Alternative Healing Through NAD Therapy with Tom Ingoglia

Going on an alternative route that sustains the healing process even if it goes up and down is always a treatment worth taking. Financial trader Tom Ingoglia contracted Lyme disease and then had an adverse reaction to antibiotics. He had massive chronic pain across his body that came and went. This gave him the attitude of get healthy or die trying. He was in pain for 8 years until he found out about NAD therapy that corrects DNA breaks and activates key proteins for longevity and anti-aging. However, this was a treatment that no else knew of. But after nine days, Tom was symptom-free. Learn more of this energy-carrying molecule called Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide and how it is essential for all life.

NAD IV therapy is an emerging vitamin therapy that is all natural, holistic and has shown outstanding results with people suffering from addiction, age-related diseases and chronic fatigue. NAD IV therapy is not yet approved by the FDA and further research needs to be done. Tom Ingoglia reached out to me saying NAD therapy saved his life and now he is on a mission to spread the good word about NAD IV therapy and help as many people possible suffering with addiction, chronic fatigue, chronic pain and much more. This has not yet been approved by the FDA so anyone looking into this type of treatment must do their research first. Please welcome, Tom Ingoglia.

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Alternative Healing Through NAD Therapy with Tom Ingoglia

Tom, from what I’m reading and hearing, you have a pretty amazing life story that I can’t wait to get into. Just a little information about yourself, who are you Tom and what do you do?

I was a finance guy. I was a financial trader who got very sick and lost my ability to really function.

How long ago was this?

This was back in 2007, 2008 and I was sick for about eight years. I found a therapy called NAD intravenous therapy and it absolutely rocked my world. I’d gone down this journey of trying to figure out what was wrong with me. It was just a very lonely journey. When finding NAD therapy, it also became a little bit lonely too because I found this amazing therapy that no one knew anything about. I never expected to fully recover from my health problems. I’ve totally given up and it fully reversed everything.

I was in the same boat probably a different story, a different situation but I was in a rough for about four years, and I never thought I was going to live a healthy life again. It’s always a breath of fresh air talking to somebody that’s come out the other side. Tom, what is NAD? For those who have not had a biochem background at all.

I don’t have a biochem background either so this will be really simple. NAD is Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide. That’s why we call it NAD. It’s an energy carrying molecule. It’s a coenzyme that’s ubiquitous in all living things. It’s essential for all life and it’s used in so many different things in the body. The Krebs cycle for example. It’s used in hundreds of redox reactions. It’s used with this enzyme called PARP which is a Poly ADP-Ribose Polymerase. That’s one of the main mechanisms by, which cells correct their DNA damage.

It’s a cell repairing facilitator, right?

In this regard, it’s correcting actual DNA breaks. A typical cell might have 50,000 DNA breaks per day. NAD is essential part of that DNA correction process. That’s one of the main priorities of NAD. NAD activates these key proteins involved with longevity and anti-ageing called sirtuins that turn off various parts of DNA and a host of other things.

It’s a strong antioxidant as well then?

It’s a very strong antioxidant. NAD is a neurotransmitter. There’s very little information on that. NAD is a precursor to other neurotransmitters in the brain. For every molecule of alcohol, you need two molecules of NAD to get rid of the molecule of alcohol. NAD is essential in these internal clocks in our body that regulate circadian rhythms in sleep. Finally, it helps reduce something called glutamate excitotoxicity quite often. Cells get too much glutamate and it could devastate the cell itself. It’s responsible in the metabolic pathway that digests and metabolizes the excess glutamate. The long story short, NAD levels decline with age across species and those declines are associated with ageing. We’re finding out more and more that this is a causal link. This is the sole reason why I’m involved because I feel like something happened to me on the ageing scale.

What exactly happened to you?

I was working in finance. I have a farm in Costa Rica. I went down and I came back and I just wasn’t the same. I thought maybe I got an infection or a bug or something. I went to the doctor, asked him for some antibiotics. I went downhill from there. Looking back, I did test positive for Lyme and I’m pretty sure that I had adverse reactions to the antibiotics that I took. There’s known adverse reactions that occur with fluoroquinolone antibiotics like Cipro, Levaquin. There are a lot of adverse reactions with Flagyl too. I was taking that as well and it’s very, very hard cases. It’s very hard to find a doctor that really knows what they’re doing. NAD is actually a little bit hit and miss with handling a lot of these cases of adverse reactions. I was on opiates for a number of years. I’m not really an addict. I’m not really someone who likes to partake in those kinds of things.

Did you have just pain all over your body?

Yeah. I had massive chronic pain.

You had massive chronic pain all over your body that just showed up out of nowhere?

It would come and it would go. It would come across my whole body and it would go. There was little peculiarities about it. I would get muscle pains in my quadriceps. I would get tendon and ligament pain in my feet and my hands. I would get pain after exercise. I would get headaches after staring at a computer screen for just a short period of time. I had trouble standing for more than 30 minutes at a time. The pain immobilized me. I must have spent maybe a couple of years in bed. That’s just the pain part. There’s the fatigue, there’s the mental fatigue, mental clarity.

You’re running around at this point seeing any doctor you can that can help, like the medical standard traditional route. What are they telling you? You have Lyme disease?

I went to the Mayo Clinic. They’re kind, they’re intelligent, they’re educated and they asked me, “What do you think you have?” I said, “I think I had an adverse reaction to antibiotics. I think I contracted Lyme.” This was at a time when the warnings on fluoroquinolones weren’t there. They said, “Honestly, what you read on the internet, it’s not something you look at them.” There are thousands of us and eventually the warnings came out.

You’re talking about the side effect of the antibiotics?

Yeah. There’s a range of things and it’s heartbreaking to hear about some of these people. They get central nervous system damage, anxiety, insomnia. I had a mental breakdown because the stress was so intense. They call it adjustment disorder. I asked them, “What is adjustment disorder?” “You’re in a mental breakdown.” It was up until I lost a couple of friends who were addicts. Then a couple of weeks later, I lost half my family in a car crash. It was an instantaneous head-on collision that rocked my world and brought me to a new low. I think I was always very much going to beat this thing. At that point, there was a massive shift in terms of really focusing on and really getting to the root cause of what this could be and just taking my health into my own hands. I was already seeing integrative doctors and naturopath and chiropractors. I was already going the alternative route. I knew at that point that that was the way to go for chronic conditions.

You’re pretty much a couple of years that you’ve been feeling like shit?

I think it’s been since 2013.

I’m just trying to get a timeline here because you’re at one of the lowest points of your life. Did you just get a phone call one day and half of your family just died in a car crash?

It was unbelievable to explain. I called my brother about our friend that just killed himself and he told me that the car crash happened.

Essentially, I wanted to comfort him about our friend. He killed himself in a very public way. He was suffering from psychosis, from a history of using methamphetamines. There was nothing we could do. We were young to help him. Even though I hadn’t seen him, it’s had a huge impact on what I’ve wanted to do with my life. I think when you go through so many of these things, you really question what is life all about and if there’s anything that you can do. For me, there was some reason for wanting to move on and I was going to find out what that was. I think that’s NAD, honestly. I did the protocol. It could be six, eight, ten, fifteen days of intravenous drip not expecting to come off of opiates, which I was addicted to.

How did you find NAD? What made you say, “I’m going to give this a shot?” Who presented it to you? I’ve never heard of the therapy and I’m just curious on who brought it up to you and how did you say, “Let’s give it a shot?”

I spent quite a bit of time online doing research. I spent time with other people that were sick asking them questions and digging as deep as I could. I hate to say that there are a lot of resources and people that might not have a medical background, but when there’s hundreds and thousands of them, you could glean a lot from that. Just doing the research, I came to the conclusion that this was a mitochondrial or cellular problem at its core. NAD works on the mitochondria and that it was something that I was willing to give a shot. It was, “Get healthy or die trying.” I called them up and I said, “I want to do NAD.”

Who did you call?

I called someone in San Diego that had an NAD practice that they no longer have it. I asked him and I said, “I want to come in and do NAD experimentally for a mitochondrial dysfunction.” They said, “This is totally experimental.”

There’s no research behind it yet.

The FDA took it off of the grass, generally recognized as a safe food. It’s not approved by the FDA. I’m not a doctor and please seek medical advised. It’s not approved for anything and your results vary. I came in to do it. They said, “We’re going to want you to come off opiates while you do it.” I said, “I’m not an addict.” “It’s not a problem then.” I didn’t come in for that.

You weren’t expecting to come off the opiates yet?

No. I wasn’t an addict. I was someone who is in physical pain. I didn’t understand substance abuse. We now know that opiates create pain. No one was talking about this before. This was not a conversation that I had with doctors.

Obviously, you’re in an excruciating amount of pain, you’ll do anything to get rid of the pain. Do you think you were abusing the opiates just to feel pain-free?

I didn’t take it recreationally or to numb myself. I took it because I was in physical pain and when I didn’t have pain, I didn’t take it. There’s something called opioid-induced hyperalgesia. It’s fibromyalgia from taking opiates long enough. I did everything. I went to the chiropractor. Fibromyalgia is linked to cervical spine for example. It’s linked to so many things. I went and checked off the list. I was going down the list. I really thought that there was something going on in the cellular level. I did it. “We don’t really know when you’re going to feel it. Sometimes it’s day five. It really depends but most of our people feel it around day five.”

What’s the regimen like? Is it one IV bag a day?

It’s one 500 ml bag, one 1000ml bag per day. It’s tedious. You’re in a comfy chair, you’ve got internet. You might be watching movie. You’re sitting there and you’re going through the motions. It’s like taking a transatlantic flight first class but it’s totally worth it. I was crying around day six, day seven.

Crying like in so much pain?

I didn’t think it would work. It’s not working and I was a mess. Then my friend comes home. He said, “Let’s go in the ocean.” We went out in the ocean and I was out there in the water and just sitting out there floating. All of a sudden, it totally hit me.

What hit you? What did you feel at that moment when it hit you?

It can hit pretty fast. It was just a feeling of peace. At that point, it was like a change in consciousness. It was something you’d never forget because I felt like time slowed down or something. It’s not something you can articulate. It’s something you just have to experience. The next day, I woke up and I was feeling pain again. At that point, I was pissed off, “I guess this didn’t work.” The next day after that, I was symptom free. On day nine they said, “We don’t know what’s going on with you.” I said, “No. This is working because if I have a fibromyalgia hangover, it last weeks but I’ve recovered in a day. Something’s going on. This is working. We’ve got to keep doing this.” I ended up doing a couple extra days. What had happened was I started getting massive energy. I started sleeping better. My pain was cut by 50% at that point, which was massive, going from an eight to a four or to a five. I felt like I can walk around. I felt like I could stand more. Here’s a person who’s at the supermarket and I need to use the shopping cart as a stroller just so I’m not putting pressure on my feet. I also suffered from brain fog and my clarity started to come back.

That was one of my worst symptoms, the brain fog. It’s a very scary symptom.

My clarity came back. The coolest thing about NAD so often is we get people who can think longer. You don’t get as tired out when you’re thinking.

Your attention span increases and you’re clear.

When you have mental fatigue, everything is an exam. There’s mental exhaustion. I’ve gone from not being able to keep up with people to being able to just keep on going. That was the coolest dividend. It’s like, “Tom, the IV takes eight hours.” You’re going to be so productive that you’re going to make up for that lost time within a month.

Were you able to work at this point? Did you have to quit your job?

Being sick is traumatic. I’m an investor. My finances were doing well. I spent a whole another year recuperating trying to figure out what’s the next thing that I was going to do. The one thing that they said was, “Why don’t you come in for a booster?” I come in for boosters every one or two months.

What’s a booster?

They said, “You want to come in for boosters?” This was after I was done.

Is this the clinic you’ve been going to that administered you the NAD at first? Is this the original treatment?

This wasn’t the original treatment center. This was another center. I said, “I thought this was a one and done thing.” They’re like, “It is. When you’re going this many days, it tends to be one and done. Your mileage is going to vary, but what we see in a lot of people is that you level up when you take a month off and you come in for boosters.” I’m like, “I feel awesome and what you’re saying is that if I come in and get a booster I’m going to get to the next level.” They’re like, “Usually that’s what happens. If you’ve got more to go, do it.” I said, “I’ll come in and get boosters until I can no longer level up.” There were a couple of years I was coming in one to two months getting boosters. I felt like I was leveling up each time but we get a lot of people that don’t come back.

That’s almost a good thing because they’re feeling better, right?

Yeah. They’re fine. They feel like they’ve maxed out. They feel like they’ve got their money’s worth. We get some people that come in, but generally speaking when you ask someone, “How do you feel after a year?” most of the time they’ll say, “It’s been amazing. I feel better a month after than when I left the treatment. After two months or three months, I felt even better.”

Tom, is this an addiction-based treatment or can somebody that has fibromyalgia go and get treatment or is very sick? How does it work?

We see the best results with alcoholism and with opiate addiction. It’s really amazing results.

Not only does it get you pain-free, does it almost rid you of the craving?

Yes. What we see is a lot of people report a minimization of craving. My mother is a social drinker. She came in to get NAD for anti-aging reasons. She just said, “I feel great. I don’t understand it but I don’t drink anymore.” I’m like, “Explain.” She’s like, I don’t need it anymore. I don’t want it. I don’t want that in my life.” What we see is that people will come in with chronic conditions whether they’re on the anxiety spectrum or it’s depression or its chronic pain and that you see some results.

If they call your clinic and they say, “I have fibromyalgia or I have intense headaches or I have severe anxiety and depression,” you take those people as well?

Yeah, we do. It varies. If someone has a spinal injury, you have to talk to them about the root cause. You’d still want to deal with the root cause. I think very much for me as an example, the root cause was at the intracellular level.

How long did it take you from your first NAD treatment and you look in the mirror like, “I’m pain-free.” How long did that take? Everything is a healing process and it very rarely happens overnight.

I was a late bloomer. For me, we didn’t think it was going to work. Then it worked at the end and then it took me a whole another year to announce. I did a little Facebook post. It’s like, “I’ve totally recovered.”

That’s what I like about that. You hear a lot of people saying, “Take this pill and overnight it’s going to work.” A lot of people want that quick fix. The healing process is a process that goes up and down, up and down. Anytime I hear someone say, “I took this one pill or something and it worked right away. I never I had it.” It’s like, “I have questions about that.” I don’t like how it was a process, but I think anything worthwhile, worth doing any treatment, it’s definitely up and down. It’s got its valleys, it’s got its peaks and it’s definitely a wild ride but it definitely stabilizes you after a while.

If this is something important, how many other things out there that we’re just overlooking? If we combined those things, maybe there’s something we get a much greater impact. That’s why I wanted to get involved. I have a non-profit that studies NAD and longevity, NAD and addiction and brain health and looking at other therapies that we can combine with it. Then also I do the back office business administration at the NAD Treatment Center. We try to apply some of that research to the therapies that we’re currently doing. My non-profit is also hosting an international conference on NAD. I’m a spokesperson for this therapy getting the word out. What really turned me was six months after my twelve-day treatment, David Sinclair, a well-known longevity scientist, came out and he rocked the scientific world where he had a journal in Cell in December 2013. Essentially, he was able to turn back the biological clock in mice through NAD administration. It turns out it was a precursor called NMN through these injections. They were able to see the tissue of a human equivalent 60-year-old mice to a 20-year-old mice. At that point I was thinking to myself, “I think I’ve been a guinea pig in this amazing journey, this amazing therapy that’s going to become something very big.”

Getting the scientific research backing now.

That really exploded. It was mentioned by Lenny Guarente, the mentor of Sinclair over at MIT. It’s a big thing at the NIH, at Harvard, internationally. I looked at some of my old test. I did some really strange test when I was sick. I did a DNA breaks test. I noticed that my DNA was in the top 1%. I don’t have a before picture of my DNA, but my after picture shows very minimal nuclear DNA breaks. I did a telomere length test. My median telomere length was that of a twelve-year-old. It was actually off the charts, but you’re only as young as your oldest telomere. I’m 43 and it was a 35-year-old telomere. It’s all this stuff that I was looking at and I’m thinking to myself,” I got to get involved. I got to do something about it.” It was killing me every moment that I wasn’t involved in this scientific or movement around NAD, so I had to get involved. I ended up meeting some scientists. He told me that, “You’ve reversed your age,” as we were talking and drinking coffee.

How does it work with treatment across the country? Can somebody in New Jersey get treatment over there or New York or is it just California based?

There are a couple of treatment facilities. One in Louisiana, another one in Florida but out here in San Diego, we try to really focus on this art of doing NAD Treatment. NAD IV treatment actually was started in the early 1960s by famous Doctor PhD Abram Hoffer. He wasn’t the only one but he was this larger than life person that takes a lot of the credit. He was one of the first scientists to be a huge proponent of niacin. He was the niacin pioneer. Not counting Joseph Goldberger in the twenties and the turn of the last century with the epidemic in pellagra. He experimented with NAD. He worked in insane asylum.

Were they using niacin to treat depression?

He was using niacin to treat schizophrenia. There was a huge backlash against him as he was trying to do this.

Was he getting results?

He was getting results but Hoffer was this amazing guy. He was also using other therapies as well. He was charismatic and he was so intuitive that his results weren’t getting replicated. He had seventeen patients that rid themselves of extremely difficult things, mostly schizophrenia. There were seventeen of them that got their lives back together and went to college and then medical school and then became psychiatrists like him. That was just seventeen that became psychiatrists. His track record with schizophrenia, there are books written about it. I’m not going to say anything. In our center, we don’t treat for that. You can’t do it basically. You’ll get in trouble. You’ll lose your license. It’s something you can’t do.

Tom, what are some of the miracles that you’ve seen in your center in San Diego that you’ve been treating? You’ve been pretty newly involved with this and you get to help other people get through this. What have you’ve been seeing?

I’ve mostly been involved with the marketing efforts. There was one patient that woke up from a catatonic state. There were issues with her keeping up with it. I met one guy that had full remissions of Parkinson’s disease. There’s generally an improvement. We’ve seen general improvement in Parkinson’s. That’s promising. What if there are other therapies that can really knock it out? There is such a lack of research, a lack of funding and that’s why I wanted to help fund this research, especially with addiction too. NAD is starting to get linked to so many age-related diseases. We already know about heart disease. That was something that Hoffer did. He was such a huge proponent of niacin. He was the first psychiatrist to do a double-blind, placebo-controlled study in psychiatry at all on the planet. There was still so much backlash. “It’s not safe. It’s not the thing.” The powers that be had pushed that off. He said, “It’s going to take 50 years for NAD therapy to be accepted.” We’re at about the 50-year mark and I think this is the moment it’s going to happen. There’s an academy-award winning producer that’s coming to the conference to do a movie about NAD and life extension. I think that the moment where Hoffer gets vindicated is starting to happen, but it’s not just about niacin, it’s not just about B3, it’s about the paradigm that we can use natural substances that correct the root cause instead of synthetic things.

That’s the problem. Our medical system goes after where the smoke is and the symptoms. They’re treating the symptom. They’re not treating the root cause of the problem. Any type of therapy, whether it be NAD or Upper Cervical Chiropractic or anything that’s going after the root cause of the problem, that’s where it needs to be. Our healthcare system is a mess. We’re almost taught to do the opposite. “Go put all these drugs in your body. See if they work and then go seek alternative treatment.” By the time those people get to us, they’ve been through hell. It’s a long time and it’s sad to see. Anything that’s going after the root cause of something, I’m a huge fan.

Bill Faloon at Life Extension, he spoke at RAADfest: The Revolution Against Aging and Death. It’s a place where the nerdy laypeople and scientists get together. We talk about radical therapies and anti-aging. We had a booth at that conference and it was where he was able to talk about the NAD infusion that he had and the response that he got. Here’s a guy that has no medical problems. He talked about the amount of energy that he’d gotten from it. We think that we’re going to see a lot of data coming out about DNA breaks and DNA damage, sirtuin effects, and telomere length.

Do they have before and after pictures of people’s DNA like telomere length and the strands looking better than like pre and post? Do they have that data yet?

None that I know of. I think some of that stuff is going to be coming out. We do have that in that works in research at our center. I’m not fully abreast at that so far. The science is still unfolding but the anecdotes are there. If you go to NADTreatmentCenter.com and go to the testimonials, you’ll find people that are completely overjoyed and in tears. We get a lot of people that say it was the greatest experience of their life going through a detox.

You said your DNA looked better than it did. What are they using?

Just to correct you, I didn’t have a before shot.

You didn’t have a before but you had after and it said your DNA looked good, right?

Yeah, it looked incredible.

Do you know what they’re using?

I could look at that and get back to you. I’ve tried to contact that lab and they haven’t gotten back to me. We’re going to be working with scientist to hopefully get the funding to do this research.

It sounds like you are off in the right direction. I’m really excited to what the future brings with NAD. It sounds like it’s very promising.

Thank you.

Do you have any advice for people that are just struggling with addiction and stuff like that? There are so many people that suffer with that. What they can do to get back on their feet?

Drug overdose is the number one cause of death age 18 to 60. It’s appalling that we haven’t done enough for it. Bill Wilson, the founder of AA, when he was his doctor, Hoffer advised him to take niacin. Wilson wrote him back and said, “I feel amazing. I’ve been sober for years but I’ve never felt normal. I felt depressed. This has really changed me.” Niacin being a precursor to NAD, he saw his results get better and then he shared it with his friends who are also his sober friends. He had 10 out of 30 felt it in the first month, second 10 out of 30 felt it in the second month. Then the third ten didn’t feel it. Bill Wilson was still going to meetings and doing other things. You don’t just do one thing, but what Hoffer was seeing was amazing results with the IV NAD but it’s very hard to synthesize. His supplier stopped supplying him and then that was the end of it. It was archived and it went underground at that point. There was just very little if any NAD therapy going on around the world. It managed to stay alive and made its way back to United States.

At our center, we have NAD injections. We have NAD patches, they’re a little bit more expensive. What we see anecdotally is this one-and-done effect, just like change of perception where you’re not really ever the same. Through the IV NAD, it’s like order of magnitude. It’s several times higher but also nicotinamide riboside too. Your mileage is going to vary. It’s going to depend on you, but we see very high rates of satisfaction with the IV treatment. It’s expensive but there are other things you can do. For example, you can take nicotinamide riboside. There’s a tea called Pau D’Arco that’s helpful.

This all has the NAD in it?

Pau D’Arco works on a gene that helps salvage NAD so you’re going to recycle your NAD storage in your body twice per day. You’re constantly using it and then recycling it. In that regard, it’s working on that. NR is two metabolic steps away from NAD. Also, exercising helps with NAD, getting adequate sleep and avoiding alcohol. Even one drink of alcohol can disrupt the changes in NAD during nighttime that you should normally be having. Intermittent fasting has an incredible effect on NAD, very doable.

That in itself they say does some cellular repair and strengthens that.

It works on mTOR too. It’s working on at least two mechanisms. Intermittent fasting certainly works on NAD, building NAD storage as well. I really think anybody that’s over 50 should come in and get NAD. Do some of the other therapies that we’re looking at for anti-aging, age reversal. Especially if you have certain red flags that come up like fatigue and pain and addictive tendencies. Now, you’re starting to see NAD could really be something that could be helpful if other things hadn’t worked.

Tom, where is your clinic located? What’s the name of it and how can people go in and see if it works for them?

It’s NAD Treatment Center. NADTreatmentCenter.com is the website. We’re in the middle of San Diego., 15 minutes from the airport. The conference is on the beach as well. It’s mostly doctors and scientists for this conference are coming up, but anybody is invited to come.

Tom, I’m really excited for you. Thanks for sharing your story. It’s amazing testimonial. I’m so glad you got your life back. You’re doing well again and you found something that you’re passionate about and you’re helping so many people. That’s really what it’s all about. Thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you for letting me share my story.

Keep us updated on the research and if anything new pops up, just keep in touch because I know something beautiful is going to come from it. Just stay in touch and thanks again.

Thank you.

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