Transcript of Episode 73: Mold and Multiple Chemical Sensitivity (MCS)
With Dr. Daniel Pompa and Phil Kaplan.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, hey, it’s Dr. Pompa here, and not live. We’re actually recording this call because we are shooting, actually, Phil and I, some amazing shows that you’re going to see in the future. But we are recording this show. But I have Phil here, which some of you who watched many of the past shows actually know who this gentleman is.
Phil:
And it’s nice to see you again.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, well, I have to always joke about this. Because I always say my interest in nutrition actually started back when I was a wrestler trying to make sure I just didn’t lose weight the bad way where you see people cutting calories, right, and they’re trying to get skinny to make a weight. And I said I’m just not going to do that because I saw those guys lose strength, right, and it’s, like, I’m not just going to cut a weight class.
So I really had no nutrition source except Muscle & Fitness. It’s like, gosh, these guys are fit, right? So I got Muscle & Fitness. I even got a subscription, and I started reading all the articles in Muscle & Fitness. What I didn’t know at that time is most likely I was reading this guy’s articles. He was good friends with Joe Weider at that time. And you not only wrote most of the articles for Muscle & Fitness, you wrote Flex Magazine. I mean, all the magazines that I read as a kid. Am I right on that?
Phil:
Yes, and in fact, Joe Weider said, “Let’s write some good articles because Dr. Pompa is going to be reading it, and he’s going to become very famous one day.”
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s it. Anyways, but Phil actually had the largest fitness radio show. And as a matter of fact, guys, I have to say this, but we’re doing a radio show together, and he had the largest fitness radio show in the country. And Phil was, I would say, the most famous guy in fitness.
Phil:
So enough about that.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m a proud—let’s just keep talking about you.
Phil:
No, no. Let’s talk about…
Dr. Pompa:
Let’s keep talking about you.
Phil:
We have something important to talk about.
Dr. Pompa:
Mold, mold is the topic today.
Phil:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, mold is the topic today. I actually announced it last week, and I said this is one of these big ones that we need to discuss. Last week we discussed Lyme. And I say it. I’ll repeat. There’s the big three amigos, right? We can’t get rid of all the chemicals in our life; however, when we get hit with heavy metals, when we get hit with infections, like Lyme, even infections from root canals, cavitations, and we get hit with biotoxins from mold, these things shut down detox pathways. They have such a dramatic effect on the nerve system that, literally, now we become very sensitive to every toxin. You know, I just recently…
Phil:
Heavy metals, Lyme, and mold.
Dr. Pompa:
Heavy metals, we’ll say heavy metals infection because infection puts out a biotoxin. That’s a toxin produced by a living thing, so root canals, cavitations. I always say, and you probably have heard me say it to the doctors, if someone’s not getting well, there’s still something upstream. I just had that happen to a client, probably, two weeks ago. They weren’t getting well, and they weren’t getting well. She had a root canal that was under a crown. She didn’t know it was there. She got it out, and since then, I’ve been getting emails…
Phil:
Better and better.
Dr. Pompa:
And better, and better, and better, exactly, she’s like—her sensitivities went down. Even her food sensitivities have changed. She’s actually eating different foods now. We haven’t even really started even detoxing the biotoxins out from that root canal. But, I mean, so these guys shut things down. But today’s topic is mold, and something—we’re actually in Warren Phillips’ house, who you all know, and something happened here the last couple days.
Phil:
There’s a big hole in the ceiling.
Dr. Pompa:
There is a big hole in the ceiling. And actually, I would take you out there but they’re doing a little school activity out there. I’d take you out and actually show you the hole in the ceiling, but a minor amount of water, Phil, leaked. And actually, it was just a crack in the ceiling, paint crack they thought, that they were going to fix. And the gentleman that fixed it said, “Oh, this is moist. Very little, but it’s moist.” He put a moisture reader on it, and it was about 50%. But Warren immediately said what I would’ve said and you. “Open it up,” but he just didn’t have them open it up.
Phil:
And we would appear to be just extreme, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah.
Phil:
Why would you do that? It’s just a little bit of water?
Dr. Pompa:
No one would’ve, right? Matter of fact, he thought—Warren was like, what? You know, it’s just a small amount of water.
Phil:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
And then open it up. But no, this is when he thought Warren was very extreme. He said, “No, no, no. Do not open it up now. We’ll bring someone, an expert in.” Because they build around it a containment if you will, right?
Phil:
Right, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Where they create something called negative air pressure. So when they open it up, let’s say there was mold, right? We didn’t—we don’t know at this point, but where there’s water, there’s mold, typically. So when they open it up…
Phil:
It doesn’t contaminate the entire home.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right. The spore, the biotoxins don’t contaminate the environment, and believe me, many people even watching this, my clients make this mistake all the time. Number one, typically you get the aggressive person like myself, folks. I’ve done this myself. You’ve done it too, right? I got to know. I have to know if there’s mold there, and I go in. And of course, back then I would be sick for days. But, you know, so mold, look, it just takes water and some food in a house. Phil, typically, what is the food in a house?
Phil:
Drywall.
Dr. Pompa:
Drywall, what’s on the back of drywall, paper? Yeah, so that’s—typically, the cellulose is the food in the paper, and it just feeds. You just add a little water. The mold spores are here, but then we add water. And then here’s the thing, folks. We’re not talking about mold allergies in this show. Please, understand. This is biotoxic illness. The mold produces a biotoxin.
Phil:
Yeah, I’m glad you said that because…
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, because many people don’t get that.
Phil:
Yeah, and when I do talk to people, they go, “Oh, well, I know someone else who’s allergic to mold.” I go, “No, no. I’m not allergic to mold.”
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Phil:
You have to go through the whole explanation.
Dr. Pompa:
Mold, biotoxin illness, I probably should refer to it from this point on, is very serious. I mean, people with biotoxin illness get, I don’t want to say more sick, but almost worse sick than someone with heavy metal poisoning, Lyme, very nasty. Mold has a certain fingerprint, has a certain look. And I’ll tell you, when people get sick from this, their lives change. Matter of fact, I think the only thing that could do that justice—and one of the reasons I have you here is you became a mold expert, from the fitness expert to a mold expert.
Phil:
Unintentionally, yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
I remember the day…
Phil:
I didn’t know that was my path. I didn’t know this would lead to…
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. I’m sure you didn’t.
Phil:
But you know what? I mean, before we get into it, I just want to say it led me here.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. That’s a good thing.
Phil:
So I think the fact that you went through an illness, and I went through an illness, and we came together, it’s going to serve all the people we can help.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. There’s no doubt. Our stories put us here. Our stories give a greater purpose, so like you always say, we look forward. Not back, right?
Phil:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
We’re able to change a world, make a difference, affect so many people watching us. I promise you, there’s many people watching this show that have symptoms, whether it’s can’t sleep at night, sensitive to things they were never sensitive, whether it’s food, chemicals, perfumes.
Phil:
And I think one more frustration of becoming sick from mold or something like it is it’s an invisible ailment. So people just tend to look at you and go, you’re stressed. We need a little Lexapro. Let’s just get you a little Xanax, and you’ll be okay.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, my illness, I—someone close to me said to me once, and I still remember. As you know, that was years ago. Just push through it. If I were you, I would just push through it.
Phil:
And you try that. You do.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, of course, I’m tough.
Phil:
You wake up in the morning, and you go I’m not going to be sick this morning, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, so what he was telling me was I’m not tough enough. He’s so tough. He would’ve pushed through it.
Phil:
Sure.
Dr. Pompa:
I’m telling you, I wanted to go across the room and do something dramatic. Let’s just say that, but, yeah, I mean, this is a—it’s what I classify as an unexplainable illness. But most people watching this have symptoms, and they just don’t know what’s wrong, right? I mean, I promise you, they’ve been addressing their thyroid like I did. They’ve been addressing their adrenals like I did, which just kinda makes you a little better sometimes, sometimes worse. It’s this nasty back and forth. What’s going on? My hair’s getting thinner. I’m gaining weight. Because that’s one of the symptoms from mold is you lose muscle and gain fat. I mean, go figure. I became skinny fat. You lost muscle in your process.
Phil:
Tremendous amount.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. It’s a horrific hormonal experience that is not good. But I can tell you this; the answer isn’t chasing hormones, taking more hormones. The answer is, I always say, is find the cause. The problem with this is people don’t know, right? I mean, there’s four people living in a house often times, and one person gets sick.
Phil:
Not only people don’t know, people don’t want to hear, right?
Dr. Pompa:
No, absolutely not.
Phil:
So somebody goes, “Oh, yeah, I found some mold behind my cabinets. They’re coming in to clean it up.” You go, “No. Get out of the house. Just get out of the house. Don’t sleep there, all right? Let’s get to work. Let’s get it tested.” “No, no, it’s just a little bit of mold.”
Dr. Pompa:
It’s just a little bit of mold, yeah.
Phil:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Phil:
It’s only after they have the experience that suddenly their interest changes and they go, “Tell me about this. How can I get well?”
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Actually, what you said there is a great thing. Because, see, we think about that little mildew on the bathroom wall is the mold, and I’ve seen that my whole life. It’s a—look, there’s different types of mold. There’s many, obviously, types of mold. There’s at least six that are nasty, nasty guys. Maybe one you’re familiar with is black mold, Stachybotrys, Aspergillus, right? I mean, there’s these nasty…
Phil:
Yeah, this is a part of our education.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. How do we know these names? Because we fear these guys, right, or these guys beat us up a little bit. Look, I want to say this too, and I want you tell your story, but we both became sensitive to our world, multi-chemically sensitive, MCS. I mean, where I was afraid to go outside of my space, my safe space. I was afraid to be around…
Phil:
Well, let’s talk a little bit about the experience I went through, and then we’ll come back and talk about that.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, but let me just say this before we get there. I got there via heavy metals. You got there via mold. But we both landed in the same place. We were—couldn’t function in our world. Tell your story because it’s a unique one.
Phil:
There is one more piece of that. You were very functional. So people expect a lot of you.
Dr. Pompa:
Perfectly functional.
Phil:
So when you go through this, everybody’s looking at you going come on. Just be yourself. Just do what you normally do. And that’s a huge part of the frustration is people don’t quite get it. And you don’t know how to explain it, and the harder you try to explain it, the crazier they start to think you are.
Dr. Pompa:
I actually hid it from my family for years, hid it. I just wasn’t showing up at family functions. Number one, God forbid I take a cologne hit or I would get sick. Even the actual emotional stress of thinking about getting sick would make me sick. I mean it was like—so I just wasn’t showing up. And my family was, really, what’s wrong?
I remember the day I went where I was sitting, where my father was sitting. And I told my dad. And I just started crying. And, I mean, I can’t go—I still can’t go down this road. But I started crying, and he said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Dad, I’ve been sick.” “What do you mean?” He couldn’t understand it. I mean, number one, I hid it, right? So I’d come over, and put the face on.
Phil:
They can’t understand.
Dr. Pompa:
He just never got it. My sister, my one sister never got it, you know?
Phil:
Because it’s a little bit like—did you ever see those old movies where aliens land, and they start to take over people’s bodies? Like the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, right? And there’s always one person in the town who knows, and he tries to warn everybody. He goes, “No, don’t go home. Your wife is an alien.”
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Phil:
And they go, “Shut up.” And you become that. The more that you try to allow other people into that world, the more they think that you’re in a different world.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. No doubt about it. And because I was a health guy in my family, there was a whole other thing of embarrassment. There was whole other thing of it’s just him being overboard once again, right?
Phil:
Right, you start to feel like a hypocrite.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, no doubt.
Phil:
Because here you are advising people on health, and…
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. You went through that too. I didn’t put that together, differently, right? It’s like, hypocrite, just being overboard again about his health, right? I mean, so there was multiple reasons why I didn’t want anyone to know. And I lived a life, literally, of seclusion and just embarrassment. But anyways, your story, I remember the day I got the phone call of—someone referred you to me as a client. And I remember hearing your story, and thinking that’s yet another amazing story, but yet, that I hear all the time, just differently.
Phil:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
But tell the story because I think it is the stories that really capture people, and get people to think.
Phil:
Let me start out by saying I think before Hurricane Wilma—and I’ll explain what she has to do with it. Before Hurricane Wilma, my life was as close to perfect as it gets. It really was.
Dr. Pompa:
I would say the same about mine.
Phil:
And I don’t know that I appreciated it then.
Dr. Pompa:
I would say the same about me.
Phil:
You know, sometimes you have to lose something to realize how valuable it is. So, I mean, I really had an idealistic life. I mean, I had a beautiful home, and a beautiful wife, and a beautiful little girl, and a tremendous business, and everything was working. I was travelling around the world doing seminars and appearances.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, you were a famous guy.
Phil:
Life was really, really exciting and fun, and just wonderful, you know. And then there was the year, 2005, in South Florida, where three major hurricanes hit. And my wife and, I guess, 1-year-old daughter at that time stayed there with me through the first two. And we didn’t have major damage, but it’s an inconvenience. Your power goes out for three or four days. You can’t get food, and you’re going to have to…
Dr. Pompa:
I guess you get used to it living down there.
Phil:
Well, you don’t, especially when you have a baby because she’s…
Dr. Pompa:
It’s scary.
Phil:
Because, poor thing, she’s crying, and she’s uncomfortable, and the humidity, and you don’t have air conditioning. So anyway, when the third one was coming…
Dr. Pompa:
Humidity.
Phil:
When the third one was coming, they went out of town. So I stayed to take care of the house. And the third one was the big one. It was Hurricane Wilma, and it was like a freight train just going bam, outside the house for hours. Then you get into the eye of the storm, and it quiets, you know, and you take a peek outside.
Dr. Pompa:
I’ve never been in one.
Phil:
You never want to.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Phil:
You never want to. And this was a real one. When I moved to Florida, they’d have these hurricane warnings, and everybody would run to the grocery store, and fight over the last container of water. And the hurricane would never come. So you, kinda go, “Oh, that’s stupid.” And people would have hurricane parties, but this one really woke people up as what the damage is, and why the warnings are there.
Anyway, the next day, the house was fine. I think we lost a tree and a rooftop, nothing major. So I’m happy, you know? I call my wife, and I’m going, “Hey, things are great. We held up okay.” I’m looking around the neighborhood, and I see stop signs are in the lake. I mean, everything’s blown everywhere, but our house is okay. So now I do what I would do, of course, is I go check on my office. And I go to my office, which in total was about 4,500 square feet. Half of it was warehouse space. So we were selling books, and nutritional supplements, and programs, and DVDs, and that’s…
Dr. Pompa:
The whole thing.
Phil:
The whole thing. And I would walk in, and there’s no roof.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, I guess that was quite shocking.
Phil:
No roof. But here’s the shocking part. That wasn’t even the shocking part. I’m stunned because I’m standing in my building and I’m seeing the sky, but every single paper was right where I left it.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s amazing.
Phil:
Nothing had moved.
Dr. Pompa:
How is that even possible?
Phil:
I had radio show equipment and computer equipment.
Dr. Pompa:
I mean, how is that even possible?
Phil:
I didn’t know. Somebody explained it to me afterwards, and I guess what happened is, after the rains, a tornado came down the street. So the rains came first, and then my roof left, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Ahh.
Phil:
Again, I feel like, oh, I am so lucky because imagine what could’ve happened, right? So we get one of those big blue tarps, and we throw it up over the building. And the following day there’s a major tropical storm. The tarp washes in, and the waterline was four feet from the floor, four feet of water in my warehouse, in my building. So when I walked in the following day, I mean, I was in tears. You know, I was—it was just—it was horrible because everything I had worked to build is suddenly ruined.
Dr. Pompa:
I can’t imagine.
Phil:
And I thought that was the bad part. I didn’t realize. That wasn’t the bad part. So I called my attorney because I didn’t own the space. I was renting the space. And he said to me, “Phil, get out of that building, and never go back.” I said, “What? Are you crazy? I mean, this is my business. This is my livelihood.”
Dr. Pompa:
Trust me. For him to say that—he must’ve seen something before for him to say that because who would say that?
Phil:
He no longer takes mold cases because they’re too emotionally defeating to him.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. I believe that. I know that. Yeah. Yeah.
Phil:
Yeah. So get out of that building, and I didn’t listen. I didn’t. And this is why…
Dr. Pompa:
And most wouldn’t.
Phil:
Most wouldn’t, and this is why I hope that those people who you pointed to before and you said somebody’s watching…
Dr. Pompa:
Watching, yeah.
Phil:
I hope they’re listening enough to get the “aha” and go maybe this is not excessive. Maybe this is not paranoia. Maybe there’s something real to this. Because I could’ve prevented the entire next phase of my life had I left the building.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Phil:
But I was stubborn, and I was determined. I said, “No, no, I’m going to fix it. We’ve got the landlord’s insurance is going to cover it.” So for the next few months—and keep in mind, South Florida is in disarray. So a lot of contractors are showing up from different parts of the country with their ladders and their trucks.
Dr. Pompa:
Cash only.
Phil:
You’re paying them cash, and—yeah. So they’d come in, and they would tear out my rotting drywall, and they ripped out my carpet. And they started to just dismember my entire office, just leaving the framing. And I was in that building every day supervising this. Then they start to rebuild, so now different contractors are coming. These guys are professionals. Matter of fact, they’re professional enough that they had masks on.
Dr. Pompa:
Masks on, yeah, smart.
Phil:
Yeah. Yeah. The first group, they didn’t. They would just, you know, let me tear out your drywall. Give me money. But this group, they knew what they were doing, and they came with their masks. Now, a part of my 4,500 square feet was the personal training studio, 1,200 square foot personal training studio. That’s what I wanted fixed first because I had trainers who worked for me, and I wanted them to generate revenue.
Dr. Pompa:
Sure.
Phil:
And so let’s fix this first. Then we’ll worry about the rest. So I’m in that building now as they’re doing the work, bringing in new carpet, new drywall, new mirrors, everything with glue and paint. I’m in there working out. Not just in the building, but now I’m, like, sucking in. So the office looked incredible. Better than ever.
Dr. Pompa:
But you thought you were being healthy. There’s another side to that story.
Phil:
Yeah, right. The office looked fantastic. In fact, I was thankful. I was like, this is great. Everything is brand new. And then I started developing a cough. And it wasn’t a little cough, and it wasn’t like a cough I ever knew before. It would come at—it would suddenly affect me. It wasn’t like I was coughing all day, but in a moment, I would start to cough, and it would knock me off my feet, literally. I mean, I was on the ground. I couldn’t stop coughing, and it felt like my lungs were going to just come out of my mouth, and then, after a while it would subside.
And I started to feel like it happens when I’m in the office. So I thought maybe there’s something in the office that’s affecting me. But none of my other employees were sick. So this is where you start to become the detective.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, right.
Phil:
What could this be? So I started by going to a doctor who said, “Go see an allergist. Clearly you’re allergic to something.” So I went to an allergist, and they told me I’m allergic to cats and dust. I said, “I don’t think that’s my problem. I really don’t.”
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, been around cats and dust my whole life.
Phil:
Yeah, I mean, if a thousand cats showed up in my office, I’d go maybe this is it. If dusty cats were there, I’d—but no. This clearly wasn’t the answer. So he goes, “You better go to a pulmonologist.” So that’s where the odyssey began is from doctor to doctor a bunch. So I go to a pulmonologist.
Dr. Pompa:
I hear this story all the time, all the time.
Phil:
Oh, yeah. The pulmonologist, a very nice guy, easily diagnoses me, emphysema, and I laughed.
Dr. Pompa:
There must be a drug for that. That’s good. That’s good.
Phil:
There is a drug.
Dr. Pompa:
All right, great.
Phil:
So I said, “Listen, I don’t have emphysema.” “Well, you’re testing as if you have emphysema.” I said, “But I was riding my bike 20 miles just a few weeks ago. People with emphysema don’t do that. I don’t have emphysema.”
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, there’s a cause. Were you dealing with asbestos? Were you smoking cigarettes most of your life? Were you doing any of those things?
Phil:
No.
Dr. Pompa:
No. Did he ever ask?
Phil:
No. Actually, you do fill out a questionnaire that I don’t know if they ever even look at.
Dr. Pompa:
No.
Phil:
No.
Dr. Pompa:
Of course not, no.
Phil:
So he gives me two inhalers. And one was a steroid, a corticosteroid, and the other was Albuterol. So I left his office, and as soon as I had one of those coughing attacks, I did the Albuterol, and I said I’m never doing this again. And I threw them both away. I mean, I just hated the way it made me feel.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, of course.
Phil:
But most of all, I knew he was wrong. I knew it wasn’t emphysema. I knew there was something else, but nobody could tell me what it was. So from doctor, to doctor, to doctor, to doctor, on and on and on, and finally, I end up in a major medical institution everyone’s heard of.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, you’re relating to most people watching this show right now, the doctor, to doctor, to doctor. Wondering what’s going on, trying different medications. Matter of fact, most of these people have tried just about every supplement out there on the market too.
Phil:
Well, you know what’ really—what was kind of frustrating for me is, at the time, I was very present on South Florida television, and I had a radio show. So the doctors knew me, and they would befriend me. And they would start to ask me fitness questions. And suddenly, it’s my buddy. And I would go in there in. I’m coming to you as an expert. Can’t you—they didn’t have the answer.
Dr. Pompa:
No, of course not.
Phil:
They really didn’t have the answer. They only had what was in their box, right? So the pulmonologist looks at the lung.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, that’s why one of our goals is train doctors around the country with the answer of how we got our lives back, you know.
Phil:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
We went through it for a reason, you know. It’s like, there is—most doctors don’t know on both sides of the aisle, alternative and allopathic. They don’t know. There is an answer. There is a way out. Go ahead.
Phil:
So I wind up in a major medical institution, and I’m in there for three days. Because at this point, oh, probably eight months post that first cough, I have severe tremors. I’m sitting on my hands all the time because they’re shaking all over the place. I could not pick up a glass off of a table. I would slowly take two hands because my hands would tremble.
Dr. Pompa:
It sounds like a neurodegenerative disease.
Phil:
Yes. I couldn’t speak. I stuttered. Now, my livelihood, in part, was speaking, you know? And I had to cancel appearances. I cancelled an appearance. I was supposed to be in Italy doing a presentation, couldn’t talk.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow.
Phil:
I was also having trouble keeping my balance.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Phil:
What’s amazing to me when I think back is I didn’t get depressed. I think most people do, and most people would. But just knowing about the body’s ability to heal, I just felt like I haven’t found the right doctor yet, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Phil:
So now I’m excited. I’m at this institution. They’re going to give me the answer. And I remember, after the three days of evaluation, and brain scans, and MRIs…
Dr. Pompa:
At this point, did you think about this building at all?
Phil:
No.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, go ahead.
Phil:
No. I’m sitting across from the neurologist, the Head of Neurology, and he’s looking at his computer. Not even looking at me. And he’s typing. And he goes, “Well, Phil, you have Parkinson’s.” Just like that. “Well, Phil, you have Parkinson’s.” And I have to tell you, nothing ever stung me like that in my life. And then he looked at me, almost surprised, because he must’ve seen the look on my face.
Dr. Pompa:
Ah, yeah.
Phil:
And he goes, “Oh, don’t worry. You could have a good quality of life for many years. There are medications for that.” That was his…
Dr. Pompa:
That’s unbelievable. Yeah. That is unbelievable.
Phil:
Yeah. Yeah. So that was a bad moment, and that was a bad day. And I’ll tell you this. Emotionally, the only image that kept coming up in my mind is my daughter coming to feed her trembling dad sitting in a wheelchair drooling. Because that’s—when you think of Parkinson’s, that’s where it’s going, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Phil:
And it broke my heart for a day. The following day I woke up, and I just—I don’t know where the thought came from, but I said, okay, one of two things. Either I’m going to find Michael J. Fox, I’m going to do everything I can to learn, and to study, and to raise money, and to create awareness, or maybe the doctor was wrong. The pulmonologist was wrong. The allergist was wrong. Maybe the doctor was wrong.
Dr. Pompa:
I have to say that, though. I mean, for you to make that transition in a day to I’m either going to make a difference or maybe they’re wrong. I mean, who does that? I mean, you’re in what I call a 3% right off the bat. I mean, most people would’ve just been devastated. I mean, if not the rest of their life, satisfied with the diagnosis, either way. Devastated or satisfied.
Phil:
And by the way, if I accepted the diagnosis, I’d be living my life on medication believing that, and I’d have every symptom.
Dr. Pompa:
No doubt. Yeah, absolutely and believe me. This happens. People come to me years on medications, and I’m looking at it going I don’t even think this is what you have, right? Because they’re lumped into this category based on symptoms and it happens all the time. Neurotoxic illness is always lumped into something else, whether it’s MS, depression. I mean, I can go down the list, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia. We like to label things. And then if we label it, now we can give a medication for it, and live happily ever after. You didn’t satisfy with that.
Phil:
That doctor gave me an anti-tremor medication.
Dr. Pompa:
Of course, yeah.
Phil:
And he gave me a beta blocker.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Phil:
And, of course, I never even filled the prescriptions.
Dr. Pompa:
Once we label it, now we can give you something. So welcome to the medical model in this country.
Phil:
Oh, and by the way, anybody who’s been through this will know this. I didn’t know it beforehand, but every time you’re given a prescription, there’s a code attached. Your insurance report records that code. So if you looked at my insurance report, I have Parkinson’s. I mean, I have everything that they ever diagnosed me with, but I don’t.
Dr. Pompa:
Now what do we do with the insurance though today.
Phil:
I lost my insurance. I managed to get another policy, but I did lose my insurance that I had.
Dr. Pompa:
Did you—you probably had to prove like crazy that this was a false diagnosis?
Phil:
I was never able to prove it.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow, another subject for another day. Wow. I mean…
Phil:
Yeah, I mean, that became a fulltime job, and then, finally, I just said, you know, I’ll figure out another way.
Dr. Pompa:
Anyways, go ahead because there’s so much more.
Phil:
So it continued to go on, frustration, question. I started to read voraciously. I would call every expert I knew and asked them who the experts are. And I really just set out to understand what’s going on. But in the meantime, life was really hard. Even, I would miss my exit all the time. I mean, we call it brain fog.
Dr. Pompa:
Brain fog, yeah.
Phil:
But people expect to you to perform the way you always did it, and your brain just doesn’t respond.
Dr. Pompa:
No, no, no, exactly. Yeah.
Phil:
And then they think—another weird thing is I guess my face started to reflect frustration because I’m trying to think, and I can’t think. I remember Curly from The Three Stooges said it, “I’m trying to think, but nothing’s happening.”
Dr. Pompa:
Well, did you try this?
Phil:
I didn’t try that. No, I needed somebody else. I needed Moe, knucklehead.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s when people start going, “Are you okay?” And you want to say, “No. I’m not.”
Phil:
Here’s really—and I’ll say this to anybody who knows somebody who suffering with this, is people go, “Oh, I don’t want to bother him.” Because I guess the look of frustration may be anger, so they would distance, you know? So you feel very isolated at that point. So you’re trying to perform at a level that you’re not capable, and you feel like nobody’s throwing you a rope, you know? So that’s a difficult part.
And then I was invited to record a TV show, and I really didn’t want to do it. But the truth is, I needed the money, and I thought, okay, let me get back to some kind of normalcy. So we went to Chicago for the shoot, and the shoot went okay considering everything. And then after the shoot, they took me to a restaurant, and I whacked myself in the tooth and chipped my tooth with the wine glass, we were toasting, because I didn’t have control, you know?
Dr. Pompa:
Right, yeah.
Phil:
And then I left there, and I went to the airport.
Dr. Pompa:
By the way, he had a neurological illness, right? It wasn’t Parkinson’s in the end. It wasn’t MS. It wasn’t a neurodegenerative…
Phil:
It was a curable one.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right. It was neurotoxic mediated illness is really what it was. Same one I had. Different start but our stories end very similar. Go ahead.
Phil:
Our stories haven’t ended yet.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that’s great. Exactly, yeah.
Phil:
I wind up walking into a beam in the airport and knocking myself unconscious. So I open my eyes. There’s a circle of people around me. I didn’t even know what happened, but this is kind of the odd way that things fall into place. So after that, they’re offering to take me to a hospital, and I go, “No, no, I’m okay. I’m okay.” Because I know the hospital won’t help me. I’d been there. You know? They don’t understand what’s wrong. They think you’re crazy.
So I said, “No, no, just let me be,” and I missed my flight. So I’m sitting there waiting for another flight, and I start talking to a woman who tells me that her father is a doctor of Eastern and also Western medicine. And she saw what happened. So we’re talking a little bit about it, and I start to tell her what’s going on. And she calls her father, who suggests that I get a book called “Mold Warriors.”
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, man. I read that book. It scares the hell out of you that book.
Phil:
So I order the book, FedEx overnight, and it’s written by Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker and a Dr. Schaller. Now Ritchie Shoemaker was in Maryland in a small town.
Dr. Pompa:
Schaller’s in Florida.
Phil:
Schaller was in Florida directly across Alligator Alley from me. So I was like, okay, I’m going to go see Schaller. And I’ll just say it wasn’t a good experience. You become the victim, and doctors who are not ethical have the ability to make money at your expense. So I called Ritchie Shoemaker. I called his office, and I called like at 5:02. Not intentionally, but his staff had just left, and he answered the phone. And I said, “Dr. Shoemaker, I just have to ask you a question. If I come to you, will I get the same treatment I got from Dr. Schaller?”
And then we started talking, and he asked me what the treatment was, and he said, “No. If you come to me, we’ll figure out what’s going on. I will get you well.” That was all I needed to hear. So I headed up to Pocomoke City, MD, and he put me through tests, and every single test. Every measure of a biomarker, the visual contrast test, all of the things they do to get clues to stack them up to go, “Yes, you have mold toxicity,” [claps] I had it, so—and you know Ritchie Shoemaker…
Dr. Pompa:
Can I just—for the benefit of them because there’s people out there going how do I know, right? One of the fastest, easiest ways that we deal—all the doctors that I train, 60 in total around the country, they all have a visual contrast sensitivity test. It’s called a VCS test. It’s, literally, a five minute test that we look at contrast of vision. Look, these toxins, these biotoxins from mold, from Lyme, they affect nerves. Well, the one nerve we can test is the optic nerve.
Phil:
The optic nerve.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, it’s very sensitive, and you lose—we don’t look at acuity. So we’re not looking at how well you see. We’re looking at contrast. So that’s one of the screening tools. And then there’s some other blood work that we do that can also be an indicator. One is C4a, etc., etc. But anyway, so you had the test done.
Phil:
I had the test done, and he said to me…
Dr. Pompa:
And you don’t have Parkinson’s.
Phil:
“You don’t have Parkinson’s.” And I jumped off the table, and I hugged him.
Dr. Pompa:
Did you kiss him?
Phil:
I didn’t kiss him. I hugged him, and you know Dr. Shoemaker.
Dr. Pompa:
I do know him.
Phil:
He’s not a touchy, feely kind of guy.
Dr. Pompa:
Nah, no, no.
Phil:
So he’s standing there like, “What are you doing? Nobody’s ever hugged me because I told them they had mold sickness.” I’m like, “Yeah, but you just told me I don’t have Parkinson’s.”
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Phil:
You just put my life back on a good track. So I love Ritchie Shoemaker. I mean, I know many people find him difficult.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Phil:
I remember that moment.
Dr. Pompa:
I would love the guy who told me I didn’t have Parkinson’s.
Phil:
Yeah, it was the opposite of what I experienced with that neurologist, right? Suddenly, somebody gave me a real answer. Now here’s the beautiful thing. He gave me a medication called Cholestyramine, which you’re familiar with.
Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm. Yep. It’s an old cholesterol medication.
Phil:
Ten days later, I’m working out. I’m playing basketball. I’m riding my bike. I’m ready to book seminars again, ten days, because somebody accurately diagnosed it and had a treatment for it.
Dr. Pompa:
Wow. Yeah, I mean, and what the Cholestyramine does, folks, is it—literally, it doesn’t even leave the gut. It’s an old cholesterol medication that pulls the bile out of the body, which pulls cholesterol out of the body, which they don’t even use it for that anymore. But what it does is the—in the bile, are these biotoxins, right? So they’re released from the cell to the liver where they’re bound up into bile. And by the way, this is the way most toxins, you know, what happens, right? In the bile, the bile is released, dropped into the gut to digest fat, but it brings with it the toxin.
Phil:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
But the problem is, in the lower intestine, it’s designed to reabsorb the bile so it doesn’t have to recreate it, and it brings the toxin back to the liver. It’s called autointoxication. So the Cholestyramine sits in there as a catcher’s mitt, and just pulls the biotoxin out of the body. So you don’t reabsorb.
Phil:
You know, the biotoxin is a living organism.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.
Phil:
So when a living organism moves into your body, it says, wow. This is a great place to live. Let’s make babies, right? So it colonizes.
Dr. Pompa:
In the mycotoxin, right, I mean, the—some of the spore actually can do that, right? But these biotoxins are, literally, toxins produced by a living thing.
Phil:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, nasty stuff. Go ahead. You wanted to finish the story.
Phil:
So well, there’s a whole other part of the story.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, let’s just fast forward. You became—okay, so feels better.
Phil:
I got well.
Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm.
Phil:
Until…
Dr. Pompa:
There you go.
Phil:
I went through a separation with my then wife.
Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm.
Phil:
And moved into a new apartment. It was probably the fourth or fifth day. I was in the apartment because I just got all new furniture, and I was actually very excited. And my now ex-wife and I had a great relationship. We just knew we shouldn’t be together.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, mm-hmm.
Phil:
My daughter lived nine miles away, so I’d pick her up all the time. And probably fourth day, I come home in a very good mood. I open the door, and I was attacked by the shower curtain. Now I know this is where I say people quit and think I’m crazy.
Dr. Pompa:
I just had a vision of Chris Farley, but anyways.
Phil:
I walked through the door.
Dr. Pompa:
Did you fall on your face?
Phil:
I could have. I did that at the airport. And suddenly, the smell of the shower curtain became so overwhelming I thought I was going to pass out.
Dr. Pompa:
I know this feeling. I know this. Yeah.
Phil:
And I’m thinking, what’s going on? Is my shower curtain on fire? Like, why would it—so I run upstairs, and I can—I don’t know how I knew what the smell was, but you know, when you open a new shower curtain, you’ll have that smell?
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, yeah.
Phil:
It was so overwhelming. I held my breath. I got a plastic bag, and I stuffed the shower curtain into the bag, and I threw it in the trash, and put it in the garage. I just couldn’t stand it.
Dr. Pompa:
Do you remember the Steve Martin movie where he thought it was the cans? Remember they were shooting at Steve Martin, The Jerk?
Phil:
The Jerk. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. The can, he says, “It’s these cans,” and he was getting rid of all the cans. So you thought it’s these shower curtains.
Phil:
Yeah.
Dr. Pompa:
These things are evil.
Phil:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s funny.
Phil:
The following morning I get up, and I go have some breakfast. And I open up the dishwasher, and the smell of the dishwasher detergent almost knocked me off my feet.
Dr. Pompa:
So now you’re getting rid of all dishwashers. For goodness sakes, it’s these dishwashers and these shower curtains.
Phil:
Right. Shower curtains and dishwashers are my enemy.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s it.
Phil:
But then it became farther reaching. And then it would be perfumes and paints, and everywhere I went, I’d kind of sniff first. Is it safe to go in here? And I would say to other people, “Don’t you smell that?” And they’d go, “No.” And some perfumes that smell good to most people smelled so horrible. I don’t even have a way to describe it.
Dr. Pompa:
To this day, I do not like—even though I’m not sensitive to it anymore, if I smell it I’m like aww. I don’t like.
Phil:
Yeah, right. So it became…
Dr. Pompa:
So you became sensitive to the world now all of a sudden.
Phil:
Yep.
Dr. Pompa:
Certain aspects you felt better, right?
Phil:
I didn’t have Parkinson’s. And I want to tell you. That allowed me to always feel better, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Phil:
Whatever I was dealing with, I would put it next to that, you know? And I’d go, okay, well, I have a problem with shower curtains, but I don’t have Parkinson’s, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, absolutely. So, great, moved out of the moldy situation, got the biotoxin out of the body, so R1, you got rid of your source. You weren’t getting exposed anymore. We always say you have to get rid of your source, and get the stuff out of your body. So you did that. But now you’re walking around going what is going on? I’m sensitive to the world.
Phil:
And I’m also, where do I go?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, where do I go?
Phil:
Because it reached the point that I couldn’t live in that apartment. So now it’s the apartment. Now I realize it’s the apartment that’s bad. I’ll move to a different one. And, well, you know this.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah.
Phil:
And this is going to sound…
Dr. Pompa:
Crazy, but…
Phil:
Bizarre. I had moved since then 13 times.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, just trying to find a safe environment. When we spoke on the phone the very first time, I said, Phil, number one…
Phil:
And I had just built a new house at that time.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. And I said nothing will work until you find a safe environment, meaning air quality. No massive exposure to toxins.
Phil:
Well, I did. You know what? Before I met you, I did find a safe environment because I moved, and I moved again.
Dr. Pompa:
You felt much better.
Phil:
And I found a great place, and my life came back in every way. I might’ve even been at my best ever at that time because I was happy in—to bring my daughter to my place and feel safe, and lay on the couch and watch TV. It just felt normal again. And then when things came back to normal, the money started coming in, and my business was thriving, and I said I’m going to build a house then, and I’m going to be smart about it. I’m going to use non-VOC stuff, but I was naïve. I didn’t realize. So I built a beautiful home, and I moved in there with my daughter. And I lived in there for four years, but they were four difficult years because I was challenged. Every single smell bothered me.
So I went through a process, and said, look, I built the house. I’m not going to move. I’m going to beat this thing. So I started paying people to help me figure out how to make the house safe. So I put in ultraviolet lights in the air conditioning unit. I baked the walls, which I was told to do. Turn the temperature up to 180 degrees. I tried everything that was told to me as a solution for the house.
No longer am I working on me. Now I’m working on the house. I’ve got an air exchange unit. And the truth is, after four years, not one of them really made a difference. I had 17 air purifiers in the house, nothing. Because you buy one and then it didn’t do the job. And people go, “Oh, well, that’s because you need the one with 25 pounds of carbon,” so then you buy that one.
Dr. Pompa:
Get that one. Yeah.
Phil:
You become a collector of air purifiers.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, the house was just putting out too much.
Phil:
And then I met you, and we had a few conversations. And then I remember. You came down to Florida to speak at one of my events.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Phil:
And I said, “Dr. Pompa, when you come to Florida, I want you to come to my house because I want you to help me fix it,” right? So you walked in the house, and I’m expecting you to go, “Oh, you just have to do this, and you have to do that.” And do you remember what you said?
Dr. Pompa:
Attic.
Phil:
You said there’s attic air coming in.
Dr. Pompa:
Attic air, yeah, it’s that smell. It’s formaldehyde. It’s just from the wall.
Phil:
And it’s also the new house smell. Most people would go, “Oh, it smells like a new house,” right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, no, I said attic. This is—I said you can’t live in here. Because it’s that smell that when you go up in your attic, you smell. Well, what does that mean? The house was being—under positive pressure, so the walls, attic air in between air walls were coming into the space.
Phil:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
So we have to positively pressurize the house, which you tried, couldn’t get it done because it was just too much.
Phil:
The load was too great.
Dr. Pompa:
The load was too great, yeah. But so you left the house.
Phil:
So I left the house, and then…
Dr. Pompa:
And 13 others.
Phil:
I found a doctor, who you know, in Dallas who is renowned as the multiple chemical sensitivity expert.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Phil:
So, here I go. This is the expert. And naïvely, I would go in believing the expert will fix me, you know? Through this whole process I keep going, well, the next one will know. So now I go to this expert, and they have designated housing for the people who come there. And it’s an old residence inn. But they gutted the whole place, and they made it what they call safe. And I remember. I went to check in.
It looks like a residence inn, and I said, “Hey, Phil Kaplan, I’m checking in.” And the girl looks, and she goes, “Oh, no.” And I go, “What’s the matter?” She goes, “They made a mistake.” I said, “What do you mean?” She goes, “They put you in Building 7.” I said, “What’s Building 7?” And she goes, “You don’t want to go to Building 7.”
I’m like, “Well, what is it?” She goes, “That’s where the sick people go.” I go, “The patients of this doctor?” “Yeah.” I go, “I’m one of them.” She goes, “No, you’re not.” I go, “Yeah, I’m telling you.”
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. You tell her…
Phil:
So I go to this building, and you see eyes peeking out through the windows. They’re checking out who is this person? There was a woman who was giving me a bit of a tour, and she shows me there’s a laundry room, and giving me the rules. We can’t use scented detergent. We can’t use fabric softeners. And there’s a man in there, and he’s staring at me, backed up all the way into the corner, and I’m thinking what it—why am I sending it out?
Dr. Pompa:
It wasn’t just your big physique that scared him?
Phil:
It was my cellphone. I was holding my cellphone. That’s the first time I stepped into that subculture.
Dr. Pompa:
That world, yeah.
Phil:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
It’s a subculture, yeah. And we’re actually—we want to do a show on it.
Phil:
Yeah. And these are people who have just retreated. They found a word that they live by, and that’s avoidance, right? They’re affected by chemicals. They’re really toxic.
Dr. Pompa:
Well, it makes sense, right? This makes me feel bad. Let me get away from all of that.
Phil:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
It doesn’t work, however.
Phil:
Yeah, as a matter of fact, I think it perpetuates the continued degeneration because emotions play a huge part of this.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right. Yeah, and it’s kind of confusing. And I wish we had more time. If we can get you—next week we’re talking about how to make a home safe. And we’re going to have Warren Phillips on, but maybe we should bring you back on. It’s just a lack of time. But, you know, I want you to say a little bit about that. The show that we want to do is, really, are these just crazy people who get sick, or are they sick people who become crazy?
Phil:
That’s the question.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, that is the question, right? But you and I really believe—because we were these people, right?
Phil:
We know they are sick people.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. They were sick people who became crazy because we dealt with it too. At one point, I kept asking my wife, “Am I just crazy?” Because I knew I had became crazy. I did. I knew it wasn’t normal.
Phil:
And by the way, going through the process of getting well, there are many tears. It’s multi-factorial. There’s not one thing to do. There is not a one thing to do.
Dr. Pompa:
No, no, and I really want to emphasize that.
Phil:
Must you change the way you eat? Absolutely.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Phil:
Must you change your environment? Without a question.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely, yeah.
Phil:
But you also have to change your neuro wiring.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s right.
Phil:
Which is an entire show in itself.
Dr. Pompa:
Absolutely.
Phil:
And that was a huge lesson for me. And I also think that my optimism, and I don’t know if that is developed or inherit, it really kept me in the normal world. Because when I see these other people who have retreated…
Dr. Pompa:
That’s not working.
Phil:
And at first, as you would, I wanted to help them. I wanted to go, no, but look at me. I’m functioning. I can go into the mall. I know how you feel, but I can go into the mall.
Dr. Pompa:
Mm-hmm, yeah.
Phil:
They’re afraid of lightbulbs.
Dr. Pompa:
Right.
Phil:
Do you know what I’m saying? I met one woman. She had all her teeth pulled out, a young woman, 36 years old.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah, because one root canal’s bad, let’s get rid of all of them. Yeah.
Phil:
Thirty-six years old, she has no teeth. She’s got a shaved head because she can’t use any hair products. Your heart breaks for these people, but I also realized I can’t be around them because they suck you into their world.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. No, they’ll pull you into that world. So let me give them some things because there’s people out there going, gosh, what you said, what do you do? And I have to just give the analogy. Because part of this—this is not a psychological illness, but part of it is rewiring the nervous system, right? So here’s the analogy I can give you to help make sense of this. If a lion walked into the room right now, what would happen to us? Our adrenaline would go up. Our…
Phil:
Fight or flight.
Dr. Pompa:
Fight of flight. We would literally drive inflammation process in the body, although, temporary, as long as the lion goes away. But when this happens again and again, the body’s just driving this chemical response that makes you feel sick, ultimately. Makes you not feel right. I mean, so the chemical, we get this massive exposure, and the body drums up this reaction that neurologically release this, release that, release this. It’s protecting itself. Just like the lion walking in. The problem is the threat goes away. We get a sniff of a chemical, and it releases the same response.
Phil:
And it becomes habitual.
Dr. Pompa:
And it becomes this habitual neurological thing that the body doesn’t even rationally go through to say, okay, it’s not dangerous. It’s just fabric softener. Although, fabric softener is very deadly, I believe, and no one should use it. But the body should go, okay, we can deal with this appropriately. We’re not going to die. But it literally knows how it felt before. It knows that its bucket was full, can’t deal with one more toxin, Phil or Dan, so I’m going to setup every defense mechanism.
Phil:
I want to tell you how important overcoming that was for me. Because you don’t realize that, right?
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah.
Phil:
You smell the smell, and you feel the fear, and you don’t realize that wiring in your brain is linking those up and it really…
Dr. Pompa:
So you really do feel bad, you know?
Phil:
You do, but what you don’t realize is you have the power to break that link.
Dr. Pompa:
Sure.
Phil:
And when you break the link, the fear goes away, and the fear response goes away, and suddenly, the chemical doesn’t affect you acutely.
Dr. Pompa:
Release, yeah. I always say, well, if you’ve got pet lions, eventually, you go, oh, they’re not eating me.
Phil:
Right. They’re nice lions.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah. Yeah. When those lions come in, you’re like, it’s a lion, but yet, I’m not releasing the same chemicals. Well, you kind of have to do that with chemicals. They’re nice lions. We’ve got to put it—and again, here’s the difference. I started the show by saying the three amigos, right?
Phil:
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Pompa:
The big boys, the three big boys, the heavy metals, the mold, and the infections, whether it’s Lyme disease, these root canals, that these toxins are nasty. These guys are bad. I mean, the Bible talks about pestilence, and how nasty they are. It talks about mold in Leviticus 14, and how to get rid of it. And heavy metals, my gosh, mercury is considered the god of deception. I mean, these guys are nasty. We can’t avoid every chemical, all right? We can’t avoid everything. All the fabric softener all the…
Phil:
Not in the world we live in today.
Dr. Pompa:
Right, but these big guys are very overwhelming to your nervous system. They almost set off these nasty neurological patterns, right? It happened to you. It happened to me differently. Let us respond to every single drop of minute particle of chemical to where our nervous system reacted the same as if it were mold, as if it’s a mercury poisoning. So yes, we have to get of it. We have to put ourselves in a safe environment because we can’t have chronic exposure, right? No chemical chronically is good. No stressor chronically is good. But we should be able to take the little stressors.
Phil:
Right.
Dr. Pompa:
Whether it’s a chemical or whether it’s upset, get away from it. But chronic exposures, they setup these neurological pathways, right? We want our environment—R1, let’s make our environment safe. But part of R1 too is getting the stuff out of the body. You had said that the Cholestyramine when you took it for ten days actually did something, right?
Phil:
Yes.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, let me—I just want to bring them to something that I do all the time. I talk about True Cellular Detox™, and I hope you can see that. Let me get the right angle on that. Okay, that’s the cell, right? So what we do is the 5R's, we start to get these pathways in the cell right, and that’s what the 5R's does. Now what happens? It’ll start to release these toxins, most of which end up in our downstream detox pathways, whether it’s the kidney or whether it’s the liver. So I just drew a really bad liver, but we’re going to call that liver. I better—that one’s so bad I better label it.
Phil:
Chopped liver.
Dr. Pompa:
Okay, or it could dump into the kidneys, which if I drew these little guys over here. Okay, so these are the pathways from the cell to the downstream detox pathways. But let’s just focus on the liver for a second. Because we talked about the bile, right? So in the liver, you make something called bile. What happens is the toxins bind up to this bile complex. And eventually, bile is used to digest fat. So I’m going to draw the intestines, or I’ll say the gut down here. From the gut, we know that ultimately, hopefully, it leaves our body.
So these toxins are bound up in the liver to bile. Then they’re eventually dumped with the bile to digest, obviously, and they end up in here. But here’s the problem. They work their way through the intestines, and in the lower intestine, bile is meant to be reabsorbed back to, whoops, I almost went too far, back to the liver because it doesn’t want to recreate it. So it brings it back to the liver. But what does it bring with the bile, the toxins? So these biotoxins like the mold that he got exposed to end up going from the gut back to the liver back to the bowel complex back to the gut. This is called autointoxication.
What did the Cholestyramine do? It’s a cholesterol medication. Actually, it’s resin. It’s actually a binding agent. That’s it. It doesn’t even leave the gut. When we put that down here as a catcher’s mitt—now we use a natural product. We use something called BIND, B-I-N-D. BIND does the same thing as Cholestyramine. It sits in here as a catcher’s mitt. So when the toxins attached to the bile are dumped in the gut, they’re caught by the catcher’s mitt so you don’t autointoxicate.
This is part of what I call True Cellular Detox™, Phil. We have to get the cell working. 5R's helps us that. And then we use true binders. And in the case of heavy metals, we use different binders, right, because most people—and you know I love to say this. Corella, it’s the metal magnet, and Cilantro, and all these ten-day cleanses, colon cleanses, all of those things are too far downstream. We use coffee enemas to help dump that often times, but it’s too far downstream. It’s not up at the cell.
You can use different things to assist the kidneys, and even a colon cleanse that helps move things out of the colon, but ultimately, it starts at the cell. You’ve got to get the cell well. Get these toxins down and out. Bind them so you don’t reabsorb them. That’s True Cellular Detox™.
Phil:
And by the way, this is the lesson that most doctors have never sat through.
Dr. Pompa:
That’s true.
Phil:
And that’s why when you go to a doctor—they’re not bad people, right?
Dr. Pompa:
No.
Phil:
And they have good intentions. But they’ve worked in the model of let’s diagnose and medicate. So whatever symptoms are screaming the loudest are the ones we want to suppress, and that’s the way they approach things within their own system. So this is what people need. And not only the people watching, but the medical field as well.
Dr. Pompa:
Oh, sure. It works. That’s what saved my life. But you know you said it right, though. It is a part of a true—it’s a step-by-step system. Make your environment safe. We have to True Cellular Detox™ starting at the cellular level. Get the stuff out of the body. It’s different for heavy metals, the biotoxin, so we have to know.
Phil:
I’m assuming—
Dr. Pompa:
A little history will show what the cause is.
Phil:
If somebody were to ask me—why don’t you ask me what’s the most important thing I learned?
Dr. Pompa:
What’s the most important thing, Phil?
Phil:
I don’t know. No, that’s a good question. The most important thing is that you have to take ownership of your power to get well. Because as long as you’re expecting someone else to do it for you, people will take from you.
They will make money at your expense, and you will not get well. But it’s that willingness to say, once I learn, I’m going to do.
Dr. Pompa:
Yeah.
Phil:
Because it’s all up to me. So first you need the education, but once you have the education, you’ve got to say it’s in your court.
Dr. Pompa:
I can say this to you, folks, especially as a last thing. You don’t need another treatment. And obviously, you don’t need another doctor. You actually—you need someone who’s been through this, and understands True Cellular Detox™ for what you’re going through, and coaches you through the process because you have to learn the process. You learned the process, Phil. You learned the process on how to make a home safe. You learned the process how to test for mold. You learned the process of how to get it out of your body from the cell. You learned the process.
I tell my doctors this all the time. You have to teach and coach the patient the process that they need to do and continue to do to get their life back. One more treatment is not the answer. One more supplement is not the answer, one more medication, definitely not the answer. There’s a process. You get coached. You learn it. That’s how we got our lives back. That’s how you’ll get your life back.
So stay tuned next week because we’re going to talk about how to make homes safe. And if we can get Phil back on next week, I think it would be good.
Warren:
Morning, guys.
Dr. Pompa:
And Warren will be here too. Warren just stepped in. But yeah, so we’re actually in Warren’s home, but yeah, we’re going to do that show. And I think it’s going to be a great show because we all learn how to make our environment safe, which is part of R1. We learned this process of True Cellular Detox™. You know what? So we’re going to teach you what we learned to make your environment safe.
And by the way, this show is for everybody. Not even just the very sick because a safe environment is the key to having health, and we have to get rid of those toxins in our lives. So make sure you stay tuned. We’ll see you then.
