Thyroid, Candida and More; Lab Testing Insights: 83
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In this episode, Dr. Michael Biamonte discusses his background in nutrition and naturopathy, as well as his interest in understanding the role of nutrition in health. He explains the importance of lab tests and how they can provide valuable insights.
Dr. Biamonte focuses on thyroid function and the challenges of diagnosing and treating thyroid issues. He also delves into the topic of Candida overgrowth and the symptoms and causes associated with it. Additionally, he shares his experience in using computer software to analyze patient data and develop personalized treatment plans.
If you're interested in optimizing health with labs, Dr. Biamonte provides valuable insights and resources. Connect with Dr. Biamonte at www.health-truth.com, on his Facebook page and on YouTube.
Takeaways
- Lab tests can provide valuable insights into a person's health and help identify underlying issues.
- Thyroid function is often misunderstood, and traditional medical approaches may not adequately address the complexity of thyroid issues.
- Candida overgrowth is a common problem caused by factors such as antibiotics and medications, and it can have a wide range of symptoms.
- Computer software can be a powerful tool for analyzing patient data and developing personalized treatment plans.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction and Background
03:28 Focus on Lab Tests and Analysis
07:16 Understanding Thyroid Function
13:28 Identifying and Treating Candida Overgrowth
29:17 Using Computer Software for Data Analysis
36:49 Working with Dr. Biamonte and Contact Information
Watch on YouTube
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Episode Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:01.288)
Hey everyone, welcome back to the Heal Nourish Grow podcast. Today I have Dr. Michael Biamonte with me, and we are going to chat about a variety of topics. One that is kind of interesting and unusual that he said they just started learning about recently. Anyway, before we get to that, I would love it if you could just tell everyone in your own words a little bit about yourself and how did you get into this whole topic of nutrition.
drbiamonte (00:28.554)
Well, let's see, I'm a clinical nutritionist. I'm a naturopath. I'm certified in New York State, which is where that's where my license is. And I got into nutrition because I was very curious as to why medical doctors poo-pooed it.
I had a relative who had cancer, who was ill, and I kept asking the doctors, well, what about vitamins and what about, this is back in the 70s, I said, what about Leutriol that I've heard about from Mexico? And they said, no, well, that's all baloney. None of that works. None of that's good. But I said, but couldn't, wouldn't giving him vitamins help his body even if it doesn't cure the cancer? Wouldn't it still help him be healthier to try to?
fight the cancer a little longer and maybe live longer and they just poo-hooed it. And around that time I started running marathons. So there was a great interest around, and this is again in the 70s. So this is all these things were in their infancy back then. Billy Rogers was first winning the New York Marathon. Carlton Frederick's was on the radio talking about vitamins and talking about the dangers of too much sugar. Adele Davis had her book out. So.
this was all kind of new. And I wanted to know why these doctors were so adamant that all this stuff was a waste of time. So the more I started studying it, the more I started to tweak on the fact that, gee, you know, if all this nutrition stuff actually works the way they say it does, I could see this being a problem for doctors and drug companies. I could see where they wouldn't want this to be around. And…
Cheryl McColgan (02:11.584)
Yeah, that's some conspiracy thing you're throwing out there a little bit, right?
drbiamonte (02:15.79)
Yeah, well, it's common sense though, in a way. I mean, it looked like with Candida, people are constantly asking me, why is it that medical doctors don't recognize Candida? Why don't they know even a quarter about it, a quarter of what you know about it? I said, well, can you imagine if a medical doctor came out and said, gee, people, you know those antibiotics I've been giving you? Well,
Cheryl McColgan (02:18.576)
It's all of the money, right?
drbiamonte (02:41.634)
That's really what caused this candida that you've been fighting with for 20 years that's caused you not to be able to continue in school, lose your job, go on disability. I said, can you imagine the lawsuits that we'd have going back and forth? So yeah, follow the money works. Follow the money works.
Cheryl McColgan (02:55.475)
Yes.
Cheryl McColgan (02:59.572)
Yeah. And so you got so interested. I love that you got into this because, you know, it wasn't making intuitive sense to you. You saw somebody in your life that was struggling with their health and you're thinking, okay, well vitamins, minerals, something's got to help this. What you put in your body has got to be of some use. Plus you're into the sports and marathoning. And when you do that, you learn, you know, you need to fuel your body in a certain way. So when you went to school for this, what was it that you decided to focus on? Like what was your primary area of focus at that time?
drbiamonte (03:28.662)
Well, I was very analytical when I was young, maybe more so than now. Now I tend to be a bit more open-minded, but back then I was very black and white about things. So my major in nutrition school was interpretation of lab tests, because I felt that lab tests was something definitive. And it showed you black or white, what was going on. And it gave you a marker that you could come back to.
Because later on, after I graduated school, my first gig, so to speak, was working with engineers at Grumman Aerospace, who were all systems analysis engineers. They were all people very well trained in aerospace physiology, but they were engineers. So they truly taught me the true scientific method, which an engineer works, that's the engineer's Bible. So you have a parameter, right? You see the parameter, the parameter's incorrect.
You do something to tweak it, you come back and watch the parameter again. So if it gets better, you know, you were right. If it doesn't get better, you know, you need to tweak it again. Something else is the reason it's very, it's common sense in a lot of ways. But I felt lab work was the thing to concentrate on. That's what would, um, separate me from the other people out there. And I, so I studied, um, Jim Seema's work and, um, uh, Ken Brockman, Ken Brockman was, um,
a barnstorming chiropractor who was using kinesiology to further understand blood work. So what Brockman would do was an example. Brockman would be kinesiologically testing somebody and if he found their anterior pituitary was weak, he'd look in the blood work and he'd try to find something about the blood work that could relate to their anterior pituitary. And then when he would fix the anterior pituitary, he'd go back and see if the blood work corrected.
And Ken Brockman did this for years with all blood chemistries. Like anything, like if you went to get a standard blood work up, and we called it an SMA 24 or 26, or a ChemPak, with a CBC or WBC. It's pretty much standard routine blood work. So he perfected this in that blood work. And that's one of the things we eventually then used, we incorporated in our computer model of the human body was a lot of Brockman's work and Jim Seema's work.
Cheryl McColgan (05:58.016)
Very interesting. I love that. But so, you know, like you said, it makes a lot of sense and it's very, a very engineer way to approach things like let's try to fix this and then see what that matches to. And yet for some reason, that's not how a lot of traditional medicine approaches things. They kind of go off on here's a symptom. This is the drug that we have that can treat that. You know, that's about all they think of.
drbiamonte (06:19.598)
Well, yeah, unfortunately, traditional medicine doesn't really always have to do with science. Traditional medicine has become, doctors nowadays are becoming advanced salesmen from the drug companies. They have the salesmen from the drug company come and tell them what the latest drug is and what it treats, and they become extensions of that. They don't have to do that much with science, unfortunately.
Cheryl McColgan (06:47.688)
which is why it's so great when you can find practitioners that are more functionally inclined or that do things with labs. I think your work is really interesting in that way, which kind of leads me to one of the things I was reading about your background and I thought was an interesting topic because I've heard so many people talk about it in many different ways, but you have this piece about learning your labs with thyroid. And I think that this is an area where people really struggle because
they'll go to their doctor, they have some of these classic symptoms, low body temperature in the morning, which somehow everybody seems to know about except for the doctors and they'll have, you know, some other symptoms like being tired or having trouble losing weight. And it just seems to be sort of a quote unquote classic thyroid symptoms. And then yet when you go get some labs from your doctor, they'll be like, well, everything's normal. So I think there's some more.
subtle things maybe there that you could speak to and maybe give some people some information about you know how should they be going about learning whether their thyroid really is you know if it is truly fine or if there are some things that they could do to better optimize the function there.
drbiamonte (08:00.17)
I became interested in thyroid and adrenal function because of my specialty being Candida. That's the one thing that a Candida ravages in the person is their thyroid and adrenal function. You can be pretty much guaranteed that in any Candida patient that you treat, who you treat successfully, the very first thing you have to do after you have handled their Candida and you've repopulated their biome correctly is deal with their adrenal and thyroid dysfunction.
And unfortunately, blood work can really lead you down the wrong path because blood work is very, let's say, what they test typically for thyroid is not enough data to really base anything on. The typical doctor looks at your TSH or maybe your T4 and that's all they look at. The best test, the least expensive test for your thyroid function.
is your body temperature. Because everything that your thyroid metabolism does is the end result is your body temperature. That's the whole reason your body produces thyroid hormones to keep your body temperature at a certain level. That's the end result. So if your temperature is low, if it's below 97.8 consistently, then you have functionally low thyroid. And now what you need to do now is reverse engineer.
to find out why it's low. You already know that it's low, your temperature's low, it's a fact. Ideally, your temperature should be above 98.2, 97.8 to 98.2 is a gray area. If it's consistently below 97.8, your thyroid's too low. So now you have to find out why. So here is what I've done in my thyroid programs is I've combined the work of three people. One is Dr. Eric Rindt.
whose website you can find. He is the expert on using your body temperature to understand thyroid and adrenal function. The next person is Dr. David L. Watts, who's the owner of Trace Elements, Inc. His laboratory has been performing hair mineral tests, and they've been studying the mineral ratios between different minerals for like the last 35 years. And he has come up with the ratios that are involved with your thyroid hormone receptors. So…
drbiamonte (10:26.442)
Essentially what Dr. Watts has proven is that calcium and copper act as governors or suppressants to your thyroid hormone activity. This has nothing to do with the level of hormone in your blood. When your thyroid hormone goes to your tissues and goes into your cells to work, calcium and copper are there to down regulate it so it doesn't do an excess, let's say. Zinc and potassium are there to upregulate it. So the…
the ratios of calcium to potassium and zinc to copper give you how sensitive your thyroid hormone receptors are gonna be. So if you could have excess thyroid hormone in your blood, it doesn't make any difference because if those receptors are blocking it, you're gonna be functionally still low thyroid. The other person's work that I've incorporated is Weston Childs, who's been studying thyroid for years and years and years. And you can find him on social media, very interesting.
the data he's come up with on blood tests. He looks at things that the average doctor would never think of. For instance, he has equated leptin levels with thyroid hormone, and very importantly also is insulin levels. Excess insulin suppresses your T3 activity. And so he's put together a blood test that goes through all of these parameters. Like he looks at reverse T3, he looks at T3.
which a lot of doctors don't do, but he also looks at a lot of other things which can be antagonistic or synergistic to the thyroid hormones and how they work. And it's not all about the level in your blood. Although I will admit, most labs have, their reference ranges for T3 are incorrect. Your T3 should be more up around 3.5, and a lot of labs don't go that high on it. But.
that what's most important is the interrelationship between all of these things in terms of how they work or work against your thyroid hormone the level in your blood is that is only a small part of it you can have totally normal levels of thyroid hormone per your doctor and yet be totally functionally low thyroid because as i said earlier they don't understand your temperatures they don't understand the mineral ratios in your body and how that affects the thyroid hormone and they don't understand things like insulin
drbiamonte (12:47.998)
If your fasting insulin is high, it depresses your thyroid activity. They certainly don't look at reverse T3, which is a huge problem. And again, the labs will tolerate much higher levels of reverse T3 than are really correct. Labs will tell you if your reverse T3 is 25, that's okay. But we have found that's not true. It needs to be more around 10.
So when you have discrepancies with labs, that makes this even more complicated. That makes the doctor even more right in his wrongness.
Cheryl McColgan (13:24.332)
So how do, knowing all these factors that can be used to determine thyroid function, I think the temperature is a really interesting one because have you heard the same stat that's something like, just the average body temperature in general through the whole population has gone down over the years. That's something that I've heard recently. Can you corroborate or not on that?
drbiamonte (13:46.067)
How could it not, if you look at how people are living, you look at the food people are eating, you look at all the drugs they're on, just prescription drugs alone, when you look at the effect of a lot of prescription drugs on thyroid activity, there's no way it couldn't be dropping.
Cheryl McColgan (14:03.736)
Okay, so knowing that and knowing that there probably is a level of undiagnosed thyroid issues out there, how can people go about finding a doctor that looks, you know, how do they find a doctor that looks at all these more progressive markers? Because in the past, I've had this thing, I've definitely had low body temperature for a very long time. And I've had doctors, you know, look at my thyroid, the traditional doctors look at that before and they're like,
everything's normal and yet I feel like…
drbiamonte (14:34.082)
They're right. Everything that they're looking at from their perspective is normal, but they don't look out of the box because most of them, once they get out of medical school, they don't open a book or a journal up for the next 50 years. Maybe next lifetime they might do that, but not in this lifetime. They're done pretty much. They don't learn. That's the problem. You don't see them going to continuing education seminars that often. It's only those that are trying to branch into another field.
Cheryl McColgan (14:48.696)
Thank you.
Cheryl McColgan (15:00.512)
So how do people find somebody that, right. So how do people find it?
drbiamonte (15:03.946)
Look on social media. Go to social media, look for doctors who are writing articles about things. That's the best way. That's the only way I know of it. That's how I found other people that I've worked with is on social media and seeing what they're saying and what type of articles they're writing and what they're talking about. Because other than that, well, other than that, you can go to the health food store and ask there if they know practitioners.
drbiamonte (15:32.567)
I would say that would be…
Cheryl McColgan (15:32.861)
Yeah, because it's a challenge. It's challenging even functional doctors, finding ones that specialize in certain things, it's always a challenge. So someday that'd be a great business idea for somebody is to get kind of a black book of progressive doctors with their different specialties.
drbiamonte (15:53.538)
You know, I actually think over the years, from time to time, someone has come out with us with something like that. But I've never really followed it through. I know I've been asked to join such publications. But I really don't know what's ever happened in the long range. But yeah, it is difficult. That's why a plus point could be the person's website. See what they talk about, see what their articles, read their articles. I know that's how a lot of people find me, is because they find excerpts of my articles online.
and then they eventually go to my website and they start reading and then it all makes sense because then they start seeing what was left out in their treatment.
Cheryl McColgan (16:31.656)
Right. And I do find that podcasts are actually a really good resource for all of this sort of thing, too. I know that some of the ones that you've spoken on before and ones that I listen to and that get to be known as kind of more progressive, they often have people on that just either have different ideas or can point you to resources to read more about these things for yourself so that you're not just stuck with the traditional medical model.
drbiamonte (16:58.367)
That's a good point.
Cheryl McColgan (17:01.548)
So we talked about the thyroid and obviously there's a lot of factors involved in that. And so maybe like looking for these out of the box practitioners going to your website, reading the resources there more about thyroid. But you mentioned your specialty is actually Candida. Do you feel like that there are more people dealing with that than maybe they even know? And are there things that people could be on the lookout for to know whether they might be, you know, struggling with Candida and not even know it?
drbiamonte (17:30.954)
And usually at any given time about 30 to 40 percent of the population has Candida overgrowth.
Cheryl McColgan (17:38.22)
Wow, that's a lot.
drbiamonte (17:40.262)
And primarily people get Candida overgrowth from antibiotics and other medications. It's iatrogenic, it's doctor induced. So what I tell people to do is if people are curious as to whether or not they have Candida, you look for the basic symptoms of it, which would be bloating, gas, digestive discomfort, constipation, diarrhea, cognitive problems.
rashes, indigestion, allergies. There's a whole list of prominent symptoms the Candida patient has. But kind of what's more important is looking at a timeline, developing a timeline. And go back to find a point in your life when you were healthy and you had no real problems. And then slowly come forward to the point where you started developing a lot of problems. Then go back slightly and look to see what was going on.
before you started getting sick? Did you take a lot of antibiotics? Were you in an accident where they had to give you prednisone, cortisone? Did you take chemotherapy for some cancer perhaps that was being treated? Because something has had to have triggered the candida. And usually what triggers, because you have to remember candida is a microbiome imbalance. Your friendly bacteria dies off, the friendly bacteria is what controls candida.
So once that friendly bacteria is compromised, then the candida starts to grow. And candida is a very slow progressive problem. People can have it for 10, 20, 30 years. It doesn't go away by its own. It only gets better or changes. I'm sorry, it gets worse or changes. So if a person can say, well, you know, about six months before I started having all these problems, I was on these antibiotics, now they're onto something. If you can equate…
Unfortunately, it isn't that you take the antibiotic and then that next day you have Candida with all the symptoms. It's not that easy. So, because it gradually develops. But if you can equate on a timeline that a few months before you started to develop your core symptoms or problems, that something, you did something or something happened that would have affected your intestinal bacteria, there's now a good chance, especially if you have a lot of the symptoms of Candida, that that's what your problem is.
Cheryl McColgan (20:00.756)
And then once people know that they have Candida, what's sort of some of the steps does it really require working with a practitioner? Are there things that people can do on their own to start to work on the Candida getting under control or to improve their symptoms?
drbiamonte (20:15.766)
Here's where we enter the maze. Because the first thing the person who says, well, I have Candida, they're gonna go online. They're gonna find Candida forums and Candida boards that they're gonna talk to other people. They'll compare their symptoms, their situation, and it will either confirm that they have it or perhaps make them a bit skeptical that maybe they do because they're not the model case like all these other people. But then they're gonna get hit with all the social media on Candida, all the home remedies.
Cheryl McColgan (20:18.232)
Hehehe
drbiamonte (20:46.878)
And the home remedies really don't work. They can help for a while, but they really don't work. And the primary reason why the home remedies don't work is because candida is very mutative. And when you take anything, whether it's prescription or herbal or natural, whatever we want to call it, to try to kill the candida for more than 21 days in a row, the candida mutates, it becomes drug-resistive, and it switches species. So a person will start off taking…
3 lakh or whatever the problem the product is initially they'll get better They'll write testimonies how great the product is if you follow them for the next couple of months. They're gonna relapse Because the candida is gonna mutate against that product and come back
drbiamonte (21:33.238)
And that's what one of the major problems is. I would say the next major problem is the probiotic scam, I'm gonna call it. If you listen to the companies that talk about probiotics, you would think that if you had Candida and you took probiotics, it would go away. But that's not true. If that was true, I would be playing golf half the time, rather than seeing 60 to 70 patients a week with Candida. It doesn't work.
Cheryl McColgan (21:54.444)
Hehehehe
drbiamonte (21:59.894)
And there's a very simple reason why. Theoretically, probiotics protect you against Candida. That's true when they say that. But what they're not telling you is that once the Candida is gone, I'm sorry, once the Candida is established and the probiotics are unseeded, so to speak, the probiotics can't come back until you remove the Candida. It's like musical chairs, you see? You've gotta remove and then replace. If you don't ever remove the Candida, the Candida keeps repelling the probiotics.
and it stops them from re-inoculating your intestinal tract. It just repels them, like when you were a kid and you had magnets and you were playing with the different polarities on the magnet. The one magnet pushing the other one away, that's essentially what happens. So they're gonna start hitting into all of this, unfortunately. They're gonna see a lot of things that are gonna be very helpful or hopeful and then when they try it, it's gonna fail. And they're very typical that they go from doctor to doctor.
By the time a lot of patients come to me, they know more about Candida than most of the doctors do. Trial and error in their case. How I learned what I learned about Candida, the data that's in my book, The Candida Chronicles, which you can get on Amazon, is a lot of that data came from listening to people, hearing what they did, what didn't work, and then taking that information and going and hitting the textbooks on mycology and fungus and yeasts.
and figuring out why that didn't work with the data they gave me. It was obvious it didn't work, so there's got to be a reason. So again, as I used the term earlier, it's reverse engineering. What happened with people? So I learned from my patients' experience what worked and didn't work.
Cheryl McColgan (23:46.904)
So it sounds like it definitely would be a case where this might be good to work with, not just a practitioner, but somebody who's very experienced with Candida. And without giving away all the secrets in your book, it sounds like, you know, it's going to be a thing like you might need to do something for a couple weeks and then change.
drbiamonte (23:56.67)
Oh, no, no. I have no problem. I have no problem with anybody talking about what's in the book. What's in the book is the is the way to get rid of Candida. I learned it the hard way. It took me 20 years to finally say, well, this is what's really going on. Because I kept wanting to do with the with the vitamin companies are telling me to do you see, and in this in this field, unfortunately,
Vitamin companies and nutritional companies are no better in certain ways than the pharmaceutical companies there's every major vitamin company we work with has a rep who comes to you and they tell you just like they do with the drug companies and the medical doctors here's our new supplement this does this and this and then it's up to you and practice to use it and see whether or not this is true or the methodology is right or wrong and I kept wanting to look for an easy way an easy solution
and listen to these people, but I couldn't do it after a while because it didn't work. And it was like, who am I fooling here? Now this is not working. So I had to listen to the patient of why it didn't work and then go back and figure it out. And some of the key things that I talk about in the book is number one, probiotics don't work until you first remove the candida. The second is you must rotate the antifungals that you use. If you don't switch the antifungals around every few days,
that your candida is just going to become drug-resistant. They're going to stop working. The next thing is that there's a list of vitamins and nutrients which feed candida and make it worse. There's another list which stop the antifungals from working. People don't want to believe this, but what I tell the person who doesn't want to believe this is go get the inside insert to a box of ni-statin.
or ketoconazole, which are two very popular antifungal drugs, and read the mechanism of action. When you read on ketoconazole, ketoconazole works by blocking Candida's uptake of vitamin D. That's how it kills Candida. It stops Candida from getting vitamin D. So now do you think a Candida patient is gonna benefit from taking vitamin D if this drug kills it by blocking the vitamin D?
drbiamonte (26:16.338)
Let's look at niestatin. Niestatin works by blocking Candida's ability to absorb iron. So now I gotta be thinking, Candida must need vitamin D and iron to live. So am I gonna, is vitamin D or iron gonna be good to give a Candida patient? And yet the paradox in this is so many Candida patients are anemic. Why? The Candida's taking their iron. So the doctor wants to help them, wants to give them iron. What happens? The Candida gets worse.
Cheryl McColgan (26:38.783)
Mmm.
Cheryl McColgan (26:44.556)
Very interesting.
drbiamonte (26:46.21)
These are the pitfalls the patients are gonna come up against. And luckily for them, I've already done it the wrong way for many, many years to the point where I then learned by default what the right way was. They can just get my book and save themselves a lot of trouble. In fact, buy two copies, one for the patient and one for their doctor.
Cheryl McColgan (27:04.936)
Right, that makes a lot of sense too, because part of the trouble with all of this stuff is getting the word out there. And like you said, maybe if one of these people that haven't kept up with everything had their patient bring in something that really helped them, maybe they would maybe learn something new.
drbiamonte (27:20.566)
Doctors tend to be very stubborn. They can be very dogmatic. And don't get me wrong, some of my best friends are medical doctors, but I joke all the time, what does MD stand for? Is that mental deficient? Or I'm not clear on that. But they'll be the first sometimes to tell you stay away from doctors. Doctors will make you sick. It's doctors can be very, they can't be wrong a lot of times. They're very stuck in being assertive and right.
So when you try to teach that new dog old tricks, it sometimes doesn't work. You have to be very subtle with the doctor when you're trying to show him something. Because he's the authority, you see. So when you try to come up against what he's telling you, it's usually not gonna work. So you have to be very subtle. But that's the problem, doctors don't wanna learn new things. The why I've been doing this for years, well, how many people have you helped? Well, I'm not really sure about that. Well, maybe.
You take a look at that and see if it's working.
Cheryl McColgan (28:21.2)
Yeah. And that's such a challenge with our medical system in general, which unfortunately, I don't know if there's an easy answer to that, but.
drbiamonte (28:28.706)
Well, the medical system is based on a few rules. Number one, don't kill the patient. Number two, don't cure the patient. If you kill him or you cure him, he's not there to buy your prescription. That's what the medical system is actually based on. Unfortunately, but true.
Cheryl McColgan (28:45.512)
Yeah, and we're back to follow the money, unfortunately.
drbiamonte (28:49.89)
Yes, but I'm back to follow the money. That's true
Cheryl McColgan (28:53.784)
So before we move on for the day, because I want to make sure I respect your time, I am really curious to hear more about the computer software program that you're involved with. And I think this must have maybe come out of some of your work with the engineers that you talked about. But I'd love for you to share how you're using computer software to analyze some of the data that you've gotten from your patients over the years.
drbiamonte (29:17.858)
When I got out of college, with all the data I amassed on interpretation of blood work, I wanted to come up with a way to do it where it would be standardized. So I was, and this is back in 1984, so I was looking for people who worked with computers, and what I wanted to do was put together a program where we would enter the parameters from the blood work or a hair mineral test or a test like the organic acid test, enter the data and the computer would just automatically go through a series of algorithms.
and then come out with what was wrong and what supplements the person needed to take. This way it would be standardized. So I was going around Long Island, passing out my business cards, and I was in a health food store and I was telling the woman there that this is what I was trying to do, and she told me, well, you have to go speak to Dr. Santoro because he's already doing this. He already has a computer that's doing this. So I called this doctor up and I found out that Dr. Robert Santoro…
I'm sorry to say the late Robert Santoro was an aerospace physiologist at Grumman Who had developed the life support systems on the lunar module? That was that the thing that landed on the moon the bug like thing He developed the life support systems in there and he was also a naturopath. He was an aerospace physiologist and a naturopath and I spoke to him. He invited me over to see what he what he was doing. I was just blown away because His son was a PhD in computer language
His son had set up a Fortran, it's called Fortran computer language, which is basically table driven. Instead of you writing up a whole program, you have tables which have different algorithms. So this was ideal for what we were doing because the more you learn about the body, you have to put more data in and you can't keep rewriting the program. So with the Fortran language, you just inserted tables where you found something new.
So if you found that B12 did something different other than what we know, it was just a series of steps you add to that rather than having to redo the whole thing. And so I worked with him for quite a few years. And what we did was essentially take Harper's biochemistry and Guyton's physiology book and load them into this computer in a way where it could re-simulate someone's body. And then we put all the data from Dr. Brockman and Jim Seema and all the other…
drbiamonte (31:41.394)
more avant-garde scientists, we put all that data in there. And then we had vitamin companies that were helping us, Neutral West, VM, Nutri, Metagenics, Neutrodyne, all of these companies were helping us. And they would give us product information, which we loaded into a product module. So the computer would get your test results.
and it would do a mock-up of everything your body was doing. It would simulate all your biochemical pathways, your hormones, your physiology, everything that was known to man at that time. It would re-simulate that and then it'd find where it failed. So if something failed, it would then go to the product module and find what nutrient or what nutritional formula was needed to fix that.
drbiamonte (32:32.306)
And then the more times you would have this run on you, the computer had a retest module. So it would go back and it was look at your previous tests.
So this is how it works. And to my knowledge, there's still nothing even like this because it's using, back then it was using this, um, these simpler forms of artificial intelligence, which by, by now, by now what we have, um, blows away what we started with would put the work that's been done, but it's still based on the same concept. The computer can look at your lab work and it can tell, it can figure out what's happening. One story I can tell you, we had a patient.
Cheryl McColgan (33:03.793)
Oh, I can imagine.
drbiamonte (33:14.151)
And the computer indicated to us, and see the computer can't, you can't talk in terms of disease using the computer system. The commentary that it gives you is only physiology because you could then be accused of practicing medicine without a license if it comes out and says, talks pathology. So the computer would just quote Guyton or Harper's Biochemistry or whatever would quote it.
And on this one person, it was explaining that the person's hyposalal stalk, which is a part of your spine that goes into your brain that vibrates, wasn't properly stimulating the hypothalamus to release hormones or communication to the pituitary gland on this patient. So the computer explained exactly what was needed to do to fix this. And the person was, I don't really know, this sounds hoogy doogy. They went to some…
some clinic, I think Mayo Clinic somewhere, and in the Mayo Clinic, they ran all these, they ran thousands of dollars in tests, and they told the person, we think there's something wrong with your hypothalamus.
drbiamonte (34:26.438)
So as an example of what it could do, this computer pinpointed exactly what was wrong with the hypothalamus where at the clinic, they just had a vague idea of something was going on involving it.
Cheryl McColgan (34:38.356)
And so what, I mean, did you happen to know what the outcome was in this specific case? Did they, were they able to figure out something to help or, or did the computer come up with something to help?
drbiamonte (34:46.186)
Yes, actually the product module had products that helped the body to stabilize the hyposyl stalk and the hypothalamus and the person went on these formulas and thereafter they were fine.
Cheryl McColgan (35:02.06)
Very interesting. And I'm surprised, again, this seems like a very intuitive and common sense way to approach problems like that, take a data set and especially utilizing the technology that we have nowadays. You might need to approach some companies with that.
drbiamonte (35:02.975)
Yeah, for sure.
drbiamonte (35:23.594)
Well, we already have, and that's where you get into the other end of things, where there are companies that once they hear you have a product module, they want to be exclusive.
Cheryl McColgan (35:35.001)
Mmm. Well.
drbiamonte (35:37.274)
So that doesn't always pan out.
Cheryl McColgan (35:39.716)
No, I was just thinking from a patient's perspective how useful that would be if it were more widespread, I guess.
drbiamonte (35:45.078)
Well, what we're actually doing with the model is we're going to be using it as a teaching tool, because we want to make it a standard instrument for all certified nutritionists, all clinical nutritionists. We want them to have access to this so they can use it on their patients, because it's an incredible teaching tool. I found what I learned in the years that I was developing this model
from studying all the biochemistry and then aligning it into the computer, I learned more than I did in my whole eight years in naturopathic school.
Cheryl McColgan (36:20.04)
Yeah, no, this sounds like an amazing program. I'm glad to hear that you'll be sharing that with other practitioners so that they can help patients a lot easier. Until all then, until everyone has access to such things and they don't certainly have all your years of experience, can you just share with how you work with people, where they can find you, and if they're interested in learning more about optimizing their thyroid or fighting Candida, what are the best ways that they can do all of that?
drbiamonte (36:49.022)
They can easily find me online and then online there are contact forms they can fill out that will come to us. They can describe their case and what's happening with them and then we'll get back to them and we work entirely virtual so we can see patients anywhere in the world.
Cheryl McColgan (37:08.32)
Fantastic. And what is the website again? It'll be in the show notes, but I just want to make sure that we say it here.
drbiamonte (37:13.262)
My main website is health-truth.com. And I have two other websites. I have the New York City Candida Doctor and the New York City Thyroid Doctor. Those are the other two websites.
Cheryl McColgan (37:18.304)
Love it?
Cheryl McColgan (37:27.032)
Okay, awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing all of this knowledge with us today. It was really interesting learning about your background and I love hearing about these stories where people actually take data and turn it into something that's a little more actionable than just seeing it and thinking, oh, that's interesting. So thanks for doing that and I appreciate you coming on today.
drbiamonte (37:48.526)
Sure, my pleasure, absolutely.
