7 Tips to Conquer Mold Toxicity-Transcript from Pick Dr. Osborne’s Brain
Seven tips today to conquer mold toxicity. So let’s dive in first to some of the symptoms associated with a mold toxicity. So who should be taking maybe it’s mold? What are the main things that we’re going to be experiencing? So symptom number one and probably one of the most pervasive and common symptoms of a mold toxicity is chronic sinusitis, nasal infections. There was a study done. I think it was published in the Journal of American Medical Association a number of years ago on in my area. Actually, the study was done on participants in my area of Southeast Texas, the one in the coastline, is that most cases of upper respiratory infections, which is your common colds that when you go to the doctor and they give you a diagnosis of an upper respiratory infection, what do most doctors do. They say, “Here’s the antibiotic.” They don’t differentiate whether it’s a bacterial infection or a mold infection, but a lot of these infections are mold-oriented.
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So think about this. Even if you suffer with chronic sinusitis or what you feel what might be chronic environmental allergies, it could very well possibly be mold growing inside of your sinuses creating that symptoms. So one of the things that can be done is a culture swab where you can take a swab and run it up in the nose into the sinus cavities and you can actually then send those. Those can be sent to the lab. Your doctor can run this type of test. You can grow them. You can differentiate is it mold, is it bacteria. If it’s mold or bacteria, what kind of mold or what kind of bacteria. Even beyond that, you can differentiate what type of treatment might work best to kill what you have.
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So for example if it’s not mold but it is bacteria, which antibiotic will work against it, or which natural agent might work against it. If it is a bacterial infection and not a mold infection, you certainly might need an antibiotic. You don’t want to just throw a broad spectrum antibiotic at it because that’s why we have antibiotic resistance. Is the doctors aren’t enough doing differentiation? So if you’re finding yourself struggling with chronic sinusitis, very, very common that it’s a mold infection and not a bacterial infection. So make sure before you take an antibiotic, make sure you ask your doctor to differentiate between the two. This can take up to four weeks. So when your culturing mold from a sinus culture, it can take up to four weeks to get a result back. That’s because we want to wait long enough for that culture to be able to propagate and grow molds. Sometimes mold takes a little bit longer to grow in a culture, so keep that in mind.
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One of the other symptoms of chronic mold or chronic mold exposure is debilitating fatigue, unendearing debilitating fatigue. You sleep 10 hours, you wake up and you want to sleep 10 more hours. You’re that tired. So if you’re suffering with chronic fatigue syndrome, this is oftentimes or it can be. Again, it’s not the only cause of CFS but it can be one of the causes of chronic fatigue. So if you’re suffering with unendearing fatigue it’s not relieved by rest, you might want to think about or start thinking about mold.
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Immune dysfunction. If you pick up every little infection, every little cold, every little flu, every little thing, a bug that comes to your life and you’re picking it up and you’re chronically the one that’s being sick, that is a sign of mold toxicity as well. Remember mold can suppress the immune system over time and that leads recurring infections. Sleep issues, one of the byproducts of mold is that it can disrupt hormones. Some of these hormones affect how you’re able to go to sleep and stay asleep. Migraine headaches, very, very common to see this in mold sufferers. The mold exposure can trigger migraine headache. Muscle and joint pain, super, super common to see that.
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Those symptoms that I just gave you, again, the chronic sinusitis, debilitating fatigue, the immune dysfunction, the sleep issues, the migraine headaches and the muscle and joint pain; those symptoms are more what we see with environmental mold, so mold that’s in your home or mold that’s at your workplace or mold that may be even in your car. Then there are also yeast infections where women can pick up vaginal yeast infections or oral thrush. You can get yeast infections in the GI tract, candida overgrowth for example. These can cause different kinds of … They can cause similar symptoms but they can also cause very different types of symptoms, so some of the more common. If the mold is inside of you and not in your environment yet in essence, you can be mold sick from mold being in your environment. You can be mold sick from mold growing inside you especially if they are linked to candida or chronic sugar craving. You have sugar bug and you chronically crave sweet.
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Severe irritability and mood swings. Women, if you struggle with hormone dysfunction, if you struggle with your periods and your cycles become irregular, very, very common to see that with a candida overgrowth. So again, just some differentiation between external and internal mold although oftentimes it’s both or it can be. So keep those things in mind.
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So now let’s talk about what we can do about it. So those are the symptoms. What do we do? So those of you that have had water damage, again, whether you’ve been in a hurricane and your home was flooded or whether or not you had roof leak and your home got water in it or the AC busted and the drain pans dripped and got into your insulation in your attic or a pipe busted in your house, doesn’t matter whatever happened. We’re wanting to know what do you do after the water damage. Once the damage is done, is that house a safe house or do you sell it and move out? No, you can have a safe house even after water damage. It’s very, very critical that you take the right and appropriate steps
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So if you got water damage in the home, the very first thing you want to make sure that you are doing is assess the damage and how extensive the damage actually is. So obviously, whether it was a pipe busted or whether it was a roof leak, you got to assess where the leak is and how much and how far did that water penetrate and potentiate the growth or potentially allow for the growth of mold and spreading of mold growth. So you have to look and assess the damage obviously once the water is gone. It is the water damage area that needs to be completely removed.
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So for example if it’s an area where a pipe broke behind the wall and it damaged a big, let’s say it damaged a big two-foot piece of Sheetrock, you need to take at least, at least 24 and preferably 36 inches away from the water damage. Remember that Sheetrock is a sponge. Once water hits it, it absorbs the water and distributes that water into the Sheetrock. I’ve actually seen cases of severe mold toxicity behind somebody’s wall where the mold was so thick running behind the wall. You couldn’t see it because it was growing behind the wall, but it was making this particular individual extremely, extremely ill. So keep that in mind that you want to remove the water-damaged material. Preferably, again, if it’s an absorbent material, you don’t want to just remove the area that had water damage. You don’t want to just paint over it or spray some type of primer paint on it and expect that that’s not going to grow mold.
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Some people that get water damage and they’re like, “Oh let’s cover the water damage up with a primer.” That’s a horrible idea. One of the worst things you could do is cover up the potential water damage and just assume the mold won’t grow. You want to cut that area out preferably two to three feet around that area. Make sure that everything is dry. So after the water damage, you want to make sure you remove any of the materials. Whether it was Sheetrock or whether it was insulation, it doesn’t matter. You want to make sure that you remove it, all of those and the material around it if it was an absorbent material where you’re not actually letting that water stay in a dark, damp area where the mold can now have that perfect environment to potentiate.
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One of the other things, once you’re done cutting out the areas where there’s been the water damage, you need to let time or you need to time on your side where you’re letting it air out. So some of the strategies with that is you want to make sure you have plenty of time for it to dry. Don’t just rip out the damaged area and then immediately replace the Sheetrock. If the water and the humidity are still too high, you can still have the potentiation for that mold to grow. So again it’s important to give enough time to let that water damage area air out. So fans and dehumidifiers are very, very helpful with this, so running a dehumidifier that pulls the water out of the air so that you can speed this process up. Fans help circulate the moisture out of the area that can speed up the process. Don’t shortchange on the time here. You really want to let the area dry before you go to try to repair it so that you minimize any potential for mold regrowth.
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Once you get the repairs done, some of the things to look out for if you’re struggling with chronic illness especially, maybe you’ve already had water damage to your home and you don’t even think about it before the day you weren’t even thinking about this, you might want to look at some proper testing to evaluate mold. Again, there are different types of tests that can evaluate whether the mold, one, is growing in your environment or, two, whether or not the mold is growing inside of you. So we’re talking about environmental testing to try to evaluate mold. There are several different types of tests that can be done. Some people call the insurance contractor get a recommendation from Mold Remediation Specialists. They can come out with special sensors and equipment to help evaluate the mold spores in the environment.
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That can be helpful and can be effective, but it’s not always 100% accurate. So you have to be careful especially if you live in a humid area. If you live in a humid area, remember what they do when they come and test your mold spores in your home is they compare the outdoor air to the indoor air in your home among different rooms. If you have a mold in community that you live in already, if the external environment is already very humid like in the Houston area for example, they’re using the outdoor air as a comparative to your indoor air so you can get misleading or false data on the test results. So it can be helpful, but it’s not always necessarily the best thing.
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One of the types of tests that can be done though that I like to see people using is to do a mold collection, dust collection. The name of this test is called an ERMI, E-R-M-I. Again, no test is 100% accurate. In ERMI, it actually measures mold spore counts based on the quantity of dust. So you do a dust job in certain areas of your home and they’re measuring the mold and the different species of mold spores in the dust of your home. This can actually be very, very helpful as compared to just doing an air test alone, so an ERMI test, E-R-M-I. It stands for Environmental Relative Mold Index. This test can actually be ordered online. There’s a company called Mycometrics, in the M-Y-C-O-M-E-T-R-I-C-S dot com. This company actually … You can purchase a kit online and you can run an ERMI test very, very simply in your home to try to detect whether or not there’s persistent or high levels mold spore counts or whether or not you have high levels of mold.
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One of the other things that can be done is testing yourself, because sometimes it’s not mold. They get you it’s something called the mycotoxin. The mycotoxin is harder to detect, so a lot of your air tests and even your dust has … They’re measuring for mold spores but they’re not measuring for the toxins that mold produced. So there are number of different of toxins. Remember mold can produce biological toxins. Aflatoxin, ochratoxin, trichothecin are just examples of different forms of mold toxins. So again if you got mold growing in your home and there’s mold or species are producing the mycotoxins, you can actually breathe in these mycotoxins and they can make you actually in many cases even sicker than mold. Some people are allergic to mold. Some people react badly to mycotoxins and some get it from both sides. They get mold and mycotoxin exposure. So running a mycotoxin test, this can be done. You can ask your doctor to order a mycotoxin test on you to look to see whether or not you have accumulation of heavy levels of mold toxins circulating in your body.
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There are some immune tests that can also be done to help us to know whether or not you’ve got chronic mold exposure issues. One of those tests is called MSH, melanocyte-stimulating hormone. This particular test helps to determine a level of a hormone that oftentimes is very low or nonexistent when people have chronic mold exposure, so you’re looking for low levels of MSH. Another type of test that can commonly be very, very high, two to three and sometimes four times or more elevated the normal value is something called transforming growth factor beta-1 or TGF beta-1. This particular marker is an immune marker can be measured by most labs. Even traditional markers can measure this using traditional lab methodology.
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So TGF beta-1, again, it’s an inflammatory marker that can be measured or picked up. Oftentimes it’s an indicator of high mold exposure. Be careful here if you’re not gluten-free. Remember that TGF beta-1 can also be elevated in patients that have gluten sensitivity who are being exposed to gluten. So you’ve got to make sure that if you’re not gluten-free but you are gluten-sensitive that you don’t suspect mold if you haven’t also ruled out gluten because, again, that type of test can be high for that reason.
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Another test that your doctor can order is that Compliment 4a test or C4a test, which is also an immune test that can measure whether or not you can be … Again, it’s an indicator of whether or not you’ve been exposed to chronic mold. Compliment is a type of immune protein. Compliment 4a, particularly, is a type of immune protein that commonly is elevated in individuals who, again, who have an inflammatory process from chronic mold exposure.
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I mentioned earlier doing a nasal culture. You can do a nasal culture too to identify mold growing in the sinuses. You can do oral cultures as well. Doctors can run oral cultures to see if there’s mold growing inside the mouth and then you can do also GI cultures. You can do GI tract stool testing that can help identify or measure whether or not there’s mold growing or overgrowth inside the GI tract. Then, of course, having a doctor qualified to do a physical examination to look at your fingernails. Sometimes we see signs of mold overgrowth in the fingernails, in the toenails. Sometimes we see it on the skin. Mold can manifest as eczema or eczema-like disease. So again, a physical examination can sometimes also be a very valuable tool in helping your doctor to rule out whether or not you’re getting chronic mold exposure, abnormal mold infection.
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So another type of test is just running circulating antibiotics. There are tests that doctors can order, look at antibiotics for specific types of mold species. Then you can also be tested for mold allergy. Obviously, if you’re not mold allergic but you are in a mold environment, you might be less susceptible to worrying about mold as a problem. So keep in mind these are just different types of tests that can be done that can help you identify whether it’s an issue.
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So let’s talk about number four. Number four is humidity and air quality control. So for trying, let’s just say we’re trying to reduce like be proactive and reduce mold growth in our home. One thing that can be done is controlling the humidity. Keeping the humidity low in the home and understand that your air conditioner is a natural dehumidifier, so just running the AC unit is going to keep the humidity down in the home. Some of you, again, maybe you live in more humid climates, maybe you have a basement. Basements tend to take on extra water and tend to be a big source for mold for a lot of people, so if you live further north. We’re on the coast so we don’t live basements down here. Further north, basements are really common room built into most homes and so basements can be an excellent source of moisture in the home for mold to propagate. So keep in mind measuring the humidity in those basements and keeping the relative humidity in those areas under 55% is ideal for preventing mold growth. Some would even say keep it lower than 50% and be more aggressive.
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I talked about drying your home out earlier. Really, when you’re trying to dry your home out, you want to run the humidifiers in a very, very big way where you’re getting that humidity down below 30%, preferably in the 20% range so you know you’re pulling a lot of that moisture out so that you reduce. Again, you’re trying to reduce the risk that mold is going to grow after that water damage is done. So air control keeping humidity low can be very, very helpful as a mold preventative.
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Another one is the use of HEPA. HEPA is a special type of air filter that can capture mold spore. HEAP filters will not capture mycotoxins but they will capture mold spores. If you have a HEPA filter unit with a UV light attached to it, an ultraviolet light attached to it, remember that HEPA captures mold spore, UV light kills mold spores. So you want the one-two punch combination, capture and kill. Don’t capture and keep the mold as pets in a filter. So capture and kill is what you’re really after. So that’s a very, very good strategy in terms of just prevention. We’re trying to prevent the problem from occurring in the first place.
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One of other strategies, number five, is that a lot of people don’t realize that we get mold in food. There are a number of different foods that you may be eating that are considered to be high-mold foods. Probably the most common of the high-mold foods are the grains. Part of what I wrote about the No Grain, No Pain was, again, I told you before this book was not just about gluten. It was about a lot of the detrimental properties that grain can bring to the table like literally bring to the table. One of them is mold. In US, we don’t really have any kind of mold or mycotoxin restriction on foods to any great degree particularly mycotoxin restriction. So many of our grains are wheat or barley or rye or oats or corn and/or rice and/or millet and/or sorghum. These grains oftentimes will be very, very high sources of mold toxins particularly things like ochratoxin and aflatoxin. So if you’re mycotoxin-sensitive, avoiding these mold-heavy foods can be very, very important and can be a very, very important strategy.
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Coffee is a high-mold food. The way coffee is grown, the way coffee beans are stored, it can be a very high-mold food. Other foods that can be high mold, anything that is stored for long periods of time before it’s processed. So think produce, think vegetables, a lot of them are sprayed with antifungals so there’s less mold growth. Imagine going to the grocery store and that’s probably happened. I see it all the time actually. You go to a grocery store and you see a cantaloupe for example. Cantaloupe has all those ridges on the surface of the skin perfect for mold growth. Mold gets into those ridges then it can grow. So when you’re picking up your produce in the grocery department, fresh vegetables, fresh fruits, you really want to make sure that you’re inspecting it for obvious visible signs of excessive mold. Obviously, you’re not going to buy a mold with piece of fruit. What sometimes happen is there’s a little tiny bit growing on part of it that you didn’t pick up on and that can become a problem.
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So again, inspect your produce before you purchase it and minimize your risk of getting excessive mold. The other thing is the way you store your produce. Storing it in the refrigerator can help reduce mold growth on it. As it sits on the counter at home, it’s going to have a tendency to pick mold up and because there’s spores floating around, it’s natural. We’re not going to escape that, but keeping it in the refrigerator will preserve it and help prevent some of that. So again, high-mold foods or food that have mold growing on, inspect those things and use that as a strategy as you move forward.
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One of the other probably most frequently quite asked questions I get when it comes to mold toxicity is that if I have it is what are some things supplementally I can do to help my body detoxify from mold. Number one, aside from all these other things that we talked about, removing the moldy environment. If the mold is growing in your environment, all the supplements in the world are not going to help you if you don’t remove yourself from the moldy environment. So the most crucial and important thing first and foremost is to get out of the moldy environment or to clean up or remediate or mitigate the mold exposure. So it’s environmental mold, you’ve got to get out of the environment or you won’t make a recovery if you’ve got chronic mold illness. Those of you who’ve ever had it, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You cannot recover if you maintain yourself in that environment.
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There are some supplements that can help with detoxification that I had in my own personal practice experience worked really, really well for people. One of them is good old-fashioned vitamin C. Vitamin C it helps with bile formation. Remember one of the ways that we bind mold toxins is through bile, bile in the intestine. So the liver produces the bile. The gallbladder secretes the bile. The bile then can help bind mold toxins, mycotoxins in the intestine and excrete them out. So vitamin C is a necessary component to properly produce bile. That’s one of the reasons why it can be such an effective tool because many people don’t get enough vitamin C in their diet or they are already vitamin C deficient. Vitamin C works in many other ways as well. It works as a free radical scavenger. It works as a chelating agent. So it works in other ways. It works to boost and build. It’s a fuel for your natural killer cells, which are part of your immune system. So it’s very, very important you want to support your immune system’s capacity to detoxify these toxins out of your body.
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So vitamin C is one of my favorite. Using vitamin C in conjunction with a quercetin works really, really well. So quercetin is a compound found in number of different plants, but quercetin works well, really, really well as and anti-inflammatory to help detoxify and to help mitigate a number of the inflammatory symptoms of mold toxicity.
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One of my other favorites is activated charcoal. Activated charcoal can be a binder. So if you’re eating foods and maybe you’re doing the best that you can to avoid eating moldy foods but some is still coming in ultimately, yeast and mold are part of our natural environment. So activated carbon can be a great binder and can help mitigate excessive mold coming in as can a supplement called EDTA, works extremely, extremely well. Not only does it work as a chelating agent to bind mycotoxins, but it actually and now has been shown to be both any bacterial and antifungal. So it can work extremely well in situations where chronic mold exposure is a problem.
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One of the other things I like to do supplementally is really support phase one and phase two liver detoxification. So using a supplement that might contain heavy doses of N-acetyl cysteine as well as Milk Thistle can be extremely helpful in allowing your liver to help detoxify some of these poisons and some of these mold toxins and excrete them from the body. If you’re going to use supplements to aid in the removal of mold toxins, it’s very important that you follow and adhere to some general principles of intelligent detoxification. One is you got to make sure that your kidneys are turned on and that you’re urinating frequently as you’re doing your detoxification. Otherwise, you get what’s called retox. You’re pulling mold toxins out. You’re breaking them down, but if you’re not pushing them out through your urine then they’re just recirculating through your system and then redepositing back into your tissue. So keep your kidneys activated. So make sure you’re drinking enough fluids that you’re peeing at least six times a day full void ping at least that much when you’re going through a detoxification protocol.
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One of the other things that’s important to do is to sweat. If you’re mold toxic, you might not have the capacity to exercise and sweat through exercise be you’re just so tired and your body is sort of [repeated 24:33]. So one of things that you can do is you can sweat through the use of a sauna. My favorite is using an infrared type of device, an infrared. I had a gentleman on the show a few months ago where we talked about sauna. You can go back and review that where we talked all about detoxification strategies. So an infrared can be very, very effective at helping cleanse the body of toxins in conjunction with making sure you’re having ample urination. Then the others make sure that the bowels are moving. Don’t get into a situation where you’re constipated when you’re trying to go through detoxification because, again, we don’t want those toxins staying inside of you for any length of time. So we want to keep the bowels moving. We want to keep the bowels pushing the waste out. When if your bile is binding on to those molds and mold toxins and you’re constipated, then you’re not going to get rid of them. They’re just going to sit there and they’re going to continue to slowly poison you.
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So make sure sweating, urinating, and defecating when you’re going through any detoxification program is going to be crucial and vital. So those systems need to be turned on, ramped up and working very, very well as long as you’re doing any kind of major detoxification support. Where we see people oftentimes struggle with detoxification, like you try to detox and you feel worst, it’s oftentimes because they’re not doing those other three things. Sometimes it’s because some people are poor methylators and they genetic mutations and so they don’t do well with heavy doses of supplements and so you’ve got to start small and work your way up. So keep that in mind too. If you’ve been that type of individual or you find when you try to do supplements that it crushes you, makes you hit the floor, it may be that you need to work your way into it much more slowly. So again, keep that in mind as a strategy if you’re going to be using supplements to help to do a detoxification protocol.
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So those are the seven strategies that I have for you today. Now I’m going to open up the floor for your questions. Again, if you haven’t chimed in, if you’re just sitting around listening but not participating, let me know where you’re from. Let chime in, say hello, hit the like button and hit the share button. Make sure you’re sharing this information with a friend, a family member, a loved one so that we can help more people together. So let’s go through some of the questions and comments and get everybody taken care of today.
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Tracy Elizabeth is saying especially with CIRS.
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So I was talking earlier about mold and CIRS is chronic inflammatory syndrome. Yes, CIRS is a very, very common byproduct or a very, very common diagnosis for people with mold. So if you’ve been diagnosed with CIRS, then you definitely want to consider mold as a problem or part of this issue. Thanks Tracy for chiming in on that.
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Let’s see here, Diane. I have had an issue with bronchitis and respiratory infection three times in three months.
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Diane, what you may want to consider, again, if you haven’t already is if your doctors haven’t differentiated the reason you have that bronchitis, in essence again it could be mold, it could be bacterial, it could be viral. Some advanced testing might be necessary. I’ve also seen people developed chronic bronchitis and respiratory infection as the result of eating foods they were allergic to, so that’s just another strategy. If you haven’t been food allergy tested or if you haven’t been gluten tested, genetically tested for gluten sensitivity, then definitely do that. You’re second comment was mucus production as being part of the issue. Mucus is one of those things that will form. Any time our body perceives a threat coming in, we can form mucus in the lungs. We can form mucus in the throat. Some foods are mucus-forming like dairy can be extremely mucus-forming. So if you’re already struggling with a chronic infection or chronic issue where you are already producing mucus, eating mucus-producing foods can make that worst. Bananas and sugary foods can increase mucus production as can dairy, so keep those things in mind as well.
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Question coming in, [Floresca 28:49]. Hi, Dr. Osborne. I get stools, which are hard or loose every four days. I have no bacterial infection. How do I make my stools normal?
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That’s a pretty broad question, but I’ll give you a couple of strategies. One of the things that you might want to try, again, without any testing for to help me help you its hard to guess at this. I would say that one of primary things that you could use to regulate your stools are look on if you’re back and forth with this IBSD-type problem is, one, your stomach acid could be too low and that stomach acid oftentimes being too low leads to constipation followed by loose stools. So this intermittent flaring where you go days with constipation and then bam, you have loose stools. Another would be your microbiome itself is do you have adequate healthy-gut bacteria colonizing your GI tract, helping run the normal functions of your gut. So I would look at your microbiome. I would look at your stomach acid production as two really easy places to start.
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If you suspect less stomach acid, you can take something called betaine hydrochloride. I have something called Ultra Acid that I like to use in my patients. It’s a form of mixture of betaine hydrochloride and some other things that help imp stomach acid. It’s really safe and really easy to take and sometimes constipation clears right up. It’s a clinical answer. You tried and it works and you have an answer as to why.
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Oh, this is a follow-up. This is a good follow-up. So I want to bring this up to you. So if ferritin is high around 1,020 and hemoglobin is low.
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That is best definitely a liver issue. When ferritin is that high, your liver is usually release at en masse and that’s the liver is taking on damage. So you’ve got to identify what’s creating liver damage. In my experience, one of the most common causes of liver disease especially if you’re not an alcoholic or you don’t drink alcohol is gluten. It’s grain exposure, corn and wheat. Very, very common to see those cause non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and liver damage and elevate those ferritin levels to that degree. Good question.
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Janice, opinion on air doctor, air filters. Good filters. So if you’ve got one, you’ve got a good filter in your home and in your place.
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Susan Christiansen is chiming in to eat garlic. Yeah, garlic is a great antimicrobial. It’s an antifungal. It’s antimicrobial, so it’s great. Natural as a food. Food can be great medicine so it’s great. However, some people don’t tolerate garlic. So if you have a lot of gas and bloating and you have ever heard of the FODMAP diet, keep that in mind. If you start eating a bunch of garlic and you just start bloating and getting a lot more gas, it could be that you are FODMAP and that you are struggling with digesting FODMAP and that pay attention to that. I’ve seen that be the case with garlic and shallots and some of the other things, natural remedies to help kill bugs where somebody has a FODMAP-sensitivity.
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Eating asparagus. I talked about this yesterday. Josh Ax, Dr. Axe and I did a live group together. We were talking about how great asparagus was, Susan. As a great diuretic, it helps to stimulate water output through the kidneys. It also is a great detoxifier. So thanks for chiming in on that.
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Oh, we got Nancy from New Mexico, so another state representing. Hi, Nancy and Amy and Jeremy from Georgia. Let’s see next question here. Amanda is … So with MTHFR, we need to start supplements and lordosis at first? On compound heterozygous.
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That’s not what I would consider to be a major MTHFR mutation. Heterozygous mutations are not really deal breakers. Unless you’re super, super sick then yes. We might want to support that MTHFR mutation. The answer is not just whether not you have an MTHFR mutation. There’s MTR, there’s MTRR, there’s COMT, there’s DAO, there’s all different types of genetic mutations that can occur in individuals that can affect the methylation cascades. So the better thing is not just okay do we just look only at MTHFR, because a lot of doctors and a lot of labs are just running MTHFR as if it’s going to make some massive huge difference in a person’s life just having that one genetic SNP. Remember you’ve got 23,000 such genes. One of these 23,000 is not really going to tell us a whole lot. If you’re looking at methylation, which is what we’re talking about with this detoxification pathway, methylation and something called transsulfuration, we want to look at the genes responsible for those pathways and look at mutation. So looking at the genes from more broad spectrum comprehensive picture would be where I’d start.
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In terms of supplementation, people with mutations in the methylation cycle generally don’t tend to do well with high-dose supplementation if they have certain mutation pattern. So just knowing your MTHFR doesn’t really give me a whole lot to work from. If I had a more comprehensive picture of what was going on in your DNA methylation pattern, I could give you a better answer Amanda.
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Susana, hello from South Carolina, another state. I met a doctor yesterday from the Carolinas. He’s a great guy, great doctor. I was in Tennessee.
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Let’s see here, Nancy. My friend keeps telling me I should take activated charcoal to rid a lingering Staph and Marcons. I just kept with protocol that doesn’t include charcoal.
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That’s correct. Charcoal can be used and it’s very, very safe to use, but it’s not always necessary. When you’re on a big protocol where you’re already doing a lot of different kinds of of pills, sometimes it’s a matter of weighing how much can we do to maintain a good compliance. When you get a pill overloaded, sometimes that’s the rate limiter and whether or not a person is going to improve or not.
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Ellen, best supplements for candida that are not going to make hair fall out.
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Well, I would say if you’re talking about just in general best supplements, the are number of things that have been shown to be effective for killing candida that shouldn’t make your hair fall out. I’d say if your hair is falling out, it’s probably not supplements creating the issue as much as it might be a protein malnutrition. When your immune system is battling a chronic yeast infection, you will oftentimes … the side effect of that is protein malnourishment. We don’t get enough protein to come in to make enough antibodies to continue to fight the war. So what happens is hair becomes a secondary need and that’s since your body looks to hair and says, “We’re not going to make hair because we need to use that protein to make antibodies instead.” So I would say you might want to consider that and have a doctor checking your protein status, your albumin and your other serum protein levels to see if even that’s part of the issue.
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One of the other things, a good supplement support hair growth is collagen. There are a number of different collagen formulations that collagen is great and helpful for hair growth as is biotin to support hair growth. Again, your body is not going to grow hair if you’re fighting a chronic infection. Protein is necessary to make antibodies and that will trump hair growth and fairly no growth. We oftentimes see weaken fingernails and hair falling out when people have chronic immune problems caused by molds. So keep that in mind as well, Ellen. As far as other supplements for yeast, oregano can be effective. Thyme can be effective. Uva-ursi can be effective. Berberine can be effective. Great [seed 37:03] to extract. There are a lot of different types of supplements that can be effective, again, depending on the yeast. Some yeasts have resistances to certain natural agents. I’ve seen a number of cases in patients where yeast overgrowth was resistant to oregano. So taking all the oregano oil in the world wasn’t effective at all and just really didn’t work. So again, hopefully there’s some strategies you can take with you.
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Georgia, hi there, Tennessee. Thoughts on this new Hemp Oil being advertised. Was told no TCH and helps with pain. I’m going to assume you mean THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. It helps for pain management.
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Look, my bigger question with things like Hemp Oil and even Cannabis Oil is why do you need that type of oil to manage pain. If you really found the root cause of the pain, you don’t need oils to manage your pain. That’s where really I would encourage you to explore with a good functional medicine doctor that avenue over taking a … Even things taken naturally to reduce your symptoms, to me that can be dangerous long term. It’s not that I’m not compassionate about people’s pain. It’s that look if we masked your pain but don’t find out why it’s there, are we really serving you. No, I don’t think we are. I think we’re making you dependent on Hemp Oil or Cannabis Oil or some other type of product. I’m not picking on those things, but any product for that matter if we’re just trying to manage pain without trying to ascertain the origin of why the pain and why the inflammation is there in the first place.
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So I would be real cautious about anything that is going to have a pain-masking effect unless your strategy is mask the pain in a short term to improve your quality of life while you’re working with a good functional medicine doctor who can help you figure out the real solution behind why the pain and inflammation are persistent. Good questions.
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Teresa, been on antibiotics for over a week now for Strep. What should I do to get my gut back in shape?
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Great question. You’ve got to absolutely have a heavy dose probiotic. I recommend at least 200 billion colony-forming units to help to boost the GI tract back from an antibiotic regimen. In my opinion, one of the best ones to use are that called Ultra Biotic Defense. It’s over 200 billion colony-forming units, a very hardy types of bifidus and lactobacillus; can be very, very helpful at supporting restoration of the microbiome map when you’ve been on an antibiotic. That’s what I would recommend as a primary you’ve got to do. At the very minimum, you’ve got to do that to get your microbiome back up to speed.
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Let’s see some of the other questions coming in. Kathy from Washington State. I have an egg allergy that does not cause anaphylactic reaction, meaning it’s not acute, but it causes stomach upset and sore muscles a couple of days after. There’s a collagen pattern that has different animal ingredients including egg membrane.
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I’m not sure I see the question in that. If you have an egg allergy, I would consider a collagen protein powder that doesn’t have the egg membrane, first just to be as cautious. So there are a number of different powders out there and some of them are really good ones. The egg membrane is a great product if you’re not allergic to the egg, but also depends on which part of the egg that you’re allergic to. Some people are allergic to the yolks, some to the white. My experience with it is if you’re allergic to the yolk or the white, avoid egg until we get your gut back in balance. I would look for different collagen products that don’t have the egg in them as my advice for you. Good question.
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So Lian. Leanna, I’m sorry not Lian. Leanna is asking why would C4a be high? Is that mold toxicity?
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Yes, it can be and oftentimes is. It’s not … So understand that C4a, Compliment 4a is a protein immune system produces. It’s not implicit to mold, meaning that just because C4a is high doesn’t mean you have mold toxicity, but it can mean that you have mold toxicity. So doing a good mold panel where you’re looking at transforming growth factor beta-1 where you’re looking at NSH, where you’re looking at C4a, where you’re looking at C-reactive protein, where you’re looking at a number of different markers that might be conducive to giving you a bigger answer about the whole picture. Another test to be run is the, well, HLADR genotyping, which can tell whether or not you have a gene patterns that is generally sensitive to mold. So that’s what I would recommend Leanne. Don’t just rely strictly on a C4a, again, because it can mean mold but it can also mean other things as well.
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Looks like I’ve gotten to the end of all the questions today. So make sure a couple of things as we close out today. We’ll be back next week for another episode live. I want you to make sure that you’re sharing this information with somebody you love especially if you know somebody in a water-damaged area where maybe they haven’t put their home back together yet. Let’s get this information into those people’s hands. I did this show special for them today so help me get this information to them by hitting the share, hitting the like button below. Thanks for helping me help more people. It’s a pleasure and it’s an honor to be able to reach so many people through you. I appreciate you all being here with me today.
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Looks like we’ve got … I’m going to answer one more because we had one more come in while I was talking. I took Cipro that killed my Oxalobacter formigenes . How can I re-establish my population to digest oxalates again?
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One of the best ways that you can really re-establish is, one, is through a high dose probiotic. To my knowledge at this point, there’s not really a great commercially available oxalobacter that you could take. If you do any gardening, if you do any outside work or you get your hands dirty while you get your hands in the dirt, it’s one of the best ways to get probiotics. If you’ve got a pet, it’s one of the best ways to get probiotics. If you don’t, if you live in the city, you’re city person, go visit a farm. Go out visit a farm and interact with the animals, interact with the dirt a little bit more aggressively and that can be very, very helpful. The other thing is eating produce from locally grown farmer’s markets. Locally grown because they’re not being shifted across the country and being sprayed with chemicals. Also much of that local produce is going to have probiotics that’s going to have soil microorganisms in it and that’s going to be very, very helpful to help re-establish your flora.
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That was it. So hope you guys have a great afternoon. We will back next week for another episode of Pick Dr. Osborne’s Brain. Until then, have a wonderful weekend. Take care.
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