94: Source Level Testing is Priority ONE

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

Hey, everyone, what's going on? It is a Sunday right now. I am officially on paternity leave. For those of you who may or may not have noticed. I don't know if I've been putting pictures up of my new little boy on my Instagram stories. His name is Zayden Philip Carr. He was born on. Oh geez, July 31st. He was due on August 18th. We were like, caught a little off guard. We had plans. We were gonna get everything done that weekend. He was born on a Friday. So like that weekend, the Saturday, Sunday, we had, we had a lot of it done. We were gonna get the rest of it done. And then bam, Here he comes. 4:30 in the morning, my wife's water broke. You go to the hospital, and next thing you know, we got a new little boy. I'm going to. I was going to start. I wasn't going to start, but I'm going to start this episode with Parent Corner at the front end. Because we were in the hospital and my wife and I had been. Have been going back and forth on what his name was going to be for months. Like, we just hadn't settled on.

Came down to either Zaden or Camden. Those were the two names that we were throwing around. And. And we're sitting in the hospital and I guess I kind of knew this, but I didn't really know it. Cause it hadn't really happened. See, with Kensington, my girl, we knew her name. We decided on her name like six months in advance. It was no big deal. We had like blankets with her name on it, all kinds of stuff. With Zade, we didn't have anything. Cause we hadn't decided yet. So we're in the hospital and you know, they kick you out of the hospital really quick now. It's like, like, hey, you had a baby. Cool. You're out of here tomorrow. It's pretty. It's pretty nuts. We stayed two days with Kensington. We basically stayed like a day and a half with Zaid. And anyways, the people. There's a department in the hospital that only deals with like the birth certificates, which I guess, you know, makes sense. And so they keep kind of coming up in the room like, hey, so do you guys have a name yet? And we're like, ugh, I don't know. We keep going back and forth. We had not figured out his name. Listen, they will not let you leave the hospital if you don't put a name on this paper. We. I. I guess I probably should have known that we were. I don't know. For whatever reason, I was just, like, wavering on the name. I was the one holding it back. I. Deep down, I just didn't know if I wanted a Z name. I didn't know how I felt about that. But anyway, so. So we're in the hospital kind of freaking out. We have, like, this deadline to get this name down. And then finally we pulled the trigger, and we decided on Zaden Philip Carr Philip, named after my dad, Zayden, because it's cool. And, you know, my last name is my last name, so that's his name. So that. That is my parent corner. Little mini tip for the day. If you're having a baby, try to have the name figured out before you roll in. And one more thing. I've heard so many people say, and I was, like, banking on this. I've heard so many people say that, you know, when you see them, you'll just know. You'll just know when you see them. You know, don't have to worry about it, figuring out. Just, you know, have some names in mind. You might even see him, and he may. He might look like a Gustavo. You don't even know, right? So try not to be too worried about. Just go in there. Whatever, Whatever. Here's what I'm telling you. I saw him. He didn't have a name yet. Still. He still didn't have a name. So my advice to anyone out there who's pregnant. Gonna be pregnant, Has a wife who's gonna be pregnant. Whatever. Try to come up with the name before you're sitting in the hospital and the birth certificate police is coming in, and they're like, hey, hey, a name. We need a name. We're literally going to not let you leave this hospital until you tell us what this name is. Because that's what happened. So. But besides the. The little naming drama, everything was super great. Delivery was easy. Thank God. It was nice. It was. My wife did very well. He did very well. We're home, and I'm officially out on paternity for a little while, which means that the podcast episodes are going to be a little slower in between for the next Five, six weeks probably. So bear with me. I have a couple other ones that are banked from a couple really cool experts that I'll Bring on. One's Dr. Lauren Tessier. The other one I have banked is with Shawna with a little less toxic on Instagram. So I got that one set with her as well that we recorded before I went out. And then I was gonna do this one today, and then I'm gonna try to get some other ones in there to keep it. To keep it going. But please work with me. You know, got a newborn and a toddler running around, so trying to work on my new version of my life here. All right, so that was. That's kind of the update on me. And in a second, we're going to get into the topic of the day.

All right, so for today's episode, what I want to do and excuse, like, a car driving by randomly or anything, I'm recording this while I'm walking my dog and while Kensington is napping and while Zade has a few minutes before his feeding. I'm trying to, like, balance all of this stuff. So if you hear a car or like a gust of wind, please bear with me. But anyways. All right, so I want to get into today's topic. I'm going to try to keep this, like, a little short and sweet just because of time. All right? But I want to talk about this experience I had with a client a couple weeks ago, and the explanation that I gave them about something which I don't really feel like I've done a full deep explanation with you guys yet on. So I just want. I had a note to just kind of, like, talk through that with you. So here's the deal. Went through this person's home. There was a good amount of things going on. It was a large home. So there's a number of potential areas that we saw, you know, where we thought there could be sources of problem. If you recall, a lot of what we talk about is understanding the source, where it's coming from, and then understanding how that or those sources potentially are impacting the living space, Meaning how is it moving through the house, which is your direct pathway to exposure? And then secondarily, how is that maybe impacting your heating or air conditioning system, which would then be recirculating that stuff through the house and be a secondary pathway for exposure. So that's basically the goal, right? And that's the goal in every inspection that we do, is to try to map all that out. So the remediation can be effective. Right, right. If you, if you leave one of those things out and you spend a bunch of money on remediation, you're going to come back in, you're probably still not going to be feeling that great because you still left problems behind. And that's not the point. Right. The point is to try to get the problems out. That's what we're trying to do. So, so anyway, so go through this house, it's a large house, we sit down, we review everything. And the client.

With her husband, they're like, you know, we need to think about this and talk it through. You know, we'll get back to you by end of day, which is cool. I'm like, alright guys, yeah, not a problem, let me know, you know, whatever works for you guys. And so they get back and basically all that they wanted to process or run with the sampling was just a couple of the screening tests in the house, like the ERMI test and like a mycotoxin test, but they didn't want to do any of the source testing at all. And I saw it and I was like, hey guys, I responded an email, they sent it back in an email and I was like, hey, listen, I absolutely have no problem running whatever you guys want to run. Right? But before we process these, like, can we set a second call? I just want to understand what your goals are and how you chose these to make sure that the information that comes back is actually going to meet the goal that you have in mind. Right. Like the last thing I want someone to do is pay for sampling to go out, the samples come back and then they expected, you know, direction on how to handle certain things, when maybe the samples that they left out are the ones that we really needed in order to have that direction. You know what I mean? So before we pulled the trigger, I wanted to set a call with them and just kind of walk through that with them and understand where they were at. And so, so he said, yeah, sure. And so, so we get on a call and. Which was like a day later or something a couple of days later. And we get on the call, I was like, all right. So I just kind of wanted to talk through, you know, what, what the thought process was, you know, what what you guys are hoping to, you know, achieve by running these particular samples that you've outlined here. You know, just try to get a feel for where you guys heads at. And like I said, I just want to make sure that you guys are getting all the information that you're expecting to get and in turn that I'm going to be able to tell you guys what you're hoping that I'll be able to tell you. Right? So I asked them that and they said, well, you know, we just feel like this is the best decision for our family and kind of left it there. And I get that. Right. I get it. It can be expensive, it's not cheap. And so that might have been part of the thought process. And so what I said to that I was like, okay, I was like, can we, can we maybe like take a step further? So basically what we're doing is that we're not including any of the source level testing. So I'm not going to be able to tell you where the problem is coming from. All I'm really going to be able to understand is if there is a problem in the house, meaning that, you know, is it moving throughout the house, are there toxins present, you know, that sort of thing. And you know, potentially if a couple of the air conditioning systems have been impacted, but I'm not going to be able to tell you where the source of those issues are coming from. I was like, so I just want the expectation to be really clear that a report for this type of sampling plan. So again, when we talked about like the different types of samples that we do, right. We have a couple goals. So again, the first goal is where's the problem coming from? And then the second goal is how is that problem moving throughout the house impacting your exposure? Well, basically what they had chosen to leave out was the first section. Where's the problem coming from? Right. So if I don't know where it's coming from, I don't know how to fix it and I don't know how to tell you how to fix it. And this is actually one of the biggest problems in our industry is people go in and they just do an ermi or they do air samples. You know, let's just assume air samples tell you something in the middle of the rooms, just for sake of conversation, even though I've harped on them many times that you don't. But the idea is that you go in a room and you just take a sample of some kind in the middle of some open space and you're saying, okay, there's a mole problem here or there's not a mole problem here and what do you do about it after that? Right? Let's say they come back and they're all bad. What do we do? You know, what's your next step? It's exactly what I asked. I was like, okay, so let's say that these samples come back and that they're a problem. What is your next step? What would you do? And it's like, oh, we're gonna remediate. I'm like, well, how, how do you, how do you know what you're gonna remediate? Like, where do you. Of all the things that we found, are you gonna do? Are you just gonna open everything up? Are you just gonna assume that everything is bad? How are you gonna do it? What are the steps that you're gonna follow to do it? You know, how is that gonna work out? Asking the questions of what will you do next? Is really important. And it'll help you sort of figure out what information do you really need right now. Right. Sometimes you don't need all the information. That's why I have these phone calls with people. Sometimes, depending on what your next steps are, you don't necessarily need to know everything. Right? Let's say, for example, that these folks were like, you know, if we find that there's a big problem in the house, we know that we have a family member that's not, you know, that's sick and not doing well in this house, we're going to move. Let's say that's what they're doing. You know, we're just going to decide, we're going to leave. If that's the case. You know what, you don't need to know where the sources are because your goal is to not fix it and then stay there. Your goal is to understand if there is a problem and then leave. And in that case, it makes total sense. That's kind of what I thought they were going to tell me when I asked that question. But instead the response was, well, we're going to remediate. And so then my follow up was, well, how do you know what you're going to remediate and how are you going to do it? Because I can't write remediation protocol for places that we haven't validated that there's an issue, right? Like, how do I know what needs to be done in terms of testing or in terms of remediation if I don't even know there's a problem? There's a few reasons that you do sampling. One is to validate that there even is a problem. There are times where we go through and something we think is going to come back and show an issue and it doesn't. And you know what, that's good news. It's good news if it doesn't. But you don't know that until you test it and validate it. So the first step, by validating, you're immediately checking some items off the list that may or may not need to be addressed at all in remediation. That's the first step. The second reason that you sample is to help kind of understand level of severity and priority. Every single time I get on a call with a client, after we've done a report and I've sent it out and we're kind of getting on the phone to review everything, the question always comes up in some way, well, which of these are most important? Which of these should we be focusing on? Are all of them the same amount of bad? Are some of them more bad than others? In some way, the same question comes up. The only way that you could really have that conversation is if you have testing data on all the different areas of suspect and then you can look at all of it and you can say, hey, you know what? These four areas, let's say, look like their severity is a lot higher, right? Because in the sampling, you can see types of mold, you can see the concentration levels, the amount of mold that's there. If you're sampling everything at the source level the right way, you could get some really good information like that. And so then if someone's having that question with me when we're reviewing stuff, I look at it, I'm like, all right, well, part of the reason that we did sampling is because it can help me kind of create a priority list for you right now, in a perfect world, you're addressing everything, you know, but you know, not everybody's in a situation where you can. And it's not on me to say, well, if you don't do everything, then you shouldn't do anything and you're a bad person and you're failing, like that's, that's, it's not helpful for anyone, right? Like at the end of the day, if you could reduce your load, your exposure load in your house. But even like 50%, I mean, that's got to be better than Nothing, right? It's 50% less stuff your body has to deal with right now. Can I tell you that you're specifically for whatever your health condition is and this and that, like that's enough for you? I don't know. I can't tell you that. Right. That's why your doctor has to be a part of this process. But all doctors talk about your overall load, your toxic load they talk about your funnel overflowing, they talk about your immune system overload, all these different analogies that they have. But the idea is that there's so much stuff impacting you that at one, at some point you, your body can't keep up. So if you can cut back, let's say the mold piece in half, let's just say, well, that's half the mold stuff that's coming in. Seems logical that your body is going to have a little more ability to catch up with that. Right. So being able to see the data and being able to then say, okay, well here's what things look like. Even if you don't want to remediate every single one of these things, here's the four or five or six different areas that seem to be kind of the worst. I know that because we did testing. I was able to validate that and now I can see almost like tear breaks in the severity of issue in all these different places. And we can have a conversation about it. Right? So that's, that's like the second reason that we test and the third reason we test is really to help us map out remediation. There are some times where there's been a historical water event or, or something like that, and they're like, yeah, well, there's been a leak in this area. We don't really know exactly how far it impacted. We tried to catch it as soon as we can. It was here for a few hours, you know, whatever. It's like, you know what we need to. Or it happened in the second floor in a bathroom upstairs. What about the areas down below that? What about the ceiling down below that? I mean, did it impact more than what your initial eye saw? We don't know that because when water gets behind building materials, it can travel in, in places that we can't see. Right. So part of testing, in some cases, depending on what we think the initial source is, is to almost map out like the full extent, like how far did something actually impact so we know how much remediation has to happen. Does that make sense? Right, so you're kind of like mapping all of that out. So those are kind of the reasons that we test. That's all source level testing. All of that is why source level testing is so, so, so important. If you cut out all of the source level stuff and you just worry about doing an ermi test and other dust testing throughout your house, you say, okay, this is what we're going to do. You're going to get that information. It's gonna be like, cool, you got a mold problem. You got mycotoxins in your house. Now what? Right? And a lot of the local inspectors, or even some of these other guys that do consults and stuff or whatever, they'll say, hey, just do an ermi in a bunch of different rooms. And then something comes back and it's a problem. They say, okay, so you just have to fog the house. It's magic fog. It's super cool. It just fixes everything for you. It's very magic and it works and it's wonderful and it's magic. And then you do that and your problem is solved. I mean, if that's how it worked, that'd be amazing. But the only reason there's stuff in your house is because there are hidden sources, there are hidden factories that are creating the problem that's getting into the house, right? So if you don't find those factories, you could clean up the mess as it stands today. And two weeks later, a month later, the mess is going to be back because the factories are still creating the problem. And so, you know, that's kind of where they were sitting. So they were doing no source level testing. They're only wanting to do kind of the dust testing throughout. I asked him the question, he's like, well, we're going to remediate. And then like I said, I was like, well, how do you know what you're going to remediate? And then it just kind of stopped. And then I gave an example. I gave this analogy that I had never really given before. And that's the whole backstory for this story that I'm going to give you right now. And then I'm probably going to cut it here so I could go back in and help change my newborn stiper. So here's what I said to them. I was like, listen, I totally get where you're coming from. It's not cheap to test stuff, right? But it's important. Think of it this way. Let's say you were diagnosed with cancer and you went into the hospital, you went into the doctor, and the doctor ran one test, and the test just said, yes, you have cancer or no, you don't have cancer. And that was it. And you get the test back and the cancer, or the test says, yes, you have cancer. And they had other tests that they could have run to maybe try to diagnose, well, like, where is the cancer? Is it like pancreatic cancer? Is it liver? Is it breast cancer? Is it whatever? Can we try to Hone in on it, really figure out where it is so we can create a plan to actually go in there and remove it properly. Right. That would be the next logical step that you do, right? You're like, oh my God, well, where is it? How far has it spread? Where did it start? Is it in other places? How do we treat it? What are my options to treat it? All of those questions can't be answered unless you're doing diagnostic testing that's mapping all of that out. So then your doctor has a real good picture of what is happening and they can create a customized treatment plan for you. Right? You can't create that customized treatment plan. If you take a single test that says, yes, you have cancer, that's it. And then you go to the doctor, you say, okay, well I'm just going to fix this cancer. It's the equivalent me saying, so you're going to do a dust test throughout the house and then what? And then your response is, well, I'm going to remediate. The equivalent to that is I did a test on my body that said, yes, you have cancer. And then I say, well, what are you going to do after that? And your response would be, well, I'm just going to cut my body open from head to toe and look for it and hopefully find it. Like that's the equivalent of that. Right. And I know, you know, it can be kind of gruesome. And that's not the point. But the point is to make an analogy that's very, very clear about something that might hit home for people and people can actually understand if you did a singular test that was yes or no cancer and you said it came back yes. And then I said, if it comes back yes, what is your next step going to be? And you said, my next step is going to be I'm going to cut my entire body open and just look for it. It that is the equivalent of going through your house only doing an ermi test or a dust test in the house, that test saying that you have a mole problem and then me asking you what you're going to do next and you say, well, I'm just going to remediate. What are you going to do? Rip every single wall open in your house? Like, what are you going to. What's really the plan after that? Right. This is why source testing is so, so, so important. And if you were going to pare back on stage stuff and not do, you know, try to kind of weed out tests and figure that out, which again, I'm totally on board for. If we talk through goals and understand where we're going, I can try to map that out for someone. But I would always keep the source level stuff and start paring back on the dust test throughout the house. Because if you don't find the source, you can't fix the problem. That means source identification is the number one. The number one priority. Again, source identification is the number one priority over an ERMI test, over a mycotoxin test, over all the new bacteria tests that everybody's talking about, that I've talked about before. All of that stuff is secondary to where is the problem coming from? Because if you don't know where it's coming from, there's literally no way you can ever fix it. Ever. It'll never be fixed. All right. And so that's just what I wanted to share with you guys. The importance of source level testing and its relationship to secondary cross contamination testing. The level of importance of that, the priority of those two, source level testing is always number one. Number one. Number one, right? And I hope the analogy of I took a test that was a yes, no test that says, oh, you have cancer, what's your next step? Is your next step just cut your whole body open and look for it, or is your next step to run more diagnostic testing to really try to pinpoint where it is and how it's moving so an appropriate treatment plan could be created? Maybe you don't have to get cut open at all. Maybe you could just, maybe you could have chemo instead and target the chemo in different places. Or maybe you do need to have surgery, remove like a larger tumor, but then you can do different types of treatments in other areas. There's different options, there's different ways to do stuff, but if you don't figure all of that out and you don't map it out beforehand and you literally just have like a yes, no, I have cancer, don't have cancer type of test. What are you going to do with that? Right? And it's the same thing that happens in the house. That's why source level testing is so, so, so important. And this was basically the analogy and the explanation that I gave to my client when we were talking about it. So I wanted to share that with you guys so you could kind of, you know, take a step behind the curtain and hear some of the conversations that I have with clients because there's a lot of valuable stuff that we talk about there. And, and my goal with this, you know, those who've been listening to podcasts for a while. We have, by the way, we have like 60,000 downloads on this now. It's pretty insane. Very, very cool. So I appreciate all of you listening and I just want to kind of keep giving you little snippets of real conversations I have with my clients. So hopefully it can help you throughout the process. So anyways, I have to run in. My time is out. I'm actually on like a time limit now. I feel like got to run in, help out my amazing, incredible wife with our newborn and everything else that's going on. So thanks everybody for listening. We'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. Sam.