Artificial Intelligence and Medicine Podcast

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Digest This Podcast

Speakers:

Dr. Liz Cruz – Host, Gastroenterologist
Tina Nunziato – Co-host
Dr. Krystal Tellier – Guest, Naturopathic Doctor
Paul Tellier – Guest, Executive Director

INTRO: Let’s talk about AI in medicine on this next episode of Digest This. Welcome to Digest This, the show that helps you revolutionize your digestive health. Here are your hosts, Dr. Liz Cruz and Tina Nunziato.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: Hello and welcome to Digest This. I’m Dr. Liz Cruz and I’ve got my beautiful wife, Tina Nunziato, sitting right here by my side. Hopefully you’re watching this.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: If you are a first-time listener, we welcome you and please check out our library. We have over 500 episodes. We’ve been podcasting for over 10 years, a lot of great information and it’s timeless.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: And if you’re one of our regular listeners, we love you and we love that you have continued on this journey with us. So thank you so much for taking time out of your day to do this and hang out with us. Today, we have special guests and I’m going to introduce them now.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: We’ve got Dr. Krystal Tellier and her husband, Paul Tellier. So welcome, We’re so excited to have you guys on this episode with us.

TINA NUNZIATO: We always love having company. So thank you so much for joining us.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: Thank you very much for having us.

PAUL TELLIER: We appreciate it.

TINA NUNZIATO: Yes. And today, the day that we’re recording today is actually Halloween.

TINA NUNZIATO: And so I appreciate you two dressing up for this occasion.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: We have to keep it festive.

PAUL TELLIER: That’s not our normal setting.

TINA NUNZIATO: Exactly. Are you guys going to a Halloween party?

PAUL TELLIER: We are. We’re going to spend a little bit of time in the neighborhood with a neighbor that has a nice little organized hayride that they bring the kids around together in the neighborhood. And we’re going to have chili tonight and watch all the other little kids run around and celebrate and probably have an early night.

TINA NUNZIATO: Very nice. Very nice.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: Well, we love Halloween. It’s so much fun. But I just wanted to tell you a little bit about how we have come to be doing this podcast together.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: So Tina and I, we started a few months ago as part of our marketing strategy. We started reaching out to naturopathic doctors here in the Phoenix Valley. And we connected with Dr. Tellier. We had the honor of having lunch with her. And just, I don’t know, we loved it. We loved her. We had a great connection. We had a great lunch, did a lot of talking and decided, hey, we need to have you on as a guest. And she was all excited about it and told us that her husband would love to do it also.

TINA NUNZIATO: I told Liz after the lunch, I’m like, I want to go to dinner with these two. I think it’d be so much fun to get to know them and be friends. But yeah, we always bring up the podcast when we’re talking to the naturopathic doctors and most of them are really scared and they don’t want to do it. But Dr. Tellier was like, my husband would love to do a podcast. I was like, awesome. Let’s do it.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: Because filling a dream for him.

TINA NUNZIATO: That’s awesome. Wow.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: So Paul, you’re the office manager, right? Or you run the practice?

PAUL TELLIER: Yeah. Well, I guess you could say I’m, yeah, I’m the executive director here. So I really focus on a lot of the business development, the strategic work. I flex into a lot of roles. Krystal taught me a lot over the past two years I’ve been here. So I wear a lot of hats, mostly on the administrative side.

TINA NUNZIATO: Yeah. That’s awesome.

PAUL TELLIER: I’m a talkative individual. I think that’s why she’s hinting at Paul, you’re going to really love this opportunity. I’m never short on words. So I think that’s where it is.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: I may have let them know that you wanted to buy like $2,000 worth of…

PAUL TELLIER: Yes, she did. In your sort of dream to do. And so we’re happy that we get to do it this way first.

TINA NUNZIATO: I mean, listen, we started out with a little microphone and I still dream of the day that we’re going to have these huge boom microphones coming down. We’re still pretty low tech.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: We’re very low tech, but effective.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: Yeah. We’ve been doing this now for over 10 years. And so it’s been a lot of fun and engaging with a lot of different people. And we have people from all over the world watching us. And it’s a lot of fun when Tina pulls the stats at the end of the year to see how many have downloaded the different episodes and from where, what part of the world. So it’s a lot of fun.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: But I was really excited with the topic that you came up with Paul, which is AI in medicine, because AI is such a hot topic, right? It’s such a hot topic in everything, in every industry, in our lives. I mean, it’s becoming the big thing, a lot of different opinions. Even here at home, we have a divided home as far as the opinions on AI. As a gastroenterologist, we’re starting to see AI and just trying to figure out how it’s going to fit in my world as a gastroenterologist. And so I think it’s a perfect topic. And yeah.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: So thank you for suggesting it.

TINA NUNZIATO: Yeah. So, so Paul, tell me, why did you want to do AI? Like, why was that the main topic you thought was interesting?

PAUL TELLIER: Yeah, no, I appreciate that question. So I’ve been partnering with Krystal for two years, but I’ve seen her over the past 15 years grow from a practice where she was the only provider seeing patients in a world where naturopathic medicine wasn’t fully understood. And the idea of functional health wasn’t necessarily prevalent. And you fast forward to today, technology’s taken off, the idea of functional health is taken off. And we’re at a point where we are evaluating, I guess you could say a competitive strategy. So how are you saying relevant and competitive in today’s environment? And I’d say, even when I started at the practice two years ago to compare to where it is now, things have changed significantly. And I would say a large driver of that is artificial intelligence.

PAUL TELLIER: I’ve created my first chat GPT account after I joined the practice here, and I needed someone to collaborate with, right. And I think there’s a lot of people who are really supportive of the idea of collaboration with artificial intelligence. But over the past two years of chatting with patients, supporting new patients, looking to establish care here, supporting the providers and hearing how artificial intelligence might support them. I think it’s just something that we have to embrace, but just recognize that what we believe at our practice really transforms medical care and really healthcare, healing healthcare is that human connection. So you can’t fully replace a provider with artificial intelligence. And so just recognizing there’s all these different facets that’s important to talk about. I think that will help us kind of move into the next iteration of medical care with the technology that we have today.

TINA NUNZIATO: Yeah. That’s awesome.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: Yeah. Yeah. And you came up with some points that I wanted to make sure we hit on, you know, the value talking initially about the value that AI brings to the field of medicine. Let’s talk a little bit about what you feel are the talking points there.

PAUL TELLIER: Yeah. So what comes up for me, I think there’s a lot of collaboration that you get when it comes to artificial intelligence. As a patient is concerned, there’s a lot of information that’s out there that they can put into artificial intelligence and get information back. So it helps with, for instance, if someone has, let’s say food intolerances or digestive issues relative to food or allergies, they can go to AI and get ideas for how to have meal prep, how to understand what considerations on creating a menu for the week. I think where the opportunity might come in and I’ll let Krystal talk a little bit about it is artificial intelligence from a clinical perspective.

PAUL TELLIER: Some people might get those results on a food intolerance test or a food allergy test and then seek interpretation of those medical labs through AI. And I think that’s where some of the risk comes in. And AI doesn’t think critically. AI doesn’t think like a clinician will. And I think you two can appreciate that. So how are we leveraging it to support and augment medical care as opposed to replacing the provider on the other end?

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: Well, which I think is an important point when you’re putting information into a function like CHAT-GPT, et cetera, your languaging is important as a consumer or as a patient, because you might be confused that is this actually an allergy test or is this an intolerance test? And that matters because if you have a true anaphylactic-like reaction to let’s say peanuts or walnuts or strawberries, but you say, oh, it’s an intolerance, CHAT might say something like, oh, no big deal. You can have a little bit of that because it’s not an anaphylactic-like reaction. And the patient might be confused when in reality their allergist or their physician or their gastroenterologist, or even me as a naturopathic physician might have much more caution. We may want them to have an EpiPen.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: We may suggest doing some type of food trialing, but maybe medically supervised. So there’s a big difference between those two things. But does the patient understand the difference between that? Because in my office, very often there’s a big confusion between food reactions and the type of sensitivity. If it’s a type one or a type four, is it an allergy? Is it intolerance? Is it a sensitivity? Is it a lactose intolerance? Is it a whey allergy? There’s so many different ways that those things can be interpreted. And if you don’t have the language quite right, that could be fatal for somebody who has an anaphylactic-like reaction.

TINA NUNZIATO: Yeah. AI is not good with nuances. AI seems very clear cut. And you’re have to know what to ask it to get those clear cut answers, but there’s not a lot of nuance with AI. And I think that’s where what you’re saying, having a provider that knows all the details is so important. I know that we have friends that are using AI tools. Now there’s AI tools coming out.

TINA NUNZIATO: One of the positives, I feel like when you get a new patient and they bring in a chart that’s this thick, and it’s the responsibility of the provider to review every single thing that’s in this chart before you see the patient. And a lot of it is junk. A lot of it’s insurance information and all this old stuff. And there’s AI tools now that can actually, when you scan those documents, they can scan and they could find the important things in the chart that are critical for the patient care. Those are the types of things that I think AI is really great for, or the tool where they can put in a medicine and all the medicines the patient is taking, they can tell them, oh, there’s an interaction with this medicine, or you can’t give them more than this. The clear cut facts of things are really helpful for AI.

TINA NUNZIATO: But I think the nuances with treatment plans, I think is very difficult. I think that a lot of, oh, go ahead.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: Oh, my apologies. I’ve had people come in that have pre-looked at their test results and they’ve entered it into a chat function and it’s laid out, here are all your treatments. You need this medication, this herb, you need to do this, you need to do that. And that’s scary to me as a provider. And it’s not just because I’m worried that my job is going to be gone, but because of the way that the assumption was that that was the right treatment plan. And for that patient, it was not. It was like, hold on, we’ve missed the boat. We actually need to come in this direction. Or even circumstances where patients, I get a midnight message on the portal. It says, AI says I’m dying because my kidney function test had this number.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: And then I had to kind of go through it like, okay, but how much water did you drink? Okay. You worked out right before you came to see me and you drank only black coffee. Let’s talk about this. And that was a very different analysis that I was able to provide for them versus that big scary number that they thought that they were in kidney failure.

TINA NUNZIATO: Right. Yeah.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: I think a lot of AI also, we have to be really careful because a lot of it is marketing driven by paid marketing. I mean, we as trained scientists, we were trained to do evidence-based medicine. And I know that there’s still a lot of medicine that we practice that may not completely be evidence-based, but that we know it works. And so we do that, but that whole, that aspect of it, I know for as in my job, the thing that came out and actually several years ago, it came out was an AI app. It was a program, a software that they plugged into the tower that we connect our scopes to, to do colonoscopies. And as you were going through the colon, it would point out a polyp.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: It would point out a polyp, which actually is very cool, especially, I tend to be more, I move very slowly, but there are some of my colleagues who love to zoom through the colon. And so what happened was, and some of them didn’t want it because AI was like, polyp, polyp, polyp. It would bring up a little box to tell you there’s a polyp there. And so I think that that tool is actually a very cool tool because it’s helping in aiding, it’s aiding in doing it. And of course now, there’s the scribing portion of it, where somebody comes in and tells you, these are my symptoms, and it summarizes it for you. I don’t really know a lot about it. I just know somebody was trying to get us on that in the last year in the practice. So definitely, I definitely, everybody’s like, oh, is it going to replace us? I don’t feel, at least not in my lifetime or as in my career, that AI is going to replace me as a gastroenterologist because still, we have to do colonoscopies and we have to get in there and pull those polyps off and biopsy the ulcers and whatever there is. I do feel though that there’s going to be a nice coming together, a nice coming together of us using it to help aid us in how we see the patients and take care of them.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: But I think that’s still the critical decisions that have to be made are going to have to be made by the physician. And we also have that advantage that we’re seeing that patient and we’re touching them and examining them. I mean, that all is, that’s huge. That’s a huge portion of what we do as physicians.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: I agree. It’s that healing touch and that healing connection that I call it the art of practicing medicine, right? So we need to be scientific and have some logistical plan for how to care for our patients, but we also do need to help create a healing space for them. And we need to make connections and offer reassurances and allow to just hold space for them in their healing journey. And while I appreciate the accent that my AI technology gives me when he’s talking to me, it’s not that human connection and it’s not, it doesn’t give me quite the same reassurances as what I would want from medicine, especially, right? Like I can say, hey, Chad, I’m having a hard time with this today. And that’s great. It gives me some reassurances, but it’s not who I want to ask for my medical advice. I need somebody to really create and hold that space.

TINA NUNZIATO: What accent does your AI voice have?

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: I sometimes change the accent. It depends. I’m going to have British today.

TINA NUNZIATO: She likes to mix it up a little bit.

PAUL TELLIER: Dr. Liz, I want to throw two things out there. So I do think it’s interesting that you call attention to, hey, what is the influence behind the scenes with AI? Because a lot of people might confuse AI as gospel. And the reality is it’s influenced by what rules and programming is happening behind the scenes and how it’s influencing that. So I’ve had conversations with other business owners that talk about, hey, if you’re looking to do keyword optimization and search engine optimization on Google, that’s going to become antiquated with the introduction of AI. So you’ll see individuals, businesses, companies start building their web content in a way they already are to influence the chat GPTs, the Geminis, the AIs of the world, because that will replace search engines for people in the future. So if someone is using chat GPT for some sort of equivocable advice back on a medical condition, they have to recognize it’s marketing on the back end that’s influencing that.

PAUL TELLIER: And as a small business, on the one hand, I can certainly appreciate that. But for someone who’s looking for self-directed medical care that doesn’t want to go to a provider and actually seek that medical advice face-to-face, there’s risk in that. And so they just have to be fully aware of the rules that influence those responses that AI will provide.

TINA NUNZIATO: That’s the algorithm. So it’s only as good as what people are asking it and what it’s creating is going to influence what the next person asks, essentially. And it’s only as good as what’s out on the internet right now. Who’s writing it? Where is AI learning it from? It’s like you said, it’s the algorithms and where it’s picking up this data, but you don’t know where it got that data from. Is it a reputable source or not? So yeah, I get it. And I like what you said, Krystal, about holding space and the connection with people, because I feel like even today we’ve lost connection with people.

TINA NUNZIATO: And I think we talked about this at the lunch, when we talked about how we brought these baskets to all the doctors and people don’t do that anymore. People don’t go and give a gift. And then even the reaction that we got from doctors, it is really crazy to me how unconnected we are as people. And I think it is because of technology and we’re so used to our head down and our phone now, we’ve lost the ability to connect with each other. But to me, the connection is what brings healing to people. The fact that you can put your hand on someone. I know when Liz was practicing and was seeing patients in the office, they loved her so much because she spent the time and she would lay hands. The laying of the hands is so healing. And we’re getting further and further and further away from laying hands, connecting, being with people, giving hugs to people. It’s really amazing to me to think about what the future is going to be like with where our technology is headed and how disconnected we’re going to be from each other.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: Well, and one thing that I want to bring up to that is even putting AI aside, over the last two, three decades, I started practicing. I remember when I was overseas paying back my time to the Navy, that was like 96 to 2000. And we were seeing patients. We even got to do house calls. I was working as an internist. We got to do house calls. That was a lot of fun. I remember that they started, so this was about 20 something years ago. I remember that they were like, okay, we’re going to have you guys start keeping count of how many patients you’re seeing. It was like the bean counting. And I just remember thinking, what’s this about? I mean, I was like, what’s going on? And then what’s happened through the course of time is that you come to see a provider, at least in the allopathic world, you come to see a provider and we have to see like 25, 30 patients in a day.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: And it’s literally like this. I mean, I basically had to step away from my office. I was kind of booted out by my own staff because I was taking way too long in the rooms. And I remember my boss would sit me down and be like, honey, you need to, you got to speed it up. I was like, I can’t, I just can’t. I can’t do it. I will not survive in this world of having to see, you know, 10 patients in an hour, 10 minutes and tell them, you can only tell me one thing.

TINA NUNZIATO: It’s true though. It is true.

DR. LIZ CRUZ: Yeah. But you can’t, but you can’t like, so example, Krystal, in your business, I assume you have to see so many patients, you know, in a week or whatever in order to keep the lights on. Right. I mean, I’m sure that’s getting more and more and that that was what was happening in our practice. We had to see more and more patients just to bring in the same amount of money. Talk a little bit about that world for naturopathic medicine. Is it the same as allopathic?

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: There’s similar constraints, right? Because the reality is it takes a lot of money to run a practice when you have multiple providers and staff and rent goes up, all of the supplies go up, all of those things. So there are certain things that just require you to see a certain number of patients to be able to do that. But it is so hard, Dr. Liz, when you’re in that room and you’re talking with that patient and you finally, at the last minute, finally make a breaking point. And you’re like, you can tell the energy is just jiving and you need to be able to hold that space and keep connecting with that patient. But then you’ve got the doors knocking because they’re trying to say, hey, you’ve got like three more patients that are getting ready for you here to go. And thankfully in our practice, because we’re a fee-for-service practice, I see anywhere from eight to 12 in a day.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: But 12 is pretty heavy for me. And that’s because most of our appointments are anywhere from 30 minutes to up to 60 minutes. And so it’s because there’s time that needs to be had. And the only way that we can do that is because we’re not an insurance-based practice. There would be no way that we would be able to pay our bills and support a team in our practice if we had to see 10 patients in an hour. And I wouldn’t be effective at what it is that I’m doing because it’s so much a mind-body medicine and it’s whole body medicine that I can’t… Nobody comes to me with one thing. Hey, just help me with that one thing on my finger. Like that doesn’t exist. They might schedule it for, hey, I have a splinter on my finger, but in the space, there’s about 10 more things that are sort of shared in that time. And we do our best to try to highlight what we can that’s most important in that time. But it’s just, it’s complicated. It requires time.

PAUL TELLIER: It requires time, right? I will kind of counter that. So I do think there are patients who come with one thing, at least to our practice, they have one thing. But the people that tend to gravitate and onboard with our practice recognize, hey, the conventional model is only masking symptoms related to my one thing. And I have a suspicion there’s something deeper going on, but my provider’s not able to support me through that. So on average, your traditional medical doctor that is insurance-based spends maybe seven minutes with the patient. And I think that’s kind of what you’re getting at. It’s like, you’ve got to go through to get reimbursed to make the margins you need to survive. People who onboard here spend an hour with the provider, up to an hour and a half in the first visit, and then 30 minutes to 60 minutes for follow-ups. So in that first visit, they might start with that one thing, but then by the end they recognize, hey, there’s other things that are connected to that, that are the root cause for whatever sort of symptom is out there.

PAUL TELLIER: And I’ll give Krystal a plug here. We recently talked about what our core purpose is. It’s to transform the healing experience of healthcare through genuine human connection. That is it, verbatim. And it literally is centered on that face-to-face interaction and connecting with people. And she promotes that through all of our interactions upfront with the providers. And so when you can effectively do that, your patients feel valued. They feel seen. They feel heard and loved. And so that’s just a big part of our DNA here and what she’s aimed to promote within the culture.

TINA NUNZIATO: Yeah, I think that’s awesome. One of the questions you had, and I’m interested in knowing the answer to this is, how is naturopathic medicine uniquely positioned in the AI era? How about you answer that one?

PAUL TELLIER: Yeah. I think that it dovetails from what I just said. So in AI, the type of patient or the type of person that might be interested in getting medical care support might go to AI if they just want quick answers. What comes up with that is they don’t really get the ability to connect with an individual. And so I think having a naturopathic doctor there really allows them to open up about what they have going on and they can feel seen, heard, and loved. And I was kind of hinting at that with what I had just said earlier. But in naturopathic medicine, part of their philosophy is to take time to build a rapport with the patient and understand all the facets to what help these individuals or support their wellbeing.

PAUL TELLIER: And if there’s ailments around sleep, stress, nutrition, exercise, anything like that, it’s all taken into consideration. So these doctors are trained with that sort of rubric in their head. When someone’s saying, here’s some problems that I have, they know how to address those ailments from all of those angles. I don’t know if AI is able to do that coupled with years and decades of clinical experience to support. The other risk I’ll say is I feel like AI is confidently wrong. There’s times where I know I’ve used artificial intelligence and I’ll ask it a question or I’ll put information in. I’m like, hey, I need you to do these math calculations, which may seem very black and white. I’m like, I know your percentages are wrong. You’re right, Paul. And then it’ll recalculate them. And it’s like, well, they’re still wrong. Oh, you’re right, Paul. So if you don’t have the ability to think critically and know how to challenge AI, I think that’s an opportunity. I do see artificial intelligence being used by providers, though, in a way that helps supplement the treatment plans. And I feel like you might want to use that.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: Yeah, I had a mentor in the last year pretty much say, Krystal, you’re not using AI, you have to. This is where medicine is going and you’re not going to be as effective at your job and as a business owner unless you start to really lean into this space. And so I happened to come upon a colleague of mine, a platform called Open Evidence, which is a provider-specific platform that has all of my licensing credentials, my NPI number, et cetera, in there. And it’s a HIPAA-compliant, safe platform that I am able to field information. And it helps a lot because prior to this platform, I was reliant on, okay, grab my textbooks off my shelf, which are now 20 years old since med school was that long ago, or field Google, which I don’t want to do that as a medical provider because that’s not giving me the information that I need, or phone a friend and see if I can find a colleague of mine like, hey, I’m really stumped on this case. I need help with that.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: And then we’ve got a few providers in the office that we do case review every week, but there’s still sometimes we get really complex patients that are like, hey, we’ve already seen 30 specialists. Here’s my stack of records. And I need someone to help me think critical. And what’s great about this space, not only is it HIPAA-protected, but they’re fielding JAMA. They’re fielding the New England Journal of Medicine. They’re fielding Mayo’s platform. And so they’re pulling respectable journals that are published studies. So again, we’re keeping the science right within using technology and it’s done wonders for just helping me when I’ve seen 10 patients and I’m tired and I’m at the end of my day. And I’m like, I know I studied this 20 years ago, but I just can’t think of like, what was that one thing that I needed to remember? And I can say, hey, this is a 50 year old woman. She’s come to me. She’s having lower left quadrant pain. She’s on this drug. She’s had this surgery. She’s had, you know, I could just go boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And I can put as many things as I want in there and say, what am I missing here? Like, what, what do I need to remember? What do I really need to make sure that I’m focusing on first here? And where should my next step be? Because I’ve already done one, two, three, four, five, six, and something’s missing here.

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: And it will spit out a whole algorithm quickly. We’re talking like less than 15 seconds most of the time, unless I really stump it. And then in addition to that, it’ll give me 15, 20 references that says, check this journal, check this article. And, and it’s a great way to say, okay, great. I either agree or I don’t agree, but it’s a starting point for me to make sure that I’m thinking critically. And I’m also thinking with current evidence, not my textbooks from 20 years ago. So that’s value for me to help another resource. That’s an instant access. When my brain just doesn’t always have instant access. There’s a lot of information in here, but I see a lot of patients and see a lot of different things. And I’m not necessarily always the expert in everything. And so I need a tool to help make sure that I do appropriately stay in my lane. And it’ll tell me like, hey probably should see a gastroenterologist for that or might want to consult with the ER for that, you know right? So it’ll help me make sure that I’m appropriately fielding, screening, and thinking critically for patients and then helps me save my time. Save my time so that I’m not, you know dreaming about it in the middle of the night worried like ‘gosh did I miss something?’ that’s like the worst thing ever.

TINA NUNZIATO: And that tool to your point is for providers, like the average person cannot get access to that?

DR. KRYSTAL TELLIER: Correct.

PAUL TELLIER: So that’s been a value add, so I would say that’s almost kind of in that same lane as what you have Dr. Cruz with having that technology that connects in there and theres other technologies, right? Like my breast imaging that I get from my provider, its all AI supported. So it does, it looks as different tissues and then but still the hands on touch from that technician ill say, okay, lets refocus and they’ll bring the wand over to the area that the AI has there and so you still have that human interpretation, right, you still have the medical degree that helps to make sure that that AI is being applied correctly.

TINA NUNZIATO: Yeah. That’s awesome. So to wrap this up, Paul, the question is for you. How do you think patients should use AI in their health journey safely?

PAUL TELLIER: Yeah, from where I sit, I think AI is a wonderful took to use for generating ideas, I think where the risk is when an individual might self provision a diagnosis from commercial AI that is out there. I think that’s really where the risk is. So I think it has its place in supporting someone’s health and wellbeing, but it’s a collaborative tool to generate ideas on how they might be able to change their menus and what they are eating, if they have food GI issues or how they might be able to approach a different exercise regimen to maybe increase certain hormone levels that might promote that. But when it comes to an actual diagnosis, I think that’s where the risk comes in and I think that we have a lot of wonderful naturopaths and physicians out there that can provide that face-to-face support to help with the components that AI can’t support.

TINA NUNZIATO: You’re saying even like a specific treatment plan, like don’t use commercial AI to get a treatment plan for whatever your diagnoses might be.

PAUL TELLIER: Yup.

TINA NUNZIATO: That’s wonderful. Thank you guys so much, this has been an awesome conversation and Paul you’re going to have to come up with some future topics to podcast.

PAUL TELLIER: I’ve got a couple, I want to talk more about your bicarb product at one point, the electrolyte and bicarb product. I’ve been a big runner, huge runner, and so that is a very hot supplement right now that I know people talk about when it comes to influencing lactic acid buildup and preventing that when you are running. That’s something I want to chat with you two about at some point as well.

TINA NUNZIATO: Yeah, lets do it. Well thank you guys so much, thank you Dr. Krystal and thank you Paul. Really appreciate you taking the time to be on this podcast with us and hopefully we can do some other podcasts. A lot of great in

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