95: The Mold / Health Algorithm - 4 Forms of Mold Illness with Dr. Lauren Tessier

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? We got another episode today. This one is super cool. Not like all the other ones aren't super cool, but this one I feel like is like extra super cool because we have Dr. Lauren Tessier. She is the president of the International Society of Environmentally Acquired Illness. I. I know that's a lot of words to say, but basically it's this really awesome organization that I happen to be a part of, of one of kind of the few environmental people that are in there. But it's mostly a medical community of all the smartest doctors, basically talking about how we help people that have environmentally acquired illness. That's mold issues, that's other things that are going on. I see a lot of the conversations that are happening. The collaboration that happens in this group is so super awesome. Questions on the best way to treat things, how we should handle stuff, and everyone's contributing. Like, I know a lot of you guys don't see this, but the people in this group, they're all working together to try to figure out how to best help all of you. So it's super, super cool to have literally the president of the company, my president, Dr. Lauren Testy. What's going on?

Hey, how are you? Thank you so much for having me. And what a brilliant introduction for ici. You know, it means a lot to hear.

I really want to drive home to people and kind of just get it out at the top. Is that ICI, the physicians that are there and the IEPs that are there are folks who are listed on our get help page. But I like patients, potential patients, to know that these physicians typically have three plus years in the mold and environmental medical field before they can even really get listed on the website. And then our IEPs have to jump as far as I'm concerned, through actually bigger hoops wherein they need like 10 years field experience and then they also need a written recommendation from a mold literate or environmentally literate physician. And I think a lot of people, knee jerk reaction and understandably so, are like, well, if I go to this website, is Joe Schmo just gonna go pay his membership and get listed and go. I really just want to reiterate to folks that that is not the case and that's not the fences we're swinging for with ici. So I really appreciate you being a part of it, too, because your services are absolutely invaluable. So thank you for all that you do.

I appreciate that. And I can attest to the application process seeming like it was a whole lot of work to get in. So I'm like, hey, will somebody write a letter for me? Everybody's so busy. You can't write letters right away. So it was cool. Anyways, so, yeah, I've been. I've been looking forward to us chatting for a while. You know, I don't know exactly when this episode is going to come out. It's probably going to be a few weeks. So before this episode comes out, Lauren and I are also working on doing, like, a common Q and A swap that we're going to do across our Instagram accounts. So, like, we have questions where I asked my community, you know, do you have questions for Dr. Tessier? And she could try to help answer some of the health questions. And then Lauren asked some of her community of, you know, questions that I might be able to help answer. So if you're listening to this, you could probably go check both of those. At that point in time, it'll probably be in our IGTVs or something. You can see some of those, too, which would be kind of cool. So Lauren's Instagram is @lifeaftermold, which is an awesome handle, by the way.

Thanks.

And. And so you guys can go pop in and check that out, too. All right, so International Society of Environmentally Acquired Illness. Sounds a little wordy, but the key of it is Environmentally Acquired Illness. Can we talk about just, like, what that is? Like, what encompasses that? I know mold's obvious, a piece of that, but I think that might be a good place to start.

Yeah, absolutely. So there's kind of a global thought and a global idea that a lot of the illnesses that we bump into in this world come from either nature or nurture. Right. It's either in our genetics or it's coming from our environment, our nurture, what has happened around us. And so the real core belief of ICI is that the things that are in our environment can negatively impact our body, impact our system, and lead to chronic disease states. So, you know, I think a lot of people think globally of, like, mold is in the environment, or even, heck, let's just say, like, Lyme is in the environment, but it's not so much just the concept and the study of those causes. It's the fact that it's now put into this kind of, like Schrodinger's box that is the human body, and it's shaken up, and what comes out the other side is an inflammatory disease state. So whether that looks like an autoimmunity or, you know, a diabetes or an arthritis or, you know, just food intolerances or food allergies, the idea of ICI is that there are things in the environment that perturb our each unique individual system and disease state results. And our goal is to really help educate physicians so that they can better help their patients as to how to navigate this big, huge picture of what do we fix in the environment to get someone recovered, to get them healthy?

Yeah, it's cool, because I think you're right. I think a lot of people, they think the environment and I don't know, I say this thing all the time that mold is the gateway drug to figuring out what's happening in your home, in your space, basically, what's going on, which is good. At least there's something where we could start. It used to be there was nowhere to start. You have chronic fill in the blank. Right. Well, that just happens. Take this pill, and it'll knock down the inflammation, hopefully. And you didn't actually fix what was causing it. So, you know, on one hand, it's great. We kind of have this entry point where we start understanding how there's these impacts from environmental space that comes in. But the picture can be larger than that. And that's why I've always been talking about a lot with my patients. Like, it's. It kind of started with mold illness, I feel like, and that's why that's where the hat gets hungry. But it's evolved over time. Right. And I don't know, I just think sometimes, like, the first concept that gets out there, that's the first thing that we know. And then for the next 20 or 30 years, it's the only thing you think that that's it. Even though there's a lot of learning and research that's happened afterwards that really shows, like, well, there's maybe more than just that, you know, but, yeah, I kind of feel like that's been happening on the mold illness front.

Yeah. And we see that. I think mold illness is right now, the. I don't have a better term for this kind of, like, the sexy concept du jour, like, lime is still very much an issue for people, but it had its heydays in the 90s and the early 2000s. Just like I remember watching an episode of Seinfeld, like last year and getting a chuckle out of the fact that Seinfeld even made a point of talking about Epstein Barr virus as like the thing du jour during that time. And so, you know, we have these big issues that pop up on timelines that really drive, drive change in the health paradigm. And so I think mold is the current one, and I'm really curious about what the next ones will be, and especially will that next health wave come from the indoor built environment? It's a very curious thing, for sure.

Yeah. When I first got started learning about the health connection, which was a long time ago, the first thing was Lyme. I was like, oh, Lyme is connected to mold. Okay, cool. And then as I went down this, like, oh, auto. An autoimmune disease. Oh, that can, that can be triggered by this. Like, all of a sudden it just started opening up, like kind of all the doors. So, yeah, I think the point is just that we need to be aware of our environment in general and take the steps that we can. And there are certain things that we know trigger reactions in some way. Right. And if, if our goal is to try to reduce as much of that as we can, you kind of inherently in some ways will reduce some of the other things that are going on just through the processes that you're doing to handle one of them. Which is kind of nice.

Would you say, like when you're, when you're just looking big picture, like environmentally acquired illness, you know, we know, water damaged buildings, it's part of your indoor environment where you live. You spend a lot of time there. There's other things that happen in people's homes too. Right. So there's off gassing, there's formaldehyde issues, there's chemicals products, there's all that stuff. Do you feel like the water damage building piece is, you know, if you were making like a pie chart or something, is that like the largest piece of the pie? Like, like, should that be kind of the first place that we try to focus?

Yeah, so. And that's a great question. And it brings me back to the concept of, you know, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And I always try to be very cautious about that. But from that, right, My, my hammer is mold. You know, my practice is life after mo. That's for a reason. You know, it's. It's self selecting people who know that they have a mold issue. So in, in my perspective, mold is a very big part about that. But in the mitigation of mold, in cleaning it up in the person's body and also cleaning it, clean it up in the lived physical environment, work environment, home environment, a lot of those other things that do exist in that building that would cause that kind of sick building syndrome picture can be mitigated kind of hand in hand. It kind of goes along with the cleaning up of the mold process. So in my pie chart, mold is really big. But by addressing mold, we're also addressing some of those other things. So I think they just aren't as strong on my radar just because they, they play red rover with mold. You know, when mold heads on over, so does a lot of the VOC and the persistent polycarbons and all that kind of stuff. So. But that's not to say that are certain things in the built environment that aren't going to be physically addressed when you just remediate mold alone. And I want to really honor that and make sure that that gets said.

Yeah, I think it's important. I mean, we've, you know, we're talking water damaged buildings. There's obviously more than mold that happens. I say this a lot. You know, bacteria is the thing that's actually going to grow first if there's enough water. Bacteria mold are different things, but they're environmental contaminants that they can off gas. They have particles that break apart and get into our airflow and get into our breathing zones. There are toxins that are a part of both of those potentially. And so they, you know, mold and bacteria kind of play hand in hand in water damaged buildings. And I do think that, you know, for me, I would say probably the last, probably three to four years. And talking with, you know, smart people like you have realized that like there's other things going on in the house. And it's important to know that stuff because like on my end, if we just did a straight mycotoxin focus, like we know that we, you know, we only pick up mycotoxins in the house about half the time.

Right.

So if that's all that we were looking for and not taking into account these other elements, which is something that we'll talk about in a second, we could be missing a piece of the equation. Right. And so that, that was something we talked about earlier, how you, how you mentioned there's kind of like four sort of pieces of, of mold illness in general.

Could you break those down for us a little bit and talk about essentially, like, how mold can impact in different ways in your body. Because I think a lot of us think it's just like a toxin thing, or we think it's one thing or the other, but there's really other mechanisms where it impacts us.

Yeah, sure, sure. And so this might be a horrible flashback to some of us, to younger times in schooling, but if people think back to a Venn diagram, or if you don't know what the heck a Venn diagram is, first of all, congratulations. Second of all, picture overlapping, like the Olympic rings, right? Picture four overlapping Olympic rings, two on the top overlapping and two on the bottom. So you have four circles there that all have some type of interconnection to the circles above them, the circles below them, and kind of a final big overlap right in the center, in the core of those four. And so having that picture in your mind's eye, I then ask people, people to label each one of those circles as a form of mold illness. When I say mold illness, I mean any illness coming from mold. And so in one of the circles, we could have fungal infection or colonization, wherein the fungus is actually existing in the body. Another one of those circles could potentially be allergy, where we're dealing more of a histamine pathway. And technically, you can have an allergic reaction to usually things in the environment, but you can still have some histamine response to something that's in the body. The bottom two circles are the ones that are a little less. Less widely accepted by the larger medical paradigm.

As an aside, those top two circles, the infection and the allergy, those are going to be widely accepted by allopathic medicines, by MDs, allergists, all that kind of stuff. It's the bottom two, where actually the bulk of my practice resides, but it's also the one that's a little bit harder to.

Kind of bring to the light to the populace. And so those two final circles there, one is mycotoxicosis, myco meaning fungi, toxic meaning toxic, and kosis, meaning the disease states, or osis. Excuse me. And so it's the disease state resulting from the toxins that are made by mold. And those tend to have a lot of what I have seen, a lot of neurological kind of toxic pictures to them. And then the final circle there is that idea of sirs. For a lot of you out there, you may have heard sirs, sometimes it's pronounced sears. It's short for chronic Inflammatory Response syndrome, cirs. It was something that was developed by Richie shoemaker in the 90s. And it's the concept that there is something that perturbs the body. It gets into the body, it shakes up its snow globe, kind of gets the inflammation running and going. And then even after the toxin has left the body, that inflammation just keeps raging on. And so I use the metaphor for people up here in Vermont, we use burn piles. Lots of people still burn things on their front lawns up here. And so it's an appropriate metaphor up here, but it's the idea that you can put gasoline on, like a bonfire and light a match, the gasoline burns off. So that could be the mycotoxin, the thing that started the inflammation, but yet the fire keeps burning. And that is in that metaphor, the inflammation in the body. And so that final circle that SIRS picture, that chronic inflammatory picture, is a little bit more rare in the mold illness community. But a lot of people hear mold illness, and they go, mold illness equals sirs. And I really want to invite people to kind of step back, pump the brakes, and look at the global picture. Like, there's more to mold illness than just SIRS allergies in there. Infection colonization is in there, and the toxic picture is in there. So that's what I'm getting at when I talk about mold illness in general.

I. I love that. I've recently been trying to, you know, obviously, I'm not a doctor. Right. Throw that out there. I think everyone knows that. I talk to some of them, though. I pick up things here or there. And the allergy thing specifically, I would just love to hear you expand on this a little bit. A lot of times when people hear allergy, they think, eyes, nose, throat, that's what an allergy is. But you can have histamine releases in several areas of the body. It could create multiple types of reactions. Is that true? Can we talk about that a little bit? Because I think if people understand that, then it's like, oh, I'm not just looking for my eyes and my nose. This is a larger thing. Allergic reaction.

Yeah, you've been talking to the right people, apparently. And I should also say I'm not an iep. So there we go.

So allergy is really interesting. There's a few forms. You can dive as deep as you want and drive yourself as crazy as you want with this. Folks, with allergy, we have this true allergy. Something that's a true allergy is something that's mediated by this antibody, a very specific type of antibody called IgE. And so that would be a true allergy. You can kind of have a low Low level allergy with, like, the cough, the itchy eyes, the running nose, or you can have a really severe allergy, which would be like anaphylaxis, angioedema, so lip swelling, difficulty breathing, and so which is life threatening. And so you can have those two things mediated by the same little IgE antibody. But what we also know about mold fragments in the body is that.

They.

Don'T always need to go through that IGE antibody. They can bump into histamine without that mediation through IgE. So histamine is really the core component for that allergic picture. And histamine is involved in non IgE reactions and is also involved in IgE reactions and. And histamine. Sure. You guys know, like, we take the Benadryl, I'm not as itchy, maybe my nose isn't as runny, I get kind of groggy. And if you think about that, you're taking an antihistamine and it's addressing a nose symptom, a skin symptom, a brain symptom, it's making you groggy. This is because histamine receptors are everywhere in the body. Histamine does not just stop at the respiratory interface of the cough, the sneezing, it even can go into joints, into the gut. So histamine receptors are everywhere in the body. And wherever there's a histamine receptor, if you're histamine reactive to some type of like, little mold fragment that's going to light you up like a Christmas tree, it's going to be fully systemic.

Yeah.

That piece is so important. You know, I've been trying to hammer it down lately. Just kind of like when I talk to clients directly too, like I'll be talking to, you know, a husband and a wife, for example, and like, they, they've run a urine mycotoxin test and there's. They don't have mycotoxins. Right. And they're like, well, why is this even a thing? Like, why am I concerned about it? You know, I don't have mold toxins, you know, but then we go back to what you said out. There's kind of like these four elements of it. Okay, so one of those are gone, right?

Yeah.

There's still three other things that maybe could be what's causing the problem. And, and mold in its own right is a known allergen. Like mold is an allergen. You don need the toxic piece for mold to trigger things. Exactly. In the way that you talked about. True. And then exactly what you said that These histamine receptors are everywhere. So you could have reactions in different places and it can still be because of just a general exposure. So correct me if I'm wrong on this because I don't know, I say this sometimes so you can tell me if I'm on point or not.

Fact checking myself.

That.

The, the way that that mold, like people will ask like, what's a good mold or what? Like some mold is okay, right. And some molds are bad molds. Right. And I'm like, it's completely dependent on you. There is no like black or white thing that like this mold type is okay. Just because it's more common. Like, sure, cladosporin is more common, right? Okay. So you find it more often. You find aspergillus more often. If you are someone who is in the description that gave, which might get a histamine trigger from something. Just because it's like a quote, okay, mold, like it's not a toxin producer, let's say, doesn't necessarily mean that it's okay for you. Right. Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, it absolutely makes sense. And you know, I'm going to go even a level a little bit higher. And this might resonate with some folks, this might miss a mark for some people, but you know, there's also the relationship of mold to histamine. And this might sound a little woo for some of you, but stick with me. When you encounter a stress response, your body can dump histamine. It's not uncommon for people who tend to already be a little bit more on the histamine reactive intolerant front, where maybe the car in front of them jams on their brakes, they jam on their brake and all of a sudden they get the hot flush, they get the itchy, they get the histamine bump because that has a stress hormone epinephrine interface in the body. Now, to take that and go a step further, sure, you can get a histamine dump from being exposed to mold fragments and mold particles. But what about those people who lived in a Moldy home for 20 years, they got out and then they go to their friend's house and they're using the toilet and they see a little bit of mold in the grout line and all of a sudden they have a histamine response. That histamine response to that mold and that little grout line might not be the mold. That could be the body's stress response to even just seeing the mold. So it even gets so much more meta of what your relation is to your mold and your past history and your stress response to another way that mold could potentially cause a roundabout histamine dump in the body.

You know, that is such a good explanation of that. I've heard versions of that, but that is the best explanation that I've heard of that. I actually was just doing. I don't know if I did an episode on this or whatever, but I was kind of talking about, like, the PTSD side effect that mold has on people.

Yeah.

And I feel like this kind of falls into that. Right. There's this whole emotional component that is tied to any sort of disease, not just mold. Right. Like. Like the things that we talk about. We talk about physiologically, how it impacts somebody. Right. We talk about maybe where it started and how it got created. So maybe we talk about the mechanism of, like, well, the mold grew in the house. You have to handle mold. Right. So I always say the three things to basically conquering mold illness, if you will, is one, fixing the environment so you're not constantly exposed to it. Then addressing the body, the physiological piece that has been addressed, you got to handle that piece. That's usually where people stop. But the third thing is the emotional and mental toll that all of that has taken on you. And I always talk about this a lot, but the way that you broke this down shows how that is just as much of a connection of how you handle the whole situation as just actually getting the mold out of the house or detoxing yourself. Like, and this may take. You know, if you look at something, you're triggering stress responses now. It's being aware of your emotions and your body. This brings in, like, a whole nother side of it. And does this tie into, like, kind of the brain retraining and all that stuff?

Sure, sure. Yeah, Absolutely. It ties into the brain retraining. And I think a lot of people. What I want to preface kind of about this little path we're going down is it's not in your head, folks. You know, don't. Don't take the answer for you might be depressed as this being the cause of your issues. And please don't hear that. That is what Brian and I are saying. What we're saying is referring to the whole entire field of psychoneuroimmunology. So psychopsychology, neuro. Neurology, your brain, your nerves or everything, and immunology, your immune system. So there's a whole entire field of how your mental health, your social environment, your stresses, your XYZ impacts your nervous system and your Immune system. And so it's very much there. And there are a lot of things that people can do. They can do limbic system retraining, they can work with DNRs, they can work with somatic experiencing and Peter Levin's work. I actually have a little article over on a website called NDNR that talks about the. The different flavors of this psychoneuroimmunology and how people can more or less, like, hack their systems to get them out of that fight or flight. Because the fight or flight is not just the bear chasing you. It's even just seeing a picture of the bear after the bear has chased you. So it's really integral and it's really important to treatment. But sometimes we bring that on sooner in treatment, sometimes we bring it on later. And for some people, we never really have to cross that bridge at all, which, you know, I'm always thankful for. So, yeah, it's a huge part of recovery, for sure.

It really is. It's. I love that we talked about that. I think that that is so important for people to hear because, I mean, there are times where I actually had. Emails were flying back and forth today inside.

One of our sister companies that I was looking at, and somebody had issues in their home, got everything remediated. All the post testing showed up fine. The inspection looked good. You know, everything was done. They're still reacting. Right. It's like, okay, so what's going on? So, obviously, we're trying to kind of dissect and make sure that, you know, everything is, you know, all the I's and were dotted and T's were cost, but, like, this is a component of that. And then how do you have that conversation with someone? It's like, okay, so you're reacting. It's hard enough for people to believe that an invisible mold fragment or toxin is creating their problem in the first place. That's a big enough hurdle to get over. Right?

Right.

Finally, there's testing that can actually sort of show validation to that. So you could kind of connect that. We can do things in the house that show. Listen, it's here. You could do things that are showing whether it's inflammatory triggers or if it's, you know, even a toxin analysis or whatever. Like, listen, it's here. You could kind of put those together. Right.

For sure.

Then you start going down the road. Okay. Now there's this whole other thing. If that other thing was hard to digest. Now let's talk about basically, ptsd, essentially, and how that could be a thing. I mean, it's a hard thing to talk about. I don't even know how you say that to someone without them getting defensive. Have you ever had this conversation? I'm so curious on how you address it.

For sure. And I'm so glad that you tossed it back to me because there's one thing that I want to say with regards to. To that is thinking back to the four overlapping circles, right? You guys went in, you physically pulled it out from the environment. And we know. So there's. Let me walk this back for a second. When you're dealing with mold, there's two major places that you can be dealing with it. You can be dealing with it in the outside, exterior, environment, outside of the body or the inside of the body. In these cases where people's homes are still like perfectly remediated, they get all the checks. The in wall samples are great. That built from the drown like it's, it's perfect and all the, the T's and I's are crossed. One of the things that I find that some, some newer practitioners are maybe not aware of is if the environment checks out in their diet checks out, which is another source of mycotoxins, and everything is more or less okay there, but they're still feeling cruddy or their mycotoxin levels are spiking, that's when you need to check in the body. Check in the body, Check in the body for colonization, check in the body for infection. Sometimes that requires an antifungal prescription from a physician. Again, this is not medical advice. I'm not directing people on how to self care. I want to put that out there. You need to talk to your local physician about this. But if the environment is clean and the food is not the issue, then we know.

From outside of the house, the call is coming from inside the house or all the old scream fans from the 90s. So you know, we, I, that's when I do an honest to goodness, either presumptive antifungal use or I try to get some type of empirical data that I can show the patient and say, hey, the fungus might be in your sinuses, it might be in your gut and those can spit out mycotoxins. Those can cause issues for people. So instead of, you know, the home being the issue, it's, it's the actual body. It's like the, the, the turtle's cage versus the actual turtle shell where he's bringing his home with him. So before people jump to the limbic system thing there, I always invite people to consider if it could be an internal source before we.

Over it.

Yeah, that's so good. It's a very like 10,000 foot view of like this is kind of the order in which you should be looking at stuff, right? When you're, when you kind of check things off the list. So what you described is really similar to like I've heard Joe Christa say, like when you're, when you become the moldy building, right? That's kind of what that is. So like people can leave the environment, it gets fixed, it's been cleaned. Like all this has happened, you're still having issues. So then you go to the next thing, right? Hopefully. Hopefully you're working with somebody. And I always say this about whether it's on our end or whether it's their practitioner or their doctor or health coach or whatever, that once you start working with them, you need to trust them. So do all the vetting beforehand, right? Do. It's almost like if you're interviewing somebody to like hire in a business, right? You do all the vetting beforehand once you hire them, like they're part of the team now, right. Like you're not, you're not constantly like checking them and like. And you'd be creating basically a toxic work environment if you did something like that because there'd be just this inherent, you know, mistrust and like all this stuff. Like they wouldn't be able to do their best job for you if you were doing that all the time. And so when you're kind of putting your team together, that's going to help you navigate this. It's like you're hiring people in your company and your company is called get me Better and you're hiring the employees that are going to now work for your. For get me Better and do all the interviewing, right? Feel comfortable about it. No one's forcing you to hire anybody in your company, right. You get to choose whoever you hire. It's great, right? Once you make the hire, trust that person. Unless something just brutally like, you know, obviously there's a reason that you would let someone go, but like.

Right, right.

It takes time usually to get there because there was a reason that you brought them on and pulled the trigger on them in the first place, you know. So the reason I bring all that up is because if there's a situation where it's like, we had everything remediated, it's not working, come back out here and fix it. You guys screwed it up. Let's talk about it first. Don't get immediately controversial like that, remember, you hired me in to get me well or get me better. Whatever the name of our company is.

We'Re still trying to help. So immediately coming with this you mess something up vibe at someone is not going to flow very well. Right. When the reality is when you talk about what you said. Okay, okay, that was one piece. Right. And this is why it's so important we always tell people, like, listen, you have to have your doctor involved in these conversations. Okay? Like, there could be other things. And so I always have thrown out, listen, have you checked, Just because I've heard Jill say that to me a lot. Have you checked to see if there's anything happening internally? You can get mycotoxin production internally, you can have internal infections. Like, has that been looked at? Right. But the other piece that you mentioned is the as. As after that, which is the neurological piece. That's another part of it. Right. So it's. It's just not like this black and white, super easy thing. You know, I think everybody's different and. And whatever, but if you trust who you're working with, trust them and honestly, like, get second opinions, like, I'm all for that. Right. But at the end of the day, like, you know, try to have some faith in the people that you chose to be working with you, you know?

Right. And I understand. And again, to just underline more or less what you've said is I always try to say, even during podcasts, I'm not going to be everyone's cup of tea. I can, hands down, tell you that. And as independent business owners, and I know a lot of the audience are also business owners in and of themselves, we're in the service industry. We're here, here to help you. We don't want to see you fail. We don't want to fail you. We're honestly going through these things with you in mind. Are there some cruddy companies out there? Sure, there's some cruddy doctors out there, sure. Unfortunately. But what I really want to invite people to understand is that there is no one single test that can say I am still sick because of this mold that was found in this part of my home. And so what I try to help people understand is there is an algorithm, there is a process of elimination that people go through in order to understand what is the cause, how is it linking in. So when I work with people, I do a first pass with mycotoxin and detox. That's just what I do. And then I usually find if we address the detox component, which also involves cleaning up the home. Then we can say, okay, your symptoms are still around. They're not as better or they're not better than what they were. Let's see if there's a colonization or infection. Okay, well, we cleared out any possible colonization or infection. You're not feeling well, your home is still safe, your diet hasn't changed because mycotoxins are in the diet. Let us now think about sirs. Let us now think about that concept of we burnt off the gasoline on the burn pile, but the inflammation is still going. And so there's something to be said, and Brian said it beautifully, of sticking with someone to trust the process. Do most doctors have a moldy algorithm? I don't know. I do. And it's something that I've really put a lot of blood, stuff, sweat and tears into and have found. It really applies great to a lot of my cases. But, you know, if someone comes into a space and.

They. They're not believing that an issue could still be their finished basement that they remediated two years ago, but still has a very high humidity, then we need to talk about that and we need to navigate that together. So what I'm getting at as I'm rambling on, my apologies, is work with people, trust the process, like Brian said. But honestly, if you're getting red flags and something's not feeling right, that's totally fine, go elsewhere. But the more hands that you have in the pot, too, can cause a lot more chaos. I've worked with other practitioners who've been brought onto the case at the same time as I have, and some of their interventions caused a lot of chaos and a lot of negative reactions to treatments that should have otherwise been well tolerated. So.

While I always encourage people to shop around and find the fit, I just think your statement is really appropriate and really resonates and it's really important.

Well, thank you. I wasn't doing this for compliments, but I'll take it. Everyone, you heard it. My president tells me that I had a good thought. I'm going to take it.

Okay. So I think we covered a lot of kind of the mold stuff. I. Or the general mold stuff. So one other thing that we were gonna talk about is specifically kind of the impact of mold on children. Pediatric side of things, I think, especially. I know a lot of my listeners have kids, right. And so, you know, we're all, like, stressed out about our kids. I mean, I. My wife is. Is pregnant right now. She's having, you know, some sort of kind of rash breakout that occurred randomly out of nowhere. They gave her this, you know, this some sort of thing to take for it. And we're very hesitant because we're concerned, you know, is it going to cause any problems with the baby, this or that. Like it's always like the thing that's top of mind, you know, and, and I almost feel like we take more care when it's not us and it's our kids otherwise. But with that said, it's okay. Does all this stuff present the same? Is it different? How do we know if our kids are having some sort of impact? Because maybe we aren't. Like their immune system isn't fully developed yet. They might show before us potentially. I'm just throwing this out there as an idea. There's just all these things on the kid front and I know that you've been doing some research on this stuff and we were talking about there's some pretty interesting things that you just mentioned to me. So can we just kind of like dive into this and we'll kind of use this for the last piece of the episode and we'll kind of do it there?

Yeah, for sure. For sure. So what I'll tell people to kind of start off with like little kiddos nuggets I call them. I hope that's okay. Little nuggets.

It's not okay.

It's not okay. Okay. I apologize. I believe in their autonomy. So these little folks, when they're really young, their symptoms are going to look a lot different because not only are maybe their detox pathways like super clean and you know, haven't had too many challenges, hopefully in the beginning of their life, their process of dealing with mold and mycotoxins might look a little bit different than like a 6 year old or a 13 year old or something along those lines. Similarly, they're also going to, and I say this with air quotes, report their symptoms differently. 6 month old can't tell you anything other than maybe crying for colic and mom noticing a skin rash versus, you know, a six year old might be able to say, you know, my nose runs and sometimes I get head pain when I'm at school versus a 13 year old might have a little bit more self awareness. So the way things get reported, which ultimately impacts how things are perceived to be manifest by a physician, are going to differ depending on the, the stage of growth with kids.

In general, when you're dealing with, you know, the younger kids, I would probably say under two, when they're a little bit preverbal you're going to see more GI stuff and rash stuff. And the GI could be like loose stools or colicky or you hear them kind of snorking like clearing their throat a little bit more in certain environments or after certain foods. And I'll get into that in one second. And then in the kind of pediatric mid range, so kind of starting of the grade school process, headaches, vision changes, behavioral issues. And this is backed by research and I would love to chat about that in a second.

Rash stuff, fatigue and a lot of kind of like timing to things. So they might have a headache when they come home from school, but when they go to dad's house for the weekend they're okay. So paying attention to timing with these things. And then finally with teens, as they're getting their hormones going too, we're going to see potentially changes with menstrual issues with younger females. And then on top of it, the GI stuff, the neuro behavioral stuff and the skin stuff. So it kind of gets.

How do I say.

Lumped on or kind of the symptom possibility grows as the kiddo gets older and older. But what we have seen is that kids tend to be pretty darn resilient when it comes to this stuff. I found that when you get kids out of the moldy environment and you work the detox with them, a lot of them have their issues shake out within a few months. And that's, you know, not including if there's a history of Lyme or some type of confounding issue. But kids tend to do really well. But what I think people forget and that they don't realize is that when a baby is fresh out of uterus in utero, so they've been born, they've been carried by mom, and if mom is living in a moldy environment while she's pregnant, those mycotoxins can cross the placenta and get into the baby's systemic circulation. And the thing with mole with mycotoxins is once they're in systemic circulation, they can get deposited anywhere over the body. And this doesn't matter if it's coming in through food or if it's coming through the umbilical cord, or if it's coming through breast milk or if it's coming through inhalation. All of these ways eventually get the mycotoxin into the blood system. There is a study that was done in Nigerian kids and unfortunately it was a post mortem study. So on autopsy they found aflatoxin in the brain tissue of These kiddos and in the liver and in the kidneys, in the high fat areas of the body. So they said, you know, it's likely due to food. And here is the brain twist of all. You can go into the literature and you'll never see much by the way of mycotoxins in the air will make you sick. But what we do have are animal studies that we do our same drug testing on for humans. Animal studies that show that inhalation through the nose into the lungs of mycotoxins and have the highest bioavailability, meaning it can get into the blood system and so much easier compared to skin and even injections into the stomach. And again, these are the animals we drug test on. So if we take a step back and we say, we know inhalation is a big deal, and then we see these studies of kids who have depositing of mycotoxins into their brain, crossing the blood brain barrier. At that point, it doesn't matter if it's coming through food or potentially inhalation. What we know is it's getting to all these problem issues. So what we've seen is that mycotoxins can cause neural tube defects in kiddos. So leading up to birth, and that is more from like a food study. And then we've seen a lot of things about how kids, early on in life, the earlier and longer of an exposure that they have to mold in the environment places them at a higher risk of a deficient IQ score. And the longer that they're in that split pace, excuse me, place makes the IQ score even worse. So we have these phenomenal pieces of clinical data that really show these lasting neurological issues for kiddos and even GI issues. One of the trippier ones that I think I've seen that, and this ties back into the histamine and allergy thing, guys, is that there was a study that was done with school age children who were exposed to, I think it was Aspergillus fumigatus or Aspergillus niger. It was one of the two and it was in a school. And they found that the kids who were exposed had a higher predilection or a higher development of all these funky allergies that they didn't have any exposure to otherwise, like horse dander. And these kids had never seen a horse before. But when they did the testing, they also found that the kids did not have an allergy to the mold. So there was something about the exposure to the mold that primed them to be reactive to all These other things, which could theoretically be food issues and intolerances too. And you know, there's, there's tons of animal literature and there's not as much human literature because it's not ethical to pump someone through all the mycotoxins, you know.

Right.

But my gosh, when you actually sit down and you read some of these studies that are retrospective on kids, like, it makes you want to cry. It breaks your heart because these kids are having such a disservice done to them. And especially when you think even longer and harder about the concept that a lot of the schools that they're in are flat roofed buildings and teachers actually make up one of the bigger populations of my patient load.

Yeah, the school thing is rough. I've done three school inspections over my time. Most schools don't want you looking through this wall.

Oh, no, no, no.

But I've done three. And they were more like, they weren't like formal schools. They were more like kind of like daycare type of things. You know, not like an actual school, but same concept. You have a place, you're bringing kids. It's a, it's more of a commercial building where they go.

Right.

And everyone was a disaster. I mean, it was, they're not good, you know, the, the maintenance is being done. It's not, it's basically not being done. It's like, I don't know if it's just indicative of how we treat our entire education system as a whole or we don't really prioritize it that much.

And part of that is the buildings that all the, you know, all the educating happens in. Like, I don't know if that's what it is, but it's bad. I mean, we tested H vac systems and one in particular, it was like, it was kind of like a hybrid sort of school daycare kind of thing. And it had like six or seven different rooms and each room was for like a different age group. You know, some of it was more toddler, some of it was like up to kindergarten level, first grade level, and went through and did testing the air conditioning systems and like it was bad, you know, and this is, this is what's blowing out all the time. It's tough. I try not to go too heavy into the school side of things because I feel like we're pretty. Our hands are kind of tied on what we can actually do with that for, you know, sort of taking our kids out of school and controlling their environment.

Right.

And I feel like if we can at least control like Our, our space where we spend the bulk of our time, then you're cutting out a large, you know, portion of the load that, that someone is having to deal with. It's not downplaying like what that impact might have on someone. Like I get that. I've even had, I've had clients who basically bought like high end air filtration units like IQ Airs or Intellipures and actually put them in their kids classrooms.

Right.

So listen guys, I'm going to pay this. I want two of these in this room. I'm going to pay for. It's fine. Like they want, I want them in here. And they've like gone to that extent to have that happen. The schools, I mean they're not going to like sure you want to do something to help clean the air. Like go ahead. They don't, they typically sound like they don't care that much. So I don't know. I've heard that happen just like anecdotally, but this. Yeah, go ahead.

There was a really hopeful moment in my heart when we had some of the COVID CARES act come through because part of the CARES act was improving. There was funding for improving air handling within schools. And there I had a couple of teachers at the time where I begged them, I said, please speak to the superintendent about securing the money from the CARES act because you know, if you're reacting to this then there's 30 to 40 depending on the classroom kids under you who are also being impacted. And you know, it would have been amazing to have, I hope some school out there took advantage of the CARES act and, and improve their air quality and their school because it's, you know, I have stories, I won't get into them. But you know, and I'm sure you do too, Brian. It certainly sounds like you do.

So yeah, it's rough. I mean the big thing with all this and I, I was trying to like come back is like, it can seem very, very overwhelming. And it's like this whole thing of like, well, I can't do anything about it. It's everywhere. It's the end of, you know, why am I even trying, you know, and so it's not to be all doom and gloom and stuff. It's just like awareness. I think if you understand like where, where the potential is for things and you can start making decisions that are going to help mitigate those potentials. Right. And like we live in a toxic world. And I say this a lot too to clients. Like you're not gonna, you're always Gonna be exposed to something like we have, we have to get that out of our mind. That like we're gonna create this like, you know, hermetically sealed bubble that's perfect and that there's nothing going on. The world is toxic. Our bodies are built to help process that. Right. It's just sometimes they get overworked for whatever reason. This is my like, you know, non.

Medical explanation of what's going on. Like sometimes they just get overworked and they can't keep up. And so if we can just reduce the amount of load that keeps hitting us, then we can give ourselves a chance to kind of catch up and then we can help ourselves do that a little bit with a little support from whatever it might be, supplements, diabetes, whatever it is, and give ourselves a body chance to do what they're actually built to do. They're actually built to get rid of this stuff. It's just we're overloading them sometimes.

Yeah, 100% agree. And to follow up on the school thing, it's three seasons that kids are in school. There's an opportunity to kind of move towards recovery during the summer. Classrooms in most cases are being changed every year. And schools, depending on the school that they're attending, you know, every two to six years, it's new school, it's a new space. So, you know, and it's, it's not even a third of the life that students are in this space. It's a third of their life, five days a week, you know, nine months of the year. So don't get too weighted down, you know, and I think you're right, supporting detox is going to be a really important core component of that and the less exposure that you can have, the better and the quicker recovery.

Yeah. So real cool. Let's wrap on one more thing and then we can be done. So like supporting detox. So like my view on this, this is that we need to be detoxing all the time, always, regardless of if there's a mole problem or not, because there's all these other things that we're exposed to. Right. So, you know, the same way that you have a workout regimen, like I'm working out X number of days of the week because it benefits me in this, this way and that way. I filter all my water because why the hell would I drink water out of a, out of a faucet when I know it's in the pipes yet I'm not going to be doing other things. Right. Like I feel like just a general form of detoxing should be happening for everyone, regardless of mold issue or not. And if, if, first off, if you agree with that, and then second, if, if so, what would you say? What is a general form of detox someone can do that maybe isn't necessarily like mold toxin specific, but would help with that, among other things.

Yeah. So I think that everyone should be detoxing or supporting their detox to the best of their ability. Sometimes there's something to be said about pulsing support for detox. So like a couple of weeks on, couple of weeks off, that's also reasonable. Detox, however, is there's a lot of moving pieces and I think people think, well, I can just do like a detox shake or a juice fast and I will be good to go and I won't have to worry about it. And the reality is there's so many moving parts and, and sometimes all I have at the phrase for is rate limiting steps. Sometimes there's one thing that might not be operating properly and it gums up the whole entire work and flow. And so if you're someone who's going to try to detox their body regularly, you really want to make sure that you lube the pipes, you open the dams before you push on the detox because you can worsen your symptoms if you're not appropriately set up to detox. That's kind of my big disclaimer for folks. And again, this is not medical advice. Please do not go treat yourself using any of this advice. However, one of the things that I personally use and I use in some of my clients relatively safely.

Has been nac. And that is a precursor to glutathione. Glutathione is a master antioxidant. And you know, now that I'm saying this, I'm kind of kicking myself because I believe the, the FDA is pulling back on.

I was just gonna ask. Yeah.

And you know, I have not seen.

I have seen long term use of NAC at high doses and many folks be safe. However, the FDA is doing their own own discovery on that right now. And it will sound like it's going to be something that's going to have to be prescribed by a physician, which is fine. But you know, detox support and doing more precursor work rather than like wham, bam, push the detox thing. I think that's how you get into trouble. But if you're someone who's going to increase your water, increase a multivitamin and increase your fiber, with that you can get pretty far, you know, with with just that alone for folks. So, you know, I. Detox is unique and it needs to be done cautiously. You need to do prep work with detox, but for general day to day health and support, you know, there's nothing like some good clear water and some really great high quality fiber just to kind of start the process.

Us. Yeah. That's awesome. All right. We've been doing this for a while, I think. I think this is good. I think we did a lot of good stuff. Is there anything else that you just kind of like in final would want to throw out there to wrap things up.

Other, other than, you know, where to find me and all that. But I think though, the one thing that I really like telling many people as I can is find the help you need. You're gonna need social support, meaning like friends and family, anyone who's going to trust and believe and support you. One of the hardest things about mold illness is how psychologically damning it is and socially isolating. Just because you have a mold issue does not make you a dirty person. It does not make you a pariah. You are valid, you are worthwhile, you're a good person. Mold just happened to come into your life. So if you have people in your life who are gaslighting you, which I see all the time, you know, it's okay to say no and to step back from those folks and really lean into the people who are going to offer you the support and the unconditional positive regard as you go through this. Because the core component to your being your home, your home is your touchstone. It's the place you go to be safe. It's the place to go to share memories and love and all these things. That is something that is so integral to us. Animals need shelter. We do too. And it's when our shelter and our core becomes shaken that a lot of the other things that.

We build upon that really gets shaken down to its core, its foundation, so to speak. So I just want to tell people like, you're not alone. Don't get too caught up in everyone else's opinions of, you know, throw out all your possessions and never go into the house again. And all that kind of stuff really work. Find a team that works for you, find a social support team that works for you and really just understand that it is your own path and what someone else has experienced in all this is not necessarily what you're going to experience. And just try to keep your head up and there's plenty of people around.

To help you guys out Absolutely. I second all of that. Not that I needed to, but I do anyway. All right, so let's talk about where people. We mentioned your Instagram at the top at Life After Molding. You also have a kind of a guide that you have for folks to just kind of do like an initial sweep maybe of their environment, get a feel for stuff. What's the deal with that?

Yeah, so I have a e booklet called Mold Prevention 101, and it works a little bit like a checklist. So let's say you got your home remediated, and it's a little bit of a report card for you to go through your home and say, okay, no holes down here, no sweating pipes. Okay. French drains look like they're working great. So it's. It's kind of how to keep your home safe or maintain it as safe. It's not going to tell you about how to remediate. You gotta leave that to the professionals. But that is available for free. If you sign up for my email list at my website, Life After Mold. And in addition to Instagram, you can find me on. Oh, geez, Facebook, Pinterest. I'm working on getting that off the ground. YouTube. And of course, if you happen to be a provider or even if you just want to support what ICI is doing, please feel free to head over to ici.org and there's all kinds of information about what we do there and how we service folks. And even, I mean, Brian's listed over on the get help page over there. So it's a good crew of people. And if you're a provider looking to it, expand your understanding and knowledge, please, please consider reaching out to us.

Awesome. Well, thank you for taking time out of your very busy day and your presidential duties. I'm sure there's a lot.

But thanks for taking some time to chat. And I feel like people are really going to like this. At least I'm. You know what I'm telling you, if you're listening to this, you probably liked it. So if you did, you should maybe go leave a review. And thanks, Lauren, for. Or thank Lauren for joining us. So. All right, thanks. We'll talk to you soon, Lauren.

Oh, thank you so much. Been such an honor, Brian. Have a great day.

You too. Bye. Bye.

Bye.

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 piece. Podcasts. It'll help spread the word to those who really need it the most.