Who is Charles Runels?

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Charles Runels: Hello, I'm Charles Runels, and I've recently been asked quite a few times, "Where did these ideas for the O-Shot and the Vampire Facelift," I did design those procedures, "Where did they come from, and who are you?" I thought it might be helpful to know why initially I actually hid myself. I tried to stay secretive about where the idea originated, where they came from, and why I tried to stay hidden for at least two years.

A little bit about how I transitioned from being an internist slash emergency room doctor to becoming the guy who's lecturing around the world about women's sexuality. It wasn't an intentional thing that I set out to do. What happened was, after 12 years in the emergency room I started taking care of women and doing hormone replacement before it was cool. 18 years ago in the year 2000 I was doing research with growth hormone, before Suzanne Somers wrote those books. Because of that, and because I was ahead of the curve somewhat as far as people knowing about these ideas about caring for women the way it's commonly done now, back then the way to take care of a menopausal woman was to give her Premarin, and no one was really prescribing testosterone. If they did it was an old Premarin missed with testosterone. It was just a completely different level. Nobody was measuring hormone levels to speak of in normal post-menopausal women. It just wasn't so good.

I became involved in the research out how to make that better, as an internist, but I had a background in research. I did three years as a chemist before I did medical school. But mostly I just had an intense desire to make women well. What broke my heart over and over and over again, with literally thousands of women, is they would come to my office and sob, and they would tell me, "I love my husband," and I heard this story literally thousands of times. "I love my husband, so I don't want to tell him that sex is not so good. Or that I don't really desire him. And I don't know why I don't desire him, because I love him, and sex used to be wonderful, but I'm afraid I'll hurt his feelings." They're sobbing, and they don't know what to do.

Then I would do the things I knew what to do 18 years ago, doing these things with testosterone and thyroid, things that are commonly done now. Then often times the man would then not be able to keep up with the women, because her sexuality is better and her libido goes up, she loss weight, and she feels wonderful and sexy, and now her libido is outrunning his. So I started focusing on, how can I help this man catch up with the woman. 18 years ago, 2000, mostly it was just body builders that were using hormone replacement. You go back a little bit before that, we were still telling men that the most common reason for impotence was psychological. It's hard to believe that, but in the 1980s when I was in medical school we thought, or it was taught, that 85% of men who had erectile dysfunction, it was psychological. That was actually taught to urologists, that they should become counselors. Then of course once we had all these medicines that help men, we knew it wasn't al psychological. It's the reverse, 85% of it was neurovascular.

I'm doing all this, and I'm taking care of women, and again, so how'd he go from there to coming up with a vagina injection, like the O-Shot? That's the question people, "Who is this guy?" What happened was, in a lot of women, when they would try to lose weight, they would want to gain their weight back when they saw the fat go out of their cheeks, and when the adipocytes left and the wrinkles would appear, and they would feel older even though they were leaner. To counteract that I learned to do fillers, like Juvederm, in the face to bring their face back so they wanted to keep losing weight. I became, I think, good at it. I won't say very good but some people say very good at it. I know this, I trained with the best in the world. So 10 years ago I started doing that.

Now I'm plugged into the aesthetic market, but I'm still doing it mostly to encourage people to lose weight, and then I discover how important it is to women, and how it's changing their whole life when they feel better about their facial appearance. It makes them want to work harder on their health than their fitness. Now I've got these three little satellite things going on. I was a ex-research chemist who was interested in technology, helped design some things that are still used by our soldiers in defense work, and then I was involved with wound care, and healing and tissue growth, that's part of the wound care in the hospital when I was a ER guy. Now I'm tuned into sexuality, not because I set out to do that, but because I was trying to take care of women who were just telling me what was wrong with them, and happened to be involved in some research about how to do that. So I'm taking care of the women's sexuality with hormones, I understand wound care, and I'm doing cosmetic medicine.

Here's what bothered me. This was to me, this still goes on and it really bothers me. What if, when you go down the street, all the signs for the restaurants just said "beef," but you couldn't tell if you were at a hamburger joint or a gourmet restaurant? Sometimes you might want one or the other, but at least you should know which one you're getting when you walk through the door. Instead one says McDonald's, I love McDonald's, maybe I want McDonald's one day but maybe I want a gourmet filet the next. That's exactly what was going on with cosmetic medicine, and still goes on. Because you see not the procedure advertised, but the material. You see Juvederm advertised. Well Juvederm, you can take a syringe of Juvederm and make a woman look natural, and younger, and she can see her mother or her husband the next day, and they think, "Did you get some rest, you look great today," and not even know something was done. Or you can take that same syringe of Juvederm and make her look like she's got sausage for lips, or like she's got Donald Duck for lips. If you see a doctor advertising Juvederm you don't know which you're going to get, because you're just like seeing beef without knowing if you're going to get a gourmet preparation or a fast-food hamburger.

I wanted to change that, but I didn't really know how to change it, and I still don't really know how to change it in the Juvederm world, but someone brought to me, and this is where the procedures happen, this is where all the starts collided. Back in 2010 someone brought to me a centrifuge that had been used by the orthopedic surgeons to prepare platelet-rich plasma for the knees, and by the dentists in wound healing. The person bringing the centrifuge says, "This has been FDA approved for preparing platelet rich plasma, and if you use it ..." Of course it's blood, the blood's not FDA approved. The FDA doesn't approve your hair, your urine, your saliva, or your blood, but they have to approve the device that makes the plasma to go back into your body. He says, "This has been FDA approved to prepare plasma to go back into the body, and it's been shown to cause new tissue growth, new blood flow, new volume, and there's never been a granuloma or a serious infection or a serious side effect from a platelet rich plasma. You should try it in the face."

I thought, this is wonderful, because if this works in the face ... Instantly, because I was tuned into the sexual problems, I thought if this works in the face and does all those things, then this should help the genitalia. Honestly initially I was thinking the male genitalia, but I was following the work that had been done by gynecologists when it comes to injecting around the urethra for sexual function and for urinary incontinence. So I'd been following that very carefully because I was involved with caring for women, but I thought, let me use it in the face first and see how it works, read the literature, learn how the thing works, and then I will use it in the genitalia. I started reading the literature, everything I could find about platelet-rich plasma. At that time there were 5,000 or so papers out, now there's over 9,000 research papers, and I read thousands of them. I can't tell you I read all of them, but I read a lot of them.

Then what I started seeing is, it really worked in the face, but I needed a name to call it, and I wanted it not to be a generic PRP, because I didn't want to be advertising beef and you don't know what you're getting, or advertising Juvederm and you don't know how it's going to be used. I said let me give it a trial of having a name that means using this platelet rich plasma in a very expert way, and combining it with the Juvederm to create this gorgeous shape. If I can make that work in the aesthetic space, maybe I can make it work in the sexual medicine space and protect patients from having something done that would be, obviously metaphorically, the equivalent of a duck lip done in the genitalia. Could be devastating psychologically and physiologically, and I didn't want stupid things being done to people's genitalia, so I needed a way to protect it. You can't protect the name platelet rich plasma, that's the name of a body fluid, but I thought if I could organize a group of doctors around the procedure, then I could protect it if I owned the name of that procedure. Let me give it a try in the face first.

The press had used the word "vampire" already in association with PRP, but they were calling it vampire therapy, and I didn't think ... I particularly don't want to have therapy, or they were calling it vampire filler, and I didn't want to be filled up, but what I could see it was actually doing was causing a facelift. Lifting the tissue away from the skeleton, a way from the skull, and truly lifting it away back into a younger shape. That's what I did with the material, and I said let's call it the vampire facelift. I trademarked it, and I started recruiting physicians who would agree to follow the specific method that I developed, and to see if I could protect that method, and it just went crazy. It went berserk. The people loved the name, it was all over the press.

I spent the next two years ... I tried to hide myself, because I didn't want it to be about Charles, I wanted it to be like, who knows. You have to do research to figure out who owns McDonald's, you just see the golden arches. I do not have a franchise, but the idea was, there's a way that that is done, as in the way that hamburgers are made, and there's a way to do this face, and I wanted only people who understood that way to be able to use my name. I didn't want it to be about Charles, I wanted it to be about the patient and whoever was doing the thing.

To this day people get it confused. The New York Times interviewed me, and I love the New York Times, but they interviewed me and the reporter said, "Dr. Runels liked the name Vampire Facelift so much he trademarked it." I did like it, because I thought of it, and when I Googled it in 2010 and first used it in early 2010 ... Matter of fact, the first YouTube video I put out was on April 20, 2010, and when I put that out you could Google "Vampire Facelift" in quotation marks and you would get zero hits. I don't know many things you can Google and nothing comes up, but that phrase, there was nobody else on the planet using it. I thought great, this is a name that I can circle around, and if we can stamp it out and protect it, this is what's important to vaginas and penises, I said if I can stamp it out and protect the way this method is done, then I can make sure that nothing stupid gets done on a routine basis to women's vaginas. I guess technically it is true that I liked it and so I used it, but I liked it because I thought of it.

As I worked with the faces, about four months into that I thought, let's do this thing with penises, and then it evolved. Because basically a clitoris is embryologically like a small penis, so the first penis I injected was my own. At this point I'm still trying to hide the identity of me and promote the physicians that are agreeing to help me on this mission, the mission being, let's do something about these women who are suffering. At that point we had not one drug approved for women. Not one FDA approved drug.

We have over 20 FDA approve drugs and devices for men, we have one FDA approved drug for women, and it's a psych drug. I'm not saying it's crap or that it should not be used, but I'm saying ... That's what we used to tell men, that it was all psychological, and the only drug we have now, it's like saying we have one drug to help you and it's a psych drug, so basically it's all in your head. But if you can have problems with circulation in the penis, and a clitoris is like a tiny penis, it's usually five inches long, you're just seeing the tip of it when you look at it in the body, then you can have the same neurological, the same neurovascular problems, both nerves and blood flow, could go on with the clitoris. The same autoimmune process that causes lichen sclerosis of the foreskin of a man can cause it in a woman. Autoimmune processes are involved with Peyronie's disease. All those things are analogous.

Anyway, back to the story, I started circling around and teaching and protecting the group for the face, and then forming the group for the penis, and then forming the group for women. When I started teaching people and they were saying, "Charles, this thing works," I thought wow, it really does work, it's not just me making this up. So we started doing research, and the research was positive. So far every study we've done, and we're up to six studies, two in the works, every one of them has been positive, both with men with Peyronie's disease, men with growth, rat studies showing new nerve growth when you inject the penis. Of course men don't volunteer to have it chopped off, but if you inject the penis of a mouse and then you chop it off, the nerve grows back as it would if someone had prostate surgery and had nerve damage. We are seeing that happen.

Eventually though, this is what happened. Charles who was hiding eventually had to come out, because anything that's valuable enough to get mentioned just last week in Allure magazine, Fox News, Cosmo, the Daily Sun, and the Daily Mail and the Sun, all of those in the past week, obviously that's a lot of advertising, a lot of attention, and now some people want to pretend like they're a part of our group when they're not. Because of that, and only because of that, I've had to come out of the shadows and say, "Yeah, this is a thing, and don't try to use it if you're not part of our group, and if you do, this is the guy that's going to have attorneys shut you down."

Because I don't like it when I have women, and this happens at least every other week, when I get an email from a woman who says, "I had this horrible procedure where it hurt like crazy and I bled and it didn't do anything for me," and I say, "Who did your procedure," and they send me the name of someone who's not in our group, doesn't even know what they're doing, never been trained by one of our teachers. We've got 50 or so teachers, a little more than 50 teachers, in 40-something countries and still growing, and so it's still not about Charles. It's about taking care of patients, it's about doing the research, and we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on research, hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorneys taking up for people who had things done to them by people not in our group. We've spent hundreds on educational materials we give for free to our patients. We all do work for free for patients. Yeah, it's not covered by insurance and some of them pay us money, but a lot of us do work for free as well.

The bottom line is, it's still not about Charles, but Charles wanted to be a doctor when he was in the first grade. He wanted to do one little thing that might help medicine, and what's happening is, Charles, through the doctors who have trusted this process, and the doctors who are also passionate about taking care of women and men ... Because they know sex is not just about pleasure, it's about putting relationships back together and keeping relationships together, when a family breaks there's a ripple effect that causes anguish throughout the whole neighborhood. It's not just the family, it's the people at their work, at their church, at the school. The kids have to travel back and forth. There's a social fiber that's built around the family. Ray Bradbury said that the family, it's the happiness machine. That's what it is. Your family might be your dog, that's wonderful. Your family might be your wife and your 10 kids. But whatever, your family is your happiness machine, and bad sex breaks that happiness machine down.

Here's the thing. I'm a internist from Alabama. I'm not a plastic surgeon, gynecologist, urologist, I'm nothing fancy. But I think we have a mission that is world-changing, and I will be ferocious to anyone who tries to hurt that mission, and hurt anyone in our group, or hurt anybody who's attracted to our providers because of our mission, and because of our message and our reputation and our research. If someone tries to be involved who isn't legitimate, I will punish them as severely as I can no matter how much it costs. If someone wants to join our group, I will take our funds, and we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, I will take our funds and I will help finance the research, I will have people be treated for free. Right now we have research going where people can be treated for free. I will protect, I will support, I will educate, I have literally flown around the world, I will do whatever it takes.

It really doesn't need to be about Charles, but because people have asked, I'm telling you who I am, where I am. We have this great organization called the Cellular Medicine Association, and what really makes our mission work, which is change the fabric of the world by helping sexual health on a very basic cellular way. Then because of that sexual health the family's made stronger. When we can do that, we have a reason for being here. We have a reason for using our brain. That's what our doctors do, that's what our researchers do, and that's what I hope that you will help us do. I'm very grateful for your attention.

Charles Runels, MD

1-888-920-5311
Cellular Medicine Association

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