This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah

What if the future of medicine isn’t about managing disease but erasing it? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Darshan Shah to explore cutting-edge therapies like plasmapheresis and their potential to transform health and longevity. Together, we discuss how this innovative treatment reduces inflammation, supports recovery from long COVID, and improves aging biomarkers. Discover how personalized care and functional medicine could redefine how we approach healthspan and lifespan. In this episode, we discuss: An overview of plasmapheresis, an advanced medical procedure that replaces plasma to reduce inflammation and aid recovery from chronic conditions. The potential of therapies like plasmapheresis to alleviate conditions such as Alzheimer's, autoimmune diseases, and long COVID. Leveraging natural stressors like heat, cold, and oxygen therapy to enhance mitochondrial function and extend lifespan. Exploring the critical role of reducing inflammation to improve overall health and prevent age-related diseases. The importance of diet, stress management, and environmental stressors in maintaining health and preventing disease. View Show Notes From This Episode Get Free Weekly Health Tips from Dr. Hyman Sign Up for Dr. Hyman’s Weekly Longevity Journal This episode is brought to you by BonCharge, Timeline, Big Bold Health, and Sunlighten. Order BON CHARGE’s Max Red Light Therapy device today and get 15% off. Visit BonCharge.com and use code DRMARK for 15% off. Get 33% off your order of Mitopure while supplies last. Go to Timeline.com/HYMAN33 today. Your future self will thank you! Try Big Bold Health's HTB Rejuvenate and get 25% off by going to BigBoldHealth. Com and use code DRMARK25 at checkout. Visit Sunlighten.com and save up to $600 on your purchase with code HYMAN.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coming up on this episode.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 0:25Dr. 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 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.

• 1:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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 things, including something called plasmapheresis, which you probably hear me talk about, but essentially it's like an oil and filter change for your body. He is an extremely well-chained 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 got to fix that and change to a healthcare system.

• 1:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And he started something called Next Health, which is a place that you can go to 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 and treating even chronic diseases like Alzheimer's and long COVID and many other things that you probably haven't happened to. It out yet because 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 diseases, aging itself. So I think you're going to 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.

• 2:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Dr. Hyman, I can't tell you.

• 2:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Mark, Mark.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Mark is, 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 it's an honor to be here.

• 3:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's amazing. That's amazing. You never know, you're going to be speaking a bunch of thousands of people in some audience and somebody gets like the light bulb goes off, you know?

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 3:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's great. So you were a traditional surgeon and 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 is a chance to cure to, you know, to heal with steel, to heal with what you're doing now.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  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. Right? 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 can never really catch up, you're actually, we're actually going

• 4:18Speaker 01

  in reverse. There were more people getting Being sick than we could ever operate on.

• 4:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  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. And think, in fact, things were getting worse and the problems were accumulating.

• 4:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  And then I saw, looking in the mirror, just working 12, 14 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 6 a.m. for a 6:15 cut time, right?

• 4:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  And then I would basically stand there in the O R with minimal breaks for hours and hours, probably 12, 14 hours a day sometimes.

• 5:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You had a Foley catheter in there?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  As a surgeon, you're not allowed the catheter.

• 5:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  For those, 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.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Sometimes you wish you had one.

• 5:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You have a Depends to go to the surgery?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  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 nurse's lounge. You use a combination of like donuts and bagels, right?

• 5:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  All the far, all the pharmacy pseudo companies bringing all that crap, muffins, bagels, donuts.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And then, you know, you're, you're like drinking coffee in between every single case.

• 5:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Coffee and sugar.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Coffee and sugar, right?

• 5:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's what medicine runs on.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  So I found myself in my early 40s in the sickest possible state that I could be in. I was had five different diagnoses, personally, personally, yeah. 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.

• 6:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Okay, and expensive guy in Beverly Hills. And his solution was to put me on Prozac because I was depressed about all of this stuff.

• 6:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  And all the latest.

• 6:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Five medications for crying out loud, you're depressed. Okay, I'll just give you Prozac.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  That's exactly what happened.

• 6:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Pill for every L.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Pill for every L, right? And so I was super sick and I, I personally was not getting anywhere. In the treadmill of my own health.

• 6:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  So I decided at that moment, there has to be a better way. But as you know.

• 6:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You were forty going on sixty.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, forty going on like almost seventy. It was crazy. I was, I was getting like decrepit at forty. 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, one of the first times. It was either, 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 of times in a row and.

• 7:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Light bulb went off, like you said, like I need to address my own health from the root cause.

• 7:11Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Amazing. That's quite a story. And, and now you're sitting here, no medications, no hypertension, no diabetes, right?

• 7:20Speaker 01

  I, I mean.

• 7:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Not on Prozac.

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. And what's great about it is not only do I not have diseases, but I feel incredible. Like the vitality and the energy and just to drive and you know, what I see in the mirror, like I just feel great. You know, and so that's it 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 just monumental.

• 7:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, Darshan, you know, what you're talking about is something, it sounds like, oh, well, I got these diseases. Then 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.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Managing your medication, managing your disease. Who wants to manage it? Why don't we get rid of it?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Well, the pharmaceutical companies want us to manage it.

• 8:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, of course.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  Subscription revenue for them, right?

• 8:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But you know, 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.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 8:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so, so that, that journey of, you know, 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.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 8:55Dr. 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 oliphant. But you, you had this vision of something different. And Next Health was, 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.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so during this time, when I was transforming my own health, I was going to a multiple different places all over Los Angeles, right? I was seeking out sauna therapy here. I was seeking out 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.

• 10:15Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Right. It's quite amazing. It's, 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.

• 10:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  And I saw myself like becoming an evangelist for functional medicine, becoming an evangelist, just an evangelist for the nutrition and like be 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.

• 10:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 11:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yes, and on people's personal health.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. I was like, you know what, the healthcare, Western medical system, that's a massive monstrosity that is going to take, you know, we got ourselves into this after five decades, it's going to take 10 decades to unwind this.

• 11:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, you and I are working on shortening that time.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  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 Next Health is. Like, we approach it completely differently. I remember like, starting Next Health, 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 be visit on a regular basis. Like, you go to a doctor once a year, we want you to come in once a week.

• 12:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's like an Apple store, instead of like, going into a like a corner bodega, which is a mess, right?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's what people call us, the Apple store of wellness.

• 12:10Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it is, it is beautiful. I've been there and then I've had been treated there. This, 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, 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 plasma resuscitation, 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.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and you know, one of the things that we're both focused on is how do we understand the science of

• 12:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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 you build within Next Health are the therapies that actually help to do that. And I've, I've been on this personal journey myself. I never had all those diseases. I had different diseases. I didn't, I didn't have lifestyle disease. 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 re-engineer myself from the inside out. I had to like reverse engineer, what is health? How do I create that?

• 13:42Dr. Mark Hyman?

  A lot of these therapies are really important and we're going to talk about them because they, 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, 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, have you been paying attention to the amount of money and research being published on the GLP-1 agonists? The Ozempics and Wegobes and Monjeros? 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.

• 14:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  If they have, you know, you have autoimmune diseases, 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.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:39Dr. 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 Altman founded a lab, but there's like a lot of, you know, billionaires, like the Google folks with Calico and Jeff Bezos with Altos and Sam Altman's initiative, where they're looking at a lot of these things. They're looking at plasma free research. 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

• 15:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  That's incredible.

• 15:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So I'm, I'm gonna, I don't know if I'm gonna hit my twenties, but I'm gonna still keep going and see how far I can get. And the point of this is not to brag, the point of this is to, is to sort of explain that the, the things that we think are inevitable as we age are not.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 15:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so why don't we sort of dive into the, some of the, the options and therapies that are available out there. And, and I, I want to start with plasma phoresis 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, but it's only done in academic centers, it's only done, you know, for very, very rare cases. It's not part of traditional medicine. It's not reimbursed for, for general health. And, and yet there's incredible research on it around Alzheimer's, around long COVID, around longevity itself. So first, why do you explain, what was the origin of the science that kind of

• 16:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  began to let us think about this particular medical procedure as a potential treatment for aging itself?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  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, and as we all know, this didn't really work or pan out because there's other things in blood. Really, really need, exactly.

• 17:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Although leeches are having a comeback in medicine for wound healing.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Leeches are having a comeback.

• 17:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cause you put them on wounds that don't heal and it makes through blood vessels.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  It does, it does. We use leeches a lot in surgery, actually. Venus congestion and things. So I'm, I'm very familiar with leeches, but any, but we're not talking leeches.

• 17:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But you're not doing trephination, you're not playing, drilling holes in people's brains to let out the bad humors.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  So, fast forward, apheresis was a technology that was developed to treat a disease called Waldenstrom'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.

• 17:59Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What is plasma?

• 18:00Speaker 01

  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 it's like a little.

• 18:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But the red, it's also your white cells, all, all your cells.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:24Dr. 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.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 18:31Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And you separate that from the soup. And, and the soup, what's in the soup?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  So the soup is where all of the.

• 18:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  In other words, what's in the plasma?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. What's in the plasma, right? So this is where all your cells are living and this is what they're exposed to on a day-to-day basis. It's the, 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.

• 19:13Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it's the communication superhighway.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's, one of the functions it has is being a communication superhighway for your entire body.

• 19:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so there are all these molecules in there that are regulating all these things.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So why, why do we then wanna? 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? Cause what you just, it sounds good.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Exactly. So, um, let's take it back a little bit more to also to the convoys with the parabiosis experiment. I think that's interesting to talk about when 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 G D F eleven, T N F, and nothing really panned out. And then 10 years later, there's a story, um, I don't, I, I think, 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.

• 20:20Speaker 01

  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. What you're taking out of the old mouse.

• 20:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  So it turns out inner 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.

• 20:40Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  It turns out where senescent cells, the S A S P, the, the negative, um, the negative products that senescent cells secrete also live in our plasma.

• 20:51Dr. 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.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  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 sat, to senescent cells, all of that is.

• 21:17Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Damage proteins.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cause one of the other things.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Damage proteins.

• 21:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And one of the other hallmarks of aging is, is, is damaged proteins.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 21:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And, and so all these damaged proteins just float around and they create more problems, more inflammation, more dysfunction. And we started to degrade and our resilience decreases and we age faster biologically.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 21:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  FDA approved, we've been using it, like you said.

• 21:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I'm a doctor for 41 years. So like, I know I'm old, but I remember it even back then.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Right, right. You 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, it's FDA approved, it's 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 could 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 was 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.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 22:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you you you then throw the stuff out and has anybody actually studied what's in there?

• 23:02Speaker 01

  People are.

• 23:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When you when you when you get get the stuff and like, it was like when you when you get an oil change, your car, you throw out the old oil.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  What's in that?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 23:34Dr. 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?

• 23:42Speaker 01

  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 exposure to even like microplastics and all of these toxins. And we've seen significant reductions in before and after treatment toxin levels. So we know toxins are in the plasma. And when you remove them, your body, your body gets a chance to catch up, right? Now it's able to say, phew, I can, I've lost a lot of the stuff I'm working overtime to remove, and it gets a chance to clean up. And like

• 24:25Speaker 01

  you said, it's like an oil change for the body. Like, 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.

• 24:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. It's interesting. I read a study recently that came out of Germany where they used plasmapheresis for long COVID.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 24:41Dr. 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, regulates all the things that are sort of automatic in your body, you know, all the parasympathetic sympathetic nervous system. And it basically affects your, your, 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, you know, they get postural hypertension, 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

• 25:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  variable about how many people have long COVID, but it's probably five to 10% of people had COVID. And I think it might be more. I mean, how many, you think how many hundreds of millions of Americans had COVID? You take 10% of that, it's still 20 million people, you know?

• 25:38Speaker 01

  A lot of people don't even know they have it.

• 25:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. And it's like little brain fog, not feeling as good, just not as good as they were before COVID. And, and was even more, more frightening as I was talking to Jeremy Nicholson, who's on, been on the podcast, who's a phenomic researcher from Australia, who's doing deep phenomics, which means looking at all these, not just the regular blood tests, but you know, metabolomics and cytokines and thousands, thousands of proteins and molecules. And he says, everybody's had COVID has something going on like they're all a little out of whack in terms of their immune system and 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 freeze is an fascinating treatment for that. And I think has a lot of promise.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I can tell you a couple of 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 wit's end. And as you and I both know, you know, some people, when they suffer with tinnitus, depending on how severe it is, it can be severely, 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 patient.

• 26:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I've heard even people committing suicides.

• 26:45Speaker 01

  So I wasn't going to say it, but yeah, you're right. Absolutely. There is a suicide rate associated with tinnitus that is, 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.

• 27:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Amazing. It's incredible.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so he's still in the treatment process right now. It remains to be seen.

• 27:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Was this post COVID or was this?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  This is long COVID. Yeah. 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 happened to a lot of people with long COVID. But my heart rate consistently elevated all night long. Right. Exactly. Heart variability really down and my, 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

• 27:52Speaker 01

  rate variability improve. And especially if you have long COVID, if you're suffering with heart rate elevation, you'll see that improve.

• 27:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So heart variability, for those of you listening, don't know what he's talking about, is basically the, the complexity of your heart rate, which is a sign of the resilience of your cardiovascular system and your nerve. nervous system. So when you're highly stressed and your, your variability goes down. So you want more, a more complexity in your heart rate, more complexity in your health means more resilience, more redundancy. It's like a rainforest, which has got redundancies and complexity versus a monocrop cornfield, which is, you know, if you have one bug or one blight or something, it's done. So, so, so this is really important measurement around your overall well being and health. And that's, that's a profound thing. I also have personally had an experience with COVID and I didn't get to long COVID, thank God.

• 28:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But I, 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 in a place where I could get plasmapheresis and literally within hours.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  Incredible.

• 29:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It was getting better. And the next morning it was completely gone.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Just never came back.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 29:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I was like, damn.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Incredible. And like with the heart variability that you had mentioned earlier, COVID makes antibodies to your autonomic nervous system.

• 29:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  That's if you have antibodies to your autonomic nervous system, your heart rate can't be variable.

• 29:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  And so from there, if we provide your organs, the, 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.

• 30:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I, 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 it in functional 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 an inflammatory. I mean, I literally had a patient recently who had Hodgkin's lymphoma.

• 30:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And and one of the ways that I figured it out was, you know, we was having certain symptoms and we checked his blood levels of inflammation and they were extremely high. I'm 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 Ultra Mind Solution, about how the body affects the brain.

• 31:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so what we're talking about here is is this this underlying process of inflammation that cuts across all diseases and it's it's one of the hallmarks of aging. So this technology of plasma free system 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 you're not just saying eat your McDonald's and come in and get your blood cleaned, right? And so you've 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 for helping to reverse some of the the phenomena that it 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 you just feel like

• 32:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  you get it like a car wash, a brainwash, your your brain feels clear, you have more energy, you just feel lighter. It's quite an interesting experience, you know, and you're like, what the hell is in my blood that's so crappy? You know, and and I think, you know, I had it done a bunch of times in the first few times, like my blood was like cloudy.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And then now it's like more clear. And you see that?

• 32:23Speaker 01

  You 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.

• 32:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, so you mentioned Alzheimer's, cardio and cardiovascular disease too. Can we talk about that? Let's talk about Alzheimer's because some of the research on that is just so fascinating.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  It's fascinating.

• 32:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And and here's a condition, just just as background where we spent billions of dollars. Hundreds and hundreds of studies, no good outcomes. Like, 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 buffkies we've gotten. 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 costing, what, 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.

• 33:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So can you talk about the science that we now have around Alzheimer's and plasma freezes?

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and 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.

• 33:53Dr. Mark Hyman?

  By the time you get to 85, it's almost 50%.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It's just mind blowing. And so 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.

• 34:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. Yes, with function and health, we're actually having what I mean called AD Detect 4240, 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 managing this plasma freezes, what's going on?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And we're doing the study right now, measuring these before and after plasma freezes. 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. Kiprow 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, 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

• 35:40Speaker 01

  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?

• 35:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  And this has basically almost zero side effects.

• 35:51Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just a needle poke, basically.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, it's a needle poke.

• 35:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, it's pretty amazing and, and it's, um, you know, so it's, it's one of these treatments that, that, you know, has been around for a long time and having new applications, right? Long COVID, Alzheimer's. Now they're looking at it for something called lipoprotein little A, which is a, 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?

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:20Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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, she's healthy, looked relatively, you know, good, I mean, she's not overweight, she's, she's got no relatives, but she has 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?

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Right, right. So, you know, I love what function health is doing with measuring LP little A, like I can't tell you the number of patients I see that still go to their primary doctors and have never had an LP little A done before. And they're wondering why they have so much heart disease.

• 36:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  When up to 15 to 20% of people have the genetic malformation that causes LP little A. And LP little A, um, just for the, the listeners to know, is a particularly aggressive form of cholesterol that causes plaques in your arteries, but also can cause a deposition of calcium on your blood valves, it can cause. And your arteries going to your brain. It's really dangerous. It can, it can cause heart attacks quite easily and strokes quite easily as well. And valve damage. And so if you have LP little A, you want to get it treated.

• 37:27Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Guess how you treat it? There's no treatment right now. There's no drug. Lifestyle changes, actually, this is resistant to lifestyle changes.

• 37:34Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I mean, some supplements I found lowering it like twenty, thirty percent. But you're not, it doesn't go back to normal.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, nattokinase, I think is good.

• 37:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And it's, you know, cysteine, some other things we use. Yeah, but it's, it's not easy.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  It's not easy, right? You people struggle with it. So we have two or three patients that we're treating with LP little A. Just like the toxins and the other things that we're talking about. All cholesterol also lives in your plasma, including the LP little A. 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 little A actually stays to close to normal levels for about six weeks after a plasma exchange. Right? And so, look, like, I mean, I think it's one of those therapies that as it becomes more ubiquitous, more people can use it for control of LP little A until we find a therapeutic that works. And there's a lot of research being done for therapies that works. But this is a great way to temporary control.

• 38:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And that sort of brings the question of, like you said, six weeks. Like for Alzheimer's, how often you need to do it? Do you need it 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? Is it, like, I'm asking for a friend here.

• 38:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I want to do it. And I want to know, what, what do we know about this?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  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 using the Mocha score.

• 39:06Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Mocha is a Montreal cognitive assessment tool. It's basically a, a quick screening tool for your memory that we use to check for Alzheimer's.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Exactly. And use other tools as well.

• 39:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's not like, uh, it's not like a Mocha latte or anything.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Give, give a, give a patient a Mocha and see how they like it. So anyhow, I, I, 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. It's the lifestyle, their level of exposure to things like ultra-processed food, lack of sleep,

• 39:59Speaker 01

  all 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 one, 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, I end up with it. There's a lot of research being done for, for Alzheimer's and for age-related diseases as well.

• 40:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So just as a regular monthly cleanup?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think it's monthly for everybody. I think that-

• 40:35Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Cause I'm way behind if that's the case.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Age-related, age-related, I would say is probably going to end up being quarterly.

• 40:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 40:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I try. A little too much traveling stress, but yeah, I try.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  My, 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 new.

• 41:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, that's another question is, is, you know, are there unique biomarkers that can be tracked that are specific to the benefits you see from plasmodiferesis? In other words, are there, should you have these panel of 10 biomarkers to tell you, oh, before and after this is what's changing? Like the, you know, AD detect 4240, or the P tau, or cytokines, or lipids? Or what, what, 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?

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Right. So-

• 41:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or do we not know?

• 41:34Speaker 01

  We do know. It's all the biomarkers that we're testing, like with function health. For your biomarker panel and it depends on what you're targeting. Okay. So for example, I have a patient with extremely high HSCR P and a lot of it is due to gut health issues.

• 41:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  And so one plasma pharesis and her HSCR P went from nine to two.

• 41:55Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Wow.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Okay. So for her, we're tracking HSCR P.

• 41:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Even chelation.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Even chelation. Chelation did not work. EBO treatments did not work. Saw all kinds of alternative therapies.

• 42:16Dr. Mark Hyman?

  EBO is a ozone therapy.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  Ozone therapy.

• 42:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Which we also do in X Health, right?

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Yes, we also do ozone as well. So for her, we're tracking toxin levels. Okay. And so like the LP little A patient I told you about, we're tracking LP little A 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.

• 42:41Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Zombie cells.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Zombie cells. Right. Exactly.

• 42:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  There's no really commercial test for zombie cells, though.

• 42:46Speaker 01

  Not yet.

• 42:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But it's research.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  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?

• 43:12Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, I mean P tau and beta amyloid. Yeah.

• 43:14Speaker 01

  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.

• 43:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Interesting. Yeah. So it's customized.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  It's customized.

• 43:26Dr. 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.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 43:37Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And they won't do it for off-label reasons. Then 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.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 43:51Dr. 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.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 44:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And so it's not widespread and there's not a lot of clinics. And Next Health is one of the few places where you can actually get plasma freezes.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  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 freezing machines in the entire Mayo system. That's, that's a lot of plasma freezing 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 plasma freezes, they wouldn't even know where to start because they don't know how to build the insurance for it, right? And so I think it's really important. What we're trying to do at Next Health is all of our locations will have a plasma freezes machine.

• 44:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 44:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And I'm going right after this podcast. Go get one.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  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 freezes.

• 45:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  It's that the best use of albumin.

• 45:08Dr. 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. 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? Cause you, you know, you have about five liters of blood. And probably one 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.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  It's about 45% of your blood is.

• 45:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay. So 45%. So a full cleaning would be what?

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Two to three liters.

• 45:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Two to three liters. And you remove all that and then you just put back in albumin.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  And fluid.

• 45:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And fluid, and fluid, like sailing, right?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Well, we, 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.

• 46:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, so you, so don't do normal plasma free, so you do like an upgrade?

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you, you put in albumin plus you put in IV nutrients?

• 46:06Speaker 01

  IV nutrients and nicotinamide riboside, we put back in you as well, which your, which your cells need. We're doing also glutathione, we're doing albumin and some patients will use immune globulin as well, IVIG.

• 46:18Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Amazing. So the, the amount you take out is about three liters.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:24Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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?

• 46:33Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So, you know, 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-

• 46:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like people are malnourished or have low protein, yeah.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Low protein, even like trauma situations where people have lost a lot of blood and you like get them volume right away. That's why 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 when it lives in the plasma. And so when you remove the plasma, you have to replace albumin because your body, as was 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, in our biology.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  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 the, this, 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.

• 47:57Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Amazing. Well, if anybody listening out there, it has a lot of money. We gotta 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 Burden 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.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 48:35Dr. 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.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Disease, right.

• 48:43Dr. Mark Hyman?

  They don't study health at all.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Took the words out of my mouth.

• 48:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Right. But, you know, this is really tremendous research. And I personally benefited, you've benefited from it, and I see the benefits from my patients who can get it. Now, the challenge right now is it's not cheap because it's an expensive machine, you know, the technology.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Album is expensive.

• 49:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  The development is expensive, the product is expensive. So do you see a world in which this comes down, you know, in price? Because, you know, for example, at Function, we've figured out how to get $15,000 worth of labs for $499 a year, right? With twice a year testing. Is plasma research is going to be able to be done more inexpensively? Well, I mean, and what do we have to do to get it covered by insurance?

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. So here's why it's expensive right now is albumin is 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.

• 49:44Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Sounds just like an IV nurse sticks an IV in, you gotta know what you're doing.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  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 the albumin product that's available, the lower that drives the 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 Plasma freezers machine at every location and we're going to drive down the price as 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

• 50:30Speaker 01

  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

• 50:38Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, if you get this once a quarter, you prevent all these chronic illnesses, right? And I think 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, you know, Alzheimer's is the most expensive disease out there in in America because of the collateral damage on the cost of, you know, caregivers not being able to work and the cost of caring for these people long term. I mean, it's it's an incredible economic drain in society and the number of people getting this going up and up. But I but I'll also just point out that don't expect that you just get plasma freezes and you're going to prevent Alzheimer's or retreat it. You know, there's some other data that needs to be talked

• 51:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  about, which is, I think, really exciting is 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 the disease itself. And Richard Isaacson, his work, who was a who was at Cornell now, he's down in Florida, is also a tremendous work showing that we can use aggressive lifestyle and personalized care to actually do exactly what you're saying. It's not everybody gets the same treatment. It's really what are you 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, you know, illness back to wellness.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And, you know, I want to just double click on that because it's so important. You should never sit in a plasma freezes chair if you're not willing to first undergo aggressive lifestyle intervention concurrently with a treatment. Program, right? Because you're just, 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 is getting worse and worse. And you're just trying to keep up with oil changes. It's not going to work.

• 52:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's right.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  You have to be committed to aggressive life cell 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?

• 52:47Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I got ninety and ninety in my score last night. I was really happy.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  Well, after your plasma freezes, you're going to get even a hundred probably tonight.

• 52:54Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Really? Oh, God, I've never gotten a hundred. Brian Johnson gets a hundred. I've never gotten a hundred. If I got a hundred, I'm going to give you a hundred bucks.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Okay, there we go.

• 53:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Or maybe more.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  But yeah, I mean, I think, I think a commitment to aggressive life intervention should be a part of any longevity protocol. But it's a requirement before you start doing things like plasma freezes.

• 53:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I think we're going to put in the show notes, references to studies and the, and the research on this. Cause this, we're not just talking about some wacky thing. We're talking about something that's being really well researched and has tremendous promise. That I personally benefited from that. My patients have benefited from that. I think it's one of the most exciting longevity therapies out there.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  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 going to, it's in peer review process, but I'll send it to you and you can maybe link it in the show notes too. Are you, 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? Plasma freezes study with omic age and symphony testing showing major reversal of, of these markers.

• 54:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. I mean, I, like I said, I went four years backwards as I went two years forward. And I probably had four, four or five plasma freezes treatments over the last two years. So I, I think, I don't know if that's what did it. I've done a bunch of other stuff too. I didn't, I just threw the kitchen sink at it, but I wanted to see how far I could get. I feel good about myself. I think, I think, you know, the, the, the studies are going to just be more and more. And I think we're going to learn more and more. Okay. So, 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 Next Health that are, I think, important to consider as we look at treating this chronic disease epidemic and also helping people optimize health and achieve longer health span and a longer lifespan.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  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

• 55:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Like in a gym, instead of like the circuit.

• 55:10Speaker 01

  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 a 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.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  So, I think that's another mainstay of therapy that we do at Next Health.

• 55:58Dr. 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 often fall under the category of something called hormesis. 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, and calorie restriction is an incredible stress on the body.

• 56:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 56:21Dr. 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 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 living to 120. Of course, you're gonna be miserable, hungry, you don't have sex drive, be too skinny, but that, but there are ways to actually mimic that. Exercise is a form of hormesis because you're, you're stressing your muscles and then you get sore because they're, you're carrying muscle fibers, but then they come back stronger. So it's like build back better, right?

• 57:02Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So the idea is, is these are all therapies that are, are available to us that we can use to up-regulate these pathways in our body that I call the longevity switches.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 57:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So, so, you know, we, 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. Like it, 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, and cold therapy, heat therapy. You know, I, I definitely find that for me, if I do a sauna and a cold plunge every day,

• 57:58Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I just feel like a million bucks, you know?

• 58:00Speaker 01

  It's the best thing.

• 58:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  It's my morning routine. I wake up, I work out, I do my, where I might, might do a hot and cold first, then I work out. And then, you know, depending on where, where I am, and it's just an incredible way to do it your, your, your day, but, but it actually has all these other benefits.

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I do mine at night. I do a 30-minute sauna and then a cold plunge at night and I, I just 100 sleep score.

• 58:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Come on.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  I'm telling you, try it at night.

• 58:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I wanna see. Give me your phone.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  I'll let you show you.

• 58:28Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Show me after. That's insane. Okay.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Try it at night.

• 58:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Okay, I'll try, I'll try it.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  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 might, 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.

• 59:08Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You can buy like a, like a little sauna blanket, or you can buy these little fold up saunas that you can like stick your head out of. They're very inexpensive and then, you know, a bathtub, I just fill it with cold water. I mean, that's what I did for years. I had a steam put in my shower, which wasn't that expensive. And I've had it for 25 years and, you know, have a bathtub filled with cold water. And I just go back and forth and I've done that for years and it's, it's not that expensive to do that.

• 59:38Speaker 01

  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. Is go donate plasma. They'll pay you to remove some of your plasma.

• 59:52Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Amazing.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it's kind of, it's kind of hacking the system a little bit, like giving the blood. Yeah.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  That's a good one. Okay. So in, in, in your vision for healthcare, where, where, where do you see all this going? Cause there's so much happening so fast right now in terms of what's happening on the margins of healthcare, like Next Health and Function Health, the company I co-founded, that are really trying to push healthcare in a different direction. And they're actually disintermediating a lot of the traditional healthcare systems, operational, like, you know, ways that we kind of work, right? So where, where do you see all this going?

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:00:56Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah. If you need surgery or whatever.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  And then there's going to be a health system. That's going to be developed by people like yourself, giving people the empowerment to manage their own biomarkers, 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 going to have a true health system and then the current system will be a disease system. And these will be in parallel, which is the way it all of these should have been done in the first place.

• 1:01:26Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:33Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Of course.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  It needs to always be there, but we need to have dollars funnel towards health versus that disease care world.

• 1:01:39Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, I mean, you know, listen, all of us are going to have something. For example, you know, I have a genetic risk for atrial fib. My mother had it. You know, I, 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 places zap. And now, you know, a week later, I was playing tennis. So that's amazing, right? I mean, that's great, but, but there are so many things we do in healthcare that are just like trying to plug a hole in a, in a sinking ship with your finger and it's a, you know, it's the size of a, you know, a, a football field. And yet we're just, we got our finger trying to hold the dam together. It's not working.

• 1:02:23Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So we do need a health, a true healthcare system. And I, and I, I think what we have now, 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.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:02:36Dr. Mark Hyman?

  And yes, you have to pay out of pocket, but now with health savings accounts, so anybody can start a health savings account. So there's literally billions of dollars in health savings accounts. People are not using them properly. TrueMed is started by a friend of mine, Callie Means and Justin Mara. They, they actually are, are now enabling you to be able to use your health savings account dollars for things like plasma freezers, or 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 own 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 sixty six years old, for all the medications she needed for chronic illnesses that three months were completely reversed.

• 1:03:21Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, fatty liver, renal insufficiency, all gone. And you, and you know, as a doctor, you don't reverse heart failure. No. 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 fifty percent. You know, when it goes down under fifty, you're starting in trouble. This one was like thirty five percent, went back up to fifty. You don't, you don't see that with traditional medicine, but when you use, this was just lifestyle and diet, it wasn't even, wasn't even all these fancy things we're talking about. So I think, I think we have the ability to really treat a disease completely differently. And one of the, one of my, 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.

• 1:04:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  I'm like, no, it's treatment. Yeah. And it works better. Yeah. Than traditional medication. If I need a drug, I'm going to use it. Right. Like if there's a drug, certain patients have genetic lipid disorders. They might need medication like a PCSK nine inhibitor. They might need a statin. That's okay, but not seventy five percent of the prescriptions being written for people for prevention for as 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 fifty four 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. Sure. And they're like, oh, we need to put you on statins right away.

• 1:04:50Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Oh, my. And I'm like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Super, you're super healthy. Right. 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. Yep. Right. Right. Uh, it's called Clearly Health. Yep. Uh, and you can look it up, clearlyhealth.com. There are centers all around the country where you can get this done, but you don't, you can get it 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. Like I, I don't think I've ever seen a fifty four year old that gets zero. He had zero plaque, zero sop plaques. Or heart plaques or any kind of plaque, his arteries are pretty clean. I'm like, you do not need a drug, you know? And so I think we really need to start looking at, you know,

• 1:05:32Dr. Mark Hyman?

  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.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:06:00Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So you don't have to treat the disease.

• 1:06:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:01Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You're just, you're just creating health and removing the things that are impediments to health, right?

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  Very well said.

• 1:06:07Dr. Mark Hyman?

  All this shit in your blood, and you're adding the ingredients for health, right? The nutrients and vitamins and all the other stuff we talked about.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:06:14Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it's really quite simple. You take out the bad stuff, you put in the good stuff. The body's healing machine.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  You've been saying this for years.

• 1:06:19Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Yeah, the body's healing machine actually just knows what the heck to do.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:06:22Dr. Mark Hyman?

  So it's quite incredible. You're just such a beautiful man.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:06:26Dr. 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, I think everybody should, should learn about these therapies. We're gonna 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.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  It will be.

• 1:06:45Dr. Mark Hyman?

  But I want this to be the Starbucks of health.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:06:48Dr. Mark Hyman?

  You know, where you get in an airport and go, everyone, it is done. And I think we're gonna change healthcare together. So, thank you, buddy.

• 1:06:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:07:03Dr. Mark Hyman?

  Well, it's exciting. It's very exciting. Well, till 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, and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Let's do it. Thank you.

• 1:07:16Dr. 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 to all of this information by signing up for my free Mark's Picks newsletter at drhyman.com/markspicks. 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 things that have helped me on my health journey, and I hope they'll help you too. Again, that's drhyman.com/markspicks. Thank you again, and we'll see you next time on The Doctor's Pharmacy.

• 1:08:05Dr. Mark Hyman?

  This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I'm the Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions, and neither myself nor the podcast endorse the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. Now, if you're looking for your help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. You can come see us at the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. Just go to ultra wellnesscenter.com. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner near you, you can visit ifm.org and search "Find a Practitioner Database." It's important

• 1:08:49Dr. Mark Hyman?

  that you have someone in your corner who is trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. Keeping this podcast free is part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to express gratitude to the sponsors that made today's podcast possible.

• 1:09:09Dr. Mark Hyman?

  When it comes to supplements, you only want the best for your body, the kind with the highest quality, cleanest and most potent ingredients you can get. That's exactly what you'll find at my supplement store, where I've hand-selected each and every product to meet the most rigorous standards for safety, purity and effectiveness. These are the only supplements I recommend to my patients, and they're also what I use myself. Whether you want to optimize longevity or reduce your disease risk, or you're looking to improve your sleep, blood sugar, metabolism, gut health, you name it, drhyman.com has the world's best selection of top-quality, premium supplements, all backed by science and expertly vetted by me, Dr. Mark Hyman. So check out drhyman.com because when it comes to your health, nothing less than the very best will do. That's drhyman.com, D-R-H-Y-M-A-N dot com.