Bob Benson’s Long‑Haul Recovery Journey: Minerals, Repurposed Drugs, and Double Plasma Filtration

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone. Dr. Stillman here. And today I am very excited to be welcoming Bob Benson to the podcast. This is a very interesting and very special episode because I met Bob over a year ago now in Florida. He came to our practice because he found us through, I think it was React19's website. Shout out to them for all the good work they've been doing. And he was looking for relief from symptoms he developed post-COVID vaccine that he'd not been able to really get under control. So I know Bob from way back then, and then he ended up going to Japan after he didn't get complete symptom relief and went through this new plasmapheresis, which is very special and only available as far as I know in Japan, and a stem cell procedure that went along with it. And he can fill us in on the exact details because He was there and he's going to tell his story. And the goal here is to help educate patients and clinicians. And I'm going to share some information about Bob's case that he's given us permission to share so that, you know, if you're listening to this as a patient or a clinician or the family of a patient or a friend of a patient, you can all sort of understand what we're really seeing in clinical practice with vaccine injury, which, you know, I think unfortunately, A, very complex and B, not at all sort of routine. There's no sort of standard course either in terms of your recovery or in terms of your treatment. And so it's really a challenging area of practice and I'll just leave it at that. So Bob, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us and for doing this. I know it's going to help a lot of people.

Thanks for having me.

I'm also joined by Amy Arp. Amy runs our immune optimization program at our practice.

Hello everyone.

We work with a lot of COVID-19 vaccine injury patients. If I had to estimate, I'd say about 50% of the patients who come to us with a new diagnosis of autoimmunity or autoimmune-like symptoms either traces their current symptoms to the COVID-19 vaccine, or the COVID-19 vaccine clearly caused a deterioration in their clinical syndrome. We're talking MS, lichen sclerosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, you name it. It feels like every kind of autoimmunity, which we both have a very strong interest in and which we started the Immune Optimization Program to care for, it feels like everything is made worse by this vaccine, which is also something I write about in my book coming up, The End of Autoimmunity. All right.

Yeah.

Enough housekeeping, Bob. I like to start by asking everybody who they are and where they're from.

Okay. My name's Bob Benson from, I live in Northern Minnesota in the summertime, and then I live in South Florida in the Everglades in the wintertime.

In the Everglades.

Yes.

I don't know if most of the, it's Marco Island, right?

No, I live about, what is it? About 20 miles east of Marco Island, right on the Tamiami and literally right in the swamp.

Oh, you do?

Yeah. Yeah.

Right in the swamp. Right on. And you're an avid fisherman, right?

Yes. Although since my vaccine injury, it's gotten harder harder. In fact, I didn't even get, I did not get on the boat once in Florida this year. Tell us about your life before COVID Before COVID I was, I was doing very well. I was actually probably maybe the healthiest I'd been in my life. I had just run a half marathon with my wife, the Grandma's Half Marathon in Duluth, right around along the shore of Lake Superior. I fished hard all that summer, both for work and for pleasure. It was fantastic. I actually ended up getting married in late November of that year to my wife Tammy.

Congratulations. Yep.

And it's spent 17 days hiking in Hawaii. It was fantastic. I got home, was excited to go to Florida, decided to go get a physical. Got, I'll say, talked into a booster shot, both for myself because I was over 50 and also because I was going to see my dad. And you know, you need to get a shot to protect others even though they're vaccinated. So I fell for that one because it's 100% safe and effective, right? Right.

And if you get both shots, you won't catch it or transmit it, right?

That's right.

Yeah.

Something like that. That's the, that's the story.

When we make claims like that and they're not true, we go to jail.

Yes. Yeah. Nobody's gone to jail yet. Nobody's gone to jail yet, but, uh, yeah, I'm still hoping.

We're still waiting for the perp walks and the, and the jail time.

Yeah. Yeah. Anything, but yeah, so I came home from that booster shot and expecting to leave for Florida the next day. Um, I actually, it was December 3rd, 2021. I got my booster shot and I think I finally got out of bed December 20th. And drove to Florida, parked my boat in my dad's yard and went back to bed in Florida. Never really fully recovered. I did have some good periods where I could go fish, but it just, the illness just seemed to keep getting worse over time.

Can we back up? You said this was a booster. How many shots did you originally get?

So I had in May of 2021, when the first shots first came out, my wife and I went in to get shots. We wanted to get our shots so we were allowed to go fishing in Canada because we couldn't cross the border because going, going fishing at a remote Northern Thai.

Yeah.

Skis actually, but yeah, so that's so that, that was what, why I got the first 2 shots and it was interesting. Those, those 2 original shots, I looked up the, the numbers on them and they were deadly. They were 0.7 and 0.1%. So there were over 70 reported deaths. And if I had died, of course I wouldn't have got me, but my wife had a bad reaction to this, that second shot back in May and she actually got driven to the emergency room from work. She lost use of her hands and she was acting kind of strange. They were worried about her. They brought her to the emergency room and she said, well, the only thing I can think of is I, I had a COVID vaccine 2 days ago. And they said, no, that can't be it. Just, you know, dismissed it totally offhand. And well, so she's still dealing with some of those issues today. We did have her get some of the stem cell growth factors while we were in Japan. Well, her antibodies are down a little bit, but she didn't want to go through through the full treatment. She saw what I was doing with the jugular treatment. She wanted nothing to do with it. But yeah, so she never had another shot. And you know, when I got my booster, she was mad. She's like, you weren't going to get it. And I said, well, I told them I didn't want it, but you know, they gave me the guilt trip about going to see my dad then.

Right.

So I got it. My life changed after that. I still don't know if it was the booster. The booster definitely had something to do with it, but those first two lots, when I looked at those, they're bad, you know, the number of reported deaths and yeah. But you didn't notice anything with those two, didn't—

did you?

I, I did not. I mean, I did go home and I had— I would say I had— I didn't feel well for a couple of days, um, but I didn't have any of the, you know, the lasting bad effects like my wife still has to this day. Um, she'll, she'll wake up in the middle of the night with rashes on both arms right where they got the shots and just, you know, so she's got ice, gets up every night and ices her arms. Just miserable.

Yeah, this is a really good point that I want people to appreciate is that You know, we always see patients in the practice when something bad enough has happened to galvanize them to take action, to, to find resolution for their symptoms. But what's so interesting about taking care of patients over long periods of time as I do, and often many of them come to us and they say, well, I just want to make sure that I'm as healthy as possible because I want to live as long as possible and as good a shape as possible, is we run their labs and very routinely we find things that we can fix before they get sick, which is not the model in the conventional world, which is such a tragedy, but it's also part of the profit model, right? If you're never you know, healing and preventing disease when it's small and it's easy to do and it doesn't cost as much, you're not cashing in on the $60,000 heart attack hospitalizations, the $100,000, you know, back surgeries, neck surgeries, right? Not that there's anything wrong with these procedures, right? They're life-saving. I just, it really bothers me how little attention is paid to this. It's part of why we want to create content like this to educate people that there's a different way and a better way. And, you know, I'll mention Bob, although we'll get into it more deeper, I think in a minute. There were plenty of things on your labs when you came to see us that I thought these must have changed or must have started years before. But it always saddens me when I think this person could have been caught earlier and we could have, and that's one of the things that I think ends up really generating so much gaslighting, which I still see on, on X, you know, people saying, oh, these, they're safe and effective and they're not, they're not causing any of this, which is just so bizarre. There's clearly a safety signal here. But anyway, so you had your booster, you got worse. What happened next?

So, no, I got my booster and I drove to Florida. And at the time my doctors were in Minnesota. Right. And so I struggled through that first, that, well, that entire winter year, I knew I was having problems, but at that point I had an active guiding business. So I was forced to get out of bed every day. And that was actually, well, I want to say that was good for me. It's certainly, certainly better than staying indoors in bed in Florida, you when it's 75 degrees out every day and the sun's out. So that kind of got me good. But by the time I got home, first of all, it was very hard on my wife because literally the day after my honeymoon, I could not get out of bed. And that went on for months where I couldn't. And, you know, as hard as it was on me, it was equally as hard on, you know, my wife and anybody that's going through this. If you had a significant other that stuck through you for the years of suffering, they're a wonderful person. So I want to make sure I get that across because she had every reason, you know, to leave. And she stayed with me for 4 years and now we can do things together again. But when I finally got back to Minnesota where my doctors were, the very first thing I did is I said, I just need to set something up right away. So I set up a telehealth appointment since my doctor took a little while to get into. And I told the, on the telehealth, I told the, the doctor that I had a problem with the booster and that, you know, I think it was the vaccine. And she told me, Well, that's not it, but it has been 7 months now since you've had your booster. So you should come in and get another one.

I was ridiculous.

I was there. They're, they're robots. They have an agenda. They have an agenda and that's to give you more shots because that's how they get paid. So they get, I didn't, I didn't know until a couple of years later that they get paid by every shot they give out or by the number of patients percentage. Anyway, that's all crazy. So, um, so I did my telehealth and I said, no, I got to go see my doctor. And then when I went to see my doctor again, it was like, well, I don't think that's it. Then, you know, and he gave me some antidepressants and I went home and it just made things worse. And I was like, he doesn't believe me. And he's getting me on antidepressants that, and that's not the problem. I mean, I was going through depression, right? Because I can't get out of bed. But I was just going to be on these meds. And after 3 days, I threw them away and I said no. And I was literally scared to go back to the doctor because I knew they were just going to try to, you know, they have their routine, they do X labs and they get you on this antidepressant or statins or whatever, whatever it is they're, they're giving out today. And you're going to be You're on these things for life. And I was like, I, you know, I was on no medications at that time and I'm on no medications today. The only, yeah. The only thing that ever helped me, Dr. Stillman, was the ivermectin when you finally got me on that, but it's great to get ahead of myself here.

Yeah.

But yeah, so I ventured through it and I had a couple other instances in the, I'll say the, what I call the Obamacare health system. Oh, that we pay for on a monthly basis. And Nobody ever believed me until I finally got to you in, what was it, May of last year, May of 2025. And you were the first doctor who ever believed me and treated me. And, um, you got me better. You got me through last summer. I wasn't, certainly wasn't 100%, but I had my life back. I was working. Yeah.

That's what you told me.

Um, and, and, and having fun. So the high dosage ivermectin worked for, um, last summer worked for about 3 or 4 months. And then I would say by October, it just It just wasn't, you know, it wasn't working again. I found myself sitting in a chair staring at a wall day after day.

So let's— something you said there really makes me think about a quote that I love. William Osler, the physician who founded Johns Hopkins and who, by the way, is quoted ad nauseam by the kinds of doctors in medical schools who are gaslighting patients about this. He said, listen to the patient, he is telling you the diagnosis.

Yeah.

It blows my mind. If you go read the greats of medicine, like Osler, Hippocrates, they say all this stuff that's today is like so contrary. You know, and it's, it's, it just reflects this total lack of self-awareness in academic and conventional medicine of the realities of clinical practice because they live in this little bubble where if they check the right boxes and fill out the right paperwork, they get paid the most money possible, which is not how anything in the world should work. You should be paid based on performance and like customer satisfaction and doing a good job. It's just so tragic. I want to go back to some of the things you said and unpack them. So you told me at one point that you went 13 days with no sleep.

Yes, that was my record, but it was often I would go 5, 6, 7 days, you know, without sleeping. My brain just wouldn't shut off.

Your brain wouldn't shut off. You told me specifically it was like you had a squirrel in your brain that wouldn't quit. Do you remember that?

Yep. And I could sometimes I could feel them cuddling up to my eyeballs and trying to push the eyeballs out of my head. And, you know, a lot of times I just, you know, I'd go to bed and I could tell immediately my brain was just like churning. And now I realize looking back for 4 and a half years, And that was going on, you know, while I was fishing, while I was in the boat, while I was doing everything. It was just this, this crazy, just, you know, you know, turning of the brain. And, you know, it was horrible because I couldn't get out of bed. It would take me 7 or 8 tries to get out of bed. Now, I thought it was like vertigo or something similar systems where I was dizzy. I maybe make it to the bathroom thinking I'm going to get out of now and I'd be back to bed. I'd probably, I'd get out of bed a lot of times like 3 or 4 in the afternoon. And then just by getting out of bed, I moved from the bed to the couch and sat there. And that was basically my life a lot of time. If, you know, unless I was forced to go do something, that's what I did. And that, for me, those were the biggest symptoms that I had. But now looking back, like since I've gotten things straightened out, like my digestive tract has improved greatly. So there were definitely other things that were going on that have now been, I'll say corrected, but like, like for me, it was mainly the brain symptoms that intense depression, the brain fog, you know, I called it vertigo. I'm not sure what that was, but you know, I literally couldn't stand up without, you know, grabbing a wall and, you know, back and forth from bed to the bathroom, bed to the couch. Yeah, it was just a horrible way to live.

Let's go through all of it. So brain fog, fatigue, vertigo, depression. Sounds like that what you were describing with the squirrel could be perhaps called anxiety. I don't know if you would describe it that way.

Oh, the anxiety. Yeah. The anxiety was horrible. Yeah. That was, I missed that symptom, but that was one of the worst things. And that's, that's something that now that I've met and talked to, um, well, a bunch of other patients, you know, that's, that seems to be the worst. The anxiety, the brain fog, um, is, is just the worst. And that, and almost all of the patients that I have talked to, there's not many of us. I think there's 16 or 17 of us now.

Mm.

Is that very first session, the brain fog and the anxiety, I don't wanna say it was completely gone, but it was mostly gone. I mean, the, the fact that like, yeah, that, that, that just immediately le— Alleviated. No, Nurse Lindsay now, who's semi-famous, I guess, among the injured community after her first treatment, same thing. Amazing. It was amazing.

Talk to me about other symptoms. Yeah.

I was just going to say, I remember meeting you, Bob, and you were just sitting on a couch. Your wife was next to you and she was doing most of the talking for you because you were just kind of like, I'm so depressed. I can't get, I can't do anything. I got it. But you know, whatever time today, this afternoon, and I just, I was very sad. I, your wife spoke for you and was like, I just wanna do things with my husband and we can't do anything. And I remember telling me, you're like, I just look at my boat and I don't, I don't, I don't get on the boat, but I look at my boat and I was like, oh, it's right out my window.

It's right out my window. And I, I parked it December 1st and I did not get in it. I tried to get in it last week when I was home for 2 days. Of course the battery wouldn't start.

You'll get back in it.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

So that's a fixable problem.

That one.

No ivermectin or plasmapheresis required for that one. Yeah.

Okay.

Talk to me about other symptoms. Did you have any chest pain, shortness of breath, palpitations, blood pressure issues, joint— I did muscle pain.

Yeah. So my blood pressure would skyrocket sometimes for no reason. I was, I was going through that chest pain. There were times when my wife was begging me to go to the doctor, go to the emergency room. We got to take you to the hospital. And I just kept telling her they're going to put me in a room. They're going to tell me I have anxiety. They're going to put me on a bunch of medications. I'm going to come home with a $14,000 bill or whatever it is for a couple of days in the hospital. And they're not going to acknowledge my problems. So they're going to treat me for something that is, you know, maybe it was a symptom, but they're never going to get to the problem until they believe me. And I don't, I don't know. I'm going to enter the USA healthcare system again here in a bit and they're not going to believe me. So it's hard. Another symptom I had, well, my, my digestive tract was messed up badly. I didn't really correlate that to being associated with the, you know, the spike proteins, hemolytes, whatever you want to call the vaccine injury, but they cleared up almost immediately with the treatment in Japan as well. So now I'm—

What kinds of issues were these?

So I've always, so, well, I've always been pretty regular, I'll call it, get up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, go to the bathroom. Instead, I was going 3 or 4 times a day. Got it. Never a solid stool sample, I'll say. Right. I mean, all of that has just cleared up completely since Japan as well. Which when you spend a lot of time in the boat, that's a big deal.

It's a big deal.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You can't really go boating with that kind of problem unless it's a really big boat.

Yeah. I still feel like I have a little bit of chest tightness. Some of it's just gotta work, you know, work out., but I need to get better at tracking my blood pressure. I tried to do it this morning. I couldn't find it. I'm not home at the moment, but I feel better. I just feel better.

Yeah.

Yeah. I want to do things. I do things every day. Yeah. It's a completely different person.

Let me unpack a few things that you, you mentioned there. So one thing that struck me about your labs that went undetected before we, we met was that your ferritin was very high, which is very interesting because we actually find that a lot of patients have an elevated ferritin and some of them may have an elevated hemoglobin hematocrit, in which case we look for sleep disorder, like apnea. What struck me about this was that a lot of patients actually felt remarkably better with blood donation. That's obviously not something I make as a blanket recommendation, but I do routinely find that patients feel better with blood donation, whether it's COVID-19 vaccine injury or other illnesses causing them to have this elevated blood pressure. And it's, by the way, it is a blood donation is a treatment for high blood pressure. It tends to drop your blood pressure by about 15 points for about 3 weeks. So it's not You know, a cure-all, but there's all these connections between too much iron, elevated ferritin, total toxic burden, and high blood pressure. And so it's been one of the most impactful things we've ended up sharing with patients over the years. Again, not all of them, not medical advice. You must talk to a clinician about that, but it's been something that I've been really impressed by. So I know I recommended that to you and I believe you donated blood multiple times in that year, right?

Yes. Correct. Ever since I met with you, I did probably donate, I think, 4 times leading up to my trip to Japan.

Did you notice a difference?

I think I did early on. I would say, you know, when, when I finally started working with you and we tweaked a bunch of different things, I think it probably did help for those 3 or 4 months. And I think, you know, whatever this vaccine was doing, I think it just kind of overwhelmed all those treatments. It just, like I say, it just kept getting worse over time and things just finally stopped helping.

Yeah, absolutely. And we had patients who went, you know, went all the way with everything we offer them, natural integrative supplements, et cetera, and still struggled. We also had patients who completely recovered without having to go through more than just supplements, lifestyle changes, dietary changes. It all varied. And a lot of it had to do with amount of time and the intensity of different things that were, that were recommended.

I would tell all patients they should start there. Start with fine-tuning your health. Ivermectin, I think, is a very safe thing that you gave to me, and that would be help because if that, if You shouldn't have to go to Japan if you can find something more local, cheaper, easier. And if those things work for you, God bless you. And maybe if I had started sooner, because I mean, it took me, what was it? I guess 4 years from my first shot to find you. It was very hard to find doctors. You know, finally, I think it was React19 and then FLCCC. I think that was how I located you finally. Maybe if I'd have found you that first year, maybe that would have been good. But I think by that I had so many things probably built up that, you know, I wasn't going to be be saved by only those things.

I think that's a tough— I totally understand. We have, we have had patients who were sick for years and years who were worsening with COVID-19 vaccine shots, who, who did recover just with diet and lifestyle and supplementation using the protocols we use. I will say that there is a challenge there that it takes a lot of time. So our practice is very different than most. We spend, you know, we budget 10 to 15 hours total combined, Amy and myself, in the first year of taking care of a patient. Which is, means we can only take on about 100 and we have 180 patients right now and only 20 or so of them are in those, those very intensive programs. So I am very pleased with the results we get. But the other thing that I found is that it is very hard to comply with and keep track of everything that we give people. And so I actually think there's a really important role for somebody who's really sick. They're so ill and they're so brain fogged and they're so fatigued that changing their diet and lifestyle is either overwhelming or impractical. And if you get them on a plane and, or get them to wherever they need for a more intensive procedure, whatever that may be. In this case, we're talking about obviously plasmapheresis and stem cells. Then you can do that. And then they can have the bandwidth, the energy, the focus, the drive to get the rest of the plan done. Right. So absolutely. Again, there's no cookie cutter, one size fits all. And I also, I say that as well, because I really want people to know that, you know, you might not need to go to Japan or pursue any kind of advanced procedure anywhere. And you also, we're very early with this therapy, so we don't, I don't want people to think it's a silver bullet. I really strongly suspect. I'm very curious. I will say what will come out of the data from this. And by the way, that's why we're doing this podcast. Mary Talley Bowden, Dr. Bowden is part of a group that's putting together an IRB to fund formal research on this in the United States so that we can bring the treatment here so that people don't have to fly to Japan. There will be links to donate to that IRB. If you don't know what an IRB is, it's an institutional review board. They are responsible for vetting and making sure that research in the United States being done is ethical. And don't get me started on how strange I think it is that we have to spend a lot of private money to study this when like the government paid for the industry to study the drugs that created the problem.

But anyway, they have a billion dollars for bombs every day, but they don't have any money to help sick people in America. It's just crazy.

You wonder how long it could possibly go on like this. Another thing I will mention, you did have low zinc. I think that's something everyone should look at. We routinely find that our patients need at least 30 milligrams of zinc a day. We've been very impressed that some of our patients seem to soak up 100 milligrams of zinc a day or more. Don't do that without physician supervision. They soak it up. Why?

Why?

Their body's burning through it. And one thing interesting to me about the blood pressure pattern we see in COVID vaccine injury is that you described it very well. We've seen it in many other cases. It also, by the way, looks the same in my practice as patients with a really bad had mercury burdens, the patients with the most mercury amalgams, the most history of eating tuna, they have this highly labile blood pressure. So it's super high one day and then it's— or one minute, and then it's really, really low the next. And we've seen some patients with very high blood pressures actually push out massive quantities of heavy metals as they're recovering from their high blood pressure. We don't have full hair tissue sequences for you, Bob, but we've got some really impressive eliminations of everything from cadmium to manganese. And so I think this is really an— it's an endothelial injury to the blood vessel lining that's driving that, that I think in COVID-19 vaccine injury is being driven by the spike protein, but I think it's similar to other causes of endothelial dysfunction. So I'll be curious what other clinicians think about that, particularly in the comments to this episode. And without further ado, let's— let me walk people through what we did when I met Bob. We gave him customized, personalized supplements and minerals. We made some key lifestyle changes. Recommendations. And then you had already started ivermectin on your own, recognizance. And I looked at your dose and I thought, this is a small dose. And you described that, I recall, feeling much better on it. So I said, well, clearly we should double down on what's working. And so I think I tripled your dose. Do you remember that?

Yeah, I was taking 3 to 6 milligrams a day. I was kind of scared because I was medicating on my own. I didn't have good—

Yeah, the horse paste that the FDA told you to be afraid of.

Actually, I have letters from my doctors telling me to get off of it this past summer.

Yeah.

They actually mailed me letters telling me, and I was like, no way, this is the only thing that helped. But yeah, so I was just so—

it's such a safe drug.

Yeah. We went from like 6 milligrams up to 40. And then at the end, right before I came to see you, without your wishes, I tried 80 milligrams a day to see if that would help for 2 weeks before I came to see you. 'Cause I wanted to give that a shot. Out so we could talk about it. And at that point it just wasn't helping even the, you know, that high dosage. Yeah.

Amy's laughing. If you can't, if you're listening to this and you can't see her, Amy's laughing because Amy's got a history of recovering from MS and she used very high doses of antiparasitics. Do you want to give people the brief thumbnail of that story, Amy, and why you're laughing?

Yeah. I mean, I think that is the brief thumbnail. I think that a lot of people are afraid of these antiparasitic drugs, but they're so powerful in overcoming autoimmune diseases, cancer, Things like vaccine injury, all of these different things, because it doesn't only target parasites, but it also does other things in your immune system. And so anyway, it is very, very powerful. And so when I came to work with Dr. Stillman and we were figuring out dosing, we were, you know, collaborated and said we need to have much higher dosing than most doctors are willing to give because we're seeing such great results with it. And so that's why for you, Bob, he was like, hey, let's up your dose. And, you know, for other people as well, of course we do it case by But we've seen amazing results.

With supervision.

Yep.

We just had a case of a woman with GI issues for, I think, 4 or 5 decades.

Mm-hmm.

And I am always hopeful in those cases, the, the, the simple things we recommend at first will work because they often do. But she was still having symptoms. I said, this sounds like a slam dunk for, I think we did metronidazole and nitazoxanide, and she immediately started to have symptoms consistent with protozoa dying and being eliminated from the body. So just another day in the real world of clinical practice where you actually listen to patients.

Absolutely. I know it helped me immensely and I know it has for you, Bob, and it is just really incredible when you find someone that it's like you've taken those high doses and it's really helped them.

Yes.

Backtracking a little bit, a couple other symptoms that I, that I had for the really the last 4 years now. So I would have occasional bouts with shingles.

Yeah.

And then I would have rashes.

Yes.

That I could not, you know, get rid of. And now, now they're gone. So those are symptoms now that I have 4 years now that I did. Well, since my trip to Japan specifically, like completely gone. So I think they were all caused by the same vaccination or autoimmune disease. 'Cause I kind of feel like my body was fighting itself. I had spike proteins and my spike protein antibodies were always greater than 25,000.

Yes.

Since Japan, they're down to 21,000. So they're finally in a measurable range. They've come down probably, you know, 5,000 points. So what I, what I kind of relate this to is my body was just fighting itself. It was creating spike proteins on one side and creating spike proteins and antibodies on the other side. And they were just taught my body was constantly fighting each other. And that's why I couldn't get over things like a simple rash. One other symptom that I had too, I'd lost feeling in my toes for the last years. I know there's something called COVID feet and, um, you know, so I knew I had a problem. I noticed like the last year I wouldn't look at my feet. You couldn't make me look at my feet. Feet. Because I guess I sensed there was something wrong that I just didn't want to deal with or look at. So that was another symptom that I had that just, I want to share those with whoever listens.

Interesting.

That's a problem. And other patients relate some of those things too.

It's interesting because to me, because what I think is so pernicious about the COVID-19 vaccines, the mechanism, right, is this unregulated out-of-control production of spike protein, right? And that's really different from other vaccines. When you look at, say, the negative health effects linked to aluminum-based vaccines, it's the aluminum building up in cells and tissues, creating immune dysregulation and direct damage through radical production. Same thing with mercury, same thing with the other heavy metals. You'll find a variety of different mechanisms for things like glyphosate, mold toxins, all kinds of things that we run into in our world. But with the spike protein, what I find interesting is that it's producing this protein And you know, the more symptomatic someone seems to be, the higher their spike protein level seems to get, right? Which does imply that it's causative. And what I think is interesting about that is that I, when I think about disease and cellular health, I think about it in terms of you actually want your cells to be very quiet and sort of orderly. So I think about how like a city or a town runs when everything is healthy and normal. You know, everything runs quickly and quietly and there's not a lot of drama or noise, right? It's when things get chaotic and out of control that then, you know, basically everything breaks down and falls apart. And when I think about spike protein, I think about, number one, it just starts to clog everything up. You know, the actual sheer volume of this can change blood viscosity, which is why we often hear about fatigue, brain fog, you know, blood pressure swings. These are all things that are affecting blood flow in a way. But I also think about just the sheer demand on nutrients, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, et cetera, to just make all this stuff. So the body to me, we always see this is it's depleted. The zinc levels are low. The magnesium levels are low, mid-range if they've been taking it. Copper can be low. Sometimes copper gets out of control and it's very high. Hair tissue testing all over the place, high, low, you know, extreme imbalances. But, you know, it's interesting. These, this is very different from not necessarily in terms of the manifestations actually, but in terms of how it presents. Because what I think gets people really turned around is, why is it affecting every organ system of my body? Or why is it affecting blood pressure and sensation in my feet and, you know, cognitive function in Patient A, but Patient B has, I don't know, palpitations and chest tightness and like a totally different symptom cluster? Or maybe they have different— completely different organ systems involved. When I think about how, how that must be, or why that must be, it seems to me it must be, well, it's affecting these different systems because it depletes the nutrients, and then it loads the body up with this toxin that creates all this stress, and then it impairs blood flow. And I wonder to what degree it's actually opening people up for infections, because that's what we tend to see when people wind up malnourished and overburdened with toxins, is they tend to get opportunistic infections, which fits with what you just said. You had 4 years of sort of shingles virus type illnesses along the way. Now that's better, right? And, you know, again, all right, I guess I'll mention as well, people will often note that ivermectin works for these sort of poorly defined viral illnesses, right? Not necessarily to find on a lab test, but just, I had a cold, I had a flu, I assumed it was a virus, I took ivermectin and it went away. I'm very excited to see what it does for shingles. You're the first person I've heard mention it for that. Now I'm going to use it the next time that pops up in the practice. Although I will say we get very little shingles with patients because when they take enough of the right, you know, like vitamin C, minerals, I find that it just puts everything back into place so that they— people will come in with shingles and then just say it won't be a problem. Otherwise I hear about it for acute care visits. But I think that's enough about, about the lead up to Japan. Is that fair, Bob? Did we miss anything?

Yeah, no, it was pretty complete, but yeah, I think that's important. And one thing I'd like to say, especially since meeting the patients in Japan, is everybody's different. Everybody has different symptoms. It's not a one size fits all. That's, I think that's what makes it so difficult to diagnose. 'Cause I really, I never understood the brain issues related to, um, I'll say the long COVID or the shot, um, until the Yale Listen study came out. And that to me was all of a sudden bingo. So that was when the— this is what I'm dealing with. Cause I had every symptom they listed in that Yale Listen study. You know, when it finally realized that it passes through the blood-brain barrier and gets into your head. Cause I had never heard that before until—

Yeah. Well, I don't think anybody really knew until then, but I do recall from the conversations around spike protein when the virus was first making the rounds, let's just say people saying this thing can get into all these cells, cause all this mayhem. And, you know, who knows what's going to happen. Obviously what's going to happen when you introduce something that makes the protein into the body, talk about playing with fire. But so you were, you know, deteriorating. I also want to point out to people, cause I bet a lot of them, a lot of you listening to this who are struggling with this will, this will make sense. You mentioned specifically that you started to get worse around October. I want to point out that the autumnal equinox is to use the technical term is September 21st. That's when we go from, from summer into fall and the day is approximately, or I should say exactly 12 hours in the Northern Hemisphere in most places. And so you've got an equal day light or day night cycle or time period, photo period, I should say. And we routinely see the patients who are doing well over the summer will do worse or deteriorate around that time. And it's actually around September, October when vitamin D levels peak in the body because that's when UV light's present in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in very high latitudes like you were in, in Minnesota. And so I wouldn't be surprised if the sunlight was really helping you compensate for all this and making up for it. Cause God knows there's almost nothing more beautiful than summer in Northern Minnesota. I know I spent 2 years there and, and then there's also nothing perhaps more depressing than a winter in Northern Minnesota.

So that's why I go to Florida.

I know. Right. So I totally get the deteriorating in October. A lot of patients notice that. And then people's, people's levels of vitamin D actually drop into their lowest ranges, January, February, March, which not coincidentally sort of, I call it the season of death because statistically it's when there's a spike in deaths every single year. And it's all linked to this vitamin D phenomenon, linked to the sunlight. It's not just the vitamin D, to be clear. It's also the frequencies in sunlight. So you just started to deteriorate. And then what was it that prompted you to say, you know what, I've had enough of this, I'm going to Japan?

Yeah. When I just couldn't get better. And actually, I guess I watched the podcast where Dr. McCarran was on with Dr. Mary Talley Bowden. And then that was the first Lindsey? With Nurse Lindsey. Yes. Oh yeah.

That's the one too.

I don't know how I got to, you know, following them specifically, but as soon as I saw that, I was like, there, you know, there's an answer that, you know, through a little bit of invasive therapy, I would say, is going to actually address the problem. Right. And so immediately following that podcast, I went on Amazon. I ordered all the blood slides and like 2 days later I had a FedEx package going off to Dr. In Japan. He called me a couple days later. We had a middle of the night Zoom call because they're 14 hours either— they're 14 hours ahead of us. And then, you know, he immediately upon opening my blood, he could show the amyloids. So the proteins misfold and cause amyloid clots within your blood. And the way he explains it is once they're in my bloodstream, they were gathering literally in my brain, choking off my brain, you know, the blood flow, the oxygen to my brain. Brain essentially giving me Parkinson's, which now that I look back makes a lot of sense. I'd sit in a chair staring at a wall for months at a time. Occasionally, you know, I'd have some shaking or whatever that went on. It was bad. In fact, when I saw you last March, I was really struggling. For me just to get out of the house and get to your office to see you, that was like a monumental thing. My wife would have to hold my hand and lead me down the hall. No, it was really, really bad. So seeing that diagnosis from Dr. So when, when, when I was leaving, just reading the word Parkinson's on my diagnosis is kind of shattering. I still don't know what kind, what to make of it, but certainly that's where I was headed. I was worried about that. And that, that's what I had. Anyway. Yeah. So it was that episode with Mary Talley Bowden and Nurse Lindsay, who I got to meet. I got to meet Nurse Lindsay while I was in Japan, by the way. Oh yeah. And so I, at that point I was off and running and I want to thank you, doctor, for not trying You, you looked at my numbers and my amyloid test and you said, go to Japan, I think, which, you know, thank you. Yeah.

Let me talk about that because I have a very, I want to talk about this and I really can't tell people how passionate I am about this. I really think, I really hope people will hear this. So I was trained unfortunately in an age of medicine when subspecialists were running everything and referring to the subspecialist was almost never the wrong answer. It minimized your legal liability. Well, I'd sent them to the cardiologist or the gastroenterologist or the whatever, enterologist cost you needed for the organ system, right? And it drove hospital billing way up. So it became super popular. Administrators would basically find ways to reward doctors through what are called generally RVUs, which is like revenue value units or something, some whatever, some paper shuffling, pencil pushing bureaucrat speech. But basically it turned into like, we consult everyone and I remember talking to a to a very senior clinician. He was 30 or 40 ahead of years ahead of me in practice. And he said, you know, Leland, if they only gave me 10 patients a day to see in the hospital instead of 20 or 30, I, I've been doing this a long time. I wouldn't need the cardiologist or the gastroenterologist. I wouldn't need all these consultants. I would just take care of everyone. And if I needed a procedure, I would call them. And I thought, man, this is just such a giant waste of time, money, energy, et cetera. And the reason that I say that is that unfortunately patients are— then I stepped out into private practice and I found out how the real world which is how I sort of always knew in my heart it should have worked. The general internist like me is supposed to be the brake on procedures and proceduralists and scans and lab testing. And we're supposed to be the ones that say, I don't think we need that test. I don't think we need that referral because this is how a normal market is supposed to work.

Why?

Because if you just refer everyone for everything, then everybody gets this kind of watered-down care. You don't actually get to really like invest in your cases and get to know them and do a good job. You're just trying to keep up with this incredible treadmill of consults. I would see this on the subspecialist services when I rotated through them, and the patients just feel like they're a number at the deli counter, which isn't how you want to feel when you're trying to get your health back in order. And so I realized that in the real world, I only had to consult when I really didn't have time— and I had time. So I only consulted when I really had a clear question for the subspecialist, or I really had a procedure that I was sure the patient was right for. And that allowed me to refer with more intelligence. And patients got better outcomes and I wasn't wasting subspecialist time. The problem with referring in like aggressively or just sort of everyone is that the subspecialists have this kind of perverse incentive of, you know, well, if you show up in my office and I'm a hammer, then there's a good chance you're a nail. And that's just human behavior. And I really hope that where medicine is going to go next is general internists are going to leave the system en masse because it's a terrible system if you're a general internist, but patients crave a doctor they can really talk to and really talk about the risks and benefits. And I cannot tell you how much I've learned about risks and benefits of different procedures that are routinely recommended to patients with no more than a sort of 30-second, hey, this is a procedure, this is what we recommend for you, this is a treatment for your disease, you should totally have it. Just like your booster, right?

Right.

It's like that brief, like, you should do this. It's— but then you get into the data and the data is horrifying. I mean, I just read the data on the side effects of radical prostatectomy. And oh my gosh, as a man, they didn't teach me this in medical school. I won't even repeat them here, but if you want to know, the book is Invasion of the Prostate Snatchers. If you're a man, don't read it before bed, you might not sleep well. And I'll just leave it at that. Yeah, but I, I really want people to understand the role of the general— of the general practitioner is to help you find the right practitioner and the right procedure for for you, given your context and the diagnosis and the disease you're dealing with, and to then go through with the course of therapy to maximize your chance of success. And the other thing I've seen with procedures is that the patients who get the best results do the work upfront to get healthy. So we would run into this in the hospital all the time. I'll never forget this case. It was a wild case. This woman had been in the hospital for 9 months when finally she ended up dying the day that I was on staff in the ICU. And the story on this woman was she, she'd basically had to be cut out of her house by EMS because she's gotten so large she couldn't fit through the door. Her kids were bringing her food to basically enable her to continue to live, and she came to the hospital, and her, her underlying health was so poor that even though we treated her with all the drugs and all the surgeries and all of this and all of that, she finally ended up dying because her body was just so run down, so malnourished, so diseased from really diseases— diabetes and obesity— that were fundamentally about diet and lifestyle. And so the lesson there from that and countless other cases I could recount out is the patients who focus on fixing this foundational level of their health— solid nutrition, gentle exercise, or, or intense exercise— all that, they're the patients who do best with procedures. They spend the money on stem cells and plasmapheresis and ozone and anything else, and they actually get great results. And more importantly, they get great results that last. Because one thing that I found coming out of training and referring out to subspecialists, either in integrative medicine or in the conventional world, was that, you know, you'd have patients go somewhere like a destination wellness center. They'd spend $50,000, $100,000, $200,000. 3 months, 6 months, 9 months later, they're back at square one. And the discouragement, the despair that I would see in these patients was actually very sobering. And the thing that really stood out to me taking care of them and other patients who often did way less— like, if people wanted to listen to real stories of this, like Emily Jerschak did a podcast with us about her COVID-19 vaccine recovery. She did diet, lifestyle, supplements, treatments for over a year, but she got a great outcome. She's all better last I checked. We spoke last about this last fall. Um, we've got multiple Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing, uh, in this series, which I encourage people to listen to, um, where people have a similar story. Oh yeah, I did tell you to go do it, but I always have a conversation with the patient like this: here's where you are, here's where you want to be. Always and never get to do the fundamentals. And if it's— if you— if it's worth it to you, you know, if you— if you can afford it, then go do it. Because the other thing I noticed is people would end up getting sort of talked into, or sometimes talking themselves into, $10,000, $20,000, $50,000, $100,000, whatever it was, in care. But what they wouldn't realize is the stress from the financial burden would actually create more illness than the procedure would actually solve. And so So, you know, this is why I'm really passionate about spending time with my patients and getting to know them so that we can really have these like very candid conversations about, is this worth it to you? And what do we really know? And, you know, if I don't have an answer for patients, I'll say like, listen, I'm going to go do some research. I'm going to go find what kind of data we have on this to help guide you to understanding, you know, what are the true risks and benefits. And again, part of why I'm doing this podcast is that this is so new. We don't have the data. Data, people have to be sort of, you know, the first people in line to find out how well it's working. And so I'm really excited that you're doing well, but I, I want to— I want everyone to like hear that it's the things you do every day that you don't think about— taking walks, getting sunlight, wiggling your toes in the grass, eating a healthy diet, not over-consuming junk food, you know, social media, not to mention like late-night television, whatever— those are things that really are going to help you cement the results that you get from a procedure. Does that make sense? Is that helpful?

I 100% agree. Agreed, agreed.

Or health coach agrees with me on that one. Not surprising at all.

No, of course you can get better. Just if you do the fundamentals long enough, you will get better, but I'm very excited to hear the rest of the story.

Yeah.

So Bob, tell us about your time in Japan.

Well, Japan itself was wonderful. I can't, you know, I won't spend a lot of time on that here, but the country, the culture, everything about it was fantastic. When I got to Japan, I mean, my wife had basically a 60-year-old autistic child that she was leading around. She had to hold my hand across the street. It was, you know, I honestly, I don't think I would've been able to function on my own. I don't think there's any way I could have made that trip without her. And I mean, it, it was bad. I mean, by the time I got into my first treatment again, I was on like 5 or 6 days without sleep. So it was, you know, just a real struggle. The night before my treatment, I met with Charles Rixey, who's just a wonderful human being. He explained to me what was gonna happen over the next couple weeks, day by day, answered any and all questions that I had. The next day I got to meet with Dr. Kato and we kind of did like a pretreatment assessment. I think they were actually— I was, I was the first one that had arrived in Japan that wasn't a lab rat that hadn't spent time at the Mayo Clinic doing a whole bunch of different therapies and on all sorts of medication. So I was the first one. I was kind of like a clean slate when I went in there.

Yeah.

I saw your, your ex post when you had the catheter sticking out of your neck and I thought, oh my gosh. Yeah, that's, that's my patient.

Yeah. I went, yes, I went straight from Dr. Kato's office. Dr. Kato is another wonderful, absolutely wonderful human being. And he's leading the charge in Japan on, you know, the vaccines. And so I was in, it was nice to see a doctor break out charts of showing what happened. You know, he broke it out on his phone showing me what would happen, how every time they had a wave of vaccines, a wave of death would follow. He was very open about that, which I found very refreshing. Flushing. Yes. So I, I went from Dr. Cotto's office in to have a catheter inserted in my jugular vein. I'm right here. So the catheter actually had 3 ports on it. I guess there was an in and out, and then there was another port, I believe, that they could add nutrients back into your bloodstream. The DFPA treatment itself, basically what it does, it, the first thing it does is separate the plasma from your blood and then sends the plasma in to be filtered. And the filtration, they, they, on me, they were able to do about 1.7 liters. I think it was 1.5 liters the time they had to stop. They actually, when they disconnected, you could see the clots hanging off the blood tube that was coming in. They actually showed me that. So that was interesting. And you could see a drastic difference in my blood on pre and post treatment following that very first test immediately.

When you say a difference, what do you mean?

A color difference. The post was much cleaner than the first.

Yeah. So let me, I want to be really precise here. I think what you mean is that it was more translucent after treatment, right? Like light came through it better, right?

Yes. Yeah. That's probably a better way of doing it.

Nurse Lindsay did a good job of documenting on her XFeed, you know, I saw that post files and I actually want to, want to really bring this up because I think it's so interesting. One thing that's not well understood about blood is its optical properties, by which I mean the properties by which it interacts with light. And one thing that's interesting about proteins when they're misfolded, aggregated, present in too much of an abundance is they'll create this scattering of light that we perceive as light not being able to pass through the sample. So we call it dirty, or we call it, you know, like the opposite of clear, dark, murky, whatever. And it's this change that Bob's seeing in terms of the light transmission is very much a biophysical change in the plasma and the proteins themselves, which is, I think, very cool when you're a physiology geek like me and maybe less interesting than the benefits that you've got, Bob, but I just wanted to make that quick, quick point.

Yeah. It's funny. I've learned a lot about biology over the last, especially the last year or so, a lot about blood, a lot about, you know, lots of those things. Just one of the good side. I used to look at fishing reports and stocking reports. Now I look at studies on blood and other things. It's kind of, I'm, I'm looking forward to going back to looking through, you know, fishing related things, which I literally just totally got away from trying to save my life.

Absolutely. Yeah. So you saw this physical difference in the blood. Tell us more about the procedure. How long did it last each day?

So on the day I do DFPA, you end up spending 7 to 8 hours in the hospital itself, right? Probably you spend 2 to 2.5 hours laying on your back, hooked up to the machines, filtering urine, blood. You know, when you're upstairs in your room is when they actually insert the catheter. The treatment itself is relatively painless. It's horrifying, absolutely horrifying, especially the first time you go through it.

What do you mean? Why is it horrifying?

Well, they're, they're inserting things into your jugular vein in the side.

That must be unsettling. Let's just put it that way. Yeah.

But, but relative, so relatively painless. So that was, that was the only problem. It was, it was uncomfortable. Uncomfortable for sure. Having something in your jugular vein was uncomfortable.

How many days did you have that cath in for?

I had it in 4 days. I was there for 4 weeks. The typical treatment is 2 weeks. But I had talked to patient number 2 and she had wished she'd stayed a little bit longer. And so when I heard that, and the doc, Dr. McCarran told me, he said, buy a one-way ticket. And he said, I'll send you home healthy. So that's exactly, that's exactly what I did. And then I was like, well, I'm feeling better. And as long as I'm here, I'm just going to opt for the second 2 weeks.

I don't know.

Hold on. Can we go back to patient number 2? What did she say to you specifically? And I don't know if I'm, if this is too much detail and you don't remember, of course I understand. I just, I'm so curious. What about the initial treatment wasn't enough for her?

Well, so she had some complications in the hospital as well that, so she's patient number 2, and actually she was the first patient to have this done in the hospital through her jugular vein. And I think they nicked an artery and that, her words, it was game on. But she had, but she, she had some, so one of the symptoms she has from this is carpal tunnel syndrome. And so when I was talking to her, she just, she felt like she hadn't got it completely cleared out, but it was what she did agree with is that after the first treatment, the deep dark depression, it was her term that she called it, that had lifted, that was gone. The brain fog was gone.

Was she as severe as you with the brain fog and the depression?

It's hard. So it's hard to compare those, those things. But I would say that similar. Yep. And she's, so she's been out 8 months now. We talk or text almost every day. It's kind of like a wonderful family group of people now. You know, there's, there's only like 15 or 16 of us, but we're all on a group chat talking about each other, share, yeah, sharing things. So that's actually been, been wonderful. But yeah, so her, you know, Dr. McCarran telling me to buy a one-way ticket and then her saying she wished she'd have stayed longer. That's kind That's kind of what led me to it.

Honestly, I think— when you said she was 8 months out, do you mean she's 8 months out from her treatment?

I think 9 months out from her treatment now and still, and still doing well.

When you say doing well, like has she mentioned that anything's gone back or gotten worse or regressed?

I hate to talk too much about other patients.

I get that.

I actually respect that. She's got some issues going on related to her carpal tunnel syndrome. I think some— she'd be comfortable with that.

Yeah. And I want to clarify why I'm asking. Asking is that it's so hard as a generalist to refer your patients out for this sort of thing when you're not confident. And so I was confident because I saw your symptom burden and we talked about it, right? But I just want to give people as much information here so they can feel comfortable, um, making a decision, whether they're counseling a patient as a clinician or they're a patient themselves. Yeah.

And one, one of the reasons I, I really wanted to go too is I had already lost my ears from 56 to 60. And I wasn't gonna— I didn't want to lose another day. And when I had seen a couple of the people that had gone through treatments, I think it was Jim and then Jay, or previous videos, and I saw Jay smiling and I saw Jim talking about trying on clothes, I realized I hadn't bought clothes in the last 4 years. I bought 8 pairs of shoes in Japan. I hadn't bought a pair of shoes in 5 years since I ran that half marathon. It's just why bother buying a pair of shoes? I don't do anything.

Yeah.

But that was— I had some urgency based on age, I would I would say. Yeah, I didn't want to lose another day. I had lost 4 years. And so that's part of my mindset. So, and I think I was dying. I literally think I was dying.

How many hours were you, were you on the machine each day?

About 2.5 hours was on the machine. And then from there I would go back, they'd bring me back to my room and then I would get stem cell growth factors. Not stem cells, but stem cell growth factors derived from baby's teeth. And I would get them through the neck that day. So I would get the apheresis and the stem cell growth factor treatment. So that was my first day. And then the next 4 days of the week, I would, I would just go to the clinic. I would spend an hour at the clinic and have stem cell growth factors and an IV through, you know, through my arm each day. And then repeat that every week. Every week was like that. One day of apheresis and stem cells, and then 4 days of stem cells.

So you only had 4 apheresis sessions, is that correct?

I, yes, that's correct. That doesn't seem like I, you know, most of the other patients had already been other places. They had been to Germany. They had been to, I think it's Alabama. They had been to the Mayo Clinic. They had been all over.

Yeah.

And I guess they still ended up there. I didn't really talk to them about the levels, levels of treatment, but like I say, they all, they all ended up there. Everything else seemed to be more short-term and the doctors were honest with me, just like I'll be honest with you. We don't know how long this is going to last. We're 9, we're 9 months out. I tell you, if I get 9, if I get 9 good months, like I feel today, it was worth it. I'm not scared I'm gonna have to go back.

Do you mean 9 months after patient 1, the first patient?

So patient 2 is the one I referenced. She was the first at the hospital. She's patient 2 and she's the one I communicate with. I have not communicated with patient number 1. Got it. So, so yeah, it's 9 months out.

It's still very early.

And that's what Dr. McCarren says. So that's what, you know, that's where, like for me, when, as soon as I got back, I looked at my spike antibody levels and it dropped into a noticeable range. Spike proteins are apparently hard to test. Test. I'm in 3 months out. I'm gonna send Dr. McCarran a test for amyloids again. 'Cause amyloids are the clots are what, you know, developed from the spike proteins and were clogging my brain, giving me essentially Parkinson's.

Right. How quick was the relief once you started the treatment?

So when I, when I walked in for treatment that day, I couldn't walk down a hospital hallway. If there was somebody behind me, I had to stop and sit against the wall until they passed. I couldn't walk. My anxiety was so bad. Post-treatment, Dr. Cotto and a couple other doctors came in to see me after the treatment. I was like, this is crazy. I've got 5 doctors staring at me, asking me questions, and I have no anxiety. But I was on 5 days of sleep. I was 5 days with no sleep. Right. And so I was like, I didn't want to judge. I told the doctors, they're like, how are you feeling? And I was like, you know what? I feel good, but I haven't slept in 5 days. So I don't, I don't have a problem. You would think you would feel terrible if you hadn't slept for 5 days. Yes. But I could sit and talk to them clearly, you know, especially 5 at once. That was a little like, like scary and I knew something was up.

Let's just for a moment say it had been pre-treatment and 5 doctors in white coats had walked into your room. Where would your anxiety levels have been from a 0 to 10?

I had trouble sitting alone with Dr. Cotto. I was still in that space where my wife was answering a lot of the questions for me. You know what I mean? I couldn't—

Can we say 10?

It was hard to deal with. Yeah, it was. Yeah.

And so 10, what did it bring it down to after that first treatment when you had 5 doctors in the room?

It basically was just a lack of sleep then I could, I could talk to them. So I don't want to say zero, but, you know, close to zero level and I'm hearing a 2 or a 1. Yeah. Yep. And, and part of it was still uncomfortable. I still had this catheter in my neck, right?

And so I mean, you were in a hospital, Johnny, which isn't exactly the most confidence inducing.

And I don't fit well in the Japan hospital gown.

I bet you're a pretty tall guy.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you felt much better quickly is the, is the upshot of that. You felt like a new man quickly. Is Is that fair?

Yeah, yeah. In fact, it was not the next day, but the day after that, once I got my bandage removed, that I went for an infamous 6-mile run where I, you know, my brain felt so good. My wife went out for a run and I said, I'm going to join you. And about half mile in, I sprinted past her. I had my headphones in and I just kept running and running and running. And then we said, well, I better turn around. And she was waiting for me at back at our Airbnb and I just ran past her. I kept going. So I think it was like 5.7 miles I ended up running, but boy, did I pay for it the next day. But my brain felt so good. I was like, I was like Forrest Gump, just, I couldn't stop running. I just kept, you know, it was—

when was the last time you'd done that before then?

I had only, the, the half marathon I ran in June of 2021.

So what's interesting is you did have an, you did have a turnaround with the ivermectin, I recall, cause I have this in my notes. You had a, you went from from not being able to run a mile for 4 years to doing 3 miles running, 3 biking, and an hour swimming with hydroxychloroquine. Isn't that right?

I had, I had a good, I had a good spell in January. Yeah. Where I was, yeah, I was running, I was running, biking, and swimming every day. And it was funny. And it was probably classic Parkinson's. They turned off the heater at the pool and everything fell apart. It was just, I had a mental breakdown and I just, I, you know what, I never ran again. I never got on a bike again. I never jumped in the pool again after they turned off the pool heater and I couldn't get it turned on and it just sent me on a tailspin. So my wife always tells me we're not allowed to talk about the pool.

So sorry if I missed this, but did you go on that 6-mile run in Japan right after the first treatment?

It was 2 days after the first treatment. Wow. Yeah, I did start.

Yep. Walk me through this if you would, with the best numbers you can. If 0 is where you were at your absolute worst and 100% is where you'd like to be, where are you now?

So I, I would say probably like an 8. So I still have some cognitive issues. I'm right. And so I do Sudoku puzzles now every day, trying to bring back, you know, my memory is bad, but getting better. So I need to retrain my brain. Also, I've been basically sedentary for a lot of the last 4 years. I'm a little bit, I'm better in the summer, right? As you kind of mentioned, make sense. And I get, I deteriorate in the fall and winter. You know, it's horrible, but even in the summer, things are hard, especially mentally. It's, it's, you know, a battle for me to do things. And I'd certainly don't do things like I used to. And then just the fact that I, I lifted weights when I was in Japan. That was the first time I'd lifted weights in 4 years. I just refused to ever— I couldn't get myself to do it. Couldn't get myself to run most of the time. I couldn't get myself to lift weights. So I've got a, you know, I need to lose a little bit of weight. I need to get back in shape. Unfortunately, my ankle's bothering me, so that's limiting me a little bit now, but I want to do it. And I go for walks every day. At least I'm going for walks and going outside and doing running errands with my wife and going to physical therapy with my mother-in-law. You know, taking her there instead of sitting at home hiding from the world.

So if you're at 80% and you were at zero before this procedure and you had 4 weeks of treatment, walk us through kind of like, if this was like a graph, I'm going to bet that you got like 70 or 80% of that 80% in the first week. But you tell me, what was the sort of progression and where did you start to see sort of diminishing returns? If you will.

So I would say like the first 2 weeks, like, which is recommended, it probably is like the minimum treatment. I would say I got most of the gains back in those 2, in those 2 weeks. Now, since we stayed there and I felt better, the last, the second 2 weeks actually turned into a little bit of a vacation, right? So we were getting able to do things. We went to a couple of baseball games. We went to see the Black Crows twice in a row. And we went to, we spent a weekend up in Nagano, which is the mountains where the Olympics were, saw snow monkeys. So I was able to hike and walk through woods. I mean, I can't remember the last time I actually went on a walk with my wife, you know, in 4 years, you know, you know, we'd maybe go on a short 3-block walk or something, but not on an actual like hike up the mountain. And we did extra side trips and saw everything. So it was, it was completely different. And I, you know, honestly, I, you know, I wouldn't want to make an assessment, but if you're financially limited and I don't want to say I'm not financially unlimited, but if If you can go for 2 weeks is what you can afford. A lot of people like me have lost their income. Right. And so I was lucky that I was at a point where I could retire, but I had always this plan of just having a fishing business guide business and being able to maintain that income. I'd lost over the last 4 years, it's dwindled down to zero. And like I see a lot of people there, you have to do a give, give, go to go. If you're doing a give, send, go to get there and you've, it's about $25,000. It's going to, it'll end up being about $35,000. I would say for the first 2 weeks.

Hang on, are we talking travel plus treatment plus lodging plus—

that's treatment, lab costs, and interpreters.

Okay.

So the interpreter piece, a lot of times they'll get missed. So that's realistic. And then, you know, wow, the flight cost. I'm glad I went when I did because the flight costs have gone way up.

Oh my gosh. Yeah. And then fuel here in a minute.

Yeah. And then my wife and I went together. I needed her, you know, and she, she goes with me every everywhere. So I needed her along too. That wasn't really optional.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, so all in, what are people looking at for 2 weeks?

I would say about $40,000 is a good number. You know, for me, well, it was, it was a, I looked it up this morning. It was $1,100 for our first one-way flight tickets. So $2,200 and $2,200 back. It'll be about $2,500 for an Airbnb, about $25,000 for the hospital, $7,000 for lab fees and then it's about, it's gonna be, yeah, about $1,300, $1,400 a week for an interpreter. That's, that's how it adds up. So it's not, you know, I did, believe me, I didn't like it, especially when I pay $1,700 a month for insurance that it's not covered.

Yeah.

Why is it not covered? I don't understand how you can just say, oh, it's not covered.

I thought I had health insurance, but that's why, you know, I don't have any relationship with them financially, but that's why we, most of our patients patients— well, I don't know if I can say most of our patients, but a lot of our patients have forsaken the insurance model because it's so absurd. You know, you just pay an arm and a leg every month and they cover nothing, especially the things that you arguably need the most.

And worried about that one trip to the hospital though, right? That one trip you have, you're in a car accident, you're— oh my gosh, I know you have a stroke or heart attack and all this.

My son went to the hospital from birth, from due to birth injury, like the bill was half a million dollars. Right. So anyway, not to get into all that, but a lot of our patients have switched to healthcare sharing ministries out of personal conviction. And just because, you know, if you're going to spend the money on these out-of-pocket therapies, well, it's like, why have your insurance? You know, you have a healthcare sharing ministry, you know, I, like you, or like they can't guarantee that they're going to pay your bills, but if neither is insurance, why have insurance? There's also a great book that Robert Yoho covered called The Big Lie on Your Healthcare Bill. Go listen to his podcast with the author of that. Lots of interesting information in there. That's all I'll say about that.

But yeah, I spent more on insurance the last 3 years than I did on my trip to Japan.

Yeah. Right. And the trip to Japan was worth it and the insurance was not. Is that fair?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah. So I'm hopeful we can get this here. I'm irritated that the FDA gets to say that we can't just ship the filters and start this procedure, offering this procedure. They have to approve it, I'm told. So we have to do this IRB, which there will be a link to donate to in the description of this episode. And if you want more information about when these therapies become available in the, in the United States, I am sure that myself, Dr. Bowden, other people I could think of like Dr. Molly James will be offering these. And we will update our email list with an email when it becomes available. So subscribe, we'll have a link to subscribe. Bob, anything you want to share with people that we haven't covered today that you think they should know?

You know, it was wonderful for me, but at this point I'm probably their flagship patient. I've had maybe the best results out of anybody coming through there. I attribute to not being a guinea pig from our medical system in the USA. A lot of the other patients had underlying conditions, you know, maybe heart conditions, other things that were to get proof of it. Apparently mine were mainly brain functions that everybody seems to have clear out after that first system. I shouldn't say everybody, but most patients that I've talked to, there's, there's an immediate benefit. Again, I can feel my toes again. So there's some other vascular things going on, certainly that it, that it worked on. And like I say, a huge change in my digestive system. I feel it's healthy again and it was not, but I I don't want to say that everything is all unicorns and rainbows and—

No, we don't want to offer anyone false hope.

Right. Yeah. So I want to state that because there's certainly other patients that are needing more treatments coming out. At this point, I'm on— as of leaving there, I'm on no medications. I do have a stem cell growth factor nasal spray that I take one day to continue healing my brain. Hopefully it's going to— help with the, you know, get back on the cognitive issues that I'm having. So, you know, I wish everybody the best too. If you decide to go and you go, there's no guarantees. And just sharing my story and everybody's is going to be a little bit different. So do, you know, do, do your research and take a look at my, you know, might be right for you. It might not.

Absolutely.

Yep. The other thing I'd like to add is we could sure use some help from RFK Jr., the Maha folks, Dr. Makri, Dr. Bhattacharya. Aria. I don't understand why you can't stand up in front of a camera and say that these people need help, that doctors should test for these things, that insurance should pay for these things. I just, I'm just astounded by the whole Maha group. They're just, they're leaving patients to die. I w— you know, I was in treatment, so it's one thing for an old fart like myself, but I was in treatment with some young people, right? One is a teenager. Some being their, you know, early 20s. I'm watching them go through the same thing I'm going through. And it really hit home. I thought I was alone out there for the longest time. And then seeing children, young adults sitting there with me, knowing that the USA hospital system won't help them. It's just tragic. And I wish they would do something. They won't, they won't, they won't do anything. It's crazy.

Well, anybody listening to this, the key is that the old guard in both parties needs to be primaried very aggressively.

Absolutely.

They need to be primary and help you because, you know, it's the same story. The Republicans will often run on a medical freedom ticket and then not fulfill. Case in point, Donald J. Trump, for whatever that's worth.

He could sign an executive order tomorrow, tell him—

I mean, when he came out with like the— what was it— AI-driven cancer vaccines, I was like, have you polled your audience recently for what they want? Because this is definitely not it. But what do I know? I'm just a right? And so the solution is to primary these people who are not moving the ball forward on this. And it's totally a bipartisan thing. You know, Elizabeth Warren is a very, very consistent player for the pharmaceutical industry, but so are GOP types who you're not gonna hear speaking up on this. And, and they're, you know, the incumbents just keep getting voted in. Mitch McConnell, good lord, how old is he? Does he know?

Yeah, yeah, right. They have to sign his name for him because he's not able to.

Oh my gosh, Pelosi, Feinstein, crazy.

Jeez, both parties though, both parties.

Been there since before I was born. I've been practicing for 12 years this July. Nobody should be in Congress that long. I like Mark Twain's quote on this. He said, "Politicians are like diapers. They should be changed often and for the same reason." And on that out. Yeah. Bob, anything else you wanna share?

No, that's pretty much it. Thanks. Thanks for having me today. I just wanna get the word out, right? If one person hears this and they can get help, you know, that's, that's the only reason, you know, that I'm sharing my story.

Thank you so much for doing it. I really appreciate it. It's the only way that we move the ball forward, which we need to, because, you know, I just see patients suffering every day and I wish we had more that we could offer them. And this seems to be, I think, the, the best thing for this from what I can tell.

Okay. Well, thank you, Dr.