00:00 Kimberly King: The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of Mother's Market and Kitchen. Mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition. Hello, I'm Kimberly king, and welcome to the Mother's Market Podcast, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's episode, stem cell therapy for Regenerative Medicine is one of the most interesting ways to promote the response of diseased or injured tissues, find out the latest information on today's episode, plus later, we'll tell you what's going on around town, but first up, we're joined today by another prominent physician, when it comes to alternative medicine, Dr. Allan Sosin is the founder and medical director of the Institute for Progressive Medicine. He's been practicing medicine for over 40 years, his institute treats people of all ages through comprehensive state-of-the-art new medicine techniques, and we welcome him back to the Mother's Podcast. Dr. Sosin, how are you doing?

01:00 Dr. Allan Sosin: I'm good, Kim, how are you doing?

01:01 KK: Great, it's great to have you here. So today we're talking about the latest in stem cell therapy, and so Dr. Sosin, what are stem cells?

01:09 DS: Stem cells are baby cells, so they have not yet developed into what are called differentiated cells, which would be the cells that work the heart, the cells that are in the lungs, the cells that are in the kidneys, the cells that are in the liver, those are all differentiated cells that have certain functions, but they all come from stem cells. Everything starts with a primordial cell that doesn't have any particular job of its own, but it develops, it reproduces and it turns into more cells and those cells eventually by some mysterious way, it's just like, "Wow, how does this happen?" It turns into a living, thinking being, and all the different parts of the body have their functions and do that, but the stem cell is the beginning of it, and we all have stem cells in our bodies now, even though we have differentiated cells, mostly that's what we think about my brain cells are differentiated neurons, but we also have stem cells that have not been differentiated in all parts of the body, and they also circulate in the bloodstream, so we're loaded with cells that we can use at some point to help develop new cells in the body to provide improvement in function or support function.

02:27 KK: So what are they being used for? The stem cells?

02:32 DS: Well, they're basically at this point, being used for anything that doesn't have an answer, 'cause it's a developing modality, it's a lot of research going on with that. Stem cells have been used a lot in cancer therapy, like a person has leukemia and they're going to be getting high doses of chemotherapy that's gonna wipe out the bone marrow, and these people would die without stem cells, so the stem cells are extracted from the patient before the chemotherapy and given back to the patient after the chemotherapy is given and it re-constitutes an immune system, so you can cure the cancer and keep the patient by doing that, so that's one of the marvelous ways, and that's been around for a long time. Things that are being... That now are somewhat different, I know of neurologic diseases are being treated with stem cell therapy, we have someone we treated a year or two ago who had very advanced Parkinson's disease for which the drugs are not so great, and he was given intravenous stem cells in our office, and along with a number of other things that were done nutritionally, physical exercise, etcetera, but his Parkinson's medications which were not working very well, were not changed, but he got markedly better, he was able to get up out of a wheelchair and walk.

03:53 DS: He was able to get into and out of an automobile, which he couldn't do before, so it was a very, very dramatic improvement in the disease that does not improve. So that was interesting to me, and something I read a few days ago, and I think out of the Mayo Clinic, they have some research going on with spinal cord injuries, and one person who fractured his neck in a surfing accident was paralyzed from the neck down. And they did surgery and they tried to fix that part and he did have some improvement for a few months, and then he stopped improving, so he was in a wheelchair, he couldn't walk, he couldn't do stuff, he couldn't feel things very well, and then he got his own stem cells, which is called autologous, so they extract it from basically the fat of your abdomen, so you think about fat as being something that's not good for you, in this case, you need it, and that supplies the basis of the stem cells, and he received that into his spinal canal and had progressive recovery over the next nine months.

04:58 KK: Wow.

05:00 DS: So he was able to walk, he was able to feel, he had a far better function than he had before, which would not have occurred because it's known that after a certain period of time, spinal cord injuries don't get better. You got a few months and that's gonna be it. So that was dramatic, and I know they're working with other patients and you wonder, "Well, who is this gonna work for and who isn't it gonna work for?", and then there's these questions, "Well, how about is there a certain age where it's not gonna work anymore? Does it depend on nutrition, does it depend on the person being on drugs, like steroids?" and I would say all of those things have... Would have an impact on it, although I can't prove it, but we know that steroids impair the healing process, people get steroid injections into their joints all the time, and their pain gets better, so the steroids are reducing the inflammation that's in the spot, but they don't heal anything, and in fact, those tissues tend to break down more with the steroids than without the steroids, so there's things like that. I think people who are smokers, not good, I wouldn't be doing stem cells in someone who's still a smoker, I think it's just not a good idea, and someone who's drinking alcohol a lot, I would stay away from that also because that impairs total body function. Recovery is not gonna be the same.

06:17 DS: So we want people on a good diet, I don't care how old they are, we've done stem cell work in people who are 85 years old and still gotten results.

06:24 KK: And that's so interesting, you mentioned something going back, it's called autologous, and that's when you harvest your own stem cells, but you can also... Can you be a stem cell donor for others? Is that how that works?

06:38 DS: Well, what's being done at this point, you can't really be a stem cell donor for others and probably wouldn't be a good idea anyway, I think the best way to do it is to take what the person himself or herself has and use that 'cause there's not gonna be any reaction. You're giving yourself your own cells, so there can't be an immune reaction to it, it doesn't happen. If it's coming from somewhere else, and folks have used umbilical cord cells from other places, they've used amniotic tissues, which we have used on occasion, but you're getting it from somewhere else, and can you be absolutely certain there isn't gonna be something in those cells or tissues that's not gonna be damaging to the person, and you don't know for sure, you can't. You can't know for sure. Amniotic tissue, interestingly is not stem cells, it's growth factors, so they're extracting the tissue from the placenta, the amniotic part of the placenta, and there's a lot of growth factors in there, and you can use those to do injections and they're effective. You can heal a torn meniscus, you can heal a torn muscle, you can do a lot with those items, so I think it can be quite useful.

07:43 DS: I don't know that it's as good as a person's own stem cells like this spinal cord individual who was getting progressive improvements for nine months, he's gotta have living cells reproducing for nine months for that to happen, and these other cells, amniotic tissues is not cells. It's growth factors. They don't reproduce.

08:05 KK: That's interesting, I didn't realize that. Thank you for explaining that. How do you harvest stem cells?

08:12 DS: Well, you have the person lie on a nice clean table and you clean off the area, so it's as sterile as you can get it, and then you make a little hole and put a cannula in there, a cannula is a very thin tube, and there's a syringe connected to the cannula that contains a combination of Lidocaine, which is what the dentist used to numb your teeth. An epinephrine, which reduces bleeding, and these are in very small amounts, but that's injected throughout the area where the adipose tissue is harvested, and you break it down with multiple penetrations with this cannula, which is about six inches long, so it's going in and out, in and out many, many, many times it takes about, us, takes us 15-20 minutes to break things down in there, so all the fat that has been penetrated is now broken into tiny little pieces of fat, and then that's extracted through a different cannula, but they're very small holes, so you need the fat to be tiny to get in, through those holes into another syringe, so we take out about 20 to 40 to 50 ccs of fat, which is less than two ounces, it's not a lot, it's not like having liposuction, where you lose two pounds.

09:22 KK: Darn it. [chuckle]

09:23 DS: Yeah, just a little bit is all we need, but we can get 50 to 150 million cells out of that small amount.

09:32 KK: Wow.

09:33 DS: That's what we process in a centrifuge, you separate the stem cells from the fat itself and you combine that with platelet-rich plasma, which comes from the same patient. Platelets also have many growth factors in them. Platelets are really important in our bodies, it's not just to heal cuts, but it heals a lot of problems, so you combine the platelets with the stem cells, and that combination is what's given by injection into whatever you're treating. So I had stem cells myself a week ago.

10:03 KK: Oh really?

10:04 DS: Yeah, we did both knees and both shoulders. It wasn't a complete job, some of these were just touch-ups, I had one shoulder that was done with six or seven injections, the other parts were just focused on areas that we knew had a major problem, so I wasn't really disabled by it at all, and I haven't required any pain meds or anything like that, and I'm expecting to have some rejuvenation of my joints 'cause I like to swim and I wanna be able to keep swimming.

10:31 KK: So that's a question I wanted to ask you about your recovery from that and what that looks like, and then also... And you kinda answered that, but so for people that have arthritis, the stem cell is an option?

10:41 DS: Oh yeah. Definitely.

10:43 KK: That's great.

10:43 DS: You can do knees, you can do hips, you can do lower backs, you can do necks, shoulders, elbows, thumbs, any part of the body that can be reached with a needle, can be treated.

10:53 KK: What about migraine patients?

10:56 DS: Sometimes, yes.

10:56 KK: When you mentioned the neck... That's interesting.

10:57 DS: Yeah.

10:58 KK: So what are some other sources for stem cell therapy? I guess we kind of just covered that a little bit, I guess, but sources.

11:07 DS: Well, there's something somewhat new that's come out called exosomes, which is actually a particle of a cell that contains factors in it that promote growth. So some folks have used these exosomes to do injections with. And I don't know what the results are. No, I haven't seen any research. That's one of the problems with this whole field, is that there are zero controlled studies, everybody is his own control, so if you give me stem cells and I'm better, I'm my own control. There's no control study, I got better and I'm happy I did it, but I can't say we took 500 people and half of them got stem cells and half of them didn't, and the stem cell people got better than the others, there is no study like that, so everything that's being done is kind of anecdotal, but the other side of it is, do you want a knee replacement or would you rather... [laughter]

12:00 KK: How long does it last when you get stem cell therapy?

12:01 DS: We don't know.

12:02 KK: Okay, that's a...

12:02 DS: I think that depends a lot on the recuperation and how you handle your body. Why does a joint break down? Well, some of it is the formation of it wasn't right, like one person has one hip goes and the other hip doesn't go. Why is that? Well, either because his posture is screwed up or because the hip joint itself when it was formed was irregular, it's not a totally round joint, maybe it's a little bit crooked here and there, so the ends rubbing on each other tended to break down that joint over 60 years. So those are the kinds of things. There can be an injury that does that, but I think if you have a good recuperation program or a rehab program and you get involved with some sort of postural training, people do Pilates, people do yoga, people do things that maintain their mobility and their balance, the likelihood of success is gonna be much greater. It just has to be, because what happens to people is they get older, they get stiff.

13:00 KK: Right.

13:01 DS: The posture is no good, they're bent over, one shoulder is higher than the other, one hip's higher than the other, everything's bent out of shape. And you see them walking down, you see, say "Wow, when's this person gonna get a new hip?" But those people ought to be going into the right kind of physical therapy, postural training, they should all do stretching... I do stretching every day, 'cause if you don't, you're gonna get stiff. That's just the way it is. And some people say, "Well, I work out with weights, I don't have to do that". Well, you have to do more, the more you...

13:30 KK: 'Cause you work out with weights. You gotta get there.

13:33 DS: Stretching is stretching. It isn't anything else.

13:35 KK: Right, right. But that's a good thing to keep in mind for the elderly as well, just something before you walk around or whatever, but yeah, as we get older. Are the stem cells FDA-approved?

13:48 DS: No, but they're not disapproved, so it's something that's allowed to be done and you can do it and you don't get penalized for doing it. Down the road, there may be, again, if we ever have these controlled clinical trials and it shows 200 people didn't have to get new hips because they had stem cells, and the other 200 did have to get new hips, well, then the FDA would say "Yes, we approve it for this condition." But I don't know when that's going to happen, insurances are not paying for stem cell treatments, so you can't expect your insurance company to handle it for you, so who's gonna pay?

14:22 KK: How much does it cost? Roughly.

14:24 DS: Depends what you're doing. For us, a hip or a knee is about 6000, which includes everything, so that's the extraction and the processing, it includes the ultrasound studies that we do, 'cause we don't go blind into areas, we always know where we're injecting, we wanna see the needle go into the tissue so we know that it's going into the right spot, you can see the damage of the tissue on an ultrasound, so you're injecting that and several spots usually in the same joint, so if we do a knee, it's usually gonna be five or six or seven locations, it's not just put into the knee joint and you expect the cells are gonna go everywhere they need to go, that makes no sense, and there are plenty of people still doing stem cell therapies without any guidance with ultrasound, for instance. And I would not do it that way.

15:16 KK: What about the risks of stem cell therapy?

15:20 DS: Well, the risk of any injection basically is injection... Is infection or bleeding. And that could be with whatever you do, an operation, a procedure, whatever. We haven't had any of that yet, and it's been four and a half years or so that we've been doing these, and I've been doing prolotherapy injections and ozone injections for longer than that, and I just haven't seen an infection. I think if you're very, very careful on the patient's skin, it's cleaned properly and your materials are sterile, infection is rare.

15:54 KK: So interesting, we have to take a quick break, but more from Dr. Sosin, when we return, stay with us.

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16:02 KK: Welcome back to the Mother's Market Podcast, and we wanna remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market or download the show from our website, www.mothersmarket.com, click the link for podcast and listen to past shows, plus download our Healthy Recipes and money savings coupons, all available at www.mothersmarket.com. And now, back to our interview with Dr. Sosin, and we're talking about the latest information on stem cell therapy, and it's been so very interesting. How do you use them? How are other ways you can use the stem cell therapy?

16:39 DS: Well, one of the more investigational routes is intravenously, and there's even less data on that, but I had a patient with a heart condition whose heart was damaged by radiation therapy many years ago that he got for treatment for lymphoma in the chest, and he went into heart failure, and he had that for a number of years. He didn't wanna get a heart transplant, which was offered to him, and he was on the medications, and he said, "What else can I do?" So he had intravenous stem cells given to him by someone I referred him to five different times over the course of about three years, and he was able to maintain his cardiac function so there was no loss, he didn't recover, didn't become a normal heart, but he was able to have a functioning heart, that did not make him disabled that whole period of time, so it worked for him, he ultimately died from a different kind of problem, so he's not around anymore, but the cardiac effect was quite beneficial.

17:45 KK: And so my next question is, do they work? And I suppose everybody's different, but from the ones that you've treated, you've treated... You've been treating, what would you say to that?

17:56 DS: Yeah, well, the Parkinson's patient that I mentioned to you before has done extremely well, we have someone we treated with intravenous stem cells for chronic lung disease, which is one of the indications doctors have used to give intravenous stem cells because one of the places they'll go... You're giving them intravenously. And one of the first places those stem cells will circulate through will be the lungs, so a lot of them will get trapped in the lungs and maybe hopefully grow there and build some new lung tissue. So this one fellow we treated a year or two ago is coming back in another month or two to get a second infusion because he responded to the first. That's a good indicator.

18:38 KK: So my brother and sister-in-law, their daughter, my niece is 13 and she has cerebral palsy, and they really have been considering stem cell therapy, what do you...

18:50 DS: No, and to me, it's a reasonable thing, because what else do you have?

18:54 KK: Right. Exactly.

18:55 DS: As long as the procedure itself is safe and done by people who know what they're doing, I think it's reasonable. You wanna do something. What's happening here, most people with a lot of these diseases are getting worse. I know of someone... Alzheimer's has not responded. I know of someone who has done multiple brain surgeries injecting stem cells into the brain tissue, that... Questionable effects.

19:26 KK: That's interesting.

19:28 DS: And that's a riskier deal opening up the brain to put tissue in there, but that has been done 'cause neurologic problems are extremely difficult, people with ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, we have no treatment for that, there is no drug that works. There's no surgery that works, all of the treatment that exists is supportive and people will have... It's ultimately a fatal disease and stem cells have not thus far been shown to work for that, but what if sometime, someday, they do? What if someone figures out, "Well, we can do this with stem cells, we can change them and train them in a certain way so they will rehabilitate nervous tissue and we can cure people with ALS"?

20:09 KK: That'd be amazing. That would be incredible. Yeah.

20:10 DS: Wow. Wouldn't that be something?

20:12 KK: Yeah, is there a certain age where people can get stem cell treatment?

20:18 DS: We don't consider an age cut off, as I mentioned, I think nutrition is far more important and what drugs the person is on is far more important, so there's no age cut off for us, so I would treat someone who is 60, 70, 80, we haven't treated any 90-year-olds, but as long as that person is in basically good health and not taking a lot of negative medications, I would treat them.

20:42 KK: And what about on the other side of the spectrum? The kids, children.

20:46 DS: We haven't done children.

20:47 KK: Okay, yeah, so as long as they're an adult and then up to possibly 80, yeah.

20:51 DS: Well, there's probably folks out there who treat children, I think if you have a disease that can't be fixed and you wanna do something, and you can do something that's not dangerous, do it.

21:06 KK: Is there an age when the stem cells lose their potency?

21:10 DS: The studies I've seen say no, there's different sources of stem cells from the same individual, there's adipose-derived tissue. This is what we use, there's bone marrow-derived tissue as well, which a lot of other places use, but from my reading, you get a larger number of stem cells from adipose tissue than you do from bone marrow, and the cells coming from bone marrow don't work for as many... They're not viably effective for as many years as fat tissue, so fat tissue is the source that we use.

21:42 KK: The fat tissue. You kinda talked a little bit about the neurological diseases, the ALS, Alzheimer's not necessarily responding yet, dot dot dot. What about spinal cord injuries?

21:56 DS: Well, that's the...

21:56 KK: That steered the one patient.

21:58 DS: Fabulous dramatic case of this guy who was not gonna get better and did, and what's really interesting to me is that he continued to improve for nine full months after the procedure, so he started to get better and got better and got better and got better, he didn't stop getting better.

22:15 KK: It was something else.

22:16 DS: For nine months. So the stem cells were still working nine months later.

22:22 KK: That's amazing. Is there any new research regarding stem cell therapy?

22:26 DS: A lot, there's a lot of research being done. There are many medical centers, University places, they've been working on stem cells for eye rejuvenation, there's a lot of people with retinal problems, with blindness, macular degeneration, all of these areas would be really nice to be able to use stem cells for as yet it hasn't panned out, but these are research areas.

22:50 KK: So how long has the research been going on and what are the predictions and the forecast for the future for this to take place and perhaps be FDA approved?

23:05 DS: I know the research is not gonna stop because people don't stop doing research, and the stem cells is such a nice attractive area since you're taking the body's own tissue to treat the body. It eliminates most of the adverse effects that could occur, so basically, it's either gonna work or it's not gonna work, but it should be relatively easy to do. So I don't think that's gonna stop. I'm not on top of all the research that's being done, I've read things from different universities, and The Mayo clinic is working on spinal cord injuries, I'm sure many other places are working on spinal cord injuries 'cause that's a really common problem for which treatments are not so great. So that's gonna continue and there's kidney disease, we gave some stem cells to someone with kidney failure, not yet on dialysis a few weeks ago. I don't know what that's going to do. I read some research saying that, well, maybe this would be a beneficial thing, why not try it? And he was willing, I told him, I don't know what's gonna happen. But this is something you can do. It's either gonna work or not work. And if it does work, wow.

24:07 KK: Yeah. Amazing.

24:09 DS: That would be a wow.

24:12 KK: Right, it really would. I know as we're looking for the cures for all kinds of diseases out there, cancers and all of that, all of the above. What are some of the criticisms from stem cell therapy?

24:27 DS: Well some folks who I think probably should know better say it doesn't work, I've had patients come in and say "well, my orthopedist told me stem cells don't work", and I say, "Well, has he worked with them? Has he used them? Does he know how to do them? And what results has he seen? Because again, it depends on who's doing the procedure, what are their techniques, are they using ultrasound for their injections, how good is it?" So technically, if it's sub-optimal, the result is gonna be sub-optimal and people may say, "Well, stem cells don't work", but it's not that the stem cells aren't working, it's that the doctor who's doing it, isn't doing it right.

25:05 KK: So do you have any tips on finding a doctor and looking for exactly somebody that's certified or capable of doing that?

25:12 DS: There's no certification for it 'cause it doesn't exist at this point, but you'd wanna see somebody who's been doing it. You would want someone who's using ultrasound, I wouldn't have anybody doing it on me without ultrasound, and some folks are... Who don't use ultrasound if they're treating a knee, which is the most common joint that gets treated, they'll put a needle into the knee, inject all the stem cells through that one needle which goes into the center of the knee joint, and they're saying it's gonna treat the whole knee, well, it doesn't, it's treating the center of the knee joint, it's not treating all of the muscles around the knee, it's not treating the ligaments and the tendons, and it's not treating much of the cartilage either, so you're not getting a whole treatment, and that's why I would pretty much suggest a person to always do it with someone who's using ultrasound or at least some other x-ray modalities, so they know where they're putting that needle.

26:08 KK: So do you have a list of questions that people should be asking when they're looking for the right treatment and the right person to handle that treatment?

26:18 DS: I think there should be a good evaluation, not just a physical examination, but MRIs are very good at determining what's going on, CT scans are useful. X-rays have limited use. Ultrasound can be extremely useful. So with ultrasound, which we use, you can see the muscles, you can see the ligaments, you can see the tendons and the cartilage, and you can make out very fine abnormalities in these tissues, and ultrasound in the right hand sees it better than an MRI does. MRI is better at looking at bones and nerves and nerve compressions, but an ultrasound is better at determining the fine structure of muscle and tendon tissue.

27:02 KK: And actually along that line. And then what would the difference between CAT scan or a PET scan be? While we're talking about ultrasounds, MRIs and scans?

27:12 DS: Well, CAT scans, at least from an orthopedic standpoint, have been largely replaced by MRIs, which give you a better definition, and in orthopedic situations, CAT scans and MRIs are done generally without contrast. If you're looking for cancer, you need contrast. If you're not looking and you're just looking for degeneration, you don't need contrast, so it's an easier procedure and a safer procedure. PET scans are different because that's basically a procedure to determine cancer.

27:42 KK: Oh, okay.

27:43 DS: So if you're treating somebody for cancer and you wanna find out has it gone somewhere, has the breast cancer gone into the chest, into the brain or something like that, you do a PET scan 'cause that can pick up tissue that's cancerous will accept radioactive glucose which is what you're measuring on that scan, so it's used a lot in following up cancer patients.

28:05 KK: Okay, I appreciate you discussing the difference between those. Has traditional medicine come around to recommending stem cell therapy more often yet?

28:16 DS: To a degree, yeah, we get referrals mostly from other patients, but also from naturopaths, from physical therapy people, occasionally an orthopedist, though usually not, an orthopedist who lives through surgery is gonna be doing surgery, he's not usually gonna be wanting to lose his patients to someone who's giving them stem cells.

28:40 KK: Right.

28:41 DS: And the surgery can be healing, it can be really wonderful if it's really necessary, but we've seen many people who were told by an orthopedist, "you need a new knee", we look at them and we ultrasound them and we check their mobility, "you don't need a new knee, you need your cartilage work done and you need this, that, and the other, but you don't need a new knee."

29:04 KK: Interesting that you can see the full treatment there, and good luck, I hope that the stem cell treatments really get on the board with FDA in the future, thank you for everything you're doing, and thank you so much for your time, and we look forward to having you on again. But in the meantime, you can catch more of Dr. Sosin on his website, iprogressivemed.com, and learn more about his passion for alternative medicine and the other great things he's involved with. Thank you.

29:29 DS: Thanks, Kim.

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29:36 KK: The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of Mother's Market and Kitchen. Mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

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