7. Why did it occur?
Transcript
Charles Runels: Hello, my name is Charles Runels and I think due to recent events in New Mexico and all the press that’s coming out because of that scare it is worth describing exactly what is a vampire facial, does this happen? Lots of questions coming. That’s Rolling Stone. That’s CNN talking about it and also on Fox News, all over the place people are wondering, what the heck is a vampire facial?
Is it safe and how did this happen? So first of all, who am I? If you go to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, uspto.gov, and you search trademarks, right there, and then you put in search a trademark and you put in vampire facial you will see that I own this name. So Vampire Facial, there you go and then you search and there I am. So Charles Runels, just so you know where this is coming from. Do the same thing for vampire facelift, which is not the same thing. Vampire Facelift and then you search and you’ll see the same thing. There’s my name.
US Patent & Trademark Office<–
What is the Cellular Medicine Association<–
So what the heck is this and why was it done?
What is it?
First of all, before this came about, I was injecting procedures and I did not like that I would be saying I was doing Juvederm and another doctor saying they were doing Juvederm and there was no way to predict the results. There is still no medical board that claims cosmetic injections as part of their medical testing. Not the plastic surgeons, not the family practitioners. It’s not part of a board exam. It’s just done and it comes under the medical licensing. It should be done in the proper way and because of that, there’s a variation in state requirements.
For example, some states like where I live, you have to have an MD to do these injections. In some states like Texas, you don’t even need an RN degree. So it’s all over the place about what’s needed to be able to do. You can be an esthetician and do Juvederm in some states. So I didn’t like the fact that I could be advertising Juvederm and no matter what the degree or letters behind someone’s name, then when I did facial fillers and someone else did facial fillers, the level of expertise and the level of training was not predictable by what we were talking about.
So when platelet rich plasma, which has been around a very long time, this is PubMed and if you just do to PubMed, which is where most doctors go to research, there’s over 10000 papers about platelet rich plasma, which is one of the two ingredients in a vampire facial.
Platelet Rich Plasma used to treat scars<—
Microneedling for scars<–
Research showing the use of platelet rich plasma combined with microneedling (what’s done with the Vampire Facial® in a very specific way)<–
Platelet rich plasma used to help fight infection<–
Platelet rich plasma used to help with incontinence and with serious female genitalia issues (like lichen sclerosus)<–
Platelet rich plasma use to help with male genitalia problems (like Peyronie’s disease and erectile dysfunction)<–
That’s been around a long time and it started to come on to the cosmetics scenes mostly used for healing scars, healing hard to heal tissue. It’s what the body makes when there’s an injury and over 10000 papers there’s not one serious side effect or infection. It’s what your body makes to heal tissues. So it would be like saying your suffocating from oxygen. Nobody gets a serious infection from PRP because it’s coming from the person’s own blood. So the process is you draw blood, it goes in the centrifuge and then that centrifuge, which should be FDA approved for preparing blood to go back into the body, a modern kit that’s made for analyzing blood, that device should be approved by the FDA for preparing blood to go back into the body or plasma to go back in the body.
That’s then processed, put back into the person’s own body. So we do blood transfusions all the time. As an E.R. physician, we handle blood all day long, every day and there was never even worry about it as long as you follow the right processes of taking blood from one patient to the other because you follow the right protocols. So using kits that are FDA approved not for a particular procedure for preparing the blood, the blood actually belongs to the person. So the FDA does not approve a person’s blood.
FDA governs devices, not blood<–
Let’s just get that off the table. Now, the FDA doesn’t approve your spit, your urine, your hair, your skin or your blood. That is not a drug. The food and drug administration governs drugs and devices but if a physician uses a instrument that’s not made to prepare blood to go back into the body and instead uses a lab kit, which is a lot cheaper, to put blood back into the body, that is second rate medicine.
So I did not want the same unpredictability that goes along with injectable fillers and Botox to be applied with blood. So from the very start, when I came up with an idea of using platelet rich plasma to go into the face and combining it with expertly done fillers, either Juvederm, Restylane or one of those FDA approved liquid collagens, I wanted the process to be predictable. Even with the same physician it’s not exactly the same results with every patient. Faces vary but at least the ideas of safety and protocols and the ideas of aesthetics should be understood by everyone doing the procedure. So that’s why I went to the Trademark Office and I patented this not to mean a material but to mean a process or a way of doing things. Now vampire fillers out there, vampire therapy was being used to mean using PRP in the face. But when I first used this word or phrase, vampire facelift, that compound word had never been used.
You could Google it in quotations marks, it did not come up and so that meant the combination of using PRP with done in using the FDA approved kit in the most sterile way, the way that physicians and people who are used to dealing with blood know how to use it. Doing that in combination with expertly used Juvederm. Now, in the same way, using PRP in combination with micro needling means the vampire facial. So vampire facelift is a way that’s of using Juvederm or Resilin or one of the FDA approved liquid collagens and then using that as a substrate and then putting PRP on top of it. That’s been used in wound care for a very long time and you can see that research if you go to vampirefacelift.com and look on the research page. You can see we’re using an HA filler like Juvederm and then putting PRP on top of it helps heal hard to heal wound but it also helps rejuvenate the face.
So back to this thing, what the heck is a vampire facial?
This was meant to imply a method, not just any method but a very particular method that evolves with the research and has agreed upon by the members of this group. So it’s not a franchise, it’s not a material, it’s a method and this trademark means, using this trademark should mean, that this person is part of our group. I own the trademark. I lease it out to the Cellular Medicine Association, which is our group of physicians who have agreed to do research and come up with very useful protocols for doing things like PRP also helps lichen sclerosus. We published in one of our dermatological journals how using PRP … It didn’t show up but you can go to our research page and find it. When it comes to lichen sclerosus or a very serious auto-immune process that causes problems with skin of the vagina, causes it to crack and bleed and cause problems. You can see where we’ve done research showing that it helps with that process.
This was published right here in American Academy of Dermatology and we had blinded the pathologists demonstrating benefit. So that’s a very good paper.
O-Shot® (using PRP in a very specific way) for Lichen Sclerosus<–
We spend hundreds of thousands on research…
and where we also spend hundreds of thousands on legal shutting down the people that are pretending to be us and even though I’ve been interviewed by the New York Times twice, very nice articles. I’ve been in Cosmo, I’ve been in the Tattler, I’ve been in lots of articles. We were recently, our procedure was recently in New Beauty. I’ve never seen, even though I’ve wanted it, I’ve never seen anyone stress the idea that this should be done by people that are in our group. We own the trademarks throughout for the O shot. We own the trademarks throughout Europe for the vampire facelift and the facial. We own the trademarks throughout the United States and throughout many other countries.
So if you go to say vampirefacelift.com or vampire facial, which is what we are talking about now and you look here in a very big disclaimer and this has been here for now almost ten years, I guess it’s eight years now, you have this very big disclaimer at the top of the page.
It’s protected by patent and trademark law…
and only people listed on our directory have agreed to follow our protocols and anyone else advertising it is stealing intellectual property.
Here’s where to learn our protocols with hands-on courses with live models<–
They’re stealing intellectual property. That means they’re not ethical and anybody that’s done this procedure has gone, you can’t tell me they’re not gone to the main website and looked at it. So they’ve read this big red letter thing here and if they’re using it without joining our group, they know they’re stealing. So by definition they’re unethical so if you go here in whatever country or state you’re in, you are … If you want to find someone who’s agreed to follow our protocol, I mean, these are top-notch doctors. Plastic surgeons. We spent half a million dollars on advertising … Excuse me. A half a million dollars on legal, just in the past six months, shutting down people who are pretending to be us, trying to protect our reputation.
Where to see infringers under notice or under litigation by the Cellular Medicine Association–those people who are using our names illegally or who have used our names illegally (these are those who are not to be trusted because are NOT certified to use our names but have been identified as illegally advertising)<–
US Patent & Trademark Office<–
Unfortunately, there’s so many people pretending to be us that we haven’t gotten to everybody yet.
But we just sent out hundreds of cease and desist letters.
We spend thousands on lawyering because people realize it makes them money, and they drop their standards, and they use lab kits, and people who aren’t even qualified to do it. Like here’s one where someone died in a massage parlor. Not from one of our procedures, it turns out. If you read here, it was an illegal buttocks enhancement, which is very dangerous, often done with stuff from the hardware store. It’s a very dangerous thing, and if you Google that, you’ll see lots of people died that way. But this person was advertising Vampire Facelift. Illegal.
Now the only thing that makes that word illegal for her to use is that we own it. All these amazing physicians with reputations to hugely … I just showed you the list, all these people on that list that have amazing reputations, they, whenever someone steals it, it would be exactly like they’re using any other trademark name, like they were pretending to be part of the Mayo Clinic, or any other respectable clinic. It’s hurting the reputation of us when somebody uses our good reputation and our hundreds of thousands of dollars in research per year, and using that good will and good reputation to trick people into coming into a clinic and having substandard medicine done.
So I have been spending out of the funds from this group of amazing physicians, hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to shut these people down. I’m very grateful, not for the misfortune, I hate that misfortune happened, but I’m very grateful that articles like this are calling attention to what the heck is a vampire facial? It’s a very particular way of using an FDA-approved kit to prepare blood to go back on the face.
If you go to here, and you look at all these 10,000 papers, which I’ve read most of them, and I read all the review papers, you won’t find any serious infections ever done. You will find research showing that it helps fight infection. So just go here and put in infection, and you will see that the dentists and the wound care physicians, they use it to help fight infections, in transplant, and all sorts of stuff. Diabetic treatment of a chronic wound. You can see this helping eye ulcers. You can literally put it in your eye for dry eye.
It’s a very, very safe thing that’s coming from the person’s own blood.
So done properly, there is nothing in the room that has blood of anybody else on it, and everything is sterile, as it should be in a medical facility where you’re dealing with blood every day, all day long. In every room of an emergency room where I worked for 12 years. So it’s blood everywhere, all the time. But it doesn’t mean that anybody ever gets cross-contaminated, because you follow the right procedures.
So all the people on our list of providers, if you go here, Vampire Facelift, or Vampire Facial, and you click Find a Provider, all these people have agreed to follow the right protocols.
Vampire Facelift® Providers<–
Vampire Facial® Providers<–
We’ve turned down three people just this week, people trying to do our procedures who are not qualified. They apply and we say, “No, I’m sorry.” Or, and then we had, I think 200-and-something letters going out last week, shutting down the infringers. So you can see a list of the infringers here. You can see some of the litigation we’re under. Some of the people who sell the kits want to be able to use our name to sell some of the kits, that are FDA-approved, but then they want to use our name. Some of the sales people have in the past, and even currently, using our good name to sell the kit, and then they want it to just mean using plasma with that kit, and no particular method.
So that’s kind of what this is. Let me go back and make sure I’ve answered this.
So how does the process work?
I think I covered that. We draw blood in a sterile fashion from the patient. It’s put in a centrifuge made to process blood to go back into that patient in a very safe way. Then that person’s blood is then put on the face, and then a device that’s FDA-approved for doing this, now, you can buy these off of Amazon. And not all devices are FDA-approved. Some of the devices suck blood up into the handle. So even if you clean up the room, you’ve got blood in the handle of the freaking device. So, you want to make sure the device is FDA-approved, too. So then you do micro-needling, and if you go to the Vampire Facial website, that’s the facelift.
If you go to the Vampire Facial, vampirefacial.com, and then you scroll down, you’ll actually see me doing a Vampire Facial on one of the beautiful, Yasmin, one of the beautiful reporters there at CNN. You see what I’m having. I have gloves on. I have a device that is approved, does not suck blood up into the handle. It’s completely closed off. I have plastic, or a disposable condom sort of thing that keeps any blood off of the thing, so that the only thing that’s contaminated with her blood, which is not a contaminant to her because it’s her blood. It’s clean. So this gets thrown away, and then this is protected. Of course the gloves are thrown away, and then everything is gone that had her blood on it. The device is made such that the blood cannot be transferred from there to there into the handle.
List of Infringers/Imposters pretending to be in our group, who are not. BEWARE<–
Even still, the device is cleansed before it’s used again, and then with the next person, there’s new gloves, there’s a new clean condom, a new, my tip, that’s making multiple puncture wounds, about 80,000 puncture wounds a minute, about a half a millimeter to two and a half millimeters deep, and then the blood is applied topically. That’s a Vampire Facial.
It’s not just for cosmetic reasons. Before some of you say, “Oh, just age gracefully.”
First of all, who says that about the house? I’m not going to paint my house, I’m not going to wash my car or wax my car. I’m just going to age it gracefully. That’s Middle Ages stuff. Those old priests who thought you shouldn’t bathe the body because you should be paying attention to the inner soul. Okay, take care of your soul, but take care of your body too, and don’t make any excuses for it. So, it’s okay to take care of your body as long as it’s done in a safe way.
Over 10,000 papers … One of the FDA kits alone, one of the FDA devices alone, they sell over a million tubes that are used to process the blood per year. So there are millions per year, probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000,000 PRP procedures at least, probably closer to 10 PRP procedures per year worldwide, and never one, never one serious sequelae, ever. Not a neoplasia, not a serious infection, nothing when it’s been prepared with an FDA-approved kit and done by a trained professional. Nothing, not one. Except for one incident when someone injected the eyeball. So don’t inject the eyeballs. I don’t know who got that crazy idea. Actually, I’m told it can be done safely in the right hands. Except for that one incident where an eyeball was injected, no serious sequelae yet, ever.
And it’s not just about being beautiful.
Here, I know, because I had serious cystic acne. I know what it’s like to have adults look at you when you’re a teenager and ask you what’s wrong with your face, because pus is running out of your nose, and people are too fucking … Excuse my language. They’re too stupid to know that as a teenager, that is painful emotionally and physically. Using micro-needling, we can fix those scars. It’s been proven, you can read the research here, it’s been proven to work better if you use our Vampire Facial procedure, where you combine the micro-needling with PRP. I’m sorry I lost my temper, but there’s a lot of pain with having acne, and with needing to hide your face as a child. Not a few bumps, but serious cystic acne. It can cause horrible scarring, and our Vampire Facial is a way to fix that. We can also help keloid, we can help hair regrowth, and so this is an important advance, a very important advance in medicine that should be taken seriously.
So what other questions? What are the health risks? The benefits, we just covered some of that. It’s aesthetic, it’s hair growth, it’s scars. For example, one lady I treated had horrible zoster, which is like herpes, only on your face, with left her horribly scarred, and she felt embarrassed to go to her granddaughter’s wedding. Why should I not be able to fix that? And I see the blogs, and I know some of you guys would put on here, “Well, just age gracefully.” Or, “Beauty is in the soul.” Yeah, but this is our body temple, and we get to take care of it if we want to, especially if it’s something safe. So the health risk of undergoing the procedure, 35,000 people per year die from gastrointestinal bleeding from aspirin and non-steroidals. No one ever, with millions of procedures done per year, has ever-
No one ever, with millions of procedures done per years has ever died or had a serious infection from PRP as a standalone [WHEN DONE BY SOMONE USING FDA APPROVED KITS AND PART OF OUR GROUP].
So the health risks are basically zero. I won’t say there’s no sequelae … People have pain, they get bruising, things happen, but as far as a serious life-threatening thing like what happened here in this New Mexico thing has never happened one time with millions of procedures per year, so I don’t know anything this safe. And the reason it’s safe is we’re using the person’s own blood and that part of the blood that helps you recover from other procedures.
When you have surgery, the thing that helps you recover is PRP. When you scraped your knee as a child, that scab that formed that helped you regrow the new skin, that was platelet-rich fibrin matrix, which comes from PRP. So how rare instances like this occurred in New Mexico, well, I don’t know, because what happened in Mexico was not one of our people. But I can tell you that this never happens with our people because we follow the right protocols.
Now I’m not up in everybody’s office,
I can’t watch over everybody’s shoulder anymore than anybody that’s a member of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. They don’t have board members watching everything they do, but that board asks people to follow certain guidelines when they do a hysterectomy or pap smear, and if somebody’s out of line, they get kicked out of the group. We’ve only had to kick one person out of our group, and there was no serious harm, it was just they weren’t following our guidelines. So we don’t let everybody in and we don’t let everybody else stay in.
Why did this occur?
Because it was in the hands of someone who was not licensed and able. First of all, they weren’t even licensed to be able to do … handle blood, the best I can tell, the way they were doing it. But they weren’t part of our group. So if you want to make sure that you’re seeing someone who’s able to do this, then … and has agreed to follow the right protocols with using FDA approved kits, then you should click on Find a Provider and find somebody that’s in our group. That doesn’t mean others aren’t doing it the right way, but I can promise you that the people in our group have agreed to do it the right way and they have the proper licenses for their state.
So in some states, it’s perfectly acceptable for a nurse practitioner, or an RN, or a physician’s assistant … Physician’s assistants help with heart bypass surgery. If you’ve got the right training, you can handle blood. It doesn’t have to be an MD or a DO, but it needs to be someone who, in their state, is able … The guideline we follow is, in their state, are they able to inject Botox and Juvederm or basically … because you can get serious sequelae, from say Juvederm, can cause necrosis and blindness even if done the wrong way. PRP’s never done that.
So if their license … If they are able to get a license to use Juvederm in their state, we approve it. This person where this happened was not part of our group, and so the person it happened to might have avoided it had they only gone to someone listed on our provider list. I’m not blaming the victim, because apparently the people who are running this must have been pretty persuasive, they had a clinic going. But do you blame the manufacturers of Tylenol if someone opens up a Tylenol bottle and takes a pill that’s not really Tylenol, if the seal was broken on the bottle? That would be … You would be suspicious that it wasn’t really Tylenol if the seal was broken when you bought it at the store. You probably wouldn’t even purchase it.
So in the same way, I would be suspicious of anybody who’s using the word Vampire Facial in the United States because by definition, if they’re not on our … I would be suspicious of them if they’re not on our list.
List of licensed Vampire Facial® providers world-wide<–
If someone’s using that name and they’re not on our provider list, they are stealing. Now there are people who are trying to say that it’s not really a thing and that I just want to use it, and there’s no reason you have rights to it. Well, yeah, there is. We proved it to the US Patent and Trademark Office and the people who are challenging it are all people who stand to benefit financially if it goes generic. But the reason I have fought and spent way more than a house costs here in this state to defend it, is that if it goes generic, there will more of this sort of thing happening and it’s to everyone’s benefit if this means actually doing things in an ethical way.
Now. If you want to know more about that, there’s stuff here you can go to, you can see the people that are infringers. You can see who I am, who the Cellular Medicine Association is, and like anything, you’re going to find good and bad out there, but we are fighting for the safety of the use of something that can be faked off. Like you can’t go out and pretend that you’re a gynecologist and do a hysterectomy. That’s not going to happen. But you can buy lab equipment on Amazon and pretend like you’re doing … and you can buy a microneedling device on Amazon and pretend like you’re doing a Vampire Facial, and both devices could be substandard and you could be hurting people all day long.
Where to apply for provider membership<–
I’ll just show you. Here’s Amazon, and we’ll go to … We’ll put in microneedling. There you go. All sorts of microneedling devices. So you could buy one of these devices and if you’re using it on yourself over and over again, okay. You don’t really know how we’re doing it, so it’s going to be less than how we do it and the way we teach it, but you have a way to look like you know what you’re doing. And all of these would be at risk for transmitting disease mostly likely … I haven’t examined them all, but I know they’re not FDA approved for using it on multiple people.
Blood tubes like what an infringer/imposter may use to look like they are doing the procedure<–
Mironeedling devices that are NOT FDA approved to use in a medical clinic that my be used by an imposter<–
So yeah, if you want to buy this and do it to yourself, go for it. It’s not going to be as … It would actually be dangerous, extremely dangerous, and criminal if you took this and you started using it on multiple people, okay? So that’s where … You could actually buy that and you can go buy … Watch this. You can buy … Let’s see … blood … So here you go. There it is on Amazon. You can buy a hundred tubes for $57, so six pennies apiece. Believe me, these FDA kits are way, way, way more expensive than that. So you could go get these kits, you could go get the microneedling device, and you can pretend like you’re doing great medicine and you could be hurting people, making them sick, all day long.
So for example, you couldn’t fake off people and pretend like you’re doing hysterectomies or mastectomies or brain surgery. But you can fake off people and make it look like you know what you’re doing when you’re doing this and you’ll be hurting people all day long.
And how to know that someone is actually trained and not using these substandard kits, you go to our official website for the Vampire Facial, the Vampire Facelift. You click on a provider, and you know that they’ve been trained to know what’s the FDA approved kits, how should they be used, and then they take their previous knowledge from being a physician or a nurse practitioner or physician’s assistant, used to dealing with blood in critical situations, and then they apply that to a much, much simpler process and they do it safely all day long every day, just like they handle blood all day long every day in the ER or the operating suite. Think about it. You’re cutting people open. Blood’s all over the place, and then the next person rolls into the room and nobody gets cross-contaminated. So a little procedure with a little one tube of blood and microneedling is a very easy thing to do safely from someone who’s trained adequately. It’s a good way to hurt people if you don’t know what you’re doing.
So again, our people have been trained, we have teachers that are officially our teachers, we have 70 of them worldwide now.
What is the Cellular Medicine Association<–
Directory of teachers for the Cellular Medicine Association<–
Who is Charles Runels?<–
Not in every country, but in multiple countries, that are trained. If you go to our Cellular Medicine Association, you’ll find a link to our teachers and to our classes. We have some of the best teachers out there, faculty in multiple medical schools, who know what they’re doing and they’re doing this and teaching it the right way. Plastic surgeons, dermatologists, gynecologists, doing this the right way. So this is where you go and … amazing, amazing people.
So it makes me angry when someone does this. Obviously I don’t blame the victim because they were duped by someone, but our name is clean when you go to our list of people who’ve been properly trained. If you don’t and you see someone else using our name, you’re doing exactly the same thing as taking medicine from a bottle that the seal was broken on because you don’t know what’s in the bottle, and you may get something wonderful, but you also may get poison.
So I hope that helps, and you guys feel free to contact me. The press can reach me or doctors can reach me at the Cellular Medicine Association. Just go there and then click on the contact button and you can reach me, and that’s also my email address. So I hope that helps clear this up. It’s horrible that someone has possibly been hurt and I hope that helps you know how to find someone who knows how to do something that’s very, very safe that also has great benefit.
Important Notice
Important Notice from the Cellular Medicine Association–the recent incident in New Mexico took place at a center illegally using our name (Vampire Facial®). Qualified medical professionals handle blood all day long without serious problems and this procedure is even safer since it’s done with the patient’s own blood. But done improperly–people can be killed by cross-contamination. The providers in this article were imposters.
This is the official website to find those who have been certified to do the procedure by the Cellular Medicine Association and where you can read the research–click to see our directory<– Providers found there agreed to use devices approved by the FDA to both prepare the blood and to do the micro-needling. Anyone advertising the Vampire Facial® who is not listed there is stealing intellectual property and cannot be trusted. See PubMed & our website for more research
The Vampire Facial® name is owned by Charles Runels (see the website for the US Patent & Trademark office), although the name is currently under attack by those who would want free use of the name to sell devices and procedures without regard for our standards.
Someone using the name —as described in this article (click)—to trick people is exactly like someone making a fake Tylenol bottle and putting poison in it. Please—buyer beware! Only providers listed on our official website should be trusted to do the procedure.
We do our best to shut down the imposters. We list those we have found to be imposters/infringers at the website for the Cellular Medicine Association. But, the legal wheels turn slowly and expensively so people still use our good reputation to trick people.
