Transcription
For today, we're going to talk about a scientist. His name is Richard Lord, and he is the original scientist that developed organic acids testing. He conceptualized of it in the 1960s.
He executed and created the first lab in functional medicine to do organic acids testing, let's say the 1980s, early 80s, mid 80s. Um, and he was my teacher and mentor for a dozen years. I still talk to him occasionally, but we don't work together as closely as we used to.
And when Richard and I used to, you know, look at organic acids tests together, he would say like, "Ever seen that before, Dan?" And I'd be like, "Oh, if he's never seen it, it's never ever been even on a test." Because he literally ran the lab that did all the original organic acids testing for like 40 years. So, what I'm conveying to you today is the work of Richard Lord. And what a wonderful decade he and I had together. It was the best 10 years of my life. He's a great guy. Still alive. He's just kind of in his mid 80s. He's kicking back a little bit. Uh, you know, living his life on his lakeside house in the Georgia mountains.
And there are thousands of things that Richard taught me that are not written down anywhere. They're not in any book. They're just passed on from generation to generation of practitioner. And it is my role and obligation and responsibility at this point in time to pass on Richard's work to you guys, the next generation. That's why he spent 10, 12 years training me twice a week. He didn't do that to be nice to me. He did that because he knew that I would carry on the work. And that is the goal of these kinds of classes.
And by the way, Diagnostic Solutions Lab, several of the people that work there and have primary roles there worked with and knew Dr. Richard Lord, uh, a while ago. So this is to say there's decades and decades of experience, like 40 years of experience here, built into this boot camp. It's not about me and my like personal experience. It's about the, uh, original science behind all this work. And in fact, I think organic acids as this topic has been just grossly misinterpreted, and we want to set the record straight and give you guys the real clinical information that you need.
And his model says that when the mitochondria are, and he's proven all this with his research, right? He's a researcher, genetics-based, I think he's an MD PhD researcher kind of person. So, um, his model says that when we're, uh, under certain kinds of stress, the mitochondria just basically freak out and they go into either battle mode or attack mode or defense mode, or however you want to say it, but they freak out, just like if you were walking down the street or walking on a path in the woods and you saw like a 20-foot snake right in front of you. Yeah. You just freak out. Okay? So, mitochondria freak out like that.
And when they freak out, they do very specific things which are very destructive in the long term, but kind of make sense in the short term. One of the things that mitochondria do when they're under attack is they stop taking all that oxygen and making energy with it, and what we just saw, the electron transport chain, all that, right? They stop using oxygen for that purpose. And they turn that oxygen against the cell by taking that oxygen and creating reactive oxygen species. They create oxidative stress on purpose because when the cell is in a danger response, this is what Navio calls a cell danger response, it's better to just nuke everything inside that cell, destroy that cell so other cells can survive.