Amy Nett: Okay, so breaking these down a little bit. In terms of Meridian Valley Lab, they offer a few different kinds of test, so I’m not sure which ones you’re asking about more specifically because Meridian Valley does food allergy testing or food sensitivity testing, and we prefer Cyrex in terms of the methodology. I think Chris did a whole podcast on food sensitivity testing, so there’s a lot more detail there.
But generally, I think food sensitivity testing is a little bit murky all around, and the most reliable tests we think are Cyrex. Even those, I’ve seen when patients do follow-up testing for Cyrex, sometimes those sensitivities change. The gold standard for diet probably is to some extent how patients react to those foods by doing a careful elimination diet with very systematic and careful reintroduction, but I think Cyrex can be used as a pretty good starting place for that.
They also do some hormone testing. I think they do, they might have even started doing dried urine hormone testing, but we haven’t compared those to DUTCH, to Precision Analytics DUTCH testing. It looks like Meridian is using the LCMS, so mass spectrometry, which I think is good for a lot of the metabolites, but again, we haven’t yet compared the differences between Meridian Valley or Precision Analytics.
I don’t have that much experience with Meridian Valley Labs, but again, to the second question here, what are you looking for, that’s one of the things you want to look for. What are the methods that they’re using? Are they using validated methods for looking at metabolites. That’s why you want to see that LCMS when you’re looking at hormones. Similarly, we’ve talked about stool testing, the different types of methodologies, the multi that the Doctor’s Data does for stool testing.
You just want to be aware of what methodologies labs are using for the analysis in terms of how reliable those tests might be. Sometimes we still do split sample testings with different labs for SIBO breath testing, for example. We’ve done split samples with some of the different labs to determine which one we feel is perhaps the most reliable or precise in terms of the similarity of what those test results look like if you do them more than once.
In terms of hair minerals and toxic elements, we actually don’t do a lot of hair mineral analysis or hair testing. Really, the only time I think we do hair mineral analysis is when we’re trying to measure iodine status, so in that case, we’ll just do a Doctor’s Data hair mineral analysis. I don’t know that it matters as much for hair mineral analysis. We’ve just been doing the Doctor’s Data lab, but really that’s, I don’t know. I’ll have to check in with Chris to see if he’s doing anything else with hair analysis, but there’s not a lot in the literature that supports hair testing for looking at toxic elements.
Most of our heavy metals testing is through blood testing, and we’re also experimenting with some urine testing, particularly through Doctor’s Data, so we’re not so much doing hair analysis. If we want to do a toxic element analysis within CCFM, we’re sort of experimenting with a combination of Quicksilver Scientific and Doctor’s Data. Great Plains has some interesting testing for glyphosate, and who else do we use? Those are the three main labs that we’re using for a sort of toxic elements-type profile.