Mark Hyman, M.D. Transcript

Mark Hyman, M.D. Transcript Mark Hyman, M.D.: I've been seeing chronically ill patients for 20 years, and there are certain patients who are resistant to getting better using functional medicine, and when I actually looked underneath the hood a little carefully, I began to understand the role of mold in chronic disease. For 20 years I've been looking at mold and getting deeper and deeper into the story of how mold contribute to or causes so much chronic illness that's masquerading as other diseases. People with mold can present in many different ways, but the common symptoms are brain fog, cognitive dysfunction, mood issues, sleep issues, autoimmune, inflammatory problems, joint pain, fatigue, and then a whole host of other sort of myriad symptoms that can go along with it. I call it the FLC Syndrome, which is when you feel like crap. The problem is most doctors don't think about mold. They don't take a good mold history. They don't ask them about where they live or where they work or what's going on. I had a patient for example, who had mold in his office. In one of the air ducts there was a rotten sweatshirt in there that was full of mold that was blowing mold spores and made him chronically ill. When people come in they often have depression, they have fatigue, they have joint pain, they have cognitive problems, they have other autoimmune related symptoms or inflammatory symptoms and they're often diagnosed as something else. The doctors will give anti-depressants or give them anti-inflammatories or give them other things instead of treating the root cause. Functional medicine is about treating the root cause of disease. That's what we do, and mold is one of the root causes of many chronic illnesses. It's a very good medical history. We say in medicine that the approach to diagnosis should be history, history, history. That's the first thing. You want to take a very good history, find out if someone has mold exposure, if someone lives in a moldy environment. If they did live in a moldy environment, then moved out, if they have mold 1

at work, what kind of building they live in. It's very important to take a very detailed history. Then there's laboratory tests that help to confirm inflammation of the body and hormonal disruption and brain disruption that happens as a secondary cause of the mold. We look at I call it the fingerprints of mold. What are the fingerprints of mold in your biology? They are increased inflammation, they are brain dysfunction, they are alteration in your hormones that regulate your immune system, hormones that regulate your digestion, hormones that regulate all sorts of aspects of your biology that we can actually measure. We look for patterns. There's no perfect mold test. In the past, we had very good mold antibody testing and mycotoxin antibody testing. Many of those companies that did those testing have been run out of business by the insurance companies, who had to pay large claims and settlements because the molds that they had in their blood, in their body, were documented by the lab tests and then correlated with the molds in their home or their room or their environment. They didn't want to deal with that and a lot of these companies got shut down. It's very hard to test for mold antibodies today. We do home testing, we measure these fingerprints of mold, which are in their biology, inflammation and hormonal disruptions, and we do measure mold antibodies. There are different kinds of tests, but they're not all available today. There are certain tests that are common in mold, but they are not specific. Inflammation could be from many causes. It could be from Lyme, it could be from infections, it could be from mold. You can't always tell the cause, but you can see the effects of the mold. There are specific mold antibodies that are helpful and there is also genetics that make you predisposed to mold. It's really looking at the whole pattern of testing and their story and see if it fits. We seen a lot of people in our practice at The UltraWellness Center and we see a lot of people with mold disease. You can't just treat one thing, so using a comprehensive approach, dealing with the root causes of imbalance in the body, we do see people get better. We do treat the root causes, and we see people recover from mold illness, but it's often after a series of complicated interventions that have to do with getting rid of the mold in the environment, with fixing the damage that's been done. I always say we have 2

to fix the cause, get rid of the cause, but you also have to deal with the effects, so we do both. There's a principle in functional medicine called the tack rules. The principle is this: If you're standing on a tack, it takes a lot of aspirin to make it feel better. The treatment is removing the tack. In the case of mold, you have to remove the person from the moldy environment. Otherwise, they don't get better. You can do all the treatments that you want, but unless you remove them from the mold exposure, they'll continue to get sick. They'll be exposed to the mold toxins, their immune system will be affected by the mold, and it's a vicious cycle that can't be broken. Depending on the situation, we have people do a complete mold remediation, which is not only fixing their house but their sofas, their couches, their clothes, their books, all of that has to be dealt with. Otherwise, the mold spores are there. They're airborne and they continue to be released in the environment even after the mold remediation. You have to deal with all the mold contamination in your house, or your environment or your work. Functional medicine is personalized medicine. Everybody's different so there are no two people the same, no two people get the same treatment. It depends on what else is going on with them. We focus on treating the root causes of imbalance. It starts with getting rid of the mold, and it starts with using various therapies. For example like cholestyramine to help bind up the mold toxins in the gut. We use other things to help support the immune system and we provide nutritional support. We provide healing of the gut and we do a lot of other treatments that are personalized, whether it's things like intravenous glutathione, phosphorous picoline, and other therapies that we use. It's really very personalized. If people are properly treated, often the long-term effects can be reversed, but if it's untreated, people will get progressive decline in their ability to function. They'll have brain fog, they'll get depression, they'll have sleep disruption, they'll have immune dysfunction. They basically get a severe form of what I call FLC Syndrome, which is when they feel like crap. Unless you get treated, even if you've been removed from the mold exposure, 3

you might get slightly better but you need to get to the root cause, which is getting rid of the mold toxins in your body. It's helping repair the damage that's been done and restoring your body to health. Age is a factor. People who are younger have more resilience. They recover faster. If they have better underlying health, they do better. If their overall condition or constitution is stronger, they do better. Depending on the person, they'll recover more or less. Depending on their genetics, they'll do better or worse. Depending on their age, they'll do better or worse. It's really individual, but some people at any age can recover. It's really a matter of looking at how to treat the root cause. People who are chronically ill often are out of balance, so we often talk about the Sumo wrestler thumb analogy. Now if the Sumo wrestler is standing strongly on his feet you can't push him off balance, but if he's standing, leaning over on one foot, you can push him over with your thumb. People become more sensitive as their bodies get out of balance. When you get them back in balance, they get less sensitive, less sensitive to foods, less sensitive to mold, less sensitive to environmental chemicals. The key is not to put yourself in a bubble. The key is to strengthen and balance your system by optimizing your nutrition, optimizing your gut function, balancing your immune system, removing all the triggers, helping detoxify. Maybe there are other factors. It could be heavy metals, it could be chronic infections. It could be all sort of things that could activate it when you have mold illness. There are molds in the environment and there are molds in food. People who are sensitive to mold in their environment are often more sensitive to the mold or yeast in their food, or even the yeast in their system. They might have bacteria or yeast in their gut that are out of balance, and when they actually treat that, they'll feel better. The key is really to understand how to reduce the exposure in your environment and your food so you limit the triggering of your immune system with the yeast and mold. A lot of food has mold that we don't think. Obviously, cheese, blue cheese has mold. Fermented foods tend to have mold, a lot of fruit, for example, that can be just sitting there, can develop mold quickly. You've seen it in your fridge with moldy crust on your 4

food. That's always there. It just more aggressively reproduces when you leave it in your fridge for a long time. Foods that contain mold are things that are leftovers, things that are fruity foods, things that are fermented foods, things that are obviously cheese and things like that, all contain mold. If you actually are aware of those and you reduce your exposure to those, you'll do better. Also people who eat a lot of sugar and flour and things that cause yeast to grow in their own system, in their gut, will have worse reactions as well. You can't really cook the mold out of your food. The mold toxins are in there, the mycotoxins are there. It's very difficult to get rid of the mold by cooking it. You'll kill it, but you'll still have the residual effects of the inflammatory triggers in them. If you think you have mold illness, there's a way out. It might be a long way out, but there is a way out. There is hope, but you have to find a practitioner who can help you deal systematically with the mold illness. One, you have to get rid of it in your environment and two, you have to get it out of your body. Three, you have to repair the damage that's been done. Those are the three steps to healing from mold illness. If you follow the steps and you're focused, and you work with an experienced practitioner, you can get better. That's a hard question. I think asbestos causes cancer, asbestos causes respiratory illness, and we mostly limit our exposure to asbestos through regulations. We have not adequately dealt with mold in our environment because it's not something that is built into the system. It's something that happens as a result of faulty construction or water damage or floods or hurricanes or rain. For example, my eaves in my house are full of leaves and the water leaks down. I can see it getting into the side of the house, and so I worry about mold, even in my own house. I have to deal with all the time thinking about how do we reduce that exposure? You really need to think about limiting your exposure. Most of the time people with mold illness are not diagnosed. The psychological effects are the doctors are often saying it's in your head or you're depressed or take some 5

Prozac. Mold illness is not a Prozac deficiency. It's a real thing. Because the doctor has missed it or not diagnosed it, it doesn't mean that you're crazy. It means that you have not been adequately diagnosed. The key is to not lose hope, to find the resources you need, and to get properly diagnosed. That's the way out. People do gain weight when they're exposed to mold because anything that causes inflammation causes weight gain. I had a patient who was living in Chicago in a moldy apartment. She gained fifty pounds from mold exposure and it took me years to get her better because the mold completely derailed her system and then she had all kinds of secondary infections and problems. We literally worked through all that and now she's functioning, working, healthy and lost fifty pounds. Chronic Fatigue and Fibromyalgia are symptoms, not diseases. They can be caused by many, many things. Sometimes it's like the blind man and the elephant. People who specialize in mold think it's all mold. People who specialize in Lyme, think it's all Lyme. People who specialize in viruses, think it's all viruses. It really can be anything. The key is to really look at each individual as a unique person and find the root cause for them. With mold, it's hard to say, but it could be ten, 20% of illness with Chronic Fatigue or Fibromyalgia, or it could be more. We don't really know because it's not really been studied adequately. Lyme disease and mold are part of the same family of inflammatory illnesses that cause the same symptom complex. It's very hard sometimes to tell if someone's got Lyme or mold. In fact, they can often have both. It's important to be a detective and not just figure out one thing, but figure out everything. The second tack rule in functional medicine is if you're standing on two tacks, taking one of them out doesn't make you 50% better. You've got to find all the factors that are driving disease and remove all of them. There are certainly not enough doctors who know about mold or how to treat it or diagnose it. There are some occupational physicians who know more about it. There's some environmental physicians who know more about it, but it's not a basic part of our training. It's not often part of our differential diagnosis, and it's certainly something we need to reset and focus on. I think doctors as a whole need to be aware that if someone has a chronic disease or they have FLC Syndrome, it should be on the list of things that 6

they're looking at, and it should be something they know how to identify and diagnose, which is not that difficult. I think people need to know that mold is a real thing, that it's common in our environment, that it's under-diagnosed, and that if you have any chronic disease or symptoms, it should be on the list of things that you ask your doctor about, or that you think about in your own environment. If you identified exposure to mold, then you certainly should seek out and find an experienced mold practitioner or research it on your own, because you can find help. In medical school most doctors don't learn about mold illness or mold-related illness. They don't learn about how to diagnose imbalances in the immune system or dysfunction in the brain, and they often dismiss the symptoms that go along with mold as something else, or as some psychological issue, which is really unfortunate. We need to rethink how we're teaching doctors. We need to rethink the curriculum. We need to rethink our approach and we need to focus on dealing with the root causes of disease and personalizing our treatment, which is the role of functional medicine. I'm the Chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine, and we've trained over 100,000 doctors in 100 countries looking at disease in a very different way, which is addressing the body as a system, which is looking at the root cause of disease, and figuring out how to address that directly. If you've not been successfully diagnosed, if you're still sick, and you are suffering, there are resources. For example, the Institute for Functional Medicine has a certification program, has trained many physicians, and if you go to functionalmedicine.org, you can search for a doctor in your area who may be able to help you. I'm a regular physician. I was trained in regular medical school, a residency as a family doctor. It was after I got sick myself, it was after I had to recover from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, that I discovered this world of functional medicine and this new way of thinking about disease and began to be involved in the faculty and ultimately became the Chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine training doctors in this new way of thinking about addressing the root cause of disease, and of personalizing medicine and treating the body as a system, not just the symptoms. 7

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