Do you find that the Cyrex 5 to 8 (the autoimmune reactivity screens) are useful for patients who have already been diagnosed with autoimmune disease? Under what circumstances would you run these tests?

This is a good question. I think in scenarios where patients already have autoimmune disease, it can still be helpful, especially if there are other labs or other indications that there [is] some autoimmune activity against different systems, different organs. If you’re concerned about other markers and labs or you have a suspicion that the thyroid autoimmune condition may be affecting other parts and other systems, I think it can be helpful. It may just tell you what you already suspect. From that case, it may not be extremely helpful because it may just confirm what you already know, that they do have autoimmune disease, and [for] a lot of those cases and results, there’s not always an answer to how to manage it, because from a Functional Medicine perspective, we’re trying to manage autoimmune reactivity in general. We’re trying to reduce and look for all the things that could be contributing to immune system dysfunction, so the approach, I think, from a Functional Medicine standpoint may not change because the goal is still to find what possible infections, nutrient deficiencies, heavy metals, mold exposure, what is it that could be dysregulating the immune system, and then trying to also support the immune system and upregulate the endogenous immune system through protocols and supplements. So I don’t know that the Cyrex 5 to 8 would necessarily change your treatment plan or change your trajectory, but you could theoretically use it as, like, treatment efficacy. If you wanted to use it before you started treatment as a way to check the autoimmune reactivity and then kind of check back in on these labs to see if things are improving, I have seen people do that before. I’ll be honest, we don’t run the 5 to 8 very regularly at all. I think in the last three years that I’ve been here, I’ve seen it run two or three times, just to give you perspective of how we use it clinically. So I don’t have a whole lot of experience with this, but that’s my take on when we use [them], is if we’re really highly suspecting that there’s much more autoimmune activity than we think and we really have some suspicion that there are some other systems that are being involved that we can’t really get, like, standard labs for where it’d be helpful in an effort to know, like, we really need to support these other systems and also if we really want to track efficacy of treatment if we don’t have any other autoimmune markers, like, we don’t have a thyroid antibody to track or we don’t have the GAD, those types of things. So I don’t think those labs are perfect, but they can be helpful in certain circumstances.