The Truth About BPC 157 - What You Need to Know

Hi everyone, I'm double board certified cardiothoracic surgeon Dr. Michael Richmond. Today I want to do a brief video about peptides, specifically BPC57, which seems to be rocking the fitness world for several years as well as social media. First of all, let's make something clear. Anecdotes are not proof of efficacy of any medication. So if it works on you, great. I'm happy. But that doesn't mean that it really has been shown to work in any human study. Now let's talk about BPC57 specifically. It's an analog for something called VEGF which stands for vascular endothelial growth factor in the human body. VEGF is a growth factor that promotes the proliferation of blood vessels called angiogenesis. Angioenesis is definitely important for healing, but it's also important for the proliferation of cancer. In fact, there's a drug called Avastin that blocks VEGF that we use in cancer treatment. And Avastin was approved by the FDA for treating several types of cancer including metastatic colarctyl, non small cell lung cancer, kidney, ovarian cancer and glyobblastoma in the brain and it was approved first in 2004 for the treatment of advanced colarctal cancer. Okay, so that's a little bit about uh the cancer role. Now the rationale for using BPC57 is injury is that maybe we want the growth of blood vessels to improve healing when you have an injury. The problem is if you have an undiagnosed cancer, do you really want to risk the growth of a cancer by promoting angioenesis? And I'll let you decide. I don't want to do it for dubious benefits. Now the problem is how do you take it? Well, stomach acid breaks down BPC157. It breaks down peptides in general. So the bioavailability meaning the amount that is available to be utilized by the body after you take it orally is about 10 to 20% of the dose taken. As I said, gastric acid rips peptides apart. So there's no evidence that you can take enough to have any meaningful effect in your body to be helpful. So many people turn to injecting it. But then what is the correct dose to inject? We don't know. So let's take an example. What if you have planner fasciitis? Well, the halflife of injectable BPC57 is 1 to two hours. So would you inject it into your foot every 1 to two hours for some unknown benefit? I wouldn't. Okay. So now I know the conspiracy theorists and people who love peptides or who make money illegally selling BPC57 are going to criticize me and say that um aligned with pharma and pharma doesn't want this to be made. Yet they are the ones who stand to make the biggest profit from development and mass production if it worked. But the FDA has said show me some data that it does work. Okay. And there is none. The efficacy of BPC57 in human clinical trials remains unproven with only limited and lowquality human data available. Okay. So most of the literature on BPC 157 describes extensive preclinical evidence of beneficial effects in animal models for tissue healing and that's animal models not humans also in gastrointestinal disorders and neurop protection but emphasizes that comprehensive well-controlled human clinical trials are lacking BPC has not been approved by the FDA or any other regulatory agency anywhere for any indication Due to the absence of robust human efficacy data, the only published human data is a small retrospective case series, meaning they looked at results after they occurred um evaluating intrajint injection of BPC57 in the knee for uh knee pain. And it was reported there was subjective. In other words, the person said, "Oh yeah, I feel better." in many patients. This isn't scientific, but the study is limited by said retrospective design, a very small sample size. There was no control group and the absence of any validated outcome measures other than people saying, "Yeah, I feel better." So, you can't establish efficacy. Um, it has also been used in phase 2 trials for ulcerative colitis and multiple sclerosis, but no published results from trials are available in the medical literature. So, that tells you something. that did nothing. There's currently no highquality evidence from randomized control trials to support the efficacy of BPC 157 in humans. So pharmacies therefore are not allowed to make it. So when people buy it, they have to buy it from shady manufacturers are only allowed to sell it for research purposes who are people saying they're going to use it for research. So there's no quality control. You don't know what the hell you're getting. You don't know Sterilli and anybody who tells you differently is blowing smoke up your ass. So would I take it? Hell no. So with that, I hope you learned something today. Thank you so much for listening. Uh for any more information, guidance, medical advocacy or consultation, you can go to my website at www.pinmds.com. And hope you have a great day. Thank you so much.