Transcript of the Benefits of the Cellular Medicine Association (CMA)
12 Benefits of the Cellular Medicine Association
Charles Runels, MD — Founder, Cellular Medicine Association
When I went into medicine almost 40 years ago, we had certain ways to treat disease — antibiotics, surgery, metabolic treatments, anti-inflammatory or autoimmune suppressants. One thing we did not have was cellular therapies: the ability to put a needle into a tissue and inject something to make it healthier. That has since become a new branch of medicine.
The challenge, of course, is that because you cannot patent someone’s blood, the money available to develop and support research in this space is relatively small. 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 CMA, they are often in the group for several years before they realize all the options available to them. My hope is that the following overview helps you 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 the research.
1. Malpractice Insurance
Even though 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 do 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 been successfully maintaining 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 that has 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 Serbia, among many other places. There are specific things to know about how 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 doing hair restoration alone. The potential is significant — but we also see people who go through training, learn the procedures, and then disappear within three to six months. The difference between those who thrive and those who do not almost always comes back to whether they actually put the procedures on their website, talk about them with 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 — 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.
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. 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 the other members. We are in this together — pushing medicine into a new way of being, where all the tools of traditional 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
Welcome
Hello. This is Charles Runels and thank you so much. I’m honored to welcome you to the Cellular Medicine Association on behalf of myself and all the staff that works with us here in our headquarters and [on behalf of] the 2,000 or so physicians in our group across 60 or so countries [where we have members].
[In our group, we enjoy the collaboration of] plastic surgeons, family practitioners, interventional radiologists, multiple medical schools, and multiple continents.
I’m so very proud of our group, and I’m honored to welcome you here. I expect that you’re going to be very pleased with the camaraderie and the sharing of ideas, so let’s get to showing how to become involved as quickly and as painlessly and easily as possible.
Here’s what you do to see the “how to do videos”…
Whatever membership you are now in, you should have a password that we sent to you by an email or if you don’t, we’re so eager to help you [so let us know if your password didn’t come through}.
Click on the provider membership(s) that you’ve joined and enter the password and username sent to you…
TIP= Here's the best software for creating and remembering strong passwords (click)<--
After you log in, using the links in the above list, to change your listed information or password…
To update your Provider Listing Contact information, once you are logged in, look at the very top right of the screen. There will be a black bar across the top, and it will say your name. Scroll over your name and choose edit my profile. Fill in all the blanks with the information you want listed on the Provider directory that patients see when they look for a provider.
If any problems at all [logging in], you can click right here and contact us lots of ways. You can text us, message us, email us, phone call us, but hopefully, you have a username and password already. If you’re a new member, the same username and password should work for all provider memberships you’re part of.
Then, once you are logged in, you will see at the top of the page in this right hand corner up here where you can click and open it up and edit your information. There’s also places … There’s a dashboard. You can see how to do it. You can see where to buy everything [all needed supplies]. You can post questions for your colleagues to answer. You can participate in research in some of our groups. It’s all right there.
I would also encourage you to go here immediately and schedule a free one-hour consultation where we will help you get the ball rolling, have the phone ringing and without spending a lot of money, engaging patients who need you so that you benefit and you will have a return on your investment of time and energy with the love and affection and gratitude of those whom you help and also monetarily, so thank you.
It’s all there inside. See you on the other side with all those videos.
REMEMBER–schedule a free marketing consult here (click).<–
TIP= Here's the best software for creating and remembering strong passwords (click)<--
It’s great to see ongoing research and discussion around the effectiveness of PRP and the P-Shot® for men’s sexual health,…