Reduce Toxins and Reverse Aging with PlasmaXchange

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Welcome to another edition of FitRx. I'm your host, Dr. Greg Dennis. I was recently in Miami, Florida at an age Management Medicine conference, which is an organization that I'm actually certified in. I've been a part of for a while and I've, I've been to several of their conferences and I always enjoy that because I get to learn about kind of the, the latest and greatest anti aging strategies. If you will certainly get to, to network a little bit and meet some, some great people. I am extremely honored to just have my next guest on Dr. Paul Savage. He is really a pioneer in this field and just has had a really illustrious career, which I'll let him tell you a little bit about that. But he originally started as an ER trauma physician. He was unhealthy himself, which is what got him into just searching for other things Again, I'll let him talk a little bit more about that 25 years later. He's just a huge advocate for getting people well and he again has done a number of things. He is, he has a stem cell fellowship, he is certified in integrative metabolic Medicine, the American Academy of Anti Aging Medicine. Not to mention he has built over 50 clinics across the United States and again, just really a pioneer in this field. So. And what we're going to be talking about today is how he got into kind of the effects of toxins and a specific thing we can do called therapeutic plasma exchange that he now does at MD Lifespan, which again, we'll talk about what all that is and that's what he lectured about at the conference and it was just a fabulous lecture. So anyways, Dr. Savage, great to have you here. Welcome to the show.

Thanks Greg. I really, I really appreciate being here and it's always nice we just met like you were talking about earlier. But it's really nice to meet other people coming in the field of longevity with a passion to get some information out. Solid, good information out to the people are really well, to everybody but especially people really are focused on their health, their wellness.

Yeah. Well, talk if you will about you started off as an ER trauma physician and you talked a little bit about how you were overweight, unhealthy. And that's kind of what I guess opened the door to this side of medicine. And like I told you before the show, we could probably spend a whole episode on just your evolution, but kind of summarize, if you will, your journey, how you got started into, you know, kind of longevity medicine, if you will.

Well, you know, it's, it's a pretty. The stories that you hear about why people come into this type of medicine where it's more say, holistic but well rounded. You're including everything that you need in your toolkit to make people better is because their own personal experience or because of their experience as a previous traditional doctor, realizing they're not making moving the needle they want. Well, I'm the one who was the guy who got sick. So I was entered medical school. I was 5 foot 8 and about 127 pounds. By the time I got out of residency, I was 5 foot 9. I was 170 pounds. And 10 years after working the night shift at the largest trauma center in the country, I'm five foot ten and I'm £267. But at this point, I have heart disease, high blood pressure, anxiety. I can't sleep, I'm tired, I'm falling asleep at work, which is real problematic when you're the nighttime guy and two o' clock in the morning, you're having narcolepsy because you just can't stay awake anymore. And I went to my doctor and I was like, neil, I don't feel good. I'm, you know this. And he's ready to put me on my seventh pill. And I'm like, neil, I'm not better. I'm not getting any better. He goes, well, you're not trying to get better. I think, what do you mean? He goes, you're the one of the most unhealthiest patients I have. And everybody in my family, all the guys die by 65 from cancer or heart disease. And he says, if you don't start changing now, you're going to die. And I walked out of his office and I realized he was actually telling me the truth. He wasn't sugarcoating anything. And I, I decided I'm going to have to start doing something about it. Halfway down the sidewalk to my car, I realized I had no idea how to start that. Now this is. I went to University of Michigan Medical School. I was the nighttime guy at the largest trauma center in the country for 10 years. And I had no clue do next. That was a little Disturbing. So I got a trainer and I got a Nutritionist. And then six months later, I'm £13 fatter. And you know these stories, right? You've heard these stories before. Working out, my trainer bemoaning why I'm getting fatter. And a bodybuilder, one of the gorillas walked by and he, you need Testosterone. This is 1997. I'm like, dude, that gives you heart attacks, that gives you prostate cancer. That's crazy. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was right. I had all those symptoms. I couldn't put on muscle, I couldn't burn fat. And so I went in search of someone to put me on testosterone. And I found cenegenics. But with their help, I. Within seven months, I dropped 50 pounds, gained 20 pounds of muscle. Everything started coming back on. My libido got better. My, you know, my fatigue went away. And I was like, this is incredible. Why aren't we doing this for everybody? And that's when I decided that I was going to leave the ER and go up to clinics. And I still remember my. The director of the emergency room going, you're going to do what? You're gonna. You're gonna do what? I'm gonna go treat guys in the clinic with testosterone. Yeah. Not taking insurance. Yeah. He goes, good luck with that. And then five years later, I have 50 clinics nationwide.

Wow, that's impressive. You know, we, you know, you've done so many things. Like I said, we could, we could have, you know, I could. I could make 10 episodes, you know, talking to you.

We can have a lot of fun.

But I. I kind of want to focus, I guess. I mean, again, you're an expert on a lot of things, but kind of fast forward a lot of years and you got kind of focused on toxins. And so one of the things you talked about was, you know, how. How bad toxins are right now, how they are, you know, causing all, you know, you know, or at least contributing to all these, you know, chronic illnesses. And so I guess talk a little bit about that. I mean, you know, what made you start focusing on. On toxins?

Well, I should let you know that before I became a doctor, I'm a statistician, so I always look at the numbers, and for me, it's. I love people's opinion, but I want to see it played out in the numbers. My. My mind works multivariate, which is kind of nice, because when you're treating patients, it's not the one solution. It's not High cholesterol. So I give you this pill and things get better. That's not how real medicine or life works. It deals with a lot of different variants. And as you both, and I know, and most of your listeners know as well, there's kind of five tenants when it comes to health, exercise, nutrition, sleep, stress management, and detoxification. So all the years that I was in practice till I retired in 2022, you know, I got pretty good at the nutrition part and the microbiome and how to get the. The body absorbing and utilizing all these nutritions and getting rid of it. And I got pretty good at the exercise part with hormones and peptides and how you exercise, what you eat. Got pretty good with the sleep part. Helping people get good night sleep. And when you do those three, helping people manage stress is very simple because usually they're just too tired or too worn out to manage the stress. But I had a great time throughout the whole part of my career. But I'll tell you, the part that I always struggled with, I think we all struggle with, is getting toxins out of our clients. Because 30 years ago, when I used to do toxin testing on people, there wasn't that many and it wasn't that much. Twenty years ago, it started to show up. Actually, right around the time of, just a couple years before the flint lead crisis, I started seeing more and more toxins in people. And that was getting a little concerning. And so we do all the regular things, right? Chelation, but that only gets 5 of the heavy metals out. We did binders, but that only gets three of the molds out. You know, there's just all these different ways of getting these toxins out, and they didn't really work very well. And they were very. And it took a long time and was very complex, but I kept seeing it. And then 10 years ago, like 80% of my clients had toxins by that point. And then five years ago, 90% of my patients had toxins at that point. I mean, I have the numbers. I've been watching this. And when I retired, I remember saying to one of my clients who was one of the sickest ladies I've ever treated for 20 years because she's completely toxic. And that's how she introduced herself to me way back in 2003. I told her I'd help her get better. I felt bad leaving medicine. I was going to retire, and I hadn't fixed that part of the medicine. And it was really problematic in the whole thing. So detoxifying people has been difficult. And I've been watching the toxins in every area get more and more. Heavy metals, mold, pesticides, herbicides, phenols, volatile chemicals, PFAS, PCBs. And now the most recent one that's really concerning is microplastics. And we've just seen them go up and up and it's very difficult to get them out. So after I had actually retired, I saw this article came out about a group of Stanford PhDs who were taking some people who were 60 and doing plasma change on them. And they noticed this drastic change in all their inflammation and oxidation. So everything on that was heated up, cooled down, everything that was on fire stopped burning. All the cancer markers went down. Alzheimer's, Mark went down in their immune system shot up, which is amazing. And they, the conclusion was that they had removed the metabolic excesses of aging. And I realized what they did at that point was they got the toxins out. They didn't realize what they did, but they, but plasma change we'll talk about. It's kind of like an oil change. They just got all the toxins out. And that's why people are going to get better.

Yeah. So before we get in that, I guess I'm curious, you know, what made you start checking for toxins or what made you start thinking that toxins were maybe the cause? Because as you mentioned, you know, doctors even like me. I mean, I mean, I'm checking more than most. I mean, I'm checking hormones, I'm talking about their sleep. You know, I want to get people at a healthy weight, but I, I don't, at least initially, you know, I don't think about toxins, you know, and, and so what made you initially start thinking, hey, maybe, maybe I need to start checking for toxins? And then like as you mentioned, when you did, you start seeing all these toxins. But, but what was that just kind of got you down that path?

So the initial thing that happened was I was at a conference and it was 2003, and this gentleman who is a PhD was giving a lecture on weight gain and what he started doing, but he can, what he concluded is that he could map weight gain to the distribution of atrazine around the United States. Now, atrazine was one of the very first pesticides that are herbicides that got produced, that got put on the field. And it started in the mid Midwest, Iowa, Ohio, around 1975. And five years later, he starts watching the outbreak of obesity. And if you watch the, the obesity stats all the way back from the 1960s to now, you watch the United States map start turning colors because it's getting more and more pronounced in the southern part of Louisiana and on the east coast and then the Midwest. And then it starts spreading out and getting worse and worse. The interesting thing is he showed the atrazine distribution that had occurred three years before, and it looked exactly the same. And that's when I started realizing, like, wow, I wonder if that's why I got so fat, because I grew up on a farm and I was exposed to all those things. Like, maybe that's the reason, because I never really quite understood why I always. Why I got fat. And then my. Had hard time losing weight. But then. So I. That's how toxins got on my radar. And then starting to look into it. There are people talking about heavy metals, so I started looking into those as well. And so over the course of the next 20 years, I started getting more and more interested in toxins because as a statistician, as somebody who had been in the fields for 20 years, so not a lot of people had the eyes that I did Remembering back in 2003, where nobody had them, 2013, where 80% had them, 2018, where 90% had them. And now everybody has a matter of fact, I have not yet found a toxin test on anybody that I've done in the last two years that was normal. That was under. That was acceptable. Now, the reference ranges we use aren't the reference ranges I recommend. The reference ranges we use are the government's reference ranges. They say it's okay to have 1.16 grams per kilogram of lead in your body. I say it's zero. They say it's okay to have seven atrazine. Again, zero. You know, but the numbers I'm looking at to tell somebody whether they're toxic or not, I'm using the government's reference ranges. So if, if we were using our reference ranges that we would agree on, I would have said this problem was 15 years ago a disaster. Now it's just a disaster by the government, state.

And, and I'm sure there's. There are studies out there, but how do we know that those toxins that we're seeing are linked to some of these chronic illnesses and that it's not? I mean, I'm sure that it's obviously multifactorial, probably, but where does that link come in?

So we know that the science has been done. I mean, even the CDC published a paper two months ago where they said doctors should, all doctors should start testing all their patients for forever chemicals, the PFAS. Because 99% of Americans have high levels of PFAS at this point. And the government has studied quite a few of the PFAs. Six of them very in deep in detail, 20 of them in moderate detail. But the other 4,970 of them, they haven't checked. So even on the 20 that they've looked at, especially that six, they've seen some very concerning trends, not only in animal models, but in the human. So that's why the government's even starting to say there's links going on here. Now the problem we've always had with linking a toxin to a disease is to do the study you have to start with the same population. So you'd have to start with either population that wasn't toxic and then make one group toxic and follow them forward, or you'd have to start with both groups being toxic and then you clean up one group and then follow them forward. You have to do it. You can't start with a clean group and a toxic group and follow them forward. That's not a study because they're not starting at the same endpoint. But we've not had any way of actually getting these toxins out of people. So we've never been able to do that study. And surely you're not going to take a group of people, make one of them toxic so you can see what goes down. So the reason we don't have any definitive studies on what causes what in whom is because we've never been able to do the human studies, longevity or double blind over a period of time to actually see which chemical causes what.

What are some of the, I guess the biggest exposures out there that you see that you typically recommend for people to maybe minimize toxins. I mean, I know we live in a very toxic environment, I've talked about that before, but I mean, when you're talking to patients or even just family and friends, what are some of the big ones you recommend that we can do just day to day?

So I mean, we test in our clinic over 110 different toxins of all different types of categories. And I'd say we know the top five in the Chicagoland area, number one, and I think this probably universal almost across the United States, is not what you're going to think it is. It's not lead, it's glyphosate, It's Roundup. It's 74% of the people that we tested and these were 60 year olds, healthy, 25 men, 25 women. And we tested all their toxins. 74% of them had high critical levels of glyphosate. Now, if you want to pick out of the 110 that we're looking at and pick which nasty toxin you don't want to have, that would be my top three, because glyphosate is highly oxidative. Now, for your readers that they always hear the word inflammation, but they never hear the word oxidation. The difference is inflammation is what happens in an area of your body when you have an injury or you have a battle, you know, against an infection. And what you're trying to do is heat up the area so the body sends more resources. That's inflammation. Oxidation is where something is in your body and it's literally setting fire to your tissues. That's what oxidizing is. When you light a paper on fire or light a cigarette, you're oxidizing the tobacco, you're oxidizing the paper. And when those things are in you, they're burning your tissues, they're burning your cells, they're oxidizing you, they're burning you from the inside out. So it's much more serious than inflammation because it literally destroys everything it touches. And glyphosate is one of the strongest oxidizers we have in, in the world that we release in the environment, and we use it everywhere. I mean, it's Roundup.

How can people know? I mean, obviously at your clinic, which we'll talk about what y' all do. I mean, you do a huge thorough panel for toxins, but just the average Joe out there coming to a small clinic like mine, I mean, what's the best way to, to test or for people to get tested to know, you know, kind of what their toxic load is?

So there's a lot of good companies out there that do toxic testing. There's Doctors Data, there's Genova Diagnostics. They're vibrant America. They all have very good panels. It's just a matter of cost. I mean, Doctors Data will do a lot of the heavy metals and other kind of helpful metals as per, say, Genova does a little bit wider. Vibrant America probably has the biggest diversity of the different things that you can do. It's just a matter of cost. That can run you from 120 up to about $800, depending on which one you want to do. But I like urine tests for people better than the serum test or the hair test, because the urine actually concentrates the toxins. So you get a better idea of how much is coming out. The blood is not necessarily as concentrated as it were per se, and hair only catches up certain types of toxins. So the urine is my favorite. People ask, do you use something provocative like chelator agents? We did initially, but then we stopped doing it because we didn't need to do it anymore. They were present even without the chelator. So now we just have people just do a urine toxin test. And like I said, it's an eye open and people can go to our website and they can actually see where they can order a toxin test. They don't even have to talk to me, they can just get one online.

Okay, and so say people have toxins, which you're saying pretty much everybody. All tests do have toxins.

You know, and again we're going to get into the, the plasma exchange. But are there things you recommend doing? You know, I'm, I'm a big sauna person, so I like, you know, sweating because it gets rid of some toxins. I mean, are there, are there just kind of simple day to day things people can do to kind of help minimize that toxic load?

There's a ton of things that people can do and they're very simple and they're pretty inexpensive. Now your listeners can go to our website and it's MD lifespan.comfx or F I X RX fit RX and there they can get a PDF that's called get clean and keep clean. There's two different PDFs. Keep clean tells you what you can do every day to keep yourself keep improve your environment. Simple things. Get yourself a triple filter reverse osmosis filter for water. You should drink no water that doesn't come out of that filter. And you should buy something called Klean Kanteen or any kind of stainless steel container to put that water in. And when you go out to the gym, when you go out to dinner, when you go out to a friend, that's what you take to drink with you. Because the vast majority of the toxins that we see, especially the ones that are highly dangerous, we're drinking. They need to stop buying bottled water. Please stop buying bottled water. Stop buying anything in plastic because that is just inviting these toxins into you. I'm going to swing back at the very end about microtoxins, why they're also one of the worst. But once you got your water supply done, then the next thing is addressed is your food. Yes, I do recommend that people try to find an organic farm. Yes, I do recommend that everybody clean their vegetables thoroughly before they Eat them. And even though the skin of most vegetables have a lot of nutrient value, I tell people it's not worth the toxins if you can't wash them. Well, then peel all your vegetables before you eat them. So you're trying to eliminate that from your exposure to it. Next, take every cleaner under your sink, in the bathroom and the kitchen and throw them out. Go back to good old fashioned ammonia, good old fashioned vinegar, good old fashioned, you know, bleach. There's just so many other good ones out there that you can use that aren't going to kill you slowly over time. Next one, you can buy a ozone water maker that you can put on your washing machine. My favorite company is Rainsoft, that for a thousand dollars they have a machine out. The plumbing goes into it, it makes the water into ozone and that's what goes into your washing machine. No more detergent, no more factor softer. No more fabric softeners, no more chemicals ever. And it cleans it better and leaves it lightning fresh. And it never. And they will guarantee it for the life of your house. So it's like it's such a great investment for $1,000 because that wipes those chemicals straight out. Next, don't do dry cleaning. It's just putting chemicals right on your skin. Stop doing that. And then finally the other thing, you know, there's a lot of things you can do to get them out. Number one, eat a lot of good vegetables. They're kind of like God's scrub brush for getting toxins out. Next, saunas. I don't care if it's an infrared sauna or if you're like the wet sauna or you like the dry sauna. It's all about the heating up. Or if you like sweating because you're exercising, that's what it's all about. I can tell you my routine every day is I do a 10 mile ride in the morning. Then I go to the gym for about 30 minutes, lift weights, and in the afternoon I go to our gym downstairs because it doesn't have air conditioning. And 15 minutes I'm, and I'm not moving fast. I'm sweating. I mean, I just drenched and sweat. And so I do it twice a day to break a sweat. Because heating up your body mobilizes a lot of those toxins because your body loves to store toxins in your fat. And that's why it's not good to be fat, because it gives your body a lot of place to put toxins. So. And it's also why when you're losing weight, you have to do things to make sure that you're maintaining a good healthy detox system. Because there are a lot of different ways to keep the toxins low. However, and I want to be real clear on this, once you reach that point in toxicity that your body has too many toxins and toxins inhibit, they break. The way you detox, then you can sweat, you can take binders, you can take chelators and it's not going to move the dialogue because you've broken the system. And that's the point where I started getting worried like what do we do now? And where we at with a population is everybody's there now. That's the interesting, interesting.

That's a great segue into the plasma exchange. And so you, you know, started realizing the effects that this can have. Talk about just, you know, kind of Plasma Exchange 101 help people to understand kind of, you know, what it is, you know, how the process works, what it's doing in the body. And then I want you to talk about some of the results that, that you've seen in Yalls patients because they've, you know, they were tremendous.

So you know, I'm really blessed. I get to work with a data scientist at top of the game and I get to work with the toxicologist that I've worked with for 30 years who has written most of the books on current toxicology or do toxicology and how to get rid of them. And the reason I think I'm blessed that this idea occurred to me. I've always been the kind of person that puts things other in maybe a way other people don't. That's how I got testosterone in the market way back in the 2000 and built the software system that analyzed all the data from vitamins. But it was really because I was thinking about the toxins and I saw this report about what these Stanford diet doctors had done. So plasma exchange itself has been around for a very long time, over 50 years. I used to use it in the emergency room to detox people who had overdosed from certain things that as we know bind to the plasma. So I always tell the story about this. A 16 year old girl who was upset and suicidal went to grandma's room and took all of her digitalis and came in the heart, came in the ER. Her heart rate beats per minute but she's 16. So as long as she was laying down she did fine. You know, somebody older couldn't last that. But we hooked her up to a plasma exchange and basically Exchanged her plasma for saline and a human protein called album, and two hours later, she walked out. But plasma exchange is literally that. It's an oil exchange for us.

Your body. The fluid in your body, the blood, contains two components, the cells and liquid. So what this machine does is it separates, just like a plasma donation machine would, the plasma, which is the liquid from the cells, and then we throw the plasma away. But then we put the cells back in salt water, saline, and a little albumin, and we give it back to you. And the body does very well with this procedure. We don't take all of your plasma, so we're not taking all of your nut. We take about 70% every time we do one exchange, but people do. This has been going around for 50 years. This has zero deaths associated with it. There's very minimal side effects that can occur with people. And if you become experienced on how to do plasma change, you start learning all the little tricks to do so that you run into these very infrequently. We've done 300 of these in the last year, and we've only had four people get their blood pressure down a little bit, or have a little bit of a rash, or have a little bit of a low sugar, because we just are very, very competent and conscious about this procedure. But the whole procedure is just basically taking out your plasma, which is toxic, inflamed, oxidized, filled with crap, and we're throwing it away. And when we give you back albumin and sanding, within 24 hours, your body makes new plasma all over again.

And what kind of results are you seeing with this? I mean, if I remember right. So y' all do multiple of these three. Three to five. And I think you said five is ideal. And after five, I mean, you're pretty much getting out all of the toxins, if I remember correctly.

Is it pretty close? Yeah, I mean, it was. It was. It was much more than my toxicologist and I had predicted, because nobody's ever done this before. Plasma chains have been around 50 years. It's been used for 167 different disease states. It's been tested on every drug on the market. So we all know those. Those stats, but nobody actually thought, hey, you know what? Instead of taking drugs out of somebody, we can get the toxins out of somebody. Nobody actually had pieced that together. And that's what I realized. That's what the Stanford people had done, but they hadn't realized it. But I also knew that we could make it better, because as a doctor who wants to use all the tools in my toolbox. I knew that we could replace their nutrients. I knew we could give them antioxidants. I know we could give them anti inflammatories. I know we should start giving them things that would start up the engine again, because I gave in the lecture that analogy between an old car that you find in a barn that's been there for 50 years, it's covered in dirt, it has weeds growing everywhere. The chicken may even have laid an egg on the carburetor. But there's also no air in the tires, no gas in the tank, no oil in the crank, and no spark in the plugs. Plasma exchange is the way to clean the car up. It's taken out all the dirt, all the weeds, all the chickens, but that's what it does. You haven't yet given the car back what it needs to start up. And that's what we've incorporated around the whole program is getting the gas in the tank, the air in the tires, the spark in the plug. And what we found was more than we expected. Six weeks after they had finished their last procedure, we tested their labs, and the results were phenomenal. We had every single toxin that we could test went down in double digits. We're talking about 40, 70, 80, 95, 99%. We had toxins. We never expected a result like that. But the interesting thing came to us from our data scientists when we were talking about, look at all these. How much, what percentage of all these toxins. We've got this huge amount of toxins that goes, you guys are looking at the wrong thing. I said, what do you mean? His name's Dr. Shi. I was like, what do you mean, Jen? She. And he goes, you're looking at the numbers instead of the sign. I said, but, Jen, they're all negative. They're all going down. He goes, that's my point. Every toxin we tested on every patient went down. Therefore, we can say statistically that we just didn't get out the toxins we tested for. We literally got out every type of toxin, whether we can test for it or not. So we came up with a universal procedure that effectively and safely removes the vast majority of toxins that a person has. That's step one. Step two is keeping them out. Now that we got you cleaned, I don't want to ever have to do this again to you. So we set into motion other protocols, and we have three different protocols that we're working with that have to keep the toxins out. Now we're Just crossing the six month mark with these patients that have finished and their levels are even lower than what they were when we ended the procedure. So whatever we're doing, we basically got the cart started again. Now the detox pathways, we feel, are not encumbered anymore. And you're able to actually use your detox pathways to get them out. So I'm still recommending that people do the sauna. I'm still recommending people eat the good vegetables. I'm still recommending people take our supplement that helps you detox better. And we have other things that we can do to keep those toxins down. Because I don't want anybody ever have to do that procedure again. But if they have to, we could.

Interesting. What kind of results are you seeing clinically? So you're seeing on paper that all these toxins are being removed, but what do patients feel like? I mean, are they coming to you pretty sick? And then are you seeing an actual reversal of certain, you know, illnesses and diseases?

So I want to be clear, you know, when we first started this, we started with healthy people. So I picked 15 healthy people around the age, average age was 60. It was about eight women or eight men and seven women. So we tried to keep it, you know, pretty, pretty standard across the board. And these people felt good to start with. I mean, there was. They really didn't have a lot of complaints. They had inflammation, they had oxidation, they had longevity markers that weren't optimized. They had a lot of toxins. And then we went through the procedure and what we started seeing right away was inflammation significantly down like anywhere from 60 to 90%. And it doesn't go back up. The oxidation, the same thing. And we've also been testing on these people, their fatigue score and their depression score. Now these people weren't very depressed and they weren't very tired. We did notice a little bit of improvement at six months on that group. After we got that group through, then I'm starting to just take people that are a little sicker or actually quite sick. And remember I told about that one lady that we had that was the sickest lady I've ever had, that most toxic lady. I didn't get her better. She was one of the first pregnancy persons I put through. We ended up having to do eight plasma changes on her because even after five we made a big dent, but it wasn't as far as we needed to go. Eight did pretty well with her. Her inflammation came down significantly, oxidation came down significantly. Her toxins did. And this was the lady who always got up at noon every day and went to bed at 8 o' clock every day because that's all she could muster. She didn't work. She had a real hard time even going to the grocery store just because the fatigue was so profound. Now she gets up at 9 o' clock in the morning, she goes to bed at 10 o' clock at night. She's able to get out of her house to go grocery shopping and actually starting to get some exercise in. But we didn't really see any of these things change until about six months after we were done. So what we're finding out is with these really sick people, it just takes time for the body to repair because the plasma exchange doesn't repair anything. It just puts out the fire that the toxins are causing. It doesn't fix the damage that may have already occurred. But the body's pretty good at doing a good portion of that if you just give it time and the support that it needs.

Now, are y' all about the only ones doing this or are there other centers?

Well, no, we're the only one that are, have, have gone down this route. There's about six or seven of my colleagues around the country that do plasma exchange. But that's what they do is plasma stage. They don't have a program like that we've developed. Plus we're working with a couple university now. And so we, we have a new protocol for patients who have, who are worried about getting Alzheimer's or who have Alzheimer's because there was a study done in 2020 by Griswold where they took 500 patients with Alzheimer's and they did five plasma changes with them with IGG infusions on each one. And then they watched them in. 62% of the patients in this moderate Alzheimer's group had no worsening of their symptoms for over 14 months. I mean, Greg, we don't have drugs that does that for these people. The problem is that at 14 months they hadn't done anything to maintain that. So these people started to revert and their disease process came back. So the government of FDA said, you know, we're not going to certify plasma change for Alzheimer's because you can't sustain it. But they didn't do anything to sustain it. I mean, you and I have been doctors long enough to realize and most of your clients out there know there's certain things you have to do to get better, then there's other things you have to do to stay better. They're not Always the same thing. This is kind of where people a lot of time ask me, well, can't you just do plasma donation? Isn't that good enough? The answer is it's not. We've done that study. We. I mean, I didn't do it, but it's been done by various people that they take out these plasma chains once or take out plasma donation once, once a week, and they're looking at the inflammatory markers and they don't change. And people like, why? Because the whole system here is that the system is clogged up, gunked up. It's not working. Taking a little handful of gunk out every week doesn't get the gunk off enough, quick enough to get the engine running. You got to get everything running. And then once it's running, then it can help clean itself and keep itself clean. So that's why you need this more aggressive, if you want to say. But it's quite a simple method to get these toxins out to begin with.

So they're. And I was going to ask that question about the, the local, you know, plasma donation. So they're just not getting near enough. Is that the thing?

You don't get enough out fast enough? Is what our. What we're concluding. Because these studies have gone on for. I mean, we have. They have people that give every week for years, and it doesn't change their inflammatory markers. That's. That's one of the signals. Like, it's just not getting. You have to get enough of it out fast enough that the engine can start up again. That's how we're making the analogy.

Is there any health benefit at all to doing that in. In your mind, the, the plasma donations?

I mean, it's health benefit for the world. Yes. For you, it's not been shown to have any health benefits. No.

Gotcha.

There was one study that said that some people lived two years longer when they did that, but that was from the American Red Cross, and these people were donating plasma. So they were pretty healthy people that they were watching anyway. So it really wasn't a study you could draw that conclusion from.

Gotcha. Do you foresee in the future this being more accessible? I mean, you know, you guys are about the only ones doing this, or at least there's not very many. It's expensive. You know, where do you see this five years from now, maybe 10 years from now?

A year ago, it cost us $50,000 to do this procedure on one person. Now it's $35,000. So I've already gotten it down by 30%. Right now I'm in discussions with a couple corporations because as this, as it starts getting more revenue is what drives everything. Drives revenue. Revenue drives everything. Right as this, we start getting more of this going on, I'm going to be able to talk to the manufacturing about making a sheet, a machine more suited for our need, that costs less, uses less parts. I can also start using some of the relationships that we have to make sure that our supply line becomes less expensive. And I think we can probably get this down another $10,000 probably in the next year. And I think after that, I'm going to still try to cut it down by five to 6,000 a year. Where eventually our goal is, once we know enough about this and we can define these different protocols for different disease states. Because that's really the interesting thing that we're, that we're also finding out here is it's going to become more affordable. And I think eventually, Greg, it's going to be mandatory for everybody. Because what we're seeing in the younger generation is this is the first time ever the government has lowered the age rate for preventative testing for cancer. It's never happened before. Now colonoscopies are 45, mammograms are 40. Why did they drop that? Because there's this large increase, 80% increase in cancer in people under 50, and that's only the last 10 years. And when you're looking at Alzheimer's, as I mentioned, in the group from 30 to 45, that's gone up 400% in the last 10 years. I mean, these numbers are alarming. I think what we're going to find is eventually you're going to have to be able to supply this to everybody because we haven't done a good enough job at keeping the environment clean. And I see no end in that site. But for the first time ever, we've come up with a process that gives everybody a chance to survive.

Yeah. Wow. Just fascinating stuff. You know, like I said, I was, you know, when you gave the lecture, I was just like, wow, this is really cool. So, you know, the potential of this.

You know, most of the clients come into us right now. They're that most of the clients coming to us now, we do get some sick people. And I'm very clear with them. I don't know in most of these cases if you'll get better. I'm happy to see in many cases we do see that kind of success. But I'm not, I'm not the type of Doctor to say I can cure everything because if I haven't done it, I don't know, am I willing to do it? Yeah, it's safe. The only risk here is financial, which is the, you know, that's the risk here. But other than that, if you're one of those people that you had a parent that had Alzheimer's and you're worried that you're going to get it, if you're. If you're a child and you know cancer runs strongly in your family.

You have to ask yourself, don't you think that toxins have a significant role because Alzheimer's is on the increase in the younger people and the older people. Cancer is on the increase in the younger and the older people. You don't think these toxins are part of that. And if you have a way that you can actually get these out of your system, and we have a way to keep them out of your system, don't you think that's going to be in your best interest? I do, yeah.

Yeah, for sure. And if I remember right, you do these. Is it once a month, you do a series, like a five or.

Okay, yeah. It takes about six months to go through the procedure. We have people from all over the world, and especially all over the country that come in. They just come in one day a month. And we have a couple that's coming in tomorrow. They're from Pennsylvania, so we'll do him in the morning, we'll do her in the afternoon, and then they'll leave tomor or the day after to go back. And then four weeks later they return. But in the meantime, we have a whole team that makes sure that there's certain things that we want to have people do. So we're always showing them, like I told you, with the lifestyle changes, the things that you can do, the supplement shake, how we want them to take it, and we just kind of walk them through the whole procedure. So it's kind of a training session also, because what we're teaching people is how to keep yourself clean. Everybody can do that, but especially after you spend that much money on a procedure like this, you have an incentive to do that.

Well, thank you for all that. This has been great. I guess.

As.

As we wrap up here, I always ask my guest if they could give us one health tip that would make us healthier today. What would you say to that?

A water filter. So let me. Let me just. I don't have any relationship to either of these two companies, but Aqua True A Q U Pru is a counter portable unit for like four to $500. You have to change the filters like every six months. They're not expensive. It works great. We've tested it. We don't have toxins that come out. It's getting microplastics, it's getting all the bpa, it's getting all the heavy metals. It's worth the investment. If you can spend more than that, then. The company called Rainsoft has a water filtration system that fits under your sink. It's better because it processes more water and it doesn't take quite so long and it's hooked to your plumbing so you don't have to keep filling the aqua true as you do. It's a picture that you have to keep filling from the faucet. And finally, the rain Soft also has a whole household unit if you want to spend $25,000 so that your showers are now also clean too. So but there's simple solutions from the countertop always out there. But that's the one tip I'd give everybody is you need to have a water filter in your house and that needs to be the only water that you drink everywhere.

Well, all right. So if people want to find out more, they can go to md lifespan.com fitrx they just kind of tied it to my podcast here and I'll have that in the show. Not as well. You can just find out more about Dr. Savage and just what they're doing at MD Lifespan, a little bit more about the therapeutic plasma exchange. And I think as, as you mentioned, if you go there, they can get, what is it, an email that they get about toxin and toxic exposure.

We have a whole bunch of PDFs that they can sign up for. I mean we, we just, I believe in strongly that people just need information. Very few people actually need to see me if you need to see me for this. And it's, I hope it's only a one time thing, but most of the things that people can do they can start doing right now. And that's what these PDFs they keep clean is how you keep the toxins out. Get clean just tells you all the different ways you can work to help minimize the toxins and do some things that help get them out of your system. It's just not as effective as the plasma change. But at this point, if you can't afford that, I want you to be able to have something that actually keeps the needle from growing quite so quickly.

Yeah, well, very nice, Dr. Savage, thank you so much for you know, not only coming on the podcast, but my gosh, for just like I said, kind of being a pioneer in this field and for just everything you've done. So it's but really appreciate you coming.

On the show, so I very much enjoyed it. Thanks Greg. Come back and talk about anything you want anytime.

You bet. I appreciate that and appreciate everyone listening and we will talk to you guys next time. Thank you for listening to Fit Rx. I invite you to share this with friends and family. If you would like, you can check out our website@vibrantlifedc.com or you can email me at Dr.greglifedc.com.