Is Your Body Ready For Ant-Aging Medicine? Here's How to Find Out

Interviewer:  We're always told to see our doctor before we start any health regimen.  If we're starting an anti-aging planner, are tests or things that we need to know beforehand?

Dr. Kugler:  Well, yeah, the next step... Assuming, and I know you should never assume, you can make a [inaudible] out of yourself, etc, etc.  But if all health practice is done correctly, the next step up is to see how your or my aging body responds to it.  Right?  And then you do blood analysis and that mainly focuses on hormones.  I mean, we have the testosterones, we have the estrogens, we have the growth hormone, we have the [inaudible]. 

We have a lot of various different hormones that play a role in aging.  For example, under your sternum you have a little organ, the thymus.  And that thymus atrophies as we get older.  Now, directly proportional to the decrease of the thymus, the shriveling away, we have an increase in cancer.  That's really interesting, that's the very bottom line.  And in the thymus, another hormone that's made, that's called thymidine (sp) and there are ways to stimulate that thymidine hormone.  And so, in essence, we look at... We look at all the basic requirements for endocrine control in your body.  And well, we know it gets expensive to some degree, because recently everybody I guess isn't aging [inaudible] is using growth hormones, right?

I mean, that should be obvious.  Well, the manufacturers in their not quite, as I see it, not-fair approach, they raise the prices tremendously.  You know, like, the minimum of growth hormone five milligrams, that's fifteen units, three units per milligram, spread out over a month, that's a half a unit per day.  That would cost you, if you get a prescription and go to the pharmacy and get this, about $600.  Now, that's why a lot of doctors, like I work in Torrance, in [inaudible] Beach, in California, and several MDs that I work with, we actually buy the growth hormone from the manufacturer at a wholesale bulk cost, and then our MD only adds a few dollars to it.  But, most recently, they have increased the most basic thing by $100.  Increase, right?

And so, it really gets a little problematic for some people who are not really exactly floating in money.  I mean, you start with the basics, I mean testosterone shots, [inaudible], and that's also important how you do that because you have to do the hormones cycling on and off.  If you just make up the difference, like your hormone level is here and that's where it should be, if you make up the difference every day, it doesn't work.  It works for a few days, and then your body says "Oh, I have enough hormones" and then it makes less testosterone.  Then you have to give more, and it makes less, and then you have to give more.  And if you continue that, it would actually lead to testicular atrophy.  On the other hand, if you take testosterone for about nine days and then you quit for nine days, there's nothing there and your body says "Oh, I better make my own" and that gives better results.

Cycling is most important for everything.  Even with growth hormone, the growth hormone, the half-life of growth hormone in your body is only about six hours.  But still, I work with a very famous Olympic trainer, that's the guy that developed the exercise program that literally every major... I mean, football, basketball, all the teams are using.  It's called the Super Circuit.  And when we put athletes on the various approaches, we find it's better when we put them on growth hormone for three or four days, twice the amount, and then for three or four days, nothing.  And the bottom results are much better.  Okay, that's one of the areas you know and look at.  And then sometimes you find something that's really baffling, amazing, really nice.  Like, I was at one of the A4M meetings here and there was an exhibitor with a new type of deer antler extract.  See, deer antler extract, that's been known for thousands of years.  I mean, they used to grind it up and they boil it in water and it's still effective.  But this is a new approach.  They grind it up very nicely with some [inaudible] low in temperature.  Put it in some solvent equivalent to, something like red wine and let it sit and extract.  And when they then concentrate it, the analysis shows that the deer antler extract actually has IGF-1 in it.  Now, IGF-1, this is a blood component that you measure to determine if you should give a patient or you should prescribe growth hormone.

So anyway, I was talking to them and they said "You want to try a sample?" and I said "Yeah, sure."  So anyway, I did.  When I was supposed to start growth hormone again and I didn't and I was really amazed because I sure thought I was going to lose some muscle mass.  I actually have maintained it.  So I called the company... Bioprotean (sp) Tech, I think it is.  But anyway, I called them and they sent me a couple bottles and I did this for three months.  And I got totally off growth hormone.  I used the quite a bit less expensive, strongest extract of the velvet deer antler and I actually gained two pounds of muscle mass.  Now, that's a possibility of saving some money, you know.  And so many different areas come in along those lines.