PLUGS Podcast
The PLUGS Podcast aims to empower healthcare providers, clinical laboratories, insurance plans, and patients by enhancing lab stewardship. Laboratory stewardship has five key improvement goals: 1) enhanced access to testing, 2) appropriate and accurate test ordering, 3) timely retrieval of test results, 4) correct result interpretation, and 5) financial alignment between patients, labs and payers. Financial alignment means that patients are protected from financial toxicity, labs are paid fairly, and insurance companies do not pay for wasteful test practices.
Through insightful discussions, expert guidance, and valuable resources, the PLUGS Podcast is dedicated to supporting all stakeholders in navigating the complexities of clinical lab stewardship, ultimately promoting both better patient outcomes and financial security.
PLUGS Podcast
Huge Test Panels in the Search for Personal Purity
In this episode of the PLUGS podcast, Drs. Mike Astion and Geoff Baird
discuss the massive testing panels associated with the belief that the environment
–through its many metals, biotoxins, microbes, and allergens—is a significant source of unresolved signs and symptoms.
The time stamped highlights are listed below.
00: 00 Defining the quest for purity.
07:00 Are the providers true believers, or is this quackery?
14:00 Are the patients psychiatric or is this simply dissatisfaction with conventional care?
20:00 War on Aging: Are we in bondage to decay and death?
25:40 Heavy Metals: Germanium, Palladium, Thorium and beyond
33:00 PFAS: and the new war on Teflon
44:00 Consequences of the quest ---for patients, labs, and insurers--and how to mitigate them.
1:01:00 How can we help conventional providers cope with these orders and results?
1:06:00 Stories from the Quest: A person discovers double-blind testing, and a person turns blue.
Learning Objectives:
- Define the quest for purity and the types of testing associated with it.
- Describe the role of belief, experience and evidence in the large test panels
- associated with the quest for purity?
- Describe two negative consequences of the quest for purity and how a risk-
- based approach can mitigate these consequences?
- Explain one way clinical labs can help conventional providers with patients who
- are on the quest for purity?
PLUGS Website:
https://www.schplugs.org/
MTS Website
https://medtraining.org/