In this premier episode of Conners Clinic Live, Dr Kevin Conners interviews Dr Brady Wirick of IAmREgen.com on his work with Stem Cell Therapy to heal many different issues related to osteoarthritic joints and bone-on-bone arthritis.
Relevant Links
To learn more about Dr Wirick and his Idaho Falls, ID practice visit IAmRegen.com!
Here is the Joe Rogan Experience episode with Mel Gibson where they discuss Stem Cell Therapy
Stay tuned for Episode 2 (you can see all episodes on the Conners Clinic Live page!)
Listen to the Full Podcast Episode
Transcript
Dr. Conners
Hello everybody. This is Dr Kevin Conners. Welcome to another episode of Connors Clinic lLve. Today’s episode is going to be a good friend of mine, Dr. Brady Wirick. Dr. Brady practices out of Idaho. I’ve known him for many, many years. His practice really concentrates on STEM cells and using STEM cells to heal all sorts of things. Knee injury, shoulder injuries, hip injuries. I know you’re going to love this video. He gives some real practical advice on what to do and helping with the aging process that we all go through. As always, don’t forget to hit the like button of the video. If you’re on YouTube, make sure you subscribe and hit that little alarm notification so that you don’t miss any new episodes. Now join me with Dr. Brady Wirick. Okay, welcome everybody. My guest today is Dr. Brady Wirick and he practices in Idaho falls way out on the West coast for me in Minnesota. So we’re going to jump right into it. Brady, you graduated as a chiropractor. When was that?
Dr. Wirick
Oh, geez. In 2006 I graduated from Texas chiropractic college.
Dr. Conners
Okay. What brought you out to Idaho?
Dr. Wirick
Fishing.
Dr. Conners
Fishing oh thats great. I remember when I was in school, it was always practice where you want to live.
Dr. Wirick
Right. So I actually, I grew up about three hours South of where I am now. I mean, Idaho falls, Idaho. I grew up in a small town just outside of Salt Lake city. Well, it’s not so small anymore. But when I went to chiropractor, when I was doing my undergrad, I was actually a fly fishing guide.
Dr. Conners
Wow.
Dr. Wirick
I would take people down the river, the green river, the flaming Gorge in the Wyoming, Colorado, Utah border. There’s a beautiful river there and I would take them down the river and we would fish. When I went to chiropractic school, my boat was about the only thing I didn’t sell.
Dr. Conners
Get your priority straight, at least.
Dr. Wirick
When it came time to figure out where I wanted to practice, the logic was, you know, I can go back to Ogden and I can have, you know, all these family and friends ready to see me, but it’s going to take me about four hours to get my boat in the water.
Dr. Conners
Sure.
Dr. Wirick
Or I can go to Idaho falls, establish my own practice, establish my own people, and be 20 to 30 minutes from having my boat in the water. And here we are 13 years later. You can see which decision won.
Dr. Conners
Well, that’s great. That’s great. Well, you’ve started off practicing as a chiropractor, but you very quickly got into functional medicine, functional neurology which is a whole field within itself. Tell us a little bit about that.
Dr. Wirick
Sure. So I really never actually practice as just a chiropractor. It was never, and, and I mean absolutely no insult when I say it this way, but I was never one of those, find a bump, smash it down guys. And I do clearly acknowledge that the chiropractic profession has done a tremendous amount for health, for healthcare, for individuals. But that was never really my gig. My first semester at chiropractic school, they had a party for all the new students where they are introducing all of the clubs and I found this neurology club and, the things that they were talking about, this neurology club, explaining how the nerves worked and how the body control or the nerves control the body and how you could fact have an effect on a nerve by firing a nerve. It all just like resonated with me at all. It sounded awesome. And so I started studying neurology as a chiropractic student. So when I graduated from chiropractic college, I had been through enough core extra coursework that I could sit and take the neurology diplomat exam.
Dr. Conners
Well, for our listeners who don’t understand what that is, functional neurology was really put on map back by Dr Carrick. There’s medical doctors and neurologists that go through that course because it’s so extensive. It is literally the elite to the elite of both medical and chiropractic professions that can graduate from character a diplomate program. So hats off to you there.
Dr. Wirick
Thanks man. I appreciate that.
Dr. Conners
And now you practice functional neurology for a period of time and now you’ve branched off into doing some other work that’s even more in depth. Is that right?
Dr. Wirick
That’s true. I’m going to say about three years ago, one of our colleagues started bothering me about, or not bothering me, pestering, I don’t know how to call it.
Dr. Conners
Nudging you.
Dr. Wirick
Nudging me in the direction of this whole regenerative medicine thing. And at the time it was just STEM cells. They started talking about STEM cells. I’m like, what? What are you talking about? What in the world is a STEM cell? I’d remember I remember talking about them in chiropractic school, but I really just didn’t have a clue. So I started looking into it a little bit deeper and the more I dug, the more it made sense to me.
Dr. Conners
You saw the benefit of it.
Dr. Wirick
I saw the benefit of it. I saw it was doing for people, you know, throughout my career I’ve helped a tremendous amount of people with some crazy, you know, things that no one else can help with. But at the end of the day when it came to osteoarthritic joints and you know, these bone on bone arthritis cases, they really only had one option and that was to refer them to a replacement. But what really got me, got me excited about this as well. You could take one of those bone-on-bone cases, give them one injection and put off having to have surgery for possibly even ever.
Dr. Conners
Yeah.
Dr. Wirick
My dad was, I’m not going to call him my Guinea pig because I had to commit to this before I could actually do it, because you have to being a chiropractor. I can’t put needles in people. I can’t prescribe anything. So I had to put the pieces in place so that I hire a nurse practitioner to do that portion for me. So there really was no, “Hey, I’m going to test this” other than just going full throttle. But my dad was the very first person that we injected and that was, we’re going on about 19 months ago. And at the time of his injection, both of his knees were scheduled for replacement surgery and he’s completely avoided it. He rode just two weekends ago. He rode his bicycle 27 miles in sun Valley. I mean, it’s just, it’s crazy.
Dr. Conners
That’s amazing.
Dr. Wirick
That was just my dad and now we’re getting all these other people that are coming back saying, “Holy cow, I can’t believe this.” I just recently I posted about a gal that was 85 years old and her doctor basically said, “if you want out of this back pain, then you’re going to have to have this extensive back surgery.” And at 85 years old, you and I both know how well that turns out.
Dr. Conners
Right. That’s just not good.
Dr. Wirick
Now she’s back going, “I’m 50% better, and I’m able to do these particular activities.” But the more you dig in this stuff, Kevin, the more it just blows my mind because now we’ve gone from STEM cells to these saints called exosomes, which are the chemical secretions that chem cell STEM cells release to do their job, readily cross the blood brain barrier.
Dr. Conners
Wow.
Dr. Wirick
So now we’re seeing people that come in and they’re saying the first thing that they notice is that their brain fog is starting to clear up their energy starting to lift. And so we’re having neurological and systemic effects just through injections.
Dr. Conners
Yeah, I’m just really interested to see what kind of results you get with people with early onset dementia and what that’s going to do for them. And that could push Alzheimer’s. My mother died with full blown Alzheimer’s and a big part of what pushed her into the dementia realm was her knee replacement surgery that she had. She had a lot of problems with it. She was supposed to get both knees done. She refused to get the second knee done. And that was a couple of years before her dementia really onset. So that was before STEM cells existed. The knowledge of this existed. I wish we could go back in time to change things. I don’t know what the outcome would be. I think it would be a lot more positive than it was.
Dr. Wirick
For sure. We’re still a long ways off from knowing exactly, but we’re seeing very, very promising things. And I think it’s important too that we know that there’s a lot of misconceptions about STEM cell therapy. There’s a lot of people that still hang onto this crazy idea that we’re using, like embryonic STEM cells or cells that are coming from aborted fetal tissue.
Dr. Conners
Well, that had been proven wrong a couple of years ago.
Dr. Wirick
Yeah I know but I get flack for that here still. Yeah. It’s just not happening. It’s not true. These come from donated umbilical cords that are tissue that, unfortunately in this country, 97% of the time, this tissue just gets discarded and thrown away.
Dr. Conners
Yeah.
Dr. Wirick
The entire STEM cell industry is operating off of 3% of the people who will actually donate their cell, don’t donate their core.
Dr. Conners
Right. Yeah. Everybody thinks of that. If they are old enough to think of the Bush era where the argument about using fetal tissue, well, it’s been long proven that fetal STEM cells don’t work the way anything else, the way STEM cells, you want them to work. So nobody’s using that. So great. You’re having great success with it. You’ve been doing this for three years now you said?
Dr. Wirick
No, we’ve only actually been doing it for about 18 months, but it took that long to get enough confidence, information and, and to get the pieces put together so we could do it.
Dr. Conners
Well, you’re a wise person not just jumping into something.
Dr. Wirick
Right.
Dr. Conners
So you had a very, very healthy, successful practice. I know that of you, prior to that, you taught functional neurology to doctors. Are you still doing any teaching?
Dr. Wirick
I don’t do it for functional neurology. I don’t do it for other doctors at this point, but we do a lot of education for our patients. We still do a lot of functional medicine stuff because frankly, the way I put it to people is this, if we’re going to help you grow new cartilage, your body needs the building blocks to make those cartilage and that cartilage. So do you want your new car? Do you want your new meniscus to be made out of Fritos and Coke? Or do you want it to be made out of real food? And so we will do quite a bit of educating as far as, Hey, this is actually how you should eat. What actually is healthy versus the standard American garbage that’s out there now.
Dr. Conners
Right. So is it mainly knee STEM cell work that you’re doing? Or could you do hips, ankles, any and degenerative joint?
Dr. Wirick
Any degenerative joint. Knees and shoulders are the easiest because they’re these big, juicy encapsulated joints that it’s pretty easy to get into that joint capsule. We still do knees. We still do spines. We still do neck. But knees and shoulders are our number one and number two.
Dr. Conners
Okay. Wow. Well great. And then what are some other major things that you focus on in your practice? You mentioned diet, you do a lot of nutritional pieces with these patients?
Dr. Wirick
Yeah, we sure do. We have, in fact, if you follow me on social media, you’ll see like recently we’ve been doing something called foodie Friday.
Dr. Conners
Oh yeah?
Dr. Wirick
Which is where we, my wife and I actually, post the recipes that we use in our day to day. And then we have a detox procedure that we developed with a U.S. Enzymes. We put that together. We have a webinar that’s associated with that. So diet a big chunk of it, by here as like I’m a daily in the office, it is mainly focused on regenerative medicine.
Dr. Conners
Well, let’s plug your website here. This would be a good spot for it. And your Facebook page too.
Dr. Wirick
So, IAmRegen.com is my website. Facebook is just Dr. Brady Wirick and that’s a W. I. R. I. C. K.
Dr. Conners
So you’re all about regenerative medicine. That’s a very hot topic. A lot of education on regenerative medicine in the last 10 years. It’s really growing. Absolutely. Because the practice of medicine tends to be just trying to patch up disease, and you know, decrease a person’s symptoms around a disease process, not really changing a person’s body yield for the disease. More and more people are becoming wise to that. You know, that’s why doctors like you and I are, practices are exploding. And I remember when I graduated having to educate people, and the, the difficulty was, was so high because there was no internet, there was no other forms of education for people. Now people can Google this information. Websites like yours, they could get a lot of information from, take back to their doctors or start doing some things on their own. And it can be really a blessing. There’s not a lot of doctors doing STEM cells like you, you’re kind of a unicorn out there, aren’t you?
Dr. Wirick
Unicorn, renegade. Just depends on how you want to look at it. It is a growing field and there’s STEM cell therapy has been happening for about, since about 2006. There were groups of doctors that started using your own STEM cells to do regenerative medicine. And so they would take them, they’d actually drill into your hip and take your bone marrow and culture your own STEM cells from there. And it works. It’s a great therapy. But that’s first generation biologics. Now we’re in the second and third generation where we now know, and we have the ability to take those umbilical cord cells, which are younger, more potent. They divide about four times as fast. They’re just flat out more effective. They are an off the shelf. So what I mean by that is, when we have an injection day, like we have an injection day coming up here in two days, our prior STEM cells are right now sitting in a cryo tank.
They’re sitting on liquid nitrogen ready for us to use. So there’s more and more doctors that are getting on board with this and seeing some growth from STEM cell therapy. There’s a whole bunch of doctors that are sitting back hanging onto those old ways of using your own STEM cells and taking shots that those of us who are unicorns and pushing the envelope a little bit more.
Dr. Conners
Yeah.
Dr. Wirick
So there is growth in the industry for sure. And it’s only a matter of time before it’s more and more mainstream. You know, Joe Rogan, I think we all need to thank Joe Rogan. He had Mel Gibson on his podcast and that really, he was on there talking about STEM cell therapy and using umbilical cord STEM cells and what he saw from that when his dad saw from it. It’s really just, it’s becoming more and more prevalent.
Dr. Conners
Yeah. We’ll have to look at that too. I bet with your kind of service people fly in from all over cause it’s not something that you have to do over and over and over again necessarily.
Dr. Wirick
We have done that in the past for people who just flat out wanted them.
Dr. Conners
But most the time it’s not necessary.
Dr. Wirick
Most the time it’s not necessary. We’ve had people fly from parts of Canada that I didn’t know or they drove from parts of Canada that I didn’t even know existed. We’ve had people fly in here to Idaho falls. We’ve had them fly their private jets in here. It’s been, it’s been a very interesting.
Dr. Conners
Yeah.
Dr. Wirick
Interesting way of practice.
Dr. Conners
Yeah. The interesting thing is, it’s not a procedure where you are laid up for a couple of days or anything like that. So they’re so less invasive, there’s really zero risk and it’s so much less expensive than a replace. I mean there’s just no reason why you’d do a hip or knee or shoulder replacement before you try STEM cells.
Dr. Wirick
If the insurance companies had any sense whatsoever.
Dr. Conners
They’d save themselves a fortune.
Dr. Wirick
You have do this before we were going to let you have surgery.
Dr. Conners
Right, exactly.
Dr. Wirick
You know, if we’re talking about just a knee joint for example, you talk about less invasive, a knee joint is two needles, one as an Ivy to take your blood cause we do use your own PRP or plasma.
Dr. Conners
Yeah.
Dr. Wirick
So we’ll take your blood, we’ll spin that down. We’ll combine that with the STEM cells and the second needle goes right into the knee joint and you’re driving home and you’re at your daily act. Your activities of daily living aren’t very restricted at all.
Dr. Conners
That is insane. It’s so cool. Seeing cutting techniques that is helping people. It isn’t based upon, you know, what the almighty insurance dollar a pharmaceutical company is prescribing for people. So appreciate your work. We’ll get the details on your information and contact information up when we do the add-ons on this too. Well, I would like to have you back on, I know you wanted to talk about EMF’s . I’d like to have your back out if we could.
Dr. Wirick
Anytime.
Dr. Conners
And record another episode. Let’s get one more plug for your website.
Dr. Wirick
Awesome. So again, it’s IAmRegen.com.
Dr. Conners
There you’ll find a bunch of information on STEM cells and what Dr. Brady Wirick does, and how you could get in touch with him. Well, thank you Brady. Brady Wirick in Idaho falls. It is a pleasure having you on here.
Dr. Wirick
Absolute pleasure, my friend.
Dr. Conners
All right. Bye bye.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
NOTE: All of the above statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This and any product(s) discussed are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
Dustin has been passionate about holistic health since he met his wife, Dr Mallory Ranem (Conners) 20 years ago. As the Digital Media Manager, he coordinates content across Conners Clinic’s large online presence, including written, video, and audio.