You could be exposed to mold 20 years ago, and there could be mold toxin in your system. Many of us, genetically or the way our biochemistry works, aren't able to get mold toxin out of our body unless we treat it specifically.
Have you ever felt like something's just not right in your body, like maybe you have some fatigue or some brain fog or things just aren't making sense, but your labs are normal, and your doctor tells you everything's normal, and then you start to worry if you even know what's going on in your own body. That's exactly what we're talking about in this episode. And today we're talking about mold illness. Now we're not just talking about mold, but that's what we're going to focus on with my guest, Dr Neil Nathan. If you've been down the rabbit hole of chronic illness, you've probably seen his name pop up before. He is one of the leading experts in this space, and has spent over 50 years helping the kind of patients that most doctors don't quite know exactly what to do with his books, toxic and the sensitive patient healing guide are must reads If you're navigating environmental illness, and I'm so excited to have him here and dig into really what's going on that's causing these symptoms that we can't always seem to figure out. In other ways, we are going to talk about what mold exposure is and why it makes some people sick, but others are totally fine. We're also talking about what it is that actually makes people sick, the mold spores, mycotoxins and specifically inflammation. We are also going to talk about why this is ignored in medicine or or maybe not understood in medicine, and why that needs to change, and how that needs to change. But most importantly, we're going to go through exactly what you do to treat this, how you can stay hopeful when all of this can feel a little bit overwhelming. If you are a practitioner trying to help patients with complex systems, this is a great place to start. But if you are a patient who's also trying to figure out what's going on, then this will be helpful for you, too. Let's get into it.
We're talking about inflammation of every tissue in the body. So depending on what tissue we're talking about, you're going to get symptoms from it.
Well, Neil, thank you so much for being on. I was just talking to you before the show and telling you how much I've appreciated the work that you've put into this field, and really looking forward to learning from you and allowing our listeners to learn from you too on this topic. So thanks for taking your time. Great. Thanks for having me. Well, we're going to talk a lot about mold today, but before we dive into mold in general, you've really dedicated the better part of your career to pretty complex patients who just aren't getting better. Will you tell us a little bit about these patients that have become sort of your people here?
Okay, I think the answer to that question would start with, I'm a little bit odd, and I maybe a lot odd, I don't know, in that, I've always been particularly interested in what we now call outliers, people who don't fit the typical medical model, And that's from the very beginning of my career, where I was intrigued and drawn to trying to figure out how to help people that my colleagues couldn't. I like puzzles. I'm the kind of person when I wake up in the morning. I do all of the New York Times puzzles of every form that they have. That's my brain wake up call in the morning. I like solving puzzles and semi mysteries, so
back in the early days, and I've been doing this for over 50 years now,
my tools were a little bit limited, so that I could only use the tools that I knew, but I was passionate about getting more tools, so I passionately studied every healing modality that crossed my awareness. So early on, I studied Therapeutic Touch, osteopathic cranial manipulation, homeopathy, acupuncture, I delved into the whole functional medicine thing when it was just starting up.
I mean, there's a lot more, but for everything that I learned, it added another tool to help some people. So it was kind of like developing a tool bag that could help more people. And so I've always had referred to me by my colleagues, who were very happy that I was around, because they could send all of their most difficult patients to me, and they were happy.
Because they didn't know what to do, and I was happy because they were presenting me with a wonderful opportunity to learn more.
So that's kind of a long winded way of explaining, kind of how I got into helping people that my colleagues didn't quite know what to do with. Thank you for sharing that. And that kind of takes us where we're going, which is into mold treatment. But again, before we quite get to mold, there is this constellation of different diagnoses and different potential problems, or what we call root causes, right in functional medicine, that can really cause these syndromes, these collection of symptoms for people where they just don't get better easily, really severe fatigue or migrating joint pains or brain fog or hormonal changes. You know, these, these things that people will go to doctor after doctor, and they have every test, and they're just told, Well, everything's normal, but the patient knows, I do not feel well. And a lot of these diagnoses, or a lot of the root cause that we find coming up under this are in this bag of not fully recognized by conventional medicine, right? We have mold, we've got Lyme, we've got Candida or MCAS, we've got all of these different things that are now floating all over the internet. Will you just help us understand, what is this gray area? Because, like you said, You've been doing this now for decades. Why is this? Why is there still this jumble of gray area where it's not really fully embraced by conventional medicine, but in your experience, people are getting better with with treating these things? Yeah, absolutely. If this is the only message I give, we can figure this out, and we can help the people who have not been helped so far. We don't know everything, and we probably never will, but we know enough that we can really be of assistance to people who've been missed or fallen through the medical cracks for a long period of time. The underlying biggest issue for all of these patients is inflammation. And typically, this inflammation is being triggered by different patterns of cytokines that are being stimulated by two main families of diagnoses, toxins and infections. So when we're dealing with this very complicated picture, the number one thing that my colleagues haven't grasped yet is, no, this is not in anybody's head. This is not psychological. Yes, this is a mishmash of odd, seemingly unrelated symptoms, but just from a medical scientific point of view, it all holds together if you understand that it's inflammation that is triggering this in all of the the things you need, whether we're Talking mold toxicity, Lyme disease, MCAS, pans, pandas, autism, neurological issues like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, all of these are surprisingly very similar and completely interrelated under the rubric of inflammation. And so if our colleagues understood that it would make all of this a whole lot easier to understand, and then you can begin to come at, okay, what's causing this inflammation? What are the specifics of this? And I grant you that this is pretty complicated. For me, it's not as complicated because I've been doing it for a long time. So for me, I've watched these patterns evolve in literally 1000s and 1000s of patients. So when someone starts telling me their story within moments, they're literally telling me what are the pieces that they have, so that I know where to look, I know what tests to run, and I know what I'm going to do to help them. That's pretty straightforward. I can't explain why our profession has not embraced this new information. As a general rule, medicine embraces new technology and new drugs quickly, because there's a huge financial incentive to do so new information, not so much. And so there's this huge gap between embracing new technology, almost before it's been thoroughly investigated, and not embracing new information with the concept of Oh no, no, no. This has to prove itself out. I have to see not one article in a peer reviewed journal. I have to see 50 in order for it to make me think that the profession is really getting behind this concept. And I come to it, and always have from a very different point of view, which is, I have a suffering being in front of me, and I need to help them. And.
And that means I need to use whatever is at my disposal, even if it's new information, to see if I can help them. So I'm not coming at this in the same way that my colleagues are. Some of my colleagues are. I'm not going to do anything until it's proven beyond any shadow of a doubt, and I come to the table of, I'll try anything to help someone who's suffering, as long as it's reasonable and has virtually no harm to it, like, how else am I going to approach it? So it's, this isn't going to sound nice, but it's my reluctance to leave people untreated, that colleagues of mine are, I'm not sure, content, but maybe medical legally concerned that they don't want to do something that somebody else might not approve of. And I'm sorry if you're suffering, but I don't have the validation that I need to help you, and from my perspective, that's a travesty. Well, I agree with you 100% and of course, we could keep talking about that for hours, because it is, it's hard and it's frustrating. And I can say for my own journey from a conventionally trained physician into functional medicine the latter part of my career, I noticed I became very conscious of how often I was telling patients, you know, I'm sorry, I can't help you go see someone else, but fully aware that that someone else wasn't going to be able to help them either within this conventional model. And the more times that I said that to patients who were saying to women, you know who are saying, I'm so tired I don't feel right. Something's not right. And I would just say, gosh, maybe go see your primary care. And the more times I said that, knowing they weren't going to get help, the more passionate I became about this work. So thanks for your work and pioneering it, because it's it still needs a lot of pioneering, unfortunately, but, but we're grateful for what you
do. Our work is not done. No, no, no, we're close, but, but it is. It is. It's really moving to hear you talk actually, because this is my patient population. Generally, to patients who have it's not that they're they're not seeking out medical care, and they're looking to go rogue and looking for the off the beaten path treatment. The vast majority of people who are suffering have already explored all of the conventional medical options they can find. They've already done it, and they are desperate, and then we have all of these safe treatments that we can use to help people. So it is, it's, it's an interesting frustration, and I ask you, because I know that this is what patients are wondering, right? Like, why? Why is this happening? So let's dive specifically, then into mold, because that's what we're really going to focus on today. Mold is everywhere. We know the substance of mold, right? We've all seen mold at some point. Of you know, growing in the bathroom or growing on food or or whatever it is. Tell us how mold translates into mold toxicity or mold illness. Okay, that's kind of a complicated question.
Mold toxicity has been known since biblical times. There's references to it in Leviticus, for example, that so it isn't a new idea, but it is an idea that has not really been explored by our profession until the last 20 years or so. I can't tell you why. It just hasn't so I'm talking to you from my office. I live in Southern Oregon, and I'm overlooking a big park right in front of me, and there are probably 1000 species of mold right out here. They all have their own ecological niche. So
the lodgepole pine trees in front of me, the azaleas, the rhododendrons, The Oaks, every mold species has its own preference for where it wants to live in that ecosystem, and they make toxins, not to make us sick, but to keep other molds out of their environment, so you're not going to get sick walking around. In fact, it's healthy and glorious to walk around in this huge park that sits down below me. So it's not going to make you sick. They're there. The problem is when mold gets into a water damaged building and it has no opponents to it. So instead of being in the natural world where it's being kept at bay and contained, it's now growing unopposed in an environment that it thrives in, and the way we've built houses since the energy crisis of 1979
is to make them airtight, no air flow in the building, so that now we're growing toxic species of mold. It's got no way to get out of the building, and we're getting sick from it. I mean, that's where it's coming from now. So people would say.
Say, why is it we're seeing so much now? And I don't remember seeing this when I was younger, and I agree, it's because we are creating an environment for the mold that is putting us in a position to be exposed to never before seen amounts of mold and mold toxin. And that's kind of where this is coming from. Okay, so what is the estimated prevalence? Because the data on this is so all over the place. Do you have any feel for this? Or is there any data to show us how many people are sick from mold at any given time? It's it's estimated that right now,
10 million or more Americans have mold toxicity, not just mold exposure, but have actual mold toxicity, and the vast majority have no idea. So it is an epidemic, infinitely more than AIDS ever was. And yet, unfortunately, our CDC and NIH is putting virtually no research dollars into this at all when this affects a huge percentage of the American population. Yeah, so tell us what the difference is, then between mold exposure and then mold toxicity. What is mold illness or mycotoxin illness? Mold toxicity, when? When does that become a thing in in a person?
When you realize you're you're really sick and you have no idea what's going on. So I think the easiest way to answer your question is, let's give you a quick rundown of symptoms of mold toxicity, and it's all over the map, because we're talking about inflammation of every tissue in the body. So depending on what tissue we're talking about, you're going to get symptoms from it. So generally, fatigue, what's called post exertional malaise, is a special kind of fatigue in which you attempt to do something physically and you get wasted for days afterwards, headaches, neurological symptoms like peripheral neuropathy, a variety of other neuropathies can occur as a result of this, every autoimmune illness possible is being triggered by mold, toxicity, headaches, joint pain, muscle pain,
cognitive impairment of every type is huge in Dale Bredesen work in which he's been studying For over a decade and writing papers about how Alzheimer's disease is essentially another example of an inflammatory illness which has been again, misunderstood by the medical and neurological community, in which they're trying to use medications that are like band aids and not Dealing with what is causing or triggering this inflammation. And when Dale first started, he found that about 60% of the patients had mold toxicity as a component of their Alzheimer's. And the more he studied it, it's now up to 90%
his work. So I mean, that's an example of it. We see it in Parkinson's disease. We see it in ALS, every gastrointestinal symptom known, gas, bloating, indigestion, reflux, constipation, diarrhea, cramps, all of that, shortness of breath, air hunger, palpitations, cardiac arrhythmias, chest pain, bladder pain, pelvic pain, and then psychologically, mold toxicity affects the limbic and vagal systems so that anxiety, depression, depersonalization, derealization, mood swings, OCD behaviors are All being triggered by mold toxicity. And that's not everything. That's an overview. So
to answer your question, when somebody is experiencing a
combination of fatigue, brain fog, anxiety, joint pain, or any of the other things that I even mentioned, the first thing people should be thinking about is an inflammatory condition that could cause that now that could be mold toxicity, Lyme disease, with the CO infections. It could be covid or Long Haul covid. It could be mast cell activation.
All of these things share the same symptoms that I just talked about, but the underlying process is they're triggering inflammatory cytokines that cause all of that. So anyone who is simply feels really awful and is having a tough time, they should be thinking about checking for mold.
If someone has developed an autoimmune disease, they should be checking for mold. So this should be a part of almost everyone's workup. Jack Wolfson, who's a cardiologist who came to the conclusion several years ago that every patient with cardiovascular disease should be checked for mold toxicity, because that is a major trigger of inflammatory conditions, which is the underlying process for all cardiovascular disease. So I think it's a huge area that is way under appreciated.
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off of a loom box. You can also find it on our favorite products page at uplift for her.com now back to the show, without going too deep into the physiology, because the physiology is very interesting. But we talk about mold spores, like the actual mold, and then we talk about mycotoxins. Will you differentiate that for us and how that actually then creates this inflammation? Because you mentioned, you know, we walk through the trees and we breathe in mold, and no one gets super, super sick. What is it about that mold being in the home, that combination of spores and or mycotoxins that's actually getting in and triggering that inflammatory response? Okay, so it's kind of two answers to that question. One is, when we talk about mold, it isn't just the mold spores, it's the mold spores, it's mold fragments, it's the mycotoxins, but it's also the VOCs, the volatile organic components. Here there's actinomyces and endotoxins and man and protein aces, when what we call mold, when we look at mold, like on a petri dish or in a colony or in our house, it's actually a soup of inflammatory components. So that, it's important to understand that it isn't just the mold that's doing it. It's this whole inflammatory soup. The biggest issue are the mycotoxins themselves. The mycotoxins are made by these mold spores, and that's what's doing most of the damage to us, by far. So when mycotoxins get absorbed by the body, and I'll try to make this as simple as I can. They get absorbed. They attach to what are called toll like receptors on fat cells. They then go into the nucleus, and then other chemicals are made the trigger of what Dr Shoemaker laid out as the biotoxin pathway. And in that biotoxin pathway, then there's a host of biochemical physiological events that occur so that it affects neuro chemicals, it affects the gastrointestinal chemicals, it affects immune chemicals, and you get this cascade in multiple directions of what the mold toxin is doing to the body, and we all have different symptoms from it based on our genetics and based on our own history, so that if we have an old injury to a particular part of the body, that's the area that will likely be inflamed, because there's already either scar tissue In that area or a predisposition for that area to be affected. And so you could have four people in the same household, and they may have different symptoms from mold toxicity, which can be confusing, until you understand that no we all experience this differently. This is starting to create kind of a grim picture, right? We've talked about how mold is everywhere because of the way that we're building homes, and so many people have mold illness, before we get to the hopeful part about how we actually help this, what is sort of the amount of mold that can cause a problem because.
I think this can start to trigger a little bit of panic when people see a little bit of mold somewhere, and they're like, oh my goodness, mold illness, and we're all going to have problems. What is sort of this threshold? Is it a duration of exposure, or is it a bulk of exposure? Is it food? Is it air? Is there? How are we exposed? That people really are most predisposed to get the illness. So by far the major exposure is what we breathe in air from water damaged buildings. That's where it's coming from. There's a bunch being written now about how food is a major player. And I have not found that to be the case, and neither have most of the people who work in this field. Yes, there are minute amounts of mold in some foods, but believe it or not, the government does require analysis of that in most foods. Exception for that would be coffee, where, for some reason, the coffee industry has gotten by that regulation so that coffee can be moldy, and you might know what you're getting. Hence, many people are seeing these bulletproof coffees, or these coffees that are known to be toxin and mold free to whatever extent we can do it. And that does matter also, things like blue cheese is, is mold? I'm sorry, it's penicillin. So there are certain things that, yes, it's there. Then there's well known in medicine, epidemics of mold, when whole silos of peanuts or grain have become moldy and have been inadvertently made into foods, and the whole communities have gotten sick. So yes, that's possible, but the vast majority of it comes from what we breathe in, from being in a moldy environment. And yeah, I don't want to scare anyone. I know this is scary information. I want to really emphasize, as I know you're going to make me is that every single thing I'm talking about is treatable. My big scare is that you're not getting diagnosed and you're suffering because you don't know what's wrong with you, and this is to help you, at least get a framework in which you can put your symptoms and go, Oh, it's not in my head. This is very real. There's a way to make this diagnosis and is really treatable. So I mean, I've helped four or 5000 people recover their health completely. So I bring to the table, not paranoia, but knowledge is power. Yeah. So one more question before, before we get to the hopeful part of things, one of the things that I see come up is I know I was exposed to mold when I lived in a home five years ago or 10 years ago or 20 years ago, I'm pretty certain that my current home doesn't have mold, therefore my symptoms couldn't be caused by mold. Tell us about that time frame, does the exposure, if we do have an illness and the exposure goes away, does our body heal on its own, or does it still need treatment? Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. I don't think the word is healing. This is all about the integrity of the immune system. Yes, how robust it is. So you could be exposed to mold 20 years ago, and there could be mold toxin in your system. Many of us, genetically or the way our biochemistry works, aren't able to get mold toxin out of our body unless we treat it specifically. But if your immune system is robust, you can be able to literally blow it off and live a healthy life with maybe minimal symptoms or maybe none for years, until the immune system takes a hit. That same statement can be made for Lyme disease. You can be exposed to Lyme disease. You might have had a tick bite 20 years ago, 15 years ago, five years ago. Doesn't matter, and if your immune system is robust, you can hold it at bay. And that might be obvious to people, if you really think about it, we've all through our lifetime, been exposed to tons of viral, bacterial infections. To imagine that our immune system has removed every single microbe
is unrealistic. So we all have stuff that's in us still, but our immune systems are keeping us healthy. So when the immune system takes a hit. Now that hit could be
an infection
covid, for example, was a huge hit from covid for those people who got it, and not just covid, the vaccine itself could do the same thing. Other infections of any kind could be the death of a loved one.
And feeling of betrayal
bankruptcy, but whatever caused the immune system to become weakened will then allow any of the insults to the body that could be hanging around contained to lose containment, and then we're off to the races. Yeah, so to think that, no, my home is great. I was exposed. I can't possibly have a problem. Sorry, doesn't work that way. To make that a little more complicated, once you are exposed, mold can start growing in your body. We call it, being colonized, particularly in the parts of the body that are close to the outside world, like the sinuses and the gut, so you can carry mold in you around from one home to the other. Your home might be perfect, but your home home, your body may need some help in order to get this thing benefited. So well. Let's then shift gears into into You were so good about pointing out the hope of these things are actually very treatable. Will you walk us through a little bit what? What are the ways that we can support the body? Then, to clear the mold or and, or to support the immune system. I call it de burdening the body, the unburdening the body, you know. How do we unburden the system and strengthen the immune system so we get this resolution or repair or rebalance? First, we need to talk about how to make the diagnosis. Yes, okay, so it's pretty easy. You just need to collect a little bit of urine in the morning and send it off to be analyzed. There are several laboratories that do this. My bias, having sent split samples to all of these labs over the years, is that the real time lab is the most consistent and most accurate of the labs, and that's my go to lab mosaic. Does it? Vibrant health? Does it? There's a blood test from my Myco that will do it. All of those can make the diagnosis, but if we're following it, the most accurate test for seeing how that is changing over time with treatment is real time. And just by the way, I have no financial connection to anything I'm going to talk about, be it a laboratory product supplement, you name it, I don't have that that connection. In case you're wondering if someone is paying, say this, I have a mentorship group of over 250 physicians, and they rely on my integrity of not being paid off by anybody for any reason, so that I'm giving them the most accurate information that I have access to when I say that. So I'll leave that alone. So if you collect the urine and we send it off for analysis, if you are, if you have mycotoxins in your urine from what we're collecting today. This is a no brainer. This is not rocket science. Then you have mycotoxins in your body, so the way it's getting into your urine is that it's coming out of your body. So that helps us to make the diagnosis. Once we have that diagnosis, then treatment basically involves three main components. The first, which is by far the most complicated, is you have to be certain that there isn't any mold in your living environment, be it work or home or
relatives, house that you go to regularly or
in your car, but mostly home and work, and you have to analyze those from a mold perspective. There's a number of ways to do that. You can do that without hiring an expensive home remediator. I like to do it in a two tier method. I like to start with getting what are called mold plates from a company called immunolytics, and basically putting a mold plate in every room in the house, which would include basement, crawl space, attic, garage, and you put a plate in every room, and you just, it's just a Petri dish that grows mold. And you simply open the dish, put it on the floor of the room, and leave it open for two hours, put the top back on and see what grows. It takes four or five days for mold to grow. If nothing's growing on the plate, great. If things are growing on the plate, you want to get it analyzed by immunolytics, so we know what exactly is growing in what part of the house? With that information,
mold plates are very helpful, but also crude. I want to get a better test, which is an Ernie test, to go over the dust in those rooms and analyze it for their mold content. So I really get an idea of are you at room?
Risk, or is there, I'll call it an acceptable amount of mold. That you can't have a completely mold free house does not exist, but you can get it down to a level where your immune system is not being bothered by it, and that that's the goal. What you don't want to do is get what's called air sampling, in which someone will come into your house, and they'll suck the air out of the middle of a room and analyze it for mold spores. The problem with that, which is one of the major tools of the remediation industry, is that mold spores are all heavier than air. They're not in the center of the room. They're on the floor, because that's that's where they are. So you want to get the home analyzed.
The biggest problem in treatment is, if you're being exposed to mold ongoing, you cannot get well. You can get a little better, but you can't get well, and that is the biggest hold up and treatment for the vast majority of people who are wrestling, once you've got that squared away, and we know that you're living in an environment that is acceptable, then the next step is to take what we call binders that are specific for the different mycotoxins that exist. Once the binders are on board, if we need to, not everybody does, if you have colonized, then we will add antifungals, either as a nasal spray or an oral treatment to get it out, and that will fix just about everybody. And what's the timeframe there that you're seeing with patients? Generally, at least a year, occasionally more, so that some people who are impatient get frustrated. They stop it too early, or they say, I did this for a month and I'm not better yet. And I tell people at the first visit, always, this is going to take at least a year, and you did not hear the word, at least it takes, it takes time to get mold out of the body. It is not a quick fix process, but it's incredibly healthful and life saving, if you will, take the time and effort to do it.
Well, I appreciate you laying all of that out, and I think that's also important. I think then when we really get into doing it in person. We see so much variability in all of it, right? Variability in testing and variability in symptom presentation, variability in response to binders. What are some of the extra tools that you've found that that people need to use, because it sounds so simple, right? Like bind it up, send it out, you're good. What are some of the places or issues that people find that that are falling short, where that's not really working?
So what I just described is very simple, and it will work for some people. So it can be just that simple. Some people will get well with blinders. I don't see those people anymore. My practice is referral from other physicians who have run up against the little wall and their patients are doing what I taught them to do, and they're still not getting better. So these patients tend to be what I will call ultra sensitive. What's happened is the mold toxicity has triggered in them, limbic vagal and mast cell activation issues, and all three of these words, which may be new to you, are interfacing biophysiological processes, but they're all important, and for many of our patients, if we they don't First reboot the limbic system and vagal nerve and trach mast cell activation, they're not going to be able to successfully take the binder. They just will find they can't even take a binder. They'll take a minuscule amount of charcoal and have a reaction to it. They'll take a homeopathic and have a reaction to it. So when those folks get to me, and that's pretty much all I do these days. It means, okay, we have to start with limbic and vagal retraining when the when those systems have settled down, then we'll do some mast cell treatment, and with that as a basis, then we will move into the binders and the antifungals, so we can help all of these folks, but it's as you are clearly pointing out, it isn't quite as simple usually as just take a binder and I'll be well, yeah, if you get lucky, maybe
one of the questions I get asked all the time is, what supplements do you recommend Now, whether this is for daily essentials, sleep support, gut health, what to take during pregnancy? I know how overwhelming it can feel to choose the right products. I have spent hours myself combing through these brands and ingredients, trying to make sure that I can find things that I'm comfortable taking myself and that I'm comfortable recommending to my.
Family into my patients, I'm then able to get feedback from my patients and family to see, did these supplements actually accomplish what we were hoping that they would accomplish, and this is why I created a curated, full script storefront with the brands and supplements I trust most. These are the same ones I use in my clinic and in my own home. When patients say, what do you recommend for magnesium, or what do you recommend for fish oil, or what do you recommend as a fiber supplement? All of these supplements are listed in this storefront. If you're curious, just visit the link in the show notes. There's also a link on our website and through our Instagram account to explore all of my favorites in one place. When you purchase through the link, you get 15% off. Now, back to the show. Yeah, I tell my patients, it's kind of like dominoes falling down, like if you happen to be in a situation where only one domino fell over, then setting one domino up is not so bad, but so often the circumstances that came about that made someone more predisposed to get quite ill had dominoes upstream, and then that knocks down a bunch of strings of dominoes downstream. And now it takes time to go set all of those back up. It's not just a simple for some people, it's not just a simple setting, setting up one domino, you know, with binders. What about expectations for binders? Again, I see a lot of frustrations with patients is doing this, you know, it's, it's hard to set the expectations appropriately. Once someone starts binders, how quickly do you start to see any improvement before you say that binder isn't quite doing the trick. It's not high enough dose. It's, you know, we need to support the body elsewhere. How do you know if you just need to give it more time versus supporting the body in other ways. So first of all,
a binder is unlikely to be helpful because there's families of mycotoxins, and usually multiple mycotoxins are present in the urine. So if you just took one binder, and like one of my difficulties with Dr shoemakers approach is that he basically only uses cholestyramine. That's nice. Colistyramine is a great binder for okra toxin and a weak binder for zero alanine, but it doesn't bind the other mycotoxins. So if a patient gets lucky, that will be sufficient, but I don't rely on luck if I can, and so we want to use binders that are specific for every single mycotoxin that we find on our testing. Now, to answer your question, again, it varies. I have some patients who will take their first dose of clay or their first dose of charcoal and go, Oh, that's better. I have other patients who aren't going to notice much of anything for three or four months. More typically, within six to eight weeks, you should start to notice something. So to give up on a binder because it's not doing anything in a couple of weeks is not understanding how it works, or certainly not how understanding what works for you. This is a long term project, and if you don't notice benefit of a particular binder, but it is specific for the mycotoxin your body, please keep taking it until we've had a chance to really see how this process is going on for you, and keep in mind that it may be that it's not going to kick in and work until you've done your limbic bagel mass cell training, until you get the mold out of your home. And so so many people get frustrated because they haven't really looked at the bigger picture, and they kind of, in their head, had this fantasy of, oh, I'm taking my charcoal on my clay, and I should be better now. I've been at it for three days. It's like,
so it's our job to set realistic expectations for patients, and
patients don't always want realistic expectation. Yeah, yeah. They want to be the exception, right? That's like, Hey, that was super quick and easy, and I wish it was like that. It would make my life easier if it was like that more often, but and it would make their lives easier. What are the things that you find, people or practitioners? Because you you see a lot of practitioners, or have seen a lot of other practitioners. What are the things that you see that people are doing incorrectly or that kind of irk you when you see patients coming in having tried a certain protocol, that just makes you, you know, frustrated to see that happening. Okay? There's a lot of answers to that question.
First, I think that many practitioners don't understand the order that they need to do treatment in, if I had to pick one thing so many physicians have heard my lectures or podcasts or study with me or whatever, but may not have grasped the whole picture. So.
What I see some people doing, for example, is putting patients on antifungals before they've given binders, which is like asking for a die off reaction, which is pretty nasty. So although I beg people not to put anyone on antifungals until binders are in place, not everybody does that lot of, forgive me, a lot of physicians like shortcuts can't do shortcuts in this work. If they don't work, you might get lucky once in a while, but you're going to hurt more people than you help if you, if you take shortcuts. Another issue is quite a few practitioners don't know how to prioritize what conditions need to be treated first, meaning
the term we use is root cause, like, what would explain all of these symptoms? So I get quite a few patients who've been treated for dysbiosis, epstein barr, methylation issues, mitochondrial dysfunction, all of those are downstream effects of mold toxicity, Lyme disease and the other things we're talking about. So you can treat Epstein Barr till the cows come home, and you're not going to help these patients. If you're working on methylation, more than half of sensitive patients can't take those supplements at this stage, and that alone isn't going to fix anything. Everyone in this field has mitochondrial dysfunction. So to say, Oh, you've got mitochondrial dysfunction. Great, everyone does, but the mitochondria rarely respond to the treatments we use until we get mold out of the system. And in the functional medicine world, everyone's been taught treat the gut first that get that squared away before you do anything else. The exception to that toxicity, mold and Candida, which come as a package deal most of the time. If you don't treat that first, you can treat the gut for years, and you're not going to get it well. So those, for me, are the biggies included in that are not recognizing that you need to do limbic bagel and mast cell treatment for many patients before you even get started on mold. And so, you know, when I lecture, I call these rookie mistakes? Yeah, so tell us with because our audience is female, I'm an OB GYN, and I deal with women and reproductive issues. Will you just say a comment about where you're specifically seeing mold, illness affect women's specific issues. Sure the number of different categories. Number one, mold toxicity messes with the pituitary ability to regulate hormones, so most of our patients will have adrenal, thyroid and sex hormone issues comes with the territory. Those should be treated and recognized early. You can't completely lock down treatment, because this is a moving target. Mold toxin levels fluctuate in the body, and so you can't give a hormonal treatment that gets someone into perfect balance and stay there. But if you can get them into the right ballpark, that can be very, very helpful. Second Candida comes with mold toxin almost all the time, and so almost all of our patients have Candida issues, which can profoundly affect our women patients. And again, many are used to getting nice statin or Diflucan. It's way more helpful if that person can be on binders specific for the Candida mycotoxin. So example, Candida makes Gliotoxin. So if someone has Gliotoxin on their test, then I know that there's Candida in there. And I'm going to want to use charcoal, Saccharomyces, boulardii and NAC as specific binders, then they will be able to respond much better to the treatment for that and keep it under control. So we have hormonal issues, we have Candida as an issue, and both mold toxin and Bartonella particularly, will cause bladder pain, pelvic pain, and those issues. So that it's helpful to know that if we treat the cause, we are likely to get all of that stuff much better. Yep, exactly. I know that you talk about these things, and have been talking about these things for decades, and I'm wondering if there are questions that you wished you were asked more often things that you you know, because you go through these basics so often. What are the things that we should be asking and really should be focusing on that maybe we're getting distracted with or or not getting through the basics enough to get to this higher level thinking? Well, because so many people, I.
Either aren't aware of or don't realize the importance of the whole limbic, vagal mast cell piece. Some of the questions that I think are very important are number one to ask patients if they've become sensitive to light, sound, touch, chemicals, smell, food or EMFs, if they have that is a limbic system that needs to be rebooted. It's just crying out for it. If someone tells me that, and I have to ask the question, my question is simple, do you ever get any symptoms immediately after eating? And that is mast cell activation, until proven otherwise, and although the common ones would be hives itching, runny nose, fatigue, brain fog, abdominal cramps, diarrhea, palpitations, if those come on while you're eating or immediately afterward that isn't food allergy. A lot of people assume, well, what did I just eat that must be doing it? It's the act of eating that is stimulating the mast cells to respond and and so that's those questions would be ones that I wish people asked a little more of to understand the order of treatment, yeah, to support the body better rather than just jumping straight to mold when we calm down that mast cell activation, then you can tolerate the mold treatment better. We don't have time to get too much into mast cell activation syndrome because it's it's complex in its own right, but the idea of the immune system kind of overreacting to everything. When we talk about mast cell activation syndrome, what percentage of MCAS Do you feel or have you seen is due to mold exposure or mold illness? The whole field of mast cell activation is kind of brand new. It kind of got put on the map by Larry a friend, back in 2016
not even not that long ago, when he wrote his book, never been against Occam. That was a game changer. And in that period of time, almost every major medical center now has a mast cell clinic. And my problem with those is, number one, they insist that they get laboratory work that makes the diagnosis and the tests are really, really inaccurate. One of my frustrations is I've had countless people go to major medical centers and be told your tryptase is normal. You can't have mast cell activation. And these are people who are telling me, I can't even finish chewing something and I'm already My nose is running and I'm getting hives and yeah. And I am baffled that these folks are getting those stories and still feel no, I can't treat you until I get a positive lab test. So I find that
very frustrating. And the other piece to it is the vast majority of those clinics aren't treating the cause, so they're treating mast cell activation as a standalone illness, when in fact, it's being triggered by mold toxicity and Lyme disease and EMF sometimes, and some other things. So you gotta those two pieces need to get into more conventional medical approaches, because a lot of people that I'm seeing are not being diagnosed, who have obvious mast cell activation and get terrific improvement within a few weeks of starting treatment. To answer your question, it is now known that 17% of the population is prone to this genetically meaning, not rare and in the mold population, 70 80% of my patients have mast cell activation, and 90% have limbic and vagal issues. Yeah, these are, we're not talking rare here. This is
really much more common than people realize. Yeah, yeah. I think that's that's true, and that's been my experience as well, having learned about MCAS very recent. I mean, I don't know, over the last few years, and now seeing patients, it seems so obvious, so much of the time of what's going on. But but a little baffling that as a physician for a decade, you know, I didn't know about it and never knew to look for it. And now that you know to look for it, it's, it's definitely, it's right there. It is, right there. Tell us, as we wrap up here, I want to come back to this idea of hope, because when we talk about mold, in my own experience, this was when I started Functional Medicine and kind of left the conventional medical world. One of the things that I was committed to is I was not going to treat mold, right? I was going to treat hormones and I was going to treat everything else.
And then I, but I didn't want to, I didn't want to go down that mold pathway. It's a little wishy washy, little stubborn, not sure you know the details about it. And then it took me about five minutes of practice to recognize that there I'm I was hitting a brick wall with patients very, very quickly. And a lot of patients, of the basics weren't working. You know, we worked on their diet. We worked even on their nervous system and their limbic system and getting their stress under control. We worked on their sleep and their hormones and their gut and we did all of these things, and still, there is a very large number of women who just were not getting better. They were absolutely exhausted. The exercise intolerance that you mentioned, just like I can't, and now I'm gaining weight because I can't exercise and I can't leave the house, and I can't be the person I want to be. And so I learned about mold and and have started treating that. And I think this is still really new to a lot of people. Many people have not heard about this, or they think it's on the fringe. Will you just say one more time, the idea of Hope behind this. Of of you know, we have practitioners like myself who are like, Nah, I'm not going down that road. But there are practitioners also now like myself who will go down that road. What? What is the hope here that you can offer to people who are struggling, who are feeling stuck, who have done all the things and aren't getting better.
Very simply, if you're still not getting better, find someone who actually works in this field. It might be someone in functional or integrative medicine, but not everyone in that field has studied mold or Lyme. There is a reluctance among colleagues to learn a whole new field. I particularly see that in the Lyme world, where people have been working with Lyme for many years, and I start to teach them, if you're not looking at mold, you're missing a huge piece of it. And they'll go, yeah, yeah, yeah, but this is what I do. And so so many of their patients are not moving forward because they're not looking for mold. I understand that a reluctance to learn something new. Forgive me, I come to the table with a different attitude, which is, teach me if it's new, I want to know the new stuff. I don't want to be intimidated by it. I I want to embrace that. I want every new tool I have that's me. Not everyone has, not everyone comes to the table. So
if you are struggling, find someone who can help you navigate through this complicated piece, at the risk of being self serving, a start of that is you might want to look at my book toxic. It was written, what? 2018
we've just finished the second edition, which is coming out next month. I've added six new chapters and really expanded the mold chapter. And so I'm really excited about that new edition. If you haven't looked at that book, it will give you a very good overview. If you have become particularly sensitive in the way that we're describing here. My other new book, which is called the sensitive patients healing guide, will really lay out for you all of the different components to that sensitivity and how to fix it. So again, my message is, everything we're talking about today is treatable, but you have to make the right diagnosis and know how to go do it, and we know how to do that now this, this is, it's a doable thing. So even if you haven't been helped until now, find people who are knowledgeable. I do have on my website, which is simply Neil Nathan md.com
a list of practitioners that I've trained in different states and literally all over the world. So those are people that I am comfortable, that they really know what they're doing. Yes, there's hope out there. Well, thank you for sharing that. I'll add that to that endorsement for your books. One of the things that I really appreciate about your writing is, I think a lot of books in the functional medicine space talk around the subject. They tell you how scary it is, and they tell you how bad it is, and then they they give you basic ideas of how to help, like, it will say, like, use binders and and then you're like, wait, but, but what? But? Like, what's the actual detail of how to do that? And your books are extremely detailed and extremely step by step, and you do such a helpful job, such a nice job of saying, this is exactly what I do. This is the dose. This is the brand. And I know a lot of people hesitate to write in that style, but I really appreciate that you are so willing to share your experience and your the trial and error by which you've learned it's it's a huge gift to all of us to be able to have that there and have it just in such detail. Because if it's not in detail, it's really hard to do it. You know, you can't just start doing it without having that level of detail. So I really appreciate that you're so willing to share.
Okay, thank you. I appreciate that, and please don't use my books as your treatment. You need to find a healthcare practitioner who knows how to do this. The entire treatment requires a lot of tweaking any given treatment, like binders, there's a risk to it. It's not well, charcoal is benign and clay is benign and chloral is benign. Yes, that's true, but if you take too high a dose, it can mobilize toxin faster than you can process it and make you worse. So you constantly have to be analyzing what you're doing and really noticing how you feel, so that you're not overdoing it, and that's key. Whatever you're doing has to be absolutely comfortable, so that you can be pulling the toxin out at a pace that is compatible with your own health. And that is, honestly it's it sounds easier to do than it actually is. I've been accused of saying this is an easy thing to do, and in point of fact, I keep being reminded that, well, maybe for me, because I've been doing this for 20 years, but for other people, it is not as obvious and requires, I call it tweaking. So please don't try to do this on your own, it has helped a bunch of people when they've done that, and I've gotten many very nice emails of people who've been helped over the years. But I've also gotten emails from people going, you know, I did what you said, and I'm horribly sick now, and you're a terrible human being, and going, I didn't tell you to do this on your own. I whatever you did wasn't on my advice, so please get the right kind of help. Well, I definitely agree with that as well. Well. Thank you, Neil, for being here. Are there any other resources you want to leave people with you mentioned your website, Neil Nathan, md.com, and then you also mentioned both of your books, which are everywhere, on Amazon and everywhere else is there, and other books you have more than just the two. Yeah, I've got some more. Another one, if you want to read a shorter version, like a cliff notes, I have an e book which is simply called mold and mycotoxins. Current evaluation and treatment. Get it from Amazon. It's 40 pages. It's pretty readable. It's a kind of a shorter version. I also really love Jill Chris, this book break the mold. It's the naturopathic approach. Jill and I have been teaching together for the last four plus years. She's brilliant and adds another dimension. And I'm very excited that in the second edition of toxic, which is coming out soon, she has added a whole piece to the mold chapter, so we're expanding and incorporating more information into that awesome well, thank you again for being here. I think it's been a really helpful conversation for people, and hopefully gives them an idea of where to get started if they're stuck and and hopefully give some hope of maybe they don't know exactly which steps to take next, but know that there are steps to take next, and that that it is treatable and slower than we all want, but but definitely doable. Okay, thanks for having me. Thank you so much for tuning in to today's episode. A huge thank you to our guests for sharing their insights and time with us. We are grateful for the incredible support from our sponsors and to all of you listening. We couldn't do this without you. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing on your favorite platform. You can find us on our website, uplift for her.com, YouTube, Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen. And if you found value here today, please share this episode with someone who would benefit from it. Leave us a comment or give us a review. It really helps us reach more listeners like you. Thank you for being part of our community. Stay tuned for our next episode. Lastly, this information is for educational purposes only and not intended to be medical advice.
