Mystery Illness #2: Mold

Mystery illnesses, what are they? What are the five mystery illnesses that are being missed that your doctor may be overlooking? And what should you know about that just in case you're dealing with something that no one's been able to figure out? So last time we talked about Lyme disease, chronic Lyme disease, as being a mystery illness. Today we're going to talk about mold related illness. Those who of you who follow us know that the technical term is chronic inflammatory response syndrome, 80% of which is water damage buildings. So maybe we should call this, you know, water damage building syndrome. In the 80s, the term sick building syndrome was first coined, which was related to chemicals in airtight buildings causing illness which would fall under chronic inflammatory response syndrome. So sick building syndrome actually is a kind of cirs of which water damage building is recounts for 80%. So, you know, mystery illnesses, what are these? These are things that involve multiple systems and multiple symptoms. It can be psychological symptoms like anxiety, depression. You almost feel kind of crazy and people think you're kind of crazy. It can be ADHD stuff. My wife, when she got some aldehyde exposure in grad school, actually developed really bad anxiety and focusing issues. She got ADHD kind of flare. It can be chest pain, shortness of breath, gut issues, body aches and pains, fatigue, chronic fatigue. One of my patients actually described her joints crickling and crackling and popping. It can be lansating, jabbing, stabbing pain. One interesting thing about water damage building cognitive responsiveness is people get excessive thirst, so they drink a lot of water, but because of issues in their central nervous system, they don't retain it, they pee it out. So they drink a lot and pee and goes right through them, they pee out. Other people because of this phenomena actually will carry static charges easier and they actually will shock themselves or others easier in the wintertime. And sometimes it gets so bad that they actually destroy electronic equipment. So yeah, that sounds kind of weird. It's kind of woo woo crazy, you know, are you possessed or whatever. And it's actually chronic inflammatory response syndrome. Each of these, the five mystery illnesses we mentioned before, Lyme mold, mast cell autoimmune, and then dysautonomia, they have very similar sounds, about 80%, 70%, 80% different. But the nuances are where, you know, the devil's in the details, so to speak. With chronic inflammatory response syndrome, you need a watery image building. So there's an exposure, direct exposure could be moving to a new location, moving to a new job. It could be. Actually I had one patient who was really anxious at work all week long she worked in a dental office. We go home, felt better in the evenings and she thought it was stressed at work. Come to find out there was mold in the office. And when she quit working at that place, she stopped getting anxiety during the week. There's also can sometimes can be weather related things. Sometimes people who have this will be more sense of humidity in the environment. So when the humidity is up, they feel worse or even like storms come through, they get water damage to house. They don't realize, oh, you know, six weeks later they start feeling sick. And with kids going back to school in the fall, most schools at least in the Richmond area were at have some kind of mold issue in them. So sometimes it's, you know, school starts back up and you think it's because the kids are going to school and the stress, et cetera. And it's actually the cleanliness of the air quality in the schools themselves. So, so what are some nuances of chronic inflammatory response syndrome or mold? Well, I mentioned the Lansing Electrical symptoms which you sometimes can see with Lyme disease, tick borne illnesses, but the excessive thirst and as well as the urination are unique for that. And the static shocks are very unique. But you have a lot of those symptoms. And part of the evaluation is looking at what's called a cluster analysis where you look at 13 different clusters and you look for someone having eight symptoms in eight of those clusters. And again multiple systems, multiple symptoms. So what's the evaluation for this? Well, the evaluation first is someone who fits in this category which actually if you look at all five of these together, it's a lot of people, I could say maybe 30 to 50% of population narcotic would fit into one of these five categories at any particular time during the year. So that's a lot of people actually. But initially for molders you do this, the cluster analysis. Then you do a Marcons test which is a nasal swab. You do a VCS test in labs and labs help clinch the diagnosis. But without labs you can be 99.5% sure someone has chronic inflammatory response syndrome. The treatment for this typically is not antibiotics like it is for Lyme or herbals or biofilm 2amorant or whatnot. But it tends to be more removing the exposure, assisting the body in detoxification, which is usually binders and lipids. And then after that rechecking, seeing how the immune system is responding and adding on additional helps to that. The trick with water damaged buildings is they can be a setup for all the other ones. They can be a setup for long Covid, which is I did not mention here. For chronic Lyme or post Lyme syndrome. They can be a setup for muscle activation, a setup for dysautonomia, or for all immune issues. So even when you see one of these five mystery, you gotta realize these mystery illnesses many times don't live by themselves. They live together. And with if in doubt, think mold. Because why? Because half of all buildings in our country have water damage. So if you or a loved one is dealing with a lot of weird symptoms, multiple different symptoms and different systems in their body, doesn't quite make sense. I would think one these five things we're talking about and if you have to pick one of the, one of the many to focus on, it would be mold. So my question for you is this, are you dealing with or do you know someone who's dealing with these kind of things that they found to be mold? I'd be curious if you share here, wherever you're listening to this, like, what did it take for them to get their final diagnosis? Because ultimately people sharing information like this can help speed along the process of figuring out when someone's ill or sick. And then we also on our website, have a bunch of resources on this particular mystery illness and we have some other podcasts we dedicate to chronic inflammatory response syndrome, which is the technical term for mold related illness. So next week we'll be talking about number three of our mystery illnesses in our short little end of week deep dives. If there's one you'd like to deep dive in, please let us know. We respond to what people ask us in this space because our goal is to educate, encourage, empower, and so hopefully that's what we're doing. Take care, we'll talk to you soon.