Don’t Make These Mistakes When Treating Mold Toxicity
Mold toxicity is illness caused by exposure to mold spores and mold biotoxins. As the term implies, biotoxins are toxic substances made by biological organisms, like molds or bacteria.
Widely recognized as a cause of symptoms or illness in animals and people who have been exposed to moldy foods, mold toxicity has also come to suggest illness caused by mold growth in water-damaged buildings and environments. However, whether people can become chronically ill from long-term exposure to airborne mold particulates (small pieces of mold) and indoor biotoxins remains controversial.
Common Mistakes In The Diagnosis and Treatment of Mold Toxicity
Dr. Neil Nathan, author of Toxic, Heal Your Body, has consulted with patients and physicians around the world, and compiled a list of common errors in both the diagnosis and treatment of mold toxicity. Read on to learn more about his findings, and how avoiding these mistakes can help to improve patient outcomes.
Make The Right Diagnosis
Be certain that the patient’s symptoms fit with the diagnosis of mold toxicity. Check that they have a history of mold exposure, even if it’s in the remote past. If a urine mycotoxin test is negative, remember that mold toxicity interferes with the body’s ability to detoxify, so an initial test may be low or negative, but will show elevated levels after you institute empirical treatment. Worth noting: Bartonella and Lyme disease can present with similar symptoms.
Make your mold diagnosis clear and comprehensive. If you’re only using one laboratory, you might not obtain a complete picture of what your patient is suffering from, and your resulting treatment could be incomplete or incorrect. RealTime and Great Plains laboratories use different technologies and have different strengths and weaknesses; when you use both, you have a much better chance of getting an accurate overview of your patient’s condition.
Consider other compounding medical conditions early in your treatment plan.
Sensitive patients will usually have developed limbic dysfunction, vagal nerve dysfunction, and mast cell activation syndrome. Failure to recognize these conditions may inhibit your patient’s progress. Other conditions should also be considered such as cervical trauma fibromyalgia, jaw dysfunction, and porphyria.
Utilize A Complete Binder Program When The Patient Is Ready
If you start binders too soon in many patients, before you have addressed the limbic system, vagus system, and mast cell activation, introducing binders may make the patient worse. Additionally, if you add binders all at once, or in high doses, many patients will experience a severe worsening of the condition and their symptoms. Proceed slowly, and follow your patient’s response carefully. Use binders that will cover ALL of the mycotoxins found on urine testing; using one or two will limit treatment success.
Don’t add anti-fungal treatment until the binders are optimally prescribed. Killing mold or Candida before binders are in place often results in a severe die-off reaction which can last for weeks or even longer.
Make sure that the patient checks their home, work, or car for mold from the onset of treatment. While patients are often concerned about the financial implications of finding mold in their homes, failing to identify the source of mold toxicity can prevent improvement. Patients cannot get well if they remain exposed to mold. A thorough home evaluation needs to include more than air sampling, which is not sufficient when it comes to determining if a home is mold free.
Listen to your patient. If a patient notices any worsening from any aspect of treatment, they are probably overdoing it. Continuing with the same treatment may make them progressively worse, and could require months to undo the ill effects. Checking in with patients on a regular basis is necessary to thoroughly assess the treatment process. Telling a patient that they should stick with treatment until their worsening symptoms ease up is unlikely to be helpful.
Be careful about the timing of the treatment of downstream issues, such as methylation compromise or mitochondrial dysfunction. If you attempt to address downstream issues early on (while the patient is in the CellDanger Response 1 mode), the treatment will either be unsuccessful or make patients worse. Patients must improve significantly before they can benefit from treatments for methylation or mitochondrial dysfunction.
Be Careful With Glutathione
While many patients get clear benefit from using glutathione, many sensitive patients will mobilize their toxins far beyond their ability to process those toxins and experience a worsening condition.
If binders have been introduced but the patient is not improving and their urine mycotoxin tests are not decreasing, it’s likely they have colonized mold in their sinus and/or intestinal areas. Most of these patients will not improve until you add nasal and oral treatments for colonization.