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Dr. Paul Anderson, NMD, CEO of the Anderson Medical Group, NIH funded researcher in integrative oncology, Full Professor at Bastyr University, continuing education presenter, co-author, co-founder of Advanced Applications in Medical Practice.

Shivan Sarna: Dr. Paul Anderson is here with me. And we're going to be learning about biofilms right now.

What is a biofilm? Why do we need to know about it? Why doesn't everybody else know about it? What is going on?

Thank you, Dr. Anderson. Hello!

Dr. Paul Anderson: Well, thanks for having me. That was a wonderful intro… better than I usually get. So that's good.

So, biofilms are essentially a very normal part of life. Whether it's us on the earth or under the sea, there's a lot of biofilms. There’s biofilms in sea vegetables and all kinds of things. And they're just a place where bacteria and other organisms can live and be protected from the rest of the environment.

And a real important thing—because people sort of villainize biofilms (later, we'll talk about that part)—is without biofilm, sort of like without good bacteria, we wouldn't be alive.

So, there's a whole spectrum of biofilms. And many are normal. They’re everywhere. Anywhere that has any moisture, they can be.

Shivan: Okay, that’s a good rule.

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Dr. Anderson: So, whether you're a plant or an animal—a lot in our digestive tract, for example.

Shivan: Sure, sure.

Dr. Anderson: And interestingly, it seems like a new concept, but they were first described 300 years ago when the first light microscope was developed…

Shivan: Oh neat!

Dr. Anderson: …because van Leeuwenhoek was looking at his teeth scrapings, and that's where we first started to hear about biofilms in humans, those around teeth. And then, they didn't get a whole lot of interest for a long time.

Shivan: What was his name?

Dr. Anderson: Antoine van Leeuwenhoek, he invented the first light microscope—or at least that's the way the story goes.

Shivan: He’s like, “I’m going to scrape my tooth!”

Dr. Anderson: He thought, “Well, what would be the best thing to look at,” and this is available. So he scraped off and he saw some bacteria, and he saw these little structures. I don’t think he called them biofilms. That term came later.

But the problem is, like everything in us complex creatures (or your dog or your cat or anything)—like the ones on sea vegetables in the ocean are pretty simple. And they’re there for the survival of the microorganisms and maybe the survival of the sea vegetables, let’s say. But in a mammal or any complex creature, we have this spectrum.

Most are totally normal. And they’re part of the ecosystem that helps to keep protected some of our more fragile bacteria, et cetera.

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Also, in healthy people, there can be some nasty bugs in there in the biofilm, but they’re not doing anything. Because you’re healthy, they’re kept where they are. And they help to, say, make the biofilm. But they just stay—

—which is one of the reasons why it’s totally different to look and say, “Oh, you probably have a pathological, a bad biofilm thing going on… or a good one…” until you assess, “Well, where’s the whole patient’s picture at?”

If you’re really healthy, and you don’t have any symptoms, et cetera, your biofilms are probably just doing what they’re supposed to.

The problem is, like every other thing, as we get beat down and have maybe a lot of antibiotics that kills some of the good bacteria, or just food patterns that kill off good bacteria just by their chemistry changes, the sleeping parts of the biofilm that maybe aren’t so good for us to start to make the biofilm bigger because they can do that.

So, something, for example, that we see now if we have a real sick person, we’ll look at their microbiome assessment where we look at the different bugs—which we couldn't do that not that many years ago—and there are certain characters that do a lot of biofilm-building. And almost always, in people with a lot of digestive and immune troubles (which kind of go in a circle together), they’ll have the organisms that we know make biofilms. And they’ll be higher than the good ones.

And that’s usually the start of this building. And I use the term “hive” because people can usually think of that, right?

Shivan: Yeah… no, it’s a good one.

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Dr. Anderson: So, it’s like the normal ones are kind of low grade. They protect the few organisms, and they’re built by a few organisms. But they’re just part of us.

When we kill off the commensal or the happy bacteria and some other organisms that are good, then the ones that aren’t so good start to make it stronger just out of self-preservation—which is normal in almost all of biology. So, if you take away the balance, they start to build.

[05:02]

Dr. Anderson: What happens is then they can attract other organisms in. And those other organisms can either support the so-called bad or pathogenic ones or actually trade some DNA with them to make one stronger than the other—or in the case of, say, certain types of bacteria that have a number of species in the GI tract—some are fine, and some are not fine—the not-fine ones can actually convert the fine ones to being bad actors.

So, the biofilm allows this to go on as a place where they can hide and they can do stuff.

The other thing is that the biofilm researchers—there's a lot of biofilm research that's going on nowadays because of resistant infections…

Shivan: MRSA and things like that.

Dr. Anderson: …and antibiotics not working. So people are really concerned about this. So it’s getting a lot of money in research. The way they also talk about it—which clinicians don't like—is it's no longer say Pseudomonas building a biofilm or some of the other guys that can be pathogenic. It’s now like the biofilm is its own pathogen. And it might have a parasite or protozoa organism and a bacteria and virus and a fungus all working

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together. And they do something totally different than all the individual pathogens do.

And that's where a big piece of resistance to antimicrobial drugs probably comes in.

So, biofilms, although they’re normal to us, they can be used for bad purposes. And the sicker a person is, the more likely that they're—if the spectrum is from normal to really bad, we kind of categorize them into phase 1 as sort of early biofilms that aren't so great for you. And phase 2 are big, heavy kind of skyscraper biofilms that are really not good.

Shivan: A couple of things… does it look like mucus kinda? Is it just filmy slimy? Does it have a look to it, a visual?

Dr. Anderson: So, the term film probably gives that up. So bio meaning alive, and then the film was probably just more of a description from the outside-in. What we know now is that it's actually a multi-structural component.

So, on the very outside, because it's usually on a mucous membrane, or maybe in a blood vessel, it actually has a film-like component. But inside, it actually builds what I would term more like scaffolding, which can include minerals, and crystal structures, and then pieces of proteins, et cetera, that all kinds of build. The bigger it gets, the more structure it needs.

Shivan: Okay.

Dr. Anderson: So, I'll usually tell—like a patient will ask, I'll say, “Well, your normal ones are like a tent,” pretty simple.

Shivan: Yeah.

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Dr. Anderson: When they get into the first phase of being pathogenic, they're like a tract house. And then, when they get into the second phase, they’re like a multi-story building. So there’s just a lot more material protecting things.

Shivan: Okay. I’m just visual. So, that really helps me in some way—even though I'm not going to see my biofilm necessarily…

Dr. Anderson: Unlikely, yeah.

Shivan: Unlikely, highly unlikely.

Dr. Anderson: There’s a couple of labs in the world that can show you pictures, but they all look the same basically.

Shivan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I have no idea.

Okay! So now that we sort of have that understanding—I'm going to call it a problem because we're talking about the part of the spectrum that's more difficult.

So, true or false, this can be one of the reasons why people aren't getting well even though they're doing everything right?

Dr. Anderson: Very true, yeah.

Shivan: Okay, okay.

So, should we blast it and get rid of it? Or should we create more positive bacteria present so that it can self-regulate? What's the best approach? Or are we going both? Are we coming in with both actions blazing?

Dr. Anderson: Yeah… I think because I write and speak about this a lot, people—because I tend to talk more about the worst ones because they're associated with the worst diseases. So people will then assume, “Oh… well, we should just carpet bomb everything as if it's over here on the

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skyscraper side of things.” And that may not be the right approach because you can be pretty sick, and be moving from the tent to the track house size, and they don't need as much effort really.

But if you think about it like from a preventive point of view—so let's say you're a parent, and you've got this stuff going on, and it came about because of a collage of things, and you don't want your children to develop this. They just have a little tent normal ones going on.

[10:03]

Dr. Anderson: The first thing is diversity in their diet, things that oppose bad biofilm formation, so things that would promote good bacteria, et cetera, in a child will keep them from doing this and forming it.

The other thing on the prevention side which is super important is, if you're not ill, and then you have to go through a series of say antibiotics or other things that might kill off your good bacteria, get them replaced with pre- and probiotics. And the bad guys won't have time to build anything. So prevention is super important.

Then when they get past that to the tract house , the phase one’s, a really nice thing is that a lot of aromatic herbs are actually anti-phase 1 biofilms.

Shivan: Nice!

Dr. Anderson: Because you get this question: so, if they were described say 300 years ago (they've been around as long as these creatures on earth have been around), why hasn't it been a medical problem until recently, right? That's a good logical question.

Shivan: Sure!

Dr. Anderson: If you look at most traditional diets anywhere, except North America and certain other parts of the world, for the last say 150 years, every traditional

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diet I've ever studied regardless of where it is in the world has anti biofilm herbs or spices as part of their daily intake. And so, they likely never built these things unless they got really sick for some other reason just because their diet was not only prebiotics, so to speak, but they were also taking things that just wouldn't let the building go on.

Now, if you think of modern, more westernized diet, we don't have a lot of that stuff, or we're just now bringing it back in. So, we've had a hundred, a hundred and fifty years of kind of a sterilized diet. So that prevention piece in just my thinking about “well, why wasn't this a big problem 80 years ago or 50?”, we’ve lost that.

And so now they can go from normal to kind of a phase 1 little tract house thing to the bad ones really quick.

The other thing is we have a lot more drugs we give people that beat up our guts and all of that of course. Sometimes you need those things. I give them to patients for various things. But the important thing is rebuilding during and after. And then you don't get this building.

So, back to your original question of should we treat all just like they're bad or good, this is tough because it's a clinical continuum. Obviously, if you're sick, you're not in the normal area. So if you have a non-clearing infection of any kind, but especially digestive or some of the mucous membrane ones (which is where the biofilms love), and you used to be healthy six months to a year ago, but you just can't get past this one, it’s probably still at the tract house stage.

So, for that, we would use actual therapeutic aromatic herbs, things like a very potent oregano for example. These are things that are made to be taken orally.

Shivan: Yeah, oil of oregano.

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Dr. Anderson: Yeah, yeah, like oil of oregano and stuff that's made for oral use. And sometimes, olive leaf and curcumin. And there's many other things.

Shivan: I’m thinking like Candibactin-AR and -BR kind of…

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, a lot of the original anti-Candida things have a lot of biofilm breakers—rosemary and all that stuff—and they didn't know it. They weren't really thinking of that. And that's part of the reason it works. So that's a big deal.

The people that I would say move to like the skyscraper phase 2 end is if you've not been well for a long time, and/or you've had really heavy treatments like a long-term antibiotics and maybe chemotherapy and other stuff. And you're just really sick. Everything's bouncing off you. Now, there’s many reasons for that, but biofilms can be one big one.

And then, they require actually—and this is something I learned in the last 10 years of working with some biofilm researchers in trying to sort this out. What they're saying now is that once you cross over from the phase 1 tract house version into the skyscraper version, the complexity is so much different. You can't get in to them with say an oil-based product or whatever very easily.

So, it’ll be sort of like this big building wherein now a small bulldozer could push down your house. It's not going to do anything to this building here.

Shivan: Good, got that.

Dr. Anderson: So, a lot of it then becomes a clinical determination of how long you've been sick, how many other drugs have you had, how many other assaults? And what's your diet been like for the last, you know, however long?

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Those all go together to say you have a small, medium or large problem. And then, we kind of start wherever it seems appropriate.

[15:09]

Shivan: What's your—feel free to use brand names and feel free not to, whatever you're most comfortable with. I like brand names because it's real nad because we all don’t want to have that next question, “Okay. Well, which do you like?” and I’ve realized that this is Switzerland in many ways when it comes to brand neutrality. But I want to know about the microbiome testing that you tend to prefer—see I did that, “tend to prefer”—or maybe none, maybe you think they’re all terrible.

Dr. Anderson: You know, I think they used to be a lot trickier to read. The reason I'm saying that is, if you go to what's done in a standard hospital setting or clinic setting, it's kind of the same thing pattern. There's small, medium and large.

And what I usually tell patients, because they'll come in and say, “Well, I had all that tested. And I have no pathogens or whatever in my gut,” I'll say, “Well, which test did they do?”

Shivan: Thank you, yeah.

Dr. Anderson: And often, because they went to their primary care doctor who only learned about the standard test, what I'll say is, “Here’s the bottomline. If we find pathogenic whatever on the standard testing, you have so much of it that we can't miss it. It not being there doesn't mean you have it, or don't have it. It just means that nobody saw enough of it to be a problem.”

And so, go back like 25 years or 30 years or 20 years, that was about all that was available. And so, it was sort of like we would do that test, great!

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If we got lucky and found something even better. But otherwise, it didn't mean you didn't have something if it wasn't there.

And that's kind of the state of the art in the standard world right now if you're in a hospital and whatever.

Now, just to be fair, if you're in a hospital with clear signs of hemorrhagic E. coli or something really bad, they have specific tests that can be done. And also, your family doctor can do those. They often don't think to do them unless you're dying though. So that's available; it’s not used a lot.

So then lab companies like what became say Genova or later Doctor’s Data or—there’s another one that has biome in its name and I’m blanking on it.

Shivan: uBiome?

Dr. Anderson: uBiome! And some other ones came along over the last 20 years. And what they did is, initially, the originals way before uBiome and the other ones were just saying, “We can do a better job with the technology we have.” And they were a little bit better because they would look for more stuff, et cetera.

And then, we started to get DNA technology like PCR’s and all that stuff. And it's looking for stuff that you couldn't see with a microscope. So, is there the DNA of these bad actors in there? That was a huge step forward.

Again, if you have it or don't, it doesn't mean for sure that's the problem. But if you’ve got a whole bunch of things that aren't good for you, and they show up and they match your symptoms, it's probably part of the problem.

So those, in my world, changed the way that we were able just to make patients more comfortable with saying, “We know there's a problem.

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We're going to treat it.” Well now, we can point at something and say, “This is not a good guy.”

uBiome, and then there’s two others also that I…

Shivan: Viome?

Dr. Anderson: Viome and some of those, they all have different pluses and minuses and all that. But at our clinic now, the way that we do most things is—I’m supervising the other physicians. Because I’m already teaching so much, they do all of the actual patient stuff. It’s not safe for me to follow patients really. But they’ll send me these things. And either we’ve run them or someone else has run them. What’s interesting is unless you’re looking for the right patterns, a lot of doctors will see it and say, “Oh, that’s not that bad. I was taught in school that you should have a little of this and that.”

Well, the problem is you’re not matching this person’s super sick. So yeah, we all have those two things in small amounts. But the presence of them here in this patient that had been sick a long time mean—you can find it on your phone really quickly—that bug makes biofilms.

And they’ve got three of them that are huge biofilm builders, some of the biggest ones.

Then we can say, “Well, one of the reasons that you’re not maybe clearing these things, et cetera, is you’re somewhere between the tract house size and the skyscraper size. It’s not a tent anymore. And whatever you’ve been doing is either just making them work better”—like say antibiotics and chemo are the best examples, but there’s other stuff, or just the way you eat—“or you’re doing things, really good stuff like rosemary, oregano, et cetera, and other spicy things, and it’s sort of like throwing them at the big building. You’re going to get the roof, but everyone hides here.”

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[20:29]

Dr. Anderson: So, that’s part of the way that the modern things that can look at some of the DNA products, et cetera, had been, in my way of thinking, very game-changing because you can say, “Now we have objective evidence that you have things that will make the big ones that are not so good.”

And treatment has to change. I think that’s really important.

The other thing that people get misaligned on is bigger is better, right? So they’ll maybe start always with the big thing. That’s not always the right thing to do because you don’t need it if you have a little thing.

Shivan: Right!

Dr. Anderson: The other thing is that the big things then start to go away. And you don’t want to just keep doing big treatments when you don’t need them anymore.

Shivan: Titrate down?

Dr. Anderson: Yeah. So what I always tell people is, if you have to go over here to big, bad stuff at some point, they don’t need it. And then, you need to work on little stuff in their diet and not having it come back.

And then, once you get down to the little tent size, it’s all about their diet.And if they have to have more antibiotics, you work around it and treat it. But it’s about prevention then.

So, really, it’s a dynamic thing. There’s a ton of research into it that is kind of hard to grasp because it’s evolving so much—it’s human nature, it’s not for whatever reason. We doctors are like everybody else. We like to stick with the answers we were taught even if it was a long time ago. And if there’s something new, we don’t want to add multiple answers. We

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want one answer. There’s not one answer for this because we’re complex, our bugs are complex. That’s the way it is.

Shivan: What are your favorite probiotics?

Dr. Anderson: You know, I’ve probably used like everything over time. There are times I think where—as part of this, regardless of where you’re at in treating it, whether you’re going towards the bad ones or away, the base that I usually use with people until I see what their tolerance is are the human microflora strains because those are what’s in us. And they are more likely to not only repopulate but actually stay there. I think that’s a big thing.

The other thing is a big part of our practice involves patients with cancer who have these exact same problems. And in cancer patients, if they’ve had immune-suppressing therapies like chemo, et cetera, you do have to be careful with non-human strains of probiotics.

So,what we use or what I have a patient look for (or I’ll get a family member who’s dealing with it), I’ll say, “Go and look for a human microflora (HMF).” And it’s all made by the same people.

So, start there because that’s not going to bother you. Those are supposed to be in your body, right?

Shivan: HMF?

Dr. Anderson: Yes, HMF. So, there are some companies that they just call it HMF Forte for the big ones and HMF for the regular ones. But if you look at the label, it will just say human microflora or HMF. And that, if you have to roll the dice and you don’t know the rest of the patient’s world or whatever, those are supposed to be in you, there’s no way they can hurt you.

Then there are other companies that make either say spore-based probiotics or other—they’re really sort of workarounds to this idea that

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our microbiome might be bigger than we thought it was, et cetera. And in people where we’re not worried about big permeability problems, or they haven’t just finished chemo or some horrible thing like that, those can be better—

The way I think about it from a microbial point of view is that it shocks the system. You know, we get most—well, a lot—of our microbiome when we’re little from putting things in our mouth. I mean you get some from breast milk, et cetera. But you get a lot of it from the environment.

Shivan: …from licking dirt?

Dr. Anderson: Right! So, the idea there is “Well, let’s give you some environmental probiotics and see what they do chemically.” And there’s stuff they do downstream.

So, we use those with people where we’re a little more certain about what’s going on.

[25:07]

Dr. Anderson: And what’s interesting in probiotics now is… now that we know more scientifically about “Will these strains actually manipulate other problems?”, we now see strains put together for people with say high histamine levels. There’s histamine scavenging microbiome stuff.

And so, we use—the name is escaping me. But Seeking Health is a big company that makes a lot of supplements. They actually designed the very first one that I knew of that was a histamine scavenger. And it worked better than what we were using before.

So, in people, during the process—let's say it's not cancer, let's say it's some other just microbial overgrowth with a lot of problems, you see a lot of people who believe they have say mast cell activation or histamine

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overload, et cetera—and they probably do—that’s mostly being driven by your gut. And if the microbiome is way out of balance, the mast cells just keep churning and making histamine, et cetera.

So, as an acute treatment, we’ll use Seeking Health’s histo-something. They have two. One is a microbiome thing, and the other is not. So you have to watch the label.

Shivan: And you want the microbiome thing?

Dr. Anderson: You want the microbiome one. It literally will just go through and chew up the histamine and calm the mast cells and all that stuff.

Shivan: Nice!

Dr. Anderson: So, it’s a good acute thing while you're healing the person. The other part of it is the bigger biofilms have big histamine and IgE which is part of the histamine response-producing bugs in them. So just to keep you comfortable and not reacting to stuff, that's necessary sometimes.

So, I guess the short version—because that's a lot there to what do you use. The short version is that you can always be safe with the human microflora strains. If you're otherwise not immune-incompetent, you can kind of branch out. And we actually recommend just rotating different strains with people because that's a little more like probably what we do naturally or what we should do.

And then, if you have specific needs, you can go to specific probiotics that will say take and help with the histamine problem, or they might help with other chemical problems that are going on, et cetera.

The other is one that we use a lot, which I think is pretty available. It’s a company called Master Supplements. And I think they're from the east coast. And they have come at it—I’ve met all their people. And the way

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they kind of came at all this is they don't have a lot of products, but they have them divided into sort of basically indications of how sick you are and which way do you need to push your biome and all that stuff. And then, they have things that keep things stable afterwards.

So, Master Supplements has been one we use a lot when we need that kind of global approach that everything's just not right. We don't know how we're not right it is, and we want to just push it back towards normal. So we use them a lot too.

So, those are the ones I can think of right now.

Shivan: Okay, yeah.

Dr. Anderson: But there’s probably five companies. And like I say, it’s all made by the same base company that have a human microflora. And I think it's a trademark, HMF, on the label. So that's our favorite unless we need something super special.

Shivan: Okay. Alright, alright.

So, the other thing is, once we get our biome tests from wherever, our stool test that hopefully has a pretty good spectrum of what's going on, and knowing it can change (like it changes all the time)…

Dr. Anderson: Right, sure.

Shivan: You said that there's some bacteria that create—there are like three biggies that create biofilm. Like if I get a test result, and it's got boom, boom, boom, what are those three things that I should probably be just alert, “Ooh, that's probably creating a biofilm”? Individual results will vary.

Dr. Anderson: Right. Sure, sure.

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Shivan: Well, first off, there's way more than three. But the most common ones we see, like if you’re doing a quick scan, Pseudomonas is something that we all have a tiny amount of. If you get an infection with it, it is a very bad infection. But everyone has it, sort of like we all have C. diff and other bad things that are very calm once we stir them up.

But pseudomonas is one of the reasons now that we know (that we didn't used to) if I get it in my lungs as an infection, or my eye, and it's so hard to heal, the reason is not so much pseudomonas is resistant on its own, it's that it immediately starts building a biofilm.

And so, the anti-infective therapies are very—

Shivan: It makes me itch my eyes just thinking about it.

Dr. Anderson: Sorry…

Shivan: No, that’s okay.

[30:12]

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, it's one of the most common causes of like—if you really get like a dirty eye injury or something, you need to be very careful with pseudomonas. But it’s hard to get out of the lungs.

So, you see, people with chronic lung disease like cystic fibrosis will get it. And it's very hard to kill. It’s because they're like champion biofilm builders.

And so, once they are disturbed from their normal, happy, little space where they're in their tent and they're not doing a lot, they get challenged. And then they say, “Oh well, pseudomonas, as an organism wants to survive as much as you do, so it's going to build all this stuff up.”

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So, pseudomonas is the first one to look for, scanning. And it’s relative order of how much stuff builds biofilms. We have just known about it longer. So maybe it's not better than the other ones.

The other one which—I’ve seen one of the reports, I can’t remember. It’s one of the Biome reports or Ohm reports. Like two or three below is the citrobacter species. They’re pretty good at biofilm building. And there's a number of other things too that really just do it very, very well.

The twist on this is like, normally, the stomach infection of H. pylori, it doesn't make a traditional biofilm. But it makes a chemical change that just makes it resistant to normal eradication by just our immune system.

And so, you get all these guys together, and you think about it, well, the sicker you get, the more the bad guys leave their tents and go do stuff. If they're all together working, and you've got two really well-known biofilm creators, they're going to start to build the house size and go right to the skyscraper size. And then, they're going to invite every other unfortunate one in. And then, you have this little hive colony that's just making things not get better, et cetera.

So, that's the way it goes.

And there's others. Now that we can test so many different microbes literally other than the ones I know off the top of my head, if I see a whole bunch, the first thing I will search is are they known biofilm or other biologic resistance makers.

And if you've got two, it’s bad enough. But some people have 10, and they all make biofilms. And so you can just surmise that that's part of them not getting better.

Shivan: So, I watch a lot of sci-fi. Are you into sci-fi at all?

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Dr. Anderson: A little bit?

Shivan: A little bit… yeah, okay. I haven’t gone to Comic Con, so it’s just a little bit I guess by comparison. But I just see this like post-apocalyptic terrain. And there are different clans, and they're all like wearing rags, but they're warriors and they’re like…

Dr. Anderson: It’s a bit like that.

Shivan: A little bit… they’re like, “Come over!”

Dr. Anderson: Burnt out buildings and you know…

Shivan: Yeah, yeah. “We have no water anymore. We’re coming to take over your space,” you know?

Dr. Anderson: It’s a lot like that actually, yeah.

Shivan: Yeah! Right?

Dr. Anderson: Yeah.

Shivan: But we will bring you our special healing skills, and then we can have peace in this portion of…

Dr. Anderson: It’s a bit like that. I never thought of it quite that way. But now it fits right in.

Shivan: Oh my gosh! Yeah!

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yes, you could make a whole movie just based on the way biofilms form up.

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Shivan: Right! All of those are actually just a metaphor for the microbiome. And we just found this out. The secret is now finally out.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, yeah…

Shivan: Okay! Let me change it up just a little bit.

So, I know that you have a supplement. And I’ve actually taken some of the recipe you did before with bismuth subnitrate.

Dr. Anderson: Mm-hmm…

Shivan: What is all that? Because there’s a lot of conversation about that. And I know Priority One—who are wonderful folks—they have a version of it. And so, I just want to talk about that because I get a lot of questions about it. What does it do? You may be thinking, “I didn’t know anybody knew about that,” I don’t know! But yeah, there's a buzz about this product.

Dr. Anderson: No, I get a lot of questions. So…

Shivan: By the way, you didn't know I was going to ask this.

Dr. Anderson: No, I didn't.

Shivan: Yeah.

Dr. Anderson: So, all of that came about—so there’s multiple things going on there. But all of that came about because I actually had a patient for a number of years ago who came in and was more than just curious that I would look into things. She didn’t really have probably a lot of biofilms or whatever. But she said, “You know…” And this is a long time ago. But she said, “Well, did you do anything with biofilms?” I said, “Yeah, you know, it was kind of like the stuff not only I had learned, which is almost nothing,

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but then like the research that came out in the late ‘80s and ‘90s, kind of the state of the art there.”

[35:31]

Dr. Anderson: And I said, “We’re actually kind of trying different things with people right now.”

And she just said, “You know, you might want to look into it now because it seems like there’s this uptick in research about biofilms.

And most of my practice at that time was as it is now, either chronically ill people with no answers or cancer patients who are chronically ill. So it was a tough crowd.

And so, I start diving in and looking and looking. And I started to see patterns in newer research. And it’s like, “Oh, somewhere somebody either stumbled on or put money into the idea that it's not just the small tract house communities. There’s something bigger out there that's causing all this resistance to treatment.”

And then, I looked a little further. And it turned out—I mean, there was no big announcement. But I think it was the CDC actually made biofilms like one of their main foci for a year, a decade or whatever, because they knew there's a lot we didn't know.

And this is why antibiotics don't work anymore. And if we don't get ahead of the problem, nothing's going to work at some point.

The other side of it—maybe this why there was no announcement—you cannot go into a hospital for anything and not leave with a high grade biofilm.

Shivan: What?!

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Dr. Anderson: Yeah. And this is something that no one will talk about because can you imagine—well, I just said it to however many people are listening here.

Shivan: Millions!

Dr. Anderson: Surprise!

Shivan: Let me make your day.

Dr. Anderson: I mean, we already know going into the hospital, stuff happens.

Shivan: It’s not good. You could be having a baby, that’s a good thing if you want the baby and it’s happy and healthy.

Dr. Anderson: Right, sure. The best microbes live in the hospital and…

Shivan: We have gourmet ones.

Dr. Anderson: Yes. And to the degree that there's a hospital that they literally tore down to just its foundation. And I think like burned it to get rid of because it had endemic MRSA. And they rebuilt it, and the same strain was in the new hospital. It's like they're that good, right?

So, that's not so great. So, I think maybe that's why there's been no big announcements.

Shivan: Did you want to tell us the town of that little hospital.

Dr. Anderson: That was in the UK. In America, they would never write that down, right?

Shivan: I know!

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Dr. Anderson: So, anyway, the big powers in public health thought this was a thing, they started putting money into research—which is why, suddenly, it's like, “Oh, yeah… this is a huge problem.”

We have tools in the last 10 to 15 years for looking at stuff we didn't have before, both DNA testing and just ways to look at things that we could never figure out before.

So, on my own, just from my own patients, I've started reading these papers. And they're terribly interesting to me. But they're sort of some themes. And then, there's some non-themes. But they all kind of come together. And I was actually—

So, think of this now. If the CDC is putting money into research in other government agencies, and the military is really into this (because they get a lot of wounds that are not so clean)—so it’s a lot of money—if that's going on, and we know this is a problem in hospitals, but we want a solution, we don't want to scare everyone—so sorry for scaring all of you, but we want a solution—well, that means then that’s going to generate not just research, but it's going to generate people to put money into, as soon as we figure out how, we will be a company that will present you with the solution and take the FDA and get approved.

So, I had to be very careful how I tell this story because I can't identify anybody, okay?

Shivan: Witness protection, totally.

Dr. Anderson: Yes, it's sort of like that. So, just on my own in my own clinic, I'm reading these newer papers, and I'm trying this, and I'm trying that. And we're actually able to do intravenous administrations of certain things—no, not bismuth, that's a very bad idea, but other things that are related to that work. And we're seeing stuff.

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And the most interesting thing I started to notice was, my assumption was that an intravenous administration that can go everywhere would be way more powerful than oral administration of a biofilm breaker. And the opposite happened. And this is just because our patients were needy and we're just trying stuff.

[40:20]

Dr. Anderson: And if you think about it, that makes total sense because the biofilm start in the digestive tract and the lungs. So if you treat them there, you're likely to get more of the original stuff.

Now, if they get into the rest of your body, you've got other issues. And we do different stuff there.

So, probably five or seven years, we just keep trying different things. And some worked better than others. And at a totally non-biome related conference, totally about something else, I ran into a doctor that I hadn't seen for a long time. I said, “What have you been doing?”

“We’ve been looking into—I’m a consultant for a company that's working on a biofilm issue.”

I looked at him, and I said, “Oh, I’ve been just sort of poking around at that.”

And he says, “Well, what are you doing? And what have you found?”

Mostly, if you ask most doctors who even know what a biofilm is, they'll say, “Well, we're doing aromatic herbs or maybe EDTA orally” or whatever—you know, these normal biofilm breaking things which are great if it's the house size. High dose enzymes, et cetera, all of that works at the lower levels.

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And I said, “Well, no… I found this research about this and this and this. So that's what I'm trying.” And I said, “I feel like we're working towards something because we're starting to get immune responses, and people's immune systems would stop responding.”

And just quickly, if you're in a big high rise, and you throw down stuff that doesn't really penetrate the high rise, there's no immune response because all the bugs are inside and they're happy. They’re not bothered by what you're doing.

If you throw something at them that opens the windows and lets the immune system see in and all that, they will respond and your immune system responds. So, you get a definite immune response when you break the biofilms at any level.

And he just kept looking strangely at me, and I thought, “Well, maybe I don't know. Maybe I'm like so far off. I don't know…”

Shivan: “Are you a post-apocalyptic warrior?”

Dr. Anderson: Yes… and he’s just looking and looking and looking. And what was really happening in his head was he was trying to figure out, “Well, how much can I tell Paul that won't break any of my confidentiality and all of that?”

So basically, he said, “Wow,” he says, “we've spent x million of the government's money running research on this topic.” And he says, “You’ve stumbled on to most of it…” because it's out there.

And he said, “I can't tell you what we're doing or whatever. They said there's a lot of research that you haven't seen because it's made very hard to get to because they're trying to develop drugs and other things like that,” which is great because I don't want people to go to the hospital and come out with biofilms. Wonderful!

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And I said, “Oh!” And he says, “So, I can't tell you what we're doing, but just look in this direction.”

And I thought, “I've heard of that. I didn't think that was a big deal.”

So, I started looking. And then, that's when the idea of complex molecules for the big skyscrapers came in. And it started to make a lot of sense. The stuff we were doing that we started to see some action was partial molecules in that direction.

And they work great on the house-sized thing. So, for instance, a simple cheap n-acetylcysteine works really well this way, like on the house. So, if you just gone from normal to not post-apocalyptic biofilms, but they got to go, NAC works well. Oregano works well. Mix it up, they all work really well.

You get to the skyscrapers, and you need more than that. But you need pieces of all that.

And so, that's when the combination molecules came together.

And at one point, the people who published the original research were threatening me with whatever. But then my other friends in biofilm research said, “Well, those patents are all old. And actually, what you're doing is great because you're getting it out way ahead of what we can get FDA-approved. But you're not violating any of the new patents. You’re coming out with like super duper things.” So I said, “Okay… well…” So I moved on.

And basically, based on the research we had done on patient response, and then this newer research string that started in the ‘90s and went on—no one looked at it, no one cared until recently—looking at combining things.

[45:16]

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Dr. Anderson: So, if you think about it, if you went to your doctor and you’re treated for H. pylori, there's usually like bismuth tablets in there. It's like, “Why am I taking Pepto Bismol along with my antibiotics?” Well, that part of that is biofilm breaking.

Now, bismuth on its own is toxic in large amounts. So you don't want to be giving people tons of bismuth that is just free and is going to go through the body. What the newer research was saying is, “Oh, bismuth, yeah, it does this thing. Thioles like n-acetylcysteine and other thiols, they do their thing.”

“If we bind them together in a new molecule, they kind of have the best of both, but they're stronger.”

And that's the best way to kind of think about it.

So then came, from the late ‘90s, forward the idea of, well, a bismuth-thiol combo might be—because if two works separately, maybe together, they work better. They’re starting to synthesize these molecules. And indeed, they work better!

So then it came all of—I’m trying to translate something that I'm seeing visually from a paper, so that it makes sense. There are affinities for, say, the bismuth and the thiole. And there are many of these things.

The big, bad ones at the top of the affinity chart that you could put together bind super tightly. And they hit the biofilms the hardest. And then, #2 almost the same; #3, 20% less… whatever. And they go down.

What was interesting was—so this is all occurring about the time that companies are starting to say, “Well, we're going to put money into figuring this out for the hospitals.” All of a sudden—which I knew I could get the year prior—the top three or four, I couldn't find.

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Shivan: The top three or four ingredients?

Dr. Anderson: Ingredients…

Shivan: Yeah.

Dr. Anderson: And it's not that they weren't made anymore.

I mean, the first bismuth-thiol actually that was synthesized was made during World War I as an antidote for mustard gas poisoning, if you can imagine. So the idea has been around a long time. These are old molecules, nothing special.

Well, because of the military use and other stuff, the government sequestered those molecules. And the pharmacies that I work with can no longer get them.

I thought, “Hmmm… they must really work then.”

So, I just kept going down and looking at the binding affinities and found, “Okay! Well, these things I know I can get.”

One of the upsides is bismuth subnitrate, I wouldn't really normally give to somebody alone. We experimented with that. It's fine if you don't overdo it. But on its own, it's powerful, but not all that.

But combined together, the reason that we try and use that form as say opposed to citrate is it likes to bind to the thiole better and tighter. And that's the whole magic, if you will, of the two coming together.

So, first thing we did—or I did. In case we get into some trouble, this is all me—is I went to a pharmacy, a drug development pharmacy, and I said, “Can you make this?” And first, I was actually like, “Can you make like these things at the top of the list?” And they're like, “Oh, no problem.”

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These research pharmacists get back to me and say, “We don't know why, but we know we could buy that last year, and we can't buy any of the top four.”

And I said, “Well, I know why.I’ll tell you later.”

Shivan: Yeah, like in 20 years.

Dr. Anderson: I said, “So how about #5 from one list, and #2 from the other list. Can we get that?” “Yeah, okay.”

So, I came up with that formula kind of looking at, “Okay, how much of this and this because they're different sizes. It needs to go together.” When they mix it—they're all powdered stuff. When they mix it together, the two molecules interact and they bind. Most of them do.

And then, we put a third agent in for both protection and also to kick up some of the activity.

So, from the drug point of view, as a pharmacy so your physician can order it, that's what I made originally. I started giving that to the people that were unresponsive in our clinic. And this kicked everything up to another level. So all this research from the ‘90s forward, they're onto something there, right?

Then it became, “Well, what do we do if a doctor…”—

Because imagine this first happen. I've got doctors emailing me from all over, some of whom are really not onboard with the idea, but their patient heard about it. So, I got a lot of angry emails from doctors about there's no research on that. And I would send them like 500 papers. And they never called me back again.

Shivan: Research revenge!

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Dr. Anderson: Yes, it was like… you know?

[50:23]

Dr. Anderson: And then, it started to break through a little bit. In the SIBO community, there were some of the more forward-thinking people. And they were like, “Can I do this? Will it kill people?” and all that. And I was like, “No, do it this way.”

Shivan: Baseline…

Dr. Anderson: “Try this out.” And that was the prescription—which is probably the strongest right now.

And what I'll say is when the pharma companies that developed around this bring it out for the military and then for hospital use, theirs will eclipse this because they have access to the chemicals that we can’t get.

Shivan: The top three?

Dr. Anderson: And also, in the last 10 years, because they can see more things, they’re becoming more laser-focused. So, that's kind of what's going to happen there.

The upside is it'll just be a standard procedure where, if you're getting any injection, surgery, anything invasive in the hospital, this will be just part of your treatment to prevent biofilms from forming.

They already have stuff for surgery to just prevent like skin—you know, once we cut you open. That’s already going on. And the patient won’t even know. It’s just preventive stuff—which is great, I'm all for that. And I wish I was their consultant because that guy's going to make a lot of money.

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Shivan: Yeah!

Dr. Anderson: So, this happens. And then, there are questions about “Well, could a supplement company make this?” Well, no, because the stuff we used in the prescription version is prescription.

But like the Priority One version, and in Canada—I’m not saying their name. I don’t know their name. In Canada, they got a Canadian supplement company to make it. And it's a bismuth-thiol combo. It’s the exact same formula.

What we did for the non-prescription world through Priority One (because I had a relationship with them) was we could use bismuth subnitrate in a supplement (because it’s used in other supplements). We cannot use the higher order thiole. So we took the strongest one below the prescription level. And we put them together.

But then what we did that we didn't do in the prescription is actually use what I call a transition treatment—so between the tract house and the big buildings. Black cumin extract is good for—it's going to be the new curcumin. It’s good for everything.

Shivan: It’s good for everything, yeah.

Dr. Anderson: Right! Well, it turns out, it's like a much more potent biofilm agent than say the other aromatic herbs and other stuff. So I thought, “Well, it's definitely available as a supplement ingredient. So let's just add it as a synergist.”

And so, in the Priority One version or the Canadian version, they have the bismuth-thiol, and then they have the black cumin together.

And so, we started using that with folks. And we had already looked at what the prescription version could do beyond what we were doing before.

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The supplement version is not as strong, but it's way stronger than some of the other stuff.

Shivan: Right!

Dr. Anderson: So, if someone calls me from the middle of nowhere or emails our clinic or whatever, and they're trying to find something available, the Priority One version is the thing if they don't have a doctor who's onboard with trying this. I can guarantee you that no doctor of any kind anywhere probably learned about this in school. So it takes them a long time to become comfortable with it. It's a new thing so…

But what we do though—and this goes back kind of full circle to the original question—is that therapy, the BT, and maybe the BT with the black cumin or whatever we're doing that's a bigger tool, it is very specific to breaking down the skyscraper thing, getting the immune system to see these bad guys again and starting your normal immune response.

Once that goes on, and then calms down, you don't need that anymore. So, these are—and when I say short-term, someone whos’ not had the big building a long time, months. The longest I've ever used it was someone who was sick for like 15 to 20 years was maybe a year, and then tapered them back. Fifteen to twenty years, that sick, it’s not going to go away too quickly.

The super important thing though—and especially if you have somebody who's doctor is not working with them totally on this—if you have the lower grade stuff, it's bad enough when you take the roof off the tract house. They're still bad guys in there, the immune system goes in, you’re going to have some responses—fevers, digestive upset, inflammatory stuff. If you have a person with PANDAS or PANS or something, they'll get brain inflammation.

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[55:22]

Dr. Anderson: So, stuff goes on because, suddenly, the immune system is aware. That's not bad. But it means you can’t just let that ride, whether it's little or big—and especially if it's big.

What we do during that time then is, because we don't know who's in there—none are good for you, but they're all together happily there. You've ripped things open, the immune system goes in.

We tend to give natural broad spectrum things, say rotating combinations of oregano, rosemary, olive leaf, stuff like that; or you could use something like say some of the Candibactin things (or some of the other mixture is fine).

The reason for that is it keeps kind of elbowing out the biofilm, but it keeps support for your immune system killing the stuff that's in there because if you just have killing and you have no support, people get very, very ill.

And that's something that like the bigger the biofilm gets, really, the more you need somebody else watching you while you go through it.

The other side of it is, when you become inflamed, and your immune system now, it’s like no awareness of all these bugs, and “Oh, wow! There’s a lot of bugs,” your immune system, very powerful, your adrenal take a big hit because, suddenly, you get this immune response, and your adrenals have not been dealing with that. If they're not doing well, they’ll like crash, and your response is even worse. Your thyroid can take a hit, other stuff.

So, giving the kind of broad spectrum natural stuff just to kind of keep whoever runs out of the building dying, and kind of keep a lid on it while

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you're going—not suppressing it, but keeping it going—and then supporting their adrenals, et cetera—

In real bad cases where we've had like neuropsychiatric problems, we actually will use low doses of steroids just to get them through that, so they don't do something bad. So it can be that serious.

But if it's a newer big building or a tract house things, mostly, the aromatic herbs and all that stuff, and then adrenal support, are really your crucial things.

And there is a write-up I did that kind of describes all this in the NDNR paper. If you just Google “NDNR Anderson biofilm,” you will find it. It comes up very quickly. And it goes through all this stuff.

But that's the important part. Once you make your immune system aware, you have to support it because it's not been working at this high level. Your body's probably worn out from being sick with whatever else you have. And you can't just throw a sick body into trying to deal with that.

So, that's just my caution is . tHe further you go to these thiols or the other big time stuff, you will create stuff.

And the other side of it is, if you use those, and the patient has absolutely no response, then that's probably not the problem; they have other problems. So we do that too. It's like if week two or three, and you've had no nothing, then that's probably not part of your problem. It could be other stuff.

So, it's very dynamic. And even breaking it down into three sections, tough. And what's interesting is—just in case people start feeling bad about not being able to navigate this—I've had, in the past year, two people (because I’ve talked more about this) who are now physicians who

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used to be microbiologists who specifically did their doctoral work in biofilms.

And so, for people who did doctoral level work in biofilms and are physicians, they're almost as confused as everyone else because they understand kind of biofilm circa 1995. It's cool to them, but they've not been privy to probably the newer research and the newer clinical stuff.

And so, I'm actually now working with some of those people just to clarify some of the—they can keep me out of trouble with respect to being a PhD and biofilms and I can tell them the clinical side of it. So that's been really important.

Shivan: Cool!

Dr. Anderson: Yeah, it’s very dynamic. At the conference I’m speaking this weekend, we're going to talk a little about how those biofilms, if you just leave them alone, they actually will lead to potentially cancer and autoimmunity and other things too because they just protect the wrong biome.

Shivan: Lots! Lots of information.

Dr. Anderson: Yeah!

Shivan: It’s a lot.

Dr. Anderson: It’s a lot, yeah.

[01:00:00]

Shivan: Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Dr. Anderson: Mm-hmm…

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Shivan: Okay!

Dr. Anderson: Thank you.

Shivan: More to learn, more to absorb. And lots to think about. So carry on. And I think this is going to be a session you probably have to watch a couple of times. I’m with you a hundred percent! Take care. Thanks so much.

Dr. Anderson: Thanks!

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TRANSCRIPT - Amazon Web Services · TRANSCRIPT D r . P au l A n d e r s on , N M D , C E O of th e A n d e r s on M e d i c al G r ou p , N I H fu n d e d ... patterns that kill off