39: Q&A - Should you just move? / How to deal with mold at work?

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. Today is going to be a Q and A day. I had some questions that came in throughout the week and I'm going to answer some of those here. It kind of holds true with the theme of the week for me. I'm also doing an Instagram Live with Bernadette Abraham, which I will.

Put in the show notes with her information. But we're going to be doing an Instagram live that's going to have both of our followers on there and we're going to do even more question answering. So today or this week is definitely a Q and A kind of week, but I want to do a few specifically that have been submitted to me first. So the first one that I that we're going to talk about, it came from Karina211 on Instagram. It says, is it better to move. Sorry, Is it better to move if you can't find the cause in your home? Meaning should I just leave the house I'm in, go to a new house if I can't find what's going on here? So, I mean, theoretically, yeah, because if you can't find the problem, you can't fix it. Right. So I think that's where the thought process is coming from. And so that makes sense. The problem is that most homes are going to have mold problems of some kind. Right. So it's not like it's just your house and you're going to go somewhere else and that house is going to be perfect. And it's just you happen to have a bad house. The unfortunate reality of things is that most homes have some sort of water damage. And where you have water damage, there's a higher likelihood for there to be a mole problem. And so knowing that that's going to happen, it's tough. You have to think about what's the reason that you're not able to find.

You know, one. Are you having actual assessments done?

Right.

It's not just you looking around your house because you're not going to be able to find things on your own. Looking around your house, there's specific things you look for, there's places you look for. It Definitely takes time to learn how to do that. So if you're doing it on your.

Own.

That'S one thing I would try to address before you just decide to up and move. So here's a few things to try to do before you just move. One, make sure you're actually bringing someone in to look for it. Two, they need to be looking for it the right way. If you have people coming in, they're just taking air samples in the house. You heard my thoughts on air samples. I think it was one or two episodes ago. It was why air samples suck. So if that's all they're doing and they're not doing an investigation, then you actually really haven't tried to find the problem, because air samples are going to come up, they're going to show false negatives all the time. So if that's all that's been done, then you haven't really tried to find it yet. Even though maybe you've been trying, you just haven't brought in the right people to help you do it the right way. So, you know, that's the next thing to think of. Now, if they've gone through and you've done a really deep assessment and you've done, you know, source testing and in multiple kind of isolated areas to try to figure out if they're. Oh, excuse me, guys. Man, it's the morning. These morning recordings get me. I was trying to fight that. Yawn off.

Sorry.

If you've.

But if you've had multiple areas of suspect isolated, you've done specific source area testing and nothing has come up. Okay. And then in addition to that, you've also done dust testing throughout your house. You've had your heating, air conditioning system looked at. You've had that tested. If you have a crawl space or basement, you've had that tested. If you've done all of the testing and you can't find the problem.

Then maybe you want to consider it. But what's interesting is that if you've done all the testing and you're not seeing any issues anywhere, then it may not be the house as the mold problem. Right. So there's a couple other things to think of. One, where do you work?

You know, if you work somewhere that has a problem and you spend. Obviously right now we're not all probably spending that amount of time in our workplaces. But, you know, before the pandemic happened, and I'm sure at some point in the future we're going to get back to that, there are times where your workplace could be an issue, you know, and one thing that I would, you know, now, maybe some of us have been away from work for a while. Have you noticed any difference in how you're feeling? You know, this might be also a.

Good time to get a new set.

Of baseline tests done with your doctor in terms of your body's clinical testing to see what you looked like before and now that you haven't maybe been at your workplace, for a lot of us, I know, not all of us, but for those of you who haven't been at your workplace for, since March or April, you've been gone for four, five, six months, depending.

That's a long time of not having exposure. So if you've been on a detox protocol and you've been cleansing and your house doesn't have a problem because you've done the proper testing and investigation and you see that things still aren't progressing.

The way that you want them to.

Be, then maybe your workplace was a contributor to what was going on. And so now hopefully, if all of that is true, then maybe some of your levels in your body are going to start being a little better at this point. They'll be like, oh.

The different treatments that you're on are starting to work over the last few months. That's great. Well, think about that. Why is it starting to work? Is it just because it's starting to work because sometimes it takes some time, or is it because you've eliminated a piece of your exposure and maybe your work was worse than your home was? So that's something to think about too. So once you think about that piece of it, and if all of that stuff just kind of makes you think that there's still a problem in the house, then yeah, you obviously can. I mean, I've had clients that have, we've gone through testing over the course of a couple years. They've remediated, they've cleaned things up, lab results look good, and they still just aren't feeling right in their home and they decide to move. Right. And that's totally fine. You know, part of it is how you feel when you're there, right? And not just from your health, but like, are you going to have this constant, like anxiety feeling? Are you always going to be thinking about, is there something that I missed? Is something going on? I know that these tests came back and say that everything's okay, but you know, there was a big problem here or something like that. And if that's something that's going to happen, which, listen, peace of mind is a big, big thing, you know, And I have people test strictly for peace of mind, which is fine. But at the same time, like, if you're going to live somewhere and you know there was a problem and.

You.

Know, even though it got remediated and cleaned up, you're still kind of wary.

About it and it's making you uncomfortable, then you should leave. You know, there's no one telling you you have to stay somewhere. So those are some instances, you know, after you've kind of gone through that process, you know, that's the time that I would consider saying, okay, one, we can't figure this out. Two, you know, it doesn't seem like it's my work. It kind of seems like it's home. And so maybe we should start looking for something else.

And then if you start looking for.

Something else, you start thinking about the criteria of what you're looking for. And some of the earlier episodes talked about new home criteria.

But the.

A few things that I'll throw out there. You want a house that's newer.

I'll just kind of summarize some of this stuff. If you're going to look for something.

And you're looking at it because you're trying to avoid mold issues, you have to understand that the older the home is, the more likely there is going to be a mold issue because it's.

Going to have history.

There's going to have been water issues that happened over time. They're either not going to have been handled at all, or they're going to probably have not been handled the right way, and that's going to move through the house and you're going to have some issues. So the longer the history, the more likelihood of mole problems. It doesn't mean that you can't move into a house that's a little older. You just have to understand that if your goal is to find a place that doesn't have a mole problem, then eliminating as many of the factors that contribute to it is a big thing. Right? So one of the big factors is the age of the house. So that's one thing to think about. Second, if you can avoid crawl spaces and basements, 100% do that, they only cause problems. There's nothing good that comes from them. I know a lot of people like basements because they think they're getting all this extra storage and stuff. Here's what I'll tell you. Like, I would rather pay 100 bucks a month for storage, then have a basement under my house that is going to be Contributing mold and toxin issues into the house. It's not worth it. Right? It's worth to pay an extra 100, $150 a month for storage. So because the amount of money you have to spend to fix a basement is going to be in the tens of thousands. And you're going to have to do it at some point, probably. So because you're talking, you know, if there's moisture issues coming in from the outside, you have to do waterproofing. You have to excavate around the entire outside of your house and put in a new drainage system. You have to remediate the whole thing. I mean, it's, it's a lot. So for me, that's a no go. Renovated houses, Houses that were gutted and renovated. No, because not only do you have the history of the house, but then you've wiped away all of the footprints and all the clues of anything that could be going on. Which means that even if you're doing a home inspection on the front end of it, a mold home inspection on the front end of it, there's a lot of things that you're not going to be able to see because they removed a lot of the history from that. So renovated houses are a no go. If you're getting a newer place, you aren't going to be typically looking at a renovated place that kind of knocks both of those out with one stone. And then flat roofs definitely don't want a flat roof. They're prone for roof leaks. You end up getting roof leaks. That's an issue.

Those are kind of the main, main things that I would, that I would say that you're looking to avoid in a new place. So if you are deciding that you're gonna leave where you are, you know, because it's better because you can't find the problem. Just know that you need to find a place.

Oh, my goodness. I'm so sorry, everyone.

Man, it's been a rough morning.

Anyways, if you're deciding that you're gonna be leaving because you're, you know, trying to get rid of, you know, trying to leave a mold issue, then you can't be going to a place that's gonna have a likelihood of a mold issue. That's why you're leaving. So you need to keep criteria in place that's gonna low likelihood of finding that in a new place. And if you're not going to do.

That, then what's the point?

Right?

Because here's the other side of it.

Is that, you know, there's a Lot of groups that talk about the percentage of water homes that are water damaged.

You know, they say it's around 50%.

Which is a huge number by the way. But that number is so much higher. That number is like 80, 90%.

Right.

It's just, you know, I've seen bunch of homes and thing is, you know, who's measuring water damage? Homes, right? What's counting as water damage? Typically it's like big water events, it's floods, it's things like that. They're not counting the smaller leaks that happen in houses that one, homeowners don't even know about and two, if they do know about it, they're not reporting it, they're just getting it fixed. You know, you had your toilet leak, you had something happen, they just fixed that. That's water damage. Right.

Doesn't have to be a flood to.

Count as a water damaged house. And so, you know, you're looking at almost every house that's going to have something going on like that.

Knowing that that's going to happen, you know that it's like you're not just going to leave your place and find a new place. It doesn't work that easy. There's always going to be something that goes on somewhere.

But if you're having a hard time.

Finding it in your home and you can't get to it and so you can't fix it, then that's obviously a problem. You have to be able to know where it's located. So if you've had the right assessment process that's happened, you've had source testing of potential issues, you've tested your H vac system, you've, if you have a basement or crawl space, you tested that, you know that that's not an issue. And you've done kind of the steps you need to do in your house and none of it can be found and you're still having issues, then that's when I would start considering maybe looking for something else. So hopefully that's a good answer for your question.

The next question comes from Love Myself Whole on Instagram. And it kind of ties into what we were just talking about, right? So we were talking about should you just leave where you live and some things you should do before you make that decision. One of them is trying to figure out, is your workplace part of the problem? So I get asked a lot like, well, how do I know?

What do I do? How do I figure that out? So let's talk about that.

The thing about your workplace is that you're not going to be at the beginning, you're not going to be doing a full on assessment of your workplace. One, because you don't have control of it. But two, you just kind of want to find out if there's an issue there before you open that big can of worms.

A lot of people do this in.

Their homes too, right? They want to know there's something happening before they invest in doing the deep dive assessment. And so what they do in the home is they'll do an ERMI test.

And they'll do a mycotoxin test in the home.

Sometimes they won't even do a mycotoxin. Sometimes they'll just do an ERMI test in the home and they'll see if there's moldish, just a general mold issue going on. You could do the same thing in your office because an ERMI collection is.

Just dust collection on a Swiffer pad.

So you can do that easily in your office and you can do it with nobody knowing that you're doing it. And so, you know, as a first step, that's probably the way that I would approach it before you start reporting issues and getting things to management. Because the truth is, is that employment, you know, work offices and stuff like this is an expense that they don't want to have to deal with. I just did an inspection for company in the Midwest about two, three weeks ago and they had one person in the office space that was complaining of health issues. And then they had been tested, they had mold and mycotoxin issues in their body. What had happened was that at the office they were decorating for a holiday and they removed some of the ceiling tiles to do it. And then that caused a disruption. And so the person after that started reacting. And so that's what spawned the issue. Well, lo and behold, we go through the entire office building and they have like six air conditioning systems and they all look absolutely terrible. Visible mold growing in multiple of them. The rooms that they lived in had mold growing all over them, not to mention a number of areas throughout the office space.

Right.

So it turned out to be a big thing. But the reason that I'm bringing all that up to you is that when it came down to it, the people that own the office, they didn't want to test the office.

Right. Because it's a big expense to handle all that stuff.

So I'm not sure what the plan is going to be, but they chose not to do anything about it, at least from a testing perspective. If they get up and Move offices. Maybe that's something different. I don't know what they're going to do, but from my end, we basically found a lot of stuff and they said, okay, cool, we're not going to do any of it. It looks really expensive. And that's kind of how it went down. So you just have to understand that your workplace may tell you that they're all about creating a healthy environment for you and all this stuff until they actually see what's going on. Same thing works for landlords. Your landlord might be all about, yeah, we're all about doing this.

You're going to have a healthy place.

Until they actually see that it costs money to do that. Right. And once that happens, the opinion changes. At that point, it's about money. And they're running a business they're running as part of their bottom line. And, you know, I'm sure some businesses are different. I don't want to make this a blanket statement for every business, but ultimately.

They don't really care about your health that much.

They don't care about it more than they care about if their business is alive and functioning and making money, that's the priority. And you're someone who is in the office to make it money. And if you are now someone in the office that's costing it money, they're not going to be super happy about that. That's just my opinion.

That's not the client I was talking about.

That's literally just my opinion. Think about a business as a machine. Every machine has pieces of the machine. The pieces of the machine are supposed to make the machine run better. If one of the pieces are making it run worse, then you get rid of that piece and you replace that piece with one that's going to make it run better. That's what employees are in a business. I know that we like to think that things are different, but the reality is, for most businesses, you have, like your HR department. Everybody makes everyone feel good. But at the end of the day, you have the people behind the scenes looking at the numbers and they're like, why? What are we spending all this money on? We're not doing this, you know, and.

So that's something that can happen.

So with all of that said, the.

Way that I would approach it is.

I don't want to bring light to the situation until I know there's something to bring up, you know?

So what I would do is I would do an ERMI and a mycotoxin test, and I would actually probably do. I would actually probably do bacterial dust testing and endotoxin testing too, in the space on my own before I come in, those are all dust collection tests.

You could do ermi, actinomycete, bacteria and endotoxin. There's a lab called Envirobiomics that you could use for that. And then you could use real time labs for mycotoxin testing. That's who I use for everything. So you could use them and they'll send you. The cool thing about the envirobiomics, those three different lab tests, it's one Swiffer collection. You're not collecting multiple Swiffers. You could do all of it on the same one. So it makes it just one Swiffer grab. And then from real time, it's a swab, but it's easy. So if you have an enclosed area, what I would do, like if you have a closed office or something, then I would do that office separate. And then I would also do a separate set of those tests in, like the adjacent area to where you are. So I would. I would do two of those. I'd like to see if my, you know, if your office is worse than everything else. But otherwise I'd kind of want to.

See, like, what everything looks like.

And then I want to see, like, what your work area looks like. So that's how I would do it. Get those results back and you're going to see.

Are there mold issues in the ermi. Do you have actinomycete bacteria? That's above the threshold of the limits that are on the report. And it kind of walks you through all that stuff. Are there mycotoxin present?

Are there endotoxins present?

You're going to see all that stuff.

So you'll have all that first.

And then if you've been doing clinical testing on your body, I would get that lined up too. So you come in and you say, I have mold issue in my body. Here's the testing that's been done. I have mycotoxins in my body. Here's the testing that's been done. And you kind of bring all that in together and you say, listen, there's something going on here. I'm whatever, getting sick, blah, blah, blah. Here's what I've done so far in the place. There's definitely a problem here. And then here's what's in my body. It's an issue. It's not a healthy environment, whatever, right?

Once you kind of put that together, right, you've already proven that there's something going on, right. It's really similar to how I talk about working with insurance. Go to them with something first. Don't go to them and say, okay, I think there's something come out and have some testing done. Because they're not going to have the right testing done. They're going to have somebody come in and do air samples everywhere and it's probably going to come back and it's probably going to be fine. And then you're going to say, well, I still don't feel well here. And then you're going to do your.

Test afterwards that I just talked about.

And then they're going to say, yeah.

But we already had someone say it's fine.

So like this isn't the normal testing, right? Because we already had somebody that did it. So it's better to come in and.

Have your proof with you.

Now they have to prove there's not a problem versus them having somebody come in, say there's no problem, and then you come in and do some of this more progressive testing on your own. You say there is a problem, but now you're having to prove that there is a problem. It's all about the dynamic of, of the interaction and what happens first. So if you show that there is a problem now, if they come back and they say there's nothing going on, you can say, no, there is something going on. Look, it's here, right? So they just don't know what they're doing. And you need to get somebody to figure it out. It's a different, different dynamic. It's a different flow, the interaction, the conversation. So that's how I would deal with it.

And that's just like the first screening piece of it. You know, there's other things that you can do as you're walking through the office just to like kind of take a look. I mean, you're not going to be able to probably get into all the air condition units are housed and all that stuff. But like walk around, do you see water staining on the ceiling tiles in your office space? So if your office has ceiling tiles on the ceiling, are you seeing like water damage, spots on them? Means there's leaks up there. It's either from the roof or it's from pipes that are running up there that are condensing and creating moisture that's dripping on the ceiling tiles. Either way it's a problem. So that's like a really easy thing that you can just walk through and.

Take a look at.

And is there anything like that going on? Is There, you know, a kitchen in the, in your space in your office and you can open up like under the sink and you can look under the sink and see if there's water damage under there. So there's other little things that you can do. But a lot of times what's happening in office spaces, a lot of time it's the ventilation systems and then and exterior walls. It's usually where we're seeing a lot of stuff. Unless there's like a lot, you know, unless there's kitchens and other things going on inside. Then we may see some stuff like that too. But usually it's drop ceiling areas. It's the areas above right where the roof gets to the ceiling. There's, there's usually some stuff happening up there. If there's anything going on, heating, air conditioning systems, then your exterior walls are kind of like the main places. But that's, it's not, it's not always.

What'S going, you know, everything is going.

On, but that's usually a good percentage of it. So hopefully that helps you.

Kind of think through like how you're going to present an issue like this and hopefully how to get some traction on that. So. Good question. Thanks.

One last thing before I go today.

Guys, I mentioned earlier, but I am doing an Instagram live with Bernadette Abraham on Instagram this week on Wednesday. So it's Wednesdays, 8am Pacific Time, 11am Eastern Time is when we're doing the live. And so she's actually had a bunch of her followers submit questions that we're going to be answering. She's going to be sending some of those to me and we're going to work through some of those. So it's going to be a good session. Her Instagram handle, it's Bernadette B E R N A D E T T E Abraham A B R A H A M Bernard this is Bernadette Abraham and you could go if you want to. You should be following her. She has a lot of really good information about your gut and hormone issues and a lot of stuff like that. She's actually even working on a book right now as well that's going to be called Unjunk, which is about different foods and things that you eat. And I don't know everything that it's going to be about obviously, but it's going to fall into what you're eating and how that can impact you.

She's a really, really good follow. I had, man, I probably had like.

An hour and a half conversation with her.

It was maybe like a month, month and a half ago at this point and we talked through a lot of stuff. She's actually based in, in Dubai. And what's so interesting is that I guess you can't do Instagram, lives in Dubai. So she is in Canada right now. And so we set it up while she's on her trip to do this so we could get this out for her community to see. And so I want to make sure I'm sharing it with you guys as well so it'll pop up, it'll show that I'm live in the, you know, like the story feed on top. But just so you guys know, it's going to be 8:00am Pacific Time, 11:00am Eastern Time this Wednesday on the 19th. So if you're interested in jumping onto that, I imagine we're probably going to be talking for close to an hour, I would imagine. So if you're interested in kind of hearing some other questions getting answered and talking through some things, then I definitely invite you to attend that as well. And make sure you go follow Bernadette. Alright, so it's Bernadette Abraham.

So that's it for today's show, everyone. Thanks so much for tuning in.

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