Pioneers in Health Care - Interview with Dr. Shallenberger
YouTube video by Dr. Frank Shallenberger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKkaj49mUJA). Transcript is the auto-caption track — verbatim ASR, not a certified transcript.

[Music] hello I'm Dr Len Saputo welcome to Pioneers in healthcare I'm the founder of the Health Medicine forum and I've been in practice in the diao valley for about the last 30 years this show is about pioneers in healthcare people who have done something special to bring the profession forward in their own special way and sometimes at Great personal risk to their own safety today we have a very special guest Dr Frank shenberger Frank it's great to have you it's good to be here L thanks for joining thanks for having me few few little things about Frank first of all he graduated from the University of Maryland Medical School and he's board certified in Family Practice he's one of only 16 physicians in the state of Nevada to have boards is a physician a homeopath and in complimentary and alternative medicine he's a member of the American college for the advancement of medicine the American prevention Medical Association the American Association of uh anti-aging medicine he's a founding member of the bio oxidative Medical Foundation and a board member of the orthomolecular orth orthomolecular Health Medicine Society he was a clinical instructor of family medicine at UC Davis here in Sacramento and he was aort appointed by the the governor of Nevada to be a state board of homeopathic medical examiner he's a specialist in anti-aging medicine and board certified the American Board of anti-aging medicine he's published scientific papers and he's lectured extensively in the US and abroad has produced research that's interesting and he's a former member of the Mount Diablo hospital system where he was on the Family Practice committee and emergency medicine committee so Frank you have a very distinguished record that I think is a lot different from what you see in most Physicians you know most doctors are content to go through their medical training they do an internship in a residency they go into clinical practice and then they do what they were taught and they occasionally read some some literature you're a Pioneer have become very controversial because of the stands that you've taken and you've done that from the start and I'm almost embarrassed to say it took me 25 years to figure out that the system had problems before before I really got into this area that you're involved with and now we're colleagues in what was it that tipped you off that medicine wasn't quite on the mark and more had to be done well um yeah you know I I I thought about this course and then I write about it in my first book uh bursting with energy but uh uh the way the way it worked for me L is I from the from the earliest days when I was in medical school I was really interested in trauma it seemed seemed to me that uh that's a real straight appealed to me it's straightforward I can see real medicine there yeah I can see what happens you're broke I put you together it's it's the kind of thing that appeals to my left brain Mechanical Mind well it makes sense too you want somebody like that yeah so uh I did trauma medicine and I did it for six seven years and uh for a very a bunch of different reasons I decided not to do that just to get into regular medicine so that's the background I came from and I'll explain why that's why that's significant a sec here but then I I just got into regular medicine I hung a shingle out became a family practice doctor and uh and and you know I was doing it for about 6 months and and it just really occurred to me that you know my patients really weren't getting well at least they weren't getting well from anything I did yeah they either got well on their own and I just sort of sat around and gave them some pain relief or some sort of symptomatic relief until they got well on their own or they never got well and I continued to give him medications for blood pressure or arthritis or whatever it was I was giving him medications and that only took you six or seven years to figure out no that took me six months to figure out you six seven years in trauma it took me 25 years to figure out that and I was getting depressed because all my patients were on drugs and most of them four five or six or sometimes eight or 10 and and they just weren't getting better and it would be like regular business and I lost interest in it and that's why I shifted but go on with your story well I think I think think the trauma set me up for that because trauma is real straightforward you know if they come into the emergency room with a a knife wound you don't just give them some coating pills and send them home right you know you want to you you pull the knife out see if it lated anything fix it up by the time they actually leave the hospital you've addressed the causes of the issue and fixed it it's an over it's a done deal there's no more of it left you basically cured that patient of that problem that's the way trauma is either that or they die right so uh I you know in my naivity at the time I thought that's the way medicine was practiced patient come in to see you with they had arthritis so they had hypertension you found out why they had it you eliminated the cause they went home everything was happy yeah so that's why you know within four to 6 months I I realized that's just not doing that right so I asked all my buddies at the Family Practice committee there I said you know what's up I I've just been doing this a short time I'm sure I'm doing something wrong so you know you were right about that they said did you know we're all doing something wrong they said no no actually you're doing it the right way I said but nobody's getting any better and they said well that's we all deal with that I'm sorry you know that's just you're going to have to get used to that and uh and that's so that's when I I started to say you know there's got to be some answer I know darn welder didn't teach me everything I need to know in medical school that much I've always known right uh and so I thought you know maybe this is one of those areas so that's that's what got me rolling and so where did it take you what kind of path did this take you on I know it's a long journey that's a huge question but maybe you do I'll tell you I'll tell you an interesting story so at that time I found out about um the um what was then known as the orthomolecular medical society okay right with Dr kanyan and let's define orth Dr juliia Julian Whitaker and lonus Pauling was in at that time and such orthomolecular medicine refers to you know Ortho means to correct and molecular means molecules so it's to correct the balance of the molecules in the body basically natural assuming all disease conditions start from an imbalance molecular imbalance in the system what do you need to do to correct that balance and then you can cure the disease that's and and of course that theory is absolutely correct I think it Bears out if you work it that way 40 Years of medicine I agree that it's that way well it's lonus pauling's idea yeah so um but so so that particular Medical Society was one of the few at the time that were dealing in in areas that we can call alternative medicine so isn't that odd that that basic premise that really does the healing is called alternative medicine when it's actually what's been done for tens of thousands of years by Mother Nature fortunately we have all the equipment to heal we the body does the healing the doctor standing by assisting it at best hopefully not interfering with it hopefully all right so go on with your story so so I went to this meeting and now I'm the neoy I don't know what's going on I'm just a medical doctor The Graduate Medical School knows about suturing up people and giving medicine all these Giants so I'm in this room with you know lius Paul and the rest of them which are basic you know they are giants in this field and uh and I look up and into the audience and who do I see but the chief of our medical staff oh no that's a surprise I see the chief of the medical staff and I go up to him and said John what are you doing here well that must have been John to that was John yeah of course he's one of us what are you doing here the better question is what's he doing there you know anyway and he says look uh you know I thought I I I came to learn some more but do me a favor and I said what he says don't tell anybody I'm here sounds like and and so uh but that's that that kind of exemplifies the time this was about 1978 1979 and that was that was the time uh when you know you didn't even want anybody to know that you were thinking about giving somebody a vitamin or thinking about making a lifestyle change yeah because you would have thought would have called you a quack would have said you know you're doing something wrong well your medical board worse off got you yeah because they were at that time really intolerant of anything that's out of the main stream they're pretty intolerant now they've expanded get they've expanded what they now accept to be true yeah you know but there's all all the stuff on the edge yeah that's still they're still intolerant ofal yeah well fortunately some legislation has passed which allows a little bit of flexibility and the way it reads is as as long long as you inform your patient of what the standard practices are and you don't try to dissuade them from that and you present the other story and they decide to do it it's fine so long as there's no harm if there's harm you're still up for all kinds of problems but that's where the law is now the question is is how much leeway will we have and that hasn't been tested in court yet so you don't really know your Point's right yeah okay so so that's that's how I got into this and and uh I started off with nutrition at first and I found out hey it works I had people with chronic headaches that if I was using the conventional medicine model that had just seen me forever and ever for some kind of medication that literally got cured right became cured I saw patients with arthritis that literally became cured I treated a woman once with rheumatoid arthritis that was literally cured on a diet elimination program and I'm talking cured I'm using the CW here I'm not talking just was better and had some symptomatic Improvement the disease went away and there was no evidence of the disease anymore in these people either laboratory evidence or physical evidence of disease and so you only have to do about a few of those cases your you realize uhoh uhoh now I've got to go back and relearn everything and that's what I've been doing all my life it's what I'm still doing well and it's been quite a few years and you don't know it all I mean there's so much more to do and yet you've expanded your horizons in a whole bunch of different fields it's not just like you're doing nutrition although without nutrition what can you do I mean the terrain of the body the way the body responds its defense mechanisms its way of protecting itself is a huge factor and if you don't give the raw materials the body needs to be able to manufacture its products to take care of itself how could you expect it to function particularly if you've got a genetic defect or if you've got a toxic exposure that's interfering with that and that's where this whole idea of nutrition pollution stress in the orthomol model that you and I know so well has come into practice now you've taken this uh your studies in some different directions and you're really geared to do maybe more things than anybody I know in a whole range of areas you're doing oxidative medicine for example tell us what that is well that that would be my weakness my weakness is that the I get too interested in everything I should specialize I should specialize in arthritis of the left hand or something you know but to make my life medicine's not like that I can't I'm like a kid in the candy shop don't you have to know a whole lot of things to be able to have a balance in what you do and have a whole bunch of different approaches it's the way I'm wir yeah what I do so what's oxidative medicine what does that mean I like to break down uh things in terms of four what I call the four quadrants of Health okay so one would be exercise learning how to exercise one would be learning how to eat and one would be learning what things to take and by that I would mean like vitamin pills supplements hormones whatever medications would body and the last thing would be learning how to deal with stress but I call those the four quadrants of health and if you can get those balanced to your genetics that's the secret that's what makes you heal and that's what keeps you well how would you get sick if those were balanced you probably you'd have to try hard you'd have to really work hard okay so oxidative medicine really comes Under The Heading of exercise what exercise does is it stimulates the body to use oxygen um and you know all that oxygen that you take in it only does one thing and that's to it produces energy period that's all it does and uh so how well you make that happen is pretty much critical to how well your body is going to be able to heal and take care of itself all right so and oxidative medicine comes under that it's ways to make your body handle oxygen better okay the the premier most common for form of oxidative medicine is aerobic exercise because it makes a lot of free radicals and it's what gets your body to adapt its own oxidative stress uh protection system and allow you to do more things safely right well you this there's there's there's this process you know this is kind of analogous to a car engine but there's this process where you take in the oxygen and you burn the fuel which could be carbohydrate or fat and from that you produce energy now you can do that efficiently or you can do that with a low level of efficiency okay uh you want to do it efficiently because if you do it efficiently what you get is a result is one more energy and two less internal pollution less free radical activity okay so you want want ni way to say do it efficiently if it were your car to do it efficiently You' take it into the mechanic you'd say you know tune all the little knobs up and get it all running well reset the car but in your body you don't do that you exercise it you exercise it and that's going to make it more efficient I mean think think about it you got a guy that's out of shape and one at some point down the line he's running a marathon he went from being inefficient to very efficient and and that he did that through Progressive exercise and conditioning of the body so oxidative medicine in its simplest most everyday form is aerobic exercise now when we use that term oxidative medicine we're not normally saying that but that's what we're thinking about because when we use the term we're talking about sick people so if I have a patient come in that's sick with say stage four cancer or he's sick with any kind of debilitating you know degenerative disease right I can't tell him to go run around the block I'm not going to put him on a training program but I can give him oxidative therapies I can give them oxidative medicine which is sort of like exercise in a bottle I can administer that to him and increase the efficiency with which he burns oxygen without him having to exercise at all now you designed a test that's specifically made to do that it's called a bioenergy test that's true tell us about what that test does because it really is an important way to differentiate who's sick and who's not sometimes and how sick are they yeah how bad is their oxidative metabolism so what is this test it it will measure how efficiently you use oxygen now from what I've just said you could say hey that's a pretty good test let me have that test good idea I want to know how efficiently I use oxygen because that makes pretty good sense it's like saying I want to know how efficiently my car uses Gas makes it's the same kind of sense this is the the four fundamental uh uh basic of what keeps us healthy is how well we do that so I developed a test that measures that and it's pretty simple test uh basically it looks at two things one is how much oxygen is disappearing into your body we use a mouthpiece for this so you can imagine uh like something like a snorkel but there's a mouthpiece and you're breathing all your breath through that mouthpiece pure oxygen and it's and it's going to measure how well you cons how all that oxygen how much oxygen goes into your body and how much carbon dioxide comes out of your body so why is that important well by knowing those two variables and then hooking that data up to a computer which runs it through some MH mathematical variance I can tell you how efficiently you're using oxygen because the ratio of carbon dioxide to oxygen under certain conditions of exercise will tell me your efficiency if I for example if I get you up to an efficent if I'm exercising somebody to say it's such and such a level say I'm working them at 120 watts of exercise okay okay if their ratio of CO2 to O2 the amount of CO2 produced to oxygen consumed is low they're more efficient okay the lower that ratio is at that level of exertion the more efficient their oxidative metabolism is all right we can measure that they need less fuel to do the same amount of work exactly they they're getting more bang for their Buck out of their oxygen all right so people who have cancer or Lyme disease or chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia or or a condition like that where energy production is marketly compromised this test will tell you how compromised it is and give you ideas of where you sit and what you can do to remedy that situation so you can make energy more efficiently it will give you a reliable number that you can use uh the best example I give to people when I'm trying to explain this concept to him is think of a blood pressure cuff mhm now if you didn't have a blood pressure cuff as a physician you'd have a heck of a time treating high blood pressure you sure would for one you'd have a heck of time diagnosing it right it's not easy to diagnose high blood you know this right you can't rely on symptoms person can feel great and have high blood pressure so so you have to have a method to one diagnose it but even more importantly if you diagnose using your blood pressure cuff that's you know a person has high blood pressure now you're going to give them a remedy for it you're going to have them do something take a medication say if you don't have a blood pressure C how you going to know if it's working exactly so it's just being a scientist yeah so this is scientific if I want to improve somebody's oxidative metabolism I better have a way of measuring it and then I'm going to measure it first and if it needs help I'll I'll give it some help but then I have to measure it a second time to make sure that the help I'm giving it is working for them because none of us are wired the same exactly if I got four people with low oxidative metabolism and I give them all the same therapy maybe 25 maybe a quarter of them maybe one of them will actually see an improvement with that the other three won't wow what a fantastic to sort it all out now you do a lot of other things you you would do what I would call uh real Integrative Medicine meaning you're looking for all kinds of strategies that can help your patients and you're not really terribly concerned about what those strategies are as long as they seem safe and have some possibility you'll study them and then maybe give it a try oh yeah sure what kinds of other things are you doing that that round out your practice um well uh you know I I we do a lot of lab tests you you know and um talk about the biochemistry of nutrition you know you know one of the most important things we do probably maybe even the most important thing I do in my practice is take a history I mean take a good history does thatan not a quicky little history what does it what does that mean okay for me it means I want to know the chronological order in which everything has occurred in their life what happened you know okay so if they tell me I I have complaint a headaches I want to know when did those headaches start you if they say they started 10 years ago I want to know can you remember when they started did you wake up with them or was it come over insidiously over 6 to 12 month period can you remember any details about it and so we kind of get that down then I say has the nature of the headache changed over the years but specifically I want to know what happened in your life life in the 6 to 12 months leading up to the onset of that symptom so why cuz that's going to help me have a pretty good idea of what throws them into imbalance you know if they told me it was a very stressful time in my life I can focus more in on that angle right if they told me uh you know that they moved into a different house uhuh then I'm going to start thinking maybe there's something in that house okay or if they got a different job or maybe there's an accident there's an accident they hurt themselves yeah exactly or may maybe how about this how about they started on a medication 6 to 12 months a lot of my patients are sick from the medications that we as Physicians give them right and and it's often overlooked I can't tell you how many times I've had a patient say I have such and such a symptom I've been into hospital after Hospital they've given me five or six drugs for this symptom and it turns out that that symptom was due to a drug that was started on them and nobody ever thought to ask them oh by the way what happened 6 months before you got the symptom oh I started that new drug but you don't think that have anything to do with it do you right yeah it's remarkable see I I would agree with you I think the a patient's story exactly is something that really needs to be listened to and it takes time A Lot takes a lot of time it'll take me an hour usually just to do that part and sometimes many hours because people come in different different uh with different situations and often what I'll do is ask them to write an autobiography of their physical emotional and spiritual life and email it to me and I look that over and hope they'll put it in or eight or 10 pages the information that comes from that sometimes makes it unnecessary to do all the complicated workups that we do that uh because they don't expose the psychospiritual basis for a lot of what's happened and I know you being the holistic physician that you are pay a lot of attention to that so when you answered that question about how do you what do you do with the patient that's important and said I take a history I listen to their story I really identify with that such a critical thing because you so many high-tech things it's easy to forget that in an a half hour show to try and go over all your high-tech stuff would be impossible because it's just too much but I'd like people to get some kind of idea of some of the other things that you do just with a a brief uh amount of attention to each one if there you know time being as it is to show the the kinds of things that uh make you really practice as a physician well okay so one of the things we look at is toxins mhm and we look at heavy metals so most of my people if there's any chance that that the reason for their problem could be due to lead or cadmium or Mercury toxicity they're going to get an evaluation for that okay so what do you do oh well I'll do hair analysis or I'll do blood analysis okay or I'll do what they call provocative urine analysis and uh then so that's one thing that we'll do the other thing that we can do is we can check vitamin and mineral levels we can we can do run tests to see how immune system is functioning I have a whole theory around how the immune system has to work so there are ways to test how well that immune system is staying in balance and self correcting itself exactly people with autoimmune diseases especially very critical stuff those are all important we look at hormones I think you know for anybody over the age of 35 or 40 hormones can definitely be in the picture so we need to start taking a look at them so we look at them evaluate them and I'm a big believer in clinical trials what does very big believer inic trials that means you learn about your patient by doing something to him and seeing how he reacts that's an outcome experiment that we do every time we put a pill in somebody's mouth or we give them any kind of therapy we do because everybody is different so it's always an experiment I like like I had a lady once that I won't forget cuz it was very dis very dramatic story you don't forget the dramatic stories but this is a young woman she's 27 years old uh her thyroid blood tests were totally normal okay the only thing she was complaining about this 27y old woman was chronic migraine headaches I by taking her history and by just sort of trying to figure things out even though her thyroid test were normal I thought you know maybe she needs some thyroid so I initiated a clinical trial basically I gave her thyroid test or normal no overt signs clinical signs of hypothyroid but it seemed to me that the whole story that was going on with maybe pointed in that direction so there's a possibility so that's a feel you have with experience so I gave her some thyroid her headaches went away and been gone I still talked to her this was 27 years ago her headaches were gone within one month and never returned wow now that's a clinical trial it tells me that her migraine headaches were caused by low thyroid hormones and so I do a lot of that kind of thing if I think that you know such and such a problem is going on I'm going to go ahead and give things maybe in a sequential fat pattern to see how the patient responds to it well when you think out of the box a little different than what you were taught in your internship and residency medical school and start questioning some of the things that we do in medicine a lot of red flags go up and when you're looking at thyroid tests in particular I mean the way that they put these tests together is they say that if you're two standard deviations from the mean that's just a statistical way of saying if you fall in a certain range you're probably with 9 5% correlation going to be okay but there's 5% that don't and those are the ones that slip through the cracks these are the patients that you and I see in our practice and these are the ones where you have to go outside the boundaries of what conventional medicine might dictate according to its strict rules and then by using your your Ingenuity there and applying your experience you come up with ideas like this and it also fits back with the test that bioenergy test that you designed which is clearly showing whether or not this is the case aside from what the laboratory tests show because the laboratory tests aren't perfect they they're never are there's no test that's perfect my test isn't perfect no of course not there's the blood pressure tests aren't perfect you know that right so there the studies are about how imperfect taking a blood pressure measurement is right so when you're talking about being a real doctor okay a real healer the story listening to the person using your experience being intuitive not just scientific because it's really one spectrum of intuition and science I think science and spirituality are in the same spectrum and they're just extremes of it that you can look at it if you want to and I know how spiritual you are too and I I'll bet I I can't I'll ask you this but isn't a lot of of what you do in medicine geared towards your intuition and your spiritual nature I'm TR myself okay uh well I was going to say before I get into that I wanted to say it's trend TRS I look for Trends on things okay uh so that if I'm look again let's come back to the blood pressure analogy since everybody's familiar with that I'm not so much interested in what the absolute value of that blood pressure is although I am but I'm more interested in what's the trend over time right and uh and I think that one of the things Physicians really can do really that helps a ton is to to be like real true honest to God family doctors and follow their people over time oh yes and take measurements over time and make flowcharts and graph and look at things like PSAs or whatever you want to look look at what the trend is over time and then look at what the trend how the trend is affected by your therapies and based upon that you can get a really good insight into what that individual person needs you well see you sound like a scientist and unfortunately we're out of time but you sound like a real scientist who looks at the data takes a special interest in your patient and then does something based on that information that requires some kind of logic so what we have here is a story of somebody Dr Frank shenberger who's a a whole physician he he treats Body Mind emotion and spirit is one thing not four and he uses his scientific training in ways that are out of the textbook doesn't necessarily use what's there he reads a textbook and then he looks at it and says this is interesting what if this is the case too and then he takes it to another level and which you wind up with is a whole different brand of medicine that makes you a Pioneer in healthcare thanks friend Frank thank you Frank so much for being part of this show thanks L enjoyed it very much [Music]

Summary: [Music] hello I'm Dr Len Saputo welcome to Pioneers in healthcare I'm the founder of the Health Medicine forum and I've been in practice in the diao valley for about the last 30 years this show is about pioneers in healthcare people who have done something special to bring the profession forward in their own special way and sometimes at Great personal risk to their own safety today we have a very special guest Dr Frank shenberger Frank it's great to have y…


Innovation Series with Frank Shallenberger, MD (Boston BioLife)
YouTube video by Dr. Frank Shallenberger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGPCTBX7GgU). Transcript is the auto-caption track — verbatim ASR, not a certified transcript.

hello and welcome to this edition of the Boston BioLife Innovation Series today we have the pleasure of being with Dr Frank shenberger he's the president of the American Academy of ozone therapy and they're going to be having their annual meeting their 12th annual meeting coming up in Orlando at Marriott Grand Lakes May 9th through the 11th of this year so Frank thank you so much for sharing some insight as to the ozone therapy the meeting you have coming up and look forward to hearing more about it yeah thanks for having me here Joe so tell me about the American Academy of ozone therapy how you got started and kind of what some of the things you guys are up to yeah so I've been in medicine for over 50 years now and about mid mid 1980s I heard about this thing ozone therapy and I went to Germany and I learned about it I was pretty amazed hard to believe that it did what they told me it would do after I came back to the US I have a a General Internal Medicine type of practice where I don't specialize in anything I treat pretty much anything that comes in the door could be a cardiovascular disease it could be an infectious disease it could be an injury could be an autoimmune disease and so forth so I pretty much treat everything that walks in the door what I very soon learned very quickly was that ozone therapy worked in just about every patient I gave it to and I don't want to uh listeners to believe that I found it to be a an independent therapy where you know you didn't use need to use anything else like it's going to fix everything that's not the way it works what the way it works is you know I found that whatever I was doing whether it was you know maybe an antibiotic or a beta blocker or whatever the heck it was that I was doing or even what it was that I was treating if I administered ozone therapy along with what I was doing the results were always better and sometimes the results were something I so good I you know I didn't begin to expect that so I was doing this for about 3 four years and and I gradually came to the opinion Joe that every doctor needs to know how to do this you know no matter what specialty they are they need to know how to do this because I know one thing about my colleagues they all want the best results they all want their patients to walk out healed and be well ozone therapy is something that all doctors can add to their practice and just to fairly dramatically improve their outcomes so with that in mind 12 years ago I started the American Academy of ozone therapy and the idea was to set up training programs and to provide annual meetings where practitioners could exchange ideas you know what they're experiencing with ozone therapy so we could all learn more yeah so ozone seems to be one of those enabling Technologies or an Adin technology that makes other Technologies or clinical techniques work better is it based on the principle of oxygenation in general where you're supplying more oxygen to the tissues and in that regard facilitating some of the metabolic and healing processes you think yeah that's a really good differentiating question when we say ozone therapy actually we should correctly be saying ozone oxygen therapy because what it is is Ozone is a gas that consists of three oxygen molecules whereas the standard oxygen gas consists of two oxygen atoms so when we use ozone therapy basically we collect a gas that is approximately 97% oxygen and 3% ozone uh so it's it's a mixture of those gases so two things happen with that gas one is as you just alluded to was oxygenation you're going to you're going to oxy oxygenate wherever you put that gas number two though is different it's oxidation oxidation being different from oxygenation oxygenation refers to just the supplying of oxygen to a tissue that requires it oxidation means that when the ozone gets into the tissue it starts the uh movement of electrons and forms peroxides and these peroxides do some absolutely marvelous things in the human body you know it's interesting because when you look at the FI of longevity everybody talks about aging right and anti-aging and whatever the science principles are but oxygenation and Vascular Health are go hand inand and we find many enabling Technologies like nitric oxide Like hypobaric Oxygen chamber like looking at the glyx and and the structure of the capillaries really to facilitate the exchange of oxygen deeper in into more important tissues and we know that some people characterize aging as a disease of the vascular system so I think it's important that this therapy which I know has been around for a long time we've talked to a bunch of people that have been doing this and I think that it's something like hyperbaric oxygen like some of these other therapies that we see from the past they're now being looked at with a new eyes and they're looking at it in conjunction with other therapies for the principles that you just stated it's an efficient way to create a very powerful supply of oxygen to tissues that may not necessarily have access to the during a normal procedural type is that a fair assessment you brought up process aging I think the process of Aging pretty well documented that this is in a direct correlation to decreased mitochondrial function what do mitochondria do well actually do a lot of things but their main job is to process oxygen and so anything that can help them do that and by the way ozone therapy is a dramatic stimulant of mitochondrial activation when you really look at it when people have diseases and it really doesn't matter exactly what the diseases are the attributes of ozone therapy by doing such things as inducing Nrf2 activation inducing cyto kindes releasing stem cells releasing endothelia progenitor cells which you just you know alluded to the uh endothelium and the glyx oone does all that it releases the endothelia progenitor cells which repair the glycocalyx it releases H oxygen A1 which stimulates angiogenesis and when you look at all the effects of this particular kind of therapy you can easily understand how it would be so helpful to use in virtually any disease with it be cardiovascular or infectious or whether it be oncological no matter what the disease or condition is including the very process of Aging this molecule can do dramatic things to help process that patient along towards a a goal of healing well clearly you're passionate about this I can hear it in your voice but I think what's also exciting from where where I sit is that we've got all these technology providers that are now looking at all this novel ways of delivering these Technologies and we've talked to another one of your your vendor o03 Purity and they've got a whole Vine of products that I don't think existed five years ago where they literally have the ability to create an ozone delivery solution for almost every part of the body and every clinical application including individualized personalized Precision do it yourself and I think that's an important part of medicine where people are starting to look at the body as a whole patients are getting more involved people are looking at the fundamental science and biology like you mentioned the mitochondria the role of oxygen and how it affects things like aging and cardiovasc ular disease and they're starting to put two and two together and figuring out well this plus this with the patient being part of it being engaged actively educated on the process really gives you the best opportunity to provide a better outcome than what you might have otherwise if you were even able to handle some of these you know more complex clinical things like in the wound care Market you see a lot of difficult complex wounds and we know that this type of Technology really helps those as well yeah that is so right and well said an analog that people can think of is simply one of you know working in your garden the patient comes in and you want to give them a therapy to uh make things better and to help them with their symptoms or their disease it's very analogous to uh you know going out in your garden and planting a seed and expecting that you know to develop into a plant that you can use but that soil is what it's all about if you put that seed in the wrong soil nothing is going to happen or very little is going to happen so in order to get the most out of that seed you need to prepare that soil and get it just right and to that extent that you can do that you're going to get a much better plant and this is the truth for human beings they come into our office they're just in bad shape all over in fact they have cardiovascular diseases not due to just one thing it's due to a breakdown of many many different systems the fact that they have a a long-term infectious disease they can't get rid of same idea there's such a focus these days on quote repairing the soil in the patients building them up either with vitamins or minerals or stem cells or platelets or whatever the process is in this case it would be with ozone but we need to not just administer the therapies that we know can help these patients we need to actually improve their overall cellular condition and ozone's so so good at that and it works right along with everything else that people are doing whether I mentioned stem cells or platelets or you know other growth factors angiogenic factors all those kinds of things it works great with all those things makes them all work better yeah and I think there's more of an awareness of inflammatory disease so a lot of times we hear our scientists talk about the cell danger response and the role of mitochondria and how things like the gut leads to a suppressed immune system which triggers extracellular ATP which this causes this immune suppression which allows things like lupus and lime and and chronic fatigue syndrome and reflex sympathetic distrophy and if depending who you talk to is really the Cornerstone of all the modern inflammatory conditions that nobody can figure out and nobody can treat and it leads to the more advanced ones like ALS Alzheimer's and Parkinson so they say type three diabetes is Alzheimer's I think that there are more Physicians now more Health Care Providers Prim primarily in private practice maybe more of the aamer Age Management elk out there that see the see the role of the of inflammation they see the role of of cell danger response in their patients every day so them buying into a technology like this today versus even 5 years ago I think is a factor of magnitude greater than it would be otherwise just because of all the education that functional medicine has brought and now the adoption a lot of these principles and tests have made a difference right people can now test for more things easily than they could in the past there's still a long way to go before you can test for a lot lot of stuff that matters versus what primary care does so I think that you what you're doing is an amazing thing because you've clung to a pretty well historically understood technology it's been around for a while right and people have been using it but now it seems as if it's coming into its own because people are starting to appreciate it for what it does versus say what it's called right ozone seem like thing but now what are we doing we're increasing the supply of oxygen to tissues that needed and we've got all these new ways of doing that with devices and so I think what you're doing is super important what could people learn at your upcoming conference in Orlando you know we have all kinds of presentations at that conference whether it's a cardiologist or a dentist or a neurologist or a naturopathic doctor a homeopath all kinds of Physicians are and other practitioners are members of our Academy and we all get together and meet once a year the presentations are always good good like this year for example we've got some very prominent key speakers that going to speak about the aging process not everything we talked about is strictly related to Ozone so we do talk a lot about specifics of how ozone can use in certain clinical cases I'm going to talk specifically about how ozone can be used in cardiovascular cases and our president who happens to be a dentist he's going to be talking about uh you know how it can be used in the dental profession then we're going to have people that are in the anti-aging sphere they'll be talking about that we use it a lot for detoxification there's a lot of new techniques coming out now that involve heavily circulated extracorporal circulation devices that oxygenate and ozonate blood and at the same time put it through a dialysis there's other techniques that give a very strong doses of ozone and certain machines out now that are making the the uh the technology of how ozone is administered much more advanced than it has been in in the past we also get into frequency especially light frequency so we we have presenters that are going to be talking about ultraviolet light and how ultraviolet light affects the hemoglobin molecule and and does things very similar to what ozone can do and so it's it's a broad conference it's not simply all about ozone but it is all about the basic idea of getting us to be as healthy as we possibly can be I didn't even mention it but you know some of these diseases you talked about ALS and Alzheimer's these are diseases that actually destroy tissue and and at some point these diseases become uh irreversible so you know the idea is to start treating our patients that have a vulnerability for a certain disease and treating them early on before they get the disease even or certainly in the very earliest stages of the possible presentation of the disease we can do really great things with neurodegenerative disease if we get it early enough and all these things work together like that so you know there's also the aspect of using oxygen ozone Therapies in healthy people to keep them that way I know I personally do that and you know I'm hopeful that all our practitioners that uh are treating their patients with these therapies even even if if our practitioner is 100% healthy I think it's a great idea to administer to ourselves so we stay that way no that's great stuff and I you know I really think that what you're put together is an amazing opportunity for healthc care providers to learn from the Decades of experience that you and your colleagues have and to really dive into all the relevant aspects of anti-aging but really helping people with complex diseases the one thing that I always kind of consider when I think about this field that we're in and I get kind of unique position to see a lot of companies a lot of organizations and a lot of Technologies which I enjoy but I see it across the spectrum of diseases and I think there's a lot of emphasis put on Health and Beauty looking nice and feeling good and looking good but really if you can affect somebody that has a very difficult condition and really help them with the science of these Technologies I think that has a lot more meaning to it because people suffer in ways that traditional medicine just can't help and oftentimes we find patients and I work with a couple groups that have patient advocacy Like Bernie seagull and the health span Action Coalition I'm attracted to them because those patient groups those Advocates are trying to help patient care populations that don't have a lot of options and ozone seems like the type of thing that really can help people from a wide range of of clinical afflictions and really help bring higher quality life to to what they're going through you when it's properly used Joe ozone therapy is 100% safe and you might could get a headache you might could get nauseated that's possible but that doesn't happen very often and it it's just the the safest easiest to administer therapy that you can possibly imagine the other thing about ozone therapy is it's inexpensive this is we're not talking about procedures that are necessarily going to cost tens of thousands of dollars the expense and the safety are other driving factors that make it really practition practical for doctors no matter what their specialty is to add this into what they're already doing so how can people learn more about the meeting I see your website here aaot us is that where people can learn about the upcoming got a whole description there they'll list all the speakers for anybody out there listening to me just wants to be informed even more they could just register with the executive secretary of the academy and we'll be be sure to put them on our email mailing list so that they can get any of the email blasts we send out because we regularly send out email blasts of things that are interesting or new in the world of ozone therapy well that's fantastic I'm looking forward to coming to the meeting because I haven't been to an ozone therapy meeting in my life although I've worked with some couple people that have presented on it and I think it makes sense and so thank you very much for all the hard work that you've done Dr shenberger and thanks for sharing your experience and your enthusiasm in the American Academy of ozone therapy with the listeners of Boston BioLife and I really appreciate you taking the time to be with us here today thank you Joe I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to get this word out all right we're going to see you May 9th in lovely Orlando great we'll have a good time all

Summary: hello and welcome to this edition of the Boston BioLife Innovation Series today we have the pleasure of being with Dr Frank shenberger he's the president of the American Academy of ozone therapy and they're going to be having their annual meeting their 12th annual meeting coming up in Orlando at Marriott Grand Lakes May 9th through the 11th of this year so Frank thank you so much for sharing some insight as to the ozone therapy the meeting you have coming…


Pain Management with Dr. Frank Shallenberger (The Wellness Hour)
YouTube video by Dr. Frank Shallenberger (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6YPzjyVdFw). Transcript is the auto-caption track — verbatim ASR, not a certified transcript.

you're watching the wellness hour leader in medical news and information I'm Randy AAS today's topic uh new treatment options for people that are suffering with uh chronic pain my first guest is Dr shenberger Dr shenberger welcome to the program it's great to be here now uh before we get into today's topic because this is a big topic uh tell us about your Center because you do more than just treat pain patients well that's true um we do everything that's uh alternative in nature in the sense of combining traditional medicine with alternative types of approaches to health okay and my my goal is to really is to prevent prevent people from getting sick we we treat people that get sick too but my what I'm really interested in is getting people in there that are healthy that feel good and they just want to be that same way in 20 and 30 40 years later so you get all types of patients I mean you get the the people that want bioidentical hormones uh the longevity crowd and uh and and and pain what so what percentage of the practice is pain and would you like to see more pain patients yes I I I really love to see pain patients because uh if there's anything that makes a doctor feel really good it's taken people out of pain that's the worst thing that could happen to anybody I that I've learned that real quick like yeah probably half my practice is pay patients really you know I've talked to doctors you know our show airs Nationwide and uh they confide me they don't like the pain patient why do you well I like it because the things that I do it takes the pain away most doctors don't like pain patients because they're there's nothing not crabby kind of a patient there's not that much out there to help the patient except give him drugs I mean you're not really taking care of the problem I can take the pain away is that right now we're going to have to put disclaimers all over the show that results are typical not typical but uh but you I mean the results are there I mean you're getting a lot of results right are using traditional medicine and alternative therapies because I know is that right well yeah I mean it this way one one is you have pain is its own problem okay now we we use an alternative treatment to solve that but you figure the other thing is to the person that has the pain if they're if they're healthy and they're vibrant they're going to be much more likely to respond to any other therapy that I do so we kind of work on both aspects we want I want my pain patient to be healthy and at the same time then I'm going to go ahead and give them something to take away the pain and that that combination just is a marel now backing up for just a moment your background training uh I guess you were involved in emergency medicine well that's how how did you make this transition that's that's how I started out I started on emergency medicine because I remember when I was younger it was exciting it was interesting and and what I always loved about emergency medicine is you get to go straight to the cause of the problem and you know if somebody came in with a a gunshot wound I just didn't give him pain medicine and sent him home we actually went to find out what was causing the problem literally fix the problem and off they go cured and it's a done deal and um and that's that's what I did for do you feel like you're doing that even today in a while well that was the idea after about eight or nine years of doing that I decided you know I'm going to get involved in just general medicine and that's and that's when when I got involved in general medicine that's when I really came through to me Randy that in most situations doctors aren't able to really get to the cause of things and and it just it it just made me very curious I just really wanted to know what is what causes us to get sick and that's you know in the in the late 70s that's when I got involved in alternative and anti-aging medicine because those are the things that really drove me okay so you started out traditional medical doctor emergency room medicine you thought and I'm paraphrasing of course that you could have the most impact there do you think you have more impact now doing what you're doing oh undoubtedly you know there's still emergency docks out there taking care of emergency so that's just fine but this this area this whole area of preventive medicine where you literally take healthy people that there's nothing wrong with them yeah and you initiate a process that keeps them that way until they're until they're old interesting interesting okay now uh you know we invited you on the show to talk about prazone therapy okay uh and and by the way what is this used for what areas of the body of pain is this used for it's used for literally any area of the body where you have pain okay we do feet we do ankles knees just work your whole way on up uh obviously anything along the spine we do a lot of necks and spines and low backs in particular shoulders elbows wrists hands fingers any place that's teeth I do teeth I do TMJ I do anything where there's pain with pain okay so let's talk then let's start with the back okay back pain you know maybe herniated disc or you know the you know they've tried maybe injections before they've tried different things medications at what point do they see you and who is your typical patient the comes in for the back pain at what point do they go to you and how do they hear about you uh virtually all the time people come in to see me after they've already tried many other tra more traditional sorts of therapies and they haven't worked so like like what Chiropractic well like maybe Chiropractic like uh rest uh like Physical Therapy uh some of them have had surgery a lot of my patients have already had surgery and the surgery either didn't work or didn't work well enough all right um then there's certain kind of neurological procedures where patients can go have nerves of bladed and such like that but most of my patients are people that are pretty much exhausted the traditional or conventional way of treating their condition and it's not working and they're just stuck on pain pills now in your area would you say there's thousands of people that are in pain that don't have to be absolutely really oh yeah yeah if you know if the average person out in the audience were to to to to just think about the people he knows he probably going to find maybe half the people a third of the people that he knows are in pain of some kind they learn to live with it is that they don't always talk about you know you're not going to tell your friend that you're in pain necessarily you're going to you're going to just sort of deal with it but a lot of people have a lot of pain and uh and they just learn to live with it because they don't know what else to do okay so let's talk about your your uh let's start with low back pain okay so it's called Uh prone therapy that's right this is one of the phrases you coined it's it's an injection with oxygen that's true I I I don't quite understand how it works so help me understand well to to understand how this therapy works you have to understand what causes pain in the first place so what is it so what causes pain in the first place is decreased circulation you got to figure your body when it gets injured there's processes in the body that cause it to heal itself okay those processes are dependent on circulation as long as you have adequate circulation to the area that area will heal so if I'm like bang my shoulder on my bang my arm on something yeah that area will heal I fully expect it to heal and it will heal but every now and then somebody wakes up and you say you know what I had an injury this injury happened X months ago and it's not healing what's up with that how come it's not healing the answer always is there's not adequate circulation so in the case of a low back pain maybe a little arthritis or herniated disc not enough circulation or something that's right if it hurts there's not enough circulation that's what causing the pain so so take me through a typical patient comes in okay so they have a herniated disc it it shows up on an MRI what are you doing that or it's pinching a nerve yeah what are you doing are you reducing inflammation what are you doing well we do all of the above of course but but here here's the pro pro problem you get the injury you have the problem it creates swelling and inflammation that's swelling and inflammation impede the circulation without the circulation they can't get rid of the swelling inflammation and it's a it's a vicious is it just a matter of it bulging against the nerve that's causing the pain or it's more than that it no it's it's not just that dis is bulging most discs get healed just on their own you don't actually need surgery for if you can get adequate circulation in the area but it's a vicious cycle so you have to reestablish the circulation to the area and that's what I do really I inject into that area the the things that the cells there would ordinarily get from an adequate circul like for example oxygen that's the main component that's what cells need to heal you know in an injured area you've got stem cells you have blast cells they're sitting there they're waiting to do their job they're waiting to fix that area in order to do that they need oxygen but they can't get it because the swelling and the inflammation prevent the oxygen from getting in I just shoot the oxygen right in on the area and what kind of oxygen are are you shooting in I I shoot it in in the form of ozone okay now oxygen that we're breathing right now now is is two oxygen atoms put together we call that O2 that's the stable form of oxygen that's why it's in the atos we breathe it ozone is something I have to make up in the office what we do is we take uh O2 from a from a you know medical grade oxygen and from a tank yeah from a tank and we pump it through a converter box in the converter box those o2s get broken up into o1s and immediately they reassemble most of them back into O2 but proportion of them reassembled into o03 so you have three oxygen atoms stuck together now that oone it's called ozone it's more powerful more therapeutic to the body powerful in fact Studies have shown that if you just inject oxygen into area nothing will happen you have to inject oxygen in the form of ozone and that's when the miracle happens really okay so where where else in the world by the way are they using this and is this accept it the use of ozone and medicine has been used for over 50 years now primarily in Europe and which is where I learned it some 30 eyed years ago right now the new thing is using it for pain it's been used for all kinds of it's working I mean are you seeing someing are you surprised sometimes with the results you're getting I'm surprised when it doesn't work every now and then

Summary: you're watching the wellness hour leader in medical news and information I'm Randy AAS today's topic uh new treatment options for people that are suffering with uh chronic pain my first guest is Dr shenberger Dr shenberger welcome to the program it's great to be here now uh before we get into today's topic because this is a big topic uh tell us about your Center because you do more than just treat pain patients well that's true um we do everything that's u…