Monthly Archives: January 2014

Review of Orthopedic Surgeon Dr. Dong Hoon Lee For Limb Lengthening Surgery

Before we start on this post, I did want to completely admit a few things for the readers of the website.

I am currently living in the country of South Korea. The exact location where I am actually living at is about 5 minute walk from the Gangnam Station in the Gangnam area of Seoul.
One of the reasons I came to Korea besides for a business opportunity was to take a look at the medical tourism opportunities. I went in for a consultation to the famous BK Hospital located in the Nonhyeon-Dong area about over a year ago to get a possible nose reduction and eyelift (I have rather baggy eyes)
In the last 3 months I have taken my Korean girlfriend to the Severance Hospital (associated with Yonsei University) in Gangnam about 10 times or so because of certain medical issues she has had to deal with. We were referred to the Severance Hospital by a neurologist.

What I am trying to state right away is that because of my very unique situation, due to the exact location of where I have lived for almost a year and a half now, from the very beginning of the website, I have had a much more lenient approach and view on cosmetic surgery than most of my friends back in the US or Canada. Remember also that I am an American and a guy. What this means that my viewpoint on the use of cosmetic surgery to “improve” or “remodel” one’s physical appearance is positive.

I have known for a very long time that the Gangnam area, specifically the Apgujeong Dong area is filled with Plastic Surgery clinics by the hundreds. Every single day I am reminded over and over again of people who have gone under the knife, and let surgeons break their bones to make themselves more beautiful. They have chosen to endure maybe a 1 month of excruciating pain for a possible 30 years of benefits for improving their physical appearance ever so slightly. The fact that every single time I turn on the TV or go to the movies and the ads and previews are filled with commercials for cosmetic surgery clinics show just how pervasive it is in this part of the world.

The video below from Simon and Martina of the Eat Your Kimchi blog might be worth checking out to understand the South Korean psyche and thinking process on why they feel that changing one’s appearance through surgery is okay.

At this point, due to what I have seen on a daily basis, and based on my own life story, I completely and fully accept the idea of using cosmetic surgery to make a person more beautiful, whether it is to make them taller by breaking their leg bones in half, or to cut the jaw bones to give the face a more V-like shape.

So let’s take a look at what is probably the only well known South Korean physician or surgeon which advertises this controversial cosmetic surgery procedure to the international community.

His name is Dr. Dong Hoon Lee (or Dr. Donghoon Lee)

I first became away of Dr. Dong Hoon Lee from scouring through the old journals written by people on the Make Me Taller discussion forum which were used to document/log their personal journey. When it came to doctors in this country of 50 millions, he was the only one that was really blatantly promoting, marketing, and advertising his services.

Dr. Lee would again be mentioned in the newer Limb Lengthening Forum in a thread entitled “Dr Donghoon Lee (Gyeonggi-do, South Korea) Bundang CHA Hospital”. The pricing listed on the forum thread is…

LON (Lengthening Over Nail) = $40,000
LATN (Lengthening And Then Nailing) = $46,000
PRECICE (Femur) (Intramedullary Lengthening Devices) = $64,000
PRECICE (Tibia) = $65,000
Nail Removal = $5,000

This is his official website Here. It seems that in a post made just a few days ago, on Jan 8th, 2014 Dr. Lee’s Assistant sent an email to one of the board members on the new discussion forum noting to them that Dr. Lee has relocated to become part of the medical staff at Yonsei Severance Hospital. Refer to the thread “Dr. Donghoon Lee Moving to Severance Hospital in Seoul, Korea“

Quoted from him on the forum…

“As I begin my new post as a Limb Lengthening Professor at Severance, I will do my best to make Severance one of the leading hospitals for Limb Lengthening and Deformity correction in the world.
…Above all else, I will be the only one in charge of limb lengthening surgeries at the Severance hospital, so I will certainly have increased responsibilities and a lot of expectations to live up to.”

Contact Information

Email: assistdong@naver.com & orthopaedee@naver.com
Bundang CHA Hospital Address: 351, Yatap-dong, Bundang-gu, Seongnam-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea (Zip Code: 463-712)
Bundang CHA Hospital Central Reservation Number: (+82) 1577-4488

Note: The contact information above is his old clinic address. The Severance Hospital he will be relocating to beginning in the March of 2014 will be in Sinchon- Dong. Click Here for the Wikipedia article on it. The Severance Hospital I’ve been going to is in the Gang-nam area. They are two different hospitals with the same name, but are in two different locations in Seoul.

Our Review

One of the things we look for in a really good surgeon to make us taller is to look for a type of transparency in their practices. From his personal website DrDongHoon.com we feel that Dr. Lee is being very transparent in his practices. When we reviewed Dr. Paley and Dr. Sarin before in posts about a year ago we were not this thorough in our analysis.

What is interesting is that there is no height limit at which he is setting, unlike most North American doctors in the West. Dr. Dror Paley has stated in a few interviews that he almost always rejects males who are already over 1.80 meters in height (or 5′ 11″) from getting the surgery because they are more likely to be suffering from body dysmorphic disorder. Dr. Lee seems to have no objection on doing the surgery on anyone who desires it, as long as they are healthy enough to go through the rehabilitation process.

He states that the surgery is for people to gain some sort of self-satisfaction, not to fix a medical disability.

For a 1st time consultation it would cost about $330. There is no insurance that would cover this type of surgery, since it is cosmetic in nature and not really of a medical concern. So far he has done about 400 or so bilateral leg lengthenings.

Something which Dr. Lee has revealed for an interview on the Make Me Taller forums was to show that while there is no limit to how much length is possible for the bones to grow, there is a limit due to the soft tissue aka muscles around the bones. While you can stretch the bones to be even even a feet longer, the muscles around the bone can only stretched out so long before they snap from having too high of a tensile load.

What we were sort of surprised with was that the interview with Dr. Lee was also posted on the MMT Forums just yesterday (Jan 15th, 2014). It seems that he is finally getting a lot of coverage from all of the major English based websites on the internet.

Personal Background on Dr. Lee

(from his professional website www.BowLegsKnockKneesLegLengthening.com)

Entered Yonsei University Medical School in 1991
Completed training in orthopedics at Severance Hospital
Became a specialist in 2001
Two-year fellowship under the guidance of Professor Chang-Dong Han from Severance Hospital
part of an Iraq dispatch troop that was stationed in Nasiriya (Operation Iraq Freedom) and served at the Korean Armed Forces Capital Hospital – 9th Airborne Brigade Chief of medicine & Iraq Korean Army medical support committee Chief of medicine
Appointed as an Assistant Professor at Bundang CHA Hospital
study under Dr. Paley around 2010
Completed Baltimore Limb Deformity Course (Sinal Hospital, Baltimore, USA) -2009,2010
Completed ISKD training course (Universitatsklinikum Munster, Germany)
Paley Advanced Limb Lengthening Institute – Clinical Fellowship

Side Note: Technically there is also another Dr. Donghoon Lee in the University of Washington’s School of Medicine Radiology Department (click for profile). We are NOT referring to that person.

1st consideration you should be aware of before getting surgery in Seoul

There is a slightly unknown practice among the Korean plastic surgery industry to charge a slightly higher price for surgery to foreigners than to the native Koreans. This is partly due to the fact that most foreigners who specifically come to the country for cheaper cosmetic surgery can’t speak the local language. If they spoke the local language, they would be able to talk to dozens of the local clinics to find the best deals on Cosmetic Surgeons.

2^nd Big consideration

There is rather sneaky tactic done by people who write fake positive testimonials for the surgery clinics on the various online forums, like Purse Forum, etc. The fake positive testimonials often end with a message saying that if the person who went in the surgery mention the referrals name, they will get some type of insider’s discount. Of course what really happens is that the referral is a sales person who gets a percentage/commission for every patient they refer to the surgeon.

This factor has been mentioned on websites like on the forums and blog postings on My Seoul Secret and the Limb Lengthening Forum on the thread “Why We Lost Trust and Left“

From reading the threads on the forum, the main reason why the new LLF forum was created was because the people who opened the LLF believes that the SysOp of the older Make Me Taller forum was secretly Apotheosis, who is accused of getting a commission for all people who go for surgery who mention his website or name. There is supposed to be some type of unknown business deal made with the accused SysOp (who is believed to be Apotheosis) and Dr Sringari and Dr. Sarin, and other surgeons who have been heavily promoting their specific method.

Update July 16th, 2014: In a sort of strange coincidence I received a private email message by someone going under the name John. The following message was written…

“Hi, i have enjoy reading your blog, you clearly are a intelligent person who is looking to provide real information exposing all the snake oil salesman. I saw that one of your link in “Forum” is to MMT Forum, maybe you are not aware that the website is a scam too, but only much more dangerous. You can find information on google by searching make me taller exposed. The details are all there. People have been hurt because of information manipulated by the webmaster Sysop who invested money on a couple of cheap indian doctors and promote them via mmt. He also invested in other doctors and delete negative feedback about them. He claims to be impartial……..The details of all these are very long, so take your time to uncover the why and how of it all. I suggest you consider put some kind of warning that mmt is potentially a dangerous website as the information there is known to be edited or even faked. “

Our Reply: At this point, we have to be completely objective about all the drama that is sort of occurring right now in the grow taller/ height increase website community on the internet. We have no idea what is really going on. We just report what we find on the other websites and let other people sort out their own interpersonal relationship dynamics. If the SysOp admin from the MMT is really promoting bad surgeons to make commissions then that is their choice. They might be misleading people to put themselves into dangerous situations. We are possible consumers just need to educate ourselves and be more informed.

We understand that money can be a very seductive force. Selling, Advertisements, Commissions, Referrals, that is something that will always exist. We will not say that those are bad things since that is the way millions of people around the world earn a living to feed themselves. Cheating or Lying to someone for profit is morally bad but it will always exist.

As for ourselves at Natural Height Growth

Let me be clear right now and say that here at Natural Height Growth we are NOT affiliated with any surgeons or medical clinics which offer the limb lengthening surgery. We do reviews that are as objective as we can make it. Sure, there might be some slight biases but we are trying out utmost to be completely ethical about what we do.

The only affiliate program we are part of is the one with Amazon. We are a part of the Amazon Associates Affiliate program and make on average about $2 for every bottle of supplement (around $40) that is bought through our links, which is not often. I’ve already posted clippings showing the monthly commissions earned from operating this website in previous posts, which is usually less than $10.

We have managed to find his Youtube Channel which allowed us to upload a few of his videos below. To see the his profile, Click Here. His website is at www.BKLL.org

Fzd9 key height increase protein

Fzd9 is upregulated in cartilage formation.

Since fracture healing often involves endochondral ossification, similar processes as those involved in fracture healing could induce height growth in intact bone. As for whether a gap is needed for longitudinal bone growth remember that bony bridging can be overcome. And it may be the limited pool of progenitor cells that limit growth and not the prescence or absence of the gap. S1p-ko mice are capable of forming new growth plates from this progenitor cell pool.

Fzd9’s role in height increase seems to be later and relates to the conversion of the cartilage to bone. So Fzd9 will affect height increase per chondrocyte but will not create chondrocytes in the first place.

The below study does provide us with the insight that the periosteum is the location of the key region of progenitor cells that can undergo growth plate chondrogenesis and increase height. How do we get these stem cells past the cortical bone and into the bone itself where they have potential to increase height?

The wnt serpentine receptor frizzled-9 regulates new bone formation in fracture healing.

“The serpentine receptor Fzd9, a Wnt receptor of the Frizzled family, is essential for osteoblast function and positively regulates bone remodeling via the non-canonical Wnt pathway without involving β-catenin-dependent signaling. Here we investigated whether the Fzd9 receptor is essential for fracture healing using a femur osteotomy model in Fzd9 (-/-) mice. After 10, 24 and 32 days the fracture calli were analyzed. Our results demonstrated significantly reduced amounts of newly formed bone at all investigated healing time points in the absence of Fzd9 and, accordingly, a decreased mechanical competence of the callus tissue in the late phase of fracture healing. In contrast, cartilage formation and numbers of osteoclasts degrading mineralized matrix were unaltered{So could Fzd9 not be linked to growth plate formation?}. Canonical Wnt-signaling was not affected in the absence of Fzd9 in osteoblasts as well as in proliferating and mature chondrocytes within the fracture callus. The expression of established differentiation markers was not altered in the absence of Fzd9, whereas chemokines Ccl2 and Cxcl5 seemed to be reduced. Collectively, our results suggest that non-canonical signaling via the Fzd9 receptor positively regulates intramembranous and endochondral bone formation during fracture healing, whereas it does not participate in the formation of cartilage or in the osteoclastic degradation of mineralized matrix.”

“Wnt4, Wnt5a, Wnt10b, Wnt11 and Wnt13, Wnt receptors, including Fzd1, 2, 4 and 5, the co-receptors Lrp5 and Lrp6, β-catenin and Wnt target genes, including Runx2, a transcription factor associated with osteoblast differentiation, were up-regulated in the facture callus during bone regeneration”

“FZD9 is one of the genes, whose homozygous deletion in humans induces Williams-Beuren syndrome, a disorder associated with multiple manifestations, including low bone mass”

According to Statural growth in Williams-Beuren syndrome, Williams-Beuren syndrome does reduce height.

“After 10 days, most of the callus was composed of cartilage and fibrous tissue. New bone formation, which started at some distance from the fracture gap near the periosteum, was significantly reduced by 45% in the absence of Fzd9, whereas the amount of cartilage was not significantly affected”<-So the periosteum is where the pool of chondrogenic progenitor cells resides and Fzd9 does not appear to affect to conversion of these progenitor cells to chondrocytes.

You can almost see the stem cells flooding into the fracture gap of the bone. Note that this region of stem cells seems to extend slightly beyond the region of the fracture gap in d24 and d32.

“bone marrow stromal cells derived from Fzd9-knockout mice exhibited a diminished capacity to proliferate and form mineralized matrix”

Original Grow Taller Website www.growtaller.com and Kalsitechnic Solutions Ltd. Review

Here is a rather lengthy post I have been wanting to write for the longest time but never got around to do it.

Out of all the websites on the internet that have ever promoted the idea of height increase and some type of product, system, or technique to grow taller, I would say that the website www.growtaller.com is probably the oldest one in existence. Checking back using the WayBack Machine, it seems that this particular website has been around for a very long time, in internet terms at least. I would guess that this website has been around since 1998-1999!

There are some unique and important information that is going to be release in this post. First, this website www.growtaller.com has been on the internet for about 15 years so far. If you type in the term “Grow Taller” into say Google, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo it shows up among the top 20 results usually for most countries. I have been trying to get this website Natural Height Growth to go up the rankings for that specific term for almost two years and it just can’t climb up the Google SERPs. At this point, I realize that somehow the major search engine companies can’t recognize a high quality, real website based on their algorithms. Somehow they do take the age of a website into account and having a 15 year old website seems to really help its search rankings.

So based on the science, posts, and hundreds of experiments of hopeful teenagers and 20 year olds over the last 15 years, it has been conclusively been proven that whatever the owner of the website www.growtaller.com was trying to sell didn’t work that effectively. On that website, the owner signed off using the name Ken Kalsi who holds the company Kalsitechnic Solutions Ltd.

A person on the Impartial Height Increase Discussion Boards (with network 54) posted back in September 2006 about the fact that he/she bought the “How to Grow Taller” book back in 2003 and it talked about this technique called Myofascial Release. It seems to be a newer version of rolfing.

Someone did reply back to them in saying that they gained 1 inch at the age of 40.

Yesterday I decided to let Google and a few other less well known searching software to search the internet to see what can be found about the company and the person. What is revealed is sort of interesting.

There is at least 6 different people that is mentioned with the last name of Kalsi. They are in no particular order….

Ken Kalsi – This name is the one that signs off on the www.growtaller.com website
Kanwaljit Singh Kalsi – This is the name of the author of a book posted back in 1999 on Amazon entitled “How to Grow Taller: A Comprehensive Guide and Revolutionary Exercise Program to make You Grow“. That book is still listed on Amazon. You can find it by copying and pasting the exact book name onto the Amazon search box.
Harry Kalsi – This is the signature given for the sister website The Relief Zone (at www.reliefzone.com). He is labeled as an Electronic Technologist.
Mr. Nirmal S Kalsi – This is the real name used by the Canadian Government in official government forms given to the guy about issue with Tariffs.
Kanwal Kalsi – This is the signature used for the website Relief Zone and for the website
Harjeet Kalsi – This is the name that is actually listed on the administrative information for the website information background check.

If I was to guess, this is a family operation. the two real names used is Nirmal S. Kalsi and Harjeet Kalsi. I am not sure if the middle name of Singh is real or not. What was shown on the Short Support website page for scam companies of fake grow taller product websites was that the majority of scammy companies and websites associated with growing taller and selling height increase pills and products originate from Canada.

There is a total of 4 websites associated with the Kalsi name. They are the following….

www.growtaller.com
www.growingtaller.com
www.reliefzone.com
www.relaxica.com

I have studied back pain before so I would guess that the company trademarked name Relaxica is a nice play off of the lower back pain condition sciatica and the word relax. I immediately guessed that the website www.relaxica.com was a website that sold a unique type of lower back massager for back pain removal. However, I was wrong.

This Relaxica is a sort of facial massager is to remove migraines, headaches, tension, and stress in the head and neck area. From a document that google results showed, it is a vibrating device that has a strap and mask that is used on the head and face. This was revealed about a Robert B. Swierupski , the Director of Specialist Division of something called the National Commodity back in 1999.

The company Kalsitechnic Solutions Ltd. is a real company. They have been listed on the BBB, which is the Better Business Bureau. From what I can tell there seems to be two primary businesses with the company.

The first one is that they buy some type of manufacturer wheel (maybe car wheels like chrome wheels) from a manufacturing company in China. The name of the company and address of the Chinese factory is (or was)

Name: Changshu Daeyong Import & Export Xo.
Address: Room 419-424 Block C, Ganggao City, No. 263, Haunghe Road, Changshu, Jiangsu, China

What they actually import or export from/to china are Wheels Models.

The real address for the company Kalsitechnic Solutions Ltd. is

7075 – 126B Street, Surrey, British Columbia – V3W 6G3, Canada
Email: hskalsi@rogers.wave.ca
Email: hskalsi@home.com
Phone: 604-572-8141
Fax: 604-572-8141

The fake address they had given was…

Company Representative: Harjeet Singh Kalsi
1733 H St. Suite 330-988, Blaine WA, 98230, USA

The Address listed on the Relief Zone website

Address for Relief Zone: 988-1685 H. Street, Blaine, WA 98230 – Fax: 604-572-0355

The port that is actually used is the Seattle Port. They get their products from something known as Chingtao.

For those people who don’t know what the Ltd. is – from the Wikipedia article – private limited company (Ltd.) – a type of company incorporated under the laws of England and Wales, Scotland, that of certain Commonwealth countries and theRepublic of Ireland. It has shareholders with limited liability and its shares may not be offered to the general public, unlike those of a public limited company (plc).

The Ltd is a very common type of suffix used say Inc, Corp, or LLC used in the US. If you look at many of the companies started in India, China, Hong Kong, and other regions and countries which have at one point in the last 3 centuries been subjugated by the older British Empire, many of the company used the Ltd. suffix to indicate that they are a company.

(Legal Talk: This is a sign that they are a private corporation. If the company fails, the debt collectors like collection agencies who the owners of the company owe money to can not come after the owners by suing them and take away their personal assets (ei house and car), but only what is part of the company.)

Overall Conclusion

The company is absolutely real. They actually do imports & exports. From some information I managed to find, they seem to be importing from a Chinese manufacturing factory through the port of Seattle a type of wheel used for automobiles.

As for the website owner’s desire to venture into the field of height increase and pain relief and pain treatment methods, I would say that they were very clever in buying the website domain name before anyone else. It is clear that they were thinking ahead of everyone else before the 2000s.

Over the years they have been selling various different products. Some people on the Impartial Grow Taller Discussion Boards say that they had at some point been selling the Kimi Height Increase Insoles as well as pills. At this point we can’t validate those claims.

What we can determine is that the website is very high in the rankings for websites which are trying to rank for the word “Grow Taller” in almost every single major search engine, although there has been no new information added to the website for probably 8 years now.

This person, whether their name is Nirmal Kalsi or Harjeet Kalsi, obviously has moved on from this endeavor. We would guess that the website did get a lot of traffic and had people emailing the admin back during the years of 1999-2006 but over time people got wiser to the tactics used by internet marketers and the sales letters they had.

On a side note, I did some research on the Surrey area of the greater Vancouver Metropolitan area and it seems to be of a predominantly South Asian community. I would conclude that the person who originally created the website was most likely South Asian, and probably did have a middle name of Singh, suggesting that they were Indian, from the Punjabi region of India, and were Sikh.

So what this person a total scam?

I think at some level, the person was NOT being a complete scam. While I did not spent the $35 to buy the old grow taller document from the Amazon product page, the fact that they did create a rather sizeable book, with clearly written up stretching exercises, and went in depth on some exercises, like the myofascial release showed that they did their research to some level, at least on the aspects of physical therapy and spinal decompression.

If they ever did claim that they can make a person who was 30 years old 4-5 inches taller, obviously that would not be true. I don’t think at any point they claimed that their stretching exercises and book would let them do that. If they instead claimed that they can help people ever grow taller, that would be sort of true.

For people who have completely closed growth plates, they can indeed increase their height. Stretching their torso would give them at most 1.5 Inches in extra height, which would not stay. Of course that is the fine print that is no completely shown on the sales page unless you are are looking specifically for the catch.

If you wanted to see where all the data above in the post was found from, you can download the Zip file I created from the numerous clippings I did on research findings on the website HERE.

Cabozantinib

Rapid modification of the bone microenvironment following short-term treatment with Cabozantinib in vivo.

“Bone metastasis remains incurable with treatment restricted to palliative care. Cabozantinib (CBZ) is targeted against multiple receptor tyrosine kinases involved in tumour pathobiology, including hepatocyte growth factor receptor (MET) and vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (VEGFR-2). CBZ has demonstrated clinical activity in advanced prostate cancer with resolution of lesions visible on bone scans, implicating a potential role of the bone microenvironment as a mediator of CBZ effects. We characterised the effects of short-term administration of CBZ on bone in a range of in vivo models to determine how CBZ affects bone in the absence of tumour.
Studies were performed in a variety of in vivo models including male and female BALB/c nude [mice without strong immmune systems] mice (age 6-17-weeks). Animals received CBZ (30mg/kg, 5× weekly) or sterile H2O control for 5 or 10days. Effects on bone integrity (μCT), bone cell activity (PINP, TRAP ELISA), osteoblast and osteoclast number/mm trabecular bone surface, area of epiphyseal growth plate cartilage, megakaryocyte numbers and bone marrow composition were assessed. Effects of longer-term treatment (15-day & 6-week administration) were assessed in male NOD/SCID and beige SCID mice.
CBZ treatment had significant effects on the bone microenvironment, including reduced osteoclast and increased osteoblast numbers compared to control. Trabecular bone structure was altered after 8 administrations. A significant elongation of the epiphyseal growth plate, in particular the hypertrophic chondrocyte zone, was observed in all CBZ treated animals irrespective of administration schedule{although epiphyseal growth plate elongation does not always lead to increased height}. Both male and female BALB/c nude mice had increased megakaryocyte numbers/mm(2) tissue after 10-day CBZ treatment, in addition to vascular ectasia, reduced bone marrow cellularity and extravasation{leakage} of red blood cells into the extra-vascular bone marrow. All CBZ-induced effects were transient and rapidly lost following cessation of treatment.
Short-term administration of CBZ induces rapid, reversible effects on the bone microenvironment in vivo highlighting a potential role in mediating treatment responses.”

The elongation of epiphyseal growth plate may or not be promising based on what’s causing it. It could be a result of inhibition of endochondral ossification. The leakage of red blood cells could also be promising.

Cbz results in bone loss but perhaps it can do so in such a way to permit neo-growth plate formation. In the Cbz group there was much more bone marrow than control.

“CBZ induces reversible alterations to the epiphyseal growth plate by disrupting chondrocyte differentiation.”

Stimulated Growth Hormone From Acromegaly After Epiphyseal Closure Does Not Increase Height

This post will be a short one since we have already hypothesized on what would happen to a person who tries to stimulate their pituitary gland after all their growth plates have disappeared. I managed to find two people who lived in the last century which had unique cases of acromegaly. All we are trying to say is that the types of exercises some people have been promoting to increase the level of GH released into their system won’t have any effect, after the growth plates are fully closed.

The Back Story

I recently started to get into watching a little bit of the tele and noticed in one of the episodes of the new UK show Sherlock (Specifically Season 1 Episode 3) that there was an extremely tall individual that was on the show. They called the man “The Golem”. He was supposed to be some type of bohemian/czech hired killer who killed people by crushing their heads with his hands. I was curious at just how tall the actor was and found that the person is named John Lebar. The website The Tallest Man listed him at 7′ 2.6″ but most sources list him at 7′ 3″. However, what was probably more surprising was that this golem character has been played multiple times.

Side Note: What has happened is that the characters of Dracula and Sherlock Holmes has been the two characters from literature fiction which has been most depicted on TV and movies in history. If a literary figure was going to be played out so often, some of the other major characters in the anthology and myth of the central figure would also appear over and over again. For Dracula, it would be Mina, Lucy, John Harker, and Van Helsing. For Sherlock Holmes, it would be Watson, Mary, Mycroft, and Moriarty. The golem seems to be one of those characters that appear again and again in the retelling of these Sherlock Holmes stories, similarly like The Hounds of the Baskerville, The Sign of Four, The Red Headed League, and similarly popular stories.

Back to the point: The other actor’s name that appeared in the google searches when I typed in for more information about the actor playing the golem was a Rondo Hatton. When I looked at the man’s face, it was clear that he indeed had some type of pituitary overstimulation causing the features of his face to be over-pronounced. When I searched to find out about his height, again it would lead to a thread on The Tallest Man website here.

Example #1: Rondo Hatton

From the picture above, we see that this Rondo Hatton guy does not seem to tower over his female actor, which is a good first indication that the acromegaly he suffered did not give him any extra height. What we do see is that their heads are very different in size to one another, most specifically the nose and ears. Remember that the nose and the ear are made from cartilage, fibrocartilage. It turns out that the nose & ears on a person never stops growing. Over time, the ears become larger, and most physicians believe the ears drop down from the force of gravity pulling the collagen downwards.

Besides the ears and nose, it seems that his eyebrow ridge is also very pronounced and his lips are quite large as well. We have seen the large pronounced eyebrow ridges before in other people who have suffered from excess GH, whether gigantism or acromegaly.

Example #2: Maurice Tillet aka The French Angel

The 2nd guy I found was a guy named Maurice Tillet, which was called the French Angel. His head compared to the young boy he is holding in the first picture shows that it might be possible to make one’s head wider and maybe even longer as an adult. People’s heads on average grow only slightly bigger than the skull size they had when they came out of the womb. Human heads change only slightly as they grow older. Tillet’s head is most likely a sign that acromegaly can give a person a larger head. If that is the case, we could propose the other idea that induced acromegaly can give a person some small bit of extra height, but they would have to accept that their heads might become slightly large in proportion to their bodies.

Notice from the 2nd picture how Tillet seems to be even shorter than average. His head has become extremely wide, and his face reminds me of the Russian Boxer Nikolai Valuev. It is very possible that Valueve also has a condition causing excess GH being released, but Valuev is 7 feet tall, and Tillet was probably below average in height.

The whole point of this post is this. If one is absolutely positive that there is no longer any cartilage tissue left as a band on their long bones, the stimulation of growth hormone (aka somatropin or somatatropin) would NOT help. The most likely result is that the person develops a larger head, but that growth will be most noticeable in the nose and ears.

The cases of Rondo Hatton and Maurice Tiller are two clear cases of what happens to people who have the pituitary gland stimulated after the cartilage tissue is gone.

We note very clearly that in both of the men, the size of their noses and ears, which are cartilage tissue (but fibrocartilage), is disproportionately large compared to their heads.

We now contrast their overall adult height and maybe compare it to the Brazilian Elisany Silva who stands around 6′ 8″- 6′ 9″. Notice how her body looks so thin and ectomorphic. I personally suspect that to allow for the body to increase in height from excess GH release, it has to happen either before or during the onset of the puberty cycle. If the growth hormone increase happened during puberty, I don’t believe that even that would work to make a person taller. Increases in GH has been shown to actually accelerate growth plate senescence. If the condition happens early enough in a person’s life, then their bodies will turn tall and thin, unlike what happened with Hatton and Tillet.

{Tyler- Here’s an interesting study about Growth Hormone that connects to Acromegaly:

The effect of growth hormone on body composition.

“GH increases the amount of body cell mass and extracellular water and decreases body fat. GH treatment has been shown to promote a redistribution of adipose tissue from the abdominal (android) to a more peripheral (gynoid) distribution. The reverse change has been demonstrated in patients with acromegaly after successful treatment. The anabolic action of GH was first demonstrated when nitrogen retention was observed after GH administration. GH seems to stimulate cell division and increase the amount of DNA in the muscle. In patients with acromegaly the overweight is partly explained by a significant increase in body cell mass and muscle volume, compared to matched controls, demonstrated by several independent methods of determining body composition. In GH-deficient patients, however, the overweight is due to an increase in adipose tissue mass and the body cell mass seems only decreased in subjects below the age of 55. The anabolic action of GH is accompanied by sodium and fluid retention, due to increased sodium pump activity{The Sodium Potassium pump may be linked to growth plate hypertrophic expansion}. In acromegalic subjects extracellular water has been shown to be increased by up to 25%. However, in GH-deficient adults the extracellular fluid volume is markedly decreased by approximately 15%. Replacement therapy with recombinant human GH in patients with GH deficiency restores the extracellular fluid volume by an initial rapid expansion of the fluid volume, followed by a slight decrease towards a new steady-state level. GH has profound effects on body composition. Although body composition is determined by many factors including age and physical activity, changes in body composition can be helpful parameters in following the effect of GH in various body compartments.”

If growth hormone’s height increase effects is linked to the sodium potassium pump and water increase that explains why acromegaly would not increase height in adults. You would need to do something like induce chondrogenic differentiation to cause height increase in adults. Although the study does also say that Growth Hormone may encourage differentiation of prechondrocytes into chondrocytes. But prechondrocytes would be like those in the Zone of Ranvier and not ordinary Mesenchymal Stem Cells.

Magnets for Height Growth

PEMFs(Pulsed Electric Magnetic Fields) have been implicated as having height growth potential before.

Physical Stimuli-Induced Chondrogenic Differentiation of Mesenchymal Stem Cells Using Magnetic Nanoparticles.

“Chondrogenic commitments of mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) require 3D cellular organization. An approach is reported to drive 3D cellular organization and enhance chondrogenic commitment of bone-marrow-derived human mesenchymal stem cells (BM-hMSCs) via magnetic nanoparticle (MNP)-mediated physical stimuli. MNPs isolated from Magnetospirillum sp. AMB-1 are endocytosed by the BM-hMSCs in a highly efficient manner. MNPs-incorporated BM-hMSCs are pelleted and then subjected to static magnetic field and/or magnet-derived shear stress. Magnetic-based stimuli enhance level of sulfated glycosaminoglycan (sGAG) and collagen synthesis, and facilitate the chondrogenic differentiation of BM-hMSCs. In addition, both static magnetic field and magnet-derived shear stress applied for the chondrogenic differentiation of BM-hMSCs do not show increament of hypertrophic differentiation.”

Although stimuli applied to pellet culture is a lot different than applying it to scattered stem cells throughout the human bone.

“cellular condensation is prerequisite for chondrogenic differentiation”

“Magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) have shown to offer a promising strategy to induce multicellular organizations. Forcing the cellular condensation via magnetic forces mimics the cellular condensation that takes places in vivo during limb development”<-maybe magnets can force the condensation in the limb.

“Physical stimuli were applied to MNP-incorporated cell pellets for 1 h for five consecutive days up to 3 weeks in chondrogenic differentiation medium.”

“MNPs themselves did not have any direct effect on chondrogenic differentiation, exogenously applied static magnetic field, and magnet-derived shear stress have probably induced closer cell–cell interactions and increased the nutrient perfusion within the pellets, respectively.”<-We couldn’t do anything with these MNPs anyways but the shear stress and magnet forces absolutely.

“The results of gross images demonstrated that the diameter of cell pellets increased when more than one of static magnetic field and magnet-derived shear stress was applied. However, there was no cellular proliferation regardless of MNPs and physical stimuli following the DNA content analysis. The ECM is osmotically swollen following the chondrogenesis progression, due to cross-linked GAG, one of the major components in chondrogenic ECM. Increment in volume of cell pellets with physical stimuli would signify their sufficient chondrogenic differentiation”

“single magnet-derived shear stress had more chondrogenic differentiation effect than single static magnetic field, and static magnetic field synergized with magnet-derived shear stress was more effective than single magnet-derived shear stress in chondrogenesis. Although the physical stimuli referred to as static magnetic field and magnet-derived shear stress needed more precise optimization, it was obvious that static magnetic field synergized with magnet-derived shear stress would be the most effective biophysical stimuli on chondrogenesis”