Marla Miller: 0:35

Welcome back to Open-Minded Healing. My guest today is Josh Kettner, a pioneer in the field of regenerative medicine. Josh is the visionary founder of Dream Body Clinic, located in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and the author of the Ultimate Guide to Stem Cell Therapy. Josh and his team specialize in cutting edge treatments like stem cell therapies, along with human growth hormone and other innovative age-defying medicines. Today, we are going to be diving into some exciting results people are experiencing when they implement treatment at this clinic, including those diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. We'll also discuss the topics of ethics, sourcing and why this clinic chose to locate itself in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Marla Miller: 1:24

There's so much to discuss, so I want to get right to it. Welcome, Josh. How are you? I'm doing real good, yeah, Very good. I am very excited about this topic. This is definitely a growing area for health the stem cell therapy so I'm really curious as to how you're implementing it at your clinic. But before we dive into that, I want to know what would you say your mission statement is, and not even as a company, but maybe why you started this company. What were you hoping to accomplish?

Josh Ketner: 2:03

Oh, we want to help as many people as possible. I got into this because my dad had Lou Gehrig's disease. That was about 20 years ago and that was up in Seattle where we were living then. And I don't know when you see firsthand how bad this medical system can be in certain cases, when you see firsthand how bad this medical system can be in certain cases, it changes your whole view on everything, and that's what happened to me.

Josh Ketner: 2:24

My dad had a big aerospace company I mean, he was a rocket scientist, right so he did his own research and with a muscle wasting disease like ALS, well, they don't have anything for you. There's no cure, nothing. So he did his own research and looked into well, how do you treat other similar muscle wasting conditions? And the closest one he could really see with any viable treatment was HIV muscle wasting. They will throw human growth hormone and testosterone at you like you're a bodybuilder, and very often it works.

Josh Ketner: 2:55

Where with ALS, he asked for it and they told no, no, that falls under the anabolic steroid act. You can't have that. He's like I'm 50 and dying, who cares? But they wouldn't do it. They gave him like a really small dose, but nothing significant that would matter and I don't think it would have helped him. But it just seems like when the logic's there, why not pursue it if the person's willing? And unfortunately they don't allow that in a lot of cases and that kind of got me on this journey and ended up down here in Mexico and started all this about 13 years ago.

Marla Miller: 3:27

So what, I would say, stemmed your interest in the stem cell therapy in particular. What drew you to that?

Josh Ketner: 3:36

Well, that was. We started with the growth hormone and other treatments like that, first a legal fly-in-by program, and then we got into stem cells because of my dad was sick. We knew a guy who went over to China and they were doing embryonic stem cells there. It's a big difference between the different types of stem cells. It's a big confusion in this industry. Embryonic stem cells back in the late nineties, early 2000s they were thinking this was going to be the ultimate fix to everything, because those cells can turn into any other type of cell which you'd think okay. Well, if we can get them to turn into the cells you want, we should be able to fix almost anything.

Josh Ketner: 4:14

But this guy went over there and they cut open part of his skull, put in these embryonic stem cells. And the problem there too is it's an ethical issue. They come from aborted fetuses. So here we are, like me and my dad and my family are all Christian and we're like, ooh, what do you do? And you start kind of bending your own ethics. Well, it's already dead. So unfortunately this guy did it. They put it in and he came back to Seattle and for about two weeks he started getting better. He starts walking upright. We're like whoa, this might be the thing. Then two weeks later he just keeled over Massive brain tumor. And that's the problem with embryonic stem cells you can't control what kind of cell they turn into, so they almost always become teratomas and that's a big problem.

Josh Ketner: 4:58

If you remember, back early 2000s Bush got a lot of flack in the media for banning stem cells, but he didn't really ban them. His advisors told him they didn't think embryonic stem cells would work and so he put a federal ban on federal funding. The state of California still spent $2 billion on research for it and came up with nothing. They found it didn't work. Same thing they want to become babies, tend to become teratomas.

Josh Ketner: 5:25

So mesenchymal stem cells are quite a bit different and I started hearing rumors that they were doing that sort of treatments here in Mexico about 10 years ago and we tracked it down, met a guy who did his PhD in cellular biology about 18 years ago, started working with him, then went and did our own thing, but to kind of yeah, those do work and there's over a hundred thousand studies to back it up on Google scholar you know well, over 30,000 on PubMed. So it's very well researched. It's been around since the early nineties and it's very effective for treating a lot of different things like joint pain. That can help with autoimmune diseases, chronic degenerative issues so pretty wide range of what they can help with.

Marla Miller: 6:06

So you're saying and maybe I missed this just now the stem cells, so they're not coming from aborted fetuses. These stem cells are coming from where? How are they being? Are they being duplicated?

Josh Ketner: 6:19

Yeah, so we use what are called mesenchymal stem cells. These were discovered by Dr Arnold Kaplan in the early nineties. He was a professor of the skeletal muscle Institute at Case Western University in Ohio and we worked with him in the past actually, and he found that these cells that live on the outside of capillaries are called pericytes and they look like a little octopus hanging on to the outside of the capillary and when you're injured they come off and go to that area. Well, he found in the lab he could turn these cells into chondrocytes, the building blocks of cartilage, osteophytes, building blocks of bone, adipocytes, building blocks of fat. There were about five or six types of cells he could turn them into and he goes it's kind of from the mesenchyme system. So let's call them mesenchymal stem cells. He always pronounced it mesenchymal, you can say it either way, but that's what he found. But then they started doing studies. They start putting them in rats, then in other animals, then in people, and they found they actually don't differentiate, meaning they don't turn into other tissues. Because that's really what you think of a stem cell. These cells are becoming whatever cell you want. These he wishes he could have renamed medicinal signaling cells, because they really work via the signals they send out and they act like the manager on the construction site.

Josh Ketner: 7:37

So there's different types of stem cells. I guess is my point. That's why we use these, because they help you heal, like when you were a little kid. You can take them from any tissue that has capillaries right, and also from bone marrow. In the United States, the most common way they'll do it, they'll take them from a fat, from like a liposuction, or from bone marrow aspirate. Or you can get them from umbilical cord tissue called Wharton jelly or the placenta. That's what we do. There are clinics that do that in the States. The big difference is in the U? S you can't isolate and replicate the cells. Here in Mexico we can do that. So we get much fresher cells. We don't have to freeze them or anything and we can replicate the cells to get very large numbers to put in to help ailments.

Josh Ketner: 8:23

So we take them from tissue that would have been thrown away otherwise. So there's no ethical concerns. The baby's perfect, grows up, it's happy, all that, and this tissue that would have been thrown away otherwise is used. And the cool part is we don't have to worry that it's from another person because mesenchymal stem cells lack what's called HLA human leukocyte antigen. That's the marker that tells you it's from your body.

Josh Ketner: 8:48

Let's pretend you needed a kidney transplant and I'm a perfect blood match, everything. Well, your body's going to try and reject that kidney forever because our HLA markers are different. Where the mesenchymal stem cells don't exhibit HLA, they're considered immune privilege, so your body just thinks they're your own and we get you back up to levels that you were at when you were in your youth. Because when you hit bone maturity usually about age 18 for women, 21 for men you lose 90% of your capillaries. Because you're not growing taller, you don't need all that extra blood flow, but you also lose 90% of your mesenchymal stem cells and as you age you lose more and more and that's why we get worse and worse at healing as we age. So we're able to put these back in you and again help you heal like when you were a little kid.

Marla Miller: 9:36

So you're saying you're able to separate those out in Mexico but not the US due to the laws?

Josh Ketner: 9:43

Yeah, the laws are pretty dumb. Are you familiar with platelet-rich plasma PRP?

Marla Miller: 9:48

Yeah, I've heard of it. I couldn't tell you about it.

Josh Ketner: 9:51

So PRP is considered a treatment, not a medication, and all they're doing is taking some blood out, centrifuging it and separating the plasma from the red blood cells, and it works really well. If you were just freshly injured, it can help with certain things. Well, that's able to be done without it being considered a medication because of the minimal manipulation. That's what the US law states. Same thing with the stem cells. We could do a liposuction for you. Take out some fat or bone marrow thing with the stem cells. We could do a liposuction for you. Take out some fat or bone marrow and we could put it in a cylinder with what's called collagenase and spin it up in a centrifuge and it'll separate the cells from the tissue. So that's perfectly legal in the US.

Josh Ketner: 10:29

But the problem is it's not really a stem cell therapy, because less than 1% of that solution is actually mesenchymal stem cells. So that's as far as they can go. And that's really where the problem is, because you can't patent a mesenchymal stem cell. It's something that naturally occurs and in the US, to be able to get a stem cell therapy truly approved, you would have to go through all four phase trials of the FDA. That can cost you anywhere from like 40 million to a billion dollars. It can take up to 10 years and the problem is no one will invest that money because you'll never get your money back, since you can't patent it. So the whole system in the US is inhibiting not just mesenchymal stem cells but all kinds of really great treatments that should be available, because they're not taking into consideration just the profit factor. It's so controlled by these large pharmaceutical companies that they want it to be only patentable. They want control because they got to get their money back. The fact it costs that much money to even get it through is insane, but it's kind of a moat to protect these big companies so no one smaller can come in.

Josh Ketner: 11:39

So luckily here in Mexico we don't have that issue. We have a different medical system. We have socialized healthcare and private care. So it's a bit of a mix between what you got in Canada and the US and the fact that we get both. But the socialized healthcare was going broke because of metformin for diabetics so many diabetics in Mexico and mesenchymal stem cells work really well for type 2 diabetes. So because of that they said, hey well, we'd rather you guys offer these treatments and bankrupt our system giving us metformin. Yeah, go ahead and that's what allowed us to do it here and get regulatory approval and create regulations that actually allow it, because they wanted to save some money, and that's the big difference there.

Marla Miller: 12:25

That's really interesting to me. So these stem cells, as far as purity, you're saying you're getting a large quantity of them. Where are they coming from If it's not from that person, like you said, because they can go in any person's body? I know you said where they're coming from, like the placenta or the umbilical cord?

Josh Ketner: 12:48

I think this will answer your question. I'll just explain the process. So we start with a team of gynecologists that we work with. They only work with first-time mothers and we have a very strict qualifications. These women have to be first-time mothers, they have to be married. We ask them how many sexual partners? Because a mesenchymal stem cell can't carry a virus. But if the donor had a retrovirus, which are mostly sexually transmitted, there's a less than 5% chance of carry through.

Josh Ketner: 13:15

We even take it a step further and we ask if they've had any of the COVID vaccines. A lot of our patients didn't want those or do them and luckily there's a federal database here. So we ask and we verify with the federal database and then we select and we only need one umbilical cord, maybe every two to three months. So we're not like this giant pool, it's not like we need all these umbilical cords. You know we're using maybe four a year, maybe five. It's not crazy numbers. So we're very strict because the health of the donor really affects the health of the cells. So you want really young, healthy women and with that we're able to screen the women, do all kinds of blood tests multiple times over those nine months, then we take the umbilical cord from the birthing room straight to the lab and we send off samples to get analyzed. So we're doing a second check, then we do a third check, when we then isolate the mesenchymal stem cells, and then we do what's called culturing. So we're chopping up the umbilical cord, we're then putting it in the centrifuge with collagenase and we're spinning it up and you're left with liquid that is filled with cells. About 70% of it is mesenchymal stem cells, 30% other types of cells. So we now have to filter that down. You centrifuge that into this thing we call the pellet. It looks like a little white pellet. That is what we put into the flask.

Josh Ketner: 14:37

So we use clear flasks and we fill them with what's called culturing medium. That's like the food for these cells and we put them in the incubators, which are imagine an oven that you can control the CO2 levels, oxygen levels, the temperature and we put them in there. It's almost like baking and they start growing and mesenchymal stem cells adhere to plastic. So the flasks are the special type of plastic they hold on. The other cells are free floating and then they quickly you know, over days or months, depending on how we set it up start eating through the culturing medium and once we've done that, we then put in an enzyme flush to flush out the other cells and put in more of this culturing medium which is their food. So they're like in the garden of Eden they got a perfect condition, they got all the food they can want. And we do this process up to about five times Each time they eat through the culturing medium.

Josh Ketner: 15:31

They call it a passage and they're replicating this whole time. They're growing, you're getting more and more cells and we're fleshing out the others. So by the third passage we filtered out all the other types of cells. Now we just have pure, isolated mesenchymal stem cells. And we got a couple more passages and we went from having 20 to 30 million stem cells with the original batch up to tens or hundreds of billions of cells and we set it up with different incubators. So every day we've got new batches coming up.

Josh Ketner: 15:58

So, kind of like my baking analogy, you've got fresh croissants every day. You're making sure each patient gets the freshest cells possible and we do a third-party lab analysis of that and we give all this documentation to our patients. It's not just us saying, hey, these are good, we send them off to a third-party lab to analyze and that way that patient knows hey, these are pure, isolated stem cells. They've given you the number. We're claiming they're free of endotoxins, bacterias, any problems, and they're safe to use. And the good part is, since it's something you already have in your body, there's no risk of rejection. There's really no downside to it. You're just putting more of something that you had more of in the past back into your body.

Marla Miller: 16:43

Well, so this is going way back in the conversation, but when you said you interview people and you find out how many sexual partners you had and do you have any retroviruses or things like that, you're just not counting on them saying it. You're saying you're doing blood work, you're analyzing their blood and looking for these things, because a lot of people wouldn't even know they had some kind of retrovirus.

Josh Ketner: 17:06

So we need to verify everything and that's why everything's quadruple checked. You know, it's not like one time. We check the people tissue, the cells, multiple screening, so it makes it super safe.

Marla Miller: 17:18

Well, that's great that you do all that work and that you do share it with the patients so they understand exactly what the process is and that it is a good, viable and, I guess, clean type of cell that's going into their body. So well, I have a question before we get into some of the amazing benefits you've seen of this procedure Does it matter the age? Because I heard somewhere and maybe it is a different type of stem cell therapy, but, like, as people age, maybe it won't be as effective if they were, say, 90, as opposed to 60 or 30. Does that change?

Josh Ketner: 18:00

A little bit. I mean, it depends on the condition, right? So we're talking about a lot of different things. Usually, older people have more damage, so there's more to fix, which means it's going to take longer, or might take more cells or more tries. But the cells are nine months old, so our cells are young. So what they're going to do, they're going to act the same way whether you're five or 50, right, it doesn't matter. So the cells will do their job. But typically people are older, have more issues that need to be dealt with. Therefore, they might need more treatments or more cells. But it really depends on what we're talking about.

Josh Ketner: 18:34

The most common treatment we do are knees. Everybody's knees go at some point, right? So we're seeing a lot of cartilage, a lot of meniscus tears, a lot of ACL tears. So ligaments, cartilage, tendons as long as it's not completely destroyed or completely torn, the stem cells can get in there. They start guiding the removal of scar tissue, which is usually what's preventing it from healing, and then they start healing, regenerating, guiding the regeneration of the underlying tissue. So my first treatment ever was multiple meniscus tears, partially torn ACL. I've got before and after MRIs that prove and did that eight years ago and they're still perfect from the regeneration. So we will find someone younger, like maybe someone in their thirties or forties, is going to heal faster because you don't have as much damage.

Josh Ketner: 19:23

You know they might be first or second degree arthritis, where somebody who's 60 or 70 might be third or fourth degree and typically with cartilage like stage one, stage two or first degree second degree arthritis. It's usually not. It doesn't matter how old you are, it's usually a one and done treatment. One shot will get you pretty much, if not full regeneration, pretty close to it. But if you're at stage three, well we can probably only get you down second degree or first degree. I've seen a few people get a hundred percent, but it's pretty rare at that severe damage. Those people might need to come back in six months or a year for another treatment. And at fourth degree, the best I've ever seen is second degree. In fact, just had a lady just last week do an MRI and she was fourth degree last year and she's at second degree now and that's awesome. But yeah, fourth degree, how can it get as far? So yeah, the age matters and that there's more damage.

Marla Miller: 20:19

So I'm curious about that knee issue. It's such a common problem, common problem. So have you been able to prevent knee surgeries by doing this treatment, or you've been able to improve the recovery time? How does it work?

Josh Ketner: 20:36

Yeah, I mean, usually if you're stage four arthritis, they're going to tell you you need to go get new knees. One of my favorite testimonials on the site we have is the ladies of firefighter and I think Northern California. She was bone on bone, she was a fourth degree and we got her to ladies of firefighter and I think Northern California. She was bone on bone, she was a fourth degree and we got her to third on one knee and second degree on the other and saved her career. And she came back and did it again but she's just continued to get better and surgery was not needed.

Josh Ketner: 21:00

So yeah, preventing surgery is one of the biggest things that we do for people that they don't have an option, and in the US that's surgeons jobs they want to cut right. And this is another thing is in Canada they actually were starting to do a lot of these treatments the way we do about nine years ago and seven years ago or so they shut it down completely, like there's pretty much no stem cells in Canada anymore, not because it didn't work, but because the orthopedic surgeons threw too big of a fit. And you know they do do private care stuff up there and it's very, very expensive and they didn't like that. These people were going and getting stem cells and not getting surgery. So you've got a lot of different big interest groups in the way of what should be helping people, because the profits get in the way, unfortunately.

Marla Miller: 21:48

Well, as they always say, follow the money to see. Whether it comes to test studies or whatever it is, see who's behind it, who's backing it. Well, let's talk about. I really want to get to some of these big things that you're addressing. The knee issue is very relevant. Let's talk about something that seems a lot, maybe tougher, which would be multiple sclerosis, because I know you have a particular program for that. So can you go into what that entails and then the success rate you've seen.

Josh Ketner: 22:21

Yeah for sure. So with multiple sclerosis and this applies to almost any autoimmune disease most there are some exceptions what we found there is those people's immune system is not working properly, so it's attacking the spinal cord or it's attacking a brain when it should be protecting it. So we need to fix that first. So we always start with an ID. We have found that doing at least 1.4 million per pound of body weight is ideal. So if you weigh like, say, 150 pounds or lighter, we're probably looking like a 200 million IV. If you weigh over 150, you're probably looking like a 300 million IV. And those cells will go through your system. They go straight to your heart, then your lungs. They get trapped in the lungs about 70% of them for two to three hours. So a lot gets stuck in the lungs and the rest go through the body. But for autoimmune it's fine. They don't get wasted because they're interacting with immune cells that pass by them and they send out these things called cytokines. These are specialized signaling proteins that when they interact with these immune cells, it's like hitting the factory reset button. It's taking their software that's telling them what to do and reprogramming it to the way it worked when they were a little kid and that's a big advantage of why we take these from nine month old tissue because it's had such a limited exposure to an immune system. It hasn't built up any of these bad habits. These people with MS or other autoimmune diseases, their immune system and their MSCs, they've got bad habits. They're attacking things they should be protecting. So this essentially reprograms that. So right there, we're going to stop the progress of the disease and for some people that's enough.

Josh Ketner: 24:03

When we first got going, that's all we did. We had a lot of success. But then, about four or five years ago, we took it a step further. We said, well, we need to get the cells directly to where the damage is. So we want to get them to the spinal cord, we want to get them to the brain, and to get to the brain is tough because the IV by the time they get to the brain it's like the last spot. You got the blood brain barrier to pass and it's very tough, if not impossible, for most of these cells to get by.

Josh Ketner: 24:30

So what we started doing is we went into the lower back into the spinal cord fluid. It's an injection called an intrathecal injection. So the thecal sac is the area around the spinal cord and that's what holds the spinal cord fluid in. So we put this really tiny needle it's like, I think, 25 gauge, so not much bigger than an insulin needle. It's kind of long and they go into your lower back and if you go to the treatment page you can see me doing it Like I don't offer things I haven't done myself For me preventative my dad had ALS Like I want to make sure my brain's good. Most people usually do it if they've got a major brain issue like stroke. I think there's a patient today with spastic paraplegia. We did it. So these sort of issues and we go in and that allows the cells to go up the spinal cord fluid. We put 50 million mesenchymal stem cells and mesenchymal stem cells are attracted to inflammation. Well, when your spinal cord is damaged, like it would be from MS, they go to that area and then they start recruiting neurons to help regenerate the nerves. So you'll hear, you're not supposed to be able to regenerate the myelin sheath yet with mesenchymal stem cells in concentration. They seem to be doing that because you can see before and after MRIs of patients on our site where those lesions have healed and we've seen it in the brain also, where they'll also get to the brain and they'll start guiding that repair. So we hit it from two different ways because we don't want to just fix the immune response, we want to help fix the damage too, and it's been working really well for that. And look, we always hope it's one and done, but it's not always.

Josh Ketner: 26:07

And this again comes to your age question and the people that have had it longer. Typically once someone's had it maybe for decades and their wheelchair browned and they're kind of end stage, I haven't seen that much success. But with younger people and people that have caught it within the first few years of being diagnosed, they're seeing tremendous success. We've got quite a few patients in their 30s and 40s that, as far as their doctors are concerned, they're in full remission. Lesions have healed, symptoms are gone. We don't know how long that's going to last. We've been doing this for eight years. I've got patients from eight years ago that are still in remission from autoimmune diseases. Will that keep lasting? I don't know. So some of these patients will come back for a smaller dose IV every year or two just to maintain.

Josh Ketner: 26:53

I'd say, like the people that are a good fit, you know we always do a consultation first, make sure where we're at it's usually around like 80% of those people are going to get the results they're looking for. They're going to fix the lesions, get rid of the immune response. It's going to help a lot. About 15% are going to see results, but maybe not a hundred percent. And then there's about 5% that just are non-responders and that's pretty well across the board for stone cell therapies. Those stats, that kind of thing, and if you read through the studies it always comes back. There's this 5% of people that just don't respond and that's just medicine. There's no guarantees. But we have a very high success rate. When you consider if you give 10 people an ibuprofen for a headache, about four of them are getting a headache relief and that's considered the go-to right. It's not a very good success rate. So yeah, we're doing pretty good.

Marla Miller: 27:45

Yeah, that's impressive with the MS. That's good that you do a consultation and get more of the facts for the individual to see if you think it is beneficial to them before they come out there assuming it'll work for them.

Josh Ketner: 28:00

Yeah, definitely.

Marla Miller: 28:01

So what are some other? Well, first, I do have a question. When you're talking about this needle going into the lower back and you've had it before is this a painful procedure? Is it like an epidural which, by the way, I haven't had, but I've only heard about it?

Josh Ketner: 28:18

So an epidural looks like I'm sticking this pen into your back. It's gigantic. That is not fun but it numbs you up right away. That's why people don't complain. But I've been in the room with docs, have administered those. It's pretty brutal looking. This is a really tiny needle and look. Mentally it's really tough.

Josh Ketner: 28:36

I've done it twice and the second time wasn't any easier than the first, even though I knew it wasn't going to hurt. So you feel a little pinch, barely feel it break the skin, and then once they're in there you really don't feel anything. It's that simple. It really doesn't hurt. Every once in a while it might bruise the fecal sac a little bit. People have a little pain and tightness there in the back, but that's the extent of it.

Josh Ketner: 28:59

You can get a pretty bad migraine from it because we have to take out two milliliters of cerebral, spinal or spinal fluid and we're putting in two milliliters of cerebral, spinal or spinal fluid and we're putting in two milliliters of solution with stem cells. We're trying to balance it but the migraine comes from the difference in pressure and we've. It doesn't happen that often, but it's good. People know, like, what the potential side effects are, because I got the headache both times I did it it lasted about half an hour. The first time it is it is a good migraine, and the second time I ran up and down three flights of stairs here at the clinic about 20 times, after which was really dumb but had a lot of patients and I had a pretty good headache the whole night.

Josh Ketner: 29:37

But it goes away and the benefits, far away the downside, but the actual injection doesn't hurt. There's no risk of, you know, severing the spinal cord, anything like that. It's such a tiny needle and stem cells regenerate nerves. This is a really common injection for an anesthesiologist to make, so we have an anesthesiologist on staff. He's the only one allowed to do that treatment, and that's because here in Mexico, I think, only neurosurgeons and anesthesiologists are even trained to do that, so they're the only ones really permitted. So now we let the expert who does it multiple times a day anyway, do it and it's real simple, sounds much scarier than it is.

Marla Miller: 30:18

Well, you said it's just as tough the second time as a first. Tough in what way other than the headache?

Josh Ketner: 30:24

mentally, mentally thinking that this needle's going in your back and you, just, you keep expecting it to hurt, and then it doesn't hurt it. Mentally it's a bit tough, but then you do it and it's so anticlimactic you're like, yeah, what was I worried about?

Marla Miller: 30:39

well, you're right, it's good to know all the different aspects of it, like with epidurals. I don't know if it's still the same, but I remember in the past it'd be like, yeah, they could cause some real damage if they put it in at the wrong point.

Josh Ketner: 30:53

It's because they're giant, I mean it's big.

Marla Miller: 30:58

Well, so what other? Now you're talking about autoimmune. What other autoimmune conditions have you seen for yourself in your clinic that have improved?

Josh Ketner: 31:09

Yeah, we've seen a lot of rheumatoid arthritis. That's probably one of the most common ones that we treat. We see a lot of Hashimoto's, thyroid and Graves' disease. Like thyroid-related that one we actually do the IVN, a little shot to the thyroid and then we see a lot of type 2 diabetes. Type 1 doesn't work. It seems to be a genetic factor there. Ulcerative colitis so you know it's a pretty big list, but those are the most common. Fibromyalgia lupus see a lot of those, it works really well and, yeah, a lot of different autoimmune diseases.

Marla Miller: 31:45

Well, that's another big one, lupus so that's good, you've had success with that. And what about something like crohn's disease? Have you done anything with that?

Josh Ketner: 31:57

yeah, crohn's is tough. Crohn's probably has the lowest success rate of all of our autoimmune type diseases. It's just so much damage that occurs with that one. We've seen, seen success. It's just I'm always straight with people we can try, but that's the one probably going to take more than one treatment and I don't know. It's just a really tough one with all the damaging gut things where ulcerative colitis is very similar. We've hit so many home runs with ulcerative colitis. It's worked so well.

Marla Miller: 32:23

So I wonder if that's a matter of like it would require, say, 10 sessions instead of one or two, or if it just does not affect Crohn's.

Josh Ketner: 32:33

It's pretty rare for that to be a one and done type scenario. People usually catch it so young that, like you've had it for long enough, by the time we get in there's a lot of damage to fix, so it's more difficult.

Marla Miller: 32:44

So it's more difficult. So do you have any other specific success stories that you can think of and how it affected or changed someone's life, like their ability to live the life they want? Do you have any specific story?

Josh Ketner: 33:01

We've got this and there's a video of this one, like multiple videos of this patient. She had a heart attack pretty young and after the heart attack about a third of her heart was necrotic like dead. The fact she even survived is a miracle. Her son's eight or so, and you know, hey really want to help this lady and the good news is when you do stem cells they go into the bloodstream straight to the heart, so they're incredible for heart health. We've helped so many people with congestive heart failure, post-heart attack issues and they usually measure it in what's called ejection fraction. So you want to be over 55%, like 55,. 65% ejection fraction is a normal rate for most people. I think she was down at, I want to say, around like 30% and had all this like dead tissue on her heart and we did treatment and she came back about a year and three months later and there was maybe like a little piece, this big and necrotic tissue, so it totally regenerated her heart. Her ejection fraction was totally normal and then she didn't come back for quite a few years and she just was back. This past year did another follow-up video with us and she's doing amazing. She's still around to help her kid, raise her kid, do all that. So I mean, when you see those sort of things, it's just, it's pretty incredible.

Josh Ketner: 34:16

We've got another lady that I think visually is probably the most striking. It's a lady from Canada. Empty nester starts hitting the bottle a little too hard, too much wine starts hitting it every day and ends up with cirrhosis. And when she came to us she looked like she was nine months pregnant and anorexic at the same time. And that's because your belly starts filling up with fluid. We're talking like end stage cirrhosis and she looks perfectly normal, happy, healthy. Now just from our IV treatment completely fixed all the fibrosis in her liver and regenerated her liver. So with organ health we see incredible results and I mean it's life-changing. If you have to get a heart transplant or a liver transplant, it's a whole different life. Maybe you're buying another five or 10 years, but it's a big change to your life if you have to do an organ transplant. So seeing those people not have to get transplants and get back to normal, just it's incredible to see.

Marla Miller: 35:13

That would be incredible. So I'm curious. I've heard about stem cell therapy where if they wanted to hit a specific organ, they've guided it with laser Right. Do you use any kind of lasers there or anything?

Josh Ketner: 35:26

You know we've tried for kidneys to go into the OR and with our internist and you can use deep field ultrasounds and like see, but I mean lasers aren't going to go through tissues, I don't know how that would work. But with ultrasound guidance you can do it. But you know what? It never got better results than the IV. By getting it systemically, we've always seen better results. Same thing with the IV. By getting it systemically, we've always seen better results. Same thing with the backs. We treat probably back treatments.

Josh Ketner: 35:51

Lower back and neck is our second and third most common treatments. We see a lot of herniated discs. I personally four years ago had a herniated disc at L4-L5 and the sciatica felt like I had a cattle rod than my femur. I used to think people that had back pain were just big babies. Because I work out all the time, my back's always sore. I'm like I'll walk it off and then, man, you get real back pain from a herniated disc and it ruins your life. It's all you can think about. I'm hunched over, walking like a 90 year old, I can't sleep and stem cells can help fix nerves. So I did the treatment.

Josh Ketner: 36:26

We injected four shots intramuscularly in my lower back at 25 million. So a hundred million there plus an IV of a hundred million. Nerve pain was gone within 10 days. Lower back pain took about three months to go away and it's never come back. And I've tried to hurt it again.

Josh Ketner: 36:41

Jet skis, four wheelers, dirt but dumb stuff Like I haven't been easy on that and it's held up and we tried for a while going into the disc and with guidance you go in the OR, put the patient like twilight sedation on their stomach and you guide it in with fluoroscopy, with orthopedic surgeons and it's brutal looking and you can't be fully asleep and you know what Like getting the cells into the disc didn't help better than around it. And again, it's because of how they work. They work via the paracrine effect, the signals they send out, so you don't have to get them into tissues directly. You want to get them around, so they recruit the help to help guide the healing process. We've consistently seen that work better than going directly into different organs. Like we would never go into the heart because we're seeing too good a result with an IV, same with the liver. We're keeping the cost down that way less invasive, it's just better for everyone.

Marla Miller: 37:40

So are these stem cells going where they know they need to go, where your body needs the most help? How are you directing it? If someone wants it, you know, for rheumatoid arthritis, versus their heart or how is that working?

Josh Ketner: 37:55

Well, rheumatoid again, you're trying to fix the autoimmune response. It doesn't matter where they go. They're interacting with the immune system. For the heart, that's the first place they go. But stem cells are smart in the fact that they know where to go. We don't fully understand why they know or how they know, but there's a huge signal. I mean, the communication going on inside of your body is mind-blowing. The more they research it, the more they find out. Everything's talking to each other, communicating. So Dr Kaplan used to explain he goes look, those cells will go to the heart because it's inflamed. I really doubt they know they're at the heart, but they know there's inflammation. Inflammation sends off signals and they are attracted to that and they get in and they start sending the signals out to recruit help and start guiding that repair process. So when they're going through the IV, you know they'll get stuck up in the lungs. This is why we have to do crazy high numbers. A hundred million, 300 million, it's a lot, but we have to get enough through to help these other issues and they'll get there and they work.

Josh Ketner: 38:57

The things they send out are called extracellular vesicles and the new name for them in the United States is exosomes. So you hear a lot of people talk about exosomes and mesenchymal stem cells, again, are smart, they'll go to the area, they'll send out the correct exosome. And an exosome is like a single payload delivery system. It can carry one cytokine, one growth factor, one chemokine, and there's over a thousand different type. We don't even know what they all do. We don't even have any labeled them all. It's still in that infancy of the research on that end.

Josh Ketner: 39:29

But there was a group called Chimera Labs that found a way, because in the US you can't work with expanded stem cells, meaning replicated, it's not allowed. So this group was really smart and they cultured the cells and then forced them to release all their exosomes and then filtered out all the stem cells. They're like yeah, see, we're not applying replicated stem cells and it was a cool idea and they're still doing it. But the problem is some of the a lot of those create inflammation, so it's not target specific. So now they had to filter them out and the filtration process is so rudimentary it's like taking a pile of dirt and sifting it, you know, through a screen and you're keeping the big rock.

Josh Ketner: 40:09

So there are clinics in the US doing exosomes, trying to promote it like it is stem cells, but we're probably a good decade away before they know which exosomes to select and send where. Dr Kaplan would laugh at those doctors, he goes. Well, we already have the perfect delivery device, why wouldn't we just do that? But if you can get the exosomes to work and deliver them yourself, that you can patent. So that's getting the funding, and I mean it just seems like a waste of time and effort, but the money's what drives it. So that's the direction they're going with that, unfortunately.

Marla Miller: 40:44

Yeah Well, what would that look like if someone came from another country, say the US, to your clinic? Are they staying there for a certain length of time? What should they expect?

Josh Ketner: 41:09

prices, info, studies. I hate it when you can't find that kind of info on websites. So I have it all there, but for like an IV or a basic treatment that doesn't require scans or anything. It's four days. Flights and hotels are up to patients, but we provide all the transportation. We've got eight drivers. Everyone has their own Ford expedition pick them up, bring them all the back and forth and or, if you need, like a joint or a heart or you know one of these more invasive procedures that need some more analysis, like we have our own MRI machine here on site.

Josh Ketner: 41:35

So any joint we require, you do an MRI with us. So day one's arriving arrest. Day two, we're doing blood work and MRI. Day three, we're sitting with the doctor, and this is my big complaint back home in the U S you, you go to your doctor. They're either pushing you off to their pa or taking out the door in five minutes. It's not what we do. We've got three full-time doctors, we've got two cardiologists and interns. We've got tons of doctors that can help out and they will sit with you for as long as needed.

Josh Ketner: 42:02

So they're going to go through your blood work line by line, explain it all. They're going to show you your images and explain what's going on, because you get the choice. You did the MRI. But you can decide at that point hey, maybe I don't want to do treatment, or maybe we're going to see a reason. I mean, there's certain things we can't fix. If we do an MRI of your shoulder and there's a ton of osteophytes, well it's not worth doing stem cells. We're going to tell you that. So day three is always analysis and then day four is treatment. Day five is fly home. So we're in Fort Lauderdale. It's a big tourist town, super nice, super safe. I always joke. It's like cheap Hawaii. You get down here, have a little vacation and get your treatment, and it's not a lot of time at the clinic, so you still get a vacation out of it too.

Marla Miller: 42:50

Yeah, smart, combine your vacation with your health protocol there, that's awesome. Well, so are there any contraindications for this treatment? Is there someone who just should not do it because of a health reason? Is there anything that could backfire, whether it's with medication or a particular illness?

Josh Ketner: 43:11

So the first thing is stem cells are attracted to inflammation, so we want to avoid anti-inflammatories. If you just did a cortisone shot on your knee or your shoulder, you need to wait three months before considering stem cells because that confuses where the inflammation is, so you'd be wasting the treatment. Basically, post-treatment, we always want people to avoid non-steroidal anti-inflammatories or corticoid steroids for at least two weeks to a month. So, like no ibuprofen, no aspirin For hearts and lungs. You have to be very careful. We do full workups with our cardiologists because we want to make sure there's no pericarditis, which means too much fluid around the heart, because when you're doing an IV, the first place it goes is the heart. If you already have too much fluid, that could be a big issue. So we're very, very careful with heart and lung patients. A lot of extra analysis on that. And then the other is cancer. So we don't treat cancer.

Josh Ketner: 44:05

Stem cells are not a good fit for cancer. We've worked with one of the top cancer experts in the world If anyone wants to check him out, it's Dr Jason Williams with Williams Cancer Institute, and this guy is beyond genius. He used to do stem cells in the US 16 years ago, like we do till the FDA came in and shut him down and I mean they were ready to throw the book at him and found out that he'd done it all for free, so they couldn't really go after him. It's pretty crazy. It got him to stop doing stem cells. But he's even injected stem cells into tumors and seen them shrink but never go away completely and there just isn't enough research to suggest that they would really help cancer. We don't think they'd make it worse, but there's also not enough research to know if they would.

Josh Ketner: 44:50

So we won't treat anyone if they've had cancer within the past five years, just to be safe. It's not going to give you cancer, because you know it's a common question I get is the cancer question Stem cells? This type of stem cell does not differentiate. It does not turn into other cell types. Dr Kaplan again wishes he could have named them medicinal signaling cells, because they're not really a stem cell in your body, but the name stuck so like because they're not turning into something else. They can't cause cancer. They can't turn into cancer. So you don't have to worry about that. But cancer would be the thing we avoid.

Marla Miller: 45:27

Well, that's very good information to know what people should not be looking for this treatment. Yeah, very interesting. So is there anything we haven't discussed yet that you really want people to know about this treatment?

Josh Ketner: 45:42

It's just that it's super safe. You know, I think it gets confusing because these different types of stem cells out there, right? So the good news is mesenchymal stem cells are incredibly safe, incredibly easy to do these treatments and I don't know if it's just people don't know enough about them or because they can't do them the same way. In the US people aren't as familiar, but even that's changing. Like when we started doing these eight years ago, every patient I talked to was a conversation like this. It'd take me a half an hour to an hour just to explain to people. And now people call up and they're like yep, I want to fix my knee. I've heard about stem cells, sign me up. So it's good for us.

Josh Ketner: 46:23

You know, it gets become easier, but there's still a lot of people that just haven't heard and it's been interviews like this. Joe Rogan famously interviewed Mel Gibson, like about eight years ago, and he brought Dr Riordan, the guy from Panama that has cell medicine, and that interview exploded and everybody learned about stem cells because they fixed Mel Gibson's dad who was dying. The Mayo Clinic say he had no chance. It was kidney failure, heart failure, like all these issues and the guy ended up living 10 years.

Marla Miller: 46:54

So do you want to tell people just a little bit about your book and what they might find in that book?

Josh Ketner: 46:59

Oh sure, so we made our book the Ultimate Guide to Stem Cell Therapy. It's on Amazon. You can pick it up there. You can also go to our website, wwwdreambodyclinic. Most of the info is there, if anything, the website's more technical than this. This is like an intro guide. This is a lot of the stuff we just discussed and really like simple, easy to follow format. There's a lot of testimonials in there, but you know our YouTube channel has the actual testimonials, so it's uh, yeah, it's just everything's there pretty accessible for people.

Marla Miller: 47:34

So your YouTube channel? What is that under?

Josh Ketner: 47:37

That is under you know they always they shut me down like every six months or a year or so. Oh, it's changing the name. If you search dream body clinic, a name now is DBC. Dbc stem cells is what it says on YouTube.

Marla Miller: 47:53

Okay, great, and then what is your website?

Josh Ketner: 47:56

It is wwwdreambodyclinic and that'll take you to all the info there.

Marla Miller: 48:03

All right, yeah, I saw it and it does have a lot of good information on there. All right, yeah, I saw it and it does have a lot of good information on there. And I guess the last question is so your dad, how did his health turn out?

Josh Ketner: 48:15

No, it's terminal. I mean he got diagnosed within a couple of years past. Unfortunately, lou Gehrig's disease just your muscles waste and you're trapped in your own body. It's the worst thing ever. So we, unfortunately, we've tried stem cells for other people with ALS and it doesn't seem to work. Same with Parkinson's doesn't really respond well. Both from my grandpa, my dad's side, grandma and mom's side both had that. So two diseases I really wish we could help and they're just. It doesn't seem to make a big difference for those, unfortunately, but for a lot of these other things like we talked about, like MS and autoimmune diseases, just works wonders.

Marla Miller: 48:53

So well, they say there's over 50 million people with autoimmune diseases, so this could really help a lot of people. I appreciate you coming on and sharing all this information so people can understand it better and also see how it might benefit them or someone that they love. And also I will say I saw you have lots of great reviews.

Josh Ketner: 49:16

Yeah, we've been doing this for you know, like I said, about eight years the stem cells, 13 years for the medicine side of things. And yeah, you help a lot of people and they go tell their friends and family and we treat about 150 people a month. And look, there's other clinics that do what we do, but they're more focused on the celebrities. We focus on real people so we're able to keep our prices way lower than these others. We're not chasing celebrity endorsements, anything like that. I could care less about that. So we help a lot of people and, yeah, they write good reviews, they film videos with us.

Josh Ketner: 49:50

We have a lot of testimonial videos on there and that's not even all of them. Like I said, I mean YouTube doesn't like us. We get pulled about every year or so. They take our channel down, usually more on the medicine side. You know, even though it's all legal, we do it all the right way. They don't like a lot of like human growth hormone. They don't like people talking about that. So I get my channel pulled every year or two and it sucks, but we do our best to get it back up there.

Marla Miller: 50:16

Well, that's good and I have heard you have a great team that works with you and that the place where you're located it's very clean, seems very safe and all of that. So that's great and seems very safe and all of that.

Josh Ketner: 50:27

So that's great and people worry about Mexico. But look, I've lived here 17 years and I've lived all over the West coast. Seattle, with the North County, is born in San Francisco. There is a kid like Las Vegas. I mean I've never seen a violent crime here in Mexico. I mean, you hear all the news. You think it's so scary, but it really is not.

Josh Ketner: 50:49

Like the whole Narco thing, like those guys keep it safer than anything because they don't want things getting messed up in tourist town, even in the cities. I've lived in Guadalajara, like it's super safe. They don't allow drug dealing or anything. There's no gangs, there's nothing like that. But just because people do worry, that's why we provide all the transportation and it's a big tourist town. So we pick you up at the airport, we take you to your hotel, we take you to the clinic. You don't even have to leave the hotel. If you don't, you can stay at the Hard Rock. You could stay the four seasons down the road. You're missing out on amazing food if you don't go out. But you know whatever you want.

Marla Miller: 51:28

Thank you so much. I think that wraps it up nicely and people, I think, are well-informed after this interview with you and then they go to a website to find out any last bits of information. So thank you for your time today. I know you're busy over there. Got patients over there to be tended to, so I appreciate your time.

Josh Ketner: 51:51

Oh, thank you.