Image by Peter Dazeley via Getty / Futurism
A high-end medical practice is offering clients the purported service of scrubbing their blood of microplastics.
In an interview with Wired, Clarify Clinics CEO Yael Cohen said that her London facility’s bespoke blood-filtering service — which is otherwise known as apheresis and generally used for plasma donation or other so-called therapeutic plasma exchange procedures — is so comfortable that some patients doze off during it.
“Once it’s running, you feel nothing. It’s very comfortable,” Cohen told the magazine of its Clari procedure, which costs more than $12,000 per session. “Patients take calls, do Zooms, watch movies, sleep. The ones who sleep are my favorite.”
People who come to the facility located off Harley Street, home to London’s storied high-end district, reportedly seek reprieve from everything from chronic fatigue and brain fog to long COVID and Lupus.
Though Cohen and her clinic claim the ability to help ease those ailments, the jury is still out as to how bad microplastics actually are for the human body. While studies in recent years have established links between microplastics and damage to human cells and hearts, that research was all, as Wired notes, observational. Thus far, the only thing we know definitively is that these mysterious particles have been found nearly everywhere researchers have looked, from our blood and guts and brains to archaeological digs and Mount Everest.
While there don’t appear to be any studies about the effectiveness of the Clari procedure, there’s a pretty strong body of evidence suggesting that therapeutic plasma exchange in general is a safe and effective treatment for some autoimmune and neurological disorders.
In a similar vein, the desire to get those foreign and synthetic particulates out of one’s blood, and to clean one’s blood in general, makes some degree of sense. According to Cohen, longevity influencer Bryan Johnson’s interest in so-called “total plasma exchange” — a more extreme apheresis procedure he used to get his son’s blood filtered into his own — where all of the body’s plasma is removed and replaced with proteins and antibodies, has been a big boon for her business.
“He’s a big platform, and he is spending a lot of time and energy finding the things that move the needle the most,” the CEO said of Johnson, a former Futurism investor who’s no longer involved with the site.
Though it doesn’t appear that Wired shelled out for its reporter, Matt Reynolds, to get his blood scrubbed, the journalist did get his microplastics levels tested to see what the fuss was about. In a fingerprick sample of blood, Reynolds had about 190 microplastic particles per millimeter, which is apparently on the lower end of the scale.
Pleased with the results, the reporter emailed Cohen. In response, she pointed out the stark truth: that he still has “around a million particles in [his] circulatory system!”
More on microplastics: Chewing Gum Is Flooding Your Mouth With Microplastics