Sasha John Bernier: Why is there this cloudiness about what stem cells are? Most people don’t understand there are many different kinds of stem cells. Most people connect stem cells with embryonic stem cells that can grow into a human body. So because they are embryonic stem cells and you cannot obtain it without destroying an embryo, so it’s very controversial and also it’s unethical. People also don’t understand the difference between umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells and other types of pluripotent stem cells.

When people hear stem cells, there’s still a lot of cloudiness behind it. But what we do know is that Robert F. Kennedy has been a proponent of it. He’s gotten a lot of heat for pushing for research. He supports the umbilical cord type of stem cell but there’s a lot of cloudiness to it. What is stem cell and why is there this cloudiness about what stem cells are?

Dr. Yi: So the cloudiness mainly came from most people don’t understand there are many different kinds of stem cells and most people connect stem cells with embryonic stem cells that can grow into a human body. So because they are embryonic stem cells and you cannot obtain it without destroying an embryo, so it’s very controversial and also it’s unethical. So that’s the part most people don’t know about. They think if it’s stem cell it’s embryonic stem cell, but then on the other hand people also don’t understand the difference between umbilical cord mesenchymal stem cells and other types of pluripotent stem cells. So they are very afraid of the pluripotent stem cells because pluripotent stem cells can grow into tumor if you introduce into a recipient’s body. Many people are afraid of it and they think it’s not proven and it has a lot of risk.

2:06 Dr. Yi’s Personal Journey to Stem Cells

Sasha John Bernier: Okay. So, let’s talk about your journey into stem cell. You opened up an acupuncture clinic in Boston. You were into healthy eating. You were doing all these things and then boom, stem cell came in. Talk about that. How did that come in? Why did you start researching and wanting to understand stem cell?

Dr. Yi: I was always interested in the scientific facts about stem cells but I got interested in stem cells four years ago. It was just by serendipity. I got connected with a lab in Colombia and I already had the Zenergy retreat back then and at the same time my mom was suffering from certain conditions that we tried everything including acupuncture and many methods we were trying to do naturally and she was not improving. So it just happened all at the same time. Then I said, “Okay, since we have nothing to lose, why don’t we just try the stem cells and also it’s a test.” More like my mom is the guinea pig for the quality of the stem cells from the Colombian lab. So she had it in October 2021 and she had great results. So that what prompted me to think, you know, there’s really something about this. It’s not just some kind of pseudoscience or some unproven treatments. And then once I started research more, I find out that actually there are many, many research that have been done all over the world, most of them outside of the United States because of the regulation in the US.

3:56 Why US Doctors Resist Stem Cells

Sasha John Bernier: Okay, let’s talk about that. So you have one subject, your mom did well, but just because you had one person that you know, it could have still been other factors we don’t know. So, what made you certain it was the stem cell? Because, you know, I’ll give you a situation. My grandmother has arthritis, right? I came to you after a referral. We talked about it, but you know, my sister’s a doctor and she said, “No, this is not proven. It’s scary. Stay away from it.” And so doctors always say, “Stay away from it.” So what is it that the doctors in the US are missing that doctors in Colombia, Europe, Panama, etc. are catching?

Dr. Yi: I think it’s just the doctors in the US, they are more affected by the whole system set up by John D. Rockefeller in 1910, 150 years ago. And they were taught in the whole system that only the double blind study proven methods are the proven treatment to be applied. You could not go outside of this box.

So on the other hand, while I already started looking and my mom already had the stem cell treatment, I also had a cow on this property in Zenergy and the cow delivered the baby. And after the cow delivered the baby, the cow ate up the whole placenta and umbilical cord. So why would the cow eat the whole thing? Maybe the cow knows that there’s nutrition value from the placenta and umbilical cord just by basic instinct. And also in Chinese herbal medicine, dried up placenta has been used for hundreds of years to help nourish people who have a lot of deficiencies. So it’s not something like we just came up with in the past 10 years saying, “Oh, let’s use umbilical core stem cells to treat this.” I think it’s the advancement in the technology that allow us to get better quality stem cells from the umbilical cord without any contamination, without a lot of other things so that it won’t trigger any immune response in the recipient’s body, but at the same time the concept actually is not new. It’s from thousands of years ago and even the animal basic instinct they know that.

6:46 Stem Cells and Arthritis Treatment

Sasha John Bernier: Let’s walk us through this. So my grandmother has arthritis. How does stem cell help in that situation?

Dr. Yi: So I know your grandmother is 96 and I even saw her. So she would benefit from stem cell because she can have a better quality of life to whatever age she can live to without pain.

Sasha John Bernier: But how does stem cells specifically help with arthritis? What is arthritis for instance and what is it that stem cell does that treats arthritis?

Dr. Yi: So arthritis from aging is osteoarthritis because your cartilage has worn out in the joint. So then the bone is grinding on the bone and it’s not like completely out. Surgeons telling people, “You’re a bone on bone, you need joint replacement.” It’s not like 100% of cartilage is gone. But because you have so little cartilage left, there’s no cushion between the bone. So every single movement you make, it causes the friction and the friction causes inflammation because it’s your body’s natural response. So that’s why you have pain. So anybody having pain is from the inflammation caused by either no cartilage or caused by injury for athletes, for young people, or caused by just some kind of repetitive injury or something. So anytime you have pain in any parts of your body, that’s a sign of inflammation.

8:24 Inflammation Reduction in Athletes

Sasha John Bernier: That’s interesting because we met at an event where Eduardo Perez, a baseball player, who’s on Sunday Night in America, baseball night in America on Sundays or ESPN. He was a client of yours and he said some good things about it. I’m also a client of Dr. Yi. Phenomenal. I’ve already had one knee replacement on the right side and I was supposed to have one on the left and she’s like, “No, try me.” And I’ll be honest with you, if you guys have not tried the umbilical cord stem cell, it’s pretty special and Colombia is pretty nice as well. So try that out. So as athletes, I guess when you’re running, you’re exercising, you suffer more, I guess, problems with your cartilage and you’re saying that this stem cell helps with that.

Dr. Yi: Yeah. So for example, we also met your friend who is a runner and then she has some foot problem. So that’s because she keeps running and then she keeps having this pounding pressure on her foot. Then if there’s inflammation, maybe she tears some tissue fascia on the bottom of the foot. Then over time she keeps running and then it keeps reinjuring the area that has more and more inflammation, that’s why she has more pain. So she can do physical therapy, she can do steroid injection, she can do shockwave therapy, all these things is to help reduce inflammation. But so far the most powerful treatment I’ve seen that can reduce inflammation is actually stem cells. So with aging, everybody has more inflammation going on in the body. That’s one of the hallmarks of aging. So nobody is escaping from aging. Nobody can reverse aging. So all you can do is to reduce the amount of chronic inflammation going on inside your body. Then you can improve your health and you can live with less pain or even no pain when you’re old.

10:24 Stem Cells and Anti-Aging

Sasha John Bernier: Interesting. So I know a lot of people they come and get stem cell because they want to reduce or slow down their aging process. It’s because it’s reducing inflammation of the body. Is that what it is? Is that why people use stem cell?

Dr. Yi: So the anti-aging aspect of stem cell treatment, one aspect is about reducing inflammation. The other aspect is about stimulating your own body stem cell so that you don’t have the dramatic decline in stem cell. Because aging, the root cause of aging, like now we keep talking about treating the root cause. So the root cause of aging is actually stem cell exhaustion. Even chronic inflammation, the root cause of chronic inflammation is also the stem cell exhaustion because our body needs stem cells to keep regenerate, to repair your tissue, because we keep having cells dying. We keep having damages from our daily activity. You need stem cells to regenerate in many parts of your body. Every parts of your body need to regenerate including bone, heart, tissue, liver, everything. When you age, the stem cells ability to regenerate declines and then it cannot keep up with the repair and regeneration. So over time, this deficit creates the aging related conditions. So the same thing for cartilage. If you overuse it, then your body cannot keep up to regenerate. Then you have less and less cartilage over years. So, if you’re a professional athlete, you would wear it out sooner if you don’t do anything.

12:11 Cosmetic Uses for Stem Cells

Sasha John Bernier: The other day, we saw someone coming for wrinkles, I guess, in their forehead. And I didn’t realize that aesthetically it could be used also for cosmetic purposes. Is that all tied in also to what you’re discussing in terms of aging?

Dr. Yi: The same thing. So if our skin ages, it’s because the skin regeneration slows down, cannot keep up with the regeneration of the collagen, the skin cells. So that’s why we start having wrinkles. So if you use the stem cells with the platelet rich plasma to stimulate the regeneration of your skin cells and the collagen, then you can reduce the wrinkle. I would not say it will make the wrinkle completely go away. You won’t look like you’re 20 years old.

Sasha John Bernier: Interesting.

Dr. Yi: When you are 60.

13:00 Stem Cells are Not a Magic Bullet

Sasha John Bernier: Are there vitamins in this? Like, you know, if you eat bad and you take stem cell, right? Sometime people always look for quick shortcuts, but just curious, is there anything?

Dr. Yi: Stem cell treatment is not the shortcut and it’s not the magic bullet to fix everything. So it has to be combined with all the other treatment. So even my mom who has received stem cells since 2021, maybe five or six times now, we are still doing all the other things including her diet, her lifestyle and also helping her to control her blood sugar, cholesterol and many other things to help her other conditions to work together with the stem cell. If you only have stem cell treatment and hoping the stem cell treatment can give you solution to all your health problem without doing anything, it’s not going to happen. Maybe it can happen for a short period of time for certain conditions, but if you don’t eat right, you don’t do other things like connecting to nature, harmonizing your body, reducing your stress by meditation or following the flow of your life, then eventually everything will catch up again.

14:26 Dramatic Patient Cases

Sasha John Bernier: Talk about some of the most interesting cases where you saw stem cell work.

Dr. Yi: I would say the most dramatic case is still my mom. She has this inflammation in the lower leg and there’s no proven medical research paper to show the stem cell can work for this type of condition. There’s no proven thing. But based on the understanding of the mechanism how the umbilical cord stem cell works because they really work magic at reducing chronic inflammation and what happens to my mom’s leg is chronic inflammation. So I basically just tried it and it worked as magic.

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Sasha John Bernier: Were there other patients that you treated? I mean you have a great clinic over here. That had similar issues?

Dr. Yi: So I had this couple from Idaho. They are in their 60s, but both of them are very active and they actually are in the group of people they want to live to 150 years old and still being able to work.

Sasha John Bernier: Okay.

Dr. Yi: So that’s why they are very into stem cell treatment because they read the book of Tony Robbins. They think it has some good potential for them to benefit from even though it’s controversial. So they were already looking into stem cell treatment when I met them just in the meeting. Then they did research on their own and then they decided to come to Zenchi to do the treatment. And the wife could not do a lot of her regular exercises like playing pickleball, running, doing cycling because of her knee problem. The husband could not play the volleyball because every time he served the ball his shoulder hurt.

Sasha John Bernier: Okay.

Dr. Yi: So both of them had IV treatment and joint injection for a particular joint they had issues with. Three weeks later the woman was in Hawaii. She wanted to play pickleball with her friend, but she thought it was too close to post the stem cell treatment, but she tried anyway. And she was amazed. She could play for three hours without any pain. And the husband started playing volleyball. He would not feel any pain playing the volleyball. So it’s been two years since they had the treatment and it’s still working for them. They didn’t need another treatment. So but again I’m not trying to say the stem cell is a magic treatment for everything, but what they did right was they did it in very early stage because they were not waiting till like many people. They never say, “Oh, we already tried physical therapy for six months. We already tried steroid injection three times over the past two years and we still have this problem.” They never waited till then. They never even had MRI or X-ray to say what was actually wrong with their joint because the point of stem cell treatment is a more holistic treatment. It’s not just treating your one joint and the stem cells they can be attracted to the site where you have inflammation. And when you do the joint injection into the joint like the knee or shoulder, you don’t need to be very specific like the steroid injection because the cells actually they can travel and they can hone in to the inflammation site and start stimulating your own body stem cell to repair. So there’s no point actually you know you have to look at the MRI to see exactly where you have to inject. My point is you want to do it as early as possible, then you only need to do one treatment and it works like magic. But if you wait till you have to have surgery, knee replacement, you cannot do anything else. There’s no other options. Of course, at that point, if you do stem cells, it may still work for you as magic, but that’s a little bit late, right?

19:23 The Importance of Early Prevention

Sasha John Bernier: Which is really a core concept of the center, right? You learn how to eat, how to get in touch with nature, and you add the component of stem cell. So, I guess we go to the question of prevention, right? When you’re younger, when you’re in your 20s, your 30s, you don’t feel that you need to do anything, right? So, as someone who if they’re in their 20s and 30s, why is prevention important? How does stem cell fit into that?

Dr. Yi: If you don’t have a lot of health problem, it doesn’t necessarily mean you definitely need stem cell treatment when you’re in your 20s or 30s. Like you told me about your back problem. I don’t think you need to go into stem cell yet. However, I would say stem cell treatment for you at your age maybe once every two years just for the intravenous injection will be beneficial for your whole body reducing the chronic inflammation. But we are talking about early prevention is not just eating right, sleeping right. All these kind of everything has to be together and also it has to be, if you really want to do early prevention right, you have to recognize your body’s constitution, your body’s potential and then you address your each body’s problem. Not just copying what other people are doing. “Oh, that person does infrared sauna and solve everything she has.” But that may not work for you. There’s so many people who are trying to be healthy.

Sasha John Bernier: The bandwagon has grown. How do you find your constitution?

Dr. Yi: So again, I think the best way to find your body type, your constitution and what your body particular needs, you need to find somebody who understands the whole concept, not just looking at symptoms, treating, giving you medication. You have to look at the whole body and then what’s, that’s what I do. I actually do a full consultation and then understand your whole lifestyle and then trying to give you advice just like what I told you you need to do for your back. I’m not trying to tell you, “Oh, just get sterile shots” because your back problem is mostly from posture, from sitting too long and then if you do more stretching, if you lose a little bit weight and then get your lifestyle better, then you probably would not have that problem for a long time.

21:58 US Acceptance and Financial Incentive

Sasha John Bernier: When do you think the type of stem cell that you’re doing will be more accepted in the United States?

Dr. Yi: I don’t think it will be accepted in the United States anytime soon. The reason for that is like I said, the medical system in the United States is deeply rooted in this responsive, disease-oriented system and also it works in the way wanting to control people’s behavior so that they can make more profit for the big pharmaceutical companies. So they don’t educate people about what we’ve been talking about like early prevention, treating the root cause, addressing your particular body type. If they ever want to use stem cell in treating neurological conditions or chronic disease, they want to use the induced pluripotent stem cells that they can patent. They don’t want to use something like this type of umbilical cord stem cells because this is not something they can control and it’s not something they can standardize. So when it cannot be standardized, it cannot be patented. So then they won’t have that much incentive, the financial incentive to develop it and market it because then they don’t make a lot of profit out of this.

23:26 How to Learn More About Stem Cells

Sasha John Bernier: If someone wants to learn more about stem cell, they’re having some pain, some issues, what would you recommend them to do? What should they do so they get comfortable with it?

Dr. Yi: I think the best way to do is not to Google online because you will get so many different opinions and the best way if you really want to learn about different types of stem cells and why this particular type of umbilical core stem cells is good and what’s the difference between the cryopreserved and fresh and lab expanded, then I actually have a full question and answer section with all the videos on my website so they can dive into all these videos to understand it better. And I also made a 10 question sheet if you want to read about it and also my book, I will talk about stem cell in the book as well.

24:25 Stem Cell Side Effects

Sasha John Bernier: Are there any side effects that you’ve seen with stem cell that people should be aware of?

Dr. Yi: If you use non-contaminated lab expanded umbilical core stem cells, I would say the most side effects would be after joint injection just like anything you would have some discomfort for two days to one week and after the facial treatment you would have some redness for three to five days. And occasionally some people may have some allergic reaction to the reagents we use to suspend the cells but not the allergic reaction to cells because these type of cells remember they are very good at regulating immune system. So they are actually reducing your inflammation. So it’s not going to cause allergic reaction, no like a massive immune response or anything like that. And also it’s very good for autoimmune conditions. So that’s why, you know, a lot of people are concerned about, “Oh, would my body reject these type of stem cell?” Actually they will not because they will not trigger any immune response.

25:34 Prevention and Active Cancer

Sasha John Bernier: Does taking early stem cell help prevent cancer? A lot of people think that. Just curious.

Dr. Yi: I think you’ve asked me several times in the past eight months about your friends having cancer, then they start looking into stem cell. I think that’s a little bit late because when you have active cancer, it’s controversial. I mean even from scientific point, the stem cells they’re trying to stimulate your body stem cell to grow and at the same time you don’t know whether the cancer cells can hijack the stem cell you injected to grow even faster. So that’s why when you have active cancer, it’s not a good way to use stem cell treatment. But if you don’t have any cancer, you’re healthy, you want to regulate your immune system, that’s the best time to do the umbilical cord stem cell treatment because it regulates your immune system and our body actually generates cancer cells all the time. The reason why some people finally develop the cancer is because they have malfunction in their immune system for the long term due to multiple reason, mostly stress, emotional blockage that causing the stress accumulate. In my book I talk about the body is like a garden. So if you have blockage in irrigation system, then it can affect certain area, even like a distal area that cannot get the irrigation well. So that’s when your body malfunction, the immune system cannot eradicate the cancer cells generated in your body efficiently. That’s when these cells become overgrown and then develop into tumor or cancer. But if your body functions normally, your immune system should be able to control these cells because they’re abnormal cells and then eradicate them before they become a problem. So that goes again to early prevention. Why do you want to wait until you are already diagnosed with stage three cancer? Then now you think about, “Oh, maybe I should do stem cell to help my immune system.” But that’s a little bit late. Of course, if you use chemo and other treatment to get into remission, then you want to use stem cell to help your immune system, you can do that. But if you do it early enough to really recognize your body constitution again because you need to recognize whether your body has any obstruction along all the systems to find out the obstruction and then unblock it. Then you will have the full flow of the irrigation system. Then you will not develop a cancer.

28:19 Concluding Principles and Contact

Sasha John Bernier: Well, this has been a fascinating week for me being in the nature, eating well, learning about how to take care of myself and stem cell. Is there anything else you want to say before we leave?

Dr. Yi: I think again we should follow the principles we talked about in our podcast. So, early prevention, recognize your body type and treat the root cause.

Sasha John Bernier: And how can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more about stem cell and come to this beautiful place in the mountains of Medigene?

Dr. Yi: They can go to my website stemcelltherapyexperts.com. They can go to my YouTube channel. Then you can go to the Zenergy Retreat website.com.

Sasha John Bernier: Great. Thank you Dr. Yi. Thank you so much.