In this episode of The Dr. Hedberg Show, I interviewed Dr. David Brady about the new GI-MAP stool test by Diagnostic Solutions Laboratory. We discussed many topics including autoimmune disease, stool testing, stealth infections, gut infections, the gut microbiome and much more. This is the stool test I use in my practice to identify bacterial dysbiosis, viruses, parasites, yeast, and overall digestive health.
Nikolas: Well, welcome everyone. This is Dr. Hedberg. And welcome to The Dr. Hedberg Show. I'm excited today to have a long-time friend and colleague on the show, Dr. David Brady. We're gonna be talking about the GI-MAP stool test and autoimmunity. And for those of you who don't know Dr. Brady, he has 26 years of experience as an Integrative Medicine Practitioner and over 22 years in Health Sciences academia. He's a Licensed Naturopath in the State of Connecticut and also Vermont. He's board-certified in Functional Medicine and Clinical Nutrition. And he completed his initial clinical training as a Doctor of Chiropractic in 1991. He's currently the Vice President for Health Sciences, Director of the Human Nutrition Institute, and Associate Professor of Clinical Sciences at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut.
He has a private practice called Whole Body Medicine in Fairfield, Connecticut. Dr. Brady is also an expert consultant to the professional nutraceutical and nutritional supplement and clinical medical laboratory industries. He serves as the Chief Medical Officer for Designs for Health and Diagnostic Solutions Labs. He's also an internationally sought-after presenter on nutritional, functional, and integrative medicine. He's appeared on the speaking panel of some of the largest and most prestigious conferences, this includes IFM, ACAM, A4M, IHS, AANP, and many more. And we're gonna talk about some of his papers today. So welcome to the show, Dr. Brady.
David Brady: Hey, thanks, Dr. Hedberg, great to be on your show. We go back a long way in this journey together in functional medicine and we have amazingly similar paths, although you're fortunate enough to have gone through it a little later than me which means, you're younger.
Nikolas: Right, right. Younger but...
David: Younger but we're pretty similar, so.
Nikolas: Younger but not smarter. So that's why I have you on the show.
David: Oh, I don't know about that.
Nikolas: So let's jump into autoimmunity and you've emphasized this topic a lot in some of your papers, and in a lot of your lectures, and you also work with a lot of autoimmune patients in your practice. So what do you think it was that developed your interest in autoimmunity?
David: Oh, I don't know sheer desperation, probably like yourself, you know? Just seeing so much of this stuff come in on practices over the years, and it's just grown, and grown. And, you know, even in my couple of decades in practice, I certainly see it as being so much more prevalent as a presenting concern with patients than I did back in the beginning. And what we've seen emerging in the literature in parallel to that has really made autoimmunity one of these...well not a disorder but sort of a constellation of disorders that have a similar underlying etiology.
It's really a group of disorders that is really just innately attached to the functional medicine approach, right? Because of the emphasis in functional medicine on the importance of the health of the gastrointestinal system, gut ecology. And now, we would talk about it in more detail is the microbiota and the microbiome, and certainly an appreciation of the role of toxins and things like that, just make it a natural that patients would turn to providers like us if they had an option.
And they become aware of other types of approaches and certainly with the internet coming, you know, blowing up during that same amount of time, people have access to information now including so much good information, like what you produce that makes patients realize that they have more options than Methotrexate, and Humira, and that kind of stuff. So I think we see so much of it, it's hard as a functional medicine integrative medicine practitioner, no matter what your core training, to not have to get up to speed on autoimmunity pretty darn quickly because you see it all day long.
Nikolas: Exactly. Like you said, there aren't a lot of answers from the conventional medical side other than a series of drugs, which, of course, some people need sometimes but we can do a lot as functional medicine practitioners. So this paper you published that was in the Open Journal of Rheumatology and Autoimmunity in 2013 and the title is, "Molecular Mimicry, the Hygiene Hypothesis, Stealth Infections and Other Examples of Disconnect between Medical Research and the Practice of Clinical Medicine in Autoimmune Disease."
David: Yeah. That's quite a title, huh?
Nikolas: Right, right. So why did this paper, why was it so well-received by so many in the functional medicine field?
David: Oh, it's interesting. I'm glad it was. I still get a lot of people coming up to me at speaking events, and conferences, and so forth bringing up that paper. And I've had quite a few actually faculty at different institutions be it, you know, naturopathic medical programs, nutrition programs, and so forth, saying that they used the paper in their teaching and which is a great honor to hear that. But I think the reason it probably struck a chord, for the people who have been exposed to it or have seen it is because what my intention was when I wrote it was really to pick out some of these really interesting connections and things that are in the medical research and literature [inaudible 00:06:18], such as molecular mimicry and actually, you know, looking at novel concepts of etiologies for specific autoimmune diseases based on the phenomena of molecular mimicry.
And then, in parallel to that research on the hygiene hypothesis, right, the whole idea that we're too clean now and our immune systems don't really get to adequately sample a diverse environment of potentially antigenic material while our immune system is maturing, and learning to deal with its world. And then just some other disparate types of really interesting research as it pertains to autoimmunity and how all of that information seems to be lost on the conventional practitioners who are dealing with autoimmune disease such as rheumatologists, for the most part. They really don't seem to in their very orthodox standard of practice paradigm and standards of care pay much attention to all this great research that's going on out there.
You know? How many times does a rheumatologist do a stool analysis to assess the microbiota and see if there's overgrowth of any of these organisms that the research has clearly said are often tied to a much higher incidence of the disorder. And now, beyond just association, we have actual causal data on some of these things, but they never even look there. There's been no real effort to educate people in from public health types of folks on getting young people more adequately sampling their environments so that they have a healthy immune system when they grow up.
And we have more and more atopic disease. We have kids, you can't walk through an elementary school without young kids, without every classroom has some sort of sign on it, "Food allergy this," or some sort of significant immune dysfunction that's even posted on the darn doorways. So there's clearly something major going on. It doesn't seem to be being addressed by the clinicians but yet the researchers are all over it. And I found that that was an interesting disconnect like a chasm between the researchers in Western medicine, which I think are really doing a great job when it comes to immune dysfunction and then the practice of clinical medicine, which I think is doing not a great job.
Like you said there's regimens of drugs from various anti-inflammatories to Methotrexate to response modifiers and strong immunosuppressants and certainly, those drugs have their role in the properly selected patient but it's usually when the patient is far down the line and they're actually having arrays of joint destruction or they have some other serious tissue damage going on and degenerative neurological conditions or what have you. And then, it's just basically putting the band-aid over it, and helping them out certainly symptomatically.
But what was going on in the research, I found, had the opportunity to open up a whole new approach, right, to these kind of disorders and actually climb very upstream and try to find patients, even before they have these disorders, and risk assess them for potentially getting the disorder downstream and making some significant changes in their lifestyle, and their dietary intake, and their GI health that might actually truly prevent them from getting the disorder.
So it's almost a golden opportunity for preventive medicine in its actual true form rather than the lip service that many providers both conventional and complementary painted to the whole idea of preventive medicine. And then, when you look at what they're doing, they're doing very little in the way of actual prevention.
Nikolas: Exactly. Yeah, it's interesting, you know, you bring up stealth infections in your paper, that's probably one of the most common questions I get from practitioners. And it's just interesting because, like you said, there is so much literature out there on stealth infections and autoimmunity but there aren't really any conventional interventions being developed for those, at least not that I'm aware of. But it's interesting because a lot of those drugs are immunosuppressive and...
David: Right, and counterintuitive, right?
Nikolas: Yeah. And if they have, you know,
