peptides

Peptide Therapy for Healthy Aging and Skin

Dr. Cates: Welcome to The Spa Dr. Podcast. I’m Dr. Trevor Cates. Today we’re talking about peptide therapy for healthy aging and skin. My guest is Dr. Mitch Fleisher who is a double board certified licensed family physician specializing in anti-aging, regenerative medicine, STEM cell therapy, constitutional homeopathy, nutritional and botanical medicine and IV therapy with over 30 years of experiencing practicing integrative medicine. In fact, he was my family physician when I was younger and was a big part of the reason why I ended up being passionate about natural medicine and going to naturopathic medical school. So I’m very appreciative of Dr. Mitch and excited to have him back on the podcast. He is the author of Alternative DrMCare Natural Medical Self-Care Protocols© designed to help people help themselves with natural therapies and he is the Medical Director of the Center for Integrative and Regenerative Medicine in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains in Afton, Virginia. In today’s interview, Dr. Mitch explains what medicinal peptides are, how they’re different from drugs, the benefits of peptide therapy, and what conditions they effectively treat, including aging and skin concerns. So please enjoy this interview with Dr. Mitch.

New Speaker: Dr. Mitch, it’s so great to have you back on The Spa Dr. Podcast, welcome.

Dr. Mitch: Thank you Trevor. So good to see you again. Happy new year and blessings for the new decade.

Dr. Cates: Yes, of course. A 20/20 vision, right? Yep. So, last time you came on the podcast, you talked about homeopathy and today you’re talking about something quite different, right? So this is kind of a little bit newer thing for you. You’ve been doing a lot of research on this, so tell everybody what you’re up to.

Dr. Mitch: Well, you know, I’m always looking at the cutting edge of things to try to find something more that’ll help my patients and my friends and family, including your family, my family with the rest of us. And over the last several years I’ve been exploring this new evolving, cutting edge medical science called peptide therapy. And what medicinal peptides are, they are specific biodentical that means the same as any human body, protein, amino acid sequences. And they can be used to repair, to regenerate the support and approve the structure and function of different parts of the mind and body. And there’s a lot of well known examples. Like for example, the most famous of all the peptides is insulin, which has been around known since the 1920s. And it’s helped save the lives of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. That is a peptide hormone and theres lots of other naturally occurring human peptides for example, ACTH from the adrenal glands, Glucagon, growth hormone, even thyroid hormone is a peptide. And there’s over 7,000 peptides that have been discovered to be naturally occurring in the human body and we all have them from when we were born, we’d have them our whole lives. Uh, and over 200 of the medicinal peptides are currently in clinical practice and actually 60 of them are FDA, certified for use. So doctors that are trained like myself can prescribe them for our patients. What excites me about these is that peptides are just amazing in that they’re very highly specific and very effective in their therapeutic action. They’re typically very, very safe, when prescribed correctly by a trained physician and extremely well tolerated. And what’s particularly important to understand is the difference between state or pharmaceutical drugs and these medicinal peptides, you know, whereas with conventional pharmaceutical drugs, the, your body, because these are foreign chemicals that your body has never seen before, your body will have a rack reaction to them.

Dr. Mitch: You know, unfortunately, which often includes unpleasant, possibly harmful side effects, sometimes lethal. For example, when you see some of these monoclonal antibodies, in the ads on TV where people are dancing around throwing flowers or playing music, those drugs, when they, when they’re giving me a little spiel about all the side effects of last thing they mentioned is death, not a great side effect. What the difference is is that with peptides, these are human communication molecules. So the body does not have a reaction to them, it has a response. So when you put these human medicinal peptides back into the body, the body says, Whoa, thank you. I’ll have that again. Okay, I’ll do this. For example, insulin’s job is to tell the other cells, open up your pores to let sugar and other stuff out and make fat. That’s its job. And all the different peptide hormones have their own job.

Dr. Mitch: And there are several now that we have available to us that have some pretty remarkable functions. You know, and with, when you’re, when they’re properly prescribed by especially transpositions, these medicinal peptides can communicate with specific cells, tissues and vital organs in the body, and the mind by binding to receptors, you know, like a lock and key hypothesis. And they help to promote greater health and wellbeing and potentially a longer higher quality of life. And that’s why I’m excited about it because they’re natural. They work with the body just like homeopathy and nutritional therapy and the basis of naturopathic medicine. Some of the benefits of peptide therapy can include, Oh, increased energy and stamina by helping to regenerate the mitochondria, which is the battery inside of all of our cells, a bit on mental focus and memory. There are certain neuropeptides that actually help regrow nerves in the brain and to, actually increase what’s called, subtle arborization of branching of the neurons.

Dr. Mitch: So they connect with more nerves and you can think clearer and better and you store memory better. They have, they can strengthen the immune system and balance it. In fact, when we were little babies, we have this big gland in our chest called the thymus gland and that thymus gland produces certain thymic peptides that are very, very important. And as we get older and stresses through life and toxicity, that gland shrinks and shrinks and shrinks. So we produce less of those thymic peptides. We now have those thymic peptides, particularly Ta1 thymic. thymosin alpha one and TB4 which is thymysin beta four available to us because the technology has been developed in the last few decades for the manufacture of those, those particular peptides, we can create biodentical that is exact molecules to the human to what’s in the human body by putting the amino acids into this device and it will churn them out.

Dr. Mitch: It’s very difficult to make, but they can be made and they make them up now to 99.8% purity, which was required to the FDA for insulin and all peptides. But we now have those available through special compounding pharmacies to be able to prescribe. So the other things they’ll do is they’ll improve recovery from illnesses and wounds. There’s wonderful peptides for wound healing. They can increase muscle mass and tone. We know that for sure especially with the growth hormone peptides, stimulate peptides, they can increase bone density so they can help people with osteopenia, osteoporosis, so the fittings in your field, they are really, really good for increasing skin elasticity and helping to reduce and repair wrinkled skin by helping increase fibroblastic activity, the production of collagen elastin fibers. They can also create fuller hair. There’s certain peptides that are really good at regenerating the hair follicles and stimulating them to produce more collagen, which is what hair is made out of.

Dr. Mitch: And to increase blood flow, they’ve been shown to help control body weight by helping burn body fat thermogenesis. And improve weight loss. They’ve also been shown to help heart function by decreasing cholesterol, chlorine lipid levels, that can also decrease joint and muscle pain. There’s some better work specifically on inflammation and to help regenerate cartilage which is the cushion between bones, ligaments, tendons, muscles. I’ve experienced that myself directly and stuff these things are great. It goes, there’s also peptides for helping be deepen and help rejuvenate youth during sleep. And there’s also ones for, for our enhancing sex drive, which is a lot of people like too. And for the professionals out there who are listening to the audience does specific that we’re using peptides for are for anti-aging and regeneration of an entire body and mind, which is the field that I’ve been in becoming involved in integrative regenerative medicine.

Dr. Mitch: I find that the peptides work very well in concert with constitutional homeopathy and nutritional therapy with detoxification and standard naturopathic therapy methodologies for helping to bring people to a state of health that we previously couldn’t achieve without the peptides. They’re very, very good for tissue repair of the bones. The cartilage ligaments, tendons, joints, muscles and skin. They help to balance endocrine hormones. They will definitely help with regrowth and restoration of the hair. They’re very, very good when prescribed accurately and over enough period of time for any kind of inflammatory, acute and chronic inflammatory disorders, like arthritis, degenerative or rheumatoid arthritis they’ll work for. I’ve had several cases who’ve responded beautifully, who have had a psoriatic arthritis, which is a combination of psoriasis and arthritis. The peptides work beautifully in those cases topically and by an injection.

Dr. Mitch: They also work in autoimmune disorders like systemic lupus. Multiple sclerosis I’ve had some cases respond. Sjogren’s disorder, which is the dry eye syndrome. Again they help with cognitive mood and memory enhancement. Especially they get very useful in pseudo protection from oxidative stress. That is that you can use peptides to help protect the skin and other parts of the body from oxidative stress, free radicals. There are certain peptides that help protect the skin from UVB light, silver, light radiation. And also internally, there this peptides that have been used for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. For example, there is a particular peptide that’s been used in Europe for years called cerebrolysin. That is an extract, that contains some of the most powerful human neuropeptides like BDMF, which is brain derived neurotrophic factor, which actually actually regenerates the nerves in your brain and regenerates glial cells to support your nerves.

Dr. Mitch: So this is really powerful stuff. And it’s supposed to use also in post stroke recovery. Someone who’s had a stroke doesn’t need to just lay around in misery for their lives. We now have peptides that regenerate the brain, regrow the blood vessels to the brain restore function. It’s been used in obesity and weight management, again for osteopenia and osteoporosis. Very, very effective. In addition to using, exercise and correct nutrition, mineral attrition. Also very helpful in anxiety and stress disorders and depression. There’s certain peptides specifically you can use that actually help to support and regenerate the nerves, the neurons in your brain that produce serotonin and dopamine, which are the neurotransmitters that balance your mood and cognition. These are, these are the seronurtured and doponutured nerves, but we have specific peptides that will improve that function.

Dr. Mitch: There’s also ones that improve insomnia. I tried one the other night it’s called salav. It knocks you for a loop. You sleep deeper than you ever have before. Very simple peptide. Again, there’s also ones that improve erectile dysfunction benefit men and wo improve libido. So there’s a really, really wide range of peptides for just about everything you can imagine. And we’re really at just at the beginning of this, this has just been around for, you know, 20, 30 years and more and more research is happening. We have 60 that are approved by the FDA now and they expect by, other than that this decade, there may be three or 400 available to us. I am a member of a, an organization called the IPS, International Peptide Society with doctors around the world who are doing clinical, and base assigned research to expand our knowledge of the use of peptides in clinical practice.

Dr. Mitch: Something very important to understand though, is that a word of caution or you know, you’ll find on the internet as you did, as people did with, hormones, especially androgens, testosterone and other agents like that. They’re there on the online and you’ve gotta be, you gotta watch out for the stuff that’s available online. I wouldn’t go out, I wouldn’t recommend your audience going out and just buying peptides online and shooting yourself up or putting on your body because these medicinal peptides, they really should only be maintained, obtained from FDA certified 503a or 503b US compounding pharmacies that provide peptides that are 99.8% pure and with chemical integrity, then you’re reassured to receive the highest quality FDA regulated pharmaceutical grade medicinal peptides by US law. I would never purchase peptides online from discount websites because they are not regulated.

Dr. Mitch: And they have been found to be all adulterated, substandard, and often fraudulent. And you don’t even have the active ingredient in them. And some of them are from far away countries that you can’t trust. This is a definite case in which the principle of cognate emptor, buyer beware applies. You know, and moreover, you know, the medicinal peptides are powerful medicines that should and must be carefully prescribed and individually managed by a specially trained licensed medical physician who understands the correct peptides to use and the dosages to use for different health conditions. You know, peptide therapy requires expert medical guidance to experience and benefit from their exceptional therapeutic potential. So I just want to make your audience aware of that fact that although these are really wonderful substances, you really should get guidance and use them and get them from, have them prescribed for you by top-notch US Pharmacies that do it right..

Dr. Cates: In your practice Mitch, what’s it like when people come in to see you? How do you, determine which of these peptides to give, how do you administer them? Can you kind of walk people through what it’s like cause you do this in your clinic in Virginia, right?

Dr. Mitch: Right. I do. Well it depends on, you know, like I do for any other condition if they came in for homeopathic or any kind of evaluation, I look at the whole person. I look at all their physical, mental, emotional symptoms, a unique way in which they experience all those symptoms. And I look and see, okay, is there a disturbance in their metabolism or they have had they had some trauma or do they have some sort of chronic inflammatory autoimmune or viral condition, infectious condition that needs support. And, I find that using the specific peptide for that unique condition in conjunction with nutritional therapy and homeopathic therapy is the most supportive approach. What I could do is I can give you some examples of the peptides that I might use for say, skin conditions.

Dr. Cates: Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. Any case studies that, you know, people, we always love to hear about success stories.

Dr. Mitch: Sure, sure. Well one of the, one of the best, one of the first peptides that I personally use, that’s really quite a remarkable substance, it’s called BPC157, which stands for body protection compound 157 and this is a pentadecapeptide that means its compose the 15 amino acids. And you know, just to give you a brief overview of the chemistry of this so people understand a peptide is when you have a string or a chain of peptides of amino acids less than 50. That’s a peptide. From 50 to a hundred is a polypeptide when it’s over a hundred amino acids called a protein. And again, I mentioned before, the human body has over 7,000 known peptides that are communication molecules. They actually are signal molecules that bind to receptors on ourselves and turn on functions.

Dr. Mitch: They turn on either genes, they make enzymes where they make our body work and that’s what really kicked us alive and functioning on all level. I mean the most powerful of all the peptides in human body is produced in a gland on the brain called the pituitary gland, which is the master ednocrine gland that controls every, all the other glands and the front of it has these cells called somatotrophs and they produce a hormone called growth hormone, a somathmedin zunotrophin that is the master hormone in the whole body. And its main job. It has many functions, but its main job is to help all the cells regenerate, regrow, and keep you going. And this is just one of many that does that. BPC, specifically is a segment of a larger peptide and its main job is to act as a potent anti-inflammatory to combat inflammation in the entire respiratory.

Dr. Mitch: It also works phenomenally well, helping to stimulate the STEM cells, Mesenchymal STEM cells that regenerate cartilage at regenerated ligaments, tendons, bone, blood vessels. And also can help heal peripheral nerves and brain cells. There’s many multiple functions of the body that it works with growth on what your regenerate tissues it can improve general digestive function. I’ve used it in people who have really terrible irritable bowel syndrome with a lot of cramps, gas and some bloating. I’ve used it in people who have had bouts of SIBO, which is a small intestinal bowel disease. And also with people who have leaky gut syndrome for like celiac disease or food allergies where the cells in their gut are broken apart and things get absorbed that you don’t want to get absorbed. BPC taken orally, for 30 day and 60 day course of just a minimum amount, like 500 micrograms which is a tiny amount once a day. And I’ve seen phenomenal results in the resolution of symptoms such that their bowel is tightened up again, inflammation is decreased. They’re able to eat foods again, they were allergic to without so much effect. In fact, I just had a woman call me last week who I’d given a 30 day course who’d been suffering from a disease called eosinophilic esophagitis, which is allergies in the esophagus and also severe infection of the entire gut with a bug called Helicobacter pylori. She’d taken tons of antibiotics and months of lots of doctors couldn’t get rid of it. One 30 day course of this that you called me up crying, can I please have more I felt the best I’ve felt in years. It’s very gratifying.

New Speaker: I’ve also used BPC157topically for the treatment of inflammation in tendons for knee pain for elbow pain, for muscle tears and injuries, very effective. It’s also been helpful for people with eczema and psoriasis to calm that down. It also has been shown to, when taken internally, to help heal gastric and duodenal ulcers, and reflux disease so people can get off the protein pump inhibitors that decreased digestive ability and can cause Alzheimer’s longterm use. So you can get them off of that, which is nice. Definitely helps promote the healing of inflammatory disease. I’ve had a patient with Crohn’s disease, one with ulcerative colitis, it completely stopped their flareups and they’re better. It definitely helps promote healing and protection of the liver from toxic insults, like injuries from alcohol, from antibiotics and other drugs that can be hepatotoxic. It definitely helps to repair damaged nerves like when someone’s developed a peripheral neuropathy, whether it’s from diabetes or from direct trauma like from a motor vehicle accident, that people who have had chronic pain and numbness and weakness in their lower limbs from injury nerve injury and taking supplements longterm just had a modest effect.

Dr. Mitch: The drugs they were given by therapists did nothing like Neurontin and just a several week course of the BPC157 and a few other peptides was very, very helpful at restoring nerve function and helping feel a lot better. The BPC157 also has some central effects, neuroprotective effects and that is specifically helps modulate the serotonin Erdrich and dopaminergic neurons in the brain. Those are the ones that produce the neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin that kind of improve your mood, keep you from having, anxiety, depression, OCD, ADD, ADHD, and autism. It’s helpful in that as well I’ve given it autistic children with, with good results. It’s been used very effectively in the treatment of traumatic brain injury, TBI and post-concussion syndromes, taken by intromusc via subcutaneous injection. So this particular peptide, several, several peptides can be given by subcutaneous injection, like an insulin injection where you just pinch an inch and just poke a little tiny needle painless.

Dr. Mitch: I’ve done it to myself. It’s easy. Nothing to be afraid of. A BPC is one of those that can be given orally. There’s just a few others. They’re developing technology now to try to make more peptides orally. Just a few of them are given by intramuscular injection, but the vast majority are just by a simple subcutaneous injection once or twice a day very effectively.

Dr. Cates: And so with your patients, do they all need, so it sounds like not everybody needs to come into your clinic that you could do some of this from a distance?

Dr. Mitch: That’s true. I, you know, I, my practice it’s all over the country actually. I’ve an international practice from where I’m located because where we are located, people from the State Department would come down to vacation to Wintergreen, they would see my sign and come in and become patients.

Dr. Mitch: So yeah all I need to do is take a good history, find out exactly what’s going on, what are the conditions that are dealing with, I have them do some lab work so I have some baselines to know the level of inflammation or whatever, what else is going on with their metabolism. And then I can call the prescription into the pharmacy and it’s delivered directly to their home. And I explain exactly how to do it. The pharmacist I use also do a very nice job of creating little placards of how to give yourself a subcutaneous injection or muscular injection if you need to. But once you learn to how to do it, it’s, it’s really quite simple and we give them the exact protocol of how much to use, how, when do you use it, how long do you use it for. And then we follow up and evaluate their progress, both subjectively the see how they’re feeling. And objectively we look at lab values and it’s been a gratifying practice and medicine now and it’s really evolving.

Dr. Cates: Okay. And so when it comes to skin, you talked about the anti-aging benefits of skin. What about things like acne, eczema, rosacea, other, other skin problems?

Dr. Mitch: Yeah, there are specific peptides that I’ve been shown to be very effective for decreasing inflammation. And the metabolic imbalances in the body that sort of lead to acne. You know, the large majority of acne is, is due to poor diet. And when people are eating too many refined carbs and sugars, that’s going to imbalance the insulin glucagon ratios and mess up their liver function. It just make life, you know, uh, make their bodies not function very well. And I find I have to clean up their diet first, just like you do in your books and what you recommend. For example, you know, you can, you can take all the naturopathic remedies and all the homeopathic remedies, all the peptides and all the medicines in the world. But if you don’t get regular exercise and eat healthy, your body is gonna rebel against you. And maybe this bottom line things you have to know, you have to get enough sleep. You can’t live on three hours of sleep party all night and thinking it’d be healthy.

Dr. Mitch: But you know, the, the wonderful thing is that we have specific tools now on the beauty of peptides is that they are communication molecule. So once you’ve got a clean body, they can communicate the right signal and say, Oh yeah, you want to do this? Okay, we’ll do this. As long as I’m not so toxic. Okay. But fortunately we do have some peptides that help the body detoxify too. Cause one of the things that happens with people is when they’ve lived a really unhealthy life and they’ve got not enough exercise, sleep or good nutrition, their cells would become toxic. And you go from having these healthy quiescence cells that are actively regenerating, regrowing to what we call senescent cells, thats cells that have no longer can regenerate. They can’t go through metatosis or regrowth. So those senescent cells are just sitting there and they’re using up energy in the body.

Dr. Mitch: The bad thing about a senescent cell or a cell that’s now senile or old is they produce pro-inflammatory toxins and peptides like TNF-alpha. And, I also IL1 or IL6 these different, peptides and immune factors that promote inflammation of the body. And if you have enough of those senescent cells around, they will also injure the other surrounding cells and the kind of the garbage and the pro-inflammatory peptides they’re producing inside the guys will also weaken your STEM cells, which are the things that regenerate skin and all of your vital organs. So there are, fortunately there are certain peptides that we can use in addition to good diet and nutrition and exercise that will help clear out the senescent cells that will help promote apoptosis or programmed, spontaneous cancer cell death in the senescent cells so that they either get converted back to healthy quiescence cells or they’re die, they die off and then your body gets detoxified and then you can heal. You know, it was told to me in one of the seminars by a world famous peptide doctors, Dr. Bill Seeds that if you were to start peptide therapy with good nutrition and exercise before 55 years of age, you could potentially live to 150 but not just live there, live healthily to 150. So I was at 66 and a half so I’m going to try and make it to 125 if I can. Okay. So there’s definitely four peptides that really specifically help the skin and dermatological conditions. There are three that are most often used. And, uh, that’s BPC157 that’s often used topically and by subcutaneous injection orally because it’s been shown to help both acute and chronic inflammatory conditions.

Dr. Mitch: And certainly things like chronic acne or cystic acne is definitely a chronic inflammatory condition. So it’ll help calm that down. It also helps to improve collagen and elastin fiber production and to help improve the quality of the skin. Probably the of the most famous of all the peptides that’s used for dermatological conditions, and it’s actually used by the cosmetic industry is a specific peptide called GHKCU, which is a combination of three different peptides. It’s a tri-peptide. And what GHKCU does, it helps decrease infectious processes in the skin, which is proud of what acne is all about. It helps to attract immune cells, to the skin and other parts of the body that need support, which is very important. It’s very, very involved in wound healing.

Dr. Mitch: It stimulates the production of collagen and the proteoglycans and glycosaminoglycans in the skin, fibroblasts, those are the cells that create the collagen, elastin fibers so that you can heal tissues. It also helps to prevent scar formation by helping appropriate skin remodeling. It’s being used in burn units, both, topically and sprayed on and take by injection to help improve the healing of really bad burn wounds so that you don’t have scarring. It actually increases accumulation of the total amount of proteins glucose, glycosaminoglycans DNA in your wounds so that they remodel and heal much, much better. And it’s GHK is actually a bit, it’s in the body from when we’re little kids and we actually have it circulating in our system we have about 200 micrograms percent when we’re younger.

Dr. Mitch: And by the time you reach your sixties and older, you only have about 60, 80 micrograms percent which a whole lot less, so certainly we can benefit from it. So it’s something that’s already on our system. And by using it topically and by injection, you can improve a lot of things. It’s also a very interesting molecule is that it’s in a group of what’s called a copper peptides. And copper, as it turns out, is a critically important mineral in wound healing and in brain function. And in fact, the brain has more copper than any other parts of the body. But what’s really interesting is that the GHK binds copper in a way that in it’s nontoxic form. Uh, the nontoxic form of copper is copper+2 whereas the toxic form is copper + 1.

Dr. Mitch: So it actually prevents the formation of toxic copper. So that’s another really important mechanism for it. And also a GHKCU also increases the synthesis of really important substance of peptide called decorum. And decorum has been shown to increase proteoglycan production and regulates glycogen synthesis in the skin and regulates wound healing. And it also has specific anti-tumor effects. So GHKCU has been used in the treatment of skin cancers and also internal ones. So this has a lot, you know, some very, very interesting properties.

Dr. Cates: Are these administered via injection that subcutaneous or intramuscular or topical or all of the above?

Dr. Mitch: The GSKCU is specifically used by transdermal or topical route. In some combinations that I’ll explain and the main route went for what you’re trying to treat internal processes is by sub Q injection usually.

Dr. Mitch: And it’s not forever too because what’s interesting is these peptides sort of stimulate the communication process and you can do it in cycles. Usually GSKCU is given subcutaneously for 21 day cycles, a twice a year. And that’s enough to regenerate a lot of processes. If people have more serious conditions, like they have a lot of serious conditions of the skin. Eczema, psoriasis, severe acne, cystic acne are other disorders. They might want to do it in 21 day cycles four times a year. So it depends. You have to individualize it for the person and measure their inflammatory markers, look at the whole person. And so there’s a lot of phenomenal science behind these things. I can go into the details of some of this stuff, but I think it’s probably above the level of the audience here.

Dr. Cates: It can be a little bit overwhelming.

Dr. Mitch: But what’s really cool is that it’s been proven in multiple clinical studies to increase the rate of healing three times. So you could have a wound and sit there and put aloe on it or whatnot and try to heal it, but if you were to, put a GSKCU on it, it will heal three times as fast and the wound will heal better. So it’s really quite remarkable substance. What’s interesting is GSKCU is also used in combination with another peptide called Zinc Thymulin. And thymulin is one of the thymus peptides from your thymus gland which have some remarkable properties. The thymic peptides like, for example, thymulin alpha one TAA1 is the most important peptide in the human body for immune modulation. That is if your immune system is too low and you’re getting bacterial infections and viral infections and you know, you just can’t recover from colds and flus and you’ve got chronic Epstein BARR virus, chronic mono, things like that, that is the one for you.

Dr. Mitch: And that one can only be taken by subcutaneous injections and they don’t have an oil root yet. They may develop in the future. I’ll let you know. But I’ve, I’ve had some remarkable results in patients who had chronic EBV and chronic herpes infections. And just by doing a 30 to 60 day course of that, their energy came back their titers came down on the viruses, they’re really improved quite a bit. TB4 which is thymosin beta four supports the actions of a thymosin alpha one, but also TB4 has some unique properties for the skin as well. It helps also to support collagen and elastin fiber production. It helps protect the immune defenses in the skin. It helps repair UVB light damage to the skin, as does the CHKCU. They all do that.

Dr. Mitch: One of the things that the thymosin beta four and GHKCU can do is, is help to calm down the production of these dangerous free radical school of reactive oxygen species, a carbonyl species that really do a lot of damage to the skin. They quill those and they repair the DNA damage that can lead to skip cancer. So these really have some pretty pop phenomenal actions. They also work on complex enzyme systems. We know that there are these, in the skin, in all the soft tissues. You have these things called matrix metalloproteinases MMPs and these are enzymes that breakdown alas in the college. And if you have too many of them, everything will kind of fall apart. Well these peptides kind of modulate that and they prevent them from over exes.

Dr. Mitch: They do their job because when you have an infection, you do want to have the MMPs working to get rid of the dead debris, but then the peptides like GHKCU modulated it so only does its work and then it’s gone. That also helps to decrease the production. Like whenever you have an inflammation in the skin, you have a more tumor necrosis factor alpha, TNF alpha, too much of it will cause skin cell damage. So the GSKCU modulates that down. So it just, it does its work and then calms it. So there’s a balance. All these things, it’s, it’s pretty phenomenal. There is, so the, I was mentioning earlier, there’s a form of thyomisn peptide called zinc thymosin and when you combine zinc thymosin wtih GSKCU, it’s used together to restore hair loss and they found it’s pretty phenomenal for that because they both increase collagen and elastin fibers.

Dr. Mitch: They both increase vasculogenesis. So you have more blood vessels to the hair follicles. They restore the hair follicle STEM cells so the hair can regenerate. And this is usually used with micro-needling or mild injury to the skin that helps to stimulate hair follicle regrowth. And I’ve used it in some patients, I’ve used it myself and its helped some, it’s really kind of remarkable. The wide range of things you can use these things for.

Dr. Cates: So where do they derive the peptides from are they link animal sources or where do they, where do they come from?

Dr. Mitch: Well, most of the peptides. Yeah. Most of the peptides Trevor, are now are made synthetically because they’ve developed the peptide synthesis technology to be able to string together amino acids. Like you have a device, special device, they put the amino acids, histidine, lysine, arginine, ISOL, leucine, whatever it is that you in there is 21 amino acids, nine of them are essential.

Dr. Mitch: They put them in there and the machine will link them together. It’s a pretty arduous process though, because what the FDA requires, did you have very high, high purity. So for example, with a BPC 157, which is 15 amino acids long, they would link two of them together. Then you have to test that sample at aliquot to make sure it’s 99.8% pure. If it is, you can go on the next step and add another amino acid if it’s not they have to throw that out and start again. So by the time you’ve got all 15 linked up it could take you several weeks to, to make the whole molecule. But that guarantees that you have a really high quality pharmaceutical grade pure product by the time it’s done. And I applaud the FDA for doing that, at least that I hope they approve more peptides because this is a field of medicine I believe, and so do my colleagues that medicinal peptide therapy is going to supplant a lot of big pharma drugs because rather than poisoning the body with foreign molecules, we can stimulate the body to do what it already knows how to do with the monitors you were born with. And now we have them pharmaceutical grade form that we can prescribe specifically to use transdermally, orally and by injection to help stimulate homeostasis, rebalancing the body and promote longevity and good health longterm.

Dr. Cates: Well, I mean that and that sums it up right there. And that’s, that’s amazing, right? And with what we know about genetics too and our ability to change genetic expression and there’s a lot of opportunity with this too, if you do genetic testing with your patients as well, and then this can help address those polymorphisms and issues that that people have. Right?

Dr. Mitch: Yeah. What we found is after doing genomics for quite a few years you get a lot of very interesting information. You find out what snips that is single polymorphisms that people have. You know, and what that means is that, you know, DNA is like a double chain. If you unwrap it, it’s like a ladder and you have all these grooves in between and those rungs are the nucleotides that hang together. And if one side is wrong, that’s a single nucleotide polymorphism. And if both sides are wrong, that’s a double mutation. And if it’s a single mutation, the gene that codes for a certain protein, like an enzyme, which is a functional protein that runs the body or a structural protein like collagen or something like that, that builds a body, then it won’t be produced either as much or maybe a little bit wrong.

Dr. Mitch: If you’ve both sides that are homozygous mutation, then it might not work at all. The thing of it is, is that you can have multiple polymorphisms or mutations in several different genes, some that are promoting a process in the body, some that are suppressing a process in the body. So trying to figure out what to do for somebody with all these different mutations can drive you crazy. And this was what was recognized by a lot of people in genomic field. So there was work done by several really premium researchers, particularly this Dr. William Wallace will probably one of the greatest, doctors in brain brag chemistry in the world, a grand guy 82 and sharp, as a tack. And what he did was research on looking at, standing back and saying, okay, here’s all these genetic abnormalities and mutations.

Dr. Mitch: What does it mean? What’s the sum total of all these different effects? And they did research looking at the biochemistry, the lab values of people who have different permutations, different arrangements of these mutations. And they were able to discover that there are certain patterns to look for, so we know what to treat. For example, there are two, the two major biochemical processes in the human body that turn on and turn off genes that make the proteins that are the enzymes or proteins are called methylation and acetylation. And what that means is methylation adds or takes away a methyl group from the DNA or histones and assimilation takes away a super low or adds a seel group and they, they both can turn on and turn off different genes depending on part of the DNA they’re working on. So it’s a very complex process.

Dr. Mitch: What they found in general, for example, if someone tends to be under methylated, that is in general, they from when you look at all their lab work from all the different mutations in their genes, the totality is that they are under methylated. That person will tend to under produce the enzymes that make dopamine and serotonin from your protein like Triplefin. And that will, if you don’t have enough dopamine and serotonin, those are important for your mood, for preventing anxiety and depression and preventing OCD, ADD, ADHD, autism and the rest of this. And so if you get enough of those things, you’ll be balanced. You can actually and have too much dopamine too. And that’s what happens in schizophrenia you have way too much dopamine. So the idea is that you want relative balance of all of those things.

Dr. Mitch: And so we find from knowing that someone’s say has under methylation, we can then give them nutrition specific nutritional medicine. We give them methylating agents like Methylamine or Sammy. And we also look for imbalances in their minerals. We now know that people can have genetic defects that caused them to mal-absorb and have imbalances of copper and zinc. And it turns out the copper and zinc are critical for both immune function and brain function. Like if you have too little zinc, then zinc is critical for activating the enzymes that make dopamine and serotonin from your food, from your protein. If you don’t have nothing, you don’t make enough. And if you have too much copper, copper is critical for the chemical reaction that converts dopamine, which is sort of your thorough hormone that when you get it increases increases, when you eat chocolate or have sex, you don’t want too little that.

Dr. Mitch: So, but what happens if you have too much copper and zinc, it drives the reaction from dopamine to norepinephrine. Norepinephrine Is our fight or flight neurotransmitter. That’s the one that you’re running away from the, from the tiger or running after the rabbit. It’s like this, your like body is tense. Your mind is spinning around. And I know when people come in to me and they say, I can’t sleep, I can’t shut my mind off that I’m tense and jittery inside. I know they’re copper toxic and they’re probably under methylated. I can just can tell by the symptoms now and then I just do the lab work to corroborate that fact.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. And then to address that, the peptides can help with that as well as the rest of what you do. Then the nutritional, the supplements, the dietary recommendations, just a full integrative approach. Right

Dr. Mitch: Right. For example, you know, when you, when you have someone who is in that state, I’ll also check very frequently, we check for food allergies. There’s a lot of people don’t realize they’re reacting to foods cause they might not have a GA effect. They may have an other systemic effect that could affect their brain or their skin or, or their bones or their muscles. We have to find out. And so a lot of people are walking around with inflammation in their gut and the lining of your small intestine the most absorptive surface, the small intestine, it’s not a smooth tube like people think it looks like a shag rug. Millions of these finger like projections and that’s what creates the enzymes and absorbed them. If you have inflammation, you have to off the surface gets blunted. It gets thickened and you’re not absorbing things and you can get leaky gut, which is cells cracking apart. One of the things that we use BPC157 for is to heal that inflammation, to restore the absorptive surface to reseal the Interosites, the cells back together to reheal the protein hooks or decimal Psalms. So the leaky gut inflammation calms down and then their malabsorption goes away. They can absorb start absorbing their minerals and their vitamins and their nutrients and they begin to heal.

Dr. Cates: Right. And leaky goes back to skin and so many different issues. So it really, I could see that how you use the peptides now in your practice and really individualizing it for people based upon their symptoms, their medical history, their lab work and all of that and incorporating it to all the other things you do. So what a powerful tool to be able to add in. So Dr. Mitch, I know we gotta a wrap up for today, so tell everybody where they can learn more about you, your clinic and the work that you do.

Dr. Mitch: Thank you, Trevor, it’s always a pleasure to talk to you. Well I have a website. It’s very simple. It’s www.cirm1.org that’s C I R M, the number one.org. And they can go there and learn about what we do. And also if you scroll across the top, you’ll see a bar that says services. You can click down and it has all about, explanation of peptide therapy there, homeopathy, nutritional therapy, occulation therapy, and all the things that we offer to try to help people restore health and wellbeing. And we’re in the beautiful Blue Ridge Mountains in Afton, Virginia. About half an hour South of Charlottesville. Not far from your family.

Dr. Cates: Yeah. Yes. Well again, Dr. Mitch, thank you much. It’s so great to connect with you and learn what you’re doing and we’ll also have the links to your website on The Spa Dr. Podcast. So thank you.

Dr. Mitch: Thank you Trevor. God bless you.

Dr. Cates: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Dr Mitch Fleisher. To learn more about him you can go to thespadr.com, go to the podcast page with his interview and you’ll find all the information and links there. And while you’re there, I invite you to join The Spa Dr. community so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows and information. And if you haven’t taken The Skin Quiz already, you can go to theskinquiz.com, find out what messages your skin is trying to tell you about your health and what you could do about it. Just go to theskinquiz.com. And I invite you to join us on social media The Spa Dr. Is on Instagram. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest. So join the conversation and I’ll see you next time on The Spa Dr. Podcast.