Dr. Carnahan explains how to spot mold illness: start by tracking when you last felt well and what changed. Symptoms can lag 6 to 18 months after exposure and include brain fog, mood swings, depression, and insomnia.
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Tell me a little bit, Dr. Carnahan, about symptoms. Like, if people are listening and they're thinking, I wonder if I have mold exposure, mold illness, whatever it is, what would tune them in to maybe take the next step and consider that as a possibility?
Yeah, this is a great question, because you don't need to spend a lot on a functional consult. You can do a lot by starting with your own timeline. So in my clinic, what I do is a great history. I'm listening and I'm asking. And I always ask the question, when did you last feel well, like, great opt. It could be 10, 20, 30 years or six months. And you go back to that point and then say, what happened since then? Because what I find frequently in the history is we move, we changed houses, we went to a new place. And it could be like, for me, I'm that flood happened 2013, and it was almost a year later when I got really, really, really sick. So it took a little time for that mold to take root and be an issue and start to really cause symptoms. So it can be a lag of, say, you moved and six to 12 to 18 months later. The common symptoms, cognitive is number one. So that could be trouble, focus, concentration, completing tasks, brain fog, word finding. Typically, people are. You could be more emotionally labile, so almost like as alcohol could be disinhibition, people can be more sad, or I've even seen people get suicidal with certain types of mold. Anxiety. And insomnia is a big one, so the brain and the mood are huge.
