213: Resiliency Radio with Dr. Jill: How To Survive on Our Toxic Planet with Dr. Paul Savage

Welcome to Resiliency Radio, your go to podcast for the most cutting edge insights in functional and integrative medicine. I'm your host, Dr. Jill, and in each episode we dive deep into the heart of healing and personal transformation. Join us as we connect with renowned experts, thought leaders and innovators who are at the forefront of medical research and practice. My goal is to empower you with knowledge and inspiration, aiding you on your journey to optimal health. Hey guys, if you haven't heard yet, my movie's out. Doctor Patient is a work, a labor of love, following my own journey and the journey of several of my patients who have overcome complex chronic illness. If you haven't checked it out, be sure and go to doctor patientmovie.com check it out, rent it, watch it, you can even gift it and share it with a friend. One of the feedbacks that we got most at some of the screenings was every doctor should watch this movie. Every medical student should watch this movie. So if you know a doctor in your life that you love and want to inspire, please share that as well with them, even if just sharing that link. Okay, so today I am so excited. I'm booked way out with my podcast and and this guest today was one that got way ahead of the curve because I saw his work, I've known him for decades and I said we have got to talk soon. So we made the time today to record this podcast for you. At 37 years old, Dr. Paul Savage was a successful ER trauma physician. But he was unhealthy, weighed 270 pounds, 70, smoked cigarettes, was tired, anxious and unwell, and had cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes and stress. As we all do after medical school. Rejecting the conventional approach to more medications, his curiosity and determination led him to explore various treatments and lifestyle changes and transform his life and career career through precision medicine. 25 years later, he's an advocate for combining traditional and integrative medicine with focusing on an evidence based approach that treats patients as partners. Dr. Savage embraces a continuous pursuit suit of knowledge and integration of the latest medical advancements into his practice. We're going to hear about some of those today. With several board certifications, including that from the Stem Cell Fellowship, Integrative Metabolic Medicine and the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine. I think that's where we first met. He's now the founder and CEO of MD Lifespan. His latest endeavor on the patented plasma exchange protocol that is cumulation of years of expertise. We're going to talk about that. Welcome Dr. Savage. I am absolutely delighted to have you here, Jill.

It's absolutely my pleasure. We should have been doing this sooner, but we both are off in our little worlds and trying to make changes. And because one thing I really respect about you, and we're still patient seeing doctors. And I have to agree with the comment on the doctor patient relationship, because I do believe every medical student should watch this. Because we're taught to not get close to our patients, we're also taught to distance ourselves from that relationship. But when you go through the things that both you and I have gone through, that's really what shapes our life as a doctor. When you realize I'm sick and I need. I'm in that position of the patient, and you start realizing how a attentive, knowledgeable, caring, compassionate doctor, it carries you through. And you really feel you have to have that sense that that doctor's on your side. And I think that's what we're missing in a lot of the traditional areas of medicine.

Dr. Savage, I love that you started there. We're going to get your story in just one minute, but I want to come. And I think this is so crucial in our. As medicine is evolving and changing, and as we need a new model, there's nothing more important than that relationship of trust and of kind of unconditional love and acceptance where you are listened to and you're heard, no matter what the complaints are, no matter what they sound like. And that you and I take that curiosity that was in your bio that's so, so important to our learning and saying, okay, I. What could be the cause of these symptoms and what might be happening instead of just so many patients have those experiences where they're gaslit and told, oh, well, your labs are normal, so you must be fine. Talking about, right.

I heard that twice this week. I have two new patients a week. That's the most I can take. And usually we try to keep it a little less than that. But both patients had the same story for me this week is they were frustrated. They've seen so many doctors, they know they don't feel well. They have a good medical intuition on what's going on with them. But all the doctors are like, nope, your tests are all normal, so there's nothing wrong with you. And that's just the fact that you're not doing enough tests or you're not doing the right test.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I couldn't agree more. In every day, same thing, I see those kind of patients that come in. And the other thing you mentioned was this connection. And literally it's in the movie. I literally mean it's just real life. It's not me acting or doing anything out of the normal. But the film crew was in there when I was seeing a patient. And as I left her, I hugged her, I said, you know, if there's anything you need. And what I heard from feedback from a lot of the docs and medical students that have seen the movie was I didn't know I could do that, right? Like, they were almost like, you're not.

Supposed to touch the patient. You're not supposed to get friendly. You don't want to stay up. And I always, you know, I always listen to that. For the first 10 years, I was in the largest trauma center in the world. I was a nighttime guy. So you came in between 8 o' clock or 8 o' clock in the morning. In Detroit Hospital, it was me, 144 beds. We did about a half a million patients a year. And it was always, keep your distance, keep your distance. Don't get close, don't make a connection. And that happened through the whole time until right at the very end when I got sick. And then I had to start going out and finding out what was going on with me. And I went through the traditional docs first, got the same thing. We don't see anything wrong. Everything looks good. You need to drop some weight. You need to eat better and exercise. I can't tell you how many times in my career, in the year, I said the exact same thing to patients. And I think that that was the universe going every time you said it, we're going to give it back to you now. Because I heard it a lot, and I was getting upset and I was getting frightened, and I was like, I. I can't go on like this. For. I was like. I was 40 years old. I was like, I can't do for another. I mean, suicidal. I can't do another 40 years of this because it was just too overwhelming. And as things changed and I got better and I started connecting with patients, I really kind of took the approach of the country. Doctor, how do you actually care for your patient if you don't really know them?

Yes, yes. It starts there, right? Because what we want to create is this kind of unconditional love and acceptance where they can truly, truly trust us to tell. I always say sometimes in that clinic, in that sacred space, I hear things that they've never told anyone, right? And I do. I. I take it like, so it's such a precious gift that someone is opening up their heart and mind and soul to these parts of themselves they maybe never shared, not even with their spouse sometimes. And trusting me with that information that I will hold it and say, okay, what does this mean? How can we navigate? How can we help you to find healing in the midst of this? And like I said earlier, one of the things in your bio that was so important is the curiosity. Right. We remain curious and say, not like we have all the answers, but we are willing to go on that journey with a patient to find the answers.

Yeah. I have a couple traits that I would say are my strongest suits. One of them is the same thing as a radio named resiliency. I am very resilient and that's good because I put myself through a lot in my life and I'm very glad. And I've had things happen as well that tested my resilience. But I was always able to get back up and keep moving. The other thing is I'm a problem solver. I enjoy solving a problem. I enjoy solving problems nobody else has figured out yet.

Yes.

As well as seeing patients and saying, okay, I'm your 15th doctor. And that's where I kind of like push everything aside, say, okay, give me the story. And they're like, what do you mean? Should we do some tests? I said, nope, the answer's always in the story. Someone just hasn't listened to you well enough. And then we just sit there and they keep talking and keep talking until finally like, I see where this is going. I see the pattern that's emerging. And then you got a better idea of where to go. I know you do that exact same thing because that's how it's done.

It is. And I realized this last year as I'm hiring help, mid levels PA nurse register in the office. They can have the greatest skills in the world. But what I ended up hiring for is curiosity, love of learning, love of complexity, love of problem solving. Because knew in my clinic, like yours, we see these complex people who have been to other doctors. And the key is that real desire to help them solve problems.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you know, it's, it's, it's something that I have as a goal is bringing a lot of this knowledge to traditional medicine. And especially with this new project that we're, we're in, engaged in, the outcome of the project that I am is traditional medicine. We're, we're, that is where we're destined to put this whole thing with the plasma exchange and the toxins because it needs to be in the area of medicine that the doctors needed the cardio. Just like nephrologists have dialysis centers, cardiologists need to have aphrodis centers, neurologists need to have aphrodesis center, rheumatologists, same thing. We're going to get into more of that as we start talking about the terrible beast that we call toxins.

Yes. So this is where, again, I get so excited because I would say I do so many different types of things. Autoimmunity and cancer diagnoses and inflammatory bowel disease, and you name it. But at the core, I think my most important message is this incredibly toxic environment that we live in and how do we navigate and how does that affect all of these many complexities that we are dealing with? So why don't you frame it for us? What is the state of affairs with environmental toxic load? Why is it getting worse? And what are some of the things that people might not know about environmental toxicity and how it affects their health?

So it's something that probably you and I. No. And the reason I'm saying this, there's only a couple people that have been doing functional integrative medicine for 30 years, and we've done toxin testing for 30 years. Other doctors, they've been here for three years, or they come in for seven and they're gone. You have to have this hindsight mirror, because 30 years ago, I did toxin testing, and every once in a while somebody had a little bit of lead, maybe a little bit of thalium down the road. Twenty years ago, I started seeing more toxins. I started seeing heavy metals and some pests the size and some of the gasoline products start to show up. But still, on the average, maybe 7 to 10% of my patients 15 years ago, especially right around the time that we started getting the lead.

Crisis, I started seeing quite a bit more toxins on people. And I started getting more concerned because I took all these courses, you know, Paul Anderson, Chris Shade. I mean, I went to all these things. How do you get these things out? And we had. We had infrared saunas. We had all sorts of things. And I'll tell you, it's difficult. It was difficult with all this. I kept seeing it more and more five years ago, like 80%, three years ago. And just as I was leaving, it was practically everybody. It was just a question of how much and how bad were the toxins? Because you want to know how many, you want how much of each of those, and you want to know which ones of those are the worst characters, Because Toxins are kind of like a schoolyard. You got the bullies, you got the kids who are not so bad. They're all not really good for you, but there's some that really are much worse than you are. And I don't know if you knew about this, but I retired in August of 22.

Wow. No.

Had every plan on sitting back and doing some research and looking for some things. And we had a place in Brazil. I was standing on the balcony in Brazil. Three weeks after I retired, there was an article that was published by a group of Stanford PhDs and Dr. Dobrik Kiproff that had to do with plasma exchange and reversing the biomarkers of aging. Now, this whole story starts way back in the early 2000s, when they had a fat, old gray mouse and a young, lean, healthy mouse. And they tied their circulation together. And within a few weeks, they started noticing the old mouse got younger. I mean, like a lot younger. And that started off, set everybody off on looking for the magic particle that was in the young mouse that was making the old mouse young. That went on for almost a decade. Bezos invested a billion dollars into a pharmacy doctor or Peter Thiel invested a billion dollars into an AI software program, all looking for that magic particle. Then around 2012, everybody's like, we can't find it. And finally somebody came forward and said, you're looking at the wrong mouse.

Yes.

And that's what happened. Everybody went, well, then if it's not what's in the young mouse that's making the old mouse young, There must be something in the old mouse making the old mouse old. And the lights went on. Everybody went, that makes sense. So if that's true, and we've had this procedure for 50 years, it's called plasma exchange. It's kind of like a fancy plasma donation. You just do more of it. Matter of fact, it's more for the human. It's more like an oil change.

Yes.

We're taking your plasma out, we're giving you back albumin. 24 hours later, you make fresh, new, non toxic, non cancer, non oxidized baby, fresh, healthy plasma, which basically gives you all sorts of positive benefits to every part of the system. So that's what they did. And then there was this group, the PhDs and Dr. Dover. Kipro took six patients who were 60, measured some biomarkers on them, labeled about 70 of them having to do with aging. Then they did a series of plasma change one month apart for five times. And then they repeated the labs and what they Saw was amazing. The inflammation was gone. All this chronic information that we all had, gone, zeroed out. All this oxidative stress markers, gone, zeroed out. Cancer markers gone. Alzheimer's markers, gone. And the immune system, you know, because we get older, our immune system gets weaker, right? Yeah, shot up, shot up super strong. And they looked at that and they said they thought that that was because they had removed the age related metabolic excess. In other words, our body is a biochemical machine. As we get older, it doesn't do it as well. That garbage left over was slowing everything down. And I knew they were wrong because I knew what they did with that whole process. They did an oil change. They actually removed the toxins. How much, which ones? I wasn't sure, but I was. Everything I knew I had come to that moment in my life, everything I had learned in 30 years of medicine at that moment. And I felt the earth, the universe shift. It really did. About four, about 40 degrees to the right. And I realized at that moment I had something special. The reason I know that is because way back in the day when I had some other things happened that weren't so good. My Chinese martial art teacher always told me, when you go through that corner of your life and it's going to feel like you're rounding a quarter really, really fast. You have a choice. You can say no, in which case you're in. It's going to be a real bumpy ride because.

The pain isn't the change, the pain is resisting the change. Yes, he said, or. And what I want you to think about and consider strongly is lean into it. And I have to tell you, when this idea came to me, I felt like Tesla in the way because it's like almost fully formed. It's like I know who I need. I need this person and this. I knew these people who I needed. I needed to do marketing, but I did that with Body Logic. I needed to build software, but I did that with power to practice. I needed to do the education, but I did that with the fellowships. I was like, wow, I think I know how to do this. And being an ER doctor, having done plasma exchange before, I was like, piece of cake. So got some people together, got the old band together. I got Dr. Paul Anderson from University of Oregon, I got Dr. Pat Hanaway from, he used to be the CMO of the Genova diagnostic, Dr. Pamela Smith from the fellow. And I got all these smart people together. And I said, let's talk about what my idea here. We put together a protocol because what we did to advance on the plasma exchange is we put everything that you'd want a functional medicine around it. Lifestyle changes, nutritional education, water filters, air filters, getting rid of the chemicals, all these supplements that help you body decrease the inflammation, oxidation and heal. Yes, we put it all together then we took 20 patients and we put them through the procedure which took six months and two weeks after they were done. I'm the first patient, I'm patient zero.

Uh huh.

I get my lab test back and I couldn't open it. I tell you, I was like 10 minutes, I was shaking so bad because like I know I was right.

Yes.

I didn't have the proof. And that right sitting there in front of me in my mailbox was this PDF. And then all of a sudden I opened it up and I literally started crying. The amount of toxins removed were fantastic. I mean, and not just some of the toxins. Yeah, every single toxin that I had that was elevated had gone down to normal limits and all the ones that weren't elevated went down even closer to zero. So I mean every single toxin we tested and what came out to find out later is it didn't matter which toxins we were testing for. This procedure removes all of them, whether we can test for them or not. Because we came back later, said, let's go test PCBs. Hey, let's test microplastics. Yeah, they're all going down. So this is really quite a passion for me because done real well in medicine, done real well in this career. But we're facing an existential threat.

Yes.

And I mean that fully as an existential threat. Even, even I can't think his name, the physicist Stephen Hawkin said before he died, pollution and our stupidity to it is the existential threat to mankind. And he, and he's absolutely correct because as you were asking, how did we get here? Yes, well, we didn't have it in the 60s. Not much. We had little oil and we had little cars. But around the 60s things started changing because pesticides and herbicides got introduced in the United States for the first time and banned everywhere else in Europe because they knew what we were facing. And then from that we started digging into the dirt for the heavy metals because we needed to put them up for the computer programs for the computers. And then we started getting more oil and more cars on the road and more power generation plants and all this volatile chemicals started going into our water and our air. And then we had the industrial machine startup and all the plastics and all the phthalates and all the chemicals that we did. Do you realize when you. I didn't know this, but I started looking through the data because I'm a statistician. That's my background is computers, physics and math. But the interesting thing is we have over 144,000 unique chemicals that are toxins in their environment today. Wow. It's, it's unheard of. And here in the United States, we're one of the worst. Matter of fact, if you look at the top 10 countries that have the highest GDP, yep. There's only two of them that are in the bottom of pollution and that's us in China. The other eight are very clean and very good with gdp. It just doesn't make a lot of sense how we're not paying more attention to this because. Right.

Because this is the elephant in the room. So there's so many things I want to ask you. 1. Just comment. I recently heard Rob Bell talk on a podcast. And the title of the podcast was Like Smoking on an Airplane. And if you remember back to the 60s and 70s, you could actually get a smoking or non smoking seat on an airplane. Like and what he was saying was we look back at that and think that is insane. You're in a tube, the airflow is exchanging and there's no way to, you have the smoke stay on one side of the airplane. So nowadays any of these younger generations are like people smoked on an airplane. So I think in five or 10 or 20 years we're going to look back at like, like smoking on an airplane. We put pesticides in the food, we use plastic. Like what we're talking about today will be ridiculous because if we really think about what we're doing to our bodies in the environment, it's like smoking on an airplane.

Right.

It's like ridiculous. And I love that analogy because it makes so much sense because nowadays we look back and say what were we doing? What were we thinking? Right.

The thing that is startling when you stop and think about is you and I grew up in an era where we, we developed without the toxins. They weren't there. 60s, 70s, 80s. It's around the 80s that things started really getting kind of worrisome, especially into the 90s. But now the kids being born, even the kids who are 20 and 30 year old, they were born into a universe where they were immediately immersed in toxins.

Well, in 2001 the Canadian study Cord blood of infants, this is now over 20 years old, had over 200 chemicals of babies being taking their first breath in the world. That was 20 some years ago.

And how about the one that came just two months ago where we're finding microplastics in the meconium.

Yeah.

Microplastics in the umbilical cord, microplastics in the placenta. We'll talk about all these different things, but there are five top hit parades, toxins out of the whole 144,000 that you better be worried about. Plastics is number one.

Let's talk about them. So number one is plastics. And I have heard the media, I've heard the average person consumes a credit card worth of plastic per day and that's only increasing. So talk to us about the top five.

Okay, the top five. Number one, microplastics. Number two is a chemical that's built by a, as an herbicide. That is the number one herbicide in the world. And it's sprayed everywhere. And people don't understand what herbicides do. Think about it. You spray it on the plant and the plant dries up quickly. It burns the plant. It's an oxidizing agent, very, very strong. It's called glyphosate. It's also known as Roundup. And people spray it all over the place. Don't, don't even use it. Don't let people use it around you. And try to get as far away from it as you can. Number three, I'm going to put these together. Mercury and lead. The reason that they're so bad is because they interfere with so many neurologic pathways in the brain. And it's not only the young kids, but it's us adults. Even mercury at our age. And you can even slide in aluminum in that. We know that these are all precursors of neurodegenerative diseases. So then, then you can't get very far away without talking about the phthalates. Probably. Mihop is me. O H, HP is a symbol for it. That's probably the worst one of it because it is a terrible DNA reconstructor. It breaks DNA when it gets you within 50ft of it. So it's just a terrible thing to be causing all sorts of damage in cancer and heart disease and neurodegenerative changes. Then finally, I think the one that I would have to put out there also is atrazine.

Yes.

And people, people wonder why I pick atrazine. Atrazine was the first pesticide we ever used, and that was in the 1960s. It was correlated within 10 years to cause obesity. And if you ever start looking at the outline of where they started Using atrazine. First it was in Louisiana, then it was up the Mississippi Delta, then into the Midwest and then in the Ohio Valley. And then you stop and take, go forward 10 years and start mapping out the obesity epidemic. Yes, it follows it right straight up.

Follows.

It follows exactly straight up. And it's still out there to a considerable amount.

Oh, I want to tell you a story about atrazine. So I don't know if you know, but at 25 years old, in the midst of medical school, I got aggressive breast cancer. I grew up on a farm in central Illinois. You know some of my story and many of my listeners know, but I want to say this because atrazine has been on my heart and glyphosate. So it was several years after my breast cancer diagnosis when I really dove in and said, why did I get breast cancer at 25? And you and I both know those cancer cells, the damage to DNA probably happened either in utero or at 5 or 10 or 12 years old, well before maybe a decade or more before I actually got a full blown tumor in my breast. So I'm looking back and saying, what could this be? And this is probably five years after I completed chemo, got through the breast cancer and I started looking at atrazine. So I pulled up the map that you're talking about in the US and use of current atrazine. When at the day that I looked it up and right there, smack dab, central Illinois, where I grew up, was the hottest area.

It went straight up the Mississippi right into the Bio Valley.

I mean, I called my dad day. I said, dad, look at this map. I said, do you still use atrazine? It's banned in the European Union since 2001. And he said, he sighed and said, yeah, Jill, they're, they're still using it. And that's not only. That was 10, 15 years ago now. That's still going on still today. And the Silent Spring and the work of Tyrone Hayes made it famous as something that absolutely disrupted. Everything along the waterways that were containing the frogs had ambiguous genitalia. It is a way down to the.

Crocodiles at the opening. Yeah.

Yes. It's a known endocrine disruptor. So of course breast cells are endocrine cells.

Right.

So our prostate for men. And to me it was an absolute hole in one of, one of the reasons, I'm sure, that there was runoff into our well water which we drank on the farm, maybe even my mother again in utero, who knows the pathway. But I have been certain ever since that day that atrazine had an effect on me getting breast cancer at 25.

And here's another provocative thought I want to give to you and your readers. It's no longer about the one, it's about the many.

Yes.

I mean, if you think about, you know, biochemistry, which is how our system works by taking a substance and then through an enzyme that you stimulate or that you facilitate with nutrients like B vitamins and magnesium, that makes it into another product. The toxins are exactly the opposite. They come in and occupy those space on that enzyme, and they freeze the enzyme, so it doesn't work anymore. But it's way beyond that. They actually go in and they burn tissues, they burn cells, they break the DNA. But probably the most notorious thing toxins do is when you get enough of them into your system, you break the ability to detox, because that's a biochemical pathway. It stops working. And we know that because we tested 300 patients in the last year in Chicago, and everybody's around 12. So out of the hundred, everybody on average is right around 12, 13 toxins, of which five of them are in the high critical range. And then there's this pause. And then at 30, you see another group of about 10% of the women we tested are spiking at 30, and they have 18 to 20 in the high critical range. And they're all women over 60 who are thin, without a lot of body weight. And everybody's like, going, why these women? Well, first off, has to do with the genetics and your detox pathways. Second off, has to do with the volume of distribution. Where can you hide these toxins when they're in you? If you're a guy, you got a lot of muscle, you got a lot of fat. As women who aren't really lean, they got a lot of, you know, you can put a lot of toxins in the fat cells. And people are like, is that true? Absolutely. Because in Korea, they did a weight loss study on people who are obese, and they measured their toxins, which spiked all the time during their weight loss as the body got rid of those.

Yes.

And here you have these women who can't hide it. They don't have anywhere for it to go. It stays right there, and it's active. And that's why their detox pathways break. And when they do, it's mold, heavy metals, environmentals. It breaks all of them.

Yes. Makes. And then there's a synergy which we know from the science of these small levels, hormetic levels of some of These things synergistically act exponentially worse when they're combined. And most of the toxicology research has not studied the interactions. And we're living petri dishes of thousands of chemical interactions, which again, hasn't really been studied, but we know is so toxic.

But as a researcher and as a mathematician, I can tell you, just like in medicine, we're always taught more than two medicines. You don't know the side effect profile. Once you get to three, it's anybody's guess. Same thing with toxins. You know, you can study the one to a degree and then you can study in the lab. But nowadays everybody's coming to as a cesspool of toxins. And I'm going to say this really clear. Everybody has toxins now.

Yes.

If you're one year old or 90 year old, everybody has toxins. Now. That doesn't mean you have to run out and come over and get the, get the plasma exchange that I'm doing. There's a lot of things that you can do in between this and that. But number one, test your home, test your water and test yourself. Because you got to have an idea where on this spectrum you are. And then you can start doing so many interesting things around the house that you talk about all the time. Water filters, triple filtered. Reverse osmosis. Not just the reverse osmosis. Triple filtered and reverse osmosis. There's a lot of good companies out there that make a lot of good products and they're only a couple hundred dollars. But it's not the picture that you PO in it filters through the filter. That one don't work.

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. I always say clean air, clean water, clean food are way more important than a ton of special supplements that we both love. But you have to start with the inputs and you have to make. I loved, I think in some of your questions you submitted before, there's these, you know, 21 day detox. You can go in January or go to a spa, whatever. You have to live daily with your choices and make a impact on the inputs or you're behind the game.

I'm gonna say I'm gonna add one thing to your air, water, food and shelter.

Yes.

You gotta clean your area. I tell people all the time there's four places you got to be good. Air, water, food and shelter.

Yes.

Second thing is, let's be real clear because the traditional medicine called out the integrated field a lot about these detox diets. Detox diet do not get the chemicals out. They take Care of the inflammation and the oxidation that the chemical cause. That's why your labs change. But when you start doing the detox, like these juices and these, it doesn't take the toxins out. The toxins don't move particularly at all. You got to do something much more different than just celery juice. But I'm not saying that's not bad. I'm saying those type of things are good because you gotta decrease your inflammation and oxidation. In my clinic, I tell people there's three people that kill you. Inflammation, oxidation and glycation. Yes, that's heat, fire and sugar. Those are the three things that turn everything in your body bad.

Brilliant.

Causes inflammation. What's the number one cause of inflammation? You get a lot of people say, oh, it's our lifestyle, it's our food, it's our. It's our. It's not. I'm going to say something, Jill, that we're just getting ready to publish a paper on the chronic inflammation of 1960 is not the chronic inflammation of today. It is a different animal and we're calling it the Beast.

Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. And you're so right because it's this toxic load.

In 1960s, we had smoking, we had typhus, we had some infectious diseases, but that was, that was. And we had a little bit of air pollution from the. But it was 60s, we didn't have that much. Today we have 250 times more toxins than we had in 1960. And get this, by the time it's 2030, it's going to be 500 times more unbelievable.

It's unsustainable. We have to do something different.

We're seeing cancer in kids who are 40. We're seeing Alzheimer's increase 387 in kids who are 30. We're seeing, we're seeing, for the first time ever, the infant mortality rate is ticking up. The, the age, the life expectancy of people ticking down. This is not Covid. This is not the infection, this is the toxins. And if we don't start, if you don't start protecting yourself now, you're going to be too late. Because the toxins are silent until they're not.

Exactly. And it's interesting because the people you don't know until. And you mentioned cancer, autoimmunity, neurodegeneration, those are at the top. But it's really, really prevalent. You mentioned testing, so it can be hard to test well for toxins. What do you recommend? How do you like to test?

So let's put the disclaimer right here. There are a lot of tests out there and some of them are not very good. And testing on toxins is to some degree, depending on what you're taxing, like moles, it's really tough to test for mold. But on the other side, heavy metals, the government has pretty upset up some pretty good standards. So when you're looking at the. We did a testing with 100 different toxins and we just wanted to see broad spectrum what was present because in our case we weren't necessarily exacting on are you at a dangerous level. We wanted to see how, where they.

Were and how they reduced relative, right?

Yes, it was all relative for us. So for that, the tests work well because the vast majority of the toxin tests you do, the vast majority of the tests on that test, the results on that test don't have any known scientific values that above this is dangerous. Let's be real clear on that. There are 20 or 30 of them on most toxin tests and those are the ones the government has vetted out through nhanes. So they give you all the heavy metals, they give you some of the phthalates, they give you some of the pesticides and the glyphosate, and those are the real important ones. So I always tell people, go for the gold. And by that it's looking at the toxins like the heavy metal, the glyphosate and phthalates, because those are the ones that you really need to understand that when you see those levels in your high, that's the government saying that's bad news because that's where health things start happening. Everybody's like, well, where do you get all the other reference ranges? The companies take 3,000 people, they measure them and they say the top 5%. So what you're looking at is percentile. So the top 5% or the 95th percentile, they're calling the toxic range and 75 is moderate toxic. We don't know that. All I can tell you is with 3,000 people, if you're in the top 5%, you're in a group probably pretty high. You're probably pretty high. That's. So that's, that's the whole thing. And there's a lot of urine tests out there that can do easy at your home. Matter of fact, two, you're going to have a link to put into your comments where people can buy the toxin test from our website. And it's 8.95 or 9.95 and we're going to give you a hundred Dollars off. And you're going to get 30 minutes with me to go over your results. Because I think this is so important to get people to understand what they're. What they're dealing with. Because you don't. You don't know what you don't know.

Yes, I love that line. That's one of the lines in my movie. You never know what you don't know. So are you doing serum or urine or both?

We're doing urine because it's the ease of application, easy to send out a kit. People can do it when they get on the phone with. Or we get on the video call with me. I'm always like, these are the ones that have nhanes, and these are the ones that are not. Doesn't mean these aren't important. It's just that we don't have as much data as we have about these, and we can talk a lot about. A lot about all of them. But even if people don't want to do the toxin testing, we have pamphlets on our website. It is called. Called keep clean or get clean and keep clean. Because we put down products that we've tested. We've vetted these out. We've made sure that they. These filter the water, filters remove the chemicals. We have these air filters that remove the particles. We tested these out ourselves because we want to make. We're like our own little consumer ecosystem. Yeah. Because I don't trust anybody unless I do it myself. So we put a lot of that stuff out in the handouts, and they're good products, and they're not expensive. This is where you should spend your money. Clean your water, clean your food. That means buy fresh. Don't buy food that you're gonna leave out for three days. It means buy good. If you're gonna buy meat, make sure you get it from a fresh source, not one that's been shipped around the country in a frozen. Frozen container for the last three weeks. Don't eat cereals. You go through that all the time. It's okay with the grains. You can do the rice because you can wash them off really well. But there's not a lot of grains that I tell my patients I feel comfortable with them eating because they're processed and they're left out too long. And that mold. Everybody's like, well, mold toxins have always been around. But we used to live in dry caves, and we used to drive grass off the. Off the plane. Now we live in wet boxes and we have grain that we store in silos for 10 years before we start making it into anything. That's why the mold problem has become so prevalent since we became industrialized.

Yeah. And, you know, growing up on a farm, I was highly allergic to corn and soybeans, which were the crops in central Illinois. But looking back again, I realized, oh, these are harvested, they're wet, they're thrown into bins. They. Actually, the process my brothers and dad went through is drying the corn and soybeans to a certain level so that there was a minimal amount of fermentation and fungal growth, but it still was there. I mean, you could ask any of my farming family. And there was fungal growth. As a matter of fact, I grew.

Up in the middle of a. Middle of Michigan. So I. We were 30 miles apart, every direction. My father was an electrician and television repairman. But you leave our little town of 12,000, you got 30 miles of fields. Yeah. And. And it was like it was everywhere. I mean, all the kids came to school wearing their blue jeans, and they were all, yes.

It was all over. That little. All over. Right. And I look back and I'm like, I don't think I was allergic to the corn and soy itself. I was allergic to the fungus that was growing on those crops.

100 probably.

And then we know things like glyphosate, which are ubiquitous in these areas, are actually changing the fungal microbiome of the soil. And. And so they're getting resistant species and more fungus growing because it's killing off the bacteria in the microbiome of the soil. And so many things happening there.

Yeah.

I mean, so what are some. You already mentioned some. But let's just for listeners, make sure it's real clear. What are like, top three simple steps people can take to reduce their toxic load.

Okay. Buy yourself a good water filter system, a triple filter. Reverse osmosis. Can I say brand names here? Does. Is that.

Sure. Absolutely.

Okay, so Aqua True is a very good. Top of your counter. $400. The.

Filters last almost a year before you need to replace them. And we've tested it over and over again. It's great on keeping everything out. Microplastics, phthalates, chemicals, heavy metals. If you want something a little bit more fancy than the Aqua Tru, we like Rainsoft. They have a triple filter reverse osmosis that goes underneath your sink for $1200. You replace those once a year for $150. The reason we like that is it's a good price, but the renewables aren't excessive because there's some that are like $300. Paying a thousand dollars every year on the renewables, which doesn't do anybody any good. One of the other things we like in the way of water is we use ozone makers for the washer. You don't have to use washing machine soap. You don't have to use softeners. All those chemicals are gone. You take the water before it goes into the washing machine. This is also Rain south product. It's about $1,000. You just put it in between your pipe and your machine and it lights up and it takes the water, makes it ozone, dots of ozone into the washer. Let me tell you, I have a very picky husband when it comes to clean clothes. He's very oc. He loves it because it smells like lightning. It's lightning fresh. All the stains come out and it doesn't harm the fabrics like the detergents do. And if they're harming the fabrics, they're hurting you.

Yeah. And the plastics are getting in. The polyesters and stuff are getting more tattoos.

Yeah. That's the other thing is, you know, no jeans. Yeah. Go back to the old natural type of fibers. Number two, and it just can't be emphasized enough. An air filter system.

Yes.

The same company that makes Aqua True makes a nice little room, HEPA filter. It's not expensive. And I tell people all the time that this is all you can pour a couple hundred dollars for. HEPA filter. Put it in your bedroom because that's where you are most of the time. And that's going to be able to at least give you that part of the day that you're having good air. Because 45 toxic chemicals are in everybody's house. And then you shut the door, turn up the heat, and that's what you live in inside. And that's why you want to pull the carpets up, you want to pull all the upholstery furniture. You don't want those things because of the chemicals that are in it. Stop using dry cleaning. Use the ozone, because dry cleaning has all those chemicals on it. And you're just putting them right on your skin. You're getting toxic from that. But the one thing that we need to talk about is food. Yes, it's in the food. There's. It's in the food in every sort of way. But there are things that you can do to make it better. Number one, if it comes in a bag, a box or a bottle, don't eat it. Number two, if you have a fair, a farmer's market, or you have the ability to go to a butchery and get your meat from a butcher, or you have a lady down the street that has chickens and she's selling eggs. Do that. That is the best thing you can do if you're going to buy vegetables from a market. Take it home. And we have a very easy.

Salt, vinegar, water spray that you can put on the vegetable, on the fruits and vegetables. Do what I do, just I sit there for a minute and just wash all the vegetables and rub them. And I have my strainer and my, you know, just drop everything in it. But once they're clean, I put them into a nice ceramic bowl, put them in the refrigerator so they keep cool and they don't get mold because you leave that fruit on out on the counter. It's good for 48 hours. After that, the mold is setting in and you have to. And you have like. I don't see mold. I know you don't see it. It's there.

Yes.

And by the time you get the fruit flies around it, you're way past the day.

Long gone.

Long gone. Yeah.

Oh, brilliant. Such good practical tips. I love it because you and I are so aligned. I've known this, but like, I just love, love hearing you say the same things I'm telling patients and just. And even hearing new tip, your kind of water filters you like and all of that. Okay, let's go back to plasma exchange. My questions are I know about aphoresis, I know about plasma phis, I know about ivig, which is more putting back the proteins in for the immune system or albumin. Tell, tell me what is your process? What's the difference? Maybe just define those processes and tell me about what your plasma exchange is.

That's a great question. So I want to be real clear here is what we've done is we've taken things that had been known to science forever and we put them together in a unique and novel way. Nobody's ever done it this way. We've done people where we send them for plasma donations and we can watch their, their toxins. They don't go down very fast unless you're a firefighter where your PFAS are very high and then you're going to get plasma because you have so much PFAs. They're like, look at this, with the firefighters, it works with them because the PFAS were so high. But that's not the net. That's not the standard patient that you see or the person on the street. They have moderate level highs of, of toxins and going to donate plasma every three months isn't enough to get those lower. But when you start taking supplements, which we know can help the detox pathway, when we take apheresis, which we know takes out everything good, bad and ugly, when you start talking about lifestyle changes to keep the food from or the toxins from coming back in, and you start putting these all together in the process, that's patentable. And that's what we did. And so we have a process now. We have a number of different patents. Now we have one process which we call the toxic autoimmune process. And what that is, is we bring. Bring people in and we test there for autoimmunity and we test them for their toxins. And then we go through a routine. They start up this shake that we have that we made it in a compound, nutrient 65 things, everything you'd put in it where you wanted to have anti inflammatories, antioxidants, chelation, or I mean, getting rid of toxins, all those good things that make the energy work better is in that product. And so what they do is they come in and they get the plasma change. People like, what's that like? You can see it on YouTube. We have patients up there that we tape the whole procedure, but that you basically get an IV put in one arm and then the IV goes to a machine and then the machine. Then once it's done with the machine, it comes back into the other arm. All we're doing is taking out your blood like you do with a plasma donation. We're spinning it, separating the cells from the plasma. We're throwing the plasma away. We're putting albumin, which is human fresh albumin, back with the plasma with the cells and infusing it back into you. It takes about two hours for us to basically exchange about 75% of your plasma. And we have it down to a science. We've done about over 300 of these last year because it's a very safe, very effective, very universal procedure. But you just have to know how to do it right. You have to make sure people eat before they come in. Because remember, we're taking everything out and that includes the sugar.

Ah, yeah, yeah.

You have to make sure you're not on seizure medicine because you have stat status epilepsy. Yeah, because I'm going to throw you into epilepsy because I'm taking all the seizure medicine. So there's certain people that shouldn't get this procedure done. If you have ventricular arrhythmia, lethal Rhythms and you're on amiodarone. This is not a process you want to do. If you're on blood clotters, because you have lighting lytic cell homozygous, and you're on Coumadin, you don't want to be. That's because I'm taking all the equipment in now. So. So we were very selective. It's generally good for everybody, but there are certain people that just shouldn't be having it done. But after the whole process, we start, we give you an infusion of antioxidants and vitamins, and then we send you home with the protein shake that you take, the nutrient shake that you take once a day for 28 days. Then we repeat the whole process five times. So it takes a five month period of time. And it's really interesting to watch people because we get a little mixed bag for the people who aren't very toxic. They get done with their, like, I feel great, I feel lighter. They literally feel less toxic is what they'll tell you. However, on the other patients who are autoimmune and sick or super toxic or mold toxic, we do them slower because what we've learned is the first and the second one, they feel worse after you're done because you're shifting all these toxins from one area to another. And we can see the oxidative markers go up between, between. Between procedures. So we've learned on the real toxic people, the chronic fatigue, the Lyme, the mold, we go a lot slower. We do less than a full plasma exchange. We might have to do a couple extra. But we do a little bit slower because you're going to sleep that next day. And probably after the second one, in a small portion, we start seeing people get fevers after the second one and they're like, my rheumatoid is flaring up. And I, I get it. We. I've heard that three or four times already. I'm like, wait, hold on, let's check something. I checked their immune system on their CD3 counts 400 times higher than what they were just two weeks ago. And I'm like, look, your immune system's waking up.

Yes.

We just need to slow it down a little bit. And you're waking, it's waking up too fast and it's seeing everything bad and it's going to town. And once we start learning that part, we started spacing them out more. Everybody does pretty well. So some people, like, I have to do it every four weeks, but he's doing every six weeks. Trust Me. We want to do it that way. So we have this toxin, autoimmune one. We also have one for cognitive decline. We've done this on three patients. We're now in the process of completing the protocol. This is a published study. I'm happy to share with your readers. And what we did, we took three patients who had moderate Alzheimer's. Now, these are people that could follow commands. They could do what we needed to do because they need you to sit in the chair for four hours and not get too fussy. But we saw. We did CNS vital signs. I think you're familiar with that test.

Yeah, yeah.

So all these patients, average, average, low and below average. When they were done, they were all average and above average. The wives, the wife, and there were three guys. The wives told me these were their husbands of three years ago. Because now I'm not saying we're curing Alzheimer's. What I'm saying is we think, and we have evidence behind this, that Alzheimer's, as with a lot of neurodegenerative diseases, is an immune system attack in the brain. Brain. And it doesn't matter against what. It could be a virus like herpes, it could be Epstein Barr, it could be aluminum. All these things are going to damage the neurons are the innocent bystander. And the immune system, what does it do after it has a fight? At least amyloid behind, because that's the part. And then here's all the things that start causing problems. So when we. This was another study that was done in 2020 by Griswold, where they took 500 Alzheimer's patients, they did plasma exchange on them, and then they just watched them. And for 14 months, the majority of these patients had no improvement, had no worsening of their symptoms. They went steady state. Jill, we don't have a drug that keeps people.

No, we don't have anything like that.

So we're really excited about this cognitive decline. We're trying to tell people, be real clear, is we're excited to offer this to people. One thing we do know is if it's multi. If it's vascular dementia, we're not offering it for this. And we always tell people that we can just go on their successes. It's safe procedure. So the biggest part, the biggest overcoming, is, of course, it's expensive because we're looking at exosomes and stem cells and neuropeptides. So we have a protocol for cognitive decline. And then finally, we're just finalizing our heart disease protocol, because as we know now Heart disease is not the soft plaque, but the very soft plaque, the LDL plaques, of which colchicine has been the number one drug to treat those people from coming on to heart attacks. And I'm an ODR doc, so I'm like, this is fantastic. But ask yourself this. What does colchicine treat?

Inflammation.

Uric acid, right?

Yeah. Your. Your inflammation is a uric acid marker. So if. And we're very confident that. Well, then if. If it's the. It's the toxins driving the inflammation.

Yes. Which is we don't have to give.

Them colchicine, we just have to get the toxins out. So, yeah, just started with four gentlemen who are 50 years old have inappropriate amount of heart disease for their age. They're all very healthy guys, except when we start looking at the coronary artery, it's bad. And they have a lot of the very low density plaques. So we're very excited to watch these people. We're working with a couple universities here in Chicago and a couple major cardiologists and a company called clearly, which if you're not here about Clearly.

Yes, I know about Clearly.

Yes, I've done hundreds of clearly now in patients because it gives us so much good information.

Maybe you can just explain. I know exactly what it is. But for those listening, clearly is an advanced.

So, yeah, when you're in the air, Doc, you know, and you can't look at. We never looked at cholesterol because it never told me if you're having a heart attack or if you're even at risk. Cholesterol is not the problem. Inflammation is. And we can't look at the heart. The only way we can do it is take you up to the, the radiology room, poke you in the groin, put an angiogram into your heart, and squirt dye into the arteries to see if they have narrowing. But that's all we saw, was narrowing. Yeah. This new technology is AI at its best. So what we do is you go in for a CAT scan and we inject you with some dye and we do a CAT scan of your heart by the dyes going through those heart arteries. Then an AI program takes all that data and reconstructs it so we can see. I can see, literally they straighten the arteries out. I can look at the whole artery. I can see where there's blockages. I can see how much. Much. I can see the difference between the calcified plaque, the yellow plaque, and the very dense or the very low density plaque and where it's at And I can start having some serious discussions that I did today with one patient, healthy guy, 50 year old, had a calcium score in a couple hundreds. Let's go do it. Clearly did that. His interesting thing is his right main completely clean. His circumflex completely clean. Left anterior and left main. A lot of calcium, a lot of plaque, a lot of very low density plaque. And he's going to be one of the gentlemen who's going to proceed forward with their plasma exchange. Because what we know, we have the data about what colchicine does to these low density. And now we're going to compare our process with that. Because the difference is when you're done with our process, you don't have to stay on the colchicine. Matter of fact, we're not giving colchicine. But when you're done, we resolve the inflammation. Isn't that what we want to do in medicine today?

Exactly. And just for those listening to be be really clear, cholesterol is like the spackling when you get a hole in your wall. And so we have this endothelial lining of every vessel in our body. And when it gets damaged by toxic exposure, inflammation, infection, all of these processes that we're talking about, the body by nature is trying to heal that lining. And so it sticks the spackling.

So we here you have all these toxins and inflammation.

Yes.

Irritating the cholesterol as it's sitting there and burning it and making it into these small, dense little particles that don't heal but cause more damage. I mean when you, when you take the whole thing apart. And Joe, you can appreciate this as we did, what we realized at the moment when we saw the study is we think we just figured out a way to pretty much universally remove inflammation.

Yes.

Because today it's different. So people are like, oh, we tried to use aphoresis 40 years ago to remove inflammation. It wasn't toxins back then.

Right, right. Well, I just have to say, Dr. Savage, I remember when you shared with me this information. Hey Jill, watch this presentation. This is just a few weeks or months ago. It's not that long ago. And I know truth when I see it. And again, I saw your presentation. I thought this is something the world needs to hear about among above anything I'm talking about right now. This is so profound and I just want to share. You shared this data with me, but I would like to read this, the plasma protocol data of the decrease in some of these things. I want to.

Are you able to show that on the screen?

Yes, I think I could do that.

If you can, I can.

Yes. Let's see if we can do that. Just so it's in an email, but we can just do a. Let me. Okay, one sec here, guys. Hang on, because this is worth seeing. I'm going to read these off.

Okay, here. Plasma chain protocol data. Microplastics decreased by 90%. Heavy metals decreased by an average of 80% with aluminum showing remarkable 100% decreases.

Here's interesting about the aluminum, which we know is really a stir of Alzheimer's. All the patients had all their aluminum removed and has kept it down for a year after just three plasma chains on our protocol.

Yeah. And what else we don't see? I do detox all day long without this and I don't see anything like that.

Nothing moves. Nothing has ever moved. Aluminum. And you should have seen us when we had this result. We're like, what the hell? We figured aluminum was going to be one of the resistant one, and it's gone. And I mean it's gone permanently. It doesn't come back. We test people even after we're done with the procedure. And as long as they're filtering their water and keeping away from the dry cleaning and all these other places that aluminum is, we're not seeing any elevation of their aluminum a year out.

Yeah. Phthalates, 97%. Environmental toxins in general, 95%. Health biomarkers improved up to 95%. Inflammation reduced to normal. Oxidative stress significantly reduced. Immune system improved up by 80%. Unbelievable data there.

And I love the data that wasn't shared. There is. We did the Beckman fatigue score. Our depression score.

Yes.

Improved in the patient. Remember that group I told you that were depressed when we started? That were the ones. They improved over 70% of their depression score after we'd done the procedure. And on the fatigue, we also did the fatigue score and that improved almost a hundred percent about six months after we ended the procedures. And we're like, well, that was kind of interesting because we were all disappointed when we got done. We thought these fatigue, chronic fatigue patients would be like dancing on the rooftops after we got the procedure and they were done. And they're like, yeah, I don't feel any different. We're like. So we just kept moving forward. It took six months for their body to heal.

Yes.

That's what we can see because now we see the healing factors improve and the nutrients improve and were like, oh, this is really interesting. But it took their body that about on average six months. And then they Start redo the test. And they come. You know what, I'm starting to feel better. For the first time ever, we have one lady who I love to tell the story of, been a patient of mine for a long time. She would get up at noon and she would get, go to bed at 8 o'. Clock. And that was her day for 20 years. Wow. And we tried everything on her. We tried every type of detox. And you know these patients, you give them a little bit of anything and they react so like, like explosions, right? We tried everything for 20 years. Nothing worked. We put her through the program. She's the one who got really rheumatoid, high fevers. She really had a rocky road. She's a trooper because she's just talk about a warrior and resilience. She's like, we're going through this. And we had to do eight, eight exchanges on her. And then afterwards she's like, I'm not feeling good. I said, okay, let's see how you do. Six months later she comes in now she go, gets up at 9 o' clock in the morning and she goes to bed at 9 o' clock at night. And that may sound to most people like that's not for a person who's up at noon. I mean now she can, she can't go out late at night still. She can't get up for early morning mass. But that's four hours. You know, that's a 50% increase in the time that she's awake. And the fact that now that she's awake, she has a lot less depression, a lot more energy. She has a life for the first time in 20 years. So we're really excited about all the implications that this process has for people lives.

Well, Dr. Savage, it is a true pleasure and an honor to interview you. And I want to go back to something you said at the very beginning of just that moment where you were retired and you read and you really had this. And you know, honestly, any great movement in history, whether it's Einstein, it's always this like combination of true experience and medical knowledge or whatever your, your career is. But then there's also this bigger, almost like a spiritual, energetic thing that happened to you. And I just want to say thank you for hearing that called on your life of turning and being like, yes, I'm going to move forward with this. This is absolutely important for our future. And I love, love the work you're doing.

I'll tell you, this is, this is, we're pretty much at cost for a lot of the procedures that we're doing at this point because we're not about making the money, we're about getting the data and moving this point down the road. I don't have any kids, but I have 30 nieces and nephews that I love, I love more than mine. Everything, they mean everything for me. And for the first time ever, I think we have a solution that at least gives them a protective bubble, because it's the kids and our grandkids that are going to carry this burden. And up to this point, and you can back me up on this, we didn't have anything that really worked to get all these toxins out.

Exactly. That's why I was so excited, because I know this. I know this environment. I know I've been in this 20 plus years and I knew this is something important. So thank you again. If one of people want to find more, where can they find you a website? How can they.

So our. Our company is the doctors who want to improve your lifespan. We're MD lifespan. And they can go to our URL. They can go to. We're on YouTube. Please go to YouTube. We have hundreds of videos about all the. About the procedures, about autoimmunity, about inflammation. Everything that you need to know about toxins is on that site. And then we're also on LinkedIn and Instagram, so it doesn't matter which way you find us. They all point up the same hill.

Perfect. Well, thank you all so much for joining us for another episode of Resiliency Radio. This has been an Absolute pleasure, Dr. Stav. As you guys know, there's a new episode coming out every week, so you can find us on YouTube or Instagram. Dr. Jill Carnahan or the YouTube channel, Resiliency Radio. Thank you again, Dr. Savage, for joining us today.

Thanks, Jill. Appreciate it.