This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah

this is directly removing inflammatory biomarkers from your bloodstream and directly reducing inflammation you can see it you can measure it and so from there if we provide your organs the the milu in which to thrive and you remove the inflammation all your organs are going to get better right and so therefore you're going to avoid chronic disease and reverse chronic disease as well well Daran it's so great to have you on the podcast we've been friends for a long time and I'm excited to talk to you about some of the most amazing advances in health

care and Longevity medicine that you are at the Forefront of and it's just it's great to have you Dr hman I can't tell you Markus I have tremendous respect for you because you know for I told you this story before you kind of set off my journey into this new field of medicine I started my career in Western medicine and when I heard you speak I think it's been over 12 years now I heard you speak for the first time you inspired my entire New Journey so it's an honor to be here Dr that's amazing

true hon that's amazing you never know you're going to speak a bunch of thousands of people in some audience and somebody gets like the light bub goes off you know that's great so you know you were a traditional surgeon and you were you know trained at Mayo and all the top institutions and you were you know top of the game you know why did you shift gears and go into a different field which is very different from what you were doing which is you know a chance to cut as a chance to cure to you

know to heal with steel to heal with what you're doing now yeah so you know um I think a few things happened at the same time in my life at that moment when I first heard you speak one of them was um being in the Western Medical system for so long I was getting really burnt out not with surgery I love doing surgery but I was getting really burnt out seeing people never get better right and then you're always seeing them at when they're at their end of their rope they're seeking surgery to turn back

years and years of accumulated damage in many different ways all the different surgical procedures that we have and you could only address these problems one patient at a time and you just felt like not only were you on this treadmill where you can never really catch up you were act we were actually going in reverse there were more people getting sick than we could ever operate on right and so it was just it just felt like this was leading nowhere to me both me personally as a surgeon and a doctor but also the entire system

was just getting and think in fact things were getting worse and the problems were accumulating and then I saw looking in the mirror just working 12 14 hours a day in the operating room like I would get I would wake up after four hours of sleep being completely stressed out as soon as I woke up in the morning because I had to get to the operating room by 6:00 a. for a 6:15 cut time right yeah and then I would basically stand there in the o with minimal breaks for hours and hours probably 12 14

hours a day sometimes you had a fully catheter in yeah you know as a surgeon you're not allowed the cathet for those those listening that's a catheter you put inside your penis so you don't have to go to the bathroom exactly you put a little bag on your leg there sometimes you wish you had one depends to go to the exactly but like you're there for hours with the you know your cortisol levels up to here and you're just eating whatever is in the nurse's Lounge you usually a combination of like donuts and bagels right

all the far all the pharmac uh Pudo companies bring in all that crap muffins bagels Donuts exactly and then you know you're you're like drinking coffee in between every single case coffee and sugar coffee and sugar right that's a medicine runs on exactly so I found myself um in my early 40s in the sickest possible state that I could be in I was had five different diagn personally personally yeah I was five different diagnoses uncontrolled hypertension I had an autoimmune disease I had uh diabetes not even pre-diabetes anymore I was diabetic on my hemoglobin A1c

level and I was on multiple medications which then I saw my personal concierge physician okay and expensive guy in Beverly Hills and his solution was to put me on Prozac because I was depressed about all of this stuff oh yeah and all the you're on five medications for chronic and you're depressed okay I'll just give you proac that's exactly what happened pill for every l a pill for every L right and so I was super sick and I I personally was not getting anywhere in the treadmill of my own health and so I decided that

moment there has to be a better way but as you know 40 going on 60 yeah 40 going on like almost 70 it was crazy I was I was getting like decrepit um at at 40 it was not good and so I um was at the end of my rope and I was looking for alternative methods and seeing what else was out there and that's when I happened upon an ifm conference where I heard you speak for one of the first one of the first times it was you it was either the ifm conference or

it was it this um big event out in Phoenix that was going or in Scottdale where you were speaking as well I I saw you speak like a couple times in a row and light bulb went off like you said like I need to address my own health from the root cause yeah yeah amazing it's quite a story and and now you're sitting here no medications no hypertension no diabetes right I I mean not Prozac exactly and what's great about it is not only do I not have diseases but I feel incredible like the vitality

and the energy and just the drive and you know what I see in the mirror like I just feel great you know and so that's it for me it was like yeah it's so great I don't have all these diseases I'm off all my medications but also just being able to like wake up in the morning refreshed attack a 12-h hour work day and then still feel great after that and be happy I mean it's Monumental it is you know D you know what you're talking about is something sounds like oh well I got these

diseases I got off them and that's not something that happens in traditional medicine these are oneway streets as we're trained these are progressive chronic diseases that we have to manage we even have a whole term we have chronic disease management systems there's whole companies devoted to chronic disease management right managing your medication managing your disease who wants to manage it why don't we get rid of it well the pharmaceutical companies want us to manage it subscription revenue for them right but you know your own life story is just an example of how these things are

not inevitable how they can not only be prevented but also reversed even after you have them absolutely and so so that that journey of you know seeing what was wrong with our Healthcare System from the inside out and seeing how you were essentially a victim of our modern society and the food system and the medicine that we actually practice which is really not focused on creating Health it's focused on treating disease we have a sick care system not a healthare system right exactly and so you decided you wanted to create a Health Care system that

was different and you called it next health and actually we're sitting here in in next Health headquarters in West Hollywood California doing this podcast and I'm about to go get a procedure which we're going to talk about because you're so gracious to offer me this treatment which I've had a number of times called plasmapheresis which is essentially cleaning your blood like an oil filter but you you had this vision of something different and next Health was was really the thing that got birthed out of what you saw was wrong with traditional Healthcare and what your

own personal challenges were and how to get better exactly and so during this time when I was transforming my own health I was going to a multiple different places all over Los Angeles right I was seeking out sauna therapy here I was seeking at hyperbaric oxygen therapy at a different place I was seeing like three different practitioners at different places to get the things that I needed to get myself healthy and it just was very frustrating and then what was incredible too is I was able to get myself healthy even though I had to go

to all these different places and I saw myself getting healthier like this stuff works like you can get on a good nutrition exercise sleep program and do a few things that most people now have access to that we didn't have access to and you can get healthy really quickly actually it's quite amazing right it's quite amazing it's it's like your body wants to be in a state of health not in a state of disease and so I was talking to my patients about this because they were seeing the Transformations that I was having and they

were and I was telling them how to do it and for the ones that could have the time and the energy to do they were getting healthy and avoiding surgery themselves yeah and I saw myself like becoming an evangelist for functional medicine becoming an EV just evangelist for the nutrition and like be doing something opposite for our regular system and I was like you know what this there needs to be a place where people can go where this is the system they don't not Cobble Cobble it together all over the place right and so nexal

really came from the idea of let me just make one place where we could basically hit the reset button on the health scare yes and on people's personal health exactly exactly I was like you know what the healthcare Western Medical system that's a massive monstrosity that it's going to take you know we got ourselves into this after five decades it's going to take 10 decades to unwind this well you and I working on short in that time well exactly I said let's just hit the reset button let's make a new place where we could start

all over again and that's what next health is like we approach it completely differently I I remember like starting next health I got together my business partner and we got a whiteboard and we wrote down all the things wrong with traditional Healthcare and we wrote down like what is that 180 opposite what is the exact opposite people hate going to the doctor's office because it's like on the 10th floor of a building and you have to wait eight hours and you're in this tiny dingy waiting room what's the opposite of that let's make a beautiful

space that in inspires people to want to go and get their health in order and and be visit on a regular basis like you go to the doctor once a year we want you to come in once a week you it's like store instead of like going into a like a corner Bodega which is a mess right yeah exactly that's people call us the Apple Store of Wellness yeah exactly yeah and it is it is beautiful I've been there and I've had been treated there and this this this approach you take is is really trying

to put together some of the Innovative therapies that have been sort of marginalized in healthcare that often have been studied and have been researched but are still neglected and and often ignored by traditional Healthcare whether it's just intervenous nutrition with IVs or whether it's more advanced treatments like ozone or peptides or exosomes or plasmaphoresis or hyperic oxygen there's so much out there I wrote a lot about this in my book young forever because these are the things that seem to be really affecting the trajectory of our biological Health yeah and and you know one of

the things that we're both focused on is how do we understand the science of Aging because aging itself is not um problem growing older it's the biological aging that's the problem and you can reverse that and a lot of the therapies that you do and you built within next Health are the therapies that actually helped to do that and i' I've been on this personal Journey myself I never had all those diseases I do I had different diseases I didn't I didn't have lifestyle diseases I had mercury poisoning and mold exposure and I had SE

diff from you know an antibiotic that I took and I had colitis and I had you know just one thing after the other Lyme disease viia I don't know why I think I got all these things so I can figure this whole mess of medicine out personally because I had to re re-engineer myself from the inside out I had to like reverse engineer what is health how do I create that a lot of these therapies uh are are really important and we're going to talk about them because they they actually provide a pathway to change

not only um improve your health but to actually reverse this phenomena that is at the root of all chronic age related diseases heart disease diabetes cancer Alzheimer's and and some of these Studies have more research or less research but the problem with a lot of these therapies is there ain't no money going into researching these right there's literally look at have you been paying attention the amount of money and research being published on the glp one Agonist the oex and wois and muros the amount of money they're studying it for everything you know if you

have a pimple they're going to use it if you have like depression they're going to use it if they have you know you have autoimmune disease they're I mean whatever they can think of they're going to try to and they're spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars I'm guessing on This research right but nobody's spending hundreds of millions of dollars to really look at these other things there are a few places like alos labs and Sam Alman found found founded the lab but there's like a lot of you know billionaires like the Google folks with

Calico and Je Altos and and Sam alman's initiative where they're looking at a lot of these things they're looking at plasma forar they're looking at various Therapies that we're doing but it's it's really only the billionaires that are funding some of this now not the ni who should be studying this and and it's so unfortunate because these therapies have really have a profound effect and I've been doing them for the last few years as I've been learning more about them and and I did my biological age when I started two years ago I don't if

I told you this it was 43 which was pretty good I was 62 at the time I did all this stuff that we're going to be talking about in a few minutes and over the last two years I've gotten 4 4 years younger even though I've gotten two years older chronologically I got four years younger so now I'm 39 that's incredible so I'm I'm I don't know if I'm going to hit my 20s but I'm going to still keep going and see how far I can get and the point of this is not to brag

the point of this is to is to sort of explain that the the things that we think are inevitable as we age are not exactly and so why don't we sort of dive into the some of the the options and therapies that are available out there and and I I I want to start with uh PL freesis because I think it's a really important Innovative therapy it's been around for in medicine for decades for treating various kinds of diseases that are autoimmune diseases or neurologic diseases and it's very effective for those conditions but but it's

only done in academic centers it's only done you know for very rare cases it's not part of traditional medicine it's not reimbursed for for General Health and and yet there's incredible research on it around Alzheimer's around Long covid around longevity itself so first why don't you explain what was the origin of the science that kind of began to let us think about this particular medical procedure as a potential treatment for aging itself absolutely so let's take the story way back to just even the ancient Romans you know they were using a technology that they called

bloodletting right because they believed a lot of the bad stuff that causes some disease lives in the blood and blood letting removing some of this Blood would minimize some of the symptoms of disease and and as we all know this didn't really work or pan out because there's other things in blood really really need exactly the leeches are have had a comeback in medicine for wound heal are having a comeback you put them on wounds that don't heal and it PS two blood vessels it does it does we use leeches a lot in surgery actually

Venus congestion and things so i' I've I'm very familiar with leeches but any but we're not talking leeches but you're not doing tation you're not drill drilling hold of people's brains bad humors no so fast forward um apheresis was a technology that was developed to treat a disease called Wald dorm's disease where um you have immune complexes that make the blood too thick and that thick thickening of the blood causes uh blockages in your blood vessels and people would die from this traditionally and then um some very uh smart scientists in IBM I think figured

out how to actually separate the plasma from the from the blood cells what is plasma so plasma is the fluid portion of your blood it's 45% of your blood and if you've ever seen someone do PRP which is take some blood in a test tube and they put in a centrifuge and they spin it down the blood will separate to a white layer in the top of the test tube and a red layer in the bottom the red layer is your red blood cells and the white layer is your Plasma on top and there's like

a little but the red it's also your white cells all all your cells right so basically you're separate it's the soup in which all of your cells in your blood flow around so it's like the red cells the white cells the platelets you take those out exactly separate that from the soup M and and this soup what's in this soup so the soup is where all of the in other words what's in the plasma exactly what's in the plasma right so this is where all your cells are living and this is what they're exposed to

on a day-to-day basis it's the it's the um growth factors it is cell signaling molecules it's nutrients it's your a lot of the factors of your immune system live in this soup so it's basically where all the signaling in your body kind of lives inside of this plasma and what's good about it is that it carries these signals throughout your entire body so if you have something going on in your gut your brain can hear about it if you have something going on your heart your your gut hears about it so it's a communication Super

Highway exactly it's one of the functions it has is being a communication Super Highway for your entire body and so there are all these molecules in there that are regulating all these things exactly so why why do we then want to kind of take out that plasma throw it in the garbage and put in a replacement fluid albumin like why like why what's bad in there cuz well you just it sounds good right right right exactly so um let's take it back a little bit more to also to the convoys with a parabiosis experiment I

think that's interesting to talk about where they hook up a young mouse to an old mouse and they found that the old mouse got younger and the young mouse got older and so for a decade people were looking for like what is the substance in the young mouse that makes the old mouse younger and so they did all these studies and substance like gdf11 tnf and nothing really panned out and then then 10 years later there's a story um I don't I think I think it's a true story but I hear it all because I

hear it all the time someone at a conference went up to ask a question to the scientist doing all the research on this and they kind of knocked on the microphone and they said you know I think you guys are looking at the wrong Mouse it's not what's in the old mouse it's not what's in the young Mouse making the old mouse younger it's the Opposites what you're taking out of the old mouse yeah so it turns out in our plasma is also where all the cyto kindes and all the signaling molecules that lead to

inflammation accumulate right it turns out that's where all of the toxins that were exposed to also accumulate it turns out where sessen cells the sasp the the negative um the negative products that Cent cells secrete also live in our the zombie cells which are part of the Hallmarks of Aging which are essentially these phenomena that happen these cells that don't die they just become uh zombie cells that then secrete all these inflammatory MO ules that make us age faster exactly so if you look at all the root causes of Aging most of the molecules that

signal the root causes of Aging live in our plasma from inflammation to toxin buildup to S to senescent cells all of that is D proteins right one of the other things damage proteins one of the other Hallmarks of Aging is is is damaged proteins exactly and and so all these damaged proteins just float around and they create more problems more inflammation more dysfunction and we sort of degrade now weing decreases and we age faster biologically exactly exactly so it goes to reason from there that if this is all living in your plasma and your body

is unable to eliminate this with its own elimination mechanisms what if we just remove the plasma and so some very smart people started doing experiments using a technology that's been in hospitals for literally five or six decades FDA approved we've been using it like you said for I'm been a doctor for 41 years so like I know I'm old but I remember it even back then right right we use it a lot and like even for like drug overdoses cuz you know that that lives in your plasma too and as works as FDA approved is

super safe we've been using it forever and you know just highlights there's so much incredible technology locked up in the sick care system that if we just bring it back 340 years like you could eliminate chronic disease this is one of those Technologies so the the treatment like you've experienced it is super comfortable you just basically sit there with an IV in your arm and your blood is removed like about 200 CC's at time so it's a small volume put through this giant centrifuge the plasma separated from the red blood cells red blood cells go

back into through the same IV or a different IV and then you get a big bag of plasma that's basically thrown away and inside of that we've basically eliminated one entire plasma volume of all of these negative factors that have been built up over time so do you you U you then throw the stuff out and has anybody actually studied what's in there people are when you when you when you get get this stuff like know it's like when you when you get an oil change your car you throw out the old oil what's in

that it's the same things that you measure when you do a blood test like you know with the function Health blood test you get a lot of you get a lot of um Biers biomarkers and blood results basically Back and You're basically measuring those whenever you do a blood test it's the same stuff but you're just totally removing it and you're throwing it away right and so I think people haven't really looked exactly like at the discarded plasma people are looking at it right now be fasinating to do like what are the toxins in there

what are the immune cells cyto what are the uh ccent cells in there what's going on that we're we're taking out yeah and basically it's all being removed exactly and so we've actually done a lot of um patients now and we've measured their total toxicity levels in their urine things all the toxins we measure things like mot toxins we measure um exposure to heavy metals we're measuring um exposure to even like microplastics and all these toxins and we've see significant reductions in before and after treatment toxin levels so we know toxins are in the plasma

and when you remove them your body your body gets a chance to catch up right now it's able to say I can I've lost a lot of the stuff I'm working overtime to remove and it gets a chance to clean up and like you said it's like an oil change for the body like you know for all of us that have had cars forever we know that if you don't do an oil change every 3 to 5,000 miles your car is not going to run as well well your body's the exact same way yeah it's

interesting I I read a study recently that came out of Germany where they used plasma FIS for long Co absolutely and what was interesting was they looked at a lot of people along Co have Auto antibodies against their autonomic nervous system which is your you know regulates all the things that are sort of automatic in your body you know all the the parasympathetic sympathetic nervous system and it basically affects your your your um blood vessels in many ways and your blood pressure regulation and a lot of people have with BL Co they have what they

called pots which is you know they get postural hypotension they stand up they get dizzy they they have all these other cognitive symptoms there's all these other cyto kind markers and and anti bodies and they were able to actually measure them before and after the plasma FIS and it showed significant reduction or elimination of these and Improvement clinically in these patients with long Co and the stats are always variable about how many people have long Co but it's probably five to 10% of people had Co and I think it might be more I mean how

many you think how many hundreds of millions of Americans had Co you take 10% of that it's still 20 million people you know a lot of people don't even know they have it yeah and it's like little brain fog not feeling as good just not as good as they were before covid and and what's even more more frightening as I was talking to Jeremy Nicholson who's on been on the podcast who's a a phenomic researcher from Australia who's doing deep phenomics which means looking at all these not just the regular blood tests but you know

metabolomics and cyto kindes and thousands and thousands of proteins and molecules and he says everybody who's had Co has something going on like they're all a little out of whack in terms of their immune system inflammatory system like my wife says I never used to get sick now I get sick more because I have covid so you know I think plasmaa is an fascinating treatment for that and I think has has a lot of Promise yeah you know I can tell you a couple stories of patients that I've seen with long covid um I had

one guy that was coming to us with ttis in his ear and he was at his wits end and as you and I both know you know some people when they suffer with tonight is depending on how severe it is it can be yeah the ringing in the ears severely even just ment debilitating I mean people end up you know um just at home not able to do anything with this and so we had people committing suicide as so I wasn't going to say it but yeah you're right absolutely there is a suicide rate associated

with chitis that is is not you know it's more than the normal population for sure and so we had a patient with this and he was suffering with it for about a year to treatments and his tentis went away amazing inred exactly and so he's still in the treatment process right now it remains to be seen postco or is this this is uh long Co yeah postco long covid symptom tontis right and so um we're still in the treatment process we're going to see how long it stays away we're trying to expand between uh plasma

exchanges for him I'll tell you a story about me so when I had covid for about six months after having Co and getting it treated my heart rate variability was down in the dumps which happens to a lot of people with long covid but my heart rate consistent L elevated all night long right exactly heart avability really down and my my regular resting heart rate was very elevated and then I started doing um plasma exchange just to test it on myself and have the you know the nurses practice on me really and complete change around

and most people will see the heart rate variability improve and especially if you have long covid if you're suffering with um heart rate elevation you'll see that improve heart variability for those you listening don't know what he's talking about it's basically the the complexity your heart rate which is a sign of the resilience of your cardiovascular system and your nervous system so when you're highly stressed and your your heart avability goes down so you want more more complexity in your heart rate more complexity in your health means more resilience more redundancy it's like a rainforest

which has got redundancy and complexity versus a monocrop cornfield which is you know if you have one bug or one blight or something it's done so so so this is really important measurement around your overall wellbeing and health and that's such a profound thing I also have personally had an experience with covid and I didn't get to Long covid thank God but I but I had a severe case of covid that was my third time getting it and my hand just swelled up I got severe arthritis two weeks after I'm like this is terrible and

it happened to be in a place where I could get plasis and literally within hours incredible it was getting better and the next morning it was completely gone yeah just never came back yep and I was like damn this is incredible and like with the heart rate variability like you mentioned earlier covid makes antibodies to your autonomic nervous system that's if you have antibodies autonomic nervous system your heart rate can't be variable right and so this is the mechanism by how this stuff works and you know I think there's always a tendency when we talk

about like novel therapies like this to think that it's woo woo and it's not really proven but what I can say about plasma exchange is it really goes back to the fundament mentals of medicine right like we know why people get into a disease State it's inflammation is one of the root causes of disease this is directly removing inflammatory biomarkers from your bloodstream and directly reducing inflammation you can see it you can measure it yeah and so from there if we provide your organs the the milu in which to thrive and you remove the inflammation

all your organs are going to get better right and so therefore you're going to avoid chronic disease and reverse chronic disease as well and we see that with Alzheimer's too yeah I I think I'm just going to highlight what you said because it's so important you know inflammation is something people have heard about it's in the news now I mean we've been talking about INF functional medicine for 30 40 years but it turns out it's it's the sort of final common pathway for aging and almost all age related diseases in fact they're calling in aging

inflammaging right heart disease is an inflammatory disease cancer is an inflammatory I mean I literally had a patient recently who had uh Hy lymphoma and and one of the ways that I figured it out was you know we was having certain symptoms and we checked his blood levels of inflammation and they were extremely high I'm like something's going on here and cancer heart disease diabetes obesity Alzheimer's all inflammatory diseases and not just that but obviously all the other inflammatory diseases we have the autoimmune diseases mental health is an inflammatory disease of the brain right depression

OCD bipolar disease schizophrenia mental health that we think is psychological is often biological and we miss that and I wrote a book about this 15 years ago called the Ultram mind solution about how the body affects the brain and so what we're talking about here is is this this underlying process of inflammation that cuts across all diseases and it's it's one of the Hallmarks of Aging so this technology of plasma free seems to be an incredible way to help reduce the body's inflammation now of course you have to do all the other stuff right you're

not you're not just saying eat your McDonald's and comeing and get your blood cleaned right and so you got to eat right exercise sleep enough manage stress take the right vitamins and so forth but as an adjunct it's a very powerful tool for for helping to reverse some of the the phenomena that that causes all these age related diseases and it also helps you just feel better I mean I've done it a number of times and just just feel like you get like a car wash a brain wash your your brain feels clear you have

more energy you just feel lighter it's quite an interesting experience you know and you're like what the hell is in my blood that's so crappy you know like and and I think you know I had it done a bunch of times in the first few times like my blood was like cloudy yeah and then now it's like more clear and you see that like you see it in the bag of plasma that we get you could see how cloudy it is dependent about the number of things floating around in there right and especially if they

have high lipid levels too you know you it gets really foamy you can see that in the plasma as well yeah so you mentioned Alzheimer's card and cardiovascular disase too uh can we'll talk about that let's talk about Alzheimer's because some of the research on that is just so fascinating F and and here's a condition just just this background where we spent billions of dollars hundreds and hundreds of studies no good outcomes like I mean if there's drugs out there for Alzheimer's they're either harmful or they might delay your entry into nursing home by a

couple of months that's a success not not reversing it not really slowing it dramatically so there's really buus we've gotten and yet now there's this treatment which is extremely safe which is relatively inexpensive compared to these Alzheimer's drugs that are out there that cost what 50,000 a year or something right and and it's showing real promise and not just not just to to to sort of slow it down but to actually reverse it so can you talk about the science that we now have around Alzheimer's and plasma FES yeah I mean this is where I'm

just so mind blown at um how approaching a problem differently can make such a tremendous difference and we know you know Alzheimer's more and more of us are suffering from Alzheimer's there's research out there showing that up to a third of us will suffer from Alzheimer's in the in the next few decades and it's it's just too high of a number by the time you get to 85 it's almost 50% yeah exactly it's just mindblowing and so um the way the way it works well we don't really know how it works I think there's multiple

different ways this is work working number one is by reducing the Baseline level of inflammation number two is by reducing the overall toxic burden to our brain number three is by actually removing some of these malformed proteins so we can detect the amalo protein we can detect a towel protein in our blood now there actually blood test use a detect yes with function Health we're actually having I mean call AD detect 40240 which is a marker of amid and also Pau 217 which is another important uh marker and that those actually change with Lifestyle Changes

Richard isacon who's been on the podcast is really quite an amazing scientists has shown actually reversing these blood biomarkers with reversing Lifestyle Changes reversing the cognitive decline and actually improving it so you can now measure before and after imagining this plasma freis what's going on absolutely and and we're doing the study right now measuring these before and after plasma frees and I can tell you from my own personal experience measuring my marker I have almost 80% reduction in the post markers okay now that's biomarker change um there's also studies that have been done by Dr

kiprov up in San Francisco where he showed a 61% reduction in the rate of acceleration of Alzheimer's symptoms in Alzheimer's patients so he's showing the actual clinical re relevance and we're seeing the biomarker relevance for using plasma exchange to treat Alzheimer's disease and I think you know I I think that this there still needs to be a lot more science done around this but it's just mind-blowing to have a treatment that can cause this much of a reduction of symptoms without having to give a drug that could potentially have horrible side effects like some of

the Alzheimer's drugs you get brain bleeding right yeah and this has basic almost zero side effect I mean it's just a needle poke basically exactly it's a needle poke yeah it's pretty amazing and and it's um you know so it's it's one of these treatments that that you know has been around for a long time and it's having new applications right long Co Alzheimer's uh now they're looking at it for something called lipoprotein little a which is a a genetic lipid condition that puts you at high risk of having a heart attack and for which

there are no good drugs so you can you share some of the research about life approachin little a which by the way is something we measure with function health and I literally just saw a patient this morning she had 37 years old healthy looked relatively you know good I mean she's not overweight she's she's got no real issues but she's a feel my history and she had a really high lipo protein L A so I'm like thinking oh this is interesting so how do you treat these right right so you know I love what function

health is doing with measuring LP little a like I can't tell you the number of patients I see that still go to their primary doctors and have never had an LP little a before and they're wondering why they have so much heart disease yeah when up to 15 to 20% of people have the genetic malformation that causes LP little a and LP little a um just for the the listeners to know is a particularly aggressive form of cholesterol that causes plaques in your arteries but also can cause a deposition of calcium on your blood valves

it can cause plaques in your arteries going to your brain it's really dangerous it can it can cause heart attacks uh quite easily and strokes quite easily as well and valve damage and so if you have LP little a you want to get it treated yeah guess how you treat it there's no treatment right now there's no drug Lifestyle Changes actually this is resistant to lifesty I mean some supplements I found lowering it like 20 30% but you're not it doesn't go back to normal yeah nyise I think is good some other things we use

yeah but it's it's not easy it's not easy right you people struggle with it so we have two or three patients that we're treating with Alpa just like the toxins and the other things that we're talking about all cholesterol also lives in your plasma including the lp a particles and so this is removed in that bag of plasma that we're throwing away and so what we're finding in these two particular patients is that they're LP littlea actually stays to close to normal levels for about six weeks after a plasma exchange right and so look like

I mean I think it's one of those TR therapies that as it becomes more ubiquitous more people can use it for control of LP little a until we find a therapeutic that works and there's a lot of research being done for Therapeutics at works but this is a great way to Temporary control that sort of brings the question of like you said six weeks like for Alzheimer's how often do you need to do it you need once a day once a week once a month once a year like what what kind of frequency for you

know treating conditions that are more serious and then like what kind of frequency for aging itself is it once a month is it every quarter is it like I'm asking for a friend here you know but I want to do it and I want to know what what do we know about this so I'll tell you what the research shows and I'll tell you what I think so the research that Dr kiprov did in Alzheimer's patient was a once a month treatment um he did that six treatments in a row for six months and measured

uh various markers um of symptoms before after using the mocha score and mocha is a Montreal cognitive assessment tool it's basically a quick screening tool for your memory that we use to check for Alzheimer's exactly and use other tools as well it's not like a it's not like a mocha latte or anything yeah exactly give give a give a patient of mocha and see how they like it um so anyhow I I he did it once a month for six treatments okay now that worked for Alzheimer's what we're seeing in our Clinic is probably about

the same once every four to six weeks is what we're tracking biomarkers so we're seeing biomarkers change right after the treatment and Chang as lasting for six weeks and then then some patients not all patients the biomarkers start reverting okay and a lot of this has to do with each individual patients's lifestyle it's the lifestyle their level of exposure to things like Ultra processed food lack of sleep all inflammatory um inflammatory Lifestyles and so really goes Patient to Patient and so what I'm a huge advocate of is this whole concept of n of one right

I don't think there's one particular protocol that applies to everybody every patient is an individual bi biology and psychology and we need to Custom Tailor the protocol for each individual patient so um that's that's kind of where I I end up with it there's a lot of research being done for for Alzheimer's and for age related diseases as well okay so just as a regular monthly cleanup well I don't think it's monthly for everybody I think that I'm way behind if that's the case age related age related I would say is probably going to end

up being quarterly but once again it needs to be customized to you right so I think for you um if we were to measure your biomarkers because you live an incredibly healthy lifestyle of course try a little too much travel and stress but yeah my my guess would be for you is once every four to six months actually and so we just have to see where your biomarkers are with our function Labs you can tell me when you're ready for well that's another question is is you know are there unique biomarkers that can be tracked

that are specific to the benefits you see from plasma FIS in other words are there should you have this panel of 10 B markers to tell you oh before and after this is what's changing like the you know ad0 detect 4240 or the ptow or cyto kindes or lipids or what what what are the things that we should be actually measuring on a consistent basis before and after so we can scientifically track what's happening right so or do we not know we do know it's all the biomarkers that we're testing like with function health for

example for your biomarker panel and it depends on what you're targeting okay so for example um I have a patient with extremely high hscp and a lot of it is due to gut health issues right and so um one plasma fasis and her hscp went from nine to two wow okay so for her we're tracking hscp yeah I have another patient that we tracking mercury levels this person has been struggling with Mercury um toxicity for literally a decade has not found anything to get even kation kation did not work ebo treatments did not work sought

out all kinds of alternative therapies EO is a ozone therapy ozone therapy which will also do it next Health right yes we also do ozone as well um so for her we're tracking toxin levels okay and so like the LPL a patient I told you about we're tracking LP little a levels what's really incredible about this technology is IT addresses so many different factors of poor health and also aging some of the research is being done around tracking markers of senescent cells for aging zombie cells zombie cells right exactly there's no really commercial test for

zombie cells yet but it's research exactly yep um we're also tracking mitochondrial Health now as well we just found some new panels to track mitochondrial health so we'll be tracking that um for people that are experiencing M cognitive impairment or symptoms of Alzheimer's or even Parkinson's were're measuring the beta tow protein and other biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease and we're tracking those right mean P Tow and beta amid yeah PTW and beta amid sorry yes exactly and so we're tracking those we're tracking based on what we're going after we're tracking those biomarkers individually for people interesting

yeah so it's customized it's customized it's fascinating and and you know the this is not really accessible all very many places though that's the problem right it's hard to find places where you can get this that are not part of an academic Medical Center ex and they won't do it for off label reasons they you can't just go and say Hey I want to get my blood cleaned and they're like sure come on let's hook you up they're like forget about it you know Healthcare is not going to do this for you even hyperbaric oxygen

is like that if you want to go exactly and it's and it's unfortunate but these are therapies that that that have a lot of signs behind them but that are only reimbursed for certain indications exactly and so it's not widespread and there's not a lot of clinics and next health is one of the few places where you can can actually get plasma frees yeah so you know when I worked at the Mayo Clinic we had literally I would say I think we had like three dozen plasma frees machines in the entire Mayo system that's that's

a lot of plasma freees machines sitting there doing nothing right we also had 10 hyperbaric chamber sitting there doing nothing a lot of the times too and it's like why is this stuff just sitting here this can be used for aging related diseases and preventing disease and so look these machines they're everywhere but they're not being used outside the Western medicine system and even if you ask a hospital to let you do plasma freees they wouldn't even know where to start because they don't know how to build the insurance for it right and so I

think it's really important um what we're trying to do it next South is all of our locations will have a plasma freees machine so anyone can come in and and do it basically with an appointment with one of our doctors and I think more and more centers are going to start doing this once and I'm going right after this podcast go get one yes yes and and you know you've had it done before you know it's very comfortable you know it's very safe you know there's one more thing we should probably talk about with plasma

phrases yeah it's that the that's the use of albumin yeah I want to talk about that because you know um before we get into that I want Albin is what you actually put back in but you take out the plasma it's the main protein in your blood and there are health benefits to it which seem also really interesting I want to talk about that before I get to that how much of the plasma are you removing because you you know you have about 5 lers of blood and probably one liter of that's probably blood cells

and the rest of it it's plasma I'm just making this up but I'm guessing that's about the amount it's about 45% of your blood is is okay so 45% so a full cleaning would be what two two to three liters and you remove all that and then you just put back in Alvin and fluid and fluid and fluid like sailing right well we we also replenish all your micronutrients as well so what we're doing is taking out the bad stuff putting back in all the good stuff oh so you she don't do normal plasma frees

you do like an upgrade yes you put an alium in plus you put in IV nutrients IV nutrients and nicotinamide riboside we put back in you as well which your which your cells need um we're doing also glutathione we're doing albumin and some patients will use immune globulin as well IVIG amazing so um the the amount you take out is about three liters yes you put back in albumin so can you talk about what is albumin why do we put it back in and what health benefits does it have besides just reconstituting your blood right

EX exactly so you know you and I have used albumin in the hospital since the beginning of residency training right so albumin is not like a novel compound we've had it forever and a lot of times people are malnourished or have low protein yeah low protein even like trauma situations people lost a lot of blood and you like get them volume right away that's where I used it a lot as well so albumin is basically a protein it's a highly purified protein that um our bodies normally make and when it lives in the plasma and

so when you remove the plasma you have to replace albumin because your body has what's called an oncotic pressure it needs to maintain it needs to have protein in the blood so that the fluid doesn't leave your blood vessels and go into all your tissues and that's why you have that protein there and so you have to replace it but there's a big side benefit to this because albumin is one of the most stickiest proteins out there um in in our biology and what it does is it goes throughout your body sticking to toxins malform

proteins sticking to dead cell dead cell material and this is what actually brings the this all these materials from your tissues to your bloodstream so that your kidneys and your liver can eliminate it okay and so by replacing fresh new albumin that doesn't have anything bound to it now you have all these binding sites available for your body to further eliminate these toxins from your tissues amazing well if anybody listening out there and has a lot of money we got to study this more because this this is one of the most promising therapies I think

that exists out there for longevity based on the data I'm seeing right and I was talking to Eric BD the other day who's the head of the buck Institute on aging and they're very focused on this as a therapy uh there's also Sam Sam alman's lab is also focused on this as well so there's a lot of really interesting science going on around this not not funded by academic medical centers not funded by the NIH but funded by a bunch of billionaires who don't want to die which is great for us because we're getting the

benefit of the science but it's unfortunate that that that that traditional Academia and the National Institute of Health which should not be called that it should be called the National Institute of diseases disease right they don't study he at all the words out of my mouth right but uh you know this is really tremendous research um and I personally benefited you've benefited from it and I see the benefits from my patients who can who can get it now the challenge right now is it's it's not cheap because it's an expensive machine you know the techn

expensive is expensive the the the product are expensive so do you see a world in which that this comes down you know in price because you know for example at function we've figured out how to get $115,000 worth of labs for $499 a year right with twice a year testing is PL Rees going to be able to be done more inexpensively well I mean and and and what do we have to do to get it covered by Insurance yeah so here's um here's why it's expensive right now is albumin's expensive because there's just not enough

of it out there um right now and so we the other big problem with the therapy is it's hard to get the machines the machines are super expensive and the people that run it need to be highly specialized as well like an IV near STI an IV and you got to know what you're doing exactly it takes a lot of training so all of these problems are solved with scale right the more machines that are out there the more people that get trained and the more of the albumin product that's available the lower that drives

a price and that's exactly what we're working on at next Health we are you know we're expanding next Health to all the states and also around the world and each location like my imperative is to have a plasma freees machine at every location and we're going to drive down the price as as quickly as we can because I feel like it's probably going to be a main stay of treatment for avoiding chronic disease and also reversing chronic disease and I want to make it available to as many people as possible and then we want to

do the studies that show the insurance company how this saves lives and saves them money as well and once we show them this is what you need to be doing there's a world where Insurance yeah if you get this once a quarter you prevent all these chronic illnesses right and I think I think that's why I asked you the question about what are the metrics that you use to determine success right if we could measure proteins in the blood that are elevated when you have starting to progress towards Alzheimer's and you can reduce those and

you can show that you know Alzheimer's is the most expensive disease out there in in America because of the collateral damage on the cost of you know caregivers not not being able to work and the cost of caring for these people long term I mean it's it's an incredible economic drain in society and the number of people getting is going up and up but I but I also just point out that don't expect that you just get plop freis and you're going to prevent Alzheimer's or Retreat it you know there there's some other data that

needs to be talked about which is uh I think really exciting is is the finger trial the pointer trial which are large studies looking at aggressive lifestyle intervention and risk factor management showing that not only we slow the progression but that we reverse the the disease itself and Richard Isaacson his work who was at who was at Cornell now down in Florida is also done tremendous work showing that we can use aggressive lifestyle and personalized care to actually do exactly what you were saying it's not everybody gets the same treatment it's really what are what's

wrong with your particular biology and how do we correct that and that's what functional medicine is it's really identifying how to create personalized care that actually is preventive and actually gets people um down the trajectory from you know illness Back to Wellness right exactly and you know I want to just double click on that because it's so important you should never sit in a plasma frieza's chair if you're not willing to First undergo aggressive lifestyle inter intervention concurrently with the treatment program right because you're just you're just chasing the tail it's like putting horrible gasoline

in your car and changing the oil later and it's just like the car is getting worse and worse and you're just trying to keep up with oil change it's it's not going to work that's right you have to be committed to aggressive LIF cell intervention and learning what they are so a commitment to education on what is real wholesome good food what is ultr processed food what does a good night of sleep really mean what is I got 90 and 90 on my score last night I was amazing well after you pla freees you're gonna

get even a hundred probably tonight oh really oh God I never gotten a 100 Brian Johnson gets 100 I've never gotten 100 if I got a 100 I'm going to give you a 100 bucks okay there we go or maybe more but yeah I mean I think I think a commitment to aggressive life intervention should be a part of any longevity protocol but it's a requirement before you start doing things like plasma fasis I think we're going to put in the show notes references to the studies and and the research on this because this we're

not just talking about some wacky thing we're talking about something that's being really well researched that has tremendous promise that I personally benefit from that my patients have benefit from that I think it's one of the most exciting longevity therapies out there yeah I'll send you a paper I'll send you another paper that just came out it's a pre-print that just came out it's it's not peer- reviewed yet but um it's going to it's in peer-review process but I'll send it to you and you can maybe link it in the show Notes too are you

know the true age omic testing that they do they do the symphony test which is organ aging by System what is your biological age um plasma FIS study with omic age and Symphony testing showing major reversal of of these markers yeah I mean I like I said I went four years backwards as forward i' probably had four four or five plasma freis treatments over the last two years so I I think I don't know if that's what did it I've done a bunch of other stuff too I didn't I just threw the kitchen sink at

it but I wanted to see how far I could get I feel good about myself but I think I think you know the the the studies are going to just be more and more and I think we're going to learn more and more okay so so next health is really pioneering some of these therapies it's offering things that were really not available what are the other promising therapies that you guys offer at next Health that that are I think um important to consider as we look at treating this chronic dis epidemic and also helping people

optimize health and and achieve a longer healthspan and a longer lifespan yeah so one of the things I try to focus on with my patients in addition to the basics nutrition exercise sleep is using some of the natural stressors that are in our environment on a regular consistent basis to push Health in the right direction so these are things like heat therapy cold therapy light therapy and oxygen therapy through hyperbaric oxygen so we have what we call the longevity circuit and I really believe that like in a gym instead of like a circuit it's a

longevity circuit right it's like circuit training but at a cellular level and so um I encourage my patients to think of Health as not a once a year or once a month or once a quarter thing it's a weekly thing it's something that you have to make Health a habit so we have people come in to do the longevity circuit on a weekly basis where they do the hyperbaric oxygen for about 45 minutes uh a sauna for 20 to 30 minutes and then cryotherapy and then light therapy as well and so this gets people um

it gets your mitochondria slightly stressed which allows them to make new mitochondria and make energy more efficiently when your cells the mitochondria are the powerhouses of our cells when they are functioning well every cell gets to do its job better and you just become healthier and you reverse chronic disease so I think that's another Main St of therapy that we do in next heal well I just want to double click on that one too because what you didn't say was that these are therapies that all fun fall under the category of something called hormesis hormesis

hormesis is a medical word it sounds like a lot but essentially it's means a stress that doesn't kill you that makes you stronger and we're all familiar with it right fasting we know in calor restriction is an incredible stress on the body exactly but it actually makes you live longer uh we look at the Holocaust Survivors who were basically starving they actually have incredible longevity and it's not genetic you look at certain uh data that you animal studies it's hard to do on humans but a third of of your diet is restricted in terms of

calories you a third less calories you live it there longer for humans that would be living to 120 of course you're going be miserable hungry and know have sex drive and be too skinny but but that but there are ways to actually mimic that exercise as a form of hormesis because you're you're stressing your muscles and then you get sore because they're you're tearing muscle fibers but then they come back stronger right so it's like build back better right right so the idea is is these are all therapies that are are available to us that

we can use to up regulate these Pathways in our body that I call the longevity switches exactly so so you know we I talk a lot about this in my book youngever but the body has his builtin heal is a built-in healing machine like it it actually literally has a healing system which when you cut your skin how does your body heal when you break a bone how does your body heal well it has a healing system but we mess it up all the time and the ways to activate this healing system is that regenerates

repairs and renews our body is through some of these practices hyperbaric oxygen therapy ozone therapy light therapy red light therapy uh and and cold therapy heat therapy you know I I definitely find that for me if I do a sauna and a cold plunge every day I just feel like a million bucks you know it's the best thing it's my morning routine I wake up I work out I do my where I might might do a hot and cold first then I work out and then you know depending on where the where I am and

it's just an incredible way to do it your your your day but but actually has all these other benefits yes yes I do mine at night I do a 30 minute sauna and then a cold Plunge at night and I I just 100 sleep score come on I'm telling you try night I want to see I give me your phone I'm show you show me after that's insane okay yeah yeah I try it at night okay I try I try it so okay I want to say um one more thing for for everyone listening is

a lot of the stuff might not be available to you or might you know there's not a lot of centers offering any of this um all over the country yet but they're coming all of this stuff can be done for free very easily for in your day-to-day life just going outside in the morning first thing in the morning exposing yourself you know maybe with no shirt on to the sunlight you're getting your light therapy you're getting some some cold therapy if you live in a colder environment cold showers you know all of this stuff is

available to everybody right you can buy like a like a little sauna blanket or you can buy these little fold up saunas that you can like like stick your head out of they very inexpensive and then you know I a bathtub I just filled with cold water I mean that's what I did for years I had a a seam put in my shower which wasn't that expensive and I've had it for 25 years and you know have a a bathtub fill with cold water and I just go back and forth and I've done that for

years and it's it's not that expensive to do that right and the plasma exchange kind of correlated to that too is another way to do this same kind of therapy but in a much smaller dose is by donating plasma just go donate plasma they'll pay you to remove some of your plasma amazing and then your body will make new plasma now that's at a much smaller volume of course because your body has to make new plasma but it still works if you're young and you're healthy that's something to consider as well so it's kind of

it's kind hacking the system a little bit like giving the blood yeah that's a good one okay so in in in your vision for healthcare where where do you see all this going because there's so much happening so fast right now in terms of what's happening on the margins of healthcare like next health and function Health the company I co-founded that are really trying to push healthc care in a different direction and are actually disintermediating a lot of the traditional Health Care Systems operational like uh you know ways that we kind of work right right

so where where do you see all this going okay I thought about this a lot and I think that we are at this incredible inflection point where we're actually going to develop two separate systems you're going to have what is considered right now the Health Care system which we know is more disease care Western medicine system that's going to be its own system treating the end result of all this chronic disease right and Trauma and other yeah if you need surgery or whatever fine and then there's going to be a health system that's going to

be developed by people like yourself giving people the empowerment to manage their own biomarkers and take personal responsibility for them with function Health with places like NEX Health giving people a place to go to do some of these therapies and to talk about their health with practitioners I think we're GNA have a true health system and then the current system will be a disease system and these will be in parallel which is the way it all of it should have been done in the first place interesting yeah and that's what I'm really excited about I'm

not so negative about the health system because I think it has a function it needs to always be there but we need to have dollars funnel towards Health versus that disease care World well I mean you know listen all of us are going to have stuff like for example you know uh I have a genetic risk for atrial fib my mother had it um uh you know I tall thin guys who are athletes when they're older tend to get it I got atrial fib I needed heart surgery okay thank God they could map out my

heart with electrophysiology and figure out which little place to zap and now you know a week later I was playing tennis so that's amazing right you need that I need that's great but but there are so many things we do in healthcare that are just like trying to plug a hole in a in a sinking ship with your finger and it's a SI you know it's a size of a you know a football field and yet we're just we got our finger trying to hold the damn together it's not working so we do need a

health a true Health Care system and I and I I think what we have now people call it health insurance we don't have health insurance we have disease Insurance disease yeah and so I see NEX health and function Health as true health insurance exactly and yes you have to pay out of pocket but now with health savings accounts so anybody can start a health saving account there's literally billions of dollars in health savings accounts people are not using them properly trumed is started by a friend of mine c means and yeah Justin may they they

actually are are now enabling you to be able to use your health savings account dollars for things like plasma free for things like ozone or things like your vitamin supplements or hyperbaric oxygen therapy so you can actually start to use pre-tax dollars for this you can start your health savings account and you have to invest in your health because if you don't pay now you're going to pay later you know I had this one patient she was on $20,000 of co-pay yeah at 66 years old for all the medication she needed for chronic illnesses that

three months were completely reversed diabetes heart failure hypertension fatty liver renal insufficiency all gone and you and you know as a doctor you don't reverse heart failure no you manage it you don't get we call an injection fraction which is how much of the blood you pump out with each pump of your heart it should be about 50% you know when it goes down under 50 you're starting in trouble this when was like 35% went back up to 50 you don't you don't see that with traditional medicine but when you use this was just lifestyle

and diet it wasn't even wasn't even all these fancy things we're talking about so I think I think we have the ability to really treat uh disease completely differently and one of the one of my my uh kind of thorns in my side that I get always really irritated about is when people talk about preven they talk about lifestyle as prevention I'm like no it's treatment and it works better than traditional medication if I need a drug I'm gonna use it right like if there's a drug certain patients have genetic limpid disorders they might need

medication like a pcsk9 inhibitor they might need a Statin that's okay but not 75% of the prescriptions being written for people for prevention for with a Statin that they don't even I had a patient just today who had a doctor tell him he needed to be on a stat and there was a 54y old guy who had some abnormal lipids they did a a coronary angiogram with a CT scan and they saw a little something that was in the circumflex artery which is a little bit was a narrowing and it probably was just a kink

or something sure and they're like oh we need to put you on statens right away oh my gosh and I'm like wait a minute wait a minute super you're super healthy right you eat perfectly you EXC all the time I don't think this is a problem let's do an AI heart scan on you yep right right uh it's called clearly Health uh and you can look it up clearly health.com there's centers all around the country where you can get this done but you don't you can get just a regular CTN Grim which they do in

any hospital and you can just have your data read by this AI he was Zero like I I don't think I've ever seen a 54y old that get zero he had zero plaque zero soft plaque zero hard plaque zero any kind of plaque his artists are pretty clean I'm like you do not need a drug you know and so I think we we really need to start looking at you know treating people really differently and and and being very personalized and doing deep deep biomarker analysis deep phenomic analysis and using therapies that are are going

to actually create health because because none of the therapies that you offer I would I would suggest are disease treatments they are Health treatments they're helping you elevate your health and when you create Health disease goes away as a side effect exactly exactly so you don't have to treat the disease right you're just you're just creating health and removing the things that are impediments to health right all this [ __ ] in your blood and you're adding the ingredients for health right the nutrients and vitamins and all the other stuff we talked about exctly so

it's really quite simple you take out the bad stuff you put in the good stuff the body is healing this for years yeah the body's healing machine actually just knows what the heck to do exactly so it's quite incredible you're you're you're just such a a beautiful man thank you you have such an enthusiasm for making the world a better place you're doing such great work uh you're doing so many other things too we didn't even get into but I think I think everybody should should learn about these therapies we're going to put links in

the show notes to them we'll put a link to next Health you can check it out unfortunately it's not in every town in every city in every corner which it should be I want this to be the Starbucks of Health yes you know you get in an airport go whever you want get this done and I I I think uh we're going to change Healthcare together so thank you buddy appreciate I'm so glad to be on this journey with you uh Mark Dr Heyman and um I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk

about this to oh it's exciting I'm very exciting well till next time we'll do this again and uh I'm excited about my plans for today I I'll tell you all how it works and uh and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy let's do it thank you if you love that last video you're going to love the next one check it out here [Music]