32. Mold: The Undercover Toxin Impacting Your Health with Dr. Jill Crista

Welcome to my podcast.

I'm Dr. Nicole Kane, a naturopathic doctor with a master's in clinical psychology and a former anxiety sufferer turned anxiety freedom rebel. Hi, Everybody. This is Dr. Nicole, and I am so beyond excited. Today I have somebody who I really admire who's doing incredible things in the integrative medicine, the naturopathic world, and it's absolutely incredible that we get to learn from her today, to hear from her today and make sure that you stick around to the end, because she has some really super cool stuff that you're not going to want to miss. And I also get to share with you a little bit about what I learned about myself from that process, and so make sure that you take advantage of these super cool resources. Today, we're going to be talking about the relationship between anxiety in particular, but really brain health and mold. And so if you have any sort of an inkling that maybe you've had a mold exposure or if you deal with brain fog, that digestive symptoms, immune system symptoms, all of the things could be related to mold. And so today, you're going to walk away with a seriously great understanding on what are the tips and signs that you could have had a mold exposure and what you can do about it. And Dr. Jill here is the number one person you want to be going to for that information. So let's dig in and let's have a really great time learning from this genius. Jill, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you. It's so fun to talk to a fellow colleague, especially when it's about brain stuff. One of my favorite areas of the.

Body, and it's a topic that I feel like a lot of physicians either embrace with equanimity and they love it and they want to learn about it, or they feel completely overwhelmed and they shy away from it. And so what I love about your work and why I've been following you for so long is because you're able to really merge those two professions, the environmental with the psych.

Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you.

It's a great compliment. Oh, my gosh. I'm. I'm.

As you can tell, I'm super pumped to get to interview somebody who's amazing as yourself.

So we can terrify all your followers.

Exactly. We're like, okay, guys, all of y'.

All got mold, so.

Right. Which is actually in. In all reality, it's ubiquitous. And I live half the year in Arizona and half the year in Michigan, and I have found that equal amounts of individuals in both states suffer from mold and so even if you live somewhere where you're like, oh, it's really dry, you can still have mold exposure. And if you live in Michigan, where they dehumidify everything, but yet it rains constantly, you can still have mold exposure.

So. Exactly.

This is relevant for everybody.

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, what we're talking about is indoor toxic mold. So what your outdoor situation is. Doesn't matter. It's irrelevant. We have indoor toxic mold anywhere you have indoors.

I love that. And it could be your work, it could be your home, and so you could be thinking you're making all of the optimal choices for you and your family. But if you're going into any sort of an indoor establishment, you could be getting exposure.

Right. Especially if it has a flat roof, like schools.

Yes.

Yeah.

Which, by the way, is like everywhere in Arizona. Yeah, we all have flat roofs here.

Yeah. So, yeah. I love, I always love when I hear from someone that I couldn't have mold. I live in Arizona and I'm like, you know, because it's test. Exactly.

I love to learn. I'm a person who loves to learn about what makes people sparkle and how they developed a passion for where they are. And so not everybody is a mold genius like you are. And so I'm curious how you got to where you are. Tell me your story.

Yeah, so I set up practice in Wisconsin to be near my family and ended up in a Lyman Demic area and didn't really realize that's what was going on until I learned about Lyme. And so I became a Lyme specialist. And also in my area, there's a lot of environmental problems. Like we have a. We have paper processing plants that dump stuff into the water systems. We have a GM plant in my town. We have lead mines a couple lead mines an hour away. So I became an environmental head. I guess that's kind of what I was into in school anyway. Herbs and then environmental medicine. So I was working with this group of Lyme patients and I was like, oh, it's. Now I understand it's not heavy metals. Only now you also have Lyme. So do what we do as naturopathic doctors, find and treat the cause, and people tend to get better. But then there is this other group of those environmentally sick, which I thought was only heavy metals. Lyme patients that were doing all the right things, 110% hardest working patients. I mean, you know them, you have them, and they still weren't getting the gains that we. We were seeing in the majority of the patients. I was like, what is Going on with these people, I cannot figure it out. And in one of those patients, they found black mold in his home. And it had been, they estimated about a 12 year exposure. And I mean, he had a cancer diagnosis, was on the wrong side of the statistics all the time. You know, there were all of these things that were happening that just didn't fit the right. He wasn't in the majority. And as I dug into the research on mold, I thought, oh, oh my gosh. I left school not really understanding the full definition of mold related illness. I understood it as an allergy problem, sinusitis, asthma, a little bit of the neurological stuff. Like some people with Ms. Can have mold, but it's usually like mold just makes the Ms. Worse. It's not the cause of it. I'm reading this research and I thought, wow, I really didn't understand. And then it was like, bing, bing, bing, bing. Oh, that's what's going on with this other chronic Lyme patient. That's what's going on with this other chronic Lyme patient. And as we did did home visits, there was either a past or current exposure to mold in their history. And that's when just like all these lights went off. And I'm a digger, so went into the research and dug, dug, dug, kind of created a protocol. And then mold happened in our own home, which was the big. It got me. And I even know what I'm doing with this. And when the flood revealed itself, I was like, oh, it's not perimenopause and my kids going into puberty and our whole life going into chaos. It's mold. And I know what to do. And I felt so duty bound then to write a book because I thought, everybody needs to know this. It's not rocket science. It just takes the right process and identification. Having somebody validate that, what your symptoms are, it could have a reason. It's not just you breaking or being, you know, whatever, having a broken brain.

I love that validation piece because our symptoms are our opportunities for deeper healing. And so symptoms provide us data. And so what it sounds like is, so you, you go to Wisconsin, you're with your family, you're doing this amazing work. Lyme is a problem up in north, especially northern Wisconsin, but it's, you know, traveling. And what I hear you saying is that you're doing great work, but it feels like there's a piece missing. And you're a digger, you start doing the digging and doing the research, and then you're like, I see this. There's this conversation that starts to develop around the relationship between chronic illness Lyme and mold. But then the doors got blast open when you started to realize that there could be something going on in my personal life having to do with mold. And it sounds like you had symptoms, your family had symptoms, perimenopause puberty. And you noticed that, okay, there might.

Be something going on with this.

And you found molds. How did you, how did you put the two together? What was that step that took you from? I'm noticing these symptoms. There's a missing piece and oh my gosh, it's actually mold.

It took for the flood to reveal itself. It took for the environment to go, hello. You know, literally enough stuff got saturated in the ceiling above my kitchen. It started raining in my kitchen. I was like, oh my goodness, this is a lot of water. And this took a long time for it to build up. So we knew it was going to be a moldy problem. From my experience, which was great. Like, I knew the inspector to call. I knew that, you know, I could get into my action plan. And that's again, you know, that was part of writing the book. I was actually creating a course and a book on a completely different topic. And all I could think about then once we started remediation was mold. And I thought, you know, I'm going to do a mold thing first, kind of to scratch that itch. You know, that's what I thought I was doing. I'll just scratch the itch. You know, I feel duty bound to teach about mold. And it'll be the, you know, the random, like, small percentage of chronically ill people that this will apply to. And once I published it, I am now realizing how rampant the problem is. It's so much more widespread than I ever anticipated.

Yes, I am curious about that actually. Do you have. And this could be something that if you don't have the statistics, we can just throw in the show notes. But do you have a guesstimate on the percentages of people that actually have had mold exposure or symptoms from mold?

It's argued a lot among mold specialists. OSHA has estimated between 25 and 50% of buildings have had enough water damage to host toxic molds. We can't necessarily extrapolate that to be then 25% to 50% of people are sick because half of people who get out of their mold environment just get better. Their bodies have the nutritional status. It doesn't have a previous exposure. The type of mold they were exposed to wasn't as damaging. Or maybe their Amount of mold toxin wasn't as much. So I don't know that we can really create that statistic. But I would say probably in the complex chronic disease people, if you're having to go into the medication world, I'm already putting you in the world of, like, something if you're doing all the lifestyle stuff. So let's say they get put on medication for diabetes or, you know, heart disease or something like that, and then come to a naturopathic doctor and do all the right things. You know, make the diet changes, do the hard work, and they don't have an improvement. Then we start thinking about something in their environment might not be mold, but, you know, could be. And like lime, It's a great imitator.

Oh, that's really interesting. So, like Lyme, it's a great imitator. And so tell me a little bit more about your observations of the relationship between the two. For example, does mold exposure predispose you to susceptibility to Lyme or vice versa? Can you talk a little more about that?

Vice versa on both? So that's one of the things that I realized when I was in practice. I had Dr. Horowitz, who's like a Lyme disease genius. I had his MSIDS questionnaire so I could kind of more accurately tell who has Lyme and who has maybe something else going on. But then I couldn't tell who of those Lyme patients had mold. So I created my own questionnaire to try to figure out what makes the mold sick people a little bit different. And we learned some things about that that he was able to identify through a data analysis of his patients. That Lyme tends to have migration. It's one of the few conditions where the arthritis migrates, the pain migrates, the ticks and twitches migrate. You could have arthritis in your left knee, and the next day you have arthritis of the first joint of your finger, which is a really common Lyme place. The next day, your knee could be fine and your finger is. And it can move around. That's a Lyme thing. Mold doesn't do that. Mold tends to be more situational. So exposure, which kind of makes sense like a kid acts up at school because they have a multi school, and then when they come home, things are fine. And you think, why are they getting bullied? Is there. You know, are they stressed about school? Are they not getting enough sleep? Definitely. Look at all those things. But the crazy thing about mold that we. That makes it so hard to diagnose is that every member of the family will express their mold sickness differently than everyone else. And that's why it has been missed in medicine, because there isn't a. You look at my questionnaires, it's enormous. There isn't a tidy list of symptoms that says this is mold related illness. And it is more the rule than the exception that everyone will display it differently because what it geniusly does is make whatever your natural Achilles heel is going to be worse. So if it's skin breakouts, that's what will get worse for you. And then we add in some other kind of cardinal symptoms, which I'm happy to go. Go through, but, you know, it's. It was really hard to pick up in our own family. And I have identical twins, and each of them had a different expression of the mold illness. Isn't that wild?

Yeah, it sounds like it's a little bit of an amplifier. Like if you have these identical twins that may have a similar nature versus nurture, they have maybe these different weaknesses, and then the mold exposure will amplify whatever that is. And so it's a little bit of the art and what a great service that you're offering to people that you've gone through the work to identify a questionnaire, kind of like Horowitz did for Lyme, to help people finally find the answers to why they're so smart suffering.

And so that's amazing.

And so we'll make sure to include the link for our listeners so that they can have access to learning from you. And I know that one of your passions is working with practitioners. And so as a practitioner, if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, gosh, I need this amazing, amazing information. I'll make sure to get all the links so that you can learn from our doc here.

And awesome.

I love this. And so when we talk about some cardinal symptoms you were mentioning, I would love to learn a little bit more about that. What are some of the telltales that are like, we really need to be examining for mold in this patient?

Yeah, it's a little tricky because they could be so many other things that's causing these. So it's general ones that we see. It's fatigue, brain fog. Okay. How many other conditions could that.

Right.

Oh, nailed it. Yeah. A keynote is ear ringing or tinnitus. That's kind of a keynote symptom. And for me, I think of it as a first pass condition where if you're breathing in the toxins, you go right past the cranial nerves that drive your vision in Your ears, and it can kind of like create a persistent pinging of that nerve. So it just basically turns it on all the time because it's got a toxin there that's a nerve toxin that's affecting its function. So if we keep going down lower as we go, it can cause thyroid disorder, gut disruption, respiratory, of course. So sinusitis, asthma. Absolutely. That's a mold thing. But you can have mold sickness and not have any respiratory symptoms at all. If you're not exposed to the spores, we also see skin changes. So whatever your tendency is, if it's more toward aging and wrinkles, you'll get more of those. If it's more toward acne, you're going to get more of that. So again, that makes it so hard.

To tell the difference.

And then a lot of urinary frequency, very common. And a keynote is the interstitial cystitis piece. If you know you've had water damage and you're having interstitial cystitis and you've had the exam and there's ulceration of the bladder, that actually can be from mold toxin irritating the lining of the bladder and pelvic pain and then joint pain. So. So those are like the body things, but the brain things. I don't think I've had one mold sick patient that didn't have anxiousness of some kind. And I'm careful not to say anxiety, because I think that some people say, well, I've not been diagnosed with anxiety. And you don't have to be to the level of having a diagnosis that can happen for certain panic attacks and a true diagnosis of anxiety. But that inner sense of restlessness, of things are, I don't feel settled. I don't feel like things are okay. And that's so, so, so common. And that's going to look different for everybody. But there is that internal things aren't okay. I'm not okay. And that's their body, like you've said in your podcast, is so brilliant. Your anxiety is telling you something. You know, it's a message. It's not something to be shut down. It's something to be paid attention to. And that can be really hard. If the thing that you're. That, I mean, it's your body being so smart because it's saying you're breathing in poisonous air, you need to get up and get out. But if it's not a tiger in front of you, it's an invisible toxin, then it doesn't make any sense why you feel that way. And so you can start to doubt your own faculties. So the reptilian brain and the cognitive brain start arguing. And that's where you can get that looping. And so you'll see people, I see people with mold sickness have that sense of anxiousness. And their cognitive brain says, yeah, but everything looks safe. And the reptilian brain says, but we're not safe. You know, it's kind of like this argument. And the cognitive brain says, well, then maybe I'm not happy in my marriage. Maybe my kids do stress me out, or maybe I don't like my job, or maybe we need a new house, or maybe I, you know, so it starts getting pinned on things that, that outside observers would say, I don't get why you're so anxious. Because you do have enough money, you have a great marriage, your kids are great, you know, like things that make sense to other people. But there's this internal experience of I'm not safe equals I'm not okay equals something outside of me is wrong and I need to fix it. So you'll see people make a lot of life changes Rather than addressing the water damage.

I really resonate with what you're saying, doc, is that so many well intended clinicians, they hear suffering and they want to relieve suffering. You come in and you have fibromyalgia, you have joint pains, unspecified pains, you have chronic fatigue, you're tired, you have brain fog, you have interstitial cystitis, you have these bladder symptoms. All of these are bucket diagnoses. We just don't know what's going on. And now you also have this worry, these anxious feelings. And so these well intended clinicians are saying, okay, I want to relieve suffering. So I'm going to teach you how to stop anxiety. I'm going to give you theanine, an amino acid that can be helpful for anxiety. I'm going to give you these amazing mantras, and I'm going to give you anodyne herbs to stop some of that pain and inflammation. And what you're talking about is brilliant, true vital resiliency from traditional naturopathy. And you're saying these symptoms are data, and we don't yet have the data to understand why these symptoms are going on. And so you're a researcher, you're a digger, and you have been digging to help people find those answers. And oftentimes it can be mold. And so what I'm wondering is if you could, because feeling anxious, anxiety, that's my passion, is helping people turn the page on the story of anxiety. Do you have could you explain a little bit more about the mechanism on how mold and anxiety coexist?

Yeah, you bet. And I want to make sure to say that all of those measures help people get out of the suffering. But they just put a band aid on something that if you're not addressing the cause and then they need your help because those things can get wired in, in a not opportunistic brain pattern. So they need to be given tools. So mechanisms are quite vast. I kind of joke the 10,000 foot view between mold and lime. Lyme needs you alive to survive because it needs. It's living off of your cells, basically. And it's borrowing the nutrition that you're eating. And all of that. Mold would just assume compost you, so it doesn't need you alive at all. So the amount of toxin and threat and things like that, and this is where we're terrifying all of your listeners now, is what I'm saying, because it can. Then when you think of that, you realize why it has so many mechanisms that are so big, very, very damaging to the body. So one of the things is we should probably talk about how mold makes you sick. There's spores and spore fragments, there's chemicals of happily living mold, like I call it mold farts. Just like factories, you know, it's just like it's eating and munching and doing its job of composting things and making nutrients so that other organic things can eat it. And it's just off gassing all of these things like microbial VOCs, alcohols and aldehydes. The big one there that I just said is alcohol. So you can actually breathe moldy air and get drunk feeling because it goes right in through your nose, right into the bloodstream alveoli of the lungs and you're taking in these toxins. So we see people feel just like you would, you know, if you had.

Too much to drink.

They feel a little bit spacey, their eyes don't quite work very good, their coordination is off, they're sleepy. And then we see chemical sensitivity because of all of these chemicals. So those are the two things. But a third part that is the most damaging is the toxin. And these are called mycotoxins, myco, meaning fungus toxin. And these are the intention of this toxin is for mold to defend its territory against all other living things. Now its target is little tiny bacterial things and little tiny other fungal spores. But the effect of them is to be deadly to that other thing. Those toxins accumulate in our indoor air. We breathe them in we take them into our bloodstream. Some of them can go right through the blood brain barrier. So they can go. The toxin can actually go and reside in your brain. What's that going to do to your brain? It's going to cause inflammation, it's going to cause neurotransmitter changes. So we see people have higher dopamine, higher glutamate, lower serotonin, lower gaba, because you now have inflammation, immune activation and neurotransmitter changes. And then the body says, I think I'm having an allergy attack to this. And so you get mast cells recruited to the brain and those mast cells secrete a bunch of histamine. And now we know histamine in the brain is an anxiety producer. So you can see all those little. We've got inflammation, immune activation, toxin presence, neurotransmitter changes, and then histamine release. Allergy of the brain makes so much sense that we're ending up with anxiety and a feeling of unsettled or restlessness.

Which is interesting why benzodiazepines are so effective for reducing anxiety. We know that benzos increase gaba, a relaxing neurotransmitter. And interestingly, benzodiazepines can reduce histamine. And so sometimes when people are tapering down and off of their benzos, histamine support can actually aid in that taper process. And so if we have a listener or somebody who's experiencing this, or if they're a clinician and they have a patient who's experiencing this, then maybe doing an investigation to see if mold might be one of the root causes would be warranted. You're doing a benzo taper, you're not even thinking about mold. But inflammation seems to be a problem. And looking at why the inflammation is there to begin with, which brings us back. That's fascinating, those links, isn't it?

And then, I mean, the gut brain connection, we know that these mycotoxins can cause apoptosis or death of the enterocytes, which means the lining of the gut for listeners. So they can actually change your, your gut immunity and they change your gut neurotransmitter production, which is really what dictates what's going on in the brain. So you have kind of the double whammy of things that can actually get into the brain. And then, you know, the ones that can travel right through the blood brain barrier. But then those that can't, you get a leaky gut, which creates a leaky blood brain barrier. And now you have leaky gut, leaky brain. Now, some of those mycotoxins that originally couldn't get through there can get through. Yeah.

When you're talking about mycotoxins causing changes in our mental health and our brain health, are there particular mycotoxins that are problematic for people or more problematic.

But when it comes to brain health, I guess, because there's that gut brain connection, I think of all of them as hard on the brain because they're all hard on the gut. But as far as the ones that can go right through the blood brain barrier, the one I'm most worried about is ketomium from. Or chetaglobusin from ketomium or chitomium, depending on pronunciation. It's always fun to listen to these mold experts. Cause we all say these crazy science words a little bit differently. But I have a post out there, I don't know if you've had a chance to say. It says, drink ice water, get dementia.

Yes. Yes.

I was going to ask you about that. Yes. I found that chetaglobasin in three refrigerators that I randomly sampled. Because we don't treat those lines like there's no. Once it gets into the refrigerator and there's a fan moving back up, those filters can. And I tested the actual filter. I didn't do the refrigerator line. I tested the one that you kind of screw into your refrigerator for the refrigerator line. And. Yeah, and they weren't from. One was from a formerly moldy house where they had moved the refrigerator, but the other two never had. Because that's what I thought. When I got the result from the first one, I was like, they maybe moved this problem with them. So then I went and found one that had only been used for three weeks and then one that had been used for about a month, they thought. And I was like, if I buy you a new refrigerator filter, can I test yours? I take it off and test it and yeah, sure enough, chetaglobasin. And this is one of them that crosses the blood brain barrier. And it loves water and watery spaces. So I think now about keurigs, baby bath toys, CPAP machines, refrigerator filters, ice machine makers. And so now when you start to think about that, it's like, oh, my goodness, how many people are having brain changes because of those simple things that we just consider a part of our normal routine?

And you'd think that a filter would theoretically be a cleaner part. But you went straight for the filter and you're finding it in there, which I'm like, Looking at my refrigerator in horror right now.

Yeah.

My gosh.

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, and then you add that the insurance industry, they see that this number two reason for having a water claim next to the roofing is refrigerator lines leaking because it's a drip, drip, drip, you know, one of those kind of things. So it's, it's missed a lot. So now I just recommend for everybody, unhook your fridge line and don't, don't use it. Go back to old school ice trays and, and that kind of thing because you've got. Now your refrigerator is now a double threat. You know, it's just not worth it. I like indoor plumbing, so I'm not going to unhook my toilet or anything like that. But I feel like the main refrigerator is an elective convenience that I might be paying for with my brain.

So. And like my brain is immediately going to like I'm looking at my refrigerator like a culprit behind, like, you know, like, I'm not free of anxiety. I'm a warrior of anxiety. Like, who can't, who wouldn't benefit from improving their brain function? Right. And so I'm looking at my refrigerator and an actionable. Thank you for this is, girl, just get an ice tray.

Yeah.

And get rid of the Keurig and so, and then also ice water. So can you tell me if I like threes? Threes are magic numbers. Do you have three actionable strategies for helping people? Because now we're all listening. We're like, oh my gosh, you know, we're all tuned in. We're like, okay, Dr. Jill, like, all right, what are three things? Like, let's assume we've all had mold exposure. What are three things we can do?

Yes, get outside. Get number one. It's the most important thing you can do. Connect, ground, pay attention to how you feel. So many people can tell me that, you know, I just don't feel good in my house or my, at my job or whatever. And again, we can make up lots of stories about why that is. Maybe it's my, my boss or my coworkers, or maybe it's that I don't like what I'm studying at school or, you know, all kinds of different things. We make up these stories. But if you're outside enough, you, you get to know what your innate true state is so you can recognize if you're having body symptoms. Along with that anxiousness, there's something affecting your body. This isn't just, it's not a top down stress causing thing. It's a something causing you, which is creating the stress. And so I feel like the get outside part helps people get that distinction because they get to learn who they are so much more if you're outside. I mean, outside does so many things for us. Vitamin D and all of that. The second is eat enough fat, eat enough of the good fats. The key about these toxins is that they are. They're lipophilic, meaning they're fat soluble or oil soluble. So they can go to all the oily and fatty parts of our body, which is more than booty fat. That means bone marrow, brain. Our brain is a very fatty tissue nervous system. All our nerves, the linings of our whole digestive system, we have this little fat pad that protects our organs. So the mycotoxins go and disperse there. And so Dr. Crinian nailed it in my head. The solution to pollution is dilution. So if you're trying to dilute a toxin that's fat soluble, you need to basically dilute it with good fats. And I feel like that that's one of the biggest things that we see, like their people's brains connect when they can get enough of the good fats. If they're eating enough fish, getting fish oil, all of the good things, you know, the olive oil, walnuts, avocados, evening primrose oil, black currant oil, all of those can help to dilute out all of those, like, sticky, gooey, yucky fat toxins. And the third is eat enough vegetables. If you look at the animal studies where they're paying attention to the fact that, oh, hey, when we feed these animals moldy food, they do better if we give them enough fat and enough bioflavonoids. And bioflavonoids are the colorful part of vegetables. Careful not to say fruit, because a lot of people who have mold exposure get fungal overgrowth and they become carb cravers, which only feed yeast more. So we want to try to, like, minimize the fruit, but maximize vegetables. And I feel like getting outside. And you probably say this over and over and over again. I feel like these are the things that I said too, to my patients. Get outside, get enough fat and get vegetables. Those are huge.

And I love that it's cost effective for people. And so it's also wonderful because it will generally increase vitality. So not only are you targeting the issue with mold, but you're also increasing the body's overall health and resilience. And so it's a wonderful strategy to. To heal the whole person, which I Love. And so another thing that's coming up for me is I'm thinking about, okay, I probably have mold exposure as well as the vast majority of my clients. Right. And we're doing the best we can to not use the refrigerator ice and to make these lifestyle changes. But we could probably be so much more strategic if we know the right testing. And that's something you said that you were armed with when you had this flood. Right. And so tell us a little bit more about the most accurate way to test for mold in the body.

Tricky question.

We're still learning this, and we don't.

A lot of what I'm talking about comes from empirical clinical experience. There are very few studies, human clinical trials, where they're doing building testing, body testing, and correlating that and finding that that's a. And then treatment and finding that that was a useful test. So right now, what I use, I try to create a couple different data points so that I'm not relying on one marker as, like, the end all, be all. I love mycotoxin testing because I feel like, well, if mycotoxins are the most poisonous part of this story, why aren't we trying to look for them in the body or what the body thinks about it? So there's a couple different ways that you can do mycotoxin testing. You can do urine mycotoxin testing, which is an excretion test that can tell you a body burden, and you can do serum mycotoxin testing, which is an antibody IgG and IgE. The IgE portion of that serum antibody test tells you whether this is a current problem or not, because it stays high for the. If you've been exposed for the past two weeks, it will be high. And so you can say with some confidence, not only are you being exposed, but your body doesn't like it. So that's what I kind of. There are pros and cons to each kind. The urine mycotoxin test, you can track your treatment more frequently, whereas with the. The serum one, you have to kind of wait about six months for the igg to normalize, although some docs are rerunning that at four. So that's the mycotoxin part. But I also look at all the stuff you can get covered from insurance, cbc. We'll see things like a low white count, iron deficiency anemia. We see kind of relative changes in the eosinophils, which makes sense if you're having an allergy. A lot of times people will come to me with an allergy test that their allergist ran, which is a ige, meaning immediate reaction to mold spores. And they'll say, well, I can't have mold because this was normal. And I just. I'm trying to get the message out there that, that that's only the case if you are exposed to the spores. But so many times, people aren't exposed to spores at all. It's. It's like trapped behind building material, behind drywall, under flooring, you know, on the other side of your ceiling, the other side of your shower container or whatever that thing is, you know, like these inserts that they can do. If the spores are blocked, you don't get a smell, and you won't have an allergy test that's positive. But the mycotoxins are making it right through because they're ultra, ultra small. Isn't that wild? That was the case in our house. There was no. Like, it didn't smell. It was a new house to us, and it was a relatively recently built home, and they had made some errors in plumbing when they built the house, and it was throughout the whole house. So it was. All three floors were affected, and it didn't smell like a moldy house. Otherwise, I would have been like, forget it. I'm not buying this house. You know, as a mold specialist. Yeah.

And if you have. I was just thinking about what you said earlier about how the mold will affect your cranial nerves and cause the ear ringing. And so I wonder if people who've had chronic mold exposure or even a recent exposure, if their sense of smell might be compromised and they may not even detect it and.

Right.

So it's still valuable. Like, you go into a house, they did a little facelift, they painted over it, the spores may be blocked and you may not smell, but then still, it's a relevant activity to. To do some appropriate testing. And I also want to emphasize what you said about the IGE is that can be normal. So while it's good to run those tests, it's not a period at the end of the sentence. It's not a rule out.

It's.

You know, it gives us a little bit of data, but we have to look at the whole gestalt, if you will. The whole piece of the pie.

Yeah. I mean, and part of that piece of the pie is how. How deeply, deeply affected is your nervous system. And there's a really cheap, easy online test the Dr. Shoemaker created, the VCS test, the visual contrast sensitivity. You can get that test on survivingmold.com or vcstest.com there's a couple different places to get it. And what that tells me. I will have patients run this when there's any neurological issue at all, because it tells me it can be normal and you can still have a mold sickness. But if it's not normal, then I'm like, okay, this is getting into your nervous system at this point. This has affected your brain function. And now we can really easily pin your sense of anxiousness to a mold exposure or a biotoxin illness. It could be Lyme. Lyme can do that too. But mold is like the classic, you know, and we see that off, we're like, okay, that's probably mold. And there are certain markers on that test that tell us whether it's more, maybe mercury, which can also mess up your neurology, or Lyme or Babesia or Bartonella, which are Lyme co infections. And then there is a certain column that's going to be more. More likely mold. So it's a super helpful test and it costs like 15 bucks. You can do it at home and it's really easy to do. Yeah. And then you have more data points.

And we should all be doing that.

It sounds like, yeah, yeah, mine was normal. And then when I was in my house, I had done the whole routine that people do, which is, is run to the doctor, get your get. Because I wear contacts. I'm like, they're just not working. I think my eyes are changing. And then three months later feeling like, ah, they're not working. And then I would go back to the doctor and say, like, you need to fix my eyes. So I had done plenty of normals just to play with my. Play with myself. Sounds funny. And play.

You're your own guinea pig.

Yeah, right. And then after we found out it was mold, I did a VCS test and it was terrible. And I was like, oh, my goodness.

I'm just going to order a bunch of those, start handing them out to my patients. What I love about this is this is so relevant for everybody. The world needs to know the information in your brain. I'm so delighted to get to download it. And we need to work with you. Everybody basically needs to work with you. And I love that you're making your wisdom accessible to other people. And so tell me. So people are listening right now and they're like, I have mold. I need this test. I need Dr. Jill to analyze this. I have someone to learn more, tell them how they can do that.

Yeah. So if anybody's listening and they're thinking, I wonder if this is my issue. I have a really short, easy quiz on moldquiz.com it answers the question yes or no. Could mold be a problem or not? And then if you really. If it says yes and you want more information, you can get that full clinical questionnaire that I put in my book. You can just get it for free. It's a downloadable PDF. Test yourself. If it's yes, take it to your doctor so that you can get a better workup. I also have on drchrista.com that's my D R C R I S T a dot com. I have a membership there since I'm not able to take any more new patients in my schedule. It just broke my heart after I wrote my book to get all these emails. And I was like, there's gotta be a way to do this. So I created a membership where people can join the membership and they can pick my brain any question they want to ask me about their body. Two times a month, it's a group meeting where you get to learn from other people's questions. There's a forum that functions kind of like Facebook, but it's private that, where you can message each other or start discussion groups and everything and support each other. There's nothing like having people that are going through the same thing that you're going through, but with guidance of somebody who is an expert in it. That's a very different thing than going to a Facebook group where things can get off on, you know, like, it can. It can create a lot of panic because people bring their worst stories. And then that just creates more questions and there's nobody to say, okay, this is why that's happening, and here are some things that you can do about it. So we're having a lot of fun in the membership. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. The other thing is, like, if it's your home that affects, like insurance claims and things like that. And some people were saying that they don't want to get onto a Facebook group because that could expose them to people knowing what's going on with their office space or their business, if they own their business or their home or those kind of things. And they're just still in the information gathering stage age. So, yeah, the membership has been a lot of fun then. I'm also trying to teach more doctors. So if you love your doctor, you don't have to go find a mold literate specialist. I have a course out there so your doctor can learn, become a specialist, and take care of you so you don't have to break that care relationship.

I really admire that. So you have this amazing membership and people can get information and have access to to you in a community setting. And I was actually doing some research on the efficacy of groups in helping people get well. And interestingly, groups work better. People have more success being in a membership type group than if they were to do it alone. And so I love that you're doing it in a group format. It helps more people get support from other warriors who get it. And it's in an environment where you're protecting it and making sure that the information is safe where you're not creating more stress. So this is an awesome option. We'll make sure to put the link to the membership in the notes here. And then you also, you're educating doctors. And so if someone's listening to this podcast and you're like, gosh, I would love to have my doctor work with Dr. Jill, you can send the doctor, Dr. Jill's information and they can connect and then you can get the support that you need.

Yes, yes.

And then of course you have a.

Book.

More about this book. So you were saying that you were, you were writing on something else and then you're like, I need to like maybe write about what's happening right now.

So. Which was really good thing to do because it's written in very simple terms. I worked really hard to take all this like Dr. Y st stuff in my head, all these big terms and this big mechanisms and all of that, and make it into something where the brain that I had during that exposure and during that remediation, if I couldn't have understood it, then there was no business putting it in the book. And so the book is very easy. That was my whole thing is like message with mold. If you go into conventional medicine and the shoemaker, he had to work so hard to convince conventional medicine that this even exists. And then it got the vibe that it's really difficult and people don't get better and it's heavy. And I thought, what I want to bring to this is lightness and joy and hope and stories of people that do get better. So it's all very much an empowerment that, like I said in the beginning, it's not rocket science. Like everybody, these are everyday tools that everybody can use. It's great to work with a mold literate doctor because there's a lot of stuff in the book that you won't know. Is that what's right for me or is that what's right for my kid or if it is right for my kid. Is it safe to do just all those little things? It's nice to have a doctor. It'll move you through the process with less suffering. But if you can't find a doctor, the book does get you started. At least it has a clear system and doses and cautions and all of that so you can get a good jump on it.

And I was going to ask you a story of hope. And so a lot of people listening, they may be feeling so burdened and so discouraged and so hopeless. Can you share with us just a little bit of hope from your experience working with this?

You bet. Oh, my gosh. I have so many stories. I have to think about which one is the best. I did have a patient that I had seen forever. The whole family. No. So she was in her 70s, and I see the adult kids and their kids, and she started really struggling with anxiety and insomnia. And it was to the point where we ran her neurotransmitters, like did a urine test at nighttime, and her anxiety markers were through the roof. I was like, wow, what are you stressing about? And then that progressed into night wandering, worry, forgetfulness. She started to get like, tics, tremors, balance issues, and then dementia full on. And that's when the kids brought her to me that they were like, okay, this isn't just anxiousness or. And what I diagnosed her with was probable sleep apnea. So she went and got a sleep study, she got a CPAP machine, and we thought that the job was done. Well, after she got her CPAP machine, things just got worse and worse and worse and worse. It turns out she had mold. A little bit of mold in her environment, but a lot of mold in her CPAP machine. She wasn't cleaning it appropriately, so every time she would sleep, she was getting toxic air from the CPAP machine. And so we were able to not only identify the cause with. With working with a. An indoor environmental professional. And I would say that is my big recommendation to everybody. Your doctor is good at bodies. There are people who spend their life work on understanding buildings. Every building is a unique individual, just like everybody is. So work with professionals on that. And I'm so glad I did in this case because we would have thought cleaning up the tiny bit of mold in her basement was the solution and not gone digging for more things. And we would have like checked that box, like, okay, we took care of mold, no problem. And so if she's still sick, it must be Something else. And we would have gone chasing other things, having that indoor environmental professional there. She was the one who was astute enough to say, oh, she uses a CPAP machine. We better test that. And it was loaded with mold, so it was so great to have that teamwork. So just getting rid of the CPAP machine did improve her symptoms quite a bit, probably 50%. But she had residual things because, you know, it was in her brain. So we did a lot of the steps that were in the book. We added a lot of little things. I didn't ever have to use IV therapy with her. And now there is no dementia symptoms. Anxiety took a while to get rid of because she needed to be retrained from that looping we talked about. So she used a few different techniques, from microcurrent to using counselor, and in the end, the DNRs. So it gave her tools to be able to say, okay, remember, remember that. You know that this is. This is my brain telling me when I'm in the moldy environment. And that's okay. You know, my brain is being. It's protecting me. So now she has absolutely no problems. Sharp as attack, balance issues got better. Dementia symptoms are gone. The only thing that she really struggled with longer term was the anxiousness. And eventually that. That became a friend for her when she knew she was going to be in an environment that was going to make her sick.

You're giving me chills and I have all of the feels. This is amazing. So loves as you're listening to this, anxiety is her friends from Doc. This is this woman. You gave her her feedback using true nature care, which is amazing because so many people, so many stories or stories of tragedy where their doctors just, I'm sorry you have this diagnosis, we'll medicate you, but it doesn't have to be like that. And making friends with your symptoms and allowing them to give you data on you deserve an alternative solution, which I think shouldn't be the alternative, but should be the actual solution.

Yeah.

Oh, I love that story. And that is a story of true, amazing healing. And so dementia is a diagnosis. Just like you were saying in the beginning, interstitial cystitis is a diagnosis. Anxiety is a diagnosis, and you are not your diagnosis. And so we have to figure out what that is. And Lyme could be a piece of the puzzle. And the other thing I got out of that story is really make sure that you're working with professionals who know housing that know the environment and buildings. Do you have suggestions on how to find, like, what kinds Of I do.

I do, actually. And I actually got the list from Weinspect. There's a company that I work with quite a bit. They have a document. And if you want to reach us, we can. We can pass it on because we. We have it now as part of my doctor training course, how to find a qualified inspector. And they have all of the things that you need to consider. You get on the phone with them and you run them through an interview, a job interview, because they should understand they're dealing with somebody that is sensitive to mold. It's not going to be your classic case of like, oh, I'm the 50% of that coin flip that does that. I can do anything. I can eat anything. I sleep like a rock. I have great bowel movements. You know, like, that's not the group we're working with. They need to understand that they're working with people that are a little more sensitive and to understand that, what that entails. So, yeah, they have a great list. So if someone wants to send an email to supportoctorchrista.com, we can send that or reach out to Weinspect, because they're the ones that created the document. We just pass it on.

Thank you so much. So we inspect. So today, you guys, I have been talking to this brilliant, beautiful expert naturopathic physician, Dr. Jill Christa, and we talked about the link between mold and anxiety or mold and brain health symptoms. We talked about the particular type of mold. There's lots for different people, but she talked about one specific key culprit and mental health symptoms. So if you missed that, make sure you go back and give it a listen what mold actually does to the brain and how it makes you anxious. This was fascinating. And so check that out, because there's a reason that you feel the way you feel. You are not broken. Your body, in its brilliance and in its wisdom, is telling you exactly why.

And what it needs.

And so we have to listen. And so she talked about some of the mechanisms, including the relationship between the gut and the brain. So that was super interesting. And then she. She shared with us three strategies for helping people who have mold exposure and babes. These strategies you can do really quickly, really affordably, and you can start doing them right now. She also shares with us a little bit of a culprit for molds.

That kind of blew my mind.

And I'm going to be making some big changes. Like today when we finish up this call, she talked about mold testing and how to work with her. And so Just to re. Emphasize she's got a mold quiz. I took the mold quiz, and I need to be talking to you. I'm probably getting in your membership group. So take the mold quiz. I'll give you guys the link. Also, buy her book. Go get the book. It's called break the mold. And make sure that you get this book from her and look through it and there's tons of information, but you may not know what pertains to you and what doesn't pertain to you. And so Dr. Jill also teaches physicians how, how to do this work. And so tell your physician about her work, tell your friends about her work, and make sure that the news is spreading because people need this information if you want to get in with Dr. Jill's brilliance. She has a membership group, and the research shows that people get more success out of membership. It's safe, it's protected, it's valuable, and it's super cost effective. And then, of course, I'll make sure to put the link in there for your practitioners so that you can share that with them. And anything else, Doc, that you want to make sure that you share or you mention before we finish up today.

I guess just reinforcing what you. What you say a lot is trust yourself. You know, that's the. That's the thing I didn't do at first. I didn't trust myself. So, yeah, that's my encouragement for everybody.

And you can heal. She told an amazing story that gave me all the feels like babes. I know you. You may feel like you are at the end of your rope. You may feel hopeless. You may feel like you've done all of the things, taken all of the supplements, spent all of the money, and you may feel like you're at the end of your rope. And maybe you even did some mold testing. And what I encourage you to do is to don't give up. In this story with this woman who's using the cpap, they could have called it quits. Like, we cleared up the mold in the basement. And if they didn't find that one piece of the puzzle, it could have been an obstacle to cure for her. So don't give up. Keep fighting. Keep looking.

And if mold may be a part.

Of your conversation, this is your girl. Go to her link, Check her out. She's amazing.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you so much for the opportunity to get to speak with you today.

Thank you. What a treat. Thanks so much.

The recording you just listened to consists of the personal opinions of Dr. Nicole Caine, a naturopathic doctor with a master's in clinical psychology. While these opinions are based upon literature, her counseling education, medical training, and clinical experience, this content should not be viewed as the definitive opinion on these subjects. Listening to this podcast is not a substitute for any sort of medical, psychological, or other form of treatment. If you are in a Crisis, please call 911 or call the National Suicide Prevention Line at 1-800-273-8255. If you're in need of counseling, don't hesitate to make an appointment with a counselor in your area. Dr. Nicole Cain is so passionate about people getting their life back. If this resonates with you and you think this podcast would help someone you love, please share it with them. Stay in the conversation with Dr. Nicole Cain about writing the next chapter of your your life so that it plays out just the way you want it. Explore your options for working with her at www. Dr. Nicolecane.com that's Dr. D R Nicole N I C O L E Caine C A I N.com when you're there, be sure to take advantage of the Free Anxiety Freedom One week challenge. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the GET your life Back podcast. Here's to your next chapter.