Emerging Science and Technology Using Stem Cells in Our Dogs
Hi there this is Krista with Episode #138 on the Wag Out Loud pawdcast. Because I'm going to be expanding my Wag Out Loud business with exciting things in store, I wanted to let you know that as of January 2022, I will go from releasing weekly episodes to releasing bi monthly episodes. Putting this show on is very important to me, but to do it right, and all on my own, I've decided to bring you the same awesome guests and content, but just with lesser frequency. That will give me more time to work on other fantastic projects in the canine health and wellness space. So stay tuned for some exciting future announcements.
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A leading practitioner in stem cell therapy, Dr. Mike Hutchinson, D.V.M., is a highly sought-after speaker at national and international veterinary conferences on the uses of animal stem cells. He has performed more than 1000 Adipose-Derived Stem Cell procedures on dogs, cats, horses, camels and a bird, among his 20,000 surgeries in 35 years of practicing veterinary medicine.
Hello dog lovers, and thanks for joining us and for being an advocate for your dog's health. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Mike Hutchinson. And he is going to share the emerging science and technology using stem cells in our dogs. So this is going to be fascinating. Dr. Mike, I have been looking forward to this, it seems like forever ago that we met. We're all going to learn more about this amazing field of medicine. So can you please introduce yourself and tell us what got you interested in the science of stem cell therapy?
Well, absolutely, and thanks for that kind introduction Krista. So I've been a veterinarian 35 years. I graduated from Iowa State Veterinary College in 1986. And in about 2000, I started reading about stem cells, these repair cells that are in our body. And honestly, I thought it was Sci Fi Krista. I didn't think this was something I would ever be privileged to do in my lifetime. You know, this is a kind of thing you prayed, your children would see one day. And then in 2007-2008, I got introduced to veterinary medicine, started out primarily in horses and then graduated into the dogs and cats. And since then I have been blessed with treating approximately 2000 cases, I've traveled all over the world to speak about stem cells, and to humans to veterinarians, to colleagues, lay people. And I feel like I waited 25 years of my career, just to be able to use stem cells. And once you get exposed to them, it's so exciting because we're using the regenerative ability of the body is that's what stem cells are is repair cells. Every tissue in your body contains repair cells. And we're trying to collect them, put them into a little micro environment or damaged area, like a joint or somewhere a bone or ligament and seeing if we can help start the repair process, maybe even regenerate some cartilage, but certainly reduce pain, reduce inflammation, calm down the immune system if it's overreacting, and that just improves their quality of life. So that's why I get so excited about it and love to talk about it. And you can't shut me up and say it just one of those passions of mine now. And like I said, I've been blessed to be able to do this. And I love sharing this information.
I don't blame you for being so excited. This just is amazing. So is stem cell therapy pretty common in veterinary medicine? Or is it still pretty new?
They you know what happens? They don't teach it in university yet. So I just gave a talk of emerging science and technology to a group in Queens College in April. And we're trying to reach the Advanced Biology students in high school. That's the next wave next generation, you know, in the veterinary schools are not teaching yet when I go out and speak at conferences, one of my sons is a veterinarian now for three years. And it's funny that, you know, he grew up with a father that was passionate about stem cells. So he knew about stem cells. And he said they weren't taught one word about them. And he graduated three years ago. And that's sad. So yeah, I’m on human boards and I’m on four boards all together. So I work with what we call autologous stem cell therapy, which means we take them out of your dog and put them back into your dog. We don't take them out of another dog and put them into your dog that would be allogeneic. And if I took them out of a pig and put them in your dog, that'd be called xenogeneic. and so I don't work with at this time, I don't work with allogeneic or xenogeneic. I only work with autologous therapy, which means I treat the patient with his own stem cells. And so what we're doing is we're harvesting fat and and generally it takes about 15 minutes to collect three tablespoons of fat from the dog. It's a very simple procedure for for veterinarians, it's within everybody's scope of surgery, easier than spays. And castration is really just to collect fat and and once we collect that fat, we wake them up and then we prepare the fraction of fat that contains the stem cells and separate those repair cells from the fat. And in that solution, we end up with like a soup, we call it the stromal vascular fraction, or the SDF, and in that soup, are the stem cells from the fat, which I said, are the repair cells. And then there's a lot of supporting characters, there's a lot of immune cells, there's a lot of growth factors, there's a lot of these, you know, cells that help form a new matrix or help to rebuild the framework so that they can lay down cartilage or reduce inflammation or do whatever is needed, in the area that we're injecting them. And that's the whole theory. And the promise of stem cell therapy, is if you have a bad knee, I mean, right now the standard of care after they do steroids, and you can just relate to humans, we don't do all of this in the animals, but after they do the steroids and the rooster collagen, and, and you know, they say, Okay, you’re bone on bone, it's time to chop off your knee. And that's as simply as I can explain it. And what I'm hoping for is that they'll start using stem cells, and around the world, there's been hundreds of 1000s of people treated with their own stem cells with adverse events being declared insignificant, because your body doesn't reject your own repair cells. So as long as you have a good technology that separates out those stem cells, and you inject them back into that micro environment that is damaged like a bad knee or back to bad knees, or bad tempered bad shoulder, or bad bone or ligaments, then we're hoping that we can initiate some repairing, I just gave a talk out at one of our big conferences in Las Vegas in September and presented 27 peer reviewed publications in veterinary medicine. And out of those 27 peer reviewed publications, 26 of them showed cartilage regeneration. So that's pretty significant. So now the information is coming out. And soon you'll see more and more doctors start to apply it, they just needed to see the science first. You know, here I am 35 years into my career. And when you get a dog, a lot of us older veterinarians, men and women, when we get these patients that we've seen our whole career, where they have this horrible arthritis, or they have a lot of pain, they're having difficulty walking, they're overweight, because it's hard to exercise them. They may be 10, 11, 12, or 14 having trouble getting up and the owners are having trouble picking them up. We've given them steroids, we've done all the nutraceuticals, chiropractic, acupuncture, all the holistic things we can do. And the poor dogs or cats are in pain, and they just can't stand without assistance. And that's why I love to come into stem cells. because up till then we had nothing else. But unfortunately, that discussion about is it time? because your dog can't get up in the morning suffering. And that's the hardest discussion for any veterinarian. So all of us in that situation, would gladly want to try to give some repair cells that could perhaps not only put time on the dog's life for the cat’s life, but quality times so they end up in a situation where his quality of life, they're in less pain they're in, you know, there have more mobility and flexibility and range of motion. So those dogs instead of trying to go to the bathroom in one place or moving around, because they can't because the pain or trying to get in and out of the car or on the furniture up and down the stairs, we treat them and generally in three to six weeks, seven weeks, they're doing those things again, and it lasts for a year, year and a half on average, which is pretty cool stuff. And, and I think anybody would want to do it. And now the price has come down back in 2007, we were treating dogs, it was about 50% More expensive than it is now. And now we're down in that range of a typical surgery. And it makes it more affordable to more people. And I wanted to, you know, get down to the hundreds of dollars instead of you know, $1,800 or $2,000. And it's a and I think the more animals that we start treating the more veterinarians that get involved, we'll get those economies of scale just like any other new technology. When it comes out. When more people start using it, the prices come down.
And you said that you get these cells from the dog themselves these fat cells. Where in the body are you taking them or harvesting them from?
Good question we can harvest from anywhere that there's fat and most dogs when we go on body condition score in cats too, body condition score, four to five out of nine is considered ideal body weight. So that's the dog where you can see their last two to three ribs, when they take a deep breath. Most people would call that dog skinny, but every veterinarian would say that's ideal. That’s the perfect body weight. they live longer. So I would say 55% of patients I see are at a six out of nine to seven out of nine, which means they're in each numbers about 10% of being overweight. So seven out of nine is 20% overweight if we say five is ideal. So those dogs usually have a pocket of fat behind their shoulder blade up towards the top of their back. That is a goldmine for fat so I take a lot of the fat from dogs in that area, because a lot of them are a little overweight. If they're a thin dog, I take it from their belly, we take it just in front of their belly button. towards the head, there's a what we call a falciform ligament, which is truly all fat. They're born with it. And we can take the fat right there. And we can get enough fat from that area to process and it's about a 15 minute procedure either way.
That's cool. So if more veterinarians are doing this, and it's not taught in vet school, could any general practice veterinarian do this? Or is there some training involved?
So it's my favorite question. So when I go to these conferences, and when I tell that they can be doing it the following week, all they need is the equipment and the technology, the technology for in house therapy. So yesterday, I did two treatments with stem cells. So I harvest the fat or I start surgeries around 7am. So I started my first one at 7am. 7:20, I gave it to my tech, and my tech starts processing that fat. It takes about two and a half hours in house. And that process is done by qualified technicians that have been put through a very simple training procedure, which is within their toolset very, very easy. It's like baking a cake, you're just following instructions. And so the first few times, and I got to go over when they were doing the first one in a state, Utah, Florida, Colorado, California, I would go in their business back in 2010-2011. I fill out there and I joined them, I would say have at least two cases, so I can show you on one how to process them show the technicians. And on the second one, they do it and literally they were doing it on the second one. So it's a very simple process. And once they learn it, they get so comfortable with it. And you know, I've had film crews come in and put this film camera on the shoulders of my technicians as they're doing this, and they could care less. That's how confident they get with this technology. And obviously we're keeping the cells sterile, we're doing it in a process that's been developed and rings out a lot of those cells that are in the fat. And then we we get them two and a half, three hours later, and we can inject them. So the treatment is an outpatient procedure. People too. you go in in the morning, like I said, the dogs are 7:00, most of them are heading home by noon or 1:00, you know, as soon as we're done. If I'm doing a second one, obviously, I'm not getting that into the surgery until maybe 7:30 or a quarter of eight. So then that one's going to go home a little bit later. Because it takes to me I can't speed up the processing, but the technicians do it. So the veterinarians, we require about 15-20 minutes for a time to collect the fat. And then when it's all processed, we give the dogs some light sedation and we inject the joints or the affected areas that we want to treat. And and that takes about five minutes and then they can go home because they can go home sedated. As long as the owners are are willing, and most of them are, we send them home usually by one o'clock.
Okay, that sounds so easy, much better than surgery.
Yes, and every veterinarian can learn this so easily. And literally, they just need the equipment and the equipment requires us to have a big centrifuge, and a water bath at body temperature that moves and after digesting the fat and that's how we separate the stem cells from it. And then an LED which is a laser emitting diode that has international patents on it all around the world that that we use on humans too, and when we put that fraction that soup that we get that stromal vascular fraction into the LED, it activates the stem cells. And what that means is it wakes them up because they're in the fat, they're dormant. They've been residing there, but they haven't been moving. And so we wake them up and we get them to start proliferating. And stem cells are very good at repopulating more stem cells so they can grow new stem cells, or they can differentiate into tissue like cartilage or bone or, or ligament or whatever we're trying to treat. And they can also secrete a whole bunch of things, a whole bunch of factors, they've identified over 17,000 genes that they can secrete. And those things will go into that microenvironment that damaged knee, that damaged area and start to grow new cells, they know what to do. In 2008-2009. When I first started speaking about stem cells, I knew about 12 things that they can do. So transform now to 2021. I know about 48 things they can do. So you say wow, that's pretty good. We we grew 400% in 10 years, 12 years. The problem is or the good thing is, is that when you're injecting those stem cells into that damaged environment, just on the side of what I'm injecting in, there's probably five to the 200th power of the available things that those stem cells can do. So super computers can't figure it out. And then you have the damaged cells on the inside the inflammation. They're what we call communicators, they're sending out distresser signals, and you know, hey, body, we need some help. We need some repair, we need some reduced inflammation we need to calm down or modulate the immune system. And they're interacting we call that the paracrine effect. It's like the endocrine system where we secrete a hormone like a thyroid hormone that helps regulate our metabolic rate with these cells communicate with each Other in this local environment, and that's what sets up the repair or the reduced inflammation, or whatever's best for that joint. And it's pretty neat. Because when you look at the age of a dog or cat, and I treated camels, horses, you know, I've been over zoo animals, they, you know, every animal that has that has repair cells. And like I said, you can, they've shown this, they publish these results in humans, they get a heart attack, we were always taught, once you have a heart attack, you have scar tissue for life, you're never going to reduce that scar tissue. So your heart will never be as efficient as it once once. Well, that's been proven incorrect. We can inject stem cells into that heart muscle. Now I'm not doing this in dogs, but it's been done in people and then animals and published and they can regenerate that scar tissue into normal, functional, beating heart cells again, and it just blows everybody away, including me. That's why I get so excited talking about this. Because, you know, these are the kinds of things we are taught that you can't once you tear your meniscus, you can't grow a new meniscus, it's gone. And people are shaking their heads. They're listening right now. Yeah, I had part of my meniscus removed. And that's just for the cushions in the knee joint. You know, they're on both sides C shaped cartilage. Once you damage and we were taught I was taught you can't regenerate. Well, guess what they've done clinical trials on animals. And now they're doing it on humans. And I'm privy to some of this information where they can 3d print a scaffold, which is kind of the framework for this cushion in our joints, this meniscus, they can feed stem cells into it and grow a new meniscus. And with with repair, so yeah, and this is, this is what is happening.
That. is so cool. Can I just stop you right there? I know this is exciting, but we just have to take a quick commercial break, but we're gonna dive right in. So hold on everybody.
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And we are back with Dr. Mike Hutchinson. And we are learning such crazy amazing information on stem cell therapy. Dr. Mike, we are just scratching the surface on what this can do.
Yes, absolutely. And, you know, when we left for that break, I was just getting to talk about but I used to when I go out to speak to my colleagues are the about at the beginning of 2009-2010 to maybe be 50 colleagues in the room for the is the audience that the talk. And I would always say put your hand up how many of you believe that one day we're going to be able to regenerate a limb an entire limb, and I get myself and maybe one or two others put their hand up. And they were usually holistic veterinarians, which you know, we believe in the ability of the body to repair itself. And in 2015, I'd put I'd have 300 people in the audience. And I'd say how many people believe one day we're going to regenerate limb and 90% of people have their hand up, because they've already seen that, you know, Popular Science Magazine, in Boston Medical Hospital, they regenerated a rat limb, the entire limb, the muscles, the tendons, the ligaments, the bone, they regenerated the skin. So I’ve been speaking to human doctors, and they go, come on Dr. Mike, once that cartilage is gone, there's nothing on God's green earth, that’s going to regenerate that cartilage and that you're just going to get fibrous cartilage or scar tissue. And I said that's not true. We could regenerate a football field of cartilage we could regenerate a football field of skin or bladder. The challenge is can we do it in a micro environment that's damaged in a human or an animal like a joint. And that's the challenge can we get it to grow cartilage in that joint, not on the football field. So we can regenerate native cartilage with all the right you know, protein makeups collagen makeups not scar tissue in same thing with a meniscus. Same thing with a heart muscle. There's a video on YouTube where I was involved with a treatment of a horse where ruptured two tendons and it's suspensory ligaments in his front leg. Any person that owns a horse knows that that's a death sentence. Not anymore. Because if ruptured his deep digital and superficial flexor tendons, and the front leg blew him out 95% Or more gone, the horse was dead lame. Usually those horses get put down humanely. And fortunately for this horse, the owners had unlimited funds. In Norway, they wanted to find if there's a technology that could grow ligaments, they sent one of their workers to a conference where I was speaking in Las Vegas, they wanted to know if it was if I thought it was possible, after I first spoke and I said, Well, I know some nanotechnology guys that can spin these nano fibers into a tendon, you know, give us a scaffold, kinda like that meniscus, Dr. Jed Johnson over in Columbus. And I called him up his father and brother, who are equine veterinarians. So he was very interested in participating. He spun these, they had a board certified equine veterinarian in the Netherlands in Norway replace these tendons. they soak them in the horses own stem cells, and they replaced him inside the sheet. And six months later, and now that horse is still alive, it's having foals, six months later, it's out running in the field. This defies all logic that we previously knew. Even the board certified surgeon had to be convinced that this was humane to even try it, because he thought it might be inhumane to let this horse suffer. And now, the first regeneration of superficial deep digital flexor tendons has occurred in the world. And that's pretty neat. And that's the promise of the future. That's why anybody that says, Oh, this is voo doo, I feel sorry for them. I don't think they're stupid, they just don't know. So they just haven't been exposed like I have, and they haven't read what's going on. And so that's why I feel it's my job to get out here and get people passionate about it. Because I'm passionate about it. Sure, I can treat 300 animals, you know, a year in my clinics, with the veterinarians that work with me. But what if I get 10,000 veterinarians treating 300 animals a year? I mean, that's what makes the difference. And then that pushes it to the human side as well. And like I said, I'm on two human boards. We're working with technologies, literally, that can regenerate kidneys, liver, it's coming. It's coming. Nobody's going to stop it. And I've been saying this for 10 years. And nobody has ever gone back and said, Dr. Mike you said this. And that was found to be untrue. No, what we've done in 10 years or 12 years is learned more about what they're doing. We did it's like a big mystery. We don't know what all these cells are doing. We just know it's good. And then you get a lot of side benefits, you know, you decide to treat a dog that has a bad joint. And then they say, Doc, does this help a dog with bad ears? Why do you ask? Well, my dog was shaking his ears like crazy. He's had this problem for years. Our vet says it's from allergies. You treat them with stem cells. And he stopped shaking his ears a week later, and he hasn't shaken them yet. Well, after you get reports like that from 15, 20, 30 people and veterinarians across the world are getting the same reports. You start to study looking at what these cells do for allergies, how they modulate the immune system and block the itch cycle and help calm down that overreaction immune system. That's pretty neat stuff. And that's what's happening. And the research is being done. Now. The publications that have come out on osteoarthritis of the knee. And that's primarily what I treat. So those people listening, arthritis, hip dysplasia, a ruptured ACL tendon in the knee, anterior cruciate ligaments, or cranial cruciate ligaments. That's primarily what we treat broken bones that aren't healing, you know, any kind of tendon injuries, we treat those, and we're having phenomenal success. And universities have now published in our veterinary journals, that they're having the same success that I've been seeing for 12 years. And I'm an ethical person with an ethical discussion. And you know, telling people, either some animals that I look at, and I don't have a reasonable expectation that they're going to do well. And I share that with the owners and some of those owners still want me to treat their animals, they just want to do every they want to know they've done everything that's out there that’s possible before they give up on their animal. And and I get that, but I don't have a reasonable expectation they're going to respond. And some of those animals have taught me so much because they responded, and I would say not all of them respond. I wish they did. out of 14 patients that I took x rays a year later, after they had ACL tears in the knee. University of Minnesota did a study on 335 dogs and showed that no matter what surgery was used, even if you did medical management, a year later, those dogs that tore their ACL ligament, and their knee had advanced arthritis a year later based on X rays. So I treat with stem cells, as I'm stabilizing that joint that ruptures that ligament in the knee, and we took 14 X rays to share with them. 13 of those knees stayed the same or got better in a year, based on the initial x rays. One of them got worse. So it's not 100% But we're having some incredible patient satisfaction and that's pretty cool. One of the stem cell companies that I'm an international spokesperson for and I tell the president every time I speak, look, if better technology comes out for animals. I took my oath to animals, not to. you guys, I'm on a handshake agreement to speak and they have a phenomenal technology. It's Ardent Animal Health and, and I don't think there's going to be many companies that could come around and wring out more stem cells from a gram of fat. So I think this is going to be it's been around for 10 years, it's been the leader for the last 12 years. And I don't think that's going to change in the near future. But it's, it's just so neat that we can take out these cells, out of fat, and put them into environments and try to treat conditions that were once thought untreatable. You know, these, the impossible is happening. And it's possible. And as we go, it's getting better and better. And this is going to get translated to humans very soon, I donated a kidney to my brother in 2011. I told him, I said, if you could have waited 10 years, probably could have grown you a kidney. I have now seen with my own eyes, a regenerated human kidney. And it was shared with me by a virologist, in Regenerative Medicine, a Human doctor. And it was done by accident at first, and now they're perfecting it. So soon, I believe we're going to be regenerating kidneys for humans and and think about all those people on the transplant list. A lot of people die every year waiting for a liver or kidney or heart. And it would be pretty neat. If we could take their own cells and grow them a new organ. That would be pretty neat, at least in my opinion.
That would be. Wow. Well, Dr. Mike, you've walked us through the process of you know, what would happen if a dog gets stem cell therapy? How many injections do they usually need? Is one enough? Or do they have to come back?
Well, I love that question. So depending on how severe their arthritis is, and I don't know that answer completely, I can just share my experience because I've treated more than most veterinarians around the world. So what I found is that one injection in the joint say they have most dogs have arthritis. in more than one joint, especially older dogs with both hips, both knees, both elbows, both shoulders, it's usually not just one joint. So we'll treat two, three, four joints. And we treat those. at one time, it doesn't take any more expense, it just takes maybe five minutes more to treat those joints. And we found that on average, one injection on older dogs lasts a year to year and a half. And what do I mean last year in a year and half? decreasing in increased range of motion and flexibility, and better quality of life. I don't know if the regenerating cartilage because I'm not doing MRIs to see I'm not going in with an arthroscope to look at the joints. Because I'm a clinician, I'm not a researcher, I do some simple research, but I'm not a researcher. For me, if that dog is better, is clinically normal, I'm not doing anything. I'm telling the owner, if we're both happy is that when when when the patient's happy, the owners, you know, very, very happy. And then I get the hugs. So I'm very happy. It's one of those things that that's typical. Now I do get some dogs, I just had one that I reinjected six months later. In the beginning 2008-2009, I was asked to do some trials to see if one injection was enough, are 3 million cells enough? Are 10 million cells, enough stem cells, or 30 million or 100 million cells better? So what we've come up with is that we know the ideal number of cells in a range of say 25 to 35 million in a joint. putting in 100 million doesn't do any more good, doesn't hurt him. But we don't need that we don't need to waste them. And 10 million is probably the minimum number we want to put in, in three million is probably too little. And I'd say around the world, most of researchers agree with that not everybody agrees on everything, but most. And then that's a fair assessment. Nobody's ever criticized me on that assessment. So I also found that giving two injections was not better than one unless it was separated by four months. So we tried it, we tried it at 30 days, we tried it at two weeks, we for different things, dogs get conditions like Lou Gehrig's, you know, with the protective sheath around the spinal cord starts to deteriorate the immune system is attacking it. And they're a good model to try to see if we can help them for people’s sake. And we inject them with stem cells and, and we found that those dogs needed multiple injections to get a mild benefit, they need to get a great benefit. I'm working with another type of stem cell that we're taking out of blood and I’m the only doc that gets to work with them right now. And I'm not saying that, that I'm proud of it. I wish every vet could work with this. But they're protecting the technology right now for people. And I think there's a lot of promise coming for diseases like Lou Gehrig's, in people in animals. So I'm excited about that it's gonna participate in a clinical trial with six animals and five of those dogs are walking again, without assistance, which is unheard of, in my entire career. It's unheard of it blows me away. So it's it's one of those things that just really excites me and that's what the future holds. And when I say future, I'm hoping I was hoping by the end of this year, and and so it probably isn't going to be everything got slowed down with the with the COVID but I'm hoping here soon. And the next you know, maybe 2022 We will have this technology available for every veterinarian and then hopefully on the human side as well.
Let's hope. Yeah, I can't believe this time just flew by. So as we're wrapping up Dr. Mike, I remember when we first spoke that you said please remind you to share the story about Timmy.
Oh Timmy. So Timmy was a dog that had a broken back. He was from Virginia. And the owner went to an emergency vet. It was a freak accident. Fell 18 inches little King Charles Cavalier. And it was a breeding dog and he was a champion dog and fell 18 inches and broke its back, its lumbar spine. So his spinal cord went in a Z. It went down and Z’d down and the back was broken downward into the abdomen. And the poor dog was instantly paralyzed. And it had a condition called paraphimosis where the penis hangs out, and he has no control of his bladder, no feeling in his back legs. So he yelped and was paralyzed, ran into an emergency clinic in Maryland, where there was a neurosurgeon. He said, it would be $11,000 to stabilize that fracture, but he's never going to pee on his own again, and he's never gonna walk again. And she said, could I build some of that? No, you have to go down the University. She went five hours down the road to North Carolina veterinary school, where they did the surgery, I think it was like $8,000. They stabilized it. But the neurosurgeon and the boarded intern told her the same thing that Timmy was never going to walk again. And he's never going to be able to urinate on his own again, somehow, some, you know, convoluted way she found me and asked if I would treat her dog with stem cells. And I said, I would love to, but the neurosurgeon has to be on board. And she said, Dr. Mike, it's my dog. And I said, I understand, but they just had a 16 minute special where they showed and I'm going to say the word some Quack in Mexico, used placenta and killed a person, a human being injecting into their spinal area. And so with all that bad press, I said, Listen, you can be on the phone, but I am not going to treat your dog unless the neurosurgeon’s on board. I don't want them thinking there's some quack up in Pittsburgh region that's treating dogs spinal cords with no rationale. So she got on the phone, neurosurgeon said, Doc, you should wait six months and I literally pulled the phone away from my ear, and I was looking at the phone. So I was busy. At my clinic. I put the phone to my ear. So Okay, Doc, why should I wait six months? He said, Because that's the only way you're going to know if Timmy is 100% Fully paralyzed. I said, Okay, fair enough. I said Sally was the owner. So when can you bring Timmy up? And then the intern said, Dr. Mike, if Timmy walks again. You can't say it's the stem cells. I said, fair enough. when can you bring Timmy up? None of us care. We're clinicians. We just want to see Timmy walk again. Well, I got this protocol. I was speaking in Thailand. My daughter, come on dad, you gotta go. to Thailand. I don't want to go to Thailand. Dad, you told me if I work for you, I could travel to Thailand. And it was serendipity. Or devine I'll say because one of the participants was the father of a vet student that came to hear me talk from South Korea. Turned out he was a neurosurgeon, human neurosurgeon from South Korea, that treated two quadriplegic American athletes with their own stem cells. This was after a year of the standard of care in the United States. Unfortunately, there were athletes that kept the physical therapy up and kept the muscles going. And he treated those two athletes. And they got some use of their limbs, which was life changing, of course. Well he shared the protocol with me. And I'm like, You gotta be kidding me. I have this protocol. Perfect, then Timmy. Yeah, three months later, four months later, Timmy breaks his back. And his owner finds me. So I told her I have a protocol. This will be compassionate use, the company donated the stem cell kits, they donated the banking you can bank these cells for the future. So you don't have to do surgery every time you treat them. So saying they need treatment a year and a half later. And and so we end up in a situation where I get Timmy up there. we harvest his fat. there's risk to this because I'm injecting cells into his intrathecal space, which is the space where the cerebral spinal fluid bays, the spinal cord, we're injecting into the muscles around the injury and we're injecting them intravenously. And we did this day zero, which was the first day he came up. We did it two weeks later, four weeks later, and then a month later, so I did the four injections in the same way each time. Five months later, Timmy was not only peeing on his. own, he was running around he had some neurologic deficits running around and breeding again. And I showed this evidence at a human research conference in Atlanta, and I'm thinking I don't want to go down is researchers are gonna say it's anecdotal. It's you know, one case it's nothing you can't say stem cells did that. I was dead wrong. I did 20 minute breakout session. I showed them the videos. And Timmy when he was walking. They gave me a standing ovation. And I saw tears in their eyes. When I looked over. It was because they have had, you know, just such a good story. and the last person to shake my hand wouldn't let go. And he said, Dr. Mike, I was the dumb S.O.B. that told you to wait six months.
I said No, you weren't. I said you told me the truth. They said but you've got to agree. At least four things. Number one, Timmy’s happy, number two, Sally's happy his owner. Number three I’m phenomenally happy. The veterinarian and number four we've got to take a further look. I used to be an ER veterinarian out on Long Island for seven half years, my career. I never saw the miracle when the neurosurgeons said they weren't going to walk again. I never saw that one out of 100 that was the miracle to walk again. I never saw it. I have high respect for the neurosurgeons and when they say that they know what they're talking about, but they never used stem cells before. So that's where I'm so excited. And we all should be sharing it. And as that, as that human neurosurgeon said, everybody with spinal injury should have the benefit of their own repair cells. When I heard him say that I was screaming out loud, I agree. So it's the truth. And I think that people should know that these things are available and start pushing your veterinarian to bring it into their their clinic, it's very easy for them to learn.
Well, this is a perfect place to wrap up on a happy story. Happy ending for Timmy. Yay. Oh, my gosh, Dr. Mike, please keep in touch with us on the latest and the greatest. Because this, I'm sure we've only scratched the surface.
It'd be my pleasure. I can give seven hours of talks, if you can imagine talking about the cases that we’ve treated. So it's a lot of fun. And I'm glad to share with your audience and thank you for having me.
Oh my gosh. Well, Dr. Mike, where can everybody find out more information about you and your work?
Well, I do have a podcast site DrMikeHutchinson.com and you can follow me there.
Social Media:
https://www.facebook.com/AnimalGeneralofCranberry
https://www.facebook.com/GardensVetHospital
https://www.instagram.com/gardensvet/
Website URL:
Wonderful. Well, Dr. Mike, thanks for all the amazing work that you're doing. So exciting. And thanks for being with us today and sharing we appreciate you.
My pleasure. Thank you again, Krista.
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Hey Winston was that another tail wagging episode?