Transcript of Episode 226: Treating Neurodegenerative Disease with Stem Cell Therapy
With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Dr. Ernesto Guitierrez
Dr. Pompa:
Wait till you watch this show on Cell TV. Look, you know for the last two years, I’ve been digging deep into stem cell research, and I had Dr. Harry Adelson on. He is the best when he comes to pain here in the U.S., but I had to reach out to Mexico, because all of you were asking me about neurodegenerative conditions, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, dementia, autism. The list goes on.
Wait till you hear the show. Every organ of the body, so I interviewed Dr. Ernesto Gutierrez, and I probably butchered it, but I called him Dr. E and Dr. Ernesto on the whole show just not to butcher it again. He’s the medical director of Rehealth in World Stem Cells Clinic in Mexico, and I’m telling you, he brought some really amazing information about stem cells, what’s happening new in stem cells, and also new protocols for these types of conditions that people in the U.S.—well, they’re not going to be able to do, because it’s in the U.S., so watch this show, and this is one, no doubt, you’re going to want to share, because I’m telling you, this affects all of us. Living longer healthy, if that’s your interest, watch this show. Stay tuned.
Dr. Ernesto, welcome to the show. This is absolutely one of my favorite topics, stem cells, and my viewing audience and listening audience, they know that. They know that I absolutely love stem cells, so I can’t wait to dig in deep here.
Look, I interviewed Harry Adelson, and he is one of the leading experts in stem cells in this country, but he focuses on pain, which Harry changed my world. If you haven’t watched that show, folks, go back. It’s not that many shows ago, and it talks about stem cells for pain, but this show, you’re going way beyond pain with stem cells, and I’ll tell you, there’s a great interest here for me. We have many people with neurodegenerative conditions, all types of conditions, so I’m going to answer their questions.
Thank you for being here. Tell us about who you are and how you got into this. How did you end up in this role?
Dr. Ernesto:
First of all, thank you so much for the invite. I’ve been watching some of your videos and other episodes, and really, this last year, I’ve been focusing a lot on raising awareness about stem cell therapeutics and what we can do and what we can achieve, and now it’s really an alternative for a lot of people. People who have conditions who were previously told that they were untreatable, now we’re finding out that there’s things you can do. There’s things such as stem cell therapy that can help you improve the outcome of their current condition.
Going back to answer your question, well, my name’s Ernesto, as you said earlier. I’m a physician. I was born and raised in Mexico City, and I’ve been training also in the U.S. I lived there for a little bit, and one thing led to another. I wanted to be a pediatrician. That really didn’t work out very well for me, because parents and moms mostly, I just didn’t have the patience for that, and I ended up doing age management training with Cenegenics and regenerative medicine.
Then, one thing led to another, and before I knew it, I was back in Mexico, running the clinics down here, and we’ve been in business since 2010, and we’ve been doing some very, very interesting things with a lot of different conditions, neurodegenerative being some of the few really big things that we’ve been working on, so Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, any kind of autoimmune disorder, Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease. We have a very large number of patients with CMT that we’ve been fortunate enough to help, and in one of our clinics, we deal exclusively with patients with autism and cerebral palsy, so we have developed exclusive, specific protocol for that that’s been giving us some phenomenal results. We’ve treated over four hundred—well, close to five hundred patients now with that protocol, and we’re getting some very positive outcomes.
Dr. Pompa:
I want to talk about some of those protocols, because I’m telling you, right now, we’ve been inundated with so many people, just from my other stem cell shows, about those topics, and I know we can do more in Mexico than we can do in the U.S., and so that’s why I was so excited to do this show.
Okay, let’s back up just a little bit, because some people, maybe this is the first time they’re hearing about stem cells, so let’s talk about what stem cells are briefly and basically why we’re seeing such incredible results. I saw incredible results with me, so talk about what stem cells are and why they work so well.
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, perfect. Stem cells, at the most basic level, they are the kind of cells that have two basic characteristics. One is that they can replicate or self-renew. From one cell, you get two, and you get four, and you get eight identical cells, and second is that they can differentiate, which basically means that they can become different tissues. That’s where the name stem comes from, so they’re the stem, and they can branch out into different specific tissues, so they can go into blood. They can go into bone, into muscle, into nerves, into neurons.
When we are conceived, at conception, we have one -inaudible- cell, and that means that that one cell gives rise to every other tissue in the body, so everything that you get in a human being comes from this one cell. As it starts differentiating, it becomes specialized. The example that I like to give my medical students and parents of patients who want to come and pretty much anybody who asks is, when we’re little, when we’re kids, and we start school, we go to the same elementary school, so all the children go to the same elementary school. They have the same classes, but as they start growing older, and they go to different areas, exactly. Each starts branching out, and the group of children who began at first, in the end, one might be a tax lawyer, and the other one might end up being a neurosurgeon with a self-specialty, and they’ve completely branched out, but they all—
Dr. Pompa:
-inaudible-.
Dr. Ernesto:
Exactly, so they all started out at the same spot, and basically, this is, at the most basic level, what stem cells are.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt about it, and I think that what we know now, even beyond differentiating into certain tissues, when we inject them and put them in those tissues, we also know that it stimulates. Even our own body is healing, right? There’s certain little redox molecules, if you will, that the stem cells use called exosomes that literally will drive our own stem cells and start the healing process, if you will, so they drive healing where we typically can’t heal.
I’ll tell you, one of the things I do want to talk about, too, is I’m very interested in living longer healthy, me.
Dr. Ernesto:
Exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
I saw what these stem cells can do to my joints, which was going to perhaps limit me from past injuries, but this goes even beyond that. This is a way to anti-age, because when we look at age-related diseases and preventing them, it really comes down to the lack of viable stem cells as we age, so we’re not recuperating the same. We’re not healing at the same rate, so talk a little bit about that. Can stem cells really anti-age us?
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, exactly. Before I go into that, there’s a point that you made right now, which is very, very important. We used to believe that the stem cells that we gave somebody would go to a specific injury site and would differentiate and become cartilage or bone or muscle or whatever tissue was damaged. Now we know that it’s a very minute percentage of cells that actually remain in the body after maybe 10 to 14 days. The rest of them, their main job is to actually go in there and start releasing these exosomes or these cytoplasm and anti- and pro-inflammatory markers, and that’s how they rebalance the immune system. That’s how they promote repair. That’s how they activate your own body’s repair mechanism. That’s why it’s called regenerative medicine, because it doesn’t go in there and replace, but it actually goes in there and promotes your body to replace its own tissue, so that’s a very, very big difference that now we understand, and we can tell.
In order to answer your question, absolutely, as we age, something that we’ve been seeing is that both the quantity but also the quality of the stem cells that remain in our body and our bone marrow and these different tissues starts decreasing exponentially. We get to a certain age where, because of what we’re eating, because of what we’re doing, because of the environment that we live in, because of our work, all these different things, not sleeping well, we start losing our ability to repair ourselves and our ability—
Dr. Pompa:
Toxicity. I do a lot of very toxic people. Their cells just get crushed. I mean, crushed. I was just reading a study about heavy metals and how they just really just crush the stem cells, and again, to get those stem cells back, we’re using strategies like fasting, intermittent fasting, things that things get the stem cells going. There is a need, oftentimes, to influx these stem cells, but go ahead. Finish your point, because it was a good one.
Dr. Ernesto:
No, it was basically that, and it’s actually very, very important that you bring it up once again, because stem cells don’t cure anything. If somebody comes over and says, oh, well, we’re going to get rid of this with stem cells, that’s simply not true. The stem cells can only potentiate whatever that person is doing, so now that you said you have a lot of people who come from a toxic environment or have been exposed to all these things, we see that that is probably the population that benefits the most from anti-aging and overall wellness treatment, because as they start transitioning into a healthier lifestyle, they start cleaning up their diet, they start exercising a little bit, they start taking care of the environment, what they’re putting in their bodies, and what they expose themselves to, they are also dragging with them 20, 30, 40, 50 years of bad habits, so they have all this underlying tissue damage.
When you can go in with a stem cell solution, contrary to what you’ve got directly in specific joints and muscles and tissues, and you can go IV, these cells are going to be able to go in there and start promoting a repair of all these damaged tissues that they’re dragging along. They’re going to see benefits much quicker and much more evidently than patients—for instance, a high-performance athlete who has taken pristine care of his body, and he’s in his mid-20s. They might not feel so great, but these people, 55 who have been dragging and doing all these bad things to their bodies before, they’re going to feel like a million dollars afterwards.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Boom. That’s why I’m doing it. Actually, before we got on, I told you what I’m doing right now. Everyone who’s watched my procedure where Dr. Harry literally injected every joint in my body, all the way down my spine, and literally, I was just telling my wife, it’s like, oh, my gosh. It’s like, I can put my hands flat on the floor again for the first time in I can’t remember. What I’m doing right now is I’m in a five-day fast, and Friday morning, I will go and get my own stem cells injected. I harvested them, which you can talk about, and then the exosomes with it, so I’m doing that at the end of my fast to maximize the benefit with my own stem cells, which are very high right now post fast, and injecting them.
These stem cell injections and IVs, what are you finding with that? Is it part of your protocol, and I want you to kind of describe some of the things you’re doing. When you inject them, do they find the bad spots? How does that work?
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, well, we have—there’s basically two kinds of stem cells that we can use, depending on their source. We can do bone marrow aspirate like you had done a couple of weeks ago, and you harvest those cells, so you grab them, and you put them right back into the patient. That’s an autologous, which means -inaudible-—
Dr. Pompa:
I’m three months out right now.
Dr. Ernesto:
Okay. Oh, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s why I’ve had more benefit.
Dr. Ernesto:
Exactly. That’s another thing. It is not immediate, because the cells aren’t going in there and fixing. They’re going in there and really recruiting every other kind of cell that will actually do the repair, so it takes a while. Going back, so we have autologous, and then we also have allogeneic cells. Now, allogeneic cells, they are the ones usually from cord blood or from cord tissue. They’re from a donor. Parents are researched intensely. They’re studied. You want to make sure that they meet certain criteria from birth as well, and then you do certain tests afterward. These cells, they don’t have a surface marker, because at that age, the placenta filters the blood from the mother to the child and back and removes the surface marker so the immune system, if the mother’s receiving them, doesn’t reject them, and these are also cells that you can utilize, and you can do IV, and you can do all these different things. Depending on the condition and the patient, you want to use one or the other.
Now, in order to address your specific question, the cells will go in there and will start finding or will start looking for injured tissues, and the way they do this is, as you and probably all of your viewers know, when a cell is injured, it starts displaying certain markers, certain surface markers that are releasing cytoplasm, all these different things. The stem cells pick up on these signals and home it. What we’ve been doing for a while is that, instead of using exogenous exosomes, so from a donor, from somebody else, what we’re doing is we’re also harvesting the patient’s own PRP right before the infusion.
The PRP, the way that we do it, we -inaudible- remove it. People think that it’s the platelets. It’s not just the platelets. It also comes with all the inflammatory markers that your cells are currently secreting, so we combine those with the stem cells, and that sort of activates them before we infuse them IV, so they already know what they’re going for.
Dr. Pompa:
Ah, interesting, so the PRP with that. Now, do you find that the stem cells derived from your own body versus placenta tissue, matrix, cord blood, whatever it is—do you find benefits to one versus the other?
Dr. Ernesto:
Yes, depending on what you’re treating, and this is a funny finding, because when you start talking to specific clinics, the ones who only have access to donated cells will say that those are much better. The ones who only have access to -inaudible-, they’ll say those are much better. We really have the ability that we have a cell manufacturing lab here, so we can use all sources. For autism, for instance, we’re treating mostly children, most of them under the age of 12, although we’ve treated 32, 33-year-olds with this protocol. We utilize autologous, so we grab the cells from them, because they’ve only been exposed to all these environmental factors and all these things for maybe four, five, six years. Those are giving us great results. The risk of rejection is much lower, and we use those.
For instance, any time that somebody in their 50s comes in or in the 60s and say, I want anti-aging or something for wellness, we recommend the donated cells, because those are younger cells. Those are really going to trigger the repair. It doesn’t mean that autologous won’t work. It just means that we’ve seen better results. Same thing with autoimmune disorders, patients with lupus, with CMT, with multiple sclerosis, we see better results, quicker results, with donated cells. Of course, you have to do some premedication. You have to control for certain factors, but it’s just the one thing right before so an H+ blocker, all these different things so that they don’t react, because they already have a very overactive immune system, but we’ve seen better results in those patients with allogeneic cells, so it really depends on each patient.
Dr. Pompa:
For me, can you do both? Because I have my own cells that I harvested. It was from fat and bone. In this case, the ones that were harvested would actually be fat. Can I combine it with the PRP and some other cord blood or placenta, whatever?
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, you don’t want to mix the whole thing into one bag before you pass it, but you can definitely do it with two hours difference between one and the other, and you would be getting both benefits. We would combine—ideally, we would combine both of those, both the allogeneic and the autologous, with your own PRP.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, but why would you separate them?
Dr. Ernesto:
You know what? We just like to be extra careful. They might agglutinize and stick together, coagulate, all of these different things, so it’s not a common request. We don’t get a lot of patients who say, I already have my stem cells harvested, so let’s try both. We either do one or the other. We have had patients—we had, for instance, this patient who has chronic kidney failure, and we go in—our interventional radiologist goes in with a catheter into their femoral artery and then into the renal artery and deposits the stem cells right there, and she has been treated four or five times so far. Some of those, we harvested her cells, and then we tried the other ones, so in her, for instance, we’ve done it this one. We do the infusion with one, then we do the IV with the other, and we just mix them around.
Dr. Pompa:
I have a client who has—their adrenals aren’t functioning. She still has adrenals, but they say that they’re not functioning. They wanted to take them out, and she said, well, Dr. Pompa, would stem cells possibly help me regenerate the adrenal function? Is it possible, and would you actually go in directly into the adrenals themselves, or would it just be an IV, or both?
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, well, in theory, you could promote certain repair. I would have to really look into the evidence. There is a lot of things that people contact us and are like, oh, I have this, and nobody’s been able to tell me if they can be done, and that has taken us to talk to a specific specialist and say, you know what? What do you think? They say, I don’t know, let’s give it a shot. As long as the patient is safe, we can give it a shot. IV is definitely an alternative. As a matter of fact, every patient that comes to our facility for whatever they want to get treated, even if it’s just a knee, they get an IV as well, because once we have the stem cells, we can just grow them and get as many as we need, so everybody gets an IV.
Then, specifically, most of the organs around the abdomen, you want to go periorgan, so we’ve done that with pancreas. We’ve done that with—never with the adrenals, though. We tried it with this one patient around the kidneys, guided with a CT or guided with an MRI, depending on what we’re treating, so yeah, all those are valid approaches. The great thing about stem cells is that, most of the time, if the cells are harvested correctly from the same patient, or they’re from a reputable source, worst case scenario, they’re simply not going to work.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, -inaudible-.
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, exactly. That’s it.
Dr. Pompa:
No harm. No harm done. Yeah. Okay, so let’s talk about some of the protocols you’re doing for the brain, whether it’s autism, Parkinson’s. It’s probably very similar, but talk about that.
Dr. Ernesto:
Our standard advanced stem cell therapy for autism, it’s a five-day process where the patients come in. It’s a lot more comprehensive than you come in, you get a shot, and you go. We see them for five days. These are people who travel from all over the world. We’ve had a family from Australia. We’ve had families from South Africa. Most of them are from the U.S. and Canada, but we’ve had them from all over the place. We evaluate them remotely before they decide to come, via Facetime or via Skype or something like that. They talk to our physicians.
Then, once they come in, we do baseline labs so just basically preops. We do certain other baseline evaluations for our studies, so we’re doing full chemistry so a full metabolic panel and full hormonal panel and a couple of other things. Then, on day two, we do filgrastim, so that’s another thing that can’t be done in the U.S. if you’re doing bone marrow aspirate, because that does qualify as manipulating the tissue, and Neupogen or filgrastim, what it does is it promotes the release of more stem cells from the bone. Its objective is to create and to increase the number of white blood cells, and it’s very widely used in oncology for patients after chemotherapy, but the way that you get more white blood cells in the bloodstream is by increasing the number of stem cells being produced in the bone marrow, so that works beautifully for us. We do that on the second day.
Then, on the third day, we do bone marrow aspirate. We process it in our labs. That takes us about 45 minutes, and it goes way beyond simply spinning. We can separate the -inaudible- fibers. We can wash them. We can concentrate them a lot better, and we create two infusions, one that goes intrathecally so through a lumbar puncture, and it’s very highly concentrated, usually around 0.5 cc, so half a cc that goes into the cerebrospinal fluid, but that does contain sometimes up to 100 million cells. Then, we create another one that goes IV in that same patient, and we’re also banking their stem cells for future use, so if they wanted to come back, we’ve already got their specific tissue.
Once we do these two infusions, that’s an outpatient procedure. It takes about an hour and a half. They go back to their hotel, and the following day, a lot of the times, we do a second IV with the same solution that we drew the first day, and which is very, very important for anything that’s neurological, and you’re talking CP, you’re talking autism, you’re talking dementias, you’re talking Alzheimer’s, is we sort of open a window of neuroplasticity, so it’s very important to start stimulating somehow, cognitively challenge these patients.
What we do is we send them out to speech therapy, occupational therapy, ABA therapy, anything like that. Everybody says one session of therapy does nothing, but we’re not doing it because we want the effect of the therapy. We want the effect of the neurochallenge, challenging cognitively these patients, and we’ve seen that the difference between doing that or not doing it and just creating new stimuli is enormous, because we’re opening up this very, very brief window of a couple of—even two weeks maybe, where we are able to really start installing new behaviors.
Dr. Pompa:
Are you doing anything to get more of it across the blood-brain barrier? You’re doing the IVs. Are you doing mannitol or—I know some people are even shunting some of the stem cells into the brain. What’s your process?
Dr. Ernesto:
Yes, we do use mannitol for some of these patients, but most importantly, we do an intrathecal infusion, so we’re going through a lumbar puncture into the cervical spinal fluid, and although you’re going down at the lumbar level, you’re depositing these cells in the cerebrospinal fluid that really flows all around and bathes the brain and the brainstem. That’s really one of the approaches that we’ve done for pretty much every neurological condition that we treat, with the exception of the one patient who contacted us about four years ago who absolutely wanted to have treatment for schizophrenia, and he threatened to commit suicide if we didn’t treat him.
He sent us studies, and this study was done in rats at the University of San Antonio where they actually injected directly into the hippocampus, and he said, I’ll have that. We talked him out of that one, obviously, and the closest that we could get, both our neurologist and our neurosurgeon and the cardiologist that we go to, was to the carotid artery, so a catheter into the carotid artery, both sides, infused a couple of cells in there, and the last follow-up that we did with him about a year after his procedure, he was so much happier, because he was able to decrease his medication to less than half of what he was taking, so he was able to function.
His problem was that, if he didn’t take it, he couldn’t function, but if he took it, he couldn’t function, so he was at a loss. His wife had left him. He was 31, 32. Wife left him. Kids had been gone with mom. He couldn’t keep a job, so those are some of the different approaches that we’re able to make, but keep in mind, we’re not just cowboys. We always have to talk the neurosurgeon into doing this. We have to talk the cardiologist into doing this. We spoke to the team at university of San Antonio and said, okay, so what are you guys doing? What was it, what he saw? They’re like, well, these were rats. I wouldn’t really go much farther with it, but that’s—
Dr. Pompa:
That’s exciting, though. What results are you getting with Alzheimer’s?
Dr. Ernesto:
With Alzheimer’s and with pretty much any kind of dementia, we’re seeing some reversal. We’re still at a point where we get some reversal, but we have to be very, very aware that most of these conditions are progressive, so you’re kind of going both ways. They improve a little bit, then they get worse, so then you treat again, and they improve a little bit. That’s why autism has been so popular, because unless the patient has a new toxic insult, which most of the time is what triggers their condition, they have no reason to lose whatever function they recover.
The same thing happens, for instance, with COPD that we’ve had some great success with, but most of the neurological conditions, they’re neurodegenerative, so you’ll achieve a certain degree of reversal, but then they’ll come right back, or for instance, with multiple sclerosis, and this is a constant fight with every neurologist that we’ve treated their patients, they get an MRI. They come down for treatment. They go back. They feel much better. They get a new MRI, and it looks the same, so they conclude that it doesn’t work, and we say, no, no, no, you’ve been getting MRIs for the last seven years, and every time it’s worse. This one, it stayed the same. That, for me, is a great success, plus your patient now has bladder control, but that’s a whole different story. It is important to understand that, a lot of these conditions, if we achieve that they slow down or they stop even temporarily, that is a big win.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m very excited to do my work with this work with these clinicians, because I’ve been just amazingly successful. My brain detox that I teach doctors around the country has been unbelievable. The autism, even these dementia, neurodegenerative cases, remarkable. I believe that putting these two things together, because I think a lot of the things that keeps that degeneration going is a lot of the things that are—the toxins that are still in the brain, heavy metals just being one of them, but it keeps that inflammation going, and it’s affecting—if that inflammation is being driven still by the sources, then you’re right. It’ll put it into remission, if you will. You’ll actually make us some ground, but if the sources are still there, it’s going to continue to drive it. I think our work—I know that’s why I’m doing this interview today. We both -inaudible-.
Dr. Ernesto:
It’s important that you mention it, because like you said at the beginning, stem cells on their own, they don’t cure anything, so stem cell therapy is something you do in addition to everything else. We’ve had a lot of people contact us and say, you know what? We just learned about my child’s diagnosis. He has autism, and we were reading about the diet and the supplements and this and that. We can’t be bothered. We’ll just do stem cells, and that’ll take care of it, right? We’re like, no, I’m sorry, you have to stick to the diet. You will have to do these things, because that’s the only way that the cells will work. The same thing with dementia, same thing with even overall wellness and anti-aging. It’s something you do in addition to—
Dr. Pompa:
I have a saying. I don’t treat anything. I remove the interference. The body has the ability to heal if you remove the interference, but the problem is when you lack viable stem cells. That can be an issue. To get the body to heal, I’m removing the interference. I’m really, really excited, Doc, honestly. Just talk a little bit about some of the other cases that you’re doing and seeing great results with.
Dr. Ernesto:
COPD’s one of the biggest ones. COPD, especially in people who smoked for a long time or were exposed to certain substances and start developing COPD, we had—the one thing I really like about COPD is that there is no backfire from the specialists, because we have spirometry tests before the infusion, we do the infusion, and 36 hours later, we had this one gentleman, 30 percent improvement on spirometry test, printed out, objective, no question about it. The guy didn’t need his oxygen anymore, so that is great, and that’s a single treatment, one IV, which could be done in the U.S. if the FDA just wanted to cooperate a little bit.
So many people are affected by this, and you could be addressing it with one IV. This gentleman that I’m telling you about, he had been going for over two years to the Mayo Clinic for nebulizations and for all sorts of things. He comes down here once, gets the treatment that could be technically done anywhere. We don’t have a super-secret formula like the formula for Coca-Cola. We have something that pretty much anybody could be doing, and that’s really part of our job is to really get this across that we’re not here to steal any doctors’ work. They could be doing this.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s irritating. That’s why when I saw that you were in Mexico, I knew that, okay, we’ll be able to actually help people that aren’t going to be able to get that here. It’s frustrating, but here’s the funny thing. You said before we got on the show, most of the studies that you’re doing are happening in the U.S., but unfortunately we can’t do it in the U.S. We have to go to Mexico.
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, most of the preclinical that we’ve done, developing our different cells and our different technologies, they’ve been done in the U.S. We’ve recently just sold that lab, because we really built one up to spec here, and we don’t have to be doing the back-and-forth anymore, but that was the whole purpose. Our whole research team, our chief scientific officer is in the U.S. He’s in Canada—in California, not in Canada, and we’re developing these different techniques. We have all these different patents, and we had to come down here to really start them, to really get the ball rolling and be able to serve some people, which is what the final goal of this is, to really be able to make a difference.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m going to put you on the spot a little bit, but I have so many viewers that I really want helped by this. Would you offer my viewers a free, very brief consultation just to see if this would be right for them? Can we make that available somehow?
Dr. Ernesto:
Absolutely. I will send you a link so that you can share it out, and the way we’ll do this is I’ll make sure that they get some screen time with one of our doctors in exchange of them just completing a brief intake form. That way, the doctor doesn’t go in—
Dr. Pompa:
They’ll identify themselves as seeing the show -inaudible-, and then you can—
Dr. Ernesto:
We’ll create a specific—I’ll have the guys create a specific link for you guys.
Dr. Pompa:
I always want to—when I bring someone on, I always feel like I have to bless the viewers in some way, and that’s—well, because I know people are watching this, and they’re going, well, can it help me? They have questions and concerns, and if I can break the barrier for them, it’s like, hey, I watched the show, and here’s the questions I have.
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, definitely. If they take a couple of minutes to complete a brief intake form about their medical history and what their concern is, we’ll make sure that they get a chance to get some screen time with one of our doctors.
Dr. Pompa:
My new team member, Ashley, is watching, and she’ll make sure that that happens, so I appreciate that, honestly. I really do.
Dr. Ernesto:
No problem. That’s what we do.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no doubt. I’m going to be coming to check out your clinic, and that’s the other thing, too, is I want to come down and check it out. I’m going to bring a video.
Dr. Ernesto:
If you have other physicians that watch your videos, we have a very strict open door policy, so if you want to show up, let me know a day in advance that you’re around. We’ll send someone to pick you up. We’ll show you around. You can go in. Sometimes doctors come with their patients. You can go in the OR and see what we’re doing. You can talk to our staff. You can go in the lab. You can see what’s going on in the lab. You can see our certification. Like you said, we don’t have anything that we should be hiding or that we should be ultraprotective about. We have something that we want the whole world to find out about.
Dr. Pompa:
No, exactly, and I’ll be down. There’s no doubt about it. Where are you in Mexico? Where exactly are you?
Dr. Ernesto:
We’re in Cancun.
Dr. Pompa:
Cancun. Come on, man. Who doesn’t want to go there?
Dr. Ernesto:
We want to make it easy for people to come.
Dr. Pompa:
Exactly. In the show, we’ll make sure that they have the link, and then they’ll be able to contact you and get that little free consultation there. How long does it take? I know with what I had done, people think in a month—the first couple weeks, it was kind of up and down. Actually, for a month, it was up and down, and then it was a little better, but I didn’t get most of the healing until after two months, three months. Is that common, and what do you typically expect?
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, that’s more than—that’s exactly what we tell patients to expect. The difference and the kind of unfair advantage that we have when we’re treating here, let’s say that somebody came in with your exact same conditions here, is that you would also have gotten an IV, so just like getting an IV, you get this -inaudible- effect of the stem cells releasing anti-inflammatory factors, so you would have felt okay throughout those first two weeks that you were up and down, because you had the -inaudible- effect before the stem cell effect really kicked in, but that is usually—that’s a very common, very logical timeframe for most of these conditions.
For a lot of neurological conditions, and this is something interesting, remember that, while certain cells do not cross the blood-brain barrier, cytokines do, so you do have pro- and anti-inflammatory side effects going across the blood-brain barrier, which by controlling inflammation at a systemic level, you also start decreasing these pro-inflammatory side effects inside the central nervous system, so you clear part of that fog, and something very interesting that we’ve been seeing is with our patients with autism, because they’re so small, before we inject 0.5 cc into the cerebrospinal fluid, we also draw out 0.5 cc. We’re seeing something that a group of Japanese researchers had described in 2007, which is that, when we send the cerebrospinal fluid to be analyzed, we’re seeing very, very high numbers of interferon gamma in it. Same thing as patients with dementia, so it’s the exact same kind of mental fog that both of these populations have. They have high levels of interferon gamma. They have high levels of tumor necrosis factor alpha in the cerebrospinal fluid, and those decrease with treatment, so that’s another big advantage. That’s why people really do benefit mentally from an IV push.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow, yeah, that’s amazing. Do you look for a certain amount in the IV push? Does it have to be a certain amount, because you’re mixing it with PRP, so is there an amount there?
Dr. Ernesto:
For adults, it’s usually around 250 cc total that they end up getting, 270, depending on how much we get from PRP and how much we get through the stem cells. The ability of the lab like we have here is twofold. One is that we can create a cellular solution, and we can concentrate them tremendously. If you wanted, for instance, to inject a knee where the volume cannot be too high, we can concentrate the cells there a lot, or we can do the opposite. We can really dilute them for IV infusions so that they have certain time to actually go down. Most of the time, we’re dealing with allogeneic, so if we draw the cells from a vial, we have standardized dosages. The patients are getting about 100, 120 million cells, but when we’re doing autologous, patients get back most of the cells that we draw. We’ve had children who, after the three infusions, end up getting close to a billion cells all together, all combined.
Dr. Pompa:
Man. Wow, that’s amazing. Gosh, putting that many stem cells in, good stuff’s going to happen. That’s why you get it.
Dr. Ernesto:
That’s why we split the infusion in two days, because there’s also this theory of limited engraftment sites, so if you throw them all in at the same time, and you saturate the engraftment sites, then you’re going to waste a few of those, so we split it over two days, and that’s why our protocols are usually three days or five days. Patients don’t just show up, get an IV, and go right back out.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s brilliant. That’s fantastic. I am excited. I am. I’m excited to be a part of what you’re doing there, because like I said, these conditions that we’re seeing more of, I know that what I do with this, it’s the next level, honestly.
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, it’s exciting times, and if you still have time, I can fill you in. We’re also banking and harvesting NKs, so natural killer cells, and we’re able to get those from peripheral blood. We’ve partnered with a Japanese firm, and we’re actually, as far as I know, the only ones this side of the world who are actually being able to do that, so from a blood draw, we process it, and we can bank and harvest your own natural killer cells, and those are even better at rebooting your immune system and giving you all these longevity benefits. We can bank them. We can culture them.
In the U.S., you could get them banked. We still cannot give them back to you, but that’s why we have the lab here, so people come down, and they can get an infusion of their own NK cells. I’ve done that with my own. I’ve down the stem cells as well, both autologous and allogeneic. The difference is noticeable with the NK cells. It’s this big boost of energy of—I don’t know how to explain it, because like I said, I don’t have any specific diagnosis that I was treating, but you do feel this boost, especially if you have someone, or if you have a family history of certain cancers, and you want to prepare yourself, it’s a great idea to bank your cells in advance so that, when you do—if you do develop cancer down the road, you can get your own personalized infusions of your own healthy NK cells.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow. What about for Lyme disease and so many—
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, any of these.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, because people are doing stem cells for Lyme disease and getting great results. I think the natural killer cells would be even a step above or doing both.
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, the tricky part about the natural killer cells is that those are harvested from peripheral blood, so people who already have cancer, we struggle to get enough NK cells. People who already have Lyme or have already some of these consequences of it, we struggle to get those, but if you had harvested them in the past, which to be honest with you is very affordable—I think it’s four thousand dollars to harvest them, and it’s about 250 dollars a year for banking, which might be out of certain people’s pockets, but it’s not completely out of—it’s not undoable, so yeah, those are all great alternatives, especially for people who are at risk. If you know you’re at risk of some of these conditions, then it’s a great alternative.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so you can actually bank your natural killer cells like you bank your stem cells.
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Basically, instead of from the bone—I mean, I took it from the fat or the bone—this would be actually from the blood that they bank them.
Dr. Ernesto:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, my gosh, well, who wouldn’t do that? I’m doing this.
Dr. Ernesto:
You need about six vials, and the only tricky thing is that it has to be processed fresh, so you cannot freeze them or do anything like that, but we’re doing that in my lab in California, so once you actually get them, we send them over there, and then we just export and bank them down here, and they’re ready for treatment whenever you are.
Dr. Pompa:
Again, this is—why wouldn’t—to do the injections with the stem cells and the natural killer cells, that’s the way to go, right?
Dr. Ernesto:
Exactly.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, my gosh. Who wouldn’t do that, because again, like you’ve said, you’re talking about boosting your immune system.
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, and we’re working together with some other projects, so here we’re dealing with very specific diagnosis, like we were discussing. One of the companies that we’re working with, we’re talking about partnering and opening up a center as well in Costa Rica, which is going to be more of a very high-end wellness where people will pay kind of a yearly membership and be able to go down there and get their infusions with certain regularity, stem cells, natural killers, the whole deal.
We want to be able to gather—we’re at a point where we need to get more data. Sadly, it’s still very expensive technology for us to really make it available to everybody, especially when you involve banking where you involve all these different -inaudible- that are manufactured just for research, but we’re convinced that, as we get more people onboard, attention is going to start turning this way, and then we’ll get some physicians, and then we’ll get some other people. The laws will have to change, because this could potentially really help save healthcare.
Dr. Pompa:
This is the future of medicine. That’s why I’ve been studying this for the last two years. I’m coming out of my skin with it, because I see these people who are suffering. It’s like, my gosh, when you add this stuff to the work that I’ve been doing, the cellular work and the cellular detox, I’m telling you, it’s like I just want to scream from the rooftops. It’s absolutely exciting. Is there anything else? Is there anything else you’re doing? I’m stunned at the natural killer cell thing. I’m blown away by that. I never heard of that. All the reading I do, I never came across that.
Dr. Ernesto:
You have to know that we also have to be very careful with what we say and we don’t say. We’ve had problems in the past, and there are certain things that we’re working on that are not ready for the spotlight, but this one is, and it’s one of the newest ones. We’ve been working on it for years, and we’re finally getting ready to really start making it commercial on a larger scale, so that’s one of the big ones. Like I said, we can bank, and we’re going to start training physicians, because one of the rules that we got from COFEPRIS, the FDA here, which is called COFEPRIS, is that, sure, we can get a stem cell license, which by the way, we helped them create their whole stem cell licensing.
When we first started, we had a blood bank license, which was the closest thing, and we’ve helped them evolve. We got the stem cell license, and now we have the ability to really manufacture an off-the-shelf product, so if a doctor in Mexico City calls us and says, you know what, I have a patient coming tomorrow, we can manufacture and create a product specifically for him with the amount of stem cells that he needs, with the concentration, the viscosity, anything that he needs, but the requirement is that we need to train them, because it’s the opposite in the U.S. In the U.S., the manufacturer of the product is responsible for the product, and then the doctor is responsible for what they do. Here, if we want to be able to sell them the product, we need to make sure that they have training, and they’re using one of the protocols that we got approved.
Now, if they receive it, and they want to do something else, that’s a whole thing, but we’re going to start training doctors, and it won’t be exclusive just for doctors in Mexico, so we’ll be able to train other physicians. We’ll be able to have them bring in their own patients and treat them here, so it’s exciting times. We want to really open the door and -inaudible- access to these technologies.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, I’m excited to be onboard with y’all. It’s very exciting, and I have a very big outreach, and I train hundreds of doctors around the country, so we really are so glad that we’ll be able to offer more of these.
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, me, too.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s exciting.
Dr. Ernesto:
Yeah, it’s exciting times, but this is exactly what we need, support and people who really start—even if they are not sure that they want to do this at this point, we want more people to know that it is successful, that it is available, and that there are alternatives. There are options.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Thank you, Dr. Ernesto, and folks, his offer, take advantage of it, obviously. You get a free consultation. Fill out what he told you. Ashley, she’ll put that on the link here, and they can contact you, so I really appreciate that, honestly.
Dr. Ernesto:
Oh, no problem.
Dr. Pompa:
Believe me, I have so many clients and doctors, and I know the questions they’re asking, and literally, I was saying, look, I’m looking into this. I know that it’s going to probably have to be offshore, but -inaudible-. Thank you.
Dr. Ernesto:
Not a problem. Thank you for inviting me.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, and we’re going to do a part two when I come down to Cancun, and we’re going to take it to the next level. We’ll do a live show right there.
Dr. Ernesto:
Sounds great.
Dr. Pompa:
Thank you, Dr. E, and by the way, that’s what you told me to call you, Dr. E.
Dr. Ernesto:
That’s right. Thank you.
Dr. Pompa:
Ernesto. By the way, folks, I didn’t even attempt the last name, because I butcher every name anyway, so go ahead and give them your full name, Doc.
Dr. Ernesto:
My full name is Ernesto Gutierrez.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so he told me, don’t worry about that. He goes, just call me Dr. E. That’s what everyone calls me. I’m like, I can handle Ernesto. I can handle that.
Dr. Ernesto:
After your time in Cancun, you’ll be doing better on the Spanish.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. Thanks for being on the show. I appreciate it.
Dr. Ernesto:
No problem. Thanks for the invite.
