Biohacker Ben Greenfield on the Anatara Medicine Podcast

In this episode of The Anatara Podcast, Dr. Ahvie Herskowitz speaks with Ben Greenfield, a biohacker, nutritionist, physiologist, fitness coach, competitive athlete and New York Times bestselling author of 13 books!

In this interview they will take a deep dive into EBOO, biohacking and longevity.

Podcast Transcript

Ben Greenfield: Man, it’s been, I think maybe almost five years since I’ve stepped foot into the beautiful Anatara Medicine up here.

Dr. Herskowitz: That’s right.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Yeah. And every time I walk in here, it seems like right off the bat, I get hooked up to all these crazy tools, and I got, I got a tube in one arm, I got a tube in the other arm. You’ve already drawn a bunch of my blood, Ahvie. So, so my first question for you here is, what the heck is going on here? I’ve got blood coming out of both arms and this weird machine off to my left. Can you explain this to people?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, this is called the EBOO device. Um, EBOO, Extracorporeal blood oxygenation and ozonation.

Ben Greenfield: Extracorporeal blood oxygenation and ozonation.

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: Okay. One of those tubes is going out from you into the machine itself. The machine has two components. One component is where it receives the ozone.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: And the other component, after it’s ozonated, it goes up upstream into that filter that’s off to the left. Off to your left. That filter is controversial in the sense that, …

Ben Greenfield: Really?

Dr. Herskowitz: When you, if you ask A.I to talk about EBOO, it only talks about the ozone component.

Ben Greenfield: You mean literally like if you go to GPT and inquire, what is EBOO?

Dr. Herskowitz: …and talk to 4.0 GPT and you ask it to talk about EBOO, it only talks about the effect, the positive effects of ozone.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: And that’s because there aren’t been, there haven’t been published studies as to what’s found in the, in the filter. So there’s a there’s a debate going on in the community. Is it filtering anything.

So I can tell everyone here now that there are credible studies that we’ve reviewed that show in the filter, when you study the filter after a treatment, you find a variety of things that you don’t want in your body. You find bacteria, viruses, fungi, mold and heavy metals.

Ben Greenfield: And you do you do that with every procedure, with the filter? Or is this just something that the researchers will do occasionally to see if the filter is actually picking anything up?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, we didn’t do the testing. The testing is done by third party sophisticated groups.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: But we know after looking at all the data and we presented the data at a course that I ran about a year or so ago, um, before the ACAM meetings, and were very impressive data. So they were also trying to find clues as to whether you could find the spike protein because it was the pandemic time.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: That couldn’t be, it couldn’t be documented.

Ben Greenfield: And what’s an ACAM meeting?

Dr. Herskowitz: ACAM is the, I’m president of the oldest integrative society in the United States. It’s going to celebrate its 50th anniversary in our next meeting in the spring of 2024. It’s the group that brought chelation therapy to the United States for…

Ben Greenfield: You mean for like, heavy metals and toxins and things like that.

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes. So this is the group that brought it to the forefront. It’s the group that will bring it again to the forefront because this second chelation study will soon be published by the end of this year or the beginning or Q1 of 2024.

So there’s a lot of, so when we have our meetings which draw very solid functional medicine and integrative medicine folks, mold experts, experts and ozone, experts across the spectrum of all chronic diseases, we also have another focal meeting, you know, focused meeting, and we focus this meeting on EBOO.

Ben Greenfield: What’s ACAM stand for?

Dr. Herskowitz: American College for the Advancement of Medicine.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. All right. Got it. So, so this controversial filter that the blood goes through, that’s not even theoretically, but it sounds like based on research filtering out bacteria, viruses, fungi, possibly mold, spike protein, etc..

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. And then what happens to the blood after goes through the filter?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, then it returns back to you so you can see if the camera could focus on it. Uh, or in the B-roll.

Ben Greenfield: And, oh, by the way, if you if you guys are listening in not watching, I’ll put the video at BenGreenfieldlife.com/Anatara, just go to BenGreenfieldLife.com/Anatara because it’s actually a pretty funky looking machine and a very, a very well slightly violent looking protocol because there’s blood in a lot of tubes.

But the machine that you were that you were illustrating here, Ahvie, is off to my left. That’s where the blood’s getting ozonated and then goes through the filter?

Dr. Herskowitz: The ozonation is occurring below…

Ben Greenfield: After it passes through the filter, that’s when it gets ozonated?

Dr. Herskowitz: No, before the filter.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: Before the filter.

Ben Greenfield: Gotcha.

Dr. Herskowitz: So before the filter, before the ozonation, the blood is darker red because…

Ben Greenfield: I see that, yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: After it’s ozonated and the O3 minus, which is what ozone is, binds to all the cells, the red cells and white cells in the blood. It turns the blood brighter red because it’s oxygenated.

Ben Greenfield: Can you tell by the color of the blood coming out of somebody when you first hook them up to this thing, whether or not they’re healthy or whether you be concerned?

Dr. Herskowitz: There are ranges of redness…

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: And if you, if you can’t transport, if you can’t respond to ozone, then you’re very, way off the curve.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: So at the same time you cannot tell a person’s health from the color of their venous blood. So the darker venous blood, it can mean that you’re extracting more oxygen in the arterial sector, you’re just extracting more and you can have darker blood. It doesn’t mean anything negative.

Ben Greenfield: Why do they call it blood oxygenation and ozonation? What’s the oxygen component?

Dr. Herskowitz: Oh, it’s just the ozonation produces oxygen.

Ben Greenfield: All right, So, so both of those effects are happening in response to the ozone.

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes.

Ben Greenfield: The ozone is cleaning and oxygenating at the same time.

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, ozone is a pro oxidant, as you know.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: It happens in seconds or milliseconds and then induces an antioxidant anti-inflammatory vasodilatory, a membrane stabilizing effect on the whole body that it comes in contact with.

Ben Greenfield: And does the level of ozone matter? Do you, do you select that carefully in terms of how much ozone you’re exposing the blood to?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah, so when we first started using these devices, this is the third one we bought our first device and that was calibrated at a higher level of ozone. And there were other mechanical issues with the device. And that device had, what I consider, serious complication. So we stopped, we analyzed that, we understood what they were, and we realized that it was not for us. So then we went to the Malaysian group that that really founded EBOO Therapy about 25, 30 years ago.

Ben Greenfield: Like in the country of Malaysia?

Dr. Herskowitz: The country of Malaysia is the epicenter of EBOO technology.

Ben Greenfield: That’s kind of random.

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah, it’s just, but I think it was it maybe an Australian doctor that moved there.

Ben Greenfield: Oh, I gotcha. Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: But they have the most experience in the world and we’re catching up now because they’re now, you know, few, certainly more than a few dozen centers that are using it. Um, and so these devices, this is the second iteration of that device are exceptionally safe, but they’re much lower in continuous ozone concentrations.

So when you’re using a single, the last time you were here, 4 ½ years ago, you had a 10-pass. You had….

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, I remember that. That’s different than this.

Dr. Herskowitz: …ten, 200 CC, uh, amounts of blood ozonated. Not continuously. It was sucked into the bowl. We then ozonate it and then give it back to you ten times.

Ben Greenfield: Ten times. It’s called a 10-pass.

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s a certain concentration. And we used the highest concentration, the highest gamma, so to speak. And that’s the, that’s the way we, we measure the concentration. So we use 70 gamma and 200 cc. You come up with a calculation. The amount of ozone in this is smaller, but the effect is larger because it’s continuous.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s a continuous flow. It’s continuously, probably flowing 2/3 of your blood of, of your blood volume.

Ben Greenfield: Now, just in case the doctors listening to this and they’re interested in this protocol for the clinic. What’s the name of the machine from Malaysia or the brand? Are you allowed to say?

Dr. Herskowitz: No, no, I don’t even know what it is. But we’ll, we’ll…

Ben Greenfield: It’s just a Malaysian one. Just Google, Malaysian EBOO, and I’m sure you’ll find it. That’s probably the safe way to go.

Dr. Herskowitz: And then, it’s really the art is in the tubing and in the filter.

Ben Greenfield: What do you mean?

Dr. Herskowitz: The choosing of the tubing. Because the tubing is, having a smooth treatment, as you’re having right now, is a function of flow. And the flow has to be proper and consistent, even though placement of the vein is not consistent and your vein valves are not consistent and eventually coagulation isn’t consistent.

So we have a certain level of um, of, of modification that’s built into the tubing size and then more importantly, uh, into the filter. The filter itself has to be ozone resistant, can’t be, can’t be damaged by ozone.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: So you have to be cautious as to the name of the of the filter.

Ben Greenfield: How big of an issue is that in this whole like, you know, I.V. medical treatment industry where, you know, people are cowboying off all over the place in, you know, in random clinics and getting these type of IVs done, in terms of the type of things that might wind up in the blood from the tubing or from the machining, is that an issue you think, with micro-plastics and things like that? I’ve always wondered.

Dr. Herskowitz: It clearly is. But with ozone in particular, um, if it’s not ozone resistant, you will deliver, um, byproducts of the tubing into the body.

Ben Greenfield: Interesting. Now, what’s the bucket on the floor over here?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, that’s the effluent. And the effluent is, is supposed to be fairly clear. Uh, and it’s, uh, it’s considered to be a byproduct. And when you test the byproducts, you have a constant, uh, more concentration of heavy metals.

Ben Greenfield: And so that that bucket on the floor is different than the filter? It’s catching something different?

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s catching what’s, what’s gone through the filter.

Ben Greenfield: And that’s called the affluent?

Dr. Herskowitz: Effluent, E, with an E.

Ben Greenfield: And what kind of stuff would you find in the effluent?

Dr. Herskowitz: That you find the, the similar types of things that are in the, uh, that are in the filter except in the filter. The filter is made up of millions of micro filaments. And when you snap, when you cut those micro filaments and you test them, you’re much more likely to find higher concentrations.

Ben Greenfield: So you tested my blood before we started this procedure. Would you be able to tell from that test you did on my blood whether I’ve got bacteria and yeast or viruses or things that this ozone would be treating, or would it make more sense to take that effluent and like send it off to a lab and test that?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, uh, what we did do just to the audience hasn’t seen it. We did take a little tiny bit of your blood and, …

Ben Greenfield:  You’re welcome.

Dr. Herskowitz: And we put it on. We, we did a dark field microscopy to look at, um, the shape of your red cells. And so on. They’re quite healthy, as I told you. But what’s going on in the plasma, is there, um, a biofilm in the plasma, is there, uh, excess fibrinogen in the plasma, is there extra things that will clog the microcirculation up. And yours was pristine, as I told you.

Ben Greenfield: Do you do that before all of your ozone treatments?

Dr. Herskowitz: Before any of the EBOO treatments, yes.

Ben Greenfield: And what happens afterwards? You ever do a live blood cell after?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yea. We’ve done, we’ve done, that’s how we do them.

Ben Greenfield: Does it look different?

Dr. Herskowitz: We show them a massive difference.

Ben Greenfield: Really?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes.

Ben Greenfield: Interesting. So can you steal, man, the blood cell analysis? Because I’ve heard some people say, oh, it’s inaccurate or, you know, that’s dumb that you’re trying to look at blood cells on a slide. Like, do you ever hear stuff like that?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, I can tell you as a formally trained pathologist that that’s very naive. That’s very naive kind of statement to make. There’s an enormous amount of expertise that goes into reading dark field microscopy, and you can make a myriad of different diagnoses. But looking at the shape of red cells is exactly what the machines do every day at LabCorp a million times.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: But sometimes you have to have an overlay of someone looking at it themselves.

Ben Greenfield: And what, why do they call it dark field?

Dr. Herskowitz: Because it’s not using stains and it has the light source, is indirect.

Ben Greenfield:  Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: Looking at it in a way where you can best visualize the cells and the plasma.

Ben Greenfield: What else did you test when you took my blood?

Dr. Herskowitz: Oh, we tested the, well, there’s two things. Two major categories. One is something that you’ve had before, which was, I knew you from, this is four or five years ago. Super, super, super healthy guy.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. And I’ll link to that initial podcast we did.

Dr. Herskowitz: And biohacking guy.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: So I surmised that you had no evidence of acute, you know, the standard inflammatory markers, the C-reactive protein and so on. I surmise that.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: But…

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, that probably wasn’t smart.

Dr. Herskowitz: But we’re interested in, if you’re interested in longevity, you have to deal with the chronic immune system.

Ben Greenfield: Mm hmm.

Dr. Herskowitz: Which is not measured by the C reactive protein. So we go to the complement cascade that’s complement with an E, and the best measure for chronic disorders like bio toxins, like mold, Lyme, uh, viruses uh, occult tooth infections.

Uh, those things that are not evident to a person until it’s late. Uh, well, your C4A level which is the, the complement marker that we use more, most frequently…

Ben Greenfield: For chronic inflammation

Dr. Herskowitz: …we also use C3A, but the C4A is the most common one. Uh, came up I think it was four or five times elevated. So it suggested that you may be exposed from mold from your travels. We know you don’t have mold in your home, but you probably kept your mold in…

Ben Greenfield: It’s notoriously found in every airBnB and hotels and, you know, front-load washers and all sorts of things people experience on a regular basis.

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield: But the blood test that you did for these inflammatory markers, you’ll often hear people say, well, CRP might be elevated if you exercised hard the day before or something like that.

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s true.

Ben Greenfield: So like if I’d have lifted weights or ran would that also artificially elevate those?

Dr. Herskowitz: They would.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz:  And they can and there’s no way to disprove it, but the other markers to get to the other things, so you look at other markers for oxidative stress.

Ben Greenfield: Mm hmm.

Dr. Herskowitz: That’s not good. So you look at ferritin, which is a classical iron marker, but when it rises in a, in a normal man or woman, it’s really an oxidized iron, which is rust.

Ben Greenfield: Like rust in your body from the inside out.

Dr. Herskowitz: You’re producing rust in your body.

Ben Greenfield: If your ferritin levels are too high.

Dr. Herskowitz: That’s correct.

Ben Greenfield: Which is, can be concerning cause there’s a lot of, I know, especially women out there who are taking both ferritin and iron. And from what I understand, if there’s things like, like an imbalance copper ratio and not a lot of that is winding up in the cells, you can develop like a like a, like an induced hemochromatosis from something like supplementation.

Dr. Herskowitz: So, most of our patients that have elevated ferritin, don’t have hemochromatosis. They have oxidative stress that’s out of control. And then you could also get some indirect information from using oxidized LDL. You can say if I’m oxidizing my iron, maybe I’m oxidizing my lipids also.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: So then you say you put the package together and you say, well, maybe I’m not really repairing well at night. I am not detoxing properly at night. And you could measure homocysteine levels and say, Do I have enough magnesium, Do I have enough B vitamins to repair to, to do my appropriate level of methylation at night? And if I don’t, you’re more likely to be oxidatively challenged and then most folks are not walking around with antioxidants that are sufficient to handle their oxidative load. So they may be, particularly your group, they may be pushing themselves and using NAD and using other things that produce more energy.

The question is, when you produce more energy, you’re also producing more reactive oxygen species. And do you have enough of a buffer to capture those and buffer them in your body? So, so ozone, for example, the few people that feel fatigued after ozone treatment because ozone is exceptionally safe. Let’s make that crystal clear here. We’ve done tens and tens of thousands of cases here over the last 12 years.

But if you feel fatigued afterwards, that means that that oxidative burst was too much to be handled by your antioxidant stores at that moment.

Ben Greenfield: So would it be a good idea based on that before you use ozone to take antioxidants?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, no. To a certain extent you want the oxidative burst to be unencumbered.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, I was going to say because like with exercise, if you take antioxidants it blunts some of the, some of the beneficial hormetic response.

Dr. Herskowitz:  That in that’s the hormesis is the one I want to get into a lot more in detail with you today. But you’re right. So you don’t want to do that. But at the same time, you want to give an antioxidant. It’s sort of counterintuitive. You say, I have a pro oxidant and then why would I give an antioxidant? Well, because the way it manifests the majority of its beneficial effects is by activating our own antioxidant systems.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: So you give it a little bit more and typically we give intravenously and people just feel great afterwards.

Ben Greenfield: So theoretically, you’d get the ozone, you would possibly get a clue based on that and even verifiable data from the blood testing that you are in a pro oxidative state and might have a higher antioxidant requirement. But rather than using antioxidants before an oxidative event like ozone…

Dr. Herskowitz: Right.

Ben Greenfield: …you would then just know that you need to leave those into your daily routine on a more regular basis.

Dr. Herskowitz: Let me tell you the poor man’s test for one of my antioxidant stores.

Ben Greenfield: All right.

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s an old story. And you take, we take the one, of the best one of the best vitamin C preparations as a powder. There’s a few. We happen to have in the office, we use Perque. He’s got a very nice powder. It’s three grams per teaspoon.

Ben Greenfield: Is this like a Whole Foods vitamin C type of source?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah. So, well, nothing is whole food based vitamin. This is a sodium ascorbate.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: But it’s, it’s as good as it gets. It’s not vitamin C. It’s not like eating an orange. I’m sorry, but, but to get to high levels. So you take three grams of one teaspoon, put it in water and drink it, 20 minutes later another three grams, 20 minutes later, another three grams.

Ben Greenfield: Why do you split it up?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, because that’s the way the, that’s the way it’s been done. I don’t think, because we don’t know how much you really need. Now, when you saturate your vitamin C receptors of your body, you activate the CFTR-receptor, the cystic fibrosis Translocated receptor in your gut. This is the same thing that turns on when you get cholera diarrhea.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s like a water faucet.

Ben Greenfield:  Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: So you have this sudden urge to run to the bathroom. You can’t do this on the street. You have to do this at home and then you just poop. You have your watery diarrhea movement. And that’s the number. That’s the level of antioxidants, and that’s the level of grams of vitamin C that was required to meet your antioxidant load at that moment in time.

So who…

Ben Greenfield: That is definitely a performance test.

Dr. Herskowitz: I think the prize here, was won by someone who needed 120 grams. The next one was 54 grams. I mean, so you don’t…

Ben Greenfield: That’s a lot of Vitamin C.

Dr. Herskowitz: That’s a tremendous…

Ben Greenfield: And if they have to take that much vitamin C,…

Dr. Herskowitz:  Yeah. No, you can’t take that much because you’ll want to poop all the time.

Ben Greenfield: That would, that would indicate that they were in a state of oxidation of inflammation.

Dr. Herskowitz: These folks both had serious autoimmune disorders.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: But the lesson was, you know, one gram of emergency is not going to help you.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: You know, you have to layer in glutathione, resveratrol, quercetin, alpha lipoic acid. Now you can, so that’s a rare case for, for those people in your audience in particular, and my patients I say we need pro oxidation. It’s mandatory to, for generation of ATP and for wound repair in particular, we need pro-inflammatory cytokines to walk around and do their job. We just don’t need, we don’t need to overdo it.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: So the folks that come in with two suitcases into the office, two suitcases now, and they have about 100 different supplements.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: There’s a lot of overlap, but let’s say there’s 30 or 40 different pathways, of which there are six antioxidant pathways. I say that’s not a coherent answer because you’re you don’t know whether you’re overtreating, under treating, you just don’t know where you are.

So then we go through a large set of laboratory data. We do a lot of labs here. Um, all the patients will complain about that. And so we say here are the validated biomarkers of longevity. There are a few that all of us know that there are more. You, I’m sure, have your, your guess as to which ones. But there’s hemoglobin, A1C of course, on blood sugar side, Vitamin D is probably the most significant one that’s unappreciated by the society and by certainly by the government.

Ben Greenfield: Right.

Dr. Herskowitz: Um,…

Ben Greenfield: Certainly certain anthropogenic risk parameters too, like triglycerides, HDL ratio or Apo-B

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah, well, but yeah, those have been validated. Um, but even ferritin has been validated as a marker of oxidation and homocysteine is a validation of, has been validated for longevity because of its effect on methylation. So we have some, and then the other thing that I always forget to say being alkaline has been validated to increase your lifespan.

So urine pH, early urine pH, the first morning pH, if it’s not between six and a half and seven and a half, then you’re, you’ve, you’ve been acidic the whole night and then you’re making 25% less protein.

Ben Greenfield: So if you use a P strip in the morning, one of these urine alkaline strips, I actually I found a company called a I think it was, vivoo, last year that tests a whole bunch of stuff on the urine and you hold it up to your phone and get an analysis and it does the alkalinity as well.

Dr. Herskowitz: Okay.

Ben Greenfield: But you want 6.5 to 6.7 if you’re doing a morning alkalinity…

Dr. Herskowitz: 6.5 to 7.5…

Ben Greenfield: So 6.5 to 7.5,

Dr. Herskowitz: 6.5-7 is really perfect.

Ben Greenfield: And above 7 or 7.5, that would indicate elevated acidity…

Dr. Herskowitz: Alkalinity

Ben Greenfield: And a lot of people will hear that…

Dr. Herskowitz: Elevated alkalinity, acidity is down, so most of us…

Ben Greenfield: I’m sorry, I meant elevated alkaline, yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: …Most of us are running around between 5 and 5.5.

Ben Greenfield: Wow. So very acidic.

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield: What do you think about the people who will hear that and go out and buy one of these alkaline water generators and, you know, do the alkaline diet and everything versus enabling the kidneys to naturally adjust the pH balance?

Dr. Herskowitz: I think that’s a tremendous marketing coo by an industry that’s running out of ways to sell water, because it’s neutralized immediately in the stomach. And if you have, if you want to invest in a water system, then get to a reverse osmosis system. Take out the crap in the water.

Ben Greenfield: What would you do if someone’s acidic, if they are peeing in the morning and it’s like below 6.5?

Dr. Herskowitz: You probably start with something as simple as giving them some water with lemon and some, a pinch of salt. And, and, uh, then you move up to, to, uh, um, um, apple cider vinegar.

Ben Greenfield: That’ll confuse a lot of people who think lemons and apple cider vinegar are acidic because they taste kind of acidic.

Dr. Herskowitz: But they induce it…

Ben Greenfield: They induce it.

Dr. Herskowitz: …an alkaline reaction for the body.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, I was hoping you’d say that. That’s what a lot of people don’t realize. Technically, that’s, those are alkalizing foods.

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s like, it’s like Ozone, why are you giving, why does the FDA think that ozone is a dangerous thing? Because they read a line that says it’s pro oxidant.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: And so well that’s what happens in a millisecond. So as soon as you drink your lemon water or you take your, your, um, uh, other remedies, it’s instantaneous. And then the body responds to it instantaneously. So the net effect is alkalinity.

Ben Greenfield: You said that you’re, you’re a fan of hormetic stressors.

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah. So the concept that everyone’s got to understand, because you can mess up if you’re just going to Google everything on your own, you know, if you’re listening to you, then you already have protection because you’ve you know, you’ve done so much and so much good for the society, in my opinion. And that’s why, first of all, I love having you over.

Ben Greenfield: Thank you. There’s, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of grumpy people sitting in ice baths because of me right now.

Dr. Herskowitz: But, you know, I know and I’ll talk about that in a minute, as a positive thing, too, but a little twist to it. But the concept that, listen, we’ve come, I’ve been doing this for 40 plus years, okay. How did chemotherapy start? Chemotherapy started because somebody found that one child with, uh, in the 50’s, one child with leukemia responded to nitrogen mustard. Okay. And so when that person died, the oncologist, the most famous oncologist ever, um, doubled the dose on the next patient and then quadruple the dose on the next patient. So if 1X is good, 4X must be better.

That’s the concept of traditional medicine per se. But it doesn’t, the body doesn’t work that way. So the hormetic effect, the hormetic effect is this curve is going up and you can be too. You can have such a low dose of something that it’s irrelevant or such a high dose that it induces negative side effects.

Ben Greenfield: Mm Hmm.

Dr. Herskowitz: So for ozone, for example, if you went to, you’re on now six gamma, right?

Nurse: Well, now we’re down to 4 because we’re almost done.

Dr. Herskowitz: Oh, okay.

Ben Greenfield: Being the level of ozone that’s pumping in my body right now?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes, right now. So if you went up to 12, you would already induce blood clotting and a reaction that’s actually happening here, but also happening in your body. You’ll be producing micro clots, given the way it’s given in this particular setting. The Europeans max out their ozone concentrations at 40, 50 Gamma.

And in the U.S we routinely use 70 and it’s been safe. But the reason they don’t do it is they’re more interested in hormetic effects than we are here. We’re more, but we’re more cowboys here in the United States. But you just look at heat, look at cold, look at caloric restriction…

Ben Greenfield: Exercise.

Dr. Herskowitz: Exercise in particular. You can do way too much. Now when you compete nationally, period, you’re a D1 athlete or you’re a competitive athlete, you’re doing too much.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: That’s the only way to…

Ben Greenfield: Keep doing too much for health. I mean, that that’s the tradeoff, right? It’s glory versus health, their career versus health when it comes to professional exercising or fitness.

Dr. Herskowitz: That’s right. So then you may have to pay back some things later.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Well, I mean, it’s like our mutual friend, Dr. David Minkoff. I mean, I certainly know that he’s aware of the fact that doing, you know, hundreds of Iron Man’s or the like 40 some over the over the past, you know, I don’t know how many dozen of years. It’s not necessarily the best thing for your body, but it is a pretty cool Mount Everest to climb, you know…

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes.

Ben Greenfield: …And it’s inspiring for people. And so, you know, I think you just have to accept the fact and not fool yourself into thinking it’s actually good for you. Last night at dinner, you and I were talking about how, you know, I have high calcium scan score and accumulated plaque, most likely due to cardiac stress from excessive endurance exercise.

Dr. Herskowitz: Vascular stress, yes.

Ben Greenfield: And James O’Keefe has shown that with some of his research on arterial stiffness and this whole law of diminishing returns or increased mortality with excessive exercise. So regarding hormetic stressors, then you do advise those in pro, program in your patients protocols?

Dr. Herskowitz: Oh, yeah. So I think when you look at master, master, so we know what drives, so, over the last 20 years we now know the genomics of aging and Peter Attia gets into that in detail in his good book, in his longevity book, and get into the pathways that are fundamental, right. Well, some easy interventions are fundamental. I sort of like, it can do multiple things, right. So ozone is one of those. NAD is  other classical example that can have multiple effects on energy cycle, which then also have effects on longevity.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: But cold immersion, heat with the saunas, and exercise have global impacts.

Ben Greenfield: What was it you were going to say about cold? You said you had your twist on.

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, I think you probably know better than I what you think is the, um, the, uh, the ideal timing of cold.

00:30:51:24 – 00:31:17:05

Ben Greenfield: Yeah

Dr. Herskowitz: But I know that people are different from one another..

Ben Greenfield: Yeah

Dr. Herskowitz: And your archetype would handle cold easier than my archetype, so I may have a shorter duration…

Ben Greenfield: Are you referring to, like, the constitutional typing?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah.

Ben Greenfield: Like the discussion we had last time. And by the way, if you want to wrap your head around that, Ahvie and I talked about constitutional typing and your diet and your lifestyle based on whether you run hot or run cold quite a bit. But yeah, I think you’re right. I would say that there are definitely some people who get too much sympathetic stress in response to cold, too much of an adrenaline norepinephrine response and almost like an overtraining response to cold. But I personally think too many people do like these long 10-20 minute ice baths…

Dr. Herskowitz: Yea, to me that’s too long.

Ben Greenfield: I mean, that’s my protocol is frequent and short.

So I have an ice tub outside the front door in my office and I jump in that thing like four or five times a day. And I’m in there for 20 seconds to a minute just for these brief cold forays throughout the day. And I don’t do a lot of the long shiver your butt off for 20 minutes of a cold plunge….

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, that’s what I wanted to emphasize, …

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: …that would be my opinion too.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Yeah. I think that every so occasionally, especially for like chronic pain, fibromyalgia, etc., that these you see these polar bear swimmers right out here in the San Francisco Bay and lots of stories of people who eliminate chronic pain and joint issues through longer cold soaks. But even those I see the people successfully doing those, they’re like, go for a cold swim like once a week and everything in between these short, cold exposures. Kind of like exercise. You might have one hard workout session for a week, but then everything else is just kind of tune-ups. And I think that’s a that’s a much, much better way to do things. More sustainable too.

Dr. Herskowitz: Right.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: So the question is 1 in 5,000 people live to one-hundred. Okay. We now know their genetic profiles and more so than when I first started medicine a long time ago. We know that just like in the beginning, we always thought that the centenarians only lived in Japan and only lived in the caucuses, and…

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, Loma Linda, Sardinia. Yeah, …

Dr. Herskowitz: …But we’re now, we know some people living in the inner city, too. Yeah. One thing we always knew about them is that they were maybe happier. They may be socially very open and they may be eating organic, you know, organically, but they don’t necessarily live very healthy lifestyles. Then some of them, you know, smoking cigars…

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: The oldest woman in the world was smoking a cigar every day and drinking, uh, you know, having alcohol every night. So, …

Ben Greenfield: Yeah…

Dr. Herskowitz: So, …

Ben Greenfield: And a lot of times it’s not just wine. We’re talking like scotch, whiskey …

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah, …

Ben Greenfield: …gin, everything.

Dr. Herskowitz: I mean, whatever, whatever made them happy. Okay, So that’s it’s not because they lived a unique lifestyle. So then you say, okay, I have some genetic pathways that you probably are well compensated for. But my most profound observation in my entire 40 plus years was when I first got out of medical school. I did a residency and chief residency in Pathology, and I was blessed. I went to Einstein in the Bronx, and I was blessed by having some of the oldsters that were chief of pathology when Einstein was still alive.

Ben Greenfield: Oh wow.

Dr. Herskowitz: They used to come in once a week just for fun, and they used to look around the center. And so, I showed them an aorta of a 60 year old person who obviously passed away. Uh, and it was moderately, severely affected. And then I showed them another aorta of a 104 year old person looking identical. It looked identical.

Dr. Herskowitz: And then, and then I, I didn’t say anything about it. So they analyzed it and they said, Oh, these are, they look, this is classical. Classical. I said, But this one is from a 104 year old. It looks identical to the 60 year old. So they said, Oh, let’s just have some fun with it. Let’s look at the histochemistry, let’s look at the cell types. Let’s look at it under the electron microscope. And let’s do that. Let’s have a fun time with us because we want to know if they’re completely the same or not, whether the cell types are different and so on.., are the pathways different?

And after months of all the data points coming together, they’re identical. One of, one of the people develops the full on bore thing that ultimately kills them at the age of 60. The other one has the full on disease 40 years later, but it’s the same exact pathology, the same pathways just delayed 30, 40 years. So to me that was, I thought that was, opened my brain to this concept that, um, if you have, if we could understand that gap, that 40 year gap, 30 year gap, we’d be able to have the rest of us, the rest of the 4,999 of us, who are fortunate enough to have these pathways up front and center, because with the genomics today, it’s not difficult to organize that. That we’d be able to make a real serious dent in our lifespan because the average centenarian doesn’t really have any serious medical problems until the age of 93, whereas the average person passing away in the late seventies is already sick in the sixties, in their sixties.

Ben Greenfield: That’s interesting. Did you actually do that kind of testing on your patients? Like you do genomics testing to see what someone’s risk is?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes. Yes.

Ben Greenfield: And there’s actual markers that you can pull up that literally translate to…

Dr. Herskowitz: Yea, so for example, …

Ben Greenfield: …increased lifespan, despite lifestyle.

Dr. Herskowitz: Right. So we know what they are. You know, they’re, they deal with senescence. They deal with, uh, with insulin sensing, with glucose metabolism, um, cell repair mechanisms. Um, and are you pro-inflammatory in your genomics? Do you tend to be on the pro-inflammatory side? Do you have, uh, mutations of TNF-alpha, IL-6, IL-1 receptor? Are you in that direction or not? Are you protected against autoimmunity versus not so, …

Ben Greenfield: So, so this is not a single mode, a single or single gene that you’re looking at.

Dr. Herskowitz: No.

Ben Greenfield: And so it’s a cluster of genetic factors that would dictate that the fewer of them that you present, the more equipped you likely are for life lifespan.

Dr. Herskowitz: Yea, because, for example, let’s say you have multiple, there are multiple detoxification pathways, right? But our epigenome is now bombarded with toxificants and was just completely bombarded. So if you have the normal amount of, and you may have a little snip in the glutathione pathways, for example, so you don’t have a full expression of your master antioxidant and detoxification, then you’re going to run into trouble faster.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: Now everybody’s got heavy metals. Everybody does, everyone has toxificants, pesticides. I mean, if you want to measure it you can, it doesn’t help me that much. Um, in the treatment because we use the heavy metals as the most, as the most tested and the most true, uh, types of data points for the last 50 years. If you get rid of them, you will, you will feel better, you will have less coronary disease, you’ll have less dementia.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: When you get rid of them.

Ben Greenfield: But you, and you from a heavy metal standpoint, because we had fish last night, and like I ordered a poke bowl for lunch today, you don’t, you don’t totally avoid them from a food chain standpoint, but do you yourself engage in regular chelation therapy?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes.

Ben Greenfield: Like ozone?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, ozone is, it makes chelation more efficient.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. But it wouldn’t count as chelation?

Dr. Herskowitz: It doesn’t count as chelation.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: That’s right.

Ben Greenfield: What do you do for chelation?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, you use different formulas, but, you use a chelating agent like EDTA.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: And you chelate it out. Takes 45 minutes, an hour, and you do it.

Ben Greenfield: What’s that? What’s that mean? 45 minutes to an hour to chelate it out?

Dr. Herskowitz: The I.V. You can do it orally or oral chelation works, but it takes a much longer time.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. All right. Okay. So by the way, this ozone, if you’re watching the video, you’ll see that they’ve pulled the tubes out of my arm and all the blood’s gone back into me at this point. Right?

Dr. Herskowitz: Right.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. And what’s that bucket look like? I can’t quite see without craning my neck. But did it accumulate? Can we get a picture that in the camera?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, the less of it you have, …

Ben Greenfield: That’s the effluent.

Dr. Herskowitz: … the cleaner you are.

Ben Greenfield: So that’s good. I don’t know. It doesn’t look like you have very much. And it’s all clear.

Dr. Herskowitz: And no, …

Ben Greenfield: Yay me.

Dr. Herskowitz: …and heavy metals would, heavy metals would have a color.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Okay. And then what’s this test that she’s doing right now on my, on my fingertip?

Dr. Herskowitz: She’s going to give us the, your blood sugar.

Ben Greenfield: Why’d my blood sugar go up so much during the treatment. It was a 73, now it’s at 111.

Dr. Herskowitz: Oh you had your, uh, you had your Perfect Amino bars.

Ben Greenfield: Oh that’s right, you did give me a bar because you don’t want your blood sugar to be low during the ozone treatment.

Dr. Herskowitz: No, you don’t. Because, uh, um, the rapidity of, uh, of the oxidative burst is, is muted by having a normal blood sugar level.

Ben Greenfield: And this clear glass slide, that she just held up to the blood. that’s a repeat of the live blood cell?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes.

Ben Greenfield: And you just look at that under a microscope?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes.

Ben Greenfield: And you showed it, it directly sends it to your phone?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah, I have the shots on my phone, but we, I just took a photograph of the, of the microscope.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: I can send it to you. I can send your photo.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, we’ll put it in the show notes at, bengreenfieldlife.com/anatara.

Dr. Herskowitz: Because know you’re clean. There’s nothing to, I can show you some things, that before and after and I can send them to you before and after that you can clearly see the difference between, what the average, what many of us are walking around with, because we’re not, we’re not, we don’t have a regular sauna routine. We don’t have a regular exercise routine. We don’t have a regular caloric restriction routine or time, or certain time restricted eating routine.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: We don’t do, that’s why we’re not on any… Oh, I take a few vitamin C tablets once in a while.

How come I had my, how come I needed a bypass surgery? I mean, I eat a banana every day. I mean, that that’s not going to work.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Yeah, I have, I have my oatmeal, my whole grains. So the, it is kind of funny though, because I, I’m glad my blood is looking good. My effluent is looking good because I just literally got back from two weeks of cycling in Italy, eating cake for breakfast, gelato for lunch and pasta for dinner. But I was also riding my bike like 30-35 miles a day in the sunshine, you know, 30,000 steps a day. And so I was, I was fine from a caloric standpoint. I think I lost like 7 pounds. Now, what’s this? This IV that they just put in to me after finishing up, this is, it says energy on it. That must be good.

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s a nutritive, it’s a complex nutritive drip.

Ben Greenfield: What’s that mean?

Dr. Herskowitz: It has vitamin C at its core and relatively low dose and then it has probably 20 micronutrients in it. A low dose.

Ben Greenfield: Low dose enough to, I’m not going to be doing the diarrhea test today.

Dr. Herskowitz: Oh, no, no.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Ben Greenfield: Well, we just took a little break here after Ozone, and, so before we get into these new needles that I have in my arm, Ahvie, what? What was that? Why did you have me collect my urine in the bathroom just now?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, we wanted a rule in or rule out whether you had, um, mold, bio toxin in your urine. And so it’s a standard test for mold. And, um, it it’ll test for okra toxin, aflatoxin, glial toxin. A few, a few half a dozen other mold species which are the most toxic. And then we’ll match it to, to what the new level of the complement cascade number is.

Ben Greenfield: How often is it that when you do a test on somebody these days they’re presenting with high levels of these toxins?

Dr. Herskowitz: I think, um, the, the estimate would be in the general population that around two thirds of us are walking around with toxic mold and as well…

Ben Greenfield: Wow.

Dr. Herskowitz: …um, in a, in an environment which is a wet and cold like San Francisco is, so it comes primarily from water damage. You can have a leak in, uh, in the desert, you know, and, um, saw that in Phoenix and still get mold toxicity, except there’s a few parameters that have to be important.

One is, am I genetically susceptible to having once I once I see mold, once my body is exposed, that I can’t get rid of it on my own. And you have that genetic susceptibility, and so do I.

Ben Greenfield: Really?

Dr. Herskowitz: Now I, I didn’t have a single mold symptom in my body until I was in my late sixties.

Ben Greenfield: Wow.

Dr. Herskowitz: I have a genetic susceptibility, so it was sort of like an area under the curve.

Ben Greenfield: And then it reaches like a threshold?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah. Then you say something is funny, something’s wrong. I’m just not sure what. Weight is difficult to take, you know, to, to lose more, more easily, is more difficult than before. Sleep is a bit, patterning is a little bit off. You measure it. It’s the same type of number that you had. And then you have to use binders.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s charcoal.

Ben Greenfield: Or ozone, right. Ozone could also make a dent?

Dr. Herskowitz: Again ozone… yeah. But again ozone, the, the real, the real direct approach is to take a binder.

Ben Greenfield: Okay, gotcha.

Dr. Herskowitz: And it’s not super difficult. They’re tasteless, but it’s black. It’s like black water. I call it. Uh, and you take it every day for and usually for…

Ben Greenfield: The treatment you call Blackwater?

Dr. Herskowitz: I mean, it’s charcoal.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s a, Quicksilver makes the number one product, the…

Ben Greenfield: Okay, yeah, I have that product.

Dr. Herskowitz: …The Ultrabinder, and we use it. And you will feel, uh, when you have mold in your body, you’ll feel something going on, on the CNS side after you take a dose. But it’s mild.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: And then eventually you will feel better.

Ben Greenfield: And do you recommend combining a binder like that with protocols like sauna, coffee enema, trampolining or limp circulation, the type of things that, that help once that binders in the system for the liver to actually…

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes.

Ben Greenfield: …process and remove everything via the skin, via the stool, etc.?

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s as, it’s as efficient as the binder. So um, but the binder is, is unique in its ability to attract the mold out. At the same time, you have to be able to be pooping.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: Because otherwise it just recirculates.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: But, but the sauna, the exercise, the trampolining, and the sauna is probably the most single, most important one.

Ben Greenfield: When someone does a urine test like that, how quickly do you get results back?

Dr. Herskowitz: Oh, we should have the results back by the middle of next week.

Ben Greenfield: Okay, Interesting. Well, that’ll be, that’ll be fascinating to delve into. And by the way, we’ll all publish all these results and photos and things like that on the website. If you guys want to take a look, I’ll put it all at bengreenfieldlife.com/anatara.

All right, so now I’ve still got this energy IVs, these B-complexes going into my body with the vitamin C, but now there’s like a, is this like a laser in my other arm right now?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes. So here, my goal here, when I started this around 12 years or so ago, was to try to find fundamental ways of, uh, of activating our energy cycle.  And oxygen is one. That’s why ozone has such an important role and ideas. And it is a separate it’s a separate system, but light energy or photo modulation, as it’s called, is something that’s underserved. I mean, the public doesn’t know very much about it. And this is, the device on your left is called the Weber Laser, and it’s from North of Frankfurt in Germany.

Ben Greenfield:  It’s quite the machine.

Dr. Herskowitz: Um, and it’s got, uh, it’s, it’s, it’s probably the best studied, uh, laser device. And there’s two, two or three different components to it. You have the, the different frequencies typically between 500 and 1,000 nanometers, but you have red, blue, green, yellow and, uh, UV light and infrared. So you’ll get all of those in what we call a rainbow, uh, a rainbow IV session. And it interacts with things that have a, it photo modulates, so it interacts with the yellow in the vitamin C and the magnesium and the drips. So it activates the, the energy drip more, more.

Ben Greenfield: So the way this works, like right now, it’s plugged into one different light and then you’ll shift it to a different light for each of those?

Dr. Herskowitz: So you’ll get 15, 15 minutes for each of the five and I’ll be over in an hour and 15 minutes.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: And, uh, we, we try our best to, to use this regularly in, in a few different populations. One is cancer populations. The tumor cells are typically sensitive to heat shock protein activation and heat shock proteins are activated by the laser.

Ben Greenfield: And when you first went through medical school, did you think you be getting into this, you know all this kind of, you know, lesser known, uh, protocols that you don’t see a lot of doctors doing? What do you think attracted you to all of this?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, I come from a heavy European background. I was born in Israel, but my parents are European. Uh, there was no question that I would probably seek to do something like medicine because it was good. It’s a good thing for a good Jewish boy to do. Uh, I got into law school first, and I, when I found out what lawyers did, I said no, no way. I, uh, I went to medical school and then really was on the outside looking in saying, everybody seems to really know what they want, and I’m just sort of going to observe things for a while.

And, uh, and it took me a while to find the niche, but I wanted to do it in a European style. So the Europeans, the, the old German doctors, this is after World War II then, they’re not high in everyone’s list, but they they were always known for outstanding medical care and they trained  in anatomy first

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: They had full, really serious anatomical training. And then they also did a year of pathology. So that’s what, why I got, I wanted to mimic that, even though I did three full years of pathology. But so I wanted to be a little bit different, but more old style because I, I truly believe that my general practitioner actually, you know, gave me a shot in my butt once for pneumonia. And, and he actually came to the house. And I like that idea.

Ben Greenfield: A shot in your butt?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah. Yeah.

Ben Greenfield: …for pneumonia?

Dr. Herskowitz: Penicillin.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: He gave me a penicillin injection and he came to my house and had a little bag and, uh, and that was all gone by the time I went to medical school. That was not done anymore. So I wanted a little bit of the older flavor and concept that something old was fundamentally not as good as something brand new, uh, came into really, is fundamental, you know, it’s been so fundamental the last several decades in understanding how little genomics has changed the world. It’s going to change. The world will take a long time. Uh, and how little, um, uh, the brand new technologies always may be incremental, but they’re not fundamental.

So, so a lot of the a lot of the, uh, of, of the reasons we ultimately use what we use is because they’re completely safe.

Ben Greenfield: Mm hmm.

Dr. Herskowitz: They can be stacked easily. So you’re going to be treated with five or six things, but they’re all coherent and they’re convergent with your systems. We’re not just only detoxing you. We’re not just only oxygenating you. We’re not just only talking, trying to talk to, uh, um, to any individual organ.

So, so then I, I went, I ran a heart, so I was trained there, and then I went to Yale for medicine and then cardiology at Hopkins. That was the pinnacle of my academic career. And I stayed there for 12 years, published a lot of work, became an immunologist, as well as a cardiologist, and had a big lab. And we were expert, the world’s experts in myocarditis. Um, I mean, there may be some groups in Germany that will tell me otherwise, but I think we were one of the best people in myocarditis. And we…

Ben Greenfield: What’s myocarditis?

Dr. Herskowitz: Myocarditis is now in everyone’s tongue because of the COVID induced myocarditis. Because COVID we knew from the very, from the very minute that we came to New York that it, the virus had a tropism, had a magnetism to the heart.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. So myocarditis would be like inflammation of heart of heart tissue.

Dr. Herskowitz: Inflammation of heart tissue, in this case, due to a virus. It’s not directly due to the virus. It’s a, it’s a reaction to the viral gene, the viral proteins on the heart surface, on the heart cell surface that then induces an autoimmune reaction. So the first paper I ever wrote to the ACAM members was on, lookout for post viral myocarditis, particularly in your kids and the college age students, and understand that it’s going to go away more likely, except when it doesn’t then it’s very serious.

Uh, so then, um, so I was doing transplants, I was doing invasive cardiology, I was, uh, catheterizer and so on. But I went to the top and I felt what it felt like. And that is an outstanding experience for anyone in any profession to go to the, to the best and, and study with the best. But then it was time to move from Baltimore to the Bay Area because my wife was from here and I ran a Heart institute, and the Heart institute had global centers.

Big, big data, big clinical trials. And we had a lot of centers in Germany. And when I went to Germany, I realized the hospitals were identical. But the pharmacies and the shops and the towns were completely different. The pharmacies were run by equivalence of PHD pharmacists here.

Ben Greenfield: Hmm.

Dr. Herskowitz: Like pharm D’s…

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: …here, there. Every pharmacist there was trained like that, and they were equally as trained in pharmaceuticals as they were in homeopathic and herbal medicine.

Ben Greenfield: And why is that important in a pharmacy?

Dr. Herskowitz: Because, you know, aspirin is not a pharmaceutical, hello. It’s an herbal remedy. You know, the curc, you know, a lot of the anti-inflammatories, a lot a lot of the fundamental chemicals, the sulforaphanes, the phenols, the ones that affect multiple pathways at the same time. It’s not a targeted single assay, targeted development of a pharmaceutical entity that needs to target something to be very, very, very specific. More of a global impact. They’re all, they’re all natural.

So they understand that and they understand that, so they don’t have a problem of over, of over, overprescribing antibiotics there. They don’t give antibiotics for viral illness. They give you 10, 20 different things that you can use. So I had that experience and then I was still professor at, I was made professor of medicine at UCSF as an honor, it was a privilege. And I took it, and I taught for 16 years and then realized that none of my, and none of my cardiology fellows were listening to anything I talked about in integrative cardiology. They were just not interested because they were overwhelmingly doing the technical part, which is appropriate, but they wouldn’t do something like order CoQ10 for someone with heart failure, they wouldn’t…

Ben Greenfield: Hmm.

Dr. Herskowitz: They wouldn’t treat, you know, metabolic syndrome. They didn’t even, they wouldn’t want to understand what it was. So a few of them sent their patients to me. I thought this would become an integrative cardiology center, and that’s what I thought when I first opened it up. But they never got their patients back, so they stopped referring them to us.

Ben Greenfield: Why wouldn’t doctor, why wouldn’t doctors like that just implement these same protocols themselves versus sending folks to you?

Dr. Herskowitz: I think that that’s the big, that’s the big problem that we see across every specialty. Um, it’s requires you to learn new things. And I don’t think that the doctors today have a problem with that, but they have a bias that their things are, are much, much, much stronger, much better. And, and if it’s not the case that they don’t want to go close to that. So sometimes they have a family urgency or an emergency and they have to learn it through their mom, through their dad, with their children. And then they come over. Um, but the guys who the women and men that come over frequently are anesthesia people, uh, ER docs and family practitioners.

Ben Greenfield: Those are the three types of doctors that wind up beginning to migrate towards the type of practice that you have?

Dr. Herskowitz: Yes. Yes. And then dermatologists too, because their into beauty, and beauty is from the inside out. You have to figure it out and

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: And, but the gut doctors don’t even know the gut biome, everyone knows about biome, and they don’t come over. Cardiologists don’t come over because they’re electricians, they’re plumbers, they’re doing what they need to do, and they’re doing it the best in the world. But that’s it.

Ben Greenfield: Is there an actual name for what you do? Is it just holistic wellness?

Dr. Herskowitz: I think it’s called it, it’s called sometimes integrative medicine. It’s now the new name du jour is Functional medicine.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. Okay. Got it. So what kind of patients do you actually see? Is this mostly people who are sick or these like the Bay Area anti-aging longevity enthusiast CEOs, these like celebrities or a mix of everything?

Dr. Herskowitz: So we enjoy the celebrities a lot and we enjoy the CEOs a lot. And you went to dinner with one of them last night. Um, and we, we, we like healthy people once in a while to break the monotony of folks. So this ultimately was supposed to be what I skipped in my story was that we then started the world’s first nonprofit pharmaceutical company, which was for diseases of poverty. So we had malaria. We produced the, uh, the artemisinin in E.coli, and we have the major, the major source of, the major source of the anti-malarial drug in the world is now produced in the way that we, we, we produced it with Sanofi Aventis.

Ben Greenfield: Is that hydroxychloroquine?

Dr. Herskowitz:  No, this is artemisinin.

Ben Greenfield: Wormwood.

Dr. Herskowitz: Yeah, yeah. Grows like weeds in my backyard.

Dr. Herskowitz: But no longer grows. Now it’s in E.coli. So we genetically modified, we genetically…

Ben Greenfield: …the bacteria make artemisinin?

Dr. Herskowitz: Now, now they do. And so Sanofi Aventis is now in charge of that. But we, we organize that and we, we have a uh, a new chemical entity for cholera diarrhea and some other diseases that we, that we did.

But um, but that took us all over the world into Asia and South Asia in particular, studied with the gurus and so on and uh, had some more exposure to the different forms and realize that certain like, you know, everyone knows that ayurvedic medicine has archetypes, everybody knows that. There’s certain types, right?

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: So which type are you?

Ben Greenfield: We talked a lot about that in our last podcast because you had me set up on a whole diet based on my, my constitution.

Dr. Herskowitz: Right. So the, so the concept of, here, as you know, we’re not going to do one thing. We’re going to, we’re going to we’re going to tackle the, the toxic load that we’re all exposed to in in an elegant, safe but multilayered approach. And ayurvedic doesn’t fit that. So the Chinese versions of archetypal medicines do.

Ben Greenfield: Mm. Hmm.

Dr. Herskowitz: So they, they do transcend different, to different lineages.

Ben Greenfield: What do you mean by that? What, what would be the main differentiating characteristic between like ayurvedic and a kind of Chinese approach?

Dr. Herskowitz: I don’t know, but they don’t, but ayurvedic medicine doesn’t play well with other, with other kids in the sandbox.

It just you’re either going to go that way and go and do it, do the best possible, go to ayurvedic specialist. But when you start mixing pharmaceuticals and you start mixing, you know, for serious illnesses, it doesn’t, and you start using natural remedies like curcumin, resveratrol, alpha lipoid acids, all these antioxidants and these master regulators, it doesn’t work well. It doesn’t work as well as it should. So either you do that or, or then you have to go to another form. So we tried it and it just didn’t work well. So in my hands it didn’t work well.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Now, you talked about German medicine. There’s a lot of these European biological medicine clinics, like Paracelsus is perhaps the most famous.

Dr. Herskowitz: Right.

Ben Greenfield: There’s another one. I took a group on a fantastic health tour of, for a couple of weeks out in the Swiss mountains called the Swiss Mountain Retreat. Are those any different than what you do here? Like, can they still do stuff in Europe that you can’t do over here?

Dr. Herskowitz: No, no more.

Ben Greenfield: It’s just the idea of medical tourism?

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s just the concept…

Ben Greenfield: You could also say traveling all that way and sitting on the airplane makes it feel more special.

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, I mean, they’re good at it. You know, they also emphasize things that we’re just coming to terms with now. They emphasize detoxification. They emphasize that the first, the first doctor you see there is a dentist because the hidden infections in the oral cavity are exceptionally common.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah, I interviewed a doctor from over in that area, Germany, I believe, Dr. Dom. And there is a big, bigger belief, at least over there, that disease begins in the mouth a lot of times over here in functional medicine here, the disease begins in the gut. Arguably, the mouth is the, the beginning of the gut. But I think a lot of people don’t realize that.

Dr. Herskowitz: Right.

Ben Greenfield: I’ve personally been doing a lot of work with a dentist in Phenix who’s done bacterial profiling of my mouth and does a lot of repeat labs and considers that a lot of disease, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, etc. can be detected by bacteria in the mouth and also via things like silver sprays and oil pulling and different medical techniques, and even biomechanical adjustments can be fixed by starting with the mouth and then moving down from there.

Dr. Herskowitz: I couldn’t say it any better. You said it very elegantly.

Ben Greenfield: Do you have dentists that you work with here in San Francisco or do you do all that work yourself here also?

Dr. Herskowitz: No, no, we don’t. We don’t. We have the, a stable of biological dentists, is the name. So the biological dentists can either handle the infected root canals, the infected gums and so on. But also then there’s biological dentists that focus on the airway.

Ben Greenfield: Okay. Got it. They’re also called a holistic dentists, right?

Dr. Herskowitz: Right.

Ben Greenfield: Or biological, holistic dentists.

Dr. Herskowitz: Mm.Hmm.

Ben Greenfield: Now, what about you know, you talked briefly with me. I don’t even know if we were, if we were on air yet or not, as you were drawing my blood about your ability to also get some early detection of cancer, is that also something that you’re testing for here?

Dr. Herskowitz: Well, we’re here. Yeah, well, we’ve been very interested in that because the, the first patient that, when I first opened up, that asked me their opinion, was the first employee of the nonprofit that we ran. And she was first diagnosed with stage 4, uh, colon cancer. Um, when, said, what should I do? And I said, well, I promise you, I eventually will figure that out. I just didn’t know. That was 15 years ago.

And, and today the field is now ready to be, to be completely changed. So we’ve known for years now, probably about ten years here, of the concept of liquid biopsies.

Ben Greenfield: Liquid biopsies.

Dr. Herskowitz: Liquid biopsies are the reality, the fact,, that tumor cells that are in the body are spilled over into the blood circulation. Most people believe the ones that have studied it for longer times than I have, is that the circulatory, the circulating tumor cells predate when you can find the tumor in, in an image. It’s one of the earlier findings but I don’t know whether that’s true or not.

I know that there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of reasons to believe that that’s the case. But it’s counterintuitive. You say, well, even if it was in the blood, maybe it has not nothing to do with the with, the with the tissue itself. Maybe they’re unrelated. Well, they’re not unrelated. The, and in the blood, you can, you can divvy out the, separate out the tumor cells as well as the as the conductors. The conductors are called the tumor stem cells. You can culture them out and you can study their biology and you can study their sensitivities. And again, as a whole world, except to say that you do get a numerical value, we do have them, yes or no. And if you have them, how much, how many of them per unit of blood do you have?

Well, that’s generation one and the other generation is, well, I have right now that works right now, as I have a tumor, so, you know, that they run genomics on tumors themselves. They run genomics to express whether the immunotherapies the newer version of chemotherapies that are targeting immune, the immune systems will which ones will be effective.

So they take the same amount of tissue as that. It’s a slice on a slide. Study the. the DNA mutations there, and then look for those same mutations in the blood, and then track it. So, for example, if you’re on chemotherapy, why wait three months to get your PET CT scan when you can get a get a blood sample every month, or every three weeks to see whether you’re going in the right direction, namely, are your tumor specific DNA that is in your tumor, in your blood going down as the blood levels going down? Because, you know, most people with traditional chemo have complications.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: They’re not easy to tell whether I’m getting better or not. So this is going to transform, so this is going to be phase two and we’re in it. We’re beta testing two of these companies and they’re allowing us to draw the bloods as often as we please.

Ben Greenfield: And it’s as simple as a blood draw for cancer detection?

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s it is a blood draw. It’s a blood draw.

Ben Greenfield: Not only for cancer detection, but for cancer progression, monitoring?

Dr. Herskowitz: This is for progression.

Ben Greenfield: Okay.

Dr. Herskowitz: So the test for, the test we send off to Europe is for the detection and progression and biology. But in the future they’ll be able to use it for detection. But that’s, that’s going to, this is all going to go through FDA. Everything I’m talking about will go through FDA. It’s going to take its sweet time in the meantime. Um, before they get to the, before they get to detection, which is the largest market, um, they’ll have to go through a lot, a lot more testing.

Ben Greenfield: So right now someone can’t go in and do this cancer detection screening?

Dr. Herskowitz: No, you can only do the screening test for the company that we send it off to Europe for. It’s called the RGCC company and you have to be a member and so on. But it’s pretty widely known in the United States and widely known and also widely criticized because, because the oncologists don’t believe in the test results.

Now, because you can you can have a number, and obviously, if the number correlates to you having a tumor, then it’s obviously it’s true. But what happens when you have a number but you can’t find that tumor anywhere and it tells you that it’s lung, it tells you that it’s colon, It tells you that it’s, it’s prostate. It tells you.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah.

Dr. Herskowitz: So…

Ben Greenfield: Even before something like a full body MRI or something like that?

Dr. Herskowitz: That’s correct. You know, the full body MRI’s are limited to 3, 4 millimeters. So you can’t always…

Ben Greenfield: So anything smaller than that it’s not going to pick up, but a liquid biopsy could detect?

Dr. Herskowitz: That’s correct.

Ben Greenfield: That’s interesting.

Dr. Herskowitz: So this is going to be…

Ben Greenfield: That seems like that could be transformative.

Dr. Herskowitz: It’s going to be transformative for the entire industry, yes, but also for follow-up.

Ben Greenfield: And how long do you think we are out from these, these being widely available as testing  goes?

Dr. Herskowitz: I think it’s going to be about, well there’s another one coming in, coming forward, um, and through FDA. It’s going to be, it’ll come in stages but it’ll be from 1 to 3 years.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Wow. Interesting.

Dr. Herskowitz: It is very interesting and it’s very specific. I mean, these are tumor specific DNA mutations that are, belong to me.

Ben Greenfield: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow.