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Disclaimer 00:55
A quick disclaimer before we begin. The PEMF Podcast does not contain any medical advice, and the content provided is for informational purposes only. If you have any health concerns, please visit a healthcare professional.
Andy Smith 01:12
Welcome to another episode of the PEMF Podcast, and today we're joined by Markus Klotz, f- uh, co-founder of Elysium Institute in Zurich and the Apheresis Center in Cyprus. Markus specializes in therapeutic apheresis and has been incorporating PEMF into his clinic's approach. Markus, firstly, welcome to the podcast...
Markus Klotz 01:30
Thank you.
Andy Smith 01:31
In this episode, we'll explain what apheresis is, why people seek it out, and how Markus uses PEMF alongside it. We'll explore how he uses the localized device and the full body mat, his early observations around assessing patients' veins, and much, much more. So we normally start with the little, uh, quick-fire questions. So we'll throw some of these at you, a short, sharp answer, and then we'll take a deep dive on those later on in the episode if that's okay.
Markus Klotz 01:57
Very nice. Perfect.
Andy Smith 01:59
So what is apheresis in a few words?
Markus Klotz 02:03
So from Greek, uh, apheresis means separation, meaning we're taking those parts out of the blood that shouldn't be in there, environmental toxins, inflammat- inflammatory markers, small little blood clots, and lots of other substances that in modern times, unfortunately very often end up in a human body due to our environment, et cetera.
Andy Smith 02:22
Uh, what are the biggest misconceptions around apheresis?
Markus Klotz 02:25
Well, first of all, that it's complicated or dangerous or invasive because if specialists do it, it's a very minimal invasive, very pain-free, very easy treatment. But again, if specialists do it, yeah.
Andy Smith 02:38
And before using PEMF, were you in the skeptical bracket or the curious bracket?
Markus Klotz 02:43
Uh, none, in the super skeptical. Because, you know, I'm a scientist, so I would like... I wanna see the data, and then when I saw it, I, I, I came into the curious bracket. Yeah.
Andy Smith 02:56
And what was one of the first things you noticed after introducing PEMF?
Markus Klotz 03:00
So the first thing, I tried it on my own, right? So I, I put it on one of our therapy chairs and, uh, I have very long days and despite doing apheresis and being on all of these nice treatments that we have, um, and I, and I'm gonna be 50 soon, and I live my life like an 18-year-old, uh, 18 hours are pretty long, so I have heavy legs in the evening. I think it's just human, right? So what I used it for, I, I did my calls in the evening on a therapy chair and I put the PEMF mat there, and it made my legs no longer heavy. They, they started to be normal and started feeling light again. So that's how I got into it. Yeah.
Andy Smith 03:35
So on your day-to-day sessions with PEMF, are you mainly using the localized or the full body applications?
Markus Klotz 03:41
So first I started using the full body application only, and now we're actually using both at the same time. So for patients, we use the, the mat on the therapy chair, and then we, we change between left and right upper, uh, thigh because that's a very large muscle, so we get even more out of the microcirculation increasing effect. Yeah.
Andy Smith 04:02
And do patients notice anything for you to be able to see something with PEMF?
Markus Klotz 04:08
That's a quite interesting one because some do and some don't. Like for example, I personally, I sit on it and I can kind of sense it, "Oh, the device is on or off," right? But not everybody can. I don't know why. The result seems to be completely independent of that. So it's different from person to person how they feel during. It seems to be very much the same result when it comes to increasing microcirculation for all of them.
Andy Smith 04:31
And what keeps you coming back to using PEMF yourself?
Markus Klotz 04:34
Oh, the heavy legs. Uh- ... like now we have afternoon. In three hours I'm on the mat.
Andy Smith 04:40
Is there anything else you want to investigate using PEMF for?
Markus Klotz 04:44
Definitely. So the microcirculation has worked like a charm. Um, but we're always curious. So every week we have patients coming in with new things we haven't seen before because we do chronic illness, but we also do longevity. The longevity is the easy bit. If you can take people out of a wheelchair and give them their life back after long COVID, post-vac, et cetera, then making them living healthy for longer is comparably easy with the same technology, right?
Andy Smith 05:09
Mm-hmm.
Markus Klotz 05:09
But especially for the chronic crowds, um, PEMF seems to be holding some surprises. Uh, that's what we're working on at the moment. Experiencing and exploring. Yeah.
Andy Smith 05:19
Mm-hmm. Cool. Thank you. That's the quick-fire round over. So let's take a bit of a deeper dive, and let's talk first about apheresis. So, you know, we've been... I've been seeing a lot of things on, on Instagram, on social media now, and you see... You know, correct me if I'm wrong with it, the treatment, you have people laying there and they've got blood coming out one arm and maybe going back in the other arm, and it's... And then at the end of the session you see all these kind of blood clots and things. So what is apheresis and what's happening to the blood while this is happening? So let's try and break this down a bit.
Markus Klotz 05:51
Yeah. So the, the misconception in public is that there is one apheresis or one plasmapheresis. Uh, actually, it's over 20 forms of therapeutic apheresis. So there is also apheresis where we collect parts of the blood, like when we're donating specific cells to another person that needs them. Completely different sector. Therapeutic apheresis is what we do. So, and again, there's also two subcategories. We're treating only the plasmapherese- uh, the plasma, the liquid part of the blood. If you put it in a vial and you put it on a shelf, the yellowish on top and the big blood part sinks down. We only treat the, the plasma, the liquid part. And then there's full blood apheresis, where we treat the whole blood through a cartridge. What does it do? Well, as you said, one needle goes in the left arm, one needle goes in the right arm, and it's going through a machine, filter, cartridge, absorber, or a series of absorbers or filters. So we cascade them sometimes. And then what happens is really depending on the machine, the speed it goes through, the pressure it goes through, did we do the plasma? Did we do the full blood? Which filters absorbers are we using, et cetera. So making it sound very simple, like this one size fits all or one push button machines, I know that marketing wise that is easy, but the reality in medical and in science is very different. Every patient needs a different set of forms of apheresis, sometimes even combined, depending on indication. What do we wanna do with it? Increase the microcirculation, remove inflammation, remove environmental toxins, et cetera. So it's a, it's a very vast area.
Andy Smith 07:16
Mm-hmm. And which, which one are you focusing more at your clinic then? So there's, you've got three different terms, um, of-
Markus Klotz 07:21
Yeah. So, uh, we're, we're, we're actually focusing on all available therapeutic apheresis forms that have been proven to work for our patient population. The one that we use most is the heparin-induced extracorporeal LDL fibrinogen precipitation apheresis. Don't try to memorize it. In short, HELP. H-E-L-P. Um, that is, uh, the one that is using what we call precipitation, solidifying of pathogens by means of a chemical agent. So we're lowering the pH value of the plasma. In that acidic environment, the heparin sulfate that we use irreversibly binds to pathogens and falls out, solidifies. Very fascinating German technology from the '90s, and it's been now third generation. So that's basically king of the class when it comes to removal rates and how to target. And what do we remove? Inflammatory proteins, small little blood clots, fibrin aggregates with amyloid proteins called microclots, spike proteins of viruses, viral fragments, bacterial fragments, cytokines, chemokines, the whole inflammatory ma- uh, markers, uh, autoantibodies, and also to a part environmental toxins. More than we ever thought of because these therapies were used for very different indications like high cholesterol, et cetera, smoker's legs, diabetes legs, tinnitus, sudden hearing loss, dry macular degeneration in the last decades. And now we've also moved on to use it for chronic illness, post-vac, long COVID, fibromyalgia, Lyme, Epstein-Barr, and others. Yeah.
Andy Smith 08:49
Mm-hmm. And who's typically coming to you for these sorts of sessions? So, you know, who's your stereotypical patient, and why are they coming to you, and how often do they need to come?
Markus Klotz 08:59
Yeah. So we have two groups of patients, quite interestingly. All these events that I speak on, SuperHuman, London Health Optimization Summit, et cetera, it's about longevity usually, right? But behind the scenes when I come off the stage, one of the speakers or organizers or anybody will always come and go like, "Hey, Markus, I have this chronic issue. Can you fix that with the machines?" So really more than 60% of the people here are here because they have post-pandemically or also before the pandemic happened, they have chronic issues. Um, they have fatigue. They, they don't perform anymore. They have brain fog. They feel, uh, constantly tired. Uh, they have headaches. They feel dizzy. Uh, when they stand up, they get problems with their blood pressure. They have arrhythmia. So there's just so many symptoms that after the pandemic skyrocketed, right? Uh, so it's, it's 60% those. And then of course, there's the crowd, the LA, Hollywood crowd, or however you wanna call them um, that does it for pure longevity. They wanna look young. They wanna perform at their optimum. They don't wanna take the risk of any cardiovascular events. They wanna prevent heart attacks, brain strokes, ischemic strokes. Uh, they want to have nicer skin, better hair, and so on. There's a long list. So there's that crowd too, and, uh, it does work. And, um, full confession, I was not for longevity at all. Um, I even told, uh, organizers of events, "Why would you want me on stage? I am the biggest critic of longevity because I was chronically ill," and you sit in that chair more dead than alive 'cause the machine saves your life. And along comes a guy and goes like, "Hey, can I do that for better hair and skin?" It just doesn't sit that well. So I was not fond of longevity. But what happened was that the patients that lost years to chronic illness then came and said, uh, "How do I get those years back?" And I'm like, "What do you look at me, right? Uh, I don't know." And then I, I go with the son and we're like, "We probably can't give them the years back, but we, we can make their healthy years more." That's something we can do already, right? So health span, and on the back of health span comes, comes lifespan. So yeah, those two groups, chronic and, and longevity.
Andy Smith 10:53
Mm-hmm. And someone kind of explained to me before, like, you know, this is reeling it right back to a very basic level and, and giving me a, um, a different analogy for this. So, you know, in the UK, we still have radiators in everybody-- in, in, in every room and, you know, we have a heating system within the house. And if you leave that heating system for 20 years, you know, it starts to get clogged up. It starts to perform nowhere near the way it used to perform. So, you know, one of the ways in which you would clean that system out is you empty out the water, you clean the system, and you put water back in. So how basic is that analogy compared to what you're doing with apheresis? Is, is there some link to that?
Markus Klotz 11:32
Not that bad. Um, we got advanced a bit. So if we would just change the liquid, we would do a therapeutic plasma exchange, also known as TPE or PLEX. And whilst that's a good idea if you have a snake bite, food poisoning, or sepsis, it's a very risky, very invasive thing, and you will put donor's plasma in, young plasma, fresh frozen plasma, or human-derived albumin. All of that can, in certain instances, cause a lot of problems, autoimmunity and so on. So we don't do that. Uh, what we do is we remove selectively parts of what shouldn't be in there, and we increase the microcirculation. So if you say the system gets stuck, the pipes get clogged, we're literally scratching treatment by treatment the plaque on the inner walls of the blood vessels, the endothelium, off. So we're not gonna go at it with a hammer, but we're gonna go targeted at it with a laser thing. We look at it, and then we do precision medicine. So the, the example is really good if you take into consideration that, of course, the, the sky is the limit when it comes to complexity and and precision medicine.
Andy Smith 12:33
Mm-hmm. And, um, uh, how often are people coming back to get this done? So say somebody has had this, and they... I- does it depend on the person, or is there a certain protocol?
Markus Klotz 12:45
Yeah. Depending on the chronic illness, there is different protocols. So basically, um, for chronic, we see a sweet spot anywhere between four to six treatments. And that's actually not only pure guesswork, because we do a lot of initial blood tests. So we test for spike protein in exosomes, for spike protein in immune cells, peripheral monocytes, PBMC. We test for, uh, QPCR, um, elliganistic autoantibody levels and so on. How strong is the autoimmunity, et cetera. So we're not flying blind. Yes, a part in the chronic area is still good old-fashioned pattern recognition. Patient with this symptom, this treatment course worked. Let's assume it will work for somebody similar as well, after analyzing all of the blood results initially and then continuously following up with, with the markers. Um, so there we know chronic illness, anywhere between to four, six treatments is the sweet spot. But we've also seen people after the first treatment, they walk out, shake our hands, and we're like, "Thanks, I'm good." You're like, "Whoa, nice." There's also the other extreme. People after seven, eight, nine, 10 times, they were like, "Hey, I don't have financial restrictions. I feel 5, 10% better after every treatment. Can I still go on?" And as long as there's no medical issues, it is of course true, sometimes more is better. Now, in my personal opinion, after 10, 12 of these treatments for a course when it's chronic, there's no medical reason usually, right?
Andy Smith 14:09
Right.
Markus Klotz 14:10
However, if it doesn't harm the patient and it's elective treatment, we would let them go to 12, 15, whatever. It's different though in longevity. If you just wanna do this preventive to prevent Alzheimer's, Parkinson, dementia, whatever, and there's very little data on that yet, so a lot of it is experimental, so these machines are used off-label. And yeah, first results are really good. Your father got Alzheimer's really early on. You do four apheresis a year, and there's no onset yet, despite you being already in the same age where he got it. That's promising data, but it's very small data, so it's more anecdotal, slowly becoming clinical experience, but it's not randomized double-blinded control study, so it's not solid science. If you have the funds and you wanna do it, all for it. I do it too, now, but I don't tell people to do what I do. I do like one or twi- twice, once a, twice a month treatment, right? That's a level of paranoia that very few people have. But for me- ... it's just like whenever I catch COVID, whenever I catch a flu, uh, that's when I do it, and also to keep my cholesterol at a perfect level, and also just because it's, it boosts my energy levels to, to... Well, I live the, the life of an 18-year-old. So like you I'm the CEO of several companies. I'm in the board. I, I do my research. So my days are full, and I have two little kids, two and six, and I live in Cyprus and I work in Switzerland, so I really have 18-hour days every single day, and, uh it's great. I have no issues doing it. If for one, two months I don't find the time to get connected to the machine, I can feel a drop in performance. And I go like, "Oh, time to go back." Now, I don't recommend that to other people. It's expensive, it takes time, and it's probably a little bit over the top. It's just what I do, right?
Andy Smith 15:50
Uh, good. And this is a really quick question, kind of off the beaten track, because I just wanna see if there's any legs in this, and, um, you seem like the right person to ask this. So I, I give blood, um, within every four to six months, and, you know, when you give blood, you, you give about a pint of blood. So my theory in this is that every six months I'm draining out some of that used pipe water, and my body's refreshing it with some new blood. Is, is... You know, is there any legs in that in, in, in longevity terms, or, or am I kinda selling a dead horse there?
Markus Klotz 16:26
No. So bloodletting can have benefits for certain groups of patients. And there is certain patients with hypercoagulation, where their blood coagulates more than it should. And if you then replace the, the blood that they let, probably up to 500 milliliters, 300 to 500 milliliters is the usual amount, then they will have a benefit because the volume stays the same, but the blood gets more liquid, uh, liquid, uh, less viscous. So there's a benefit for them. Now, of course, your body also needs a certain energy to reproduce coagulation factors, fibrinogen, uh, blood cells, et cetera. For a healthy person, not a problem. For a ill person, sometimes a bit taxing. So is there a benefit for a healthy person? Arguably, yes. Probably not at the same level as apheresis, but at least if you don't overdo it, there's no reason to think that it will cause harm. So as an elective thing, yeah, why not? I, I wouldn't be against it. Yeah.
Andy Smith 17:27
Okay, good. And let's move on to the PEMF side of things. So, uh, we, we actually met recently at the Health Optimization Summit. Um, Tim Gray introduced us. And, um, it wasn't until I said that one of my businesses is, is Celarate, a PEMF, uh, company, and, and you sprung into action and said, "Ah, we, we use one at the clinic." And we got talking about how you're using it. So, you know, and for me it was really interesting just to, you know... 'Cause we're seeing our mats kinda going into different areas, in dentistry, in, you know, in, in all sorts of areas of medical sci- science. So it's, it was really cool to engage in this conversation. So- We, we got talking and, and you explained that, you know, your journey into PEMF was that you were really skeptical about it. Um, so how did you kinda come about this and why did you add it? Why did you initially start looking into it to add it in for this application?
Markus Klotz 18:18
So as you mentioned, Tim Gray is a good friend, and also Jacob Nap- Nottloff, a, a Swedish guy who's friends with Tim and me, uh, he was with me at London Health Optimization Summit, and he took me to your booth. Um, and he was like, "Marcus, you need to get this for your clinic." And I said, "Why?" He said, "This is great. It does A, B, C, D, E, F, G." And then just as a mystery shopper, I just bought one of the devices and took it to the clinic, and, um, we started using it, right? And, uh, to my surprise it started working because, you know, I did it first on myself, and then I had the effect on my legs. And we have lots of people with very difficult vein access, so it's not always easy to place an 18 gauge needle. And to give you a little understanding, the higher the gauge number, uh, 34G is the smallest n- needle that exists, and then it goes down. So an 18 gauge, it's about one and a half millimeters, so it's not huge, but it's not small either. It's not very painful, but when people have bad veins, and what means bad veins, small, they, they're not diluted, um, the walls are probably affected from a chronic illness, then it's not so easy to place these. And then we need to use others that are called Branulas or we need to have PICC lines or, or catheters, which we do if there is a, a need for it. But of course we prefer the minimal invasive needles 'cause an hour after the wound's closed, then you can go swim, right? So it's, it's a quite easy thing. Now, what we've learned with the PEMF, and we combine it with infrared sometimes, right? So the standard procedure if a person has not good blood flow, microcirculation is down. By... What does microcirculation mean? Blood flow in the small capillaries, in the small blood vessels. Then we put them on the mat, we put the local device on the arm where the, the needle goes, and we radiate with infrared, with a specific Heckel radiator the other side, and then we switch five minutes, five minutes. And after that, our nurses have a much easier time of placing the needle because the dilution of the blood vessel has positively increased. Also, sometimes these machines, they're very sensitive, so they will give us an alarm if the blood side or the plasma side of the circuit is not having enough, uh, flow. And what we've learned with, with PEMF, we can actually upregulate the blood flow. So when the machine gives us an alarm, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, patients get nervous and we go like, "No, no, that's just a sign of life. It does it in ants- in an anticipation that it's not gonna have enough flow so we can correct it." Okay. They chill out. If you put the PEMF mat sometimes also combined with the infrared radiation, we usually observe substantially better blood flows, so much less problems during apheresis. So I think it's gonna become kind of an industry standard. So I think literally, I mean, it, it would be fascinating to build this technology into our thera- uh, therapy seats so that every seat has it already built in. That would be amazing actually.
Andy Smith 21:05
Yeah, and it's really interesting that you're talking about microcirculation 'cause we do a lot of bonus episodes on here, and a lot of the studies, they mention microcirculation, how benef- how beneficial PEMF is for it. So, um, and, and you said about the putting PEMF into the seat. So you mentioned the controller goes on the arm and as well as the infrared. Are you also putting the, the, the patient onto, uh, the mat as well? Are they, are they laying on the mat or is that not always the case?
Markus Klotz 21:32
They're always on the mat. So we always use it duo because we wanna get the maximum effect. So if you have a very tiny person, female, young patient, had chronic illness for years, you really need to work with all the tricks. So we have heating pillows. We give them volume through NaCL 0.9, uh, intravenously. Sometimes we use diazepam to, to just calm them down a little bit intravenously, low dose. Um, then of course the radiation, uh, and the PEMF. And so yeah, we, we, we probably will, uh, even in the future start using two of the local devices, uh, and radiate and PEMF at the same time. So, uh, definitely a course that we- we're going to have a look at, yeah.
Andy Smith 22:13
Lots of development ideas going on in my head now, so we'll have to work together on something.
Markus Klotz 22:18
We will. We will for sure.
Andy Smith 22:20
Um, that's it. And do, do you use the PEMF for the entire, um, session? So, um or like you mentioned, are you kind of just using it initially, and then are you, um, integrating it again if you've got low blood flow and that sort of thing or is it kind of just running throughout the session?
Markus Klotz 22:37
Yeah. Because they sit on these mats on the therapy chair, we have very sophisticated custom-made, uh, therapy chairs with lots of hydraulics. You can completely balance it out. You can adjust it in lengths, angle, height. I mean, these things are super sophisticated. And then your mat goes on top. And once the patient is on there, he has two needles in his arm, so you really can't move around too much because the needles could suck onto the wall, they could st- they could get stuck to the back of the wall of the vein. So when they're on the mat, they stay on the mat, and there's literally zero reason to switch it off usually, right? So usually it will go through all the therapy. What we also have observed, if a patient starts to have troubles with flow during the therapy, what we do is we just help them to lift up their hips. We put the mat under their feet, upper and lower thighs, and that also really works well. So sometimes we use it to, to intervene. If we don't get enough circulation, then we're gonna do that, and of course with the local little device. But then we don't put it on the armband of course, because that's where the needle are at this time, but on the upper leg because that's like the largest muscle. And then we just switch between one leg and the other. So we have the mat plus the local device combined.
Andy Smith 23:43
Yeah, okay.
Markus Klotz 23:44
We haven't really a- been able to record data in such a way that we could see a difference between local plus mat and just mat only. We would need to do a, um, a study to, to, to with, with two local devices plus mat versus using half of the mat for the lower part of the body. I, I, I would, I would assume that we will definitely see a difference actually.
Andy Smith 24:05
Yeah, sure. Okay. And, um, it's interesting you saying about, um, you know, before you introde- introduced this, there would be people with, um, you know, problems with accessing the veins and things. Did you ever get patients that you just had a complete failure rate with, so that you actually cannot do the complete-
Markus Klotz 24:21
We didn't, but-
Andy Smith 24:22
... session?
Markus Klotz 24:22
We didn't in the past. It's a bit early. I, I don't wanna jump the gun. Uh, we've been using PEMF now for about two and a half months. So, uh, real calculation, probably, yeah, few hundred treatments, all good. And so far we haven't really had more than one or two cases where we had, uh, bad blood flow, where we needed cath heaters. Now, in the science world, it would be a bit too early on to go like, "Yay." "This solved all of the problem." In practical life, it looks like it did solve the problem, but we would need at least a year to, to publish proper data on this, and for the science to be solid and, and for anybody to take this serious. So I would say thousand treatments inside of a study, and then publishing it, peer reviewing it, then we can talk about proof, proof of concept. Right now, I would say we're collecting clinical experience. It's no longer anecdotal. We're now at the level of clinical experience, but it's not published yet. Yeah.
Andy Smith 25:20
Mm. No, sure. Interesting.
Markus Klotz 25:21
We, we should ac- we should actually start with you guys. That would be good.
Andy Smith 25:23
Yeah. No, 100%. Yeah. And, um, just explaining to people that are listening to this, and, and they might not quite understand what microcirculation is. How might getting, uh, how might microcirculation be really important for access- accessing those veins and, and getting a successful session?
Markus Klotz 25:43
So you as a human being, you're sitting in front of me with 30 trillion cells. And interestingly enough, you also have 30 trillion guest cells in your microbiome. But of your 30 trillion cells, 80% of those are in your blood, but only 2% of your body weight is blood. So that means, in return, the blood cells are very small, and also the blood goes to over 99% of the body. There's only very few parts where the blood doesn't go to. Um, front part of the eye gets the oxygen from the air, joints don't have blood in them, and so on. Immunoprivileged sites. So it's a very good idea to start with the blood, but to get to the blood you need to go to the veins. So usually we use the topical veins in, in the, in the armbands. And what is microcirculation? It's blood flow in the very small blood vessels. Now, why is it important, you would ask, because you're accessing the big blood parts, right? You're going into the largest vein in the arm. Yes, that's very true. But what people keep forgetting, your blood is not transported through the body only by the heart, but also by your blood vessels. The Russians at one point said 70% is done by the blood vessels, 30% is done by the heart. It's not that easy, but just to give you an idea. So it's very important that you have good microcirculation, that during the apheresis the body is fully supplied, that we remove a lot of the toxins from the tissues. So that's where the microcirculation comes in. But also the macrocirculation in the big blood vessels, because they're also very, very prone to respond positively to PEMF. The dilution of the veins, the diameter of the veins, and therefore the accessibility is definitely, and sometimes dramatically, increasing. And also, if we use real steel medical-grade needles, and we put them into a vein, very often the body responds with a bradykinin shock, and that makes them contract. With PEMF, we seem to be able to partially reverse that, sometimes fully, and we get access and we get blood flow again. So we might be onto something really nice here, because if in private clinical settings it works well, maybe later on, we're talking 20, 30 years by the speed the public systems work, this could be used in hospitals. Imagine if PEMF would be put in every therapy seat, knowing that whenever the patient has a blood flow problem, you push a button and the PEMF goes on. Not a bad idea, actually, isn't it?
Andy Smith 27:54
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we, we've, we tried doing a clinical trial before with the NHS in the UK about getting patients out of their beds 50% quicker, you know, just by integrating PEMF therapy into, uh, into the hospital beds. So it's, we're not a million miles away from there. And, you know, there's a lot of things coming out of Japan at the minute with these med beds that are all integrated with, um, PEMF technology. So, um, let's hope we're not a million miles away from that. Um you mentioned to me a little earlier about people that notice the difference between, uh, some, some people notice the PEMF being switched on, some people don't notice it being switched on. Is there a difference in the veins and accessing the veins, or any difference that you notice from, from doing a session, um, of the people that kind of notice the difference or not?
Markus Klotz 28:40
And it's, it's quite interesting. The, the result seems to be there independently if they notice it or not, right? So the nurses will see that the treatment works smoother when we have the PEMF mat there. And even if you ask the patient or you go like, "Oh, did you notice we switched it on?" And they'll go like, "No." So I like your little party trick with a little magnet or a metal piece.
Andy Smith 29:05
Yeah.
Markus Klotz 29:05
I don't know. You know that little black thing that you put on the PEMF mat, and then you hear in which frequency it is?
Andy Smith 29:10
That's it. Yeah.
Markus Klotz 29:11
Once you put that on the seat, they go like, "Oh, it's already switched on." Those that don't realize. Those that realize, they go like, "I can feel somehow funny. It's a bit almost like ticklish, lighter," whatever. You know, everybody describes a bit different. And as I said, it's some do, some don't. But the result of increasing the microcirculation is there independently if the patient is sensitive to feeling it or not. Yeah.
Andy Smith 29:33
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that's really important actually, 'cause we, we talk about high intensity and low intensity PEMF therapy quite often, and high intensity you can feel the pulsing. And some people like that because they can understand that there's something happening. Whereas low intensity, like what you guys are, are using, they can't feel it. Sometimes they don't think some- something's happening. So with somebody like you that's working with the blood, and you can see for the apheresis, it's the exact same result. So it's, uh, it's really good to kinda get that to match it together.
Markus Klotz 30:04
Absolutely
Andy Smith 30:05
And yeah, you said that you use the mat yourself as well. Um, so not only yourself, sometimes your colleagues are taking it. So what are you observing personally in terms of using the, uh, PEMF therapy?
Markus Klotz 30:17
So as mentioned before, my days are long, and my legs get kind of heavy, and I think that's been always the case even when I was younger. It's just genetic in my family. It's got to have something to do with the blood vessel structure. Um, however, it got worse after COVID because COVID is basically, when it turns into long COVID and also COVID, is, is a disease of the blood vessels. That's what many people don't understand. It's not a lung disease. It's the blood vessels on the lung and everywhere else. So for me, COVID, I was one of the people that did not respond very well. It got me into a wheelchair, and I was disabled. I... dark room, couldn't tolerate light, noise, sound, movement. Couldn't even see my six-month-old baby, and I was depressed and, and paranoid and anxious. So that didn't go very well. And I almost had no way out, and then apheresis saved my life, which is why I do the, the clinics, right? And so what effects do I feel from PEMF after my blood vessels have suffered so much from that long COVID? Um, maybe I see a bit of a increased effect because my blood vessels are not at the same quality than they were before the, the COVID. Now, the apheresis fixes them partially, uh, and to quite a good level. Like, I had fibrosis on the lung, gone. Myocarditis, gone. My blood vessel quality when measuring with the VasioScore, the laser, pretty much back to normal, but not yet completely. So I basically use it when everybody's out. I just put the mat on, and I just work on the mat, or I do my phone calls on the mat, and my biggest effect is literally from below the, the, the hips, upper legs, lower legs, feet. Basically, they don't feel heavy anymore. No more pain from long days whatsoever. That's amazing. I, I must admit, I haven't really tried any other effects, but probably it's fair to say it also relaxes. That's probably the second thing I noticed. Yeah. Definitely.
Andy Smith 32:05
All right. Good. And, um, yeah, we mentioned Tim Gray earlier, a mutual friend of our two, of us, and, um, you said to me about coming over to your clinic and trying some of your, your therapies out, and one that I saw on his Instagram was the hypothermia treatment that you guys do. You know, it looks a little bit uncomfortable. Um, an internal, uh, temperature probe as well needs to be, needs to be monitoring the internal temperature of the body. What would anyone benefit from hypothermia? You know, what's, what's happening in here, and, um, and what's the outcome of this?
Markus Klotz 32:38
So I don't know. Do you know the movie Dallas Buyers Club with, uh-
Andy Smith 32:42
I haven't
Markus Klotz 32:42
... Matthew McConaughey?
Andy Smith 32:44
Yeah.
Markus Klotz 32:44
So it was people that had HIV, and they created a, a company to be able to access antiviral medications. Now, the real guy in real life who sold them their medication is called Sean Morgenthaler, a bestseller author, and he showed up on my clinic door, and he was at Bell Scale 20. So he was basically in a wheelchair, and he came in, and being Texan, he was like, "I want 10 of this, 10 of this, 10 of this." Hypothermia, apheresis, and other treatments, hyperbaric. I said, "You're gonna be dead." He said, "Okay, nine of this, nine of this, and nine of this." I said, "No, no, mate. What we're gonna do is your fatigue dictates the level how fast you can do the treatments." And so under ph- uh, physician's guidance, he did that, and within six weeks, he did apheresis, hypothermia, apheresis, hypothermia, apheresis, hypothermia. And after six weeks, and he had Lyme combined with long COVID. After six weeks, he was from Bell Scale 20, wheelchair bound, back to 90% being able to go to the gym. I had never seen something like that before. So I was like, "He's onto something." And over the last years, I've studied it. Stefan Heckel, the son of the inventor of hypothermia, a very good friend of my wife and mine, um, and, uh, other experts, plus apheresis experts like Dr. Beate Jaeger and the inventor of, uh, apheresis, Professor Dietrich Seidel, and we've looked at that. So now it start- it's a- it's part of our protocol for chronic illness, for longevity, et cetera. What does hypothermia do as a standalone? It actually boosts up your immune system, in layman terms, to the highest gear. It fries off from your ad- uh, receptors, adrenergic receptors. Um, what are aner- adrenergic receptors? Let's say you and your girlfriend or me and my wife are in an argument, and my wife goes, "You're an idiot." And I go like, "Yes, of course." And adrenaline, and I'm angry. And then she goes like, "It's all my fault." And I go like, "Yes, of course." And I calm down. No adrenaline, and that's a thing of two minutes, two minutes. But those receptors have autoantibodies docking onto them for weeks, and they start dysregulating that. So you feel like you're getting fried from the inside in chronic illness, et cetera. The hypothermia will make those receptors release those autoantibodies, and then we can catch them with apheresis, or the body can process them. So that's the first two things. We're also going to increase microcirculation because the heat will dilute the veins. So you're gonna have more circulation, similar to PNF actually. And the, the last thing is we're mobilizing pathogens that are stuck in the tissues to come into the bloodstream where the body can process it, or we can take it out with apheresis again. So the combination of apheresis and hypothermia has been one of the most successful treatments in our private clinics, and, uh, we've published quite a bit of it. We haven't published studies of the combination. There's quite a bit of studies on hypothermia, quite a bit of studies on apheresis, and our next job is to combine the two and publish about that. Yeah.
Andy Smith 35:21
All right. Good. And, and actually, there was a major flaw in your analogy there, and that wives never accept they're wrong. So you might have to change that slightly. But no, I like that. That was good, good, uh, good way to explain it. And, uh, Markus, uh, thanks for joining us on the podcast today. Um, you know, it's really great to see different applications of PEMF therapy, hear about your clinic. Um, just to sign off, you know, uh, where can people find you? Where can people, um, come and visit the clinic? Where can people get the treatments? Uh, yeah.
Markus Klotz 35:52
Yeah. Very easy. So we're right in the heart of Zurich. It's called Quartier Enge, directly on the lake, 80 meters from the water edge. Uh, we're called Elysium Institute. Just Google it, and you'll find us, and then just come in for a coffee. There's always a scientist here that has an afternoon to kill. Uh, we are very, very much engaged with, with, uh, all of the scientific community because we're trying to do med tech, cutting edge, and Switzerland is a very good place for that. So yeah, uh, we're actually very accessible. Um, it is, uh, in my opinion, a very lovely little area here. We're right in between the Red Castle on one side and Vontobel Private Bank. So it's a, it's a very lovely, quiet, nice area, good restaurants around. So if you have an afternoon to kill in Switzerland or in Zurich, uh, pop by for a coffee or a tea. We have organic tea. Um, and if you, if you wanna go for some of the treatments, just try us, and our doctors will pick it up from there. Yeah.
Andy Smith 36:44
Uh, thanks a lot. And, uh, for all the listeners, thanks again for listening. Please do leave us a five-star review, subscribe. It really does help us get more amazing guests like Markus onto the podcast. Thanks again.
Markus Klotz 36:55
Thank you so much, Andy
