THE ACCRESCENT™ PODCAST EPISODE 260

Leigh Ann Lindsey (00:01.4)
Well, Brad, welcome to the Accrescent Podcast.

Brad Pitzele (00:04.705)
Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (00:07.66)
Getting ready for our conversation, I was doing a little bit of research just into past conversations you’ve had and a little bit of your history. And I think it’s one that is going to be really aligned for a lot of our audience with some of the different diagnoses or illnesses that you experienced and have since recovered from. So I think that origin story is a really great place to start, which is how did you get to where you are today?

What as much as you’re comfortable were some of the things that you were experiencing.

Brad Pitzele (00:38.421)
Yeah. I came by it honestly. I my earliest kind of I guess what I’ll call disease symptoms were about second grade. I developed psoriasis, an autoimmune condition. It was mild. But then throughout childhood and young adulthood, I had other weird kind of symptoms come and go. I would go to the doctor for some of them, even had a surgery for one of them, but there was nothing to be found or it had a name without a treatment and just kind of went back to life as

Normal, I would I would have described myself as relatively healthy. and some of them kind of piled up in young adulthood too. But eventually things came to a head. In my mid-30s, I developed autoimmune arthritis. I was I was kind of surprised. A doctor once had mentioned that psoriasis could become psoriatic arthritis, so I knew it was possible.

But my psoriasis was just so mild that it yeah, it’s like it’s probably not me. It’s probably the person who’s got it all over their skin. and so I started on the kind of traditional path. got put on a variety of drugs. The first sets didn’t work, and then they put me on the powerful biologics that are really strong immune suppressants. And they would work for about six months, but when they’d wear off, I was in a worse place than where I started.

Towards the end I I did them for about two years and towards the end of it I started to v develop new symptoms. the backs of my legs became very stiff. the arthritis that was started in my hands had also developed in my feet. I had what was called like sausage digit. The tops of my feet were swollen, my my my toes were like puffed up like s little sausages and really red. and then the bottoms of my feet really started to hurt and

It’s so hard to describe this pain to someone who hasn’t experienced it. But the best way I can describe it is imagine someone beating the bottom of your feet with meat hammers and like trying to walk on that afterwards. That’s what it felt like. It it it got so bad, like I had to have a pair of a special pair of shoes by my bed. So if I had to get up and go to the toilet in the middle of the night, I would slip on those shoes because I couldn’t even walk walk barefoot to the toilet. It was too painful. but about my second year.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (02:55.923)
my gosh.

Brad Pitzele (02:59.669)
I developed a weird little psoriasis patch on my shoulder. And I went to the dermatologist just to get it checked out. I just had a hunch. It ended up being melanoma. I developed cancer, and that was a side effect of the drugs I was taking. Yeah. so I went back to my rheumatologist after that and said, Hey, what what do I do? Like, if I don’t take the drugs, I’m crippled. If I do take the drugs, that’s like.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (03:16.182)
Wow.

Brad Pitzele (03:28.053)
Russian roulette with cancer. And he was kind of flippant about it. He was a very nice man, but he was just kind of like, well, we’ll just try a different drug in the same category and hope for the best, sort of thing. I think he was trying to comfort me, honestly. Like, don’t stress it. But I just went out of there. I walked out of his office and there was like alarm bells screaming in my head. I just had this like flash forward to me on my like deathbed in a hospital, saying, Manna, you shouldn’t have listened to him. You knew better.

And I just sat in my car after that appointment, turned the music off, just had the air blowing and I in silence. And I was just asking myself, what do I do? I had a young family at the time. I was the single breadwinner in the house. And I was really scared about the whole thing. And I was, and then I just said something simple off the cuff. I said, Well, I don’t like either of these choices. I guess I got to pick a third way. And I didn’t know what that meant, to be honest with you. I just said it like it sounded good at the time. And I was like, okay, and I I left.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (04:18.911)
Hm.

Brad Pitzele (04:26.015)
And I spent some time thinking about it. I started researching, trying to figure out what I had. And then I kind of began this period of like self-experimentation. Like I I was going on chronic illness groups of people had similar symptoms. I was reading research. There was a ton of research back then on like leaky gut syndrome and candida overgrowth and different autoimmune protocols. And I was trying anything I could and not getting any relief.

went to an integrative health practitioner. nothing was working. And then I went to him for a while and he tried everything he could, like prescriptions, ozone, all sorts of different things. The ozone, he was like, This is this is my big gun. It’s a little expensive, Brad, but it always, you know, we need to do three of them. You might not notice it after the first one, but just wait till we get done with the third one. And we got done at the third one and I didn’t feel any better. I didn’t feel any worse. I it was

It was irrelevant to me. And I was like I became really afraid at that point, you know? It was just like nothing works. Even this integrative guy doesn’t have anything for me. like this might this might be the best life ever gets. me I cause I was continuing to get worse and worse and new symptoms and brain fog and energy issues and and so many things. and that was probably me at my worst.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (05:29.74)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (05:39.469)
Mm.

Brad Pitzele (05:53.174)
I think he kind of at one point he decided to test me for Lyme disease and I laughed at it. I was like, I don’t have Lyme disease. I’m like, I was never bit by a tick. I didn’t have that bullseye rash thing. This is ridiculous. But I’m gonna pay the 500 bucks for this test because he needs to know it so we can get on and figure out the real thing. And it came back positive. I had Lyme and a co-infection called Bartonella, and I didn’t even believe it. I went back to him and said, What’s the chances this is a false positive? And he looked at me and kind of scoffed and he goes, Brad.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (05:59.204)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (06:15.51)
Yeah.

Brad Pitzele (06:23.017)
It’s a a urine DNA PCR test. That means you have the DNA of those bacteria in your urine. What do you think the chances are you don’t have the bacteria? I was like, That was the moment I accepted I had Lyme disease. but then he was like, I don’t treat Lyme disease. He’s like, I won’t touch that stuff. You need to go find a a special Lyme doctor for that.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (06:32.503)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (06:44.348)
how funny he tested for it but he doesn’t treat it.

Brad Pitzele (06:47.195)
Well, he kind of knew that’s probably what it was. And there is this specialty. Like, if you’ve got Lyme, you gotta go to what’s known as a Lyme-literate doctor. And doctors have historically gotten harassed for doing things that are out of the standard of care. And the standard of care doesn’t work for Lyme. So there’s a lot of doctors who won’t touch it. he did say something to me kinda on the way out the door. He’s like, You should look into oxygen. He’s like, hyperbaric or exercise with oxygen therapy, which I had never heard of before.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (06:49.56)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (07:00.148)
Yeah. Yep.

Brad Pitzele (07:17.361)
And so I I I went home and I researched it. And hyperbaric was gonna be seven days a week, you know, an hour and a half inside of a chamber in a doctor’s office. It’s gonna cost me 75 grand here in Dallas. He I called him, said 75 grand. I don’t know if I can do that. And he said, I can get it for you for like half price if you can fly out to Florida. I know a place. And and I was like, Well, geez. And then I’m flying and renting a place for two months, and how do I keep my job?

So that wasn’t realistic. And then I looked into exercise with oxygen therapy, which I had never heard of. And there was no information about it. There were a few companies selling it and their websites were kind of filled with hyperbole. I just didn’t have a lot of confidence in it. So I just kind of pushed my seat away from the desk and walked away and said, I’m not doing either of those. That doesn’t make any sense. but then I kind of sat with it and realized I didn’t have any other ideas. I’d run out, I’d tried so many things.

And I decided, well, would you try the exercise with oxygen therapy if it weren’t so expensive? And I was like, Yeah, I’d try it. It because it was only like 15 minutes a day. And if you you bought it, you could have it in your house. So it was it’s it wasn’t like a burden from a time perspective, like hyperbaric. And as I joke, I’m a recovering engineer. I spent the first decade of my life doing engineering. And so I just kind of decided to research and make my own.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (08:25.41)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (08:31.18)
Exactly.

Brad Pitzele (08:44.319)
It did eventually become, you know, a linchpin in my healing. and about a year later I went and saw that doctor for an annual checkup and he was surprised how much better I was. And he’s like, Hey, are you doing the oxygen? I’m like, Yeah, I am. And he’s like, Well, who’d you get it from? I need to tell my patients about this. You’re looking great. And I’m like, sorry, doc. I just kind of made my own. He’s like, What? You made your own? Like, well, how does that? What? That doesn’t make any sense.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (09:09.666)
God. I have two I have two brothers who are engineers and they’re the masters of being like, yeah, I just built my own thing. I’m like, God, you’re I you’re so lucky. I love that you can do that.

Brad Pitzele (09:20.271)
Well, and like you don’t think about it. It was just something I did out of kind of desperation and lack of belief, to be honest. And I I expected to get scolded for it. You know, it was kind of like sorry, Doc. You know, I and he looked at me like there was a horn growing on my head. And after like he ge regained his composure, he’s like, Would you consider making them for my patients? And I was a lot better, but I wasn’t all the way there yet. So I was kind of like, Doc, uh-uh, I don’t want to overextend my I’ll think about it. And

I was so s I’d been sick for so long. I’d spent, you know, every inch of my life trying to like come up with excuses to get out of social engagements and or any other commitments. So that was always like reflex at that point. You know, it’s like but I went home and I sat with it for a while, and maybe about six or nine months later, we launched One Thousand Roads to help folks.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (09:58.767)
So totally.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (10:13.014)
Yeah, it’s amazing. I’m sure there’s so many other facets of that story, but I’m excited to get into EWOT because it’s a it’s a modality we haven’t talked about here on the podcast. And I think there’s a lot of different pieces I’m excited to hear your input on. And I love that you’ve had the patient experience because you’re gonna be able to speak to this completely differently. So let’s get into that a little bit more. And I am gonna rewind us a little bit and go EWOT, exercise with oxygen therapy.

Tell us what this is, and then we’ll start to get into the weeds a bit a little bit more. But just for the audience who’s like, okay, hang on, hang on, slow down. What is this?

Brad Pitzele (10:47.489)
Yeah.

Yeah. It’s a great question. So exercise with oxygen therapy is exactly what it sounds like. You do about fifteen minutes of cardiovascular exercise while you’re wearing a mask, breathing near pure oxygen. So at sea level, we breathe about twenty-one percent oxygen. So we we enrich the air up to ninety-three percent oxygen, and you just do fifteen minutes of cardiovascular exercise. It doesn’t need to be

You know, this isn’t high intensity interval training necessarily or anything like that. We’re helping a lot of folks with chronic illness. So the word exercise is often scary to many of us, especially if we’re dealing with fatigue. and it doesn’t have to be intense. And actually the thing that surprises folks, the first like benefit I noticed was the exercise is much easier when you’ve got the mask on. So you can do more than you thought you could. and

Leigh Ann Lindsey (11:29.741)
Right.

Brad Pitzele (11:45.514)
Second benefit you notice is you you like your cardiovascular endurance like improves so much faster than if you were even just doing exercise. So it for a lot of folks who are really sick, there does need to be an on-ramp period sort of time to when you and that’s okay. And the the therapy actually helps with that on-ramp, but it’s pretty simple. You just do that 15 minute session. There’s not a special exercise. You can kind of use any exercise you want. As all we’re trying to do is get your heart rate up and your circulation up.

while you’re breathing the oxygen. And, you know, we have people using exercise bikes. We have people using rebounders, elliptical machines, treadmills. We even have fol there’s even a passive option. Some folks are like too sick to exercise and they’ll just start with like an infrared sauna blanket while they’re breathing the oxygen. And because infrared sauna can increase your heart rate. So that’s like even an o or people use like one of those forty nine dollar under the desk

Leigh Ann Lindsey (12:23.177)
Neat, okay.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (12:35.682)
Wow, how cool.

Exactly.

Brad Pitzele (12:43.383)
pedal bikes when they’re starting. They’ll do calisthenics, aerobics, marching in place, slow walking on a treadmill. so you it’ll it’ll you can kind of start wherever you are. You can do a rower, like whatever piece of cardio equipment you like. As long as you’re getting your heart rate up, that’s really the idea of it. and you only do it about you only have to do it like to we say the optimal amount to do is maybe three to five times a week.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (13:06.218)
Mm-hmm. So the exercise piece is where I wanted to start because I know that’s where we might lose a lot of listeners from the beginning. Because to your point, when there’s chronic illness or a lot of my demographic when there’s cancer, you’re in such a weakened, fatigued state that the thought of exercise can shut it down completely. So I love that you’re explaining it does not, it’s not hit exercise. It’s not these really intense things. But I did want to ask because so I go to this small little like

Brad Pitzele (13:18.999)
Mm.

Brad Pitzele (13:22.645)
Yes.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (13:35.498)
locally owned gym owned by a doctor and he has EWOT there. And so I’ve only ever done EWOT on a bike, like an exercise bike where you’re just riding the bike and you have the mask on and you’re breathing the oxygen in. So I didn’t know if you could do kind of any kind of exercise that gets your heart rate up. So I love that.

Brad Pitzele (13:54.816)
Yeah, I do I do mine on an elliptical because I like that best, but you can use any piece of equipment you like. It’s all just about there’s a real powerful synergy between oxygen and exercise. one helps the other and the other helps the one, so to speak. And so that’s really the goal is increased circulation while breathing the oxygen.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (14:17.582)
So let’s get into that science a little bit of what is the studies of why doing exercise while inhaling oxygen is a lot more efficient. And then I do want to get into how is this different? Cause I know everyone’s gonna ask this. How is this different from HBO or hyperbaric oxygen? And I’m also curious how it’s different from something like even like an oxygen nanobath or something. But let’s start with the tech. Why does exercise while breathing oxygen make it so much more efficient?

Brad Pitzele (14:34.871)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pitzele (14:42.091)
Yeah.

Brad Pitzele (14:47.837)
Yeah. So when you start exercising, the the first thing that happens is your body recognizes that it does not have enough energy to maintain that level of activity. And so it makes several physiological changes, right? So the first one you notice is all of a sudden you start breathing faster and deeper. That’s to bring more oxygen in. Because if we think about people in the Western world, we’re not starving for food. You look around you, we all have an a

plethora of food. However, the gating factor for your cells producing more energy is oxygen. and if you’ve ever heard anyone talk about this metric VO2 max, that literally stands for the maximum volume of oxygen you can take in. And so VO2 max is considered the best predictor of of longevity. So the better your VO2 max, the the longer you’re likely to live. less cancer, less cardiovascular risk, less everything.

and that’s simply related to your body’s ability to utilize oxygen. So when you start exercising, your body knows it’s in an oxygen deficit, you start breathing faster, you start breathing deeper, your lung membrane actually thins out to allow the diffusion of oxygen more quickly, and all of the capillaries around your lungs start to engorge themselves with blood. So, as you and I are sitting here.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (16:06.07)
Mm.

Brad Pitzele (16:14.859)
We’ve got capillaries that maybe just have a little dribble of blood in our lungs because it’s unnecessary. It’s like excess capacity, quite frankly. But when our body says, hey, we need more oxygen, it all of a sudden it engorges all these capillaries. So these physiological changes are happening. And then obviously your heart starts pumping faster and deeper, and your blood vessels dilate, vasodilation, meaning that the diameter increases so more blood can flow through each one of your.

your veins and your arteries. And then the other thing that happens in exercise that people don’t know, which I think is kind of fascinating, is we have an increase in systolic blood pressure. That’s the pressure when your heart’s actively pumping versus when it’s relaxing. Now we all think of blood pressure and we’re like, that’s bad, but actually higher blood pressure during exercise is really good. This is the nerdy engineering me, but when that pressure is higher, the pressure difference between what your blood

And your tissues outside your blood are like the driving force that forces more of the nutrients and more of the oxygen out. So when we’re exercising, that increase in blood pressure works as a force to drive more oxygen and nutrients into the tissue. So the purpose of of increased circulation and increased breathing ventilation is all about driving more oxygen into the working cells. That’s what our body is literally physiologically designed to do. And we have

All this reserve capacity in our cardiovascular system that’s designed for that moment that we’re running down prey or we’re running from a tiger, or whatever reason, we decide we need to start using a lot more of our cardiovascular endurance. So that’s the reason why we we take advantage of it. I always say we hijack all those physiological changes, and then we breathe near pure oxygen at the same time.

So all of a sudden the fraction of air that is oxygen is greatly improved. And on first blush, that shouldn’t actually matter. And here’s why. If you were to look at the percentage of your red blood cells that have oxygen on them right now, they’re like 93% or excuse me, they’re like 98 or 99% full. Like there is no more room on your red blood cells for oxygen, and that that’s the part of the blood that typically carries most of your oxygen. So

Leigh Ann Lindsey (18:33.261)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (18:40.578)
And isn’t this real quick, isn’t this, you know, I kind of laugh because sometimes people have aura rings and different devices that measure their oxygen levels and they’re never really below a certain point.

Brad Pitzele (18:51.979)
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, you can get something like this. It’s called the pulse oximeter, and you you put it on your finger and it’ll tell you what your pulse your pulse ox is, what how much what percentage of your hemoglobin is filled with oxygen. Mine right now is sitting at ninety-eight, so there’s only two percent room on my red blood cells for more oxygen. So breathing a higher fraction of oxygen.

shouldn’t actually do anything except there is something awesome that happens when you exercise with oxygen. The oxygen doesn’t just fill your red blood cells, it goes into your blood plasma. blood plasma is this clearish yellow-brown liquid. It’s mostly water. It’s what your red and white blood cells ride in. And it also carries your nutrients and other things to and from the cells, but it normally doesn’t carry a whole lot of oxygen. Maybe 2% of all oxygen is normally in plasma.

But we can saturate it doing exercise of oxygen therapy, which does two things. it increases the oxygen carrying capacity of the blood, because now we cannot just use red, we can also use plasma. But the other thing is, blood plasma is way smaller than a red blood cell. so it’s about 7,500 times to 10,000 times smaller than a red blood cell. So

Leigh Ann Lindsey (20:06.648)
Hmm.

Brad Pitzele (20:15.969)
Put this in perspective for you: if a red blood cell was the size of a semi truck, plasma might only be the size of a grain of sand. So the reason why that’s important is this goes into some of the research on how EWOT began. Is in the 1950s, a gentleman named Manfred von Ardenne, actually, I call him the godfather of Iwot, he started experimenting with oxygen and exercise, and he found that.

Most of us as we age, our microcirculation, which is the part of our circulatory system where our nutrients and oxygen get exchanged with the tissues. These things are incredibly thin. They’re are capillaries. They’re thinner than a human hair. They’re actually thinner than a red blood cell that needs to deliver oxygen. So normally, as you and I sit here, the only way oxygen gets to our tissues is the red blood cell holding it needs to fold up like a taco to get.

Inside the capillary. That’s how fine the tolerances are. And he found that there’s this buildup of swelling and inflammation in our capillaries as we age. And it can stop red blood cells from flowing and cause all the tissue downstream to become hypoxic, which is the fancy medical term for starved of oxygen. And when we do EWOT, he found, hey, you can flood the plasma, and because it’s 10,000 times smaller, it can get through those blockages and immediately.

feed the downstream tissue the oxygen it’s starving for. And also because oxygen is such a strong anti-inflammatory, it caused this anti-inflammatory effect inside the the swelling inside the circulatory system and reopened up our microcirculation. So even when we get done doing our EWOT session, even and he showed this he had elderly people who had a lot of inflammation in their circulatory system, do a few sessions and they came back weeks later and and he had

permanently reopened those capillary beds so that they were able to get red blood cells through.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (22:14.477)
Wow.

my God, this is so fascinating. I’m loving, by the way, we love the science. We love, we love nerding out here. So keep going deep. What I want to talk about, because I think this is what will also help people understand the difference, is HBOT or hyperbaric oxygen is the first thing everyone’s gonna think of. And it’s become very common and frequently used, especially in integrative medicine. A previous cancer facility I was at had hyperbaric oxygen. So

Brad Pitzele (22:36.117)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (22:45.162)
It’s awesome that we understand the benefit of oxygen and we want to be as efficient as possible and as impactful as possible. So let’s do a little comparison because I think that’s what’s gonna help people really get why EWOT is so amazing beyond just the time. Like I remember when I was looking into EWOT a couple of years ago, I saw a study, and correct me if this is wrong, it was something like 15 minutes with EWOT.

Brad Pitzele (22:55.756)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (23:13.364)
Is equivalent to an hour in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber. And so for me, that I was already sold because I was like, I’m not doing an hour in a chamber three times a week, but I can do 15, 15 minutes three times a week. So efficiency is what sold me on that, but it does go beyond that, which you’ve already explained a bit, but let’s go into that more.

Brad Pitzele (23:22.177)
No.

Brad Pitzele (23:29.707)
Yeah.

Brad Pitzele (23:34.422)
Yeah, well, and to your point that it makes sense that they would have a hyperbaric chamber in an integrative cancer center. the gentleman I mentioned, Manfred von Ardenne, started doing work on oxygen and exercise because he was following on the heels of another well-known German researcher, Otto Warburg, who in the nineteen twenties started

experimenting with oxygen and cancer and found he could turn a cancer or regular cell into a cancer cell by depriving it of oxygen. and it’s known as the Warburg effect if you look into it. There’s just so much research between the linkage between oxygen and cancer, it’s it’s kind of shocking that it’s not more widely known. It feels almost criminal. So as far as the differences, yeah, I I’d put the differences in a few different buckets. There’s

Leigh Ann Lindsey (24:20.109)
Uh-huh.

Brad Pitzele (24:27.617)
Physiological differences and then there’s pragmatic differences. Physiologically speaking, when you get into a hyperbaric chamber, the pressure in the hyperbaric chamber, so as we sit at sea level, we’re at what’s known as like one ATA, which basically stands for one atmosphere of pressure, right? It’s a standard pressure we feel. When you get in a hyperbaric chamber and there’s two different flavors of hyperbaric, there’s hard shell hyperbaric, which you have to do in a doctor’s office.

that’s the real hyperbaric. And then there’s what they call mild hyperbaric. You can buy the soft shell that you do in your home, and you might see LeBron James doing it, or s someone else might have one of these in their home. So the hard shell will go up to 2.3 ATA. The home mild used to go up to 1.3. I know. I think now they’ve crept up where they can maybe do like 1.5. So at 2.3 ATA, that’s 230%.

Pressure. So 130% more pressure than you’d feel at sea level. And then they they have you breathe near pure oxygen as well. So now that near pre pure oxygen is being forced by that pressure through your lung membrane, and it’s kind of proportional. So 130% more pressure, 130% more gas flows through the lung membrane and into your body. And then you’re laying in this hyperbaric chamber. Now, once the gas gets past your lung membrane,

Leigh Ann Lindsey (25:25.453)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pitzele (25:53.74)
The thing that I always try to clarify for people is the hyperbaric pressure is no longer doing anything inside your body. Your lung membrane is actually holding that pressure out. If if the pressure from the hyperbaric could be felt inside of our body, that would put our blood pressure at, you know, 130% increase and it would be incredibly dangerous to us. So thank God we don’t. So

Leigh Ann Lindsey (26:01.07)
Hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (26:16.642)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pitzele (26:17.537)
But our blood pressure goes up mildly, maybe 10 or 15%. And that’s simply because you’re pushing more gas into a closed system. And so that extra space causes a little bit more pressure. And just like exercise with oxygen therapy, they both actually utilize the blood plasma to carry more oxygen through to the tissues. So, in that sense, they both are using that same modality. The difference is really.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (26:38.071)
Okay.

Brad Pitzele (26:45.859)
in flow dynamics. So as we talked about in exercise with oxygen therapy, you have increased heart rate, increased vasodilation, faster blood flow, and increased blood pressure, much higher than you would get from hyperbaric chamber. the pressure benefits actually are ewatt because of the systolic blood pressure can go up. I don’t know, something like fifty plus percent easily, when you’re exercising.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (27:09.122)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pitzele (27:13.119)
With hyperbaric, your body, in all of its infinite wisdom, it senses a massive amount of oxygen coming into the blood and it tries to maintain homeostasis. And so what it does to take this oxygen down is it causes vasoconstriction. It causes your blood vessels to constrict, and this causes a resistance to blood flow. Net net, you still get more oxygen, but you’re effectively fighting against your body.

When you’re doing exercise with oxygen therapy, that’s part of the beauty of the synergies, is your body’s already like, hey, I need as much oxygen as possible. We got to keep this thing going. And so you have vasodilation. And so you’re working with your body versus fighting against it. And in a way I kind of like I simplify it for folks is I know there’s a lot of talk about like peptides, and there’s certain peptides that people talk about. This is exercise in a protein.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (27:44.47)
Hmm.

Brad Pitzele (28:07.243)
You know what, in 20 years, they’re gonna have another exercise and a pill. And no matter which one it is, if I came to you and said, hey, what’s better for you? Real exercise or exercise and a pill, you don’t need to know what’s in the pill. You know it’s real exercise. And in much the same way, people intuitively seem to understand, like, which way do you think the oxygen’s better for you? When you’re fighting against your body and pushing it in with artificial pressure, or when you’re leaning into some a place where your body’s naturally thirsting for it and it’s basically opening up.

All the corridors and saying, bring it on in, and your mitochondria are primed to use it because they’re trying to produce energy and keep you active.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:38.914)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (28:44.532)
Yeah, and just I’m probably getting into the weeds of it a bit here, but when I think about that demographic of cancer and chronic illness where the body is already so weakened, we wanna try and ask the body in some ways to do as little as possible. So yes, I get that with EWOT, we’re asking the body to exercise, but we’re making that oxygen absorption so much easier and natural versus

Brad Pitzele (28:59.286)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (29:09.622)
I can’t help but think when you’re in HBO and your body is fighting it, that is just excess energy exertion we don’t need to be having patients do.

Brad Pitzele (29:18.165)
Yeah, and energy is the key to the whole thing. So people think exercise and they freak out because I don’t have the energy. Well, here’s what happens. We talked about like the cells becoming s becoming hypoxic, starved of oxygen from this inflammation. Now, what I didn’t tell you is they c they trace back this this capillary inflammation, endothelial cell inflammation.

As early as the 30s, we start developing this early. And every year past age 25, we lose about 1% of our body’s ability to utilize oxygen, which sounds like nothing at 32, but you really feel it when you get to 50 and you’ve lost 25% of your ability to utilize oxygen. That’s why your memory’s not as sharp. You can’t work out as hard. You it takes you longer to heal or to recover from exercise. That’s because.

At your cellular level, you’re not having the right level of cellular energetics. You don’t, your mitochondria, which produce energy, aren’t able to keep up. There’s not enough of them, they’re not functioning as properly. So what we do when we’re doing exercise with oxygen therapy, that’s the beauty of it. We’re feeding more oxygen to those mitochondria so that they can produce more energy. And when you stimulate the body.

With an increased demand signal, meaning you’re telling these mitochondria to make more energy. And at the same time, you’re supplying them more oxygen. Hey, here’s the fuel you need to make energy. They don’t just make energy for that workout, so to speak. After you get done, they continue to have this elevated energy production immediately. And then they do something else that’s really cool: they send out signals to the body as you start doing this regularly. Hey.

We need more energy production machinery here to keep up because the next time this person goes to do this exercise, we want to be able to do this easier. And then it says, Yeah, but it’s not just about energy production. We need to increase the supply lines, and it causes something called vas vascular endothelial growth factor to be released, which causes us to grow new capillaries to those same tissues, capillaries that don’t have the same swelling in them. And so

Leigh Ann Lindsey (31:33.261)
No

Brad Pitzele (31:34.422)
We actually start building new fuel delivery machinery and machinery to convert it into energy. And so over a period of time, we become more and more energetic at the cellular level and at the, you know, at the overall level. but that has to happen with consistency over time. It doesn’t happen in just one or two sessions. So that goes back to our hyperbaric discussion about the likelihood of doing it.

And that’s actually, even though I think there’s so many physiological benefits, I think the bigger thing is the lifestyle benefits, the actual likelihood of you being able to do it. Because as you said, in a 15-minute session, we can actually take in as much oxygen as you would in like 90 minutes in a hard shell hyperbaric chamber. So it’s a massive amount of oxygen in a short period of time. And because it’s 15 minutes, almost all of us can find 15 minutes. But finding, to your point, 60 or 90 minutes.

at a regular clip is just unrealistic for most of us. And that’s why if you talk to folks who’ve done hyperbaric oxygen therapy, it’s always spoken about in past tense. I did it, it was a heroic treatment. I did 20 dives or 40 dives. I hear it all the time. I’d like to get back and do it. And maybe someday it’s too expensive, it’s too much time. That’s that’s the difficulty of it. Now

I think it’s good in certain heroic situations, so don’t put get me wrong. I think it’s a very powerful thing, but it’s just not a pragmatic sort of therapy to do over the long term.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (33:06.984)
Mm-hmm. Totally. Do you can you speak at all to oxygen nanobaths, another form of absorbing oxygen in an in still a passive way? And the differences there. Is it similar? or are you not as familiar with that? Because we don’t have to go there if you don’t want to.

Brad Pitzele (33:16.3)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pitzele (33:24.605)
I’m a familiar with it. You know, there’s gonna be limits on how much transdermal oxygen you’re gonna feed into your skin. And there’s also gonna be limits there on how deeply it’s gonna get into your tissues, right? So what’s what’s gonna happen is it’s gonna diffuse into your tissues a certain distance, and then it’s gonna make its way back into the circulatory system on what we call the venous side, which is the spent side, the side that’s going back to the heart to get reoxygenated.

Which is not unusual. Like I said, even if you look at your veins now, there’s a lot of oxygen. You don’t use all the oxygen you breathe in. so a lot of it’s gonna end up there. It could help a little bit on on the edges. Now, oxygen does so many wonderful different things. And we should talk about that in a second, because there’s some it will probably help with more than others. But obviously, if you want to get oxygen into your tissue, you already have this built-in supply chain that is literally made to

Leigh Ann Lindsey (34:15.896)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pitzele (34:23.873)
Fill every single one of your cells that need oxygen with oxygen. Like that is the purpose of your circulatory system. And it will always be the most efficient way to get oxygen in. That doesn’t mean that also doing a nanobath couldn’t also be helpful. but it’s just it’s going to be orders of magnitude less helpful. and where it might be most helpful is I would say it’s probably more of a detoxification modality. So

That’s one of the places where people don’t really know this about oxygen. So oxygen has a variety of benefits. We talked about it’s incredibly anti-inflammatory. there’s also a lot of research around it being anti-cancerous or helping with cancer. clearly it helps with cellular energetics, which means it helps with healing and repair and all that sort of stuff. but when your cells get starved of oxygen, they flip on backup generators.

And this is anaerobic respiration or anaerobic glycolysis. And when you take a molecule of glucose and you give it to a cell with oxygen, it can produce over 30 units of ATP, which is like the energy currency of the cell. And if you give it that same molecule of glucose without oxygen, it uses anaerobic glycolysis and it can only produce about two units of energy. We’re talking like maybe five or ten percent of the energy production.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (35:47.404)
Hmm.

Brad Pitzele (35:53.398)
With oxygen when you don’t have it. So imagine your phone immediately goes from 100% down to 10%. It’s on, it’s literally on life support. It’s not able to do all of its critical functions. It’s just kind of like I describe it as like a zombie cell. It’s just barely hanging on and trying to hang on. That’s really its primary goal. the problem with it is it’s also a dirty power source. glycolysis produces a massive amount of lactic acid.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (35:55.798)
Wow, okay.

Yeah.

Brad Pitzele (36:20.949)
Metabolic waste, free radicals, and inflammatory cytokines. And so now the cell is filled with all of this inflammation and free radicals, but it also is low energy. So it doesn’t take out the trash. And it just like builds up in there. It damages our mitochondria, which lowers the energy potential of the cell. That inflammation leaks out and causes more endothelial cell damage. And it causes what I refer to as this doom loop. You start with endothelial cell damage.

Inflammation that blocks oxygen. The blocked oxygen causes glycolysis. The glycolysis causes free radicals and inflammation, which damages your mitochondria. It leaks out back into the endothelial cell, causes more swelling, more oxygen starvation. And so it goes round and round so you have these dysfunctional mitochondria and dysfunctional microcirculation. and it’s really hard to get out of. And it’s a

I mean, I lived in that world for a long time. It’s like that downward spiral where no matter what you do, you just keep getting worse. so one of the big things oxygen does is it’s an incredible detoxifier and it works and exercise with oxygen on top of that is is very powerful. So oxygen itself is needed for detoxification for a variety of reasons. If you can re-establish oxygen into the cell, you kind of turn off the spigot on all that free radical and inflammation happening.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (37:19.906)
Totally.

Mm-hmm.

Brad Pitzele (37:46.271)
Number two, it starts producing more energy. One of the first things it does once it has a little bit of extra energy is it starts taking out the trash. So now you’re stopping future damage. and then once our body ha gets, you know, toxins for lack of a more succinct word, out into our circulatory system, it needs to break them down in a way that the elimination organs can get them out of the body. And it goes through what’s known as an oxidative reaction.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (37:57.004)
Yeah.

Brad Pitzele (38:15.166)
It oxidates these things. It uses oxygen to break them into simpler forms so the body can get it out. And so when you’re doing a nanooxygen bath, it’s probably that’s one of the best benefits is it’s helping those cells get a burst of energy to detox all of the all of the toxins that have built up in the hypoxic tissue, and a little bit of healing in those in those hypoxic tissues as well.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (38:21.164)
Hm.

Brad Pitzele (38:41.186)
When we exercise with oxygen therapy, it has additional detox benefits because there’s exercise and we’re sweating, we’re moving our lymphatic system. And the other thing people don’t know is that our lungs are one of our biggest detox pathways. you know, about 70% of all toxins in your body exit through your lungs, and no one realizes that. It’s a lot of it’s the carbon dioxide waste gassed from our metabolism, but it’s also other things and

The easiest way for people to kind of conceptualize this is if you’ve ever walked around someone who had a big garlic dinner or drank too much the night before, you can smell the detox coming off their breath. so so yeah, it’s an incredible powerful detox as well. So we even have folks who are doing we have people who use, for instance, EWOT for all sorts of chronic health conditions, including for holistic oncology uses.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (39:18.889)
huh.

Brad Pitzele (39:36.972)
But we even have people who are doing traditional oncological approaches using it for the detox benefits to help get the chemotherapy and some of the negative effects of radiation out of their body more quickly so that they have less damage and they feel better.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (39:51.651)
Right. Exactly. I mean, there’s so many use cases for this. We’re talking a lot in this case about chronic illness and cancer. It’s also an amazing longevity resource that if you’re just interested in longevity and being as efficient as possible with your longevity biohacking things, an amazing resource as well. Are there any other benefits to oxygen that we haven’t gone into?

Brad Pitzele (40:17.056)
Well, my favorite quote is from a gentleman named Arthur Guyton. Arthur Guyton wrote the medical physiology textbook every doctor any of us has ever seen has has read. It’s been the medical physiology textbook since the nineteen fifties and persists today worldwide. And he says all forms of disease start at lack of oxygen at the cellular level. And that’s pretty powerful when you realize that it so

When we think of energy or or cellular energetics, we think about feeling alert and maybe having clear thoughts and having energy to live our day, which is true. That is part of it. But like every cell in your body needs energy. And that energy is primarily gated by oxygen. So if it has good energetics, your skin can renew, your liver can filter things, your bone can repair itself, every single thing.

And we lose that ability we talked about on the front end. We lose VO2 max as we get older, but that’s partially reversible through exercise. And exercise with oxygen therapy is actually has some pretty good research that it has incremental VO2 max benefits as well. So yeah, we have folks using it for longevity. We have folks using it who are hardcore biohackers, we have folks using it for just about any chronic illness you can think of.

Because at the root of all chronic illness is inflammation. and the research on inflammation and oxygen is like really clear. There’s nowhere in your body you have inflammation and you don’t have hypoxia, which is localized oxygen starvation. And anywhere you have that localized oxygen starvation, you also have inflammation. So you can’t have one without the other. and so that’s why I believe it’s such a a powerful tool, is because it can deliver oxygen.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (41:54.894)
Mm.

Brad Pitzele (42:11.232)
and provide energy to places in the body through the blood plasma that couldn’t get it and restore it. So as a byproduct, it improves your immune system health, it improves your detoxification, it improves your athletic performance, it improves just all of these cellular energetics, et cetera.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (42:33.602)
Yeah, I mean the reality is when you give a cell more energy, it can do every single thing better. So you know those are broad sweeping claims that I know we can’t legally make, but if the cell has more energy, every single thing that cell does, it can do better, more efficiently, et cetera. Sleep, I know like when I do my EWOT sessions, I sleep a lot better those nights. Deeper, I feel like I wake up much clearer headed.

Brad Pitzele (42:40.172)
That’s right. Yeah.

Brad Pitzele (43:00.534)
Yeah, absolutely. Those are some of the first things folks notice when they start doing it. The very first thing is like, wow, exercise is easier. And I thought the next sort of cascade of things I hear from people is clearer head, more energy throughout my day. I’m not crashing anymore. and sleeping better at night. And there’s a ton of research on oxygen and sleep quality. If your if your brain loses or becomes partially hypoxic, you know, like think about sleep apnea.

it causes a waking sensation in your body. It’s like, get up, you’re you’re not breathing. And so whether that’s conscious or not, that causes us to lose quality of sleep. And so folks who do EWOT to your point, it’s not surprising that they report having better and deeper sleep.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (43:34.135)
Wow, yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (43:46.027)
Mm-hmm. Which, you know, then we we start this whole upward spiral, which is sleep is absolutely critical for repair and detoxification. I, you know, I interviewed a cancer doctor a few months ago who said, I won’t even work on a patient with anything else until we get their sleep and their nutrition dialed in. Like we need their blood sugar balance and we need their sleep optimized. I’m not gonna recommend them a supplement until like we’ve gotten those things dialed in. That’s how important they are.

Brad Pitzele (43:53.282)
Theaters.

Brad Pitzele (44:13.438)
And it I mean really, I mean, if you wanna name the big three things you should do for your health, right? It’s quality sleep, quality diet, and exercise. Like if you had to pick three things, those would be it.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (44:24.758)
Right, completely. So I I have a couple specific questions. And then I do want to talk as much as we’re able, because I know we’re running out time on combining EWOT with red light. I know you’ve talked about this a lot, so absolutely want to get into some of the benefits of that and how that might really up level this process. But I have two really specific questions about one, and I know this is unique to each person, but how often should someone be doing it if they’re in the thick of like a diagnosis and treatment and then

Does that frequency need to continue or once you’re maybe out of the thick of treatment, is there is there a minimum or a maximum amount that is still going to achieve benefits?

Brad Pitzele (45:04.512)
Yeah. you know, to your point, everyone’s different. We have people who are only, you know, start out doing it maybe one day a week and still seeing good benefits from it. Our recommendation, we feel like the sweet spot is right about three to five times a week. could you do it more? Yeah, there’s no harm in doing it more. The the major harm of anything that happens with Ewad is related to the exercise. You know, you can get soft muscle or soft tissue injuries, you know, pull your muscle, that sort of thing, right?

so you always need to give yourself a little bit of time to rest and repair from the exercise component of it. although oxygen is also really good for exercise recovery. however, so I generally recommend three to five times a week. There are holistic cancer centers out there that are actually having folks do EWOT up to three times a day and getting good results. I tend I tend to think that’s overkill. You don’t need to do that. It’s kind of on a law of diminishing return.

Once you get past you know, even doing it once a day, sort of thing. can you stop after you get better? You certainly can. I’ll tell you most folks don’t because they’re like, it’s 15 minutes. I feel so much better. I have so I’m so much more clear headed, energetic. Like, I can’t imagine like giving this up, sort of thing. I think that’s like for me, I discovered I had like I continue to like get incremental benefits until through my third year.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (46:13.324)
Right.

Brad Pitzele (46:30.466)
Which is kind of shocking. Imagine you weren’t exercising at all and you just started doing the same exercise every, you know, three to five times a a week. You’d figure after four months or something, you’d hit a plateau. but it doesn’t seem to work that way with the oxygen. So we’re our goal is really to get people to do it consistently over time. And I think once you get to the point where you do kind of plateau with benefits, you’re like, I I’m never going back because why would I want to give any of these up?

Leigh Ann Lindsey (46:57.154)
Totally. And so that three to five times a week, is that a standard regardless of if there’s a diagnosis or if it’s just longevity?

Brad Pitzele (47:06.292)
generally I say it’s it’s good for most people. Again, the balance isn’t about the diagnosis. The balance is about how much can you do. You know, I like to get people to five times if you’re healthy enough to do it. I think that’s a sweet spot. Giving your body one or two days of rest to just let the muscles repair so you’re not overworking yourself is good. If you don’t feel like if you feel like I always tell folks, if you’re doing it five times a week and you feel like I feel like I want to do it a little more.

Rather than add more sessions, you can increase your intensity a little bit and listen to your body. so that you kind of that way we’re increasing our circulation, we’re increasing our vasodilation, we’re we’re hitting even, you know, getting deeper into the tissues and so on and so forth. that’s my preference, but that’s a personal thing. I mean, I have folks out there that are doing it every day. no problem with that. or I had another person just the other week say, I’m really thinking about adding a second session.

she didn’t feel like she wanted to do more intensity, but she wanted to do a second session and there’s no harm in that. so it’s really that, but it when you start doing it that frequently, it has so many benefits that they start to compound and you really don’t need more for just about any diagnosis that I’m aware of.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (48:20.958)
Right. Is there a like minimum return? Like if you’re not gonna do it at least blank times a week, don’t bother.

Brad Pitzele (48:29.494)
Well, I I think it’s a moving target. I always tell folks, start where you’re at and listen to your body. Your body’s gonna tell you, this is too easy. Just, you know, throw another log on the fire here. Do a little bit more. And then listen to it as you ramp up. So I have folks because it’s such a powerful detoxification tool, I have folks who will do it when they’re really chronically ill. And if they start too fast, they can have a detox reaction where they start to feel

Leigh Ann Lindsey (48:58.03)
Okay.

Brad Pitzele (48:59.062)
feverish or toxic because they just mobilized all these toxins and your elimination organs can’t get rid of them as quickly as as you mobilize them. So we have a protocol for starting really slow if you’re super sick. So I have folks who won’t even do you know they’ll just breathe the oxygen passively for a few minutes as they start and work up to 15 minutes. And then they’ll slowly add a little bit of exercise in at a time or they’ll start with that infrared sauna blanket for for weeks and maybe even a couple months.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (49:19.041)
Okay.

Brad Pitzele (49:28.836)
so I don’t really say there’s a minimum. I just say keep listening to your body and crawling up. I I feel like there’s too much. this a lot of times people throw the baby out with the bathwater. They’re like, this is all too overwhelming. I’m just gonna stop doing all of it. And our goal is like, hey, just do what you can. I have folks doing it one time a week and seeing good benefits. Do I think they’d get more with five times a week? Yeah, they would. But sometimes like when you’re really sick.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (49:44.195)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (49:50.306)
Yeah, yeah.

Brad Pitzele (49:56.951)
You want to get all the way better. You want your life back. And that’s what you focus on. But I always think like when I was there, like if I just felt better this month than last month, like that would give me hope. Like, okay, I’m crawling out of this tunnel. Eventually the light’s gonna get bigger and bigger. And that would be exciting enough. I might start doing mental accounting. How many months do I think? Do I think you know, like, and so I think that’s the big thing is if you can keep consistent at at some level.

you’re going to see benefits and that becomes motivating. And once you start seeing that light growing above you, you start wanting to do a little you feel better. You physiologically are able to do more. And you, you’re physically, you’re emotionally, you want to do more because you can kind of see that progress.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (50:40.96)
Yeah, well, and to your point, I mean, I can’t tell you I’ve seen many patients who got put on super intense protocols that actually made them sicker because it was too much too fast. So more is not always better. Sometimes we really need to ease in. So I love that you talked about you have those like ramp up protocols for some of those people. Is that something how how could people get that information?

Brad Pitzele (50:46.988)
Yeah.

Brad Pitzele (50:53.74)
No.

Brad Pitzele (51:05.674)
We have a I’ve got a whole YouTube video on that. And if there’s someone that’s worried about that, they should definitely reach out to us and we can point them in the right direction for that. so yeah, we have a we have a lot of great stuff on our YouTube channel if you want to learn more about the science or how how an exercise with oxygen therapy session looks like or you know what how you get started or even like what does it take to assemble it, all that sort of information and how it might help you in a with a variety of different symptoms.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (51:14.179)
Mm-hmm.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (51:35.082)
Yeah. Now more questions. The what I’ve noticed is, I mean, I’ve only ever seen one EWOT device. It’s the one I use. Yours looks very different. Is there, I’m imagining you being the engineer, there’s a reason for it looking the way it does. How is your EWOT device different from maybe others out there?

Brad Pitzele (51:39.521)
Awesome.

Brad Pitzele (51:56.247)
Well, ours isn’t super different from most. most EWOT systems are similar to ours. And what it is, is it’s a device that you plug in the wall that purifies the oxygen. It’s, you know, 18 inches wide and 12 inches deep and 24 inches tall, sort of thing. Flip a switch and it pa it starts producing oxygen. they can produce five or ten liters of oxygen a minute, but

When you’re exercising, you could easily use like 50 or 60 liters of oxygen a minute. So they’re not powerful enough. You’re too powerful for our machines. So what we do is we plug those machines into a large reservoir. It’s kind of like a large balloon. It’s like six feet wide by six feet tall, and it holds a thousand liters of oxygen. So if you think about a two-liter bottle of soda, it’s kind of like, you know, 500 of those sort of thing. thousand liters of oxygen.

And so we use that machine to fill the reservoir, and then we take a hose off that and hook it up to a mask. And the mask has two ports, one for breathing in, and it comes straight from that reservoir, and one for breathing out into the room. So your exhale gas does not go back into the reservoir. And so it’s really it looks more intimidating than it is. People have it set up. Even people with a lot of brain fog have it set up in 10 to 15 minutes. I had an eighty-year-old guy out in Iowa the other week tell me it took him 15 minutes.

to have it set up from when he pulled it into his house. the machine itself is not complex. You don’t need an app or, you know, an engineering degree to work it. It’s a simple physical switch to turn it on, sort of thing. and it’s made that way on purpose because it was designed really to help people with chronic health conditions. And I know sometimes we don’t have the energy or the wherewithal to flip through something or try to figure out complex technology.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (53:47.447)
Yeah, exactly. Okay. Do I do we do I have time to ask about red light? Okay. I know we that could probably be a whole nother 30 minutes. I’m not gonna take us that, but just a couple minutes on. Tell us about how red light and ewat together is creating some kind of synergy. What’s going on? This is totally new to me. So I’m really excited to learn about this because I have access to both. And so being able to understand what’s going on here is really exciting.

Brad Pitzele (53:52.588)
Sure.

Brad Pitzele (54:09.56)
That’s awesome.

Yeah, the I’m gonna take it back just a step. And the reason why we need red and and near-infrared light, I think this is kind of a fascinating story. historically we’ve always gotten red and near-infrared light from the sun. It was full sp it’s full spectrum. Everything from UV on one side to infrared on the other. and then of course we moved indoors, we spend less time in the sun, but then even more recently

We switched from incandescent lights over to LED lights. And this is really important because red and near-infrared light is not very illuminating. And the body experiences them as heat. So when they built LED lights, wanting to be energy efficient, they intentionally cut all the reds and near-infrareds out. So under incandescent lights, you were still getting some of that. You think about all the heat, an incandescent light throws off.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (54:53.955)
Mm-hmm.

Brad Pitzele (55:06.38)
You’re now not if you’re inside and you’ve got LED lights, you are literally starved of this red and near-infrared light. and it’s something your body has evolved to use. So we normally experience red and near-infrared light at two times the day, early in the day and late later in the evening when the sun is near the horizon. just due to the dynamics of the atmospheres when we see r we feel and see red and near-infrared light.

So what it does is it’s a it’s a signal. It’s it’s a signal our body uses, and those specific frequ frequencies penetrate our body and they they interact with our mitochondria, those little energy centers in our cells that produce ATP and all the energy our cells use. And they do one specific thing to them. They impact this particular enzyme called cytochrome.

Cytochrome C oxidase, that’s a tongue twister. And what they do is when they when they stimulate it, it causes the mitochondria to utilize more oxygen. So, so that is any benefit you’ve heard about red or near-infrared light, whether it’s wrinkle reduction, collagen, bone healing, brain health, all and there’s tens of thousands of papers of research on it. It’s not voodoo stuff, it is very well researched.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (56:06.134)
Mm.

Brad Pitzele (56:32.554)
It all comes down to the fact that it causes mitochondria to use more oxygen and thus produce more energy. And the way it was actually discovered was NASA was growing some plants with red lights, simulating growing, you know, like plants on the moon or somewhere else. And the folks working there noticed that the cuts on their hands were healing more quickly. And so that’s when they started to research what’s now called photobiomodulation. so

Leigh Ann Lindsey (56:39.064)
Hmm.

Brad Pitzele (57:02.56)
So that’s why it’s beneficial. So you could kind of ga gather why it might be synergistic with EWOT. So what we but you have to use it in a specific way to get the best benefits out of it. So you want to do EWOT, and then immediately after, like don’t cool down, don’t go take a shower, immediately get underneath the red light because here’s what’s happening. You get done with EWOT, and you’ve got all this excess oxygen still floating around in your system.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (57:12.417)
Okay.

Brad Pitzele (57:29.14)
And it starts to decay, you know, almost immediately, but it takes time. But while it’s still in there, then we stimulate the mitochondrial with red and near-infrared light. And it tells it, hey, you need to absorb this oxygen and make more energy. So it becomes an amplifier for the benefits of EWOT alone. So it’s kind of like we goose the supply of oxygen and then we goose the demand for oxygen. and so it kind of becomes a multiplier. And there’s a lot of a lot more folks have heard of red light and done red light.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (57:46.542)
Hmm.

Brad Pitzele (57:59.385)
if you’ve ever done red light and you’ve done it without oxygen, you have to think about this. A lot of the tissues in your body you’re targeting, they’re hypoxic because we lose oxygen utilization as we age. And so you will see some benefit, but there’s kind of a ceiling on it because if you’re if you’re not getting the oxygen you want you you need, then you can’t your cells can’t react to it the way they need to. You’re stimulating the car, but the fuel line’s pinched, sort of thing.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (58:16.055)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (58:25.998)
Exactly. It’s like it’s great that it’s stimulating more oxygen usage, but if we if there is no oxygen to uptake, yeah.

Brad Pitzele (58:33.932)
That’s right. That’s right. And and usually it’s not an all or nothing. It might be like the cell is d partially deprived. And so you’ll see some benefits, but you to your point, you quickly hit a ceiling because, you know, there was five extra oxygen molecules and you just used them. So sorry. You know, the next one’s not there for you, sort of thing. and so that’s why you kind of use them in a specific phase. I when I was really sick, I started on the oxygen therapy and

Red light wasn’t very big back then. no one was really doing there was a few laser things out there. Dermatologists were doing it, but it wasn’t like an at-home sort of thing. And I started doing some research on it. I stumbled across it and I I kind of cobbled together on my own again, you know, engineering me. and I d I used it for a while and I didn’t notice anything myself until I kind of got that sequence right. And then I started to notice it become an amplifier for my healing. Is like if I did both together.

I I started to notice quicker and quicker benefits.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (59:35.502)
How long with the red light?

Brad Pitzele (59:38.197)
it depends. So red light is finicky in the sense that it works on the technical term is a biphasic dose response, which just means the benefits ride a bell curve over time. So it’s kind of like Goldilocks, too little is not good, you don’t get any benefits, and too much, you also don’t get any benefits. No harm, it’s just you negate the benefits. So there’s a sweet spot. With our red lights, we target ours at about 10 or 15 minutes.

regular, but if you’re gonna do it right after an EWOT session, because your mitochondria are already stimulated, you can actually do less to get into that biphasic sweet spot. We say about seven to ten minutes. our red lights have eight different wavelengths. So four reds and four infrared. The reason for that is each wavelength can have a different level of penetration. So reds are generally skin and superficial.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:00:19.564)
Yeah.

Brad Pitzele (01:00:35.724)
And near-infrareds can go deeper into tissues. and so because we’re dealing with folks with chronic health conditions and a variety of them, we basically have a spectrum so that we’re covering all the tissue from the top layers all the way down as as deep. So we go from the the 600s, which are reds, and 800s, which are near-infrareds, and then we actually also do a a 1060, which is a little bit higher than a lot of the market lights do. So

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:01:01.059)
Hmm.

Yeah. Well and that’s unique ’cause if you look at the descriptions for most red lights on the market, it’s usually only two frequencies. The near-infrared, which is like 660, and then the far-infrared, which is like 880 or whatever, something like that. Yeah.

Brad Pitzele (01:01:16.354)
That’s right. Yeah. They’ll do something in the 600s and something in the 800s. And so, I mean, that was our goal. I mean, we’re helping folks with Parkinson’s and stroke and and all sorts of different cognitive things, Alzheimer’s, dementia sort of thing. So we want something also that can penetrate the the skull and the scalp and and get into the brain, and some of the deeper organs and some of that. So that was the the design thought behind that.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:01:38.646)
Right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:01:43.575)
Yeah. My gosh. Well, Brad, I’m so jazzed on this. I can’t I can’t wait for the audience to get to hear this. And it’s making me go, gosh, I I kinda wanna get an EWAP for my own place, even though I have access to it to be able to do it so frequently and just for how beneficial it is. And it’s like it’s so good for everyone. You know, I’m already I’m already like, okay, my parents could come over and use it and my brother.

Brad Pitzele (01:02:07.102)
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s it’s definitely one of those things too, you know, there’s it you know, we were talking earlier and I just think when I was really sick, I always called it like the ceremonies killed me. There’s like every night I was counting pills and then I had to take this one before that one and that one with food and that one without food, and then I was doing a sauna over here and this and that and like

it get trying to get better became a full-time job. And I’ve seen so many people just get overwhelmed with all the different protocols and things they’re doing. And that’s kind of the I felt like I feel like that’s the biggest power of it is in fifteen minutes you get all these a variety of different benefits that are critical for most healing. And so it is something that’s pragmatic you can do. And a lot of folks love that about it.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:02:55.478)
Yeah. And just to that, and the last thing I’ll say is there’s treatments and modalities and supplements that are supporting things downstream and then upstream. We want to hit as many upstream modes of action as possible. And so anything that’s working on a cellular level is pretty much as upstream as you can get. Everything below that and it is n it’s important sometimes to address downstream things as too when we’re dealing with certain toxins and pathogens, etc. But

Brad Pitzele (01:03:16.088)
That’s right.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:03:25.122)
being able to hit something upstream is going to benefit every single thing downstream, which is why I love oxygen so much.

Brad Pitzele (01:03:32.758)
That’s right. And that was my experience. I tried I spent so many years of my life trying to kill Lyme. you know, and like y you really are never gonna get rid of it all. That’s just not how it works, unfortunately. And I finally had to shift my head to like stop worrying so much about killing the thing and worry about making yourself healthy. And when you’re healthy, you’ve got a healthy immune system, you’ve got good cellular energetics, like that stuff really can’t do anything to you. It’s when you’re

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:03:50.734)
Yeah.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:04:00.387)
Right.

Brad Pitzele (01:04:00.898)
When you’re beaten down, that’s that’s when it can get to you, so to speak. So that is that’s really my thought process on a lot of this healing is if we that’s also why I’m like, don’t beat yourself up. This isn’t hit, you know, don’t think you have to come like we’re not trying to get you to Olympic athlete. We’re trying to get your body’s energetic status slightly better this week than last week. And if we keep crawling up that stairwell, you’re gonna get better and better without a crash.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:04:27.668)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love it. Thank you so much, Brad. Where can the audience find you? Learn more. We’ll make sure it’s linked in the show notes as well, but just so they can hear it.

Brad Pitzele (01:04:37.28)
Yeah, you bet. you can go to our website, onethousandroads.com, all spelled out. we’re also gonna give your listeners a a special offer, so that’ll be in the show notes. And then they can also go to YouTube, like I said, and it’s One Thousand Roads HQ is our channel. And check out some of the videos if they want to learn more. And if they have questions about their specific situation, hit our contact page and send us a message.

or give us a call. We’ll have a real person on the other end who’ll be willing to talk to you and help you figure out your specific situation. and we’re just here to support.

Leigh Ann Lindsey (01:05:11.212)
I love it. Thank you so much.

Brad Pitzele (01:05:13.965)
Thank you. I appreciate you having me.