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.