Is Mold Making You Sick? Symptoms, Testing, and the Path to Healing

Have you ever wondered if you may have been exposed to mold, or have you had symptoms or health conditions such as recurring infections or testing positive for HPV virus, and it's not going away no matter what you do? Things are not getting better, they're only getting worse. Well, in this episode, I'm going to be talking about mold toxicity and the most common symptoms that it presents with, as well as the best way to truly test and accurately identify whether you have mold toxicity, and then the important aspects of a protocol to help you to detoxify mold toxins. So welcome if you're new to How Humans Heal. I'm Dr. Doni Wilson, and This is such an important topic, mold toxicity. It's something that I've been seeing more and more and more often in my practice. In fact, 5 years ago, I was seeing it so often that I decided to do a full mold toxicity certification program so that I could be offering my patients the latest, greatest, up-to-date, and effective Detoxification Protocol for mold toxicity. And even definitely to this day, I'm identifying mold toxicity in my patients all the time. And so, and most of the people where I help them to identify mold toxicity, they would have had never known that they had mold toxicity. Usually people are not actually seeing the mold or noticing the mold, and so they don't realize they have mold toxicity. And unfortunately, in the standard medical approach, in standard medical care, they are not identifying or treating mold toxicity in most instances. And so this could explain why you may be experiencing health issues and symptoms for a long time without getting better. This actually could be a hidden underlying cause of those health issues. So let's talk first about what are the— some of the common symptoms and conditions that help me to start to identify mold toxicity for my patients. The most common symptoms are headaches and sinus congestion. Now, there's a lot of things that can cause headaches and sinus congestion, but if it's something where it's coming brand new, right? Usually it's out of nowhere, or it's been going on and it's not getting better, right? You get a sinus infection or allergies causing congestion, and you treat it, and yet it keeps coming back, keeps coming back. Uh, that would be a common sign that we should be looking for mold exposure. I also very often hear patients talk about having a rash. Now, this could be any kind of rash, and oftentimes it's a rare rash. Like, yes, it could be eczema. Yes, it could be psoriasis. But a lot of times it's a rash that most times a dermatologist is like, I don't know what to call that except for an inflammatory rash. And you're getting treated with usually hydrocortisone or some sort of topical steroid. And yet the actual rash is not going away. It could also be hives. A lot of patients with mold exposure experience hives that are not going away, but it could literally be just random red splotches that are coming up on your hands or your face or anywhere on your body, and that could be a sign that you've been exposed to mold, but not always. Not everybody gets headaches, not everybody gets rashes, but the other common scenario that I see is autoimmunity, and allergies. Not necessarily both, right? Some people may have been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, whether that's Hashimoto's or psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis or any other kind of autoimmune pattern. Or a person might be experiencing allergies, like lots of increased allergies during spring and fall pollen season, as well as allergies in their day-to-day life where there's either sneezing, congestion, hay fever, uh, just more than usual, or even an aggravation of asthma. So if you're seeing an increase in your allergy symptoms, we need to start thinking about mold as well, as well as any other increase in infections, whether that's a sinus infection to a bladder infection to a digestive imbalance like overgrowing yeast, molds, or the Candida. Or SIBO, for example, right? Like if you start noticing overgrowth of bacteria and yeast in your gut, then we need to be thinking about is there some mold exposure that's behind the scenes? Also vaginal infections, vaginal yeast, vaginal HPV, or let alone HPV anywhere else in your body, low-grade HPV or high-grade HPV. Because what happens is the mold lowers your immune function. So you become susceptible to other infections, whether those are viral infections, bacterial infections, yeast infections, or all of the above. So if you start going, why am I keep getting some sort of infection? We have to be thinking, is there underlying mold exposure? Also could be that you're experiencing sleep issues like not, not being able to get to sleep, not staying asleep, not getting good sleep ongoing night after night. Weight gain or sometimes weight loss, but I would say more commonly weight gain and bloating. Also fatigue, anxiety, and depression are very common with mold exposure. So overall, if you're just feeling awful in many different ways and you're like, what the heck is going on? And it's not showing up on your blood work, right? Likely you've already been to the doctor and maybe they diagnosed an autoimmune condition or allergies. But it's not getting better. You're having to be on an antihistamine or an anti-immune, like an immune suppressant, long-term, or antibiotics over and over again. We have to start thinking, wait a minute, what's going on with your immune system? Why is your immune system so disrupted? Why is it instead of protecting you from infections, you're becoming susceptible to infections and susceptible to autoimmunity, allergies, and even cancer? Mold toxins can be behind risk of cancer as well. So these are some of the things that make me start thinking, wait a minute, is mold going on behind the scenes here? And the other thing is I look for certain patterns in patients' other lab results that I'm looking at already. For example, in your blood work, there's not a blood test for mold toxins. So unfortunately, it's not like that's going to be found in regular blood work. Even when, when I order specialty blood work, it's very hard to identify mold toxicity there. But what I look for is if a person has elevated CRP, which means they have high inflammation in their body. Also, if they have elevated homocysteine, homocysteine, that's especially if it's above 10, makes me think that methylation is not working well. And often that's caused by stress, inflammation, and toxicity. So we start to go, what's going on behind the scenes that's making it difficult for your body to use B vitamins effectively? And that's what raises the homocysteine. Also, in a neurotransmitter panel, which I am often recommending for my patients, on a neurotransmitter panel we might see low neurotransmitters with an elevated PEA. And when the PEA is elevated, It's most often from a deficiency of iron and/or a mold toxicity. So if I see elevated PEA, then I start thinking, where's the mold? Where's the mold? Also, if we do an organic acid panel, which is a urine metabolism panel that we use to assess for mitochondrial function, if we see mitochondrial dysfunction, one of the most common causes is mold exposure. And if I'm looking at your gut health, we look for food sensitivities. If we see severe leaky gut, food sensitivities, and also disruption of the gut microbiome, so we start seeing overgrowth of bacteria or Candida or both in the stool analysis, then that also starts to make me think, hey, wait a minute, what's throwing off your microbiome? Now, the microbiome can be thrown off by stress and not digesting food well and high refined processed foods or high sugar intake. You know, there's different things that can disrupt the gut microbiome, but that should resolve relatively easily with antimicrobial protocol. If it's not resolving relatively quickly with a good antimicrobial protocol, then that says to me, is there mold behind the scenes that's holding us back, preventing you from getting better, because that's what mold exposure tends to do, is it disrupts the other microbiome in the body, including the gut and the vagina and other— and your skin, for that matter. And it makes it so that it's harder and harder for your body to heal. So those are some of the ways that I start to pick up on it. And I see patients— I have patients from around the world, so I especially see a lot of mold exposure in Florida and Dubai. Those are probably the two most common locations that I've identified mold exposure. But this is the thing, is mold exposure can really happen anywhere. So even if you're— no matter where you're located, if you have some of these things going on with your health, I would not— I would want to test for mold toxicity because I've seen patients in the New York City area, Connecticut, New Jersey. I see patients in France to Arizona, all having experienced mold toxicity. So in California. So if you— what I usually say to patients is, are you aware of or have you ever seen mold in your home? Where have you been living even for the past 30 years or in your work environment? Because mold, when you're exposed to mold toxins, they can stay in your body for 30 years. So it might not be that you're being exposed to mold where you are located right now. It could have been an apartment you lived in 5 years ago or an office you worked in 10 years ago. And still the mold toxins are with you in your body. And we need to help your body to clear them out. This is the thing, is once we know you have mold toxins, we can help clear them out safely and effectively. It's better to find out and do something about it. Than to leave it there, leaving you susceptible to all kinds of different health issues. So even if a patient says, gosh, no, I've never, I've never noticed mold, how would I know if I got exposed to mold? I would say we want to start checking your current environment. So check under the sink, check the air conditioning units. Those are the two of the most common places is the bathroom around the sink or the bathtub, in the tiles, and around the air conditioning unit, and in the basement. Those are really common places for mold to appear, but sometimes it's hidden and you can't see it. That's when we would want to have a mold inspector come, but please keep in mind that not all inspectors have the best training in how to identify mold. So I really recommend that you contact a mold inspector that's very professional, very efficient at identifying mold exposure. And I'll put a link in the resources down below to a company that I've recommended for patients. And I know that they are highly likely to identify mold if it's present. That's the thing. You don't want to just find a company that ends up missing it. You want to find a company that's going to identify it. And they even have now some mold inspectors who are using dogs who are trained to identify molds in your home. So even if someone does a quick test, even sometimes you can do a home test, but sometimes it gets missed on the home test, or it gets missed by the company that comes to service your air ducts. They— be sure to get your air ducts cleaned, by the way, and the filters changed. If you have a central air system and air filters in your, in your home, make sure you're changing them on a regular basis. I even like to change mine more often than they recommend because I want to make sure I get the mold and the dust cleared out of my air ducts and my air filters. But even if that service company is saying they don't see mold, I would still If you're having major symptoms in your body, I would go to a specific mold inspection company. And again, I'll put that resource down below. What if you tested positive for high-risk HPV virus and you don't want to wait around and see if it's going to go away on its own? For many women, high-risk HPV can linger for years, taking a toll on their health and their peace of mind. I'm Dr. Doni Wilson, HPV expert, expert, and I've been helping women for over 24 years to clear HPV to negative. I created the HPV Kickstart program as a simple, effective way to support your body's natural ability to clear HPV. This is not about waiting and hoping. This is about taking action. In fact, thousands of women have regained control of their health by following my protocol and You can too. You deserve to take back control of your health. Join us today. Now, what I usually do is find that it's most efficient to first do a urine mycotoxin test on yourself because you can do a urine— this was not always available, that, by the way. They only came out with urine testing for mold toxins maybe 5 or 7 years ago. And there's only 2 labs in the United States that do the accurate testing for mold toxins in your urine. And you're not going to find these through your standard doctor's office. They're just not even going to know. And it's not going to happen at Quest or LabCorp. You have to go to a specialty lab. There's Real Time Labs and there's Vibrant Labs that I've seen give accurate mycotoxin results. So it's called mycotoxins is mold toxins, and there's a bunch of different possible mold toxins, and they can vary based on the type of mold that you were exposed to. And a lot of times when you're exposed to mold, you're exposed to more than one type of mold, and you're going to have more than one type of mold toxin in your body. So you want to make sure that you're using one of these really high-quality urine mycotoxin panels. It's a first morning urine that you send out., and they will show you exactly how much mold toxins in your body. Now, if you run that and it's all in the green, they didn't see any mold toxins, which is luckily how mine came back when I did it the first time a few years ago. Then you don't have to dig deeper and look for— have an inspection because it's, you know, at that point I would trust that it's very unlikely that you have mold toxins and we're going to look at other potential causes for your issues, for your symptoms. But if your mold toxin panel. And those mold toxin panels are $500 to $600 depending. So if it's worth it to me, in my mind, if you're dealing with this severe symptoms and going through such so many other treatments for these health issues, it's worth it, $500 or $600 to know whether mold toxins are working behind the scenes. And if so, if it tests positive, then it could be worth it to hire a mold inspector who's going to be able to come into your home or your workspace and look deeper to identify where the mold is. And then they would make recommendations for a team to come in and do the remediation. And sometimes, depending on the extent of the mold in the location, remediation in your home, it could take months, if not over a year, I've seen. And so it's quite an expensive project. But if you know you have mold toxins in your body, then it becomes mandatory, right? It's kind of like all you— we— even most patients cannot continue living in the environment with the mold because by that point, often their symptoms are so severe— the sinusitis, the anxiety, the fatigue, all of that. And what I want to also— and I'm going to be going into how I help patients, but what I can tell you is the cases I've seen turn around— amazing, amazing turnaround from severe symptoms, even severe neurological symptoms, rashes, infections. And these patients, we've been able to help them to clear out the mold toxins safely and effectively and get back to their real lives. And sometimes that may be 3 to 6 months, sometimes 12 months, depending on the extent and the severity.. But I want you to know that once we identify it and we help you deal with it, right, you remediate in your space where the mold is. So you get the mold out and then we work to make sure we help your body get the mold out. Because this is the thing, is these molds that are in your— could be in your environment. And by the way, I've also had a lot of— I've worked with a lot of students, children who've been in schools. The school building was moldy. And so I can help children to detoxify from mold. And I see also patients who work old buildings like old churches, which is very common to have mold in the old building, including old churches. And so we want to be able to help not only clear out the building, but some cases that they're— the landlord or the owner of the building isn't maybe not going to invest in remodeling, right, a school or a church. And so you might then have to make a decision about how do you get yourself out of that building so you're not continually exposed. And, and I really want to emphasize that we have to get the mold toxins out of your body, because what happens is when the mold is present, it's spewing out all these invisible toxins and these mold toxins. It's not like you have to come in physical contact with the mold. The mold toxins are in the air and it's— yes, you're going to breathe it in, but it's not even just about breathing them in. They go right through your skin to get into your body. So these mold toxins, even if you— if there's mold in the bathroom and you shut the door, the mold toxins are still going to seep around outside of that doorway into the air. You won't be able to see it, and it's going to be getting into your body without you realizing it. So, and it can get even into your clothing, into your furniture and belongings. And so if you had mold exposure exposure. Sometimes it means having to get rid of some of your items if they have been exposed to the mold, because otherwise it's just going to be a repeating pattern. So sadly, sometimes it means a lot of loss to go through to clear out that mold and finally be able to get yourself into a nice clean space, clean air, clean everything so that you're not— no longer being exposed. And it can be really tricky sometimes if you're living in an apartment to be able to identify, or finding a new home, you become extra careful to be like, how do I make sure this apartment or this home doesn't have mold? Because you went through so much to get rid of the mold toxins. So that's part of this process, is helping you to recover, to feel better, and to be able to get into a safe space going forward so that it doesn't happen again. And so when it comes to helping to detoxify from mold, what I like to emphasize is that the goal is to gradually help your body clear the mold toxins without you feeling worse. A lot of times people assume that if you're going to detox from something, that it means you have to feel worse before you get better. And I like to emphasize that You don't have to feel worse than you already feel. You already feel not good. And we can— the other thing I like to emphasize is it's possible to detoxify mold using natural substances. It doesn't have to require medications or synthetic substances. So this is where I really, as much as possible, attempt to help get the mold toxins out without using other substance, other pharmaceuticals as much as possible. Sometimes it's necessary depending on the extent. Sometimes we have to use an antibiotic or, or steroid or other substances, antihistamines, until we can calm down the immune system. But in the meantime, we want to be helping to support your natural detoxification pathways and use natural substances to help remove the mold. So the way to think about detoxification of mold is, is same, similar to how we think about detoxification of any toxins, is to support our natural detoxification pathways. So in the human body, the way we get toxins out is through our urine, through our stool, through our sweat, and through our breath. And so, and sometimes from mold exposure, it ends up causing more dehydration or imbalance of your electrolytes in your body. She can cause constipation and irregular bowel movements. So we have to identify that and start there is where I would recommend to say, how do we make sure you're getting good clean water with electrolytes on a regular basis through the day? You're going to be amazed how much better you feel with just optimizing your hydration and then also optimizing bowel regularity. It's so important that you're having at least one hour, not if not two or three bowel movements every day. And so That becomes my first priority is helping to regulate your bowel movements. Again, using natural substances whenever possible, such as magnesium oxide or citrate to get the bowels moving. And then we can also use fibers, certain fibers to help the bowels move as long as the fiber is not going to aggravate the bowel dysbiosis, right? Because fiber can feed the bacteria. And if we have an overgrowth of bacteria, We don't want to make that worse, but there are certain fibers we can use that are not going to aggravate dysbiosis but will help bind the mold toxins and keep your bowels moving. Two favorites are ground flaxseeds. So you could start with ground— buy the flaxseeds already ground and keep them in your refrigerator to keep them fresh. Even like a half a teaspoon or teaspoon a day. And see how that feels to your body, or chia seeds. And also, uh, you can use something called SunFiber. There's a supplement, uh, you can find on my website. Any supplements I mentioned you can find through my website at drdoni.com. But there's a fiber called SunFiber that can be used to help regulate the bowels without overfeeding bacteria. So that's part of it. We can also use sweating, so we can use Sauna therapy. Studies show that even 30 to 45 minutes of sweating, such as in a sauna, twice a week can help to detoxify mold toxins. And so, of course, if you do sweating, you're going to even need to make sure you stay hydrated even more because now you're losing fluid and you got to replace it. But sauna therapy, such as infrared sauna therapy, can be very helpful. And then we can also use binders. Now, this is where I often see a lot of confusion because there's a lot of different talk out there about different binders. And it really depends on the— actually, the type of mold toxin that you have. So I would want to look at your mold toxin results and see which mold toxins do you have and then determine the best binder. My favorite that I usually like to start with is Yucca root, yucca, Y-U-C-C-A, yucca root is compared to cholestyramine, which is a medication that is used to bind mold toxins. But the problem with cholestyramine is it also binds your nutrients. And to me, if you have to take a substance that binds mold toxins but also binds your nutrients, now it's hard to stay ahead of the nutrients. Whereas with yucca root, it doesn't bind your nutrients. Yucca root can bind the mold toxins without binding your nutrients. Makes it much easier to take it, and I find it to be very effective. You can either get yucca root in a capsule by itself, or there are formulas that have yucca root along with other binders such as fulvic acid, humic and fulvic acid, as well as sometimes combined with chlorella. Um, and those could be good combinations. As well as some types of mold require more of an activated charcoal. So you can get activated charcoal. I tend to use supplements that have them in combination as much as possible because it's going to make it easier for you to take them instead of having, you know, different supplements at different times a day. We try to be efficient and say, hey, let's find the binder formula that you can take even once a day, away from your other nutrients. If we're, if we're adding in charcoal, we're going to need to put it away from your other nutrients because charcoal, clay and charcoal will bind to your other nutrients, especially your minerals like calcium and iron. So it's important if you're taking anything with charcoal or clay to put it at a different, like at least 2 hours away from your thyroid medication and away from your minerals. Like calcium and iron and other minerals. And I usually try to put them, like, let's say, a couple hours after dinner. So it's by itself in your digestion while you sleep would be even better. So this is where when I'm working with patients, I really help them go through their supplement chart and figure out what time of day are you going to take this, what time of day you're going to take that. And it needs to be very individualized. Based on your body, your nutrient deficiencies, your health concerns, and your type of mold toxins. Right. So that's one of the things. If you're looking for help with this, please, you know, trying to do it on your own is very tricky and you want to make sure that you're being effective. So I would say it's really worth it to, you know, have my— have me order the urine mold toxin panel for you and then guide you how to do these supplements, including the supplements that are binders, as well as we don't start— we don't stop there. I know a lot of people will just think, oh, I'm just going to take this charcoal and that's good enough. And a lot of times it's not good enough. So if you're not feeling better, then not only do we have to make sure you're not taking charcoal with your nutrients and your food, but also we need to go beyond that and look at testing for mitochondrial function. Do your mitochondria need more help? That would be the organic acid panel shows us that, and then we can add more mitochondrial support. How about your gut? Is there gut dysbiosis? So we need to do a stool PCR analysis and look at your gut microbiome and address that with antimicrobials. And I use herbal antimicrobials to address the gut microbiome as much as possible, as well as bacillus or spore-forming bacteria that are going to be able to help be traffic directors for the microbiome. So that is part of the protocol, as well as antioxidants, because one of the best ways to protect yourself from the mold toxins while you're getting them out of your body— you got to protect yourself from them while they're there. And we use various antioxidants for that, from glutathione and NAC. We can also use protection for the liver, such as milk thistle. And so we look, we look to use antioxidants, even vitamin C, zinc, selenium, right, and CoQ10. And we also use resveratrol and other substances, natural substances that help protect from mold toxins while you work on getting the mold toxins out of your body. So it can be a complex protocol. Which is why it's helpful to have a practitioner help guide you, because otherwise it can get overwhelming and not be effective, and then your— the effects of the mold toxin are lasting longer than they need to. So I hope that helps to give you a sense of this. And those of you who may be listening in because you've tested positive for high-risk HPV and an abnormal pap smear, or high-risk HPV somewhere else in your body, then I recommend to, you know, let me know if you think this might be part of your case, and I can help you investigate further. Because I can't tell you how many times if I see high-risk HPV that's not going away easily, then we dig deeper and end up identifying that there is mold toxicity happening. And sometimes we find other toxins too, like glyphosate and metals, and we need to do even a more complex detoxification process, or even, um, Cases like breast implant illness can happen, and that can overlap with mold toxicity. So if you have a sense that this may be going on for you, please know that I can help you with this. This is something that I usually work with people one-on-one. I do also have a— that I designed a 14-day detox program, which I think is amazing. I've seen amazing turnarounds even in a 14-day detox program. So if you're thinking, hey, maybe I just need like a sort of a quick detox, you could start with the 14-day detox program. But if you're really thinking this might be mold or other environmental toxins, again, I would say it's better to do the testing. And there are also, by the way, the same urine mycotoxin testing. We can do urine testing for glyphosate, urine testing or other environmental toxins. So this way we know exactly which toxins we're dealing with. And that's important because then we're going to want to make sure to support your body specifically to clear those toxins we identify. And so— and then we can also recheck it 3 to 6 months later and see how much progress we've made and how much more we need to do to get you all the way to healthy. And so I just want you to know that that's absolutely possible.. And if you feel like this might be part of your case, then reach out so we can plan a time so I can help you. So I hope that really helps you get much better sense of if you hear someone mentioning mold toxicity. Now you know what they're talking about and now you know the best test to do and, and a sense of what an effective protocol to clear mold toxins should include and what it should look like. And what it sounds like when you're talking to a practitioner who has real experience helping with this. Because unfortunately, I see too often that practitioners don't have enough experience and, and might not be guiding you in an efficient way, an effective way. So, uh, please consider me a resource if you are in this situation, or if you would like to investigate more the possibility of mold toxins and Again, thanks so much for listening in to How Humans Heal. Please, if this is your first time, I welcome you to subscribe and join me for the next episode. And I look forward to connecting with you soon. Take care. Thanks for listening to How Humans Heal. If you liked this episode, leave a rating and a review. And for more resources, visit drdoni.com.