Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome: Is mold really the issue?

Welcome, welcome, welcome, Everybody. This is Dr. Hartman here to remind you that you were made for health. So currently we're doing our Mold wars series where we're walking through controversies with chronic inflammatory response syndrome, also known as mold related illness. And so one of the controversies is mold actually what's making you sick? Or is it other things associated with mold? This becomes important to know if it's mold proper or other things because that affects testing and affects environmental testing for your home and actually affects the treatment. So first we need to dive into what serious or chronic inflammatory response syndrome actually is. How many things can actually cause this thing that is generally clumped together and just called mold illness. The first thing to keep in mind is that roughly 80% of chronic inflammatory response syndrome falls under the rubric of water damage buildings. So we'll take that 80% and put it aside really briefly and talk about the other 20% of this mold related chronic inflammatory response syndrome. Those include things like Fiesteria, ciguatera. If people have chronic Lyme, also known as post Lyme syndrome, some long Covid people actually are thinking to have this be an activator for their innate immune system. But also includes things like recluse, spider bites, scorpion bites. There's a whole bunch of things that fall into this. And from some of Dr. Schoenfeld's work, he wrote a really great textbook about it called Vaccines and Autoimmunity. He talks about adjuvants, which are things that tickle or irritate your immune system and activate it. And if it happens chronically, that can relate to this chronic inflammatory response syndrome that he refers to as Asia. I know there's a lot of acronyms. It gets a little confused, but it's basically a different way saying the exact same thing. The reason that's important is with adjuvants, those are things like silicone. So breast implants could fall into that rubric. That's where breast implant illness falls into. But also heavy metals, specifically aluminum, which is in some vaccines, but also mercury, lead, and other metals that attach to your proteins in your body and actually can cause this adjuvant or vaccine type reaction. The reason I say that is because this category is 20% of the whole. But as you can see, it's a lot of other small things that if you don't know to look for, you can miss the cause of someone's mold illness. Obviously it can be more than just mold. So that's 20%. Now within the 80%. Okay, let's go that 80%. So within that grouping, most of that is actually not mold or mold toxins, it's the company mold keeps. So the way to think about it, it's things like actinomyces, endotoxins. So what are these? Endotoxins are actually bacteria that will grow in humidity. So you can have a beautiful house, brand new house, but if your humidity is over 60% and you have hardwood floors, you can grow bacteria that have endotoxins in your furniture. Or if the humidity is between 50 and 60% and you have carpet with padding, you can grow this stuff in there. And then the actinomyces is a soil based organism. So if you have an unencapsulated crawl space, so all of a sudden you can see how a water damaged building doesn't actually have to have visible water. It could just be a humidity issue and a crawl space issue, which is the case in a huge, huge majority of these cases. Again, and that 80%, most of that 80% is actually not the mold toxins proper. Then you have within that the whole idea of a water damaged building, which is actually water leaks, et cetera. And you have particulates, which are these things that as water infects environment, you actually get these things released in the air. And those particulates are very, very inflammatory and toxic. This includes over 200 different things that we've actually recognized that are actually recognized by the EPA as indoor pollutants from water damaged buildings. So all of a sudden you can see how that in a water damage building or in Sears, you went from mold illness, being all these things to being literally 20% of the whole is actually directly related to mold. And within that, it's actually toxins related with mold. So this plays into a lot of different things. It plays into the kind of testing you do for illness. So if you're looking for someone who has a water damaged building, you need to do testing of their home, for example, that includes not just mold particles or the spores, but also particulates as well as actinomyces and your toxins. So it gets a little bigger than just mold proper. And if you're not looking for those things, it's really easy to say, oh, you don't have a mold illness because there's not a water leak in your house. Realizing that's not just something as basic and simple as a water leak. So that also affects how you look at your home. So for example, you could use sport trap testing, which is very commonly done. The mold inspector says your home is safe. There's Nothing wrong in your home. But when you understand particulates and how they play into Sears, you can realize that one interesting statistic is that for every single mold spore in the air, there are 500 particulates. So someone can come and put a plate down on your house, have a few things, nothing really grow. But for every spore that's in the air, there are 500 particulates. So if the mold plate's negative, you can still have lots of particulates, but if the plate's positive, you're gonna have tons of particulates. And if you're only focusing on the source of the mold and not the particulates, all of a sudden you can renovate, clean your house, whatnot, and still have an illness related to it. So that's one of the issues that people need to realize when they talk about the cause of chronic inflammatory response syndrome, which is usually referred to as mold related illness. Actually, the vast majority of it is not mold proper. Now this is where it also gets trickier, is that half of all buildings in the country have some form of water damage that could be water damage proper. You see the water leak, it could be humidity issue, it could be the particularization that's associated with these kind of these buildings. And all of a sudden now it becomes a little more difficult to figure out if you're dealing with Sears or mold related illness because you haven't been able to visually see the mold. So that's the reason why when you do personal testing, you're looking for your immune response, not mycotoxins in your urine. You're looking for the C4A, MMP9, TGF beta. You're looking for dysfunction and your hypothalamus and pituitary axis, looking at osmoaltic, etc. And actually did a whole blog series on this. And part four of that actually dives into all these labs in a deep dive. But the important part of this part of the mold wars controversy, the clashing of the two sides, is one side focuses on urine, mold toxin testing, mycotoxin testing, the other side focuses on immune system testing. And ultimately, once you realize that mold proper is a minority as a small part of sers, really looking at the immune system makes more sense than focusing just on the mold mycotoxins. And that's the reason why a lot of people will test negative for the urine and have sers. And also when you want to realize with the urine microtoxin testing that it's looking at food, that you can realize why people will test positive and might not have sers. It also makes it important to look for other things like the endotoxins. And what I think is interesting about this is a lot of people with SIBO and dysbiosis and gut issues are actually making these endotoxins in their gut. So I've started hyper focusing on people's gut issues with Sears, because if they're making these endotoxins in their gut, the tick bite, the water damage, building the concussion, whatever might start this whole process with them. If their gut's still off, then that inflammatory process can continue forward. And so that's where these controversies actually play out in clinical practice. If you know these things to look for them, then clinically you can start taking care of patients and dealing with it. So we've got some more in the Mold wars series coming up in the next couple of weeks. Please, if this interests you, this is a deep dive into some deeper topics. Please read first the blogs on our website as well as we've done a lot there, plus the other videos we've done. To really understand more about chronic inflammatory response syndrome and how understanding these nuances can help you put together your own, your own protocol to help you get better, to detoxify, to clean your environment. And then if you've done that and you're still having the inflammatory response, but then start calming down your immune system once you've removed yourself, because ultimately since it is an immune issue, you can remove the toxins, remove the environment, and still have a dysregulated immune system, which is one of the things people don't realize. Just removing yourself is huge. But some people don't get better unless you start calming inflammation down after you've removed the exposure. So hopefully that helps you all understand a little better what we're talking about with these controversies in mold related illness. If this is helpful, please share with your friends. We'll be putting this after it's done editing putting on YouTube to be there's a resource as well as sharing on Facebook. So this is just information. If you feel like this is helpful, please share with your friends because the only way to get information like this out there is with people like you who listen to it, actually share. Take care and we'll talk to you soon.