only through clinical studies, but also my own clinical experience with patients is that just by putting cells in the IV route, you actually can access all these organs. And we've seen incredible results in the brain, in the heart, in the lungs, in the liver, in the reproductive system or even joints. So there is a lot to be accomplished by simple IV injection. And in my last episode I talked about the misconception about IV route. Stem cells delivered through the IV route entrapped in the lungs. And that was an old concept that has been disproven. So for people who are holding onto it, you're really not looking at what is the most current. So the cells, if you have a lot of lung pathology. Yes, fantastic. The cells are going to be trapped in the lungs. They're going to stay there because the inflammation is going to keep them there. That's what they're attracted to. Then they're going to stay there and help you repair your lungs. But if your lungs are fine, they're going to go out into the vasculature and be traveling throughout your body to find where the high inflammation and high signals. So the signals of stress from the cells is going to attract the cell, these stem cells and keep them there. So I want to clarify. So when we're talking about stem cells, we're talking about the most utilized type of stem cells, which is mesenchymal stem cells. And there are different, you know, different cells. You know, now people are talking about mu cells and that's a subset of mesenchymal stem cells. So when I provide mesenchymal stem cells, I'm including a wide array of cells, including cells such as the muse cell, which are more. Have more wider potential because they're considered pluripotent stem cells. But anyhow, so by IV route we are letting these cells who are really good at orchestrating regeneration, we're letting them to travel to places where they're needed. And in my clinical practice, I've seen people reaching incredible benefits, including repair of of the eyes of a vision and or hearing issues. So they can get everywhere. And this is not just me saying it. Research studies have seen the cells been infused, actually end up residing in an end organ. Right. They don't get trapped in the lungs unless you have lung pathology. So we're talking about chronic illnesses which have immune dysregulation. They tend to have dis. Immune dysregulation as part of the picture. Otherwise, if your immune system is healthy, your immune system is going to fight it off. And the same thing that goes for the aging process is your immune senescence. So your immune system is getting old and getting not as competent and also with over activation of this inflammatory state. Then if you put the cells in the IV route by the cells interacting with your immune system, then you end up having this repair and regeneration of the immune health, which in turn can trigger all the repair of various organs of various systems. Because eventually, if you have a good immune system, they can repair all the organs. And so that is the kind of the four more chronic conditions even for different organs, because they have the inflammation and immune dysregulation and organ tissue damage as part of the picture. And that is exactly what the cells can do. And then let's talk about some other more specific issues. Let's say what if you have knee pain, right knee problem, and then your doctor told you you have osteoarthri. So what's osteoarthritis? If a doctor tells you that this is a wear and tear disease, then the doctor is not understanding the Full picture of this condition because it's not a wear and tear disease is a disease of your body not being able to keep up with the repair. Because when we were little kids, think of us as 5 year olds, you know, 10 year olds, we're running around climbing walls and jumping off the things and, and even if we hurt something, it gets repaired so fast. We don't have osteoarthritis, right? You know, you're wearing and tearing it, but your body just keeping up, keep repairing it and then you end up repaired and healthy until you get older, in your 30s, 40s, 50s. It gets worse and worse than you because your body are running out of stem cells and your stem cells have less quality. Not to mention you're also having mitochondria issues, a toxicity hormone decline. So there's a whole, you know, perf as we age then you know, you need to address all those other factors too. That's a whole integrative approach to repair and to stem cell therapy as well. But you're also running out of stem cells and the quality of stem cells also have declined significantly. So if you want to help something like knee osteoarthritis or any osteoarthritis in shoulders or even rotator cuff injuries and you know, the things that are, are musculoskeletal and chronic. For most musculoskeletal issues, let's say your tendons and muscles are very well perfused. So you can certainly give stem cells by IV route and people can have tremendous repair, such as my first patient, that his rotator cuff injury was repaired without me knowing. He didn't tell me about his shoulder rotator cuff injury that's been bothering him for 40 years. I focusing on his knees and never touched a shoulder. But I gave him an IV infusion so his rotator cuff injury was healed. And that was eight years ago. Right. It's, it's beautiful. It's so elegant. But however, if you have a lot of injuries, a lot of inflammation all throughout your body and I give you certain amount of cells and there's only so much, so many cells to go around. If you have a lot of places screaming fire and needing these cells to put out the fire, then in each location you're going to have less fighting force, right? You're going to have less number of cells, then maybe you won't have enough healing in that location. So also there's less control. When I give stem cells iv, maybe one place got all the cells and the next place the Next location just didn't get as many. So I've seen that happen with patients who wanted to have one thing repaired, but something else they weren't thinking about. You know, that wasn't their main focus that got fixed. So I have less control. Right. In that case, then if we had one more control to make sure there are more cells and more signals in a particular area, I want to put the cells right there so I can inject right in the local area. I can put them in muscles and tendons, et cetera, including the back. Right. We can put in the intramuscular into the paraspinal muscle, or we can put it right along the fascia of aligning the spinal cord, because that is where most of the pain and signals and chronic issues are generated. So we can put the cells right there. And as far as joints, that's a bit of a different issue because larger joints is not very well perfused, which means they don't get enough blood supply, which means whatever I'm putting in the veins may only, you know, get. Get into the joint after a very, very long time. The signals. And you know, that's going to take a long time because the exchange rate is so slow. May take a couple months for larger joints like the knee. So for smaller joints it's fine, you know, like the fingers, and those are very well perfused. So not. I'm not worried about that. But for larger joints, what we know is that for the cartilage, let's say there's cartilage is the. This is the full thickness. The outer one third is nourished by the blood supply. The inner 2/3 is nourished by the synovial fluid. So I may want to inject right into the synovial fluid to give the cartilage enough signals. Right. That's enough. There's enough regenerative component in the knee joint. So. And that's when I can promote a lot of repair, including cartilage regrowth. That's evidenced in mri, which shocked a orthopedic surgeon who just didn't have the tools. You know, there was nothing that could regenerate cartilage, so they thought is impossible. But it turns out I only gave this person intravenous infusion of stem cells and she was having regeneration regrowth of cartilage. So that shows you how powerful the stem cells are. And when you are also looking at osteoarthritis, it's not just the local tissue that's a problem. It's your whole body, that's a problem. Your entire body is not helping you to regenerate. So that is the inflammatory issue that comes along with aging and the aging decline. And that's where stem cells can come in and reduce the inflammation throughout your body and boost your immune system, make your whole system function at a higher level then your whole system, your immune system can come and help out that joint, right? So we're, we're not only attacking the joint from both angles, the outer one third, inner two thirds, but we're also telling the immune system, come on, come on board and help us repair. So that's why that approach is helpful. And then what about organs, right? All these different organs. So the fact is that the cells are attracted to inflammation and injury, that they can find their way into these different organs. And we have seen incredible results of people, you know, improving, sometimes even reversing completely the different conditions. I'm talking about condition of the lungs, heart, liver, kidneys, varying degrees of improvement. And the brain, but we can improve the access. Let's talk about the brain, right, people. Everyone talks about the blood brain barrier. Yes, there's this barrier that's preventing a lot of things to go across, getting into each other's domain. But we can do things to help open up the blood brain barrier. So there at our clinic, what we do when people have significant brain pathology, we can give people mannitol IV infusion first. And what is mannitol? It's a sugar. So that's commonly used in emergency rooms when people have a severe head trauma. Because what happens when you have a head trauma? The brain tend to swell up, accumulates fluid, and then that can cause compression, and that's like a squeezing the tissue, cutting off the blood supply to the point where there's a lot of death of cells. So you don't want that. So what the emergency room doctors do is to give people mannitol infusion. And that makes the tight junction that's guarding the blood brain barrier make the cell shrink, right? Because it's so high, such high concentration, a lot of fluids will leak out of the cells. And when the cells shrink, then you are opening up the gap junction. So now whatever that's accumulating in the brain, all the excess fluid can escape, then you're reducing the injury. But what we're using in stem cell therapy, if we're trying to access the brain, we're really looking at the reverse of the flow, right? We're giving people a lot of fluid and a lot of cells. We're opening up the gap junction. Now the cells can go across because is large enough. So we, we do that, but for all the organs and all the tissue. In my clinic, we also use laser guidance to help the cells to get to a particular organ so we can shine the laser. Not only the laser is going to make the cells live longer, activate them, make them more mobile, but it can also help attract the cells to stay in certain areas so we can target the laser at certain organs. And which is true. Really, really just an incredible tool because I don't want to inject into people people's organs. There can be significant side effects. And if I can have something that's more elegant, that I can attract the cells to where I want them to be, then then I'm solving a big problem, right? So that's the local tissue targeting. And then we can also use things we're, you know, still talking about the brain. We can use the exosomes because exosomes are these nanoparticles that's secreted by cells, especially stem cells, and they secrete massive amount of exosomes. So what we're doing in regenerative medicine is to obtain these nanoparticles and use them for these healing purposes. I have a video on specifically on stem cells versus exosomes, because people ask me, which one do you use? I talk about my philosophy. I will never skimp on stem cells. I will always utilize stem cells because they are the mother of the exosomes. That's how the exosomes were made. So I am not going to forego, you know, the, all this capability from the cells because the cells can secrete much more targeted exosomes and it can keep secreting. Right. If you give exosomes, there's only one group, one large amount, and that dissipates. The exosomes won't live very long, you know, hours, you know, the most days, and they're gone. So but then their effect is going to last. But if we have cells, the cell is going to keep secreting exosomes, right? The gift that keeps on giving. And then you will. You're going to continue to receive these signals. So that said, I do utilize exomes along with stem cells to maximize benefits, especially for someone that has a lot of inflammation or when we're trying to target the brain, because it. The exosomes are nanoparticles, they have no trouble getting through the blood BR barrier. So then we can give people exosomes and that will get right across. But we can also put cells in Certain locations or put exosomes in certain locations. So in this case, I do like the intranasal delivery of exosomes that we can put cells direct directly into the nose and allow the nasal membrane to uptake the cells. And that will go right across the crib form plate and right into your brain. We can also inject stem cells. I've done that as well. It's a little more painful and uncomfortable. So I prefer not to do that if we don't have to. We can inject into the membrane, mucous membrane in the nose, and then the cells will be uptaken by both the olfactory and trigeminal nerves into the brain. So that's pretty cool as well, but it's very uncomfortable. So that's another way. And then when we come to other deliveries, of course you can put the cells directly. You can put subcutaneously into the face and the cells will travel, will move around and they, and then they also, they will keep secreting these regenerative factors to help with skin rejuvenation. You can inject into the scalp and the cells will send signals to kind of repair and waken up the hair follicles to help with hair restoration, improving your, the, the, the number of follicles and, and the health of the hair. And of course, we can inject into the, the penis or the vagina to help with sexual wellness. So we can improve, for men, the erectile dysfunction. Right. We can help improve the quality of the effect of the erection and then also the, you know, the sustainability and the sensation. So improve sexual pleasure and for women as well, improve lubrication, improve the gorging and improve sensitivity. So improving sexual pleasure. And then we can, you know, of course we can put cells or exosomes into eye drop. We can, you know, have people use that for their eye, you know, for eye lesions or other concerns of the eye. You can certainly do that. So these are kind of the main routes of administration. Oh, I want to say something particular about intramuscular because an interesting study was looking at injecting animals with stem cells. They were looking at IV route intraperitoneal, so that they're injecting into the belly and they were injecting subcutaneously and they were injecting intramuscularly. What's interesting is that all the other route was very quickly they lost signal. They couldn't see any. Basically, if looking at fluorescence, then it's lost because it's so dispersed, right. So, so that you can't see Any, any concentrated cells still surviving doesn't mean they're not around just because the, you know, they couldn't detect it, right. When it's too diffused and it's hard to detect, however, when cells were injected in the intramuscular route, it's fascinating because the cells stay there and continue. A lot of them stay there and continue to live there and be metabolically active for up to a hundred days. So that's pretty awesome, right? It's like a living pharmacy on site, actually. I do that for myself. And it's, it's nice to know that I have something that, that just keep secreting, you know, different signals because they will still get contacted by the blood, they will still get signals from the blood, and then they can send out whatever directions or orders into the blood, and then they can help rejuvenate your system still. So some doctors have done both IV and then they want to add some intramuscularly just to make sure there's some cells that are always there sitting around and keeping working for you. So that's the little extra point about intramuscular. And of course, you can inject into local tissue, especially in cases like ulcer or wound. It's very helpful and it's powerful to enhance wound healing because you, what you do is that you don't touch, you know, the center of the wound, right? Doesn't matter what sizes the center's dead, so is debris. And dead tissue, which is what you want to inject is all the rim right along the lesion, because those are still intact, healthy tissue, right? You don't want to inject into debt tissue that does no good. You want to inject into healthy tissue and wake them up, make them more active and help them to divide and start to close up on the wound. So that's what's, you know, important is to put it right around the healthy perimeter. And then, of course, you know, don't forget the intravenous route that is tremendous for healing local wound because of how it brings the immune system on board. And that is a particularly important point because when people have to go through operations, right, I don't care if it's you broke a bone or you have to have a knee replacement or you're doing a plastic surgery or dental procedures, you can get some stem cells right before the procedure or right in the middle or right after. It almost doesn't matter. As long as you have some cells, they're going to start to go to work. They're going to be attracted to where you just created a big damage. Right. Surgery is a huge insult on the body in a sense. Right. You cut it open, you did a bunch of things and you're closing it up so the cells are screaming and they can get some extra help because these stem cells can actually especially, you know, you can put it locally as well, but intravenous. What I know from clinical experience is extremely powerful. It speeds up the recovery process probably by two to three times as fast. So if usually you have it's going to take you three weeks to recover and go back to work, it probably a week is enough. That's what I've seen consistently. And it's pretty amazing because these surgeons are always surprised. Why are you healing so fast is because these cells are so good at helping your body, preparing your body to repair. And then also they can be attracted, of course, to the local area and help with local regeneration. So that's kind of all I have to cover today about all these different various rods. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the intrathecal, which means injecting into the spinal canal. So some doctors do it and thinking that this will give the brain more access. Right. You're bypassing the blood brain barrier, so you inject into the spinal canal and that will travel into the brain. So yes, potentially it could give you more cells into the brain, but it also can introduce more risks because you're puncturing the spinal canal, the membr, there could be more risk. So that's something I don't do in the clinic, I don't think is quite necessary because I think by opening up the blood brain barrier, by directing the cells to certain locations, we can produce incredible results. But that's not chiseled in stone, right. If the technology improves and, you know, who knows what comes along. But that's my approach that I want to minimize potential problems but maximize the treatment benefit. So. Okay, that is all I have to say and I hope you find this helpful. So next time when you are ready to get stem cell therapy, you know exactly what to expect and what the rationales is behind these therapeutic, you know, the stem cell therapy and how the doctor can approach it so you can analyze the treatment intelligently. If people don't know. I do have a clinic in Los Angeles, I think a lot of times I people don't know that I do provide treatments and I have a group of doctors that help helping patients with a vast array of conditions starting from very young, you know, kids with autism to people who are in their 90s. Right. People with who want to keep their vitality or have all kinds of maybe chronic issues. So in anywhere in between, a lot of people come in with very difficult conditions that traditional medicine really has not been able to help. So we're offering tremendous hope and also real improvements. And that has been the driving force of why I'm doing this because really there's nothing more rewarding than helping somebody else to live a better life and to not suffer. So hope this helps. And do look at my YouTube videos because I have covered so many aspects about stem cell therapy. So it just under Joy Kong, MD. And yeah, so get more educated and, and embrace this new form medicine because it is here to stay because of how powerful it is and how little side effects. And this is a nature's way of healing ourselves. And now modern medicine has uncovered the secrets, in a sense, you know, from the kind of the original design that's in place, and now we can utilize it in medicine. So I hope you find this helpful and I will see you next time.