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Transcript...

Lecturer: If you take a tube of blood and you place it on the counter, it settles by weight. The heavier stuff sinks to the bottom first, and the lightest one's up at the top. All you need a centrifuge for is to make it happen faster, and when you're done, it goes red cells, white cells, platelets, in that order, and most of them are stuck right here in this thing called the buffy coat, and then this also has platelets in it, but you can see the color changes. This is my finger. I just spun the yellow top and took a picture of it. The color changes as you get closer to the top and by the time you get here it's mostly water.

Now, what is platelet-rich plasma? Remember the guy called me down at the ortho meeting because what I was calling platelet-rich plasma didn't meet his definition of what platelet-rich plasma is. I think I told him ... Did I tell him my joke about the girl and the high school kid? So my Dad told me there was this girl in his high school that only had sex twice. Once with the football team and once with the basketball team. And so, my point is that you got to, that words can mean whatever you decide they mean and people are going to use the word platelet-rich plasma to mean two different things, and I want ... They're not trying to trick you. It's a true statement, just like the girl just had sex two times. That was true. So they're not trying to trick you. They just have a different meaning for their words, and I want you to understand what those meanings are so that you can make a smart choice.

Okay, so you ready? So, if you take this, let's assume they don't, this person probably has hematocrit of about 40 percent, 45 percent. How do I know that?

Male student: Just estimate by ...

Lecturer: Yeah, exactly. You can look at it.

Male student: ... [inaudible 00:01:41].

Lecturer: Exactly. So if the crit was 50 percent, it would be half plasma and half red cells, right? So let's just to make the math easy, let's assume we're dealing with a man with a crit of 50 percent, and without using a microscope, I'm going to tell you how to know how many platelets you got. So, let me set this down for a second. So, if this were, if I just took a tube of the man that had a crit of 50 and I spun his blood in a centrifuge, I would have ... and this is 10 milliliters, I would have 5 milliliters give or take of red blood cells and I would have five milliliters of plasma with the platelets mostly living right there. You guys still with me?

Some of the platelets would be in this upper layer of red cells. The younger platelets have a weight that's very similar to red cells so they would be right here, but that's a small number. Most of them would be right here with some of them through here. So if I took this and I put that into a syringe, I would have platelet-rich plasma if my definition of rich means compared to whole blood. Right? And what would be the concentration of platelets in this compared to whole blood? Two time, three times, four times. Which one?

Male student: Two times.

Lecturer: Two times, right? Because you took the platelets that were in ten and you put it in five, so you doubled the concentration of platelets, and you didn't need a microscope. So, the gel kits are engineered to do that. When you're through spinning them ... oops, went backwards ... We should probably talk a little bit about what's in the platelets. So these are seven or so of the over 20 growth factors that we know are there. The way I describe this to the patients, and I'll say "You're making what was in that scab ... " because they always remember scraping their knee as a child, I said "You're making that yellow goo that was in the scab, and that's what prompted your body to grow the skin back." When I go to Antigua next week and teach this class, they're going to have me on the news. I always use that analogy when I talk to lay people about what it is I'm doing.

But we didn't invent a drug, we're just taking what the body normally does every time you are cut, scraped or had surgery. This is nothing hokey. If this wasn't there you couldn't heal when you scraped your knee as a kid on your bicycle. All were doing is getting those same platelets that started the thrombin cascade and we're putting it in a syringe. And we don't even care about the platelets. We care what's in the platelets. So when the platelets are exposed to collagen or calcium or thrombin, they break open and they release all these growth factors. And people say "Well, how does it stay in place?" It stays in place because it gels, and that's why you had that yellow stuff, and becomes platelet-rich fibrin matrix. Everybody say that. Platelet-rich fibrin matrix. Because when, I'll see our doctors on the news and they'll get tongue-tied and say "Rich platelet plasma" or all sorts of crazy combinations. It's platelet-rich plasma and platelet-rich fibrin matrix.

Now the Selphyl people have a great kit. It comes with calcium. They finally lowered their price a little bit. It used to, they tried to sell it for 400 bucks for those three drops of calcium, but now what they're doing, they're using a little bit of a game on our doctors, and they'll say "Well, we're the only ones that are selling platelet-rich fibrin matrix." And all they're doing is they're selling you one kit that makes the PRP and another little tube that has calcium in it. Well, heck, all of us are making platelet-rich fibrin matrix every time we inject it or add calcium to it. Okay? So don't fall for that.

All of us are making platelet-rich fibrin matrix. When you take the platelet-rich plasma and you inject it, it turns to this matrix when it's exposed to the collagen in your body. Yes, sir.

Male student: The calcium, what's the ...

Lecturer: Okay, yeah. So I haven't introduced that yet. So calcium chloride is ... I usually use 10 percent, this is in the research a lot, and again, a lot of this came from our orthopedic friends trying to think how can you ... Let's just stop and think. Why do we even need to do this? Why can't you just take whole blood and shoot it in the face? It's got platelets in it?

Female student: [inaudible 00:06:18].

Lecturer: Well, that's basically, I mean ... It's got platelets, though. Right?

Male student: Well, you're not going to get the matrix ... It's going to be diluted.

Lecturer: It'll be diluted, but you still have platelets.

Male student: So you're not going ... It's going to be too diluted to get the effect for the small area that you're working.

Lecturer: Maybe. Maybe. It's a good point and that's what our orthopedist friends would tell us, is that you don't have a high enough concentration. So the game they were playing was, they have a little, tiny space like a knee, and they need a lot of growth factors to heal something that doesn't have good flow, like collagen in a knee, so that's where the technology came from and the reason the plastic surgeons and the derms and gynecologists have to think about is you've got a lot of blood flow in a vagina and a face. I've sutured up hundreds of faces like you guys have. You hardly ever see it get infected. They can go through a windshield, get drug on the street and get urinated on and cut with a beer bottle and you wash it with a little saline, sew it up, they're fine. Not so with a knee.

And so, the game they've had to play, and same thing with the dentists at Wound Care Center in the hospital over here with the hyperbaric chamber, and the oral surgeon would send people over that had been radiated for throat cancer. Now they have to do surgery on radiated tissue, so we'd do hyperbaric medicine, then they would do their surgery and do PRP afterwards to try to make it heal better. So, what the technology, what the research shows out of that is that if you activate those platelets before you inject them, you get a more complete activation than if you depend on the collagen itself to activate the platelets. And one guy, when I lectured in Serbia, there was a guy there who had just published a paper he had worked on for 20 years. I was definitely not the smartest man in that room, and he was big on that. He said if you don't activate, the tissue itself is only going to activate about 65 percent of your platelets.

And so the orthopods have been activating with calcium and thrombin and they've been looking for what's the sweet spot for concentration, and what they have found is for a knee, the best healing takes place at about five times the concentration of whole blood, for a knee. But we don't know that that's the case for an easy to heal tissue like a vagina or the face, and what I can tell you as a clinician is that for three years, I spun gel kits. I used Eclipse, I used Regen, I used Selphyl during those three years, and a gel kit, all it does is it starts with a little goo at the bottom. You got one in your kit, C?

Male student: Yeah.

Lecturer: So want to show them one that hasn't been used. Just hold it up where they can see what it looks like. Can you pull it out of that package? And you'll see it looks like a little goo at the bottom, and what happens is that goo is stuck here and you add blood. Then the good pops up like a cork to the top of the blood. Yeah, hold it where they can see the goo at the bottom. Yeah, you see that white stuff at the bottom. Yeah, Vanna White, there you go. So, that goo pops to the top and then while it's spinning in the centrifuge, it winds up stopping somewhere in the middle so that ideally you've got nothing but red cells there and platelet-rich plasma right there. Compared to whole blood it's just this with the goo stuck between the red cells and the plasma.

So it winds up looking like this. We'll come back to all this. Like that. So platelets here, red cells there, goo right there and your buffy coat ideally should be there. If you try a different speed or a different length of time you're spinning, the goo's going to be at a different place. If you use a centrifuge with a different diameter, you're going to get a different g-force, so their intellectual property is that they know that, the people who sell these kits, that this goo put in a centrifuge with this diameter and circumference, spun at this many RPMs for this many minutes is going to put your plasma right there.

And it sterilized in such a fashion, again, nobody gives me kickbacks on any kit. Nobody. I don't get a penny. I don't get something put into my son's bank account. I don't get a blowjob. I don't get nothing. Okay? And so, that's why you see kits from eight different manufacturers back there, right? But what I'm telling you is there are people out there who don't use these kits. That's why I'm prefacing this remark. You can get a yellow top for seven dollars. You don't even have to pay for it. You can probably have Lab Corps bringing you yellow tops to your office. You all need something? You guys okay? Do you need something? I'm just making sure you're good because we got fed and breakfast and juice and you guys just came in off of a plane, so I want to make sure you're comfortable. Do you all need some juice or food or something? Because we got beignets. I hate being on airplanes. I freaking hate it. And so you're probably feeling beat up and dried up right now. You got some Perrier or something? Give them some Perrier.

So, anyway. So that's a long way of saying that don't do that because that is second rate medicine and when someone asks you is this a FDA approved procedure, what is your answer going to be? Is this o-shot FDA approved? How do you answer that?

Class: No.

Lecturer: No. Why? Can you elaborate?

Male student: Because one, it's not a drug.

Lecturer: He's right. Blood's not a drug, and so the analogy I give people is I'll say "You know, if I sell a needle and thread to a doctor ... " I'm getting back to the kits. "If I sell a needle and thread to a doctor, I can't go get a needle and thread that's made to suture up clothes and sell that to a doctor to suture up people." So, I have to prove to the FDA ... it should be called Food Drug and Device ... so the FDA has to approve a device to be used in the human body, but then once that suture material's in a doctor's hands, it's approved, now it's doctor's business. FDA's got nothing to do with how you sew up a wound. Nothing.

So in that same manner, you're using ... and you need that analogy to explain to patients ... you should be using a device that's FDA approved to prepare blood, not to examine in the laboratory but to go back into a human body, and that's a different game than preparing it to look at under a microscope. It's a different level of approval. So if the patient says that, you say "I have a device that's FDA approved to prepare plasma to go back into the human body, and I know the concentration of platelets that I have in there, but the procedure is not needful of approval because it's your blood." That's the way you explain that.

Okay, so back to this thing. So, you do this with a gel kit, you got two times concentration of whole blood, and I can tell you I've literally treated hundreds of people with two times concentration of whole blood with a very, very high success rate on the o-shot, the face, and the priapus shot. The two times concentration. In my opinion, I don't think you need more than that to do those procedures like you do with the knee, okay? On the other hand, I don't think you're hurting anything going to five times concentration, and it could be that our research eventually shows that you get a higher percentage of ... Not all my procedures work.

Maybe you get a higher percentage of success rate when you go to five times, then you do a two, just like you do with the bone. We just don't know that yet. But my suspicion is you'd get a pretty high success rate with these procedures if you used whole blood. I'm not going to do that, but my suspicion is that you might because there may be enough platelets in just whole blood to make it work for a face or an o-shot. I don't know.

But activation, whether it's by calcium chloride or by the body's own collagen, makes PRP turn into platelet-rich fibrin matrix, and that's why it stays in your penis or around the urethra or in your face because of that matrix gel holds it there. Now, here's what I've decided ss a clinician, I'm open to be taught. I'm going to send you home with more questions than answers. It's just like when you get a new drug, suddenly there's hundreds of research papers come about how to use it. Part of the danger of me teaching this is I start to believe everything I'm saying. I want you guys to go research it and figure out a better way, okay? But here's the way I'm thinking about it.

If I'm treating something like a face or the scalp, I want that PRP to spread, and if I'm treating the breast I want it to spread, and if I get a little bit less activation and it still works, I don't really care. But if I'm treating around the urethra where I want it to stay in a space that's only a few millimeters in diameter or in a penis where I want it to kind of stay in a, you know, relative to my whole scalp, it's a lot more area than here, than my penis, so I want it to spread. So what I'm doing is I'm using calcium to activate when I do the o-shot and the p-shot and when I do loss of sensation for the breast. Everything else I'm not activating it.

And what I found is a lot of our people that have told me their o-shots are not working, they've not been activating it. So I think you need the complete activation and I think it's helping it stay in place. You should be activating it when you do an o-shot. Activating it and adding something to that syringe before you inject it, so you're getting a more complete release of all of your platelets, dumping those growth factors. Is that making sense? If not calcium chloride it can be calcium gluconate, it can be thrombin. Some of the kits come with thrombin, some with calcium chloride, and Cell-Fill includes the calcium chloride, but you pay extra when you can buy a vial of calcium chloride and treat a hundred people for a ten dollar vial. Okay?

Now, what's a double centrifuge kit? What a double centrifuge kit does is it takes this and you spin it and you wind up with your red blood cells. This is Harvest, Insight, Magellan, True PRP, that's the double centrifuge. So what they do is they get, you get red blood cells here. You got plasma up here. I'm just going to call it plasma for now. And then they do a second centrifuge that pulls off the richest part here, so then you have ... If you had 60, you would get 30 of red blood cells, 30 of this total, and then you could pull off ten of this richest part and 20 of this, so this would have fewer platelets, this top two-thirds. This lower one-third would have most of the platelets, and so in this case you would call this platelet-poor plasma and this richest part would be called platelet-rich plasma.

And now this is rich compared to plasma. You see the two different definitions now?

Class: Yeah.

Lecturer: So this is rich compared to your plasma. The other, when you take all of this, this is still platelet-rich compared to the whole thing. Two different definitions using the same name. Now, what you can do, you'll see Z has a kit that spins 22-CCs and if you want you can spin that 22-CCs, have a gel kit, and then if this is your gel, you can pipette off this top part and use that part and you'd still have rich compared to ... So that's how you can alter your gel kit. So that's the two, that's kind of the idea behind that.