Dr. Aaron Hartman explains why mold exposure blocks recovery in patients with Lyme disease, long COVID, and autoimmune disorders. Mold toxins trigger chronic inflammation that some people can't clear, especially those with specific HLA genetic variants. One patient's Lyme serology normalized after a year of treating mold exposure and removing the source.
Chapters
As we keep on talking about individuals getting stuck, you know, why are you still sick? Why are you not getting better? What's going on? What's been overlooked? That's a question I get a lot. What's been overlooked? What have we missed? What special fancy test has not been done? What special fancy diagnosis has not been made, which is the reason why you are still stuck? And for me, in our clinic here at Richmond Integrative Functional Medicine, we have a big, a big toolbox, lots of things we think about. And so I want to go over the next Several podcast episodes is what are some of the things we actually see that cause people to get stuck in their healing process? And want to start with probably one of the major things that we see as a reason why people aren't healing from their chronic Lyme disease or their mast cell activation syndrome or their autoimmune disease or their long COVID, you know, or your concussion or your autoimmune disease or you know whatever. Or maybe it's like you've been to multiple doctors and no one can figure out what's going on with you. Like You know what's going on, and I want to talk about one of the first things that people are familiar with. They like to talk about that when you look at the hierarchy and our most sensitive patients that we see that come to us from around the country. Why are they stuck? Or even the executives we see that are you know high functioning individuals, but they've lost their spark. They've lost their. It's actually interesting. Sometimes they lose their photographic memory, or just some of their brain. They get brain fog. What is one of the things? At the basis that can make it hard for everything else to get better, and that's mold. Now, now, and the appropriate term to use probably you know people use chronic inflammatory response syndrome to define your part of your immune system, your innate immune system that gets activated by biotoxins, which are biological toxins, and the fancy term is CIRS for that. That's one aspect of mold. Mold exposure is the The innate immune system activation, and when you have an autoimmune issue related to you know SIRS or mold, I'm gonna use the word mold just because it's easier and more familiar with. The appropriate term would be chronic inflammatory response syndrome, or SIRS, is you can show up with an autoimmune disease: thyroid, Hashimoto's, rheumatoid, whatever, psoriasis, gout, which is not autoimmune but it's an autoinflammatory syndrome, and you might be stuck there because of this this mold exposure. That started as an innate, went into the adaptive immune system. But then there's just the toxins themselves. Historically, mold—it's really interesting how you know even in you know in the Torah, in the first five books of the Old Testament, you'll see you know building laws. If you have a building that has a mold, basically they they call up a patch or a moldy spot, and if you remove it, it comes back in seven days. Literally, you destroy the building. You have a piece of clothing, a piece you know. Nice piece of clothing because back then clothing was really expensive and hard. You know, you get a spot in it, you clean it out, you cut it out. If it comes back, you get ready to burn the clothing. You can wash metal things. You know, wood things you have to burn, et cetera, et cetera. They knew 3,500 years ago that, huh, if you get mold in a building or in your clothing, could be bad. But that that was a little different than what we deal with today. That was actually the direct toxicity. You know, one thing when I was in medical school, I learned about aflatoxin that in corn or wheat. Causing liver failure, causing liver disease and liver cancer. And so there are direct cytotoxic or cell toxic effects from mold, which are the direct toxicity, which you can you can measure that kind of stuff in urine to see like look for the toxins. But then there's the autoimmune aspect of mold. And the thing about it is we all have some kind of exposure. You know, 50% of all buildings in our country have are water damaged buildings have some kind of water damage. And then you get from the mold to. Endotoxins, dactylomyces, to particulates. It gets kind of complicated, but in general, this is a big issue, and this can be at play with Lyme disease. For example, I've had patients with Lyme disease who've been lots of different fancy doctors, been on antibiotics for a year. I'm thinking about one in particular came to see me, and she still had like six or seven bands positive on her Western blots, and I felt comfortable not giving her more antibiotics because she'd literally been on them for a year. And realized, hey, she was hypermobile. We'll talk about that later. Hey, she's got POTS. We'll talk about that later. But I started with detoxifying her mold with binders, with phosphatidylcholine, getting out of the environment, working on her gut. And that, and over a year, I saw her bands normalize. So mold is tricky because it's, because it's so common, it's ignored by the HVAC guy who comes to your, your house. I remember having our, where I used to work before 2022, having, um, The mold, the HVAC people come out, they looked at it and they're like, oh, everything's fine. I was like, I know this place isn't fine. So I had my, my, my guy come take a look at it and he was like, oh, it's horrible. He gave me pictures. Well, the thing about it was, is that the first guy saw that so commonly that they're like, yeah, every building has that. Every place has mold on the, on the condenser. Like they didn't see it as a big deal. Well, it was. And so it's one of those things that because it's so common and so commonly seen by so many different tradespeople, or other individuals, they assume, well, since it's so normal, it can't be causing a problem for you. And part of the story is there are about roughly 23%, um, depending on what you read, maybe 22%, 23% of the population has a gene, an HLA-DRDQ gene, that makes it more difficult, not impossible, but it makes it more difficult for them to detoxify mold from their body, the biotoxins. Part of what your adaptive immune system does in making antibodies You make antibodies to your own tissues to help your body heal from an injury, a wound, right? To get viruses out of your body, to get bacteria, you make antibodies to get them out of your body. You can make antibodies to DNA to get broken DNA out of your system and toxins as well. And a significant number of individuals, they have this part of the system is off just a little bit and it's a little harder for them to do. So, when you look at mold, we have lots of resources on our website on You know, healthy. We have a healthy building guide on the website that helps you walk through your own home. We've done a whole mold blog series. But if you're stuck in your healing process and your journey, and you're not quite sure why you're stuck, you've been to a bunch of different doctors and even some other functional specialists. If you haven't actually looked into the mold part, getting your building, getting the place you live evaluated first, getting your body evaluated, doing the appropriate testing, not just for exposure, like do you have the toxins in your system, which you may or may not have. But do you have your immune system dysregulation? I personally have checked myself for all this stuff, and it's interesting to see how many toxins I have in my body from working in a factory in college, living in moldy places, and I'm working on that stuff right now. But my innate immune system was not activated, so I didn't— I don't have chronic inflammatory response syndrome, though I had the stuff in my system setting me up for that. And I have the genes that make it hard for me to detoxify. So that's where living a healthy lifestyle Focusing on the foundational stuff probably is what's kept me healthy, not having issues. So mold's a big, big spot. If you're not getting better, you're not—you're stuck. Why are you not getting better? Think mold. Visit some of the resources on our website. We have a whole SIRS podcast series that just walks through this, as well as blog series. Get educated. But that might be the reason your body is not getting better and not healing. Take care. Talk to you soon.
