Stem Cell Therapy with Dr. Harry Adelson
”We're thinking of the body as a garden, and we're going to treat the tissue beds so they grow more healthy plants. Right. And so in order to do that, that takes some time. You don't just plant a garden and then the next day you get a beautiful garden, you have to wait for the plants to grow.”
Dr. Harry Adelson
Today I am speaking with Dr. Harry Adelson.
Harry Adelson, N.D., was one of the earliest adopters of the use of cell therapy for chronic musculoskeletal pain. He began his training in regenerative injection therapy (prolotherapy) in 1998 while in his final year at the National College of Naturopathic Medicine (NCNM), in Portland, Oregon. Dr. Adelson graduated from NCNM in 1999, with a degree in Naturopathic Medicine.
In 2001, he completed his residence in Integrative Medicine at the Yale/Griffin Hospital in Derby, Connecticut, under the direction of David Katz, M.D, M.P.H. During his residency, Dr. Adelson volunteered after hours in a large homeless shelter, providing regenerative injection therapies to the medically underserved. From 2001-2002, Dr. Adelson served as Clinical Faculty, Residency Coordinator, at the University of Bridgeport College of Naturopathic Medicine, in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Dr. Adelson opened Docere Clinics in Park City, Utah, in 2002, and from day one, his practice has been 100% regenerative injection therapies for the treatment of musculoskeletal pain conditions. He has performed more than 6,000 bone marrow cell therapy procedures and has injected bone marrow cells into more than 1,600 intervertebral discs, placing him solidly among those most experienced in the world with use of bone marrow cells for the treatment of pain. In 2017, Dr. Adelson launched his flagship product, the Full Body Stem Cell Makeover®, the most comprehensive stem cell upgrade ever conceived!
In Today's Episode, You'll Hear:
Dr. Adelsons Background
What Are Stem Cells
What is PRP
What are VSELs
PRP Facials
What Happens To Our Stem Cells as we Age
Preventative Stem Cell Therapy
Full Body Stem Cell Makeover
Stem Cells For Beauty, Sex and Hair
+ More
Follow Dr. Adelson on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/harry.adelson/
Visit the Docere Clinics Website: https://www.docereclinics.com
TRANSCRIPT
Kayla Barnes (00:00)
It’s such a pleasure to have you here, Dr. Adelson.
Dr. Harry Adelson (00:06)
Thank you so much, Kayla. It's my pleasure to be here with you.
Kayla Barnes (00:10)
Absolutely. So I can't wait to jump into all things stem cells. I came and visited your clinic not too long ago, and I mean, your view is gorgeous, but what you guys are doing inside the clinic is so much more impressive and I just can't wait to dive into it all.
Dr. Harry Adelson (00:26)
Great, let's do it.
Kayla Barnes (00:28)
Absolutely. So I want to start in the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what got you interested in stem cells?
Dr. Harry Adelson (00:34)
Yeah, sure. So when I went to naturopathic school because I sort of fell in love with the philosophy, the healing power of nature, using the body's own natural ability to heal itself. And when I was wrapping up my first year, I was preparing for a rock climbing trip in France. And France is the birthplace of modern sport climbing, and it's a big deal. It's like going to Mecca for rock climbers to go to France. And I was training really hard and I was working on the gym and I felt this pop in my shoulder, and I thought, oh, that's not good. It swelled up. I had a lot of pain. Went and saw an orthopedic surgeon. He said, yeah, you tore the cartilage in your shoulder. I can put a scope in there and clean it up. It will help in the short term, but it's probably going to give you problems later in life. Or I can give you steroid injection, which will help in the short term, but it could potentially further degradate the structure of your ligaments. And I thought, that's it. Those are my choices. That just seems so dumb. Neither of them sounded appealing, and that was really all medicine had to offer.
Dr. Harry Adelson (01:46)
Now, I was in naturopathic school learning about this sort of using the body's natural ability to heal itself. So I just kept asking around and I was introduced to the man who was to become my mentor, Dr. Rick Marinelli, who was the first naturopathic doctor to perform prolotherapy. Now, Prolotherapy was the predecessor of stem cell therapy. It's the injection of natural substances, substances that are simultaneously nutritive and slightly irritating, such as sugar, oddly enough. I mean, something as simple as sugar. You inject that into the area. It basically is slightly irritating, tricks the body into thinking that it's been re injured and launches the healing cascade. So you get the second opportunity to heal without actually having been injured again. So I felt it worked so well. My trip to France was a huge success, and I became friends with Rick, and my life path just sort of unfolded before me. So for my first six years, I did prolo therapy, which was very simple procedure. My office was slightly more complicated than an Acupuncturist office and trained a lot of people had pretty good success. We'd have to treat people pretty frequently. I'd have to see them, like once a month for up to a year sometimes to really get the results that we wanted.
Dr. Harry Adelson (03:07)
Well, then in 20 05, 20 06, plateletrich plasma hit the scene. Platelet rich plasma is you do a blood draw, you concentrate down the platelets from the person's own blood, and you inject that instead of using sugar water like we do in parallel therapy. Well, what I found is it really was different instruments, same sheet music. Like all the principles, everything was pretty much the same. The difference was the results occurred much more quickly. Like, instead of six to twelve treatments over at one month intervals, I would end up doing like three to six treatments. So it was almost like twice as fast the outcomes that we wanted. And this is treating low back pain, neck pain, arthritis problems of the musculoskeletal system. Well, I did that for about four years, and I thought that was what I was going to do the rest of my career. And then a woman came to me, a woman who had treated for years, Laura. And Laura was hyper intelligent, ridiculously high IQ. She comes into my office with a stack of papers, drops it on my desk, and they're all scientific articles on the use of bone marrow stem cells for the treatment of arthritis, all in animals, because this was back in 2009, that's all we had.
Dr. Harry Adelson (04:32)
And she said, I want you to put bone marrow stem cells in my knee. And I said, Laura, I don't know how to do that. And she said, So learn. I said, Laura, I'm a naturopathic doctor. Do you know how much flak I'll get if I start doing bone marrow aspirations? And she leaned across the table and she said, Harry, I'm a materials engineer for NASA and I'm a woman. So if you want to complain to me about people telling you that you're out of your League, I'm afraid you're complaining to the wrong person. Well, I had nothing. I had no recourse for that. So I found a surgeon who was willing to teach me how to do a bone marrow aspiration. And I started doing it. And the results were so spectacular, really. Like, I was so impressed with it. I knew that's all I wanted to do.
Dr. Harry Adelson (05:26)
Well, that's amazing. And I love this is the first time hearing about Laura and how this kind of came about. So that's so exciting. Laura sounds amazing. And yeah, the incredible results from stem cells. I can't wait to dive into them, but I want to go back really quick to PRP. So I've only had PRP used on my skin topically. And I love the results. It's great. It really speeds healing. I've done micro needling on one side of it, and then when you put the PRP, it just heals so much faster. But do you still do the PRP injections as well, like into joints and in different areas.
Dr. Harry Adelson (06:01)
Well, we do what's called a photo modulated PRP. So we use primarily bone marrow stem cells, but then Additionally, we use what's called this photomodulated PRP. And what that is, is you take the blood. Blood is comprised of red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, which are the cellular components. And platelets are actually cellular fragments. And then the serum, the serum is just the fluid that cellular fragments exist in. You put it in a centrifuge when the tube comes out. At the bottom are the red blood cells because they contain iron, so they're the heaviest. So they go to the bottom. At the top is the serum. And then in the middle are the platelets. Now, platelets exist in your entire blood supply. They are what are responsible when blood finds itself outside of a blood vessel, it recognizes that and activates and it releases these proteins, the most important of which is called platelet derived growth factor. And platelet derived growth factor is what triggers the activation of your own endogenous stem cells. Now, one of the other things so that's sort of like PRP basic PRP platelet rich plasma. Now, blood contains stem cells, a very specific kind of stem cell called Vselt.
Dr. Harry Adelson (07:32)
And V SEL stands for very small embryonic like stem cells. And they're called very small because they're just slightly smaller than a red blood cell. And they're called embryonic life because they're almost as primitive as embryonic stem cells. So this exists in your blood. So anytime you inject PRP, you're injecting these VSE. The problem, however, is these VSE are completely hibernated. They're quiescence, they're not active. So you're not getting any benefit from the plateletrich plasma. You're getting benefit from plateletrich plasma from the concentration of platelets, but you're not getting the benefit of the VSL. Well, I had heard about methods for activating these Vs in your blood. And the only way that I really heard a few different people doing it and involved freezing the blood and thighing it. And it's also like some people call it platelet lysate. And at first they thought it was because they were actually rupturing the platelets and all the contents were getting released. But now we think it's actually because in that freezing and thyme, you're activating these Bscls because you're sort of like applying stress to these platelets or to the BSLS. And what's interesting is if you say, oh, it's the process of freezing and thawing.
Dr. Harry Adelson (08:53)
Well, that sounds a lot like biohacking, doesn't it? I mean, one of the main sort of mainstays of biohacking is hot and cold therapy, hot and cold contrast. Same with naturopathic medicine, by the way. Well, what we're now starting to think is a lot of the benefits that you get from these cold and hot alternating therapies is you're actually activating your own endogenous Vs. So anyway, I heard about this way where you could freeze and thaw the blood. But the problem with that is it's very time consuming and in order to you really have to keep the blood overnight and then there's sort of, like a whole regulatory problem because whenever you keep a blood product overnight, you're now considered a blood bank which is a whole other mountain of red tape. So I never really got into it, I never could really figure out how to incorporate it but then I actually got a call from Dave Asprey he said, he called me on a Sunday and normally when I talk to Dave we'd schedule it but I just looked at my phone like, oh Dave is calling and he goes there's a guy.
Dr. Harry Adelson (10:00)
In California, Dr. Todd Ovalkaides, who's developed a laser that activates Vs from PRP. And you need to start doing it because this is the next biggest thing to really hit the cellular medicine world. So so I called this guy Todo Volkaides. He's in Southern California. He's developing a network of doctors, which I'm now on the board of scientific advisors for and a member of the network. And so we started adding that. And what we really noticed with Vs and what we've just observed because we've only been doing it seven months now. So long term results, I don't really know. But the thing that we've noticed is that when people wake up from their procedure, they have significantly less pain and they tend to have benefit quite a bit sooner. Normally we tell people to not expect any benefit for two to six months. And with the Vs, people seem to get results much more quickly. So we've been very happy with it.
Kayla Barnes (11:04)
That's incredible. Would it have any benefit to the skin, too? I'm just curious. So if you're already getting the PRP and you're already doing the blood draw for the PRP facial, if you ran it through the laser, do you think it would have benefit for this?
Dr. Harry Adelson (11:18)
Oh, absolutely. See, when I was saying that the transition from prolo therapy to plateletrich plasma and then plateletrich plasma to stem cells, it's different instruments, but it's the same sheet music, really, like whatever it is that we're doing, it's the same concept. So the area in stem cell therapy that enjoys the most scientific literature, scientific evidence is wound care. And part of the reason for that is because it's a very easy thing to study. Someone has a non healing ulcer, a wound that will not heal, and then you perform an intervention and either it gets better or it doesn't and you take pictures of it. There's nothing subtle, like there's nothing subjective. It's entirely objective, like the wound gets better or it doesn't. Well, that's part of the reason why it's been studied with stem cell therapy, and it seems to be very effective for that. And the reason we think that is because how does a wound heal in order for like, if you have skin that won't grow back over, first you have to grow new blood vessels, and then the skin grows on top of it. So that's why with regenerative medicine, we're not thinking in terms of the body is like a machine that we're going to replace or repair parts of it.
Dr. Harry Adelson (12:43)
We're thinking of the body as a garden, and we're going to treat the tissue beds so they grow more healthy plants. Right. And so in order to do that, that takes some time. You don't just plant a garden and then the next day you get a beautiful garden, you have to wait for the plants to grow. Right. So if we're treating a knee for treating an interpretieval disc, if we're treating the skin for treating the hair follicles, whatever it is, whatever tissue whose health we wish to improve. We inject either the plateletrich, plasma or if we want to turn up the volume, the bone marrow, stem cells, the photo modulated PRP, which is the VSCL. It similarly, just like the old fashioned Polo therapy tricks the body into thinking there's been this new severe injury, but there has been no tissue insult there by launching the body's natural healing cascade to get the benefit of a healing reaction without having actually been injured.
Kayla Barnes (13:44)
Great. Is it true and I've heard this, but is it true that the body will typically only heal say you have an injury, a sports injury, the body will typically only heal to the point of using that portion of the body, whether it's the elbow or the ankle. It might not actually go back to the way it was prior to the injury. Is there a truth in that?
Dr. Harry Adelson (14:04)
Well, it depends. It's this combination of the severity of the injury and how robust your own natural healing response is, because we've heard of about some pro athletes who've had some really horrific injuries who return to the field, because part of what makes them a professional athlete is they have superhuman healing powers. And then you've heard of other people who have relatively small injuries that just never completely healed. So it's this balance of, like how much structural damage is actually produced by the injury, whether it's a single traumatic injury or multiple microscopic micro traumas, and then how well your body responds. And that's when we're talking about the treatments that I do. It's very easy to tell which injections I want to do. The difficult part is whether or not I think I can help this person, because if the person is not in particularly good health, if they're not in good physical health, if they're not in good emotional health, if they're not in good speed, really like all of those things, if the person is just not particularly healthy on all levels, this therapy does not work that well because we can move these cells around all day.
Dr. Harry Adelson (15:29)
But if your own ability to heal your own body isn't functioned properly, well, it's not going to do much. So anyway, I'm kind of rambling. But to answer your question, you have the injury and then you have a healing response, and then either you get back to back where you were or you're left with what's called suboptimal healing, and that's a setup for chronic musculoskeletal pain.
Kayla Barnes (15:55)
Great. Thank you for that, because I've always kind of heard it or some people their injury will re occur. They might blame the weather or something. The weather is changing, and now my old foot injury is hurting. So, yeah, it's really interesting, the different mechanics of healing and how bio individual it is. And it's also a great point that you make that the foundation really needs to be there for any really biohacking or really high end regenerative therapy to truly take place and work really well in the body. So I love that point as well. So before we jump into stem cells, can you just tell us what stem cells do in the body, what's their purpose and what can happen to them as we age?
Kayla Barnes (16:36)
Sure. We have stem cells in virtually every tissue in our body, and their job is to maintain the health of their microenvironment. So whether you're in a fat pad in the knee or you're in a ligament in the shoulder or you're in an intriguing wherever you are in the body, you have stem cells that just live there. That's their domain. And their job is when you have an injury, they kick in the healing response. So whenever you have healing in the body, it's a stem cell mediated event. Right. So what we do is for us, for instance, we just treat low back pain, neck pain, joint pain. We don't treat any kind of systemic disease. We're treating people with pain. In that case, you have somebody who's had an injury, they have suboptimal healing, and now they're kind of left with what they're left with. So what we do is we take stem cells from an area where you still have a robust population, such as your bone marrow, such as the Vs in your blood. And we inject them directly. And it has to be direct. It has to be really precise. A lot of people talk about, oh, I went to Costa Rica and had an IV infusion of stem cells.
Dr. Harry Adelson (17:52)
And that's great. That's a great therapy for your internal organs because when you give an IV of stem cells, it primarily goes to your internal organs, your brain, your liver, your lungs, that sort of thing. But when you're talking about a knee, when you're talking about especially an interpertable disc which has no blood flow, these are not nearly as vascularized as your internal organs, so it needs to be injected very precisely. So if someone's listening to this, they're considering undergoing stem cell therapy for the treatment of low back pain or neck pain, we want to make sure that the person you go to is using some form of image guidance, either X ray guidance or ultrasound guidance or ideally both, because some things are X rays perfect for some things. Ultrasound is perfect for any small number of things you can't do one or the other. So yeah, it needs to be precise because we're putting the cells in the area that has experienced suboptimal healing, and that's where you get the healing response.
Kayla Barnes (18:58)
Great. And as we age well, actually, two questions. So every time you get an injury, if these are kind of being released. So does that mean if you've sustained more injuries in your life, you're going to have a less of a stem cell count in your body over time?
Dr. Harry Adelson (19:11)
I don't know that anybody really knows that for sure. That makes sense to me, as you say it, but I don't know that anybody really knows that for sure.
Kayla Barnes (19:20)
Okay, good. And then as we age, though, they do decline. Right. So we know absolutely. Less stem cells.
Dr. Harry Adelson (19:27)
We have fewer stem cells, and more than that, they're less robust, so they don't produce as many exosomes. So there's these vesicles filled with growth factors within the stem cell that as we age, we manufacture fewer of those axial zones.
Kayla Barnes (19:47)
Yeah, absolutely. So I know you mentioned low back pain and neck pain, but you do all sorts of different injections. Right. So what are some other areas that you can treat? Can you do hands? And I think you do like the big toe, like even down to from the top to the bottom.
Dr. Harry Adelson (20:03)
Yeah. Basically, if it moves in your body from your TMJ down to your big toe, I've injected it at one point or another because it's all the same concept again, like whether it's your shoulder, your knee, or your interpersonal disc or your epidural space, it doesn't really matter. Like, if it's experienced suboptimal healing, if it's experienced changes in the microscopic anatomy, then the hope is that putting stem cells in that area will launch a healing cascade and get it to work. When I started doing stem cell therapy back in, Laura gave me that stack of articles in 2009. It was in February of 2010 that I learned how to aspirate bone marrow, and I just jumped right into it with both feet. And back then in 20 10, 20, 11, 20, 12. What's really interesting is the only people who had heard of stem cell therapy were Cowboys. Yeah. So I was getting these Wyoming Cowboys, and the reason for that is because the very first adopters of stem cell therapy were the veterinarians, and there was a large animal veterinarian in Wyoming who was doing bone marrow stem cells on horses. And so these guys had these very expensive workhorses that they wanted to get a couple more years out of.
Dr. Harry Adelson (21:28)
They were getting old, and they were just not able to function as well. So they take him to this guy. He would do stem cells on the horse, and they would see with their own eyes how the horse wasn't able to work, and now it's able to work. So they say to this guy and say, well, can't you just, like, inject my back and my neck? And the guy would say, well, no, I can't because I'm a veterinarian, but there's a guy in Park City doing it now. Go to him. So in those early years, my practice was very slow because so few people had heard of stem cells, and that's all I wanted to do. So I would alternate a month here, and then I would travel and then a month traveling through South America, learning from the maestro, learning from the people who've been doing it the longest. But for my cowboy patients, these are legitimate Wranglers ranchers people who've exceeded the terms of their warranty. Like, they've really pushed their bodies to the limit every single day for years and years. So they literally have had arthritis throughout their entire bodies. So I started doing these huge treatments.
Dr. Harry Adelson (22:35)
I do their neck and their low back and both shoulders and both hips and both knees. And I totally, as a joke, would call it full body stem cell makeover. Like, it was really seriously, like, tongue in cheek. And then early 2016, David Aspirin became a patient. And once that happened, I started getting the biohacking community, and these people would say, can't you just do my whole body just sort of preventatively? And I thought, yeah, actually, I can. I've been doing it for years. And so that was the birth of the full body stem cell makeover. And we did, let's see, three this week. It's a little over half of what we're doing now. So basically what that is, is we do everything under IV sedation. So an anesthesiologist puts you to sleep so you're asleep through this whole thing. I do a relatively big bone marrow. Aspiration we concentrate the stem cells from the bone marrow, we do a blood draw to get the VSE Owls from the blood. And then we proceed to inject basically the entire body in a single sitting base of the skull down to the tailbone, every single level, including epidural injections.
Dr. Harry Adelson (23:48)
Turn the person over both shoulders, both elbows, both wrists and thumbs, both hips, both knees, both ankles and great toe. People have the option of having my partner, Amy Killing, who you've interviewed, do her portion, which is the skin of the face, to improve elasticity and hydration, do the scalp to thicken the hair follicles. And then in men, she does the penis to improve micro circulation. In women, she does the vagina to improve elasticity and hydration of the vaginal tissue. And we call it the most comprehensive stem cell upgrade ever conceived, because it is I know this industry pretty well, and nobody's doing really anything close to it.
Kayla Barnes (24:31)
Absolutely. Yeah. You guys are definitely the experts and have the best. And that's why the top biohackers are going there. I love that Cowboys were the first biohackers, it seems like.
Dr. Harry Adelson (24:43)
Yeah, I mean, because they're very pragmatic people. These are people who like to take a farmer, for instance, farmers. If you have a piece of farm equipment that's critical for production, if it breaks down, well, if your warranty covers it, great. But if the warranty doesn't cover it, you're still going to get it fixed because you need it. Well, these guys realize that their body is a tool and they need their bodies in order to function. So they're very pragmatic because a lot of people are like, oh, insurance doesn't cover it. There's sort of two elements to that. One is like, oh, I actually have to pay money, which yeah. How much do you value your ability to move in space? And then the other thing is there are people who are just like, oh, well, if insurance doesn't cover it, then it must somehow be fringe due to its own inadequacies or something, which is not at all true. It's just the way the system set up. This does not fit into the system. And Cowboys Wranglers, those guys sort of understand that. And they don't even necessarily trust the system. And they're okay with stepping outside the system, which isn't for everybody.
Dr. Harry Adelson (25:57)
And that's fine. But if your back pain is bad enough and you want to really do something about it, you don't want to wait ten years for the research to catch up with all of this, then there's people doing it right now.
Kayla Barnes (26:11)
Absolutely. And I always say health is an investment, not an expense. And you're either going to pay now or you're going to pay later. So it's really up to you. Do you want many more years of health and vitality and waking up with energy and not having pain, or do you want to just wait until that occurs? And of course, your quality of life is definitely less than. So I agree with you totally. Hence why I'm going to come to your clinic very soon and do something. And I'm hoping we can talk about brain health and what stem cells might be able to do because you and I chatted about it before.
Dr. Harry Adelson (26:44)
Yeah. So I really stay in my Lane. I don't treat the central nervous system. I have had people over the years now, especially with these BSLS. We inject the spine, we inject the joints. Well, it gets picked up into general circulation. The masengymal stem cells from your bone marrow, that doesn't necessarily cross the blood brain barrier because they're too big. But these Vs do. So I've had people telling me all sorts of I just say, like, positive side effects. So I'm not treating brain fog, I'm not treating people's brain health. But hopefully you'll get some sort of positive side effect. And I've had people over the years tell me all sorts of things, from sleeping better to you name it. Probably our most famous brain guy that we treated was Jim Quick. Of course, we treated him and helped him mostly helped him with his shoulder. His brain is in pretty good shape to begin with. Yeah.
Kayla Barnes (27:51)
I was with him a couple of weeks ago. And yes, he actually mentioned that he came and how great you are. So his mental state is incredible. So that's wonderful. But it'll be interesting to see what happens in the future because obviously, stem cells can turn into brain cells. Right.
Dr. Harry Adelson (28:13)
That's the belief, especially potentially these VSE could turn into the Mesa stem cells from bone marrow, not so much. I don't believe that turns into nervous tissue, but the Vs potentially can.
Kayla Barnes (28:28)
Yeah. I think it will be really interesting in the future to just see where it takes us because I would love to see some progress in terms of neurodegenerative diseases or even traumatic brain injury. If you could do an IV, kind of they can pass the blood brain barrier. I think so many people would benefit from that.
Dr. Harry Adelson (28:46)
And my very good friend Doctor Marcela Madera, who's based out of Austin, Texas, she's treating she's a John Hopkins trained neurosurgeon spine surgeon, and she's doing a lot of traumatic brain injury and stroke and that sort of thing. So probably I should introduce you to her and you should talk to her about those things. But she's easy to find on Google, Marcela Madeira, and she's really sort of specializing in that area.
Kayla Barnes (29:16)
Amazing. So we covered definitely the joint pain and the full body stems I'll make over, which is amazing. I definitely have an in depth podcast with Dr. Kellen about skin sex hair and how it can work with stem cells. But can you just touch base a little bit for anyone that didn't hear how it can improve some of the skin? Skin health?
Dr. Harry Adelson (29:35)
Yeah. So let's sort of like we were saying earlier, whatever it is you're placing stem cells, it's what we think the mechanism is. It's launching a healing response. So the thing about your skin, you sort of think like, what are the three things that are sort of like, show aging in your skin? Well, one is lines of facial expression. One is loss of volume, and the third is loss of elasticity and hydration of the skin. Well, for the lines of facial expression, Botox is great for that. If you're into that, if you're not into it, that's cool, too. But we have something to treat those lines of facial expression for loss of volume, there's lots of different fillers, including your own fat. And you can do filler with just your own liposuction fat. However, neither of those things really do anything to improve the elasticity and hydration of your skin. And that's what stem cells are great for you inject into the skin. And just exactly the same concept as doing a low back or knee or anything like that. It's triggering this healing response, growing new, healthy tissue, giving you stronger skin, more even collagen fibers.
Dr. Harry Adelson (30:58)
So that's one portion, the other is the hair follicles. So injecting the scalp, in an area where you no longer have hair follicles, it's not going to do anything like that. Person needs to see a hair surgeon for the follicle replacement where they move the follicles around. But if they have follicles that are producing very thin, wispy hairs injecting with PRP injecting the stem cells appears to thicken those hair follicles to make it more full. Similarly, in men, the penis, women, the vagina with the penis, the erectile dysfunction is a circulatory disorder. It's a loss of microcirculation the tissue. Well, one of the things that we know from that conversation we are having about wound healing. Stem cells for the use of wound healing. One of the things we know is that therapeutic use of stem cells triggers neo vascularisation, which is the growth of. I'm sorry, it's not neovascularization, it's angiogenesis. Neovascularization is something else. Angiogenesis is the growth of new, healthy blood vessels. And that's exactly what we think is happening when you inject the penis and with the vagina. When women complain, especially post menopausal, when they complain of painful sex, it's usually due to dryness and loss of elasticity.
Dr. Harry Adelson (32:28)
Well, just like the skin of the face, the mucosal tissue of the vaginal wall seems to respond quite well to stem cell injection.
Kayla Barnes (32:37)
I love where we're going in terms of regenerative everything from antiaging internally, externally.
Dr. Harry Adelson (32:44)
Yeah. And it's all natural. That's what I love about it, especially as a naturopathic doctor. Like this is using the body's own natural ability to heal itself.
Kayla Barnes (32:54)
Yeah. And that's how it's supposed to work, right. We've just gotten so out of whack with our environment, our lifestyle, that our bodies aren't in a position to heal themselves the way that they were originally meant to. So let's stop protocol. So what age would you recommend someone starting? Maybe a stem cell procedure or therapy, and I guess we can look at this two fold. Of course, if you have more of, like an acute injury, that might be one thing. But in terms of maybe the whole body stem cell makeover just for prevention, anti aging, what do you recommend? Like, age wise, when do you start?
Dr. Harry Adelson (33:29)
Okay, well, there's basically like two types of people that we get. Let's talk about full body steps to makeover. First, there are the busted up Cowboys, the people who whether they were athletes or manual laborers. A lot of times I'll get these people who own a dredging business, and it's a very successful business. But in the early years, they were actually doing all the manual labor. So these people are just broken down with those people. It's whatever age they're having pain. We get people in their 20s with low back pain. We get young people who have pain that will not go away. And conventional medicine either hasn't helped them or they're just lean towards alternative stuff. So, I mean, that's really just sort of like case dependent what's ailing you, whether it's full body stem cell makeover or, like, what we call a site specific treatment. So, like, last week we had a 25 year old who is a firefighter, and he's got low back pain from carrying patients, from carrying people he was rescuing. So that's an appropriate use. Then you sort of move into the realm of people doing it for preventive purposes.
Dr. Harry Adelson (34:53)
And that's a little trickier because when you're treating somebody with pain and it's like, clear what your goal is, and then when you're done, if everything works out, they should have less pain. When you're treating somebody preventatively. We're doing this sort of based on the idea that we think this is pushing off kind of the inevitable. This is turning back the hands of time. So if you're 40 years old and say you don't have pain now, but who's to say that you won't at 55? Well, if we do the treatment now, we're hopefully pushing it back ten years now. That is a completely unscientific statement, and I have no way to prove that. But I'm just saying from my own experience of treating people with pain, and then we get them out of pain for a period of years, and then it sort of starts to come back and we do another treatment and gets them pain relief for a period of years. That makes sense to me. I think that's a reasonable thing to say. If someone wanted to do, for instance, a full body sexy will make over purely for preventative reasons.
Really?
Dr. Harry Adelson (36:04)
The earliest I would say would be 40, but probably more like 50. I just did a consult with a guy who was super gung Ho to do it 29 years old, no problems at all. And I basically talked him out of it. The risks are very minimal, but the risks aren't zero. It's not completely without risk, and it just doesn't make sense to do it. It's such a young person who's so healthy.
Kayla Barnes (36:41)
Very good point. So now we kind of know the age. What about the protocol, like the frequency? So say you are 40 and you do your first one. How long should you wait until the second procedure? And when would you recommend it? Like once a year. Every other year?
Dr. Harry Adelson (36:57)
Sure. So again, it sort of depends if we're doing like a site specific treatment on somebody with pain. We do the first treatment and then we wait and see. It really takes a year to find out what we're left with. As we were saying earlier, we're launching a healing cascade. It takes time for this to work. I don't really expect any benefit initially. The benefit starts usually around two months, kind of starts to Plateau around six months, but can continue for the entire first year. So at the year Mark, we check in and just looking at my follow up records and I have documentation of all of this. This is not something I'm just making up. Around 70% of the people that I treat at the one year Mark are happy. And by happy, I don't necessarily mean 100% pain relief, but they've had enough pain relief that they're glad that they did it and they don't feel like they need another treatment. Then we just wait. I expect to hear back from the person anywhere from three to six years average is four or five years, where four or five years later, it's not completely back to where it was, but it's starting to come back and they don't want to go back there.
Dr. Harry Adelson (38:10)
So you know most people are okay with that. If we do get you out of pain for four or five years, and then we have to do it again, a knee replacement, you got to redo every ten to 15 years. So surgery isn't permanent either. You got to redo those things, too. So that's the majority of the people, smaller percentage of people at the one year Mark have had some improvement, but they'd like a little more. Well, then maybe we would talk about doing a second treatment at the one year Mark. A smaller percentage. Again, between ten and 15% of the people that I treat. I just don't help at all. It's dull and I hate that and it drives me nuts. It keeps me awake at night, but I just don't help everybody. I do everything I can to screen out. I won't treat people. I don't think I'm going to help. I won't treat smokers. I don't treat heavy drinkers. I don't treat people with blood pressure through the roof because I know it's not going to work. It's going to be a waste of their time and it's going to be bad for my reputation.
Dr. Harry Adelson (39:13)
So I really try to weed people out. But still, there are some people I just don't know.
Kayla Barnes (39:18)
Well, I really appreciate the honesty, too. It's so important for anyone considering this. What do you think that the future of stem cells kind of looks like? Because things are always changing, of course. But what's your opinion? Because I feel like you should just become more accessible, but also we should be able to kind of do what we want with our bodies. I know a couple of mutual people that we know think the same.
Dr. Harry Adelson (39:44)
Yeah. Well, there's two areas when we're talking about stem cells. There's regenerative medicine, which is what I do, and then there's tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, where we're using primarily whether we're using stem cells from your body, which is what we do, or if you're using stem cells from like umbilical cord or something like that. The main thing that needs to happen is all the regulatory stuff needs to get worked out because there still remains a great deal of Gray area. And it's hard for anyone to really understand what is OK and what isn't okay. And there's some stuff that is clearly not okay. That should be okay. And then there's other things that's really what needs to happen. It's more about just sort of the regulatory landscape than it is even about advances in treatment technology. Tissue engineering, on the other hand, this is like growing a kidney or growing an introvertebral disk or growing potentially like an entire ankle joint or something like that. That is what's going to explode over the coming years. Like we are to the point where we're growing hearts and kidneys and lungs and stuff in laboratories. We're not to the point where we're actually then putting them into people.
Dr. Harry Adelson (41:05)
But between 3D printing technology and stem cell technology. That's probably the most exciting thing that's on the horizon.
Kayla Barnes (41:15)
Yeah, absolutely. Some of the stuff that I've just gotten a glimpse at in the future is just so incredible. It's going to be able to help so many people, which is definitely what you're doing. And I know that you probably can't make this claim, but I've known a lot of not a lot, but a handful of people who've had incredible results with stem cells where they thought that they were going to have to have surgery. So I want everyone to be aware that there are other options, and I think that they should explore those options if they're in a situation like you are. And the only options are like here's steroids or here's a surgery, this may be able to do some pretty incredible things.
Dr. Harry Adelson (41:57)
Yeah. I'm not philosophically opposed to surgery. My daughter was born with Tetrology, which is the most common heart abnormality genetic disorder. So she's had two life saving surgeries. If those surgeries didn't exist, she would not be here. And she's perfectly healthy and happy and thriving and doing amazing. So I have no axes to grind with conventional medicine or overall, but the treatment of chronic conditions, and anybody with any sort of background in functional medicine will agree with me on this. And chronic pain is a chronic condition. It's not where conventional medicine shines. And the part of the problem is we just throw stuff at it. If somebody is sick because of all the chemical exposures and now we're going to give them more drugs, that doesn't make any sense.
Kayla Barnes (43:04)
Just curious, do you give any protocol, pre stem cell injection, like maybe nutrition or certain lifestyle aspects that you should adhere to to make the treatment?
Dr. Harry Adelson (43:14)
Generally not. And the reason for that is because I'm much more interested in the person's overall lifestyle, the two years leading up to the treatment than I am the two weeks leading up to it. I don't think there's a whole lot you can do in a month or two that's going to move the needle that much as far as your outcome. I mean, that's part of the reason why I only treat people who are in good health overall, because those are the people who can have good outcomes. That's one reason. The other reason is just completely like logistically and pragmatically. About half the people I see are doing all this different stuff, and they know what's best for them, and nothing I'm going to tell them is going to make that much of a difference or anything I tell them to do. They're not going to do anyway. I've sort of just given up on trying to micromanage their lifestyles.
Kayla Barnes (44:10)
That makes complete sense. I totally get it. Well, wonderful. Is there anything else that you want to say that you think that the listeners should know about stem cells or your practice?
Dr. Harry Adelson (44:19)
The one thing I'd like to tell you guys about is if this sounds expensive? Well, it's because it is. Unfortunately, it costs a fortune for me to run this facility and staff it with people and everything else. If you know somebody who you think could benefit from this who otherwise can't afford it, we have a tithing program. So the way that works is first someone has to demonstrate that they're, in fact living below poverty line and that's like there's government charts that we have that on our website that show that we basically look at your taxes to determine that once we've determined that you are, in fact living below poverty line and among the medically underserved, Then there are two pathways for enrollment. One is for combat service veterans. If you've served this country in combat, I'm happy to do the treatment. No charge, no further questions asked. I'm happy to do it. The other pathway for people who are not combat service veterans Is I will do the treatment in exchange for community service hours. So on my website I've got listed like the four different places Because it can't just be anywhere. Like it's Habitat for humanity Boys and girls club, VA hospital system and then a local park city Christian Center.
Dr. Harry Adelson (45:45)
Depending on what we're doing between 60 and 120 hours of community service, I'll do the treatment.
Kayla Barnes (45:51)
That's incredible. I absolutely love that And I think it's very important. So on behalf of everyone, I'll say thank you for doing that.
Dr. Harry Adelson (45:59)
Yeah, it wasn't my idea. I heard a doctor Give a lecture about her tithing program and she finished it by saying any doctors in the audience? I invite you to rip off my idea and I did.
Kayla Barnes (46:11)
I love that. That's amazing. Well, Dr. Adelson, I'm going to include all of your Instagram And your company website And I'll definitely include a link to that program Because I think it's so important and something that if we want to identify the biohacking space or regenerative health, It's not always ultra accessible. So I really appreciate you doing that.
Dr. Harry Adelson (46:31)
Thank you so much. And then I guess the last thing is my film, My nicknanson film, the stem cell solution. It's free to watch. Maybe you could throw a link up to your audience. It's free to watch. It's a deep dive. Dave Asprey is in there. Jim Kwik is in there. It was a fun project to do And I'm glad we did it.
Kayla Barnes (46:53)
I love that. I'll definitely include that and a link to your book, too. So I'll include all that in this shown And I really appreciate you coming on.
Dr. Harry Adelson (47:00)
Oh, you're most welcome. Thank you for inviting me. I really appreciate it.
Kayla Barnes (47:03)
You're so welcome.
To learn more about stem cells for sexual function, skin and hair, listen to my podcast with Dr. Amy Killen.