Breaking the Mold with Dr. Peter Osborne

Hello, friends, and welcome to Perfect Practice. Today I have somebody who is very near and dear to me, my mentor, Dr. Peter Osborne. And we're going to be having a conversation that's not about business. This is something that we've, you know, had many discussions of in the past. Today, we're going to get really personal, and we're going to talk about mold. And this is something that affects millions and millions of people, something that I have, you know, admittedly, very little education and training on, but I know that is something that is very prevalent and relevant in today's climate. And as you'll discover today, you know, knowledge about mold doesn't necessarily mean immunity from being exposed to it. And so Dr. Osborne today is going to get very vulnerable, and he's going to be sharing his personal journey and how mold has affected him and his life and his family's life and. And what he's done about it, also what he's discovered along the way, because there's a lot of nuances. And, you know, just because somebody calls himself a mold expert or mold inspector, as you'll learn today, doesn't necessarily mean that they know what they're doing. So thank you, Dr. Osborne. I appreciate you joining me today and being so open and willing to share a little bit more about your journey.

Hey, thanks so much for. For allowing me to share, and I really appreciate, you know, you offering up your platform for me to be able to do this.

Well, let's get right into it. Maybe you can give a bit of a backstory in terms of where this all started. And I know, like, for people that don't know your work, who've been living under a rock, you know, your. Your main body of work is in helping people understand the ramifications of gluten, and you've developed a very large community to help people understand gluten. And, of course, one of the reasons grains can be horrible for us is because of their mold content and the way they're stored. But there's also mold in other areas, like in. In our. In our homes as well, that can be impacting us. So I loved for you to maybe share a little bit more about, you know, kind of the. The things that you've discovered along your journey. Maybe we can start by where it all started.

Well, for me, where where mold all started was. Was really in the clinic. Right? I mean, so I've been treating for 21 years in practice, seeing people with chronic mold toxicity. Of course, many of those that are in the mold. You know, I clinically probably know the name Richie Shoemaker, who's arguably one of the world's leading authorities on the, on the topic of mold induced illness. And so a lot of what I originally was doing was a lot of the things that I learned through his, you know, through his teachings and educational platform. And it was frustrating for me because tests that were being used to try to identify whether or not a person was in chronic mold were not specific to mold. Like we would run, you know, TGF beta 1, transforming growth factor beta 1 and MSH and MMP and other markers. They were just basically non specific inflammatory markers that if they were high, meant you could have mold, but that didn't necessarily mean you did have mold. Right. And so like, as you've already mentioned, grains are one of the highest mold contaminated foods in the world. And so what I found with a lot of those tests were that they weren't super specific or accurate. And it was frustrating because I knew if I, you know, intuitively I knew a person, maybe they, I knew they had mold, they'd already changed their diet and they weren't getting better and they were hitting a wall. And. And then all, all of a sudden, along came this new technology to be able to measure something called a mycotoxin. Mycotoxins being the, the volatile organic compounds that mold produces. It can poison humans. It acts like radiation poison because it suppresses DNA and RNA and protein synthesis. And now all of a sudden we have this new technology platform that we can use to pinpoint it and say, yes, you definitely have an environment where you're being exposed. Because the half life of mold toxins is very short for most of them, it's just a few days. I think the longest half life I've read about in the research is like a 37 day half life. And so, and meaning that if you're being exposed and you have really high quantities, you know, you're probably being exposed either from where you work or where, where you live. And so then it just becomes a matter of ruling out one versus the other. But for me, it started with, with those types of tests. And then what would happen is I is I would find these the most terrible cases. Like, I don't know what it is. Maybe God has just sent me people with 12 autoimmune diseases and 25 medications. That's kind of the standard of entry, right? And so here we're trying to decipher and move through food and you know, food allergies and chemical exposures and other autoimmune inducing Factors. And so here we are with mold being this thing that just keeps popping up, right? Just repetitively popping up. And so one day I'm just praying and I, and I, and I say, God, would you please sit. Quit. Quit sending me chronic mold cases. You know, and there's specific reasons why. One, I'm super empathetic. So I take my work home with me and I take people's burdens. Oftentimes I take those home with me because I care about them and I want them to get better. And so it's just tough because you're. Not only are you carrying that burden with someone, but your promise is that you're going to walk them through it, which can be very hard. But you're telling them their house is killing them. Which, you know, if you think about this from a practitioner standpoint, for most people, your number one financial investment, your home, right? So you've got more money dumped into your house than you have in your portfolio or anything else. That's true for everybody, but it's true for most. And what you're telling them is all that money you've been investing into your home, you've been investing to a box that's poisoning you and killing you, and you need to leave it. And if you don't have insurance and if you don't have anybody that you can go back and sue, right? If your house is 10 years old for, you know, in Texas, the way it works is if your house is older than 2 years old, you, the builder has no liability on anything. So an insurance doesn't cover mold damage or mold mold claims. So you're basically, you know, let's say you're, you know, $300,000 into a home. And I'm saying you have to leave your home and you can't get anything valuable from it. And if you try to sell it, you have to disclose it or they'll take you or they'll come back and sue you and you're already financially burdened by this big thing. Like, that's a heavy conversation to have. Like, how do you. Now, how do you begin to navigate that? Especially when you have a woman who's very sick, which is usually the case in my practice, it's, you know, the male to female ratio is 70, 30. Right. Females to male, but the wife generally is sick. The husband, who again, in my practice, most of the husbands are hardworking guys. They're at work 12 hours a day, you know, so they're getting half the dose of exposure of mycotoxins. As their wife. Their wives are getting sicker and sicker and sicker. They're not quite as sick. Maybe they have a few things going on, but there's this like huge doubt in their mind. Right. So you have to overcome all of their objections about why their wife doesn't have a mold problem. Right. So you're telling them their house is killing them, you're having to convince their husbands. Right. And then you're carrying their burden empathetically on your shoulders to a certain extent. And it's just not fun. I mean, it's. But it's necessary, you know, I mean, not everything in life is fun. And I certainly do enjoy my life and have fun. But my point is, I asked to not have that happen anymore. And the answer I got back was my dog died and my wife got so sick that she could barely get off the couch. And I just watched her health deteriorate slowly. And you know, in our journey, it was a brand new house. So, I mean, our house wasn't even 2 years old. And so we began this hunt for, you know, for what we thought was mold. And we went through four different mold inspectors who were all morons, and finally found a forensic guy who found mold in five minutes. And, you know, you know, we got out of our house, we left our house. But like I said, it was devastating in the sense that my wife went from a high performing, high, high level exercise, you know, family woman to somebody who was just basically castrated on the couch. Couldn't think I was finishing her sentences. And it was super frustrating on my end, but that's what happened to her. And so I kind of had lost her. You know, I kind of lost who she was as a person. My son was breaking out in rashes all the time. Like his body, just mysterious, weird rashes. Right. You know, you know, my family, we're clean eaters. We do. Right. And so, so he's running fevers periodically for random. No, you know, random fevers, random rashes, no reasons. And my dog starts getting sick. My Yorkie, my family dog of, you know, she's, you know, 14 years old. And some would say, oh, she's just an old dog. And I'm like, no, this dog is a paleo dog. This dog eats raw meat. I mean, she's in phenomenal shape. And you know, but by the time the mold set in, it basically caused organ failure in her and she died very quickly. And my, my German shepherd, who's a 100 pound dog, is now 85 pounds, skin and bones wasting away. And, and I've gained 30 pounds around my torso. And my brain, which is, you know, notoriously very fast and quick, is now functioning like a. Like a hooptie, right? It's like a Pinto instead of a Ferrari speed. And so I'm. I'm struggling in my own mind because, you know, you're supposed to be the guy who helps other people get better, but now your mind is slowing down, you're gaining weight, you're getting fat. It was, for me, it was, it was all about. It was all about an estrogen mimicking mycotoxin. That was really wreaking havoc on me emotionally. I was crying. No reasons, right? Just. Just imagine randomly breaking down in tears on your way to work. Like, that's where I was. Hmm.

It's like, it's hard for me to even imagine you being in that condition because I. Because of our relationship. I've known you for a long time, and I remember when you told me this story during one of our phone calls, I almost started crying because I know how you are. I know how meticulous you are. I know how much your family means to you, how much your work means to you. And to even think that that's compromised in any way by something that's invisible that, you know, in a brand new home, like, it's just. It just broke my heart to know that that was happening. And if it's happening to people like yourself who are doing a lot of other things right, I can only imagine the devastation it would cause to somebody who's not doing all the things right and the impact that it would have for them. So, you know, I know it's not easy to talk about, so I do really appreciate you being vulnerable and being open to share. And, you know, thank Kate for us as well for allowing you to share a bit of her journey and story. It's never easy, but I know there's a. There's probably a message that God is trying to send to you, Right? And I love, I love to hear what, what that message is.

Well, I mean, for me it was, you know, one of the toughest things to do is to identify why you're sick. It's easy to do it when other people come to me. You know, there's a different lens that you're looking through. Um, but when yourself finding your health, failing, and it didn't happen overnight, like, I want to be clear, it wasn't like one day my dog was 85 pounds. It was, you know, it was the slowest form of poison you could imagine. And so it was like you were second guessing and questioning everything that was happening in that regard. It's like it's not. My wife was on one day I CrossFit and the next day on the couch. It was just a slow march over about a year and a half period of time where everybody's health was just slowly declining. And you know, once we finally found, we finally found that we suspected mold, right. And we went through four different inspectors and you know what they would, traditionally, what they would come out and do because our house was under a two year mark, the builder would supply the mold inspector. And this is one of the things that I came to realize is that the builder, when they pay for the inspector, they're going to give the builder the answer the builder wants to hear, not necessarily the answer that, you know, that's true.

Right.

So their, their inspection is. We'll just say it was. Imagine if you go to a functional medicine doctor and the only test they order on you is a complete blood count, and when it comes back normal, they tell you you're healthy and that you're just depressed. Like that's kind of the same scenario with mold inspectors is they come out and they run what's called an air test. So they do, you know, like a, just a sample of the air in your home and they compare that sample to a control air sample from outside. And if your spore counts aren't astronomically high on the day that they test in the area that they test, they gaslight you. Oh, it's not molded. I mean, our mold inspector, you know, he said these words, he said, a little mold, you know, coming out of your wall cavities every day is normal. I'm like, knowing what I know, right? He didn't know who I was, right. And I'm just like, this guy's fired and you know, bring the next one in. Right? So we went, we went through and we had four different inspections done. They all really failed to diagnose any great problem. Although we did pick up on an air test, you know, spore counts in the air of over 3,000 spore counts, which is high. But they tried to say, oh, it's not that high, you know what I'm saying? So, like now we have positive Aspergillus penicillium. And they're trying to say, they're trying to demean it, they're trying to demean the value. I'm like, if an air test is positive, we have a major problem. And so I ended up Calling. I ended up calling around and finding, you know, ultimately finding a very good mold inspector who. His story is just, just probably more terrible than. Definitely more terrible than mine in regards to their experience. They lost a child to mold and him and his wife. And so that's why he became a mold inspector. And so anyway, this guy, he's a, he's forensic, and so he goes into courts and he represents people when they're, when they're trying to go in and prove that the mold is a problem and why it's a problem. So I hired him and he came out and I said it earlier, literally within five minutes, he shoves a camera, he takes a wall plate cover off, he puts a camera behind it. He says, there's the mold right there. And what he, what he showed was, was really quite interesting. It was, it was white and it was. Looked like dust, but it wasn't dust because it formed a geometric pattern. So it was almost like a fractal pattern, right in mold way it grows. And so under the right light, under the right LED light, it's very obvious, you can see it. But if you don't put that light and shine it that way, and you don't know to do that and don't have that experience to do that, you don't find it. Well, he found it. And then he started looking at all my wall cavities and found it in all of them. And then we started pulling samples of the air from the wall cavity. We had 250,000 spore count level in our wall cavity of Penicillium stachybotrys, which is black mold, Aspergillus and Fusarium. And that's why I was crying, because the Fusarium produces an estrogen mimicking toxin. And so again, it wasn't that hard. He came out, he did the inspection, found it, then they found out why it all happened. And I learned a lot about construction through this whole process. You know, even though it was a brand new home, it was improperly constructed. So the vapor barriers were broken, the brick was improperly installed, the foundation didn't have a proper moisture barrier installed. The H VAC system was improperly connected so it wouldn't control the humidity in the house to any great degree. So we had all these small things that added up to catastrophic failure. And, you know, for me, that journey, you know, I've been dealing with chronic mold for, you know, 20 years, but that journey just gave it a whole different level of understanding. Because before, you know, I would, I would find if Somebody had the mold, I'd help them find that they had it, and I'd help them find out that it was a problem. But I'm not a mold inspector and that's not my level of expertise. So I would just kind of refer them, hoping that those experts could continue to serve them well and help them understand where their mold was, why their mold was growing, and how to properly remediate that mold so that their house was no longer poisoning them. And anyway, you know, I look, I look back and a lot of times I've seen it. I've seen cases where people were told incorrect information by their mold inspectors and quit looking for the mold and maintain their illness and continue to stay sick. I don't, I don't allow that to happen anymore. That's one of the big changes, is now I know once I find it, once I find mycotoxins and I find evidence of mold, you know, it's allowed me to be relentless in the pursuit of making sure that that patient understands what they need to do. And so we've created systems and processes within our office so that when people do get mold, when they have mold illness, we now know how to educate them before they ever even meet a mold inspector. A lot of people don't realize this, but I could go this weekend and I could take a 16 hour course and I'd be a mold inspector on Monday. You know, it's not, it's not like a PhD type degree where you're in school for eight years. It's a, it's a really, an easy, it's an easy certification to get. And the other thing is, there aren't any real great, we'll just say objective criteria for identification of what level of mold constitutes a problem. In other words, the standards that are being used have never been validated to be right, wrong, or indifferent. And so it's just like an esoteric number that somebody subjectively created out of thin air and said, if your house is below a level, you're fine, and if it's above this level, it's not fine, but it could be below that level and it could be not fine at all. And that's where my house was. My house was definitely below their standard criteria. But we had one of the worst cases of mold toxicity in a home I've seen. You know, and again, I've been, I live in the hurricane region of Houston. So mold is not a small thing that comes through this office. It's, you know, second to gluten sensitivity. It's probably the second most common thing we deal with.

Wow. You know, one of our mutual friends, Joe Polish, talks about a consumer's guide, Right. That's one of his ways of educating the public. Is that something you've created yet?

Yes, we're actually in the process of creating the most comprehensive mold information the world has seen. I'm about 32 hours in and into a documentary film that we're shooting and we're creating the webinars and the educational coursework. And I've brought all the experts together. We've got building engineers, we've got architects, we've got mold inspectors, we've got PhD scientists, we've got mold clinicians and experts that are all basically coming together to help get this information so that it's organized so that, you know, if somebody has a mold issue, we can hand them this and we can say go, right? And that there's no willy nilly subjective. Well, this person told me this test was better than that test. Or this person told me that, you know, that if I just diffused essential oils in my house that my mole problem would go away. And. Or this person just said, you know, just get an air filter, don't worry about remediation. Like none of that. It's, it's. We're trying to be as objective as we can be and as systemized and organized as we can be in presenting the information so that people don't, don't get caught into the, in the industry, they call it mold gold. Mold gold is because you have crooked inspectors and you have crooked remediation companies. And that's not to say they're out, they're all crooked. But you get a guy who's an inspector who comes out, sometimes they say you have a problem and you don't because they're getting a 20% take when they refer you to their remediating company. Right. And one of my buddies who's a mold inspector, he came, he says we get five or six calls a week from remediation companies where they're offering us 20 to 30% kickbacks if we'll refer the business that's, by the way, in Texas is illegal to do that. Some states it's not illegal. Right. And so I have no idea about Canada. But that's why we have attorneys too. We've got some of the best mold attorneys in the US that are, that are helping us put these guidelines together so that people know what their rights are around mold and know how to basically pursue a remediation project to finality and to successful finality. Because see, other thing we've seen as we've been doing these interviews, one of the interviews I did was an attorney and his family, they had gotten out of a moldy home, had a new home built. That home became moldy, right? So it was just boom and then boom. And that, that's, I've seen that happen to some of my own, some of my own patients as well. So that's part of where to me, you've got to, you know, when you're going in to buy a new house or have a new house built, you know, if you're, if you, if you're thinking mold prevention in mind, you have to understand that, that it begins with the architectural design of the home, right? And it also, every step of the, of the, of the build has to be inspected by somebody who understands what they're looking for and what to do in order to reduce the potential risk of your house becoming a death. BOX.

What are the red flags? So if somebody's listening to this, maybe they have patients coming in that are facing this challenge, you know, dealing with mold. What are the red flags for the practitioner to pay attention to? Symptom wise.

Symptom wise diet change with no change. Right? So if you, you know, as many, many of these practitioners that are watching this today, if their experience is like mine, and I don't want to project my experience onto the world's practitioners, but my experience has been pretty simple. You know, 90% of the time when you change a patient's diet, you know, to accommodate who they are and what their needs are, they get better. And they may not get 100% better, but they, there's tangible, objective, and subjective improvement. So there's objective lab criteria that we measure like CRP and homocysteine and things that show inflammation, we see improvements there. We see improvements in their subjective reporting of how they feel. You know, their digestion improves, their skin improves, their headaches go away, their muscle pain goes away, that kind of stuff. Ricer. Now, in mold, one of the number one things that should kind of raise your hackles, right? Your practitioner hackles, to suspect that mold might be a possibility is if they have done a phenomenal job of complying with diet and lifestyle change, and the needle of their health hasn't moved at all. This is a surefire. Well, not surefire. It should put mold on your radar big time. And, you know, that's one, that's one thing I would suggest. Number two, one of the common symptoms that we see that People report is metallic mouth feel, so their mouth tastes like metal. Their food, when they're eating, there's a metallic taste. Number three, if you've got them on any kind of supplementation protocol, that includes methylation factors, so like methylcobalamine, methylfolate, any type of glutathione or cysteine, things that support methylation and detoxification. And every time they try to supplement, they hit the floor like they feel terrible. Think mold, because when you're in mold and you're trying and you're ramping up their capacity at detoxification, Mold toxins are fat soluble. So what happens is, generally speaking, when somebody's in that mold, their body's way of trying to deal with the mold toxins is to shove it into a fat cell and get it out of the bloodstream. Because in the bloodstream it creates the most volatile interactions and so it creates the most damage. So the intelligence of the body is put it in a fat cell and at least get it out of the main circulation. And so when you start giving methyl nutrients or liver detoxification agents, you basically start mobilizing those fat soluble toxins and you start trying to convert them into water soluble substances that can be sweated out or peed out, but they're not out of the mold. The mold is still coming, the toxins are still coming in them. So basically you're mobilizing, but they're still being exposed. So you hit them even harder. And that's why they react to their supplements. So you want to really be cautious around their supplement protocol if they're reporting back to you. I am on the floor here. These supplements are wrecking me, but they shouldn't be wrecking, like B vitamins shouldn't make anybody go to the floor, you know what I'm saying?

Right.

And, and so that's mold. A lot of the time mold can do that. Heavy metal can do it too. But molded mold is one I see do it more commonly than anything else. Neurological symptoms, huge brain fog and neuropathy as well. Numbness and tingling in the extremities is very common. But brain fog and then another really big symptom is the loss of vision. In a rapid onset of loss of vision. I'm not talking about I'm 55, and in the last 10 years my vision has declined. I'm talking about in the last two months, I'm squinting to make words, you know, come into focus. And that's exactly what happened to me. Like I, you know, I have 20, 20 vision, I could see, you know, I could read, you know, 500 yards away, I could read a stop sign if there was graffiti on it. Now, today, I'm still dealing with the damage that molded to my eyes. I'm not, I've not yet recovered from that damage, but it deteriorated my vision over a very rapid course. So I found myself, things were getting blurry. I couldn't quite pick up things. So vision deterioration in short periods of time is a symptom of mold, a severity of brain fog, and then also the severity of gastrointestinal symptoms. Mold keeps you in a fight or flight sympathetic state. So it really shuts down digestion and it makes it, you know, no matter what you eat, you just don't feel good. And it's not food allergy. It's actually inability to digest properly. And then the last symptom I would say is notoriously mold is I, I can't go to sleep at night. I keep waking up. I can fall asleep, but I wake up at 12, I wake up at 2, I wake up at 3. That is a very common hallmark side effect of somebody who's in mold poisoning, you know, mycotoxicosis or in a moldy environment.

What are some of the red flags somebody can look for in their home? So I know you can smell a musty basement or a musty home, but that's not always the best test. If somebody is listening to this and they want to know just by visual inspection or by doing a quick assessment of their home, if they're suspecting that they have mold, what are some red flags that they can look for?

Number one is just being aware of what your humidity levels in your home are today. Most new homes, not all. And it depends on where you live too, because not all homes being built have central air or H vac systems. Down here, every home does. But it's because it's taxes and it's 110 degrees and you got to have an air conditioner. But the humidity, usually on a digital thermostat readout, you have a hygrometer which reads the humidity back. And humidity, usually it's measured by percentage. So it's a relative moisture percentage in the air. Any humidity consistently where you're seeing humidity driven up over 55%. And really, in my opinion, over 50%. Really, you know, the goal is to keep the house 50% or lower in terms of the relative humidity. And, and so if you're finding like your humidity 60% all the time, Right. If you look at yours or higher, right? That's a sign that you've got. You've got more moisture in your air. And so now you have to start asking, why do I have more moisture in my ear? Because the moisture in the air is just the symptom. Right? But the cause is probably something else. And there are a lot of things that can cause that. So being aware of the humidity is just one simple thing that you can do to be aware. Number two, is obviously a visible inspection. I mean, mold is not always obviously visible. In my case, it wasn't at all until you got behind the wall. But if you've got visible mold that keeps recurring and growing on your shower tile, you've got a moisture problem in the bathroom that you probably should resolve if you have visible signs of mold. That's an obvious. Another thing that you can do is look at your air filter. A lot of people, you know, they. They don't ever check their air filters. They never change them, right? Or they. They. They rely on a service to change them. But one of the things that we've seen commonly is black mold growing on an air filter. Just like all you have to do is pull it out and look at it, and there it is. Boom. It's growing on your air filter. That means you have a mold problem already, right? And that air, as it's pulling through that filter, all those mold spores are just going through your entire ductwork. And now you. You're just blowing mold and mycotoxins all over your furniture, all over your family, Right?

And that.

And that's a simple thing to just check. Just check your air filter, looking inside the H Vac plenum. So, you know, again, if you have an H Vac unit, the plenum, which is the box, the main box the coils reside in, I would have that thing inspected once a year by somebody who. Who's a good, reputable H Vac guy, and just have them do a visual inspection for mold inside the box. Monday morning, I had a patient send me an email, and their house was built fantastic. The mold inspector went out. The house was perfect. But they opened up the plenum. It was totally covered in carpet, like black mold carpet. So that was the only visible sign of mold that we had. There was no visible. So, again, if you get your H Vac inspected, that's a simple thing to pay for and do. But make sure they check inside the plenum to see that there's no mold growing. I mean, roof. Loose roof tiles or loose roof shingles, you know, Any signs of or past history of water damage? If you've had a history where they're like, here we've had a lot of homes flood, you know, where they came in and cut out the sheetrock. Like if you start smelling, must go to those areas first, right? And start looking at, is there potential there? If you have a basement, check the humidity in your basement. Most homes that have basements, you know, you don't have the thermostat down in the basement. Right. A lot of basements aren't finished. But what happens is that concrete slab that forms that basement, it's not a solid waterproof barrier. And so you get moisture coming into that basement. So check the humidity in your basement. I've seen no less than 100 cases of basement induced mold toxin poisoning. Basements are notorious for causing it because they're built under the ground and that water seepage just comes through in it. So those are simple things. Another simple thing that may not be your house per se, but I've seen people who are really sensitive to mold with those front loader washing machines. Because what happens is those front loaders, you know, how you open the lid and then there's this kind of water accumulates in there. And what happens is mold starts to grow. It's now you're washing your clothes and your clothes are just collecting mycotoxins. So then when you go to put them on, you know, you're basically poisoning yourself. And so different people are reactive at different levels. And so if you've got a, if you've got a front loader, get rid of it. Whirlpool was sued, I think a number of years ago. I don't know what the outcome of the lawsuit or if it's even finished yet, but that, you know, somebody was taking them to court for the defect in those units, you know, becoming a mold hazard for, you know, for human health. So that's another place that's common that up in the attic, if you have a water heater, a lot of times that that drain pan will clog and you'll get. It's kind of a slow spillage of water coming over that pan. And that can lead to a slow leak that I've seen happen for a lot of people. The H VAC unit itself, most of them are in the attic. And so if you have a temperature depending on where you live, you know, my attic in the summer months is 110, 120 degrees. If I don't do anything to basically shield it from the heat so, you know, if you're in the market to build a new home, make sure your attic has radiant barrier. And it's really. Ideally, it's better to build a little insulated box for your H vac unit where you can make sure there's not a huge temperature differential between the environment of the outside of your H vac unit and the H vac unit itself. Because if there's a 30 plus degree temperature difference, you're going to get beating, which is water sweating. That water's got to go somewhere and it can drip down into your wall cavities. You can find yourself with no running water damage, but mold growing as a result of that. Just that condensation that can occur. These big tubes that they install in the attic, you know, they're the big ducks, right? The flex duct work a lot of times as they're installing it, they'll have one tube and then they'll have another duct and they'll be touching. And if you put your hand in between those two, you'll. You'll pull it back and it'll be wet. It's. It's because you have to. There has to be. Ducks can't touch like that. So this is just something. Go up in your attic and look. I know when I went up in my attic, I put my hand in between and it was saturated, soaked. Pull back a wet arm. It's because it's by code, building code. You're not. Ducks aren't supposed to touch because they sweat. And so you'll get water that just drips constantly into. First it goes into the insulation, you know, but if it's there long enough, over enough period of time, you build up enough moisture and water where it's now starting to drip down behind your wall. So those are all things you can, you can go in your attic, you can look at your ductwork, you can look at your H Vac, you can look at your water heater, you can, you can assess your washing machine, you can look in your bathrooms, you can look at the air vents where air is being pulled in the bathrooms or in the K. And you can make a decent visual inspection yourself. And if you find anything that you know is questionable and you're sick, right? And pursue it. You know, pursue it. And one of the best ways to know you need to pursue mold without any shot of a doubt. I've yet to find a case where we were finding mycotoxins present in a patient where they didn't have a major mold problem, not once. And we've been doing mycotoxin testing for, you know, probably 10 years now. Close to 10 years, and not a single case where if it was a positive result, that that person didn't have a mold problem. And so, you know, if you suspect it, you know, a lot of people run and get an army test. Army stands for Environmental Relativity Mold Index. It's a type of. It's a type of dust collection where you're swabbing dusty areas of the home and then you're analyzing that dust for spore counts and spore species, like types of mold, and then also counts. And it's a good test. I mean, it's not like it's a bad test, but it's not definitive because you could have, like, I've had cases where people did Hermes after remediation, but they were collecting old dust from before remediation time. So you get a false positive test result back. So Hermes are good, but they're a screening tool. Mycotoxin testing on the person will never lie. Now, that being said, there's three major labs that do it. Use the lab from Texas. That's all I have to say about that. I've tested them all. I've blinded them all. The lab from Texas is accurate. The other ones are going to give you false negatives, oh, 50 to 80% of the time. And that makes it really, really hard for you to help that person who's in mold. And your test is telling them they're not in mold.

And.

And now you have to convince them that it might be their problem. So use the lab that runs mycotoxin testing. They're in Texas. They're the only lab in Texas that does it. Go look it up. But I'm not going to get into the game of talking bad about certain labs because it's not like these labs are terrible or bad. It's just that my experience in terms of accuracy is that lab in Texas.

Okay, I'll ask you off the record then. I remember the laundry machine. My current home, we have a top load. But in my previous home when I lived in Cincinnati, I always thought this was such a silly, like, stupid design because you'd shut it and then next time you open it up, it would smell moldy and musty. So I'm glad that, you know, there's something being done about that to protect the consumer because, you know, obviously most people nowadays, for the convenience purposes of convenience, or if we have a stacking washer and dryer, sometimes it's going to be a Front load. And that can create some problems for people.

Yeah, big time. Big time. I mean, it only takes mold 48 hours to grow. That. That's kind of one of the myths, too. I think it's important everybody know that you think, oh, my house is new. I mean, I made the mist. I didn't, you know, I made the mistake. My house is new. There's no way there's mold in it. 48 hours. All they need. You need moisture, and you need food, and food is generally your Sheetrock or your wood framing. And moisture is, you know, water. That's all mold needs to sporate, propagate, and release its toxic, you know, toxic burden.

Now, one of the things you said was about the foundation, and there was a, like a structural flaw or fatal flaw in the way the foundation was either poured or sealed. Could you describe that a little bit more just in case somebody else is wondering about that?

Yeah. So in a slab foundation. And this is. This is. Again, it's a slab. So concrete is what I'm referring to. Not a. Not a raised foundation. But what's supposed to happen in. Is when they. When they get all the rebar, which is the, you know, the. The iron work in. In laid and down, they're supposed to put a plastic. A thick plastic barrier over that so that when they come in and pour the concrete, you. That plastic barrier is a moisture vapor barrier. Right. So what happens is there's moisture in the ground, and concrete is like a sponge. It will absorb water and it will show up on the other side. So if you put that plastic barrier down and it's solid and it's thick enough and it's not compromised, then you're going to have a nice barrier. Right. To prevent excessive moisture from coming up. They didn't do that properly in my house. That was one of the mistakes when we were reading the humidity on the floor. In some areas of my house, the humidity was well over 70%. In one area, it was like 82% the humidity on the tile. Right. And we had, you know, we had marble tile, and, you know, humidity is high, but it's not like it's wet and you're sliding on it. So it's just high humidity within it. And so that's moisture carriage coming through. It's vapor, moisture coming into your house. And so again, if. If your H Vac is also improperly connected and it's not pulling moisture out of the air, and you've got moisture coming from the ground into your house, and then you've Got the attic is improperly sealed. So the, the attic air is pushing down into the walls of your house with moist air. You know, you've got moist air coming from all sides, permeating through your house, bringing in enough moisture content for that mold to grow again within, within 48 hours. So it, you know, if you've got a washing machine and you close it and you don't use it until next week and you open it, it smells musty. That's because there's mold growing in there and they don't, you know, it only took a couple of days.

So the 48 hours that makes sense. What happens when the source of the water is removed? Does a mold die? Does it persist? What's, what's the situation there?

So mold hibernates, right? It doesn't, it doesn't die. It hibernates and it waits for water. A lot of times though, when, when mold is losing water, it will sporate extra, right? And it's attempt to spread just like life. It's trying to reach out and find and survive. And so it will sporate more and it becomes dormant, but it is not dead. And so, you know, but the good news is is that dormant mold is not an issue to any huge great degree. It can be because you don't know when the, when the moisture might come back or you know, what kind of day is going to set it off. So in my, in my opinion, the goal is, it's just, the goal is not zero mold. You'll never achieve zero mold in a home. But the goal is containment of moisture and containment of mold sources of food, which is hard to do if you're not building your house now. You know, you're probably already in a house with wooden sheetrock, which is like material that you know is very conducive to the growth of mold. So you, you, you're, it's about mitigation. You're not getting rid of it because it's ubiquitous, but you don't want so much that it's constantly sporading and constantly releasing mycotoxins. You also don't want moisture perpetually coming in because that creates self propagating mold where you'll never get it under control. And so that's really the real danger. It's that moisture, if you can control the moisture and the airflow in your house, you can control mold becoming problematic or not.

You know, one thing you said in our conversation earlier was that when you were out of the home and you came back and you would just run your hand across the countertop that it would be covered like you would. You'd have the spores on the countertop, right. Because it was circulating throughout the house. So, you know, if somebody's gone on vacation for a week or two and they come back and they. And they find this fine dust or this fine film, would that be another indication, a red flag for people?

It could be. So one of the things that we had in our house was we had. I had built. It's kind of a home within a home, right? We built a suite as part of our home for my wife's family, because they come. When they come, they stay two, three months, right? So it's. So we want them to be welcome. So what would happen is, you know, we have. In our house, you know, you do your regular cleaning, like you wipe all the counters down. But in there in their suite, nothing was happening. And so what was happening is this film was growing on the wood. And it's like, what is this? You know, we didn't. We didn't quite. At first, we didn't know what it was. You just clean it and move on. We cleaned it a couple of times. Like that's not normal. Like that shouldn't be happening. That's a problem. And at time, I didn't know it was mold. And that's again, the mold. When the mold. When the actual mold inspector, who knew what the hell he was talking about, came in, he was like, yeah, you've got mold as visible mold. It's growing all over your cabinets. It just didn't look like the classic green or black mold because the cabinets were dark brown. So it just looked like a filmy haze. And so, you know, if you're coming back to a filmy haze on your. On your. On your wooden cabinets, I would say definitely, you want to get that checked out and. And suspect mold. That's because that was one of the clues that I wish I had had known about sooner because I just wasn't aware, you know, until the problem was really, really big.

What's the lesson you've learned in all this? What's the message from God that you've received from all this?

I think what I was doing, Sachin, was I was. I don't know, I look back and I think, what. What was I doing wrong? Right? What was I doing that God really wanted me to take away? And I think one of the things that I. If I'm honest with myself, as I was coasting, you know, we all. We all just. I Mean, I've been, I've been practicing 21 years. You know, everything I have, everything I've done, I've built from scratch. You know, I didn't have, you know, I didn't have a lot of money. I didn't come from any money at all. I was broke. I was in major debt when I graduated college. And so you get to a certain point where you've worked your ass off, you know, 80 hour work weeks for, you know, 15 years, you find yourself just kind of wanting to sit back just a little bit and take a little bit more time. And, you know, and, you know, I don't know, I don't want to say be lazy. I just want to say not work as hard. And that's not why God put me here. So if I, if I think about the lesson for myself, it's, you know, I am a worker. That's what I do. The work doesn't bother me because I love it and I enjoy it and it's a passion of mine. But I got to a point where I was just, I was comfortable. You know, you get comfortable and you know what you get comfortable with. You know, you generally, you end up, you end up, you end up not growing as a person as much as you should be growing. And I think we should all. For me, I've always, in my, in my history, I've always tried to grow. I've always been a part of masterminds. I've always, you know, looked at education, not stopping with the diploma. But there was a period in my life where I kind of was taking steps back from that. So I think for me it was, you know, God was also telling me, you know, you've stopped growing as much as you should. You need to, you need to wake up, you need to start growing. This is, you're not going to stop growing. We're not going to let you coast through the rest of your life on your gluten fame and, you know, and not reach more people in other ways. And I think the other, the other lesson for me was, you know, I've been, I've really been entrenched in the world of gluten. So I think mold is a bigger problem than gluten, honestly. And I, and I, I didn't think that before, but, you know, it's funny, it's like when once you see a red car, you know, that's like yours, you see them everywhere, right? And it's like mold as much has been that way for me. The more I look, the more I realize that a lot of the nuance of what a lot of people that come to see me are struggling with is mold induced. Not just food induced, but mold induced. And the more we dig, the more we find, you know, there's corruption in the construction industry. They're building homes with unskilled laborers who are cutting corners, who are. Who are building homes that are going to end up being moldy. And that is happening nationwide on mass scale. Because if you look at the growth rate just in the last 20 years, you look at where I live, just in Houston, you can't drive from one side of Houston to the other in less than an hour and 45 minutes, right? And when I was a kid, that was a 30 minute ordeal. And that's because it's just, you know, and that all that is housing. All that is cheap, unskilled labor housing. There's mold in those homes. 50% of the houses, I would estimate, at least have a mold problem. You've got autism rates that are sky high. There's now research coming out that's directly shown that autism can be caused as a result of mold exposure. You know, look at the. I think it's 800% increase in autistic rates over the last few decades. You know, and, you know, some people will argue that it's gluten. Some people argue that it's dairy or vaccines or, you know, whatever. I think mold is playing a major role in this. I think. I think for me, mold is playing one of the biggest roles, because I think what it's doing is it's reducing the constitution of the people who live in it so that they become more susceptible to everything else. You know, and so their resiliency is suffering. They lack resiliency and robustness in their health and their constitution. And I think mold. Mold is much bigger. And I think today mold is where gluten was 20 years ago. And, you know, maybe. And maybe I'm wrong, but, you know, gluten 20 years ago was a whisper on the wind, right? There were a handful of us that were, you know, the belligerently speaking out about it. And, you know, and bringing this movement today. Gluten is a household word. And there's not a person in an industrialized country that hasn't heard the term gluten free. And I think we're going to see that with mold in the next 15, 20 years. I think it's that big of a problem. And I think the more practitioners are aware of it and turn their attention to it, the more we're going to find.

You said a few things that I want to unpack a little bit. You mentioned cars and cars can get water damage. Cars can have mold related issues. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Yeah. One of the common practices in southern hurricane Gulf coast states is when cars get flooded, they go to, you know, they go to auction lots and they get auctioned off and a lot of times they get sold used and people buy a mold car. And so, yeah, I mean, mold can grow in your car. Mold is very common to grow in cars because, you know, depending on where you live, if you live in the south, there's a much greater likelihood that you're going to get mold growing. Where there's heat and where there's cold air, you get water. And so the must of an air conditioner, when you first turn it on, guess what that is? That's mold. And so some people do fine. That's the only exposure they get. It's not a big deal. Their immune systems handle it. But when their house is moldy and then their car is moldy, you know, it really sets them up. And then there are some who have genetic susceptibility to mold poisoning and they get a car like that. And I've actually had a case, a woman, you know, severe neurological deficits. So she'd get seizures with mold. And so she's driving this, what she thinks is a new car. And of course we come to find out that it was the mold in her car that was, that was her new trigger because she had gone through diet change and everything else and was perfectly fine and it was the car that set her off. So cars can definitely be a source of mold. So if your car has water damage or you bought it used and you don't know the history of it and it smells musty, think about that as a potential part of the problem as well.

Is that something that can be mitigated or is that something that you just got to get rid of the car?

Depends on the person. Anything can be remediated. Depends on how much you want to spend, the value of the car. Generally, as you know, it's a deteriorating asset or I wouldn't even really call it an asset. It's only an asset. And then it helps you get from A to B in that way. But as a, you know, as an investment, it's a poor choice of invest. So I would look at at it as if you can remediate it simply because you may be somebody spilled something in the back seat and there's some mold growing in the carpet. You can rip that out for a reasonable rate and get it replaced, fine, remediate it. But if you've got a systemic water flooded vehicle, you know, I wouldn't do it. Or if the cost is greater than the car is worth, obviously that's a no brainer.

Another thing that comes up in regards to this is, is. And not to get too nuanced with this, but is knowing that there's help. Right. So once we remove somebody from that environment, perhaps, do you have them, you know, rent a hotel just to. Just to make sure that. Or to see how they feel or have them go on vacation and see how they feel and if they feel better, that could be a sign that their home is. Is problematic for them sometimes. Actually, I went to a hotel, a really nice hotel. I went to the GW and the first two rooms that they gave me, I could smell the mustiness as soon as I walked in. And these were. This is like a high end hotel. So, you know, they were very gracious and they moved me into a different room. But I pity the fool that ended up in that room. But you know, even hotels can be problematic too. And you know, it's a matter of speaking up for yourself. And had I not had that conversation with you, I may have even tolerated it. But you were on my little shoulder and you said, no, Satchin, you got to change that room out because, you know. Because it gets into your clothes, right? It gets into, it gets into everything when you stay in a space like that.

Yeah, I, you know, especially after Covid, what happened is a lot of the hotels were closed. And so in order to save money, you know, they were skeleton crew staff and they shut off their H Vacs. So what you had was you had moisture entering the building, you know, and not being properly controlled. So a lot of hotels today have a mold problem. I've. I've actually, in the last year, I've been to more hotels that were moldy than I think I can remember in the entire, you know, career of traveling, you know, as much as I do. So that's a big problem right now. But to answer your other question, which is, you know, is it a good idea for a person who suspects that their home is hurting them and to leave their home and see if they feel better? It can be. One of the problems though is sometimes people will leave and you know, out of the, out of the cattle, into the fire, so to speak. Like they get. They leave their house, which is moldy, and they end up in another place which is just as moldy or more moldy. And so there is no difference. And so now it creates a, it can create a doubt that mold is even an issue. And so I'm always very, I'm always very open to say, look, if you're going to go stay at moms or dads or aunts or uncles or nephews or neighbors or whoever it is, know that it's not a controlled experiment that you're doing, you know, and so it's important to have this conversation because otherwise they might get the wrong idea and then, you know, and then never get the help they need. So let make sure they're aware that just because you're leaving doesn't mean you're leaving to go to a place that doesn't have mold. And just because that person, that house you're going to, isn't as sick as you, doesn't mean that they're not. Again, not, not having a moldy problem that might affect you. And so you have to keep that in mind. But like in my case, in my own anecdotal story, when we found our mycotoxins were high, like my wife's levels were over 10 times the limit, right. For black mold mycotoxins, it's one of the highest levels I've seen. We walked out of the house that day. We didn't go back. Where did we go? For two months I packed my dog and my son and my wife and we lived in a damn extended stay hotel. Now, was there mold in it? Yeah. Could I smell it? Yeah. Was it as bad as my house? Not even close. My wife started to recover in mold, right. So in that case, you know, within two weeks, her brain had started to return to her, her energy had started to return to her. So, you know, in that regard, we left something bad and we got into something less bad. And it was helpful until we could figure out what we needed to do to get organized to get out of, you know, being in a hotel and being kind of more into a, a home, if, if that makes sense. So you do have to be careful if you're trying to do that. Just know unless you are doing a controlled experiment where you're certain the house or the location you're going to is completely mold free, then you have to keep that in mind. And I actually, I've had this happen at a young man with rheumatoid arthritis and, you know, he had mold. And I kept telling him, you got mold, you got mold. He finally said, okay, we're going to do something about it. So he says, I'm going to go to my grandfather's house. And he did. And his grandfather's house was worse mold than his house. And so he flared. So that's just another example of how, you know, just because you go somewhere else doesn't necessarily mean that you're getting out of the problem. You're just getting out of one of the problems, but hopefully you're not getting into a bigger one. But again, it's a possibility that a person has to keep in mind.

Yeah, you know, a few years ago there was a controversy about maybe it's, there still is, about coffee and mold. And I know Dave Asprey, you know, took a lot of heat for, for this and he, he did a, he did a documentary on mold as well a few years ago. I'm curious, what are other foods that people need to be mindful of? Or are there certain foods that can potentially make people worse that, that are high in mold counts?

For example, highest is grain, hands down. I mean, you know, it's interesting, you know, doing the research here. The veterinarian industry is so much more advanced in this topic than mainstream medicine. They actually have entire scientist blocks dedicated and devoted to reducing mycotoxin concentration of grains for farmers. Because what happens is the grain, when you store it, it becomes so moldy and contaminated that it kills your animals. And if you're, you know, when you're thinking about a farm, it's a business, right. And so for every animal that dies, it's, you know, depending on how much that animal is worth to you, maybe it's $500 or $1,000 ahead that you're losing to mycotoxicosis or poisoning. So they actually make in the feed now, they make different enzymes that they put in the feed that destroys and denatures mycotoxins. They make different treatment sprays that they put on the animal feeds so that mold won't grow as a mold preventative so that the animals are safe. Like, this is a really huge, I mean, it's a huge industry. It's, I'd say it's a billion dollar industry. And humans is nothing. Right. You barely have any legal requirements to prove that you're, you know, that your food that you're producing, you know, there are some foods that have limits on mycotoxin levels. Certain grains have limitations. Dairy has some limitations, but grain is number one. Coffee is a big one. Peanuts are another big one because they're a ground legumes. That grow in the dirt. And so they're, they have a tendency to have a lot more mold and mycotoxin on them and then any kind of berry that's ground growing. So like your raspberries, blackberries, those things that are viny like that grow close to the ground, can, can, can, you know, they can collect mold and they also spoil very quickly. And so what do they, what spoils them? Mold. You think about what mold is? You really want to know what mold is? Mold is God's great equalizer, right? No matter what you are, mold will return you back to the earth because when it attaches to you and it starts growing on you, it secretes enzymes and toxins that suppress your life and that degrade your organic material and matter so that you become soil again. That's what mold is, is. It returns everything back to the earth. So any produce, you know, that's. That starts to spoil can be a potential exposure for mold. So, you know, if you pick up your apple and there's little green growing on the top by the stem, that's not one, in my opinion, that I'm going to eat. And that's just because of my experience and what, what I went through with mold. Now some people would just cut that part off and eat the apple anyway. More power to you. I'm not, I'm not saying it's going to necessarily make you sick, but you do have to be aware that any organic matter, fruits and vegetables, do have the capacity, a much greater capacity to be contaminated with mold. The longer they sit out and the longer they, they have the ability to spoil.

I love what you said. It's God's equalizer, right? It just turns everything back into soil and really powerful stuff, man. I'm sorry you had to go through this, but I'm glad in, in a way that it was you, because I know you can do something about it, spread the message. You know, I'd love to hear more about the documentary. If you have any dates. I'm definitely very open to helping you promote it, get this message out there to more people, because, you know, it's causing a lot of unnecessary, needless suffering. And there needs to be accountability, right? Not just, you know, because it's one thing to move from one house to another, but if you move into a house that was equally poorly built, then, you know, it doesn't really solve the problem. So there does, does need to be more awareness raised about this.

Absolutely. And I would say to any of you that are helping people or going through remediation or going through remediation yourself. The most two important questions to ask. Question number one is where is the mold? And question number two is, why did the mold grow? Because you have to remediate where the mold is, right? But if you don't know why it grew, any remediation you try to attempt to do will fail. So you really have to understand why it grew. And that's really the job of the mold inspector. The reason I say that, I've seen so many different mold inspectors find mold, but have no idea as to why it grew. Their remediation plan was incomplete. It did not include, you know, it included how to clean the mold, but it didn't include why the mold grew. So you could really not fix the core of the problem, which is now you're spending, you know, anywhere from 10 to hundreds of thousands of dollars to remediate something out of your home that's just going to come right back. So it's very, very important. There's, there are a lot of inspectors that will not identify the reason why. And if you're stuck there, and if you're in that position, you hire an architectural firm who specializes in building failure, right? Their expertise is in understanding why something went wrong. In our case, we had one of the problems was the way they installed the brick. They allowed the mortar to back up behind the brick wall. You couldn't see that. What they call it in the industry is something called mortar damming. So the mortar stops the water because bricks not waterproof. So water goes through the brick and it rolls down the back of the brick. Well, if you have dammed all the weep holes at the bottom so that the water can escape, then now the water goes into your house. You see what I'm saying? So that, like that we would never have known without an engineering architectural company who understood where and how to look for that. We would never have known the foundation was defective without having that team. Even my mold inspector couldn't find that. But my mold inspector said, we think it's this reason, but we need more answers, right? Because again, if you're going to go through the process of remediation, you just don't. It's the number one investment most people have, right? So if you're already, you know, 300 grand deep into a home and you're about to spend fifty plus thousand dollars on a remediation and you don't know why the mole grew, you know, you're just going to end up staying sick and then you're going to get frustrated and then you're not going to believe that it's mold and then you're going to get mad at your doct or you know, whoever you guys listening to this, they're going to get mad at you. So you just got to be aware that you have to have the right team of experts even beyond the inspector. Because that, that, that why the mold grew is the most important question that can be answered about it. If you're, if you're looking into doing remediation.

Well, it's kind of the functional medicine way. Right. To find out why, where is this problem coming from. To get to the root and go upstream to, to solve it.

Yeah. Functional medicine in your, in your approach to mold? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Root cause resolution.

Right, that's it.

Do we have any timeline on the, on the documentary, any dates?

You know, I'm hoping this time next year I, I'm really. It's not going to be a small documentary. I mean we, like I said We've already got 30 some odd hours of footage and I know I've got at least 100 more I want to shoot. So it's a big project. It'll probably be more like a major docu series multi parts. But I'll let you know as soon as I get can be more concrete about a date. I'll definitely let you know.

Always here to support you and the work that you do. Appreciate you and thanks man for being so vulnerable and sharing and as I said, if it's going to happen to anyone, let it happen to someone who can do something about it. Spread the message and, and I hope this is something that's behind you now, but also something that you can help thousands or millions of people look at through a different lens. So thank you for the work that you do and here's to your family and their full healing and wholeness again.

Well, thank you, Satchin. I really appreciate that and thank you for sharing your platform with me so that we can reach more people with this message. I think it's just critical and I think we're going to see it. It becomes more and more critical for the health of our, of our modern world as we, as we advance through the next several decades.

Thank you. Is there anywhere we can send people in the meantime if somebody is struggling with mold? They want to contact you.

Your office.

Where, where can we send them?

Yeah, just drpeterosborne.com There's a tab at the top, it says schedule a call and they can just hit that button and talk with somebody. On my staff, and if they feel like if I'm a good fit for them to help them, then they can, you know, then they can make an appointment.

Amazing. Thank you. We'll put that in the show notes. And always a pleasure to chat. And once again, thank you for sharing, my friend.

Yeah, you're welcome.