Dr. Darshan Shah
Appearances
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
This is directly removing inflammatory biomarkers from your bloodstream and directly reducing inflammation. You can see it, you can measure it. And so from there, if we provide your organs, the milieu in which to thrive and you remove the inflammation, all your organs are going to get better, right? And so therefore you're going to avoid chronic disease and reverse chronic disease as well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
That's incredible.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Absolutely. So let's take the story way back to just even the ancient Romans, you know, they were using a technology that they called bloodletting, right? Because they believed a lot of the bad stuff that causes some disease lives in the blood and bloodletting, removing some of this blood would minimize some of the symptoms of disease.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And as we all know, this didn't really work or pan out because there's other things in blood that you really, really need. Exactly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Leeches are having a comeback.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
It does. We use leeches a lot in surgery, actually. It's a venous congestion and things. So I'm very familiar with leeches. But we're not talking leeches.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
So fast forward, apheresis was a technology that was developed to treat a disease called Waldenstrom's disease, where you have immune complexes that make the blood too thick, and that thickening of the blood causes blockages in your blood vessels, and people would die from this traditionally.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And then some very smart scientists in IBM, I think, figured out how to actually separate the plasma from the blood cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
So plasma is the fluid portion of your blood. It's 45% of your blood. And if you've ever seen someone do PRP, which is take some blood in a test tube and they put in a centrifuge and they spin it down, the blood will separate to a white layer and the top of the test tube and a red layer in the bottom. The red layer is your red blood cells and the white layer is your plasma.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
plasma on top and there's like a little.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
So the soup is where all of the... In other words, what's in the plasma? Yeah, exactly. What's in the plasma, right? So this is where all your cells are living, and this is what they're exposed to on a day-to-day basis. It's the growth factors, it is cell signaling molecules, it's nutrients, it's a lot of the factors of your immune system live in this soup.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
So it's basically where all the signaling in your body kind of lives inside of this plasma. And what's good about it is that it carries these signals throughout your entire body. So if you have something going on in your gut, your brain can hear about it. If you have something going on in your heart, your gut hears about it.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. One of the functions it has is being a communication superhighway for your entire body.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, right, right, exactly. So let's take it back a little bit more also to the convoys with the parabiosis experiment. I think that's interesting to talk about where they hook up a young mouse to an old mouse. And they found that the old mouse got younger and the young mouse got older.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And so for a decade, people were looking for like, what is the substance in the young mouse that makes the old mouse younger? And so they did all these studies and substances like GDF11, TNF, and nothing really panned out. And then 10 years later, There's a story. I think it's a true story because I hear it all the time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Someone at a conference went up to ask a question to the scientist doing all the research on this, and they kind of knocked on the microphone and they said, you know, I think you guys are looking at the wrong mouse. It's not what's in the old mouse. It's not what's in the young mouse making the old mouse younger. It's the opposite. It's what you're taking out of the old mouse.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
So it turns out in our plasma is also where all the cytokines and all the signaling molecules that lead to inflammation accumulate, right? It turns out that's where all of the toxins that we're exposed to also accumulate. It turns out where senescent cells, the SASP, the negative products that senescent cells secrete also live in our plasma.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. So if you look at all the root causes of aging, most of the molecules that signal the root causes of aging live in our plasma, from inflammation to toxin buildup to senescent cells, all of that
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly, exactly. So it goes to reason from there that if this is all living in your plasma and your body is unable to eliminate this with its own elimination mechanisms, what if we just remove the plasma? And so some very smart people started doing experiments using a technology that's been in hospitals for literally five or six decades. It's FDA approved. We've been using it, like you said.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, right. We use it a lot. And, like, even for, like, drug overdoses, because, you know, that lives in your plasma, too. And it works. It's FDA-approved. It's super safe. We've been using it forever. And, you know, this is highlights. There's so much incredible technology locked up in the sick care system that if we just bring it back 30, 40 years, like, you could eliminate chronic disease.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
This is one of those technologies.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
The treatment, like you've experienced it, is super comfortable. You just basically sit there with an IV in your arm, and your blood is removed like about 200 cc's at a time, so it's a small volume, put through this giant centrifuge. The plasma is separated from the red blood cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Red blood cells go back into you through the same IV or a different IV, and then you get a big bag of plasma that's basically thrown away. And inside of that, we've basically eliminated one entire plasma volume of all of these negative factors that have been built up over time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
It's the same things that you measure when you do a blood test. With the function health blood test, you get a lot of- Biomarkers. Biomarkers and blood results basically back. And you're basically measuring those whenever you do a blood test. It's the same stuff, but you're just totally removing it and you're throwing it away, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And so I think people haven't really looked exactly like at the discarded plasma. People are looking at it right now.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. And basically, it's all being removed.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And so we've actually done a lot of patients now, and we've measured their total toxicity levels in their urine, all the toxins. We measure things like mycotoxins. We measure exposure to heavy metals. We're measuring exposure to even like microplastics and all of these toxins. And we see significant reductions in before and after treatment toxin levels. So we know toxins are in the plasma.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And when you remove them, your body gets a chance to catch up, right? Now it's able to say, whew, I've lost a lot of the stuff I'm working overtime to remove, and it gets a chance to clean up. And like you said, it's like an oil change for the body. For all of us that have had cars forever, we know that if you don't do an oil change every 3,000 to 5,000 miles, your car's not going to run as well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Well, your body's the exact same way.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Absolutely.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. You know, I can tell you a couple of stories of patients that I've seen with COVID. I had one guy that was coming to us with tinnitus in his ear and he was at his wits end. And as you and I both know, you know, some people, when they suffer with tinnitus, depending on how severe it is, it can be severely, yeah, the ringing in the ears, severely, even just mentally debilitating.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
I mean, people end up, you know, just at home, not able to do anything with this. And so we had a patient.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
So I wasn't going to say it, but yeah, you're right. Absolutely. There is a suicide rate associated with tinnitus that is not, you know, it's more than the normal population for sure. And so we had a patient with this and he was suffering with it for about a year, two treatments and his tinnitus went away.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And so he's still in the treatment process right now. It remains to be seen. Was this post-COVID or was this? This is long COVID.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Post-COVID, long COVID symptom, tinnitus, right? Yeah. And so we're still in the treatment process. We're going to see how long it stays away. We're trying to expand between plasma exchanges for him. I'll tell you a story about me.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
So when I had COVID, for about six months after having COVID and getting it treated, my heart rate variability was down in the dumps, which happens to a lot of people with long COVID. But my heart rate consistently elevated all night long.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Heart rate variability really down. And my regular resting heart rate was very elevated. And then I started doing plasma exchange just to test it on myself and have the nurses practice on me, really. And complete change around. And most people will see their heart rate variability improve. And especially if you have long COVID, if you're suffering with heart rate elevation, you'll see that improve.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
This is incredible. And like with the heart rate variability that you had mentioned earlier, COVID makes antibodies to your autonomic nervous system. That's right. If you have antibodies to your autonomic nervous system, your heart rate can't be variable.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And so this is the mechanism by how this stuff works. And I think there's always a tendency when we talk about novel therapies like this to think that it's woo-woo and it's not really proven. But what I can say about... plasma exchange is it really goes back to the fundamentals of medicine, right? Like we know why people get into a disease state.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
It's inflammation is one of the root causes of disease. This is directly removing inflammatory biomarkers from your bloodstream and directly reducing inflammation. You can see it, you can measure it. And so from there, if we provide your organs, the milieu in which to thrive and you remove the inflammation, all your organs are going to get better, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And so therefore, you're going to avoid chronic disease and reverse chronic disease as well. And we see that with Alzheimer's too.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, I can see it in the bag of plasma that we get. You can see how cloudy it is dependent on the number of things floating around in there, right? And especially if they have high lipid levels too. It gets really foamy. You can see that in the plasma as well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, and this is where I'm just so mind-blown at how approaching a problem differently can make such a tremendous difference. And we know Alzheimer's, more and more of us are suffering from Alzheimer's. There's research out there showing that up to a third of us will suffer from Alzheimer's in the next few decades. And it's just too high of a number.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, exactly. It's just mind-blowing. And so the way it works, well, we don't really know how it works. I think there's multiple different ways this is working. Number one is by reducing the baseline level of inflammation. Number two is by reducing the overall toxic burden to our brain. Number three is by actually removing some of these malformed proteins. So we can detect the amyloid protein.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
We can detect a tau protein in our blood now. There's actually blood tests that use a detector.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Absolutely, and we're doing the study right now, measuring these before and after plasmapheresis, and I can tell you from my own personal experience measuring my markers, I have almost 80% reduction in the post markers. Now, that's biomarker change.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
There's also studies that have been done by Dr. Kiproff up in San Francisco where he showed a 61% reduction in the rate of acceleration of Alzheimer's symptoms in Alzheimer's patients. He's showing the actual clinical relevance, and we're seeing the biomarker relevance for using plasma exchange to treat Alzheimer's disease.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And I think that there still needs to be a lot more science done around this, but it's just mind-blowing to have a treatment that can cause this much of a reduction of symptoms without having to give a drug that could potentially have horrible side effects. Like some of the Alzheimer's drugs, you get brain bleeding, right? And this has almost zero side effects.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly, it's a needle poke.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, right. So, you know, I love what Function Health is doing with measuring LP little a. Like, I can't tell you the number of patients I see that still go to their primary doctors and have never had an LP little a done before. And they're wondering why they have so much heart disease.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
When up to 15 to 20% of people have the genetic malformation that causes LP little a. And LP little a, just for the listeners to know, is a particularly aggressive form of cholesterol that causes... plaques in your arteries, but also can cause deposition of calcium on your blood valves. It can cause plaques in your arteries going to your brain. It's really dangerous.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
It can cause heart attacks quite easily and strokes quite easily as well, and valve damage. And so if you have LP little a, you want to get it treated. Guess how you treat it? There's no treatment right now. There's no drug. Lifestyle changes, actually, this is resistant to lifestyle changes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, natokinase I think is good.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
It's not easy, right? People struggle with it. So we have two or three patients that we're treating with LP little a. Just like the toxins and the other things that we're talking about, all cholesterol also lives in your plasma, including the LP little a particles. And so this is removed in that bag of plasma that we're throwing away.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And so what we're finding in these two particular patients is that their LP little a actually stays close to normal levels for about six weeks after a plasma exchange. And so look, I mean, I think it's one of those therapies that as it becomes more ubiquitous, more people can use it for control of LP little a until we find a therapeutic that works.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
There's a lot of research being done for therapeutics that works, but this is a great way to temporary control.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
So I'll tell you what the research shows, and I'll tell you what I think. So the research that Dr. Kiprov did on Alzheimer's patients was a once-a-month treatment. He did that six treatments in a row for six months and measured various markers of symptoms before and after using the MOCA score.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And use other tools as well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Give a patient a mocha and see how they like it. So anyhow, he did it once a month for six treatments. Now, that worked for Alzheimer's. What we're seeing in our clinic is probably about the same once every four to six weeks. We're tracking biomarkers, so we're seeing biomarkers change right after the treatment, and change is lasting for six weeks.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And then some patients, not all patients, the biomarkers start reverting, okay? And a lot of this has to do with each individual patient's lifestyle. It's the lifestyle, their level of exposure to things like ultra-processed food, lack of sleep, inflammatory lifestyles, And so it really goes patient to patient. And so what I'm a huge advocate of is this whole concept of end of one, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
I don't think there's one particular protocol that applies to everybody. Every patient's an individual biology and psychology, and we need to custom tailor the protocol for each individual patient. So that's kind of where I end up with it. There's a lot of research being done for Alzheimer's and for age-related diseases as well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Well, I don't think it's monthly for everybody. I think that- Because I'm way behind if that's the case. Age-related, I would say, is probably going to end up being quarterly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
But once again, it needs to be customized to you, right? So I think for you, if we were to measure your biomarkers, because you live an incredibly healthy lifestyle, of course.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
My guess would be for you is once every four to six months, actually. And so we just have to see where your biomarkers are. With our function labs, you can tell me when you're ready.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
We do know. It's all the biomarkers that we're testing, like with Function Health, for example, for your biomarker panel. And it depends on what you're targeting, okay? So For example, I have a patient with extremely high HSCRP and a lot of it is due to gut health issues, right? And so one plasmapheresis and her HSCRP went from nine to two. So for her, we're tracking HSCRP.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
I have another patient that we're tracking mercury levels. This person has been struggling with mercury toxicity for literally a decade, has not found anything to get it better.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Even chelation. Chelation did not work. Ebo treatments did not work. All kinds of alternative therapies.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Ozone therapy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes, we also do ozone as well. So for her, we're tracking toxin levels, okay? And so like the LP little a patient I told you about, we're tracking LP little a levels. What's really incredible about this technology is it addresses so many different factors of poor health and also aging. Some of the research is being done around tracking markers of senescent cells for aging. Zombie cells.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Zombie cells, right, exactly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly, yep. We're also tracking mitochondrial health now as well. We just found some new panels to track mitochondrial health So we'll be tracking that. For people that are experiencing mild cognitive impairment or symptoms of Alzheimer's or even Parkinson's, we're measuring the beta-tau protein and other biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease, and we're tracking those, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Dr. Hyman, I can't tell you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Mark, I have tremendous respect for you because I told you this story before. You kind of set off my journey into this new field of medicine. I started my career in Western medicine. And when I heard you speak, I think it's been over 12 years now I heard you speak for the first time. You inspired my entire new journey, so it's an honor to be here.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
P-tau and beta-amyloid, sorry. Yes, exactly. And so we're tracking those. We're tracking... Based on what we're going after, we're tracking those biomarkers individually.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
It's customized.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. So, you know, when I worked at the Mayo Clinic, we had literally, I would say, I think we had like three dozen plasma freezes machines in the entire Mayo system. That's a lot of plasma freezes machines sitting there doing nothing, right? We also had 10 hyperbaric chambers sitting there doing nothing. a lot of the times too. And it's like, why is this stuff just sitting here?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
This can be used for aging-related diseases and preventing disease. And so look, these machines, they're everywhere, but they're not being used outside the Western medicine system. And even if you ask a hospital to let you do plasma freezes, they wouldn't even know where to start because they don't know how to build the insurance for it. And so I think it's really important.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
What we're trying to do at NextHealth is all of our locations will have a plasma freezes machine. So anyone can come in and do it basically with an appointment with one of our doctors. And I think more and more centers are going to start doing this once.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes. And, you know, you've had it done before. You know it's very comfortable. You know it's very safe. You know, there's one more thing we should probably talk about with plasmaphrasis. Yeah. That's the use of albumin.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
It's about 45% of your blood is plasma.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Well, and we also replenish all your micronutrients as well. So what we're doing is taking out the bad stuff, putting back in all the good stuff.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes, this is an upgrade.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
IV nutrients and nicotinamide riboside we put back in you as well, which your cells need. We're doing also glutathione. We're doing albumin. And some patients will use immune globulin as well, IVIG.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, exactly. So, you know, you and I have used albumin in the hospital since the beginning of residency training, right? So albumin is not like a novel compound. We've had it forever.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Low protein, even like trauma situations where people have lost a lot of blood and you just like get them volume right away. That's why I used it a lot as well. So albumin is basically a protein. It's a highly purified protein that our bodies normally make. And when it lives in the plasma...
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And so when you remove the plasma, you have to replace albumin because your body has what's called an oncotic pressure it needs to maintain. It needs to have protein in the blood so that the fluid doesn't leave your blood vessels and go into all your tissues. And that's why you have that protein there.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And so you have to replace it, but there's a big side benefit to this because albumin is one of the most stickiest proteins out there. In our biology. And what it does is it goes throughout your body, sticking to toxins, malformed proteins, sticking to dead cell, dead cellular material.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And this is what actually brings all these materials from your tissues to your bloodstream so that your kidneys and your liver can eliminate it. And so by replacing fresh new albumin that doesn't have anything bound to it, now you have all these binding sites available for your body to further eliminate these toxins from your tissues.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. So here's why it's expensive right now is albumin is expensive because there's just not enough of it out there right now. And so the other big problem with the therapy is it's hard to get the machines. The machines are super expensive and the people that run it need to be highly specialized as well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. It takes a lot of training. So all of these problems are solved with scale, right? The more machines that are out there, the more people that get trained, and the more of the albumin product that's available, the lower that drives the price. And that's exactly what we're working on at NextHealth. We are, you know, we're expanding NextHealth to all the states and also around the world.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And each location, like my imperative is to have a plasma free system machine at every location, and we're going to drive down the price as quickly as we can. Because I feel like it's probably going to be a mainstay of treatment for avoiding chronic disease and also reversing chronic disease. And I want to make it available to as many people as possible.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And then we want to do the studies that show the insurance company how this saves lives and saves them money as well. And once we show them this is what you need to be doing,
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Right, exactly. And, you know, I want to just double click on that because it's so important. You should never sit in a plasma freezes chair if you're not willing to first undergo aggressive lifestyle intervention concurrently with the treatment program, right? Because you're just chasing the tail. It's like putting horrible gasoline in your car, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. So, you know, I think a few things happened at the same time in my life at that moment when I first heard you speak. One of them was being in the Western medical system for so long. I was getting really burnt out, not with surgery. I love doing surgery, but I was getting really burnt out seeing people never get better.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
and changing the oil later and it's just like the car's getting worse and worse and you're just trying to keep up with oil changes, it's not gonna work. You have to be committed to aggressive lifestyle intervention and learning what they are, so a commitment to education on what is real, wholesome, good food, what is ultra-processed food, what does a good night of sleep really mean, What is next?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Amazing. Well, after your plasmapheresis, you're going to get even 100 probably tonight.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
But yeah, I mean, I think a commitment to aggressive lifestyle intervention should be a part of any longevity protocol, but it's a requirement before you start doing things like plasmapheresis.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
I'll send you a paper. I'll send you another paper that just came out. It's a preprint that just came out. It's not peer-reviewed yet, but it's in peer-review process. But I'll send it to you, and you can maybe link it in the show notes too. You know the true age omic testing that they do?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
They do the symphony test, which is organ aging by system. What is your biological age? plasmapheresis study with omic age and symphony testing showing major reversal of these markers.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. So one of the things I try to focus on with my patients, in addition to the basics, nutrition, exercise, sleep, is using some of the natural stressors that are in our environment on a regular, consistent basis to push health in the right direction. So these are things like heat therapy, cold therapy, light therapy, and oxygen therapy through hyperbaric oxygen.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
So we have what we call the longevity circuit. And I really believe... Like in a gym instead of like a circuit.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
It's a longevity circuit. It's like circuit training, but at a cellular level. And so I encourage my patients to think of health as not a once a year or once a month or once a quarter thing. It's a weekly thing. It's something that you have to make health a habit.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
So we have people come in to do the longevity circuit on a weekly basis, where they do the hyperbaric oxygen for about 45 minutes, a sauna for 20 to 30 minutes, and then cryotherapy and then light therapy as well. And so this gets people, it gets your mitochondria slightly stressed, which allows them to make new mitochondria and make energy more efficiently.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And then you're always seeing them when they're at the end of their rope, they're seeking surgery to turn back years and years of accumulated damage in many different ways, all the different surgical procedures that we have. And you can only address these problems one patient at a time.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
When your cells, the mitochondria are the powerhouses of our cells, when they are functioning well, every cell gets to do its job better and you just become healthier and you reverse chronic disease. So I think that's another mainstay of therapy that we do at Nexcel.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes, yes. I do mine at night. I do a 30-minute sauna and then a cold plunge at night, and I just 100 sleep score.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And you just felt like not only were you on this treadmill where you can never really catch up, we were actually going in reverse. There were more people getting sick than we could ever operate on, right? And so it was just, it just felt like this was leading nowhere to me. Both me personally as a surgeon and a doctor, but also the entire system was just getting nowhere.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
So, okay, I want to say one more thing for everyone listening is a lot of this stuff might not be available to you or there's not a lot of centers offering any of this all over the country yet, but they're coming. All of this stuff can be done for free very easily in your day-to-day life.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Just going outside in the morning, first thing in the morning, exposing yourself maybe with no shirt on to the sunlight. You're getting your light therapy. You're getting some cold therapy if you live in a colder environment. Cold showers. All of this stuff is available to everybody.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And the plasma exchange kind of correlated to that, too, is another way to do this same kind of therapy but at a much smaller dose is by donating plasma. is go donate plasma. They'll pay you to remove some of your plasma.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And then your body will make new plasma. Now, that's at a much smaller volume, of course, because your body has to make new plasma, but it still works. If you're young and you're healthy, that's something to consider as well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Okay. I thought about this a lot, and I think that we are at this incredible inflection point where we're actually going to develop two separate systems. You're going to have what is considered right now the healthcare system, which we know is more disease care, Western medicine system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
That's going to be its own system treating the end result of all this chronic disease, right, and trauma and other massive infections.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And then there's going to be a health system that's going to be developed by people like yourself, giving people the empowerment to manage their own biomarkers, take personal responsibility for them with function health, with places like Next Health, giving people a place to go to do some of these therapies and to talk about their health with practitioners.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
I think we're going to have a true health system. And then the current system will be a disease system. These will be in parallel, which is the way it all should have been done in the first place.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And that's what I'm really excited about. I'm not so negative about the health system because I think it has a function.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
It needs to always be there. But we need to have dollars funnel towards health versus that disease care world.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
In fact, things were getting worse and the problems were accumulating. And then I saw looking in the mirror, just working 12, 14 hours a day in the operating room. Like I would get, I would wake up after four hours of sleep being frustrated. completely stressed out as soon as I woke up in the morning because I had to get to the operating room by 6 a.m. for a 6.15 cut time, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And then I would basically stand there in the OR with minimal breaks for hours and hours, probably 12, 14 hours a day sometimes.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
I appreciate it. I'm so glad to be on this journey with you, Mark, Dr. Hyman. And I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk about this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Let's do it. Thank you.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Sometimes you wish you had one.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. But you're there for hours with your cortisol levels up to here, and you're just eating whatever's in the nurse's lounge. You're usually a combination of donuts and bagels, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly, exactly. And then you're drinking coffee in between every single case.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Coffee and sugar, right.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. So I found myself in my early 40s in the sickest possible state that I could be in. I had five different diagnoses. Personally. Personally, yeah. I was five different diagnoses, uncontrolled hypertension. I had an autoimmune disease. I had diabetes, not even pre-diabetes anymore. I was diabetic on my hemoglobin A1C level.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And I was on multiple medications, which then I saw my personal concierge physician, okay, and expensive guy in Beverly Hills. And his solution was to put me on Prozac because I was depressed about all of this stuff. Oh, yeah.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
A pill for every ill, right? And so I was super sick, and I personally was not getting anywhere in the treadmill of my own health. So I decided at that moment there has to be a better way. But as you know— You were 40 going on 60. Yeah, 40 going on like almost 70. It was crazy. I was getting like decrepit at 40. It was not good.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And so I was at the end of my rope and I was looking for alternative methods and seeing what else was out there. And that's when I happened upon an IFM conference where I heard you speak for one of the first times. It was either the IFM conference or it was this big event out in Phoenix that was going, or in Scottsdale where you were speaking as well.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
I saw you speak like a couple of times in a row and light bulb went off, like you said, like I need to address my own health from the root cause.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And what's great about it is not only do I not have diseases, but I feel incredible. The vitality and the energy and just the drive and, you know, what I see in the mirror. Like, I just feel great, you know? And so that's... For me, it was like, yeah, it's so great I don't have all these diseases. I'm off all my medications. But also just being able to, like, wake up in the morning refreshed,
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
attack a 12-hour workday and then still feel great after that and be happy. I mean, it's just monumental.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Absolutely.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And so during this time when I was transforming my own health, I was going to multiple different places all over Los Angeles, right? I was seeking out... sauna therapy here. I was seeking a hyperbaric oxygen therapy at a different place. I was seeing like three different practitioners at different places to get the things that I needed to get myself healthy.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And it just was very frustrating. And then what was incredible too is I was able to get myself healthy even though I had to go to all these different places. And I saw myself getting healthier. Like this stuff works. Like you can get on a good nutrition, exercise, sleep program and do a few things that most people now have access to that we didn't have access to.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And you can get healthy really quickly actually.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Right. It's quite amazing. It's like your body wants to be in a state of health, not in a state of disease. And so I was talking to my patients about this because they were seeing the transformations that I was having and they were, and I was telling them how to do it. And for the ones that could have the time and the energy to do this, they were getting healthy and avoiding surgery themselves.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And I saw myself like becoming an evangelist for functional medicine, becoming an event, just an evangelist for the nutrition and like be doing something opposite for our regular system. And I was like, you know what? There needs to be a place where people can go where this is the system. They don't not cobble it together all over the place, right?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
And so Next Health really came from the idea of let me just make one place where we could basically hit the reset button on the health care system.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. Exactly. I was like, you know what? The healthcare Western medical system, that's a massive monstrosity that it's going to take. We got ourselves into this after five decades. It's going to take 10 decades to unwind this.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
I said, let's just hit the reset button. Let's make a new place where we can start all over again. And that's what NextHealth is. We approach it... Completely differently. I remember like starting NexHealth, I got together with my business partner and we got a whiteboard and we wrote down all the things wrong with traditional healthcare. And we wrote down like, what is that 180 opposite?
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
What is the exact opposite? People hate going to the doctor's office because it's like on the 10th floor of a building and you have to wait eight hours and you're in this tiny dingy waiting room. What's the opposite of that? Let's make a beautiful space that inspires people to want to go and get their health in order and visit on a regular basis.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
It's like you go to a doctor once a year, we want you to come in once a week.
The Dr. Hyman Show
This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life | Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah, exactly. People call us the Apple store of wellness.