Transcription
Hi Dan Kahl, share. I'm going to talk to you today about the GI map. This is a wonderful lab test for assessing intestinal health, digestive health, which is a key aspect to any kind of functional medicine assessment. So I'm going to go through the test and explain some of the basics of it.
So it's done from stool sample. It looks at different types of infections and digestive tract functions, organ functions, and the digest of the digestive system. And it does it very, in a very sort of technologically advanced way. So in the old days, what used to happen is someone do still test and it would go to a lab, and the lab company would, you know, have a tech that would look at that stool sample under a microscope and try to find organisms. It's the veritable needle in a haystack kind of problem, right? Takes a hard to find a microscopic organism in a stool sample. And so wasn't the greatest idea, but it's all that we had, you know, from the invention of the microscope up until very recently.
And then they also had the ability to culture. With means that you would take part of the stool sample and put it in a petri dish and try to grow out one other organ, whatever organisms you could grow out. The problem with cultures is that a lot of these organisms that we're looking for, especially the commensal bacteria, are anaerobes. That means that they grow better without oxygen. And obviously, in a petri dish in a lab, you know, if you're doing a culture, the organisms are going to be exposed to oxygen. So both the culture technique, not so accurate, looking under microscope, challenging, just logistically to find stuff.
And so this test, that's new technology, is based on something called PCR or polymerase chain reaction testing, which means that they're looking for a DNA sample of these organisms in the stool. So rather than having a human being see an organism, they're basically doing a DNA test to see if the organism is present or not. So it's a huge leap forward technologically, and that's why everyone's excited about it because we just threw away the microscope and now we're doing it basically looking for parasites, bacteria, and yeast from DNA samples. It's pretty exciting. Probably, I mean, honestly, in terms of digestive panel testing, it's the biggest thing that's happened since the microscope was invented. This is a big deal.
So GI, you can see the pathogens that they're looking for, various bacteria, different common parasites that we see causing health problems like Cryptosporidium and Giardia, you've heard of some of those. It also looks for H pylori, as well as some of the normal bacteria. The test includes opportunistic bacteria that could cause autoimmune responses, including, and also dysbiotic bacteria, a bunch of other parasites, and then yeast or fungal organisms as well. So there's a wide variety of markers.
They also look for secretory IgA, which is an immune. Look at Ig stands for immunoglobulins. So they're looking at a, you know, globulin levels. You can see on this person, the levels were low. That means there's low immunity or poor immunity in the gut. They look for things like pancreatic enzymes, blood in the stool, and whether you're sensitive to gluten or not. So a really comprehensive test. We run it on a lot of patients that we work with and have found great results implementing the findings that we find on this particular test. Thanks for your time.