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Joey: I'm here with Dr. Dan Goodman from Lifespan—your website's increasedlifespan.com.
Dr. Dan: Correct.
Joey: We're out here today by Turtle Bay Bridge. It's gorgeous, by the way. It's a typical Redding winter. Another harsh winter in Redding. And you and I met through a mutual friend because you're really big in mountain biking. Very into hitting the trails around here. Did you hit one this morning?
Dr. Dan: I did.
Joey: Where'd you go?
Dr. Dan: Swasey. It is a big mountain bike location, so I went through Swasey and into Whiskeytown. I go up to Mule Mountain, which overlooks Redding.
Joey: Is that behind the old Shasta Middle Creek school in that area?
Dr. Dan: Muletown Road goes up there.
Joey: Am I getting my mules crossed?
Dr. Dan: Yep, you are.
Joey: You got to be careful. It's easier across mules. Mules, you can't breed them, right? Anyway, I'm curious about hitting the trails because I know many of them. Do you ever see any big wildlife? Have you ever seen a mountain lion?
Dr. Dan: Yes.
Joey: Or any black bears?
Dr. Dan: Yes.
Joey: You ever have to kill me with your bare hands.
Dr. Dan: Only once.
Joey: Only once?
Dr. Dan: In probably 20 years, I've seen four mountain lions and multiple bears. Redding is one of the best mountain bike locations in America.
Joey: Really?
Dr. Dan: And I've been to North Carolina, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, I've been all over it. There's so much here it's. Yeah.
Joey: And yet we were talking before we started. You were talking about how people don't utilize it. Considering how good the trails are, they go out, and you bump into one or two people.
Dr. Dan: Yeah. Very few.
Joey: But you were in Colorado, just hundreds of people up and down the trails. Yeah.
Dr. Dan: Yeah, my parents and sister live in Colorado, so I visit there. They live outside of Boulder. Boulder is the Mecca of endurance athletes and outdoor adventurists like that. So I go there, and you're only allowed to ride certain trails every other day.
Joey: Because it's so.
Dr. Dan: Because it's so impacted, so kind of credit. And so the days that I am, I was riding there, and hundreds of people are on the trails.
Joey: And you come here and see more wildlife than humans on these trails.
Dr. Dan: Right. Right.
Joey: Yeah.
Dr. Dan: You're really outside in the wilderness, even though you're very close to town. It's. Yeah, it's very private, very peaceful, and calming. It's beautiful. Yeah.
Joey: Now, I don't know. You said you've been here 20 years.
Dr. Dan: Yeah, 20, god, 25 years.
Joey: So what did bring you here 20-odd years ago?
Dr. Dan: A job I wanted to. I was trained as an anesthesiologist, and at that time, in like '93, there was a glut of anesthesiologists in the country.
Joey: Really?
Dr. Dan: Yeah, and I wanted to move to San Diego or outside of LA. There were no jobs, and there happened to be a job in Redding, and then that day after my interview, someone said go up to Whiskey Town, essentially, go up over the hill, and I went up over the hill, and that sold it totally. Look out at Whiskey Town and the Trinity Alps around there. It was beautiful.
Joey: That's gorgeous.
Dr. Dan: That sold me pretty much, and so that's how we came here in '93.
Joey: And you have. How many children do you have?
Dr. Dan: Two kids.
Joey: You raised them here.
Dr. Dan: Yeah, totally, and they're 18 and 21 right now. So they've just moved out.
Joey: Congratulations.
Dr. Dan: Yeah.
Joey: But they're still on the payroll?
Dr. Dan: They still are. But it's interesting is my son, who's 18, has just wanted to leave essentially, this past holiday, he said to make sure you don't sell your house because I want to come back here and raise my family in this house.
Joey: Oh, man, that's awesome. Did you tear up?
Dr. Dan: I did.
Joey: Oh, so he's cutting onions. Okay, okay. I'll call the realtor and cancel.
Dr. Dan: But to know that he likes this area. He wants to come back here. So it's like, wow. Okay, so it's okay.
Joey: Were your parents in medicine at all?
Dr. Dan: No. No. Artist. Artist and teacher.
Joey: Very good. So why were you attracted to medicine?
Dr. Dan: Totally random.
Joey: The cheques?
Dr. Dan: No. Oh God, no. There was no forethought, no forethought, it really. The honors classes in high school and I could have been more smart, but the honors classes were in Science and Math, that's it. There was no other, no history, no English whatever. And so if you were pretty smart, you took those classes, and when I got to college, it was like, well, I'm used to taking Science and Math. So I just kept doing that, and then, like my junior, I'm like, what will I do? Well, apply to med school. It wasn't as competitive as it is now. So, it was significantly easier to get in back then.
Joey: I don't know. Scrap that. It was much harder. You. Because you walked barefoot in the snow uphill to the medical school you were in. It was always challenging. It's always hard. Kidding me? Come on.
Dr. Dan: So, I think what I was looking for and the reason I picked anesthesia, really what I was looking for, is a way to integrate what I wanted from my life, meaning being outdoors, being able to take vacations, being able to be athletic, which were the most important things in my life back then. Integrate that with my career. The benefits of anesthesia are, first of all, it's extremely interesting. Giving drugs, seeing immediate reactions, and learning how to resuscitate people. It's intense, but we don't have an office. And so when I'm off, I go home, and with anesthesia, after you're on call for 24 hours, you're off for 24 hours. That's what I was looking for in terms of integrating my life or lifestyle with medicine. So, anesthesia was great for me for a long period of time.
Dr. Dan: But the stress of seeing emergencies, seeing people with their throats sliced open, blood pouring out, and seeing women having to have emergency C-sections for the baby who's in distress, very, very stressful. And so, after a long period of time, that was not good for me. And that's how I transitioned from anesthesia to what I'm doing now. That's how I ended up here, in a different type of practice.
Joey: Yeah, no, I couldn't. I'm a sympathetic crier and a sympathetic vomitor. So a guy like me should not be in the ER, you know what I mean? I don't know. I might be a sympathetic bleeder. I don't know. I try not to find myself in those situations. So you came into Redding as an anesthesiologist, but now you own your practice. And you're in. I know you have stem cells and blood. Oh man, I should have practiced this off-camera better.
Dr. Dan: Blood platelets.
Joey: Thank you. Blood platelets.
Dr. Dan: So it's PRP.
Joey: Tell me a little bit about it, please.
Dr. Dan: Okay, so PRP and stem cells are. Basically, the medicine is called regenerative medicine. It's where we take cells from our own body, whether it's from the bloodstream or and that's where platelets or something called stem cells, which are found in fat and bone marrow.
Joey: Oh, I have plenty of them. Excellent.
Dr. Dan: You're going to donate.
Joey: Yeah.
Dr. Dan: So these are natural cells for our body, and they're the natural healing cells in our body, which if you get a cut, the blood pours out in a couple of minutes, it clots. And that's from the platelets. And then in the morning, you have a scab, and two, three weeks later, you've got skin, just a natural healing process. And that involves the blood platelets and stem cells attracted to the area. So we're trying to take these natural cells out of your body, concentrate them, and then inject them back into the areas of your body that either have damage, chronic pain, or poor healing. It's very big in Europe and Asia. It's been going on there for 15, 20 years longer than here in the States, but we're just starting to bring it to America.
Joey: Well, I think, yeah, we had under the Bush presidency, I remember there was a big anti-stem cell movement, and you'd hear about a lot of the professional athletes like Kobe Bryant is the one that comes to mind immediately, but I also know there was a lot of mixed martial arts fighters because that's one of the sports I enjoy, that were all going to Europe. They were all going to Germany, including the knee and ankle injuries. But it is, but we are. We may be behind, but it is now common practice, right?
Dr. Dan: Well, it's not common. It's definitely not accepted by conventional medicine in America.
Joey: Why?
Dr. Dan: That's a whole philosophical issue.
Joey: Maybe this video will reach the leaders of the AMA, and you know what I mean? You're going to be the Paul Revere of the stem cell, and then you can always, it was me, it was me on AllRedding that did this, the Batman to Robin.
Dr. Dan: Or vice versa.
Joey: Either way. I know you have a lot. I've worked with you. So I know that you have many people who will testify to this power, but you have a great testimony of just a little while ago. You injured yourself pretty badly and treated yourself with stem cells. Please tell me about the injury, how quickly recovery was, and everything.
Dr. Dan: I have done this all over my body. I mean, so mountain biking, I fall, I break things. And so I fell off my mountain bike and hurt my ankle. And after about three weeks, it was definitely not getting better. So, being an anesthesiologist, I numbed my ankle with an ankle block. And then with a video, someone taking a video, I injected my ankle with blood platelets, essentially, and I can jump around in my ankle as much as I want now. The first time I learned about this medicine was because I had knee problems and couldn't run. I could barely walk. I'm only 48 and can't believe I cannot walk for the rest of my life. And I had all these conventional medical procedures done. I'd had surgery on my knee and had steroids, a cortisone injection, which is the standard conventional treatment. Nothing helped. The next option in conventional medicine is a total knee replacement. And there's no way they will do it on someone who's 48.
Dr. Dan: So, being a doctor, I just. Because, like, what else is out there? And I heard about platelets, PRP, and stem cells, found a guy in LA doing some of this stuff, brought him up here to Redding, and I got markedly better. I found that the PRP, which is the blood platelets, again, we're just drawing your blood, spinning it down, was very good for soft tissue injuries, like your shoulder, elbow, and thumbs. But for the big joints, like my knees, for instance, the PRP, the blood platelets weren't strong enough, and so, like my knees, after injecting this blood platelet thing got maybe 20%, 40% percent better after a couple of procedures, which wasn't enough for me. Then, I did more research and learned more. I found that stem cells, which we get from fat and bone marrow, are much more potent in regenerative properties. Then, I learned how to do mini liposuction. We take some fat from your belly, going to the bone marrow, which I'd done in anesthesia, but we get some of your bone marrow. We spin them down, concentrate them, take out the stem cell portions, and inject them into my better knees.
Joey: How quickly did you see, when you say totally better after you started injecting stem cells? How quickly did you say, hey, my knees are better?
Dr. Dan: It takes about 12 to 16 weeks to really notice a difference. The younger you are, the more potent your regenerative cells are. For me, within, usually within about two months, you notice significant changes. And then, within three months, I played tennis again, and the stem cells kept working. They continue beyond three months. So they keep working for six months, nine months or so. Now I can play tennis as hard as I want. Before the procedure, my friend would stand me in the corner of a tennis court, and I would take one step each way. That's all I could do. And now I play with the pros out at the tennis club, and I can run as hard as I want. So, at that point, I was like, this is pretty cool. And I bought into it, got some centrifuges and some products, and started my practice.
Joey: So we talked about stem cells, stem cell therapy. But I know that your practice is more than stem cells. There are a couple of other services that you offer.
Dr. Dan: There are three parts to my practice, pretty much. One is the stem cells or PRP injections for healing. And then another part is called anti-aging. Anti-aging is a general term for me, talking to people, you know, asking things that most doctors don't have time to ask about. So your sleep, your bowel function, your diet, your nutrition, your exercise, your medical problems, if you have any. Then, we draw labs. You know, in this medicine, we look at minerals. Your vitamin levels, mineral levels, and all the hormones in your body, including your sex hormones like testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, and growth hormones. We look at the thyroid, another hormone, much more carefully than I was ever taught in med school. Make a plan to optimize your health.
Dr. Dan: It's not based on drugs. We, and I'm trying to get you off drugs. It's based on, you know, vitamins, supplements, hormones, if they're appropriate, lifestyle changes, exercise, and diets like that. The other part of the practice is IVs. You know, I've put in tens of thousands of IVs before giving you medicine to sleep, wake you up, change your heart rate, and change your blood pressure—very powerful drugs. So now I have a refrigerator filled with vitamins. Okay. And we put in IVs and give you intravenous vitamins compared to oral vitamins, which have to go through your digestive system, get broken down, get absorbed, giving you stuff through the IV is everything's going right to your cells.
Dr. Dan: If you have a virus, you know, the flu or upper respiratory infection, it can kill viruses. You know, cure your cold, if you're burnt out, burnt out from too much physical activity, like a marathon or, you know, or just burnt out from life, from stresses, IV vitamins will totally rejuvenate you and restore health. If you have cancer, we can give you a very high dose of vitamins and, in some cases, kill the cancer cells. If nothing else, if you have, if you're on chemotherapy, which kills everything, we're giving you IV nutrition, which, I mean, there are, there are some significant studies which show that giving you IV vitamins along with chemotherapy, improves outcome, improves wellbeing, decreases side effects, you know, nausea, vomiting, just from IV vitamins.
Joey: So when you started this, you probably had to spend a lot of your time educating people.
Dr. Dan: Yeah, I still do>
Joey: Yeah. Are you seeing a transition where people are coming to you? Hey, I know this works. Can we just get going? Or is it still like you have to explain it?
Dr. Dan: I think with the, the professional athletes, so, I mean, Steph Curry two years ago in the NBA championships hurt his knee, I think it was two years ago. And he had PRP, these blood platelet injections in his part of his knee. And two weeks later, he came back.
Joey: Yeah.
Dr. Dan: I think people maybe heard about that possibly. And Kobe Bryant and Tiger Woods. In some people's minds, it's becoming more like, what are they doing?
Joey: What are the biggest challenges you have in working with people? Is there anything like that? Oh, hey, you shouldn't do this. Don't do that.
Dr. Dan: Pretty much with these procedures, there's no downtime. It's just injections, you know? So there's no.
Joey: Surgery.
Dr. Dan: There's no. Right, there's no hospitalization. It's not surgical, you know, meaning I'm not putting you under deep anesthesia and making some incisions. We're finding the areas of damage and injecting your natural cells into the areas of damage. And there's no downtime. Meaning, you're not going to lie. I don't say lie on the couch for the next two months, you know, and don't do anything.
Joey: Which is what I was hoping you'd prescribe.
Dr. Dan: Yeah, that's right. Really.
Joey: Honey.
Dr. Dan: He can't do anything.
Joey: I'd love to do the yard work. Are you kidding me? I'm chomping at the. Right.
Dr. Dan: He can't do dishes, right?
Joey: But look at this. I have a prescription here to lay on this couch.
Dr. Dan: Yeah. So.
Joey: And watch Game of Thrones. You see, it was, it's in a different handwriting, but it's his, I promise he wrote that. That's him writing.
Dr. Dan: When the series is over.
Joey: He's a doctor.
Dr. Dan: He can go back then.
Joey: Yeah. It's about the same time.
Dr. Dan: Right away, we're sending you to physical therapy. We're having you do exercise.
Joey: I was. That's what I was going to ask. Is it? Okay, so you're still on the road to recovery.
Dr. Dan: Absolutely.
Joey: You still need to do the physical things.
Dr. Dan: Well.
Joey: This is just going to help it. This is going to aid it.
Dr. Dan: I believe that it helps. It helps the healing. And that's what athletes do. Pro athletes, you know, when you get some procedure done, they're like, the next day they're in ice baths, they're doing exercise, you know, to hasten their recovery. And that's what we should be doing after this procedure.
Joey: So, really, the only hurdle is the financial one.
Dr. Dan: Right.
Joey: Because insurance won't pay.
Dr. Dan: Right.
Joey: So this has the financial, it's not an invasive surgery.
Dr. Dan: Right.
Joey: And you are, you're not going to be on the couch, unfortunately, for two weeks watching Game of Thrones. But if you are, it's because you're lazy. So we've established that you weren't born and raised in Redding. And I caught your accent very quickly. I mean it.
Dr. Dan: Great.
Joey: It's obvious you're from Texas. And so I don't, is it, are we talking like San Antonio or you Dallas? That's what I can't pinpoint.
Dr. Dan: I grew up in New York and came to California after college. I stepped out of the plane to San Diego and said, " oh my God, this is where I should be. I should not be in New York. Then, I spent a lot of time there, went back to New York for medical school, and came back to California as soon as possible.
Joey: Before you came to Redding, you didn't know about it. You, Hey, there's a job.
Dr. Dan: Right.
Joey: There's an opportunity.
Dr. Dan: Totally based on that. I've had opportunities to leave to go to other places, and I love the outdoors here. And that's what keeps me here. We don't have some of the theatre and opera, you know, that they do it in San Francisco, but.
Joey: Which is only three hours away.
Dr. Dan: Right. Exactly. Not very far.
Joey: If you're into the opera. You can drive for three hours. Okay. Yeah.
Dr. Dan: Totally.
Joey: Absolutely. It's a human thing or an American thing about going west, young man. There's something about us having to, like, leave. The Europeans don't have it. It's quite the opposite. I have to stay. Whenever I get that itch and I'm online looking at stuff, I try to find another Redding. I want it big enough to have certain amenities, but not too big.
Dr. Dan: Right.
Joey: I don't want to spend 35 minutes in traffic across town. The worst-case scenario in Redding is seven minutes from one side to the other. And that is at five o'clock on the dot. I want nature. It's really, really nice. And the people that move here overwhelmingly know that. It's the people that grew up here that they're, "Oh, I've seen it change."
Dr. Dan: Yeah.
Joey: And it just, you have to take it in a bit more. And that's why we're out here today instead of inside an office. Sir, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate your time. Dr. Dan Goodman from Lifespan and increasedlifespan.com.
