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I recently went to a new doctor and noticed he was located in something called the Professional Building. I felt better right away.

—George Carlin

Less than half of my MRIs and X-rays from 2004 to 2009.

The French explorer and marine biologist Jacques Cousteau was once asked how he defined a “scientist.” His answer:

It is a curious man looking through a keyhole, the keyhole of nature, trying to know what’s going on.

I had become a very curious man in June 2009 out of pain and desperation. The question I had in mind was extreme: what would happen if I tried to reverse a lifetime of injuries and physical abuse in 14 days?

If there were no financial constraints, if I had access to the doctors and drugs of Olympic and professional athletes, could I do it?

Or, perhaps more likely, would I just go bankrupt or kill myself?

In the end, I did come close to killing myself (easy to avoid, thankfully), but I reversed almost all of my “permanent” injuries. It took closer to six months, but the end result was well worth the hiccups along the way.

Let us begin with a cautionary tale, and then we’ll move on to how to reap the benefits without the screwups.

The $10,000 Lesson

I was sitting on a doctor’s table in Tempe, Arizona, battling the ice-cold air conditioning as I stared, not through Jacques’ keyhole, but at a bulging transverse colon.

It was gorgeous.

The bulbous organ was right in the middle of an anatomical poster on the wall, and for some reason, the artist had rendered it in such glistening realism that it dominated the entire chart. For lack of other decorations, I ended up fixating on the colon like a candle flame while I had three-inch needles stuck into my neck, shoulders, and ankles.

The first needle grazed my cervical spine, and I began to sweat. That was just the warm-up. Within two hours, I set the clinic record for single-visit injections.

Setting the clinic injection record.

There were two additional sessions over the next eight days, and I traveled the full spectrum of emotions, including abject terror. The needle taps on my spine, done to elicit additional growth factor release, sounded like small scratches on a blackboard. Less than an hour later, I watched on in perverse amusement (the cumulative anesthetic of 10+ shots helped) as a syringe inserted in one side of my left ankle began to dance underneath the skin on the opposite side like a chest-popping fetus from Aliens. It then poked through the skin, and I was less amused. Not a party trick you want to show your patients.

We used everything but the kitchen sink.

The most potent of the chemical cocktails was a hybrid. It combined the ingredients used on the knees of an Olympic skier with the ingredients used on one sprinter who’d torn his Achilles tendon eight weeks prior to the world championships. The latter ended up winning a gold medal.

The final Frankenstein elixir was serious business. It included:

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) PRP is an emerging treatment mainly used with elite athletes. It gained national attention in 2009 when used successfully to treat two Pittsburgh Steelers just weeks prior to their Super Bowl victory. PRP contains the plasma portion of your blood with concentrated platelets. Platelets are packed with growth and healing factors and are part of the body’s normal tissue repair system. The PRP is prepared using a special centrifuge after whole blood is drawn from your arm, similar to getting blood drawn for lab work.

Making platelet-rich plasma.

PRP formed the base to which the following were added:

Stem cell factor (SCF), flown in from Israel, which assists in blood cell production.

Bone morphogenic protein 7 (BMP-7), which helps adult stem cells (mesenchymal) develop into bone and cartilage. In retrospect, I believe this to be the most dangerous substance in all of the cocktails I tried.

Insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) IGF-1 has anabolic (tissue-building) effects in adults and is produced in the liver after stimulation by growth hormone. It is one of the most potent natural activators