Dr. Dan Stickler
Appearances
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
A lot of people ask me, you know, is AI going to replace physicians? And the answer is yes, if physicians don't change their mindset a little bit, because the majority of physicians using AI use them as research assistants. They're not interacting with the AI. Evidence-based medicine has been valuable, but it's also reductionistic and
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, preparation is super important. I always recommend people do a little bit of parts work before jumping in, a little bit of shadow work before jumping into ketamine therapies or even any of the psychedelics. It's great.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Oh, yeah. I mean, and before you have to be careful because you don't want to pre-frame people either.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
i mean you can create an experience for them by the way you do it and a lot of these the shamans that are out there that they became shamans because of their success with the psychedelic that they're promoting they tend to take people on their journey rather than take people on their own journey and so pre-framing can be kind of problematic you also have to
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
You know, kind of find out because I've seen this happen where people can wake up and experience emptiness in a session and their psyche is not ready to experience emptiness in true existential crisis there. It's a powerful tool.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, so I've done a deep dive into MDMA and I'm excited for what's happening with it right now. I mean, you're right. I mean, 500,000 therapy sessions prior to 1984 when it was classified as a scheduled drug. And the therapists and researchers at the time were outraged. They're like, you can't take this away. This has been so successful with our treatments, with what we're seeing in the research.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
up through the executive courts. And they won the appeals, but the DEA refused to overturn their decision. And the DEA has that right, which was not the best way to do it. Hoping RFK has some new say in this. But yeah, I mean, it is a super effective drug and we're at a crossroads right now because medicalizing it has some drawbacks to it. legalizing it has some drawbacks to it.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
So what route are we going to go with this? I mean, we saw, you know, look at medicalization when it comes to like ketamine. It prompted all these ketamine clinics to come up all over the country and they've been effective, but they could have been more effective had they been set up in the right way.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
I mean, we know with psychedelics set and setting is like a huge part of the effect you're going to get. And walking into a sterile looking clinic, having an IV put in your arm and you're laying there on the table and somebody comes by and checks your vital signs periodically. Is not a setting I want to be in.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
With MDMA therapy, I mean, it's like all these rules, you know, don't touch the person. I mean, if somebody's taken MDMA and they have to lay there and not be touched, you know, but you also have to have that. The legal aspects of that.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
I mean, it's such a tricky area right now. But it is a medication that is, I mean, you saw the results of the MAPS study. And I'm not sure what the FDA committee was thinking.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
The FDA committee said they couldn't believe that there was this lack of side effects with it. They couldn't believe that it was this effective overall. I mean, it was just like it met the perfect outcome and they just refused to believe that that was possible without some kind of manipulation of the data.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Well, thank you for that beautiful introduction. I mean, I'm used to people running through credentials and all of that, but I love that. That was perfect.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
The Tuesday blues day.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, that's been pretty much debunked by a lot of the researchers because prior to allowing it in research, the researchers had to rely on recreational users to get their data. Okay. And a lot of it was this occurs because people are using MDMA out partying and They're drinking with it. They're taking other drugs with it. They're not eating, not hydrating or overhydrating.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And because they're partying with it, they don't sleep well the night before or the day after. And that's the perfect formula for having the symptoms of the neurotransmitter deficit.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And when they actually looked at people who did it the right way with just sticking with the one drug, eating while they're taking it, which is hard to do because it's an appetite suppressant, but making themselves eat something and getting a good night's sleep especially that people didn't have to take supplements or anything like that, that they were just fine.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, we had a female executive. She was with a Fortune 500 company. And she was noticing that her edge was dropping off. She was around, I think, 52 years old. She had started losing her hormones, but she wasn't really being symptomatic. So her doctor said, you know, we're not going to put you on hormones if you're
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
you're not having any symptoms, that's going to increase your risk of breast cancer. and all of this. And this is one of the failures of evidence-based medicine. Evidence-based medicine has been valuable, but it's also reductionistic. And you can't treat a human in a reductionistic way because we're a complex adaptive system.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And the Women's Health Initiative truly set women's health back for the last 20 years by taking hormones away from women. And it resulted in there's going to be increase in dementia rates, quality of life just deteriorated over those 20 years that women were denied the hormones.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
This was based on evidence-based medicine of the Women's Health Initiative and the sensational headlines that it created. Physicians were all buying into evidence-based medicine. That was the new medicine, you know, have the evidence of it. But it's reductionistic in the fact that it groups everybody into the population. And, you know, we saw this happen with the Women's Health Initiative.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
We saw this happen with the low-fat craze of the 80s and 90s where everything was healthy as long as it didn't have fat. I mean, you know, sugar corn pops got the heart healthy label on it because it didn't have fat in it. And that resulted in a lot of metabolic disorders and cardiovascular disease because of that. But that was our evidence-based medicine approach.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
We try to delve into all of the leading edge types of therapies that are out there, even the ones... You have your evidence-based stuff, but you have stuff that you know you've seen work. Anecdotally, there's common sense behind it, and yet there's not the science to support it.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
The statin issues, even the opioid epidemic where pain became that symptom that had to be addressed and treated. rather than looking at individuals from an N of 1 basis. I mean, you can use the evidence-based medicine to guide what you look at with the individual, but you've got to look at the individual there.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
So this woman, instead of getting hormones, she was placed on a little bit of Adderall to help with her brain fog that she was having. And then it wasn't quite enough. So they added a little bit more Adderall. Then she couldn't sleep. So they put her on some benzodiazepines to help her sleep. And this crazy ups and downs threw her into some depression.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
They put her on SSRIs, which those are the hardest to get people off of. So when she came to us, she was looking at just retiring because she could not function anymore. And what we did is we set her on a gradual waning protocol for the polypharmacy that was – pharmacy to treat the pharmacy side effects of the other pharmaceuticals and got her on hormones.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And it took us about six months to finally wean the last of the SSRI off of her and the benzodiazepines. And during that time, her hormones were coming up. We were working with her lifestyle, her exercise, relationship aspects with her family, relationships at work, her work environment. And by the end of the six months, she was at the top of her game again. And she actually got a promotion.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
It was beautiful to see the transition that happened. But we weren't taking a pharmaceutical approach. Well, with the hormones, we were using hormones, but they were bioidentical hormones and And overall, it just really turned her life around.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Well, system science. System science really started coming on in the early 90s, even though I think in the psychological world with IFS, it was actually in the 1980s that it was being recognized. Then in the 90s, systems biology, systems science, this all started to pick up.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
But we also didn't have the ability to... I mean, in systems, looking at relationships and massive amounts of data on an N of 1 basis is daunting for the human brain to do. So you can dabble in it and computers can only hold so much data, but their ability to see these things and predict is limited.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
AI now is a whole different story, especially with agentic models of AI and knowledge graph systems that you can develop where the agents can communicate with each other and interact with each other. And you can create agents to do each individual thing, but then interact with one another. So agentic models in AI have opened a whole new world for systems approaches.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
I think a lot of it is that we just don't have the available testing that can measure the responses that you get from it. I mean, just... A lot of stuff with like yoga and meditation. I mean, for years, everybody knew it worked. But how do you quantify that? And then comes along epigenetics.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
A lot of people ask me, you know, is AI going to replace physicians? And the answer is yes, if physicians don't change their mindset a little bit, because the majority of physicians using AI use them as research assistants. They're not interacting with the AI. And this is where, you know. We don't want to give up all of our agency to the AI.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
you can't treat a human in a reductionistic way because we're a complex adaptive system and psychedelic experience helped to open up possibilities for me because i started looking at things and i was saying well what if instead of like oh there is no proof of that i've seen some stuff that has been very consistent
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
We don't want to give up all the decision making because there are aspects of the human, just empathy, intuition, all of that, which you're not going to get from the AI. When AI is used in that way, it's going to change the landscape dramatically. I use AI throughout my day in treating my clients, just asking it the questions. Am I missing something here?
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Based on these symptoms and these labs, is there something that I could potentially be missing that's interconnected in this? And it'll find these things for me. So being able to interact with the AI, I think, is the future of medicine.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, the psychedelics have a big impact on the default mode network. I mean, when you look at brain mapping of people on psychedelics, there are massive amounts of interconnections being made. So the brain's communicating with areas that it normally doesn't communicate with, and it's looking for new pathways. Someone once described this, and I thought it was the best explanation.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
I'm sorry, I can't give them credit for it, but... They said the default mode network is where patterns are created to kind of conserve brain power. We use a lot of brain power on a daily basis. We're faced with massive amounts of decisions. But the default mode network is this steady flow of a routine that we have.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
So the brain says, I don't have to do much thinking power on this because this connects with this, this connects with this, and this connects with this. And imagine it like a steadily flowing riverbed. And You have all these rocks in the base of the riverbed and the water flows and it's flowing at the same rate. So you get the same eddies, the same whirlpools and the same flow patterns.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And then we have scientific evidence that says, oh, okay, yes, we do have the scientific evidence that it works. And I think a lot of the modalities that we look into are the ones that are the meditation of 20 years ago prior to that. So we'll do a lot of work with that. We work with a lot of IRBs, so Institutional Review Board studies that are early access to IRBs.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And so, you know, if I'm doing this on a daily basis, it becomes a routine. I don't have to think about doing it anymore. you have patterns of like depression and anxiety that can become a pattern in the default mode network as well.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And it gets locked in there. That's why the medications aren't that effective with it. But what happens is when we take like a tryptamine, like psychedelics, or even MDMA will slightly disrupt this.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Ketamine does a really good job of it, but it will temporarily shake up that riverbed and the rocks get dislodged and they're trying to fall back in place, but the brain all of a sudden has this option to look at alternatives. to that pattern. Is this the best pattern? Is this working for me? And those rocks settle back in.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Some of them are going to go back into their same positions, but others are going to say, wait a second. Maybe this is a better way to look at things. And this is what we see. I mean, these default mode patterns that people have, they suddenly change after a psychedelic experience.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, and Nicole Dolan did a lot of work with MDMA on this where she found – so we have this social reward window development. And this comes online I think around age nine and then kind of shuts down in the late teens, early 20s. So we're basically learning our social – that are going to kind of lock in on us. And that window of plasticity closes down.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And what she was finding is that a single dose of MDMA reopens that social reward window for up to two weeks where you have the neuroplasticity reprogram that social reward system.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, we spend a lot of time in the follow-up sessions for integration. So we'll do the immediate integration work. We'll do... The day after and then generally a week after assess how they're progressing and decide whether any more sessions need to be done.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, it's a great new opportunity for a lot of people.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
I became disenchanted when I first got into medical school because I used to love my pediatrician. He was great because when I would go, he would always ask me about the sports I was playing and he would give me guidance on how I could be better. At doing these things, you know, I didn't care about it. I didn't mind about the shots or anything because he was such a cool guy.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And so I had this impression that this was what medicine was, making a person better at something. I didn't have any medical people in my family. So from third grade on, that was all I wanted to be was a doctor. Yeah. And I got into medical school and it was all about disease and pharmacology to me. And I was like, well, you know, what about like nutrition and exercise?
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And there just wasn't much of it. And then I had to decide what I was going to do. And I didn't want to do family medicine or internal medicine because I saw it as, oh, it's a stepwise postponement of death. I mean, you just accumulate diagnosis and medications over time until you die. And that didn't resonate with me.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Different forms of testing, different forms of intervention that we feel might be promising for moving forward. And so we'd like to really stay on that leading edge of the new and exciting therapies that are out there.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
I ended up choosing to go the route of surgery just because I could take someone who had a quality of life that suddenly dropped for some reason. I could intervene and at least bring them back up to baseline. And that was something that I enjoyed doing. I loved working with my hands, and there was some reward with it of bringing people back to baseline.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And then I discovered age management medicine. This was about six years into my career. Private practice of surgery. And it was about optimizing the human system. I was like, wow, this is a new concept for me. They were using hormones and nutrition and exercise. I thought that's really cool. So I started doing that as a hobby on the side just because I enjoyed it.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And over the next five years, I was fully convinced that it was the way to go. And we had added stress and genetics. And I started seeing the complexity of the human system. And I was like, this is the problem. We've been looking at it like a... in a reductionistic way in the human system is complex. Epigenetics opened that up to me and we started teaching people epigenetics.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
I walked away from surgery in the end of 2009 and said, this is what I want to do. And so I dedicated myself full-time to this and I've been learning systems biology, systems health, Over these years, and I am fully convinced that this is the new paradigm of health. We actually started that way, though. I mean, ancient medicine, you know, you look back at Ayurvedic medicine, and you look back at
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
traditional Chinese medicine. It was all about balance and harmony in the system. It wasn't about the parts and pieces. It was truly the harmony. And even the early Greek stuff was about the balance and harmony of the four humors. And then along comes the later Greek period where they started getting into the parts, breaking things down to understand them based on the parts of that.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And then Descartes and Cartesian dualism really started to solidify. And then you had the germ theory. And then you had the Fleckner Report. And I mean, we just solidified reductionism as this is the way everything works and how it should be done. And we lost that initial understanding of the harmony and balance of the system.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And now systems medicine, systems health has, I mean, this evolution is like a spiral. We keep coming back around to it. And so now we're coming back around to the harmony of the system. I mean, just think of something like inflammation in the body. Everybody looks at it as a bad thing. It's the body trying to balance. It's the body trying to get back into harmony.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And we take anti-inflammatories to treat it, but we're treating the response of the body to get us back. Understanding the human system in this way really has changed the way that we look at patients and the way that we treat them. And it's made a dramatic difference in the outcomes we see.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Like we've been doing a lot of apheresis, which is the removal of a liter of plasma.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Oh, for sure.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Oh, I mean, we work with a lot of... executives and and high achievers i mean these are these people who have built their kingdoms basically a lot of entrepreneurs that have exited companies and and suddenly they have lost meaning and purpose in life you know they they built this for the last 20 years and now Now what?
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
So a large portion of our clients, that's one thing that they don't realize is missing, but it's a piece that is impacting them across all different categories of health. And so we help them to identify meaning and purpose in life. We work with belief systems and expose them to various belief systems that may resonate with them, give them some perspectives. It's an important process.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
area to work with i mean even even in in designing interventions for people understanding and respecting their belief systems is so important and it's ignored in a lot of the medical community yeah what would it look like to design an intervention for them We get a detailed questionnaire on spirituality.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
So we've developed one that it's a 30-question questionnaire that asks them about their meaning in their relationship, their purpose in life. Do they feel in touch with a higher power? Just to get an idea of where they are in five different categories of spirituality that we have.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And that is so illuminating in people because you're like, wow, I really thought that this person was really in a solid place with this, but they're obviously not really connecting well with that aspect of their life.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, I mean, it's like a rainforest. In a rainforest, you can't treat that in a reductionistic way like we repair a car. In a car, we know what each individual part is responsible for, and we can predict what a failure in this one part creates in the outcome of the overall car. In the rainforest, I mean, it is a complex ecosystem that relies on feedback loops and emergent properties.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And the human system is the same way. Looking at the human system as a whole allows us to look at the human ecosystem. Say, you know, what are these feedback loops? What are the feed-forward loops? What are the interconnections that are being made between these systems that create the outcome? Instead of going, oh, okay... They have high blood sugars.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, I mean, the plasma is carrying a bunch of proteins, exosomes, microRNAs, but they can also be carrying a lot of inflammatory things. This is like the email system of the body. So it's sending out all of these messages to inform other cells of what is happening in the environment. And basically, we live in a fairly toxic environment.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
They eat a poor diet, so we need to change their diet and put them on an insulin-lowering drug. Well, what if their socioeconomic status makes it so that they can only afford these foods? What if they just have a lifestyle that they're following that they think is healthy and And we can educate them on these changes that can be made.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
What if they don't have access to safe nature space and they can't get out and walk for the day? I mean we've got to look at all these things that can intervene before the medications and make it work for them.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
The approach that I have taken with that, that really changed my world, I was the atheist scientist. I mean, that was me. Psychedelic experience helped to open up possibilities for me. Because I started looking at things and I was saying, well, what if? Instead of like, oh, there is no proof of that. And the other thing was, okay, if that were true, how could we prove it?
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And so I started looking at things from a whole different perspective of, okay, what if this is something that is out there? I mean, you know, the fact that we know nothing. We just need to accept that and be comfortable with uncertainty. That's the key. And just say, wow, maybe there's something to this. I mean, there's an electromagnetic spectrum out there that is massive.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
that we have no idea what's going on in it. We have no idea if there's some people that have special perceptions of it. And you can say, well, they can't prove it, but can't they? I mean, I've seen some stuff that has been very consistent. But we don't have the measuring tools because we don't know what frequency it is or what part of the electromagnetic spectrum is occurring.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
But you hear about these things. And so you say, well, what if? It's just like placebo effect. People talk about that like it's just placebo effect. And I'm like, are you kidding me? That's the coolest thing that I have seen in so long. I mean, what is the magic of the placebo effect that it's so effective?
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah. I mean, I was trained to be closed minded for sure.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
It's getting comfortable with uncertainty, I think is truly the best way to put it. Accepting the fact that there's nothing we know for sure, and even reality itself is not real. But for me, that getting comfortable with uncertainty was the hardest part. I mean, I was just like, oh, but I am certain about this. And then I realized I'm not certain about anything.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
So it made a lot of stress responses in there. Session of apheresis removes about 40% of that plasma volume. And then we replace it with saline and albumin. And so that albumin has a bunch of clean binding sites on it to bind up toxins and other things. Items in the blood. And so it cleanses the blood essentially. We're involved in a study that's looking at it with aging.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And so I can be comfortable with being uncertain, but that also opens up possibilities for everything when you're like that. I mean, when you think about a complex adaptive system, it thrives on the edge of chaos. I mean, you think about the measures we use like heart rate variability. What is heart rate variability? It's basically chaos. It's on the edge of chaos.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
It's the interval between heartbeats, that timing that is just so different. And the wider that gets, the healthier the system is. They've also proven that in breath rate variability and gait rate variability that the healthiest systems have the greatest variability.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And so, wow, a healthy complex adaptive system thrives on the edge of chaos, not being metronomic and regular, which is what most people try to focus on. And so that was mind-blowing to me.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
My favorite philosopher was Nietzsche. And in his book, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he was talking about man was given two options. He could be the Ubermensch, where he would experience the highest of highs, but also experience the lowest of lows going through life. Or he could make the choice to be what they call the last man, which was choosing the greatest comfort with the least pain.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And he was so disappointed that everybody chose to be the last man. When he saw the Ubermensch as this person that really lived life, that life of excellence, because, you know, you can't experience those highest highs if you don't experience the lowest lows. And that full spectrum human experience is what makes life grand.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, I mean, some of the stuff we talked about this weekend in relationships. I mean, that is something that is not talked about And we were with couples that have the most spectacular relationships. I mean, truly transcendent relationships with their partners. And if that could be taught and bottled, I mean, wow, that would change the world.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, and the co-creative couple. I mean, we see that in you guys. We have it as well. And that is such an exponential transformer in life. And not enough couples are entering that co-creative dance. Yeah.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
We're working with some stuff with people that have Lyme, people that have long COVID. And we're seeing anecdotally really good responses from it. We can't say anything from a scientific standpoint quite yet because we don't have enough people involved to do that, but that's what part of this study is determining.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
I love that.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And we wouldn't proclaim. I mean, that was important for us because we believe in the... the ultimate reality of we do love eternally. But change happens and, you know, a commitment is worth the words and that's about it as we've seen in most of the commitments that are made on a daily basis throughout the world. So, you know, we just, we want to show through actions our commitment in each moment.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
There have been some studies out of Stanford that showed positive effects on aging, cognitive decline in older people, but in some of the younger people we're also seeing, especially with long COVID, we're seeing really impressive results. That's one area we're also involved in a study that's using young plasma to replace the plasma that we remove.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
No formula.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Most of my stuff is LinkedIn and a little bit of Instagram. And our clinic is the Appear On Center here in Austin. And we also have a nationwide tele-wellness program that is all about optimization called Clotho Wellness.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Wonderful.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
This is really exciting because young plasma is plasma from donors that are between 18 and 24 years old. And this is where... Our human system is at its peak physiologic optimal performance at that age. That's our peak reproductive age. And so all of the things circulating in that plasma is really pro-life-giving at that point.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
So we're taking older individuals, especially individuals with early dementia, and And we're replacing their plasma with this young plasma. We take off 40% and we give them one, two, or three liters of this young plasma. I mean, it's very impressive. And again, we can't say anything about it because it's a study in progress. And I just say anecdotally, it's pretty impressive right now.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
But we don't have the measuring tools because we don't know what frequency it is or what part of the electromagnetic spectrum is occurring. But you hear about these things. And so you say, well, what if? It's just like placebo effect. People talk about that like it's just placebo effect. And I'm like, are you kidding me? That's the coolest thing that I have seen in so long.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Right. We do ketamine therapies in the clinic. Not so much from the psychotherapeutic standpoint. Most of our ketamine therapies are... designed around where people are waking up, and they're going through some existential crises. You know, what's it all mean? Why am I here? Is their purpose to any of this? And we can help guide them through that process with the ketamine therapies.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And that's been really rewarding.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
So we take a systems-based approach and that has been the key differentiator for us in the outcomes that we see. We look at the human organism as a whole and not as these individual puzzle pieces that we have to put together. You know, the people that are experts in the heart, people that are experts in the liver, and that's what they focus on.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
But that's not the way the human system actually exists. We are a whole system. And so when we approach things, we want to assess where the whole system is in this moment in time. So we collect as much data as we can on an individual basis. We're getting extensive amounts of blood work. We're getting QEEG brain maps. We're getting psychophysiologic stress profiles.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
So we see how their autonomic nervous system responds to five different stressors and does it return to baseline. Full-body MRIs, coronary CT angiograms, I mean, P300s on each individual. microbiome, full genome. I mean, I could go on and on with this, but it's a massive amount of data points. And we look at how all of these interact to create the wholeness of the system.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
It's just like, you know, if you have somebody come in and they're early insulin resistance, they've got a little bit of high blood pressure, great deal of stress in their job, the traditional treatment is, okay, let's put them on a medication that lowers their glycemic response, let's put them on a blood pressure medication,
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
When you look at it and you say, okay, well, this is a business executive that's working 50 hours a week, 60 hours a week, catching flights to different time zones at regular intervals, eating –
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
eating fast food when they can get it, getting stimulants like caffeine and all this, staying up late, going out to social dinners and drinking, giving them medication to lower glycemic response and the blood pressure medication.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah, it's probably not going to do much there. So what we have to look at is, you know, what's their motivations?
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
you know why are they coming in for this how can we you know we could give them a list of a diet this is the diet you should eat okay well how are they going to do that when they're traveling like this and so you've got to look at all of these factors that will drive them to make the changes that they want to make but feel like they're incapable of doing because of the requirements of life
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
I mean, what is the magic of the placebo effect that it's so effective? I mean, when you look at brain mapping of people on psychedelics, there are massive amounts of interconnections being made. So the brain is communicating with areas that it normally doesn't communicate with. And it's looking for new pathways.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
With the ketamine.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Yeah. I mean, that's the only legal one that's available right now.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
I know there are some people here in town that are working with MDMA therapies, which I mean, I can't wait for MDMA therapies to become legal.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
We do an extensive intake in basically six domains of the human system. So we look at the physical or physiologic domain. That's the blood work, the microbiome, the genetics, the EEG of the brain. We then look at the psychological realm. I guess the EEG kind of crosses over into the two. A lot of questionnaires like quality of life inventory, cognitive function testing.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
We'll look at the social domain. What is their social connections like? What is their family situation? What is their work situation? We look at their environment, not only their home environment, but but their work environment. I mean, work environments are some of the worst environments to be in. We look at their exposure to things like how much plastic do they use? Are they using things like
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
black plastic cooking utensils i mean some of the most toxic uh fire retardants are in those because the black plastic is made from recycled electronic uh electronics oh wow yeah so that was a more recent study that was quite impressive um you know what kind of water are they drinking um What's their home environment like?
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Just getting environmental monitors for the home has been hugely valuable for a lot of clients. Then we look at spirituality. And when we talk spirituality, everybody has their own idea of what spirituality is. For us, it's their beliefs, their ideas around meaning and purpose. That's really important. I mean, I think I saw a study that said that
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
Only about 30% of people actually have a true understanding of what their meaning and purpose in life is. And that other 70% are so prone to depression and anxiety that it's becoming a major health metric.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
And then the last domain, energy domain, that's the one that kind of gets into the unknowns. But if you look at the science right now, I mean... Energy domain, we're measuring energies of the body all the time. You know, we get EKGs of the heart. We get EEGs of the brain. I mean, we're measuring frequencies in the body.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
The ancient wisdom of things like chi and prana, all of these, the kundalini movements, these are really important.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
and they do have an impact that we have seen and working with these energy aspects of the body the flow of energy is crucial i believe the science side of it i mean just recently there's been a lot of work done on what's called the electrum michael levin out of columbia university is mapping a lot of the electrum and
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
I think a lot of people have seen that electrical spark that occurs when a sperm fertilizes an egg. But they're also identifying that there is a coordinated electrical sparks that guide embryogenesis. So guiding how this egg starts to differentiate into different organ systems. And they're mapping the energy that's occurring with that. The other thing is like limb regeneration in various animals.
Healing + Human Potential
The Future of Holistic Healing: Age Rejuvenation, Psychedelics + AI w/ Dr. Dan Stickler | EP 64
They're seeing that it's like there is an electrical map of that limb that's being followed. So I think we're starting to see that these measurements are coming online. And I think it's exciting to find out what this actually shows.