Dr. Kevin Conners interviews Dr. Jeff Donatello, a specialist in neurology and functional neurology. They discuss the importance of functional neurology and its role in addressing various health issues. Dr. Donatello specializes in optimizing health by reducing inflammation through neurology, maximizing metabolism, and utilizing regenerative therapies such as stem cell therapy. His clinic, The Center for Wellbeing, offers regenerative biologics treatments, to help patients avoid knee or hip replacement surgeries. They focus on regenerating tissues using ultrasound-guided injections of purified amniotic fluid, which have shown promising results in 90% of their patients.

Additionally, Dr. Donatello clarifies that the therapy they use is not stem cell-based, but rather an acellular product derived from purified amniotic fluid. This product contains healing agents like extracellular vesicles, exosomes, and microvesicles. By injecting these microvesicles, they aim to stimulate the immune system, create new tissue, and improve joint function without drugs or surgery. Dr. Donatello believes that by reversing certain aspects of aging, individuals can experience better longevity and overall health. Dr. Conners emphasizes the importance of maintaining mobility and preventing surgeries like knee or hip replacements, encouraging listeners to consider this type of therapy for joint problems.

We hope you enjoy this episode!

About Dr. Jeff Donatello

Dr. Jeff Donatello works with his medical team to help patients with chronic pain and inflammation using a Regenerative Therapy (Stem Cell Derived Biologics) and Functional Medicine Model. This approach gets to the root cause of inflammation and disease rather than masking symptoms. He has a 30+ year career in health care and is passionate about empowering people to optimize their health and wellbeing.

Stay tuned for Episode 39 (you can see all episodes on the Conners Clinic Live page!)

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Transcript

Dr. Kevin Conners

Hello, everybody. This is Dr. Conners again, welcome to another episode of Conners Clinic Live. I have a special guest who’s been a long time friend of mine way out on the East Coast. I’ve known Dr. Jeff Donatello for what, 10 years maybe?

Dr. Jeff Donatello

You know, Kevin, I think it’s longer than that.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Let’s pretend it’s not, okay?

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Yes, I think it’s close to 12-13 now. Who knows? Time flies.

Dr. Kevin Conners

We are getting older, that’s for sure Dr. Jeff. I got to know Dr. Jeff when we were both doing intensive study in neurology and functional neurology and Dr. Carrick’s work. We were seeing a lot of people dealing with trying to help their neurology. Understanding that neurology is the basis of a lot of disease. You can’t ignore the metabolic side, so you got to pull it all together. But functional neurology is really important. Now I know you’re doing… I’m just looking at your website and we’ll give website information, thecenterforwell.com. You are out in New Hampshire. I’m going to stop talking and just turn it over to you. What do you like to specialize in? What have you been led to deal with to help people?

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Well, it’s great talk with you, Kevin. I’ve told so many people about your cancer therapies and how you’ve helped people over the years. In fact, you actually attracted me. I went and got a fellowship in integrative cancer therapies years ago because of you.

Dr. Kevin Conners

That’s right. I remember that now.

Dr. Jeff Donatello

A long time ago, I had a bunch of people…my whole thing is to try to optimize people’s health by diminishing inflammation, whether that’s through neurology or increasing, maximizing, optimizing their metabolism. Or a big thing we’re known for now is stem cell therapy, regenerative therapy. We’ve had over 2,000 people go through those treatments in our office, and people fly in from all over the country. We’re about an hour north of Boston. You don’t have to go overseas to get some really neat regenerative biologics nowadays for knees and hips and backs and necks and even some systemic issues. We just can’t make claims that we’re helping anything specific. But again, we’re at a point now where we could talk about this more. If you’re listening to this and you’re like, I don’t want a knee replacement, I don’t want a hip replacement, and you don’t know what’s out there, we’ve had over 350 people cancel knee or hip replacement surgeries that were scheduled. That’s my cool thing, is getting that information out to people and letting people know that there are options. I have doctors around the country that I help guide through these processes on what products to inject, what type of regenerative biologics to inject, how to do it.

Dr. Jeff Donatello

The reality is about eight years ago now, I retired my chiropractic license and I realized I was much more entrepreneurial. Now I have a staff of almost 30. We have three locations. I have a bunch of nurse practitioners, 10 health coaches. My wife, Kelly, is a co-director. Really, what I do is always… My job is to vet out what’s next, what’s up and coming, what is working. I’m talking with people all around the world. I’m actually working with some folks in China right now to try to see what we can do with them. It’s just a fun place to be, on that cutting edge.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, I know in our area, there are multi-million dollar orthopedic facilities popping up everywhere. The argument is, well, people are living longer, they’re trying to stay healthy, they’re out exercising, and what do they do when you’re 60 years old and you decide to take up jogging? You hurt yourself. What do they do? They go to the orthopedic surgeon. What do they do? They get injections of steroids and then push you toward surgery. It’s not “if” you have to have that done, it’s “when” you have to have that done. That’s kind of the expectation in our culture today. What would you do if someone was like, Okay, I really damaged my knee. They’re saying it’s bone on bone, or they’re saying it’s the ligament that I need surgery and the meniscus is damaged. What would you do? How would you take that patient from that point?

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Yeah. I should start off by saying almost every one of our people have been told it’s bone-on-bone. When they hear bone-on-bone, they think they’re done, right? I always compare it to the the tin man in the Wizard of Oz. Before Dorothy squeaked the oil on his joints, right? They have this fusion, and nothing is going to get in between because that cartilage is gone and they just need to rip it out and put a new one in. That’s very rare. If you can bend your knee and move and you still have mobility in the joint, we can regenerate tissue. Are we going to make you 18 again? No, but the average person gets… We’ve gotten pretty much to the point where 90% of our people that we accept as patients get 60-80% better with one injection of purified amniotic fluid. We can talk more about that. But really what we do is, an ideal person is someone that’s gone to the doctor, and in your doctor, you know they want to help you. They’re in the profession of helping people. They are just, unfortunately, managed by insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies, and they’re just a pawn in the overall scheme of things.

Dr. Jeff Donatello

In the United States, if you have an acute injury, and again, I’m preaching to the choir. If you have a cardiac event, if you have a stroke, if you have a heart attack, if you break a bone, nothing’s better. But for that C-word, that chronic word, not good because they’re going to give you a drug in the case of a joint or a damaged tissue that’s been damaged for over 6, 10, 12 months. They’re going to try to decrease that information with a corticosteroid and pray that it works. And sometimes it does. But when they’re talking to you about a second injection, a light bulb should go off, okay? Because they used to do four corticosteroid injections. Now they do two or three, and they will start talking about replacement, and it’s just the pattern. You’re a consumer. You listen to the guy in the white coat. Unfortunately, what we do isn’t covered by insurance. It can be $4,000 a knee. This is when people shut off this podcast sometimes. But the reality is this. If you get a knee replacement, it’s usually around $40,000 to $50,000. Many, many people feel like they’ve been told that they have full coverage.

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Their secondary is going to pick it up. I don’t know about you, but we see all the time these horror stories where the coverage really was only 80%. It was 90%. Ironically, they still end up… They go through this procedure where in the case of a knee, there’s about a 20% to even some people say 25% failure rate, and they still have to pay out of their pocket, four to five grand. With us, it’s something that as long as you have a doctor or nurse practitioner, or someone with primary care status who’s looking at the joint, and this is the problem with this regenerative stem cell world, there’s a lot of poor players, we want to make sure that we use a very strict inclusion and exclusion criteria. And what that means is this: we don’t want to take on everybody as a patient. If you come into our office and you have all these comorbidities, and you know what those are, Kevin, the whole world learns what comorbidities are during COVID because people with multiple comorbidities died from COVID because they weren’t healthy. So the same thing with us. If you’re type 2 diabetic, if your hemoglobin A1C is sitting around 8, 9, 10, if you’re on 3, 4 blood pressure meds, if you’re on statins, if you have a laundry list of medications, we can’t just put a regenerative biologic in you and expect you to get better, right?

Dr. Jeff Donatello

We want to make sure we have a good patient. You can be on a few meds. As long as you’re overall healthy. If we can inject a joint with ultrasound guidance— this is important— we use ultrasound to look and see what that damaged tissue looks like. Part of my job is getting our nurse practitioners trained. We send them all over the country to get trained in the right techniques. We make sure that they get a good patient sitting in front of them, a good candidate. Then we put this product in you that I can talk a little bit more as far as where it comes from, and people get better. And so do you want to hear a little bit about where it comes from and how that works?

Dr. Kevin Conners

I do. But first, I think everybody listening to this is like, Well, do I have to fly out there and stay there for six weeks? What would be the reality of…what do I have to do to get this done? What are the steps?

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Yeah. So if you’re interested, and again, I’m not trying to sell my practice, but people always ask, what do I do if I want to see you? You sound like you know what you’re talking about. The first thing is to go to the website and really get a feel if you feel comfortable with what we do because we’re really solid. We are embedded in our community an hour north of Boston, New Hampshire. But to answer your question, what they would do is typically they would contact the office. We would do a Zoom with someone from farther away where Crystal or Watandi, our nurse practitioners, would talk to you, get a good feel if we’re on the same page. If we are on the same page, the next step would be to say, Okay, do you want to come out and get this done to be clear based on what you’ve told me? If everything stays in these guidelines, then you can probably get this done and you’ll stay for 24 hours afterwards. The procedure is simply come in, just like it’s an in-office procedure. You’re not getting a scrubbed-in procedure with an anesthesiologist at a hospital.

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Everything is done very clean. It’s a very safe procedure out of the 2,000 patients we’ve had, we’ve had zero issues. Some people might feel a little bit yucky afterwards, but what we’re putting in you is what nature uses to heal. It’s injected, you go home, you go to your hotel, and then you fly the next day, you fly out. The healing typically, the average person is going to feel about, in the first six weeks, they’re going to notice about a 50% improvement. We have people that walk out feeling like a million bucks.

Dr. Kevin Conners

All right, so is there a second injection that needs to be done? Do you decide that? Does that patient decide that? Well, that really helped a lot, but could I do a second one in six months to give it a boost? Should I do it once a year? What’s the follow-up?

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Yeah, our recommendation typically is if you get to a certain level, and some people get 100% better, they’re done. If you get 50, 60, 70, 80% better, what we have now is people that will come back and get a second one, and it’s almost like painting another coat of paint on the wall. Let’s say you have a red room and you put white on it. It looks a little pink, but it’s better. Now we can put another white coat on it and it looks really good. That might happen down the road. We’ve had, I would say 10-15% of people come back. But it’s really up to you. A lot of times what people will do is they’ll test out one joint because when you’re 50, 60, 70, who has just one joint that’s problematic? If you’re athletic or if you do a lot of sports, you’re probably going to have shoulder issues and you’re probably going to have knee issues and your low back hurts. A lot of times people put a toe in the water, get something done, get great results, and then come back and get another body part done later.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Okay. People need to not be scared of that because, I mean, goodness sakes, if you go get your knee replaced, you’re looking at weeks of physical therapy, re-checks with your orthopedic surgeon. The list goes on and on. You think you’re out of the woods after the surgery, and that’s a major surgery that you have to recover from. I do want to touch, before you get into what’s in the injection, because I think there will be people that might be interested in that. But I do want to touch on, because we see people that have cancer. There’s a difference between systemic stem cell therapy and localized injected stem cell therapy. Could you talk a little bit about that difference? Because I know a lot of people with cancer are afraid of… You hear about stem cell therapy with cancer, you can’t really talk about that and do that in the United States, but there are places that are doing that. But there’s pros and cons to that. Can it stimulate circulating tumor cell growth and such? We talk about the injectable. A person has got cancer, but they also have bone on bone on their hip.

Dr. Kevin Conners

What is the pros and cons of doing injectable stem cell?

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Yeah, that’s what’s great about this. I want to be clear that these are not stem cells, what we use. This is an acellular product. This is next-generation. It’s what the stem cells secrete. So yeah, sure, in the United States, you’re not going to be able to probably get stem cells. You could go to foreign countries, and then could in the foreign country, if you have cancer, could it be made worse? We don’t know. There’s theories that it could. There’s not a lot of research on that right now. But to be clear, if you have a cancer and you have a joint problem, what we do, and this gets into the nitty gritty of the difference between now and maybe years ago, is that we use a product that’s called Purified Amniotic Fluid. So anyone that’s given birth knows that that baby is protected by this fluid, not only from if the mom tripped and fell mechanical protection, but it’s also protected from the mom’s diseases. This fluid is what nature has got us… Nature has got to this point over 80,000 generations, two million years. We’ve adapted to all these things coming at us because this amniotic fluid is filled up with what are called extracellular vesicles, exosomes, microvesicles, eptopic cell bodies, all these things, these little things that are out to create healing.

Dr. Jeff Donatello

So what we do is we have a way of putting… Not we, there’s a scientist that I’ve worked with. I’ve been to the lab. I’ve seen what he does. The FDA has been into his lab many times. He’s passed with flying colors. And you want to make sure you know the lab and the scientist. So I work with the Dr. Ian White, NeoBiosis is a company in Florida. What they do is they work with a cord bank. The mom, if she’s scheduled for a C-section birth in certain hospitals, she’ll raise her hand, fill out the paperwork and say, I want to donate my amniotic fluid. No babies are harmed. At birth, that amniotic fluid is taken out. Enough for 200 needs, to be honest with you. There’s a ton of this product out there. It’s taken out, and it’s tested by a third party under FDA guidelines, the same way that our blood is tested for disease. And what it is, the product we use, there’s 250 billion microvesicles, okay? So a microvesicle, think of it as a little bubble. And in that little bubble are all these cool things that help you heal. Messenger RNA and micro RNA are really what does the work.

Dr. Jeff Donatello

So a messenger RNA is going to upregulate and downregulate genes. In short, it’s going to tell your immune system, Hey, let’s get stronger. And then the micro RNA is going to create proteins, the building blocks of everything to make structure happen. So if you have damage, let’s say a knee, going back full cycle here to you, not you, but someone like they might have arthritis in their knee, arthritis is inflammation. It’s your body’s way of saying, Hey, fix me, buddy, fix me. The problem is you don’t have enough stem cells to secrete these microvesicles on your own. You don’t. And what you do have is old, and it just doesn’t work. So what we do is we put 250 billion of these little bubbles in, and they turn on your immune system. There’s new proteins, and we can create new tissue so that we can smooth out that joint and get better mobility, better function without drugs and without surgery.

Dr. Kevin Conners

That’s why as we age, we don’t heal as fast. We don’t heal as well. You’re just basically giving the body that extra boost to be able to do what it could do.

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Yeah. That’s why cancer hits most, not most, but a lot of people later in life, not all cancers, but because their immune system is weaker. Everything’s slower and nothing happens as quickly, and cancer is able to take over, where everyone has cancers in them. But if you have a strong immune system, it’s going to be knocking them down constantly and you won’t even get symptoms or it won’t even be a problem. But as cells, they go through senescence, right? The telomeres on the end of your chromosome start to shrink. It’s called aging. We can reverse that in many ways to a certain extent to give people a healthier, longer, better longevity.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, I know a lot of our listeners are going to want to hear this and want to get a hold of you. We’ll have your website information up on this podcast, but share a little bit more about your clinic and where people could reach you and how they could have a consult. Let’s say they live in California, they can at least have a telephone consult with you or what are you working on?

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Sure. It’s centerforwell.com. It’s Center for Wellbeing. We have three locations. All they have to do is call, and it’s a pretty easy process to get in. But the whole thing is talking on the phone beforehand to get an idea of what’s going on. If you go to the website, there’s a webinar on there where I talk about this whole thing a little bit more in detail. It’s about 22 minutes long, but I think the best thing is just to go to the website and then go from there.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, I know that this is a huge issue, and people get scared and they just go down the orthopedic route. I could speak from people that I, not just patients but family members I know that did knee replacement surgery or hip replacement surgery and greatly regretted it. If there’s anything that you could do to help prevent that, I would highly recommend it. You talk about, Okay, well, people get scared away with a $4,000 bill. Goodness sakes. I mean, you spend $4,000 on junk food. This is something that is worth investing in. This is your ability to stay mobile and to stay younger.

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Yeah, people spend it on latte, which again leads me to my next thing. If you go to our website, you’re going to see a metabolic reset weight loss program. That’s a large component to what we do. We get weight off people very quickly, and quite frequently when the weight comes off of them, the average person loses 20 to 40 pounds in three months. When the weight comes off, the inflammation dives down, and they feel better in their joints. A lot of times, we’ll have people—and we can do this from a distance—we use functional medicine or we have a program just with our health coaches where the whole goal is to stabilize insulin and to have the body get into a fat burning mode. It’s with real food. It’s not prepackaged meals. We teach people how to eat, how to shop. We try to work on people’s belief systems. If they have physical, chemical, and emotional stress, then they’re not going to be able to lose weight. You know this. If they’re not sleeping well, their cortisol is going to be spiked. We have to teach them how to sleep maybe. Maybe it’s not the hot fudge sunday they’re eating three times a week.

Dr. Jeff Donatello

Maybe their sleep just is horrible. Maybe their emotional stress is through the roof. Maybe their kid needs to be booted out of their house, or they need a new job, or they need to get a divorce. That’s creating stress that is causing their body to be in a fight-or-flight response, and they’re inflamed and their joints hurt because they’re inflamed. So we got to look at the full picture. So it’s a functional metabolic reset weight loss program and regenerative biologics combined. There’s not a lot of better things for getting people healthy.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, we’re going to have you on again if you’re willing to talk just about that whole weight loss program because that is obviously an issue in our society as well. Not as much to my listeners with cancer issues. Maybe that’s not what their main concern is, but I do know I have cancer members that talk to me on a regular basis about joint issues and knee issues and hip issues and not wanting to do the surgery while they’re in the middle of cancer treatment. But this is something you can do. This is going to be of great interest to a lot of people. Dr. Jeff, I just thank you for being the full gamut for this type of condition and not just somebody who’s just injecting people with something to make money. It can be an issue with different practitioners around the country. That’s why we always clicked as friends because you were passionate about helping people, and I always respected that about you. We want to have you on again. Thank you so much for being our guest today. I know people will love this information and be contacting you to move forward, so thank you.

Dr. Jeff Donatello

No, I appreciate the opportunity. We’ll talk soon. It’s always good talking to you. You’re like, top of the pile when it comes to people who understand what’s going on, so I appreciate that.

Dr. Kevin Conners

Well, thank you so much. All right, we’ll talk again soon. Thanks again.

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