Why Your Mold Test Is Normal But You're Still Sick | Dr. Diane Mueller

Things just do not make sense. They've done, you know, work with you and remove the implants and things that can leak and cause other sorts of toxic issues in the body. And it's like there's still something major going on. The cognitive decline is so. It's just scary. Roughly affects 24% of the population. The inspector had actually found visible mold and told her that she could just take a wet wipe and wipe it off. It's literally do this hard thing or continue to live in this horrible way. It is amazing how much I see it being able to heal.

All right, everyone. Today I have Dr. Diane Mueller. She is a catalyst for holistic healthcare, armed with a dual doctorate in naturopathic medicine, acupuncture, and Oriental medicine. Author of the bestselling book it's not yout Mind. She's been featured on Fox News, cbs, and numerous healthcare summits and podcasts. With a global footprint, Dr. Miller trains physicians and clinicians worldwide, fostering a comprehensive approach to chronic disease treatment. Her personal health odyssey from debilitating conditions to full vitality fuels her passion to guide patients through a personalized healing journey. An avid snowboarder with a zest for life, Dr. Mueller's approach transcends conventional healthcare, providing a beacon of hope for those seeking to reclaim their health. Thank you for joining me, Dr. Diane Mueller.

Oh, thank you, Dr. Rob. I'm so excited about this conversation. I had many years ago, a patient of mine who was not doing well that was being treated for Lyme and mold and all these things we're talking about. And it turned out that the missing link for her was that her breast implant had ruptured. So I've been looking forward to a conversation like this for years. So I can't wait for the conversation we're going to have today.

Yes, Everybody should understand Dr. Diane is the expert in mold and Lyme. And so when I have difficulty understanding what I should be doing to help patients, I reach out to my network. And I'm very fortunate to have someone like Dr. Diane in my network. So everybody should understand that patients who suffer from problems with breast implants, and we'll say breast implant illness is a chronic inflammatory process. The medical device is just a component. When we look at patients, we look at their functional genetics. So we look at how they methylate, their vitamin D metabolism, antioxidant pathways, and how they utilize glutathione. Then we also look at their estrogen metabolism, because that can be a very, very bad harbinger in women with estrogen toxicity. That is basically a genetic predisposition. And then we look at toxicity tested. And so that's where I find a lot of mold, Dr. Diane. A lot of ochratoxin, aflatoxin, fumison, citronins. You can name a toxin, I have found it in a breast implant illness patient. But that's not obviously where the story ends. That's where it just begins with our detox program and looking at gut health and horm imbalance and food sensitivities. So that being said, everybody offline, I had a patient give me a challenging moment this past week. So I called Dr. Diane to discuss how often she sees mold and Lyme together. Because it seems like I'm seeing it far more often.

It is so common we see these things together. And I think some of it, there's a couple of different reasons why. I mean, some of it is just a simple awareness factor around symptom wise, the symptoms from mold illness, the symptoms from Lyme disease can be so similar that one of the things that I find happens so frequently is people get one of these hats put on them diagnostically so a doctor will diagnose them with mold illness or something like chronic inflammatory response syndrome. And because they have that diagnostic label, nobody has actually then looked for the Lyme or vice versa because there's this, this symptom similarity. So I think that's one component of it. And like you and I were talking on the phone, I also think another component that's happening is we know that Lyme can go dormant. We know that some of the standards of care that we've been using for years, such as doxycycline, amoxicillin, some of these standards of care for Lyme disease actually will cause the bacteria that creates Lyme, Borrelia burgdorferi will cause that bacteria to go into this dormant persister form where it's cleared from the blood. Oftentimes people feel better, but it's not cleared from the body. And then people get into these mold infested homes and they have a genetic predisposition for mycotoxins building up in their body, which we know is a very common genetic predisposition to have. And once they get in these homes and their immune system starts really kind of going haywire to speak very simply about it. And then once their immune system is say, busy and doing other things like trying to find the mycotoxins inside the body, it creates enough of an internal stressor that then that Lyme disease that was in that persister dormant form sometimes from decades ago starts to reemerge similarly to somebody with chickenpox getting shingles, but obviously a lot more intense and severe than that.

Yeah, I feel like. And as I told you, I try not to, from a testing standpoint, try to be the person who helps identify and care for the patient with Lyme. Because we. We cover a lot of bases in our program, and you gave me some insight, but what I get a lot of now is feedback about a. A Lyme flare to. To be. You know, that's how it's presented to me, and it can present itself in some very unpleasant ways for the patients. And I recently had a patient who's having half of their body have neurologic type symptoms. And so obviously, for everybody listening, when I have somebody who has something like that, short of a brain problem, like a stroke or something we know that's not related to or a surgical outcome issue. So then I have to identify, like, in their toxicity, do they have other things that we can create healing opportunities for them through our detox process, or do we have to send them to Dr. Diane to help with what is clearly a Lyme problem?

It's a really important thing to delineate, and I think some of it is, yes, truly understanding the symptoms and knowing when to look for Lyme and when not to. I think something that we said when we were chatting the other day is really important for listeners to hear, which is in considering, you know, Lyme as a potential problem. Some of it, when we consider this is when things just do not make sense, when it's like they're, you know, people are doing so many good things, are living a clean lifestyle. They have a lot of the toxins out of their food and water and home. They've done, you know, work with you and remove the implants and things that can leak and cause other sorts of toxic issues in the body. And it's like there's still something major going on or another. You know, key thing, I think, for your audience is, you know, maybe having. I don't know if you see a lot of this, but I would imagine there are certain people where you're doing the removal and. And it's a hard process like the removal. They don't handle it maybe as well. Is that true?

Right. So I think, you know, from a neural standpoint, this is a very stressful event that, you know, a lot of people would do. They would be benefited greatly by going through EDMR or other therapy to help them. Because if someone goes back to a traumatic state when we'll say in this instance it's a physical appearance, it creates somewhat unwanted memories from surfacing. So you could get in a very bad neural loop. And we, we see that a fair amount.

Well, and another link here that I hear in what you're saying is when we're thinking about, you know, the limbic system and that stress response and the need to do some of that neurological reprogramming, you know, it brings us to that conversation of sympathetic of that fight or flight adrenaline, nervous system overdrive. And we often see that adrenaline is something that makes the biofilms of Borrelia, the bacteria that causes Lyme and makes the biofilms films stronger. And it can actually lead to the biofilms creating a better cell to cell communication network between all the different Lyme bacteria. What do the, what do we do in, you know, in microbiology when these bacteria communicate better together that is actually related to their growth, their survival, their proliferation. So you know, another thing is like, just like with mold kind of being something that can really create the situation where dormant Lyme all of a sudden rears its ugly head. Well, things that are like bringing up those traumas you're mentioning, right. That you know, anytime we're bringing up any of those traumas, if we're getting that adrenaline surging through our body, which we probably are, that could be another thing that actually is creating that situation where Lyme's coming out of that dormancy, we're getting that better cell to cell communication. And all of a sudden these symptoms that perhaps were dormant for many years reemerge.

Yeah, I often try to explain it and you know, I can work in the biologic very well. We have a extremely aggressive, well oiled program for that. When we look at testing and detox and surgery and supplementation and support. But we don't have a other 2/3 of the equation with psychology and social support because those the areas are, you know, we're trying to build more and more community for our, our patients and have other resources, things like books and, or therapy opportunities. With Amanda savage brown. So 2/3 of the equation is not completely fulfilled in this situation. And it leaves a lot of room for improvement. And we have in our office ways to get into a parasympathetic state. We have a specific device from New Zealand called a flopresso that helps really both reduce lymphatic congestion, so it enhances drainage, but it has a temperature setting, we use frequency settings. It helps really get people into a parasympathetic state. And then we use hyperbaric and red light therapy as well.

Yeah. Something that you're making me think that we should mention here is the conversation also about Bartonella. So Bartonella is that one of the co infections that comes with Lyme disease. Because when insects, ticks predominantly, but now there's a couple very, very, very limited studies that are show Lyme disease is perhaps even transmitted in mosquitoes and fleas, you know, and that's leading to some of the widespread nature of Lyme and all of a sudden knowing it's not just in the New England states of the United States, but when these, these bugs bite, they deliver, as we know, anything that's in their bloodstream. So maybe it's Lyme, maybe it's Borrelia and Bartonella, which is a common co infection that we see. A common infection that we see transmitted in these bites, interestingly enough, loves the lymphatic system. So we can see it actually invading the white blood cells, invading the lymphatic system. And it's very common that when people are starting to mobilize their lymph, like sometimes if people are, say, responding negatively to that, like, I love lymphatic drainage, I think it's an essential part of basically any holistic healthcare plan. And if people react negatively to it, sometimes that can be assigned to us that says, oh, maybe we need to go in and look for Bartonella and do good testing for Bartonella, because we could actually be perhaps mobilizing that as well. And it's really common, like a common symptom. I see. And I'll use myself as an example. When I had Lyme disease and Bartonella babesia and all these, and mold and all the things, and I used to have like the most lumpy head, lumpy, bumpy, cystic. And first I thought maybe it was like genetic. My dad has some lumps on his head. He actually went and had him surgically removed. And then as I got sicker and sicker and I found Bartonella and I went through treatment, it was so crazy. I could run my head, my hands through my hair and all. I would feel these like cystic lumps. And as I started doing Bartonella's treatment, my head is like perfectly normal, no lumps. So all these things that were like cysts that in like naturopathic school, we talked a lot about that being related to the lymphatic system. Once I did that work on Bartonella, then all of a sudden that symptom that I didn't even, you know, at that point, Realize that that could totally reverse to is totally gone. Yeah.

I find that a really taking care of patients with breast implants and the systemic symptoms and breast implant illness and mold and all sorts of exposures from chemicals and gut dysbiosis, you know, and hormone imbalance. I mean, it's quite the. I think, you know, my team's like pretty complicated cases and they are. We have a lot of really good team members and they listen and when it. I try to tell them when things aren't making sense. You know, you really got to think about mold and Lyme and coexistent infections or co infections like I'm mentioning, because we have really rigorously went about like testing and retesting and. And working on it. And this the patient I told you about, you know, the other day I was just like, oh my gosh, I'm sitting here and I'm like, this sounds a lot like somebody with mold and. Or Lyme. It just. Nothing makes sense.

Yeah. And I think some of that nothing makes sense is related to, you know, neural cell death. Right. Which I always like when I talk live about our neurons dying. I always like to remind people that our neurons do regenerate. Luckily, we know that, you know, now in medicine. But anytime we're dealing with things like our nerve cells dying or situations that can happen with biotoxin accumulation from things like Lyme and mold, where, you know, our VEGF levels go down. Vegf, of course, for our listeners, is that molecule that helps stimulate our body to grow new blood vessels and grow new capillaries. So when we have things like our nerve cells dying and the inability or a lessened ability of our body to grow new capillaries. Well, nerves and blood are widespr cell. Every tissue, every organ, every gland needs these things. Right. So it's so easy then to start understanding, I think, as a listener, why things may not make sense and why we can have a problem in our big toe and our gut, in our heart and our brain. And they're actually all related. Well, it's because of the widespread impact on this connection between our entire body network.

Yeah, it is confusing. I often say when you have patients in front of you that we see all the time, the patients are super frustrated because they've talked to provider and I don't think any provider ever wants not understand what's going on. Super frustrating when you don't. But if you're faced with a group of patients like we have all the time, pretty rare that you're going to know exactly what's going on, like, all the time. So you got to get, you know, wrap your head around that. And that can be a challenge. Then you have to be like, super, like you are used to listening, and then you'll be like, yeah, that makes sense. So now it's the opposite. Like, instead of listening for clues, you have to listen to what's not being said.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, I think the, the other thing that obviously leads to so much problems is people feeling like there's gaslighting or other things that have happened in the medical community where they're not being believed or understood. And I think one of the other things, and I imagine you see this in, in a lot of your work too, which is, you know, that diagnostic state label being the end point for people. And I think so many times people get like the fibromyalgia diagnosis, the migraine diagnosis, the chronic fatigue, you know, all these types of diagnosis, whether they're a conglomeration of, you know, symptoms like a syndrome or a true diagnostic. And it's like the end points, right. Versus like that listening is to actually go back and say, okay, well, what is like the diagnostics and should in many ways, like the label we give should in many ways be like that beginning point. So when we're listening and it's say somebody that you have in your clinic and all of a sudden it's like we're talking about, wow, this doesn't make sense. That's. That's what you're listening for is like, is this, does this make sense? Does this not? Is there a clear path to, oh, yeah, I, I got this implant or I did this thing or I had this trauma and we can see the path or it just seemed like everything got muddled and tangled. And when everything is muddled and it doesn't seem clear, that is usually when one of these chronic inflammatory things does come into play.

Yeah, it happened to me when I was interviewing a patient who didn't have breast implants and they were just talking and wanted some advice about their body contouring and a no cut facelift, which we do, and all these different things, but something just didn't add up. Stuff they kept saying. And they were hopping from practitioner to practitioner and trying protocol after protocol and. And finally I was like, any chance you ever lived at a house with mold or home with mold or worked in a place with mold or you got a tick bite? And it just occurred to me, like the interview had went on so long that I'd lost the plot. Like they were telling me what was wrong and I really wasn't catching on because it wasn't my traditional breast implant patient. But this is the person who has the same quote unquote genetic predisposition. They've now got exposed to or never got cleared of mold and, or Lyme. And then whatever happens, stress, trauma, event X, eating bad food, breathing bad air, drinking bad fluids, has really turned on, to your point, their immune system, and now everything is going haywire.

The point I want to bring, that you just made me think of here is when we're talking about that, that haywire moment, right when we're talking about mold illness, it really is that genetic that's being turned on. So the genetic that makes us predispose disposed to mold roughly affects 24% of the population. As far as people that have that genetic, where they're in a moldy environment, they breathe in those mycotoxins, those toxins from the mold, and they build up in the body because of the body's immune system's inability to tag that mold toxins, to put that marker on it to that signals the rest of the immune system to eradicate it. So without that tagging mechanism that the immune system has, it's almost like, you know, the immune system doesn't see the mold toxin and it doesn't get removed. And so then we have to take a step back because we know with the study of genes and the study of our environment on our genes known as epigenetics, we know that just because we have a gene, we don't necessarily our genetic abnormality, it's not necessarily expressing in a disease promoting way. But I am, you know, super curious from the standpoint of even with like what you've seen with patients that have breast implants, I'm super, you know, curious from a standpoint of like, okay, what is it that turns on this gene? And I, I talk to my patients about this all the time. For some people, they can clearly delineated or it was a trauma, like a motor vehicle accident, or it was like the stress of a divorce, or they went out and they had some sort of parasite that they know or some type of infection, they got some foodborne illness type of thing. And other times it's a little bit harder to trace. But I suspect that for some people, it could be hay the toxins from something like these breast implants and that is actually creating that epigenetic expression where all of a sudden, maybe for years they've been in a moldy home that hasn't been bothering them. Because if that gene's not expressed, your immune system's not having a problem. And then all of a sudden it feels like one day it's out of the blue. But it was just that there was another toxin or another. Something that actually triggered that gene to, say, express and turn on. And now somebody has that illness on top of breast implant illness.

Yeah, I think it's. To your point, to us, it seems very cumulative. Yeah, well, they typically, genetically are a little challenged in terms of capability of detoxification, especially in the liver, where predominantly we detoxify substances. And they'll have SNPs and GSTP1 and GSST. So there'll be specific problems like you're. You're alluding to. But then the secret sauce is like home renovation. Someplace they lived in school, school or worked, or a. A traumatic event like a loss of life of a loved one, a caregiver. If something happened, sick child, pregnancy, delivery can really exacerbate things. The kind of. If you just sit there and pick enough, you'll get to a point where they'll tell you what happened around that time. They won't know, but usually if someone's with them, it becomes easier. A lot of times, people just afraid to come with somebody else, and they'll come on their own. And then it's a much tougher interview because they can't recall, you know, when they felt good. Can't remember, honestly, half the time when they felt good.

Well, and the interesting thing about that, too, I find in a lot of my mold illness patients, because the symptom list becomes like this crazy grocery list for a party of a thousand. Right? It's like so many symptoms that happen, and it's really common. I work with a lot of people that have mold illness. I work a lot of times with a family member or a spouse or a loved one who can actually help us track this. Because just like on the, you know, the forefront where people can't communicate sometimes that things, you know, how bad things are, what's going on. The same thing I actually find through treatment. Like, you know, I have a patient right now who she was like, for a while was like, okay, I'm not getting better. I'm not getting better. I'm not getting better. And then I got her wife on the call with me, and her wife was telling me then that actually she's nicer to me. She's doing the laundry, she's getting out of bed for four hours a day when before she wasn't getting out of bed at all. She's actually complaining about only mentioning her pain twice a day instead of about 100 times. Because the brain, you know, so orient to what is wrong. Right. That's our survival tool. And so I do find in this population having a partner, a spouse, a friend, anybody that can be that other sounding board to say, what else? What are you noticing? Because it really is good data to say, oh yeah, this is working, we're on the right track. Things are changing. You know, people just get so neuro inflamed that it can take a while before the inflammation's down where people actually feel like themselves again.

Yeah. Some of the first interactions I ever had with patients was bad mold. Like you would say something to them and it was just like Groundhog Day.

Yeah, exactly. The cognitive decline is so. It's just scary. You know, the level of brain fog is just, it's really scary. It's scary for everybody involved. It's scary from a long term dementia standpoint. But it is amazing how much I see it being able to heal. And I think one of the most important things I want to make sure we mentioned, you know, in this time is it's so common that people will tell, you know, say something to me like, well, it's not in my house. We're not going to check my house. I, you know, bought a house, it's fairly new, I had it inspected. These inspectors, it means nothing. It means nothing. In fact, I give it. I had a patient when she was buying a new house and she even told me that the inspector had actually found visible mold and told her that she could just take a wet wipe and wipe it off. Like that is the level of misinformation that really got my blood boiling to a point that I, that actually affected my sleep last night. I was so angry over that. But that's, you know, that's like what we're being told, right, is that it's not that big of a deal. And it's not as big of a deal as lead based pain. And there's nothing to take seriously. And so many times people go online and they look for like certified inspectors. Well, certification doesn't mean that people know that these inspectors know truly the significance of how to find mold, of what biotoxin and mold illness actually does. The levels that are actually problematic, it's like an entry level do they know how to do a certain portion of their job? But you really need somebody that is a high level specialist in mold inspection and a high level, you Know, remediator. And it's the hardest conversation to have with people, I think, because to tell people that are sick, that are having this struggle, you're talking about around like you speak and it's Groundhog Day, you say the same thing over and over again. And then to have the conversation with them, to say like, well, now you need to inspect your house and possibly spend tens of thousand dollars in remediation or moving like, it's a crazy thing to wrap the brain around, but it's one of these things. We either. It's like. So at the core of it, the hardest thing to say and hear oftentimes is it's literally do this hard thing or continue to live in this horrible way. And that's the. That bad choice we have to make.

I foundationally tell everybody the same things. And the ways to start to help themselves right away when there are clients is improve your air quality in the face of getting your home tested, which is a very, as you just mentioned, can be kind of a hard path to navigate. Identification of the team, if you will, to inspect it, which is different than the team to mitigate it, by the way. And then your food quality, your overall fluid quality, all these things are super important that you can try to start working on right away to lower inflammation. And since you brought up the home. So it's intrinsically written in any home offer we ever make on any property in Austin or in Texas, anywhere, for that matter, that I get all of my money back upon inspection that I pay for. I don't ever ask anybody to inspect for this. I just get it done. And to your point, like, actually, a home inspector found it and sent us pictures. And I was like, well, just give me my money back. And they're like, you don't want to negotiate? I'm like, why? I don't negotiate mold. I would burn it down and build a new one. But I'm not trying to mitigate something built in the 60s and has no. It just makes no sense. So I actually. Can you speak about, in terms of homes, what you feel like is a contributor now? Because for my patient population, the worst mold I see is patients in Hawaii. But I have people in the northern states, obviously. I have people in the Gulf states. I have people in the Deep South. I have people East Coast. I have people in Singapore. I got people in Europe coming. And, you know, all these environments, they're gonna have mold, especially the older places. We were just in Boston. Come on, give me a break.

Yeah, yeah. It's a really Good question and points. One of the biggest things is the level of airflow. So, like, what I have found in traveling to the tropics, even myself, is like places where they don't use ac, as horrible as that sounds from a comfort standpoint, but it's open air and there's that constant moving air, right. That those places are actually better biologically for our body. Even though, you know, smoldering humidity in the tropics is not the most comfortable things. It's like when we. It's. Some of it is the more we seal and lock in that humidity without the airflow. So the better we get with our triple pane windows and our lead certified things. And home building from a standpoint of like saving the environment and helping the environment is actually, unfortunately, comes at a cost of more likely mold buildup. And so there's definitely that. That airflow plays a big factor. There's other things that we always want to consider in home building. One is very simple things like that awning, right? That part that hangs out from the corners of the house. How far does it hang away from the house? Like, a lot of times in home buyer, you know, ownership, they talk about like the grading. Is it negative graded or positively graded towards our way from the house. And that's a common part of home inspections. But people aren't talking about like, really the biggest thing with it is like, well, you're. If it's graded incorrectly, you're getting that moisture seeping down into the foundation. But a huge part of that that is not talked about in home inspection is how far away that awning hangs out from the side of the house. And you ideally want absolute minimum 6 to 8 inches. Because what you're dealing with is you want. When water and snow are running off the top of the roof, you want that trickle to be far enough away from the foundation so that you're not getting that moisture inside the foundation. So definitely basic things like that on a lot of older houses too. I'm just amazed where the ventilation systems go. You know, I've seen situations in patients with mold illness where it's like, oh, you get an inspector up there and it's like the bathroom exhaust is actually going just. And just like dumping into the attic. Not even like through the attic in a duct, ductwork system, but just like out into the attic. And so, you know, there's one patient I'm thinking of, like, you know, then there's like, there's. There's this huge mold problem in the attic because of this Duct work that was done poorly. So. Absolutely. From a standpoint of places around the world, like, mold is anywhere. Like, mold is in Colorado here, where it's super dry. I, you know, I have patients coming in from Arizona very frequently, and I see a lot of mold illness actually in their houses as. Right. What were you going to say?

It's. Arizona is as dry as you can, actually.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So some of that is, like, how structurally sound is the roof. Right. It's like Arizona has a few weeks a year where they have monsoons and maybe some hail and, like, is that enough to damage the roof and cause a small amount of leakage that is not taken care of. And, you know, in the basics of homeownership, I think it's one of the problems we get into as well is people don't realize, like, how severe this is. So if there's damage to the house and they're like, oh, do I put my money and my dollars into fixing or not? And it's like, well, it's just a small little leak. It's not really harming anything I'm saying in air quotes here. And so then people won't fix these small little things, these small, little, like, holes or, you know, leaks in their system. And small problems can turn into big problems. So we really just need to make sure that with homeownership and, you know, renting, if people are renting, that we're doing the work and working with owners to make sure the structural integrity of the home stays intact. The other thing I'll add, there is just a very simple hack when you're talking about other things to do around just like, the basics of home, clean air and those sorts of things is once a week open, even in the dead of winter, even in the dead of summer. It's. Yes, it's not going to be the most economical thing, but open all the doors and windows in the house for a couple hours, like, let that air flow through, help things stay dry, help things circulate, use fans in your room, Just really help with that circulation of air can also help make sure that things stay, you know, dry and help with that mold and stay away from humidifiers. That's the other thing.

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. So we have this real problem in Austin because it never gets cold enough to freeze, so there's pollen all the time. And they'll tell you you have cedar fever after living here for a period of time. And, okay, we have a lot of cedar, but we also have a lot of mold. So to me, when you get the quote, unquote, cedar fever, I think, you know, from our standpoint, what I tell patients is, you know, short of what Dr. Dayan just said about, you know, really checking your home, trying to get the air circulating, air filtration, just like water filtration is important. And we use things like Jasper air filters in the office. We use IQ air in the office. And man, I'm telling you, on days where it's difficult in Austin, and we have a lot of them because of the, the way the wind blows and, and it never gets cold here until it freezes and then it's like, like that's a whole nother disaster when it freezes. But if you can really work on that, the quality and reduce this palm count and everything, then that, you know, you're not going to have as many symptoms that are quote, unquote allergy symptoms. And if you're eating, you know, properly as, you know, eating, God, if I eat eggs, I get hay fever. So what do you know, I don't eat eggs. And, you know, many of my allergies, you know, that I used to quote, unquote have. So what we eat, what we drink, the quality of the air, you know, we breathe, from my standpoint, and I'd love to hear what you think about it, makes a tremendous difference in just day to day living.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, we know the liver from a detoxification standpoint has a rate limit, right? We can only break down toxins at a certain rate. That's just as fast as those processes go. And so when we're talking about that rate limit, then we also have to take into that accumulation around. The more we can actually control and we can actually do the things we, we can control, I should say. So the more we are breathing clean air and drinking clean water and eating clean food, then we're actually allowing more space because there's a pace, you know, in the liver, that's how fast it works. Or we're. So we're allowing more space for the liver to actually detox the things that we don't have as much control over. My question for you. I'm wondering, like, do you think your audience knows about, like, the difference between from like mold testing? Like, would that be good to go over as far as. Because I do find that some people get confused between mold illness and mold allergies. And there's a. Is that an important differentiation, do you think, for your audience?

Yeah. So what, Dr. For us and I'll, you know, say we talked about a little bit offline previously about how we look at it. We use vibrant wellness to do a mycotoxin test, and we're looking at those toxins versus an allergy is obviously very different. I'll let you go into, like, what you see and better describe that for the audience.

So the biggest thing I want everybody to know is it's very common to listen to a conversation like this and then go to a GP and just be like, hey, I heard this, this conversation. I really want you to test me for mold. And the most common things that people will do when they don't have the background and the knowledge of this is they'll test for a mold allergy. And a mold allergy is very different than what, you know, Dr. Rob and I are talking about here, which is a mold allergy is really, when we are. It's just like an allergy. So, for example, it's like, you know, you mentioned eggs. Well, that could be an allergy. And hay fever and cedar fever, like, all these things could be allergies, where our immune system is just responding by that release of histamine, that molecule that is going to lead typically to allergy symptoms, to our runny nose, our itchy eyes, maybe a little headache, those common things that we associate with allergies. So we can't have an allergy to mold, and we can test for that. But when we're talking about the things that we're talking about, you know, in today's conversation, it's more related to actually not the allergy, but actually the toxin buildup in the body. And that toxin buildups is what causing that neuroinflammation is what's causing the nerve cell death and the blood, you know, circulation issues that I mentioned earlier. And so that's a really important thing for, I think, for everybody to understand is that if you just go and you're. You're working with somebody that doesn't have the background that Dr. Rob and I do on this, it's so easy to just get that allergy test and then it's normal, because it's not an allergy, it's a toxin buildup. And then people easily think like, oh, I already checked that box. It's not that I don't need to worry about it when it's actually, like, it's the wrong box that got checked. And it's a different way that we are reacting to mold. That's not that allergy relationship.

Yeah, I'm glad You mentioned that because a lot of people come to me having had, like, you've had a lot of work done. They've really tried. It's, it's been super frustrating for them. They've met with who they think are really good providers and everybody's trying to do what they understand. So when Dr. Diane talks about mold and Lyme, she sees the type of patient all the time. When I talk about breast implants or breast implant illness, you know, somebody may see one or two of those patients a month. I see like 30 a week. And I hear all of their stories all of the time. And so when we mention something specific, you know, that's a difference in what we hear, because we hear it all the time. It's a very frequent conversation we have. So experience always in my head is going to bring expertise and certainly the more time and more effort and more curiosity you have, like Dr. Diane and I have had about mold and, or in my case, just trying to solve this breast implant problem, which is a never ending battle. I reached out to her for her expertise and, you know, further in the conversation about Lyme and its synergy, if you will, with mold and. Dr. Diane, if you have mold and Lyme, what order do you recommend us? You know, looking at it and trying to help with it and, you know, pros and cons maybe of, of what you've seen in that, that, that clinical setup.

Yeah. Thank you for this question. I think it's really important because so many times I find that when patients of mine get these types of diagnoses, it's like, oh, finally answers, right? And there can be so much relief and there can be this desire, this drive to just be like, let's just treat everything at once and just go for it. And it backfires, everybody. It does. People get way more inflamed, they feel worse, treatment slows down. So order is actually quite important. Typically, I do find that before we even start with mold and Lyme, for most people, it's really important to just also make sure some of those foundational things are in line. So making sure that people's thyroids are balanced, that they have enough cortisol and dhea, our adrenal hormones, that their micronutrient profiles and balance. So some of those things that are going to give the mitochondrial support, that are going to give the cell support, give the liver some support. So I always like to, for most people, start with like, I know we're excited to get to these root causes now that we found them, but we want to give the body the strength. And then most of the time for most people, I find that mold actually is better to do before Lyme. Now of course, you know, not everybody flows that way and there are nuances, but the reason for that is like most organisms, there can be a huge amount of biotoxins that get released when we actually go and we start killing the Lyme bacteria. And those toxins, those biotoxins are things that our liver has to deal with. And since our liver has a rate limit, if our liver's already at its rate limit, dealing with mold, dealing with breast implant toxins, dealing with the other environmental toxins that it comes across, and we then throw more toxins in the body as we're eradicating and killing Lyme and the co infections. Oftentimes that's where we get into that Herxheimer. That fuel feel worse from a die off event because the body can't get it's more toxins the body can eradicate. So most of the time I do find for people it's better to work on those toxins to lower that inflammatory threshold to actually get the liver processing things a little better before we go off killing the infections.

Right. So I think it was over a year ago that I had one of my clients who had a bad heavy metal exposure from degradation of the shell of the implant. And they were constantly superheating themselves in a dry sauna up to 200 degrees and having Hershenheimer reactions, not knowing what those were. And so everybody listening, obviously we'll just say it. When you're detoxing more than your body can manage, you'll get a Herxenheimer reaction. And so I said on the air, you know, we had talked about it and were saying, you know, you're melting your implants, when of course it's not melting, it's leaching leaching chemicals from the implants and giving yourself an exposure to tin, cadmium, all these different things can give you even worse neurologic symptoms, worse thyroid symptoms, worse gut symptoms, like everything you can have can be potentiated or made worse. And certainly when you have Lyme disease or you have mold, all of these things are just so much more. They're exacerbated by a more aggressive approach. So I tell everybody the same things like, so if you have a bad tox test, this allows us to create a series of opportunities to get you feeling better. So that when I send you, if we're suspicious you have Lyme and then we go test for it to Dr. Diane, she then can work with you in a more meaningful way rather than pressing on the gas. So there's. There's taking the elevator and there's taking the stairs. So basically, in my, my population, we're trying to be very intentional and very careful about how we approach supplementation, detoxification, and surgical plans, as well as plans for neuroplasticity, because it's a very, very complicated equation in our patients, and we don't want to make matters.

Yeah, and I totally agree with all of that. I think we have a similar approach and mindset that way. Like, like, even sauna, I've had people where they go in for one minute of sauna, like, way prior to any perspiration happening, and they still hurks from that. So I think there's this, like, there is. There's this impulse to like, be like, oh, we have to get it out. But any of these things that mobilize, any of these things that kill any, like, they can actually make us worse before we actually see any improvements. And when we are in that Herxheimer, right, When we're in that situation where we're having that die off or that detox reaction that's making us feel worse, what's actually happening? In part, there's a lot of things happening, but one of the things that often is happening is we're releasing more of those inflammatory molecules. And what I tell people is like, the more inflamed we make you, the more we have to go back and fix that and help your body to calm and get you out of that vicious cycle of inflammation, which we can really get in that vicious cycle where it's like we get more inflamed and the tissues work more poorly and we get more inflamed. And, you know, we see situations in medicine, we call things like cytokine storms, where we add this huge bolus of inflammation all at once. And for some people, it can be that level of severe, and it can be this whole secondary process to calm that down. So it works a lot better to just, like, avoid getting there, you know, to begin with. So that by step is. I. I feel like one of the most important components of this whole process.

Yeah, we have completely told our patients from the time of interaction until at least 90 days after their explant has been completed, there is no sauna, no dry sauna, no wet sauna, no infrared sauna. Because of her reactions, I. I just tell them it's a no go because you want to make someone extremely vulnerable, then you do that to them. So they're already going through a detoxification process. Maybe they're having a tough time with their toxin burden, which, I mean, safe to say in my patient population that, yes, they are. And then you stick them in and superheat them and, you know, you express more and your liver's already burdened and you're just like. Then you get. What Dr. Diane is describing is a Hershenheimer reaction. You can only cope with so many, you know, toxins at one time. You're going to make yourself feel worse. That's why we started our own detox program and feel very comfortable with our practitioners running and supervising it because people will just go do things. Women are super tough and they're very resilient, but there's no reason to put yourself through something in a. A way, a more extreme way than necessary to get to the end point.

Yeah, and that also just doesn't really work, you know, that pushing faster, quote, unquote, faster and harder. It really, I just see in my patient population that it just, it makes the whole process of how long we work together actually go slower. So I, you know, I see the same thing in my people. Like, sauna is not where we're starting. And when we do get there, like, that's why I tell people, like, whatever we start with this new thing, we're starting, like, slower than you could ever imagine. Because I want to catch. If you are having a Herxheimer reaction, I want to catch it. If you're like, okay, let's say we're. We're finally ready and we think you're ready for sauna. Well, everybody responds differently. So it's like, if you do, we start slowly and it's one minute and you have a baby reaction, well, we can fix that a lot better than if you've had 20 minutes in the sauna and you're super inflamed from that. So when we do start to add these things in, you know, adding them slowly. So if, like, we're, if we miscalculated and it is slightly the wrong timing, we can get you back on track much quicker than if it was, hey, you just went for it completely.

Yeah, we're in alignment with that. Well, yeah, I really appreciate you coming on the show today. And so tell everybody, like, if, if they want to learn more about your programs and your options and how to work with you, please obviously let them know.

Yeah, absolutely. So you guys can find me? It's super easy. My lime doc dot com. I always like to remind people that it's L Y M e. It's not the fruit. I'm not a fruit, doc. And so mylimedoc.com is where you'll find me. You can take. I also have a quiz. I have a free quiz online. It's just getwellquiz.com and that quiz is designed to go through your symptoms and just kind of spark your curiosity around. Like, oh, maybe I haven't had this tested for. Maybe I haven't had that tested for. So it's a quiz I put together with a developer after doing this for 15 years. So that's a cool resource. And then I do work one on one with people that are that come to the state of Colorado. So if you're willing to come to the state of Colorado, great. If not, I have educational programs that I do throughout the world where I guide you and I work with your doctor as far as educating you on what to avoid, orders to do things, things to ask your doctor about, and how to support your doctor in this area that they may not be as aware of. So that's how I can support people through education around the world as well.

Awesome. Thank you for joining me. It's been a pleasure to have you on. And we will work closely with Dr. Diane to help our patients who are currently experiencing problems with mold or were suspicious have mold and lyme.

Thank you, Dr. Rob. It's a pleasure.

All right, Bye bye, bye, bye.