85: Your Home Could Be Making You Sick – The Hidden Mold Exposure Keeping You Tired, Inflamed, and Stuck with Dr. Philip Oubre

So today we are chatting with Dr. Philip Oubre, who specializes in honestly a lot of complex conditions, but mold is certainly one of them. He is a longtime colleague of mine and very respected in the Austin community. He's passionate about expanding the reach of functional medicine beyond the traditional clinic, recognizing that one-on-one care has inherent limits. He committed to empowering people at scale with knowledge and tools to improve their health. Through Plus Wellbeing, he brings real-world clinical insight into an AI-driven platform designed to help users manage nutrition, labs, and the pursuit of wellness. He is a physician and really emphasizes reversing chronic disease rather than managing symptoms and has helped thousands of people over the years. I am so excited to share this conversation with you. You'll leave today more empowered, more knowledgeable, and with actionable steps to get your health on track. Let's dig in.

Well, this has been a long time coming. Dr. Oubre, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, for sharing your knowledge and your wealth of expertise on a topic that we haven't really dove into yet of mold and kind of complex issues and just complex patients. You're where I send complex patients.

So thank you for that as well. That's our forte. We love that.

Right. We have worked together for a long time in Austin and finally had the pleasure of meeting one another.

Yeah.

Let's not say too long. How that, that ages us., right? It's just proverbial long time.

It really does. Like we started as babies, right? Right.

How old?

I was talking to someone recently that was saying when they started functional medicine, I was like, I wasn't even a real doctor and you were already doing functional medicine. Yeah. I feel young all of a sudden.

I love it. I love it. Well, I'm really excited to talk a little bit about this. So I see mold patients through this teeny tiny lens, often with Hashimoto's. With these symptoms that just won't improve. But I am always the first one to say I don't touch mold with a 10-foot, 100-foot pole. Incredibly complicated. Yes. When people come to see you, and I know you see people for a lot of different things and you even have really incredible wellness-based programs here in Austin.

Keep going. I love this.

I know, right?

Tell me more.

It's true. When I have people who are like really invested in their health, they're like, where can I go to get like the best care to stay healthy? I'm like, you should go see him.

I appreciate that.

Yeah, of course. But tell me, in your patient population, what symptoms kind of make you start to consider and think about mold as a potential diagnosis or signs, whatever it is?

So the answer's probably gonna be pretty similar to the thyroid answer, right? Cause there's so many symptoms that can be caused by mold, so many symptoms that can be caused by thyroid. And kind of like you, I, back in 2018, I said the same thing. I don't want to touch mold with a 10-foot pole because I don't know what to do about it if we did. And so it was a nutritionist at the time that pushed me over the edge and said, no, we're testing this patient. And sure enough, the patient came back positive. And I was like, okay, now we gotta figure out what to do. And so as we've figured out what to do about mold, and it's, it's been quite the journey, we've learned that mold can have all kinds of symptoms and including disrupting the thyroid, as you know, and disrupting the brain and disrupting hormones. And mold is really one of those, it's an ancient organism, ancient, ancient organism. And how it's learned to disrupt our biochemistry is, is incredible. I, I kind of describe it like if you have 20 dominoes that have fallen, of course you wanna pick up the first one before you pick up the second one, third one, fourth one. But mold has a way of knocking down the first one while simultaneously attacking all 19 other ones. So it's not just about like, oh, just picking up the one. It, it just incredibly destroys people. But just like thyroid, there's a huge spectrum, right? There can be people with just a little bit of mold and it's affecting them slightly and they have a little bit of brain fog. And I'm sure you hear this all the time and it drives us crazy is I feel my age. Like, well, there is no such thing as kind of feeling your age. I normally tell people like age is nothing more than time to accumulate problems. So you've picked up some mold along the way and we'll focus on mold. Of course, there's all kinds of heavy metals and toxins and chemicals and everything else, but specifically focusing on mold. The most common, I guess, to answer the actual question. The most common symptoms of mold are the things that a regular doctor can't diagnose. If, if a regular doctor can't come up with a name for whatever you're suffering from, it's must always mold. Because we say if you're on a safari looking for a lion and you don't know what a lion looks like, you're never gonna find one. You're gonna find cats and you're gonna find tigers, but you're never gonna find a lion. You don't know what it looks like. So if, if you've been to 10 doctors and you don't have a good answer, it's probably mold is the answer. Most commonly though, it's brain fog and fatigue that are out of proportion is, is how I'd say it. Like everybody's walked in the room and like, why did I come here again? Like I forgot why I entered the pantry. Everyone's had that, that dumb moment. Everyone's had a tired day where you needed a nap, but you know your past self. Patients know their past selves. You know, you were a collegiate athlete and now you can't make it to 2:00 PM without taking a nap. You can't. You used to be able to run 6 miles and now you can walk the block. Clearly something's wrong with your biochemistry, so it's at least worth investigating mold.

It's funny too, and with my patients where we've, we've taken their thyroid from completely massively dysfunctional to perfect, and they're like, yeah, I don't feel better. We've looked at hormones, inflammation, and all the other accessory things. I'm like, there's probably something going on, environmental, mold exposure, et cetera. And I remember years ago when you and I kind of started our journey in the world of functional medicine, mold was incredibly controversial. Do you feel like we've made any progress from that at all or not really?

Unfortunately, not really, McCall. I, I'm, I'm disappointed cuz I've been doing it since 2018 now. And so I'm shouting it from the rooftops and I, I, I felt like everyone should have jumped on the train by now and more, it's at least more discussed on social media and things, but it's still almost all the many times I get a patient that's seen the 20 doctors and sits on that couch, that couch right there. And they'll, I'll of course bring up mold and, but the, if a patient sits on that couch, there's basically an 80, 90% chance they are living in mold and don't know it. And it's not because 80 to 90% of patients have mold. It's because if someone else hasn't been able to figure out by now, it's because they don't know how to look at a lie. They don't know what a lion looks like, and that's how they end up on my couch. So already just entering my practice is a bad sign that you're living in mold, statistically speaking. But the other part to mold is that it's a huge spectrum, as is everything. But people always think of mold and they think of like, oh my gosh, it's black mold. We got to bulldoze the house down. Or there's no mold. That's the biggest problem in most people's mind right now is that, well, I'm not dying, so it can't be mold. And so unfortunately, what we call it is we call it the grayscale of mold. The black mold bulldozes it down. It happens. We have patients with it. They're in lawsuits and all kinds of stuff that does happen, unfortunately. And there's no such thing as no mold. That is also nonexistent. So we call it the grayscale. Where are you at between dark, dark, dark gray that you can't heal in and light, light, light gray to say that, yeah, you're not no mold, but you're low enough mold to heal in. So if you're doing the thyroid, if you're doing the vitamins, if you're doing the nutrients, you're changing your food plan and you're not getting better, we call it ongoing toxic exposure. Now we, just like you, we, we have to kind of think outside the box cuz we're so, we see so much mold that we automatically think of mold. So we try to remind ourselves when a patient's not getting better, we call it ongoing toxic exposure. And I do air quotes because the idea is that If you're eating Doritos and McDonald's every day, well, that's an ongoing toxic exposure. That's why you're not better. If you're drinking gasoline every day, well, that's an ongoing toxic exposure. But the number one ongoing toxic exposure that most people don't recognize is mold. Because you know when you're eating Doritos, you know when you're drinking gasoline, you know when you're in a toxic relationship, uh, you know when you're— I had a patient recently playing with thermometers who got mercury poisoning as a kid and like Okay. That was a thing in the '80s. So, you know, when you're playing with mercury and your thermometer, so all of those are pretty obvious. So if you're doing all the right things and not getting better, it usually means there's something invisible. And either you're ignorant to the toxic relationship you're in or what you're doing, or you're breathing an invisible toxin. Another thing that completely surprises me about mold to this day is how it has no smell. No smell. People need to get the idea out of their mind that mold smells musty. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The idea is by the time you can smell musty, boy, you're in a whole nother realm. So I, I won't bore you with my entire mold saga in my house, but suffice it to say that we, we hunted mold in my house from 2018 until 2025, believe it or not. And we finally found it in 2025. It was a window I had replaced and the, the company just didn't seal it. Window World, do not use them. Not Window World of, of Austin. And they didn't seal it properly. And every time it rained, it was waterlogging the wood and we never ever saw it. It never ever created a leak until unfortunately, you know, the July 4th floods last year that killed the Camp Mystic girls. It rained hard enough that we finally found the leak, opened it up and it was just rotten wood everywhere. What's fascinating is my wife's desk was right there at that window and she has a nose like a bloodhound. She smells everything. No smell, no nothing. As soon as we removed the drywall, it smelled like dead animals were in there. It was horrific. I would go in there just to see what the situation was like, but so bad that you could barely take a small sniff without holding your nose. It's so bad. How can drywall hold that kind of smell that's that horrific? So people have to get out of their head that they're gonna smell mold. If you can smell it, it's super bad. Anyway, I don't remember if you had asked a question, but I went on a rant.

Well, I'm now, I'm so wrapped into this. Story, Philip. So I need you to tell me, did your wife have any symptoms that maybe she didn't even re— realize and then that went away, or what was that whole deal?

Yeah, so it goes back to a common mold symptom. It's actually eczema. So Laura kept having eczema, and I love her, she's not the greatest patient, so she wasn't doing the protocols and things, so she wasn't reversing her eczema. So the story we told ourselves for a long time was, oh, it's just 'cause you haven't done the protocols and that's why you're used to have eczema. It was small and not a big deal, but really it was me. I started getting sicker and sicker And I'm the nerd patient. I do everything. I do all my protocols all the time. Always taking vitamins and supplements. You're probably the same, right? And so I'm doing all these things and I developed restless legs. As annoying as that is, it still barely plagues me today. But I developed two main things. One is restless legs. Second one's a little embarrassing, but I had to pee 4 to 5 times a night. Full bladder, not just like a trickle, not just like, oh, I think I need to pee. Full bladder of urine. And that's actually a mold symptom, believe it or not. So restless legs was kind of weird.

Inflammation that like accumulates during the day, the water retention, and then it goes away at nighttime, or it's just a—

I'm sure that's a piece of it, but mold loves to interact with all kinds of biochemistry and hormones. So it, it somehow, we don't know how, but it somehow prevents you from concentrating your— so you just start making very dilute urine. So during the day you don't really notice it because, oh, if you're thirsty and you're peeing, just drink more water. No big deal. But when you go to bed and you stop drinking, your body's supposed to concentrate its urine. So then you don't make as much urine. So it's a really common mold symptom too. It's not every— not everyone gets it, but when it happened, it was pretty obvious. 4 times a night. And I don't have prostate issue. I'm too young for that. So that was the final kicker of like, okay, there's mold in this house somewhere. And we had already done 3 remediations in the house. Found it in the kitchen and found it in a gym window. Same people, Window World. That was tiny stuff. Found in the kids' showers. I was putting holes in walls looking for this stuff and couldn't find it. And then when this happened, I was like, okay, it, it's somewhere. And we just so happened to around that time find the, the leak and then open it up. And yeah, as soon as it, it, one of the disappointing parts is people think they can get outta mold and within 3 days they should feel better. But unfortunately just getting outta the mold, people typically get worse before they get better. Makes zero sense to me., but they'll get worse before better. So it took a couple months, but eventually the, the urination thing just went away. Restless legs has been a little longer of a battle, but the moral of the story is the mold is incredibly sneaky in your house and everyone wants to see mold growth, but mold inspectors, mold assessors, they're not looking for mold, they're looking for water damage. And that's one of the questions we ask every one of our patients when they come in. How old is your house and what water leaks and water damage happened as far as you know? And I'm constantly surprised how many people say like, oh, I've lived in the house for 8 years and I've never had a water leak. We just moved into our house in October. We, we moved after this whole window saga, not because of it. We just moved and we've only had like 2 water incidents of like, hey, it was safe. We caught it and we're crazy mold people, but I've been in the house 6 months and we've had 2 water incidents. You've been in the house for 8 years. I know you've had water incidents. You just don't know it, right?

Or they just don't think it's a big deal. I mean, I think I've had 6 in my house, you know, and my husband's like, I would have just— that would have happened and I would have dried it up and moved on.

Never thought about it.

And I think that's where people are. The other hiccup that I so commonly see in my patients when I bring up mold and I'm like, look, do you— does it seem like there's been water leak in your house? Like, do you notice any damage? They're like, The response half the time is always, no, I live in a brand new house. And so they think that those houses are safe and they're some of the riskiest. And then they'll come back 2 years later and be like, oh my God, you were right. I did have mold. Tell me your experience with that and why people still need to be so incredibly vigilant.

Uh, good question. 'Cause a new home is either the best thing or the worst thing. It really just, Depends on the builder, right? Because newness, and of course VOCs, and people know about off-gassing and chemicals and all that. But as far as what I've seen in our patients, VOCs don't make people nearly as sick as mold. So one of the telltale signs of mold, and McCall McPherson McCall, I can't tell you how many times this has happened. It's almost like one of those magic tricks that when it happens in a new patient visit, they're like, oh my gosh, you've really figured it out. But it's really not that big. It, once you know the pattern, you see it over and over and over again. So. I'm sure your new patient intake's kind of like mine. Hey, why are you here? When did you get sick? All of this jazz. I can't tell you how many times I'm taking the dates down, the months, the years, whatever. And then they say, oh, January 2023 is when I get sick. And I'll tell them, oh, what happened in June, July of 20— what year did I say?

2025?

2023. So, okay, January 2023. What happened in June, July of 2022? And they'll often say, oh, we moved into the new home, or we moved into this home, or moved, or this happened. We had an AC issue or something. And so the 6-month window is the usual paradigm for water leak to happen, enough mold to grow and get the human sick is about 6 months. So when, especially when someone's just fine and then not fine, you gotta know it's something that you've been exposed to that you don't know. Did you just start eating Chick-fil-A? Did you just change your nutrition? Like, it's most likely something that's new to you. And if you didn't just start drinking gasoline or something, it's most likely in your air. So I don't care if the home is new. And, and actually we've noticed the newer the home, the good news is the, they're environmentally friendly, they're energy tight, they're cost efficient, all of that. That, that's nice and all. The problem with mold is the smallest amount of mold that never dilutes outside concentrates inside, concentrates and concentrates. So we found that homes pre-1980, pre-1990 can actually have higher levels of mold and not get people sick because their homes breathe. I love to tell the story of, we're, I'm of course a crazy mold doctor, so I've made a crazy mold wife. And so we were visiting her brother in Ireland, in Ireland, I mean, ancient homes, right? The country's older than ours by a lot. And so we rented this Airbnb near the beach and I mean, the windows are rotten. You, you keep like, you can see rot all over the place in this, this old home. It was a nice home. It was fixed up and everything., but you could tell there was mold everywhere. And my wife was like, oh my God, are we going to get everyone sick in the mold here? And we're standing in the living room and I said, just stop for a second and listen. And there was so much air movement in the house, you could practically feel the breeze from outside. So I said, it doesn't matter how rotten this place is, it's breathing with the atmosphere, so it can't concentrate mold toxins inside. So I'm sure someone's super sensitive could get sick here, but most people won't. So the older the home, the mustier it smells, the more you worry. But actually a 100-year-old home breathes unless you've updated it and blown brand new insulation and sealed it by changing the windows and stuff. An old home actually breathes better than a newer home. That's the scary part.

So true. I know. And that's the new home. Like they're so sealed that they're locking everything, you know? And I think people don't, realize that. And it goes back to this whole concept that you keep touching on of like, look, people get very worried about what we eat, the water we drink, but we do not think about the air that we're breathing. And it is a potent way to get toxins into our system so quickly. Yeah.

I mean, even candles and things, all of that stuff. You wouldn't cook in a tiny little room, right? You'd smell all the bacon grease and whatnot. It'd be terrible. So yeah, the idea of too tight of homes is an interesting phenomenon where the pendulum has swung so far. And now it's actually swinging back. When we bought this new house, there was kind of walking us around and bragging about his build. And one of the first things he said was like, we did not do spray foam insulation because spray foam insulation is considered one of the best, most expensive things. And he said it almost as an apology. We did not do spray foam insulation because, and I was like, oh, I'm curious where this is going. He said, we used this other insulation that has a better R-value. I don't know what that means, better R-value, but breathes with the outside. And I was like, who are you that you're a builder that's talking about the energy efficiency as well as the home breathing? And now HVAC people are installing outdoor air intake pieces. Like you can actually have a unit added to your unit, not that HVAC's cheap enough, that where this will bring in outdoor air, filter it, dehumidify it, and push it into the home. And the idea is if you're pushing outdoor air into the home, you're making a positive pressure home that's pushing its air outside. Because you open the door and close the door, but that's not really diluting all of the stuff that gets pulled in. And there's so many— I mean, we could go on and on about even the fire retardant things that are on furniture and God knows what are on our clothes and the fire stuff they put on kids' pajamas. Like, if a kid's on fire, the pajamas are— the flame retardant in the pajamas are not going to save their life, right? Why are we toxifying our couches and things? I guarantee if this house catches on fire, That, that couch is going up in flames no matter how much chemical. Exactly. So yes, the chemicals and everything. Air is getting more attention, but people do not pay enough attention to air.

Yeah, no, I totally agree. It's one of the first places people should start and it's so incredibly passive, you know, I mean, until you have to go digging around for mold, obviously. Talk with me a little bit. So mold is kind of like thyroid in the way that it starts to interact with all these other systems and you see other dysfunction, obviously thyroid being one. Some other ones that I see are like SIRS, histamine issues, gut issues. I would love for you to tell me some of the most common other systems that you see interacting and maybe how they kind of manifest for people.

So it can affect every system of the body, and just like thyroid can affect every system of the body. So the most common ones are frequently gut issues, and frequently gut issues that a GI doctor can't figure out. That's just a common one, right? Whether you have bloating or indigestion, heartburn, diarrhea, ulcerative colitis, even autoimmune conditions can be caused by mold. So, uh, EOE is another one that we weren't even trained in residency. EOE, I'm sure you've heard of that by now. Eosinophilic esophagitis. It's that allergic reaction to food and the throat. Why is my body allergically reacting to everything? Um, and so we see lots of gut issues. Oddly enough, men typically don't feel the gut issues. Their gut's completely broken when we do a stool study. But the idea behind it is, is kind of crazy. The idea that mold can grow inside us is gross. I've said it a million times and it still sounds gross that mold can be growing inside you. So everyone knows mold as far as mold spores. Almost everyone knows about mold spores. So mold releases mold spores in order to continue growing elsewhere, right? Grow in the next wall and grow elsewhere, grow, spread its, its seed, so to speak. Well, if you live in mold, those spores land in your sinuses, they land in your mouth, you breathe them into your lungs. And enough gets in your mouth that you swallow them down and it grows in your gut. As disgusting as it is, mold can grow in your gut. And guess what? There's always food down there. There's always food down there. And even if there's not food, it can survive past a little bit of a food break, but you always have blood sugar roaming around. And so I call it that bad friend. Everyone's got that bad friend that we love, but when he or she comes around, we drink a little bit more than we should. We party a little more than we should, and we love it in the moment. And then we regret it. Like, dude, you gotta leave. Like, you're just bad for me. Right? Everyone's got that friend. Uh, so that's what mold is. Mold is not the problem of the gut, but it introduces all kinds. It's the imbalancer. It manages to disrupt your immune system enough to, to say, hey, go look over there, stop looking over here. And then other organisms overgrow with it. So mold is kind of the distractor. So by the time you do your stool study, you might see Klebsiella, you might have Candida, you might have parasites, all kinds of stuff. But mold was the disruptor that brought all of his friends with it. And as those continued to disrupt, well then it gets worse and worse and worse. And so the idea is that mold also slows your digestion. We don't have hardly any of this mapped out as to why. We just see it enough that we can say it, it's for sure causing it. So mold slows down your digestion enough, decreases your enzymes, decreases your acid production so that you now don't digest your food very well. Well, obviously not digesting your food means you don't absorb your nutrients, so you get all kinds of consequences from that. But the other part is that if you don't digest your food, your body naturally starts craving easy-to-digest food. Well, sugar is the easiest thing to digest. It takes no effort at all by the body, right? So then you start craving sugar, eating more carbs and sugar. And what does mold love? Love sugar. So it, it's unfortunately a cascading problem that commonly ends gut issues. And there's no— there's zero mold test for the gut. You will never, ever, ever find mold in the gut. I just met someone who said they've now research proven that there is mold in the gut, but there is no consumer test to ever find mold in the gut. So the way we normally diagnose people with, with mold in the gut is, A, you've been exposed to mold, but B, if you have a deficiency of the good guys, the bifidos and all the people and all bugs that we know are supposed to be in there, but you can't find the bad guy, that usually means it's mold because we have no test for the mold in there. So when you're missing the bad guy and don't know who to blame, it's almost always mold. Interesting. And so the kind of answer was gut is one of the big things we see start to finish, but just like thyroid, it does skin, it does sinuses, it does— I think too many people focus on I should have runny nose and congestion and coughing. With mold, and that is rarely the case. It's much more gut, brain fog, fatigue, eczema, or the other one is anytime you have a true neurological problem, kind of like my, my restless leg syndrome. Anytime you have a true neurological problem, it's almost always black mold. All molds can do neurological stuff, but it really seems like every patient that has a— and what I mean by true neurological problem, I mean that if you told someone on the street about your symptoms, they probably understand like, ah, that's a nerve problem. That's a nervous system problem. That's a neurological problem. If someone on the street could tell you it's a neurological problem, it's almost always 97% chance that there's black mold causing it. Black mold loves to do neurological stuff. And of course we had black mold in the window.

Wow.

So it was black.

So multiple sclerosis and any of the neurologic stuff, not ALS, that's a whole nother beast. But Yeah.

Wow. So tell me this, you know, I want to talk with you a little bit about testing and like what testing options are, how people proceed with that themselves, home, all of it. But leading into that, one of the tests that used to be popular, I have no idea how valid it is if you use it at all, is the vision test.

Oh yeah, the VCS test.

The VCS test. So I'm curious your take on that, which kind of aligns with Oh, mold impacts your nervous system, which impacts that part of your vision. So I'll let you take it from there.

I'm glad you said that because I so rarely think of the VCS test and it's so easy. Anyone can go to— I think it's VCSTest.com. It's $15, the cheapest test in the world. $15. You take this little vision test and I will tell you, McCall, I struggled to believe that this was a real thing. I can say I've seen enough patients that are moldy and have taken the VCS test. That is weirdly accurate. In addition, we'll take those same patients that have done the VCS test and then heal them. And as we heal them, their VCS test gets better. And it is the stupidest little test when you're taking it. You're like, oh my gosh, what could this possibly do? How does this work? Now, I will say it is not a perfect test by any means. A $15 test— no test is perfect. So just because yours is positive doesn't mean you're moldy. And just because it's negative doesn't mean you're not moldy. But it is weirdly, I'd say like 80% accurate.

Wow.

So has anyone ever explained why it works? Like why is that a mold test?

No. To please explain it.

And so this goes back to like people that were doing functional medicine before us. Like Richie Shoemaker has started the whole mold movement and unfortunately he's fallen behind the times. Mold has passed him up, but this man is the god of all things mold. So we all pay homage to Shoemaker for starting this whole process and and being the pioneer, because without him, we might not even be talking about it today. But he's the one that— I don't know if he designed or won a huge part in the VCS test. So the idea is all the VCS test is, it's a contrast test. So you can obviously see air between my fingers, right? And if you take these fingers, now you can see contrast between the fingers, but not really. So the idea is on the VCS test is just gray lines or black lines, white lines. Obviously everyone can see the difference between black and white., then they simultaneously start graying out the black lines and graying in the white lines. And what they're trying to see is how well can your eyes see the difference between the gray and white lines. And the reason why that's actually effective is it makes perfect sense. Your retina, the, the back of your eye that senses color and light, um, burns the most energy per capita in your entire body. Per capita. It is a very tiny single layer cell thick, so It's probably only like 0.1% of your body's energy production, but it's such an energy-intensive process to see light that when your mitochondria start getting dysfunctional via mold— mold loves to destroy the mitochondria. I mean, it's, it's incredible. It's brilliant how it disrupts your mitochondria. And so for anyone listening that doesn't know what the mitochondria means, they need to look it up, but the mitochondria make the energy for the cell. So the highest energy demand per capita thing is your eye. And so as your energy production of your eye starts to get disrupted, you can't see as well. This is that simple. So then when they test you against this contrast, how well can you tell the gray lines apart from the white lines? Basically someone who's moldy can't see the contrast as well as someone who's healthy. And so it's pretty fascinating. I don't know what nerd figured that out. As far as mold testing, I think in, especially in functional medicine, we can go crazy with spending thousands of dollars. But to your point, I'm glad you brought that up. I, we don't do nearly enough VCS testing because we have the luxury of, of other tests and we can do home testing and stuff. But a VCS test is absolutely every, any, $15, folks, skip your Starbucks. That's a great point. Go do a VCS test.

Yeah. And then where do you find the best outcome for people to go after that as far as testing? I'm so curious.

So A, just identifying that mold could be a part of your issue is number one. So many people are just walking around, oh, the handyman said that wasn't a problem, or my doctor said this It's not a real thing. Uh-uh. You gotta investigate this. So number one is VCS. If it's positive, you should definitely dig further. But the main, the reason why we don't do as much VCS testing is because I don't trust tests on the human for mold because I don't need to know if the human has mold toxins in them. The only thing I need to know is, are you currently exposed? Because you can carry mold toxins around. This is a true story. For 20 years, this little old lady, she was my patient. She, we treated her, she was doing better, but mold testing is always part of my process. So a year and a half into our program, she's fabulous, but we do a mold test, super positive. I'm like, oh my God, you're living in it. So we send a mold inspector to her house, nothing. I was like, don't believe it. Get another mold inspector, another mold inspector. I, why they still trust me to this day, I don't know. But another mold inspector goes to their house. Nope. No, no mold. They built this home. They've been in this home for 20 years. We decided to do our detox program and in 6 months she goes from rocket high to zero. And so the moral of the story was we don't know when she was exposed to mold, but she was exposed to mold at some point before this home, because if the home were moldy, it, her test would still be positive. So that was my first confirmation where this woman had clearly been exposed to mold at some point before 20 years. It was still inside her body in incredible amounts. So I don't trust a mold test on a human because if you pee out mold toxins, that doesn't tell me if you're currently exposed. Or if you have a past exposure. So I always, always, always, it's a requirement for all of my patients and only about 30% of them do it, is mold test their home. So the number one test that anyone, just like the VCS test, anyone can do this test. You go to thedusttest.com, you order your little kit and you go around swabbing dust from around your house, dust from multiple surfaces, every room in your home, and you send it in. They DNA analyze your dust for mold. The only test where mold cannot hide. A mold inspector can come and look. He's not Superman. He can't see behind walls, right? So in my mold saga, I just told you about finding mold in this window that had been there for 10 years and we didn't know. I had had 2 mold inspectors come over, never found it. I, well, same mold inspector twice come over. I think maybe even a third time. Not his fault. Not his fault. Uh, he's still our preferred mold inspector. Number 2, I had a mold dog. Have you ever heard of a mold dog?

Wow. I have not, but that's incredible.

Total waste. Dog walked right past the window. No problem. Yeah. So $1,000 dog did not find the mold.

Um, he makes good money, that dog.

He makes great, that's a good dog. He, he got good treats. But the ERMI test, E-R-M-I, um, Environmental and Relative Moldiness Index test is a standardized mold test across. You can order an ERMI test from numerous companies. We like thedusttest.com the best because their report is the only report that's written for patients. Everyone else is a mold inspector report. So you get your report and you're like, wow, what do I do with this? I don't know. This is numbers on a page. So the Dust Test, when I got my first dust test years ago, I actually read the report cover to cover and I learned things as we always can learn things, right? And so and I just met the guy, Corey, like a great guy that runs it. Owner. He's great. And so just wonderful stuff. They're doing even cooler stuff than that down the road. But anyway, it's a simple— it's just a Swiffer Swab. You go around swiffering dust from your house and they give you a score. Now remember, there's no such thing as zero mold, so no one's score is zero. In fact, on the mold test, on, on the dust test specifically, their scoring is pretty hardcore. So they call it code 0 through 5. Maybe it's 1 through 5, but whatever. Um, if you have a code 3, that could be okay. They score really hard. If you're below a code 3, you're really pretty fine unless you just didn't swap dust. But code 4, code 5 is you're living in mold, you just have to find it. So this happened in my house and I, I was becoming a non-believer in the ERMI test and the dust test because my ERMI test in my house kept coming up positive and I couldn't find the mold. So my mold inspector gave me an idea of like, well, why don't you do an ERMI on 2 rooms at a time? So I did 4 different ERMEs, dust tests around the house, and they were all positive. I was like, that's it. It, it's just something's wrong with this. It is not a good test. Well, fast forward, of course we find it in the window. I'm like, okay, the ERME wasn't wrong at all. The reason why all of my ERMEs were positive, even though I was swabbing rooms that were not with the window, is because it just so happens that where that window sat is, it's like a typical house where you walk in and the front entrance is, is 2 stories high. So this window just happens to communicate with every room in the house because of shared air. So doing separate ERMIs on your home is actually a useful tool, but if they're all positive, it tells you it's in the common room. That's the part I missed. So if your ERMI is positive, don't be stupid like me and say, oh, it's just a, a fake positive, or, oh, it's cuz the cats come in and out, or it's because of the dogs or something. Do yourself a favor and look. So if your home is fine, then you can test yourself. And if yourself is positive, you need to go back and look at the home, right? Or it was a past exposure or work or, you know, that's a good point, McCall McPherson. I will say clinically, I don't like saying this because I don't want to be wrong, but clinically it really seems like people exposed to mold at work and school aren't nearly as sick as if it's at home. And yeah, the main explanation— and there are people that have gotten sick at work, please don't take that away. It's just a smaller percentage. The main reason why is because wherever you sleep, that's one-third of every day. Every day. And most people don't sleep at their work. And so most people I know feel like they live at work, but the 40-hour work week, that's 40 hours and there's how many hours in a week? So in order to get sick with mold, it takes time. Of course, severity of the exposure matters, uh, and time. So yeah, if you worked at the same place for 20 years, for sure, for sure can get you sick. It also depends on how much they open the doors and stuff too.

Right. Totally. That makes me feel better about the school situation cuz I know so many schools in Texas, I'm sure it's the same in America, are incredibly moldy because they shut off the AC all summer and then our kids are just going and hanging out there for 8 hours every day.

So that actually makes—

and carpet and— quite reassuring. And carpet.

Yeah. Luckily kids are really resilient, really resilient and can heal from mold really quickly, but To that point earlier, you asked about symptoms and I might catch flack for this, but I'm a big believer that autism is a mold symptom. You could say ADD, you could say any child mental illness should really raise a flag for mold. Now, the other flag that goes up is of course, are you feeding them Fruit Roll-Ups and McDonald's and stuff? Because food, food is always number one. But if you're feeding your kid pretty good and he's got any kind of mental disruption, especially one that's not genetic, like, oh, when mom's super ADD and the kid is too, it's like, all right, come on. That's, that's not mold. Everybody's different, right? But when mom and dad are totally fine, never heard of depression, never heard of ADD, anything like that, and you got a kid that's off, look into it cuz your psychiatrist is just gonna give you medications and not tell you to look at mold.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Yeah.

100%.

Talk with me a little bit about treatment for these people. What are maybe some interesting treatments that you find move the needle? What are outcomes for these people? Are they able to get their lives back from this a fair amount of the time? What's a realistic construct for them to expect?

Yeah, good question. Most patients that have been exposed to mold, by the time they're done with treatment, they feel better than they've ever felt because A, it's forced them to learn about nutrition. It's forced them to learn about clean eating and water and, and all the things. So by the time they've healed, they feel better than ever. They're taking vitamins and nutrients and checking their hormones and all that. So they're even more in tune with their health than ever before. But that's not because the mold made them healthy, but the idea is so mold often robs people of their health and then they build back stronger. But the idea is, yes, you can be 100% better from whatever mold it— maybe I shouldn't say 100% because like my restless leg, it's like 1% of what it was at its absolute worst, but I'm still healing it. Still, still getting it. To go away. So the expectation should be, one of the things I tell people is if you weren't born with something and you acquired it along the way, you can unacquire it. You just have to find out what that thing was that you acquired and get rid of it. Maybe it's mercury and not mold, and you just gotta get the mercury outta your body. Whatever it is, you just gotta keep investigating and, and look for those main things. And if your doctor isn't helping you look for those things, then sorry, but find a new doctor, look elsewhere. So as far as treatment though, I could talk for hours on treatment. I'm sure just like thyroid, right? The simplest answer to say is, believe it or not, the number one place people make a mistake in mold is, and I'm gonna have to tell you this to tell you that the number one place people make mistake in treating mold is they go after the mold toxins and they try to detox. So mold does not make you sick via spores. So earlier I was talking about the spores. So mold spreads spores. And they're trying to grow elsewhere. And yeah, it'll grow in your sinuses, it'll grow in your gut. That's fine and all. That's not what makes you sick. What makes you sick is the mold toxins. Mold make a gas, a chemical. I say a fart cuz it gets people's attention. Mold makes a gas as a byproduct to kill other organisms. That's how mold grows so slowly that it's learned how to cheat the system. Most people don't even know that penicillin came from a mold, came from a fungus. Well, why does a fungus make an antibiotic? Well, a fungus has to kill the bacteria in order to keep surviving. So fungi have learned, mold especially has learned how to disrupt our biochemistry and kill us in order to consume us, as disgusting as that sounds. So the idea is the mold toxins are being released as a gas. That's why behind this wall there could be a ton of mold and you may not see many spores inside the house because the wall is containing the spores. But the gas penetrates any wall, any plastic. It's just, it's a gas. I dare someone to have a gas leak behind the wall and light a match, right? How much do you trust that wall to keep that gas out? You don't, right? Gases can go right through the wall. So the gas is actually what makes us sick. And we call those gases mycotoxins. Myco just means mold, toxin obviously means toxin. So these mycotoxins are not living, they are not alive. And we breathe them. We, they, they absorb into our system. They go into our brain, they go into our tissues, they go into everything, and they actually disrupt our biochemistry start to finish. It's brilliant. It's brilliant and terrible. So the mycotoxins make you sick. So most people go after the toxins. That's not it. If you fix your gut, if you get the mold out of the gut, you restore your microbiome, you restore your ability to absorb your nutrients, you eat those nutrients, you restore your bile production, you restore your abilities, your liver's ability to detoxify. You will heal a human. So our promise to our patients is after 6 to 9 months of gut treatment alone, without touching toxins, without detoxing at all, after 6 to 9 months of mold treatment, you will be at least 50% better. Most patients say 80, 90% better, and that's our promise to all of our patients. They haven't done any detox work and they're 80, 90% better. And that's because your own body is really good at detox. If you give it the right tools and the tools come from the gut. So you gotta get the bad microbes out so the good microbes grow. You gotta restore the digestion. You gotta eat the nutrients and your own liver will come back online. Your own body will come back online. Sure, there's all kinds of fancy detox stuff you can do. We do a lot of Questran, cholestyramine for, for binding up the mold toxin. A lot of fancy stuff we do. But if anyone does anything, never sees a functional doctor, never sees you, never sees me. Please, you have to adequately treat the gut. And the big mistake people make in the gut is they just go to eradicate, they eradicate the bad guys, eradicate the bad guys. That's what conventional medicine is all about. Eradicate the bug, right? Spend more time on rebuilding the good guys. That's where people mess up. You can't eradicate the bad guys because the bad guys just come right back. You got to rebuild the good guys, then eradicate the bad guys so the good guys can take over. That was a bit of a monologue. Did I answer the question?

Oh, I loved it. No, that was so good. Okay. No, you're good. So interesting too, because it is a unique approach. It's so evolved from where we were 10 years ago, which— and if you think about it, look, if we rebuild the gut to that level, it's going to serve you in every other aspect of your life too.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And so whatever toxin and chemical you're exposed to, whether it was mercury in your tuna because you binged on that in your bodybuilding days, whatever it may be, improve your gut will get everything. And your body is smarter than us. So like when you drink alcohol, your body detoxifies that first. It doesn't say, well, hold on, let me get this glyphosate you were exposed to 20 years ago. It's like, no, alcohol's the worst toxin in our system, so let's detoxify that right now. So when you fix your own detox processes, your body gets to pick what it wants to get rid of first. And it's not always linear. It might pull this one out and you might get brain fog and it might pull that one out. You might get a skin rash. But let the body do what it's doing and we just support it.

Absolutely. In a topic that is so incredibly confusing that people really have a difficult time accessing good information from, and as someone that has so much experience in this particular niche, is there anything that I haven't asked? Is there anything that you want people to know that we haven't touched on yet?

The main thing is do not trust your home. Never trust your home. You've got to test it. And I'm speaking to the choir because we moved in in October and I still haven't done my dust test. It's been sitting on my counter. So it's actually on my reminders right now. Do a dust test in your house. It is the single greatest thing you can do for your family because believe it or not, one person can get sick and four can be totally fine. Mold is the strangest thing and it's not something wrong with that person. They're just the one that's more sensitive. But it's only a matter of time before the others get sick. One person just got sick the, the fastest. So make sure you test and treat it. We say that the home should just be healthy enough that you can heal in. Don't spend $100,000 blowing the house up and rebuilding it, but go for the big ticket items and get your home healthier. Even before you take all the fancy supplements and stuff, if you have an ongoing exposure, I tell patients this all the time, if you have an ongoing exposure, should I be selling you supplements to get rid of the toxin? Or should you stop eating the toxin? Should you stop drinking the toxin? So first step is, you know, when you're eating Chick-fil-A, you know, when you're drinking bad water, you don't know when you're breathing bad air. So get your air tested.

Yeah. That's such good advice. Cuz I've had a mold inspector come out to my house no less than 5 times, remediated on more than a couple occasions, even preventatively.

Yeah.

And I'm still, I'm just like, I'm not satisfied yet. And you know, the dust test gives such a good actionable solution for people to start with. So thanks for that.

It does. And it's a pretty concrete score. I often tell people, even if you have remediation work to do, get a score before, then do that remediation and make sure that score drops. And as long as it drops, you're done. That's what I didn't do in my house. I kept finding mold and then repeating the test and not jumping on it quick enough, which is why it took me 7, 8 years to find the window. Keep repeating that ERMI test, and as long as it's positive, there's mold somewhere. You just gotta find it.

Thanks. I really appreciate your time. I appreciate your dedication to this. Yeah. And creating a place where people can go when there's not a lot of other places for them to be able to go to get support. So very grateful for your work and it's been an honor chatting today.

Thank you, McCall McPherson. Appreciate it.