Mark Testa (Stem Cells, Bone Marrow and Chiropractic) - Episode 907

I'm extremely excited to announce a brand new sponsor for the Behind the Shield podcast that is Transcend. Now for many of you listening, you are probably working the same brutal shifts that I did for 14 years.

Suffering from sleep deprivation, body composition challenges, mental health challenges, libido, hair loss, etc. Now when it comes to the world of hormone replacement and peptide therapy, what I have seen is a shift from doctors telling us that we were within normal limits, which was definitely incorrect all the way to the other way now where men's clinics are popping up left, right and center.

So I myself wanted to find a reputable company that would do an analysis of my physiology and then offer supplementations without ramming, for example, hormone replacement therapy down my throat. Now I came across Transcend because they have an altruistic arm and they were a big reason why the 7X project I was a part of was able to proceed because of their generous donations.

They also have the Transcend foundations where they are actually putting military and first responders through some of their therapies at no cost to the individual. So my own personal journey so far filled in the online form, went to Quest, got blood drawn and a few days later I'm talking to one of their wellness professionals as they guide me through my results and the supplementation that they suggest.

In my case specifically, because I transitioned out the fire service five years ago and been very diligent with my health, my testosterone was actually in a good place. So I went down the peptide route and some other supplements to try and maximize my physiology knowing full well the damage that 14 years of shift work has done. Now I also want to underline because I think this is very important that each of the therapies they offer, they will talk about the pros and cons.

So for example, a lot of first responders in shift work, our testosterone will be low, but sometimes nutrition, exercise and sleep can offset that on its own. So this company is not going to try and push you down a path, especially if it's one that you can't come back from. So whether it's libido, brain fog, inflammation, gut health, performance, sleep, this is definitely one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.

So to learn more, go to transcendcompany.com or listen to episode 808 of the Behind the Shield podcast with founder Ernie Colling. This episode is sponsored by a company I've used for well over a decade and that is 511. I wore their uniforms back in Anaheim, California and have used their products ever since.

From their incredibly strong yet light footwear to their cut uniforms for both male and female responders, I found them hands down the best workwear in all the departments that I've worked for. Outside of the fire service, I use their luggage for everything and I travel a lot and they are also now sponsoring the 7X team as we embark around the world on the Human Performance project. We have Murph coming up in May and again I bought their plate carrier.

I ended up buying real ballistic plates rather than the fake weight plates and that has been my ride or die through Murph the last few years as well. One area I want to talk about that I haven't in previous sponsorship spots is their brick and mortar element. They were predominantly an online company up till more recently but now they are approaching 100 stores all over the US.

My local store is here in Gainesville Florida and I've been multiple times and the discounts you see online are applied also in the stores. So as I mentioned 511 is offering you 15% off every purchase that you make but I do want to say more often than not they have an even deeper discount especially around holiday times. But if you use the code SHIELD15 you will get 15% off your order or in the stores every time you make a purchase.

And if you want to hear more about 511, who they stand for and who works with them, listen to episode 580 of Behind the Shield podcast with 511 regional director Will Ayers. Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast. As always my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show, acupuncturist, chiropractor and the executive vice president of Regenexx, Mark Testa. Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics.

From his journey into chiropractic, how the holistic professions were accused of quackery, predatory practice in chiropractic, his journey into the world of stem cells, PRP, the healing power of bone marrow concentrate, the myths around stem cell therapy, treating the sporting and tactical athletes of the world and so much more. Now before we get to this incredible conversation as I say every week, please just take a moment.

Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and leave a rating. Every single 5 star rating truly does elevate this podcast therefore making it easier for others to find. And this is a free library of over 900 episodes now. So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them. So with that being said, I introduce to you Mark Testa.

Enjoy. Well Mark, I want to say welcome back to the Behind the Shield podcast. The first time you and I sat down we had some technical issues in the world of the internet but I want to welcome you onto the Behind the Shield podcast today. Thanks a lot James and I'm glad we could get that rescheduled because I was looking forward to talking to you. Absolutely. The internet and computers are an amazing thing unless they don't work and they suck away all that time that you saved. Yeah, for sure.

And I want to say thank you to Doug Orchard, a mutual friend. He is the creator of arguably one of the most powerful documentaries when it comes to fitness and health in this country and the amazing PE program that some schools had in California in the 60s. So how did you and Doug meet and tell me about what you guys did together?

Yeah, Doug and I met, I don't know, it's probably been eight years ago now and he came to shoot some video on me in my home when I was still practicing full time and that's how we met. And then I realized how talented he was and brought him into Regenexx because we were looking for video on what we do, how we do it. We had a lot of patients who wanted to share their story and Doug became our go to video guy and he just got it. He was so professional.

He was able to tell a story and actually better than that, better than telling a story, he's great at asking questions and not the obvious ones and getting to a good story. So that's how we met and then we traveled around a lot. We became friends. He's a great conversationalist. We had a lot to talk about and I'll tell you, he turned you and me onto that video you mentioned. He also turned me onto fasting. He did a fasting documentary and I was like, how do I not know anything about this?

How do I not know these people you're mentioning? And that sent me down a deep rabbit hole then into fasting and intermittent fasting and fasting mimicking diets. So Doug has contributed a lot to my personal life as well as our business. Brilliant. Yeah, his documentaries need to be seen. Funny, he did some on pandemics and masks and things like that a few years before 2020 and those ones disappeared into the ether from the people that originally funded them.

So that was interesting too because apparently they were phenomenal and they were talking about a lot of the things and not demonizing stuff, but just the vulnerability that we had when it came to the mask specifically, the very fitting N95 that was effective and the ineffective elements of a lot of the other masks. So really great information that would have been invaluable as we went into 2020, but I guess cancel culture one and sadly his documentaries disappeared.

All right, well then where on planet earth are we finding you today? Today I'm in typically sunny Denver, Colorado. It was just outside with the dog. It's like 60 degrees, sunny, beautiful. So I'm not forgetting March is our snowiest month here, so I'm sure the other shoe is going to drop at some point. Last time I was there with my family skiing, I think it was about four years ago and you had your coldest winter you'd ever had.

And we came over from Florida, rented a two-wheel drive car and I had the most terrifying two days of driving to the slopes and back I've ever had in my entire life. So I'll never forget Denver. Yeah, right. Once you start heading up that hill, if it's icy and cold and snowy, it's treacherous. Absolutely. All right, well, I'd love to start at the very beginning of your timeline then.

So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings? Yeah, I was born in Ravenna, Ohio. It's Northeastern Ohio. I have a twin sister who's a year older than me, who used to really beat me up till about ninth grade and she's still quite competitive and athletic. And then we have two older siblings as well. So family of four, parents were both first generation born in America from Italian immigrants.

So they spoke both languages, but unfortunately didn't teach us both languages because they wanted us to fit in because they didn't fit in, right? Only Italian and so I'm sure that language is lost now in our family. But we had great cousins and family really super close by. We had a really tight knit Italian family, celebrated everything together.

I grew up really in my mom's kitchen learning how to cook Italian food and still love to cook food and have dinner parties for people and have people over. So it was fun. And I remember during the holidays, during Thanksgiving, she'd make turkey and all that. And then on the other side of the table was the whole Italian entrees. And I was like, I'm going for the Italian. I'm eating the lasagna and the meatballs. Still lean that way. What about their immigration story?

I think sadly a lot of the rhetoric at the moment with the borders and that kind of thing. And obviously I'm an immigrant myself, is very kind of black and white, but this country was created through immigration, depending on how you look at it. Some forced, some willing. But I think there's so much depth and power to people's immigration stories. So what were the pros? What were some of the good things, the good stories they used to tell?

And did they encounter any kind of prejudice or anything when they first came over here? I'll start with that last one first. Some of the stories, yeah, definitely a lot of some prejudice, right? I remember my uncle telling a story like he never seen a banana before and someone at school gave him a banana and he started eating it and didn't peel it, right? Just he didn't know. And there was a lot of that, you know, heckling and sort of thing.

And because they didn't speak English, they had a difficult time, which led them to stay tightly knit, right? With Italians. In fact, when I went to school in first grade, I did not know there was another person on the planet named Mark because we were just around our cousins all the time. Anyway, on the good side of it, they were super hardworking. They were industrious. They came here to make a difference in their lives and in their heritage, in their, you know, in their lineage, right?

They wanted to have opportunities and they came here and they were celery farmers. And that's what they did. They grew celery and they contributed a lot of that to public companies. I heard like Campbell's soups and, you know, gave them some of those vegetables to use in their soups. All four of the Testa brothers were in World War II and all at once at one point. So my dad was in Okinawa. My one uncle was in Hiroshima literally days after they dropped the atomic bomb there.

Some of his pictures were just phenomenal of the and in a bad way of the devastation. Like everything was literally flat there. So they really were proud to be American and to help in every way they possibly could. So after that, they tried, you know, they tried everything. They were cotton farmers in Arizona. They raised chinchillas. They worked in machine shops. They did all kinds of things till they found their niche in general construction, excavation. They built roads and highways.

They built universities and hospitals. They built housing developments. They ran eight miles of water and sewer in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Ohio, giving them running water for the first time. So they really made a significant impact and really tried to, you know, make not only their lives better, but contribute to, you know, their little ecosystem of Northeastern Ohio. They never went far from there, but they did make a big impact there.

With your uncle being exposed to what we now understand would be an immense amount of radiation after Hiroshima, did he have any health issues as he progressed through adulthood? Interestingly, when he was over there in the Philippines before he went over to Hiroshima, he got malaria. But out of the four brothers and his sister, he lived to be 97. So no, he was fit. He was healthy. The last time I saw him at, well, I saw him at 97. And obviously, you know, that's frailty.

But when he was 87, he was on no medications at all and was completely healthy. So somehow he dodged it. And I asked him about that. Why are you so healthy? And you know, he ate clean. He ate off the earth, right? He exercised. And his last thing was, I eat a quart of honey a month. I don't know. And that's really what he attributed a lot of it to, the honey.

Going back to the COVID conversation, one of the most heartbreaking things that I talked about this a lot is, I mean, I stood in the middle the whole time. Of course, it was a real virus, you know, but the underlying medical issues that people had were a big determinant if someone succeeded and overcame that virus or they succumbed to it.

And so we had a captive audience for two years to really educate the people of the importance of exercise, nutrition, sleep, time and daylight, community, all the pillars of health. And yet it was completely disregarded. And what a powerful kind of symbol of that, of your uncle thriving after being exposed in Hiroshima because of his underlying health. Yeah, I think that's so important. And I think we really missed an opportunity to talk about that.

I mean, you don't need a double blind randomized controlled trial to know that exercise and moving and sleep is going to be better for you than not and, you know, trying to do healthy things. And I think we missed a real opportunity to have a very simple, basic message to people about that. And everyone was so afraid to say anything that they said nothing.

And that was just as bad as saying the wrong things, in my opinion, because I mean, I think intuitively, everyone knows that and hardly anybody or nobody's going to disagree with like you should get good sleep and eat a good diet. Yeah, 100 percent. And people were dragged one extreme or the other.

And it was so sad because the middle ground was where really 80 percent were actually, you know, that's where they would have been had they not been pulled and censored in a way and shamed because they dared to talk about a vaccine or a mask or Chinese conspiracy, whatever their thing was, you know, and the middle ground was the truth. Like there will be another virus. There will always be another virus.

And even if there isn't, we're still losing people, you know, just millions when it comes to obesity and diabetes and all these other things. So let's fix that. That is the truth. Yeah, completely agree on that. And there's simple ways to do it. And it's it's it's it's within all of our grasp to be able to do all of that.

And if we all just shifted a little bit, you know, I had a mentor, a little plus often equals a lot, it would make a big impact on overall health of the individual and overall health of our society. I really believe that. 100 percent. Well, just staying on the previous generation for one more observation, you have multiple relatives in World War Two. We are told that they were the greatest generation.

And I've had a kind of awakening recently where I listened to so many stories of granddad and a lot of times he wasn't dealing well with what he had to do and what he saw when he came home. And we almost kind of projected that you're OK, you're the best generation on them and really kind of closed the door on them finally be able to open up about what they saw and did with this kind of wiser lens that you have now from a mental health perspective.

Did you ever observe the impact of the war on any of your your family? You know, it's a great question, because as my 97 year old uncle was the last one, his sister is still alive. She's like 93. But as he was the last brother to come back and then die, we were going through a lot of his stuff. His sister was there and she's like, yeah, he had what they called them shell shock. Now we would know it as PTSD, post traumatic stress injury.

You know, his time in the Philippines before he was deployed to Hiroshima, he came back home and I didn't realize this and I didn't necessarily witness it because I wasn't born yet, but he holed up in his bedroom for a long, long time and did not want to interact and did not want to come out and did not want to participate. And I'm sure that's right. That was what was going on.

I mean, some of the images, the pictures he shared with us, literally where it's a human body vaporized on the sidewalk, you can make that out. But he witnessed all that. And I think, you know, all I can say is what I witnessed is they were all very short tempered, right? Kind of a classic thing with PTSI, short tempered. Now they were not smokers or alcohol abusers or things of that nature, you know, and I think they just learned how to more of us in a stoic way, keep it in check.

But that is something I witnessed and that is something I heard my aunt say about my uncle from Hiroshima when he came home is that he was just, you know, isolated, wanted to isolate. Yeah, it's interesting.

I'm writing a book at the moment and the real kind of nucleus of it is multi-generational trauma because I've got this unique perspective with almost 900 interviews now where, you know, you just hear, and I love these kind of, you know, generational stories that these guests have and you start to realize that, of course, war is going to have an impact and we romanticize about some of these generations.

And some of them had the tools and they did deal well and they thrived for years and years and years, but it still took its toll. It still had an impact, which then is passed to, you know, to son and grandson. And, you know, now here we are in 2024 with a lot of the physical mental health issues that we see. And if we're not talking about our ancestors, we're missing a part of the puzzle. I agree and I think we are losing our ancestry heritage.

We don't, you know, our family, while we were super close growing up, is now dispersed everywhere and we have one of the five siblings. On both sides, they're all gone. But on my dad's side, she's 92, 3, and I try to get as much out of her as possible, as much as she can tell us. And we all are like glued to it. But to your point about intergenerational, like, right, some of that short wicked anger was probably pushed down on me. And I'm aware of that.

And I'm trying to temper it and not pass it on to my daughter. But you know, we learn this way. And then we act this way. And you know how kids are, they're not listening, they're watching, they're observing. And I can tell my daughter, you know, do as I say, not as I do, doesn't work. No, no, doesn't work if you're a parent or a politician. All right. Yeah. All right. Well, then go into your childhood now. What were you doing and playing as far as sports and exercise in the school age?

I started in second grade competing in track meets. I grew up going to a Catholic school and again, small town. And so we were all very tight knit. And I had a family that really took us under their belt. They had older siblings. And I say us, my twin sister, because she competed as well. They took us under their belt and they would start taking us to local J.C. track meets. Right. And I was fast and I was good and I was winning. I still have all those awards from second grade. What is that?

Like seven years old. And I competed in track all the way through high school doing hurdles, doing quarter mile sprints, you know, again, small school. So I threw the shot put and was pretty good at it, even though, you know, it was one hundred eighty five pounds. I came in frequently second or third. And one of our the funniest story, one of our techniques I think I came up with was as we let go, just to make the as much noise as possible.

And it was intimidating to a lot of people who should have beat us. But we did that. And it was a lot of fun. And then in ninth grade, I started playing football, lettered for three years. I was a kicker. The only regret there is I wish I would have stuck with it because I probably could have got a college scholarship because it's a lot easier than being a lineman, which I ended up playing. But had a lot of had a lot of fun.

I love the camaraderie of team, you know, as in Doug's video, I think maybe the the exercise video. Some of the the doctors that were interviewed talked about how teams break the barrier of color and race. Right. You're teammates. And I had a lot of friends that I became and stayed friends with through all of that. And color and race meant nothing to any of us. We were buddies, we were teammates. And I love that camaraderie. Now, I'm still very active.

I don't participate on any teams, but I still work out, you know, five to seven times a week. And, you know, I know I don't golf, but I enjoy Frisbee golf when I can. I definitely do a lot of hiking here in the Colorado mountains. So I love to stay active. I think, you know, that was just part of my DNA, and I'm grateful to have the the ability in the body to still do it. I don't take any of that for granted because I know people who can't. And so I'm grateful to still be as active as I am.

I think that was a missing part when people see because a lot the video of last year or high school has gone around a lot. I mean, there was a JFK initiative and a lot of these are actually out clips that Doug uses in the video. You see these very muscular fit, you know, I'm assuming juniors, seniors by that point, navigating all these different courses. And every one of them could be on the front cover of Muscle Fitness is crazy.

But when you hear that they're put into groups and so the whole group has to rise up and get to the next color shorts in the next level, you're working together. And when you listen to them talking, their academic grades went up and the bullying went down. So now we've removed basically any sort of physical exercise. And what are we seeing? All these videos of horrific bullying doesn't mean it happens all the time, but it happens.

And whether it's wrestling on jujitsu or a PE program, when you get kids to have shared suffering, when you have to come together and work together and as you said, you see each other now as team A instead of, you know, an Asian, a Hispanic and a black guy, you basically debunk the ridiculous myth that is, you know, racism and prejudice. And you see each other as human beings. So this is another element that I'd love to see that program put in because it's not just about fitness.

It's about so much more. So much more, right? You said it brain health, help that develops. And you know, my daughter goes to an all girls school here and they are, it's called GALS, Girls Athletic Leadership School. Now she's not an athlete. She is now, but their first period is movement every single day. And the first six weeks, they did the one mile run, all of them. And they want to teach girls, they can do hard things.

And so she went from, you know, learning that to now she's on the lacrosse team. You know, we just bought a football, you know, she wants to play football. I'm all for it. Whatever she wants to do. And I love it that movement is their first period because to your point, it makes everything better, right? And then when you see in your camaraderie with your colleagues, race, color, everything goes out the window. You're just a team now. You're just, you're working towards the same goals.

Absolutely. Well, I know you got into the health profession. When you were in school, were you dreaming of holistic health or was there something else in mind? I was sort of brought up with it, truthfully. My parents, again, they were, they took care of themselves. We did have a great holistic primary care doctor. He was an osteopath. He took care of three generations of us, of the testes. He was part of our family, really anytime, our Christmas Eve parties. He was always there.

He was always invited. He took care of us from all of us. But I grew up with a big garden. We were eating and cooking food. My parents in the seventies were early adopters of vitamins, particularly vitamin C at nothing, at a minimum. Linus Pauling was really pushing that and they were into it. I think when I started cooking with my mom, I realized, oh man, look, I can make healthier meals. I can make higher protein meals.

I can make food the way I want to eat it because I started lifting weights in ninth grade after buying my first Charles Atlas workout. Do you even know who Charles Atlas is? Oh, I do. Yeah, yeah. The father of modern bodybuilding, but I mean, he was a strong man as opposed to a bodybuilder, wasn't he? Yeah, yeah. And I got his little free thing out of the back of a magazine when things used to take six to eight weeks to be delivered and I got it. And I was like, pushups.

It was all kinds of different pushups, inclines, declines between chairs, and I couldn't do them. So that was my early foray. So between the cooking, the garden, the vitamins, the working out, the how do I get more out of this? When I went to chiropractic school and I intentionally went there because I was like, I don't want to deal with disease and dying and sick people. I want to do health related stuff.

That just fueled the intention to get into holistic health care and learn as much and more about it as I possibly could ingest. And so I've been down that rabbit hole. It's my ethos. It's again, like exercise is just part of who I am. So is this. And I have a hard time not giving advice unsolicited to people when they tell me about an ailment. You're going to get some advice from me. You don't have to follow it, but I can't help myself.

I can relate to that number of times I had people in the back of the ambulance. And of course, we're dealing with their acute emergency. But in the conversation that many a time to talk about, you know, plant based diets or foundation training or all these things so that hopefully they'll go away and like, all right, I'm not in an emergency condition anymore. How can I start reversing the disease that's causing this in the first place?

So I don't know how many of them landed, but you know, all you can do is try. Yeah, right. So as you entered the chiropractic world, I heard you kind of discussing this on another podcast. Usually I write down who it was and I honestly I can't remember who you were on with. But quackery. I was kind of interested that actually was a real term. I thought it was just kind of a, you know, a snide remark that a lot of people regarded certain areas.

But walk me through the challenges that chiropractic, I mean, osteopathy, for example, I had a great osteopath in California that after getting the shit kicked out of me, he'd reset my jaw, my nose and my knuckles after training. But I feel like we're at the beginning of a renaissance again. And we've gone full circle from the generation I grew up in, which was poo pooing anything healthy, you know, organic food is for hippies and, you know, chiropractic is witchcraft and all this stuff.

And now we're finally realizing that there's a reason why it's called ancient wisdom, because it works. It's lasted a long time. So as you enter the holistic space, what was the history of this term quackery? Because I think it's important for people to understand how quote unquote modern medicine demonize a lot of the things that we now understand are extremely effective. That's right. They did.

And I don't mean to throw the medical profession under the bus, but they deserve what I'm going to say and it started in the AMA. And let me start where this I just really learned this right chiropractors have always been called quacks. And it started in the 50s or 60s. And let me tell you this crazy story. L. Ron Hubbard, right, the father of Scientology wrote Dianetics. And he must have been also a little paranoid because part of his deal was we're going to get rid of the need for psychiatry.

And I think in his paranoia, he thought the AMA was after him. This is all back. And so he put Scientology operatives in the Chicago AMA office and they started looking through filing cabinets and things like this. And the AMA and I don't remember the exact year, if it was the 50s, I want to say it was the early 60s, started a committee on quackery and they weren't after L. Ron Hubbard and Scientology.

They found out that the AMA was after chiropractors and they were after us because they were worried about their turf. Apparently during that, at that time, there was only 25 or 30,000 chiropractors or I mean, MDs. And so chiropractic was helping people with obviously musculoskeletal pain. But I've seen it in my whole career. Sometimes asthma gets better. Sometimes irritable bowel gets better. You know, I'm not saying we cure those things.

We allow the body to find homeostasis and the body does its healing. And so they were concerned they were going to lose ground. And so they had an all out assault from the 60s until 1987 where they literally did everything. They told their members, you cannot associate with chiropractors. They told their members, you cannot take x-rays for chiropractors. They told the radiologists, you cannot read x-rays for chiropractors. We cannot do lab work. You cannot refer to them.

They brought social media at the time, influencers like Ann Landers and I can't even remember some of those names to talk crap about chiropractic. They literally tried to crush the whole profession. And that got disseminated into society. And people started to believe it. We didn't have an education. We were going to kill people. We were bad doctors. We were, you know, we weren't real doctors. And that got out there. And like I grew up going to chiropractors and osteopaths.

And so I've been getting manipulation since I was little. I thought everybody did, frankly. And when I got out of school in 1990, well, let me back up. So 1987 and in the early 80s, the chiropractic profession sued the AMA, American College of Hospitals, American College of Radiology, et cetera. And we won this lawsuit that said, you guys got to stop this discriminating lying about this profession and find ways to collaborate. AMA appealed that. They lost that in appeal.

But still, the damage had been done. Physicians had believed it. Everybody had believed it. And when I got out of school, I didn't know. I thought everybody got adjusted, right? I thought we were a noble profession. I know my education was not easy. I know we learned a lot of the same basic sciences as everybody else. I dissected a human body for a year. And so when I first got called a quack, I was like, what? We're quacks? I did not even know that. And so it is getting better now.

So I say that in that in the 30 years or so I've been out of school, I have broken down a lot of barriers. I've worked in the largest primary care group in Colorado here, in-house. I worked with the largest occupational medicine provider in the country. I worked in one of the largest pain centers here in Colorado. I helped develop hospital staff privileges for chiropractors and acupuncturists and then became the first chiropractor on the medical staff here at Denver Health.

And so and I work with MDs, right? They know we all know the value we provide each other. And I haven't been called a quack in a long time, but it started out of, you know, the medical profession trying to control patient flow and revenue and and their seat at the table as the big dog, when in fact, it really did a lot of damage not only to our profession, but it probably does a lot of damage to other things out there as well.

And so, you know, that that's sort of the story on quackery and the misinformation really that started back in the 60s and got pummelgated into today. I'm a walking example of chiropractic and another thing called foundation training that was created by a chiropractor, Dr. Eric Goodman.

I hurt my back pretty severe near career ending injury about 10 years ago now in the fire service and the workman's comp route was, you know, anti-inflammatories and painkillers and then it would have been surgery. And I've got friends that went down that route that temporarily had relief and then now they're you know, they're living with fusions and all kinds of horrific things.

Conversely, by going through this route, you know, I did PT, I did chiropractic out of my own pocket because it wasn't covered. I worked with a PVC pipe and then started loading, you know, in the gym. But then foundation training was a real game changer. And it was so effective in the end that I wasn't just better. I was actually stronger than I was before because I'd fix the underlying issues that got me hurt in the first place, which is a big part of the surgery conversation.

You haven't addressed what got you hurt. Then I ended up getting certified in foundation training and taking it back to my fire department. I was so impressed. And in the SIRT, there were all these people with, you know, severe back injury stories. Some had surgery, some, you know, had overcome opioid addiction through the painkillers that they got hooked on. And so this is the big conversation is it works. Again, nothing works for everyone. And that's the problem people get.

You know, they always point, well, it didn't work for Steve. So I'm not doing it. Well, yeah, but what about all the other people? But you know, you parallel that with the Oxycontin issue. You know, if painkillers and surgery with the B.O.L. end all, then that's everyone would know that it worked. But how many horror stories have we heard there? So sometimes, yes, you know, micro disectomy might be, you know, an effective solution.

I had a chiropractor from Australia on recently who did all the right things. And then that was one little tool he put in and it worked for him. So that was in addition to all the other stuff.

But when we look back now and realize how many holistic options were demonized and how many of our 70% population that's obese or overweight have been prescribed blood thinners and blood pressure medication and statins and diabetes meds rather than exercise and nutrition and the things that they should be being given to. It really underlines that whole, you know, first do no harm. We couldn't be further from that. We do nothing but harm to so many people.

And it's not malicious most of the time, unless you're talking about Purdue Pharma. But this lack of education on underlying health that most of our physicians have, you know, we need this paradigm shift now. We need to go back to, as you said, giving the body the tools it needs for it to heal itself because we're so fucking arrogant that we acted like the body doesn't know what it's doing. So let me give it pills or cut it open.

So I'm excited to think to see that we're at the beginning of a shift yet again. And part of that, again, I'm going back to the AMA, you know, I've studied this stuff and I've been subject to the harassment. They wanted to elevate the status of physicians by making the people they took care of needy of them. And so they did that by talking in Latin terms, using Greek terms, using big jargon that separated the patient, the person from medicine, from health really is what happened.

And we all became reliant on going to a physician to learn about ourselves. Right. I, you know, most people have no idea where their liver is. You know, you got heartburn. Oh, we got a pill for that. Don't think twice about not eating that thing again. Like that's not even part. And so that is spread so far in our society that people don't think their body has any wisdom, like you said, or can heal itself or that nature can do it.

And they think the only way that they're going to get health is to go to the system. And to your point, the system, it's not malicious. It's just like this wide of what's available. And because we're dealing with chemicals and surgery, of course, there's going to be adverse side effects. And I'm going to jump on the Purdue Pharma thing real quick because I was practicing full time in the pain clinic during that heyday.

And that rep lovely woman nurse was in our office, not for me, but for the pain docs that were there, where it was 10 of them pushing, pushing Oxycontin like it was candy. And this the fifth vital sign, I was like, what, when did this come out? Right. Remember that the pain and we started asking everybody about it till they became trained to tell we say, I'm a seven, I'm a seven. And I mean, we had four deaths in one quarter in that practice from Oxycontin.

And we now know the way that that whole thing was cooked up to think doctors had a solution that was non addictive and that patients were going to do well with it. And even before I knew what was going on, I had patients saying, oh, yeah, I crush it up and snort it. I'm like, what? Why? Right. Like, I didn't know what the whole what they were doing with it then. But yeah, that was just another crazy fiasco. And you know, money drives a lot of it.

They paid the AMA to teach physicians about the fifth vital sign. Did they know? I don't know. Did the AMA know? I don't know. They were probably buying it just like Purdue Pharma was selling it. And as we know from that story, the guy who was working at the FDA rubber stamping all that stuff when he left, went to work for Purdue. So I'm a little bit jaded and skeptical about FDA as well. And I think chiropractors are just brought up to be looking over our shoulder all the time.

Like, is that true? Is that really true? Is that are they? Are they back on this? I don't think they do. So anyway. Yeah, no, it's an important perspective. I was actually in that myself. Totally oblivious because I was a patient. I remember I hardly ever go to see a doctor, but I was working for Hialeah Fire and had some that there. I'm sure that a lot of the stations back then were full of black mold. They had to have been. So I had some really nasty infection and just wouldn't go away.

So I was there feeling like crap and waiting for just to see a physician just to get a simple antibiotic so I could hopefully kick it and move on. And my wife at the time, my ex, she was working for a doctor's office. And I remember her telling me, she's like, it's so weird that these people come from New York and New Jersey. They fly down, they get a prescription and then they fly back again. Well, we were in Broward County, Florida. This is where all the pill mills were.

So now, you know, obviously we know exactly what was going on. But I remember waiting at doctor's office while dolled up, you know, model after dolled up model went in peddling their wares and the patients are waiting for hours while these reps were being prioritized. So I mean, it was just so unethical and so disgusting. And if anyone's ever seen Dope Sick, the show on Hulu, there was one called Painkiller that I didn't think was that good. Dope Sick to me tells the real story so, so well.

And it was a predatory practice. They knew exactly what they were doing. They knew that people were dying in droves. They are the still the origin story of the opioid crisis that we're dealing with today. And Sackler, the main one, I forget his first name now, is still living in a mansion in Boca Raton, Florida. So you know, I mean, it's absolutely disgusting. Absolutely fucking disgusting. Yeah, I can't agree with you more on that. And then to try to take care of these people.

And I remember, like, you know, ask them, you know, what's your pain level seven? What are you taking? I'm taking Oxy-Toc-Contin. I'm taking a breakthrough med. I'm on a long acting morphine. I'm on a muscle relaxer. And I'm like, and you drove here? Like how in the hell are you operating like this? And then, you know, again, part of the leak into society is somebody else is going to fix my problem. There's a pill for that out there. And that's just it's a slippery slope. It's not how it works.

Yeah. Well, I think the other side of that whole problem is the fact that the thing is just us in New Zealand are the only countries in the world where you can advertise pharmaceuticals. And the number of times doesn't matter if it's a yeast infection medication. They've got a bunch of models dancing around, you know, and then what, like a two minute warning thing at the end of all the things, you know, the antidepressant that will cause suicide ideation.

And I really and this is this is approved. So this is the issue is the environment we've created again is not about the body's ability to deal with with its own mental and physical trauma. When given the tools, it's just just relax. We got it. We got a pill. You don't have to do anything. You know, just go see a doctor. Ask your doctor for insert drug name. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And I worked with a lot of those docs who are like, you know, fee for service is how you make your living in America as a clinician. And so he's like, I remember them. If I if I don't give them to them, they're going to go somewhere else and I'm losing business. So they were kind of put between a rock and a hard place, too, because it's how they make their living. There was more. There was a ton of moral injury there. They don't want to do that. They knew better.

But at the same time, you know, especially if they work for a large hospital system or now a large insurer. Big Brother's looking down on them. You got certain RVUs, relative value units, the scorecard for how much revenue you're developing driving. And if they don't hit certain metrics, they're giving back some of their revenue, their income. So tons of moral injury everywhere around that system. Absolutely.

One more area while we're in the world of chiropractic, to be fair and pull the kind of other side of it that I've witnessed out into the light a little bit. I am such a firm believer in the medicine that is chiropractic. But you in America see some clinics opening up and it's a chiropractor and a lawyer in the same office and they're targeting all these traffic accident lawsuit cases. Talk to me about that side of your profession. Yeah, especially you see that in Florida, right?

I'm sure you do. Yes. It's, you know, people do get injured in car crashes, right? There's no doubt about that. And they don't even need to be high volume or high velocity crashes. Low velocity crashes can hurt people. And again, these are how attorneys make their living is fighting the insurance company for payment. They need a chiropractor to treat those people. To me, it's a little slippery. It's a little conflict of interest working that closely together.

Sometimes, you know, I would refer a patient to an attorney because they were in a quagmire that I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know the legal, but you need some help with this. You're getting the run around by the insurance company. And it's just a very adversarial thing. The insurance companies don't want to admit anything. So you got to get a lawyer. The lawyer needs documentation on injury. So chiropractors are a little easy to not all.

Some are easy to just say, yeah, I'll go ahead and treat that person and do the documentation for you. And let's also be honest here, too. Right. Medicare pays a chiropractor twenty six dollars a visit. If I'm doing an auto injury, I could get one hundred and fifty dollars a visit. Now, when you're doing time for money, you have to make a decision where you're going to spend your time. And so I see I see both sides of that.

Right. Like I did do a lot of auto injury work and I did a lot of work comp. And again, my my decisions were there because people needed the care. I felt super ethical about the care I gave, but not everybody's that ethical. And when you're that close together, there are. Hate to say it, backdoor shenanigans that might be going on. Yeah, I think I mean, we all knew the lawyers who were that lawyer.

And I had one lawyer I had lunch with who asked me, you know, do you know anyone that works at X, Y, Z Hospital in the admission department? I was like, no, how would why would I know that? And then lo and behold, a few months later, I'm treating a patient who was in a car crash. She's like, I can't believe it. The lawyer called me while I was still in the hospital. That's because he had somebody in there working for him, giving him names. And you know, that's the classic ambulance chaser.

So if the shoe fits. Yeah, I think this is an important part of the conversation, too, because I know people that have said, oh, I tried chiropractic. It didn't work. And I said, well, what did they do? Oh, you know, they put me on a table and they and they pushed down. And that was it again. So no traction, no x-rays, you know, no no ways of figuring out what the imbalances are, where the subluxations are, you know, what the treatment plan is.

Because obviously, the other side is that, OK, you need to come in 10 times a week for the next two years. There's those people, too. But you know, if they're just coming in for an adjustment without any kind of backstory, well again, that's not the right chiropractor either. So I think, you know, whether it's jujitsu or whatever, a restaurant, you know, you've got to you've got to go to the right ones that are right fit for you. That's right.

And you know, you don't go you don't stop eating at restaurants just because you got a bad meal at one. You try another one. And that's what I encourage people to do with chiropractic, because there are great chiropractors out there and, you know, I would not have made my way into medicine if I was full of shit because they have they don't they don't buy anecdotes. They don't they want you know, they want results. They want evidence.

They want, you know, they want to know who they're referring to as reputable and not going to give them a bad reputation. And I think there's a lot of great chiropractors out there that are doing good research, good research, developing techniques, and just like every profession, you know, there's the other side of that coin. Absolutely. Well, staying on the holistic side just for one more moment, then we'll go into regenics and what you're doing now. Yeah. Talk to me about acupuncture.

I have an amazing guy. I haven't seen him in years, actually, but Dr. Wong. And when I was still in the fire service, I used to get brutal, brutal migraines. And I would go there and they'd put pins in my head and I'd basically take a nap for an hour and it was amazing with all the candles and soft Asian music in the background. But you know, again, this is another therapy that people seem to have a lot of success with when it comes to pain, but also on the mental health side as well.

So what took you into the world of acupuncture and what are your observations of that art too? Yeah, I got sucked into that while I was in chiropractic school. I don't say that negatively sucked into it, but it was like this force pulled me into it. So I was in my first or second year, first year of chiropractic school. Me and my buddy were going to weekend acupuncture conferences, courses. We were in a course and these physicians, these doctors were like, the hell are you guys doing here?

You're still students. And I was like, I am drawn to this so much. And you know, in the seventies, Nixon went to China and his press secretary had an appendicitis and got treated without surgery with acupuncture. And I remember that being on the news. That's my earliest recollection of acupuncture. So I got trained in traditional acupuncture. I did it. I didn't stay in traditional acupuncture. I did do it.

I've been doing it since like 98, but I got really drawn into what's called more biomedical acupuncture and dry needling. And my focus was on musculoskeletal pain. I know there's a lot of other utilization for it with internal disorders and mental health. That was not my niche. I've seen it performed there, you know, to help those things. But biomedical acupuncture was developed by Chan, by Yuntao Ma, who was a neuroscientist training from Clemson, but from China.

And he diagnosed or he dissected about, I don't know, almost all the acupuncture points. And he found 11 that had the most nervous system input. And if you address those, you could stimulate afferent and efferent messages going back and forth to the brain and the central nervous system. And it just made a lot of sense.

And I read his book a dozen times, at least, and then learned dry needling, where that also pulled in more Western understanding of anatomy and physiology and was based more in just kind of what I learned as a chiropractor, anatomy and physiology and how the body worked, not to discount the five elements or yin yang or any of that. That was just not something that, like, I could explain to other people or truthfully, that made a lot of sense to me.

Your liver chi is messed up and that's causing your headache. Okay, I'm not your guy. I mean, I get that said, I taught for seven years in acupuncture colleges. So I believe it. I've been around it. I witnessed it. I worked in the student clinic. I worked with those students and those professors that were way smarter than me on that sort of stuff. I worked with a woman who came from Beijing that we sponsored, who is phenomenal.

I still refer people to her at the University of Colorado that I can't help. And for more internal things. And so I think there's a lot there that can be done to help people manage their pain. Here's my understanding, especially of dry needling and biomedical acupunctures, we're creating a lesion in the body with the needle. The body knows that injury is there. And this has also been shown, University of Vermont School of Medicine did a bunch of research on this.

That lesion stimulates a healing response. Anti-inflammatories, cytokines are released. They're released locally, anti-inflammatories, all that. They're released locally at the needle site. Then they get into the blood and they go everywhere. And they stimulate, they bring homeostasis back. If you're inflamed, it's going to reduce it. If you need circulation, it's going to happen. If you need to decrease inflammation, those cytokines are anti-inflammatory. And so people get better.

It's a non-specific healing modality. And then when you start twisting the needle and you can feel this, it's grabbing the fascia and turning it. And that's getting a mechanical change to the muscles and the fascia and the connective tissue where it's stimulating those tissues to repair themselves. And so on the musculoskeletal pain front, it's been a game changer for me. And when I could explain this stuff like that to physicians, all of a sudden they bought it.

Because I was speaking their language and my goal was to work with them, not alienate myself from them. And once I could explain it and they understood it, boom, I started working with them. I started getting referrals and people started getting better. And however you get there, to me, all roads lead to Rome. And when I studied at the University of Beijing in China in 2007, I don't want to come across like I know everything, but I left there and go, all right, I'm on the right track.

They're doing very similar things, but they're saying it a little differently. And so I felt, and I'm super confident with my needling skills. And then I went to Janet Trevelle, which hardly anybody remembers anymore. She was John F. Kennedy's physician because he had chronic back pain after a failed back surgery in the 60s. And she treated him using trigger point injections. And so Chan Gunn, an MD in Canada, started what was called dry needling.

Instead of injecting stuff with an injection trigger point, he just would use an acupuncture needle and disrupt the tight spots. And so I used her textbook. She wrote two textbooks on how she was getting the muscles with the steroid or with the lidocaine. And I was like, well, if you can get to this muscle that way, I'm going to needle it with just an acupuncture needle.

And I just kept pushing my knowledge and hands-on skill, taking from everywhere that I could and using her technique, needle techniques or injection techniques to do dry needling with. So that's sort of my path to it. I'm grateful for the time I spent at the acupuncture college. Oh my God, I saw in Boulder, I'm blanking on his name, but I took my mom there after a stroke. And he got her so much relief before I was confident to do this stuff myself.

And I saw him just do literally miraculous stuff with the needle and his wife with the herbs. It was absolutely miraculous. So I know there's something to that as well. What is the difference between traditional acupuncture and dry needling? Traditional acupuncture uses the five elements, fire, water, air, water, fire, water, air, metal, wood as imbalances, yin-yang. So too hot, too cold, too damp, something. It's imbalanced, right?

And that's what that symbol means is these things coexist together, darkness and light coexist. And it's in a balance. And so they believe in this energetic flow of these meridians, 12 main meridians, fire, water, or no, long, large intestine, stomach, spleen, et cetera, and that they become imbalanced and we can balance them back out. And the flow of the energy will bring homeostasis. Dry needling is very Western.

We're looking at the muscles, the trigger points, the imbalances of the muscles, the hypertonicity, the ropey bands. And we're going into that with a needle to loosen those up. Interestingly, about 75% of acupuncture points are on trigger points. So there is this overflow, overlap.

And I think a lot of the alternative medicine or more traditional medicines like you or what would you call it, natural medicines, Ayurvedic medicine talks about prana, Chinese medicine talks about chi, chiropractic talks about innate. We're all saying the same thing with a different word is that there's this natural healing ability in our body that needs to be let loose, added to, things removed from allowing it to flow properly, nurtured, nourished something.

So we're all saying the same thing and just all roads lead to Rome except in a different way. Beautiful. Well, thanks for that description. I've never actually heard the difference before. I want to move then to the world of PRP, stem cell, bone marrow concentrate. So obviously there's a couple of specific ones that you do at Regenics, but talk to me about the differences between all of these kind of elements of this group. So bone marrow concentrate is what we use out of the iliac crest.

It's got a lot of different cells in it, but Arnold Kaplan, who just passed away, his time as a researcher at Case Western Reserve discovered this cell in bone marrow concentrate called the mesenchymal stem cell. And this thing can turn into our body, can turn into ligament cartilage, bone and tendon. That's what it does. That's what it does naturally and how we can repair some things naturally by that. And so that's one spectrum of the body's ability to heal.

We take those cells, we concentrate them and using a needle, an injection needle and video x-ray, fluoroscopy or ultrasound, we can put all those cells, bone marrow concentrate cells into an arthritic knee, into a ligament tear and do a tendon tear and get the body to increase its own circulation, develop new blood vessels, even bring those cells, those cells specifically call in other cells, ligament cartilage, bone tendon cells, tell them what to do to do the repair job.

And then they can turn into your brick and mortar. And so we've got papers and before and after MRIs where you can see certain rotator cuff tears repair themselves, certain ACL tears repair themselves. If there's a few strands of fiber left or it's not separated by a big distance, adding those cells in there can do that.

And then platelet rich plasma comes out of the blood like a blood draw, again, concentrating the platelets, getting rid of the red blood cells and for the most part, the white blood cells, but getting the platelets and platelets have in them growth factors against cytokines and other growth factors that can stimulate the body's repair, increasing circulation, reducing inflammation and getting those local repair cells in a joint to work harder longer.

So when we cut our finger, it scabs and platelets heal that. But why isn't it doing it for my torn rotator cuff? Because those platelets are literally around the globe because we got that many blood vessels and they're everywhere. They're not all there. So when we concentrate them and put them all there, wherever there is, they can stimulate those cells that are locally there to do a repair job. So that's what we're using to help people avoid elective orthopedic surgeries.

Our focus is only musculoskeletal. Both those cell types are delivered with ultrasound and or fluoroscopy by a physician who knows how to use those tools and is trained and skilled at getting the needle to the right place. So what is the difference between that and some of the stem cell therapies we hear in Panama and some of those other countries? So some of those other countries are, in particular in Panama, are taking someone else's cells like cord blood. So they're not yours.

We only use the patient cells called autologous. So they're yours and they go right back into you in a couple of hours. What they're doing is taking someone else's cells and growing them in a Petri dish and mostly the mesenchymal stem cells and either putting them back in in an IV to go everywhere or injecting those into an arthritic joint or something to that level. Now we do that as well in Grand Cayman where we have a clinic where their government allows that to happen.

And so we have a stem cell culturing clinic there where again, but they're your cells and then we bank them and then we culture them and you can get, I don't know, a dozen or so treatments out of those. But the upside of that is that those are your cells and you're getting the Regenexx physicians who were the first in the United States to do this sort of stem cell culturing, bone marrow concentrate culturing.

And so you're getting all of our knowledge down there with American doctors that are following best practices. And again, the only focus of that clinic there is orthopedics as well. So same day cells here, all we can do is concentrate them. That's all the FDA allows. Leave the country. You can start to culture those and grow the number of those out into bigger numbers. Beautiful. I love Grand Cayman. They have afternoon tea and they drive on the correct side of the road.

You know, I was down there with Doug Orchard and he was driving me around and I was a nervous wreck in the back seat with him on the other side. Yeah, yeah. He handled it well. Well going back to the bone marrow concentrate, and that's what's available to people here in the US. Talk to me about some of the success stories, whether it's in the sporting industry or some of the tactical professions that are listening. Yeah, so it's interesting.

Everyone wants to talk about athletes and we treat our fair share of athletes. We don't promote it because they don't want it promoted, right? We really protect that and they lose value when people know they're injured, but they do come to us to get more time out of their career and knowing that we are the top notch kind of clinic and clinicians to do this work.

That said, you know, we treat the 99% of people most of the time, just regular people who are trying to avoid surgery, who want to get out of pain, who want to get off meds, who want to get back to doing a lot of their normal activities. Now we brought this to the self-funded employer benefits space and now we've got about 2000 employers who cover this under their health insurance for about a million people across the United States have access to this.

The self-insured, the self-funded employer has skin in the game. They're paying the first 50 to $100,000 for every employee. You might have that insurance card, but that employer is paying that, those claims. Once it gets past that deductible of 50 or $100,000, then an insurance company picks it up. So they got skin in the game to try to control costs and this is one solution. Now to your point, we work with a lot of firefighters across the country.

We work with, I don't know, three, 400 fire departments, multiple fire trusts. And my time at Denver Health, I took care of Denver fire and all you guys have little injuries, right? Just from the work, whether it's injured on duty or in the gym. And if you're busy and active, we all have our aches and pains. And so we treat a lot of first responders, fire personnel, and they love it because mostly they want to stay on the rig. They don't want the downtime.

Otherwise they just keep working through the pain, which I get it. But that's also a little potentially dangerous, right? If you got to help your buddy out or someone else and you're injured or working in pain, it can impair that. So our value proposition to employers is orthopedic surgery avoidance. And if people didn't already go to Cairo or PT or whatever, we'll send them there first so they maybe don't need us. And so that's kind of how we're working with employers and first responders.

And I'll tell you, the fire personnel, they love it. They absolutely love it because like I said, you know, you guys are physically fit and want to stay that way. Well, that's the irony is that preventative or a lot of these holistic methods are just less expensive and more often than not more effective as well. I mean, my back is a perfect example of that.

So seeing departments and insurance companies start to embrace chiropractic and therapies like Regenexx, just like staffing in the fire department, we'll get to sleep in a second. But they have resisted change because they don't want to pay the extra money to get more people into the department. But the long term savings is really what's starting to change people's minds now.

They're realizing that they're actually saving a lot of money by investing in their people on the front end rather than trying to put them back together when they're already broken. Yeah, that's so important right there because it's inevitable that people are going to get hurt or injured to help them get better quickly. And it's somewhat incumbent on the employer to help facilitate that because they get a lot out of it as well.

We were talking about the kind of philosophy out there that the body can't heal itself. And you look at, I mean, Forks Over Knives, for example, great documentary. It doesn't mean in my opinion you need to be plant-based the rest of your life. But if you want to reverse heart disease and obesity, I think plant-based diets are a great star.

And you see these success stories of patients that were given to the study after the other physicians had given up on them and then they end up living for decades after. So we know there's a lot of reversible elements for a lot of disease. One thing where people still seem to be set in their ways is arthritis. Now to my very white belt level understanding of medicine, to me, it's still inflammation.

And therefore, if you can address things that put the body into inflammation, whether it's muscle balance, whether it's gut biome, in my understanding, you can then reverse some of the inflammation and arthritis is one of them. Talk to me about that. There's this kind of doom and gloom element about, well, it seems like I haven't met a person yet that hasn't said, oh, I'm bone on bone. And I'm not 100% sure that everyone is bone on bone.

So what have you seen as far as the perception of how bad arthritis is in a lot of people that come to you versus the reality and possible irreversibility of some of this pain and degeneration? Yeah, the knee is definitely the number one body part we treat. Knee one and then one A, I call it, is lumbar spine. Those are two areas that are definitely prone to injury on people. Low back pain is the leading cause of disability in the world.

We don't have great treatments for it in traditional medicine. And so we do see a lot of patients who have bad knee osteoarthritis. And some can get symptomatic relief if they're willing to take the initiative to eat better, clean up their gut health, make sure they get good sleep, exercise to the ability that they're capable of, and calm down the inflammation, which is going to improve some of the symptoms. That's a lot of, you know, we're sitting on 10 tacks.

And if you remove two or three of them and you're sitting on eight or seven, it still hurts. And so sometimes you just got to go to the next level and try something to calm it down. You know, traditionally, medicines use steroid injections, right? Anti-inflammatory. My patients would ask me, how long am I going to feel better? And then my cynical, but it's my experience. I'd tell them two hours to two weeks. That's it. Those things wear off. Steroids kill stem cells locally in the joint.

If you have them in your shoulder, they could cause another rotator cuff tear if you had surgery, if you have it in your knee before surgery, you know, you could have an infection after surgery. All this is well documented. And so controlling inflammation is a good thing, but doing it with steroids is not. It comes with a big downside. The platelets, the bone marrow concentrate, those are also anti-inflammatory. And so when we put those into a bad knee, they can change that environment, right?

In an arthritic knee, that environment is catabolic. It's breaking down, right? And that's causing problems. It's causing pain. That's causing a lot of cartilage to wear out and become more inflamed. And then so once we put those cells in there, we can change that environment from catabolic breakdown to more anabolic. Now we're not going to see a meniscus grow. We're not going to see, you know, the joint space go from, you know, bone on bone to this.

But at the cellular level and at the symptom level, people are definitely feeling better. Their range of motion is better. Their ability to function is better. Their pain is better. How do we know? We track that. We have the world's largest registry with about close to 100,000 patients whose data we've been following since 2005 when we started this, their outcomes, and it's self-reported, but we use standardized questionnaires. We break it down by body part.

And then we break it down by pain function and overall improvement. I was just looking at our knee data where there's like 19,000 patients in that cohort and pain drops 45% from time zero before the procedure to one month later. And it stays low for six years. We follow people for six years. And so we know that that's what's happening is those joints are changing from breakdown to catabolic to from catabolic to anabolic.

So from breakdown to repair and symptomatically, people are doing a lot better. And it's not just about squirting it in the joint, right? Because when a joint starts breaking down, especially as it narrows, the ligaments, oh, let me do this. Ta-da. As the joint space starts to break down in a knee, these ligaments, which were once tight, get lax because the space is narrow. And then you get abnormal motion in the joint because the ligaments aren't holding it together.

And now the cartilage in the meniscus is starting to grind in there. And so when we go in, and so sometimes also in a knee, as the cartilage on the end of the bone, the articular cartilage wears out, the bone will crack and fissure and synovial fluid will go into the bone causing a bone marrow lesion. There's a whole lot going on here. So when we inject these things, we tighten the ligaments, we put it in the meniscus, we hit the ACL if we need to, we'll get it into the articular cartilage.

We will put bone marrow concentrate into the bone marrow lesion. All of that is how you holistically treat an arthritic joint to get another six to 10 years of good function out of it. So people get good results when we do it this way. And it's not for everybody either. We give everyone a good, fair, poor candidacy grading. And if you're a poor candidate, and some people are, we're not going to do it because we know it's not going to help.

Well, I mean, when I think about my knees, I've got, I had jug handle tears on both my meniscus, so they've both been snipped. And so this is something I'm definitely going to look into in the future. However, when I was able to get the swelling down initially after the surgery, and then I love CBD as well. So it's another thing I use for pain and sleep and some other things.

But then when the pain is down, you're able to start moving more, which in turn is, so it's this kind of, I think self-fulfilling prophecy is the wrong phrase, but it's a positive vicious circle, you know, where as you heal, you start addressing imbalances, you get more exercise, you get more blood flow into the joint. You know, maybe you're getting now into yoga. And so now you're addressing the things that are making it worse.

So it makes so much sense to me versus, for example, you know, having lumbar bones fused together, you're actually pushing the other way, less activity, and therefore probably more surgeries down the road. Right. Exactly. That's why there's an ICD-10 diagnosis code called adjacent segment disease. When you fuse the segments above and below, got to take on more motion. And so they wear out. And the number one predictor of back surgery is a previous back surgery.

And so, yeah, that's just a short, you know, short solution. And to the point of, you know, positive, you know, cycle, there's the negative cycle too, when you're in pain. People in pain are greater utilizers of the health care system. And, you know, they, I've seen this my whole career. Their weight goes up, their diabetes gets worse, their blood pressure gets worse, their sleep gets worse. And we know what happens when sleep gets bad.

Just it's a bad cycle to be in pain and limiting your motion and your movement because you only get weaker, you only get sicker. And so, you know, trying to address that either through what you're talking about natural kind of anti-inflammatory, calm things down, get out of pain or what we're doing or acupuncture. But it needs, it's not going to be solved with just chemicals. How much does the weight of the individual factor into the degeneration of their joints?

Again, I said, you know, 70% of our population is obese or overweight. Just the loss of weight, how much would that help someone with joint pain? I forget what the actual physics and math is, but on a knee, it's going to be a huge difference. It can definitely make a big difference. But then, you know, people with knee pain, it's hard for them to exercise. So there's that catch-22. But I was just looking at the rate of growth for knee replacements. It's very steep.

And one has to wonder, well, there's a couple influences there. One has to wonder how much obesity is playing on that, right? There's definitely that thing that's causing it to wear out a lot faster, driving the necessity for a joint replacement. And then same in the low back, right? Same thing in the low back. If you have that big pendulous abdomen, it's going to alter your mechanics and you're carrying around, you know, 30, 40 pounds.

And that abdominal fat, as you know, James, is inflammatory. So you're already feeding, you're fueling the fire to that max when you're walking around with a lot of excess fat and weight and upregulating inflammatory chemicals. What have you seen about our younger people? I've made this observation numerous times when it comes to the youth athlete in the States. Sometimes the lines are blurred between performance and winning your organization medals and the wellness of our youth athlete.

However, that aside, removing that from the equation, as we are seeing our youth getting more and more overweight and deconditioned, you know, the posture is starting to change. Are you seeing disease processes that you would have seen in much older people starting to appear in younger and younger people? I think biomechanically, it's going to cause a lot of problems and not when they're in their 40s and 50s like in 60s like it is with us, but at a lot younger age. So absolutely.

And, you know, young girls tear ACLs frequently in soccer and in other sports. Maybe that has something to do with it. I think our nutrition, you know, if you're feeding the cells Twinkies, that's what they're being built out of. So there's that. What do we know about fatty liver or not fatty liver, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, massive in children. And that's from high fructose corn syrup and is going to drive, you know, liver disease like crazy.

And we're seeing that in young people at very high levels. And so, you know, liver disease, cirrhosis, liver transplants, you know, I'm sure the pharmaceutical industry is chomping at the bit to find something to, you know, to treat that sort of thing. Instead of us saying, let's clean up our diet or telling more people like we didn't during COVID, get some sunshine, try to back down on the high fructose corn syrup. But it's everywhere. It's just everywhere.

And if it's not that, it's, you know, rice syrup or it's, you know, what sugar comes by 53 different names. So it's hidden everywhere. So yeah, we're starting to see that big time. And I think we're going to just only continue to see it. This is where, you know, I called bullshit on the whole leaning on, oh, we're so concerned about your health during the pandemic, because if that was truly heartfelt, then the soda machines would have been removed from schools.

And our dinner ladies and men would be serving real food like they used to. It's not like we're asking anything crazy. They used to cook real food, you know, a few decades ago. PE programs would be bolstered. Sports programs would be bolstered. Arts programs would be bolstered. You know, there'd be more recess time, less standardized testing, but we didn't see any of that.

So when they were screaming like, you know, oh, you're murdering people if you're not doing A, B and C, well, where's your accountability now? We relied on you to make the population healthier and they've actually got fatter and sicker. Right. Yeah, I know. And I think that's going to really come back and continue to bite us on the butt and build a society of people who don't believe anybody. And, you know, again, all this fighting that is constantly now ubiquitous everywhere.

Yeah. Well, I think I've again, I think that this might be the beginning of an awakening, though, where there were people that call themselves leaders that we realized couldn't lead shit because they were tested into the last two years. So now I hope there's a real desire for real leaders and we get people that pull communities back together and unite people and educate them on all the things. And I mean, for example, come from England, I love the philosophy of the NHS.

Hey, we all chip in and whoever needs us at the time, whether it's someone having a baby, whether it's an elderly lady or a four year old fighting leukemia, we're not going to ask you for your social security number. You just focus on getting better. We got you. I love that philosophy. Is it flawless in the UK? No, because it's been torn down and underfunded.

But for example, the altruism that most people study in their churches and temples, if we apply that to the real world rather than this divisive nastiness and, you know, worshipping of the monopoly, that maybe we can actually start undoing some of this damage. Yeah, I'd like to think so. And I like to think that, you know, my daughter's 11, that, you know, she's going to be in that generation.

And, you know, I work with younger physicians who don't know anything about the history of chiropractic, like I told you, but just see me as a peer, a colleague and equal. And I think this younger generation is going to be like, this shit makes no sense. What the hell are we doing? Like we're good. This makes no sense. I work with a young resident now and he's like questioning everything. And I love it.

I'm like, yeah, dude, keep questioning, because those are stupid things that we're doing and you're asking the right questions. So I hope you know, you're right that we are on the tip of a revolution or, you know, some improvement here that brings it back full circle. That's a good segue to one point I want to make before we go to fasting. We have a hiring crisis in the first responder professions as a whole.

And you know, a lot of people are kind of, oh, these young generations, they don't want to work. And I tell you, I disagree. The summer don't want to work. Of course, we see videos of people crying over stuff with purple hair and I get that. But the other 90 whatever percent of this population are our soldiers and firefighters and police officers and nurses. But as you just said, the difference is they're looking at the way that we've done it forever and going, that makes no sense.

So 56 hours a week, I work, I don't sleep for 24 hours. And then two days later, I'm back doing the same thing away from my family. And so it's really interesting because I think we've really hit a wall now where people are realizing that if we keep doing it the way we're doing it, we're not going to have a fire department or a police department anymore. So these young people that some vilify the way that they look at the world is actually the way that we need to look at my profession as well.

And the insanity of the firefighters work week, for example, is something that we have to change. So with that being said, with your holistic lens, talk to me about the importance of sleep and what you've seen when it comes to chronic sleep deprivation. Well you know, I'm sure you know, shift work is a carcinogen, right? Yes. NIH considers it that. It unravels everything in our biology. And with light and food everywhere, it's easy to mess up the circadian rhythm.

And when you are either a shift worker or going to bed late or just not getting adequate sleep, it affects everything. And I don't think people, right, we grew up with the sleep when I'm dead. I'm sure you heard that a million times. And I kind of did that. I was like, oh, fuck it. I can handle this. Macho. But that's just such a bad thing. And thankfully Matthew Walker in his book, his book, Why We Sleep, I'm sure you're familiar with that, right? Yeah, I am. But there's an even better one.

I'll have to come back and I'll plug it in a second. But Professor Russell Foster, he's actually the man that discovered the chronoreceptors in the eye that even allow us to have a circadian rhythm. So I'll look it up in a sec. But his book is absolutely phenomenal. Okay, great. I'm going to have to check that one out.

But yeah, so sleep deprivation, which I think, you know, with your peers and your colleagues in the fire station, you know, maybe why their injuries don't heal really well, maybe why there, you know, why there's so much mental health issues that, you know, you're you see such horrific things. And then, you know, I don't know if it's a culture of the fire department, but the stoicism and then I don't want to talk about it, kind of mentality that goes along with first responders.

You know, that's always my question to all new patients, any anxiety or oppression, cops and firemen are perfect all the time. Nope, good. And so, yeah, so the lack of sleep, I just think is like the tip of the spear to making little things bigger and worse. And it's just too easy to fall into that, you know, again, with light and food and social media and computers and Netflix, and it's easy to not prioritize that and coffee all the time. Although that was a decaf because I prioritize sleep.

So I think it's I think sleep deprivation, whether it's self induced or work induced or whatever, it just takes something small and makes it even worse. Absolutely. This book is called Lifetime, by the way, it was a tip of my tongue. What was I going to say then? I just lost my thought. I was going to add something to the sleep thing, but that's all good. All right, I'll switch to the next one. All right, well, then one more area I want to discuss before we go to some closing questions.

And it's funny because I just had Dr. Jonathan Edwards on and he mentioned the same study. Talk to me about firefighters and intermittent fasting. So you have a Salk Institute and Dr. Sashin Panda, who sort of leads that circadian program there. I've heard him speak at a couple of fasting conferences and he's got a book as well on the circadian code, which is really interesting.

All of ourselves have a clock on them for everything where they're optimal and where they're sleeping and intermittent fasting, which has become popular recently, can positively help those clocks and eating within a certain narrower window. It doesn't have to be one meal a day or it doesn't have to be 16, 8 or it doesn't have to be something that maybe everyone can't do. But in that San Diego Fire Department, they just narrowed their eating down to 10 hours.

And so an intermittent fast of 14 hours they could eat. And I think it was ad libitum. They didn't even tell them what to eat. They just narrowed it down to more of a normal eating window, start at 7 and at 4 or something to that degree. I just read the study before we talked, but that was a few weeks ago.

And blood pressure got better, blood glucose got better, weight was dropped, all these things that can occur when we're not forcing our body to operate in a time when it's not really meant to operate, when it's not meant to be digesting, right? Digestive juices and the pancreas start shutting down at 4 or 5 o'clock at night. Circadian levels, we know this, are increasing with cortisol in the morning. That's when you want to really optimize your workout or stop eating or what have you.

And so intermittent fasting, I mentioned it earlier, light and food are the two things that mess up the circadian rhythm more than anything. And so if you can try to rein it in by dimming the lights in your house and being done eating, I usually recommend three hours before bed, but even at 7 o'clock, you're just going to sleep better. You're going to lose weight, inflammation is going to go down. And if you're not doing, even if you're 12 hours, in my opinion, still a little too long.

But if you reduce that eating window to 10 hours or less, you're going to see some improvement in all that, including your sleep. I really like the intermittent fasting model versus the full on, you know, I'm going to be in ketosis for forever, you know, extreme that some people thrive in. But I think a lot of people fall off the wagon because I always just go back to, you know, evolutionary, what makes the most sense.

And even though you're talking about acupuncture, you know, the chi and the meridians didn't really resonate with you, but the way that you framed it did. And so you think about caveman Steve, because everyone's called Steve when I tell stories. You know, one day they come across an animal and, you know, and we were probably scavengers, but at least, you know, they ate like kings that day. And the next day there was nothing. And then the next day there was a bush of berries and they were fine.

And so that intermittent element just makes sense to me. And there's days intuitively where I'm ravished when I wake up and days where I'll do a full jujitsu session, not even eat till 12 or one in the afternoon. And it's very, you know, very intuitive listening to my body. But I think getting off that rigidity of so many nutrition plans and just allowing yourself to have variability, I think just that concept alone is a powerful one. Yeah, I completely agree.

And you know, like you said, the feast and famine of our ancestors. And you know, it's interesting because we always go back to Paleolithic man or caveman. But again, my 92, three year old aunt, I asked her about this, what was your day like? Right. Well, we got up in the morning and we worked milked of cows. We collected the eggs. Then we would come in the house and we would eat. But we made our own bread. In the winters, we had a greenhouse. So we had our we were growing vegetables.

And then we went back to work. Right. They didn't snack all day. And then sometimes they wouldn't eat until dinner again. But then she's like, then it would get dark early and we, you know, there was not a lot of electricity and lights. And so we would go to bed and start the whole cycle over again. And so they were intermittent fasting, which if you look back at our grandparents, no one in that era was overweight. Even into the 70s, no one was overweight for probably other reasons.

But nonetheless, I think that, yeah, I mean, there's a lot that can be beneficial. Right. Again, there's food everywhere. The refrigerator is right there. There's snacks. I hate it that, you know, my daughter was brought up with like, I have a snack, got to bring a snack. Did you bring snacks? I don't ever remember having snacks. Now I probably have forgotten more than I remember. So I'll attribute it to that.

But nonetheless, the other thing I tell people to do, too, if they're going to intermittent fast is like fast between meals. Right. Have your breakfast, have your lunch, but don't eat everything in between or anything in between, because that can be beneficial. It's all about the glucose and glucagon, you know, balancing itself out. And if there's not a lot of insulin, the glucagon kicks up and starts pulling, you know, sugar out of the liver to burn out of the fat, mobilizing things.

And so if there's no reason for the body to do that, it's not going to do it. And insulin is a storage molecule. So it's going to keep shoving things in there into the fat cells, into the liver, into the abdomen, and the bathtub is going to fill up and start overflowing. So yeah, fasting, intermittent fasting, a lot to do there. Now I think there's a lot of upside if you can do it with two things, water only fasting, which most people can't do.

But that's when you start to see autophagy, where the body's starting to clean up old cells, weak cells, senescent cells. But that comes at day three. That's not in a 12 hour intermittent fast. I totally disagree with all the bloggers and the blingers and the bullshitters out there that are saying, oh, I'm getting into an intermittent, I'm in autophagy after 12 hours of fasting. No, you're not. The liver can store a ton of glycogen and so can the muscles.

And I track all that when I do intermittent, when I do five day fasts. And even on the fifth day, if I'm on the bike working out and I take my blood glucose, there's still a squeeze of glycogen out of those muscles because I'll see my sugar levels go up over 100. Right. So it's still got some to squeeze out of there. The other side of that, if water fasting is not your cup of tea, and it's not, it's not easy, it's hard, but it's also a good mental game too. What can I put up with?

What can I tolerate? How do I get through this? Is the fasting mimicking diet developed by Walter Longo at USC, where you can actually eat food, it's plant-based, and your body thinks it's fasting. And it's largely a keto type diet, low carbs, super low protein, because we know protein turns on that mTOR pathway and carbohydrates, specifically sugars.

And so if you reduce that and they know what the right number is to reduce it, you can eat for five days and your body thinks it's fasting, goes into ketosis, autophagy happens. At the end of that, four or five days, six days when you start refeeding it, the body knows it just cleaned up a bunch of crap and upregulates hemopoietic stem cells to go repair and rebuild. So longer fasts, if you can do it, there's a lot of benefit that can come from those as well.

I know when I simply switched to a plant-based diet, not vegan, not vegetarian, but plant-based specifically, so a lot of whole foods. It wasn't, again, with the understanding of trying to mimic fasting. However, I had blood work done at the fire department when I was there, the annual physical, and the physician literally said to me, can you tell me how you eat? I've never seen blood work this good before.

It's not as good now, but that was what was interesting, is there was obviously a full-on cleanse going on there as well. Most of what I was eating was just leafy greens and there was filling.

This is the thing, I didn't have to feel like I was fasting, but removing not only meats at that time, but obviously more likely the processed carbohydrates was the big common denominator with these diets that swear up and down that theirs is the only one that works, whereas the middle ground is they're all removing processed shit. Right, exactly. So do you eat meat now? Yes, yeah. For me personally, it was incredible, but I did hit a point where I felt like my strength was diminishing.

And again, back to evolutionary thinking, when it came to, well, you just need to supplement with this, this, this, and this, I'm like, well, I shouldn't have to supplement if it's a diet that I naturally have. So that was kind of what took me in. But the way I look at it, I try when I'm eating well to have a plant-based diet.

Meat, which sounds ridiculous, but the focus being on the greens and the vegetables on your plate, and then you add some protein versus the kind of yellow brown plate that we only have in America where it's carbs, meat, and there might be like two green beans on the side. Exactly. You're eating the garnish for greens. Yes, exactly. You know, it's interesting because prior to about maybe nine months ago, I was very plant heavy and low protein.

I just wasn't paying attention and fasting too much because I was 50 pounds heavier with fatty liver disease and reversed all that through fasting. And I was like, so I was like, I studied it, I learned it. But here's what happened is with that diet for me and everybody's different. I'm in the gym and I'm not putting on any muscle. I looked scrawny and I was like telling my wife, I'm like, what the hell is going on here?

And so I started looking at my protein levels and I was getting like 35 grams a day. That was not enough. Two eggs is 14 grams. That can be your breakfast, but you better eat something else. And I up the protein to like 130 grams and then boom, 10 pounds and muscle. So you just got to find what works for you. And I always say that to people, but eat as close to the earth and nature as you possibly can and leave that process stuff on the shelves.

Don't even bring it in your house and everybody's different. And so, you know, I've gone plant based before. Doesn't work for me. Nothing changed. And so you just got to find your balance and listen to your body and, you know, hopefully you stick with something long enough to see some improvement. Yeah. Well, I think that's it. Find what works for you. And there's, you know, talk about the mental health side as well.

I mean, the toolbox is much bigger than people realize to say you've got pain, you've got foundation training, you've got Regenexx, you've got CBD, you've got all these things that 20 years ago you asked someone, they wouldn't have even discussed that. Some of it wasn't even developed. So this is what exciting now is you can find, you can make your own cocktail of what works for you.

And if, you know, your neighbor swears up and down that plant based eternal ketosis is the way to go, beautiful, you know, but as I point out, you take an Aboriginal man from Australia who lives in the bush and you take an Inuit, are they going to have the same diet? No. So, you know, understand that we're all this beautiful tapestry of, you know, generations and generations. So we're going to have a unique fit based on who we are and what we're made of.

And I think you got to find something you can stick with, right? Like you said, you know, you can do ketosis, but how long can you stay on that sort of thing? And again, I've taken care of the 99%. I'm not the guy who, you know, my sister's like, why don't you treat the Broncos? I'm like, I don't want to treat those guys. It's my thing. I want to just take care of normal, regular, everyday people. I feel honored to do that and that they trust me to stick needles in them as a stranger.

So the point is, you know, not everyone's going to do an ice bath. Even my friends who do them. I'm like, how long are you going to stick with that? Like, right? That's not sustainable for most people. I want people to do things that they can do for the long haul that are sustainable, that are pretty easy within their grasp. They don't have to go out and buy special stuff. They don't have to go get whey protein every two weeks because they're, you know what I mean?

I'm all about the, you know, the common man. What can you do? What's simple? What's sustainable? What can you do for a long time? What's easy? Not, you know, what's the fad of the month kind of thing. Absolutely. Well, you mentioned Dr. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep. Are there any other books that you love to recommend? It can be related to today's discussion or completely unrelated. You know, I'm a big Peter Atiyafan. I like Peter. He's not a hyper. He's a physician. He's a scientist.

He's an engineer. He's a mathematician. He thinks differently. He takes care of human beings. His book Outlive. I like, I like it. I recommend it. I just sent one out yesterday. I give that book to a lot of people because it makes the most sense to me. Again, back to sustainability. Managing blood glucose, right? That's so important. Having strength. Our muscles are resilient metabolic tissues in our body at controlling blood glucose. You know, cancer is, get the screenings, right? Blood smoke.

What kills more people in America than anything? Cardiovascular disease. So how do you control that? Some diet, like you, they'll, diet people will fight endlessly. So I'm not going to get in the middle of that. Yeah. Plant-based can help. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine, they show you the one image of the coronary artery that's been reversed. Show me a hundred thousand of those. So I don't want to get in the middle of diet, but I think that's important.

But I think managing cardiovascular disease. So the things he talks about and then neurodegeneration, right? Those are the four pillars that he talks a lot about. And how do you keep your brain healthy as we age? Well, that's a lot of glucose related stuff too, right? That goes on in the brain that causes and leads to dementias of some sort. So that's another one of the books that I recommend a lot. And then Influence Is Your Superpower. I love that book by Zoe Chance.

I'm looking at it because that's the second number book I give to people as well. She's a Yale professor who's done a lot of work with like Google, all the tech companies. And she's a behavioral economist and she's science-based and it's such a good book on and I give it to people who like you, James, are influencing through your podcast. And it's not manipulation, but there's a lot of great lessons in there on how to help you get what you want, but how to be a good influence on other people.

So those are the two books I've given away a ton of last year and already this year. Brilliant. Yeah. Well, I need to work on trying to get Dr. O'Tee on the show and I've never heard of Influence Is Your Superpower. So I'm going to have to get that for myself as well. So I appreciate that. Let me send that to you. Oh, well, thank you. I'll send you. I mean, it may be a poor exchange, but I wrote a book and I know you do a lot of work with firefighters. So I wrote a book about three years ago.

So I will send you that in return. Wonderful. All right. Well, then the same question, but what about movies and documentaries? Any of those that you love? Movies. You know, sometimes with an 11 year old, I'm watching kid movies. There's some great kid movies out there. The double meaning of a lot of them. I mean, Up, for example, I sobbed my way through that damn movie several times. Which one? Up. Have you ever seen that one? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Horrendous. You know, it's funny.

I always say this and it's not a good one, but Goodfellas, that could have easily been my life as a kid because, you know, I grew up around a bunch of Italians, mostly the men. Hey, go park my car. Hey, go drop this off over here. And thankfully, my family wasn't into that sort of thing. But I love that movie. I'm Italian. I mean, I love all the Godfathers. It took me a while to like number three. My wife and I just watched the it's I think a 2012 The Great Gatsby. I didn't know that story.

I thought that was such a really good movie. And the way F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote it, it was it was brilliant how it was written. So let's see documentaries. I've been enjoying the Arnold Schwarzenegger documentary. Always been a big Arnold fan. I mean, again, it started in ninth grade when I started working out. Right. His movie Pumping Iron. And you know, you can say a lot of things about Arnold. I like Arnold. He's done an amazing. He's had an amazing career.

He's done amazing things and he's really self-made. And so his documentary, I thought, was really well done. And I like following, you know, people like him. How do you do this sort of thing? I read Elon Musk's book last year. Also curious, like what makes this guy tick? And it might have been a little, you know, curated. But he's an interesting person as well. And you know, I just like to see what makes people tick.

Well, speaking of interesting people, is there a person you'd recommend to come on this podcast as a guest to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the world? Yeah, you know, I met Chuck DeSmith, Rent and Fire last year. And Chuck's an amazing human being. I think you guys will click a lot, but he's really brought a lot of. As you have as well, but a lot of the mental health stuff to the forefront.

And so I think there's something very powerful and he's just getting ready to retire. But all his years of experience, to your point, recruiting, he understands some of those problems, like you mentioned, the 56 hour week. He talks a lot about how the younger firefighters are looking for solutions like we talked about intermittent fasting, Regenexx. They're aware they're changing it, right? They're shaking it up. Why is it done like this? How can we do it better?

So Chuck is a great person, a physician psychiatrist, Owen Muir. Owen is a psychiatrist who spent a lot of time researching transcranial magnetic stimulation for. Are you familiar with? Yeah, TMS. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really powerful. Again, also we see this, we do some of this, but it's not our forte, but the stellate ganglion block. Are you familiar with that? I've had guests on talking about that too, which again, perfect example.

I know people that it was game changing for and people that it didn't work for. So I think some of those people are powerful. Matt Chan is a firefighter here, a friend of mine, who he's an athlete. He's a beast. In fact, Doug videotaped him and his testimony. You can probably find that on the Regenexx website, but Matt is a great athlete. He's a great human. He's a great firefighter. He was like number two in the world in CrossFit when he was at his peak.

He's a super nice guy and very knowledgeable about fitness and he walks the talk. He's had a CrossFit gym and now he's got a really successful app working with athletes and first responders and staying fit and like that. So those are a few names right off the top. Brilliant. Well, the first two I don't know, and I'll definitely look into them. The last one, Matt, he's been on twice now. So yeah, the way that his fitness even saved his life with that mountain biking accident is a story in itself.

Right and he's not shy, but we keep him going as well, pumping him with his own cells. Good. Good, good. It's good to hear. Yeah. Well, I want to get to where people can find that, but one last question before we do. What do you do to decompress? You know, I've meditated for almost 40 years. That's my daily thing. I'm not, you know, I'm not like ballistic with it. And if I miss days, I don't beat myself up about it because I try to live it and not have to do it to get the results. So I do that.

I do a lot of journaling. I have a journal. In fact, I don't know if you can see them, but all those brown journals there. I mean, I got journals that go back 20 years and when I'm pissed off or when I'm upset or when I'm whatever, I go to the journal and I get it out of me. And so I do that. I have a great relationship with my wife who has trained tantra, sex, love and relationship coach. That's somebody else you should have on your podcast.

She's got a podcast with about 300 episodes, but she talks about trauma. She's trauma certified, trained, somatic, experiencing, trauma certified. And so we have a great relationship where we can talk about a lot of things that and I always tell her, I mean, I call it, I don't know whether to call it the armor that I wear or the shield. And I think it's both sometimes that I have up. But we were laying in bed last night just talking while our daughter was bathing.

I was like, I feel like I can let all of that down with you and be super vulnerable. So when we can slow down enough, that's another great way where we just have just where we can just talk. So I try to keep it again, real at hand. I don't drink anymore. And the other big outlet for me, which I'm going to go do right after this is working out. That's, that's, I love to, I'm going to get on the bike and today's a push pull day. So the girls, I'm going to do some of that.

I do more, you know, like you probably, you know, functional movements. I don't do isolation, but you know, some of it comes there. Brilliant. Well, for people listening then where are the best places to find Regenexx and then also what about yourself personally? Yeah. The best place is Regenexx.com, R-E-G-E-N-E-X-X. That's where you can find out a lot of stuff. The only social media I have is LinkedIn and you'll find it just like this, Mark Testa, DC, MHA. I put a lot of content out there.

I talk about a lot of stuff. I talk about, you know, a lot of the stuff we talk about. And then I talk a lot about reducing healthcare costs and I talk about what we do at Regenexx and how to get through injuries. And so I use that platform to educate, you know, insurance brokers, employers, friends, people like that. Beautiful. Well, Mark, I want to say thank you. It's been an amazing conversation.

We've gone all over the place from chakras and chi through to intermittent fasting, but it's very exciting, you know, the things that you're bringing to the table. I mean, this is the whole point of the podcast is to first obviously highlight problems. It's important that we drag them into the light, but then to bring in solutions as well. Otherwise, you know, what's the point of the conversation?

So it's really exciting to hear that even though, as you mentioned, there are certain things that we hear about overseas when it comes to stem cells that the bone marrow concentrate is actually available and you're finding a lot of success with the civilian population, but also with a lot of the professions that are listening. So I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the show today. Yeah. Thank you very much, James. It's been a great conversation.

You're a great interviewer and I love what we talked about. So thank you very much.