Using Peptide Therapy to Treat Neuropathy and Chronic Pain

Neuropathy, I think, is one of the scourges of our era. I'm going to shut this door here.

And I had neuropathy with Lyme, and yeah, out of almost every illness, you had that with anxiety, and it's just a miserable time. And just taking 50 showers a night, baths, getting up and down, can't lay down, you can't stand up. Um, it's one of those things like, I, I can't live this way, you know.

Yeah. And so it was interesting because neuropathy was one of the first things that I tried to tackle, and I've been tackling it consistently for the last 10 years. Um, the— as an anesthesiologist, I, I— what my practice was in anesthesia was I would use an ultrasound and basically put a needle real close to a nerve and then create a halo around that nerve of fluid that was numbing medicine to put that nerve to sleep.

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Hello, this is Dr. Ken Holtorf with another episode of the Peptide Summit, and today I'm very excited. We have Dr. Matt Cook, uh, who is just He's just done so many things. I've known him for a long time and just respected everything that he does on the cutting edge in so many areas. Um, but today he's going to talk about peptides for pain management, and he has new ways of doing things. They always coming up with new ways, um, and it's pretty incredible and just getting great results where, um other people. They've gone, you know, the typical 5, 10, 15, 20 doctors. So, um, and just a little bit about Matt. He is a board-certified anesthesiologist who completed a fellowship in functional medicine. You don't see that a lot. Um, his practice BioReset Medical provides treatments for conditions ranging from pain and complex illness to anti-aging and wellness. At BioReset Medical. He treats some of the most challenging diagnosis and difficult to live with ailments that people suffer from today. I know that's true because we talk all the time— Lyme disease, chronic pain— and he's just amazing with chronic pain. Uh, he's doing things that isn't in the literature. Um, post-traumatic stress disorder, autoimmune, mycotoxin illness, throw it at him. He has a way that no one else does. Uh, he has an approach to use the most non-invasive, natural, and integrative ways, including advanced peptide therapies. And he'll also do invasive stuff, but he does it, uh, he does it very differently. We were just talking where, like, for joint injections, you don't need to go in the joint. He treats the nerves and injects all around the nerve. He has some unique things, twists on, you know, that so-called cutting-edge doctors are doing. He's improved those therapies. So welcome. I'm very excited that we have you. And thank you for being on the summit.

Oh, thanks. I'm delighted. I'm just thinking about it must have been 10 years ago when we first met and we were sitting next together at an ILADS meeting, so.

Yeah, we're up in Banff and it was like Siberia. I couldn't— I don't see how people live there. Crazy. Like driving to Calgary, I got out to get gas and I'm like, I can't breathe. How do people live here? And someone walks by in Bermuda shorts, you know. But it was good. And yeah, I see him in all the conferences and I just have great conversations about, you know, cutting-edge therapies, and it's such a pleasure. So, um, God, we have so many things to talk about. I'd love to— I'd love to hear from you. Um, but let's talk about pain, your approach to pain. I guess there's so many different things, but, uh, aspects of it. Let's say someone comes in with neuropathy. What What's your approach?

Okay, so that's a great question. Neuropathy, I think, is one of the scourges of our era. I'm going to shut this door here.

And I had neuropathy with Lyme, and yeah, out of almost every illness, you had that with anxiety, and it's just a miserable time. And just taking 50 showers a night, baths, getting up and down, can't lay down, you can't stand up. It's one of those things like, I can't live this way, you know?

Yeah. And so it was interesting because neuropathy was one of the first things that I tried to tackle. And I've been tackling it consistently for the last 10 years. As an anesthesiologist, what my practice was in anesthesia was I would use an ultrasound and basically put a needle real close to a nerve and then create a halo around that nerve of fluid that was numbing medicine to put that nerve to sleep. And so I always thought, I wonder if there's something that I could do to help.

Now most people don't use ultrasounds. They just kind of shotgun it.

Right. It takes a super long time to learn how to do ultrasound. I happen to have been doing it since like 2000, and you can become very fast at it, 2002 or 2003. So for me, it takes less time to use ultrasound because I'm just kind of used to doing it all the time. And so I, you know, I was really oriented towards treating nerves and fixing nerves. And so the first, the first thing that I did, which is pretty interesting, is I went into a field of functional neurology, which was, which is a field that was really pioneered and developed by chiropractors who were basically using things like light photobiomodulation, electricity, creating really anti-inflammatory diets to try to decrease inflammation because around that nerve And the nerve is always running with an artery and a vein. And if there's a lot of inflammation in the nerve and the artery and the vein, the idea was if you could do something to lower that inflammation, you could get people better. And generally what we found is if we really dialed people in and got them to quit eating sugar and optimize their diet and did all of these things, A lot of— and you start to do light and you start to do vibration techniques. And so we were doing all this and it seemed like you could make nerves about peripheral neuropathy about 20% better doing that stuff, which was for me frustrating because it was helpful, but it's not that helpful. But that was kind of my first entry into it. Yeah.

And too, with that, I mean, I found like you don't sleep and then so you're so hungry in the morning, you know, it's like you crepe sugar.

Exactly. So as soon as that comes on, there's inflammation. So you're not sleeping, you're stressed, you're in pain. And then the other thing that happens with peripheral neuropathy is crazy is people get muscle spasms and cramps. And so then they wake up in the middle of the night and it's just like a 10 out of 10 ice pick in the back of their calf.

Yep. Yes.

And so then I started doing things like putting exosomes and placental matrix years ago around peripheral nerves. There was— and what I think is that there's probably 4 or 5 different type versions of peripheral neuropathy, and we're going to start to go through and identify them. And I'll walk you through this a little bit. What I found is— oh, look at that, a little— I got some green tea that just spilled over.

Yeah, and this is not in textbooks, folks. This is like—

right. So then what the, the regenerative medicine techniques to the peripheral nerves helped, but they didn't help everybody. Okay. And so then the next thing that happened is the peptides came onto the scene. And so I— and I really, because I've talked to you and I've talked to other people, I've had so many patients who came to me with Lyme disease where their manifestation of Lyme disease was nerve pain. And so you— a lot of people with horrible peripheral neuropathy from Lyme. And a light bulb went off into my head where I said, I wonder if those nerves are kind of inflamed because of an immune mechanism. And we know that some of the peptides that we have have an effect of modulating immune function. And so the best one for that is thymosin beta-4. But I like, when I inject thymosin beta-4, a lot of times I'll put some BPC-157 with it, and together I find they're synergistically—

yeah, they're very synergistic. Yeah.

And so then what I started doing was I started doing nerve hydrodissection. And so then if somebody—

can, uh, can you explain hydrodissection?

Oh yeah. So what, uh, what hydrodissection is, is And I like to say I spent the first half of my life facilitating surgery and putting nerves to sleep and putting people to sleep. And I'm spending the rest of my life waking people up and waking up nerves. And so interestingly, what I do is I look with an ultrasound and I take a needle and I thread that needle through the muscles. It doesn't hurt at all. And I put that nerve in the fascia right next to the— or my needle in the fascia right next to the nerve. And then I inject that. I create a halo around that nerve with the peptides. And for peripheral neuropathy, by far the best ones is the thymosin beta-4 and the BPC-157. So then I create that halo, and then I treat wherever they have pain. And so sometimes I'll treat them in their ankle, sometimes I'll treat them— if for the— if they have neuropathy in their foot, I'll treat the tibial nerve and I'll treat the sural nerve. So I treat the nerves on the inside and the outside. And then often I'll treat the saphenous nerve, which is another nerve that goes to the foot. And often in addition to that, I'll treat the sciatic nerve up above the knee. So I'm treating— and then often I'll do an epidural, I'll do a caudal epidural. So I'm treating the nerve in a whole bunch of spots along the— all the way.

Yeah.

And then interestingly, we can inject quite a bit of fluid. So when I treat the tibial nerve, I will generally create a halo of fluid that will track almost all the way back up to the knee. And then when I go up and I treat the sciatic nerve, I'm up above, kind of somewhere above the knee, and often the fluid that I put around up there will track down and up. And so I might cover 30 or 40% of the entire length of the nerve with peptides.

So are you basically diluting it so it has a much higher volume?

Yes. Yeah. Now I've done— I'm constantly sort of testing this. I've done techniques where I'll put relatively high concentration in a low amount of volume, and I've done high volume in lower concentration.

But same dose. Yeah.

In the same dose. And both work. And so then this is an evolving conversation for me. I love it. I love it. Figuring it out. But so then the, the idea now of how I guess my approach to peripheral neuropathy is then to try to put all of that together. And so to take that a page out of your book and say, okay, let's do a real functional medicine approach and try to figure out everything and optimize their biology from that perspective. And then I do the peptide hydrodissection, but then the thing that I find there's a couple things that I think are important. The same peptides that I— we're treating their nerve with, I put them on those peptides and I let them go home and I let them do injections every day. And for people that have enough subcutaneous tissue, I'll actually get them doing injections on their legs at home. So then they're continuing the treatment and they're doing that every day. And then what I'm doing is I'm supporting that treatment with other peptides. So I found that the, um, everybody that has peripheral neuropathy just about will respond very well to the mitochondrial peptides. They tend to respond fairly well to NAD+. So I'll do alternating approaches where I'll do some NAD+ and then I'll stop the NAD+ and then I'll do some mitochondrial peptides. So we have all—

so you're doing the NAD+ IVs? I think you said you're doing—

We're doing them, NAD IV, we're doing NAD subcutaneously.

And what type of dosing do you do on that?

So, you know, there's some different ideas that I've had. One thing that I found with NAD in terms of dosing that people kind of like is I started doing NAD in an insulin syringe, and so 50 units on insulin on an insulin syringe is 1/2 of a cc. And so then if you do 50 units, it's super easy to draw it up and inject it. And that is 100 milligrams. And I find that's a great dose. It's not too much. Um, what I'll tell you is with NAD+, it can turn on your immune system in terms of healing. And so you gotta be real careful. And so if somebody came in and they had Lyme disease or any complex illness, I'll often get them doing NAD, but I'll start with like 5 or 10 units. So baby, baby, baby doses. I might only be given 25 milligrams and then I'll slowly ramp them up. And when I do that, they tend to tolerate that very well.

And, and do you think people tolerate the dose of the sub-q much better than the IV? Because probably the IV It just takes so long.

Right. So the IV takes quite a while. Now there's a couple of things that I've discovered. Number one, when you do the IV, it creates a lot of methylated metabolites. So for example, they did these studies where they gave people niacin, which is a little— like NAD is kind of like almost like a derivative of niacin. And when they take niacin, you get all these methylated niacin metabolites in your urine. And so then I started thinking, I wonder what would happen if you gave somebody a lot of methyl donors before NAD+. And it turns out if you give people a bunch of trimethylglycine, the stress of doing NAD+ afterwards is about a quarter. So it's way easier to take the IV. If I have people doing NAD+ at home, I give them TMG and I have them do 2 or 3 scoops and drink it. And then they have less side effects. If you do ozone—

Oh, that's a huge pearl right there.

Oh yeah, that's a home run pearl. That's a total home run pearl. Ozone, if you do like a Major Autohemotherapy or really any IV ozone technique, afterwards NAD+ is much easier to take.

So you do the NAD+ then the ozone?

Ozone then the NAD+. Because the ozone makes— the ozone, I think the ozone somehow has a balancing effect on the vascular. Or— and ozone is also quite analgesic, so I'm not sure exactly what the mechanism is.

You're going to get that rebound antioxidant, probably methylating thing, maybe, you know, in there.

The other— ozone also naturally increases your NAD+. So there's a, there's a number of mechanisms, but Regardless, what I'll do is if they're in the office, I'll give them NAD+. And sometimes over there we're going low dose, sometimes medium, sometimes high.

And what, what, what doses are you doing when you say low, medium, high?

When I'm doing low, for me, a low dose is 100 milligrams. And so the nice thing about that is, is if I have somebody and we're working on immune modulation and we're doing— so they might come in and do vitamin C, B complex, quercetin, CoQ10, and then I might give them a baby dose of NAD, some glutathione, and some peptides. And so that might be kind of a—

I like that.

Yeah, I do 20 times a week, you know.

But, but try, uh, uh, fisetin instead of quercetin. It's like much more potent.

Oh really? How were you— how do you deliver it?

Uh, it's just typically oral.

Okay.

Yeah, it's— I was looking at a head-to-head study.

Okay.

And yeah, and it's, it's like, you know, Mastermind mast cell guys and chromalin, it's so weak, and this like blasts and blows it away in terms of potency.

Oh, okay, awesome. Send me some stuff. I'm gonna, I'm gonna try that next week. See, it just paid off being here.

I knew it was going to be worth it. Hey, you got something. I got 50 things.

I would, I would love to come hang out with you and see what you do because you've been such a, uh, luminary, you know, especially everything you've done on the thyroid is so awesome.

Oh, well, I appreciate that coming from you especially. But, um, let's see, so NAD, so you're doing that.

Um, so, so then, but to kind of circle back on the peripheral neuropathy, it's really interesting because I think there are more conditions and more problems that have a component of inflammation that's immune inflammation. Now, almost all of those people also have vascular inflammation. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, and, and then they're just generally inflamed in their tissues. Now, what happens is one thing we're doing when we do hydrodissection is we're treating the nerve, Another thing we're doing is we're treating that fascia, which is like a signaling kind of almost tissue.

Yeah, which is amazing to me. And I heard originally from Kathleen O'Neill, she had an lecture on fascia. I'm like, how boring is this going to be? And I'm like, damn, I didn't know it had, you know, actually didn't do anything but sit there and be a connective tissue.

Oh yeah. So then imagine, you know, have you ever like opened up like if you were cleaning a chicken and when you kind of open it up, you see almost like that spider web of— so fascia is like this intricate, unbelievable, three-dimensional spider web that connects and holds everything together. And the ligaments are running through it and nerves are running through it and arteries are running through it.

I think of it, you know, a picture like flat, you know, just the picture. Oh yeah.

So it is immaculate, three-dimensional kind of structure. And so then what happens is, is when you inject in the fascia—

Oh, just, uh, can you, can you define fascia? What it is?

So fascia is that when you kind of peel that chicken apart and you see that spider web, that spider web, the connection between the muscles where the nerves and the arteries and the veins live is the fascia. And so then sometimes you'll see a gigantic nerve, But there are millions of tiny nerves that live within the fascia that are carrying electricity to every muscle. And so then when we stick our needle in and we can see that we're in the fascia, and then we start to inject whatever we're injecting, could be peptides, it could be something else that starts to expand that fascia and that will spread up and down in that fascia.

But then we're putting something—

in that plane. And that's healing.

How would someone get into the fascia if they don't have ultrasound? How would they know?

So then what there is there in German biologic medicine, people have been doing approaches to treating the fascia forever. And then what they're doing is they're using the feel of the needle to feel when it pops into the fascia. And interestingly, you're going to be happy to know that I'm so old that—

you don't look it.

I'm so old that—

you're older than me. I'm basically Yoda.

You're Yoda. And if you're Yoda, then I'll be Obi-Wan. But then the interesting thing is that when I did my anesthesia residency, we didn't have ultrasound because the only ultrasound we had was to look at the heart. We would do echocardiogram. Echo-cardio, basically to put an ultrasound in the esophagus to look at the heart. And actually, when we did one, I think we did probably the first ultrasound-guided brachial plexus injection, like in 1999, one of the first ones in history. And I kind of, it hit me at that moment. I was like, oh, this is going to be the future. But we were using a cardiac ultrasound that was the size of an operating room table.

Wiggle that thing in, yeah.

And now the ultrasound that I have is about 1,000 times better than that, and it's the size of this computer right here that I've got. So then what happens is we used to just do everything by feel, and then we would use a nerve stimulator, and when we got real close to the nerve, then we would unload our medication around it.

Okay, now you go in And as soon as it really hurts, when you hit the muscle, the fascia, can you tell by that, by the pain?

You can, but then the thing that has been the highlight— so this is kind of this thing that I developed, my most recent kind of idea— is I developed this idea called the BioReset Shot. And so then what I do is I take these insulin syringes And we just do subcutaneous injections in all the same places where I normally do my big complex injections in the office, but I teach patients how to do it. And I was, what, you know what happened is I was doing all these telemedicine calls with COVID to people all over the world.

And they were like, well, this is changing the way people are doing everything, right?

Oh, it's changing the way everything. Because what happened is it used to be people would call me and they'd be like, hey, I can't wait to see you. I'm going to fly there. I'll be there in 2 months. It'll be awesome. And then I started doing all these calls. People would be like, my country is closed. And so I'm going to see you in 2021, I hope, maybe. I might not even be able to come.

That's brilliant. I can imagine the ivory tower always having the patients inject themselves.

Well, you would think so. But so then what happened is I started having people— somebody had shoulder pain. And I would teach them all of these points where they can inject just in the subcutaneous tissue. And it turns out the nerve that goes to your joint also will have a little branch that goes to the skin. And so if you heal the, the part that goes to the skin, a lot of times the joint will feel better. But also if I put peptides right next to the joint, you'll have an area of about 4 or 5 inches where you'll have a real local effect from those peptides. So then what I'm going to start in the next week or two, we're going to do a call every week and we're just going to tackle a different part of the body where I, I say, okay, we're going to do the shoulder this week. We're going to do the knee this week. And I have to tell you, it's been amazing because people call me now and they say, hey, you know what? I don't have any pain anymore, but I do look forward to talking to you sometime. That was super cool. And then, hey, I miss you. Exactly. And so I'm putting myself out of business, but creating something new, you know. It's—

and I've learned, it used to be like, oh, don't tell people things, or, or like doctors, or what are you gonna do, they're not gonna come in, you know. But you do what's right and it works out 10 times more for you.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm super excited. And it's interesting because one of— what happens is, remember that big immune problems cause nerve pain. So you've got Lyme. We think of Lyme as a big immune problem. And so there's a lot of patients that will have pain, particularly peripheral pain with Lyme. And I think a lot of the migrating pain that people used to have that we thought of was myalgias, is more nerve pain with Lyme. But what is super interesting to me is I've been seeing a lot of people who are post-COVID with nerve pain, and then I'll— I've taught them how to start to inject the peptides, and we've, we've been having a lot of success treating those patients, which has been super— probably one of the highlights of my life.

They seem to have like heart inflammation.

There is a ton of heart inflammation. And this— I've got some great cases. Like, I have a person here today who's great who had COVID. This is a typical case. COVID 3 months ago, and then basically came to see me after having chest pain for 3 months in a row. And so then 3 months in a row—

How old was this person? Just wondering.

40. So then this is the 10th or 15th person that I've spoken to that had COVID, a month or 2 of basically daily chest pain, multiple trips to the emergency room, and they ruled out for MI. And so then this is—

the cost of that.

Oh my God, this is crazy. Every one of those is— every one of those admissions is, you know, $20,000. And so it's interesting because they're coming with chest pain. Hey bud, I've got a call. I'm on a podcast, I gotta call you back. No worries. Thanks, bud. Kent?

I'm here.

Oh, I'm so sorry. For some reason—

It's live TV.

It's just like live. Okay, so then, so what happens is when you say— this is super interesting for patients to understand— when you say that someone rules out for MI. It means they didn't have a heart attack and their EKG is not showing any changes consistent with the fact that they're not getting enough blood to their heart.

Yeah, it's— there's around one thing, but they still have this chest pain.

And so then I'll tell you the things that I've done. These people, I've given them thymosin alpha-1 in relatively high dose And the thymosin alpha 1 seems to help. And I think that that is regulating some of the immune-mediated inflammation of the heart. So that's one thing that I'll do. I've given them thymosin beta 4 and BPC-157. I've done all of these both as subcutaneous injections and I've treat— done them all as IV injections. And when I do it IV, I'll often break the pain right there.

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We've done the high-dose T before and people on felt like my pain's gone. And now I think thymulin is even better at that.

Oh, tell me about that.

Yeah, it tends to be a more, uh, um, amino I don't want to say suppressant, but it's much more anti-inflammatory. Um, then the other ones are more immune modulation, where, where I kind of think this is very simplistic, you know, thymosin alpha 1 raises Th1, uh, Treg, TB4 kind of the middle, then BPC lowers that Th2, Th17, and then thymulin's in that, raise Th1 lower Th17, uh, it seems to lower the, the inflammatory IL-6, which is a major, um, uh, cytokine. Uh, it seems to work better. And we're finding, uh, also, um, Epithelium we're using a lot more, which is, which is kind of resetting the thymus. And then, um, Pinealium, or Um, people pronounce it very differently, but, uh, we'll have that out as a, uh, as a supplement as well.

Uh, we're excited about that, kind of resetting the whole adrenal access from the pituitary.

Yeah, and, and we're finding that hypo— um, the hypothalamic inflammation is key to so many things.

I totally agree. I totally agree.

And that gets broken insulation— uh, insulation— um, insulin resistance. Um, it can reset the, uh, the basically the pineal, uh, hypothalamic, uh, pituitary thyroid axis, adrenal axis. Um, it's, it's kind of amazing. We've been messing around for quite a while, right?

I'm 100% with you. And so then I agree with that. And then Essentially, that axis is derailed in almost all disease, I think.

Hallelujah! I can't—

yeah, someone gets it. And it's interesting because your work is interesting because you've been so focused on this thyroid. And interestingly, when you heal that, a lot of times that has this retrograde effect of kind of healing that whole cascade.

Yeah, it's the same, and it's kind of like with immune modulation, same mechanism for, you know, you look at if you do a big panel, the, uh, you know, Lyme patients look like the autistic patients look like, you know, chronic fatigue. And people say, oh, there's no studies that— there's no tests you can do for chronic fatigue syndrome. Uh, well, we can do it and probably gauge who has chronic fatigue syndrome, or, you know, that's just the syndrome. Could be Lyme, could be whatever, um, who has it, who doesn't, and how severe it is about 70% of the time, you know.

Yeah, I, I would agree with that. And these are multifactorial—

yes—

issues. And so then, and then just like with peripheral neuropathy, what we're going to have is there's going to be 4 or 5 variants because there's going to be different variants of immune mechanisms. Sometimes we see a lot of people that have traumatic brain injury that will begin to disrupt that. And, uh, and I've actually seen a lot of cases where somebody basically had like Lyme disease and they got a traumatic brain injury, and then all of a sudden it was like that's what seeded the brain, and then all of a sudden they start to get this autoimmune and adrenal axis dysfunction. Yeah, you've seen that.

It's like, uh, and I think too emotional stress is a killer. And that's what put me in bedbound heart failure, you know. So, you know, I was told I would get 10% better in 10 years. I couldn't stand up fully, I couldn't walk upstairs. And someone tell you that, I'm like, I can't live like this. And, uh, and basically, whatever peptide saved my life, and I walked in, you know, a year later when they did my test, like, your heart's normal. Yeah. Do you want to know what I did? Uh, yeah, why don't you tell me? Like, okay, thank you. Okay.

Yeah, it's like, it's like, for you, you're like me. When I found this stuff out, I'm like, you have got to be kidding me. This is the greatest thing in like just about in history. And then I'm like basically studying day and night and thinking about this stuff every minute because it's so spectacular that we can do things like heal heart failure, which doesn't— it's sort of outside of the realm of the anesthesia residency that I was kind of trained in because the idea was we were just going to manage that condition.

Algorithm, algorithm.

Yeah.

It's funny, did you sleep? Because I got an intervention last night from my staff, and I couldn't sleep because I just, I start getting into the research. If I were to show you all around, there's just papers everywhere, and I love it. All of a sudden it's daylight, and I've got a meeting in the morning, you know, and I go to that all the time. They're like, you have to stop it, you have to get balanced. You have to go out on the weekends.

So that's, you know what, I had this idea. This was a good one that I was aiming for an A-minus, like in kind of life. So I'll work super hard, but then I generally kind of try to take the weekends off now, especially. And I'm building—

You need balance. I know it. It's just like, ugh.

And then I'll tell you, you know, What— there's a lot. I think sleep is one of this huge— this is a huge opportunity. For people that can't sleep, I'll get them to do their peptide stack at night. So, and so what, you know, DSIP has been really great for us.

And so I love it. And it reduces hypothermic inflammation. It's, you know, where the number one tissue where it's found?

Where?

It's Jeopardy. It's the gut.

Oh, that's right. You told me that one time.

So we're actually going to have a product with that and KPV with it, which is melanocortin, which is very anti-inflammatory.

And a great— I've been— have you had good results with KPV with your Lyme patients?

Yeah, so we just barely started using it because we couldn't get it, right? Um, and yeah, mast cell. Yeah, which they all pretty much have. So, uh, right.

I, I can't believe what a big deal mast cell activation syndrome is. And we didn't—

I know we didn't have this 20, 30 years ago, you know?

Yeah, although I still remember It's one of my favorite— like, you have these memories. There was a general surgeon that I absolutely loved at Harborview. He was like the nicest guy. And we were like—

That doesn't go together.

It doesn't go together, but he was a super nice guy. But there was a woman who was saying all of this stuff that didn't make sense. And then I remember he just said, get that crazy lady out of my office. And so then they're like, ah, you just, you have to go. I guess there's nothing that we can do. What happens, I think, with a lot of microglial activation in the spinal cord is that you get an overlap where the spinal cord kind of miscommunicates. And so somebody might have pain in their groin, but they also have pain in the outside of the foot because the spinal cord has a little overlap and they're both coming up, but it doesn't make sense because different nerves go to both of those locations. And so we didn't understand this. And Lyme patients and almost all patients with big immune problems, and especially these days COVID patients, will have this type of phenomena where their presentation doesn't exactly map the textbook the way that we were taught, you know, 20 or 30 years ago. But I remember when I was taught 20 or 30 years ago, they said, what we're teaching you now is just how to learn because the rules are all going to change.

But I think that the opposite now— they teach you not how to learn, they teach you to memorize. And that's like when we, you know, try to hire a doctor out of, you know, But in the best schools, they're like, they're like, what's the algorithm? Uh, there is none. There isn't one. They're all— it's everyone's different. It's concepts. Yeah, they freak out.

Well, you know, I had this— I'm, you know, I have been a huge believer in Chinese medicine, and I ended up getting a doctorate in Chinese medicine and medical qigong. But in my first kind of foray into it, At my medical school, we went and we did an exchange in China. We went to Chengdu and studied acupuncture with these grandmasters of acupuncture. It was the greatest, my favorite thing I ever did.

And it was really, I think, helped you, like, you know, kind of. Oh, yeah.

It was so good. And what happened is the University of Washington was doing this program of what was called problem-based learning. Which is kind of thinking in a broad sort of systems approach to dealing with the problem. And so we went over there, and it was interesting because we were there to teach them that. And it's interesting, you get an idea and you kind of run with it. Because the Chinese healthcare system was based on the Russian model at that time, and so as a result, it was memorization. So I remember this kid came up to me and he goes, he came up to me and smiled and he goes, "Can you name the 72 collagen vascular diseases?" And I was like, "No." And he was horrified because they had all 72. And yet, like, we had a model of approaching things. And so it was very interesting kind of cultural—

Yeah, can you tell me the one underlying cause of all of them? How about that?

Exactly. So then In a way, that was like this idea that I got in 1997. It was right before the changeover. There was countdowns to when it was going down. And that idea has been with me basically ever since. And now, really, I think, you know, what I'm trying to do and what you're trying to do, what a lot of people are trying to do, is take systems-based thinking and then use basically functional medicine approaches and techniques that involve peptides, that involve regenerative medicine, that revolve around kind of a coherent model of putting in inputs that are going to optimize how these systems work, that begin to have diverse effects on biological pathways.

Yeah. And the epigenetics. And it frightens me. I mean, this is where the action is happening and where people are getting better. But I worry where we are now. The FDA is trying to take it all away.

Yeah, I hope that doesn't happen. Because it's interesting, I have people— it's like I have this kind of grandma and grandpa couple that I basically adopted that I just totally love. And you know, it was interesting. I was like, I've got him out of pain now. And he was like in like 8 out of 10 pain for like 30 years. They're like 88 years old.

Nothing we can do. Yeah.

And so then you realize, you realize, I like, I think that in a fairly profound way, you can begin to impact some of these conditions. And so then, you know, this is— we're gonna— we have a lot of work in front of us for the next 20 or 30 years to kind of define these approaches and kind of figure out which patients benefit, what the protocols are, and trying to approach it in a real serious way. Um, and, and, and that goes with— for really all of musculoskeletal medicine all of immunology, all of cardiovascular medicine. It's just, it's kind of amazing. I'm so excited to be a doctor that I can't, I actually can't, like, I pinch myself. I can't believe I get to do it.

Wow. You go on CERMO and ask standard doctors how many of them are, they're miserable.

Yeah, I know they're miserable. It's kind of interesting, but I always say that I feel like I'm kind of a bridge to the traditional—

You actually, I hate to see you get out of where you are, but I have a sense that you should be teaching like at a university.

I would love to. If they would have me.

The world in that way, you know.

I would go there. I would go help them tomorrow. Because, you know, the interesting thing, this is the greatest. What I do is not that hard.

Well, to you.

Well, yeah, maybe to me. But what I'm actually saying is that if you give me anesthesiologists and interventional people, we can basically begin to tweak the way how we approach medicine. And this is the first time I'll say this. On your podcast. I think that COVID is, you know, whenever something cataclysmic and crazy happens, it often leads to pervasive changes that last a long time. And Lyme disease represented a kind of a fringe population, and accepting it was would have meant accepting a whole bunch of other things that the traditional healthcare system just didn't want to accept.

And they had no incentive.

And it's expensive and difficult. And none of the approaches of traditional medicine really work, except for antibiotics with Lyme.

They don't get paid more for spending an hour with the patient instead of the 6 minutes.

Right. And then—

Better not to believe it's there.

And then that population, that population, the Lyme population, has so much PTSD and stress and stuff like that. So it's a difficult population. It turns out that the biology of COVID is very similar. It's like a model of Lyme. And so then what happens is, is to go back to kind of that chest pain case, now we started seeing more and more people And they look just like our chronic Lyme patients.

Yeah. Is it going to be the next chronic fatigue syndrome?

It's go— I think it will. And yet what's going to happen is people are now having the conversation. People are now going to listen to this conversation. People are going to realize, oh, okay, so there's a model that would begin to explain a lot of these symptoms. And then, then there's a model. So peptides, different approaches.

And it's accepted. They're not, oh, it's a crazy woman that's stressed out.

Right, which goes back to that, get that crazy person out of my office. And I remember, it's like you, I remember in the back of my mind, I go, this isn't right, there's something else going on. But I don't know what it is. And it was kind of like, they just tell you to do something. And so it's like, it was my first real profound cognitive dissonance that I ever had professionally. And it was totally amazing because I wasn't able to reconnect to that moment until about 6 or 7 years ago. And I remembered that moment. I go, oh, that was what was happening, that poor lady, you know what I mean? So hopefully—

Hey, Trent, I wish I knew who she was.

I wish I could go back there and I would say, God, I'm so sorry.

How did you transfer to the functional medicine arena?

What's that?

How'd you transfer to the— whatever. I hate all the terms, but I guess functional medicine, precision medicine is better than anti-aging and alternative. But, um, how did you transfer? And this is— I think you're kind of like me where people ask what I do at a party, I don't know how to answer. I just say I'm a quack, just leave it at that. Then they ask more questions, right?

Um, that's a good one.

Or you tell them what to do, they go, well, my doctor says it doesn't happen. Well, Well, then why are you talking to me? How's that working for you? You know, but, but how did you get into— out of standard medicine to this crazy alternative, more evidence-based, I'll tell you that.

But so it's, you know, it's interesting because I was, um, I, you know, my— I had this deep interest in Chinese medicine And so, you know, was doing medical qigong and I was doing acupuncture. And so I was treating some musculoskeletal stuff with that. And I was doing a lot of myofascial therapy and treating the fascia and doing hands-on approaches. And, and I realized that systems approach of functional medicine, the approach of, of, was very similar to that thing that I found so appealing in medical school. And so I thought, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go get certified in functional medicine and I'm going to have an integrative wellness practice and I'll wrap the myofascial stuff that I was doing and I'm going to wrap it up.

Everyone told your colleagues, "Oh, you're crazy." They thought it was—

you know, it's interesting that I was like totally beloved by like the surgeons and stuff that I worked with. And no, they love me, and they just thought I was kind of mildly crazy for doing that. They were like, yeah, I don't know, there's like, there's no money in that. I don't like— they talk to me like kind of a loving big brother.

They'd be like, like, that's good for you, I'm glad you think that.

Yeah, but they were like, I don't think there's not any money there, you're not gonna— like, there was a very coaching me to kind of let that go and just focus on anesthesia. So that was— I was doing that. And so I had this kind of dual life where I was spending part of my time doing this integrative stuff and talking about it. And most people were not super interested in kind of integrative stuff back then. I was like, all of these people— I was talking about being gluten-free like 10 years ago. People are like, what are you talking about? Nobody's—

crazy guy. You were nice, but I don't know.

And so then at the same time, all I did all day long was ultrasound-guided nerve blocks. So I was doing 2 or 3 tibial nerve blocks, a couple of sciatic nerve blocks, couple of femoral nerve blocks. I was— brachial plexus. So all I did all day was that. And then about 5 years ago, I found out if you put stem cells or other things around nerves, you could start to improve nerve function.

You crazy man.

And then all of a sudden, immediately, I just quit doing anesthesia because I got overnight busy doing that. And then I began— and at that moment I realized functional medicine and these systems approaches to healthcare help nerve pain and myofascial and joint pain. And then also fixing that stuff often had other systemic effects. And so then all of a sudden I took and kind of pulled everything together in my life into kind of one kind of cohesive approach, and then I've been doing that ever since.

Well, I, I think it comes down to your passion to learn and keep investigating. Yeah, I think that's what makes a difference. And, and I don't go there anymore, but like CIRM, it's just a bunch of miserable doctors. I can't get out of this, can't get out of this. And I say And I used to post and say, do something great and better than everyone else and then get out of the system. Oh, I can't do that. You know, it's like, it's like my brother, they call him the anti-Tony Robbins. It's like, you tell him do this, he'll give you a thousand reasons why you can't, right?

So it's just like, uh, but you know what, I'll tell you, I remember viscerally, I bought like a Tony Robbins program when I was 17 and I was like, I'm going to make it someday. Like, and I was, I started doing Tony Robbins style programming on myself. And like, I've never said this. It's insane how much, how incredibly helpful he was to me. And so then I listened to those tapes and I took, I got the CDs and I transcribed them and I would like, and, and then now what I always tell everybody is, and people tease me about it, but I always say it's going to be amazing. And in a way, I'm kind of programming that. And so many people have a lot of stress and PTSD, and it became probably one of the favorite things that I do in my career is kind of help people with that stuff.

Oh yeah, it's, it's major. Or it's like, I mean, uh, veterans now and then, they have post-traumatic stress, and it's been so strange because I said, I will treat you for free. And this one guy at a party was basically telling me everything. And I'm like, let me guess, you have da da da da da da da. And he's like, he says, no one, they say it's all in my head. And I'm like, it's not, I'll show you on paper. I start crying, he starts crying, but they never come in. I don't know what it is. Yeah, it's very strange.

Let me tell you my thought on PTSD. That's a good one. Um, first of all, so many people with PTSD, they're stuck in fight or flight, and so then that you're trying to get out of that, you got to do something. And so next thing you know, they're self-medicating. So a lot of times there's a little bit of alcohol and drugs overlaid now on top of it. And so what I found is I figure that out. If there's any alcohol and drug stuff going on, Thymosin beta-4 as a peptide has been fantastic for me on the addiction front. And so what I'm doing is I'm getting people on that and ramping them up. And I'm using that with BPC-157. The issue is if I think that there's a lot going on on the immune front, I'll preload that with thymosin alpha or thymulin. But then that thymosin beta-4 seems to be really good for addiction and it starts to help these people feel better intrinsically a little bit.

Yeah, and it's shown to reduce intake of substance, and BPC is shown to reduce basically withdrawals and cravings. And yeah, it's like the homeostatic preparation.

Yeah, you build a lot of homeostasis with those. That's exactly right. And so then that becomes a place now to start from. And so then ketamine has been really amazing. We do a lot of work with ketamine. We always do NAD before. For it because when you optimize the mitochondria, then ketamine works better. It turns out that if you do ModaC and Humanin, ketamine definitely works like twice as effective. So we're doing a lot where we're combining mitochondrial peptides. Interestingly, I did a real—

Can we get them?

It's hard to get them. I know. Yeah. So then what happens is—

Yeah, we're going to have the 5-MeO-1 MQ, which we've had like, uh, one of our employees had, you know, terrible OCD and also she had Lyme, but she just started, we didn't work it up yet, and 3 days gone.

Isn't that crazy? Yeah, 3 days of 5-Amino-1 MQ. Yeah, that's awesome. And so interestingly, we— in my first foray, like the things that I have done a lot of for PTSD has been stellate ganglion block, vagus nerve hydrodissection, a bunch of different peptide protocols, ketamine. But we also have done a lot of neurofeedback. And there was always this question, is it soup or is it spark? Is it the biochemistry of what's going on, or is that the electricity? And so then we would do these programs where you would wear the EKG leads on your head and try to train a Brodman area, an area of the brain that was kind of physiologically off, to turn back on. And so then we're trying to get that to happen, and with some modest success, but it's a lot of work, and typically those— it takes 40 times to do those protocols. Now what I'm really focused on is realizing if I can turn the mitochondria on in the brain and start to biochemically, you start to have experiences like what you're saying, the 5-Amino-1MQ.

I mean, everything physiologically is psychologically, you know, it's neurons firing.

Right. And so now, now it's super interesting to begin to say, oh, okay, I have a bunch of ways to physiologically start to turn parts of the brain on, start to reset the, the balance between rest and relax and fight or flight. And basically, and it was, it was based upon this concept that I named my company BioReset because we're trying to do a biological reset. But then what that does is that's a reset, and now you go live your life. And so then you're coming back in and getting reset and living your life. But basically the idea is we're trying to reset you basically kind of the factory default settings. And interestingly, that means you're not going to be on drugs forever because we're turning these biological systems back on so that you can be— what do you do?

You're not used to that.

Yeah. And, and this is— if like for people out there listening, I think this is a really big concept because then all of a sudden this is an alternate strategy in terms of the practice of medicine than giving you something that you're going to take as a drug to tweak how you feel every day. Instead, what we're doing is we're doing something to kind of reset the mechanics. I always tell people, I, I, kind of, I think of myself as a McKinsey consultant. McKinsey is this big, you know, you are not your typical anesthesiologist, but we're, we're just kind of looking under the hood trying to figure out what, what parts of that biochemistry are off, reset it, and then once that happens, now they get a blank slate.

Like, where do they go from there?

Well, so then what I say is, then once you're a blank slate then program. And so now program. So one program is, it's going to be amazing. One program is, it's safe for me to be me. One program is, it's like, oh, my life is super fun.

Actually, maybe you should be a cult leader and you can—

Yeah, I don't have enough energy for that.

But you reprogram. Follow what Matt says.

Well, I kind of I kind of, I'll say to people, like, I'll say intentionally this, I'll say ketamine makes you super hypnotizable. People, and so I always say this, and so I say, guess what we're going to do? We're going to decide what you program in, and then we're going to program in whatever you want to program in.

I don't think I can be hypnotized. I've never been on ketamine, so I don't know, but Yeah, I think you can, because basically what happens is, is there's a—

there's a—

can you hypnotize me to get more balance in my life?

Yeah, yeah, that's gonna come. I think that that's gonna come. And as that comes, what happens with all of these peptides is, as the protocols get better and better, you start sleeping better, you have more energy during the the more energy— it's interesting, these mitochondrial things, when you have more energy in the day, you actually sleep better at night.

Yeah, but I get energy at like 11 and then I'm awake, but I'm excited about what I'm doing. I don't even realize also the sun comes up.

You were— somebody told me—

favorite thing is reading studies and trying to find new crap, new interesting things in it.

Well, and it is It is astounding. You know, somebody told me— that's a good one— somebody told me, you gotta just go to the hospital and just walk around and pay attention. And then they said, you're gonna, you're gonna notice problems. Like, there was this one guy that his name was Fogarty, and he was noticing that, you know, it's just they do these huge surgeries for people that have like a blockage in their artery. And then they would stick a cath— they would, they would have to do open up and then they would have to take a vein out and they would bypass the blockage. And this was because everybody was smoking at the time and smoking causes disease in your arteries. And then he thought, what if you stuck a catheter in there and then blew it up and then just kind of did it? And so then that literally totally revolutionized medicine forever.

Okay, yeah, then you have to be outside of your element to think, or, or I have a little notepad in the shower because you always come up with the ideas in the shower, all the negative ions or whatever it is, you know, it's like, oh my god, right?

And so then I remember I was hanging out, um, and I'm from Missoula, Montana, and I was hanging out with these cardiac surgeons because they were like the king of the heap back when we were, you know, young And so they were like, hey, I'm going to send you up to see this cardiologist. But they go, just go up there and get out of there because cardiology is not that interesting, but you got to know where these patients come from. And so I was like, okay. So I went up there, I was like 20, I was on my way to medical school, I was 22 years old. And so I go up there and this guy goes, I still remember it to this day because he goes, you know, those guys down there, He goes, how many rooms are they running? I go, 3. He goes, that's what I thought. At that time, every small hospital in North America was doing open heart surgery in 3 rooms, 3 times a day. And they were the king of the hospital because they brought all the revenue to the hospital. So then I go up there and he goes, kid, he goes, I'm not going to be sending these people down there anymore. He goes, this is the future of medicine. We're putting stents in. And it's the same thing that Fogarty was doing in the arteries in the leg. And now they're opening it up. Now, interestingly, what I think is going to happen is in 15 years, we're not going to be doing most of these orthopedic surgeries. I presided over kind of an era of orthopedic surgery doing everything. We're going to start to fix these tendons and ligaments and fascia and nerves and joints percutaneously. And patients are going to begin to take control and start to do things. And then there's going to be an entire new era of pain management where nothing is done. In the future, they're going to look at what we do now as relatively barbaric.

They're like, oh, they're just doing that. Yeah.

Oh yeah. They used to— and we'll say, we'll get on a podcast, me and you in 20 years and be like, oh yeah, remember when we like, we're talking about that? And it's amazing because if you—

Well, I have a talk 17 years ahead. It takes on average a proven new therapy accepted in mainstream medicine takes on average 17 years. Unless it's a new drug where there's a sales force. Yeah.

Okay. So then this is my idea. This is why I'm so grateful for you and for people like you and what you're doing with this. Because the other thing that's happening is that with media, like now, I mean, I'm getting phone calls from people from Kuwait and Germany and England. And what I think is going to happen is, is that ideas travel much faster than they did before. And ideas are traveling in patient communities, just like COVID. We're on Facebook groups with thousands of people and people are sharing.

Problem is all the suppression from Google, the mainstream media. There's no truth anywhere. You can't find the truth.

Yeah, I know. That's disturbing. And at the same time, then I think it creates an opportunity to then share the truth. I always wear these shirts that have the logo inscribed knowledge, wisdom, truth on the inside. Guy's name Graham. And, and I think that what's going to happen is, is that truth is going to percolate up to the top. And, and then what's going to happen—

and then get crushed.

And probably it's going to get crushed here or there. But, um, you know, light shines, and then it, it, it— light is the opposite of darkness, you know. But the light is going to rise up to the top. And what's going to happen with the— like, we have seen what I think is almost— it feels like an exponential rise of immune and autoimmune and inflammatory conditions, like we've never seen, partially related to culture and diet and lifestyle and all of this stuff.

Yeah, it's multifactorial.

It's multifactorial. And we have we haven't really had multifactorial approaches. Like functional medicine is a multifactorial, multifactorial approach to a multifactorial problem, which is why—

and you're criticized for it.

But the Western model hasn't worked very well for those, for that entire class.

One treatment, one disease.

Yeah, exactly.

I had a good— what scares me, it's like Now Google is the basically determinant of truth. And when you look at the levels of evidence, you know, it goes double-blind, individual study, uh, you know, whatever, single meta-analysis, single-blind, and then you have, you know, case studies, anecdotal stories. Um, what's below that is societal guidelines are the worst. They are shown to be worse than anecdotal studies. Why is that? They're 20 years behind the times. They don't look at— they only look at one side. And that's what Google is saying they're using, like for this COVID thing. They're going by the guidelines of these societies like WHO and suppressing everything else. Like if you just give everyone in nursing home vitamin D, vitamin C, Biacetin, uh, you know, zinc. I— we— no one should be dying from COVID at this point.

You know, I agree with that, although I have to tell you, I'm— COVID's one of the most humbling things that I have, I have faced, uh, in my—

and oh, I guess on stem cells Boom! Stem cells and peptides, you know, reversed.

And I think COVID is multifactorial, and it definitely, definitely, from my perspective, the optimal approach is going to involve ozone and flavonoids and regenerative medicine.

Yeah, and like Brownstein's study on, you know, basically nebulized peroxide, and they made him take it down. Like, and they say, well, it's fake. There's no truth in medicine. This is the truth until another study comes along. Yeah, but there can't be any alternative. They won't allow any alternative thoughts. It's like there's book burning going on right now.

That, that is, that is— I agree with you. It's, it's, it's a shame That is a shame. And yet, I'm like, I'm, I, by nature, I'm a little bit of a Pollyanna. You know, I'm a very positive person. And I've always been a super positive person.

We, you people.

But I, and I feel that what's going to happen with COVID is there's going to be so many people that have fairly substantial issues. It's like these people that I've been seeing that are post-COVID, that it's fairly profound.

And it can't be just written off.

And you're not going to be able to write that off. And so then it's like, I saw somebody that had 3 months of chest pain and then we treated them one time and then everything went away for 10 days and then it slowly started to come back and they came back in and we treated them.

What was the treatment, by the way?

Ozone, NAD+, quercetin, vitamin C, glutathione, thymosin alpha 1, thymosin beta 4, BPC-157.

How dare you get someone better without a vaccine?

Well, the vaccine, I would love it. There's no one that would be more delighted than me if the vaccine works.

Ah, it's a little scary though. RNA vaccines, you know.

But I, I'm, I'm, I would be, I would be skeptical that it will be effect— very effective.

We've been trying for how many years?

We've been trying. We haven't really ever had, I don't think, a real successful vaccine for coronavirus. There's more bandwidth being kind of, you know, put out towards that. And, you know, not everybody does perfect with vaccines also, so then that's, uh Yeah.

Hey, I got in so much trouble. I won't even— for saying something about vaccines on Fox News. Then I'm not anti-vax. I'm just saying, let's just discuss it. Oh, God. It was like I was the devil.

Yeah, that's fun. I'm actually trying to actively talk a little bit about that because I think I was vaccinated and I went through that and got vaccines as I traveled all over the world and stuff like that. When I was younger and I was relatively healthy. And so I didn't really have any issues. But the population of patients with profound immune problems—

Immune dysfunction or mitochondrial dysfunction, I've seen people devastated.

They'll have big challenges.

I've sent letters to the FDA and I don't do anymore. They say, oh no, no relation. But I have— before I think we can talk forever, I love talking to you. Let's just finish up. Tell me about your Peptide P-Shot.

Oh man, that's super interesting. And so I've been taking care of guys with erectile dysfunction for years and we have a bunch of different approaches that we use. We do shockwave therapy, which has been helpful. We do some electrical therapies that have been helpful.

Can you kind of explain each thing just a little bit?

Oh yeah. So what— there's a couple different forms of shockwave. One where there's basically a little jackhammer that is almost like a jackhammer, but it's just about this big. And it does a little shockwave where it's— there's a mechanical little piston inside that sends sound waves into the penis and it creates an inflammatory response, but it improves blood vessels and it breaks up plaque. And can have some healing effects for the nerves. We have one that does that, and we have another one that is a piezoelectric version of the same thing. So it has an electrical sound wave that's different from the regular shockwave. So we'll do that. The traditional approach was— and there's a guy named Charles Reynolds who's been the great leader in this area. And so what he did is he came up with this term, the P-Shot. And so what he does is he takes blood out and spins it down and isolates the platelets, and then you can inject those platelets into the penis. What I discovered is the penis kind of looks like a double-barrel shotgun, and if I put my ultrasound—

No pun intended.

If I put my ultrasound, I can actually see the, all of the structures inside there. And so then what I started doing is using my ultrasound because I can look and I can see the arteries and I can see the nerves and not hit them. And then I go in and then I inject the fluid around the nerve and then inject the fluid actually into the area, the double barrel called the corpus cavernosum, missing the artery. And so that was a great experience and we treated a lot of people And if somebody had mild erectile dysfunction, what I can tell you is a pretty darn helpful. If somebody had mild, a mild case, we would generally often see them get almost all the way better. And so guys that were—

And how many treatments?

Sometimes 1, sometimes 2, but this is guys that they said, you know what, my erection used to be a 10. Now it's a 10 if I take Viagra, but now it's a 7 and they're 45 years old. Now that guy generally, I think, has an immune component on top of everything else to the erectile dysfunction. As I was telling you earlier, almost everybody that you see that has peripheral neuropathy has erectile dysfunction. Yeah. And so then I started saying, well, wait a second, what would happen if you start to put peptides in A, because I'm fixing all of these nerves and nerve veins, I thought, what happens if I put some peptides by the dorsal nerve to the penis? And I started just doing that, and then I started actually putting it everywhere. And I had guys who the only way that they could get an erection is if they injected something called Trimix into their penis.

Now, with these people, PT-141, How did that work with those people?

That PDE141 is this peptide that helps you have an erection, and generally I find that very helpful. What I'll tell you is that some of the patients, some immune patients, will— people with Lyme disease sometimes will have a hard time with PDE141, and it'll almost throw them into a little bit of a Herxheimer reaction, in a similar way to the way that sometimes people with A lot of autoimmune and Lyme will have a hard time with the growth hormone secretagogues.

Now, yeah, yeah, I think a hard time with anything. I always tell them for a supplement, look at it for a week, smell it for a week, maybe lick it, and then take a little bit.

Yeah, exactly. But, but in general, the PT-141 has been a home run. And so then what we will do is I'll have people do it. It fades if you do it all the time.

And plus I have problems with, you know, people getting dark, uh, and if they're older, dark spots coming out.

And especially if they take it on vacation and they go to Costa Rica, they're in the sun every day. And so, but PT1 can be very helpful, um, as, as an approach. Um, and, and interestingly, all of these peptides and, and molecules and platelets work in different ways. So it's like, I had one guy who had end stage. He could only get an erection if he injected himself with these things that the urologists give to force you to get a hard-on.

Yeah.

And so interestingly, when he came in, and I've seen this probably about 100 times now, where good-looking guy and he came in and I looked and it was kind of crazy, his penis was great. Like dusky. It was interesting. And so then I started, I gave him a couple of P-Shots, didn't help him at all in terms of erections, but all of a sudden his penis was pink. And so I was like, "God, it looks great." He was like, "Well, I—" Hey, aesthetically. He was like, "Thank you." But he goes, "That didn't do anything for me." And he's like a good friend of mine. So I was like, "Well—" So then the great thing is, is when then we just started to work our way up the chain and I tried regenerative approaches and stem cells and stuff like that and still nothing. And then I started to do peptides and then next thing you know, sometimes he can have sex with nothing. Sometimes he can have sex with Viagra, but he's not doing anything near what he had to do before where I kind of classify erectile dysfunction from class 1 to class 4. And he was like an end-stage class 4 and we kind of moved him back up to a 2 or 3.

Wow. How old was he again?

65. And other medical problems? Not, not so much, but Lyme and mold. Oh, he had— okay. And all that stuff that was fairly well managed and stable. But that goes to this peripheral neuropathy and to this idea that you can have immune-mediated nerve issues because it's— I wouldn't think of a 65-year-old guy being end-stage like that if there wasn't an immune component. And peptides are real quick at resetting the immunity around nerves. And so then now you begin to think, oh, okay, so I'm looking at any area of the body. And so then think headaches. So then we're doing like hydrodissection of the greater occipital nerve the nerves in the throat, the nerves in the neck, the nerves under the mouth, the nerves basically everywhere in the body. And then as you begin to reset this, you begin to physiologically sort of reset the inflammatory state of the nerve. And interestingly, like, that's everything because that's the electricity. That's what's controlling the physiological—

because I think when I had Lyme, I thought I had BPH, right? I had every classic symptom. I'd sit there forever trying to pee, blah blah blah. And then, you know, basically treated the Lyme, got rid of that. I don't have— and they— oh, I did ultrasound. I don't have BPH, right?

Yeah. So there's this thing with Lyme disease and And what happens, I think, is with Lyme disease, there's a lot of people who actually have inflammation in their bladder. I think there's a big association between Lyme disease and interstitial cystitis for women, which is, which is a mast cell condition.

Yeah. Yes.

Which is kind of analogous to a BPH type of pain. It's almost like you were on the spectrum of kind of interstitial cystitis and probably had some mast cell stuff going on. And there's probably bacteria that can live in the— even though we think of the bladder as being kind of sterile, there's probably a microbiome in the bladder. And then when there's immune dysfunction, it's very common that little infections, particularly stealth infections, start to get out of control. So then now all of a sudden people are See a lot of people with Lyme that have prostatitis and inflammation there. Yes. And so then now taking that and then realizing that I'm going to have a systems approach to that, so I'm going to have an immune kind of approach to that. I'm going to think about the nerves. I'm going to think vascular, so what's the blood supply, what's happening with that, and how can we— and then what's going on with the gut because the gut has a huge impact because the gut The intestine is right behind that prostate. You can touch the prostate from the colon. And so then now beginning to understand that now we have tools to modulate all of those systems, which is, I mean, that's spectacular.

Have you tried the TB4 FRAG in BPC? In BPH? The TB4 frag.

So I was enormously grateful because I remember I was at a meeting and I remember I felt like I totally made it because somebody walked up to me and said, "Hey, are you Dr. Cook?" And I go, "Yeah." And they go, "Dr. Holtorf wants you to have these." And they hand me bottles of them. And so then I took them and I felt totally fantastic when I took them. I have not used them for BPH, although I just saw a couple—

or you're just kind of everything in place of TB4, you know. Um, I want to see what you think. Yeah, I'm gonna— good or bad. Great results.

Yeah, I'll give it a try because it, uh, because I, I think that thymosin beta-4 and then is, is the key to resetting autoimmunity, central nervous system autoimmunity. Yeah.

And I think that's gonna have a genetic component. Yeah, and so yeah, I'll send you a bunch of it. I'd love to see your feedback.

Talk me through, just for people to hear, because I think it'd be useful for them to hear, explain the difference between TB4 and TB4-frag.

Yeah, so TB4 is a long molecule, has different domains, different domains do similar but different things. For instance, there's— we have a TB4 if you want for hair growth, there's one, but the TB4 frag that we use, which is the end terminal, and a lot of great studies on it, shows that it has basically the same effects of TB4 and better for a lot of things. Much more anti-fibrotic, about 10 times as potent, uh, per weight. It takes out there's a domain. Now, if you give someone TB4 with mast cell, it generally helps because you're helping the upstream immune modulation, um, but there's part of it that directly stimulates mast cells. So that is basically taken out. Now, if you try to take TB4 orally, you get no absorption. So this is shown to absorb orally whole very good absorption in studies, cross the blood-brain barrier, so you get the effects that you can take orally.

Yeah, I think that's going to be great for so many patients.

And then we also added it to, uh, with TB4, which is the, um, uh, TB4 FRAG+, which, because there's a lot of synergy between a lot of the thymic peptides, especially small molecular weight, that absorb. And so we added a small molecular weight processed thymus extract to that. So there's thymus in there that we made, we processed it so it has at least 150 micrograms of TB4 in there as long as— as well as other thiamine peptides.

Yeah, I think that that's a very good idea because I think that diversity, that diversity— if you're, you're providing the whole symphony rather than just the violin soloist, which I think generally is like a better approach.

Yeah, I mean, you tend to I mean, there's limits. The drug models, this is going to, you know, do this, but your body's usually secreting multiple, you know, of these things. So, but plus we guarantee, hey, the one we know that has all these studies is in there. Yeah, so I'm going to send you more. Awesome. Are you Matt Cook? Yeah, but, uh, oh my God, I can go on. I don't know how long we've been speaking. Um, I can go on forever with you. It just— you're amazing, and thank you so much. I think this was a great talk, and I've learned so much, and I'm sure everyone who watches this is just gonna be, you know, blown away.

Oh yeah, I'm delighted to be with you. If you ever want to talk again, I'll come on anytime, and I learned a lot, and I learned a lot preparing for it, and I look forward to learning from you and sharing information.

Oh my gosh, yeah, I'll I want to come up and see all the stuff you're doing. So it'd be awesome.

Yeah, it'll be great.

And so how does someone find and get a hold of you?

Oh, so you can— our website's BioReset.com. And I've got a podcast, BioResetPodcast.com.

How long has that been going on?

Basically just since COVID And so we're— I'll have you on, and we'll do a deep dive into some of the stuff that you're doing. You haven't been shut down yet? In your experience? Well, I'm taking kind of a just what I think is a straightforward and kind of thoughtful, careful approach of not trying to market anything, but just explain how I'm thinking about things. And hopefully, hopefully that's okay. Like, that's, that's my approach. And I'm hoping that that's going to be okay. I'm just, you know, I'm sitting here.

Yeah, it used to be the truth would set you free. And now truth will set you in jail.

Yeah, well, but we have to create a— I'm going to create a new paradigm. We're going to be the few. We're representing like a small little corner of the universe where it's kind of safe to kind of try new ideas and do it in a thoughtful and careful way and not hurt people. And then, you know, hopefully that someday You know, that'll be the dominant paradigm. And that's the thing, you don't hurt anyone.

And I love it. I went to Robbins, who does the direct ozone, you know, and he tells patients, I can take out my prescription pad and kill you and nothing will happen to me because that's a known side effect of this drug. But if I do this alternative treatment and anything happens to you and harms you, I'm in huge trouble, you know. And so You know, we're doing these things safely and effectively. This is where the action is, but it's tough fighting, you know, Big Pharma and their enforcement, uh, uh, they basically arm the FDA, you know. So anyways, I can talk forever. I gotta stop talking conspiracy things.

So anyways, well, it's great, great to be with you, and I, I look forward to more.

Hey, same here. Thank you so much for taking time. I know you're so busy. You're probably going back to do some more treatments.

I only have 2 more injections.

Oh my gosh. All right, my man.

It's going to be amazing. That's what I always tell people. And then just kind of connect— these are kind of sketchy times, but just connect to this idea that the human body has an incredible capability to heal. We're here for you and we're never going to give up on you.

Hey, you're a wise man.

Appreciate it. Okay, have a great day. Have a great weekend.

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