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The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
01:15:09
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- [00:00]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode, this is.
- [00:02]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Directly removing inflammatory biomarkers from your bloodstream and directly reducing inflammation. You can see, you can measure it. And so from there, if we provide your organs the milieu in which to thrive and you remove the inflammation, all your organs are going to get better, right? And so therefore you're going to avoid chronic disease and reverse chronic disease as well.
- [00:25]
Dr. Mark Hyman
When I'm with my patients, I see.
- [00:27]
Narrator
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- [02:28]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand well you if you're looking for data about your biology, check out Function Health for Real Time Lab Insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership Community Hyman Hy Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website supplement store for a summary of my favorite and tested products. Care about living long and living well. You're going to love this conversation with a brilliant physician, one of my good friends, Dr. Darshan Shah, who is the guy who founded Next Health, which we're going to talk about on this podcast, among other other things, including something called plasmapheresis which you probably hear me heard me talk about, but essentially it's like an oil and filter change for your body. He is an extremely well trained physician. He's trained at Mayo Clinic, he's a surgeon, he's done over 20,000 surgical procedures. But he, through his own health journey and through his own sickness at 40 years old, having five diseases including diabetes, hypertension on five different medications, realized we have a sick care system and we gotta fix that and change to a healthcare system. And he started something called Next Health, which is a place that you can go to create create health, not treat disease. But by the way, when you do that disease goes away as a side effect. So Next Health is a cool place and we get deeply into the science around. I think one of the most promising things now in the space of health and medicine and longevity in treating even chronic diseases like Alzheimer's and Long Covid and many other things that you probably haven't haven't figured out yet because it's, it's so it's such a universally effective treatment for dealing with inflammation which is the root cause of so much of what's wrong with us today, including mental health, chronic chronic diseases, Aging itself. So I think you're gonna love this conversation with Dr. Darshan Shah. So let's jump right in. Well, Darshan, it's so great to have you on the podcast. We've been friends for a long time, and I'm excited to talk to you about some of the most amazing advances in healthcare and longevity medicine that you are at the forefront of. And it's just, it's great to have you.
- [04:41]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Dr. Hyman, I can't tell you. Mark, Mark, I have tremendous respect for you because, you know, for. I told you this story before. You kind of set off my journey into this new field of medicine. I started my career in Western medicine, and when I heard you speak, I think it's been over 12 years now, I heard you speak for the first time. You inspired my entire new journey. So honor to be here. Doctor.
- [05:05]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing.
- [05:06]
Dr. Darshan Shah
True honor.
- [05:06]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing. You never know you're going to be. Speak a bunch of thousands of people in somebody, and then somebody gets like the light bulb goes off.
- [05:12]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes, yes.
- [05:12]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's great. So, you know, you were traditional surgeon. You were, you know, trained at Mayo and all the top institutions, and you were, you know, top of the game. You know, why did you shift gears and go into a different field, which is very different from what you were doing, which is, you know, a chance to cut, as a chance to cure, to, you know, to heal with steel, to heal with what you're doing now.
- [05:36]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. So, you know, I think a few things happened at the same time in my life at that moment when I first heard you speak. One of them was being in the Western medical system for so long. I was getting really burnt out. Not with surgery. I love doing surgery, but I was getting really burnt out. Seeing people never get better.
- [05:57]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
- [05:57]
Dr. Darshan Shah
And then you're always seeing them when they're at their end of their rope. They're seeking surgery to turn back years and years of accumulated damage in many different ways. All the different surgical procedures that we have, and you can only address these problems one patient at a time. And you just felt like not only were you on this treadmill where you could never really catch up, we were actually going in reverse. There were more people getting sick than we could ever operate on. Right. And so it was just. It just felt like this was leading nowhere to me, both me personally as a surgeon and a doctor, but also the entire system was just getting nowhere. In fact, things were getting worse and the problems were accumulating. And then I saw looking in the mirror, just working 1214 hours a day in the operating room. Like I would get. I would wake up after four hours of sleep being completely stressed out as soon as I woke up in the morning because I had to get to the operating room by 6am for a 6:15 cut time, right?
- [06:55]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
- [06:56]
Dr. Darshan Shah
And then I would basically stand there in the OR with minimal breaks for hours and hours, probably 12, 14 hours a day sometimes.
- [07:03]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You got a Foley catheter in there.
- [07:05]
Dr. Darshan Shah
As a surgeon, you're not allowed the.
- [07:07]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Catheter for those listening. That's a catheter you put inside your penis so you don't have to go to the bathroom. You put a little bag on your leg.
- [07:16]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Sometimes you wish you had one.
- [07:17]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Have a Depends.
- [07:19]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. But like you're there for hours with the, you know, your cortisol levels up to here and you're just eating whatever's in the nurses lounge. Usually a combination of like donuts and bagels.
- [07:29]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right. All the pharmacy pseudo companies bring in all that crap. Muffins, bagels, donuts.
- [07:34]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly, exactly. And then, you know, you're like drinking coffee in between every single case.
- [07:40]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Coffee and sugar.
- [07:41]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Coffee and sugar, right.
- [07:42]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's what medicine runs on.
- [07:45]
Dr. Darshan Shah
So I found myself in my early 40s in the sickest possible state that I could be in. I was at five different diagnosis. Personally. Personally, I was five different diagnoses. Uncontrolled hypertension. I had an autoimmune disease. I had diabetes. Not even pre diabetes anymore. I was diabetic on my hemoglobin A1C level. And I was on multiple medications, which. Then I saw my personal concierge physician and expensive guy in Beverly Hills and his solution was to put me on Prozac because I was depressed about all of this stuff.
- [08:20]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, yeah.
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Dr. Darshan Shah
And all the little.
- [08:21]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You're on five medications for chronicling you're depressed. Okay, I'll just give you a Prozac.
- [08:24]
Dr. Darshan Shah
That's exactly what happened. Pill for every ill. A pill for every ill. Right. And so I was super sick and I personally was not getting anywhere in the treadmill of my own health. So I decided at that moment there has to be a better way. But as you know, you were 40 going on 60. Yeah, 40 going on like almost 70. It was crazy. I was getting like decrepit at 40. It was not good. And so I was at the end of my rope and I was looking for alternative methods and seeing what else was out there. And that's when I happened upon an IFM conference where I heard you speak for one of the first times. It was either the IFM conference or it was this big event out in Phoenix that was going. Or in Scottsdale where you were speaking as well. I saw you speak like a couple times in a row and light bulb went off. Like you said, I need to address my own health from the root cause.
- [09:14]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Amazing. It's quite a story. And now you're sitting here, no medications, no hypertension, no diabetes. Right. I mean, not on Prozac.
- [09:25]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And what's great about it is not only do I not have diseases, but I feel incredible. The vitality and the energy and just the drive and you know, when I see in the mirror, like, I just feel great, you know, and so that's, for me, it was like, yeah, it's so great. I don't have all these diseases, I'm off all my medications. But also just being able to like wake up in the morning refreshed, attack a 12 hour workday and then still feel great after that and be happy, I mean, it's incredible. It's monumental. It is.
- [09:56]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, Darshan, you know, what you're talking about is something, it sounds like, oh, well, I got these diseases and I got off them. And that's not something that happens in traditional medicine. These are one way streets, as we're trained. These are progressive chronic diseases that we have to manage. We even have a whole term. We have chronic disease management systems. There's whole companies devoted to chronic disease management. Managing your medication, managing your disease. Who wants to manage it? Why don't we get rid of it?
- [10:21]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Well, the pharmaceutical companies want us to manage it. Yeah, of course, subscription revenue for them.
- [10:25]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But your own life story is just an example of how these things are not inevitable, how they can not only be prevented, but also reversed, even after you have them.
- [10:35]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Absolutely.
- [10:37]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So that journey of seeing what was wrong with our healthcare system from the inside out and seeing how you were essentially a victim of our modern society and the food system and the medicine that we actually practice, which is really not focused on creating health, it's focused on treating disease. We have a sick care system, not a healthcare system.
- [10:57]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, exactly.
- [10:58]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And so you decided you wanted to create a healthcare system that was different and you called it Next Health. And actually we're sitting here in Next Health headquarters in West Hollywood, California, doing this podcast and I'm about to go get a procedure which we're going to talk about because you're so gracious to offer me this treatment which I've had a number of times called plasmapheresis, which is essentially cleaning your blood like an oil filter. But you had this vision of something different. And Next Health was really the thing that got birthed out of what you saw was wrong with traditional healthcare and what your own personal challenges were and how to get better.
- [11:33]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And so during this time when I was transforming my own health, I was going to multiple different places all over Los Angeles. Right. I was seeking out sauna therapy here. I was seeking a hyperbaric oxygen therapy at a different place. I was seeing, like, three different practitioners at different places to get the things that I needed to get myself healthy. And it just was very frustrating. And then what was incredible, too, is I was able to get myself healthy, even though I had to go to all these different places and I saw myself getting healthier. Like, this stuff works. Like, you can get on a good nutrition, exercise, sleep program and do a few things that most people now have access to that we didn't have access to. And you can get healthy really quickly.
- [12:18]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Actually. Yeah. It's quite amazing, right?
- [12:20]
Dr. Darshan Shah
It's quite amazing. It's like your body wants to be in a state of health, not in a state of disease. And so I was talking to my patients about this because they were seeing the transformations that I was having, and they were. And I was telling them how to do it. And for the ones that could have the time and the energy to do this, they were getting healthy and avoiding surgery themselves. And I saw myself, like, becoming an evangelist for functional medicine, becoming an event, just an evangelist for the nutrition and, like, doing something opposite for our regular system. And I was like, you know what? This. There needs to be a place where people can go where this is the system. They don't not cobble. Cobble it together all over the place. Right. And so Next Health really came from the idea of, let me just make one place where we could basically hit the reset button on the healthcare system.
- [13:05]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes, right. And on people's personal health.
- [13:07]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly, exactly. I was like, you know what? The healthcare, Western medical system, that's a massive monstrosity that it's going to take. You know, we got ourselves into this after five decades. It's gonna take 10 decades to unwind this.
- [13:20]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, you and I are working on shorting that time.
- [13:22]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Well, exactly. I said, let's just hit the reset button. Let's make a new place where we could start all over again. And that's what NextHealth is like. We approach it completely differently. I remember, like, starting NextHealth, I got together with my business partner and we got a whiteboard and we wrote down all the things wrong with traditional healthcare. And we wrote down, like, what is that? 180 opposite. What is the exact opposite? People hate going to the doctor's office because it's like on the 10th floor of a building and you have to wait eight hours and you're in this tiny, dingy waiting room. What's the opposite of that? Let's make a beautiful space that inspires people to want to go and get their health in order and visit on a regular basis. Like, you go to a doctor once a year, we want you to come in once a week.
- [14:04]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's like an Apple Store. Instead of going into a corner bodega, which is a mess, right?
- [14:10]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, exactly. People call us the Apple store of wellness.
- [14:13]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, exactly. And it is beautiful. I've been there and I have been treated there. And this approach you take is really trying to put together some of the innovative therapies that have been sort of marginalized in healthcare, that often have been studied and have been researched, but are still neglected and often ignored by traditional healthcare. Whether it's just intravenous nutrition with IVs, or whether it's more advanced treatments like ozone or peptides or exosomes or plasmapheresis or hyperbaric oxygen. There's so much out there. I wrote a lot about this in my book Young Forever, because these are the things that seem to be really affecting the trajectory of our biological health. And one of the things that we're both focused on is how do we understand the science of aging? Because aging itself is not the problem growing older. It's the biological aging that's the problem. And you can reverse that. And a lot of the therapies that you do and that you built within Next Health are the therapies that actually help to do that. And I've been on this personal journey myself. I never had all those diseases. I had different diseases. I didn't have lifestyle diseases. I had mercury poisoning and mold exposure. And I had C diff from, you know, an antibiotic that I took, and I had colitis and I had, you know, just one thing after the other. Lyme disease, Babesia. I don't know why I think I got all these things so I could figure this whole mess of medicine out personally, because I had to react re engineer myself from the inside out. I had to reverse engineer. What is health? How do I create that? A lot of these therapies are really important, and we're going to talk about them because they actually provide a pathway to change, not only improve your health, but to actually reverse this phenomena that is at the root of all chronic age related diseases, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's. And some of these studies have more research or less research. But the problem with a lot of these therapies is there ain't no money going into researching these. Right. There's literally, look at, have you been paying attention? The amount of money and research being published on the GLP1 Agonists, the Ozempics and Wegovies and Manjuros. The amount of money they're studying it for everything. You know, if you have a pimple, they're going to use it. If you have like depression, they're going to use it. If they have, you know, you have autoimmune disease, I mean whatever they can think of, they're going to try. And they're spending literally hundreds of millions of dollars, I'm guessing on this research.
- [16:41]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right.
- [16:42]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But nobody's spending hundreds of millions of dollars to really look at these other things. There are a few places like Altos Labs and Sam Alban founded a lab, but there's like a lot of billionaires like the Google folks with Calico and Jeff Bezos, Altos and Sam Altman's initiative where they're looking at a lot of these things. They're looking at plasma free associates, they're looking at various therapies that we're doing. But it's really only the billionaires that are funding some of this now, not the NIH which should be studying this. And it's so unfortunate because these therapies have really have a profound effect. And I've been doing them for the last few years as I've been learning more about them. And I did my biological age when I started two years ago, I don't know if I told you this, I was 43, which was pretty good. I was 62 at the time. I did all this stuff that we're going to be talking about in a few minutes. And over the last two years I've gotten four years younger, even though I've gotten two years older chronologically I got four years younger. So now I'm 39.
- [17:39]
Dr. Darshan Shah
That's incredible.
- [17:40]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So I don't know if I'm going to hit my 20s, but I'm going to still keep going and see how far I get. And the point of this is not to brag. The point of this is to sort of explain that the things that we think are inevitable as we age or not.
- [17:54]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [17:55]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And so why don't we sort of dive into some of the Options and therapies that are available out there. And I want to start with plasmapheresis, because I think it's a really important, innovative therapy. It's been around for. In medicine for decades for treating various kinds of diseases that are autoimmune diseases or neurologic diseases. And it's very effective for those conditions. But it's only done in academic centers. It's only done for very rare cases. It's not part of traditional medicine, it's not reimbursed for general health. And yet there's incredible research on it around Alzheimer's, around long Covid, around longevity itself. So first, why don't you explain what was the origin of the science that kind of began to let us think about this particular medical procedure as a potential treatment for aging itself?
- [18:47]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Absolutely. So let's take the story way back to just even the ancient Romans, you know, they were using a technology that they called bloodletting. Right. Because they believed a lot of the bad stuff that causes some disease lives in the blood. And bloodletting, removing some of this blood would minimize some of the symptoms of disease. And as we all know, this didn't really work or pan out because there's other things in blood really, really need. Exactly.
- [19:15]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Although leeches have had a comeback in.
- [19:17]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Medicine for wounds, because I'm having come.
- [19:18]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Back because you put them on wounds that don't heal, and it makes new blood vessels.
- [19:21]
Dr. Darshan Shah
It does, it does. We use leeches a lot in surgery, actually, Venous congestion and things. So I'm very familiar with leeches. But any. But we're not talking leeches.
- [19:30]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But you're not doing trepanation. You're not drilling holes, people's brains to let out the bad humors.
- [19:36]
Dr. Darshan Shah
So fast forward apheresis was a technology that was developed to treat a disease called Waldenstorm's disease, where you have immune complexes that make the blood too thick and that thick thickening of the blood causes blockages in your blood vessels, and people would die from this traditionally. And then some very smart scientists in IBM, I think, figured out how to actually separate the plasma from the. From the blood cells.
- [20:02]
Dr. Mark Hyman
What is plasma?
- [20:03]
Dr. Darshan Shah
So plasma is the fluid portion of your blood. It's 45% of your blood. And if you've ever seen someone do prp, which is take some blood in a test tube and they put in a centrifuge and they spin it down, the blood will separate to a white layer in the top of the test tube and a red layer in the bottom. The red layer is your red blood Cells. And the white layer is your plasma on top. And there's like a little.
- [20:23]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But the red, it's also your white cells, all your cells.
- [20:26]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right.
- [20:26]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So basically you're separate. It's a soup in which all of your cells in your blood flow around. So it's like the red cells, the white cells, the platelets, you take those out.
- [20:33]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [20:34]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And you separate that from the soup. And. And this soup, what's in this soup?
- [20:38]
Dr. Darshan Shah
So the soup is where all of the.
- [20:41]
Dr. Mark Hyman
In other words, what's in the plasma.
- [20:42]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, exactly. What's in the plasma. Right. So this is where all your cel. What they're exposed to on a day to day basis is the growth factors. It is cell signaling molecules, it's nutrients, it's your. A lot of the factors of your immune system live in this soup. So it's basically where all the signaling in your body kind of lives inside of this plasma. And what's good about it is that it carries these signals throughout your entire body. So if you have something going on in your gut, your brain can hear about it. If you have something going on in your heart, your. Your gut hears about it.
- [21:15]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's a communication superhighway.
- [21:17]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. One of the functions it has is being a communication superhighway for your entire body.
- [21:22]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And so there are all these molecules in there that are regulating all these things.
- [21:26]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [21:27]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So why, why do we then want to kind of take out that plasma, throw it in the garbage and put in a replacement fluid called albumin? Like why? Like why? What's bad in there? Because why? You just. It sounds good.
- [21:38]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, right, right, exactly. So let's take it back a little bit more also to the convoys with a parabiosis experiment. I think that's interesting to talk about where they hook up a young mouse to an old mouse and they found that the old mouse got younger and the young mouse got older. And so for a decade people were looking for like, what is the substance in the young mouse that makes the old mouse younger. And so they did all these studies and substances like GDF11TNF and nothing really panned out. And then 10 years later, there's a story. I think it's a true story, but I hear it all because I hear it all the time. Someone at a conference went up to ask a question to the scientists doing all the research on this and they kind of knocked on the microphone and they said, you know, I think you guys are looking at the wrong mouse. It's not what's in the old mouse. It's not what's in the young mouse making the old mouse younger. It's the opposite. It's what you're taking out of the old mouse. So it turns out in our plasma is also where all the cytokines and all the signaling molecules that lead to inflammation accumulate. Right. It turns out that's where all of the toxins that we're exposed to also accumulate. It turns out where senescent cells, the sasp, the negative products that senescent cells secrete, also live in the zombie cells.
- [22:54]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Which are part of the hallmarks of aging, which are essentially these phenomena that happen. These cells that don't die, but just become zombie cells and then secrete all these inflammatory molecules that make us age faster.
- [23:06]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. So if you look at all the root causes of aging, most of the molecules that signal the root causes of aging live in our plasma. From inflammation to toxin buildup to senescent cells. All of that is damaged proteins. Right.
- [23:21]
Dr. Mark Hyman
One of the other things.
- [23:22]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Damage proteins.
- [23:23]
Dr. Mark Hyman
One of the other hallmarks of aging is damaged proteins.
- [23:26]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [23:26]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And so all these damaged proteins just float around and they create more problems, more inflammation, more dysfunction, and we sort of degrade and our resilience decreases and we age faster biologically.
- [23:37]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly, exactly. So it goes to reason from there that if this is all living in your plasma and your body's unable to eliminate this with its own elimination mechanisms, what if we just remove the plasma? And so some very smart people started doing experiments using a technology that's been in hospitals for literally five or six decades. It's FDA approved. We've been using it.
- [23:57]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Like you said, I've been a doctor for 41 years, so, like, I know I'm old, but I remember it even back then.
- [24:03]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, right. We use it a lot. And like, even for, like, drug overdoses, because you know that that lives in your plasma too. And it's works as FDA approved, is super safe. We've been using it forever. And, you know, this is highlights. There's so much incredible technology locked up in the sick care system that if we just bring it back 30, 40 years, like, you can eliminate chronic disease. This is one of those technologies. So the. The treatment like you've experienced it is super comfortable. You just basically sit there with an IV in your arm and your blood is removed like about 200 cc's at a time. So it's a small volume put through this giant centrifuge, the plasma separated from the red blood cells. Red blood cells go back into you through the same IV or a different iv and then you get a big bag of plasma that's basically thrown away and inside of that we've basically eliminated one entire plasma volume. Of all of these negative factors that have been built up over time.
- [24:57]
Narrator
One of the most important tools when it comes to living a long, healthy life is improving the quality of our food.
- [25:03]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But why?
- [25:04]
Narrator
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- [26:02]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Get out of bed.
- [26:03]
Narrator
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- [26:46]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So do you do you then throw the stuff out and has Anybody actually studied what's in there.
- [26:52]
Dr. Darshan Shah
People are.
- [26:53]
Dr. Mark Hyman
When you, when you, when you get, get the stuff, like, you know, it's like when you, when you get an oil change, your car, you throw out the old oil.
- [26:58]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right.
- [26:59]
Dr. Mark Hyman
What's in that?
- [27:00]
Dr. Darshan Shah
It's the same things that you measure when you do a blood test. Like, you know, with the function health blood test, you get a lot of, you get a lot of biomarkers and blood results basically back. And you're basically measuring those. Whenever you do a blood test, it's the same stuff, but you're just totally removing it and you're throwing it away. Right. And so I think people haven't really looked exactly like at the discarded plasma. People are looking at it right now.
- [27:24]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It'd be fascinating to do, like, what are the toxins in there? What are the immune cells, cytokines? What are the senescent cells in there? What's going on that we're taking out?
- [27:33]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. And basically it's all being removed. Exactly. And so we've actually done a lot of patients now and we've measured their total toxicity levels in their urine things, all the toxins. We measure things like mycotoxins. We measure exposure to heavy metals. We're measuring, measuring exposure to even like microplastics and all these toxins. And we see significant reductions in, before and after treatment toxin levels. So we know toxins are in the plasma, and when you remove them, your body gets a chance to catch up. Right now it's able to say, whew, I've lost a lot of the stuff I'm working overtime to remove. And it gets a chance to clean up. And like you said, it's like an oil change for the body. You know, for all of us that have had cars forever, we know that if you don't do an oil change every three to 5,000 miles, your car is not going to run as well. Well, your body's the exact same way.
- [28:25]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's interesting, I, I read a study recently that came out of Germany where they used plasma freesis for long Covid.
- [28:31]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Absolutely.
- [28:32]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And what was interesting was they looked at a lot of people have long Covid have auto antibodies against their autonomic nervous system, which is your, you know, regulates all the things that are sort of automatic in your body. You know, all the, the parasympathetic sympathetic nervous system. And it basically affects your blood vessels in many ways and your blood pressure regulation. And a lot of people have, with long Covid, they have what they call pots, which is they get postural hypotension, they stand up, they get dizzy, they have all these other cognitive symptoms. There's all these other cytokine markers and antibodies. And they were able to actually measure them before and after the plasmapheresis. And it showed significant reduction or elimination of these and improvement clinically in these patients with Long Covid. And the stats are always variable about how many people have Long Covid, but it's probably 5 to 10% of people had Covid. And I think it might be more. I mean, how many, if you think how many hundreds of millions of Americans had Covid, you take 10% of that, it's still 20 million people.
- [29:28]
Dr. Darshan Shah
A lot of people don't even know they have it.
- [29:30]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And it's like little brain fog. Not feeling as good, just not as good as they were before COVID And was even more frightening as I was talking to Jeremy Nicholson, who's been on the podcast, who's a phenomic researcher from Australia who's doing deep phonemics, which means looking at all these, not just the regular blood tests, but, you know, metabolomics and cytokines and thousands and thousands of proteins and molecules. And he says everybody who's had Covid has something going on. Like they're all a little out of whack in terms of their immune system, inflammatory system. Like my wife says, I never used to get sick. Now I get sick more because I have Covid. So, you know, I think plasma freesis is a fascinating treatment for that and I think has a lot of promise.
- [30:07]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. You know, I can tell you a couple stories of patients that I've seen with Long Covid. I had one guy that was coming to us with tinnitus in his ear and he was at his wits end. And as you and I both know, you know, some people when they suffer with tinnitus, depending on how severe it.
- [30:21]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Is, it's ringing in the ears.
- [30:22]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, the ringing in the ears. Severely, even just mentally debilitating. I mean, people end up, you know, just at home, not able to do anything with this. And so we had a. I heard.
- [30:33]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Even people committing suicide as a result.
- [30:35]
Dr. Darshan Shah
So I wasn't going to say it, but yeah, you' Absolutely. There is a suicide rate associated with tinnitus that is not, you know, it's more than the normal population, for sure. And so we had a patient with this and he was suffering with it for about a year, two treatments, and his tinnitus went away.
- [30:51]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing.
- [30:52]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And so he's still in the treatment process right now. It Remains to be seen.
- [30:56]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Was this post Covid or was this.
- [30:58]
Dr. Darshan Shah
This is long Covid. Post Covid. Long Covid symptom tinnitus. Right. And so we're still in the treatment process. We're going to see how long it stays away. We're trying to expand between plasma exchanges for him. I'll tell you a story about me. So when I had Covid for about six months after having Covid and getting it treated, my heart rate variability was down in the dumps, which happens to a lot of people with long Covid.
- [31:23]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
- [31:23]
Dr. Darshan Shah
But my heart rate consistently elevated all night long. Right?
- [31:27]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Exactly.
- [31:28]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Heart availability really down and my regular resting heart rate was very elevated. And then I started doing plasma exchange just to test it on myself and have the, you know, the nurses practice on me really. And complete change around. And most people will see their heart rate variability improve. And especially if you have long Covid, if you're suffering with heart rate elevation, you'll see that improve as well.
- [31:49]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So heart rate variability, for those of you listening, don't know what he's talking about, it's basically the complexity of your heart rate, which is a sign of the resilience of your cardiovascular system and your nervous system. So when you're highly stressed, your heart variability goes down. So you want more complexity in your heart rate. More complexity in your health means more resilience, more redundancy. It's like a rainforest which has got redundancy to complexity versus a monocrop cornfield, which is if you have one bug or one blight or something, it's done. So this is really important measurement around your overall well being and health and that's a profound thing. I also have personally had an experience with COVID and I didn't get to long Covid, thank God. But I had a severe case of COVID That was my third time getting it and my hand just swelled up. I got severe arthritis two weeks after. I'm like, this is terrible. And it happened to be a place where I could get plasmapheresis and literally within hours.
- [32:51]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Incredible, right?
- [32:52]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It was getting better and the next morning it was completely gone, Just never came back.
- [32:56]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yep.
- [32:57]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And I was like, damn incredible.
- [32:59]
Dr. Darshan Shah
And like with the heart rate variability like you mentioned earlier, Covid makes antibodies to your autonomic nervous system. That's right. If you have antibodies, automatic nervous system, your heart rate can't be variable.
- [33:08]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
- [33:09]
Dr. Darshan Shah
And so this is the mechanism by how this stuff works. And you know, I think there's always a tendency when we talk about like Novel therapies like this to think that it's woo woo, and it's not really proven. But what I can say about plasma exchange is it really goes back to the fundamentals of medicine, right? Like we know why people get into a disease state. It's. Inflammation is one of the root causes of disease. This is directly removing inflammatory biomarkers from your bloodstream and directly reducing inflammation. You can see, you can measure it. And so from there, if we provide your organs the milieu in which to thrive and you remove the inflammation, all your organs are going to get better. Right. And so therefore you're going to avoid chronic disease and reverse chronic disease as well. And we see that with Alzheimer's too.
- [33:56]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, I think I'm just going to highlight what you said because it's so important. You know, inflammation is something people have heard about, it's in the news now. I mean, we've been talking about inflectional medicine for 30, 40 years. But it turns out it's, it's the sort of final common pathway for aging and almost all age related diseases, in fact, they're calling in aging inflammaging. Right? Heart disease is an inflammatory disease. Cancer is inflammatory. I mean, I literally had a patient recently who had Hodgkin's lymphoma. And one of the ways that I figured it out was, you know, he was having certain symptoms and we checked his blood levels of inflammation and they were extremely high. And like something's going on here. And cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's, all inflammatory diseases. And not just that, but obviously all the other inflammatory diseases. We have the autoimmune diseases. Mental health is an inflammatory disease of the brain. Depression, ocd, bipolar disease, schizophrenia. Mental health that we think is psychological is often biological. And we miss that. And I wrote a book about this 15 years ago called the Ultramind Solution, about how the body affects the brain. And so what we're talking about here is this underlying process of inflammation that cuts across all diseases. And it's one of the hallmarks of aging. So this technology of plasmapheresis seems to be an incredible way to help reduce the body's inflammation. Now, of course you have to do all the other stuff, right? You're not just saying eat your McDonald's and come in and get your blood clean, right? And so you got to eat right, exercise, sleep enough, manage stress, take the right vitamins and so forth. But as an adjunct, it's a very powerful tool for helping to reverse some of the phenomena that causes all these age Related diseases. And it also helps you just feel better. I mean, I've done it a number of times and just feel like you get like a car wash, a brainwash. Your brain feels clearer, you have more energy, you just feel lighter. It's quite an interesting experience. And you're like, what the hell is in my blood that's so crappy? You know, And I think, you know, I had it done a bunch of times. In the first few times, like my blood was like cloudy.
- [36:10]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah.
- [36:10]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And then now it's like more clear. And you see that.
- [36:14]
Dr. Darshan Shah
You could actually see it in the bag of plasma that we get. You could see how cloudy it is dependent by the number of things floating around in there. Right. And especially if they have high lipid levels too. You know, you can. It gets really foamy. You can see that in the plasma as well.
- [36:27]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So you mentioned Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease too. Can you talk about that? Let's talk about Alzheimer's because some of the research on that is just so fascinating. And here's a condition just as background, where we spent billions of dollars, hundreds and hundreds of studies, no good outcomes. I mean, if there's drugs out there for Alzheimer's, they're either harmful or they might delay your entry into nursing home by a couple of months. That's a success. Not reversing it, not really slowing it dramatically. So there's really bupkis we've got. And yet now there's this treatment which is extremely safe, which is relatively inexpensive compared to these Alzheimer's drugs that are out there, that are cost, I don't know, 50,000 a year or something. And it's showing real promise and not just to sort of slow it down, but to actually reverse it. So can you talk about the science that we now have around Alzheimer's and plasmapheresis?
- [37:23]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. I mean, this is where I'm just so mind blown at how approaching a problem differently can make such a tremendous difference. And we know Alzheimer's more and more of us are suffering from Alzheimer's. There's research out there showing that up to a third of us will suffer from Alzheimer's in the next few decades. And it's just too high of a number.
- [37:44]
Dr. Mark Hyman
By the time you get to 85, it's almost 50%.
- [37:46]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, exactly. It's just mind blowing. And so the way, the way it works. Well, we don't really know how it works. I think there's multiple different ways this is working. Number one is by reducing the baseline level of inflammation. Number two is by Reducing the overall toxic burden to our brain. Number three, is by actually removing some of these malformed proteins. So we can detect the amyloid protein. We can detect a tau protein in our blood. Now there's actually blood tests to detect.
- [38:12]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes. With Function Health, we're actually having something called AD Detect F4240, which is a marker of amyloid, and also P Tau 217, which is another important marker. And those actually change with lifestyle changes. And Richard Isaacson, who's been on the podcast, is really quite an amazing scientist, has shown actually reversing these blood biomarkers with reversing lifestyle changes, reversing the cognitive decline, and actually improving it. So you can now measure before and after imagining this plasmapheresis, what's going on.
- [38:46]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Absolutely. And we're doing the study right now measuring these before and after plasmapheresis. And I could tell you from my own personal experience measuring my markers, I have almost 80% reduction in the post markers. Okay. Now that's biomarker change. There's also studies that have been done by Dr. Kiproff up in San Francisco, where he showed a 61% reduction in the rate of acceleration of Alzheimer's symptoms in Alzheimer's patients. So he's showing the actual clinical relevance, and we're seeing the biomarker relevance for using plasma exchange to treat Alzheimer's disease. And I think, you know, I think that this. There still needs to be a lot more science done around this, but it's just mind blowing to have a treatment that can cause this much of a reduction of symptoms without having to give a drug that could potentially have horrible side effects like some of the Alzheimer's drugs. You get brain bleeding, right?
- [39:39]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
- [39:39]
Dr. Darshan Shah
And this has basically almost zero side effects.
- [39:41]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, it's just a needle poke, basically.
- [39:43]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. A needle poke.
- [39:44]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's pretty amazing. And it's, you know, so it's one of these treatments that, you know, has been around for a long time, and it's having new applications. Right. Long Covid Alzheimer's. Now they're looking at it for something called lipoprotein little A, which is a genetic lipid condition that puts you at high risk of having a heart attack and for which there are no good drugs. So can you share some of the research about lipoprotein little A, which, by the way, is something we measure with function health. And I literally just saw a patient this morning. She had 37 years old, healthy, looked relatively, you know, good. I mean, she's not overweight. She's. She's got no real issue, but she's a family history and she had a really high lipoprotein little A. So I'm like thinking, oh, this is interesting. So how do you treat these?
- [40:31]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, right. So, you know, I love what Function Health is doing with measuring lp. I can't tell you the number of patients I see that still go to their primary doctors and have never had an LP before, and they're wondering why they have so much heart disease.
- [40:45]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
- [40:45]
Dr. Darshan Shah
When up to 15 to 20% of people have the genetic malformation that causes Lp. And Lp, just for the listeners to know, is a particularly aggressive form of cholesterol that causes plaques in your arteries but also can cause deposition of calcium on your blood valves. It can cause plaques in your arteries going to your brain. It's really dangerous. It can cause heart attacks quite easily and strokes quite easily as well, and valve damage. And so if you have lp, you want to get it treated.
- [41:17]
Narrator
Yeah.
- [41:18]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Guess how you treat it? There's no treatment right now. There's no drug. Lifestyle changes. Actually, this is resistant to lifestyle changes.
- [41:25]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, some supplements I found lowering like 20, 30%, but you're not. It doesn't go back to normal.
- [41:29]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. Nattokinase, I think is good.
- [41:32]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Cysteine. Some other things we use. Yeah. But it's. It's not easy.
- [41:35]
Dr. Darshan Shah
It's not easy. Right. You people struggle with it. So we have two or three patients that we're treating with lp just like the toxins and the other things that we're talking about. All cholesterol also lives in your plasma, including the LP particles. And so this is removed in that bag of plasma that we're throwing away. And so what we're finding in these two particular patients is that their LP actually stays to close to normal levels for about six weeks after a plasma exchange. Right. And so look like. I mean, I think, think it's one of those therapies that as it becomes more ubiquitous, more people can use it for control of lp until we find a therapeutic that works. And there's a lot of research being done for therapeutics that works. But this is a great way to temporary control.
- [42:14]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That sort of brings the question of, like, you said six weeks, like for Alzheimer's, how often do you need to do it? Do you need once a day, once a week, once a month, once a year? Like, what. What kind of frequency for, you know, treating conditions that are more serious and then, like, what kind of frequency for aging itself? Is it once a month? Is it every quarter? I'm asking for a friend here. I want to do it and I want to know what do we know about this?
- [42:41]
Dr. Darshan Shah
So I'll tell you what the research shows and I'll tell you what I think. So the research that Dr. Kiprov did in Alzheimer's patient was a once a month treatment. He did that six treatments in a row for six months and measured various markers of symptoms before and after after using the MOCA score.
- [42:56]
Dr. Mark Hyman
MOCA is a Montreal cognitive assessment tool. It's basically a quick screening tool for your memory that we use to check for Alzheimer's.
- [43:02]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And use other tools as well.
- [43:05]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's not like a mocha latte or anything.
- [43:07]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, exactly. Give a patient a mocha and see how they like it. So anyhow, he did it once a month for six treatments. Okay. Now that worked for Alzheimer's. What we're seeing in our clinic is probably about the same once every four to six weeks is what we're tracking biomarkers. So we're seeing biomarkers change right after the treatment and changes lasting for six weeks. And then, then some patients, not all patients, the biomarkers start reverting. Okay. And a lot of this has to do with each individual patient's lifestyle. Is the lifestyle, their level of exposure to things like ultra processed food, lack of sleep, inflammatory. Inflammatory lifestyles. And so it really goes patient to patient. And so what I'm a huge advocate of is this whole concept of n of 1. Right. I don't think there's one particular protocol that applies to everybody. Every patient's an individual. Biology and psychology. And we need to custom tailor the protocol for each individual patient. So that's. That's kind of where I end up with it. There's a lot of research being done for Alzheimer's and for age related diseases as well. Okay.
- [44:19]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But just as a regular monthly cleanup.
- [44:23]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Well, I don't think it's monthly for everybody. I think that because I'm way behind.
- [44:26]
Dr. Mark Hyman
If that's the case.
- [44:28]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Age related, I would say is probably going to end up being quarterly, but once again, it needs to be customized to you. Right. So I think for you, if we were to measure your biomarkers because you live an incredibly healthy lifestyle, of course.
- [44:39]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I try a little too much travel and stress, but yeah, I try.
- [44:42]
Dr. Darshan Shah
My guess would be for you is once every four to six months actually. And so we just have to see where your biomarkers are with our function labs. You can tell me when you're ready for that.
- [44:50]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, that's another question, is, are There unique biomarkers that can be tracked that are specific to the benefits you see from plasmapheresis. In other words, should you have this panel of 10 biomarkers that tell you, oh, before and after, this is what's changing, like the AD Detect 4240 or the P. Tau or cytokines or lipids or what are the things that we should be actually measuring on a consistent basis before and after, so we can scientifically track what's happening.
- [45:21]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right.
- [45:22]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Or do we not know?
- [45:24]
Dr. Darshan Shah
We do know. It's all the biomarkers that we're testing, like with Function Health, for example, for your biomarker panel. And it depends on what you're targeting. Okay. So, for example, I have a patient which, again, extremely high hscrp, and a lot of it is due to gut health issues. Right. And so one plasmapheresis, and her HSCRP went from nine to two.
- [45:45]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Wow.
- [45:45]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Okay. So for her, we're tracking hscrp. I have another patient that we're tracking mercury levels. This person has been struggling with mercury toxicity for literally a decade, has not found anything.
- [45:58]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Even chelation.
- [45:59]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Even chelation. Chelation did not work. EBO treatments did not work. Sought out all kinds of alternative therapies.
- [46:06]
Dr. Mark Hyman
EBO is ozone therapy. Ozone therapy, which you also do in exile, right?
- [46:10]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes, we also do ozone as well. So for her, we're tracking toxin levels. Okay. And so, like the LP patient I told you about, we're tracking LP levels. What's really incredible about this technology is it addresses so many different factors of poor health and also aging. Some of the research is being done around tracking markers of senescent cells for aging cells.
- [46:32]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Zombie cells.
- [46:33]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Zombie cells, right. Exactly.
- [46:34]
Dr. Mark Hyman
There's no really commercial tests for zombie cells. Not yet, but it's research.
- [46:38]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. Yep. We're also tracking mitochondrial health now as well. We just found some new panels to track mitochondrial health. So we'll be tracking that for people that are experiencing mild cognitive impairment or symptoms of Alzheimer's or even Parkinson's. We're measuring the beta tau protein and other biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease. And we're tracking those. Right?
- [47:02]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, P tau and beta amyloid.
- [47:04]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, P tau and beta amyloid. Sorry. Yes, exactly. And so we're tracking those. We're tracking based on what we're going after. We're tracking those biomarkers individually.
- [47:14]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Interesting. Yeah. So it's customized.
- [47:15]
Dr. Darshan Shah
It's customized.
- [47:16]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's fascinating. And. And, you know, the. This is not really accessible. Very many places, though. That's the Problem. Right. It's hard to find places where you can get this that are not part of an academic medical center.
- [47:27]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [47:28]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And they won't do it for off label reasons. You can't just go and say, hey, I want to get my blood cleaned. And they're like, sure, come on, let's hook you up. They're like, forget about it. You know, healthcare is not going to do this for you. Even hyperbaric oxygen is like that if you want to go.
- [47:41]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [47:42]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And it's unfortunate, but these are therapies that have a lot of signs behind them, but that are only reimbursed for certain indications.
- [47:49]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [47:50]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And so it's not widespread and there's not a lot of clinics. And NextHealth is one of the few places where you can actually get plasma fresis.
- [47:56]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. So, you know, when I worked at the Mayo Clinic, we had literally, I would say, I think we had like three dozen plasma freezes machines in the entire Mayo system. That's a lot of plasma freesis machines sitting there doing nothing. Right. We also had 10 hyperbaric chambers sitting there doing nothing a lot of the times too. And it's like, why is this stuff just sitting here? This can be used for aging related diseases and preventing disease. And so look, these machines, they're everywhere, but they're not being used outside the western medicine system. And even if you ask a hospital to let you do plasmapheresis, they wouldn't even know where to start because they don't know how to build the insurance for it.
- [48:30]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.
- [48:30]
Dr. Darshan Shah
And so I think it's really important. What we're trying to do at NextHealth is all of our locations. We'll have a plasmapheresis machine so anyone can come in and do it basically with an appointment with one of our doctors. And I think more and more centers are going to start doing this once.
- [48:44]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And I'm going right after this podcast. Go get one.
- [48:46]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes, yes. And. And you know, you've had it done before. You know, it's very comfortable. You know, it's very safe. You know, there's one more thing we should probably talk about with plasma phrases.
- [48:55]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.
- [48:56]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Is that the best use of albumin?
- [48:58]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, I want to talk about that because, you know, before we get into that, I want to. Albumin is what you actually put back in.
- [49:05]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [49:06]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Once you take out the plasma, it's the main protein in your blood and there are health benefits to it, which seem also really interesting. I want to talk about that before I get to that. How much of the plasma are you removing because you have about 5 liters of blood and probably 1 liter of that's probably blood cells, and the rest of it's plasma. I'm just making this up, but I'm guessing that's about the amount.
- [49:27]
Dr. Darshan Shah
It's about 45% of your blood is.
- [49:29]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay, so 45%. So a full cleaning would be what, two to three liters? Two to three liters. And you remove all that and then you just put back in albumin and fluid. And fluid and fluid, like saline. Right.
- [49:43]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Well, we also replenish all your micronutrients as well. So what we're doing is taking out the bad stuff, putting back in all the good stuff.
- [49:50]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, so you don't do normal plasma freesis, you do like an upgrade? Yes, you put an albumin plus you.
- [49:55]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Put in IV nutrients, IV nutrients and nicotinamide riboside. We put back in you as well, which your cells need. We're doing also glutathione or doing albumin. And some patients will use immunoglobulin as well.
- [50:08]
Dr. Mark Hyman
IVIG Amazing. So the amount you take out is about 3 liters. You put back in albumin. So can you talk about what is albumin, why do we put it back in, and what health benefits does it have besides just reconstituting your blood?
- [50:23]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, exactly. So you and I have used albumin in the hospital since the beginning of residency training. Right. So albumin is not like a novel compound. We've had it forever. And a lot of times people are.
- [50:34]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Malnourished or have low protein.
- [50:35]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, low protein. Even like trauma situations where people lost a lot of blood and you get them volume right away. That's where I used it a lot as well. So albumin is basically a protein. It's a highly purified protein that our bodies normally make, and it lives in the plasma. And so when you remove the plasma, you have to replace albumin because your body is what's called an oncotic. Pressure needs to maintain. It needs to have protein in the blood so that the fluid doesn't leave your blood vessels and go into all your tissues. And that's why you have that protein there. And so you have to replace it. But there's a big side benefit to this, because albumin is one of the most stickiest proteins out there in our biology. And what it does is it goes throughout your body, sticking to toxins, malformed proteins, sticking to dead cell, dead cellular material. And this is what actually brings all these materials from your tissues to your bloodstream. So that your kidneys and your liver can eliminate it. Okay. And so by replacing fresh new albumin that doesn't have anything bound to it, now you have all these binding sites available for your body to further eliminate these toxins from your tissues.
- [51:47]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing. Well, if anybody listening out there, it has a lot of money, we got to study this more because this is one of the most promising therapies, I think, that exists out there for longevity, based on the data I'm seeing. And I was talking to Eric Verdon the other day, who's the head of the Buck Institute on Aging, and they're very focused on this as a therapy. There's also. Sam Altman's lab is also focused on this as well. So there's a lot of really interesting science going on around this. Not funded by academic medical centers, not funded by the nih, but funded by a bunch of billionaires who don't want to die, which is great for us because we're getting the benefit of the science.
- [52:24]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [52:24]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But it's unfortunate that traditional academia and the National Institute of Health, which should not be called that. It should be called the National Institute of Diseases.
- [52:32]
Narrator
Disease.
- [52:32]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right.
- [52:33]
Dr. Mark Hyman
They don't study health at all.
- [52:34]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Took the words out of my mouth. Right.
- [52:36]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But, you know, this is really tremendous research. And I personally benefited. You've benefited from it. And I see the benefits for my patients who can. Who can get it. Now, the challenge right now is it's not cheap because it's an expensive machine. You know, the technology. Album's expensive, development is expensive, the products are expensive. So do you see a world in which this comes down, you know, in price? Because, you know, for example, at function, we figured out how to get $15,000 worth of labs for $499 a year. Right. With twice a year testing is plan for this is going to be able to be done more inexpensively. Well, I mean, and. And what do we have to do to get it covered by insurance?
- [53:15]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. So here's. Here's why it's expensive right now is albumin's expensive because there's just not enough of it out there right now. And so we. The other big problem with the therapy is it's hard to get the machines. The machines are super expensive, and the people that run it need to be highly specialized as well.
- [53:34]
Dr. Mark Hyman
It's not just like an IV nurse. Sticks and iv and you got to know what you're doing.
- [53:36]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. It takes a lot of training. So all of these problems are solved with scale. Right. The more machines that are out there the more people that get trained and the more of this albumin product that's available, the lower that drives a price. And that's exactly what we're working on at Next Health. We are, you know, we're expanding Next Health to all the states and also around the world. And each location, like my imperative is to have a plasma freesis machine at every location. And we're going to drive down the price as quickly as we can because I feel like it's probably going to be a mainstay of treatment for avoiding chronic disease and also reversing chronic disease. And I want to make it available to as many people as possible. And then we want to do the studies that show the insurance company how this saves lives and saves them money as well. And once we show them this is what you need to be doing, there's a world where insurance, yeah, if you.
- [54:29]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Get this one's a quarter, you prevent all these chronic illnesses. Right. And I think that's why I asked you the question about what are the metrics that you use to determine success? Right. If we can measure proteins in the blood that are elevated when you have starting to progress towards Alzheimer's and you can reduce those and you can show that Alzheimer's is the most expensive disease out there in America because of the collateral damage on the cost of caregivers not being able to work and the cost of caring for these people long term. I mean, it's an incredible economic drain in society and the number of people getting it is going up and up. But I'll also just point out that don't expect that you just get plasmapheresis and you're going to prevent Alzheimer's or retreat it. There's some other data that needs to be talked about which is, I think really exciting is the finger trial, the pointer trial, which are large studies looking at aggressive lifestyle intervention and risk factor management, showing that not only we slow the progression, but that we reverse the disease itself. And Richard Isaacson, his work, who was at Cornell, now he's down in Florida, has also done tremendous work showing that we can use aggressive lifestyle and personalized care to actually do exactly what you were saying. It's not everybody gets the same treatment. It's really what's wrong with your particular biology. And how do we correct that? And that's what functional medicine is. It's really identifying how to create personalized care that actually is preventive and that actually gets people down the trajectory from illness back to wellness.
- [55:58]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, exactly. And I want to just double click on that because it's so important. You should never sit in a plasmapheresis chair if you're not willing to first undergo aggressive lifestyle intervention concurrently with a treatment program. Right. Because you're just chasing the tail. It's like putting horrible gasoline in your car and changing the oil later. And it's just like the car's getting worse and worse and you're just trying to keep up with oil changes. This is not going to work.
- [56:23]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.
- [56:23]
Dr. Darshan Shah
You have to be committed to aggressive lifestyle intervention and learning what they are. So a commitment to education on what is real, wholesome, good food, what is ultra processed food, what is a good night of sleep really mean? What is.
- [56:37]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I got 90 and 90 on my score last night.
- [56:39]
Dr. Darshan Shah
I was really happy. Well, after your plaza freezes, you're going to get even 100 probably tonight.
- [56:44]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, really? Oh, God. I never got 100. Brian Johnson gets a. I've never gotten 100. If I got 100, I'm going to give you 100 bucks.
- [56:51]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Okay, there we go.
- [56:52]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Or maybe more.
- [56:54]
Dr. Darshan Shah
But yeah, I mean, I think. I think a commitment to aggressive lifestyle intervention should be a part of any longevity protocol. But it's a requirement before you start doing things like plasmapheresis.
- [57:05]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I think we're going to put in the show notes references to the studies and the research on this because we're not just talking about some wacky thing. We're talking about something that's being really well researched that has tremendous promise that I personally benefit from, that my patients have benefited from. That I think is one of the most exciting longevity therapies out there.
- [57:22]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, I'll send you a paper. I'll send you another paper that just came out. It's a preprint that just came out. It's not peer reviewed yet, but it's in peer review process. But I'll send it to you and you can maybe link it in the show notes too. You know, the true age omic testing that they do. They do the symphony test, which is organ aging by system. What is your biological age plasmapheresis study with omic age and symphony testing showing major reversal of these markings.
- [57:51]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, I mean, like I said, I went four years backwards as I went two years forward. And I probably had four or five plasmapheresis treatments over the last two years. So I think. I don't know if that's what did it. I've done a bunch of other stuff too. I just threw the kitchen sink at it, but I wanted to see how far I could get. I feel good about Myself, But I think the studies are going to just be more and more, and I think we're going to learn more and more. Okay, so Next Health is really pioneering some of these therapies. It's offering things that were really not available. What are the other promising therapies that you guys offer at NextHealth that are, I think, important to consider as we look at treating this chronic disease epidemic and also helping people optimize health and achieve a longer health span and a longer lifespan?
- [58:34]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, so one of the things I try to focus on with my patients, in addition to the basics, nutrition, exercise, sleep, is using some of the natural stressors that are in our environment on a regular, consistent basis to push health in the right direction. So these are things like heat therapy, cold therapy, light therapy, and oxygen therapy through hyperbaric oxygen. So we have what we call the longevity circuit. And I really believe, like in a.
- [58:58]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Gym, instead of like a circuit, this is like.
- [59:00]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, yeah, it's a longevity circuit. It's like circuit training, but at a cellular level. And so I encourage my patients to think of health as not a once a year or once a month or once a quarter thing. It's a weekly thing. It's something that you have to make health a habit. So we have people come in to do the longevity circuit on a weekly basis where they do the hyperbaric oxygen for about 45 minutes, a sauna for 20 to 30 minutes, and then cryotherapy and then light therapy as well. And so this gets people. Gets your mitochondria slightly stressed, which allows them to make new mitochondria and make energy more efficiently. When your cells. The mitochondria are the powerhouses of our cells. When they are functioning well, every cell gets to do its job better, and you just become healthier and you reverse chronic disease. So I think that's another mainstay of therapy that we do at NextHealth.
- [59:49]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I just want to double click on that one, too, because what you didn't say was that these are therapies that all fund fall under the category of something called hormesis.
- [59:56]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Hormesis.
- [59:57]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Hormesis is a medical word. It sounds like a lot, but essentially it means a stress that doesn't kill you, that makes you stronger. And we're all familiar with it. Right. Fasting, we know calorie restriction is an incredible stress on the body.
- [60:11]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [60:11]
Dr. Mark Hyman
But it actually makes you live longer. We look at the Holocaust survivors who were basically starving. They actually have incredible longevity. And it's not genetic. You look at certain data that you can animal studies, it's hard to do on humans, But a third of your diet is restricted in terms of calories. You eat a third less calories, you live a third longer. For humans, that would be a living to 120. Of course you're gonna be miserable, hungry and have sex drive and be too skinny. But there are ways to actually mimic that. Exercise is a form of hormesis because you're stressing your muscles and then you get sore because you're tearing muscle fibers. But then they come back stronger. So it's like build back better. Right. So the idea is these are all therapies that are available to us that we can use to up regulate these pathways in our body that I call the longevity switches.
- [61:04]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [61:05]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So I talk a lot about this in my book Young Forever. But the body has this built in heal is a built in healing machine. It actually literally has a healing system which when you cut your skin, how does your body heal? When you break a bone, how does your body heal? Well, it has a healing system, but we mess it up all the time. And the ways to activate this healing system is that regenerates, repairs and renews our body is through some of these practices. Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, ozone therapy, light therapy, red light therapy and cold therapy, heat therapy. You know, I definitely find that for me, if I do a sauna and a cold plunge every day, I just feel like a million bucks. You know, it's the best thing. It's my morning routine. I wake up, I work out, I do my. Well, I might, might do hot and cold first, then I work out and then, you know, depending on where I am. And it's just an incredible way to do it your day. But it actually has all these other benefits.
- [62:05]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes, yes. I do mine at night, I do a 30 minute sauna and then a cold plunge at night and I just 100 sleep score.
- [62:12]
Narrator
Come on.
- [62:12]
Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm telling you, I want to see. I. Give me your phone. Show me after. Yeah, that's insane. Okay.
- [62:21]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, yeah. Try it at night.
- [62:23]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay, I'll try it.
- [62:24]
Dr. Darshan Shah
So. Okay, I want to say one more thing for, for everyone listening is A lot of this stuff might not be available to you or my. You know, there's not a lot of centers offering any of this all over the country yet. But they're coming. All of this stuff can be done for free very easily. For in your day to day life. Just going outside in the morning, first thing in the morning, exposing yourself, you know, maybe with no shirt on to the sunlight. You're getting your light therapy, you're getting some cold therapy. If you live in a colder environment, cold showers, you know, all of this stuff is available to everybody.
- [62:59]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You can buy like a, like a little sauna blanket or you can buy these little fold up saunas that you can stick your head out of for very inexpensive. And then a bathtub I just filled with cold water. I mean, that's what I did for years. I had a seam put in my shower which wasn't that expensive. And I've had it for 25 years and have a bathtub filled with cold water. And I just go back and forth and I've done that for years. And it's not that expensive to do that.
- [63:28]
Dr. Darshan Shah
And the plasma exchange kind of correlated to that too is another way to do this same kind of therapy, but at a much smaller dose is by donating plasma. Just go donate plasma. They'll pay you to remove some of your plasma.
- [63:42]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing.
- [63:43]
Dr. Darshan Shah
And then your body will make new plasma. Now that's at a much smaller volume, of course, because your body has to make new plasma. But it still works. If you're young and you're healthy, that's something to consider.
- [63:52]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's kind of, it's kind of hacking the system a little bit, like giving the blood. Yeah, right, That's a good one. Okay, so in your vision for healthcare, where do you see all this going? Because there's so much happening so fast right now in terms of what's happening on the margins of healthcare, like nextheld and Function Health, the company I co founded that are really trying to push healthcare in a different direction and are actually disintermediating a lot of the traditional healthcare systems operational, like, you know, ways that we kind of work. Right. So where do you see all this going?
- [64:24]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Okay, I thought about this a lot and I think that we are at this incredible inflection point where we're actually going to develop two separate systems. You're going to have what is considered right now the healthcare system, which we know is more disease care, Western medicine system, that's going to be its own system treating the end result of all this chronic disease. Right. And trauma and other.
- [64:47]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. If you need surgery or whatever.
- [64:49]
Dr. Darshan Shah
And then there's gonna be a health system that's gonna be developed by people like yourself, giving people the empowerment to manage their own biomarkers and take personal responsibility for them with Function Health, with places like Next Health, giving people a place to go to do some of these therapies and to Talk about their health with practitioners. I think we're gonna have a true health system. And then the current system will be a disease system. These will be in parallel, which is the way it, all of it should have been done in the first place.
- [65:16]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Interesting. Yeah.
- [65:18]
Dr. Darshan Shah
And that's what I'm really excited about. I'm not so negative about the health system because I think it has a function. Of course it needs to always be there. But we need to have dollars funneled towards health versus that disease care world.
- [65:29]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I mean, you know, listen, all of us are going to have something. For example, I have a genetic risk for atrial fib. My mother had it. You know, tall, thin guys who are athletes when they're older tend to get it. I got atrial fib. I needed heart surgery. Okay. Thank God. They could map out my heart with electrophysiology and figure out which little place to zap. And now a week later, I was playing tennis. So that's amazing. Right? That's great. But there are so many things we do in healthcare that are just like trying to plug a hole in a sinking ship with your finger. And it's a size, you know, it's the size of a football field. And yet we're just, we got our finger trying to hold the dam together. It's not working. So we do need a true health care system. And I think what we have now, when people call it health insurance, we don't have health insurance. We have disease insurance. And so I see next health and function health as true health insurance.
- [66:26]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [66:26]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And yes, you have to pay out of pocket, but now with health savings accounts, so anybody can start a health saving account. So there's literally billions of dollars in health savings accounts. People are not using them properly. Trumed is started by a friend of mine, Cali Means and Justin Marrow. They actually are now enabling you to be able to use your health savings account dollars for things like plasma free things like ozone, or things like your vitamin supplements or hyperbaric oxygen therapy. So you can actually start to use pre tax dollars for this. You can start your health savings account. And you have to invest in your health because if you don't pay now, you're going to pay later. You know, I had this one patient, she was on $20,000 of copay at 66 years old for all the medication she needed for chronic illnesses that three months were completely reversed. Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, fatty liver, renal insufficiency, all gone. And you know, as a doctor, you don't reverse heart failure.
- [67:19]
Dr. Darshan Shah
No.
- [67:20]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You manage it, you don't get. We call it ejection fraction, which is how much of the blood you pump out with each pump of your heart. It should be about 50%. You know, when it goes down under 50, you start in trouble. This one was like 35%, went back up to 50. You don't, you don't see, see that with traditional medicine. But when you use, and this is just lifestyle and diet, it wasn't even all these fancy things we're talking about. So I think we have the ability to really treat disease completely differently. And one of my kind of thorns in my side that I get always really irritated about is when people talk about prevention, they talk about lifestyle as prevention. I'm like, no, it's treatment. And it works better than traditional medication. If I need a drug, I'm going to use it. If there's a drug. Certain patients have genetic lipid disorders. They might need medication like a PCSK9 inhibitor. They might need a statin. That's okay. But not 75% of the prescription is being written for people for prevention with a statin that they don't even. I had a patient just today who had a doctor tell him he needed to be on a statin. He's a 54 year old guy who had some abnormal lipids. They did a coronary angiogram with a CT scan and they saw a little something that was in a circumflex artery, which is a little bit, it was a narrowing and it probably was just a kink or something. And they're like, oh, we need to put you on statins right away.
- [68:40]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Oh my gosh.
- [68:41]
Dr. Mark Hyman
And I'm like, wait a minute, wait a minute. You're super healthy. You eat perfectly, you exercise all the time. I don't think this is a problem. Let's do an AI heart scan on you. It's called Clearly Health and you can look it up. Clearlyhealth.com, there are centers all around the country where you can get this done, but you can get just a regular CT angiogram, which they do in any hospital, and you can just have your data read by this AI. He was zero. I don't think I've ever seen a 54 year old that gets zero. He had zero plaque, zero soft plaques or hard plaques or any kind of plaque. His arteries are perfectly clean. I'm like, you do not need a drug. And so I think we really need to start looking at treating people really differently and being very personalized and doing deep biomarker Analysis, deep phenomic analysis, and using therapies that are going to actually create health. Because none of the therapies that you offer, I would suggest, are disease treatments. They are health treatments. They're helping you elevate your health. And when you create health, disease goes away as a side effect.
- [69:49]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [69:50]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So you don't have to treat the disease.
- [69:51]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Right.
- [69:52]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You're just. You're just creating health and removing the things that are impediments to health. Right. All this in your blood and you're adding the ingredients for health.
- [70:01]
Narrator
Right.
- [70:01]
Dr. Mark Hyman
The nutrients and vitamins and all the other stuff we talked about. So it's really quite simple. You take out the bad stuff, you put in the good stuff. The body is healing machine for years.
- [70:09]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah.
- [70:09]
Dr. Mark Hyman
The body's healing machine actually just know. Knows what the heck to do.
- [70:12]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
- [70:13]
Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's quite incredible. You're just such a beautiful man.
- [70:16]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Thank you.
- [70:17]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You have such an enthusiasm for making the world a better place. You're doing such great work. You're doing so many other things, too. We didn't even get into. But I think everybody should learn about these therapies. We're going to put links in the show notes to them. We'll put a link to next health. You can check it out. Unfortunately, it's not in every town, in every city, in every corner, which it should be. It will be. I want this to be the Starbucks of health.
- [70:38]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes.
- [70:38]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, we get in an airport and go, whatever you want, it's done. And I think we're going to change healthcare together. So thank you, bud.
- [70:46]
Dr. Darshan Shah
I appreciate it. I'm so glad to be on this journey with you, Mark, Dr. Hyman. And I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk about this.
- [70:53]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, it's exciting and it's very exciting. Well, until next time, we'll do this again. And I'm excited about my plans for you today. I'll tell you all how it works and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy.
- [71:03]
Dr. Darshan Shah
Let's do it. Thank you.
- [71:06]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and follow me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. And we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm always getting questions about my favorite books, podcasts, gadgets, supplements, recipes and lots more. And now you can have access, access to all of this information by signing up for my free Marks picks newsletter@doctor.com marks picks I promise I'll only email you once a week on Fridays and I'll never share your email address or send you anything else besides my recommendations. These are the things that have helped me on my health journey and I hope they'll help you too. Again, that's doctor.com marks picks. Thank you again and we'll see you next time on the Doctor's Pharmacy. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function.
- [72:01]
Narrator
Health where I'm the Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my.
- [72:05]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Guests opinions and neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests.
- [72:09]
Narrator
This podcast is for educational purposes only.
- [72:12]
Dr. Mark Hyman
This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.
- [72:17]
Narrator
This podcast is provided on the understanding.
- [72:19]
Dr. Mark Hyman
That it does not constitute medical or.
- [72:21]
Narrator
Other professional advice or services.
- [72:23]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Now, if you're looking for your help.
- [72:24]
Narrator
In your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner.
- [72:27]
Dr. Mark Hyman
You can come see us at the.
- [72:28]
Narrator
Ultra Wellness center in Lenox, Massachusetts.
- [72:30]
Dr. Mark Hyman
Just go to ultrawellnesscenter.com if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner near you.
- [72:34]
Narrator
You can visit ifm.org and search find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who is.
- [72:41]
Dr. Mark Hyman
A licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.
- [72:46]
Narrator
Keeping this podcast free is part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the general public.
- [72:51]
Dr. Mark Hyman
In keeping with that theme, I'd like to express gratitude to the sponsors that.
- [72:54]
Narrator
Made today's podcast possible.