Dr John A Podlaski - Natural Medicine Institute

06/17/2026

Allergies? Natural treatments that work, no dangerous drugs!

Monday 6/15 Health TalkDo you have allergies? Discover the natura...

06/15/2026

06/14/2026

The biggest selling drug class of all time.
What if there was a better way?

06/13/2026

Statins… one of the worst drugs ever invented

Lipitor 80 mg versus placebo
This was the SPARCL trial.

Over 60% higher risk of having a hemorrhagic stroke in the Lipitor group

And no one cares.


06/13/2026

We utilize DMSO routinely at the Natural Medicine Institute Institute

Get the real story.

06/13/2026

The farming practice in the US is to spray glyphosate on grain crops. This is a major contributor to initiating dysbiosis and leaky gut problems.

06/13/2026

Screening for leaky gut and dysbiosis is done in office at the Natural Medicine Institute. Follow up additional lab testing can pin point the underlying cause.

I have this conversation with patients regularly. They come in frustrated, having been told their colonoscopy was normal, their endoscopy was normal, their standard blood work was fine. And yet they are dealing with bloating, irregular bowel habits, food sensitivities, fatigue, and brain fog that nobody can explain.

The disconnect is a testing gap, not a diagnostic mystery.

A colonoscopy is a structural examination. It is looking for cancer, polyps, and visible inflammatory bowel disease. It is an important test for those purposes. What it cannot do is evaluate the functional and microbial environment of the gut, which is where most of the chronic digestive dysfunction I see in practice actually lives.

The GI-MAP stool analysis is the test I use when I want to understand what is actually happening in a patient's gut. It looks at bacterial pathogens, opportunistic bacteria, parasites, fungi including Candida, H. pylori, markers of intestinal inflammation like calprotectin and zonulin, and digestive enzyme output. These are the factors that drive symptoms like bloating, constipation, loose stools, food reactivity, and the systemic issues that flow downstream from a compromised gut including mood disruption, skin conditions, and hormonal imbalance.

The standard gastroenterology workup is designed to rule out serious disease. The functional medicine workup is designed to understand how the gut is actually functioning. Those are two different questions, and most patients only ever get an answer to the first one.

Want to know what is actually going on in your gut? Get my Free Balance Toolkit — comment BALANCE.

Research: Camilleri M. "Leaky gut: mechanisms, measurement and clinical implications in humans." Gut. 2019;68(8):1516-1526. https://doi.org/10.1136/gutjnl-2019-318427