Life, Health & The Universe - A Podcast For The Midlife Rebel
Welcome to **Life, Health & The Universe**, the podcast dedicated to empowering women in their 40s and 50s to embrace a vibrant and meaningful life. Join us as we explore the intersection of health, wellness, and personal growth, offering insights and inspiration to help you navigate this transformative stage of life.
Each week, we dive into topics that matter most to you— from holistic health and nutrition to mindfulness and self-discovery. With expert interviews, relatable stories, and practical tips, we aim to inspire you to live your best life, cultivate deeper connections, and find purpose in every moment.
Whether you’re seeking to enhance your well-being, explore new passions, or simply find a supportive community, **Life, Health & The Universe** is here to guide you on your journey. Tune in and discover how to thrive in this exciting chapter of life!
Contact Nadine: https://lifehealththeuniverse.podcastpage.io/contact
Life, Health & The Universe - A Podcast For The Midlife Rebel
Regenerative Medicine for Midlife Health | Dr. Jeff Gross on Stem Cells & Healing Without Surgery
What if the future of medicine wasn’t about cutting, but about regenerating?
In this powerful episode of Life, Health & The Universe, Dr. Jeff Gross — a neurological surgeon turned regenerative medicine pioneer — reveals how stem cells, PRP, and exosomes are transforming healthcare.
For midlife women in particular, this conversation offers hope beyond surgery. Dr. Gross explains how hormonal changes accelerate cellular aging, inflammation, and bone or muscle loss — and why regenerative medicine can help restore vitality, reduce pain, and prevent decline without invasive procedures.
With over 20 years of surgical experience, Dr. Gross has now treated more than 650 joints using regenerative therapies, with only one patient ultimately needing surgery. From platelet-rich plasma to cutting-edge exosome treatments, he shows how the body’s own biology can support healing and longevity.
If you’re navigating midlife challenges like joint pain, reduced mobility, or loss of bone density, this episode offers practical insights into how regenerative medicine can help you stay active, healthy, and thriving.
Listen now to discover how regenerative medicine can help you heal naturally, avoid unnecessary surgery, and celebrate midlife with strength and vitality.
Explore more about Dr. Jeff Gross in our Guest Directory: https://lifehealththeuniverse.podcastpage.io/person/jeff-gross
Welcome to Life, health and the Universe, bringing you stories that connect us, preventative and holistic health practices to empower us and esoteric wisdom to enlighten us. We invite you to visit our website, where you can access the podcast, watch on YouTube and find all of our guests in the guest directory. Visit lifehealththeuniversepodcastpageio. Now let's get stuck into this week's episode. Today's guest, dr Jeff Gross, is a neurological surgeon and longevity expert who helps people recover, regenerate and thrive without defaulting to surgery. With a background in biochemistry and over two decades of experience in spinal surgery, dr Gross now focuses on cutting edge therapies in regenerative medicine and biohacking. He's the founder of Recelebrate, a practice dedicated to helping people optimize performance, recover from injury and age well, using modern biochemical tools that support long term health from the inside out. And that is just the tip of the iceberg, jeff, thanks for joining me. We've had a wee little preamble, but not much so happy to be your iceberg today.
Speaker 1:I'm kind of going to be led by you a little bit. I do have my own personal experience in biohacking, but it only goes so far and mostly you know tapping into all of those natural things that we have available to us getting proper sleep you know sleep and wake times being regular, red light therapy, sauna, cold plunge food as medicine those kind of things are in my wheelhouse. But when it comes to um, that sort of deeper getting into biohacking in in the way that you're you help people is really something I haven't explored. So I'm really looking forward to to hearing more about it. Can you start by sort of sharing a bit about your story? You moved from spinal surgery to regenerative medicine. What happened?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a strange story, but accidental, like most cool things. So I'm minding my own business practicing spine surgery. A long career and I still see spine patients but neck and back trouble, disc issues, nerve problems, injuries, always trying to make surgery the last option. But my patients came to me, you know, one at a time, of course, and they would say, well, I've tried all these non-surgical treatments, we've tried therapies, we've tried medications, we've tried time, we've tried stretching, yoga, chiropractic, I've tried injections, and those things may help a little temporarily, but I still have this problem. And I'd say, well, the next thing on the menu that we have here at Spine Restaurant is surgery. Should we talk about it? No, doc, I'm not ready for surgery. Great, would be my answer, Because I really didn't want to offer it to you.
Speaker 2:So then patients would say, well, what else you got? And we would, you know, say, well, there's, you know, cutting edge things where I'm looking at and researching. And a lot of people would say, well, how about stem cells? And you hear that enough times. And luckily, chance favors the prepared mind and I do have some background in that field from years ago and I said, you know what? I'm not going to go to these annual spine surgery meetings when a bunch of bow tie wearing knuckleheads pat themselves on the back for doing the same things over and over again. Instead, I'm going to start going to stem cell meetings and regenerative medicine meetings and I'm going to retrain, and it got. And regenerative medicine meetings, and I'm going to retrain, and it got more and more interesting and I got reinvigorated and I did it because I wanted to add this as an additional tool to the menu of services, but it has blossomed into so much more that it is almost all I do now. And you can't do regenerative medicine without doing longevity because they are so heavily overlapping.
Speaker 1:Wow, I love the fact that, as a surgeon, you were telling people not to have surgery, because I feel like for so many people, that feels like the only path. My husband actually had some back issues and he was the same. The surgeon said well, as long as you seem to be getting better, let's not go there, but for so many people, they feel like they don't have any other option.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really bad here in the States at least, getting worse and worse with what's happening in our sick care system.
Speaker 1:I agree, and I feel like there are more people, and younger people as well, having huge operations, for, you know, hip replacement seems to be something that's really hit the market right now.
Speaker 2:It's a profitable thing, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's a whole conversation in itself, isn't it? You know, I'm kind of curious. As a spinal surgeon, you could have been making a whole bunch of money out of doing surgery, but you chose not to.
Speaker 2:Always.
Speaker 1:Was that a hard thing to do?
Speaker 2:No, it's never been worth it. I guess you know I haven't sold my soul to anyone yet, so any devilish, you know, demon hasn't come for that. But no, I mean, I was always trained by people who said surgery is the last option. And even though I have the skill and the knowledge to do it, the real art is knowing who to do it for who to offer it to. And there was a time when, you know, the only people who had spine surgery were those who could barely get out of bed every day. And now you know, sadly and almost, you know, despicably, there are doctors who look at the MRI, don't even touch the patient and say I can fix you with surgery, and these people are walking around, going to work. Yeah, they may have a little pain, but surgery is overutilized and because of it it has a very bad reputation, as it should. I did not want to contribute to that ever.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's really. Yeah, that's good to know that there's people like you out there rooting for the general population. Yeah, Can you give us some detail on regenerative medicine and what that is?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's really neat because what we're doing is tapping back into biology and nature, naturally. So you know, we've been, we've been utilizing certain elements of regenerative medicine. Not knowingly, our grandmothers recommended certain behaviors and things to utilize that, not knowing that they were practicing regenerative medicine. But regenerative medicine is using strategies of learning from how a baby is made and how a child grows and develops and maintains itself, and then what happens is as we age, and then what happens is as we age, as we are inflamed, and those could be, you know, vice versa, how our system falters in being able to heal and maintain us as well as it did when it was younger. So tapping back into that knowledge, supercharging it, leveraging it, is the whole basis of regenerative medicine, whether it be from PRP, also known as plate enriched plasma, stem cells, and now the latest cutting edge is really stem cell messaging, which comes from extracellular vesicles or exosomes.
Speaker 1:Okay, wow, so we're going to get into that. My husband's actually had PRP as well on his knee, that my husband's actually had PRP as well on his knee, I don't know. Yeah, he went for it for quite a while, but they remove the plasma and then they spin it around in some kind of centrifugal thing and then put it back in. We're talking in layman's terms here today.
Speaker 2:You got it. Prp is from your own body. You take a number of vials of blood. You spin it around to separate out the red blood cells from the liquid, the watery part of the blood called the plasma. And in between those two layers, the red stuff and the kind of yellowish, is a little whitish layer and it has all these growth factors, peptides, proteins, platelets. It's called platelet-rich plasma. Prp it's part of the plasma but it's got stuff in it. It's the good stuff. So you can kind of remove just that layer from a number of tubes, add it together and reinstill it in the body in a place where you want to increase the healing potential. And there's even cosmetic uses for that, where you can inject it into the face for a more youthful skin. That's called the vampire facial.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, Love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:All right. So there's a couple of things you mentioned which I really think are important things to understand for the people who listen to this podcast. Women, specifically in midlife because you've mentioned cellular aging and you've mentioned inflammation and I kind of want us to understand a little bit more about what that means and how it might show up for us.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, let's, let's, let's call out the elephant in the room.
Speaker 2:You know, midlife women are going through a steep hormonal change perimenopause, menopause, postmenopause and you know, men, this happens more gradually. Andropause is a gradual, slow thing and but with women it's quite abrupt. And when you lose access to those youthful hormones, you increase and accelerate the rate of cellular aging by cellular inflammation, and that's why you have an increase in the number of injuries and joint problems and inflammation in the body. That's why you have an increase in autoimmune issues and pain and other problems and that's why the age is so accelerated, which is, you know, one of the things we do, before we ever consider a regenerative approach, whether it be stem cells or what have you, is to make sure the patient is optimized for that, so they get the most out of it, and that might include proper sleep, proper exercise, proper supplementation, proper hormesis. Hormesis, as you know, might be hot sauna, cold plunge, fasting, things like that, and I'm not meaning to exclude anything but other epigenetic lifestyle behaviors to optimize oneself, including hormone optimization with bioidentical hormones, not the synthetic horse driven or horse driven things.
Speaker 1:I'm kind of a little bit on the fence with the bioidentical hormones. I understand that for some women it's essential, but similar to the hip replacements, Jeff, it feels like it's a little bit of a one size fits all is what I'm hearing from the women around my age group. It can be like prescribed when it might not need to be.
Speaker 2:Let me help fuel your curiosity, if possible. If you do not maintain a youthful hormone profile, you will have accelerated loss of bone density, you will have loss of muscle mass, you will have increased risk for cardiovascular disease, you will have increased risk for dementia. But you are correct that these bioidentical hormones have to be dialed in in a precision way for an individual, not one size fits all.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay. So it sounds like a pretty rough ride for us midlife women.
Speaker 2:Doesn't have to be.
Speaker 1:Doesn't have to be, and do you think that how much impact? I mean how much impact does lifestyle and that sort of stuff have on us? Because I feel like I'm in pretty good nick, considering I'm going through these changes. Yeah, well, listen, am I?
Speaker 2:in denial you are, but that's okay. You could be your royalty, you could be the queen of denial, but no, I mean honestly, you won't know until it hits you right. The hormones decline now, but the cumulative effect of that, as you lose bone density and you go into what's called osteopenia, which is kind of pre-osteoporosis that's a one-way train and as you lose bone mass, bone density and muscle mass, you're losing longevity, because longevity is correlated to those things. We also know that women who have periods later in life, you know, live longer. We know that women who have later pregnancies live longer. Why? Because they have the youthful hormone profile, and these are well-known longitudinal scientific observations. This is not goofing around here, it's got to be the bioidentical. So I really think people should reconsider that if they have any idea that. Oh no, that's not for everybody. It really needs to be offered to everyone in some form.
Speaker 1:Okay, cool, I do tick the box of having children late in life.
Speaker 2:So I'm claiming that one, maybe, one more. Maybe you've got room for one more, I don't know.
Speaker 1:No more, I'm done with that, okay. No more, I'm done with that, okay. So that all sounds like pretty, uh, doom and gloom for us, and I think that that well, again, this you're talking really realistically, but there are. You know, women are generally given this message that it's all over. Rover, you know you hit midlife and it's downhill and you know things are just going to get shitty, but it doesn't have to be that way. The work that you do with stem cells has that regenerative effect on us and can help with longevity and not having those experiences that we may otherwise have in midlife, right, so this is a good news story, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean combined with all the other you know, longevity optimizers and healthy lifestyle, anti-inflammatory lifestyles. Yes, of course, the earlier you start, the more you do and the better you behave in this, you know, the more effective it is. We have people at all different ages or different inflammatory status who benefit from regenerative approaches, whether it be stem cells or stem cell derived exosomes, things like that. We take care of people with joint problems, spine problems. We help people trying to avoid a knee replacement or hip replacement, because I don't know about where you are, but here in the States there's a joint replacement, fast food on every corner. Right, you can go through the drive-through and get your knee replaced. So you know and why there are.
Speaker 2:There are companies that make big money selling metallic implants. That's sort of the you know. There's big pharma and then there's big implant business. So that's a thing out there and we help people with inflammatory issues. Autoimmune might be one of those Persistent infectious inflammation like after a certain type of Lyme's disease or viral infections. There was a popular one just a few years ago. You may have heard of Starts with a C. So all kinds of different approaches and then we have fun stuff. We have certain approaches for sexual health for men and women. We have cosmetic applications and so forth.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I want to go back to the inflammatory thing just quickly, because you've mentioned it again and you've kind of touched on cellular aging and some of the things that happen to us women in midlife. Inflammation what is that? Is it like? Because the way that I see it is like often shows up in the body in some way. Is it in the joints, is it?
Speaker 2:in. Yeah, no, your question's really good because the word is vague, it's general, it's broad and inflammation is a cellular process and that cellular process affects tissues and sometimes you can see inflammation in tissue. If you twist your ankle wrong, in the wrong way, it will get swollen and red and painful and hot and that's acute inflammation. That's a normal healing process. We want that. The problem is over time our cells get less efficient at turning that on and off and if it can't fully turn off it's leaky and you get what's called chronic inflammation. That's the problem.
Speaker 2:Chronic inflammation is aging and some people use the word inflammation. And at the cellular level it's a set of processes. Certain genes are called upon, certain proteins are made. It's a programming. It's stuck in this cycle and those cells that are inflamed cannot do what their job was or used to be, or should have been or should be, for example, joints. Joint pain is a common manifestation of an ongoing chronic inflammation, an arthritis. That's what arthritis means inflamed joints, what arthritis means inflamed joints. So this affects the cells at the edges of the bone that are supposed to produce and maintain and lubricate cartilage. Well, if you can't maintain your cartilage, it's like having a bald tire on your car. It's going to eventually go bad, right, but we have the ability to retread our tires as long as we maintain those cells in an uninflamed state. So that's where these regenerative medicine approaches come in. They seek to reprogram those cells, even temporarily, but that might be enough to turn back on that cartilage production and maintenance process, enough to help rebuild that joint or reverse the process.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm going to keep going with the inflammation just a little bit longer before we move into the types of treatment, because I just want to. You've talked about the joint pain and how that can show up in the body like inflammation shows up in the body. Some of the behaviors that I've witnessed in clients that I work with when it comes to inflammation and actually my own personal experience.
Speaker 1:Alcohol I don't drink anymore, but when I did drink like I look back at photos of myself and my face looks inflamed. And I can often see in other people if their lifestyle behaviors aren't great, like if they're not getting enough sleep, if they're not eating the right foods, that kind of puffiness is a real telltale sign and it does make definitely makes you look older and I've had experience with a client who had some food intolerances and she got experiences with inflammation in her joints from that and when she fixed up her food that inflammation went away. So I just wanted to kind of share those examples with people as well so they can kind of correlate lifestyle behavior and how that can then show up in the body lifestyle behavior and how that can then show up in the body A hundred percent.
Speaker 2:We see this in joints too. You have a person with slightly inflamed joints. A little bit of pain, discomfort, and they clean up their lifestyle. They start eating clean and getting away from the processed stuff with the preservatives, or maybe cut out gluten if they're intolerant or something, and all of a sudden their joints feel better. So we know that we can impact our own inflammatory status at any time by how we behave, how we eat, how we sleep, how we exercise, everything.
Speaker 1:Cool, which is, yeah, great news. So, but we really need to be in that optimized state before you start any kind of stem cell therapy. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 2:It's not an absolute requirement, but it certainly will stack the deck in your favor for success, because if you're going to spend some money on regenerative medicine, because it does have a cost associated with it, you want to do everything you can to get the best results. So I help people do that. Unless there's an acute situation where we have to act soon, like a brain injury or heart attack or stroke, we can't wait around for them to clean up their lifestyle. We will push them along the way to do so, but we, we, we, we sometimes have to act with the regenerative medicine sooner.
Speaker 1:Wow, I would love to go there and hear a little bit more about some of those kind of more, um, complex cases where you're using this therapy to assist people in their recovery process. I mean, to me it's a no-brainer and hopefully to people listening you kind of start to you know your mind starts ticking over. Why would you not have this compared to being cut open and having bits removed because of the trauma that's experienced? So can you describe to us you talked about brain injury, I think, stroke, heart attack, those three how the therapy works in those circumstances?
Speaker 2:Well, ideally, any of these elements have an inflammatory component and the regenerative medicine seeks to help suppress the chronic inflammation. So turn on and off the acute properly and then support any regenerative actions that go on. And regeneration we regenerate without regenerative medicine. We don't do it as well if we have chronic inflammation and that chronic inflammation accumulates with age and with maybe not clean living, if you will. So it depends on how much of that you have. So we want to use, sometimes we use the regenerative medicine to help clean things up and the inflammatory burden in the bloodstream and, turn on, get the best out of our own natural healing pathways.
Speaker 1:So could you describe if someone came to you like what would happen in that circumstance? What would happen? They've had a stroke or heart attack. How does the process?
Speaker 2:unfold. Yeah well, we, you know most of my. I'm here in Las Vegas, nevada. Most of our, most of our patients aren't from Las Vegas, they're from somewhere else. We meet with them by video, we get all their records, we order any tests we need remotely. We do the deep dive. This is not a 10-minute doctor's visit. This is comprehensive and precise and if we see an injury and the injury we think we can help whether it's a stroke, an actual traumatic, you know blunt injury, a traffic accident or something or some other problem then only invite people here to Las Vegas for treatment that we think we can help and then we help them, whether it's through intravenous.
Speaker 2:We've helped people with lung problems with the breathing treatments of regenerative medicine, biologics. We've also do another access to the brain is through nasal spray. We can actually spray up in the back of the nose. The brain does take that up. We have, in fact, we have some children on the autism spectrum who have had some improvements with the nasal spray regenerative approach. But most people come here. We do a course. It might involve some hyperbaric oxygen therapy if it's a brain injury or a stroke. A stroke is a form of brain injury, if you will, and it might involve some intravenous or nasal spray treatments. It might involve other types of nutrients high dose vitamin C, intravenous, other anti-inflammatories IV like curcuminoids. We have all kinds of different approaches that we customize for the individual.
Speaker 1:Okay, so it's not just the stem cell therapy that you do, it's a whole host of different treatments.
Speaker 2:It can be. I mean, a lot of people already have a lot of access to some of these other things and all the missing piece might be the stem cell or the regenerative piece, and we can just add that in. That's why everyone's treated as an individual.
Speaker 1:There's no one, there's no cookbook to your recipe, one cup of flour for this, etc so those um people may be coming to you post, hospital, post, kind of like you know standard procedure kind of thing, and this is about getting better healing after the fact, like right.
Speaker 2:We want to maximize the recovery.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, Okay, cool. What's next? So can you kind of give us a little bit of information about where stem cells come from? Like you said, we're kind of learning and the regenerative idea is, or the regenerative medicine is um taken from that kind of the baby and that kind of fresh life.
Speaker 2:So this, this is yeah, these are the most active sources of regenerative biologics. So stem cells or stem cell uh. So you can get stem cells from your own body, but if you take them from an inflamed person you may be getting some inflamed signals back. So I, like the youngest at least, these are usually mothers who are going to have a planned cesarean section delivery of a baby. The mother cannot have had the COVID vaccine because we just don't know enough yet. And the mother must be healthy no drinking, no smoking, no drugs on prenatal vitamins, et cetera. They're screened at the time of delivery once again, and then after the baby's born congratulations, mother.
Speaker 2:Instead of throwing away the umbilical cord, the amniotic fluid, all these wonderful things, they're now put on ice and sent to a regulated lab. It's all certified and compliant. Where those materials are put on ice in the freezer, they're tested. Third-party samples are set out to evaluate. They are tested for all kinds of viruses and things. So by the time I purchase them because I purchase them, I'm sort of an end user for my patients I get four pages of testing with every sample that we have. So I feel confident that we have safe material.
Speaker 1:Wow. Do you have any people who have ethical challenges with this kind of treatment?
Speaker 2:You know, there's this myth that people think that there are people either having babies just to donate or, you know, aborted fetuses and stuff. But this is actually not known to be true or reported. It's a myth. It's just a purported myth, probably put out by Big Pharma and others, who have an incentive to suppress this entire line of development.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, it's pretty cutting edge, isn't it? Can you share?
Speaker 2:Well, in Europe it's been around for 20 years In Europe. China and Korea are very advanced for two decades. We're late to the party here in the States. I think that where you are, you're even behind us in this regard from what I understand.
Speaker 1:Are there any negative side effects that people experience when they have it?
Speaker 2:Well, people with a lot of inflammation. If we give them an intravenous infusion of either stem cells or stem cell signaling factors, they can, as they have to release some of the inflammatory proteins stored up in their cells as they purge that inventory out of their factories. They can have a day or two of a flu-like syndrome, so low-grade fever, chills, aches, sleepiness, because you know your cells store that stuff. But when you come in and reprogram your factories, your cells, you know you're saying well, we're not going to make these wartime implements anymore, we're going to make peacetime implements. You still have to clear out the inventory. So that was released into the bloodstream has to be purged out. That's the only thing I've ever seen. There's really no rejection to be purged out. That's the only thing I've ever seen. There's really no rejection. It's theoretical. With stem cells it's barely even that for the exosomes from the stem cells.
Speaker 1:Okay, and I'd love to hear a bit more about that in a minute. I just want to kind of ask more questions about that experience. So you've talked about intravenous and you've talked about the nasal spray. Is the process generally local or is it like a IV in the arm? Throughout the body, the IV?
Speaker 2:is a systemic body that's supposed to get throughout the body and when we treat joints or spine it's local. So we direct our injections specifically to the parts that are targeted where there's confirmed pain correlated with something we might see on an MRI. So this isn't just you know, close the eyes and shoot and see what we get. This is very specific and deliberate.
Speaker 1:And the vampire facial, obviously, is localized.
Speaker 2:Right, and that's not a big deal at all. We numb the face with a numbing cream and then we use the tiniest of tiniest needles to do these little, tiny micro injections. So it's not a big issue at all, and and people love the results. And you think about it, Nadine, if you ever see a pregnant woman, you've been one yourself, right? So during your later trimester, your, your skin is a glow and your hair is growing. Why is that? You're getting a daily dose of stem cell exosomes into your bloodstream and so you're getting regenerative medicine and we give people a sense of that without having to be pregnant.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm. And you know, one thing that I think of with women trying to freshen up their face is Botox. But this is nothing like that. It's not going to kind of freeze the face or anything like that.
Speaker 2:We're talking about skin quality. You know less dry skin, which is especially a problem during midlife, you know, for women. We're talking about the quality of the skin and the underlying. You know tissues right, because you start to lose, you know, tissue under the skin. You lose muscle and you lose fat and you need that for your facial features and your facial volume. I know people say I don't want any fat. Well, we do. In our face, we do want some fat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just to make us look plump and fresh.
Speaker 2:Right. Otherwise we look hollow and cachectic and emaciated right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how long does it last? Is this a lifelong, like once you have it done it's forever, or do you have to keep doing it?
Speaker 2:Some of the treatments can be permanent. Right, if you help regenerate a joint, then you help reverse that joint back to its normal program and of course you're going to still live with that joint and continue to degenerate it, but the results are permanent. Some of the things are temporary. For example, my wife and I do the IVs of the exosomes four times a year just because it's more of a longevity, anti-aging preventative move, and those last a few months at a time I think it's more of the cumulative benefit we get from that.
Speaker 1:How does it make you feel? I was going to ask you if you use the treatments. How does it make you feel?
Speaker 2:Well, the first time was just like a shot of rocket fuel. Uh, just the, the energy, the improvement in sleep, uh, the, the mental speed. You know, even though we go about our day at work and I don't I don't think I'm slow at all mentally, but man, it's like your computer works faster, so recovery from exercise you're not sore the next day if you went hard. So all those things were noticed. But because we do it all the time now, I don't have that wow factor each time. But towards the end of those few months after a treatment I do notice a few little aches and pains start to make their way back. Those tend to disappear after each injection. Still Wow.
Speaker 1:Sounding very, very good, Do you? Okay, let's talk about the exosomes versus the stem cell. Is that a different therapy?
Speaker 2:No, not really Okay, but you're going to hear more and more of the word exosomes out there. So stem cells, you know, turns out stem cells aren't doing much what you say. We're doing a whole podcast on this and delivering smaller messaging elements. Some of those are growth factors, peptides, and some of them are, through these small out bubbling. I say small, but cells are already small. These are even smaller by about a thousand, one, one thousandth.
Speaker 2:These are called extracellular vesicles or for fun we call them exosomes, and the exosomes deliver a set of instructions through microRNAs and small peptides and things that are taken in by the neighboring cell.
Speaker 2:So our cells actually are the ones being reprogrammed that do the work. So a stem cell really is encouraging our cells to do the work through these exosomes and then our cells sort of get back to a more youthful, restorative state, and that's regenerative state. So we can now skip the delivery mechanism, the stem cells, and go right to the exosomes, because they're highly abundant in amniotic fluid, and amniotic fluid is very abundant compared to the size of the umbilical cord, so most of these come directly from the amniotic fluid is very abundant compared to the size of the umbilical cord, so most of these come directly from the amniotic fluid, they're filtered and we can give them, and because of the abundance, the cost is about a third of that for stem cells. So you can have the same effect by cutting out the delivery mechanism, going right to the business end of the stem cell, which are these exosomes.
Speaker 1:Wow, okay, I'm just kind of picturing trying to collect amniotic fluid at this point, because you know if your waters break then.
Speaker 2:Well, if your water breaks from below, you are not a candidate to donate. It has to be a C-section, because that's considered a sterile delivery.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, my water's broke, but then I had a cesarean, so um, you probably didn't have much fluid left at that time, right? Exactly, yeah, and even doing a cesarean and collecting the fluid could be like quite a job, I would expect.
Speaker 2:I'm sure they've got all the right equipment to do it, but you know well they have a specific donor services and they're there with their own separate sterile suction and they are allowed, I think, 60 seconds. So they they slice open the womb and they enter the amniotic sac and they have exactly 60 seconds. Of course, if the baby's in distress, you're out. Sorry, abort that donation.
Speaker 1:We're going right for the baby, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's very regulated and done right.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, amazing. Okay, You've been. You touched on this, although you didn't mention the word cancer and how this treatment is potentially a new way of helping people treat cancer. Can you tell us a bit about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, this is a little bit of a sidestep, because standard stem cells and exosomes aren't really applicable for cancer. We are not certain if they are helpful, hurtful or neutral. We know they help the immune system fight cancer, but we also don't know if we are giving cancer an advantage, so we don't want to do that, but in wanting to make sure we had something. In my research it became clear that there is a certain immune cell in our white blood cell system called the natural killer cell. It's named beautifully. Natural killer cells are NK cells for short. Their job is to go around our body and remove abnormal cells that might pop up, and they do pop up during our life. We make cancer cells, we do. They go around and remove cancer cells that are accidental. They remove infected cells and they remove the senescent cells, also called zombie cells, which are old cells that stop dividing, got a bunch of junk in them, taking up resources, sitting on your couch eating all your food, but they're not contributing to the household. Okay, so those are zombies and they got to go. So the natural killer cell system works on those, and maybe one or 2% of our white blood cells are natural killers, so they're hard to come by. We've noticed, though, in certain studies that cancer patients tend to have a reduced number and a reduced function of natural killer cells. Now, I'm not saying that that's the cause, but there's a correlation there. So the logical physician would say hmm, if we could jazz up that natural killer cell system, maybe we can fight that cancer better. So that's where we come in, and I'm not the only one, but there are researchers in the world for a number of years who have been studying natural killer cells as a treatment for cancer. Okay, well, they're tough to get, because you got to get a lot of them and you can only take off so much blood from somebody to get that 1% of the white blood cells you know. So it turns out.
Speaker 2:The next piece of information is that natural killer cells kill their victim cells selectively. They don't hurt normal cells. They kill their victim cells by making what's called a natural killer cell exosome. So here we are, back to the business end of cell function is these delivery, these ammunition coming out of the natural killer cells. So there are now labs that can concentrate enough of these natural killer cell exosomes to make them in a therapeutic dose.
Speaker 2:There are a couple labs in Europe, a couple labs in China. I've been tugging at their lab coats for years and finally we got some of these earlier this year from a lab in Europe and we've been using them therapeutically to help people with cancer. So the research shows you can inject tumors and shrink them. The research shows you can inject these in the bloodstream and it can help remove circulating cells that might want to metastasize to a distant site. The logic dictates that if you're at higher risk for cancer, maybe you have some kind of gene or something you might use these as a preventative. Or you've been treated for cancer, maybe a more traditional route and you're in remission. You want to stay in there longer. Maybe it helps prevent this from coming back.
Speaker 1:That's how we're applying them okay, and I would uh assume that, um, at this stage in um the research and development of this treatment in relation to cancer, that the people that come to you for treatment are doing this as an option to add on to what other treatments they're already having Some yes or because they've chosen to go down a different route to the traditional route.
Speaker 2:Both. I just want to point out for listeners.
Speaker 1:This is an option. No one's trying to force you into like saying that one thing, it doesn't work, but we are like the world is like this and research is just amazing and there's just things being new, things being discovered all the time. It sounds like this is one, and a lot of people are choosing to go down what we might consider a more alternative route. It's kind of yeah, it's a tricky. It's a tricky one because it makes people feel uncomfortable, um, when we talk about it, because we are told that there is only one way to treat it. So this is all about personal choice, and I think that that's an important factor to make.
Speaker 1:But what I love about learning about these things by talking to people like you is we are discovering new possibilities. By talking to people like you is we are discovering new possibilities, and so if it doesn't feel right for someone to go down the traditional route, they want to try something different first. There's people like you that are actually, as I said before, at the cutting edge of this work. So there you go, thank you.
Speaker 2:Well, part of the Hippocratic Oath is help people, relieve suffering and treating people. You know, sometimes we have to protect patients' right to choose and access to things otherwise not available to them. So we try to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, that's exactly right. Love it. Can you share any particular studies or success stories that you have had? I mean, I reckon that probably most of the people that come to you from what you've told us go away feeling a lot happier with how things are going for them, I think so I mean, we hope so Well listen.
Speaker 2:I made this jump to add this tool to my toolbox about seven years ago and I've probably done between 650 and 700 joints or spines. So, speaking to the musculoskeletal area, which is sort of the low-hanging fruit of regenerative medicine, we've only had one person in that group go on to need a joint replacement and, to be fair, I think she became impatient too early because it takes six to 12 months for these things to really fully do their thing. At about four or five months she was offered surgery and she took it and sadly she's still not doing great. So we've been, knock on wood, very successful in helping people delay or put off a recommended joint replacement and return them to function.
Speaker 2:I have a very small percentage of patients, just in full transparency, who didn't get a robust response. Maybe they're only 30 or 40% better and I told them at the one-year mark we will repeat your MRI to see if maybe you just need a second, because most of these are one and done and maybe some of them just had more advanced degeneration and needed a second go around. So I'm continuing to refine how we approach this based on patient needs, so no one's left out there. I don't just throw up my hands and say, well, we tried, we keep trying is the answer. So those are probably the best ones, because I have people that we've returned to sports and certainly move them away from impending open surgeries. And the beauty of these injections are there's no downtime you can play golf the next day.
Speaker 1:That's one thing I was going to ask as well is, like you know, for so many people six to eight weeks is pretty much the general prognosis. If you do have an operation, so you're out of action. If you're a physical, if you're physically active and you've experienced an injury, that can be a real bummer, um, but. But the people wouldn't necessarily be able to go back to their um physical activity if they've had an injury, I guess so well, the goal here is to help restore that for people.
Speaker 2:So, given them, you know, I have, you know, I have some, some people in their 70s who are runners and they can't run because of a knee or an ankle or something. And I say the goal is to run again because I know that's your happy place. So it's not going to happen overnight, but we dig in and we try to get it back for them. It's not impossible.
Speaker 1:And you sort of have people go for an MRI after the treatment to see how things are regenerating. There are only two reasons for an MRI after the treatment to see how things are regenerating.
Speaker 2:There are only two reasons for an MRI after the treatment. One is you're not doing well enough and we need to take a look, okay. And two is you're curious because you did well and you want to see what it looks like, yeah.
Speaker 1:Could you do that through like a DEXA scan type thing as well? No, no.
Speaker 2:It has to be a very high quality mri, because this is a bone marrow targeting. So it's got to be a three tesla machine or better, and it cannot be an open magnet, which I don't think there are three tesla opens and and it has to include a set of sequences called inversion recovery, which most people don't order it's not a standard order. Some do, because that's what really brings out the targets in the bone marrow.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We're coming to the end of our conversation and I would love to know a little bit about your the future, like what's going on for Jeff in the future, what's your big picture vision for this treatment?
Speaker 2:well, I mean we have a lot. We have a lot of projects here. I sort of have the second wind in my career and I'm loving it. But you know we're doing more and more of the joints and spine and I want to continue to help people try to avoid that. So that's a growing part of what we do.
Speaker 2:We have started a nutraceutical line based on plant-derived exosomes. So, as it turns out, plants make exosomes and those exosomes carry the phytonutrients at high concentration that deliver at high concentration to our cells instead of being lost in our bloodstream or in our gastrointestinal tract. So we have a product, an anti-aging one, based on curated Italian organic fruits called Longevex. So we're very excited about that. It's just the beginning and we continue to try and get a hold of the latest and greatest in regenerative medicine. There's a new type of stem cell. It's not new. There's a newly identified subset of stem cells called MUSE cells M-U-S-E, and those cells may have an enhanced advantage in certain applications. So we're trying to get our hands on some of those to make them available.
Speaker 1:Is the plant-based exosome product a supplement or is it something you still have to do it as an intravenous?
Speaker 2:no, no, it's an. It's an oral one capsule a day and if you take that, you can probably get rid of all your other phytonutrient supplements, like quercetin, resververatrol, fizetin, many others. It also has all the B vitamins in it and vitamin C, because those are encapsulated in plant-derived exosomes, except B12. You still have to take B12 supplement.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, that's good to know. So that's something that we can access right now, or is this something that's in?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah it's available right now. You go to resellnutra R-E-C-E-L-L-N-U-T-R-Acom, yep, and or look up. Look that up on Instagram or on the web, you'll find it. It'll take you there.
Speaker 1:Great. Thank you so much for this insightful conversation. I love talking about the future of medicine because, as I said before, that just the possibilities that are available to us are amazing and, yeah, just sort of stepping out of our comfort zone and exploring those things for improved health and longevity like is just something I love. So thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate it my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.
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