154: The Parallels of Mold Inspections and Holistic Health with Dr. Stephen Cabral

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, everyone, what's going on? Today's cool. Today's cool because it. I almost feel like it's an intro to what's maybe going to happen in a couple months. I have Dr. Stephen Cabral on. He is a board certified doctor of naturopathy. He has a lot of really cool stuff and has. Puts a lot of information out there that's very helpful for people in the mold world. Right. People that are going through all this stuff. And he actually has a conference that he is putting on, which maybe we could talk about a little bit too, in October that I'm going to be speaking at as well. And so kind of thought it'd be fun to like, hey, let's get on and chat, like, before we get over there and maybe like, kind of tease some concepts and stuff and do some different things I might be talking about, have a little more time to get into some things here than maybe we might, you know, at, you know, in the conference sense. So really excited to be chatting with. So, everybody. Dr. Cabral, how's it going?

It's great to be on. I appreciate you having me and, and yes, in just about two months or so, not even I will be turning the tables on you and actually be interviewing you. So this'll be a lot of fun.

So I gotta take it easy so I. So you can reciprocate down the road.

That's true. Exactly.

Awesome. Um, well, we were. We were kind of chatting as I, I usually share, like, with everybody, that I kind of come into these sort of, let's see where it goes. And we were chatting beforehand just, you know, conceptually about some things. And I've mentioned this on the show before, this concept. And then Dr. Karbal actually just brought it up on his own. It's like, oh, this is perfect. Let's talk about this from both sides and like, really see it. And it's the idea of, of treating a body or, or the way that someone goes through when they're. When they're dealing with like a functional medicine approach to treating the body is really how the house should be treated in the same manner and vice versa. Right. And so if we're talking about someone is sick or they're having symptoms or whatever's going on. Right. There's a reason that that's happening. Right. Some of it is internal, some of it is probably environmental for at least the lens that we're talking through today. And the idea is that you need to understand kind of the origin point, the root cause. Right. Every hear is the phrase root cause all the time, like what's actually causing the problem? And then what are the symptoms essentially that are getting created from that initial source root that's happening. And then you can start figuring out treatment. And do you treat symptom first? Do you treat root first? Like whatever. And that becomes part of the conversation with whoever you're dealing with. Right. And the house is very similar. Where's the problem located? The symptoms are equivalent to how it's moving throughout the house and what you're breathing. And then how do we fix it? Do we start at one place, do we start at the other? And how it happens? And so I thought it might be kind of cool for us to talk through like almost that journey, like side by side, like maybe you'll start like here's where I start with someone that I can start and like we can look at the parallels and kind of bounce back and forth and see how it truly is like a, like a through line. How does that sound?

Yeah, that sounds great. Absolutely awesome.

So let's play a game. We'll pretend that I'm somebody coming in or whatever and starting. So I come in to work with you and I don't really know what's going on. I have X, Y, Z symptom set and I'm kind of a blank canvas. So there's really no history of anything that's happening. And I feel like a lot of people come on our end is a similar thing. So if somebody comes in, like where's your starting point in your head? Where do you start to start? Kind of getting the puzzle pieces that you even need to put together. Start figuring stuff out.

Yeah, absolutely. So it could be an online questionnaire or if it's over consultation, it would actually be a video based consultation. Since we're virtual, we work with people anywhere in the world and the goal is to learn a history about that person that would then lead us to be able to refine what at home lab tests they should run. Like in a perfect world, that's how it works. And so I'm asking ahead of time, you know, we're going to talk about every single symptom you have. And I literally say this every single time. But what I want you to do is start with the one or two that you need to fix that. Those are the ones that keep you up at night. They, they make your life miserable. Because we work with a lot of people that have been suffering for years. And so they'll go over a laundry list of symptoms and if they start saying things like itchy eyes, post nasal drip, inflammation in the throat, poor digestion, slow digestion, bloating, gas, skin rashes, already in my head, since the amount of people that we've worked with, I'm thinking, okay, this could be candida overgrowth, it could be parasites, it could be mold, it could be bacterial overgrowth or sibo in the gut. And so I'm already going there in my mind thinking we need to find out if this is a gut fungal issue or a systemic issue with potential mold aggravation. So then at that point, as I'm listening, I'm saying, have you ever lived in or do you currently live in a water damaged apartment or home? And those are just like the basis for the questions. They say, no, I'll say, okay, do you have an office job? Do you have a vent above you? Are you, do you feel other symptoms worse when you're at work? Because I go over something called like the rain barrel effect, right? If it gets worse and worse and worse when you're in a particular area, okay, that could be a symptom. So I'm doing my best to tease out the symptoms and then because they may or may not be able to afford at home lab testing, but if they can, that's when I say, okay, we're going to ship you out these labs to actually get definitive proof, typically through urine based samples to see if there is mycotoxins in the urine. So I'm going to hand it back over to you now.

Cool. All right, so this is cool. So one of the things is history. Tell me all the things. What are your symptoms? What are this? What are that? Right? We actually start with the same questions. Not necessarily because we're going to treat something, right? But more so for us to understand how in depth we need to get in the types of testing that we are mentally now considering before we even bring anything up. The same way that you talk about it, right? So somebody starts talking about multi system, multi symptom type of thing. So I've got, I have skin, I have brain fog, I have pain, right? Like several different areas, different systems. Then in my mind, I'm like, all right, this sounds like something that is beyond like a basic allergic type of reaction to something. It may be something that's possibly more of a toxinic response. It may be something that's more of a volume of issue or something that's going on. So in my mind, and it may be something that's not only mold. So, you know, a lot of the learnings recently that I've learned from folks like you is that, you know, the immune system, the body responds to water damaged buildings, to what grows in there, and it reacts and it kind of creates this cascade of things. And recently the learning has been it's not only mold that does that. Bacteria can create similar reactions, you know, things like that, Right? So in my mind, going through the health symptoms and kind of having the same type of question, you know, questions is more. So how in depth already am I thinking that we need to get in terms of what a panel, a sampling panel might look like in a house, Right? So I have an idea of what that goes and that goes down in the notes and I have an understanding for later in the conversation if I'm even bringing up bacteria. If I'm not bringing it up, people are more focused on mold and that's why they came in. And it aligns with that.

Then.

Cool, right? So that's kind of the first piece. Then comes the house history piece, right? So now here's where like the house starts equaling the person, right? It's. So your question was, you know, do you live in a water damaged space? What I've learned over time, that nobody knows the answer to that question, really in their mind, they define a water damaged space as like, I had a flood or something, or like something major that's happened. And so most people, when the question gets phrased just very like broadly like that, it's. The answer's usually no, even though it's not true. Because the term water damage in their mind means like a larger big thing that's happened. So then what I start doing is I start kind of walking them through their house, like, hey, so tell me, how many bathrooms do you have? You know, just kind of give me a walk through the house. I got a few bathrooms. I got this. Got laundry here. Cool. In this bathroom, you know, have you ever had like. And I start prompting questions to try to get answers, right? So like, have you ever had like a drip under your sink? You're like, oh, man, my. My little faucet's drippy. I have to like, Go tighten that or I have to go do this. Have you ever like, do you have kids in this bathroom? Do they splash out on the walls? You ever see like water staining on the walls? Do you know, and all these like kind of little prompting questions and in my mind I'm like, all right, this is an area of concern. This is an area of concern. This is an area of concern as they're explaining those things. Because the truth about water damage is that it doesn't need to be a big thing. It needs to be enough that will allow something to grow there. And a lot of times it's minimal and it's not a, an immediate event. It can be like a slow on currying thing. Right. So I'll kind of path that out throughout the house. And then I have notes sitting in front of me before I've ever stepped foot in the house of I'm at least thinking I need to test here, here, here, here, here, without seeing anything. And then we'll go through and do the inspection. So that's kind of my onboarding piece of trying to understand the starting point, the panels and all that stuff before we even see anything. So I think, I think we're on equal levels at that point now. It's kind of fun actually. So let me kick it back to you. All right, so what's next?

So next up would be the actual lab testing. And there's really two to three ways to do this. The most comprehensive way for overall, let's say metabolic dysfunction, including Candida overgrowth, yeast, bacteria and lower levels of mold, would be running something called the Candida metabolic and vitamins test, also called the organic acids test. So the first page of that is essentially like a microbial organic acids. And what you're looking at is is there any essentially waste from Candida or yeast in the blood that's then been filtered by the kidneys, that's come out the urine now as some type of mycotoxin or yeast fungal based marker. So it's not, it's not pinpoint accuracy, but it shows that there is something there and it's a great starting point. So I love that because not only they run that test, they can also learn about vitamin deficiencies, mitochondrial issues, neurotransmitter issues that are absolutely affected by mold. You know, kids with add, adhd, um, any brain fog that can absolutely be mold induced. So we get a really good look at that. And then if someone wants to get even more refined specifically for mold because they had a, a what's what's called like a water heater that, that let go and it's just flooded. Okay. You know, for that individual, you have all the symptoms. You had a known leak, which is probably a better term than water damage. You know, it was there. You had a water stained saline, whatever it might be. You never placed the Sheetrock. But let's run something called a mycotoxins test. And a mycotoxins test now is gonna look at four or five different categories of deeper levels of mold. That again looks for the, the waste products of the mold themselves. That would be a simple urine sample. And this is literally either. Both of these labs are as easy as a small sample of urine that comes with a freezer pack. You put it in, you ship it back to the lab, you get the results in about three weeks. So it's really simple, really straightforward. And then we'll go on to, then what we do if we find the mold and, and how we, we fix that. So, yeah, this is, this is great. Cause I'm learning myself as well. Don't say water damage because people do think about a flood and it could literally just be a water stain. When you bought the place and used Bin's stain killer and just went over it, you know, and didn't even think of that. It's underneath the Sheetrock.

Yeah, it's crazy. You know, a lot of, A lot of the, A lot of the stuff around mold is actually very, it's like stigmatized. Almost like people feel like they did something wrong or they have a dirty house or they did something. If they, if you imply that there's a mold issue there, right? And it's like so like not how it works, right. Like I literally. My room, nobody can see, but like I'm in my room right now. I have a wall back here. There could be a bunch of mold behind this wall. Not anything on the surface, because maybe on the backside of this there's a toilet that has a slow leak into the wall behind there. And you can't see any of it, for example. So like it's, it's not anyone's fault. I'll just kind of insert this before I get back into the game we're playing is that it's not anyone's fault. And so when, when we understand that it's not an indicator of like, I'm not a clean person or I'm, you know, don't maintain my house properly or whatever. Nobody ever taught anyone how to understand this stuff. Therefore you can't know what you don't know. And it's not your fault yet. Right. And so anyway, so that was just like a quick thing I thought about, but going back to the game. So the interesting piece, so you mentioned, okay, we'll do like a test kit, kind of get a general idea of what's going on. Right. So now there's a step in here where some, some of our clients will, will kind of do that equivalent step and some of them will skip to the next one. So there's kind of two paths on how it works. So some people will have. And keep in mind that, that the people we're talking about are intersecting what you and I are doing kind of like at the same, like they might be talking to you and then they're calling us and talking to us and different things. Right? So there's like a bit of an intersect here. So let's say, let's say somebody went down your path and they got their urine test results back. And it shows that there's a reason to be concerned about a mild issue. Let's say that they now have a little bit of at least biological validation that there's something going on. Right. So at that point there's then kind of two paths that that person would take. One is they would just believe you, which hopefully they would, but a lot of people don't, cuz they can't see it, but, but hopefully they would believe you. And they say, okay, I need to get my house figured out. And they're in the mindset of I believe it, I need to get my house figured out. They would call us, we would do everything I just talked about and we'll be like, okay, let's figure out how we start this process. Right, we're ready to go now. The other version of this is I did this clinical test. It's saying something's going on. I look around my house, my house looks great, it's clean, there's never been a flood. I don't really believe that it's here. Maybe it was where I lived before, maybe it's somewhere else. And so there's this little interstitial step which is the equivalent of what you're doing with the test kit for the body, which is a test kit for the house. So we have one that's called the dust test. And you can order a dust test kit. It comes in, it's very, very similar. So people listening if they've heard of ermi, very similar to ermi, some small tweaks in how the data is represented to get Rid of the ERMI score because it's useless. I won't go into all of that. But if anyone who's listened to my episodes rant about ermi, you know why, um, and can even add in analysis for mycotoxins or endotoxins within the space. So basically, what you can do is do a dust collection sample throughout your house. Dust is the place to look because dust harbors everything that settles in our environment for extended periods of time. And as we walk around, we resuspend dust consistently into our breathing zone, and that becomes our. Our exposure path. So dust can be really telling to understand what we're breathing. In your house, it's not going to tell you where it's coming from. It's not going to tell you any of that stuff, but it will tell you at least what's happening from, like a screening perspective, kind of what you're talking about with your urine test to at least give some direction on. Okay, there's now a next step that we need to dive into here. Right. And so if somebody wants to do that, they do. The dust test comes back, let's say it validates that there is a mole problem in this house. Man, there's something going on. I didn't. You couldn't tell by looking around, but, man, there really is something going on here. And then we can move into the inspection portion of what's going on, which is then going into deep dive the house and really try to isolate what's happening. I'll stop there before we talk about what that looks like. But that's kind of the equivalent path of what you outlined.

Yeah, absolutely. And just for a little color on that as well. I've had to do that now twice with a new home that I bought. So we moved into a new house, we had it tested ahead of time, and we did, actually. So what's interesting to me, I didn't know, and it makes total sense, you know, I should have known this, but they test the outside ear first, and then they test the inside ear, at least the test that I had run. And in my area, there's high levels of mold in the air. And so what they need to do, and I shouldn't say high, there's moderate, mild to moderate levels of aspergillus, not the forms of mold in the air. And so they want to make sure that that level is not necessarily higher in your home. So when I had these labs run, obviously the before and after was higher in my home. Okay. We found the specific areas. I Didn't know it because, again, some homeowners do this. You buy a home, you go in. My wife, she can smell mold anywhere. My nose does not pick up mold. I don't smell anything from years of sinus infections when I was younger. Oh, that Smell it. And so she knew in the garage. And I was turning this into a gym. I was turning our garage into a gym. And so they came in and lo and behold, there was a water heater that damaged the whole thing. They had to rip out a bunch of the garage, do all that. And then they obviously they tested before and after. So that's. That's my story with that. And ours is not dissimilar for what we do. So I don't want to. I won't jump into the whole protocol yet. But what we do is we do the symptom questionnaire, if you're able to and interested. We do the lab testing. The lab testing is third party. So it's not like me even trying to. I won't never know what the results will be until you get them as well. So we both look at them. We say, okay, there's elevated levels. Let's look. And we don't actually begin our mold protocol yet until we work with someone like you, because if we don't know the root cause, then we're going to continue to do mold protocol after mold protocol after mold protocol. And that's not the goal. So their house that they're in right now might be clean, but they moved there six months ago or a year ago. And their home before that had the water damage or the leak or the mold. And that doesn't mean that it left their system. It just means that it may have died down a little bit and not as chronic. So I made sure, again, that they're working with someone like yourself and that we then move into the mold protocol. I can dive into that now for what we do, or you can jump in.

Yeah, let me jump. This is an interesting spot in it because the next phase for you is now the treatment piece, right? Cause now we've done some stuff. So on our end, the diagnosis piece is really two phase. There's a little bit more there in terms of what we're doing. Right. So the first thing is general screening. What's going on, what's happening. Then we get into, let's dive the house. And this is where, like, the intersection between us happens. Right. So, like, you're in a. And what you said, I've heard from many other people, and I've seen to be true as well, that if you're trying to treat somebody who's still being exposed to a root of what's happening, that maybe they'll get a little better, but at some point they'll probably plateau, maybe they'll get worse again. Like you just don't get to where you want to get to. I always use the analogy, like just, just imagine you walked in your front door and some dude just punched you in the face every time you walked in the front door. The answer is not figuring out like how to fight this guy when you walk in the front door. The answer is like just get the guy out of the house so he doesn't punch you in the face anymore. And, and so that's like kind of where forget. Every time you walk in your house, you're getting punched in the face by the mold, the toxins, whatever's there, right? So the kind of like, you know, diagnosis phase two, if we want to on what we're doing, like kind of the second layer of it is figuring out where it's coming from from the house so we understand what has to happen. In terms of remediation, the order of events that we're talking about is that you've kind of gone to your point and now it's like a handoff almost to us to kind of get this whole point figured out. Where are the sources in the house? How's it moving through the space? What's up with the H vac systems? What's the remediation plan really need to consist of in order to handle everything properly, which I could talk about prioritizing maybe after you do, and then trying to get the house as clean as it can be to then hand off back to you so then you can kind of finish the piece. So there's definitely an intersection between both sides of what we do. But the similarities in terms of what we are doing is there. It just now becomes like a time like order of events of sort of which one you do first and next. So for us, thorough inspection. I won't beat a dead horse. You know, four, six, eight, ten hours in a house, depending how big it is. Where are the sources coming from is the biggest thing that we need to pull out of this. It's not an air sample in the middle of a room, because if it's elevated, I don't know where it's coming from. It's. Where is. Where do I think the water damage? Is it in this wall? Is it in this ceiling? Is it over here under this cabinet. And we test directly at source, where we believe that it is, which is all wrapped into our process of examining a house. You know, tools, eyes, like all that stuff to say. I think that there are 13 areas after the inspection throughout this house that I'm concerned that there might be a hidden mold problem behind those areas because I'm seeing signs of previous water damage. So then the testing plan would say, we're going to test all 13 of these. We're going to understand what's there. We'll also want to be testing your H vac system to understand if it's been cross contaminated and to see if that needs to be addressed in a cleanup plan. And then after that, we start talking about how we address it, right? So maybe I'll start there, then I'll kick it back as it's kind of the flow is that we would finish the house and we'll kick back. So I'll get into the how you address it piece. So in a perfect world, you address everything, you get rid of all of it, right? You do it all at the same time. Everyone's independently wealthy, doesn't matter, and you take care of it and your house is clean and you know that you got rid of all of it. That is the perfect world that handles maybe 1, 2, 3% of people that will actually do that. So the more realistic conversation for everybody listening is, let's say I go through and there was 13 areas that I thought were a problem. And I found 10 that actually were a problem. Say three of them were fine, 10 of them were actually a problem. And out of that, the conversation comes up with, Brian, there's 10 things here, I got this over here, this over here, that I can't do all this, can't afford all of it, can't handle it. How do we work through this to get benefit and get the most like that I can get out of the dollars that I have, right? So that's where on our end, we come in with various priority frameworks that we can help people walk through. There's a lot of different ways to think about priorities. One way is to think of it strictly by numbers. I'm looking at the numbers of these 10 samples. These are the highest. These are the ones he hit first. These are the next highest. These are the ones they hit next. So there's a very linear way of thinking about it. Sometimes it makes sense to do it that way, sometimes it doesn't. Because maybe the things that are the worst are in the areas of the house that they don't spend as much time.

Exactly.

So it's like, okay, so we at least want to tier it out from a numerical perspective, at least have that lens to look at stuff. And the next part of the conversation is really around how do you live in your house, where do you spend time? Also, who's the one that is sick in the first place that triggered this process? Is it you? Is it your kids? Well, if it's your kids and we found stuff in your room and their room and you can only do one room, we're gonna do the kids room. Right. You kind of, you start like kind of layering these priority conversations on. And so for us, we have a couple basic frameworks, but a lot of it turns into conversations with our senior level consultants that get out with people and start talking through the whole scenario. If we do this, here's what we're missing, here's what we think can happen, but here's the benefit you can gain. And you kind of start trying to apply the 8020 concept in a more specific lens to goals, initial problem sets, and all of them. Right. So that's kind of the thought process. Remediate as best as you can, Host test after you remediate, to make sure whatever you did try to clean up actually was cleaned up. Right. This is like one of the biggest problems in our industry. But if the post testing comes back clear, which I have other episodes on that, so I won't dive into how we do that, but go through the post testing on all that, and if that's clear and we say, okay, this is the best we can do for right now, then that's kind of where we're like, okay, that's. Now we hand it back over. And so the question I have to you before it being like a hard cutoff on a handover is are there things you're doing with people during the process to try to help minimize the effect that they might be having in the house? And then once they get the house handled, does that change afterwards or is it a continuation or however? So that's kind of the handoff there.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's great. And I, I'm glad to hear you say that because obviously you're the expert in the space, but we make those recommendations. So let's say there are 10 spots. We. So for us, the bedroom always has to be clean and clear because you're in there for sure for eight hours for most people. So you might be at work for eight hours, you might be out of your house. For another two. So no matter where you are in your house, you're most likely in your bedroom the majority of the time. So we cut out the EMFs in the bedrooms. We don't put people's heads next to an outlet. You know, when they're sleeping, we make sure there's no mold there. And then after that, it's really, like you said, process of elimination. So for me, and you might differ on this, but for me, it's bedroom and it's H Vac. And because if it's in the H vac, then it's blown over your whole house, and you're just basically breathing in spores all the time or some type of mold. And so that's kind of how we look at it. And then the other issue, though, is not everybody owns their home, and so they're renting. And so what happens when you're in an apartment? You can't get out of the lease. You don't want to get out of the lease. You can't afford to go anywhere else, and you're in a place with mold. Okay, so then it's. A lot of times it may be a bathroom, so you're trying to keep that door closed to the best of your ability. We're putting in a small air filter in the bathroom that can continue to run, and we're using other air filters in the home that are actually pretty good at grabbing mold spores and molds out of the air. Not the best, but better than nothing, for sure. And it circulates the air to pull that in, which is great. And then from there, we are actually doing in beginning our mold protocol and immunity protocol at the same time so that we start to empty that rain barrel. So your analogy was the, you know, the guy at the front door punching you in the face, like, you know, get the cat out of your house. It's the same thing. It's like, empty the rain barrel. The problem is, every time you go back into that bathroom, the less time the better because you start to fill back up the rain barrel again. So the protocol at least allows you to empty it. Same with the air filters and everything else. Keep the windows open, you know, do things like, as long as there's less mold outside. But, I mean, I'm from New England, and when you're in Massachusetts and you're in Maine, the mold counts are actually quite high in the fall and for sure in the spring, and you get the moldy leaves, and you've got mold in the air. And so, you know, as someone who used to suffer from allergies. I know for sure that sometimes not all that fantastic to be able to open the windows as well.

Yeah, it's. It's actually an interesting conversation about open. Cause anytime I talk about easy things you can do, you know, air flushing your house, which is opening windows, is a piece of it. Air filters are a piece of it. Thorough dust cleaning is the third piece because everything lives in the dust. So if you do a dust cleaning and you get the dust out of the house, you know, 70% of the dust out of the house, that's settled. Well, that can't pop up in your face anymore to breathe. So you've literally removed 70% of your exposure pathway if you get to that point. And then what is popping up in the air, the air filters are hopefully getting a portion of that. Right. And you start, like, kind of trying to, you know, manage it the best that you can. The air thing with the inside outside is interesting. I think when people, when you hear, like, open your windows, it's like, I have to live with my windows open for this to happen. And, um, it's not really true. To get a dilution in the house, you actually don't need the windows open that long. So, like, I actually saw this much more visibly. I. I went last year and I had a friend get married in Mexico. And so we're at this hotel in Mexico. And, you know, in these Caribbean or, you know, area hotels, it's really hot outside, right? So you get, like, massive condensation issues and all these things. So they really try to tell you, like, they don't want you opening doors when you're on, like, these beach holidays, which is hilarious. That's why all of these hotels in the Caribbean are just mold disasters, essentially. But what happened in this particular. The way it was set up and just sort of like the airflow of the, you know, how it was related to the ocean or whatever, it kind of created like a wind tunnel. And so if I opened the slider to the patio, but the door, the front door to the bed to the room was also open. Stuff was flying off of our tables. The amount of air that was flying through our room was completely insane. I'd never seen anything like it before. And it was interesting because it visualized how much air can move in a short period of time. When you see it like that big, right? And then you think back and I've. I've talked about this idea a lot, but if, like, if anyone, maybe it's happened to you, you've you've opened a door or a window and then you hear a door somewhere else, like slam shut in your house, right? The same exact thing is happening. It's just. It's not ripping up all of your stuff that's on there. It's not as hard, right. But when you hear that shut, there's actually a big air current shift that's moved throughout the house. And it's a pressure thing, right? So you could really do without having, like, science and specific numbers and stuff behind it. But if you're just talking, like, generally how it works, you could do an air flush or version of a dilution by only opening your windows for, like, 10 minutes. It's not like a huge thing to do, right? And so if you. If you kind of balance that a little bit and you're not doing it forever. The thing is, if your house is enclosed, you may have high counts outside. Think about how the outside is, though. It's not enclosed. It's a massive, huge thing. The wind is blowing everywhere. So when you think about dilution, it's very, very diluted outside. You come into the inside and you're in a closed box. The sources start building up in your rain barrel, like you're talking about, right? And so the concentration within the house is now very high compared to the concentration of it outside. So if you think of that pressure difference and what's going on, you open the outside, the dilution starts taking from the inside, and it can. And it can help dilute. So I'm a big fan of doing them. But a lot of the questions that come up is, well, it's more humid where I live, and it's more this and it's more that. It's not keeping your windows open forever. It's doing, like, short little bursts of I'm going to open the front door and I'm going to open the back door of the house for 10 minutes. I'm just going to let, like, a flush come in that's not going to spike your humidity incredibly high. And if you do have some outdoor things that are happening, you have the air purifiers in the house to help kind of grab that stuff that we talked about. And I think it's an overall net benefit to be doing it that way.

I would agree. Especially you know, first thing in the morning when you get up and maybe even while you're cooking in the kitchen, because you're also then getting the carbon dioxide and any fumes if you're cooking, especially with gas and ozone too On a hot day. So I completely agree. 10 to 20 minutes, just daily to recirculate the air. Because especially newer homes, newer homes are built so airtight and especially with blown in insulation that you're not getting that fresh air turnover. So there's a lot of benefits to getting those windows open for 10 to 20 minutes a day. Completely agree.

Yeah. On top of the blown or the spray foam insulation, not only are you sealed, but you're just pumping SVOCs into the house on top of that, which is like even worse. It's a conversation for another day. So. All right, so we left off priorities going through. So, okay, so now we're on your side. So you've kind of done the initial form of treatment. We were talking about minimal things you could do in the interim. Let's say now we kind of get the house set up.

We're.

We're like, okay, how's the goodest can be. How does your protocol continue? How long does it typically last? I know different people are going to be different. There's a lot of variable there. But maybe just kind of walk through like what the next stage looks like.

Yeah. So the big difference between I think what you do, which, you know, I find amazing, you can be done in maybe three days. It might take longer. I don't really know the process. Ours took a week, it took longer. It took five to seven days. We did it in both my daughter's bathroom and we did it in our garage because we found two areas that were. We also did a 10 hour testing day. So they looked at everything which we wanted. I mean just me being in the field, I wanted to make sure that every room was checked. They went to each of the vents, they went to the bathrooms especially. And so they found in the garage and they found it in my daughter's room and the garage. Probably took like four or five days and. Cause they had to let it sit, whatever, whatever they did when they opened it up. And again that's not my expertise. And then they had to retest before they sealed everything up. Which, which I appreciate the thoroughness. But for humans we can't rip out our insides. Right. We can't do that. And that's the unfortunate thing. So we can't get this done in a week's time. So the protocol is actually starting with typically a functional medicine, detox, which opens up, if you think about it, that's opening up the windows and doors for airflow. You open up your liver detox pathways. Your liver filters all of the blood in your body every five minutes, every five to six minutes. Your. Your body, your liver literally filters one liter every minute. And it's something like 250.

Something like 250 liters a day. It's. It's absolutely astounding at how much blood just flows through this large organ underneath the right side of your rib. Ca. So the problem is it doesn't get everything. And what our job is is to be able to open that up. So we do a seven day, 14 or 21 day detox, depending on what the person needs. And then we move into what's called the mold protocol. And the mold protocol has three parts to it. And I think that this is where people go wrong, because I know when I was originally taught 20 years, 15, 20 years ago or so, it was, okay, you're going to take these binders and that's going to bind up all of the different mycotoxins involved. Now, that's not necessarily wrong, but it means that you've already gotten them from your liver to your intestines. To be able to bind them up, we need to get them there first and we need to open up the detox pathways on a daily basis. So we're using things like what are called phase two liver detoxifiers. I don't want to get too in the weeds, but we're looking at things like selenium and glutathione and taurine and acetylcysteine. So we're opening up the liver so that it can do its job to remove these things after we've used a very specific product that contains a synergy of herbs like olive leaf. One of the big ones that nobody talks about with mold is rosemary acid or rosemary leaf. It's one of the most potent natural antimicrobials and antifungals that will kill yeast and mold. So we have a synergy of about 10 different herbs that we use in the mold protocol. And then what we're doing is we're opening up the liver. So it's going from blood to liver or kidneys, and the liver is actually then bringing it to the intestines and then intestines. That's when we use a binder. But we use a very special binder. It's called universal binder, and it's because it's low histamine. People with allergies or mold based issues typically are more, what's called TH2 dominant. They're more sensitive to smells and chemicals and foods and everything. And so they're one part of your immune system, TH2. So we have a low histamine one, which means it doesn't have a lot of charcoal. You're using things like bentonite, clay and humic acid, fulvic acid, et cetera, to bind it up. Now your body can safely eliminate that through a bowel movement or of your kidneys just when you urinate. So that's our protocol that lasts eight weeks. So you have function medicine, detox first, then the eight weeks, and then we're usually moving into an immunity protocol, which is very simple, which is vitamin c, zinc, and vitamin D3 on a daily basis. And that is now because it's not done like you're now. Your immune system is recovering and it's being able to now rebalance after, who knows, months to years of having mold harbored inside of the body. The ultimate goal of any especially naturopathic doctor or integrative health practitioner is not to be the healer per se. It's to give your body what it needs in order to heal. And so our job is to give a big boost for eight weeks to heal it and then let your body to take over now that you have, you've emptied that brain barrel a lot of give your immune system what it needs so it can continue then to push out any remaining mold that might be there.

Very cool.

I like how you describe the purpose of a integrative or functional practitioner is to let your body actually do it, as opposed to being, you know, the magic pill that fixes it for you.

So question. So a couple questions. So eight weeks in the core protocol.

How often is that enough time? How often are you revamping the protocol because maybe they haven't removed everything they need to. Are you testing after the eight weeks to kind of see what pre and post looked like? Like, like how does, how does all that look?

Well, the truth is that most people have, they. It caught up. They just caught it too late and because at first you just feel maybe a little bit more groggy when you wake up, or you might start just getting a little bit post sinus, but no big deal. Like you just don't think too much of it. And then, you know, you start to feel like you need a little bit extra coffee in the morning and you've already, again, you're filling up that rain barrel. I don't, I don't know any other way. You're just getting more symptoms. Like, it's just my analogy of saying that because I learned it when I had terrible allergies when I was A teenager. I didn't understand why. And so by that point, you have a lot of inflammation in your body. You oftentimes have a lot of gut issues and you most likely, a lot of times you have candida overgrowth, another fungus, same type of family, in your gut. So what we're doing is we're actually doing what's called the CBO protocol. First, it's a candida bacteria optimizing protocol. So we're getting rid of the yeast and fungal overgrowth in the gut and balancing the bacteria because you might have a bloating, you might have gas, you might have a lot of issues there. We do that first. And that's because 80% of your immune system is in and around the 26ft of intestinal tract that you have. So if we don't fix that, if that's not balanced, then we're always fighting an uphill battle.

So is that different than what you were talking about before or that the same eight weeks? So that's a different portion?

No, that's, that's different. And, but it's more effect. So this is how it's most effective is functional medicine detox 12 week CBO protocol, which is life changing for most people because it affects the entire body, because it affects how you assimilate food, and, and it affects inflammation in your gut, which is again, 26ft of intestinal tract from essentially your rib cage down to your hips. And then after that we move to sealing up the gut wall healing ceiling. So in intestinal permeability, if people have heard of leaky gut before, well, mold can cause leaky gut as well. And then after that we move into the mold protocol. So it becomes five months, which is now extremely effective. So people who didn't get results before, it's often times because they did a little something for the mold, they, you know, they, they worked on killing at that time, but it didn't get it to a deep enough level. So by us doing a thorough protocol that is tremendously helpful for people with all sorts of stealth pathogens. And one of those being mold, of course.

Yeah. Going back to the whole analogy train, we work with so many people who have gone through it a couple times and it's like, oh, we did this, we had this inspection, we had this remediation. We're still sick, we're still seeing signs. Right? And it's like, and, and I say this a lot and you kind of, you know, you kind of alluded to it also. The reason that something doesn't work at Least on our end is because you didn't do it, right? I mean, that's just kind of why it didn't work. And so there's two reasons why something doesn't get done, right? One, you did the. You executed what you executed correctly, but you just didn't find all the places to execute it. So there's still places left over that you need to do. So you were competent. You just didn't know everywhere that it had to happen. That's an inspection problem, right? The inspection wasn't good enough or the inspection found things, but the remediation wasn't up to standard on what needed to happen. So it was done poorly. Right. So either you didn't find everything or you did it poorly, or maybe it's a combination of both. But that's typically what's going on, right? So it's the same thing. It's like, okay, well we need to go back now and relook at everything and see if there's things earlier in the kind of downstream effect that are causing what's happening now and get it higher upstream so it doesn't flow downstream and kind of do the same type of thing.

So the gut stuff, I feel like gut is super, super common. Gut issues with people that are having mold, mold sensitivities and mold exposures, are you seeing the same thing?

A hundred percent. And that's because you may never react to the mold itself if you don't already have some pre existing health issues. So it's just a layering effect on top. And since the majority of people that do have a lot of autoimmune issues or inflammatory issues also have gut issues, it just makes sense to start there because it is foundational. So working on mold is not more foundational than working on digestive distress. Digestive distress comes first before then icing the cake, which would be the mold or heavy metals or anything on top of that. Even Lyme, which is another cell pathogen, would be on top of the gut based issues. Because if you never fix that, you don't fix the immune system. So our ultimate goal is to let the body take over. I can't, I can't keep giving you protocols your whole life. I need the body to take over and I can't get the body to take over if the immune system isn't functioning well. And I can't get the immune system to function well. If there's a deeper root cause, which essentially is digestive distress. And that can be four things. It can be parasites, H. Pylori Candida overgrowth or bacterial overgrowth. There's really only four. I mean, that's the truth. And inflammation comes from those four. Or of course eating poorly, but we can fix that quickly. And then after that's the intestinal permeability. So now if we think about it, okay, you have basically larger spaces in your gut wall that now allows the foods that you're eating to spill through. Now you get a greater inflammatory reaction. So when you're exposed to mold, your reaction's far greater because you're already so inflamed, whereas the other person in your house is exposed to it just the same. But they don't have the same symptoms or reactions because their rain barrel hasn't already overflowed from other issues they may be experiencing now. Eventually in a year or two, that person could now end up with autoimmune issues because they've now again overflowed their rain barrel as well.

Right? No, that all makes total sense. I mean, the gut stuff, I've been dealing, still dealing with gut stuff. And so I think it's probably partially because of all the years I spent in all the houses we were talking beforehand just how much time I spent in all these houses that were so bad. And it's get, trying to figure out the right way to address the gut, to kind of get it in play. My symptoms come out more so in like skin breakouts on my face, which I've shared many times on social and stuff.

With some other things, but that's kind of like the primary thing. And I can even feel, I could feel before it comes. So like I could feel the inflammation building up, you know, cuz it kind of waves in and out, right? I'm like, oh man, I probably didn't eat well this week because I can feel it coming now. And then, you know, next thing you know, now they're here, now it's breaking out and it's, you know, whatever it is. And so the gut piece is really interesting to me and it really is like such a foundational component of overall immune health that it's like so important to get that there. So when you're looking at, at gut health specifically and you're looking at like your protocols and what's included in, in, in everything, is it, is it more. It's tough. Cause I know there's a lot of, there's a lot of variables. There's parasite, there's bacterial overgrowth, there's all these things. So it's really the first step, trying to figure out like what Is the culprit that's creating. Actually, let me take a step of. For that.

Let's say I come to you and I tell you my symptom, which I just described. Right.

How do you get to the point where you figure out which of those four things in the gut or combination of those four things in the gut are happening?

Yeah. So we do a pretty thorough consultation to understand what your main needs are, what your secondary symptoms are, and then we'll give you options based on lab testing. And so the majority of people in our practice, if they're. If they're able to. Right. Like you said, There might be 13 areas of the home to clear out, but you can only afford to do half. Okay, so we do the same exact thing. Yeah, you may only be able to afford half the labs that we recommend. No problem at all. Even if you can offer the best prices, there's still. There's a cost to it. So we start with what's called a big five labs, and that's going to look at metals and gut minerals, vitamins, inflammation from omega 3s, food sensitivities, hormones, thyroid, you name it. Like, it's a re. It's a big full panel. You can do it right at home. Ship it in, you're good to go. Now, if you want to layer on top of that and it was someone, let's say you're yourself, like you had digestive issues. I would say, okay, big five plus something called the bacteria and parasite stool test, which is the only one. You can't test for parasites any other way, really, except for a stool test. So if we believe. If you had specific symptoms, you said, you know, listen, like, I get night sweats at night. I get sometimes some yellow tinge on my palms and my feet. I sometimes get grinding in my teeth. I'd say it's very possible you may have parasites. I can't diagnose that, but we could run this lab as well. And so they might say, well, I really can't afford adding on that. I said, no problem, because for every lab that you're also testing for, there could be a protocol. And so with us, we may actually just do the protocol because you say, I wanna run the big five, but I don't wanna add on the. The mycotoxins test or the bacterium parasite stool test. No problem. Let's test for the foundational things. That's the big five. Then let's go. Detox, parasite, gut protocol, mold. And you can take your time and. Cause the truth is that each One of those sets you up for success for the next and you'll have less. What's called Herxheimer reactions. Herxheimer reactions are when you kill things off in the body too quickly. And your liver, that's why we support the liver, cannot keep up with all of that bacteria or viruses or other things in the bloodstream. And you actually feel flu like symptoms or skin rashes or other items like that. So if you work with a qualified practitioner, they're going to be able to walk you through this process and let you choose what works best for you.

Yeah, that all makes sense.

I feel like we talked through all of, all of the comparison back and forth. I feel like. Is there anything else that you feel like that we're missing that we should be covering?

Well, then it's the maintenance. You know, I think that's a big part of it is letting people know like how these things happen. Right. Like how, how do you get mold in your home? So I'll just give you another example. I, I have a place in Maine. Maine is one of my, my favorite, favorite spots. We're, we're typically just there for like holidays. It's a small place and we're there for the summer. It's just, it's just a happy place for my family to go to. It's quiet, it's unplugged, all those good things. It's in nature. We keep the doors open all day long there in windows. Beautiful. Now we have a little outdoor shower. It's literally a shower head stuck through the wall and, and all that. It's on the outside. Well, unbeknownst to us, we had some work done there. They put in new flex piping, whatever the work. We weren't there when they were doing the work. We come back this summer, there's mold on the inside of the wall where they put in the new piping. So whoever was doing the work, obviously water got into the wall and now we have about a three foot patch of mold that we just discovered because we're not there now. I shouldn't say luckily, but it's in our garage on the other side of that. However, our garage in Maine is a big part of our house. It's just like it's all of our stuffs in there, so we're always in and out. So, you know, the thing is, and like you said, it's not your fault. Like no one's perfect in this game. It's knowing what to look for in the future, knowing who your experts are, that you can contact and then just doing your best to make sure it doesn't happen in the future. And then a couple of those things is have your air filters. Teach your kids, your family, like, you can't overflow the bathtub. You can't overflow the sink. You can't play in this. Like, these things aren't like, for. For doing because they have real serious consequences. And. And mold is legitimately a real health issue that's often overlooked by the majority of people. So that's kind of my last tip that I give people is just be. Can't be perfect. Stay on the lookout and be conscious at work as well. You can't change always your work in your office space. But if there's a vent blowing on you, you know, what can you do to filter that in some way, shape or form? I have people put filters over their vents, you know, up in their office, just to try to grab some of that from coming out.

I mean, you can even get portable units in your office. Like, there are things you can do for filtration units that you can put in there to add a couple things on the maintenance piece. First off, the thing you said about teach your kids not to do this. It's so funny because I. I always tell a story about my daughter all the time. But, like, before I say it again, which everyone who listens has probably already heard. If I'm in a house and I'm in a kid's bathroom and there's water damage on the baseboard by the tub. Cause the kids are splashing around. And I get on a call with the clients, like, review. Okay, so this looks like an issue. What's going on? They're like, well, I mean, that's just.

That's.

The kids are splashing, like, okay, that's no different than turning a water faucet on and spraying it on there, right? Like, it's a same thing. And it kind of comes into this thing that I think actually applies a lot of things in life. But I'll just. I won't get so philosophical on it. I'll keep it here. Is that there are things that we consider to be normal because it happens all the time.

It doesn't mean it's okay that it happens all the time. It means that it does. And we have normalized it. And now we don't look at it the same way because we see it all the time. And we now start. It doesn't, like, stand out like a red flag when our eye scans it anymore because we see it Everywhere. And our brain computer's like, oh, we see this all the time. This is normal. Whatever. It's not normal for water to be coming out of a tub or a shower. That's why they're built the way they are. That's why it's supposed to stay in the tub, in the shower, right? So I would tell you that if the response is, I had little kids, I have this, I have that, I have a 4 year old daughter who knows very, very well that if one drop of water comes out of that tub, that time is over, she's out, no more fun, just that easy. And she knows it. And she was trained on it from the time that she was little. And she knows now that if water gets out, she'll like, look at me. She'll be like, sorry. And. And it's funny. It's like, all right, it wasn't on purpose. I don't end the baths like I used to, you know, to kind of teach the math, you know, teach it right. But it's like she now is very cautious about water getting out of the tub, which is the lesson that was meant to be taught throughout that whole thing. Um, and we can make these little changes and it's not something that's out of our control. So just when you say, well, this is something that happens all the time, it's normal, it's this or that. Try to take a step back on, like why you're saying that and actually ask yourself, is it really out of my control and it happens all the time? Or is there actually something I could do? And I just don't because I've. I have inherently normalized this inside, right. And so there's just like a piece of that other maintenance things of where to look. So it's looking for signs of water damage. It's not necessarily looking for mold. Right. And I think that's the biggest mistake that happens is people go looking for mold, and most mold is behind something so you can't see it, right? So you walk around, I don't see mold anywhere. And then you think you have no problem, right? So areas where there is the most moisture are the areas that you should be having your eyes look at more frequently as a maintenance kind of walk around your house, right? Under every sink, at least every month, take everything out from under your sinks and just look. Is there little bubbling? Is there stained discolors? Is there things going on that weren't there the month before? So many issues happen in sink cabinets where it's a little bubble In a floor panel of a sink that doesn't look like mold. It doesn't have a massive stain around it yet on the bottom side of the floor panel. Cause the water soaks through. There's stack, there's cotomium, there's aspen. You know, whatever it is is like growing under there. Looking in those areas, your toilets are big areas. Your tubs and showers are big areas.

So.

And your washing machines, those are kind of like all the big areas.

Tubs, toilets, the floor and the walls and the baseboards right around them. Is it stained? Is it bubbled? Is it bowed? Is it separating little things that you probably wouldn't see if you were going just like looking in the room. But like make an effort to go look at them. And if they start looking like something, it's a clue that there's something going on and you want to get on it earlier than not. Right. So those are, those are just some additional little, like use your eyes maintenance tools. You don't need special moisture meters, you don't need infrared cameras. You don't need any of that stuff. Most of the stuff that we find has nothing to do with a tool. It has everything to do with just like knowing what to look for. And so those are like some of the little, some of the little tricks to look for.

Yeah, those are great tips for sure. I appreciate that. Cool.

So where do people find you? You're everywhere, I feel like. But for those of you that don't know Dr. Cabral, where do people find you?

My, my, my main website is Stephen cabral.com and Stephen with a pH. And from there you'll be able to find my podcast, which is the Cabral Concepts, the live event, the Reimagining Health Summit. That's Brian you'll be speaking at in just a little bit. So that'll be super exciting. We're going to do some really engaging TED style talks and then live Q and A engagement from the audience. Your talk's gonna be huge. People are gonna, I mean, this is a topic that people now are learning more and more about. Every year that goes by, we have more people come into our practice asking about mold where they didn't before. Nobody asked me 10 years ago about mold and it was lime 10 years ago now that they're asking about mold. And so there's more education, there's more awareness and people know now what they can do. And so that's good and bad. Right. In your field Now I'm sure there's a lot of people popping up that do mold remediation, that don't do it the right way. That's frustrating for you. It's frustrating for me in my practice as well, where you're like, oh, take this one vitamin and everything will be okay. That's not how. That's not how the body works. Right. And so. But no, I mean, that's, that's it. I'm. I'm on social media. I have my podcast, I have my book, which is, you know, aptly called the Rain Barrel Effect. And we're always happy to help in however we can, for sure.

You said the book is free. Did you say that?

Yeah. So it's now, believe it or not, this is now its fifth year. And so we are giving the book away for free to as many people as we can. It's on Amazon. You know, it's there. But at my website, we just ask people to pay for shipping. I pay to have the book printed. My biggest thing is education, so I also teach health practitioners. We certify health coaches and practitioners to do what we do. We have almost 5,000 practitioners around the world. And my goal is to get this information to as many people as possible. I call it putting a health coach in every home so that they can do just what we spoke about right now. They know what to look for, then they know the action steps to take, and they also know, like, where to find the information. Like, that's the thing about the Internet right now. Like, we can listen one of your podcasts. You know, I've got a ton of questions for you. It's like, how quickly does mold grow? Like, what's the incubation period? Does it. If water leaks, does it always create molds? I'm sure I can go to your page and I can learn about these things. And so you have to know the right questions to ask. And if you do, from the health education you have, you can always find the answers. And then you could say, okay, you know what, I need to call an expert in this particular area. So that's what I try to provide through either a book or podcast. Just a lot of free information.

I love it. I've. I've seen you in various things, scrolling and all this stuff for a long period of time. And I'm, I'm excited that we had a chance to talk. Super looking forward to October to be doing the talk. I, I love these things. It's going to be just like, regardless of how much information gets out, like, I'm going to have a lot of fun doing it. So I feel like that's it's going to hopefully pass through to everybody else who's seeing it. And thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me at the conference as well. And maybe there'll be a way to share some of the stuff that happens there when it happens.

Appreciate it. Thanks so much.

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