Celebrity Doctor Reveals How to Reverse Aging | Dr. Darshan Shah | Ep. 57

Introduction and Dr. Shahu2019s Background 0:00

I no longer charge my cell phone at my bedside. I don't use it as my clock. It gives me 10 to 15 minutes before bed where I get exposed to my phone and 10-15 minutes in the morning. That's been a game changer for me. How much are you utilizing AI when it comes to your practice? It's woven into everything we do now. AI is going to revolutionize health. Today we have Dr. Darshan Shah, a renowned surgeon, health innovator, and the founder and CEO of Next Health. He's also the host of the Extend podcast, an international speaker and author dedicated to transforming lives through health and holistic care.

Big fan of mitochondria. Yeah, that's what I'm asking you. What is it that you're doing with the mitochondrion? Here's how you break it down for my patient. When it comes to bioquantum and like frequency medicine, what are your thoughts? I am a big believer in plants have a very significant role in medicine. And if you look at a lot of the pharmaceuticals, they're derived from plants. 60% of people over the age of 50 have high blood pressure. They need to get that treated and really tightly managed.

Who is one celebrity that is out there that want to see take control of their health? Welcome to another episode of a Healthy Point of View podcast. Today we have a guest. As you guys know, we interview experts from all over the world in health, beauty, wellness. And today we had one of the top doctors in the longevity space. This guy, he became a doctor from a very young age. He's like the real life Doogie Howser. He's doing all kinds of different type of forward thinking treatments. He is working with some of the top people, he is considered a celebrity doctor, and today we get the opportunity to interview him.

And you guys probably see him all the time interviewing other people. But today's my turn to interviewing him, so today, we have Dr. Darshan Shah from California. Doc, how are you? I'm doing great, I am so happy to be here, man. Thank you for having me. It's amazing, man. I see you all over social media, interviewing, moving around, all the top people in the biohacking longevity space. Man, I want to just start digging deep into what even brought this passion to you because you initially started off or most of your career initially was as a general surgeon.

Right, right. So you're talking about being more in that traditional medicine world, where now you have a strong focus on preventing people from actually going on that operating table. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. 21 years old. Let's start from there, man. 21 years old as a doctor, like I'm thinking about when I was 21, there was nothing at all of me thinking of about me being a doc or anything of that caliber, right? I kind of was thinking more, actually I did start at the fire department at age 20, so I kinda was doing emergency medicine, but a Doctor, man, at 21. So let's talk about that.

You must have been like the top of your class or something. You know I think when I went through grade school and high school, because that's where it all started, I skipped a couple of grades there. Skipped a year of high schools, skipped year grade schools. And that put me a few years ahead and then I when to the special program in Kansas City, Missouri that instead of eight years, like four years of college, four year medical school they compress it down to six years. That's how they do it in like England.

They model that for that system. There's like five schools in the country that did that back then. And I was able to join that program, which, you know, look, it was a combination of hard work, being dedicated to learning and also a lot of luck. So I think it just all kind of came together for me. I wasn't trying to graduate at 21. It just kind like, one thing happened after the other. And then all of a sudden here I am in medical school and I'm 16 years old and doing surgery when I 21 as a surgery resident.

That's amazing, man. Friends and family, what would they say when it's like, Man, you know, like my little cousin, only 21 years old, he's operating on people. What would say? So, my family I come from a long line of doctors, actually. I was going to ask. Yeah. And so my Family, many of them are doctors. Um, I think they're all a little bit maybe envious I got done with a bit earlier, but you what it is in the long term? The benefit of this has been that I've had multiple decades in medicine already.

I'm 52 years old, I have had three decades of medicine. So I had the ability to change my career trajectory in Medicine for three times now, you know, basically 10 years and three different. aspects of medicine that I was practicing, and I've seen it all, I have seen all. And you say, what brings upon this passion for what I'm doing now? I just feel like this is how I always wanted to practice medicine. Is to focus on preventing disease, reversing chronic disease and truly getting people healthy.

I agree. So all three, well what are the three? So my first decade in medicine after the age of 21 was spent doing general surgery and trauma surgery. So that's, you know, I saw everything like I was operating in the chest cavity and the abdominal cavity in everywhere, and trauma, as you know, in your career, you saw a lot of trauma. People are messed up after car accidents, so you have to really know the human body well, not just from an anatomical standpoint, but also a physiological standpoint.

Because when you're a trauma surgeon, once you are done with surgery, it doesn't end there. You take that patient in the ICU and you try to keep them alive, right? And so there's a lotta medicines you need to know how to run a ventilator, et cetera. So I was the first 10 years. After 10 of that, you know, and this probably happened to you as well. And you get tired, right?

From Surgery to Preventive Medicine 6:00

Like a lot of this stuff happens at nighttime. It's a huge adrenaline rush. You get burned out very quickly. I got burned down. He said it exactly. So then I went to the Mayo clinic to study reconstructive surgery. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's where people have cancer and there's cancer doctors that remove the cancer. They leave big places in the body with no skin or covering. And so I would come in as a plastic and reconstructive surgeon and reconstruct those defects. That's much more finessed surgery and super technical.

So I spent 10 years doing that, and then after doing plastics and restructuring for 10 year, I found myself, because of a high stress life tile, not sleeping, just working really, really hard all the time as the surgeon, And then I would spend another 12 hours trying to run the business. And so, you know, I was working all the time. I found myself in a state of very poor health. Because I'm a Western medicine trained doctor, the only thing I knew how to do was to diagnose the disease and then do a pill or surgery to fix that disease.

But I took a handful, like 10 different prescription medications. And I saw the trajectory of my health going in the wrong direction. I was like, I'm just getting put on more and more medication and I am feeling worse and not getting any healthier. And as we all know, when you have multiple diseases like diabetes, high blood pressure, autoimmune disease, all of it, the chance of me dying in early death was pretty high. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know, thinking about your career, man, go back to the whole trauma stuff.

I got a lot of respect for guys that did what you did. And I would always remember, man, I'd bring in those traumatic patients and man you guys had all the tools ready to go. You know, when that trauma surgeon, you know you bring that person with a gunshot wound to the chest and they got to figure out well what organs did it hit? It wasn't, oh let's take them in to get an x-ray. It was let crack that chest open. They bring the big bolt cutters and cut the ribs and all of a sudden you see the doctor just start grabbing the organs and looking what got hit.

You know, and I was always amazed by that, you know. By the time that we would get to the hospital, the whole team was ready there, ready to go. We'd put that patient on the table, give the turnover report to that doc. And it's just amazing, man. So much respect for that. Yeah. Thank you. The plastic surgery side, so obviously you had a passion for like aesthetic medicine. Is that something that you guys offer as well, too, in your clinic? Yeah, yeah, we do offer aesthetic medicine. So, you know, I started off doing a lot of reconstructive surgery.

I was doing like jaw fractures and breast cancer reconstruction. But then what happens is just being in the field of plastic and reconstrative surgery, You start experimenting with Botox and fillers. All of this had just come out towards the end of that decade that Iwas practicing. And so I, yes, did do some aesthetics as well. We do incorporate aesthetics into our clinics aswell. Nice, nice. Which, you know, right now in the world of aesthetics, when we start talking about a lot of the other things that you guys do at Next Health, and we also do it at Liquivita, one of big things, I had Dr.

Shino Bay on the podcast. Oh, yes, very well. And his big thing now is functional aesthetic medicine where now you're taking a deep dive to figure out why this person's having these issues with their skin, why is the elasticity of the skin not as good, collagen production, and why isn't it not properly happening? So he's doing comprehensive blood work on his patients and then his focus is actually nutrients, different vitamins, minerals, amino acids. So I love seeing this big shift even on the aesthetic medicines side.

Yeah, we were doing that at our clinic as well years ago because we saw that if you were to do any aesthetic procedures on people that were nutrient deficient, had metabolic disease, have their hormones off, the patients would actually not get better from the treatments you were doing, and then they would blame you. They'd be like, your treatment was ineffective. But when you look under the hood of their health, their hemoglobin A1c is through the roof, they're hormones are in the toilet, that is a major factor to play in success or the non-success of your aesthetic treatments.

So it should be done first. Anyone listening out there that's gonna go do Botox or a tummy tuck or facelift, make sure that you are checking comprehensive blood work. You've got your health optimized before. I wrote a book on this, actually. Oh, really? Yeah, it's called Making the Cut. It was the number one seller on Amazon in plastic surgery for many years. And it talks about all of this because when I discovered that key factor, I was like, no one's doing this. I wrote a book about it. Yeah. Now that that I feel like it's going to be a bigger push.

And I'm already seeing it, even with the the biggest medical spa show, which is the AM spa in Las Vegas. We had the CEO founder on the podcast as well, too. In one of the things they've reached out to the association. to get more support with the IV nutrients therapy because a lot of med spas are implementing these type of procedures. So I think you're gonna start seeing a lotta the people in the aesthetics field get into the wellness side because they see what the benefits are from there. You know, we live this world of everything so siloed, right?

You have your aesthetics, and then you have you're primary care doctor, then maybe you'll have a functional doctor. And the regenerative medicine over here. It's all part of the same. Human physiology and biology, right? And so that's what I love about what you guys are doing to that You've put everything under one roof because it does all come together and if you address all of these different aspects of your health and Biology physiology at the same time all if it gets better together, but if leave one out You struggle with the other ones, right?

Right. So on that topic, Dr. Shah, is when you look at the biohacking in the wellness space, there's just tons of different modalities, all these different supplements. Everybody has the best next thing. But one of the things that I've noticed is a lot of people supplement just to supplement. I have noticed that you are big into data. So I want to take a deeper dive and hear your perspective on how important data is when it comes to your health. I mean, data should be the most important thing. So the way I look at data, I put it into two buckets.

One is data around studies and what works and doesn't work and how good a study is. And so, you know, we have this hierarchy of studies where you have case reports and then you case report. To me, that's equivalent to like a biohacker on Instagram screaming, Everyone needs to eat this food, you know, it's just like a one person report It means nothing but it goes all the way up to randomized controlled trials and the meta analysis, right? And so until a particular treatment modality has multiple randomized control trials I'm hesitant to fully believe that it works on everybody.

Okay, and The other thing about data that you have to realize is whenever you get reports from a study It's on a bell-shaped curve and what that means is they're telling you what's happening with the average of most people What affected most? People but then if you look at a Bell-shape curve on the outsides of that bell shape You have what it's called one or two standard deviations away where that same treatment modality caused harm or caused incredibly out of size benefits for certain individuals.

So for each individual person, you need to know what part of the bell-shaped curve that you're on. And that's what I call N of one data. There's data that is specific to you and personalized to, and we have to apply the big research to what's actually working to. That's how everyone needs to look at all of these studies and what people are telling you. Yes, there's people that they do really well in the carnivore diet, and then there are people who do well on the vegan diet. But that's because everyone's an N of one, you have to see what works for your particular biology.

So when it comes to your biology, what type of tests are you running on these patients to get that data from their particular body? Yeah. So we do multiple different forms of testing. I put them into six different buckets. One bucket is your blood work, of course. We're measuring 1,500 different biomarkers in our patients. Then we're looking at their genetics. Okay. personalized monitoring devices, things like, I like wearing the aura ring. Some people have the whoop band. Those are all points of data that we can use things, like HRV and morning heart rate, that help us determine what's going on with your biology.

Data-Driven Longevity and Health Testing 15:00

Then we look at their body composition. So skeletal muscle mass, body fat, visceral fat. We're looking at that using special scales and special measuring devices. we're Looking at continuous glucose monitor data as well, which is extremely important. Metabolic health is poor in 90% of Americans and the continuous Glucose monitor can help us fix that problem. And then finally, we're just looking at scans as well. So we are doing full body MRIs on our patients too. And so we tie all of these different data points together to have a digital twin pretty much of an individual.

Then we can say, okay, let's do this particular intervention. Maybe it's a supplement. Let's see what it does to all these data point. That's how we need to be running our health. So you're trending the data, right? You're getting the baseline to start off, and then you are trending it as they get on these different programs. Exactly. And that's kind of like what we do too. I'm actually in the process of writing a book called Your Wellness Data. There you go. for people to take control of their health, they really need to actually understand their own personal wellness data.

And same thing, I wear my oar ring. I primarily wear the oaring, it's like I want my sleep data, and I wanna know how I'm sleeping, if I gotta prepare better before I go to sleep, eat at a further time out versus too close because my heart rate's too up. But that personal data, I feel like that's something that missing with a lot of these companies that have all these different supplements and whatnot. And I think that they could actually get further with their different customized supplements if they had these type of data points that you're talking about.

So with these data point, that full body MRI, you guys have this technology or you are working with someone? We work at Pranova. I know you interviewed Andrew as well, right? Yeah. Actually, we're publishing this podcast very soon. So are we. That's how I did it. We love working with Pranuvo. They have the best product out there in the deepest research. And so they do, man. Yeah, We are using Pranuvo scans on all of our patients that come in for certain memberships. And then we, yeah, that's basically what we tie in.

We also do another scan of the heart called a clearly heart scan. Yeah, we're doing that too. Amazing, right? It's a game changer, game changing technology. So the listeners of viewers understand what this clearly scan does. Dr. Davis obviously is an interventional cardiologist. He's huge into this. He and I talked about the CLEARly like when we met. So talk a little bit about Clearly and what type of information you get from doing this type skin versus what people are used to like a stress test and stuff.

Yeah. Right? So basically when people used get their heart worked up, it was always too late and always looking for signs of damage that's already been done. That's what a Stress Test does. your heart is not getting enough blood and is stressed out. And now we finally can tell, right? Now what's happened in the last couple of decades is the CAT scanner. So this CAT Scanner, the first test that we were doing for the heart was called the coronary calcium score. That would measure calcified plaque, so advanced plaque in heart and score it from zero to a thousand.

Then we would know how much plaque you have in your arteries. It's a game changing test because now you're seeing plaque buildup before it actually causes damage to the heart. And I can tell you, hundreds of patients of mine have changed the trajectory of their health from getting that scan. That scan's available in almost every city in the United States for $150 or less. Everyone should consider getting one before the age of 40. It's very low radiation. Now the CLEARLY test is a more advanced CAT scan of the heart.

It's actually what's called a CT angiogram. So you know when you have a heart attack, you go in and they put a tube in your artery or your vein and stick dye in, they do what is called an angiogram, right? The angiorgram would tell us where their blockage is, but it's very invasive, it is not a great test for actually preventative diagnostics. What it clearly does is it takes that same CAT scan, a little bit longer, so there's a bit more radiation, and it lays out every one of the four major blood vessels of your heart and tells you where there is early plaque and late calcified plaque as well.

and it uses AI to really help lay out the blood vessels. You can see him in incredible resolution. This is game changing technology because now we can way before you have damage to your cardiac muscle where there are blockages. And what's even better is we can track interventions and see if we turn plaque around on you as well. And we're seeing certain interventions can actually, your body can heal plaque. It can reduce the amount of plaque over time. So that's mind-blowing. game-changing technology in my view.

That's amazing. So some of those interventions, what are they? Where you actually see the reversal of what the plaque has done. Yeah, so you have to have a multimodality treatment. You know, plaque is not due to just cholesterol. I think a lot of people have that misconception is due damage to your arterial blood wall, inflammation in your body. It's due to metabolic health disturbances combined with specific types of cholesterol that can make their way into your artery, okay? And some of the interventions that you can do are addressing all of those factors.

Reduce inflammation by, most people have a lot of inflammation due poor gut health. Most people who have high blood pressure, 60% of people over the age of 50 have higher blood pressures. They need to get that treated. and really tightly managed. And then you can also do cholesterol lowering therapies such as PCSK9 inhibitors, which are extremely helpful to get your cholesterol levels very well controlled without the side effects of statins. I still prescribe statins to patients. I think that they have a benefit.

Not everyone should get it. It's one of the most over-prescribed medications in history, but I feel like there's certain people that can use it, and also medications that decrease the body's absorption of cholesterol, things like azetamide, which some people overabsorb cholesterol from saturated fat. Azetimide can help with that as well. Very interesting. So, Doc, you were mentioning about AI with it, clearly. And when we're looking at the different technologies that are out there, I'm starting to hear and notice that AI is being implemented in multiple different things.

I was talking with True Diagnostics, and they're utilizing a lot of AI as well, too, to be able to actually predict what's going to happen two, three, four, five years down the line, based off of previous state of people that have died, et cetera. They clearly is obviously one that's using a lot of AI. Crenuvo, utilizing a of a AI, where now they have the ability to actually have greater findings of other type of diseases and other things. So how much are you utilizing AI when it comes to your practice?

I mean, it's woven into everything we do now, actually, to be honest with you, I think AI is going to revolutionize health. I'm on the advisory board for true diagnostics. And so we talk all the time about how we can finally use methylation patterns on our DNA to give us similar results as to blood tests, biomarkers, and it correlate very well. That's incredible. that now just from a simple cheek swab, how much information we can get versus having to draw blood from people. And so we see and estimate what your hemoglobin A1C is using AI in your methylation pattern, which is mind blowing.

So that's the next thing that is coming out with true diagnostics. I also use AI in our practice to help us synthesize large amounts of data. So every patient, I told you all the data that we're collecting, we actually feed it through an AI and we have the AI enable our practitioners about what are the things that should be thinking about, right? And it's really good at spotting longitudinal changes that you might not notice as a human, because humans It's an incredible amount of data to track month after month, after a month.

But AI can do it easily, right? And so that's another way that we're utilizing AI in our processes. And then we are using simple things with AI too, just even enabling our practitioners to not have to sit there and type away in a computer for hours taking notes. The AI listens and it types in the data for us and keeps it super organized. It's a lot of different applications and I just think it's getting better and better. I heard today that the whole world of peptide therapy, that's another game changer that is coming.

Stanford's AI tool on discovering peptides has found a peptid that can work better than the GLP-1 but without any of the side effects. Really? Right. Oh wow. And you know, peptides are just a math problem, right? And so the AI is perfectly suited for finding that too. Amazing. That's crazy. You know I hear all these different stories when it comes to AI in the medical field. One of the ones, and you were talking a little bit about how it basically empowers the medial provider. Dr. Davis, one of tests that he runs, well was running on the patients because right now it's not available, you've probably heard of it, the IGL test.

out of Germany, the IGL test based out in Germany. So Dr. Mark Hyman wrote a whole article about it, right? And the IGL test, what it does, it's a test base out Germany and it tests over 900 environmental toxins, all kinds of different toxins. But the interesting part of that test is that it actually shows the toxinadiena adduct what gene it's attached to.

AI in Modern Health Practice 25:00

But then you get this crazy code of this gene. P56.7, nobody knows what the heck this is. So Dr. Davis, initially what he was doing, he'd have to go into the literature to try to figure out, well, what is this genome responsible for? Is it why this person has dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's? Whatever it is, And what he started doing is plugging, utilizing AI, where he plugs this gene code into it and now starts spitting everything up. So now, instead of spending hours trying to research it, AI's getting this information to him quicker.

Yeah, so for me, I hear those stories, it's like, Man, medicine is gonna truly change. There's gonna be a huge shift in the course of medicine, especially with everything that we see right now. Yeah, I mean, it's so important to be alive at this moment and be super healthy, because literally the next 10, 15 years, things are gonna completely unrecognizable in medicine in my opinion. Just so much better. We're gonna have so many more diagnostic clarity and treatments available for people. I agree, man.

So, next question for you, Dak. Mitochondria, let's talk about it. Big fan of mitochondria. That's why I'm asking you. So mitochondrion, man, I am going to let you just break it down. What are the mitochondrial cells? What do they responsible for? How do we enhance them? You know, like, what is it that you're doing with the mitocondrial? Great question. Okay, so here's how I break it down for my patient because people hear the word mitochondria and it's kind of like a black box, but many people remember it from high school biology as a powerhouse of our cell, right?

What's really interesting about mitochondrion is that mitochondry were not part of unicellular organisms when the primordial soup of existence came about. And so what happened was single cell organisms, they could only divide maybe once or twice and they just didn't have enough energy to survive. But then mitochondria, which was a separate organism, came inside and they started living symbiotically. So mitochondrion actually have their own DNA that is separate from our DNA. And so you get your mitochondrial from your mom.

I don't know if you know that or not. It only comes from their mom, right? Exactly. Because it doesn't need that separate chromosome from the dad it just follows the egg yeah exactly so mitochondria the powerhouses of your cell they they are what take energy well they take glucose and oxygen and make energy and they also take other molecules to make to realize about it is, it's not just energy like, oh, I woke up feeling energetic this morning. That's part of it. It's every cell in your body needs energy to do what it needs to.

So your liver cells need energy, to detox you. Your heart needs, energy pump blood. You're muscles need, help you move. Now what happens as we age and as were exposed to toxins and have poor metabolic health is our mitochondria get dysfunctional. They can't produce as much ATP and we just don't have enough of them and then we don' have healthy ones as age. This is why having good mitochondria is extremely important. And now we know through recent research, what can keep your mitochondrion healthier, making enough energy for all of your cells, but also how you can have more mitochondry as well.

Cause a number of mitochondries, each cell has hundreds of thousands of my mitochondrial and you. Make more of them with certain interventions and can also make them healthier. Having your body get rid of the old ones and make new ones. awesome so what are some of those interventions so mitochondria like little bits of stress okay so if you expose your body's certain hormetic stresses like for example sauna therapy cold therapy High intensity intermittent training is another form of stress. Short bursts of stressed cause old mitochondria that don't work so well to go away and new mitochondrion to form and make more energy.

And so that's why you really want to incorporate some of these modalities into your weekly health and wellness regime. Having good metabolic health also is extremely important for your mitochondrial. So what that means is if you are somewhere on the verge of diabetes and you're average glucose level is high, your mitochondria are also not healthy, okay? And so getting your metabolic health in order is extremely important. Lastly, there's some new supplements that are out there that have been proven in research to increase the number of mitochondrion.

There's one called Urolithin A by a company called Timeline. And Uralithine A increases the amount of Mitochondria and increases their ATP production. It's actually a really interesting supplement. It is made in our gut bacteria. And second supplement is, second thing that you can do is give your mitochondria the precursors and needs to make energy. That's the whole world of NAD that we hear about all the time. Nads are precursor of energy, the best form of Nad is either IV Nad or I like nicotinamide riboside, both orally and IV.

Because NR is converted to Nad on the inside of the cell and so people have less It has better absorption. Also, people have less negative side effects. You know, you do a lot of IV NAD. Some people will have a hard time tolerating it. Especially if it's going too quick, right? Yeah. All right, so let's talk about that part of mitochondria, with the N, A, D, N R. So I want to get your opinion on NR versus NAD versus nmn. Yeah. So obviously they all have a little bit of a different function, but when it comes to like mitochondrial health or even cognitive health, how do these work and which one would you prefer?

You know, this question is actually popping up more and more.

Mitochondria, NAD, and Metabolic Health 31:00

Everyone's trying to answer this question right now, right? And so the research that I've seen is NAD works, it's important to know the mechanisms of how these things get converted and how they work. NED works inside the cell, mitochondria takes it up and turns it to ATP through what's called electron transport change inside of the mitochondrial. The problem is getting it from the outside environment Into the mitochondria right to where it can do its job so and are is a specific form of the entity molecules called nicotinamide riboside and that is taken orally or give an IV and it travels through the bloodstream or your gut and then into the bludgeon.

much more efficiently and then it gets turned into NAD inside the cell. And what's important about that is N A D doesn't like to hang out outside of the sell. So when it's in your blood vessels, it can cause that, you know, that chest compression type of pain, nausea and, and R it stays in that form until it goes inside, the sound that it turns into an AD. Now NMN is another form of this molecule that just has not a lot of research around it, there's only a couple labs doing research on NNM, but also it seems very promising as far as increasing intracellular NAD stores.

There's just no IV version of it yet. Okay, very interesting. I think a lot of the listeners are gonna like that response that you just gave. So, okay, so mitochondria health. What other type of actual treatments are you doing to help mitochondrial health? So I mean, one of the main things that we do is we have an entire metabolic health program, and I think it's incredibly important to get your, I thing the number one thing people have to do to have healthy mitochondria is make sure that they have good metabolic help.

And the reason I want to emphasize that over and over again, it says 90% of Americans have some level of poor metabolic, health, right? And you discover this by measuring blood biomarkers and you treat it in multiple modalities. You have your nutrition, your movement, Sleep your stress levels in order We I mentioned earlier the continuous glucose monitor is something that we use in everyone that has poor metabolic health Because then we can have a daily biomarker actually of every five-minute biomarquer that We can track to see what direction the metabolic Health is headed in We also use, you know, after we get nutrition, we tie them with nutritionists to get the nutrition in order.

You have to eliminate sedentary behavior, so we do a lot of work around movement tracking. And then we go to another level for some people that really need it, which is using GLP-1s to help them kind of jumpstart that journey to better metabolic health. Are you using any peptides for mitochondrial health? Yeah, I mean, there's, we are using peptides as well. So there is peptide like MOTC that people use for their mitochondria and combining that with peptidies like GLPs aswell. And are you doing any testing to test the mitochondrial health?

Yes. So we just started doing some testing with some companies that were evaluating their tests for right now. Um, you know, these mitochondrial health testing companies are kind of come and gone. Some of them. Yeah, exactly. We just sort of working with a new one. I think it's called MitoQ or maybe that's one that has gone, I can't remember the name. MidoQ is the supplement. We're looking into it as well, too. And we're trying to figure out what's going to be the best test. I mean, historically, we were doing primarily like the VO2 max to look at mitochondrial health.

But we really want to look at it really at the cellular level through like blood and that IGL test that we were doing that it was Yeah, I was doing. That too. Yeah that had the best According to dr. Davis. He says that he's never seen any other tests testing for mitochondrial health the way that one did which now it's not available, but it would look At mitochondria clumping mitochondrion potential and it should psych you would just, you get the baseline. And then when you repeat it after doing all the different treatments, You just saw it light up beautifully.

Everything turned green from red. So if you find out good tests, let us know because we gotta help our patients with that. Absolutely. All right, so moving on here with some other things, I wanna know more about what you do for yourself when it comes to health and wellness, because it's one thing being able to help a lot of people, but what's your number one biohack for Dr. Shah? Um, you know, I am a believer that it doesn't take one thing, right? As you, no, but, so I'm going to answer your question.

Probably you won't like this answer because it's not one. But I would give you the one that I do is have a morning routine. I think that more than anything in my health and wellness journey, going from, you know, 50 pounds overweight and having multiple medical problems and being on 10 different medications, the number one thing that saved me was creating a morning routine. And so, so the first thing to save me, was to create a routine that focuses on multiple aspects of my life that I can do consistently, day after day, without fail for 30 to 45 minutes, that's what made all the difference for me.

So I just add, do that every single day. I add little bits to it. It's called habit stacking. Being, you know, when I talk to my patients, I always say that the number one thing that you can do before you start any particular intervention is become an expert at forming habits and breaking down bad habits. That's probably the most important thing, especially because a lot of the stuff that we deal with and what we see with the patients that come through the clinic is lifestyle. Exactly. Great. Sorry.

So let's talk about that morning routine, man. Let's crack the code. I want another morning. What is it? So one thing I discovered that's extremely helpful is I no longer charge my cell phone in my bedside. I don't use it as my clock. You know, my cellphone charger is actually down by my coffee machine. So I charge, I put it on there. It's downstairs. I have to go up to my bedroom and start my nighttime routine at night. It gives me 10 to 15 minutes before bed where I don't get exposed to phone, and 10-15 minutes in the morning before I get, don' get expose to the phone.

That's been a game changer for me, is decreased stress levels, it's actually improved my HRV just to get the cell phone away from me. You know? For my patients, I recommend start just putting it in your closet or your bathroom, but then try to move it as far away from you in the house as possible. Do you use the alarm clock on your phone to wake up? I don't. I didn't wake with an alarm. That's another thing. When I left out of the fire department, when I retired from the department I told myself I'm never waking up to any kind of alarm or siren, anything.

Because honestly for 12 years I felt it. killing me. Yeah. You know? Yeah, and I mean, that was the beeper. Same thing. The beepers. Wow. It's just like your heart rate goes up as adrenaline. So it was horrible. That's a horrible feeling. Uh, you know, then the sleep deprivation kicks in. And for me, um, if I wake up to an alarm clock today, right. I actually have a midday crash. When I don't wake up to an alarm clock and I wake just naturally, it's completely different. I do have mid day crash and the interesting thing is I only sleep about five hours.

And I fall asleep when my body tells me to fall sleep, right? And wakeup when body tell me wake me up. And I feel well rested, refreshed all throughout the day. Now some people tell me, hey, you really should get eight hours. My body just wakes up. You know, I got my oral ring, my data looks good, and my readiness score is perfect. I don't know what else to tell you. So what I'll say on the morning routine. So I wake up, I get to the specific area of my house. I think it's really important to have the environment centered around your routines where I do journaling every morning.

So, and write about the day before I'd do a five to 10 minute meditation, not a long one, depending on how I'm feeling for the date. And then after I've done with journalling, meditation I'll then read, read for 30 to 45 minutes. Cause I find that my brain is most receptive at that time. Anything in particular that you're reading? I always read two books. I would read one book on health and wellness, something I'm trying to learn about, and then one around mindset is what I do. So I keep them both there and depending on how I am feeling, I'll read both.

And then with the meditation, are you doing guided meditation or do you go into your own meditative state? I just do my own. I am a big believer. For me, what worked for me personally was transcendental meditation. And so, for my, you know, transcendent meditation is typically 20 minutes. So I don't normally have time to do 20 minute, so I'll just 10 of it. But I do just my on, yeah. Nice, nice. Yeah. What's your background ethnicity wise? I'm Indian, my family's from East India. I was born here in New Jersey, but my parents came from India, yeah.

So I mean, you come from a family that focuses on natural medicine a lot, right? And also energy medicine. Which I know sometimes physicians are a little bit not willing to talk about it because some people might look at it a bit weird. But when it comes to bio-quantum and frequency medicine, what are your thoughts on it? I'm so interested in this right now. So my parents, you know, my dad was an Ayurvedic doctor, and so I learned about Ayureveda since I was a kid from my mom and my Dad. And so, I am a big believer in plants have a very significant role in medicine.

I mean, if you look at a lot of the pharmaceuticals, they're derived from plants. Like, Metformin comes from a flower. They're all plants that are a lotta the medications we take right know. There's definitely massive amount of power in plant, And another thing that you just asked me about was the energy side of this. If you look at a lot of what people are talking about in health and wellness is this whole aspect of quantum biology. And I'm doing a deep dive into that right now. They found the microtubules in our neurons actually can initiate a quantum field in the brain that can connect us to the quantum world.

And I've gone down a rabbit hole on this and if people are interested, just search quantum biology. There is a whole new field of medicine that a lot of very respected scientists and doctors are incredibly interested in because there's something major there as well. You know, my mentor in the functional medicine space that I started at the age of 19 with, before I even started with the fire department,

Morning Routine, Habits, and Biohacking 42:00

Dr. Robert Willicks. So Dr Robert, world-renowned, he was a heart surgeon, you know. He was chief medical officer of senagenics for many years. You, know he studied as a shaman with The Natives in Peru. And he was really big into Ayurveda medicine, he's really into energy medicine. And some of the things that I would hear him talk about with a lot of these other energy guys, it was just like mind blowing. You know, and what they were saying, like, what you can really tap into and how you're really not even here.

It's just, so I try to like read and listen to other people talk about it and you can go down a crazy rabbit hole on it. I think it's important, especially if you have children right now, this is the new frontiers, right? So the New Frontiers are AI, quantum science and quantum biology. These are the things that our kids need to wrap their heads around now at a young age Because this is where all the science is headed So they'll be uniquely prepared to understand like what people are talking about, right?

So I talked to my son. My son is 11 years old I make him watch YouTube videos on quantum biology now. Yeah, he's gonna be a doctor by 16 So that's amazing man, so alright the The other thing I wanted to talk to you about, man, it's like I see it all over social media. We don't offer this. And I always see people at your clinics and they're holding a bag of plasma or whatever's in it, right? And it it. It's pretty cool. You know, like, I, see, and I'm like. Well, they just did something and. They're feeling good.

What is it that you're offering? It's called therapeutic plasma exchange. Therapeutic plasma change is a treatment that's been available in hospitals for five or six decades now. It was approved by the FDA in the 60s. And basically what's so great about it is we're not giving you a chemical or a medicine. We're letting your body actually reset itself and heal itself. So the way the treatment is done is you put an IV in one arm, we remove your blood basically from that arm about 150, 200 cc's at a time.

and then we spin it down in a giant centrifuge, in very complicated machine that has an incredible amount of science in it, but basically it's a joint centrifugal. And you know what happens when you put blood in the centrifuged, it separates into plasma and blood cells. Through another IV, we give you back your red blood cell, because obviously you need your blood. But your plasma is full of all the things your body's trying to detox you from. toxin buildup, inflammatory cytokines, malformed proteins, it all is living in your plasma.

And your liver and your kidneys and you skin is all working extra hard to mitigate the effects of all of this build up. But unfortunately we live in one of the most toxic environments ever in human history right now and it can't catch up, but what this does is when you remove that bag of plasma, we take out all your of your plasmas and you basically throw it away, you give your body a chance to reset itself. And it allows your a body chance of live toxin free for a little while, and your liver and kidneys can now catch up and detoxify you from whatever's remaining in your tissues.

We also replace that plasma, because plasma's like the liquid part of your blood, and you replace it with something, with IV fluid and albumin. Albumin is one of the most stickiest proteins in the body. And what albumins does, it goes through your body and it sticks to these toxins. It sticks in these malformed proteins. Its basically a clean-up molecule. So we give you brand new albumine that has no toxins on it, furthers the effect of that plasma exchange. So it's a two or three hour treatment.

It's very comfortable. Most people do it with absolutely no problems. And like you said, like, you know, many of the physicians that we hear about on podcasts and the celebrity health and wellness, they all come to us to do this because we have the best protocols and best scientists and team to execute on this. I've done it myself many times. I have had many celebrities and patients come to us to do this and universally people feel much better from it and it's because your body has a time to catch up.

How does that compare to like the other one that we see that EBO2? Yeah, EBO2 is a little bit different. So what EBo2 does is it exposes your blood to ozone, which creates an oxidative stress. An oxidated stress as we know in small doses can be really good for eliminating toxins from your body, but also to cause a regeneration of new cells in new mitochondria. And so it's a very different, But it looks similar. Interesting. Yeah. I like that. Dr. Davis, he does a lot of the EBL too, but this is one thing.

He actually told me that he wants to talk to you more about that because it's something that wants offer to his patients. It's a great treatment modality. Great treatment. Doc, right now we have a big movement that's happening with the new administration. Make America healthy again. What's your view on this? I think it's fantastic. I mean, look, I don't care what political ideology you are, we need Americans to be healthier. It is destroying our economy, it is destroy our mood as this human race that's living together on this planet.

The rates of depression and anxiety are through the roof right now, and this all comes from poor physiological health. chronic disease has become rampant. Almost every human living in America will get one chronic by the time they turn 50 years old. It's crazy, it's absolutely an unmitigated disaster that is happening right now. And so Americans need to be healthy again. The world needs to become healthier again, right? But we have to start because once we can figure this out here in the United States, Every other country usually follows us, you know, and so I think it's a fantastic moment And I'm not political in any way, but I I am a huge believer that we do need to make Americans And that's the same thing I said, man It doesn't matter if you're on the left or the right right like who doesn' want to be held exactly like if You vote against that.

We got to check you. You know for psychiatric issues, right? You don't So did you think in your career that you would actually see what's happening today with someone like RFK Jr. going and doing what he's doing against the big pharmaceutical companies, the food companies? I don't ever think I even thought about it, to be honest with you, until recently. So I spent the first 20 years in medicine just being part of the machine. I was submitting bills to insurance, getting paid, working in the hospital.

It was all, I just was part the of machine and I had no idea why so many people were getting so sick until I got sick myself.

Quantum Biology and Plasma Exchange 49:00

And I was like, oh my God, it's the ultra processed food. It's a massive amount of gut health disturbances caused by ultra-processed food and gluten and dairy and all these things. We're all sedentary now, like it all happened kind of simultaneously where we became sedentar and shift work destroying our sleep and I had no idea this was a problem. And then not to mention all the chemicals being poured out into everything in our water and our food everywhere. Once I realized it was problem, It's kind of overwhelming.

I think for most people, it's overwhelming to understand that you're fighting these trillion dollar industries, the food industry, right? It is a trillion-dollar industry. How are we gonna fight this? So I guess I didn't realize it was a problem until I realized it is massive problem. Then I was overwhelmed by the degree of how big of a problems this is. And it has to start somewhere. So, I'm so happy that it become part of the general consciousness now. It's a beautiful thing, man. And when we talk about the change in the course of medicine, I think this is a good start.

They appointed a new person to lead the NIH recently, which has the background that we need for our industry. I think this is our time to shine, man. The next four years, we have a really good landscape for the industry in place. So we'll see what happens. I fully agree. And another part of this too is that I don't think the Western medical system is bad. It's been asked to do something it was never designed to. I mean, thank God we have such incredible science and therapeutics in this Western medical system that can keep us alive when we get hit by a bus or when you're talking about trauma or we could diagnose a cancer or have a heart attack.

Thank God, we had that system, right? But it was never meant to reverse chronic disease. So like what you are doing and what I'm doing is we're creating this new system. That is focused on health and reversing chronic diseases. And I think that's where I think we're in the right place at the time because this is where everything needs, all the energy and focus needs to go to. We need to keep our Western medical system. we need these hospitals. In case something really bad happens, but through companies like yours and mine, we create a new system that everyone needs go too to make sure they stay healthy, they find chronic disease early through biomarker testing, and if they do have any chronic diseases, We immediately reverse it rather than waiting for someone to get on you know, a pharmaceutical or end up on the operating room table.

I agree, man. It's well care versus sick care, right? We're going to take more of that proactive preventative approach to your health and wellness. So that's what we're here to do for sure. What is the next biggest breakthrough that you see in this whole functional medicine world or biohacking world? So I think there's gonna be two or three major advances. It's going to be utilizing AI and deep biomarker testing to have incredible diagnostics available to us very early and very easily. So, I thing there is going be a world where we'll just have a machine at home that we can easily, you know, maybe put a little cheek swab in or whatever have you, and we will know with very clear clarity when things are going in the wrong direction, right?

I also think that every single one of us, our phone will then be our health coach. It will be constantly and consistently guiding us on our healthy journeys and reversing issues the minute they come up through wearable data, through the biomarker testing that we're talking about, et cetera. And so that whole AI health coaching is gonna be a major part of everything like it is right now, just like how we use our phones for everything else, right? And then lastly, I think we're going to have an accelerated course of discovery for peptides and regenerative therapies that we are going be able to do by using the sheer power of computing.

Nice. Like we talked about with Stanford's recent discovery, with the testing that you had mentioned, it's all coming together at this moment in time. And we have this massive industry that was fighting against it, the pharmaceutical industry, right? Fighting against peptides, fighting agains regenerative therapies. But I think they can't fight that much longer. It was just an article today that scientists in Japan are actually reversing paralyzed nerve deficits with stem cells now. Japan is an incredible thing where they realize early that the typical FDA body that they had the analogous body was never going to be able to understand regenerative technology.

So they created a new governing body, a separate one for regenerate medicine. And so they're rocket blasting past us in regenerated medicine right now. We're going see lots more discoveries like that come. Amazing. Yeah. You're a celebrity doctor, right? Who is one celebrity that's out there that you want to see take control of their health? That's a good one. I would, huh. Listen, we know celebrities have the power to influence people. Who's someone out who is not, Not on our train just yet, that you wanna see them say, you know what, I'm gonna take control of my health.

I know who, Adam Sandler. Adam sandler, okay. So I've seen him live many times in my life, and his health has gone not in the right direction, in opinion. He said this publicly. you know right and so i think that if he were able to just give me 30 minutes of every day we could make a massive difference in his in this health trajectory

Future of Medicine and Closing Thoughts 55:00

and he's around my age so I kind of know how he feels because I Was in his body and his health a few years ago, you know and just how different you feel mentally and physically Once you just reverse something you change the course of direction of your health Just one degree that adds up over time, right? Right. So yeah, he's he is one person. I would say needs to have a little bit of a health reset. We're gonna make sure he sees this podcast. This reel that we're going to get from this page. Adam Sandler's gonna see it.

Yeah, Adam. Ryan Braun's been trying to keep you in to see us for a while now. Well, make it happen. Make it happened. You know, on my end, I want to DJ Khaled. Ah, there you go. To make that adjustment. I love him, but I'm sick and tired of seeing him in the back of his Maybach with the McDonald's and eating it and I did see recently he's got like an infrared sauna cold plunge, but it's time to take a deeper dive, which we're going to make that happen at some point. Yeah, and like DJ Khaled and Adam Sandler, they both have given all of us so much incredible art, right?

Like we don't want them to go away. We want it to still function at the highest level. I agree. So Doc, as we wrap up here, if there is one person, we have a lot of doctors that tune into our podcast, but we also have lots of consumers. If there's one that resonates with our message today, what is the one thing you can leave them off with? I would say number one, get your habit forming ability in order. Understand how to form habits and then everything else will fall behind it. And so a great book written by James Clear is called Atomic Habits.

Buy that book and read it, once you're able to formed habits that are good and stack them on top of each other, it could be a morning routine, could an afternoon routine whatever it is. Every one of us has bad habits, right? There's something that we need to take out of our lives. Learning how to break down bad habit. There is an actual science behind this and it's not as hard as people think. So become an expert habit former. Habit former, I love it. Doc, where can people find you? I'm on social media at Darshan Chai MD.

My company is Next Health. So www.next-health.com and drshaw. com is my website. Amazing. And we're going to include all those links down below. Thank you, man. You know, make sure that people can follow and everything else. It was a pleasure having you on the podcast. We're gonna keep on collaborating and doing bigger things together. Such a pleasant. I can't wait to have you in mine, actually. As soon as you're in LA, we'll make it happen. Thanks, Doc. Appreciate it. Thank you for watching another episode of a Healthy Point of View podcast.

Again, I'm your host, Sam Tahata. Make sure you follow Dr. Shah, make sure follow Next Health. Everything's down below. Subscribe, share this with all your people, and we'll see you in the next one.