In treating IBD or IBS patients with dysbiosis and parasites using the botanical protocol, are they often intolerant of the Seed probiotic? If so, how do you adjust for that?

I think this is really hit-or-miss for the probiotics. It really depends on the patient. If they know that they’ve had sensitivity to probiotics, honestly, I’ll leave it out of the protocol. There is some question right now about whether or not to add probiotics to the protocols. I think you guys probably listened to Chris’s podcast with his research assistant on the one study that came out suggesting that adding probiotics after or before antibiotic therapy was maybe counterintuitive. Last I know, it hasn’t been reproduced, and so there’s still a question mark [on] that, and so, at this point, Chris and I are not always including the probiotic in the protocol. I don’t want to confuse anyone more than necessary, but if the patient is sensitive to probiotics, I usually leave it out, and then what I will do is I will add the probiotic at the end of the protocol. So let’s say the protocol is 60 days and they’ve got to work their way up, and then the 60 days starts once they’re on the full dose of everything. So I will have them add the probiotic in, like, three weeks before they’re going to be done, and then they maintain and they continue the probiotic. This is something that we have just started doing in an effort to kind of get a jumpstart on the repopulation side of things and the supportive and restorative phase of the protocols, and I actually have been having patients stay on the Seed or stay on the probiotic during the retest. This is just something new for us. I don’t have a lot to report back, but the theory for that is that we generally already have a test, like, we already have a stool test generally that shows us their microbiome and shows us their environment without a probiotic, and so the whole goal of this is treating infections, treating pathogens, and then also repopulating and getting the microbiome and the environment and ecosystem back to optimal and nice and stabilized, and so, for me, it doesn’t make sense to, like, put them on a probiotic, take them off, [and] do the test when they’re off the probiotic because most of the time, we’re going to see the normal flora has kind of been affected. We just went through a whole antimicrobial protocol and we were killing off microbes, and so I find that the follow-up stool test for the normal flora section just isn’t really as beneficial because it just tells you what you already know. It tells you that you did an antimicrobial protocol. So, for me and Chris, more recently, like I said, we started adding that probiotic, like, toward the end of the antimicrobial protocol allowing them to stay on it during treatment. So that kind of actually gives us more of a glimpse of how well the normal flora is bouncing back, how well it is responding to Seed or whatever probiotic we’re using, and an answer to your question specifically for Seed, I’ve actually seen Seed probiotic tolerated much better than most of the other probiotics that we’ve used. I will say that MegaSporeBiotic is still high up there on our list. People like the spore-based, maybe even the Terraflora. Those Seed, Terraflora, and MegaSporeBiotic are probably the ones that are best tolerated, but we have transitioned over to using Seed more often than not, in these cases, and I think I’ve only had a couple of people that did not tolerate Seed where they had like loose stool from that, but that’s only been one or two people in a very large group. So yes, I think they are much more tolerant, especially in the inflammatory bowel patients and even the IBS [patients], so you can open the Seed. The disadvantage [is] that you do kind of lose that algae polymer technology that helps the delivery to get past the stomach acid, but I think in an effort just to see if they’ll tolerate it, then you can open the capsule and use part of it just as a test to see, but the goal is to try to have in a full capsule for optimal delivery. I hope that answers your question in a very long expanded version of that, but I do think people tolerate Seed probiotic well and we have been adding it toward the end of the protocol.