This Breakthrough Blood Therapy Could Add Years To Your Life with Dr. Darshan Shah

Mark Hyman, MD

Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Coming up on this episode.

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 the milieu in which to thrive and you remove the inflammation, all your organs are gonna get better. Right? And so therefore, you're gonna avoid chronic disease and reverse chronic disease as well.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Before we jump into today's episode, I'd like to note that while I wish I could help everyone via my personal practice, there's simply not enough time for me to do this at this scale. And that's why I've been busy building several passion projects to help you better understand, well, you. If you're looking for data about your biology, check out function health for real time lab insights. If you're in need of deepening your knowledge around your health journey, check out my membership community, Hyman Hive. And if you're looking for curated and trusted supplements and health products for your routine, visit my website, supplement store, for a summary of my favorite and tested products.

Care about living long and living well. You're gonna love this conversation with a brilliant physician, one of my good friends, doctor Darshan Shah, who is the guy who founded Next Health, which we're gonna talk about on this podcast among other things, including something called plasmapheresis, which you probably hear me probably talk about, but essentially, it's like an oil and filter chain for your body. He is an extremely well trained physician. He's trained at Mayo Clinic. He's a surgeon.

He's done over 20,000 surgical procedures. But he, through his own health journey and through his own sickness at 40 years old, having 5 diseases, including diabetes, hypertension on 5 different medications, realized we have a sick care system, and we gotta fix that and change to a healthcare system. And he started something called Next Health, which is a place that you can go to create health, not treat disease. But by the way, when you do that, disease goes away as a side effect. So Next Health is a cool place, and we get deeply into the science around, I think, one of the most promising things now in the space of health and medicine and longevity in treating even chronic diseases like Alzheimer's and long COVID and many other things that you probably haven't figured out yet because it's it's so it's such a universally effective treatment for dealing with inflammation, which is the root cause of so much of what's wrong with us today, including mental health, chronic diseases, aging itself.

So I think you're gonna love this conversation with doctor Darshan Shah. So let's jump right in. Well, Darshan, it's so great to have you on the podcast. We've been friends for a long time, and I'm excited to talk to you about some of the most amazing advances in health care and longevity medicine that you are at the forefront of. And it's just it's great to have you.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Doctor Hyman, I can't tell you. Mark. Mark. Mark. Mark is I have tremendous respect for you because, you know, for I told you this story before, you kinda 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's an

Dr. Darshan Shah
honor to be here. Doctor. I That's amazing. True honor.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing. You never know. You're gonna be speaking a bunch of thousands of people in somebody, and then somebody gets, like, a light bulb goes off. You know? Yes.

That's great. So, you know, you were a traditional surgeon. Right. You

Dr. Darshan Shah
you were,

Dr. Mark Hyman
you know, when it came to Mayo and all the top institutions, and you were, you know, top of the game. You know, why did you shift gears and go into a different field, which is very different from what you were doing, which is, you know, a chance to cut is a chance to cure to, you know,

Dr. Darshan Shah
to heal with steel, to heal with what you're doing now. 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. Right? And then you're always seeing them at when they're at their end of their rope, they're seeking surgery to turn back years 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.

And you just felt like not only were you on this treadmill where you can never really catch up, you're act we were actually going in reverse. There were more people getting sick than we could ever operate

Dr. Mark Hyman
on. Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Right? And so it was just it just felt like this was leading nowhere to me. That both both me personally as a surgeon and a doctor, but also the entire system was just getting nowhere. And think in fact, things were getting worse and the problems were accumulating. Yeah.

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 4 hours of sleep being completely stressed out as soon as I woke up in the morning because I had to get to the operating room by 6 AM for a 6:15 cut time. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A Foley catheter in there?

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. You know, as a surgeon, you're not allowed to put catheter. But I was

Dr. Mark Hyman
I was listening. That's a catheter you put inside your penis so you don't have to go to the bathroom. Exactly. And you put a little bag on your leg. Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. There's sometimes you wish you had one.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. But it depends. You go to the

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. But, like, you're there for hours with the you know, your cortisol levels up to here, and you're just eating whatever's in the nurses' lounge. Usually a combination of, like, donuts and bagels. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
But all the far all the pharmacy, pseudo companies bring in all that crap, bit muffins, bagels, donuts. Exactly.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And then, you know, you're you're, like, drinking coffee in between every single case.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Coffee and sugar.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Coffee and sugar.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right? That's what medicine runs on.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. So I found myself, in my early forties in the sickest possible state that I could be in. I was at 5 different personally personally. I was 5 different diagnoses, uncontrolled hypertension. I had an autoimmune disease.

I had, diabetes, not even prediabetes anymore. I was diabetic on my hemoglobin a one c level, 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And all the 5 medications for crying and you're depressed. Okay. I'll just give you Prozac.

Dr. Darshan Shah
That's exactly

Dr. Mark Hyman
what happened. Pill for every

Dr. Darshan Shah
ill. A pill for every ill. Right? And so I was super sick, and I I personally was not getting anywhere in the treadmill of my own health. Yeah.

So I decided that moment there has to be a better way. But as you know

Dr. Mark Hyman
You're 40 going on 60.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. 40 going on, like, almost 70. It was crazy. I was I was getting, like, decrepit, at at 40. It was not good.

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 one of the first times. It was either the is it was either the IFM conference or it was a this, big event out in Phoenix that was going or in Scottsdale where you were speaking as well. I I saw you speak, like, a couple of times in a row and Yeah. Light bulb went off like you said.

Like, I need to address my own health from the root cause.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. That's quite a story. And and now you're sitting here, no medications, hypertension, no diabetes.

Right? I mean, I'm not a Prozac.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And what's great about is not only do I not have diseases, but I feel incredible. Like, the the vitality and the energy and just the drive and, you know, when I see in the mirror, like, I just feel great.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know?

Dr. Darshan Shah
And so that's it for me, it was like, yeah. It 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, attack a 12 hour workday, and then still feel great after that

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah
And be happy. I mean, it's

Dr. Mark Hyman
just incredible. Monumental it is. You know, Darshan, you know, what you're talking about is something it sounds like, oh, well, I got these diseases, then I got off them. And that's not something that happens in traditional medicine. These are one way streets.

As we're trained, these are progressive chronic diseases that we have to manage. We even have a whole term. We have chronic disease management systems. There's whole companies devoted to chronic disease management. Right.

Managing your medication, managing your disease. Who wants to manage it? Why don't we get rid of it?

Dr. Darshan Shah
Well, the pharmaceutical companies want us to manage it. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Of course. So there's

Dr. Darshan Shah
some revenue for them. Right?

Dr. Mark Hyman
But, you know, your own life story is just an example of of how these things are not inevitable, how they cannot only be prevented, but also reversed even after you have them.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Absolutely. And so so

Dr. Mark Hyman
that that journey of, you know, seeing what was wrong with our health care system from the inside out and seeing how you were essentially a victim of our modern society and the food system and the medicine that we actually practice, which is really not focused on creating health. It's focused on treating disease. We have a sick care system, not a health care system.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so you decided you wanted to create a health care system that was different, and you called it Next Health. And, actually, we're sitting here in Next Health headquarters in West Hollywood, California doing this podcast. And I'm about to go get a procedure, which we're gonna talk about because you're so gracious to offer me this treatment, which I've had a number of times called plasmapheresis, which is essentially cleaning your blood like an oral filtration. But you you had this vision of something different, and Next Health was was really the thing that got birthed out of what you saw was wrong with traditional health care, and what your own personal challenges were, and how to get better.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And so during this time when I was transforming my own health, I was going to a 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, 3 different practitioners at different places to get the things that I needed to get myself healthy. 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, and you can get healthy really quickly, actually.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's quite amazing.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Right. It's quite amazing. It's it's like your body wants to be in a state of health, not in the state of disease. And so I was talking to my patients about this, cause they were seeing the transformations that I was having. Yeah.

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. Yeah. 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 the our regular system. And I was like, you know what?

This there needs to be a place where people can go where this is the system. They don't not cobble cobble it together Yeah. Yeah. All over the place. Right?

And so NextHealth really came from the idea of let me just make one place where we could basically hit the reset button on the health care

Dr. Mark Hyman
system.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Right? And on people's personal health. Exactly. Exactly. I was like, you know what?

The health care Western Medical System, that's a massive monstrosity that is gonna take you know, we got ourselves into this after 5 decades. It's gonna take 10 decades to unwind this. Well, you

Dr. Mark Hyman
and I work on shorting that time.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Well, exactly. I said, let's just hit the reset button. Let's make a new place where we could start all over again, and that's what Next Health is. Like, we approach it completely differently. I I remember, like, starting Next Health, I got together with my business partner, and we got a whiteboard, and we wrote down all the things wrong with traditional health care.

Yep. And we wrote down, like, what is that 180 opposite? 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 8 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 wanna go and get their health in order and and be visit on a regular basis.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like, you

Dr. Darshan Shah
go to doctor once a year, we want you to come in once a week. They're like a

Dr. Mark Hyman
it's like an Apple store instead of like a going into a, like, a corner bodega, which is a mess. Right?

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. Exactly. That's what people call us the Applesore of wellness.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it is it is beautiful.

I've been there and then I've had been treated there. This this approach you take is is really trying to put together some of the innovative therapies that have been sort of marginalized in health care that often have been studied and have been researched, but are still neglected and and often ignored by traditional health care. Whether it's just intravenous nutrition with IVs or whether it's more advanced treatments like ozone or peptides or exosomes or plasmapheresis or hyperbaric oxygen. There's so much out there. I wrote a lot about this in my book, Young Forever, because these are the things that seem to be really affecting the trajectory of our biological health.

Yeah. And and, you know, one of the things that we're both focused on is how do we understand the science of aging? Because aging itself is not the problem growing older. It's the biological aging that's the problem. And you can reverse that.

And a lot of the therapies that you do and you built within Next Health are the therapies that actually help to do that. And I've I've been on this personal journey myself. I never had all those diseases. I do I had different diseases. I didn't I didn't have lifestyle diseases.

I had mercury poisoning and mold exposure, and I had c diff from, you know, an antibiotic that I took, and I had colitis, and I had, you know, just one thing after the other. Lyme disease, Babesia. I don't know why I got these

Dr. Darshan Shah
I think

Dr. Mark Hyman
I got all these things so I could figure this whole mess of medicine out personally because I had to re reengineer myself from the inside out.

Dr. Darshan Shah
I had

Dr. Mark Hyman
to, like, reverse engineer what is health, how do I create that. A lot of these therapies, are are really important, and we're gonna talk about them because they they actually provide a pathway to change, not only, improve your health, but to actually reverse this phenomena that is at the root of all chronic age related diseases, heart disease, diabetes, cancer, Alzheimer's. And and some of these studies have more research or less research, but the problem with a lot of these therapies is there ain't no money going into researching these. Right? There's literally you look at have you been paying attention to the amount of money and research being published on the GLP one agonist?

The the Ozempic's and Wegovis and Manjurals. The amount of money, they're They're studying it for everything. You know, if you have a pimple, they're gonna use it. If you have, like, depression, they're gonna use it. If they have, you know, you have, autoimmune disease.

I mean, whatever they can think of, they're gonna try this, and they're spending literally 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars, I'm guessing, on this research. Right. But nobody's spending 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars to really look at these other things. There are a few places like Altos Labs and Sam Altman found found I founded a lab. But there's like a lot of, you know, billionaires like the Google folks with Calico and Jeff Bezos Altos and and Sam Altman's initiative, where they're looking at a lot of these things.

We're looking at plasma freezes. We're looking at various therapies that we're doing. But it's it's really only the billionaires that are funding some of this now, not the NIH which should be studying this. And and it's so unfortunate because these therapies have really have a profound effect. And I've been doing them for the last few years as I've been learning more about them.

And and I did my biological age when I started 2 years ago. I don't know if I told you this. I was 43, which was pretty good. I was 62 at the time. I did all this stuff that we're gonna be talking about in a few minutes.

And over the last 2 years, I've gotten 4 years younger. Even though I've gotten 2 years older chronologically, I got 4 years younger, so now I'm 39.

Dr. Darshan Shah
That's incredible.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So I'm I'm gonna I don't know if I'm gonna hit my twenties, but I'm gonna still keep going and see how far I get. And the point of this is not to brag. The point of this is to is to sort of explain that the the things that we think are inevitable as we age are not.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so why don't we sort of dive into some of the the options and therapies that are available out there? And and I I wanna start with plasmapheresis because I think it's a really important innovative therapy. It's been around for in medicine for decades for treating various kinds of diseases that are autoimmune diseases or neurologic diseases, and it's very effective for those conditions. But but it's only done in academic centers. It's only done, you know, for very rare cases.

It's not part of traditional medicine. It's not reimbursed for for general health. And and yet there's incredible research on around Alzheimer's, around long COVID, around longevity itself. So first, why don't you explain what was the origin of the science that kind of began to let us think about this particular medical procedure as a potential treatment for aging itself.

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. And 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Although leeches are becoming have had a comeback in medicine for wound healing.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Are having a comeback.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Because you put them on wounds that don't heal and it makes new blood vessels.

Dr. Darshan Shah
It does. It does. We use leeches a lot in surgery, actually. It's a penis, congestion, and things. So I've I've I'm very familiar with leeches.

But any but we're not talking leeches.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But you're not doing trepidation. You're not playing drill drilling holes in people's brains to let out the bad humors.

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 thick thickening of the blood causes, blockages in your blood vessels, and people would die from this traditionally. And then, some very, smart scientists in IBM, I think, figured out how to actually separate the plasma from the from the blood cells. And then

Dr. Mark Hyman
What is plasma?

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 in 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 on top. And there's like a little

Dr. Mark Hyman
But the red it's also your white cells. All all your cells.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Right. So,

Dr. Mark Hyman
basically, you're separate. It's a soup in which all of your cells and your blood flow around. So it's like the red cells, the white cells, the platelets. You take those out.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you separate that from the soup. Mhmm. And and this soup, what's in this soup?

Dr. Darshan Shah
So the soup is where all of the

Dr. Mark Hyman
In other words, what's in the plasma?

Dr. Darshan Shah
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 it's the, growth factors. It is cell signaling molecules. It's nutrients. It's your a lot of the factors of your immune system live in this soup. 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 your heart, your your gut hears about it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's a communication superhighway.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. It's like one of the functions it has is being a communication superhighway for your entire body.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so there are all these molecules in there that are regulating all these things. Exactly. So why why do we then wanna kind of take out that plasma, throw it in the garbage, and put in a replacement fluid called albumin. Like, what like, why what's bad in there? Because what you just said sounds good.

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. And so for a decade, people were looking for, like, what is the substance in the young mouse that makes the old mouse younger? Yeah. And so they did all these studies and substance like g d f 11, t n f, and nothing really panned out. And then 10 years later, there's a story.

I don't I I think I think it's a true story, but I hear it all because I hear it all the time. Someone at a conference went up to ask a question to the scientists doing all the research on this, and they kinda 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. Yeah. So it turns out inner 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 senescence cells, the sasp, the the negative, the negative, products that senescence cells secrete also live in

Dr. Mark Hyman
our body. Cells, which are zombies. Part of the hallmarks of aging, which are essentially these phenomena that happen. These cells that don't die, they just become, zombie cells and then secrete all these inflammatory molecules that make us age faster.

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 sat to senescence cells, all of that is

Dr. Mark Hyman
inside the plasma. Right? Because one of the other things that Damage proteins. And one of the other hallmarks of aging is is damaged proteins.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And and so all these damaged proteins just float around and they create more problems, more inflammation, more dysfunction. And we started to degrade and our resilience decreases and we age faster biologically.

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 5 or 6 decades. Yeah.

It's FDA approved. We've been using it, like you said, for

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm I'm been a doctor for 41 years. So, like, I know I'm old, but I remember it even back then.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Right. Right. You we use it a lot. And, like, even for, like, drug overdoses, because you know that that lives in your plasma too.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah
And it's works as FDA approved. It's super safe. We've been using it forever. And, you know, just highlights. There's so much incredible technology locked up in the sick care system Mhmm.

That if we just bring it back 30, 40 years, like, you can eliminate chronic disease. This is one of those technologies. So the 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 separated from the red blood cells. 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So do you do you then throw the stuff out? And has anybody actually studied what's in there?

Dr. Darshan Shah
People are When you when you when you get get the stuff, it, like,

Dr. Mark Hyman
you know, it's like when you when you get an oil change, your car, you throw out the old oil. Right. What's in that?

Dr. Darshan Shah
It's the same things that you measure when you do a blood test. Like, you know, with the function health blood test, you get a lot of 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?

And so I think people haven't really looked exactly, like, at the discarded plasma. People are looking at it right now.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It'd be fascinating to do. Like, what are the toxins in there? What are the immune cells? Cytokines. What are the, senescence cells in there?

What what's going on that we're we're taking out?

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. And, basically, it's all being removed. Exactly. And so we've actually done a lot of, patients now, and we've measured their total toxicity levels in their urine. Things all the toxins.

We measure things like mycotoxins. We measure, exposure to heavy metals. We're measuring, exposure to even, like, microplastics and and all these toxins. And we've seen significant reductions in

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Before and after treatment toxin levels. So we know toxins are in the plasma. Yeah. And when you remove them, your body your body gets a chance to catch up. Right?

Now it's able to say, whew. I mean, I can 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. Like Yeah. You know, for all of us that have had cars forever, we know that if you don't do an oil change every 3 to 5000 miles, your car is not gonna run as well where your body's exact same way.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's interesting. I I read a study recently that came out of Germany where they used plasmapheresis for long COVID. Absolutely. And what was interesting was they looked at a lot of people who have long COVID have auto antibodies against their autonomic nervous system, which is your it regulates all the things that are sort of automatic in your body, you know, all the the parasympathetic, sympathetic nervous system, and it basically affects your your your, blood vessels in many ways and your blood pressure regulation.

And a lot of people have with long COVID. They have what they call POTS, which is, you know, they get postural hypotension. They stand up. They get dizzy. They they have all these other cognitive symptoms.

There's all these other cytokine markers and and antibodies, and they were able to actually measure them before and after the plasmapheresis, and it showed significant reduction or elimination of these and improvement clinically in these patients with long COVID. And the stats are always variable about how many people have long COVID, but it was probably 5 to 10% of people had COVID. And I think it might be more. I mean, how many you think how many hundreds of millions of Americans had COVID, you take 10% of that, it's still 20,000,000 people.

Dr. Darshan Shah
You know? A lot of people don't even know they have it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. And it's like little brain fog, not feeling as good, just not as good as they were before COVID. And and was even more more frightening as I was talking to Jeremy Nicholson, who's on been on the podcast, who's a phenomic researcher from Australia, who's doing deep phenomics, which means looking at all these not just the regular blood test, but, you know, metabolomics and cytokines and thousands and thousands of proteins and molecules. And he says everybody's had COVID has something going on. Like, they're all a little out of whack in terms of their immune system, inflammatory system.

Like, my wife says, I never used to get sick. Now I get sick more because I have COVID. So, you know, I think plasmapheresis is an fascinating treatment for that, and I think, has has a lot of promise.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. You know, I can tell you a couple 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 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,

Dr. Mark Hyman
it can be The ringing in the ears.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. The ringing in the ears. Severely even just mentally debilitating. I mean, people end up, you know, just at home, not able to do anything with this. And so we had

Dr. Mark Hyman
a patient people committing suicide as a result.

Dr. Darshan Shah
So I wasn't gonna say it, but, yeah, you're right. Absolutely. There is a suicide rate associated with tinnitus that is is not, you you know, is it's more than the normal population for sure. Yep. 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing. It's incredible.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And so he's still in the treatment process right now. It remains to be seen.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, this is post COVID or is this

Dr. Darshan Shah
This is, long COVID. Yeah. Post COVID long COVID symptom tinnitus. Right? And so, we're still in the treatment process.

We're gonna see how long it stays away. We're trying to expand between, plasma exchanges for him. I'll tell you a story about me. So when I had COVID for about 6 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah
But my heart rate consistently elevated

Dr. Mark Hyman
They elevated. Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah
All night long. Right. Exactly. Heart rate variability really down, and my my regular resting heart rate was very elevated. Yeah.

And then I started doing, plasma exchange just to test it on myself and have the, you know, the nurses practice on me really. Yeah. Yeah. Complete change around. And most people will see their heart rate variability improve.

And And especially if you have long COVID, if you're suffering with, heart rate elevation, you'll see that improve as well.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Heart rate variability, for those of you listening, don't know what he's talking about. It's basically the the complexity of your heart rate, which is a sign of the resilience of your cardiovascular system and your nervous system. So when you're highly stressed, your your heart variability goes down. So you want more and more complexity in your heart rate, more complexity in your health means more resilience, more redundancy. It's like a rainforest, which has got redundancies and complexity versus a mono crop cornfield, which is, you know, if you have one bug or one blight or something, it's done.

So so so this is really important measurement around your overall well-being and health. And that's that's a profound thing. I also personally had, an experience with COVID, and I didn't get to long COVID. Thank god. But I but I had a severe case of COVID.

That was my 3rd time, I think, getting it. And my hand just swelled up. I got severe arthritis 2 weeks after. I'm like, this is terrible, and it happened to be in a place where I could get plasmapheresis. Mhmm.

And literally within hours Incredible. Right. It was getting better. And the next morning, it was completely gone. Yeah.

Just never came back. Yep. And I was like, damn.

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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Dr. Darshan Shah
And so this is the mechanism by how this stuff works. And, you know, I think there's always a tendency when we talk about, like, 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.

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. Yeah. And so from there, if we provide your organs the the milieu in which to thrive and you remove the inflammation, all your organs are gonna get better.

Right? And so, therefore, you're gonna avoid chronic disease and reverse chronic disease as well. And we see that with Alzheimer's too.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I I I think I'm just gonna highlight what you said because it's so important. You know, inflammation is something people have heard about. It's in the news now. I mean, we've been talking about functional medicine for 30, 40 years, but it turns out it's it's the the sort of final common pathway for aging and almost all age related diseases.

In fact, they're calling in aging, inflammaging. Right? Heart disease is an inflammatory disease. Cancer is inflammatory. I mean, I literally had a patient recently who had, Hodgkin's lymphoma.

And and the one of the ways that I figured it out was, you know, we're having certain symptoms, and we checked his blood levels of inflammation, and they were extremely high. And, like, something's going on here. And cancer, heart disease, diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer's, all inflammatory diseases. And not just that, but obviously, all the other inflammatory diseases we have, the autoimmune diseases. Mental health is an inflammatory disease of the brain.

Right. Depression, OCD, bipolar disease, schizophrenia, mental health that we think is psychological is often biological, and we miss that. And I wrote a book about this 15 years ago called The Ultra Mind Solution about how the body affects the brain. And so what we're talking about here is is this this underlying process of inflammation that cuts across all diseases, and it's it's one of the hallmarks of aging. So this technology of plasmapheresis seems to be an incredible way to help reduce the body's inflammation.

Now, of course, you have to do all the other stuff. Right? You're not you're not just saying eat your McDonald's and come in and get your blood cleaned. Right? And so you gotta eat right, exercise, sleep enough, manage stress, take the right vitamins, and so forth.

But as an adjunct, it's a very powerful tool for for helping to reverse some of the the phenomena that it causes all these age related diseases. And it also helps you just feel better. I mean, I've done it a number of times and just just feel like you get it like a car wash, a brainwash. Your your brain feels clear. You have more energy.

You just feel lighter. It's quite an interesting experience, you know. And you're like, what the hell is in my blood? It's so crappy. You know, I could and and I I think, you know, I had it done a bunch of times.

In the first few times, like, my blood was, like, cloudy. Yeah. And then now it's, like, more clear. And you see that?

Dr. Darshan Shah
You could actually see it in the bag of plasma that we get. You could see how cloudy it is dependent by the number of things floating around in there. Right? And especially if they have high lipid levels too. You know, you can see it gets really foamy.

You can see that in the plasma as well.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. So you mentioned Alzheimer's cardi and cardiomyopathy is 2. Can you well, talk about that. Let's talk about Alzheimer's because some of the research on that is just so fascinating. It's fascinating.

And and here's a condition, just just as background, where we spent 1,000,000,000 of dollars, 100 and 100 of studies, no good outcomes. Like, I mean, if if there's drugs out there for Alzheimer's, they're either harmful or they might delay your entry into nursing home by a couple of months. That's a success. Not not reversing it, not really slowing it dramatically. So there's really bupkis we've got.

And yet, now there's this treatment, which is extremely safe, which is relatively inexpensive compared to these Alzheimer's drugs that are out there that are cost, what, 50,000 a year or something. And and it's showing real promise and not just not just to to to sort of slow it down, but to actually reverse it. So can you talk about the science that we now have around Alzheimer's and plasmapheresis?

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, you 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 in the next few decades, and it's it's just too high of a number.

Dr. Mark Hyman
By the time you get to 85, it's almost 50%.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. Exactly. It's just mind blowing. And so, the way the way it works well, we don't really know how it works. I think there's multiple different ways this is working.

Number 1 is by reducing the baseline level of inflammation. Number 2 is by reducing the overall toxic burden to our brain. Number 3 is by actually removing some of these malformed proteins. So we can detect the amyloid protein. We can detect the tau protein in our blood now.

There's actually blood test Yeah. We use to detect Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
With function health, we're actually having something called AD detect 4240, which is a marker of amyloid and also p Tau 217, which is another important, marker, and that those actually change with lifestyle changes. And Richard Isaacson, who's who's been on the podcast, is really quite an amazing scientist, has shown actually reversing these blood biomarkers with reversing lifestyle changes, reversing the cognitive decline, and actually improving it. So so you can now measure before and after I'm managing this plasmapheresis, what's going on?

Dr. Darshan Shah
Absolutely. And 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 postmarkers. Okay? Now that's biomarker change.

There's also studies that have been done by doctor Kiproff up in San Francisco where he showed a 61% reduction in the rate of acceleration of Alzheimer's symptoms in Alzheimer's patients. So he's showing the actual clinical relevance, and we're seeing the biomarker relevance for using plasma exchange to treat Alzheimer's disease. And I think, you know, I I think that this 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?

Yeah. And this has base almost zero side effects. Yeah. I

Dr. Mark Hyman
mean, it's just a needle poke, basically.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. It's a needle poke.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's pretty amazing. And and it's, you know, so it's it's one of these treatments that that, you know, has been around for a long time and having new applications. Right? Long COVID, Alzheimer's.

Now they're looking at it for something called lipoprotein little a, which is a a genetic lipid condition that puts you at high risk of having a heart attack and for which there are no good drugs. So, Drew, can you share some of the research about lipoprotein little a? Yes. Which, by the way, is something we measure with function health. And I literally just saw a patient this morning.

She had 37 years old, healthy, looks relatively, you know, good. I mean, she's not overweight. She's she's got no relationship, but she has a family history, and she had a really high lipoprotein middle a. So I'm like, thinking, oh, this is interesting. So how do you treat these?

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 before. And they're wondering why they have so much heart disease.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

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 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. It can 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. Yeah. Guess how you treat it? There's no treatment right now. There's no drug.

Lifestyle changes, actually, this is resistant to lifestyle changes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, some supplements I found lowering it, like, 20, 30%, but you're not it doesn't go back to normal.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. Nattokinase, I think, is good.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And there's a lot of other things. Cysteine, some other things we use. Yeah. But it's it's not easy.

Dr. Darshan Shah
It's not easy. Right? You people struggle with it. So we have 2 or 3 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 Yeah.

Particles. And so this is removed in that bag of plasma that we're throwing away. And so what we're finding in these two particular patients is that their lp little a actually stays to close to normal levels for about 6 weeks after a plasma exchange. Right? And so look, like, 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 Yeah.

Until we find a therapeutic that works. Yeah. There's a lot of research being done for therapeutics that works, but this is a great way to temporary control it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And that sort of brings the question, like you said, 6 weeks. Like, for Alzheimer's, how often do you need to do it? Do you need once a day, once a week, once a month, once a year? Like, what what kind of frequency for, you know, treating conditions that are more serious? And then, like, what kind of frequency for aging itself?

Is it once a month? Is it every quarter? Is it like, I'm asking for a friend here, you know, because I'm like, I wanna do it. I wanna know what what do we know about this?

Dr. Darshan Shah
So I'll tell you what the research shows, then I'll tell you what I think. So the research that doctor Kiprov did in Alzheimer's patient was a once a month treatment. He did that 6 treatments in a row for 6 months and measured, various markers, of symptoms before and after using the MoCA score.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And MoCA is a Montreal cognitive assessment tool. It's basically a a quick screening tool for your memory that we use to check for Alzheimer's.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly. And use other tools as well.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's not like a a it's not like a mocha latte or anything?

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. Exactly. Give give a give a patient a mocha and see how they like it. So anyhow, I I he did it once a month for 6 treatments. Okay?

Now that worked for Alzheimer's. What we're seeing in our clinic is probably about the same. Once every 4 to 6 weeks is what we're tracking biomarkers, so we're seeing biomarkers change right after the treatment and changes lasting for 6 weeks. And then 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, all inflammatory, 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 1. Right?

I don't think there's one particular protocol that applies to everybody. Every patient's an individual bio biology and psychology, and we need to custom tailor the protocol for each individual patient. So, that's that's kind of where I I end up with it. There's a lot of research being done for for Alzheimer's and for age related diseases as well. Okay?

Dr. Mark Hyman
But just as a regular monthly cleanup.

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 age related, I would say, is probably gonna end up being quarterly. Okay. 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I try a little too much travel and stress, but, yeah, I try.

Dr. Darshan Shah
My my guess would be for you is once every 4 to 6 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, that's another question is is, you know, are there unique biomarkers that can be tracked that are specific to the benefits you see from plasmapheresis?

Dr. Darshan Shah
In

Dr. Mark Hyman
other words, are there should you have these panel of 10 biomarkers that tell you, oh, before and after this is what's changing. Like the, you know, AD detected 4240 or the p tau or cytokines or lipids? Or what what what are the things that we should be actually measuring on a consistent basis before and after before we actually can scientifically track what's happening? Right. So Or do we not know?

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 hs CRP went from 9 to 2. Wow. Okay. So for her, we're tracking hs CRP.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

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 Even chelation. Even chelation. Chelation did not work. EBO treatments did not work.

So sought out all kinds of alternative therapies.

Dr. Mark Hyman
EBO is a ozone therapy.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Ozone therapy. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Which you also do in X Health. Right?

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. Cells. Right. Exactly.

But

Dr. Mark Hyman
there's no really commercial test for zombie cells. So Not yet. But it's research.

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?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, p tau and beta amyloid. Yeah.

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

Dr. Mark Hyman
for sure. Yeah. So it's customized.

Dr. Darshan Shah
It's customized.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's fascinating. And and, you know, the this is not really accessible very many places, though. That's the problem. Right? It's hard to find places where you can get this that are not part of an academic medical center Exactly.

And they won't do it for off label reasons. Then you can't just go and say, hey. I wanna get my blood cleaned, and they're like, sure. Come on. Let's hook you up.

They're like, forget about it. You know, health care is not gonna do this for you. Even hyperbaric oxygen is like that if you wanna go. Exactly. And it's and it's it's unfortunate, but these are therapies that that that have a lot of signs behind them, but that are only reimbursed for certain indications.

Exactly. And so it's not widespread, and there's not a lot of clinics. And Next Health is one of the few places where you can actually get positive freezes.

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, 3 dozen plasma free cell machines in the entire Mayo system. Mhmm. That's that's a lot of plasma free cells just 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? This can be used for aging related

Dr. Mark Hyman
diseases and

Dr. Darshan Shah
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 know how to build the insurance for it. Right? And so I think it's really important.

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 and do it basically with an appointment with one of our doctors. And I think more and more centers are gonna start doing this once

Dr. Mark Hyman
And I'm going right after this podcast. Go get one.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes. Yes. And 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 plasma phrases. Yeah. It's not the that's the use of albumin.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I I wanna talk about that because, you know, before we get into that, I wanna albumin is what you actually put back in Exactly. Once you take out the plasma, it's the main protein in your blood. And there are health benefits to it, which seem also really interesting. I wanna talk about that.

Before I get to it, how much of the plasma are you removing? Because you, you know, you have about 5 liters of blood, and probably 1 liter of that's probably blood cells, and the rest of it's plasma. I'm just making this up, but I'm guessing that's about the amount.

Dr. Darshan Shah
It's about 45% of your blood

Dr. Mark Hyman
is is plasma. So 45%. So a full cleaning would be what? 2 2 to

Dr. Darshan Shah
3 liters. 2 to

Dr. Mark Hyman
3 liters.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And you remove all that, and then you just put back in albumin. And fluid. And fluid. And fluid. Like saline.

Right?

Dr. Darshan Shah
Well, and we 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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, so you you don't do normal plasmapheresis. You do, like, a upgrade.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's something You put in albumin, plus you put in IV nutrients.

Dr. Darshan Shah
IV nutrients and nicotinamide riboside, we put back in you as well, which your which your cells need. We're doing also glutathione. We're doing albumin, and some patients will use immunoglobulin as well, IVIG.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing. So, the the amount you take out is about 3 liters.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You put back in albumin. So can you talk about what is albumin, why do we put it back in, and what health benefits does it have besides just reconstituting your blood?

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 That's right.

Albumin is not like a novel compound. We've had it for ever. And a lot of times

Dr. Mark Hyman
people are malnourished or low protein. Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Low protein, even, like, trauma situations where people 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. And so when you remove the plasma, you have to replace albumin because your body is what's called an oncotic pressure and 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. And so you have to replace it, but there's a big side benefit to this because albumin is one of the stickiest proteins out there, in 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, and this is what actually brings the this all these materials from your tissues to your bloodstream so that your kidneys and your liver can eliminate it. Mhmm. Okay?

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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing. Well, if anybody listening out there that has a lot of money, we gotta study this more because this this is one of the most promising therapies I think that exists out there for longevity based on the data I'm seeing. Good. And I was talking to Eric Verdin the other day who's the head of the Buck Institute on Aging, and they're very focused on this as a therapy. There's also, Sam Sam Altman's lab is also focused on this as well.

So there's a lot of really interesting science going on around this. Not not funded by academic medical centers, not funded by the NIH, but funded by a bunch of billionaires who don't wanna die, which is great for us because we're getting the benefit of the science. Exactly. But it's unfortunate that that that traditional academia and the National Institute of Health, which should not be called that, it should be called the National Institute of Diseases.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Disease. Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
They don't study health at all. Take the

Dr. Darshan Shah
words out of my mouth. Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But, you know, this is really tremendous research. Yeah. And I personally benefited. You've benefited from it. And I see the benefits from my patients who can who can get it.

Now the challenge right now is it's it's not cheap because it's an expensive machine. You know, you hit the technology

Dr. Darshan Shah
The human's expensive.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is expensive. The the products are expensive. So do you see it a world in which this comes down, you know, in price? Because, you know, for example, at function, we've figured out how to get $15,000 worth of labs for $499 a year. Right?

With twice a year testing. Is plazaresis gonna be able to be done more inexpensively? Well, I mean and and and what do we have to do to get it covered by insurance?

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. So here's, here's why it's expensive right now is albumin's expensive because there's just not enough of it out there right now. And so we 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

Dr. Mark Hyman
well. Yeah. It sounds like an IV nurse sticks an IVN. You gotta know what you're doing. Exactly.

Dr. Darshan Shah
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 this albumin product that's available, the lower that drives a 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. And each location, like, my imperative is to have a plasma free system machine at every location, and we're gonna drive down the price as as quickly as we can. Because I feel like it's probably gonna be a mainstay of treatment for avoiding chronic disease and also reversing chronic disease. And I wanna make it available to as many people as possible, and then we wanna 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, there's a world where insurance Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you get this one's a quarter, you prevent all these chronic illnesses. Right? And I think I think that's why I asked you the question about what are the metrics that you use to determine success. Right? If we can measure proteins in the blood that are elevated when you have starting to progress towards Alzheimer's, and you can reduce those, and you can show that, you know, Alzheimer's is the most expensive disease out there in in America because of the collateral damage on the cost of, you know, caregivers not not being able to work and the cost of caring for these people long term.

I mean, it's a it's an incredible economic drain in society, and the number of people getting it is going up and up. But I but I also just point out that don't expect that you just get podroparesis and you're gonna prevent Alzheimer's or retreat it. You know, there there's some other data that needs to be talked about, which is, I think really exciting is is the FINGER trial, the POINTER trial, which are large studies looking at aggressive lifestyle intervention and risk factor management, showing that not only we slow the progression, but that we reverse the the disease itself. And Richard Isaacson, his work, who was at who was at Cornell and Alexander in Florida, has also done tremendous work showing that we can use aggressive lifestyle and personalized care to actually do exactly what you're saying. It's not everybody gets the same treatment.

It's really what are you what's wrong with your particular biology, and how do we correct that? And that's what functional medicine is. It's really identifying how to create personalized care that actually is preventive and actually gets people, down the trajectory from, you know, illness back to wellness.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Right. Exactly. And, you know, I I wanna just double click on that because it's so important. You should never sit in a plasma freezers chair if you're not willing to first undergo aggressive lifestyle intervention concurrently with the treatment program. Right?

Because you're just you're just chasing the tail. It's like putting horrible gasoline in your car and changing the oil later, and it's just like the car is getting worse and worse, and you're just trying to keep up with oil changes. It's not gonna

Dr. Mark Hyman
work.

Dr. Darshan Shah
That's right. 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 is a good night of sleep really mean?

What is I

Dr. Mark Hyman
got 9090 on my score last night. I was

Dr. Darshan Shah
really happy. Well, after your Plaza freezes, you're gonna get even a 100 probably tonight.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, really? Oh, god. I've never gotten a 100. Brian Johnson gets a 100. I've never gotten a 100.

If I got a 100, I'm gonna give you a $100. Bucks.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Okay. There we go. Let's see.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Or maybe more.

Dr. Darshan Shah
But, yeah, I mean, I think I think a commitment to aggressive life out intervention should be a part of any longevity protocol, but it's a requirement before you start doing things like plasmapheresis.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think we're gonna put in the show notes references to studies and their and the research on this. Because this we're not just talking about some wacky thing. We're talking about something that being really well researched that has tremendous promise that I personally benefit from, that my patients have benefit from, that I think is one of the most, exciting longevity therapies out there.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. 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 it's not peer reviewed yet, but, it's gonna it's in peer review process, but I'll send it to you, and you can maybe link it in the show notes too.

Are you you know the true age omic testing that

Dr. Mark Hyman
they do? Yes. Yes.

Dr. Darshan Shah
They do the SYMPHONY test, which is organ aging Yep. By system, what is your biological age? Plasmapheresis study with omic age and symphony testing showing major reversal of of these markers.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, I like I said, I went 4 years backwards as I went 2 years forward. I probably had 4 4 or 5 plasmapheresis treatments over the last 2 years. So I I think I don't know if that's what did it. I've done a bunch of other stuff too.

I didn't I just threw the kitchen sink at it, but I wanted to see how far I could get. I feel good about myself. But I think I think, you know, the the the studies are gonna just be more and more, and I think we're gonna learn more and more. Yeah. Okay.

So so Next Health is really pioneering some of these therapies. It's offering things that were really not available. What are the other promising therapies that you guys offer at Next Health that that are, I think, important to consider as we look at treating this chronic epidemic and also helping people optimize health and and achieve, longer health span and a longer lifespan.

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. So we have what we call the longevity circuit. And I really believe

Dr. Mark Hyman
Like in a gym instead of like this. A circuit. This is like yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah
It's a longevity circuit. It's like circuit training, but at a cellular level. Yeah. 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. 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. When your cells the mitochondria are the powerhouse 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 mains tray of therapy that we do at NextHealth.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I just wanna double click on that one too because what you didn't say was that these are therapies that all fund fall under the category of something called hormesis. Hormesis. Hormesis is a medical word. It sounds like a lot, but essentially, it means a stress that doesn't kill you that makes you stronger. And we're all familiar with it.

Right? Fasting, we know, and calorie restriction is an incredible stress on the body Exactly. But it actually makes you live longer. We look at the Holocaust survivors who were basically starving. They actually have incredible longevity, and it's not genetic.

You look at certain data that you animal studies, it's hard to do on humans, but a third of, your diet is restricted in terms of calories. You eat a third less calories, you live a third longer. For humans, that would be living to a 120. Of course, you're gonna be miserable, hungry, don't have sex drive, and be too skinny. But but that but there are ways to actually mimic that exercise as a form of hormesis because you're you're stressing your muscles, and then you get sore because they're you're carrying muscle fibers, but then they come back stronger.

Right. So it's like build back better. Right? Right. Exactly.

So the idea is is these are all therapies that are are available to us that we can use to up regulate these pathways in our body that I call the longevity switches.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So so, you know, I we I talk a lot about this in my book, Young Forever, but the body has this built in heal is a built in healing machine. Like, it it actually literally has a healing system, which when you cut your skin, how does your body heal? When you break a bone, how does your body heal? Well, it has a healing system, but we mess it up all the time. And the ways to activate this healing system is that regenerates repairs and renews our body is through some of these practices, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, ozone therapy, light therapy, red light therapy, and and cold therapy, heat therapy.

You know, I I definitely find that for me, I do a sauna and a cold plunge every day. I just feel like a $1,000,000. You know?

Dr. Darshan Shah
It's the best thing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's my morning routine. I wake up. I work out. I do my where I might might do, hot and cold first, then I work out. And then, you know, depending on where the where I am.

And it's just an incredible way to do it your your your day, but but actually has all these other benefits.

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 I just a 100 sleep score.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Come on.

Dr. Darshan Shah
I'm telling you tonight

Dr. Mark Hyman
at night. I wanna see it. I give you your

Dr. Darshan Shah
phone. I'm gonna show you. My bad.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Oh, show me after. Yeah. That's insane. Okay. Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. Yeah. Try it at night.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Okay. I wanna try I try it.

Dr. Darshan Shah
So okay. I wanna say, one more thing for for everyone listening is a lot of this stuff might not be available to you or might, you know, 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 for in your day to day life. Just going outside in the morning, first thing in the morning, exposing yourself, you know, 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, you know, all of this stuff is available to everybody.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You can buy like a a a like a little sauna blanket or you can buy these little fold up saunas that you could, like, like, stick your head out of. They're very inexpensive. And then, you know, a a bathtub, I just fill with cold water. I mean, that's what I did for years. I had a a a seam put in my shower, which wasn't that expensive.

And I've had it for 25 years. And, you know, have a a bathtub, go with cold water, and I just go back and forth. And I've done that for years, and it's it's in in not that expensive

Dr. Darshan Shah
to do that. And the plasma exchange kinda correlated to that too is another way to do this same kind of therapy, but at a much smaller dose is by donating plasma. Just go donate plasma. They'll pay you to remove some of your plasma.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing.

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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's kinda hacking the system a little bit by giving the blood. Yeah.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Right. Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
A good one. Okay. So in in in your vision for health care, where where where do you see all this going? Because there's so much happening so fast right now in terms of what's happening on the margins of health care, like NextHealth and Function Health, the company I cofounded, that are really trying to push health care in a different direction and are actually disintermediating a lot of the traditional health care systems' operational, like, you know, ways that we kinda work. Right?

So where where do you see all this going?

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 gonna develop 2 separate systems. You're gonna have what is considered right now the health care system, which we know is more disease care, western medicine system. That's gonna be its own system treating the end result of all this chronic disease. Right?

And trauma and other Yeah. If you need

Dr. Mark Hyman
surgery or whatever. Fine.

Dr. Darshan Shah
And then there's gonna be a health system. That's gonna be developed by people like yourself, giving people the empowerment to manage their own biomarkers and take personal responsibility for them with function health, with places like NextHealth, giving people a place to go to do some of these therapies and to talk about their health with practitioners. I think we're gonna have a true health system, and then the current system will be a disease system. Yeah. These will be in parallel, which is the way it all of this should have been done in the

Dr. Mark Hyman
first place. Interesting. Yeah.

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.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Of course.

Dr. Darshan Shah
It needs to always be there. But we need to have dollars funneled towards health versus that disease care work.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I mean, you know, listen. Almost you're gonna have something. Like, for example, you know, I have a genetic risk for a atrial fib. My mother had it. Mhmm.

You know, I tall, thin guys who are athletes, when they're older, tend to get it. I got atrial fib. I needed heart surgery. Okay? Thank god they could map out my heart with electrophysiology and figure out which little place to zap.

And now, you know, a week later, I was playing tennis. So that's amazing. Right?

Dr. Darshan Shah
You need that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, that's great. Right. But but there are so many things you do in health care that are just, like, trying to plug a hole in a in a sinking ship with your finger, and it's a you know, it's a size of a, you know, a a a football field. And yet we're just we got our finger trying to hold the dam together. It's not working.

So we we do need a health a true health care system. And I and I I think what we have now, people call it health insurance. We don't have health insurance. No. We have disease insurance.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Disease. Yeah.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And so I see Next Health and function health as true health insurance.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And, yes, you have to pay out of pocket. But now with health savings accounts so anybody can start a health savings account. So there's literally 1,000,000,000 of dollars in health savings accounts. People are not using them properly. TruMed is started by a friend of mine, Cali Means and Yeah.

Justin Marrow. They they actually are are now enabling you to be able to use your health savings account dollars for things like plasma freezers, for things like ozone, or things like your vitamin supplements, or hyperbaric oxygen therapy. So you can actually start to use pretax dollars for this. You can start your health savings account, and you have to invest in your health. Because if you don't pay now, you're gonna pay later.

You know, I had this one patient. She was on a $20,000 of co pay Yeah. At 66 years old for all the medication she needed for chronic illnesses that in 3 months were completely reversed. Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, fatty liver, renal insufficiency, all gone. And you and you know as a doctor, you don't reverse heart failure.

No. You manage. Right. You don't get a we call it ejection fraction, which is how much of the blood you pump out with each Yeah. Pump of your heart.

It should be about 50%. You know, when it goes down under 50, you're starting to trouble this one was, like, 35%, went back up to 50. You don't you don't see that with traditional medicine, but when you use and this is just lifestyle and diet. It wasn't even wasn't even all these fancy things we're talking about. So I think I think we have the ability to really treat, disease completely differently.

And one of the one of my my, kind of thorns in my side that I get always really irritated about is when people talk about prevention.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
They talk about lifestyle as prevention. I'm like, no. It's treatment Yeah. And it works better Yeah. Than traditional medication.

If I need a drug, I'm gonna use it. Right. Like, if there's a drug, certain patients have genetic lipid disorders. They might need medication like a PCSK9 inhibitor. They might need a statin.

That's okay. But not 75% of the prescriptions being written for people for prevention. Whereas with a statin that they don't even I had a patient just today who who had a doctor tell him he needed to be on a statin. There's a 54 year old guy who had some abnormal lipids. They did a a coronary angiogram with a CT scan, and they saw a little something that was in the circumflex artery, which is a little bit it was a narrowing, and it probably just a kink or something.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Sure.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And they're like, oh, we need to put you on stands right away. Oh my god. And I'm like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Super you're super healthy.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You eat perfectly. You eat all the time. I don't think this is a problem. Let's do an AI heart scan on you.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yep. Right. Right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's called Clearly Health. Yep. And you can look it up. Clearlyhealth.com. There's centers all around the country where you can get this done.

But you only you can get it just a regular CT angiogram, which they do in any hospital, and you can just have your data read by this AI. He was 0. Like, I I don't think I've ever seen a 54 year old, like, at 0. He had 0 plaque, 0 soft plaques or hard plaques or any kind of plaque. His arteries are pretty clean.

I'm like, you do not need a drug, you know. And so I think we we really need to start looking at, you know, treating people really differently and and and being very personalized and doing deep deep biomarker analysis, deep phenomic analysis, and using therapies that are are going to actually create health. Because because none of the therapies that you offer, I would I would suggest, are disease treatments. They are health treatments. They're helping you elevate your health.

And when you create health, disease goes away as a side effect. Exactly. So you don't have to treat the disease. Right. You're just you're just creating health and removing the things that are impediments to health.

Right? All this shit in your blood and you're adding the ingredients for health. Right? The nutrients and vitamins and all the other stuff we talked about.

Dr. Darshan Shah
So

Dr. Mark Hyman
it's really quite simple. You take out the bad stuff, you put in the good stuff, the body is healing machine.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Yeah. The body's

Dr. Mark Hyman
healing machine

Dr. Darshan Shah
actually just knows what

Dr. Mark Hyman
the heck to do. Actually just knows what the heck to do.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So it's quite incredible. You're you're you're just such a beautiful man.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Thank you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You have such an enthusiasm for making the world a better place. You're doing such great work. You're doing so many other things, too. We didn't even get into. But I think I think everybody should should learn about these therapies.

We're gonna put links in the show notes to them. We'll put a link to Next Health. You can check it out. Unfortunately, it's not in every town, in every city, in every corner, which it should be. It will be.

I want this to be the Starbucks of health. Yes. You know, where where you can get in an airport, you can go wherever you want, get this done. And I I I I think, we're gonna change health care together. So thank

Dr. Darshan Shah
you, buddy. Appreciate it. I I'm so glad to be on this journey with you, Mark, doctor Jaime. And, I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk about this today.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's exciting. I'm it's very exciting. Well, till next time, we'll do this again. And, I'm excited about my plans for you today. I'll I'll tell you all how it works.

And, and we'll see you next time on The Doctors Pharmacy.

Dr. Darshan Shah
Let's do it. Thank you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Thanks for listening today. If you love this podcast, please share it with your friends and family. Leave a comment on your own best practices on how you upgrade your health and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And follow me on all social media channels at doctor Mark Hyman. And we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy.

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Thank you again and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center and my work at Cleveland Clinic and Function Health, where I'm the chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guest opinions, and neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional.

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