Mitochondria & Anti-Aging w/ Dr. Frank Shallenberger (RWN #118)

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Mitochondria & Anti-Aging w/ Dr. Frank Shallenberger (RWN #118)
YouTube video by Dr. Frank Shallenberger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm67JAadp18). Transcript is the auto-caption track — verbatim ASR, not a certified transcript.

[Music] all right welcome everyone to a new episode of the roscoe's wetsuit podcast i am your host toby passman on my show today i have a very special guest dr frank schallenberger dr schallenberger is a six-time grandfather and four-time father he's one of the originals he's been practicing medicine since 1973 and has been a pioneer in alternative and integrative medicine since 1978. dr schallenberger has revolutionized the practice of anti-aging and preventative medicine by developing a method to measure mitochondrial function and oxygen utilization he's written two popular books describing this method the type 2 diabetes breakthrough and bursting with oxygen along with numering uh authoring numerous papers in the international peer-reviewed literature on ozone therapy and oxygen utilization dr schallenberger thanks so much for coming on the show today glad to be here toby awesome well i want to first start off just by talking a little about mitochondrial function it's something that i think has gained a lot of you know popular press and you know a lot of just lay people talking about it um over the past few years can you briefly kind of describe you know the mitochondria why they're important and why you know people should be paying attention to to the health of their mitochondria the you know the mitochondria are probably at the very bottom of uh why we stay healthy or why we get sick it's the probably the single most important determining factor there and the reason is because on the one hand uh the thing that keeps us alive is energy and that's where the energy comes from so uh you know nothing else is going to happen if you don't have energy right so that's that's where all the energy comes from the mitochondria so that's that's one thing that makes them extremely important the other is they go bad as we get older they don't get better they start they start to decline in their level of efficiency uh and just for just for the listeners to give you if you don't know what mitochondria are let me just give you a thumbnail sketch inside each and every one of your cells red cells by the way would be an exception to this rule um because they actually carry oxygen but every other cell in the body uh in each every cell in the body energy is uh created in that cell through oxygen as it gets processed in the mitochondria so all that oxygen that we breathe in it only has one purpose one destination that's to go into one of our cells and in the cell the oxygen gets processed in the mitochondria energy gets released the cells use that energy to do what they do there's a lot of incredibly important functions that the cells have to do but every single one of those functions requires energy and that's where the energy comes from so if you're mito if you have lots of mitochondria and cells uh you know healthy cell have in the order three to four thousand mitochondria in it in each cell if you so if you have your a big quota of mitochondria and if the mitochondria are functioning well you're going to get a lot of energy in that cell and it's going to do its thing at optimal levels conversely to the extent that the mitochondria don't work as well or you don't have as many both of which happen with aging to that extent you cells are going to have less energy they're going to be less likely to be able to work at optimum levels and the bottom line is things are going to start breaking down a lot sooner interesting and at this point in the conversation i feel like people are probably you know wondering okay well you know what is the health of my mitochondria um and it sounds like you know from what i've read you've kind of pioneered this new method of testing mitochondrial function uh using respiratory gas analysis is that correct that's right yeah can you tell me a little about how that works how are you able to test the people's mitochondrial function you know about uh 25 years ago you know realizing how important mitochondria were i started thinking to myself these mitochondrial function is the most critical thing that happens to us as we get older and uh so the problem is there's no way to measure it you don't know and it's sort of like your blood pressure if you don't measure your blood pressure you don't know what it is if you don't measure your temperature you don't know what it is and uh so i thought here we are the most important single thing that ever happens to us as we get older is is problems with mitochondrial function and yet we have absolutely no way to assess it so i started thinking uh about that and what uh and and the logic really is quite simple all the oxygen that we breathe in it only has one destination one purpose and that's to go into the mitochondria and be processed into energy so if i can just find a way to monitor what happens to the oxygen that we breathe in i have a direct way of assessing what's going on with the mitochondria so it's very simple there are devices that you can buy they've been around a long time just haven't been used for this purpose but been around a long time uh and what these devices do is you breathe through a tube typically you have a like a face mask on like a scuba mask or something and as you're breathing through this mask it's connected with the tube down into a device it's going to measure essentially two things one is how much oxygen is your body is consuming and two is when it when you when when the mitochondria process oxygen for energy they release carbon dioxide and the more efficient the mitochondria are operating the less carbon dioxide they release so we're so this device will measure how much oxygen my body is consuming and simultaneously how much carbon dioxide it's producing and i can look at those two numbers i can look at the absolute values of those numbers and i can look at the ratio of those numbers and we do this with the person resting quietly for 10 minutes we put them on a bicycle and work them harder harder and harder for approximately say 20 minutes something like that and we take all that data and from that data we can putting that data into various formulas we can determine with exact precision exactly what the mitochondria are doing how are they producing are they uh processing a lot of oxygen or just a little bit of i can tell you exactly how much oxygen they're processing and with exact levels of efficiency exactly how efficiently they're doing that so i'm curious with all of this data now in the testing what are say the biggest things that you've found um i guess we can come at this from both angles what are the biggest things that you found with this testing that improve mitochondrial function or um take away from mitochondrial function besides aging which we already mentioned so yeah i mean that's that's like the holy grail you know trying to find out how can how can i optimize my mitochondrial function because ultimately we want to get to be really really old people with really really youthful mitochondrial function that's the goal that's the that's the end zone being really old but the mitochondria are functioning like they're they're new and young that is so possible uh for example what's fresh on my mind is the guy i saw maybe four weeks ago 86 year old man i've been working with him now for almost 12 years 86 year old guy and he has the mitochondrial function of a 32 year old exactly the same as a 32 your average 32 year old and now how is that possible he's basically functioning even though he's 86 years old he's basically as functional as the average 32 year old he's got wrinkles and he's got all that other stuff that happens to be over time but in terms of functionality ability to do what he wants the way the brain works the way he detoxifies all those things he's like a 32 year old so it's very possible so you having done this for some 20-plus years i mean that's the first thing i wanted to know what do i need to do to improve mitochondrial function and so what we would do is we would do lots of tests so we would get people measure their mitochondrial function and find out it wasn't very good and we would give them a supplement or we would give them a hormone or we would put them on a diet or we you know have some kind of intervention with them and then come back and recheck the mitochondrial function and see if we got a bump and so we've been looking at that for for a long time and um now the book i wrote which is called bursting with energy kind of explains this a little bit on the other hand that book was written maybe 10 years ago so it's not quite up to par so what i can tell you is a couple of things that are just obviously critical and that is one that totally stands out probably the number one thing you and i can do to get our mitochondria operating at a very high level is high intensity interval training very interesting yeah so that's number one it's every now and then i in fact yesterday i saw somebody like this who had really good numbers i think the guy was 64-ish or something he had very good mitochondrial numbers and he didn't exercise so you will find people like this uh and and and you know the thing is and i like to tell i like to explain this to people we're all different we all all have different genetics right so some of us come into this world with incredibly good mitochondrial genetics which by the way you get from your mother some of us come into the world not so good you know so now this man that i'm talking about he happened to be a very good athlete as a young man and so that automatically clues in he probably was born with really good genetics right from the mitochondrial standpoint so that's probably how he got to the point of being 64 years old not exercising uh and and yet has pretty good mitochondrial function on the other hand you can have somebody else who was not born with genetics like that and their mitochondrial function is going to be a1 dependent on a high intensity interval training so that's that'll be number one that we look at the other thing is surprising to me and it might be surprising to a lot of the listeners but this totally this caught me off guard i didn't realize i was gonna see this but one if i take your mitochondrial function and uh and i measure it and it's looking really good and i turn around and i give you some carbohydrates to eat now normally when we test this we test it in a fasting modality just to control for food but i let's say i give you some carbohydrates to eat could be an apple could be a peanut butter jelly sandwich whatever doesn't much matter bring you back in an hour and retest your mitochondrial function 85 of the time it'll be significantly depressed because for the majority of people there's about 15 of the population that is not like this but for about 85 percent of the american population carbohydrates absolutely suppress mitochondrial function wow so it's crazy huh it is crazy these days we hear a lot about this but back 20 years ago you know we didn't really people were still pushing how great wonderful carbohydrates are right well it's interesting to think about i mean how you know oftentimes you think of like carbohydrates as an energy source you know as a fuel source yet yep when we're testing the mitochondria it's actually showing you know their slower energy production after consuming that which is very surprising yes it's really surprising now the truth is that uh people are different so in your mitochondria the way they produce energy from oxygen is the oxygen interacts in the mitochondria with either fat or fro with glucose which is basically carbohydrate broken down right so so in in your mitochondria the oxygen you're breathing in is going to either metabolize fat or it's going to metabolize glucose or sugar the thing is with some people their mitochondria way prefer to burn fat over glucose and for other people their mitochondria prefer way to burn glucose over fat so there's totally different a whole spectrum of metabolisms out there and the only way you're going to find out which kind of metabolism you have is to get use this test and get tested by it because they're going to be some people and like i said it's approximately 15 of the population when i do the test i'm going to look at them i'm going to say you have the kind of metabolism that wants to eat a lot of carbohydrate you will thrive with carbohydrate in fact if you don't get enough carbohydrate you're going to be tired and run down wow so i mean i might tell somebody else listen you better stay away from carbohydrates essentially poison for you right yeah no i mean this this seems like it could have huge implications as far as you know when people you know with all the kind of popular diets right now there's like people just very kind of um you know in in each camp who are very strong advocates of you know keto or paleo or vegan and it's like you know now what we're coming to find out with genetics and you know something like this test it seems like could be really helpful as far as you know showing someone okay this is the correct diet what you're gonna thrive on the most our culture is uh so used to statistical medicine and statistical science that's that's the way i was trained in medical school in the 1960s that's what everybody's used to you know if you do something and uh greater than 50 percent of the people do really well on that there's this tendency to make everybody do that which is is bogus well what we need to do is this concept that they call now personalized medicine we try to figure well what's right for this guy may not be right for that guy but what's right for this guy what's the right diet for him is there a hormone that he needs is there a vitamin that he needs and and so it becomes pretty aggravating uh if you're me anyhow and you see people writing books like everybody ought to eat this way or everybody ought to exercise this way or everybody ought to get eight hours of sleep everybody can't no you can't get four hours of sleep you know it's it's so different and it's so varying that you really have to test people to try to figure out you know what's right for them and my point is if i test you and your mitochondrial function looks great like that 86 year old guy i was talking about i'm not going to tell him to do anything i'm just basically going to say look whatever you're doing just keep on doing it that's working clearly working well and and so he can leave the office knowing hey what i do is right i don't have to change anything i don't have to switch up i'm i'm right on the money for my particular genetics conversely if i have somebody come in and they test out lousy you know now we got to say okay whatever you're doing not working so well so let's let's try this and then we bring you back when we retest you and either you test out better or you don't test out better if you don't test out better it's it's on the plan d and we keep working that out until we find what is the what is the what what are the special remedies for you given your genetics that make your mitochondria work better right i mean that that approach makes a lot of sense to me um i'm curious as far as you know if we could talk specifically about mitochondria in the brain because i know a lot of you know different psychiatric neurological conditions even neurodegenerative diseases have been linked to mitochondrial dysfunction so how you know what's the importance of of mitochondria there every every organ in the body requires energy but some organs more or less obviously require more energy than other organs because they're very they're a lot busier one of those is the kidney the kidney is constantly working and filtering out things another one's the liver but the the one the heart obviously but the one organ that certainly uh requires the most single amount of energy would be the brain and uh so if if you have mitochondrial issues probably one of the first places you're going to start noticing that is going to be in your brain and and so what what you know whatever say tendency you might have in your brain let's say you're a person that's that tends to have insomnia or let's say you're a person that tends to get depressed or whatever your deal is uh as your brain gets deprived of adequate amounts of energy it's gonna it's gonna fall down into certain state of symptoms that you can see but it's very clear i was just even looking at an article that was published maybe three four months ago and they were looking at alzheimer's in particular for example and um there's these plaques that form in the brain of alzheimer's that come from these things called amyloid proteins turns out that what these researchers were able to show is that the our brains make these amyloid proteins when the mitochondria aren't functioning well so as you and i get older and we start experiencing uh the the decrease in mitochondrial function which can start around the age of 35 and but but by the time you get to be like 60 65 it could be fairly decreased your mitochondrial function could have dropped down very significantly as that's happening you're putting more and more of these amyloid beta plaques into your brain and depending on your genetics and susceptibility and such you may be that guy that gets alzheimer's where is if you didn't let your mitochondria go down you could yeah that's that's very interesting about alzheimer's um and it seems like i mean the the approach to treating that uh or you know different psychiatric conditions seems to be very a very like top-down approach you know as far as targeting you know one or two neurotransmitters and trying to you know either elevate or decrease the levels of those whereas you know if you get you know the mitochondria working properly it seems like you know just the whole body and brain is going to be you know given the the sufficient energy it needs to to run properly is that kind of an accurate sort of how you view it absolutely you know and you know i think listeners can probably appreciate this a little bit uh because they could probably just think of their own experience and ask themselves uh when was the last time i knew or heard of somebody who was in really great cardiovascular condition i.e good mitochondria okay really good cardiovascular condition who had anything go wrong with them it happens but it's rare enough so that when it does happen it probably makes the newspaper so we hear of these cases but they're not at all uncommon the the one that's common is the guy has the heart attack or the guy gets the alzheimer's or the dementia or he gets the cancer and you know people who know him were thinking to himself well yeah he was in really bad shape and he didn't take good care of himself and so on and these were factors that led to that happening right right so then as far as you know uh it seems like you have kind of also pioneered some of the therapies to to treat mitochondrial dysfunction can you tell me a little as far as ozone therapy may be something that a lot of listeners you know may have heard of may not have heard of it seems relatively uh still kind of working its way into you know at least western medicine but can you tell me a little as far as ozone goes sure for for the listeners that that haven't um aren't aware of this uh ozone is a very high potency molecule made out of oxygen and and it's been used throughout the world for decades it's new to the united states i actually brought this therapy to the united states about seven eight nine years ago when i formed the american academy of ozone therapy and now we have in excess of a thousand doctors here in the us that are utilizing ozone as a medical therapy but it's just new here it's not new around the rest of the world around the western world it's actually been there since the 1800s if you want to know the truth but people should know that when we talk about ozone as a as a medical therapy we're talking about a high potency version of oxygen normally oxygen travels in pairs so every oxygen atom finds another oxygen atom and uh they get together kind of and they form a bond together and the reason that is has to do with the amount of electrons that each atom has they don't have enough electrons but if they get together they can share electrons so that's your standard uh very stable form of oxygen we call it o2 because there's two atoms of oxygen in there that's what we're breathing right now uh oh three is what ozone is so what to to get ozone you actually have to make it you can't capture it you can't buy it in a bottle or anything like that you got to make it so what doctors do is we take oxygen o2 run it through a little converter box and what the converter box does is it shoots electricity over the oxygen molecules that causes them to explode a little bit to break apart into single atoms and instantaneously however they recombine back into their pairs but a small percentage of them something like two three percent depending on you know how everything's set up will convert back into o3 so you'll have three oxygen atoms sharing the amount of electrons that make two oxygen atoms stable so that three oxygen atoms set up it's not very stable it's a highly reactive molecule o2 pretty stable if i take o2 and say inject it into u it'll more or less just sit there it's not going to do much but i take o3 and inject it into you instantaneously there's an enormous amount of what we call oxidative signaling going on in your entire body almost instantaneously almost as if you could kind of compare to an electrocution let's say you had lightning strike your body instantaneously it pervades every aspect of your physiology this is what it's like when you inject ozone into the human body and there's lots of ways to do that but one of the interesting things is because it's oxygen it's a very potent stimulator of mitochondrial function so so so when what it's like for me is and what i've learned is the reason i mean there's lots of reasons people get sick but at the very bottom the very core reason people get sick is that their mitochondria don't work so well they don't have the energy that required to stay well so you could you can clearly make the statement and this is about as close to being 100 percent true as anything you could say there's no possible way in the world that anybody who's sick with anything significant and by that i mean a cardiovascular disease or diabetes or cancer or autoimmune disease or whatever 100 percent of the time they got bad mitochondria 100 of the time and there's no way they stand any chance at all of getting well unless the mitochondria are improved so it's sort of a baseline foundational therapy that you can use essentially on every sick person there is wow so i'm i'm curious because from what i've read about ozone it is what they call like an oxidative therapy right where you know most people i mean what what gets all of the kind of popular press coverage is you know antioxidants you know the vitamin c and and glutathione you know all of these being antioxidants and people thinking that is is a good thing um from my understanding they are but at the same time when you when you trigger this uh with oxidative therapy it can actually real uh rebuild your body's kind of own production of those antioxidants is that kind of what ozone is doing well yeah you're you're pretty much right on it there uh so so in the body you know you always got you the body wants to stay in balance so these bodies were created with a whole series of systems that when one thing comes along and throws us out of balance we've got another thing that's going to come along and bring us back into balance almost instantaneously so what we have in the body is we have things that we have systems in the body for example that will make your blood pressure higher then we also have other cis symptoms that'll make your blood pressure lower so that if it's too high the lower systems start working if it's too low the higher systems start working and i just use that as an example because this is yeah how many thousands if not millions of times across the board with all kinds of things and one of those one of those two systems kind of setups is the oxidants and the antioxidants which you were just talking about so on the one hand you can't survive without oxidants all that oxygen that you're breathing in that's keeping you alive is an accident so you can't survive without oxidants it is incredibly important to have free radicals it's incredibly important to have oxidants on the other hand uh you have antioxidant systems to contain those oxidants to make sure they don't get out of um out of order so to speak and start making damage because they are they can be destructive molecules so you have antioxidant systems and the other point is without the antioxidant systems you couldn't live either so you actually need both to get that balance so on the one hand you got the antioxidant systems that are kind of controlling what the oxidants do and then you have the oxidant cysts the oxidants that are actually giving us energy and keeping us alive so it's about getting that balance right in there very interesting so as far as ozone goes i'm curious um i guess first off what what are the conditions that it's been found to be kind of most effective for yeah if i had to like pick one thing that it's all by itself as a standalone therapy ozone is absolutely remarkable i would pick pain pain is uh there's a lot of factors that go into why we have pain but i'm talking more or less about chronic pain pain that won't go away never heals and um at the very bottom of what causes chronic pain is uh decreased mitochondrial function and that's why these areas never get better so you know you can go out and fall down and tear your rotator cuff or something and uh and you know you fully expect that within a matter of one two maybe three months that that rotator cuff's gonna heal and you're going to be back to normal again but they're going to be a lot of people out there that are going to hurt their rotator cuff or some other part of their body and they're going to wake up like 9 10 months a year later and they're going to think to themselves you know what this isn't getting better it's supposed to be getting better but it's absolutely no better now than it was 10 months ago maybe it's even worse so you ask yourself the question what's the deal how come it didn't heal and the answers always decrease mitochondrial function so the really cool thing about ozone probably the single coolest thing about it is you can take ozone keeping in mind now this is a gas it's not a liquid it's a gas you make right up there in the office you could take ozone in a syringe and inject it into an area of pain just get a needle stick needle in wherever it hurts could be a rotator cuff could be a knee could be a back could be a neck could be tennis elbow doesn't matter and the pain goes away it's astounding all by itself with nothing else that means i'm not saying you need about physical therapy or anything else it'll make the darn pain go away so so if i had to like pick one thing that was just remarkable about ozone i would pick on pain and tissue regeneration healing up bad knees healing up bad hips bad necks bad backs whatever but the point is i want to say that in other areas say say cancer cardiovascular disease autoimmune disease infectious disease where ozone isn't necessarily a stand-alone therapy it will certainly make everything else work tons better so for example i will treat i treat cancer patients i actually in my practice i know how to give low dose chemotherapy so we use chemo agents in my practice uh we do detoxification it's a it's a collage you know of all the kind of the conventional medical stuff and moral of the alternative medical stuff put the whole package together in in my practice uh and i can say without a doubt that when you take chemotherapy and combine it with ozone therapy the combination there is amazing you you get very few of the side effects you conventionally see with chemotherapy you don't get the immune system suppression you see with chemotherapy uh you uh the chemotherapy works lots better uh and you and you could and this could branch out to pretty much any specialty where you know whether you're a cardiologist or a dermatologist or you know you're a macular degeneration let's say you're an ophthalmologist it doesn't matter what your specialty is you add ozone therapy into what you're already doing your results just got twice as good right well it makes sense i mean at any condition that involves mitochondria mitochondrial dysfunction ozone's gonna you know play a part in improving that yeah it makes that it makes sense you know in the common thing of you know by the way if you're sick and you've got a problem shouldn't you be eating really well you know are you going to go out and you know eat oreos and mcdonald's all day long i don't think so you need you need you know so it's just calm in a way it's common sense right what about as far as you know ozone and say you know more like the the peak performance aspects of things is our athletes are you know olympic uh teams are they using ozone is it something you can test for as far as a performance enhancer or well you can't you can't really test for it uh and i am i know that some of the european leagues have a rule against what they call doping with ozone but the reality is this uh these athletes when you when you're up at that level of athleticism your mitochondria pretty much top game anyway and so you're not going to see much of a bump from ozone therapy now you could use it as an athlete say for pain management if they sprain something you can make them heal better i know a lot of soccer teams for example where after all the games or practices they inject all the painful areas that these guys had with some ozone so they can recover three times faster but the actual the doping with ozone is not going to give you a benefit because you're already at the top of your game that's con that stands conversely to uh you know your average joe who is not on that level he will benefit from it he'll see and he'll see a bump from it right okay so that makes sense kind of bringing people who have depressed mitochondrial function kind of bringing that back up to off yeah these athletes they're already up here i mean you can't push them any higher right right so let's talk now about as far as another kind of condition that's sort of plaguing um you know the western world you know being type 2 diabetes you wrote an entire book on it and i'm curious as far as you know how ozone ties in or just mitochondrial function or other stuff that we haven't talked about yet but what what is kind of the western uh medical approach they seem to be getting it completely wrong as far as treating diabetes since it's still such a huge issue so so what's your take on that yeah they really do get it wrong got some good ideas there's some good medicines out there and such but the whole approach is is is wrong and and the reason i wrote the book about diabetes is because diabetes is the classic disease example of decreased mitochondrial function there is no way you're ever going to get diabetes if you have good mitochondrial function it's not happening so this epidemic that we're currently seeing even in kids as you know uh has it has to do with the fact that there's things out there that are apparently ruining our mitochondria at a much faster rate than they used to get they used to get damaged and so the focus always wants to be with diabetes improved mitochondrial function now if you remember we were just talking about how oxygen produces energy in the mitochondria by either combining with fat or with sugar so you see sugar's right in there and the problem with diabetics is their mitochondria won't allow them to burn the sugar and so their sugar levels can build up they have to burn fat diabetics are the classic type of people who in their cells their cells prefer burning fat they don't want to burn sugar and which is okay because they can't and so they want to burn fat so a diabetic is the classic person that wants to have a diet very high in fat now some of the listeners may be hearing me thinking oh this guy's a nut case he's telling me to eat a lot of fat when in fact everybody's been telling me for the last 40 years to eat less fat that's the bad guy yes and i am telling you eat lots of fat if you're that person if you're the person whose cells prefer to burn fat and you eat glucose or sugar or carbohydrates instead you're going to get diabetes in all likelihood if you have the genetics for it you're getting diabetes and that's why we have so much diabetes because for the past 20 30 40 years everybody's been telling you all the so-called experts don't eat fat it's really really bad for you and what you want to eat is all these carbs because they give you this tremendous amount of energy so great so we all go do that now we got a diabetes epidemic right right i mean it seems like hopefully things are are starting to shift i mean it seems like i don't know the past uh five seven ten years yeah um since the whole kind of you know the way i got into you know being interested in all this stuff is sort of from dave asprey's work you know with uh with bulletproof and biohacking you know with that kind of being a big movement as far as the the high fat goes but i mean it seems like with you know ketogenic diets are nothing new um from my understanding they were used to to treat you know kids with intractable uh epilepsy right back in the 60s or 70s so well it goes actually back to the 20s the 20s yeah 1920s is when that paper was first put out wow so we we've known for a while the benefits of of at least some people eating uh good amounts of good uh healthy fat yeah interesting do you yeah ashbury is you know probably he's been the guy that's put this on the map so you have you got guys like me out there they're doing all the research and the clinical work but it takes somebody like dave to come along and write the books and get it out there to people so they hear this new information because without dave and people like him all they're doing is getting information from the vested people that are already in the system and want to promote diabetes they don't want to promote the fixing of diabetes they want to promote everything they've been promoting for the last 40 years high carbohydrate low-fat diets well i mean it makes sense financially if they don't fix it then but there's reality there yeah yeah well that makes sense yeah so it seems like you know a lot of the the research findings i mean it uh i had heard somewhere that you know what what we actually see in medicine is kind of 20 years behind like the research like it takes the research that long to kind of get converted into to actual like practical medical applications is that something that you found just as you're you know in your work as a doctor you know it's even getting worse it's worse but you're absolutely right you know in medicine you know doctors and scientists involved in medicine are and should be a little cynical and should be a little skeptical about things i got that that's the way we ought to be we shouldn't like just grab onto the first thing that pop songs and give it to everybody like it's wonderful we need to be a little skeptical about it and look at it and so it's true somebody will come along with penicillin and it it'll be 10 15 years before you know people without the under using penicillin well well that's reasonable but what what we have now is not only that kind of an issue going on but we have an entire system here in the united states between big pharma big medicine big insurance we've got this system that absolutely promotes everything um that makes money and it doesn't matter if it's good for you or bad for you that's not the bottom line the bottom line has to do with money and this is dang shame so i mean you it could be like 200 years if ever something like ozone therapy becomes accepted as a major thing wow because of that how about i'm curious what your opinion is as far as some of the other kind of uh uh regenerative therapies say like uh like uh stem cells as far as uh their impact kind of maybe just on mitochondrial function but also just in general what's your take on those okay so yeah so in the clinic we use stem cells we use the platelet-rich plasma and we use some homeopathics and we we combine a lot with the ozone now so initially we started off just injecting ozone so back in the 70s and 80s that's all i used to do for example is just use ozone by itself because that was the the major principle since then we've learned that wow there's all these other things that you can use with ozone and ozone's a great catalyst and so i can tell any doctor you know whatever you're doing you throw ozone into the mix it's going to be better you're going to do better and this is true for platelets it's true for stem cells it's true for virtually anything that you want to do throw the ozone in there and all of a sudden it's tons better and so all the regenerating properties of stem cells and platelets all of those are remarkably enhanced if you put them in combination with ozone which by the way has its own regenerative properties right so there's a synergistic effect there yeah so you know let's say i've got a guy with a really bad knee this happens all the time in the clinic got a guy who comes in with the bad knees probably limping the you look at the x-ray it doesn't look so good he says doc i'm here because the last doctor i saw told me i needed you know a brand new knee they need to cut my knee out and put in an artificial knee and i don't want to go do that uh that guy i can inject him uh in that day one day takes me all of maybe 15 minutes i can shoot some ozone into the knee along with some vitamins and minerals i can then shoot some platelets into the knee i can then shoot some stem cells into the knee and in four months later he'll be walking around like there's not a problem and if you look at the images you'll see growth of cartilage you'll see repair of ligaments and repair of tendons it's pretty darn remarkable wow yeah yeah i mean it's it's crazy to think what what i you know what else is kind of possible as far as you know with with the sort of alternative or functional medicine what are there any other kind of like looking into the future um what are are any other kind of therapies do they stand out to you is super promising or just kind of where do you see the field going yeah it's a good question i think you know ozone's always going to be there because it's one of those fundamental things it's like eating right sleeping right you know exercise they're always going to be part of the program that's not going to vary uh but ozone is particularly helpful as as we get older and stuff starts breaking down like your knee or maybe your brain's not quite as sharp or whatever it becomes more important as we get older in terms of what's up in the future i'm thinking well these stem cells have been a game changer they've just told the core derived stem cells been an absolute game changer in my practice i can fix things i never used to be able to fix before uh so i know that's going to get better and they're going to come out with uh you can take these stem cells by the way and you can train them it's illegal here in the u.s so the fda won't allow us to train them but you can the technology is there you can take the stem cells and put them through a series of of treatments that will make them regenerate bone or make them regenerate brain cells or make them regenerate something else you know whatever you want to do and then once they're trained then you can take the new trained stem cells and probably do some outstanding stuff i'm thinking immaculate degeneration which even to today is very difficult to treat uh certainly in its advanced stages and i'll bet you a nickel we're going to see them coming up with some stem cells that we can inject into the eye or around the eye or something like that to fix that particular problem right now we're putting stems not stem cells per se but these things called exosomes right to cerebral spinal fluid for dementia for cases of dementia in cases of parkinson's and i'm aware of a physician up in new jersey who has been taking uh exosomes and injecting them straight into the brain stem wow i can't do that in my clinic because you got to have a whole special setup to be able to do that you know uh but but yeah so wow so here he is and i've seen him take a guy with parkinson's who has fairly progressed and turned him around in about five days with the exosomes by taking those exosomes and shooting them right in somehow right up there around c1 and the bottom and the brainstem interesting can you just briefly introduce kind of what what exosomes are doing yes so we're our ideas of stem cells are changing a little bit uh you know we've always had this concept of stem cells as being cells that can differentiate they call them pluripotent stem cells but can differentiate into other cells so let's say i have a stroke uh some some of my brain cells are dead the concept has been uh my stem cells are going to go to that area and they're going to literally turn into brain cells to replace the ones that are dead it turns out that that's probably not what's going on in an adult in in infants newborn babies and maybe kids up to the ages six or seven months that's what happens we know that happens but for us once you get to be you know past four five six years old we don't think that's what happens anymore we think what happens is the fact that stem cells contain thousands of little bubbles called exosomes e-x-o-s-o-m-e-s and these exosomes contain dna fragments they contain uh proteins they contain growth factors they contain cytokines all kinds of these regenerative sorts of molecules and what happens is that when when i get the stroke and the stem cells go to that area of my brain they release all these exosomes out into the tissues and then these exosomes with all these growth factors that they have in them cause that area to regenerate and repair so we have a little so basically what i'm saying is in adults our current concept of stem cell therapy is that the stem cells are just sort of the transport vehicle for the exosomes it's the exosomes that are really doing the healing so why not just take the exosomes why actually inject the stem cells per se why not just inject the exosomes which is what you can do now because you can go out and buy exosomes too wow so that could really be huge as far as uh you mentioned that the doctor in new jersey you know using that to treat neurodegenerative conditions i wonder as far as you know psychiatry neurology um other you know possible things that that could be helpful for yeah you know we're kind of working on on that in the sense that we are now uh taking certain people self-included uh who don't ostensibly have anything wrong with them and and injecting a bunch of exosomes into them just to see what it that's a happened thing entirely safe so we can do it uh and so we're and yeah it's going to be interesting to look at that and let's get somebody who's like chronically depressed uh and inject a whole bunch of exosomes and see if it doesn't go away it just might wow by the way if you pre-treat them with ozone therapy for about three weeks that's another thing we've discovered if if i'm going to give the stem cells or the exosomes to anybody for regenerative purposes if i pre-treat them and get the mitochondria up and running really well and then put the stem cells or exosomes in there wow awesome well this has been a fascinating discussion dr schallenberger i've enjoyed talking with you and having you on the show today um can you tell me a little as far as if uh you know any resources if listeners are more curious about finding out about your work or or your books where would you direct people to okay yes so uh they could go onto youtube and just plug in my name schallenberger and i i must have 20 30 different videos on there that cover almost everything that you can cover uh they can go on amazon plug my name in and they'll see i've got four books out there most of them about ozone but some of them touch on other areas then go to my website which is antiagingmedicine.com and on there i've got a video page and they can access other videos that talk about all kinds of things from thyroid to adrenal to you know cancer or whatever and those and also i have a newsletter i should mention that uh we've got uh some like 50 000 people that subscribe to this newsletter every month and it's a fully referenced newsletter so you people if they want to can go and look up the references and make sure i'm not just giving them a bunch of hogwash that i'm telling them the real deal it's called second opinion so people could go to secondopinionnewsletter.com and sign up for the newsletter but between all that there's a lot to be learned absolutely yeah there's some great resources and if you guys enjoyed watching today's episode go ahead and like and subscribe to our youtube channel it's roscoe's wetsuit also you can listen to the audio version of the show on apple podcast spotify iheartradio so go check out either version also follow us on instagram we are roscoe's wetsuit podcast uh dr schaunberger again thanks so much for coming on today yeah it's been a real pleasure have me back anytime i enjoy talking with you absolutely we'll do okay take care take care