Pablo Motos and the “scam” of cellular regeneration for 375 euros per session: the experts speak

“It’s a lie like a house.” This is how categorical the specialized scientists are about the new ‘discovery’ of Pablo Motos, the cell regeneration machine. The presenter, who spent the Easter holidays in an exclusive beauty and wellness center, presented it last Thursday through his social networks as the solution to natural aging: “I’ve been looking for a machine for months and I’ve finally found it, and in Spain too. It seems like science fiction. I’ll tell you about it. The feeling is super pleasant”said the presenter.

It is in the Sha Wellness clinic in Altea. In the video, Dr. Anna Baeza explains that the operation of the machine is based on “taking the air from the room and converting it into cold atmospheric plasma” that gives up electrons and protons to our body so that the cell generates more energy, stimulates the vagus nerve to fight chronic stress and act on aging by fighting free radicals. A treatment that costs a whopping 375 euros for a 50-minute session and of which they recommend a minimum of four sessions.

The first criticisms came from Internet users themselves: “How foolish it is to get money from the rich”, “How irresponsible it is to deceive from your position as a famous person”, “Let’s see, Pablo… You’ve been scammed…”, “Every day you remind me more of Michael Jackson”…Then they arrived those of the Minister of Health and the experts. According to researcher Manuel Ruiz, all this “smells like thymus”: “The claim that a machine can improve cellular energy by supplying electrons to the transport chain and at the same time neutralizing free radicals seems suspicious and smells like a scam. If it worked by increasing the electron transport chain, this would probably generate more radicals instead of neutralizing them. That is, it would do the opposite by increasing oxidative stress. Consequently, it sounds more like a hoax than a genuine solution for health,” he wrote.

Other colleagues support him: “That, breathing plasma and being in a room with many electrons or protons, helps your body make more ATP (the molecules that are the source of energy for cells) is a lie like a house.” “said Guillermo López Lluch, professor of the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Cellular Biology of the Pablo de Olavide University, in The Spanish. “This energy can be mobilized more quickly. It doesn’t make much sense to energize the cells.” The professor, who is also a researcher on antioxidant systems in aging at the Andalusian Center for Developmental Biology, adds: “A lot of atrocities are done in the world of aging. Athletes and celebrities are very prone to buying this type of messages with a lot of pseudoscientific verbiage.”

Experts agree that the effect of these techniques has more to do with placebo and suggestion than with science. From the Association to Protect Patients from Pseudoscientific Therapies (Apetp) they affirm: “What Dr. Anna Baeza Román says It’s pure pseudoscientific nonsense. and his ‘rejuvenating’ machine has not been scientifically proven. In fact, the supposed mechanism of action that it explains has no plausibility of being real.”

Studies on cell regeneration

The Sha Wellness clinic explains that “with several sessions of this therapy, an electromagnetic field is created that reorganizes the cellular charge and increases the energy, health and longevity of the cells.” Cold atmospheric plasma technology generates “a stream of molecules that improve the nervous system, increase serotonin and dopamine, reduce cortisol, stimulate melatonin, vitamin D production and increase cellular voltage and mitochondrial health.” They claim that, in this way, “vital energy” significantly increases and although this therapy “does not cure diseases” good results have been observed “as an adjuvant treatment of cancer.”

However, the studies The existing data on the subject are not conclusive: some speak of skin regeneration by applying cold plasma directly to the skin (not by breathing it in the air) and others note an improvement in skin microcirculation after a discharge due to an increase in blood saturation. oxygen and cutaneous circulatory flow with two peaks after treatment (but does not speak of regeneration).

The doctoral thesis of Jose Baeza Oliete, presented in 2020 at the University of Valencia and collected in the Dialnet scientific research portal, explains that cold plasma has applications in medicine that are applied in the disinfection and sterilization of materials, not cell regeneration. Its use in oncology is also being investigated, with no approved treatment currently available. According to this text, the human body does not take electrons or protons from a plasma outside it, but rather the ATP molecule is produced as a result of cellular respiration.