257: The Hidden Epidemic of Toxic Mold
with Dr. Margaret Christensen
Ashley:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Toxic mold is an incredibly common yet often completely unassuming trigger and cause of many different chronic health conditions. Today Dr. Pompa will be talking to Dr. Margaret Christensen who is an integrative doctor who has conquered mold in her own life, and she’s here to share her story and hopefully help you understand how to know if mold is affecting you. They’ll discuss why toxic mold is becoming so common these days and how toxic mold is different from regular mold allergies. You’ll also learn what mycotoxins are and what common symptoms are if you’re struggling with chronic health problems and mold may be to blame but, first, just a bit more about Dr. Margaret.
Dr. Margaret Christensen is board certified in integrative medicine and an Institute for Functional Medicine certified practitioner and was board certified OB-gynecologist for 23 years. Dr. Christensen first became interested in functional medicine 17 years ago when trying to solve the riddle of her own health challenges. Dr. Margaret is also hosting the online and totally free Toxic Mold Summit, which you can sign up to join by using our link in the show notes. Dr. Pompa will be part of the panel of experts in this important event, and you won’t want to miss it.
Today’s episode is brought to you by CytoDetox. CytoDetox is a powerful detox supplement that can help you safely and naturally support your detoxification systems and flush away the toxins you encounter on a daily basis. All CHTV listeners can go to buycytonow.com to discover the science of CytoDetox and what makes it different from all the other detox products on the market. That’s buycytonow.com for more information or to purchase. All right, so let’s get started and welcome Dr. Pompa and Dr. Margaret Christensen to the show. This is Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Pompa:
Margaret, welcome to the show, CellTV that is.
Dr. Christensen:
Thank so much, Dan, for having me.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I was on your summit, yeah, where you had some of the world’s experts in this topic. What a topic. I’m excited to bring this again to CellTV. We’ve done a lot of shows on how to make your home safe, but we haven’t done a mold show in a while. When I look at why people are sick, why people can’t lose weight, hormonal problems, unexplainable illnesses or symptoms, autoimmune, mold is one of the things we always have to determine if it’s a factor. I’ll tell you, it’s one of those hidden factors that most people think they’re not being exposed because they don’t see mold, but yet, it can be one of the causes that goes hidden and unseen.
Margaret, tell me your story. How did you get involved in this, so much so you did a summit on mold? I think you’re the only mold summit that I know of, and I think it’s a really important one for everyone to watch. How’d you get involved in this?
Dr. Christensen:
It’s funny. I don’t think anybody’s attempted to do a mold summit before because it’s such a huge and complex topic. It’s involving two patients. You have the person themselves and their family and/or their co-workers, and then you have the building, the home, the school, the church, the dorm, whatever it is. In terms of my own personal story, I was a really successful OB-GYN. I had a big practice here in Dallas where I am. This was 18 years ago.
I was just getting so fatigued, and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. I was so tired all the time. Yeah, I had four kids. I didn’t sleep much delivering babies, but something else was wrong. My whole body hurt, and I would go see my different colleagues and say, well, honey, you’re just depressed. Here’s your antidepressant, or go see the pain doctor. Go see the physical therapist. Nothing was really helping.
Now, at the same time, a number of my family members were also sick. We had asthma, allergies, ADD issues, migraines, a lot of sleep disturbances, some psychiatric stuff going on. No dots were ever connected. It took, actually, over eight years. I ended up having to close my practice because I felt so bad, and I still didn’t figure out what was wrong with me. It wasn’t until a re-exposure eight years later that I figured out, and we realized, oh, we had toxic mold in that house. We had sold it and moved out, took everything with us. I knew nothing.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, meaning that you can contaminate the next place.
Dr. Christensen:
Yeah, unfortunately, I think the next place we went to also had some issues. One of the interesting things is I was actually able to get better initially. Because of this, I got into functional medicine. I had a friend who gave me some nutrients, much to my resistance. I was like, expensive urine, but I started taking them. I felt significantly better within [00:05:05] months. Then I quit taking them because I thought I don’t need them, and I crashed after I stopped taking. This was about two years into this process, and I was like, oh, hmm, biochemistry and physiology.
Because of that, I got into functional medicine. I started going to some courses. Really, I still didn’t know what the problem was, but I had got better just from changing diet and lifestyle until I got hit a second time. Now, again, my family members were still—everybody was having issues. Dan, this is so common. I’m sure you see this all the time. Doctors don’t realize what they’re seeing and, just like you mentioned, everything from autoimmune to chronic neurological diseases. Psychiatric disorders are a really big one that is completely unrecognized as being related. I’ve got some great cases that I can even talk about.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I’d love it.
Dr. Christensen:
Anyway, that’s how I got into this. I closed my practice twice, my first, my big practice because I couldn’t keep going, and I took two years off just to get better. I started this little teeny-tiny practice in the back of a compounding pharmacy, and then I moved my way up, got into another office. That office building was really toxic, and the apartment that I was living in part-time was also moldy. I mean, it was following me around. Jill Carnahan, we laughed about this and some of the other folks on the summit that I talked to. We’re just like mold magnets. It follows us everywhere we go, and some of us are a lot more susceptible than others to some of the side effects.
It took a while to figure out. It wasn’t until that second re-exposure I actually went to the Environmental Health Center, which is here in Dallas. There’s a very famous doctor, Dr. William Rea, Bill Rea, who’s one of the pioneers in environmental medicine.
Dr. Pompa:
Just recently died, unfortunately.
Dr. Christensen:
He did recently die, and he died the week before I was supposed to interview him for the summit. I did interview Dr. Stephanie McCarter. She’s on, and she’s talking about EMFs and the role of the electronic fields in, again, exacerbating all kinds of illness. That’s a whole other topic we can talk about and what it does to mold. Yeah, that’s how I got started, and then I started a little teeny boutique practice in functional medicine. Over time, again, my husband developed Parkinson’s, and he had Lyme too. We know that mold is such an immunosuppressant that any underlying infections that you’ve picked up along the way, viruses, parasites, mold, Lyme, that can all rebirth itself, and so it’s so important.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, by the way, mold is such a big factor that many people are trying to get well from these different infections, and they can’t because they’re in a mold exposure unknowingly. You have to get rid of the mold exposure. By the way, folks, we’re going to make sure we link you to the mold summit. You need to see the world’s experts in this area. This is a big deal.
I have to ask this question. You had been in many different mold exposures. I was part of—I had massive mercury in my brain. We were living in probably a low-grade mold exposure, but it became more problematic because my bucket was full. We realize that most people are bombarded with different neurotoxins, right? Metals and molds are some of the biggest ones. Why is mold so prevalent? I mean, you were in how [00:08:27] mold, and so many people are in homes right now, or businesses, or schools unknowingly, but there’s mold. Why has this become such an epidemic?
Dr. Christensen:
That’s a great question, Dan, and unfortunately, at least 50% of houses and 60% of commercial buildings have had some kind of water damage. A lot of it has to do with how we build and construct homes and buildings in this country with the materials that we’re using, particularly sheetrock, which is, basically, paper.
Dr. Pompa:
Cellulose.
Dr. Christensen:
Yeah, cellulose, it’s food for molds and shoddy building standards, and it’s real interesting. In other places in the world, they don’t have quite the same problems that we do. We also have the challenges with very tight buildings and particularly, again, buildings that were built in the 70s and 80s that don’t breathe. They don’t breathe well, so you don’t have good air circulation. Once you get a water problem, whether it’s from an air conditioner leak or from a toilet overflowing—it can be a window leaking. It’s doesn’t have to be a roof. It doesn’t have to be a flood.
There’s the problem, Dan. So many of the time—so much of the time, it’s these small, slow leaks that are happening behind walls. People don’t notice and/or underneath the houses. If they’re on a pier and beam house, that’s another common challenge and because of how the air conditioning system works and if you have fans on inside the house that are sucking—they’re sucking air in, in through the walls or in from underneath the house. That can contaminate the space. Then it gets into the air conditioning system, and you’re blowing mycotoxins around. We can talk about specifically about mycotoxins because that’s the big problem, especially for mitochondria.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think when people think of mold they think allergy. They’re having an allergy to the spore, but mold produces a biotoxin. Explain that for people because that’s a really important distinction.
Dr. Christensen:
That’s a really great distinction. Again, most people, when they’re thinking about mold, they’re thinking about the mold counts that are outside. It’s spring or fall, and you have more pollen and more molds. That’s different. Definitely, that can cause allergies. The type of molds that can grow inside water damaged buildings that are, again, feeding on the sheetrock, those not only can cause chronic allergy, stuffy nose, recurrent sinus problems, sinusitis infections, upper respiratory cough, drainage, etc., but it’s the mycotoxins that those toxic molds produce that are so damaging to cell membranes and to mitochondria. I know all of your folks watching know what mitochondria are. That’s the powerhouse, the energy production in our cells.
These mycotoxins, they’re fat soluble. Once they get in your system, they’re going to go to the areas of fat. In between the cell membranes is a layer of fat. In the mitochondrial membranes, there’s a little layer of fat. What’s our brain? It’s all fat, so when you get these mycotoxins that get in you, you can have had exposure. You grew up in a moldy basement somewhere up in the Northeast coast, and maybe you had some allergies. You didn’t feel great, but you weren’t really sick. Then subsequent exposures over time, it’s this sicker quicker phenomenon. You’ve built up your bucket.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I would just walk into a restaurant and be—and I had a nose for it at one point. I mean, I could smell it a mile away. Then, lo and behold, I’d realize I’d be sick days later, sometimes for weeks just from one exposure. I mean, even walking in, smelling it for five smells before I’d turned around and gone out, I still got sick quicker, sicker quicker, meaning our immune system was so hypersensitized now from this. It just drove this inflammatory response. People have no clue that that’s happening, by the way, and that’s a sad thing.
Talk a little bit about it because I want people to identify it. Now we have people thinking, well, maybe this is me so talk about that. Give some symptoms, and we can even talk about some tests that we need to run and then some tests maybe if you want to test your house. Let’s go in that direction for people.
Dr. Christensen:
Okay, sure, again, one of the common symptoms is recurrent upper respiratory infections, chronic cough, or chronic allergies, and sinus infections. If you’ve been on antibiotic, after antibiotic, after antibiotic for a chronic sinus infection, we know that that’s a fungal problem. It’s fungal overgrowth that has taken place in the cavities because you’ve killed off all the good bacteria anyway with the antibiotics, but breathing in the molds and the mycotoxins themselves are incredibly irritating to the whole sinus system. They create biofilms, so what you get is this slime-like layer of molds together with bacteria, with yeast, with fungi. They make a layer of snot around themselves that’s protecting themselves from our immune system and from antibiotics. What happens, people take oral antibiotics, after oral antibiotic, after oral antibiotic. Maybe they get some sinus surgery, and they still are sick. It’s fungal. You have to use some type of antifungal treatment and then rinsing out the sinuses.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I was just going to say there’s a test that I like to run called MARCoNS, testing for—it’s a simple nasal test for 80 to $100.
Dr. Christensen:
Yeah, so we can do that. MARCoNS is looking for the bacterial infections.
Dr. Pompa:
Now they run a fungal portion of it. When you have these resistant staph up there, these negative staph, it’s an indicator that you were in a mold exposure.
Dr. Christensen:
Absolutely, and that you’ve been on tons and tons of antibiotics. We don’t even have to get those nasal cultures anymore. There’s a really, really great organization that I would strongly recommend that all of your participants check out. There’s a section for the laypeople. It’s called the International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness, iseai.org. What we’re doing is bringing together all the minds who’ve been working on these complex chronic illness problems and mold toxicity and Lyme and infections. Everybody coming together, along with environmental air inspectors and experts in that area, along with the lay public so we can all work together to try and solve these problems. Like people working together to try and solve autism. Again, it’s such a common challenge that we’re seeing.
We talked about sinus infections. That’s a biggie. Again, we need to think about, when your sinuses are inflamed, all those cytokines, those chemicals in your sinuses being produced by the white blood cells, they’re seeping into your brain. You get that brain fog, that heavy-headedness. I just don’t feel good. I can’t think straight. I get headaches, migraines. Those are common symptoms, brain inflammation.
Also anxiety, particularly free-floating anxiety, can’t ever figure out where it’s coming from, have a hard time sleeping. Can’t get that brain to calm down and be de-revved. That’s a problem. Again, chronic brain inflammation we both know creates depression. Then what happens when you’re swallowing all those boogies? They’re going into your gut, and then you’re disrupting that microbiome. You’ve already taken ten rounds of antibiotics, which has really disrupted your microbiome, suppressed your immune system. You’re even more susceptible. That’s the kind of chronic challenges that we see.
One of our guests is Evan Brand, who is real big on candida and yeast. We talked about the yeast-mold connection is so common. People are being exposed to toxic molds, getting infections, and then getting treated with antibiotics. Then you get yeast in the gut, vaginal yeast. You get prostatitis. You can get interstitial cystitis, which is recurrent irritation of the bladder, so those are things. We talked about anxiety and depression, even [00:16:43] psychoses. Mary Ackerley is one of the girls we interview. Dr. Mary Ackerley, she’s an amazing psychiatrist and got into mold toxicity just totally by accident. Now, again, a lot of—she and a lot of the other docs who are psychiatrists on this iseai.org forum are talking that 80% of their clients that they’re measuring have mycotoxins with psychiatric challenges. You can get a lot of mold rage and psychosis type symptoms.
Then I talk with Doug Kaufmann. He wrote the very famous book called The Fungus Link. He’s got an amazing show called knowthecause.com. People watch all around the world. He and I talk about the connection to addiction and alcoholism also. When your brain is on fire, you feel like crap. You can’t sleep. You’re super-anxious. What do you try and do? You’re trying to calm it down, and then you’re feeding it.
Again, when you get that leaky gut, a lot of that fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, muscle weakness, those are very common symptoms. One area that you—and you’ve taught so many of your mentors, Jay Davidson, who’s on the show. Todd Watts is on the show, Scott Richmond. They’re also interviewed talking about chronic infections, parasites, Lyme, co-infections.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, those guys were my students early on. The message then and I keep spreading the message was, look, you have to look upstream to these heavy metals and molds and mycotoxins to parasites, to candida, to your point. The people that can’t get rid of these things get better. They could be living in a mold exposure, right?
Dr. Christensen:
Absolutely, yeah, it’s really interesting. One of the folks that I interviewed that’s on the bonus session is Dr. Dennis Hooper of RealTime Lab. He developed one of the first tests to test the urine for mycotoxins. What he taught me is that one of the mycotoxins that is produced is called mycophenolic acid, and mycophenolic acid is actually used in medicine to kill the immune system before somebody’s going to have a bone marrow transplant. Can you understand that if we’re breathing stuff in that is producing toxins that disrupt hormones, create neurological disturbance and suppressed immune system, no wonder you get—if you have underlying viral infections, parasitic infections, tick-borne illnesses like Lyme or co-infections, all of those can bloom and rise. It’s chicken and the egg, and/or you get bitten by a tick. You’re doing okay until you move into a moldy house.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, yeah, the immune system will keep most of those things at bay. We all have candida. Now they’re finding out 90% of population—Lyme, why aren’t they all sick? Until they move into a mold exposure or have a heavy metal exposure, it’s always the perfect storm. Is there a test? You mentioned the urine mycotoxin. What are some other tests that some of you run? How do we test for homes? How do we know if…
Dr. Christensen:
Sure, so we go into a lot of—there’s a lot of different variety of testing looking at the underlying disturbances and physiology and all that, but I think that one of the—some of the best tests now are these mycotoxin urine tests. One is from RealTime Lab. You have to have a physician do that. They’ve been around the longest. They do have an extensive panel that particularly looks at trichothecenes, the black mold guys. GPL Labs now has a urine mycotoxin test that’s relatively new. Some of us who are doing this are using both tests depending on what the situation that’s presenting. The GPL test looks at zearalenone, which is one that is very hormonally disruptive found in—that actually is tested for a lot in the animal industry. Those are some ways of testing. There’s a very inexpensive screening test that can be done online, the visual contrast sensitivity or VCS test.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we use that too. It’s a great first screen.
Dr. Christensen:
Yeah, it’s a great first screen. Just because it’s negative doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t have an issue. Again, all of these can have false negatives. In fact, that’s one of the things that we tell folks is if you do a urine mycotoxin test and it’s negative, even though you’ve had a known exposure and you got all the symptoms, it may be because your body is so toxic it’s having a hard time detoxing for it to come out in the urine. There’s ways that we provoke it and ways to help, and I’ve definitely seen this. If you’re treating somebody all long and you gave them some biocombusting agents or you’re working with treating they’re Lyme and using something like Biocidin, when you break up the biofilm in their gut, in their nose, whatever, you’ll see an increase in the level of mycotoxins before it comes down. We get into that.
There’s a lot of different blood work that you can use. Dr. Shoemaker is one of the ones who initially elucidated a lot of different tests, some inflammatory markers. Things like TGF beta and MSH. Those can all change. You don’t need to get a genetics anymore.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I don’t like the genetics either. We did the HLA test on—I don’t know. I was training many doctors as well, and we looked at it. First of all, we didn’t come out with the same statistics. Second of all, what relevance is it? We would have four people in the house. The sickest one didn’t even have the gene half the time. It was other exposures where their bucket was filled and ended up reacting more to the mold. The C4a test is a good one, but it has to be done by National Jewish Laboratories. LabCorp, the test doesn’t…
Dr. Christensen:
It’s a pain to get it, and then you have to ship it on dry ice. It can be useful. Again, I’ve quit using it just because…
Dr. Pompa:
It’s hard to get.
Dr. Christensen:
It’s expensive, and it’s hard to get. I find with a good history, a positive mycotoxin test, and again, a lot of the symptoms—and then, to me, I recommend looking deep. Again, when you start using binding agents—and we talk about all the different ways that you can approach these challenges. If somebody is not getting better, then you wonder, (A), is there an ongoing exposure? You got to get out of the situation or clean it up, one or the other, and (B), again, do they have a confounding challenge like a heavy metal toxin, parasites, candida?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I [00:23:26] for you. That compounding factor, it just really makes people sick. Let’s talk about testing the house. Often times, you’re right, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck. Then you start asking questions about people’s homes. Oh, yeah, we had some water leaks. It’s not hard, few questions, to go, okay, there’s a problem.
What are some of the better tests that they can do? Typically, people get online, and they’ll fine, oh, yeah, they test for mold, and they come out and do an air swab test. Teach our people here.
Dr. Christensen:
Right, again, on I think day five of this one, I have the different mold inspectors on. There’s a number of different ways that we need to test. Obvious mold, that’s easy. That’s easy to see. It’s the hidden ones that are the challenges. You can do air sampling, and there’s some do-it-yourself home kits that you can get. The challenge with those is that you have to know what the data is that you’re looking at.
Whoever’s doing air sampling too should get disturbed air samples, not just sticking something in the middle of the room. You need to be sure your HVAC system has been on. You can even walk around and use a fan or a blow dryer to stir up the dust because some of these molds are very heavy. The Stachybotrys or Chaetomium, those are some of the really bad guys. They’ve been there for a long time. They’re really heavy. They’re very difficult to pick up in air samples.
You can use mold plates. One of the guys I interviewed is JW Biava from ImmunoLytics.com. They do an amazing job of do-it-yourself home kits so people can test for it. Now, you want to put it not just in the middle of the room somewhere and/or on your bed where you sleep, but also, put it in those dark, moist spaces underneath the sink, underneath the refrigerator, or in your laundry room. Those are some places that you need to think about, hot water heaters in there. Those are some other areas that you can pick up some of maybe the hidden ones.
Then there’s some vacuum tests. Again, Dr. Shoemaker popularized those, the HERTSMI test or the ERMI test where you get a vacuum sample. Now, it’s interesting because all the qualified mold inspectors tend to pooh-pooh that test for lots of different reasons. I still find that if people are wanting to try and get a little assessment of the history of what’s been in their house and if there are some of the bad molds on there in the Aspergillus and Penicillium families and the Stachybotrys family, then you know that there’s a problem that needs to be—then you need to hire a professional. That’s a whole other ball of wax.
We give you a lot of guidelines about what makes a quality professional. You sign up for the Toxic Mold Summit. There’s a free eBook guide. In that guide, I have some lists of organizations that you can contact, good mold expecting around the country and some resources.
Dr. Pompa:
Where they’re available, mold dogs are amazing. We’ve had major people problems solved with mold dogs. I mean, they sniff out drugs at the airport. They can sniff out mold very easy. Mold has an odor. Some people just don’t smell it when you live in your own house. I walk into people’s homes. I’m like, mold.
Dr. Christensen:
Right, yeah, I mean, that is definitely another way to do it. I think one of our bonus interviewees is a guy who—one of the first guys who is using mold dogs. Yeah, I think, really, a quality inspector who knows what they’re looking for, especially if you have multiple family members who are sick with lots of different stuff. Everybody’s irritable. Nobody’s sleeping well. You’ve got ADD, learning disorders, headaches. That’s when you got to start thinking is it something environmental?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you have to go there. You have to rule it out. It’s my R1. Look and remove the source. Otherwise, you’ll never operate really normal detox pathways, and you’ll never downregulate the cellular inflammation. Mold is a biggie.
Right now, I think it’s a hidden—my next seminar in March is we have a focus on cancer. Tell us a little bit about it. There’s more [00:28:02] showing a link between mold, hidden mold, and cancer.
Dr. Christensen:
Absolutely, again, these are some of the things that I talk to with Doug Kaufmann. It’s some of the stuff that I talk to with—Ty Bollinger and his wife are on the summit, and we talk about the cancer link, Doug Kaufmann as well and Dennis Hooper. Aflatoxins in particular are known—they’re immunosuppressants, so especially if you’re looking at leukemia, lymphomas, those are definitely hormonally associated. Excuse me, mold toxin associated cancers. Kidney, bladder, those are some other ones. For several different reasons, both your suppressing immune system as well as impacting the mitochondria, those are things that create the cancer cells. Then you get the fungal and yeast overgrowth, and you’re feeding it all sugar. That’s where some cancers arise.
I’ve had a gal who’s came with breast cancer who was living in a moldy house. She was getting chemo and all that, and of course, that was giving her fungal overgrowth and yeast overgrowth and antibiotics. She really couldn’t get better until she got out of that house, and we started really working on the fungal side of the issues.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I mean, it’s one of those things that you have to consider. If you have any immune challenge, any autoimmune unexplainable illness, you better look under this rock, literally.
Dr. Christensen:
Yeah, then there’s the neurological diseases that are so common too, everything from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Dr. Dale Bredesen talks about Inhalation Alzheimer’s effect. We’re breathing this stuff into our noses. It’s getting in our sinus right here by our brains. The olfactory nerve goes right back into the brain under the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus. It’s a conduit for chronic inflammation into the brain, and so no wonder you can get everything from psychiatric symptoms to neural degenerative diseases.
Dr. Pompa:
You said it. It goes right in for that pituitary hypothalamus, which controls the thyroid, the adrenals, so [00:30:13] people are [00:30:15] and functional medicine doctors try to treat the—and I put this warning out all the time. I like to say, look, there’s three big ones you have to consider, mold, metals, and hidden infections in the mouth and, by the way, which is another topic. A lot of times we find these cavitations that make people very sick. Now we have better testing to test what’s in them. Guess what we’re finding? The mold that’s in people’s exposures end up making their way into these cavitations, so now we have another problem. Check for cavitation, and check for mold as well.
Dr. Christensen:
Folks can get really overwhelmed with all this. It is a big ball of wax, and then you’re talking about your house. There’s a lot of challenges. Part of watching the summit is you can hear all these different stories, but there’s so much resilience, and there’s hope. What you and I are trying to do, Dr. Dan, is we’re trying to educate people so they find it early. Think of it early in the diagnosis, not waiting like I did. It was eight years down the road, and some changes had already happened that were so difficult to reverse.
I think it’s important that if you’re recognizing these symptoms early—if all the kids in a classroom are sick and the teacher’s sick all the time, then suspect that something’s going on at the school and air quality at the school. Get together with the PTA. Demand a high-quality air testing. Bring in some surreptitious mold plates from ImmunoLytics. These are some of the ways that we can start turning things around is recognizing it early, and not waiting five, ten years down the road when it’s much harder to turn around your immune system. It still can be done.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, no doubt, the body heals itself. Look, we can just talk briefly. I think when you’re dealing with these type of illnesses, mold illnesses, you need a coach. You need a practitioner who understands this. Let’s just talk a little bit about—we’ve been in this long enough, and we’ve dealt with so many different mold clients between just the two of us, let alone all the people in the summit. There’s some things that transition into what’s common with all of us that we know works, like using binders in the gut, etc. Talk a little bit about that.
Dr. Christensen:
Sure, again, a common thing that we all wanted to do is we want to figure out how do we mobilize these toxins and get them out of us? We start with upregulating our detox mechanisms like in the liver and the bile; get those flowing; get our lymphatic system flowing. You got to make sure the gut is working. You’re pooping well, getting all those things. Then you can start using binding agents, and there’s all different kinds of binders out there. Dr. Shoemaker started out with cholestyramine. Those of us who have been doing this for a while, we don’t use that so much anymore. There’s charcoal, clay. There’s pectins.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I think if you heard but it caused people—especially those suffered from constipation. It was hell.
Dr. Christensen:
Right, you can use pectins. Even with children, there’s some fruit pectins that you can use, apple, orange, cranberry pectins. You can actually make applesauce and make things. I have a little recipe in our mold detox diet book that comes along with the summit if you get the upgrade to it. Zeolite is another one, so it depends what you’re trying to bind.
Dr. Pompa:
The CytoDetox has particles big that’s standing out, particles that go to the cell, which you need too, by the way. You have to pull these things off the cell membrane, and so Cyto has worked. It’s been a godsend for us. We also use BIND that has four different types of binders. A lot of people try to use carbon, but there’s only one carbon actually proven to actually pull biotoxin, and it’s a special carbon that we import from Holland, by the way. I mean, if this stuff gets on the counter, you can’t get it off. That’s how strong it is. Anyways, yeah, these binders become—and upregulating cell function, I mean, if you don’t upregulate what the cell naturally needs to do to get rid of the biotoxin from the membranes, you’re dead in the water there too.
Dr. Christensen:
Absolutely, this is where we can use things like—it could be vitamins. If somebody’s really super-sick and super-reactive, they’re dumping histamine all the time, so they’re sensitive to everything. They can’t take any supplements. They can’t eat any foods. We have whole protocols to help deal with and approach those clients. That’s a problem, multiple chemical sensitivity. You start by decreasing your total toxic load in your environment, eating [00:35:12], staying from sugar, staying away from grains. Those are some simple things that we discuss in the summit.
Something else super, super-simple is you start irrigating your nasal sinuses, just using sinus rinse. We add different preparations to that, different botanicals to help knock off things. We can also use prescription colloidal sliver, EDTA. I don’t use the BEG spray as much anymore. You can also use prescription antifungals.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, the colloidal silver, EDTA is the better way to go.
Dr. Christensen:
Yeah, prescription antifungals, so there’s a lot of protocols that are being used. Dr. Joseph Brewer is one of the ones who started using antifungals nasal, and that can be very [00:35:56] who’s been sick for a long time. Folks can just use plain old sinus rinse, and just start taking a shower inside your nose. Just wash the mold out. Right there, that’s helpful and, like you said, binding agents. Then you want to do anything you can to sweat to try and get it out of your pores, Epsom salt baths. For some folks, things like coffee enemas.
We talked to Wendy Myers a lot about detox and, again, different detox mechanisms. If you have access to an infrared sauna, that’s amazing. We have a new company or app that’s called HOTWORX that you can go work out. It’s infrared sauna kind of environment for really inexpensive for a month where you can go frequently for free. That’s something to think about. If you’ve been really sick, if you have lots of family members that are sick, then purchasing a really high-quality portable, smaller infrared unit may be useful to get everybody onboard, and then give everybody some binding agents. I use a combo binding agent as well, but I’m very interested in yours.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I mean, it works well. It’s been changed and bettered over the years. That’s for sure. Look, number one, folks, if you have these symptoms that we discussed, yeah, you might want to consider looking further into your home and into your own immune system. What’s going on in your own body, the urine test? If you think this could be you, that’s why we’re training doctors as well.
Dr. Margaret, what a—it’s great just to be able to bring this information. I know people are going to get the summit. We’ll make sure we put that little link here because it’s a wealth of knowledge that you brought. This topic, I’m telling you, it’s the three things. Metals, molds, and hidden infections are why people still aren’t feeling well and have unexplainable illnesses that doctors are just covering up with medication. Functional medicine is just…
Dr. Christensen:
I agree. Yeah, we didn’t get enough training in this particular area, and so that’s part of why I’m doing this is to raise awareness because it’s such a huge challenging problem. The other thing I just wanted to mention is, on the fifth day of the summit, that’s when I have the different mold inspectors and all that, but I talk to George Swanson, who’s a building biologist, which is just amazing. There’s only 600 certified building biologists in this country. In Germany, there’s 85,000 of them. You have to have that certification in order to build houses. He talks about using materials like magnesium oxide and like rock wool insulation. How do you build a house so that it breathes? How do you build a house also so that it guides EMFs out of it in a building, to guide EMFs out? What are some of the things that we can do for that? EMFs is a whole other area.
You know what? If you’re sick, turn off your damn Wi-Fi at night, for sure, and don’t have any electronics in your bedroom. That’s one of the things that you can be helpful. Get a real high-quality air filter. I have some suggestions, again, in the eBook that you can put in your bedrooms. That’s something else simple that you can do. Drink filtered water. If nothing else, get a pitcher for your refrigerator. Those are some simple things that you could do. Rinse out your sinuses, sweat a little bit, and start eating apple and orange and cranberry pectins. Okra has lots of pectins as binding agents, so if you don’t know anything else to do, you can do those things.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s great advice, and something people can do right away. Thank you, Dr. Margaret, just great. What a great summit. I can’t wait to hear George. I want to hear his talk just for the EMF reasons alone. You’re right; they’re building homes much different than we are in other parts of the country than we here are in the US. It’s amazing we’re still using drywall with paper. It really is a perfect food. Just add water, and you have mold.
Dr. Christensen:
That’s true. That’s great.
Dr. Pompa:
Thank you for being on CellTV. Thank you.
Dr. Christensen:
You are welcome. Thanks so much, Dan.
Ashley:
That’s it for this week. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode. This episode was brought to you by CytoDetox. Please check it out at buycytonow.com. We’ll be back next week and every Friday at 10 a.m. Eastern. We truly appreciate your support. You can always find us at cellularhealing.tv, and please remember to spread the love by liking, subscribing, giving an iTunes review, and sharing the show with anyone you think may benefit from the information heard here. As always, thanks for listening
