Use Younger Cells to Heal Your Older Body with Regenerative Medicine (Stem Cells, PRP, Exosomes & Prolotherapy)

Nick Urban [00:00:07]:
Are you

Nick Urban [00:00:08]:
a high performer, obsessed with growth, and looking for an edge? Welcome to MINDBODY Peak Performance. Together, we’ll discover underground secrets to unlocking the full potential of your mind, body, and spirit. We’ll learn from some of the world’s leading minds, from ancient wisdom to cutting edge tools and everything in between. This is your host, Nick Urban. Enjoy the episode. Are stem cells, exosomes, and regenerative medicine an overpriced fad or the future of medicine? In this episode, we walk through the landscape of regenerative medicine. So if you’ve heard of terms like stem cells and exosomes and PRP and prolotherapy and x cells and v cells and follistatin gene therapy, This episode, we explore them all. We also discuss other biohacks and more affordable ways to get similar benefits or to increase your own stem cell pools without expensive procedures.

Nick Urban [00:01:15]:
Our guest this week also specializes in cartilage regeneration and the world of antiaging. He is doctor Jeff Gross. Known as the stem cell whisperer, doctor Gross has worked at the National Institute of Health, the NIH, and had opportunities to study IT, Johns Hopkins, and eventually chose Berkeley, where he worked under Nobel laureates. He trained at top trauma centers, and his landmark research on brain tissue has been cited nearly 500 times. Perhaps most relevantly, though, he continues to treat patients in neurosurgery, focusing on nonsurgical approaches and regenerative medicine, often providing second opinions and consulting internationally. If you’re very involved in the world of biohacking and specifically the events and summits, you’ve surely seen his name as he’s often a presenter at most of the big conferences. You can find his work online at recelebrate.com, recelebrate, where he offers a wide range of services. And for listeners of this podcast, just mention my name, Nick Urban, to receive a free 30 minute consultation.

Nick Urban [00:02:34]:
You can find everything we discuss in the show notes for this episode, which will be at mindbodypeak.com/thenumber175. If you have any questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you. So go ahead and reach out on Instagram at mindbodypeakperformance, or simply tag me and doctor Gross, and we’ll get back to you. Alright. Sit back, relax, and I hope you enjoy this episode with doctor Jeff Gross. Doctor Gross, welcome to the podcast.

Doctor Gross [00:03:04]:
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much.

Nick Urban [00:03:07]:
This is gonna be an exciting one because I have never covered in-depth the topics of regenerative medicine and cartilage repair and a lot of different things that are in your wheelhouse on the show before.

Doctor Gross [00:03:20]:
Well, I’m happy to be the first to help, explain things and educate you and your audience and spread, good good information, good science, and and the good word.

Nick Urban [00:03:31]:
Let’s start off today with the unusual nonnegotiables you’ve done for your health, your performance, and your bioharmony. And it’s a couple hours earlier over there for you. I know you’re in, I believe, Nevada. So if your list isn’t as comprehensive as a typical biohackers, that’s a okay.

Doctor Gross [00:03:50]:
Well, I I do a lot of things, but I I think the nonnegotiables would be time restricted feeding. Some people call it intermittent fasting, but I don’t think we’re designed to eat during the dark phase. So I don’t like to call it fasting because we should it’s fasting seems like on purpose we’re not eating. This is intermittent feeding. So I I definitely am a very big, somewhere between 16 and 18 hour non feeder, depending on the day. I I have it down to a a routine so that if if I fudge from 16 to 18 hours or vice versa, I don’t get too worked up up about it. The second thing would be my supplementation. I make sure I get my anti inflammatory supplements and other things we don’t get in our diet, and I take a a long list of things.

Doctor Gross [00:04:44]:
And but I don’t start people on a long list of things when they meet with me because it’s it’s it’s too overwhelming. But, I do, modify from time to time my daily, miss my midday snack. So so, I I do believe we don’t get these things in our diet. And if we were eating of the earth, you know, with organic, you know you know, really diverse fruits and vegetables and meats and things, we we wouldn’t need all that. But, unfortunately, we have a very watered down food source and affected water supply and all whatever else is in our air. So we’re fighting inflammation at a higher rate. And I think we see that I can go off topic a little bit. We see that in younger people having, you know, hormone deficiencies disease and and earlier inflammatory problems.

Doctor Gross [00:05:34]:
And so many people with inflammatory type diseases, autoimmune things. We’re seeing this across the population. So you gotta fight inflammation, and the younger you start, the better. And that can be through lifestyle, through supplements. So the so the supplements are nonnegotiable. They’re easy to do, you know, once you get as part of routine. And the the the investment, because you does cost some money to to buy these, you know, is is that or, you know, always preventing always preventing. Right? Preventative medicine comes first.

Doctor Gross [00:06:05]:
And then 3rd would be exercise, and I’m guilty of not always, make getting that done because of my crazy schedule. But, I think the one take all pill to fix everything, that you could do would be move. And there are some hacks and strategies on how to get the most out of strength training, and it it doesn’t have to be a 2 hour gym trip every time and that kind of thing. But

Nick Urban [00:06:27]:
To double click into your supplement stack a little bit, you mentioned the anti inflammatory nature of the things that you take. Is there a reason that you’re focusing specifically on that? And I’d assume that the substances you’re using are not just anti inflammatories. They have other benefits as well.

Doctor Gross [00:06:46]:
Sure. Of course. And we throw around this this phrase anti inflammatory or or if you don’t hyphenate it, maybe a word anti inflammatory. But, it’s it’s a kind of a general concept that, you know, we age because we are slowly oxidizing. We are biologically rusting. If you think about it, you know, an old car sitting out in the garage and it, you know, it just hasn’t been used and it’s it’s the old chrome is rusting back when they had chrome on cars. You know? The we are biologically rusting. And the faster you rust and the more you rust, the quicker you age.

Doctor Gross [00:07:20]:
And age is really this accumulation of chronic inflammatory damage in the cells, the tissues, and then inflammation leads to degeneration. And, of course, we’ll talk about the opposite of degeneration as regeneration, and how you get the opposite of inflammation as anti inflammation. Right? So that’s that’s the overarching thing is we really wanna slow the degradative, degenerative process, the inflammatory process. And and the earlier you start and the more you do, the slower you age, the slower you’ll develop the risk of disease formation, particularly diseases of inflammation. And, frankly, most diseases, except maybe some genetic ones, although there’s some overlap, are an inflammatory disease of an inflammatory nature, osteoarthritis, diabetes type 2. Alzheimer’s disease has an inflammatory component. All the autoimmune diseases have an inflammatory component. Cardiovascular accumulation, you know, hardening of the arteries has an inflammatory component of the plaques.

Doctor Gross [00:08:20]:
I mean, all of these things, can be slowed slash reversed slash prevented. So back into your DoubleClick, in the maze, things may start people on the 5 first things. Everyone every antiaging doctor will have a a little different stacking. You know, you can compare all these fun opinions and get to make your own choices. But, I’m a I’m a big believer in omega 3 supplementation for anti inflammation, outcompeting some of the bad fats and things. You know, fish oil, good fish oil is classic. Now we have different types of omega threes, the fatty fifteens and others, you know, mix and match, change it up. But I believe an adult should have about 3 grams minimum a day.

Doctor Gross [00:09:02]:
And you look at the blue zones where people live healthier longer, we talk about longevity, but, really, it’s healthy longevity and health span. Like Okinawa, the their omega 3 indices, meaning the index of the amount of omega 3 in their body that have q accumulated over time, from a probably a lot of the seafood that have access to in Okinawa. Those, that’s that’s probably one of the reasons, not the only reason, but one of the reasons they they do so well. So you can have a little bit of Okinawan in you by by taking the right omega 3 supplementation, but significant amount. Some people take even higher than we have other people on higher amounts to get their omega 3 indices up. So that index is a lab test. I’m a very big fan of good probiotics. I think that, you know, I when I went to medical school, you know, decades ago, the we were not taught about the microbiome.

Doctor Gross [00:09:57]:
We were not taught about the gut. We were not taught about supplements, and I had to go back and learn that. And I am such a big fan of the anti inflammatory nature of our invited slash uninvited guests. Some of them are invited. Some of them are uninvited that live in our gut and other places in our body. I’m focusing on the gut, but we have biomes everywhere. Right? Skin and other places Mouth. So but the gut microbiome you know, when we’re kids you know, I grew up in the Midwest and, you know, before there were really screens.

Doctor Gross [00:10:27]:
And, you know, mom would send us out to play. Right? And we would play sports in the grass and roll around and wrestle and do what boys do and get dirty and get soil on our fingers and, you know, probably got some in our mouth. And we had this diverse, healthy, young, you know, of the earth’s microbiome growing, and and we were healthy. We could heal, and we didn’t have problems. Well, kids today are sitting inside in front of a screen. They’re not doing that. And certainly adults at a desk job and, you know, to some extent mine is, maybe yours is. So we we have to supplement and replace that microbiome, either that or go roll around in the mud, you know, every morning or grounded.

Doctor Gross [00:11:08]:
3rd, I like, proper restorative sleep. And the 2 things, among others, that we use for that at night would be, a really good multimodal magnesium because so many cell processes require magnesium. And if if you don’t take a good supplement, by the way, it does help with restored sleep during the night. We’ll get to that. But if you don’t take a good supplement, you’d have to eat, you know, 10 to 12 servings of leafy green vegetables a a day, and some people do. But even the vegetables we have now are the nutrients are bleached out, watered down. What we’re getting is not the free range stuff that of 200 years ago when you grow your own vegetables. So so magnesium.

Doctor Gross [00:11:51]:
And at night, I I’m a big believer in melatonin even if you go to sleep fine. You know? Classically, people, use melatonin to help them sleep, which it can. But, it actually is the dark phase hormone, dark phase being no sun out. You know, in the morning, cortisol is released from the adrenal glands once the sun hits our eyes and it’s the retina in our eyes. And we release the stress hormones so we can get things done. We can hunt. We can fish. We can, you know, take care of the day and all all the things we need to do.

Doctor Gross [00:12:21]:
But but our cells are busy inflaming during that time, and and they need equal opportunity to repair and restore, you know, repair DNA, fight oxidation. That happens mostly during the dark phase. And if we don’t give ourselves proper downtime through restorative sleep, they won’t get there. So the opposite sort of opposing hormone of cortisol is melatonin. Sadly, after puberty, we don’t make hardly as much. You’ll get deeper sleep, restorative sleep. Your cells heal better, and and you we know this if you measure HRV. Anybody that wears an Oura ring or a Whoop band or a Apple Watch has it and others, your heart rate variability.

Doctor Gross [00:13:04]:
You know if you don’t get proper sleep, your body has physiologic detriment the next day.

Nick Urban [00:13:10]:
Yeah. And I wanna really quickly touch on your routine. You mentioned the focusing on the anti inflammatory, like, stack and upregulating that system in the morning, it sounded like. There’s a concept called redox, which as I understand it, is the balance between anti inflammatory or oxidation and reduction. It’s like the two sides of the seesaw. And you also mentioned one of your daily habits is exercise. And back in I don’t even know how long ago, one of the leading theories behind the cause of aging was simply a mismatch of too much oxidation, not enough reduction, too much inflammation, etcetera, etcetera. And then they realized that that’s an incomplete picture, and there’s forms of healthy inflammation that results from certain lifestyle things, like the hormetic stressors, such as exercise.

Nick Urban [00:14:03]:
Are you at all concerned that by consuming anti inflammatories after a workout, as a number of papers have shown that you’ll blunt some of the beneficial adaptive or hormetic effects of exercise.

Doctor Gross [00:14:18]:
No. And we know this from from HRV tracking. There’s some wonderful data, community data on this. You know, the WHOOP band statisticians are probably the best at this. You know, you’re right about the hormetic stresses to build resilience. Right? You’ve got exercise. You got hot sauna. You got cold plunges.

Doctor Gross [00:14:34]:
You’ve got fasting, real fasting. You know? These build resilience through acute inflammation. Right? Healing is acute inflammation. You cut yourself. You want that acute inflammation. What we don’t want is chronic leaky inflammation, and these type of supplements are really fighting against the the chronic mediators of inflammation, not necessarily the acute mediators. So people who track HRV will tell you that if you overwork and do 2 you know, you can overdo it with exercise. Right? There’s too much too.

Doctor Gross [00:15:05]:
So, they will tell you that, you know, you you find your sweet spot with the exercise, and, I don’t have any fear that we’re goofing around with the seesaw by taking the anti inflammatories. Now is there an ideal time before and after a workout or where, you know, when you should take them? That I don’t know, and I don’t know that would be a very difficult study to do, but worth looking at. So it’s a great concept.

Nick Urban [00:15:29]:
I think the other missing layer there is your age. For example, when I was younger, teenager, I could do double days, triple days of, like, weight lifting, like, heavy resistance training, and then football practice or rugby training, and then hit another session, and I’d recover fine. My HRV would not tank like it would. But as I get older, I can no longer sustain that. And what I’ve seen is that the inflammatory response, it it’s no longer as efficient as it was previously. It spikes and then drops, and then as you get older, it kinda just ramps up and doesn’t decline as it should. And And so I see a stronger case that as you’re aging, it makes more and more sense to have these types of things because you’re also gonna like, the if there is a blunting of the hormetic beneficial effect of exercise, it’s probably pretty negligible unless you’re an Olympic athlete or someone really who needs every last little morsel, then perhaps it’s not the good choice. But for everyone else, it makes sense.

Doctor Gross [00:16:27]:
It’s a very keen observation. So when we look at, just as an analogy, HRV or heart rate variability, we want the healthy heart is the one that responds and adapts quickly to demand and to relaxation. Well, you’re almost asking that here. You’re you’re creating never thought of this before. You’re kinda creating an inflammatory variability. We want an adaptable inflammation system that can turn on and turn off. The problem is with with the chronic accumulated inflammation, it doesn’t turn off as well, and and it gets leaky. So so we almost want to learn how to improve our inflammation system variability, and I’m coining that here with you so you can patent that later.

Doctor Gross [00:17:12]:
You know, we’ll give it we’ll give it a thing. Maybe it’ll be a measure on your phone, but and we can look at the the the cell mediators of that. But this this bridges over into regenerative medicine. And I know you didn’t necessarily if you meant for that, you’re brilliant. You’re brilliant anyway. But but the, the you know, our stem cell reserve is less functional, less voluminous, less functional as we accumulate chronic inflammation and vice versa. As we accumulate chronic inflammation, that that that system is is is less effective. So we can’t suppress the chronic inflammation, and the acute then doesn’t fully turn off because we want the acute.

Doctor Gross [00:17:53]:
And you think about this if you’ve ever seen a toddler playing on the sidewalk, scrapes his knee, has has a an abrasion, cries, mom cleans it up, puts some Bactine on or whatever, puts a band aid on it, kisses it, and sends him on his way. And then 3 days later in the bathtub, the band aid falls off. But the the abrasion’s not only a scab, it’s a mature scab. It’s almost healed. But, you know, you look at, like, a 70 year old person who bumps their elbow has a bruise for 3 weeks. So why can’t that 70 year old who healed so quickly as a 3 year old, the same genes, you know, heal as rapidly. What’s happened to that body? And that’s, depleted functionality and number of stem cells. So so regenerative activity, regeneration.

Doctor Gross [00:18:37]:
So it comes from that.

Nick Urban [00:18:38]:
I think it is time to step back and define some of these terms because there’s gonna be a lot of things that we’re gonna discuss. And unless someone is heavily steeped in this field, they’re not gonna have any idea, and they’ll get lost very quickly as I am when I hear about all these new types of regenerative procedures that are just being tossed around in every day, like, biohacker conversations?

Doctor Gross [00:19:00]:
Where do you wanna start? I’ll let you drive. Look. Okay. I’ll lay

Nick Urban [00:19:03]:
out some of them. We can revisit them, after I list them. First, stem cells, then PRP, prolotherapy, X cells, v cells, stem cell derived exosomes, exosome therapy, and certain gene therapies, because I think those fit into the bucket of regenerative medicine also.

Doctor Gross [00:19:21]:
I think they they they sort of overlap with regenerative medicine. I’m not doing any gene therapies. We can define it, but I don’t think we’re gonna get into it here today. I’m not stem cell 101, we’ll start there. So stem cells, when you were a fertilized egg in your mother’s womb for the first you’re you’re a single cell, then 2 cells, then 4, then you’re an embryo. You’re made of cells that have amazing potency and power to become a small human fetus. Right? And those cells are called stem cells. Now these are embryonic stem cells.

Doctor Gross [00:19:54]:
They are extremely powerful, and, they are the most powerful stem cells. Why do we call them stem cells? Because all cells stem from them. Right? This is the mother of all cells. Right? The the single cell embryo makes 2 cells, etcetera, and that just goes on and on. And as that as that embryo develops into a fetus, which is sort of this, you know, animal shape looking, you know, thing in in the womb before it looks, you know, humanoid, those stem cells start to differentiate into specific types of cells. Right? Some cells are gonna become the heart, the liver, the arm, the whatever, the brain. And there are 3 main layers, 3 main types of cells in the embryo once once they sort of divide out into those cells. And the they’re they’re called the outside, the middle, and the inner layers, okay, of the when you look at an embryo, it it forms into these layers.

Doctor Gross [00:20:49]:
And that’s ectoderm for outside, mesoderm for the middle, and, endoderm for the internal. Most of the body’s tissues come from the mesoderm. It forms most of the organs, except the brain, the teeth, and a few other things, which is ectoderm. There are a few other things that are ectoderm and endoderm. Some of the glands are are mixed. But most of the tissues of the body are are mesodermal. And I’m saying that now because when you look at a fully, you know, a a fetus ready to become a a baby to be delivered, and we talk about, you know, harvesting stem cells from the umbilical cord, things like that, we’re really taking mostly these mesoderm cells. And mesoderm is it becomes the the middle tissues or the what’s we call also mesenchyme.

Doctor Gross [00:21:37]:
And you hear mesenchymal stem cells or mesenchymal stromal cells or MSCs. Those are these multipotent cells that reside in a human after delivery. So a baby helps the baby grow and develop, and then helps us heal and regenerate our tissues. So, you know, skin is current is constantly renewed through these this process. Liver cells, hair, follicles, things like this are constantly renewed. And then and if you get injured or you have to heal it, the immune system calls upon these cells. They’re all over the body, but mainly in the bone marrow more than fat. And these are all mesoderm.

Doctor Gross [00:22:18]:
Now when we talk about stem cells for therapeutic purposes, we’re talking about these mesenchymal stromal cells. They are multipotent. They can’t go backwards and form a new human. They can’t regrow a limb. You have to go back in the lineage of stem cells to from multipotent to pluripotent, and we can do that. There’s a reversal process. We’re not that’s not currently clinically available in the US, outside of a few studies. And those are called induced pluripotent stem cells, and they can be induced backwards even to an embryonic state.

Doctor Gross [00:22:50]:
These are very powerful and not fully controlled and understood. We are not using them, although there’s a lot of excitement and promise in those induced, you know, reversed cells back towards a more embryonic state. But what we’re using clinically, throughout the world, generally speaking, are these MSCs, and they’re multipotent. They can become almost any tissue in the body that’s of mesoderm origin. And, we help use them as a strategy to help people fix things and repair things that help the body heal and regenerate like they were a much younger person. We’re taking that strategy we’ve learned about and simply reapplying this natural biologic approach. So generally speaking, that’s regenerative medicine.

Nick Urban [00:23:40]:
So it sounds like there’d be very little value to someone who is younger because they already have a naturally greater pool of those stem cells.

Doctor Gross [00:23:48]:
Generally, that’s true. Now there are some specific applications. For example, autism and, chronic infections, people with immune syndromes, and and hyper inflammatory syndromes that can benefit from, regenerative approaches, even the young people, and we have seen some of that. But most of the work is in people whose regenerative apparatus is not doing what it used to do or was designed to do when they were much younger.

Nick Urban [00:24:20]:
So then it seems to me that a good first starting place here for everyone would be to figure out the factors that are rapidly depleting your stem cell pool and to address those before going on to a potentially very expensive procedure because you might be wasting them if you’re rapidly depleting all your stem cells when you could first try addressing that naturally and then layer it on top, and it should be more effective.

Doctor Gross [00:24:46]:
I I agree with that. In fact, when people do, you know, seek our advice and are looking for a regenerative approach to something, we make sure that they have lined up everything and stack the deck in their own favor so that any type of treatment they do try will have the best chance of success. So this means, you know, lifestyle factors, diet, restorative sleep, you know, epigenetics and all forms, supplementation, hormone optimization, peptides. Everything else has been optimized extensively, because sometimes that alone will suppress the inflammatory problem adequately and slow the the process.

Nick Urban [00:25:27]:
Are there any top causes or factors that you see that are not the basics, like sleeping more or moving more or eating what are clean foods, that kind of stuff?

Doctor Gross [00:25:37]:
Yeah. I think we’re killing ourselves with our our diet. So we we are in a world of of processed foods. They’re full of, chemicals that are supposed to make them have longer shelf lives and not not melt if they’re cold or vice versa. All these fillers and binders and things. And the nutrient value of the grown food isn’t there. Right? It’s it’s all it’s got fertilizers in it and and, you know, even the word organic at the store means that it’s, you know, 95% organic. You know? So the what’s in the 5%.

Doctor Gross [00:26:10]:
You know? So and if you look at countries that that have perhaps not as industrialized societies, they don’t have these types of inflammatory problems. Right? So now we we have this balance here in in in the first world, and that’s we we have longevity that is, you know, is kind of peaking around. You know, the average is about 79 to 82 years old, and that’s all comers. That’s smokers. And if you look at the life tables government life table, that’s everybody. You know? So that means half the people will live longer, and the people are healthier longer for, you know, doing things for their health and wellness longer in their lives, you know, we’ll we’ll live to a 100, a 120. We’re gonna have increasing populations that do that even if the average doesn’t move.

Nick Urban [00:27:03]:
We also just tied this back into what we’re talking about at the beginning because you have a very high inflammatory burden, sounds like you’ll be depleting your stem cells more than you would be if you weren’t.

Doctor Gross [00:27:15]:
Agreed. All cells get gunky and rusted. Remember we talked about biological rusting? And all cells have a diminished capacity. We call it cellular metabolism, but their ability to do their job, make the right proteins. And if they get really bad, they become zombie cells. Right? They become these senescent cells that take up space and resources, blood flow nutrients, but they don’t produce and give back to a community of cells. So, you know, the in a lot of the senolytic medications, medications to support longevity, are designed to help remove zombie cells. Like, a lot of them advertise that.

Doctor Gross [00:27:56]:
Yeah. So if you can target your zombie cells and recycle them through different types of cell lysis, cell death for those or or we call apoptosis is the is the medical term. Right? So you you can kill off those cells, then you can recycle their resources. And we’re we’re looking that’s called autophagy where you can the cells eat themselves and and then recycle their components back into healthy cells. And now we’re looking at that for for not just cells, but mitochondria. We’re looking at and so many supplements and activities you do support which is which is a super healthy thing. And a lot of the hermetic activities you mentioned earlier to build resilience, you see that correlate with good mitophagy and good autophagy. Yeah.

Nick Urban [00:28:43]:
Yeah. I’ve written articles on senolytic therapies, and a lot of these things you’ve discussed, I have some of their products. They don’t make much difference to me as far as I’m aware because I’m not in, like, the target demographic for them, but it’s interesting to learn about and to try, demographic for them, but it’s interesting to learn about and to try nonetheless. Are there any other therapeutics

Doctor Gross [00:28:57]:
that you see working really well

Nick Urban [00:28:57]:
in conjunction with stem cells to either I guess, mainly to amplify the effects and or, like, help get more from the same expensive procedure.

Doctor Gross [00:29:13]:
Yeah. A big fan of of peptides and even some of the bioregulators depending on the individual person’s needs. I don’t think we’re gonna get too deep into that. So we wanna stay on the stem cell topic, and you’ve had other good, guests on who’ve talked about peptides, but that that yeah. You think about peptides like there’s something new. They’re not. We have we have many peptides in our body at any time. Let’s list a few.

Doctor Gross [00:29:39]:
Insulin, endorphins, some of the neurotransmitters, and peptides. Melatonin is a peptide. You know, if any if anyone’s using semaglutide or tirzepatide for weight loss or other or antiaging purposes and anti inflammatory purposes, those are peptides. So we’re now learning more and more about these small fragment peptides that we’ve had all along. We just didn’t know enough about them as cell signaling and as, gene influencing. So don’t change your genes, but they influence which genes are called upon because we wanna call upon the healthy, you know, youthful, regenerative, restorative anti inflammatory genes. We don’t want the other, you know, cell you talk about seesaw. Cells kinda have 2 metabolisms.

Doctor Gross [00:30:25]:
Only, like, we as a body have 2 metabolisms. We’re either anabolic, so we’re we’re we’re storing glucose and building, or we’re catabolic. We’re burning. Well, cells are similar. They’re either fighting against the the rust, the inflammatory, nature of our world, whether it’s food, water, air, electromagnetic fields, all these stress, even neuro stress, our cells are making those calling for the immune system. That’s that chronic leaky inflammation, or they are in optimal mode, which is anti inflammatory, and they make different whole different set of proteins. So we want, you know, do everything we can to keep ourselves in a more anti inflammatory, rust fighting mode.

Nick Urban [00:31:11]:
Okay. So we’ve talked quite a bit about stem cells so far. I’d assume that’s the most popular, like, regenerative medicine therapy, is it?

Doctor Gross [00:31:20]:
In the world, yes. In my office, no. And hopefully, we’ll move next. I think we should move backwards if you don’t mind first Yeah. And talk about, like, PPE and prolotherapy. Because when we talk about regenerative biologics that can be used in a therapeutic way

Nick Urban [00:31:35]:
Yeah. I guess before we go before we go on to those, let’s I wanna make sure that we clarify, like, what are the pros and cons of each of these? Because it’s one thing to, like, understand, like, under to get all the the terminology. It’s another to understand, okay. This is how and why I would choose this versus that.

Doctor Gross [00:31:50]:
Well, I think if I can define them and then the comparatives might be more instructive, if that’s alright. Okay. So the very lowest level, almost, of regenerative medicine is is PRP, platelet rich plasma. And this is generally taken from your own blood. You draw a number of vials of blood, and you spit it in a tabletop centrifuge in the office. And the blood separates between the red part, which is the red blood cells, and the plasma, which is sort of the the watery juice of the cells that has different things in it, proteins, hormones, things like that. But in the middle, there’s a small little, you know, area, and it’s kind of got some platelets, which are a type of cell, and it’s got some growth factors. And it turns out that stuff is really rich in a lot of the anti inflammatory cell mediators Mhmm.

Doctor Gross [00:32:40]:
That are also the regenerative cell mediators. So growth factors and and things like that that suppress inflammation. Mhmm. So if you can suppress inflammation, you can then rebuild. So, you can actually, you know, pipette out or suction out that middle layer and take it from a few tubes, put it together, and reinject it in an area of need like tennis elbow, which is classic, or a knee strain or something like that. So you’re concentrating the body’s own regenerative, capacity in one area, that the body simply wasn’t able to to do that efficiently for some reason. So that can help. Usually, you go for a 3 sessions spread over a number of weeks, and that’s very common now.

Doctor Gross [00:33:23]:
And if I can even go backwards down the maze for a second, this is all for educational purposes, and and, none of the regenerative therapies we’re gonna talk about are approved for marketing claims, including PRP. But but, ironically, health insurers have figured out that three sessions of PRP is a lot less expensive than some type of surgery. So they are now paying some of them for PRP treatments.

Nick Urban [00:33:52]:
Wow.

Doctor Gross [00:33:53]:
Yes. And this is actually not new. This has been going on. So just for definition of terms, another type of treatment is called prolotherapy. Mhmm. Prolotherapy is an is taking either a sugar or salt substance, and in in causing a local inflammation. So it’s a sclerosing agent or usually, you do it for for lax ligaments. You wanna tighten things up, causing a heal and scar tissue reaction.

Doctor Gross [00:34:20]:
So that sort of overlaps with regenerative medicine. That’s been around for a long time. That’s not new, and you can get a series of those. I don’t know that some health insurance has paid for it or not. So that that’s prolotherapy. And then we’ve talked about PRP. And by the way, PRP can be used for the face for skin rejuvenation. It’s called a vampire facial.

Doctor Gross [00:34:40]:
It can help with thinning hair. And then the next level up will be stem cells. And we should say that stem cells, which I defined earlier, can come from 2 sources. It can come from your own body just like PRP where you usually harvest it from the fat, or for the from the bone marrow, and that can be done in an office setting or what have you. Some people choose to bank their own fat derived stem cells, and that can be done just like you you can bank your child’s umbilical cord now. And you can, pay to have that banked at a lab, and then when you need cells, they’re available. There’s some evidence that doing that at a younger age is is good because when you get older, you want some of the younger derived cells that haven’t been exposed to chronic inflammation. So, that might behoove you to to do something at a younger age.

Doctor Gross [00:35:31]:
Just put it aside, and that can be done very simply. The other source of stem cells, so the almost the easier source is from perinatal donation. So whether it’s from, you know, your your your own child or or a relative’s child or these days, off the shelf, there are plenty of places that do perinatal donations. So these are planned c sections here in the United States. They’re usually for people who or the labs I use anywhere from people that have not had the COVID vaccine, and that wasn’t necessarily a political statement, although it could be. It’s because we just don’t know the long term, effect, and and we don’t want that variable in the mix. So these are from non nonvaxxed donors. They’re screened early.

Doctor Gross [00:36:19]:
They’re healthy women. And and at the time of a plan c section, they they they’re donating. They do not get paid. They’re donating their amniotic fluid, umbilical cord, things like that. And it gets sent to, ironically, an FDA certified lab that follows all the protocols as inspected and as the right, you know, cleanliness standards, what have you, sterility. And they’re tested. Right? Their culture, they make sure they don’t have any, you know, virus, any Epstein Barr, any CMV, any HIV, any anything. Right? And then those are concentrated to made available to us as end you end users.

Doctor Gross [00:36:58]:
So we just buy them from the labs. And that’s a very simple, efficient source. I’ve never seen any kind of rejection since this is not your own material. Unlike a child who has, sadly, leukemia and has to undergo a bone marrow, you know, replacement procedure. They give them chemotherapy to kill their bone marrow, then they have to have a matched donor because they’re repopulating their entire immune system. That’s different. Stem cells don’t have a lot of the cell surface markers that identify them as being from an individual, so, we it’s more theoretical. I haven’t seen any rejections there.

Doctor Gross [00:37:34]:
So then we define I’m gonna say the sort of the last or more more, the more recent and latest version of regenerative medicine, comes from what are called stem cell derived exosomes, and that’s the thrust of most of my practice now. I find these quite efficient. If you look at a stem cell delivery, like, if I had you come over and I gave you I intravenous IV stem cells, whether we got them from yourself or from a fetus, they’d be used up and gone in 10 to 14 days. And, however, the benefits would last months if not longer. And some of some of the benefits during the regenerative phase, depending on what we’re doing for you, you get to keep forever. So, how could that be? If the stem cells are gone, how come the benefit lasting? Well, it turns out the stem cells aren’t doing all the work. The stem cells are making cell signaling, particles called exosomes, which are taken up by your own cells and your own cells are doing the work. So we figured out that you could skip the stem cells, which are delivering the exosomes, and just concentrate the exosomes and, give them to you.

Doctor Gross [00:38:44]:
Now exosomes are are much smaller than cells. Cells are are measured in diameter by microns, which is 10 to the minus 6 meters. Well, exosomes are about 11000th that size and measured in diameters in manometers, 10 to the minus 9. So they can cross the blood brain barrier. They can cross other tissues. They penetrate the body and tissues better than stem cells do. Stem cells are too big to get into your if you give them IV to get into your brain. So if you wanna deal with the nervous system, exosomes may be an easier delivery.

Doctor Gross [00:39:20]:
Also, stem cells intravenous, the heart and lungs take up quite a bit of them. Their cell cells are sticky. They bind. The heart gets a good dose, which is great for the heart. If you’re recovering from a heart attack or something, a stem cell IV might be great. And then because the vein goes right to the heart, then to the lungs, then back to the heart before it gets to the body. So the body doesn’t get a type of direct dose from intravenous stem cells as it does from exosomes. Exosomes are more fluid, and they just go everywhere.

Doctor Gross [00:39:48]:
Exosomes are small bubble. They bubble out from the cell. They they do not have hardly any markers, so they’re even less of a chance of rejection. It’s not even seen ever a chance rejection from a stem cell derived exosome. By the way, all cells make exosomes. When we say exosome here, we’re talking about stem cell derived exosomes. And there are people who you you can take your own blood and your own stem cells and create your own exosomes, but it’s a very laborious and expensive process. It’s a lot more efficient cost wise to do, stem cell derived exosomes from a perinatal donor because amniotic fluid is is abundant.

Doctor Gross [00:40:29]:
It can be concentrated and filtered, and it also comes with certain growth factors and anti inflammatory cytokines and mediators, that that make it, you know, for for sometimes less than half the cost of the stem cells. So so a lot of people are worried about the cost of regenerative procedures. It’s come way down because of the exosomes. So now let’s compare. Cost wise, exosomes are, are almost as low as PRP. PRP usually runs 5, 6, 7, $800 per session times 3. Exosomes, you’re usually one session. And when you add up those 3 PRP sessions, you’re you’re starting to get around the cost of an exosome session.

Nick Urban [00:41:13]:
Is exosome just one session?

Doctor Gross [00:41:16]:
Generally, yes. Depending on what we’re doing. Exosomes, I think, penetrate tissues better. They’re easier to handle. I store them here in my office in a minus 30 c freezer. I I have a separate minus 80 c freezer for stem cells because we do a little bit of both, but, really, most of my work is is exosomes these days. They’re easier to handle. They come shipped overnight to me under eye ice, so they’re nice and cold.

Doctor Gross [00:41:41]:
So when we deliver them to someone, they go from the womb to ice. Mhmm. To the lab, lab takes a little bit test it to me on ice. And then when we fall them in our hands to give them to someone, they’re basically from the womb to ice to them. So so they’re they’re fresh frozen as if they’re getting and you think about a pregnant woman, if I can divert for a second. A pregnant woman usually has wonderful glowing skin. The the hair is growing robustly. The nails are growing.

Doctor Gross [00:42:12]:
They’re usually in a decent mood. They generally don’t have a lot of aches or pains except maybe low back pain from carrying a womb. So why are pregnant women so youthful? Because they’re getting a dose of exosomes through the placenta every day. I’m not saying that PRP is wrong. Prootherapy is wrong. Stem cells are wrong. They they all have places. We’ve used these different things, but I think you get the best bang for your buck and result from the exosome.

Nick Urban [00:42:37]:
And these are all injections. Right?

Doctor Gross [00:42:39]:
There are some topical exosome preparations and stem cell preparations and growth factor preparations for some skin. But, really, the real work of regenerative skin is done in the cells underneath the epidermis. So we see our best results if if we’re looking for skin rejuvenation in microinjecting the exosome like a vampire facial with exosomes. Same with, thinning hair follicles or or that kind of thing. So in the cosmetic group. But we can do many other things. So, we can do most of my work is is either IV or structural, work in cartilage regeneration. So, you know, we take people who are arthritis, osteoarthritis, chondromalacia, or what their what their doctor will call bone on bone often who are being offered or may have had a past arthroscopic surgery.

Doctor Gross [00:43:33]:
Maybe they’re told they’re gonna need a joint replacement. Those are our ideal patients. We can help those people generally, give them a chance to help them, tap back into the factory that made their joint in the first place, turn that factory back on, help them, and and heal and re enhance enhance their cartilage. And we have some wonderful MRIs before and after, knee examples, where we’ve shown cartilage restoration by height, in the knee and, improvement in the in how people are doing clinically as well.

Nick Urban [00:44:04]:
Wow. And this is with stem cell derived exosomes also?

Doctor Gross [00:44:08]:
Right. It’s with, and now what’s we follow the best practices, and everything we do is based on really good literature somewhere. So in the US, we’re behind. The liter the the research had been suppressed for so long, and the funding for the research is suppressed. So most of the research we follow either comes out of Asia or Europe. So we’re following a French protocol that clearly demonstrated, their last study a few years ago was a 15 year follow-up of injecting they didn’t have exosomes. They’ve only been around 6 years. They were injecting stem cells into the knees of people who were told they need knee replacement.

Doctor Gross [00:44:46]:
So they were having knee problems, trouble walking, pain scores, that kind of thing. And they said, wait. Before you do this knee replacement surgery, which is a big deal, would you like to join our stem cell study? So the these doctors at the University of Paris East took half the patients injected in the joint in the cartilage area, between the the bones of the femur, upper leg, and the tibial plateau of the lower leg. And another half of the patients got ejected in the bone edges, subchondral bone edges just adjacent. And it was crystal clear by 15 years that the 80 some percent of those patients were still doing great, did not need that knee replacement they were once offered if they had the bone injection where only 20 some percent of the joint injected were still doing great. So it was clear that, you know, stimulating the cartilage forming cells that live in the bone in the old growth plates of the bone edges that made that cartilage in the first place called the chondrocytes, was the way to helping those joints long standing. So it’s a one and done procedure. I’m using exosomes instead of stem cells because, again, I think exosomes are doing the work probably more efficiently and, at half the cost, and we’re getting at least the same outcomes, if not better.

Doctor Gross [00:46:07]:
So whether you do stem cells or exosomes, and some some doctors still do PRP into the bone edge, but a lot of clinics still do the joint injections. Now the joint injections do help people, but they won’t last as long. So that’s why I recommend the the bone injection. Now bone injection sounds painful. We do it under sedation at a at a local injection facility. But but, I’m a big fan of this. It’s called intraosseous or in the bone, exosome injections. By the way, the knee cartilage, and I use the knee as an example because we have so many knees, but we do spine.

Doctor Gross [00:46:42]:
We do other joints as well. The cartilage doesn’t have a lot of cells. So when you inject stem cells or exosomes into the cartilage, those those mediators have to penetrate back through the bone edge to do their work. There’s not a lot going on in the cartilage. The cartilage is like a biological rubber gasket, and it’s like hair. Hair is made by a follicle cell in your scalp. Cartilage is made by a chondrocyte cell in your bone. Other guests you’ve have have spoken to osteoarthritis in the body as being a metabolic disease, and it it it is.

Doctor Gross [00:47:14]:
It’s inflammatory, degeneration of those cells. Well, we seek to reignite those cells and, you know, stop the inflammation, turn back on that healing capacity, that that production, basically putting in a new factory order for some new cartilage?

Nick Urban [00:47:34]:
I might have missed it. Did you say what are the downsides, if any, of exosomes versus stem cells or PRP or any other alternatives?

Doctor Gross [00:47:43]:
Exosomes are better cost wise. They are easier to handle and deliver. They penetrate the tissues better. They do as well, if not, potentially better than than some of these other things. And I I don’t think there is a downside.

Nick Urban [00:48:00]:
The whole world of exosomes, whether it’s stem cell derived or from other cells, I find extremely interesting. I’m sure it’ll be a, like, a future frontier of medicine because it really explains a lot. And I read a couple of books where they mentioned exosomes, and I’m like, why isn’t this more common knowledge? This seems like it should be integrated into our current understanding of human health, and I’m sure it will be in the coming years and hopefully not decades, but probably then.

Doctor Gross [00:48:28]:
Well, I I I think you’re completely right. It is coming. It’s and there are and it’ll come faster. You see biotech companies and big pharma is getting their hands in it, and that that’ll really move it. Of course, they wanna monetize it. So, and I I teased you before we went on about, you know, there are things coming. Right? So what we’re using now are these generic stem cell derived exosomes. And, what’s and we do them IV.

Doctor Gross [00:48:56]:
We do them, like I said, for the structural parts of the body. We do them for many other things. We do it for a sexual function. We have men and women, you know, p shots and o shots. We do dry eye syndrome. We’ve done, glands in the eyelid. You know, do the eye. The eyelid is where the the party is.

Doctor Gross [00:49:15]:
We have some cosmetic things. Lots of IVs, for, you know, antiaging biohacking. People do it preventatively. And although a joint procedure might just be a one and done, you know, I do the IV myself 4 times a year, and some people do it every year. Some people do it every other year just depending on your appetite and what you’re what you’re trying to get out of it. I have a sweet little old lady who who has osteoarthritis aches and pains everywhere. So we’re not gonna inject all her joints. Right? But she’ll do an IV, and it lasts her a good 2 years before her pain comes back.

Doctor Gross [00:49:47]:
So so see in 2 years. We have people with cognitive hands. I have an attorney who comes in before a big trial and gets an IV just to sharpen his brain. So, you know, quick on his feet. We have things like that. I have I have some, you know, high end athletes that do it, you know, before a big race or or for recovery purposes. You do see a boost in HRV after an exosome IV without changing anything else, without changing sleep or or diet or anything. But what’s coming here is we’ve got some designer exosomes coming, and it’s actually very big in Asia now, but they there are different types of immune cells in our body that fight cancer, constantly circulating throughout throughout us removing wonky cells, like like accidental cancer cells.

Doctor Gross [00:50:31]:
Well, there are exosomes that those cells make that that are highly selectively able to kill cancer cells. So we’re looking at that as potential augmentative therapy for people with both circulating and solid tumors. And, there are also now mitochondrial enhanced exosomes. So you look at people who are declining muscle mass, you know, frail syndromes, older, you know, almost, you know, nursing home populations that that are there because that, you know, you’ve gotta maintain your muscle mass and your bone density for for longevity. Right? So it might you know, having these mitochondrial stuffed exosomes might help their cells have newer mitochondria and more mitochondria, which which correlates with reduced biological age and and healthy, longevity as well as helping people with mitochondrial diseases. So these are coming. There are others. And, also, think about mitochondria for weight loss if you have a lot of fat that lasts £10 you can’t lose or whatever or maybe more.

Doctor Gross [00:51:34]:
You know, that that’s white fat. If you inject white fat with exosomes that are chock full of mitochondria, white fat becomes brown fat, and brown fat is easier to burn. Right? That’s the baby that’s the stuff you start exercising comes right off. So if we convert white fat to brown fat with some injections, boom. We’ve got a new angle on weight loss or or body contouring. You know? Those are cosmetic side of it. But you think about, exosomes in our world, we’ve had them all along. We just didn’t notice.

Doctor Gross [00:52:04]:
Most cultures have you know, if you’re sick, your grandmother makes you some kind of chicken broth or chicken soup. Right? That’s chick chicken stock, and chicken soup is full of the exosomes from the bone marrow of the chicken stock. You look at also healthy biohacking foods, bone broth, and, colostrum, and, bone marrow as a as a delicacy. These are all, high in exosomes. And exosomes are also in plants, and they’re they’re highly preserved. A lot of the the little peptides that are in exosomes that the cells make, yes, peptides, you’re hearing it, peptides again, are naturally occurring forms of a lot of the peptides we use therapeutically. And you also see heat shock proteins, The healthy anti inflammatory heat shock proteins that you release when you go into a hot sauna are found in some of the plant and fruit derived exosomes. So eating plants and fruits and vegetables is not just for the phytonutrients and the fiber and the probiotic and the prebiotic, but it’s they you are getting, this epigenetic influence from the exosomes within.

Nick Urban [00:53:15]:
This morning, I was just reading Joel’s Joel Green’s book, The Way, and he’s going through a bunch of different foods in it, and he’s talking about how they not only have a bunch of fascinating bioactive substances, but also peptides and bioregulators. And I previously thought it was just the organ meats, Like, you would eat, say, heart, and you get the bioregulators and peptides that would help your own heart doctrine signatures kind of thing. But then I also realized it’s a lot of other plant and, fruit and vegetable and even, I think, some grains had those as well.

Doctor Gross [00:53:48]:
Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s amazing that, you know, you look back historically at our food sources going back ancestrally. And, really, what we’re getting is is a genetic influence, an epigenetic influence that is, you know, truly from some of these little peptides and things that are in those food sub substances, not just the nutritive value.

Nick Urban [00:54:14]:
One thing I’d be remiss not to ask you about is if you’re consuming one of these foods, say, bone broth, and you’re getting some of the exosomes and the microRNA and all that kind of stuff that’s naturally occurring within it, that has to pass through your digestive system to some degree. Maybe the peptides are small enough that they emerge unscathed from through the other end of your stomach, and they go on straight into your bloodstream and circulation. How does that compare to a subcutaneous or IV when it’s administered directly into, like, different bodily fluids and tissues?

Doctor Gross [00:54:49]:
It’s the a dosing difference or a bioavailability difference. Right? If you inject right in your bloodstream, your your body has it available, like, right then and there everywhere. Whereas if you ingest it, you have to it goes through your like, your GI tract has to be absorbed. That means not all of it gets absorbed and has to get into the capillary and into your bloodstream, and then you you just don’t get as much that way. You’d have to eat a lot of bone broth, you know, every day for for years years to get a kind of effect that maybe has one IV.

Nick Urban [00:55:19]:
Okay. And the so there’s no safety concerns, like, by bypassing the body’s, like, natural systems. You’re not gonna be experiencing greater side effects. It doesn’t sound like it.

Doctor Gross [00:55:28]:
Well, interesting. The only side effect, that we notice is with with IV exosomes is in the minority of people. And mostly people who have had sick who have significant inflammatory burden, like an autoimmune condition, like Lyme’s disease, like long COVID, their body their cells have stored up and are ready to release the immune system mediators called cytokines. And if you remember during COVID, the sickest people in the ICU had cytokine storm. They were severely inflamed. Right? They got all kinds of fluid in their lungs, and their heart wasn’t functioning right. And, if if your body is busy fighting inflammation, it’s making those proteins. Remember, your cell is in that fighting inflammation mode.

Doctor Gross [00:56:17]:
And it has vacuoles and and, endosomes, meaning these little bubbles in the cell full of these things ready to release. When we give, the anti inflammatory stem cell derived exosomes IV and we ask these cells to flip into anti inflammatory mode, it has to purge out all these cytokines. So people have a day or 2 sometimes of a flu like syndrome. They don’t have a flu, but they have the aches and pains because of all the inflammation from those cytokines that are being released into the bloodstream as if there’s something going on, but there’s not. And those have to clear out of the system. So people can have for a day or 2 this hue like syndrome as their factories are flipping from wartime to peacetime.

Nick Urban [00:57:01]:
Yeah. That’s that was the context in which I learned about exosomes to begin with. It’s like if it’s how your body communicates in a way with the environment and takes in for information and, like, removes certain components of the cell that shouldn’t be there, not necessarily the cell, but, like, things that shouldn’t be inside the cell get taken out and vice versa. It’s a way of, like, rapid adaptation. And so if you’re sick and people around you sick, there could be an exosome component. So to me, it seems that this would strengthen the argument for doing the healthy lifestyle practices ahead of time before the procedure because this might be affected more so than, say, a stem cell procedure or a PRP procedure or something like that. Maybe, maybe not.

Doctor Gross [00:57:41]:
No. As a preventative, this this is smart. You know, doing this to suppress inflammation, slow the aging the biological aging process can’t slow the calendar, but slow the biological aging process, and and, may bet maintain the immune system at its highest level, is is so smart.

Nick Urban [00:58:05]:
Okay. And then I also I’m not sure if you’re aware of these. A a while back a couple years ago, I first heard of v cells, and more recently, I’ve heard of x cells. Are you familiar with those?

Doctor Gross [00:58:15]:
A little bit. It it’s not something I’m doing in my clinic at this time. These are activated cells, and and what we’re what what’s being done is, you know, usually cells are taken out of the body, or the blood is taken out of the body. They’re activated in some way, whether it’s ozone or certain types of laser light, and they’re reinjected. It stimulates the stem cell activity, in different ways. I’m not the expert in b cells. I’m not doing b cells. We we have a great experience with stem cell derived exosomes, and we’re we’re achieving the results that people desire.

Doctor Gross [00:58:53]:
So I haven’t branched out in the cell arena too far. Plus my main projects are, besides working in the office to to give advice every day, is to and treat people, is is are these designer exosomes. So I’m academically involved, and we will be having those available at some level, whether it’s a a research study or what have you. You know? Some of these these ones we may be able to help with cancer and other things we’re very excited about.

Nick Urban [00:59:20]:
So if someone’s interested in getting started with this, say, they just had a surgery or they’re going into a surgery or they have joint pain, what are the things that they should know? Because as you’ve mentioned throughout this interview, the landscape is a bit tricky to navigate, especially with the, like, legal status of certain things and the

Doctor Gross [00:59:40]:
jurisdictions and medical tourism.

Nick Urban [00:59:41]:
How would you recommend, and the jurisdictions and medical tourism. How would you recommend exploring this world? Yeah. Let’s let’s

Doctor Gross [00:59:47]:
cover that because there’s so many myths. So briefly, there’s an organization as part of our government. It’s called the FDA, and they have planted a flag in saying that they regulate, regenerative biologics, which is the overarching term for stem cells and exosomes and PRP and all those things, b cells, excels, everything. They have not yet approved marketing claims. That’s their job, marketing claims. They have not yet approved marketing claims for any of these things. So I cannot say to an individual that I can treat or cure a disease or condition. Well, as a as a doctor and a surgeon for so many, you know, decades, I’ve never been able to guarantee I can fix anything.

Doctor Gross [01:00:27]:
But I give everyone full informed consent. So it’s not illegal to do these things. It is a it is noncompliant for a doctor to make mark or a company to make marketing claims. That’s it. What you and you your doctor decide you do between your doctor patient relationship is sacred, and, it’s just, you know, just our there are certain words that we cannot say. And I have I go through that. We’re transparent about it. We’re not shy about it.

Doctor Gross [01:00:55]:
We have consent forms that say all that. So most people that come see me or get with me on a Zoom, because most of our patients actually don’t live here in Las Vegas, they know about that, and, they’re okay with it. And most of the the the work we follow, the best practices, best protocols have been developed in Europe or Asia or both and are based on scientific publications in those areas. Sometimes we extrapolate. We take something what they did with stem cells. We might do it with exosomes, but, we’re not getting different results. A lot of people travel to Mexico, Panama, other places to have stem cells. You know, Joe Rogan sends people the mixed martial arts fighters down to Tijuana.

Doctor Gross [01:01:35]:
You could go there as well. They have tourism packages. You don’t have to leave the country. Now they they can advertise more freely. Mhmm. We cannot advertise stem cells biohacking, regenerative medicine, antiaging, or anything like that on Google or Facebook. They they have something going on on the back end. You know, with the government, they won’t they won’t let us do that.

Doctor Gross [01:01:59]:
So most of the ads you will see, they’ll be on Instagram. But what what you can see that though is a lot of the websites from the places out of this country can say whatever they want. They don’t have the FDA restriction.

Nick Urban [01:02:14]:
But can they perform different procedures that you’re unable to here in the US?

Doctor Gross [01:02:19]:
Probably. I mean, I’m not I’m not sure there’s anything we’re unable to perform. There might be things we’re unwilling to perform. For example, we’re not doing, you know, these induced pluripotent stem cells, the the stem cells that work backwards along the, you know, the evolutionary chain towards the embryo. We’re not doing those. There are places you can probably go and get those outside of a country, things like that.

Nick Urban [01:02:43]:
So that would be one reason people would go out to the country if they wanna do these more experimental things that sound really cool and promising, but there’s obviously less research on them. And even if you were able to, perhaps you wouldn’t because they’re so much newer.

Doctor Gross [01:02:58]:
I’m just not ready for that. It’s just not available to me and my I I can’t obtain the product, and I’m not gonna get it from some, you know, questionable source. Right? So you asked earlier about gene therapy. You have to leave this country for gene therapy. You know, what’s popular now is the follistatin gene, you know, you know, the, you know, you, you know, the the chief anti agers are are taking. Right? It’s, like, 25 or 20 or $25,000 that last for 2 years. You have to go out of the country for that. So it’s it’s, it it could be quite powerful.

Doctor Gross [01:03:30]:
I I don’t know enough yet because I’m not gonna focus my time and energies on something that I can’t make available to people.

Nick Urban [01:03:37]:
Yeah. And for anyone tuning in who’s curious about that, you can Google myostatin knockout, and then any animal, like myostatin knockout horse or rat or something. You can see the potential of using something like follistatin to reduce myostatin levels. It’s pretty entertaining. I’m not sure I would be first in line to get get that done even though it seems to be popular today, because I think there’s a lot more to work out with that technology in general, such as, like, off target effects, but it’s an interesting avenue nonetheless, one that I’ll leave to other people to explore.

Doctor Gross [01:04:07]:
So listen. Gene therapy is great. If you could change your genome and you have a genetic disease like sickle cell anemia, fantastic. You gotta fix that. But when you’re doing it to enhance, and it could have downstream effects, like you said, or off target effects, that’s scary when you start modifying your it’s like going into your computer and changing a a few words of code thinking you’re enhancing it, but then your computer doesn’t boot.

Nick Urban [01:04:30]:
Yeah. And if you know what you’re doing, going into your computer and changing just a single letter, a single character can completely crash the computer if you’re modifying the kernel or something like that. So I think there’s not enough risk awareness around some of these things. And like you said, for certain conditions, it can be, like, literally life saving, life changing. But for some of, like, the aesthetic and other uses, TBD.

Doctor Gross [01:04:53]:
Agreed. It’s great stuff. It’s great research. We need to keep pushing it. We’re we’re gonna get there.

Nick Urban [01:04:57]:
Well, doctor Jeff, you mentioned that people most of your clients do not work with you in person in Nevada. How do they go about connecting with you and or working with you remotely, and what are you able to offer remotely?

Doctor Gross [01:05:10]:
Yeah. Thanks for asking. So we we, my practice name, where we do regenerative medicine is called Recellabrate because we’re celebrating the renewal of your cells.

Nick Urban [01:05:20]:
Recellebrete.

Doctor Gross [01:05:24]:
And that’s how you find us. Our website is recelebrate.com. Our Instagram is at recelebrate. Our Facebook, LinkedIn. So just type in recelebrate. You’ll find us somewhere. And there are ways just to reach out and say, hey. I’d like to talk.

Doctor Gross [01:05:35]:
You know, if if you mention you’ve, heard us on Nick’s mind body peak performance podcast, you know, I’m happy to do a 30 minute, pro bono, you know, conversation consultation. You fill out a a quick form about yourself. We get on a, a Zoom or if you wanna send me some records or images ahead of time. You know? Especially if you’ve got, you know, joint problems, spine problems, that’s that’s, you know, I’m I’m probably one of the the few centers in the country doing the interosseous, the the bone treatments. I’ll show you some befores and afters, and I’ll knock your socks off. And then, you know, we get you all tuned up. If there’s other things we need to adjust ahead of time, we do that. And then only if you’re a candidate, would we invite you to come to Las Vegas, make a weekend of it, you know, do it maybe a treatment, on a Friday if it if it’s a joint.

Doctor Gross [01:06:28]:
And and there’s no downtime. So you can be up and walk the strip here in Las Vegas on Saturday, providing it’s you don’t come in August when it’s so so hot.

Nick Urban [01:06:38]:
Yes. Very nice. And I don’t think we covered this, but if someone has any of those things that you’ve mentioned, say they have they’re either about to go into a surgery, or they went into a surgery, or they just have pain, like, how do they go how do they navigate that? Like, where would they where would they find you ideally along their journey, and where can you and these procedures still make the biggest impact?

Doctor Gross [01:07:05]:
Well, I mean, the earlier we we we get in front of someone, we can educate that person even if it were they’re not ready for what we have. And it might be through other biohacking. It might be peptides. It might be, you know, structured, exercise, certain types of weight bearing exercise. It might be hormone optimization. It might be, you know, pentasen, polysulfate. It might be, you know, all kinds of things. So the are the more you have more options, the earlier you get in front of us.

Doctor Gross [01:07:33]:
We do have a lot of people that had, like, an arthroscopy surgery, like, when they were playing sports in their teens or twenties or thirties. You know? And and now they’re starting to have that accelerated degeneration of pain, and and they’re less they’re less active. They’re not getting off the couch because it hurts too much. Those those are ideal. The bone when you when your doctor says at some point, you’re gonna need a a knee replacement, that’s the person we wanna get in front of because we can we can try and help that person help heal that knee and stop and then maybe reverse, in many cases, that degeneration into regeneration.

Nick Urban [01:08:11]:
Yeah. I was thinking if I had, like, say, torn a meniscus or ACL or something nasty, would I want to come to you and attempt this before I I’m guessing not before attempting, like, a reconstruction. I guess that would have to happen first, but, like, under what circumstances? Say, I I’m, like, ready for a knee replacement or a hip replacement or something. Where do you fit into that? Like, what where would I get the best results? Obviously, it’d be nice to have that in advance, say it is happening or this procedure has to happen or maybe not even that it has to happen, but it might happen if nothing else.

Doctor Gross [01:08:45]:
We do catch people early and address tears. If the tear is catching in your knee locks, the the regenerative medicine is probably not gonna fix that. So sometimes we do recommend that people get that trimmed surgically. And then if there is an augmentative add on regenerative to help them heal, it would be right after that. I just saw someone who and it was pretty bad injury, and they had a fracture of the bone below the knee, a tibial plateau. And, we did some regenerative to help heal faster and and restore the knee. Because if those cells don’t heal right in that knee, the cartilage will degenerate, as as others say. This is a metabolic disease.

Doctor Gross [01:09:31]:
If those if those cells can’t metabolically function, they’re not gonna make support and make cartilage. So the earlier, the better. We can at least, you know, be available and give advice even if they still do need a surgery. The earlier, the better. If you are and I’ve had patients absolutely bone on bone, what’s called grade 4, and we’ve been able to help them. So we we catch people at the end too. Takes a little longer with them and it’s a little, you know, slower process. But So

Nick Urban [01:10:01]:
if it was a more major injury, like, say, like, a a tear, I could go to you before anything else, before deciding on something more potentially complicated, and then see how that progresses. And I’m guessing with all these things, whether it’s post surgery or preoperation, the time is of the essence, and the earlier I worked on it and saw you, the better?

Doctor Gross [01:10:28]:
I think the earlier, the better. Even if we just meet and we look at your MRI studies and we we really dig in as to the root cause of what’s going on now with acute injury and what’s going to happen If you don’t have surgery, what’s going to happen if you do have surgery. And then maybe it’s something we say, okay. Do what you need to do surgically. Let’s meet back in 6 or 12 months and see where we are. And if you’re content, then we just we we’re on standby if and and you we we give you advice, you know, peptides and other things to heal. And and if you’re not content, then we reevaluate. Because the the surgeon might say, well, you know, I do what I could, and you’re just gonna be a knee replacement someday.

Doctor Gross [01:11:06]:
That’s really where our best jump in is. We take those people, and we we do things that are not yet available to mainstream orthopedics. So but some some doctors are getting retrained in this, and that’s what I had to do. I had to go back and retrain because we were not taught regenerative medicine, you know, back in the dark ages in in, in the nineties when I went to med school, late early nineties.

Nick Urban [01:11:31]:
If I needed a knee replacement and I had knee pain, like, nagging knee pain, it was preventing me from doing the things, the sports that I wanted to, then I could come in. I could work with you. And within maybe a couple months, I would see either this is enough to mitigate the potential knee replacement, or I could still have it and perhaps I’ll get better results and maintain or retain or even gain functionality after the surgery because I went in and had and combined the 2.

Doctor Gross [01:12:02]:
Yeah. We have some people that have tears that, you know, and we we we try to treat them with the exosomes. And down the line, they’re feeling better. They’re not suffering. They’re able to do what they wanna do, and they just live with the tear. It’s it’s like the spine. You can live with a disc herniation if it’s not bothering you.

Nick Urban [01:12:20]:
One other thing I wanna ask you about in this realm is the role and your perspective on cortisone shots.

Doctor Gross [01:12:27]:
So cortisone has a role in the suppression of painful acute inflammation. Like, you’re you’re a mess. You can’t walk. Your knee is swollen and red, and it’s acute injury. There’s a role there. It’s the repeat you overuse of those that actually accelerates the degeneration because it suppresses those cellular functions as a side effect. So it it’s got its role. Probably, we’re overusing it.

Doctor Gross [01:12:53]:
And and before I got into regenerative medicine, you know, I I recommended tons of cortisone shots in the spine, and they were helpful in the right setting. But, they do reduce the cartilage function, particularly in cartilaginous joints. So in the spine, you know, for, like, an epidural injection is different. That’s not for the joint itself, but some of the facet joints and and other things can be affected long term if you keep doing those.

Nick Urban [01:13:21]:
So if you have the ability, you have the choice. You have minimal pain. You can come work with you instead and then get an exosome treatment done and see if that relieves an it enough, because to me, it seems like you’re gonna rob Peter to pay Paul by going and getting these done, because then you’re gonna be degenerating your cartilage and other things that you don’t want, and you’re gonna increase facilitate the onset of more issues down the line. So if you can avoid that and take a regenerative approach first, granted that you’re on you’re not in extreme pain, then that might work better long term.

Doctor Gross [01:13:56]:
Yeah. If you’re not, like, going to the emergency room, like, oh, I twisted my knee. It’s this big. It’s rad. I can’t I can’t sleep. Okay. You’re gonna need a cortisone shot just to get things, you know, out of control. That’s okay.

Doctor Gross [01:14:07]:
That’s and there’s a there’s a role for that. That’s the acute suppression. But there are people who go into the orthopedics office every time they get a cortisone shot every time. That’s just to kinda keep things quiet. That’s probably not the best long term management. That’s all we had for decades. So it I understand why it was used. And now we also have these lubricating, injections.

Doctor Gross [01:14:28]:
Right? People go in for the hyaluronic acid or the rooster comb injections, SynVisc, what have you. And then they usually go for a series of 3, and and typically they need to be repeated periodically. Those are okay. Those aren’t necessarily anti inflammatory. They provide some lubrication for the knee. They’re not regenerating the knee, in any way. But if you do the intraosseous exosomes to stimulate the chondrocytes in the cells there, then your body will make the hyaluronic acid and lubricate its own joint. So which is which is kind of a better root cause fix.

Nick Urban [01:15:01]:
Right. Well, if people want to dig into this world of regenerative medicine, are there any researchers or teachers that you found most helpful in your own journey?

Doctor Gross [01:15:13]:
Yeah. You know, there’s an organization called the a four m, which stands for the American Academy of Antiaging Medicine. It’s really where, we flock, the doctors who do this kind of work. It’s it’s not just for clinicians, and they have resources online. I think it’s a 4 m.com. They have great resources and webinars you can attend, and the best researchers and those who publish a lot and have the most experience in peptides and things are on there. And I I learn a lot still, and I go to the meeting in December of every year because it’s it’s here in Las Vegas, so it’s around the corner. That’s a great resource.

Doctor Gross [01:15:51]:
You know, if if you wanna dig if you have a certain ailment or problem, you wanna see if stem cells or exosomes are good could be used for that. You you you search PubMed. You you can Google PubMed, comma, you know, whatever problem you’re having, whatever symptom you’re having, comma, stem cells. You can put in exosomes, but most of the work comes from the stem cells because they’ve been around for, you know, 20, 30 years. Exosomes have only been really available here in the US for about 6, 7 years. So and exosomes, by the way, you know, know, make sure you’re if you get them somewhere, you’re getting from a reputable source, that they’re you know, I prefer they not be, powdered form where you have to re, you know, put fluid in to reconstitute them like some of the peptides, because although the exosomes may be okay, the you lose some of the growth factors and proteins that come with. So, well, I like the fresh frozen stuff.

Nick Urban [01:16:51]:
Well, thanks for that. If I ever decide to try and procure my own exosomes, I will keep that in mind. Doctor Jeff, thank you so much for coming on. Are there any closing thoughts you wanna leave listeners with today?

Doctor Gross [01:17:02]:
Keep moving. Exercise a little bit every day. Get your steps in. It it’s better to do fewer steps, faster and harder uphill than it is to do more steps. So, that that’s a hack. Intermittent fast or intermittent feed as I like to call it. Be anti inflammatory in almost everything you do, whether it’s from mindfulness, restorative sleep, supplements, diet. And and if all that doesn’t work, come talk to us about exosomes.

Nick Urban [01:17:33]:
Well, again, thank you for coming on. It’s been a blast chatting about all things regenerative medicine, and I’m looking forward to staying in touch and following your work as you branch out and go deeper into the exosome and stem cell therapy rabbit holes as well as some of the new frontiers that emerged down the line.

Doctor Gross [01:17:52]:
Absolutely. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Nick Urban [01:17:55]:
Thank you for tuning in to this episode. Head over to Apple Music, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and leave a rating. Every review helps me bring you thought provoking guests. As always, you can find the show notes for this one at mindbodypeak.com/ and then the number of the episode. There, you can also chat with other peak performers or connect with me directly. The information depicted in this podcast is for information purposes only. Please consult your primary health care professional before making any lifestyle changes.