big difference between the exosomes and the stem cells, significantly lower price point, better safety profile, and I can do treatments more frequently.

Hey there. Welcome to the Recharge Biomedical Podcast. I’m Dr. Edward Park, if you’re curious about regenerative medicine, you’ve come to Hi, everybody.

This is Dr. Ed Park, your host of the Recharged Botanical Podcast. And today we’re very lucky to be joined by Armin Nikugosha. Hey, Arman. Hi. How are you doing today?

doing great. Thanks for joining us. So Armin is a doctor in Nevada and he has been exploring the use of exosomes for autism spectrum diseases. I know that you have had a lot of success and people are interested in your work.

This also comes on the heels of Jodi Repko who’s treated her own son who is nonverbal and she reported great results in terms of social activity and coordination by motor skills.

Tell us how autism has been a part of your family as well. Well, I got into this field as many people do by falling into it the hard way. My son was diagnosed with autism in 2010 or end of 2009, a little under two years old.

And, you know, it was one of those things, of course I heard about it in med school, sort of peripherally, but it’s, one those thing you don’t really jump into till it is part of your life.

I very quickly found out that there the conventional medical model really didn’t offer much for our kids. And I did seek out, you know, so, the best this and the better that, all that kind of stuff.

I’m sure those guys were great, but in terms of just the model that they’re working within, there wasn’t much to offer. So, I wound up doing my own research back then.

There wasn’t as many people that were involved in treating this as there are today, and certainly not as much treatment options as are there today. But regardless, through a sort of roundabout sort way, I made my way to MAPS, which is the Medical Academy of Pediatric Special Needs.

And I do want to actually say a thank you to Nancy O’Hara, who I believe you’ve had I think on the podcast before. She’s actually the one I reached out to, she didn’t know me from anybody.

I just randomly sent her an email and asked her, told her my situation. Told her I was a doc and I wanted to learn more about this. What should I? She said, Hey, we got this great conference in a month.

Come on down. You’ll love it. And I did, and I love, it never since then, I’ve been pretty much going twice a year since. Then, at that time I sort of transitioned my whole practice structure more to a functional medicine model.

Now I’m doing a hundred percent functional, medicine, 60% autism, about 40% adults. And it’s really just sort of evolved over the years as the treatments have evolved and gotten better and they really have, they’ve really changed.

There’s still a core, certain things that we did, you know, 10, 15 years ago, but there’s a lot of new things on the horizon. And one of the big ones in my clinic really, it, yeah, It’s been the exosomes.

I’ve been very, very happy with how, how the kind of results that We’ve seen with it. It, well, the results have They’re really, they haven’t really been comparable with much else.

The results have been really consistently very good. And in particular, because my son’s 17 years old now and he is an on speaker, he communicates through letter boards.

There was a disproportionate number of older autistic kids that I was treating and that’s traditionally a very resistant treatment group. In terms, when I say resistant, I don’t mean resistant to treatment where you’re trying to maybe stabilize them or have them be better regulated, not in that regard, but in regards to improving their actual core symptoms in terms of getting better communication, better ruler planning, those kinds of things.

You can absolutely do that with older kids, you have to put in a lot more work to get as much return as you would with a three-year-old or a six- year- old, something like that.

I was talking to a person yesterday, a late person, and they asked me if I wasn’t anti-vaxxer. You know, that’s kind of had negative connotation. It reminded me of a patient I consulted with two years ago.

She said her 17 year old daughter was very articulate, but she can only communicate with typing. In other words, she had the Broca’s aphasia or expressive aphesia.

But she could, you know chat with you on the keyboard in deep conversation. And she said that it happened like maybe a week after her MMR. And then the thing, interestingly, she said after that as sort of a grace note, but I know vaccines are safe and effective.

So I was thinking, okay, this is how bad the cognitive distance is. Like, even if your suspicion is that it somehow affected your child, you can’t go around saying that or you’ll sound like a flat earther.

And, you know, I think that’s hard for people to choose sides on because I told this person I just met, yeah, kind of coming around to being an anti-vaxxer because why, other than convenience, do we need measles, mumps, and rubella together with all the adjuvants?

So that is always sort of the leitmotif. You know I went first a couple of years ago to Alisa Song’s pediatric sort-of special needs conference and there I met Nancy O’Hara, who is great, we’ve had her on as you said, had Alissa Song on.

And she was your daughter’s pediatrician too. And I think that it’s so hard for people to understand what it is like to be a doctor, specifically a pediatricians, and hold those concepts that, yeah, vaccines are a big part of the practice, but they’re not completely risk free.

So how do you deal with that as a paediatrician and a dad? Well, I want to be clear. I’m an internist by board certification and all that. But you’ve sort of pivoted more into that area.

The children that I see are specifically in the lane of neurodevelopmental delay, things like that, but yeah, in terms of vaccines, yeah. Well I guess first thing I wanna mention is I kind of hate that forced dichotomy of Provax, Antivax, right?

Because to me it oversimplifies it because I don’t think anybody’s against vaccination. I mean, nobody’s against the idea of getting a relatively innocuous treatment to prevent a disease that could potentially hurt you.

Right. And nobody in their right mind would be opposed to that. I’m not opposed that by any means, I think there should really be a third group, which frankly, most of the so-called anti-vaxxers fall into, basically people that want responsible vaccination or realize risk in vaccination.

And I think Bobby Kennedy has actually said that himself where it’s like, you know, nobody’s talking about getting rid of them. All we want to do is make them better.

Really the design, since the liability protection was implemented in 88, they haven’t really changed much on the designed. Frankly, I mean, the took the mercury out in 02, replaced it with aluminum.

I guess that was better, You know, now they get, you know a couple of milligrams of aluminum instead of a few milligrams mercury. You either is really good.

But yeah, I mean, so I wish they could just make them cleaner. Clean up some of the adjuvants, the other things. Because like I said, love the idea of preventing some these things without having to take the risk of getting the kids sick.

The way it works now, United States has, if not the most, vaccine schedule, one of the most aggressive vaccine schedules in the world. And I think in this last six to eight months, it really uncovered that the so-called safety studies they’ve done on them, nobody looked at combinations.

They looked, you know, single ones, they never compared them to placebo groups. they compared one vaccine to another vaccine, which… Yeah, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I story of how the miracle of cowpox and smallpox.

And so I think deeply rooted in the psyche is that, oh my God, if it wasn’t for the tetanus shot, we’d all have lockjaw, right? So it just began this snowball effect that we’ve never met a vaccine we didn’t like.

So the whole premise of How Vaccines Work. was never really questioned, you know, like some of the toxic adjuvants that are meant to stimulate, obviously they took out the thiamarasol, that’s great.

But, it wasn’t really treated as, they were all a blessing. Everyone was welcome, in terms of, the HPV1 Gardasil that was forced on boys and girls. We don’t know what the long-term public health effects of that.

All the old people get the varicella zoster. But the thing that’s most concerning to me from an autism, potential autism standpoint, is how packed the schedule is for these kids under two.

Like, so maybe there is time to consider ruling back some of them or splitting up the M and the R. I mean, people don’ realize, because it’s not talked about, You know, even in the old days of polio vaccine, some people got polial from it.

They just called it something else, transverse myelitis. You, know it’s always kind of a fallacy and bargain, but I think people. Especially with this COVID going around, you know, I’ve tried to read what was available for the safety studies and it didn’t look good from the animal point of view.

But my friend asked me the other night, why did your son get vaccinated? You know it ended up maybe causing some low level of myocarditis. And the kids, they’re just blindly trusting.

I said to him, when he so proudly disobeyed me, or didn’ it take my advice, did you read this penultimate paragraph that says you might get myocariditis?

He’s like, ah, your just a conspiracy theorist. So I’m like okay. But you know, I don’t think it passed the thought experiment for me. And I had a pediatrician get really mad at me and I said, well, what is the mechanism by which your body will know that cells expressing the spike protein predictably.

are friendly versus not friendly. There is no thought experiment where that works. So it wouldn’t know. And so I think people, some people have had some sort of autoimmune like downstream consequences.

We’ll never know because people are so fixed in their religion on this. Yeah. Well, I know people that kind of like to worship at the altar of vaccines in terms of the disease reduction.

What I would say instead is, you know, worship the alter of your toilet because really it was running water that did the big reductions. You know, front water was the amazing public health innovation that really dropped the major numbers.

I’m not saying vaccines didn’t drop it more. They did additionally do it, but the big chunk of it was, was sanitation. My son and I went to Edinburgh and they would yell, garde low, which means watch out for the water and the residents, these tiny, small things would just dump their fill into the street.

And I was just thinking like, God, who would want to live in these conditions? But. It was gross. Let’s pivot a little bit to autism in general because you mentioned Nancy O’Hara, who’s an expert in PANS pandas.

And we did discuss that if it’s episodic behavior and otherwise neurotypical child, it could be strep antigen related, but tell us what They used to call it PDD, pervasive developmental delay, but now it’s an autism spectrum.

And I always tell people, everyone’s autistic. Everyone’s internally preoccupied. But there seems to be this disconnect between the body and the mind.

Can you express what that is in terms of your patients? Yeah, so, well, yeah, one thing that happened was they used to kind of have three distinct diagnoses, right?

They would have what they called, you know, autism spectrum disorder, then they had pervasive developmental delay, which was kind like a milder form. And then you had Asperger’s, we just considered the highest functioning form, but they have distinct categories and they different challenges, different skills, and different approaches, I would say.

There were certain things in common, they were really distinct in a lot of ways. You know, a few years back, they got rid of all that. They just lumped it all into autism spectrum.

That really obfuscated kind of what we were looking at because you’d see the numbers go up. Okay, boy, these high functioning kids, you know. Was this a kid who, was a little, had social anxiety and maybe couldn’t express his emotions versus a complete non-speaker who’s a teenager and still has to wear diapers, right?

In terms of the severity, So that was one issue that had happened. When we look at all of them, and Asperger’s might be a little different at that really high functioning end, but to some degree, there’s some degrees of apraxia that is involved.

And apaxia is where there is a disconnect from the mind or the brain and the body. So at its core, at the very least, profound autism, moderate autism which used to be just autism and PDD.

At that range, there’s some degree of apraxia at play. And from what I’ve seen, and I have seen hundreds and hundreds of patients over this, that really plays in some the reason why they’re having difficulty with speech and actually even our perception of their understanding.

It turns out, and I haven’t seen an exception yet, when we get these severe kids, non-speakers, who are almost universally diagnosed with intellectual disability, once we actually have them reliably communicating on a keyboard or a letter board, We actually see normal or even above average intelligence.

So it’s not that it was a cognitive issue. The issue was, was that they weren’t able to respond. If they said, you know, pass me the fork and the kid grabs a spoon and gives a.

He knew full well what a fork was. His body went for the spoon. And he didn’t have good control over his body. That translates to in their mouth, the most complex motor functioning that we do or motor planning that do by far is speech.

We’re the only animal on this planet that can do it. And we do all these distinct little motions. I mean, even to the point where if you grow up speaking a foreign language and you could learn English perfectly, grammatically and everything, but if immigrate after the age of 20, there will be some hints of an accent still, despite that you can be a much better English speaker than native speakers, by the rules, right?

So the motor planning can very subtle in those ways. So, praxia is a big one as far as the motor planning. And one of the big things I really push in my clinic, whether I’m talking to the parents of a two-year-old or a young autistic adult, a 23- year- old, you know, parents are still helping out, is really presuming competence.

That’s just such a foundational point because If you’re presuming that they’re incompetent, if you treating them like they are incompetant, they will internalize that.

And once they believe they aren’t competent, it becomes really difficult for them to learn motor skills. Yeah. Now that’s a great point. I know Jody, whose son I think is around 13, he allegedly can do like five digit times five-digit multiplication.

So she doesn’t feel there’s any intellectual problem. It’s just, again, that apraxia, the inability to vocalize. Which is a great point about access, well expressed.

The question then that I pose then is, okay, so we’ve got these kids that have these, you know, dysfunctional neuronal pathways, right? That are creating a crack in their brain and degrees of severity.

So, Okay, why? Why is that happening? Right? that’s been the $64,000 question for decades, with autism. So when we really break it down, we see at autism, there’s kind of disease processes that we over and over again in our kids.

And I’d say one of the big hallmarks is chronic inflammation. There’s inflammatory storm or disorder. In the case of a regressive autistic kid, developing normally, all the skills are normal, and then boom, 18 months, he loses the ability to talk, loses eye contact, doesn’t want to respond to his name.

What’s happening in those situations is usually there’s this inflammatory storm that hits the kid. Sometimes that’s triggered by vaccination, but that is only one of the triggers.

I actually have unvaccinated kids that have autism, including even severe autism. There are other triggers that are not the only trigger. But whatever, that trigger is there.

Normally, a kid would get some kind of inflammatory insult. They’d be a little under the weather for a few days. Their body would turn it off, rebalance itself.

Day four or five, they’d good to go and everything would be all right. With the autistic kid, it doesn’t. And what we’ve seen… It’s like melting the circuitry or causing problems in the hardwiring, right?

Well, it’s keeping that inflammation on, right? When that happens, once that information has been turned on and sort of stuck in that on position, you start getting mitochondrial dysfunction.

You know, mitochondria function and inflation are kind of inversely proportional. So when the longer you have this inflammation going, is start suppressing that.

And then it just starts a cascade of events such as once the mitochondrion function goes down, where you become energy inefficient. Well, brain development is a very energy hungry prospect.

You need energy for that, but not only that also for things like detoxification, fighting infections, particularly certain chronic infections like some difficult ones, certain viral infections or tick-borne infection like say Lyme or something like that.

So what we see in a lot of our kids is we do see a disproportionate amount of toxic burden, whether it be from old or pesticides or heavy metals. But we also see a disproportionate amount of chronic viral activation, or I shouldn’t say viral, it could be viral.

Chronic microbial activation. That’s a great point. And you know, I always, when I was at the conference, Elisa Song’s A4MP thing, as a lurker, outsider, was understanding what your functional medical bag is or armamentarium.

You could decrease inflammation through diet, like everyone preaches elimination of certain things. I had a patient tell me yesterday, hey, you got a bagel, that’s why you’ve got eczema.

I’m like, give me the glyphosate. She said, yeah. But eliminate toxins, doing elimination diets, either as an experiment or as therapy. Obviously, cognitive behavioral things, learning to relax, breathe, get on a good sleep schedule.

But nobody really talks about mitigating the disease. I guess the exosomes, in your opinion, are helping reduce that neuroinflammation. That’s great. But I saw one lady who was an expert in tick diseases because her son, and I’ll never forget the story, they went to Disneyland and he was eating like funnel cakes and sodas and whatever, popcorn.

And she believes in her heart that it was that toxic processed food that that’s the moment when the ticks started. Good news, bad news. She started learning how to train him to be an athlete and to do meditation and whatever, breathing.

And the performance level created like this institute for young people even without tic and movement disorders. So I think there’s a lot you could do with behavior, diet, some supplements, you know, that even spoke like genomically based supplements.

A lot of people have inefficiencies. I know that IntelliX DNA, they do it. There are other genomic panels. So you obviously from internal medicine to a functional medicine thing, what are your big four or five tools that you use?

Are those most of them are the other ones we should know? Therapeutically, diagnostically. What do you mean? Like therapeutically, like you got a kid with established severe ASD.

So where do you start? Yeah. Therapeutically like I said, I’m always evaluating their inflammation status, right? So if their information is present, big one is dietary change.

To determine not only are there foods that may be fueling the inflammation like gluten or dairy or something like that, but also the carb content of their diet.

It shocks me that majority of the kids that I see, they are on 50 to 75% of their calories come from carbs. It makes up a majority in their diet and some of them, it’s almost exclusively ultra processed foods.

So part of it also is getting that balanced. I don’t like putting kids on keto diets unless they have intractable seizures or something like that, but just balancing it.

Because the carbs are tasty, like I had a cake and caffeine. People like the sugar rush from the carbs, but I ascertain your point that more complex carbs and vegetables, protein, do you ever pivot people to a mostly meat diet?

Is that helpful? Yeah, I like, well, not mostly meat, but mostly it would be okay. But I’m a big, big egg guy. Love it from a nutritional standpoint. They’re, you know, almost a complete food and fruits and vegetables have the role.

And, and I don’t, like I said, don’ like putting kids on like a keto diet. I’d want them to eat fruits. It’s like well if you’re going to get your carbs, get them from fruits, some vegetables.

It’s your best source. They’re the most train dense source Yeah, I mean I just had a consult with a patient’s son and I Mean, you know right away. I’m like that you got vitamin b6 deficiency or thiamine You know because he had neuropathy as a 27 year old But all he does is play video games and eat pop tarts and drink Mountain Dew That is just like classic.

Like, yeah, we could speed up your recovery with exosomes. But already, thank God, he’s doing the ataxia and the weight bearing is better. So, I mean, this we’re used to seeing it in people who are, you know, chronic alcoholics, maybe, on the street.

Think of it as somebody who’s playing, video games in the basement is going to get a vitamin deficiency, but that’s real. Yeah. And it can be done without doing a preponderous meat.

I mean, I have a fair share of vegetarian patients, not vegan, but vegetarian. So, you know, it, can, be, done, without necessarily having to go ahead.

They need to be cognizant of the lack of, yeah, some of those B vitamins too. It’s not something they like to think about. Anyway, so let’s pivot to your experience with the exosome course.

You took it online and then you decided to try it on your patients. So what was that like in terms of taking the course? What aspects did you find helpful?

It opened my eyes to how it worked and it really gave me some insight to really the a lot of the similarities between stem cell therapy and exosomes. I think that was the thing that hit me the most in terms of their improved safety profile and similar outcomes.

The trick with exasomes is that paracrine action where it’s having its local effect. It’s really important to make sure you get it to the So you’re alluding to the fact that in the ASD literature, there is some modicum of success from stem cell therapy.

So, you are attempting to say, since the stem cells work via exosomes, we don’t really need the stems cells. Yeah, it’s tricky because the STEM cell literature is a little over all over the place in terms of like the type of cells they use.

You know, as it was kind of mixed, but overall it says. The thing that you alluded to in your presentation was that people do develop antibodies to the foreign HLA.

So it’s kind of like a tongue in cheek. We use the Chimera brand. I think that was probably a kind. tongue-in-cheek reference the fact that every time you take someone else’s stem cells, there’s a very small risk of becoming a chimera genetically.

Yeah, that’s true. That’s, true, yeah. And I mean, with the exosomes are cell-free and, you know, as far as, the sets of patients that I’ve done since last summer, I really not run into any significant issues.

That’s amazing. Now, I noticed in your presentation you were talking about the dart, the Dart Nebulizer, that’s very easy to use, but I presume that you usually do that in clinic.

Do you ever send patients home with it for them to do it themselves? I don’t because, mainly because of the whole defrosting. You don’ t want to mess it up and waste it.

Right. It’s, you know, it probably could be It could possibly be something that could be done with some planning, but I do it all in the clinic. I, do a big significant part of it too, is making sure that we prep the patient, making that the nasal passages are open.

They’re not too congested. And also with the, with. The autistic subset, you know, these are kids that are mostly in sympathetic overdrive, right? A lot of anxiety, even though it’s a really absolutely painless procedure, no needles, there’s no breaking of the skin.

Nobody likes stuff being shot in their nose. They’re nervous about it. So there is a little bit of making sure they’re not struggling or fighting it because we don’t want it, you know, we want to go all over their face or on the floor.

Yeah. And I noticed one of your pearls that you derived was to give Afrin the day before, but not eight hours before the procedure. Explain that. So in kids that have more of a chronic congestion or their stuff, I think another issue that’s important here is a lot of autistic kids, particularly the more severe autistic kid who have severe apraxia, they can’t blow their nose.

Coordination wise, yeah. Right. Now you can do like bulb suction, things like that. But, you know, just simply blowing your nose is a pretty effective intervention for clearing out mucus from your.

So we want to prep that because we don’t want put the exosomes into mucous. It’s just a waste. Just get caught in there. so we really want get that cleared out.

And in cases where it’s very difficult or the mucuss is kind of far up where we can’t flush it. Sometimes I’ll do it like saline flush or whatnot. We will use Afrin and, you know, Afrine, it’s got a lot of issues if you use it more than a few days, pretty stringent about, talking, using it for a day.

And then eight hours before I tell them not to use, I don’t know of any interactions with the exosomes in the Afri, and I’m really doing it out of the sense of precaution just to make sure that it is kind of clear.

You’re trying to decrease the congestion and the secretions. Is that the goal? Right. I want to increase the amount of contact and surface area of the nasal mucosa with the actual exosomes.

So yeah, I wanna get it up in that cribriform plate. You know, absorbed into the bloodstream, get into brain as much as possible. Sure. That’s a good tip.

Okay. What was the response, if any, from your presentation at the MAPS conference? Any feedback? Yeah, well, we had a good response. There was a lot of interest in it as sort of a relatively new thing.

A lot people had heard of exosomes and hadn’t heard the way this was being done, right? There were most, I’d say most of the practitioners were absolutely familiar with stem cells.

We’ve all been seeing patients coming back from Panama and India and Mexico, you know, getting them. So we’ve seen the results with it. And a of us, after seeing so many patients, Sure, sometimes you can get what I call fireworks.

You know, you get one treatment, all these amazing things happen, and that’s wonderful when that happens. But what realistically you see instead is slow, steady improvement with six massive treatments.

That’s what I saw with stem cell treatments. And that’s, what, I’m seeing with exosome treatments and I’ve seen slow, steady, incremental improvement.

The big difference between the exasomes and the stem cells, significantly lower price point, better safety profile. I can do treatments more frequently.

Every six weeks. Some of my older patients I do, my son actually, who’s my first patient, he gets it every six Nice. And yeah, he’s due actually on Friday.

What would he tell us in terms of like… I have a quote from him. So all my patients that are spellers, so these are my non-speaking, severely autistic patients.

They’re either typing or on a letter board. I was getting quotes from all of them because usually in autism, you’re getting the parents telling you what they’re observing, right?

Sure. It’s helpful, but you know, it’s, you don’t ask the, if you’re seeing the doctor, the doctors not talking to your spouse, they’re talking you, right?

They want the information from you. So same thing in autism. If you get it from the patient, so much more powerful. What we’ve seen from my son, as well as his friends and some of the other older kids that we treated, They’ve actually consistently all said the same.

They feel more connected with their body. And that is the core thing. that I’ve been chasing after in treating our kids for the last 12, 13 years, which is treating the apraxia, having a better brain-body connection.

Because the better they can make that connection, the more coordinated they’re going to be, they more compliant they are going be in following instructions, better chance they will have to speak.

Even if they were older, maybe they won’t have full open communication, but even if you can get them to say a few words, where they could do single word answers, yes-no answers.

Little things like that, which someone who has open communication may not appreciate that. But when you don’t have that that’s actually, you can actually get a lot of information relate that even though small incremental changes are going to be significantly life changing for these kids.

Right. That’s amazing. So they feel connected. Now, let me ask you, it’s kind of a weird question, but In the history of everyone that’s ever treated autistic patients, have there ever been cures?

Like, I wouldn’t think so. Like I think it’s part of the hard wiring. But significant improvement to a modicum of a normal lifestyle, yes. But it’s one of those things where expectation, you never really expect someone to just emerge as neurotypical, right?

That never happens. Well, I think it depends how you define it. So the way I define recovery, and I do have patients in my clinic. We have a certain percentage of patients where we get what we call recovery.

And now the ways I defined recovery is I’m not trying to change the anybody’s brain is organized. If someone’s neurodiverse and they see the world a different way, great.

I think that’s fantastic. Like we need people to see things differently, right? That’s what makes the word a great place. My big thing is, is that neuro-diversity or that brain reorganization, whatever you want to call it, Is it creating disability in that child?

And is a disability something that is going to stop them from being an independent adult? If I can eliminate the disability where they can get to a point where That’s recovery for me.

Now, I still have an autistic mindset or view, but so did Nikola Tesla. So is Elon Musk. These people are not disabled clearly. I don’t certainly see autism as a negative thing, But I think there’s levels of it where it disables the individual.

And again, we’ve heard from the kids, they’ll say things, my son will say, you know, and my body is my prison. They’ll see things. We have another female older autistic girl.

She has a different name for her body than for herself. She doesn’t even view her body as her, so she gives it a different name because it just does what it decides to do on its own.

So, you know, the kids are suffering. If we can get them beyond this level of disability, then I feel I’ve done my job. Yeah, no, I think that’s a great point.

High functioning to an independent adulthood, that is for all intents and purposes like a cure. Yeah. But let me ask you, you know, back when we were growing up, we didn’t have all this sophisticated knowledge.

You know? I just did a rage bait Facebook post. I said, yeah, spent a lot of time with young people in their twenties. And it strikes me that they’re all very conformist.

Like they all want to believe what they are, the politics and the opinions of their peer group. And they express their individuality and their weirdness with piercings and hair dye.

But I feel like when we were growing up, there was a definite independence and negative stigma. You didn’t want be a spaz or a retard or nerd or whatever.

So that was our spectrum. We were all weirdos pretending to be normal and carried that into adult life. I feel like the younger generations very much into like acceptance, neurodivergence, maybe they became up a term ableism, right?

Or differently able. But you know, at the end of the day, most people want to be able to hide and integrate and not be shown as different. And I think that it’s good news, bad news.

Younger people are very much more supportive and collaborative, you know? Our generation, or at least mine, Gen X, is very like, like you suck. Get over it, your reading is fast.

But all these things are much much inclusive and loving and accepting. I guess my point is, Is it true that autism spectrum diseases, and this is not like Tourette’s, it’s not cerebral palsy, which is from a childbirth injury, that this whole rubric of autism-spectrum, you quite rightly pointed out it collapsed from PD Asperger’s into just ASD.

It’s kind of lazy. Is really the incidence prevalence much higher than back in the 70s? Or were those kids just considered weirdos? I think the incidence is higher, but I, I.

Think it’s a little bit. I Think there’s things that make it hard to tease this out. Like I said, collapsing those three diagnoses into the one, because you’ve got that group that is sort of diagnosing off, you know, questionnaire online or something like that.

And, no, they’re writing these long, eloquent Facebook posts. They have no interference in their speech or their motor plan. Yeah, like. That, and I’m not denying that they may.

be neurodiverse or have a high-functioning form of autism? That’s what I’m saying, like, you know, I was talking to my sister. She’s ADHD as hell. I’ve never had a conversation with her where she wasn’t typing at the same time and doing three other things.

So, it’s like this tent is so large that everyone wants to self-diagnose as this or that, or now there’s attachment disorders. Like, there is such an identity gain from identifying with a disease state.

So, but I do stand at the toxicity of our diet environment, our social media use. It is giving a predilection towards higher expression at least. Well, there’s a term called pseudo-autism.

And it’s interesting because they found that kids that would spend, you know, 10, 11, 12 hours consecutively on a screen or a tablet for multiple dates in a row, which sounds like some marathon, but that’s not uncommon at all.

It’s lifestyle. Yeah. All right. They’ve actually found out that these kids actually have, they acquire symptoms that are really line up with autism. Now they call it pseudo autism because you take them off the screen for a few days, those things fall away.

Once you’re interacting and everything, but so that you can acquire some of these symptoms. But to go back to the question about, you know, the incidence, it hasn’t really changed or not.

The way I look at it is one third, about 30 to 35% of kids on the spectrum have profound non-speaking autism, to severe ones, right? That’s a big chunk.

So you got one in 30 kids has autism. So if we’re looking at a third of them have the severe, profound autism, it’s about, what is that, one out of 90, right?

That’s a big number. It’s big a number, but if you, we go back pre 1990s, that group at least has definitely increased. I think their worst, I don’t know if it was one and 10,000 back then, they were giving it different names, But it definitely has increased and frankly, you know, like I said, massive amounts of EMFs in the air that didn’t even exist in 90s.

You know, we have genetically modified foods with high pesticide residues and glyphosate. Yeah. We talked about that EMf with Joaquin Machado. He’s an expert.

I had a patient tell me her hand hurts. And I remember I an overpowered Microsoft phone that would hurt. So I think people, they’re very binary. They’re like, either it is safe or why would they let us use it or it’s not safe.

But I agree with you. I think the food has too much glyphosate and probably other things that you don’t want in there. So anyway, I do think that’s fascinating.

The instance I agreed is quite a bit higher. Hopefully we can roll that back with make America healthy again, whatever they’re calling it. But yeah, another look at the vaccine schedule might be good.

I mean, there is even this contravailing theory where it’s just like the childhood diseases are meant there to train your immune system. Where do you come off on that?

Like that there was actually one, two, three, four, fifths disease, all these things are part of priming your system? Well, I mean, in theory, yeah, it’s good to get through them all, right?

And you’ll have a better immune system. I think the problem with that is, is along the way, we’re going to lose a few kids, so that’s the part that makes it scary.

But the reality of it is most of the childhood diseases, most the kids get And I get it. I mean, people, parents want guarantees their kid’s going to be good or they want to stack the odds as much as possible.

So I understand wanting these things to happen where I can get a shot and they don’t get these. But I think the immune dysfunction that we’re seeing, and I finished med school in 99, right?

So, I’ve been practicing 26 years now. In that span, I mean, you know, i’m not fresh out of school, but, yeah, one of these guys have been around 50 years either.

Just in that time span. I’ve seen significant increases in immune dysfunction. What they taught me in school was MS is supposed to happen to people in their fifties.

Well, two years out of med school, I’ve got three patients that are in their early twenties with MS. I’m like, what’s going on here? I think that the rules have changed.

It’s very sad after COVID, like people dying suddenly, even LeBron James’ son having a heart attack, it’s all very normalized. And my brother was telling us yesterday that a surfing guy died at the beach and just like this sudden death thing, people just accept it as normal.

people in their 40s getting cancer. But I do think that if we dumb it down and we took it immune dysregulation, there is that sort of covariance of Lyme and mold and gut dysbiosis and immune derangement and ATP and mast cell activation and behavioral things.

So yeah, the immune system is the on-ramp to a lot of bad stuff, including accelerated aging, cancer, and death. So anytime we’re playing around too much with that, it’s a problem.

Well, that’s one of the things I like about the exosomes in terms of, the function that they perform, right? A big one is an anti-inflammatory function as far as reshifting the brain and autism, which is important.

But also that immunomodulatory, function which I think is, important because immunodulation, you know, of all the, things they do in my clinic, That one’s, it’s not easy.

You know? We don’t have a lot of tools where we can directly like, tweak the immune system. They’re all kind of wreck tools, we’re doing it. I mean, that’s why if I’m fighting a cold, I won’t take exosomes.

And the founder of the company, and I remember he got COVID in Tulum. I was like, are you going to take Exosome? He said, no, but I need some antibodies.

So it is a Faustian bargain. But you’re right. If you are just looking for autoimmune or downregulation of that inflammation, it can be pretty drastic and immediate.

Some people have immediate clear vision because whatever is going on, they’re excipital lobe with processing. They’re like wow, you can see so much clearer.

Yeah, I think that is a good point. It’s just the neuroinflammation is one of those contributory factors, which then will affect cognition and mood, right?

I mean, I guess what excites me about it is I feel like I’m scratching the surface or I just sort of on the edge of it. I think there’s a lot of room for optimization exosomes, at least within that sort a slice of pre-autism.

we can really make the treatment even better. So I’m really excited moving forward. You know, I am hoping after I did the talk at MAPS, there’s some other docs that kind of come on with it.

Just so we have more patients and we really can get this treatment. I think it’s a good treatment already. And I really think we make it even be better, really.

Yeah, it is a lot of costs, you know. Spacing of appointments. But I’ve had another practitioner who’s had great results and she rightly attributes it to her other adjunct therapies, diet, you know, supplements, but to be able to move the needle so drastically, in these severely affected kids is impressive.

And I’m glad that you’re taking the time to educate. So for those that don’t know Dr. Nika Goshen and I are going to partner at expanding the online provider training course.

It’s open to nurse practitioners, anybody with a license to practice, OD, DO, MD, and some natural pests too. So take the course, learn from Dr. Niko Goshen and let’s get things rolling for your patients.

See if it works. Yeah, sounds like a plan. All right. Thanks, Armin. All Right. So everybody, the course is at rechargebiomedical.com slash courses, and we’ll have three very important new lessons from Dr.

Nick Agosian. And that’s where you can enter to order the exosomes and be trained. Okay. so thanks again. Have a great day. Thank you. If today’s episode got you thinking, you’ll love my book, Exosomes, Songs of Healing.

It’s packed with cool analogies, full color illustrations, and all the science you need to understand how exosome are changing the game in aging and regenerative medicine.

You can grab it in paperback, ebook, or audiobook, whatever works for you. Now head over to www.rechargebiomedical.com to check it out. And don’t forget to like and subscribe so you never miss another episode.

See you next time.

Armin Nikugosha, MD

Functional Medicine & Exosomes: Transforming Autism Care