Today I'll be revisiting an important interview from 2018, addressing one of the most threatening, yet overlooked forms of toxicity that could be overwhelming your environment. Toxic mold is an incredibly common yet often completely unassuming trigger and cause of many different chronic health conditions. Dr. Margaret Christensen is an integrative doctor who has conquered mold in her own life, and she can help you identify if mold is affecting you. Why is toxic mold is becoming so common these days, and how is 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 if mold may be to blame.
More about Dr. Christensen:
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.
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Transcript:
Ashley Smith:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Cellular Healing TV. I’m Ashley Smith. Today, we revisit an episode from 2018 with Dr. Margaret Christensen. Toxic mold is an incredibly common yet often completely unassuming trigger and cause of many different chronic health conditions.
Dr. Pompa is meeting with Dr. Christensen, who is an integrative doctor who has conquered mold in her own life. 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. Thanks for joining. Welcome again to Cellular Healing TV.
Dr. Pompa:
Hey, I want to tell you about one of our sponsors, CytoDetox. Look, podcasts cost money. There’s a lot of production going around this, but we are grateful to have Cellular Detox as one of the sponsors. It’s so easy for me to talk about the product because myself and my family use it constantly as we practice what I preach. For over 15 years, I have talked about and taught doctors and the public about cellular detox.
I’ll tell you, Cyto was a breakthrough; Cyto was a breakthrough for us. It’s changed so many lives. We’re grateful that they sponsor Cellular Healing TV. It makes sense, doesn’t it? They should.
Ashley Smith:
If you’re listening to this podcast and want to access the amazing CytoDetox product Dr. Pompa just mentioned, please visit DetoxOffer.com. Again, that’s DetoxOffer.com.
Dr. Pompa:
Margaret, welcome to the show, Cell TV that is.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
Thanks so much, Dan, for having me.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, I was on your summit.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
Absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, where you had some of the world’s experts in this topic. Wow, what a topic. I’m excited to bring this again to Cell TV. 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.
All right, well, Margaret, tell me your story. How did you get involved in this so much so, you have a summit on mold? I think you’re the only mold summit that I know of. I think it’s a really important one for everyone to watch. How did you get involved in this?
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
It’s funny because 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 for their coworkers. 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. 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, and 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. I still didn’t figure out what was wrong with me. It wasn’t until a reexposure 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 but took everything with us. I knew nothing.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, meaning that you can contaminate the next home.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
Yeah, and 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 because I was like, expensive urine, but I started taking them.
I felt significantly better within about—and then I quit taking them because I thought I don’t need them. I crashed after I stopped taking them. This was about two years into this process. I was like, oh, 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 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, just like you mentioned, everything from autoimmune to chronic neurological diseases. Psychiatric disorder is a really big one that is completely unrecognized as being related. I’ve got some great cases that I can really talk about.
Anyway, that’s how I got into this. I closed my practice twice. First, my big practice because I couldn’t keep going. I took two years off just to get better. I started this little, teeny, tiny practice in the back of a compounding pharmacy.
Then I moved my way up, got into another office. That office building was really toxic. The apartment that I was living in part-time was also moldy. It was following me around.
[00:06:10], we laughed about this. Some of the other folks on the summit that I talked to, we’re just mold magnets. It follows us everywhere we go. 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 reexposure. I actually went to the Environmental Health Center, which is here in Dallas. There’s a very famous doctor, Dr. Wayne Ray, Bill Ray, who’s one of the pioneers in environmental medicine.
Dr. Pompa:
He just recently died, unfortunately.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
He did recently die. 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 nother topic we can talk about and what it does to molds.
Yeah, that’s how I got started. I started a little teeny boutique practice in functional medicine. Over time, again, my husband developed Parkinson’s. 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.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, and 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 because 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 to—in many different mold exposures. I was part of—I had massive mercury in my brain and probably a low-grade mold exposure, but it became more problematic because my bucket was full. We realized that most people are bombarded with different neurotoxins. Metals and mold are some of the biggest ones.
Why is mold so prevalent? You were in how many mold? So many people are in homes right now, or businesses, or schools, unknowingly that there’s mold. Why has this become such an epidemic?
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
That’s a great question, Dan. 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. Margaret Christensen:
Yeah, cellulose; it’s food for molds. Shotty building standards. It’s real interesting because, in other places of the world, they don’t have quite the same problems that we do. We also have the challenges with very tight buildings, particularly getting 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, or it can be a window leaking—it 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. Underneath the houses, if they’re on a pier and beam house, that’s another common challenge because of how the air conditioning system works, and if you have fans on inside the house that are sucking air 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 mycotoxins because that’s the big problem, especially for mitochondria.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, because 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. Margaret 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. You have more pollen and more molds. That’s different. Definitely, that can cause allergies.
The type of molds that grow inside water-damaged buildings that are again feeding on the sheetrock, those not only can cause chronic allergies, stuffy nose, recurrent sinus problems, sinusitis, infections, upper respiratory cough, drainage, etcetera, but it’s the mycotoxins that those toxic molds produce that are so damaging to cell membranes and to mitochondria. I know all of you 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. That’s in between the cell membranes is a layer of fat. In the mitochondrial membrane, there’s a little layer of fat. What’s our brain? It’s all fat.
When you get these mycotoxins that get into you, you can have had exposure like you grew up in a moldy basement somewhere up in the Northeast coast. Yeah, and you 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 could smell it a mile away. Then low and behold, I’d realize I’d be sick days later, sometimes for weeks just from one exposure. Even walking in, smelling it for five smells before I turned around and got out, I still got sick. Sicker quicker, meaning our immune system was so hypersensitized now for this, it just drove this inflammatory response. People have no clue that’s happening, by the way. That’s a sad thing.
Talk a little bit about—because I want people to identify because now, we have people thinking, well, maybe this is me. Talk about that. Give some symptoms. 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. Margaret 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’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 good—with the antibiotics.
Breathing in the molds and the mycotoxins themselves are incredibly irritating to the whole sinus system. They create biofilms. What you get is these—this slim-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. 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 and there’s a test that I like to run called MARCoNS, testing from MARCoNS. It’s a simple nasal test for $80 to $100.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
Yeah, we can do that. MARCoNS is looking for the bacterial infections.
Dr. Pompa:
Now, they run a fungal portion of it, but when you have these resistant staph, these negative staph, it’s an indicator that you were in a mold exposure.
Dr. Margaret 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 great organization that I would strongly recommend that all of your participants check out because there’s a lay—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 have 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 all these problems like people working together to try and solve autism because it’s—again, it’s such a common challenge that we’re seeing.
We talked about sinus infections. That’s a biggie. Again, you 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 and 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 the 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. Then you’re disrupting that microbiome. You’ve already taken ten rounds of antibiotics, which really disrupted your microbiome, suppressed your immune system. You’re ever more susceptible. That’s the chronic challenges that we see.
One of our guests is Evan Brands, who is real big on candida and yeast. We talk about the yeast/mold connection is so common because 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. Those are things.
We talked about anxiety and depression, even people are in psychosis. Mary Ackerley is one of the gals we interview, Dr. Mary Ackerley. She’s an amazing psychiatrist and got into mold toxicity just totally by accident. She and a lot of the other docs who are psychiatrists on this ICI.forum—.org forum are talking about 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, who he wrote the very famous book called, The Fungal Link. He’s got an amazing show called knowthecause.com that people watch all around the world. He and I talk about the connection to addiction and alcoholism also because 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. Then you’re feeding it.
You’ve got a lot of that fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, muscle weakness. Those are very common symptoms. Then one area that you and you’ve taught so many of your mentors, Jay Davidson, who’s on the show, Todd Watts who’s on the show, Scott Richman. They’re also interviewed talking about chronic infections, parasites, Lyme, coinfections.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, those guys were my students early on. The message then and 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 because the people that can’t get rid of these things get better, they have—they could be living in a mold exposure.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
Absolutely, yeah. It’s really interesting because one of the folks that I interview that’s on the bonus section 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. Mycophenolic acid is actually used in medicine to kill the immune system before somebody is 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 disturbances, suppress the immune system, no wonder you get—if you have underlying viral infections, parasitic infections, and tick-borne illnesses like Lyme or coinfections, all of those can bloom and rise. It’s chicken and the egg. Are you getting by a tick and you’re doing okay until you move into a moldy house?
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, yeah, because the immune system will keep most of those things at bay. We all have candida. Now, they’re finding out 90% of the population have 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? Okay, you mentioned a urine mycotoxin. What are some other tests that someone could run? How do we test for homes? How do we know if our homes—
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
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 [00:20:03] lab. They’ve been around the longest. They do have an extensive panel that particularly looks at trichothecenes, the block 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 is that’s presenting. There’s some interesting—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, a visual contrast sensitivity or VCS.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, we use that, too. It’s a great first screen.
Dr. Margaret 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’ve 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. That’s ways that we provoke it and ways to help.
I’ve definitely seen this. If you’re treating somebody along and you gave them some biofilm busting agents or you’re working with treating their mind 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 bloodwork that you can use. Dr. Shoemaker is one of the ones who initially elucidated a lot of different tests and inflammatory markers, things like TGF-beta and MSH. Those can all change. We don’t need to do the genetics anymore.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, I don’t like the genetics either. We did the HLA test on—I was training many doctors on it as well. We looked at it. First of all, we didn’t come out with the same statistics. Second of all, what relevance is it because 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 mold. The C4a little—C4a is a good one, but it has to be done by National Jewish Laboratories; LabCorp test doesn’t—
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
It’s a pain to get it. Then you have to ship it on dry ice. It can be useful, but again, I’ve quit using it just because it’s expensive.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s hard to get.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
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—again, when you start using binding agents. We talk about all the different ways that you can approach these challenges. If somebody’s not getting better, then you wonder, a, is there an ongoing exposure because you’ve got to get out of the situation or clean it up or one or the other. B, again, do they have a confounding challenge like a heavy metal toxin, parasites, candida.
Dr. Pompa:
I preach on that for you, that compounding factor. It just really makes people sick. Let’s talk about testing the house because oftentimes, 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, but you know. It’s not hard through questions to go, okay, there’s a problem.
What’s some of the better tests they can do because typically, people get online. They’ll find, oh yeah, they test for mold. They come out and do an air swab test. Teach our people here.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
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 to see; it’s the hidden ones that are the challenges. You can do air sampling. 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 just to—because some of these molds are very heavy like the Stachybotrys or Chaetomium. Those are some of the real bad guys that if 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 interview is JW Biava from Immunolytics.com. They do an amazing job of do-it-yourself home kits that people can test for it.
Now, you want to put it not just in the middle of a room somewhere and/or on your bed where you sleep, but also put it in those dark, moist spaces underneath the sink, in underneath the refrigerator, 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 cuckoo that test because—for lots of different reason, but I still find that if people are wanting to try and get a little assessment of what’s—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 nother ball of wax. We give you a lot of guidelines about what makes a quality professional. If you sign up for the toxic mold summit, there’s a free e-book guide. In that guide, I have some lists of organizations that you can contact of good mold inspecting around the country and some resources.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, where they’re available, mold dogs are amazing. We’ve had major people problems solved with mold dogs. If they sniff out drugs at the airport, they can sniff out mold very easy because 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. Margaret Christensen:
Yeah, right, yeah. 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 was using mold dogs. 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, and everybody is irritable, nobody’s sleeping well, you’ve got ADD, learning disorders, headaches. That’s when you’ve 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 R Number One, remove the source; otherwise, you’ll never upregulate normal detox pathways. 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’re going to focus on cancer. Tell us a little bit about it because there’s [00:27:54] link between mold, hidden mold, and cancer.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
Absolutely, and 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. We talk about the cancer link. Doug Kaufmann as well and Dennis Hooper.
Aflatoxins, in particular, are known—again, they’re immunosuppressants. Especially if you’re looking at leukemias, 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. You’re feeding it all sugar. That’s where some cancers arise.
A gal came with breast cancer who was living in a moldy house. She was getting chemo and all that. 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, it’s one of those things where you have to consider if you have any immune challenge, any autoimmune, any unexplainable illness, you better look under this rock, literally.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
Yeah, and then there’s the—again, the neurological diseases that are so common, too, everything from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Dr. Dale Bredesem 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. No wonder you can get everything from psychiatric symptoms to neurodegenerative diseases.
Dr. Pompa:
You said it; it goes right in for that pituitary hypothalamus which controls the thyroid, the adrenals. Many people are down in functional medicine doctors trying to treat—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. By the way, which is another topic because 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. Now, we have another problem. Check for cavitation and check for mold.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
Folks can get really overwhelmed with all of this because it’s just a big ball of wax. Then you’re talking about your house. There’s a lot of challenges. Part of again 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 diagnosis, not waiting like I did. It was eight years down the road. 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 you are—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 the air quality of the school. Get together with the PTA and say—demand high-quality air testing. Bring in some surreptitious mold plates from Immunolab—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. We can just talk briefly because I think when you’re dealing with these types of illnesses, mold illnesses, you need a coach. You need a practitioner who understands this, but 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 even 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, etcetera. Talk a little bit about that.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
Sure, again, a common thing that we all want to do is we want to figure out how to we mobilize these toxins and get them out of us. We start with upregulating our detox mechanisms like in the liver, in the bile. Get those following; get our lymphatic system flowing. You’ve got to make sure the gut is working, you’re pooping well, getting all those things. Then you can start using binding agents. There’s all different kinds of binders out there. Dr. Shoemaker started out with cholestyramine. Those of us who’ve been doing this for a while, we don’t use that so much anymore. There’s charcoal, clay; there’s pectins.
Dr. Pompa:
It works; it causes people, especially if they’re suffering constipation, it was hell.
Dr. Margaret 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 we—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. It depends what you’re trying to bind.
Dr. Pompa:
CytoDetox has particles big that’s standing on particles that go to the cell, which are needed too, by the way.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
You have to pull these things off the cell membrane. 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. It’s a special carbon that we import from Holland, by the way. 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. 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. Margaret Christensen:
Right, absolutely. This is where we can use things like B vitamins. If somebody’s really super sick and super reactive, they’re dumping histamine all the time. 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 because that’s a problem, multichemical sensitivity.
You start by decreasing your total toxic load in your environment. [00:35:03], staying away from sugar, staying away from grains. Those are some simple things that we discuss in the summit. Something else 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 silver, EDTA. I don’t use the big spray as much anymore, but you can also use prescription antifungals.
Dr. Pompa:
I still think EDTA is the better way to go.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
Yeah, prescription antifungals. There’s a lot of protocols are being used. Dr. Joseph Brewer is one of the ones who started using antifungals nasally. That can be very helpful on someone who’s been sick for a long time.
Folks can just use plain old sinus rinse and just start taking and shower inside your nose; just wash the mold out. Right there, that’s helpful. Like you said, binding agents. Then you want to do anything you can to sweat to try and get it out of your pores. Epson salt baths, for some folks, things like coffee enemas.
We talked to Wendy Myers a lot about detox and different detox mechanisms. If you have access to an infrared sauna, that’s amazing. We have a new company. It’s called HOTWORX that you can go work out in an infrared sauna 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 on board. Get everybody some binding agents. I use a combo binding agent as well, but I’m very interested in yours.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, 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 in 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, 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 link here because it’s a wealth of knowledge that you brought. This topic, I’m telling you, it’s the three things, metals, mold, and hidden infections are why people still aren’t feeling well and have unexplainable illnesses that doctors are just covering up with medication and functional medicine is.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
I agree, yeah. We didn’t get enough training in this particular area.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
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. I talked 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 like 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 ROCKWOOL insulation. How do you build a house so that it breaths? How do you build a house also so that it guides EMFs out of it and in a building to guide EMFs out? What are some of the things that we can do for that? EMFs is a whole nother area, but if you’re sick, turn off your damn WIFI at night for sure.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, for sure.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
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 e-book 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. If you don’t know anything else to do, you can do those things.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s great advice that so many 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 the perfect food. Just add water and you have mold.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
That’s true. That’s great.
Dr. Pompa:
Thank you for being on Cell TV, thank you.
Dr. Margaret Christensen:
You are welcome. Thanks so much, Dan.
Dr. Pompa:
Give thanks to one of our sponsors, CytoDefend. Look, in a time like this, I think that our immune system and keeping our immune system up right now is more important than ever. I can also tell you that I pay attention to the things that keep my immune system on par and healthy. I’m so glad that CytoDefend is one of our sponsors here on Cell TV. It’s a product that I use, my family uses. Hopefully, you’ll check it out.
By the way, you can check it out with the link right here below. If you want to try a free bottle, you can actually get a free bottle, just pay the shipping. I think you’ll reorder after that but check it out.
Ashley Smith:
If you’re listening to this podcast and want to access the amazing CytoDefend product Dr. Pompa just mentioned, please visit FreeImmunity.com. Again, that’s FreeImmunity.com.
That’s it for this week. The materials and content within this podcast are intended as general information only and are not to be considered as substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you would like to purchase some of the supplements mentioned on this show, please visit the site, AsSeenOnCHTV.com, and use the code CHTV15 for 15% off. Again, that’s AsSeenOnCHTV.com. Use the code CHTV15 for 15% off. As always, thanks for listening.
