Surviving a Toxic World with Advanced Serial Therapeutic Plasma Exchange

So I'd like to introduce Dr. Paul Savage. He is the founder and chief medical officer of MD Lifespan. Dr. Savage began his career as an emergency room physician where he saw firsthand how many people were struggling with chronic health issues that weren't being fully addressed. After facing his own health challenges, he began exploring new approaches, combining traditional medicine with advanced therapies and lifestyle changes. That journey led him to discover MD Lifespan. led him to develop the patent-pending protocols used at MD Lifespan today, centered around advanced serial therapeutic plasma exchange. Dr. Savage is also the author of the newly released book Avoiding Toxins, a trusted resource for reducing toxic exposure and living a more toxin-free life. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Dr. Savage. Welcome.

Thanks, Lisa. I'd like to welcome everybody for attending. This is really great. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about something that It's getting quite a bit of press, and also at the same time, it's getting a lot of confusion from some of the information that's being disseminated regarding what plasma exchange is and what plasma exchange isn't, what it can do and what it can't do. So I really appreciate the opportunity to have this open forum with clients and have them have an opportunity to ask questions from me as well. So we're going to get started here, and I'm going to start sharing my screen. So I have a short presentation which should help everybody quite a bit understanding where we're coming from with all this. So, Lisa, can we see my screen well?

Yep, looks great.

Okay, so we're here today to talk about surviving in a toxic world and what exactly is therapeutic plasma exchange. Well, what I hope to answer your questions is here to clear up some of today's most Serious and overlooked health risk. You know, what is toxins and what is a toxic burden? Why does it matter? How do they build up in the body? What's the best way of measuring toxins in your blood? How does Advanced Serial TP help remove toxins? What's the difference between MD Lifespan and the other offerings out in the industry? And what steps you can take immediately. Why this matters now. I've been a doctor now for 40 years. For the last 10 years, I've been in the area of health and wellness. As Lisa was saying, I underwent my own health crisis after being one of the top ER docs in one of the largest trauma centers in the world for about 10 years. And at that point, I'd gotten quite obese, had quite a few health problems, and it was my search for health and wellness that brought me into this field of health and wellness. It's been a wonderful journey. I've had a lot of exciting companies that I've participated with, including a number of centers that dealt with natural hormone for men and for women, building a software system that is used in the integrative space to be able to aggregate all the data so we could actually show colleagues the importance of what we're talking. And then the last 10 years I spent dealing with a lot of clients with a lot of chronic illnesses across 25 different centers. So I was really dealing with patients that had what we'd seen at that point in the 30 years of being in health and wellness is a considerable number of patients that were presenting with a lot of chronic inflammatory diseases already. As I'd been able to advance through the last 30 years of treating patients in health and wellness, it was not a secret that we were seeing toxin levels on patients increase exponentially. Matter of fact, around 2015, they really started to take off. And by the time that COVID hit, that really complicated the picture quite a bit. And so here we are coming up on 2022 and 2023, which is when I stepped away from the practices because I really did not believe that I was able to help get these people as better as I had previously because of the toxic burden. that they all were holding. Fortunately, as the universe would have it, shortly thereafter, the concept of using plasma exchange to remove the toxins came across. And I was so certain that this could be used for removing chronic toxins from patients' bodies that I ended my retirement and came back and started MD Lifespan. The idea— we're going to talk about using therapeutic plasma exchange, what it is and what it isn't, but we're going to talk about how no one had ever thought about using this process to remove toxins. So let's start talking a little bit about today's discussion. We're going to talk about, as I mentioned, toxins, where they come from, how they're impacting our health, the limitations of previous methods of detox, what— why the solution of TPE is a significant advancement in this area, and we're going to talk about some individual cases and And I'd like to mention, I'm only gonna show a couple cases, but we have hundreds and many different categories. So what are we talking about, the hidden toxic burden? Well, we all know toxins are everywhere. I don't think there's very many people that don't have that concept. You know, there's microplastics in the tissues, like our plaques in the brain. There's heavy metals and the forever chemicals, what we call PFAS, in everyday products. There's pesticides that come in on your shoes and that are on our food supply. Toxins are everywhere. They're everywhere and in everything. You can't pick up a paper nowadays without seeing a new report on toxins, whether it's the Washington Post or whether it's online or your favorite news station. They're always talking about a new study, a new finding.

This is—

I just want to make sure that people understand this isn't a new topic. It's just getting more media exposure, as it should. There's been a number of studies within the last year alone. Some of the examples are here, which shows that microplastics are in the plaques, the plaque, the hardening of the arteries in the carotids. And if you have that and they have microplastics, which 67% of the plaques do, you run a much higher risk of having a heart attack or stroke within the next 3 years. Or the study that shows that these forever chemicals, the ones that were banned, you know, the The Teflon issue with DuPont in Parkersville, Virginia. If you've never seen the movie Dark Waters, you should watch it. It's very compelling. But we knew back then that the PFAS were incredibly dangerous. And then we're talking about the different things that we find in the environment, the heavy metals, the pesticides, the plastics, and they're infiltrating everything. It's not like it was 20 years ago when I told people, if you had mercury, avoid these kind of fishes. The problem is today mercury is everything. It's in the water, it's in the food, it's in the air, as are most of these pollutants. So they become disseminated through a lot of different sources at this point. Where are they coming from? Well, there's a lot of different types of toxins, and so one of the things that we have to understand is they're not all made the same. They're not all as dangerous as other ones, but they are all toxins. That means they're not good for you in any way or fashion. They disrupt the way that your hormones work. They can actually injure, burning and breaking your DNA. They can inhibit the way that your immune system works. They can inhibit the way your brain works. They can dysregulate the way the mitochondria make energies. They do everything bad. And they come in many different forms. There's microplastics, which arguably might be the worst of all the toxins because of how they break down into smaller and smaller particles. Every degree of the breakdown of the plastics becomes dangerous. Mold toxins. Well, mycotoxins have been around since beginning of time, but they become more prevalent because we now live in wooden houses and we eat grain that has been stored for years instead of being eaten fresh. We have metals that we dig up out of the earth, the rare metals for the computers and all the electronics we have, plus industry. You have things like the PFAS and the PCBs, which are industrial chemicals made in increasing quantity every year. You have the phthalates and the BPA, which are chemicals that are used to make plastics and chemicals that are from the breakdown of plastics. And you also have the pesticides and the herbicides, which continue to be used in significant fashions and by every industry of agriculture. We know that the toxins are entering— in the United States, there's probably over 100,000 different toxins in the environment. And this number, per the Environmental Working Group, is increasing by about 100 million tons per year. And that's why we're seeing, I believe, an acceleration in a lot of these chronic diseases. We're seeing pesticides and herbicides on crops, the mycotoxins in our cereals and grains, the Fossil fuel consumption, putting pollutants into the air, the heavy metals that were for industry, the chemical boom, and the plastic boom. But how is this impacting your health? Well, toxins I mentioned, they do every kind of danger and damage that you can imagine to the body on almost every single different pathway. And just talking about plastics, we know that you're carrying around about a credit— you eat about a credit card worth of plastics Every week. There's 77,000 microplastics that you inhale every day. And we find them in the brain and we find them in the tissues and the carotid. We find them in cancers. We find them in a baby's first poop. We find them in the umbilical cord. We don't need to spend a lot of time talking about this, but I can take virtually probably every toxin and connect it to a known chronic inflammatory disease. Multiple chronic inflammatory diseases. We know that pesticides and Alzheimer's have a link. We know that pesticides and Parkinson's have— has a link. We know that microplastic increases your risk for heart attacks and strokes. And we know that our children are being born with over 34 chemicals found in preschoolers. And what we found that was really disturbing is that we found the 2-year-olds carried more than the 3-year-olds who carried more than 4-year-olds. You'd think it'd be the other way around, that the older children would have more toxins, but we believe what's going on here is the moms have become more toxic in those 2 years between the kids' births. So the kids are being born with toxin levels that are reflective of the amount of toxins that their moms are carrying. We know there's over 270 neurotoxins given— found in the umbilical cord, and we know that there's plastics found within their stools. There's some research that shows that toxins may be linked to autism as well as attention deficit, childhood obesity. There's a whole area of pediatrics that is looking at the relationship between these toxins and our children. The thing is, every American carries a measurable and arguably a significant toxic burden. We know there's over 200 diseases linked to these toxins, and we know that toxins cause oxidation and chronic inflammation, and we know chronic inflammation is the driver to chronic diseases. Why traditional detox falls short. Traditionally, for the first 30 years of my career, when I was presented with a patient with toxins, the first thing we did was talk about avoidance. How you minimize your toxic exposure. That's changed. That discussion's changed a lot in 30 years because it used to be pretty specific to a toxin. Now it's general overall. How do you avoid all toxins? It's become that important. But toxins used to be able to be pulled out of the body with binders that you would eat, and as they passed through your gut, they would grab certain chemicals. Or we could give you other chemicals which would take out metals that were in your system. Or we could use Exercise or infrared saunas to heat you up so that your sweat glands and the movement mobilize these toxins so your body could detox them. But what we've found is that these processes are notoriously difficult and incredibly slow to get out to the— get out of the body. So before the burden built, and what we see is toxins can drive inflammation, which leads to disease. But the better way is looking at a healthier foundation by removing the toxins and minimizing your exposure so you minimize the amount that you take in. Remember, this is kind of like the analogy of the bathtub. The bathtub used to be not very full, which is your body. Now it's markedly more full in everybody. That's without question or without argument. But we have patients— we have people also putting more toxins into the bathtub, and that's what your toxin exposure is. What we need to do is turn off that fountain that leads into the bathtub to stop putting more toxins in the body and find a better way to let the body remove toxins so the system gets better and the toxins drain out of your system through your own detox pathways. So what we did is we came up with this solution because what we noticed was when there was a paper published about using therapeutic plasma exchange in 6 older adults. And what we saw after doing a series of 5 of them is that the patients had a reduction in their immune system— I'm sorry, they had an increase in their immune system, reduction in oxidation and inflammation, which are chronic processes of the body which are very damaging. We saw that they had decrease in cancer markers and increasing length of their telomeres. But what we figured out from that study was what they were doing isn't removing the metabolic excess of every day. What that was doing was removing toxins. We were so sure about it that we put MD Lifespan together. Combining, taking that idea of using therapeutic plasma exchange as a way of removing the toxins and letting you replace the plasma that we removed with your own natural plasma that you made, which was fresh, non-toxic, non-inflamed, we thought So we thought if we wrapped a better approach around it, teaching people avoidance therapy, using nutrients to resupply the body with what it needed to get it back up on its feet, we would see a better response. And we did. So what exactly is therapeutic plasma exchange? Well, this is a process that's been around for medicine for over 50 years. Typically was used in the hospital, most often in the ICU on very sick patients, where the patients had their blood withdrawn from their body and then a centrifuge separates The liquid part, which is the plasma, which is basically kind of like a conduit that carries everything— good, bad, and ugly— and the other part, which is the solid or the cellular part, which is mostly the red cells, the white cells, and your platelets. Then we would take the plasma and discard it, throw it away, and we'd recombine your cells with a neutral replacement fluid called albumin and reinfuse it back into the person. Within about a day or 2, a lot of the plasma was replaced by your own body's own plasma, which we make every minute of every day in ourselves. So you replace it on your own, and this tox— this plasma that you replace it with isn't toxic. It's free of inflammation. It's free of oxidation. And as time goes by, you start replacing the antibodies and the clotting proteins as well. But what advanced serial plasma exchange does is we take that procedure, instead of doing it back to back like they do in the ICU, which really does strip the body of a lot of its clotting factors and antibodies, we waited a month in between the different therapies. So we gave your body plenty of time to regenerate, plus we supplemented it with both IV and oral nutrients. On top of that, what we discovered was that it actually took a month Between plasma changes, because toxins are mostly in the tissue and we're only removing your plasma. When we took your plasma out, we needed to give the body about a month to let the toxins reenter the plasma. So by the time we come back to do a next exchange, we're getting the maximum amount of plasma containing toxins out of the body at one time. So when we talk about serial plasma exchange, we're talking about doing these procedures Once a month for usually a factor of 3 or 5 months. But we're also talking about now adding IV and oral supplements, adding avoidance therapy, and possibly even some regenerative therapies and maintenance to make sure that you never have to get this done again. The phases of the advanced ceraplasma is the detox phase, in which we're using the TP and the nutrients. Then we have a regeneration phase because a lot of the patients that we're seeing aren't just filled with toxins, They've actually had damage done to the brain, to the tissues, to the immune system. So we, we start helping the body repair by adding in some regenerative therapies like exosomes, stem cells, possibly naltrexone to modulate the immune system, or a chelator to help pull out even more of the heavy metals. And finally, we end up with teaching the patient the most important thing about minimizing the toxins in their environment so these toxins don't get put back in. Also, adding in nutrients, and possibly even recommending plasma donations a few times a year, just kind of like taking a little bit off the top. So let's talk about some real patient results. When our observational data that we've done on thousands of procedures shows that when you compare the advanced serial therapeutic plasma exchange against just serial plasma exchange, which you get many of the different other locations were 3 times more effective in almost every area: symptomatic improvement, laboratory reductions of toxins, removals of these toxins, improvement in the immune system, reduction of inflammation, oxidation, all these different markers that we measure, including cognitive function. Our results show that we're able to decrease microplastics by up to 90%. Heavy metals on average around 80%, with even some of them like aluminum up to 100%. Phthalates, which are very damaging chemicals which are used to soften plastics, we decrease up to 97%. Most of the environmental toxins, most of the biomarkers improve, the immune system improves, herbicides and pesticides decrease. And most importantly, when you get the toxins out, you see a significant reduction in inflammation And oxidative stress. Some of these biomarkers, since we have a lot of patients coming in who are getting our protocol, but other patients come in only wanting TPE itself, which is something that we're absolutely happy to provide, but we've been able to divide those patients and look at their data individually. On the patients who only did serial plasma exchange versus those patients that did our protocol, we see a significant difference in the amount that the immune system improved. As well as a significant change and difference in the amount that the inflammation decreased. Also, we see a marked improvement in the way the body is able to remove oxidative stress, and we saw some markers also associated with longevity increase substantially better than it did with plasma exchanges alone. When we start looking at things like the toxins and the heavy metals, now we do 25 different heavy metal testing in each one of these procedures. I'm just showing a couple from every category, but this is basically mirroring what we see with all these different toxins in that category, that the heavy metals come down substantially. Environmental toxins, herbicides, and pesticides, similar. When we're talking about the phenols, which are part of the plastic industry, the phthalates, which are part of the plastic industry, we see significant reductions. Volatile organic chemicals, which you find around fumes or candles or in your house through textiles and other sources, markedly reduced, as well as the mold toxins, the mycotoxins. In many different ways, this has been the most effective detoxification method we've ever seen because it removes every toxin that we've been able to measure. So let's talk about some of these case studies that we have, and this is all of our Anecdotal observational study, but this is pretty similar to every single one of the cases that we've been able to treat. This is a 55-year-old female who presented with poor energy, brain fog, forgetfulness, and a family history of Alzheimer's. She had some medical issues that were well controlled by her physician. After we had done the plasma exchange and had done the IV and oral nutrients, we had done some nasal exosomes as well as teaching the patient how to avoid toxins. We see a significant significant improvement in their immune system. You can see the top half of the screen is their immune system, and the top half of that, which are called the lymphocytes, are all improving anywhere between 10% and 50%. Also, we see the cytokines and the inflammation markers reduce significantly. When you look at the bottom half of the screen, you're looking at her toxins that were elevated, including mold, Half a dozen metals and some environmental toxins. All of them went down substantially. Part of the thing that you should look at is in the toxin part where it says high. Those are the values that we aim to get the toxin level down under. Now, we don't always obtain it with every toxin because although we're testing for 100 toxins, there's 100,000 toxins in the environment and probably many more toxins in a person's body that we're not able to measure. So what our goal is is to get the general overall burden down enough where the detox systems and the use of avoidance can help the patient continue on their journey towards health. This is her cognitive scores before we started, and one of the things to take away from this is most clients who are healthy for their age should score in the above average and the average column, which are in green. But she had quite a few of these markers that were in the and the yellow and the orange, especially in the area of memory and cognitive attention and function. After we were done and we tested her cognitive score 6 weeks after, she had a significant improvement in all of those markers. Although some of them still remain in the low average, you can see most of them moved upwards. We see a lot of patients that come to see us because of autoimmune issues or immunity issues, like they have chronic Lyme or chronic infection. One of the challenging things in the autoimmune world is coming to understand that the immune system we were taught in medical school just starts attacking somebody's tissue, and that's what autoimmunity is. I always ask, why does it do that? We really didn't have a good answer. I think one of the most logical answers that we're seeing is it's probably the toxins in the, in the body that the immune system is fighting, and that toxin happens to look like a protein on one of your cells. And so there's more Starts going after your cells as well. It's a pretty clear explanation and backed up by a number of different research. So when we start talking about the immunity protocol, what we're looking at is people who have problems with their immune cells, the lymphocytes, their antibodies, inflammation, oxidation, whether that's from a chronic infection or whether that's from toxicity, they start developing a dysfunctional immune system. In this patient, she presented with a lot of different immune issues. She had eczema, she had asthma, she had autoantibodies to her thyroid. She was on some medications by her doctor to treat some of her hormone and thyroid issues. And what we saw from her is that you can see here on the initial labs, her CD3 count, which should be above 1,000, was 955. But by the time we had finished the protocol with the exchanges and the IVs, she had increased that by over about 40%. Her C4s and the CD8s, which are 2 other T cells, they also went up by about 30 to 40%. And that was just 6 weeks after we're done with the therapy. And most of these patients, they continue to increase those numbers the further out they get from the protocol, as long as they continue doing the avoidance therapy. Some of the other things you see there with TMAO, which is an Oxidation marker, and CRP, which is an inflammatory marker, you see a pretty marked reduction of both of those as well. Plus, the complement C4a is something that we see in a lot of patients with active infections or active chronic infections, and you see a marked reduction of that by the time we were finished. Many patients suffer from mold toxicity. I've treated many patients for 30 years with mold toxicities. What I do want to make sure that all the mold toxic patients know is mold is a very dangerous and harmful toxin to the body. But you're not just mold toxic, you're everything toxic. That's why 10 years ago, even 20 years ago, it was easier to treat patients with mold toxicity because they didn't have the amount of toxins that we have today. The only way to get people better today with mold toxicity is by removing the mold toxins Along with every other toxin. And that's exactly what we're seeing in these cases. This is a 48-year-old man who has a history— doesn't have really big history. He knew he was mold toxic. He's a tech, he's a tech owner in California, and he was actually very sick. His brain fog was so severe that he had to step away from his company. He had a lot of puffiness and swelling in his face that was associated to all the inflammation. You can see here that he had quite a few toxins on the left side beforehand, and after we were done, a marked reduction not only in the quantity of the toxins but in the severity. But also with him, you can see the differences in his cognitive function when he came in. That's brain fog, where you have problems with your memory and your attention, and had some pretty— most of the— Scores in the low average. By the time we were done, he had done quite a bit of a shift up towards the average. Now, he's continued to get better with avoidance therapy and further therapy, but he hadn't been able to move the dial at all, and we believe that was because he had quite a bit of toxin load that we couldn't get out other than using the plasma exchange. His immune system reciprocally also improved significantly with a drop-off in both of the oxidative and inflammatory markers. One of the interesting things that we've been looking at is women who are going to get pregnant who wanna lower their toxin load before they do so. Can I tell you today that that's going to impact how the baby's health is? I cannot. I can just tell you that we know the babies are being born with toxins and microplastics, and to me it makes complete sense That a woman should do everything she can to minimize her toxic load. That doesn't mean every woman needs plasma exchange, but every woman does need to test her toxin levels, and every woman should know how to avoid toxins by the book that we're going to be able to offer you, everyone here. Please get that. Please give it to your friends. It is a very well-written book by myself and 5 other toxin experts to help people realize You can push back against toxins being everywhere by minimizing your exposure. But in many of these clients that we see, they're young women. This lady was 32. She had some obesity. She had quite a bit of inflammation as well. And she came in because she was having some difficulty getting pregnant. That's not why she did the plasma exchange. She did it because she had a lot of inflammation and she was concerned with her toxin levels. Now, her toxin levels weren't significantly numerous, but the ones that she did— she had quite a bit of mold and quite a bit of metals. By the time we were done, we'd been able to remove those significantly, but also we were able to drop her inflammation rate from 12.6, which is very high, to under 1.3. And I'm happy to report that she went on to get pregnant and had a very healthy child afterwards. So we can talk about— we talked about a couple of the different protocols that we do, and now I'm gonna talk about categories. So we're bringing along new protocols for many different medical issues by showing the relationship between toxins and inflammation, and inflammation and chronic disease. I'm not saying that any of these protocols treat or cure a chronic disease. What I'm saying is these protocols are designed to lower toxin levels, which lower inflammation, and if you think that's going to improve improve your health on the brain, the heart, the immune system, or help you prevent cancer, I would agree with you. But those studies are yet to be done and yet to be proven. But not— but as I always say, as a biophysicist, it doesn't— just because we don't know it to be fact doesn't mean that it can't make sense. You can't avoid toxins. They're everywhere. But you can limit your exposure And you can remove them. That we do know. The difference in MDL is that we have the advanced serial plasma exchange, and this is a patented process, and it's our exclusive focus. We're led by physicians and grounded in clinical experience. It's delivered by physicians that are certified and nurses that specialize in plasmapheresis and ultrasound placement. Most of the nurses come to us either from the ICU or the ER. Patients have had a very good experience with our nurses. Not only are they compassionate and experienced and knowledgeable, but they're very talented in the procedure, and they minimize the fear that many people have about this procedure overall. We personalize protocols because one protocol never fits everybody. It, it differs by the timing, the frequency, the amount of the plasma. It differs by the amount of the supplements or different protocols that we put into effect. But we measure and we track and we optimize every patient through their data, and we're supported by research and academic partnerships. The takeaways I hope you're getting from this is, yes, toxins are everywhere and in everyone. That toxic burden, we believe, is a major driver of chronic inflammation, which is a major driver of chronic disease. Testing, we believe, is one of the first steps that everybody needs to do to be able to put into picture exactly how much toxic burden do I have, and learning how to minimize your exposure is critical. Finally, there is possibility that advanced serial therapeutic plasma exchange is something that you may want to consider to remove the toxins directly from the body so that you have the ability to take care of your health. Your path forward— there's 3 ways to take control of your health starting today. Number 1, It starts with awareness, understanding your toxic burden. Your physician can order this test for you. We like— we prefer the Vibrant America Total Tox Burden with the add-on of the PFAS because 3 years ago we looked at a number of different toxin companies. We're not affiliated with any of them, but we chose this test because it gave us a significant number of different toxins in a significant number of different categories that was easy to do at home and affordable. We've also shown that this test is reproducible in many of the different patients, as well as clinically maps with the patient's improvement. Number 2, reduce your everyday exposure. This is possible. It's a doable thing. It's not hard. Please download our book, download our book, please read it and take it chapter by chapter Day by day, and eventually within a very short period of time, you have implemented all these various things that we know work because the patients that have finished our protocol, which have followed this advice, have continued to have lower levels of toxins. I myself was patient number 1, and 4 years ago I had 18 in the high— higher ranges. By the time we were done with the protocol, I had 6. The next year, only using avoidance therapy, I went to 4, and then the next year, 2. And I'm happy to report this year I did not have any of the toxins in the ranges above suboptimal. And finally, 3, please feel free to speak with one of our clinicians. You can sign up on our website for free to schedule a call directly on the website. We're happy to talk to you about your concerns. We're happy to talk to you, look over the labs. And give you our assessment of what may be the most valuable path forward for you. I'd like to thank you all for listening, and I'd like to open up the floor for some questions.

We have a couple of questions, Dr. Savage. Thank you so much for your time. So, the first one is from Joyce. She would like to know, where does the albumin come from that you put back into the patient? Does it come from young donors?

So albumin is a human-derived product. So yes, it's a blood product, and the donors come from all sorts of runs of life, not just young donors. This— MD Lifespan made a commitment when we started only to use the best personnel and the best product. So we use albumin from a company called Griswold, which is a United States-based company, highly regulated. We don't use international albumin. We only purchase our albumin from Grifols. They've been the king of the world and they're the biggest industry maker of albumin. They also have the most rigorous screening techniques and making sure that what we're getting is a pure and safe product. One thing I can tell you is in the last 50 years of using albumin, we haven't seen any viruses transmitted. There's been no documented transmission of hepatitis or HIV. There's been no known documented transmission of COVID or the spike protein or the mRNA. There's been no known diagnostic transmission of any kind of cancer. And it's been 50 years that they've been looking at this. They also do a lot of certification of authenticity where they measure the albumin. We've actually tested the albumin for toxins, which we found none, including microplastics. So yes, Albumin is a human-derived product. Yes, there has to be some risk associated with it, but that risk is very small. It's actually without any defined episodes that we've been able to find of any transmission. That risk is put at 1 in a million because we know it's not zero, but we've never found any supporting evidence that there's been any transmission. That's how medicine works in those cases. But you also have to look at why we're doing it. And if the fact that this albumin has a much lower risk, in my opinion, of giving back to a person than it is leaving their plasma filled with toxins, that's a risk-benefit that every patient needs to assess. It's one that I'm comfortable talking to patients about.

Thank you, Dr. Savage. Terry from Austin, Texas is scheduled to have her plasma exchange in 2 weeks. By the advice of their doctor. They've recently diagnosed with post-COVID vaccine syndrome with a high spike protein of 23,000, and they want to know what are some ways they can help them help the toxins not return post-procedure.

Well, for that, just download our book Avoiding Toxins. I mean, it's free on the website. It's free to everybody. I just— and give it to your friends, give it to other doctors. We just want people to understand this was, this was the most comprehensive guide put together by toxicologists and myself, which help walk patients through some very rational and very simple steps. We try to make sure that people understand that you don't have to be dramatic in the media talking about all these terrible things that toxins can do, but you don't want to dismiss it like another portion of the community does, like, oh, it's nothing. The real risk lies somewhere in between. I really think that you will enjoy the book that we wrote. I believe it's well-written and well-positioned for people to take a step-by-step approach to where their toxins are and how they can minimize their exposure.

Thank you. Another guest would like to know, is the toxin test covered by insurance? And if so, what is the code?

Yeah, well, almost these type of things aren't covered by insurance. Insurance doesn't cover these type of toxin testing. No, the toxin test usually runs around $850. If you wish, you can purchase it from our website for $995, but that includes a visit with one of our clinicians to go over those results with you. There aren't any— the tests that you get through LabCorp and Quest are very limited. They tend to do with more of the metals, and when you're really looking at a toxic burden, you really have to start understanding the plastics and the PFAS, the PFAS. And for the amount of money that with the The ability to get over 100 tests, and we've been able to show that it's a reliable test if performed correctly, you know, and there's ways to interpret that. We want to be able to help patients understand what that test means to them.

Thanks, Dr. Savage. And we have quite a few guests that are joining us from the Arizona area, and they would like to know if we plan on heading over to Mesa anytime soon.

We're looking at Arizona. No, we're looking at Arizona very seriously. We've had A number of different conversations with a number of different locations there. They're very positive. They're very— I think that there's a relatively good possibility within the next 6 months we'll be in the Arizona area.

And we'll also drop the link to our locations page on the website where you can stay up to date with new locations that are coming soon. One last question that I've got is someone's asking that their understanding of most toxins like heavy metals are stored in the bone and other tissues and are not circulating in the blood? Does TPE only target recent toxins that are still in the blood?

So we don't believe so. Now, there's more research that needs to be done, but let me give you the kind of scenario that we're working on. Toxins equilibrate throughout the body, so some are stored in the bone, some are stored in the tissues, some are stored— some are in the plasma. What we see in— it's interesting what we see in Women who have low body weight, who don't have a lot of places to hide it, we see much higher levels of toxins in their plasma simply because they don't have a place to hide them. But we know that the toxins are throughout the body, which is why when we started doing the Plasma Exchange, one of the first things we did was figure out what's the timing we needed to do. And we did it a month in between, the Plasma Exchange one month apart, because that's how long it took until we saw some of the harder toxins To get back into the plasma. By the time that we were done and we did the final toxin test on the patient, they had a significant reduction. But here's the interesting thing. The next year and the year after that, we're 3 years out and 3 years out, those toxin levels in patients have continued to decline. I can't say for certain that we've gotten the tissue levels of the toxins lower, but That's how biology works, and it wouldn't be continuing to drop if those toxins were coming back in at any high rate. So we do believe that we have a— and the other thing is we see improvement in the symptomatology of patients. We see improvement in their cognitive function. We see improvement in the immune system. We see reduction in inflammation. All those things point to the fact that the total toxic burden in the body is lower. I don't think anybody can or should ever claim to be able to remove all the toxins from the body. I don't believe that's physiologically possible with the people that have lived on this earth for any period of time. But we can substantially reduce the amount of toxins and seeing a response in the biology and the physiology that we're seeing very much implies to us that we're getting enough of the toxins out to restore normal physiology.

Next question. My daughter is 29 and has Crohn's disease. Is this something that would help?

We don't know. I'm, you know, I always tell people there's a lot of things that we're looking at. We've seen quite a significant improvement in people's GI systems and symptoms with this process, which just kind of makes us wonder and scratch our head. Like, you know, when we first started doing this, I really thought that we were just going to get the really sick people coming in to do this. What we started seeing were people that weren't so sick that had concerns about their toxins as well. And when we started doing those patients, I was pretty startled by the amount of toxins they had, and I was also startled by the improvement they had by getting the— by having the plasma exchanges done. Their immune systems got better, their cognitive scores got better, their inflammation went down. Which made me start realizing that it's probably not as small as a population that I had originally thought that needs this. But in the case of Crohn's, there is a genetic component. I'm certain there's a toxic component, but I can't tell you that removing the toxins is going to improve the Crohn's. One of the things that I'm seeing, and this is just my own biophysicist background, is that, you know, we see a lot of improvement in patients with cognitive issues and even in early Alzheimer's, and that's And that's supported by another study called the AMBAR study. But I don't really see a lot of improvement in people with Parkinson's or ALS. I see a slowing of their symptoms, but I don't see an improvement because in the area of Parkinson's and ALS, there's been change to the neurons. They've actually degraded. Whereas in Alzheimer's, especially early Alzheimer's, they're more like confused. I think the same thing goes with Crohn's. Once the tissue is damaged, I don't know if removing the toxins is going to repair the tissue. It might slow down its progress, but there's much to be discovered yet.

How does this compare, TPE compare, to the filtration levels of other popular filtering treatments like hemapheresis or EBOO?

So first off, hemapheresis isn't in the United States and it's difficult to compare the two. But of the studies I've been able to look at, hemapheresis, which kind of goes along with the physics of the machine, Apheresis is a process that you bring the blood out, you separate the blood from the plasma, then you filter the plasma through a filter, and then you take the filtered plasma and put it back together with the cells and reinfuse it into the body. 2 parts here. The good part is you're getting your own plasma back. You don't need albumin. The second part is though, there's no filter on earth that is as efficient as throwing it out. So I think that— And Frequently you hear inapheresis called the gentler plasmapheresis because you're, you know, you're not removing everything. You're giving substantial amount of it back. I think what we'll see when we do it, when a comparison is finally done— this is my own opinion— between inapheresis and plasma exchange, if we're talking about removing toxins, I think you'll still see TPE as the winner in how much it's able to do in how short of a time. I think inapheresis will give you the same effect, I just think you'll need more of the hemophoresis. EBOO is a different matter because what you're doing is you're taking the blood out, you're oxygenating it with ozone, and then you're filtering it and bringing it back into the body. I have a lot of problems with using oxidative forces in patients that are already toxic with a lot of oxidation. So I don't think these 2 things should be compared. I don't believe that EBOO should be given people to people with high toxicities. Even though it does— ozone kills everything it touches and it may break down some of the toxins itself, many of these people who have a lot of toxic burden are already what I call oxidative maxed. They have so many toxins that are oxidative, their body is just struggling to take care of that load, and then you're going to bring it this gigantic load of oxygenated blood with it.

Yeah.

Having done EBOO previously with my other companies, having done it with people with chronic infections, I saw that a lot of the patients didn't react very well to EBOO, and I now realize that it probably had to do with the amount of oxidative stress that they already were carrying and combining with this. So I don't really think we should probably be talking about EBOO comparative to— as a filtration for toxins as we are with TPE.

Thank you, Dr. Savage. And we have another question asking, what if you have Lyme?

Having treated Lyme patients for 30 years and toxic patients, it was a struggle as there's certain patients that you could get better, but a lot of patients with chronic Lyme that you couldn't. And as the years progressed, it just seemed like there were more and more of those patients that you couldn't get to clear. Now, there's other therapies out there that are promising and looking at Lyme, but my gestalt, and this is just my opinion on Lyme, is that with all these toxins in the universe and in these various people that's impairing the immune system, it's really hard to clear a person with Lyme if your immune system isn't operational, and you need it operational well. You don't need it operational minimal. What we have seen in patients who've seen us with chronic Lyme is our protocol that we work with is we'll get the toxins out, we'll help reestablish the immune system, and then we want to work with your functional medicine doctor or your traditional doctor on initiating the Lyme therapy. We ourselves here at MD Lifespan are focused on plasma change and toxin removal, but I do believe that this is a significant component that people with chronic Lyme need to consider Because many of these patients have tried many other things, and I think a lot of that issue has to do with their immune system not being optimized and able to be working with you when you're trying to clear the Lyme.

Okay, thank you. I think those are all the questions that we have.

It's been a pleasure. I really appreciate people, uh, joining us. I hope you'll get the Avoiding Toxin book. I hope you'll share it with your friends.

I—

if you enjoyed the lecture, I really would appreciate If you can leave some reviews on the lecture, I would also appreciate if you could share this because we are planning on having a lot more of these town hall conferences so I can take and answer questions for people as it relates to toxins and plasmapheresis. I wish everybody good health.