Chris Kresser: Amber, “Chris, you mentioned you’d be doing a GI-MAP interpretation video in the near future. When do you think that would be available? Would it be under content updates in the portal when it’s available? Thanks for everything.”
Yes, it will. However, there is an unfortunate caveat in that situation. One of my research assistants and partners who helps with the GI [gastrointestinal] content of the course, and we’ve been thoroughly evaluating the GI map, sent in a split sample, same day, same patient, and got very different results, and I had some questions and concerns after using it for, maybe almost a year now with patients seeing some stuff that didn’t totally make sense. We’re still pursuing and investigating this further. We’re going to do a couple more split samples and see. I know one of the issues that we think might be happening is the GI-MAP was doing the testing. They were performing, I think, quadruplicate to verify the results, and then they stopped doing that, and I’m not sure why. This is part of what we’re trying to investigate.
This is how it goes in medicine in general and then Functional Medicine, too. We always want to make sure we’re using the best possible lab, and we always want to keep the labs honest by periodically doing these kinds of split samples so we can ensure that the results are reproducible. That’s obviously a very key important characteristic that determines the reliability of a lab. The jury’s not out yet. I think we need a little more exploration here, but certainly, if this does turn out to be an anomaly or our confidence in GI-MAP is restored, then we will continue to use it and we will create content based on it, and yes, you will have access to it, as you do have access to all other updates.