The Hidden Epidemic Behind Chronic Illness

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone, Dr. Stillman here back today. I'm very excited to be interviewing Dr. Neil Nathan, who may not need introduction for many of you who are very avid health and wellness enthusiasts, geeks, what— however you would choose to describe yourself. He, I think it's safe to say, is the world expert on mold toxicity, and that is why I wanted to talk to him today, because I find mold toxicity as fascinating as it is terrible. And Dr. Nathan, thank you for joining me. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

So I like to start by asking everybody who they are and where they're from.

Okay. I remember the old Bill Cosby line on some of his things, which is, I started as a child, but in terms of this journey, which your listeners might want to hear about, I always wanted to be a healer. And when I went to medical school, I was very disappointed when I realized they weren't gonna teach me to be a healer. They were gonna teach me to be a medical technician. Now that's very useful and would give me a license, but that wasn't really what I wanted. I wanted to really understand my patients' issues at a deeper level, and I wanted to help them at whatever level they wanted help from me. And so after I, I left medical school, that's when my real education began. And I studied almost every form of healing that I could possibly come across. And I spent almost everything in those days on workshops and spending time with particular people who I thought had some particular healing gifts. And so, I mean, over the years, very slowly, I put together what I will call a toolbox, which included such things as osteopathic cranial work, laying on of hands, therapeutic touch, acupuncture, homeopathy, a wide variety of injection techniques, a deep delve into biochemistry, emotional release techniques, spiritual healings of all kinds. So some of the weekends I spent were a waste of my time and money, and some of my weekends were fabulous.

I would, I would say though, do you know the quote? I think it was, it was Edison who said, I didn't fail to make a light bulb 10,000 times. I discovered 10,000 ways not to make a light bulb.

Yes.

So you can't call it a waste.

So early on, I was interested in helping those people that my colleagues couldn't, if you will, they'd fallen through the medical cracks. And with each modality that I learned, I was able to help more people. And so it kind of evolved that way. So although I started as a family physician, delivered babies, worked in the emergency room, did a little surgery.

Where did you, where were you born and grow up?

Oh, I was born in New York City and born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens. I went to Queens College before I went to medical school at the University of Chicago.

Interesting. I'm from Manhattan.

Yeah. I always say there's two kinds of New Yorkers, the ones that stay and the ones that leave.

I am no longer there.

Okay. I'm just my own personal form of humor.

I get it. You're totally right. So now you live in the Pacific Northwest, Oregon, right?

I live in a little town on the southern coast of Oregon called Bandon.

I'm curious, how did you start with the perspective that you wanted to be a healer? What's your earliest memory of medicine and healing?

I just had a deep love for people and I wanted to be of service, even from the time I was a little one. I think it was, I think I, I came out of the uterus that way. Yeah.

What's your earliest memory of that? I love that I'm making you think.

My mother, I'm, I'm not sure I have memories of it, but my mother said that when she would push the baby carriage around, I would stand up in the baby carriage and wave to everyone who passed.

Love it. That's so cool. That's so funny.

I don't know if I remember that or just heard my mother saying that a lot.

And you don't have a memory of this was, this happened and then I wanted to go to medical school because being a healer, right, you could be anything.

You know, I think other people have more specifics than I do, but I never had that aha moment where I had a medical experience and said, oh, that's what I want to do. I just always knew I wanted to go to medical school. It was just a knowing thing that that's what I'm here for. Can't tell you how I knew that. I mean, so, you know, when we went to college, so many of my, my colleagues and friends were at sea because they didn't know what they wanted to do or what they wanted to pursue. And I always knew what I wanted to do. It was always like, okay, for me it was easy, easy choices.

Got it. Okay. And I'm really curious to hear more about your experience as you came out of medical school. It reminds me of very much my experience coming out of residency. I spent everything on you know, going to conferences and learning new things, new techniques. At a certain point though, it's really hard to even remember everything you've learned. You know, just today going over the stuff that comes up with my staff, there's just so much for us to know, so much for us to do, so many little things that we can do. It's very overwhelming. And I'm really curious, do you still feel like you have that generalist bent? And if so, or— okay. So then I'm curious, how have you made it manageable?

I can answer your question.

Okay, great.

At this point, what I know is so many systems, so many ways of approaching health. And for many years, what I do is if I'm sitting in a room with a patient or I'm doing a consult with a patient, what I basically do is start a conversation with them. At that time, I basically send a prayer to God, which is This human being is so complicated that help me understand what they need from me today. I don't have to do everything that they need in one visit, cuz I can't, that's impossible. Because as you probably know, I get the most complicated people around and I have for decades. So it's basically, okay, guide me as to where this being needs me to be today for them. And then it's the same prayer every time I see them. And so at a particular visit, I might talk about biochemistry. I might talk about spiritual things, emotional things, a particular problem that they're having. I, I don't enter any patient visit with a preconceived idea of what I wanna do because it's not about me. It's about what do they need from me today? So in that regard, maybe I'm a little different than some other people, but that serves me. So literally, if you will, it's a bit of a prayer, but it's also, I'll go quiet while I'm listening to the person tell their story. What I'm basically trying to do is read the room, read the energies, take in what, again, what does this being need from me today? Where do we need to go? And I may not stick with what I start with. That may shift during the visit. So at some point we may start someplace. And then at some point during the visit, there's a need to shift to something else. So it's a little bit like an art form rather than an algorithm. I mean, 'cause there is no algorithm for this. I hope I'm, I hope I'm being clear.

No, that's very helpful. And I'm partly asking 'cause I'm curious because I've found that it's one thing for me to know what to do in a patient visit. It's another thing for me to have a team of people coming around me that can support the patient. I see patients all the time. They've got their hormone specialist, they've got their general practitioner, they've got this person, they've got that person. They have like a whole team, it's very exhausting. But what's interesting is the level of complexity, as you mentioned, right, of all these different tools in the toolbox to be able to support. I think it's challenging for us as practitioners. And I know you're—

are you—

you're retired and you're consulting only, right? And so it's for those of us still in the trenches wearing the stethoscope every day.

It's—

boy, is it a lot to try to put together.

I kind of did all of that. At a certain point for time restrictions, I might refer to colleagues who do this as well or better than I do, or this or that, but I was kind of a one-man band by the time I ended practice, which is whatever they needed, I could do. You know, you introduced me as a mold specialist and I am, people consider me that, but when I walk into the room or I talk with patients, simply taking in what does this being have, what do they need? So I don't start with the thought that you've got mold and I'm gonna treat it. I start with the concept of you may have mold. What else do you have that I need to take into consideration in order to orchestrate a healing program that's gonna work for you. And sometimes you don't have mold, but my radar is not that you have mold. My radar is that you are not well and you are wanting my help in figuring out all of the complexities of what you've got so that we can put a program together that's gonna meet your needs.

I love that. And I think it's so important because I, I do find that there's a tendency for people, particularly And I'll see this a lot with influencers is like, they'll, they'll find out that they had a problem with mold or with an infection or anything like that. And then all of a sudden everything is that. One of the great things about general— and I did general internal medicine as my training— of being a generalist is you see such a wide variety that I think it really humbles you over and over again, the number of things that you— that it could be, right? And, and, and then, I mean, I, I sometimes joke with people that subspecialization is for doctors who are not ambitious enough to try to know everything. And that's not my problem, which has been really a tough, tough, tough to handle. Um, I think it's really important what you said there. And I, I hope patients will understand that one of the big things I see happening in practice is that people will go to somebody who only know a narrow silo and then something very important will get missed. But, but, you know, and in defense of my, my introduction of you, you've developed quite a reputation for mold. I think that's fair to say.

That's fair to say.

Okay. So then here's what I want to know. You start out as this incredibly eclectic, I think is the word I would use, clinician working in— when did you graduate residency, if I may ask?

'72.

Okay. So it's been a minute. In '72. And you were— where did you work first?

I started in the Indian Health Service. I worked for 3 years. And then where did you work? Huh? I worked in Wagner, South Dakota, Pawnee, Oklahoma, and Anchorage, Alaska.

Get out of here. I worked near the reservations near Bemidji, Minnesota. Just a hop, skip, and a jump from where you were in the Dakotas.

Well, it's closer than you think. I spent 11 years in Duluth, Minnesota, teaching in the residency program and at the medical school at UMD.

Boy, it's cold up there right now.

You know, it's not the North Pole, but you can see it from there.

The Canadians are going to make fun of you for saying that.

Yes, I picked up the accent while I was there.

Okay. So, but you came out in '72, you learned all this stuff. How did you wind up developing such a reputation for mold toxicity?

Well, because of my interest in helping people who my colleagues didn't.

Can I ask you to clarify that for a moment? Because a lot of us say that in integrative medicine, but I get the feeling that you didn't just help people who your colleagues, like conventional colleagues, couldn't help, but you also got the people from your integrative colleagues who they couldn't help. Is that fair?

Correct.

Okay. I think it's important for people to hear that.

Mm-hmm. Yep. And what I mean by that is I worked in small towns for much of my life and in a small town practicing at the local hospital, the doctors in that town, although they many often didn't understand what I did or didn't wanna learn what I knew, but they were very happy to refer their difficult patients to me and I was very happy to help them. So it was a very good relationship that we always had. Ultimately, although I'm board certified in family practice, I also became board certified in pain management because I used a lot of my skills and tools to help people in chronic pain. And that included my learning osteopathic manipulation skills, acupuncture, injection techniques, nutritional kinds of things that I, I worked with patients. So I eventually ran a regional pain center in, actually in Duluth, Minnesota, since you know the area, it was at Miller-Dwan at that time. The— we began to see in the mid-'80s this unusual pain syndrome of pain that fluctuated all around the body that was associated with fatigue, insomnia, irritable bowel, that was then called fibrositis. Now we call it fibromyalgia. Nobody understood what to do with it. And when medicine doesn't know what to do with something, the first thing we assume is it's in people's heads and you get go to a psychiatrist or you get medications for it. Now, those didn't work for people with fibromyalgia. Mm-hmm. So we began to study those people and we began to understand that you could cure those people, even though my colleagues didn't know what to do with it. You could cure those people by figuring out deficiencies that they had, deficiencies in magnesium, hormonal deficiencies, thyroid, adrenal, sex hormones. Dysbiosis, food allergy, and just beginning to appear on the radar were things like Lyme disease and mold toxicity. So we were starting to help those patients by figuring out the biochemical perturbations that triggered that chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. And that led ultimately to realizing that we had an epidemic of Lyme disease on our hands. And then back in 2005, and you'll probably like this story, a patient came into my office and she plunks down Ritchie Shoemaker's book, Mold Warriors, on my desk and said, read this. I said, great. But just understand that I read voraciously and there's a stack of books on my desk.

I'm the same way. I got more books I gotta read than I can possibly get through.

And she said, no, you don't understand. I'm paying for you this visit to read this book. Wow. And I said—

That's never happened to me. I'm looking forward to that day.

I said, that's fabulous. You're gonna actually pay me to read? I couldn't find a better job than that. That's like phenomenal. All right. So I start reading the book and fortunately early on in the book, he has the biotoxin pathway laid out. And I read this and I went, holy mackerel, this is profound. This is the most put together understanding of some of these chronic illnesses that I've ever seen. I need to study with this guy. This guy. So literally I'm with her in the office. I pick up the phone and I call his office and I said, hi, can I come down and study with you? And Richie at the time was a little bit paranoid of other medical people. And he said, who are you and why are you calling me?

Why?

Well, because he'd just been up against the Maryland Medical Board because despite the fact that he had just figured out the epidemic of hysteria on the Maryland coast and put it all together in this incredible way and figured out how to it, Maryland was mad at him because he had affected tourism in the state by implicating that all of the die-off of fish that they were having was because of a toxic runoff. So they weren't happy with him. So the medical board was investigating him at that moment.

So let me get this straight. The tourism, the effect of like, basically the medical board was acting as a political puppet of—

Correct.

How sad and unfortunate.

He had just done a brilliant job of putting this whole thing together. So I said, no, I just, I've got your book right in front of me. I'm reading this biotoxin pathway. I think it's brilliant and I wanna study with you. And so I flew off the next weekend to Pocomoke, Maryland and spent some time with him and we became friends. We began lecturing together and it became super obvious to me that this thing that I had no knowledge of, this is 2005. Mm-hmm. This thing that I had no knowledge of was an epidemic. And once I began understanding what it was, I realized, wow, I've got lots of people in my practice already that have mold toxicity and I haven't diagnosed it correctly.

What proportion would you say before you knew about it had mold toxicity in your general practice?

I can't answer that.

Can you give me like a big window?

You know, I can't. I just knew that I had missed a whole bunch of people's diagnosis and using the tools that Ritchie gave me, I began to help people and then we, even though we were teaching together, it felt to me like what he was doing was not as comprehensive as it needed to be. And I began to expand that process to include a lot of other things that he still doesn't include. We just, you know, I'd like to think we're still friends. Last couple of months ago, we had a nice long discussion about things. He just sees this differently than I do. Learning what I've learned, I really felt that my colleagues really needed to be educated. That is kind of how I got into mold, which is I realized it was an epidemic to the proportion of— it's estimated that at least 10 million Americans are currently suffering with mold toxicity. And the vast majority have no idea. And it's, it's not being diagnosed.

One of the things that fascinates me about mold is that it's very hard to— I mean, in relative terms, it's hard to detect it. I wanna talk to you a little bit more later about the testing for it, like the blood, urine, et cetera testing. But you know, I always think about a patient's total toxic burden as really the big, the big question mark because it, it obviously isn't any one thing. It can be predominantly one thing, but one thing I find tough about mold is in terms of a diagnosis of you have mold toxicity, I find it challenging to think, well, how do, how can I establish that anyone is free of mold? How do I, how do I quantify their total toxic burden? And maybe that is the, the, the right time to ask you, well, those are, how do you think about testing?

Two different questions. Sure. Okay. So first, I think that the tests we have currently, while not perfect, can tell us when that they A, have a mold toxic burden and B, when it's gone, you gotta use the right tests. Second, it is now estimated that there are 350,000 5,000 new chemicals in our environment that didn't exist 70 years ago. And we don't even know how to test for the vast majority of them.

Yes.

500 have been tested as to their effect on human beings. So we're, we're living in a toxic soup that, so you're talking about toxic load. There is a toxic load of epic proportions here in this world that we are not even capable of identifying. The thing about mold is we do have tests to measure it. It's one that we can treat. And then in terms of the other things that are making us toxic, we need better tools.

Agreed. So let's talk about this. A lot of patients come to me and they say, Dr. Stillman, I'm curious to test my mold markers. And in the back of my head, I think, as happy as I am to get data, if their markers are negative and they're in relatively good health, does it mean they don't have an appreciable burden of mold toxins? So what do you mean by their markers are Well, let's use like, say, I try not to, or I'm judicious about mentioning product names because companies change, they sell, they rebrand, they are acquired, they are outcompeted. So I don't, but I'm curious. Well, I'm curious which company you're using right now.

So first of all, when you say markers, I tend to think more of what we call the shoemaker markers, things like TGF-beta-1 and C4a and even P9 and VEGF.

So I tend to use those.

That to me is a separate category of test measurement than measuring mycotoxins.

No, I'm thinking about mycotoxin testing specifically.

So in the mycotoxin category, there are basically 4 main labs that will run mycotoxins. Any of them can make the diagnosis. So, and I don't mind talking about names because I think consumers need to know the difference. I agree. I agree. Between them. Nor Am I affiliated with any of these laboratories or any product whatsoever? So whatever I talk about from my perspective is pretty clean. Mm-hmm. I have a mentorship group for over 300 physicians, and they rely on my objectivity to give them information about what's useful and what's not useful.

Yes.

So in terms of the tests, any of the tests, Real-Time, Mosaic, Vibrant Health, MyMyco, all of them. If you're positive on that, you have mold toxicity.

Are we talking about blood tests?

Well, 3 of them are urine tests. The MyMyco is a blood test. Okay. So let's, for your listening audience, let's talk about them. They're, they're different tests. So you have to get the information and understand what it means a bit differently. The Real-Time test, a urine test, is an ELISA-based test. And it uses a lysate technology to measure not just the mycotoxins, but the metabolites of the mycotoxins. The Mosaic and Vibrant both use the same technology, and it's urine, and that is basically mass spec technology to do the measurement. It's much more specific. It doesn't pick up metabolites. The MyMyco test is a blood test, not for mycotoxins, but for whether the body is making antibodies to mycotoxins., and so it is in some ways not as specific. However, if the body is making antibodies to mycotoxins, it's a very strong indication that it's in the body. A first test from any lab, from my perspective, makes the diagnosis. However, for follow-up testing, the only lab that I have found to be consistent is RealTime. So I've done tens of thousands of tests with all of these laboratories and looked and looked at what we're seeing. You will get follow-up tests, for example, from Mosaic or from Vibrant, which are kind of random, meaning they'll show a different thing this time and 3 months later, a different thing and 3 months later it's different. And with Realtime, I can follow this along sequentially much, much more accurately. So for my purposes, Realtime is the one to give me the information that I find most clinically useful.

Have you run, say, in relatively healthy people, Real-Time Labs or any of these lab testing companies? Have you run samples like week to week to week, multiple samples in the same person without any intervention just to see how much it varies in, say, a healthy person?

Well, healthy people don't come to me.

I know that, but I still want to know.

Well, for me, one of the failures of all of these laboratories is that they have not done what you're asking for. Hmm. And I am working with Realtime right now. I have a meeting on Friday to push them to do the kind of study that you're asking for, where we can compare people with mold toxicity with controls, real controls. Now, the one study that's been done was done by Great Plains before it became Mosaic 4 or 5 years ago. And what they did is they took, um, They took 82 controls, healthy people, and then they took 102 people with mold toxicity and they measured their urine mycotoxins. In the controls, with the exception of ochratoxin, basically nobody who had a negative test, they, they were all negative. And in people with mold toxicity, those same things were positive. The exception was ochratoxin and for ochratoxin, 51% of the controls had a little bit of ochratoxin in their body, and they defined it as in their level, 1.8 was the reading that they averaged on that positivity. And for the mold toxic patients, that average was greater than 18. Hmm.

Big discrepancy.

So you could, yeah, you could easily distinguish. And so that is why MOSAIQ will see, you'll see they made a cutoff of 7.5, meaning that any of those people with a light amount would be registered as negative as opposed to taking the med at all. That's the one study that, that has been done. More studies are necessary. I know a lot of people fault the laboratories for not doing those studies. I do, because we, we need them in order to really be able to say if your urine is not showing up, you know, not an issue. But if you're showing up in your urine, it's something you need to be aware of. Example, I'll often work with a whole family with mold toxicity. Not surprising because they're exposed to a moldy home, all of them, but they all may exhibit different manifestations of the illness. So they may have different symptoms. Some may be severely ill, others may not be ill at all, or just barely, and That is very confusing to people, but we all cope with these toxins in different ways. We have different genetics, different biochemistries, different proclivities. I mean, that's just the way it is. But when I have, for example, if I have a mother and a couple of kids who are really sick and a husband who is not particularly ill, maybe a few symptoms, often those people have not checked their urines, not even looked at it. And they'll basically go, I'm not sick. Why do I need to do that? Mm-hmm. But I will often urge them to do that. It is rare for those people not to have a significant amount of toxin in their urine. Now, toxicity is not just about having mold toxin in your body. It's about how your immune system copes with that. It's really about your immune system. So if you have a robust immune system, you can live in mold. You can be exposed to mold and you can stay reasonably healthy for, for years. If your immune system takes a hit, And for many people, COVID was that hit, but COVID, other infections, surgery, childbirth, or an emotional upset of any significance. Once the immune system takes a hit, the toxin that's already there will trigger a really severe illness. And so what I try to convey to those people is that you're a ticking time bomb. You've got mold toxin in your body. Why don't you get it out now so that you're at no risk? The example I will give patients is Let's say I measured that you have a significant amount of arsenic and strychnine in your body, but you don't have much symptoms. You want to leave it there or do you want to get it out of your body? It means for me, it's a pretty simple choice.

Indeed. Did you ever get into heavy metal testing, like provoked urine metals testing?

Oh yeah, I've done that for 30 years.

I'm interested in your perspective on this because I've been fascinated by metals and minerals for a long time, and I've noticed pretty, pretty profound abnormalities in metals and minerals in people in my practice who've got known mold exposure and toxicity. And one of the things I find and reasons I'm fascinated by this is, you know, if you look at the toxicity of the heavy metals, it can be much— they can be— the only thing that compares with them that's a biological toxin is like trichothecene, T2 toxin, which is almost as potent as mercury. But I'm curious, you know, in terms of the body burden, one of the challenges I feel I face that we all face, I guess, is how can I quantify like what's the metals, what's the pesticides, What's the mold? We already talked about the organic pollutants, but the heavy metals, I feel like I have a better toolbox for assaying. What do you think about that?

I think we need to be looking at all of that. Again, I'm not a mold guy.

I know. I love that. I love that you're not a mold guy. I also wish that you had more reputation as a generalist because of that.

I don't control my reputation.

I know.

I make no effort at being branded. I make no effort at, at all. But in terms of answering your question, first of all, if one understands Dr. Bob Naviaux's cell danger response model, in his model, again, for your listening audience, a complicated model, but basically it's on a cellular level. If a cell is threatened by a toxin, infection, or stress, it will undergo a response to that, which is an orchestrated biochemical response to help it deal with whatever that stress response happens to be. Now, one component of it is it will shut down its ability to detoxify. So you will get a sequestration of heavy metals as a part of mold toxicity. You cure the mold and the body's ability to detoxify improves. It's your basic toxic load concept. Mm-hmm. That essentially the body will eventually unload that load. Now, if you can help it, earlier on by measuring it and recognizing it makes it even better. So it's all in the understanding of the complexity of what— call it mold toxicity. It's not just mold toxicity, it's doing a whole lot of other things to the body, all of which have to be taken into account in order to really treat it effectively.

One of the things I've, I've struggled with over the years is what labs I order initially, and I have resisted ordering mold testing at the outset of every case, in part because a lot of what I'm going to tell patients to take anyway directly or indirectly helps them get rid of mold. I like to try to figure out from the history if there's a mold problem, and I do frequently find it as a result of that. And then we can test if they, if they want or can afford it. But one thing that has struck me over the years is it's very hard for me to do all the testing I want and then make it sustainable for people, because if I want to check mycotoxins every quarter, What does that run to? I don't, I don't know the math or the current pricing in my head, but I think it's gonna run to hundreds or maybe $1,000 a year. Is that fair?

It could, it could run to that. The first test is $400 and follow-up testing is, uh, $250. But keep in mind, like for your Medicare patients, it's free. Medicare, Medicare covers that test completely.

So let's talk about that because not long ago, Genova Diagnostics, who I'm sure you know, got smacked with a pretty hefty— I don't know how, how it came about legally, but basically they were slapped on the wrist, I think, if I recall correctly, by Medicare for a lot of what they called inappropriate or unwarranted testing. I did not know that about mold testing for Medicare patients. And is that, is that something they can do even if I'm opted out of Medicare?

Yeah, the patient just has to have Medicare.

Interesting. That's good to know.

So they— Medicare and TRICARE. Are covered by Real-Time. None of the other labs cover it.

Good to know. How about everybody under 65?

Then you pay $400 for the first test and $250 for follow-up testing.

And I guess my question to you is, if you were still in practice, what would your opening battery of tests be? I don't want test codes. That would be ridiculous. But I mean, what do you think is most important for us to test?

Remember, remember, I'm not a mold guy. So my opening battery of tests is what do I think this patient has?

So do you have a, you recommend a consult before ordering any lab testing?

So if I, and the complicated people that I generally see, the two most useful tests I have are urine mycotoxin testing, Lyme. There's a whole lot of other tests you can do that are way less useful from my perspective because they represent downstream effects and they're not root cause of what's making people sick in the first place.

I think of the same generation as Tom Cowan, MD. You know, Tom Cowan, Dr. Tom Cowan?

I don't know the name.

Interesting. Okay. So I asked this because, you know, you mentioned Lyme. I didn't think we were going to get into Lyme today, but I don't see how I can't get into it now. So I've been very interested in my practice to find that people who had problems attributed to Lyme would often get better when I did things that I didn't know had anything to— or didn't think had anything to do with Lyme. For example, I just gave a guy a high-dose thiamine protocol and it knocked out symptoms that had been attributed to Lyme by another practitioner. And he's got all these positive biomarkers now, and I'm very, you know, wary of, of using antibiotics for obvious reasons. And I, I wonder about how, uh, what is appropriate antibiotic stewardship in 2025, knowing that obviously Lyme is a real thing. But then the question of, you know, and I think this could be another podcast because this is a big one, but, you know, if you do all that Lyme testing, then what proportion of those people are you going to put on antibiotics?

Almost all of them.

Interesting. You haven't found that it's possible to control or eradicate or resolve their issues without the antibiotics?

Very rarely.

Why? Okay.

Because Lyme—

doesn't jive with my experience.

Well, because Lyme is a really nasty infection and it is a stealth infection. The Lyme bacteria, not just Lyme, but Bartonella, Babesia goes intracellular and that herbal treatments alone are usually in my experience don't work well. I've tried that. Yeah. Now your other point is I sometimes think Lyme is misdiagnosed. So you could have someone who looks like they have Lyme, which are very similar to the symptoms for mold toxicity. And if you treated the mold toxicity and all their symptoms go away, they didn't have Lyme. You didn't need to go down the Lyme rabbit hole. Yes. So again, pinpoint precision diagnosis is key to everything that we do. So we need to know the tests for mold are better, more than the tests for Lyme. The tests for Lyme are not quite as accurate, but they have gotten much better over the last few years.

Who's your favorite for them right now?

I'll give you two. I think generally the IGeneX has been by far the best lab for Lyme that we have. More recently, I like the T-Labs test because it tells us more accurately whether that is current. The IGeneX testing is all immune testing. So if you get a positive immune test for Lyme, is it current or does it represent immune memory? And that can be hard to determine. Having worked in the Lyme field for many, many years, probably treated successfully over 5,000 people with Lyme, Lyme and mold do coexist. Each weakens the immune system to the point that the other becomes more and more likely for them. So it is really common to have both.

Have you ever used in your practice or had any experience otherwise with chlorine dioxide? Have I used chlorine dioxide?

Yeah. In the early days we were using chlorine dioxide. It works a little for Lyme and Bartonella. It works better for Babesia, but you have to be really careful with the dose because, because people will have some nasty die-offs, nasty Herx's, and really react badly to it. So we're talking starting people on like one drop. I think when people start taking more, You can make people really sick from it. So I do think—

I totally agree.

I think it has a place, but you have to be very careful with it.

Okay. I've always been very wary of using antifungals, antibacterials.

Why?

Great question. I was gonna basically ask you—

I'm gonna turn the tables here. Why?

Yeah, I like that. So just because of my experience, I'll tell you the experience that I had with this. I worked at a mold Lyme clinic when I came outta residency and I—

Which one?

Um, I am not interested. I, I am not open to discussing the identity for various reasons.

Okay, your call.

You would know the guy, and I really liked him. I really thought well of him, but it just wasn't a good fit for various reasons. And when I got out, I got very interested in light, EMF, energy, bioelectromagnetics, whatever you want to call it. And I started to see these people having these amazing turnarounds with Eliminating EMF, eliminating artificial light at night, started to do more and more of that in my practice, got amazing results. From there, I sought out mentors who were very often very deep in that space, and then my practice evolved out of that. And we do something that I don't know of anybody else really doing. We actually track our outcomes, and we don't track them the way that I would like to, but we're working on that. And basically the way we track them is we have programs, beginning and end of a program, we'll ask you how well you've done, like, where are we in terms of you know, our goal. And we'll get— and the average patient has seen 4 to 5 practitioners before us. The average person is in a program for 3 to 6 months, and 95% of them say they're 50% better. The average is 68% better. And so when I'm looking in my own practice for treatment failures, the people I missed, do they have the infection I didn't pick up, or I didn't use the right agent? Do they have the mold toxicity I didn't find? And, you know, I'm always looking for them like, what did I miss? Right? But I have this system where it's a members-only practice, so I know how everyone's doing and I can track the outcomes. It's not just like revolving door, book time when you want. I've got 2,000 patients and don't know half their names, wouldn't recognize them on the street. It's only 180-some patients. And of those that haven't gotten better, you know, I'm not doing a lot. I'm not doing mold testing, I'm not doing Lyme testing, and we're still getting great results. Am I not getting people who are as sick as the ones that come to you? You have a lot more gray hair and have had a lot longer than I have to create a reputation that would attract those people. So I'm open to that. But that's why I don't— I don't order it. I'm not struggling to get results with the people I am not seeing results in. We are doing more weird testing. I'll tell you a really interesting case. Woman and her husband not getting better despite everything we throw at it. She has 10 times the normal limit of barium coming out in her urine toxic metals test. I don't know where that's coming from. She doesn't know, her husband doesn't know. So that's where we are at, at, at the practice. That's why I'm wary of, of using antibiotics.

Can you say chemtrails?

I can say, I could say geoengineering. Dane Wigington told me not to say chemtrails.

I mean, chemtrails right now can be an excess of barium.

Yeah. I, I, yeah. And I, it actually ox—

Okay. That's a specific, I'll leave that alone. When I started practice and I was working with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, I cured the vast, vast majority of them. We're not talking Lyme and we're not talking mold by just balancing them biochemically, getting their dysbiosis fixed, food allergy, getting their magnesium levels, taking care of heavy metal toxicity. But as I went along, more and more of the sicker people came to me. And so part of comparing practices is there is a self— water seeking its own level to—

it's a selection bias.

People who find me are especially now, unusually complicated and sick. I don't get the people that I saw, uh, 30 years ago when I started my journey, and I helped the vast majority of them without ever delving into the Lyme and mold world. So my comment to you is it's going to find you. I promise you it will find you. And please don't be afraid of using antibiotics or antifungals, antifungals especially. They're quite benign. They have very few side effects. Mm-hmm. To many of our patients have colonized, and if you don't use antifungals, you're gonna have trouble getting, getting the mold and Candida out of their body.

I think my hesitation is mostly about, I do not have experience, extensive experience with, you know, more than weeks of antibiotic treatment, and I don't want to get lost without a mentor or guide.

You gotta start somewhere.

I get that.

I know when I started, neither did I. Yeah. So it's just starting somewhere and slowly becoming comfortable. When you start helping some of the people that are not responding to what you're doing, then I think you'll have that aha moment where, okay, I need another gear. I need a couple more tools for my toolbox.

Yeah, absolutely. No, we're adding them all the time. We have multiple new protocols under production.

And just by the way, have you Have you read my book, Energetic Diagnosis?

No, your books are on my list.

I think from what you're describing to me, you would like it. It's— I'm sure it will be up your alley.

Yeah, I will read it with interest. Do you have any closing thoughts? We covered a lot of ground today. This was all over the place. I'm looking forward to actually going back and listening to it again to make sure I got everything.

I want to close with, for patients who have been ill for a long time, and not progressing, not in your practice, I'm saying this globally, be sure you look at mold toxicity and Lyme disease as possible causes. They're not rare. They're important. And I always wanna close with the essence of healing is finding the spiritual source for each patient and nurturing it. I mean, I could say more, but that would be a whole nother podcast.

I love it. Thank you very much for joining me. It's been a real pleasure.

Great pleasure. My side too.