Unpacking Mold Illness: Symptoms, Testing and Recovery Protocols with Terri Fox, MD

Welcome to The Perfect Stool: Understanding and Healing the Gut Microbiome. This is your host, Lindsey Parsons, and today I'll be speaking with Terri Rebebo-Fox, MD, who is a graduate of UCF Medical School and is board certified in integrative holistic medicine. Dr. Fox practices functional medicine at a clinic she founded called Boulder Holistic in Colorado and specializes in biotoxin illness, mold, and Lyme disease. She's also a founding member of ICI, the International Society of Environmentally Acquired Illness, and serves on the medical board of Change the Air Foundation and is a founding physician for Ravel, an organization committed to bringing Lyme literate physicians to patients who can't generally afford one. She's created an online mold treatment course for patients called Dr. Fox's Mold Treatment Masterclass. But before our conversation, if you haven't yet followed or subscribed to the show, be sure to do so. If you want to get transcripts of the podcast, pop over to my website, HighDesertHealthCoaching.com, and sign up for my newsletter. You'll also get my free ebooklet, Finding Your Root Cause Through Stool and Organic Acids Testing, when you sign up. And if you haven't yet done my quiz on which stool test would help you get to your root cause, you can find a link in the show notes and take that. Now onto the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Fox.

Hi, thank you for having me, Lindsey Parsons.

It's my pleasure. So I wonder how you got into your specialty involving biotoxin illness and mold and Lyme. Yeah, sure.

So biotoxin is something that is released by a living organism that's toxic or pathogenic. To humans. Some examples of biotoxin illness is Lyme, Lyme co-infections, mold, that sort of thing. So I was practicing functional medicine for maybe 10 years. I found most of my patients really did well with the normal functional medicine interventions and studies and work on their hormones, get them sleeping, optimize their nutrition and their nutrient status, clean up the gut, and they would do better. And about 15% of my patients just didn't budge. Matter what I did. And so I kept finding myself stuck in this and they had some similarities in their symptomatology. After a while, I figured out most of these patients had Lyme and Lyme co-infections. And so then I started treating Lyme and learning about Lyme, which is a lot. What happened for me was my son was 8 years old and he got really sick. So he was one of those scrappy, thrill-seeking maniac little boys climbing everything and trying to kill himself all day. And suddenly he started limping. I would ask him, Kai, do your knees hurt? And he would say no. And then he would walk normal without limping. And I was just watching him and he was getting stiff after a car ride or in the morning when he woke up, he had new anxiety that he never had. He put on 30 pounds in, I don't know, 6 weeks on his teeny little frame. And so I started testing him for things and he turned out to have Lyme and I tried to treat him myself. And I'll tell you as a mom, don't ever try to treat He choked for Lyme. And I ended up taking him to see Dr. Stephen Harris in California, who's a wonderful Lyme doctor. And he gave us a urinary mycotoxin test for mold. So we brought it home and we did it and Kai's mold levels were through the roof, his mycotoxins. So at that point we knew, okay, there's something else going on as well. And I had a good indoor environmental professional out to evaluate the house. This was the year of the Boulder flood. So I live in Boulder, Colorado, and we had this 100-year flood. Every house on our whole block got just tanked by it. And we thought that we were okay. And so this is maybe like 9 months later when the indoor environmental professional comes in and he goes in— we have this massive crawl space under the whole house at the time. And he went into the crawl space and he cut the vapor barrier and there was 3 feet of water under the entire house. And our airborne spore traps were in the red. I don't actually think I've ever seen them as bad as our house was. I didn't know what it meant to remediate or what a good remediation was. So I had a regular construction company come out. It sort of spreads it everywhere and makes it worse if you don't do containment and negative air pressure. At that stage, he got much worse and he called it a migraine. He had 9 out of 10 pain in his head that got worse with any movement. And he basically was in bed for 6 months. He dropped outta school and out of soccer and it was pretty horrible.

And was anybody else in your house impacted?

I was, but do you have kids?

I do.

So you know how it is as a mom, you focus on the kid. I was having anxiety and insomnia and I couldn't sleep at all. I lost 15 pounds that I didn't need to lose at all. And so like people, they can get this unexplained weight gain or loss. Mm-hmm. My ex-husband, my husband at the time, and my other son, they were 100% fine. When we, you know, I put him on a mold detox protocol. And then once we got out of the house, the marriage didn't make it through, unfortunately, but Kai got better. As soon as we got him out of the exposure, he sort of slowly got better. And within a few months, he was back at school, mostly full-time and playing soccer again.

That's awesome. So did you just have to give up on the house or what did you ultimately do to remediate the mold?

We had, we remediated it and sold it. I didn't believe that he was ever going to get air in that house. I mean, the mold was so significant and the toxins stay in drywall and wood and anything porous made of cellulose.

So how expensive was the remediation?

A lot. It meant that we didn't make very much on the sale of our house. I want to say maybe $80 grand.

Wow. I sold a house. I can't remember if it was what they said was mold or if they just said that there was rot or something under one bedroom's worth of floor. And that alone was gonna be like $5,000. I tear that out and redo it.

Yeah.

Subfloors are expensive.

Yeah. Anyway, you mentioned the weight loss or gain and migraines and insomnia. What else would you see in a patient that might make you suspect mold?

The common symptoms are fatigue and brain fog. So cognitive dysfunction of all kinds, word recall, memory loss, difficulty, focus, and concentration. And then I see a lot of headaches and migraines. I see a lot of insomnia, anxiety, sometimes depression, and then a lot of unusual neurological presentations that don't fit into any neurological diagnosis. So like asymmetrical numbness, tingling, weakness, ice pick sensations, burning sensations, crawling sensations. Involuntary muscle movements, ataxia, or difficulty with your balance. So those all fall under the unusual neuro symptoms. And then we see a lot of rashes, itchy rashes, acne, hair loss, and then rapid weight gain or loss.

So I know that some of the things you said, like the crawling sensations, that's also common for Lyme or Lyme co-infections. So is there anything that's really distinguishing between those two that would make you think one or the other?

Yeah, a few things there, but the things that make me think more Lyme than mold are when somebody has flu-like symptoms. So they feel like they're coming down with something, like they're sick, but they don't actually get a cold and they have joint pain that moves around. So we call that migratory joint pain, achiness, or recurrent fevers. So I often think more of Lyme with those. And then the mold symptoms are really similar to Bartonella symptoms, one of the co-infections in Lyme, those can be hard to tease out. But if you have Lyme, you always test for mold first and you always treat the mold first, cuz mold often the reason that Lyme remains active and chronic in the system. And when you clear the mold, often the Lyme goes back into dormancy. So I actually don't ever start treatment on a Lyme patient without doing a mold test first and treating that.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

So I know mold can also present with GI issues. So what GI symptoms might you see with that?

I feel like we see the whole gamut. Mold can colonize or live in your upper respiratory tract or your GI tract. So if you're living in a moldy space for a long time, eventually you're gonna breathe a spore up into your nose or swallow one down your esophagus. And if it colonizes in your gut, you can see anything from intractable hiccups, but More commonly diarrhea, constipation, gas, bloating, a lot of vagal stuff, burping, and right after you eat, bloating. Yeah.

I've got someone who has a lot of those symptoms and just tested positive for mold. Ah, which is always, I think, pretty shocking because of the potential implications. So I'm curious if you recommend people, if they suspect mold, do they start with inspecting the house or do they start with the mycotoxin test?

I always have people test themselves first. Let's just see if that's even the right road. If it is, then we need to figure out if it's an old exposure or where you're living now.

Yeah. And so which mycotoxin test do you like to use?

Definitely recommend a urinary mycotoxin over biomarkers in the blood and some of the other testing. And I really like Realtime Labs. I like Vibrant. The Realtime Labs probably is my favorite because I've just used it for so long and I trust it, but it's very specific, meaning you won't see false positives, but it's not as sensitive, meaning you'll miss a decent amount. So it has to be provoked. And I do a pretty intense provocation. I do an IV of phosphatidylcholine and glutathione, and then we wait an hour and collect the urine. And the reason is that the people that get sick from mold are the ones that can't detox it. They can't metabolize it and get it out in the urine, the stool, and the sweat. And so if I just check their urine, they probably wouldn't be sick enough to end up in my office if they were getting it out in the urine, the stool, and the sweat. So these phosphatidylcholine and glutathione will help metabolize them and detox them so you can get a sense of what's really in the body.

And if somebody doesn't have access to an IV, could they use those orally to provoke?

Yeah. So you would do liposomal glutathione, as big of a dose as you can stomach, kind of some, it gives some people diarrhea, at least 1,000 milligrams a day for a week. And then if you can do either a really hot bath or an infrared sauna beforehand, that'll help as well, pull it out and mobilize it. When I have people do a retest, I'll actually have them stay on their antifungals. So if somebody has antifungals around, they could take the antifungals as part of the provocation as well. And the idea there is if it's living in you and you take an antifungal medication that kills it, it releases its contents, which are those mycotoxins. So it's another way to provoke to see what's actually in the system and the urine.

So they're literally taking the glutathione right up until the testing.

Yeah. Yeah. And by antifungals, I mean like pharmaceuticals, like itraconazole or voriconazole.

Would you give them phoscholine orally or?

I'm real careful with phoscholine orally. If they are already on it and we know they tolerate it, then absolutely, that'd be a great provocation. But I've found a lot of my chronic complex illness patients and my mold patients don't initially tolerate oral phosphatidylcholine, it can exacerbate symptoms. It releases these fat-soluble toxins. Some people can't clear them and they get symptomatic. So I, I'm convinced that one.

I imagine glutathione would do the same, wouldn't it?

I find most people tolerate it. Some people have to work up real slowly, but generally I find most people tolerate it.

So are there any tests beyond the mycotoxin tests that you use related to mycotoxins?

I like the Mycotoxin because it gives me the specific strains that are in the body, and there's different binders for different strains of mold or mycotoxins. That one, you can create a protocol that's actually gonna work for your unique mycotoxin load. There are markers in the blood that if you have insurance that covers all your blood work, they can be sort of nice to follow to see how we're doing without paying for a mycotoxin test. I don't find them diagnostic or definitive. To be honest, the two big ones now, at least here in Colorado, we can't get them processed correctly. The labs changed where they sent them and after COVID they changed. So it was a C4A and a TGF-beta 1. And after COVID they changed the reference ranges. So as everybody's really high from the inflammation from COVID And so if you can get them done accurately, they can be helpful, but That's proving to be harder and harder right now.

Interesting. Okay. So you'd be looking for those in theory to go down over time.

You want them all to go down except for the MSH.

Oh, is there, is that another?

It's another one that, yeah, that one you can do without a specialty lab, but it's melanocyte stimulating hormone. And when the MSH goes down, that's often when the system fully crashes. We don't treat the MSH directly, we treat the mold and it's sort of the last value to come back up into the normal place. It wouldn't necessarily be a good data point along the way.

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So if someone is in what appears to be a mold-free environment but shows mycotoxins on the test, could they be from a previous residence and How long would they stay in the body?

When we get a positive test, um, that doesn't tell me whether it's an old exposure or current exposure. First, we test the home that they're at and see how that one looks. And it can be from a previous exposure. If that's the case, then they likely colonized in you, meaning it, it's living in you now, releasing mycotoxins, and you brought it with you. The most common places of colonization is in the sinuses. So part of a good mold treatment program has a nasal spray aimed there.

So basically you don't know whether it's— it could be in the body for years in theory.

Yes, it can. It's always better if it's not their current living.

Right.

Of course.

Then you don't have to tell them you've got tens of thousands of— that's why I wouldn't wanna go into mold, cuz that's gotta be stressful.

I find mold to be a great diagnosis in that people get better. The turnaround is awesome. In a good mold protocol, you never feel worse. You feel either nothing or better the whole time. As opposed to Lyme, where there's some pain before you get better. It's, it's trickier. I think it's a great diagnosis. However, if they're still in a moldy place and they have to either remediate or move, that's when it turns into more of a challenge.

So what should people know about getting their home inspected for mold?

Well, you want to get a good environmental professional. Anybody can put up a website and call themselves a mold inspector. It's not a regulated industry. So you want somebody good, you can start with, there's an organization called ICI, the International Society of Environmentally Acquired Illness. It's ici.org and they have a find your physician directory and a find your IEP directory. So usually I have patients, if they're not close by where I know the people that are good, I have them go to start at that directory, that website, and see if they can find anyone near them. If not, they can call the one closest to them and see if they know anybody. There's a national company called We Inspect that does most of the country.

Okay.

If they have no suspicion that it's in their current home and none at all, which most of them don't even when it is, but if they have, there's no history of leaks and any of that, then I have them start with an ERMI, a qPCR, which is a dust test for DNA of mold and mycotoxins. So you just do a little Swiffer sample of the dust in your house and send that in. We get a sense of if it's bad and needs a thorough evaluation, or if it looks okay, then I don't need to worry about it.

That's ERM.

ERM.

Okay. How much can people expect to spend on a mold inspection from a professional mold inspector?

Probably like $1,000.

And what should people know about doing remediation on their home?

That's another one that's really important to get the right person. Cause like I said, it's an unregulated industry. And so people can sort of say like Servpro, will come in and they'll put fans on it, which will just blow the mold all over your house and make it worse. Again, that same directory of IEPs has a lot of remediators on it. Home Cleanse is an organization that does remediations all over the country. They do a really good job. Yeah, there's a couple other directories. I'd start there. There's an organization called Change the Air Foundation, and they have tons of free downloads. And so they have entire guides around what looking for in a good remediator? What does it mean to have a good remediation? What does a good remediator contract look like? I have— oh, they've got a ton of resources, but some things is you want to make sure that they're going to contain the area. So if you've got wet moldy drywall and they're going to pull it out, that has to be contained in 6mm plastic with negative air pressure. So a scrubber that's pulling the air out of the house before they remove the moldy wet material so it doesn't just all over your whole house and make things worse. You can always ask, what kind of a containment do you do? After all the demo's been done where they pull out everything, you have to get a small particulate cleanup. So the mold releases these mycotoxins and other nanoparticles that are toxic to those of us that are sensitive to mold. Those can stay in the drywall, in the wood. So everything has to get wiped down and vacuumed. And then sometimes we fog at the end.

Is this one of these things where you probably need to replace your furniture and stuff?

So if it's a hard surface, you can wipe it. If it's a fake leather or leather, you can wipe it. If it's a fluffy couch, you're going to probably need to get rid of it if it was a significant mold exposure. Yeah.

Yeah.

Ideally mattresses.

Yeah. That can be expensive on top of everything else.

But anything you can throw in the washing machine, you can keep.

Right. Right. So actually my sister and her husband are going through this right now. I'm not convinced that they have any big mold problem, but he's got a lot of allergies. And they're in Georgia. They said they found a dog that apparently can inspect for mold. Have you heard of that?

Yeah, there's great mold dogs out there. So we have one in Colorado named Buddy and he's great. It's the same organization that trains the dogs to sniff out drugs and weapons in our luggage at the airport. So the same people train them to smell mold. If you know you have it and you can't find the source, like let's say your ERMI is really high or even an airborne spore trap is high and they can't figure out where the source is, that's a nice time to get a, a mold dog in.

Yeah.

So I imagine when you're getting an inspection, are they drilling holes in the wall to check So they've got infrared cameras, really intense, powerful ones, like $10,000 ones that can see dampness in the walls and they have damp meters. And so usually somebody good can see like a water damage spot somewhere and pull back a baseboard. If you're stuck and you don't know for sure, is it behind this thing or whatever, then they might do a cavity sampling. They do drill a little hole to go behind a wall and do an airborne spore. But that's a more specialty thing that you would ask for. They're not going to come in and tear down your walls. Right.

Right.

Okay. So if someone can't leave the moldy environment, is it worthwhile to treat them at all? Will you put off treatment until they move?

I have a mold eradication protocol that's two phases. So phase one is teaching your body how to detox, metabolize, and get these toxins out. That part is binders and glutathione and organ detox support, that kind of thing. That can be done while you're still in the exposure. So basically the longer you're in the exposure, the more mycotoxins you're gonna have in the system, and they're just gonna keep accumulating until you're out of the exposure, and then there's more work to do. And so you can bind while you're in and decrease that total body burden. And sometimes it's enough to even feel a little bit better, but you might not feel that significant improvement until you're out of the exposure. I wouldn't do phase 2 antifungals and biofilm until after they're out of the exposure.

And say somebody can get out of the exposure, how long would somebody typically stay on binders before moving on to antifungals?

If they're not being exposed?

Right.

Oh, if they're no longer being exposed, once they're on the full phase 1 for 4 weeks, they're doing it successfully, having daily complete bowel movements, cuz the binders are constipating and they're sweating and they're doing all of this and they feel either nothing or better for 4 weeks, then I start phase 2.

And when you say they're sweating, are you sending them to saunas and that sort of thing as well?

I have a pretty lengthy handout on biotoxin relief and things that help to pull biotoxin outta the body. And those will, you know, just potentiate it, make it go faster and you'll feel better quicker. And those are things like infrared sauna and ionic foot baths, detox baths, and acupuncture and, a variety of things.

Interesting. Are there particular genes that make people more susceptible to mold illness?

Probably. Our number that we use in the mold community is 25% of the population is sensitive to mold. Not everybody is. I personally think that number's growing. Now I could have a really distorted view of things because mold just walks in my door. People just come in and they go, I have mold, help me. But there's a variety of factors that would make it where more people are sensitive to mold than used to be. One really easy example is that a total body burden. If you have a bucket that has been getting full throughout your life with plastics and pesticides and glyphosate, and then some inflammation from COVID and then some biotoxin from Lyme, when the bucket gets full is when the system begins to crash. And I actually don't remember what the question was now.

Oh, about genetics, whether there's particular genes that have been identified for Mold.

Yeah, sorry, I went on a tangent. I think there is genetic mutations or SNPs that make some of us more sensitive than others. I don't think we really know exactly what they are yet. You might be alluding to the HLA-DR, which is an old test that we used to do that can look at your genetics and say whether or not you're more susceptible to mold or Lyme or both. I think most of us in the mold community have found them not to be useful or accurate, so a lot of really sick patients that didn't have any of the genes and people that have both the bad genes that are fine and mold-in-line. So I don't even check those anymore.

Is there some estimate about the percentage of the population that is mold sensitive?

25%. Yeah.

25. Oh, that high.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's a wonder there's people living in certain places with the mold because like I'm in Arizona here. Obviously we don't have as much mold to worry about. This is where everybody moves when they're trying to get away from it.

Right.

Exactly.

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So do you use nasal sprays as part of mold treatment? I think you did mention that, and I'm wondering if there's any non-prescription options because for those of us who are not MDs or naturopaths, it's kind of like, what do you do when you become old?

Yeah. Yeah. I usually start with BEI. That's a compounded prescription one. Xclear is really good. Silver is really good. Nasal silver. Propolis can be helpful.

What about biocidin put into a saline spray?

Yeah. If you put it in, in your sinus rinse. They told me they were gonna make a nasal spray like 5 years ago.

What is taking You told me that too.

I know.

And they've come out with all these dental products and all these other things.

And I know, I'm like, where's our need?

We're all, come on. We're still telling people to take pliers and pry off nasal sprays and put in biocidin drops. I mean, help us out here, people.

Yes, exactly.

Okay. So you go binders and then you do nasal sprays and then the next series is antifungals. Is that kind of the sequence of events?

The first phase is really to get this sick from mold. Your detox pathways are not working correctly. So you make sure they're having bowel movements. You got them on all the right binders. You do it one at a time. You layer them in to make sure you're not trying to detox more than the body can handle. And that's one of the really common pitfalls when people try to treat themselves. They do too much too fast. They feel more sick and then they think they can't get better. So you're teaching the body how to bind with binders and pull out in the GI tract. And we're playing with magnesium and different things to have you continue to have daily bowel movements and then nasal sprays and then liposomal glutathione and then organ detox support. So some kidney liver lymph detoxification pathway support, and then you get some of the other biotoxin relief things happening.

Are there a certain company's products that you like for these things? I know Quicksilver does a lot of metal detox stuff.

Yeah, they do mold detox too. I love their UltraBinder. Activated charcoal is a big common binder that we use and UltraBinder is made by Quicksilver Scientific. It has activated charcoal and it has 3 or 4 other binders in smaller amounts. If you're not sure if there's some other stuff we didn't catch and you wanna clean it up, but that one's nice and it's got some aloe and some other things that make it a little easier on the belly. It's more expensive though, too. So if you're on a budget, plain activated charcoal is fine as well. The glutathione you should be picky about. It's hard to make a liposomal glutathione that you'll actually absorb.

Yeah. Have you tried the Aura Wellness's new glutathione spray?

I have it on right now.

I put it on after my shower. Yeah, I just started trying it recently. I had heard about it from a friend from Scott Forrest-Grand, do you know him? Who does the Better Health Guy podcast. He told me about it and then I was at that longevity conference, the A4M World Congress in December. They were there, Oro, Oro Glutaral. I was able to check it out and try it. Now we have it in clinic. I think it's pretty cool.

Yeah. I had Dr. Patel on the podcast recently, so, oh nice.

Yeah.

And the way he tells it, it doesn't matter if you take the liposomal or the whatever, it's not gonna get in. It's just gonna break into the components and recompose was the way he told the story.

So, oh yeah. If you get a good liposomal formula, it will get absorbed. I mean, there's several that you put under the tongue that get a lot of venous absorption, and then the liposomes get through the cells in the small intestinal wall, and as opposed to having to go through a receptor, so they get absorbed into the system easier.

Yeah.

No, what he said though was when they tested any kind of, of glutathione besides their own, obviously he was selling products, so, you know, whatever, with a grain of salt. But he said when they tested the blood levels right after taking it, there was no raise in glutathione levels and. There was a couple hours later, a subsequent raise in the levels of cysteine, glycine, and glutamine. So they knew that it was breaking it into its components and recomposing it, which is not to say it doesn't also work in that sense, but yeah.

But that's exactly why you have to get a good one and it has to be liposomal so that you don't digest it. 'Cause I follow glutathione levels on all my patients 'cause glutathione is necessary to detox and metabolize mold. And so Generally a person who's had a big mold exposure, their levels are tanked. They're really, really low cuz they've used it all up trying to get the mold out themselves, their body has. That's something I follow and I absolutely come up with the liposomal formulas.

Okay.

And what marker are you using to test them?

I check glutathione levels in the serum and LabCorp. I check them on the NutrEval has the serum and the red blood cell, which is the more recent exposure glutathione.

Oh, I was asking about whose products you liked for the kidney, liver, and lymph. We mentioned Cleesever, was there another?

Yeah, so kidney, liver, lymph, I like Pachana. Have you ever worked with those? It's like a German homeopathic company.

No.

P-K-A-N-A. They have kidney, liver, lymph. I like, if somebody prefers a capsule, Cellcore's, um, Drainage Activator. I like that one. Those are the two main ones I use. There's some others, but mostly I like those.

Okay. So I often see clients who have Candida and will likely go through, say, 1 to 4 courses of antifungals and binders and such. So I'm curious, is it possible that someone with mold illness could still have mold issues after going through that kind of a protocol? I assume they'd have like an extreme reaction as soon as they started the antifungals if they had a big burden of mycotoxins.

So the antifungal you would use for yeast versus mold are different. But where there's mold, there's always yeast. So mold and yeast are both fungal, and mold will create all the right conditions and pH and everything for yeast to flourish. And so even in the buildings that have water damage, there's often yeast. See that on the plates and on the tests that we do. And then in the body, this is mostly just from doing this for 15 years. I've just learned that where every mold case has a yeast component. Sometimes it's a huge part of the case and sometimes it's a small part and you don't really know till you get to the yeast part of treatment, but it's a huge part of my mold treatment is I treat yeast as well.

Oh, okay. And so what are the, the antifungals for mold versus yeast?

I would use itraconazole, voriconazole for mold, fluconazole for yeast, but I treat yeast. This is a more unique thing to me. I treat yeast with low-dose immunotherapy. Have you ever worked with LDN?

I've heard of that.

Yeah.

You wanna talk about it a little bit?

Yeah, sure. So LDI, it works kind of like a vaccine or like allergy drops where you're giving the body a tiny bit of the thing that you want it to recognize, but also to develop tolerance too. So it's not so much immune reactivity. They have low-dose immunotherapy for Borrelia, Bartonella, for EBV, all kinds of things. But the yeast one for me has just been like Absolute game changer in clinic. I love it. It's always a huge part of a mold case and it's always one of the parts when we find the right dose that the patient goes like, like 12 things get better. I honestly remember when in my medical training in the late '80s, early '90s, no '90s, in the '90s, I remember, you know, there were different phases like Candida is the cause of everything. And then the, there was this other thing that was the cause of everything. And I remember thinking how silly it was. And now I'm like, everybody has yeast and I treat certainly all the mold patients and all the Lyme patients, cuz most of 'em have done antibiotics. There's a lot, a lot of yeast.

Yeah.

There's just one provider of low-dose immunotherapy. Isn't that right?

Oh, Ty Vincent. Yeah. I, I, the guy that makes it, you mean?

Yeah.

There's one guy that makes it and then you just have to do a training to be able to get the actual LDIs.

Yeah.

Interesting. And so you mentioned prescription.

Do you find out you can treat the yeast and get rid of it for good? So I feel like I spent 7 years with herbs and biofilm busters and fluconazole, or, you know, you can use voriconazole, but that's a pretty intense med for yeast. And that they'd get better for a while and then it would kind of come back.

Yeah.

It's hard to say because people will sign up for a certain number of sessions and then they'll be better and then they'll leave. I don't insist on retesting if people are feeling better. I don't insist on seeing clean organic acid tests. I certainly see levels come down after treatment, but whether it stays gone forever, I, I mean, I know that there are genetics that make people more susceptible to Candida, that they just, their body just doesn't fight it as well. And so if you're one of those people, then you just can't have a high sugar diet and high carb diet ongoing if you wanna manage it. So that's part of it. I think if you just wanna go back to eating sugar, then yeah, it's gonna come back. Yeah. So you mentioned some prescription antifungals for mold. Are there non-prescription alternatives?

I use prescription antifungals. You could sort of imagine the binders are sort of sopping up the mycotoxins that the mold is releasing in your body and pulling those out. But until the mold is no longer living in your system, it's gonna continue releasing more mycotoxins. So it's like you're in a boat and you're bucketing out the water and there's a hole in the boat until you get rid of the actual source. I just have really found that that's where the needle moves and that's where clinically everything changes is when you start the antifungals. Now that's only if the system is ready. If you start 'em too soon, you'll make 'em more sick. I don't find the herbals to be fungicidal, meaning they actually kill and get rid of entirely. Now I have patients who don't tolerate the antifungals or who just Most won't. They don't wanna do them. I will use, there's a bunch of herbal combinations that I'll use. It seems like we get somewhere with them. Mm-hmm. It's not quite the magical turnaround of a pharmaceutical.

Yeah. Are there particular herbs in those combinations that are the relevant ones or?

Lemongrass, Pau d'arco. I use usually some combos. Byron White makes one called A-Fung, F-N-G. Beyond Balance has two that are helpful, Pro-Mico and Mico Regen. Yeah, there's a few other ones. I have another homeopathic that I've just been experimenting with for the people who don't tolerate antifungals or won't take them. It was from a podcast I did with a homeopath in Australia, and she told me about this homeopathic thing that's for yeast and mold that she has super dramatic results with in clinic, and she sent it to me from Australia. So I'm experimenting with that to see if I can do something without antifungals. I'll let you know if it works out.

Okay. Sounds good. Anything else that I haven't thought to ask about mold treatment?

Well, a couple things. If you have mold, I really feel like you should be hopeful and you should get tested and you should get treatment because like I said earlier, I really think it's a great diagnosis. People do really well. They get all the way better. I have patients tell me they're better. They feel better than they ever have after all the detox. It's not a terrible diagnosis, so don't be heartbroken if you have.

Except for the part about remediating your house, if it's in there, that's the terrible part.

Hopefully it's an old exposure. Get yourself tested after you move to a clean place.

Yeah, exactly. Don't find out while you're still there yet.

Yeah.

Anything else?

Oh, well, you know, if patients are interested, I have a mold treatment course for patients that I created. So As an MD, I can only really treat patients in Colorado because that's where I'm licensed. I get calls from people all over the world, and after many years of feeling like I should create something, I finally did, and it's been birthed and it's out there. I did the first live version of it last summer and it went great. And it's pretty affordable now and step-by-step sort of walk you through a whole mold detox protocol, phase 1 and phase 2.

Okay.

So is that like a series of videos then?

Yes.

35 video modules and tons of resource guides and how to find your supporting physician to write a couple scripts and that sort of thing.

Okay. And where can people find that?

Dr. Fox Medical Detective dot com.

Okay, great.

Sounds like a very useful resource.

Well, thank you so much for sharing all this great information with us. I appreciate it.

You're welcome. Nice to meet you.

You too. I love the straightforward information that she gave us, and I hope that will be useful to many of you.

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