Mitochondria, Health & Longevity

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Hi, this is Dr. Pawluk. This episode today is with a great friend, Jason Prall. He’s a world traveler. He knows more about not growing old than anybody I know. And that’s part of our topic today is being eclectic in terms of regeneration and stalling aging, and recovering from injury, and so on. So I’m not gonna tell Jason what we’re gonna talk about. I think we’ll basically float around a bit on probably numerous topics, but Jason, tell us about yourself, please.

Jason Prall

Yeah, thanks for that. I appreciate the emergent quality of this ’cause it actually ties into this. Well, I hope we can talk about today, which is regeneration and this ability of things to grow anew. So yeah, I’m a Health Practitioner, Author, Speaker. I do a lot of one-on-one work with people that have a lot of chronic illness. And so for me, it’s really is about how do we resolve chronic disease, chronic illness and symptoms. And then how do we avoid these things as we get older because as we get older, as far as I know, falter time is undefeated. And, but we do have mother nature at our back, right? So what are the things that we can do, both the old wisdoms that we can carry with us? The acupunctures, the Ayurvedas, the wisdoms that come from indigenous cultures and the, all the people from the past. And then also, how do we incorporate this new stuff, this new technology that we’re developing? PEMF is such a great example of this. And there’s many others that we can use too, to help basically ignite this repair process, this regenerative capacity that is inherent within us. Granted it does dwindle as we age, but we are inventing some really new cool technologies to sort of augment that, to slow the aging process. And more importantly, as we age, not suffer because I think that’s really what we’re all looking for is we can age, but just, I wanna be able to move. I wanna be able to be without pain. I wanna be able to think and remember, and interact. And so that’s really what I think this is about.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, let’s go forth then. And my journey, as we were discussing before, my journey started with acupuncture and I was a holistic physician before that, and I was always looking at all kinds of different things. And as a medical doctor, I was taught by a British physician that I needed to do environmental medicine. I needed to do homeopathy, that I needed to do nutrition and I should do acupuncture. And I said, “Oh crap.” So here I am at MD, finished all this training, spent 13 years, 15 years of doing all that. And I said, “What, I’m not done yet?” So then I started my journey. And acupuncture became one of those ports in the journey and that started me into PEMFs. So yeah, so we have to be eclectic. Ultimately, we have to be eclectic.

Jason Prall

Absolutely, and there’s so much to learn and like you, I was sort of the same way and a little bit different of a path. I started off in engineering, but found my way into the health world, thought I had a good basis for understanding what health is and how to let’s say create it, so to speak at what I thought back in when I first started. And then I realized, “Oh my gosh, there’s so much more.” I need to learn that and this and this. And eventually it became this idea that finally landed for me, which is that health cannot be created, it is within us. It is an inherent process and we can rather align with it. And when we do that, then magic happens, right? It’s just like when we cut our finger, we actually don’t have to do anything. We just have to sort of protect it and not get in the way and life will do its thing. And so that really became my sort of guiding principle, as I started to learn about all these other therapies, what can I use to help the body do it? What fundamentally understands it, what to do and how to do it.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And more efficiently.

Jason Prall

Exactly, exactly.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And what we find with magnetic field therapies is that when you kind of, when you have a wound and as we discussed earlier, at different ages, that wound is gonna heal at different rates depending on your vitality generally, but no matter what, it’s gonna do its own thing in its own way. And we know, for example, fractures, nonunion fractures, you break a bone, five to 10% of people who break a bone are slow when healing that bone. So what can you do to augment to make sure that you don’t leave it to chance and you augment it with all sorts of therapies that we’re gonna get into.

Jason Prall

Absolutely, and to that point about breaking bones, you know, that actually ties into PEMF that I think is in a really important way. There’s an electrical property that happens in bone healing. And to some degree, as weird as this may sound, bones can heal normally without any sort of cast or anything. I mean, before we invented all this new technology to help our bones heal, so to speak it, there was a process that it could heal. And part of that is the piezoelectric effect. In other words, we needed a little bit of pressure on, if I broke my foot or something, a little bit of pressure actually helps stimulate the growth and repair of the osteoblasts and the fundamental structures that lay down bones. So there’s really interesting things. And this ties into PEMF because it’s essentially focusing on the same principles that we’re using a magnetic field to induce an electric current at the body. And again, all we have to do is induce that and the body knows how to use it, what to do with it, what to turn on, what to turn off. I mean, there’s a lot going on. And this is one of the beautiful things about PEMF is that you’re just supplying magnetic field and there’s nuance to it, no question. But once we do that, then we literally just let go and the body does the rest, and that’s what’s so cool.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

It’s amazing actually, I read an interesting report the other day about a new idea about electricity. And the magnetic fields produced by charge production or charge moving through wires. The scientists, the physicists are basically saying the electrons are barely moving.

Jason Prall

Yes.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

They’re barely moving. And yet they generate this electric field and this magnetic field, and that electric field, the magnetic field move at the speed of light, but the electrons are barely moving. So that’s an even more astounding phenomenon is how do you get this amazing charge going through this wire of a magnetic field and electric field, but the electrons aren’t moving.

Jason Prall

Yeah, it’s really funny actually, not to take too far of a tangent here, but electric theory is really interesting. If you go back to Steinmetz and some of the old people who really looked at electricity, and there’s this idea of a standee, of a longitudinal wave and a transverse wave, and a transverse wave goes like this, and a longitudinal wave goes basically straight through, without hardly anything moving. And you know, that like, if I can take a little bit of a wire and somebody’s standing at both ends and one person waves, then you can see the wire go, right? But if you do a longitudinal wave and it take off a pole, a metal pole, and you bang on one end with a hammer, then instantaneously, you actually feel on the other side virtually. And it’s just an example. But when you apply it to electricity and a wire or the ether then actually does happen faster than the speed of light. So there’s really interesting things…

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Faster than the speed of light?

Jason Prall

Exactly, faster than the speed of light because it is not… it transfers waves, it’s a totally different style of wave. And Tesla got into this, and so there’s some new electrical theorists that get into this as well, Steinmetz got into some of this. My point of bringing that up even is that we still don’t dimensionally know how electricity works. I don’t think. I mean, there’s a lot of different… Let’s say there’s competing theories and the classical theory that I think most of us learned, I was an engineer, that most of us learned doesn’t really hold a lot of water in a lot of instances. In other words, there’s things that break the laws that we’re being taught. And so this is what’s really interesting about electricity is that we’re still learning about this stuff, right? And again, they actually sort of hammers my point home, which is that we just supply the magnetic field and we just kinda step back because, and with a little humility and go, “Okay, body, you do your thing, we’re just gonna provide you the alignment, and allow that to happen.” So there’s so much that we don’t know and I think we will continue to learn as we implement some of these technologies going forward.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And incredibly too, PMF magnetic fields, as opposed to electric fields.

Jason Prall

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Magnetic fields are extraordinarily safe.

Jason Prall

Absolutely. And again, it’s something we actually don’t really know a lot about. What is a magnetic field? It’s just a field. Like we don’t really fundamentally understand like where it comes from, how it works? We just know the effects of the magnetic field. And that’s been studied very well, but again, a lot of questions when it comes to these things, and again, what we’re really focusing on here is the effects, right? So how do we regenerate the body? How do we allow it to turn on those mechanisms that allow for healing faster and more efficiently with less damage?

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

That tells us that we are an electromagnetic apparatus ourselves.

Jason Prall

Absolutely, yeah. And one of the fundamental aspects of the body is of that electromagnetic component is the mitochondria. It’s one of the things that I really like to focus on when it comes to health and wellbeing, because look, I’ve got a two year old and he gets hurt all the time. In fact, he tried to skateboard on this little tiny skateboard the other day, he thought he could ride it and he stepped on it, and it went back and he went face first, just bloodied up the front of his face. And it’s pretty bad, but I watched how fast he heals, and it’s unbelievable. Literally he goes to bed the next morning, it totally changes. And whereas me, when I get injured, when I cut myself or what have you, it takes so much longer. So there’s a point here that when we’re young, we have this unbelievable vitality. We have so much coherence. And look, the research on stem cells has actually shown us this, that the number of stem cells available to us when we were young is like, it’s so high, it’s in the millions. And then it’s a parabolic decline as we get older. So when we hit 30, we heal infinitely slower than we did when were two. And when we’re 80, infinitely slower than when we’re 30. So we have this ability to heal is really declining. So whatever we can utilize to assist that process, to ignite that process is gonna be really, really beneficial. Particularly, as we get into our middle ages and older ages, that’s where something like PEMF and other therapies that I’d like to talk about too, can really help this process out.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Let’s dig in.

Jason Prall

Yeah, so when it comes to mitochondria, there’s mitochondria these little organelles inside the cells, right? And each cell, depending on the type of cells, it’s gonna have different numbers of mitochondria. So the metabolically active organs in our body, the brain, the heart, the liver, the kidney, these things have a lot of mitochondria per cell. So they have a higher density, and that’s actually what creates the electromagnetic field of the heart and the brain. So when we do EKGs and EEGs and all these things, we’re actually measuring some of these fields. And this is not wholly, but mostly related to mitochondrial function. And so what we wanna do is we actually want the mitochondria to be really efficient at the electrical current that’s happening at that level. So to be able to transfer electric flow through the mitochondria, creating a lot of charge separation, that and then also creates ATP consequently, for us to create energy. But it’ll also, that we’re producing reactive oxygen species that help signal things. So there’s a little bit of sort of oxidative stress that’s normal, that’s natural, that’s healthy to help signal certain things in the cell. So all of that is how mitochondria should function. As we age, and as we start to exhibit ill health or disharmony, or disease the body, mitochondria essentially weaken, they lose their capacity to produce energy. They produce more oxidative stress. They actually get into a mode that is a protective defensive mode, right? So when there’s a threat, when there’s heavy metals, when there’s a lot of chemicals, when there’s infections going on in the body, and I like Ayurveda, so if anybody here familiar with Ayurveda, this Alma that builds up, this toxic morbid waste that builds up at the cellular level throughout the body, that that creates a dysfunctional cell. 

And a lot of inflammatory signals go out from the mitochondria. In other words, they’re signaling to other mitochondria and other cells, Hey, danger, danger, threat, threat. And so just like us as a human body, when we’re in danger, we don’t engage the parasympathetic. We’re not in rest and digest, it’s not a good time to have sex. It’s a time to run, it’s a time to fight, right? And so our parasympathetic overdrive get kicks into gear, and that we’re not healing at that point, we are using all of our vital energy to stay alive. Well, that’s the same thing that happens at the cellular level, right? The mitochondria are in this threat danger mode and therefore they’re not as effectively producing energy. And so when that happens, this is when we see this runaway inflammation. So we have inflammation at the cellular level, literally happening at the cellular level, that’s causing damage to DNA, it’s causing damage to other mitochondria it’s causing damage to cellular membranes, which are really, really important aspect of the cell, as well as the other components of the cells. So as that’s happening day after day, month after month, year after year, now we really start to get a dysfunctional cells, some poor communication. Certain genes are turning on and often, and we lose this coherence, this harmony that’s happening, both on the cellular level, the organ level and the system level. And that’s what we call disease. So how do we unwind that? One of the key mechanisms is to restore that function at the mitochondrial level. I was interviewing once a mitochondrial researcher, and he said, there is no disease where the mitochondria is not associated. In other words, every single disease process does involve the mitochondria on a fairly significant level. And some diseases like cancer, like particular, are fundamentally mitochondrial-related. And so we really, it’s a really important thing to focus on mitochondrial health and function. And so there are a number of things we can do from a lifestyle perspective to both regrow new mitochondria. That’s the cool thing we can, it’s called mitochondria biogenesis, right? So we can regrow new mitochondria and these are healthy ones. We can recycle old ones and the ones that are damaged and dysfunctional, we can actually break those down in a process called “Mitophagy” and recycle those parts. That’s beautiful. And then we can also have this process of a fusion and fission, so they can actually fuse together and separate apart. And through this process, they can become more efficient, more effective. And that’s really what we’re looking for. So a couple of those things that we can, sleep is the number one, I just wanna name a couple of these. Focusing on sleep really, really critical to repair mitochondrial function.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And appropriate sleep.

Jason Prall

Appropriate sleep. Absolutely, at the right time of day, we get good deep sleep. We get enough REM sleep really, really important. And the time of day actually really is important, right? So there’s critical windows of opportunity for sleep. So typically between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM give or take, those are kind of the prime hours. The other things, intermittent fasting. Very, very effective for recycling mitochondria, and producing new healthy mitochondria. Exercise, particularly interval training or something somewhat intense, right? It doesn’t have to be a marathon, nothing like that, but a little bit of intense movement throughout your day. And intense is variable. So intensity for an 18-year-old is gonna be different from the intensity of a 65-year-old, but whatever it is for you, whatever is a little bit intense where you’re breathing hard and you’re physically stimulated for 30 seconds, 60 seconds is beautiful. And we can take these rests and then we can go stimulate again, but something that’s gonna move the body really work and force the body, that’s gonna actually provide an adaptive pressure to the body. So the body’s gonna say, whoa, we’re moving a lot here. We gotta create more powerhouses. We gotta create more energy centers called mitochondria. So let’s build new ones. So we can adapt to this pressure that we’re being put under. You can do things like heat and cold therapy. Now this is something that’s not… It’s not ideal for everybody, I wouldn’t say that, but it’s one of the mechanisms that we can use. But I fundamentally, I think intermittent fasting, perhaps even fasting for 24 hours every now and again, is a good thing and exercise. Those are the really, really important things I think for good mitochondrial function, from a lifestyle perspective.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, you know, interesting that you say about movement. There’s an interesting phenomenon that happens with movement as well. We think tend to take a charge movement in the body as a charge moving down say, well, maybe a blood vessel, but primarily moving down a nerve. But the fascia, fascial layers of the body, the connective tissue layers of the body are a matrix. And they’re matrix of tubules. They’re like little wall structures, et cetera. So that matrix forms the 3D dimensionality of the body essentially. Charge moves down that matrix at the rate of 70 meters per second. That’s amazing.

Jason Prall

That’s darn fast.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

70 Meters per second. If you go like that with your arm, charge moves down that fast. So when you’re moving charge down the body, what does that do to mitochondria? What does that do to circulation? What does it do to anything else in the body essentially?

Jason Prall

Absolutely, absolutely. And vice versa, right? So the more that we can actually, and there’s a lot of adhesions, especially as we get older, in that fat in those fascial layers and fascia is something that innovates every organ tissue and cell in the body. And they’ve really identified the interstitium and the fascia, and this collective network that is sort of outside the cells, so to speak. It’s a network that we don’t think associated with the cells or organs, and it is unbelievably important. And of course, it’s intertwined. There’s a really important relationship with water. And we get into things like Gerald Pollock’s work and fourth phase water, EZ water, which has special electrical properties. It can actually hold a lot more electrical charge through its structure. And that becomes an important aspect to the ability of the fascia. And so we can actually break that stuff up through something like Rolfing. Rolfing is a fantastic tool to really loosen these adhesions. We can call it scar tissue, but it’s even fundamentally deeper than scar tissue because it’s not necessarily associated with scars only, but it starts to get sticky, and the body internally doesn’t move, and we loosen those up, and we can start to get this flow now, and everything starts to move and flow. In fact, a lot of injuries, what we call pain is actually associated with nerves being caught and trapped into those sort of fibrous structures at that level, right? So something like Rolfing, there’s another therapy called Block Therapy, which I think is really, really cool. That is a way to loosen these adhesions and unbelievable stuff happens when you start to loosen that up because now we’re getting flow, as you mentioned, that electrical current and that flow and the charge, and the prana, and all the stuff that we associate with, with blood flow, so to speak, and it goes deeper than that. There’s an energetic aspect that’s happening beyond just the blood, but blood, oxygen and energy, prana can go through the body and start to deliver the healing mechanism to the tissues that weren’t really getting a lot of it.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, so when you talk about charge at the beginning, we’re talking about electrical charge, but people often get concerned that it’s electrical and that that’s bad, right?

Jason Prall

Right, right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Or we’re not talking about electrical per se, not like a current flowing down a wire, even though we talked about currents, not flowing down wires. So this charge is basically ions, sodium and potassium, and chloride, positive, and negative charge ions, that’s charge. So when you increase the environment of those electrons and ions, basically, to connect with each other charge flows, So that’s the kinda electrical charge we’re talking about. The PEMFs increase that flow of charge in this crystal matrix.

Jason Prall

Absolutely, yeah. And then that’s… Again, there’s so much to the body when it comes to, when I say electricity, it’s really just, you can think of static electricity. You can think of charges. It’s really just, it’s chemistry. It’s fundamentally what we talk about when we talk about calcium and magnesium, and these elements in the body, and these… Even vitamins and men- and vitamins, just like B12 and vitamin C, these all work fundamentally on electrical charge. That’s really how the body communicates, that’s maybe a better way to say it is that the communication tool of the body is through electric charge. We think about it mostly in terms of chemistry, but chemistry is just the layer above electric charge. The first battery, was just a bunch of chemistry going on. That’s really what we were using, you can use water and sodium and some metals, and boom, you’ve got electricity. So it’s really the charge carrying capacity, the communication ability of the body. And we wanna increase that. We wanna increase its ability to create charge, to hold charge, to hold charge separation. There’s voltages that happen at the cellular level that are ideal. We want to initiate that instead of distort it. And that’s really what’s happening is this, there’s a distortion happening at that sort of electrical level. And we don’t need to think about these terms. You don’t think about the body in terms of electrical potential, but that’s really how it’s working. And so again, I think it belabors the point here that we just create this circumstances for the body to do what it does and goes, and we just go, you handle the charge stuff. I don’t need to worry about that, I’m just gonna do my thing that I know is gonna be beneficial. And that’s where we can include PEMF, we include good sleep, intermittent fasting, good loving relationships, low stress, reducing EMF, bad EMFs in the environment. Getting good EMFs from the sun, in small amounts, in a proper amount. There’s all these things that we can do to harmonize and to create that potential in the body. And that’s really what we wanna focus on.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

We’re talking about mitochondria. So let’s talk about entropy.

Jason Prall

My favorite topic. Yeah, so there’s actually something called negentropy as well. So this idea of entropy is really this loss of organizational capacity, this loss of structure, coherence, this loss of intelligence, so to speak, and into this sort of diffuse milieu. It’s it kind of, it’s the loss of heat, so to speak, it’s the loss of organization and structure. We can undo that, we can actually go and this idea of negentropy, which is what some physicists actually thought was the basis of life itself, was this idea of negentropy. This idea of organizational structure, this idea of intelligence resisting the natural capacity to go to zero, to go to rest, to go to emptiness. And so that’s really what we wanna facilitate. And that’s what mitochondria do. That’s what the whole body is kind of doing. But mitochondria fundamental in holding that negentropy to resist entropy this, to resist this idea of sort of falling apart into just random chaos, right? And so the body doesn’t like chaos, the body likes organization. It likes structure, it likes intelligence. And when we can provide that, then it’s able to maintain that coherence, it’s able to maintain, all your kidney cell, I’m a liver cell, I know what my job is. I’m gonna turn this on, I’m gonna do that. And all these functions are, I mean, there’s trillions happening per second, they’re coordinated. 

And that’s what’s so amazing. And the body is coordinated. That’s why something like circadian rhythm, which is a really important aspect to maintaining mitochondria health and health of the body, which is this idea that the light, primarily from the sun and the darkness, when the sun’s down is going to entrain our brain, and our entire body into what time of day it is sort of to predict the functions that’s going to happen next. In other words, as this light, as this daily cycle of light happens, my eyes take that in, talks to the super charismatic nucleus that talks to the hypothalamus, the pituitary, and the pineal, and all these organs in the brain, are now then talking to the organ systems in my body, and the cells in my body. And we have period genes and clock genes, and BMAL, and all these things going on inside the cell that say, “Okay, I know what time of day it is, I’m gonna do this.” And that’s why when we’re healthy, we don’t have to urinate at night. Certain functions are turned off and turned on, and all these hormones are working and beautiful. We can shut that process off and we can turn on all these other genes, and turn off all these other genes. And then we wake up and cortisol rises because we know what time of day it is, right? So this is all coordination that’s happening. And that’s governed by this idea of circadian rhythm. So it’s really, really important to understand what coherence is so that the brain is talking to all the cells and we all know what’s going on. And that’s really this idea of resisting entropy, fundamentally at the cellular level and throughout the body.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, what we have to do often, unfortunately, the body’s supposed to do what it’s supposed to do, right?

Jason Prall

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

But we have a problem ’cause we interfere with that. All the different ways that human beings interfere with the natural rhythms.

Jason Prall

That’s right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So what are some of those ways that we interfere it?

Jason Prall

Yeah, well, and this is what you’re saying is I love this because it is the fundamental idea of health, which is that it’s there, it’s your birthright. The body wants to do to be healthy. And when we are out of alignment with the sort of universal principles that we all must follow again, we need sleep, we need certain things. If we don’t, some of these things we die, but otherwise we get sick. And so, we need to follow these universal principles. And then there’s other things a again, those are like, we need connection, we need love. We need to touch the ground. Astronauts have proven to us that we actually, we need the Earth’s magnetic field. It’s a really important aspect of our health. We need the circadian rhythm, we need to be operating on those times of day, we ideally need to be eating. There’s a way to eat. There’s all these sort of things, we need to move. These are fundamental aspects that are universal to human health. There’s other things too, that are in alignment with our personal health. In other words, we do have uniqueness. We do have a constitution. We look at Ayurveda, we look at Chinese medicine, some of these old, well, wisdoms, they tell us they have a really good map for those things, but that this is where we figure out what’s right for me. I tend to like more plants, I do better on that. Interesting, okay. And perhaps even later in life, I might change. And so this is where we come into alignment with our own individual aspect and we do these things properly. So some people really, really benefit from really intense exercises. Some people benefit more from slow movements like Yin Yogas and Qigong, and Tai Chi, and walking, depending on the age, depending on the condition, depending on the body type and the constitution. Some people benefit from more spicy foods. Some people benefit from more cooling foods, right? So there’s all these things. 

And so this is, I guess it’s hard for me to really name a lot of these ’cause they’re so individualized, but this is where it’s important to really focus on what is good for me, instead of just listening to this quote-unquote, “health advice” from this person out here, it may or may not apply to me, right? So some of these things are universal that we all need and some of these things are specific to me. So it’s really important to get in tune with those. But there’s a couple therapies that I really wanna bring in that I think are really exciting as we move forward into this sort of new wave and this new generation of health technology and development that I found unbelievably useful in my clinical practice. One is peptides. So these are, we all naturally produce peptides in the body. Actually, let me back up. When it comes to introducing the therapy, I think what ideally, what I like to use is something that is inherent to the body. So the body already knows what it is, right? So it’s fundamentally understood by the body. It has a communication that the body understands or it is a substance or technology that we know how to, that we can use to influence the body in a safe way that’s not going to push us too far outta balance, right? So there’s some things that are just so foreign to the body that I don’t, I think there’s only very small cases or individual cases that they become useful. I like to use things that are more universal. So something like peptides, we all produce them. When we’re young, we produce a ton of them. We’re producing them now inside the body. And peptides are just am strings of amino acids, right? But these amino acids like a piano, if they’re played the right way, they can produce beautiful music, the right strings of amino acids, turn on certain genes and turn off certain genes and ignite certain processes. And so we can use some of these peptides. Now, a lot of them right now are injectables, right? So unless you’re dealing with something really severe illness, then you may not wanna go down the injectable route. Most people don’t. And right now in the US, they’re only able to be sold for research purposes only. Now that doesn’t mean people aren’t using them for therapy to use. There’s a ton of people, maybe biohackers and people that are in regenerative medicine clinics and these type of things that are using peptides very successfully with the injectable.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Because they’re injectable. So if you’re not doing injectable peptides that you can do, they’re basically a food, anyway. So you can do

Jason Prall

Exactly.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

a non-injectable so injectables require that.

Jason Prall

Yup, injectables are highly therapeutic. They’re very specific. And the research has identified certain peptides that can turn on certain processes, right? And they’re beautiful for certain things. Now, most of them are not, we are not able to digest them or ingest them. As soon as we do our stomach acid breaks ’cause they’re fragile. They break down and the stomach acid and they just come down into a amino acids, and then the body’s gotta reconstitute ’em, and they kinda lose their whole point at that stage. There are a couple though that can be digested. We figured out ways to sort of resist the digestive processes so that they can exert their effects. One is, what they call TB4-FRAG. And this is Thymosin Beta-4, but this TB4-FRAG actually is able to resist that process of digestion and there’s some bioavailability there. Now this TB$-FRAGs, unbelievable for regeneration capacity, particularly with gut function, immune function, really, really beneficial. Another one is BPC-157 and this is another one that is, BPC stands for Body Protective Compound. And this is a peptide that basically, again, these signal certain processes to turn on just like PEMF in a totally different way, but similar idea, which is that it’s gonna ignite these processes of the body to repair and regenerate. And that’s why it’s called Body Protective Compound. They actually originally found it in the gastric juices in the digestive tract. 

So they found that there was this compound that was being produced that was initiated when healing response was necessary. So they thought, Oh, okay, we can identify this. They extracted it and sure enough, when you extract, and inject BPC-157 in a specific area, right in this specific like joint or something, unbelievable healing. When you take it orally, it actually works really well in the gut as well as anywhere throughout the body, it gets into the bloodstream and it basically goes and finds the healing that’s needed. So it’s beautiful because it can be taken over long periods of time and it just starts to work wherever it’s needed throughout the body. And so it’s a beautiful compound for that. So I love peptides, I love where they’re going. I think the next five or 10 years as we develop and understand more, we’re gonna have unbelievable technology to use there. And again, it’s operating on the principle that these peptides are created by the body. We’re tweaking them a little bit, but it’s the same thing. We’re speaking the language of the body. And so we’re basically telling it, Hey, turn on this healing capacity and that’s what the peptide does. It sort of unlocks the door for healing. So that’s a really, really good use is peptides. Another one, yeah, go ahead.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Oh, and I think that, you’re gonna have transdermals. You’re gonna have inhalants, nasal sprays, all sorts of things that are coming down the road.

Jason Prall

Absolutely. And there actually are transdermals that have been very effective too. So you can actually use those. So if you don’t wanna do the injection, transdermals really great for regeneration of the skin and face, people are using for cosmetic purposes. And apparently I haven’t used them yet, but I’m really excited to try them. Apparently they work beautifully. So instead of doing Botox and some of these other things that are really not good for the nerves and the structures of the body, this is a much better application. And so we can use these cosmetically. We can use them for joint pains and gastrointestinal issues. I mean, look, people with GI issues, BPC-157, TB4-FRAG, autoimmune conditions, these are fantastic. Like these are really, really good therapies. These are so far beyond the herbal and supplement protocols that I’ve been using for the last 15 years. These are next level. And so when you start to include these in your regimen, and then you include something like PMF, you’re talking about one-two combos that are just like insane for healing, that the aspects of the body that really need the healing without causing damage. Like that’s, what’s so cool. It’s not like if you take too much of this stuff, you’re gonna cause problems, that’s the beauty. You might be throwing money down the drain, you might just be wasting it. But the body is not… There’s no mechanism that it’s gonna cause issues with. So that’s why I like this stuff. That’s the beautiful aspect. Another really cool therapy that most people still aren’t sure about, which is kind of funny to me, but it’s using melatonin. And it’s actually using higher doses of melatonin. And so melatonin is a funny compound because we think about it solely as the sleep hormone. And yes, of course the pineal gland produces melatonin and it is involved with sleep architecture, and that’s great. But melatonin’s made in the mitochondria, it’s made in every cell throughout the body, except for red blood cells. 

And so what’s going on there? What is this melatonin doing? And it turns out that even when you supplement with high dose melatonin, there’s no negative feedback loop like other hormones. So when you take testosterone, or any other hormone, progesterone, DEHA, you actually start to saturate the receptors, and we can actually get this shut down response to the body ’cause the body’s trying to down regulate, ’cause it’s getting so much. This also gonna down regulate your own production and we have this negative feedback loop, and then when you come off of it, there’s problems and there’s issues there, but melatonin’s not the case. In fact, it’s so safe that they tried to, they have been able- they’ve tried to kill people with it. In other words, they tried to kill rodents with it and they can’t find the dose. It’s called an LD50, right? So it’s what dose is it gonna take to kill 50% of the study participant? And they can’t find it. That in fact in human studies, they’ve used something like 6.6 grams for really long periods of times. Now, most people are taking like a milligram, right? So times that by 6,000 and do that every day, and they can’t figure out any negative effects. So not only can they not figure out how much what’s the LD50 of melatonin, but if you look through the research, there’s no really no evidence of harm being caused by this stuff. It’s really, really interesting. 

Now it does because it is a master hormone, it will regulate other aspects of hormonal function. So in fact, in Europe they’ve been using it’s about 75 milligrams of melatonin plus progesterone as to as birth control. So it will affect things like progesterone and luteinizing hormone, and follicle stimulating hormone. So it’s a master regulator, but we actually, it’s kinda wanna suppress luteinizing hormone and follicle stimulating hormone as we age ’cause that actually rises. So there’s this interesting phenomena. At puberty, we actually see this, we have really high melatonin right before puberty, then puberty happens, melatonin falls, follicle stimulating hormone shoots up, luteinizing hormones shoots up and these are our sexual reproduction hormones. So we have this inverse relationship that’s happening with melatonin in these two hormones. Same thing happens at like 60, 65, after menopause and in about 60, 65 for men, we see this drop in melatonin and by the way, it’s dropping precipitately throughout our life. But there’s these real stark dropoffs at at about 60, 65. And then we see this massive increase in luteinizing hormone in follicle stimulating hormone. So there’s something going on there that has to do with aging and sort of maturation of the body. What’s interesting is that you can actually supplement with high dose melatonin and prevent or delay the onset of puberty. So we can actually, so it’s like melatonins acting as a break for a follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone, keeping it suppressed. And so yeah, you don’t wanna do that necessarily for puberty, but it’s interesting that that’s happened. 

What where we might wanna do it is in that age of 60, 65 is start taking a little bit higher dose of melatonin to suppress that follicle stimulating hormone, suppress luteinizing hormone and keep that low, and protect against these sort of diseases of aging in that way. But more importantly, melatonin is a master antioxidant. It is the number one antioxidant in the body. So not only does it have direct an antioxidant capacity and antioxidant, remember if it’s out of control, that’s what’s responsible for inflammation, that’s stimulating inflammation at the cellular level. So this quells that, and gobbles up these oxidative molecules in the body directly, it also has the capacity to turn on other antioxidant-related genes, superoxide dismutase, other things going on at the cellular level. So now it’s sort of like it’s acting as the soldiers taking care of things in the battlefield. And then it’s also acting as the general saying, kind of directing some of the other soldiers to clean up things. And then it also has another capacity to turn on anti-inflammatory genes. So it’s turning on these oxidative things, but it’s also influencing, IL10 and other in anti-inflammatory markers to help suppress or I’m sorry, not anti-inflammatory, suppress the inflammatory genes. So it’s gobbling up things and it’s also suppressing this inflammation. So this is what I’ve seen clinically is that it does an unbelievable job at cellular healing, at healing the gut, skin healing, wound healing, joint healing, these pains go away. I mean, it’s unbelievable what happens at the cellular level and this inflammation just starts to be mopped up by melatonin. And so you can use doses of five milligrams a day, 10 milligrams a day, 20, 50, 100. I’ve used up upwards of 200 milligrams a day of melatonin with myself and clients to clean up immune related issues, autoimmune conditions, gut related issues, and things like this that are chronic in nature and it’s really unbelievable what happens.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Do you do that temporarily or do you do that over an extended period of time? Those very high doses?

Jason Prall

Yeah, you can do it. I like to work up to those doses, just so people can feel if there’s any… And by the way, when I take those high levels, I don’t notice, it doesn’t change my sleep architecture. It doesn’t make me more groggy. It doesn’t make me sleep better necessarily. I sleep pretty good. Again, the light is what’s guiding that sleep rhythm in the darkness, but some people, it will affect their sleep. Everybody’s different. And so… 

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

For a second, salamanders.

Jason Prall

Say that again.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Make a lot of melatonin. It’s one of the original hormones antioxidants in the body. Teleologically speaking.

Jason Prall

Yeah, well, this is also what’s interesting about melatonin. I’m sorry, I was getting blinded by the light here. Melatonin is an ancient, ancient hormone. In fact, this is why the mitochondria likely make it is because it was first made by Cyanobacteria in the sort of evolution of organisms billions of years ago, they made melatonin. This is why all organisms make melatonin, plants make melatonin. So the it’s really, really a fundamental hormone if you wanna even call it that. But again, it doesn’t operate like a hormone in some senses. And so it’s so much more than just this sleep hormone. That’s what I really wanna get through is that it’s not like we take melatonin for sleep. That’s great. And then there’s a lot of longevity research that has been done on supplementing with melatonin, especially as we get into our 50s and 60s. And that research is focused on mimicking physiological doses when we were younger. And I think that’s really brilliant. I love that train of thought, I like that idea because I think if we can, ’cause that’s what happens as we get older, we lose our sleep architecture a little bit. And that’s part of what’s contributing to the rapid onset of aging and disease as we get older. So we can continue to get a little bit better sleep architecture, then that’s gonna prevent aging. Fundamentally though, it is a antioxidant molecule. It is going into the body and there’s studies that I’ve seen, it doesn’t actually, there’s no point at which it becomes oxidative. So in other words, what happens with oxidation, oxidation precipitates more oxidation. It’s like this chain, it just keeps oxidizing. 

Well, melatonin actually works in the opposite way, which is really weird ’cause not every antioxidant, so to speak, in the body will do this, but usually it’ll mop up what it can and it’s done. This actually precipitates and oxidate an antioxidative strain or chain the other way. So it actually keeps precipitating more antioxidant capacity. So it’s really, really unbelievable. Now theoretically, we could get into ’cause we’re balancing reduction in oxidation in the body, that’s healthy person, a healthy infant is gonna have really good balanced oxidation and reduction. So we may not need to precipitate tons of reductive capacity of antioxidant capacity, but I don’t see a lot a lot. So theoretically we could go too far into reduction and not enough oxidation, theoretically, that’s not what’s walking in my door. The people that I’m working with, especially as we get older, it’s all extra inflammation. It’s all this highly oxidative thing that’s going on at the cellular level. And partially because we live in a very destructive environmental state, right? Both mentally, emotionally, physically, there’s a lot of things that are precipitating this oxidative capacity. So using melatonin three times a week, five times a week, seven times a week, whatever the case is, but on a regular basis, what I say is start low, start with five milligrams, and use that for a week, go up to 10, and just keep going up until you start noticing beneficial changes. And what you’ll notice is softer skin, more smooth skin, more even colored skin. You’ll notice your stool formation starts to improve really, really well because there’s a lot of what happens at the microbiota level. It’s actually your microbiota are responding to melatonin. So they are fundamentally influenced by melatonin and there’s something called swarming that happens. They start to get together and start to, their activity increases of the beneficial strains. It actually promotes the growth of Akkermansia muciniphila, which is really responsible for the mucin layer of the gut. It’s unbelievable. 

I could go on and on about what this does at these levels. Another important thing that melatonin does. And this is particularly related to immune issues as well as aging, which is that it regrows the thymus. Now the thymus has not talked about a lot in health circles, which is really funny, but the thymus is responsible for T-cells. So this is fundamentally the immune response of the body. And when we get into things like autoimmunity, food sensitivity, this is all related to TH1, TH2, TH17 and THReg. So regulatory T-cells are the T-cells that kind of govern the balance of TH1 and TH2. TH1 and TH2 are your inflammation molecules. And so we want a balance of TH1 and TH2, TReg helps us do that. Melatonin and what’s governing all those functions is a healthy thymus. So the interesting thing about the thymus is that it starts to lose, it’s really big when we’re young. And then in about puberty, it starts to shrink and it starts to gain fatty tissue around it. So it starts to lose its capacity, its functional capacity. Exactly, so we’re losing our functional capacity for our immunity at 13 or 15 or whatever. That’s remarkable. that’s before, we’re still developing and somehow the thymus is starting to degrade. So there’s something really interesting. And again, remember what I said happens at 13 to 15, melatonin drops, LH and FSH increase. So there’s a relationship between the melatonin, the thymus and those luteinizing hormone, follicle stimulating hormone. 

So if we can keep melatonin high, particularly in our 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and onward, not only can we preserve thymus function, we can actually regrow thymus function. And what’s interesting about the thymus too, is that not only is it degrading on a sort of linear level, but we can have these events, whether it’s a mold infection, we can have various events in our life that really ramp up inflammation and create havoc in the body. And we can have something like this sort of spontaneous thymic involution, this thymic reduction capacity just instantaneously happened in a very short order because of some inflammatory state. So a lot of us have gone some, gone through something like that, especially in the health space. So if we go through a health crisis of some kind, it’s quite possible that we lost a lot of thymic function. So we really need to grow functional thymic cells back to help produce the TH1, TH2, TReg balance that will take us out of autoimmunity, take us out of food sensitivity and stop reacting to everything in our environment, the chemicals, all the things. And we start to react to only the things that are truly threats, which are infections and these type of things. And so we balance our inflammation in a really, really important way. And again, melatonin’s doing that, right? So, I mean, this is what’s fascinating. Dr. Pawluk, you can go look at the melatonin research for days and days, and it’s like, you can’t find anything bad. I mean, it’s so weird that it’s been demonized or people have this idea of like don’t supplement with melatonin, and I’m sensitive to that ’cause for the last number of years, I followed that same idea. Like let’s just mimic physiological doses, that makes sense to me. 

We don’t wanna do anything crazy here. It’s a hormone, you know, let’s just take caution. But the more research I do, the more I find that there’s literally nothing. It’s like melatonin needs a good PR like they’ve they need a PR rep to help restore its image because it’s so funny that that people think it’s bad, but it is unbelievable from a clinical perspective when you use something like higher doses of melatonin, you see nothing but good things happen. I mean, again, the biggest thing for me is when my skin starts getting better, softer, more luscious, it tans easier, and my stool is forming more consistent on a regular basis. And what you wanna look for in stool formation is that it should look like a ban- it should have the consistency of a banana. It should come out smooth and easy. Shouldn’t have like bumps or anything. And it should be this long stool that’s banana and should curl up on the bottom, and it should not leave any marks. Like that’s the ideal stool. So the closer we can get to that on a regular basis, that’s a good sign that your gut is functioning in a really, really healthy way. So the melatonin is being- the receptors are all over the gut lining. It’s affecting microbiota, it’s affecting mitochondria, it’s affecting DNA. This is why I think it’s so impactful. And it’s why I think if you use something like melatonin, like peptides and like PEMF in combination for inflammatory conditions, I mean, look out.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

What PMFs are you using?

Jason Prall

Good question, I actually don’t have any PMFs. Dr. Pawluk, I need somebody like you to come work on me.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, I’ll recommend something to you offline.

Jason Prall

But that’s true, actually, I would like to. I’m in relatively good health, but I do have some old injuries that I’m consistently working on. And so I’ve been doing a lot of reconstruction essentially, with various movements to get the structure back and the alignment back, but I do need some help with the persistent pain deep in this shoulder from playing baseball in college and things.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, beyond that, we talked about charge at the beginning, we talked about mitochondria. PEMFs increase ATP dramatically. ATP, unfortunately is basically local. It doesn’t circulate really. It’s all produced locally pretty well. And we produce our body weight and ATP every day.

Jason Prall

It’s amazing.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Every molecule of ATP is recycled between 200 to 500 times a day, right? So it’s constantly moving, constantly changing. Now PMFs increase, they increase the total cycling process of ATP. That means…

Jason Prall

And with that real quick, sorry, I wanna interrupt that ’cause one of the things too, I decided to this train, I didn’t wanna lose. When you produce ATP, there’s a byproduct of ADP that when we use ATP, and that helps sleep, right? So this is perhaps one of the reasons why it helps sleep.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well you break down ATP into ADP, right? Now the ADPs, they’re used as a substrate to make it more ATP. So the more ATP you’re producing, the more ADP you’re gonna produce, not all of the ADP is gonna be used to make ATP.

Jason Prall

Right, and in the brain, ADP’s used to bind to certain receptors and in fact that’s why caffeine works ’cause it actually gets in there and binds to those receptors instead of ADP. And this is what keeps us awake. It’s not a stimulant actually, it’s a sleep suppressant. And so I know whenever I work out, whenever I use more ATP, so to speak, I have such better sleep, and part of that is because it’s ADP. And so, I suspect that PEMF is working through some of that same process, almost like exercise would be without the sort of inflammation that comes with exercise.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

So I guess my concept of magnetic therapy then basically, but you’re doing it on a regular basis. You’re increasing charge of the body. We don’t control what happens.

Jason Prall

Right.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

The body decides what it’s gonna do with that energy. So anything else that you’re doing, magnetic field therapy, just basically amp, using the word, amps it up. So then, and it’s a wave, so you amp yourself up and then you ride that wave for a certain amount of time. So people will ask me how much treatment should I do? Listen to your body. ‘Cause you know, if you have a million biochemical processes per second, and every cell of the body, you have a hundred trillion cells, how much treatment do you need? I don’t know. And there are people are selling magnetic therapy devices say just eight minutes a day, that’s all you need, eight minutes a day. But if you’re well, you probably don’t need that much. And I know people who do it at magnetic field therapy at bedtime and go, whong. But most people, I would say 90% of people who do at bedtime sleep better, ’cause they’re gonna sleep deeper, the cells are more restored. Things are more balanced ’cause whatever you’re doing is going to be used throughout the body. It’s not just gonna be used locally, whether you do local or whole body. And I clearly recommend whole body primarily.

Jason Prall

Yeah, and that’s how I’ve used it. And I think you’re right, that makes sense to me, is you’re basically, bringing things back into alignment so that you’re shutting off that sympathetic drive. You’re shutting off the inflammation at the cellular level. You’re increasing coherence and the parasympathetic puts you in a body in the restful state and you can fall asleep naturally. That’s how I’ve actually used it. My friend had one when I was living in LA and that was where most of my use came from was using his, and as a whole body machine. And I noticed really good sleep with it. That was one of the fundamental things. ‘Cause I was tracking my sleep and I typically get good sleep, I always wake up restful, but when I was tracking my sleep with that, I did notice that my deep sleep increased and my REM increase as well. So this the period, the time that I spent in light sleep or in that slight wake up mode was much less.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

The one system I recommend the most now is from Israel. It’s called the Parmeds Multi Flash. It’s not cheap, but it’s a high enough intensity. That’s gonna reach deep enough into the body and throughout the brain. So 30-minute treatment, once or twice a day, you ought to be humming, but it’s not reliant on frequencies. So we don’t have to worry about frequencies. This is all about Faraday’s law, it’s all about increasing the charge in the body.

Jason Prall

Right, absolutely. And this is one thing, I mean, look, I’m actually at that point now, I’m just cross 40 and I’m sort of just dawning on me that I’m getting older and took me a while to figure that out. But I’m realizing that it’s actually important for me to maintain and to do these things on a regular basis, to maintain this function. Again, and a lot of it is in the research I do in longevity, and as we cross 40 and 50, man, these things just start accelerating in normal state. And so the more we can do to sort of slow that process down and I don’t, I’m not one who actually thinks that we can live forever. I know there’s some people out there futurists that like to think that way, I think there’s this natural process that we go through that we call aging that is important, it’s important to get older. But what it’s not important to do is to get sick and to have all this pain, right? And to digress, and so I think that’s what I fundamentally believe that we can get older and not suffer in those ways, and still participate in life like we always wanted. And that’s really what what I’m trying to do here. And so I think I’m actually, let me write this down, say that again, ’cause I’m not recording this. I know you are, but what’s the device?

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

It’s called Parmeds, P-A-R-M-E-D-S like, par and then meds like medications, Parmeds Multi Flash.

Jason Prall

Multi Flash, beautiful. Cool.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

It’s on our website, drpawluk.com.

Jason Prall

That’s beautiful. That’s on my list because that’s actually one of the things that I wasn’t sure exactly what to get. So I’m really glad I got that advice from you ’cause, and there’s look, there’s a lot of people talking about PMFs and they all recommend different things, but I like the way you think when it comes to using this post-magnetic to induce Faraday’s law, which induces current and the natural healing, that’s what I’m looking for.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Now, there are places for frequencies, but I don’t worry so much about frequency. What most of us need is more energy.

Jason Prall

Totally, totally. We need more coherence to that cellular level, to induce those intakes.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

And amplification of our, all of our processes get amplified.

Jason Prall

Totally agreed. That’s what I’m looking for. Beautiful, I love that.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Well, fantastic. Jason, this is a fantastic roaming interview and I learned something absolutely new about the melatonin ’cause people are afraid of melatonin. They’re told to turn off all the kinds of other things. And I know that in cancer people often use pretty high doses. And quite frankly, the highest doses I was looking at were people were using that 20 milligrams. But now Hey, gloves off, gloves off.

Jason Prall

There’s stuff, there’s studies actually they use 600 milligrams a day for a long periods of time. So this stuff is extremely safe. It’s used actually in the NICU when babies are in really dire circumstances, little dosing with melatonin, high doses of melatonin into newborns and it’s effective. And again, cancer therapy too. As a standalone treatment, it’s being tested and utilized. In Europe, not so much in the US, they don’t really like that here, but in combination we use it here. And so yeah, it’s tremendously effective. Again, I really encourage people to look at the research on it and you can just go into Pubmed, and type in melatonin, and you find some very fascinating studies. It’s tremendous.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

I’m gonna warn my wife that I’m gonna get locked up for the next few days, learning about melatonin.

Jason Prall

Let me just say this too ’cause if anybody is interested in going and looking for to experiment with melatonin, there’s suppository forms with the company I like is called MitoGen. They boost the suppository of high dose melatonin. And the reason that’s good is because it’s really good deliverability. Good of bioavailability. If you take standard capsules or standard drops of melatonin, actually not much of it’s available. It’s like 2% or actually, the research says two to 75% availability. So you’re rolling in the dice on that. The other way is liposomal, so there’s good liposomal forms, Quicksilver has a good liposomal melatonin. You just take a bunch of pumps of that and you can absorb that through the mucosa of the mouth. And that’s really good at bioavailability, but I like suppository, it’s a very weird form. I know people aren’t used to sticking things up the rectal area, but it’s easy. It works and I’ve seen and believe me…

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Do it at bedtime?

Jason Prall

Exactly, that’s exactly right. And that’s where the healing happens anyway. Most of it’s happening at night, right? So we can induce those processes at night. So yeah, it’s beautiful. I love that I can introduce that here ’cause it’s been so clinically important for me and my clients.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Fantastic, thanks again. I know you have a hard stop, so we’ll have to let you go. Unfortunately, we can talk for hours.

Jason Prall

It’s been a pleasure. Well, yeah, and I’ve got a summit coming up, so I’m gonna invite you on to talk about PEMF in a deep way, so that I can learn from you and bring that to my audience as well.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

I appreciate it, and I look forward to it very much always. Thanks again.

Jason Prall

Thanks Dr. Pawluk.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

Enjoy the rest of your day and good luck with everything that you’re doing.

Jason Prall

All right, take care all.

William Pawluk, M.D., MSc

All the best. Live well and long, or as they say live long and prosper.