Charles Runels, MD — Founder, Cellular Medicine Association 

When I went into medicine almost 40 years ago, we had certain broad classes of treatments for disease — antibiotics, surgery, metabolic treatments, and anti-inflammatory or autoimmune suppressants. That classification still applies, but one new class of treatments that we did not have then was cellular medicine: the ability to insert a needle into a tissue and inject something to make it healthier — at the cellular level.

That idea is now a new branch of medicine. 

The challenge is that, because you cannot patent someone’s blood or tissue (from which most injectable materials are derived), the funding available to develop and support research in this space is relatively limited. That is the reason for our group — a group that does not conflict with other medical organizations, but definitely augments and facilitates them. Being a member can lead to improved outcomes, improved safety, and support in ways that may surprise you. 

When people join the Cellular Medicine Association (CMA) to learn how to perform our procedures, they are often in the group for several years before they realize all the options available to them. They join to learn the procedures, then discover the benefits of the community.

My hope is that the following overview helps you (as a CMA member) get everything you are entitled to — tools to take better care of your patients, to earn the profits you deserve, to live the lifestyle you want, and to have the safety net and new ideas you need if you want to help develop and conduct research. 

1. Malpractice Insurance 

Even though injecting PRP is among the safest procedures in all of medicine — if you search the entire medical literature, now spanning 20 years and millions of cases annually, you will find fewer than a half dozen instances of a serious adverse event — you still need malpractice coverage. 

In our experience, most carriers have been willing to write a policy for licensed CMA members once they understand our training and certification process. Your instructor can send signed documentation confirming your training, and we will issue you a certificate from the Cellular Medicine Association, which has been in operation for over a decade and a half. That certificate carries real-world weight — millions of procedures, documented effectiveness, and no serious sequelae. 

If your carrier presents any difficulty, we have a relationship with a Lloyd’s of London underwriter who will write you a policy at a solid price up to your state’s maximum liability limit. This alone can be invaluable, particularly for members in certain countries where our certificate is a prerequisite for coverage. 

2. The Latest Protocols 

No one else can claim a protocol that has been in active use for over a decade and a half. A JAMA article published a few years ago described “secret shopping” calls to providers advertising PRP for sexual dysfunction. The findings: no standardized protocols, and licensing all over the map — from chiropractors to high-end physicians, with no consistent methodology. 

That article initially included criticism of our procedures. We responded by demonstrating, with documentation, that every CMA member has agreed in writing to follow a specific protocol. We were also able to show the research, the credentials of our physician members, and the institutional affiliations behind our work. The result: JAMA published a correction acknowledging that providers who advertise P-Shot® and Priapus Shot® have agreed to follow a protocol and hold appropriate licensing credentials. 

The protocol is what gives reassurance to patients — not of a guaranteed outcome, but of the best possible chance of a good outcome. And it is what separates what we do from the generic “just injecting PRP anywhere” approach that does not produce reliable results. 

3. Reputation Protection 

Our trademarks are not merely branding tools — they are quality-control mechanisms. Consider what happened in New Mexico several years ago, as widely reported at the time: two individuals operating a salon were advertising the Vampire Facial® without being licensed members of our group. As reported in the subsequent legal proceedings and media coverage, they transmitted HIV, apparently because they used non-FDA-approved devices without the training required to safely handle blood products. They were convicted and imprisoned. 

When that story broke nationally, multiple television stations and publications — including Rolling Stone — contacted me. Our message was consistent: if you want a procedure performed safely, find a provider on our directory. The result was that our business actually increased during the crisis, because the story made clear what the difference between a licensed CMA provider and an unlicensed imitator actually means. 

We have now maintained this reputation for 15 years. We have nearly 3,000 physicians in over 50 countries. We take up for each other, and yes — we do turn people down, and we do remove people when necessary. We keep the group full of good people, which protects every member’s reputation. 

4. Medical Board Protection 

If you ever have to go before a medical board, you lose two years of your life — even if you ultimately prevail. It is the cloud that follows you from breakfast to bedtime. We work hard to prevent that from happening to our members. 

Over 15-plus years, eight of our physicians across three countries have had a colleague report them to a medical board — in every case, with no bad outcome, simply a physician who did not understand what we do. In every one of those cases, I wrote a comprehensive letter citing the research, listing our physician members at major universities, documenting our protocol, and including our members’ results. 

Seven of those eight cases were closed with that letter alone — the physician never had to appear before the board. The one case that did proceed to a hearing ended with board members shaking the physician’s hand when he showed his before-and-after results for Peyronie’s disease. The key is that you are not alone. If a jealous colleague ever sends that kind of letter, you have a group behind you. 

5. Buyer’s Club — Equipment and Supplies at Better Prices 

Because we have nearly 3,000 physician members, we have genuine market leverage — something no other PRP-focused medical group can claim. We have used that leverage repeatedly. When a major PRP kit manufacturer refused to negotiate on price, we moved to another vendor. When that vendor was not supportive, we moved again. The result is that our members consistently get preferred pricing on the equipment and supplies they need. 

As one concrete example, we negotiated a deal where members who purchase a particular device receive a $10,000 discount. That kind of buying power exists because we have the customers. Patients are looking for the Vampire Facelift®, the O-Shot®, the P-Shot® — names that have tens of millions of dollars of marketing behind them. That gives us the ability to go to technology and supply companies and negotiate on your behalf, putting you in control rather than at the mercy of device manufacturers or insurance payers. 

6. Trademark-Based Price Protection 

When you advertise generic PRP, you are vulnerable to the provider down the street undercutting your price. When an unlicensed provider uses our trademarked procedure names without authorization, we report the infringement to our trademark enforcement team and, when necessary, to our intellectual property attorney. Unlicensed use is typically resolved within days to weeks. 

We spend approximately one million dollars per year on legal protection and brand enforcement across the U.S., Canada, South America, the European bloc, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, and other jurisdictions. Every member of our group contributes to that through their monthly fee — and every member benefits from it. You are able to charge for a premium protocol, and our enforcement efforts help ensure unlicensed imitators cannot misrepresent themselves using our trademarked names. 

We also maintain a minimum suggested advertised price, which exists for quality and safety reasons: as we learned when we were unable to protect the Vampire Facelift® trademark in the UK early on, uncontrolled advertising leads to price levels that cannot cover FDA-approved devices or proper sterile technique. When advertised prices fall below a threshold where safe, protocol-compliant care is economically viable, patient safety suffers. Members who consistently advertise below that threshold are reminded of this standard; continued non-compliance may result in removal from the group. This is a quality-control policy, not a price-fixing arrangement — members remain free to offer discounts, charity care, or individual pricing arrangements in their own practices. 

7. Advertising Value — Tens of Millions of Dollars 

The trademarked procedure names you are licensed to use have been featured in celebrity interviews, television programs, major national publications, and international media coverage many times over. The Doctor’s Show, Dr. Oz, Rolling Stone, Cosmopolitan, The Guardian — the list is long. The cumulative advertising value behind these names runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars. 

For that monthly licensing fee, you are plugging into a brand with 15-plus years of history and awareness. Think of it like having the right to hang a well-recognized sign above your door — one that patients already recognize and search for. It does not replace your individual marketing efforts, but it gives you a head start that generic PRP providers simply cannot buy. 

If you are ever contacted for a news interview or television feature, reach out to me. I have been interviewed in multiple states, London, Serbia, and many other places, and by the New York Times, Men’s Health, the Tatler, Medscape, the Rolling Stone, the Associated Press, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, Shade45, and many others. There are specific steps to take to handle those opportunities well, and I am happy to help any member prepare. 

8. The Right to Use the Trademarks 

This sounds obvious, but it is worth stating plainly: use the trademarks. Do not advertise “PRP for the vagina” when you have the right to advertise the O-Shot®. It is like owning the rights to Tylenol and only advertising acetaminophen. The brand name is what carries the recognition, the search volume, and the decades of marketing investment. 

We have members with multiple clinics, each generating millions of dollars annually from these procedures. We have members who have built thriving practices solely in hair restoration. The potential is significant, but we also see people who complete training, learn the procedures, and then disappear within 3 to 6 months. The difference between those who thrive and those who do not almost always comes down to whether they actually list the procedures on their website (using the methods we teach), discuss them with their patients, and use the names they are licensed to use. 

9. Weekly Journal Club with Pearls & Marketing 

Every Tuesday evening, we hold an hour-long live Journal Club with Pearls & Marketing— the JCPM — where I review the week’s most relevant peer-reviewed research related to our procedures and our specialty areas: cosmetics, sexual medicine, regenerative medicine, and dermatology. These sessions are recorded, transcribed, and archived on our membership sites.

We now have over 900 videos and millions of words in our membership library, searchable via an AI assistant trained exclusively on our content. You can ask it a question and receive an answer — not just links — from a curated database that filters out the noise you would otherwise have to wade through. 

Along with the research review, every session includes marketing guidance: specific, actionable strategies for communicating the latest findings to your patients, positioning your services, and attracting the people who need what you know how to do. I also bring guests — gynecologists, urologists, dermatologists, family practitioners, nurse practitioners — from around the world to share their clinical experience and insights. 

After each session, a Marketing Kit is produced: a set of ready-to-send patient emails, written in your voice, tied to the specific research discussed that week, and ready for you to deploy to your own patient list. 

10. Print Newsletter 

At least every other month, a printed newsletter is mailed to your physical address. Think of it as a curated highlights edition — the best of the recent Journal Club sessions, guest interviews, and new marketing ideas, formatted as a reference you can hold in your hands and return to. It functions as both a continuing education tool and a practice-building resource. 

11. Directory Listing — and How to Make It Work 

The patient-facing directories — OShot.info, PriapusShot.com, VampireFaceLift.com, and others — are often the first thing new members think about. But I want to give you an honest picture of how they actually function, because it is different from what most people assume. 

In 20 years on the Botox directory, I have received exactly one new patient from it. But I can tell you that at least 50% of my patients have looked me up on the directory to verify that I am legitimate — that I am buying from approved suppliers and following approved protocols, not cutting corners. The directory is primarily a trust signal for patients who are already interested in you. It is the answer to the question: “Is this person one of the real ones?” 

That said, new patients do find our doctors through the directories. But whether they follow through and book an appointment depends almost entirely on what they find on your website. If you are not on our directory and there is nothing about these procedures on your practice website, patients will find someone two states away and get on a plane. For a procedure involving their genitals, the price of a first-class domestic flight is less than the procedure itself. Make it clear on your website what you do, and make the directory link go to a dedicated page about the procedure. That combination works. 

12. Research Funding and Being Part of a Revolution 

Our group financed the first published paper on using PRP for lichen sclerosus. I co-authored it, but the lead investigator was paid $150,000 by our group to conduct the study. I traveled to teach him the injection technique. We have funded other studies and are currently publishing a cohort study of over 2,000 women followed for more than nine years, documenting the outcomes of the O-Shot®. 

By being a CMA member, you are contributing to the development of this field. You are also part of something broader — three overlapping revolutions: the rise of cellular and regenerative medicine, the long-overdue demand among women for better sexual healthcare, and the shift among men from symptom management to actual regeneration for erectile dysfunction. 

The P-Shot® is designed to address vascular and tissue-level factors associated with erectile dysfunction — factors that medications alone do not treat. There is nothing available at a drugstore — not Trimix, not Cabergoline, not the PDE5 inhibitors, not Viagra, not Cialis, and certainly not a penile implant — that targets those underlying mechanisms. Many of our members use the P-Shot® as an early intervention rather than a last resort, and the clinical outcomes we have documented support that approach. That is the kind of medicine you are practicing when you are in this group. 

Closing Thoughts 

For over 16 years, I have watched physicians enter this group and find a renewed sense of purpose. They see remarkable outcomes in their office. They see ethically earned profits grow (sometimes explosively). They experience the kind of soul satisfaction that drew most of us into medicine in the first place. 

We want to take care of you, as you take care of your patients. Call on me. Call on my staff. Call on our other members. We are in this together — pushing medicine into a new way of being, where all the traditional tools of medicine remain available, and we add to them.

Thank you for your attention, and I look forward to working with you. 

Charles Runels, MD  |  888-920-5311  |  CellularMedicineAssociation.org