Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine
“Your Life Style Is Your Medicine” is a podcast that focuses on how a person's lifestyle can be the key to health and happiness. Routed in the principles of lifestyle medicine, Ed Paget, osteopath, and exercise scientist, interviews area-specific experts on how lifestyle impacts well-being, focusing on purpose, physical activity, nutrition, sleep, and stress, which could lead to a longer, happier life. Edward now runs immersive lifestyle medicine retreats, with the purpose of helping others take back control of their lives to live longer and healthier.
Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine
Understanding Mold Toxicity: Expert Insights and Healing Strategies with Dr. Terry Fox
Unlock the secrets to identifying and managing mold toxicity with insights from Dr. Terry Fox, a leading holistic integrative functional medicine expert. This episode promises to shed light on the often-misdiagnosed symptoms of mold exposure, such as fatigue and neurological issues, and how they intertwine with conditions like Lyme disease. Dr. Fox shares her personal journey, revealing how her son's mysterious health struggles led her to unravel the complexities of mold-related illnesses, offering a roadmap for those facing similar unexplained health challenges.
Explore advanced strategies for addressing mold and fungal colonization in the body, including the lungs and sinuses. Dr. Fox walks us through effective diagnostic approaches, like urinary and DNA dust tests, and explains a comprehensive two-phase detox protocol. For those dealing with severe cases, discover the role of ENT specialists in surgical interventions and learn about the necessary steps to combat concurrent illnesses like Lyme disease. This episode is packed with actionable advice, making it a must-listen for anyone grappling with mold-related health issues.
Gain valuable insights into the mental health implications of mold exposure, particularly its impact on anxiety, depression, and cognitive impairments in children. Dr. Fox discusses how environmental factors, such as toxins, exacerbate these issues and offers practical solutions for reducing mold exposure within the home. Learn about the link between mold and conditions like POTS and mast cell activation syndrome, and get tips on dietary adjustments and home remediation techniques. For more resources and educational content, visit Dr. Fox's website at drfoxmedicaldetective.com and boulderholistic.com, where she continues to guide and support those on the path to recovery.
Welcome to the your Lifestyle is your Medicine podcast, where we do deep dives into topics of mind, body and spirit. Through these conversations, you'll hear practical advice and effective strategies to improve your health and ultimately add healthspan to your lifespan. I'm Ed Padgett. I'm an osteopath and exercise physiologist with a special interest in longevity. Now, did you know that mold in your home can cause serious health problems? Did you know how to test for mold and do you know how to determine whether or not the mold you have is dangerous? Do you know how to treat mold exposure? Now, if you're like me, you probably said no to all those questions.
Speaker 1:Well, I've got good news for you, because today my guest is Dr Terry Fox. She's a holistic, integrative functional medicine doctor based in Colorado, and she's well known for her expertise in addressing fatigue, bioidentical hormones, sleep disorders, gastrointestinal dysfunction, chronic inflammatory response syndrome and our chosen specialist subject for the day mold toxicity. She also likes to sprinkle on a little bit of Lyme disease and helps with that as well. So Dr Fox is a family trained physician who combines these natural healing modalities with her comprehensive training in Western medicine. In her practice, she blends herbal medicine, nutrition, exercise counseling, supplements and stress reduction techniques and like, in my opinion, doctors of the future will be. Her practice begins with a thorough two-hour intake to identify underlying triggers of imbalances, and she utilizes cutting-edge technology and lab testing to tailor individualized treatment plans aimed at restoring wellness and balance.
Speaker 1:Now, mold toxicity is such an important topic and it's commonly overlooked, and this can unfortunately result in in deaths, as we saw a couple of years ago with a young boy in the UK. But this is a super important topic and something that I really think we should be paying more attention to and get as much education on as possible, dr Fox welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:All right, I want to start this with knowing a little bit more about the symptoms of mold exposure. So what are five things that could be a sign that someone has been exposed to mold?
Speaker 3:So symptomatically fatigue, brain fog, cognitive dysfunction of all kinds, rapid weight gain or loss and unusual neurological presentation. So numbness, tingling, weakness, burning, ice picks, crawling sensations, involuntary muscle movements, things like that.
Speaker 1:Okay does a person have to have all of those to have a diagnosis, or just one or two of those?
Speaker 3:Yeah, even just a couple.
Speaker 1:Fatigue brain fog, headaches and migraines are really common, and anxiety and insomnia Okay so that covers a broad scope of symptoms, and we're going to tease out how to find out whether those symptoms are something else or whether they're mold later in the show. But I'm interested how did you go from a standard medical doctor to a mold expert?
Speaker 3:I always wanted to do more integrative, natural, holistic medicine and so I trained in that after my medical degree and then I did a lot of functional medicine training and I was doing functional medicine for years and enjoying it and having great outcomes with my patients. And there was about 15% of my patients that wouldn't budge. They just wouldn't get better with the normal functional medicine matrix and interventions. And it turned out that most of these patients had biotoxin illness, which is Lyme, Lyme co-infections, mold toxicity, and so I ended up diving a little bit more into that toxicity and so I ended up diving a little bit more into that.
Speaker 3:And then what happened was my son got really sick. So he was eight years old. He was one of those really active, thrill-seeking, maniac little boys that was running around constantly and busy, and he started limping and he started getting stiff and he started getting anxious and he started putting on weight. He was this underweight, scrappy little kid. And so I tested him for everything and then I, you know, he ended up having Lyme disease, and you know, this is quite some time ago.
Speaker 3:And so I brought him to this wonderful Lyme doc, dr Stephen Harris, in California, and he gave us a urinary mycotoxin test for mold. And so we did the test on my son and his results were through the roof. And from there I began learning about mold and how you can't really clear Lyme or treat Lyme in the presence of mold. You always have to treat the mold first. And so that was my introduction and, you know, then I just learned more and more about lime and about mold, and mold trumps a lot of other diagnoses. So, yeah, I ended up, you know, becoming a mold expert.
Speaker 1:With that presentation of your son having a limp, being really active and putting on some weight. So myself, as a as a manual therapist, I may have been like, well, it's hurt his hip and he's put on weight because he's not exercising, so is is Lyme and mold, uh toxicity commonly misdiagnosed or not reported, or yeah, it's often misdiagnosed or not reported.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's often misdiagnosed. So the symptoms are very, you know, they're pretty big, there's a large amount of different symptoms and they're a little vague-ish. They could, you know, sound like a lot of different things. It often gets misdiagnosed mold and Lyme. I always like to say if you have more than one trash can diagnosis like IBS or fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue or mixed connective tissue disorders, then you've probably got biotoxin illness, mold or Lyme.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking there's going to be people listening to this and they'll be like, hmm, that could be me. I've got X, Y and Z and no one's given me a diagnosis that makes any sense. My doctor's not interested, so what would be the next step in a patient's journey if they, if they, become aware that they're not right, then what?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So if they're suspicious for if they feel mold is, you know, suspicious for them and the picture matches their, you know, clinical symptoms um, there is a few little things you could do before paying for testing. So there's the visual contrast study you can do online. There's a couple different ones and, um, it's a. It's a visual where you look at a pattern and you, you know, write what you see. And when you have mold toxicity in your brain, you can't see the pattern inside the thing in the visual contrast study. So you fail, yeah yeah.
Speaker 3:And then, when you get rid of the mold, you can see it.
Speaker 1:It's crazy. I see those things. It says like do you see the girl or the candle?
Speaker 3:I'm like it's kind of like that, but's for mold. Yeah, it's a fingerprint for mold, and so that's kind of an easy way just to see, like, oh okay, well, I'll do one of these. There's also some good. So sers is chronic inflammatory response syndrome. That's the disease you can get from mold toxicity, and there's a few really good um sers questionnaires online that you can ask and see if it looks suspicious as well, and then, if you want to know, you just do a urinary mycotoxin test on yourself. So mold releases mycotoxins that are toxic to humans or disease-causing, pathogenic, and so you can find these toxins in the urine, and so there's a couple of good companies that do really good urinary mycotoxin tests and so you know you give a urine sample and you either have mycotoxins or you don't.
Speaker 1:So let's say it's wintertime or autumn, I should say there's more rainfall, it's getting a bit moldy, there's musty outside, and you do one of these tests. Does it show that you have, like, a chronic mold exposure or acute mold exposure? Like, how do you differentiate the difference, or is there a false positive or something like that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it doesn't. It can't really determine whether it was a previous exposure and you brought it with you. It's living in you. You've colonized whether or not you're being exposed right now in a house, but it does distinguish between, like outdoor non-pathogenic molds and indoor toxic molds.
Speaker 1:Okay, wait, it colonizes inside of you. Yeah.
Speaker 3:What? Yeah, it, it colonizes inside of you. Yeah, what's so? Yeah, so, um, I was just, you know. A good example is imagine you're living in a moldy house and eventually you know it's humid out and so the mold is sporulating, which means there's spores up in the breathing air and you breathe one in and it sticks in your sinuses, or you swallow one down your esophagus and it can replicate and have babies and build communities and families and they aggregate together and form a colony and then they secrete a glycoprotein matrix around themselves called biofilm that protects them from your immune system and from antifungal agents. And from there they just release mycotoxins in your system that you know. Many of them are nerve toxins. They're toxic to the central nervous system. Yeah, so it can be from a previous exposure or a current exposure.
Speaker 1:You know, I have actually I haven't come across it mold, but maybe mold and fungus are similar. I've had patients who've had like, literally lumps of fungus removed out of their lung and that kind of stuff. That's bad yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so mold is a fungus. Okay, so same same yeah. So a fungal ball in, like their lungs or something, would be, yeah, mold.
Speaker 1:Is that extreme to find the fungus growing inside you?
Speaker 3:or do we need to focus on that or not? Well, the a fungal ball in the lungs is very extreme, okay, but, um, you know, colonization in the sinus is pretty common, um, and you can colonize in the gi tract or other places in the upper respiratory tract. Um, like you know, I always laugh that the purpose of mold on the planet is to turn over and decompose organic dead matter, to turn it into soil for fresh growth. But you don't want mold trying to decompose your own living organism from the inside out. So it's pretty gross.
Speaker 1:So a person has some symptoms, they come, maybe they do their online visual test and they see something. So now they're interested, they take a urinary test, comes back positive. So we're correlating now their results of the test with their symptomatic picture and it's like, yes, you probably have had some chronic exposure to mold. Now what? What do you do as a physician?
Speaker 3:Well, two things. One is I start them on a mold detox protocol. So we do things that help you metabolize, detoxify, pull these mycotoxins out so that you're not so sick. So I would get them going on that and then I would have them do a test on their home and so there's a kind of an easy dna dust test that's do-it-yourself, called a qpcr and ermi, um, and it's kind of just quick and dirty like does it look terrible? Do you need to get somebody out, or is it? Does it look pretty clean? Um, if you're suspicious that you've got mold in your current house, like you know, you know you've had some water leaks, you know you smell something musty in the bathroom or something like that then you're going to want to get an indoor environmental professional out to do a full evaluation of the house.
Speaker 1:Yes, and I interviewed Jason Earl in episode 34. And he talked about how to test your house and then what how to remediate your house as well. So if anyone wants to listen to that, that's episode 34, we go into detail on what to do in your home.
Speaker 3:Perfect.
Speaker 1:Okay. So these things that are growing, let's say, in your sinuses, do they need more? Like, how do you identify them in your sinus, or is that just a place they commonly grow?
Speaker 3:it's a common place of where they're living in you. If it's a previous exposure, we don't have great tests. There are some nasal swabs. Um, we often don't catch it on a nasal swab. I think it's more in here than where we can get to with the swab, um.
Speaker 3:And so when I get a positive urinary mycotoxin and I'm not doing a mycotoxin on somebody that I'm not already suspicious of you know they have all the symptoms and usually by the time people come to me they've seen 20 to 40 doctors and they've seen all the specialists. So you know I'm not doing the initial workup of all the other million little things that could be. Usually they've had all that done by the time they come to me. And so when I get a positive urinary mycotoxin test, I just assume colonization. And then what happens?
Speaker 3:So the way I treat mold is it's two phases. Phase one is teaching your body how to detox and pull these things out with binders and glutathione and other things. And then phase two is kill or be killed, where we kill any colonized mold living in the system. Now, if you don't have anything living in the system and you just breathed it in in your current home and then peed it out for the test. You will get a hundred percent better on phase one and you won't. You won't need to do antifungals and stuff and that's kind of how we can tell you get out of the exposure. You do phase one and they're a hundred percent.
Speaker 1:They don't then they didn't colonize so these colonizations then, so I'm just going back. They don't like. You can't see them on x-ray or anything like that.
Speaker 3:Not really so. There's some MRI imaging that you can occasionally see, sort of more like softened in the sinuses, and then we have, you know, an ENT that specializes in biotoxin illness, that does surgeries, and he pulls out these fungal balls from people's stenoid sinuses and other sinuses that we couldn't see on any imaging um, which is yeah, insane right.
Speaker 2:Have you seen one of those fungal balls? What do they look like? I mean black and nasty, like you'd expect more to look like yeah, kind of like gross.
Speaker 3:You just can't. I mean I, when I saw the first time I saw it after my patient had it done I was like wow, there is nothing I would have done that would have gotten you all the way better like I can't get an antifungal to up in your sphenoid sinus.
Speaker 1:There's no blood flow there's no blood flow and it's protecting itself with the biofilm right okay, so you need ENT specializing in removal of like mold.
Speaker 3:Most people are not colonized like that. Most people we can handle, 99% of patients would get better with it. Just regular mold protocol.
Speaker 1:Now did that person or can you think of another example of a patient have a dramatic recovery from their symptoms to either going through the protocol or having it removed, to a recovery? Can you give me an example?
Speaker 3:Yeah, he was tricky because he wasn't responding like I would think he also had Lyme, so it was, you know, a messier picture. But you know we did try. You know a variety of different antifungals and different treatment regimens and he got a little better, but he was in a ton of pain.
Speaker 1:Was pain.
Speaker 3:Yeah, a lot of pain. He was young, he was like 21. I mean, he had all kinds of systemic symptoms as well and he just wasn't. You know, it wasn't really. Most people respond really well. I find mold to be really treatable and a great diagnosis. People do really well and he didn't, and so he ended up going to that guy and getting it removed and then he responded great to the whole protocol. We had to clean up you know the mess from. Once you pull something like that out, it spreads more mycotoxins in the brain and in the system. So we had more work to do, but he did great.
Speaker 1:So you mentioned the brain there as well. Does mold affect things like mood or even depression and that kind of thing?
Speaker 3:Yeah, some of the most common symptoms are anxiety and insomnia and often depression, sometimes suicidality, and then in kids it's often more neuropsychiatric symptoms than you know tummy aches and headaches but then they all of a sudden are anxious, they're all of a sudden can't sleep, they're all of a sudden depressed and crying out of nowhere and they might get OCD, they might get tics. Yeah, it presents more like that in kids. So a lot of the mycotoxins that are pathogenic or disease-causing are nerve toxins, so they attack the central nervous system and the peripheral nerves as well.
Speaker 1:There seems to be an epidemic of kids now getting more depressed and more anxious, and you know we can point fingers at lockdown, we can point fingers at COVID and so on. Do you think mold plays a role in that as well?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I do and I think that. So the number has always been only like a quarter of the population is sensitive to mold, but I really feel that number is increasing and I think there's a variety of reasons why. And yeah, I have a lot of kids on college campuses that are patients, that are mold sick, that were brilliant and going to Stanford, for example, and then suddenly they can't think and they're anxious and they're foggy and they're exhausted and they can't get up out of their beds and you know, I think we all probably went to college in moldy dorms, you know. So I mean, I think things are changing and people are a bit more sensitive and I think kids are more sensitive. I always sort of I sort of blame the blood-brain barrier. I sort of think that glyphosate I don't know if you guys have glyphosate it's not legal in England, is it?
Speaker 1:Well, in the EU, I think it was banned yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. So it increases permeability of the blood-brain barrier and then things can get in. And then you get autoimmune things like dunopans and pandas.
Speaker 1:Pandas, yeah immune encephalitis.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I sort of think you know partially the reason kids and also it's total body burden, so your system doesn't crash until your bucket is full and completely overflows. So imagine you're born and you get some exposure to plastics and pesticides and then maybe you get COVID and you get a ton of inflammation from that. And then you know if you live here you can't avoid glyphosate. And then maybe biotoxin from Lyme or who knows, and then you live in a moldy place and those mycotoxins might fill up your bucket and crash the system. And so I think that our kids are exposed to a lot more chemicals and worse, toxin, like they're more toxic than they used to be when we were young.
Speaker 3:And so I think their buckets fill up easier and the system crashes.
Speaker 1:So let's keep talking about kids here, because I think a lot of parents are obviously more worried about their children than they are about themselves sometimes. So let's say someone has a kid, and perfectly normal to start with, but that bucket started filling up and they're not sure whether it's with mold or whatever. If they took them out of their house but they had had a mold exposure let's say they're away for a weekend or even a week's vacation would the symptoms change or do you think it would continue?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, that's a big clue. So not everybody. It probably depends on your total body burden, but a lot of people will go oh my gosh. I went, total body burden, but a lot of people will go, oh my gosh. I went away for a week or two and I felt completely fine. And then they, you know, they think it's confusing because they were on vacation so they're not stressed and they're not having to take care of their kids and you know they don't know. But then they come back and all the symptoms come back when they come back into their house. I think it takes more than a weekend, but you know, kids are more resilient. So I used to notice when we would go camping, my, my son, would be able to be active and play a lot more. So but I feel like adults, it's a week or two out before they feel any different.
Speaker 1:Why do you think we as humans have problems with mold? And you mentioned some outdoor molds don't cause a problem, but some other molds do and I feel like you know as our evolutionary past we would have been, you know, in the woods, we would have been sleeping on the ground and exposed to mold quite a lot. What is it about these particular molds in the houses that we have nowadays that are problematic?
Speaker 3:Well, they're mycotoxin producing nowadays that are problematic. Well, they're mycotoxin producing and mycotoxins are pathogenic to humans, and the ones outside don't generally produce mycotoxins.
Speaker 1:What is it about our houses that causes like that's friendly to the mycotoxin producing mold?
Speaker 3:I think it's the particular types of mold that grow. And then also they're in an indoor space, so you know they're getting the concentration is higher than if you're outside and open air. So one of the things I always tell people is open your windows, you know, ventilate as much as you can. You know it's the concentration and the density of the mycotoxins in the house. We build our houses that are more energy efficient now, where they're really sealed tight, and so those, you know, the old houses, are built with draft on purpose because of mold. So you know there's a little airflow and it doesn't get so concentrated. And then we also know that if you expose mold to electromagnetic frequencies it releases 10 times more mycotoxins. So maybe we could have, you know, handled some mold in the basement and then we put our wifi down there and then it's 10 times more mycotoxins in the air and then our buckets are more full from the world we live in.
Speaker 1:Let's. So someone comes to to you, they've got their positive diagnosis, they've gone through, uh, a course with you, and people might be listening to this and saying, well, that's all well and good for the residents of boulder, colorado, but what about me? I live in the uk. Or what about me? I live in canada. What can they do?
Speaker 3:yeah, well, you can look for, um, you know a doc who knows how to treat mold, and and um, I'm a founding member of an organization called ICI, which is the International Society of Environmentally Acquired Illness, and there are, um, you know mold docs all over the world that we're all in the same um organization together so you can see if there's someone near you. And then, um, then so I'm an MD in Colorado and I can really legally only treat people in Colorado. So I get calls from people all over the world, and so I created a course that's kind of a do it yourself that walks you through. It's a very sort of step by step, spoon fed kind of methodical gentle um, phase one and phase two mold eradication protocol that's designed to help you get all the way better and healthy again, but also not to make yourself more sick. So a lot of people will get parts of the information and try to treat themselves and they'll go too fast and basically they're trying to detox more than their body's capable of and they get sicker and then they think they can't get better.
Speaker 3:So in phase one mold detox you're binding these different strains of mycotoxins and pulling them out in the stool and you're giving the body the things that needs to metabolize it, to get it out in the urine, the stool and the sweat, and then you add in antifungals and biofilm. But you can imagine so if somebody came into me really mold sick and I started them on an antifungal that kills mold living in the system. When you kill the mold it releases more mycotoxins, and so I would just flood their system with more of the very same thing that was already making them sick. So there's a particular order to it and you should really only feel better in a good mold protocol. You should never feel worse, because when we try to detox more than we're capable of, we mobilize these toxins to different places. They might end up in a worse place than when they started. So it's not one of those diagnoses that you get better before you get worse. You really should not suffer through it.
Speaker 1:What do you do in phase one? What sort of things are you using? Are you using pharmaceutical stuff? Are you using natural things?
Speaker 3:Mostly natural stuff. So there's different binders for different strains of mold, and so when you get the urinary mycotoxin test, you know which binders you need. So you know binders are things like activated charcoal, bentonite, clay. They bind these mycotoxins in the GI tract and pull them out in the stool. You don't absorb them into the body, and then things like liposomal glutathione will help you metabolize it so you can get it out. I do a lot of organ detox support, so kidney, liver, lymph, opening up all your detoxification channels and pathways, you can begin draining that bucket on your own. There's a lot of things that you can do to help the process go quicker, like infrared saunas, ionic foot baths, detox baths, stuff like that. And then phase two is kill or be killed. So then that's the antifungals and biopalm.
Speaker 1:What's a good example of an antifungal?
Speaker 3:Itraconazole, voriconazole. But this is the when you start the antifungals is when the needle really moves. That's when you get the big clinical turnaround. After I start the antifungals on the next visit they're like I feel so much better. So you know, I know people have you know they're coming to a holistic doc thinking it's going to be all natural. But there really aren't great natural ways of killing the mold in the system.
Speaker 1:If someone's working with you online or doing this online program, how would they get those antifungal medications?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so so it's an online course. It's about 35 modules. They're really short and kind of easy to get through and in there there's a lot of different guides to. One of them has I have a find your supporting physician guide. So there's only a couple prescriptions that you need One.
Speaker 3:Ideally you would get a compounded prescription nasal spray that is trying to get into the sinuses. There's alternatives if you can't get that. There's alternatives if you can't get that. And then there's if you need cholestyramine or Wellcol it's a particular kind of binder then you need a prescription for that. And then for the antifungals you'll need a prescription for that. And in the Finding your Supportive Physician Guide I give a lot of different directories and resources for you know you want somebody kind of holistically oriented um. Not not likely a primary care doc, unless they are open-minded. Um, but any Lyme doc will believe in mold and they don't all know how to treat it. Um, most functional medicine docs know about mold, but they don't all do it, so they'll support you. There's the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine Institute of Functional Medicines directory.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so with this course, with those modules, does a person get to interact with you at all or do they get a support group or anything like that?
Speaker 3:Yep, there's a couple of different options. So there's a do-it-yourself just go through the modules on your own, and then you would be part of the community support forum. And then there's a another option where you have twice a month Q&As with me as you're going through the course, and both you're in the community support form.
Speaker 1:Earlier on you mentioned about how the mold toxins can damage the nervous system or cause neurological problems. What sort of illnesses come from that damage?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, I mean, like I was saying in the beginning, there's a lot of unusual neurological presentation. So I have people that come in with fasciculations which are like involuntary muscle movements all over their body, like all the time, like weird neurologic things like that. People have burning sensations, ice pick sensations, crawling sensations. They'll get ataxic, so they'll have balance issues. We see a lot of POT of pots, if you're familiar with that.
Speaker 1:so dizziness, lightheadedness, um, a lot of hypermobility we see as well that and but that's so a connective tissue problem, that's that's pre, like a predisposition to that or like I'm not quite sure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think so the I think so the EDS spectrum right. So I think that biotoxin illness makes it worse. So it's not necessarily the cause. Most people that have it, you know, probably had a gene, a genetic predisposition. But it makes the hypermobility worse. So we see them getting more injured and then when you treat the mold it'll get a little better. They'll be a little less hypermobility, worse. So we see them getting more injured and then when you treat the mold it'll get a little better. Look at, be a little less hypermobile what about mast cell activation?
Speaker 3:yeah, a lot of that mold is a very common trigger of mast cell activation syndrome. Yeast is as well.
Speaker 1:I recently had a patient who I was working with me for back pain and they were very apprehensive because everything they tried in the past would trigger this. They described it's like you know, I click something in my back, so there's the connective tissue disorder, because you shouldn't have a hypermobility in between your shoulder blades and it would put the shooting pain down into their hands and then they would be flat on their back for a week with just fatigue. That was their symptoms to me and I was like, huh, okay, all right, well, we'll take it very carefully, and so on. And then throughout the we did 12 sessions. The other sessions they got tested and they ended up with being diagnosed with a thing called mast cell activation syndrome and then they've traced it back to a mold infection in their previous home.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that is interesting.
Speaker 1:So what could a person be eating that could be possibly better for their mold exposure or maybe even worse for their mold exposure?
Speaker 3:Well, so if you do an anti-inflammatory diet, that'll help reduce your inflammatory load. The one mycotoxin that can get elevated just from food is aflatoxin. So if there, if I have a patient whose urinary mycotoxin is positive, but it's just aflatoxin and it's not that high, I'll write that off to food sometimes.
Speaker 1:What is that toxin being? What food is that then?
Speaker 3:Oh, nuts and berries, coffee beans, oh yeah, okay, so the common.
Speaker 1:Well, for some people it might be common, but there's a lot of talk in in the social media at the moment about peanut butter and coffee being problematic because of the amount of mold is that something? That you're um, you're concerned about you're, you're aware of I'm aware of it.
Speaker 3:Like to me the food, the mycotoxins that you get from the food that you eat, are a drop in the bucket relative to breathing them in a water damage building all day. And my patients, you know, by the time they come to me they might have SIBO and they might have MCAS and they're layering FODMAP diet on top of an antihistamine diet on top of a mold diet and they're eating five foods and it's just not healthy. So I tell them not to worry about the low mold diet.
Speaker 1:We talked a little bit about the glycinate having a potential problem on the blood-brain barrier and that may be increasing people's susceptibility to mold. Do you think that mold in general in our homes has also got worse?
Speaker 3:I mean, I think in the US, the way that we build. I think that you know we build our homes out of mold food, so it's all cellulose, it's all drywall and wood. This is what mold and mycotoxins live in. If you have glass and steel and cement, you're much less likely to have a mold issue.
Speaker 1:And how does a person go about remediating that? I mean, I know I've talked to the guy on a different podcast, but what's been your experience of you clear someone up or you tell them how to get rid of the mold in their bodies, but they still got to get rid of the mold in their environment? How do they do that?
Speaker 3:And so a remediation, a good remediation, is removing any wet, damp, moldy materials, going a full 24 inches past what you know is damp or wet, and then that has to be done under containment. So as soon as you disturb mold, you pull drywall out of a wall, it releases all the spores. Pull drywall out of a wall, it releases all the spores, it goes, and then it gets in your HVAC ducts and, you know, in the fabric of everything around you. So it has to be under containment with negative air and then the nanoparticles and the fragments and the mycotoxins that mold releases in the house they can land in your drywall and your wood. And so everything has to be you know. You first you have to vacuum every single surface and then you wipe down every surface with a microfiber cloth and an antifungal agent and then sometimes you fog at the end. Yeah, it's, it's kind of a big process. If you don't have HVAC ducts it can be less.
Speaker 1:Dr Fox, it's been a real pleasure having you on the show. Is there anything you'd like to say to people who think they've got mold exposure?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would love to just say to have hope and you're not alone. And mold is a very treatable diagnosis. People do great. It's not that hard to treat. Sometimes it can be tricky to get out of the exposure, but once you do that part and you start treatment, people do really, really well.
Speaker 1:Now, that's excellent. That's such a positive message. So where can people find you and maybe learn a bit more about your course?
Speaker 3:Yeah, sure, so drfoxmedicaldetectivecom is the website that has the course on it, and there's also a webinar that I did on mold that you can watch if you're interested. And then my medical practice is boulderholisticcom, and we have a lot of blogs and information on there.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much and I'll put all that information in the description below Great. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks for being on the show. Thank you for joining me in my conversation with Dr Terry Fox. Now. If you've enjoyed listening to and learning from this podcast, please leave a comment and leave a suggestion for a future podcast guest that you would like us to feature. If you're on Apple, leave us a five-star review if you're so inclined, and remember if you're my direct help. You can send me an email, ed at edpadgettcom, or visit my website, edpadgettcom, where you can learn a little bit more about how I can help you make your lifestyle your medicine.