Episode 288- Organic Acids Test Explained: Gut Bacteria, Yeast & Brain Health with William Shaw, PhD

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[01:24] DEB: What if a simple urine test could reveal hidden clues about gut health, nutritional deficiencies, mitochondrial function, and even factors contributing to neurodevelopment changes. Today, we’re speaking with William Shaw, PhD, a pioneering biochemist whose research has helped shape the field of functional laboratory testing. We’ll explore autism research, the organic acid test, and why understanding metabolism may be one of the most important keys to personalized health care.

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[02:30] DEB: Welcome back to Let’s Talk Wellness Now. I’m Dr. Deb and today’s conversation explores the fascinating intersection of biochemistry, functional medicine, and personalized health. Our guest is William Shaw, PhD, biochemist, researcher, author, and the founder of the Great Plains Laboratory, now known as Mosaic Diagnostics. For more than three decades, Dr. Shaw has researched metabolic disorders, autism, gut microbiome imbalances, nutritional deficiencies, and environmental toxicology. His work helped popularize the organic acids test known as OAT, a laboratory assessment used by many functional and integrative medicine practitioners worldwide. So, as normal, grab your cup of tea, coffee, or whatever helps you unwind and settle in to another amazing episode. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Wellness Now. I have the pleasure of having Dr. William Shaw, PhD with me today. And I’m excited for this conversation. We were just chatting before we went live and we’ve got some great topics for you. But I want to first start by hearing his story about what got him interested in this type of medicine. So you’ve been a biochemist for quite a while. Tell us your story.

[03:56] WILLIAM: So the story was I was doing research at the Centers for Disease Control to try to find out about a really abnormal thing, which was: all the thyroid testing in the whole world gave falsely elevated values. And so I was given the mission of finding out why. It was bizarre. At the CDC, I was given the direction to find out this was why all the thyroid testing in the whole world gave falsely elevated values, so that nobody got the correct thyroid value, no matter where they were in the world. They were getting erroneous values. And the strange thing is if you put purified thyroid hormone and you stored it, it would go down with time, but if you put serum and then measure the thyroid, it increased with time. So there was the blood was giving high values whereas purified thyroid hormone declined. So there was something about the serum that was making the values go up. And so I found the cause was fatty acids, fatty acids that were not attached to glycerol or some other things. So in other words, free fatty acids, not fatty acids that were part of triglycerides. They were okay, but fatty acids that were separated, if you added them to serum, it made the values go up. And so I wanted to find out what the mechanism of that was. And it was that the free fatty acids denatured all the proteins in the body. And the protein that measured thyroid hormone was also being denatured. So the way it worked, that made high values occur. So that was a major thing. And of course, this was before the internet. So nobody in the world knew about this, except the people who read my scientific paper, you know? But so everybody, probably for a period, maybe of five years, everyone who did thyroid hormone tests got a falsely elevated value. And this finding put an end to that. And so shortly thereafter, a new neighbor moved in next to me and I went over to the neighbor to introduce myself, and the woman — she and her husband were mid-20s, and she said, “I’ve been meaning to come over, but my husband is extremely sick. He has juvenile diabetes. And he has extreme kidney failure.” And the physician has told him, “If he doesn’t get a transplant, he’s going to die soon.” And so what I thought about was the same phenomenon was going on in her husband. So her husband had juvenile diabetes so he had no insulin and his kidney function is measured by something called creatinine clearance, which is a measure of the filtration ability of the kidneys. So a normal value, a good value is about 120. His value was 0.5. So it was less than 1% of the normal. And he was already on dialysis. He was far down on the transplant list, so it was in effect a death sentence. And I said, I think I know something that might help. And I said you could take high doses of niacin. So niacin has no effect on glucose. So almost every medical practitioner in the world, if you ask them what does insulin do? They’ll say it helps to control glucose. Probably less than 1% of them will know it also helps to decrease free fatty acids. But that was my focus of my research, so I knew that. And I said, if you take high doses of niacin, it won’t do anything for your husband’s glucose, but it’ll dramatically decrease his free fatty acids which is probably the thing that’s destroying his kidneys. So I told her to give him 500 milligrams three or four times a day. And so this was the first time I’d ever recommended any treatment for any patient. And then I didn’t hear anything from her. So I thought either her husband had died or that was the most likely scenario, but I thought maybe she would have come over and told me about it, but she didn’t. And so I got extremely agitated wanting to know what happened. And so after about three weeks, I couldn’t stand the suspense anymore. And so I slowly started walking up to the front door. And I knew if I saw her crying or something, I would know that he didn’t make it. But when she opened the door, she had a big smile on her face. So she said, “I was meaning to come over and tell you, but I’ve just been so busy, but my husband’s completely recovered. So, he recovered so much, his kidney function went completely back to normal, and his kidney doctor told him he didn’t, he was taking him off the kidney transplant list because the kidneys were completely functional now.” So I felt like a baseball player who has never been in a game before and they put him in the World Series with three men on base and they put him up. He’s never swung a bat before and he hits a home run. That was what, so I thought, “Gee, I’m pretty good at knowing how nutritional therapy can be extremely helpful for some people.” And I still think that’s something that almost no physicians know about, and fatty acids are at high levels are one of the most toxic things there are, that almost nobody pays attention to. And that’s one of the things that niacin is very good at doing. It does nothing for, won’t affect blood sugar at all, but it has a profound effect on reducing toxic fatty acids.

[10:34] DEB: Wow. So you’ve spent some decades studying complex chronic conditions. What led you to focus specifically on autism and metabolic abnormalities.

[10:45] WILLIAM: Well. So I guess partly it was that experience I had previously. And what happened was I was working at the Children’s Hospital in Kansas City and a colleague of mine had a test for organic acids at the medical school that was across the border just a few miles away. He was a pediatric neurologist and he had a family come to him. It was a mother and two children, and both of the children had severe autism. But they also had other abnormalities as well. They had kidney problems and they also had muscle weakness, extreme muscle weakness that even though they were three or four years old, sometimes they would get out of bed and their legs would just collapse underneath them. And they had been tested at almost every medical center in the United States. Their medical record was about this high. There was… They’d been tested at Johns Hopkins and Mayo Clinic and nobody could find what was causing it. I was originally focused on the severe muscle weakness and actually I didn’t find out until later that they also had the severe autism. And so Dr. [Chavez] at the KU Medical Center had a mass spectrometer, but it was an old model and he knew I had a new, fancy, up-to-date model for the time. And so he said, “Go over and see Dr. Shaw.” He said, “I couldn’t find anything with my mass spectrometer when he tested the children’s urine.” But he said maybe he can find something. So the mother came across and told me about her children and that she wanted to get some help. And so I said that sometimes you need more than a single test because some metabolic diseases ebb and flow so they can be close to normal sometimes and then they get extremely abnormal. So to find out for sure what they have, I want you to do at least several urine tests and then I didn’t hear from her for about a month and I thought she had forgotten about it but then I was paged and said Dr. Shaw please come down to the main lab and the woman was there and she had a giant shopping bag full of frozen urine samples. And at that time, it was more urine samples than I tested in an entire month. But I thought this is, you know, if there’s something that’s related to the autism and the muscle weakness, I may find it by doing all these tests. And so when I did all the tests, what I found, there was nothing that was related to any known metabolic disease, any genetic disease. And so I thought I failed, but then I looked, but… There were all these things that, when I talk to colleagues in the field, they say, “Oh, you can just forget those things because those things are from the microbial contents of the intestine. So they’re not important.” And I thought, maybe they’re all wrong. Every one of the leading so-called experts I talked to said forget them. And I’m kind of a contrarian and I decided instead of forgetting it, I was going to focus on that. What I saw is all these things that were likely due to mold or candida were very elevated. And so from then I started testing more children and found the same thing that there were. And then later on, I did a formal clinical trial using the drug nystatin and we had some significant improvements in the autistic symptoms. But I found there was one compound that actually got worse. So I thought that must be something that’s from a different microorganism. And later research found that was due to Clostridia. So that was an extremely important thing, finding the chemical called HPHPA. It’s now been found to be not only a major cause of autism, but also many other neurologic and psychiatric diseases. But at first it was difficult because it did not match any existing compounds because it was a compound that was new in nature. And so I had to use advanced mass spectrometry using stable isotopes and things like that to determine its structure. And so what I found out– was it was very similar to a compound that microbiologists at CDC had found in Clostridia bacteria, but it wasn’t exactly the same. And so what I reasoned is that the clostridium produced this compound then the human metabolism alters it. And so I had to use all my biochemistry knowledge to figure out that the compound produced by Clostridia was being converted to the compound that I now call by its abbreviation HPHPA. So this has now been confirmed at laboratories throughout the world. It’s been found the Chinese lab who confirmed it found that if you measured this and the other two metabolites of Clostridia together, it’s like 98% diagnostic of autism. So there have been articles published in the Journal of the American Medical Association saying there’s no test for autism. The group in China completely disagrees with that. They say you can get 98% confirmation of disease without doing any psychological testing just by doing a simple urine test. If they have this, HPHPA, they have autism. If it’s a child. Of course, some adults have it, not because they have autism, because they have schizophrenia or depression or anorexia nervosa. Almost every kind of neurologic disease is also associated with this. So because of this, that’s when I started Integrative Medicine for Mental Health (IMMH), because I found all the stuff found in autism. There were other neurologic and psychiatric disease where these things were also important.

[17:30] DEB: Is it helpful? Clostridia is a bacterium. If we know clostridia is there and we treat it, can these symptoms then resolve?

[17:39] WILLIAM: Well, that’s why autism was such a challenge because a high percentage of people with autism have both yeast or mold and clostridia. And so if you only treat one of them, the other one gets worse. So if you only treat clostridia bacteria, sometimes the candida or the mold gets worse. If you only treat the mold or candida, the clostridia gets worse. So that was a very important thing to find out — to treat both things simultaneously in order to get it to work.

[18:12] DEB: Yeah. And it’s hard sometimes because when you’re treating those things, people have what we call die-off, right? The Herxheimer reaction?

[18:20] WILLIAM: Yes.

[18:20] DEB: And when they can’t tolerate that, it’s really hard to push through, especially if you’re nonverbal or you’re just having such a horrible time as a parent, seeing your children go through this terrible, you know, die-off reaction, it’s hard to push through when you’re treating with these things.

[18:36] WILLIAM: Yeah. Yeah. So. So one of the things that was very helpful was finding out that using just sodium bicarbonate to neutralize excessive acids was very helpful in controlling the die-off or Herxheimer reaction.

[18:52] DEB: Something as simple as that, right? Most of the time as practitioners, we’re looking for charcoal and clay and milk thistle and all these other herbs when we can simply use something like sodium bicarbonate to help with the die-off symptoms. We’ve forgotten about some of our very simple things.

[19:12] WILLIAM: Right. Sometimes simple things work very well.

[19:16] DEB: Yeah. So tell me how did this lead you to the development of the organic acid test that we know now as OAT, right? That’s how we-

[19:25] WILLIAM: Yeah. So I actually developed that prior to the family with autism coming in. But what I decided is my, the test that I developed at the Children’s Hospital was going to be not only focused on known genetic diseases, I was going to test everything possible, vitamins and, and compounds from microorganisms and things like that. And so that decision was very important. So I had a very, it was offered more things tested than anybody’s test that was then and throughout the world, really, I had more things to be measured. So that was the key. Once I had this, it was very good. So for the case of the Clostridia, that had never been found before. And so that was more difficult because that required years of research until I could get the exact—so I could get 99th of the structure of the molecule, but not that additional—I needed that additional 1% in order to publish it. So it was very frustrating. I was so close, but just needing one small thing, which is where the hydroxyl molecule fit on the molecule. I didn’t know the exact position in which they fit. And so that took years to discover the exact place where they were attached.

[21:00] DEB: We know if a marker is elevated on an organic acid test that it has any kind of clinical significance. Could there be something that’s elevated but it’s really not contributing to somebody’s symptoms?

[21:13] WILLIAM: It could be. But in the case of the Clostridia — that was another big thing. I found that it inhibited a key enzyme in neurotransmitter metabolism, which is dopamine beta hydroxylase, which converts dopamine to norepinephrine. So people had high values of the Clostridia marker had extremely high values of dopamine, but very low values of norepinephrine. So they had an imbalance of neurotransmitters in the brain, which is why people with psychiatric or neurologic disorders have strange symptoms is because the neurotransmitters are imbalanced. And so that was an important factor after finding it. But the value was so high, I knew it had to be important. I found one person — the value was so high you couldn’t even see the other compounds that were in the urine because it was like a tsunami of HPHPA. And so it was so large you couldn’t even detect the other normal compounds in the urine. So I knew that if something was that large, it must be having a significant effect. And I knew from the timing as well, initially the person was in pretty good shape, but then he deteriorated and when he deteriorated the HPHPA became a tsunami that caused really severe problems.

[22:48] DEB: So is that the bacteria and the fungi and the mold — fungi, mold, same thing — but is it those things that then disrupt the neurotransmitters in the gut that then disrupt them in the brain? Is it as simple as that kind of…

[23:04] WILLIAM: Or sometimes the chemical goes right to the brain and has an effect on the neurotransmitters, but in the brain, but also on the peripheral nervous system. So some people argue, oh, you can’t, with urine, you can’t know what’s going on. But that’s false because the same enzymes that are in the brain are in the peripheral nervous system. So if one of these chemicals affects the peripheral nervous system, it’s extremely likely that it’s going to affect the brain because the brain has exactly the same enzymes that the peripheral nervous system does.

[23:41] DEB: Wow. So we’re seeing a lot of neurological issues in the past couple of years after our big pandemic and a lot more Parkinson’s, MS horrible neurological things. Do we think that viruses can play a role in this as well as bacteria and fungi and other compounds?

[24:02] WILLIAM: So undoubtedly viruses are, you know, like, for example, the question is, did we actually cause [the pandemic] by supporting the Chinese lab? And I think the evidence is getting strong that indeed we did, but so that the mold and yeast and Clostridia affect almost all these neurologic diseases. I’ve had dramatic improvements in Parkinson’s disease by treating the Clostridia. The woman went from waving her hands wildly, unable to control her hands at all, unable to speak. And after treating the Clostridia bacteria with a probiotic, she had, she had extremely good results, almost complete remission of her, you know, like 99% improvement, not 100%. She still had a slight hand movement, but it was markedly, markedly improved. And so really we had a situation where people thought that the intestinal organisms were inert, that they were just a passenger in the intestinal tract, but didn’t have any influence on health. And my work has shown that it’s just the opposite. The flora of the intestine is probably the most important factor in determining a person’s health or illness.

[25:30] DEB: It’s our gut-brain axis, right? We talk about this so much in the last few years, and the evidence is getting stronger and stronger and stronger that if your gut is unhealthy, your brain is unhealthy, and it’s a reflection of what’s going on in the gut but yet sometimes we just, we can’t get that gut right. So what are we doing wrong when we can’t get that gut bacteria balanced?

[25:54] WILLIAM: So, so, the testing is extremely important. So of course, I tried to make that organic acid tests try to have as much information as possible, but we could still use additional things. So when I first tested the people with autism, there were a number of chemicals that I realized that were characteristic of autism, but I didn’t identify them. So there’s still room for research. There’s probably another 10 or 20 chemicals that are commonly found from GI organisms, but we haven’t identified them yet.

[26:31] DEB: And trying to find the right probiotic and the right antimicrobial. Every person is so different in these bacteria and fungi, they mutate so easily these days. It’s sometimes hard to find that right compound for each person.

[26:47] WILLIAM: So using a mixture of probiotics might be the best approach. So that’s a very important factor. I was very excited because it looks like there’s a good chance that dysbiosis is a major cause of ALS, the Lou Gehrig’s disease. So we’ve had four patients who are all had severe dysbiosis, and they also all had high amounts of glyphosate, the Roundup, the weed killer. So the weed killer is probably the number one cause of many chronic diseases throughout the world now, any country that’s using Roundup on crops and especially they even put Roundup on things that are not genetically modified like wheat and rice. They spray them, they say, to dry them out at harvest. And to me, this is absolutely ridiculous. Take a good, healthy, beneficial food and spray it with a toxic weed killer.

[27:59] DEB: Yeah, and so many private wells are contaminated with this weed killer as well. I live in what we call the Driftless Area in Wisconsin, and more than 50% of the wells have undrinkable water there because of the groundwater table. It’s all sandstone. And so that glyphosate sits in that well and contaminates it. And many of these people don’t even realize that’s what’s happening.

[28:25] WILLIAM: Right.

[28:26] DEB: So we’ve got it from our food source which we think we can wash.

[28:30] WILLIAM: So the glyphosate, it’s not only on the surface of the fruit or vegetable, it’s through every atom of the fruit or vegetable. You’d have to cut the thing up into a million pieces and wash each molecule to try to get, but it’s impossible. You can’t do this. The government needs to eliminate the use of that. And so that’s one of the things I’ll be talking about at IMMH: that technology exists now. There are machines that you attach to a tractor and they have lasers underneath and they use artificial intelligence to identify what’s the weed and what’s the crop, and then the laser, artificial intelligence instructs the laser to shoot and eliminate just the weed but not the crop like corn or something. Yeah. And so. This has already been in use in the northwest part of the United States, and it’s actually cheaper than using the chemicals as weed killers. And so the United States needs a giant government plan to do away with the use of the weed killers and replace it with machines that don’t use any chemicals at all.

[29:52] DEB: Yeah, we need to start doing something very quickly because even if we decide to do that tomorrow, right, our soils are still contaminated. Right. So it’s going to take at least a couple years before that stuff has dissipated. So

[30:10] WILLIAM: So it’s critical to start as soon as possible. And I think in the meanwhile, the government should pay for pregnant women and children under two years old to get only organic food, if they have to go to the special stores that sell organic food. That’s what we need to do. Because the amount of money spent on autism, it’s estimated it’s going to be four times the entire federal budget, something like $15 trillion if we don’t do something about it.

[30:43] DEB: Yeah. We’re going to be looking at a large amount of our population that is going to be born with autism in the future which is going to be a major problem for us if all of those people are not high functioning and they have to be dependent on the government for the rest of their lives.

[31:03] WILLIAM: Yeah, that’s right. So for a lot of people, it’s currently now a lifetime disease. And these things will probably, the good thing is that it’ll stop new cases. If we do all these things that will stop new cases, but this knowledge will probably help those who already have autism as well, but the important thing is to stop new cases from occurring. And by doing that, we’ll have a lot more resources to take care of the people who are already affected.

[31:36] DEB: Yeah. And getting that glyphosate out of the body is really a challenge for a lot of people. And if you have some genetic mutations that don’t allow you to clear these toxins well, it’s even more of a challenge. It’s not like you can just do it for a couple of weeks and then it’s done. It’s going to be a longer challenge, longer time to do those things.

[31:56] WILLIAM: Yeah. Yeah. And so it’s very important to eliminate it as soon as possible. But as you say, even after eliminating new glyphosate, there’ll still be some of the glyphosate in the soil. And in Germany, it’s been found that the cattle develop — and one of the diseases caused by clostridia is botulism. And so the cattle in Germany were developing signs of botulism with difficulty walking, difficulty chewing, and things like that. But they found that even the farmers taking care of the cattle were developing botulism too, likely due to the use of the glyphosate in the fields.

[32:43] DEB: Just lowering their immune system and lowering their metabolic function and made it more susceptible?

[32:51] WILLIAM: Yeah. So one thing that hasn’t really been [recognized]: glyphosate is also a major contributor to heart disease. The latest study at the CDC found that high amounts of glyphosate were greatly increasing cardiovascular disease. So, you know, all the focus is on cholesterol, but nobody is, you know, except a few labs like Great Plains and now Mosaic are testing the glyphosate. And so that probably markedly increases the incidence of cardiovascular disease as well.

[33:33] DEB: Yeah, that would make a big difference. It would help so many people from being debilitated.

[33:38] WILLIAM: Yeah.

[33:39] DEB: You’ve done some interesting research on Tylenol. I wanna make sure we touch on this. You’re getting ready to present at IMMH, is that it?

[33:47] WILLIAM: I, I am, at IMMH.

[33:49] DEB: Can you tell us a little bit about what that research is showing with Tylenol or acetaminophen?

[33:55] WILLIAM: Probably the biggest factor is I was the one behind what Kennedy and Trump announced several months ago — that people shouldn’t use Tylenol and they were blasted for it. And Trump said there was a rumor that Cuba didn’t have any autism and that they didn’t use Tylenol. Well, it wasn’t a rumor. It was information I provided them. And scientific data from the Cuban health ministry indicates their rate of autism in Cuba is like thousands of times less than the United States. And they have almost no access. I mean, occasionally family member might send some Tylenol to them. But in Cuba, they have a block of using Tylenol. They use a different drug, which is cheaper in Cuba. And so they almost never use Tylenol. And they do not give Tylenol with vaccines, whereas in the United States, almost every pediatrician’s office has a sheet. If your child has any fever or stuff, and they don’t even see them, they say Tylenol. There’s been a finding that 70% of people with autism have antibodies to the folate transport protein. The thing is that nobody says why do they have some autoantibodies. Well, those same proteins have extremely high attachments to the metabolic products of acetaminophen. So when you’re born, your immune system does an inventory of all the proteins in your body. And it says, okay, you have this one and this one and this one. And so we’re not going to attack those, but if you have Tylenol attached to those proteins, the immune system says, “Hey, wait a minute. I’ve never seen that protein before with all these Tylenols attached. It must be a microorganism that’s attacking my body. I better develop an immune response.” Well, that immune response is against the folate transport protein, which then can’t transport folic acid derivatives and so the children have to take massive amounts of folinic acid in order to overcome that. And it’s probably not, it’s probably happening to many other proteins as well. We just haven’t done the research yet because you think about it, children with autism have also been recommended to take massive amounts of vitamin B6. So probably the same thing is happening to those other proteins that transport vitamin B6 and they also have problems with B12. You’ve seen protocols, you need to give massive amounts of B12. That’s one of the common therapies. It’s almost surely it’s because there’s autoantibodies against the proteins that are transporting vitamin B12. And also vitamin D is the same thing. And there are probably additional vitamins, we just haven’t tested them yet. You’re going to find out there’s, and this has all been confirmed by research. This isn’t just a hypothesis. The researchers have found when you give the acetaminophen, one of the metabolites called NAPQI reacts with hundreds of proteins in the body and of course will induce a autoimmune reaction against all those proteins that are modified. So nobody has proteins that function normally if they form the wrong metabolites of acetaminophen.

[37:52] DEB: So it’s basically like an autoimmune issue. It gets turned on from that acetaminophen. Can you turn it off or once it’s turned on, it’s like any other autoimmune issue?

[38:05] WILLIAM: Well, this will be for future researchers to find out if they can develop some way to turn that off. So right now, of course, there’s the worst possible scenario, if somebody has those autoantibodies and the next time they’re sick, they give them acetaminophen again, it’s going to make the problem even worse, the titer is going to get worse and worse with every dose of acetaminophen they take.

[38:32] DEB: Wow. We’ve thought for years that this was safe. We’ve always known it’s hard on the liver, right? And it should have probably-

[38:41] WILLIAM: No, as a matter of fact, it’s so hard on the liver. When a group of nurses at a hospital found out about research, they told me there were so many cases of liver failure at their hospital associated with it. Tylenol that they started saying, “We’ve got another ‘Dye-lenol’ case.” There were so many deaths due to this drug, they started calling it “Dye-lenol.”

[39:07] DEB: Yeah, that we take for granted over the counter, people can buy, use as often.

[39:12] WILLIAM: And that’s one of the reasons that people think it’s safe because they see it in all these brightly colored boxes. But if those boxes had skull and crossbones on it, they wouldn’t be buying it. Yeah. But they’re seeing the television commercials about how it’s faster than this or that. But they did comparison studies when they compared acetaminophen to Advil, and children who were exposed to Advil didn’t have the increased rates of autism. It was only with the acetaminophen. So they found the same thing. So it not only affects autism, but also ADHD and asthma as well — a much higher incidence of those diseases in people who have been treated with acetaminophen.

[40:04] DEB: Well, and it seems like, too, once you start stacking these things on top of each other, right, we’ve got poor gut health, we maybe have mold exposure. We all know a lot of the homes in this country are not healthy homes. They’re sick with mold. We’ve got fungal overgrowth in the gut. We’ve got an immune system that’s disrupted. We’ve got genetics that are disrupted. We’ve got these chemicals like glyphosate in there. Now you add Tylenol to the mixture and who knows whatever things we’re adding that we just haven’t learned about yet. It’s a perfect storm for somebody. It’s amazing anybody is walking around healthy.

[40:39] WILLIAM: It is a perfect storm. Matter of fact, so what it is, is the presence of the Clostridia. If the person has that, it makes it more difficult for the acetaminophen to form a non-toxic metabolite. So there’s several options, but if the person has clostridia, at the same time they get acetaminophen, much more of the acetaminophen can be converted to the toxic form. So acetaminophen itself has very little toxicity. So most things are less toxic once you metabolize them. Acetaminophen is the exception. It’s much more toxic if it’s broken down to form this compound called NAPQI, N-A-P-Q-I. And if the person has clostridia, they’re going to produce massive amounts of the NAPQI because they can’t get rid of it by the alternate pathway. So these two things work together and if the person is exposed to both, they’re going to have a much more severe [reaction].

[41:46] DEB: Based on your research that you’ve done with acetaminophen and Clostridium, all of these things, what kind of recommendations do you have for pregnant women who are told to use acetaminophen if they need to use a pain reliever during pregnancy.

[42:01] WILLIAM: I would say don’t do it. I mean, that’s really it. It probably is toxic for the pregnant woman and is probably equally toxic to a newborn child. But I think I would look to other things — what did women do prior to that? You know, for example, use aspirin. Aspirin is an alternative and in some cases that you might, they might be able to use Advil.

[42:34] DEB: Yeah. What’s your recommendation for pediatricians these days who are still recommending acetaminophen for babies?

[42:42] WILLIAM: I think you better stop doing it pretty soon. Or you’re going to be in hot water.

[42:48] DEB: Yeah, I mean, if you’re recommending this and the research is out and it’s proven that it’s causing problems and we’re still recommending it as a practitioner, there’s some liability issues there that could be held against us.

[43:02] WILLIAM: This thing is going to keep lawyers busy for the next 20 years.

[43:05] DEB: It’s a shame. You think about all the children who’ve been injured, not necessarily on purpose, right? Nobody knew. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, but now we look back and now we know. We’re going to have more and more children that are injured, but now we have to try to find a way to help these children and these families to have normalcy so that they can live a life that is of quality for all of them.

[43:29] WILLIAM: That’s right. Absolutely. So it’s… It’s a really difficult situation, but there are alternatives. I mean, aspirin — its toxicity was markedly overemphasized. There was very little toxicity to baby aspirin. To me, it was a marketing gimmick to phase out aspirin and increase use of a new more profitable product.

[43:55] DEB: Yeah. That’s what we do with so many things in the drug world. We dismiss one that’s been on the market for 100 years because it’s not profitable anymore because we’ve got something bigger and brighter and newer and it’s taking its place, but yet we don’t know what’s going to come from that. I always tell my patients, If there’s something new on the market, don’t take it for at least five years. In five years, you’ll find out if it’s healthy or not.

[44:21] WILLIAM: Right. That’s a very good suggestion. That’s a great suggestion.

[44:25] DEB: ‘Cause that’s the time frame you’ll [know]. You know, Dr. Shaw, I am curious what’s kept you motivated all these years in researching these challenging and oftentimes controversial topics for you.

[44:39] WILLIAM: So my goal has always been to focus on diseases that they say are incurable. So that’s one of the things I’ve done. So I’ll tell you another story. So we had a young woman who was a student in Mexico, and her mother was a very religious Catholic. And she was a member of this religious group called Opus Dei, which means the work of God. It means that people should be happy with the work they do, that all work is important. The person who takes care of your garden is just as important as the surgeon and that everybody should thank God for the work they do and try to do the best possible work for what they do. And it was her daughter who had developed a bizarre syndrome in which she was unable to speak, unable to walk. When she was in class, the bell would ring to go to the next class and she would think, “I’m going to the next class,” but she could not get out of her seat. Her body did not respond to her will. And she started having seizures and crying spells and so they sent her to Mass General, you know, the teaching hospital of Harvard because her brother was a resident there. And so they did all kinds of brain scans, CTs, MRIs, nothing showed up. Absolutely nothing. So nothing they did was of use. So the mother, because she was so religious, she went to the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe, where Virgin was supposed to have appeared to an Indian in the 1500s, and she prayed there for about an hour for guidance. And she also prayed using the intercession of this bishop in Spain who was the co-founder of Opus Dei, Bishop [Álvaro del Portillo]. She asked for his intercession with God to give her the clue to her daughter’s disorder. And as she walked out, she said, her inner intuition said, “You need to talk to Leticia’s husband.” And Leticia is my wife. So she knew my wife who gave seminars in Mexico, and I’m her husband. So she said that was the guidance. So she called me shortly thereafter, and immediately I said, I think it’s likely she has toxic metal poisoning. And so she did the hair metals test and was found very high levels of manganese, which is an essential metal, but it’s a Goldilocks. Too little is bad, but too much is very toxic. So she had high levels of manganese and high levels of mercury. So I knew a physician who knew how to do chelation in Mexico City. She went over there. Within a week, all her symptoms were gone. And so the mother was so impressed, she wrote a letter to the Vatican. Bishop [Álvaro del Portillo] had been nominated for sainthood. In the Catholic religion, you have to have two miracles to be declared a saint. And he had one miracle, but she asked that this cure of her daughter be considered the second miracle and the Vatican agreed. So Bishop [Álvaro del Portillo] is now a saint. It’s an amazing story. So now when I give a presentation, I would say, “You need to use our lab, which is the only lab certified by the Vatican to perform miracles.”

[48:23] DEB: Well, we can use a lot of them in healthcare these days, that’s for sure. So I have one question left that I’d like to ask you, and I like to ask this of all of my guests. Healthcare is a challenge these days, as we all know. If you could change one thing in our healthcare system, what would it be?

[48:42] WILLIAM: I think we should probably not have the insurance system. We should have healthcare paid for everyone so nobody has to worry about not getting care if they’re sick because they just lost their job and so don’t have a way of paying for it. Nobody should have to deal with that, in my opinion. So to me, that’s the worst thing. But you should still have the option of choosing someone else. If you don’t like the one the government is assigning you, you should have the ability to go somewhere else and pay out of pocket if you want to.

[49:20] DEB: Wonderful. This has been such a great conversation, Dr. Shaw. Thank you. How can people find you? And please tell them about the conference that you’re going to be speaking at coming up.

[49:31] WILLIAM: It’s called IMMH, and you can find it by googling IMMH.org and that’ll give you the information and you can go and I don’t know if in person seats are still available but it’s also available virtually as well. So you could get the online registration if all the in-person seats are taken, and I’m sure it’s probably unlimited number of virtual spaces. I would look at that. And then on my website you can contact me directly if you have a difficult medical issue. And I get lots of them. Unfortunately, there’s so many, I can’t always crank these out extremely fast. But the website is williamshawphd.org. So, William Shaw PhD — no abbreviations, no punctuation. Just williamshawphd.org. And on that website is an email form that uses Squarespace to contact me. So if you have an issue, and of course, if you have testing data, that’s always very helpful. But of course, I can also direct people to where to go if they want to get testing. And because of my long career, I think I’ve got suggestions for almost everything. The only thing I really feel like I need another lifetime is to look at cancer. So all the neurologic and psychiatric diseases, I think I’ve got covered, and I’ve got some types of cancer covered, but not as many as I’d like to have. I would need another lifetime, I think, to get into the cancer field.

[51:30] DEB: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for being with us. For those of you who are driving or walking or doing whatever you’re doing while you’re listening, we will have all of Dr. Shaw’s information in our show notes with a link directly to his website so you guys can find him easily.

[51:46] WILLIAM: So thank you very much Deborah.

[51:47] DEB (Outro): Thank you for joining me today on Let’s Talk Wellness Now and a huge thank you to Dr. William Shaw for sharing his insights, research and decades of experience with us. To our listeners, thank you for spending this time with us. If this conversation sparked your curiosity about personalized medicine, metabolic health, or root cause healing, please share this episode with someone who could benefit from it. Remember, wellness isn’t just about managing symptoms. It’s about understanding the unique story your body is telling. And if you’d like to learn more about our integrative approach to health, visit serenityhealthcarecenter.com or explore Venaari.com designed to help you take ownership of your own healing journey. Until next time, I’m Dr. Deb, reminding you to care for your body, mind, and spirit. Be well, and we will see you on the next episode.

The post Episode 288- Organic Acids Test Explained: Gut Bacteria, Yeast & Brain Health with William Shaw, PhD first appeared on Let's Talk Wellness Now.