Epoch Times - How Gut Bacteria Shape Your Brain, Immunity, and Mental Wellness

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Sept. 20, 2025 - Epoch Times

01:18:59

How Gut Bacteria Shape Your Brain, Immunity, and Mental Wellness | Dr. Sabine Hazan

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	So with a fecal transplant, you're basically taking poop from one person and you're giving it to another.
	Correct.
	It's a messy business.
	Dr. Sabine Hazan is an expert in the field of gut health and microbiome research.
	Her book, Let's Talk SHIT is an easy to digest explanation of the human microbiome.
	The future is in poop.
	The importance of gut health, which is really your immunity is in the gut.
	In this episode, she breaks down the FDA's recent approval of the use of fecal transplants for research into the treatment of autism.
	It's gonna be an important study to give us data onto whether siblings of that are neurotypical can be a good donor for the kid that's autistic.
	We also discussed the relationship between the COVID-19 spike protein and the microbiome.
	How people who got severe COVID lack a certain critical gut bacteria, and the need for precise microbiome research to develop effective treatments.
	If anything we've learned from COVID, is the importance of microbes, microbes that can kill us, but also microbes that can save us.
	This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Yanya Kelleck.
	Dr. Sabine Hazan, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
	Thank you.
	Thank you for having me.
	So there's some news hot off the presses, very relevant to your work.
	We have the FDA approving familial fecal transplants for research purposes.
	I mean, this is kind of a game changer.
	And the only reason I know it's a game changer because we've talked in the past and have kept talking.
	And the other thing is you have this study where you uh helped some twins, severely autistic twins, get better.
	And so I want to talk about both these things and then the whole bigger picture.
	Yes.
	So but what's going on with this uh FDA approval now?
	How is that going to change everything?
	It's gonna at least allow us to do the proper research.
	This is this is not a pharmaceutical product.
	This is using the stools of a healthy sibling into a kid that is autistic.
	And it is also looking at if the family if the kid that is neurotypical is has the same microbes of the kid that has autism and therefore kind of decide do we wanna use that or not.
	Uh so this is this is gonna be a research that's gonna open some give us some answers uh onto autism, hopefully, and also a research that's gonna allow us to say why isn't it working if it's not working?
	Why is one kid neurotypical and the other one is autistic to be able to compare it?
	Because kids share microbes, families share microbes, and so that's kind of like you know what I want to see with this study.
	Well, so let's break all this down, okay?
	There's there's multiple elements here, you know, autism, it's this multifactorial disease, as best as I understand it at the moment.
	And of course, there's the uh HHS is now has this deep interest in tackling it because the rates have been going up, and that's kind of I guess incontrovertible at this point.
	The question is why?
	And this directly targets that.
	The other part that I think you're speaking to here is that people are different, and sort of one size fits all policies for medical care just don't work.
	And this is one of the lessons we had during the pandemic that you need to treat each and you look at each patient individually when it comes to microbiome, when it comes to their genetics, all sorts of things.
	So let's just let's unpack all this for me.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, so you know, I think to unpack it, you kind of have to go back to the history of what happened, right?
	How did we get to this?
	What is the microbiome?
	How does FDA look at the microbiome, etc.?
	So if you think about the microbiome, it's basically microbes in your gut, right?
	We describe the microbiome of the gut, but there's microbes all around us.
	If anything we've learned from COVID, is the importance of microbes.
	Microbes that can kill us, but also microbes that can save us.
	And the importance of gut health, which is really your immunity is in the gut.
	So that's the first thing.
	When we embarked on this, we st I when I embarked on this, I started, you know, looking at fecal transplant because I come from a World of having done hundreds of clinical trials for pharma.
	And clinical trials for pharma basically brought me to the world of C. diff.
	C. diff a bacteria that causes diarrhea to patients.
	They overdo it with the antibiotics and then eventually acquired this bacteria that secretes toxins and then gives them diarrhea and could kill them.
	And so when you look at C. diff and you start in 1957 with Dr. Einzmann, who basically was doing, decided, you know, I can't fix my patients with antibiotics.
	I can't seem to get rid of this bacteria.
	Let me do two NMS of poop of a healthy, so-called healthy person, right?
	Back then we didn't even know what was a healthy microbiome.
	We still don't, we have some ideas, but we still don't have it as a guideline of what is a normal healthy microbiome look like.
	So when you look at Dr. Einsman and he just took from a gut feeling, because that's what medicine is.
	It's an art, it's bravery, it's I'm gonna take stools from a person, put it in another, and he fixed those two patients.
	That was the first case, the the f those were the first two cases.
	From there, Dr. Tom Barotti started looking at that and saying, wait a minute, there's there could be something there.
	And there could be something there for autism.
	There could be something there for Alzheimer's, there could be something there for other diseases.
	And he took it to the next level, but he tried to show it for C. diff.
	The way it works in medicine is you have doctors writing abstracts and they publish them and they present them at the American College of Gastro or these meetings.
	And then you've got a, you know, 18,000 young brains from all over the country gather and they go around these posters and they start looking at the data.
	And so that data of Dr. Barotti attracted the attention of a few doctors, Colleen Kelly at Brown University, um Neil Stolman, who's on the board of the American College of Gastro, uh, Sahel Khanna, who's at Mayo Clinic, Zane Kasam, you know, and basically Jessica Alligretti from Harvard.
	So all these young people were basically fascinated with poop, whether it's their gut instinct that there's something there or not, it was definitely interesting.
	Uh for me, it started at a meeting probably about three decades or two decades ago or three decades, I can't even remember.
	But Neil Stolman took me on a on a poster and he said, the future is in poop.
	And I said, please don't make me play with that because I I like my colons to be cleaned, and I don't like to step into this.
	And sure enough, fast forward, um, you know, I had a uh doctor that was dying of C. diff.
	I was the girl that was bringing drugs to market for pharma.
	I was the girl that was enrolling patients for clinical trials.
	And I was well known for C. diff.
	In fact, they called me pharma, called me the queen of C. diff because I was really good at enrolling patients.
	And the way that I would enroll is I would call on my colleagues and say, look, before you do fecal transplant, give me this patient, let me try this new drug.
	It's you know, safer, it's basically FDA's watching, it's cleaner, you don't have to like do testing on the stool donors.
	And so I started enrolling a lot of patients, and when a doctor could not be fixed with the treatment or couldn't be fixed with the clinical trial, I did fecal transplant.
	And that doctor survived.
	And that was the first for me to kind of say, wow, there's something to this, right?
	And you know, but I would still do fecal transplant only when the clinical trial would fail.
	Because to me, the simplest way is look, you're getting paid by pharma to do a clinical trial, you do the trial, the trial doesn't work, you at least have a backup, and you could use the money that you made from pharma to test the patient's stools, you can treat the patient because fecal transplant colonoscopies are expensive, anesthesia is expensive, testing the stools of the donor is expensive.
	So this was not something that you could readily do.
	And so fecal transplant, when fecal transplants started showing Alzheimer's improved in an N of one for me, that's when I really paid attention.
	And then it kind of became from there, you know, the studies of Dr. Adams, Dr. Adams was working with Dr. Barotti.
	I started working with Dr. Barotti.
	We all kind of united as doctors that played with poop to understand the microbiome a little bit better.
	And you know, I didn't really believe feces could help autism.
	I had to see it with my own eyes.
	And so I had to do that N of one with the FDA, you know.
	So I wanted I I just want to kind of break this down for the uninitiated, right?
	I mean, basically, so with a fecal transplant, you know, you're basically taking poop from one person and you're giving it to another.
	Correct.
	It's a messy business.
	Right.
	It's a messy business.
	But you're taking sort of a healthy, what you believe to be a healthy uh poop.
	Right.
	And you're giving it to someone who has a problem and with C diff an obvious and with C diff it was an obvious, very clear problem.
	And that drug that there's no drug that will help them.
	That's how it started.
	That's what you're saying.
	That's that's what it's basically.
	So the people that come to me are always the people that have tried seeing a lot of doctors, and they come to me for clinical trials, whether it's for psoriasis, Alzheimer's, they come to join a clinical trials.
	So we look for clinical trials.gov, we find a trial, we contact the pharmaceutical company, we say, hey, we're we have a couple patients for you.
	Do you can we embark on the trial and test those patients?
	So those are the people that come to me.
	C diff, you know, they came to me because they didn't have the funds to pay for fecal transplant, or the county hospital was not able to pay, or for whatever reason.
	So that's what we are.
	So we uh explain that to me though.
	So you were giving them a fecal transplant or you were enrolling them in a trial or both?
	I I yeah when I started uh for C. diff, I was treating patients, and if the treatment didn't work, I wouldn't enroll them in a clinical trial.
	So I had multiple clinical trials that I was doing at all times.
	So I've been doing clinical trials for pharma for decades.
	And so when C diff clinical trial didn't work, I would use the funds to pay for fecal transplant to help the patient.
	I see.
	Okay.
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	And now back to the interview.
	And then that with this N equals one, meaning this one patient you saw market improval in one instance.
	So when I was doing it for C diff, the only way in America to do fecal transplant is for C diff.
	So remember, from Dr. Einzmann to now, it took s it took 62 years for fecal transplant to be part of the guidelines because it needed clinical trials.
	We needed, you know, Zane Kasam to show the data that fecal transplant improves C. diff.
	From there, pharmaceutical companies started paying attention and saying, wait a minute, if it improves C. diff, maybe we can make a pill of poop for C. diff and bring it as a pharmaceutical trial.
	They would bring it to the FDA.
	The FDA would help them, you know, together, they would bring out a a pip uh poop pill, essentially.
	So when you look at from the beginning, those two enemas to where we are right now where it's part of the guidelines, it's part of the guidelines as fecal transplant.
	It's not part of the guidelines as, well, I'm gonna use the product from pharma, but it's sixty-two years have gone.
	So in this country, if you want to have fecal transplant for whatever condition, you want to try for Alzheimer's, you want to try for MS, for Parkinson's.
	You cannot do it unless you have C. diff.
	And so the guidelines are very clear on that.
	Well, until now.
	Well, no, still you need FDA involvement.
	So that case of N of one, uh, which most people, you know, don't realize, took three and a half years to get approved by the FDA.
	Of course, COVID was in the midst of all that, where the FDA said, hold off on fecal transplant because we discovered COVID in the stools, and therefore we could pass stools with COVID to the patient with the immunosuppressed or the autistic kid or whoever we use feces, right?
	Um, my first N of one of fecal transplant was actually not for autism, but it was actually for metastatic mesothelioma.
	So this was a woman that was supposed to die within a week, and the family came and begged me to do fecal transplant, thinking that it could be a good adjunct to Catruda.
	And I said, Well, let me look at it, but it needs FDA.
	So that case was pre-COVID, and that took us 24 hours with the FDA to basically say, hey, no problem, go for it.
	But it was still, I had to argue with the FDA to say, look, this woman's dying.
	Frankly, if I show her how to blend her grandson's poop, you have no data.
	I'm giving you the data, and I'm willing to do it and watch her.
	Well, this woman, it improved her up to a certain point.
	I mean, she lived on, you know, months and months when she should have died within a week.
	What we learned from that case was that not only did her appetite improve with the implant, she was craving her grandson's micro uh grandson's foods, and she um her appetite increased, her weight improved.
	So it was a great adjunct in a way, but it had to be done the right way because the FDA was right, you know, this is poop you're putting in an immunosuppressed patient.
	So the problem then happened is that she ended up being given antibiotics down the road, and that killed whatever I gave her in the transplant.
	So, but that was the beginning to say, to see and say, this is a patient with terminal cancer that was supposed to die within a week, and she lived on months and months, maybe because we optimized the gut while we gave her a drug to kill the tumor or suppress the tumor.
	That's the direction I want to go with that.
	But from that to that N of one with autism, that was 2019, and we submitted the case, and then COVID came in the middle of it, and we had a hard time getting that approved because COVID was in the midst of it.
	So if I want this familial FMT that's approved right now, is literally a breakthrough in a way, or not a breakthrough because we haven't done the research, but it's gonna be an important study to give us data on to whether siblings of that are neurotypical can be a good donor for the kid that's autistic.
	Well, just as I under as you as you said, right?
	There just you simply couldn't do these studies before.
	Couldn't do and and what changed, I think this administration is a little bit more efficient in the processing of the paperwork.
	Um I'm the agent and I thanked her.
	Um she was back and forth, like within three days gave me an answer.
	Uh the last administration, we basically had we gave the protocol, we gave the paperwork in, it would take like a month before we got answers back.
	So I don't know if the politics change.
	I I would hate to think politics have something to do with treating kids with autism because kids with autism affects both the Democrats and the Republican and the independents.
	It affects all races, it affects all religions, uh, it affects boys and girls.
	So, you know, to make it a political agenda is really not okay.
	And so that's we need to we need to kind of think when you look at one in 12 and a half boys in California have autism, you gotta pay attention.
	You gotta put all hands on deck and say, what are we doing here?
	How do we do it?
	And this is an amazing study because this is not a pharmaceutical study where you know the price of the stock matters more than the price of a life.
	This is a physician initiated IND investigative new drug that's basically, as a physician, I'm gonna be looking at these kids, every single one of these kids, and say, why did it work in this kid?
	Why didn't it work in that kid?
	And what can I do to that kid that it didn't work?
	Because I'm not gonna wait, you know, for something else.
	You know, this is where it happens.
	It happens on the on the front line of clinical trials, where as a physician, you have the courage to try different things.
	And there are definitely a lot of different avenues for autism, because there are different causes for autism.
	You know, like you said, it's most likely multifactorial.
	You know, I'm focusing on the microbiome and an answer with fecal transplant, possibly.
	But what about the kid that doesn't have a microbiome abnormality and has a neurological primary?
	Or what about the kid that has an inflammatory bowel disease where his colonic mucosa is completely, you know, destroyed and needs to f we need to fix that before we start implanting microbes?
	What about the kid that has a connection between the brain and the gut?
	What about the kid that has a genetic problem?
	You know, these are different ways to treat.
	So when you do clinical trials, and when I do clinical trials anyways, um, I do clinical trials for a pharmaceutical company to bring a product to market.
	The product either works or doesn't work, and then the FDA gives says, okay, Dr. Hazen, uh, the product work, we're gonna bring it to market.
	Even if the product only gives you 20% success.
	But what happens to the 80% that didn't succeed on that protocol?
	Who looks at that, right?
	So think about it.
	The pharmaceutical company, their job is, hey, let's bring the drug to market, let's make billions of money.
	But who's looking at the 80% that didn't succeed on the protocol?
	Nobody.
	This is gonna be a great trial because it's gonna allow me as a physician with my hat of a physician that has done hundreds of clinical trials for pharma to say, okay, well, familial fecal transplant didn't work.
	Let's look at this trial.
	Let's look at this trial, let's look at this trial.
	And let's not give up on this kid.
	Much like what I did with C. diff, right?
	I would first start with the guidelines, which is you give antibiotics, and then if the guidelines didn't work, I would go to clinical trials because that's what was available, and I would say, let me try ABC trial.
	And then if that didn't work, I would go to fecal transplant and fecal transplant, 99% of my patient improved with with C. diff.
	So I think that's the same attitude that I'm gonna take with autism.
	I'm gonna try the first, I'm going backwards now.
	I'm going with familial fecal transplant first, and if that doesn't work, then I'm gonna go to the clinical trials, and then I'm gonna go to whatever else is being used that has improved these kids.
	Unless there's things that are, you know, Dr. Richard Fryer has some amazing studies that he's seen some kids improve.
	Um, you know, we're testing the microbiome before and after because we want to see what is it in kids with autism that is improving and what's not improving.
	You know, we first uh met what because you had been doing work around uh microbiome and uh COVID-19 uh the virus and then also the what what happened after mRNA vaccination and the these this had profound effects on the microbiome.
	And you maybe maybe you can kind of remind us of what you discovered.
	Yes.
	And maybe uh sort of bring us to the current stage where remember I was the girl that basically was doing clinical trials for pharma, and when COVID and I was doing fecal transplant, and that N of one was in the process during COVID, and at the beginning of COVID, I looked at myself and I said, I have a portal with the FDA.
	I'm connected with all these brilliant minds, Dr. Barotti, Dr. Stallman, so many brilliant minds.
	And um, and I'm a physician, and I'm a physician on the front line of clinical trials.
	Surely I can figure out, and I own a genetic sequencing lab that's looking at the microbiome and COVID and we have the possibility to look for COVID.
	The first thing that came to me during COVID was I bet you it's in the stools.
	Why?
	Because we noticed when we were doing stool analysis that if you have a person that has a nasal congestion and is growing a microbe in the nose or in the sinuses, you will find that microbe in the sinuses.
	If you have a patient that has uh pneumonia, you know, H influenza, you will see that H. influenza in the stools.
	Or a person with a kidney stone, klebsiella pneumonia, you will see that in the stools.
	You know, people are shocked when I analyze their stools, and they don't tell me they have a prostate problem.
	And I say, you have a prostate problem, don't you?
	And they're like, how do you know?
	Because I see the microbe that would be present in prostatitis in their stools.
	So the the think about the colon.
	What is the colon?
	The colon is where all the waste ends up, right?
	And so you've got three parts to the colon.
	You've got the part that goes backwards, the motion of the colon goes backwards.
	That's the cecum.
	And then you've got the transverse colon and the sigmoid, where basically the stools are just to be evacuated.
	It's the process of evacuation, okay?
	So when you think about what we do when we do fecal transplant, we transplant microbes of a healthy person and we put it in a cecum for the best results because it's backwards and it keeps it in there, right?
	The rest of the colon is really for evacuation of the toxin.
	So think about you ate a hamburger with E. coli, too much E. coli it's in your system.
	Your body's gonna give you diarrhea because you're flushing out that microbe that's too much of, right?
	Same thing when you're you ate some rice that stayed over the counter, and you have a bacteria called B serious, you're vomiting that you're it's it's born to the body, it doesn't recognize it, so it says, get out of here, right?
	So to me, the first thought was wait a minute, we immunity is in the gut.
	I know that the colon is where everything's there.
	I bet you it's COVID is in the stools.
	So the first thing we did, the first samples that came to America, we were right there trying to collect the stools.
	So the first patients that had COVID that we intercepted, we already had their stools, and we started working a pipeline.
	And I even called Scott Jackson at the time, because he was part of my biome squad.
	He used to work for the National Institute of Standards, and I said, I bet you it's in the stools.
	And he started looking and getting his team at NIST to look at the septic tanks.
	And that was all the brilliant work that was done from NIST at the septic tank level.
	But we were, we were at the clinical level.
	We were taking patients that had COVID, doing a nasal swab positive, and we were finding COVID in the stools.
	We found COVID in the stools in 100% of patients that were positive nasal swab.
	What we then ended up figuring out is COVID can persist in the stools.
	And what we also ended up figuring out was that some people were asymptomatic and had COVID in their stools, but yet never had symptoms.
	What was the difference between those people?
	The difference was their bifidobacterial.
	I'm gonna jump in because I remember early in COVID, there was uh uh some anecdotal evidence.
	I think it might have even been from Korea initially that that you know, people that are eating kimchi, a lot of kimchi are doing well or not catching COVID.
	And then I heard something similar about uh sauerkraut.
	Yes, which you know made me want to eat kimchi and sauerkraut, of course.
	Yes.
	So, yeah, so um that was that was my question at the beginning, right?
	Those, you know, anecdotal studies like of kimchi and sauerkraut, because obviously you can talk to people that ate sauerkraut and still got COVID.
	What's different between that population?
	Why is one person eating sauerkraut and kimchi is fine and another person not, right?
	So that was my my biggest uh question.
	The other question that I so that question led to me wanting to test, first of all, families, right?
	So because I'm a big family person, like we find the answers in the family.
	You because we're all different, we all have a different microbiome, it's it's um it's easier to compare within the families, right?
	So you could see we published the first case of a family, which was basically the kid had COVID, the other three didn't have COVID, and yet they didn't wear masks, They ate the same foods.
	The mom was taking care of her kid face to face, never got COVID.
	Her two other kids never got COVID.
	The main difference between those three and the kid that had COVID was the absence of bifidobacteria.
	Not only bifidobacteria, there's another bacteria called Fasylobacterium Pratznitsi.
	Um, and there's an increase in bacteroides that happens and loss of diversity.
	So we noticed that, but we focused on bifidobacteria.
	Why did we focus on bifidobacteria?
	Remember, we had the clinical data of the microbiome before COVID.
	We were analyzing stools before COVID.
	So we knew babies had a lot of bifidobacteria.
	Do you know we are I always spill the beans and then somebody's listening somewhere else, and then they do the research and publish, which is fine.
	You know, when I talked at the first microbiome meeting, I was saying bifidobacteria, focus on the bif.
	Why did I focus on bifidobacteria?
	Because if you look at the bottles of probiotics, you turn the bottle and it says bifidobacteria.
	Now, you know, in the olden days, uh scientists could make an experiment like the discovery of penicillin, right?
	And where you essentially, a scientist left his apple mildew next to a petri dish with a bacilli, and then the bacilli disappeared from the fungus of the apple, and there goes the discovery of penicillin, right?
	So in the olden days you could see all these things.
	Now there's such a because everything is about market and patents and business, there's a lot of secrecy to research.
	There's a lot of data that we don't know.
	And sure enough, bifidobacteria is important in absorbing sugar.
	It's important in your metabolism, it's important in your energy drive, it's important in, you know, making sure a person wakes up in, you know, in the morning and goes to work and is effective, right?
	Um, so bifidobacteria is really an important microbe, and it's that microbe that is present in newborns.
	So when you start looking at the bifidobacteria and you start looking at COVID, we notice that 43 severe patients with COVID had zero bifidobacteria.
	I'm just gonna focus on bifidobacteria, not the others, because there are some people that have zero bifidobacteria and never got COVID because they are other microbes that came on that said, hey, bifidobacteria is low, I'm gonna up this group of microbes to basically create a resilience, right?
	You think about your kids that, and that's something we don't really talk about, resilience, right?
	So you think about your kids that took a ton of antibiotics and they're fine, they don't have any problems.
	Why?
	Because their microbiome has adapted to increase other microbes to create that resilience, right?
	So again, when you look at the bifidobacteria in these in these 43 patients, zero, and then you look at your patients that never that were exposed but never got COVID, like that first family that I did, we noticed they had a lot of bifidobacteria.
	So bifidobacteria was really the beginning for me.
	It was like, I wonder if that's the microbe I need to focus to neutralize COVID to suppress COVID.
	If I have a lot of good bifidobacteria, maybe I'll be fine during COVID, right?
	How do and then it became a there was a study that there was a uh I forget where it was, but some newspaper in India, it was a woman, she lived to 117 years old, and they found that it was because she had bifidobacteria in her gut.
	So there's even on your longevity, the longer you retain that bifidobacteria, the better it is, right?
	And it's not a simple thing because people are like, what should I take?
	Should I take this probiotic?
	Should I take?
	No, it's not that straightforward.
	You gotta figure out what is killing your bifidobacteria and what's growing, right?
	It's like having uh a field that just burnt and you're trying to stop the fire and you're pouring gasoline and water and you expect to grow some fruit trees.
	It's not gonna happen.
	You got to turn off the fire, stop the gasoline pouring, bring on the water, and then turn the earth, replant, and let it grow.
	It's the same thing in the microbiome.
	You're destroying a city.
	So when you destroy a city, expect complications from that.
	Expect disease to happen.
	And so that's really my field to demonstrate that once you destroy a key group of microbes, you start the disease process.
	So what we discovered, this bifidobacteria was really the beginning.
	It was the beginning.
	And then when you when we looked at that kid with an N of one of autism, that we got approval after, you know, in the midst of COVID, and we discovered if I give him a neurotypical sibling that has a diversity that has good resilient microbes that have, you know, allowed herself not to have autism, but yet the boy has autism, then that sibling might be the answer for that kid.
	And what we noticed with this sibling is that the kid had one group of microbes that the sibling didn't have.
	So we picked that sibling.
	We didn't pick the other ones because they had some of the same microbes as the kid with autism.
	Are they predisposed to going into autism?
	Who knows?
	But we picked that one sibling, and that one sibling became the donor.
	And what we discovered with that was that there was a ref there was a refloralization.
	And the refloralization process is really an engraftment of microbes to mimic, to look like the sibling, to look like the donor.
	And one of the things we discovered was that bifidobacteria increasing.
	Now, whether it was because we suppressed that toxic bacteria and allowed the gut to kind of rest and give it diversity, and therefore the good bacteria starts flourishing.
	But that case was really the end of one that first of all made me say, I need to see more.
	Because that was the miracle.
	You know, I mean, I think what I saw during the pandemic was a bunch of miracles, you know, from losing no one during the pandemic to still being standing speaking to you today with all, you know, the controversial the controversy in my research, because you know, here I am, the girl that brought vaccines to market, and because I showed data that the messenger RNA killed the bifidobacteria, now I'm an anti-vaxxer.
	So the controversy has stopped the movement of research and science.
	And again, we need to stop with the controversy and say, let's ask questions.
	That's what science is all about.
	Science is about asking questions and pushing that narrative and saying it's not the way it should be.
	And if if I may just jump in, I mean, you discovered that the spike protein reduces bifidobacteria, really.
	Correct.
	So what we discovered with the vaccine is that it did kill the bifidobacteria within a month, but it persisted in killing the bifidobacteria.
	People come to me every day with long COVID or vaccine uh and I take their history.
	And I go back and I say, So, did you have COVID?
	Did you were you vaccinated?
	And they'll say, Yes, I was vaccinated.
	And I'll say, were you vaccinated?
	Did you get COVID after the vaccine?
	They'll say, Yes, doctor.
	And I know I'll ask, did you get COVID before the vaccine?
	They'll say, No, I was fine before the vaccine.
	And then you kind of like have to start asking, did the vaccine kill their bifidobacteria?
	In other words, they were fine.
	They had bifidobacteria in them, and then they started fighting the virus, and they survived and therefore created their own little immunity, right?
	In a way, because immunity is the ability to get a piece of the microbe so that it recognizes the next microbe in the future, right?
	So you have to kind of in layman's term, you have to think of your body as a group of communities, group of gangs or communities in your gut, and there's one microbe that approaches, and there's some of them that rest resemble the microbe, and it's like, hey, you're part of the gang, you're part of the family, you're part of the community, come in, you're non-dangerous.
	But if you see a microbe, you're exp that's a foreigner, the microbiome is on guard and saying, wait, foreigner, we don't want it, reject autoimmune process occurs, right?
	So that's how I look at it anyways.
	I could be wrong, I could be right, but this is how I see the microbiome.
	So when you look at these patients and you say, the vaccine, you got the vaccine, you probably killed your bifidobacteria.
	Now your bifidobacteria is low, you got COVID.
	So now it's like a double whammy.
	You're killing more bifidobacteria.
	And so these people, what happens with the long COVID or these vaccine injured, it depends on the timing because there are long COVID that never got vaccinated.
	They got spike injury.
	I think we need to rename all that to spike protein injury.
	You have to start thinking of at what point did they kill their bifidobacteria?
	Because if you look at the long COVID or the vaccine injured, the one con, and we're coming out with data on that, zero bifidobacteria.
	Across the line.
	I mean, I I I look at I've yet to find one person that is deemed long COVID or vaccine injured that has biphedobacteria.
	So if they have zero bifidobacteria, you know I know, because I've been dealing with this for five years now, it's very difficult once you've killed your microbiome to get back up.
	So these people are still at a state of loss of diversity, loss of immunity, uh poor immunity, and they're also at a state, remember bifidobacteria is important in absorbing sugar.
	So they're not absorbing sugar.
	And that's one microbe that they've lost.
	What about the microbe that helps break down, you know, calcium to get absorption of calcium?
	They've destroyed that as well.
	So they're not absorbing calcium.
	What do you think happens at the cellular level in the mitochondria when you lack sugar and you lack calcium?
	You're missing that energy, that Krebs cycle.
	Your mitochondria stops working.
	Therefore, the cell's not doing what it's supposed to do.
	Their energy level is down.
	So what happens in the microbiome level?
	Your good bacteria is down.
	Now you have space for bad microbes to come in.
	That's your anxious patients, the people that can't sleep, the people that are like, you know, have your mast cell activation syndrome.
	So this is kind of like the process of how it happens.
	So long COVID is really a spike protein injury.
	But also when you look at these cases, they have zero bifidobacteria, either from the treatment or the virus themselves or the spike protein.
	But also some of them have res remaining COVID in their stools.
	So we need to pay attention to that.
	There were uh some problems also with sometimes there being endotoxin in the uh COVID genetic vaccines and so forth.
	So that would be another route that they're damage and problems.
	So does that factor into what you've been looking at?
	There's a lot of different factors.
	There was the studies from um the study from Kevin McKernan and Philip Buckholz that basically showed a contamination, S V40, right?
	That could be a possible mechanism on how this spike protein became a bif, how this vaccine became a bifidophage, too.
	Um did it stimulate, you know, the ability to stimulate cancer cells, for example.
	We don't know.
	That's a whole new idea.
	Well, so that's the third, that's the third thing, right?
	There's the SV40, and then there's also the just just the endotoxin.
	Yeah, the E. coli and the plasmid the leftovers, yes, the leftover E. coli cells and so forth.
	I don't know.
	And then the nanoparticle too, the the fact that it's able to get absorbed, you know.
	This is right, right.
	But it goes that it penetrates basically all membranes.
	Correct.
	So that makes it even more different.
	You know, like the the whole idea, the the reason I stepped into the pandemic at the beginning was really because there were so many red flags, you know, the messages on the media by the media, the vaccine stays in the deltoid.
	Nothing stays in the deltoid.
	It's not like there's a little pocket there that's sterile.
	You know, the the muscles are connected to the nerves, are connected to the blood vessel, everything's intertwined, you know.
	You can't just put something in a blood vessel and expect it's gonna just stay there.
	And again, the blood vessel supplies the muscle.
	So it's all, you know, you can't we tend we've so divided in the medical field with um different specialties that we forget that the gut is connected, you know, by blood vessels, the by nerves, by lymph nodes, you know, by lymphatics.
	It all circulates.
	So we can't just think, well, it's a it's a gut problem.
	No, it's a gut and a brain problem because they're connected.
	You know, and there's it's not just a heart problem.
	They're connected.
	We're gonna come out with, and you will see probably in 10 or 50 years from now, there will be a connection between cardiac disease and the microbiome.
	We will be possibly able to fix the heart by fixing the gut, because it all is connected.
	It all moves.
	All these viruses are passing, moving.
	Um, the toxins of these microbes, bacteria travel, you know.
	So that's gonna be the future.
	Are you aware of cases where um you know you've been able to treat people with either vaccine injury or lung COVID by fecal transplant?
	That's something that I possibly would bring.
	Although I think, you know, it as I was pushing, you know, there are other ways to fix something that's going to be coming in the future.
	You know, you always got to keep on top of the research.
	And research is a story that's untold.
	It's one experiment after another after another, and you discover one thing and you move on to another thing.
	Uh, and then others kind of bring in their opinion and and validate, verify, and reproduce what you've done, right?
	That gets you to keep moving further.
	Um, look, this case of familial FMT is going to be amazing.
	But in the time that I spent trying to get that approved by the FDA, which was five and a half years later of this protocol being approved, um, you know, I was I had patients with with autism that came to me.
	I had to do something.
	So there are things that you can, when you understand the microbiome that you can do to kind of modulate.
	So the whole process of refluoralization is not just I'm taking stools from a healthy donor and putting it into the person.
	It's really refloralization that I coined was bringing back the flora.
	However, you bring back the flora.
	You know, you've heard of cases, you know, and I I forgot who mentioned it, but sermon.
	Someone said serum cures autism.
	Well, there's no data on that.
	And but I'm sure what happened is there was someone that took serumen and their kid flipped and became improved.
	Did that sermon help that kid for that particular you know, microbiome issue, right?
	There's another uh there's other cases that said, well, and I'm very linked with the whole autism community, right?
	Because I pay attention to everything.
	One of the things was antifungals.
	Some parents swear by antifungals.
	There's a woman that wrote a book, and basically it's about how she improved her kid who was nonverbal, autistic, and now the kid is working as an engineer somewhere, um, and basically graduated college, etc.
	But she gave him antifungal.
	Now, there's a lot of parents that listened to that case and tried antifungals and their kid is still nonverbal.
	Why is that?
	Because that antifungal was probably the right solution for that kid's microbiome.
	Maybe he had too much fungus in his microbiome, and therefore the antifungal improved that.
	So everything we're doing, and I think that's that's where I'd like to see, and I'd like to work with this administration right now, to kind of guide us better by looking at the microbiome.
	Pay attention to the microbes.
	Pay attention to what we're doing before and after.
	Before you bring on a drug to market, see what it's doing to the microbiome, long short term and long term.
	You know, I think that's where I want to bring pharma.
	You know, people have said, oh, I'm, you know, I'm shaking the beehive of pharma.
	I'm the girl that brought drugs to market for pharma for almost three decades.
	And my sister has brought Harvoni and ivermectin to market for pharma.
	You know, we're in the clinical trial business, my whole family.
	You know, we're two sisters, three sisters, one is a dermatologist in New York, the other one was a pediatrician slash clinical trial doctor.
	And the pediatrician slash clinical trial doctors did over 300 clinical for 500 clinical trials for pharma, has brought a lot of drugs to market.
	Why was it that you know pharma listened to us during all those clinical trials?
	Think about drugs like RemedKid that made that made it to the market.
	Uh drugs like Rapatha.
	I did the clinical trial on Rapatha for cholesterol for Amgen.
	That went to market.
	Why are we listened to when we bring a drug to market and we're not listened to when we're saying, hey guys, pay attention to the microbiome.
	I'm not here to shake the beehive of pharma.
	I'm here to take the beehive and put it in a nice place so it can make me some nice honey.
	That's what Rome, you're destroying the gut, you're destroying Rome.
	Rome was not built in one day, much like the gut's not gonna be built in one day, and it was not built with one person.
	I'm not one person to restore the microbiome of humanity.
	But I'm one person that can be a little bit of a hurricane and work with multiple pharmaceutical companies like I've done in the past to say, let's start looking at the microbiome, guys, because eventually you're gonna be that patient.
	And eventually you're gonna come to me.
	How many executives from pharma have I treated as patients that have come to me because of my knowledge that I have of clinical trials?
	You know, how many billionaires have I treated?
	How many celebrities have I treated?
	I'm a Malibu physician, you know.
	I treat outside the box, I innovate, but I also look at what's out there in the clinical trial world that could help my patient because ultimately, if you stop the innovations, you stop progress, you stop health care.
	And it doesn't help the person, the executive at pharma, when he becomes the patient, who is he gonna go to?
	You've killed off everyone that was innovating.
	And you've m given fear to every doctor.
	You know, I have the head of an academic center today that called me, her kid has COVID.
	She's scared of giving ivermectin.
	She's like, Am I going to lose my license if I write ivermectin?
	Like, you're a gastroenterologist.
	I mean, come on.
	We gotta be better.
	We gotta be more brave.
	The art of medicine needs to remain an art.
	So when it comes to, you know, the art and perhaps of refloralization, I like I really like this term.
	It's a very uh uh floral nice term for something that that maybe doesn't look as nice if you were to keep staring at it.
	But you you have had this case.
	I know that you're still working on publishing the research where you you know you did this with twins, and we know that you know the twin studies are very popular for a bunch of reasons because the genetics are identical.
	Um what happened?
	So um so from COVID and from doing that N of one, which took time, and then from trying to get this familial FMT, I had these kids that were basically coming in with autism.
	And I have a lot of patients that come to me that have tried so many things.
	And so this case was two twins with the mom flew in from Tennessee, and I felt bad for her, and I basically innovated.
	And but I said to her, I said, let me look at the microbiome.
	What was amazing about this case, and it's gonna be a breakthrough.
	I don't want to say too much because it's gonna be published in October at the American College of Gastro, but essentially we saw the identical out of trillions of microbes, we saw elevation, relative abundance of microbes elevated the same three phylum in both identical kids.
	And as we refloralize the gut, not with fecal transplant, but with methods, um, we basically noticed that those microbes disappeared and the good bacteria came on at the same time as speech started.
	So this was a breakthrough case, and it's gonna be a breakthrough for the FDA once they see that, and we're gonna use that.
	So we're gonna start doing familial fecal transplant with the FDA, but we're hoping that we can bring this other method after, you know, while we're doing familial fecal transplant to get the data to understand, because this could have been a fluke with these two kids, kids, but we want to try to reproduce these two kids to see if we can do this for other kids.
	And therefore, maybe run two protocols.
	One with familial FMT, fecal tran fecal microbiome transplant or intestinal microbiology transplant, and then another one with this protocol to kind of see can we do this more, you know, safer, better, less playing with poop, you know, because this doesn't play with poop.
	Well, and the the the other aspect is also that as we said at the beginning, everybody's different, right?
	And so just you I think this is actually kind of important.
	There isn't uh sort of uh solution when it comes to this.
	There isn't a microbiome, there's trillions of microbes, and like I gave you the example with the fungus, or it could be a fungal, you know, overgrowth, it could be a you know, even Dr. Feingold, who was the beginning, who basically said, let's try vancomycin, right?
	He said, let's try vancomycin for kids with autism.
	And he saw something with vancomycin.
	What he was seeing was a destruction of a microbiome and a suppression of microbes that secrete toxins, which decreased the aggressivity, the aggressivity of the kid, but did not restore the speech.
	But at least it gave a quality of life to the family to say, hey, our kid is not banging his head on the wall.
	And so vancomycin got us to this level, right?
	But vancomycin is not a permanent solution.
	Vancomycin, you know, wipes out the gut and puts you in a sterile and increases some microbes.
	Um, but there the solution is really to restore the gut to the way it was.
	And the challenge that we have is we do not know what it was before.
	So when you take a kid and he has a destroyed microbiome, you don't know what his fingerprint of his microbiome was before to reproduce him, right?
	It's kind of like destroying a house, and you're trying to reproduce the house, but you don't know what it looked like.
	You don't have the floor plan, you don't have the architecture before that was done on it.
	So it's the same thing with a kid, and you're right, everybody's different, so everybody may not need the same, but we need to be more precise.
	What I would like to see in the field of the microbiome and and with pharma is to get away from feces and to get into more precise work.
	In other words, this is a uh a compounding of microbes that this person needs, right?
	I think that's where I'd like to see.
	You know, something just kind of struck me though.
	If you're going to take some sort of therapy which is going to affect your gut biome, like for example, you mentioned antibiotics earlier.
	I don't know if it was obvious to people.
	You can basically nuke your gut.
	Correct.
	If you use heavy antibiotics or protracted use of antibiotics.
	So this creates its own set of problems, like in some cases C. diff and so forth.
	Could does it make sense to kind of, I don't know, put some on ice before you if you had do have to go into uh some sort of treatment, and then maybe that might be useful in the future.
	So I do that with some patients that I see have a spectacular microbiome and are super healthy.
	I say, you may want to save it.
	You know, I saved some of mine before COVID because I knew I was going to be on the front line, I was going to be exposed to COVID, and I wanted to make sure I had my original microbiome that I could go back to because I know the genetics of my family.
	Um so, and I know I want to go back to my personality in a way and what I can do.
	So I kind of wanted that.
	But yes, that's the future.
	Again, there's red tape with that as well.
	You need to have a uh license lab, you need to store it properly, you need to make sure it's the right stools.
	You don't want to give someone uh, you know, that's diseased a microbiome that was less than perfect.
	And you gotta also say, well, that person got diseased, is what they got was the beginning.
	Should I give them back the microbes that yes, they're taking antibiotics, but technically, you know, if you take antibiotics, you're supposed to bounce back.
	So your microbiome is bouncing back.
	If you're not bouncing back, there might be a problem with that microbiome.
	The original.
	Yeah, with the original.
	So, and it's very rare, by the way, and let me just say this to everyone it's very difficult to find a perfect microbiome.
	It is very difficult because everybody's doing everything.
	You know, you're drinking too much, you're killing your microbiome.
	Now, if you're lucky, it bounces back up and you've become resilient and you can tolerate the alcohol.
	You know, you apply a topical uh lotion that has some toxins in it that could destroy your microbiome as well.
	So everything we do affects the microbiome, and you count on your resilience to survive all those things.
	You know, people got vaccinated and got injured, but people got vaccinated and didn't get injured.
	What's the difference between those people?
	A resilient microbiome is what's the difference.
	You know, people that take antibiotics and get into C. diff.
	What's the difference with those People and the person that takes antibiotics and never gets C. diff resilience.
	So I think we need to look more carefully at the resilient factor of the microbiome, because that's what allows people to live on more than the presence or the absence of microbes.
	And like I said, there's trillions of microbes.
	We're just touching the surface.
	We're just, I'm telling you right now about C di about C. diff.
	I'm telling you right now about bifidobacteria.
	But what about the other bugs?
	You know, whenever someone tells me, you know, whenever there's there's always an arrogant physician that comes up like they know it all, right?
	And I always say to them, I go, what's Doria?
	Is that a good bug or is that a bad bug?
	What's Roseburia?
	Is that a good microbe or a bad microbe?
	And then they're like, what?
	Out of left field.
	But that's the reality, right?
	You know, the expression, you know, you don't know sh.t.
	Well, it does apply.
	You don't know the microbiome.
	If you don't know the microbiome and it's trillions of microbes, you gotta stay humble in medicine and you gotta stay humble as a human, because there's trillions of microbes out there, and if you start killing them groups by groups, eventually you kill the human.
	The microbiome to me is a look at humanity but at the microscopic world, right?
	You're looking at all these microbes, groups of microbes coming together to create a healthy human.
	You kill off the clostridium, you kill off the bifidobacteria, you kill off the fermic, that human's no longer able to metabolize sugar or to metabolize uh calcium, their mitochondria are dead, they're non-functional.
	So the microbiome, the balance of the microbiome directs that human because we're just a reservoir.
	When you look, when you go to Venezuela and you have a population that has Giardia in their guts, right?
	An American goes to Venezuela, gets diardia, will get diarrhea.
	A person in Venezuela that is living in that environment with giardia, they're fine, they're resilient.
	The African microbiome is different than the Amazon jungle than the Amish population in America.
	So what do all these microbial communities do?
	There's different regions and they basically all work the planet.
	The microbiome underneath the ground of the planet survived thanks to this diversity all around.
	So you have to look at your, you know, and I always tell my patients a phylum.
	What is a phylum?
	It's a group of microbes that share one thing in common.
	If you look at the African community, if you look at the Amazon jungle, they have a lot of phyla, a lot of groups of microbes that share one thing in common.
	Americans barely have three or four.
	Now we are globalizing the world by with our American ways, and we're making Africa look like America.
	So are we gonna decrease those phyla in um in Africa and therefore mimic America?
	And now we've lost groups of microbes that were supposed to sustain that you know African community.
	I'll I'll take it one step further.
	You take a person from the Amazon jungle that lives in the jungle, they've adapted to the Amazon.
	They've adapted to the jungle.
	I will go to the jungle probably because I live in the sterile environment, I'll get sick because I've not seen these microbes in my life.
	But now you start giving foods from America to the Amazon jungle.
	Guess what's gonna happen?
	You're gonna weaken the Amazon jungle, and they're not gonna be able to survive in their own environment.
	Now the microbiome of these Amazonians is gonna change in the Amazon.
	The culture, the fruits, the vegetable, the vegetation is now changing because you've you've kind of made it the same as the microbiome of America.
	So my interest with the microbiome is not just, hey, let's fix autism, let's showcase, you know, Parkinson's signature microbiome, let's showcase Alzheimer's.
	My interest is really preserving the microbiome of humanity to say, hey, Japan looks like this, China looks like this, Mexico looks like this, because that diversity needs to remain.
	But I also think the headline here, right?
	The thing that you're not mentioning is that all those conditions are actually treatable by affecting the microbiome, and that's been shown, right?
	And I don't know if everybody understands that.
	And not every person, and not every time.
	So here's here's the thing.
	When you say that, it gets the academic the academia to go, oh my God, she's talking cures, etc.
	You can't really say that until you show the data, right?
	We have anecdotal data that shows, you know, if you look at the studies from China, they've showed improvement of Parkinson's with fecal microbiota transplant.
	John Hopkins is going to start a study on that, right?
	So we're at the beginning of all this.
	Eventually we'll go back and say, oh my God, how archaic these humans were.
	They were practicing, you know, they were operating on a kidney instead of like changing the microbiome, right?
	I mean, like we're in the Star Trek era right now.
	I don't know if you saw that episode of uh Star Trek where you know the doctor gives a pill and he goes, he goes to a patient, he goes, kidney dialysis?
	How barbaric.
	Here, take this pill and call me in the morning.
	That's gonna be the future.
	We're not there yet.
	I mean, it took 62 years to get C. diff into the guidelines of speaker transplant.
	I think that's what I'd like to see, but right now we need to kind of bring humanity to us for them to listen so that we can advance and move forward.
	So we can't really say things like, well, there is cures of this and that, because we're shutting off the academia, the uh uh academic doctor who is basically, you know, within the box of I need this, this, and this for you to prove me that I need to pay attention to your experiment, right?
	Because we all have that gut feeling that says, hey, look at this study.
	It validates what I said.
	You know, I improve, I give raw milk or whatever, you know, and my gut is improved, but the raw milk could also have, you know, to the mind of a physician at Harvard, for example, he'll say, but wait a minute, raw milk has a lot of other microbes that this person could, it could affect that person, right?
	Because you're dealing with a population that is in a way immunosuppressed, lacking microbes, and now you're giving them a diverse, you know, product that could be, you know, clean, could not be clean, depends on the practices of the farm that you went to.
	So, you know, it's there's a lot of work that needs to be done.
	That's all I'm gonna say.
	Aaron Powell, you know, another thing but I guess we should say that there's potential in all these areas.
	Very real potential.
	Yes, right.
	That's again, and that's that's actually that's what I meant.
	This is certainly is not something that's being broadly done or explored, I understand.
	But the other thing that you mentioned, which I thought was really interesting, was uh I think you were suggesting that when your gut flora changes significantly, your personality might change significantly.
	I think you mentioned that, like you alluded to that a few times.
	Yes.
	So we've been talking.
	So we showed data of a signature microbiome in anxiety.
	Remember, COVID was people were very anxious during COVID.
	And whether it was from the media, whether it was from, you know, whatever, um, the the COVID itself or the treatment, people were very anxious with COVID.
	And um what we noticed with COVID was essentially people because they were anxious, we were able to test our microbiome and we were able to see a signature microbiome with anxiety.
	We gave a questionnaire which is a GAD score.
	Can I just jump in for a sec?
	When you say you saw signature, there were some commonalities in microbiome with everybody who is exhibiting anxiety.
	So we we gave it to the city of the city.
	So you understand.
	That's what I'm saying.
	We gave people a questionnaire.
	I worked with Dr. Sasha Bistritsky from use from UCLA.
	And basically, we gave a questionnaire which was a GAD questionnaire.
	Uh it's an anxiety score.
	You basically check box, check the box, like are you sleeping, you know, one to five best or not.
	And you get a score at the end.
	And then depending on the score, the the score dictates your anxiety level.
	Well we noticed is that the there was a huge correlation with a score that determines anxiety on the GAT questionnaire with a certain microbiome picture.
	And so we decided, we said, well, you know what?
	Maybe this is how people that have anxiety.
	One of the key f feature with anxiety was this loss of bifidobacteria.
	We then took the study to another level in bipolars.
	We said, let's look at bipolar disorders.
	And again, an absence of certain microbes and increase in certain microbes gave us this signature.
	Kind of like a formula.
	AB is is elevated, C D is down.
	So how do we bring back C and D?
	How do we bring it?
	Because the hypothesis is that if you fix that, you can help with the problem.
	That's the hypothesis, right?
	And that's exactly where I want to get pharma to say, hey, this is a hypothesis, let's test this out and give the opposite formula, right?
	And so what we did is we started looking at that for you know bipolar disorder, anxiety.
	Why?
	Because when you talk to doctors who do fecal transplant, they will tell you.
	You know, I had a case with a guy with suicidal, super anxious, suicidal psoriasis, C. diff, chronic UTI, and um, and basically I gave him fecal transplant from a stool bank from Dr. Alex Carootz, by the way, who Alex has done some amazing work in the in the world of and I want to acknowledge all these doctors because they've we wouldn't be at the microbiome level without the work of all these doctors.
	And um Alex Caroots basically um you know had a stool bank and he gave me a stool from the stool bank for this patient.
	I had tried giving him his wife's poop in the beginning as a transplant, it didn't work.
	And then I gave him this donor from Alex Carutz's lab and University of Minnesota, and basically the patient's suicidal ideation disappeared, chronic UTI disappeared, psoriasis disappeared, C diff disappeared.
	And to me, this case, I've yet to see the patient, it's been five years, he's doing amazing.
	And he and and we showed engraftment with that case.
	In other words, it latched on to those microbes.
	It's stuck, right?
	And it persisted in sticking, right?
	I I in fact I said to him, I said, don't ever go to univers to Minnesota because there's someone that's matching you better than your wife.
	But that's like a side joke.
	But Alex Carutz essentially uh that was a case that we discovered the right donor can change the mental status, the right donor can change the suicidal ideation, you know.
	And so whatever how was the donor chosen in this case?
	It was it was just serendipitous.
	It was really serendipitous.
	That's how research happens, you know, serendipitously.
	Um, you know, like I said, I picked the wife as a donor to begin with.
	Turned out he kept having C. diff.
	And by the way, this was a very interesting case for multiple levels.
	One he had diarrhea, but we kept testing him at the lab with the conventional test that we have for C. diff.
	And we kept finding he was negative, negative, negative.
	We never could prove he had C. diff.
	And finally, when I did, you know, genetic sequencing of the gut, and I saw it, I said, I gotta keep doing these, you know, lab tests from the conventional lab because that's what proves that he has C. diff.
	It took me 11 stool samples to prove that he had C. diff.
	On the 11th one, he finally had C. diff.
	I treated him for C this conventional, didn't it didn't succeed.
	He kept having diarrhea, and then we started considering, you know, it we treated him twice, and then we started considering the wife as a donor for C diff, and that didn't work.
	So then that's when I called Alex and I said, Can I have some stools?
	Well, you can't do that anymore because it's all kind of regulated, and Alex is doing his own work with um with uh Dr. Adams on autism.
	So, you know, back then you it was much easier to just call a physician that had a stool bank and say, Hey, can you get me the best stool donor?
	And why I like that and physician is because he's taking the history.
	He's getting from the history, you know, the worst mistake we we do is taking stools from a person we think is healthy, but really that person is not healthy.
	You come to find out the person was an alcoholic, the person is a drugie, the person is bipolar, you know, didn't tell you.
	So history taking of donors is very important, and that's an art on its own.
	How how do you determine this is given everything you've just said about diversity and so forth?
	You It also sounds like you've been on this quest to find the perfect microbiome or that that actually exists as a concept.
	So what what is that?
	It's not defined yet.
	It's not something, there's all these lab tests out there, stool tests that tell you, oh, you have this microbes, and people kind of like you know, put their money on these stool tests.
	And when you look at these stool tests, and actually it was a study from Scott Jackson showed that um these tool tests are not validated, they're not reproducible.
	You know, different labs show different, and I even tested myself these labs, right?
	Because I would have never opened pergenobiome if there was a lab out there that could give me valid, verified reproducible data.
	You want to make sure that when you test your stool sample, you get the same data.
	If I show one day you have acromencia in your stool, like 10% elevation of acromentia, you want to retest the same stool sample in diff, you know, in a different lab, and you want to show the 10% acromentia.
	If you show that one lab is giving you acromentia, but another lab you have elevated bacteroides, that's not valid.
	That's not reproducible, right?
	So when people come to me and they're they say, Well, doctor, I have zero bifidobacteria.
	How do you know?
	Well, I tested.
	Well, how do you know what they tested at what level of depth of the microbiome did they test?
	And did they test your food that you ate last night, or are they testing your baseline of your microbiome?
	So there's multi factorial reasons why the testing itself needs to be perfect in order to get that ver reproducibility of that data.
	What I showed with you know the the vaccine the vaccines before and after, you have to have a validated reproducible assay to do that, right?
	Because otherwise you can't really show the data if one day you have acromentia that's high, one day you have bifidobacteria, one day you don't have bifidobacteria.
	I mean, you gotta have some kind of way of knowing, and there's different pipelines that we do when we analyze the stools to see what's elevated, what's really elevated, and and we retest, right?
	So because we have to reproduce the data.
	Um so when you look at that and you look at the stools and you kind of say, what's going on there?
	What is the perfect microbiome, right?
	You're not gonna understand these microbes unless you try to remove these microbes and see if you change the disease.
	With autism, for example, Dr. Feingold, who wrote the book on anaerobic infections, basically started with the idea Clostridium perfyngens is the bacteria behind autism.
	Then he said, nope, wait, there's the sulfavibrio is the bacteria.
	Somebody else comes along and says, no, it's this other microbe.
	So is it the sulfur vibrio?
	Is it Clostradium perfingans?
	I found Lactobacillus animalis was elevated, my kid with autism, right?
	I found bacteroides plebeius.
	Is it?
	Is it one micro?
	So here we are all different, and here we are, every disease has a different microbe that causes that predisposition.
	Why?
	That's where we need to be.
	So how do you understand what is a perfect microbiome?
	You can't really.
	You're practicing the art of medicine.
	You're practicing taking a history from the patient and saying, let me find clues of what you did that got me here.
	It's plain detective, right?
	It's like finding the murderer who was the murderer at the end, right?
	You're trying to find the bug that caused the problem in a trillion.
	So it's like a needle in a haystack, and then you're trying to fix to remove that needle gently without disrupting the haystack, right?
	So that's where we are in the microbiome.
	We can't really say this is a perfect microbiome.
	We can guess of what a perfect balance should be, could be.
	I see.
	But right now you're kind of following your hunch.
	You're taking from people who, for all intents and purposes, are really healthy.
	I for after taking a history, yeah, and and and and doing questionnaires that basically say, okay, this person's not anxious.
	If a person is anxious, that's already that person is not qualified for a microbiome to be a donor.
	Okay.
	If a person is bipolar, they don't qualify.
	If they have anything whatsoever, if they're taking medications, they do not qualify.
	So figure out Who is the person that's not taking medicine, that doesn't drink alcohol, that is not bipolar, that is not depressed, that is not anxious.
	You know, it's very difficult.
	Those people are kind of that needle in the haystack.
	But people are desperate.
	You know, they listen to these interviews and you know, what like COVID, you know, those were desperate times.
	They listened to all these doctors out there and they were trying all sorts of things to save themselves.
	Um so it's very important to realize when we get into the it's one thing to take ivermectin, for example, it's another thing to do stools and transfer stools because unfortunately, majority of people will not have will not find the perfect microbiome.
	And the majority of people will find a microbiome that probably may not be compatible with them.
	That's another problem.
	So you know, I think even if you have, you know, very closely genetic matched people.
	That's not maybe, but there's so many.
	Here's the thing.
	Microbes, you know, the person that is resilient, do they have microbes that are secreting toxins that could harm the person that is not?
	When we do, when we pick donors, we do a whole slew of blood work and stool test, especially stool test.
	There are three tests that the FDA requires us to do because there were two cases.
	I mean, obviously there's been thousands and thousands of fecal transplants done out there, uh, but there's been two cases where um people died.
	You know, and so unfortunately, you have to kind of like put your guards on when that happens.
	You have to go back and say, wait a minute, I don't want that on my shift, right?
	Um, I compare fecal transplant or intestinal microbiotic transplant to blood transfusion.
	And and here's the thing.
	Before we did blood transfusion, we didn't even have a CBC or hemoglobin.
	We didn't know what we were looking at.
	People remember the days of George Washington, they would fix a virus by removing the blood of George Washington.
	I think that's probably what killed him, because they removed so much blood from him during a virus when that was not the way to do it, right?
	So they had no idea back then what a CBC was.
	They had no idea what a hemoglobin was.
	They had no idea that a hemoglobin below seven, you have to transfuse, but a hemoglobin above seven, you don't need to transfuse, you just need to, you know, give iron and and good nutrition to the patient, right?
	It's the same thing with fecal transplant.
	We don't even have a marker.
	Now, is the biphylobacteria a marker?
	Is the bacteroides a marker?
	We don't know yet.
	We need to do those studies to say does the biphyto bacteria correlate with this disease, does disease, does disease?
	And now we have a marker.
	Once you have a marker in the microbiome that you can like say, okay, let's look at these microbes, they seem to be out of whack.
	Let's let's try to fix them.
	Then you can start saying, okay, well, I need these microbes to offset these microbes that are missing.
	And then from there, you have to kind of look at the stools and say, well, this one would not fit with this one because this one has a bacteria that's toxic that could kill this one, right?
	So it's again the same principle as blood.
	You're not going to give a blood transfusion if you don't test for hepatitis C or HIV, right?
	Because we've learned that if you give blood to hemophiliacs, when we gave blood to hemophiliacs, they got hepatitis C because but we didn't know then, right?
	So this is why you don't stop research.
	You keep looking for answers over and over again.
	At the microbiome space, we're very early.
	We're 10 miles out of hundreds, you know.
	This is not of my lifetime.
	This is gonna be of, you know, hundreds of years, probably.
	Of course, with AI, we may be speeding it up, but you know, AI has its own little problems.
	So we got to be careful with AI as well.
	So there seems to be, you know, quite a bit of open-minded thinking around health, especially preventative medicine, but of course, in treatment of all sorts, and there's this huge focus on autism right now.
	You know, what would be your recommendations in terms of you know, approaching the autism question from through the biome, for example, or more broadly?
	I mean, this is something that I'd love to work With this, you know, um this government to kind of start seeing and not only this government but probably with with governments from around the world as well to because autism, like I said, affects everyone, every country has kids with autism.
	If we could come together to help these kids, what a great thing that would be.
	You know, I I think it is I think the this is the right time to start that focus.
	I think what COVID did is it removed our trust, removed our trust in the agencies, removed our trust in the government, removed our trust from pharmaceutical companies.
	I think I'm the right person to kind of bring it all together to say, look, you want me to trust you, then let's start doing the research properly where we look at the microbiome, where we understand these diseases properly, where we work together.
	You know, the the guidelines of that that um that drive research are ICH GCP guidelines.
	They were created not just for America, they were created around the world.
	So we all have, as clinical trials doctor, we come together with doctors around the world.
	Part of the reason that I stepped into the pandemic was because I knew I had colleagues in Italy that were doing clinical trials.
	I had colleagues in Germany that were doing clinical trials.
	I could call Italy and say, what's been working for you?
	And then I could apply it for my patients and my population here in America.
	I think the same way that research joins all of us, we need to start joining together to understand and to fix these kids.
	Because here's the big problem.
	One in 12 and a half boys in California have autism.
	When are we gonna start paying attention when one in one kid is autistic?
	And if not now, when we need to start now, in order for our kids and our children to survive because our children is our future.
	And the only way to fix that is to all come together as human beings for the goodness of our children and the generations in the future.
	Well, Dr. Sabine Hazan, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
	Thank you, and thank you again for having me.
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