In this episode of The Dr. Hedberg Show, I interview DUTCH test founder Mark Newman.  We covered a lot of detailed information about hormone testing and why the DUTCH test is superior in many ways to other forms of hormone testing.

I've provided a transcript of the interview below or you can listen to the interview through the audio player above.

Dr. Hedberg: Okay, well, welcome, everyone. This is Dr. Hedberg and welcome to "The Dr. Hedberg Show." I'm excited today to have Mark Newman on the show, and Mark is the founder of Precision Analytical. This is a lab that I've been using, I think, pretty much since the beginning, but Mark is a recognized expert and international speaker in the field of hormone testing. He has assisted many labs in developing novel tests to create world-class laboratory testing. He's also educated thousands of providers about hormone monitoring best practices. Welcome to the show, Mark, thanks for coming on.

Mark: Yeah, glad to be here. It's good to chat with you.

Dr. Hedberg: Why don't we start with you just filling everybody in on what you've been doing and what you've been working on with your testing?

Mark: Sure. The tests that we do and most people know it by its acronym, which is DUTCH, so it's a Dried Urine Test for Comprehensive Hormones. It's kind of a culmination of everything I've done career-wise vocationally in this world of hormone testing, starting off developing and working on 24-hour urine testing and kind of taking a good look at that in terms of the pros and cons. And then moving on to blood testing and saliva testing and governed over about a million of those tests over a five or six-year period. And what we've been doing the last five or six years is trying to piece together a little bit of a better model for people to get more information when it comes to reproductive and adrenal hormones.

You know, saliva testing has its advantages and blood testing has its advantages, and we've tried to combine all of that into one model that people can use to get a lot of information. So, we've got a uniquely comprehensive look at your adrenal hormones and your reproductive hormones and that's what we did and launched in about 2000, early 2013. I think you were kind of one of the first to jump on with us, which we've, of course, appreciated. And since then, we've been looking at this puzzle and saying "Okay, what else can we add to this to add into the picture?" So, we added a melatonin marker, we added 8-Hydroxydeoxyguanosine for an oxidative stress marker.

And then we've recently added a handful of organic acids so that we can see B12 deficiency, B6 deficiency, glutathione deficiency, a window into the neurotransmitter world. Because those all have a lot of crossover with the hormones and our goal and my goal is really just to give people the best most cost-effective tool they can for when you're dealing with functional medicine, integrative medicine and just some of these tough cases where you've got multiple things going on and we're trying to figure out as much as we can about those patients so that we can treat them well.

Dr. Hedberg: Yeah, I was really looking forward to this interview so we can really delve deep into some of these areas. So, like you said, I think I was one of the first to start using the DUTCH Test and like a lot of practitioners out there, I started with saliva and blood. And then I had done some 24-hour urine, but that always was a little bit difficult to get the patient to do all 24 hours of collection. And then with that, we didn't have the cortisol rhythm that we have with the DUTCH Test. So there were a few disadvantages there, but why don't you give us a general breakdown of the advantages of urine compared to saliva and blood testing?

Mark: Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think historically,