Innovation Series with Frank Shallenberger, MD (Boston BioLife)

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Innovation Series with Frank Shallenberger, MD (Boston BioLife)
YouTube video by Dr. Frank Shallenberger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGPCTBX7GgU). Transcript is the auto-caption track — verbatim ASR, not a certified transcript.

hello and welcome to this edition of the Boston BioLife Innovation Series today we have the pleasure of being with Dr Frank shenberger he's the president of the American Academy of ozone therapy and they're going to be having their annual meeting their 12th annual meeting coming up in Orlando at Marriott Grand Lakes May 9th through the 11th of this year so Frank thank you so much for sharing some insight as to the ozone therapy the meeting you have coming up and look forward to hearing more about it yeah thanks for having me here Joe so tell me about the American Academy of ozone therapy how you got started and kind of what some of the things you guys are up to yeah so I've been in medicine for over 50 years now and about mid mid 1980s I heard about this thing ozone therapy and I went to Germany and I learned about it I was pretty amazed hard to believe that it did what they told me it would do after I came back to the US I have a a General Internal Medicine type of practice where I don't specialize in anything I treat pretty much anything that comes in the door could be a cardiovascular disease it could be an infectious disease it could be an injury could be an autoimmune disease and so forth so I pretty much treat everything that walks in the door what I very soon learned very quickly was that ozone therapy worked in just about every patient I gave it to and I don't want to uh listeners to believe that I found it to be a an independent therapy where you know you didn't use need to use anything else like it's going to fix everything that's not the way it works what the way it works is you know I found that whatever I was doing whether it was you know maybe an antibiotic or a beta blocker or whatever the heck it was that I was doing or even what it was that I was treating if I administered ozone therapy along with what I was doing the results were always better and sometimes the results were something I so good I you know I didn't begin to expect that so I was doing this for about 3 four years and and I gradually came to the opinion Joe that every doctor needs to know how to do this you know no matter what specialty they are they need to know how to do this because I know one thing about my colleagues they all want the best results they all want their patients to walk out healed and be well ozone therapy is something that all doctors can add to their practice and just to fairly dramatically improve their outcomes so with that in mind 12 years ago I started the American Academy of ozone therapy and the idea was to set up training programs and to provide annual meetings where practitioners could exchange ideas you know what they're experiencing with ozone therapy so we could all learn more yeah so ozone seems to be one of those enabling Technologies or an Adin technology that makes other Technologies or clinical techniques work better is it based on the principle of oxygenation in general where you're supplying more oxygen to the tissues and in that regard facilitating some of the metabolic and healing processes you think yeah that's a really good differentiating question when we say ozone therapy actually we should correctly be saying ozone oxygen therapy because what it is is Ozone is a gas that consists of three oxygen molecules whereas the standard oxygen gas consists of two oxygen atoms so when we use ozone therapy basically we collect a gas that is approximately 97% oxygen and 3% ozone uh so it's it's a mixture of those gases so two things happen with that gas one is as you just alluded to was oxygenation you're going to you're going to oxy oxygenate wherever you put that gas number two though is different it's oxidation oxidation being different from oxygenation oxygenation refers to just the supplying of oxygen to a tissue that requires it oxidation means that when the ozone gets into the tissue it starts the uh movement of electrons and forms peroxides and these peroxides do some absolutely marvelous things in the human body you know it's interesting because when you look at the FI of longevity everybody talks about aging right and anti-aging and whatever the science principles are but oxygenation and Vascular Health are go hand inand and we find many enabling Technologies like nitric oxide Like hypobaric Oxygen chamber like looking at the glyx and and the structure of the capillaries really to facilitate the exchange of oxygen deeper in into more important tissues and we know that some people characterize aging as a disease of the vascular system so I think it's important that this therapy which I know has been around for a long time we've talked to a bunch of people that have been doing this and I think that it's something like hyperbaric oxygen like some of these other therapies that we see from the past they're now being looked at with a new eyes and they're looking at it in conjunction with other therapies for the principles that you just stated it's an efficient way to create a very powerful supply of oxygen to tissues that may not necessarily have access to the during a normal procedural type is that a fair assessment you brought up process aging I think the process of Aging pretty well documented that this is in a direct correlation to decreased mitochondrial function what do mitochondria do well actually do a lot of things but their main job is to process oxygen and so anything that can help them do that and by the way ozone therapy is a dramatic stimulant of mitochondrial activation when you really look at it when people have diseases and it really doesn't matter exactly what the diseases are the attributes of ozone therapy by doing such things as inducing Nrf2 activation inducing cyto kindes releasing stem cells releasing endothelia progenitor cells which you just you know alluded to the uh endothelium and the glyx oone does all that it releases the endothelia progenitor cells which repair the glycocalyx it releases H oxygen A1 which stimulates angiogenesis and when you look at all the effects of this particular kind of therapy you can easily understand how it would be so helpful to use in virtually any disease with it be cardiovascular or infectious or whether it be oncological no matter what the disease or condition is including the very process of Aging this molecule can do dramatic things to help process that patient along towards a a goal of healing well clearly you're passionate about this I can hear it in your voice but I think what's also exciting from where where I sit is that we've got all these technology providers that are now looking at all this novel ways of delivering these Technologies and we've talked to another one of your your vendor o03 Purity and they've got a whole Vine of products that I don't think existed five years ago where they literally have the ability to create an ozone delivery solution for almost every part of the body and every clinical application including individualized personalized Precision do it yourself and I think that's an important part of medicine where people are starting to look at the body as a whole patients are getting more involved people are looking at the fundamental science and biology like you mentioned the mitochondria the role of oxygen and how it affects things like aging and cardiovasc ular disease and they're starting to put two and two together and figuring out well this plus this with the patient being part of it being engaged actively educated on the process really gives you the best opportunity to provide a better outcome than what you might have otherwise if you were even able to handle some of these you know more complex clinical things like in the wound care Market you see a lot of difficult complex wounds and we know that this type of Technology really helps those as well yeah that is so right and well said an analog that people can think of is simply one of you know working in your garden the patient comes in and you want to give them a therapy to uh make things better and to help them with their symptoms or their disease it's very analogous to uh you know going out in your garden and planting a seed and expecting that you know to develop into a plant that you can use but that soil is what it's all about if you put that seed in the wrong soil nothing is going to happen or very little is going to happen so in order to get the most out of that seed you need to prepare that soil and get it just right and to that extent that you can do that you're going to get a much better plant and this is the truth for human beings they come into our office they're just in bad shape all over in fact they have cardiovascular diseases not due to just one thing it's due to a breakdown of many many different systems the fact that they have a a long-term infectious disease they can't get rid of same idea there's such a focus these days on quote repairing the soil in the patients building them up either with vitamins or minerals or stem cells or platelets or whatever the process is in this case it would be with ozone but we need to not just administer the therapies that we know can help these patients we need to actually improve their overall cellular condition and ozone's so so good at that and it works right along with everything else that people are doing whether I mentioned stem cells or platelets or you know other growth factors angiogenic factors all those kinds of things it works great with all those things makes them all work better yeah and I think there's more of an awareness of inflammatory disease so a lot of times we hear our scientists talk about the cell danger response and the role of mitochondria and how things like the gut leads to a suppressed immune system which triggers extracellular ATP which this causes this immune suppression which allows things like lupus and lime and and chronic fatigue syndrome and reflex sympathetic distrophy and if depending who you talk to is really the Cornerstone of all the modern inflammatory conditions that nobody can figure out and nobody can treat and it leads to the more advanced ones like ALS Alzheimer's and Parkinson so they say type three diabetes is Alzheimer's I think that there are more Physicians now more Health Care Providers Prim primarily in private practice maybe more of the aamer Age Management elk out there that see the see the role of the of inflammation they see the role of of cell danger response in their patients every day so them buying into a technology like this today versus even 5 years ago I think is a factor of magnitude greater than it would be otherwise just because of all the education that functional medicine has brought and now the adoption a lot of these principles and tests have made a difference right people can now test for more things easily than they could in the past there's still a long way to go before you can test for a lot lot of stuff that matters versus what primary care does so I think that you what you're doing is an amazing thing because you've clung to a pretty well historically understood technology it's been around for a while right and people have been using it but now it seems as if it's coming into its own because people are starting to appreciate it for what it does versus say what it's called right ozone seem like thing but now what are we doing we're increasing the supply of oxygen to tissues that needed and we've got all these new ways of doing that with devices and so I think what you're doing is super important what could people learn at your upcoming conference in Orlando you know we have all kinds of presentations at that conference whether it's a cardiologist or a dentist or a neurologist or a naturopathic doctor a homeopath all kinds of Physicians are and other practitioners are members of our Academy and we all get together and meet once a year the presentations are always good good like this year for example we've got some very prominent key speakers that going to speak about the aging process not everything we talked about is strictly related to Ozone so we do talk a lot about specifics of how ozone can use in certain clinical cases I'm going to talk specifically about how ozone can be used in cardiovascular cases and our president who happens to be a dentist he's going to be talking about uh you know how it can be used in the dental profession then we're going to have people that are in the anti-aging sphere they'll be talking about that we use it a lot for detoxification there's a lot of new techniques coming out now that involve heavily circulated extracorporal circulation devices that oxygenate and ozonate blood and at the same time put it through a dialysis there's other techniques that give a very strong doses of ozone and certain machines out now that are making the the uh the technology of how ozone is administered much more advanced than it has been in in the past we also get into frequency especially light frequency so we we have presenters that are going to be talking about ultraviolet light and how ultraviolet light affects the hemoglobin molecule and and does things very similar to what ozone can do and so it's it's a broad conference it's not simply all about ozone but it is all about the basic idea of getting us to be as healthy as we possibly can be I didn't even mention it but you know some of these diseases you talked about ALS and Alzheimer's these are diseases that actually destroy tissue and and at some point these diseases become uh irreversible so you know the idea is to start treating our patients that have a vulnerability for a certain disease and treating them early on before they get the disease even or certainly in the very earliest stages of the possible presentation of the disease we can do really great things with neurodegenerative disease if we get it early enough and all these things work together like that so you know there's also the aspect of using oxygen ozone Therapies in healthy people to keep them that way I know I personally do that and you know I'm hopeful that all our practitioners that uh are treating their patients with these therapies even even if if our practitioner is 100% healthy I think it's a great idea to administer to ourselves so we stay that way no that's great stuff and I you know I really think that what you're put together is an amazing opportunity for healthc care providers to learn from the Decades of experience that you and your colleagues have and to really dive into all the relevant aspects of anti-aging but really helping people with complex diseases the one thing that I always kind of consider when I think about this field that we're in and I get kind of unique position to see a lot of companies a lot of organizations and a lot of Technologies which I enjoy but I see it across the spectrum of diseases and I think there's a lot of emphasis put on Health and Beauty looking nice and feeling good and looking good but really if you can affect somebody that has a very difficult condition and really help them with the science of these Technologies I think that has a lot more meaning to it because people suffer in ways that traditional medicine just can't help and oftentimes we find patients and I work with a couple groups that have patient advocacy Like Bernie seagull and the health span Action Coalition I'm attracted to them because those patient groups those Advocates are trying to help patient care populations that don't have a lot of options and ozone seems like the type of thing that really can help people from a wide range of of clinical afflictions and really help bring higher quality life to to what they're going through you when it's properly used Joe ozone therapy is 100% safe and you might could get a headache you might could get nauseated that's possible but that doesn't happen very often and it it's just the the safest easiest to administer therapy that you can possibly imagine the other thing about ozone therapy is it's inexpensive this is we're not talking about procedures that are necessarily going to cost tens of thousands of dollars the expense and the safety are other driving factors that make it really practition practical for doctors no matter what their specialty is to add this into what they're already doing so how can people learn more about the meeting I see your website here aaot us is that where people can learn about the upcoming got a whole description there they'll list all the speakers for anybody out there listening to me just wants to be informed even more they could just register with the executive secretary of the academy and we'll be be sure to put them on our email mailing list so that they can get any of the email blasts we send out because we regularly send out email blasts of things that are interesting or new in the world of ozone therapy well that's fantastic I'm looking forward to coming to the meeting because I haven't been to an ozone therapy meeting in my life although I've worked with some couple people that have presented on it and I think it makes sense and so thank you very much for all the hard work that you've done Dr shenberger and thanks for sharing your experience and your enthusiasm in the American Academy of ozone therapy with the listeners of Boston BioLife and I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us here today thank you Joe I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to get this word out all right we're going to see you May 9th in lovely Orlando great we'll have a good time all