64: Infrared Saunas - Healing Spaces or Mold Traps?

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. I am coming to you from the inside of my brand new sauna. I'm in here right now. I'm going to be sweating while we talk, and the point of the sweating is for detox, right? So, you know, it's so funny. First off, I don't know what this audio is going to sound like, so I'm going to listen back to it. If this sounds really weird, then I won't record in here. But if I'm gonna be sitting in here for a half hour, seems like an awesome spot and time for me to be recording. So hopefully it doesn't sound too bad. So I'll look back at that if for some reason it does. Just bear with me for this one episode and then I won't do it again, I promise. But, yeah, I'm in the sauna. I'm excited. So for those of you that didn't see, I got a new.

Clearlight infrared sauna, a lot of you are asking me, like, which one did I get and why did I get it and kind of all that stuff. So I thought maybe I would just share a little bit about the one that I got.

Why I got it, and kind of start there. So clearlight has two different models. They have the Premiere and then they have the Sanctuary. And the Sanctuary is more expensive. It looks cooler, at least for me anyways. The Premiere has like, more the traditional sauna feel. The Sanctuary, it kind of is like more modern, looks kind of cool. But the reason that I went for clearlight, I was looking at a bunch of different ones.

So, you know, infrared, Infrared, heat. A lot of the saunas can do it. The concern and the thing I wanted to be careful of with this one was EMF being pushed out of the heating components that are in here, right? So there are units where the EMF that's produced is pretty high. And so if you think about it, you're in this tight little box for however long you're in here. I'm going to try to be in here for like a half hour maybe. And you're just in this tight little space and you're wrapping yourself in like kind of microwaved EMF or whatever. So like, I didn't want that to be happening. So I started doing a poll of all my favorite docs, who I'm sure a lot of you follow as well. And it came down to. For me, it came down to Clearlight. And then I was looking at the two models. One, the look and feel of the sanctuary, like I said, is more modern, right? Which honestly, I really dig that I kind of wanted that. But then I was like, it's not enough for me just to spend extra money on the modern piece. So like, what else does it have besides design that I could in my mind justify spending more money to get this other thing right? And one big piece that it had is that it has chromotherapy, like an add on kind of lights that go in the front of you. So for those of you who don't know this, that's different light therapy. So if you've listened back to me or heard me at any point, I may have mentioned red light therapy. I have a red light machine.

So the red light device that I have I got around last Christmas time. If you guys tell every Christmas I kind of get myself something for my, for my health. That's like my gift to myself. It's some sort of health thing. Last year was the red light device. This year is the sauna. And.

The red light machine that I have is from a company called Platinum led. It's called the Biomax is the one that I have. And it's like four different panels. And I created four panels. So it's kind of like a full sized thing. So I can literally just stand in front of it. It's covering my entire body when I stand in front of it. So that's what I got. Red light is super awesome. A whole bunch of amazing benefits from my, from red light.

Honestly, probably more than I can go into while we're talking. But a couple of the reasons that I got it again is around what I do. Like, I'm exposed to mold. I'm in people's places that have it. My body thinks that I live in a moldy place. I have multiple mycotoxins in my body. I now have skin issues that have redeveloped as a result of all of that. And I have gut issues. I have a lot of things that are going on. Right. Well, one of the things that red light does is it helps decrease inflammation. So I think a lot of us may have seen, if we're doing the research around and poking around, that chronic inflammation is A pretty big problem with people that have environmental exposures. And so the red light helps to decrease that. The other thing that it does is it helps to increase the effectiveness of your mitochondria and boosting your ATP production, which is also very good for you. And it gets. That gets deplenished as well. When mycotoxins are at play, they basically rob your body of that energy and it stops it. I don't know the technical terms. I'm not the doctor. Right. I'm sure there's other podcasts that you could listen to where they're telling you exactly why that happens. That's not me.

I'm just like a lot of you guys. I do a lot of research and luckily I have some experts that I'm on a friend level with, on health experts that I can ask questions to. And so I'm very thankful for that. And because of that, I typically pull them when I'm looking to do things like this. So anyways, I have the red light device already. Right. So like one of the big upsells on the sanctuary, the Clearlight sanctuary model, was that it had like a red light, like kind of add on where they would. The panels would go in front of you kind of like, so if you walk into the door and then you sit down, you like turn around, you face the door that you walked into. And so they would put like red light panels there or chromotherapy panels, which there are different wavelengths of light that affect your body differently. You know, according to research, I haven't done a lot of digging on any of the other color spectrums outside of red. And then near infrared is really all that I've done most of my looking into, because that's what I did all my research for when I was looking for the red light device. But anyways, one thing that I saw when I was researching that last year was that you need to be pretty close to the lights for them to have the effect that you want them to have. So like that the standing setup that I have, you know, I was reading because when I was trying to figure out like how many of these panels do I need and how much space do they cover? It's like, you know, the further away you go from it, the more the light kind of spreads. So like you could stand a few feet away from it and like you would have red kind of covering your whole body, but you'd be a couple feet away from the source. And is that okay? Right. And from what I gathered from what I was looking through is that you actually need to be really close to it for it to have its maximum effect. So, like, you should be standing more than, like, I don't know, six inches away from it or something. And so I was like, all right, one, I have that whole device over there, so I'm not really interested in getting another upsell on asana that has that, too. Like, that's not the reason I should be getting an upsell. But when you sit in a sauna, like, I'm sitting in mine right now, my back is against the back wall, and I'm probably a good, I don't know, three, four feet away from the door. So that's some distance. Right. And you're getting further away from it. And from what I had been poking around and seeing, like, that kind of limits. I don't say limit. It just makes it a little less effective, I guess, is kind of the deal with the red light. So, anyways, that was another reason why I didn't go with it. But the cool thing about the heating components is that it seems that they're the same components and that they don't put off a lot of. A lot of emf. It's really on the low end, which was a big thing for me. And ultimately, the goal of me getting this thing was not about all the other bells and whistles. It was about.

Infrared sauna. It was about being able to heat up and sweat and detox. All of you that know Dr. Jess Petros know the Kill Bind sweat protocol, and the sweat is a piece of it, right? So you got to be sweating. Sweating is our body's, like, kind of biggest detox pathway. You literally sweat out of all of your skin. Like, that's a great thing. And you could detox that way. So, anyways, that's why I got this. And that was the thought process, what I was looking for. I had a lot of people message me, which one is this? What about this one? Did you look at that one? Why didn't you compare it to this one? I was like, first off, I was just showing you a picture of me putting it together. It doesn't mean that I didn't compare other options. It just means that I just showed you me putting it together. So I thought that was kind of funny. But I just wanted to do a quick little recap on kind of what I got and why I got it and all that stuff. But the putting it together piece was not super difficult. I still messaged me, and she's like, yeah, so we're Think we got the same one. We're thinking about just me and my husband doing it. Are we crazy? And I responded back, I Woke up at 5:30 this morning and did this entire thing by myself. So if you're crazy, then I'm a lunatic. Like. And that's what it was. It's actually. I mean, it came in like six pieces. It was four walls, a floor and a top. And those were all the pieces. They were all already kind of put together. All you had to do is attach them. So the thing that, you know, kind of sucked is that they're a little heavy, right? But if you could deal with them being a little bit heavy, it was actually really easy to put together. The plugging everything in and all the electrical stuff was really easy. The toughest part was probably putting the ceiling on by myself. But I was able to lift it up and basically kind of put it on top and then get it on. So it was pretty easy to put together too. Anyways, that was my sauna weekend getting together experience. So then the next question I started getting from folks was, what are you doing to prevent mold in there? What are you doing, doing? And I was like, okay, so. Because, you know, I don't know if you guys saw, but like a while ago we did a post on saunas and how mold grows in them. And I had told this story about. I was at a medical conference at this point. This one was probably five years ago or something. And I want to say it was Dr. Crinian that was talking, but I'm not totally sure, but they were talking about, you know, infrared sauna as a method to help detox and kind of the whole protocol of getting better from mold and everything. And I was really interested in saunas at the time. And I hadn't had one. I hadn't gotten one yet. I ended up getting like this little kind of portable one that I got right afterwards. But one of the things I took out of that, that I definitely remember from that thing was he was talking. He's told a story about his practice. And again, I don't know if it's Dr. Crinian's. I just, for some reason I feel like it. I remember it being him, but it could have been someone else. So anyways, I remember that they were talking about their practice, where they were at the time, and they actually offered sauna therapy to their patients. So their patients come in. So like a lot of doctors offices, they offer some of the.

Processes that they recommend for detoxing, right? So, like, they might have An IV lounge where they give you different IV drips, or they might have a sauna lounge where you could go out and do the sweating and the detoxing, right? So different places offer that stuff. And so his place had like a sauna thing and the saunas were all in this room and people were going in the saunas and doing their thing. And he was just like noticing that people were saying that they weren't really feeling well. And for. He was like trying to figure that out. He's like, why? Why are people not feeling well? Like being in a sauna should not make you not feel well. Right? That was kind of the thing. And so he, they started kind of digging around and you know, fast forward, I don't know all the details because I wasn't there, but fast forward. There was mold in the room. Hidden mold. There you go. Find the hidden mold that's making you sick. There was hidden mold in the room, in the med. In the practice, the doctor's practice, treating people who have mold, right? So like treating people have mold exposure. So being in a moldy place is not good for them. You know, it might not have been Dr. Crinian. God, I don't know. I don't remember. Sorry guys. I'm just really trying to think of who it was. Anyways, there was a moldy. There is, you know, some hidden mold in the room in the doctor's office, right? Which ironically is, you know, they're treating people that have mold issues. You really don't wanna be exposing them to any more than they have to be. So they come in and then when they get in the sauna, this is what I, this is what I really took away from it, is that when you get in the sauna, you're like opening your detox pathways. And the way that I understood it is that it's not just like a one way street. Like you're opening the door, like things could come in and out, right? That's how I understood it. And so basically what he was saying is that people weren't feeling that great because they were in the saunas. They were opening everything up in terms of their pathways and, and whatever the biological terms are for whatever's actually happening and they weren't feeling well. And then they ended up finding out that there was mold kind of like in the ceiling area above there. And he was just putting it all together of like why that's a problem. And I was like, whoa, that is nuts. Okay. You can't have mold where you have your sauna. Right. That was like the thing that I took away from this. So after that, I was thinking about that. I'm like, well, I'm obviously going through people's houses the way that I do. So, like, that's not any different. But I've seen these saunas in people's homes. I see them all the time. And you sweat in these things, and the whole sauna is made out of wood and your body is made out of a lot of water and sweating. And there you go, and you drip water on your sauna and you leave it there and mole can grow. And at the time, sorry, I'm taking a drink periodically because, you know, in a sauna, gotta hydrate. So bear with me on that. And so I start looking at these saunas a little differently. I'm like, man, there's a lot of wood here and people sweat in here. Like, is there mold in these things? How can I try to figure that out? Right? And, you know, the more I think about it, it's not like a thing where there's leaks behind the walls or stuff. So, you know, the way that I'm thinking it through is that you're usually going to see probably what's happening on the surface because the source is typically the person. The water source is the human in the thing, right? So the water source is on the visible side of what you could see. And so I start going into these things and I start seeing that there's like a lot of. A lot of sweat stains, you know, water drips and stuff all over the ground. Like, okay, well, I know what. I know what staining means when I see it in other places of the house, right? So for those of you who have been through the Mole Finders method free webinar that I'm giving that talks about how to find the hidden mole in your house is making you sick. I talk about there's five signs of water damage. This is the first thing that you look for or that I look at when I'm going through a house. You need to know two things. You know, what to look for and where to look for it. And that's really what the whole piece of that entire webinar thing that I'm doing is basically teaching you guys that. So there's two pieces. What do you look for? What do you look for it? So what do you look for? You look for water damage. That's what you look for. And there's really just five types when you kind of put it together. And I won't go too into it. We can save that for the webinar. If you're interested. Moldfindersmethod.com you can register. The next one is December 23rd, ten days from now. So if you want to learn all about that stuff, you can. Anyways, so one of the five signs is staining, right? And so if I was in a house and I saw dripping and staining on a floor anywhere else in the house, I would be like, whoa, what happened here? I got to test this and figure out if there's a problem. But for some reason, like, in a sauna, I was kind of writing it off before. And then I go to this conference, and I hear.

Doctor, I can't remember talking about it. And I'm like, oh, my God, why am I overlooking this? It's the same thing with, like, kitchen sinks, right? Like, I've said this before. Like, why do we overlook kitchen sinks? Like, or bathroom sinks or whatever, like, the cabinets underneath them? We're like, oh, sinks leak, cabinets leak. So it's not a big deal. Like, no, it's a bigger deal because we know they're leaking, right? That's the problem. And so is kind of the same thing. Here is, like, light bulb for me. I'm like, why am I not thinking about this while I'm going through? And so it changed the way that I think about going. Just looking in saunas in particular, like, if someone is dripping water onto wood, water plus wood equals mold. I need to be testing it, making sure. Because now the connection I made was because if they're sitting in that tight box and there's mold growing in there and they're opening their pathways, they're going to get more sick than they were before. And that was, like, the big takeaway for me. So that's what I started doing. So there's kind of two things I started noticing. One, I would see, like, dripping stains and stuff like that. The other thing is that I would actually see, like, darkness that looked like there might be mold growth actually on the floor or the seat where the person would sit, right? Because that's where the sweat is dripping, right?

So the post that I did a week or two ago was showing a sauna that I did a surface test of, because it looked like that there was some physical growth on the surface. And it came back, and there was. And then I got, like, this big flood of messages and texts and stuff like, oh, my God, what's happening here? Is my sauna making me sick? What's going on? And it's the thing Is you just have to be aware of what's happening in this space, right? You're in a, in a wood space and you're made of water and you're dripping water all over the wood. And some people are using towels to sit on and for their feet to go on. And some people aren't, right? If you're, if you're using towels and they're maybe catching some of it, but then guess what? A lot of people do, they leave the towels in there. So now you're leaving like a damp towel just on top of wood for an extended period of time. You're gonna get mold that grows at some point if you keep doing that over and over again. So you almost have to think of your sauna kind of like a front loading washing machine. I don't know if, you know, a good number of us probably have a front loader because they're super convenient and very popular now. But for those of you that don't, basically, instead of like opening the top of your washing machine and putting all your clothes in it, you open the front of it and you put all your clothes in the front. Front. Well, the thing with a front loading washing machine is that there's this rubber seal around the door where the door shuts and water gets stuck in there. And because the machine is built kind of more horizontally with the door on the side instead of the door on the top, water that gets into that space doesn't drain and it just stays there. And then I cannot tell you how many times I go into a house, go into a laundry room, there's a front loading washing machine. Every single time there is one, we open the door, we pull open the rubber seal, and more times than not, there's something that looks like mold growing in the rubber seal. And then you say, you think about that, you're like, oh, man, that means you're washing your clothes in mold, right? Like, that's defeating the purpose. So a sauna is no different because it's about maintenance. So the question is, like, what do you do with a front loading washing machine? Well, I have one too. So here's what we do. We, after every wash, we dry the rubber seal, take a towel. There's two sides of the rubber seal. There's like the, just the top side. So if you open the door, you just wipe the rubber seal and then you pull it open. You could pull that seal open and kind of like it kind of splits and you can kind of see down into it. And then you dry that interior part of the rubber seal, too. You do both of those, and then you leave the door open on the washer. And it really helps to prevent that because, again, you're getting. You're taking the water away, which is causing, you know, which is what you need for mold to grow, right? Mold needs water to grow. So in a sauna, the reason I say that they're the same is because the way youy treat them the same, you say, okay, I'm in a sauna. I, as a human, am a water source in my sauna. So if I'm going to use it, I'm inherently going to sweat. Otherwise, the sauna is not doing its job. So it's not like you come in here and not sweat, right? So, like, okay, so if I know that I'm going to sweat, like, that's why I'm going in there. I know that I'm going to be leaking water onto wood. What can I do to make that not as big of a deal? The first thing, you can sit on a towel and put a towel on the ground. Right? This way, you're not dripping and leaking directly onto the sauna. It's getting caught up in a towel. So that's cool. But when you're done, you, have to take the towels out. Okay. Don't leave the towels in there, or else now you're going to be trapping the moisture. It's actually going to be probably a bigger problem if you do it that way, because you're going to be trapping the moisture against the wood for who knows how long until you get in the sauna the next time, right? So when you get out, you, got to take these towels out. And then the other thing, dry the sauna. This is the same thing I do in a shower, right? Where like, it's like a sauna, apparently, is a comparison or the addition of a shower and washing machine, apparently. So the shower piece, every time I'm done taking a shower, because think of it the same way showers, Just gallons and gallons and gallons of water just shooting into a shower. You have grout lines. Grout becomes damaged, allows water to penetrate behind the grout. If you leave a bunch of water in there, it could deteriorate the grout even more. So you want to get the water out as best as you can. So whenever I get out of a shower, I squeegee all of the shower walls. But I don't stop there. I also squeegee. I have, like, a little bench thing, so I squeegee that off so it gets onto the floor. And then I squeegee the floor all the way to the drain, right? Because I don't want water. Because if you pull water down a squeegee on a shower wall, it comes straight down to the side of the wall where it meets the floor, which is a shower pan. And if you have cracks and stuff in the grout or if it stays there, it could start to deteriorate the grout and that's a problem, right? So, so what I do is once it gets to the floor, then I pull it all to the drain, right? And so what am I doing? I'm drying it, I'm drying the shower. And so that's what you do. That's what I am going to be doing in my sauna, right? I'm sitting on a towel, I have towel under my feet. I've been in this thing right now for 21 minutes. I'm definitely sweating. It's getting caught in my towels. I'm drinking water, I'm wiping my face with a towel. I'm wearing a sweatband on my head. And when I get out of this thing, I am going to wipe the floor and the seat down. And, and where my back leans, because I'm leaning on that, my back is sweating a little. And so that's getting wet. So that's how I'm going to be doing prevention on my sauna, right? So these, these are a lot of the questions I begin asking. I've been getting asked about the whole sauna situation. What did you get? Why did you get that one? People ask me where you could buy it. I mean, there's so many places you could buy these things. I would just search clear, light, infrared sauna. And there's a million places you could buy them. So that was another question. Where can I get the one that you got? And then it's, you know, how do I prevent mold from happening? I saw your post from before. You just got one of these things. What are you doing? How do we stop that? Right? And so, so that's everything that I'm doing. So now let's say you have one of these things already. And me explaining how water staining and darkness on wood has sometimes turned into mold has completely freaked you out. Let's just say that's happened, which is not trying to freak out, just trying to make you aware, right? But let's say that's happened. Okay, so what do you do? So here's how I tested saunas, alright? So one, if I saw something that looked like Actual mold growth, which is like a. It was usually darker in the saunas, usually. But you see some sort of spotting or something like that. That doesn't look right. It's a surface test. It's just a basic surface swab. Any mold inspector could come out and do a surface swab of that, and they could. Can do that. Okay. So that's how I would do it there. Now, when I only saw water staining and I wasn't seeing what looked like growth, you can't take a surface swab over that because a swab is only showing you if there's growth on the surface where the swab touches. Right. So that's like you can't use a swab where there's just staining or some sort of water damage, because it's actually not going to tell you what's there. That's not the strength of that test. So what I would do instead of I would do an air test, but I wouldn't do it like in the middle of the sauna. What I would do is, like on the floor, typically where the staining was on the floor, I would kind of bang my fist, kind of pound on the floor a little. So if you could hear.

I would do like that on the floor. And then right after I do that, I would put an air sampling pump right on the ground right next to where I did that. And I would do that right over where the staining was, and then I would take an air sample right there. Right. So you've heard me talk about cavity samples and source air testing and all that stuff. Right. There's kind of two ways to do air tests. One is to do a cavity. Right. If you're in a wall and you just put a hole in a wall and put a tube in there and find out what's going on behind the wall, that's great. Some things you can't do that. You can't do that with floors, you can't do that with showers, you can't do that with cabinetry. So there has to be another way that you can utilize the strength of that test, which is identifying hidden mole problems and being as close to the source as you can, there's got to be another way to do it. So this is kind of how we figured out how to do that. And we've done it a lot in different places and seems to be pretty telling. And so that's how we do these things. Now, again, I go down wherever the staining is, I kind of like bang my fist on the Floor a couple times just to kind of disturb whatever's there. Put this air sampling pump right next to it, take the air sample from there. And there are times where that sample has come back and shown some pretty gnarly stuff. And you're like, okay, there's a problem here.

So that's kind of how you figure it out. So don't freak out. Just because there's water, you know, sweat drips, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's mold growth there. Right. But it' sit's water. It's. We have to be cognizant of that. And if we're not, we're really not being aware. Right. And so we need to be looking at that. And then the next question is, okay, well, what do we do if there is a problem that's kind of more like dealing with the manufacturer? Like, is there a way to get like. So now that I've put one of these together, I know that they come in pieces, right? So, like, if the floor had an issue on it, could I just call them and order a new floor? Like, I don't know. Right. I've never had to do that. Or if it's the bench where I sit, can I just get a replacement bench, for example? And again, I don't know that. Right? So, but those are. Those are things that I would look at for that. You know, some people ask, well, can I just, like, sand it and surface clean it? If it's, like, physical growth on the surface, I guess you can. But here's the thing, though. You're coupling a potential mold issue in a box where you're opening up all of your pathways to where you could get even more easily exposed. Whatever's in there. So because you're kind of opening yourself up to it even more, I would probably lean more on the side of caution and maybe replace the things that we're concerned about in them.

Because I don't know. Right. Taking another sip of water. Please hold.

All right, thank you. Been in here.

Been here 25 minutes. In the last four minutes, the sweating has really kicked up another notch. So I'm officially dripping everywhere. Luckily, I'm dripping onto my towels. So, guys, this is the sauna episode. I hope you guys found it informational and useful. Thank you for listening. Be more episodes this week if you haven't gone to check out the webinar that I'm doing. I spent almost a year putting this thing together, and I'm literally just giving the webinar for free.

I'm talking about the five signs of water damage, how we inspect a house. I'm going through all of how we do it right and I'm even sharing the number one reason that remediation fails. So you could try to avoid that moving forward too. All of that is in there. All you have to do is go to mullfindersmethod.com and register for it. It's just your name, your email. Push us through. I'll send you an email that says you're confirmed and you will be in the webinar. Okay, so next one is December 23rd. That'll be the last one for the year. And then we'll probably be looking at like late January for the one after that is probably my guess. So if you're at all interested in that stuff, I would go look into it now. Otherwise you're waiting over a month to get into the next one. Alright guys, so hope you guys had a great weekend and I'll talk to you soon.

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