186: Pediatric Mold Expert: Autism is a Brain Allergy! Binders Don't Work for Kids! 50% of Autism and PANS is Mold Toxicity... Dr. Pejman Katiraei

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.

All right, coming up, we have an awesome conversation with Dr. Pajman Kadurai. He is a integrative medicine pediatric focus. This conversation is all around kids with pans and Autism Spectrum disorder. And, and he actually created, we're going to be referencing this, a mold protocol that he has created. It is really, really detailed specifically for kids, Autism Spectrum disorder and pants. So we're going to be referencing it a lot. I'm going to put links to that down below in the show notes so you guys can get access to that document. I think as we talk through, you're going to want to, like, pull it up as well because there's a lot of really great detail in there. And if you are working with a kid who is dealing with brain inflammation or either of these issues of any kind, this is going to be incredibly incred, really helpful for you. So go ahead and check the show notes for that. There's a link down there. You can go just, you know, we'll, we'll shoot it over to you. And then also you could find Dr. Cataract. I forgot to ask him at the end of the episode, so I'll do it now. You can find Dr. Cataract. He's on Instagram. He's at Wholistic Kids. Who, like who says who Again, I'll just put in the show notes. But it's in the show notes and his website is wholistic kids.com will also be in the show notes. You guys can see all that stuff. There's. And you can reach out. He does work. If you listen to this and you want to work with Dr. Catarai specifically, he works either you could fly in and see him, he's based in Santa Monica, or he does work with your provider and he'll actually work with them. So if they're open to that, he'll do that. Right. So there's a possibility to tap into him if you feel like that this really resonates with you. But I've been, been familiar with Dr. K for a very long time, worked with his, his pediatric patients, his kids patients for many, many years. And this is, this is one of the guys I know in a field that's very small when it comes to very. To a pediatric focus on integrative medicine and really with a lean into the neurological component of it. So this would be a really awesome conversation. Looking forward to you guys hearing it. Hey, everyone, what's going on? Got a really cool episode today. I'm not really talking about mold or ranting or anything like that.

We have Dr. Patron Catarai on for those of you who don't know who he is. He's like a genius for 1 and 2.

He specializes in working in pediatrics with kids, specifically with complex issues. And a lot of times there's mold kind of components to that. And so we've created a relationship with Dr. K over the years, and he sent over.

A write up of a new protocol that he's putting together to help children, a mold specific protocol for children who are on the autism spectrum disorder and with hands. And I looked over and it kind of like blew my mind. I was like, people need to hear this, basically. So I immediately emailed him back. I was like, will you please come on and talk about this whole thing? And you said yes. So everyone, this is Dr. K. Dr. K, everyone.

It's a pleasure to be here. And gosh, now I've got, like, some big shoes to fill it. I appreciate the introduction, though, but I mean, at the end of the day, I was a kid who really struggled. And it breaks my heart to see all of these kids who are struggling. And, you know, they're struggling in life, they're struggling to be at school, they're struggling to make friends, they're struggling to learn. And it's just. I mean, it's truly, truly heartbreaking. And everything that I do is because I'm driven to help as many of these kids as possible. And. And I know as a parent, when we see our children struggle, there's nothing worse in the world than to see that. And I have parents that look at me and say, is my kid gonna be okay? Are they gonna be okay? Meaning, are they gonna be able to learn? Are they going to be able to hold down a job? Are they even going to be able to know how to socialize and be in the world? And it's not fair. It's just not fair to have this happen, especially when we can do something about it. And part of why I'm so grateful to be here and also, you know, for the work that you guys do is I want to change this and I want to make this, you know, this Model of understanding as accessible as possible. And part of, you know, why I was so happy to integrate the work that you guys are doing into my protocol is you guys have done the same thing in the environmental side. You made it simple. You've made it accessible, and we need to do that. We need to do that to help as many people as possible get better, especially for little kids.

Yeah, it's. It's amazing to have someone like you focused on it. Right. Because there's just a lot that we all know that. That kind of. Kind of aren't in the way that maybe they should be. Can you talk a little bit about why this became your area of focus in practice?

So kids with learning and behavioral challenges has been an area that I've been drawn to, you know, pretty much since I started getting into integrative medicine. Jesus. This goes back to 2008, aging myself a little. But, you know, part of it is, as a kid, I had gnarly levels of anxiety, ocd, inattention, et cetera. Sometimes I look back, I'm like, God, it's a borderline miracle that I made it through school with the degree of distractibility I had. And really, the more I came to learn, the more I realized that I'm like the kids that I take care of, and the kids are like me. And at every step, it turns out the more I've learned how to take care of myself, I've been better at taking care of them. And the more I learn from them, I've learned how to improve my own health, mental health in particular. So I see a lot of myself in the kids that I take care of when it comes to mold. You know, now, about eight years ago, I thought I knew mold, and I thought I understood what the heck it was and what it does. And long story short, I was completely and utterly clueless. And I had this one guy, he was probably 6 or 7 at the time, was presenting with brain inflammation and extreme anxiety and aggression and all kinds of awful things. And it was the mom that was like, hey, do you think this is mold? And I was like, I don't know. Right.

So we did testing. The testing didn't really look terrible, but then she kept pushing and somehow found Dr. Neil Nathan and, you know, introduced me, and then, you know, that that was kind of the beginning of this entire journey. And, you know, at the time, I never thought I'd want to get into mold because, like, I had done enough training. I had done two fellowships at the time, blah, blah, blah. But I looked around and it was like, holy crap. Like no one actually understands this, like in the entire pediatric community, like holistic community. And we're a pretty tightly knit bunch. You know, I looked around, it's like, well, Jesus, no one really knows what the hell this thing is. It looks like I've got to get into it. So grudgingly I started digging. And the more I learned, the more I understood it, the more I saw it in the patients, the more concerned I became. And it became this thing where, you know, it's, it's truly terrifying what this, this dampness, if you want to say it's not even just mold is doing to kids at a immunological gastrointestinal central nerv system level. It's, it's one of the scariest things that I've encountered. And you know, over the last decade and a half plus I've seen a lot of things and nothing has troubled me the way this has.

There's, there's a lot there which we will get into. The first thing that I, I just to like a little bit more lean into this, the specialty in pediatric as compared to grownups. Right. I know from just like the number of practitioners that are out there, there's a lot more people on the doctor side that are getting into understanding this, but there, there aren't like people who are then specializing down into pediatric. Do you see a fundamental difference in approach between adults and kids? Is that or, or do you feel like it's kind of the same thing and you're just sort of doing it in different, in different people?

It does seem that there is actually a, I don't want to say pretty significant, but at least a noticeable difference. And you know, the more for those people who don't know, Dr. Nathan, I mean, he's, he's one of the leaders in this domain of mold medicine and he, I mean, he's helped open the doors for many of us to enter into it. And the more he and I have talked about, the more apparent it has become, at least to me and I think to the both of us, that the pathophysiology of mold related illness in kids is actually quite different than adults. And the challenges that the adults have are different than the kids and even how it affects them. You know, like adults, we have relatively stable gastrointestinal tracts, we have relatively stable microbiomes, immune systems. For kids, all of these things are just developing. Right. So if you've got a two year old that's exposed to mold, the way their bodies can handle These toxins is actually very different than those of adults. So I'm sure there's overlap, but I also see, you know, big fundamental differences. And this is also where I think, you know, the efficacy of binders, for instance, I believe is much less in kids than, you know, for instance, adults got.

Makes sense because of the development of, like you said, like, the immune system and, and how the bodies are different. You know, I've. I've heard different.

I've heard the same kind of talk around. Well, kids are different, but. But I. I would love to define, like. Like, where is the point in time? Not from, like, how old the kid is to playing sports and what grade they are in school and things like that, but from, like, an internal body perspective of where we kind of transition out of, like, developing our, you know, our systems in our body to then being, you know, considered physiologically like an adult. It's much older than I thought probably when I initially heard it. But I love for you to kind of talk to that because as people are listening, a lot of times we hear, you know, we think kids, you know, five, six, seven year olds. But I feel like it's. It's more than that. Is that. Do you think that that's true?

Yeah, absolutely. I would say, you know, late. Probably very late adolescence kind of teenage years is when you start getting physiologies that are more alike adults. You still have all of the weird, you know, hormonal shifts, right? There's tremendous hormonal changes taking place, you know, and it's not just their mood, right? It's. It's all of the growth that's taking place. They're going through puberty. So I would say towards the middle to end of puberty is when you've got kind of a physiology that's more like an adult early on. I mean, there's so many different changes that kids go through. And I mean, the morphological, physical, developmental changes are, you know, staggering. And these kids keep evolving into different human beings, whereas us adults, we're kind of the same boring version of ourselves, right? We don't change as much.

Well, it's interesting when you say that, because in my mind, the way I picture this, you could tell me if this makes sense, is that when you see a kid who say somewhere between like, you know, 4, 5 or 6 is compared to a kid who's like 9 or 10 compared to a kid who's 13, 14, 15, it feels like it's actually not evaluating the same type of human at that point because of where they are in their stage. So it sounds like it, it makes it much more difficult. Maybe that's why there's much less pediatric focus and there's more on these stable adult who's the same forever. But does it, is it really like you're almost looking at different sort of archetypes of a person as you're looking at different age groups within the growth cycle of kids?

That's a really great question. I would say that I would parse out the infants and young, young children as a separate, separate camp than the older children. I think once they're past four or five, I mean. Yes. Do they go through changes? Of course. Are there physiolog and their physiological susceptibility similar, let's say four to five years on up? Probably.

It'S the little, little ones that, that have a little bit of a different physiological makeup. And when those little ones, you know, we're talking infants that are born into mold, that grow up in mold in the first year and a half, two years of life. I mean their susceptibility, I would say is the highest of all human beings. And then from there it just kind of changes.

Got it.

So we're going to be talking about this mold protocol that you put together. It's specifically as it's written so you can tell me specifically for autism spectrum disorder and pans. So can we, I guess, maybe two questions into this. The first one, the mold relation to both of those specifically, like why is it for those two specific things as opposed to just somebody who's exposed to mold, I guess. And then can we also maybe just kind of define what those two things are so we all know what we're talking about?

Sure. So I geared. First of all, let's start with what the heck are these things, right? So I mean everyone knows autism, but when you really dissect it and you say what the hell is autism? Right? Well, it's kids who have social abnormalities and they struggle to socialize and interact and they've got all kinds of constellation of weird things. But then when you look at it, you get to a place where, I mean there are the severely autistic, right. The level 3 autistics, non verbals barely can make eye contact and you look, you're like, oh, that poor child is clearly autistic. And then there's this whole spectrum, right. We call it autism spectrum disorder for a reason where they can make eye contact, they can talk to you, but there's, there's funky stuff happening to them that really doesn't make sense when people look at it and they say, well, okay, this kid has some social anxieties, and they have trouble interacting with some kids, and they've got some other stuff, so therefore it's autism. And this is where things get really interesting, because when you ask, well, what the hell is causing all of this? Right? So then you get into the weird sensory issues, and these kids get overwhelmed environments and they shut down, and so social environments because of their overwhelm, and they've got all kinds of other stuff. You get into more of the physiology, which has to do with basically inflammation of the brain and toxicity of the brain. If I had to distill it down into kind of a core thing, that happens. And then this thing called pans, Pediatric Acute Neuropsychiatric Syndrome is basically the brain on fire. And when the brain is highly inflamed and neurotypical kids. So these are kids that were developing fine, everything was fine. And then all of a sudden, usually over the course of weeks to months, weird things happen. They develop intense levels of OCD and aggression and irritability, and all of a sudden, they've got sleep issues and pee issues and other things like that. And part of why I geared the protocol towards these kiddos is one. I mean, that's my area of focus and passion. And I've come to know these kids fairly well, and I, of all of the kids who are struggling, this is the area that I wanted to put my focus in. So the protocol is really geared towards addressing the inflammation and toxicity within the nervous system. I think if. If we were looking at it from, like, if you were treating gastrointestinal issues or eczema or asthma, you'd have to make modifications to it. But that's where the protocol kind of became from and why I focused it on that. And, you know, at the end of the day, the goal of it is how do we reduce inflammation, how do we improve brain functioning, neuronal functioning, and how do we reduce the toxicity that comes from all of this exposure?

So is the nervous system the same system that's tied to brain inflammation? Like, you're thinking body systems, would that be the same system, or. Or is it a different approach of, like, working on the nervous system versus working on reducing, like, brain. Brain inflammation?

I love where you're going with that. So when you've got inflammation, the nervous system falls apart. I mean, the brain does not like inflammation. And, you know, the analogy that I've come up with is having brain inflammation. And specifically, there's a A type of inflammation called microglial activation. And there are these funny little cells called mast cells. So they're kind of buddies of each other. Having microglial activation is like having a chainsaw. Like a. Basically a crazy person with a chainsaw going through your house and just literally shredding your house, right? Walls are falling apart. All of a sudden they're hacking off a support beam and a part of the house falls. If you could imagine that, microglial activation begins because microglia actually influence the health of the neurons. They also control neural plasticity, neural neurogenesis, neural circuits. So literally, they start screwing with how the brain connects or how the neurons connect with one another. So literally, cell to cell signaling. And our circuits become disrupted as there is inflammation. And they're finding microglial activation to be tied to not just autism, but, but to all kinds of weird neurodegenerative diseases, psychiatric illnesses, severe depression, severe anxiety. It's a really fascinating world. And one of the things that I have seen, and, you know, the more I look into the literature, the more concerning it becomes is like this. Microglial activation and all of the weird things that come with it is one of the primary drivers that causes a lot of the weird manifestations we see in these kids.

Got it. So is mast cell. So mast cell activation syndrome. So is that microglial activation from mast cell? Meaning is mast cell effectively the thing that's creating this? Or are they just kind of somewhat correlated, but not causation?

They're heavily tied to one another. So when we talk about mast cell activation, a lot of times, you know, people are referring to this kind of large constellation of things, from urinary issues to skin issues, right? People. Because mast cells trigger histamine, so you get allergy reactions. Some people have blood pressure, like adults, they have more blood pressure issues, etc. So when you get exposure to dampness and mold, first of all, the particulates, the mold particulates, the mycotoxins can trigger through. Through our nose, the olfactory bulb. They can trigger microglial activation directly. They've taken these poor animals, exposed them to this, and then they like, let's see, did we mess up their brain? And they're like, yeah, we did that.

The more spooky part of this is really, because the mycotoxins and the soup of toxins that come from dampness, because it causes larger cascades of immune activation within the body, it really messes with the gastrointestinal tract of these kids. So these, these toxins are Disrupting the microbiome in really significant ways. Like, the kids who have the weirdest microbiomes all have had, or I shouldn't say all, a vast majority of them have had significant exposure to dampness because these mold toxins are antimicrobial, right? So imagine like every time you're inhaling, you're taking a dose of antibiotics and that's going into your bloodstre, your gut, killing off your beneficial bacteria, right? So we have all of that. A lot of these toxins are also highly inflammatory to the gut. So it triggers gut inflammation, it triggers leaky gut or intestinal permeability. And all of that creates this really perfect storm within the gastrointestinal tract of these kids to actually create a secondary effect which then causes inflammation from the gut to go up here and then it releases these weird bacterial toxins, bacterial endotoxins that go and cause further damage within the nervous system. And then you kind of get the sec. The initial effects, the primary effects, right? And now you get the secondary effects from the gut also causing damage. And that soup of stuff is what, what we believe is a major contributor to autism and this brain inflammatory condition.

Got it. That's a really helpful explanation that the. Never heard that. I'm going to steal it. I will, I'll give it to you whenever I say it though, that breathing in mycotoxins all the time is the equivalent of taking an antibiotic every day. That really lands. Because, you know, his parents, like I have a six year old and a three year old, right? And my three year old, he just had to go in, he had his tonsils out, his adenoids and he had to get ear tubes put in because he has had persistent ear infections just every month. Every month. And so then every month he's having to take antibiotics to knock out the infection. And of course, like you're just destroying, you know, their microbiome and all that stuff. And I feel like a lot of the people that, you know, listen to this and are in kind of like, you know, the, the more health focused wellness world, like understand like this, you don't want to be taking antibiotics all the time. And, and this, this like analogy that you just gave of you're, you're literally just breathing antibiotics every day and what that does to your gut, I think like just like light bulb crystallizes it so well. I'm like the king of analogies for anyone. I'm like, that is great. That was a great, great analogy. So very helpful to understand the connection between the two Because a lot of times I try to explain how that connects, and that was great. So selfishly, thank you.

You're welcome. You're welcome. But, you know, in the wellness world, how many people talk about all kinds of, you know, fancy probiotics. Take this probiotic to fix this, take that probiotic to do that. You know, take this prebiotic if you eat this kind of diet. And I'm all for that. You know, don't get me wrong, I do think probiotics could be helpful. Obviously, eating healthy and eating the right kind of prebiotics is healthy, but, you know, it. It's. All of this is like, you've got a lawn, right? And you're getting obsessive about what kind of water you give the lawn, how you fertilize the lawn, except someone is going there and literally pouring acid all over your lawn. And you keep looking at it. You're like, what the hell? I just watered it. I just poured the perfect seeds. Why is this lawn just dying, right? And you're missing the fact that someone's going around just literally spraying acid all over your lawn, killing everything off. These, these microbial particulates and toxins, including the mold toxins, are literally like someone is going and spraying acid on your lawn and just killing off everything. And probiotics are like seeds, right? And prebiotics are like fertilizer. And you can seed and fertilize that lawn as much as you want. If there's acid being poured on your lawn, like, it's kind of game over. You've got to stop the acid from being poured on the lawn before you can get it to grow.

Another great one. You're giving me a run for my money right now.

Okay, so we've been. I've kind of been taking this on tangents, but I just think it's so interesting digging into kind of the foundation of this stuff. I'd love to start actually talking about what you sent over to us. So myself and Corey, some of you listening, but Corey's my. My co founder, and we inspect and sent this over, and you essentially, basically provided the full mold protocol here for kids with ASD and PANs, starting from kind of clinical presentation and history and things to think about and kind of working its way down. We don't have to get into, like, how much of what you take in this out of the other. But I would love to.

Talk through maybe conceptually some of these things, maybe call out some of the highlights in some of these or something like that, just so people have A general idea of, like, what this roadmap looks like. And just real quickly, before we start going through it, can you just kind of talk about, like, how you put this together and how this was sort of created and all that?

Sure, sure. So it's taken me probably four or five years and, Jesus, I don't know, probably over a thousand kids to kind of get here. And I would say, you know, the benefit I have is pretty much I only work with kids, and pretty much I only work with kids who have, you know, more or less severe autism, neuroinflammatory conditions, learning disability. So I have, if you want to say, the luxury of seeing a lot of these kids and quickly seeing what works and doesn't. And one of the things that I quickly learned doesn't work are binders. So the typical charcoal activated, you know, bentonite, clay, cholestyramine, etc. I didn't find them to be very helpful. And that's where I started asking, well, what the hell is going on with these kids? Right? Why are these kids not getting better? And as I started working through it and, you know, really, by not choice, started realizing how significantly the environment was impacting the kids. And the first thing that I would like to start with is the. The. Literally the number one reason or the number one thing that I see a lot of my colleagues missing is the environment. You know, they. They think mold. They kind of piece some things together, and then they go and say, well, you know, I think this is mold. And then the family's like, well, we tested our house and we don't have mold. You know, and then the provider's like, okay, you know, and then they go on their merry way and, you know, try some things which fail because they're. They're. It's living in mold. This is the analogy that I've come up with to kind of impress upon people what this means. Living in mold is like having a child with peanut allergies, except that child who has borderline anaphylactic peanut allergies is living in an environment where there are peanut crumbles everywhere, literally everywhere, and their. Their face keeps blowing up, and they keep having asthma attacks, and they have, you know, whatever other issues, they keep having eczema, and you keep giving them Benadryl, and you can't understand why they keep having these breakouts. When it comes to dampness and all of the weird things that are released in the environment. These children have a borderline. I don't want to say anaphylactic because that's not the appropriate term, but they have the same degree of sensitivity. And when these children are being exposed, that same weird allergic reaction that we see in the allergic kids is happening up in their brain. And there's this brilliant researcher, Dr. Theo Heraidis, that, that actually has come out and termed the coin of autism being a brain allergy, which I think is, is spot on. So if we look at autism and secondarily this, this pans, you know, business as a brain allergy, and the thing that they're allergic to are all of the compounds and microbial particulates and toxins that are being released. We get to a point where it's like, oh, if they're that sensitive, they're borderline allergic. And just inhaling this stuff can trigger the inflammation which causes all of the weird things. Then we need to get to a point of understanding, well, how truly clean is this environment? And I'm sure you guys have talked many a times about how commonly conventional testing methods miss mold, right?

Yeah, yeah, like ad nauseam.

Can I ask a follow up to this? Because this is really interesting. So we've spent some time a minute ago talking about how mycotoxins are an antibiotic for your stomach, for your gut, that then allows inflammation to get to your brain and triggers this microglial effect, which is essentially brain inflammation. Right. So we're talking about toxins being a mechanism to drive the brain reaction. So now what you just, what you just said here is that it's actually an allergic reaction as well. There's an alternative kind of path here. Right. And so what. Am I understanding that correctly, I guess.

Is my first question.

I use that as an analogy because when you get microglial activation within the nervous system, the microglia and mast cells are literally, it's like having twin sisters that are joined at the hip. One, one person gets pissed off, the other one automatically, like with, without fail gets pissed off and they actually ping each other. So there's, there's a complex kind of immunological web, if you want to say, within the nervous system. And you, you essentially can't get microglial activation without mast cell activation and vice versa. So.

When I use that analogy, and Dr. Theo Horatius has termed that because it's something that's digestible, right? Microglial activation is like, what the hell is that? Right. But brain allergy. Oh, that makes sense. Right.

So it's, it's a complex immunological manifestation in the nervous system that, that essentially is brain allergy. Even Though it's not in the conventional way that we think about it.

Yeah, that makes sense. I guess the reason I wanted to dig in on it a little more is that a lot of times the. The concern from people is around, like, the toxic mold component of things, Whereas a lot of what people are exposed to in houses are not necessarily the toxin. There's a much larger load of just mold particle and fragment moving around than the toxin itself. And we know that all mold at its very base minimum level is an allergen of some kind. And so if you're breathing that in and triggering a histamine response off of an allergen, which. And your mast cell activation, right? And then that connects in and now just says what we just talked about, about getting into this kind of larger, easy analogy. Technically not exactly what it is, but the analogy of a brain allergy at that point, like that lines up for me and how I'm like picturing it. Does that, does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah. And I would say it's. It's fairly close. You know, the thing that gets interesting is when you get, for instance, these microbial particulates, right? These microbial volatile compounds, which are part of the soup of toxins, they are highly inflammatory to the entire ENT sphere. So a lot of times, sadly, what you're seeing in your child with the recurrent ear infections and allergies and congestion, those are all the microbial particulates causing inflammation. That inflammation starts causing a cascade of other inflammatory events in the body. When you get inflammation, for instance, in the upper airways or lungs, that actually triggers inflammation in the gut. So it's. It's remarkably complex and beautiful and yet simple in terms of how the body is interconnected. And one thing pings another, which pings another. And ultimately what we get is, is a nervous system that's just not happy and inflamed.

Yeah, this is very helpful. I feel like, as someone who is health adjacent is what I would consider myself. I'm like, I hear about it. I talk to smart people like you, but it's not like what I do, right? So I feel like if I could figure out a way to frame it, then maybe other people who listen to this are probably similarly health adjacent, and maybe it helps them. So. Okay, I keep falling off of this. I would love to highlight some things that you. That you have here in the protocol that you sent over. So the first section that you have in here is, is clinical presentation and history. And you're kind of talking about the clinical history of the individual signs and symptoms. Some of those things. Can we. I mean, you just mentioned ent. You mentioned different things here. I see here specifically enlarged adenoids or tonsils, which. My kid had both of those things. Snoring and disruptive breathing while sleep. My kid had both of those things. So I'll ask a couple questions when I look at it because there's a large list here. A lot of what you just talked about, right. There's gi. There's a lot of things you just mentioned when you're looking at.

Signs, symptoms. So this specifically says signs and symptoms of possible mold exposure. Right. So. And then specific things are bolded that are more indicative is the idea that you need to have a certain number. Because I know diagnosing, you know, quote, mold is very difficult. Difficult, Right. So like when you go through like a symptom set or signs or like what you're looking at, is it like, is it court? Is it like a preponderance of ever evidence? Is it a certain number of things? I know some protocols are very specific. It needs to be this, this, and this specifically. Like that's how they try to diagnose Lyme. Has to be these number of things. So, like, what's your view on how you look at a number of things here and kind of decide or at this point in your evaluation, is it not making the decision yet? And it's just more kind of like throwing possibilities up in the in on your board of where things might be.

Excellent question, and I love where you're going with this. I would look at it as the. The more findings there are, the higher the probability that exposure has happened. And, you know, if you look in the document, one of the things that I share is, you know, some of the findings could be in a sibling. So I've had many cases where, you know, the child is presenting with autism and they've got sensory issues and, you know, eating issues and whatever. But then there's a sibling who's had, you know, a million ear infections, has asthma attacks, has eczema, and then the parents have horrible brain fog, one of them, at least. Right. So it's creating this clinical picture. And sadly, there are very rare exceptions where there's only one thing happening. If you look at, for instance, children who present with autism and you look at all of the kind of correlative findings, children with autism commonly have gastrointestinal issues, children with autism have a 2 to 300% increased risk of having inflammatory bowel disease. If children, if a family has allergies the likelihood of the child having autism goes up 2 to 300%. So there's all of these weird things that we see in the literature that sadly, we haven't put two and two together and say, well, what the hell causes all of these things? And dampness and mold causes this entire constellation. So I would say the more of these findings people find, the higher. It's never a guarantee, but the higher the probability that there is an issue with. With. With exposure.

Got it. No, that makes a lot of sense. So I'm scrolling through. We have the symptom sets that are different systems of the body. It's sleep, it's skin, it's gut, it's all the things you were just talking about. It's upper respiratory. We have family history, which you just mentioned, siblings, parents, whatever it might be. So we're kind of showing this, and then you kind of get into the conventional labs. Can you. Can you talk a little bit about this? Because I feel like a lot of people, this is sort of where they start, because they might go to their general practitioner, they might go somewhere else. So they're getting more of their conventional labs that they're able to see. And maybe if they know specific things here that they're. That they're looking at, that they can look at outside of their doctor, then they can cross reference with how they're feeling, the symptoms, the other people in the family, maybe they can start kind of connecting some dots.

So, you know, the one thing that you said that I think is really important to highlight is I believe we've made this entire model way too complicated, and we have thrown way too many things into what is necessary to heal. And I think part of that has to do with, you know, some very well intending people wanting to help. But we've got adult models of care kind of translating or being carried inappropriately into pediatric models where you've got to support the liver and you've got to do binders and you've got to give probiotics, and you've got to give fish oils, and you've got to do a million things to get kids well. And part of what I try to do with this protocol is just simplify the hell out of it to the point where it's like, what are the key foundational things you need to do to move the needle? And with that, I believe that, you know, a clean environment and ultimately understanding what you're dealing with. And we'll talk about the protocol a little bit after. With the basic labs, it would be Hard to say. Oh, yeah, this is mold exposure or dampness with the conventional labs, because none of them are entirely specific to say, oh, gosh, this looks like there's exposure. The reason why I put the basic kind of clinical labs is one, if you've got a child who, for instance, is anemic and has severe iron deficiency, it's like, game over. It's like trying to run a car that has no gas in it, right? And you keep turning on the engine. You're like, why is this thing not turning on? Because you've got a severely iron deficient kid. Or if they're severely zinc deficient, like, the gut can heal if there's no zinc and forget about the brain and everything else. So part of those labs are to kind of do a system check to make sure there aren't other things. I find at least 10% of the kids that I take care of have, you know, outright Hashimoto's. And, you know, if you've got Hashimoto's with thyroid disease and your thyroid is falling apart, like, things sometimes can't move forward, there are some tests that people can do that would give clues. They're not, again, highly specific or indicative, but they would give clues. For instance, there, it turns out that celiac markers, gliadin antibodies, IgG and IgA, happen to have a crossover. They're kind of immunogenically similar to Candida and certain yeast. And there's actually a larger body of research that's saying, hey, maybe this thing that we thought is celiac is actually a fungal problem, because there's such crossover between these gliadin or wheat proteins in the Candida in yeast that maybe it's actually the Candida that's causing this immune reactivity. So, like, people will see that in there. I've included these gliadin antibodies because if the gliadin antibodies kind of start going up a little bit, not like crazy high, but they're kind of positive, you could look and say, gosh, is that some kind of fungal imbalance which typically comes from the dampness and mold? There are these other antibodies against brewer's yeast anti Saccharomyces cervaceae antibodies that also.

Look very similar to other types of yeast, including mold. So Aspergillus candida and Saccharomyces cervacea all happen to look similar. It's like having a bunch of Middle Easterners, right? And they all kind of look the same. And you're like, wait a second, is it that guy or that guy? Right? Because we all kind of do look the same.

So, you know, the immune system. System looks at these different antigens, these different particulates or proteins, if you want to say, on these microorganisms. And sometimes when you see the reaction, it's actually from something else. So with some of those basic tests, it was a way to kind of help people screen one to make sure there aren't big scary things happening. You know, if a child has outright inflammatory bowel disease, you've got a different condition than a kid who doesn't. At the end of the day, that the thing that I have found to be probably the single most helpful thing to actually identify and assess exposure, and this is even in little kids, is antibodies against the molds or mold toxins. A lot of people are all about urine testing. Frankly, in little kids, I've completely given up.

Up.

And this is after, like, testing probably three to 500 kids. And either the urine tests were showing up as false negatives, where family was living in horrendous amounts of mold, like contamination, where they had to, like, walk out of the house kind of level and the urine looked completely normal, or because the kids were eating peanuts and moldy foods, the urine looked scary abnormal, except that there wasn't contamination. So the urine levels are, in my book, very unreliable in kids.

To the point for adults, too, or do you think it's more so for kids? Because I've heard similar. You know, I've heard if an adult is so toxic and they're not detoxing and their pathways are closed and they would take a urine test and they would show nothing, but it's because they're so bad. Right. Do you. Is it similar, do you think, or is it specifically different for kids?

I've heard the same. I don't want to really say that much because, I mean, the only people I've tested are basically myself and like, a handful of the parents. So I've got maybe an N of 10 adults, but I've heard the same thing. And, you know, when you just think about it, it's like, well, gosh, if a test could be falsely negative because someone is highly toxic and they can't push the toxins out in their ear, and then it's like, well, how useful is that test if. If that possibility is there, right? And then vice versa, if you eat, you know, a few too many nuts and, you know, a little bit of dairy and gluten, and those are all moldy foods, and your urine looks terrible because of that, well, then how reliable is that. Right. So that's where ultimately I veered away from these. And one of my mentors and friends is Dr. Andrew Campbell and Dr. Arista Vojdani. And both of them, you know, from day one, they're like, pageman, why the hell are you using these tests? They're not reliable. You know, so they keep, like, hammering in my head. And after, like, three, I'm like, okay, fine, you're right.

Well, you know, it's interesting because I. I have a lot of people. You know, people will call and they'll. They'll speak with my coaches when they call in to kind of talk about their situation or even when I'm talking, you know, when our team is. Consultants are talking afterwards. And the question is, like, well, should I. Should I do this test now? Or, like, should I test my body first? Because logically it makes sense. Like, well, if it's not on my body, it can't be here, right? And I've kind of had the same conversation that we're having right now where I actually feel like body testing when it comes to that specifically is really unreliable and a lot of possibility for false negatives. Almost similar to taking an air sample in the middle of a room for mold, how you get false negatives all the time because it's not the right test to really understand. Like, there's variables at play. For the air sample in the middle of the room, your variables are there's airflow everywhere. You're further away from the. The problem, which means you have all this dilution of the air before it even gets to the thing, right? So, like, that's why that works. But here, with a false negative, you know, you have in here 30 to 50% false negatives on these. Is what is. What you have written in here is, is that the right thing to be doing? Right? And so, like, when I talk to people, the one thing that doesn't lie where there are no variables is, show me what's in this dust. There isn't. The dust isn't holding on to the toxins because it's too toxic, and it can't send it out the dust and eat a whole lot of peanuts that day. And all of a sudden, it's spiking. Its mycotoxin, right? Like, the dust is just a net. It's just catching it. And so you're getting a much more true look at what's sitting in an environment by looking there, as opposed to, say, Because I thought I was like, listen, if you guys come back and tell me you don't have it. I'm still going to tell you, I think you need to do this and this is why. Right. So like, should you wait for one or the other? And this is the thought process on that. So the, the fact that you mention it and then have it like literally specific written in here. These tests appear to have 30 to 50% false negatives rate in children impacted by mold, obviously depending on factors. Right. But it's, it's important. Right. Because I think a lot of people lean on that. They get hung up on this like toxic mold thing.

Yeah.

And there's so many other pieces of it outside of like the toxin thing. And I, I think it's like really important as you're kind of going through all this stuff.

Yeah. And I, I, I love what you're bringing up because I think we have done a disservice and making people think that this is just the toxicity. Frankly speaking, I think the vast majority of the toxicity actually comes from within the human body. So when, when you get the gastrointestinal tract that falls apart, there's this essentially entirely second wave of toxicity that comes from within the gastrointestinal tract. And at least what I see in the kids is the kids who are really, really sick.

Sick.

And I would argue it's probably the same for the adults. It's actually the bacterial endotoxins that are making us really sick. So all of these particulates and I mean, you've, you know this better than I, and I'm sure you've talked about this a million times. Mycotoxins are just a tiny, tiny piece of the bigger picture. Right. All of these bacterial particulates and volatile compounds and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. That, that entire soup of stuff is what makes us sick. And that soup of stuff is what triggers inflammation, which then derails our own systems. Right. It derails the mitochondria, derails, you know, detox pathways. It derails the gastrointestinal tract and then it essentially throws the body into a tailspin. It's like someone coming and like basically puncturing your tires. Right. And then all of a sudden the car just falls apart because of that. And now the transmission is falling apart and all of the internal issues of the car become the primary issue, even if the exposure is gone.

So let's move through. So when you have a couple other diagnostic tests outside, we kind of talked about mycotoxin, I guess. What's your thought on OAT tests? Because a lot of people Know organic acid, they know o testing. Do you find yourself gravitating toward that more? Do you feel kind of the same way as you do about mycotoxins in kids? Again, we're talking like kid specific care.

So I still use organic acids all the time. First of all, I mean, for those people that don't know what organic acids is, basically a check on the biochemistry and it's a way of looking at weird biochemical abnormalities that shouldn't be there. First of all, only Genova diagnostics in Mosaic or what used to be called Great Plains do organic acids that look for fungal markers. So if people are using other tests, they may not get those markers. I love those tests and I still use them. But I also have found that 50, 60% of the time, and I put about 50% in the document, you will get false negatives where the fungal markers don't. Either don't look abnormal at all or they don't look terrible. But that, that actually does not reflect the exposure that's happening. And I see a lot of colleagues in the holistic community, forget about the conventional community. In the holistic community, they run one organic acid on the kid. They look and they're like, oh, that's not bad. And then they go and look for all kinds of other things and they completely miss the mold. And I was guilty of this. Early, early on in my first year or two, while I was doing all of this, I would run the organic acids and I would go to Neil. I'm like, this doesn't look bad. He's like, dude, you're missing it. I'm like, okay. You know, and then after a while, I'm like, oh, crap, I am missing it.

Was this something in the lab that you were missing or was it that we shouldn't be looking at this? There's other signs. Like, don't be so tunnel vision on the test.

No, no, I was. The test was missing it. So therefore I wasn't thinking of mold. Right. Or I was like, could this be mold? Oh, the urine doesn't look bad. Maybe it's not, except it was. So I still run organic acids because sometimes you pick up on big time mitochondrial issues, you know, all kinds of other things. But to use it as an exclusive assessment of mold exposure, you're missing it one in two times. And that's where the blood testing I think is, is way more accurate and superior.

So does that can be your antibody testing? Yeah.

So as, as I'm looking through this.

We'Ve there. So you're we're in this diagnostic testing phase which is beyond your conventional labs. When we're talking about organic acid, we just talk about mycotoxin. Now we're talking. We just touched on antibody blood testing. Is the thought here that you do them all and look for, like, because again, we're still trying to figure out, like, is there a flag that pops up somewhere? Because not any single test test is really perfect. So they all have different strengths and weaknesses. Is it kind of like building a puzzle almost and kind of trying to fill the gaps of strengths and weaknesses? So the idea in this protocol is you want to do all of these and kind of see the whole picture and then see if there's flags. Like, what's the thought on that?

Great point. I usually. So depending on the resources and funds, I mean, there are some families that are like, look, we can't spend 500 or $1,000. And in those cases, I always start with just the blood antibody testing. I do find that in kids about 20% of the time they give a false negative, which is better than 50% of the time. But at least, let's say two in 10 times or one in five times, you know, you get a normal looking test. Except there's a problem that has to do with some of these children immunologically are just so off where their immune systems are actually not, not mounting an appropriate response to the molds and therefore you don't see it. So that's where, you know, if possible, doing a blood test plus a urine test is better. Because now you're kind of overlapping and the likelihood of two tests failing is less than 1. I've seen that happen, but it's less. And then if you add the dust test on top of it now you've got a much richer picture. And I've had cases where my blood test and urine test failed, but the family was gung ho and, you know, God bless them, they did everything. And then all of a sudden, dust test comes back, you know, code five, and they're like, that's not good, is it?

I'm like, no, yeah, yeah, it's really interesting. And you know, we, on our end too, there's testing that goes in, right? And it's like, what is the balance of what you test versus what you pull potentially based on situations and what you lose potentially by pulling certain things. Things. And like, where's the line that you draw that you say, listen, I get it, but if you pull this or any more, whatever it is, we're actually now not Doing ourselves any service. Right. Because sure, run one of them. But we know that there's such a gap there that even if it comes back with nothing, I'm not going to be confident that it's nothing. Right. So like, at what point like is this combination. It sounds like, it sounds like you're saying if you go like blood antibody with. Are you. Do you like the, the my Michael lab. So Dr. Campbell's. Do you like his blood serum? I got. He's been on the show by the way, and talked about it. Have, have you been. Are you. Do you lean more towards that than you do urine, mycotoxin or like if you were choosing like how do you look at that?

So there's a few companies that run antibodies. My micro lab has the patent on antibodies against the mold toxins, which I think is the superior test because it's specificity. So meaning it's accuracy of. Is the. Is this person mounting a reaction against mold toxins and if the mold toxins are high, then it's like, shoot, they've been exposed. Right.

I find in little, little kids sometimes their immune response to the mold toxins is less than to the molds themselves. So you've got mold toxins and then you've got the mold spores, aspergillus, penicillium, stachybotrys, etc. There's a company called Alates A L L E T E S S. I think it's. It's linked in the protocol where they Check for antibodies IgE, IgG and IgA against various molds and fungi. It's half the price of my microlab. Obviously it's a little less accurate because you're checking for molds and you know, molds could have come from somewhere else. But I find that that is also a really good test. And my Michael lab and ALA test are the two, the two that I run and depending on the family's budget and kind of the. The age of the child, those are the two tests that I usually go with.

Yeah, that makes sense. And does the thought of. So you just mentioned with the antibodies like is. Is it's the mold, Is it from this place? Is it from somewhere else? If you layer on the dust test with that, you're now seeing the current place that you're in. So is then is it. If you look at correlation of the dust test to the antibodies that somebody is showing in their blood mold antibody, is that a way to be more confident of the connection, I guess of.

How it's impacting someone you know, you can. And that is one way to look at it. We also know from building biology that usually when there's contamination, like, everything is kind of you know, showing up. Now do. Do all basically when there's water events and you know, this, and you guys have probably talked about this also to ad nauseam. Like, it's never just stachybotrys, right. It's never just ketomium. Like, they, they. It's like a block party, right. They invite their friends. Everyone is having a, you know, fabulous time together. Right.

And it's short tempers and start spouting out mycotoxins.

Yeah. So, you know, I don't. I don't pay so much attention to which spike was to which toxin. And does that correlate because you also get immune kind of anomalies. You know, sometimes the immune system will pick up one mycotoxin more than another. For me, these tests are, has this human being been exposed, right. And has that exposure been sufficient to say, gosh, this is part of the picture of autism or pans or learning disabilities or whatever? The thing that I also find these tests to be helpful for is it's not always the home. Right. I've had cases where, for instance, the school was the problem and the home was pitch like, perfect. But then we keep looking, we're like, what the hell is this? And then. And the mom's like, well, you know, in her classroom, there's four other kids that are having really weird anxiety and panic attacks. Or there's one case where lovely little girl that suddenly started having, like, anxiety and intrusive thoughts and all kinds of really weird things. Her gymnastics gym, of all places. And she was a gymnast, so she was spending like three, four hours multiple days a week at this gym. Who, every time it leaked, you know, it was like a big, like, waterfall. So the. The testing becomes helpful because sadly, it's not always the home.

Most of the time it is, but not always. So this is a way to kind of start stick, sticking to your guns and saying, okay, well, God, the home looks clean. Where the heck else could this be?

Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Moving down through here. So next is evaluating the home. We've talked about this, this a little bit. You know, we have to go, like, too heavy into it. You have one section in here. Differentiating, differentiating based on history. I think this might be just kind of what you were talking about. Like, not. Or maybe I'm actually reading this incorrectly. So this is where we're talking about. Age groups, actually, and how like younger kids versus older kids look a little different. So that. Look at that. I asked a question I had. I was cheating.

Testing stuff so we won't get too heavy into the house stuff, because I do that a lot the time. But you did, which we also didn't ask. So I. When you sent it to us, I was surprised and very honored and thoughtful that you put this in here, but actually included the dust test as part of the protocol for the testing through all of this stuff. We've talked about the house stuff a bit here. Maybe just real quickly, like, where. Where do you see the biggest benefit of that in this? Like, what is it of that that you like to see to the point where it's. It's actually included as part of the protocol here.

So it takes us back to that entire kind of peanut allergy thing, right?

If. Let's say you've got a code 5, right. Pretty high probability of significant contamination. The likelihood of those kids making good progress, I don't want to say is impossible, but it's lower. And part of why I've really become fond of the dust test is you guys have just made it so accessible. And, you know, I used to use envirobiomics and micrometrics, and I still think they're good tests. But you have to have it like a PhD to figure out what the hell the test means. Right. So for most families, they look at it like, well, that ERMI number looks bad. It's like, oh, no, don't worry about it. It. So you guys have done just a really beautiful job in simplifying. And I think for providers and families to look and say, oh, crap, well, it looks to be some bad stuff in the environment. And because this bad stuff is causing a lot of inflammation, we may not be able to make a lot of progress until we are able to somehow control it. And this is what ties into the protocol, because what I've learned is without doing a million things with some simple anti inflammatories, a little bit of zinc, a little bit of D, the kids who don't have significant levels of exposure get better. Autistic kids, I've seen, they're much less. They're much less irritable, much less sensitive. So they're more calm, they're able to sometimes even start making eye contact with just some basic anti inflammatories, which basically chills out that brain kind of allergy event, the pans, kids, less anxiety, less ocd, et cetera. And that then essentially Becomes a gauge because it's almost like a little bit of a dance where if the exposure is there but not bad, the kids will start moving forward in the protocol because their nervous systems are calming down, which basically says, yes, there's inflammation, yes, there's exposure, but it is not overwhelming the immune system. And one of the things that I see, like all the time is this now love affair with itraconazole, which is part of the protocol, which is a really potent antifungal. But people don't understand, like, you can't just throw Itraconazole at a kid that's living in horrendous amounts of mold and expect some kind of miracle to happen. Because that's like your house is burning, your gas line is ruptured, and you keep, you know, calling the fire department. They keep trying to put it out, but your house just keeps exploding. And you don't know why. Right. So it's part of what I love is because you guys have made the environmental kind of science so accessible, people can now look at that and say, okay, it's a code four, or, this was past exposure. We tested the house. Now it's a code two to three, which to me is fabulous in the big scheme of things.

And gosh, now we can move forward. And oh yeah, my child responded to these supplements. Well, they're calming down, they're responding. Okay, now we can move to the next steps.

No, that makes a lot of sense. You know, something you said real quick. And then I want to get into just quickly the treatment piece. So you have kind of overall diet and then three phases in here that we can touch on. One thing I just wanted to ask like a follow up on a lot of times when we get. When myself or other consultants get on calls with people to kind of talk to the house and sort of what's the plan of attack? You know, most people can't, you know, remediate everything that's on this. Most people don't. Most of our clients don't remediate everything that's on the list. We help prioritize it to try to show them, like, where the biggest reduction comes from. Right.

And.

And a lot of them show, like, by doing that and not fixing everything, they're able to start on the path and the symptoms do subside. Right. And it's not like this zero sum game and something that you mentioned there is. And, you know, I don't know if this is applicable to everybody, obviously, because it's not, because we're talking about very specific, like, subset of, you know, people here, but.

Doing a little something in terms of like a treatment on your end. So you mentioned, you know, a little zinc, a little of this, little of that. And if you see that there is some improvement off of kind of like a lower level intervention, let's say, from that point, then it's. Then does that feel like some sort of barometer that can then be used when you get to the next step of the equation where it's like, all right, I found all these things in my house and I have this whole plan. Because a lot of times we'll say, hey, we've seen this, right? I've seen people get better. They don't do everything, but at the end of the day, it's like, like it's. I always use analogy, like, if your body can handle, you know, this much, for those of you listening, you can't see if I'm holding my hand, like middle on a scale of 1 to 10, and you're exposed to much more than the middle, like 8, right? Then the goal isn't to get 8 to 0. The goal is to get 8 to like, 4 and you're at 5, and so you're like right under it. And then your treatments help to build your resilience and push you back up the other way, but it's determining where you're starting at. Like, where the most sensitive person in the house, what's their starting number on the scale of 1 to 10? And what you said, there is kind of a light bulb. And I, I actually wonder if other practitioners do this or whatnot. But, like, is there like a short, like, smaller. Let's just test the waters and see how this person responds to a low level intervention of some kind. And if we see any sort of improvement, then that means we actually think this person could bounce back pretty well. Let's just get this down a little bit and go there. Like, does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly the premise behind the protocol. So the two anti inflammatories, which is Mirica, which is PA and luteolin, and then the other one is a enzyme that breaks histamine down in the gut. The whole purpose of just starting with this simple combination of two supplements, and then some D and zinc, which are easy to give. So even the most sensitive autistic kids, you can mix in with some juice a little bit. So it's easy, easy to give. And as long as their diet isn't awful, right, they're not eating Skittles. And, you know, process, like high sugar processed foods. It gives us a barometer to see how stable is this child's immune system. And usually that is a reflection of how much exposure they're having. And I love what you touched on, because we don't need to get the house perfect. We don't need to get the environmental pristine. Like, people get obsessed over this. And I love what you touched on. It's just bringing the contamination down to the point where the immune system can now reset itself, which can then allow us to move forward. And I think between addressing the key areas, I love the, you know, DYI kind of deep cleaning document you guys have. Like, I think it's. That is fabulous in some filtration, and that's all that's needed. But that's. That's the whole premise of the protocol. Like, it actually is a barometer on how good or bad things are. That will then allow the family and practitioner say, okay, we've got a green light. We can start moving into the next phase. Or, oh, crap, no. Like, something keeps blowing up. There's something there. Let's figure out what the trigger is. And this is, I think, important to reflect on because what I see in a lot of. Of my colleagues is, well, the system is inflamed. Let me throw cromolyn at it. Let me throw ketotife in at it. Let's put some ldn on top of this. And, you know, it's like, let's dump the kitchen sink. And it's not to say those things shouldn't be considered, but what I see so many times is they keep throwing stuff at the poor child. And half the time, those things become triggers for the child, right? They start giving the kid glutathione, and they do this, and then they put them on. On 15 supplements. And, you know, I learned this hard way myself, like, some supplements have citric acid. Citric acid looks a hell of a lot like aspergillus to the immune system. So if you're giving your kid 15,000 supplements to detox them, you're actually triggering their immune system further, which keeps them stuck. And by just asking, well, what the hell is triggering this child's system? And is the environment clean enough? And this is again, where I think, you know, it's. It's so cool that we can kind of merge the work that you guys are doing with this. We get to a point where we can say, nope, the system is not being assaulted. There isn't a lot of peanut crumbles in the Environment, pissing off the immune system, we can move forward.

Very cool. So you've got your three phases. Phase one was some inflammation reduction, which we touched on a little bit. Phase two is. Is. Can we talk about, like, what the ad. What the additions are in phase two, as opposed to just kind of like your basic let's. Let's try to knock down overall inflammatory triggers.

Yeah. So phase two then becomes, you know, some magnesium for those families whose kids drink reverse osmosis system. A lot of those kids get lithium deficiencies because we get all of the lithium we need from our water and our system strip that. So just a little smidge of lithium, some oral immunoglobulins, which are generally very helpful for healing the gut. And then along with that, nystatin, which is kind of the least problematic antifungal there is, period. And if you were to even compare it to the herbals, nystatin is oftentimes way better tolerated than all the herbal stuff. And this is coming from a guy that's back. Spent five years training as an herbalist.

Got it. And then the last piece is then intro. I never say it right, but it's the. Can you say it? But it's the antifungal that you mentioned earlier.

Yeah. Itraconazole.

Yes.

Yes.

I could read really long, weird mold names, but the medicine is hard for me. The medicine's hard for me.

Yeah. So Itraconazole is really cool. I actually have a separate post on it.

Itraconazole, everyone just thinks is an antifungal, and how it helps kids or adults is because it kills the fungus. It turns out that itraconazole is anything but just an antifungal. And part of how I came to really pay attention to this is when I was treating these kids. This is about two years ago when I started with itraconazole regularly. I started noticing there were a handful of kids that literally, in like two or three weeks, all of a sudden were, like, making eye contact and, like, way more connected. Or their weird anxiety, OCD, aggression, like, chilled out by 50%. And it's like, well, what the hell? Like, that can't be from fungal effects because it takes way longer for kind of antifungal effects and changing the microbiome and getting rid of the fungus, all blah, blah, blah. So I started then. Then talking to Neil, and he's like, yeah, itraconazole isn't just an antifungal. There's other stuff to it. So then I went Digging in the literature and it turns out it's a powerful anti inflammatory.

It acts as an anti inflammatory effect within the gut. It acts as a systemic anti inflammatory, changing multiple immune pathways simultaneously. It acts as an anti inflammatory in the nervous system. So. So itraconazole becomes the thing that starts shifting the immune system, shifting the gut, and simultaneously shifting all of the excess fungus that's triggering a lot of the inflammation to start the healing process.

Again. This is not good.

So that all sounds good. So if it does all of those things, is it just that it has to happen at the right time? Is that the problem?

Yes, it has to happen at the right time for the right child, when they're ready. And you throw it at the wrong child or the wrong time, 50, 60% of chance you'll throw the kid under the bus and all of a sudden they're just flaring and you know, the autistic child is now stimming like crazy or, you know, they're having panic attacks or whatever else because they're in those kids. Their immune system and their gastrointestinal tracts were already unstable. And now here you come, you know, like cowboy, and you're just shifting the entire physiology of that gut quickly in a system that's not ready to handle it. And then what also happens is about 20% of the time you get other issues where you, you start shifting the immune system and that starts triggering more inflammation.

So it sounds similar to like a Herxheimer reaction.

Yes, big time, big time.

It's. We're putting too much, too much gasoline on the fire right here when it's not ready to keep the fire inside of the bonfire thing and then it goes all over the place. Yes, got it. Okay, well, that makes a lot of sense. This was very cool.

Is there anything that we didn't talk about that you feel like we should.

No, no, I think we got it. I think we got it. And you know, the one thing that I'll say is I created this protocol because I think there's so much we can do. I see so many kids who are struggling, and I'm pretty convinced, as are many others that have come to really understand mold, that perhaps as high as 50% or more of kids with what we call autism is actually mold related toxicity. A very large percentage of these kids with panic attacks, anxiety disorders, et cetera, is mold toxicity. And the reason why we're not seeing it is because it's so complicated at this time. It's over complicated to make these connections. Right. People are using the wrong tests, they're missing it. They're looking at the environment, they're missing it. So part of what I was really wanting to do is bring simplicity to this picture where people can look and say, gosh, all of these signs and symptoms look a hell of a lot like my kid. Gosh, this environment doesn't look good because There's a code 5 that doesn't look bad, you know, or God, this test came back really abnormal. That doesn't look good. We need to bring simplicity, we need to make this accessible. And part of why I've been so happy to, you know, collaborate with you guys is I know you're on the same path, you're on the same mission, and this is how we make things better. And I mean, I've seen so many wonderful things happen where autistic kids who couldn't connect, lost in the world, couldn't go to school because they're overwhelmed. You know, six months later they're in school interacting with kids. I mean, I've had non verbal autistics that, that literally were completely aloof, are now interacting with other kids. They can't talk, they've got like five words, but they're wanting to go play with other kids. You know, the kids who are having panic attacks, anxiety disorders, are now going to school, no problem. Kids with learning disabilities, they were failing out of school, are now learning and thriving. And you know, we started off with, there's too many kids that are struggling, there are too many poor kids that are suffering. And at the end of the day, what I hope is that this conversation and this protocol can really bring a lot of useful information to all those families who are looking at their, at their kids saying, my God, what's happening to my child? What's happening to my child? Why are they suffering? Why are they struggling? Because there are solutions that there's. We can treat all of this, we can help so many kids. And that starts with just getting information, information out there. And I'm so grateful for you to, you know, bring this conversation forward.

Well, I appreciate it. I. This is amazing. We've, you know, worked with you for a long time with your pay, I mean, years and years and years. Now, even back to the before the we inspect days, we were working with some of your patients. So I really love that we're able to do this. This is incredible. Thank you so much for taking the time to share with everyone.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you for creating this space. And it's my pleasure.

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