Latest / Hormone Heroes with Dr. Kelly Hopkins / The Virden Method: Reinventing Pellet Therapy with Atraumatic Trocars with Dr. Charles Virden

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The Virden Method: Reinventing Pellet Therapy with Atraumatic Trocars with Dr. Charles Virden · Hormone Heroes with Dr. Kelly Hopkins

• 0:03
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Hormone Heroes, where I share testimonials from real people who have experienced bioidentical hormone therapy.
• 0:11
  Speaker 2: Men and women share the symptoms they have experienced and the difference proper hormone replacement has made.
• 0:18
  Speaker 2: I'm your host, dr Kelly Hopkins, and I have been in the functional medicine space for over 30 years, with a focus on hormones for 20 years.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Please keep in mind this podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only.
• 0:33
  Speaker 2: Please consult with your physician or practitioner for medical advice.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Let's get started with today's guest guest, hi.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: Welcome to Hormone Heroes podcast.
• 0:51
  Speaker 2: Today we have Dr Charles Burden.
• 0:53
  Speaker 2: He is the owner of BurdenMD and Atrocar and he is in Reno, nevada.
• 0:56
  Speaker 2: Welcome, dr Charles.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: Good morning Jelly, and thank you for having me on.
• 1:01
  Speaker 2: Absolutely so.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: Just tell us a little bit more about you your background, your education, your practice, all the things.
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: So I live in a smaller city in Nevada called Reno.
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: We're in the north of the state.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: People will say, oh, Nevada, that's Las Vegas.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: We're not.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: We're up by Lake Tahoe.
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: I've been in practice here in private practice for over 30 years, Lake Tahoe.
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: I've been in practice here in private practice for over 30 years.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: I came to Reno out of San Diego where I did a complete general surgery and then plastic surgery residency, and that was mid-90s to 2000.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: And I became very interested in anti-aging medicine at that time and so throughout the course of my wonderful career I'm 66 now I've been able to treat over 43,000 patients in the Reno area, both with anti-aging medicine and with my trade, which is plastic and reconstructive surgery.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: I know that's an unusual combination.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: Not so much anymore.
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: You're healing people from the inside out and taking care of their bodies.
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: That's fantastic.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: Very true.
• 2:12
  Speaker 1: So describe your practice to us so my practice would probably be about as garden variety as any plastic surgery practice.
• 2:20
  Speaker 1: I did not want to hyper-specialize In plastic surgery.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: In big cities you will oftentimes see people who have to be a rhinoplasty specialist or a breast augmentation specialist or a craniofacial specialist.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: Because there's so many competing doctors, you have to carve your own little niche Right.
• 2:42
  Speaker 1: Having a practice in a town the size of Reno, which is 350,000, I was able to stay as generally focused as I wanted to be.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: I enjoyed going in in the ER and fixing a child with a dog bite.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: I replanted fingers.
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: I took care of burns, although we shipped the sick ones out, but I also enjoyed the reconstructive side of cancer surgery.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: I took care of burns, although we shipped the sick ones out, but I also enjoyed the reconstructive side of cancer surgery, both skin, breast, soft tissue, tumors.
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: And we're primarily, if you look at, just for fun, for the audience.
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: There's probably a question of why do you call it plastic surgery?
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: What's plastic about it?
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: And it's interesting because the root word from Greek, plasticos, means to remodel or remake.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Interesting, our specialty really came out of World War II, world War I, where people were surviving catastrophic injuries.
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: Typically, before that, people got blasted and they got infections and they died.
• 3:43
  Speaker 1: Our specialty really was a war-born specialty where people came back maimed, parts missing, parts, stuck, parts broken, and plastic surgery became the remodeling and restructuring.
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: Cosmetic surgery then joined on and now, sadly, I think, we've separated those two and cosmetic surgery can be used by a lot of people, but plastic surgery still, to the core of us, represents all of that and that's what drove me to it.
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: I like the broadness of my field.
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: I'll see 20 different things in a day that don't require, for instance, like a cataract, and if I just had to take cataracts all day, I'd be about the most bored guy you've ever seen.
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: My specialty lends itself well to keeping my mind active, creating individual plans and then solving problems, and that's why I've loved what I've done for so long and as I look at my career, it blew by.
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: Loved what I've done for so long and as I look at my career, it blew by.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: Like, if your listeners are wondering how fast time passes, there's no pass, it's still going to pass fast for you, but enjoy every minute and pick something you are passionate about doing so you can love what you do every day Absolutely, and that's fantastic.
• 5:02
  Speaker 2: Tell us a little bit about a trocar.
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: So a trocar.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: I have to then delve in and tell you my own personal story, which gets kind of to the root of where I got involved with hormone therapy.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: At the age of 55, 11 years ago I unfortunately tore what's called a cord in your valve.
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: Cords tether your valves to the muscle and probably from sleep apnea, which I was not a real healthy individual.
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: 10, 11 years ago I was grinding running hard, busy dad, busy doctor.
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: We don't do great at taking care of ourselves sometimes.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: I was faced with a health crisis which did a complete workup on me and, as a sidebar from needing a heart valve repaired, I also had hormone levels that were almost unmeasurable.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: My testosterone was 105 at 55 years old, and so, as part of my repair your life buster I started to learn about hormones and what my options were.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: So my intro was, like most of us and most of our patients, is you dabble in it, you learn about it.
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: What are my options?
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: Creams, patches, trochies, injectables.
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: Well, the one that made the most sense to me, which is a $5 billion industry today, is injections.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: That's easy, I'll just give myself a shot.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: Well, guess what?
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: I hated giving myself a shot.
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: I can give shots and operate on other people all day, but I want to do it myself.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: So I had my friend giving me a shot, my wife giving me a shot and me sweating getting shots, and so it drove me towards pellet therapy.
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: I thought there must be something else and I just started with Google and said what else can I do to get my hormone levels up?
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: And I ran into a couple of the national companies.
• 6:54
  Speaker 1: Back then there was a big one out of Texas and I went and learned.
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: I went and learned the didactic side.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: I was terrified, but I was very personally interested in fixing my levels first, not creating a trocar or having a massive clinic like I now have.
• 7:11
  Speaker 1: And so the first thing I did was learn about how to give pellets to patients, and I was terrified.
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: I can take a breast off and rebuild it with your tummy, but if I was worried about giving somebody the wrong hormone dose, what would happen?
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: So you tend to then go ask national companies who train you to make you sharper and give you a dosing calculator and make sure you don't make a mistake.
• 7:39
  Speaker 1: And so I did all that and I brought my staff and we learned how to pellet, and I was so excited to be a pellet patient.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: I was one of the ones that raised my hand and said pellet me, I want to do this.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: And the next day I went out and walked 18 holes of golf and I couldn't sit down for the next two weeks and I went okay, you're a bad patient, they told you to do nothing, so you earned it.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: So several months go by, I feel good on pellets and it's my time to repel it.
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: And so now my staff's done probably a couple hundred, and we're getting pretty cocky.
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: And so I said, okay, I'll have a better experience this time with this procedure.
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: And so my staff does it, and, lo and behold, I wake up that night, sore as heck, can't roll over in my bed and I have this warm bump on the back of my backside and I career moving tissues around, liposuctioning people doing rotational flaps, knowing about blood vessels, nerves, I kind of started to question that maybe something was wrong with the procedure, and so I think I may have had another extrusion or my first extrusion.
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: So I've had both pain and then an extrusion, and then again, I'm slow to learn.
• 9:07
  Speaker 1: I said, well, all right, I'm really going to take it easy.
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: The third time, which was three or four or five months later, and that time of the next procedure was equally as bad and I did nothing.
• 9:21
  Speaker 2: And so these are, these are all going in on your posterior, on my buttock.
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: That's when they were being done high on your butt with the 5.2 or the male trocar and the method that the industry uses today short trocar, bevel or diamond tip.
• 9:38
  Speaker 1: Push the trocar in, extrude a pellet, turn it 45 degrees, put out another pellet.
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: Once you got four in, back it out, put four more.
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: Back it out, put four more.
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: I got to tell you, kelly, that's about the stupidest thing I've ever seen.
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: Because you have a better one.
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: It's not meant to be derogatory to anybody.
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: People in this field didn't understand what they were doing.
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: They still don't.
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: It's still being done today in a way that injures tissue, and I think it has a lot to do with the people who started it.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: Just assume that that space was okay to just blow through that space, meaning your subcutaneous tissue is a very dynamic structure.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: I have pictures of how intricate the blood vessels and nerves and vessels are that I've taken through these years of developing a better trocar method and I can share with you a slide deck when I go teach.
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: That people are shocked about, and one of the greatest ways to teach this to people who are beginning to pellet is to take the traditional trocar, and everybody can buy them for $25 as a disposable or a permanent that wears down.
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: I encourage you to put one face up with the sharpest point of your trocar, sticking straight up, and dare yourself, after repeating to yourself the Hippocratic Oath which is do no harm, right?
• 11:13
  Speaker 1: I dare you to then bang your palm on the top of that sharp trocar and tell you you're not hurting yourself, right?
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: That's people's aha moment where they go.
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: Hmm well, why did we get sent down this path and I can't answer that.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: I can only say that after having been down that path as the patient, I went to work to design a trocar that valued that space and a hydro dissection method, which was the first patent I got that diluted that space with volume and epi and local and allowed it to be mobile volume and epi and local and allowed it to be mobile.
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: And then introduction of the trocar allowed tissues to be spread apart as opposed to cut Nice.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: And then there's a technique to weave through the connective tissue fibers called the septa, so they actually help you to hold the pellet in place instead of an extrusion.
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: So we started that with a couple of prototypes, so they're historically sitting in this box.
• 12:24
  Speaker 2: I've seen that box, I'm going to gold plate them someday.
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: But that was my early days of going.
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: Okay, am I right?
• 12:31
  Speaker 1: Is there something?
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: If we don't damage this tissue, it should make for a better experience, and I think I've told you on this podcast or you and I have chatted personally.
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: What people don't understand is blood's incredibly irritating when it's not coursing through your blood vessels, and so what people were experiencing were the injury of the trocar, and you don't experience it immediately because you have local on board, and then epinephrine typically wears off or some people don't even use epinephrine, which is even scarier, and they're just lacerating the dickens out of all the microvasculature and then it bleeds around your pellets and then your patient's miserable while they're dealing with raw blood in the space that should hurt.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: God created a protective mechanism that when blood gets outside of the vessels, it's coursing in.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: That's your warning signal.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: Something broke in here, you got a leak Right, and when we induce the leak, shame on us for not knowing that we're created the problem.
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: Shame on us for not knowing that we're created the problem, and my answer creating an atraumatic trocar or an atrocar, which is our trademark was to allow tissues to be pushed apart and have minimal trauma, and I think it's really important to decide why minimal trauma is still important.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: That microvasculature is so fragile that I actually expect a small amount of injury.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: It's that injury, that cell signals the immune system to come fix and remove the pellet.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: So I actually have designed my trocar tips to be just enough of a micro injury to also accelerate the removal of the pellet.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: So it's a lot more sophisticated than people knew about or thought about and our message now, as you and I have talked and you're a national trainer is to rethink this entire industry.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: There should never be another pellet procedure done with a sharp device.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: There's no reason for it.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: It's not easier.
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: In fact it's harder.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: You're damaging tissue which you don't have to.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: You're making more work for yourself, ie complications, extrusions, infections, wound checks, bone calls when none of that's needed anymore.
• 14:56
  Speaker 1: Wound checks, bone calls when none of that's needed anymore.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: So your experience as a plastic surgeon and doing liposuction was the cannula you used to do that rounded, kind of like the trocar you designed Very much so and I worked on several different iterations of that tip and some were two-rounded and some kind of got more sharpie, and it took me four or five workings through with my engineers to find what I think is the right pitch, to the point where it's rounded but will move tissue apart.
• 15:31
  Speaker 1: So yeah, we worked on several iterations and found the right one.
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: Then we were able to prototype it and work in our.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: We did three years of work at our clinic with it and worked on changing it and improving it and finally found, maybe two years ago, the exact pitch of that leading edge that pushes tissue apart, minimally injuring it, maximally dividing it, where you then can lay pellets in linear rows.
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: That's another thing.
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: That's different.
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: We don't want clumps.
• 16:06
  Speaker 1: When you put pellets next to each other in a clump you're limiting their surface area from being seen by the fat.
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: Then you go ahead and lay blood around it and you wonder why any of them ever get absorbed and a lot of people have horrible scar tissue from it.
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: I'll tell you, the first invite I got to another national president or owner was if you pellet me and it doesn't hurt, we'll use your trocar.
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: And when I pelleted him there was so much scar tissue there that he was duly impressed that it didn't hurt.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: And we're working on his deal.
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: But it's a real deal.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: It is so different and patented, by the way.
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: And I think that's an important thing, because I've had an infringer, somebody who thought they could just make it because they're made in Pakistan and Mexico, and hey, it's just a trocar.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: No, it's not, it's actually an intellectual property.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: I was given two patents and there are six pending on disposable kits that say you know what?
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: There's a method that allows this device to enter the subcutaneous space, weave through it, lay pellets in.
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: They found novelty in it.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: The US Patent and Trade Office and that was the first patent I got was something called a process or a method patent.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: And then the apparatus patent was harder because other specialties use a blunt trocar.
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Apparatus patent was harder because other specialties use a blunt trocar.
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: And I'm dealing with another big company now who says, oh, we want to make a blunt trocar, but we don't want to involve you, so we think it's not novel.
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: And I said, ok, well, we've done this once, I've already proven that it is, and I would strongly suggest you rethink that, because the issuance of blunt in sub-Q is specialty to this device and just because they make a blunt trocar for an abdominal cavity entrance or a thoracic cavity entrance, that's specific to those surgeries.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: So the uniqueness of my device and the atraumatic line called Atrocars is we actually have a patent on a blunt device.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: That's a 17 year patent and I plan to enforce it to those who thinks it can just be knocked off.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: Well, I have seen the procedure and it is incredibly simple and the fact that it just kind of walk us through the male procedure.
• 18:40
  Speaker 1: Sure.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: So I think you're wise to talk mainly about the male procedure, but I'm going to tell you the female trocar, which is 3.6 millimeters in diameter.
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: The female trocar can get a little tender, a small dent and create a little scar tissue, and my wife did not like a little dent on her butt.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: So women clearly don't have the same problem as men, and when you look at the clinic compositions, the majority of people doing hormones with pellets are female, and it's not because men don't like pellets, it's because the procedure was god-awful and painful, and so you'll tend to see 70, 80, 90% clinic volumes being female and only a small percent 10 or 20% being male.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: Well, I have a 90, 10 female practice here in plastic surgery, but our hormone clinic is 60% female, 40% male and the 40% male.
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: We have an 86% retention rate.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: That doesn't exist in the industry.
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: That's incredible.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: Most people drop out because it's expensive or it hurt.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: We're really proud to say when clinics use a blood method, their patients are going to come back.
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: I know that two major companies have data and I've been shared that data and sadly they work really hard to get a patient in.
• 20:08
  Speaker 1: They do trainings, they get their doctors in, they teach them a flawed method and only 50% of that male population tends to return.
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: And the 50% returned because it hurts but they just enjoy the value of the hormone, whereas an 86% retention could mean millions to a big clinic.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: That's getting 36% more volume of patients who return because the method got better for them.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: My guys literally work out the next day.
• 20:45
  Speaker 2: That's really incredible, because we're trained to tell men not to work out for seven.
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: They can go back right the next day.
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: So where do you like to place the pellets?
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: Understanding that pellets in males require far more pellets than females.
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: The most vacuous space to actually do it without any pressure from sitting is the beltline or the love handle, and I can truly and honestly say I'm not sure who moved it up there, but it was around the time that I was developing a blunt trocar and somebody said to me this is a better location.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: And immediately I agreed I was doing the male procedure in the upper buttock and I rapidly moved to the belt line or the love handle, and I do only there, for males and females still get it on the upper part of their buttock.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: Now to walk you through the procedure, because I think you asked me to kind of talk you through it, the first thing to think about and it's certainly at the forefront of my mind on somebody who's made their living out of making procedures the most comfortable you can.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: My patients demand that.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: So our procedure starts out with a 30-gauge needle the smallest one we can use and making a small wheel in the skin.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: We make a little mark on the skin or we use a mole or a hemangioma.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: So we know where we make that first entrance of one half to one cc of local and you always use epinephrine.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: Nobody's allergic to epinephrine Nobody.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Your own adrenal glands make it, and anybody not using epinephrine is seriously not understanding this procedure.
• 22:35
  Speaker 2: What does epinephrine is seriously not understanding this procedure.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: What does epinephrine do for us?
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: It's a vasoconstrictor, it's the adrenaline hormone.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: It's also called adrenaline.
• 22:41
  Speaker 1: It's the fight or flight response when you got to get out of somewhere because it's dangerous.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: Your epinephrine goes right through the ceiling when you use it in a local environment, we're asking it to come in contact as a solution to the microvasculature and constrict it, and so the vessels become tighter.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: They have intima, they have adventitia, they have media, and those smooth muscles shrink to become very small little cords for a while, which you're now going to take advantage of by bouncing into them instead of cutting them and moving them out of your way, letting them stay intact.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: There are other fiber structures there, including little nerves that regulate hormones coming in and out, including insulin, and then there's connective tissue that holds it all together.
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: But the thing to understand about a fat cell is there's a lot of fat in the cell and a pretty thin membrane, and then there's a nucleus and the other Golgi apparatus and other things.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: But if you look at an H&E stain of a fat I think that was probably some of the problem it looks like there's nothing there because all the fat's been washed out in the stain.
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: But if you look at an underscanning electron microscopy you go what?
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: There's that much blood supply around one lipocyte.
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: Wow, when I teach with that slide, people kind of get that and they say, oh, oh, you're right, we should make that microvasculature as invisible as we can, so then we can manipulate around it.
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: Now cells adhere to each other in a connective tissue bath that's bathed with serum and tissue water and so we hydrate, and that's part of what plastic surgery is is a hydro dissection.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: We loosen tissues up by putting fluid there.
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: So I use a pretty aqueous solution of about 20 cc's of local which is easy to put in that space and that bathes the entire area and loosens it, and I'll sit for a minute or two while I'm letting that work and massage that into the tissue in the love handle area.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: And then you make, of course, what's unavoidable a small little access incision with an 11 blade.
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: And then the other thing that we do as part of our patented method is I don't allow the skin to ever be stuck again with a needle.
• 25:04
  Speaker 1: Every time you penetrate a skin with a needle, somebody goes out or they jump Right Again.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: My mentality is do not hurt your patients.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: And so we use a proprietary blunt cannula and all the infiltration of the other 19 cc's of fluid is put in through a blunt device and the patient doesn't even feel it going in when you have a blunt little cannula moving through the tissue, bouncing off of structure, hydrating.
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: At the same time you're prepping that space for your trocar to pass through it, causing maximal vasoconstriction and maximal hydration.
• 25:43
  Speaker 1: So now your path is easy.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: And then I use in the method a weaving in a slight fashion to allow the connective tissue fibrils that hold skin to fat and muscle to become valuable little retainers of pellets.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: And so once we insert the cannula and the trocar body all the way in, you're going to pull out the center channel, which is your obturator, which had the blunt end on it.
• 26:11
  Speaker 1: You're going to load your pellets into the chamber we usually use six in one row and then you're going to deploy the obturator back into the cannula body and you're going to put pressure on the obturator and back the trocar body off so they get tick-tocked into that space and get caught on each other.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: That's why we dropped extrusions from 3% or 4% and as high as 8% to an eighth of 1%.
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: We don't say it's incredible and we also don't get infections, because I teach every one of my people a really simple aseptic technique and we use chlorhexidine, we don't just use betadine.
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: You've got to protect that patient from a small incision and an infection and we change our gloves and that's part of our training and I know you and I have talked about that.
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: We don't want an infection.
• 27:02
  Speaker 1: I have an incredibly low infection rate, I have an incredibly low extrusion rate and I have an incredibly high happy patient rate and our clinic is crazy busy and we don't even advertise it.
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: I had a lady the other day yesterday in fact say why don't you advertise this more?
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: I have four friends who had come to you and I didn't have an answer.
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: I was embarrassed.
• 27:20
  Speaker 1: I said, well, I guess we should, we're just busy, we're okay.
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: But she was right, it needs to be out there more.
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: And so my frustration.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: And if your listeners to this podcast go well, how do I get these?
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: Oh boy, that might even be a whole nother talk, because now you talk about manufacturing, you talk about licensing.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: I'm a darn surgeon.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: I'm not a manufacturer.
• 27:46
  Speaker 1: I had to become one.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: I had to learn how to do that.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: I had to source tubes, I had to sort plastic, I had to sort kitting.
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: I had to find kitters.
• 27:53
  Speaker 1: That's my small little practice, busy as a plastic surgeon.
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: With this, few other members of my company became a manufacturer of trocars and it's taken a couple years and guess what A lot of hard work.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: And we're really close to launching the entire atraumatic line, which has both an entire kit which gives you everything you need to pellet, or if you're already versed at pelleting and you like to buy your own supplies but you only need the device and the proprietary cannula body, we can sell you a sterile, separate.
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: That sounds amazing.
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: We're very excited in our clinic to use your ATO clone method.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: I don't think I've ever been more enthusiastic about the reward for hard work.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: If any of those people out there in our big world think anything's easy or anything worth doing is easy, that's not the path I've experienced.
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: It's hard, good things you got to work through, you got to get better, you got to make some mistakes and pay for it.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: I'm telling you, all the advantages that I've been able to create for a pellet industry will change this industry and nobody should ever be pelleted with a sharp device again, and that would be hard for me because people are going to steal it and try to knock it off and do all the things they can.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: And I'm bringing this out at a device cost the exact same as what's being put out now.
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: Nice, you don't have to pay more for it, even though you probably theoretically could.
• 29:25
  Speaker 1: Right, I've been told that strategically by a number of advisors.
• 29:27
  Speaker 1: I don't want that to be higher than what my doctors would and providers would pay for it.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: Now, right, I want them to just have a better and easier procedure that their patients love, and then their practice is increased by 20 or 30 percent and everybody wins.
• 29:42
  Speaker 1: I've told you before, when everybody wins, it's a viable, long lasting relationship.
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: And your patients are no different.
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: If you continue to pellet them well and they achieve those values with you of being right, perfect in their hormones, they're going to love you and come back and see you.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: So does anyone come to mind that you had used the SHARP method with and you've switched to your method?
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a lot of them, kelly, and I'm going to tell you one in particular because it was an aha moment for me and it had to do with a patient who came in to get pelleted.
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: I typically don't do a lot of the pellets.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: I have APRNs that are my pelleters and they're amazing at it.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: They do them as good as I do.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: But I had an elderly male, early 70s, come in on the wrong day, drove 40 miles from a suburban of Reno, down south the Gardnerville-Minden area, and was told he came on the wrong day.
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: Drove 40 miles from a suburban of Reno, down south, the Gardnerville Minden area, and was told he came on the wrong day.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: And I happened to be sitting at this desk and my front desk came to me and said Mr X, mr Smith is here.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: He came on the wrong day.
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: Would you pellet him?
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: And I said sure, happy to.
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: I had never met him.
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: He had been pelleted three times by our staff.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: I get up out of my desk.
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: He stands up and gives me a hug, says you're the guy who invented this.
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: I said well, not pelleting, but the method.
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: He goes.
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: Let me tell you how it's changed my life.
• 31:09
  Speaker 1: I run three companies and I got where I could hardly do that.
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: I wasn't mentally clear, I didn't have the energy and I was losing it.
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: And somebody told me about you guys and I'm on my third or fourth pellet procedure now and I've got vigor, vitality, mental clarity like I've never had.
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: So I hope you don't mind that I hug you and I said stop, I'm going to go get my phone and I want to record this because the world needs to hear your story.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: And I have his video that I treasure and, frankly, I ran into him about four months ago.
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: I saw him being pelleted and I just went over and said how are you doing?
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: And he's continued to have three or four more years with us of running his company in his upper 70s with vigor.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: And that's what we're selling here is people's vitality.
• 32:03
  Speaker 2: Yes, yes.
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: So, as a hormone hero, dr Verdon, what would you like our audience to know?
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: I would love them to know that I'm proud of them for going out of nobody ever trained in hormones.
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: I'm coming at it differently.
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: You can't look up and I hope we change this and I had a business model where we would go approach, say, the American Association of Advanced Practice Nurses and say, well, you allow a geriatric specialty, you allow a family practice specialty, let's do one for hormone replacement.
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: Let me show you how to do that.
• 32:43
  Speaker 1: That's again another concept for another day.
• 32:47
  Speaker 1: Everybody who comes to pelleting comes from something else.
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: I just happen to come from a surgical specialty, which is pretty rare, from something else.
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: I just happen to come from a surgical specialty, which is pretty rare, I would say the majority of people fall into primarily OBGYN, urology, internal medicine, family practice, naturopaths, osteopaths, aprns of all makings that are saying I really like this hormone business, I want to get into it, and they have to come to somebody like me or go to a national clinic and we got to go through didactics, and so anybody who got to be a hormone replenisher I love that word better actually had to kind of self-learn it, and so I'm proud of them all for doing it.
• 33:36
  Speaker 1: I also understand why you didn't question how the pellets go in because you didn't know.
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: That's not your fault, right, but it's now my job to teach you that that's the wrong way to do it and you have a better mousetrap to offer your patient that will make them happier about what you're going to do to them.
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 33:58
  Speaker 2: So in closing, Dr Verdon, is there a website you would like our audience to know about?
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: I'm going to direct you currently to our atrocarscom website.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: I'll get you some information on that.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: Okay, we have posted a couple of teaching videos.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: I have a 3D animated video about how the procedure is different.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: We are very, very close to having a nice amount of inventory to start selling our trocar devices.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: That was supposed to happen last spring.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: So this whole lesson of manufacturing has been a brutal learning experience for me.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: But guess what?
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: I solved it.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: Like any of you out there can solve a problem if you work hard enough at it.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: I've been able to create the kit at a price that I think everybody will be able to afford who's doing pellets?
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: And we should have an ample amount of stock moving forward where we don't have shortages.
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: And so we as a company are kind of preparing for a more of an outlook or an approach to how we get our message out.
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: I know there's ways like trade shows, a4m.
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: I've been asked to give some talks to some other national clinics.
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: I'm getting busier, not slower, in this side because it's kind of ready to go with getting it out clinically and I'm gonna be available to those who need to be taught because I'm passionate about it.
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: I've been blessed to be the inventor of it and I've also put my blood, sweat and tears in making it happen, and that's also exciting.
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: There's an entrepreneurial side to me that's enjoyable.
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: I don't shy away from it, but I've taken some bumps and lessons from it.
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: You sure have, and I just want to mention to our audience that our patients.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: If you're interested in having Dr Verdon's trocar method done, when you get pellets, please contact us and we will help you find that person in our network that does this technique early about this wonderful national trainer gal somewhere in Arkansas and we did chat maybe seven, eight, nine months ago, and you very genuinely kind of got what I was doing and very graciously said I'd like to learn that you, on your own time and on your dime, showed me you were legit and that you loved this patient base and you wanted their lives to be better.
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: It was a treat to have you here.
• 36:41
  Speaker 1: It's a treat to be on with you today.
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: I respect your level of care and understanding in this space and I know you're a reliable training source moving forward for our products.
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: Yes, thank you, dr Burden.
• 36:55
  Speaker 2: Source moving forward for our products.
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: Yes, thank you, dr Burden.
• 36:59
  Speaker 2: So if anybody has any questions or would like to see anything that we've referenced, it'll be in our show notes and I guess we'll just get on with our Friday.
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: You have a great weekend All right.
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: Thank you, Dr Burden.
• 37:17
  Speaker 2: Bye-bye.
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: Thanks for listening to Hormone Heroes.
• 37:20
  Speaker 2: Take a moment to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode.
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: While you are there, help us spread the word by leaving a rating and a review.
• 37:31
  Speaker 2: If you would like to share your bioidentical hormone story or need help finding a physician in your area, please email us at drkelly at hormoneheroesorg that's D-R-K-E-L-L-Y at H-O-R-M-O-N-E-H-E-R-O-E-S dot org.
• 37:56
  Speaker 2: We want you to be a hormone hero.