Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, “Find what you love to do; find your passion. Know what makes you want to get up in the morning. That’s all you need.” Asher Milgrom followed his passions to develop breakthrough methods for doing cosmetic surgery and removing skin problems using natural holistic modalities.
In 1999, Asher Milgrom founded American Medical Aesthetic Corporation and is the principle architect of AMA Corp’s business strategies and unique medical protocols. Along with his wife, Dr. Alice Pien, Asher developed advanced medical protocols for a wide variety of laser procedures that produce extraordinary clinical results while requiring minimal patient downtime.
Together, Asher and Alice developed AMA Corp’s signature laser treatments utilizing their unique understanding of multiple modality holistic laser protocols. Strong proponents of holistic and naturopathic medicine, Dr. Pien and Asher use high-potency vitamin therapy and hyperbaric oxygen treatment in their clinics as an adjunct to the high-tech laser medicine they have been practicing.
Their newest industry-leading innovation is the integration of Physiological Regulating Medicine treatments into their proprietary laser protocols. PRM, Physiological Regulating Medicine, is the most advanced form of homeopathy and homeotoxicology developed in advanced scientific centers in Europe. From celebrities to business executives to homemakers, AMA Corp’s results using natural and non-invasive strategies are breathtaking.
Would anyone ever choose to have a surgical facelift once they have seen what AMA Corp can do without the pain and long recovery times that traditional cosmetic surgery requires? Asher attended the School of Medicine at the University of Chicago, and is trained as both a naturopathic medical doctor and an integrative medical doctor.
Marci Shimoff, New York Times bestselling author of Happy For No Reason, and the woman’s face of the biggest self-help book phenomenon in history, Chicken Soup for the Soul, conducted the interview with Asher Milgrom. Her books have sold more than 13 million copies worldwide in 33 languages and have been on the New York Times bestseller list for a total of 108 weeks. She is also one of the stars of the movie, “The Secret”. Be sure to go to Marci’s website at www.HappyForNoReason.com.
MARCI SHIMOFF: I love the work of the Passion Series, and I’m delighted also to be here with Asher, whose work I absolutely love and respect. Asher, since this series is called the Passions of Real Life Legends, what role have your own passions, the things that matter the most to you, played in leading you to the life that you live today, which is an amazing life?
ASHER MILGROM: Speaking with you on the phone, how can I but state that reading books such as the two books that you both have written so eloquently have been a driving force in my life? I know this interview is not about you, but for all those who are listening or tuning into this, doing that kind of work in my life-whether it’s other authors, ancient authors, or you-has been amazingly empowering for me. Kudos to you.
MARCI SHIMOFF: Thank you.
ASHER MILGROM: I can’t imagine anything more important than teaching my kids that happiness is a choice, a choice they need to make on a momentary basis. For me, what’s the single most driving force? It’s great to see this question because I don’t think about this all that often. To start the interview this way is an indication of what an enlightened facility you have provided here. It’s all about awareness.
Even as a child, I had this inkling that awareness was something like the peels or layers of an onion, that under any awareness is another layer and another layer. Of course, when I got a little bit older it got more scientific: from molecules to atoms to sub-atomic particles to sub-atomic space. There are layers within layers within layers, almost like a kaleidoscope. As you keep on changing, new realities emerge.
I thought that in anything I do as a person, in anything anyone does as person, you can elevate awareness at any moment. Into that elevated space of awareness, there you can create really good things. That’s been a driving force for me, and I try to live that.
MARCI SHIMOFF: You’ve been deep and profound, it sounds like, from the get-go, from the very beginning. That’s really driven you and been your greatest passion. Will you tell us a little bit about the story of how you got your start in what you’re doing?
ASHER MILGROM: It’s kind of interesting. Actually, at the end of my medical training 25 years ago, I actually left medicine for a while, wanting to delve into things that were of a more creative sort. The practice of medicine is not meant to be creative. It’s more of a routine-oriented kind of thing unless you’re doing research. I left medicine to be more entrepreneurial in my life.
It wasn’t until about 10 years ago-May of 1999, to be exact-that my wife, Alice, who is a physician and is my partner in life and partner in our practice and in business, and who had spent most of her time as an ER physician in Pediatric Trauma, was basically burning out. She was wondering whether or not she should leave medicine, too. We really got to thinking about that.
“Wait a minute. Just because medicine is conventionally practiced the way it is, which is not the most enlightened thing, doesn’t mean that we have to do it that way. What area of medicine could we look at that we could transform, that we could bring our own genius into, our own sensitivities, our own sense of how life should be and, perhaps, this whole idea of awareness within awareness within awareness?
“Could we create something that would be truly exciting, in which our passion could flourish, and in which we could bring extraordinary value to people?” Out of that came the idea of using lasers as a form of energy medicine to transform the physiology of skin. That’s how it all began, and that’s when the research started for us about 10 years ago.
MARCI SHIMOFF: What was it that made you think that there could be a more natural way to perform cosmetic surgery?
ASHER MILGROM: Cosmetic surgery, in its foundation, the way it’s performed by surgeons with a scalpel, with a knife, doesn’t deal with the physiology of skin or the physiology of the patient or the person. All it does it repositions skin; it moves it around and cuts off the excess and stitches you up. Whatever physiological condition your skin was to begin with-whether it’s sun-damaged, aged, pock-marked, scarred, or whatever it is-it’s going to be the same physiological condition after the surgery as it was before, plus the insult and the damage from the surgery.
Basically, it’s a superficial addressing of the problem, which is a physiological problem. Doing cosmetic surgery or performing medicine in that sense didn’t interest us at all. Of course, there are times when that kind of surgery is really the right way to go, especially in reconstructive conditions and things like that; but as a method of fundamental approach to skin, that didn’t make sense to us.
It was just about that time that the new generations of lasers were beginning to come out. Lasers had been used in medicine for over 50 years, but it was only 10 or 12 years ago that the new generation of lasers were emerging. They were really interesting because they offered a greater level of flexibility, so the practitioner could really modulate the energy in creative ways and in precise ways.
I got to thinking about this. We know that light in nature is often absorbed in plants and in the different biological systems where the light itself can change the physiological state of the tissue. It’s like leaves in the sunlight going through photosynthesis. Why couldn’t it be true that human tissue would also respond to the exquisite refinement of light energy and also have a transformative physiological change?
We started doing research to see if that was possible. Could we actually change the physiological state of skin by using different frequencies of light? That’s how it all got started.
MARCI SHIMOFF: What I really appreciate is that what you’re doing is not just dealing with the surface results. You’re actually interested in going in more deeply and doing the very deep healing of the skin. That, to me, is quite amazing. I’ve actually seen the pictures-and they’re remarkable-that show what you’re doing when you’re going deep into the layers of skin and doing some very deep healing.
ASHER MILGROM: Exactly. The bottom line of it is this: Of course everyone wants their skin to look young and beautiful on the outside, but how do you achieve that? We do that by making sure your skin physiologically is young, strong and healthy on the inside, which is then reflected on the outside.
MARCI SHIMOFF: I’ve heard you say that you have the only medical practice that’s developed a holistic approach to the physiological transformation of skin. Tell me what you mean by that.
ASHER MILGROM: Yes, that’s accurate. There may be some others out there in the world, but we don’t know about them. Certainly, people fly in from all over the world for these treatments, so apparently they haven’t found them either, if there are others out there. I hope there are, but it took us a long time to get here and a huge amount of money to figure this out. The barriers of entry are large, but we would be happy to see others do it, too.
MARCI SHIMOFF: What are some of the most common skin issues you’ve been able to treat?
ASHER MILGROM: First and foremost, there is the man or woman who comes in at 40, 45, or 50 years old and says, “I’ve aged more in the last year than the 10 previous years combined.”
MARCI SHIMOFF: I can relate to that!
ASHER MILGROM: Somewhere along the line, we all do. The flagship, so to speak, of our protocols, is something we call the Spectra™ Lift, which is a very comprehensive, multiple-modality approach we use. We have over 20 different lasers here, and they’re all very specific in what they do. We’ll use a select group of those lasers, depending on the assessment of the patient’s skin.
Plus, we also have other modalities, such as the hyperbaric oxygen therapy, the high-potency vitamin therapy, and the Physiological Regulating Medicine-that’s the European discipline that Janet mentioned-as well as a variety of other modalities, including the lasers, to bring that patient’s skin back to a much younger physiological state on the inside.
The lifting, the toning, the closing of the pores, and the wrinkles disappearing from the inside out so you get your younger face back, again, is a physiological transformation. That’s the overall, and in that we take care of everything else that needs to happen. If the person has sunspots, age spots, sun damage, broken capillaries, or some rosacea, all of those things are dealt with in one complete package.
Of course, people may have individual things or not be ready for the overall Spectra™. They might have cystic acne, cystic acne scarring, sun damage, the age spots, birthmarks or melasma. Melasma is very difficult to treat, but we’ve found ways to do it.
MARCI SHIMOFF: I don’t know what melasma is.
ASHER MILGROM: Melasma? Some ladies during pregnancy suddenly get dark blotches on their faces, a dark coloration. The common, colloquial term is the ‘mask of pregnancy’. This can happen because someone is very sensitive to sun or because they’ve had hormonal fluctuations that have caused it. Melasma is very debilitating because sometimes the dark blotches are so dark she can’t even cover them up with makeup, unless it’s theatrical.
To walk around that way is emotionally difficult; you feel scarred. This has traditionally been one of the most difficult things to deal with, and we have found that our physiological, holistic approaches work extremely well with melasma. There are all these things, whether it’s the overall or if you have individual things you need to deal with. What else did I forget? Of course, scarring of any kind and stretch-mark scars.
Those are in your skin too, and these are things that are healable physiologically. Those stretch-marks either go away or nearly go away, and it’s transformative for the patient. Birthmarks, you name it, whatever is in skin we can address.
MARCI SHIMOFF: These approaches you use, you’ve gone over a little bit about the modalities, but will you just explain a little bit more about this Physiological Regulating Medicine, some of these modalities you use, and how they’re different from more of the traditional modalities?
ASHER MILGROM: Okay. Let me start from the basics, and thanks for asking. Let’s talk about lasers for a second, because that is a major part of what we do. How do they work? Why do they work so well? How is it we use them differently than everyone else out there? First, let me explain how everyone else out there uses them. Again, I’m not saying this to condemn how other physicians operate. I understand very well why they do these things, and I can’t blame them for it.
Lasers are extraordinarily expensive. On every one of them, I pay monthly a mortgage bigger than my house, and I have over 20 of them. Obviously, if you’re a physician and doing a lot of different things in your practice-and it’s hard to make a living these days as a physician; it really is, with managed care and the political situation-then you look for something you can do to bring in extra money. Doing laser procedures that are cosmetic or aesthetic in nature, where people pay cash, is very alluring.
The issue, though, is that the way the manufacturers teach you how to use the lasers is rudimentary and it doesn’t deal with the true physiological nature of how the light interacts with the skin. Let me explain what happens. The manufacturer says, “I want you to use my laser. You don’t need any other,” so the physician will get one or two, or he’ll rent them on a Wednesday afternoon.
What they’re taught is to use a laser to impart energy on the skin and to essentially damage the skin, but not above that threshold that overwhelms the skin to the point where it can’t heal itself. Then you’ve really damaged the patient and you’re in trouble, and so is their skin. If you damage them underneath that threshold and you cause this generalized damage to the skin, you will induce in the skin a generalized healing response.
This is just like if you burn your skin in the sun and your skin heals afterwards. These are minor damages, so you can do that up to that threshold with a laser and induce this healing response. The hope is that whatever the patient came in complaining about-whether it was broken capillaries, sun spots, sun damage, wrinkles or whatever it was-those will be healed and improved, along with everything else in the wake of that generalized healing response.
However, that’s like throwing mud on the wall and seeing what sticks. More often than not, you’ll get a minor-and only a minor-improvement, if anything at all depending on how lucky you are. This is because your particular thing was somehow swept up in the healing response. We use lasers very differently. What’s important to understand about lasers is that every one of them emits a very unique, exquisitely pure form of energy down to the nanometer of the frequency of the light that’s coming out.
Because of that, every laser has a very unique target specificity. This means that every kind of component of your skin-the cell type, the tissue type, the structure, the layer, and there are so many of these in the skin-is going to respond in a unique and specific way, given the kind of energy it’s interacting with. Every laser is going to have a different effect physiologically on every different component of the skin.
Once you have enough of these devices around and you’ve really studied the interaction between the physics, the energy, and the physiology, you can see that with different kinds of frequencies you can stimulate very specific physiological responses. Instead of taking just one laser, whatever you happen to have around, and blasting away at the skin, causing this generalized damage and sitting back to see what happens, saying, “Let’s wait for it to repair, and let’s hope for the best,” we have an array of lasers.
We very carefully assess the skin; we use very sophisticated computer equipment and photographic equipment to figure out what’s going on with the skin. Of course, we also have a very extensive interview with the patient to really figure this out. Then we customize a protocol with various lasers in order to stimulate the correct physiological response in every component of the skin that needs it in order to bring it back to a younger physiological state where it’s functioning in a healthier, stronger way.
You can’t do it in just one treatment, so there are a number of treatments, progressively, and each time we can do more because your skin is physiologically changing, and so your skin is doing what it used to do when you were in your 20s. That is a completely different approach than what everyone else uses. That’s just lasers. Now let’s talk about the rest of the body. Everyone knows that your skin is an organ, and most people know that your skin is your single largest organ.
What people don’t think of is the fact that your skin is also your body’s single largest detoxification organ. People normally think of the liver, the kidneys, and the bowel as being the big detox organs, and they are. However, the skin is so much larger than all those other ones, so the skin has a lot to do with your detox, which is why, everyone, when you have a big garlic meal the night before, the day after you can smell the garlic in your skin.
Your skin is detoxing, and that’s why you smell the garlic in it. When you look at the health of the skin, in order to really transform it physiologically you can’t pretend that the skin is an organ in a box; it’s working with all the other organs. You have to bring them into play. You have to put their activity on the table, too. That’s why the other modalities we use-the hyperbaric oxygen therapy, the high-potency vitamin injections, and particularly the Physiological Regulating Medicine-are very important. The other organs need to support the transformation you’re looking for in the skin.
MARCI SHIMOFF: Can you take a minute and explain each one of those a little bit? What’s the hyperbaric oxygen chamber? I’ve been in that, and it’s a tremendous, amazing experience. Why don’t you tell people what it is, what it does, and what the other two things you mentioned do, as well?
ASHER MILGROM: Sure. We’ll start with the hyperbarics. It’s kind of like being inside Jeannie’s genie bottle. You get into this chamber, and the chamber is pressurized so it closes up around you. There is plenty of space in there, so it’s not like you’re cramped. It’s pressurized and it’s filled with pillows. There’s light so you can read, meditate, listen to music, or whatever you want to do. You can take a nap.
It’s pressurized, so while you’re inside that pressure, you’re also breathing pure oxygen. What happens is that the pressure causes the oxygen to dissolve in all the fluids of your body. Normally, the oxygen is carried to all the tissues of your body just by hemoglobin, which is a relatively effective system-obviously, we’re all alive-but it’s not the most efficient system.
All the tissues of our bodies, literally all of them, are constantly operating with a certain amount of oxygen debt. Our tissues and our cells aren’t getting enough oxygen, but when the oxygen is dissolved in all the fluids of your body-including the extracellular fluids that surround all your tissues, cells, lymph, cerebral spinal fluids, and all the fluids-suddenly, every cell of your body is being super-saturated with oxygen.
That availability of oxygen allows the cells to really blossom metabolically and clean themselves out. It’s a huge detox, hyperbaric oxygen, and it allows healing to occur in every organ, every tissue in your body from your brain to your big toe. It’s remarkable what it does for the skin, of course, but it’s remarkable what it does for everything. That’s one of the things we do.
MARCI SHIMOFF: After somebody does the laser treatment, then they do the hyperbaric chamber. It’s not just a benefit for their face, but they feel better. It lasts for a while, as well, for people. Is that right?
ASHER MILGROM: Yes, it’s good for everything. Your digestion is better; your sleep’s better, your concentration is better. Hyperbarics is simply good for you. The bottom line is this: Of all things, what do you cells need more than anything else? What can’t they live without for even a few seconds? Oxygen.
MARCI SHIMOFF: Oxygen, yes.
ASHER MILGROM: So give them more. Your cells like it. It’s that simple.
MARCI SHIMOFF: That’s great. That’s the first one. The second one you mentioned was what?
ASHER MILGROM: High-potency vitamin injections. Lots of us, and most of us, I imagine, listening to this take vitamins by mouth in pill form. The unfortunate reality is, however, that a very small percentage of the vitamins you take orally actually get absorbed-maybe 5%, if you’re lucky-depending on how well those pills are put together in capsules or whatever form they’re in.
This means 95% of the stuff just gets excreted out; it’s not getting in there. When you take high-potency vitamins, either by IV or by injection, now you’re getting the full dose right into the system. We all know that vitamins are incredibly important for virtually every metabolic pathway in our body. Now there are certain metabolic pathways that we specifically want to encourage during this restoration of the physiology of your skin.
This has to do with detoxification pathways and tissue regeneration pathways. The B vitamins are very important for that: B5, B6, B12. B12, by the way, is also great for your brain, so when people get these injections they get a great mood boost and an elevated mental acuity and energy. It’s just wonderful. We give these high-potency vitamin injections along with our treatments in order to encourage the continual detoxification and regeneration of the tissue.
Then there’s the Physiological Regulating Medicine. This is absolutely stunning. A little over a year ago, or maybe about a year ago, in Fall of last year, I got a call from the president of the European Congress of Physiological Regulating Medicine. Mind you, in medical school, Physiological Medicine wasn’t even discussed. I never knew that this organization existed.
MARCI SHIMOFF: What is it? You’re going to tell us what Physiological Medicine is?
ASHER MILGROM: I sure am.
MARCI SHIMOFF: Good. Okay.
ASHER MILGROM: I was very curious. I didn’t know about this organization. Why would this guy be calling me? The bottom line is that they had heard about us, that we use lasers to physiologically transform tissue. They said, “You should learn about what we are doing.” I said, “Great. Send me some information.” He sent me some articles and a book. I read it, and I got more excited about medicine reading that material than I had been since medical school.
Let me tell you what was so exciting about it. Every one of us, as we stand right now, has about 100 trillion cells in our bodies. Every single one of them is sitting there idling, basically, waiting for instructions like, “Hey, Boss, what do you want me to do now?” Where do these cells get their instructions from? The three regulatory systems of our bodies: our neurology, our nerves tell cells what to do; our endocrinology, our hormone system; and our immunology, the immune system.
These systems tell cells what physiological functions they need to be engaging in. Cells have lost of different things they can do, but what should they do right now? They get messages from those three regulatory systems. The messages all come in the form of chemicals, chemical messengers. Obviously, we all know about hormones. Hormones are chemical messengers, and the nervous system has neuropeptides and neurotransmitters, et cetera.
Our immune system has lymphokines and cytokines. These are all communicating molecules. They release into the blood, they get to the various cells, and the cells all have receptors on their surfaces, receptors that are specific to the various communicating molecules. When the correct molecule binds with its corresponding receptor, that cell immediately initiates a very specific physiological response.
That’s how our bodies work. Now if you can imagine for a minute a mobile-do you know those mobiles they have hanging over a crib or a beautiful mobile hanging from the ceiling? You have one little string attached to one bar, and that one bar has a string on either end of it attached to another bar. At the ends of those bars there are four strings attached, and on and on and on.
Finally, at the bottom, you have the little fish, flowers, or whatever it is hanging at the bottom of the mobile. The bottom line is this. Physiologically, every system of our body is represented as something that is in balance on that mobile. If you take any one of those little fishes or stars at the end of the mobile and press down on it or push it up or down, everything shifts out of alignment.
The Physiological Regulating Medicine say the following: that you should be able to-unlike pharmacology using drugs from pharmaceutical companies, which just suppress different symptoms-by using regulatory messenger molecules, go to the source of the imbalance and bring it back into balance at its source. Everything then falls back into place. It was very exciting for me to read this, and Dr. Pien-Alice-and I went to Europe and studied this form of medicine.
As Janet read, the mechanism that’s used here is a form of homeopathy, a very advanced form of scientifically derived homeopathy. Major universities in Europe are involved in this, and it’s so effective a method of treatment that the governments of Germany, Italy and France, with their socialized medicine, will even pay for a lot of these treatments. It simply works as good as and, in some cases, better than conventional medicine at a fraction of the cost without any side effects.
Thus, it’s gaining a lot of popularity and traction over there, but over here it’s really relatively unknown. We use that in order to garner or bring to bear all the resources physiologically of our bodies in order to help the repair and the transformation of the skin’s physiology.
MARCI SHIMOFF: It’s amazing. Do you know what I love? It’s so obvious that you have a complete passion for this, and I can tell that your passion is that you love the science of it, you love the discovery of it, and you also love getting to see the results of it. I know you just see miraculous results.
ASHER MILGROM: We do. Do you know what else I love? I love sitting down with the patients and teaching them about this, because the lights go on behind their eyes. They realize, “Oh, my gosh! My physiology is accessible to me? I can actually physiologically transform?” For so many people, the idea of going to a doctor or taking drugs or, God forbid, having surgery when you don’t need it is a compromise.
“I want to look better so I’m going to compromise my principles of what health should be in order to have what I want.” You don’t have to do that. You can keep your principles intact and also have what you want in a healthy, balanced way.
MARCI SHIMOFF: The results, I know, are astonishing. I’ve seen numbers of pictures of these with the results. It’s fabulous to know you can get the results and do it in a way that’s supporting your health and actually helping your health along with it. I love that.
ASHER MILGROM: You and I have common friends who have had the procedures-can I say it? I think so; he says it all the time-like Mark Victor Hansen. You’ve seen how he’s just glowing now.
MARCI SHIMOFF: Janet and I both had the experience of looking at Mark once at a conference and saying, “Oh, my gosh! He looks amazing.” We asked him what he did, and he said that he worked with you. It’s tremendous to see the results of it. People are also concerned, though, with the recovery time of treatments. Traditionally, I know cosmetic surgery often takes three to four weeks for recovery time. What’s the situation with your treatments?
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