By Amely Greeven
Washing your blood sounds almost medieval, but it’s actually a cutting-edge approach to help sufferers of chronic illness to find relief, and to support highly motivated health seekers to optimize longevity. Advocates call it “subtractive medicine”—removing what’s in the way of the body healing itself—and the thinking goes like this: Our detoxification system, which evolved to handle natural metabolic waste, gets overloaded by today’s onslaught of environmental chemicals and pollutants, as well as culprits like mold, microplastics and other industrial materials. When these things accumulate, the immune system is activated into a state of chronic, silent inflammation, which steals energy, impedes critically important work like warding off viral, bacterial or fungal infections or fighting cancer cells, and causes rapid aging (aka inflammaging).
Technologies that purify the blood by machine can help to “clear out harmful immune complexes, auto-antibodies and circulating toxins,” says Dr. Jonathann Kuo, founder of New York City’s pioneering longevity clinic Extension Health (extension.health). “It’s a powerful way to rapidly lower the inflammatory load in the body.” People with chronic, often complex conditions like long COVID, Lyme disease and chronic fatigue, as well as autoimmune conditions, immune-involved neurological conditions and mold toxicity, are candidates, but so are individuals concerned with staying well in a world where pesticides and heavy metals are on the daily menu. “Even totally normal people have baseline levels of silent inflammation,” says Kuo. “This is next-level cleansing for life in our modern environment.”
Three kinds of blood purification therapies are currently being used in longevity and regenerative medicine, all of them administered after personal medical evaluation. Extracorporeal blood oxygenation and ozonation filters and ozonates several liters of blood over the course of an hour in a closed loop system (similar to dialysis), to not only cleanse blood and improve cellular function, and potentially inactivate pathogens causing constant low-grade symptoms, but to “stimulate and exercise the immune system,” says Kuo, as part of a longevity strategy. Therapeutic plasma exchange, aka plasmapheresis, removes a certain amount of blood plasma (the watery fluid component of blood—distinct from the red and white blood cells—which carries proteins, antibodies and toxins) and discards it, offering the immune system a chance to reset, almost like doing an oil change for the body. The plasma is then replenished with new albumin and saline. A more advanced and selective technology of double-filtration plasmapheresis filters plasma through a special membrane system that selectively binds and removes specific inflammatory mediators, heavy metals and environmental toxins, then returns the purified plasma back into circulation. The goal is to cleanse the blood more gently, without the fluid shifts or protein loss that can occur with standard plasma exchange. “Rather than changing the oil, it’s more like running the oil through a high-performance filter that keeps what’s healthy and removes what’s harmful,” says Kuo, who believes that receiving these procedures seasonally, ideally as part of a two-day program of regenerative treatments, is optimal for thriving health.
The protocols are an investment—at Extension Health, ozone treatments start at $1,500 and plasmapheresis starts at $9,000 per session, which includes toxin screening, inflammation testing and mitochondrial testing. But patients report feeling clearer, more energized and, sometimes, like they got their lives back.
Plasmapheresis is the subject of multiple studies showing improvements for cognitive health, Alzheimer’s prevention and lowering biological age scores, and researchers are tracking promising results from blood filtration for sufferers of chronic fatigue and long COVID, though “the data is still out on which procedure is most effective for which conditions,” says Kuo, who will soon be offering a double-filtration system called INUSpheresis as part of an FDA clinical trial, making Extension Health the first U.S. clinic to offer it—possibly at lower cost than plasmapheresis, as it avoids the expense of albumin.
Until then, health-seekers can find this double-filtration treatment offered in Europe, at luxury medical resorts like the new Buff Medical Resort (buff-medical-resort.com) near Zurich, where the treatment, which is followed by restorative nutritional IVs, can be added to multiday retreats that merge high-tech medicine with body-mind-soul restoration. (Each apheresis treatment costs 3,200 euros—some opt to do a second treatment a few days after the first because once the blood is cleansed, the organs can purge a secondary amount of toxins.)
In Encinitas, California, meanwhile, a state-of-the art longevity clinic called Lumati (lumati.com) offers its own advanced purification protocol, which is administered just over the border at a luxury medical center in Tijuana, Mexico. Called HemoDetox, it runs the entire blood circulation through a unique filtration system 10 times over, and has been used by celebrated biohackers like Ben Greenfield and Gary Brecka as well as individuals seeking recovery from complex and chronic conditions.