Transcript of #330 Dr. Craig Koniver - The Godfather of Peptides New

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Dr. Craig Conover, welcome.

Thank you very much for having me, Sean. I'm excited to be here. It's very exciting to talk to you.

I'm excited that you're here too. And, uh, so I guess we've been, uh, we've known each other for 2 years already.

I think about 2 years.

Yeah, that's like, it feels like 6 months.

Yeah, I know. Well, time is a crazy thing, right?

It is. It is.

Yeah. No, I think it's been about 2 years we've been working together. Wow.

Well, my health has gotten a lot better in the last 2 years.

Good to hear.

So thank you for that.

Yeah, you're welcome. And it's an honor to work with you.

Yep. Likewise. Likewise. Yeah. So Andrew Huberman—

shout out to Andrew—

connected us.

Right.

And, and we've been working together ever since. Not together. I've been— you've been my doctor ever since.

So it's an extreme pleasure and honor.

Likewise, likewise. But, um, well, I'm gonna go ahead and give you an introduction. We got a lot of stuff to talk about today, right? So here we go. Dr. Craig Conover, 20 years ago you walked away from the disease-based model of medicine and founded Conover Wellness in Charleston, South Carolina, a science-driven practice focused on performance optimization and longevity. Since then, you've administered more than 50,000 peptide treatments, giving you what many consider the most extensive clinical experience in biological optimization in the country. Your patients include Navy SEALs, Hall of Fame athletes, Fortune 100 executives, and members of Congress. At 46, a near-fatal blood clot nearly took your life, changing not only your health but the way you viewed medicine and performance overall. Once again, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

So before we get to— we do— we've got a couple things to to knock out here. One, everybody gets a gift.

Amazing.

That's definitely not going to help with your longevity, but, uh, they do taste pretty damn good.

I love gummy bears. Literally perfect for me. Seriously. Right on. Thank you.

Right on. And then I got a Patreon account, and, um, that is— that's just— we've grown it into one hell of a community. I think we're like 200,000 strong on there now.

Okay.

And, um, so Honestly, you know, they are— when I started this thing, I couldn't get anybody to— I had no advertisers. Nobody wanted to do business with me, right? And, um, and so we started a Patreon account and have grown it into one hell of a community. So they've been— a lot of these people have been with me since I was in the attic of my house. And, uh, and then you see what it's grown into today, and that's all because of these guys. So one of the things I give them to give back is they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question.

Okay.

So this is from Eric Auger. If you had a healthy 45-year-old guy in your office who wanted to be as strong, healthy, and mentally sharp as possible for the next 40 years, what are the top 5 things you'd tell him to do?

That's a good question. Yeah, I mean, I still think the— I think there's— I'd mesh it some basics and then some things that probably aren't basic. So I think everyone's familiar with sleep and how important sleep is, right? I think sleep is really challenging for people, um, particularly in the modern day. I think the trouble is, is, um, you know, from my perspective, people have sleep attachments. So they're very worried about going to sleep and if they get enough sleep, you know, what does it mean the next day if they only get 4 hours or 6 hours? And so then people end up turning to pharmaceuticals, for example, right? And now they're taking Ambien. And I have plenty of patients who, you know, maintain good sleep on these drugs. However, we just have to wonder what is that doing to them long term. And, and even more than that, I don't, I don't know if they're getting to the deep restorative sleep phases from these drugs that help them fall asleep. So first thing is, you know, kind of lose a sleep attachment, but find some things that you can take intermittently for sleep, right?

I, I look at sleep as like some nights I'll take the theanine. I'm a big fan of theanine right now. Some nights ashwagandha, some nights glycine, different compounds that are natural. Um, we can get into peptides for sure that help promote not only falling asleep but staying asleep. I think that's number one. I think we'll get into further in the show about how important rest is, you know, for optimization, whatever that means. That'd be number one. Number two, I think the most important thing for people once you can sleep and have that foundation is changing you know, what happens between your ears, you know, and changing your thought process, understanding that not every thought you think has to be true, and forming more of an empowerment type of approach and being positive. I think I want to talk to you more about that because I think positivity is such a powerful tool that's not talked about, particularly in longevity space. We talk about compounds. Number 3, things that people can take, um, I think there's a few supplements that I think stand out to me that really help people. Number 1 is CoQ10, coenzyme Q10.

It's fat-soluble vitamin coenzyme, works in the mitochondria, really helps our mitochondria work more efficiently, which is the battery of the cell. As people get older, certainly someone who's in their 40s is, you know, tends to be more in the kind of decline, starting to decline, starting to be more in the degenerative phase. We're hoping to change people into the regenerative phase, which is possible. But CoQ10 stands out, you know, that if anyone's going to take one supplement That's the one I promote.

CoQ10.

CoQ10.

Roger that.

Um, that'd be 3 things. Um, 4, um, you know, I'd get their hormones tested. You know, I think the most tangible aspect to human health as we age is hormonal decline, meaning once we get hormones balanced and optimized, it becomes more tangible. Um, for men, testosterone. Testosterone is a big deal. Um, and, you know, kind of optimizing and replacing testosterone um, is so important for women. I think the most important hormone is thyroid, um, and making sure their thyroid is optimized. So that's number 4. Number 5, just because I believe in them so much, is figuring out, you know, peptides. They're such safe, safe, safe compounds, and utilized correctly and judiciously, and individualizing that and figuring out what that is, can accelerate kind of getting into that regeneration phase. Okay, there's 5 things I'd say.

There's a follow-on here. Okay, I like this one. And what popular treatments or supplements would you tell him not to waste his money on?

That's a good question too. I, you know, the way I—

it's a good question because you— I mean, everybody's promoting something these days. You don't— you just— you don't know.

You don't know. I, I think, you know, the thing— and I know we'll talk about it more— the thing that bothers me about whether you call it longevity or optimization, performance medicine, is kind of this model. Maybe we call it the biohacker influencer model, which is screaming at people to do everything. And the idea is if you don't do everything, you don't do anything. And from where I sit, that's very stressful. And so I have people come into my office every day taking 47 supplements, doing sauna, cold plunge every single day, taking 16 peptides, you know what I mean? Doing all these things. It's almost as if they've become so fragile that they can't even lead their life. And so getting away from that mindset, I think, is the most important thing. There's not just— everyone's so different, right? Like, every certain people go through phases where they have to work on their liver detox, they have to work on figuring out their gut, they have to work on hormones, they have to work on their mitochondria. So it's hard to answer that. But I think from a mindset perspective, I'd encourage people not to get caught up in like, if you're not doing all these things that people are yelling at you to do, that's, that's a better place to be.

Okay.

Is the— you brought it up— cold plunge sauna.

Yeah.

Is it overhyped?

I think it's good. I think, again, to me, everyone's got to figure it out themselves, right? Like, I think there's good research on both, right? I'm personally not a fan of cold plunge. I don't like cold. So neither. I just don't. So is there health benefits from doing cold plunge? For sure. I think it's overdone in the sense that you have to cold plunge every day or you have to reach a certain temperature over a certain time period for it to count. You know, I'm a big fan of people, you know, helping shepherd people to make decisions and try things out because to me, direct experience is the only thing that matters. So I want people to try it out, right? Like try out doing a sauna. How does it feel? Be really honest with yourself. I tend to like sauna. We have an infrared sauna. I used to do it all the time and I do it a couple of times a week. I like how I feel, but I don't feel like I need to do it as much anymore. Cold plunge. I have lots of patients who do it religiously, you know, and I would just always ask the question, are you doing it because you're seeking alignment within yourself?

Are you doing it because you're seeking permission? You know, are you getting, you know, allowance to do it? And I think there's a big differentiator there. Same thing with diet. I mean, diet's very personal to people, you know. I mean, I've talked— what's the best diet? I don't know, right? Like, I want you to try different diets, whether it's carnivore, vegan, vegetarian, you know, Mediterranean, paleo, keto, and see how you feel, right? And you're going to gravitate towards some at different points in your life and depending on what you're working on. I think that's great, you know, but there's whatever, 16 different diet books written every year telling people how to eat. Uh, I think it's overdone.

Right on. What about, um, water?

Water's complicated. Yeah. I think water can get deep. You can go into lots of different facets. I think first and foremost what you said, people need to filter their water. You know, like, I don't ever drink tap water. You know, I just think that you're taking from—

I can't stand it anymore. I go to a restaurant and if it's tap water, I won't—

I don't think it's healthy for people to drink. And if we look at and analyze it, what's in that water, it's getting worse.

It used to take— I'll probably throw a picture up here right now, but we, we got— me and my wife got a water filtration system for the first I don't know, 3 or 4 years ago.

Yeah.

And it used to take— the first thing goes into is this clear filter, then it goes through these.

Yeah, huge tanks, probably reverse osmosis or something.

And, uh, actually it's not reverse.

Oh, it's not?

No, but, um, supposedly it's better than that.

Okay.

But, um, I don't know if there is, but I like it and I can tell a huge difference. But it goes through this clear thing first. It used to take a couple of months to get it— used to take a couple of months for it to get gunk, like nasty looking. It's like 2-3 weeks now, and the tank, the tank is brown. It just shows you, I mean, there's, it's, there's chlorine, there's particles floating in it.

Yeah, I mean, and if you think about it, there's chlorines and fluorines and bromines, there's heavy metals, there's pharmaceuticals, right? Like, where does it go? Where people excrete all these pharmaceuticals you're taking into our water supply. There's fluoride, I said. I mean, there's so much junk and toxins and pesticides, glyphosate, it's all in there. Yeah, yeah. And so I think to your point, filtering water, you know, but then you got to remineralize the water.

You do need to remineralize.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that's, I think that's the best way to get minerals is, okay, from the water. Um, so you can either, you know, use a water filter and remineralize You could drink sparkling natural water, you know, that has minerals in it. But without those minerals, you know, you could make an argument. I mean, there's several ways you could do this. You can make an argument that the decline of the human population over the last 60 years mirrors the loss of minerals from the soil, from our food.

The human population is declining for sure.

I mean, we're devolving as, you know, I think for sure we're devolving. We're not, we're not evolving, we're devolving.

I thought you're talking about deaths.

Well, I'm just talking about our health. Yeah, our health and chronic disease. And like, is that the whole world? I think so. Have you—

did you ever, uh, I'm just curious, have you ever seen that documentary? I think it's called, um, it's something like Live to 100 or something like that. And they go to all these zones.

Is it the Blue Zones?

Yeah, is that what they call it?

I know what you're talking about. There's like 7 or 9 Blue Zones around the country, around the world.

Yeah, there's like Japan, Japan. They tried—

Italy's one of them. There's one in Italy. Yeah.

What are those people doing?

I think they're doing many things, right? I think they're— what they're trying to do now is they're trying to say, what are— what exactly are those people doing to let them lead long lives? Obviously there's going to be genetic contribution, but I think if I had to pick one thing that those communities do is they are a community. Like, they, they have strong connection and ties as a community. They also tend to walk after eating. I mean, I think it's subtle, so I think it's little things, you know, but it's hard to extract and say, okay, what can I do here where I live to be like them? I mean, the reality is you're not. I don't think that's necessarily a good goal.

Seems like they have a lot less stress.

I think they handle stress differently, you know. I think stress is such an interesting topic, you know, that comes up usually when I meet a client for the first time, I want to really understand how they're handling stress. And I don't just mean like, what do you think about stress? We tend to— we like to do this urine and saliva hormone test to see how their adrenal glands, which is the triangular-shaped glands sit on top of our kidneys that processes and metabolizes and excretes cortisol, which is our main stress hormone. And I put a lot of value in understanding, you know, because there's a— we're hardwired for a cortisol response. Literally, it's hardwired into us. And once you start escaping that rhythm, bad things start to happen to people. So I'm kind of fascinated. I put a lot of value in understanding, like, what are the biological mechanisms to how someone thinks and handles stress in their world.

You guys did that on me, I think.

I did that early with you.

Yeah, your, uh, facility office down there is— we You've just done an incredible job. Your team—

well, thank you—

is amazing.

Yeah.

I mean, it was— we were talking right before the show started. It was like you've, you've really created— it feels like you're at a family. Everybody gets along. Everybody knows each other. Everybody takes their job very seriously. Everybody loves their job and wants to be there. You don't see that very many places.

Well, it's important, you know, I think that we get to work with a lot of people And I really want to instill, like, we really want the customer service to be at its highest, you know, because we get to— people are vulnerable with us. People aren't feeling good. And, um, we put a lot of time into kind of how do we create a unit. I'm so grateful for my team. Like, they are just— they always show up, they want to work hard, and they're really dedicated to helping the people we work with. So I appreciate you saying that.

Well, they're awesome. So Kudos to the Conover Wellness team. Seriously, you guys are awesome.

I appreciate that.

You're doing amazing work.

Well, thank you.

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The Glacier App. So let's go, let's dive into your story a little bit here. And so you had a, you had a death sentence at age 46, it sounded like.

I did, I did, yes. I was— we have friends in Hawaii who we see once or twice a year, and we'd come back. It was August of 2020. And soon after we got back, I started having abdominal pain. I tried to, you know, dismiss it, not think much about it, but it persisted, got worse. Um, so I was like, well, let me figure this out myself. Um, so I did testing on myself, and from what I could see from the lab results, maybe I had a gut infection. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna take some antibiotics. I'm even gonna take some steroids because to calm down the inflammation. I did that. Seemed to get better. And then I remember I was playing tennis with my wife. It was Labor Day of that year, and I had to stop playing. And I, the pain was so intense. So I have a friend who's a radiologist. I got in touch with him. I said, hey, I got to do a CAT scan. So he arranged for me to get a CAT scan the next day, went and had a CAT scan. Then I remember driving back from my office.

This was the day after Labor Day. And he said, you need to go to the emergency room right now. This is a very serious situation. You have what's called a portal vein thrombosis. So this is a blood clot of the vein that kind of comes up from the lower extremities into the liver. So it's the main vein coming to the liver. If you lose that, you die. And, uh, so I stopped at the office, picked up my wife, didn't really know what was going on, but I knew I was in a lot of pain. Um, and I honestly I don't know if I'd ever heard of a portal vein thrombosis. I've certainly heard of a deep venous thrombosis, which is what a lot of people have heard of, a DVT. And I'd heard of a pulmonary embolism, which happens in the lung, blood clots in the lung. But this was in between it. I don't think I'd ever heard of a portal vein thrombosis. So we got to the emergency room. They started me on a blood thinner, heparin. And I remember the ER doctor walked in and he said, hey, Did you see the actual radiology report of what, you know, what was diagnosed?

I said I didn't. So he handed it to me and I read, read about the blood clot, but I also read that I had a mass in the head of my pancreas.

Whoa.

And I turned to him and I said, because my wife was sitting there, and I said, I, I can't tell her this. And, um, so he told her, and I can still hear the shriek.

Shit.

I was 46 years old. I'm obviously aware that if I had pancreatic cancer, that's almost a death sentence. Yeah. So it was during COVID so she had to leave, you know, couldn't stay in the hospital. And they said, we want to do an MRI of your, um, liver to look at this more in depth. And I remember they took me up to the MRI suite, but for whatever reason, Sean, they left me there for a while, like there was a delay or something. And I had the most amazing experience maybe of my life where I was with God and just received tremendous peace, like knowing that everything's okay. And it was an amazing moment. And all I can tell you, it's hard to articulate, but all I can tell you is It's all okay.

You felt at peace.

I felt at total peace.

And knowing that you—

I just felt total peace. I just knew. I just knew it was okay. I just—

I for sure you were going to die.

I wasn't sure. I can't say that. I, you know, I mean, a mass on your pancreas is pretty close to a death sentence.

Uh-huh.

So the next morning I got through the night. Next morning, that same ER doctor comes in.

But now, hold on, that just came over you?

I lost track of time, but it was probably over a 2-hour time period. And let me back up. I've always had a close relationship with God. It's always been foundational for me. I've always felt connected to God. This wasn't new per se, like this feeling and what that feels like. It was new in in how far it went. It was new and like, wow, this is— it's all okay. Like, it's all okay. God told me he's got my back regardless of the outcome. Wow. Regardless. So the next morning, that same ER doctor came in and he said, hey, I was thinking about you overnight. Did you see your MRI results? I said no. He said, you don't have cancer. Yeah.

What did you have?

So I can't tell you that I didn't have a miracle healing.

It was gone. Gone.

Holy shit. Or, I mean, I'm pragmatic, I'm practical. Maybe it was an overread by the radiologist. I don't know. But he saw something. He saw something or wouldn't put it on the report. And my research after that is that a portal vein thrombosis, like all the time, occurs in the setting of cancer. So maybe I did have a miracle. Seriously. And I've witnessed other patients have miracle healing. I have. It's possible.

I don't doubt it.

And for your listeners, like, and this is an important point, like, anything is possible. Anything is possible. And, and for me, it was such a pivotal moment in my life. And even though it was at its potentially darkest hour, I would never trade that. I would never do it differently, ever, because that experience I had with God and finding that total peace stays with me to today. You know, and I'm so thankful for that.

That's powerful.

So thankful. And that's why I just know it's all okay, no matter what, you know. And I think when people— because people, a lot of time, they want to separate out, hey, is this disease? How does this relate to God? It's all the same. It's all linked up. It's all synchronized. Obviously depending on what people believe, but for me, um, so transformative, unbelievably transformative. And then, you know, it was a very confusing time being a patient. Um, I had— doctors didn't know what to do with me.

Well, hold up, what— how did you— so your— then your wife comes back.

What—

how did she—

yeah, and then I— so yeah, sorry. So she comes back that morning and, you know, literally crying together, like She spent the whole night upset. I mean, I get upset thinking about it. Like, she thought she was going to lose me, man. And comes back and I get to give her the good news, you know. And I followed up on this. I've done several scans since then. It's— this isn't a fluke. Like, I don't have it. Wow. And, um, you know, and then being able to— you know, I'm very grateful for my wife because She's been my rock, man.

I love these kind of stories. We're talking about some of this kind of stuff at breakfast. Yeah. Shit.

Yeah. This is where it gets really real.

This was 2020.

This was 2020. This was 2020. And, you know, I— it just affected me personally, affected me professionally, you know, because I still had the blood clot, but they didn't know what to do with me, right? I'm— it was such a fluky thing. They, um, and, and, you know, I know we're going to talk about a lot about peptides and kind of more outside-the-box therapies, but I want to make the point, like, they put me on a blood thinner that I take to this day. I believe that pharmaceuticals are here to help us, you know. Do I have to take it? Probably not, but it gives me peace of mind, you know, and for me that's very important. Mm-hmm. Very important. I got a lot of life left, you know, I got a lot that I want to help people. And so, you know, taking that blood thinner every evening, easy. And I believe in it. I believe in it. Wow. But I mean, being in the hospital is so interesting because I was the patient, you know, and I— what happened was, is they, they released me the next day. Was on a blood thinner.

It was probably too soon. And by the end of the week, I had worsening pain. I'd go back to the emergency room and they scanned me again and said now the blood clot had extended and was now affecting my colon and my large intestine, and that they had to figure this out even further. They couldn't figure it out. I had every test under the sun, never could find anything that said it was this or that. Very, very strange. So they switched up my blood thinner. I was in the hospital for another almost a week. And, you know, I met several doctors and it really was profound for me. I'd been on this path of like, I think we're all on a path like, what are we doing here? What is the purpose? And for me, that's both personally and professionally. And being a doctor and knowing what I know and then being treated as a patient by doctors outside of my hematologist. My hematologist is amazing. I still work with him today. These doctors were not very helpful. I remember, you know, I was in a lot of pain, and I remember saying, hey, can I get a prescri— I remember this conversation.

Can I get a prescription for pain medicine for when I leave? You don't need to give me a lot, but just— I'm still in some pain. I'm not asking for ton, but some. And they told me, no, we're not going to give you any pain medicine. And I was like, I don't understand. Like, I'm really confused. Like, I have legitimate pain. I've been in the hospital almost a week with a portal vein thrombosis that you guys have never seen. I'm 46 years old and you refuse to give me pain medicine.

What, what is— what is— what's going on with the healthcare industry? I mean, it's just— you can't get in. I don't know what it's like everywhere. Here you can't get an appointment anywhere. It's like a 6-month wait. I mean, you go, you go there, they spend 30 seconds with you.

Yeah, all your blood work looks great.

They don't go through shit with you.

No, you know.

And I mean, didn't they just change the mammogram thing too? Weren't you supposed to get it? Or—

yeah, they've lowered the age of mammograms, which I want to talk to you about.

Yeah, well, they, they spread it out like it used to be. I don't know, I don't know, my wife knows. We were just talking about this, but it used to be every 6 months, and now they've upped it to a year, and they've— I think they raised the age, I thought. But, and she's like, what, what, like, what is this? So it's just all the good doctors are now out of, out of insurance networks. They're all, they're all gone. You know, and, and what, what, what happened? Like, we, we— well, we go to private health.

I mean, yep, you come see me. Yeah, I, I think, I think it's worth— like, and this was a kind of inflection point for me, having this experience. You know, I've always kind of been trying to understand how do we get here. And really then I kind of dove into it. And if we go back, and, and I want to express to your listeners, the healthcare system is actually working perfectly. Because the healthcare system treats us as customers, not patients. So it's working just fine. Did you know it's the largest employer in almost every state?

That's a surprise. I didn't know that.

The large— in, in many states, it's the fastest growing industry. Many states. So we have a system that's working super well as a business. And, and what I learned from researching it, it goes, it goes back deep, right? So in 1910, there was something called the Flexner Report, which was kind of created by John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, right? Two of the biggest, wealthiest families in America. And what the Flexner Report did was to look at medical education and decide what should go forward and be allowed and focused on and what should be excluded. And it's hard for us to understand this because we live in 2026 where everything is dominated by pharmaceuticals and randomized controlled studies and surgeries. But if you go back to before the 1900s, other types of health modalities were flourishing. That we now in very real sense consider rogue, right? So I'm talking about acupuncture, chiropractic, naturopathy, herbalism, hydrotherapy, fitness, nutrition. What they did literally was say medical education can't focus on those. And I lived it, right? I went to medical, I graduated in 2000, and the model that I came up from, which I'm sure is teaching today, is when a patient walks in the room, you're immediately thinking, what medicine am I prescribing?

Mm-hmm.

You're not thinking, what's going on with the patient? What's the story? How did they get here? What are they feeling? You're thinking, what diagnosis can I come up with to give them a medicine or 3 medicines? And that system works very well in the system. And so for a lot of people talking about, oh, peptides, right? Well, there's no studies because we've been trained to think that it doesn't count unless there's a study. But if we go back and look, for example, ashwagandha is a botanical herb used in the Ayurvedic system. It's been in the historical record for thousands of years, thousands of years. And I remember I gave a talk many, many years ago at this power company in Charleston. We're talking about sleep, we're talking about different natural options. And I said, well, ashwagandha actually is great at helping clear out cortisol receptors. And people, you know, observing them sleep better over time taking ashwagandha. It's very safe. And a gentleman raised his hand, he goes, but has it been studied? I said, well, it's been studied in the historical record for thousands of years. He goes, that doesn't matter.

What do you mean that doesn't matter?

But that's where we are, right? And so we have— we've been trained, we've been programmed that we have to look at anything like we do pharmaceuticals. But the reality is we can't, right? The pharmaceutical testing is very expensive. I mean, everyone knows that. Exorbitantly expensive. And it's also very biased, right? I don't put a lot of weight on that. Like when I'm sitting in front of a patient, I'm interested in them. I wanna know what works for them. I'm not interested in a study that says, hey, if you're 45, I don't even know what that means. Most of it's done under artificial settings. They certainly can't control for the things they say they can control for. Control for. Rarely do they control for all the variables of being human— sleep, diet, movement, thought process. Just doesn't happen. Now again, I'm not saying pharmaceuticals are bad. I don't think that pharmaceutical companies are evil. I think they're playing perfectly into the industrial medical complex. Perfectly. Mhm.

Mhm.

And, uh, I point that out to your listeners because we don't talk about this enough, right? We talk about it as there's one way to do this, right? And if you look at statistically, the majority of Americans take pharmaceuticals. That's how we define health. Yet the majority of Americans are overweight, tired, and depressed as well.

Very true.

And it's challenging. It's challenging for listeners to know what to do, where to turn.

I mean, I feel like a lot of people are kind of waking up to this.

I do too. I'm hoping—

I sure as hell have.

And I actually think that COVID and the pandemic, as bad as it was, there was a silver lining there. I think doctors lost a lot of faith and trust from people, and for good reason. Yeah, for good reason. But I think it helps spur on for people I want to take care of myself. You know, I, I got COVID the next year after I got that portal vein thrombosis. It was August of 2021. I got COVID. I think it was the Delta variant. I almost died again. I mean, I've never been as sick as that. I mean, I was out of commission for 3 weeks at home on oxygen, and I—

holy shit—

I couldn't get better. Like, it was one of the weirdest times. Like, I would— I just— and I finally had to be hospitalized. And I didn't want to go to the hospital because I was afraid if my blood— I would measure my blood, my oxygen saturation. It was in the 80s, right? Should be 95 or higher, certainly 93 or higher. Mine was in the 80s, and I'd be at oxygen at home. I knew if I went in, they'd want to put people on ventilators, and that was killing people because we didn't know. Shit. It was a crazy time. And so I was reluctant to seek help. For sure.

Wow.

But then eventually I had to go to the hospital, and I, I did fine.

But how long were you in there?

I think— so I went for a weird reason. So I developed, I think, pneumonia on top of the COVID and I was taking antibiotic, but because I was on a blood thinning medicine, the antibiotic made my blood thinner— made my blood super thin. There was an interaction there.

Gotcha.

And I remember waking up, I was sleeping on the couch, couldn't even sleep in bed with my wife because I, I, it was so uncomfortable and I was on oxygen. I didn't want to disturb her. But I remember I was in the middle of the night, woke up and I started urinating frank blood because my blood had gotten so thin that I was literally urinating blood. I told her, I woke her up and I was like, I got to go now. And I went and it all worked out okay. I mean, and I only had, I stayed there, I think it was either 1 or 2 nights. I had to stay in the emergency room. There wasn't even— the hospital was packed. It was totally full. Jeez. But I think there's some silver lining. I think that, you know, people, to your point, are waking up saying, I want more than just taking a pill.

I sure as hell did. Everybody I know has. Yeah, I mean, and, and I don't know, I feel like there's like two healthcare systems now. There's the private healthcare system that seem— everybody seems to be gravitating towards. And, and then there's the traditional one, like the traditional American one.

Yeah, that, that—

or maybe North American one, I don't know. But there's, there's the in-network and out— out-of-network.

And I think it's accurate.

And nobody wants to be in-network anymore.

Well, I think, I think especially, especially people my age and older, you know.

I think a lot of the young people don't really care yet, but, but they should.

Well, I think, I think we have to— I think it's time for an evolution of it, right? I think that if we look at the history of it and people saying, well, I have health insurance— health insurance is not for the healthy, right? Like, it's a disease-based approach.

Yeah.

And I think it does a good job, right? When I was really sick, as much as I questioned it, I still was there to help me. If you fracture your leg, it's there to help you. If you're in an acute situation, it's there to help you. But that's not how we get healthy and that's not how we optimize. And I think that's why people are getting disgruntled.

Is there any— what do you think about the ivermectin thing?

I'm a big fan of ivermectin.

Is it true this is an anti-cancer drug too?

Yeah, I think it can be used for that.

How do you use it for that?

I think it depends, right? So they're looking at it more and more in terms of how to dose it. Um, I learned about it during COVID right? And, and we learned about, you know, people doing research in terms of clinical research, in terms of weight-based ivermectin, where would we— would use a dose of 0.2 milligrams per kilogram, meaning you find out the patient's weight and then you do a calculation, say this is how much they need, and you'd either give it to them, you know, again for COVID symptoms. Even though it got such a terrible rap, you know, after Joe Rogan said he was using ivermectin, then the world came down saying how dare you, even though it's been used for decades safely worldwide. I mean, ivermectin is an inexpensive, valuable medicine. Mm-hmm. But during COVID one of the big troubles— not to get off course, I'll come back— is the focus. All the focus was on the vaccines. The focus was not on treatment. And the— and that's still probably true to this day. I mean, they're still promoting COVID vaccines, which is crazy to me. But if we remember, it was all about you need to get your vaccine, not that what do you do if you get COVID?

And ivermectin seemed to be, for a lot of people, again, just clinically a way out and a quick way out. And so since that time, people have been exploring, can we use it for other inflammatory conditions, whether it's viral illness, whether it's cancer? Cancer is complicated, but I'll tell you, you know, an interesting thing. To this day, if I were to call in, send in ivermectin for a patient to a pharmacy, they wouldn't fill it.

What? Why? Why? Yeah.

And I'm not going to say that's every pharmacy because it's not true, but it's most. And they say, what is the diagnosis code? And now that doesn't matter, right? If I see you as a patient and I decide, hey, this is an appropriate drug, and I want to make a point to patients because this always comes up, well, it's off-label. 90% of medicine that's prescribed is off-label, by the way, meaning we use it outside of the indication that the FDA approved it, right? So the best example is antibiotics. Antibiotics tend to have a very narrow classification, right? Meaning I'll take penicillin for a type of bacteria. However, people use penicillin for lots of different bacteria. We don't actually test the bacteria anymore in many ways because that's inefficient. Most medicine is prescribed off-label. And so what they're saying— so the, the FDA approval for ivermectin has nothing to do with a viral illness, has nothing to do with cancer. So I— this has happened to me so many times where I thought it was appropriate because of the safety profile. Number one, it's super safe. We, we don't see side effects from ivermectin. And two, my clinical observation working with patients and having a relationship and prescribing is they seem to get better faster, the ones using ivermectin.

Not always. And so if I send that into a pharmacy, I've spoken to so many pharmacists who said, well, we need the diagnosis code. And I was like, well, here's the diagnosis code. That doesn't qualify. We can't prescribe it. We're not filling it.

What was it originally used for?

I feel like it was— I don't, I don't even remember at this point. It was like, um, something along the lines of like scabies or something like that. Some like small— yeah, that's what it's used like for worldwide. We'll call it a parasite.

Gotcha.

Like a type of parasite. So if you tell the pharmacy, oh, it's a viral illness because there's a diagnosis code for that, they'll say that doesn't qualify, so we're not filling it. And I'd say, well, so you're going to stand in the way of the patient getting the medicine and say, well, we don't feel comfortable filling it. I mean, this is a real thing. Very strange. And I think it's a huge disservice. Huge disservice to patients because, again, I'm trained as a doctor. We've all heard of the Hippocratic Oath.

Why, why have they—

I think got politicized.

That's it.

It got politicized. It was determined— again, if I don't know, this is just my observation— we go back to COVID, we're more interested in the COVID vaccine and, you know, giving everyone a vaccine than actually coming up with solutions to help them when they got COVID. I think it's a remnant of that. And people were taking ivermectin, having success, and that was like, how dare you, you should be vaccinated. Yeah, and it became this, you know, line in the sand, which I think is unfortunate.

Yeah, I just— I was just in Mexico, bought a ton of ivermectin because I, I was reading about the— yeah, the anti-cancer—

it could be an—

I think it's current— or anti-cancer, for sure.

I think there's a lot of this. I mean, there's a, there's a big push. Um, I don't do it per se because I don't really work with cancer, but there's a big push from, from doctors who work with cancer repurposing drugs to help with cancer. You know, so there's different clinical scenarios. I've heard patients using doxycycline, ivermectin, mebendazole, another antiparasitic medicine. Methylene blue, which we'll talk about, it's another one of these agents which can be helpful. Metformin is another one. I mean, there's a whole host of them that we can actually be smart about.

Doxycycline, huh?

Doxycycline seems to kill cancer stem cells, so it's, it's not allowing those cancer stem cells to grow. Again, cancer is very complicated. I'm not an expert, um, by any means. Um, but I think, you know, I think if I try to answer questions, what would I do if I developed cancer? I would want every option on the table.

Yeah, me too.

And unfortunately, in the United States, um, it's very limited. In the state of California, interestingly enough, I learned this recently because I talked to a doctor. State of California— I don't know if this is still true, but it was true— if they see a patient who has cancer and you recommend something that's not a pharmaceutical, they'll come after your medical license.

Not surprising at all.

Yeah, it's— and it's— that's not how we make progress, right? I think one of the challenges— we live in such a dogmatic society. It's either bad or good. This is evil. This gets And the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. And, um, it's hard. It's hard for people to know what's real.

Let's take a break real quick.

Sure.

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When you become a paid member of the SRS Patreon community, you get more than just the podcast. Watch new episodes early alongside other members, join monthly live shows with guest Q&As, and submit questions just like you see on the show for upcoming guests on the Protector tier. You'll also unlock exclusive range day videos, behind-the-scenes content, and premium ambience videos that you're not going to find anywhere else. Join the Patreon community today and get access to the full experience. All right, Doc, before we move on to the, uh, The outer and the inner war. One of the— we— I forgot to bring up some of this ancient medicine stuff. Native American, Egyptian, Greek.

Yeah. I mean, I think for me, you know, first of all, for whatever reason, I've been fascinated with ancient history. I remember being as early as 5 years old or 6 years old reading about ancient worlds. I actually, in college, I majored in something called Old World Archaeology and Art. Been archaeological digs. So I've always had this fascination with what happened in the ancient world. And, um, and then I, you know, go to medical school, and then, you know, learning about, you know, kind of just changing how I think in terms of— I learned that the medical model was really two things: either you're going to take a medicine or multiple medicines or we're going to have surgery. And when I kind of started thinking about what did people do 100, 200, 300, 1,000, 2,000 years ago, they seem to me more connected, one, to God, and two, were trying to articulate systems for human health. They just didn't have the vocabulary to describe that we would, you know, term that in modern terms. And I find this fascinating, you know, because I really do think that in many ways as a society, maybe across the world, we're devolving.

We're going the wrong direction. You know, I think some of that is our knowledge, but certainly the wisdom that's applied. We're totally disconnected from nature.

You know, what do you mean devolving? Like we're getting sicker?

We're getting sicker, dumber, and less connected. Mm-hmm. I think most people could recognize that.

Oh yeah, I mean, I was, I was watching a docu— I can't remember the document, I'm trying to think of the name but it's not going to come to me. But it was talking about all these disease— a lot of the diseases that we have today are not even organic diseases, they're man-made diseases like cancer. That's what I'm talking about, all the pollutants and yeah, microplastics and fucking smog and you name it, just all the shit in the soil, all the chemicals, all everything. It's not even— we wouldn't even have these diseases if we wouldn't have destroyed the planet.

100%. And so tying it back to this, what I call the— that's the outer war, right? That's that we're being poisoned and it's very real. You know, for example, men with testosterone today. Yeah, it's like 50% less than our grandparents.

Yeah.

It's a real thing.

Why is it? Why is it? What happened?

I think it's what you just said, right? I think if we look at what the environmental toxins, right, like, for example, microplastics, we look at even just the things that people probably don't take seriously, but the Wi-Fi, all the invisible waves. We're so connected to these phones and screen time and changing our physiology.

You think the— you think the EMF stuff is, is I think it's very real.

I think it's very real.

What do you do about that?

I, again, I'm— I try to be practical, right? There's some people who are saying never use your cell phone. That seems stupid to me, right? Like, it's such a convenience and such a tool. Um, but I— and I struggle with it. Like, I, I should put my phone down more for sure. Um, I struggle with this. Um, so, so what do I do? I try to limit it, right? I certainly don't I try to keep it off me as much as I can. Right. So I'm not— I used to have it in my pocket all the time. I think that's probably bad, right? It's an antenna. So if I'm sitting anywhere, I have it put down. And then something that I found to be really good is this device called BlueShield. BlueShield.

BlueShield.

Yeah, it's a company called BlueShield and they make this device and I've gotten to know the guy who runs it really well, Brandon, who's super smart. They make it, this cube that I put in our bedroom, and it helps to mitigate the incoherent effect of Wi-Fi. Now, this is not my territory. I don't understand this well, but the way he explained it is with all these waves coming at us, which, you know, they desynchronize our own physiology, our own biochemistry, the rhythms of our body. And something like this, this cube, it helps to get them back in sync. That's the best I can understand.

Interesting. Uh, I was gonna paint.

Yeah.

Oh, you've heard of the EMF paint?

Yeah, you know, I was going to do that, and then I read that you don't want to do that because then— yeah, I think I've read that if it is in there, then it bounces.

That's right, it's bouncing around and it's actually worse.

I think that's right. And so So, you know, I think, you know, one thing I'm excited about for our new office is I think the kind of the next phase in wellness is how do we deal with this, this energy? What is energy?

You know what I mean?

And so we're going to be setting up the first of its kind with the help of Brandon, you know, different modalities such as PEMF, which is pulsed electrical magnetic field therapy. People are pretty familiar with that. We're not just electrical beings, but we're magnetic beings. We're going to combine that with vibrational therapy.

You know, what is that?

What is vibrational? Vibrational is where there's like these big plates and it basically just vibrates you because the mechanical force on your body, right? This is one of the reasons that's not spoken about, but exercise is so important because you're changing the mechanical force on your cells. And again, tying it back to what did people used to do thousands of years ago, right? They had to do things like a lot of walking. They had to lift heavy stuff. They had to sprint every now and again. They were in touch with nature in ways that we don't. Now, I'm not saying don't go to a gym because we have to work out and we have to take care of ourselves. But most of us, you know, work out under artificial lights, right? We don't take our time when we work out. We're rushing through. We're certainly not focused on the workout. We're thinking about, what do I got to do next? You know, and I think just trying to tie it all together to answer your question about ancient It's very hard for us to understand what people did in the ancient world because we think that we are evolving and that everything is getting better.

Certainly technology is better, but I don't think we know how to use it appropriately.

The electromagnetic—

yeah, it's—

you call electromagnetic therapy. Have you heard of a Rife machine?

Yeah, for sure.

Is that real?

I think it's very real. I think it's very real. Again, I'm—

explain it.

I'm not the expert, but here's how I think. I think that we are all frequency-based, right? We are energy. We are different. We're, we're operating at different energy spectrums, which has to come down with different frequencies. People can understand this. The best analogy I've heard is a radio, right? You turn the dial of the radio to pick up what's coming in from different sources, different towers shooting out the different— whether it's AM or FM. And when you get to the one, it becomes crystal clear, right? Well, I think of us as the same way. We're antenna for what's going on in our environment, particularly our brains are, I think, right? That's how we pick up thoughts. That's how we pick up on stuff is because either you're either dialed into the wrong station, right? And we talked about that before this podcast. And I think some of that's how that happens. And so if I think one of the cool things that we're going to be able to use with technology is to help us become more coherent. So that we can then receive messages in a more coherent way, that we can be more attuned, lined up.

And to me, that's really important. Unfortunately, we're— this outer war, right, is all of these, right? We're basically— our planet's being microwaved, right? If you look at all the satellites circulating above the Earth, right, and all this Neuralink stuff that's coming and all this star— I mean, it It's a lot. We're basically microwaving ourselves in an environment which is already polluted with pesticides, herbicides, glyphosate, toxicities, heavy metals. I just tell people, think about all the airplanes flying over us every single day. The amount of jet fuel, which has a ton of heavy metals, is pouring down on us every day. To your point, this is all new. Last 50, 100 years. All of it's new. And so our lens, we're told to believe that this is natural. It's natural to have heart disease and cancer and autoimmune disease. By the way, there's more autoimmune disease than cancer and heart disease combined. More neurodegenerative disease. People are concerned about dementia, Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's. You know, it's very real. And so we're being attacked. Mm-hmm. I mean, you know, I think all of that's real. And so a lot of the work we can do, which I'll get into, which I think is the inner war, which is working on ourselves.

So the inner— you think there's two wars, the inner war and the outer war?

I think most people pay attention to the wrong things. I think most people are paying attention to what's going on in the media, what's going on in politics, what's going on, people out to get us, right? And they don't take the time to actually work on themselves. They don't actually take the time to—

I'm definitely guilty of that.

We're all guilty of it, you know? And I think that it's hard because we're told that what matters more is what's going on the outside. But if you think about it, I mean, I, I can tell you for me, a non-negotiable for me in the morning is I get up every morning, or every morning early, excuse me, with these two little dogs we're obsessed with, and take them out, feed them, uh, and then that's when I'm total silence, praying, meditating, journaling. That's a non-negotiable for me because when I do that, I don't care what happens the rest of the day. We're all busy, things are coming at us, people needing stuff, Got to do this, got to accomplish that. But to me, that and then the end of the day when I can connect with my wife and we can catch up and kind of share what happened. Two non-negotiables, you know what I mean? Most people would say, well, I got to get to the gym, I got to work out, I got to be whatever. To me, it's about the internal conversation more than the external conversation. Now, that's just me. But to give you an example, I mean, I work with one of the— I'm just thinking of this— one of the most famous actors on the planet, recognizable across the world.

Not going to name names. By all intent, you look at him leading the best life, and he is, no doubt, very successful in all facets of his life, great family. But this part of his life, when we started working, wasn't as developed as he wanted it to be. And I helped him kind of get that back for himself, about what it is to wake up and have that silence and work on yourself. You know, the introspective work, which I call contemplative introspective, or, you know, being contemplative, I think is really important. And the silence and, you know, over the whatever year and a half, almost 2 years I've been working with him, you know, he shared with me recently because he had some big movies come out that he's really found his purpose and more importantly, his peace. And that peace, like I told you about what I was able to find in that hospital. I think once you find it, changes everything. And that to me is what the center was about. And that's where I, I think, not to overstate it, but I think we've gotten lost. And I think that people think, particularly with health and longevity, that it's a destination.

I don't think it is. I think we're already here. I think it's just directional change. And I really see— love to talk more about all these different therapies. They're a bridge not to get us anywhere, but to get us back to ourselves. That's what's so cool. They're literally a bridge to help us find ourselves again. And that to me is fascinating. And that's how I look at that. I really think whether it's peptides or nutrients or hormones, they're a bridge because ultimately what I want for all my patients, all the people I care about, not to need me anymore, to figure it out. I want to continue to help, but that's a very contrast to the medical model where if you're not a customer, you're not paying in, they don't need you. You know what I mean? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Talking about two totally different things.

Interesting. Where do we go from here?

I think we've described the outer world pretty well. I think it's the things external. I think it's also our attention. I think if we're paying attention to social media feeds and the algorithms that are being presented to you and picking a side, and that's how you're defining your life, you're not paying attention to yourself.

A lot of distractions.

A lot of distractions. I think those phones are super helpful, but they're also a huge distraction. Again, I think you can use them well. I'm not saying put down your phone or ignore it or turn off social media. I think you got to find— everyone's got to figure out what—

when I turned off social media, we were talking about that at breakfast. It's been gone for over a month now. Everything gone. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, it really is.

You get more clarity. Yeah. And again, I don't want to keep harping on this, but what do people do? 100— I mean, social media is new. Phones are not even 20 years old. It's crazy. But we think this is how life has been lived. It's not even close. So what do people do 100, 200,000 years ago, they were with each other, you know, they were finding things to eat, they were taking care of each other. Yeah, there was a lot more purpose. And to me, it's about finding your own who you are again, to find that awareness, to find that vitality, right? So when I think about how can I help someone lead their best life from a health perspective, it's tapping into that vitality. I just read it. The last book I read, which I think you're— you're probably a lot of your listeners now, I don't know if you know, by Dan Millman, The Way of the Peaceful Warrior.

Hmm.

Wonderful book. I mean, it's a wonderful— it's about this gymnast back in the '60s who's this, you know, super awesome college gymnast who's, from a physical perspective, I mean, he's got it, becomes qualified for the Olympics. And he meets this kind of crazy old man who takes him under his wing and teaches him about how to find purpose and attention again in his life. So it just doesn't pass him by. And there's so many little valuable, you know, things that came from reading that book because I think, you know, he talks about what he thinks is that his mentor is the goal is Becoming a warrior, peaceful warrior. And the job of a peaceful warrior is to find unreasonable happiness. And unreasonable happiness, meaning he says the fool uses things to— he does to take him to happiness, whereas the warrior can be happy at any moment in any time. And I would take that a step further and say what I'm hoping for people is to find unreasonable joy. I think we'll talk about it a little bit, but for me, it's the best analogy. I didn't come up with it, is being a warrior in a garden, meaning you're strong, you take care of yourself and your family, but you also know how to cultivate peace and love and compassion.

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Yeah, one of my favorite quotes. Yeah, you want to win the game, stop playing. Yeah, yep, yeah. And that's what this— that's what I'm saying with this outer war. People are playing that game and we're being played, and it's very real. But if you want the most biological sovereignty, you got to focus on yourself. Yeah, stop playing that game. Play your own game. Yeah, it's all possible.

Yeah, it's killing us. It is, it is.

And I think it's taking away our attention. I think it's taking away our ability to know what's real and what's not real. I mean, and I feel for people, they don't know where to get Reliable information. You know, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about is, you know, one of the problems with the current medical model is what I call the three traps. The first is what I call the pill push, right? This is what most people are used to, where we've talked about it. It's giving people pharmaceuticals and more pharmaceuticals and more pharmaceuticals. And again, I don't think doctors mean poorly. I don't think doctors are out to get you. That's just they don't know any better. I, you know, one of the things I take pride in, what I enjoy doing, is we— I train other doctors and providers. Done this for years and years and years, and I love it. I love the collegial aspect, but I also love— because I didn't have someone to help me get to where I am. I had to make a lot of mistakes, and most of it's self-learned through experience working with great patients.

But I want to help them start to think differently.

I mean, it's obvious that you're not against—

I'm not—

pills, because we just talked, and you're on a blood thinner.

I am.

I take it the past, what, 6 years?

Yeah, I take it. So I'm not against medicine, but that's one of the traps. The next trap is the supplement shuffle. We have these— all these functional medicine doctors who basically exchange pharmaceuticals for nutraceuticals. And this is very common.

Nutraceuticals? I've never heard that term.

Yeah, like supplements. It's like a fancy word for supplement. I mean, I have so many patients who come into my office and they're on 47 supplements, and this is common. Well, it's natural. Well, that doesn't mean it works. Can be safe, right? So patients are taking their vitamin D, their fish oil, their probiotics, on and on and on. They don't even know what they're taking anymore. And then they get thrown into this loop where there's constant testing, testing, testing, and the kind of the paradigm is take this for that. And I, I have a problem with that. And then the last trap, what we're most familiar with, which is the biohacker influencer, which is all in, right, and promoting all of this testing like crazy, you know. Now this full-body MRI scan is becoming so popular.

Is that bad?

I think, again, I don't know if it's bad. I just think you have to be careful. You're basically looking for things we don't necessarily have, and I think it can create a lot of anxiety and stress. And here's what I'll tell you, and I think this is hard for people to get to, is they say, well, I want to find it so I can do something about it. Well, how do you know your body wouldn't have done something about it anyway? Right. So to give you just modern-day examples, and this is real, um, they, they've recently looked at— I think it was in an article in JAMA, one of the big medical journals, I think it was 2022— they found that CT scans would likely contribute or cause 5% of cancers annually over I think it was like 100,000+ cancers would come from CT scanning alone, right? Mammography, which we touched upon, they've done studies to show that mammography does not change mortality, meaning we have plenty more women diagnosed with breast cancer, yet women are not living longer because of that. Colonoscopy, same thing. So we're screening, and I get it because people are like, I gotta find it.

But then we're creating problems, right? I mean, I've had patients who diagnosed from a mammogram with breast cancer, and again, I'm not saying they shouldn't do this, it's an individual choice. But then they go down the chemo path, they go down the radiation path. And that, that can be ultimately what kills them, not the cancer. And this is a complicated, and it's also a very touchy subject, and I'm not speaking out against these therapies. I think there's, again, like we've said, if I was diagnosed with cancer, I want all options on the table. The problem is, is we're being pushed and coerced in a certain direction that if you don't screen for it, you're doing something wrong. I have an innate trust in the human body that God created to figure things out.

So you don't get screened?

I don't do those screenings. No, I don't.

You don't do the MRI?

No. I've had too many patients who— and I understand— they say, well, I want to know. I say, but the problem, once you know, is you can't unknow, and you're going to be anxious every day till you do something about it. And they say, no, I'll be fine. And that's not what happens because now you've diagnosed with something in your liver. I mean, I just had— I just had this conversation with a patient this past week. He— one of the common tests that men get done is what's called a PSA, prostate-specific antigen. It's not a good test, but it's a blood test to look for prostate cancer.

And so why is it not a good test?

It's not a good test because there's a lot of inconsistency with And so the majority of men, like the vast majority of men in my practice who I've taken care of over the last 25 years who've had an elevated PSA greater than 4 has nothing to do with cancer. This is why it's a bad test. So anyway, he— we do routine— I believe in blood work. That's different than screening per se, but I do routine blood work. And for our patients, we do a lot of blood work depending on what they're working on. And he had a PSA and it was elevated higher than 4. Okay, well, he was concerned. I get it. And so eventually we did an MRI of his pelvis to look at his prostate. Nothing there. Maybe his prostate was enlarged. So the PSA can elevate from an enlarged prostate. The PSA can elevate from a prostate infection. Lots of other things. So we repeated the blood test over time. Totally fine. So last week he sends me that he did a full body MRI, and that full body MRI is not very, um, it's not— the visualization's way worse than a dedicated MRI, if that makes sense.

So the image quality is way worse.

Okay.

So he did a full body MRI and he sent it to me and said, I need to talk because they see something in my prostate. Now, 6 months ago, he did a dedicated MRI of his pelvis Nothing. So again, we're going to have to repeat that now. He's gonna have to have a dedicated MRI of his pelvis. I'm confident that maybe his anatomy is a little bit different, maybe his prostate's a little bit enlarged, but I don't think he has prostate cancer. But what he's created for himself is a lot of anxiety. Yep, yep. And it's a slippery slope when you've got that anxiety. What do people do? Well, now they're drinking more, Now they're taking, you know, whatever it is. Now they need more benzos. It's a slippery slope. That anxiety and that stress, that'll wear you out.

What do you recommend if somebody gets diagnosed with cancer that's one of your patients? Do you have places that you recommend to them?

I do.

Are they in the US?

Uh, no. The, the number one place I— there's a couple things is I just met a patient and his wife is dealing with non-small cell lung cancer, which is aggressive. She's doing okay. She's in the conventional route. I'll just tell you what I told him. I'm going to meet with her when I get back next week. There's a place that I learned of in Thailand called the Bangkok Stem Cell Center where they're able to do things that we can't do in this country. For example, I have a friend who lives in Bali who introduced me to them, and he was introduced— and sorry, Last year he got diagnosed with this very rare type of fibrosarcoma, um, just like a connective tissue, soft tissue type of cancer. Super rare, but it can tend historically to metastasize or grow. He had the biopsy, saw that he had it, so he went to this place and they measured something called natural killer cells in his blood. Now the natural killer cells seem to be the, the type of white blood cell that attacks the cancer in the blood. I'm— this is an oversimplification, So when they tested his natural killer cells, they were really weak and they were— say, I'm going to make this up— less than 5% kill rate.

Again, I'm messing up the details. So they were able to do some things to amplify how those natural killer cells grow. They retest them. Now he's greater than 60%, and then they're giving him back his natural killer cells as an infusion into his body.

The cancer?

Correct.

And it worked.

It's working. Wow. And that's just one example. The other thing I tell people to do that I told this patient, and this is kind of confusing, you brought up water and I'm again not the expert, but people are familiar with hydrogen. Hydrogen is the first element in the periodic table, right? It's got one electron, one proton. Hydrogen over time morphs into something called heavy water. Which has— we call it deuterium. One electron, one proton, one neutron. Now, the problem with deuterium is that it's a little bit heavier, and so our bodies and our cells can't use it as efficiently. I know we're going to get into the mitochondria. This might be a good time. Mitochondria, the body, you know, the batteries of the cell. When you're— might— we know that people stressing themselves out working, you know, late hours out of sync with natural world. We get tired as we get older. We get tired more and more. We don't have that energy to do all the things we want to do. A lot of that academic research comes back to the mitochondria not working well. The mitochondria take our fuel, things we eat— fats, proteins, carbohydrates— and through a series of steps turns it into energy, water— by the way, it's deuterium-depleted water, I'll get back to that— and oxygen.

Electron.

And the main way this works, and why I want to talk about it, is there's 5 hubs that sit on this mitochondrial membrane. We call them 5 hubs. They call them cytochromes. The first hub is where NAD is used. NAD is a chemical cousin of niacin, so chemical cousin of vitamin B3. And what the mitochondrial membrane is supposed to do is we're supposed to exchange electrons for protons down these different hubs. So you can just think of it like a conveyor belt. And so we're moving these electrons and protons to eventually get to Hub 5, where we spin this wheel to make ATP, oxygen, and water. Again, oversimplification. Hub 1 is where NAD operates. And this is where I think most people get stuck. I think this is where we form a traffic jam. And so that exchange of electrons and protons slows, just like if people are familiar with a traffic jam, you get stuck in traffic, can't go anywhere. So we can't make as much energy. This is very real. This is why I'm a big believer in NAD therapy. You know, I think I've overseen more NAD treatments than anyone on the planet.

We got into it, you know, 12, 14 years ago before it was popular or anything. Very impressed with how NAD works. Very impressed. Doesn't work for everybody. There's a lot of holes. We can't measure your NAD levels, but clinically observing people who before they start NAD to after they go through NAD treatments, it's transformational for most people.

Interesting.

Yeah. And so that's part of that mitochondria. That's, that's Hub 1. Hub 2 has to do with something called riboflavin succinic acid. Hub 3 is where that CoQ10 I talked about is utilized. Hub 4 is also called cytochrome C oxidase, is where methylene blue can bind. Methylene blue, basically, which has become super popular, people can take methylene blue and basically jumpstart their mitochondria because we can jump over these other hubs. So, we can get these, again, conveyor belt work.

This is that stuff I think you injected it in me.

Yeah, you took it as an IV. Yeah.

And, people eat it too.

You can take it orally. People take it under the tongue, turns their mouth blue. Yeah, that's that methylene blue stuff. Fascinating compound.

You show— I think you showed me my cells under a microscope after that.

We did live blood analysis. Yeah, good memory. Yeah, yeah.

And so what is it doing?

So, so it's basically allowing for more efficient transmission of electrons for protons so you can turn that wheel. That last wheel is what's important. So you're making more energy, right? Because that energy stored in this ATP molecule, adenosine triphosphate, And we want more of that because that is the potential to have energy to go in your nervous system, help you think a thought, help you move, help you throw a ball, help you shoot a gun, whatever you want to do, help you train, right? You need ATP. You also need water. You know, the, the largest substance in our body is water. And you need oxygen, right, to live your life. And so, I mean, you showed me when I went there, you showed—

I think there was a I think there was a before and after comparison of what the cells look like before you gave it to me.

Yep.

What they look like after we did. How long does that last?

Probably not— I don't know per se because we haven't tested it out kind of longitudinally. And what we're talking about for your listeners is live blood analysis, right? As opposed to drawing your blood from your veins, sending it to a lab, and then days later that blood is tested for a volume of a hormone or a cholesterol level. We're looking in real time. We prick your finger, we put your blood on a slide and look at that slide under the microscope, and we can see how your red blood cells are moving, how your white blood cells are aggregating or congregating. And what we've seen over and over and over, and why you remember it, is before people do treatments like this, it tends to move very slowly and be kind of sludgy. This is represent— this is what's happening in your bloodstream. And then you do a treatment like methylene blue and you look under the same microscope an hour later, and now the red blood cells are moving. They're cruising along. It's fascinating. It's fascinating. So what is it doing? Well, there's an electrical charge. And again, this is over my pay grade, but that methylene blue is helping the electrical components of the cell and helping us make more ATP, also more water and more oxygen.

So should we be taking that every day?

I don't know if you need it every day, but, you know, a couple times a week is probably a good thing. Yeah, a couple times a week. It tends to be long-acting. Again, it's gotten very popular. People are talking about it. People can take it every day, but I don't think you need to. I think it, you know, again, for me, it's least effective dose for the maximal result. I think we want to be reasonable about it. But yeah, I think it's a— I think it's fabulous for the mitochondria. Also seems to be a great cognitive enhancer. So methylene blue can— what's called a mild MAOI inhibitor, so it keeps your dopamine and serotonin in your nervous system a little bit longer. So people report back and say they're a little bit sharper. Um, and then we talked about a little bit earlier kind of repurposing drugs in terms of cancer therapy. I think methylene blue is utilized in that scenario as well. So it's versatile therapy. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I can keep talking about the mitochondria. I can talk about this deuterium if you want.

Sure.

Yeah, go back to the deuterium. So again, you asked me what, what would I tell people, or what I do if cancer, right? Go to that place in Thailand if I could, and then I'd work on the water. Water, we talked about, you know, you have to filter it, you have to remineralize it. But water over time becomes heavy water. That's just from being on the Earth. That's by no fault of anyone's. It's been shown. So I'm going to make up numbers here, but most people have a deuterium level of about 150 parts per million. Okay. There was many, many years ago, they found a group— we talked about, you know, the Blue Zones. They found a group of people living in Siberia region, no cancer. And when they measured— zero, zero— their deuterium levels were in the 80s.

And what is deuterium?

So deuterium is hydrogen that's morphed into essentially heavy hydrogen. So it's got now 1 electron, 1 proton, 1 neutron, whereas hydrogen itself just has 1 electron, 1 proton. So there's going to be— we're going to see more and more talk about this because I think it matters. How do you deplete your deuterium levels? Okay. Does that make sense? Because, you know, because if you just eat the regular food you're eating, you're not going to do it. If you just drink the regular water you're doing, you can't do it. So there's one way to do it. Well, there's multiple ways, but the most practical way is you actually have to drink something called deuterium depleted water. So it's a fancy and complicated process where they're taking that deuterium and removing it from the water.

Okay.

So as opposed to being 150 parts per million, you can get it down to 5. So if you consume— one consumes deuterium-depleted water over and over and over and over again, over time they're going to deplete the deuterium. Now, there's a lot of work to be done, but it resonates to me that if one has cancer, that's the perfect scenario for one working to deplete, deplete their deuterium because based off that cohort of those people living in some Siberia region where there was no cancer and their deuterium levels were way lower than the average person. So the idea is, oversimplification, water is the most abundant compound in our body, right? I think everyone's familiar with that. Most of it's, you know, the, the The stuff we make by our mitochondria is deuterium depleted. That's the best kind. The stuff that's around ourselves has a lot of deuterium. If we can convert and make— get to lower deuterium levels, it makes it easier to use for our body. And again, I'm not an expert on this. This is an oversimplification, but I— if I'm your listener, I'd look into it.

So we need hydrogenated water. You know what you're saying?

Deuterium depleted water.

But isn't that the one and the same?

They're similar, but, but they're not the same. Deuterium is a, is a kind of isotope of hydrogen.

So how do you get deuterium-depleted water?

There's a couple companies worldwide who make it. It's expensive.

You have to order it?

You do.

It's not like a filter or something you can put under your sink?

And I, I know the guys who started the company in America. They don't make it here, it's too expensive. It's called Drink Lite Water, L-I-T-E. Water. So Drink L-I-T-E Water. That's where people can order it. It's expensive, going to get very expensive if that's the only water you drink. So I don't think that that's practical for most people. If you had cancer though, that would be something that's very high on the list of what I would recommend and do. I would try to get your deuterium level as low as possible.

What do you think about hydrogenated water? Is it, is it a gimmick? Is it real?

I don't think it's gimmick. I think that better is hydrogenated gas you teeth.

Okay.

Yeah. And so different devices make different things. The problem with water is complicated, right? So I think that the, the hydrogen water is not going to move the needle much, right? This is even like we saw this with alkaline water, right? People say if it's alkaline, is it alkalizing? Meaning does it make your water, uh, you know, we're talking about pH scale, right? And they're talking about acid and alkaline. And people thought, well, if I drink more alkaline water, I'll become more alkaline because cancer grows in an acid environment. That's not totally true. Same thing with hydrogen-rich water. One of the things we— I got for our new office though is we're going to have a, you know, hydrogen generator. So while people are doing IVs and stuff, different treatments, they're going to be breathing in hydrogen gas because I think that makes more sense. Okay, complicated. Lot— lots of different tools here. Sounds like it. I know, I know.

You know, you, you, uh, just a little earlier you had mentioned, um, people coming in with 40, 50 supplements. Yeah, taking 40, 50 supplements, and, and that we don't need that. But then, but we're also talking about all the nutrition that's been depleted out of the— yeah, fruits and vegetables. So how are we supposed to replace that if we're not doing all these supplements?

So we like to test, right? And so again, if people need it, I'm not against it. I'm in favor of whatever works. I just think that the paradigm— and I get it, people listen to a podcast and then they buy 3 things based on it and they add and they're never subtracting. And so their medicine cabinet grows to these— now they're just taking and they don't know why they're taking it. So if you're taking it for a particular reason, great, right? You have a goal, great. But most people aren't— they've gotten over the goal, right? Whether they're tired, whether they're low mood, whether they want to lose weight, they have pain. I'm not saying don't take the supplements. I think because you're right, they can be valuable tools. But if you're just taking blindly, you just added and you've amassed now all these supplements, you don't even know what they're doing. Just because they're natural and safe doesn't make them effective by any means. And so I'm a big favor of doing this for the long term, you know, making it reasonable for people. And I think there's some things that we should focus on.

And then again, my view lens of the world is it's not destination-based, it's directional change. Meaning, oh, now you sprained your knee. Now you've, you know, now we got to work on the knee. Now you want to be a better golfer. Now we got to work on that. Now you have a test coming up, you're a student, you want to be a better focuser. There's lots of things we can do in a goal-directed manner which are great. But then once you get to the goal, I think you probably back off them. You know, you don't need to keep amassing them. And that's what people tend to do. That's just my observation.

Was there anything left on the mitochondria we needed to cover?

Mitochondria? Yeah, I mean, the mitochondria— I— so for me, I tie in the mitochondria. I think of, again, simplification just helps me— of energy, right? I think what most people are looking for is energy. And I talk to people, what is the number one thing they want? More energy, right? People are tired now. People are stressed out. People wake up, they don't feel good. They have to caffeinate, stimulate. People get a second wind, so now they don't sleep. People can't turn on the energy. I think of like a little child, right? They can turn off and on that energy when— at will. I think that's the goal, right? It's not just having energy, it's having energy when you want it, when you need it. And I think it's fascinating. And so I— to me, there's 7 different energy circuits essentially, right? The mitochondria are one of them. We can talk about the others, but the mitochondria are powerful, and it's like the cellular circuitry. And, and, you know, it's very real for people when, you know, we give them mitochondrial-enhancing nutrients like NAD, like methylene blue, like CoQ10, and watch what happens. I'm a strict clinician.

I'm not an academic, and I have the fortune of being able to observe people who do these therapies and take these certain nutrients, and it's a game changer. For a lot of them. You know, we talked about, uh, before, um, you know, you had Pete Scobell on, right? Great, amazing podcast. Amazing, great American. I got to know Pete like a decade ago, and he, he stands out in my mind. When I got to know him, he was complaining that he couldn't read, his eyes would go all over the place, chronic daily headaches, and he was depressed. And he'd been through the VA system left and right, upside down. They weren't helping him. You're more familiar with this than I am, working with a lot of veterans. And so, um, he was living in Aspen at the time, went out to Aspen, um, and we gave him NAD IV. And again, this is like 2016, this before it was any bit popular. After 2 treatments, Pete's symptoms were gone.

After 2 treatments?

Yeah. Wow. And, um, if you talk to him about it, he'd still say it was an impactful part of his life and I still work with Pete, and it's— and that is indicative of how other people respond to NAD+. And that's when the mitochondria has been damaged through, you know, he told me he was blown up 50+ times. He had 50+ traumatic brain injuries, right? NAD+ works first, you know, on the nervous system. And if your nervous system's in disarray and been harmed by blasts, we get energy into that nervous system, it can start to heal. Okay, so yeah, I mean, the mitochondria is very well studied from an academic perspective. I think it's part of how people, um, you know, whether it's taking NAD or these NAD precursors— I find NAD itself to be the best. Again, that's just my experience overseeing tons and tons and tons and tons of NAD treatments. Now we have methylene blue, and then there are certain mitochondrial nutrients What are the 3 keys? The 3 keys. So this is what I think of as like the 3 paradoxes, right? That this is just my take on it from working with people and fascinated with human health and progress.

The first is, um, energy comes from rest. That's number 1. And I think, you know, we live in a time where People beat themselves up. You know, workouts become a chore. We have to put our foot on the gas more and more and more. And people don't value downtime and recovery time. So that's the first. The second is symptoms are signals. The conventional medicine, modern medicine says, if you've got this, something's wrong. I'd look at it and say, actually, that's your body healing, right? You've got knee pain, you got a headache. You got fatigue, you're out of alignment. So we need to honor those signals and understand them as opposed to giving you Band-Aids. I mean, Band-Aids are appropriate every now and then. Let's figure it out. Let's get to the root cause. The last is strength comes from coherence, right? And the way I think about this, I just read this, I didn't come up with this. If you were to hold water in your hand and you squeeze it, what happens?

Goes between your fingers.

What happens if you hold it with your open palm? It stays, right? So we become more still and more coherent. Think about your body. Like we already talked about, water is the most dominant substance in the body. If you're squeezing in tight and under stress all the time, you're not very fluid. If you're not very fluid, you know, and you know this better than I from your training, like working with people, it's not just about having big biceps. It's about how can you be coherent. So those, I think, are the 3 keys.

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Go to babbel.com/srs. That's Babbel, B-A-B-B-E-L, .com/srs for up to 60% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. The internet wasn't built with your privacy in mind, but Glacier was. Open the app, tap connect, done. You're protected. Remember, privacy isn't paranoia, It's protection. Take your privacy back. Download Glacier today. All right, Doc, we're back from the break. So, uh, I just went and looked up the Light Water.

Expensive, right?

Yeah, I, I just— but I ordered it.

But it's worth trying.

It is expensive.

It is expensive. But like we were just saying, I think it tastes like the cleanest water you've ever had. Wow. Yeah, I mean, there's something to it. It's expensive water, but I'd like people to try stuff, you know. I think that it's— you just don't know what'll click.

Do they expect— do they expect people to drink this all the time?

Again, it depends, right? So like we were talking about, in the context of you've got active cancer, yeah, I don't know of another way. What they say is a higher saturated fat diet has the least amount of deuterium. But I think that takes a while, right? So if you've got— and the guys I know who started the company, one's named Robert, the other's Victor, they would say if you've got active cancer, you don't necessarily want to lower it too quickly because you could have a tumor crisis, is what's called, like a tumor. If it can kind of lyse and, and I don't want to say explode, but implode, and, and that can cause some problems. You can get blood clots, things like that. So you want to do it in a gradual way. But the idea is if you've got cancer, I don't know of a more practical thing one can do than to lower their deuterium.

Wow.

Knowing what I know, I mean, there's lots of protocols, supplements, people talking about baking soda, green tea extract. I mean, on and on and on, removing toxicity, stop using a microwave, you know, only using stainless steel or glass to cook, things like that to remove toxicity. I'm talking about very basic stuff.

They need to be teaching this shit in school. But like, I went down there, I just watched this, uh, documentary. I'm actually going to try to get this woman on, okay? And she was talking about the fertility crisis because of the microplastics. Have you seen this?

I haven't seen it, but I, I, you know, it's, it's interesting topic because it's become normal for couples to jump right into in vitro fertilization. This is all new.

That's kind of— that's what—

this is all new.

She brought on— I know it's a small sample size, and she says that in the documentary, She brings on, I believe it's 6 couples who are trying to get pregnant, young couples. One of them had been trying to get pregnant for 10 years.

Wow.

And she brings these people in and, and I mean, I'm not a doctor, I don't know the tests, but she tests them, you know, just to see, uh, she tests the sperm count in each one of the males and then she tests the I don't know, the microplastics. Yeah. And I guess you can test for those, how many microplastics each one of them have. And so she, she does a test and then they go through and she's there for 90 days and they go through and they just wipe out everybody's, you know, what are you wearing, what are you drinking, what are you cooking your food in, what are you buying your food in, you know, how basically like how What are you drinking your water out of? What do you— you know, all this shit. And it's like everything we have, everything. Oh, is— I didn't realize, I guess skin absorbs 40% of everything you put on it.

Yeah. I mean, it depends. I've heard different statistics, but yeah. Anyways, I mean, think about—

she does this thing for these people, you know, and then, and then, you know, they do like the revamp. Like, all right, now you're going to buy berries from this place, do this and that and the other thing. I think every one of these couples got pregnant after the 90 days.

I mean, it's— again, you said they should teach us in school, but no, that's not the goal, Sean. You know that.

Cutting boards. No, everything.

I know, but the goal is to keep people as customers, right? Keep us— our energies dim so we keep coming back to the trough. For more medicines, more testing, and then more diseases. And we've normalized it. We've completely normalized chronic disease and think that this is— I don't think it's normal at all. I don't think this is how people lived. I think it's supposed to be vital, strong, immersed. I always think of like children who are fascinating because children don't know what temperature it is, what time it is. They are absolutely immersed in what they're doing. You know, you say to a kid, come back before dark. They don't know what before dark is, you know. But we can't do that as adults. We can't be present.

Yeah, yeah, I know you're right. So I like to live out in the woods.

I don't— I mean, I think that's such a healthy choice. I think it's awesome of you. And they've shown— I mean, you can speed up and go to the technology side of Being in the forest, in the woods, is very healing. Just being out in nature is very healing.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. I tell people, because I— we talked about a little bit earlier about circadian rhythm and kind of how people handle cortisol. And the fastest way I tell people, if you want to get yourself back in sync, go camping for 3 days. Don't take your phone or leave it in the car, whatever. Don't check it and sleep on the earth. You will get back in sync. Your body knows. So interesting. Yeah, yeah. We've gotten so disconnected. I'm— again, I'm not advocating people want to go do that full-time. Great. I think most of us are looking for mitigation strategies.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, like, how can we have a little bit of both? That's fine.

Let's talk about protocols.

Yeah, start with peptides.

Perfect. Here we go.

Yeah, peptides, right? 2025 became the year of the peptide. You know, I've been fortunate. I think, you know, I don't know the number, but I've probably overseen more peptide treatments than anyone probably in this country, maybe on the planet. I was in the right place at the right time.

When I researched you on, uh, Anthropics Cloud, it, it says you are the godfather of peptides.

All right, well, good, good. We'll leave it at that, but I, you know, to be really on the very, very elemental level, peptides are chains of amino acids. We call it a peptide if it's 40 amino acids in length or shorter. We call it a protein if it's 41 amino acids in length or longer. By definition, these are small molecules. They're signaling molecules. And I've been super impressed with peptides because they're very, very safe, you know. And to me, it always got to be safety first. And so I think of them to make a distinction for people. I think of peptides as like whispering to your cells and pharmaceuticals like a sledgehammer. Yeah, I think it's just a good analogy. And so sledgehammer is we're going to take the same dose, give it the same everyone, we're going to have side effects, but by golly, you're going to feel something. And, and peptides are working with your biology, you know, signaling. So there's lots of different categories of peptides. There's the growth hormone-releasing peptides, things like ipamorelin, tesamorelin, um, sermorelin. And these, by and large, all the peptides we're talking about are injected. So they're injected under the skin.

In the case of the growth hormone-releasing peptides, travel up to the part of the brain that releases growth hormone, binds the growth hormone receptor, and puts out some growth hormone. Well, as we know, as people get older, stress out their bodies, we put out less growth hormone. Growth hormone is an anabolic hormone like testosterone. And it's in charge of helping us mend, heal, recover, rejuvenate our cells, our tissues. That's why it's banned in professional sports, right? If you're a pitcher and you injure your elbow, you want to be back in 2 weeks, not 2 months. Well, growth hormone will do that. And so, um, I still use a lot of growth hormone with— when appropriate with my patients, but we've replaced a lot of that with these peptides because it gets you most of the way there. And, it's working with your own biology. It's giving you a push. So, that's a big category. Another big category is the anti-inflammatory peptides like BPC-157.

That's the one I was talking about earlier.

Yeah, the one that you said you think helps you. Yeah, we have you on a combination of which includes the BPC.

I have torn rotator cuff. I don't know what's going on with the other shoulder, but usually I can't lift my shoulder over 90 degrees and I think I was on that for me, I don't know, 2 weeks, maybe a month.

Yeah.

And full rotation.

Yeah. And that's your experience.

So what is it doing?

Yeah, it's very anti-inflammatory to the soft tissue, so the tendons and ligaments, you know. Um, it's, it comes from, again, our kind of our stomach juices. This, this particular peptide stands for Body Protection Compound. So your experience is what a lot of people experience with BPC. A lot of people experience. I had a patient in the office this week, um, and he plays guitar and does a lot of yard work, and he messed up his forearm. And we actually gave him intravenous BPC because we use some of these peptides intravenously. And he said he had 2 treatments, and he said, I'm, I'm 100% better.

So does it go away?

It heals, right? So I think a lot of it with the inflammation is you're getting, like we talked about earlier, getting aggregation of inflammatory cells you know, that sit in the tissue, sit in the extracellular space, and they may hit nerves, right? They may cause nerve irritation, which is then sending a signal to your brain, pain. And what they do is they help facilitate the removal of these inflammatory cytokines and this cascade so that you don't have it aggregated there. So it's actually healing it. Now, the challenges is for people is once you're healed, don't reinjure. Right? And people have a hard time, as you know. My patients tend to be the peak performers of the world, right? They don't want to take any time off, and that's a challenge, and I get it. And so as we get older, we're in this degenerative state, you know. We're very focused on lifting weights and getting strong, but we also get tight, we get firm. What tends to happen to people is, well, firm breaks. That's just a reality. So I think including peptides, you could argue that one who works out a lot should be on BPC-157, you know.

And we were talking about earlier, interesting day, because today and tomorrow is the day the FDA is discussing if these peptides will still be allowed to be compounded. Compounded means made by a pharmacy, and that's how we do it. We don't use any research chemicals. They're all individually made. They're all the best sourcing highest potency. They're all tested, analyzed, made by pharmacies who are FDA registered, state board, you know, inspected. Best of the best. We do it all the best way. What happened a couple years ago is the FDA removed them. They said they can't be compounded anymore. This is why these gray market peptides took off, so people can go online and get their own peptides with no oversight from sources that are, you know, probably contaminated or illegitimate. I'm not saying they're all bad. That's not the way it works. But there— we don't have any oversight when they're— when we're allowed to use them, like hopefully we will be able to, you know, then— and we can now, and hopefully that continues— well, then we can continue to compound them in a very safe manner. And that's what—

what's their argument?

Their argument, I do understand it, right? Their argument is that the compound didn't go through the FDA approval process, right? So if we look at drugs, pharmaceuticals, a lot of money, a lot of research, following the hoops that the FDA wants you to jump through, including safety studies and certainly, you know, testing on people and looking at, you know, what goes wrong, what goes right. We don't have that for these compounds.

Lots of things aren't approved by the FDA.

Exactly. Now the challenging part with this is they sit in a gray area because they're— most of them are injected. Right, if we take something like a nutritional supplement like vitamin C, never FDA approved, on the counter you can get vitamin C, take as much or as little as you want. Well, people would argue, well, that's because you take it orally, like you— it's very, very safe. Now what I would argue, and I've actually spoken to people in the Trump administration about this a little while ago, maybe a year ago, is I think we need to evolve where we are, how the FDA works. Right? My argument to them was what we saw with the COVID vaccine was that the FDA was going to expedite pushing through a vaccine that was never tested. We know that's true now. It was never tested. It was a big experiment. The testing came after it was released, not before, using these mRNA, whatever you want to call them. That was the testing, right? It wasn't that they were tested beforehand and said, oh, they were tested while we used them. That's a big problem. But since they're able to do that and now a lot of that's become the norm, right?

These pharmaceutical companies are seeking fast approval process based on something like the COVID vaccine, saying there's such a need and such an urgency. People can argue that. What I said to them, I think there also needs to be a place for compounds to be evaluated which have proven to be very safe. I don't think that's happening right again. I've just seen again, I think that I don't think people at the FDA are out to harm us. I don't think pharmaceutical companies are out to harm us, but it's a business.

That's what it's—

I mean, I think the business, it's pretty much been established.

I mean, yeah, we need a lobbying firm. I don't know.

So, so my hope is today and tomorrow they meet and they say, hey, it seems safe. We're not hearing of, you know, adverse reactions, which there aren't. We're not hearing of, you know, I want to remind people, minimal, minimal 7,000 deaths a year from medicines. That's just the lowest number possible. At least 200,000 adverse reactions that are reported a year from just medicines being prescribed. These are big numbers. So this happens every day. With a pharmaceutical, yet there's so many pharmaceuticals that they're still, you know, yet peptides, because they don't fit into this category or that, we have to be— we can't use.

I mean, there is a narrative out there. I've had somebody on the show that actually brought it up that said that, um, they think that the use of peptides will create an uptick in the— in cancer. Is there any truth to that?

I, I don't think so at all. No, that doesn't resonate with me. And I think the challenge is this, is— and this is just my observation— we have a lot of people reading about what a peptide does, and then from my perspective, I see what it does to people clinically. I am biased. I'm going to be on the clinical side. I take care of a lot of people over the years, and we're talking 10+ years of using peptides. Is it perfect? No. Has I've ever seen cancer develop? No. You know, and we're talking big numbers of people now. Have I seen blood clots, heart? No, none of it. Have I seen a rash from an injection? Sure. Have I seen it not work? Sure. And I know what they're talking about with BPC causing angiogenesis, but that's where you develop new blood vessels for, for cancer and say, oh well, the cancer, which is now developing new blood vessel has a blood supply, so it's going to feed on its own, right? And the BPC could be making that worse. That's one theoretical. Two, I could argue that's a really healthy thing with heart disease, right?

And this happens already naturally. If someone's got an artery that's feeding their heart muscle and it's becoming full of plaque, the body is intelligent enough to make new blood vessels to fulfill where those, you know, those tissues need to be supplied by oxygen. That's angiogenesis too. You see what I'm saying? So I don't know, right? And so some people would come at this like we've been talking about and say, well, we need to do longitudinal study. That's probably a good thing, right? But you have to do it clinically. And the trouble with doing clinically— we've touched upon this— unless we're doing some sort of live, real-time analysis, how do we really know right? And, and it gets tricky, and it's hard to do, and it's, and it's harder to do than I think we've been led to believe. I'm all in favor of learning, um, but I'm not in favor of dismissing anecdotal data as BS because it doesn't count because it wasn't done by a proper study. I'm just not, because my experience is the anecdotal data, data is super valuable.

I'm interested in people sitting in front What, what are some other things that you would use peptides for?

So there's peptides for inflammation, right? So BPC-157, TB-500, they have these weird names, KPV, GHK-Cu, which is GHK copper. All of these are very anti-inflammatory, right? So they're promoting anti-inflammatory mechanisms, not pro-inflammatory mechanisms. There's peptides for the nervous system. One called CMAX, which was developed in Russia many decades ago to help people who've had a stroke, people who've had a traumatic brain injury. CMAX and its cousin Selank— Selank taps into the GABA system, which is our calming system. That's the same receptors that alcohol and benzos tap into. Well, Selank is very calming for some people. Um, in fact, the combination of CMAX and Selank is like a natural Adderall. Um, and so we make that into a nasal spray. I have a lot of patients who try that because, you know, I like the nasal spray because it's kind of a quick hit to the nervous system and they can redose it. I'm not going to say it's perfect and certainly not for everybody, but you know, one of my problems with mainstream medicine is a lot of doctors act like gatekeepers, like, no, you can't do it. Why should it be up to them?

Like, if it's safe, why can't the patient try? I'm a big believer, let people try and explore as long as we're doing it safely. And from my perspective, I have more experience with stuff than most. We're going to start there, right? We're going to start as a reference point. I only want to— want you to try it if it's safe. We're never going to recommend things that are out of bounds, ever. And I recognize that doctors don't know either, right? We train a lot of doctors. They're interested in learning, but to your point, we need to teach this stuff. That's not coming from conventional medical education. That's not part of their model. So I want to help these providers, these physicians, learn how to use these tools. So other peptides good for the nervous system: Semax, Selank, Cerebrolysin. We've had great success. Cerebrolysin is this neuropeptide. Patients who've had a stroke, you know, my nurse practitioner, um, her dad had a stroke. He did so well using Cerebrolysin, just subcutaneously injecting himself. She said he made such an amazing recovery. And she used to work in a kind of stroke rehab center. So she has a lot of experience with it.

So cerebrolysin is another one, um, that we can use. There's mitochondrial peptides, peptides like MOTC, which I think of as the stronger, fitter, faster peptide, helps with body composition and energy. Humanin, which is like the DNA repair peptide, one called SS-31. Which we talked about the mitochondria, we talked about where methylene blue binds on that fourth hub. Well, that's where SS31 binds to help keep the shape and architecture of the mitochondria intact. So again, it's challenging, a lot of different peptides. How do we know what to use? Well, the way I do it is I want to understand patient's motivation, understand their story, understand their goals. And then we start. And then I want feedback. How's it working? Are you experiencing— like with you, my shoulder's feeling better. We're on the right track. I have more energy. I'm sleeping better. There's peptides for circadian rhythm, one called epitalon. Um, there's one called pinealon, which helps us release more melatonin. I could go on and on, but I think you get the gist.

What other kind of protocols?

Hormones are a big deal. I think understanding— we touched upon this a little bit— as people age, I think the most tangible thing that happens is that their hormones decline, right? And there's a lot of hormones. Hormones by definition are just messenger molecules. So we have adrenal hormones, cortisol, DHEA, pregnenolone. There's thyroid hormone, which works with, you know, metabolism. There's insulin, is a signaling hormone that helps get, you know, glucose utilized There's growth hormone, which is an anabolic hormone. Testosterone, another anabolic hormone, probably the biggest deal for men. There's estrogen, progesterone. Um, you can see there's a lot. And so what we like to do is understand someone's— where they are, and if clinically and in the lab they're low or they're exhibiting signs of deficiencies, we may consider replacing those deficiencies with bioidentical hormones. So for men, testosterone is the first and obvious place to look. Most men don't realize that low testosterone in a man is the number one risk factor for heart disease, stroke, depression, and dementia.

Is it really?

Yeah, it's a big deal. Big deal. As well as if you look at the studies, clinical studies, men who replace their testosterone report a higher quality of life across the board. So again, the goal is not to manipulate. The goal is not to make your arms as big as your legs unless you are a bodybuilder and you want to do that. We never want to manipulate the hormones. We want to help you get back and you— and we want to trial, you know, taking this hormone or those hormones and see how you feel, see how you respond. For most people, it's a very positive experience. The goal is never to make someone younger. I think that's a silly, silly goal. The goal is to help people feel their best. So they can perform their best at any age.

So what, what, what level T should somebody have? I mean, are you— are we shooting for—

it's relative—

we had it when we were 21?

Some people say that. So here's how I look at it, is, you know, we want to—

because you go to the regular doctor and it's like, oh, you're great for your age. Yeah.

So let's talk about—

does that mean—

I agree. So let's talk about where do reference ranges come from, right? Reference ranges come from what's in the population. And as we've talked about, the majority of people in the population— we're talking about adults— overweight, tired, depressed, and taking at this point multiple pharmaceuticals. So just being in that range to me is mediocre. I don't want anyone to be mediocre. Life's too short to be mediocre. So when we're looking at the ranges, we want it to be on the upper end of the range, right? And so it doesn't mean, like, for example, testosterone range— most labs' normal is going to be somewhere between 200 and we'll say 1,500. Some labs it's more, some labs it's less. It doesn't mean you have to be 1,500 to feel your best, by no means. Again, it's exploration. Everyone's different. Everyone has different, um, stories that they tell, that stories they experience, life that they live. So if we do a trial of testosterone, over time we find, hey, I'm feeling great, and we draw their blood and it's 800, great. Doesn't mean we have to shoot for the moon, and it certainly doesn't mean we want to manipulate it and get super physiologic.

You know, because any kind of thing you do to the body, there's going to be other things it affects. When men take more testosterone, they're going to make more estrogen. Sometimes that's good, but if they're making too much estrogen, they feel bloated, swollen, they gain water weight, they get really emotional. Some of these hormones, I think of them like kids on a playground. Some of them, like testosterone, testosterone is a fun, happy kid. Everyone wants more testosterone. Other hormones like cortisol or stress hormones, like the big bad bully, too much cortisol, too little cortisol has a negative impact on other hormones. In terms of testosterone, though, because this is a great question, if we start and someone is low, I just want them to be higher associated with how they feel. Now, does that mean that if we measure and they say, hey, I'm— I think I could sleep better, that we can't try going a little higher? Sure, if it's appropriate. But I think there's an interesting book, it's called The Trouble with Testosterone, and it was written by this guy. He's a sociologist at Stanford called, uh, his name is Robert Sapolsky, and he, and he studies baboons in the wild.

He also wrote another book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Fascinating guy, talk— that talks about stress. But The Trouble with Testosterone, to summarize, is he found that in the baboon population, you have the alpha male with the highest level of testosterone And then you have the number 5 in the pecking order with the lowest level of testosterone.

No shit.

Both of those have the shortest lifespan. Number 1, number 5 had the shortest lifespan. The longest lifespan was number 3, right in the middle. And his theory was, if you're number 1, you're always trying to stay number 1. That's very stressful. If you're number 5, you're always trying to get to the top. That's very stressful. If you're number 3, you're good, but you don't have to be too good. And I think that applies to— I think that applies to a lot of things in life. So to answer your question, I just want people to be on the closer to the top, but based on how they feel. The more, more stuff we use, the more side effects we're going to have. So hormones, I think talking about protocols, they're foundational, right? For a female, it's thyroid hormone. Used to be progesterone. It's a thyroid hormone. Low thyroid in women has become an epidemic. Most women who hit their 40s and 50s are going to have some thyroid problems. Not a pessimist, I'm just a realist.

What do you think about GLP-1?

Great question. I think by and large they're a great tool, and I've seen this, right? I think we've been using semaglutide-trirzepatide for almost 6 years now, maybe 7 years, and I think they work. If I, if I am looking at a weight loss tool, I think it's the most reliable right now. I think you have to use it judiciously. I think that helping people start at a low dose, take their time, go slowly. There's never urgency to me to lose weight. You know, I hear from people, I need to lose weight in a month. You know, I remember some of these supermodels I work with, hey, I'm doing a shoot in 2 weeks.

Can we— any season?

Yeah, like, can we get it? We gotta, we gotta have good expectations. But for most people, the vast majority of us, there's no urgency, right? We want to take our time. And the way they work is they are— it's a signaling molecule. So it's slowing down gastric emptying. So your food, as it goes through your stomach and your digestive tract, is going to be slowed down. So you're going to feel full faster. As you feel full faster, you're not going to eat as much. If you don't eat as much, you're going to lose weight, but you're going to do so and you're not going to feel cranky. I think they can be very effective that way. I really do. And by and large, if we use them judiciously and take our time, we really don't see a lot of side effects. The trouble seemingly that we have now, and it's not really trouble, is people don't want to come off of them. And so people want to stay on them because they're like, I'm afraid I'm going to lose the weight back. And I understand that. And, and again, I think if we're using low dose and we're checking in and we're monitoring, we're probably good.

What I'm starting to see is at higher dose, whatever that is, but higher dose, people are experiencing anhedonia. They're coming back and they don't find pleasure anymore. They don't enjoy sex. They don't want to drink, you know, coffee. Tequila doesn't taste good. They're just not as satisfied. And so I think it's showing that it doesn't just work on the food pathways, it's working on pleasure pathways. And it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out. But as a tool, I think they can be very effective. We've also learned that a lot of people with autoimmune disease and chronic inflammation can benefit from low-dose GLP-1s. So I'm a fan if used appropriately, you know. We monitor. Um, I do have some people who overshoot, you know. I had a patient just a couple months ago, I had to call her out and said, hey, I think this is— this is— you're going too far too fast. You know, you're not looking healthy here. You've lost weight. I get it. But we got to dial that back. And she appreciated it. Like everything, there's always going to be bad apples who—

over.

So, yeah.

What about ozone?

Ozone is interesting. I mean, ozone, which is technically O3, and kind of falls in this category of like oxygen therapies. Traditionally has been used for many decades primarily for wound healing, right? And so the idea— and it still is, um, because the more we need to heal a wound, we need more oxygen in that environment. This is why hyperbaric oxygen in the setting of wound healing is very powerful, very powerful. My wife just had this complicated nose surgery, and, and the surgeon, as part of the recovery, have to go into hyperbaric oxygen after the treatments for days upon days because he found that after having a surgery you can accelerate the healing. And she's found that she's really enjoyed the hyperbaric oxygen. And that, you know, the trouble with oxygen, not to get too far off the path, is for to get oxygen into our system— this is what happens with CPAP— we have to pressurize it, right? And so the idea with people having sleep apnea, if they have a decreased airway and they're not getting enough oxygen to their brain, you can't just have them breathe in oxygen. They won't get more oxygen into their system, so you have to pressurize it.

So then we have these devices that sit on the side of the bed, which no one likes, but it allows for more oxygen to get to the brain so they don't have apneic events where their blood, you know, oxygen dropping too low. Ozone, tying it back in, is another one of these therapies that helps oxygenate our tissues. And so what we do in our office— there's different ways to do ozone— is we'll start an IV and then we'll draw the blood out into a bag. It's a pump system, so it draws the blood out into a bag. We take oxygen gas, we turn it into ozone, which is O3. So we're taking O2 to O3, putting that in the blood, mixing it, and then we're turning the bag over and running that blood back in. We run it through a UV light to essentially clean it. and we're kind of oxygenating their system. Now, industrially, ozone gas is used to like clean out used cars. It has a, you know, disinfectant effect. So we think of that happening in the body. So we've seen it with people who have chronic— not necessarily chronic, but things going in their gut, or post-viral, or they're coming down with an infection.

They have a bacterial infection, a viral infection, a yeast infection. You can use ozone successfully to help clean out that system. And then allows their own innate immune system to strengthen and work. So I think it works well for that, but it also works as an oxygenator, which just helps people have more energy.

How, how, how often should somebody be doing that?

It's variable. I think it depends on what they're working on. If just from a pure, you know, preventive, I want to be my best, I want people to try it if they feel good from it, maybe once a month. I don't necessarily think more than that. Maybe once every couple of months if they're working on stuff. We've had people who, whether it's post-COVID or some other viral thing, they're doing it twice a week. So it just depends.

Twice a week?

Yeah. Yeah. It's very safe. And again, it has a long history.

Have you seen these? I can't remember what they call it.

I think I know what you're talking about. People have the bags of yellow.

It looks like they pissed in a bag. And yeah, what is that?

Plasma pheresis. Yeah. So what they're doing is like dialysis, right? And so the idea is, is we're going to clean the blood really, really well. And so their plasma exchange is basically what it is. So they're drawing their blood out, they're separating the components. The plasma or serum is the fluid. They take the red blood cells out. It and they run it through filters or something, and then they run it back in. And the stuff that they're holding is kind of what they call the debris. Now, I think it's more hype than anything, and the reason I say that is I've known several people to do this treatment and they're like, eh, didn't notice much. The other thing I think about— maybe I'm thinking the wrong way, I don't know— is dialysis. They don't get better. If someone has chronic kidney disease and they're on dialysis, that doesn't get better because they're doing dialysis. Dialysis is filtering their blood so they can remain, you know, alive, essentially. So I think it's a bit of a stretch to say we're just going to clean your blood and you're going to be even healthier. I'm not saying it's bad, but it tends to be very expensive and I've heard it's very uncomfortable.

So when I try to evaluate therapies, I don't want to do things that are hurting people per se. And there has to be some efficacy. In fact, a lot of efficacy.

So you're kind of on the fence about this?

I'm not on the fence. I don't recommend it.

You don't recommend it?

Not plasmapheresis. No, I don't recommend it at all. I looked into offering it in training, and the training was exorbitantly expensive. The business model didn't make sense to me. And people are— you need to charge people. I mean, I think people are paying $15,000, $20,000 per day.

I looked at it per session.

Yeah, for one. I don't— I can't make sense of that. I have a hard time understanding that, particularly when people tell me directly, multiple people did it, didn't notice anything. You're going to spend that much money, I would hope you notice something. Same thing with like peptides. A little bit off topic. If you're injecting yourself with something on a regular basis, I hope you're feeling it, right? I don't want it to be that people are just injecting, well, I think it's working.

Uh-uh.

I want you to feel it. So I'm not a fan of plasmapheresis. Um, I understand why people would do it, right? Again, if— again, it's all contextual. If someone had cancer, if someone had some grave disease, why not? Again, why not try everything?

But I want to go back to the light plasma. The—

say that again.

Light plasma. PEMF. Light plasma.

Yeah, the, the PEMF with the magnetic therapy.

So what is that doing?

I'm not— this is not my, you know, subject matter. The way I think about what's been explained to me, we're electrical beings, right? And so electricity is kind of how we had electricity before we had chemicals, meaning there was charge potential, there was voltage. We know that, for example, our mitochondria maintain a— or cells maintain a voltage to exchange ions or exchange different minerals to allow cellular processes to continue. Gross oversimplification. That electricity also creates a magnetic current, and that magnetic current can get incoherent. And what the PEMF does is essentially lines up this— people are familiar with magnetic therapy, right?

Mm-hmm.

Two things repel, and then you put positive minus and you get attraction. We're trying to get our cells lined up so there's coherence again. So why would someone want to do that? Well, a lot of people are living with pain, inflammation. You know, my wife's got a lot of kind of stored up tension, pain in her muscles, and she's done a lot of that PEMF and really finds it to make a difference. It's— wow. And it's noninvasive. And you're looking at 15, 20-minute sessions, sometimes longer. But in, in the terms of looking at the body contextually, you know, more holistically, it's more than just chemicals. And so that's why I'm excited about incorporating some of these energy devices, from PEMF to hydrogen gas inhalation, vibrational plate. We're also looking at vibroacoustic therapy, which is sound as, you know, mechanical therapy. Everyone's just like, yeah. So there's this, there's this pod I just trialed, um, it's called Solodome, S-O-L-O-D-O-M-E. And, um, basically sit in it and there's different frequencies you can apply, different songs, but it's basically helping your cells get tuned. Again, a lot of people say, oh, that's quackery, that's woo-woo. I don't think so.

You know, our, our Physical being is both mechanical, it's electrical, it's magnetic, it's chemical, it's all of the above. These therapies that, you know, are non-invasive, um, again, going back to ancient traditions, drumming, drumming, sir, I mean, this has a very profound effect on people. Rhythm, sound, um, different frequency, it's a big deal. So we're just trying to understand it, you know, how do you create an environment for the human to thrive, not just be me mediocre.

Any other protocols?

I think for people to do at home, um, is, you know, there's a lot of talk about HRV therapy or HRV understanding, right? Heart rate variability. And what that means is like the in-between the beats of the heart beating, um, we should have coherence. I've said that word a lot, in syncness. It should be in sync. So people are using their Whoop or their Oura Ring or their Apple Watch and trying to get an HRV reading, which ties into their readiness score, their sleep score. And I think that's fine. I think those are probably not the best ways. I think the, the best way is to get, um, like Garmin makes a chest strap called the Polar device. You just put it on, there's an app, and you can do HRV testing. And I think it makes sense for people to do this at home when you wake up in the afternoon, understand your baseline, and then examine what you do, whether it's behaviorally or things you take, and see how your HRV is affected. The higher the HRV has been associated with better health outcomes. So that's something I think is important for people to consider.

Okay, easy, right? Not complicated. You don't have to do it every day, but just try to get a baseline, understand yourself. I think what's missing for people is an, you know, as self-awareness. And, you know, for better or for worse, people are looking for permission for people to do things. You know, that's become very popular. Listen to that podcast, they said to do that. We'll try it out, see how it works for you. You know what I mean? I'm a big fan of exploring that and wanting people to explore it. Everyone's different. Yeah, I commonly hear, particularly peptides, hey, my brother, my cousin was doing this peptide They're doing amazing. Why aren't I? Well, you're very different than your brother and your cousin, you know. Doesn't mean it can't work for you, but maybe you need a different dose. Maybe you need different dosing. Maybe you need twice a day instead of once a day. That's what we like trying to help people do is figure out that individualization.

What am I missing? I don't know. I think we've got it.

This is awesome, doc. I just want to say, Sean, you're doing amazing work. You've had an amazing life. God's really chosen you to do some heavy lifting. You know, you're selfless. You sacrifice throughout your life. Means a lot that I get to know you, that you invite me to have conversations with your audience. And just want you to know, speaking for the rest of your audience, how grateful we are for someone like you. I know it's not easy when you do have to sacrifice and you do have to do heavy lifting, but I can tell you it's noticed. And from my vantage point, it's very much appreciated.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for saying that. And hope to see you open an office here in Middle Tennessee. But I'll keep going to South Carolina in the meantime.

I appreciate it.

All right, Doc, it was an honor. Thank you.

My—

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