488: How a Life-Saving Doctor Saved His Own Life: What Dr. Savage Learned Beyond the ER

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All right, welcome Food Heals Nation. Thanks so much for joining me. I'm Allison Melody.

Thank you.

Today I've got an incredible transformation story for you, plus loads of tips and advice on detoxing and healing the body naturally from a doctor who did just that at 37 years old Dr. Paul Savage was a successful ER and trauma physician. But his own health was in serious Trouble. He weighed 270 pounds, smoked cigarettes, was tired, anxious, and unwell.

He.

He had high cholesterol, high blood pressure, prediabetes, and lots of stress. Instead of turning to more medication, he decided to take his health back into his own hands. A born investigator with a keen curiosity and determination to improve his health. He researched and explored every method and treatment that promised positive results. Lifestyle changes, nutrition supplements, hormones, IV therapy, style, stem cell therapy, and more. Fast forward 25 years, and Dr. Savage is healthier, stronger, and more vibrant than ever before. Today, we'll dive into his expertise on navigating the toxic world that we live in, especially when it comes to the hidden dangers in our food and in our environment. Let's dive right into the interview. Roll it, Roxy.

The Food Heals podcast starts now.

He is the founder and CEO of MD Lifespan. Please welcome Dr. Paul Savage to the show. Welcome, Dr. Savage.

Alison. It is certainly a pleasure to be on your show today. Really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you and to talk with your audience. I'm looking forward to it.

Absolutely. As AM I. And Dr. Savage, like many people that come on this show, you have an incredible health transformation story. Can you start by sharing how you embraced integrative medicine after healing yourself first?

Yeah, that's. You know, I've been told by a lot of the people that I get interviewed by or by patients that I should write a book about my life story someday. And I think that's, for me, it's my life story. But, you know, when I. I guess I just think that everybody has a story like mine, but my story is I want to just get a little bit into it because it matters a lot in the end, because it's not just about anything that happens, but it's about things that happen to our lives as we go along. I always tell doctors when I'm. And I always tell new patients on complex patients. Start back at the beginning, way back, and tell me your life story. Because everything is a blossoming onion. You know, it just gets layered and layered and layered. So I was born in a Midwestern town, and I love my parents. My family very much, but really were dysfunctional Irish Catholics, and the family was alcoholic. So I grew up in a household that was very dysfunctional. There were six of us. I had a twin brother, and I'm gay. And this was in the 70s, so it was difficult. And my family knew I was gay before I did. And that caused a lot of strife in the family, and to a degree of. With our family, it's always about what we looked like to the outside world. You know, make sure that they see a different you, make sure they see this you. Because we were the Brady Bunch when we were not the Brady Bunch. But I had that in my head for a long time. And I had to leave home at an early age, and I had to strike out on my own. And that's a little bit unnerving in the late 70s, early 80s to be gay on your own. And found my way to the biggest city that was near me, which was Lansing and East Lansing, and got a job at a warehouse. And then with the help of an angel, as we all get angels, she got me into college. I did very well, and I got myself into medical school. But I had to work two jobs through medical school and go to medical school to be able to get to where I wanted to go. And for me, this whole time, Allison was, that's just life. And that's what I would tell myself. But, you know, the thing to understand, because we talk about health and wellness and being emotional, mental, spiritual, physical, all of this is I didn't understand at the time I was emotionally stunted, that I just didn't. I didn't get angry, but I didn't really get happy either. And I was scared and I was hurt and angry underlying all of it. So. But that's what drove me. So I ended up getting into a very good residency program and in the emergency medicine program, because most doctors gravitate towards the area they're trying to heal. And for me, my whole life was an emergency. It was one after another. And it's interesting, but that's how doctors find their specialty. And then for 10 years, I was the nighttime guy at some of the largest and actually one of the largest trauma centers in the world. And we was. And that was in Detroit, Michigan. And this was when Detroit was the murder capital of the United States. And we were busy, to say the least. And I worked about 12 hours every day from 8pm to 8am if you came in. And I worked the night shift. We didn't understand at that time how bad that was for you as well. And I come out of residency, and I'm okay. I mean, I'm about. I was never in shape, but I was like 150 pounds, 5 foot 10, and I get into emergency medicine 10 years later, I'm 270 pounds, and I have heart disease starting. I'm 38. Heart disease is getting pretty bad hypertension, 30, diabetes, thyroid issues, depression, anxiety, matter of fact, I hadn't even had sex for so long because I never even thought about it anymore. It just never occurred to me that was going on. And one day I went to my doctor, and I would say, you know, 38 years old, 275 pounds. I'm not in shape. I mean, this is a waist size of 40, 42. And it's like, I'm like, I don't feel well. And he goes, as he's writing me the prescription for my seventh medicine, he looks up over his glasses, he goes, well, you're completely out of shape. Why don't you go get healthy? And I looked him, I said, well, how do I do that? Because I never was the athlete, I never was the proper eater. I really. We never get trained in this stuff in medicine. I really didn't know. And it was a sincere question. He looked at me, goes, just eat better and exercise.

Oh, like it's that easy.

And I must have said that to a thousand people in the previous 10 years. I really did. I must have said that, because that's what we're trained to say. And it hit me, and I'm walking down the pathway to a sidewalk, on the sidewalk to my car, and I suddenly realized I have no clue where to even start to do this. And I'm pretty bright. I like to think I graduated, had degrees in mathematics. I worked on physics. I went to medical school, graduated very high in my class, got into prestigious residency. I mean, I consider myself a pretty smart guy. And I was like, I was dumbfounded. I didn't know. I was like, okay, vegetables, right? Eat vegetables and meat. Eat vegetables and meat, right? And I'll start. I'll start walking right now. So. And anyway, I got fatter.

Because I was eating vegetables. I was eating rice, and I was eating potatoes because I like them both. I occasionally had a little bit of a salad. I was drinking Diet Fanta, which I didn't realize had high concentration, corn syrup. And I'm walking, which was doing nothing. And within about. Wasn't very long, six months, I got £13 fatter. And then I said, okay, I'm going to go hire a trainer. I'm going to go hire a nutritionist. And I did. I ate what she said to eat. I worked out with him five days a week, drenched my clothes every single time. And six months later, I'm £10 fatter.

What.

I'm like, I was angry, anxious, and I didn't know what was going on. And one Day, I'm in the gym with my trainer and by the way, he's a, he's a golden. He's won the gold medal for the Junior Olympics of martial arts. So I mean, he's a very good trainer. And she was a, she still is a very well known nutritionist in Chicago. And I was like, I was dumbfounded, but I was bemoaning. I'm on the treadmill and we're getting warmed up and I'm bemoaning to him. I'm upset, I don't feel well, I'm angry, I can't lose weight, I'm not getting stronger. And this gorilla bodybuilder walked by and he goes, you need testosterone now. Mind you, this is middle to late 90s. That was way before testosterone was a thing, right? And I looked at him and said, oh man, are you kidding me? That's going to give me heart disease. It's going to give me prostate cancer. It's terrible for it. It's going to kill guys, we all. And for some reason, it just kept bouncing around the inside of my head for days. And then I just, I'm gonna go look it up because in ER we don't deal with anybody with testosterone deficiency, for God's sakes. And I'm looking it up, I'm like, unable to put on muscle, unable to lose weight, tired, especially after 5pm, anxious, irritable, no libido, no erections, hair, just. I'm like, what the. Okay, I'm going to go do my testosterone level. So I did my testosterone, it came back 92. You know what I said, what does that mean? I had no clue what that meant. 92, is that good? Is it bad? So I called my endocrinologist, went over to his office, he goes, yeah, that's pretty low. I said, really? He goes, yeah, like my 90 year olds, like, okay, well, let's start on testosterone. He goes, you can't do that. I said, why not? Because it causes prostate cancer and heart disease. And it's illegal to prescribe testosterone to a guy who doesn't have testicular cancer or certain other, you know, problem. I'm like, I'm like, are you kidding me? And he goes, no, not at all. And so then I did the next best thing that every sane doctor would do. I went on the Internet to find out where I could buy it.

I was like, God damn, I'm going to go, this sounds like something I need. Anyway, I found a compounding pharmacy to find out that, yes, still certain types of Testosterone were in the anti serot act, but compounded testosterone had found a little bit of an area to maneuver. And then we can talk about compounded pharmacies every day. They're wonderful and deadly and terrible at the same time, but I love them. And so they invited me to a convention that they were having, and I stopped by there and I start listening to the convention. And up on the stage is my residency director now, hormone expert, Dr. Pavlov.

And talk about fate. I mean, this is the interesting thing about life. If you look, there's a string of patterns through everybody's lives, and there's. There's connections that you make and there's relationships you develop and things that happen to you. And at the end of the day, when you're 62, like me, and you've had so many interesting things happen to your life, you look back on life and you realize this is wonderful. It's just wonderful on the ups and the downs. So I learned from her in exchange to help her build the first fellowship in integrative medicine out of the University of Southern Florida. Then I went on to help build two other fellowships as well. I got better, significantly. I mean, within nine months, I'm down 70 pounds of fat. I'm up 20, 30 pounds of muscle. The lights came on, my erections came on. My, my, My appetite for life came back. My brain stopped being gray and turned back the colors is all I can tell you. Because everything, it was so transformational, so existential that I went into. I had decided. I went into my boss and I gave him my notification that I'm leaving the er. He goes, what are you going to do? I'm going to go out and open a clinic and treat guys with testosterone. You know that's illegal, don't you? Yeah, well, there's ways around that. And you're not going to get insurance to pay. No, they're going to pay me cash. No guy's going to pay you cash to give you. Anyway, we know the story how that ends, right? And here I am now in 2006, and I have about 60 clinics throughout the United States treating hormones to both men and women and starting in the integrative space. And that happened because of a angel that stopped by my office one day named Suzanne Summers. And you may know her, she wrote some books on menopause. And she came in my office a month after I opened, she sat down and said, you're the only doctor in this area that is doing hormones, but you're doing them for men. I Said, that's right. She goes, Dr. Savage, you need to do this for women. And I said, I don't know anything about that. She goes, you don't have to. I have people that can teach you. I said, but why do I want to do it for women? She said, you do it for the women. They'll bring their husbands.

Very good point.

It was the best piece of marketing advice to this day I've ever been given. And that's how we expanded to 70, 70 centers. And then unfortunately, a terrible thing happened with a business relationship that I had. And let's just say within a day, the company was no longer mine.

Oh, no.

$2 million in debt to the IRS. Things weren't paid and my identity was locked into that business and everything got torn away from me. And it spun me out of control. And I'm not. I'm. Let's talk about relationships. It's always 50, 50. I had my part in it, too. I didn't see this coming, but everybody plays a role. And it did spin me out of control and it did send me into a very dark period for about a year. I finally was able to get some help from the people that I love. I'm recovering from alcoholic. I've been now alcohol free for almost 20 years now.

Congratulations.

Thank you. But there was friends around me that came to me and said, we need you. You need to get better. You need. And they helped me understand that you can't do that by yourself. So gave up. And by the way, when I was in the er, I was smoking, so stopped smoking, stopped drinking, got better. And then I set out and I. There was no software system and data collection because if you want to prove traditional medicine how to do integrative medicine, you got to show them the numbers. The only way to do that was to build an emr, a medical system, software system. And I did that. And we had thousands of doctors and millions of patients and we gathered data over 10 years and I was able to prove many different aspects, including the hormones, got them out of the anti steroid act vitamins, which ones are good, which ones aren't. Believe me when I tell you 95% of the stuff you buy on the market doesn't have any vitamins in it.

I believe you. That's why I interview people on the podcast first before I buy the product. But continue.

I'm telling you, we qualified every supplement. We had 45,000 different supplements through our software. And I can tell you the top 10 brands and the ones that actually work and why you have to buy them from certain places because they're all biodegradable. They all. They all get weaker with age. So that's another podcast we can talk about. And then I built that company up and then I decided to open a bunch of other clinics. So I went out and started a bunch of other clinics and got those all started up and felt pretty comfortable. It was enjoyable. I me, I met my husband 15 years ago. So that's about five years after I got sober. And it's been wonderful ever since. And then I retired in August of 2022 and I was talking to one of my mentors that it was a great time and touched a lot of people, made a lot of changes. Felt like it really made my mark in the world. But I bemoaned to her that the thing that we had been watching for the last 20 years and often talking about were the toxins as we watched them. Because remember the integrative space. I've been there for 25 years and we've been monitoring these on patients for the entire time. And we've watched them climb, and I'm not. And they've climbed in number, they've climbed in quantity. I mean, there's. There's more of them than. The amount of them is more. And they're more deadly than they've ever been. And we're seeing these, this, this thing that people always talk about, chronic inflammation driving illness. And that is not a conversation that we used to have until about the early 90s, it started to be talked about. We can talk about all the different data claims that people make, and they're wrong on those claims. But chronic inflammation is the hallmark of everything bad for you. And it is significant and it is present and it is getting worse. And it is almost entirely now driven by toxins in our environment where 60 years. We're 60 years ago, it was smoking, typhus, influenza, and a couple other different things that would GI issues which would cause chronic inflammation. But the reason we have more autoimmune today, the reason we're seeing cancer in people under 50, the reason we're seeing a 400% increase in Alzheimer's in people who are 30, and a 400% increase in Parkinson's, why we're seeing more birth defects, why we're seeing lower aptitudes. I'm sorry, folks, there's only. It's all one thing, and I'm absolutely convinced it's the toxins. We have put so much in our world. This is kind of like that movie Twister. Where people. The guy says at the screen, like the tornado, it's coming. He looks and he goes, it's already here. Because that's what the traditional doctors do. Oh, yeah, the toxin problem. Yeah, it's going to be bad. We got to do something about it. It's not going to be bad, Allison.

It is bad.

It is bad. It's here, it's now. We're up to our necks in it. We're seeing kids with. I mean, I'm 62, but I'm seeing 40 year olds and 30 year olds. And not only are they having cancer, they're having incredibly aggressive cancers that we never used to see. Except for very old people with very complex medical problems, these type of aggressive cancers. It's heartbreaking. And so I was bemoaning to her that that's the one thing I never figured out. And I was very. I mean, we have saunas, infrared saunas and chelation and clay and charcoal and glutathione and IV and oral and rectal, and we have all sorts of different ways to avoid them. But in actuality, with all those things that people are doing, and I know they need to do them better, the toxin levels were continuing to increase and now it's affecting everybody across the board. And that's where I left it. And my husband and I have a place in Brazil. We went down to Brazil three weeks after I retired. After my last day, I was reading articles because I'm a data fiend. I love data, I love to read. And I was reading an article by a group in San Diego who had recently done a procedure called a plasmapheresis. And for your listeners who are not familiar with that, this has been around for 50 years. I used to use it in the emergency room. I used to use it on drug overdoses to get the drugs out of people. So it's not new, but they used it in a different way because they used it on older people who had inflammatory markers that were elevated, oxidative markers, which we'll talk a little bit difference between inflammation and oxidation. Cancer markers, Alzheimer's markers and siestin markers, which is the zombie cells, were all not good in these clients. And then the immune system was not good. And after they did a series of five of these, plasma change, think oil change for the human takes about two hours, all those went away, Their inflammation went down, oxidation went down, cyascence, cancer markers, Alzheimer's markers, and their immune system jumped up about 25%, which I've never seen. And somebody just by doing, we Tried to do it with echinacea and supplements, and it didn't work. And when I read that paper, maybe it's just because of things I've been through in life. Maybe it's because I've learned software, I built marketing companies, I've built multiple clinics. Maybe it's because I built the fellowships, maybe because toxins were such. In my mind. I realized when I read the paper, their conclusion of why the results happened was wrong. They said it was because they changed the metabolic markers of excess, the biologic excess. In other words, the garbage we make when our system works. And I was like, no, you missed the point, dudes. You just found a way to take the toxins out. And I was fairly confident it was all the toxins. And I must have stood there, I'm a little teary eyed right now. I got chills. I probably stood there for three, four minutes. My husband came out and he looked at me and I turned, I had this little tear coming out of my eyes. He goes, what's wrong? I said, I think the universe just gave me a gift. He goes, what do you mean? I said, I think I know how to fix something that nobody else has figured out how to fix. Not the way we can do it. And I told him about that because he's also a business. He also works for me in the business. Will you do this with me? Because if my husband. That's a part of life, right, Allison, you gotta. You gotta draw in your fans and your strengths.

Yeah. And you had just retired.

If he wasn't gonna join me, this was not gonna happen. But he looked at me, goes, yeah, this is something we gotta do, don't we? I said, yeah. So within about a week, I'd called the researcher, I'd called some of my mentors, some of the smartest people I know in the world. And I know people all over the world, Brazil, China. And I was talking to him about my idea and getting input from them on how to do this better. And long story short, got back into business, got the machine, got certified, put the protocol together, got everything up and running. Because I'd sold my practice, I had to start with ground up and software systems and everything. My patients, some of them started to find me. Other new patients I found, and I started talking to them. And I think I have a solution here. I think I know how to get toxins out. I don't know how, what percentage. I think I can get quite a bit of it. But do you trust me enough? Because it's not Inexpensive. They said yes. They said yes. And there we went. And so for the next year we took, we've done 300 plus procedures now in 15 months and we started getting the numbers back. Do you know who is the number one patient, the first patient on my list? Me. Yeah, no, I mean that's, that's it, right? I mean if you're gonna, if you're, if you know you got something, put yourself out there. And I did. And then we're to the end of the, we're at the end of the. Got the, got the last set of labs back and I remember holding them in front of me and I was frightened, anxious but frightened to open them. I wanted, you know, to see what it was and I opened it up and I started, got teary eyed again. We're looking at 75, 85, 99% removal of virtually everything. Not only that, Denomy started testing people serially down the road because now we got them out, let's do things to keep them out. And so really. And although I've always put an emphasis on food and protecting against chem, I really put an emphasis. I mean I really went through my house. I really got rid of all the toxins, even the Windex and all this stuff. I was like, oh, that's not so bad. They all went out the door. The food, they're all about bad. I mean I literally took all the carpeting up out of the house. All the fabric, all the fabric furniture went down, all the cloth drapes went down. Everything got changed to wood and natural and stone. Food became a high priority for me on not only eating but making sure it ate clean air inside the house became a high perform, high priority for me. Before I had a HEPA filter, now the host house had a HEPA filter. Luckily, you know, I went overboard financially. I could afford that. I found out what worked and what didn't. But then patients started coming through the system and the interesting thing is their toxins university went down and it was amazing to watch people who hadn't felt good for decades for the first time say I'm better now. It's a process on healing. I always tell people plasma exchange, the way we do it takes out the toxins, the toxins without them, inflammation turns off. With the toxins gone and inflammation turned off, the immune system recovers. The system can start operating again. But the plasma exchange just took out the fire, turned it off. It doesn't replant the trees.

Now we have to go back and start doing things to get the tissues to heal. And that's another part that we can get into. But I'm very excited because we're getting ready to publish five pretty monumental papers on plasma exchange protocols. We call plasma exchange and its effect on heavy metals, on its effect on mycoplasms or mycotoxins, on effect on all the environmental toxins, pesticides, herbicides, phenols, phthalates, volatile chemicals, PFAS, PCBs. And our most exciting one, we just got back the numbers from France, microplastics. There was an article in the paper about a month ago, about May 24, that said whoever figures out how to get microplastics out of the human body is going to make a fortune and well deserve it. We're 89%, and it keeps getting better the further away from the process that you do.

That's incredible. So what is the process? What is this plasma process? Can you tell us, like, how it works?

Yeah, and all these are up on our YouTube channel. So some people are visual like I am. So please go to. We have it on the Instagram. We have it on the YouTube. But plasma change is like a plasma donation. So it's like a blood bank procedure. You come into our office. Our staff is very well trained. Our nurse is an iv trained trauma nurse, and they establish an IV in one arm, and then they put an IV in the other arm. And so the blood comes out of one arm, it goes into a machine we call a cell separator. And it separates all the cells in the blood, the red cells, the platelets, the white cells, from the plasma, which is all the liquid part. We throw the plasma away, we put your cells back in with albumin, which is a human protein, and we give it back to you. And what we call one exchange is that we're probably replacing about 65 to 70% of your plasma volume. But the body knows how to make new plasma. And within 24 hours, you have fresh, new, non inflamed, non toxic, non cancerous, non autoimmune plasma in your system.

That is incredible.

And then we wait a month and we do it again. Because if we got 70% of it the first time, and you let the body sit, all the toxins equilibrate from the bone and the tissues and the brain, and everything equilibrates. That's the way medicine works. Everything finds its equilibrium, and then we go do it again. So the first time we got out 70%, and then of the 30% left, the next time we get about 21%. So we're up to 91%. Then the third one, you're up to 96 and then 99 and then 100. That's the general way of describing what a plasma exchange is. Interestingly. It's been around for 50 years. There's machines that do the whole procedure. You really have a hard time messing it up if you just let the machine do what the machine needs to do. It does have some side effects, but they're minimal. Some people have a little bit of low blood sugar, because when we take out everything, we take out sugar as well, but we make sure everybody eats before they come in. Some people, your calcium can drop down because we use a chemical called citrate, which is a normal biologic chemical to the body. But what it does is bind calcium so your blood doesn't clot when it's in the tubes getting prostagated, getting separated. And sometimes that makes people have a little low calcium, which gives them tingling nose, tingling mouth. They might feel a little sleepy, they might get even a little spasm starting. But what we do is we have them eat 10 tums, you know, the little antacid tums, before they start. So they got all that calcium on their stomach that gets absorbed during the procedure. They might have a. A volume problem with the, you know, with the fluid. But we're giving back one to one. The only people that have sometimes have a low volume problem are people who might be on diuretics or blood pressure medicine, because that might drop their pressure. We have to stop, give them some saline. They do just fine. And then the other thing that happens is sometimes people get a rash to the citrate, and it's known. It's known as a citrate rash. It's not a problem. It's not an anaphylactic reaction. You don't have trouble breathing, your lips don't swell. You just get this itchy rash all over your body, and it's itchy. I agree. But luckily, that only happens in just a point percent of the people who go through the procedure. We usually know who they are because they're the people who are hypersensitive to everything in Grad Screen Earth. Matter of fact, I've done it on many of my patients who are hypersensitive. And they're hypersensitive because they have too many toxins. Immune system's gone crazy. And once you get the toxins out, the immune system settles down. They're hypersensitive, has dramatically reduced a lot of these patients. So it's just been the first couple ones that go on. So having been who I was and built fellowships and built software and did marketing and public relations and built clinics, I just got the band together of everybody who I worked in the past and started launching a campaign that let people know how dangerous toxins are. Because you need to do plasma exchange? Probably not. There's many things that you can do right in the ease of your own home that will eliminate the vast majority of the toxins for you, your loved one, and your children.

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And let's talk about that a little bit because let's say you do this plasma exchange or you don't. Let's say you do this plasma exchange. It's still going to be up to you to continue to detox, to continue to or to take things out of your life that are toxifying. Right? And so whether you do the plasma exchange or you don't, we still need to know what it is that we can do every single day to avoid these lifestyle toxins, these environmental toxins. You know, I read a stat the other day, tell me what you think about this. That 90% of the food in the grocery stores, and I say food with quotation marks because I'm talking about processed garbage in the grocery stores didn't exist, I think 100 years ago. Also, neither did 90% of the chronic diseases. So that's a connection that we can make. Same with the environmental toxins I can imagine, right?

100%. Absolutely. The. The process of processing food is filled with toxins, Right?

Exactly.

When you say processed food, I'm going to say stop right there. And for many years, I've been telling people, vegetables, fruit, meat. Now I'm more specific. And it's not just organic vegetables and fresh, you know, wild caught fish and stuff. Now it's know your source, buy from the farm, know your butcher, buy from the farm, know your chicken. People buy from the farm everywhere that you can spend time and make sure. And there are plenty of these places around. And we have a brochure on our website that's called get clean and stay Clean, which just basically tells people here you don't need plasma exchange. Here's what you need to do. Do these things. And if you want to get your toxin tested, you can do that from our website. You can sign up on the website, we send you a test kit, you do it at home, you drop it in the mail when the results come back. If you want to spend some time with me talking over what that means for you, I'm happy to do so. And myself and my team are. Because education, like what you do, Alison, education is the power that everybody needs. People aren't aware that this is a emergency. And I've been an emergency room doctor my entire life, and I know the difference between an emergency and an urgency. This is a full alarm fire. We are toxic. Everybody's toxic. The CDC says you don't need to worry about it because at the levels we have it, your body can manage this amount of toxins. We passed that level 15 years ago.

Absolutely right. And so it's like, this is a chronic problem. This is a chronic condition. This is an epidemic. Right. Like, this has to be looked at. And I still hear people saying toxins don't exist. Our bodies naturally detox. Yeah, our bodies do naturally detox, but they cannot possibly handle the amount of toxins, like you said, that are in things that we don't even think about, like our curtains, like our cleaning supplies, like our shampoos, conditioners, lotions, everything we're putting on our body. A blanket brought from the store. You don't know what kind of carcinogens could be on the blanket. There are so many things that we don't even think about living in this modern society.

We have a lot of that written into our brochure, because I tell people all the time, first off, step back for a minute. Get your toxin tested. That's the only way to know where you're at. End of story. Urine Testing I think is the easiest, it's relatively reliable, it certainly changes with the condition, it certainly matches the chronicity of the patient. So everybody say, oh, urine test, hair tests, blood test, the government does blood tests. But because of the. And I'm not saying like, but every. I'm a math major, I did reference range for a living. Every test has its good size and downsides. The nice thing about the urine test, we can do a lot of testing on a very short budget and you can do it at home. And honestly, as a screening test, that's what you look for. And as a screening test, it's a good option. Because here's an interesting thing we've all don't realize is on those 109 tests that we do, and they're all heavy metals and pfas and pesticides and herbicides and phenols and phthalates and go down the list and you're going to get some of them in some categories and lots of them in another category that's only measuring 109 toxins out of the 144,000 that are in our environment. So just because you have 12. Oh, I only had 12. Then multiply it by 1500 because that's what you have to do to get. No, you really have like 20,000 now. Does that mean that you're in trouble and sick? No, because many of them are low enough that they're probably not giving you. We can detect them, but not giving you a problem. But here's the thing about the toxins. They're synergistic. In other words, people like I have mercury, I have lead, I have a pesticide, I have atrazine. Nobody has one toxin anymore. Every toxin works in a different way on the system. And when you have a bunch of toxins from a different categories acting on the system, everything gets impacted at the same time. Toxins act as oxidizer. That means it burns things, that means it destroys things. It acts as an inflammatory agent, that means it turns up the heat. It acts as a hormone on stimulating something that shouldn't be stimulated. And, and then it acts as an endocrine disruptor by not stimulating something that should be stimulated. And then it gets into every enzyme that runs every biochemical reaction in the entire body because we are a biochemical engine and interferes with those processes. And the worst of it is they interfere with the biopath toxic, they interfere with the biopathway enzyme that are involved with detoxification. So at some point your ability to detox gets inhibited. What we've seen in our studies, we've had people just do our Clean up your. Clean up your foods, clean up your diet, clean up your house, take this supplement, go to infrared saunas. And we watch their toxins. They go down slowly. And about a year out there, about 20, 25% down, and you let them go and they kind of come right back up again relatively quickly. But with tpe, they go down and afterwards they continue to go down for the next year. There seems to be a critical threshold which makes complete sense, over which the toxins now inhibited your system enough, you can't detox anymore. And almost everybody is there today.

So how do we decide if we're a candidate for do? We take the test on the website, and then that's how we determine if the plasma exchange is right for us.

So, great question. First question, first thing I ask people is, do you have a chronic disease? Heart disease, Alzheimer's, neurodegenerative cancer, osteoarthritis, autoimmunities? Since all chronic inflammatory diseases are run by chronic inflammation, and the majority of those diseases are either caused by or significantly worsened by toxins. If you have a chronic inflammatory disease, you probably are already toxic and we need to get them out. Because no matter, even if you're not super toxic, the toxins that are there aren't helping your cause.

And if you're one of those people, let's say that goes to the doctor and they can't find the diagnosis, but they're just feeding you full of pills and you don't feel well. That is a chronic disease without a name, 100%.

I had a really nice lady who's the daughter, she's 40 years, a daughter of some clients of mine. They've been my patients for 20 years. She came on and she was in tears. And Allison, I hear the story all the time. I get consults from around the world and she's like, nothing's. And let me tell you what's wrong. And her symptoms were not common. I mean, she had this fasciculation, the muscles were twitching everywhere in her body. Sometimes you could see them, sometimes you couldn't. She'd get this rash that would come and then it would go. And by the time she got to the doctor, it was gone. She would have fatigue that she could not get over. She'd get up at 8 o', clock, but then she'd have to lie down at 10, and then at 2, and then she goes, I'm 40, I shouldn't be this tired. And the doctor said, you're not sleeping well. We. We ran all these tests. Everything looks fine. And I looked at her, I said, trust me, I'm a doctor, but I'm a data. I'm a statistician and a data collector. With those symptoms, you have something going on. They've just not done the right test yet. And we did the test on her. A couple of things that popped out. I don't know if your readers ever heard of this, but besides the toxin test, one of the best determinations to find out if you have chronic toxicities is to do A T lymphocyte, B lymphocyte, natural killer cell cell count. Now, that's kind of like a CBC on steroids. Okay, so instead of just getting the white blood cell counts, I'm getting the lymphocyte counts, and I'm getting the T cells and the B cells. Now, some of your readers may recognize T cells as being what we check people for HIV. We do CD4 counts because CD4 counts are the helper cells that help your beta cells, which shoot antibodies, take on invaders. And then you have your CD8s, which are your suppressor cells, which make sure your system doesn't get too far out of control. Then you have the natural killer cells. We can go through all the different things, but her CD4, her helper cells were incredibly low, and she doesn't have hiv. And she's like, why? I said, well, then obviously some things suppressing your immune system. What suppresses immune systems? Most? Drugs. And what are toxins? Drugs. What are drugs? Toxins. So anyway, story is. No, we figured it out and we. So she's. She's on a pathway to. We hooked her. She's going to get plasma change, obviously from her profile that she had. She had where? On the. Okay, so here's out of the 109 we check on all the people we've checked over the last 15 months only. And I've checked for 25 years out of that. The average number of toxins per person is 13, and five of those are in the 95 percentile. Those people say, was that bad? I said, well, what we know from the government, because a lot of those test results we're doing on the urine have guidelines established by nhanes, which is the National Health and Nutrition Examiner Survey. And where the government has looked at pee and looked at blood and corrected and these toxins, at these levels, you're in the 95% of all Americans. So we don't know that 95% is a bad thing. But you're the top 5% toxic people in the United States. Probably you're in that category. And probably a lot of people, all the way down to the 85, maybe even 80, are. We just don't know what those relationships are to disease, but we know the relationship to inflammation. So the other thing I would say is if you have patients with inflammation that won't go away, look, toxins. If you have a chronic disease, look, toxins. If you have an immune system where your CD4s or your natural killer cells are really low, think toxins. So those are things that kind of make me clue in, like, yeah, you might need plasma change because you have significant findings already that are leading me to think if we don't turn this around sooner than later, you got problems coming down the road. Now, everybody else who doesn't have chronic inflammation, and by the way, you can get that from your doctor with a simple test called a crp, a C Reactive protein. There's another test, a sedimentation rate. There's a. There's a whole bunch of tests. If you have auto antibodies to your thyroid, if you have.

Myoperiacidase, if you have tmao, any of these tests for oxidation, inflammation that are elevated, that aren't going down, you have something going on.

In your system, right? So we're talking about detoxing. And we know that we have to detox, whether it is through things like sweating and infrared saunas, changing our diets, changing our food and. Or doing something like the plasma exchange. But when do we know when it's time to add something on? Earlier we talked about how adding testosterone changed your life. It helped you lose all the weight. It helped you get back on track. I've used testosterone as well. I have friends in their 40s and 50s who it has completely changed their life.

So talk to me about, like, when do we know when we need to add that? And when you were working with Suzanne Somers and she was like, you need to help women with this too. How can testosterone help women? Because I know we talk about this a lot with men, but I don't think women realize how important it is for them to get their levels checked as well.

So this is a great point, and this is my sweet spot too, because for 25 years now, I've been known in the industry as the hormone guy. I was also been known as the guy who gets stuff done because I built a number of corporations and did very well on helping people through that pathway. Hormones are the messengers that Tell your body what to do without them. Your body doesn't have a signal. People are like, well, it's natural to lose your hormones as you get older. It is. That's correct. Those tissues do wear out. Those levels do go down, but that doesn't mean it's healthy. Osteoporosis, Alzheimer's, cancer, those are things that come on with age. Those aren't healthy either. And the way to stay healthy the longest, the best, is to make sure you balance what we all know right? Exercise with your hormones. Sleep, nutrition, make sure your microbiome is doing well. Stress management. And I'm not just talking about emotional stress. I'm talking about toxins. I'm talking about physical things in your environment that are stressing you and your gut out and detoxification. So testosterone is an incredibly important hormone for women. Women always. People always think estrogen, and they might think about progesterone. Estrogen is your female hormone. It does two things. It brightens up your brain and it gives you energy. It makes you feel like a woman. Number two, progesterone. It's estrogen's partner. Where estrogen builds up the lining of the uterus, progesterone thins it out. Where estrogen gives you energy, progesterone calms you down. Where estrogen wakes you up, progesterone puts you to sleep, estrogen puts on fat, makes you curvy, progesterone thins you out, estrogen retains water. Progesterone, I can go on, on that. It's just, it's partner. And we have cortisol, which is the stress hormone. Everybody knows about that. That's how we get away from everything. And everybody but they don't always realize is testosterone is cortisol's partner. Where cortisol puts on fat, testosterone burns fat. Or cortisol burns muscle, testosterone puts it on. Where cortisol makes you focus just on running, testosterone makes your brain think analytically. Testosterone for women is their strength. It is their emotional, their mental, their physical and their sexual strength. Women come to see me, and usually your testosterone drops way before your progesterone does. So that's perimenopause in your 40s and way before your estrogen does, which is menopause in your 50s. Testosterone usually goes down in your late 30s or usually after your second child, it starts heading downhill. And that's when you start noticing things like, I can't sleep anymore, or, you know, Dr. Savage, I watched a movie and I started crying, and that's not me. And Dr. Savage, I can't manage the stress anymore. I mean, people get in front of me, and I'm about ready to go ballistic. And it's just this lack of strength. I can't contain my emotions. I don't desire my partner. My brain doesn't think anymore. I've always got brain fog because that's what cortisol does, is just tell your brain. People think cortisol is the. The. The fight or flight makes you. Your brain's all static. No cortisol d dens all the neurons and just says, run, mother, run. That's all. And so you can't think. Testosterone is one that clears all that up and makes all the connections work again. And testosterone is. Women are like. Then there's two different types of women. There are the androgenic women, and then there's the. The non androgenic women. The endogenic women are my tomboys. They were cheerleaders, they were athletes.

They.

They have a strong sex drive. They have. They might have more mus. Muscles than their. Their girlfriends. They're. They tend to be driven into what are considered male fields, executive fields, finances, this. And I'm not making any kind of slander against women. They're beautiful. They're wonderful. But some have more testosterone and need it. Some women don't.

Yeah, that's okay.

And for the women who need testosterone, you give a message in and they don't feel well, you give them testosterone and they're like, who turned on the lights? Exactly the same thing. Experience I had. Women need testosterone. Suzanne Summers convinced me of that. And then Dr. Rebecca Glaser out of Dayton, Ohio, she has a hormonebalance.org. she's a. She does a lot of research for NIH. She's a breast cancer surgeon turned hormone doctor. And she will tell you every day of the. Of the week, testosterone safer and more effective for women with menopause than estrogen ever will be.

Wow. Okay, that's really interesting to hear.

The reason is estrogen does not cause cancer like everybody would think. But if you have a cancer cell, like a breast cancer, ovarian cancer, cervix, uterine cancer, estrogen does tell that cell to grow where testosterone tells those cells to die.

Wow. Okay, that's interesting.

Yeah, it's a really, really good point. So I tell. But not every woman's a testosterone woman. Some women don't do well on it. You give them testosterone and they get acne, they get hair, they get acne, their clitoris gets larger. They don't feel good. And I Don't usually there are different ways to do it. You can give them testosterone in the cream form, but then the testosterone dependent women, the androgen equipment, give that in an injection form or as a pellet so you can give them a bigger dose under the skin because hormones aren't created equal. Estrogen or progesterone gets in through the skin. Very easy to most degree. Estrogen too, but testosterone does not. It's really hard to drive that testosterone through the skin. So putting it on the mucosal borders like the labia as a cream, or more importantly, giving them the injections like the bodybuilder does, or these little pellets which are about the size of a jasmine piece of rice that we slide underneath their, into their fat tissue right in the buttock area. And that's good for four months. That is transformational for some of my women. And they're listening to this podcast, they'll call in and tell you the same thing. And when they found out I was retired, they let me know that they weren't happy.

Oh, yeah. I was going to say, how can we work with you on this? Or where can we go?

Right. Well, I gave them options, but I'm glad I have a big fan base, let's just put it that way. It makes you feel special for sure.

Well, if you have recommendations for us in case women ask me, let me know because I can put them in our show notes. Yeah. And I know your current. Everything you're doing now since you retired and came back to business is@MDLifespan.com and before we wrap up on that and the plasma, I really want to ask you one last thing about cancer because you have mentioned it a few times and it is, you know, one of the most.

Can I miss one thing versus the. And we're going to get the cancer part because that's important. We've just completed a couple patients, independent studies, observational data with people with cognitive decline, early Alzheimer's. We've had some pretty exciting results that was just published in June of this year where we saw mentation cognition return 33% in two of our patients with the protocol that we have modified for cognitive decline. Also, we are now starting to see men who don't want to take, who are maxed out on their medications, doing our protocol and with some other supplements and lifestyle changes that we are seeing reversal in their plaque buildup in their coronary arteries. So I'm just saying this whole thing with the plasma chains isn't just toxins, isn't just about getting the toxins. It's about turning around the chronic diseases that are caused by the. By the chronic inflammation, including cancer.

Right. And so cancer has been something throughout my life that has affected me. I lost both of my parents to cancer by the time I was 25. Then from the time I was 25. Thank you. Until early 40s. It seems that every couple of years, someone in my life in my age range is diagnosed with cancer. And now I've lost three other people only a few years older than me. And then I've had multiple people in my life have cancer and go through it and heal it, but not really. Never really return to where they were. So we know that cancer is this scary thing that is happening to people younger and younger. What can the plas. What do you. Actually. Let me just start over. What are your thoughts on cancer, why we're getting it, why it's more prevalent, and what we can do about it. And is the plasma exchange one of the healing tools for them to have for their healing toolbox?

Great question. The answer's already in the increase in the cancer frequency is the toxins. That's what's causing it. We've polluted our world so much that our next generation doesn't have a chance. Cancer is coming at an earlier age, and it's more aggressive. Alzheimer's, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, all these chronic diseases. And everybody's trying to lay it well. It doesn't go up with this toxin and this toxin go with all the toxins. Look at them as a multivariable package, because we're not talking one or two. We're talking thousands at different doses affecting every part of the system. And it's getting worse. All of these things are the same thing. And that's what we're excited about because we don't. Can't prove this, but we've seen improvement in heart disease and cognitive decline, decline. We've seen improvement in inflammation, oxidation, siescence, which is the zombie cells, cancer markers, Alzheimer's markers. We're very excited because this is. I may not be able to get the world to stop putting toxins in the environment, but I think we're. I think we found a way to put a bubble around everybody. And I'm really sorry to hear about your. Your story. The thing I will tell you is that's a story I'm hearing more frequently, and the data supports it, that people are getting cancer in their 40s and 30s at a rate we've never seen. And the type of cancers are horrific. We're seeing Alzheimer's in 30 year olds go up 400%, Parkinson's, ALS, dementias of all sorts. And in my opinion, and it doesn't take much logic to see if the toxins aren't causing it, then they're contributing majorly to, to its advancement.

Absolutely, yeah. I could not agree with you more. I think at this point, you know, I'm 10 years, I'm nine years into doing this show, almost 500 interviews with incredible people and doctors such as yourself, and they're all getting the same results, finding them out in different ways. Right. And so it must be the truth. This is a universal truth that we cannot deny at this point, that we are making ourselves sick. And so with that knowledge actually comes the power to, to change at least our internal environments. If we can't change the world, we can at least change the environment that we put our bodies in. Right.

Ignore this toxin threat and we will go extinct. And I didn't say that. Stephen Hawkins, the physicist, said that pollution and our stupidity is the major existential threat to mankind, who many I consider to be one of the most brilliant men ever born. And he knows that toxins, not climate change, not an asteroid hitting the earth, not a nuclear war, it's the pollutions. And they're already here.

All right, let's leave on a positive note.

Positive notes is in the power of knowledge and your ability to communicate.

Yes, absolutely. And your ability. Talk to me a little bit about the emotions too, because I know you said in your own personal story you were going through all of this physically, but there's an emotional component when it comes to. Well, I grew up in this type of family and that stays with us. Our traumas stay with us. Right. When you grow up in alcoholic family, you try not to become an alcoholic. So you either go 20 years sober like you did, or you become a raging alcoholic very often. So talk to me about how our childhood circumstances and traumas can shape this and what we also need to be detoxing our minds when we're detoxing our bodies as well.

So I've had 62 years and 40 years as a doctor and 30, 25 plus in this field. And there's a couple things I always try to tell everybody. Please understand that you need to learn through your whole life. Don't ever stop. Trust me when I tell you you will never get close to knowing it all. But that knowledge you need to act upon and it has to be with intention. And the best thing to do is think of you and Your family first. How can I protect them? Don't become obsessed. You don't need to be. But there are steps that you can take day by day over the next few months to eradicate your house and make it a safe zone and make it a place where you and your family will do well and continue to do so. This is the emotional part that drives us as being. Remember, we aren't thinking beings that feel, we're feeling beings that think.

I like that.

Our emotions are what drives us and toxins interfere with all that. So if you. I mean, the more I've been in this field, the longer I've seen. I've seen people who come in with all sorts of psychiatric dilemmas and problems, and usually the answer is it's physiologic. The brain's just sitting in a soup that is toxic. So my advice to people is take it one day at a time. Be honest with yourself and be willing and open to do new things. Listen to new ideas, even if you don't agree with them, because some of them are going to be valuable. Do things for you and yourself. And remember that the order of the universe is your higher power first, because you're not in control, at least only of your decisions. And then comes you, and then comes your family, then your friends, then your work, then everybody else. Make sure you keep the order right. Make sure you work on yourself. Make sure you learn. Go get a toxin test, see where you are. If you already have chronic inflammation, if you have markers that you're concerned about, you can schedule a free consultation with me on our website. I'm happy to talk to anybody and give them a little bit of my knowledge or my piece of advice on just, you know, just. It's just about knowledge, Alison. You just do it in a much better way than I do.

No, that is so generous of you even to pick up the phone, you know, when people call. So the website I see is mdlifespan.com. you mentioned your YouTube. I know you have an Instagram. Where else can people just go to learn more about you and what you do?

Oh, imagine I'm all over the Internet. I've been out there for 25 years ruffling feathers one way or the other.

All right, so we'll just put you in Google.

Yeah, you can put me in Google. I'll show up on number one search all the time. I mean, you kind of get that when you. You know, I used to be on Suzanne. I used to do the circuit a lot. I swear, I'd Never do that again until now. And here's another thing, is like if. Yep, I'm going to have to go get on the podcast. I'm going to go be on television. I got to start getting the word out. People have to. Now here's the thing, though. It's not because I'm raising. There's toxins out there. Everybody be afraid. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to do is there's toxins out. Everybody, there's a solution. That's what we didn't have before. That's what I didn't have before. I used to not want to raise the alarm, as the government doesn't want to, because what can we do about it? Well, now we have a solution and it's effective and it's dramatic. And within the next few weeks, the first of five of our papers are going to be published and a prestigious medical journal. And I'm very grateful for all my friends and all my colleagues who just understood what this means. And Allison, not a single person I've contacted has told me no. They're always like, what can I do? This is great. You got something. Run. How fast can we run? How fast? And I have people. Our team grew from one to 27 people in 12 months.

Wow, that's incredible. Congratulations.

Well, I mean, it's got to be bigger, it's got to be faster. And they certainly need people with your.

Voice and yours as well. That's why we do this. And to your point earlier, we're not here to spread fear. But with this knowledge comes the awareness and the empowerment to make the changes that you need to make. And so they can look to resources such as yourself, resources such as podcasts that they love to get the information they need to make the changes in their life that they need to make. Because I believe that we're all meant to live healthy, strong, and long to 100 and beyond and not 100 suffering from chronic disease. I'm going to be the 100 year old granny riding her bike to the farmer's market. And grandkids are like, she's still alive.

Okay, I'll still be your doctor. How's that all?

Absolutely exactly right.

You and I will be doing podcasts here in 40 years. Going. 40, 56 years. Going. See, you should have listened to us, everybody.

We told you, but everyone's listening.

We told you. You're locked in, but you're not helpless.

Thanks so much.

All right, I'll have you back in 40 years. How about that sooner, I hope. Definitely sooner. I'm just joking, but oh my gosh, Dr. Savage, this has been a very fascinating conversation. I certainly learned a lot. I know Food Heals Nation did as well. Any last thoughts before I send them back to your website? One more time.

Enjoy life. That's what you're here for. Learn and love and be. And the biggest thing is be of service to people. That's the only real thing that brings you joy.

I love that. Well, thank you for those beautiful last words of wisdom. All right, it's all over@md lifespan.com Dr. Savage, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you.

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