B (4:06)

That's what happened to me. Mold absolutely ruined my life. I didn't realize it. You know, I had spent some time in childhood in a moldy bedroom. You know, I was becoming more and more sensitive, more and more reactive. Life was harder. My temperament was changing was one of a few factors. But it wasn't until I lived in moldy house after moldy house and the car was moldy because I had a leaky seal. Like there were just nowhere, there was nowhere to get away from these multiple exposures of poison. And then even when I got told that finally that mold could be an issue, it didn't even occur to me that it was my issue, which is just so weird. How are people missing this in their homes? And what should they look for?

A (4:46)

The easiest way to assess for risk. There are a couple things. Number one, you should get really familiar with the term hygrometer. These read humidity levels in your home sometimes. What your humidity should really ideally be below 50% in your home. Between 40 and 50% is a really good place for mold prevention. If you're sitting at 60 70% if you're trying to save money by not running your air conditioner. The air conditioner is designed to dehumidify the air when it runs. What happens is humidity levels build, and you don't need a pipe burst. You don't need running water to grow mold. You just need vapor. So get hygrometers in your bedrooms. You can get them for $6. They're real inexpensive ways to kind of monitor if you suspect you have mold. You can, very inexpensively, you can do a type of dust collection called an ERMI test. And ermi is just a. Basically, it analyzes for mold spores in the dust samples of your home. And that can give you at least a window of what kinds of molds are there and quantitatively how much. Because at certain levels, mold is okay, but at other levels it is not. So those two things are kind of preliminary. They're not definitive. They're preliminary. You really want to know if you struggle with autoimmune disease, if you struggle with the signs of chronic aging, your eyes are going, your joints hurt, regardless of the fact that you haven't really injured anything. Your brain is slipping, your brain foggy, you can't react word recall very well. You're getting electrostatic shocks when you walk through your house. You're developing nerve stings or nerve pain neuropathy. These are super common symptoms of mold exposure. So if you fall in that umbrella, you know, you can do an army, you can get hygrometers, but ultimately see a mold literate doctor, somebody that's trained or understands mold really, really well, because there's some simple tests that a doctor can run. One of the most simple tests is a urine test that will measure for the toxins in your body that molds produce. And that's another really great way to understand, is this playing a role potentially in your health issue? Because once that's identified, there's a step two to that process. Now you need to go the extra mile and do a mold inspection of your house. Mold can hide in the walls. Mold can. I've seen cases where I just had a case where not one inkling of visible mold. It was growing behind the wall, behind the laundry room where the water goes into the wall. There was a leak, and it wasn't an obvious leak where water was all over the floor. So they pulled the washing machine back, and they saw some wet, slimy, black stuff, and they were sick for years. And this was in a home that had largely been rebuilt and remodeled. So don't think because your house is new that you're safe. Don't think because you bought a house that's been brand new, remodeled, that you're safe. There are mistakes, construction mistakes, that are very common, that allow for moisture accumulation, water buildup, and that can lead to mold growth. The invisible kind. When I lost my house to mold, we had a million spore count in our wall cavities, but we didn't have any visible mold. That was obvious. So a good mold inspector and key note there, if you hire a mold inspector and they come out and they do an outside air sample and an indoor air sample, get them out of your house and fire them. Air testing for mold is the equivalency of a doctor running a CBC on a chronically sick patient and saying, you're just fine. Air testing is a tool and it can find mold, but more commonly it does not. Especially black mold, because those spores are super heavy and they fall to the floor, they don't circulate up in the air. The other problem with air tests is most people that are trained to do them have a weekend certificate. They don't know about mold illness. They're coming into your house, they turn off the air conditioner and everything is still. And then they take their air sample. Well, mold spores circulate when you walk across the floor. It's kind of the way dust kicks up. And if you're taking a still air picture, you're getting a false potential message. Some believe you need a 20 inch box fan to stir things up to be able to properly do an air test. But don't stop at the air test. The true mold inspection will include an air test. It will include humidity readings, thermal cameras, fiber optic cameras that can be placed behind the walls to do visualization. They should crack open your H vac and look at coils to make sure there's no mold growing on your coils should go in your attic if you have one. They should go in your crawl space if you have one. They should walk the perimeter of your house to look for signs of water intrusion and water damage. So very comprehensive. If you get a mold inspection report and it's one to three pages long, you haven't had a mold inspection, you've had an inadequate inspection, you've had a fake inspection, if you will. So definitely you want that good one if you're trying to rule it out. Because what we see is people get these three page inspections. They come to my office all the time. I read the Inspect, I'm like, you haven't had A mold inspection, and they think they're out of mold and that they're home free and their mycotoxin levels in their urine are sky high. And ultimately, when you get a good inspector to go out to the home, typically you can find it relatively easy. You just have to know the difference. Right? It's just like this, good and bad in every profession. If you hire a bad plumber, you won't rehire them. You got to go find one that's good. It's the same thing in mold inspection. You got to find the people that have great reputations and know what they're doing.

B (10:32)

Could not agree more. Also, my least favorite thing is to see a mold remediator provide the only inspection, because there's just an inherent conflict of interest, and it's not to disparage remediators. We need you, you know, we need you to be great at your job. You know, when you're the one that's deciding how big that bill should be, you know, that should be a dispassionate third party.

A (10:57)

Well, it's just like when you go to a doctor, oftentimes, if it's a big health issue, you seek a second opinion. Absolutely. Yeah. And with remediation companies, they should never be held to judge their own work. It's not to say they couldn't do a good job. But your mold inspector, your high quality mold inspector, is kind of your liaison. It goes to bat for you to ensure that you not only know where the mold is at, but know why the mold grew. And from those two pieces of information, to create a remediation plan for the remediator to follow. The remediator should not be making their own plan up. The mold inspector does that, and the remediator follows along the lines of what the mold inspector is asking. And then when it's all done, the mold inspector comes back out to cooperate that the work was done so that the family that was mold stricken can move back in in a safe fashion and with confidence.

B (11:51)

One of the most frustrating things that I found for folks is it takes them too long to even get to this topic because there might be a family of five, and they're all not feeling at their best, but it presents differently. So mom might have difficult periods and joint pain. A kiddo might have, you know, childhood asthma, and another one might have, you know, all kinds of different histamine sensitivities, you know, skin rashes, et cetera, but no apparent lung issues. Dad might be depressed, you know, and feeling like he's Aging rapidly and not sleeping well. You know, there's so many different presentations to mold illness. Can you speak to that a little bit from a clinical perspective?

A (12:32)

Yeah, of course. It's a tragedy, really, that mold is such a hydra because it can manifest in different ways for different people. At its core, underlying, it causes inflammation, and different people have different weaknesses. They're going to manifest that inflammation in different tissues. And when. When mom, who's usually in charge of the health of the family, right, when she starts getting ner, nervous, worried, she's taking everybody to doctors and making sure the husband goes to see his doctor. And what's happening is they're all getting a diagnosis, right? You have asthma, here's your steroid inhaler. You have eczema, here's your steroid cream. You have depression, here's your antidepressant. So they're getting the pill for the diagnosis, but the diagnosis is wrong. Because the way our system works is, you know, and this is the way insurance works, unfortunately, is they're going to pay your insurance bill. If you have a formal diagnosis, they're going to pay for your medication. If that diagnosis matches the medication. Right. And excuse my language, it's a shitty system, and it hasn't worked and it's failed us so horribly. But what happens is people get stuck in that and they think, I have hypothyroidism, I have eczema. It's kind of like my McDonald's. They start owning their illness as if it's special to them, as if it's.

B (13:53)

Part of their identity.

A (13:54)

Yes.

B (13:54)

That's when I got told I would never be well. Well, Lyme disease, very easy for me to resolve. Once I resolved the mold, I had been financially devastated by trying to tackle Lyme directly without including that mold piece.

A (14:08)

Tackle all the underlying factors. Mold typically is one that's very common, that's often overlooked. And don't get stuck in that. That route of take the pills to suppress your symptoms. Because ultimately what happens, it's another area that very few people talk about. Drugs don't come free now, and I'm not talking financially free. You can't rob Peter to pay Paul. You can't trick your body to mask your symptoms by suppressing something without paying a price somewhere else.

B (14:40)

Can you give me an example of that?

A (14:41)

Yeah. Let's take high blood pressure, for example. Very common manifestation in mold is high blood pressure. So patient goes in, doctor says, oh, we need to control that blood pressure. Here's hydrochlorothiazide, a very Common diuretic. Well, that particular diuretic causes suppression of vitamin B1 uptake into cardiac cells. So although it may lower your blood volume and subsequently lower your blood pressure, it's actually inducing vitamin B1 deficiency, which will cause beriberi, which will cause your blood pressure to go back up, will cause congestive heart failure. So you can't. There's not a trade off. And so you have to understand that if you're taking medicine to suppress your symptoms, your medicine is ultimately going to create a new series of problems that then get diagnosed as a new disease that then gets added to with a new medication. Now you're stuck in this pharmaceutical rat race where you're not going to get healthy. So you have to step back from that. Sometimes it's kind of scary because when you've been diagnosed with something and the doctor's looking at you and saying, you have rheumatoid arthritis, if you don't take this biologic, you're going to be in a wheelchair in five years. You're not a doctor, you're not trained, you don't have any experience with any of that. You're just trusting that that doctor knows what's best for you. It's a scary thing to step back and say, maybe that guy's wrong, maybe I shouldn't really take that drug. I would encourage anyone watching this just to think about medicine empirically. We spend more money, vastly more money than any country in the world. And we have the poorest health as it relates to chronic disease. So how are we right? And so sometimes it's just looking at outcomes. Don't look at it too deep, don't overthink it, but just look at the outcome. If we're doing these things and we're the sickest nation on earth amongst other industrialized countries, then shouldn't we step back and maybe reevaluate what it is that we're doing? And this is the revolution that's happening right now in our country. We are moving toward. Let's ask a deeper question. Let's ask a different question. Doctor, why do I have high blood pressure? Not what can I take, what can I be victimized to take for the rest of my life? And so this requires ownership. People call me the gluten free warrior mold warrior. But you have to own yourself. And if you don't own yourself, somebody else will own you. It's a form of slavery. When you can't function in this world without going to fill your prescription, you are a slave to that, and if you want to be healthy, it requires work, it requires diligence, it requires thinking, it requires action. And when it comes to mold, it requires enough bravery to say, yes, my house may have this problem. I can't ignore it. Mold can kill you. It can cause cancer. I have seen, of all the things I've seen patients die from, this is probably the most insidious. And you have to understand that a lot of people get offended. I'm a great housekeeper. There's no way my house could have nothing to do with how well you keep house. It has only to do with was your house constructed properly? Is there water damage? Is there water intrusion that's allowing for that mold to grow? And that's a question that's very complicated. But if you have the, if you have the right thoughts, if you suspect mold and you bring in the right team, you can find it before it takes your whole family out. It almost took my whole family out. My wife almost died, my dog died. My son was sick with rashes and fevers. I was weeping like a baby some days because my emotions were all over the place. It's a horrible, horrible travesty to be in mold. And so many families are, but they just have so many different diagnoses they've been given, and so they don't even think mold because again, they own that disease. They own the thyroid, they own the skin disease, they own the asthma. And then they proceed to treat those things. But again, if your family is really sick or even kind of sick, and everybody's a little sick, look at, look at mold. Look for mold. If you have an autoimmune diagnosis, look for mold. 100% mold causes autoimmune disease problem. Well, I used to treat a lot of people and their gluten sensitivity and their autoimmune disease. And, and what we found was there's a percentage I no longer see these people anymore because most people that come to me now have changed their diet, like, diet change. I'm sure you, you've talked about this. But if you are grain free, sugar free, dairy free, GMO free, not pumping yourself with seed oils, eating organic, grass fed, free range organic, you know, getting good sunshine, getting good sleep, doing all those things, and you're still sick, you are in mold, most likely, and you better go hunt it down.

B (19:31)

Amen. I think that there's a lot of people out there who make this initial discovery of, oh, shoot, mold may be a part of the picture for me or my house may be moldy. And then there's this huge chasm between that awareness that is so hard won because it can take years or even decades to figure out that it's a part of your health issue between that and resolution. And I think part of that is because there's a major, Like a passive. A passivity that becomes. With mold toxicity, you know, there's been a lot of study and research about how different fungi and different mycotoxins can actually induce passive behavior in people. Right. And I see it all the time in people who have mold exposure, and then they wait and wait and wait to do something about it. And I think part of that is that nervous system overload, because it's so hard on the nervous system. It's directly neurotoxic. Different mold species have different mycotoxins that have, as you so well know, these different types of damage that can, you know, happen to the body citrine and start on the kidneys, et cetera, et cetera. But when you look at how mold directly attacks the nervous system and can distort your emotions and actually induce this kind of passive behavior, it's easy for people to feel overwhelmed or, like, this is too hard, especially because mold is, you know, shutting down the mitochondria. And so right when you need energy the most, because you have to rise to the occasion to be your own advocate in a system that is not set up to let you, you know, to rise to the occasion to do your mold mitigation, you don't have the energy to do that. The part that I really want you to speak into about this is there's a weird nervous system influencer backlash going on right now. Have you seen this? Where people who life coaches and therapists who want to talk about the nervous and how profound it is to work with the nervous system, you know, and use nervous system supportive tools are extremely dismissive of mold detox, and they're pointing at mold detoxes that didn't work or how people felt worse on mold detoxes, not better. Can you speak to this gap in clinical knowledge? Like, how do we get people through that? Because the last thing I want to see is people figuring out this issue and then getting stuck and being like, oh, well, I guess I just have to positive think my way through this, because mold detox doesn't work.

A (21:51)

You can't positive think your way through mold.

B (21:53)

Yeah.

A (21:54)

My wife is a very. I would say, very positive person. She didn't tell me this until we were out of the mold, but she. She said there were so many Days where we were in that house that I imagined just going outside on my knees and just blowing my brains out. You can't positive your way out of that now. She was never suicidal. It was. She just became so apathetic about life that she didn't want to be here anymore. Again, you can't positive your way out of that kind of a situation. So it's not to say that people shouldn't be trying to retrain their, their negative emotions and their negative loops, that if you're still in mold, I will say this, all the brain care in the world is not really going to be super effective. There's a right way and a wrong way to detox a person in mold. The vast majority of failed detoxification cases, they didn't fail because detox doesn't work. They failed because they probably weren't working with somebody who was adamant and diligent and enough of a beast to have the courage to tell that patient, your remediation failed. I understand that it's expensive and that you're struggling and that you're frustrated, but I'm not going to have you spend a bunch of money on a bunch of products to detox when I know that your remediation failed or when I know that you're mold inspection sucked. It was a three page report of some jerk who took a weekend class who doesn't know what he's doing, who came in and told you that you don't have mold. And it gave you some relief because you, you couldn't fathom having to deal with that. I get all that. There's a psychology, deep psychology with mold. But brutal truth is the only way forward and the only way you get out of mold is you. You first have to identify it, then you have to identify why. Then you have to fix the why. Then you have to the mold properly through good remediation technique. Then you have to clean the air through something called fine particle remediation. Then you have to think about, do I keep grandma's afghan and do I keep this and do I keep that? Is it worth bringing that stuff back into my house that I've just paid thousands of dollars to remediate? You have to do all those things before you can detox. And there are too many unethical practitioners that are out there that are telling people, I had a patient in my office last week, she had some of the highest mycotoxin levels that anyone's ever brought to me. Her doctor was detoxing her, but never told her to Get a mold inspection. This is part of the problem. Right. So you have. I mean, it's not to pick on the coaches that are out there trying to retrain people's brains, because I think there's a good place for us all to be helping patients.

B (24:59)

Those tools can be profound. It's insane to think that a body under attack should just ignore being attacked. That's the same as a pharmaceutical. Yeah, I'm sorry. It's not. Okay.

A (25:10)

So the thing is, is that your body is so giftedly intelligent that it is not going to let you stay in an environment, it is a threat to you without throwing alarm bells. That's what it's supposed to do. Like, that's what being in tune is. It's recognizing that, oh, that's not an ache or a pain that we're going to diagnose. That's your body saying, do it differently. And if you shut that down or suppress it or you try to mind over matter it, I mean, that's not to say there aren't people that have had spontaneous healing and spontaneous remission. We don't know everything. But if you're in mold, you're not going to positive your way out of it. You've got to find the mold, you've got to remove the mold before you try to detox your body from, you know, any potential toxins that you were exposed to or that were embedded in your tissue. There's an order. There's a proper order to things. And unfortunately, in the mold community, postgraduately speaking for doctors, there's a few different groups that I think do a pretty good job of bringing awareness and education to physicians and doctors.

B (26:19)

Do you want to name a couple here?

A (26:20)

So there's ISEAI and there's the Sears group. And they have different approaches and different opinions for, for what it's worth, not everybody agrees with this group and not everybody agrees with that group, which is fine. That's true in every group. But they're doing a great job of bringing awareness and education and asking deeper questions so that doctors can get better at understanding the scope of this illness. But they're relatively new and we're kind of at the whisper stage, Right. So you remember when gluten was like relatively unknown 20 plus years ago, what's gluten? All of a sudden there was a handful of doctors taking patients gluten free and writing books about it. You know, William Davis wrote Wheat Belly.

B (27:09)

And you're amazing book. No grain, no pain.

A (27:11)

No grain, no pain. That gluten at first was like a little whisper today. What is it? There's not a grocery store in the country that doesn't have a gluten free aisle. There's not a person in the modern world that doesn't or hasn't heard the term gluten, whether they agree with it or not. My point is the awareness is there and we're at that early whisper stage right now with mold that it's going to become a roar. Well, there's an awakening happening right now in our country where people are fed up with being fed poison. We've got great folks like Vani Hari, who's out there, food babe, doing great work, RFK and the whole political movement's doing great work to bring awareness. And I think families are sick and they're sick of being sick and they don't know why. And when they go to their doctor and they ask a question and they get insulted, I think they're kind of tired of that. Doctors are no longer on that immortalized pedestal of yes, doctor, yes, doctor, yes, doctor. Now it's more like, I'm not going to let you treat me like that and I'm not going to let you gaslight me. That's the trend that we're waking up to today. And I think with that revolution of food change, we're going to see mold come more to the forefront because people are changing their diet. People are recognizing they can't eat, you know, fried chicken nuggets and french fries and drink soda and be healthy. Right? So there's that awareness. And because of that awareness, they're also realizing, I've got to exercise and probably should get some sunshine and go to bed on time and I should probably have some peace in my life and have some practices that bring me peace in my life. That awareness is going to shed the light on mold even more simply because as people do those things and still feel sick. Now what? There's six fundamentals, six things that this audience can be in, any audience can be empowered to do so if you are trying to be healthy, I call that these things are not negotiable. Not because I said so, but because your body won't work well if you're not doing these six things. Eat real food. That's easy. Go to bed on time, get some sunshine every day. Exercise, drink clean water and breathe clean air. And when your house and the air in your house is killing you and you're doing all six of those things to the best of your ability, that's when you need to start looking for mold.

B (29:37)

Beautifully said. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today.

C (29:42)

Thanks for spending this time with us today. I know these conversations can bring up a lot and I want you to have room to sit with what you learned and let it land in your own body. If you want more support or you're curious about the next step on your healing path, you can always connect with me. Find me on Instagram hedetoxnation and explore resources mentioned in this episode@detoxnation.com this conversation is shared for education and personal reflection, and isn't medical advice. Please always work with your trusted healthcare providers for your care. I'm really glad you're here and I'll see you in the next episode.