A Doctor’s Awakening to the Power of Peptides Through Her Son’s Recovery

Integrative Health Coach

Founder of the International Peptide Society
- Discover how peptides and bioregulators can dramatically accelerate healing in complex conditions like brain injury, autoimmune disease, and chronic inflammation by restoring cellular signaling and immune balance.
- Understand how real-world clinical cases—from traumatic brain injury to hair loss and heart failure—demonstrate the powerful regenerative potential of peptides beyond conventional medicine.
- Learn why peptides work as part of the body’s natural communication system, offering a safer, more targeted approach to healing compared to traditional pharmaceutical interventions.
Full Transcript
Introduction to Peptides and Dr. O'Neill 0:00
We can go from severe encephalitis using these peptides, where the person is completely unresponsive, young, 49, 50, 48 years old, completely on responsive because of a viral en cephalitis, within three to four months of using this peptide. normal, walking, talking, making dinner, not, I mean, completely back towards the same person that they were and not needing 30 more sessions of shockwave that never helped in the first place. This is Dr. Talks. Hey everybody, welcome you back to the peptides and bioregulators summit.
I have a real treat for you today. A super mom, a super doctor, super healer, just a pioneer in the place of peptide and bio regulators, even with Dr. Holtorf himself. I have the most beautiful, kind, and amazing woman on the planet. We have Dr. Kathleen O'Neill. Thank you so much, Dr O Neill, for joining me. And I just appreciate the time that you're going to take to just break down some probably nerdy and powerful stories that we can share together. I'm excited for our audience to encounter it.
Wow, thank you, Michael. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. I just have had so much, we have so many history with Dr. Holtorfer myself and have always enjoyed working with him, learning with and learning from him and just kind of bantering all of these things around and growing and expanding and educating as much as we can to help others heal. and their journeys were healing. Yes, let's go. And Dr. Neal, what was your first introduction into the peptide space? Like, how did peptides become a part of a healing tool that you use in your life or your practice?
From Conventional Medicine to Stem Cells and Peptides 1:44
I mean, the most amazing thing about the journey that I've had is that, I'm a conventionally trained Boston doctor from one of those Ivy League schools, which is incredibly mainstream. But I always had questions, and I had question because when I started out, I was an athlete and a coach at a high level, elite level. And I knew that there was more than just hormones and other things. So we never even used back in the day, in 90s, as a physician at some of these mainstream institutions. So fast forward in the early 2000s, I had colleagues here in Boston who were interested in this stem cell space.
So you enter the stem cells space on their boards, and then you expand the STEM cell's space to other people. And I ended up working with the group every week, meeting on a group call global with STEMCELL doctors. Fortunately, had met those STEMcell doctors because you never know what's going to unroll, right? Later, wind, you know, fast forward, I guess, probably about six or seven years later, my son's in college out in California. I'm still in Boston. And I've been a Boston gal my whole life, born and raised, could be Ben Affleck's sister.
Right? His older sister, or Matt Damon. At any rate. So my son's out in college and I'm still working with this group in Southern California on stem cells, et cetera, but it was a global group and we were just bantering cases and learning about cases weekly for a long time. They were in Irvine. And ultimately my sun ends up on a college campus in Northern California watching a football game from his school, his college. And there's a random act of violence and he ends up being beaten in the head with a crowbar.
And then push comes to shove. He ends being robbed and left for dead and ends in Oakland, California in a hospital with no identification or anything. So the mother of necessity, I was actually in Italy at the time with his sisters. And I get that call that he was found in this hospital and he's unconscious and his head by brain bleeds and what's going to happen. So immediately I start to call. Luckily I have friends. I mean, you never know who your friends are and how they're going be there to help you later.
Right. I mean, clearly, it's 11, 12 years later, so I can talk about this still, but at any rate, you know, prepared that he would go down to Southern California when able, and we would do things. And in the conversation with this group, that was when I learned of peptides. So this was just 2013, 2014. Let's do peptides for your son. We may do other things, whether it's stem cells or other thing, but let's just really think about how to heal the brain. Cerebral lice and thymus and beta, all of these different peptide.
And I had maybe heard of them in the conversations, But they didn't ring a bell because I didn' have access to them. really. These were more, you know, kind of not easily accessed at that moment in time. So subsequently, fast forward, my son and I end up taking him AMA out of the hospital and driving him to Southern California where he gets treated. and then comes home for treatment to Boston and takes some time off from school at USC and he ends up being treated at home, for a long time. It took a year to get better with all of the different treatments and continual peptide therapies, some other therapies as well, growth factors, you name it, and ultimately is fully healed from that.
But that was my intro into peptides. with his case and other people kind of reaching out to me, have you heard of peptides, which there was a bingo moment when I treated my son and I saw their healing and learned more about them and understood their benefits versus and their safety profile, they have a complete safety profiles, the ones that I used for my sons. So learning the safety digging into the research, speaking to the people who founded these particular peptides, et cetera,
Personal Catalyst: Son's Brain Injury and Recovery 5:37
and going down those rabbit holes, deep diving into those rabbits holes. I then learned and thought that, bingo, to my days as an athlete and realizing that it wasn't hormones that athletes were taking from Russia, from East Germany. It was, you know, Cold War then and all through the early 80s, 80 through 84, people were, I mean, the People from the Russian Bloc countries really did not look human and they want everything. And we lost and I just knew that it wasn't hormones, even at that moment in the 80s, because we were all testing our urine in same bathrooms and nothing was happening.
And I know hormones having been a physiologist were easy to discover. Peptides were not though, respectively you learn that. So it's interesting. So fast forward teaching, started to teach on the case studies that I had of patients with peptides, and I used more and more. Another young boy I use right around the time of my son who had like 10 years old. I knew his parents and he had lost all of his hair, literally bald. Compared to you, bald in a day. On a trip over Christmas holiday and the parents called and said, you know, our son lost his here, what do you think is the issue?
We think it's Lyme. They were in Europe. I'm like, it is not Lyne in December, January, I can tell you that much. But if you think, okay, go and get it treated for Lymes. So he subsequently went to Children's Hospital and they treated him for five or six months. He didn't get better. This boy came to my office, my clinic in Boston, had a private clinic for over 17 years. And we treated them with peptides and other things and he got a whole head of hair like mine. Literally from May until September by the time school started.
So it was an immune situation. These are the cases that I've been seeing like all the times, pre-COVID, post-Covid, of how do we use peptides and what we can do with them. And with over 12 years of experience with using them in patients every week, I want to say every day, maybe I'm exaggerating when I say that, embellishing a little bit, but literally multiple patients a week for long periods of time and knowing the safety profiles. I met a minuscule dose. It's basically microdosing of these peptides, whether it's thymus and alpha, thimus, and beta cerebral lysin, a GLP1.
glutathione is a peptide or any of the other more advanced peptides, MOTC, SS31, you name it. You know, these peptids are really remarkable in their healing capability. And that has been exacerbated since COVID because all of peptidies used to heal the post-vaccine, the long COVID sequelae, I mean I have seen miraculous, miraculous changes. Man, what a journey. You're a master. I feel like when I got to talk to Dr. Holzer, my brain just like exploded with like, oh my gosh. He's a dynamic brain to say the least, but I really appreciate that full spectrum story and what powerful way to not only be like a practitioner to patients, to be a practitioners mom.
I saw mostly women and children in the clinic I was working in and mom was at the center of healing for the family. And so it's really, really powerful. I just like that story that, man, you got to use something that now you're using on all your patients that who brought your son's wife back,
Early Patient Success Stories with Hair Loss and Inflammation 9:08
and I had a similar interest in peptides from an old colleague of mine who's a pharmacist. Her name is Lisa Brock. I was working in a clinic. We had supplements, we had all types of stuff, detoxing, EDTA, chelate, all these different tools at hand. And I started to become fallibly challenged at an early age. My dad has the widow's feet. The classic. call it, and my brother, older brother was bald by age 19. I mean, we just, it hit us pretty hard at that introgenic, you know, alopecia. And so I was just like, I'm going to do anything to save my hair and I'll reach out to my friend Lisa.
She said, well, what stopped her daughter's hair from falling out at 12 from being a Lyme patient and having high systemic inflammation was this company, Integrative Peptides BPC157. And that was five years ago. And so when I brought it into the clinic, I bought in all of their products. I noticed not only for myself, it kept my follicles strong into my 30s, 35 now, but it helped to offset so much of my patient's systemic inflammation load that is causing things like hair loss with all these underlying co-infections and things that.
It's just powerful that we have access to them on the injectable or the oral side and we can shift patients' conditions fairly quickly with a tool like a peptide or a peptide bioregulator that's much faster in the therapeutics space than just a supplement program. That's amazing. I mean, to get the patient to understand and to trust and develop the rapport with the patients whenever there's a problem that, I means, you lose your hair as a young person, a 12-year-old, 10- year- old, it's devastating, right?
This young boy began to wet his bed and it was very difficult socially. Of course, who doesn't want to lose their hair? So one of the things that's funny about his story is, again, he was one the early on patients that I used it for. And I remember going, so at that time, that was what I knew. So we used TB4 predominantly. I became friends with these gentlemen who have been studying thymic peptides, the 19thies. So I went to them just to kind of meet them, and they were talking amongst a group with them.
The doctors and their proteges who are younger, they're now almost 90, And their protegees are much younger. And I said, Hey, do you guys realize what you can do with CB4? And, I showed them the pictures. of the patient who had no hair and grew his hair back. And they were just like, you're using this for that? Because they're research people, MD, M.D., PhDs, and others. I'm like why you don't? And then they are like well that's one of benefits of it, but it has many other reasons for being used.
So that was just opening into creating a whole new group of friends and colleagues, professional colleagues that I could get on the path to realize I can use some of these same peptides. for heart failure, which I have done and seen the heart go from heart-failure of 20% back to normal over the course of time. That's pretty remarkable. We can go for severe encephalitis using these peptides where the person is completely unresponsive, young, 49, 50, 48 years old, completely on responsive because of a viral encephalitis, a year and a half to two years unresponsive shockwave therapy, et cetera.
Within three to four months of using these peptides, normal, walking, talking, making dinner. I mean, completely back towards the same person that they were and not needing 30 more sessions of shock wave that never helped in the first place. That is unbelievable. Yeah, that's, man, live. Blowing my mind over here. Well, I'm curious, Dr. O'Neill, like, what in this space, we could probably just do an immune system segment. We could, probably, talk for four hours straight, but what were some of your choice peptides that you were using when these cases came in with,
Immune Modulation, Autoimmunity, and Peptide Choices 13:12
you know, autoimmunity and so much dysregulation and immune-system function? Did you grab it like I know you said TB4, did you gravitate towards, a certain subset of them that really served your patient base well? Yeah, and I think with autoimmunity, there's definitely an immune challenge. So you need to use the immune modulators, right? If you're talking Lyme, you might use one, but if you are talking general and you trying to boost the number and the efficacy, the work, so the army guys and bullets they have to do the job and immune system to attack an invader and then to repair from the invaders, your going to talk the thymic peptides.
whether it's TA1, thymosophil-1 thimus and beta-4, and those can, especially beta 4 can be available orally as well as a frag, right? Or it can available injectably. And those have been studied for 75 years, I mean, or 65 years. Again, maybe I'm exaggerating, but it, it a lot. VPC has been study for a lotta years 35 years 30 years something enormous. Cerebral lysine has be studied enormous number of years decades. Any of these immune modulators, thymus and alpha, thymos and beta, BPC, cerebral lysin, and even in the oral space, the cerebral prep, PEP, or any of this, I mean, all of the depending upon your budget or the problem, do you believe they can be absorbed orally?
And even now, you know, a peptide developed by Dr. Fasano and his team, he's a Mass General, lorazotide for a heal and seal the barrier of the gut or the brain. All of those things, I mean, these have the most amazing effectiveness with the least downside imaginable. I used to tell my patients, there's no side effects, only side benefits. You're only going to get better and better. The pleiotropic nature of a peptide means that it's positively going influence cellular biology in so many amazing ways that patients come in for, let's say they wanted to do the same hair protocol I was on, but then their shoulder wasn't in pain and their knee joint came back to me.
Always from BPC and TB4 and all of the tissue regenerative Abilities and I can't believe right now there's certain influencers a lot of people actually that are anti peptide saying that they're not natural it's really driving me crazy that our bodies are creating seven thousand peptides a day in a cascade of beautiful symphony if you didn't have things like glutathione or things. Insulin are things that aren't peptid in nature. that informs cell biology to function correctly, we would die. When we're just taking amino acid structures and mimicking the power of what we found in nature through our own bodies, I can't see something as more natural as that to the forefront of how we treat our cellular biology because it's literally how our bodies treat themselves.
I just can't believe that there's like an anti-peptide movement out there. And I don't know if it's because bodybuilders and, you know, all these people are just taking them to hack muscular biology, but I'm not necessarily interested in that. I am interested the fact that we're erasing chronic illness, autoimmunity and affecting patients' lives. in a very quick and efficient way. And so I just feel like that's the thing that I feel they would try and come against us with is because we're coming against a system that keeps us sick for a long time.
You're giving testimonies that people get better in two months or three months. I'm talking miraculous change. This is not even debatable in terms of the change. But I think there's a lot of noise. And you have to ask the question, Michael, about the noise, who is making the noises, and what are the reasons that someone might make a noise? It could be that they don't have the knowledge and they're not willing to learn. They want to be in a box. it could be that they have, you know, some emotional interest in it.
Like, no, it couldn't be easy because I remember I was diagnosed with an autoimmune condition that uses a peptide, type 1 diabetes, insulin is a protein peptides, when I in my 40s. And I remembered my first lecture that I went to where I learned and heard that if you just did A, B, or C, and this I was pretty conventional mainstream at the time, that you might have mitigated diabetes. Well, I thought I had mitigating it for a long time because I health-oriented. So, if there was one thing I would never get, it would be diabetes, and then I get it.
And then, I hear somebody who's now deceased who I respect enormously and wish you were still here talking about, you know, some of the precursors and what are the susceptibilities and vulnerabilities you could have, that there may be some viral associations, and there maybe some vitamin D deficiency associations. immune modulator deficiencies, which allows you, if you have deficities in your immune system, your T-cell system or your regulatory system you're going to be more likely to get an autoimmune condition.
So I remember how that made me feel. because I didn't know anything. The difference with me and another person is that when I felt that way and I had a lot of resistance to what I heard because, I thought, are you saying I caused this? Are you say I might not have known something and harmed somebody or harmed myself? Then what would I do in those situations where I have a big response, where it's like, oh no, what did I miss or what do I not know as a clinician?
Why Peptides Matter: Safety, Natural Biology, and Noise 18:38
Because we want to know a lots, we wanna help. That makes me dive deeper. My response is to say, what do I not know? What can I read? what can i know what? Can I learn? And as I dove deeper with that responsive talk to the hand to this clinician, I learned, wow, there was truth to these. Those were just papers I hadn't seen, hadn t read. So there's a lot of noise. There's lot information that keeps us in a lane. If we can expand our view, And we can take these glasses off and put on new glasses.
It's kind of like I say, when you go to the eye doctor, they say is this better or is it better? Is this is better, or this? You could change your view and you can see more clearly when open up and expand what you're willing to learn. or no. You can always make a decision that it doesn't feel right for you. But the noise has to be noise that's spoken from a place of, do you know about this or do not? If you don't know, don' t say it's bad. Think it is the be all and end all. I really don t think anything is that way.
Because think about how much, how fast medicine is changing today. So AI, AI living intelligence, all of these things are changing medicine today, What we have to think of AI as is, what is the actionable information that we can use to do something that's safe, therapeutically effective, and somehow sustainable? Safe means without harm. And you mentioned a couple things. Three things you've mentioned. One is pleiotropic. What does pleiotropic mean? It means that there are many functions that one thing in our body will do.
Well, if we have something that's intended to do many function, it may need, like a peptide, that we may have to supply a little more of it. So, there's a study on heart failure. where one of the docs, who previously was in the States but is now in Hungary, presented long-term research, more than a decade's research on using thymic peptides for heart failure and demonstrating that there was tremendous benefit because there were thymic peptide available at the source but they couldn't get where they needed to go.
So giving them exogenously through an injection boosted the response. I mean, like, that's your point, right? Number two, you said, was the cellular healing, molecular cellular, healing. And what I teach a lot on is signaling mechanisms. How does signaling mechanism work? And having had type 1 diabetes and taking insulin for a quarter of a century has taught me more about signaling and anything I ever thought I could learn in a medical school textbook about how peptides signal, So I can appreciate from the experience that I've had, lived experience, yours, mine, and others, is valuable.
It's noise that needs to be upgraded. We need to upgrade the noise of what the experiences, the lived experiences of individuals. who experience the magnitude of the benefit of my patients and like you and me and my son. Because if we don't, then it's going to be 20 years of this head-to-head research of, this versus that. And then, it is another 17 years before it gets to the doctor's office. We don�t have that kind of time for something that they don´t. Yeah, we're in the future now, and we are literally paving it with every choice we take to further the peptide research, which there's no greater research than the years you put in.
The years Dr. Holtorf put into it, the testimonies of our own bodies. You know, your son, Dr Haltorf, me, I mean, it's incredible. And now with peptides bioregulators, you have something for cellular signaling, something to turn on RNA, DNA, transcription factors for healing themselves, glandular restoration, there is literally whole symphony of things that you can pull from that are so adhered to our biological state. I feel so grateful and thankful to have found something that has such clinical relevance in our community and can really shift how we treat anyone.
It's just been such a blessing in my journey to be able to around the pioneers of the industry, like you are Dr. O'Neill and with, you know, Dr Holtorf and just the ones who were trying on themselves or, making sure that it worked for them before they gave it to their patients. Dr, Haltorf getting his cardiology back after his Lyme infection. And I mean, there's just so many stories of it restoring the body back to homeostasis. and I believe all of those Trump, the white noise. of the systemic inflammation disruptors to the truth of what actually healed our bodies.
I feel like it's a good time to turn down the programming that we're told, you know, from media and culture and things. tap into something if you've never tried peptides.
Longevity Symposium, Case Books, and Practice Information 23:38
If you just got a bottle of BPC 157 or start putting some in your arm, you're going to notice a lot of benefits. It's undeniable, the pleiotrophisms and the bioregulatory effects and how amazing you can feel. And so take this conversation. Listeners, if haven't even took a step into it, let this be an invitation for you to be able to utilize it. peptides and bioregulators for you to bring healing to your own body. And so just thank you, Dr. O'Neill, because I feel like you're an eloquent speaker in the way that you are kind of putting the puzzle together for a patient's healing journey.
I'm curious, are you working on anything? Do you have anything that want to provide our audience for, they can reach out to you or learn more about you and the research that your doing with your patient base? Yeah, there's a lot I'm doing which is kind of fun. One last thing about your point, which was brilliant about the symphony, the fact of playotropism and the multiple mechanisms that these work by creates a symphony which our body is intended to do. And the last point is, anyone that would be opposed to this, There's so much money spent on biologics and all the money today spent in pharmaceutical is around peptide-like small molecules or peptides small molecule.
The fact that the money is put into that tells you the value and the impact that peptides will make. It doesn't have to cost $100,000 a year to get a biologic. I don't know, $1, 000 a years to have the biologics of a peptide orally or injectably for a healing program that you need. I'm working on several things. One, I have a really big longevity symposium with global speakers coming to Boston for consumers. It's a consumer event. And I am so proud of this event because I had colleagues and friends like Dr.
Holtorf in the field that I've been working with for 10 to 15 years that have agreed to come that. I believe in and I trust as educators. and people with science background that will speak to the consumers here in my hometown, which I love so well, and educate them on what does it take to be a longevity patient, Which includes peptides. So it's the basics and the foundation of the gut health, the brain health etc. And then the secondary part of conference in the afternoon is all on peptide and value of peptid.
So that's one thing I do going on. And then I have several, I had three case report books with a series of eight case reports that I'll be publishing. I like the number eight because it means infinity and I believe these are infinitely possible and thus I wear my Legos to put together. My necklace is the way I want and peptides the I way want for healing with the patient. But yeah, so I books that are coming out and also have the longevity symposium among other projects that i'm working on It's been such a pleasure, Michael, to just do this with you and with Dr.
Holtoroff. He is just such renegade in this field and I have so much respect for him and all of the concern. And the first thing that we all think of is do no harm and do the best you can with any tool that you have to offer safe, effective, sustainable solutions for people who are suffering to help them in their healing. So I'm located in Boston and the name of my practice is Treat Wellness. And I named it that 17 years ago as Treat for Wellness, I want people to be well. I think of myself as a longevity doctor trying to improve the quality of years lived.
For whatever time we live, it must be quality. And my patients are longevity patients. So we're in Boston at Treat Wellness, www.treatwellness.boston. If you have any questions, if you're interested in education or anything else that we can do for you, please feel free to reach out at any point in time. Thank you so much and have a wonderful day. And please, I implore all of you to become longevity patients and to find your own longevity doctor so that you can be the best version of yourself for all the time that Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks.
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