07: Action Mindset / Evolution of Environmentally Acquired Illness

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to today's show. If you're one of the 130 million people that are dealing with Sirs Lyme disease, autoimmune disease, or other conditions that are impacted by mold on a daily basis and you need to learn how to eliminate that exposure, then you're in the right place. My name is Brian Carr, and you're listening to Mold Finders Radio.

Hey, guys. So today I want to talk about setting your expectations for what's going to happen or what's going to come from a mold inspection and ultimately what needs to be looked at for remediation. The reason I want to do this is I was, I did an appointment yesterday and I was going through this home. This is an older home. It was built in the 50s. There was an addition that was built in around 2000 or the year 2000. So anywhere from like 70 years for a portion of it to 20 years for another portion of it. So there were some things that I found in the house. So the reason that I was called into this appointment, the wife who.

Had scheduled the phone calls was a husband and wife. So the wife has Lyme disease and is dealing with some other things. And so she's mold sensitive. She's bounced around to several doctors. They're all kind of telling her the same thing. And I think she kept bouncing to different doctors after hearing the same thing over and over again. This is just my interpretation of talking with her because I think she was looking for a different answer. Right. And the reason that I want to kind of give you guys this topic today is to understand.

What your mindset needs to be in order to move forward down this path. So, you know, the reason that I think that this particular.

Woman was bouncing to different doctors because they were all telling her they think she's being exposed to mold. She's being exposed to mold. That's what's causing all these problems. And I don't think she liked what she was hearing. And she kind of keeps looking to find somebody who's going to tell her that everything is fine and I'm just going to give you this pill or something and it's going to get better. And, and any mold literate doctor you talk to is going to 100% tell you that's not how it works. Right. Like, the first thing they will tell you is that you have to handle the mold problem. And so I think she scheduled the appointment with us only because she kind of felt like forced to do it from her doctors continuously trying to push that on her. And then when I came through the house, I was there for about six and a half hours before I actually sat down with them and told them everything I found. So this lets you know kind of the extent of what the problems were, because I'm logging everything as I'm going through the house, and there ended up being like 34 different areas where there was either visible mold or it looked like I was seeing signs of water damage, where there could be hidden problems in different places. And so when I get done with the initial assessment, I then sit down with the client, I show them all the pictures. I basically walk them through every single area and say, this is what I was seeing. This is what the concern is. This is how we would validate it and understand if it truly is problem, if it needs to be remediated. Also.

What does the remediation plan look like? The plan is dependent on what test results look like as well. So it all kind of goes in together anyway, so I'm sitting down and I'm starting to go through this with her. And the very first thing that I show her, it looks like some of the windows in the house have mold growing on them. So keep in mind, the house, for a big portion of it, was built in the 50s. These look like older windows, maybe not the originals, but maybe like the second set of windows that were in, they're all like wood trimmed. And what I was seeing is that it looked like that there was mold growing around, like the window panes, where they meet kind of the wood trim around all of there. And a lot of times the reason that that happens, by the way, is that the window, over time, it loses the ability to insulate itself properly. And so what happens then is that the glass changes temperature pretty easily. And so think about, you know, like, when you fill up a glass with cold water with ice in it, you know, how all the water beads start showing up on the outside of the glass. That's condensation. Right? So I think we're all kind of familiar with that. The reason that happens is because there's a pretty significant temperature change on there, and it's creating that moisture. And so that same thing happens on windows. So the windows will basically, like, sweat a little bit. And because all the trim was wood and it was soaking into the wood, and ultimately there was mold growing around a lot of the windows. And so, anyway, so I'm showing her this. It's the very first thing that I'm showing her, by the way. So we haven't even gone through a lot of stuff yet it's the very first thing that we look at. And she looks at me and she says, well, that means I'm going to have to remove that window. And I said, yeah, most likely you probably will have to remove that window. She's like, well, I don't want to remove anything. This was. This is the mindset that I think that she has had through this whole process. Right. I think she's looking for the magic pill, the magic answer, the magic we're going to fog your house and everything's going to be fine. You don't have to do remediation. And I don't think she's liking the information that she's getting from that point on. I mean, we didn't even go through everything because I could tell she just didn't want to hear what I had to say. And so the reason that I'm sharing all this with you is that, guys, if we're really trying to understand what's happening in our homes, how it's impacting us, we have to know that there is not some sort of magic solution that's going to fix it. It's going to require some remediation, probably. So if you're not ready or willing to go through the process of maybe having to remove a couple walls or remediate things a certain way, they need to remediate or even do testing to validate what's going on, then you shouldn't be having a mold inspection.

You shouldn't be going down the road. Right. Because what is going to happen is someone not like me is going to come in. Someone who comes in and tells her that she can do that. You're like, oh, yeah, you don't have to remove this. You don't have to do that. You can just fog your house and everything is going to magically be better. That is going to happen. Right. Most. Most likely than not. Right. And so if that happens now, what is going to trigger in her mind is, okay, well, the house had some problems, but I just did this kind of magic fix and now everything's fine. And so now in her head, moving forward, if that's what ends up happening, she's going to have removed the house being a concern from the potential issues. And so now as she goes to see the different doctors and continues to bounce around from doctor to doctor because she's not hearing what she wants to hear.

She in her mind is going to say in response that, no, I had my house looked at. And yeah, there was a little problem, but we remediated it by just fogging everything and wiping it so everything is fine. This can send her down a path for years because in her mind she's going to continue to think that her house isn't the problem. And what's going to go on is that the medical treatments the doctors have her on are not really going to be super effective because she's going to continue to be getting exposed to things in her house. But because in her mind, she's kind of written that off as an issue, like it's been fixed as far as she's concerned, she's going to assume it's something else. She's going to assume maybe it's her diet or maybe it's something else. And the big kind of cause of all of her exposure is going to go unhandled and it's going to continue to impact her and she's going to kind of end up in this, like, hamster wheel of nothing working. And unfortunately, I think that this might go on for some time with her. And it's really, you know, it really makes me sad. And I tried to do everything I can to really kind of educate her and let her understand how all this works, but I just don't think mentally she was there yet. So with all that said, I think the mental preparation is really, really important. You know, it's understanding that. And I say this all the time. There's not a magic button that you push and everything gets fixed. If you're not ready to, you know, invest in something or say, you know what, I'm just going to move even. At least you're making an action, right? You're taking an action. At least if you're not ready to take an action of some sort, meaning that you're not able to, or you're not ready to listen to what the experts are telling you, and you're really just looking for the answer that you want to hear, then unfortunately, you're going to continue down this path. And it's going to take a very, very long time for you to start feeling better. And you might not over some period of time. Please, as you go down this path. I share a lot of information here with you guys. I'm sure a lot of you are working with different doctors and they're doing testing on you and they're sharing information with you. The information is only as good as what you do with it. It's that old saying that you could lead a horse to water, but at some point they have to drink the water themselves. We can only show you so much. At some point, you're going to have to. To be willing to take the step to move forward. And there are different triggers for people of what's going to finally kind of get them to that path. But.

All that said, if you're going down this mold journey, just please understand that it's not going to be easy.

But even though it's not going to be easy, it doesn't mean that it can't be done. It just means that there's going to have to be some investment on your end, and it doesn't always have to be financial investment. It could be.

It could be the idea that you understand that you just have to leave a place that you're emotionally invested in. There are things, there are actions that you're going to have to take is kind of what I'm saying. As long as you understand that, then by all means, move forward. Start getting the information, start seeing the doctors go through this whole process, because I've seen it work for people. Just make sure that you're ready to take action on that stuff. So you could. You could do the best that you can with their information.

So next I want to talk about the evolution of our sampling process and what we look for in a house and how it ties to the evolution of understanding mold illness and environmentally acquired illness from a medical perspective. On our end, what we do is that we want to make sure that we're mirroring and showing the correlation between what could be happening in your house to what is happening in your body, so we can understand how they may be impacting each other and what might need to be fixed in the home. But even more so, so your doctor can understand what your exposures look like, and so they can help make sure that you're on the right path for healing. So the reality of this whole process is that this is teamwork between us on the environmental side and your doctors. Right. You're kind of the quarterback of this whole situation. And we're giving you data and your doctors are giving you data, and all needs to be shared to understand the true impact of what's going on so you can make the right decisions. Our entire testing philosophy is partially built around what the evolution of the medical side of understanding through mold and environmentally acquired illness has moved to from start to finish. At the beginning, it was really focused on mold. That was the first thing that the medical community was really understanding and figuring out. And so from our end, we were trying to obviously figure that out within the homes. And so we were really just testing for mold. We weren't testing for mycotoxins, we weren't testing for anything else that's really happening in a water damaged building at the time. This is years and years ago before this evolution started moving. Then what happened, a few years pass and all of a sudden the medical community is like, oh, wow, it's not just mold, it's mycotoxins too. Like these toxins get caught up into your, into your fat cells. They can cause a whole lot of problems. There's now research studies that tie mycotoxins to different types of cancers, to Alzheimer's disease. There's a lot of different things that look like can be correlated with mycotoxins in your body. And so then all of a sudden, the importance of understanding if mycotoxins were in the home became really important because we needed to know if that was there one and two, we had to make sure that we were getting rid of it Right. And so our testing expanded to not just mold, but then also to understand if the toxic byproduct, which are mycotoxins, were being produced in the homes. And so our plan and our approach expanded on the heels of the medical information and what the doctors were doing on the way that they expanded. And then most recently, there's actually been a pretty big shift in the understanding of what's happening with people.

And how the environment is impacting them. And a lot of the language has changed from mold illness or chronic inflammatory response syndrome to environmentally acquired illness. And the idea about this is that what happens to somebody when they are living in a water damaged environment and the impact that everything that occurs in a house as a result of water damage has on that individual. So when we think about what's happening in the house, it's not just mold. When there's water damage, the other big thing that happens that we weren't really looking at for a long time is bacteria. And it's funny, now that we look back at it, it just kind of makes sense. But bacteria is actually the first thing that will grow if there's enough water. So bacteria could grow in a couple hours. Mold might take a couple days, up to a couple weeks, depending on the type of mold type that it is. So we were kind of like not looking at that on the environmental side until the doctors started bringing it to our attention. What they were telling us is that they were finding endotoxins inside of their patients bodies. Endotoxins are a toxic byproduct. That's produced by a gram negative bacteria type. And basically.

The analogy I give is that it's kind of like part of the skin of the bacteria. So if that bacteria type is there, the endotoxin is going to be there. And so what we were seeing as we were going through is we keep data on all the samples, we take all the ermimold tests, we do all the mycotoxin tests, we do all the endotoxin tests, we do. It's really interesting when I went back and looked at the progression of how all of this has happened.

We pick up mycotoxins about 55% of the time in homes. You know, it's kind of a coin flip, but if they're there, it changes the remediation plan. So we've created this entire plan, which maybe I'll go into a little bit in a day in the future that helps to remove and extract these biotoxins in the house. And so if the mycotoxins aren't there, then you wouldn't necessarily have to implement that extensive of a plan to get rid of them. So if you're picking them up 50, 55% of the time, that means about half the time we weren't implementing the more comprehensive kind of chemical byproduct remediation strategy. And the reason that mycotoxins only get picked up that percentage is because a mycotoxin is a defense mechanism of a mold. Basically what that means, if mold is like, you know, kind of growing in its space, and as long as no other mold or bacteria comes to kind of take over its territory, then it has no reason to protect itself and create this toxin. Because it's defense mechanism, when it needs to protect itself, it creates this chemical that basically covers it like lava over a volcano. And it kind of creates like this toxic moat around the colony. And so then any intruders that are coming in will get killed by that toxin. It's meant to kill them. And so that's the point of it. Think of it like if you owned a gun in your house, you have no reason to take your gun out and shoot it unless somebody busts into your house and like tries to rob you, right? Then you would have the ability to do that. So because that doesn't happen very often, you don't fire a gun very often. And so that's kind of the idea with mycotoxins and why they're.

Not detected all the time. Right. But what's different is that endotoxins are not a defense Mechanism. Like I said, it's like the skin of the bacteria. So what that means is that bacteria type is there, the endotoxin is going to be there. And so we're seeing that the endotoxin detection is closer to like 75, 80% versus where we're on the mycotoxin side. 50, 55. So now that we understand that these bacterial toxins are coming up more often, and then we started to continue to communicate and collaborate with the medical community, and they were showing us that they were seeing endotoxins in the bodies. That's when we started testing for it in the house. We started seeing it coming up more frequently. So what does that all mean? What it means is that before we knew that we were needing to look for that, there was probably 30, 35% of the time where we were not implementing the appropriate cleaning plan because we were not testing for the bacterial toxins, which are the endotoxins that would have been probably present in a good majority of those spaces. And if the mycotoxin on the 50, 50 split came up negative, then we were implementing a lesser cleaning plan because we didn't think that there was a biotoxin in the house. And so there was still some exposure issues that are happening. This is why this remediation plan that we've put together has taken years to develop to the point that we know that it works now at this point.

So anyways, the point of telling this whole story is to understand why we need to test for certain things in the house. So you need to understand where the sources of the problem are. That's where the core of the inspection comes in. That's where the six hours of going through a house to find every little place where there's mold growing. That's the purpose of that. Right? And then we do the more basic level testing, which are really targeted to those sources, just to validate if there's a mold problem there. But then we need to understand.

Mold fragmentation. What's moving through the house? Mycotoxins. What's moving through the house? Endotoxins. Are they present? Are they moving through the house? Are they also potentially in the heating and air conditioning systems or are they not? Right. We have to. We have to test to figure this stuff out, because we need to give you the right plan to be able to remove it. So a lot of times we get a question, why do we need to test for this stuff? The reason we need to test for it is because I want to make sure that I'm actually giving you the appropriate roadmap that can help you get rid of it. And if I don't know that it's there, then I don't know what to tell you specifically. And so we might miss things the same way that we were missing stuff before we even knew to be testing for endotoxins. You know, recently Dr. Shoemaker, who is kind of viewed as like the kind of pioneer of understanding mold illness, he came out recently and he said that actinomycetes, which are kind of like a bacteria mold hybrid sort of organism, he said that he thinks that those might be even more problematic than mycotoxins. So even he is shifting to understand that there's more going on than just mold and just mycotoxins. You know, it's happening across the medical community. That's why the organization, if you haven't heard of it, the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness, it's a big reason why that organization was created and why I'm a member of that organization is because it's at the forefront of trying to understand the other elements that are contributing to these environmental illnesses that are really impacted by your water damaged environments, as well as some other contributing factors. So that's really the overview on how our sampling strategy is really put into play, how we work with and how it's important to not just live in a silo and just focus on your area of expertise, but to collaborate with the other key players in understanding how people are being impacted. Because the truth is, the doctors are the ones that are working on your body. And we need to understand what's happening there, right? So we can figure out what's happening in the environment. And when we put all that together, then we can end up with an environment that's going to be as conducive to you being as healthy as possible as you can.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed the show, please take a moment and subscribe and give a rating wherever you get your podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most.

Sam.