0:00 Cold Open and Introduction

Dr. Yi Song: Nobody needs to be in a wheelchair for the last 20 years of their life. Nobody should be sitting in the nursing home.

Len May: Is modern medicine fighting aging the wrong way?

Dr. Yi Song: I really never thought aging was a disease until seven years ago. What we know about the whole body’s function at the cellular level is only less than one percent of the whole thing that’s going on in our body.

Len May: Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to another episode of Everything is Personal. It’s not just any other episode. It actually is an in-person episode of Everything is Personal, with Dr. Yi Song, my guest here. How are you doing today?

Dr. Yi Song: Very well. Thank you for having me here.

Len May: Well, thank you for being here. This is a new experience for me, so I’ll give it a shot and see how I do. Just bear with me on this. But I want to ask you, is modern medicine fighting aging the wrong way?

1:04 Is Modern Medicine Fighting Aging the Wrong Way

Dr. Yi Song: I would not say it’s the wrong way. It’s just not the best way. It doesn’t have the fundamental philosophy, the approach that would address aging as a really solid approach. Modern science and medicine only look at each molecule, each cell, and then their function. And what we know about the whole body’s function at the cellular level is only less than one percent of the whole thing that’s going on in our body.

So then, what we don’t know, how do we understand how we can address the imbalance in the body, and what causes the aging related degenerative conditions? If we don’t understand and we don’t have any measurement in modern science, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If we only address the ones we know and we ignore the whole picture, that’s when the approach is incomplete.

2:32 Why Single Molecule Science Misses the Whole Body

Len May: Is Western medicine taking an approach that’s more reactionary, and not looking at what to do to prevent and look at the root causes of some of these conditions that are responsible for aging?

Dr. Yi Song: Yes, I think that’s part of the reason, because they only look at the molecule, and they only look at how the molecule interacts with the receptor. So they will say, oh, if this binds to that receptor, then it causes this. But that’s only part of thousands of other reactions going on in that particular process, just like the cannabis you’re studying.

So how do we understand that? It’s very difficult to pinpoint each one, because there are thousands of them. We have to go above everything to look at the whole forest, and then look at it from the energetic level. But that’s the part Western medicine doesn’t really look at, because it’s not built on this type of thing.

Len May: I really want to unpack this a little bit. For years I’ve been going to my doctor, Dr. Chang. She’s a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine. I just want people to understand the difference in experience. You look at both my pulses. She looks at my tongue and yells at me because I brush my tongue. And then if I have a pain, she follows it down. She says, that’s related to your kidney, there’s too much heat, we need to turn down the heat.

So when I have these conversations with traditional Western medical practitioners, they don’t understand it, and they discount it. How do you blend the two together to get people to understand that it is the whole body, and there’s energy, and everything is interrelated? It’s not just our philosophy versus your philosophy. It’s looking at the whole thing.

4:26 Root Cause Versus Masking the Pain

Dr. Yi Song: Did you go to your traditional Chinese medicine practitioner just for maintenance, for longevity purposes?

Len May: She’s my primary medical practitioner. That’s my doctor. I don’t really go to a doctor for maintenance per se. I go when I feel something is off, so I can get back into balance.

Maybe this is why I’m really, I don’t want to say anti traditional doctors in Western medicine. I just remember when I was a kid, my grandfather had a stroke, and he proceeded to have many complications. A lot of them were caused by different medications, adverse effects of medications. My mother and my grandmother would sit at a table with bags full of pills, talking to doctors, changing this and changing that. And I started seeing that there are adverse effects.

I also started seeing that if you have pain, maybe that’s a signal that something is going on. We tend to not deal well with pain, so we try to turn the pain down. I don’t want to feel it. But it’s signaling something in you. So when I go to doctors and they say, we’ll give you a pill for that, that wasn’t right for me. It didn’t feel right. When I found my doctor, it was all about what do I do, what’s the root cause. That’s what I was going for.

Dr. Yi Song: That’s basically the difference between the ancient Chinese practices and philosophy versus the Western medicine approach. Modern Western medicine was only established in 1910 by John D. Rockefeller. Before that, the medical schools were actually teaching a lot of alternative therapies, including homeopathic, naturopathic, and different methods of natural medicine. But when the modern Western medicine system was set up, they discarded all the natural therapies.

So they only teach this strict Western medicine approach, only studying each molecule and the cells. Back then they were not even studying the cells. They just looked at it as, okay, if you have high blood pressure, take this pill. If you have pain, take the painkiller. They don’t address the root cause of the pain, and they don’t look at where the pain came from.

Why are you trying to mask the pain? Because, like you said, it’s a signal to the body that something is going on and you need to pay attention. But if you mask the pain, you keep making the condition worse and worse, until finally the painkiller doesn’t even work anymore.

7:26 Beijing Roots and a Family of Physicians

Len May: Let me back up and talk about your origin story and how you got to this. Where did you grow up?

Dr. Yi Song: I grew up in Beijing, China, and my family has many generations practicing Chinese medicine, from my great grandfather up. Some of them were even palace physicians for the Chinese emperor in Beijing.

But my grandparents on my mother’s side actually studied Western medicine. My mother’s mother was trained in the medical school set up by John D. Rockefeller.

Len May: Johnny Rock. It comes full circle.

Dr. Yi Song: He was a philanthropist and he wanted to spread his medical system all over the world, so he set up many different medical schools in different countries, including China. She actually went to that school. So my mother’s parents were both in Western medicine. They were also working for the Communist Party, so they were very devoted to the communist ideology.

My mother grew up influenced by her parents. They were very into Western medicine, not really Chinese medicine. However, my mother’s older sister, who had a lot of health problems from birth, resorted to traditional Chinese medicine and studied with my great grandfather. From there she also studied with a lot of other masters in China. So growing up, she had a lot of issues and she was trying to use all the natural ways and Chinese medicine approaches to address her problems. That’s when I was influenced by the other side of the family.

Len May: When you were a kid, were you into medicine? Were you into books, athletics? What kind of kid were you?

Dr. Yi Song: I was always interested in medicine. Even when I was six, I was thinking I wanted to do something to solve the suffering from aging related disease.

I think partially because my grandmother on the maternal side had type 2 diabetes running in her family. She and her seven siblings all had type 2 diabetes, and their parents had type 2 diabetes. She had very severe complications from it since before I was born. She was almost 80 percent blind when I was born. My parents were not in Beijing at that time because of the Cultural Revolution, so my grandmother was taking care of me even though she was half blind. I probably got away with a lot of stuff.

In the last 10 years of her life, before she passed away when I was around 15, she was in hospital for long stretches with top notch care, but she still had intestinal blockage and a lot of eye problems because of the diabetes.

11:13 When Aging Started Looking Like a Disease

Len May: You’ve brought up this disease of aging a couple of times. When did you actually realize that aging is actually a disease?

Dr. Yi Song: I really never thought aging was a disease until maybe around seven years ago. I had been practicing Chinese medicine in Boston for the past 25 years, and I think this aging related issue came around maybe 10 years ago. Before that I was mostly treating people with pain, with fertility problems, with heart problems.

We were using alternative therapies in Chinese medicine and other holistic treatments to address a lot of problems people couldn’t solve with Western medicine, or for people who don’t want to take medication just for cholesterol or high blood pressure. We certainly have very good ways of treating that.

I started to realize it also because of the movement in our modern society about anti-aging. But even 25 years ago, when I started my practice, I always said I wanted to teach people how to do early prevention. That’s my goal, because I think early prevention is the key for a healthy long life.

12:52 Type 2 Diabetes and What Early Prevention Looks Like

Len May: Before I get into your principles, you brought up type 2 diabetes. A lot of these conditions that you may be predisposed to are based on lifestyle. So if that’s the case, what should somebody do? If they know they may have some sort of predisposition, why are you repeating the same thing your predecessor had? Should you be looking at what your genetics are, what runs in your family, and then taking action to make sure that you don’t turn those things on?

Dr. Yi Song: Exactly. That’s what early prevention is. My grandmother’s family definitely has this familial type 2 diabetes, and my mother has it too. I actually do have it too, because I did a DNA test recently within the past six months and it showed I do have that predisposition to type 2 diabetes.

My mother has a very strong predisposition, because she has a very close genetic composition to my grandmother. Once she reached age 50, she started having a lot of symptoms related to aging and pre-diabetic symptoms. We started to address those around that time, and we addressed all of it with natural therapies instead of giving her medications.

Up till now she’s 81. She doesn’t have any diabetic symptoms. Her blood sugar and A1C are all good. She doesn’t have high cholesterol or high blood pressure, and she doesn’t take any medication. So it definitely can be modified, even though you have a strong predisposition.

Len May: What are some of the things that you did? Is it related to lifestyle, supplementation, other things? Pharmaceuticals involved or not at all?

Dr. Yi Song: No pharmaceuticals involved. Mostly herbal medicine and dietary modification. My mom always wanted to eat some carbohydrate with her meals, because she said that’s not a meal if you don’t have carbohydrate. That’s a habit, it’s very difficult to change, but at least we told her she can’t have white rice or a lot of wheat products.

In the morning she has her oatmeal porridge. Over the past 20 years we also tried to give her other dietary meals that don’t have a lot of carbohydrate. We combine some herbs from Chinese medicine that you can make into porridge. It tastes like porridge, but it doesn’t have a high glycemic index.

16:09 Herbal Synergy Versus Single Molecule Pharmaceuticals

Len May: Bringing this philosophy to the US, did you get pushback from traditional practitioners saying what you’re bringing is herbs and plant medicine, it’s not FDA approved, it’s not really medicine? Did you get pushback from people saying it’s more quackery, not proven medicine, because it’s not FDA approved?

Dr. Yi Song: A lot of people do say that. What I would tell them is, this has been practiced for 6,000 years. It’s not just for 100 years or 200 years. And even though you say we don’t have really solid double blind studies like Western medicine pharmaceuticals, the difference is that herbal combinations are not one single ingredient extracted or synthesized from something. They have thousands of ingredients. Sometimes we don’t even know all the ingredients.

The difference between that and a pharmaceutical drug is that it has a lot of synergistic effects from all the other ingredients in the natural plants. It’s not just one single ingredient.

That’s the difference between red yeast rice, which works very well for cholesterol control if you take the natural red yeast rice, versus taking a statin drug. The statin drug was discovered by Japanese scientists from a certain fungus, and that fungus was actually used in the fermentation of red yeast rice. But the red yeast rice doesn’t cause a lot of the side effects of the statin drug, and at the same time it can lower cholesterol very effectively.

Len May: I find it fascinating, because big pharma’s focus is on single molecules. I mentioned up top that I work with the endocannabinoid system as well. A lot of these drugs come from plants, but the synergistic effect of what’s in that plant is maybe what’s giving you the therapeutic effect, not just a single molecule. They tried it with THC, with Marinol. Yes, it made people drowsy, it made them sleep like a sedative, but it didn’t have all the other effects, because it’s synergistic. You have thousands of years of real world experience, and they have double blind placebos with a mouse. We’re not mice. We’re humans.

19:08 The Six Principles of Natural Longevity

Len May: I want to ask you about your book, The Six Principles of Natural Longevity. Which of the principles do you feel that people ignore most of all?

Dr. Yi Song: I think early prevention is the one that people mostly ignore.

Len May: I should have asked you what the six principles are first.

Dr. Yi Song: Number one, recognize your body’s constitution. No two people are the same, and you cannot use one size fits all. If something works for another person, maybe it’s not going to work for you perfectly, even for longevity purposes.

The second principle is early prevention, because once you recognize your body’s constitution, you need to address the imbalance, the weakness, the excess as soon as possible. But that part most people ignore. For 25 years I’ve wanted to teach people early prevention. I quote the Yellow Emperor. I tell them all these things. But I find most people wait until the symptoms are already so bad, and then they think, maybe Western medicine is not working for me, I need to look for something else.

Len May: I really think that when you talk about taking action, we’re creatures of comfort. We’re comfortable in our routines, and to prevent something from happening means I have to be uncomfortable. But I don’t think it’s that difficult. Like you were talking about diabetes, modifying certain things in your diet. If I had this genetic predisposition, maybe things like alcohol, sugar, simple carbohydrates, at the very least I limit those things or try to get rid of them completely. It’s not changing your entire lifestyle. It’s modifying certain things that you know are associated with that. So it’s getting people to feel okay with being a little bit uncomfortable, and dangling some carrots in front of them, that you’ll feel better about yourself.

Dr. Yi Song: I find a lot of people don’t want to make that change, because they feel the pain of making the change is bigger than the pain of staying status quo. A lot of people have the illusion of, why do I want to make these changes and sacrifice my pleasure? Instead, if I keep doing what I’m doing now, even though I know it’s bad for me, then when something bad really happens several years down the road, my doctor will figure out something to treat it.

That’s a lot of people’s illusion. They don’t think ahead. Sometimes the damage you do to your body over time can be irreversible.

Len May: No, you’re absolutely right. So continue with the other principles.

Dr. Yi Song: The third principle is treat the root cause. Once you know you need to do early prevention and you already know your body’s constitution, then you need to treat the root cause, not just the symptoms.

The fourth principle is tend your body like a garden instead of a machine. The fifth one is follow the natural rhythm. And the sixth one is combine all the approaches holistically, in the right proportion for your type of body. That’s when you can achieve maximum optimal health.

Len May: I love that. My podcast is called Everything is Personal, and that’s my passion in life as well, because we’re all individuals and we have this cookie cutter approach to everything we do.

23:19 DNA Testing, Epigenetics and Your Body’s Blueprint

Len May: Can we unpack each one of them a little bit? The first one is find out your unique self. What are some of the ways that you can take a look and see what is unique about you?

Dr. Yi Song: Nowadays we have DNA testing. That is a way of finding out some fundamental uniqueness about your body.

Len May: I had a conversation with a doctor today and he said, I don’t really care about DNA, I care about epigenetics, what’s expressed. My position was that if you don’t know what your life’s GPS is, how are you going to know what to turn on and what to turn off? Epigenetics are important, absolutely. But don’t you want to know where the potholes are in your own road?

Dr. Yi Song: Yes. Of course, sometimes you can figure it out yourself by just experimenting. But if you have the blueprint of your DNA test, you can actually have some guidance.

For example, I figured out myself that I cannot do red light therapy at night. If I do it at night, it disturbs my sleep. When I did the DNA testing, it showed I have certain genes that can affect my circadian rhythm very easily. I’m always a light sleeper. Because of that, I understand why I cannot do the red light therapy at night. If I do it in the morning, it works for me and I feel great.

25:36 Blood Glucose, Cortisol and Arbitrary Reference Ranges

Len May: I’m so glad you brought that up, because I also talk to people and doctors about this whole notion of biomarkers, we can get your blood work. As you can see, I’m tattooed, so I’m not afraid of needles. But when I get my blood drawn, I almost always pass out. I told a functional medical professional that I need to lie down, and he said no, you’ll be fine. I don’t know how much time went by, but somebody was saying, hey, come in here, because I guess I started sliding off the chair and passing out. They got me juice and I was fine.

When I went through my results, everything was good except my blood glucose level was high. And I don’t eat sugar. I don’t eat simple carbs. It didn’t make any sense. He said, I think it’s the cortisol, you were stressed. He said if you’re worried about it, we can prescribe a glucose monitor, you wear that for a few weeks and we’ll see. Which is great, and that’s exactly what happened. It was stress.

But most of the time you go to a doctor with a high glucose level and they’ll give you medication for that. You’re pre-diabetic. There’s no other option they can give you that’s non medication, to look more holistically and see what the root cause is. And by the way, reference ranges are different from different labs.

Dr. Yi Song: Yes, human beings set that reference range. And for a lot of people, cholesterol at an older age actually needs to be a little bit higher than the normal range, for your cognitive function.

Len May: Isn’t your brain cholesterol? That’s what I find interesting too. So we created these ranges and they’re arbitrary.

27:18 Stress, the Microbiome and Autoimmune Conditions

Dr. Yi Song: Number three is treat the root cause. Treating the root cause basically means you are not just looking at the genetics or the epigenetics, you have to look at the other things.

Sometimes when you develop certain digestive issues for a long time, you have an upset stomach, you have IBS, it may not just be your digestive system problem. Nowadays it’s fashionable to talk about the microbiome. But what affects the microbiome? It can be hormone related. It can be stress related. When you have stress, the stress affects your nervous system, and the nervous system affects your hormones, and that’s why it acts on your digestive system.

It’s not just that you supplement certain bacteria and it fixes your microbiome. If your stress level is still high and it’s still acting on the digestive system, it doesn’t matter what you take. If you don’t fix that trigger, you will still have it.

Len May: My mom, when I was growing up, always told me all the diseases are caused by stress. Kind of right, in a way. But for me the curiosity is, how? How does it work? If we have cortisol released into our bloodstream at different times that it’s not supposed to be released, you were talking about a messed up circadian rhythm, I find it to be a domino effect. Every single time you’re just treating the symptom, you’re not really addressing the root cause.

So I want you to go into number four, five, six.

Dr. Yi Song: Number four is tend your body like a garden. That again explains everything about stress. When your body is a garden, it has an irrigation system circulating to supply the whole garden. But if you have stress, it can cause blockage in certain areas, and that blocks the circulation system. That can affect systems even further away from where the blockage is.

So when you only look at the symptoms, you say, oh, you have this digestive problem, you have a stomach ulcer. But the root cause of that problem is not just in the stomach. It’s in the irrigation system that’s supplying the nourishment to the stomach. That’s why the stomach is not functioning correctly. If we don’t look at that and only treat the stomach, you will never be able to solve the whole problem.

Len May: I have a friend who has colitis and I feel that they’re very stressed. Their job is stressful. They’re constantly watching what they eat, because if they take something that’s going to create inflammation, they’re going to have symptoms and they can’t function. I asked, have you tried mindfulness, just sitting there and getting your mind still for a little bit, and doing certain lifestyle modifications outside the food that’ll help you reduce that stress level? And they said they need to talk to their doctor. They’re afraid to get off their medication because they’re going to have those symptoms again.

Dr. Yi Song: A lot of people with colitis or irritable bowel disease have long-term stress. That’s what causes it. Colitis is also an autoimmune condition, and most autoimmune conditions come from long-term stress, because that’s what affects your immune system.

When you have this fight or flight, all this anxiety and stress, it acts on your brain, causing the endocannabinoid system to dysregulate the immune system, the immune function, and the hormones. If you have it over decades, of course some people with colitis do have a certain predisposition or a family history. But a lot of people don’t have any family history. It’s just because they have this kind of nervous reaction all the time in the brain, in their mental health, and that’s what causes it.

32:08 Follow the Natural Flow

Len May: It’s all interconnected. What’s next?

Dr. Yi Song: The fifth one is you need to follow the natural flow, because everything has ebbs and flows. That again is to try to regulate the irrigation system in the garden. How you do that is you just have to recognize everything has its rhythm. You cannot force nature to do something it’s not supposed to do. You cannot swim against the current, because that’s going to be counterproductive. You’re going to drain all your energy and you still don’t achieve what you want.

In Western culture they don’t really teach you that. They actually teach you the other way. They say you can do whatever you want to do, human beings are superior, we have the power, so if you want to do this, just keep going and don’t fail. If there’s something against what you want to achieve, back out a little bit and find the right time. They never teach you that.

Len May: It’s really interesting that you bring that up. I’m going to go back to my own experience with Dr. Chang, about something you’re experiencing, this pain, it has nothing to do with your elbow. It’s not like you played tennis and hit it. It’s something else that’s going on. So everything needs to be in a rhythm. But how do you actually go about understanding where you have some of those blockages? Is there a certain technique that you would suggest?

Dr. Yi Song: Besides recognizing the predisposition from familial DNA testing and epigenetics, in Chinese medicine we look at your body through the pulse, the tongue, the facial expression, the color, the voice, and even your activities, just the way you do things. Sometimes you just look at somebody without even talking to them and you can tell they’re a very nervous type of person. They’re very stressed out all the time and they want everything to be perfect the way they want it. Those types of people tend to suffer a lot of symptoms associated with this kind of stress causing blockage. That’s how we recognize it.

34:47 Heat, Cold and Where the Circulation Stops

Len May: Would you then recommend certain herbs? Explain this whole notion of hot and cold, because there are certain times that my doctor would say you need something to create more heat, more energy, and certain things are cooling.

Dr. Yi Song: Most people’s body type is either heat or cold. Me, I was born with heat. I always had heat, I can tell. I generally do not run cold in my body. The heat symptoms I would have are a very good appetite, some stomach heat, and my digestive system has a certain weakness. Combining that with the heat, right after I was born I tended to have eczema, and I also had a lot of other symptoms related to dampness and heat and digestive system weakness, even nowadays.

But I’ve already modified a lot of things over the past 50 years. Of course, in the first 10 years I probably didn’t know anything. But then I started realizing it and I started working on it. Now I don’t have any symptoms of digestive system weakness. However, I still have that digestive system weakness.

That goes back to all the previous principles, because you recognize what you were born with, and then you try to strengthen the weakness and moderate the excess. But you don’t want to do things that work against it. If I know I already have heat, why would I want to eat more heat producing food? Then you’re adding more heat. If you already have cold in your body like my mom, she’s always cold and she has a deficiency, she doesn’t generate enough fire in her body. So you’re not supposed to give her food that makes her even more deficient. You’re supposed to nourish her body. And for people with a lot of excess, you’re not supposed to give them a lot of tonifying food like ginseng, because that will make them hyper.

Len May: I’ll use myself as an example. I was born in Lithuania, so speaking of communism, I was under the Soviet Union, but I came to the US when I was about six or seven years old. I grew up in Philadelphia, and Philadelphia is cold. I just got back from Philadelphia and it was 36 degrees, and I came to LA and it was 86 degrees. A 50 degree swing. I don’t like the cold. I like feeling warm. But I can’t really say that I run cold. I just don’t like the cold. So when you know this about yourself, what are some of the actions? Do you start eating certain types of foods that are more cooling, or do you avoid heat?

Dr. Yi Song: Does your Chinese medicine doctor say you have heat or cold in your body?

Len May: Heat.

Dr. Yi Song: Okay. That means you need to have food that is more calming and disperses the heat. Even though you say when you were in Philadelphia you would feel cold, and you don’t like the cold, that doesn’t mean you actually have a tendency toward cold, or that your body is in the cold category.

For example, some people have extra heat, but they also have cold hands and cold feet. That actually means they have a blockage in their circulation.

Len May: Right. So it’s not being dispersed throughout the entire body.

Dr. Yi Song: Exactly. So it’s not circulating. A lot of times people have cold hands and cold feet all the time, all year round. Sometimes they actually have extra heat in their body, but it’s just not dispersing.

Imagine the garden hose is blocked. The pressure builds up in certain areas, so that manifests as heat in certain systems. But because it’s not flowing correctly, your hands and feet are the extremities furthest from the heart, and that’s where it will show up as cold hands and cold feet.

Len May: If that heat is being blocked in a certain area of the body, that can create adverse symptoms in that part of the body, which may be unrelated to anything else. The heat is trapped in your liver, your kidneys, or as pain somewhere.

Dr. Yi Song: You would have to work on it with herbal medicine and other things. Somebody with that kind of blockage would have cold hands and cold feet, but because they also have this extra heat generated from the obstruction and it’s not flowing correctly, they can also have hypertension.

40:34 Herbal Formulas and High Altitude Blood Pressure

Len May: Going forward, what are some of the tools and remedies available to us today to combine Eastern and Western philosophy, medicine, Taoism, to prevent people from expressing disease, and also to treat the expression of some of these conditions?

Dr. Yi Song: When you have any predispositional symptoms, you don’t want to just say, let me take this pill. It never works that way, because nature works in a way that has to be synergistic with different ingredients.

For a general condition like high cholesterol or high blood pressure, if you recognize the predisposition and you modify the lifestyle and you still have the symptoms, then the best way is to use natural approaches like herbal formulas, acupuncture, and even combining some natural ingredients in your food to treat it.

One good example is that my retreat center is in Colombia and it’s at 7,000 feet. When people in LA already tend to have some high blood pressure tendencies, some of them are generally at 130 over 80. If they go to Colombia at 7,000 feet, usually their body will react, because it’s thinner air and the heart has to work harder. They would tend to have 140, 150, or even 170 systolic blood pressure.

So I would always ask them, do you have this blood pressure issue when you’re at home? And if I know that, I would have a formula already prepared, because I know if they’re at higher altitude and they don’t adjust, they would start having high blood pressure symptoms. I would give them that drink, the formula, and once they take it, usually within two days their blood pressure would be back to normal.

That’s how you deal with these types of things, because you don’t want to just take the blood pressure pill. A lot of people who come to my retreat center were already on blood pressure pills for years, and even then, at higher altitude it doesn’t work for them. They would still have a blood pressure spike.

44:20 Why Colombia

Len May: Where is your retreat in Colombia?

Dr. Yi Song: Near Medellín. It’s very close to the airport, only 10 minutes outside. That’s why it’s at higher elevation. Medellín is in the valley, but the airport is outside of the city and it’s at a higher elevation. Where we are is even a little bit higher than the airport.

Len May: I think the warmth of the people there is healing anyway.

Dr. Yi Song: I just feel the energy, and also the clean food, because you don’t have a lot of preservatives. The air is very clean because of the higher elevation. You don’t have the pollution trapped in there. When you go to the city of Medellín, because it’s in the valley, the pollution is worse.

Len May: So why Colombia?

Dr. Yi Song: I actually just stumbled upon it in 2017. I had no intention of going to Colombia. It was just because of this group of people I got to know who were doing some investment in agriculture in Colombia, so they organized a trip. I always liked traveling to different parts of the world. Even before that I was traveling to Australia, Singapore, Thailand, all over. So I just went with them and I fell in love with it immediately.

Part of the reason was that I’ve been to so many other parts of the world, and most places don’t have moderate weather all year round. You either have extreme cold, extreme heat, or alternating cold and heat. You don’t have this kind of temperate weather all the time. Where I am now in Colombia, because of the elevation, it’s 70 Fahrenheit year round. That’s part of why I got so intrigued by it.

Also because I feel the energy. I do a lot of things by how I feel. That’s what I’m talking about with following the natural flow. You have to feel how your body connects to your environment, and you should be able to feel it.

Len May: I think people block their own intuition about certain things, because weather makes such a huge difference. Like I said, I just came back from Philadelphia and I feel different. When I’m here in LA it connects with me energetically. I feel at home. I can go hike in the wintertime in shorts. It gets a little cold, but it’s not Philadelphia cold.

46:20 Discovering Stem Cells in Colombia

Len May: I thought maybe also because the US is very strict in their guidelines with stem cells and other therapies. Maybe that’s why you made that choice.

Dr. Yi Song: No, actually when I first went to Colombia, I had no idea about stem cells. I started the retreat first, because I wanted people to feel the same kind of energy I feel when I go there. I feel it can help people rejuvenate their body and promote the circulation, the energy flow. That was my goal, why I got the place after 2017.

I actually started the retreat center in 2018, but I got introduced to the lab in Colombia in 2020. So it was two years after that. Because I already had the retreat, and then I got introduced to stem cells, I understood that actually you can do a lot more. You have higher quality stem cells from Colombia, or even outside of the US in some other countries.

That’s when I thought, I can combine these together and give people’s bodies a jump start treatment with stem cells, and then they can enjoy nature’s healing power in the retreat, and they can also incorporate the principles I teach.

47:45 Placenta, Umbilical Cord and Chinese Medicine

Dr. Yi Song: After I started doing stem cells, I actually feel the stem cell treatment is applying what I talk about in these six principles. The placenta and umbilical cord were used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. It’s not something new. But back then they didn’t have the technology to isolate the cells, so they could only grind up the dried placenta to treat people with deficiency, to nourish people’s energy.

The principle is the same, because the energy in the placenta or umbilical cord is from the newborn baby, and it has the energy to supply the wood to the cauldron in your body. When you are aging, your cauldron is declining and the fire is diminishing. If you can add some energy to it, that’s when you can slow down the decline.

Len May: It’s so odd to me that the United States doesn’t allow placental stem cells, and only very limited amounts of stem cell therapies. But you also have peptides, exosomes, and stem cells. Do you incorporate those into your protocols as well? What should people actually do, outside of their general maintenance pharmaceutical approach? How can they utilize some of these treatments like stem cells and exosomes?

50:02 Exosomes, Peptides and FDA Limits

Dr. Yi Song: We actually use exosomes, peptides, all these things. And stem cell treatment is not one magic bullet that fixes everything. It’s more like a jump start. When your body is declining, like a car that doesn’t start, you need something super powerful to give it a start, and then your body can start healing itself.

But for your body to start healing itself in a prolonged and effective way with stem cell treatment, you actually need to combine the other treatments like peptides and exosomes. Exosomes come from stem cells. The reason exosomes are more popular now in the US than stem cells is because they’re acellular. But still, none of these are approved by the FDA. Not even PRP is approved by the FDA.

Len May: It’s interesting to me, because one of the reasons I started my company was to build the world’s largest repository on efficacy. I was so frustrated with this whole FDA approach. We already have hundreds and thousands of people giving feedback, and we can see that it’s working for them. Why do we have to wait for the phases of the FDA and spend billions of dollars to get it approved, when we know that it works, and as you said, for thousands of years?

51:02 Where to Start With the Six Principles

Len May: If somebody connects to your six principles and they wanted to do this, what would you say somebody should be doing as far as lifestyle goes, preventatively, to be ahead of some of these conditions they know they’re predisposed to?

Dr. Yi Song: The first step for somebody who really resonates with these six principles is to consult someone. It doesn’t have to be me. It can be any traditional Chinese medicine practitioner who can recognize your body’s constitution according to Chinese medicine principles, because it’s not just about the DNA predisposition. It’s also about the different systems in your body, how they interact, and whether you have a deficiency in, say, the digestive system or the kidney. It doesn’t mean you have any disease. It’s just at the energetic level. You need to recognize that.

Once you know that, you can start thinking about what steps you can take to strengthen the deficiency and moderate the excess. In that way your body is in better balance. But everybody is still aging. It’s not like if your body is in good balance then you don’t age. That’s inevitable.

52:11 Maximum Lifespan and Health Span

Dr. Yi Song: Even though biohackers say they want to live to 180, I don’t know what you think of that.

Len May: I think that we have a vessel, and this vessel is meant for a certain lifespan. As long as I’m healthy in this vessel, as long as I’m not in a diaper, as long as my quality of life is good, I want to live until it’s no longer that quality of life. So I will add fuel, whatever I need to do for this vessel to operate at its optimal level. But when it’s done, it’s done. And we move on.

Dr. Yi Song: That’s why I think in the Yellow Emperor’s book, he already talked about the maximum human lifespan, 120. I don’t think we can go beyond that, even though you try all these different things, biohacking, all these things. I think again, that’s against nature. In nature, everything that has a beginning has an end. Our flesh is part of the organic cycle of life on Earth, and in the universe. Everything has to have a beginning and an end. There’s no such thing as having something perpetually.

Len May: I completely agree with you, and that’s why the body signals to us. I had my dog recently pass away and she lived until 12. Great life, no suffering. And then when she went, she went. I have my mom’s aunt who lived until 102, but the last 10 years of her life it wasn’t really living, it was existing. I don’t think that biohacking yourself to live long beyond that quality of life is what we have to do.

Dr. Yi Song: But I think we can certainly achieve that we can live to the end of our body’s designed maximum lifespan with a good health span, so that nobody needs to be in a wheelchair for the last 20 years of their life. Nobody should be sitting in the nursing home.

Our goal is that even though some people can only live to 100 and some people can live to 120, we can be doing the activities we enjoy until the last day. And then once it’s time to go, it’s time to go. That’s the ideal way. You maximize your lifespan.

Len May: We’re all different, as you said. Some of us are meant to live longer, some less, but as long as our quality of life is there, we maximize the ability.

55:04 Rapid Fire: Concerts, Albums and a Childhood Room

Len May: I have some questions I ask all my guests that are unrelated to what we’re talking about, mostly music related questions. Do you remember what the very first concert was that you attended?

Dr. Yi Song: I actually grew up in a family into classical music. I know you’re very into different pop music and you have all the records. I’m not familiar with all those things. My grandfather grew up listening to Mozart and Beethoven, and when I was growing up, before he passed away, he played those all the time. That’s how I was influenced.

The first concert I ever went to would be in the US after I came here, because in China I don’t even remember ever going to a concert. Back then we didn’t have a lot of pop concerts either. When I came here I was also drawn to classical music, and because I was in Boston, I went to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Len May: What was the last concert that you attended?

Dr. Yi Song: I think that was also a classical concert, maybe in Tanglewood.

Len May: I like classical. I saw Yo-Yo Ma. I saw Dudamel with the LA Philharmonic. Everything, not just rock. And Philadelphia has the Philadelphia Philharmonic, that’s very famous, that’s very good.

One more music question. For the next year, you could only listen to five albums. You don’t have to remember the name of the actual album. What would those five albums or artists be?

Dr. Yi Song: Recently I’ve been so busy and I haven’t been listening to a lot of music. However, my partner, my boyfriend, is very into rappers and all the different pop music, rock and roll. Since he’s been playing it in the car, I’ve been listening to them. So I would say even some Bad Bunny is not bad. It sounds interesting to me because he keeps playing it. And he also plays some other old artists who have already passed away, like Freddie Mercury.

Len May: Queen.

Dr. Yi Song: Yes, those types of things.

Len May: Some of the classic rock stuff too. All right, final question for you. Please describe what your room looked like when you were growing up.

Dr. Yi Song: I had a very small room, because I didn’t grow up with a big house or anything. We lived in an apartment building and we still have that apartment. Of course right now it’s empty because nobody has been there for a long time. I had a very tiny room with a twin bed, and then I had my desk. Most of the time I would be studying, sitting at the desk. That’s how I grew up.

Len May: Did you have any artwork on the wall? Anything that you can remember?

Dr. Yi Song: I actually studied painting between the ages of about four to 12, and I was a very good painter. I can do watercolor Chinese calligraphic painting, painting shrimp and bamboo. It’s a little bit meditative too, so I like that.

Len May: Love that. I took a class at LACMA for Chinese calligraphy and watercolor. I paint with oil, so it’s a completely different style of paint.

Dr. Yi Song: Do you still paint regularly now?

Len May: I stopped painting during COVID. I just lost my inspiration for it. I’ve painted a little bit here and there, but I used to paint a lot with oil. I sold paintings. People would buy them. I put some up online and I gave some to restaurants.

Dr. Yi Song: Do you paint mostly portraits or landscapes?

Len May: I paint anything that inspires me. There are a couple of paintings that people wanted. I paint sneakers. Paintings of sneakers. I was also inspired by a painter named Vladimir Kush, a surrealist. Very interesting, like the next version of Salvador Dalí, so there are images within images within images. I painted one I call my woman bridge. It’s a naked woman, but she’s the bridge. She’s connected to the bridge. So it’s a little bit abstract too.

1:00:40 Where to Find Dr. Yi Song

Len May: Doctor, where can people engage with your content? Where can they get your book, and anything else that you want to share?

Dr. Yi Song: The book I just published, The Six Principles to Natural Longevity, is only the abridged version of the big book that’s coming. I’m still working on finishing that up.

For that particular book, you can actually get a free ebook copy of one of the principles, because I break them down into six pamphlets. It’s easier for people to understand. If you want to read more, you can get the six principles and read all of them. Or if you’re interested in pre-ordering the hardbound copy that’s coming out in a few months, you can pre-order it at a significant discount, about 75 percent off. From there you can also have a complimentary 15 minute consultation with me to discuss your concerns and what your body constitution is.

Len May: Love it. And for your retreat centers, where can they go to find that?

Dr. Yi Song: They can either go to stemcelltherapyexperts.com, or they can go to theenergyretreat.com, which is a website I haven’t updated for the past three years, so I need to update it.

Len May: When we post, we’ll tag you and put all those links up. And for my audience, thank you so much for listening. Don’t forget to like, subscribe and share. I’m so grateful for all the wonderful feedback, comments and reviews. Keep doing that. And don’t forget to buy my book, Making Cannabis Personal, on Amazon or wherever you get books. I also have a new one coming out, so stay tuned for that one. I’ll let everybody know. And for now, thank you so much.