098 MOLD (A Four Letter Word) with Dr. Lauren Tessier

Mold. The reason why mold and Lyme go hand in hand is not just because they overlap, but mold and mycotoxins suppress and alter the immune system. Like, this is probably like the thing that people are putting— put a note on the show notes, stay tuned till the end. You know, we've seen that mycotoxin called cytochalasin B actually interferes with the body's ability to reach out and grab specifically the Lyme spirochete.

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Welcome to this episode of Lion Voice. Thank you all so much for being here with us. I think you'll find valuable information as we talk about mold, M-O-L-D, the 4-letter word, with Dr. Lauren Tessier, who runs lifeaftermold.com. There's a bunch of information in here that you're going to find helpful. She's also recovered from Lyme disease, and a lot of her patients have recovered from Lyme disease or dealing with Lyme disease, and so she is just a wealth of information. If you have not rated, reviewed, or subscribed to Lyme Voice, please do so at your convenience. If you are new to Lyme and you want information and you're trying to figure out what your symptoms are, please consider going to lymedisease.org. They are a wealth of information with up-to-date news and they do a great job of getting it out there. So lymedisease.org. And this episode is brought to you by tickwarriors.com and Medical Bill Gurus. TickWarriors.com offers safe, effective, all-natural, eco-friendly protection against ticks, mosquitoes, and other insects. They help you protect the people, pets, and property that you love. If you use the promo code LIMEVOICE, you will get 10% off your order. Also, Medical Bill Gurus— MedicalBillGurus.com is committed to helping you get money back from your insurance company. You pay no money out of pocket. To speak with them, and you only pay if they are able to get money back for you. So if you're paying out of pocket for medical bills, consider giving them a call. They're a great resource. Our next episode is going to be an update with Aaron and I, and we're going to just be talking about some of the changes and stuff that have been going on with our family and how Lyme is still a very active part of our lives, even though we would like to get over it and move on. We're still dealing with stuff, so we'll be updating you about the last 6 months or so on our next episode. But until then, enjoy learning all about mold.

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Well, I wanted you to just start by maybe like saying a couple, 4 or 5 minutes of your own story and how that impacts your practice, because I actually think that's I think that's one of the most powerful parts of physicians' stories who truly understand the illness. So that's what I was hoping to start with.

Yeah, absolutely. So how I kind of got started in all of this is so multifaceted. I think a lot of times people get this kind of core concept of this one story that really like drove people in a certain way. And if you sit down and like listen to my other interviews and things like that, you'll, you'll hear that, well, she said this here and She said this here, and the reality is that there's so many directions that are pointing towards kind of how I got here. There's the emotional component where I lost my favorite uncle as a teen to a severe autoimmunity disorder, Wegener's granulomatosis, while he was living in a moldy basement, a moldy basement apartment. And then there are my own struggles. Mold sensitive. I am a mold canary with some of my treatments and recovery. I can kind of walk into a space, say, oh, there's mold here. I probably have like a half an hour or so. And then the nice part is I'm recovering much, much quicker. And so I also have kind of a toolbox of what I do when I leave, but that wasn't always the case. And it's so interesting because, you know, you'll have your initial motives of why you got into a practice. You know, like I had a lot of people with fatigue and Lyme and all these things that were coming into my primary care practice and kind of mold was just this like passing glance. And so I started working with people there. And of course, as I'm working with people in my community with mold, It just creeps up under, underneath me, you know, in, in the current home that, that I was, uh, living in. And, um, what had happened was, uh, previous owners had built a roof over an existing roof that had a very specific type of, um, ventilation. Yeah, type of insulation with the roof gap. So usually when there's a roof cap up top that lets the air come up and breathe. There's also soffits along the side. When they put on the new roof, oh my gosh, so what was happening was the dampness in the house was climbing, hitting the inside roof deck, freezing through the winter mostly. And then in the spring we'd get these really big thaws and we would just get water kind of eking down the studs. Oh my gosh. And so I was living in one part of the house where my brain fog was terrible, and I thought it was like work stress of being like a new independent primary care provider and juggling all these things. And part of it was, but, but there was more. But there was more. And after we got tested and had someone come in and then, you know, go through the remediation, and I got myself physically out of that space, it was like back on all 8 cylinders and just like Oh my gosh, I can't believe— and it's so hard because it's such an insidious process. It's such an insidious process. So you might have a completely healthy house and then you might have a water intrusion event, and very slowly the mold will grow. It'll spit out its mycotoxins, it'll spit out its mold fragments, it'll trigger all these histamine response issues. And it doesn't happen overnight. You just don't wake up and you feel cruddy. It's like this loading dose that goes very slow, and then a year in, you're like, I'm not functioning. I'm not functioning. What is happening? You know? Wow.

Wow. So what year was that for you?

That was— let me do my counting backwards— that was 2015. 2015. Um, where it started to really be an issue. And that was actually as I was undergoing the studying to become shoemaker certified and certified. Yeah. So going through like hundreds of research papers and books this thick while sitting in a room and just reading the same sentence over and over and over and over and over again. So, you know, it's really ironic when I look back and I think about it. So Yeah, definitely had my own battles with it and then kind of moved out of that space, got recovered, started really taking more care, and, you know, ended up moving. And now we are in a home that we bought very cautiously. I believe it. But it did have a finished basement. Um, and this was just a month or two ago, and I noticed my ears would kind of do their little clicking thing, you know, when you kind of get a little stuffy. And then I realized that I was getting some brain fog in there, and we really wanted the home, and we were like, how are we going to figure this out? And we, we gutted the basement under negative pressure. I don't often suggest that people do their own remediation. In fact, I— no one out there listen to me right now when I say this, but I did my own remediation. And, you know, we had the negative air pressure machine, we had the full face masks from 3M that had the, um, uh, P100 filters on them. We had the Tyvek suits We had the gloves, and we— excuse me one second, I apologize, I'm a little congested. And so we, we remediated, and part of it was, I know I shouldn't be doing this, but it was also really important for me to go through the learning process. Because if I have patients who come to me and they say, I can't afford afford, like $10,000 or $20,000, or, you know, have it— it goes higher than that to remediate my home. What am I going to do? And those, those happen. Like, that's more common than not. And if I can tell people and walk through them and, you know, walk them through the process and kind of dialogue with them about that, and maybe also refer them to people for coaching of that process, um, that's an invaluable tool. So I know that your initial question was, what is this big?

But it's so big.

I've had so many experiences with mold personally. And what I will say is, this is even funnier, after we pulled up the carpeting and all of this stuff with this really well-intentioned for a finished basement, we found asbestos tile underneath it. Which we then remediated to the standards of like 6 mil plastic and like just the positive face masks and positive pressure ones. So we, we have done it all. And I also have a 7-month, almost 8-month child at home. So it was put him down, finish seeing patients, get home, eat, put him down, and then go work in the basement from like 8 o'clock at night until like 1 in the morning. So, you know, when people tell me like it's dragging tush, like I get it, I get it for sure. So, but the beautiful part is it is doable. You can recover. And I think people get nervous about the concept of being a canary in a coal mine for the rest of their life. So people who might not be familiar with that is, us in the moldy community— us moldies the way you limeys, vice versa, right? Um, you will get your little things where you're like, oh, this place has mold. It's like a sixth sense. I had a client for a while who would walk into a space and they could get within 3 feet of a moldy space and their ears would ring, right? And, you know, I would say yes, absolutely, you know. So, um, The part about kind of living with being mold sensitive is that it's, it's really nice to get these warning signs and to identify them and to know them and to work with them. And there is hope for moving on from it to the point where, like, sure, you take a hit and hopefully you're only down and having to go home, shower, and relax for 30 minutes, and then you're back up on all four cylinders once your body kind of processes everything out. So yeah, that, that's my mold story. That's like my gigantic mold story.

And you are probably in— you, because you're in New York and you have two practices.

I do. So I, I technically have, um, there's a few different ways my practice is set up. So I do, um, kind of educational health consults with people where, um, because people aren't medically established, I'm not writing prescriptions, I'm not ordering labs, um, and I'm not diagnosing. And so I operate more as kind of a wellness coach and kind of talk people through that process. That's one way in which my practice operates. And so that is also the way in which the practice, um, in New York operates. Naturopathic physicians unfortunately are not licensed in New York, so when I do go down to New York, I'm usually renting a space, for a day or two, and then I'll see clients like that. And then, so it's kind of a transient temporary thing, but it does allow me to kind of serve New York. Um, but then people who really want the kind of full-fledged medically established care, um, do come up to Vermont. And we have people from all over, people from all over Canada, Alaska, um, Arizona that will end up coming to see me. Um, so So it really works out to kind of have those two different options. And then I also do kind of professional coaching with other physicians if people find themselves in a position where they'd like kind of some instruction. Yeah. If their docs are open to it too, you know, it's always a blessing when you have a physician who's willing to, to learn and help you out.

Yeah. Take us back to the basics of mold. Because you in New York, you guys are dealing with a ton of this and probably Vermont. And it does— when, when you realize what you're battling or you realize through experience, okay, I'm dealing with Lyme or I'm dealing with Hashimoto's, or— but I'm also dealing with this other stuff. Take us back to the beginning of mold basics of how it You, you, you used the word insidious earlier and chronic illnesses in general are that way, right? Right. Because we, a lot of people are living with things that they just assume are normal or it's been their normal or they don't know how to overcome it. But mold is becoming this huge, huge issue. So how, what percentage do you think of your practice is really dealing with mold issues? Right.

Well, my practice is life, life after mold. And so a lot of it is very self-selected. So, you know, people will go and do a search and they'll say, you know, mold doctor, mold, whatever. And I'll, I'll pop up, or maybe they've heard of me somewhere else. So when it comes to what my population is, it's very kind of niche, self-selected, usually of people who know that they have a mold issue. And the reason why I did that is it can be really hard to tell people that you think mold is an issue. It's, it's a borderline— it can almost be insulting for you to not realize when you go into a physician's office and they sit you down and they go, okay, well, you're not Lyme treatment responsive, you're not XYZ responsive, do you have mold? And mold is a 4-letter word, literally and figuratively. And I think for some people it infers being like dirty or messy or, you know, I think there's— I think shame that comes with it too. And I mean, I get it, but It's really hard. Like, there were situations where, you know, I, in my primary care practice, had worked with clients, and in listening to their lungs, I had my— one of my little mold canary reactions just from being within feet of their clothing. And this is not how I diagnose people. I want to be really clear with people out there, please.

But it—

I, I asked, and this was kind of when I first got started, I said, do you, do you think that there could be kind of a mold issue in the home? And, um, it was no, absolutely not, couldn't be. Um, and then they were, they were like pretty upset and kind of hurt by, by the fact that I would have, um, asked that. And, you know, I try to be very respectful and gentle with my clients, and I don't feel like I asked it in a, um problematic manner. Um, so from that I kind of learned that, you know, there's, there's something guarded there about, um, prying into someone's home and really just asking people like, what, what is your— what you think is a safe space? Is this where your threat is coming from? And that's a really hard thing for people to hear.

Wow, I would have never thought that. Like, because I've fought so hard to find physicians who would investigate, who would think outside the box, right? And so if a physician was saying, hey, what is your home environment? I, you know, I would want to hear that. But I never thought about the fact that it really could be stigmatized in the sense of feeling dirty or shame or something, right?

And it's— so I'm a— I come from a big, um, psych family, a big psychology-trained family. And I'm a huge believer in Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And, you know, the, the core foundation of a happy, healthy human is sustenance and having a roof over their head at some point. If you don't have that, you're not going to thrive and meet your— and so what you're doing is you're going into someone's like base core of their pyramid of what they have and what they need, and you're saying, you know, hey, this little brick here, this little Jenga brick, I'm just going to go here and wiggle it out from under you. I mean, like, that's— it's hard. It's really hard to have those discussions, and it's hard to have those discussions with people who aren't potentially, uh, I don't want to say ready because ready really infers, um, that it's them. It's not them. Um, I think having the mold practice that infers like, hey, I'm here, let's talk about mold, it allows people to come to me when they're ready to come to me.

No, that totally makes sense.

So I end up seeing a lot of mold. In my practice to answer that question. Um, yeah, and I, you know, the mold can come in a lot of different flavors for people. So there's, um, uh, fungal allergies that a lot of, uh, Western medicine doctors, um, typical MDs will recognize. Uh, there are fungal infections which are rare, rarer, um, but also something that Western medicine recognizes. And then there's SIRS and mycotoxicosis.

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There's SIRS and mycotoxicosis. Yeah, explain that. Mm-hmm. So these are two other separate entities. Uh, SIRS— let's go on to mycotoxins first, then we'll go into SIRS. So, uh, mycotoxicosis. So there's molds and then there's mycotoxins. Molds are the little living cellular entity, um, and mycotoxins, M-Y-C-O, mycotoxins are a metabolite that the mold makes. It's a chemical and There are lots of different types of this specific chemical and what they are used for by the mold in theory, people still aren't sure, science still isn't sure, is we use it, they use it as a virulency agent. So meaning it's able to go in as a defense system, kind of spit out mycotoxins, clear out the niche around it so it can kind of take foot and build its own little home. So, um, you know, we consider them a virulence factor. Help the mold get a foothold. And so mycotoxins are really, really small. They like fat and they like water, so they pass into and out of cells really easily. And they also have a really great way of evading the immune system and detoxification systems. So the problem is it gets into the cells and then it just kind of dodges everything and hangs out there. So you can have people who, what we say, bioaccumulate accumulate because they're not processing and getting it out well enough. And those people can be sick for years potentially after their exposure. Um, the bulk of mycotoxin research is actually in the agricultural field, um, because each year, uh, the US loses about $932 million on mold and mycotoxin damage to our food systems. So, uh, moldy grains, sick cattle, things like that. So when you go to do research or do some reading, you won't find very many studies of mycotoxins in humans because it's not ethical to give a human a mycotoxin and then study it and do it intentionally. However, it is unfortunately ethical to do that to an animal and do those studies. So there's a lot of information out there in animal studies that really outlines the dangers of lots of different mycotoxins. And so when people get sick from mycotoxins, we call it mycotoxicosis. And the body should be able to handle toxins, you know, like we— the, the wonderful late Dr. Ray, he always had his kind of toxin cup where, you know, lower on we have that accidental gasoline spill, we had that time the mercury thermometer broke in our mouth as a kid, we have grandma running the kerosene lamp on her porch in the '70s. You know, we have, we have all these things and then our toxin cup gets so full that at some point that last few drops just spills over. And that's when we get really sick with symptoms and mycotoxins. You might have a pretty low cup and you might be able to go in and out of buildings and not have to worry about overflowing and overfilling your cup. Or you might be someone who's fighting chronic infections, has very problematic detox pathways, and just a sprinkling of mycotoxins it's gonna be enough to push you over the edge. So with mycotoxicosis, we see a lot of different pictures of it. For what I see with my clients, it's a lot of neurologic stuff that's going on for them, you know, like brain fog, fatigue, headache, dizziness, light sensitivity, what we call photophobia. And then we see some like rashes and nausea and that kind of picture. So You know, anything else that you would think of, like a toxin, like heavy metals are toxic, certain organic solvents are toxic, they're going to have that same almost neurological kind of toxic picture. The immune system is still impacted, but it's what really, really blows up for people I see is neurological and hormonal. So Neurological and hormonal. Neurological and hormonal. I actually have an article coming out, and it's going to be a little while before it's published, but about endocrine disruption with mycotoxins and just how, you know, they run an absolute muck on hormones. There's certain ones that really potentiate the effect of estrogen. They act as estrogens. They sit on estrogen receptors. To the point that we use them for hormonal treatments for like animals in like Brazil, you know. And then there's other ones that mess with thyroid functioning and with adrenal functioning. So they, they run amok on hormones and they run amok on the nervous system. But a lot of people don't pay attention to their symptoms until the nervous system is involved. You know, are you gonna notice if your estrogen is kind of off one day to the next? No, but you're sure as heck gonna notice when you get a migraine and lights start flashing in front of your eyes, you know?

Yeah.

So how do you tell the difference with people? Because so many of those symptoms overlap with Lyme and overlap with other issues. And one of the questions I get the most about Lyme— or about mold— is, what do you treat first? People send me that question all the time, and I say the same thing. I have no idea. Go ask someone who knows what they're doing. But because all those symptoms interlock, and because Lyme has so many neurological aspects to it, how do you tell the difference of what you're dealing with? And then how do you decide what order to treat things in?

So I want to double back to the last question because I think it might this question. Okay, so the, the other illness that can come from, from mold, but technically any biotoxin, any biological toxin, any toxin from a living source, is called chronic inflammatory response syndrome, also known as CIRS. It's something that Richie Shoemaker discovered, put a name to in the '90s. Um, the easiest way to describe it is, um, We have a— we're building a bonfire and we pour some gasoline on the wood and then we set it on fire. 20 minutes later, the gasoline may be gone, but the fire is still going. That in and of itself, if the gasoline, let's say, is a toxin and the fire is the inflammation, that is the perfect example of SIRS. So you can have a starting agent that sets the whole inflammation cascade in, in, um, in motion. And then you could potentially not have that exposure anymore, but that inflammation is still going and going and going and going. Hence chronic inflammatory response syndrome. So with chronic inflammatory response syndrome, the picture of symptoms are a lot broader than mycotoxicosis. So as I said, with mycotoxicosis, there's mostly kind of endocrine and neurological and a dash of immune. But what I find with SIRS is that it's just this like huge umbrella that just opens up for people. It's GI distress, it's chronic pain, it's respiratory issues, it's skin issues. It's, it's people who are coming in with like 25 or 30 symptoms that they've only ever been put put on, you know, um, an antidepressant for in the past, or maybe they've gone through tons and tons and tons of antibiotics for Lyme and still haven't seen a change. So I think that, um, and this is kind of the, the sea change that's been happening recently, um, like we all know what acute Lyme looks like, you know, we, we may or may not have our bullseye rash and all that kind of stuff, and we have our flu-like symptoms, our joint pain, and that kind of picture. But the chronic Lyme is a lot like kind of chronic mold exposure, is a lot like kind of XYZ, because it really should just be called chronic complex illness in that, you know, it's not the bug really anymore that's causing the issue. It's the body and an inflammatory response that just won't quit. Because technically, I know that, you know, Lyme goes in and out of cyst phases, and they're seeing stuff where, you know, it stays active for a long time after antibiotic treatment, or it stays present. And I understand that, you know, our chronic infections kick around, but the reality is at some point in time they should really come to— I don't want to— they should really come to be understood by the body as almost part of our microbiome, like we shouldn't be reacting and inflaming as much to them. So there's kind of this, you know, moving forward in the Lyme community where it's not only how do we prevent this bug from kind of flaring us again and making us sick again or potentially having an active infection go again, but how do we calm the inflammation that happens in the body? So when you say, hey, Lyme looks a lot like mold, what the heck? It's like, yes. Yes, yes, yes, it does. Because here, I'm gonna do this again, this cup thing here.

That's a great analogy. I love that. I hadn't actually seen that.

This is Dr. Ray, William Ray. William Ray passed away about 2 years ago or last year, I believe. He was one of the founders of AAEM, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. And if there's any physicians working or listening here, please go support AAEM. They are a wealth of information. That's where LDA started. That's where LDI started. We owe them so much. So anyway, that's my little plug for AAM. So you get back to this point of chronic complex illness. Lyme falls in it. Epstein-Barr flares fall in it. You know, Bartonella, Babesia, anything that's gonna stay and keep that body in that continual phase of inflammation, that's when people come in with like 30-something. And we see that— we just so happen to see that with mold too. So I hope I'm kind of being clear for people where kind of SIRS is like the, like, oh my gosh, it's, it's off the rails. Mycotoxicosis is more of the toxic picture. And then we have fungal infection, and then we have fungal allergies. So there's a whole entire huge array of what, what mold illness can look like and present in office.

Yes. So what are the tests that you guys recommend? And I know that you do a lot of coaching and stuff over the phone, correct? Yeah. So if people have specific questions, they can get in contact with you. But in general, if you suspect mold in your body and in your house, what are those initial steps for problem solving that?

Yes. And I, so I love telling people this now because it saves so much time. This is not a secret proprietary anything that you have to pay me lots of money to find out. In fact, I rather have people jump through these hoops before they see me so that way we can hit the ground running. Oh nice, okay. Yeah, I, I do this initial thing called an on-ramp session where people can kind of call and have a short 30-minute at a super reduced fee to kind of get this information out there. So the fact that I can do this information now to a wider array of people is a really good thing. So, um, how I typically have people start, um, is we do the low-hanging fruit first, right? We don't hop to the worst-case scenario because worst-case scenario, I hate to tell everyone, but the CIRS tests, the chronic inflammatory response tests, are so expensive they're not covered by insurance. So I don't— and I differ from other people on this— but I don't I don't see the benefit of putting people into a situation where they're gonna have more debt for a potential medical bill, and it's not gonna change the treatment outcome. Guess what? Before we can even start SIRS, you need to get out of exposure anyway. So it's kind of the top-shelf thing that I hold onto for later on because It's usually something that, um, shakes out. I, I get a lot of really great results with people with avoidance and, you know, cleaning up and doing some of the basic stuff. And so the basic stuff really includes mycotoxicosis. So usually what I do for people is we say, okay, let's get a plan in order for the house, but then I do, um, some urine mycotoxin testing. I usually provoke people But because many people have multiple chemical sensitivity who are seeing me, people who can't even drink water without having hives, like, you guys know it, you get it, it happens. Um, those are the people who I'm seeing. And so before we can even provoke you to catch a urine mycotoxin test, we're working backwards and upstream. We're checking in on the gut. What's happening with the food? Have we done any biotherapeutic drainage? Um, we're doing a lot more of the gentle preparatory stuff before we pour, before we step on the gas and get the engine revving for detox. So, you know, I, when I say, oh, you know, in the first step we take care of mycotoxicosis. Yeah. But sometimes for people there's like a 2-week ramp, a 2-month ramp up to try to get to that point. So, um, the urine mycotoxin test can be really helpful. If someone isn't good at detoxing, that test could very well be falsely low because they're holding on to it rather than letting it go in their pee. So that's why we provoke people. But people have to be healthy enough to provoke. So it's kind of this little dance after we get people out of exposure and we check in on the mycotoxins and we see that they're dropping and maybe some of their symptoms are clearing up, but they're not quite there yet and they need that additional workup, then we go into SIRS. Then we say, okay, what type of inflammatory modulation, what type of kind of things can we bring on to kind of tamp down that immune system response? And there's a lot of, um, nutraceuticals, so a lot of like herbs and supplements that can really go a long way to help smooth out that inflammatory reaction. So that's kind of the, the way I move people through, but Some people will come to me and they'll say, hey, I already have this urine mycotoxin test. I'll say, okay, great, does it say that there's something there? Great, wonderful. Well, let's, let's work with it, you know. Um, so to kind of double back, how do we check in the home if there's a mold issue? And so the first thing I'll say, um, is that there are many good IEPs, indoor environmental professionals, around the United States. Some of us are lucky in that we have some really good ones in our region who are essentially mold illness literate. I'm the vice president of ISEA, the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness. So ISEA, I like the ocean, ISEA. SEAI. And there we have IEPs who are members who are ready and willing to help sick patients navigate the ecology of their home to make it safe for them. So yeah, I mean, we, we're always looking to see it grow and hope for more IEPs who can come on. But, you know, we're very happy with the ones that we have there so far. And so people can always go to ISEAI.org and check for kind of like find support or, um, and look for environmental professionals and see if there's one around them. I have a handful that I really like and I appreciate, and people can always reach out to, to check in on who those people are. Um, so testing the home— testing the home is hard. Yeah. And this, this is why I think it's really important to have an IEP, because I have seen firsthand in my personal experience I have had someone come into my home and I've said, hey, we have this issue. It's been tested for before. We've had a sample taken from the wall before. There's mold in the wall. I need you to run another in-wall sample. And the person takes the air vacuum pump, punctures a hole in the wall, and just holds up the pump to the hole. If anyone knows anything about physics, That is not going to create a locking suction to pull anything out. And I was just another person telling him how to do his job, like, okay, lady, you know. And it was one of those moments where it's just like, this is unbelievable. And I know, I know firsthand, everybody out there, what it is like. So, um, finding an IEP that will sit down and hear you out and listen is really important. So I think that But calling and seeing, having a dialogue, see if they'll let you pay a certain amount to have a half an hour conversation with them to screen them about what they would do here and what would this situation be. Anyone who's really willing to sit down and talk to you and help approach your problem from a very teamwork space is probably going to be someone who's going to be open to doing the work thoroughly for you.

Um, I, I know that's a frustration of people when they do do their due diligence, or they think they're doing their due diligence by hiring certain people, and then they come in and the remediation isn't done correctly.

Or— so yes, yes. And that's why we always keep our testers different from our remediators, because of conflict of interest. So the person who's testing and putting together remediation plans should not be the person who's carrying it out. Stop because this person, the tester, could potentially, if they're unethical, put together an $80,000 remediation plan when in actuality it only needs to be $10,000. And, you know, so that's why we always keep those parties completely separate. So everyone out there, if you are having someone testing and doing the remediation, that should send the hairs up on your spine. So you said that Yeah, and the other thing that you should do, if you have someone come into your home, ask when you call the people to do the inspection, say, do you guys do visual inspection? And if they go, yeah, and you say, well, if you don't see anything, do you do any testing? And they go, no, don't use them, right? I— yeah, well, I mean, it seems obvious, but, you know, I've had so many times where people have come in And the person goes, "I don't see anything. I kind of smell something, but that's the smell of a basement." And it's just like, "No, stop." So, we definitely want you to try to find an IEP who gets it. So, there are places where you can look. There's also the ACAC. I'm not affiliated with them, but they are a kind of certification kind of group for indoor environmental professionals and remediators. So those are the two options, and you have hit the gold mine if someone is on ICI.org and on the ACAC. And chances are, if they are on ICI.org, they're also going to be listed on the ACAC. Stacy. So, you know, the initial testing, you really want someone who's gonna come in with— what, this is another question people can ask— they're gonna come in with tools. You know, you want them to come in with a particle counter, you want them to come in with some type of thermography imaging, you want them to obviously come in with like the air vacuum test, the slide impact vacuum, and, you know, a hygrometer which measures the relative humidity. Because if people can kind of get that information, then they can really give you a good sense of the home. So for instance, if you have a, a water pipe, kind of, it's a wastewater pipe and it's running through part of the home and it's running through drywall. If someone can take that thermal imaging camera, see that maybe, um, the pipe is cold and the rest of the area is warm, then they know that there's a temperature difference. If there's a temperature difference, there's a potential for condensation. If there's a potential for condensation, there's potential for mold. So why not take an in-wall sample there? So you really need to find someone who's going to think on their feet and use their brain. And so that's really important. And I think it's also important for people to ask if they do in-wall testing. Do you do in-wall testing, in-wall air testing? And if people don't know what you're talking about, I would move on. So air testing, I'm sure there's people out there yelling at their video cast, but air testing is horrible. And it is. Air testing is hard. And the reason why air testing is hard is twofold. It depends on two things. It depends on collecting spores, which then need to grow. And then after they grow, we look. So there's two points of error that we can get hiccuped with. So if you're just collecting fragments and no spores, from the air, you're not going to grow anything and your air test is going to be like normal. If you grow something and you actually collect a spore and it grows, they use light microscopy, meaning they use a light microscope and they look at it through the microscope and they go, okay, this looks a lot like this species. This looks a lot like this species. The problem is is Aspergillus family of molds, which there are a lot of, and Penicillium family of molds. They look like alike, so much alike under light microscopy that when you get those lab results, it says asp/pen. So you don't know if what you have is the super dangerous Aspergillus fumigatus or if it's some like willy-nilly Penicillium that doesn't really cause a lot of problems for people. And so the downfall of air testing is you need to catch a spore and you can't visually identify dangerous species. So that's, that's an issue for sure. So the workaround for that then is people say, well, let's collect an ERMI. So ERMI, maybe some people have heard about this. It's the Environmental Relative Moldiness Index, which I think is such a hilarious term, moldiness in a title. So moldiness, it was developed by the EPA, and I think that's why a lot of people glommed onto it. And then at one point, once the EPA realized that people were using it to kind of determine the health and safety of their home, they went, no, no, no, no, no, this is for research purposes only. And why that might be, I don't know. But, you know, we do have a lot of water-damaged buildings in this country that maybe can't afford to be remediated. And God forbid people open up a can of worms and point fingers based on IRMI. The other issue is that IRMIs can be problematic on how they're collected. They can be over-collected. So the idea is you're supposed to collect from a square footage. You get like a, either a little kind of vacuum canister or you get a dry Swiffer cloth and you kind of do like a, I don't know, I think it's like a 2 by 3 or maybe a 2 by 10, I can't remember, of a dust sample and you send it in. And so if maybe you collected too much dust Oh, okay, then you're gonna have a higher count. Or maybe you had a family member bring a box of stuff from Grandma's house that's moldy into your home, and you don't actually have mold growth in your walls, but there's some spores and stuff coming off of Grandma's box. So what IEPs will typically say is they'll go, it's an archaeological dig, meaning it was in the air, we don't know where it came from, look, we find it. And I agree with that, but the reality is in most cases it had to come from somewhere. And the other issue is that if it is now on the ground or on surfaces of things, it was once in the air, which means that you were exposed. So there's still some benefits of running an ERMI. And so there's this whole like, ERMI must be less than 2, and her HurtzMe, another way of crunching the IRMAA numbers. Never buy a secondary HurtzMe, just find a HurtzMe calculator online and run your IRMAA off of it. Don't spend the extra money. Sorry to all the IRMAA companies out there. But you know, it's— how I use it is rather than saying your IRMAA must be less than 2 if you have any hope of recovering, it's like No, no. What if someone cleans obsessively and their ERMI is less than 2, but they have a huge patch of mold growth in the wall?

Right.

You know, so what I find important with that data is not the number, but it's the species. Because the beautiful part about ERMI is it speciates, meaning it takes the DNA of even the fragments. You don't need the spores. They can take a little busted up fragment of the mold and then mix it with enzymes and then and then they kind of extrapolate the DNA. They make the DNA bigger than what it is, and then they can go, oh, look, this is correlated with Chaetomium, or this is correlated with Stachy. And so they're able to see just from small mold fragments and specifically identify species, which is what air testing cannot do. So, you know, it's— if you have visible mold growth in your home, you have visible mold growth. Like, I don't I don't tell people to typically test if they see it. You know, if that— it can be helpful to have someone come in to go, yeah, that's mold. Let's make a remediation plan. Sure. But, you know, it's, it's that thing of sometimes I run into people where they go, you know, I have mold in my home, but could mold really be the issue? And it's like, you know, you're With as much respect as my heart can muster, you're, you're, you're in a mold practice. And, um, you know, I, I won't say that everything looks like, um, a nail when I have a hammer, but I'm human and I am absolutely willing to admit to that. But I also know the research, and I know that mold can cause a lot of issues. Mold can absolutely cause a lot of issues, including making people who have chronic infections a heck of a lot worse.

Wow. So what do you see? I know everyone is different and I'm asking you to generalize, but if someone comes in and remediates, gets out of the mold or remediates it, what is the— how long does it take their nervous system to heal? Say they're doing the diet, they're taking the herbs that they need to be taking, they're following a protocol. Is Is it once the mold gets dealt with, then you can deal with other stuff? Or is it like you kind of have to tackle everything and just let the body heal?

So I think of it like a river, right? And you're going upstream in a river. If we're downstream and I start maybe, let's say, like like killing stuff in your body, but none of your detox pathways are opened up, your gut is totally destroyed, you're gonna get so much worse. So for me, it's kind of, okay, let's, let's work backwards little by little by little. The beautiful part is that most people in the Lyme community who come to me have gone through rounds and rounds of antibiotics. They've been on gluten-free diets, if it— like, it's not food intolerances, it's that they've gone through everything. And like, those are the people where I'm like, yes, let's do this, you know. And so, um, it's this concept of we're, we're picking away things little by little and moving back. So that way, when we do detox people, the gut is okay with it, the liver is okay with it, the kidneys are okay with it, because If you like start pushing on detox with people, which you need to have running anyway before you potentially start killing or, you know, using antifungals or using, you know, any type of like antibiotics or stuff like that, you need to have your detox pathways. But if your detox pathways aren't open, um, then that's problematic. But if your gut is ragged and can't stand the toxic bile coming out, that's going to be problematic. So, um, you know, there's is this backwards progression of kind of talking to the body about what it looks like to detox, maybe encouraging the body to slightly detox, then maybe pushing on the detox pathways a little bit more, then potentially, then we can dialogue about bringing on some of the anti-X, Y, Zs. So, you know, when people are, there's kind of a few different levels of, people who respond. So about 25, sometimes no higher than 25, there's about 25% of my practice who, once they get out of exposure, like without treatment, once they, they're fine. And I'm like, get out of here, go away, you know. And I mean that with as much love as possible, you know. Like, um, and then probably about So that 25 to maybe 70% are kind of the mycotoxicosis, kind of complex mycotoxicosis, maybe some co-infective pieces. And then that last 70 to 100, maybe that 30% total, are more like the SIRS, really kind of Everything's just really hard to pull apart and kind of suss out. And so usually with the easy kind of like get you out, get you detoxed a little bit, mycotoxicosis people, the neurocognitive complaints really start to improve. For some people, it's like a day after they're out of mold. For other people, it can be upwards of 3 to 4 weeks, maybe, maybe 2 2 months. And by then, if they're out of exposure and we're working with the mycotoxins, then it might be time to move on and see what's happening with kind of SIRS and start addressing.

So what are your— some of your favorite forms of detox? As we, as we approach the end of our hour with you, what are some of your favorite forms of detox for people?

My favorite forms of detox, um, I have my personal favorite forms of detox, and then I have the, uh, saving grace of whatever people can tolerate. Yeah, I hear, you know, I, I have folks who they, they can't take cholesteramine. Of course, there's so many people who can't take cholesteramine. They can't take Welcol. They can't take charcoal, um, and they can't do sauna. And so we'll have them, you know, take a warm shower and put like charcoal on their skin to try to get some type of like binding through, through sweat or something. I really— I like binders. I think binders are the way to go for detoxing people, but you gotta poop. If you're not pooping, you're just retoxifying yourself. So binders are really big. I really like Welcol. I really, really like Welcol because cholesteramine is really rough for people for detoxification. So cholesteramine is another one of those binders. It It's prescription, you can get it without additives, but it has to be compounded. It's like $130 a month at a good price point. It's really drying and kind of rough on the way down. Meanwhile, WellCall a year or so ago, maybe two, went generic. So, now it's easily afforded by people's insurance. It's like a cholesteramine light like it does a really beautiful job. And the fact that we can get it potentially covered by something someone already has is a wonderful thing. You know, charcoal as a detoxification agent, it's always nice as a fallback. Like, I don't have anything against charcoal. I think at times it's a better option. But, you know, someone might tolerate charcoal and not tolerate Welcol and vice versa. I've seen charcoal, as benign as it seems, cause liver pain in people, you know. I've seen Welcol, as benign as it seems, cause kind of like fevery buzziness for people. And so it's all about also how quickly things are being kind of pulled on and what pathways are being pulled on. So, you know, I would like to say that I love glutathione for people, but not everyone can handle glutathione A lot of people get a lot sicker from being on glutathione even for a small period of time. So to kind of step back, if there's one thing that I love for everyone, I could have everyone on, would be NAC, N-acetyl cysteine. N-acetyl cysteine is a biofilm disruptor, number one. And thanks to Paul Anderson, one of my mentors, that was a fun little knowledge nugget from him. NAC also, based on the research that I've looked into, modulates something called TGF-beta 1. TGF-beta 1 is highly involved in SIRS. It's a marker that lets us know what's happening with your T-reg cells. And so T regulatory cells are kind of the referees of the immune system. And underneath them are your T helper cells. And your T helper cells respond to your T regs. So your T regs keep those helper cells in line. And if one T helper cell goes one way or one goes another way, you can swing really allergic, you can kind of swing really autoimmune. So it's really important to keep those T-reg cells healthy by modulating TGF-beta 1. And NAC is amazing for that. The other thing NAC is great for is for general lung health. It reverses kind of some of the, the fibrotic constriction that we can see from chronic mold exposure and mold damage to the lungs. It even helps people kind kind of gets stuff up and out by secreting a really nice thin lubricating mucus. So even for people's common colds, you know how stuff can go to your chest and stay there? NAC is amazing for it. So I am so in love with NAC that I even had a physician complain about the fact that I said I, quote, "love it" while giving a professional lecture to other doctors. So I'm willing to to stand trial for NAC in the face of my peers. NAC is great and it tends to be really well tolerated with people. And then one other thing that I want to mention about it is it's, it's really well tolerated where glutathione isn't. So in animal studies, we've seen that if you give an animal NAC, it can help raise glutathione levels by 150%. And so it's— I call it the backdoor to glutathione. It's really allowing people to make glutathione at a pace that their body can handle rather than throwing it into their system and expecting them to be able to tolerate it.

Do you have a brand you recommend or you love?

Um, you know, I'm totally not into product endorsement. I like— I stay away from affiliate marketing for that. Point to. Like, it's just not my thing. Um, with that being said, I do like really high doses of NAC for people, and obviously people need to talk to their doctor first. Um, but there is a specific company that does do a 900 milligram capsule, um, and that specific company is one that I like using, but I won't say this.

Okay, we have to figure it out for ourselves.

Yeah, a quick Google search. I'm sure people would be able to figure that out.

Okay, awesome.

Thank you so much for your time and being here, and thank you so much for your availability for people who are not in your area. I think what you're doing, Life After Mold, is so— I love what you're teaching. I mean, I've looked through tons of your slides and stuff in preparation for the interview, and I know we're just barely scratching the surface. Um, but I know just so many— the people who I have known in my life who have struggled to recover from chronic illnesses, most of them have had issues with mold. And so I know it's just a huge factor.

Before we cut off, there's one thing that I really think I want to drive home to your client, if that's okay. Um, so mold— the reason why mold and Lyme go hand in hand is not just because they overlap But mold and mycotoxins suppress and alter the immune system. Like, this is probably like the thing that people are putting— put a note on the show notes, stay tuned till the end. We've seen that mycotoxin called cytochalasin B actually interferes with the body's ability to reach out and grab specifically the Lyme spirochete, bring it into our white cells for destruction. We've seen that aflatoxin B1 can perpetuate Epstein-Barr viral loads. You know, we've seen that, um, T2 toxin causes a shrinkage of our thymus, which is where our immune system cells go to be educated. It depletes our lymphocytes, it depletes our white blood cells. Dawn, another one, uh, causes toxicity in the genome of our white blood cells. Um, uh, zealanone interferes with our T cells and their ability to get the signal and to move to where they're needed in the body. So sure, like, the symptoms overlap, but the really key is that mold makes you sick so that all of your other chronic infections just bubble to the surface. Your, your Lyme or Babesia, your Bartonella, your HHV-6, your Parvo B19, like it's all there, it's all hanging out in you. And that's why a lot of people who are mold exposed, who maybe had Lyme in the '90s but thought they were doing well, get sick again. It's because your immune system is just just all the way suppressed, and then you're probably adding in personal stress on top of it all. And of course those things are gonna pop up. So I wanted to get that in before we—

Yeah. And you know, I forgot to ask you too, how does the MTHFR gene play into mold?

Mm-hmm. Um, you know, it's MTHFR. I think a lot of people have understandably been very excited about it. Um, but you know, it's, it's not the only SNP. It's not the only SNP, and you know that it's not the only one. Our body is full of them. But there's so many different SNPs along those two cycles, our methylation cycle, that the MTHFR is the one that really got a lot of the attention in the beginning. But as we kind of chug through our detox and we really think about people detoxing from mold, ones that are more important to me is what's happening with GST. That's a SNP that's specific to glutathione. Another one is UDP or UDG, I'm sorry, that's specific to glucuronidation, which is another detox pathway. So, you know, and if I had my druthers, instead of spending people's money on HLA genetics where people have the dreaded mold gene, I'd rather be spending money on seeing what's happening with their SNPs, their detox SNPs. And you know, you can always pull— everything is 6 degrees of separation in the body, just like that, that old game from the '90s. You know, I can always make a connection between XYZ and mold, you know. Um, and so with MTHFR, you have issues with methylation. You had— methylation is the core component for, um, healing your DNA for you're doing a lot of cellular repair and you need proper single-carbon metabolism, aka methylation. You need proper methylation to really repair yourself to the point that we see in the literature, it's been theorized or presupposed that the way a B12 deficiency looks with that single-carbon metabolism methylation issue looks a lot like how mycotoxicosis looks neurologically. So there's a little bit of a theory that, you know, mycotoxins might have a kind of similar detrimental pathway as issues with single-carbon metabolism. There's one paper out there that kind of theorizes about it. But we know that to have a healthy methylation cycle is also to have a really well-balanced serotonin and really well-balanced dopamine. And there's research that shows that mycotoxins also deplete dopamine in the brain. And so, sure, MTHFR for sure. And there's one more thing, I'm so sorry. No, it's okay. There's also research that shows that everyone says, MTHFR, MTHFR. You need L5-MTHF. That's, that's— you need activated folate. Specific mycotoxins interfere with the absorption of L5-MTHF. And this goes back to a research paper back in like 1983 or '86. You can tell I do way too much time in PubMed. And there's also research showing that it interferes with how our body takes the information from the DNA and makes receptors for MTHFR— sorry, for L5-MTHF. So you see people who have mycotoxin exposure who have folate, folate depletion issues too. So it's all, it's all there in one big pile. So yes, yes, and Yes. And to the MTHFR.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's not, it's not just about building up the immune system, it's about detox pathways, it's about getting out of the exposure. Yeah.

And then rebuilding.

Absolutely.

Yeah, I mean, you hit the nail on the head. You just summarized it all.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for being here and And tell people, tell our lovely listeners how they can get a hold of you.

Yeah, thank you. So people can reach out through lifeaftermold.com. I also personally put energy into my social media platforms, my Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and all of those are also Life After Mold as the handle. And if people go to my website, they can download download for free the Mold Prevention 101 e-booklet. It's about 19 pages of kind of how to walk through your home and how to optimize your home to try to keep it mold-free. And, you know, check on sweating pipes, check on French drains, you know, what's going on with your dehumidifier. So people are absolutely welcome to download that for free.

It's awesome. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

I appreciate it. Hey, Lime Voice listeners, we love bringing these episodes to you every week. If you would like to help us and support us, there's several ways you can do that. Those are all listed at limvoice.com, and if you look there, there's ways you can donate even as little as $1. Any would be appreciated it to help continue to get the message out, to help fight, heal, and live. Thanks again. Hey, Lyme Voice warriors, just wanted to tell you about our friends over at Oval Dogs Coffee. They're a family-owned roastery right in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Oval Dogs Coffee uses some of the best coffee from around the world, grown by dedicated farmers. Oval Dogs Coffee cares about people and the amazing things that people can do when they're affirmed, nourished, and inspired. Learn more at ovaldogs.com. Go to ovaldogs.com to order your coffee and have it delivered right to your door. Oval Dogs Coffee, loyal to the cup.

Hi guys, I want to let you know about a book I wrote called Little Bite, Big Trouble, and I'm going to read a review that recently came in. This is from Carolyn, and she says, thank you so much for writing your book. It has become the means by which I have explained Lyme to my 4-year-olds. They asked for it to be read as a bedtime time story over and over again and love that the mama birdie does yoga and juicing like their mommy. I can't thank you enough for writing this book. It has helped my family so much. You can find it today at amazon.com. Little Bite, Big Trouble. Disease is contrary to life. Therefore, wherever disease exists, life must also fight to exist.

Good job fighting, line fighters. Keep it up. We'll see you next time. Lion Voice contains general information about medical conditions and treatments. The information is not advice and should not be treated as such.

Okay, Lincoln?

Okay. The medical information on Lion Voice is provided as is without any representations, warranties, expressed or implied. Okay? Okay. Lion Voice makes no representations or warranties in relation to the medical information on this podcast. You must not rely on the information on this podcast as an alternative to medical advice from your doctor or other professional healthcare provider. If you have any specific questions about your medical matter, you should consult your doctor or other professional healthcare provider. And for you, you consult your parents, okay?

Okay.

If you think you may be suffering from any medical condition, you should seek immediate medical attention. You should never delay seeking medical advice, disregard medical advice, or discontinue medical treatment because of information on this podcast. Got it, Lincoln? Got it.