This is a short segment from a YouTube interview (Wendie Trubow, MD host) with Dr. Jaban Moore about mold and mycotoxin illness. Dr. Moore frames mold as a powerful, often-hidden neurotoxin that can cause neuroinflammatory symptoms, liver and mitochondrial dysfunction, and severe psychiatric/neurologic changes in children and adults. He illustrates with a clinical case where a child’s neuropsychiatric symptoms improved markedly after leaving a school with very high dust-based mold levels; the segment ends by transitioning into how to test for mold exposure, noting testing is challenging.
We're going to talk today about mold and mycotoxin. And can you tell us a little bit about why are we talking about it? I mean, it's just. It's just some little thing over there that's maybe a little black. Why would we care?
You know, it's funny you say it like that, because I remember back to my first couple years in practice where I had gone through my Lyme journey. So then I came out and practiced like, I want to. I want to be a lime doc. Like, I want to work with those people and help them. And I remember somebody saying something to me about mold. I'm like, yeah, I haven't seen much about mold now. You know, I kind of blew it off. And then I was like, I'm sure it could be something, but I just haven't seen it.
That's what.
That's kind of what I say. And. And then all of a sudden, I kept getting people that kept getting sicker and sicker and sicker, and I started looking at patterning. And this was a little before the big mold craze that I feel like is kind of there now. Even though the mold craze is probably for us, it's not necessarily for, like, the whole world. Right? Like, we hear about mold a lot, but mold is this. This wrecking ball is what I call it. It is so powerful, it is so strong, and it's so hidden because it's hard to put a finger on it because it's either non visible, you can't see it, because inside of a wall, you don't necessarily always smell it, but it is a neurotoxin, a neuroinflammatory toxicity. It shuts down your liver, your mitochondria. And I'll tell you this, as a guy that went through Lyme, I would rather deal with Lyme disease all day than deal with somebody that has mold. As far as the fact that it's just more difficult. Like, I. I do love working with mold clients now, but it's just Lyme is easier because mold you got to talk about, where do you live? Where have you lived? Are you in a safe environment today? What food are you eating? We get to talk about with mold. You know, what's your genetic factors that may make you more sensitive to mold or where you're going into hotels? And I mean, just to put this out there for people. Mold has been used as a bioweapon and an immunosuppressant in medicine. So that's how powerful mold can be.
Yeah. And don't forget kids in school houses and schools.
Oh, gosh.
That's the thing that really kills me.
You know, I've got a kid that was in school, and she was depressed and anxious and cutting herself and nauseous and. And losing weight. And then she started developing OCD and food avoidances, and, I mean, the list could just go on. I could just talk and talk and talk. And we were trying to figure out where this mold was, and the parents were whatever it takes kind of parents. So they tested their home. Immaculate, perfect. Went to school, and it was 10 times higher than the top of the range on a hurts me, because we just started with a hurts me at the school. And that's a type of mold test using dust collection for those that didn't know. Ten times higher. When she moved out of there within three weeks, her neurological symptoms were cut in half.
Yeah. Yeah. Isn't it scary? So let's talk about that. I mean. Yeah. I don't know how many kids I've seen that either have mold or Lyme, that. Not a Prozac deficiency, that. It's scary how many people are on. How many kids are on medicine when they really have something going, real going on. So it hurts my heart. So let's talk about how do you test? Because that's. That's not that easy either.
No. So for me, it's a multitude of different processes. So I'm gonna take all your symptoms. Of course, I'm gonna see what those symptoms are. And with mold, a lot of the times symptoms can be vast because they're going to cause those fatigue and brain fog symptoms, anxiety, even to the level of, like, paranoia or dissociation. I see a lot of brain symptoms of mold. So I. I look at the symptoms and the assessments. But then when it comes to the lab testing, which is, I think the. The target your. Your question was going toward, there's different testing, like Richie Shoemaker came out with, which is the C4A, MSH, VIP. These are different blood labs that are markers. Oftentimes you can. I. I associate it for people when I'm trying to explain it to inflammation markers or immune system markers. So you're looking for a change in those. Those pieces inside your body. But then there's also urine testing where you can test for different particles coming out through your urine. So you're looking, say, for a mycotoxin, which is a particle that mold releases, and that mycotoxin could be named ochratoxin A. And we're Looking for that in your urine. And that's one way to do it. And none of the testing is perfect, by the way. But then the last way that I use is using organic acid testing. And there's a few organic acids that have been now correlated with different types of mold colonization or mold inside your body. So you can find aspergillus or for serum and those forms in the body that way. So those are kind of my more direct ways. But then now being that I've been doing this for years and I just see a lot of patterns, I love finding patterns. If I look at an organic acid test or any sort of testing that is directed toward mitochondria, and if I see suppression in your mitochondria, the first two things that come up in my brain is, is this person living in a place where they're drinking radioactive water, which about half of the United States is. If you look@ewg.org, you just go look and see what's in the water supply. You might find uranium, radon, those sorts of things. They're living in a basement that's full of radon or mold. Those are my two go to's when I see a lot of suppression in mold. So if your organic acid test has more than two to three markers, that's one of the first places I'm going to start just looking into for you to go, is this something that's possible for that person? So those are some of my favorite ways to test for mold. But none of them are perfect because if your body is too stressed out and it's depleted from minerals and you don't have the ability to detoxify at the time, or maybe you moved out of mold so now you don't have fresh mold coming in. That urine test might be negative without some provocation. I don't love provoking. It is something that can be done. But I don't love to provoke because sometimes if you provoke now, you send that, that client into a detox reaction. So there's a lot of different things that a person can have done for them to find mold. Just make sure you find a good practitioner that understands what they're doing with these tests and how to interpret them for the conditions that you're in. And that's the biggest importance. I tell people with mold testing like you can't find it. You just need to get the right practitioner to help you get there. Because depending upon your body and its strengths, you have to test differently.
