Regenerative Medicine with Dr. Jeffrey Gross: Rational Wellness Podcast 335

View the Show Notes For This Episode

Dr. Jeffrey Gross discusses Regenerative Medicine with Dr. Ben Weitz.

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Podcast Highlights

1:02  Dr. Gross was a neurosurgeon offering his spinal patients anti-inflammatories and therapy and epidural injections and performing spinal surgeries for 25 years.  He realized that the surgeries that he was performing had not changed much in decades and there were a percentage of patients who did not want surgery and he wanted to find alternatives to surgery.  Dr. Gross looked into stem cells and regenerative medicine to see what alternatives could be offered to patients who did not want to get surgery. 

3:58  Regenerative Medicine is the field of using your own body to tap into it's ability to heal itself using your own cells activities. When we are an embryo and we are a ball of cells and then we have organs and tissues and those cells have picked a job to do. Before these cells pick a job, they are stem cells.  Stem cells can be coached into different jobs, but once they pick a job, they're done as stem cells.  The placenta of a mother is very rich in stem cells and the placenta makes a lot of supportive proteins, which we call the matrix.  Stem cells like other cells make signaling particles to talk to neighboring cells called exosomes. 

8:10  Exosomes.  If we take perinatal, amniotic fluid derived stem cell exosomes, we can provide a stem cell signal to a patient. If we use stem cells, each stem cell will also give off thousands of exosomes, sharing their signal with your own cells.  We don't know if exosomes are better than using stem cells, but exosomes are cheaper and easier to access and they are smaller and can cross the blood/brain barrier, unlike stem cells. 

10:20  Stem cells when given to patients do not go in and form new cells in their body but stimulate their own cells to, for example, generate new cartilage proteins in their knee. Some people consume bone broth or bone marrow and they contain stem cells and exosomes and while cells get degraded when consumed, exosomes do not and can have positive effects on the body.

12:48  For therapeutic purposes, adult stem cells are less effective than perinatal stem cells derived from the placenta or from umbilical cord blood, which are probably less effective than embryonic stem cells.  But true embryonic stem cells derived from embryos are not currently available in the US for therapeutic purposes, though these embryonic stem cells can be induced to go backwards to become pluripotent stem cells and there is a lot of exciting research going on with these cells now. 

14:39  The keys to making stem cells maximally effective include making sure the patient who receives them is maximally healthy to begin with with respect to diet and lifestyle and taking the proper supplements. Both the quality and the quantity of stem cells can play a role in the effectiveness of stem cells.  Adult stem cells are less likely to be effective than perinatal stem cells since they are likely to be damaged by living and exposure to factors that may have damaged them and adult stem cells from fat are less likely to be effective because fat often contains inflammatory signals.  When you take your car for an oil change, you don't put the old oil back in.

18:14  Intravenous stem cell benefits.  Intravenous stem cells provide a general anti-inflammatory signal to your cells and you switch the pathways from defense mode to improved operations mode.  You are slowing down degradation of tissues and focusing on regeneration of tissues.

 

Dr. Jeffrey Gross is a trained neurosurgeon who spent years performing spinal and nerve surgeries and who is now focused on regenerative and anti-aging medicine.  His clinic which has offices both in Henderson, Nevada and in Orange County California is called ReCELLebrate.  His clinic can be reached at 1-844-4RECELL.

Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.  Dr. Weitz has also successfully helped many patients with managing their weight and improving their athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.