A Personal Note from Orion

Everything you know about conventional medicine is about to be turned upside down. I’ve always believed in the healing power of our own bodies, and today’s episode confirms this as true: our own stem cells can can create incredible healing within ourselves, merely by transferring these precursor cells from a place in your body where they are plentiful to another place where they are in need –  no need for drugs or surgery.

However controversial this may seem, the fact is that stem cell therapy is a powerful new medicine. Today’s guest, Dr. Harry Adelson, is at the forefront of this field, having performed over 4,000 of these regenerative injection therapies for treatment of musculoskeletal conditions. If you or a loved one is about to have surgery soon, please consider listening to this episode first, as you may reconsider your options once you hear about the amazing power of stem cell therapy.

 

 

In this Episode

• [03:54] – How did Harry get involved with stem cells? He describes his background in rock climbing, and mentions his experience in being treated with prolotherapy.
• [06:24] – We hear about how Harry learned about the use of bone marrow stem cell injections into arthritic joints, and how this led to his exploration of stem cells.
• [08:22] – Harry explains what stem cells are and what makes them unique.
• [10:41] – Orion clarifies in simpler terms: the stem cells are basically like the ace in a deck of cards, because they can be anything.
• [10:56] – What kinds of conditions can stem cells treat?
• [13:10] – Harry’s area of specialty is treating musculoskeletal pain rather than using stem cells in the brain, he explains, but there are quite a few other areas (including the brain) that can be treated with stem cells.
• [17:19] – Harry talks about the treatments that he has done on Dave Asprey and his whole family.
• [19:48] – We learn about the “P-shot” (or, as Orion calls it, the “privates shot”), which Harry explains is very popular in South America.
• [21:26] – Can stem cells help with hormonal imbalance and adrenal fatigue? Harry answers that this isn’t his area of focus, but he has had patients tell him all kinds of fascinating things that suggests the treatments have a positive systemic effect.
• [22:38] – Harry explains that results vary and some patients aren’t helped by his treatments. After that disclaimer, he explains that they do help most people, and gives an example of a great recent case.
• [23:49] – The biggest risk in injecting stem cells is infection, Harry explains, but the risk is extremely rare and not unique to stem cell therapy. He then talks about a case in cosmetic surgery when a combination of stem cells and cosmetic filler went wrong.
• [25:44] – Harry talks about the types of stem cells that he uses in his practice.
• [29:17] – It’s been about a year since Harry started using his new combination of stem cell types, so it’s still too early to tell exactly how successful it is.
• [31:38] – Harry discusses banking stem cells, as well as a new technology that involves culture expansion of your own stem cells.
• [33:18] – How do the facilities in the US compare to those in other countries?
• [34:30] – There’s no reliable way to measure the quality of stem cells in a clinic, so Harry doesn’t routinely do it.
• [36:47] – Our genetics, lifestyle, and diet can all affect our genetics. Dr. Harry discusses how the combination of genetics and lifestyle can impact our stem cells.
• [40:07] – Harry talks about his recommendations for Orion, given the general wear and tear she mentions in her body.
• [42:21] – We hear in more detail about the process of getting a procedure at Harry’s clinic.
• [45:08] – At what age should we bank our stem cells? As early as possible, Harry answers, because our stem cells age as we do.
• [45:50] – Harry doubts that these treatments will be covered by insurance. He explains that his procedures currently cost $6,000 to $15,000.
• [48:12] – What are Harry’s three top tips for living a stellar life? The four pillars to health are emotional balance, sleep, exercise, and diet, he explains, then gives his three tips: 1. Take care of your mindset and don’t blame others for your own suffering. 2. Bank your stem cells. 3. Adopt an attitude of gratitude.
• [52:28] – Where can people find Harry?

About Today’s Show

‏‏Hello. Welcome to Stellar Life Podcast. I want you to be happy, I want you to be healthy, and I want you to know about the new type of medicine, the one that your doctor will probably not really recommend or maybe not even know about, the one that is unfortunately not yet covered by insurance. If you see the effects of stem cell treatments, you’ll see that people are getting better and better, happier and healthier everyday. I have with me Dr. Harry Adelson. His practice has been 100% regenerative injection therapy for the treatment of musculoskeletal pain conditions. He performed over 4000 procedures. He’s one of the top guys in the world doing what he’s doing. He combines stem cells from adipose tissue and from your bone marrow, mix it together and inject it to the right place, the injured place, and then the body miraculously heals itself. If you or anyone that you love are about to do surgery, just take a moment to listen to this show and just listen to Dr. Adelson. He is a great teacher when it comes to stem cell therapy, he’s full of energy and he is very, very interesting. Without further ado, onto the show. Hey Harry, welcome to Stellar Life Podcast.

‏‏Hello.

‏‏Hello. Thank you for being here. Today we’re gonna speak about stem cells. Since you are one of the top experts in the area, it’s gonna be really awesome to ask you all the questions I wanted to ask because I wanna do some treatments myself too. Stephan met you at the previous Bulletproof Conference.

‏‏He heard my talk, I didn’t speak with him but then soon after the 2016 conference he reached out to me. We connected and did a podcast with him and that went very well. I got to meet him this year. This year I’m happy to say I was a keynote speaker.

‏‏I’ve seen you with your wife but you were surrounded by people so I couldn’t really come and say hello and introduce myself in person. I’m glad that we’re here now talking. How did you get involved with stem cells?

‏‏When I was a 4th year student at naturopathic school in Portland, Oregon, the National College of Naturopathic Medicine, my whole life revolved around rock climbing. I was completely fanatical about rock climbing. I had an injury, I was training to go on my dream trip to France, I was training in the gym because I wanted to go and do all the hard routes. France is the birthplace of modern sport climbing. I tore the labrum in my shoulder. I saw an orthopedic surgeon and he said, “Yes, you torn cartilage in your shoulder. We could put a scope in there and cut out the torn cartilage but you’re definitely gonna have problems later in life.” That didn’t really appeal to me. I started researching my options and I found out about a treatment called prolotherapy. Prolotherapy is the injection of natural substances, usually a 12.5% dextrose solution. What it does is it’s slightly irritating but at the same time nutritive. When you inject it directly into a damaged area, it tricks the body into thinking that it’s been re injured thereby launching the body’s natural healing cascade. I was treated with prolotherapy and it works so well that I decided that’s what I wanted to do with my practice, it was really quite splendid and I was quite impressed with it. I got to meet this really wonderful community of people who are involved with prolotherapy. My first six years of practice, I did just that, prolotherapy. It was my first four years of practice but also two years during my residency, I did prolotherapy up until about 2006. In 2006, I found out about platelet rich plasma. A platelet rich plasma is a very similar concept, platelets are what are responsible when you have an injury, it’s what causes blood to clot but it also is what releases the growth factors to tell the body that it’s been injured to go ahead and start the healing process. What you do is you just take normal peripheral blood, venous blood just like for any lab test but you put it in a centrifuge, concentrate down the blood platelets, and inject it into the damaged area. Same concept as prolotherapy but what I found was we were able to get the job done instead of 10 or 12 treatments for about over a year, now we were doing four or six treatments once a month. I had a patient who came to me, she handed me a stack of scientific articles about the use of bone marrow stem cells injected into the joints for treatment of arteritis. She said, “Harry, I want you to inject my bone marrow into my knee.” She has a torn meniscus in her knee. I said, “Laura, I don’t know how. I don’t know how to aspirate bone marrow, I don’t know anything about it.” She said, “Learn how to do it.” At that time there were very few people, it’s 2010, February 2010, there were very few people in The United States doing that. I was able to find 10 people who were doing it at that time, I called the first nine, they all hung up the phone on me.

Platelets are what are responsible when you have an injury, it’s what causes blood to clot. Share on X

‏‏Why?

‏‏Because they just didn’t wanna teach, they wanna have to do it. They were very happy doing this very new thing and didn’t wanna share their knowledge. The 10th person was a guy named Joe Purita who’s an orthopedic surgeon in Boca Raton, Florida. He said, “Yeah, sure. Come on down. I’d love to teach you how to do it.” I went and I was able to watch him do one case and I thought, “Man, this is the future of medicine.” That’s what started it.

‏‏I’m happy that he taught you. For people don’t really know about stem cells, they don’t have any clue, this is just new information, what are stem cells?

‏‏Stem cells are primitive cells that have the unique ability to either self-replicate, turn into new versions of itself or differentiate, turn into target tissue cells. The best known stem cell is the embryonic stem cell, that’s when a human egg and a sperm meets, they turn into a blastocyst which is basically an embryo. It’s a small cluster of 8 to 10 cells and that is known as the stem cell, that then has the ability to turn into an entire human organism and placenta and umbilical cord. In our body, we have stem cells in every tissue in our body. The one that’s really most pertinent into this conversation is the mesenchymal stem cell. Mesenchymal stem cells exists in most tissues in the body. Their job is to maintain the health of their microenvironment, they have the ability to differentiate into target tissues but they additionally contain a whole host of growth factors that are specifically responsible for maintaining the health of that microenvironment. They’re able to kill invading microbes, they’re able to control infection and they’re able to signal the growth of new healthy tissue. When you have any damage to a structure in the body, say a knee joint, then the first thing that happens when you have damage is blood vessels become damaged. The contents of the blood finds itself outside of the blood vessels. The three constituents of blood are white blood cells, red blood cells and platelets. When the platelets find themselves outside the blood vessel, they release these growth factors that signal healing a damaged tissue. The best known of which is called platelet-derived growth factor. When a stem cell, a mesenchymal stem cell, comes into contact with this platelet-derived growth factor, it activates. It knows that there’s been an injury and now the healing mechanism is turned into the on position. Whenever you have healing after any injury, this is a stem cell mediated event.

‏‏Basically, stem cell is like the ace in a deck of cards, it can be anything.

‏‏That’s right. We call them the body’s natural drugstore.

‏‏Why would people look for stem cells? What type of conditions does it treat?

‏‏When you have an injury, when you have an acute injury, then your body goes into a healing mode and hopefully you go through a healing response and have optimal healing. If the injury is too great and overwhelms the system and you’re left with what’s called suboptimal healing, you have essentially a scar tissue. If you were to look at it under a microscope, you’d see that there’s been changes in the microscopic anatomy of the tissues. That’s when people start to have chronic pain because it’s not a normal, healthy environment; you have irregular blood vessels, you have chaotic collagen matrices, your connective tissue which is this miracle fabric just stretches just the right amounts in every direction and has just the right amount of blood floor to bring nutrients to the area and metabolic waste away. This miracle fabric loses its miracle properties, it stretches too much in some directions and not enough in others. The blood vessels are not able to bring sufficient oxygen to the area, another nutrients to the area and it’s not able to bring metabolic waste away. That’s what we call suboptimal healing which is another way to say you form scar tissue. You take robust stem cells from a part of your body such as your bone marrow and fat. You inject them into an area of suboptimal healing, say it’s an arthritic knee, say it’s a dehydrated inter-retrieval disk, say it’s a narrowed spinal canal, say it’s a torn rotator cuff, any muscular skeletal structure in the body that’s dysfunctional. If you inject stem cells into this area, what is does is it tricks your body into thinking that it’s undergone a new injury without actually having caused any tissue insult. They’re launching the body’s natural healing cascade, providing the body with the building blocks necessary to grow new tissue and hopefully reversing that damage.

‏‏It’s also maybe good for brain conditions as well, being used for cosmetic procedures.

‏‏My area of specialty is treating musculoskeletal pain, low back pain, neck pain, inter-retrieval disks, dehydrated disks, post whiplash syndrome or peripheral joints, hip, knee, ankle, foot, shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand, largely arthritis or even sports injuries. There is a whole host of other conditions that you can treat potentially with stem cells, one of which is the brain. If somebody has had a traumatic brain injury, there’s damage to the nervous tissue in the brain, there’s a damage to the blood vessels in the brain, what we do is we administer the stem cells intravenously. Frequently we’ll preload the system with Mannitol. Mannitol is a polysaccharide, it’s a sugar. It’s used in the emergency room when people have increased intracranial pressure. They’ve had maybe a close head injury and there’s building pressure in their brain. What this Mannitol does is it temporarily renders permeable the blood brain barrier. It allows fluid to pass freely to into or out of the brain. If there’s increased pressure, it allows the pressure to come out of the brain. In this case, we administer the Mannitol. After we give it, we then give the stem cells, that allows the stem cells. More importantly, the growth factor is associated with the stem cells to pass freely into the brain.

‏‏Does it really help with Alzheimer’s or with other things like that?

‏‏There’s a growing body of data, we don’t have sufficient evidence to definitively say yes absolutely, we have a lot of anecdotal evidence, we have a lot of people out there practicing this therapy with good stories to tell. I’m a member of the Cell Surgical Network. The founders of the Cell Surgical Network are Mark Berman and Elliot Lander. Mark Berman’s son, Sean Berman, is a scientist. He conducted a very interesting animal study where they took rats and they gave them concussions and then they divided them into two groups. The control group got IVs of saline and then the control group got IVs of stem cells, stem cells from their own body. Fat was taken from their body and then the stem cells was taken from the fat and then they were given IVs of their own stem cells. I believe it was two months after the treatment, after either the placebo or the treatment then they killed the mouse. They did an autopsy and looked at their brains and it’s staggering. In the presentation, he shows the brains. The brains of the concussed mice, anybody can see the brain have bruises, literally bruises in them. You can see these areas where there’s been tissue death, you don’t have to be a zoologist or a veterinarian, surgeon, to see that these brains have damage. It looked like bruised apples. The group that got the stem cells have these very healthy, robust brains, some of them looked perfectly normal, some of them have slight damage but nearly to the degree that the control group have. There is a small body and a growing body of data in humans mostly with traumatic brain injury, soldiers who got traumatic brain injuries serving our country who receive stem cells intravenously. The results are very promising.

‏‏You did a procedure on Dave Asprey. What did you do on him exactly? He was here on the show, I interviewed him. He talked about the P Shot and injecting intravenously into his brain and all kinds of things. What did you do with him?

‏‏Dave has been to my clinic two times. Since that time, I’ve treated his parents a number of times and his sister and his brother in law, I’ve become the stem cell doctor to his whole family. They’re very, very kind, sweet people. Before we got on this podcast, I got this lovely quilt that Dave’s mom sent me for my new baby. My wife is 39 weeks pregnant. The first time Dave came in, we treated him and his wife, Lana, Dr. Lana. When I treat people, my focus is musculoskeletal pain injuries. Everybody who gets treated gets an IV of stem cells because if we’re gonna go through the rigmarole of harvesting and collecting and preparing your stem cells, you’re gonna get some intravenously. Lana had suffered a severe whiplash injury concussion when she was a child, she fell out of a tree and was knocked unconscious for several hours and was concussed very badly. We treated her neck because she had neck pain and headaches. Dave, we treated his low back, his knees and his shoulders. They both got IVs. They additionally underwent some cosmetic and sexual enhancement treatments in my clinic that are performed by Dr. Amy Killen who also spoke at the conference just last year and the year before. When we do a case together, I harvest and prepare the stem cells and I do orthopedic injections. We save some of the stem cells for Amy and she does cosmetic treatments into the skin of the face and neck, she does treatments into the scalp for promoting thicker hair follicles. Finally she does the O Shot and P Shot which I guess you guys spoke about. The O Shot is the Orgasm Shot, that’s performed into women. It’s injected into the wall of the vagina, it’s to increase elasticity and hydration of the skin, increases sensitivity in microcirculation. Lana reported that it helped her enhance her sexuality.

‏‏She called it toe curling orgasms.

‏‏It granted her toe curling orgasms. Dave underwent the P Shot, the P stands for Priapus Shot. That is a very popular procedure in all of South America. That is the number one cause of erectile dysfunction, it’s really a circulatory issue, it’s a loss of microcirculation. One of the things that we know that stem cells do when used therapeutically is promote the growth of healthy microvessels.

‏‏Does it increases the penis as well?

‏‏When Amy does it, she has a whole protocol that she does. Maybe you might wanna have her as a guest because she could speak to this much more intelligently. She does these shockwave therapies and she uses a penis pump and she does this whole long list of stuff. I don’t know if the stem cells themselves grow the size, the P Shot grows the size. I think that helps more with the blood vessels but then she does this spectrum of other things that I believe it’s supposed to help.

‏‏Did you happen to just treat all your family members and everybody that you love in your life all day long? It just seems like everybody needs it.

‏‏Fortunately I have a very small family, I’m an introvert. I spend more time treating patients than I do family and friends. I do get plenty of family and friends as well.

‏‏Stem cells, can it help with hormonal balance or adrenal fatigue and these types of conditions?

‏‏I don’t really have a good answer for that. My focus is really on musculoskeletal pain but we do administer intravenously to every single person that we treat. I’ve had people telling me all kinds of interesting things where they say, “My exercise induced asthma has disappeared. My sleep has improved.” Any number of things. If people are looking for treatments for more systemic disease or something, we usually refer them to this network to which we belong, it’s the Cell Surgical Network. It’s the largest affiliate network of stem cell practitioners in the world.

‏‏I think it was in your presentation. You showed a video of an arthritic dog.

‏‏No.

‏‏Maybe I saw it on YouTube or maybe it was last year, I don’t remember.

‏‏It might be the year before, it might’ve been [Christine Comela’s [00:22:24] talk. I’ve seen that from her talk as well.

‏‏Sorry. All the presentations just mix together, so much good information. What type of incredible recoveries did you see in your own practice?

‏‏First of all, I feel the need to preface this by saying that we don’t help everybody, that results do vary. I really have some people who I’m totally convinced we’re gonna get this spectacular outcome and they’re precisely the people that I don’t help at all. We do help more people than we don’t help. This morning for instance, I came into the office and I came in half an hour before my appointment, as always. There happened to be a woman in and she was a Bulletproof person who was just passing through Park City on her way from Seattle to Moab for their annual trip to go mountain biking. She wanted to stop by the clinic in order to let us know how she was doing. She was back to racing mountain bikes again and she was really thrilled about it. That’s an increased quality of life things. We’ve had some people who really is pretty dramatic, dramatic, people unable to function at all. They’ve been given their life back.

‏‏Is there a risk to injecting stem cells?

‏‏The biggest risk of course is infection. That’s a very real risk and can have very serious outcomes. It’s extremely rare. It’s not unique to stem cell therapy, it’s anytime you put a needle on somebody, there’s a risk of infection. In 15 years, over 10,000 procedures, it happened to me one time. The odds are pretty good there. Other than that, there’s really few risks associated. You’re using stem cells from your own body so there’s never been a documented case of any cancerous growth or abnormal growth. This is a homeostatic environment. The stem cells respond homeostatically, what that means is they act the way that your body wants them to act. They’re not rogue cells that are gonna turn into bone when you want it to turn into ligament. There has been one case in the cosmetic surgical literature where a group was combining stem cells with a type of cosmetic filler that contained a substance, it was a type of plastic. What that did is it caused the stem cells actually turn into bones. This woman developed bone shifts in her face. They had to be surgically removed, it was a real mess. As long as you don’t get too cute, just injecting the stem cells and not mixing it with anything else. There are thousands of people doing this in this country at this point. There have been very few reported cases of anything going wrong rather than just basic stuffs that’s associated with injections, most notably infection.

‏‏What type of stem cells do you use in your practice? Do you take them from the adipose tissue? Do you take them from bone marrow? Do you mix both?

‏‏I do both. I started out using bone marrow in 2010 when I learned, I started out using bone marrow. In 2013, I started lipoaspirating, aspirating fat and isolating stem cells from fat. My initial instinct was to combine the two but I thought, “I have an opportunity to compare them and see maybe one is better than the other and maybe it’s not necessary to do both.” For a period of time I would offer people one or the other, I’d say, “Would you prefer to use bone marrow which I have a lot of experience and there’s some scientific data supporting its use, or would you rather use fat,” which I had a very little experience with, there was less evidence supporting its use. We knew that we were getting instead of in that neighborhood of tens of thousands of stem cells, we were getting tens of millions of stem cells. I would just let people self-select that way. After four months, I switched over because I was seeing a trend. At that point, I started combining the two. When we were a year out, during those periods, we’re a year away from their treatment. I phoned everybody to ask them how they were doing, I just said, “In your opinion, how much improvement did you receive from that treatment?” The bone marrow group, as had been my experience, got very consistent results and very few people were what we call nonresponders. Of the adipose group, when people had improvement, they did better than the bone marrow group but I had a higher non responder rate. The group that I did both when we were a year out from the people getting the combination, what I found is that people got the consistency of the bone marrow with the augmented improvement of the adipose. Ever since that time, that was back in 2013 that I did that, by the time we did the survey it was 2014, I’ve really just been doing the combination of the two. In a small number of people over this last year, I have started using additionally umbilical cord stem cells. Up until that point I was only using what we call autologous stem cells. Autologous means donor and recipient are the same person. You’re taking stem cells from one part of your body and putting it somewhere else. In the last year, I’ve been using allogeneic stem cells which is where their stem cells come from another person. There’s a laboratory in Salt Lake City, their called Predictive Biotech, their website is predbiotech.com. What they do is they recruit these young, healthy women who are scheduled to undergo uncomplicated births. They do a very thorough screening for communicable disease or genetic disorders. If they pass all of that then the woman gives birth to their baby and then this laboratory buys the umbilical cord from them. The laboratory isolates the stem cells, what’s called the Wharton’s jelly which is the insulative layer of the umbilical cord. It’s made of human derived Bio Identical Hyaluronic Acid and chondroitin sulfate and then they sell those to guys like me. In a small portion of my patients, I’ve been using bone marrow combined with fat combined with these umbilical cord products.

Autologous means donor and recipient are the same person. You’re taking stem cells from one part of your body and putting it somewhere else. Share on X

‏‏What was the result?

‏‏It’s really too soon to say. It’s been just almost a year that I’ve started using them, I haven’t been tracking the outcomes formally. Just for my own experience, I think it does give a little bit of an added benefit. I mostly used in in people who are either 75 years or older because it seems to be when you hit about 75, my results tend to drop off. I think that’s due to stem cell senility, it’s from the aging of the stem cells. The other category I use them for is people who have just very difficult presentations. In people of where I know, it’s very difficult presentations and I just wanna throw the kitchen sink at them. The third category is Dave Asprey devotees because there’s this certain portion of population that Dave had it so they want it. That’s perfectly okay.

‏‏Dave had the extra ones as well?

‏‏Yes. In his second treatment.

‏‏Is there a risk of getting stem cells from other human beings?

‏‏At this point there does not seem to be. The data that exists shows that when you use the allographic stem cells, when you use stem cells from a different person, they don’t actually engraft into you. They exert their paracrine effect where they have an effect on your own cells but then they don’t reproduce, they don’t actually engraft into you. You’re not taking somebody else’s DNA and permanently making a part of your own. As long as you just use any small doses, there does not appear to be any tumor growth or anything like that.

‏‏What about using the different species? I know that in the clinic near my house, they offer the facial treatment with embryonic cells from cows.

‏‏It sounds crazy but theoretically that is fine because what’s weird about stem cells is that they’re actually invisible to the immune system. One of the indications from stem cell therapy is organ transplant to suppress the graft host disease where you reject an organ because it downregulates the immune system in that way.

‏‏What about banking your stem cells and FDA approval of the use of stem cells in the US?

‏‏That’s something that we’ve just started doing. In joining this group, the Cell Surgical Network, there’s a lot of back office ramifications that don’t really matter so much to patients. The most important being is it allows to participate in their online registry of patient outcomes, it allows us to track safety and outcomes along with hundreds of other doctors in The United States doing stem cell therapy. In the front office, what joining Cell Surgical Network does is it gains my patients’ access to their cells on ice program. Cells are on ice, on the web is cellsonice.com. That is cryopreservation, banking, and culture expansion of your own stem cells. This is, as far as I know, the first time that it’s completely legal and out in the open. We are openly banking, cryopreserving, and culture expanding people’s own stem cells.

‏‏If you wanna use those preserved stem cells, are you allowed to use them in the US?

‏‏Yes.

‏‏That’s new.

‏‏Yes, very new.

‏‏Because in the past you have to bank them somewhere else and then go do the procedure in a different country.

‏‏Precisely.

‏‏When you look at other country’s facilities compared to the US facilities, is it the same level or are we on the leading edge here in the US?

‏‏Some other countries, I’m thinking the Stem Cell Institute in Panama, those guys have been doing the stuff for a lot of years. I think that group specifically has been at the cutting edge for the longest, they’ve been doing a lot of different stuff and they’ve been doing it right. They’ve been doing it really correctly, ethically, and safely but it’s also extremely expensive and it’s in Panama City. The nice thing about cells on ice program is you can do it here at home. It’s not inexpensive. It’s not the thing that I routinely recommend. Most of the people I’m seeing are musculoskeletal pain conditions, low back pain, neck pain. For those people, they don’t routinely need cells on ice. We do one or two treatments and then we’re done. If somebody has a serious neurologic condition or something like that, that requires ongoing treatments where they’re not gonna get a liposuction every single time they get treated. It’s just fantastic to be able to do that here at home now.

‏‏How do you determine the quality of the stem cells?

‏‏There’s no reliable way to measure that in a clinic. There are ways to do it in cellular laboratories that are very complex and expensive tests. I don’t routinely test cell function in the clinic, I just have confidence in the methods that I’m using for isolating or concentrating the stem cell out of the body for such short period of time. These methods that I’m using for isolating and concentrating stem cells have been demonstrated to be effective. But then there’s the question of how well are people’s stem cells functioning in their own body? That really is the key with this recent theory, the stem cell theory of aging. When you look at two people who are 40 years old and one of them looks like they’re 25 years old and the other one looks like they’re 60 years old, a lot of this is a function of one stem cell, how robust, healthy your stem cells are because your body’s ability to replenish itself is a function of stem cells. If your stem cells are robust and able to easily reproduce themselves, you have very robust stem cells, your biological age does not match your chronologic age. Whereas if your stem cells are tired, then they’re just not functioning properly, you look older than you actually are. That’s something that when I treat people, as far as what my prognosis is for their outcome, it really has less to do with the severity of their condition. If someone has a mild to moderate arthritis knee pain compared to someone who has bone on bone arthritis, that actually is less of the predictor of how well they’re gonna do. What is more of a predictor is how healthy they look as a person because how healthy they look, that’s determined by their ability for their stem cells to replenish themselves.

‏‏Our genetics, the way we eat, the way we treat our body, does that affect our stem cells?

‏‏It’s all of those things. Yes, it is genetics and it is lifestyle, it’s some combination of those two.

‏‏Some people say that you can reverse your age by exercising, eating right, eating super foods, thinking better. If we can reverse our age, can we reverse the quality of our stem cells?

‏‏I think there’s nature and nurture, there’s your genetics and then there’s your lifestyle. Some people have strong genetic traits and weak genetic traits and some people have a very detrimental lifestyle, behaviors, and then some that are less detrimental. It is some combination of those two. If you’re just genetically predisposed to your telomeres, shortening extremely rapidly, it’s probably difficult to overcome that.

‏‏Unless you take embryonic stem cells from somebody else.

‏‏What we’re finding is that those cells don’t actually engraft, you have to take them every week. When you take those allographic stem cells, you get this burst of growth factors but they’re not actually engrafting into your system. I’m just totally guessing and this is all conjecture. It’s a balance of nature and nurture. What’s interesting with the cells on ice program is something that Dr. Berman and Dr. Lander are coming up with is this cell renewal program where you culture expand your stem cells and then just regularly infuse yourself with 50 million or 100 million of your own stem cells at regular intervals. They’re postulating that this could dramatically increase longevity. I’m very happy to say Vishen Lakhiani has invited me to present at Awesomeness Fest in June of 2018 in Sardinia. The topic of the meeting is longevity. I’m going to give an entire talk on this very topic at A-Fest.

‏‏Vishen and I met for lunch in New York about more than a decade ago. He was semi famous but now he’s so big. He’s a great guy. That’s awesome that you’re gonna be in the Awesomeness Fest. More people need to know about you and more people need to know about these treatments, that’s why we’re here so you, listener, can benefit your life and the life of your loved ones. I am planning on doing a procedure hopefully with you. I’m just looking at my body, I’ve done dance and martial arts and now I’m getting older and I have neck pain. I fell and I hurt my shoulder, I’m still rehabilitating my shoulder, constant pain everyday. My hips, the left one is cracking. The knees are starting to irritate me every once in awhile. How many injections should I put in my body?

‏‏Not to take away from what you’re going through but you sound like typical patients. That’s very much the thing that we do. Not to put you in a box but from what you’re describing, you fit very nicely into a box. As you go through life and wear and tear, this is precisely where I have found stem cell therapy to really excel, is in wear and tear of the musculoskeletal structures. As far as how many we do, that’s really up to you. One of the things that’s really different about my clinic, Docere Clinics, is we routinely do what we affectionately refer to as whole body makeovers where we’ll do somebody’s low back and we’ll do their neck and we’ll do their shoulders and we’ll do their hips. I have found after years of doing this, I don’t really see any detriments to doing a bunch of different body parts in a single sitting. This is also why we have anesthesiologists in the clinic two days a week because when you’re doing that many areas, it really is better to sleep through it because we’re talking about a liposuction and bone marrow aspiration and a bunch of pokes. Vishan slept through it. Dave didn’t sleep through it but he’s a crazy person.

‏‏Didn’t he faint or something?

‏‏We tell everybody if they’re not undergoing sedation to make sure to eat some breakfast. I said, “Dave, you ate?” He said, “I had five Bulletproof coffees.” I said, “Okay good.”

‏‏I’ve seen it, not undergoing sedation. There’s a big needle shoved in his adipose tissue in his back. You can see the needle through the skin and it looks like something out of sci-fi, an alien experiment. It looks pretty scary, just that visual in my mind, not so good but I can see how amazing it’s gonna be. I totally want to do this. Why don’t you take me through a typical day in the clinic? What does it look like when somebody is coming for a basic procedure, what does a more comprehensive procedure looks like?

‏‏We do procedures usually three and a half days a week, two days a week are with sedation. We have the anesthesiologist there, the person comes in, they haven’t eaten that morning, they haven’t had anything to drink that morning. They lay down on the table, they get a tiny little needle right in their hand and they go blissfully to sleep. I hate to call it the Michael Jackson drug because it didn’t work out so well for Michael Jackson but it’s the Michael Jackson drug, it’s propofol, it’s versed. These are very gentle medications, this is not general anesthesia work which is very hard on your liver and very hard on your brain, these are very gentle medications that actually puts you into a restful sleep. When people wake up, they’re a little bit goofy and stoned from the versed but they actually feel rested like they’ve had a terrific nap and we’re done. They wake up two hours later and they go, “Wow. What happened?” Meanwhile I’ve been busting my butt. The first thing we do is the liposuction, we call it a lipoaspiration, it’s a minutral liposuction.

‏‏Somebody’s getting slimmer after your treatment?

‏‏It’s a relatively small volume, we take 50 ccs of fat. It does not render a cosmetic difference. I usually only take it from one side because that way, if you come back for another treatment, we have the virgin other side to go to. It’s much easier to get, go to a virgin area. First we do the lipoaspiration then we do the bone marrow aspiration then we have a break in the action while we prepare the cells. If you’re being sedated, we just keep you asleep, we usually lighten up the meds a bit but you’re pretty much asleep just laying there. Then I start the injections. That can be anywhere from one elbow to a full body makeover, in which case I might be injecting one more inter-retrieval disk or doing one or more epidural injections with stem cells or doing facet joints, we’re doing ligaments, we’re doing sciatic nerve injections, we’re doing a whole host of things then we flip the person over, we do their shoulders, we do their hips, we do their knees, we have Amy come in, we do the skin and the face, she injects the O Shot or the P Shot. This is why a lot of people choose to sleep through it because it’s a happier experience for them, it’s a happier experience for me.

‏‏As long as you’re happy. It sounds amazing and scary at the same time. As far as banking the stem cells, at what age should we bank our stem cells?

‏‏Theoretically, as early as possible because as you age, your stem cells age. The age at which you bank the stem cells are the age that the stem cells are when you bank them. Theoretically, the sooner the better. There’s no reason not to do it if you’re already 50 years old, go ahead and do it. It’s better to have them than not have them.

‏‏What’s the latest?

‏‏I don’t know, I don’t know that there is a hard latest.

‏‏It depends on the condition of the individual. How much will an average treatment cost? Will it be ever covered by insurance?

‏‏I very seriously doubt this will be covered by insurance, it just does not fit into the system.

‏‏Why not?

‏‏Whenever we talk about whether or not insurance will pay for something, I think people mistakenly make the assumption that the decision is based on logic. It isn’t. It’s based entirely on profit. I don’t know that this would be a profitable venture for insurance companies. It’s a long discussion unless you feel strongly about it. It’s my opinion and the opinion of people who I trust, that it just likely will not fit into the model. Perhaps the simplest of things like knee arthritis of something like that. I’m very interested to see how this pans out. I honestly don’t think it’ll come to that, it doesn’t make sense to me. What my goal is to make stem cell therapy affordable because the greatest advancement in medicine doesn’t do anybody any good if you can’t afford it. Right now in my clinic, the procedures range anywhere from $6000 up to $15,000, which a large portion of the population can afford, but a larger portion of the population cannot afford. What I’m currently doing is we’re in the process of expanding my clinic, we’re doubling the size, I’m gonna bring on another provider and then probably a third provider. I’m going to raise my prices a little bit because we’ve started using this more complex, this superior method for isolating stem cells from the fat. The providers that I’m going to bring on, I’m bringing on at a lower price point. My goal is to try to provide stem cell therapy through these providers at approximately 30% the current industry’s standard. They’re going to be doing stem cell treatments anywhere from $2000 to $8000, starting at $2000 or $3000 which will be accessible by a much larger portion of the population.

‏‏Before we finish, what are your three top tips to living a stellar life?

‏‏The four pillars to health are emotional balance, sleep, exercise and diet. I just did Dave Asprey’s 40 Years of Zen.

The four pillars to health are emotional balance, sleep, exercise and diet. Share on X

‏‏Oh my god, tell me, tell me more.

‏‏In the topic of emotional balance, for 40 Years of Zen, it’s doing meditation using biofeedback. It’s basically using the software that translates your brainwaves into auditory cues to trick you into going deeper and deeper into alpha state. While you’re in this very deep alpha state, you’re essentially guided forgiveness exercises. What it did for me is it allowed me to see how deeply this habit of blaming others for my own unhappiness, how deep that ran. It was staggering. I really did not realize how much resentment controlled my life. It gave me a little window into that. One of the things that’s really amazing, a very tangible evidence is I, for 25 years, suffered from what’s called migraine aura without headache. When you talk about a migraine aura and you have these visual disturbances, it usually happens right before someone has a migraine headache. I would just have the visual disturbances without the headache. I had it for 25 years, I had it pretty much everyday for 25 years. For 25 minutes, I would lose half the field in my vision. That completely went away, I have not had one episode, it is 100% gone since doing 40 Years of Zen which is pretty staggering. I think it all just boils down to identifying this habit of blaming others for anything wrong with my life. It was subtle, it wasn’t so obvious, certain inhabitants of the White House at this period in history. It wasn’t so grossly obvious, it was the subtle little thing but it was really profound.

‏‏The first tip was to take care of your mindset and not to blame others for your own suffering. If you can afford it, go and do 40 Years of Zen and do some neurofeedback. What will be the second tip?

‏‏Just bank your stem cells through the cells on ice program.

‏‏Number three?

‏‏Adopt an attitude of gratitude. Just last year, on Christmas Eve, I had a stroke. I was at home with my wife and I had this very great gangbuster year of work and everything was going good. She asked me a question and all of a sudden I couldn’t speak. We went to the hospital and it took a few days but we figured out that I had a bacterial infection on my heart which lead to requiring an aortic valve replacement, just a seven-hour open heart surgery. God’s saying, “We’re gonna do this for a while now.” I’ll tell you, you just never know, life is so fragile.

‏‏After that, do you see yourself as a more enlightened person? Do you live more in the present moment?

‏‏I certainly don’t take anything for granted. I really am grateful for a lot of things. That coupled with my ability to recognize this new found ability to recognize these very subtle complaining techniques for blaming other. Life is really precious.

‏‏You do everything to give people more life. This is beautiful. Where can people find you?

‏‏Our website is docereclinics.com. If you just google Dr. Harry stem cells, that come right up.

‏‏Thank you so much. I’m in awe and gratitude to you Dr. Harry. I hope to see you some time soon in the future.

‏‏So am I. I look forward to it.

Your Checklist Actions to Take

✓ Observe your body and watch for chronic pain. Consult with a doctor when it is recurring or disrupting your normal activities.

✓ Research different stem cell treatments. See if they can help your overall health and wellness.

✓ Avoid mixing stem cell therapy with other treatments or drugs. This can lead to negative side effects and infection.

✓ Research your genetics and family health history to help fight diseases.

✓ Eat healthy and keep a balanced diet. Eat vitamin and mineral rich food to help with cell regeneration. 

✓ Get good sleep and exercise to recharge your body to its full potential. 

✓ Bank your stem cells as soon as possible so they are available when you need them. 

✓ Take a break and do activities that will help you de-stress and relax.

✓ Determine what type of stem cell therapy you need by differentiating bone marrow concentrate aspirate and adipose-derived stem cells.

✓ Book a consultation with Dr. Harry Adelson to know more about the benefits of stem cell theory. 

Links and Resources:

About Dr. Harry Adelson

Dr. Adelson has performed over 5,000 bone marrow and adipose stem cell procedures and has injected stem cells into over 600 intervertebral discs, placing him among those most experienced in the world with use of stem cells for the treatment of spine pain. His personal mission is to offer autologous stem cell therapies for the treatment of pain that are safe, effective, and affordable, to get people out of pain and back to living their lives.

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