Paul Turek
speaker
358 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Paul Turek’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So when you freeze sperm, it's about a 200-year-old process, regularly used for about 75. I forgot who the Italian scientist was who froze sperm in snow and then thawed it, and it was alive a couple hundred years later after Leeuwenhoek came up with a microscope. They found it was moving, and it was possible. So egg thawing is very new. Egg freezing and thawing is very new. This is very old.
So everyone is thinking about sperm now because eggs are being frozen left and right. but this is much older technology and the cell is much hardier than an egg. So it does a lot better typically. When you freeze it, it's the freezing process that kills sperm before icicles on the inside. And then while it's frozen, there's usually no issue.
And then there's another problem when you thaw it, rapid temperature shifts. So that's where the kill rate comes from. In a good sample, half of it should survive.
So I usually say, depending on what technology you're going to use, but if your sperm counts normal... Three ejaculates is one kid's worth of sperm with insemination technology where you would thaw it and then turkey baste it.
So there's three levels, sex, no tech, high tech is IVF, and then the middle is IUI. That's the stuff that's turkey basting. It's relatively straightforward, relatively cheap. I see. Three kids for that, but plenty of sperm for IVF. So three ejaculates would be more than enough- If they're normal. For IVF. Yeah.
So the population you're talking about, maybe cancer survivors, half of those will not be normal. They're really looking at IVF. Yep. So they don't need that many, but I'd say three is a good number, but it's an insurance policy, right? Yeah.
Well, we started a podcast last year because of the blog of 15 years. And we're just doing timely topics and it's me and my associate Rob Clyde, who's a director in Hollywood. And we're going to be the anti-Bourdain in men's health.
We're going to just take on the topics, testosterone, et cetera, penis myths, and just talk about stuff that everyone is asking questions about, but no one's talking about. And like you, data-driven answers.
Yes, I think it should be done. That's the first step. There's a lot going on now that the biomarker concept relates a lot to your views on medicine 3.0. The paper came out two days ago looking at longevity based on the semen analysis in Danish, in the Riggel Hospital in Copenhagen.
They looked at 74,000 men over 50 years and found that those guys with, say, normal semen quality lived three years longer, all causes, than men with low sperm counts when they were younger. This was a single payer system, so they have all the data on it. It's very much a landmark study.
So if you ask me what excites me about the field, I would say as the author of the biomarker concept early in my career, I would say I'm really happy that we're scaring couples to realize that their fertility is a measure of their health. And now we have our foot in the door. If we can get a sperm count and get them in the office, we can actually tell them a little bit about their trajectory.
And it's becoming more and more every day. And we've never had a chance to do preventative medicine with young men. So it's a men's health play in a big way because their partners are bringing them in, but who cares? They're in the office. Your father had prostate cancer when he was 50. Someone had colon cancer. So I have now an NP, Molly Jessup, who is medical.
And it's like, okay, there's metabolic stuff and you can pick up diabetes. And we have an opportunity here we've never had ever. is to get men at younger ages. And I was a professor at UCSF for 15 years, endowed chair. I left. And I went to Yousan University, traditional Chinese medicine. I lecture there now. We had a conference last week.
And I lectured and I liked it because I thought Western medicine, maybe your view too, is too reactive. They're always trying to get men out of trouble or get patients out of trouble, but we're not thinking about getting them from unhealthy to healthy, which is the preventative aspect. We're just never good at it.
your general surgery, every example you give is a guy who did something bad, you get him back, whatever. But you got to think next step, like kidney stones. Great. Urologists, we treat them all day. It's fun. It's endoscopic. It's lasers. It's shock waves. But what are we doing about that stone? I mean, how come we're not preventing these more? It's not on the radar.
I go to Yosan University in traditional Chinese medicine, fabulous place, and it's all holistic. So I see patients who get referred by acupuncturists and they come in, their diet's under control, their stress is under control, they're doing acupuncture, they're sorted out. And what do I find? Varicoceles, because they don't find those.
But the phenotype is totally different than the Western referral. I've loved that because that's 3.0. That's medicine 3.0, which they're doing. They've been doing it for 4,000 years. It's interesting how we don't give a lot of street cred to it, but in my view, a much of we don't understand about fertility, certainly men, possibly women, is epigenetic.
And the drivers of epigenetics, which are marks on the DNA, not DNA mutations, 50 DNA mutations a generation doesn't explain it. There's other stuff going on. Epigenetics is all lifestyle and diet driven. It's all lifestyle and diet driven.
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