Nine days prior to my second therapy, I injected 15mg or 5 billion exosomes derived from the MSCs of a newborn placental umbilical cord into my vein. The only symptoms I had were two very large bowel movements and about 10 days of bronchitis with mod light brown sputum and no hemoptysis, chest pain, fevers, chills, or other viral prodromal symptoms. At the same time, I injected my mother with 2Billion intranasal and 3billion IV exosomes as I blogged about here.

Second treatment:

At 4pm on April 3rd, I injected 2 billion MSC-derived exosomes from newborn placenta into my nose and they quickly entered my brain via the olfactory nerve tracts (according to animal models). I also injected 1B into my right knee, 0.25 into my right achilles, 0.25 into my chronic subclinical dental abscess site,  and 0.5 into my right shoulder tendon.

In the initial 1 hour, I felt nothing but a mild discomfort at the sites of nasal injection.

After one hour, I felt a strange sort of breathless anticipation, kind of like the feeling one gets as one ascends a roller coaster before the hill.

Two hours after intranasal injection of 2 billion exosomes, I experienced ASMR, or autonomic sensory meridian response. This relatively recently described phenomenon is the subject of many YouTube videos but is basically a feeling, spreading from the base of the skull and then down the torso and out through the skin of the limbs, causing goosebumps. I usually only experience this during yoga when we do standing at attention with the hands at the heart or when I have an memory or aesthetic trigger like thinking of the movie, The Shining.

Interestingly, the ASMR and associated piloerection (hair standing on end) was suddenly something I could produce at will, without tricks usually associated with triggering it (see below.)

At three hours, I got very hungry and although I wanted to avoid digestion to avoid the circulatory and immune distractions, I simply had to eat. Strangely, I had a craving for fresh vegetables and fatty meat, the former of which is unusual for me.

4.5 hours after injection and digesting food, I was very sleepy although I had a good mood and very clear thoughts. I went to bed four hours earlier than usual and the brief awakenings were unusual. I awoke at 3 hours, which is usual and was very thirsty. Usually, my sleep cycles are 90 minutes like most adults, but they seemed to be two hours, awakening at 4AM, 6AM, and 8AM, voiding and drinking water each time.

After 24 hours, I felt calm and oddly, I retained the ability to produce ASMR at will. The sites of injection, except for my gum, have a sense of slight gravity or heaviness to them without classic signs of inflammation (heat, redness, and tenderness).

At 32 hours, mild tenderness appeared at the achilles’ site and mild to moderate tenderness in the shoulder. The gum is still tender (slightly over baseline). The knee is unchanged.

The first night, I slept 12 hrs. The second night, I slept 6+2.5 and the two awakenings were less prominent but strangely at one hour intervals.  I went to sleep at 3AM. I was very thirsty each time I awakened.

At 44 hrs post-injection, and the pain in the achilles and shoulder was gone. Late on day two, I experienced a diffuse dull headache without associated fever, nausea, dizzyness, light sensitivity, or neck stiffness. This lasted about 12 hours and resolved after a night of sleep.

On day four, the voluntary ASMR persists. I have no residual pain in the head, or any other injection sites, including the gums. I walked a couple of miles without discomfort in my achilles or knee.  On night three, I still awakened after just six hours, rested, and the sleep intervals still appear shorter at 60 minutes. Eczema flare on my right arm is 90% improved.

Now after five days, I feel essentially normal without pain in my injection sites. The voluntary ASMR persists and my sleep is now just six hours with awakenings spaced at 60-minute, not the usual 90-minute intervals.

The ability to voluntarily generate piloerection was only previously reported three times but that is because no one looked for it. In the only study on the subject, published in the summer of 2018, the authors found through Facebook that there are people that can do this although it never came on suddenly. In a survey of nearly 700 undergraduates, they found some could elicit the response using tricks and triggers like yawning, straining, certain sensory cues, etc.

The ancient Hindu Vedas point to a possible spiritual reason and it is possible that this represents a spiritual connection from harmonic balance of the chakras, whatever that means. If you want to learn more about voluntary piloerection, read this one and only article on the subject.

The main reason I did these treatments was to make sure that there were no untoward reactions and to see if any improvement occured. I wish to offer intranasal injection to patients with musculoskeletal and joint problems and also to those have with dementia and other serious central nervous system problems. That is why I wanted to make sure it was safe and that I understood the clinical symptoms to expect.

In summary, it appears that for me, a relatively healthy person, there were signs of changes that included heaviness followed by injection site pain and headache that lasted less than a day and that began around 2-3 days post-treatment. This was followed by resolution of previous functional deficits in those ligaments, joints, tendons and no further headache.

The central nervous changes of needing less sleep and having an altered ultradian clock may point towards a change in my hypothalamic neurons. The pulsatile secretion of glucose-controlling hormones seems to be a basis for our internal clock. As for the ASMR “superpower” it seems like a bit of a parlor trick and is essentially harmless in my estimation.

Theoretically, it is possible that the degradation of our hypothalamic-pituitary neurons, associated with telomere dysfunction, inflammation, and a senescent phenotype, are central to the loss of homeostasis and many of the changes associated with aging. 

I am hoping that since babies have biological sleep cycles on the order of 60-minutes, that perhaps I have reset this clock. Time, no pun intended, will tell. More exciting is the possibility of helping to repair the brains of much more damaged patients. While their clinical course may be different because of the higher levels of inflammation and senescent cells, perhaps their improvements will be even more dramatic as well. Stay tuned to find out more as I try to replicate the anecdotal results of some of the pioneering physicians using exosomes in their clinical practices.

If you want to experience the ASMR phenomenon, there is a very good chance you can by watching and listening to one of these videos. Have fun!  https://bestlifeonline.com/asmr-videos/

You may have had the experience of feeling goosebumps when something happened that was meaningful…maybe this is a latent ability in all of us that speaks to a previously unrecognized phenomenon? Even the term, ASMR, only dates to around 2007 although it is probable that we just didn’t bother naming it and looking for it as in the case of voluntary generation of piloerection.