Peptides, Bioregulators and Longevity Medicine with Dr Suzanne Turner

Lisa: Well, hi everyone and welcome back to Pushing the Limits. Today I'm super, super excited. I have Dr Suzanne Turner with me. Welcome to the show. It's fantastic to have you.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Thanks. Thank you so much.

Lisa: You are in Atlanta, and we've just been having a big conversation before we started and I thought, "Hang on a minute. We're sharing all the gold here. We actually have to get recording." Dr Suzanne is an absolutely fabulous doctor. I'm going to read out on the intro your full bio, but can you give us a little bit of a background? Tell us who you are and where you come from and how did you get here?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Sure. So I started out as a regular family doctor seeing 30 or 40 patients a day, working 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. and prescribing medication for every single person. Whatever the drug rep told me was the thing that needed to be prescribed, that's what I did. And I was really blessed because I had a couple of patients who came to me and said things like, "Hey, my prostate's bothering me. What do you think about me taking saw palmetto?" And because I have just an innate curiosity, I said, "That sounds great. Let me do some research. I don't know what that is." So I started doing some research.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Then a patient came to me and asked me if I would write for her bioidentical hormone patch or hormone cream. And I said, "I don't know what that is. Let me do some research." So I did, and the compounding pharmacy said, "Hey, it looks like you don't know what you're doing. Can I send you to a conference?" And so I went to a conference, and it was like the scales fell from my eyes and all of a sudden I could never go back to what I was doing before.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So I started getting hungry and learning as much as I could, and much like you told me in your story with your mum, I just dove right into whatever I could find that would get my patients better, because there was always a percentage of patients that just didn't get better. Their labs were completely normal, all the signs were there that they were sick, but they didn't feel well. So I kept diving into why. I guess I just believed them and I was curious enough that I said, "There's got to be something wrong if you feel this badly."

Dr Suzanne Turner: So I started doing as much research as I could. I went back to school and did another fellowship in functional medicine. And then I went on to do advanced training in peptides and endocrinology and tried to find as many things as I could. At every stage there was another level of patients who got better. So I added bioidentical hormones. Wow, all these patients got better that I thought had a Prozac deficiency, or I thought they had something else, and it turned out, "Wow, they just were oestrogen deficient. If I fix their hormones, they feel so much better."

Dr Suzanne Turner: And so then I was a runner — not like you, but I was a 10K runner. I injured my hip and just could not run anymore. So I said, "I've got to continue. First of all, I'm fairly competitive, and second, I just need the activity." So I started doing a Tabata class and loved that Tabata. It was great. Lots of weights and running, so you're doing a little bit of both, not too long, so it wasn't putting too much injury on my hip. But again, I started injuring myself. Maybe the training wasn't 100%, or maybe I wasn't listening, or whatever the things were that were going on.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And so then COVID happened. You didn't ask me about my exercise, but this is the story. Before that, I'd gone and learned about peptides to try to treat my hip. I used PEG-MGF and IGF-1 to treat my hip injury, but really the answer was a mechanical change. So I went to a gym close by. All the gyms were closed, of course, but this gym would let you in the back door with the lights out, one person at a time. And it just happened to be a powerlifting gym, and I had some good acquaintances who were powerlifters that I admired. So I started training for powerlifting. My intention was just to be active, but as I progressed and continued, I started to get competitive.

Lisa: Yeah, and you are a competitive powerlifter to this day. I heard you on another podcast talking about powerlifting and what it's taught you, even as a physician, that muscles equal longevity. Did that light bulb go off in your brain when you started doing powerlifting? I mean, you would have known that to a degree, but it's really, really a big thing, isn't it? Myokines and things like that.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes, I think it really hit home when I started learning about peptides. When you begin to delve into what the cell needs and how the cell functions and how the mitochondria work — as I'm trying to optimise my ability to be the best powerlifter that I can, of course all this longevity stuff comes out. So like you're talking about myokines and trying to optimise the way that your body functions. What I tell patients is these are chemical messengers that your muscles produce when they're exercising that tell your body to be more youthful. So your DNA will begin to produce more youthful proteins than it would if you did not have an exercising muscle. So your doctor, and I, probably back in the day was telling patients, "Oh, you need to exercise." But now I can actually tell you why you need to exercise. It's not just that you need to exercise, although that is true. I can now tell you that your body will be younger if you are exercising regularly. Look at your mum, for example.

Lisa: Yeah, exactly. And the more we do, the better she is. And with her, it's the weight training that actually brings the most benefit, because when you're older you start to lose muscle mass. And when you lose muscle mass, this is an endocrine functioning organ that you're losing mass of, and then your metabolism goes down. That's when you start to get the insulin resistance happening, maybe the middle-age spread. All those things are related, or in part due to, the muscle decline. So if we can keep our muscles active and strong, and the myokines, the messengers...

Lisa: And I really wanted to dive deep into peptides a little bit with you today as well and sort of understand that. I heard you say on one of the podcasts that when you're powerlifting, you have to be on your best recovery. You need to recover massively, and as an ultra endurance athlete in the past, I know that I had to really recover hard and I often didn't recover enough, and that's when the damage would happen, right? And you said that your grip strength was one of the things that you noticed — if your grip strength was down that day at the gym, then you weren't 100% recovered. And if you weren't able to lift just that tiny bit more, 1% a week I think you said, then you weren't really getting the recovery in between. And I was just like, "Oh, wow." Because grip strength is one of those very simple ways of measuring our aging, isn't it? If we've got a strong grip, then... I mean, there's lots more sophisticated Horvath clocks and DNA methylation and things like that now, but just for that layperson on the street who doesn't know, you can measure your grip strength, you can buy a grip strength measurer. That's a real indication. And you as an athlete, of course, you're in tune with your body. You'd know that, huh? Like, my grip's not too good today, I can't lift that huge great weight off the ground, and your form would be off and things like that. Tell us a little bit, how do you measure when it's time to go hard or when it's not time to go hard?

Dr Suzanne Turner: So I use an Oura Ring. I think that's just the simplest way. I hate to advertise for people, but I can definitely recommend the Oura Ring. I use that a lot and I use the heart rate variability that's on there to guide me. I know that when my heart rate variability is down — and I have a fairly low heart rate variability to begin with, I think because I train so hard.

Lisa: Yeah, me too.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And so, running a business and all the things. But I know that when my heart rate variability has gone down, that's a day when I need to rest. So for example, I just came back from a conference. I travelled across the United States, so several time zones, and came back. So today was a rest day. I did not go in this morning, which is unusual for me to not train on Mondays. That's usually my "let's go back to the gym". But I'm getting ready to go into training mode for competition in August, so I know I need to, and this was my last travel before I start really focusing hard on that training. So I took a rest day today and then I'll hit it hard tomorrow.

Lisa: And that is a wisdom that you've built. Because with me, I used to be like, if I feel like that, go harder, because you must be being a wuss, you know? And now I'm like, "No, hang on." I had to travel last week for work too. I had two days in a row with only four hours sleep and immediately I got a cold. I was just like, "Okay, back off. Back off for three or four days of the training." Even though my brain's going, "But you didn't train for two days. You've got to go harder." You've got to really sort of talk that voice down sometimes, that athlete voice, which can be sometimes too hard and too strict, and it's actually now you need to follow that HRV. I follow mine, and I remember talking to our mutual friend Dr Bitsy years ago and she was like, "Yeah, my HRV is low too. I don't know why. I'm doing all the things." And I'm like, "So we're in good company, you and I." And it is, it's a battle, because you're running multiple businesses, you're go, go, go, you're training your backside off and trying to get that HRV up. I'm still in the lower part of the population for that. It's quite disappointing.

Dr Suzanne Turner: There was an interesting study that might be interesting to you that came out, I think it's 2018, with the Polish rowing team, where they gave them 160 mg of the amino acid L-theanine during their training coming up to competition, and it prevented them from getting sick. It raised their gamma delta T cells so that they were able to prevent illness. So this was one of the things in my armamentarium against the virus that just was out.

Lisa: So it's helpful for you. I've had L-theanine on occasion for adrenal HPA axis dysfunction and problems like that. I hadn't realised that that could help with that. That's a good tip. Right, off to get some theanine.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yeah, just Google "Polish rowing team L-theanine". I bet it'll come up.

Lisa: Okay. Now, I want to dive into a little bit into peptides and things because you are a peptide specialist. You teach all this stuff and I'm very, very fascinated with peptides, and I've done a couple of interviews in the last couple of weeks — Bitsy is one of them, and Ryan Smith I had on the show as well.

Lisa: Nathalie Niddam, and these are hard to get in New Zealand. The reason I'm doing these recordings is not to make everyone jealous because the Americans can get all this stuff and we're struggling. It's because I believe — and I'm working on trying to get them down to New Zealand — and I think with the more awareness that I make out there in the space, and then I have quite a few doctors listening to the show, maybe I can pique their interest and they can go and get trained. Tell us, did you do your training with Dr Seeds or the A4M, or which institute did you do peptide training with?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes, back when I trained, it was Dr Seeds and the A4M. They were together.

Lisa: Oh, yep.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And so I trained with them, and then Betsy and I started teaching with Bill. And then SSRP split off, but they both have great training programmes for peptide care.

Lisa: Right, right. So any doctors listening, one of those programmes might be good. I want to do the peptide training as well, but oh man, it's pretty intense, isn't it? Even just understanding the sort of basic pathways and stuff. So I'll have to take a deep breath and take a bit of time out to get my head around that one.

Lisa: But tell us a little bit how you use it in your practice and what you've seen. I could list off 100 different peptides, but maybe — what do you see coming into your clinic, because you're practising with this for years now? What would be the most common thing that you use peptides for? We'll start there. Probably a good place.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Probably number one is athletic injury, athletic recovery. That's probably what I see the most. I have a lot of patients who have osteoarthritis, those sort of people who are still active, still playing tennis. They're out there building muscle, trying to be athletic, and they are having injuries occur either to tendons and ligaments or to the joint itself, and watching the joints deteriorate.

Dr Suzanne Turner: One of the things that's most frustrating — I'm sure Betsy said the same thing — was that it's frustrating because by the time I see them, it's often too late. People don't come to you when the injury originally occurs. I just saw a patient earlier today who had the injury two weeks ago, and I said, "Why didn't you come to me right away? Because let's get on this as quick as we can to prevent a lot of the inflammatory, the immune recruitment that can occur, and then the macrophage activation, and then all the production of the inflammatory cytokines that can occur — these chemical messengers that will create an ongoing problem." If we can start that from the very beginning and nip it in the bud, it's a way better process.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And then for our younger athletes who are continuously competitive, they want to continue to be competitive. And so we want to help them to be able to get back to sport as fast as possible. And there are lots of things we do for them, both actually in the tendon or ligament and systemically, that can be helpful in either treating or preventing injury or illness.

Lisa: Yeah, brilliant. So things like BPC-157 and ipamorelin, tesamorelin — the growth hormone secretagogues, I suppose, would be in your first line of defence for these guys.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And thymosin beta. And then I love the modifications of IGF-1 that we can get that the body naturally makes in response to injury. In response to the injury, the body will begin to make MGF, mechano growth factor. Not PEG-MGF, that's synthetic, but the MGF. And so we want, as quick as we can, to put some MGF where the injury occurred. And then the body naturally will begin to switch over from making MGF to making a different form, a more healing form of the IGF-1. And so then we want to put IGF-1 on board. So you want to do the MGF first and then IGF-1 after that for an acute injury.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Both of these are going to help with more rapid repair, and we know that your body depletes its ability to make any form of growth hormone or IGF-1 as we age. So I see patients who are in their 60s whose IGF-1 is 75. And we know that a low growth hormone is going to affect the ability of the body to do many things. It's going to increase mortality in general from all causes. So we want to address that low IGF-1.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Of course, my goal is always, "Why do you have a low IGF-1? Let's not just give you growth hormone" — which is an option — or growth hormone secretagogues. Let's figure out why do you personally have a low IGF-1? Are you overtraining? Is your sleep poor? Do you not have enough resistance training? Is all of your training ultramarathon, so you are sarcopenic because of what you're doing, your training method? Do you need to cross-train a little bit more? I'd love to hear you talk about your experience with flipping from ultramarathon to CrossFit and what the differences are that you see.

Lisa: Huge, huge, huge. So from a genetic predisposition, I am not suited to the super long stuff anyway. I create a lot of oxidative stress. I need a lot of antioxidants. One of the programmes I'm trained in is ph360, which is looking at your genetics but also how you're expressing. And this sort of gives me information about going shorter, sharper, high-intensity workouts. I have a lot of adrenaline, a lot of cortisol, a lot of stress hormones naturally. And of course, that breaks down tissue a lot, especially when you're older and you're under a lot of pressure. I'm under a lot of pressure with my businesses and Mum and so on. And doing the ultramarathons was just another massive stress on the body.

Lisa: So when I was a competitive athlete doing this for years, I was always holding fluid. My hormones were mucked up — and not just the hormones, it was a combination of things, genetics and being on the pill for too long, terrible things. But the inflammation was constant. I was exposing my body to way too much oxidative stress and too much inflammation for too long a period.

Lisa: When I switched, when I did the genetics and understood that I'd been doing the wrong thing for 25 years basically — and luckily I was at a time in my life when it was cool to change something, I'd done the athletic challenges that I wanted to do — that's when I really saw massive changes in my body shape. I lost a lot of extra weight. I wasn't overweight, I was like four or five kilos just heavier than I should have been, and I was running like there's no tomorrow. At one point I was running 500 K a week, like when I was running through New Zealand, and I was just getting fatter. So calories in, calories out — my audience has heard me blather on about that before — but it's not just about that.

Lisa: When I started doing weight training, that was when I shifted that little bit extra weight. I got really lean and really ripped and felt a whole lot better, and got some hormones. And even though now I'm menopausal, and that's another bloody — and I'm on hormone replacement therapy. We've just upped the doses because even that wasn't quite enough. So you need to tweak — if you're on hormone replacement therapy, you need to monitor and tweak it. But that's been a game-changer.

Lisa: So I'm a lot happier not doing the ultramarathons. That's not to say that everybody is like me, it's just my genetic makeup as well, but being aware of that is really, really important. I think that anyone who's over 40 should be doing a hell of a lot of weight training.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Amen, sister.

Lisa: Yeah. Resistance training, muscle building, body weight, whatever you can manage, but you should be doing that.

Dr Suzanne Turner: May I point out how amazing your body is, that even though your genetics were designed otherwise, and even though you had the emotional stressor of your relationship — I listened to a podcast earlier about that — all that in place, and all the oxidative stress that you put your body through, it still was able to do the ultramarathons. Amazing stuff.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Wow. Like, what a big hug to yourself.

Lisa: This is so amazing. Thank you. That was really good. Thank you. No, thank you. And that's what I did learn out of that — the negative side on the body, and that, but the mental strength that comes from that, the resilience, the relentlessness, the ability to push through, which can have downsides as well. But that's what you learn from ultramarathoning, and that's what I'm a big fan of people doing it for. If they're doing it for short periods and they're recovering properly, and they're taking into account the genetics, and women their hormones and things like that, then if they're having that challenge and that ability to push the body to that nth degree when you're young — I mean, go for it. There's reasons to be doing things that aren't always healthy.

Lisa: And I'm sure powerlifting at the top end of the scale like you're doing it isn't always healthy. It is maybe pushing the boundaries, and you're prone to injury, but you're doing it for an athletic goal.

Dr Suzanne Turner: It's interesting, it's a completely different way to think about it. There's long rest periods in between sets. We train like bodybuilders — part of the workout is training like bodybuilders, and the other part of the workout is training specifically sport-related. And it's interesting because I am always fearful. When I'm under the bar, it's this huge adrenaline, this exciting adrenaline rush. There's this fear like, "Oh my gosh, if I drop this, I'm going to break my leg, I'm going to break my back, my knees — so many things could go wrong."

Lisa: Oh no.

Dr Suzanne Turner: You just practise and practise and practise and practise the same thing. I think it's much like training for a marathon or whatever — you do the same motion over and over, so your body knows exactly what's supposed to happen.

Lisa: Yep.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Even with all of that training, three years before I did my first competition — and I still, the second lift, you get three chances to do each of the three lifts — and the second lift, I did it completely wrong.

Lisa: Yep.

Dr Suzanne Turner: It was amazing I could even pull it up. It was amazing I didn't get injured.

Lisa: Yeah, and it's training that subconscious level, isn't it? It's really getting that in. And then when you've got the competition and the nerves and the anxiety, the brain goes offline a little bit, and that's when things can happen. And kudos to you for taking on such a difficult sport, and dangerous sport at that, really. But from the training perspective, how that's going to benefit you as you move forward and get older is going to be huge. I bet your growth factors are doing pretty well — better than mine probably are.

Lisa: And these are the things that you learn as being an athlete. Being an athlete isn't always healthy. I love watching the rugby players and things, but I am like, got one hand over my eyes when they hit each other in the head, and I'm like, "Oh god, another head injury." And head injuries are something that I'm quite passionate about. You need to be fixing it immediately. You need not to be waiting. I'm working with a Dr Elizabeth Harris down here, and she wants to get a post-concussion system going, so

Lisa: We can get in early, not just sit and wait and rest, but actually get in with the right supplements, the right imaging so that we know what's going on, and not just see if you turn out okay. Because this is what's leading — and I'm off down a rabbit hole — but in 10, 20 years' time, a lot of those rugby players and boxers and things are going to be having major issues, not to mention Alzheimer's. And we can see that coming 20 years ahead, and we can do things about it. I don't know what you would recommend, but what are the things that you think have been researched and are the most beneficial for things like that?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Ideally, I think most of the research is having them on board before the patient gets a condition, if possible. So things like ketone ester.

Lisa: Yes. Plus plasmalogens?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes, things like TB4, thymosin beta 4, and BPC. Most of the research with BPC is in rats, but the research shows if you can get that on board before the patient — before the rat — gets the injury, then we know that the recovery is much better than it would have otherwise been. And even mortality is significantly improved. In the rat study, they just drop a weight on the rat's head, and they had two groups, and one got BPC and one didn't, and the ones with the BPC had a way better outcome.

Dr Suzanne Turner: There are more human studies with the thymosins because they've just been around, or recognised, for a little bit longer. So there is some human data with the thymosins, but most of the research with them is in animals. And I can tell you from my own patient experience that that's where we see the most benefit: if I can get people on either HVMN or KE4, whichever people prefer — which is the ketone ester supplement — and then have them do a BPC and TB4 cocktail around their training so that their brains and their tissue are prepared for the possibility of trauma.

Lisa: And even in the aftermath. I've got my mum on Ketone-IQ, and I also have her on BPC, and we cycle on and off thymosin alpha 1, thymosin beta 4, and MOTS-c. When you've seen somebody's brain go from completely, really badly, massively damaged to full health again, and then back after the brain tumours to being like a baby again, and then bringing her back to almost full — if you're sitting having a coffee with Mum, you don't know there's anything wrong with her. Only when she's walking, there's a limp, and she leans slightly to the side, and we're constantly working on those sorts of things. But from an intelligence point of view, there's nothing wrong with her. In fact, I've seen her memory start to improve.

Lisa: I've got her on high doses of ProdromeGlia, one of the plasmalogens by Dr Dan Goodenowe. And plus I've got her on StemRegen, which is a stem cell product by Dr Christian Drapeau. And she's on hyperbaric every day. My mum gets the best of the best, right? And her brain has come back to the level it is at, and she's independent to that degree. She's not fully independent. She hasn't got a driver's licence now, but she can go out for a little walk. She can get herself up. She can go in and have a shower. She can go to the toilet on her own. She can go around the house, make herself a cup of tea. She can do all those little functional things. Go out with her girlfriends for a few hours — all of those things that she can do now. And they make her feel better.

Lisa: We got her driver's licence back after the aneurysm, then they took it off her when she got the brain tumours, and we haven't managed to get it back yet. It's one of her goals, to get back to driving. But all of those things show a capacity, right? To see the neuroplasticity. We used to think that the brain doesn't develop new neurons, it doesn't change, it doesn't improve, and if you've had an injury, if you've got Alzheimer's, you're buggered. It's not true. It's not true, and I've seen it.

Lisa: A lot of the researchers — I've got Dr Bredesen coming on next week, the Alzheimer's specialist. He's written a book about the end of Alzheimer's, and then the first survivors: the first people to actually have had an Alzheimer's diagnosis, then to reverse it and to live full, happy lives again. And this was impossible. I'm like, "Dr Bredesen, I've seen it." I'm an n of one over here, I've seen that, and I've seen it with other people that I've worked with, that they've had a massive slowing down of the decline.

Lisa: Now, the hard thing with Alzheimer's and things is that you have to change your lifestyle radically. You've got to do the exercise — the stuff that we've been talking about — the exercise, the diet, the detoxing, the saunas, the hyperbarics if you can, all of those sorts of things that are going to create this baseline so that you can recover, and then you can get some pretty amazing results. You're not going to get everybody, because sometimes it's too far advanced and so on and so forth. But Mum was in pretty bad shape. She was said to be, by the head specialist, "You're below the level of the worst dementia patient and there is nothing we can do," and this was after a year into rehab. And this doctor, who shall remain nameless, said this in front of my mum in a panel where we were being interviewed as to whether we could stay in the physio programme.

Lisa: And they had to eat their words, because a few years later she saw Mum walking down the walkway. I was having a coffee and I'd sent Mum out for her training, and she comes and goes, "It's a miracle. It's a miracle. She's walking. Is that your mum?" And I'm like, "Yeah, do you want to know what happened? How I did it?" And she was like, "No," and walked out. And I was like, "Oh my God." I think that's a big shame.

Dr Suzanne Turner: I think I mentioned in the beginning, seeing 30 to 40 patients a day is insane. The doctors just don't have the time to be naturally curious. I think medical school burns out of us a lot of curiosity because it is such a toxic environment. At least when I went through medical school — there have been some changes since I went through — but it was a very toxic environment when I went through, and anyone who asked a question was deemed stupid. So you sort of get the curiosity beat out of you.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And I'm just grateful for people like Bill Seeds, like Betsy Earth, people who stirred up curiosity again; for people like Eldred Taylor, really terrific leaders who stirred up my curiosity again. I'm grateful to have been in there around them and around other people I could list — hundreds of them — that have been so helpful and so encouraging for me. And so now there's almost not a new thing that comes my way that I don't say, "Let me go look it up. I don't know. Let's go study. I'm so excited. This is something new I can learn, and maybe I can help 10 more patients by learning this new thing." So it's been really fun.

Lisa: People are so lucky if they can get in to you. And are you doing telemedicine? So can people reach out to you, or do they have to be living in your state to sort of come under your care?

Dr Suzanne Turner: So I'm officially licensed in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Alabama. I can do telehealth in other places and people can come see me, but they have to physically see me once a year in order to do telehealth. So I have patients who live all over the country, but they come and see me for a one-time visit and then we do all the rest of their visits telehealth. I even have people who live in Atlanta who don't want to drive through traffic who do that.

Lisa: That's a pretty good point. And international as well?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes.

Lisa: Yeah, because this is one of the things — I wanted to develop a network of doctors that we can reach out to with certain different things, because you need doctors who are specialised in different areas, right? I've got lots of doctors that I get people access to, so that they can get these fantastic people that are doing this cutting edge stuff. And even if they — we run into the problem often with prescribing, but sometimes we can get around those problems with getting things over here and stuff. There's often where there's a will, there's a way. Often, not always.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Legally, I think that's right. It ends up being — the international patients legally, I can't prescribe, but it ends up being a consult where, hey, let me hear your story and let's talk about what I think is a great idea for you.

Lisa: And then you can go and try and find a local GP who might agree with that and take that on board, and that's often how it works here, and that works quite well sometimes. That gives us access to things that we probably wouldn't have otherwise got access to. And I think the message from me for this is just keep digging and keep banging on the doors, because every person that's doing this is also awakening the curiosity of their doctors to this stuff, maybe.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes.

Lisa: Making them think, "Oh, maybe I should have a look over here," the ones that have the capacity. And to your point, just having 30 or 40 clients a day, or patients a day, that's just mind-blowing to me. I don't know how the hell you would even remember who walked in the door in the morning to who walked out at night, let alone keep their records straight and their whole history straight. We're asking too much. We're asking too much of people when we ask them to do that.

Lisa: Now, let's dive into a little bit more into the peptides, and also I would like to cover off blood tests. Blood tests we can get, right? Basic blood tests. There is a wealth of information in a basic blood test. Can you give us a little bit of the things that, if you're looking at someone and all you've got is a blood test and you can't get the fancy tests — what can you tell from a normal blood test that you don't get when you stand up and go to your doctor? You don't get this sort of information.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So it's interesting, because this information has always been available to me, but it's only in the last 10 years, since I started being more curious and saying, "Well, what does an alkaline phosphatase actually tell me?" It's not just a test that's out there. It actually has a purpose in your body, and it tells us a lot about what might be going on. So from the very simple complete blood count and complete metabolic panel, which almost every doctor orders on almost every patient, at least in the US —

Lisa: Yep.

Dr Suzanne Turner: — there's so much we can tell from that. There's a research study

Dr Suzanne Turner: — that came out a few years ago, I think it was 2014, that showed that for every six points above 87 that your fasting blood sugar goes, your chance of developing diabetes in the next 10 years goes up by 6%.

Lisa: Wow. Every point? Wow.

Dr Suzanne Turner: For every point above 87.

Lisa: Yeah, we use a different measuring, but that would be probably above five or something like that. Five and a half, maybe. Sorry, I don't know the conversion.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And so all the labs measure that as 100 or less is normal. Well, if you're at 100, you're already at a 60% increased risk of diabetes in the next 10 years. Why would I wait until you develop diabetes to begin doing something to help you? That doesn't make sense.

Lisa: No.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So I am talking to patients from the very first time I see them about their blood sugar being high, and this is already telling me that your body is under oxidative stress, your cells are under stress, that the mitochondria aren't functioning optimally, and the cells aren't getting the nutrients they need to make everything function well. So that's no matter what your age, no matter what the circumstances are — 87 or above is where we start to talk about problems.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And so it's an easy segue into talking about what are you eating? And people often don't even know. So I'll just have them do some sort of macros tracker. There's an easy one online called Macros Inc. There's one called Carbon. Whatever works for you — MyFitnessPal, whatever works for you. But I want you to know, this is just taking an inventory of what you're doing. I also love the continuous glucose monitor.

Lisa: Yep. It's amazing, the results that you get from continuous glucose monitors.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So that's a simple one to check. And then I'm going to look at what is their albumin level. So albumin is a protein in the blood. It acts like a boxcar. It carries nutrients around everywhere, picks it up at one place, dumps it off at the other place. It just acts like a carrier and protects whatever's in its boxcar while it's travelling through the bloodstream. So as we age, as we have less resistance training, or as we become more sarcopenic, we start to notice that that albumin level goes down. When you're sick, for example, when you have COVID, we know that the patients who come in the door with an albumin less than 3.5, those patients are much more likely to have terrible outcomes than the patients who had higher than 4.5. So my goal for an albumin is to be greater than 4.5.

Lisa: Yeah, which is 45 here.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So I try to track those over time. I'll say, "What was it last year? What is it this year? What are you doing differently this year that makes things better?" I try to see most of my patients every three months and we'll just see what's happening, what's going on. Are you progressing, or are we headed in the wrong direction? What can we adjust that's minor that can help you head in the right direction? I need a trainer at the gym for my workouts, just like they need a health person to guide them in what they're doing and to keep them on track.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So albumin is probably the second thing. The third thing I look at is an alkaline phosphatase level. Alkaline phosphatase is unique in that it can indicate all kinds of things, but it is in the body naturally. It rises in response to inflammation, so it's an inflammatory marker. It's specifically often related to intestinal inflammation, and we learned from our naturopathic friends years ago that all disease starts in the gut.

Lisa: Yep.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So we need to pay attention to things like that. So if I'm seeing a low albumin, a high alkaline phosphatase, I know this patient is not absorbing nutrients from their diet, and that there's probably some intestinal inflammation. So I'm going to start to focus on what's happening with their intestines, and how do we correct this? So these are just simple tests, instead of having to order a really expensive, extensive intestinal panel, which would be helpful at some point. I'd rather patients be able to spend their money on the treatments rather than the diagnosis, if I can.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So I'm going to start with going down the inflammatory pathway, or the intestinal inflammation pathway. What can we do to fix this? There's some simple PCR tests that have come out to look at gut microbes, and so I'll maybe throw one of those on, that will tell me if there's anything unusual happening in their intestines, if they have an overgrowth of something that shouldn't be there. And those are also fairly inexpensive, and they don't have to go through the extensive multiple-day testing that's $600 or $800. So those are very simple, easy, right there.

Dr Suzanne Turner: I also think that we need to pay attention to things like liver enzymes, the AST and ALT. And they give us so much information, too. So we know that for an AST or ALT greater than 25, we're going to start running into problems — we're seeing that the patient is having difficulty with either detoxification, or again some sort of intestinal inflammation. So I'm going to again look at what's happening in the intestines. I'm going to treat them whatever way that would mean. I'm going to start with diet. Maybe we'll do an elimination. Maybe we'll look at, are there foods that you need to take out? Are there things we need to add in? Do you not have enough?

Dr Suzanne Turner: I love to tell people to please do a vegetable with every meal. And please start with — or it's ordering the meal. So starting with a protein, and then going to whatever your vegetable is, and then whatever your carbohydrates are on the end. If you're starting with a protein, we're priming the system for handling the blood sugar more efficiently. So even if you do nothing but reorder the food that you eat — it's a little bit of a problem if you're eating something like lasagna, but if you're having chicken, broccoli...

Lisa: Yep, yep. Eat the potato last, eat the chicken first, and eat the salad in between.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yeah. And people when they're watching their continuous glucose monitor, we'll see a difference when they make just that simple change in their diet. So we'll watch to see if that makes a difference. I'll repeat labs at six weeks or three months. Six weeks is kind of that midway between your three-month check-ins, so I like to do a midway check-in, and then we repeat. I order a huge panel of labs the first time I see somebody, so there's probably 20, 25 things on my panel when I first look at them, because I want to make sure I have a complete picture. And then we're going to pick and choose as we go, things we might need or not need, depending on what their initial panel shows.

Lisa: What about the thyroid? That's another pet peeve of mine. We often will get a TSH, maybe if we're lucky we'll get a T4, some even a T3, but there's hardly anybody who does reverse T3, the antibodies — that full thyroid panel. And I can order it, I can get it for my clients, they have to pay for it privately, but that would be great if that was sort of standard, so that we can make an assessment of what your entire thyroid pathway is doing, and then where we can intervene. Are you seeing a hell of a lot of people having issues with the thyroid coming through?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Absolutely, absolutely. And remember, my patients are self-selecting, because if patients are going to primarily use their own insurance, they're going to go to — I'm not sure what the system is in New Zealand, but our patients can either use insurance. I'm a cash-only pay practice. We don't deal with any insurance at all. And so obviously patients who come to see me are a selected group. And so I either have the really healthy entrepreneur athlete, or I have the very ill Lyme disease, mould illness, chronic fatigue, that kind of patient. So I have this sort of dichotomy.

Lisa: It's similar for me. I've got the same sort of situation.

Dr Suzanne Turner: They're going to self-select. So I have to remember there's a bias when I see patients, but I would say probably at least 50% of my patients have some sort of thyroid issue. We have to remember we live in a toxic world, and so everything is going to affect the thyroid. Even in the United States, we use a lot of bromine-related fire retardants in our clothing and our furniture. And so all of that is going to affect — we use fluoride in our toothpaste. That's all going to affect the way that our bodies are able to handle iodine, and it's going to substitute for iodine at the same locations. And now your thyroid is unable to do the iodine exchanges that it needs to do to produce the actual thyroid hormones that we need.

Lisa: Question on this. So fluoride does that? Fluoride actually will stop the iodine being taken up? Did I understand that correctly?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes. It will substitute in the thyroid hormone. It will substitute.

Lisa: Oh wow. Okay, that's great info. Take note of that one, everyone.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So this is one of the reasons why I ask about the dental concerns about using mouthwashes and toothpastes and such that are going to kill off all of the bacteria, and the concerns about being able to actually continue to produce nitric oxide. We need good bacteria in our mouths. If we're killing it off with all of that — that's a whole other story for another podcast, but that's another reason for us to be cautious about using fluoride. I don't recommend it for most of my patients. So that's just an "oh by the way," lots of interesting things. And so giving patients iodine is something we can do to help — if your iodine is greater, you're going to start substituting out your bromine and your fluoride for iodine. And so that's another way we can help these patients out.

Lisa: Yeah, but you've got to also be careful with iodine, don't you, if you've got Hashimoto's, or you're pushing too hard on that one pathway? Because if you've got Hashimoto's and you take iodine, that can actually exacerbate the problem, can't it?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes, and all of this should be done under the supervision of a qualified, experienced functional medicine doctor, for sure.

Lisa: Or there are some really good, like you, some really great health coaches that know what they're talking about. But you should do some research with doctors.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yeah, always work with doctors.

Lisa: You should definitely do some research into who you're getting your advice from. And my friend Carl Lanore, if you know Carl, who does podcasts too — Carl always says, what does he say? The new evolutionary pressure is who you get your information from.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yeah, we're going to be self-selecting, hopefully, for stronger people evolving into something better.

Lisa: But yeah, some of the stuff that you just said, I know if I went to the Dental Association, you'd be getting massive pushback. I had this discussion with a friend the other day. He was having his kids use baking soda — the toothpaste here that's baking soda-based. And the kids went to the dentist, and they ripped shreds out of them for not using a fluoride toothpaste. And luckily my colleague's pretty onto it, and he was just like, "Yeah, that's fine. Thanks very much. See you later," and went home. But this is a confusing part for the consumer and the

Lisa: So if you come across contradictions like that, go and do your own deep dive into that area if it's important to you, so that you can make a fully informed assessment, and trust yourself to do that. I did a course with Dr Yueth — we did it together, taught a course in what to fix first, and how not to die, it was called. How Not to Die. And we were looking at, how do you do the research, and how do you do those things? That's a really good course to do, so that you can make a good assessment of the material that you're getting in. I think that's important for consumers to be thinking about.

Lisa: So thyroid, yeah, the thyroid, the hormones, the gut health — these are all intertwined, and the HPA axis as well in there. Very complex integrated mechanisms that talk to each other and are affected by each other, and so it's a very difficult thing to be peeling apart. I love to do Dutch testing and look at the complete hormones, and check what the methylation is doing, and look at the thyroid, whether they're a candidate to be looking at HRT or not if they're going through menopause, etc. All of these things are very much intertwined. If you're going to be looking at that, I like to look at the thyroid, I like to look at the gut health if I can.

Lisa: And of course, as you said, it's always, where do I put the person's resources first? That's always the biggest, hardest thing for me. I've got a number of really, really wealthy clients who can just say, "Give me the whole gambit," and I'll get everything tested, and I'm like a kid in a candy store then, because I've got all the data, right? I can go to town and get it all and make sense of it all. But when I've only got a piece of that puzzle, that's where you have to be pretty clever and intuitive and have experience, when you don't have that whole sort of picture.

Lisa: For me, like doing blood work — if we could get it funded, everything every three months for everybody, just to get a basic blood test, like the $10, $12 run-of-the-mill blood test for everybody, we would have a much healthier society, because we're just going to be preventing, or we can see things happening before they actually become a problem, rather than waiting until they're actually out of range and then a problem. We can see when they're hitting towards the top end of that blood sugar range, for example. Insulin resistance is a thing that I really look at pretty much with everybody walking through the door. I want to know how they are, and I look at questionnaires that look at your blood sugar regulation, and how are you looking, as well as your HbA1c and your fasting glucose and all of those sorts of things, your insulin levels. And then you can make a picture of where they are on that spectrum, because I can tell you, most of us are on that spectrum somewhere of heading towards diabetes. I think if you live long enough, everybody would get it, unless we can be really actively trying to stay metabolically healthy. And that's, I think, at the core of so many diseases — metabolic dysregulation and metabolic issues. If we can start working on that piece of the puzzle, then the diabetes, the Alzheimer's, the cancers, the heart diseases, all the things that branch off that, will have less likelihood of going down that path.

Dr Suzanne Turner: I love the Dutch test. You mentioned it a minute ago, because it's fairly comprehensive. What I mean is, I love that they've added at the end the 8-OHdG and they've added the oxidised LDL. That just makes it such a complete test.

Lisa: Yeah, the 8-OHdG — what do you call it, the 8-OHdG? So is that really looking at the LDL, or just oxidative stress in general, that one? Or is it looking at oxidised LDL?

Dr Suzanne Turner: The 8-OHdG is specifically looking at DNA damage. The oxidised LDL is looking at oxidative stress.

Lisa: Right, so that's a different marker. Yeah, isn't it great that they've added that? Plus the cortisol awakening response. I really like to understand that as well. My God, that's been difficult to get my head around. I've struggled with that one a little bit, the cortisol awakening response. But seeing that, and seeing patients coming through with flat curves, or a curve that's going down before it goes up at night — some of the crazy cortisol awakening responses I've seen lately, I'm like, "Wow, okay, no wonder you're having trouble sleeping," or whatever. So getting that, and that sort of plays into that whole hormone cyclicity — are you doing the right things at the right time of the day to initiate the right sort of responses, and getting that cortisol response on point with that nice diurnal curve, a nice rise in the morning and then down throughout the day and then nice and low at night so that your melatonin can kick in.

Lisa: And I like to work on people's lifestyle habits, like a sleep regime, just like you would with your three-year-old. If you've got a kid, you wouldn't give them a bunch of ice cream at nine o'clock at night and then make them run around the house until they're all excited and screaming, and then try and pop them into bed. It's not going to end well, right? But we do it all the time. We're doing that to ourselves. So I am very, very strict when I'm at home and not travelling. I've got a very nice strict regime of my blue light blocking and my chamomile tea and my yoga and calming myself down as best I can. I do work too late, that's the only thing, and that's hard when you've got so much work to do that you can't fit it all in in the day. But it's trying to prepare that brain to bring those brain waves down and bring yourself down into that right state to be able to go to sleep. Those things are important.

Dr Suzanne Turner: One of the things that's been really cool for us to do — we just started doing therapeutic stellate infiltrations. The stellate ganglion is the motherboard for the autonomic nervous system. And it lives right here, just behind your sternocleidomastoid, right in front of your C6 transverse process. And it's easily accessible with a little half-inch needle in most people. So you can infiltrate that area with a little bit of cheap procaine, and they actually should get a Horner response, where their face becomes a little bit heavy, their eye becomes a little small, and that means their sympathetic nervous system gets turned down. The parasympathetic gets a chance to take over. Who of us since COVID has given our parasympathetic a chance to take over?

Lisa: Yeah, no, man, this is a constant battle of mine, trying to get the parasympathetic up. Wow.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And so it's been really fun in the last year, year and a half that we've been doing this with our patients who have PTSD, and then we've expanded that into patients not just with PTSD, but who have, like you're talking about, HPA axis dysfunction. It's been really, really beneficial and helpful to watch these patients recover, because they're getting just a little bit of a break, just a little bit of a break, just a little bit of a break from the massive sympathetic response that all of us get. So that's been super helpful, and can really help with that cortisol awakening response.

Lisa: Wow, I've never heard of it. That's brand new to me, that one. So is this something you've trained in, and you have to inject into the neck?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yep.

Lisa: Okay, so you have to have a doctor.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yep, and most of the time the pain specialist will do it.

Lisa: And how often do you have to do this, like every night, or...?

Dr Suzanne Turner: So the research with PTSD is once a week for 18 weeks.

Lisa: So you'd have to go to your doctor, have it done at night time, or...

Dr Suzanne Turner: Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. You can do it in the morning. The local anaesthesia effects last about — and that's where the Horner response comes in — lasts about 20 minutes, something like that. The parasympathetic dominance can last all day. So it's this amazing calm. People talk about euphoria. They talk about the increased margin that they have for creativity, because their brain is not so busy fighting off... Yeah. It's really been an amazing tool. And I have several patients — I have a woman who runs her husband's medical practice, who had some terrible trauma in her childhood, and this has really freed her up to be able to do her job and be the mother and wife that she is also, and is doing really amazingly well. So it's been an exciting new addition to the things that we do here at the office.

Lisa: Wow, that is just... I mean, that's going to be difficult to try to get doctors to be trained in that, I suppose, down here, but wouldn't that be marvellous? Because anything that stimulates that parasympathetic is just so, so crucial. I know I struggle personally with post-traumatic stress, and I've had eight years of hell basically in my life — losing babies and my dad, and my mum going through... yeah, just the things that happen to us, and COVID of course and all of the drama that that brought. And so to shut your brain up is the hardest thing, and to calm down and not be like, "Where is the next lion coming at me from?" So that would be amazing. And without taking SSRIs and things, like I'm just not going to entertain those ideas, because I know the downsides of all of that. I've been there, done that, actually. That's not the answer. But that sounds really, really exciting. Oh, you've sent me down a new path to start to investigate.

Lisa: That sounds really exciting, because one of the other things I do in the evening — well, I'm lucky enough to have a hyperbaric chamber, right, because I've got a clinic with a hyperbaric chamber — is I try to do that in the evening if I get a chance, even if it's just half an hour, because that turns on all my parasympathetic nervous system without fail. I sort of get up out of there and I'm like, nice and relaxed, I can go off to bed. And these little things — sauna can do that as well, hot baths, things that can really help that parasympathetic state. Breathwork, of course, cold therapy, another one of my favourite things to do.

Dr Suzanne Turner: There's a lot of devices out there right now that are really helpful for it. I really like the BrainTap. I like the Apollo Neuro. I don't know if you're familiar with those.

Lisa: Yeah, yep, I've heard about it. I haven't had it. Oh, Rezzimax — I'm interviewing the inventor of a thing called Rezzimax, which I'm testing out with Mum. Check that one out. Sharik Peck, interviewing him next week. And this is certain vibrations. It's a machine that vibrates at certain frequencies — and I've probably butchered this, sorry Sharik — but it has certain algorithms that it plays through, and it can turn on the parasympathetic response. It can really get rid of migraine headaches. I'm using it for Mum to

Lisa: ...stimulate that right side of the body that's had stroke damage and the connection isn't there. So before I get her to stand up, I will rub this vibrating thing, this Rezzimax device, and that sort of wakes up that side of the body so that when she goes to stand, she's not — because if she's been sitting for more than half an hour, the connection from the brain to the body shuts down. For us, we've still got it, but she sort of shuts off, and so her first steps are very stuck. Literally like stuck in the mud. And if I do that first and wake that leg up with this, it sort of activates. We've only been using it for a couple of weeks, but it's very, very interesting.

Lisa: But you can also use it — they've used it for, you can put it here and really stimulate that parasympathetic by putting it under here somewhere, and then you can do it here for headaches and across the top of the head. Different areas that you can use it for different things. So check that one out, Rezzimax.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And have you ever used stem cells in her? Stem cell injections or anything?

Lisa: No. I'm using StemRegen from Christian Drapeau, which I've had her on for the past month or so, and I'm doing a sort of loading dose of those, because it's very hard for us to get stem cell stuff down here. There's hardly anybody that's doing it, and if they're doing it, they're doing it with your own stem cells, and when you're 81, you're probably not really going to benefit much. So yeah, just the StemRegen, which I'm a big fan of. That research by Christian is pretty compelling, I think. So we're giving that a go, and I'm using it as well.

Dr Suzanne Turner: It's interesting, there are a couple of companies — American Cell Technologies, I think. And again, I don't know what your access to it is there, but that will have the provider take an adipose tissue specimen, like a liposuction.

Lisa: Yep.

Dr Suzanne Turner: I think they call it lipo harvesting, and then they will expand those cell colonies and cryo freeze them for you. So she could get three or four treatments in a year that would potentially be beneficial. I don't know all the details of how you would access it from where you are, but it may be something to think about, because there are companies all over that will do that. If you could just find someone who will do the fat harvesting, the company will take it and—

Lisa: And they proliferate it? They grow it and then put it back in?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yeah.

Lisa: I think there is one up north that might do that, or I'll have a look into it. I just thought with 81-year-old stem cells you might not get much of a — and you're putting back into the body damaged, senescent stem cells, because there's that argument too.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So a lot of the protocols include doing some sort of pre-treatment with MAH ozone, you know, ozone therapy, with senolytics.

Lisa: Yep.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Rapamycin, fisetin, growth factor — factor four, something like that, ahead of time, and then pre-treating with ozone therapy and then doing stem cell harvesting. So you've gotten rid of a lot of the senescent cells.

Lisa: Gotcha.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And then you're giving them. For her, because of her history of cancer, I don't know what their restrictions would be, whether they would allow her to do it.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Those are all things you'd have to ask the company. They have different recommendations, but those are options.

Lisa: Those are all options. Yeah, and your own stem cells are way better than using somebody else's stem cells, just because your body knows what to do with them.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yeah, yeah, they're endogenous to you.

Lisa: And this is the easy way, with stem cell mobilisers like what Christian's got in his StemRegen. He's been, I know, 25 years or something studying what plants around the world, what compounds around the world, help the body mobilise stem cells. And he's done a lot of clinical trials with these to show that the stem cell production out of the bone marrow is increased. And of course, when stem cells are higher in the body, then you're going to get repair processes happening much better. And that's one of the reasons why we don't repair well as we get older, because we've lost so much of our stem cells running around in the blood.

Lisa: So these plant molecules — things like AFA from Klamath Lake, the blue-green algae, and aloe macroclada and fucoidan — it dissolves the adhesive molecules that are holding the stem cells in the bone marrow, and actually gets rid of those so they can be released. And then if you combine it with hyperbaric, then that actually proliferates the stem cells and sort of crowds them out of the bone marrow. So you've got a sort of a double whammy going on. So that's the easy access for people who don't have access to stem cell treatments. I think it's worth trying. So yeah, we're experimenting with it at the moment.

Lisa: But all of these other things are just so exciting. Like getting more stem cells in your body, and then back to the peptides, because we didn't really finish the peptide conversation. There are just so many — there's 7,000-odd peptides. And then you've got the bioregulators in the peptides, right? What's your take on bioregulators and Dr Khavinson, or Professor Khavinson's work for 40-odd years, who started off with the KGB producing stuff for the military?

Lisa: Anytime I hear the military are using something, I always double down on my research in that area, because I know that the military — whether it was in Russia or the American military or whatever, like with ketones — when they're studying something, they've usually got a big budget and they've usually not got the amount of restrictions that we have in normal society. So they are usually at the cutting edge of things. So I'm always sort of doubling down if the military's doing something.

Lisa: But bioregulators — Professor Khavinson is probably the major player in the space, and now it's becoming more available. And the cool thing with the bioregulators is a lot of them are oral or sprays, which makes it more accessible for more people. But I'm not 100% on them yet, because most of the work's come out of Dr Khavinson's lab. What's your take?

Dr Suzanne Turner: I think you're right on. What's exciting is, are you involved with Dr Bill Lawrence's American study?

Lisa: I know about Dr Lawrence. I'm hoping to get him on the show, but I think that might be a stretch. We'll hope. Because that would be great.

Dr Suzanne Turner: He's a good fellow. He's right here in Atlanta.

Lisa: Oh, well, put in a good word for me, would you? I would love to get him on the show.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yeah, so he's repeating the work of Khavinson here in the United States. I think the most interesting research that Khavinson has is on the thymus gland and the pineal gland peptides—

Lisa: Epitalon, yeah.

Dr Suzanne Turner: —and giving those to patients for three years and then following the patient for multiple years after that.

Lisa: Mhm.

Dr Suzanne Turner: What the Russian study found is that significantly lower numbers of patients were ill or had died who had taken the peptide bioregulators for three years. So Bill Lawrence is the American version, who is trying to replicate the work of Dr Khavinson under his tutelage, or in conjunction with Dr Khavinson, and is trying to make that happen. So he's in the middle of that. I happen to be one of his clients.

Lisa: Oh, wow.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And so my telomere length went really low compared to where I was last year, just being on peptide bioregulators in the middle of a particularly stressful time. My telomere length went down. But because of having had COVID twice, my chronological age actually got a little bit worse. So this is really curious to see what's going to happen.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So we've made some adjustments to see if we can get rid of spike protein. We've added some bioregulators that are specifically related to that, one called Nemarex, a spray—

Lisa: Mhm.

Dr Suzanne Turner: —that has some interesting research — limited, but interesting research, I like the word compelling that you used — on helping to remove spike protein. So that we're hoping to do for me. I did not ever get a vaccine, but I did have COVID twice.

Lisa: Same. Yeah, I didn't get vaccinated. I got COVID once, and I'm seeing a lot of people with long COVID and vaccine damage as well, unfortunately, and sometimes it's a bit of a double whammy — we had both.

Lisa: And so you actually saw yourself go backwards in the first part of the study because of the stress that you were under, and this COVID and so on and so forth. And now you're halfway through this three-year cycle, or whereabouts are you at the moment? You're so lucky to be in there.

Dr Suzanne Turner: I did my second test in January. So I'll have another one next January. We'll see where things are. It's just a three-year study, and then he's going to follow me for the next 15 years, and we'll see what happens. The Russian study — they just called people up 15 years later and said, is he or she still alive?

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And significantly higher numbers of the treated patients were still alive.

Lisa: And then he treated a lot in that second time too, didn't he? Like people that were now in their 70s and so on — didn't they continue with the peptides at that point?

Dr Suzanne Turner: No, they didn't. Just the ones for three years.

Lisa: Wow. And was it injection? I think it was injection, wasn't it, rather than the oral and sprays that they used in the original—

Dr Suzanne Turner: The Gazprom study was done with orals.

Lisa: Oh.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And that's the huge one — 13,000 people that work for the gas company.

Lisa: Wow. And that was in very stressful living conditions, I should imagine, back then in Siberia. Wouldn't have been the easiest places to live, I shouldn't imagine. And so those people died less, they lived better, they were healthier, and that was just having these bioregulator peptides for three years. So that's interesting that Dr Bill Lawrence is in the middle of that. That's going to be really exciting. And I think meanwhile, if you've got the money and the resources and you want to try that, they've got a very good safety profile.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes.

Lisa: So yeah.

Dr Suzanne Turner: What's also interesting is, I would consider SS-31 and GHK-Cu — I would consider both of those peptide bioregulators, because they are less amino acids. And so we know that they have significant effect. GHK-Cu affects 800-something genes, up- and down-regulates a bazillion genes. So we know that we're getting a more youthful expression of your DNA if you're taking GHK-Cu on a periodic basis, and I think the recommendation is once a quarter to do a round of GHK-Cu. Same idea with epitalon — once a quarter to do a round of epitalon. And then the other peptide bioregulator that I think is interesting and so effectual is SS-31. This is one of our mitochondrial

Dr Suzanne Turner: peptides. I think it's had amazing results with my patients who can afford it. It's hard to find. If you can find it, it's expensive, but I think it is one of the most impactful peptides that we have available to us.

Lisa: Mhm.

Dr Suzanne Turner: I have a patient who has pulmonary fibrosis that's related to having had COVID twice.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And she came to us on oxygen. Of course we did a lot of things. We did ozone therapy. We did — not inhaled — we did oral.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Dr Suzanne Turner: IV, major autohemotherapy. And then we did regular peptides like thymosin beta. We also did SS-31, and her energy came back. She was off of oxygen. She was walking.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr Suzanne Turner: She's doing four or five miles a day. She was doing really, really well.

Lisa: Amazing. And that's for something that you can't really fix, apparently. Right? So that's amazing. And would BPC-157 be in the mix there as well, or for things like that?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes.

Lisa: Is BPC not also a bioregulator? Because it's also —

Dr Suzanne Turner: It's not, because it's 15 amino acids. So the official definition of bioregulators is four or less.

Lisa: Yeah, two to four. Yeah, okay. I thought BPC was, for some reason, a smaller number of peptides than that. But it's what, 13 to 14?

Dr Suzanne Turner: It's 15.

Lisa: A string of 15. But you can take it orally. That's what threw me off — that the BPC-157 you can take oral and it does have an effect. So how does that happen when it's such a biggish peptide? How is it able to tolerate the stomach?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Mhm. It's because of the sequence of amino acids itself that are resistant to the acid environment. It's naturally made in the stomach. BPC-157 is the fragment of the original, and the one that's made naturally in the stomach is a longer version of that. But it is resistant to the acidic environment of the stomach because of its amino acid sequence and its conformation.

Lisa: Right. Yeah, because I've used both the oral and the injectables, and we had a situation with a gastrointestinal bleed, and so the oral was important. And I put KPV in the mix as well, under Dr Betsy's guidance.

Dr Suzanne Turner: And I also like treating both sides. So if they have an intestinal problem, I like giving it systemic and oral, because then you're treating from both directions.

Lisa: Yeah, and I think when you give it systemically, it could end up in the cartilage or the joints or somewhere else, and not — preferably in that case I needed it for the gut healing and the gut lining. So that's why we put it in orally as well as an injectable.

Lisa: And just going on to some of your other favourite peptides or bioregulators — from the thymus perspective, sorry, the thyroid perspective. What do you take in the bioregulators there, like thyrogen? The bioregulators in the thyroid space — do you use those?

Dr Suzanne Turner: I was going to say, the first things we should do is treat with the pineal gland peptide and the thymus gland peptide. So always, always, always we should be treating with those two, and then everything else we do for patients with any of the bioregulators should be added to that regimen.

Lisa: So epitalon — that would be epitalon and thyrogen?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes, first, and then whatever. And then the blood vessel regulators like ventfort. And I'm such a fan of cartalax, because everything is made of — everything: heart, lungs, kidney, liver, all of it needs an extracellular matrix. And so I'm always going to throw that one on. I'm always going to throw on the vessigen to try to get their blood vessels. So those are my kind of number one, two, three, four for everyone, and then I'll throw the extra ones on.

Dr Suzanne Turner: So she was on taxorest oral, the patient I just mentioned with the pulmonary fibrosis. She was on taxorest. How much does the taxorest affect her versus everything else? Because I mean, we gave her everything, so I have no idea which was the most contributing factor. She ended up having almost a Herxheimer-like reaction to the thymosin alpha. So we started going down a path of looking at whether she had a mould exposure or something else in her home that may have made her predisposed to the problem to begin with.

Dr Suzanne Turner: I had a question for you. Did you ever use in your mom dihexa or cerebrolysin?

Lisa: So, yes, cerebrolysin, but I could only get the one mil little vials out of Austria. So I couldn't get — what we really needed was the infusions of the stuff and really high dosages. So I think, once again, I was throwing a shitload at her at the time when I was doing the cerebrolysin, and I've done two rounds of cerebrolysin. And I definitely think it helped. When she got cancer, I was like, do we put cerebrolysin in? Is that safe when she's got an active brain cancer, like in the brain? And I conferred with Dr Youth on that and we did — we put cerebrolysin back in the mix.

Lisa: But I haven't tried dihexa yet, and I've been looking at — have you seen, was it Jordan Harding, I think is his name, the researcher who studied the Parkinson's rats? Have you seen that video? He's talking about the dihexa. He's given one rat Parkinson's — however they give rats Parkinson's, I don't know, but they do — and then one without Parkinson's, and then one with Parkinson's treated with dihexa, and they're hanging on a pull-up bar, these rats. So he sticks them on a bar and they're holding it. Now the Parkinson's rat falls off very, very quickly, obviously, because it's got Parkinson's. The normal rat falls off about 10, 12 seconds later. The rat with Parkinson's treated with dihexa hangs around there for a good minute or something, like three times as long as the healthy rat. Not quite exactly, but it was a lot longer.

Lisa: And when I was talking to Dr Orion Smith last week on dihexa — because I wrote to Betsy and said, "Dihexa? Should we do dihexa?" And she's like, "We should be doing oral ox." Orion said that there is something like 10,000 times the amount of BDNF produced when you have dihexa, and I'm like, "What?" Like BDNF is the gold that we're trying to get a little bit of when we have saunas, or we're hoping we get a bit when we do hyperbaric. But really, 10,000 times the amount — is that safe? That to me sounds very — so I haven't yet put dihexa in the mix. I need to have another appointment with Betsy and just see whether that's an option. What's your experience with that?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Here's what I would say about dihexa. I have patients with MS who've had great results. I have a patient who has vascular dementia who's had great results. We've kept her very, very, very stable with her symptoms. It's been amazing to watch. We were able to reverse her initial decline, and then she stayed at that same level since we reversed her initial decline. And so we cycle her on and off.

Dr Suzanne Turner: One of the things I always encourage these patients to do is to find something they love doing that they want to learn. So my perfect example is salsa dancing, because it uses the upper part of your body differently than the lower part. It uses left and right. It requires you to remember steps, so there's a learning process that goes on. I think powerlifting is very similar, if you were going to do weight training or something. So anything that you're willing to learn that requires you to hold on to information. But I don't want you to start dihexa until you start doing something that challenges your brain to do that neuroplasticity. So whatever that is. I have a patient who picked up learning guitar, and he was able to memorise whole songs and things, where he wasn't able to before to remember two or three. So I think there's been some really dramatic changes.

Dr Suzanne Turner: One of the ways that it works is by decreasing the inflammatory response on the brain, because it is an angiotensin four agonist. The angiotensin two receptor is this inflammatory-producing receptor, and if we can get that turned down in the heart, in the liver, in the brain, we know that we can increase the anti-inflammatory response of the immune system, the microglia in the brain, so they go from that Henny Penny, "oh my gosh, the sky is falling," to the janitor — put things away, take the trash out. And we can get a good response in that direction. So it's not just the fact that dihexa increases BDNF, although that's a wonderful effect that it has. It is its anti-inflammatory effect and changing the phenotype of the immune system in the brain, helping the oligodendrocytes begin to lay down myelin again in patients with MS. So it's very exciting to see what it can do and what it should be able to do.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Again, most of the research is in animals. So when I have these conversations with patients, I go, "I don't have any human studies to tell you what it's going to do. I can't make any promises. But this is what it's done in animals. There is nothing out there for you. So I think it's worth a try. I mean, you tell me — you think it's worth a try? But I think it's worth a try."

Lisa: Yeah, and this is the thing when you're up against it and it's your last — things like, yeah, this is when you should be able to initiate these sorts of things. And then there's Selank and Semax. Have you had any experience with those, too?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes. Probably the most benefit I see for those is in patients who have either a history of addiction, or who have the fairly high HPA axis drive that we can get turned down. There's a lot of GABA that's produced there. I think the other place where this would be really beneficial is in our ALS patients who have that high glutamate around the synapse that's causing a lot of inflammation. I think we get some benefit in those patients too from using Semax and Selank. And I think especially if we can use these things to help get patients off of their benzodiazepines, etc. That's where I think they also can come in to be really helpful.

Lisa: Isn't it amazing that we've got so many of these exciting new things for things that traditionally you're on a path to destruction and doom — like multiple sclerosis and ALS. I work with an ALS patient, or clients, and you're given — there's nothing, you know, there's some drugs that they can do to maybe help with a little bit of this or a little bit of that, but actually there's a lot more out there. And getting them access to the right information was really, really key for them. And I didn't even put any of the peptides in, because, well, I can't. But just having that information — I'm going to pass that on, because they might be able to now go over to America and maybe find you, or Betsy, or someone that might be able to help.

Lisa: Because I think when people like that have got no other options and they're facing a really horrible decline, why not try dihexa, Selank, Semax, cerebrolysin, a combination of those sorts of things, to try to rehabilitate the brain and get

Lisa: — them back. I know, I certainly...

Dr Suzanne Turner: If someone has ALS, I am highly, highly going to recommend they see a dear friend of mine named Amy Hada Mayo. She's in Miami. She has the largest non-university-based ALS clinic in the world.

Lisa: Oh, I think I've heard of her.

Dr Suzanne Turner: She's amazing.

Lisa: Yes, I have.

Dr Suzanne Turner: She has five reversals of ALS that have been recognised by Duke University. Three are awaiting recognition by Duke University. So these are genuine reversals of ALS under her care. ALS is an incurable disease.

Lisa: Richard Bedlack is another one to put on your radar there, Dr Richard Bedlack. He's also studied the people who didn't decline and what did they do. He's studied it for years, and one of the things that he put them on was theracurmin. There was a whole list — I can't remember off the top of my head, but there was a whole list of things that all of these people had done, and he's studying that. So yeah, Dr Richard Bedlack was his name, and another very, very interesting out-of-the-box thinker that I came across when I was researching for that client.

Lisa: So yeah, there's lots of things out there that are this cutting edge, and it's coming all the time. When you study for a couple of hours a day, you're still not going to keep up with it all. There's just not enough hours in the day. I sometimes get, gosh, I wish I just could do more, be more, be brainier so I can remember it all. That would be just great. But dihexa — if I use some dihexa, maybe I'll become like the limitless guy in that movie. What was it? Limitless.

Lisa: Look, I want to be a little bit respectful of your time, Dr Suzanne. It's been absolutely fantastic to have you. Is there anything that we didn't cover that is really a hot topic you want to talk about? We've touched on some pretty exciting things, but anything that you wanted to add?

Dr Suzanne Turner: I think that we've covered most things. I can't say enough about the growth hormone secretagogues. I think most peptide doctors are familiar with using those. The FDA-approved one is tesamorelin. I think it works amazing. I love tesamorelin. I'm going to cycle that on and off with other things. I think that is foundational for any programme that I'm going to start — I'm not going to say for all patients, because everyone's different, but it really is foundational for most of my patients to be on some sort of growth hormone secretagogue. Even your mum with active cancer, we think that probably ipamorelin is the one to use in active cancer.

Lisa: That's the one that Betsy's put her on, ipamorelin. Yeah, so we haven't gone with the other ones, but that one is the one that we've chosen here, or she's chosen.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Again, there's no research behind that. I don't have a human study that shows it's safe to use in active cancer, but because of the way it works, because of its ability to help cells get out of that glycolysis, that Warburg effect, we think that's why it'll be beneficial in helping patients. That's a complicated one and a story for another day, but don't forget that sort of baseline level, foundational for most programmes that we'll do.

Lisa: Yeah, and getting yourself more metabolically flexible is really good in any which way. I did want to touch just briefly on hormone replacement therapy — ladies going through menopause, or men going through andropause, if you want to call it that. Are you a fan of people finding out, and under the care of someone who's qualified, doing DUTCH testing and all of that sort of stuff? What are the benefits you see of hormone replacement? Because we're still fighting against the Women's Health Initiative over here.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Absolutely. And we are here in the US, too. I still have patients who come in and say, my best friend is afraid of using hormones because of the risk of breast cancer. And it doesn't matter what I say — a prophet in her own home is without honour.

Lisa: Exactly. Yeah, that's what I keep saying, too. I like that saying. That's really good.

Dr Suzanne Turner: I think that there's so much evidence of benefit. The two big studies that just came out with subcutaneous testosterone in the prevention of breast cancer — I think those are really powerful studies that were done by Dr Glaser and Dr Donovitz about using subcutaneous testosterone. I'm a huge fan. That's my favourite route of administration, is subcutaneous testosterone. I use a fairly low dose of subcutaneous testosterone relative to those studies, but I think it's pretty interesting. Actually, mine is more in correlation with Dr Glaser's dosing.

Lisa: And you're just on that in general now? For yourself?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Both. Not while I'm competing, but when I'm off-season. Yes.

Lisa: Yeah, I'm taking — I can only get access to testosterone cream, so I take it that route. I don't know if it's as effective as the subcutaneous probably would be, but that's what I've got access to. Because I want to maintain my muscle mass, and I tend to be catabolic because of the stress levels that I run under, and the amount of things that I do and the training that I put myself through. So I want to maintain a little bit of muscle — a lot of muscle, actually. And so testosterone's in the mix, and then DHEA as well. Do you put DHEA in the mix in your regime?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yes. In fact, the testosterone we use has DHEA — the injectable has DHEA in it.

Lisa: In it. Okay. Because if you're someone like me with hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal gland dysfunction and you're flatlining on your cortisol awakening response, DHEA is going to go along for the ride, isn't it, when your cortisol's in the tank?

Dr Suzanne Turner: You just have to be careful, because if your cortisol's already in the tank, my experience has been that if I put DHEA on board in someone who already has a low cortisol, I might make their cortisol worse. Whereas if their cortisol's high, I'm probably going to make it better by adding DHEA. So that's just sort of my experience. If I see that their DHEA is low but their cortisol is high, I'm going to replace DHEA. If I see that their DHEA is low but their cortisol is low, I'm going to address: what do we need to do? How do we get your cortisol up so that then we can add the DHEA in? It's obvious they're deficient, but I think sometimes the body is wise and it's doing things on purpose. So what's happening with their teeth? What's happening with their sinuses? What's happening with their intestines that may be causing it? It's not always just an emotional stressor — I don't mean "just", but it's not always an emotional or environmental stressor. It may be an internal stressor. We forget about things like root canals that are problematic in so many people. I can't tell you how many patients I've said, will you just go see your dentist and ask them to do a CT scan instead of an x-ray? And lo and behold, they have an abscess in their tooth that they didn't really feel. Maybe they had a little bit of sensitivity, but nothing crazy, and their x-rays were normal. But they were systemically unwell.

Lisa: I've got quite a few root canals.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Yeah. So you can actually treat that with injectable procaine and ozone, if you want to do that. That's a simple way to do it. I don't know if you have a doctor who would do that for you. If you know a holistic dentist, they might be able to do that for you.

Lisa: Good luck trying to find that. But I will have a look. Because I probably do need to update extensive dental work, because of the ultramarathons for decades. I remember coming back from the Himalayas — 222km race in the extreme altitude — and three teeth fell out in a week. So, pretty horrendous state. They look great now, I've had a lot of work on them, but I do wonder sometimes about the root canals. What's going on there? And you don't know, right, if you don't have access to something like a CT scan.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Mmhmm. And most dentists have plain x-rays, so you're not going to get what you need from just a plain film. It sometimes will show up, but not always.

Lisa: Very interesting. Well, we've covered a lot. I think we've really gone around the block a couple of times. I'd love to have you back on, and I'd love to stay in contact. Where can people find out, reach out to you, talk to you or your team? Are you on any socials? I don't imagine you have time for social media.

Dr Suzanne Turner: I'm on Instagram, so you can look for me on Instagram at Dr S Turner, D-R-S-T-U-R-N-E-R. And then on Facebook, but I don't do too much with my Facebook. I have a book coming out in October called Counterclockwise, so that's exciting.

Lisa: We'll reach out before the book comes and we'll get you back on to talk about that.

Dr Suzanne Turner: I'm excited. It's really fun. It's sort of setting down a cairn, saying this is a fun thing that I've done, and so I'm excited about that book.

Lisa: Where do you find time to do all of that?

Dr Suzanne Turner: I have no idea.

Lisa: Overachiever much. Absolutely amazing. Okay, so your main practice, Vine Medical — is that right?

Dr Suzanne Turner: Vine Medical, yep. Vine is in Grapevine, and we are vinemedical.com.

Lisa: Excellent. Okay, vinemedical.com. We'll have all the links there, and we'll wait with bated breath for that book to come out. That will definitely be on my bedside table when it does. And thank you so much for your time today. It's been absolutely amazing. Thank you, Dr Suzanne.

Dr Suzanne Turner: Thank you. So nice to meet you. Really a pleasure.