The Fixed Podcast

From Classroom to Clinic: Dr. Rick Myron's Journey with PRF: Part 1

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Blood has always been the essence of healing. But what happens when we harness its regenerative power in concentrated form? In this captivating conversation with Dr. Rick Myron, we explore the revolutionary world of Platelet-Rich Fibrin (PRF) technology and how it's transforming both dentistry and facial aesthetics.

Dr. Myron's journey from a small-town science fair competitor to a globally recognized researcher exemplifies the perfect marriage between clinical practice and scientific innovation. With 19 years of university education spanning dentistry, medicine, and advanced cell biology, he brings unparalleled expertise to the conversation about regenerative technologies. His work bridges a critical gap in American medicine—the separation between researchers and clinicians—allowing him to develop practical solutions for everyday clinical challenges.

The discussion demystifies the science behind PRF, explaining how this technology improves upon its predecessor (PRP) by eliminating anticoagulants and working with the body's natural healing mechanisms. While traditional PRP disrupts the essential clotting process, PRF preserves it, resulting in consistently superior clinical outcomes across thousands of comparative studies. We explore specific applications in dentistry, from extraction sites and implant procedures to sinus grafting, where PRF significantly enhances healing in challenging low-blood-flow environments.

Perhaps most surprisingly, Dr. Myron reveals how PRF has created a lucrative revenue stream for dental practices through facial aesthetic applications. Treatments like the "vampire facial" (popularized by celebrities) utilize a patient's own blood components to rejuvenate skin naturally, without foreign substances. These procedures cost practices roughly $50 in materials but command $700-1,100 per treatment, with patients returning regularly for maintenance—making them more profitable than many traditional dental procedures.

Whether you're a clinician looking to incorporate cutting-edge regenerative techniques or simply fascinated by how science is revolutionizing healing, this episode offers valuable insights into how your own blood might be the ultimate medicine. Ready to transform your understanding of regenerative therapy and possibly your practice's bottom line?

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

My name is Dr Tyler Tolbert and I'm Dr Soren Poppy, and you're listening to the Fix Podcast, your source for all things implant dentistry. All right, and welcome back to the Fix Podcast. We are on with a very esteemed guest today. So, as you guys know, we always reach out to our audience to hear about different things that people are interested in, things that we could canvas a little bit better. And, you know, one thing that Soren and I, uh can talk about for days is heart tissue, and we can talk about how to do, um, you know, placing implants in a native bone, doing remote anchorage, all these different things that are, um, you know, it's sort of the more common things that we think about with full arch.

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

But some of the things that we kind of gloss over a lot, partially due to our own naivete, is soft tissue stuff and PRF and other regenerative materials and different methods that we have out there. Even though we do actually utilize some of these things in our clinics, we don't always feel that we have the type of expertise necessary to really talk about it, and so a name that just kept coming up for us was Dr Rick Myron, who is a huge innovator, pioneer in the world of PRF and its various applications in medicine and dentistry, and it's really transformed what we're able to do with you know, a patient's own blood and their own body and how that can help us out with different regenerative techniques that are good adjunct to full-arch treatment and all kinds of other kinds of things that you know we're aware of and also not aware of. So I'm super excited to welcome Dr Rick Myron onto the show. Thank you so much for coming on and I'm really looking forward to this one.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Absolutely, as am I, and thank you guys for the invitation.

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

Yeah, no, absolutely. So I mean, this is a, this is a subject that you know. I I've definitely I've got a few friends that are just absolute PRF nerds and when I had first reached out to you and you were gracious enough to come onto the show, I reached out to Dr Sean Land, a really good, close friend of mine, really really into regenerative dentistry and I think he actually went to one of your courses at one time. But he is a huge, huge fan and he helped us out with putting together some questions and things like that and I just know he's, he's spoken, uh, so highly of you and I it's just so great to have you on Um, so we did put together a few things, but I was hoping that, um, just for the folks at home, uh, if you wouldn't mind just kind of canvassing a little bit about you, where you're coming from, your education, um, I tried to read off your, your biography before you came on here and there were so many awards that I just I felt they would come a lot better, um, you know, out of your mouth than mine.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Yeah, um, you know it's kind of a different story to tell, uh, because I'm not a normal dentist by any means and most people know me for the research that we do. And uh, I like to start from the very beginning. Um, I grew up in a very, very small city in North Bay, ontario, and uh, it's about 400 kilometers north of Toronto, so it's way up in the north. There's not a lot to do there.

Dr. Richard Myron:

And when I got to high school, our science teacher was actually an ex-dropout of the University of Toronto in the science department. He got so frustrated with academics that he decided that he was going to go teach high school back in his hometown of North Bay. So when I was 13, my science teacher was a university professor who had written hundreds of papers and now he was going to start teaching us, you know, basic grade nine science and what he did with the top students. I mean, it's a crazy story now that I look back on it, but what he did with the top students is he had us enrolled in some science fair projects and so in the summer months he would hire us to do these different research projects and I was basically doing like his continued university type research at 13, 14 years old, for two months every summer, where I had these jobs in the lab, and that's the huge leg up.

Dr. Richard Myron:

So we're now competing at these national science fairs in Canada Our school's winning first place in every single division you can imagine and I'm getting to travel around doing conferences, conference talks at these science fairs I'm now doing, by the time I'm 17, international conferences and competitions in Sweden and Switzerland and I did some in Chicago. And so by the time I got to 18 years old and I was going to apply for university, of course I had decent grades, but I had all these extra accolades. I won academic scholarships, full ride to wherever I wanted to go, and in university, as you guys probably remember, in undergrad you try and get the science research job if you want to go to medicine or dentistry. Right, it was very common during our summer months we try and do little projects. So of course I already published like peer reviewed articles at 18 years old with my high school teacher, and so I got every summer job that I wanted, you know, direct pass to go to dentistry. And so you know, looking back I didn't realize how special it was and how lucky I was. But because I was doing this, I just had a knack for science. I was always doing it when I finished dental school which is what I always wanted to do was be a dentist.

Dr. Richard Myron:

When I finished, I pursued, also at the same time, a master's in cell biology. I was very interested in dental implants. So I was doing actually research projects where we were taking Stroman implants implants and we were coding this back in 2006, trying to figure a way to get growth factors on a surface of a dental implant. So I was doing work with PDGF, bmp2, enamel matrix proteins, etc. I had published a couple of good articles there and in 2009, I won a full scholarship and this is very unique for Canada but the Canadian government they give a full ride for you to go anywhere you want in the world and they pay for everything. Wow. So five years, they'll pay for all my tuition fees. They'll pay for all my living expenses, all my conference fees. Only five people get this award every year and I won one of them. So I'm like a green ticket now and I'm like like I can go to any school, they don't have to pay me anything and I'll be a phd and and you know, I did a phd in molecular cell biology.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Well, I went to all these different schools and I was trying to decide where I was going to spend the next five years of my life. I went to harvard, I went to michigan, I went to germany, switzerland, italy, and when I went to burn switzerland and that's the school that's most affiliated with Stroman I was like man, this is the place that made sense. That's where Danny Boozer was, that's where Tony Schooley and Klaus Lange a lot of big legends in the space and they are 30 minutes away from Stroman headquarters and 45 minutes away from Nobel biocare headquarters, and so the these huge, massive companies want to collaborate locally, and so I stayed there.

Dr. Richard Myron:

For seven years, I pursued perio, as well as a PhD in molecular and cell biology, and my life was just literally living in the lab most days and then spending one or two days a week in the clinic doing perio work. We developed a lot of biomaterials along the way, and then I moved back to North America in 2016, located in Floridaida, and then, did you know, I set up a research lab and our job is literally try to get materials fda cleared as fast as possible and bring new technologies to dentists. So you know that's a little bit of who I am. You know it's hard to put together in a few few sentences yeah, it's amazing that that's the.

Dr. Richard Myron:

That's the abridged version, you know yeah, you know I obviously am very passionate for what I do and people that take my courses, you know they, they understand like I put a lot of time and energy into, into, you know, really making sure that we're doing things that are well done. And you know what people forget is like if you guys are using dental implants and biomaterials and membranes and this and that like those materials before they were ever launched to market and you guys ever got a chance to use them. Four years before that we started preclinical research to get FDA clearance. So like, right now I'm literally testing Stroman implants that are going to be launched to market in 2029. And a guy like me has to take, you know, cells and seed them on the implants and make sure that cells behave properly on the implant surfaces and that'll take about a year to do.

Dr. Richard Myron:

And then we'll do the first animal study in 2026. And that is usually a large animal model, so it's got to be a dog, it's got to be a mini pig or a monkey, and those are huge projects. They take a year, year and a half, to complete and when we finish that then the FDA says OK, you guys get a checkmark. You know, you can now go to the next step and do the very first human study, and then it'll be 2027. We do the first ever study with these new stromal implants and then, after doing a randomized clinical study, then finally they get FDA cleared.

Dr. Richard Myron:

So in my office, 95% of the things that I do is not, it's not materials that you guys have access to, it's not things that are FDA cleared. Right, it's all kind of where the future of dentistry is going, and so I get to live in this world where we need to have, obviously, special IRB permission, which means the universities have to approve, you know, say this is ethical, they've done the preclinical work, and then you know all these, all these new toys and new tools you know we bring to market. So, yeah, our team's pretty excited about being able to do these projects.

Dr. Soren Paape:

Yeah, that's an amazing story. Very cool that you have access to that and really, really cool that you know you're, you're walking around and you know so much more about the industry even you know than we do, right, because you're you're four years ahead of a lot of people. What would be that transition? You know you talked a lot about kind of the, the stepwise that you've taken to get to where you're at in the career. Now I'd love to hear a little bit about you know where PRF, prp kind of fit into that, and what you're doing as far as your courses and how it evolved into that.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Yeah, I think even dating back to before the courses were started. So in 2011, we understood and I was in Switzerland from 2009 to 16, this pure F world was going to be a big thing, and so we started to do research projects because there was not a lot of like very good work out there. You know how do you spin your protocols, what's RPM versus G-force, you know how much time do you spend, what kind of tubes do you use. All this stuff was back then was nobody knew anything right. So we decided that we were going to start pursuing this, knowing that maybe in the future it would probably be a big field. And so, as we were publishing more and more work and really I think the year 2015, 2016, 17, around those years, we had published a series of, you know, many different articles. It was becoming more and more popular, to the point where we started doing courses on on the technology, and so that's how it basically started and, honestly, I love. I love, obviously teaching as well. It's a lot of fun for me.

Dr. Richard Myron:

But back then, a lot of people don't realize, like, how low and how small the academic salaries are for people like me, and so you know I had graduated. So imagine I had an undergrad completed in bmsc, I had done my dental degree, I had a master's in cell biology, a phd molecular and cell biology and a period a lot of letters. Okay, before I could do my perio degree, I had to redo dentistry or medicine. So I actually studied medicine in Switzerland as well, okay, so I did 19 years university and when I moved to, when I moved from Switzerland back to um to us and I wanted to be in Florida, cause, growing up in Canada, a lot of people move and retire to Florida. So my parents actually live in Florida now, as does my brother, and, uh, you know, I sat with the dean.

Dr. Richard Myron:

I said you know, I really want to live here. This is my school, I know, at Nova Southeast University. It wasn't like a highly reputable school right, it's not like the Harvard's or Michigan but I was like I really don't care, my lab will have the reputation it needs to attract people to courses and publish good data. She sat me down and she's like you know, dr Myron, I'm looking at your CV here. You're a dentist from Canada. That degree doesn't count here and you did it in the French speaking part, so you can't even apply for you know you can't even write the boards. You're going to have to redo two years. Your perio degree is not valid here. You did it in Switzerland. It's top school in the world. But you know you're not a periodontist. Uh, you're not a dentist, you're a PhD and you spent your entire life in school. You have one year experience of real professional life. All your years were spent in university and you're a one year postdoc and your starting salary is going to be $50,000.

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

Just just reduced all of that to $50,000 a year on the on the on the uh on the subject of really just provenance of all these things and they just wouldn't recognize it. That's.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Florida. Yeah, so I had obviously done a lot of years of university and I had to pay back some student loans and stuff and I was like I can hardly even live off this. I mean, you know, it's borderline impossible. But with the Dean no-transcript puref course it immensely benefited me. I now do puref in my practice like these people are very few and far between.

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

So yeah well, I certainly appreciate you for, you know, sticking it out through all that time, uh, to get as educated as you did and to have had as little reward I mean to actually be recognized there at Nova when you first started, and everything I mean that's just it takes quite a bit of perseverance and dedication to what you're passionate about and you've certainly benefited, you know the whole field of dentistry and beyond for that passion, so that definitely I appreciate you. Delaying gratification for so long, that that's pretty cool. That's really good, yeah, yeah.

Dr. Richard Myron:

We, yeah, yeah, you know I always say in the research world, you know, I think the biggest mistake that happens in the United States and this was a little bit and you guys can really pitch in and give me your feedback. But when I went from Canada or North America to Canada, united States to Switzerland, there was a big difference in the way research was performed. And I want your opinion on this because I have a very, very different background. There are so many researchers in all the dental schools in the United States. They don't, they're not actually clinicians. Right, when you think of the dental schools, you're either a clinical person and you're doing like no research or minimal research, or you're a researcher and you're a PhD and you don't know what it's like to work in a private practice or how difficult that is or what it's like to treat patients. So all these people are doing this research on map kinase pathways and osteoclasts. This and you know it's got very little clinical relevance. And when I went to Bern, switzerland, danny Boozer sat me down. He, rick, you are no longer going to do research like that. You are going to do research that's going to benefit patient care in three to four years. Otherwise there's no point in doing that.

Dr. Richard Myron:

And so when I got back here, you know I was shocked because I think I'm one of the only people that I've ever met that does like, is like a real researcher, right? I'm not talking a guy that has 15, 20 papers, I'm talking people that have hundreds of publications, et cetera, but also works in a clinical practice. You know they're few and far between, and if you don't work in a clinical practice, you have no idea how to ask the right research questions, like now. I started to ask, like how do I actually spin blood to get more platelets in the cells? I'm a cell biologist. Let's figure out a way to get more platelets in the cells. I'm a cell biologist. Let's figure out a way to get more platelets in this upper puref layer so that we can go help. You know all of our colleagues when they're trying to treat their patients right, yeah, I, I haven't.

Dr. Soren Paape:

I haven't seen it personally, right, like, I see a lot of dentists that, um, will they hear about the newest research? Right, they hear, like in the fixed world, that four implants work. You can, you can load a prosthetic on four implants and then they go and they just do it. But there's not a lot of people here, at least that I know in the close proximity with us and we talk with a lot of, you know, top implant dentists and not a single one of them is doing research. Right, they're profiting off of the research that's been done and gracious enough to you, right, that you spent all this time to develop these concepts like PRF and stuff to benefit clinicians and the patients that are getting the treatment done. But you're totally right, in the United States I feel like it's far and few between of people who are actually doing the research and then applying it on a day-to-day basis.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Yeah, and I think that's a little bit of a drawback in this country, but it's not. It's not the fault, right, it's not the fault of anybody. It's that when you graduate like there's no, let's go, you know, spend thirty thousand dollars, make thirty thousand dollars a year and go to a postdoc and learn how to do research, this, and that you just can't afford to do that. The deaths are too big and you can go, and yeah, and that was going to be my response is that you can't come.

Dr. Soren Paape:

I mean, there's when I came out of dental school, right, and I was on the higher end, it was, I think I came out of school with like 360 to 400 000 in student loans, and now there's people graduating and with nyu, if you're including the living costs, that are seven million dollars, and I mean seven figures in debt, over a million dollars in debt, and it's like they just don't have the means to take a pay cut to do research and stuff they have to practice clinically, otherwise they're not going to be able to pay for the loans that they got.

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lack of financial incentives to go into the academic world and contribute to that greater body.

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

And I definitely appreciate too that in Switzerland there was this approach of you're going to be a hybridized doctor, because you are directly thinking about what are the clinical applications of what I'm doing, not being so mired into cell pathways et cetera, whereas here in America it's totally polarized. I mean, you're either clinical and that's that's your world, and you will go into PubMed just to kind of support an argument you're having with someone on Facebook, or you live in that research world and there's not really much of a world in between to actually bridge that gap. And so on one side you have people who are clinically applying things that have been researched 10-15 years ago. One side, you have people who are clinically applying things that have been researched 10, 15 years ago, and then you have people that are researching things aren't going to come about for another 10, 15 years and there's nobody that is really living between those worlds, because the financial incentives just it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.

Dr. Richard Myron:

There's not a whole lot of marriage between the two and I think that stifles innovation innovation and I think also the because of the debt as well, and all and just the way that things go. Now you know, like if I was to ask you guys a question, name five of the your top favorite implantologists that have more than 50 papers yeah, give me, give me just a moment to pull up chat GPT for a second.

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

Yeah.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Yeah, in the U S, sorry, in the U S right. So it's difficult to find right. But, like, the reason why you know a Dr Michael Picos has been so well recognized in implant dentistry is because when he was my age, right, he was actually publishing papers, as was Craig Misch and those guys, so that generation did a little bit more. I don't feel like it's possible today for a young person graduating with the debts that just says like oh, I'm really excited to play with BMP2. I'm going to go write a research paper on it and design this study and get an IRB approval and spend all this time making literally zero dollars because you're interested to find out if BMP2 works or not. Right, there's there. It's very, very challenging and you know you won't find those people. But I can go into Byrne University and I could probably count 20 people that are superstar clinicians that all have over 100 papers easily in one university, right?

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

so that's a big, big difference to be in that environment and living there like that for, yeah, we wonder why generation is coming out of that small country and not from us.

Dr. Soren Paape:

So, yeah, yeah and then you, and then you come out of it and here you come here and they're like oh yeah, well, you still don't get a license, clearly don't value anything you did elsewhere.

Dr. Soren Paape:

Well, rick, that's an amazing story. I really appreciate you going into depth about your background, your accolades, and I would love to kind of get into talking about PRP. Prf, and I think a good place to start there is. There's probably a lot of people here that just don't really understand what it is in general, so it'd be great if you could just start with the basics. You know what PRP is, why it's beneficial, what are the uses for it. How do we transition into PRF, why is that beneficial, what are the uses for it and how can you know how can clinicians use this in their everyday life, and then maybe talk a little bit about where they would get that information, like things like your course right, that they would be able to apply that.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Yeah, so when I start, even when I do education courses to doctors or patients, I try and simplify things as much as possible so it's easy to digest and understand. We have an amazing intrinsic ability to heal ourselves, right? Like you and I. I always give the same examples. We can be in the kitchen and we're sitting there cutting cucumbers and all of a sudden, you know, you cut your finger. Let's say, it's pretty amazing to think you're actually going to heal all by yourself, right? You don't need these growth factors and this and that to heal. Your body has an innate ability to heal itself. And how does that happen? Well, you have blood circulating and the main proteins are fibrinogen and thrombin and when that gets exposed to air and oxygen, a clot will form and then cells get trapped in the clot, growth factors get trapped in the clot and then over the next 21 or so days you're going to heal. But it all relies on the blood flow to these areas. And the unfortunate thing is, as we age, our blood flow is continuing to go down Right and our blood vessels are getting smaller. And I always say this in our facial aesthetics courses, like the reason why females they look they have these cute, chubby cheeks when they're young and everything's nice and elevated. And what happens as they age? You don't pump enough blood flow into the area anymore. You can't maintain that fat tissue. This starts breaking down, this will fall. Then you start having deep nasolabial folds, marionette lines, so on and so forth. And really, when blood flow is really reduced and as you age, like I said, what happens to your? You know beats per minute. Right, you have 220 beats per minute when you're an athlete and 20 years old and it goes down by 10 every single year, every decade, and by the time you're 70, you know your max heart rate is like 150, 140 and it's very bad for diabetics. Where do diabetics typically have problems? That's right, furthest place away from your heart. So you or I always give the same examples you can. We could be playing tennis and get blisters on our feet. No problem, we heal up. Just fine.

Dr. Richard Myron:

A diabetic person, they're not going to heal and that can become an ulcer. They may not even know that they have this like defect. That's this size and this thick because they don't bleed, there's no blood there, and if they get infected, you know that's amputation. And so bob marks, who's the inventor professor at um in miami, jackson Jackson Hospital, who's retired now he came up with the concept and he said you know what? I know that those patients with these diabetes and I know these ONJ cases there's no blood flow here and so all I'm going to do is I'm just going to take a few tubes of blood from the hospital. I'm just going to drop the blood and bring the blood to the area, okay, inject it around the periphery of the defect, splashing blood on the surface, and just bathe it in blood and bring the cells there because the body can't do it. And, sure enough, the patient started to heal. And then, you know, then he thought let's put this in a centrifuge. I know what cells go where light cells go to the top, heavy cells go go to the bottom, and now in a 10 ML tube you can super concentrate one CC with all of the platelets. So you have like a tenfold increase in these platelets. And when they took that and they started to inject that around the peripheries and use it in ONJ cases and grafting cases, et cetera, they realized that healing was happening a lot faster. And that's when they called the technology platelet-rich plasma, prp. Okay. So then it's used in many fields of medicine. I always say we use it a lot in dentistry. Dentists invented this technology, so we've been ahead of the curve forever since it started.

Dr. Richard Myron:

But the two areas that really made this technology boom was first being sports medicine. Right, you've got your $20 million a year quarterback for the Miami Dolphins. He gets a meniscus tear. He's told he's going to be out for six to seven months. Why are you out? Why does it take so long for people to heal their knees and their Achilles, et cetera? Answer low blood flow. It's not like your cartilage and your knees are just filled with running blood at all times, so it takes a really long time to heal. So they said well, we got, you got a blood flow problem. We have a blood flow solution. Let's take the PRP injected in this pro athletes knee and then healing started to happen. And then that went on the news you had your $20 million a year athlete back on the playing field in three or four months. Everybody's like what the hell did you do? And he's saying I did this, all natural PRP stuff. So now everybody's starting to know what PRP is.

Dr. Richard Myron:

And the second area which made it even more popular was facial aesthetics. They started to realize that, hey, back then they were doing these microneedling treatments uh, with vitamin C and hyaluronic acid. And one doctor one day said why don't I use this PRP stuff? I'll put it on the face and then microneedle it in, so it's almost like getting a tattoo. When you put tattoo and the ink under the skin, it stays there forever. So they said, instead of putting a tattoo with ink, let's do the same procedure, but let's put some PRP in there. And that worked incredibly well. And then he called the technique. Well, he called the technique vampire facial, which is one of the top five trademarks in terms of value in all of medicine, which is just unbelievable. And then celebrities wanted to do more and more of these treatments. And then there was one celebrity in particular, that went online and posted I've done microneedling with prp.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Her name was kim kardashian. She posted that, yeah, and she made it super popular. One post online. Now I always joke around. I say every female over the age of two years old now wants you know this vampire facial and so very, very popular.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Now, last question what is the difference between PRF and PRP? Because we get asked this question all the time. When you fill that tube up in a hospital, like Bob Marks did years ago, you always see what does the phlebotomist do? They take the tube of blood and they do this, right, what are they doing they? They cannot put blood in a regular tube with no anticoagulants inside because it'll clot in two or three minutes. So there's no way you could take that tube and send it to a blood lab and say, hey, go measure my vitamin d levels and blood cell counts etc. Not possible. So they have to put the anti-clotting factors in the tube and then do this. So when you take that and that's prp and you spin it down and you and you draw that up and you inject your pro athlete's knee, yes, you get all the benefits, the growth factors. We know it helps with healing.

Dr. Richard Myron:

But scientists, clinical scientists, have known right from the beginning there's a little bit of negativity here. Why? Because you're putting an anti-clotting factor inside. Right, like the cucumber example. Right, when you cut yourself, what is the single first, most important step to healing? A clot needs to form. If you don't clot, you will never heal. Okay, so that's an extremely important step to healing.

Dr. Richard Myron:

And so what was done? There was a modification of the tubes and the tube surface and what they've done is they've made these tubes more hydrophobic, which is water repelling. So, just like a dental implant surface, that's a you guys have heard Shirley of SLA active and noble active right Hydrophilic surfaces. The more water loving it is, the more blood gets drawn to the surface, the faster it's going to clot, degranulate the platelets and faster oscinegration. Okay, the opposite is true. If you don't want something to clot, you make the two balls very hydrophobic.

Dr. Richard Myron:

No chemicals. Now you can put PureF in that tube and it'll stay liquid for up to four hours. So now we'll do the same spin cycles like we do in PRP, if we want to. Instead of using the chemicals, we're using a hydrophobic tube surface. I can do everything in under four hours easily. I can drop the platelet rich layer and now I inject it in my pro athlete's knee and, just like prp, I get all the benefits. That sells the growth factors, but I also get a clot to form, and clotting is the single first, most important step to healing. So there have been thousands of papers that have compared PRP to PRF and every study so far has shown that.

Dr. Richard Myron:

PRF is better than.

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

PRP. So my follow-up to that then are there still indications for PRP over PRF in any of these types of modalities, or is it just altogether superior? I?

Dr. Richard Myron:

see, okay, yeah, altogether superior. Yeah, every field In fact, you'll still see a lot of people that will use PRP, and two more common places is facial aesthetics and sports medicine. So you'll still see, you know, orthopedic surgeons using PRP. The reason why is the PRF. It's hard to get into these markets because the companies that have been established and around for a very long time selling PRP. They don't want to switch to PRF, and the reason why is most PRP kits are like a hundred and 120 bucks. The PRF tubes are a dollar each, and so they're still making a huge amount of money selling these PRP kits to their doctors, and so they never get really introduced to PRF.

Dr. Soren Paape:

Wow, can you talk a little bit about because in I'd love. First this is more of like a personal thing I'm curious on facial applications for dentists for facial cosmetics with PRF, and then I'm also, and then I'd love for you to go into where dentists can use PRF in their surgical applications clinically.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Okay, I'll answer the dental question first and then we'll talk about how we got into facial aesthetics. So in dentistry we know today that PRF is better for soft tissue than for bone. Okay, it helps with soft tissue but of course it'll still help with bone and it greatly enhances the quality of handling because when you make sticky bone you know your particles are all kind of together. It just makes your life a lot easier. So common places, you know extraction sites, just making sticky bone for your extraction site and even using it for soft tissue over top of it. We use it all the time for soft tissue around dental implants, any GBR procedures.

Dr. Richard Myron:

We do sinus grafting and then of course recession coverage.

Dr. Richard Myron:

You can use it as well under certain indications.

Dr. Richard Myron:

So really there's a lot of applications for it and I wrote an entire 400 page textbook understanding, understanding platelet rich fibrin, which goes over all the data and you know really the highest evidence, meta-analysis of these systematic reviews of randomized clinical studies.

Dr. Richard Myron:

So there's been, you know, hundreds, thousands of papers that have been published on this and so really there's a lot of applications. But when people start I just say extractions, third molars, round implants, soft tissues you know those are common places to start and you know, as you get more advanced in your surgery, like Dr Picos, who I teach quite closely with you know he always says in a sinus grafting course like I have not done a sinus grafting case without PRF in like over a decade, he's just like, it just makes your life so much, much easier. It helps with the vascularization in this relatively low blood flow area because when you go to a sinus on an x-ray it's literally just a big black hole with no blood flow and that's why it takes so long. We gotta wait six to eight months. We don't have blood flow there.

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

So you know, by adding in these blood flow, and that's specific to like making the sticky bone itself, or is that like a membrane application, or what is that specific for sinus lifts?

Dr. Richard Myron:

okay, yeah, it's really the sticky bone. Um, you can't use it as a barrier membrane, as you guys know, uh, because it doesn't last long enough until the extended puref was created. Um, we can talk about that a little bit later, but you know, that's how. That's how it's being utilized primarily in dentistry the facial application. You know I can share the story if we have the time. How I got into it it's kind of a crazy story, but when I was working. So, going back to my story, right 2016, I moved here.

Dr. Richard Myron:

2018, I finally get the ability to work as a dentist right. So in 2018, I start as an associate and all I'm going to do is these perio and implant cases out of a pretty busy practice. The guy's name's Michael Kanner. Dr Kanner is located in Florida and he's like the dentist of a dentist, of a dentist and his 60s now and he's got this nice big practice with 16 ops, three associates, and I'm going to get fed basically all the perio cases one or two days a week that I work there. I start doing that over a small amount of time and at the same time, when I'm teaching puref to dentists, about 20 percent of the people are asking myself and my brother actually created PRFEDU, so he and I work very closely together, obviously, and he's getting asked all the time do you teach PRF and facial aesthetics? And I'm like dude, no, like, I'm a hardcore, hardcore biologist.

Dr. Richard Myron:

And I love implants like get away from me, right? So yeah, that's how it started. But we just kept getting asked over and over and over again. And then one day I had this really nice lady fly from Greece all the way to Miami to take a one-day PRF course as a plastic surgeon. And what was she doing in Athens? She was doing a hair transplant and a fellowship there, and she's sitting in the front row and I'm like what the hell are you doing here? Like, are you lost? What's going on? And she's like no, no, dr Myron, I've been teaching PRP courses for 14 years to plastic surgeons. We're doing research right now and trying to regrow hair with this stuff.

Dr. Richard Myron:

And I read your paper, injectable Platelet-Rich Fibrin, which was published in 2016. That was the first time that we started realizing we could use a liquid version, and I published the first paper with Dr Joseph Shakrun in 2016 called Injectable Platelet-Rich Fiber and Opportunities in Regenerative Dentistry. So she saw the paper. She's like I don't care about all this dental stuff you guys are talking about, but when you explain it in the paper not using the anti-clotting factors and the anticoagulants et cetera that makes so much sense to me. So I'm here and we had done some data of like where do the cells go, etc. And what concentrations. She's like I was wondering if, after the course, you can sit down with me. I want you to help me develop protocols for injecting in the face, where to inject and how. I was like I can tell you the protocols. I have no idea how to inject. She's like I told her she's like all right if I tell you I need six milliliters of platelet concentrates with one million platelets per cc. Can you help me figure that out? I was like absolutely, I have all the data. We sat through it. We said okay, kathy, if you spin exactly at this protocol and grab exactly this layer from these three tubes, you'll grab two cc's each. You'll get exactly what you need.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Okay, she went back to Greece. Now she get exactly what you need. Okay, she went back to greece. Now she's ordering 600 puref tubes a month. Yeah, a month. Okay. So we're like what the hell is this person doing? Right?

Dr. Richard Myron:

So one day my brother says to me he's like let's just call dr davies. We're like she's like six months into this, she's ordered something like 3 000 tubes. I'm this must be working extremely well, because she wouldn't be ordering this much. So, yeah, she says it's unbelievable. I think it's working probably three times better than PRP is what our early research is showing. Um, yeah, we love it.

Dr. Richard Myron:

I'm doing all my Instagram. People is what she calls them all the time, the Instagrammers, the people that want to look better at posting these stupid photos online. But she's like there's tons of them there, they love this stuff. And I was like, oh, okay, cool. I was like you know, dr Davies, I'm getting asked to do a lot of these PRF courses in facial aesthetics. Would you be interested in doing a two day program with me where I'll teach the science of platelet concentrates, you teach how to do the injections, then we'll do a hands-on? I think it would be quite popular, but most of our audience is going to be dennis. Is that okay with you? She's like absolutely, dr marion, I'd love to be affiliated with your research group. I have all the respect in the world for you. I'd love to do it. So I said, okay, great, my brother sends out an email to everybody that I had trained and, um, we had, we capped at 32 people. We sold out the course in four hours.

Dr. Tyler Tolbert:

One email blast all right, taylor swift. So I was like okay so we do the course.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Oh, yes, we do the course and um it, it went extremely well and it was a lot of fun. People really like doing the microneedling and practicing on each other, etc. It's all safe, it's all natural. Think of how safe this is. You can't be allergic to your own blood, you can't have a foreign body reaction, you can't cause a vascular occlusion, you can't do any damage, really, and so it was a huge success. But then the difference was is that these dentists that had taken this course here versus the other, my other courses they were calling my brother and saying you know, I started doing these vampire facial type treatments in my office and a couple of these puref injections were exactly what was recommended. You charge $700 to do the treatment microneedling with PRF which, by the way, can be delegated entirely to a dental assistant, so they can legally do that. You don't even have to do anything, and it's $700. When we add the PRF injections, we charge $1,100. But you tell Dr Myron, these cases don't even cost us $50. We don't even have to do most of the procedure. My dental assistant does all the blood draw. My dental assistant does all the spinning. My dental assistant does all the microneedling. I go in for two minutes, inject a few places. I made $1,100. And these people just like Botox. They're coming back every four to six months to do another treatment and they're spending like $3,000 a year doing these treatments every year. It's like doing dental hygiene, but this is skin hygiene and it's extremely profitable. And you tell Dr Marin that since I took that course I made an extra $200,000, $300,000 this year doing this. It's been one of the biggest moneymakers for my practice. So I'm like, holy shit, nobody ever says hey, I started doing PRF in dentistry and I all of a sudden am making an extra $200,000.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Dr Kanner, the owner, he's had a lot of people do Botox in his office and fillers come and go over the years as associates, so he knows that people want to do it. But then when that one doctor left we didn't have another doctor doing botox. So one day he said, dr marion, do you mind if I come to the facial course? I want to go meet dr davies. And we started running this course every every four months. Okay, because it was it's our most popular course and it grew every single time we did it. The next time there was 40 people, the next time there was 50 people.

Dr. Richard Myron:

And what was happening? We do no marketing. What was happening was a doctor like yourself took the course. You're making an extra $200,000. Now You're telling your buddy hey, you got to go take Dr Marin's facial aesthetics course because you can add a lot of extra income by offering these types of services. So the course now, like last November, we had 300 people attend this course and we have one coming up in April. We already have over 200 people. I expect there'll be 250 people there. Hundred people attend this course and we have one coming up in April. We already have over 200 people. I expect there'll be 250 people there. And so it's grown, you know, exponentially.

Dr. Richard Myron:

Because of the fact that you know people are making a lot of extra money and it's fun, right, when you go to your staff, like a lot of people just do these services on a Friday because it's a lot of fun. And so, yeah, it was. And I did the same thing, even perio. I said, okay, dr Cantor, dr Cantor, after the course that you need to start doing these. I said, no problem, we started doing them Fridays in the office and I just kept getting busier and busier doing these treatments because, let's face it, more people want to do facial aesthetics. The patients versus. You know a connective tissue graft right and so you know it grew quite naturally, organically, in the practice and to this day, like I said, it's our most popular.

Dr. Soren Paape:

Yeah, it's amazing, it's. I'm looking it up right now, april 24th, you know you might see me there. To be honest, sounds fantastic.