Charting New Territory: The Longevity Blueprint with Dr. Paul Savage M.D. FACEP, FAARM

On today's podcast.

So it's really interesting that, you know, for a long time I was like, why can't they come? Why can't the PhDs come up with a test, a blood test that I can look for cancer on people? And the answer is they did about 17 years ago. And that test has been available through a company in Greece called rgcc, and now a new company in the United States called Galleria. It's called the Grail, where we're actually looking inside your blood for particles that belong to cancer, like the markers on protein markers from the cancer cell membrane, or we actually see the cancer cells themselves, or we can see the DNA that we know is from cancer. So with that ability, now we can look into people very early on. I mean, instead of catching cancer, when it finally shows up, about halfway through the cancer lifecycle, it shows up on an X ray. We're talking about getting cancer in the first few months that starts to develop when the markers first start to appear.

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Hey there, Vibrant Wellness listeners. It is your host, Jen Rivas, here with the amazing Dr. Emmy Brown, back with another episode that promises to be a Great listen. Meet Dr. Paul Savage, a man who, at 37, was an accomplished ER physician, but found himself on the brink of several health issues. Weighing in at over £250, battling high cholesterol, high blood pressure, pre diabetes, and just the normal stresses of life, he knew there had to be a better way. He dove deep into lifestyle changes, nutrition, IV therapy, stem cell therapy. He explored it all. Today, he has a new lease on life. With over two decades of experience in blending tradition and integrative medicine, his accolades are many, from fellowships in stem cell therapy and metabolic medicine to founding roles in several medical institutions. So let's welcome the founder and CEO of MD Lifespan, the ultimate partner in your health journey, Dr. Paul Savage. Thanks so much for being here, Dr. Paul.

Thanks, Jen. Wow. I don't think I've ever had that. I'm going to hire you to do all of my openings for me. That sounded a lot better than. I mean, it is, but that's a lot of great coming from you, and I'm so pleased to be on this podcast with you ladies. It's going to be a lot of fun here because information is the critical highway to someone's health. And it's all about getting good information out to the people at the right point. Absolutely.

We're so happy to have you, Dr. Paul. And I'm going to kick it off. We talked a little bit about your history and starting out as an emergency physician. You had your own journey, as Jen just laid out for us. But why the field of longevity? When did you start getting interested? What was kind of the aha moment that this is really where you wanted to head next?

So I'm graduating from University of Michigan Medical School. I did my residency in Detroit in emergency medicine, and then I worked in the largest trauma center in the world. That's where we trained at Detroit Receiving, at Detroit Receiving Medical Complex. I worked there for just a very long time. And I was always a nighttime doc. And this is before we knew about swing shift disorder and all those different things. And when I started, I was very healthy. Not that I exercised a lot or ate well. I just wasn't really out of shape. I really wasn't overweight. And then fast forward 10 years of working the night shift, and here I'm now at £267. I drink alcohol, I smoke cigarettes. I'm seeing my doctor fairly regular because my cholesterol is out of control. Thyroid, diabetes, you know, pre diabetes, anxiety. I start having panic attacks in the emergency room. I'm like, what's going on here? I was just fried. And I went to see him at one point, and his name's Neil. And I was like, neil, I don't feel well. And he looks at me, he goes, you're completely out of shape. He said, why don't you do yourself a favor and go get healthy? And I walked out of his office. And that was one of those cornerstone moments of your life. Everybody gets a couple of those. I can remember still to this day walking down his sidewalk and get healthy. Okay, what am I going to do? And I had no answer. I mean, literally, how can I be one of the top docs in the ER at the largest trauma center in the world? On the night shift, everybody recorded up to me, and I didn't know where to start. I really. I mean, okay, am I supposed to exercise? Of course. But do I run? Do I lift weights? Do I do yoga? I mean, where. Which one's better for me? And, oh, my God, how about eating? What? I mean, okay, vegetables, Right, Vegetables. And then that's. That's. I heard about Atkins, so let's do some meat. That's why I started eating potatoes. And steak all the time, plus diet Fanta because that didn't have any sugar which had high concentration. I mean I didn't know any of this stuff. And six months later and I have a personal trainer, I have a nutrition. So six months later I'm 13 pounds fatter than I started six months before. I was like what the hell is going on here? And so anyway, that was the start when I realized I need to start digging into this stuff. And this is before IFM started. This is actually at the beginning when A for M, the American Academy of Anti Aging started and I started hearing about hormones and that's a good idea. I'm going to check my hormone level. And it was that of a 90 year old guy. I'm like, went to my friend who was my endocrin or endocrinologist, I'm like dude, look at this, I'm 93 on my testosterone level. And he goes yeah. I said I need testosterone. He goes yeah, we don't do that. I was like what do you mean you don't do that? He goes you don't have cancer, you don't have an mean where he said we don't, we don't. You can't legally give it to guys just to give it to guys because they have a testosterone plus heart disease and cancer. I'm sitting there thinking all this stuff through and I'm just realizing that doesn't make any sense. It just doesn't. It really caused heart disease and cancer then every 18 year old boy should have cancer at that point. And that's the kind of stuff. And I started researching and came across Meadows Pharmacy, which is a pharmacy back in the day and Steven Russell and he kind of pointed me towards hormones and that kind of pointed me towards a fram. And I attended the second year that a fram got together and there was like 54 of us and this little hotel room at Palos Alto in Las Vegas before they went to Palazzo and Trezorada and then Palazzo. So I've been around this for a long time but it's been a blast because I get to do something that is exciting. I get to do something that makes complete sense to me because it's not, hey, I'm not against drugs. I like drugs when needed for certain things, but it's not the main tool in my, in my toolkit. And I was so enamored by like I, I, they started me on testosterone. Within six months I dropped 50 pounds of fat. I put on 20 pounds of muscle. The lights came back My libido came back. I was like, this can't be. This can't be bad for you. It just. It just doesn't make. And it's bad for me through it. I'm going to do it anyway, because my quality of life just skyrocketed. And. Okay. And I went to the director of the emergency room, and I gave my notice, and he goes, and all the guys were there. I know all the guys and ladies were there. They're like, what are you going to do? I said, I want to open up a clinic for hormones for guys. And they're like, why would you do that?

I said, look what it's done to me. It's a. Well, there's all sorts of problems. Anyway, I didn't listen to them. Thankfully, I opened up the clinic, and within 60 days, Suzanne Summers walked into my office, and she was like, you do hormones? I said, yeah. She goes, you guys are hard to find. She goes, you need to do women, too. I'm here to convince you to take care of women, too. And I was like, why? Because I was just a guy going through for guys. She goes, women need it more than that. Let me show you a couple things. Introduced me to John Lee and a couple of the other people early in the day. Uzi Reese and Dan Schwartz buying. I mean, I got them paneling with all those. And Pam Smith, and she said some very critical words to me. She goes, Dr. Savage, take care of the women, and they'll bring you to their husbands. And honestly, that was the best business advice I'd ever. And I started doing that within four years. My company, Body Logic MD, that I founded, had 50 centers throughout the United States, and we were kicking some serious butt on helping people get healthy. So that's how it all kind of started. And then I have iteration after iteration of the same kind of idea that I've held for almost 30 years now, which is my purpose. My vision is to help give life more moments for people. And by that, it means I don't really necessarily want to give you more age, more years, as much as I want to give you the quality of health so you can have those magical moments that you. That everybody paces their life by. I mean, it's really more about not losing your independence than it is anything about time and health. And so people ask me about longevity. That's a new emerging field of medicine that focuses on better quality of life for longer. I don't say that it's. It's learning about how to keep people's independent how to help people keep their independence, because that's really what we all want. We don't want to be dependent on society or on your family or on. Or in a nursing home, for God's sakes. So, yeah, it's. It's been fun and all the different things. I've gone around the circle from starting with hormones to gut to brain, cardiac to stem cells, and it comes back to God again at the end of the day. I remember Pat Hanaway from Genova telling me one day, it starts with the gut. And it's gut in beginning and gut in the end and gut in between. And quite honestly, true fact. True fact, yeah. Wow.

That's a pretty amazing story. Thank you too, for being vulnerable and transparent. I know it takes a lot for some providers to admit that they were struggling and they didn't have the answers.

So, you know, I share with my patients. You can come talk to me about anything. I'm an alcoholic in Recovery for almost 30 years. Used to be a smoker, obese, anxiety, had no emotional tools. I didn't grow up. I grew up in an alcoholic Irish family and really didn't have the emotional tools. And that's one of the things that I've learned over 30 years, is what I call my rules of living. Because one person, my sponsor way back in the day said to me, let me put it in a way, because I was computer mathematician and undergraduate, but let me put it in a way you can probably understand. You don't have a hardware problem, you have a software problem. You don't understand rules of living. And that's where that whole thing with mindfulness comes into play and how impactful it is. I don't think people appreciate how impactful that is because if you have a pretty good upbringing, there's still a lot more you can learn to make that even.

More robust.

Well, I know we talked to Dr. Paul before we. We hit record about just sort of how, you know, the, the uniqueness between marketing and. And being a provider and just keeping up to speed on all the new things. How do you keep yourself updated and inspired in such a rapidly evolving field, especially when it comes to longevity?

That's a great question, and my answer is a little bit jaded. But now that I've been in the field for 30 years and I've had. So, I mean, and I've had my stint through hormones and growth hormone, and I did my sin through the gut and then did my sin through inflammation and, and then through cancer and how cancer develops and I mean, I've done all these things over 30 years. So it's different for the provider who's coming in nowadays because there's so much in front of you. I've had the privilege of seeing it as it came into being and learning about it as it came into being. So I've had it spread out over 30 years, which makes it a lot more easy for me to absorb. And I'm a as mentioned computer guy. So I have my algorithms and they're all written down and I can show people this is how you do stuff, allows for customization for each individual person. But everybody has their different pathways that you need to address. And that's why on our website, MD Lifespan, a lot of it is about the causes of aging because there are known 12 known causes of aging. As you start looking at them individually, you can start testing for them and treating for them individually. I tell people all the time, hormones are not going to get you to be an old age. If you don't have a good gut, if you don't have good exercise, if you don't have stress mechanisms, if you're not sleeping, they're just considered as being a 12 wheeled semi. And if I'm only moving one wheel, the semi is not going to go very far. You have to get all 12 wheels engaged, going in the same direction at the same speed and then suddenly you're really moving down the path. Well, so it's always a journey for people to come into longevity. And you asked me before, why longevity? Because that's what I was facing when my doctor told me within five years you're going to die from a heart attack. Okay, I can either die from a heart attack in five years or I can not. And for me, that was, it was the.

Yeah, that choice was easy for you.

Yeah, well, it wasn't, but it was, it was startling. Dr. Emmy. I mean, it was late for me. And I think a lot of the docs in the world of longevity and functional medicine have some kind of story about their parent or themselves or their child. I've heard so many different ways that it really puts you as a doctor in a position where you realize there's not enough answers in traditional medicine for what you're facing with a child, yourself or your loved one. And that's kind of what brings you into this world of. I remember thinking like, there's a bunch of crazies. I'm going to learn stuff from out there. And I mean, because that's really, at that time, 30 years ago, it was all I mean I was like number two on quackery.com yeah, number two. And John Lee was number one and I was number two. I was out there on the news talking about all this and it was a real thing that you had to get around. But when you start becoming humble and realize that there's so much more out there that makes sense that you can learn and there's PhDs and Napa Pass and nutritionists and physical trainers and they all have good information. And when you start listening and AA people Sponsored but when you start listening to things over time, you start hearing the same message over and over again from different people, which is don't do this. This is better. And mindfulness and putting it into your own lifestyle.

Right.

Is a lot of times clients come to me and they're like, that's so much that I have to do. Well, we don't do it all at once. We start with some basics. And what it's going to take any client to get a longevity program and healthy takes you about 30 to 40 minutes a day. That's it. The rest of it is the rest of your day. But if you can commit 45 minutes a day to think about what you're going to eat, do your meditation, get to the gym and do your exercise and by the way, you can do pretty much all three of those at the same time, it really sets in the fact that it really doesn't have to be expensive and it doesn't have to consume every minute of your life. That's not a longevity program. Longevity is making a program that works into your lifestyle.

I love that you mentioned things that are very accessible to everybody.

Yeah. I mean 90% of what we do in longevity doesn't take a lot of expansive testing, doesn't take a lot of medication drug. There are the advanced therapies out there which are pretty amazing. But I tell people all the time before you get there, let's go do the basics first. Because you don't get the basics down. The rest of stuff doesn't really work well. I mean, study after study on stem cells show that if you're going to harvest it from the person and they're an unhealthy person, you have unhealthy stem cells which are not going to do what you want them to do. And in our so when we have a huge stem cell practice, we have our STEM cell doctor, Dr. Irizarry, who's been he's a family practice and.

Athletic doctor. That's all he does is stem cells. But the Patients work with me first on inflammation, gut weight, all these different things because I can get you healthy, I get your stem cells healthy, you can return those stem cells to health. But you have to do these therapies and in the right order. And people want to jump into stem cells right away, but they're overweight, inflammation, got a bad knee, bad quality. Don't waste your money. Don't waste your money. It's just you're going to be blowing money and it's not going to do you much good.

Right. Yeah, great advice. I'd love to jump into. Dr. Paul, you mentioned 12 processes of aging. I've come across seven pillars of aging in my research and so I want to see what you can add to this. But I have macromolecular damage, so, such as damage to DNA, lipids and proteins, dysregulated stress response, disruption of proteostasis, metabolic regulation, epigenetic drift, inflammaging, and stem cell exhaustion. What am I missing and how do we measure and monitor these processes?

There was a really great article that was produced in cell in 2020 which had. The researchers came out with the 12 reasons that we age. And they put it in their scientific terms, as you did as well. Epigenetic drip, mitochondrial dysfunction, nutritional decline. So I kind of twisted them a little bit and tried to make them a little bit easier, accessible for the layperson to understand. So I'm going to. You can tell me when I hit the ones that you said and we'll get through the other five. But in essence, what we're really talking about here is probably number one on the list is epigenetic drip, which is your genetics. We have to know what your genetics are, but it doesn't seal your doom if you have bad genes. That's one thing that people. I need to know my genes. Yeah, maybe you do, maybe you don't. But everybody has ability to turn genes on and off, and that's by what you do. So that's why we know it's 80% environmental and only 20% genetic. And that should give people some pause because I have some people with really good genes who are really, really sick because they have no good lifestyles. And then I have people who have really crappy genes, but they're really, really healthy because they really do work at maximizing their lifestyle factors or supplements or medications, all the things they need to do because you are able to tell your genes what to read. And so that's where the sociogenomics and the nutrigenomics come into Play. So genetics is one of the top ones. And you can't much talk about genetics if you don't start talking about telomeres, senescence, and cancer, because that comes from a genetics. So another one is the DNA damage and epigenetic problems that occur over time. And that's why we put up cancer as one of those. I tell people all the time, cancer, everybody gets cancer. It's the part of the cellular pro process that goes on. But when you're younger and healthier and you have a better immune system, you're able to take out those cancer cells early. The problem is, as we get older, that that immune system declines. So there's another one, immune dysfunction, that occurs over time. That brings us to the point where cancer becomes more prevalent because we're not able to take it out sooner. And all of that goes around the big three, which is inflammation, oxidation, and glycation. What that means is what people may not understand. Oxidation is burning. We are oxidant. We are a machine. We are a vehicle. We have pulleys and switches and dials. We have water pumps and air pumps, and we have exhaust pipe, and we have an intake, and we burn fat just like a car burns oil. We burn oil, and that's combustion, and that's called combustion. When you combust, you burn things, and that's oxidation. So oxidation is a fire that's inside us, and we have too much fire. You burn other things, which is not good. So that's why you have to balance it out with your antioxidants. And the heat that comes from that fire, well, that's inflammation. So you have the fire itself, then you have the heat. And then you have glycation, which is sugar, which makes everything in the body sticky and causes even more dysfunction. So then we always talk about oxidation and chronic inflammation as well, and how those cause heart disease. Then you have the proteomic decline, which is basically our proteins decline because our hormones decline. Hormones are. What are our anabolics. They make all these proteins and things that are in the body along with the epigenetics. And when you start losing those, your body doesn't know what to do anymore because those proteins, like the enzymes, they tell your body what chemical reactions to do and how to do it. But as we get older and those declines, so do those metabolic functions. The microbiome, dysbiosis. That's another one of the top 12. Because as you get older, your bacteria and your gut change. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Matter of fact, they've shown that if you change your bacteria from one set to another, but it remains as diverse as it was its first time, you're going to do fine even if the count is lower. What really matters is the diversity of the bacteria in the gut. So monitoring your gut, knowing how to heal your gut, knowing how to replenish your gut is going to do everything for you in immune function and neurologic part as well. Nutritional failure as we get older, we everything declines, including all the enzymes and acids that break down food. So we don't break it down. You may be eating really well, but you're not absorbing the nutrients because of microbiome dysfunction, nutrient or enzymatic decline. And you can replace those things so that they all work. And then finally, and I think this is a huge one to talk about is the toxins. Whether it's organic, like infections like Lyme and bacterium and viruses, or whether it's inorganic like the environmental or the heavy metals or mold or all the food additives, toxins are going to become the next smoking. It's going to replace smoking and sedentary lifestyle as the number one risk for longevity. And, and that's probably going to happen within the next five years because we, I remember testing for heavy metals environmental toxicities way back in the 90s and the early 2000 and it would be very uncommon for me to find someone with heavy metals or environmental toxicities all the way up to about 2012, 2015. Then suddenly by 2015, nobody, every, it's not now who's, who's, who's positive, negative is like how many do you have? And I've seen people with this and I see people with 30 of high level toxicities and I'm just stunned. I'm just stunned. And it keeps, every year it keeps. I mean you guys have vibrant health, they have more data but every year the number of toxicities per patient seems to double. So that's going to be the new smoking and that's the one that we're going to be talking about. A lot is like how do you get those things out once they get in? Because you can talk about chelation for heavy metals, you can talk about binders for mold, you can talk. But there's all these forever chemicals and these petroleums and these pesticides and these herbicides. Once upon a time, back in the early 90s or late 90s when one of the first lectures I went to was this toxicologist and he was talking about atrazine, which was the number one pesticide using egos and here's the distribution that dupont did with atrazine. They started down in Louisiana, they went up the Mississippi, they branched up the Ohio Valley, and then they went to the west coast and the east coast using this product. And they said, now watch this. And they started, advanced 10 years. Let's look at the obesity outbreak, Louisiana, up the Mississippi. I mean, literally laid on top of the atrazine, was this obesity epidemic paralleling it completely. And you could be atrazine or any of the other ones you're introducing, but these are how these molecular compounds are messing with us incredibly, and it's only getting worse.

Well, and we're going to talk about hope, because I know that a big part of your practice is the therapeutic plasma exchange, also known as tpe. So I'm wondering if you could sort of break that down for listeners who may not be familiar. Familiar with that. Dr. Paul, kind of in layman's terms, what is it?

So it's TPE stands for Therapeutic plasma Exchange. It's essentially taking out the fluid that is in your blood. So your blood is made of fluid, which is called plasma, and cells, mostly red blood cells, but also white blood cells and platelets. And then what you do is you take the plasma, throw it away, and you put another replacement fluid with the cells and infuse those back into the body. So essentially what you're doing is an oil change. That's what this is. But the interesting thing is when you take out the plasma, you take out everything with the plasma, good and bad. So you're taking out toxins, you're taking out metabolite breakdown things. You're also taking out viruses and pathogens and spare kites, but you're also taking out immune system.

Sisters like modulators, like the antibodies and all those other proteins. So you're taking everything out. But the wonderful thing about plasma is your body will make a whole new set of new plasma within 24 hours. So it's like you're getting this baby plasma refresh, refreshing the whole, the whole body over time. So that's what plasma exchange is. It's basically taking out plasma, giving you a replacement fluid. And every time you do that exchange, you're changing about 70% of the plasma. So the first time you do it, you get 70% out. And then the next time you do it, you get 70 of 30, so you get another 21% out. So you're now up to 91. Third time, you're up to 96. Fourth time, you're up to 99. Fifth time, you're up to almost 100% complete exchange. So that's why a lot of times you'll hear the number five or three put out the plasma exchange. Interesting thing is we used to do that in the emergency room. So we back in the day when we used to use digitalis and digoxin and the 16 year old girls who were upset with going to grandpa's or grandma's medicine cabinet take the digoxin and swallow it, which is a heart blocker. So they come in with a heart rate of 6, but they're 16 year old girls so they're doing fine as long as they lay down. But instead of just waiting for it to wear off, we would hook them up to the plasma exchange. Because digitalis is carried on proteins, anything carried on proteins are going to come out with the plasma exchange and within an hour and a half they're ready to go. I mean, when I heard about this, I was like, oh, that's interesting. And then fast forward 30 years and now 30 years in August of 2022, after I had retired, I retired in August. Three weeks later the study came out, which is a study we've been waiting for for a long time. I didn't know anybody was doing it, but it was what plasma change could do for longevity. And that story started in 2005 when a couple PhDs from Sanford took an old fat, arthritic gray mouse, human equivalent age of 70, and literally tied its circulatory system to a young, healthy brown mouse, human age equivalent 20. And within a month the 70 year old turned 50. And everybody's like, wow, this is, there's something in the young mouse's blood that's making the old mouse young. And for seven years this study was repeated thousands of times around the world. So many different tests were. And seven years later they could not find that particle that was making the old mouse young. Until finally somebody said brilliantly that that's because you're looking at the wrong mouse. It's not what's in the young mouse that's making the old mouse old or young, it's what's in the old mouse that's making the old mouse old. And that's where they went, there's a toxin. And here we go with the toxin again, right? Oh, there's a toxin, there's something toxic in the mouse's blood. So hey, if we're just going to take, if we just want to take out the toxin, best do a plasma exchange. And that's what they did on this Mouse. And a month later it was equivalent, human equivalent age of 54. So not quite the same with plasma. But there's a lot of problems when you give people plasma. Which is why that started out that blood theory where hey, let's take all these 18 year old kids, get their blood and get to these 80 year old men. We were talking about that like hey Dr. Tabby, you need to do this. I was like I'm an ER dot, I'm. I remember putting out the 10th plasma pressure frozen plasma on a trauma patient, realizing I'm not sure what's going to kill them, the trauma or bad. Because 10 years of threshold plasma from so many different people that has a lot of complications including death and ITP and all these terrible things. So the longevity study kind of got held up until the PhDs and it got with the other with atherous attacker named Dover Kipro. Brilliant guy in aphrasis. He said we're not going to do plasma, we're going to do albumin because that doesn't have any reactions, we don't have any transfusion problems. If you're just trying to dilute out, no reason to give them the plasma back. Plus if you just give albumin your complication adverse rate is about 3% and those are relatively simple things to take care of. But if you gave plasma, you look at 50% complications including death and ITP. So they did the study on these eight people and what they found out was after five plasma change on these older people, they saw a decrease in their inflammation, oxidation, cancer markers, siesence, neurodegenerative markers like Alzheimer's went down and their immune system bounced up incredibly. And that's what he published in his paper in August.

Pretty amazing.

Wow.

So I'm curious then. I know you have a three step process for new patients. I noticed you mentioned liquid biopsy. Is that what you're referring to or is that completely different?

Yes. No. Liquid biopsy refers to the ability to test for all sorts of cancers with a blood sample. Because what really needs to be understood is all the preventative screenings that we do for patients, whether it's mammogram, pap smear, skin exam, colonoscopy, or for guys, a PSA, colonoscopy and skin exam. That only accounts for 30% of the cancers that kill people, 70% of the cancers that get people we never test for. And the problem is, unless you're one of those lucky few that have been in X ray for something totally unrelated. Oh by the way, we found this Cancer really early. Most of those cancers don't show up until you become symptomatic. And those type of cancer, by the time they become symptomatic, you're stage four. That's been the real problem in the battle against cancer because you look at all the therapy you've been done in the last 50 years, we have not won, we haven't even gained any in the battle against cancer. So it was really interesting that, you know, for a long time I was like, why can't they come up? Why did the PhDs come up with a test, a blood test that I can look for cancer on people? And the answer is they did about 17 years ago. And that test has been available through a company in Greece called rgcc and now a new company in the United States called Galleria. It's called the grail, where we're actually looking inside your blood for particles that belong to cancer, like the markers on protein markers from the cancer cell membrane, or we actually see the cancer cells themselves, or we can see the DNA that we know is from cancer. So with that ability, now we can look into people very early on. I mean, instead of catching cancer, when it finally shows up, about halfway through the cancer life cycle, it shows up on an x ray. We're talking about getting cancer in the first few months that starts to develop when the markers first start to appear. So amazingly, when you start to do things to eliminate a cancer, when it's that early, it's relatively simple. I mean, nutritional changes, lifestyle changes, maybe a couple different medications, Because a lot of these cancers are early on, are really susceptible to metformin, celebrex, quercetin, green tea, capsitam. And I've had about a hundred patients now, and I've done probably.

Over, probably over 2,000 of these tests on people. But we've had a number of these people just have early markers. And every single one of them we've turned back to negative within six months. That's the whole thing. If you catch it early, cancer is just terribly. It's a sissy, it's terribly weak, it doesn't have any of the adaptive tools. And almost everything kills it. If you do it then. And it does matter a lot with cleaning up your diet, Stop smoking immediately, you know, and then there's other things with the nutrients that, you know, the strong antioxidants, the strong anti inflammatories are almost always cancer killers. That's why. Cursor 10 green tea capsitam. They're some of my favorite supplements but what I tell people is don't take kercitin every day to prevent cancer. What you want to do is wait till you have the early cancer, then use the curcitin. Because if you use Curcitin every day, you're going to select out a cancer that's resistant even in that baby stage, resistant to curcitin. And we don't want to do that. So leave Curcitin in your back pocket. There's a couple, there's other anti inflammatories that I like people to be on an anti antioxidants like glutathione is one of my favorite. But there's a couple supplements you want to kind of not use. Just saving for that day. You need to.

Got it.

That's definitely a huge clinical pearl. And I think that touches on the art of detecting cancer early in the management because there's no standard of care, I imagine with the liquid biopsy, positive results and so being really judicious in how you choose that management. I think it's fascinating.

You know, the interesting thing is it's not terribly expensive test for what it's giving you, it's $1,500. And for what it's giving you is if you get a negative no markers and no cells report, which is the best report you can get, that gives you an 84% probability you don't have cancer. And I mean every cancer except for brain cancers. Because of the blood brain barrier, it doesn't check for brain and spinal cancer. So you still have to do the MRIs for that. But all the other cancers that are peripheral, it will show up on this test. So if you do it the first year and you're negative, negative, you're 84%. If you do it the next year and you're negative, negative, it's almost 100% at that point statistically that you don't have cancer at that moment. So people like, how often should you do this? Every year? When should you start? I don't know. I don't want any 20 year old to get it. And we see a lot of 20 year old cancers increasing because of the toxicity. Cancer is happening to a bigger group of people at a much younger age and a much group of people that are otherwise relatively healthy. And we're seeing these increases of all these different types of cancers. That's one of the reasons we can't get ahead of cancer is because it keeps running further, further ahead of us and getting more people involved in diagnosis cancer than Ever before.

I have to ask Dr. Paul, before I forget, is there a provider directory that you want to guide our listeners to find the liquid biopsy if maybe they can't see you or they want to find someone more local?

So that would be the RGCC lab website, but also that would be the gallery G A L L E R I website. Both of those are very good tests.

Wonderful.

And honestly, those are the only two companies that I know that are doing it preferentially. I like the RGCC over the. Over the gallery. The reason is, is because the rgc, if you're positive and they have cells, they'll actually give you a DNA analysis of the cancer. So you know all the genes the cancer is using or not. You can see how advanced the cancer has become. But it also gives you a lot of information on what to use to help mitigate the cancer at that point, including they do a sensitivity testing on all the cells, both for nutrients and for chemotherapy and chemical reactions. So you get all these great data from that company, which you don't get from galleries.

Amazing. And it's so individualized in that way.

And so about six years ago, my test was positive on the rgcc. It was lung cancer, which is not surprising back in the er, smoking two packs a day because every ER doc did. And all the bad habits I have now. It's interesting, it's 20 years later. That's when it started showing up. But within six months, by taking Curcitin, green tea, capsitan, but and of all things, hydroxychloroquine plaque. Within six months, the markers turned negative. And by the way, I did repeat the test initially to make sure it came back positive. Positive. Very sensitive test six months later was negative. I retest myself for about two years, every six months, negative. And now I'm six years out testing back to every year. Wow, that's great. But imagine if I hadn't done that test, imagine where I'd be dead today, six years later. It's incredible.

Yeah. Well, I'd love to jump back into TPE for a little bit, Dr. Paul. And you touched on it a little bit. I imagine you're doing the liquid biopsy on patients who are interested in TPE first. So what are other parameters you're looking for in ideal candidates for TPE and any misconceptions you want to dispel or address for tpe.

So I think, I think one of the misconceptions people have about TPE and longevity is it's giving you something that's helping you live longer. That's not true. It's taking away stuff that helps you live longer. Now here's the interesting thing. In medicine we always think about taking supplements, taking medicine, doing this, doing that. In this case it's the opposite. It's what I'm taking out that probably has more benefit than everything else because I'm taking out those toxins. We know that people who have cytomed virus, Epstein Barr virus, they live less time because of these infections that chronically wear down the immune system. Plus toxicity is not. There's not a good toxin that you can talk about that extends your life. They don't. They all shorten your life just in different ways. What TPE does is give you ability to take out the toxins. Now as I mentioned, I retired in August of 2022 and I was very happy. I was going to write some books, I was going to do some lectures. And then this study came out because in the 30 years I've been doing it, I can take care of exercise pretty well and hormones, nutrition in the gut, not that big of a deal. I can get everybody sleeping to some degree. I can help every. And you get the first three done. Manage stress becomes almost a non brainer because all that other stuff helps them manage stress better. But detoxification, that's always been the problem child. I mean you can do chelation, you can do binders, you can do infrared saunas till you're dead. And the problem is it doesn't move a lot of those toxins at all. And that's when that study came out in 2022. I realized probably more than most that what they just did was purify the blood from toxins. Even the researcher said, we don't know why these markers changed. I knew as soon as I read I was like, I know exactly what it did. So that's one of the things that we do with people is when people come to see me, there are some people that are really healthy, right? I mean think of Brian Johnson, the 47 year old millionaire who did the TP with his son. And they're like, it didn't have a lot of benefit for him. Of course not. The guy is like almost as clean as clean can be. He's not going to get that much of a benefit from tp, especially by taking on his son's plasma as much as, which is what he did instead of taking out the plasma and throwing it away and letting him build more of your own. So the reason he didn't get Better is he didn't use enough, he didn't do it frequently enough. But he was also a very healthy person. What we're looking at with TPE and the longevity part is when they come across those clients that are otherwise doing the best they can, but they have all these toxicities that we can't get rid of. One of my favorite clients who had been my client for 20 years, when I got back, I decided I had to come back. I have to come back because I don't know very many physicians that built 50 centers. I built the software for the whole industry of integrative medicine called Power to Practice. I then set up a whole. I helped set up a couple fellowships in metabolic medicine and stem cells. I helped Pam Smith launch the Fellowship of Anti Aging. I don't know many doctors who had the experience and knowledge in marketing and software and studies to be able to bring this thing but it TP to market. Well, longevity space. But it must be brought to market in the longevity space because what it does, I've never seen anything else do, even on myself. We did my toxicology program and you're welcome to bring up my vibrant America toxicology both before and after the TPE, but we're looking at 70 to 90% reduction across the board and everything. Everything. And I've never seen the petroleums go down. I've never seen atrazine go down. I've never seen all these markers. They all dropped. And by the way, just to throw a screwball to it, the final test that I did for retesting my toxins, I super concentrated myself. So my creatinine was really high. Just to prove, just to see how high I could ride those markers and they were still 80% lower.

Wow, it's dramatic.

The data doesn't lie.

Right, right. It damaged that. I mean one of the things we did is we did two sets of vibrant toxicology on everybody before we did the procedure just to compare the valid validity of the study, you know, validity of your guys test. By the way, you guys have impeccable tests because the vast majority of those markers lined up almost within percent of each other, single percents of each other, which is really hard in the testing world to be able to accomplish. You guys do that very well. I have nothing but athletes to give for your guys's total toxic burden profile because, and I tell people all the time, add food additives because they are a serious problem that people are looking at.

Yeah, that's helpful. Thank you for that. What about. So the elephant in the room. Dr. Paul, any side effects or potential risks associated with TPE?

So TPE is actually a very low risk procedure. If you think about it, it's kind of like a fancy iv, except the fluids I'm giving you is your own. I mean, I've taken fluid out and at that time I'm separating it. We put it with albumin, human albumin, and we give it back to you. So people are like, well, the human albumin. Can I get something from, from that? The answer is no. Human albumin has been around for 50 years. It's what they call scrubbed, so nothing can survive except for the protein. There's been never any associated problem with infection and cancer, nothing without lbumin, except for some mild allergic reactions that people have to seeing that much concentrated albumin enter their system. So it's really kind of like a fancy iv. You're never going to have the blood touch another person's blood because the whole system works in a cassette that goes through your tubes, through the whole cassettes and machine back to you. So when we're done, we just lift the cassette out and we throw it away, or we put a new cassette in and we use it for the. So it's no possible that you're going to get anybody's hepatitis, hiv. It's not possible. The machine doesn't work that way. But it's really kind of like people. It's kind of like a plasma donation. When you go to the blood bank, they put an IV in you, they draw out your blood, they spin it, separate it and give you back your cells. The difference is we do it on a bigger volume. So instead of 500 or 600cc of plasma, I'm going to do three liters at a time. So I'm going to remove 70 to 75% of your plasma and give you back albumin at that time. The only real side effects we see is sometimes you get some tingling of the hands and fingers and the lips because we have to use a mild anticoagulant called citrate. Citrate is a normal part of our body, but it binds up calcium and that can give you those symptoms, which is easily reversible by having you eat a couple Tums. Here, eat some Tums. Okay, we're good. The other things that can happen is you can get hypoglycemia because I'm taking out 70% of your plasma. That's where your sugar is. So I'm leaving you with 30% of your sugar. And so all of our clients Eat before they come in. And not infrequently, we tell them to bring a snack to eat during the procedure, because as long as you're resupplying your own glucose, there's no problem. And finally, sometimes we get a little hypovolemia, low blood, low blood pressure. That's not common because we're replacing CC to CC. So if I take 1 ML plasma, I'm giving you 1 ML albumin back. So it's not very often, but some people get a little vagal basal, some people get a little, you know, worried and drop their blood pressure. In that case, we just open up, give them a little saline bolus, and it's fine. So, and then I mentioned the allergic reaction and the time we had allergic reaction, we just gave him a little Decadron IV and that went away as well. So it's a very low risk procedure if performed by an experienced staff with an experienced doctor. We have the protocols in place. My team together has done thousands of TP's already, so we have this thing down to pretty well science. So the side effects are minimal?

Yes.

The benefits, though, have been remarkable. Now, I've been in this field for 30 years. I remember giving hormones to women for the very first time, and within weeks watching them transform into this person that they used to be. I mean, I have story after story of people that come in and say, if you don't help her, we're getting a divorce. And she was hormonally stressed and absolutely emotionally unable to manage things because her hormones were gone. And within a month, she's like, oh, you're the best thing in the world. I love my husband again. And. And I've had those kind of stories. That's how dramatic hormones were. Same thing with stem cells. When you duct in the joints and suddenly they're moving around like before and to degree peptides and cleaning up the gut. This also has that kind of a dramatic effect, this plasma change. When you're dealing with people who are toxic from whatever lines, viruses, petroleum, pesticides, and they're very toxic. And we know these people, right? I'm tired all the time. I have brain fog all the time. Everything hurts. My joints or I wake up in the morning, takes me 20 minutes to get started. And that's because I'm getting out of bed at noon because I'm too tired to get out of bed beforehand. These patients have been transformed by this procedure. I mean, it has been exciting to watch. And you can go to the YouTube channel and they sending me their testimonials. 30 years I've never had people sending me videos. Will you put this up online? This is what it is. That's what's going on. I'm like. And I, I get to watch these people. I get, I get tingles because these people are transforming in front of our eyes with just one or two procedures because these people never had a chance because of their toxicologies.

You mentioned Dr. Paul, obviously being pretty well trained in this. And if I'm a clinician listening, I'm excited about this. I'm intrigued. I want to know more. So what could you tell practitioners that are interested in tpe? What equipment and training do they need that are essential to kind of get started?

So there is no training yet for tpe, especially in the longevity space. There's basically two good companies out there. There's Fresenius Cabe, and then there's Terumo. And so you have the Amicus and you have this Spectra Optima, which are the two machines there really, you don't. There's no other alternative other than those two? I prefer the Fresnenius, probably because they're clinical team is amazing. They're just, they're always there for you. When we started out and we had questions, we had a clinical nurse with us that has done thousands of these and she was there every time we were doing one. But we kind of had to kind of make it up as we were aligned. There's not a lot of clinics around the United States that are doing this for longevity at this point. So this is. You're going to learn it from. You got to be the type of entrepreneur, but you also have to be well versed in this field of longevity. And the people that I know are doing it are my colleagues who've been in this field for 20, 25 years. And I would really prefer that the new, the new clinicians in this field who haven't yet realized what inflammation is, oxidation, how to take care of the gut, how to do hormones. I'm going to say probably shouldn't get into TPE because it's an advanced therapy. I mean, it's like, in my opinion, of all the scale of things, it's the epitome of advanced therapies for longevity. And it takes a lot of skill to get them to that point.

Walk before running. Right?

Walk before running every day of the week. The other thing is, if you're not an inner doctor and you're not comfortable to take care of hypovolemia, hypoglycemia allergic reactions in your office. Probably shouldn't be doing this. I mean, the funny and interesting thing is not funny. But by the time we're doing a first patient, I have my aed, I have my monitor, I have my defib, I have my whole jump box. I have EPI, I have atropy, I have calcium, I have V50, I have Cy Medrol. I mean, I literally have everything in the doctor wants Ambu bag, intubation tools. We haven't used it except for the siamed draw. But there is no emergency in medicine. They're just being poorly prepared. And if you're not comfortable taking care of potential problems and that to some degree, emergencies, probably not where you want to start with this, but I hope down the road, not too far down the road, that we can actually start getting some of us together and kind of come up with a program to help teach people who are ready to venture into this field to do so. The other part is on this is it's an expensive machine and it's expensive parts and the albumin is expensive and the procedure is expensive. I know on the west coast there it's a thousand, it's $10,000 for every procedure. Now in Chicago, I've been able to reduce that to 4900 because I need to make this available to these people who really desperately need it. And quite honestly, we work with our clients. We have a package of five that also includes testing and IV supplements and oral supplements that we know make things better. It's actually a proprietary progress procedure that we put together and we're actually in the process of having it patented that works really, really well for people. And we always work with a. I'm able to provide financial assistance to people to get these done as well. I mean, on those patents of 3 and 5, because my job at this point, I've had a really good career in anti aging. We've done financially well enough that I don't have to try to make my, my retirement on this project, but I am absolutely doing everything we can to make it available to people because of what we're seeing on responses of these people that have been sick for so long. And I felt frustrated for 20 years. Dr. Amy, you know what I'm talking about. It gets frustrating with those patients who have all those infections and all those toxins. I'm getting them so that at least they have some kind of quality of life. And also now something here that it's like 95% of the people that we're doing it on are having these relatively great responses.

Yeah, I must be extremely satisfying to see that.

I haven't had this feeling since 30 years ago when I gave my guys women their hormones and.

I mean, it was like somebody. It's a game changer. This is one of those things, the longevity medicine, which is why when I saw the study, I knew I needed to come back and do this because I knew I could do it well, I knew I could do it safely, I could do it effectively. I knew how to market it, I knew how to economically make this feasible for people I didn't know. A lot of other doctors had those kind of skill sets as well. But that's my goal here. It always has been to give life more moments. And I finally can give something to my toxic patients that for the last 25 years they've struggled, as I have with them.

Right. Yeah. And you've given us so much, Dr. Paul. And before we wrap it up, I'd love to know where do you think the field of longevity is headed? So any bold predictions for us? I'd love to know what, what you think.

I think longevity is in trouble because of the toxicities that we have in the world and the infections that we have in the world. We're seeing the lifespan for the first time ever start to decline. And I don't think we're to the.

Nexus of that. I think we're going to continue because we're on just the verge of having another pandemic and we got lucky for somehow to not have it for 100 years until Covid hit. But the next pandemic is just one virus away. And plus all the different mutations like Covid right now, plus all the toxicities that we're saying. I have to say, my concern in the world of longevity and in longevity medicine is that overall health is going to become worse and worse over the next few decades, and that's going to make progress difficult. At this point. What do I see on the realm of possible breakthroughs? Well, of course, the nanotechnology, but mostly the genetic splicing. Being able to give people exosomes that have the genetic SNPs to replace things that they're not good at, like detoxification pathways like MTHFR and comt. But giving these people the SNP that they can incorporate, that's probably pretty close to the next thing that we're going to see. And finally, like all the work David Sinclair and his group's doing with the medications, they've come out, come out now. With their six drug cocktail that expand the mice, the mouses lifespan by human equivalent of 10 years. We're going to see some areas of that that's going to become more medicinal areas as well. But overall I'm concerned about where health is going to be, especially in America, because the other countries around the world do not treat our environment nearly as bad as we do here in the US.

That'S the truth.

Sorry for the bad news, but there you go on the fact that I think plasma change is going to become much more beneficial for a lot more people. Right.

And it's a call to action, I think, and it can be inspiring if we see it in the right light. So thank you.

One of the most frustrating things for me is we have a place in Brazil. Brazil has a agricultural, as most of the EU does as well, that you're not allowed to put things in food unless you're these 15 things. There's 15 things you put in food in Brazil and in the eu. Monsanto, dupont, Dao, they're not allowed in those countries. I mean, Brazil actually bans them from coming in their country. So we don't have all that toxicology in our food like we do here in the United States. Matter of fact, in the United States we have the list of things you can't put in food, but if it's not on that list, you can put it in there. Which is completely insane. Which is why you hear all the time like, hey, I went to Italy and I ate bread and I lost weight. Of course you did. That's because not food is a much better quality than here. Plus the other thing is our treating of our environment in such an industrialized way, we have really just increased the toxicities and it keeps going. The drugs, the pesticides, herbicides, the, the organ phosphates, the forever chemicals, it's going up. I mean, again, viper and merciful would have more detail than I do, but it looks to me like it's doubling every year and that is fear.

Yeah, I agree with you, it's an uphill battle. But I'm so glad you're doing the work you are. It's really cutting edge stuff. Dr. Paul, so we're going to wrap it up and for the listeners, we talked about therapeutic plasma exchange, tpe, liquid biopsy, super exciting stuff.

And delighting the mood a little bit and learn more about you personally because it has been fun and I don't have to be.

A downer on this whole thing. No.

I'm very grateful for my health. I'm very Grateful because I tell everybody on everything that we do at the office. I did for me. I did it from a very personal reason. I looked into it for very personal reasons. One of the things with the plasma change is my atrocine level has always been super high and I've always struggled with weight loss. And now from the tests on them, I was in the red on atrazine. It's like almost zero now. And I've never had that.

Well, it's empowering. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I hear you. And it's knowledge that our listeners can use. And I think a lot of people unfortunately have blinders on or they're focused on one area. Like you said, gut health or just hormones. But we really can't ignore the toxic overload in our environment today. So all really important stuff there before we say goodbye, Dr. Paul, can we learn more about you a little bit on a personal level with our three rapid fire questions?

Okay, go ahead. On your other podcast. So listen, I was like, oh, man, which ones are they going to do me? Go ahead.

They're good ones. I promise I'll take the first one. If you could dine with anyone, alive or deceased, who would it be and why?

The Dalai Lama. Cool. Why? Because I, I think one of the greatest things that happened to me in my life is the ability to emotionally grow. And I, from a dysfunctional iris. Alcoholic family. And I had none of those tools to learning all these things about life that are the actually, the rules that actually do apply. That kind of enlightenment absolutely made the perspective of my life change and empowered me more than anything I did nutritionally. I mean, they're all important, but that's the part that really gave me the biggest bang for the buck.

I love that. All right, Dr. Paul, what is a guilty pleasure of yours?

Oh, chocolate anything. There's the alcoholic this year, but chocolate. That's why they have to say chocolate cake. And I'm, I, I do have chocolate cake maybe on my birthday, maybe twice a year. It's not so. But it makes it awesome when they do have it. Otherwise, I'm usually having a frozen protein shake that is like J. Rob, all natural stuff, something. Yeah, that's not a bad way to do it either.

Maybe with raw cacao in the smoothie.

Get a little. Get a little of that taste.

Yeah, that's right.

Very good. All right, last one. One thing about yourself that might surprise people.

I'm openly gay for 30 years.

Awesome.

Okay.

Almost 20 years. I think most of the people out there know it, but when, when you Hear about any kids that being gay wasn't always cool? Actually, now it's a lot more acceptable being an alcoholic in recovery for 25 years. I think that sometimes surprises people. Being being a recovered smoker for 25 years maybe surprised me. You're the health and wellness guy. I am now.

Yeah.

You learn so much and you're so open, and I admire that so much.

Definitely. Yeah, I've had a blast. Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Paul. We are going to make sure our listeners get a lot of that information that you shared. It'll be in the show notes, so don't worry about.

That would be great.

Well, any of your listeners can call our client service advisor, and I'm happy that they can get in contact with me. I'm happy to talk to any clinician who has questions about a patient of theirs. I'm very happy to work with them on that type of stuff because it is about a group effort. Just like Dr. Emin, Dr. Emmy and I, we just. We reach out to other people. We give them any kind of help or knowledge that we can get from our experiences over time, and that's how we work together to make this whole thing work.

Yeah.

Well, if you're listening, podcast is incredible noteworthy because this is giving people good information.

That's where. That's where it starts. Yeah.

Teamwork.

That's right.

We appreciate you.

Thank you so much, Dr. Ball. And lastly, make sure the listeners know where to find you. What's your website? Do you. If you have any social handles you want to throw out there.

So MD Lifespan. So that's MD as in medical doctor Lifespan, all one word dot com. You can find the links to all of our social networks. I'm really proud of our YouTube channel, which is MD Lifespan, because you can see patient testimonials. You can see all about how to do a TPE procedure. You can see all about the 12 reasons, the 12 causes of aging, and all different ways. I think we have over 100 videos now up on our YouTube channel, including the testimonials from all of our clients from different areas. And that's just a huge resource for people.

Awesome. All right, well, there you have it. Thank you guys so much for tuning in today and until our next podcast, stay vibrant, everybody. Thank you so much for being here today. Don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe so we can continue to pay it forward together. And remember, the the key to longevity is knowledge. Keep learning, growing and tuning in to the Vibrant Wellness Podcast to discover the latest insights and strategies for optimal health. Join us again next week. Just a reminder, this podcast is for educational and informational purposes and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. The views expressed by guests and host are their own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of vibrant wellness. As always, consult your healthcare provider before applying any recommendations that you heard here today.