Transcript of Episode 227: The Future of Stem Cell Medicine
With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Dr. Ahvie Herskowitz
Dr. Pompa:
Cellular Healing TV fans, exciting few weeks. You are on location with me at SocMed, the Society of Progressive Medicine. You know why we’re here? Because we’re bringing together MDs, NDs, DCs, all types of practitioners to mastermind, bring the best of what we believe people need to get well today, and as a matter of fact, even this very evening, tonight, we have the leaders coming together in this profession to meet on the future of alternative medicine. You’re on location, so I’m going to be bringing you some exciting interviews with some of the leading practitioners in the area that you’re going to want to hear from, cancer researchers, doctors, stem cells, you name it. You’re going to hear some exciting interviews right here, so the next few weeks, stay tuned to Cell TV for these exciting interviews that I know that you’re going to love, and it’s going to definitely affect and change your life.
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith, and today we welcome special guest, Dr. Ahvie Herskowitz. We have a really exciting topic for you today. Dr. Pompa and Dr. Herskowitz will be talking all about the future of stem cell medicine and advancements that we will see even in just a few years. We’ll learn about how stem cell medicine will hopefully become more affordable, and we’ll discuss whether there’s hope for the future of insurance as stem cell medicine evolves, how living longer is possible, and how stem cells are the future. This is an episode you won’t want to miss.
Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit more about Dr. Herskowitz. Dr. Herskowitz’s extensive training includes a medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, residencies in anatomical pathology and internal medicine, and fellowship training in cardiology at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center. He is the founder of Anatara Medicine, based in San Francisco, a world-class integrative medical center. He is also the founder of the San Francisco Stem Cell Treatment Center. With his 37 years of experience, Dr. Herskowitz is one of the most renowned anti-aging specialists in the U.S., so let’s welcome Dr. Pompa and Dr. Herskowitz and get right into it. This is Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Pompa:
Welcome to Cell TV, and you can see we have a special series at the conference of SocMed, and you, Doc, are the first one, the first interview.
Dr. Ahvie:
Thank you, Dr. Dan.
Dr. Pompa:
Welcome, welcome, Dr. Ahvie. I appreciate you taking the time out from the busy seminar schedule here, and welcome to Cell TV.
Dr. Ahvie:
Thank you, Dr. Dan. It’s a pleasure.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, no, listen, I want to hear—we had a little bio, obviously, before this, but I want to hear a little bit about you. I want to hear from you personally, what you do, where you practice. How’d you end up in medicine?
Dr. Ahvie:
Okay, well, you know, a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn ends up going into medicine. I went to Einstein, Albert Einstein, in the Bronx in New York, and I decided to do things like the European style, and I studied their style. Apparently, the Europeans tended to work in anatomy and pathology before they went on to medicine, so I did a residency and chief residency in anatomical pathology before I went on to medicine and ultimately to cardiology. I had the real pleasure of being at both the Yale and Yale-affiliated hospitals for medicine and Johns Hopkins for cardiology, but by the time I moved into cardiology, I was already trained in immunology, so I fused the two together, and as you know, 25, 30 years ago, inflammation and cardiology came together as one and the same, so we were able to ride that wave over time.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I was just going to say, then you ended up here in San Francisco, practicing.
Dr. Ahvie:
Yeah, so in 1995, some 23 years ago, I moved and led a team of 70 MDs and PhDs in a cardiac institute and ran the institute for 5 years in cardiovascular outcomes research of big data from a hundred hospitals around the world, and then ultimately became professor at UC San Francisco. About seven or so years ago, I decided to enter the field of functional medicine, integrative medicine.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s the story I want to hear. How did you make that transition, because you were in the world of medicine as we know it today.
Dr. Ahvie:
I have a story to tell. It takes about a minute or two, if you don’t mind.
Dr. Pompa:
No, let’s hear it.
Dr. Ahvie:
When I was on the transplant team, the cardiac transplant team at Hopkins, we were the founding team there. We had some folks that were never going to get transplanted. They had bad blood types, bad antibody profiles, and some of them were youngsters. The group that got to me the most were the postpartum cardiomyopathy patients, the ones that had heart failure after childbirth, and they were going to die, and so I did everything that I could do. I said, well, let’s optimize your nutrition, so I sent them to the -inaudible- Institute. In those days, it was the premiere institute.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I remember.
Dr. Ahvie:
Then, there was an acupuncture college close by in Columbia, Maryland, that I took them to just to see, because I had no idea what to do, and then a cluster of them did well, unexpectedly well. We didn’t know why, but when I presented the material at Grand Rounds at Hopkins in probably 1993, some 25 years ago, it was a bit too early for that, because when I unblinded the event, I said, the intervention that we did and the reason that they’re alive today was because I sent them to nutrition and the acupuncture. That had a lasting impact on me over time, and when I was in my European centers, when I ran the heart institute, I realized that they treat their patients differently, not in hospital, but in the real world, their pharmacists are homeopathists. They’re herbalists, so I understood that we have a lot of different approaches to take, and so how to fuse those approaches and do them safely was a good question.
Then, I had a woman who was the first employee of that nonprofit that I ran, which is now part of the story today, the Institute for OneWorld Health, which took us globally. Our first employee developed stage 4 colon cancer. It was a late-stage, because it grew outward, and they asked me the simple question, what would you do if you were us? What would you do if you were me? I realized that that’s the standard that we have to apply to our souls.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely. Oh, my gosh.
Dr. Ahvie:
That’s it, so if you can do that—so I said, well, I don’t know, and I took a two-year journey, started ultimately in anatomic medicine, which is my version of how I want to be treated into the future of medicine on the integrative medicine side, and then four and a half years ago, we felt strongly that regenerative medicine would be part of the future, so that was relatively easy to do, because in fact, we were able to accomplish it fairly easy. In my case, I went after the adipose-derived stem cells. In other people’s cases, they went to bone marrow, but it was available.
Dr. Pompa:
Right. A lot of people—now, we’ve been kind of doing a theme or a series on stem cells these days, because it’s my interest. One of my interests is living long healthy, and we have that in common.
Dr. Ahvie:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I believe stem cells is the future of medicine and what we can do. Tonight, you’re speaking. You’re actually leading a group that—there’s I don’t know how many of them. How many of us are there?
Dr. Ahvie:
Yes, about 15 or 16 of us.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, about 15 or 16 of us, the heads of functional medicine, if you will, or this integrative approach to healthcare and medicine. We’re all getting together, and we’re sharing. Talk about that, because that’s part of what we’re doing here with this conference. That’s why, by the way, we have so many amazing doctors here.
Dr. Ahvie:
It’s an opportunity. I was thinking this through a few years back and said, why don’t we get together the team of people? Obviously, the organizers of the meeting, Tom Lowe, he actually executed it, so I had nothing to do with that, but once he gave to me the population of doctors that we have, I said, let’s talk about our version of the future of medicine, not 20 years out, but I want it to be practical, and let’s talk about it 3 to 5 years out. We’ll have you speak about metabolomics or the effects of fasting on stem cell populations and how to get to a hundred on the same train that I intend to be on. I’m going to give the future of stem cell medicine. Dr. Bush will give the future of biomics and so on, so we’ll have some—
Dr. Pompa:
We even have a good friend of mine, Patrick Gentempo, speaking with Bush on insurance, even looking at the future of medicine with insurance. Dr. Mercola’s in the room, Stephen Sinatra. Who else? Tony Jimenez, leading up the Hope4Cancer, so some amazing—
Dr. Ahvie:
Some amazing folks. I have the blessing of being moderator of that event, so hopefully we’ll get the most out of it.
Dr. Pompa:
Better you than I.
Dr. Ahvie:
Yes, so what I’ll be talking about is a few things. The future of stem cell—we know that it’s going to be part of the future, because as chairman of one of the largest safety committees in the United States on stem cell therapy, we know that it’s fundamentally safe. Right now, we’re using live cells. Maybe that’s going to be not the future, but right now, we’re using live cells, whether they’re embryonic or they’re your own adult cells. The majority of us use adipose-derived or bone marrow-derived, but there are other lineages that are now being explored by the commercial sector. Surprisingly, this is one of the few fields of medicine that’s both consumer-driven as well as commercially-driven, and they’re both—I think they’ve been run—they’ve been energized by the consumer sector, so ultimately, the question is, how do we participate as functional medicine doctors so we can today learn how to optimize, activate, and localize these stem cells better than we are doing, and we can also deal with what is going to happen in the future, so what is going on in the future?
In the commercial sector, as well as the private sector, there are folks saying, listen, these cells are big. They’re large. They can’t cross all the different barriers that we have. They can’t get all the way downstream, so what about their own communications network? We have to optimize ours in order to accept these cells. I know that you went on a six-day water fast, so that would be a great time to exercise and actually initiate to be given your stem cells.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I may be the only one that’s ever done that, at least with exosomes, which we’re getting to, but—
Dr. Ahvie:
Yeah, we’re getting to that.
Dr. Pompa:
Opportune time.
Dr. Ahvie:
Optimize yourself if you’re getting your stem cells now, whether they be exosomes—we’ll talk about that in a second—or embryonic or your own stem cells, but they have their own communications network, so they—I like to look at it like this. When you have a stem cell interacting with an endogenous cell, we have two things that can happen. One thing is that cell can become the cell type that’s injured.
Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm, whether it’s a meniscus, joint, disc, or—
Dr. Ahvie:
Brain, heart cell.
Dr. Pompa:
Brain, heart cell, right.
Dr. Ahvie:
Yes, we know people—I just treated a woman who I had as an original patient at Johns Hopkins 30 some odd years ago with an ejection fraction of 40 percent. Now, her ejection fraction is 60 percent three weeks after getting her own stem cells, so we know that it can do it, but the question is, did it do that because it generated new cardiac cells in three weeks? No, it could not have done it, so it has to have what’s called a paracrine effect. That paracrine effect is when the stem cell is talking to the lineage that it’s talking to. In the heart, that’s certainly heart cells, but it’s also interstitial cells. It’s vascular cells.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s driving the healing. It’s speaking healing.
Dr. Ahvie:
What I like to say is here’s the space shuttle. Here’s the shuttle, which is the stem cell, and it’s shooting out photon torpedoes. Those torpedoes are the vesicles. These lysosomes, these exosomes, these are packets of information, and they’re going, and they’re shooting them in the right direction. They know they have that inherent intelligence, which is profound and complicated and fascinating, but they go there, and they say, listen, we have to optimize your energy cycles, your vascular supply, your oxygen utilization.
Dr. Pompa:
This is massive, innate intelligence communication.
Dr. Ahvie:
It’s massive intelligence, and if you think—and the reason I wanted to act as a bridge between professor of medicine at a major institution, molecular biology, cellular immunology, and ultimately this functional world is because if you think that you can work exogenously and not use the bizone intelligence, you’re fooling yourself. You’re just absolutely fooling yourself.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and by the way, you have a lot of experience here, because you did go to the basement. You were in pathology at one point for some years.
Dr. Ahvie:
Yeah, so we always just ask these mentors at Albert Einstein, these 90-year-old guys already—
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, my God, -inaudible-.
Dr. Ahvie:
—who were already retired and used to come downstairs and talk to us.
Dr. Pompa:
What a blessing.
Dr. Ahvie:
I used to say, what are these cells doing here? Oh, they’re cells. They’re immune cells. We don’t know what they do. Now, we know that they’re part of the massive communications network that’s telling us, hey, there are foreigners around here that we didn’t know about before, because they didn’t see those cells in the gut. We see them now, and well, it emerged in the ‘70s, because they didn’t see them before. That was one of the major lessons that I got from them, so then you say, I’d rather use these photon torpedoes to make this happen, so then now—
Dr. Pompa:
Instead of the cell itself.
Dr. Ahvie:
Now, the reality is, we’re blessed with nature’s reality, that we can isolate and characterize and concentrate these packets of information from the peripheral blood, and so we have the next three to five years in the following fashion. There are going to be companies coming forward. There are companies already doing neural elements, the Israeli company that’s giving stem cells into the spinal canal of ASL patients, but they’re neurally differentiated. They’re going to be ophthalmic differentiated cells, cardiac, lung, kidney, liver cells, and then they’re going to say, let’s use those, and my argument may very well be that I hold true is that you need the combination of all the cell types in addition to that individual cell type, but then we may end up layering in the informational packets as well, so we’ll need to figure out the best way to approach it, but for the public and for the population of physicians that we’re now in, we’re in a renaissance period. It’s fantastic.
Never been a bad time to be alive today and to say—I just want you to understand one thing if you’re in the lay public. You have to wake up to the reality that you need this type of technology, number one. Number two is that you need to participate. Without participating in this and making it part of your life’s work, you will not age gracefully. There are no magic pills for you, and there more likely than not won’t be for another 10 or 20 years. If it happens, it happens. It’s great. If genomics suddenly takes off in the way it has not yet taken off, then that’s fantastic. If robotics takes off, if tissue engineering will grow you—I remember I gave a lecture seven years ago at a -inaudible- Conference on the future of medicine, and there, the head of the Diabetes Association said, well, don’t you worry, we’re going to be able to have artificial pancreases for all you guys with diabetes, and it mortified me, because that’s not the message we want to give.
Dr. Pompa:
Right. You know, you said something that’s, I think, so profound, because we thought all this advancement in genetics, even some of the pathways and the SNPs that we’ve been studying, we thought that was going to change treatment. It really hasn’t.
Dr. Ahvie:
It has not.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, but stem cells has, and yet it’s gotten really a fraction of the attention, but I know right now 25 people whose lives were changed from stem cells. I can’t tell you one whose lives were changed by knowing that they had a MTHFR SNP and all those different genetic pathways. It’s fun to look at your genetics, but ultimately, how does that change—how does that allow me to live longer healthy? It really, ultimately, doesn’t.
Dr. Ahvie:
I agree with you, Dan. It’s fun. It has not led to any actionable—and for the average person is not actionable, and it’s also fun to look at your images. We have fantastic imaging technology. It’s fun to look at. Oh, this cyst in my liver doesn’t mean anything. Oh, it’s fun to see it. Oh, it’s fun to see I don’t have something, but when I do have something, well, what do I do about it? If it’s on the kidney, you go to the kidney specialist. If it’s on your liver, you go to a liver specialist, and you and I well know that, in order to live to 100, if you take that approach, you will not get there more likely than not, unless you’re just an oddball, and you’re just fortunate. If you want to play the odds, you play the odds on the system side.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, there might be people watching this, saying, okay, but I can’t take advantage of stem cells. To get a knee done could be three thousand dollars to some of these procedures even far more. That’s why I talk about fasting, because autophagy, your body literally eats away the bad tissues and the bad DNA, and then stem cells rise, so you can take advantage of it somehow, but I believe, though, in the future, as we’re talking about the future, it’s really making this more affordable, and what about insurance? Is insurance going to play some role at some point? At a certain point, they have to look at the numbers and say, wait a minute. They’re a business. This is going to save them money in the long—where are we on that?
Dr. Ahvie:
We’re nowhere yet on it, so we have to—that’s the blessing of this afternoon’s lecture on the information technology or the IT platform. They will be able to accumulate the data. In the organization that I sort of chair, the functional safety committee, we have a database. The database is following patients over time. That database will be useful, but is it at the standard that’s necessary for insurance to cover it? No, not yet today, but yet there will be compelling arguments, and I’ll say this. One of the major areas of benefit is going to be traumatic brain injury, because we’ve seen lives changed. Now, on the one hand, people are encouraged by football players with concussive illnesses. The major area for this will be veterans with RPG injury, blast injury, whose lives will change, and the public cannot allow someone who’s been a hero for society to suffer needlessly because insurance won’t pay for it, so I think may end up to be the golden—the bullet that we’ll need to use to get their attention, because we know one thing—
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I agree.
Dr. Ahvie:
—about stem cells, and they’re safe.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Wow. True. I always feel like I’m representing so many of my clients, people watching this, who go, ask him this please. I got to interview Dr. Ernesto from Mexico, and they’re doing a lot and seeing amazing results with neurodegenerative conditions. What about that? What are you seeing? The reason I ask the question is because I know so many moms are watching with the autistic children. I know so many people with family members, loved ones, with Alzheimer’s, dementia, and all these different brain conditions. What are your thoughts?
Dr. Ahvie:
I think that this will be another area of great efficacy, so we’ve seen personally, in my own clinic, Parkinsonian patients who stand up and walk out. We’ve seen MS patients do the same. We have not had the—we’ve stabilized a few patients with ALS. Stabilized.
Dr. Pompa:
ALS is the hardest.
Dr. Ahvie:
That’s the hardest of the hard.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s hard.
Dr. Ahvie:
We used similar to the Israeli protocol of using intrathecal stem cells every two months. It’s a bear of a protocol, but it has stabilized some folks. We have a lot to go there, and that’s where exosomes will play a big role, because they cross the blood-brain barrier.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we’ll talk about that.
Dr. Ahvie:
I think that we want to get to a place where, when you inject your knee, even when you have severe, stage 3 or 4 arthritic degeneration, you’re going to get an 80 percent effect. We’d like to get the same with autoimmune diseases, with neurodegenerative diseases, with the larger organ diseases, and to get there, we’re going to have to optimize. We’re going to have to have the patients optimized, so when you have a center that has great data, they’re also a center that are looking at not putting the stem cells into a polluted terrain and activate them and localize them.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about that, because I’ve been looking for everybody who’s doing something that I need to know about, they need to know about, and doing something more, because I really am—when I understand the toxicity of the body, the autoimmune, all of these things, I realize optimizing the body even ahead of time is very critical, and we even talk about that with fasting, but talk about some of these things that you’ve discovered that you’re doing to optimize the stem cells, whether it’s joints, heart, whatever it is.
Dr. Ahvie:
Right, so four or five years ago, five years ago or so, before when I did my diligence, the literature was clear then that, in animal models and in vitro, the stem cells respond to other forms of energy. They respond to photonic energy. They respond therefore to lasers or to LED lights. They respond to low-frequency ultrasound waves, so that’s a way to localize. When I give you now a stem cell treatment, and I say, I need these cells to be here for a longer period of time. I did this person with a quasi-severe asthmatic condition that is not quite asthma but not quite cystic fibrosis, and we localized the stem cells that he got infused intravenously and got it inhaled. I localized them there for a few hours, and his oxygen saturation went up by six points.
Dr. Pompa:
How did you do that?
Dr. Ahvie:
Literally. It’s a device. I have a German laser device that has the ability to go on the skin, like almost with EKG leads stuck on the skin, but also I can go deeper into the body, and I can give it intravenously, so my goal, when I get my stem cells again in the near future, is to get the stem cells infused in one vein and have the photonic energy infused in the other vein.
Dr. Pompa:
Right. That’s interesting. I’ve used myself—to optimize mine, I’ve used red light therapies, different spectrums in the red light. I used PEMF and BEMER devices.
Dr. Ahvie:
Absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
All of that concentrates the stem cells.
Dr. Ahvie:
The folks that come into the clinic, they sit on the BEMER for an hour.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I have a BEMER.
Dr. Ahvie:
They have a PEMF device that we use locally into the joint, over the joint, so we’re trying to optimize, and then I noticed—when I began stem cells, I said, listen, I don’t know enough about this area, so I’m not going to mix and match things, and then we got comfortable enough with the safety profiles that we said, okay, let’s see what happens when we give folks intravenous ozone, glutathione, and acetylcysteine and sort of an antimodulatory version of a nutritive vitamin C drip. We noticed two things. One is that they felt better immediately, even before the stem cell procedure, which we normally would expect. Number two is we had 30 to 40 percent higher stem cell yields. That doesn’t mean you’re producing those stem cells suddenly. It means they were more easily extracted from the fat.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so you’re able to measure, meaning that, when you extract from the fat or bone or whatever you’re extracting, you’re able to actually measure and look at how many stem cells you have, and you realized the yields were higher when you did, say, ozone head of time.
Dr. Ahvie:
Right, and the yields are higher if I say to somebody, you are ready for stem cell therapy. You need three, four, six weeks of preparation, and then I don’t get the low end of the yield. I get the high end of the yield when they’re busy to do that, and they get better effects, because there is an association, albeit not completely linear, between the number of stem cells you’re taking, you’re able to get, and the effect.
Dr. Pompa:
What about expansion, expanding the stem cells? What I mean by that is extracting, whether it’s from bone or fat, and then expanding. Some people expand right there in the lab, right in the moment, and maybe inject later that day or two or three days later, and then you can also—like you and I did, you can send it to US Stem Cells, and they can expand there, and then we can opt for our stem cells at any time. Talk about the expansion. Is it better than just pulling out and putting right back in?
Dr. Ahvie:
We don’t know the answer to that.
Dr. Pompa:
We don’t know. Yeah.
Dr. Ahvie:
We don’t know the answer to that. I think that the strongest stem cells are fresh, but that’s just something that needs to be shown. Certain folks cannot be extracted repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly, the thinner patients, the patients have difficulty maintaining nutritional status, so using expanded cells and then bank them is the only viable option for them, so that’s when we use the expanded cells. As you know, FDA is taking this to court, and we’ll have an answer in a year or two, but in the meantime, you can do this. I’m now figuring out who is best to use both embryonic cells as well as their own stem cells, because we’re seeing effects when we didn’t see them before with either one.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, I want to talk about that, because I’ve already had the question asked by many of you about the difference, the taking your own versus whether it’s placenta, cord, embryonic, so talk a little bit about the benefits of both of those.
Dr. Ahvie:
Taking your own is the safest approach. When you’re taking embryonic cells, whether they’re from the cord—they’re usually from the cord. Just as an aside, amniotic cells are not cells. They’re just growth factor, so they’re not large cells, so they’re not in that category of stem cells. Taking it from the embryo, in this case from the umbilical cord, the FDA seems to not have any issue whatsoever, as long as it’s manufactured properly, and it’s been shown absolutely not to have any communicable disease, and it’s done safely and so on, and then it’s not passed so many times that you have DNA injury. They’re fine with joint use. They have no regular opinion yet on intravenous use, so when the companies first came out, they wouldn’t talk about the intravenous use. The doctors used them as they knew to see fit, particularly in patients that had no option.
We noticed that it was safe in the short term. We don’t have 20, 30-year follow-up yet. We do have 20, 30-year follow-up on patients that got fetal cells in the olden days when they went abroad, so in those days, you had more self-antigen cells, these HLADR cells, than we do today, and if you go to certain vendors now, you have to ask them, what proportion of the cells have self-antigens on them? The higher they are, the more—if you get them repeatedly from different donors, and it’s part of your routine once or twice a year to get these cells, well, after 50 years, you’re going to have a hundred donors. You want to be able to minimize that and minimize the self-antigen recognition, but there have never been any—there’s never been graft versus host reactions. That’s never been the case, nor has there been published reports of the folks getting these fetal cells decades earlier and getting malignancies later. They have had rare cases with benign tumors, but it’s never been malignant, so there’s a few cases, and it’s surprising that it hasn’t been more, so we’re completely resilient—
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, especially the way they were doing it then.
Dr. Ahvie:
—to these types of cells. We’re basically quite resilient to them. I don’t know of centers that will expand the cells in their office.
Dr. Pompa:
Not in this country.
Dr. Ahvie:
To say that, how much can you expand them? You can expand them in three days, but you can expand a lot more over six weeks, so ultimately the real centers that are doing true, cultured work will have you come back in a month to six weeks.
Dr. Pompa:
Right. Okay, so we talked a little bit about these molecules, the communication molecules, these exosomes. That’s what I had. The thing I like about them is they are completely safe, because it’s just packets of information, as you said, right? Let’s remind them what are exosomes. Back in the old days, we used to—they were just called vesicles. We thought it was rubbish in the cells not that long ago. We thought it was cellular rubbish or at least removing cellular debris, if that. Now, we know, oh, my gosh, these things are really that innate intelligence, that communication from that, so what is an exosome again, and why could this be the future?
Dr. Ahvie:
This is going to be part of the future. It’s being handled more in the commercial sector, so it’s going to be a bit slower. There are private clinics popping up. I’m taking a few of my patients to an exosome center in Southern California in a week from Monday. These are, again, the vehicle by which you can talk to your environment. It’s not different whether you’re a stem cell or a regular cell, so these are the mechanisms by any cell talking to its neighbor. In this case, they’re probably much more—the RNA that they’re going to hand over is probably much more intelligent, less polluted, less damaged and so on. There’s much more -inaudible- potential. I will say one thing, though.
Dr. Pompa:
Explain what -inaudible- potential means.
Dr. Ahvie:
-inaudible- potential means your stem cells can become any one of 220 cell types in the body. It can do anything it wants to do. We have to optimize more of those cells, and we will do so in the future, but these are the packets that these produce. I will say that one thing that my center has learned over years in terms of taking care of the iller populations, not just the optimized populations, is go slow. With the iller populations, go slow. That comes fully to bear with people that you can’t push that much, so people in adrenal failure, people with autoimmune states that are really at the edge—
Dr. Pompa:
I was going to ask you about that.
Dr. Ahvie:
Where they’re on immunosuppressives. They’re fighting for their lives. You do not want to change anything. I don’t want to give them 5—1X is good, 5X must be better. No, not in that population. You can push all—
Dr. Pompa:
In a joint, different. Yeah.
Dr. Ahvie:
You can push us a little bit further. How many of these vials should I take? How many vials did you get?
Dr. Pompa:
I had two vials of my own and two vials of exosomes.
Dr. Ahvie:
Two vials of your own and two vials of exosomes. If you got embryonic cells, you’d also say, I—
Dr. Pompa:
That was after they were expanded. That’s what I just got.
Dr. Ahvie:
Yes, that’s what I’m saying, but two vials is a certain number of cells, but when you get the embryonic vials, they come also in low, medium, or high volume of concentration, so what’s a therapeutic dose? No one really knows, but there, one is good, two is better is probably a good idea for those of us that are trying to optimize. Is one is good, three is better for someone who’s truly on the lip of their systems are truly collapsed? I wouldn’t say so, so I think I would just send out that warning out there.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. All right, so let’s talk a little bit about some of these—autoimmune. Are you helping any of those, or—
Dr. Ahvie:
Yes, absolutely, so we have—our approach is to optimize communications networks in general, so thyroid and adrenal function have to be optimized no matter what, and sex hormones are a different story. I could discuss that in another session, but modulation, these cells are good at. They’re the good modulators, and again, optimize the person going—now, you can override their effect, so one of the favorite stories that I have is younger folks, the teenagers with autoimmune bowel disease, whether ulcerative colitis or Crohn’s, they normalize. They’ve been already on stricter diets, and they’ve been difficult—they’ve had a difficult life, so then they feel normal. They go to their first set of birthday parties. They go with their friends to McDonald’s. They can override its effect in a year. It’s logical that that’s the case, so you can override it. Then, I like to go into the pep talk and try to do the immunomodulatory peptides, and the one I tend to use now is thymosin.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’ve heard.
Dr. Ahvie:
In the olden times, you had this homeopathist in Europe grinding up animal thymuses and giving them to folks with these types of conditions in the olden days. Now, we have more sophisticated approaches, so we’re using those approaches with good effect. We use them with—I would also use that—if you’re going to use stem cells for Lyme disease, I would also use it for that population to modulate it down, because you don’t want to activate. You want to modulate. That’s another one where I say, one is good, three may not be better, because you just want to start low. If you get a good effect, then go ahead and go for it. If you don’t, if you get nothing, go for it, but if you get a negative effect, you’re not burnt in any significant way.
Dr. Pompa:
Right. You can keep progressing. Yeah, the autoimmune, the results even fasting alone, because the autophagy is bringing that immune system down, so that’s some of my theory that the fasting ahead of some of this is really absolutely amazing. I’ll tell you, my cellular detox ahead of it is critical, because I think that’s why some people don’t get the full response. As you and I know, cellular toxins are going to affect the stem cells, as well as infection. I think that’s another reason why doing the ozone perhaps gives you more yield.
Dr. Ahvie:
As I told you before, I feel better intermittently fasting and naturally gravitated to that 30 years ago.
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s talk about that.
Dr. Ahvie:
I actually started eating breakfast, because everyone said, oh, you have to eat breakfast, and I started getting sicker. I’ve sent a few of my clients to your program, because you know best what you’re the expert in. The concept is, you have normal cells, you have senescent, and you have ultimately mutated cells. The senescent cells are also in this gray zone. They’re pathways for cell death. Our apoptosis pathways are not functioning beautifully. They’re so ambivalent that they don’t know what they’re doing, so fasting gets—this is one of the things that it does. It gets rid of these cells. There are ways to optimize to get that done. This is probably the most single easiest and most efficient way to get it done, because as you’ve said before, and I think I truly believe, our state of affairs today is ridiculous. We eat, eat, eat three or four times a day. There’s a very small portion of the population that needs to snack repeatedly throughout the day, a very small proportion.
Dr. Pompa:
Even when we do that, I make them do it in a window.
Dr. Ahvie:
Yeah, and you have more experience than I do there, but we’re not geared to that. Our whole history is not geared for that. Our protein synthesis pathways are not geared for that. That’s nonsense that we have to eat all the time, so we’re just feasting all the time, which is not a great thing.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, if you want to die early, eat more often. If you want to live long healthy, eat less often.
Dr. Ahvie:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
In all the studies, when you look at studies on living longer, it really is about eating less, but everybody thinks it’s about pushing the food away. It’s not. It’s really about eating less by eating less often, and that’s what ancient cultures have done. One of the things that you and I are bringing together tonight with these leaders in this industry of alternative medicine, if you will, is bringing stem cells, fasting, the cellular work that we have been doing for years, together. I believe every practitioner needs to be doing these things in some aspect. This is, in fact, the future of medicine, so hopefully we get our message across.
Dr. Ahvie:
Yeah, I agree.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s great. Tell them where they can find your clinic in San Francisco and how they find you.
Dr. Ahvie:
Right, so you can find us at Anatara Medicine. Anatara is a Sanskrit word for core, so we’re going to focus on system biology on the core. Anatara Medicine in San Francisco. We have the San Francisco Stem Cell Treatment Center, and over time, I’ll probably do what you’ve done. I’ll probably create a channel called drahvie.com.
Dr. Pompa:
I think you should.
Dr. Ahvie:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
You’re a rare breed, because you’ve come not just from the other world, so to speak, but you’ve come from deep within the other world, no doubt, with a philosophy that is the body has an ability to heal itself, and we just can remove the—
Dr. Ahvie:
I’ll tell you one last story, okay? In preparation for a talk I gave here about a year or two ago, I looked into alternatives to this. There’s a few billionaire folks out there that have large-scale research outfits, looking for the magic bullets. God bless them. It’s fantastic. They’re very serious scientists doing that. Then, you have the Ray Kurzweils of the world that want to live forever and doing a good job of it, mentally alert and so on and doing a lot of different things, but he says, when my body fails, when it fails, I expect my brain to be connected to a supercomputer. That’s going to be my thing, because ultimately the body will fail.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s true. It’s designed to fail.
Dr. Ahvie:
Then, they said this other thing. No, actually, that’s too primitive, so the Russians came up—this Russian group of scientists came up with the idea to get together, and they have now 60,000 people in this association that has till 2045 to link our brains to an avatar, so we’ll produce an avatar of a body of ourselves, because fundamentally, the whole premise, the whole excitement there is that the body is not capable of doing it ourselves, and that’s what I have a problem with. If you’re waiting for this, go ahead. You’re rolling a dice. Wait. If you don’t want to wait, you can do some things right away, and these are the types of things you can do right away.
Dr. Pompa:
What are you doing? Your goal’s the same as my goal. I don’t want to just live longer. I want to do it healthy, prevent age-related diseases. What are you doing? Intermittent fasting.
Dr. Ahvie:
I do intermittent fasting. It probably is the single most effective thing I do today.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s powerful.
Dr. Ahvie:
I optimize my thyroid function. I don’t want to be in the bottom quantile. I want to be in the upper quantile.
Dr. Pompa:
How do you do that?
Dr. Ahvie:
I measure it. I measure the right thing. I get all these patients that are measuring TSH and free T4, which is not, in my opinion, the right measurement, so I measure for my free T3 to be above normal, at the peak level of concentration.
Dr. Pompa:
What do you like it above?
Dr. Ahvie:
I like it above 4.2 at the peak level, so that’s at noon to 2 o’clock after I take it at 7 in the morning, I want it to be above 4.2.
Dr. Pompa:
Noon to 2 o’clock, about 4.2.
Dr. Ahvie:
I want it to be above the normal range so that the rest of the day, it’s in the upper quantile. I optimize my adrenal function, so I do the curve, the stress index curve.
Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm, cortisol.
Dr. Ahvie:
When my cortisol was low, I started with adrenal adaptogens, but it didn’t work.
Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm. Bravo.
Dr. Ahvie:
It didn’t work for me.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, yeah.
Dr. Ahvie:
Then, I did it with adrenal cortex. It worked, and then they came right down again, so I use a low dose of hydrocortisone in the morning.
Dr. Pompa:
That kind of just boosts you up.
Dr. Ahvie:
Boosts up and doesn’t change the rest of the curve, and so it allows me to sleep well, and it’s fine.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I was just going to ask that. Does it interfere with your sleep?
Dr. Ahvie:
It does not interfere. Again, if you take the first dose—either the only dose in the morning, or you take your second lower dose—10 milligrams in the morning and 5 at lunchtime. If you don’t take it past that, usually it does not affect sleep. The thing that I also—as part of my bio that may not be on my usual bio, I’m the—I guess—I used to be the chairman. Now I’m the director of the Institute for Rare and Neglected Disease Drug Discovery and Development. It’s a big mouthful, but it’s IRND3, and this was meant for the rare and neglected disease. I’ve decided to take it over now. We’ve had a very long history of success, and you know something? Our rarest diseases are our common diseases not being treated properly. Really, our biggest gap—so what’s going to be the gap when you live forever? What’s going to be the gap? Not to live forever. Let’s say you live to a hundred very gracefully, beautifully. You’re still active. You’re still having sex. You’re still doing the things you really like to do. It’s our musculoskeletal systems.
Dr. Pompa:
Yes, that’s why I’m getting stem cells.
Dr. Ahvie:
It’s brain.
Dr. Pompa:
Yep, brain.
Dr. Ahvie:
We’ve shown at Hopkins 30 years ago that a well taken care of 80-year-old, an athletic 80-year-old’s heart under great stress conditions is indiscernible from a 20-year-old heart, so it’s not going to be your heart. It’s going to be your brain. It’s going to be your skeletal muscle, perhaps your eyes. We have to protect these individual places which don’t have the same compensatory mechanisms as other places do, so that’s one—these are limiting factors, right?
Dr. Pompa:
What have you done stem cell wise, because you said that. My injuries back in my 20s, there’s a limitation to matter, even with what I did. My discs needed—
Dr. Ahvie:
I’ve done a few things. I had my own stem cells when I found a clinician that I trusted to extract them, so he gave me my own stem cells. I had a good effect. It’s been about two and a half years ago. The effect has worn off. I did bolus myself—
Dr. Pompa:
You just put them in.
Dr. Ahvie:
I put them IV. I had no joint issues, thankfully, for myself at this point. I did use platelet-rich plasma on my left shoulder at one time. I had a much better effect by using the laser intraarticularly. The laser intraarticularly set into motion the repair mechanisms that have been permanent for me. I had given myself intravenous embryonic cells and got a good effect. It’s been about six months, so I still have the effect.
As the story goes for the IRND3 thing, I asked a group of very serious neuroscientists who we had worked with in the past when we ran this institute that was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for other people’s diseases—I said, let’s talk about brain function. How come there’s no brain food out there? Tell me about—I want you to find me a nootropic—this field of nootropics that has emerged that has been largely abused by—not abused—largely used by people that want to stay up all night, people that want to have a bolus at work to accomplish—in a very short time to accomplish it. Now, C-level people in Silicon Valley are adopting it and so on, but is that safe? Is it safe to push your brain without feeding it? In my opinion, no, it’s not. It’s a short-term thing. It’s like giving yourself amphetamines. You think you’re doing great, but you’re not doing that great. You may be making a lot of mistakes. You think you’re not, but you are.
Dr. Pompa:
The premise you’re talking about is microdosing basically and taking—
Dr. Ahvie:
Constantly feeding yourself things that are good for your brain. Everyone knows that omega-3 fatty acids are.
Dr. Pompa:
Pushing. Okay.
Dr. Ahvie:
You’re one of the experts on that. Everyone knows some of the components of brain food, but there hasn’t been a strategy over time, over a ten-year period of time, to make yourself more cognitively focused, because as you can improve cardiac function by exercising it, you can of course exercise your brain ,but you also have to feed your brain, so we’ve had—now this Institute for Rare and Neglected Diseases is coming up with a formulation is the point, that will do both. It’ll push you like the others. The others do it mainly with caffeine.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, of course.
Dr. Ahvie:
Caffeine is not a bad drug.
Dr. Pompa:
I thought you were talking about even microdosing, where people are using small amounts of brain stimulants, very small amounts.
Dr. Ahvie:
Yeah, and I think that that’s going to be part of the future, too, as well as microdosing of a lot of different things will be—
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, right, well, I think people can push that too far, too. I think you made a good point.
Dr. Ahvie:
It’s not for me.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, it’s not for me, either.
Dr. Ahvie:
I’d rather say, this is what my brain needs. I don’t really understand why these are not packaged in one package anymore. I don’t know why, but it’s an opportunity that we can take advantage of.
Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Ahvie, I don’t know how much you know about my work with my cellular detox, but the brain phase is how I got my life back and thousands of people even watching this. The toxins that are accumulating in the brain, driving inflammation in different parts of the brain that they affect, will oftentimes manifest as a certain condition that genetically we are predisposed to or what have you, but combining some of the things that you’re talking about, the stem cells, etcetera, with that, I think, again, it’s part of the future that we have to understand. People aren’t dealing with toxins in the brain correctly or even long enough to matter. People would say, oh, I did this detox, or I did that, but really they didn’t do it long enough to actually matter, so with Dr. Ernesto, one of the conversations was that. With some of these neurodegenerative conditions, we put it in remission, but then, oftentimes, it starts coming back, because I believe they’re not getting to the cause of why it was happening in the first place.
Dr. Ahvie:
Right, and so, again, the message to the public is wake up. It took 50-plus years to get there. It’s going to take a longer time than you hoped it would take, because we’ve been mythed into the idea that you take your one pill a day, and you’ll be fine. You’re not fine. You’re just masking your symptoms a bit longer, so I get patients that are angry. I take this thing twice a day. Are you serious? You want me to take it three times a day?
Dr. Pompa:
I’ve done that for two months.
Dr. Ahvie:
I’ve done it for a month. This is no different than the joke we used to have at Hopkins when we used to bring these patients for cardiac bypass surgery, and they said, listen, Doc, I don’t understand why. I can’t understand why this is happening to me. I said, what do you mean? Why? Because I eat a banana every day. I take care of myself. I’m at the cutting edge of prevention, but you’re not, so let’s understand that the system is—it’s beautiful that it works. It’s amazing that it works despite all the toxicity, but if you want to feed it, there’s a large level of intelligence, participation, sharing and collaboration, joining communities of likeminded people. I hope to join—
Dr. Pompa:
That’s what we’re doing tonight.
Dr. Ahvie:
I hope to have my own community, in addition to clustering other communities, and this is a good way to start.
Dr. Pompa:
I can’t wait. I want to have you as a guest at one of my seminars for sure, because we have a growing group of doctors who get this, what we’re talking about. All right, last question. ACAM Seminar. We have a lot of practitioners that watch this. Tell us about ACAM. What’s it about, and what’s happening this year in Vegas?
Dr. Ahvie:
ACAM is the American College for Advancement of Medicine. I guess they never actually hired a marketing firm, but it was the first of the integrative medicine groups that’s around 50 some odd years old. It actually is the group that A4M spawned from, so the largest anti-aging group in the world, for that matter, A4M, spawned from this some 25 years ago or so. We’re a collection of 700 or a thousand doctors that think likemindedly, like Dr. Dan does here and the doctors that come to SocMed. We have a meeting this November, from November 8th to 10th, in Las Vegas. The unique part of this meeting is it’s advanced integrative medicine. We have our own sessions, but we also bring together two serious dental groups that also have systemic health interests and how to merge the two, because we know that one of the systemwide effects is in the oral cavity.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, boy.
Dr. Ahvie:
This is something that I used to laugh at, and I don’t laugh at it anymore.
Dr. Pompa:
Me, either.
Dr. Ahvie:
The Germans and Europeans have a lot more experience with this, but now we understand we have to merge the two worlds. It’s not the only two worlds we have to merge, but it’s clearly the two, so we’re going to have a thousand some odd participants. I invited Dr. Pompa to not only give a lecture within the ACAM, the integrative medicine component, but also to talk to all the thousand or so complete dental MD doctors, also naturopaths, chiropractors, and so on, because he’s going to give a TED-like talk on the version of the future of this type of thinking, but basically we’re trying to have an advanced form of integrative medicine, merging several communities together.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, I appreciate the opportunity, and they need to hear the message. That’s for sure.
Dr. Ahvie:
Thank you, Dan.
Dr. Pompa:
Dr. Ahvie, thank you.
Dr. Ahvie:
Thank you.
