BY ROBYN LITTLEWOOD
In my nearly 60 trips around the sun, I’ve been to a lotta places and I’ve seen a lotta things but after attending a seminar at the One and Only Palmilla last night called “The Future of Regenerative Medicine” I think I have NOT seen it all yet! It would appear that sickness and age-related disease could soon be a thing of the past. For the right price, of course. Confucius said a healthy man wants a thousand things but a sick man only one. My generation, the “Baby Boomers”, have spent their lives amassing more disposable income than any generation before them and any yet to come. And they sacrificed their health doing it. So trying to buy it back has created a trillion-dollar industry in “wellness”, plastic surgery, health food, workout gear etc.
Age reversal is a real thing. It has been a real thing for lab rats for quite a while now but I was expecting access to age reversal for humans to be at least 7 years away. As an avid student of the science of reverse aging, I was aware of certain discoveries and developments over the past 12 years that were going to help the human race achieve “longevity escape velocity”, a term coined by biogerontologist Dr. Aubrey de Grey in 2004.
Longevity escape velocity refers to having technology that can reverse your age one year for every year you age. If we have access to something like that, technically it would be possible to stay the same age forever unless you get hit by a bus or eaten by a shark or something. My goal was to use cheap bio-hacking tactics to stay in decent shape long enough to avail myself of such technology. I have been extremely fortunate to have been able to afford stem cell therapy to fix my wrecked hips, neck, back and sagging face. I was happy to be able to get back to bodybuilding so I wouldn’t die before the miracle happened. But it looks like it has arrived early here in Cabo.
I was invited to attend the Future of Regenerative Medicine seminar at the last minute and I almost didn’t go because as part of my own reverse aging regimen, it was past my scheduled bedtime. I was expecting a fancy sales pitch and went to see if I could identify potential snake oil salesmen to warn my personal training clients about. I was caught off guard by the philosophy of both the presenters and although I haven’t worked with them personally, (yet), I was extremely impressed.
Most importantly, I agreed wholeheartedly with their general philosophy. There is no point in looking for a quick fix for your serious health problems or even trying to improve the way you look without dealing with strong foundational health habits. Liposuction will not solve your weight problem, plastic surgery will not make your skin look better and even stem cells will not be effective unless you look at your foundational problems: Lack of nutrient-rich food, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, sun worship, wonky biomechanical tendencies and too much tequila to name a just a few.
The presenters were Dr. Adeel Khan MD, a Canadian Board Certified Physician and the founder and CEO of Eterna Health Clinics and Jennifer Benson a Board Certified Integrative Holistic Health Coach from Beverly Hills, CA. The presentation was co-sponsored by the PR Medica Clinic, a stem cell clinic in the corridor next to Fresko supermarket in San Jose del Cabo. Dr Khan and Jennifer Benson have been using the luxurious facilities at PR Medica for over a year now to do procedures on their celebrity clients.
The first presentation was by Jennifer Benson who uses a holistic approach to assessing where their clients are at in their foundational health issues. I agreed with her views on our “sickcare” system, (my wording, not hers). Our entire healthcare system is so outdated in the way it deals with disease. We go to the doctor with a tummy ache and they give us a pill. No doctor looks at your gut microbiome, your stress levels, your diet, your sleep habits or anything else sensible. They give you a “diagnosis” and a drug, as the system trains them to do. When that doesn’t work they send you to the “specialist” who does more of the same.
I was impressed that Dr. Khan would choose to work with a holistic health practitioner in the first place. My own experience with referring my personal training clients for stem cells for knees, backs and shoulders has been that if my clients work with me to improve their foundational lifestyle habits, they get better. The ones who were looking for a magic bullet got poor or no results. Not to say that the stem cell providers were at fault there. They all recommended that my clients stick with the exercise and diet plan I provided them individually. People just chose not to do it. A collaboration between health coaches and stem cell doctors is absolutely essential if we are to truly help people.
The second presentation by Dr. Khan, M.D. was much more technical in nature. As the Chief Scientific Officer at Science and Humans and an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, he was speaking of very cutting-edge stem cell and gene editing technology and the combinations of technologies that were fascinating to me but difficult to follow. It appeared to me that most of the audience was baffled. I have been studying this for years and I was barely hanging in there with him.
I cornered him afterwards to ask him about his techniques to create pluripotent stem cells without causing cancers and his answers were highly credible and ingenious, to say the least. Pluripotent stem cells are characterized by their immortality and ability to become any type of cell whereas mesenchymal stem cells have limited self-renewal and differentiation capabilities. The vast majority of stem cell procedures are using mesenchymal stem cells. These are still fantastic but pluripotent cells have even more promise.
Pluripotent stem cells have been very controversial. For one thing they are made from embryos so that creates an ethical concern for some people. It turned into a big political issue during the George Bush administration because of protests by the religious right wing.
In 2012 a Japanese scientist named Shinya Yamanaka won a Nobel prize for managing to reverse the age of adult human skin cells back to the embryonic stage, thereby solving the embryo destruction argument. However, there was a problem with the occasional accidental creation of Teratomas, nasty little cancers made out of teeth and hair.
So it looks as though Dr. Adeel Khan has found a way out of that by neutralizing the gene that was causing the problem. That is basically combining genetic reprogramming and gene splicing which is experimental but it seems to be working in most of his patients. These types of therapies are very difficult to perform in the US which is why he is working with a Lithuanian company to produce the cells. Their government has been a fan of iPSCs for a while now. Hopefully, Mexico will catch on soon too.
The other topic discussed was using peptides for anti-aging purposes. Peptides are short protein chains of about 2-100 amino acids. Your body makes peptides that serve important functions in some of your body’s most necessary processes. One now very famous peptide is a GLP 1 agonist that is helping people lose weight, a semaglutide, (Ozempic is one brand name). Insulin is an example of a peptide.
Peptides are also proving to help with skin health and gaining muscle so they are hot on the list of anti-aging compounds coming to market. Jennifer Benson made the point that we should not be injecting these compounds willy-nilly. One of her services is proper testing and dosing of these peptides.
As part of their overall assessment of patients with illnesses, Eterna clinics are offering very extensive testing in order to know what peptides might help you and also your biological age, the rate at which you are currently aging and other useful biometrics for preventative health care.,
Each one of the topics mentioned today is worth an entire article so we can break them down for a closer look so stay tuned for more great aging health news. If you want more information feel free to send me an email: robynlittlewood@yahoo.com or Whatsapp me at +526242119435.
