00:00
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
80% of people who tear their ACLs will go on to have severe joint arthritis. So something’s wrong, right? We think we’re fixing the problem, but what we should be doing is using all these things we have to turn off the inflammatory cascade.

00:14
JJ Virgin
Today I’m talking with Elizabeth. She is a medical doctor, co founder and chief medical officer of Boulder Elizabeth Institute. She’s got over 30 years in sports and spine orthopedics. She was fellowship trained also in anti aging and regenerative medicine. And you’re going to hear how she is using all sorts of cool stuff to create healing at the cellular level.

00:35
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
If you have joint disease, irregardless of your activity level, you have an 80% higher chance of having heart disease because the same inflammatory cytokines that are going after your joint are going after your heart as well.

00:45
JJ Virgin
So hold on. That is like such a mind blowing statement, right? Hey, I’m JJ Elizabeth, PhD dropout. Sorry mom. Turned four time New York Times bestselling author. As a certified nutrition specialist, fitness hall of famer and globally recognized leader in health, I’m driven to keep asking the tough questions and use my podcast to simplify the science of health into actionable strategies that help you thrive. I’d also love to hear your thoughts on the show. And here’s the fun part. When you send me your review, I’ll reply to you using my on demand virtual me. That’s right, my team and I created a virtual JJ packed with my books, speeches and wisdom so I can personally connect with you. Here’s how you do it. Subscribe and leave an honest review of the podcast. Take a screenshot of your review. Text it to 813-565-2627.

01:47
JJ Virgin
That’s 813-56526 to 7. My virtual JJ will reply directly and trust me, this will make your day. So subscribe now@subscribetoJay.com and text me your review. Let’s keep thriving together. Dr. Elizabeth, welcome to well Beyond 40.

02:11
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Thank you JJ. I’m actually really grateful to be here with you.

02:14
JJ Virgin
Well, I have been listening to podcast after podcast interview of you. I don’t know where you’ve been all my life. Holy smokes. And I mean some of the stuff you say, I’m like, wait a minute, what? I had to take it back. You know, replay part of it of like the way that you manage pain so that someone will not have to have a joint replacement. The OA connection with heart disease. I mean it just was going on and on. So I’m going to start at the beginning. You, as an orthopedic surgeon, are saying that we don’t actually have to get a lot of these joint replacements, that our body can regenerate and that we can manage joint pain.

02:49
JJ Virgin
So I would love to start there because I think that’s a revolutionary concept, especially for a gal who’s had a knee and a hip replacement.

02:57
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Well, I’m going to start with, you know, at some point, and you probably found this in your own life. A knee and hip replacement can be life changing. Right. There certainly is a place for that, at least in this day and age. The key, honestly, is for us to start thinking a little more proactively because to me, we’re letting this disease go too far and then treating it. And the problem is because we’re not thinking about it like we do everything else. This would be sort of like, oh, we’re just going to ignore your atherosclerotic plaque in your heart until you need to have a stent placed right. We’re not going to do anything, we’re not going to treat it, we’re not going to do anything.

03:33
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
We will just wait because when you need a stent, then we’ll just put a stent in there, all will be good. And that’s what we’re doing with people with joints, Right. Where basically you come in and you’ve got a sore knee and we put some steroid in it and then maybe we scope it and clean it up and we put some more steroid in it and then we just, you know, at some point we’ll just replace it and everything will be good. So the key is, why are we looking at every other disease proactively to prevent that outcome and not in orthopedics? We’re basically just patching things together with the outcome being exactly what you faced.

04:03
JJ Virgin
Yeah. And it’s what I was always told, just what you said.

04:05
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Right. It’s a. This is a wear and tear. There’s nothing you can do about it. One of my old partners used to say, this is just a sign of a life well lived. And it’s not. This is an inflammatory disease process. So it is a disease, somewhat, based on your genetics. You know, I have horrible knee arthritis too. So somewhat. It’s based on your genetics. So some of us just have different cytokines that are going to be more prone to that. So then when we have an injury, instead of that injury going on to heal, we basically create this huge inflammatory response that starts its destructive properties. So that’s really the key is that we have this inflammatory response that’s inappropriate and long term, ongoing. So that’s really where we need to be starting.

04:44
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
We need to be looking back to the first time you hurt your knee, right? And the first time you hurt your hip and what should have been done differently from square. Because at some point there’s no turning back, right? At some point the joint’s gone, you’re gonna have to replace it. Now we can do regenerative therapies, but my goal would be to start educating people on how to prevent the need to have these procedures done even in the first place.

05:07
JJ Virgin
Well, let’s hope, because I was one of those ones. I heard you talking on another podcast about how in the United States we do meniscectomies and they’re not allowed in other countries. When I, I tore my ACL when I was a teenager and then fully tore it in my 20s and then had the whole thing. But for someone listening who maybe now just has joint pain and nothing severe, like they just have a little wear and tear, where should they start?

05:37
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So let’s look at that wear and tear, right? It’s not wear and tear. Just like you don’t use your brain too much and it wears out, or your heart beats too much and it wears out.

05:45
JJ Virgin
So that whole, you were an athlete.

05:46
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
The whole concept needs to go away, right? Let’s go away from that wear and tear. We don’t just wear our joints out.

05:52
JJ Virgin
That is just. But like, that’s all we’ve ever heard, right?

05:55
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
That’s all we ever hear, right? It’s just like wearing through a tire. And that’s not the process. Our joints are actually not designed to just wear out like that. So what happens is you do get a little injury. Like you know, I, I like you. I tore my first. I throw my ACLs four times. I finally stopped repairing them. You know, the. So basically the key is you have this little injury, you drain your knee and maybe or get a little damaged to the meniscus, that starts an inflammatory cascade, right? That inflammatory cascade is designed to be there for about three days. And then your body brings in all of these other, what we call cytokines, these proteins that turn it off and begin the healing. Now you and I, so I have end stage arthritis in my knees.

06:39
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
We hurt our knee, has inflammatory cascade start and it didn’t turn off. So instead of these little cytokines who are there to try and start repairing things, they Stay turned on. So what happens? You have these high levels of these cytokines which are called things like interleukin 1 beta, tumor necrosis factor alpha. These high levels of these inflammatory cytokines. That’s telling your own cells to go into attack mode. So now they start trying to clean up this debris. And I always tell people it’s a little bit like if you have a spot on your wall and you keep scrubbing the wall, if I keep scrubbing that spot, eventually spot’s gone, but so is my wall. So that’s what happens. You have this little injury, the body comes and tries to clean up. It doesn’t turn off that process, it keeps cleaning.

07:20
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Finally, you have no meniscus. That’s gone. Somebody scopes it, they just start even more inflammatory process. So what should we have done instead? Well, number one, we need to look at injuries that like when you and I tore our ACLs the first time. 80% of people who tear their ACLs will go on to have severe joint arthritis. And if you had young like you and I, by the time we’re 50, we’re gonna have severe joint arthritis. 80%. So something’s wrong, right? We think we’re fixing the problem. And yes, you are giving some stability to the knee. Yes, it did feel better for a while. But what we should be doing after the fact is using all these things we have to turn off the inflammatory cascade. If you came to me and you hurt your knee, you’re gonna.

07:59
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
First thing I’m gonna make sure is do they have what they need to heal? Number one is things like hormones, right? Because if I have no hormones on board, I can’t heal. And that’s true even if you look at young people. Like when you and I first started our acl, were you on birth control pills? Right. If you’re on birth control pills like a lot of us were, then you’re going to have these very high levels of estrogen, no progesterone, which is the anti inflammatory hormone, and very low levels of free testosterone because sex hormone binding globulin, this protein binds testosterone when you’re on birth control pills. So these women are on birth control pills, they hurt themselves. They don’t even have the hormones they need to be able to start this recovery process.

08:34
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Number two, you’ve got to let that inflammatory process go for about three days. So the first thing you do want to do is not sort of turn it off. You don’t want to start giving these people tons of anti inflammatory medications or putting the steroid in. Just like a fever, the body starts that inflammatory response to try and heal. So get rid of that old rice concept.

08:52
JJ Virgin
Yeah, I was just thinking of rice. I’m like, oh boy.

08:54
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Because none of that’s right. You want motion. So we do what’s called meat want motion. You want to quiet everything down by sort of resting that joint while you’re moving everything else. So if I hurt my shoulder, I’m going to get on the bike. If I hurt my knee, I can get on the cycle ergometer. It can do something, but I can move. So you keep moving. And then we start anti inflammatories at about three days. After those first couple of days, let the inflammation go. One of the best things you can do, believe it or not, is a low dose of aspirin. Because at three days a low dose of aspirin turns off the high levels of these inflammatory cytokines.

09:27
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Just a low 81 milligram of aspirin and then you can actually start things that are really like peptides that are really going to help that healing process. A couple of peptides that are really easy to get, that anybody can get is BPC body protective compound. And that’s available just as a supplement anymore, an oral supplement. If you want injectable, you need to see a physician that works with peptides. But as an oral supplement you can buy bpc. There’s a bunch of companies that make it. So if you just look for BPC from a good reputable supplement company, Is.

09:56
JJ Virgin
It all going to work in this situation or would injectable.

09:59
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Injectable is going to better. So body protective compound. Guys, if we back up to what are peptides? Because I don’t know if your listeners all know what peptides are. Are they?

10:06
JJ Virgin
You never know when someone’s coming into the show. Yeah, so we’ve done some talks on them, but I always think it’s great to go back over these things again.

10:14
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So start back to what is a peptide? So peptides are short chains of amino acids. A protein is greater than 50amino acids, a peptide is less than 50. Okay, so it’s. And it can be two or three amino acids. It can be an arginine, glycine put together. So basically three, two or up to 49amino acids makes it a peptide. The reason peptides are so important is because they have very specific actions. A lot of the peptides are made endogenously by your body. So they’re not some wild compound that people have invented, they’re made by us. The most familiar one is insulin. Insulin. You eat glucose, insulin appears, glucose goes into cells. Well, bifurcated compound is made by our gut when we’re little, young, we have nice high levels of it. So if we’re injured, this body protective compound is exactly what it sounds like.

11:03
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
It starts turning on this process to repair. So this is not some weird compound, it’s how your body is going to do it. Some of us make more than others, right? If you’re older, you’re going to make less than. If you’re younger, if you have more things going on, you’re going to need more. So that’s why it’s sometimes adjunctively adding it on. And you’re right, most peptides are denatured if you take them orally. Body protective compound is not. But it’s not as strong as it is injectable. So in a perfect world, you’d want to inject it. And anecdotally, people feel like they feel better. Like if it’s a knee injury, I’m going to take a little skin by my knee, inject it in my knee. If it’s a shoulder, I’m going to take a little skin by my shoulder, inject it by my shoulder.

11:38
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So people feel a little bit better injecting it actually close to site. So if you haven’t find a doc who works with peptides, you’re going to get going with something like BPC and then what we call the wolverine healing complex with thymosin beta 4. So thymusid beta 4 is one of the thymic peptides. When we’re young, we have this giant gland in our chest that makes all these things that stimulate our immune system that help us to heal. When we’re at puberty, it starts shrinking. So by the time you’re in your 60s, like me, it’s a little fatty nub. It doesn’t do anything. So basically I can give back thymic peptides like thymosin beta 4. So BPC, thymus beta 4, is that.

12:11
JJ Virgin
One orally as well, or is that one.

12:13
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So there is a fragment of thymus and beta 4 that is available orally. So there’s compounds, people who are now making BPC with Thymus and Beta 4. It’s a fragment of thym. It’s not actually Thymus and Beta 4, but it’s a fragment that appears to still have some really good properties for healing. And it’s hard to find doctors who are really well versed in peptides. But if you can find a good doctor well versed in peptides then I would say work with somebody who can get you subcutaneous injections. I’m not a fan of getting them through research chemical sites. I think we use only compounding pharmacies.

12:43
JJ Virgin
Because people are buying them on the BPC157. My husband had it and I was going to use it for one of my things, one of my injuries and he’s like, you have to inject it three times a day. And I’m like, okay, I’m out. What’s the big deal?

12:57
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
It has a longer half life than that. So usually once a day is plenty. If you’re taking orally, you probably want to try and get up to two or three times a day because it’s much shorter lived. But subcutaneously injected it has a much longer half life than that. So if somebody’s really acute, sometimes I’ll have it do it twice a day, but usually once a day is plenty. So with both those peptides you can do them once a day. BPC you can take for an extended period of time. You could take it forever if you wanted. Thymosin beta 4, you need to cycle. It’s a little bit more growth stimulating. So when we think about growth stimulating things, we don’t want to do them ongoing because we don’t want too much growth. Right.

13:32
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So Basically Thymus and Beta 4, you would do a 12 week cycle maybe so 3 month cycle and then stop it. Really once a day is plenty for both of those. And as people are healing, you can even go down to less frequently than that. They’ll still do fine because remember, it’s not just all the compounds in there working, initiating a process in your body to instigate this healing. So it’s getting more blood vessels to form in the areas all those things that you and I didn’t do. And that’s why our knees went on to develop horrible arthritis, right, is because we didn’t have the ability to heal that. And one of our favorite go tos when people are injured or let’s say you’re older and you have pretty severe knee arthritis.

14:11
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
It’s actually not a peptide, but it’s what’s called a repurposed drug and it’s a very cool repurposed drug that’s actually now available in Australia as a drug called Xylasel. It’s in phase four trials here in the US now. It’ll probably be available for knee osteoarthritis probably end of 2027 maybe. But it basically is something that. So penicillin polysulfate is a drug that’s used orally for bladder inflammation, but it doesn’t work well for joints orally. But if you do a little subcutaneous injection of, has all of the properties we need to turn the joint into your body, into its own healing machine.

14:55
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So the things that happen when you’re injured is you get elevation of these bad cytokines and you get elevation of a couple of enzymes that are very destructive, and you get elevation of something called neural growth factor, and that causes these little nerve endings to grow into the joint, which causes a lot of pain. Basically, penicillin polysulfate blocks the bad cytokines, blocks interleukin 1 beta, blocks TNF alpha. It turns off these degradative enzymes that are continuing to destroy your joint, and it regulates neural growth factor so that the pain starts to go away.

15:28
JJ Virgin
It sounds like a miracle.

15:30
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
It’s a miracle. And it really is, honestly. It’s considered a disease modifying agent of osteoarthritis. It’s called a DMAO because it may be truly a cure for osteoarthritis.

15:40
JJ Virgin
Wow.

15:41
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
In Australia, it’s eliminated the need for joint replacements by almost 90%.

15:45
JJ Virgin
Oh, my gosh.

15:46
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
And even if people have pretty severe osteoarthritis, what they found is after a year on this drug, that there was 30% improvement in joint space. In the group that was not on the drug, they had 6% loss of joint space. So it actually didn’t just help with pain or stop the ongoing process. It actually rebuilt cartilage. And we’re seeing the same thing like in the Rabbit models with discs, and people have degenerative discs. At least in a rabbit model, you could actually repair the disc as well. So I like you, I tore my ACL four times. I had repaired four times after that, tore it again, was like, screw, this is not working. So I have really bad knee osteoarthritis. I started this medication, pens and polysulfate, about three years ago now. And really even. And I was bad.

16:35
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
I mean, it was hard for me to walk, it was hard for me to, you know, hiking, bracing, I did everything, but it was a lot of pain. Totally have no pain in my knees. I mean, zero. I haven’t reimaged them to see if they look any better because I kind of don’t want to because they feel fine. But it’s been remarkable. And for a lot of our patients, too, it really is. You Know, maybe I think one of the most remarkable ages. So let’s say you tear your acl. What if I let you go for a couple of days, you have your surgery, right? And then after your surgery, I’m going to pull in all stops to stop you from heading down that road that you and I went down, where now we end up at 50 with horrible arthritis in my knee.

17:15
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So we want to get those people right after injury in our office, where we’re basically starting them on some peptides, starting them on penicillin, polysulfate, making sure their hormones are all optimized so they have the best chance of actually not following this road.

17:29
JJ Virgin
And I would assume they’d never cut out meniscus in this case either.

17:33
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
You should never cut out meniscus. It’s the stupidest surgery in the world. I always tell people, it’s a little bit like, you know, somebody comes in with dementia and you’re like, oh, we’ll just take out those bad parts of your brain. You’ll be fine. When you trim out meniscus, you know, so the people have this torn meniscus and you trim it and you. What we do is we trim off the edge to make it more stable. Then what we’re starting is even more of an inflammatory process going on right now. We just set our body up to go, oh my God, there’s another injury here, I need to go. And it starts destroying it more. And it’s why when you have one joint bad, you’ll start to see other joints go bad. This is not just one joint, it’s systemic. Right.

18:07
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
That’s why you mentioned that in one of my podcasts we talked about heart disease. If you have joint disease irregardless of your activity level. So even if you’re still exercising, still doing everything right, you have 80% higher chance of having heart disease because the same inflammatory cytokines that are going after your joint are going after your heart as well. So we have to address this as a systemic problem.

18:29
JJ Virgin
Hold on, that is like such a mind blowing statement. So is it the inflammatory cytokines that are. They’re active because of the joint issue. Because of that, they become systemic and cause this heart disease.

18:44
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Exactly. Nothing isolated to one place, right? When our body sets off an inflammatory cascade, it sets it off somewhat systemically. And remember, you have these genetics too. Not everybody’s going to have an injury and have horrible levels of interleukin 1 beta, but some of us do. And so those are the people who then. Now I’VE even further upregulated this. I’ve started this whole process. This cytokine is even further upregulated. So you’ll see systemically in the blood, higher levels of interleukin 1 beta in these people after an injury. So that’s going to go on and do the same problem to other places, like your brain, like your heart.

19:20
JJ Virgin
Wow. Wow. And are you running labs to see these levels?

19:24
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Sometimes we will, yes. We’ll run an inflammatory cytokine panel on people. It’s a little tough right now because everybody post Covid has pretty bad inflammatory cytokines. Covid was sort of a disaster. Covid and some of our treatments of COVID were sort of a disaster for our immune system. So now we’re seeing a lot of high levels of inflammatory cytokines in everybody. But, you know, so a lot of times we will treat presumptively and say, listen, we know this is going on. You’ve got a horrible inflamed joint. Let’s just go after this instead of running, you know, an $800 test on people.

19:57
JJ Virgin
That makes sense. So back over to this treatment, the bladder treatment, what is it called?

20:05
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
It’s called pentosin polysulfate. The joint injection form is called xylisol. The oral form is called elmiron.

20:12
JJ Virgin
How would one get this before it’s approved? Like, can you get it now in compounding pharmacies and get it done now?

20:18
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yes. And that’s because it is a drug, right? It’s a FDA approved drug orally. So I can have a compounding pharmacist take the oral form of it and make it into an injectable form. So because it already is an FDA approved drug, I have the capability of making it into whatever form I want. So I can have a compounding pharmacist make it into xylitisol, make it to the injectable pentasin polysulfate.

20:42
JJ Virgin
Wow.

20:43
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So we have access to it. It’s an FDA approved drug. So unlike peptides, which you run into this kind of regulations, are they FDA approved? This is an FDA approved drug. Interestingly, the one caveat is the oral form. Elmiran. About three years ago, people, a big ophthalmology group at Kaiser came up with that. They were seeing this connection between people who were on elmeron for at least 15 at a high dose and a retinopathy in the eye. So penicillin Elmeron. So the oral form of this drug got a black box warning on it that said, listen, there’s a retinopathy associated with this medication. Bunch of lawsuits ensued. That black box warning doesn’t exist in other countries, just here in the US where we’re a little more litigious. But the injectable form, number one, it’s at a significantly smaller dose.

21:35
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Even if we say this is a dose dependent response, it would take about 90 years to ever hit the dose that would cause that. Retinopathy only occurred in one out of 1,000 people. So it’s a rare occurrence anyway. And it appeared to be that you had to hit this max threshold of dosing. We also know this drug because it’s been used in racehorses for a while. So racehorses always get the cool stuff before we do.

21:57
JJ Virgin
I know. It’s just saying we should just look at what the racehorses are getting.

22:00
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah, exactly. Like a lot of peptides, they made their way into the racehorse population way before they made it to the US.

22:06
JJ Virgin
That’S interesting to us, not shocking, but. And I would assume it’s not like you’re taking this every day anyway.

22:12
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
It’s a once a week injection. So usually once or twice a week injection. You give yourself subcutaneous injection. We teach people how to do subcutaneous injection.

22:18
JJ Virgin
Oh, you don’t even have to put it into the joint.

22:20
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
And no, it doesn’t have to be in the joint. It’s just a subcutaneous injection. So it’s working systemically. So there’s all these other benefits. If you look at penicillin, polysulfate, it also has anti cancer benefits. Makes sense. Cancer is an inflammatory, immune mediated disease. If I could modulate, imagine heart too then.

22:34
JJ Virgin
Right, heart.

22:35
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
And yes, very protective against heart, very protective for kidney disease. So really has all these other really great properties. I give this lecture on penicillin where, you know, you look at the studies that have been done on penicillin and all of its benefits and there’s so many places, even as antiviral agent. So it’s actually a really potent antiviral. So it’s a really, it’s, you know, and eventually it will be available to everybody right now to find a doctor who knows about it. It’s a little bit hard, right? You know, people, they have to listen to me. But there are doctors who are learning about it. Again, it’s not a difficult thing to have a compounding pharmacist make. And it’s life changing to so many of our patients.

23:18
JJ Virgin
Really.

23:18
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Life changing. It’s amazing. And you’re treating the disease when you Replace a joint, jj, you didn’t actually treat the underlying disease process. That disease is still going on. So now your other joint goes and this goes, right? Because you continue to work out hard and do all the things you’re doing now. You live a perfect life. You eat perfectly and you do everything perfectly. So your inflammatory scores are definitely much lower. Right. But there’s somewhat, you’re fighting, obviously, a little of a genetic predisposition to this. Right? You had a hip and you had a knee and all this stuff. So.

23:48
JJ Virgin
Well, I look at it, I mean, the very biggest thing that you’ve said that I kept hearing these podcasts is, wait a minute, you flipped the entire paradigm because again, when I had this initial injury and then like, you know, broke my foot, blew out my knee, hurt my like. So you just, you keep hearing the common school of thought is, oh, you’re an athlete, where are your joints?

24:14
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Where are your joints?

24:14
JJ Virgin
Right? And so to hear this completely 180 degree opinion and go, huh, what if that wasn’t the case? And it makes sense as you said it, and even if it was, oh, you had an injury, but it created all this inflammation, of course inflammation would create other problems. Like, it’s like, of course, you know, and I was going to one doctor who was managing the inflammatory response in my broken foot, right. Because that was an old injury, but what he was doing started to degrade the joint. So I was like, all right, so.

24:46
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Steroids, steroids are anti inflammatory. They do blunt the immune response, right? They turn off that immune response. The problem is they turn off all the good immune response too, which is why you end up with, yes, acute relief, but long term destruction. Steroids are, and I won’t say steroids should never be used. Sometimes there’s an acute injury where you’ve got to get somebody just pain under control using a steroid. But that’s like one time and you don’t keep doing it every six months having a steroid injection. I have so many people that’s their mainstay treatment for a joint is they keep doing steroid injections until they replace the joint.

25:20
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So I think unless we start, you know, and we’re never going to get the, you know, my old partners at my orthopedic practice were like, you know, when I ordered labs on patients, they said, you know what, we don’t do medicine here, we do orthopedics. I mean, you know, unless we start shifting this paradigm, we’re going to see an epidemic of worsening arthritis because there’s more inflammation. We’re all in a post Covid era now where everybody has higher cytokines. So now these injuries are going to be compounded even more and more. So unless we start understanding this and treating it like a disease. Jj, even you work with a lot of functional medicine people and if you look in the functional medicine world, they still, if somebody hurts their knee, they send it to the orthopedist, they don’t treat it themselves.

26:04
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
And I’m out there preaching, you guys are the first line treatment, you guys are the ones should be treating these people, not sending them to the surgeons. You need to get their inflammation, regulate it in control. You need to help them to start repairing. That’s going to be, you know, and with some simple things like I said, you know, a once or twice a week injection of using BPC orally even and once or twice a week injection. Let’s go back to like my aspirin thing. The reason aspirin is so hugely beneficial is because three days after an injury, what we want to start have happening is we want to turn on what are called pro resolving mediators. Some of you guys probably take these, they’re called SPM specialized pro resolving mediators.

26:41
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Pro resolving mediators are what your body brings in about three days after an injury to say, okay, turn off the inflammation, let’s start healing. But that pathway doesn’t always work so well. So there’s something called the aspirin mediated pro resolving mediator pathway. It takes your omegas, so your omega 3s, your, you know, your DHAs, your EPA’s and it basically with a little aspirin you turn those into pro resolving mediators. So this whole pro resolve specialized pro resolving mediator pathway is aspirin mediated. So I can start three days after an injury a low dose of aspirin and if I’m taking some good omegas, I will turn, accelerate this healing process, turn off and blunt the inflammation. How easy is that? Right?

27:24
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So if you guys get an injury, keep moving relative rest of the injured site, but not you want to keep moving it and you want to keep moving the rest of your body. Try and stay away from the anti inflammatory drugs right away. Try and stay away from the ice. We want that inflammation for three days. After three days. So use your red lights, use other things like that during that three days for pain control. After the three days, a little low dose aspirin start moving, start some bpc. If you can’t get it injectable, get it orally, it’s still going to help. Right, so low dose aspirin, bpc. And if you can get in and somebody knowledgeable can get you a little penicillin for even a 12 week course, it will modulate this response.

28:01
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So we do not see this cascade of this event going on to developing end stage disease.

28:06
JJ Virgin
Amazing. But when you look at it now, and you mentioned it with, you know, post Covid, it would seem like a high percentage of people here. I mean, and especially you look at, okay, we’ve got post Covid, we’ve got like 80% overweight, 40% obese. So if you’re obese, you’re going to be inflammatory. Like then you look at women going through menopause.

28:28
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Right. Horribly inflammatory. Right.

28:30
JJ Virgin
Okay. So, so you’re just, you know, stacking the deck. Could it be that doing these things to control inflammation could be just one of the most significant things you could do for health here?

28:43
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yes. And you know that for everything. Right. And you know, and we mentioned hormones, remember hormones start dropping, guys, in your 30s, it’s not, you know, in your 50s that your hormones start dropping. They start dropping in your 30s, you know, so basically, you know, progesterone is one of the most anti inflammatory hormones that we have. Estrogen is one of the people. Testosterone gets all the benefit from muscle. Estrogen is a huge player in muscle. Right. And muscle makes what a muscle makes. Muscles make. You preach muscle all the time. Yeah, it makes anti inflammatories, it makes myokines that are actually anti inflammatory to us. Right. So we’ve got to be able to have muscle, which we need hormones for and we need exercise for and we need weightlifting exercise. So we have to be doing those ongoing. I please do not.

29:27
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Guys, anybody who’s listening to this, if you’re in your 30s, start looking at your hormones, start looking at this, start being knowledgeable that I want to keep my hormones always at a nice level. And that starts in your 30s, potentially even taking a little progesterone in your 30s. So usually don’t need estrogen until much later. But testosterone too can start dropping at a very young age, especially with some of the stressors that people are under or birth control pills that people are under. So yeah, you’re exactly right. If we can get people to start, you know, be metabolically sound, which will bring us to, hey, you know what if I pick one peptide, that’s my very favorite, it’s going to be the GLP1 agonist, it’s going to Be me too.

30:06
JJ Virgin
I mean, you know, so just for.

30:08
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
The inflammatory, when you look at, they’re hugely anti inflammatory. So, you know, take all that criticism off the board because these drugs used appropriately are probably one of the best longevity tools that we have. And we know there’s studies on osteoarthritis, there are studies on, you know, on neurodegeneration, on bone, on heart. So we know that all these things are being benefited by just a low dose. You don’t have to keep losing weight. Like if you’re thin like you don’t want to lose weight. So you take a low dose and you basically keep on that low dose forever. And we’re going to keep inflammation stable. So we don’t. So now if I’m injured, there was a great study on mice, if they were on a GLP1 and they were injured, they did not go on to develop progressive osteoarthritis.

30:53
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Really, let’s say if we have everybody on adequate hormones and everybody on a little bit of a low dose glp, are we going to be going a long way to preventing this horrific disease that gets ignored? Because it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t in reality kill people, but it does. You know, I look at my dad who had horrible knee arthritis. My dad died at 93, but he was so active and when he couldn’t be active anymore, he got really, didn’t really want to live. I mean, you know, that was all desire.

31:22
JJ Virgin
Well, you think about it’s like so it hurts more, you move less.

31:25
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So it hurts and I eat less muscle, right?

31:28
JJ Virgin
Move less so it hurts more. Now you’re losing muscle so you’re not reducing like it just becomes this bad snowball. So let’s go back because you threw out a couple things. Number one, I’m a big fan of hrt. I feel like there’s a. The women were the same age, I’m a little older than you. But it’s the women that were like 65 plus really got screwed by the Women’s Health Initiative. But HRT as a big part of this. Then you mentioned GLP1s. I’d love to just unpack that a little bit because there’s a couple different types. Now, which ones you’re liking when you’re talking about low dose, where are you seeing that low dose land? Because I agree with you. When I started learning about them a couple years ago, I was at an IHS event and Dr. Sees was talking and I’m listening.

32:15
JJ Virgin
I’m like, oh, I need this for my son for his neurodegeneration. He had severe tbi. And then I’m like, oh, I need this for my husband because of his elevated apob craziness. Oh, wait a minute. And I heard you. I want to unpack the apob too, because I heard what you’re saying about that, but. And then I’m listening about the osteoarthritis. I’m like, hold on. And as I started to look at the research on this, I go, what is going on?

32:39
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Tremendous, right?

32:40
JJ Virgin
Why is the media going crazy?

32:41
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Why is the media going crazy? And all these people are criticizing this drug.

32:44
JJ Virgin
It makes me crazy. And I was looked at. I went, this is like the best longevity thing I’ve ever seen.

32:49
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
I think it’s the best longevity tool. And part of that is because the number one thing that’s going to really enhance longevity is metabolic control. Right? By far above anything else is really balanced medical metabolic control, making sure that, you know, your insulin and glucose levels are always sort of perfectly regulated. And so, you know, that’s number one, GLPs. But they, but what they’re doing for the immune system, which is at the root of almost all these diseases we’ve about talked about, is huge. So, you know, the media has picked up on the, you know, people who use them at high doses, lose weight too fast, get a lot of side effects, get constipated, get all these problems.

33:24
JJ Virgin
Blame that on the pharmaceutical companies and their rotten dosing, right?

33:28
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Or on doctors who are giving these massive doses of these drugs. I mean, you can sensibly use them at weight loss doses too, because I’m not. I mean, I love them for weight loss drugs too, but, you know, the whole, you know, ozempic face and you lose muscle. The only reason you lose muscle on these drugs is because you don’t eat right. You have to prioritize protein because you don’t want to eat when you’re on them. But when the drugs first came out, they showed that they actually pushed insulin into the muscle, which is actually a really good thing. We want insulin in our muscles. It helps us grow. Remember the bodybuilders used to inject insulin in their muscles. So basically they were actually designed to help diabetics gain muscle.

34:04
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
And so you don’t lose muscle unless you don’t eat protein, which a lot of people don’t. If you, if you’re on a lot of this drug, maybe too high of a dose, your appetite goes down so far that you’re not going to eat. So we have to make sure that people are doing these sensibly. But like you or me, we’re thin, we don’t need weight loss. So how do we use these drugs for every other benefit? I had a mom who died of dementia. I’m not going there. Right. You talk about your son with a tbi. They’re so neuro protected, they’re in phase three trials for dementia. So you know, so neuroprotective, so cardio protective. So how do we dose it so we don’t lose weight? Basically we don’t know what that dose is exactly.

34:42
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So what I do is I dose it up to where people are like, okay, I feel a little side effect here, maybe I’m a little bit queasy, I feel a little side effect and I back it a notch down from there. So that’s gonna be different from every person. Right. So it’s not like it’s always gonna be this, but it’s usually pretty small that you need. It’s probably gonna be half or less, even a quarter of the dose that we would be using for weight loss for people. And that makes it, you know, much more cost effective too. Right? So people talk about the cost of these drugs. Well, not if you’re using it at a very small dose because a one month supply for weight loss is not going to last you four or five months.

35:19
JJ Virgin
But you have to get the compounded because you can’t do that with.

35:22
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Right, you can’t do it with the Ozempics and things like that. So you have to get a compounded dosing on, right?

35:26
JJ Virgin
Yeah, no, I noticed when we started doing them because it was still so much out there about that you would lose muscle. And I thought this is the weirdest thing because you can absolutely dose it so you don’t lose your appetite. And I’m like, I just put on muscle. So I know this not to be true. Then I dug around to find out that oh no, this is like lowering myostatin.

35:48
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So they’re doing everything you want. They’re helping you put on muscle, helping keep.

35:53
JJ Virgin
Yeah, you look at it and go, okay, some optimizing your HRT, getting a little GLP1 adding some BPC157.

36:02
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
How far do those simple three things go?

36:05
JJ Virgin
Right, that’s the whole sleep and protein and exercise.

36:08
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Right? That, that’s if we would just do those couple of things and start people a little bit earlier at their first injuries, at their first beginning to lose Hormones, you know, like you and I got into this in our 50s, right.

36:21
JJ Virgin
We.

36:21
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So, you know, we’re. That’s where the knowledge was. Had I known when I was, you know, in my 20s, these kinds of things, would I be where I am now with my arthritis? No, I wouldn’t be, you know. And so what I have to preach to the doctors is we have to be out there telling the, even the younger people, because people come to us, you know, much later in age when they finally have pain or they have severe arthritis or their hormones are so low. And we can obviously still help. But what if we got people nice and early? What if we got people first injury? What if we got people the first sign their hormones were dropping, like your son with a traumatic brain injury. What if we started that stuff then so we could prevent him from getting dementia? Right.

37:02
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
That’s where we really need to be looking. And it’s what functional medicine doctors preach, and yet they don’t do it in so many places like joint health.

37:10
JJ Virgin
Yeah, well, it does feel like orthopedics has been siloed.

37:14
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yes, it’s right.

37:15
JJ Virgin
Right. I mean, it’s like you go, I’ve always avoided the orthopedic surgeons because I figure they’ll want to cut. I will go to them last when I need that option. Go to the just the right straight orthopedist.

37:27
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Right.

37:27
JJ Virgin
Who doesn’t cut, who injects or the functional medicine doctor doing regenerative therapies.

37:33
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
But, but let’s look at the regenerative therapies. I love regenerative therapies and I do a lot of regenerative procedures. But if you’re isolated because you’ve seen these clinics all, you know, that’s what they do. They just throw in some platelets or platelet fibrin or stem cells or exosomes, whatever it might be into a joint. And I haven’t fixed the underlying process. Do we really think that long term is going to work? It’s not. And so that’s my criticism. A lot of the regenerative places is that they’re still not optimizing health. We always. So if we do a regenerative procedure on somebody, you can damn well be sure they’re on hormones. We’ve got them on some BPC, some Thymus and Beta 4. We started on some penicillin. So we actually have them in an optimized state.

38:17
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Where now if they’re doing an expensive regenerative procedure, it’s actually going to hold Right.

38:22
JJ Virgin
I mean honestly, this pentocin that you’re talking about sounds like with that you probably won’t need a lot of these things.

38:28
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Well, that’s so, that’s so.

38:30
JJ Virgin
Okay.

38:31
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
I’m not missing a little while beforehand. So we’ve lost a lot of our regenerative procedures because if people are on that for like 12 weeks, they’re like, I don’t really need anything else done now. So like, well, darn. But you know, the, so the key is that oftentimes once you do these things, people don’t need the regenerative procedures. Now if you’re very far down the road, then that, then yes, you probably still need to add on. Right. So that’s where now I can pull in my stem cells or exosomes or whatever your favorite tool is and it’s going to really work because now I have the body in a state where it’s going to actually utilize these things.

39:04
JJ Virgin
Appropriately and heal it sounds like then the smartest thing is you do all of these things because those are expensive. I mean we did early on, after my son had his traumatic brain injury 10 years ago, 12 years ago, we had, you know, back then we had his own stem cells expanded, done interthecally like all these things. I mean, $50,000 people are spending, you know, stem cell procedures can be so expensive. And now I’ve heard there’s potential issues with. And maybe I heard this from you, but when you hear it, you’re like, oh, this makes sense that there could be, you know, senescent cells in the stem cells.

39:42
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah. So that’s another problem is if you’re using your own stem cells, if you’re, you know, and you’re older, we used to think, oh, stem cells don’t get senescent. Well, Chinese study really proved that wrong when they took mice, so elderly mice that had arthritis and they put in culture those cells next to nice healthy chondrocytes, nice healthy cartilage cells. Initially not much happened, but if you watch them over time they started to create this senescent. They actually spew out these senescent proteins that start damaging the cells, sort of anti inflammatory response. But then you actually, down the road you now have these zombie senescent cells that chondrocytes that are killing off the other cells.

40:25
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
So using your own stem cells I don’t think is a really good idea at as you get to be an older person, if you’re young and healthy and perfect, then probably that’s okay. But by the time you’re my age, they’re probably not going to work. And you really want to be looking for. And then if you go to umbilical stem cell, well, then you’ve got the downsides of some of those. You have to be very careful where you’re getting them and who you’re getting them from. And there was just a bunch of people who had infections recently out of one clinic, you know, and so you have to be super careful with that. So, you know, I think that we have to be really careful with what we’re doing with a lot of these regenerative therapies too.

41:01
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
And, you know, and make sure that we’re knowledgeable about who we’re doing them with and, you know, and making sure that we do have the right tools on board for that person to actually get better.

41:13
JJ Virgin
So again, that would be a last case. I’m like going, all right, this definitely seems that we do this if none of these other things would work before we go do a joint replacement.

41:25
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Right, right. So that would be your next tool before you go to the joint replacement. And then, you know, I have patients that come to me, they’re bone on bone, they have horrific pain. I’m gonna say, you know, let’s get your joint replaced. After that, I’m gonna make sure that you go down the right road. Right. But I’m gonna help you recover from that. So I’m gonna help you so you heal much better, you know, and even we’ll even pull in, like post joint replacement, even using anabolic steroids. Steroids a little bit for a little while. Because what anabolics do, they help you put on muscle very rapidly. So if you have an injury like that where you had a joint replacement, we can actually use things like a short course of anabolic steroids on people.

41:59
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
You know, I work with a lot of bodybuilders, so we kind of. You learn that tool of, if I want somebody to put on muscle fast, I can use a short course of anabolic. So you can even do things like that to help people heal. There are people who, I say, I advise them, you know, the best thing for you right now is a joint replacement. I’m not going to say, you know, I’m not going to say let’s try a $25,000 procedure and make you spend, you know, all this money. I’m going to say, you know, you’re kind of at that stage where the joint placement is going to work for you.

42:26
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
But then Two days after that surgery, three days after that surgery, I want to be working with you and I want to get you on this road so this heals really well and that you don’t have a cascade of events where now your next joint goes.

42:39
JJ Virgin
You mentioned red light. So I keep coming back to my favorite tools, which is a sauna and red lights.

42:48
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah.

42:49
JJ Virgin
And I’d love you to talk a little bit about red lights, because that’s the one that you’re still kind of going. Is it doing anything? I can’t tell. Like what’s your take on red lights?

42:58
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
I think it’s really compelling and I think it’s very helpful for healing. And, you know, a lot of this goes beyond some of the basics of cellular mechanisms, because if you look at mitochondria, which are your little energy cells, but they’re much more, they’re not just the energy of our cell, they are actually in control. They’re the control tower. They’re in control of everything that happens in your cell, whether it lives or dies, in fact. And so how do we get mitochondria healthier? Well, we know that when mitochondria are exposed to certain wavelength frequencies, they actually, it tells, it signals these little mitochondria to become tougher, stronger, and actually make more of themselves. And it’s actually, you kind of have to get into this whole quantum biology that is actually because of the way the electrons flow. This is all electron transport. Right.

43:46
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
It’s all electricity. So if I can put the right wavelength of light, then I can actually rev up these mitochondria to work harder. When the mitochondria are working harder, I have more energy, I can get more blood vessels to the area, I can make more muscle, I can heal faster and better. So red light’s a great tool and it has a lot of basis in science. I mean, you know, and it’s not expensive. You can buy a little red light for your home. That’s not, you know, if you don’t have to have a big huge panel and if you have, you know, I have one that’s big that I can put on my shoulder or I put on my knee or something like that. Right. So you don’t even have to have a $50,000 unit. You can buy a little $500 unit.

44:25
JJ Virgin
You got a great wrapping. So we have a huge panel, then we have a small travel one, then a face one. But I have a great wrapping one.

44:33
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah.

44:34
JJ Virgin
Around joints. That’s amazing.

44:35
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah, that’s great. You put around your back. Yeah, that’s a really nice one too. That. Yeah. So I love red light and agree with you. Sauna, I think, has some of the most documented evidence behind it. You know, when you look, sauna’s been around for a really long time. So you look at things that have sort of established in history as it was a healing tool way back. You know, if you go to like the Egyptian pyramids, I mean, basically this goes way back, right. That people used sauna heat because it helps you to detox. It helps basically when you heat up to a higher temperature, you’re sweating, you’re getting rid of all these bad cells, you’re getting rid of all these bad cytokines, all these inflammatory cytokines. I think if you want to.

45:16
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
And I have like one of those little sauna space saunas. It’s like a $5,000 unit. You know, it’s not expensive, it doesn’t take up a lot of room. And I could sit in the corner of my. I don’t have a big house, so I could sit at the, in the corner. And you know, and so these are such easy tools to implement. You don’t have to have all this big fancy $150,000 things or be running off to all these places. I think you can do. I think that’s what we really need to emphasize to people because we have all these people out there who are preaching the million dollar protocols and you don’t really have to have the million dollar protocols.

45:50
JJ Virgin
Is what’s so funny about Brian Johnson with this $2 million a year is when you read through his stuff, it still comes down to okay, sleep, exercise.

46:00
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
I’m like, all right, anti inflammatory diet. Whether he’s on the right anti inflammatory diet, I don’t think so, but sure doesn’t seem so.

46:07
JJ Virgin
But either which way. It sure doesn’t look very delicious. So there.

46:13
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
I don’t know.

46:13
JJ Virgin
I’m a plant. I’m a plants and animals.

46:16
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
We have to remember that too in all of this is that when we eliminate like fun and social and all that stuff that’s also hugely beneficial to our health. So when I’m like, oh, I fast three days out of the week, I can’t go out to dinner with any of my friends. That’s not really a great way to live either.

46:36
JJ Virgin
Yeah. When you have to get up at 4:30am every day.

46:39
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Right. So we have to sort of look sensible. I think, you know, we’ve got way over the Deep end here. And, you know, and I love people like you who are like kind of going, bring it back to, well, exercise, which is the number one thing we can do, right? And I always talk about, because I do get a little, you know, I see people who truly can’t exercise, they are so sick. So, so there is tools we can use to help them get back so they can get to exercise. But, you know, you have to at least simulate exercise for a while until you can get people back on the road. Because it’s the number one thing that’s going to save your joints and save your brain and save your heart in most cases.

47:11
JJ Virgin
I mean, even when I worked in physical therapy, I remember we had a guy in a wheelchair. It was like we still figured things out, right. I remember when I had one of my ACL surgeries, I like, you know, went over, got over there, crutched over to the Schwinn Aerodyne bike. I remember the surgeon walked over, he goes, what are you doing? I said, I got a leg, I got arms.

47:32
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Right, right. You could, you could pedal one leg. And I remember I did too. I had my foot over the handlebar and was, you know. Yeah, I, you know, I had rotator cuff surgery about a year ago. Completely tore my rotator cuff, lifting. And, and the next day I was in the gym doing stuff with my other arm because, you know, 20% of that goes to that bad side. So. So yeah, you really don’t ever have.

47:54
JJ Virgin
To stop moving, which is so important with the, gosh, you look at that, the studies that show just one week of bed rest and you lose two pounds of muscle. And I’m like, do you know how hard it is to put on a pound of muscle? And that is where, when the other places I heard you talking, you were talking about fortotropin, about meios.

48:14
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah.

48:14
JJ Virgin
Oh my gosh, that’s been a recent find. I’m like, where is this?

48:18
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Isn’t it? It’s so cool. I mean, and I know you talk a lot about meios md but you know, fortitropin is, you know, people are going and getting these big false down gene therapies, which is amazing, but you have to have 50,000, $60,000 to do it. So we can actually give fortitropin, which is in these fertilized egg yolks that will turn off myostatin, you know, and we can now do that. So that’s another tool I use on my patients too. So they have an injury or they Do a procedure on them. I’m going to have them doing their protein shake is going to have some meios in it. The other thing that when you look at fertilized egg yolks beyond the fortropin, they have tons of choline in them, which is hugely helpful for cell membrane function. So, you know, so that’s such a.

49:04
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Again, you know, throw a few scoops of that into your protein shake.

49:08
JJ Virgin
Oh, yeah, that’s such. Every day.

49:10
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah, yeah. After my workout, that’s my first thing.

49:13
JJ Virgin
Creatine. Yep. All of it. Collagen. And I heard you’re a collagen fan too.

49:18
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah, I am. I was kind of pooed collagen for a lot of years. Now. It’s just a big meta analysis that came out that looked at collagen and so skin and it said there was zero benefit in the skin and it was a pretty big meta analysis. So I don’t know about skin, but I could tell you that we know it’s beneficial for joints and there’s some really good clinical data on that. That just 5 grams of collagen actually improved walking speed in people with knee osteoarthritis and pain perceptions in people with knee ostritis. So I think you have to use a collagen hydrolysate. So it has to be the right type of collagens and you usually have to have adequate vitamin C or take it with some vitamin C if you’re vitamin C deficient. It’s not going to work.

50:00
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
But I pooed collagen for a lot of years. My orthopedics, I’m like, that’s stupid. You can’t take collagen and make collagen. The data supports otherwise. So again, another simple tool that you can do that’s going to help joint health.

50:13
JJ Virgin
Yeah, I heard about this. I’ve not seen the study. It makes sense. I think it’s probably premature, but about taking it pre workout because of the blood flow to, you know, these areas that are tough to get blood flow to. So I just like, well, that’s easy enough to do.

50:29
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
I think I have a hard time with creatine before or after workout. Collagen before or after workout. Creatine shouldn’t matter.

50:36
JJ Virgin
It’s tissue stores. Right?

50:38
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
I mean, get it in there. But you know, so I drink a little creatine while I’m working out.

50:45
JJ Virgin
I throw my creatine, my aminos because I was like, well, you know, mice will have more on board, you know.

50:52
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Right. And then I come home and have myOS md. The other thing that you know, when we’re talking about just kind of simple things like ketones, you know, so ketones. So you know, when we have somebody who’s really bad autoimmune, what a lot of people do if you look like, listen to like Dr. Terry Walls in her Ms. Talk things like that is put them in a ketotic diet, right? The problem with a ketotic diet long term is you start to lose metabolic flexibility. So short term it’s okay. It can really bring the immune system stable. It’s really the production of ketones. Exogenous ketones work equally as well to making your own ketones. So one of the other things we use a lot of and for your son with the brain stuff, ketones are so, so good for the brain and protective.

51:36
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
If you get all you guys who go out and do high risk sports, take your ketones beforehand because basically stops that neuroinflammation. But if you look at ketones and joints by using like you know, 10, 15 grams of ketones like three times a day, you can actually really help. Inflammation turns off something called NLRP3, which is one of our big inflammatory modulators. And so basically it just turns that off. So I, you know, I drink ketones a lot through my day too to keep my brain functioning better, to keep my inflammation down. But some really good data. If you’ve one. I think if you did one thing before you’re going to do any kind of strenuous sport or anything like that is to take some ketones ahead of time because they really prevent this big inflammatory cascade.

52:20
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
If you were to get an injury or a brain injury or something like that, I just.

52:23
JJ Virgin
Ketones are really one I haven’t been doing. It’s like I’ve played around with them on and off and I’ve never really focused on them.

52:30
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
But yeah, and there’s some, you know, I mean in general you have to be careful with the ketones you get ketone. Ketone salts really aren’t great. You want a ketone ester. There’s really only a couple companies that make ketone esters. Ketone aid kinetic separated the ester out, which is really cool. So they separated the two, the beta hydroxybutyrate away and by doing that they were able to get a much longer state of ketosis. They were able to bring people into a ketotic state much longer. And plus they taste really good versus most ketones taste like gasoline. So Kinetic did a really nice job.

53:03
JJ Virgin
But.

53:03
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
But you want to make sure you have a ketone ester on board. But guys, I honestly think if you did one thing for your health, I think ketones are huge. JJ, you know, go back and just like your GLP1s, start looking at ketones and every disease in the book and you’ll see that they can really help almost everything.

53:21
JJ Virgin
Interesting. I know. We played around with them, as you can imagine. We put Grant on a ketogenic diet for a while there. Of course, getting him to stay one.

53:28
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Is it possible? Yeah, it’s impossible, right? Like, yeah, you know, and we played.

53:33
JJ Virgin
Around with different ketones, but probably we just didn’t have a, you know.

53:36
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah. Good source. And you have to do enough of them. Like if you have a brain injury person, you want like 20 grams three or four times a day, which is why like these kinetic cans are like 12 grams.

53:45
JJ Virgin
And.

53:45
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
But you can buy this Kinetic Pro and it’s. And it is like 20 grams and like 2 tablespoons and add it to some sparkling water. It tastes yummy.

53:54
JJ Virgin
Perfect.

53:55
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
And that’s something you can get like, you know, even an 18 year old to do.

53:58
JJ Virgin
That’s perfect. Yeah. He was, he’s now 26, which is great because he wasn’t supposed to live through. Is he 20? No, he’s 29.

54:06
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Wow. How. How did he get a brain injury?

54:09
JJ Virgin
He was run down by a car. Hit and run. Yeah. 13 fractures, crushed heel, torn aorta.

54:15
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Oh, my God. Jesus.

54:17
JJ Virgin
Yeah. And the doctors who told us to let him go.

54:20
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Wow. Wow. I didn’t know that story.

54:23
JJ Virgin
Yeah, it’s, it’s pretty brutal. But we did progesterone. We did high dose. We. So we did high dose fish oil. But that was a whole story in the hospital to get that. Yeah, right.

54:33
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Try to get anything in the hospital. Right. Once you’re in icu, try to get anything is pretty hard.

54:37
JJ Virgin
Oh, we couldn’t. We like once we spit his feeding tube out, I’m like, game on, man. So I had like essential aminos and high dose fish oil and we’re doing progesterone cream.

54:47
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yep, yep. Progesterone is great. But guys, you forget about progesterone for men. Right? But it’s not only good for the brain, but low progesterone in men will present with achy joints, so just like it does women. So you can actually use low dose progesterone in men and help a lot of back Pain and joint pain, too.

55:02
JJ Virgin
Interesting. Well, I had a girlfriend, I don’t know if you know, Anna Kabeca, but she pinged me. She’s like, this is a study out of Emory. I’m like, cool. I actually found. The researcher asked him because they were only using it for five days post injury. He goes, yeah, we didn’t have the funding. I’m like, oh, okay, cool. You know, so I actually got to all these different researchers for different things. So that’s where I got that 20 grams of fish oil and do the progesterone. So we. We threw everything at him behind the doctor’s back. Yeah, so.

55:34
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
And you didn’t even have peptides back then. Right. You couldn’t get.

55:36
JJ Virgin
You know, that’s so. I mean, now we are. Now we’re throwing more stuff at him. But, you know, it’s like amazing what you can do because otherwise he would. No way would. Would he be here?

55:46
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah. Wow. Anyhow, I mean, thank God you knew what.

55:48
JJ Virgin
You are such the cutting edge. And I know what I love is this, that you are teaching laypeople that you have access to all of this so that laypeople can actually read it and study up on it themselves. Because again, I think that’s critically important.

56:03
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Guys, because you’re not going to hear it from your orthopedic doctor. Right? I mean, not in the 50 minutes to get a steroid injection and get out of there. So you guys have got to learn this and then seek out the people who can help you to get up all the things. J.J. and I just talked about. So many of those you can just do on your own.

56:20
JJ Virgin
Are you able to. And we’re gonna put all of this information. Your Hormone Optimization Academy, your Boulder. What’s Boulder?

56:30
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Elizabeth Institute.

56:31
JJ Virgin
Elizabeth Institute. We’ll put that all@jjbirgen.com yearth y u r th are you able to see people virtually? Does your clinic do that?

56:42
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah, very much so. I’m licensed in every state. We actually see people all around the world, so we see people virtually lots of times. Obviously, if they have a procedure, they have to fly in, but we can get them going on all this stuff virtually. And, you know, and you know, we have people usually send their images to us so we can look at them. But, you know, for a lot of this stuff, honestly, when people come to us with joints, joint pain, we just get them into this really nice optimized state and, you know, like, they’ll come to us saying, oh, I want stem cells, or I want, you know, exosomes or whatever they might. They might want. And I said, okay, let’s back up. Let’s start here. And you know, three months later, like, oh, no, I’m doing pretty good.

57:20
JJ Virgin
Yeah, it makes sense. Well, either which way. Whether they get them or not, they should do this first. From everything you.

57:24
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Exactly. So it’s perfect.

57:27
JJ Virgin
And a lot of things we talk about in the show, they’re already doing, but you just added another layer of things. And I love that because I got to tell you, what I was thinking was like, I was like, all of us who’ve been active our whole lives are now screwed because of our joints. And I was like, I’ve been thinking about it all wrong.

57:43
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Right, Right. Let’s think about. Right. And that’s why you’re, you know, like, because you live such a good life. Right. But even these little things, like, for you, pentocin may be a godsend. I mean, for me, it really was.

57:53
JJ Virgin
Oh, I’m getting my paws on that. I like, yes. That was the first thing I’m like, what is this? And how do we.

57:58
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah, no, it is a really amazing drug. And like I said, it’s, you know, this is. This drug’s been around since 2019. It’s been being utilized in other countries since 2019. It’s not like new to the show.

58:09
JJ Virgin
Yeah, well, the U.S. it’s great. We’re just, it’s crazy how behind we are on these things. Like, yeah, it’s like, it’s.

58:17
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
Yeah. It just takes a long time. It takes 17 years for a drug to get from proven safe to being utilized in Carousel.

58:26
JJ Virgin
Yeah. Meanwhile, we’re all sitting here having joint replaced, so. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you. I love what you’re doing. Thank you so much for being out there, being courageous, being brave and changing lives everywhere. And again, I’ll put everything@jjburgin.com yurth y u r T H so that everyone can grab these resources and get out of pain.

58:52
Dr. Elizabeth Yurth
I so appreciate you letting me share this so we can hopefully stop this epidemic. Thank you.

58:59
JJ Virgin
I am super excited about everything that Dr. Elizabeth talked about. I’m going to give you a couple key things to think about. Number one, when you do have some kind of an injury. Move, move. Wait a couple days to reduce the inflammation. So wait a couple days for the ice and low dose baby aspirin. The low dose aspirin. And then start to work through these things. BPC157, I’m going to give you the code. I have for healthgevity. That is where I get my BPC157 oral and is also where I get that fragment of thymosin beta and then I’m also the other things there. So thymosin BPC157 moving, doing exercise. But the other cool things that she talked about were yolked and creatine. So I’ll also put the information on yolked on that fertilized egg yolk that’s amazing that I take every single day.

01:00:01
JJ Virgin
I put two and a half pounds of muscle on with that and then my creatine chiotine product. I am going to be looking for ketones to see which one is the best one. So I will be looking for that. She talked about I think a kinetics formula. So I’m gonna start to dig into that. Stay tuned there. And then red light. I do have a couple different red light panels. I have a joovv red light panel and a small joovv panel and then I am not sure what my wraparound one is. We will find it for the show notes but those are my different red light panels that I’ve been using. So there you go. So again think about what can you do?

01:00:43
JJ Virgin
What if joint pain was a sign of just, you know, we need to work on inflammation and what are the things that you can do for inflammation. I’m also going to go get that treatment she was talking about so I will let you know how that goes in a future episode. Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you can use to look and feel your best and be built to last. Also, I’d love to connect with you and hear your thoughts on the podcast. Here’s how. First, subscribe to the podcast and leave an honest review. Second, take a screenshot of your review and third, text it to 813-565-2627. That’s 813-565-2627. When you do, I’ll reply using my brand new virtual jj.

01:01:38
JJ Virgin
It’s my on demand virtual self built from my books, talks and years of experience so I can interact with you directly. You’ll make my day and I can’t wait to hear from you. Thanks for tuning in and I’ll catch you on the next episode. Hey JJ here. And just a reminder that the well Beyond 40 podcast offers health, wellness, fitness and nutritional information that’s designed for educational and entertainment purposes only. You should not rely on this information as a substitute for nor does it replace professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment if you have any concerns or questions about your health, you should always consult with a physician or other healthcare professional.

01:02:19
JJ Virgin
Make sure that you do not disregard, avoid or delay obtaining medical or health related advice from your healthcare professional because of something you may have heard on the show or read in our show notes. The use of any information provided on the show is solely at your own risk.

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