What You ACTUALLY Need to Know About Mycotoxins and Molds | Dr. A Explains

It seems like we're hearing more and more about mold-related illness or mycotoxin-induced illness, et cetera. And I've gotten a ton of questions. We've done other mold content and mycotoxin content. So I wanted to kind of clear up some of the more maybe mysterious things around mold and mycotoxin illness, or at least that's the way the questions sort of looked. So I want to get into mold, how it gives us mycotoxin, and what kind of health threats, health issues we may have from it. So the first thing, and we have other content that goes deeper into it, but a mycotoxin is a form of biotoxin that is going to come from mold. And that can be mold that is naturally occurring in your environment. It can be mold that's occurring in your sheetrock because you had a leak. It can be due to any sort of water-damaged area. All sorts of things can create mold that will put off a mycotoxin. When we have mycotoxins, we often have all sorts of big picture problems. And because we're often, unless we happen to see the mold and think, well, maybe this is part of why I'm so sick, unless we happen to have that cause and effect going on, the symptoms that we might have are going to be very diffuse and we might blame them on other things. And indeed, you can have 2, 3, 4 reasons for an illness all at the same time. So they might be partly because of mycotoxin, might be partly because of The other stuff. Also, mycotoxins have a way because we generally don't see them and they affect us chemically. They have a way to be permissive to other types of illness that we otherwise may not be experiencing. So they can have things like neurological and immunological side effects. People can have effects on their cardiovascular and digestive system. Pretty much every system in your body, joint pain, all sorts of things. Additionally, mycotoxins. Toxins, as I mentioned in a couple other YouTube videos we've done, can be directly immunosuppressive. So there's actually immunosuppressive drugs that are used, like in transplant medicine, stuff like that, that are a mycotoxin chemical that is synthesized into a drug because they're so immunosuppressive. So all of those things then can lead us to a quandary about what in the world would I look for in, you know, my health patterns or illness patterns or whatever that might make me think mold and mycotoxin would be a piece of the puzzle. So some of the things that I've seen and some of the things that triggered me as a physician to start looking at mold and mycotoxin-based illness included things such as people that had chronic illness problems that were not resolving with normal treatments that would usually help those chronic illness problems. So for example, at one point in time, I was director at a clinic where we focused specifically on chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia patients. And we had particular protocols and things we did. And normally people would improve at a certain rate. We kind of knew if we do these things over this amount of time, this person's going to improve. What I started to see was the people who were not improving like the other people were, and let's say we were doing our job right and our homework, we had the right stuff going on. When I started to test those people for toxic influence, which includes mycotoxins, often there were toxins in the background that were probably just sidelining their immune function so they couldn't heal like that. So chronic illness generally that doesn't want to resolve. Now, what's a very current modern type of a chronic illness that we hear a lot about? That would be something like long COVID or post-acute COVID syndrome. One of the things we've seen in long COVID, and there's some research on this too, is that people's sensitivity, people with long COVID, their sensitivity to toxic influences is much low— higher actually than people who don't have long COVID. So what that means is their threshold for toxins changes. And so while they are having their long COVID, it changes their sensitivity. And so then the biological and pathological effects of a toxin like a mycotoxin can make their chronic illness, being long COVID, harder to treat, longer lasting, et cetera, et cetera. The other one that I noticed a big pattern with were people with chronic infections where, again, lots of people have chronic infections, whether it's Lyme or Lyme complex illness or Epstein-Barr or chronic CMV or any of the other things. When they don't experience resolution when we're treating them, often if we check them for mycotoxin exposure, what we wind up seeing is that mycotoxins are a piece of the puzzle. Now, with all of these, there's sort of a chicken and egg kind of thing that can go on that we'll talk about. But one of the patterns, if you're thinking of it, say for yourself, for a loved one is if you've really been doing appropriate treatment for chronic infections or chronic fatiguing illness or whatever, and you either are not getting any better or you're in kind of a loop of a little improvement, then you crash and a little improvement, you crash or a little improvement, then you get other problems. Sometimes toxic exposure can be doing it. Mycotoxins are famous for that sort of a pattern. Also neuropsychiatric illness. One of the more devastating manifestations of mycotoxin exposure is really the neurological inflammation that goes on and neuropsychiatric illness. I have had patients where prior to us testing them and we found out they had mycotoxin exposure, they were getting more and more psychiatric illness. They might've had a little bit to start, you know, a neuropsychiatric diagnosis, but they developed extreme, maybe anxiety, maybe sleep disorder, maybe depression, maybe all sorts of other things. And it turned out that the mycotoxins exposure, once that was dealt with, was shown to be a big part of the neuropsychiatric manifestation. The other thing can be neurological signs and symptoms that might not be neuropsychiatric, such as chronic headaches, chronic pain syndromes, other things of that nature. Other things I've seen are hormonal balance issues that are very hard to treat. And the idea with that is not so much that lots of people don't have hormonal balance problems, but that it is the normal treatment treatments to help the hormones get rebalanced, go in the person, and maybe they stick for a little while, or maybe they don't help at all, or whatever. And then they need more hormone, or they need more rebalancing, and it's just never-ending cycle. If a person can't get their hormonal system kind of balanced with normal interventions over the course of weeks to a few months, another corollary I've seen clinically is there's usually a toxic influence, and mold mycotoxins would be a huge one there. And you could pick any other part of the body where this same pattern is going on. Now, one of the things I wanna be clear to say is, am I saying that this is all caused by mold and mycotoxins? No, certainly not. You can certainly have hormonal balance problems or neuropsychiatric or neurological problems or immune problems or chronic infections with no mold exposure at all. What I'm trying to say is that all those things can be made much worse and more importantly, harder to treat when we have mold and mycotoxin exposure. So we talked a little bit about where you might get exposed The worst cases I have seen is where the mold is not visible. It's either behind a wall, under a carpet, or up in the attic, something like that. Some of the worst mycotoxin-induced illness patients that I have and currently have discovered that they were, for example, living in the top floor of a condominium and the attic was above them. When they had it inspected, their condo looked okay, but the whole attic above was full of black mold, for example, or something like that. And so we When you have that and you have that level of invisible exposure, you are so toxic that you can get extremely ill. These patients I'm thinking of had extreme amounts of neuropsychiatric illness, pain syndromes, hormone dysregulation, chronic infections, everything you could think of. And was it all the fault of the mold? No, but a huge part of it was. So those are the sort of things you can think of for exposure. Now, there's different ways to test you, the human. You can test your house, get a good mold inspector, but as far as humans go, there's the direct mycotoxin testing, which would be often a urine test. And those are not the greatest tests in the world, but they're not the worst tests in the world. They're telling you what's coming out of you as far as mycotoxins. Then there's also immunologic tests where they will test the immunoglobulins, the immune proteins that we make against foreign invaders. And you can test for direct mold immunoglobulins, but also More importantly, mycotoxin immunoglobulins. And when I have people who are really sick, I test both. So immunoglobulin reactions to the mold itself, immunoglobulin reactions to the mycotoxin. Those are 2 separate things, by the way. So people often ask, well, which one should I do? A lot of times in the screening on the front end, I will just tell them we'll pick one or the other kind of based on what I think's going on. So for example, if I know they've already gotten exposure, I may want to just see what their body is pumping out in the urine. I might do a urine test as a screening. If I want to see how badly their immune system is disrupted, I may do those 2 levels of immune immunoglobulin testing for mycotoxin and for mold exposure. Whatever you do, then you have to move on to either getting out of the moldy environment or remediating through, you know, construction remediation, et cetera, the mold environment. And then you also have to treat the person to help their body eliminate as well. All right. I hope this answers those questions. Please do like, share, and subscribe. We really appreciate all you subscribers in the growing community, and we're gonna put some other videos up here that you might like as well. See y'all on the next video.