Why do kids almost never get osteoarthritis, despite putting their joints through far more than any adult does? I joined entrepreneur Mike Cormier on his show to unpack that question, along with stem cells for addiction, brain trauma, and hair loss with no clear treatment path.

I explain how mesenchymal stem cells, sourced from fat, bone marrow, or umbilical cord tissue, travel through the bloodstream to support tissue repair and immune function when delivered by IV. Osteoarthritis reflects a decline in the body's regenerative capacity, not simple wear and tear. I cover an animal study showing a 70 to 80% reduction in relapse behavior among alcohol dependent rats treated with stem cells, and an ongoing clinical study using SPECT imaging to evaluate traumatic brain injury. I also detail my personal peptide protocol: BPC-157, Tesamorelin, Ipamorelin, CJC-1295, Epitalon, microdosed GLP-1, and GHK-Cu for skin structure.

Mike traces his hair loss to years of business related stress, describing patches spreading across his scalp and eyebrows and the recovery protocol he built himself: PRP, BPC-157, red light therapy, and microneedling. I share a parallel case from my clinic, where IV stem cells regrew a physician's hair after a service related infection.

It's a wide ranging look at how regenerative medicine adapts to what the body actually needs, whether that's a joint, a damaged brain, or hair that wouldn't grow back.

Key Takeaways:

00:47 From psychiatry to stem cells

04:04 How stem cells build organs

06:06 Mesenchymal stem cells and sources

10:22 IV infusion versus local injection

13:41 Why Dr. Joy built skincare

22:32 Stem cells cut alcohol relapse

24:21 Reversing brain damage from addiction

26:00 Favorite peptides for muscle gain

29:41 Cycling peptides and testing NAD

34:52 What stem cell skincare involves

37:58 Healing alopecia through gut health

55:10 Extending human lifespan twenty years

Additional Resources

✨ Follow Mike Cormier on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikecormieronair/ 

✨ Follow The Inner Circle Studio on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theinnercirclestudio/ 

✨ Subscribe to The Inner Circle On Air on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheInnerCircleOnAir 

Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

About Dr. Joy Kong:

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

Two orthopedic surgeons told a 69 year old patient there was no other option left for his knees. He tried something else first, and ten years later he's still walking four miles a day.

Dr. Joy Kong is a triple board certified physician specializing in regenerative and anti-aging medicine, and the founder of Chara Health in Los Angeles. In this live audience Q&A, she explains why she uses non-expanded, umbilical cord derived mesenchymal stem cells instead of autologous or bone marrow sources, how IV delivery interacts with the immune system through the spleen, and why exosome products claiming trillions of particles per dose are not biologically realistic. She walks through real patient outcomes, including a 69 year old who avoided bilateral knee replacement, a patient whose hemoglobin A1C improved after years of failed interventions, and a peripheral neuropathy patient who regained the ability to write after three treatment sessions.

She also gets into the questions people ask most: how many sessions it actually takes to see results, what she's seen go wrong in over 40 treatments on herself, and how to spot inflated claims from clinics that don't test their products the way she does.

If you've ever wondered whether a second opinion is worth chasing down, or what actually happens inside your body after a stem cell infusion, this one covers more ground than most.

Dr. Joy talks about:

00:00 Why some patients feel change in days

05:19 The three pillars of stem cell therapy

08:31 Why the FDA restricts stem cell language

13:31 The five Ps of regenerative medicine

14:23 Why umbilical cord cells beat your own

20:54 Why expanded cells trigger FDA drug rules

22:11 How delivery route decides where cells go

26:53 The peptides in every stem cell protocol

31:24 What peptides are and how many exist

40:19 The ten-year knee replacement study

57:33 The real risks of stem cell therapy

Additional Resources

Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Discover CharaOmni, my skincare line built on the same regenerative science as my clinical work: https://charaomni.com

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

About Dr. Joy Kong

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

If you're holding off on stem cell therapy because you're waiting for FDA approval to bring the price down, this is the reality check you need.

Dr. Joy Kong, a triple board certified physician and stem cell specialist at Chara Health, breaks down what FDA approved stem cell products actually cost. Cord blood transplants like Omidacel and AlloCord run $450,000 to $1.2 million. Ryoncil, used for pediatric graft versus host disease, totals $1.55 million. By comparison, current stem cell therapy provided as a legal tissue transplant, the same model used in organ transplants, costs $7,000 to $25,000 per infusion.

Dr. Joy explains why that gap exists, and what it means if you're counting on insurance to make this treatment affordable.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/

Dr. Joy talks about:

0:21 Why FDA Approval Doesn't Lower Cost

2:26 Cost Of FDA-Approved Stem Cell Products

3:40 Why Legal Stem Cell Therapy Is Cheaper

Additional Resources

Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/

About Dr. Joy Kong

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

Why does eating sugar sometimes leave you more exhausted than before you ate it? Metabolic health researcher Chris Mearns sits down to explain the science behind fructose, cellular energy, and the compound that changed his own relationship with cravings.

Chris Mearns is a metabolic health researcher and founder of LIV3 Health, focused on how fructose metabolism affects cellular energy production. He explains how the enzyme fructokinase converts dietary fructose into uric acid, degrading ATP and shifting cells into a defensive, energy-conserving state linked to fatigue, fat storage, and chronic cravings. The conversation covers how this same mechanism connects to gout, a disease historically limited to those with access to sugar and alcohol, and why calorie restriction or GLP-1 medications often fail to address the underlying signal. Chris also discusses luteolin, a flavonoid identified as a fructokinase inhibitor, the personal experiment that led him to develop it into a supplement called Sugar Shield, and emerging research linking fructokinase inhibition to cognitive decline prevention.

The conversation also covers why fruit affects the body differently than refined sugar, and what a realistic timeline looks like once the underlying signal is actually addressed.

It's a practical look at why willpower alone rarely fixes chronic cravings, and what the research says might work instead.

✨ Get Sugar Shield (use code DRJOY for 15% off your first purchase): https://liv3health.com/joykong 

Chris talks about:

02:29 Why every disease shares one root cause

05:44 Mitochondria: your body's real engine

08:12 Reframing fructose as a signaling molecule

10:32 How fructokinase turns ATP into uric acid

13:03 Bears, torpor, and ancient fructose survival

19:12 The organs fructose hits hardest

20:03 Fructose, uric acid, and gout

23:54 Why GLP-1s don't fix the engine

26:17 Pharma's race for fructokinase inhibitors

34:56 Lutein: a natural fructokinase inhibitor

43:23 Fructose and the Alzheimer's connection

46:01 First steps to reset your metabolism

Additional Resources

✨ Visit LIV3 Health: https://liv3health.com 

✨ Follow LIV3 Health on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tryliv3/ 

✨ Follow Chris Mearns on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chris_liv3/ 

✨ Subscribe to Chris Mearns' YouTube channel, The Fructose Model: https://www.youtube.com/@thefructosemodel 

Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/  

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

What if a single urine sample could screen for 50 diseases before you ever felt sick? Dejan Nenov, co-founder of AI diagnostics company Luventix, joins Dr. Joy Kong to explain how.

Dejan Nenov has spent nearly a decade navigating FDA processes and clinical trials, and also founded Panaton, a healthcare IT company connecting hospitals, labs, and clinics across the US. Luventix uses machine learning to analyze 38,250 raw chemical data points in a single urine sample, identifying disease patterns without isolating a specific biomarker first. Its ongoing IRB-approved study covers roughly 1,250 patients across colorectal cancer, Crohn's, celiac disease, and SIBO. The same model can predict which patients will respond to a given treatment, a tool called companion diagnostics, and could eventually screen for dozens to hundreds of conditions from one low-cost sample. Dejan and Dr. Joy also cover the regulatory pathway for AI diagnostics, including the FDA's Lab Developed Test framework, and how genetics and metabolomics offer two different, complementary pictures of health.

The conversation also covers a personal case: a close friend's daughter whose rare condition took years and specialists across ten states to diagnose, and why Dejan believes AI could have caught it sooner.

Dr. Joy and Dejan close with what a fully AI-run hospital already looks like in China, and Dejan's vision for an at-home test, like a pregnancy test, that catches disease three to eighteen months before symptoms start.

Dejan talks about:

00:00 How a dog's nose inspired Luventix

03:58 A dog's nose as a gas chromatograph

04:22 Training AI to classify disease

05:25 The 450-patient GI cancer trial

06:54 Urine reflects the body's metabolic state

08:07 Skipping biomarkers, reading raw data patterns

11:00 38,250 data points per urine sample

13:22 Metabolomics plus genetics, a fuller picture

16:44 The single 50-disease urine panel

18:51 FDA pathways: PMA vs. lab-developed tests

22:20 Regulating AI models that keep improving

36:11 Catching disease 18 months early

Additional Resources

✨ Learn more about Luventix: https://www.luventix.com/ 

✨ Read more about how AI offers an alternative to genetic testing: https://www.luventix.com/blog/ai-offers-alternatives-to-genetic-testing-to-make-disease-detection-more-accessible 

Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

About Dr. Joy Kong

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

Anti-aging protocols usually come from a doctor's office. This one comes from a self-made entrepreneur who swears by weekly NAD and Sermorelin injections instead.

Mara Dorne is a self-made entrepreneur who built her sales organization from scratch after losing everything in the 2008 financial crisis, eventually becoming the second person in her company's history to surpass a billion dollars in career sales. She describes the realization that turned her first year in sales from six months of no income into six figures, her approach to leading over 1,500 agents through servant leadership, and her biohacking routine, which includes weekly NAD injections for mental clarity, Sermorelin paired with resistance training, glutathione, microneedling, and cryotherapy. She also discusses treating anxiety as a functional trait rather than a limitation, and her view that actively working against aging is a legitimate choice, not vanity.

She and Dr. Joy Kong, the Stem Cell Queen, also get into diversifying a male-dominated industry and staying steady when gossip and criticism show up.

It's a conversation about resilience, biology, and refusing to accept defaults, in your bank account, your industry, or your own aging.

✨ Check out my stem cell skincare line, CharaOmni: https://www.charaomni.com/

Mara talks about:

00:44 Self-made millionaire and BILF Pod host

01:12 From $92K a year to $1B in sales

04:02 Losing everything in the 2008 crash

08:28 The self-accountability moment that changed everything

11:12 Building a team, banned from LA Fitness

19:42 Why work-life balance is a myth

26:12 Anxiety as a lifelong superpower

30:26 Her non-negotiable 4:30am gym routine

32:36 Why she calls herself a biohacker

34:10 Peptides, microneedling, and cold therapy

35:20 NAD, glutathione, and semaglutide injections

40:36 Legacy, stagnation, and refusing to slow down

Additional Resources

✨ Follow Mara Dorne on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maradorne/ 

✨ Listen to BILF Pod on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Hly3iu1MXsNguaNgW9MuK 

✨ Subscribe to BILF Pod on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bilfpod 

✨ Follow Mara Dorne on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maradorne/ 

Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

About Dr. Joy Kong:

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

At six years old, I was beaten for refusing to say I was wrong. I did not know it then, but that moment would shape almost everything that came after, including the woman who would eventually found Chara Health.

I am a triple board-certified physician, founder of Chara Health, and an expert in stem cell therapy, regenerative medicine, and anti-aging treatment. This episode marks the first time I share my personal history on my own podcast: childhood abuse in China, a decade practicing psychiatry before shifting to anti-aging medicine, the ego collapse I experienced in medical school, and my decision to leave China in the early 1990s with no money, no connections, and a rejected visa. I also describe my mother's multiple myeloma diagnosis at age 43, a prognosis of only a few years, and a 32-year remission she achieved through Chinese medicine and daily aerobics after leaving chemotherapy. The episode closes with my reflection on what I believe humanity most needs to heal from.

This is a more personal side of my story than I usually share here, including how I found faith after growing up an atheist in Communist China, and the identity I had to let go of in order to become who I am today.

If any part of my story helps you see your own a little differently, then sharing it was worth it.

I talk about:

00:00 The Beating That Built Me

05:00 Why My Success Felt Empty

08:00 Med School Shattered My Ego

11:00 Discovering My True Purpose

13:00 I Said There's No God

18:00 My Memoir, Tiger Of Beijing

23:00 Mom Called Me Social Garbage

27:00 I Married The Process

30:00 My Mother Survived Cancer Naturally

32:00 What We Need Healing From

Additional Resources

Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Listen to The Space Between, hosted by Sean McClellan: https://open.spotify.com/show/1F74r3TpbqrFfOQxYUMkXf

✨ Learn more about Sean's coaching: https://seanmcclellan.com/

✨ Learn more about our training academy for medical professionals: https://aaict.org 

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

About Dr. Joy Kong

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

A parasite cleanse gone wrong once left Elizabeth Aylor bleeding seventeen times a day, and it took her thirty years to build the gut healing framework she now teaches thousands of women. The holistic nutritionist, GAPS practitioner, and functional diagnostic nutrition specialist joins me to break down why so many gut protocols make people sicker instead of better.

Elizabeth Aylor is a holistic nutritionist, GAPS practitioner, and certified functional diagnostic nutrition practitioner who has worked with over 3,000 women on chronic gut issues. She explains why generic probiotics and greens powders can worsen SIBO and histamine issues, and why she relies on GI-MAP stool testing and full thyroid panels instead of guessing. She describes how biofilms shield parasites, yeast, and bacteria like H. pylori and Klebsiella from treatment, and why aggressive kill protocols without addressing nutrition and the nervous system can cause serious harm. She also covers why elimination diets like carnivore and low FODMAP should not extend past six to eight weeks, why GLP-1 medications often lead to weight regain without strength training and proper nutrition, and how she uses DUTCH testing to address insulin resistance and perimenopausal weight loss resistance.

Elizabeth also shares her own thirty-year health history, from childhood eczema and asthma to an eating disorder that dropped her to ninety pounds, and the extreme fruitarian and carnivore diets that nearly destroyed her gut before she built her own ninety-day recovery protocol.

If you've ever done everything right and still can't fix your gut or lose the weight, this conversation walks through what most protocols miss, and what actually works instead.

Elizabeth talks about:

4:00 Childhood Eczema, Asthma, and Anxiety

6:00 Eating Disorder and Fruitarian Dieting

9:00 150 Colonics, a Parasite Diagnosis

10:00 Her Own 90-Day Gut Protocol

12:00 Mold Toxicity, Thyroid Misdiagnosis

18:00 Why Probiotics and Greens Powders Backfire

22:00 A $10K Protocol, Near-Bedridden Bleeding

23:00 Interpreting Complex Stool Test Results

26:00 Why Elimination Diets Stop Working

31:00 Biofilms and Failed Parasite Protocols

38:00 DUTCH Testing and Insulin Resistance

41:00 Why GLP-1s Don't Fix Metabolism

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

Additional Resources

✨ Follow Elizabeth Aylor on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elizabethaylorfitness/?hl=en 

✨ Follow Elizabeth Aylor on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@elizabethaylorfitness 

Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

About Dr. Joy Kong

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

Stem cell clinics around the world are charging anywhere from $3,000 to $50,000 for a single IV treatment, and the price tag tells you almost nothing about whether it actually works.

Dr. Joy Kong, a triple board-certified physician and founder of Chara Health and the American Academy of Integrative Cell Therapy, breaks down the regulatory and clinical reality behind IV stem cell therapy. She covers FDA homologous-use rules, the narrow scope of current FDA approval for pediatric graft-versus-host disease, and why most clinical use is legal off-label practice. She explains the difference between mesenchymal stem cells and other cell lineages, why dead or non-viable cells can still deliver benefits through exosomes and growth factors, and the contamination risks tied to improper handling, including a real FDA recall linked to E. coli infections. She also outlines documented rejuvenation effects in patients, including improvements in hair, skin, energy, and libido, and a notable animal study in which stem cell treatment reversed aging markers in brain and muscle tissue.

Known in the field as the Stem Cell Queen, she also tackles the questions patients are afraid to ask: why doctors are often skeptical even when evidence exists, what separates a budget clinic from a fully regulated one, and how price actually correlates, or doesn't, with safety.

If you've ever wondered whether stem cell therapy is worth the cost, or whether your doctor's hesitation is really about the science, this episode lays out exactly where the evidence stands today.

Dr. Joy talks about:

01:49 Stem cell therapy's shift to mainstream longevity medicine

02:29 The longevity boom and today's biohacking tools

03:46 The different types of stem cells and what they do

05:03 What's FDA approved in stem cell therapy

06:58 Why doctors dismiss the stem cell evidence

07:49 Anti-inflammatory effects of IV mesenchymal stem cells

08:49 Reversed aging in animal studies

13:04 The real cost of IV stem cell therapy

13:56 Contamination, dead cells, and rejection risks

21:37 Why IV delivery powers the immune system

Additional Resources:

✨ Check out my stem cell skincare line, CharaOmni: https://www.charaomni.com/

Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/

About Dr. Joy Kong:

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

Stem cell therapy is producing patient outcomes that conventional medicine does not yet have a clean framework for, and the gap between what is possible and what most clinicians can explain keeps getting wider.

Dr. Joy Kong is a triple board-certified physician specializing in regenerative medicine, anti-aging, and longevity, and the founder of Chara Health in Los Angeles. She explains how mesenchymal stem cells from umbilical cord tissue are used to treat autoimmune conditions, musculoskeletal injuries, neurological disorders, end-stage organ failure, and chronic pain. She walks through delivery methods including IV infusion, direct injection, laser-attracted cell targeting, and intranasal exosomes that cross the blood-brain barrier. She covers cost ranges of $8,500 to $18,000 per IV treatment, frequency protocols ranging from every two months for biohackers to once a year for preventative use, and animal study data showing 30 percent lifespan extension along with reversal of senescent cell markers. She also discusses patient cases including reversal of late-stage cirrhosis after a single low-dose IV and chronic pain reduction of over 90 percent.

Adam Ficsor is the host of the Longevity World Cup, a new sport where athletes compete to reverse their biological age. He asks the questions most clinicians will not give a straight answer to, from cell sourcing to pricing to what to expect from a real treatment protocol.

Some of the cases Dr. Joy shares are ones she has been thinking about for years. They raise a bigger question about how much of what conventional medicine treats as terminal is actually a limit of the tools we have been using.

Dr. Joy talks about:

00:00 Is Stem Cell Therapy The Missing Piece?

04:07 What Stem Cell Therapy Actually Treats

07:14 How Stem Cells Target Inflammation

08:11 Stem Cell Therapy For Anti-Aging

09:26 Stem Cells Extend Lifespan 30% In Animals

18:10 Why Umbilical Cord Cells Are So Powerful

21:06 The Real Reason Celebrities Get Sepsis

22:43 The LivOn Contamination Scandal Explained

24:13 Stem Cell Therapy Cost Explained

27:50 Hospice Patient Reversed Cirrhosis

29:24 40 Years Of Blindness Reversed

33:52 Tiger Of Beijing: Dr. Joy's Story

Additional Resources

✨ Follow Adam Ficsor on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nopara73/ 

✨ Subscribe to Adam's YouTube and the Immortal Combat Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@nopara73/podcasts 

✨ Learn about the Longevity World Cup: https://longevityworldcup.com/ 

Visit My Clinic: 

Chara Health 🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Discover my stem cell skincare line: https://www.charaomni.com/ 

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

What if a single peptide could reset thousands of the genes that age you? GHK copper has been quietly running most of your regenerative biology since the day you were born. And by 60, more than half of it is gone.

In this deep dive, Dr. Joy Kong, the Stem Cell Queen and a triple board-certified regenerative medicine physician, walks through the science of GHK copper: a naturally occurring three-amino-acid peptide bound to a copper ion, first identified in 1973 by Dr. Loren Pickart, who observed aged liver cells regaining youthful function after exposure to young human plasma. The episode covers GHK copper's two primary mechanisms (copper delivery and gene-level bioregulation capable of shifting thousands of human genes back toward youthful expression) and its application across skin remodeling, wound healing, hair growth, neuroprotection (BDNF support, neural inflammation, anti-anxiety effects), ATP production, mitochondrial function, and stem cell reactivation. Dr. Joy reviews practical methods including topical formulations, subcutaneous injection, microneedling combinations, cost considerations, stability with other actives like vitamin C, and the protocols she uses in her own clinical practice at Chara Health in Los Angeles.

GHK copper is one of the few peptides shown to switch dormant stem cells back into active proliferation, support the brain against oxidative damage, and rebuild skin from the dermis up. It works at the gene level, which is what makes it different from nearly every other anti-aging compound on the market.

If you've been curious about peptides but overwhelmed by the marketing, this is the breakdown to start with.

✨ Shop CharaOmni, my stem cell skincare line: https://www.charaomni.com/ 

Dr. Joy talks about:

00:00 What GHK-Cu Does in the Body

01:15 GHK-Cu Discovery: Dr. Loren Pickart, 1973, and Why Levels Crash by 60

02:10 The Two Mechanisms: Copper Delivery and Genetic Bioregulation

03:45 GHK-Cu for Skin, Wound Healing, and Hair Growth

05:55 GHK-Cu for the Brain: BDNF, SOD1, and Anti-Anxiety Effects

07:25 GHK-Cu for ATP, Mitochondria, and Stem Cell Activation

08:40 Topical, Subcutaneous, and Microneedling Protocols

11:15 Cost, Stability, and the Vitamin C Interaction

Additional Resources

✨ Visit My Clinic: 

Chara Health 🌐 https://chara-health.com  

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

About Dr. Joy Kong

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

What if the most talked-about healing peptide in biohacking came from your own stomach — and carried a risk nobody in the space is talking about?

BPC-157, nicknamed "the Wolverine Peptide," has taken over fitness forums, longevity podcasts, and regenerative medicine circles. The preclinical data on tissue repair is remarkable. But the same biological mechanism that drives its healing power is the exact mechanism tumors use to survive and grow.

BPC-157 is a synthetic 15 amino acid sequence isolated from human gastric juice, first identified in the early 1990s. It drives tissue repair through six mechanisms: angiogenesis via VEGF upregulation, nitric oxide pathway modulation, FAK paxillin signaling activation, growth hormone receptor upregulation in tendons and ligaments, anti-inflammatory cytokine downregulation, and free radical scavenging for cell protection. An active Phase II randomized controlled trial is currently evaluating BPC-157 for acute hamstring muscle strain repair. Its pro-angiogenic properties raise a theoretical cancer risk in individuals with undiagnosed early-stage tumors. WADA has banned it for competitive athletes. The FDA has reclassified its availability and the FDA Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee is reviewing its status on the approved bulk substances list.

Dr. Joy Kong talks about:

00:00 Meet The Wolverine Peptide

02:40 Discovered Inside Human Gastric Juice

03:42 Six Pathways That Drive Healing

07:33 The First Real Human Trial

07:58 Why The FDA Cracked Down

09:24 The Hidden Cancer Risk

Additional Resources:

✨ Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

MUSE cells are one of the most exciting breakthroughs in regenerative medicine — and most people have never heard of them.

Hidden inside your own tissue is a rare, elite subpopulation of stem cells that can find injury, eat damaged cells, and become them. Discovered in 2010 by Dr. Marie Dezawa at Tohoku University in Japan, they are now one of the most talked-about developments in regenerative medicine. And for good reason.

Dr. Joy Kong, the Stem Cell Queen, breaks down the science from the ground up: why conventional stem cell sources like bone marrow and fat-derived cells have real limitations, what makes umbilical cord cells a significant upgrade, and why MUSE cells represent something fundamentally different. These cells home into damaged tissue like a guided missile using the S1P pathway, eat the damaged cells, absorb their DNA fragments, and transform into the exact cell type that needs replacing. They carry zero tumor risk, require no donor matching, and get stronger the harsher the environment they're placed in. Dr. Joy also shares her own personal experience using MUSE cells for a chronic hip issue — and the result that surprised even her.

This episode covers the full history of stem cell therapy, the biological mechanisms that make MUSE cells unique, the Goldilocks ratio for optimal treatment, what clinical use looks like today, and why this technology — though newer — carries extraordinary promise for the future of regenerative medicine.

If you are in your 50s or 60s and wondering why your body isn't healing the way it used to, MUSE cell therapy may be the answer.

🧬 Contact Chara Health at 818-356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to get started.

Dr. Joy talks about:

00:00:53 MUSE Cells: Why Everyone Is Talking About Them

00:03:39 How Your Stem Cells Age With You

00:05:02 Aging Stem Cells and Cancer Detection

00:05:32 Umbilical Cord Cells: Younger Than a Newborn

00:09:52 What MUSE Cells Are and How They Were Found

00:11:04 The S1P Pathway: Precision Homing

00:12:03 How MUSE Cells Eat Damaged Cells and Become Them

00:12:43 Zero Tumor Risk and the Built-In Genetic Brake

00:14:08 Immune Privilege and Zero Rejection

00:15:28 Dr. Joy's Personal MUSE Cell Result

Additional Resources

✨ Learn more about stem cell therapy case studies at the American Academy of Integrated Cell Therapy: https://aaict.org 

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

Visit My Clinic:

Chara Health 🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

About Dr. Joy Kong

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

Every day starts with the same mind. Most people never stop to ask what shape it's in before the day takes it.

Marc Champagne is a mental fitness strategist, bestselling author of Personal Socrates, and host of the Behind the Human podcast. He spent over a decade interviewing high performers, longevity leaders, and world-class thinkers on the practices that keep their minds clear under pressure. After building a daily journaling practice during his corporate sales career, he founded Keio, a digital product that brought guided journaling to nearly 90 million people in its first two years. His work today bridges longevity and mental performance, with Fortune 500 companies including Google and LinkedIn.

In this episode, Champagne defines mental fitness as anything that trains your mind to work for you instead of against you, and explains why most people running 12 to 14 hour days at high cognitive intensity with zero recovery are experiencing burnout, not stress. He covers the one-minute morning check-in that identifies the fuel source behind stress, the question "what am I pretending not to know" that surfaces what people have been avoiding for years, and why you trust the plan over the mind during downward spirals. Dr. Joy shares her own recovery stack, including infrared sauna, ShiftWave chair, and the day the heat overrode an emotional state she walked in with.

For high performers, health-literate adults navigating chronic stress, and anyone who wants to understand what recovery actually looks like before burnout arrives.

The mind is the thing that executes everything else. It deserves a plan.

Marc talks about:

00:00 What Is Mental Fitness, Really?

01:30 How a 10-Minute Morning Habit Changed Everything

05:00 Build a 90-Day Plan for Your Mind

09:00 Why Most People Quit Their Mental Practices

12:30 Sleep Is the Number One Mental Pillar

15:00 The Key to Stress? Trust the Plan

18:00 How to Identify What's Fueling Your Stress

22:50 One Question to Ask When Your Mind Is Clear

27:00 Why Self-Awareness Can Feel Worse Before Better

32:00 Approach Mental Fitness Like Curiosity, Not Work

Additional Resources:

✨ Follow Marc Champagne on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mchampagne/ 

✨ Visit Marc’s website: https://mchampagne.com 

✨ Listen to Behind the Human:  https://open.spotify.com/show/6H3VNU8UiKPxzyM82KXKiT?si=b1a12ec9b8234732 

✨ Get Marc’s book, Personal Socrates: https://baronfig.com/products/personal-socrates?pb=0 

Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

Most psychiatric treatments for autism don't address what's actually happening underneath the diagnosis. They subdue. They don't repair.

In this episode, I sit down with Karen Thomas of Naturally Recovering Autism to break down what stem cell therapy can actually do for children on the spectrum.

Children with autism show impaired central nervous system circulation, active neuroinflammation on brain autopsy, and higher rates of autoimmune patterns in their families. Mesenchymal stem cells, MSCs, address all three at once. They stimulate angiogenesis to restore blood flow and oxygen to the brain, suppress pathological immune responses, reduce neuroinflammation, and secrete factors that activate the body's own local stem cells. I share a clinical case of a seven-year-old who went from diaper-bound and non-verbal to verbal, continent, and climbing stairs after a single IV treatment with birth-tissue-derived cells. We also get into why not all MSCs are created equal, why 200 million expanded cells overseas often underperform 20 million original cells, what the FDA's Section 361 actually means, and how I sourced and built the cell product used in my clinic through Chara Biologics.

We close on why no stem cell protocol works in isolation. Diet, detox, nutrient status, and exercise are part of the protocol, not optional add-ons.

If your child is on the spectrum, or you work with families who are, this is the mechanism and sourcing breakdown most parents never get.

Joy talks about:

00:00 What stem cell therapy actually is

05:37 The three mechanisms underlying autism

08:46 How MSCs restore oxygen to the brain

10:54 From non-verbal and diaper-bound to talking and walking stairs

16:25 Why your own bone marrow cells may not be the answer

19:58 Are all MSCs created equal

21:55 FDA Section 361 and what's legal in the US

23:34 Why 200 million expanded cells underperform 20 million original

27:39 Inside the sourcing and 89-question donor screening

43:42 Why diet and detox decide whether stem cells work

Additional Resources

✨ Listen to Naturally Recovering Autism with Karen Thomas: https://naturallyrecoveringautism.com/ 

✨ Karen's free four-stage webinar for parents: https://naturallyrecoveringautism.com/freeworkshop 

Visit My Clinic: 

🌐 Chara Health https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

What if aging isn't about time, but about the cells your body can no longer replace?

Dr. Joy Kong, triple board-certified physician and founder of Chara Health in Los Angeles, sits down with Luke Storey to break down what regenerative medicine actually does inside the body. Dr. Joy explains how umbilical cord-derived mesenchymal stem cells work through five core pathways: anti-inflammatory effects, immune modulation, antifibrotic action, antimicrobial properties, and angiogenesis. She covers mitochondrial transfer, where new cells pass fresh mitochondria into aging cells through a microtubular bridge, and senescent cell clearance, the same process that reversed aging in published mouse studies. Dr. Joy also addresses why minimally manipulated birth tissue cells used in the US can be safer than the cultured, expanded cells used overseas, why "more cells" is not better, and how stem cell therapy supports DNA repair through micro-RNA signaling.

The conversation also covers the cesarean delivery and screening process behind ethical sourcing, the science of micro-chimerism, and why every organ inside the body ages alongside the skin you can see.

Dr. Joy then opens up about her own four-and-a-half-year IV stem cell protocol and the reversal she's measured since 43. The episode closes with a deeper conversation on ketamine therapy, gamma brainwaves, and the philosophical roots of integrative medicine.

Dr. Joy talks about:

00:00 Why we age and why stem cells are the answer

01:03 From Chinese medicine to UCLA psychiatry to regenerative medicine

03:12 Anti-aging philosophy: treating disease before symptoms appear

05:36 How umbilical cord stem cells are collected and screened

11:12 Why your immune system accepts another person's stem cells

13:08 The Y-chromosome study that changes how we think about cell transfer

16:18 Bone marrow vs. fat vs. birth tissue stem cell sources

19:30 How stem cells trigger cancer cell death through Trail ligand

25:00 Anti-inflammatory, immune-modulatory, and anti-fibrotic effects explained

28:28 Killing senescent cells to clear the path for regeneration

30:54 Mitochondria transfer: getting a fresh cellular battery

39:00 Ketamine, gamma waves, and the science of expanded consciousness

Additional Resources:

✨ Get My Famous Skin Cream CharaOmni: https://www.charaomni.com/ 

✨ Subscribe to Luke Storey on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LukeStorey 

Visit My Clinic:

Chara Health 🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

He was an elite marathoner running 150 miles a week. A few years later, his SPECT brain scan looked comparable to 80-year-old patients with dementia. He was 22.

Cameron George is the founder of Tru Kava and a member of the Kava Coalition. He has worked with physicians and researchers to modernize kava as a functional beverage category and has spent more than a decade studying plant pharmacology, GABA modulation, and nervous system recovery. In this conversation, Cameron explains the biochemical credit card model of synthetic drug dependency, why acetaldehyde — not ethanol — drives the effects of alcohol, and how traditional kava binds to GABA-A receptors without producing the depletion and tolerance seen with benzodiazepines. He describes how the kavalactone entourage effect enables reverse tolerance, the mechanism that allowed him to taper off benzodiazepines in under two months. Listeners learn the measurable impact of casual alcohol use on HRV and sleep architecture, the difference between real kava and US-market extracts, and the practical applications of kava for stress, focus, sleep, and alcohol-free social life.

Cameron also shares his own collapse: the high-dose Adderall and benzodiazepines that nearly destroyed his nervous system, the years of multiple chemical sensitivity that followed, and the serendipitous phone call from a friend in Vanuatu that changed the trajectory of his recovery.

This conversation is for anyone questioning the role alcohol plays in their performance, anyone who's been handed a prescription without answers, and anyone looking for a credible path back to a regulated nervous system.

Cameron talks about:

00:00 Why alcohol is a metabolic poison and acetaldehyde causes the buzz

09:11 Biochemical credit cards: how synthetic substances drain your neurochemistry

20:40 The Adderall and benzodiazepine prescription that broke his nervous system

22:16 A SPECT brain scan comparable to 80-year-old dementia patients

29:30 Autoimmune collapse, 10 grand mal seizures a day, and reacting to water

31:33 The Vanuatu phone call that introduced him to traditional kava

35:28 How kavalactones modulate GABA-A receptors

37:10 Reverse tolerance: why kava heals the system instead of depleting it

41:46 What hyper-sobriety, focus, and the kava afterglow feel like

44:00 Why kava hepatotoxicity claims were debunked in 2014

46:30 Why traditional preparation beats kava extracts

51:55 The 200 strains of kava and the vision to replace coffee culture

Additional Resources

✨ Follow Cameron George on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cameron.george_/ 

✨ Learn more about Tru Kava: https://trukava.com 

✨ Connect with Cameron George on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameron-george-0311aa185/ 

✨ Follow Tru Kava on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/trukava/ 

Visit My Clinic: Chara Health

🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

—

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

What if the knee replacement your surgeon insists on isn't actually your only option?

A 12-year study followed 30 patients with osteonecrosis in both knees. One knee got replaced, the other got umbilical cord–derived stem cells. By the end, six replacement knees needed revision surgery. Only one stem cell knee ever needed replacement.

Dr. Joy Kong is a triple board-certified physician known as the Stem Cell Queen, and at her Los Angeles clinic Chara Health she treats joint osteoarthritis using birth tissue–derived mesenchymal stem cells from donated umbilical cord and placental tissue from healthy live births. Her dual-angle protocol combines intra-articular injection with intravenous delivery — the outer third of cartilage is fed by blood supply while the inner two-thirds is fed by synovial fluid, so treating both routes produces a synergistic effect single injections cannot match. She walks through the anti-inflammatory phase, the tissue rebuilding phase, the critical four-to-six-week fragility window, and the comparative study showing dramatically lower revision rates for stem cell–treated knees.

If you've been told joint replacement is your only option, this episode may change how you think about what your body can still heal.

Dr. Joy talks about:

00:00 What to expect from stem cell therapy for joint pain

00:27 How umbilical cord stem cells regenerate joints

01:25 Birth tissue vs. fetal cells — clearing the confusion

02:18 Why dual-angle treatment outperforms single injections

03:09 What recovery actually looks like

04:13 The 4–6 week fragility window most patients underestimate

05:27 The 12-year study that changed how I think about knee replacement

Additional Resources

Visit My Clinic: 

Chara Health 🌐 chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311 

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: joykongmd.com 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: instagram.com/dr_joy_kong 

—

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

She wasn't depressed. She was manic. And her doctor put her on antidepressants anyway.

Alessandra Torresani — actress (Caprica, The Big Bang Theory, American Horror Story) and NAMI ambassador — spent over a decade misdiagnosed before learning she had Bipolar I Disorder. In this episode, she joins me to unpack what that decade cost her, how she got stable, and what she wishes every patient knew before walking into a psychiatrist's office.

Alessandra brings firsthand experience managing Bipolar I Disorder, including more than three years off all psychiatric medication through pregnancy and breastfeeding. Drawing on my 11 years of clinical psychiatry before moving into regenerative medicine, we cover antidepressant-induced mania and its link to suicidal ideation, why bipolar disorder is routinely misdiagnosed as ADHD, and the symptom-tracking method that shortens the path to an accurate diagnosis. Alessandra walks through the non-pharmaceutical tools that kept her stable through pregnancy: transcendental meditation, breathwork, hypnobirthing, menstrual cycle tracking, clean nutrition, and ballet. I share emerging research on stem cell therapy for alcohol addiction, including animal studies showing up to 80% reduction in drinking behavior, along with how GLP-1 medications and NAD IV infusions are being used to reduce cravings and ease opiate withdrawal.

We also get into the overprescription of stimulants like Adderall in young children, and why ruling out lifestyle factors — sleep, nutrition, screen time — should come before a prescription pad.

And Alessandra shares why, despite being told speaking openly about her diagnosis would cost her her career, she refused to stay quiet.

We talk about:

• 00:00 Misdiagnosed with bipolar her whole life

• 03:06 The myth that bipolar equals creativity

• 04:30 Hiding a bipolar diagnosis in Hollywood

• 06:32 Early childhood anxiety and perfectionism at age 5

• 08:00 Why bipolar disorder takes 10–12 years to diagnose

• 15:39 Antidepressant-induced mania and suicidal ideation

• 17:24 Identifying bipolar I disorder in adulthood

• 19:42 Managing bipolar without medication during pregnancy

• 34:26 Tracking symptoms before starting psychiatric medication

• 38:42 Stem cell therapy reduces alcohol cravings in studies

• 40:46 GLP-1s and NAD IV therapy for addiction recovery

• 43:52 NAMI resources for postpartum depression and anxiety

🔗 Additional Resources:

✨ Follow Alessandra on Instagram: instagram.com/alessandratorresani 

✨ Follow Alessandra on TikTok: tiktok.com/@iamalessandratorresani 

✨ Subscribe to Alessandra's YouTube: youtube.com/@Iamalessandratorresani 

✨ Listen to Emotional Support Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/emotional-support-with-alessandra-torresani/id1476940278 

Visit My Clinic: 

Chara Health 🌐 chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311 

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: joykongmd.com 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: instagram.com/dr_joy_kong 

—

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.

He's not a doctor. He's not a researcher. And his path to becoming one of the most-watched voices in biohacking on YouTube didn't start in a lab or a gym.

Dylan Gemelli, known as the Wellness Revolutionary, spent years rebuilding his life before discovering that the same obsessive drive that once worked against him could be redirected into something extraordinary.

Dylan Gemelli is a self-educated biohacker with over a decade of hands-on experience in peptide therapy, SARMs research, and performance nutrition — a path he built from the ground up after serving time in prison. In this episode, he breaks down the "Glow Stack" — BPC-157, TB-500, GHK-Cu, and KPV — explaining how each compound targets tissue repair, skin regeneration, and inflammation reduction. He covers how to spot counterfeit COAs and white-labeled peptides in today's market, and why chronic stress — specifically elevated cortisol — undermines any optimization protocol you're running.

He also opens up about his complicated history with nutrition and the moment everything finally shifted.

Key Takeaways:

• 00:02:34 Who is Dylan Gemelli?
• 00:05:26 The prison sentence
• 00:07:18 The mom conversation
• 00:18:12 Discovering biohacking
• 00:25:18 Free health habits
• 00:27:14 Electrolytes and sodium-potassium
• 00:27:24 Creatine for everyone
• 00:36:00 SARMs explained
• 00:46:22 The Glow Stack
• 00:50:58 Overcoming fat fear
• 00:57:36 The vagus nerve
• 01:02:00 Mental health drives physical health

🔗 Additional Resources:

✨ Follow Dylan Gemelli on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dylangemelli/ 

✨ Follow Dylan Gemelli on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dylanchristianogemelli/ 

✨ Listen to The Dylan Gemelli Podcast: dylanjamele.com 

✨ Subscribe to Dylan's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@DylanGemelliBiohacking 

✨ Follow Dylan Gemelli on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dylangemelli/ 

—

Visit My Clinic: 

Chara Health 🌐 https://chara-health.com 

📍 9568 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 91311

📲 Call (818) 356-8232 or email info@chara-health.com to make an appointment or go to https://www.joykongmd.com and fill out a contact form.

✨ Learn more about how to live a long and pain-free life: https://joykongmd.com/ 

✨ Follow me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stemcelldrjoy/ 

✨ Follow me on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dr_joy_kong/ 

—

Dr. Joy Kong is a regenerative medicine and anti-aging expert. Her podcast is part of her mission to reduce suffering and elevate happiness. Join us every week for the latest holistic health insights that will help you live a long and pain-free life.