My guest today is Dr. Eric Weiss M.D.
Dr. Weiss is board certified in plastic and reconstructive surgery, an original leader in advanced regenerative medicine.
This practice offers umbilical cord stem cell therapy as regenerative medicine treatments, including treatments for autism.
In addition, these treatments are offered for osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, wound repair, and traumatic brain injury.
Dr. Weiss attended College of Medicine at Duke University on a naval scholarship.
That's right, Dr. Weiss is a veteran of the U.S. Navy.
He completed residencies in plastic surgery at University of Miami, general surgery at the University of California in San Francisco, and general surgery at the University of California, Daedalus East Bay.
Umbilical cord stem cells are living cells that are transplanted into the patient.
These living cells must be alive during the infusion process.
An industry standard is between 40 and 60% alive.
However, Dr. Weiss and Duke University is seeing over 90% live cells during infusion process.
So we're going to have Dr. Eric Weiss join us and tell us and learn all about this process.
And now my conversation with Dr. Eric Weiss.
Dr. Weiss, start with telling me a little bit about your medical journey, some things that were interesting you were interested in.
And just take us up to the point of the autism research.
Okay, well, I went to Davidson College and then from Davidson College, I went to Duke University Medical School.
And Davidson and Duke are linked by the Duke brothers and Duke University used to be called Trinity College.
But if you give anybody enough money and ask them to change their name, they change their name.
In fact, I think they asked Princeton first, but Princeton wouldn't change their name to Duke.
So they gave the money to Trinity College and they became Duke, but they gave a little bit of money to Davidson College as well.
Davidson is kind of a feeder school to Duke Medical School, so there's a lot of people from my class that went to Duke University Medical School.
After that, I went to University of California, San Francisco, where I did a residency in general surgery.
Then after general surgery, I went to University of Miami and did a residency in plastic surgery.
And then after that, I went to the United States Navy because the Navy sent me to medical school at Duke, which is very nice of them.
And so I went into the Navy and was a plastic surgeon and then eventually got out of the Navy in 98 and started my plastic surgery.
And my journey to stem cells and to autism, I think revolved around two things.
One is when I was at UC San Francisco, it was a hotbed for research.
They were doing surgery on pregnant sheep because there were some congenital anomalies that are found in humans that make it incompatible with life.
You can live in the fetal environment, but as soon as you get born, you die.
And one of those is called hypoplastic left heart syndrome, and that's due to a congenital diaphragmatic hernia.
And so at that time, they were getting sheep pregnant and then in the first trimester, they were opening up the uterus, taking one of the baby or the fetal lambs out,
opening the chest, creating a diaphragmatic hernia, putting it back in, and then letting it be born so they could study how to do that.
And what they found out was if they do this injury too soon, not only is the sheep born without a scar, but the defect was fine too.
That somehow it fixed itself.
They cut a hole in the diaphragm instead of being born with a hole in the diaphragm.
They were born with a complete diaphragm.
So the big question is how are these fetal sheep healing by true regeneration and not scarring?
And so that was a big question.
And that research was done by a pediatric surgeon, but it got picked up by plastic surgeons.
And I was going to be a transplant surgeon.
And in my year, I think nine out of 11 of the chiefs went all went into plastics because of this research.
So I had some kind of regenerative medicine in my background due to my early training.
But then my son was born with autism.
And it obviously became a lifelong passion of both my wife and I to heal him, you know, any way we could.
And there was a landmark article in 2005 from John Hopkins, because autism rates were increasing.
And they said, we need to look at some some fresh brains from people who died from autism.
And so they did that.
And, you know, kids that died in car accidents, kids that, you know, died, house fires, drownings, you know, anything.
And what they found out where there was brain inflammation in these kids,
there was something clearly different about their brains than normal brains.
And this was the first time that that was described.
And as soon as that happened, the people that do, you know, picked up on it.
And I'll get back to how that how that happened is, is that the traumatic brain injury research people, you know, with chronic traumatic encephalopathy that were happening with the football players.
And soccer players were was in the news.
And they had discovered that you can get a concussive blow to the head or even a sub concussive blow.
And then 20 years later be 30 times more likely to have dementia.
And what happens to the brain with just a very small blow.
And what they found out is, is some people develop neuro inflammation.
And they, they did a 30, 30 different trials trying to figure out what they could give that would be neuroprotectant.
And then the 30th thing they tried was on Biltrochord blood, because some other researchers found out that it really acted on the immune system.
And as soon as they published a paper saying that, that for traumatic brain injury, it looks like on Biltrochord blood may turn off brain inflammation.
The people from Duke said, wow, cerebral palsy is a is a brain inflammatory problem.
So they took kids with with cerebral palsy and gave them on Biltrochord blood.
And it got, you know, fabulous results.
Almost 90% of the kids got measurably better.
And I mean, crazy stuff.
Kids in wheelchairs started walking, kids who couldn't see started seeing.
And then the next thing was, well, let's do it with autism.
We know from that one report that it looks to be a neuro inflammatory problem.
And then the people at Duke did it, and sure enough, about 65% of the kids got significantly better.
And when I say significantly better, I don't mean marginally better.
I'd be better than can then can be explained by anything else, except what was what was given to them.
And a single dose of a Biltrochord blood was shown to to grow more brain connections by MRI that their EEG started to normalize because kids with autism have a different brain wave pattern.
It has less electricity, but more importantly, they have abnormal ratios of alpha waves to beta waves to theta waves to delta waves.
And those started to normalize and then by sophisticated objective measurements, their socialization skills got better.
And so as soon as I read that, I knew from my previous training that that this could be the answer.
And so, you know, having trained at Duke and at UCSF, it was nice that I could call Duke.
And I knew the people there, you know, the woman who was doing the research Joanne Kurtzberg, she got there as an intern during my fourth year of medical school.
So we were only a year apart. So as I was rotating through the hospital, she was only one year above me.
And in fact, she married, you know, somebody we knew as well.
So when I called there, they were very nice and said, you know, you know, Eric, we're seeing some amazing stuff.
But due to our protocol, we can't treat your son. He's too old.
And I said, well, do you think he's too old to get a benefit? And they said, no, certainly not.
But we don't know. We don't know for sure. Nobody's ever treated adults.
And I went back to the original paper from Hopkins. And even though the study was on kids, they were sent two brains of adults.
One was 33, one was 42. And both those brains had the same, you know, identical neuro inflammation like all the kids did.
So I figured it was a lifelong problem.
And so my wife found a tremendous physician surgeon in Chicago who was doing a pediatric brain injury study, a doctor named Thomas Loeb,
who, you know, famous, he was the head of pediatric surgery at St. Jude's Children's Hospital.
And they had pioneered stem cells for pediatric leukemias and lymphomas.
So he was very adept at it. And so he was doing a brain injury study at, you know, I called him, you know, one day we talked on the phone for about an hour as I was driving home.
And it turned out he was trained at UCLA when I was at UC San Francisco. You know, we knew people in common.
And the more I talked and the more we talked, the more he said, why don't you bring your son up and let's give it a try.
You know, we know it's safe. This stuff has been given medically in the United States for 60 years.
So the safety profile is very well known. There's 80 different diseases that unbeholdable blood treats.
And so this is not new to medicine. It's just new to autism.
And so we knew that it was very safe. We knew how to give it. And so he did it and we saw remarkable results.
You know, he was one of the responders. And that's how it all evolved.
And that obviously, you know, happy life, happy wife, you know, my wife convinced me, pushed me into this because she said,
are you going to do this for our son and not offer it for anybody else?
And I tried to convince her I had a day job. And so it started off on Friday mornings and then it involved, you know, the Fridays all day and then it went to Wednesday mornings and it went to Wednesdays all day.
Now it's on Tuesday mornings, Wednesdays all day, so I'm selected Fridays.
And so very soon I'm going to give up operating and do this full time because it's very rewarding. We see tremendous results.
It doesn't work on everybody, which we're still trying to figure out, but it works on about 70% of kids.
And it offers hope to these, to not only the children, but the parents, you know, because, you know, we talk about neurodiversity and it's good and everybody, you know, wants to love the person the way they are.
But if we can help the person interact with the world a little bit easier, it just will make their life easier. You know, it's like saying, well, let's don't tear paralysis, you know, that we can get around finding a wheelchair.
Well, you know, you can get around finding a wheelchair, but in some instances, you know, it's nice to be able to walk as well.
You know, and this stuff is starting to show promise and spinal cord injuries.
So there's going to be a tremendous, I think it'll be the single biggest thing that happened to medicine since antibiotics will be harvesting the healing powers of umbilical cord blood.
Well, that's very fascinating. How old was Marston at the time?
Well, Marston was 22. And, you know, and anybody who was kind of, I talked to had never done it to that age, I actually called Panama and their cut off is 18.
But, but Dr. Loeb did it at 22. And he got remarkably better. You know, he had probably 20 to 30 words, he could put two words together, mostly speaking for function.
You know, he would say bathroom and you knew he wanted to know where the bathroom was if we were in a strange place.
But he started making changes almost immediately. He started, you know, asking questions. We didn't tell any of our family, we did it.
It probably had a month, maybe six weeks, our niece called us and just said, you know, what the f's up with Marston?
You know, and I'm going like, what do you mean? Is he okay? I went to his bedroom, you know, and he goes, no, he just called me on the phone.
And, and, you know, Carly was only one year above him. So, you know, he was 22, she was 23, and he kind of grew up with her.
But that was the first time he ever used a cell phone to initiate a call.
And he was just kind of missing her. And he said he asked me about my boyfriend and, and etc, etc.
And so that's when we really knew something was crazy was happening.
And then everybody else started saying, you know, something's different, he's talking more, he's acting, you know, he's following commands more, you know, and it just his life blossomed.
Wow. Yeah, I'm almost thinking like, as he initiated that phone call previously, we could just imagine how much he wanted to interact and how much he was just so curious about others.
And wonder maybe even why, why he couldn't do that or initiate that stuff.
And, oh, I think it was frustrated. Yeah, as he, as he started to talk, he said, I wish I had Austin's brain, which is his older brother.
You know, so he, he knew it was more difficult for him to, to speak.
But it was just like when he was young, you could say, go get your purple pajamas and he could do it, but he couldn't say purple pajamas.
And you, you know, you think of the people that, you know, were completely conversant and used to talking how to stroke and can't talk.
It must be incredibly frustrating to have something to say and not be able to say it, but it, it certainly freed up his life.
Yeah, that's incredible. Just, just sitting here trying to imagine this, that frustration that he went through and others as well.
There's plenty of others as, as you described, and it kind of sounds like he's more level two or level three as the DS, the new DSM describes that needs substantial support.
But can you explain to me about what it is exactly in this um, umbilical cord that is being infused or transplanted into the recipient?
Yeah, I will. It's, um, well, first let's go back and we'll talk a little, you know, neurophysiology 101 here is that your brain is full of neurons and those are very specific cells.
So specific that they really don't, you know, metabolize glucose too well. They don't do a lot of things well.
So they have these support cells called glial cells that live right next to them that, that help them exist.
And these glial cells can exist in three states. They can exist in the neutral state, meaning not much has happened.
They can exist in the pro inflammatory state, which means there's some type of insult and they're secreting inflammatory mediators.
And those mediators cause the neurons to die off, something called apoptosis, and it breaks up connections between neurons.
And it's been shown with kids with autism that they have less connections in the areas of speech and socialization and language than other kids.
And the third state they could be in is a, is a brain restorative capacity where they're causing new connections and new cells coming in and they're making everything right again.
And it's been shown in certain situations, whether it's trauma, infection, inflammation that you can get stuck in that pro inflammatory state.
And so when the researchers in traumatic brain injury were looking at it, they found out that the mesenchymal stem cell, the MSC, which is a found in a Biblical court blood, has the ability not to act on the glial cells
and not only turn them from the pro inflammatory state, but they go back to neutral, but all the way to the pro restorative state.
And they secrete something called brain derived neurotrophic factor, BDNM.
I'm not going to ask you about that.
Right, or something called nerve growth factor.
And brain derived neurotrophic factor makes more connections.
It causes cells and neurons to come together.
And nerve growth factor causes your own brain cell, your brain stem cells, which live in your brain kind of in a far away area to migrate to the area and make more neurons.
So when I think when you infuse these cells, they're very, it's a very, it's an amazing thing what they do, because when you get the umbilical cord blood transfusion, they get trapped in the liver lung and spleen.
So all the cells get trapped in the liver lung and spleen right away, you know, or not all about 95%.
Then starting on about day eight, they start migrating back into the bloodstream.
And then they just circulate looking for things to do, looking for inflammation.
And if you look at the experimental animals and they're experimental animals for autism, that by day eight is when they start to migrate to the brain.
And by day 14, they're all in the brain.
And they have the ability to cross the bloodstream barrier.
People aren't sure how they do it, but they know they do it.
And as soon as somebody published, you know, by day 14, they're all in the brain, the people who were using stem cells for leukemia and lymphoma, they wrote letters to the editor of the journal and said, you know, we saw something very similar.
You know, we've been using stem cells for 50 years.
We infuse them. We don't, we don't have any idea where they go, but we know at three weeks, they're all in the bone marrow.
And since we've done it 10,000 times, we don't worry about it.
And so it looks like that's a property of stem cells.
Because when you, when you radioactively label them, or when you label them with immunofluorescence and you say you inject them in a puppy, they can circulate for two years because there's nothing wrong.
But if you put them in an age of dog with bone problems and, you know, brain problems and heart problems, they attack the problem, you know, right away and get used up right away.
So back to your original question.
It's a simple IV.
It looks like the MSC or the mesenchymal stem cell is the heavy lifter, but I'm not convinced of that.
If you look at what's in umbilical cord blood, umbilical cord blood is like chicken soup for healing.
There's five different types of stem cells.
There's stem cells for the heart, there's stem cells for the liver, there's stem cells for the gut, there's stem cells for the lung, there's stem cells for the whole immune system.
And this MSC.
And there's also something called an undifferentiated somatic stem cell, which may be the precursor for the neuro stem cell.
People aren't quite sure on that.
And on top of these stem cells, there's something called natural killer cells, which help you with, with viruses.
There's also something called T regulatory cells, which are really good for the immune system.
So it's been shown that kids with autism also have inflammation of other parts of their body, you know, the gut and the skin and stuff like that.
And so these help that as well.
Autism and GI problems are so common.
And yeah, and it's such an easy treatment.
You know, it's a simple IV.
You know, now it might not be simple to start an IV in an autistic child because they're very frightful.
But once the IV is in, it literally takes minutes to you infuse it just like you would infuse IV vitamins, you know, it goes in over the course of several minutes.
And I think that, you know, I'm uniquely, I want to say qualified, but I think parents find me unique is for two reasons.
One is my son got this and I did it for my son.
And I've seen it work. I understand the science.
When you call my office or set up a console, you actually talk to me, you know, you don't talk to somebody in between.
But the second thing is as a surgeon for the last 30 years, it's very easy for me to sedate people and sometimes these kids are very frightened.
I can give them a quick shot or, you know, and then they just, you know, relax.
We start the IV, you know, we have a time pretty well.
They wake up in 20 minutes.
The IV comes out, it's all done.
You know, and it's just, it's not stressful on the parents, the child or even me, you know, nobody wants to hold the child down and to put an IV.
And obviously if they don't need sedation, we don't sedate them.
But it's a simple treatment.
And I believe it's the only thing that can that you can do to train your to change your brain at a cellular level.
Okay.
Or the person that's giving the blood, the umbilical cord blood, what's that like?
How do you select that?
Well, it starts with the OBGYNs.
And so almost anybody gets offered you want to save your own stem cells for you.
But that can be costly and pay yearly.
But then they usually follow that up. Would you like to donate your umbilical cord and your umbilical cord blood?
And they say, you know, yes or no.
But if they say yes, so the hospital knows they're going to donate it.
So a woman has a baby.
And all these are live healthy births in the United States.
And as soon as the baby's born, the umbilical cord blood is harvested and then the umbilical cord is harvested.
They're placed in a solution and they're FedEx to the lab.
The lab is in Las Vegas and it's in Las Vegas because there's more direct flights to Las Vegas than any other city in our nation.
And they have to be processed within 48 hours.
And so they get processed, they get placed in the freezer.
And then at that time they're waiting on data.
They're doing genetic screening of the mother and father.
And they're also, you know, checking the mother for infectious diseases.
So the mother, you know, gives her blood and they're checking from, you know, HIV, human T cell leukemia virus, Lyme's disease, shagus, CMV, Zinc of West Nile.
You know, anything you can think of, it's all that hepatitis A, B and C, all that's getting checked.
And it takes about eight weeks to get all that data back.
And then once the data comes in, the obviously the lab looks at it and says, you know, is this a go or no go?
It's not just about depending on infectious disease, genetic screening and stuff like that.
But before it can be released to the public, it has to be looked at by a third party physician, you know, who looks at it and agrees with them.
And then it goes on a public bank.
And most people don't know that there's a public bank just like if you were going to donate a kidney or something like that because bone marrow transplants really aren't done anymore.
You don't care about bone marrow transplants.
And that's because a whole immune system can be reconstituted from a Biccocort blood
now.
And so, like I said, there's 80 different diseases that are treated with this stuff.
Some things need to be HLA matched with the mother, most not.
But as soon as it's put on the public bank, then we can use it for autism.
And the nice thing about it is that these cells don't have the ABO blood markers.
They don't have HLA markers yet.
So they're generic cells that can be given to anybody.
It kind of sounds like once they're given or once they're infused, the body already
knows what it's going to do with them.
You don't have to manipulate them or kind of direct them.
No, I feel like I'll give you a quick story, which is how this whole thing was started,
which really was amazing, at least to me, it's kind of amazing.
Back in the 50s, we win World War II.
The Russians get the bomb.
Cold wars and full swing.
And the government makes our medical researchers look at radiation fallout, just in case we
get nuked by the Russians.
And so they were doing radiation research on rats, and they just noticed that young rats
could tolerate radiation injury much better than older rats.
And somebody got the idea and said, why don't we sew an old rat to a young rat and see what
happens?
And so what they did was they did that.
They made them kind of like conjoined twins.
Then they radiated the old rat and it healed like a young rat.
Then they said, well, let's injure a leg.
And they injured a leg and it healed like a young rat.
Then they looked at the metabolic activity.
Well, how many liver cells does it make per day?
How many gut turnover cells?
And what they found out was the biologic clock of the older rat got younger.
And they said, what circulates in young animals that gives them the quality of youngness?
And that question was asked like in 1957, but it took decades before we figured out
there's something called the adult stem cell.
Most people, which heal, there's two big types of stem cells, embryonic, they make a baby,
adult, they heal.
So these are adult stem cells designed to heal.
They're designed to circulate in the body, find things that are broken and fix them.
And so there's very little manipulation.
You infuse them and let them do their thing.
I've always heard that, I haven't always heard, but recently, over the last maybe two years
that I heard that bone doesn't heal, it just regenerates and you can't find a scar on it.
Is that something you're familiar with?
Yeah.
Well, first it develops something called a callus.
When a bone breaks, and the question is how many living cells are in the bone?
They're mostly calcium and stuff like that.
And so they get made, a callus forms, which just looks like a callus on your hand.
It's a bump on a bone and there's a lot of metabolic activity, but it lays down a sheet
of calcium that gets remodeled exactly like the old bone.
And so radiographically, you're right, there's no scar there.
And that's just because if you think about it, it's more like a hole in your drywall.
It gets patched and polished and sanded with the exact same stuff so you can't see it.
It's a good anablet.
As opposed to a skin injury, which there's that fine line of scar where there's no skin.
But I believe with these cells, we're starting to get stuff, as a plastic surgeon, I've had
huge traumatic injuries where I've treated that with stem cells and the scarring is down
98%.
And so there's people working on scarless healing now so that you can have an operation
and not have any scar after it.
Based on the timeline of the 1950s and everything you just said there and regeneration, I'm
reminded of a guy named Robert O'Baker who was kind of canceled, which is kind of reminding
me of like this whole process right now.
He did legendary work with regeneration.
He has the DC electric effect.
But what would you think?
And I want to kind of ask you about are there trials or clinical trials or what?
Why is this more popular?
I think there's two things.
One first is new science.
So it was really kind of written about and exploded on the scene in 2019 followed by
the pandemic where everything kind of got shut down.
And so it's been up and running and things are happening.
But it's exploding regenerative work, just like the DC currents and stuff like that.
We're starting to find out that cells migrate through electricity.
We're finding that when the sunlight hits your skin, there's changes in your gut.
That photon of energy gets transmitted.
And I think we've done a disservice to people.
Keep your clothes on, slap sunscreen on.
Sure, you're not going to get a skin cancer, but you're not going to be as healthy either.
And if you look at people that work outside, their skin cancer rates pretty low.
None of those guys got COVID.
COVID didn't blow through the homeless population or the people working outside.
And so I think this renaissance in healing, which is happening, is going to be the biggest
change we've seen in medicine.
I think that we're just scratching the surface on this.
We know now that people with congestive heart failure, where your heart's not being effectively,
not everybody's a candidate for a heart transplant.
We know now with an infusion of umbilical cord blood that your ejection fraction, the
efficiency of your heart, gets better just by a simple infusion that's measurable and
quantitable.
And so I think after a heart attack, this will be first line therapy.
After a stroke, this will be first line therapy, spinal cord injury, brain injury.
It looks like it's going to be infected in Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, multiple
sclerosis.
You know, I think in burns where you lose skin, you know, it's going to start to, because
your body has the ability to heal itself.
And the biggest problem we see is that you're born with a bank of these adult stem cells
and it goes down very quickly.
You know, by the time you're through your teenagers, you've lost 90%.
And by the time you're in mid-thirties, you've lost 95%.
And so once we learn how to give these cells, we can do it.
Yeah.
You're spot on.
100% over the target on the sunlight and healing.
It's electrons.
And I think that's what caused autism is the lack of electrons.
And people going out in the sun don't get sunburn because they get more red light in
the AM, which preconditions for the UV light.
And with the gut, it's 100% true because the enteric system and the bacteria emitting
light and all of those aromatic amino acids are synthesizing those things like serotonin
and dopamine and all of that, which is crucial for the development.
And this whole gut brain axis, we're just trying to figure out.
I've had several patients, you know, gut issues go with autism.
The nice thing about infusing this stuff and let it work, you know, I've had kids seven,
eight years old, nine years old, 10 years old, not potty trained, you know, product
diarrhea, product constipation.
Get this treatment, you know, and within days, they start to have normal bowel movement,
within weeks they're potty trained.
But then they start to get better, you know, and so this stuff, by great to the areas of
most concern, and it might be the brains, not the area of most concern.
You know, I talked to a parent today where they've had gut issues from the word go, the
kids 10.
And I just said, I said, the nice thing about this stuff is, you know, I don't have to
be a smart doctor.
The only smart thing I have to do is give this to your kid and let the cells figure out what
needs to be done.
This is not big pharma.
This is something that God gave us.
And we just have to live a healthy lifestyle.
We need to get outside.
We need to walk.
You know, you need to be grounded, you know, breathe fresh air, breathe salt air if you're
close to the ocean, and let your body heal.
Yeah.
Evolution gave us these, either God or evolution gave us these and we should utilize them.
You wiped out the randomized controlled trials.
What we have works as long as we can properly utilize them.
Right.
And this stuff should get start, you know, in first grade, you should get it.
You should get this stuff.
You know, and I've just seen amazing things, you know, autism primarily, but, you know,
now I'm starting to do neurodegenerative disorder.
I had a woman come in with Parkinson's who was using a walker, it's shaking, you know,
and in one dose, she's walking more normally.
She's not using a walker anymore.
You know, her brain is better.
And so we have these cells which are there to fight inflammation.
And the interesting thing, which I think is very interesting, is that these cells can
turn into fat cells.
And most people don't understand with a poor diet, you're eating inflammatory things.
Fatty acids are inflammatory in your bloodstream.
And so the way to get those inflammatory things out of your bloodstream is for these
cells to turn into a fat cell, you know, and then that takes the fatty acids out as a fat
deposit, but it also makes your bank smaller.
And so with the obesity epidemic in the U.S. and the people that are overweight, they even
have less of these cells, you know, and so it's all about living a healthy lifestyle,
eating normally, you know, decreasing your inflammation, getting sunlight, using your
body's natural ability to heal, and you could heal probably damn near anything, you know.
I mean, there's going to be a role for traditional Western medicine.
Don't get me wrong.
But most doctors on talking about how to prevent disease, they're talking about how to treat
disease when you should be trying to prevent it.
Yeah.
The obesity, I think, is a loss of electrons as well in the mitochondria.
They're not getting those electrons and they're not pumping out water and cytochrome-siocides,
and they're just not pumping out ATP.
They're losing energy to the environment.
And that concept, you know more than most, but if you get down into the nitty gritty,
because we don't talk about the nitty gritty on how these mesenchymal stem cell works,
because most people just want to know that they work, but they work by something called
paracrine activity.
And so when they sent an inflamed cell, they migrate to the cell and they make something
called an exosome.
They make a little packet of information, which goes from the stem cell to the inflamed
cell.
It goes inside the cell, fuses with the nucleus of that cell.
It gives it the proteins and the signals to heal itself.
But one of the things that it fuses with is the mitochondria, because it always comes
down to mitochondrial dysfunction, and especially with age.
But starting much earlier than most people think in our 20s, your mitochondria needs
support, which is why there's these supplements, MNN and NADH.
All these things help support healthy mitochondria.
But that's how these things work, by actually changing the cell and affecting the mitochondria.
Okay.
As we age, our ability to make water in cytochrome cell stakes in the mitochondria are decreasing.
And I think this might help kind of level that back up.
Right, because they don't make ATPs like they used to.
Yeah.
So you're losing cellular energy.
So the processes which were crucial are starting not to get enough energy to be a peak 100%.
Now, your cytochrome P450 is at 95%, which is not so bad, but it's not 100%.
But if you can drive that to 100%, because the goal in life is your health span to be
equal to your life span.
And so nobody wants to be in a nursing home in a wheelchair or an oxygen with dementia.
You want to live a healthy life and then collapse with that.
You win life when you do that.
Yeah.
All of these conditions, all of these modern health conditions started after electricity
and artificial light was invented, because we're just getting isolated light.
Isolated light is no good.
You need the full spectrum of light.
Right.
So if you're from a farming people to an industrial people, people start to work it
inside, then they're tincing even the windows of buildings so they don't have to heat them.
But natural light is just good for you all the way around.
All of these rates, including the rates of autism, follows humans removing themselves
from the sun and getting under artificial light, both day and night, two different things,
both severe problems, and the types of artificial light.
The rates follow it identically.
That's hard for people to hear and understand as a cause of something that's driving this,
but I don't know.
Right.
Well, I think that what's interesting is now that we know the end, the end is there's
some type of inflammation that's not being dealt with, then you have to work backwards
and say why.
But before doctors would throw up their arms and go, well, it just happens.
Well, it doesn't just happen.
The rates increasing and now that we have some type of, it's like jeopardy.
We know the answer.
The answer is inflammation.
The question is how did it get there?
What can we do to help our bodies deal with inflammation better?
Something this magically happened in the 30s, Canter and Asperger started seeing these children
from different parts of the world.
It was like something's going on here.
Right.
It's amazing.
It's taken 90 years.
Yeah.
And Alzheimer's, 1911, and this obesity over the last 50 years.
Right.
What does, you said that the process takes about 20 minutes.
What does it look like for the person receiving the IV after that?
Well, first of all, if they're not sedated, they feel fine.
The one interesting thing that the stem cells that are preserved in it has kind of a funky
odor.
It comes out in your breath.
We've heard it described as garlic, corn, strawberries, raspberries, olives.
I've heard it, but I think it's kind of a sweet smell.
I would say strawberries.
It goes away after about five hours.
Most people say they sleep really well that night, but it really is like a little bit
of an energy boost, but that's it.
The kids that are sedated, once they come out, by that afternoon they're playing, they're
going to the beach or whatever they want to do.
I think most of the, you really start to feel good at about two weeks because that's when
the cells start to migrate out.
I think from, there's a biphasic thing because the first thing they do is they stop inflammation.
The second thing is they stimulate new cell growth.
Even if I inject it in somebody's knee, who's got a bad knee, arthritic knee, they feel
pretty good for the first couple of weeks just because the inflammation is getting better.
But by three months they're going like, my knees never felt good, and that's this good.
That's because now they're starting to recover that with normal cartilage and get rid of that
bone on bone.
I think with neurodegenerative disorders, whether it be Alzheimer's or Parkinson's or
autism.
It takes a while to start to get those new connections.
Because I think there's kids out there that might have had an inflammatory hit, and they
might not have a lot of inflammation now, but they have the end result of that.
Because I've had parents say, not much is happening, not much is happening, not much
is happening.
Then at four months go, okay, he's a different kid.
Now we're starting to see crazy things.
I think if you think of it as a highway, as my wife said, those Bob barricades are up,
and you just can't get through.
Bob barricades start to get knocked down.
Then you're starting to get normal neurologic transmission of electricity.
You start to see good things happening.
That's incredible.
For the recipients that didn't work, there was a small percentage you mentioned earlier.
The question is what to do.
Is it an emergency thing?
Everybody really knows that answer.
Duke's been doing a lot of the studies when I was up there talking with him.
I said, have you looked at the non-responders yet?
They said, no, we really haven't.
The question is, do they need more?
Do they need a higher dose?
Do they need multiple doses?
Or is there another cause that may not be the classic inflammation that was seen in that
one study?
Because right now, there's not a great non-invasive way to document inflammation, and you can't
buy up to the brain.
A phase one study in the United States is it safe.
A phase two study doesn't work.
A phase three study is dosage administration.
That's where we're just starting to get to phase three right now.
When I did my son, I just, as a medical guy, said one dose is not a trial.
I'll try it twice and see what happens.
But he was so much better after one dose, it was much easier to give the second dose.
But I work with all the parents, and I just say, the downside, the biggest downside is
the stuff is not inexpensive, and it may not work.
But it's not going to be bad for your child.
But when I looked at people wanting to do supplements, they want you to, from hyperbaric
to the speech therapy, the occupational therapy, the ABA, all that costs money too.
If you look at the actual data, the data supports this treatment pretty well.
It doesn't work for everybody, but it works for a lot.
If you would just even compare it, and even some autistics are given like antipsychotics
and stuff like that, it was just so wrong.
But if you look at-
Oh, I agree completely.
So, one of the side effects, this stuff has side effects, but nothing long term.
Short term side effects include a rash or a fever, and we usually pretreat with a little
benadryl and a little hydrochlorosome to help prevent that.
That can go and come in about the first six hours.
Kind of midterm side effects.
Kids with ADHD can get a little bit more hyperactive.
Kids with aggression can get a little more aggressive.
It's not continuous.
It's episodic.
It usually lasts a few months, but then it gets better, and it usually gets a lot better.
But I was talking with a family last night, and they said, well, our daughter's really
got caught aggressive.
We're thinking about maybe we should talk about starting her on antipsychotic.
And I was trying to convince them.
That's not- you just want to manage it.
This is a phase.
It's been described.
It doesn't happen in everybody.
In fact, it doesn't happen in most.
It happens in about 10% of kids.
But it gets better on its own.
And antipsychotics are a slippery slope.
Manage it at home, and it'll get better.
In fact, a lot of kids that we give this to can get off their antipsychotics.
Oh, good.
That's a nice thing as well.
Yeah, that's fantastic.
I don't like the medical paradigm.
I'm not a big fan, even though you're a part of centralized medicine.
Not a big fan of it.
But from our conversation today, I mean, 100% know that you need my approval or judgment,
but I am just enjoying what you've said so far.
No, no, I think it was a watershed moment to me when there's such pushback on this.
And I'm able to do it because the FDA has already approved it for a bunch of other different
things.
And so the FDA regulates drug companies.
It doesn't regulate healthcare.
And so if you and I agree that this is safe, it's indicated, and we want to do it, then
we're allowed to do it.
20% of all medications in the US are used off-label because they're discovered that they're
beneficial for something else.
We know 70% or 70% plus people benefit from this.
We know it's safe.
Why not use it?
And I think that COVID pointed out to me drastically that Big Pharma is interested in making money.
We know in that there's nothing better than a sick person because then you have a customer
for life.
And so we've been thinking about managing disease when we should be talking about preventing
the disease.
And once you prevent it, you can probably figure out how to cure it.
And I think that this stuff will offer a lot.
There'll always be a role for pharmaceuticals.
Biotics help save a lot of people's lives, but people are doing antibiotics like chiklets
or candy.
And you can't do that either because people are just starting to understand the microbiome.
And I think the next big thing will be, there'll be people with a super microbiome.
They'll figure out that there'll be a percentage of people that they've got an A-number-one
microbiome.
And then we'll use that to put into people whose microbiome, if it's screwed up due to
trauma, illness, antibiotics, genetics, whatever, and try to repopulate their gut with a microbiome
we know is much better than their own.
And then we can start seeing how that impacts the health care.
Yeah.
If I had to guess, it would be athletes or super lean people, super athletic people will
have that super microbiome.
That's why there's this metabolism is just kind of like an overdrive.
Right.
Well, I think we think that these people are genetic specimens.
And it might be that their microbiome is better than everybody else.
Yeah.
And that might be the cause.
Yeah.
Right.
You know, because I think we're starting to see differences in people born by C-section,
you know, verse coming through the birth canal, because that's your big first microbiome
hit, you know, that might need to happen more than we think.
Yeah.
Okay.
That's very interesting.
Something I learned about the womb and the maternal is she's providing so much serotonin.
Her peripheral serotonin is providing so much for the womb central nervous system.
And in large part, autism is that just abnormal central nervous system.
And the serotonin is putting together the sensory map and help developing the central
nervous system.
Right.
And that's why when women take antidepressants, you know, and select a serotonin, you know,
it screws up the serotonin system.
And those kids can certainly have issues.
Yeah.
The autism or other things, autism and things.
Yeah.
Right.
SSRIs.
Yeah.
Just a couple more questions.
I'm having a heck of a time here.
This is so fun.
Whenever you mentioned that crossing the blood brain barrier, I made a note and I just wanted
to run it by you.
Do you think vasopressin is involved there?
Where by it kind of signals or something signals stress and the vasopressin through the pituitary
will open up the blood brain barrier?
That's interesting because we know the brain is stressed.
We know that when injury or inflammation or something happens in the brain, that the
blood brain barrier can be opened by internal mechanism.
I mean, nobody knows quite what that is, but it could be.
You know, I have no idea.
All we know is that the cells go from the peripheral blood and they get access to the
brain.
And by 14 days, if you induce inflammation in the brain and then give these cells by
day 14, they're right there.
If you take the same animal and you don't induce inflammation, they're in the blood
system running through the brain, but not into the brain proper.
They haven't crossed the blood brain barrier yet.
Blood leaks out and tells that cell to stick to the blood brain barrier and how does it
zip through it?
There's these things called tight junctions that are supposed to be tight.
Maybe those junctions slide open for a second and slide back and then the stem cells in.
But it's interesting that you can't detect a leak, a wide open leak, yet somehow these
cells are in.
So they pass through without causing damage.
So it could be vasopressin.
Yeah.
That's...
Oxytocin and vasopressin is very interesting.
Two little molecules, they're very powerful things and they're very small peptides.
There's only like nine proteins, but they're very powerful.
What is something recently that you're most excited about before we wrap up professionally
or personally or both?
Well, I think professionally and personally, it's probably going to be the stem cells in
this.
It took some soul searching and talking with my wife.
I've been a surgeon for 30 years.
It's what I am.
It's what I do.
I like to be the guy called when the life is on the line, when traumatic injuries, car
accidents, whatever.
But I think that phase of my life is coming to an end because I think that these will
be truly healing properties.
Not many people are doing it.
I think it gives hope to people that need hope and I think it can restore life like
nothing else.
And if you can ever figure out how to get the body to heal itself as opposed to a drug
or surgery, you're much better off.
And so I'm going to concentrate on this.
I'm going to give up surgery and do this full time because I've seen remarkable things.
I've seen tremendous healing.
I had a woman who came in in a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis and after a single treatment,
she was walking normally and went back to work.
So I've seen it work and it's amazing.
And so I'm excited for the next phase of my life to be honest.
Yeah, it's very promising.
It's just the amount of motivation and hope that you're giving me, just telling me about
it.
Right, right.
It's a spiritual journey.
I do believe that I was set up to do this, that I had a connection with you.
I had a connection with UCSF.
I had a connection with stem cells early.
And then I've seen it in my plastic surgery practice and then I saw what it did to my
son and it made him integrate into the world.
He lives on his own.
He drives a car.
He has a job.
He's interested in girls.
He's had a girlfriend.
He's living his best life through completely natural healing that most people don't even
know about, to be honest.
Most pediatricians don't know about.
And that tells you it's crazy.
That people who are in this field, especially people way before me, were ridiculed as nut
cases.
But that's what happens when you work outside the box, where you go like, the question is,
why are we seeing all these diseases and we don't have enough sunlight?
Why is all this stuff going?
Yeah.
I'm about to lose my battery here.
I can either plug in or we can end it real quick.
We can end.
We've done an hour and I don't want to keep you, even though I could.
I always say a big part of the podcast is like, research is right here and we're just
constantly running in this circle.
We're like a rat on a rat.
I'm more interested in than just expanding the edges of science.
I'm thankful you came on because I get the message that's what you're doing.
Yeah.
I love, I spend my time reading about this.
It's nice that I can pick up a phone and call a major researcher and go, hey, I think
our paths are going to cross this way.
What have you ever thought about this?
And I've called people from Stanford to Michigan to all sorts of people.
And the people who are doing it are always interested in the clinicians point because
they're doing the bench stuff.
And I go, I think your research is going to be.
Dang.
Well, it looks like Dr. Weiss's battery died.
That's my fault.
I rambled a little bit too much at the end instead of just having a goodbye.
And I wanted to mention to him happy Veterans Day and I didn't get to do that.
So Dr. Weiss, this will be on the recording.
If you, if you listen to it, happy Veterans Day and thank you for everything.
Thank you for the conversation and your work and pushing the knowledge about this themselves
practice.
I think you go ahead.
You asked me about what I was excited about.
Yeah.
And talking about the colleagues and stuff.
Yeah, go ahead.
Right.
So there's one guy that I'm really intrigued with a guy named Bruce Patterson, who was
a world class kind of molecular biologist and pathologist from, from Stanford.
And he described a lot of cytokine and chemokine stuff in COVID and kind of the really molecular
markers of inflammation, which really hadn't been studied, and he, he found out, you know,
kind of what was killing people with cytokine storm.
But he also afterwards, people have what they call long COVID.
They had brain fog.
They had the stuff and, you know, some doctors thought they were making it all up because
all their tests were normal.
And what he did was he measured their cytokines and there's 11 billion different combination
of cytokines and he found out that they all had the same pattern.
And so there was something molecular that was happening in these long COVID patients.
And so he, he took 18 people and found out it was all the same.
And then he showed that if you keep treating them and you drive down their cytokine levels,
their symptoms got better.
Then he decided to look at 45 people who, who all had long COVID just to see if he could
reproduce his results.
And then he found out that 40 had the same pattern of long COVID.
But these five people over here had had a different pattern, but they all have the same
pattern.
So then he said, these people have long COVID.
These people have something else.
And then he looked at their medical history.
They all had Lyme's disease.
Then he goes, okay, Lyme's disease gives you a pattern.
And then he said, I think I found a pattern for pandas.
So I heard about them.
I called them and I said, you know, Bruce, Eric, we introduced ourselves.
But I said, you think there's a pattern for autism that, that there's going to be a basic
pattern of inflammation that we can pick up on the cytokine level.
And you know, he said, I don't know, let's do it.
So we've taken blood on about six or seven kids now.
And we've looked at 14 or actually 12, 13 different cytokines.
And the, the most normal kid had had 12 have our 10 abnormalities at 13, you know, so they're
they're profoundly inflammatory, inflammatory state.
And so now we're trying to put it together.
We're trying to get maybe 30 that we can get, you know, the infamedic guys to look at and
go, okay, this looks like a pattern.
These two are the same.
What's different about this kid?
Let's get more medical history.
But I think two things can happen.
One is that we now have something we can measure autistic kids that we can say we're getting
better.
Look, is inflammatory markers are dropping?
And well, first of all, you know, as inflammation drops, should it does that correlate with
getting better?
And if it does, then we can really, really press it.
And the same thing, you could use it almost as a diagnostic tool too.
Yes.
You know, this, this 18 month old, you know, something happened here, you know, and then
you could start saying, okay, well, their initial blood sample at the hospital didn't
have this inflammation, you know, is this acquired?
Because in that initial autopsy study, they, they had blood or they had brains from kids
that were so-called neurotypical and then degenerated or regressed into autism.
And then they had kids that were never good, you know, that always had it.
The interesting thing is they all had inflammation in the same place.
And so now we're starting to think that there's something called maternal immune activation
MIA, where if the mom gets infection or some type of inflammatory hit, they can transmit
to that child, or if the child gets an inflammation early on when they're young, whether it be
COVID or some other problem, that can, that neuroinflammation can cross the blood brain
barrier.
So it just opens up a lot of, of directed research, you know.
So I think that's exciting, but just that's the most exciting thing happening in my life.
Wow.
That is exciting.
What about those patterns?
Cydecans, if I'm not, if I'm not mistaken, they're some of the roles or the role they're
or cell signaling and a part of cydecans is interleukin.
Is that right?
Interleukins are cytokines.
Oh, okay.
So yeah, right.
So you've got interleukin 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 all the way up to 35.
Every time they, they figure out a new cytokine, it's interleukin 42a or 42b.
So yeah, they're the, the, the, they're the cellular communications of inflammation.
That's the lowest molecule there is.
They're the ones that turn on the whole immune system.
And so these kids and adults have, have issues with their cytokines and chemokines.
And so now we just have to figure out when it all started and how to turn them off.
I see, I see the interleukins in autism papers a lot.
Correct.
Yeah.
It seems like, you know, that's the path there.
You're on to something there with the patterns.
I'm extremely excited about that.
I want to look up Bruce Patterson, Dr. Kind of.
Yeah.
He would be, he would be an interesting guy to talk to.
He might talk to, you know, most of his work is done with, with inflammation and disease
disease, but I think he could tell an interesting story about COVID and long COVID and Lyme's
disease, you know, stuff that most people don't know about, about immune activation
and how to treat it.
Yeah.
Okay.
How can people get ahold of you and if you want to share and I think there's two things
I would share.
One Eric Weiss MD.com, you know, is the one website, but NorthFortostemCells.com is, is
my main one.
But my wife wrote a book called Educating Marston, who is my son with autism.
And it's everything we did for him.
You know, the one bad thing about autism is that, you know, if your kid gets leukemia,
there's a playbook, you know, but as soon as your kid gets autism, the pediatrician
kind of, you know, patch on the back and says, go get therapy.
But there are things we, you know, we did that work.
There are things we did that didn't work.
My wife was very honest, but I wrote the middle three chapters on stem cells kind of on the
biologic basis of why they should work and how they work.
And I think that'll give people a very nice baseline to know that this stuff has been
studied a lot.
It's not new to medicine.
It's a new application for, for an old drug.
It's safe and maybe it's something they want to do.
Yeah, good.
And Educating Marston can be found on Amazon or Barnes and Nobl or Books of Million, all
those.
Great.
I'll put, definitely put show notes.
There'll be links in the show notes.
I'm excited about that.
I just loved our conversation.
No, I'm looking forward to seeing it.
Nice meeting you as well.
Where are you located?
Tel City, Indiana.
Southern Indiana.
It's about two hours south of IU.
Oh.
About an hour west of Louisville, Kentucky.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, it's a very small town.
Well, keep doing what you're doing.
You're bringing knowledge and power to a bunch of people.
Thank you.
Yeah.
I didn't want to, the other recording ended before I could say this, but Happy Veterans
Day.
Oh, thank you.
And you screen your service.
No, no, no.
You know, I did my little bit, you know.
So glad to help out.
Thank you.
Have a good night.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Eric.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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