Ep. 154 What If We've Been Thinking About Stem Cells All Wrong with Dr. Tommy Rhee

[00:00:06] I'm Michele Simms and this is The Beauty in the Mess, a community where people who crave a shift in mindset, personal growth, and connection to like-minded people come together to start rewriting their stories. Through engaging, honest, and insightful conversations, the show will help you embrace the mess to recognize the meanings and the lessons it holds and discover its hidden treasures to help you start making a mindset shift. Let's listen, learn, and reclaim who we were meant to be.

[00:00:35] Hi friend, welcome to The Beauty in the Mess. If you've ever dealt with chronic pain, an injury that just wouldn't heal, or wondered whether there might be better options beyond surgery, injections, or simply learning to live with discomfort, then today's conversation is one you're going to find fascinating. My guest today is Dr. Tommy Rhee, a sports chiropractor, regenerative medicine pioneer, author, and former team chiropractor for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

[00:01:01] Over the course of his career, Dr. Rhee has worked with elite athletes, including professional football players, Olympians, and collegiate athletes, helping them recover from injury and getting back to doing what they love. But what really caught my attention is that after years of working alongside athletes seeking the latest advancements in healing and recovery, Dr. Rhee began asking deeper questions about regenerative medicine and stem cell therapies.

[00:01:26] Those questions eventually led him to develop a non-invasive topical approach focused on cellular signaling and recovery without injections. In today's episode, we discuss stem cells, inflammation, aging, chronic pain, arthritis, recovery, the science of cellular communication, and what the future of regenerative medicine may look like.

[00:01:49] Whether you're an athlete, someone dealing with chronic pain, or simply curious about the cutting edge of health and healing, I think you'll find this conversation incredibly thought-provoking. Hi, I'm Michele Simms, your host. I'm just a regular person who, like so many, has faced my fair share of messes. Life hasn't always been neat or easy, but it's taught me a lot, and somewhere along the way, I got deeply curious. How do other people make it through their messes and not just survive, but thrive?

[00:02:16] That started my pursuit. I started searching for stories, wisdom, and real strategies, not only for myself, but for anyone looking for a better way forward. Maybe there is a faster way, a softer way, a more human way, and maybe we don't have to figure it out alone. I believe we grow through shared stories, lived wisdom, and the beautiful mess of being human. So welcome to the conversation. I'm glad you're here.

[00:02:41] Please join me for episode 154 of The Beauty and the Mess, called What If We've Been Thinking About Stem Cells All Wrong, with Dr. Tommy Rhee. So without further ado, let's get into it. Hi, Dr. Tommy. Welcome to The Beauty and the Mess. I'm so grateful to have you with me today. Hey, how are you doing, Michelle? I'm excited and having this conversation about the future of regenerative medicine.

[00:03:04] That's awesome. Now, I know you're a sports chiropractor to elite NFL players, and I know you've come up with some regenerative medicine that's an alternative to the injectable stem cells. But before we dig into those, I wanted to see if you would tell us, like, what even got you down the stem cell path? What brought you to this?

[00:03:24] I guess it all started knowing that I'm going to be a sports doctor. I always knew that I was going to be around this kind of environment, helping out athletes, helping out their ability to get back on the field from a traumatizing type of injury or some capacity of their fitness and advance that in that regards of my aspect of helping them out. So because of that, I started off at UCLA. That was when I first started going into the sports world.

[00:03:52] And with that, experience of all the sports. You're just not looking at football and basketball. You're going into soccer or waterpuddle, tennis, golf. You're seeing a lot of sports there. And they introduced me to a lot of that type of special type of events, sporting event, and then their particular injuries. And because of that, you start seeing how they do their type of, like, rehab or recovery or return back to play.

[00:04:17] So as these kids get out of college into pros, they start going into a different kind of advanced type of therapy. They're going into the new cutting edge stuff. Whatever their team or their environment or their group is trying to get involved with, they're getting exposed to it. And because I'm attached to these guys, I get exposed to that.

[00:04:37] So this is back in 2007 and 2008 when I started seeing all this regenerative medicine from different kind of equipment to things of, like, injectables where they shoot sugar water therapy called prolotherapy. And you start seeing that type of advanced therapy. So then you go into further into their career and later down the line. And then you start seeing things like PRP therapy. Then you go into stem cell therapy.

[00:05:04] So it's always because these athletes want to advance their healing and recovery faster. It made me kind of follow along with that and made sure that I understood it. And I really found gaps that I had to fill with the future tense of this whole environment. Yeah, that's amazing. Because I wanted to ask you, too, like, I know the product that you invented is topical, correct? Yeah.

[00:05:28] And so one thing, and this is just from a complete layman's view, obviously, because I don't have a lot of experience with stem cells at all, although I'm very curious. But how does a topical product go deep into the tissue? Because you always think injectables are going right near the site or down deep. And a topical, you think, is more surface level. So can you explain how this goes deep into the tissues? Okay, Michelle, get ready for this long explanation, okay? Sure.

[00:05:58] All right, so let's go back to the world of stem cell therapy. So when you hear the word stem cell therapy, you'll hear clinics say, I offer 10 million live cells. They're talking about cells, right? A cell is a typical, if you remember biology, it's like the membrane, the cytokine. I mean, it's the helper cells inside there. And the nucleus, which is consistent of the chromosome and DNA components.

[00:06:21] Well, once I started going into this world and seeing what this whole therapy is all about and then how they do the procedure, you understand that one of the big factors in there is that when you see the delivery mechanism from the lab to the clinic in the cryopreserve and their process of defrosting it or thawing it out, you start wondering what's really going on with these cells.

[00:08:15] So if you're looking at this large diameter, you're going after the EVs. Well, now you're looking at smaller molecules, a more easily transdermal type of molecule to go through the skin. All you need is an agent to actually take that stratacordium, that outer layer of the skin and break up that bilipid layer and then disturb it. It allows those small molecules, EVs, those messengers to get through the skin and then it'll migrate down to saturation to the deep tissues of the tendons, ligaments, and bones and muscles.

[00:08:43] So understanding that philosophy of just the signals and not the cells, now it's just a process of understanding how to deliver. And that mechanism, of course, is topical. So that's the big thing. If you understand about what's really going with genetic medicine and stem cell therapy, it's not the actual live cells, it's a signal, the messages, carriers that we're working with. And then now, smaller molecules, easy gets through the skin, and now it's a topical application.

[00:09:12] So that's what the whole future is moving towards to, is a signaling molecule to get through the actual skin to signal your existing tissue that's damaged or injured to actually regenerate. So it works kind of like the way peptides do, that they signal something to occur in your body. Yeah, peptide's another form of signaling. It's all these signaling molecules. It's real simple. You're going to start hearing about more signaling, all the way from exosome, peptides, many kind of peptides.

[00:09:39] And peptides are just a bunch of proteins together, right? So that's all that is. And all of this is information that your body, your receiver, has to have that receptor to match up to the signal. So it's like insulin and glucose. You have to have that right type of match for the actual receiver to be your receptor. And that's what the whole cell or the paracrine effect is all about. So what kind of ailments can this actually help? I mean, can it help arthritis or is it just like an injury? Yeah.

[00:10:09] Besides the injury, the classic injury of acute injury, and you want to repair that injured site, you want to speed it up, regenerative medicine signals. But also when you look at our aging system, as we age, we have our signal to do what they call like heal or regenerate. Well, as we age, our signal gets declined. It starts losing its signal power. Well, we have to introduce that signal stronger, and that's what that's all about.

[00:10:34] So if you don't have that strong signal, you start going into the arthritic world, the degeneration world. Your joints start losing its cartilage. So our body always recycles, right? We always have a good healthy cell, and as the healthy cells die down, we have to replace it with another good cell. So it's always that recycle, right, one-to-one ratio. As we get older, that ratio starts declining because you start losing two cells. You replace it with one cell because your signal is not strong enough to keep that one-to-one ratio.

[00:11:03] Get the signal, increase it, and now you're back to one-to-one ratio. And then you lead towards that osteoarthritis because that's what that's all about is that arthritis is not getting the right signal, not enough signal to get that cartilage to regenerate. It's a slow process. You're destroying more than you're actually replacing. So is this actually signaling us to make more cells then? Yes, exactly. Yeah. Your body is sitting there dormant. It needs information. It just sits around. For instance, like we have hormones, right?

[00:11:33] We have a thing called an endocrine system. We have a system that we send information from like the brain, parts of the brain, into a target tissue. So that's a longer distance of signaling called the endocrine system. When you look at paracrine system, that's a cell-to-cell communication. That's when you get closer to each other where they're actually engulfing each other or actually like getting that receptor information to receive. So that's what this whole information about regenerative medicine is about, signaling your existing tissue to do its job.

[00:12:03] So it will signal any, I mean, like we always hear, and I don't know if it's just marketing or what, but we always hear that traditional stem cells, they shoot them into you and they go where they're needed and they morph into whatever cell you need it to be, right? Right. So does this trigger whatever repair you need? So here's something funny. So here's something funny. So way back, I think the problem was is that stem cell therapy in its overall view works.

[00:12:31] The technician has a problem explaining how it works. The mechanism is not there to prove it. They would say this cell, this mesochimus stem cell would differentiate into your target tissue. But the problem is that they can't explain it. They just say, well, it just knows. It just knows. But if you go back to just basic biology about DNA and our codes and how we look at a chromosome, right? We look at chromosomes and we see all those codes in our chromosome, right? Right. A, T, C, G, right? Those genes, right?

[00:13:00] So those codes are long. And to reproduce that set of codes from my tissue to somebody else's exact tissue that has the same code, impossible. So you can't think that this DNA sequence in our chromosome is going to match to their target tissue. It's impossible. So you start looking at that fact. It can't do that. So what does it have to do with regenerative medicine? It's a signal. So you drop down. You look at your existing tissue that's sitting dormant. Now there's two processes of this dormant tissue.

[00:13:30] There's one thing called senescence. Senescence is when you have to look at the ends of the chromosome, which is the telomeres, right? The telomeres are basically a safety mechanism for a chromosome when it starts replicating. So it goes through the thing called mitosis cell division. So the chromosome is protected because if you don't have that little telomeres at the end of the chromosomes, well, it starts replicating. And it basically goes to the end of the chromosome. And then it starts mismatching codes.

[00:13:58] When it mismatches codes, it turns into that thing called tumor, right? We don't want that odd type of formation of that tissue. So we have to stop it. So it stops by that little telomeres. Well, when you stop it, you stop the replication. You stop the actual process of that whole regenerative medicine. So you need a signal to turn on those telomeres back to its normal length. And that's in the form of an emzon called telomerase. We have it in our body, but we need to get it going. We need to wake it up.

[00:14:28] We have to get it to the telomeres to say, all right, go ahead and do this thing called a tert. You have to understand that these little chromosomes... Sorry, I'm getting too deep in this thing. No, you're good. Okay, so the chromosome at the very end of the telomeres, they have to go through a process. And that process has to be elongated. Once you elongate a telomeres, well, now you're ready to start that mitosis, cell division, replication, and then you start getting dollar cells. And then you start going to regenerative medicine.

[00:14:55] And now you're doing that what you should be doing, which is healing that tissue. Yeah, because I know I've heard... I can't say I understand it fully, but I've heard that as your telomeres get shorter, as you get older. I mean, it's kind of like once they recede so much, that's the end of life in a way. Kind of. Yeah. That's the secret. That's the secret of this anti-aging longevity world is those telomeres. There's so much great research, like Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn.

[00:15:22] Now, she's the one that discovered the enzyme that increases telomeres, and that's a telomerize. It's the enzyme that makes those telomeres grow bigger and healthier. We have it in our body, but of course, as we age, the signal decreases, telomerize, that enzyme drops down. So you have to get something to wake things up, and that's a signal. The signal does its job to say, all right, increase the telomerize, increase telomeres, increase those factors that help that cell be healthy.

[00:15:49] And then your body, with the signaling, your body just kind of takes over and knows how to repair itself. Is that the whole? Yeah. Yeah. So think about it. It's almost like you're at a construction site, and there's no foreman. There's no instruction. So the guys just sit around waiting for somebody to say, lay the foundation, build a frame. There's nobody there doing that instructional component, or you're halfway through it, and all of a sudden, there's no more further instructions. There's no more somebody saying, like, drywall. There's nobody saying, put the roof, the loft, and all that stuff.

[00:16:17] So think about that kind of information to say to the foreman and to the actual construction guys, proceed further. Go do your job. They're sitting there waiting. It's just like our cells. Our cells are sitting there waiting. I'm assuming this topical helps even, like, inflammatory sorts of conditions. Like, I had a frozen shoulder twice in one year, and I know my doctor was talking about, I think he mentioned it, and I'm probably saying it wrong, but it was PRP or something,

[00:16:43] where they take your blood, and they separate it out, and then shoot parts of it back in you. Yeah. I didn't do that, but she was talking to me about it because it was that bad. So does this help stuff like that, or is inflammation totally separate from injury? No, you're absolutely correct. Inflammation is probably the biggest thing about pain, right? So think about how we heal. We have to stop the bleeding first, and then we have to bring some type of information or

[00:17:12] message or building blocks to the damaged area, and that's the inflammatory world. We have to open up channels, but that includes excess fluid. It goes in the area. But then we need to get the stuff out. We need to get the inflammation out so that you can reduce the pain. So when you look at stem cell, mesocomus stem cells, there are cytokines in there that will decrease the inflammatory world. So absolutely, it does anti-inflammatory. And that's why right away when you do a product like mine, your pain gets reduced right away because you're decreasing inflammation.

[00:17:42] Now, you haven't healed the tissue yet because it takes a period of time for that to happen. But your first couple of days, you're going to find yourself like, I feel great with my shoulder movement because inflammation has been decreased. But then, for your instance, a frozen shoulder, if it's diagnosed correctly, it's not so much the inflammation. It's this, they have this like capsule on the back of your shoulder. It's called adhesive capsulitis. So that thing shrinks down. When it shrinks down, it tightens up that range of motion.

[00:18:10] So it's difficult to raise your arm above your head. Right. So that's why you have to go through an aggressive therapy to kind of break up that adhesion and move that kind of like that capsule to its normal range of motion. So you're allowed to go reach over your head. So when you look at that, you want to think about not so much the regenerative medicine for that particular thing because it's about excess tissue you got to break up. But when you look at maybe something like a bursitis or a tear or sprain or strain like

[00:18:38] micro tears, absolutely those work. Arthritis works. Anytime you have to regenerate tissue. But when you have excess scar tissue, you don't want to put more regenerative medicine, stem cell cream, whatever on it because you'll lay down more structure and make it tighter. Oh, wow. So you're doing like a compounding factor on it. So you want to do the opposite, which is break it up. So it all depends on what you have. So I always think like if you have arthritis, absolutely. If you have a sprain strain, absolutely.

[00:19:06] If you're dealing with something chronic that doesn't heal correctly, yes. But when you have something that's a tight type of like tissue, that scar tissue, and you can't, you have to break it up, I would avoid that. Okay. That's interesting. And I never really heard that description of it before. I was just always told it was like severe inflammation. And they did have a, I ended up having aggressive physical therapy for like six months to finally get out of it. So, yeah. Yeah.

[00:19:31] Everybody that goes through my process and procedures, frozen shoulder, that first six weeks, they hate me. I've got to do it. Look, you want to get better? We got, I mean, they can't get above 90 degrees and then we get them up as high as we can in six weeks, but they hate me for the first couple of weeks. Well, yeah, but it's coming from the other side too. It's just as miserable not being able to move without severe pain. So yeah, during that hour or whatever your physical therapy is, you might have a few choice

[00:20:00] words, but when you get home and you got a little bit more motion, you're very grateful. So I was always glad to go, even though I knew I was going to hate that hour, but I knew I'd get more on the other end of it. So did you document what, while you're working with NFL players, did you document a lot of this to see like how, I don't know, to perfect your formula or to see how long it takes? Cause I'm curious, I'm seeing a lot of people like influencers on social media that are going

[00:20:28] to Panama to get the stem cell injections. Right. And they talk about these quick recoveries. What's a recovery like with the topical? I mean, what would be the difference? So there's, I guess there's a couple of things in there, but I'll talk about the recovery. So the topical side of the thing is a 30 day application morning and evening that will yield as much as the injection. So when you do an injection, you get the whole shot right there at one shot and it takes its time and 30 days, they'll feel better.

[00:20:56] With regen and topical, it'll take a little longer because you have to saturate the area 30 day application. So our start point is right about in the middle, right? The 15th, 17th day where it's really like the injectable one day one. And then it takes time. You have to think about right now you're going to do the anti-inflammatory component of it. So you reduce your pain. Then the secondary thing is to actually get the tissue to regenerate. The signal gets down there. It's called honing. These little vessels will hone into the damaged area and then it will signal.

[00:21:26] Once it gets down there, then it turns that process of signaling and it takes its time. So to really see the difference of a tissue regenerate, it's going to take about a good two months, but the pain reduction is right away. Wow. Now going back to Central America, here's a tough thing with Central America. In fact, it's tough about this whole industry right now of the stem cell therapy. It's not really regulated. If you look at the FDA clearance, it's not really clear to do any type of therapy.

[00:21:55] So we're in the United States, it's utilized as an experimental or for research. So when you do like a clinical study on it, you're going to see that kind of pattern. You have to volunteer into this therapy and then you have to be aware that this is experimental. But in the FDA world where the control is at the lab, but the thing is that a lot of FDA, a lot of labs right now is being shut down by the FDA because you're going to see some unethical sourcing from these things.

[00:22:23] It's not really coming from where they say it is, which is like the umbilical cord, the gelatinous material called Wharton's jelly. It's coming from other sites. There's studies out there with the FDA calling out from bovine tissue, pig tissue, animals, and then sometimes it's not even from the females, from some other source. So it's hard to determine at the clinical side of it, but that's why people are going to Central America.

[00:22:50] Now with Central America, it's even worse because there's no regulation on there. So you'll hear about 10,000, I mean 10 million, 20 million live cells. And there are some facilities where they'll actually have the tissue right there after a C-section delivery right there at the spot. And they'll do the actual harvesting from that delivery. The problem is that you have to be careful. You have to vet the patient. You have to understand what the patient has in the historical sense and what they're dealing with pathology.

[00:23:16] And if they're cleared, because you're taking something that has a DNA component in there and you're shooting it into your body. Well, guess what? Your body's going to look at that. It's going to look at it as an antigen. It's going to fight it. And that's why you hear a lot of people say, I was sick for the first two days. Well, you just gave it a foreign substance into your body. And then you're going to hopefully think that maybe it's going to turn into a healing factor. It may be true, but you just have to be careful. Now, when you look at what they do over there, it's not just stem cell therapy.

[00:23:45] They do more than stem cell therapy. They do hyperbaric chamber. They do IB. They do all kinds of different like ancillary type of modalities along with the stem cell injection. So if you really want to know if it really works, avoid the stem cell injection and do everything else that they're doing, which is like the IV, hyperbaric chamber, red light therapy, massage, just everything that makes you feel good. And you're in a vacation resort setting. I mean, you're going to feel good by itself.

[00:24:11] So is it because of the injection or is it the environment along with the other therapies you can do here in the United States? So when I hear people go into Central America or Mexico, I say, well, you can do the same thing here. It's just that I feel more safe here. You're going to have to understand that when you get sick there, there's no governing agency that's going to protect you when you get there. Yeah, that's very true because I remember the people I'm thinking of talked about being sick for two to three days and I didn't understand why because, but now I do. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:41] So what allows those stem cells to thrive at all? If your body can recognize that foreign DNA and it attacks it, how do they survive at all? Yeah. It's because you're basically, you're building yourself an immune system antibodies to fight that. That's why that's, so when I went through this whole world of, so we had the service in our office years ago, stem cell injections.

[00:25:03] And then when you went to the actual, the classroom setting and you learn about the actual procedure, how to take this cryopreserved type of stem cell, and then you thaw it out. And then you go ahead and you do a saturation with the IV injection with saline, and then you inject the area. You start questioning, well, why is it taking, why is it taking this process? Why such a quick thawing process?

[00:25:25] If you look at everybody that understands about a cryopreserved tissue and you want to get back into a live state, there's a stepping process. It takes many, many minutes, probably 45 to an hour to take something that's negative 66 degrees and get it back to room temperature of 75, 80 degrees. And that's like an increment every 10 minutes. There's a 10, I think it's 10 degrees every 10 minutes of steps that you have to get back. And that's a long process.

[00:25:52] And that's how you keep the vitality of these little stem cells from a cryoversion. So with that, nobody's doing that type of step of the thawing. They just stick it in their hand and they take that solid type of frozen tissue and they make it into gelatinous right in their hand. So because of that fast type of thawing, it kills those live cells. But here's the thing again, it still works. So now it's not about the cells. It's going back to that EVs, those little cell-free molecules. And that's where you're going to start seeing this trend.

[00:26:22] Stem cell is a generic term right now. Now it's moving into the signals. Yeah, and you brought up something that I can't quite get out of my head, I guess, because I never thought about it before. But if someone takes stem cells, you're taking on someone else's DNA or the animal's DNA or wherever it was sourced from. Is that correct? I mean... Yeah. Think about it. Think about what is that cell meant to do? I mean, you're taking, let's say it's a live cell. It's a real live cell and you shoot it into your body. Well, it's going to act like a virus. It's going to do something.

[00:26:52] It's going to connect on something. It's going to replicate. It's going to do mitosis. It's going to divide. It's going to turn into a tumor cell. You have no idea what that code is supposed to turn into. So you're kind of playing a little Russian roulette when it comes to taking something that you don't know where the sourcing is, shoot it into your body in a live form, and then let your body try to either accept it, which it doesn't.

[00:27:15] It always takes it into like the antigen, antibody, virus type of scenario where you start getting that symptom being like a flu-like symptom. They mean sick. Wow. Very interesting. I mean, it complicates the whole live stem cell scenario. Yeah. It's stuff that we never obviously hear about. They're not going to market it in that way. But the funny thing is that it works. That's the interesting thing. So then if you have a dead cell from the thawing, just on thawing itself, right? You shock thaw it and it's dead.

[00:27:44] But the whole procedure still works. Then you have to ask yourself, well, what is it? It's the cell-free. That's where I moved into the molecules, the cell-free molecules. That's where I started thinking, okay, it's not about this whole mesochrome stem cell, the live cells, and this differentiator. That old terminology is not evolving. It's dead. It's moving into signaling. It's about the paracrine.

[00:28:07] It's about the actual information that's inside those cells that are secreted, that we're capturing, to put into your body to do its job. So the neat thing about a cell-free, meaning no nucleus, it doesn't give any type of warning to your own body. Say, hey, there's an antigen. There's a virus. It doesn't say that. It goes, all right. It's just a little bit of capsulated tissues coming in. No big deal. Come on in. Just like a fluid or a liquid. Oh, wow.

[00:28:32] And I think you're in a unique position where you've seen the results of the live stem cell because you said you used to do it. And you're seeing the results of the topical. Yeah. And in your opinion, I mean, the topical is equal to what the live stem cell injections? Okay. Yes or no. So yes, in the sense that it's equal, but it's equal in a different time span, right?

[00:28:56] So in an injectable, you'll get the results a little quicker because you're delivering everything all at once, whereas a topical, it's a 30-day length, right? So you're spreading it out for 30 days. But here's a cool thing about topical versus injectables. When you do the injection, let's say you have a patella tendon. Your tendon in your knee is compromised. You have maybe a grade one or two tear there. So you want to heal it. Now, a tendon doesn't have that much blood flow. It doesn't heal well because of that avascular kind of tissue.

[00:29:26] So you have to get better signal down there. So in this class, they'll teach you how to do the injection. Now, here's a funny thing. You have a tissue that's compromised from the injury. Then you take this syringe and you penetrate it through the same tissue that you're trying to repair. Well, now you have two sites of injury. You have the primary one and the secondary one with the needle. Well, now those two areas have to heal. So now that's why they typically say after you get the injection, they call it downtime, right?

[00:29:55] They don't want you to do anything for the next couple of days to a week because you have to recover from that injection site. The neat thing about topical, there's no downtime. There's no injection site. There's no secondary injury site. It's just application, daily application, and continue on with your play. Wow. That's amazing. Can it actually help regenerate cartilage in the knee? Yeah. If someone's lost someone, it can? It can do that.

[00:30:20] But as long as you, if you hear somebody bone on bone and there's osseous, the cortex has been destroyed, you're not going to fix them because there's no tissue to regenerate. Right. You're not going to, you're going to have some tissue there. So if you have tissue, depending on the grade of the arthritic site, you're going to have, if it's a grade one, you have a better chance because you have more tissue. If you're grade three, you're down there almost close to bone on bone. It's a long process because you have to take that one eighth of the tissue that was there. Right. And you've got to regenerate that.

[00:30:49] It's going to take a long time. So absolutely, it does that stuff. Any tissue that has that arthritic kind of situation that doesn't have the signal, if the tissue is there, you're signaling the existing tissue to do its job. So in preparing for this show, I was looking and I saw a few other topicals, but I'm wondering how somebody can tell. Like, I'm sure there's fake products out there is what I'm getting at, I guess. So how do they know what's real and what's fake? That's a good question.

[00:31:18] So I don't want to tread on too many toes here, but I'm in the stem cell world way before topical, way before. I've been in this whole regenerative medicine since 2007, 8. So I've seen the evolution. It's all about the sourcing. It's all about what's going on in the delivery mechanism. And more importantly, it's about the partnership you have with the lab. So when you can understand that there's got to be one thing besides just like a trust factor, you've got to have traceability.

[00:31:46] The traceability is more important. Then you're saying, okay, my tissue that I'm getting with the stem cell, whose tissue is this? So you have to ask the clinic, hey, do you have traceability? Do you have a page or some type of form that tells me who the patient was? You can redact a name and stuff, but you have to have at least their blood type, serology, maybe some STD clearing. You've got to see everything just like a medical doctor would see if you're doing an examination. So we have that ability.

[00:32:16] So when you look at other products, if they can't deliver that, there's a problem. Now, there are some other products. Here's the tough thing about my world. When you're first on the market, it's a blessing and a curse because, number one, it's a blessing. I have no competition, but it's a curse because I have to educate people about this, right? So it's like me going on these shows and I had to write a book to explain what this is all about. I just have to constantly teach. Now, as we go further into it, people understand this and they develop their own topical.

[00:32:46] So there's just companies out there that are mimicking mine and they understand the principle based on my information and my research and they're applying it. So more power to them and me because we are both doing the same thing. But the tough thing is that you have to understand it's not so much the signals. You have to find out what's the actual mechanism to drive it into the tissue. And there are some danger points in there where people are like touching in a different type of products that sounds great.

[00:33:16] But if you look at the science behind it, there's warnings behind some of these ingredients they're using to do the transdermal component of it. Oh, wow. So you just have to do your homework. Yeah. The best thing to do is just take it, take the ingredients, put it in chat GPT and say, what's the hazards? What's the damage here? Chat's pretty neat. You can take anything and you stick it in there and just ask some cool questions. They'll shoot you some generic answers out of that thing.

[00:33:40] So there's one thing I want to touch on because I know a lot of people that suffer with a lot of pain and everybody, because stem cell treatments, live stem cell treatments are so costly. You see, a lot of people go after the cortisone shots. And what I've been told or what I've learned on my own, I guess, is that cortisone actually destroys the joint. And I asked my physical therapist when I was because they kept wanting to inject my shoulder with cortisone.

[00:34:10] And I'm like, doesn't that destroy the joint? And my physical therapist was like, well, it's also going to destroy your ligaments and tendons too. But nobody's telling you that. And so people are actually making themselves worse long term by thinking they're helping themselves in the short term. Yeah. So. Yeah, don't forget, if you're moving into that world of the anti-inflammatory through cortisone, your ortho should say you only get three of these a year. It just, they'll inject locally to your knee where you want it, but it gets systemically through your body.

[00:34:39] So it just doesn't stay right there at your knee. It'll travel to your other knee, your back, and then you'll start recognizing. You recognize the reduction of pain because you're decreasing inflammation. But give it about six months to a year, you're going to start seeing my knee pain came back, but also my elbow pain because you are chewing down that cartilage between those joints. And that's what it really does is kind of degrades that fast. Yeah, it's kind of scary. I was just talking to a woman the other day just telling me she was going to go get her neck injected with cortisone.

[00:35:08] And I'm like, don't you realize that's going to make you worse? And she's like, I'm in so much pain. I don't care. So, yeah, it's sad. But if you can tell your friend, you need to go to like a sports guy like me. You need someone that knows about physical movement, not just like a plain, a chiropractor or a physical therapist. You have to go to one that really loves about movement and then understand about biomechanics and really tailor their therapy separate from other people.

[00:35:34] Because if you look at a generic chiropractor or physical therapist, you have that cookie cutter kind of mentality, right? Oh, your low back pain, you do these three exercises. You sit over there and do those exercises and that's it. You want to avoid those kind of guys. You want to go to the real specific person goes, all right, when do you have the pain? Extension at what rotation? Left, right, what angle? And then they can go after that piece of anatomy that's compromised and go directly to it. And there's advanced equipment out there. There's all kinds of stuff out there.

[00:36:03] And then once you figure out what it is, that therapist should really hone into it by not just diagnostic tools like MRI or an x-ray, but ultrasound and palpation. And then you need someone out there that's been out in the world for about 20 years. You got to have some provider that really understands because they have experienced the normal tissue. And then when they put their hands on you, they know what abnormal feels like. Okay, I've got it now just based on experience.

[00:36:31] So when you go out there, tell your friend, please find someone like me to understand that, hey, this could be an easy fix without all those injectables. So for the topical that you have, do people have to like do a televisit to get it? Or how does that work? Yeah, just contact me and I can point you to the right provider. If you have general questions, you can ask me. I'll get you. There should be a provider near you. If there's not one, just tell your provider to contact me and I can set them up.

[00:37:00] My product is very interesting. It's not an OTC or over-the-counter. It's more so it goes directly to the provider. Okay. And then they dispense it out to the patient. So it's for professional use only. Okay. I wondered how that worked because I know you don't want people just blindly treating themselves. Well, there's going to be a point when there's going to... No, go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. So Regen, my product is evolving, always evolving. Right.

[00:37:28] And one of the big hurdles that I have right now is understanding about the cost. So the cost for injectables is between $5,000 to $10,000 per joint, per site. Now with Regen, we cut that cost all the way down to retail price at about $1,000 because we still have to source it from a human tissue. And then of course, what takes this process to do is longevity and the lipid nanoparticles, all that stuff. And then we get it into the actual cream and then give it to you guys. But still cost.

[00:37:56] So now there's got to be a better system. So then understanding that it's all about the signals. Then you start thinking about, all right, can the signal come from somewhere else? Sure enough, it comes from plants. There are plants that have the same ability, just like our tissue and our mesocombus themselves signals our tissue. So I'm so close to finishing a lot of things. I don't want to divulge too much, but you're going to start seeing this go in the over the counter for less than $100. Oh, wow.

[00:38:24] Same function, same ability and same production as these human tissue. And that's what I'm excited about. It's going to take me, I'm in a couple more tests. We're doing, you know, how that goes, right? So we have to do a little bit more tests, make sure that everything that we're talking about, the signaling our target tissue is actionable. So then we can slowly release this. So we can talk about that in the future. And you're already in the testing phase? Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty awesome. And you feel like you're seeing the same results. It's interesting.

[00:38:54] Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. But the neat thing about that is that when you want to really see the outcome of this, it's not so much like for someone like my age, right? So I'm 50 plus. My signals are decreased. So I know that with this new signal, I can repair tissue. But the problem is that once I eliminate my topical out of this whole world of applying on me, well, the signal decreases again, because you can't increase your own signal. It's just like anything else, right?

[00:39:23] When your equipment fails on you, you have to replace with better equipment and that signal, right? So here's a cool thing about this new product that I'm developing. It's a lot more affordable. So you can use this over and over again. So you're constantly giving your body the signal it needs to not just do its acute repair, but it's for preventative. Just like your tissue, you want to stay that one-to-one ratio. So this cream, not only does it go local, but systemic, it goes through your whole body.

[00:39:51] So all the tissue that needs that information will receive it. I was just going to ask that, just like cortisone goes everywhere. Surely this, the message has to be delivered everywhere. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty awesome. That's a fun thing. And the neat thing about that is that it's going to be a shuffleable type of product. It's going to be an OTC under the FDA. It's going to be a fantastic product that it gets in the hands of the patient.

[00:40:16] So now patients these days are getting more informed with shows like this, with all this AI and information. Now you can even ask the doctor based on AI or your information you gather and goes, is this true? And hopefully he can concur or maybe he doesn't like it. If he doesn't like the fact that you're doing your own research for your own body, maybe it's time to go to another doctor. I love it when patients come to me and talk to me about, I went to chat GPT and I found

[00:40:45] this because let's talk about it. And then I informed them that they're correct or I would go this way a little bit more. But the neat thing about that is in the patient's hands. So now the patient has the ability to say, okay, I know what I have. I'm self-diagnosed. I'm psyched dosing. Now I just need the product. And here comes regen over the counter. I can get it right to my door and then start that process of healing. Can you tell us like how long you think it's going to be till it's would be in our hands over the counter? Is it two years away or? Yeah, no, no, no.

[00:41:15] It's going to be sooner than that. Hopefully before the new year. We're at the end stage. Oh, wow. Yeah. So we have to do this. They call it the permeability test. I've got to do that and another test. And then once those two go through, then it's fun. Now I've got the patents filed. We're going to have to get that. We're going to try and get that response back quick. And then a couple other schools are testing out a couple of things. And then like anything else, you know how that goes. I don't want to tell too much until I'm a hundred percent sure. Right. Right.

[00:41:45] I just wanted an idea of when to maybe expect to see it. So yeah, it's going to be a fun trip. Yeah, that would be awesome. And I think the biggest thing like I talked about is the educational component. We all understand aging is a process that we have to deal with. But what if you can slow that aging process down? What if you can get the right signal in our body to say, all right, slow down because we want to get that one to one ratio. The one to one ratio of cells go down, cells come back up one to one, replacing it and regenerating it.

[00:42:14] So that's what my goal is right now is just get those signals back in your body and then into a pattern where you can take it non-aggressively. It's not going to be hazardous. There's no bad outcomes out of this thing. There's tumor formation and apply it on your skin and like just like a lotion. And then you're getting those signals on a daily basis where now you're able to live past a hundred, maybe 125, 150. You don't know. It's all about keeping those cells information signal correct. That's amazing.

[00:42:42] So how much do you think diet and exercise play in? It's one thing to have a product that works, but it's another to actually help your body heal, right? It all plays together because while you want to be healthy, the reason why you want those tissues to be stronger is because you want to exercise. Exercise is very important for the cardiovascular system. You've got to get the endothelium, that lining around the blood vessels to contract and relax. You've got to avoid that hardening of the arteries, right?

[00:43:09] So in order for you to avoid that, you've got to have the ability to flex it and relax it open and close. And that's through exercise. So that's big in there. So if you have an injury and you can't exercise, well, guess what? Your aging is going to go quick. Oh, wow. So if you can get that tissue to heal, now you're back to doing your walking and your exercise and stuff like that. And diet's big too because you need those building blocks, those amino acids, those carbs, right? For energy. You need all those things.

[00:43:38] So think about you have to have that side of it because of your building blocks and your energy source. Then you have to have the ability to do that type of exercise to train those tissues to open and close and be normal again. But then you also have the signal to say, stay at its one-to-one ratio. So it all works together. That's awesome. Well, is there anything we haven't talked about? I know we're edging up on time for you, but is there anything we haven't talked about today that you want to make sure the listeners hear?

[00:44:07] Or do you want to tell us a little bit more about your book or Regen or anything? Yeah. If you want to learn about Regen, the topical transdermal stem cell cream, you can go to my website, www.regen.com. And you can read about it there. I also have a book. If you go on the website, you can see I just finally put a link in my website. I didn't thought a year later. But the reason why I wrote the book is it helps explain the world of stem cell therapy and

[00:44:37] where the future is moving towards. You'll learn about the different kinds of stem cells and then why that old world of like differentiating, moving into signaling is occurring. So that's an easy book, 100 pages. And the neat thing about that, there's a science side of it and there's a layman's version of it where you can just follow a guy named Jeff and his journey into discovering and the future of regenerative medicine. I love that, especially since I'm a layman. But thank you. Thank you very much. It's been fascinating today.

[00:45:06] I greatly appreciate your wisdom and your time sharing with us. Thank you very much. Like I said, I will have all the little details. I can explain that once I pass these tests and say, okay, now I can talk about some of those products about coming out here soon. Well, let me know and I'll have you back and we'll talk about it. That'd be great. Awesome. Great. I love it. Okay. Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Oh, it's great talking to you. Thank you very much. All right, Michelle. Take care. Have a great day now. You too. Bye-bye.

[00:45:34] As we wrap up today's episode, I have to say what an interesting conversation that was. One of the things I appreciated most about talking with Dr. Rhee is that he encourages us to ask questions, stay curious, and continue learning about our bodies and the options that are available to us. Whether you agree with every perspective discussed today or not, it's hard to ignore how rapidly the fields of regenerative medicine, longevity research, and recovery science are evolving.

[00:46:01] What once sounded like science fiction is quickly becoming part of everyday conversations about health and healing. What really stood out to me was the idea that our bodies are constantly communicating, constantly adapting, and constantly working toward repair. Sometimes the challenge isn't that our bodies don't know what to do, it's that they need the right support, environment, or signals to do it. I also appreciated Dr. Rhee's reminder that we should be informed participants in our own

[00:46:29] healthcare, ask questions, do your research, explore your options, and don't be afraid to advocate for yourself. Dr. Rhee, thank you for sharing your knowledge, your experience, and your vision for the future of regenerative medicine with us today. And to all of you listening, whether you're navigating pain, recovery, aging, or simply looking for ways to live a healthier life, I hope this conversation gave you something new to think about. Thank you for joining me for another episode of The Beauty and the Mess.

[00:46:56] As always, I hope this episode helps at least one person. And with that, I hope you have a blessed week, my friend. Thank you for listening to The Beauty and the Mess. If you enjoyed what you heard, please share it with a friend. And if you haven't already, please subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on your favorite pod player. If you have any questions or comments, any topic ideas you would like to hear about, or

[00:47:23] you think you would be a great guest on the show, you can reach me directly at thebeautyandthemess.com. Thanks for listening.