Scientific Reasoning, Medical Assumptions, and the Osteopathic Model

Source video: https://youtu.be/JvZxba-rP0c

Editorial note: This is a lightly edited transcript. Repeated caption fragments, obvious speech-recognition errors, and non-substantive false starts have been corrected while preserving the meaning and conversational character of the episode. Speaker attribution is omitted where the automated captions do not reliably identify the voice.

Introduction and Hosts

Welcome to the Neil O’Neal Show, a podcast dedicated to helping you achieve peak wellness through the osteopathic model of health. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered medical advice. The content herein should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Consult a licensed healthcare professional for any medical concerns.

Today’s show answers the questions, what is science?

How does the osteopathic model differ from mainstream medicine?

And how can you apply this knowledge in everyday life? Thanks for listening. And now here’s Neil. My name is Neil O’Neal. I’m an osteopathically trained manual physical therapist.

I started out as a regular physical therapist. Went to the University of Washington. got my degree and started working in clinics doing the regular physical therapy thing. It didn’t take me long though to recognize that I that what we had been taught in school didn’t have the effect that it was supposed to have. so I went back and looked for further training and ran into various individuals that we’ll talk about on some other podcast, but that yeah that we various other individuals that really helped me out. So osteopathically trained physical therapist and I’ve been treating patients for 30 years now and you know so if you look at the numbers maybe about 75 to 100,000 patient hours of treatment so yeah that’s fantastic.

He’s old folks. I came here in my my aid car. All right, Adam, now you introduce All right, Adam, now you introduce yourself. Oh, I’m Autumn Mayberry. I’m an osteopathically trained massage therapist, manual therapist.

I don’t give massages though. Everybody stays clothed and I just use the techniques I’ve learned from Neil and other mentors that we’ll talk about too. And I was going to also headed into the physical therapy field. And as I was trying to get residency and get a cheaper education, I was always running into people that had just graduated the year before in PT. And I was like, “Well, great.

Now that you’re done, are you doing posttops or MBAs or, you know, for and they were all like, me?” I’m going, you just graduated last year.

You’re supposed to be the latest and greatest, right?

And they educated the fun out of you for sure. And and they were like, well, it doesn’t really matter. We just put everybody on a six week program and if they don’t get better, refer them out. And finally, one guy, we were at the DMV, so we were there for a while a while longer. We couldn’t just get away.

And I said, so wait a minute, they put their face through a windshield or they blow their ACL 6 weeks either way. And he’s like, yeah. And I was like, well, I don’t have to go to school to tell you that doesn’t work. You know, it’d be amazing if the body was like, it’s been six weeks, ding ding ding, we’re better. but it doesn’t. And so I was like, I don’t think this I want to do this.

And a mentor had massage school director had studied with with Bear. We’ll talk about him more, but and she had given me this stuff and I was like, I think I’m ready to pull that pull that brochure sign up form out of my box and start taking it because I just wanted to get people better. I didn’t care how he did it as long as it was, you know, hard to hurt people and it didn’t involve blood for me. I’m a I’m a clear fluids girl. Sweat and tears is about all I do.

I’m a nonhosp guy. Let’s guy. Let’s go. awesome. And how long have you been awesome. And how long have you been practicing? 22 years.

So not as old not as long as Neil.

Yeah.

She drove herself here. I I cab-ulance picked me up here. No, I have I have lots to learn. I I have done a lot of my education as I’ve been a young mom. And so I haven’t been able to be as intense about some of my studies as I’d like to do.

So, I’m I’m still grateful to learn from Neil and grateful he’s taken enough to to keep teaching classes and and to have these conversations and I look to him for, you know, not just understanding how to treat people, but how to communicate and stuff, too, because we concerned about that they’re feeling fearful. You don’t you don’t heal very well if you’re feel fearful all the time and you’re trying to, you know, manage being told to do this or do that and you don’t know what to do. So, there’s all that all that goes into treating a patient, the organism.

Right.

So, exactly. All right. And my name is Brent Mayberry. Hey, I’m Autumn’s husband and I represent the portion of listeners who, you know, don’t have 30 years or 22 years of experience in in osteopathically trained manual therapy. And so I’m here just to kind of, you know, kind of ask some questions to kind of help elaborate these principles that we’re going to be talking about and just represent the listeners who are interested in this this kind of this aspect of of physical therapy or manual therapy.

And so yeah, thank you for for being here, Neil. We appreciate it. Yeah, that’s too hope we can get this together and make it go because we wouldn’t have any idea about we wouldn’t have any idea about electronics. All right. So, today we were going to talk about the scientific method or science.

What is science?

And it’s a really good question to to answer because we seem to have a lot of opinions about what science is and a lot of disagreement is what I would say. We hear that all the time. We hear that all the time. Yep. If oh, we’re just going to follow the science like which science are you following because science is no is not some thing that’s already been decided.

There’s not some like cloud in the sky or data bank in the sky that says these are the facts and that other stuff is all you know surrept spurious thought or whatever. you know and just to kind of quote my favorite AI science is the systematic enterprise of gathering knowledge about the universe and organizing and condensing that knowledge into testable laws and theories. At its core science is a way of learning about the natural world that is based on evidence and logic. The word science comes from the Latin word scientia.

Okay.

So, which means knowledge. There you go. so, and and knowledge knowledge to me is is a a kind of a loaded word as well.

Like what do you know?

I was a philosophy major so this could take all night but we don’t have all night, right? Go that far. But know like what do you know? like I think therefore I am is you know kind of the the basis of western philosophical and scientific thought is going well I can can prove that that I exist because I’m thinking and and there therefore I am and then I can converse with other thinking beings and I can also interact with my environment and I can do some thing to gather information. Now we have our five senses and then we have our brains to try and interpret that and there’s where the first problem begins.

Not everybody sees the same thing, hears the same thing or weights, you know, information the same. And so knowledge becomes dependent immediately on what what people’s experience is. It’s subjective in some sense.

Yeah.

There’s some sub subjectivity to it.

Knowledge, Consensus, and Testable Claims

So right off the bat, we we all have to understand that there’s what I can I feel that I experience and know and then there’s what you experience and and you feel you know and those may not have as much to do with each other as we like to think. So right off the bat we have to reach out you know unless we’re going to solipsists which were people that said look I think therefore I am and there’s nothing else you can prove everything everything else is a figment of your imagination.

Well that gets a little boring so let’s move on. Let’s assume those other people who say I think therefore I am as well. We’ll just assume that everybody in this room exists and everybody listening. That might be a good good starting point.

Okay.

So anyway, moving on from that. So we’re going to have to the idea of knowledge means we’re going to have to share ideas, share experience, share understanding to come to an to an agreement as to what knowledge is. Some kind of consensus. It’s a cons.

Yeah.

Correct. Knowledge is a somewhat of a consensus. Meaning we have we we have ideas, we have information come in and we say okay look this happened and there may be various reasons for that happening but you know the three of us are going to test out hey if I flick this switch here and that light goes out I’m going to conjecture that that switch has something to do with that light turning on and off and if I do it and you do it and you do it and we all come to the same consensus we call that knowledge right and we say okay we we we We’ve verified this.

We’ve we’ve done it three times each. Maybe we do it three three times each and then the three of us all do it. That’s nine times. We have pretty good information that says yes, here’s what the data shows. Here’s how the three of us interpret that, we agree on our interpretation and that becomes a an agreed upon fact.

Okay?

And we say, yeah, we we think when now if all of a sudden we’re flicking this switch and all of a sudden the lights go out and they never come back lights go out and they never come back on, we might say, well, there’s something wrong with our theory. say, “Well, this we know that this switch has something to do with that light, but it may not be the only thing that has something to do with that light. There may be a circuit breaker over in the electrical panel that turns off that light as well.” Right.

And now we have to add information and say, “Oh, wait. We didn’t take this other information into account. We just came across it.” One of the famous examples is of of how we do deductive and inductive reasoning is that at one point in time, all swans that have had ever been seen by a European had been pink. So, it was inductive reasoning that all swans are pink until someone went to some place in Africa where there’s these black swans and they went, “Oh, wait. Those are swans.” I’m like, “Well, how can you tell?

Are they pink?” Like, “No, they’re not pink, but they’re exactly like a swan except they’re black.” So, of course, we have to add information and add knowledge. Anyway, moving on. These are all interesting things, but at the end of the day, no matter what, there is testing and and retesting and consensus and saying and sharing that information and saying, “Do we all concur? or do we all agree? Is this all within the the realm of what we think? Now, this can be a very difficult process because, for example, we all experience gravity every day.

Right.

I think we’d all pretty much, you know, you know, no one’s seen anyone else floating off without another good reason. And so, we can all pretty much say we’re pretty sure that gravity is a say we’re pretty sure that gravity is a law. Mhm. And yet we still discuss it is the theory of gravity because of the way the the the scientific process is such that yes however like the light switch we don’t know enough about gravity to be able to see say this is the only thing that could be there are some other possibilities.

So while we say we think it’s the attraction of of like bodies of bodies that have mass there’s this there’s this gravitational constant of attraction between the two of them. That’s what we’ve observed and we’re going to call that gravity. The problem being is that we have not been able to observe what is the the the entity or the structure the mechanism the mechanism that that transfers that force between the two objects.

What is the graviton?

We’ve never seen a graviton. And so we know that there’s a gravity field. We know that there’s a gravity wave. But the actual quant or mechanism has not been decided. So it’s still a theory. decided.

So it’s still a theory.

Right.

Okay.

So there’s a there’s a really great place to start with because I’m pretty sure that everybody no matter what their political affiliation can agree we’re pretty sure there’s gravity, agree we’re pretty sure there’s gravity, right? And yet that in the scientific method that is a theory. So it just shows you that then when we get into more difficult topics like human health, right? Human what what things are good for humans and what things are bad for humans like what is helping their health and what is help hurting their health. If the theory of gravity is very difficult to prove then all of a sudden we have a much greater onus put placed upon us to say well what is good for humans we have we and we have lots of abilities lots of scientific methods lots of scientific processes to determine things unfortunately what’s happened is over unfortunately what’s happened is over time and certainly a lot of our knowledge comes from people that lived previous to us who wrote books and said here’s the knowledge that we’ve gained here’s what we’ve said and we build upon that knowledge but there were definite limitations in the ability to gather data, gather information and do things or in the processes of doing it or some of the things for example vaccinations are brand new to humans for the most part right I mean within the last couple hundred years we’ve started doing inoculations and vaccinations and saying oh we think this is helpful but much like gravity there’s room for discourse and actually even worse than gravity there’s not nearly as much concrete information that tells you what’s right and what’s wrong and there’s various aspects of that but you Not getting into that too deep, just saying, well, what is science?

Science is a method of gathering information.

Yeah.

And like with like with the vaccines, right?

I mean, gravity affects us all pretty much universally, us all pretty much universally, right? Vaccines do not. We have individual humans that have different responses variants, you know, and and their experiences and what they would maybe think they know about vaccines is going to be very about vaccines is going to be very different, right? And people are saying, well, I read something. I I’m an engineer.

I went on Facebook. I wrote what I I read what this one guy wrote and now I’m an expert on vaccines because I read what they wrote. The problem with that process, you know, and you heard that definitely through COVID, you know, and you hear it for various reasons in various places, people assuming a level of knowledge saying, well, I’m highly trained in this one area and I’m a very intelligent person. Therefore, I can read this small amount of data and come to a concrete conclusion when we haven’t been able to do that about gravity.

Correct. which tells you something about the the scientific method that the scientific method itself if we’re going to say what are facts what’s science you know we’re following the science somebody who says they’re following the science is not doing science I can guarantee you because they’re not understanding the base process is you have to gather information test that information and then figure out well we have some variances in that data collection like we did A and then you know we we we we had A we did B we expected C however sometimes D or E or F occur.

If we can’t explain why those are variances from the A B therefore C then that’s not very scientific and and that’s really the baseline like we could just look at it at pure logic and say purely logically speaking if you don’t get C every time you have A then B A and B then there’s a problem with your method and that’s not scientific. So anybody’s saying I’m follow we’re just going to follow the science. you’ve made vast assumptions. You’ve assumed certain things and and you may not know, you know, bec because if you haven’t been around in, you know, in medical science and haven’t learned some of the ins and outs of it like as with any arena, you don’t learn that there are assumptions under many of the assumed facts and saying yes, but and in logic we always have well, what’s a presumption?

You know, we say, well, if A occurs and B occurs, then we expect C to occur. One of those assumptions may be like, well, what is B? Well, every time somebody flips a switch, we expect that light to come on. Well, tell me about all the possible switches there are. You just assume that all switches are light switches.

There are switches that don’t turn on lights. There are switches that turn on the disposal. The disposal.

Exactly.

And and and there’s our exact problem is that not all switches do the same thing. And if the person doesn’t know enough about electricity in this case or medical science in the other, they don’t know the qu the assumptions and they don’t know what’s underlying that assumption saying, “Yeah, we took a bunch of information that we interpreted and made into and said, well, our interpretation is this.” And and that may be that they didn’t have all the information. It may be that they weren’t faced with this exact situation. Sometimes we’re looking at a situation where oh small pox and this versus okay and small pox and inoculation where we take cowpox and and expose somebody to the the antibodies for small for cowpox right we inoculate them with cowpox so they won’t get small pox or have a better time beating small pox then we take an m mRNA vaccine and we say oh well pe people have mRNA in every one of their cells it will be fine it’s like well will it.

Yeah, that’s a that’s a pretty big leap. That’s a pretty big leap, especially when that mRNA codes for a a a protein that is not normally in our bodies, right? That’s not a normal mRNA. So, there’s going to be some blow. There’s going to be some problems with that. you’re making the assumption that all mRNA is the same, And that all proteins made by an mRNA are going to be, oh, it’s fine.

It’ll be are going to be, oh, it’s fine. It’ll be okay. is particularly when you say okay look there are things like HIV or there’s even more specifically Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is mad cow disease in humans right and those are what are called pro prions prions are are single proteins and these proteins recap cause themselves to be recapitulated and pretty soon they cause holes in the brain and you have Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or mad mad human disease so there you go so a simple protein there are times when we know that if you make a protein and and make that a bunch it will have a deleterious effect.

Okay, this was not that one necessarily but but these proteins are also the things that your immune system recognizes and you’re saying yes great. And when when the wrong kind of protein comes into the body, the immune system is is intrinsically inherently knowledgeable and and wise and says, “Oh, this is something I should prepare myself that if we ever see this protein come again, we should have a a a modified or a moderate response to and kill it off and go on with our lives.” As opposed to those people who who may have a very touchy, hyperreactive immune system that says, “I just saw this protein.

I’ve never seen this protein. It’s freaking me out. I say we do DEFCON 1 and destroy the place. Let’s burn the place down. And that’s what happens.

Right.

Now, some people only go to Defcon 3 and only lose all feeling in their arm and have Raynaud’s phenomenon all the way up and down their arm or complex regional pain syndrome, right?

Okay.

Still pretty bad, Some people die. Some people only have, you know, have this problem or that problem. And some people do fantastic. They avoid the disease entirely. Some people only get the disease moderately.

The problem being is that we flipped the switch and we expected the same light to come on or to come off exactly like they all did. And that’s not the scientific all did.

And that’s not the scientific process, right?

It’s a different system. There’s different systems, lots of different variables you have to take into account. There’s an assumption that all immune systems react the same. That’s an assumption. And it’s pretty I think the three of us sitting here as three I think, therefore I ams are going to say, “Oo boy, that’s a dangerous assumption.” Right.

Because and it’s interesting, isn’t it?

Because we all know people who whose immune systems are reacting completely differently. Yet when we we talk about vaccines, for example, we expect, oh no, we’re talking about everybody being the Right.

Exactly.

Right.

There’s just this expectation. And this, well, we’ve given vaccines for years and and the doctors have said, oh, it’s all just fine.

Which doctors have said that?

Well, typically public health doctors. Well, public health doctors, who are who who is it that employs a public health is it that employs a public health doctor? The government. Government. So who is the patient of the public health doctor?

The government.

The government typically, right?

And and public policy, let’s call it public policy as evidenced by the current administration. Okay, fair enough. But that doesn’t make you their patient. They’re looking out for their patient and the best interests of their patient. And so they’re going to give you advice off the best interests of their patient and their patients representatives.

That is not necessarily you. And so you have to be able to look at this and say, I’m going to look at these assumptions and determine if those are assumptions I would make. And if I if I wouldn’t make that assumption, then all of a sudden I need more information and and I need more scientific process of saying we need to test this out better. We need to know more about it. more about it.

Right?

And that’s a scientific process. Now let’s let’s let’s move on to more what I really do for a living is I’m a manual therapist. I restore health. I I remove barriers to health in patients. I don’t fix anything.

I don’t heal anything. That that’s not what happens. So very much like a vaccine that is to go in and to help a patient’s internal mu out to help their that body function appropriately. My guy my my idea is to go in and say I’ll remove barriers to proper function. And there’s all sorts of levels of that.

Okay.

So again the scientific process and and and and the information and the techniques I use are always based on is how does the structure work and by the structure we start with a human and you say well it’s this complex set of of joints and muscles and tissues and organs and organ systems that make up this very complex and vast array of of a of humanity. of humanity.

Yeah.

So you know so when we start applying science you have to apply science like okay so I work with these organisms called humans and they have a vast number of things going on with them but you start breaking down certain principles they say okay well let’s look at biomechanical principles like how does how does the how does a human stay alive well they have to eat they they so they have to get food that means they have to see food right they have to you know touch food they have to you know get the food in their body they have to break down the food.

They have to use that what what that food can turn into for them and then distribute it to their cells and be healthy with that. Well, we’ve just, you know, we just and get the waste out. And get the waste out.

Exactly.

And then end it all out. And so and and and there are vast complexes going on with that.

Okay.

So the scientific processes we go through and we study those things and say, “Okay, how does this process work?

How does this process?

How does a human move?

How does a move a human move ideally?” And so we pay we we go to school, we learn, we study the scientific method, right? We use the scientific method to study humans and to gain knowledge about how do humans work, how do their joints work, how do they’re like how do they grow, how are they how are they made, how do they grow, how do they develop, how do they how do they interact, what keeps them alive, what allows them to thrive, what are the various systems that have to interact you know the various systems.

So we really take it down to you have a cell, it has to interact with some other cells. Those cells together have to perform form a task.

Okay.

At some point we call those an organ or a structure.

Right.

And that organ then and maybe that organ has various things that it can do and it interacts with other organs that have various things they can do. And if you put these various abilities together, you get an organ system that performs a function or a task that keeps that organism alive and helps that organism ultimately thrive. So we have different levels of of that of that human not only surviving but thriving and that’s that’s really thriving and that’s that’s really important. All interacting in their own intricate ways. The problem being is that okay so there are times when those things break down whether that’s pathological or just down whether that’s pathological or just dysfunctional right and that inhibits the that human from thriving at the level that they would like.

Pathological meaning it’s broken. Pathological is broken. There’s no fixing that portion of it. The the problem is is again we get into the scientific method here and and understanding look there’s what’s broken and then there are assumptions about what’s broken. Oh, I’m sorry but you you have this problem and that’s it.

You’re dead. You have cancer. Stage 4, it’s all over. There’s there is absolutely nothing that can help you now. And we all know that not to be true.

There are lots of things that happen and they actually happen outside of scientific knowledge. Sometimes we have no idea why this person went into who had stage four cancer. We gave them, you know, 3 months to live and yet they went into remission and they’re doing just into remission and they’re doing just fine. fine. Mhm. Right now, less less, you know, less fanfare.

We could talk about, oh, this person sprained their ankle and now their leg doesn’t work quite like it did. It doesn’t have the motion that it did. They don’t drive fluid out of their leg. The the problem with that being that as that ankle stops working now that the arteries and the and the veins and the and specifically the veins and the lymphatics stop working appropriately eventually, right? And they slowly degrade over time and the and the worse that dysfunction becomes, then we move into into pathology.

Something starts breaking down. For example, the veins of the legs may, you know, they’re supposed to stop the backflow of venous blood. Well, if that venous blood sits there long enough, the weight of that blood will reverse those the those valves. Those valves.

Yeah.

The the venous valves. And so those valves will just be broken and now they don’t work. And now the the the amount of blood in the vein becomes even greater, right? That’s all in one place without a valve in between it. So pretty soon all the the valves of the veins have given and you have Venus the veins have given and you have venous insufficiency, insufficiency, right?

And then and all this from the fact that an that an ankle got jammed and stuck and stopped working. So you do have some pathology. You have torn or you know not torn but overstretched u valves that won’t come back.

Okay.

So there you so there’s a process and you say well that just turned into pathology. However, if someone comes along, a manual therapist and says, “Hey, I understand how these joints work to cause to to squish the you know, cause the the soft tissue around the foot and ankle and leg to torsion to twist.” Well, that torsion and twist will help drive lymphatic drainage and help maintain Venus Venus sufficiency or venous patency. And so if we fix this foot, we fix your ankle, we get your hip to rotate, we get the various body parts to work, now all of a sudden we have a leg that works.

And that venous insufficiency though it still has a pathological component stops being as bad as it was. So the dysfunction, so there’s a a penumbra of dysfunction with a with a heart of of pathology. We can’t fix the pathology, but there’s a lot of that dysfunction that we can do something about and restore to function and then have that individual actually go back to doing quite well. Yep. They can thrive better.

They can thrive better.

Structure, Function, and Human Variation

I was just going to ask in studying manual therapy and how the body functions and how the cells grow, is functions and how the cells grow, is that, you know, is it like the law or the theory of gravity that it applies to everybody equally or are there variances or like a spectrum of how people’s bodies develop? and and how people’s bodies work that you can see when you treat people like not not everybody’s ankle is necessarily the same. Correct.

Right.

Yeah.

Some people have extra bones, some people have extra muscles, some people are born without certain parts. you know there’s the problem. Sometimes they’ve been surgically Sometimes they’ve been surgically removed. There’s that part. But even in in the initial growth and development so much of that is a product of and for example one of the big questions always is like oh if you had Abraham Lincoln you you had cells from Abraham Lincoln and you wanted to bring Abraham Lincoln back would you clone him and bring him back so we could have a discussion about the Civil War.

It’s like well that’s very nice but if you if you put Abraham Lincoln in a in a womb today and grew him even if it’s a mechanical womb it won’t be the womb that he was born into originally. So this President Lincoln will not well won’t be president number one and then number two won’t even necessarily be the same person. They’re going to have cells that grew differently. They got exposed to different chemicals, different cosmic ray, if you will, different radio waves. mom ate different stuff. Mom had stuff in in her in her bloodstream.

She got exposed to stuff. There was experiences are going to impact that kid. experiences and and the and the hormonal moo what that womb what what’s this what’s the environment of that womb right because the placenta is trying to help make a certain environment but that environment can only be as good as what the mom has available to her so if the mom has already had six kids and she’s on her seventh and they’ve all just been bang bang bang she may not have enough calcium that’s easily pulled out of the bones to be given to the baby so the baby may have certain problems with its bones simply because there’s the internal milieu of the of the womb is Not the same.

Sure.

But there’s like probably like a low end and a high-end.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So, there’s the optimal and and genetically we say, well, here was what what your genes coded for and then here’s what got made. And even what your genes coded for, your genes actually code for all sorts of stuff. You have tons of extra information in there, which is why your kids don’t look exactly like a perfect split of you and your spouse.

Right.

Because when you when you take that, there’s actually multiple aspects of genes in there. You know, there’s you know, blue eyes, brown eyes, this that you know, you might have genes for all sorts of stuff, but unless those match up with other genes that will enhance them, then those aren’t going to be expressed. So, and there’s and there’s part of the problem, too. It’s like, well, which genes are going to get turned on? That may have something to do.

So, for for example, speaking science here, there’s what we call the grandfather mouse. So, one of the things they did as an in an experiment, they took a mouse who was this large, you know, beefy mouse. It was a real strong mouse and they exposed it to ionizing radiation and then they let that that mouse go and mate. And what they noticed is that the that the pups of the grand of this grandfather mouse we’re going to call him. Those pups were diminutive.

They never got to be as big as as their They never got to be as big as as their father. And then those pups had pups and those pups were dimminionative. But by the time it went to the next generation that that great-grandfather really so the the last the last group of pups that were small were the grandchildren. The next round of pups boom they went right back to being large again. So the genetic code had had enough time to I don’t know if you want to say overcome that’s that’s a euphemism in a way or repair or something repair that there were repair mechanisms or whatever that effect was speaking to your question about well is it always the same.

So it had a lot to do with that and this was the male not the female right? So this is the grandfather mouse was exposed to that ionizing radiation and it somehow affected the genome epigenetically of course and then and then that that caused certain things to change that those pups now we didn’t ask questions about like well then how did those mice what they weren’t big but did they have other attributes?

Were they better at living through ionizing radiation?

Were they less susceptible to things?

Were they more susceptible to things?

So even though they shared the genetics of the of the grandfather mouse, they may not have had its qualities and their cell lines wouldn’t necessarily look the same, but by the time they were great great grandpups, those ones had popped back to looking a lot like the great-grandfather mouse.

Yeah.

So I was going to ask also in in your treatment of people, what kind of rules or guidelines do you use to to deal with all those variations that come through your door?

Yeah.

So like and how does like science help you kind of understand that and and be able to devise an appropriate treatment for all kinds of different people.

Right?

So one of the things that we’ve come to is we’ve come to understand through the scientific method of studying people saying you know it’s interesting this bone grows with a certain roundness at this point but a certain flatness to that point and that allows a joint to move in a specific way so that the structure governs its function. So this bone being a talus has a dome on it right and so it becomes a pivot point for part of the for part of the body. This other bone is a temporal bone and it has a flat part on it, but that allows it to accept forces from your jaw as you’re crushing things in your teeth and not completely deform and destroy the head.

You don’t break the bones of the head because this synchondrosis will slide as opposed to be a dome that’s a pivot point. And so there that structure governs function and function governs governs structure is is one of the ways that has been come to ex explain that and say okay so if these cells have a certain structure say they’re a say they’re an endoderm and endoderm is a a a cell type that lines tubes and glands they tend to be waterproof. If you didn’t have endoderm you would get bladder you know your your bladder wouldn’t hold water very well.

Kind of important. Want to keep that urine in there and until it’s time to get it out and you don’t want it leaking into the surrounding tissue or you want to keep the blood, it’s a little bit different, but you so that the structure of whatever the function that is supposed to be attained is also governed by that structure of whatever that is. So just the way that those cells are set up, they have certain properties to them that cause that. So there are certain rules in in particularly mamalian cells since we’re cells since we’re working with patients.

We’re really looking at mamalian cells and and so the the eukaryotic eukaryotic cells function a certain way. Proaryotic function a different way. Those are plant cells.

Okay.

So the plant cells have cell walls. They they tend to have certain organelles etc etc. So if you go down to the next layer of what do the cells look like? eukaryotic eukaryotic cells look one way and prokaryotic have other attributes and and and structures and have a different function. So again back to structure and function. So we take these cells and say well if we look at how cells function and how they’re what their structures are and then how they’re put together and then how and back to the how we build tissues and organs and organ systems these cells with these cells you know you have to have endoderm that lines tubes and glands you need to have ectoderm that is brain tissue that’s smart that can make decisions or can take in information and then eventually do something about it and then you have to have mesoderm something that just does what it’s supposed to do It’s a packing material that hey maybe I need to make some muscles that are good at moving me around so I can catch that food.

I need mesoderm to just build that and I don’t want them to complain too much. If they were ectoderm they’d complain a ton and we’d never get anything done. We’d never catch any anything done. We’d never catch any food.

Right.

So and there you go.

Right.

I hope I hope that answers your question and that so there’s some like baseline like we can go down to very small packets of of humanity and say well these cells are human cells right? Those are a type of eukaryotic cell and they have certain attributes. they organize in a certain way. They they they have a code that tells them how to organize, how to how to how to come together and and perform certain functions and and and even from the very beginning plan like which cells to build and and which sheets which you know building blocks so to speak and then how to mix those building blocks together so that you get not only do you get ectoderm mesoderm endoderm you get somatopleure you know splanchnopleure which are mix which are combinations of those two cell types where you have a cell type that’s actually a der derivative cell type of two of those cell types.

So you get advanced properties. So we actually have you know five cell types that are the baseline of what we’re building and then those build into certain things that become that that become either for example that mesoderm or what we’ll call a sclerotome a sclerotome build certain structures. Well those structures may be muscle they may be ligament they may be bone. In fact the same the same somite, right may build multiples of those structures. So people may have sensation like, “Oh man, when I hit my funny bone, it really aches into my whole arm in a really strange way.

It’s not so funny, but it’s certainly not so funny, but it’s certainly off-putting.” So exactly. So and that’s just it is that that that those structures that grew from that one somite grew in that such a way and they share information so that your nervous system picks that up and says, “Oh, that group of cells down there that does this is telling me such and such.” Mhm. So those principles of function and structure inform your whole treatment structure inform your whole treatment approach. approach.

Exactly.

For people. So even at the cellular level and then you know you just kind of build on that to the bones and the joints and the to the bones and the joints and the muscles, the tendons, the tendons, organs, organs, right? And then we have to ask ourselves, well you know what are organs, right? We would say oh well organs are you know we all know like oh you have a heart, you have lungs. We can all kind of agree, oh, any of these organs like your digestive tract or your pancreas or your liver or your kidney, those are organs.

But when you really look at the function of those of those structures, right, we say, well, you know, that’s that’s interesting because one of the one of the the integral functions of those organs is that they produce fluid and that fluid is and the and the consistency of that fluid or the the u chemical properties of that fluid are determined in part by the autonomic nervous system. So then you have nervous tissue that also grows in with these organs and cells and says, “Hey, here’s what I would like you to do.

I I advise that you do more of this or or I advise you do more of that.” And so it’s kind of there’s there’s a a variance out there of, “Hey, you can function more towards this end of the functional line or you can function more towards that end of the functional line.” So then things like that we think of as organs actually get spread out. For example, like joint capsules. Joint capsules become organs because they produce fluid and that fluid can be stickier or runnier and change the the function of the structure that it that it’s a part the structure that it that it’s a part of.

Yeah.

So all of a sudden you start going, well, wait a second, there’s a lot of things in the body that we wouldn’t traditionally call an organ, but that become organs. Cool. And then I don’t know if this is within the scope of what you want to discuss now, but I was this got me thinking in contrast to other you know models of medicine that other people you know other professions I should say use to in their approach to treating you know dysfunction or pathology., could you maybe talk a little bit about the contrast between what you do and maybe what maybe a regular physical therapist might do or maybe, you know, or another M, you know, an MD might do.

Does that make sense?

Do you want to talk about that right now?

We don’t have to, but I just, you know, it would be interesting, I think, for people listening to understand the contrast of of the approach, the scientific approach that you use in your practice with maybe what you’ve observed because, you know, you were you’ve also been kind of like a a I don’t want to say regular PT, but you’ve been training. Well, I was Yeah, regular PT. Like a regular PT, you know, I just maybe you’ve been you you’ve had feet in both worlds, I guess I could say.

And just what kind of contrast do you see?

Do you want to talk about that right now?

Is that okay?

Yeah.

No, let’s let’s talk about that.

Yeah.

No, let’s let’s talk about that. So, you know, and and kind of this fits right into our science discussion here in that you go to school and you’re trained in certain in certain fields and and there are assumptions made about what it is you need to know to do your job. For example, most MDs, we’re not going to give them embryology. that this medical school is not going to teach them embryology because as far as most day-to-day doctors are concerned, they don’t need advanced thinking skills on embryology. Look, identify the disease process, give them a this is the appropriate class of medic medications to give them and then and or and here’s the other things you should do to follow up.

If it’s if you suspect that there may be pneumonia because their lungs sound inappropriate you know when you listen to them, then you’re going to send them for an X-ray, right? and and and so there’s only certain we we want to box things in because when when we have people who are treating on a daily basis, their job is to really, you know, meet the wall. They’re the seaw wall where the the the mass of humanity washes up against and and and have to be helped and and and not dealt with, but but certainly interacted with and and then those those problems dealt with in some way.

And so there’s a certain amount of training that we’re not going to give to a regular physical therapist. We’re not going to give to, you know, on, for example, regular PT. I mean, we often see this in the movies that, hey,, you know, let me let me get your gait belt and I’m going to put it around your waist and I’m going to help you down the hall, you know, Bertha, because I’ll I’ll push your urine bag on its pole and we’ll go up and down the hall because you need to walk.

And and that doesn’t require advanced thinking, right?

So, there’s certain levels of of what we’re going to train practitioners to do. Like, look, here are the parameters. people far smarter than you have set up these parameters and we’re saying follow through on these parameters and just do that with the understanding that if something advanced happens we we are expecting these people that have set up these parameters to have thought about it and said well for this situation in in here here are the things that we can that we we’re going to make these assumptions and these assumptions are mostly valid in these situations and so for the most part the daily clinician doesn’t need to worry about what these assumptions are we’ve gone through those and we’ve made sure that those are pretty scientifically based and that we’re going to get them that that you know treated that that you know treated appropriately.

So those protocols were already So those protocols were already established and so a traditional PT or practitioner would just follow those things and yeah like what you know for example my my favorite is one of the favorite exercises of physical therapists are clamshells even Dr. Oz thought that a clamshell was the best exercise ever., and that exercise is what’s known as a grade three exercise before you put the rubber band on it. So, if you lay down on your side and you’re lifting your knee, so you bend your knees about 45 to 90 degrees and then you lift one knee up.

So, you know, laying on the on the ground, that is a clamshell.

Is that is that called abduction?

Is that is that called abduction?

Abduction. Abduction.

Okay.

So, it’s an abduction exercise, but it’s not a full anti-gravity because you’re only lifting the weight of the leg. you’re not lifting up the body against gravity. So, we we number the the ability to fire a muscle on zero to five. Zero means the muscle didn’t even move because the there was no nerve impulse to it. Not one that you can generally see. You would see that there’s no not even a twitch for the muscle.

One is that you can fire the muscle but it’s not a very strong and it doesn’t really accomplish much. A you know the the muscle you can barely move whatever body part it is. A grade two that if if gravity’s not involved, you can actually move the body part with some alacrity.

Okay.

Grade three would be, oh, I can move this body part with some weight, but I can’t do a full anti-gravity like body body weight anti-gravity like body body weight support exercise. A a grade four would be I can almost do that with some assistance. I might use a cane, I might use a walker, I might use handrails and continue to train that strength. And a grade five, it’s it’s perfectly fine the person’s walking down the street. My my my favorite little piece of knowledge is that exercise of clamshells comes from polio.

So physical therapist therapists today and plenty of other practitioners are handing out clamshells due to their experience due to humanity’s experience with polio and saying these people lost all motor control and then bringing it back or present day would be someone with I mean people still get polio but Guillain-Barré syndrome.

Okay.

So, so there’s the whole problem is that we’re giving these rehab exercises that are just really glorified polio exercises. Well, my patients haven’t had polio. Well, I’ve had a couple that have had polio, but at this point in their life, they didn’t need that exercise. So, when we’re looking at that, we say, “Okay, well, why is this person’s abductors weak?” Because the funny thing is that person walks in the door and they walk in perfectly fine. They’re on they’re they’re in other words they’re a grade five walking in the door.

We lay them on their side and we have them fire their abductor and it’s a grade three and so we give them clamshells not making and here’s exactly the scientific process. Now most physical therapists we’re not going to worry about it. Give give them some clamshells they’ll be happy. Give them enough time they’ll heal from whatever it was. now the problem being that an inpatient physical therapist, right? Or an inpatient patient is somebody who was in the hospital for some reason.

I’ve only ever worked in outpatient. Actually, I did internships, but I I’ve only worked professionally in outpatient clinics.

Why would I ever give a clamshell?

It’s not an inpatient. There’s no way, you know, now certainly there are some surgeries and stuff that could call this into question, but I should have have knowledge of that. That’s actually within the purview of a clinical therapist. They should know that a clamshell is actually inappropriate. Now, of course, people add the rubber band and this that the other and have them standing and that changes the dynamic a little bit, but I’m just using this as an example.

You know, it’s a little clearer to be able to see in that Why are if if if if the clinician is supposed to know certain things and then they give clamshells when the patient wasn’t an inpatient and doesn’t they have a grade three muscle firing in nonweight bearing but a grade five in weight bearing there has to be a deeper scientific process of going wait I flicked the light switch in standing and it worked and I flicked the light switch in laying down and it didn’t work there’s something else going on it’s not the light switch and that’s the problem right so right there’s for a physical therapist like and and for the most Our physical therapists are taught, look, your patient was an inpatient.

You just need to strengthen them up. And yet most people, and a lot of people go into, yeah, I’m here to get really get strong. My doctor wants me to be strengthened up. Now, people have surgeries and and so they do need to strengthen up and they need management of whatever it was that happened during the surgery. But most physical therapy other than wound care and and you know, you know, rest, ice, ice, compression, elevation, they really don’t have much to offer.

They might do electrical stimulation. They might do an ultrasound. They might do this or that or the other, but those aren’t really truly rehab functions. Those aren’t going to help the that’s not going to change the structure and it’s not going to return the function. You’re waiting basically for the patient to heal and you’re just keeping them busy while it happened.

I see. And the problem with that is then so and and part of this problem with why why why doesn’t the physical therapist question this? And and this is speaking to your question. The chiropractor, the physical therapist, the occupational therapist, the the you name it, the naturopath, whomever says, “Oh my gosh, you have pain down your leg. It must be a disc.

You better go see the doctor.” And it’s because all of these people instead of studying their own the the assumptions that are made in their own field, they’re looking at what the information that the medical doctors are talking about. And the medical doctors operate under assumptions of their own. And so, well, gosh, you you you you have maybe some pain in your back and maybe it goes all the way down your leg.

Therefore, it has to be a disc problem, right?

Well, that’s based on some right?

Well, that’s based on some assumptions. And and I and I and I and I know this not because I came up with this, because some some more intelligent MDs who understood the assumptions said, “No, that’s not actually true. Just having pain down the leg is not as sufficient to say, yes, the this switch controls the light.” it the the the thing is is that your nerves are made up that the sensory portion is on the outside. The deep tendon reflex is the next ring down and the center ring of the nerve is motor.

So unless that patient has sensory change, pain counts, pins and needles, numbness, positive numbness or negative numbness and deep tendon reflex changes which are very hard to measure. So we don’t tend to use those as well because how how well did you hit the tendon etc etc. That’s like reflexes. Those are reflexes. deep tendon reflexes, kneejerk reflex, elbow reflex, jaw reflex. And so then that that center though is motor response, motor control.

If the patient has drop foot, now it’s now we know that something hard hard enough is pressing on the nerve and it’s depressing the nerve all the way to the center causing aberrant propagation of the signal from the motor neurons which are the center of the nerve. Now we know something hard is there. It still doesn’t have to be a disc. It could be arthritis. It could be pick something else stenosis or stenosis which is usually the bone right the neuroforaminal stenosis but there there could be some other structure somewhere else it could be a piriformis that is locked down that’s really irritating but not really right that’s not enough that squeezes the outside but it’s pretty hard to get motor change out of that so unless it’s entrapped unless that nerve is entrapped somewhere or squeezed somewhere you’re not going to get motor change so we can be pretty sure it’s time to send them them to the MD and say you need to take pictures and see what are the hard elements that could possibly be causing this disc problem or potential disc problem.

They could actually be causing this symptom picture, this this set of symptom picture, this this set of symptoms and this set of of signs, right? A sign is something that a a clinical observer can can see and measure that’s objective. The symptoms are something the patient complains about, the patient complains about, right? That’s why often in a medical document, you will see, oh, patient complains of, right? complaints of tells you these are the subjective these are the symptoms it was observed that it was measured that right then those are the signs so again back to this whole situation so you have all these people who are trying to assume oh well the MDs said this this and this don’t know the assumptions that MD’s information is based on and at this point many MDs don’t either they don’t know that that in the in the 50s and 60s doctors all the time said no no no no that can’t be a disc because you don’t have all three portions of the problem and Again, you know, you can kind of assume a deep tendon reflex problem.

If you see a motor problem, you go, “Well, this is worth risking surgery for because you have motor loss and if we don’t do it now, we’re going to lose don’t do it now, we’re going to lose more.” Okay? So, that’s when I personally would say, “No, you need to go see a surgeon and decide if they want to do something about this.” Or if they say, “Well, yes, you have had a problem. It looks stable. I’ve decided in my professional opinion, it’s stable enough. I don’t need to do surgery.” Not my call.

That’s the doc’s surgery.” Not my call. That’s the doc’s call. But that’s exactly the time to refer to the doctor. However, this physical therapist who was assuming, “Oh, yeah, that’s a disc.” Well, now when the patient comes back to you and the doctor said, “I either did the surgery or didn’t do the surgery, now what do you do to restore that dropped foot?” Or what if they never had drop foot? What if they come back and they still have pain, which 50% of the time minimum, and it depends on which back surgery you have.

Back surgery is only successful 50% of the time, right? That doesn’t matter whether it’s a fusion, a discectomy or a laminectomy. So, it’s only 50% successful. The other portion of that is is that the complication rate of the fusion is 10 times that of the other two. The other two don’t tend to have huge complications because they’re they’re pretty minimally invasive at this point, right?

By the more minimally invasive they’ve gotten over the years, the less complication rate we’ve had. They may not they may only help 50% of the time and help is somewhat subjective because a surgeon asks very soon right after you’ve they’ve had the surgery, well, how’s it feel? Well, the numbness is gone, but now I, you know, the positive numbness is gone or the pain is gone, but now it’s just completely numb.

Well, was that a was that a success?

It depends on how you want to measure it. That let’s not worry about that too much. So, again, back to this that you have all these practitioners who are not understanding the assumptions that are made and the decisions that are being made and and and saying, “Here’s how we’re going to treat most patients.” So when something comes along that doesn’t fit that criteria, they don’t know to opt out of it to say, “Oh, it can’t be a disc. Just because you have pain down your leg, it can’t be a disc, you don’t meet the criteria.” No, because that that criteria has been lost, In the educational process and in the and in the scientific method of of of of science. certainly various reasons for that. for example, like medications. it’s it’s documented research that shows medications at best are 50 to 60 50 to 60% of medications are effective at doing what the intended outcome was. 50 to 60% of the time.

That doesn’t mean that five times out of 10 that you use it, it works. It means out of five people out of 10 actually get the benefit they needed. Like you’d say it was like 100% successful. You would like to think that it’s 100 100% successful, especially when you’re using some powerful when you’re using some powerful medication.

Do you get the desired outcome?

Only 50 to 60% of the time. Well, that’s a problem because we pretty much assume that if you put a chemical in a body, you’re going to get the same outcome all the time. This medication does A and this patient had a condition. I gave them B medication. Therefore, the outcome was C.

And that’s not what we see because again the scientific method has not necessarily been followed here. You know, and I don’t want to I don’t want to get on a political horse, but pharmaceutical-based intervention is less expensive in general until it’s been done for years and then it’s not. So, and since people are making money and they have control of and they have enough control of the the money flow, they’re going to say, “Oh, it’s only 50 50 to 60%.” But it’s great. And they might just obfuscate the fact that it’s only 50 to 60% and then say, “Yeah, no, it’s 100%.” Totally.

We we’ve totally seen 100% of our patients get better, not using the scientific method. And no one’s questioning that. Meanwhile, people are saying, “Yes, doctors andarmacies and hospitals, we we trust them 100%. Back surgeries 100%. This is obviously a disc problem.

This is obviously a 100% effective medication, right?

And we’re going to assume that we’re going to follow the science and we’re going to use vaccinations.” Hold on. Because if those triedand-true known things aren’t so tried and true and aren’t so known and are based on assumptions that may or may not be true then then what can we say about vaccinations that have a whole lot more assumptions under them. So again so then how do practitioners like how do I function in my job? I’m not really a physical therapist per se. I am a osteopathically trained manual therapist where I take structure and function and try to make those interact again in the appropriate way.

I try to remove barriers and those barriers come in in injuries or disease process., you know, so I I can’t fix the disease, but I can clean up the body after that’s happened. Somebody’s had COVID, they’ve jammed their chest by coughing, right? And the inflammation behind their chest plate. If their chest plate no longer works properly, they’re going to have edema in their chest. And they’re going to have irritation in their chest because of the nerves.

The nerves are going to say, “We’re not being stretched and there’s fluid down here and we don’t like it.” So, it’s going to cause irritation. may cause asthma, may cause COPD, may cause various things. So when we’re using the scientific method, we have to be very clear about that. And and various practitioners are not necessarily using that method to really look at it, what it is they’re doing, not only in their own field, but then they’re assuming that knowledge in other fields and then using their supposed knowledge of those other fields to then make decisions about patient care.

And then the the public in general or certain elements of the public want to say, “Hey, we want to follow the science. We the science we’ve been told by these medical practitioners. Well, that may not be such a safe bet.” Yeah. Everybody can agree on the facts.

Right.

And if we can’t all agree on the facts, then we just can’t be friends. And there’s the whole problem is like which facts are you speaking of?

Which science are you speaking of?

And in which situation, which assumptions underly that science, which assumptions allow that aspect of science? because every every every piece of medicine is situational. There are times that where that’s 100% appropriate and there are times where it’s 50% appropriate and there’s times where that’s 0% of you know expected. Now obviously lawyers sometimes go and figure that out after the fact and sometimes that can be known beforehand and sometimes it can’t. So I’m not blaming anybody and saying oh bad doctor, bad therapist, bad this. Sometimes you can’t know those things.

But what we can do is use scientific principles, scientific understanding to then go back to these basics of how are cells, how do cells act, how do they organize, how do they interact with each other, how do they develop into larger and larger structures that become tissues that become organs that become organ systems that interact in in a whole way that that build structures that help them function, you know, help the various other elements of of the area function like veins. veins and lymphatics are going to function when the when the the ankle joint works properly and the muscles are able to fire fully through their range of motion and squeeze the fluid through.

So hopefully that answers your question. It does. And it’s kind of led me to another question about for someone like me who, you know, doesn’t have any medical training. People listening to this, you know, what what would you recommend they do as far as like checking assumptions or what kind of principles do you think that they could follow to help manage their care if they’re, you know, if they have problems that they want fixed? Does that make No, it totally makes sense.

And and the problem is we have people on both sides. We we do have people that use and and all these people are using scientific principles to some point and then there’s some jump in their logic and that’s going to be the really hard part for patients. People want to know like how should I take care of my kids?

How should I take care of myself?

How should I, you know, take care of my mother?, you obviously want to get information from multiple sources and there are going to be people who say things way out one direction and people who say things way out the other direction and and and as we all know right you get you you always get two stories and somewhere in the middle lies the truth and that’s the whole thing is you have to play you have to be your own philosopher. You have to be your own scientist and start gathering information.

Now, the problem is that not being trained, it can be really hard to make some decisions because there are some really goofy things that are said by practitioners that are that are trying to take advantage of the situation going, “Well, I’m just going to say very opposite things because that’ll get me money.” And then it will actually be damaging and hurtful to to people to patients, but they don’t care because look, again, just like the pharmacy is like, “Well, we’re helping people and we’re making money and we’d like to make more money, so we’ll help people more, maybe more than they need.” and and I and that go that that is that rubs both directions or to limit my liability or to limit my liability.

There you go. Yeah, we do it this way.

It’s safer, right?

I just do what everybody else did and I can’t be sued, and I can’t be sued, right? So, there you go. I I think you need to get as much information and I and I really think that’s the reason that we’re going to continue this podcast on and say, let’s start discussing some of these issues.

Yeah.

Like I would be really interested in you know being a little more scientifically literate like how do we you know what principles do we need to follow so that we are not making you know choices that hurt our health or take us down the path that may maybe we didn’t want to go down. yeah so I think you know obviously there are historical texts and stuff there’s information there’s there are certain books and certain authors you want to be able to look at that information., first off is knowing some of the anatomy, knowing some of the physiology and that’s much easier with the internet today.

You can garner quite a bit. AIS are very helpful can still be wrong is the problem and they can they can dream up an answer., or they can pre-think an answer, right? So eventually the answer will be this, but we can’t prove it., so there’s the whole thing is certainly educate yourself and here’s here’s the whole thing. My mentor was an osteopathic physician and he said look an expert is somebody who doesn’t screw up the basics and there are certain immutable medical you know basic kind of rules laws of how things function and and unfortunately if something sounds too good to be true it probably is and one one of the biggest is oh the the body is inherently wise and will take take something for example I had a patient who was getting stem cells and and I says oh and she has had type two diabetes and she says, “I’m going to have I have a stem cell injection for my type 2 diabetes.” I was like, “Wow, I haven’t heard of this.” You know, this was several years ago.

I haven’t heard of them injecting stem cells into people’s pancreases to, you know, return their function of the pancreas and get this to go. I says, “So, you’re going to be okay with that big big long needle they’re going to stick in your abdomen to put it in your pancreas?

I mean, how’s your naturopath going to do this?

Does he use an ultrasound to direct the needle into it?” She goes, “What? No, no, no. It’s just a small little needle.” I said, ‘Well, well, you have to get all make sure you get to the pancreas and you were a little overweight. I mean, I wasn’t trying to put her down, but it was one of those, well, it’s going to take a bigger needle than, you know, 2 or 3 in to make sure that you get into the pancreas.

And she goes, abdomen?

No, he’s not going to stick it in my abdomen. He’s going to stick it in my in my rear end. He’s just going to inject the stem cells in my rear end. And I said, well, do you need a larger rear end?

Does that help type two diabetes?

And she goes, “No, I don’t want a bigger rear end.” I says, “Well, if they stick stem cells there, they’re going to grow more stem cells there.” And she goes, “No, no. The stem cells will go in and we will see the damage done in my pancreas and will travel to the pancreas and do that.” So, here was all this stuff that was based on the stem cells and doing certain things and and so this guy had used this information saying, “Yes, stem cells can do these things, but then this underlying caveat of yes, but they have to be placed in the place that they’re going to have their action.

They don’t just magically float through the body and oh find their way. Find their way and say, “Oh, fix Find their way and say, “Oh, fix everything.” Otherwise, the stem cells we have in our body would just go fix everything. body would just go fix everything.

Yeah.

So, there’s there’s some of the stuff of of educating yourself now. And and the guy was good because he had information on well, these are embryological sheep stem cells from New Zealand. First off, the the the the the intimation here was, well, they can’t have scrapey is sheep version of mad cow disease. They can’t have scrapey, which is a worldwide problem. New Zealand won’t let any sheep product into their country because they’re trying to keep their sheep population pure.

No problem. I I I can understand. And so, he was actually speaking to something. Now, this lady didn’t know about that, but I understood that that’s what he was speaking to. So, it can’t have scrapey.

And because it’s a stem, because it’s a embryologic an an embryo, it doesn’t have an immune system, so there won’t be an immune response. And I said to her, I says, “Well, the sheep’s not going to have an immune response to you, but don’t you think your immune system is going to have an immune response to the sheep cells?” And she goes, “What?” I saved her $15,000. I saved her $15,000.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So maybe in future episodes we could talk about you know literature or methods to you know that people can use to help them become more educated and and you know understand a little bit more about medical approaches to to dysfunction. I I think that’s yeah I think that’s really good because again like and my my my reason for saying that telling that story was even if I if you read up anatomy and physiology you it’s easy to get tripped up because people are good at throwing things in and turning them around.

And so also being able to recognize like wait whose immune system are we talking about? But there there are medical texts and and you know microbiology texts that tell you about how do cells function. I mean I took microbiology in 1993 and it it spoke about cytogal virus human papilloma virus virus and how when those viruses all infect similar tissue the same tissues in an area that you almost always come out with cancer. It was 1993. I I might point out that most people have not heard of cytoglo people have not heard of cytoglo virus.

Now we’ve heard somewhat of human papilloma virus but again that’s a whole another discussion. We’ll have that one in another future podcast. But so the the thing is is going back to like you might have to educate yourself on well for example mrna vaccines.

What is mrna?

Well mrna is a so your DNA is hidden inside your cell nucleus and it and your DNA is actually packed up so that it can’t be damaged. And then when you when you have a need to grow a protein of a certain sort, your your the cell nucleus will open up the DNA ball, expose a certain segment of DNA, unhinge the two sides of the DNA because DNA is two-sided, right? RNA is one-sided, a single strand, DNA is a double strand. And so the double stranded DNA opens up and one and and then these these amino acids come in and match up with a with a with a ribos you know and nucleio nucle ribboucleic backbone right will match up with this one half of the DNA called a messenger RNA.

The DNA will now close the mRNA will come away from your DNA. The DNA closes back up, hides back away, gets folded back up, packed down tight so that nothing can interfere with it. And now this messenger RNA leaves the cell nucleus and goes out into the cell in into the cell body itself where the organelles are and a structure a ribosome grabs onto this mRNA and says, “Oh, you’re a code to build a protein.” Well, cha cha cha cha cha cha and it starts adding the pro the amino acids on to build that protein and that protein starts doing its folding.

So understanding processes like that like what is mRNA and understanding that you can’t build an entire organ organism from mRNA. It it codes for one protein only do one protein at a time. Now RNA can build larger structures because it’s a much longer strand but an mRNA is is long enough for typically one protein. And so you can’t get the entirety of COVID from one protein, but you can get an immune response to some portion to a protein that will be on COVID, right? And that that was the whole idea behind the mRNA vaccine, but there are pitfalls there.

And we’ll discuss those later. But so it’s it’s that sort of stuff of going through and saying, I want to know what about mRNA. Go back to a school text, a a college text or even a high school text of saying or ask the AIS and look it up. There’s plenty of information online that will tell you how does this process actually work.

Sure.

Because there will be people giving you bad information about that. Oh, I don’t want to get an MR&A vaccine and have and and catch COVID. You can’t catch COVID from one protein. It’s 1300 proteins. That would be pretty hard to do.

That doesn’t mean it won’t cause some of the, for example, the spike protein would cause certain signs and symptoms and you would go, “Wait, I have those signs and symptoms. I must have COVID.” No, you just have your body’s response and it looks a whole lot like having COVID even though it’s not because of course that was the one protein that caused the biggest problem. The spike protein caused the biggest problem out out of the whole COVID thing. So, it it’s going to it’s going to cause disease-like process, but it can’t cause the entire disease.

So, you have to be educated about that. That doesn’t mean that it won’t cause your immune system kind of like the lady with the stem cells like, well, your immune system is the one that’s going to be the problem. So in this case, what’s it going to do to the immune system or how’s the immune system going to react to that? That would be the real question. And of course, that’s where you you want to go back and get that information.

So we’ll put a list together of of like certain texts that might be worthwhile. Anatomy and physiology texts, microbiology texts of of human biology, human biology, microbiology, texts that speak about what are how does DNA work, how do these things work. If you want to know about some topic, that’s the best way to do it to get the the basis of the actual science, the stuff that we can all agree on. You know, the the the I think therefore I am in this room could all look at this information and go, “Yes, every time this happens, this is what we get.” Okay, great.

Now, we go out into the big wide world where wild things like COVID and other diseases live and what else can we get from that? So, we’ll we’ll come up with a list of some texts and stuff that should and we’ll we’ll post them on our website.

Awesome.

Sounds great. noticed that with my patients in my clinic too is is when you get back to just basic things like maybe before COVID, right? When it’s just about this is how viruses work, this is how these kinds of things happen, right? It’s not politically tainted. No, no social, you know, construct to punish or shame or intimidate or or any of that kind of stuff. If you just, you know, basic things like that where you can be like study that first, study that first and that will help take a lot of the fear away and then go, okay, now what am I hearing here?

Does that fit with what I know about how just viruses work in general or so that can be that’s gonna be great. Yeah, science was a lot less political 30 40 50 60 70 100 years old. And you know I I read texts all the time about human anatomy and physiology that are 100 to 200 years old. Well, the human body has not changed tremendously, In the last couple thousand years.

Yeah.

Right.

We It’s pretty much been the same for a long time. Y so I think a lot of that I mean I think we can go back to Plato and Aristotle and say yeah the things they had to say are still true today right if a diabetic person urinates in the forest bees will come it’s still true today folks so yeah getting apolitical viewpoints and especially like you said going back before co going back before this was such a political force or even a financial force going back to back when it was real research and people saying hey here’s what we found.

Yep.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

Awesome.

Sounds great. All right, I think we should take a break here. a break here.

Perfect.

Thanks for joining us on the Neil O’Neal Show. For more information, please visit Show. For more information, please visit pursuitpt. com or pursuitperformancetraining. com. Our music is provided by Sky Toes.

The Neil O’Neal Show – Episode 001 |

Video: https://youtu.be/ycyIenMbN6w

Lightly edited transcript: duplicated caption fragments and obvious transcription errors have been corrected while preserving the substance of the discussion.

Introduction

ANNOUNCER: This is OsteoSignal with Neal O’Neal, a podcast dedicated to helping you understand the osteopathic model of health so you can live a better life.

Today’s episode discusses oncogenes – parts of our genetic code that can cause unwanted cell growth – and their relationship to arthritis and cancer. And now, here is Neal.

ARTHRITIS AND CANCER: TWO SIDES OF A GROWTH-CONTROL SYSTEM

NEAL O’NEAL: Today, I would like to talk about arthritis and cancer, and how those two conditions can be viewed as opposite sides of the same coin.

In our effort to understand medical science and medical decision-making, this is something people should understand so they do not develop the wrong idea and then choose the wrong course of treatment.

Arthritis and cancer are flip sides of the same coin. That may sound like the craziest thing you have ever heard, but the reason involves growth-control genes called oncogenes.

Most people know what an oncologist does: an oncologist treats cancer. One growth-control instruction in a cell can be summarized as, “If you are pushed on, die.” This helps prevent cells from overgrowing their area, crowding neighboring cells, and causing tissue damage.

A cancer cell has disrupted that control mechanism. The disruption may result from a virus inserting genetic material into DNA, a chemical exposure damaging DNA, radiation, or another mutagenic event.

The other growth-control instruction is less commonly discussed. It can be summarized as, “If you are pulled on, grow.”

Who treats the consequences of that growth signal? Often, it is an orthopedic surgeon.

Normal Bone Growth In Response To Pull

NEAL: Many normal bony landmarks develop because muscles and tendons pull on bone. Terms such as tuberosity and trochanter describe bony prominences that form in response to mechanical loading.

For example, people who ran or played sports extensively while growing may develop more prominent bony structures around the knees. Bone grows to meet the mechanical demands placed upon it. Someone who spent childhood primarily playing chess rather than running may not develop the same degree of bony prominence.

This is a normal use of the growth-control system. Bone responds to tensile force – especially at tendon-to-bone insertions.

When Normal Growth Occurs In An Abnormal Mechanical Environment

NEAL: The problem arises when the same normal growth response occurs under abnormal conditions. A person may be told, “You have arthritis,” as though arthritis itself were always a disease. In many cases, osteoarthritis is better understood as a natural bone-growth process occurring in a dysfunctional mechanical environment.

Bone spurs commonly form near joints because of chronic traction on bone.

During childhood and adolescence, muscles and tendons can create substantial changes in bone because growth hormone is abundant and bone is highly responsive. In adulthood, muscles alone are less likely to create large new bony prominences unless the pull is repetitive and sustained.

That chronic pull often comes from the joint capsule.

The Joint Capsule And Synovial Fluid

BRENT MAYBERRY: Is that because joints have a capsule around them?

NEAL: Exactly. Synovial joints contain fluid, so they are enclosed by a fibrous capsule that retains the synovial fluid.

BRENT: Does that fluid allow the joint to move smoothly?

NEAL: Yes. Healthy joint surfaces are not supposed to grind directly against each other. They are designed to move on a thin film of synovial fluid.

When synovial fluid production becomes inadequate, or when the quality of the fluid changes, cartilage wear can accelerate and the joint may progress toward bone-on-bone contact.

The capsule is a fibrous bag attached around the bones forming the joint. It often has thicker regions that we call ligaments. For example, the ischiofemoral ligament is a thickening of the hip capsule.

Bone spurs often form near the points where these capsular and ligamentous tissues attach to bone. If someone has a painful hip and imaging shows a bone spur, the spur may reflect chronic abnormal traction on the capsule rather than being the primary cause of the problem.

A cortisone injection may reduce inflammation, but it does not necessarily correct the mechanical process that caused the bone growth.

How Abnormal Joint Motion Creates Chronic Traction

NEAL: A joint may have been injured, overused, or held in a restricted position for years. If it never regains full motion, the capsule no longer distributes force evenly.

A person may be able to rotate the hip outward but not inward, or may be unable to raise an arm fully overhead. That loss of motion means part of the capsule is being chronically tensioned.

The bone responds normally to the abnormal pull by growing. If the spur becomes large enough, it may mechanically block the joint and eventually require surgery.

The important distinction is that osteoarthritis is not always a primary disease process. Rheumatoid arthritis is a separate autoimmune disease. Osteoarthritis, by contrast, is often a normal adaptive growth response occurring in a dysfunctional system.

“Normal Wear And Tear” Is Not Necessarily Normal

NEAL: People are often told that osteoarthritis is simply normal wear and tear. But seeing something frequently does not make it healthy or inevitable.

The process may be common, but it still reflects abnormal mechanics and tissue dysfunction.

Bone spurs are also commonly misunderstood in conditions such as plantar fasciitis. A person may see a sharp spur on an X-ray and assume it is stabbing the foot. But the spur sits within dense fibrous tissue and formed because something repeatedly pulled on that bone.

The traction may come from the plantar fascia, an intrinsic foot muscle, an extrinsic muscle, or one of the many joint capsules in the foot.

The spur is often an indicator of dysfunction rather than the true source of symptoms.

Why Restoring Capsular Function Matters

NEAL: If a manual therapist understands how to restore joint-capsule function, that may be more useful in the long term than repeatedly suppressing inflammation with cortisone or injecting regenerative products without correcting the mechanics.

A normally functioning joint has a far better chance of staying healthy.

Even after a hip replacement, the patient still needs restoration of proper motion. The surgery restarts the clock, but the mechanical conditions that damaged the original hip may still be present.

In fact, long-standing compensation elsewhere in the body may cause the replacement to wear even faster if those patterns are not corrected.

Function is the key. Arthritis is a process of adaptation within dysfunction.

What Exactly Is Abnormal?

BRENT: What is happening to the capsule that causes arthritis? Is there abnormal motion, or are the cells receiving the wrong growth instruction?

NEAL: The bone-growth response is normal for the circumstances. The abnormality is the mechanical environment.

For example, many people sit for long periods with the hips held around 90 degrees. The capsule is repeatedly tensioned in the same pattern. The iliopsoas, gluteal muscles, and other tissues crossing the joint are used through limited ranges over and over.

Eventually, the joint may lose full motion. The capsule becomes restricted and maintains a constant pull on the bone. That continuous tension signals bone cells to grow.

At the same time, the joint may stop moving normally on synovial fluid. Cartilage begins to wear, the joint becomes irritated and warm, and the synovium may become thickened and sticky rather than thin and serous.

The growth response is normal. The sustained mechanical state is dysfunctional.

Why A Whole-Body Assessment Is Necessary

AUTUMN MAYBERRY: This is why the practitioner has to take the person’s full history and determine what created the problem.

Did the person tear an Achilles tendon? Is the talus restricted? Was there a knee or ACL injury? Is there a hip-flexor problem? Is the diaphragm restricted against the top of the psoas?

Any of those factors can alter force transmission and create abnormal pull on a capsule somewhere else.

NEAL: Exactly. There is the deforming force, and then there is the location where that force could no longer be dissipated or transmitted.

Those sites are often distant from each other. That is a central osteopathic concept: do not draw a six-inch box around the painful area and assume the cause must be inside it.

A force acting at a distance through a lever arm can create a much larger effect elsewhere in the body.

Treatment Before And After Joint Replacement

AUTUMN: Patients often ask whether they will need surgery. Early in treatment, we may not know yet.

Whether we ultimately save the hip or proceed to a replacement, the early treatment may be similar: remove the mechanical “hammer,” restore function, improve fluid movement, and reduce the forces driving the damage.

Eventually, we may reach a point where we know whether conservative treatment is enough or whether replacement is necessary.

NEAL: And even if the joint is replaced, the same functional restoration is still required. Otherwise, the replacement may wear out.

The Practical Takeaway

BRENT: What is the main takeaway for listeners?

NEAL: Understand why you have osteoarthritis and how you want it treated.

People in pain will often do almost anything to obtain relief. A clinician may image the painful six-inch area, identify damage, label it arthritis, and treat only what appears inside that box.

But arthritis is often a process, not an isolated disease.

Think of a sandbar in a river. The sand accumulates at a particular bend, but it came from somewhere upstream. The visible deposit is not necessarily the original source of the problem.

There may be smoke in the hip, while the fire is somewhere else. Put out the fire rather than simply moving the smoke around.

That means looking beyond clamshell exercises, cortisone, stem cells, or platelet-rich plasma when those interventions are used without correcting the underlying biomechanics.

PLATELET-RICH PLASMA: USEFUL, BUT NOT A COMPLETE SOLUTION

BRENT: What is PRP?

NEAL: PRP stands for platelet-rich plasma. Platelets are separated from a person’s own blood and injected into an injured site.

Platelets are involved in clot formation. When tissue is cut, platelets form a sticky web that helps stop bleeding and creates a scaffold on which healing can occur.

For a small or partial tendon tear, PRP may be useful because it can create a biological framework for tissue repair. This is why it is categorized as regenerative medicine.

But the question remains: why did the tissue tear?

Sometimes the answer is a clear trauma. Other times it is a chronic mechanical process, or the delayed consequence of an old injury.

PRP may help the damaged tissue, but the joint capsule still has to move normally. The distant mechanical driver still has to be identified and treated.

The Limitations Of Six-Inch-Box Medicine

NEAL: Insurance-based medicine tends to demand a diagnosis within a defined body region: identify the code, treat the coded area, and do not look outside it.

That framework is often guaranteed to fail when the true cause is part of a larger mechanical system.

The goal of osteopathic manual assessment is to identify the distant force, restore normal motion and fluid dynamics, and treat the body as an integrated whole rather than a collection of isolated parts.

Conclusion

BRENT: Excellent. Thank you.

NEAL: Thank you.

ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening to OsteoSignal with Neal O’Neal. For more information, visit pursuitpt.com or pursuitperformancetraining.com. Music provided by Sky Toes.

OsteoSignal Episode 003
Treat the Body, Not the Symptom: The Osteopathic Approach to True Health
Lightly edited transcript

Editorial note: Obvious automated-caption errors, repeated fragments, filler words, and false starts were removed. Technical terminology and speaker transitions were normalized. The transcript preserves the substance and conversational structure but is not a court-certified verbatim transcript.
Introduction
ANNOUNCER: This is OsteoSignal with Neal D. O’Neal, a podcast exploring how your body’s natural design connects with osteopathic science, translating complex signals into practical insight so you can truly thrive.
NEAL O’NEAL: My name is Neal O’Neal. I’m an osteopathically trained manual physical therapist. I’ve worked with patients for 30 years and have approximately 75,000 to 100,000 hours of direct patient treatment. During that time—interacting with patients, the medical system, and my role as an osteopathically trained therapist trying to provide a health-delivery model—I’ve noticed many problems with how medical care is provided.
Joining me is Autumn Mayberry. She has been an osteopathically trained manual therapist for 22 years. Welcome, Autumn.
AUTUMN MAYBERRY: I’m still learning, but thank you.
NEAL: She’ll help provide insight. Sometimes you cannot fully recognize what you are doing within your own profession, so we have brought in another perspective. We also have Brent Mayberry with us to help keep the discussion on track.
BRENT MAYBERRY: Hello. I don’t have manual-therapy training. I’m here to provide a layperson’s perspective and ask follow-up questions for listeners who are new to manual therapy.
NEAL: We’re glad you’re here.
Why Should People Care About Osteopathic Manual Therapy?
NEAL: Why should the general public care about osteopathic manual therapy? What is its role? The most important point is that our job is to restore function. We do that by treating at the cellular level. We seek to maximize cellular function and deliver health. We do not merely treat symptoms.
AUTUMN: Absolutely. Unfortunately, the traditional medical system is heavily based on treating symptoms. Part of that is because many people have serious problems and need somewhere to go for help, but they do not always know where to go. There are not many practitioners trained in the osteopathic manual-therapy model that we use.
NEAL: Traditional medical care is fundamentally a disease-treatment system. That is extremely valuable when someone has an acute disease, a life-threatening emergency, or requires immediate intervention. When a person is close to the edge and something must be done rapidly to preserve life, that system is essential.
The role of medicine expanded dramatically with the development of antibiotics. Antibiotics appeared to be a “magic bullet.” Modern people often cannot imagine how dangerous infection once was. Almost any infection could kill, and many people lived with lifelong consequences from chronic infection. Today, infection is often brushed off until the last moment because people assume an antibiotic can pull them back from the edge.
When antibiotics proved so effective, the public began to assume that physicians must possess a similar magic bullet for every health problem. Doctors are generally trying to help, but medicine is extraordinarily expensive, and financial incentives have increasingly shaped the system. Physicians can become constrained by administrators and productivity demands. Hospitals and advanced care cost enormous amounts, yet this system still primarily treats disease rather than delivering health.
The role of osteopathic manual therapy is different: restore function, remove barriers to health, and allow the patient to thrive.
BRENT: So it is not only an incentive problem. It is also a philosophical difference in the approach to healthcare. Traditional medicine often applies the “magic bullet” concept to many problems, focusing on symptom alleviation rather than restoration of function. Is that accurate?
NEAL: Yes. If symptoms disappear, people often assume the underlying problem has disappeared. That is not necessarily true. Patients eventually recognize this when they have gone from one treatment to another, tried medications, or been told, “We have nothing else for you.” They are not simply asking for symptom control. They want the problem addressed.
AUTUMN: There is often a lot of kicking the can down the road: try this for a few months, then try something else. The patient may feel there is nowhere else to go. Our training gives us a different way of looking at the body and different opportunities for intervention, but practitioners trained this way are difficult to find.
NEAL: Many healthcare practitioners adopt the same disease-treatment framework because they want to assume the authority or importance associated with physicians. That is usually not a path to success. Osteopathic thinking starts somewhere else: with function, integration, and the body’s capacity for self-regulation.
CELLULAR FUNCTION: THE LIVER AS AN EXAMPLE
BRENT: I’m looking forward to hearing how osteopathy addresses root causes, restores function, and removes obstacles.
NEAL: One major concept is that we treat at the cellular level. Consider hepatocytes—liver cells. Liver function is central to many life processes. The liver is made of many similar cells that can nevertheless perform different tasks.
The liver deals with food-derived compounds, medications, toxins, viruses, and other materials entering the bloodstream. Hepatocytes have an enormous workload. Many baseline metabolic processes depend on them, and metabolic dysfunction can reflect an inability of liver cells to meet metabolic demands.
BRENT: Are there different types of hepatocytes, or do the same cells perform multiple roles?
NEAL: They multitask. Hepatocytes are chemical experts. Some can become more specialized through adaptation. For example, if a person regularly takes a medication, drinks alcohol, or consumes caffeine, a portion of the liver may become especially involved in processing that substance.
Our goal is to support those cells at their own level of function. When a cell meets its metabolic needs and performs its work, it releases signals that reinforce its function. An autocrine signal acts back on the same cell—almost like the cell telling itself, “Good job.” A paracrine signal communicates with neighboring cells. An endocrine signal enters the broader circulation and communicates with distant structures, including the brain.
That is how function organizes from cells to tissues, tissues to organs, organs to organ systems, and ultimately the whole organism. This is the difference between merely surviving and thriving. In medicine, we hear about “failure to thrive.” We are seeking the opposite: continued growth, development, adaptation, and vitality.
BRENT: What does thriving look like in the body?
NEAL: In a child, it means appropriate growth and development: feeding well, gaining weight, building muscle and organs, having energy, attention, and the capacity to adapt. A newborn’s gastrointestinal tract is not an adult gastrointestinal tract. As children encounter more foods, chemicals, and environmental demands, their systems must continue to mature and adapt. Thriving means successfully meeting those challenges.
When someone is not thriving, the immune system may become hypersensitive, hyposensitive, or erratic. It may respond appropriately to one infection but inappropriately to another stimulus—for example, progressing toward anaphylaxis after a bee sting.
What Cells Need
NEAL: Cells require fluid exchange, nutrients, removal of waste products, blood flow, and proper nervous-system regulation. They need sympathetic input—the “fight or flight” system—and parasympathetic input—the “rest and digest” system.
The sympathetic system is often portrayed as bad, but that is inaccurate. We need stressors to develop and function at a higher level. Athletic training, growth, immune responses, inflammation, and healing all involve sympathetic activity. The problem is not that sympathetic activation occurs. The problem is when it does not switch off after serving its purpose.
BRENT: How do you change that during manual treatment?
NEAL: Sympathetic and parasympathetic neurons have cell bodies. Information enters the nervous system from the internal and external environment. That may include information from hepatocytes, the gastrointestinal tract, the skin, the eyes, or any other sensory receptor. Neurons process that information and create motor or autonomic responses.
Some reflexes are brief, like the knee-jerk reflex. Autonomic reflexes can persist. Neuronal cell bodies collect in ganglia. These ganglia participate in decision-making and can become stuck in repetitive response patterns. They continue issuing the same response even when it is no longer appropriate.
BRENT: What is a common example?
NEAL: Swelling—edema. There is no pain without some form of swelling or altered fluid environment. Edema sensitizes neurons. Normal sensation becomes nociceptive input, which the brain may interpret as pain. Pain is ultimately experienced in the brain, but nociception begins in the tissues and nerves.
When the system becomes stuck, many inputs are interpreted as threatening. The person develops chronic pain. Chronic pain is not thriving. Chronic edema is not thriving. These processes break down joints, muscles, organs, and nervous tissue. They accelerate aging in specific body regions.
BRENT: How do you address the ganglia?
NEAL: First, you must know where they are. You must understand their hierarchy, how they share information, how they communicate with the spinal cord and brain, and how the enteric nervous system participates. There are enormous numbers of neurons in the gastrointestinal and visceral systems—comparable in scale to the central nervous system.
When we say “gut,” we often mean the viscera or organs. In an osteopathic sense, an organ is not limited to the stomach, liver, or intestine. Structures such as a joint capsule also function like an organ because they produce and regulate fluid. Those fluids must maintain appropriate protein and electrolyte content, and their composition must fluctuate over time under sympathetic and parasympathetic control.
Using our hands, we locate ganglia and tissues that are not regulating properly. We may apply pressure, reduce local edema, restore movement, or create a route for fluid to move through tissue. Once edema accumulates, osmotic and oncotic forces can hold it there. Electrolytes, proteins, and other substances draw water into the area.
Think of a bee sting: a chemical enters the tissue, and fluid is drawn toward it to dilute and clear it. Across a semipermeable membrane, water moves toward an area with a higher concentration of dissolved substances until the system approaches equilibrium. The body follows those same physical laws.
The problem is that a local equilibrium can still be detrimental to health. A swollen joint may remain chemically “balanced” at the local level, yet the persistent swelling damages cartilage, limits movement, and degrades the joint. Stress is useful, but the stress must resolve so rebuilding can occur.
The Body Must Tear Down And Rebuild
NEAL: Health requires both breakdown and rebuilding. If the process becomes stuck in one direction, tissues stop recovering and begin to age prematurely. Cells release signals indicating distress.
The popularity of GLP-1 drugs offers one example of signaling. These drugs interact with receptors in the liver, visceral fat, and other tissues. Cells perceive a signal and change their behavior. The effects extend from individual cells to neighboring cells and then to systemic endocrine communication with the brain.
The liver does not work alone. It functions with the gallbladder, pancreas, stomach, small intestine, visceral fat, and many other structures. Visceral fat is an organ, not an “evil” tissue. It becomes problematic when its metabolic role moves progressively out of regulation. We then see conditions such as type 2 diabetes, fatty liver disease, and other breakdown processes.
Some of these processes are at least partially reversible. Osteopathic manual therapists do not claim to cure the underlying pathology. We address the surrounding dysfunction and the barriers that keep the system from working as well as it can.
Cells need fluid to remove waste, nutrients to arrive, and appropriate autonomic input. The vagus nerve and the sympathetic system must alternate in a coordinated way. All life depends on dynamic fluctuation—the crest and trough of a wave, the tide coming in and going out. A coastline without tides would support far less life.
BRENT: Dynamic equilibrium.
NEAL: Exactly. Dynamic equilibrium, homeostasis—whatever term you use, health depends on continuous, regulated change. Our job is to examine the ecosystem of the body and ask where it has gone wrong. Where has fluid become trapped like a stagnant marsh? How can we restore movement so it functions more like a productive wetland?
AUTUMN: A much more pleasant place to be.
NEAL: Exactly. We do not want deserts with too little fluid, and we do not want stagnant marshes with excessive trapped fluid. We want a productive, living environment.
Why Treating Only The Painful Area Fails
NEAL: Consider a painful knee. A patient may see someone who mobilizes or manipulates the joint. That may be useful, but what are they doing for the synovium—the cells that produce and regulate joint fluid? Are they considering sympathetic and parasympathetic input, blood flow, fluid movement, the tissue beneath the synovium, and the structures above and below the knee?
When a knee deteriorates, the ankle and hip are often involved. You cannot draw a six-inch box around the painful area and assume everything important is inside it. Treatment confined to that box may provide short-term relief but fail in the long term. Once the patient stops the exercises or temporary intervention, the original system-level problem may remain.
Sometimes the prescribed exercises or treatments make the condition worse. Patients often report that they spent considerable time and money on an intervention that not only failed but aggravated the problem.
AUTUMN’S EXAMPLE: FLUID IMBALANCE
NEAL: Autumn, tell us about your experience with swelling and fluid regulation.
AUTUMN: I had a friend in the hospital who was being treated with diuretics. The apparent measure of success was that his urine output exceeded the fluid he was taking in. But when I saw the urine, it was extremely dark—almost fecal-brown. Regardless of what anyone says, physiology still matters. The kidneys need adequate water.
After he left the hospital, I worked on areas related to autonomic and fluid regulation, including the tissues around the organs and the pathways through which they drain. Before morning he had eliminated approximately nine pounds of fluid. His wife noticed that a compression stocking went on one leg much more easily than the other, depending on which side had been treated first.
He had areas that were effectively deserts and other areas that were marshes. The goal was not simply to force fluid out. It was to help the system redistribute and regulate fluid appropriately.
The body can begin coordinating again when you intervene at the right point. Cells, organs, organ systems, and the whole organism can begin working together. We look for practical signs: the patient sleeps better, eats better, eliminates waste more effectively, and feels better.
NEAL: That is the key—multiple systems and multiple organs integrating meaningfully. That is survival and thriving.
The Limits Of Specialization And Single-Modality Care
BRENT: That seems unique to osteopathy. Traditional medicine often becomes highly specialized around one organ or one aspect of a system and may not consider how everything integrates.
AUTUMN: The same problem occurs in adjunctive therapies. A practitioner may become devoted to a particular method: “I do PRP,” “I do deep tissue,” or “I do myofascial work.” Those can be useful when the patient’s problem matches the method, but a hammer does not work well on a screw.
BRENT: PRP means platelet-rich plasma.
AUTUMN: Yes. Our training emphasizes identifying the kind of dysfunction present and choosing the appropriate tool. Once that dysfunction improves, the tool must change because a different limitation becomes visible. A cell needs lymphatic drainage, removal of waste, nutrients arriving, hormonal communication, and hardwired neural regulation. The treatment must remain flexible.
NEAL: Integration is what we emphasize. We integrate processes, systems, and the function of cells in different regions. Laboratory results do not always reveal dysfunction. An organ may use its remaining capacity to preserve a “normal” lab value until very late in the process. Its last effort may be to produce the expected output—right up until it can no longer do so.
A lab result can therefore resemble a blind person walking toward a cliff. At the current step, the ground still feels solid. The next step may be into open space. Our job is to recognize the direction of travel, turn the person around, and guide the system toward safer, more functional territory.
What An Osteopathically Trained Manual Therapist Should Provide
NEAL: Osteopathic treatment does not reject medical intervention. Disease treatment is often necessary. But before, during, and after disease treatment, someone must focus on health delivery: cellular function, organ function, integration among organ systems, and removal of barriers to self-regulation.
AUTUMN: Even the six-inch box around the painful area may eventually require treatment. The issue is timing and order. Should it be addressed during the first visit, the second visit, or only after a distant driver has been treated? The sequence matters.
BRENT: How can listeners find an osteopathic manual therapist? Is there a directory?
NEAL: Through our educational program, clinicians take courses and develop their knowledge of these processes. We are building a directory showing practitioners and their level of training—from practitioner and clinician levels through master clinician and, ultimately, neurobiohacker. That information will be available through Pursuit Performance Training and Pursuit Physical Therapy.
How To Evaluate A Practitioner
BRENT: Are there different “flavors” of osteopathy or osteopathic manual treatment? What should people look for when searching for a practitioner?
NEAL: There are osteopathic physicians who perform manual treatment. Our mentor was trained as an osteopathic physician and then studied with experienced osteopaths before teaching others.
There are also many people who describe themselves as osteopathic because a term becomes popular. It can be difficult to distinguish deep training from “me too” marketing. A practitioner’s website or direct conversation should explain how they think osteopathically and how they use their hands to assess and treat the body.
Be cautious when the practice is centered primarily on machines, devices, or gimmicks. Technologies such as red-light therapy may have value, but many can be used at home. They do not replace an assessment of why the body is failing to regulate blood flow, temperature, fluid, or autonomic function.
Look for someone who addresses the autonomic nervous system—not only the vagus nerve, which is currently popular, but both sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. Look for cranial work, soft-tissue techniques, muscle energy, strain-counterstrain, joint techniques, visceral approaches, and other tools. No single method is appropriate for every problem.
Someone who only performs one technique may be highly skilled in that technique, but osteopathic practice requires multiple tools because patients present with multiple interacting problems. Hepatocytes, for example, need lymphatic drainage, blood flow, neural regulation, and movement associated with breathing and diaphragm function. Different limitations require different interventions.
AUTUMN: Variety matters. “I only do craniosacral work” may be appropriate for a craniosacral problem, but not every problem is craniosacral. “I only mobilize joints” is also too narrow.
NEAL: Craniosacral relationships are closely connected with parasympathetic function, but the autonomic system includes more than that. Gentle skin stroking may be pleasant and may have effects, but it is a technique—not a complete treatment system.
The letters after a practitioner’s name matter less than how that person thinks. A chiropractor, physical therapist, massage therapist, physician, or other licensed practitioner may think osteopathically, while someone with an osteopathic degree may still focus narrowly on one body part.
AUTUMN: A patient recently sent me a website for doctors who talked almost exclusively about hips and knees. Her problem involved the ankle. The doctors may be excellent at their specialty, but an osteopathic practitioner should not be a specialist in a body part.
NEAL: An osteopath is a specialist in the body. I have never seen a knee and hip walking down the road by themselves. They are attached to the rest of the person.
The “Zoom In, Zoom Out” Method
BRENT: Autumn, you described trying to learn many different things and being able to zoom in and zoom out. What does that mean?
AUTUMN: We begin observing patients as soon as they enter. Before they sit down or describe the complaint, we are already noticing movement patterns and areas that are not working normally. Those patterns are usually associated with something else. There are always two ends of the stick.
The question is where to intervene first. We collect the patient’s history, observe how life is affecting them, and organize the findings into a hierarchy. We ask whether to treat the painful six-inch box now or to begin somewhere else.
We use rules and relationships: findings that “boss around” other findings, “no matter what” relationships, and “true until proven otherwise” patterns. We select the place most likely to create the largest beneficial change, intervene, and then zoom out again.
After treatment, we look at the whole person. Do they move better? Are they breathing more deeply? Do they look calmer? Is their autonomic system settling? Then we identify the next remaining problem, intervene again, and reassess.
I tell patients that I would like to treat one component of a problem only once, whenever possible. A hip or knee problem may have multiple contributing components, but I do not want to keep fixing the same component because I treated the system in the wrong order. I want people to get better, return to their lives, and refer new patients—not become permanent “bread-and-butter” patients.
BRENT: So the aim is to choose the right intervention, at the right time, in the right sequence, so the patient can return to life as soon as possible.
AUTUMN: Exactly.
NEAL: We want our patients to die young—as old as possible.
Conclusion
NEAL: I hope this helps listeners understand why osteopathic manual therapy can be an important part of health delivery: to restore function, support cellular and organ-system regulation, and help people not only survive but thrive. Thank you both for being here, and thank you for listening.
AUTUMN: Thanks, Neal.
ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening to OsteoSignal with Neal O’Neal. For more information, visit pursuitpt.com or pursuitperformancetraining.com. Music provided by Sky Toes.

OsteoSignal – Episode 004
Heterochronic Parabiosis: Unlocking Rejuvenation Through Blood Volume Exchange
Featuring Neal D. O’Neal, Autumn Mayberry, and Brent Mayberry
Video: https://youtu.be/k2CFrQD_Psk
Editorial note: This is a lightly edited transcript. Repeated caption fragments, punctuation, filler, and obvious speech-recognition errors were corrected for readability. The substance and conversational character were retained. Speaker changes are not labeled where the automated captions did not allow reliable attribution.
Transcript
Osteo signal episode 4. This is Osteo Signal with Neal D. O’Neal, a podcast exploring how your body’s natural design connects with osteopathic science, translating complex signals into practical insights so you can truly thrive. Hello to everybody. Welcome back to the Neal O’Neal Show. We’re here with Neal O’Neal and Autumn Mayberry. I’m Brent Mayberry and today we’re going to talk about heterochronic parabiosis. Okay. And let’s break that down. So hetero means same uh chronic same time. So at the same time and then you had parabiosis. Para means two and biosis means life.
What it refers to and of course like so many of these terms that come up in research it’s a little bit of a you know odd term uh and what it really means is that there was a research done where uh medical scientists are trying to figure out how can we help people not have dementia not have Alzheimer’s etc etc not have uh loss of brain function as we age in that pursuit they took a young mouse and an old mouse and They actually attached their arteries and their veins together so that they shared uh arterial and venus their arterial-venous venus flow. Thus the heterochronic parabiosis two lives one at the same time sharing sharing a body in in fact.
So they did this and what they what they found was and so this research was done in about 2005 and they found that uh when they connected the old mouse and the young mouse that the old mouse actually improved in health that its brain health that its brain health and function and that its uh organ function and and health improved.
So of course this is amazing result everybody says wow that okay that’s great and immediately people tried to make assumptions and of course doctors made assumptions immediately which you would think that they wouldn’t do that but MDs immediately said oh we think it’s the uh is it the platelets yeah we we believe that’s the platelets so they immediately started using uh PRP platelet-rich plasma now that has worked well for some things like small tears and rotator cuffs and such, but it’s not really a healing paradigm from the standpoint of that’s not going to do anything for your brain, platelet rich plasma. So, of course, you know, if you come across something and you have some idea like we think this is what caused it, you have to test that theory out. So, of course, once this research came out, everybody was interested in it.
And several teams, several scientific research teams, medical scientific research teams followed up on this. Uh, and no one could figure out what it was that was the difference in the in in changing the old mouse. What was it in the young mouse that made the old mouse mouse that made the old mouse rejuvenate? Okay, so you know, they tried all sorts of things, including all all sorts of blood products. They said, “Well, what if we do red blood cells? What if we do white blood cells? What if we do platelets? What if we do plasma? What if we do this? What if we do that? And what they what they, you know, they weren’t finding any answers.
And so fast forward to about 2023, the same group that had done the original research was was doing a all hands-on deck kind of thing where they said, “Okay, look, we’re going to take tons of mice.” And what we what what occurred in the first research project is we took half the blood volume of both mice and exchanged it really. Right? So you figure that at any one time or at some point in time the old mouse received about half the blood supply from the young mouse. So they decided okay we have to try and you know if if we’re going to find the answer we really need to hone in here and figure out let’s so let’s take out half the blood volume of each of these mice and of these old mice and replace it with something from young mice. Right?
So they tried and they had in this uh 2023 research they had 20 different things they were checking but they needed a control group and they said well look if we take old mice and just take out half their blood volume they’re going to die. So they said well we have to replace it with something. So in order and we don’t want to replace it with anything from a young mouse or anything that might be considered something that could be healing. So what we’ll do is and you know you can basically either just hang it hang a bag of fluid for the old mouse but if you do fluid to replace the fluid volume that was lost with the blood volume that was lost there are several factors you have to take into effect into account.
First there’s hypovolemic shock right just the the the volume of blood that was removed you need that much more fluid in there or that much more water like say saline or that much more water like say saline solution. However there’s also electrolytes that are that need to be there. So a saline solution is great but is that enough solution is great but is that enough electrolytes? And then finally also what about proteins? So when they when they put this fluid this non-healing regular fluid back in the old mice they said well we’ll just use albumin that we’ve collected from other mice and albumin. That’s a common thing to happen that when somebody has a large blood volume loss you’ll receive a bag of fluid but if your protein levels are too low they’ll give you albumin. Okay?
Okay, so they did that for these old mice and they went through their whole thing, had all these mice live for x number of weeks and then of course they destroyed them. So it looked at their brains, looked at their organs and they went through their groups and lo and behold they had found a winner. They had found actually they had found an even better result than they had originally, right? They said, “Wow, this is amazing.” Except there’s a problem. It’s not any of the groups that we gave stuff from young mice. It was the one group that we didn’t give anything other than replace their blood volume with saline solution, make sure there was enough electrolytes and make sure there was enough protein. So is the was it the control group? It was a control group. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
So the control group actually not only did fantastic, they had done better than the original set of old mice, which of course shocked everyone. And of course then when they sat back and thought they went, “Oh yeah, certainly logically that was one of the possibilities that it was simply that we changed over blood volume. We took what what the blood volume was in the old mouse and diluted it.” My analogy for this is like having a pool. So, anybody that that has had a pool or swam in a pool, let’s say you have a pool and you swim in it, you and the kids are swimming in it all summer and you’re putting chemicals in there, but you know, the chemicals are keeping it blue and it looks pretty clean, but there there there is organic material building up in that pool. Okay?
So, now you winterize the pool and you cover it over and and you leave it alone and you forget about it for 6 months and then you come back in the in the spring, late spring when it’s nice and warm, you say, “Hey, the kids and I, we all want to get back in the pool.” So, you pull back the cover only to find a black pool. Ew. Oh, yeah. Exactly. Ew. So, what do you do with that pool? Do you start putting chemicals in it and then do you pull some of the black the black water out and you ozonate it and you red light laser it and you do all this other stuff and then put it back in the pool? And I bring that up because that’s exactly what there there’s a lot of naturopaths or various people who say, “Hey, come to our clinic and we’re going to take out your your blood volume and we’ll put ozone in it. We’ll irradiate it.
will put all this great nutrients in it and then we’ll put it back in your body. Is that how you would do your pool? What you would do is you would just take as much water out of the pool as you possibly could and then ideally all of it, but there’s still going to be some black goo, black stuff, right? But you might just dilute that down saying, “Well, never mind. I’ve got a lot of powerful chemicals. I’ll just dilute as best I can and then break it down, right?” And then you’d have your pool up and running and you have blue water again. Well, the analogy here is, okay, these old mice had old blood volume and there’s a lot of stuff in there. I was going to say that they, you know, getting old is like being winterized. Is like being winter, right? And then all that black goo starts to build because nothing’s happening. And then whatever had been in the system slowly grows and aggregates.
And so let’s talk about some of the things that might be in in people’s bloodstreams, right? Well, you have a history. Your immune history is in your bloodstream. you have broken down antigens and you’re constantly getting new antigens. Let’s say you had bacteria that got in and got defeated by your immune system. You didn’t even get sick or you did get sick or you had viruses. Viruses that attacked cells and the cells got destroyed by your immune system so that they couldn’t propagate more viruses. We have all this broken down stuff. Well, how do we control that? Well, humans, you know, we have these things called cytokines, cell cytokines as killers. So, but they’re also it’s communication, right? So, cytokines are for communication from cell to cell. Oftentimes can end in cell death. Apoptosis, you tell a cell, it’s your turn to die. Here’s your cytokine.
Here’s your death warrant. We said kill your death warrant. We said kill yourself. And that’s why, you know, that’s one of the ways that we keep ourselves from getting cancer. However, all these cells are breaking down. So, you you have this multitude of things. In other words, the pool is getting darker and darker and pretty soon it’s getting black. And as you get older, it gets harder and harder for your kidneys and your liver and your spleen and the other organs that are supposed to take care of this stuff to clean that out because they too have been assaulted by just this the sheer vast amount coming at them. Right? So that really becomes a problem and and that really becomes a problem and and and how I can say that or why I will say that I I will relate a little bit of information that a lot of people know.
if you have older parents or you’ve had older relatives that have gone into say a nursing home or a care home and they’re they’re doing pretty well but they’re being taken care of and they’re but all of a sudden one day the doctor calls and said, “Well, we’re going to put your your your this person on medication because they have Alzheimer’s.” And you go, “What are you talking about? I just talked to my uncle or mom or dad last week. They were perfectly fine. There’s no chance they have Alzheimer’s.” No, no, they’ve got have Alzheimer’s.” No, no, they’ve got Alzheimer’s. So, of course, you would go down to the care home or whatever and say, “Okay, let me talk to mom and dad.” And sure enough, they seem quite quite like they’ve lost their marbles and say, “Well, wait a second.
That seems really odd because just like last week, they were fine.” Now, somebody else in the care home might say, “Oh, anytime you see that in an older person, we know that’s a UTI, a urinary tract infection.” Now, why would that have that effect? Well, the kidneys generally clean your blood and keep your electrolyte balance and your protein balance, right? That’s what they do, uh, and your blood pressure appropriate. However, if as you get older, they don’t do as good of a job anymore. And let’s say that you have a huge challenge on on the kidneys, otherwise known as a urinary tract infection, which that’s the top of the urinary tract, right? So, now all of a sudden, they’re not able to do their job as well.
They’re still a able to do it to some degree, but you can see how close to the edge of of function that they are because they kick over into what we would consider Alzheimer’s or dementia, right? And you go, “Oh gosh, they’re kicking over that.” So, you know, let’s go back to our old old mice. Their systems are becoming senescent, right? And there are certain sites in organs that are senescent sensitive sites where you start to age at that point and then the organ ages from that point outward and then pretty soon you have old organs that can’t keep up with it. Plus the tide the sheer tide of stuff coming on against them. They just can’t handle it and it overwhelms them and you begin aging. Your kidney ages and then the rest of your body ages and eventually your brain ages from that. So what do we do about that? Right?
So of course you know what I’ve taken from this is and and obviously the uh the research team said well we hadn’t realized there was this other option about what we should do. What we suggest is you that you do a neutral plasma exchange. Okay. And and again fun term that they came up with but what they mean is that they they think that you should remove a certain amount of plasma right because we’re trying to get rid of and now think about all the things in in plasma. plasma is if you take out the white blood cells, if you take out the red blood cells, then that what you have left is this straw colored fluid that’s left over fluid, right? And there’s platelets in there, but there’s cytokines, there’s immune complexes, there’s antigens, there’s etc, etc., etc.
I remember in class you said cell lines from, you know, for females from our kids, each of our kids that we’ve had and things like that too that are going there are other things floating around. Now when you when you when you you do the plasmapheresis it you know anything that’s big enough will get pushed back into your system like a red blood cell or maybe white blood cell but you’re going to lose a lot of stuff and so of course how how clean is a plasmapheresis you know I’m not an expert on that but I know that they’re trying to keep it as clean as possible because when we do this for people with kidney disease we need to keep that protein level up otherwise they’ll die right so so what they said okay neutral plasma exchange take out a certain amount of plasma and then just replace that plasma with clean plasma or again like saline solution albumin if you need it.
Of course you’re going to be get get that from some other human that might not be your best bet but you know maybe if you just do it at a slower level. So that was their suggestion. And now there’s other ways you could obviously think around this. You could say well you can al also go donate plasma. you can actually get paid money to donate plasma. Uh if you have certain kinds of blood types, AB and O I believe it is that even the blood banks want that and will take your plasma out for you. But if you’re not that, they’re going to be like, “Well, thanks, but we don’t really need that today. They really just want it from those couple.” So, if you happen to be A or just B or you know, then they’re not going to be overly happy with that and they’re not going to want to do it for you.
But there’s plenty of pharmaceutical companies who need plasma to do their research and so they’re willing to pay you for it. So you could have that done. There are like naturopaths and there are rejuvenate is a a chain that goes around. They they will do certain things for you including will do certain things for you including this plasma replacement. Now they in the in the past this has been going on for years though before this research came out people had been doing this but generally it cost about 20 to $25,000. Currently, I I I can find places that will do it for $5,000. However, they would really rather add several other things to the process for $5,000 each. So, by the time you’re getting out of there, it’s 15 to $20,000 again. Well, that’s outside the reach of most people. most people. Sure. Right. Yeah. That’s impract impractical.
Now, that doesn’t mean that in the near future or if people don’t start demanding it that they obviously it’s not going to cost $5,000. It’s quite ridiculous. You can buy a plasmapheresis machine, a used one online on on eBay for a couple thousand I love that you know that. Just saying. I might have looked. So, you can see, but you you still need a doctor and/or nurse available or phlebotomist. I mean, there’s still professionals involved. It still takes money. There’s still safety factors that you want to look at, but it can be provided for a whole lot less than that. particularly if there’s more volume.
If more people understand this and know about this and that this is a pathway to restoring health, this is truly health care as opposed to just covering up problems or saying, “No, no, no, let us put new stuff in your black, you know, pool stuff in your black, you know, pool water.” It It’s interesting because I I’ve had patients that have have started to do this, you know, a few of them, and they’ve had some really great results. their cognition is better, their affect is better, all kinds of things, overall health and things. But I’ve I’ve had some patients that have sent me videos of, you know, people on YouTube that have claiming, “Oh, we’re going to we’re going to do PRP today. We’re going to take out, you know, two two liters of your of your blood and we’re going to run it through this machine, ozone it, and no, not PRP. It’s ozone, sorry. Uh ozone.
They’ll run it through there and then we’re going to put it back and then, you know, sometime later we’ll come back and we’ll do two more.” And so after three times, we’ve gotten all your blood clean. And I’m going, “Right.” But if you mix it with the how how are you getting if you’re taking black pool water you ozonate it I don’t care how well you ozonate it the gunk is still in there ozonate it the gunk is still in there and and it’s mixing with everything else and so in three times you’re supposed to have all your blood clean and I think got to stop and think you know that this is not how how it’s going to work you know right so there’s some problems there and I had a question about so they discovered this result from their study with the control group of those mice but did they you know in your research Did they ever figure out what replacing the the plasma does?
Like what does it force your body to do? How does your body compensate? What does your body do with the, you know, now that it has half or I guess with the mice, you know, what did the mice’s body do with half the volume of its blood, you know, removed? Removed and then Yeah. So, does that make sense that Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, we and they didn’t do a follow-up because I think that’s kind of within the medical knowledge is that well, if you can restore the health of those organs, they’ll regenerate and start doing their job better. Like Otto was saying, like she’s had patients who’ve made improvements. But they they also understood that, you know, it’s going to start to you’re going to have a chance to clean more of that stuff out of the system. However, it’s only going to be so much. Mhm.
So, it just gives your your body system a chance to, you know, it doesn’t have to worry about all of the junk that’s that you may be, I don’t know, preventing it from fun functioning at 100% or, you know, at a higher level. So, let’s say you’ve lost uh let’s say you’ve lost 50% function. You’re older like me. So, you’ve you lost that function in your organ. And then we do this neutral plasma exchange and if you go back to only having lost 40% of function, right? That’s exactly that’s what they’re looking at saying, hey, we might be able to take you back some percentage point. Now, they didn’t measure that. They they just basically said, we know that it takes them backwards.
We saw regeneration and they and the self-healing properties of the human body or the mouse body in this case took back over and regenerated organs brain and the the theory is that it because that junk was eliminated or removed to a you know to a certain extent and allowed the body to to rejuvenate. Exactly. Okay. Restored them to a more youthful time. Those toxins and those those yucky things that we don’t want in our plasma they accumulate at those senescence sensitive spots. Right. Exactly. And there’s also but there’s also cells there and things there that would with without that clogging in there would regenerate and turn over those cells, right? And help that be better. Exactly. Liver cells, pancreas cells, brain cells, bone marrow cells. bone marrow cells. Yeah. You know, you natural healing would take place without the gum gunk in there. Yeah.
And there’s another aspect of, you know, we talk about cytokines and that that creates a certain amount of noise in the communication line because hormones are a communication system. You think of them somewhat like liquid nerves. Well, if you have a bunch of cytokines and antigens and, you know, positively charged and negative char negatively charged proteins and this that the other floating around in your in your blood plasma, that’s going to interfere with the messages that you’re trying to get. So, you you know, do you need testosterone or estrogen or is it just that you have bad signaling, right? Yeah. And we talked about that last, you know, last episode. Yeah. The last episode we discussed, right? So, you can see that Yeah. Maybe that’s something that that that’ll restore that.
So we would want to do this neutral plasma exchange but I’m a manual physical therapist and of course thinking about this and trying to integrate the osteopathic method the osteopathic thinking that I learned from that we learned from our mentor Loren “Bear” Rex, DO uh that so we learned to think around the problem and say well what more can we do to to make this process work better. So as manual therapists, we work with people all the time to help take them backwards in time and restore function by restoring deep lymphatic drainage. Not just the superficial stuff that most people think about with lymph lympadeema, but the deep lymphatic drainage, the drainage in organs, neurolymphatic and you know endocrine function. Can you get the endocrine system functioning better? Do you can you restore and remove inflammation? That’s another barrier.
Can you can we make the kidneys work better by stimulating the sympathetics and the parasympathetic? And you mentioned about expressing the liver and the the spleen also. So think about this. So we have this gunk sitting around and you do have organs liver, spleen, pancreas, gallbladder, etc. and and even fat stores uh you know visceral fat that have absorbed some of this these cytokines and other let’s just we could call it toxins or we could just call it waste products things that are no longer useful to the body. They’re really just waste products and that need to be getting rid of gotten rid of but we the body couldn’t do it. but those are also going to be stored in all those organs.
So what if you had a manual therapist who understood this, knew how to express the liver, so that let’s say that you had done a neutral plasma exchange maybe once, maybe twice, you’d already gotten a lot of stuff out of the circulation that you have, but some of that stuff is going to be in the nooks and crannies of the body. So you need somebody to go and restore function and the ability to move to the liver, what we call the mobility and the motility of the organ uh of the of the spleen, right? because those those organs are going to take up th those contaminants, if you will. Okay. So, but what about the bones? What about the inside of the bones? Yes, they’re going to have that, too, because those are centers where your bones are going to age. Your bones are producing bone age. Your bones are producing bone marrow, white blood cells, red blood cells.
You need you need this constant turnover of cells and your production sites have been taken offline by this level of contamination. So, if I could go in and I and let’s say that this is maybe the third time you’re doing your neutral plasma exchange, but I go in and express your liver, your your your make sure your kidneys have good high high function and and are able to get the edema or any fluid out from around them, you have proper drainage, there’s going to be a lot of gunk that’s been in the nooks and crannies of the body that that will then get put into the circulation. So instead of just skimming off the clean water that’s kind of now taken taken, you know, as you put cleaner stuff back in the in the system, that cleaner system, you know, that cleaner water is going to be or that cleaner fluid is going to be in the in the circulation. It’ll be easy to take right back out.
The stuff we want is that blacker, darker, you know, more contaminated stuff. So you have to stir up the bottom of the pool, right? You have to make the legs work. You have to you have to make the whole you have to make the diaphragm function. You have to open up the the function of the cranium because you actually weep cerebral spinal fluid out of your cranium. You actually have venus drainage out of your cranium. You have what we call the glymphatics. So you have a lymphatics lymphatic drainage out of your skull. But that gets backed up as well. There are other studies that have shown the glymphatics when they get overwhelmed stop working. Uh so those are the sorts of things you’d want to go back in, prime those mechanisms, prime those pumps, and then as that those contaminants are now placed into the bloodstream for a short period of time.
So you’d obviously want to do this right before you go in for the neutral plasma exchange again, then do that neutral plasma exchange and you’ll get more gunk and you’ll have gotten it out of the new nooks and crannies. So then we can advance we can we can make that that restoration to health and rejuvenation even better. Mhm. So I was going to ask how much of that process involves directly you know I don’t want to say manipulating but addressing the organ itself and how much is involved with addressing the the autonomic nervous system. Does that question make sense? Yes it does.
So you have you have the organ itself and it in most organs a lot of organs have a capsule around them right the liver has a capsule the kidneys have a capsule and so or like for example say the pancreas uh it’s in the peritoneum in the abdomen and then the abdomen has a is a a container of sorts that fluid has to not only get into the lymphatics but it also has to maybe drain through the diaphragm. So you have to directly treat that. But then the autonomics, what is the what is the what do sympathetics do? They control blood flow. And at some point they control blood flow into an organ. So if you’re not getting proper blood flow into the organ, then you’re not going to get proper function of that organ and you’re also not going to be able to clean out that organ. But before you can do that, you have to make sure that it has proper lymphatic drainage, proper venus restor.
You know, you have to restore venus return. uh and and then do you have parasympathetic that also feeds into do you have parasympthetic innervation or proper stimulation of those organs. So yeah the both so you do both but you would first directly address the organ itself the organ system and then the and then the nervous system. Yeah.
So let’s let me speak to that just a little bit because so the vagus nerve comes out of the cranium and you actually have a couple of other parasympathetic nerves coming out of your cranium ocular motor facial vagus glossopharyngeal and then that controls really this upper portion of your body and then of course vagus goes through the chest cavity the abdominal cavity gets threequarters of your digestion or well 2/3 so Vegas and then S23 and four that’s all your parasympathetic then your your sympathetics come from your hypothalamus come down your spinal cord and and feed out into ganglia in front of L1 through or T1 through L2. So you have to stimulate all these areas. So there’s this overall then also the sympathoadrenal part of that system, right? The the sympathetic nerves themselves may release norepinephrine to cause a sympathetic response.
But to get a systemic response, the system will kick in the adrenal glands. So the adrenal glands have to be uh let’s say worked on in order to get that proper functioning that proper autonomic balancing of not too much stimulation to as in the sympathetic realm and not too much parasympathetic enough parasympathetic enough sympathetic to be healthy. Yeah. And this is what makes the osteopathic method in my opinion so vital is because it looks at the whole body system instead of just you know just poking at the liver trying to you know squeeze it or whatever to get proper function. It you you just talked about all kinds of systems that go from your you know from your top to to your lumbar spine. Right. Right. All the way down to your sacrum. Yeah. So yeah.
And there’s a spec specificity to it also right like if you know I’m a massage therapist I’m osteopathically osteopathic model trained right with from bear and stuff and but yet you know a lot of massage therapists just push push fluid through the body right and it’s just just general like motion thing and once they stop doing that it kind of slows down and goes back to the way it was where with with how we’re trained it’s we’re we’re manipulating like the ganglia we’re uh or working with the ganglia not manipulating like popping or anything like that like HVLA but but we’re we’re applying treatment specifically to these certain to certain things to create flu fluctuations in the hormones or you know to restart or create you know electricity bioelect electrical you know flow and drive yeah so that helps you know it’s not just mechanically shoving just fluid willy-nilly or just general fluid it’s to be able to integrate and like coordinate these individual systems but also to help them coordinate better and I you know I bring that up just for people who are watching or listening to, you know, get an idea of what osteopathically trained manual therapists do and how they approach something like this.
Right. It’s not just uh, you know, in other episodes we talked about, you know, it’s not just pumping your body full of supplements or doing some, you know, cutting edge procedure, you know, to to help your body. It’s you have to you use that for sure.
You can use that but you also need the o osteopathic model to you know to integrate it and to give your body the best opportunity to to restore function right and I think that’s why we call it health care or returning returning the body to its healthy state it’s its ability to regulate itself and to heal ability to regulate itself and to heal itself right and you can’t you can’t do that just with external you know support or supplementation like we like you know like we talked about with the peptides or in this case with plasma exchange, you need that’s great external stuff that you could pro you could definitely leverage in your body, but you need the osteopathic internal, you know, treatment as well to maximize it. Yeah, exactly. And that’s what we’re trying to do.
We’re we’re optimizing, maximizing, trying to take this even further because, hey, if a 50% improvement is really good, why don’t we make it great? Make it a 75%. But you’re not going to get those numbers unless you put out a lot of money and time constantly doing this stuff. And even then you may not get the return of function. Sure. And that’s and that’s why like you had asked about what about the autonomic nervous system? What about this? Right. That’s the self-regulatory systems can you know you you can do these external things but that doesn’t bring these things but that doesn’t bring these self-regulatory things back online. The autonomic nervous system the drainage and and those are going to continue to be a barrier to these external right in in those cases. You can kind of think of the human body as a black box.
They’re throwing things in from the outside and then there’s a couple of measures they can do like a blood test this that the other. But those are end evaluations where there’s so many things going into that that you don’t you can’t quite know who caused that. But that’s where we come in. We go through the body from from your feet to your head and look at all the things and how they interact, right? in and knowing understanding lymphatics, nerves, arterial arterial-venous, hormonal signaling, endocrine function, what we call the neuro hormonal axis, the hypothalamus, pituitary, gonadal, adrenal axis, right? You have to understand these the gut microbiome. Understanding that actually there’s different gut populations in different microbiome populations in different parts of your gut. So there’s going to be different signaling.
There has to be different signaling in every area where there’s a different area where there’s a different microbiome. That’s important to know and to That’s important to know and to understand. Yeah, that was something, you know, that we discussed today that really helped me because I I didn’t quite have it set up that way in my head. And earlier today, we had a young man come in, you know, that had had viral menitis been in South America and he’s he was plugged up. He was, you know, he’s having a hard time breathing. He couldn’t do it. So kind of all these systems were kind of slowed down or stopping, you know, and it was really fascinating while Neil worked on him. He, you know, he had to pump the the spleen and get that to start to turn over. And the kid turned green. I mean, really green. And we were kind of like, whoa.
But Neil was able to like help him get through that part and make sure that the other systems could accommodate the overflow and then like the sloughing off and then help those kind of restart and then coordinate their system again. And he was able to care for him the whole time that he did that. And by the time he was done, you’re like, “Oh, he can get it. He’s getting color back in now.” And then he went and sat it for a little bit and recovered and and he was doing much better. But even the biomechanics, the biomechanics got better. You could see like the electrical flow and he wasn’t, you know, just his affect was better. His mood was better. Not so depressed. So, you could tell there was like electrical changes and stuff with the neurons and all that kind of stuff, too. But, you know, Neil had to take a like a swampy system, right?
And find the entry point and then not just be like, well, I’m going to just squeeze this out and, you know, come what may. He had to help him like move past the, oh, cuz if we’d have left in there, you would have done harm, right? And so, I think that’s neat that to be able to see. I mean, your your mind fascinates me anyway and I want to be like you when I grow up, right? But but uh that was just a neat thing to be able to be like, well, we have to do this to get him better, but you can’t just do one thing and then be like, well, I started started the system. It needs a little bit of care and guidance and understanding of how when things need to come in and why you would do a certain thing and then be able to cater that to the person at that time because it’s not you’re never going to do that same treatment on that kid he’s never going to be the same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Well, and and I mean the interesting fact is for the people at home who who didn’t see this, this was over a year and a half ago. This was almost years ago. It’s becoming more chronic of a problem for this kid, right? And it’s only worsening. Y and he’s How old was he? He was 20. and he’s How old was he? He was 20. 20. Yeah. 20. Right. And that’s what’s really sad is that medically he had been treated and and his viral menitis and everything had been stopped. but the effects of it and the the deleterious effects on his body had not changed. They had stopped him from dying at that time, but they hadn’t restored him to life. him to life. Yep. And there that’s the difference. And and I’m not saying that what they that’s fantastic.
They were able to stabilize him, get him get him, you know, I mean, I think he he got off the airplane from South America and he wasn’t even able to make it back to to Utah. He had to they had to stop in Atlanta and put him in the hospital Oh, wow. Yeah. And immediately start there. It was that it was that dire of a situation. And they they saved him. It was That’s awesome. That’s great. Then what’s the where do they how do they restore health after that? And that and that’s really one of the problems with our system is like who does the restoration of health? Well, I think that’s our job and I would love to see more people get interested in this and and see because again from our mentor we were taught these rules and ways of looking at it and given perspectives that you know I went to physical therapy school. They don’t teach that.
That’s not that’s not what the schools are in and that’s really not the school’s job. That’s the people’s job to be interested in it and to push and to come and find this knowledge. It’s here and and unfortunately the medical system to you guys, you know, if you’re interested in this, come come check out Neil stuff Neil stuff experience. Exactly. With all of us, it’s a I mean there’s a lot community. Yeah. Yeah. And hopefully we’ll get bigger. But yeah, it was it was just a fascinating thing to see this you know this kid and you know he’s like it was as good as it going to get. you know, you could kind of tell, but the parents have they’ve haven’t spared any expense to try and they’ve taken him. He was in South South America and he had some care there. He had it, you know, in Atlanta.
had I mean great hospitals and great doctors looking at it but unfortunately the allopathic model as opposed to the osteopathic model is not set up to be able to think through these these individual layers and then how they come together which is what we’re trying to learn you know from you and what you’re you’re able to see and and reading this research and stuff how your mind puts it together in applying that model that you’ve had more experience in than I have it’s it’s something that you know as a mom you want your kids you want to have that right you don’t want to sick care you don’t want to lose your kid because somebody didn’t understand how to how to put things together that way.
Well, I think that’s what may be different between our group and lot there’s lots of people who say I’m a manual therapist and just because you put because you put your hands on somebody and rub or twist or move or do some stuff and I’m not saying that there aren’t people that have big big chunks of what we have but again as you say it’s the integration of the of the systems the systems analysis and the integrations of system treatment. Yeah, that’s what we particularly have that’s special that I don’t think you necessarily get from those other systems. There’s also a certain amount of the the bullpy effect of like uh for example, can you do cranial by pulling on the earlobe at 5 g. You can’t move the temporal because the the soft tissue of the earlobe is not is not hard enough to transmit those forces into the temporal. Right? So, there’s some bullpy out there.
there’s some and and what happens is people will be scientific right up to the point that they know and then they want to get somewhere but they don’t understand how to cross the chasm of knowledge between there and so all of a sudden there’s a magic pathway and that’s really where you what you see is that all of a sudden it’s a magic pathway and some people get better and a lot of people don’t and oh well I tried manual therapy right I get that all the time like no this is manual therapy but it has to be and it has to be high level scientifically oriented and it has to have that have to be logically put in place. It it can’t just be happen stance and maybe we’ll try this today. I have a feeling, you know, I heard a bird and it said, you know, treat your left ankle. That that’s great, but that’s not scientific. You have to test it, treat it, test it.
And it has to work on more than just one person instead of I had this idea one time and it happened to work on that guy time and it happened to work on that guy today, you know? Right. It’s it’s got to be something you can can count on and say and one thing that I don’t ever hear you say is well it’s just that way right like you are like well the reason we have this is because of this or you know or this happens because of this instead of just you know stopping and saying that’s just the way it is we just don’t know or we don’t care to investigate further and that’s where a lot of the shortcomings I think come in you know is because we don’t push further and go why is that right why why is it that way because that’s where the key to health is going to be or at least past that point Right. So, health not sick here. point Right. So, health not sick here. Exactly. Awesome. All right.
How anything else we need to discuss about this topic? what we want people to do about it. Yeah. So, how Yeah. How can you know? Well, I want people to seek it out. Seek it out. Yep. Right. And and I think so find us. Right. So, we have people that take classes from us and they are at certain levels and we have them listed on a website to say, “This person’s a clinician, this person’s a master clinician, this person’s a neurobio hacker, somebody who really knows how to tweak the system, right, Autumn.” So, I don’t know that there yet. We’ll see. I’ll take We’re all trying. Yeah. Yeah. We’re always trying to learn more, Always try and be better, refine our skills. But that’s the whole thing is is learning how to do this and how to it’s somewhat like you might be able to play a riff on a on a on an instrument, but can you play a song?
And then not only can you play a song, can you play your part of the song in with the other people playing the the with the other people playing the the music? Right. The body’s already playing a song. You have to be able to integrate yourself into that that music. Figure out where it’s just kind of going wrong. Where’s your part? Where’s your role? How do you help that body? That’s how you become a neurobiohacker. Awesome. All right. So, let’s maybe just bring it back to for plasma exchange. If people are interested in doing this, who would be a good candidate for something like that? Well, really, everyone and everybody needs to get that junk and everybody needs to get that junk out. Yeah.
As you get older, more and more, and pe especially people who’ve had chemo, let’s say you’ve had chemo, let’s say you’ve had viral menitis or you’ve had a disease process that’s that’s caused problems, Lyme disease. I mean, you go go through the list of chronic diseases or chronic inflammatory diseases, Crohn’s disease, autoimmunity, all these things, you can help because again, autoimmunity is inappropriate signaling. You’re not turning on and off your immune system at the right time. So, this is really something that can benefit everyone. So, a theme here that I think I’m hearing is that somebody who’s had maybe a severe illness, chronic illness, somebody maybe who’s older, what did you say? Sorry, lots of children. Or females especially. The lines are in our bodies too. start autoimmune things.
Somebody, you know, who has, going back to the analogy, somebody who has a lot to the analogy, somebody who has a lot of junk in their system, maybe, which we all do. Yeah, we all do. Sure. Yeah. Because you were especially, you know, unhealthy or whatever. We You just get You get exposed to stuff. People that live within a mile of a That’s right. You mentioned that of a golf course. 85% chance of getting So, environmental stuff, too. Environmental stuff. Environmental air pollution. Indoor air pollution. Number one cause of lung cancer. Indoor air one cause of lung cancer. Indoor air pollution. Fascinating. So, how would they how should they go about doing it? Do are you aware of any, you know, specific companies that do it or or if you do a search in your local area, there are people that do it. Again, it’s a cost factor.
Probably a lot of them, but I mean like or yeah, but just like maybe donating plasma is there do you have any Biolife Plasma? It’s Teada Pharmaceuticals. Our pharmacy, you know, pharmaceutical. They want to do research on it. So, they’ll actually pay you for it. Now, they want you to come a lot because they want a lot of plasma and they keep trying to reward you with money. And so, some people might have a purative view of that, saying, “Oh, that’s what junkies do.” Well, yeah, for the money, but you can also do it for your own health. And because you, who’s the sucker here? They’re paying you for you to get really healthy. I think that’s a great deal. healthy. I think that’s a great deal. Sure. Anything to be a you know, maybe to be How do you go about how do you go into it with your eyes kind of open?
Are there any any side effects you need to worry about or any post, you know, treatment, post exchange things you need to post exchange things you need to consider? The removing plasma can can be a little problematic. They do have to put an anti-coagulant in there, and it’s a it’s a it’s just a very simple chemical, but it’s not it’s not it’s nothing bad. It’s like I think it’s like vinegar or something. Vinegar and you know, I don’t know. I it’s it’s a real simple thing. The problem is they’re removing plasma from your system and people who have more of a vasovagal response or syncope or whatever you want to call it are going to have a harder time with it. only because the blood volume decreases and your vagus nerve will go what the heck is going on.
So there’s going to be some of that and and and you know they have lots of things like like if you go to Biolife Plasma they’ll say hey make sure you eat lots of protein make sure you’ve eaten that morning drink lots of fluids. drink lots of electrolytes and then even afterwards have electrolytes, have proteins. You know, one of the things they don’t say is when you’re there, just like when you go to the hospital and you’ve had a surgery and they say, “Oh, we’re going to squeeze your legs so that the blood comes out of there.” Pump your ankles while it’s going on or after it’s going on, making sure you’re mixing your blood volume because they’re going to mix up. They’re going to mess up your blood volume like where it’s coming in and out of your arm. you have, you know, a lot of plasma going out and, you know, just protein coming in, your fluid volume is going to drop.
So, there’s some certain things. Yeah, it can be there can be some challenges to it, but the payout on the other end of rejuvenating your brain, rejuvenating your organs to me outweighs a lot of that stuff. And as we all demand this, there will be more people that are providing it for less money. For sure. Yeah. And then also you know try to find a manual osteopathically trained manual therapist to integrate that exchange with the other you know the things we talked about earlier the things we talked about earlier optimizing optimizing that this exchange right and and we have people that we are listing on our website and and on pursuit physical therapy pursuit.com where I have my classes where I have my classes pursuitperformancetraining.com there you go pursuitperformancetraining.com there we go he’s in the hot seat folks yes there we All right.
And then so do you have any like have you seen any of your clients do this and and benefit from it? Do you have any you know examp flew to Switzerland where they have clinics that have been doing this for 30 years and for $20,000 each they had uh two days in a row they did the plasma exchange. Now, she’s always doing things to improve her health or this that the other. So, she’s she’s kind of a she calls herself a a hippie healthy chick. Uh so, she’s pretty funny. So, her plasma came out and it was pretty clear. It was relatively clear, mildly strawled. Now, her boyfriend, who hasn’t taken as well as well of a care of himself, his came out pretty dark. She said, “Well, if we were drinking beer, I was drinking a very light beer. He was was drinking a very light beer. He was drinking Guinness.” Guinness. Yeah. And so she gave him no end of heck about it.
Now it was a costly thing on their part and they got there was a spa treatment medical spa blah blah blah. Very expensive. They were there for a week. The food was provided. It was like best of this and best of that. Welcome Medical followup all the things. Right. Right. Right. but it but his health and her health immediately you could see an improvement and that has maintained itself over and that has maintained itself over time. Can you be more a little bit more specific like how did how did she notice what differences did she notice? Well, so she’s one of those people who is constantly looking at her numbers, her HRV numbers. Uh she’s watching, you know, all these health numbers and her her blood panels improved. Her C reactive protein, you know, all the way back down to normal.
She had actually had a positive ANA, which is a can be a test for autoimmunity, and she hasn’t had one since. It’s been six months. She’s constantly doing other things, but she still goes and has ozone treatments done and this that the other and she may still have problems here and there, but her overall health and mental well-being, uh she’s sharper than ever, and uh yeah, so she’s she’s just done really well. She’s been really happy with the results. She’s not keen to go back and repeat it. She says, “I think I’m doing pretty well. My numbers are all pretty well.” Uh so she’s not keen to, but she’s pretty like I don’t really want a healthier lifestyle. She’s and she’s living a healthier lifestyle. Yeah. So, that all helps. But the boyfriend, she’s thinking she might have to send him back or she’s not sure whether she’s keeping him yet. So, trade him in, right?
She might be trading him in on a on a less uh Guinness colored model, That’s cool. On a neutral plasma exchange. This exchange is bad. So, yeah. No, she’s she’s done really well. He’s noticed he’s actually noticed a tremendous improvement because where he was uh and where he’s come to. Now, again, he’s kind of adopting the lifestyle. he’s been doing that helps. Obviously, how you eat has a lot to do with that. You can’t just go and eat at McDonald’s or ultra-processed food, but his health has improved a lot. His markers have all improved. His cholesterol has gone down. His inflammatory markers have all gone down. So, you know, I myself am just doing the blood donation on a regular basis and then saying, okay, well, you can just do blood donation, it takes a little time to get to the plasma place. Yeah. So for me replace the red blood cells.
So you you can’t do it as often. Say that again. Sorry. You have to replace the Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Donation. You can’t donate blood as often as you do plasma. You got to take breaks. There are some people that have a problem with making too many red blood cells, particularly men. so they can, but yeah. Yeah, you have to take a break from whole blood donation. So doing it too often is not a good idea either. So, have what what differences have you noticed in your own personal health? I don’t need as much sleep. I mean, obviously, we all need regular rest and sleep, but that fatigue level of being able to like when I do sleep, I wake up and I’m refreshed. Like, cool. We all worked yesterday. We did a late podcast. We were up I was up even later than that screwing around, you know? But and got up really early. We were back at class.
But I have to Yeah, I was walking around downtown taking my life in my hands. No, it was fine. But I have to say when I go to bed and I and I get that chance to sleep, I sleep deeply. My my uh I get dreams. I It used to be there for a while. It’s like, yeah, I know I’m dreaming, but I just can’t remember them. Now it’s like, oh yeah, I’m always aware that I was dreaming. Oh yeah, I had some doozies last night. So I have to just say that the general rest and the general just vitality, I just feel better. Awesome. I have a patient. Yeah, I want to hear your and a little bit different story. We’ve been providing osteopathic based, you know, model manual therapy for a while and he I mentioned this about the plasma donation. He has a leg that didn’t grow at the same rate as the other and used to have a really huge lift in it and between the How big was the lift? Sorry.
Three and a quarter inches. that’s huge. It’s pretty big. I have a picture. But anyway, he has been receiving treatment, you know, regularly, but well, regularly since we’ve been here. There was a time we were here for weren’t here for about six months and so he didn’t get any while I was gone. But anyway, he started doing the plasma donation, was able to donate seven times and then needed a break., but his leg is growing longer. He no longer has any kind of an an insole addition at all. No lift. No lift. And he’s not exactly perfect, but he feels like having any kind of lift was always you could never get it off fast enough because it was always inhibiting. And he’s actually growing taller overall. So he’s at 42, he’s growing bigger. The other thing that he’s mentioned to me too is that he feels better and he’s he has lots of stress.
He’s got a young family, you know, providing for his family and stuff. Has a couple different jobs that, you know, blend a lot of his his uh talents and stuff, but he’s handling it much better. And you wouldn’t think that someone at 42 could, you know, start growing. He’s been told his whole life, you are what you are. yeah. That’s awesome. And I think where where is his lift at now? Isn’t it less than an inch now? There’s no lift. No lift now. No lift whatsoever. which is fantastic. No lift whatsoever. which is fantastic. Yeah. Super cool. Thanks for Yeah, that’s Neurobio hacker. I just do what I’m taught. Aren’t we all? Yeah, but it really does work and it takes time, right? But he’s never had, you know, just how we always treat, right? He’s never had a recipe. You know, we we do the different tests and say, “Well, how is he today? Where is he at today?
What did he do since we saw him last time?” And then we, you know, kind of catch up and say, “Well, today is where this is where it seems like he’s needing work.” So that’s where we provide treatment and then go from there. And so each treatment is customized at that time for what where they’re at and also what they can Yeah, that’s something I I appreciate about the the osteopathic model is that, you know, it’s it’s not cookie cutter. For sure. You have, like you said, you have to test, observe, retest, right? Test, treat, observe, retest, do it again. Yeah. Now what do you have? Okay, that’s not responding. Where else should I go? What other thing pops up? Yep. And it’s different every time, which is amazing. It’s how we’d all like to be treated for our stuff. Well, that’s truly healthc care because the system is complex. This is the And this is the whole thing.
You see people on YouTube going, “Oh, if you tap your chest three times, you’ll make your Vegas nerve work.” If your vag nerve or that ding of a big of a ding-dong, you’d be dead long ago. Okay? You’re you’re you’re it’s a complex system. There aren’t simple little tricks to get stuff to work or it might work one time, but the next time you do it, your your nervous is called neural accommodation, right? Neural accommodation, for example, the clothes on your body, you forget all about them all day long until I say that and then all of a sudden you remember you have clothes on your body. Like, oh yeah, thank goodness. But that’s just it. The nerves got used to you having clothes on your body. So, you doing this tap to improve your vag nerve function works once. So, all these little tricks you keep seeing on social media about, oh, just do this. So do this for vagus nerve.
We’ll do how could that work? That’s not going to work. That’s not Oh, but it does this. No, that’s not how it’s complex. it’s complex. Yeah. And the treatments have to be complex because you have to stay one step ahead of the the system who’s going, “We don’t trust you.” trust you.” Right. Awesome. Well, thank you. I don’t know. Is there anything else we need to address in this episode? That’s great. Thanks for having That’s great. Thanks for having conversation. Yeah. So all you listeners and watchers out there, yeah, thank you for joining us and we’ll see you next time. pursuitperformance.com. Yes, check us training. Oh, performance pursuit performance Yeah, pursuitperformancetraining.com. pursuitperformancetraining.com. pursuitperformancetraining.com. Yep. See you next time. See you. Thanks for joining us on another episode of Osteo Signal with Neal D. O’Neal.
For more information, please visit more information, please visit pursuitpt.com or pursuitperformancetraining.com. Our music was written and performed by Sky Toes. Copyright 2026 by Neil D. Sky Toes. Copyright 2026 by Neal D. O’Neal.

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