October 8, 2025 • 66 mins
Did you know that 50% of the US water supply is contaminated with "forever chemicals" that you can't detox from your body? These invisible toxins, along with hidden mold in your home, could be the real reason for your chronic fatigue, brain fog, and mystery illnesses. In episode 821 of the Savage Perspective Podcast, host Robert Sikes sits down with Dr. Kelly McCann to expose the shocking truths about how environmental toxins are silently harming your health. Dr. McCann reveals the surprising connection between past trauma, chronic infections like Lyme disease, and conditions such as Mast Cell Activation Syndrome. Discover why your house might be making you sick and learn practical, actionable steps to clean up your environment, build resilience, and reclaim your health and vitality.
Are you ready to build a resilient body that can withstand these environmental threats? Join Robert’s FREE Bodybuilding Masterclass to learn the foundations of creating a strong and optimized physique. Sign up here: https://www.ketobodybuilding.com/registration-2
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Subscribe to the podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/42cjJssghqD01bdWBxRYEg?si=1XYKmPXmR4eKw2O9gGCEuQ
Chapters:
0:00 - Are You Being Poisoned By Your Home?
0:50 - Why a Doctor Specialized in "Mystery Illnesses"
2:47 - A Doctor's Personal Battle with Toxic Mold
3:55 - When It's More Than Mold: Uncovering Lyme & Mast Cell Syndrome
5:19 - What Is Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS)?
6:07 - How Your Immune System Can Turn Against You
7:34 - Why Your Body's "Alarm System" Won't Turn Off
8:20 - The Shocking Link Between Trauma and Chronic Illness
10:06 - How Emotional Trauma Physically Changes Your Cells
13:17 - Is Your Body Sending You Secret Messages?
15:30 - How Holding Back The Truth Can Manifest as Cancer
19:10 - What Your Doctor Won't Tell You About Chronic Inflammation
19:55 - A 2-Step Approach to Healing Chronic Illness
20:38 - How to Calm an Overactive Immune System (MCAS Treatment)
22:02 - How To Activate Your Vagus Nerve for Instant Calm
23:59 - Can You Retrain Your Brain to Heal Your Body?
25:45 - Why Your Primary Doctor Can't Solve Your "Mystery" Symptoms
28:49 - Is Chronic Illness on the Rise? A Doctor Explains Why
31:27 - The "Forever Chemicals" You Can't Detox From Your Body
33:07 - Is Your House Making You Sick? (Modern Building Issues)
36:41 - Is The Mold In Your Bathroom Dangerous?
38:52 - How to Test Your Home for Toxic Mold
42:05 - The Biggest Mistake People Make When Cleaning Mold
43:25 - Does Your Coffee Contain Hidden Mold Toxins?
44:10 - How Serious is a Tick Bite? The Truth About Lyme Disease
46:43 - The Long-Term Dangers of Environmental Toxin Exposure
49:20 - Are Your Clothes Making You Sick? (The Dangers of Polyester)
52:22 - The Link Between Plastics and Low Testosterone
55:11 - How to Start Detoxing Your Life (Without Feeling Overwhelmed)
56:14 - How Technology & Blue Light Are Destroying Your Sleep
59:21 - A Doctor's #1 Tip for Reducing Toxin Exposure
1:01:04 - How to Build Spiritual Resilience Against Physical Illness
1:02:47 - A Simple Practice to Reconnect With Your Authentic Self
1:05:39 - Where to Find Dr. Kelly McCann
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
There are hundreds of thousands of chemicals in the environment
today that we're exposed to on aregular basis.
It's impossible to live your life without being exposed to
plastics or salads. 50% of the water supply in the United
States is contaminated with PFASS, the forever chemicals.
Guess what? Can't sweat it out.
(00:20):
You can't detox it out, You can't get it out or mold is a
huge issue. It's one of the biggest drivers
that I see of mouse cell activation.
There's lots of really bad moldsin the soil that get into the
buildings, and you move into a super moldy house and you get
sick and you're like, what happened?
I was healthy before. Well, your immune system was
(00:41):
navigating and managing that infection, and now you've added
something to it and it just can't keep up.
The number of environmental chemicals is skyrocketing.
And we are live. Doctor Kelly, how are you doing
today? I'm great.
Thank you so much for having me,Robert.
I'm excited to be chatting with you because you dive deep into
all the lesser known ailments like the mold toxicity, just
(01:05):
everything, the everything. And people go, people like have
a surface level idea of mold toxicity, for instance, or
environmental toxins, chemicals.And they, it's kind of like this
abstract concept in their minds.And when it comes to treatment
of it, it's like they don't really know what to tackle
first. So I want to flesh that out in
(01:25):
great detail. But but first of all, what even
gets you fascinated in this lineof work to begin with?
Like, was there an ailment that you were dealing with that kind
of catapulted you into this space?
Yes and no. I mean, I always wanted to be
able to help the people in frontof me, right?
And so I started out integrativemedicine, functional medicine,
(01:45):
and then I, I had learned about environmental toxins and
environmental medicine in my fellowship with, at the
University of Arizona with Doctor Andrew Weil.
And so I pursued that because that was really fascinating to
me. And it was a huge gap in
education for physicians. And I, I recognized that it was
(02:07):
a big problem and it was only going to get worse.
And so this was like, you know, 2007 ish, so pretty early on.
And I studied with a man named Doctor Walter Crinion, who's a
naturopath. And he had been doing
environmental medicine for many,many years even before I started
studying with him and learned about all the alphabet soup of
(02:30):
environmental chemicals. And in that fellowship year that
I was studying with him, one of my colleagues said, hey, you
know, there's this guy, Richie Shoemaker, who's teaching about
mold and you should learn about that.
And I thought, Oh yes, I should.So on I went to learn about mold
from Doctor Shoemaker, realized that OK, this is actually very
(02:54):
impactful for a lot of people. It caused a lot of light bulbs
to go off in my own mind becauseI had gotten super sick when I
moved to Oregon and my office was flat, a flat roof building
in western Oregon where it rained all the time and I
developed chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia type symptoms.
(03:17):
I was depressed and actually after about just a little over a
year, I left Oregon because I was so sick I couldn't really
continue. And I, I went and took a job
elsewhere. So I knew I was just going to
continue to, to decline in termsof my health, but I didn't know
what the problem was at the time.
And when I learned about mold, you know, this was several years
(03:41):
later, I was like, oh, Oh my goodness, this is what happened
to me. And as I explored mold and tried
to help people get better from, from mold using his techniques,
I, they weren't always getting better.
And I realized that we've had totalk about chronic infections
like Lyme. And then more recently, I'd say
(04:04):
within the past 10 years, peoplewere coming to me not only with
mold and lime, but they were more sick, more sensitive.
And they had something called mast cell activation syndrome,
which is a hypersensitivity, allergic inflammatory condition.
And we couldn't even start treatments for things like mold
(04:25):
and lime because they were just so sensitive.
They were so sick. They could, you know, eat like
10 or 12 foods, sometimes even less, let alone, you know, take
binders and cholestyramine and all the things that, you know,
people are often given for mold.So I had to learn a whole new
way of managing patients who could only take little tiny
(04:48):
sprinkles of things. I had AI had one client that had
mass so and it was super tricky because like the the foods that
we can pick from. I mean, she was having to go to
a local butcher, like hand select the items because she was
really sensitive to histamines. So anything that was preserved
(05:09):
or old at all, like just she could not tolerate and like I
was, I was scratching my head more than once in working with
her, we got a lot of headway made.
But like with things like that, like what is the catalyst for
that to begin with? Like what causes someone to be
so hypersensitive to seemingly everything?
Yeah, it's a complex condition. There is some genetic
(05:34):
susceptibility to it. Pre COVID, some of the research
showed that the susceptibility in the general population was
about one in six, like 1718% something like that from a
genetic standpoint. And and many people had
(05:54):
expressions of their, of those symptoms as well.
Often times these people would be kind of allergic kids.
They might have had asthma or allergies or just eczema when
they were younger. And what happens is that the
mast cells, which are a normal part of everyone's immune
system, those are like the the soldiers at the gate, right?
(06:21):
Their job is to seek out and identify and sound the alarm
when they perceive a foreign invader or a threat, which is
mold, Lyme, chronic infections, environmental chemicals.
So the mast cells are just doingtheir job, and they say, hey,
guys, there's a problem here. And then they dump all these
(06:44):
inflammatory mediators, including histamine and heparin
and serotonin and cytokines and chemokines, and they send these
signals out to the rest of the immune system to come and help
navigate and manage that threat,whatever that is.
And so this is how our immune systems work.
(07:06):
You know, you heard about the cytokine storm through much of
COVID, and people would get verysick from the cytokine storm.
That's a mass cell reaction, butit's a normal reaction to a
invasive threat like COVID or Lyme or what have you.
What happens in these genetically susceptible people
is that the triggers get turned on and they don't get turned
(07:28):
off. Gotcha.
That's really the big differencebetween a normal reaction and a
mass cell hypersensitivity reaction.
So the question is, why doesn't this signal get turned off?
And that can be from a variety of different things.
For some people, it's because they have a persistent infection
(07:51):
like Lyme or Bartonella cat scratch fever, or they're living
in a moldy house and they don't know it, or they're surrounded
by environmental chemicals, or they're sensitive to EMF.
So there might be. Always an environmental factor,
typically more so than internal.Internal things can do it too,
(08:14):
but it's more so external. And and then the other thing
that I would say is often times there is some sort of traumatic
past. So they might have had, you
(08:35):
know, they might have an high ACE score, adverse childhood
events score. They might have had trauma in
their lives growing up, whether that's a sexual trauma or a
physical trauma or neglect. Significant neglect can also
manifest and increase the susceptibility for these
(08:57):
sensitivities. But I think it's really this
perfect storm of all of this trauma history and then all
these environmental chemicals and exposures that we have in
the world today. You know, I have a few theories
about why it's presenting now also that I think are a little
(09:21):
bit out there. But, but suffice it to say that
we know that there is a ton of environmental chemicals and it
seems to be this, this accumulation of things in
somebody's body or system or exposure that kind of pushes
(09:42):
them over the edge. Anyone who could add COVID to
that too. So even though people aren't
necessarily very infrequently dying from COVID, it's much more
ubiquitous and it's causing all sorts of inflammatory reactions
in people than the likes of which we've never seen before.
Well, you describing that prettymuch perfectly checks all the
(10:05):
boxes for that former client that I'd worked with.
I know she had. There was some trauma early on
in life. What?
What's happening, like if she's got that psychological and
emotional traumatic event, what's happening physiologically
that's that's creating those mast cells to not be turned off
and returned like a parasympathetic state, Like
(10:25):
what's what's the actual mechanistic, you know, currents
there? This is not my area Forte, but I
will say mast cells have quite anumber of different receptors
and court they have cortisol receptors, they probably have
epinephrine, norepinephrine receptors, you know, but I, I
(10:46):
think that I think that plays a role.
And you know, when you pick, when we get some of these
pictures, these cartoons of mastcells, I just imagine that the
mast cells have all these receptors on them and they have
receptors for endotoxins, which would be internal toxins.
(11:11):
They have receptors for pesticides and molds and and
then all of the hormones. So a lot of women get more mast
cell symptoms around their periods because there's a lot
more hormones racing up and downthat are also triggering those
mast cells. And the challenging thing from
(11:33):
a, from a clinical perspective as a physician or even just
trying to wrap your head around it, is that not only is every
person's mast cells different from another person in terms of
the composition of those inflammatory mediators, the mast
(11:54):
cells in your mouth are different from the mast cells in
your gut, are different from themast cells in your blood
vessels. Or like every organ tissue, mast
cells in a single person has a different composition of
mediators. And there are, there are
hundreds, if not thousands of mediators in these mast cells.
(12:17):
So computationally, it's just a huge diversity of inflammatory
mediators that are happening. So imagine if you've got these
cells that have numerous different receptors and numerous
different mediators and things can turn on and off and trigger
(12:38):
these mast cells. It's just kind of mind boggling
to think about what's happening.But from a clinical perspective,
what I'm seeing is that there's this underlying genetic
susceptibility. And then as people go through
life, they get more and more exposures to different things
(13:00):
and these and then the mast cells get more and more kind of
hypersensitive and trigger happy, as it were, to the point
where now they're having massiveflares all the time or they're
much more symptomatic. To tie that back to the
conversation about spirituality and kind of the mind body
(13:24):
connection. The mind and the body are
linked, right? They're fundamentally absolutely
linked. And Western philosophy really
thinks, thanks, Descartes. I think therefore I am the will
in this. The mind is here, the spirit
even is here, and then the body is here.
(13:47):
And what we try and think is I'mgoing to dominate my body.
I'm going to force it to do whatI want it to do because my mind
and, you know, is supreme. And I think that we ignore, we
ignore the messages of the body.So what if we reframed things to
(14:12):
say that the body provides symptoms in the way of messages
to say, Hey, you're off track how you're supposed to be in the
world or the things that you need to work on in the world.
(14:34):
And, and it's not a bad thing. It's more feedback.
I don't know. I think, you know, when people
find the things that they love, they, they are living a life of
purpose and are happy, they tendto have a lot of less symptoms,
(14:57):
right? When we, when we are really
struggling with who we are in the world, who we're supposed to
be, we have ideas that we're notOK.
You know, we, we bought into this belief because of trauma
early in our lives that we weren't lovable, that we're not
OK as we are, that we can't justbe or that who we, who we are is
(15:22):
not good enough. All of these misbeliefs that we
have about ourselves, they show up in our bodies over time
because our bodies and our intuition are trying to get us
to express who we really are. I'll give you an example.
I had a woman in my practice andshe came in after she had been
(15:45):
struggling with symptoms of fatigue and and depression and
anxiety. And this is about three years
after she had had thyroid cancer, and she had her thyroid
removed, and she couldn't get her medications right.
She just felt awful. And she was really stuck on the
(16:07):
fact that, you know, she had to have her thyroid out, that the
thyroid cancer just destroyed her life.
And I asked her about what was going on in her life around that
time, like, you know, a year, year and a half before she got
the diagnosis and had to have the surgery.
And she was a business person. And she was in business with
(16:28):
another woman. She happened to be British.
And she grew up in a family where you were not supposed to
ever confront anyone or ask for what you want or express
yourself. And this other person, this
(16:50):
business partner of hers, like basically destroyed the
business, stole all of her clients and left her in debt.
And she never said anything. She never confronted this woman.
She never expressed her upset orher anger or her frustration.
She was just like, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine.
(17:12):
And her body was saying, no, this isn't fine, this isn't
fine, this isn't fine. And she didn't listen.
She didn't make that connection.And as I was trying to explain
this to her, it really seemed like light bulbs were going off
in her head about how maybe she could have reframed the way that
(17:38):
she dealt with that situation and potentially done it in a
different way. Now, if she can't get her
thyroid back, she can't change the fact that she had thyroid
cancer, but she can heal the energetic issue of really
connecting the heart and the mind and really speaking your
(17:59):
truth, right, Which was what youdid to me was not OK.
I mean, I don't know if it's that simple really, but that's
the idea is that, you know, we can listen to these symptoms and
if we can hear them as messages and be open to the possibility
(18:22):
that how we're thinking about things in our life is not may
not be exactly what we think andthat maybe it's just an
opportunity to explore deeper, right?
Yeah, I feel like especially in the West, we we try and get very
(18:44):
granular and we separate things out, tease it all out.
And the notion that everything'sinterconnected and there's like
this energy sounds almost too woo woo for the general society
in the West. But it's like the more I've
learned, I mean, you're absolutely right.
Like the the brain and the body are one.
I mean, you can't have one with the like, it makes sense that
(19:06):
they would be having a symbioticrelationship of sorts.
But like when it comes to people's ailments, especially as
abstractors, like something likemast cell, I mean, what what is
the standard of practice in the West?
Like is that just something theythrow, you know,
anti-inflammatory medications and prescriptions at like what?
What is? What is the general standard of
(19:27):
care there? Yeah, so we have to quiet down
the mast cells. So it's twofold, right?
And believe me, I don't start the conversation with a new
patient walking in about spirituality most of the time
because that's really not where they're at.
They're suffering in their bodies and they want help in
their bodies. And they're coming to me as a
(19:47):
medical doctor saying my body isn't working.
I want it to do something different.
My will wants it to do somethingdifferent.
Help me like, OK, here we go. We have to do 2 things.
We have to help with the symptoms so that you can
function better in your life. And then we have to identify
what are the root causes and work on them.
(20:09):
So usually the first things thatwe're doing is calming down
those mast cells. And I have, you know, there are
so many different things that wecan do, whether it's medications
or supplements. You mentioned that your client
had a lot of histamine issues. So yeah, a low histamine diet
works for some people, doesn't work for other other people, but
(20:30):
that's OK. So we and look at are you eating
some? That's something that's
triggering you to make you worse.
So it would clean up the diet. We start using things like H1
blockers or H2 blockers. So this would be Zyrtec, Xyzal,
Allegra, Claritin, Pepcid, and there are specific medications
(20:51):
that calm down the mast cells, cromolyn, ketotifen, and there
is a ton of supplements. We can use DAO enzymes to
breakdown histamine in the gut. So that would be something for
your client because she had extra histamine and she might
have had an insufficiency of theDAO enzyme, which is one of the
(21:12):
ways that we metabolize histamines.
And sometimes it's trial and error.
Honestly, I know it sounds really out there, but I muscle
test now because if I have 100 things I can give somebody I
don't want it They and they wantto feel better yesterday.
I don't want to make them go through the trial of every
(21:35):
single H1 blocker on the market,every single H2 blocker on the
market, you know, and then go through the supplements and then
the medications and because it takes too long and I'm not right
100%. I'm not saying that I am, but I
would say I'm batting about 80%,which gets them on a regimen of
(21:57):
things that helps. So we're calming down the mast
cells themselves. And now we really have to work
on the nervous system. So we have to work on the vagus
nerve. Most of the time people are in
fight, flight or freeze all the time, right?
So we have to help them learn. What is parasympathetic feel
like? How do you get to that, that
(22:19):
relaxed state to start to heal? And we can use devices, we can
use exercises. There's all sorts of things out
there in the market like an Apollo Neuro, which is a a vagus
nerve device that you wear. It has a little vibration
machine in there and you set it with your phone to a certain
(22:44):
pattern of vibration that stimulates the vagus nerve.
It's great for sleep, it's greatfor anxiety, things like.
That in something similar to that, I'm not seeing that one,
but I've seen like people will wear certain patches on their
body at different trigger points.
And I guess what I've heard fromthem is that they'll be a
different vibration frequency based off of the vibe or energy
(23:07):
they're trying to target. Whether they're, you know,
trying to get amped up to go speak on the stage or relax and
chill out for the evening. That has different frequencies
for the mood that's desired. Yeah, those are more subtle
frequencies. This is literally vibrating.
OK. So you can actually feel it in
your hand or you know, on your body.
(23:30):
And there are other ones where the they might, it might look
like a little. I can grab them if you want, but
might look like a little. It's kind of like this and it
stimulates the vagus nerve. There are a whole host of
different devices out there thatcan help stimulate the vagus
nerve and get you into that parasympathetic ventral vagal
(23:52):
state. And then we often need to work
on the central nervous system, right?
So the limbic system, which is the ancient part of the brain
that turns emotions into memories, is often stuck or
(24:13):
activated in people who have hadtrauma and then in people who
have have mass activation. And there are a number of
different programs that help guide patients to retrain their
brain. There's a program that's been
(24:35):
around for a long time called DNRS.
And then there's one by a gentleman out of England named
the Gupta program. There's one that I have found
very helpful called Primal Trust.
And they work a little bit differently, but generally the
idea is to help, again, quiet that nervous system and calm,
(25:00):
calm things down. And that's usually the first
step, is that we have to get people to be able to eat a few
more foods, feel a little bit better, feel a little bit more
comfortable in their bodies. And then simultaneously, while
we're doing all of those things that I'm investigating, you
know, is it mold in your home? Are you having exposures?
(25:23):
Do you have Lyme disease or other chronic infections?
Are you EMF sensitive that I'm going through that list?
And then at some point, if they seem open, then we start to have
those like deeper spiritual conversations.
It's probably safe to say that none of this conversation would
(25:46):
take place if someone's walking into their local primary care
physician and, you know, illustrating the symptoms
they're experiencing. I mean, in in that context, like
they're none of this conversation would take place.
They're just going to be prescribed some type of
antidepressant or anti-inflammatory drug, I would
assume, right? Right.
(26:07):
And they may react to that, right.
So you know, one of the one of the keys to me when patients are
struggling with mast cell is they've already self prescribed
an antihistamine. Or when I see that they have a
long list of allergies, you know, they're allergic to
(26:29):
amoxicillin and to sulfa and to garlic and to this and that.
And the other thing, more often than that they have mass cell
activation. And yeah, if you go to your
primary care, they will probablysend you if it, if it's allergic
enough in presentation. So some people have mass cell
(26:50):
and it's more inflammatory, whereas some people will have
more allergy symptoms like they have food, they eat a food and
they get a rash or they have more like upper respiratory
illiteral allergy symptoms or even asthma breathing issues.
They'll get sent to an allergistand the allergist would do
(27:13):
allergy testing and you know, 9 times out of 10 they won't have
any allergies. These are sensitivities and
they're mast cell reactions. If the allergist is a little
savvy, they may they may consider the possibility of mast
(27:34):
cell activation. But unfortunately, just like in
the Lyme world, there's a big divide in the mast cell world
between the conventionally trained allergists who have a
very narrow, rigid diagnosis, diagnostic criteria for mass
cell, and then what we like to call consensus to mass cell
(27:57):
practitioners who recognize thatmass cell activation can be a
clinical diagnosis. That is here.
Here's your clinical diagnosis. Multiple symptoms of allergy,
inflammation or even unusual growth patterns like cysts in
(28:18):
multiple systems, probably more than four or five in the body.
And you know, so people have like headaches and anxiety and
palpitations and diagnosis like interstitial cystitis and
fibromyalgia and migraines. That's probably enough systems
(28:43):
to, you know, consider that theymight have mass cell activation.
Did it seem as though there's more people being diagnosed as
such and dealing with these symptoms?
Or like, is there something going on environmentally or
traumatically that's creating this influx in people with these
(29:05):
symptoms? Because it seems like I'm
hearing about it much more, especially from a mold toxicity
standpoint. Or has it always been pretty
much around in the same, you know, quantity as it is now?
It's just now people kind of know what to put a finger on, so
to speak. Now it's a good question.
The first medical literature that mentioned mass cell
(29:27):
activation as a its own diagnosis diagnosis was 2007 and
Doctor Lawrence Afrin wrote the 1st.
His wrote his first paper on it in 2008.
He's my mentor. He wrote a book called Never Bet
Against Occam. Occam's razor is an idea in
(29:47):
medicine that if you have all these different symptoms, the
what there will be 1 unifying diagnosis.
And that's definitely the case with with mass cell activation.
But in environmental medicine, which has been around for much
longer, and these are the doctors who would see patients
(30:08):
with multiple chemical sensitivity.
And there's a PhD researcher named Claudia Miller and she
actually got together with Doctor Afrin and they did some
research to look at the overlap between muscle activation and
multiple chemical sensitivity. And, and basically, I, you know,
(30:30):
they overlapped about 80%. I mean, people who have multiple
chemical sensitivity, it's usually because of exposure to
pesticides or different kinds oftoxins, solvents, you know, and
those things would trigger this chemical sensitivity.
And they had many symptoms that were similar to mass activation.
(30:52):
We've had patients like this formany, many years.
I'm on the board of a professional organization called
the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, and
they're celebrating their 60th year anniversary as a
professional organization in 2026.
(31:13):
So people have been suffering from these sorts of things.
They just called it different things.
But to answer your question about increased prevalence, I'd
say absolutely it is skyrocketing.
And I think it's in part becausethe number of environmental
(31:34):
chemicals is also skyrocketing. You know, when I first started
learning about this in the early2000s, it was there's 82,000
chemicals in the environment, there's 85,000 chemicals.
There are hundreds of thousands of chemicals in the environment
today that we're exposed to on aregular basis.
It's impossible to live your life without being exposed to
(31:57):
plastics or salates. And in many instances the the
forever chemicals like PFA, S&P,Foss, 50% of the water supply in
the United States is contaminated with PFASS.
That's a lot, right? Guess what, They we don't have
any way to get them out of the body.
(32:20):
Holy crap, no way. You can't sweat it out.
You can't detox it out. You can't get it out unless
you're going to do plasmapheresis.
So, so this is a huge problem and one reason, you know, to all
your listeners, be sure you filter your water.
So I think, I think a huge part of this is the skyrocketing of
(32:41):
the environmental chemicals. And you know, it's interesting
about the mold because I've beendoing mold for a long time too.
And mold is a huge issue in Southern California where I
live. I've lived in 12 houses in
Orange County. Luckily I've been renting and
(33:01):
all of them have been moldy. Every single one has been moldy.
Three of them were so moldy I had to move out of, But the
other ones are they have some degree of mold.
I don't know if it's because we've been using fungicides in
the soil, and this used to be farmland and orange Groves.
And so there's lots of really bad molds in the soil that get
(33:26):
into the buildings. And, you know, there's also
building science issues. I think the way that we build
things now is not well constructed.
What's interesting on the building because like I don't
know what year where they started using like Tyvek wrap,
but like now everything has an impermeable Tyvek wrap around
(33:50):
the exterior. You know, between the total
exterior and like the framing and from like a energy cost
efficiency standpoint makes perfect sense.
Like your house stays cooler in the summer, stays warmer in the
winter, and your utility bills much lower, but like the house
cannot breathe and as a result of that you're getting a lot
more moisture and condensation build up.
(34:12):
Very true. The other thing that we find
here is that, you know, they throw up the sheetrock and
they're supposed to be about an inch and a half of space between
the slab and the sheetrock. And the slabs are chronically
moist because we spring, we, youknow, water and irrigate our,
(34:34):
our beautiful flowers and whatnot around the houses.
But if any part of that sheetrock is touching the slab,
the moisture just Wicks right upthe sheetrock and it may be
enough to cause an issue. And then a lot of the builders
are putting luxury vinyl flooring, which is toxic, by the
(34:57):
way, you know, that's PV season and plastic.
But they put the luxury vinyl flooring right on the top of the
slab without enough room to breathe.
Same kind of issue with the Tyvek.
And it's a, it's a source of moisture and mold growth.
If there's a little bit of dust or sawdust and you've got food
(35:18):
for the molds to grow and it just, it just blossoms.
So mold is a huge issue. It's one of the biggest drivers
that I see of mast cell activation.
And you know, as I mentioned, it's like this total load.
So say somebody goes to a trip, they go to Cape Cod, they get
(35:38):
bit by a tick, but they don't know it.
Or even if they do know it, theyget treated, you know, with the
standard of care, like 10 days of doxycycline and they say
you're good. But what if you have Babesia in
that tick? What if you had Bartonella in
that tick? You're not getting treated.
Maybe you're not symptomatic until, you know, 10-15 years
goes long and now you move into a super moldy house and you get
(36:00):
sick and you're like, what happened?
I was healthy before. Well, your immune system was
navigating and managing that infection and now you've added
something to it and it just can't keep up.
I think it's the same thing withlong haul COVID people like I
was healthy before. Well, your immune system might
have been managing something, but now it can because it got
(36:22):
this huge thing. So what I see is people are
doing OK and then when they falloff the Cliff, it's just the
straw that broke the camel's back.
It's not. It's not the only thing.
Got you. That makes total sense. 2
selfish personal questions. So like my house, you know, I've
(36:43):
got, it's not a very big house. It's out in the country, like in
my bathroom, here's a lot of condensation in the bathroom.
I was just taking a hot shower and whatnot.
So I've got like some surface mold.
What I could tell to be surface mold, like little specks on the
ceiling because that's somethinglike, I'm assuming not all molds
are created equal. So that may not be like a deep
(37:04):
rooted issue necessarily, right?How would you even test to see
the extent of it all? Correct.
Yeah, no, very good questions. Moisture is potentially a
problem. I'll just speak to that.
I have one of these little, I think they're called
hydrometers. I don't know.
It's a little moisture meter. So you can always check what
(37:25):
your moisture reading is and youideally want it to be less than
50%. So you know that would be one
thing to do is get a moisture meter and get a dehumidifier.
But you're right, not all molds are created equal.
Not all molds produce mycotoxinswhich make people sick.
And you can have a mold allergy,which is a different
(37:51):
immunological problem versus a mold toxic illness because the
mycotoxins are only produced by certain molds.
Imagine that the molds are in a war and they're fighting for
resources. Their resources are, you know,
(38:13):
food and water. And they need to develop a
warfare or, you know, a mechanism of killing other
molds. So they create mold toxins or
mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are metabolites.
They're not alive, but they are used to like, try and kill each
(38:39):
other and be the dominant species.
We just happen to be innocent bystanders in their mold war
over resources, right? So the mycotoxin producing molds
are going to be the ones that are problems.
So how do you test? There's a couple different ways
and it depends on the degree of concern and you know, your bank
(39:04):
account. So the best thing is to have a
indoor environmental professional who understands
molds and how people can become sick with from mold and mold
toxins to come out to the house and do an inspection.
You know that's going to set youback.
A couple $1000 might not be worth it in your instance.
(39:25):
There are a couple of do it yourself tests that you can
order called an ERMI, ERMI or a Hertzme, which is a more
abbreviated test. The ERMI test looks at molds
that produce mold toxins. So there are two categories.
(39:48):
They split them into category one, which are all the mycotoxin
producing molds and look at about 36 molds.
And then there is, I don't know,a dozen plus of the not bad
molds and then they look at the numbers.
Using PCR, so it's APCR test usually obtained with taking a
cloth like a Swiffer cloth and just wiping an area or a vacuum.
(40:13):
And then you send off the specimen to be counted by PCR
and you get a score and you alsoget individual numbers.
So for example, if you see a lotof certain kinds of Aspergillus
or Penicillium species, some of them are mycotoxin producing,
some of them aren't. Stachybotteris tartarum is a
(40:36):
terrible mold that always produces mycotoxin.
So if you see that, that's a huge problem.
So then you can evaluate based on the score and the numbers of
the tox, the toxic producing molds versus not.
So that's one way to evaluate it.
(40:58):
It's not always straightforward though, because the score
doesn't always reflect the totalburden of the house.
Additionally, you know, it depends on what's the sample.
You know, if you're sampling in the living room where no one
spends any time and all the molds are in the kitchen or the
(41:19):
bathroom, and that's kind of a useless test, right?
So it's really important to pay attention to what would be the
most likely places where you're going to find more molds that
produce mold toxins. And then there there is a
company that does mold plates. So if if money is a real issue
or you rent, you know, somebody rents and they're trying to
(41:41):
decide is this place moldy or not, You can set out a mold
plate, like literally old fashioned mold plate, put it
down, let it collect some dust and then you, you know, send it
in to the company and they kind of do an analysis for you.
So those are some options. Yeah, I should probably test
(42:02):
those specs on the ceiling, but my my plan of actually just to
hit it really good with some alcohol, you know like just rub
it down really good with alcohol.
But that may not be the the longterm solution there.
No, yeah. Bleach is not going to bleach
alcohol. They're not going to help.
They actually can cause more issues because then you may kill
(42:23):
the molds, but you don't get ridof the mold toxins and now
you've got. Remember I said that you can
have an allergy to molds. So now you've killed them and
you've like broken them into little pieces and parts and now
these can be very what we call antigenic.
So they can be very stimulating to the immune system and you can
(42:44):
start to develop allergies to the molds.
So you don't really want to necessarily do that.
If you do find that there is a amycotoxin producing mold
problem, it really needs to be remediated properly because if
you open up a wall or try and treat it yourself you can really
(43:05):
spread the molds in the mycotoxins everywhere and
contaminate your whole space which is really problematic.
Yeah, I mean, I feel really good.
So like, I don't know, there maynot be any mycotoxin in that
specific strain, but I just needto like test it to see for sure.
That'll kind of dictate the the path I take as far as the
(43:26):
mycotoxins go. Like knowing what you know about
mol, do you? Are you pretty specific on like
where you source your coffee? I am, yeah.
I mean, it's kind of funny. It's like, are you jittery from
the caffeine or are you jittery from the mycotoxins in your
coffee? Yeah, I'm particular about my
(43:48):
coffee. I think it's relevant to people
who are sensitive. Not everybody's super sensitive,
but you know, I think given our conversation about environmental
chemicals, it's really importantthat we, you know, choose,
choose our coffees carefully. Yeah, totally.
(44:11):
Other question. And it kind of blades to the
lime. You know, people typically think
of, you know, tick bite when they think of Lyme disease.
Again, I'm out in the country. I mean, I've been, I've had
ticks on me. Like I can't even begin to tell
you how many ticks I've had. Like I just don't think anything
of it. I just pick it off and go on
about my business. Like how much emphasis should
people put on ticks? Like is there, is there like a
(44:33):
underlying predisposed issue andthen that ticks carrying
something and then it causes that to flare up?
Or should people pay much attention to any time they get a
tick on them, as long as they'repicking it off within a
reasonable amount of time? Yeah, If you can pick it off,
you can actually have the tick tested for not that much money.
If the tick is not infected, it's not going to be an issue.
(44:56):
But if the tick is infected, it could potentially be an issue.
And I think that the the challenging part is it may not
be for an an issue for you now, but it could be an issue if
something else happens, right? COVID, you get in a car
accident, you have a surgery like some other sort of
(45:17):
inflammatory event that you might not ever anticipate.
And your immune system is managing it just fine right now.
But in 10 years, it might not be.
And then, you know, circling back to the conversation about
spirituality and where symptoms manifest, you know, women seem
to manifest their symptoms in a different way than men do.
(45:39):
That's why when a family is in amoldy house, mom will often have
like chronic fatigue. She'll get an autoimmune
condition. Dad might have a lot less
symptoms, apparently not always.But, you know, this is kind of
like, you know, classically. And then one or two, the kids
will be differently affected as well.
(46:03):
I had, you know, one family thatwas the case.
One of the daughters had a seizure disorder was terrible.
And then the other, just the other daughter had some like
allergies and food sensitivitiesand she wasn't that bad.
Mom had an autoimmune condition.But now, you know, years later
(46:24):
after they're out of the mold and they're, they're healthier.
Dad is having more cardiovascular issues that
weren't really identified because I think he's got some,
you know like expression of loveissues.
So it could it be that cardiovascular disease and men
(46:46):
is a long term sequelae of environmental toxicant exposure.
Well, we know that lead can leadto cardiovascular disease.
We know that other environmentalchemicals are associated with
increased risk for different kinds of diseases, Parkinson's
and pesticides for example. So is it possible that the
(47:09):
damage is being done potentially, but the symptoms
are not showing up right away? I know that's a scary thought,
but, you know, we're on a planetwhere everyone is a vote is
exposed to environmental chemicals no matter how pristine
your diet. We're all affected at some
(47:32):
level. And then I think really thinking
about resilience as more than just physical resilience, but
mental, emotional, spiritual resilience is a way of
protecting yourself. So when you live your life in
(47:54):
alignment with who you like you really are, and you're as
authentic as you can possibly be, and you find, you know, the
things that bring you joy, I think a lot of this stuff
doesn't stick as much. Yeah, I mean, this is totally
(48:14):
anecdote on my part, but I feel supremely confident in who I am
as a person, and I'm incredibly passionate about the life that
I'm living and how I'm spending my time.
And for whatever reason, I literally never get sick.
And I feel like there's probablysome, you know, parallels synced
together in that. I mean, I literally, I've been
sick once or I guess twice in myentire life.
(48:36):
And that's pretty atypical, it seems.
Right. And I would be really curious to
have a conversation with you about those two times that you
got sick. What were the circumstances that
were going on in your life? Because sometimes it's just
like, you know what, I need a holiday.
I need I need a time out and I can't take one any other
legitimate way. So I'm going to get sick.
(48:57):
I don't know. Be curious.
Yeah, I mean, I was, I was pretty young both times.
First, first time I was really young, like, like, I don't know,
probably less than five years old.
And then second time was when I was like in high school and had
no clue who I was as a person. So yeah, there's some, there's
some common ground there for sure.
(49:20):
When it comes to environment toxins, we're definitely
inundated with them more so thanever.
How much emphasis do you put on like the clothes that we're
wearing? Because like, obviously we want
to try and be mindful of the soaps that we're using, the, you
know, conditioners, shampoos, all of that, our dish chemicals.
But like when it comes to actualclothes that we're wearing, if
the skin is absorbing whatever it's in contact with and you
(49:44):
look at clothes now and primarily all of them are
produced out of the country trying to improve, you know,
margins. They're pretty much all recycled
plastics, polyesters. Like that's probably going to
have a compounding effect I would assume.
Yeah, you're right, it does. And then think about when you
(50:04):
launder those clothes, you throwthem in the washer and they
break down in the washer. And now you've got microplastics
and nanoplastics in the water. And then you throw them in the
dryer and they break down a little bit more.
And now you have microplastics and nanoplastics in the dust in
your house that you're breathingand that your, you know, pets
(50:26):
are walking around and and your children are breathing because
they're closer to the ground. So yeah, not only is it an
absorption problem, it's also a problem with the like when we
start to really think about the entire exposure of all the
(50:49):
things, it gets really completely overwhelming.
And So what I would counsel yourlisteners and you know, tell any
patient is you got to start where you are, right?
So you got to start with clean food and then you work on your
clean water and you filter your water after what you've learned
(51:09):
today about the PFA s s, right? And then you got to filter your
air because of air pollution andwhat not.
And then you need to clean your house like simple things.
Don't wear your shoes in the house like, but don't worry,
don't wear your shoes in your house.
You'll track in pesticides and God knows what else.
(51:30):
And and then we have, we need tovacuum, we need to clean and we
need to make us healthy choices as we can.
I, I do not have a perfect wardrobe.
I'll tell you right now, it's really hard to try and be a
fashionable woman and have a perfect organic wardrobe.
And we look like I wear a sack, right?
(51:52):
And there are definitely companies out there that are
making some high, higher qualityorganic cotton, you know,
clothing. And there's some really cool
sportswear companies that are not plastic out there.
But yeah, it's it's definitely awork in progress and you just
(52:15):
have to do the best that you can.
Yeah, it's it is very daunting when you.
Start peeling back the layers. One of my good friends, Anthony
J, he wrote Astro titeration andhe's like talking about all
these endocrine disruptors and just the, the day-to-day
consumption stuff that we use. And it's like people pay no mind
to this. You know, they go to Walmart,
(52:35):
they go to Target, they get, youknow, the shampoos, the dish
soaps, they heat their food up in plastic, you know,
Tupperware, which I'm guilty of doing all these things.
But like you look at you look athormone levels, testosterone
levels, the decline in testosterone over the past 50
years, it's, it's bonkers. And it's like, OK, we got to
start taking action somewhere orelse we're just going to implode
(52:59):
as a species. And you're starting to see this
unfold. I mean, like the, the
infertility rate is through the roof.
Birth decline is rampant. I mean, yeah, it's, it's pretty
much going to be an implosion point between the people that
are actually able to function asa species versus those that
aren't. And I feel like a lot of that
can be mitigated by simply the day-to-day choices that we make
(53:21):
and the environment that we livein.
Yeah. And it starts with education.
You know, if you don't know, youdon't know, right?
And I, I see this in a lot of myyoung male patients, you know,
they're in their 20s, maybe evenearly 30s and their testosterone
levels are like 2 or 300 and they've never been normal,
right? So if you have a young man whose
(53:42):
testosterone level is 200, he doesn't have drive, He, he
doesn't have motivation for, youknow, like life really.
And and then what happens? They play video games and they
hang out and they're, you know, they're not going to procreate
because they're attached to their computer because they
(54:03):
don't have the motivation to go out and like exercise and find a
woman because who cares? My testosterone is solo.
Like they don't, they don't recognize the difference.
Whereas when I talk to, you know, a 55 year old man or a 60
year old man, they had normal testosterone levels in their, or
at least they were better than they are now, right?
(54:25):
And they can tell the difference.
They can tell the difference. You know, I just it it is, it is
an existential crisis on a certain level.
Yeah. And I remember when I first
started learning about all of these chemicals and all of these
conditions and I and this was 15years ago, right?
(54:47):
It was depressing as hell, but but you know, I really don't
want your listeners to feel depressed.
I want them to feel empowered because once you have this
knowledge, you can't forget it, and then you can only start
moving forward and making healthy choices for yourself and
your families. That's the key.
(55:09):
I mean like for me, the catalyst.
All this was, you know, learningwhat I learned about nutrition.
But then when you start recognizing how much better you
feel when you're eating the right food, like you start
looking towards the next thing. So like, OK, what's the quality
of the water that I'm drinking? How can I improve my exercise
and movement and longevity from a, you know, skeletal
musculature standpoint? And then you start looking at
(55:29):
everything else and it just becomes another rabbit hole
after the next. But then it becomes exciting
because it's it's tangible. You can grasp, but you're
excited to get better and make progress.
But like, you got to take, you know, one step and then once you
know better, you do better. It's just it's not easy, but it
is relatively simple in that regard.
Yes. Yeah, you can't.
(55:50):
You, you just have to make like 1 incremental change over time.
If you did something every some new change every week for a
year, well that's 52 changes. You know that's huge.
Even if you take a couple weeks off vacation and you don't make
a change, it's still a huge amount of progress in making
(56:11):
different choices for yourself. Totally.
What about sleep? Like I feel like when we're
looking at all these societal ailments that we're experiencing
these days, I feel like sleep and just hyper awareness as a
result of the ability to view a screen and be stimulated through
technology that didn't exist notthat long ago.
(56:34):
I feel like that is very foreignto us, you know, naturally
speaking. So that's probably going to have
a very negative impact, impact on our parasympathetic state.
All in all, yes. And you know.
Guilty as charged too, for me. So not that I'm scrolling, you
(56:55):
know, social media, I'm completing charts and answering
patients emails and things like that at night.
But yeah, it's a huge issue. And I definitely know from
personal experience, if I spend time on the computer at night,
even if I'm wearing my blue blocker glasses and I've got the
lights turned down and I've got my blue blocker light bulbs in
(57:16):
the room and you know, all the things and my red light on and
my feet, I still don't sleep as well as if I just read and go to
bed. So it's absolutely.
Impacting. Us and all, a lot of all of
these chemicals too. And the molds are they're
neurotoxins and they, they causea lot of brain inflammation.
(57:40):
And so sleep is an issue. And I think it's, it's driving
like the mental health disorders, the
neurodevelopmental disorders, autism, ADHDI mean how you know,
all of those, all of these environmental chemicals are
crossing the blood brain barrier, which is not very
(58:03):
robust in, in people who have leaky gut, who have
environmental toxin exposures. And they're, you know, my, my
primary symptom when I was mold exposed was insomnia.
And this was way back, you know,when I was talking about when I
lived in Oregon, I would just wander my house at night because
(58:24):
I couldn't sleep because my brain was so inflamed from the
mycotoxins and I had no idea what was happening.
So yeah. And sleep is critical.
It's so restorative. And it definitely because of our
culture and our choices, it can definitely cause a it is placed
(58:46):
on the backseat and that's not ideal.
Yeah, I'm totally. I mean, that's my Achilles heel.
I don't get enough. Sleep.
And I know that I would perform better on all levels if I got
more sleep. I feel like the quality of my
sleep's pretty dialed in, but the quantity is leaving much to
be desired. But yeah, yeah, I mean, there's
so many things that every singleone of us listening to this can
(59:07):
like do today and implement to get better, and it's just a
matter of making it a priority and taking action.
Yes, only 24. Hours in a day, gosh darn it.
Yeah, well, let's let's end withthis.
What is? One like non negotiable that you
create for yourself to kind of just like put the right foot
(59:29):
forward in mitigating against these toxins, mitigating these
environmental, you know, adverseissues.
What what is something tangible that's like lesser known, so to
speak, Like we all know when youdid drink clean water, eat good
food. Like what's something that you
do that's very practical that you've, that you've found to be
creating a meaningful differencefor you?
(59:53):
Honestly I think, well what I would say is how about?
I'll give you 2 ideas. I think plastic like really,
really looking at your plastic exposure in your home and your
(01:00:15):
life would be the one thing and I know, you know, we know, don't
heat and and microwave. No, don't microwave and plastic
and don't drink out of plastic water bottle, stuff like that.
But really looking at all the plastic in your life and, and by
that I also mean like your TV, your stereo system, your
(01:00:36):
computer, all these things are breaking down and contributing
to the, the toxins in your in the dust.
So maybe the thing that I would say is vacuum more and I hate
vacuuming. So vacuum more.
No shoes in the house. And then and then I would really
(01:01:00):
encourage people to start to think about how how to engage
with their own spirit, with their own authentic self as much
as possible. And it doesn't have to be
religious. I mean, if you believe in God,
great for you. It's your relationship with God.
(01:01:23):
But whatever you call it, we allhave the capacity to have
amazing intuition about what whowe are and what's good for us.
And the more that we can tap into that and start to live from
that place of heart, you know, you, you know when you hang out
with somebody who makes you feelgood, right?
(01:01:45):
You know what? Everybody knows what flow is
when you're doing something thatyou love and time just passes by
and really like dialing in thosethings in your life and living
from that place, you start to feel more connected to yourself
or connected to your purpose, more connected to life in your
(01:02:10):
community. And I think that that is one of
the ultimate ways of building resilience for yourself and your
physical world reality because you're living in alignment with
yourself. Yeah, no, I totally, totally
agree. I love it.
I. Love it.
Do you have like I'm rambling now, but do you have like a
protocol for how you kind of like relax your physical and
(01:02:33):
mental state to connect more on a spiritual basis?
Like is there a way that you candisconnect from the stressors of
your day-to-day and just like get into that zone more readily?
Well, the more. You do it, the more you get into
that zone really, right? So it can be as simple as like a
broth, I think. So my next big project is
(01:02:57):
actually this topic. Exactly.
It's called the Unforgetting project.
And what I mean by that is our capacity to access that
authentic self, our true nature,our intuition.
It's right there. It is like it's right there all
(01:03:17):
the time. It always was there.
That's the unforgetting part. So we're not remembering our
true selves. We have forgotten and we are
unforgetting to connect with that part of ourselves.
I have to connect with that partof myself every day, multiple
times a day seeing patients because that's how I'm I'm
(01:03:40):
figuring out what it is that is going to be best for them.
So I have to have it right thereat my fingertips.
So what I encourage people to dois, you know, whether it's a
meditation process or a prayer process, something that just
(01:04:01):
brings them to their center place.
And then really start to learn what feels good in your body,
what feels, you know, kind of isthis the right thing to do?
I, I started actually muscle testing everything like should I
(01:04:25):
not just should I take this supplement or should I take that
supplement or eat that food or whatever, but like, should I
work with this person? Should I pursue this?
Is this the right name for this thing that I wanted to like
everything. Ask yourself and then see what's
(01:04:45):
the answer that you get inside of yourself?
Is it a hell yeah? Is it a, is it a no?
And then follow that. And the more we do that and the
more that we practice, the more we dial in.
I mean, you already do that, right?
You do that intrinsically and naturally.
That's why you love your life. You know, you've built this
(01:05:07):
great life for yourself. And then for people who are not
quite sure you, you practice just like we practice
everything. Yeah.
The world will be a better placeif we had more people that were
self. Aware and had more hell yeah
decisions throughout the day then yeah, you know, like we
just got a type of things with intensity and passion and
(01:05:29):
purpose and you do that by knowing who you are and what
you're called to do. So totally totally agree, this
is awesome. Where where do people go to find
out more about you? Dive deeper into your world and
and follow along. I have a brick and mortar
practice. In Southern California, the
website isthespringcenter.com. We're currently close to new
(01:05:50):
patients, but we have a preferred wait list.
So if that is calling to you, people do have to come to
California to see me. And you do have to live in a
state where I can see you as a telehealth patient if you're not
in California. So you can check the website for
information there. You can find me on Instagram at
(01:06:14):
Doctor Kelly, Dr. Kelly McCann. And I also have my personal
website, doctorkellymccann.com, where there's blogs and webinars
and other resources for people. And eventually we'll be
launching a a website for the Unforgetting Project.
Awesome. That is super exciting.
(01:06:35):
You had all kinds of good. Stuff in the pipeline on the
horizon. I'll be following along for
sure. Doctor Kelly, truly appreciate
the time and the inside. If there's everything I can do
for you, just let me know. Thank you so much, Robert.
It's been great. Take care.
There are hundreds of thousands of chemicals in the environment
today that we're exposed to on aregular basis.
It's impossible to live your life without being exposed to
plastics or salads. 50% of the water supply in the United
States is contaminated with PFASS, the forever chemicals.
Guess what? Can't sweat it out.
(00:20):
You can't detox it out, You can't get it out or mold is a
huge issue. It's one of the biggest drivers
that I see of mouse cell activation.
There's lots of really bad moldsin the soil that get into the
buildings, and you move into a super moldy house and you get
sick and you're like, what happened?
I was healthy before. Well, your immune system was
(00:41):
navigating and managing that infection, and now you've added
something to it and it just can't keep up.
The number of environmental chemicals is skyrocketing.
And we are live. Doctor Kelly, how are you doing
today? I'm great.
Thank you so much for having me,Robert.
I'm excited to be chatting with you because you dive deep into
all the lesser known ailments like the mold toxicity, just
(01:05):
everything, the everything. And people go, people like have
a surface level idea of mold toxicity, for instance, or
environmental toxins, chemicals.And they, it's kind of like this
abstract concept in their minds.And when it comes to treatment
of it, it's like they don't really know what to tackle
first. So I want to flesh that out in
(01:25):
great detail. But but first of all, what even
gets you fascinated in this lineof work to begin with?
Like, was there an ailment that you were dealing with that kind
of catapulted you into this space?
Yes and no. I mean, I always wanted to be
able to help the people in frontof me, right?
And so I started out integrativemedicine, functional medicine,
(01:45):
and then I, I had learned about environmental toxins and
environmental medicine in my fellowship with, at the
University of Arizona with Doctor Andrew Weil.
And so I pursued that because that was really fascinating to
me. And it was a huge gap in
education for physicians. And I, I recognized that it was
(02:07):
a big problem and it was only going to get worse.
And so this was like, you know, 2007 ish, so pretty early on.
And I studied with a man named Doctor Walter Crinion, who's a
naturopath. And he had been doing
environmental medicine for many,many years even before I started
studying with him and learned about all the alphabet soup of
(02:30):
environmental chemicals. And in that fellowship year that
I was studying with him, one of my colleagues said, hey, you
know, there's this guy, Richie Shoemaker, who's teaching about
mold and you should learn about that.
And I thought, Oh yes, I should.So on I went to learn about mold
from Doctor Shoemaker, realized that OK, this is actually very
(02:54):
impactful for a lot of people. It caused a lot of light bulbs
to go off in my own mind becauseI had gotten super sick when I
moved to Oregon and my office was flat, a flat roof building
in western Oregon where it rained all the time and I
developed chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia type symptoms.
(03:17):
I was depressed and actually after about just a little over a
year, I left Oregon because I was so sick I couldn't really
continue. And I, I went and took a job
elsewhere. So I knew I was just going to
continue to, to decline in termsof my health, but I didn't know
what the problem was at the time.
And when I learned about mold, you know, this was several years
(03:41):
later, I was like, oh, Oh my goodness, this is what happened
to me. And as I explored mold and tried
to help people get better from, from mold using his techniques,
I, they weren't always getting better.
And I realized that we've had totalk about chronic infections
like Lyme. And then more recently, I'd say
(04:04):
within the past 10 years, peoplewere coming to me not only with
mold and lime, but they were more sick, more sensitive.
And they had something called mast cell activation syndrome,
which is a hypersensitivity, allergic inflammatory condition.
And we couldn't even start treatments for things like mold
(04:25):
and lime because they were just so sensitive.
They were so sick. They could, you know, eat like
10 or 12 foods, sometimes even less, let alone, you know, take
binders and cholestyramine and all the things that, you know,
people are often given for mold.So I had to learn a whole new
way of managing patients who could only take little tiny
(04:48):
sprinkles of things. I had AI had one client that had
mass so and it was super tricky because like the the foods that
we can pick from. I mean, she was having to go to
a local butcher, like hand select the items because she was
really sensitive to histamines. So anything that was preserved
(05:09):
or old at all, like just she could not tolerate and like I
was, I was scratching my head more than once in working with
her, we got a lot of headway made.
But like with things like that, like what is the catalyst for
that to begin with? Like what causes someone to be
so hypersensitive to seemingly everything?
Yeah, it's a complex condition. There is some genetic
(05:34):
susceptibility to it. Pre COVID, some of the research
showed that the susceptibility in the general population was
about one in six, like 1718% something like that from a
genetic standpoint. And and many people had
(05:54):
expressions of their, of those symptoms as well.
Often times these people would be kind of allergic kids.
They might have had asthma or allergies or just eczema when
they were younger. And what happens is that the
mast cells, which are a normal part of everyone's immune
system, those are like the the soldiers at the gate, right?
(06:21):
Their job is to seek out and identify and sound the alarm
when they perceive a foreign invader or a threat, which is
mold, Lyme, chronic infections, environmental chemicals.
So the mast cells are just doingtheir job, and they say, hey,
guys, there's a problem here. And then they dump all these
(06:44):
inflammatory mediators, including histamine and heparin
and serotonin and cytokines and chemokines, and they send these
signals out to the rest of the immune system to come and help
navigate and manage that threat,whatever that is.
And so this is how our immune systems work.
(07:06):
You know, you heard about the cytokine storm through much of
COVID, and people would get verysick from the cytokine storm.
That's a mass cell reaction, butit's a normal reaction to a
invasive threat like COVID or Lyme or what have you.
What happens in these genetically susceptible people
is that the triggers get turned on and they don't get turned
(07:28):
off. Gotcha.
That's really the big differencebetween a normal reaction and a
mass cell hypersensitivity reaction.
So the question is, why doesn't this signal get turned off?
And that can be from a variety of different things.
For some people, it's because they have a persistent infection
(07:51):
like Lyme or Bartonella cat scratch fever, or they're living
in a moldy house and they don't know it, or they're surrounded
by environmental chemicals, or they're sensitive to EMF.
So there might be. Always an environmental factor,
typically more so than internal.Internal things can do it too,
(08:14):
but it's more so external. And and then the other thing
that I would say is often times there is some sort of traumatic
past. So they might have had, you
(08:35):
know, they might have an high ACE score, adverse childhood
events score. They might have had trauma in
their lives growing up, whether that's a sexual trauma or a
physical trauma or neglect. Significant neglect can also
manifest and increase the susceptibility for these
(08:57):
sensitivities. But I think it's really this
perfect storm of all of this trauma history and then all
these environmental chemicals and exposures that we have in
the world today. You know, I have a few theories
about why it's presenting now also that I think are a little
(09:21):
bit out there. But, but suffice it to say that
we know that there is a ton of environmental chemicals and it
seems to be this, this accumulation of things in
somebody's body or system or exposure that kind of pushes
(09:42):
them over the edge. Anyone who could add COVID to
that too. So even though people aren't
necessarily very infrequently dying from COVID, it's much more
ubiquitous and it's causing all sorts of inflammatory reactions
in people than the likes of which we've never seen before.
Well, you describing that prettymuch perfectly checks all the
(10:05):
boxes for that former client that I'd worked with.
I know she had. There was some trauma early on
in life. What?
What's happening, like if she's got that psychological and
emotional traumatic event, what's happening physiologically
that's that's creating those mast cells to not be turned off
and returned like a parasympathetic state, Like
(10:25):
what's what's the actual mechanistic, you know, currents
there? This is not my area Forte, but I
will say mast cells have quite anumber of different receptors
and court they have cortisol receptors, they probably have
epinephrine, norepinephrine receptors, you know, but I, I
(10:46):
think that I think that plays a role.
And you know, when you pick, when we get some of these
pictures, these cartoons of mastcells, I just imagine that the
mast cells have all these receptors on them and they have
receptors for endotoxins, which would be internal toxins.
(11:11):
They have receptors for pesticides and molds and and
then all of the hormones. So a lot of women get more mast
cell symptoms around their periods because there's a lot
more hormones racing up and downthat are also triggering those
mast cells. And the challenging thing from
(11:33):
a, from a clinical perspective as a physician or even just
trying to wrap your head around it, is that not only is every
person's mast cells different from another person in terms of
the composition of those inflammatory mediators, the mast
(11:54):
cells in your mouth are different from the mast cells in
your gut, are different from themast cells in your blood
vessels. Or like every organ tissue, mast
cells in a single person has a different composition of
mediators. And there are, there are
hundreds, if not thousands of mediators in these mast cells.
(12:17):
So computationally, it's just a huge diversity of inflammatory
mediators that are happening. So imagine if you've got these
cells that have numerous different receptors and numerous
different mediators and things can turn on and off and trigger
(12:38):
these mast cells. It's just kind of mind boggling
to think about what's happening.But from a clinical perspective,
what I'm seeing is that there's this underlying genetic
susceptibility. And then as people go through
life, they get more and more exposures to different things
(13:00):
and these and then the mast cells get more and more kind of
hypersensitive and trigger happy, as it were, to the point
where now they're having massiveflares all the time or they're
much more symptomatic. To tie that back to the
conversation about spirituality and kind of the mind body
(13:24):
connection. The mind and the body are
linked, right? They're fundamentally absolutely
linked. And Western philosophy really
thinks, thanks, Descartes. I think therefore I am the will
in this. The mind is here, the spirit
even is here, and then the body is here.
(13:47):
And what we try and think is I'mgoing to dominate my body.
I'm going to force it to do whatI want it to do because my mind
and, you know, is supreme. And I think that we ignore, we
ignore the messages of the body.So what if we reframed things to
(14:12):
say that the body provides symptoms in the way of messages
to say, Hey, you're off track how you're supposed to be in the
world or the things that you need to work on in the world.
(14:34):
And, and it's not a bad thing. It's more feedback.
I don't know. I think, you know, when people
find the things that they love, they, they are living a life of
purpose and are happy, they tendto have a lot of less symptoms,
(14:57):
right? When we, when we are really
struggling with who we are in the world, who we're supposed to
be, we have ideas that we're notOK.
You know, we, we bought into this belief because of trauma
early in our lives that we weren't lovable, that we're not
OK as we are, that we can't justbe or that who we, who we are is
(15:22):
not good enough. All of these misbeliefs that we
have about ourselves, they show up in our bodies over time
because our bodies and our intuition are trying to get us
to express who we really are. I'll give you an example.
I had a woman in my practice andshe came in after she had been
(15:45):
struggling with symptoms of fatigue and and depression and
anxiety. And this is about three years
after she had had thyroid cancer, and she had her thyroid
removed, and she couldn't get her medications right.
She just felt awful. And she was really stuck on the
(16:07):
fact that, you know, she had to have her thyroid out, that the
thyroid cancer just destroyed her life.
And I asked her about what was going on in her life around that
time, like, you know, a year, year and a half before she got
the diagnosis and had to have the surgery.
And she was a business person. And she was in business with
(16:28):
another woman. She happened to be British.
And she grew up in a family where you were not supposed to
ever confront anyone or ask for what you want or express
yourself. And this other person, this
(16:50):
business partner of hers, like basically destroyed the
business, stole all of her clients and left her in debt.
And she never said anything. She never confronted this woman.
She never expressed her upset orher anger or her frustration.
She was just like, it's fine, it's fine, it's fine.
(17:12):
And her body was saying, no, this isn't fine, this isn't
fine, this isn't fine. And she didn't listen.
She didn't make that connection.And as I was trying to explain
this to her, it really seemed like light bulbs were going off
in her head about how maybe she could have reframed the way that
(17:38):
she dealt with that situation and potentially done it in a
different way. Now, if she can't get her
thyroid back, she can't change the fact that she had thyroid
cancer, but she can heal the energetic issue of really
connecting the heart and the mind and really speaking your
(17:59):
truth, right, Which was what youdid to me was not OK.
I mean, I don't know if it's that simple really, but that's
the idea is that, you know, we can listen to these symptoms and
if we can hear them as messages and be open to the possibility
(18:22):
that how we're thinking about things in our life is not may
not be exactly what we think andthat maybe it's just an
opportunity to explore deeper, right?
Yeah, I feel like especially in the West, we we try and get very
(18:44):
granular and we separate things out, tease it all out.
And the notion that everything'sinterconnected and there's like
this energy sounds almost too woo woo for the general society
in the West. But it's like the more I've
learned, I mean, you're absolutely right.
Like the the brain and the body are one.
I mean, you can't have one with the like, it makes sense that
(19:06):
they would be having a symbioticrelationship of sorts.
But like when it comes to people's ailments, especially as
abstractors, like something likemast cell, I mean, what what is
the standard of practice in the West?
Like is that just something theythrow, you know,
anti-inflammatory medications and prescriptions at like what?
What is? What is the general standard of
(19:27):
care there? Yeah, so we have to quiet down
the mast cells. So it's twofold, right?
And believe me, I don't start the conversation with a new
patient walking in about spirituality most of the time
because that's really not where they're at.
They're suffering in their bodies and they want help in
their bodies. And they're coming to me as a
(19:47):
medical doctor saying my body isn't working.
I want it to do something different.
My will wants it to do somethingdifferent.
Help me like, OK, here we go. We have to do 2 things.
We have to help with the symptoms so that you can
function better in your life. And then we have to identify
what are the root causes and work on them.
(20:09):
So usually the first things thatwe're doing is calming down
those mast cells. And I have, you know, there are
so many different things that wecan do, whether it's medications
or supplements. You mentioned that your client
had a lot of histamine issues. So yeah, a low histamine diet
works for some people, doesn't work for other other people, but
(20:30):
that's OK. So we and look at are you eating
some? That's something that's
triggering you to make you worse.
So it would clean up the diet. We start using things like H1
blockers or H2 blockers. So this would be Zyrtec, Xyzal,
Allegra, Claritin, Pepcid, and there are specific medications
(20:51):
that calm down the mast cells, cromolyn, ketotifen, and there
is a ton of supplements. We can use DAO enzymes to
breakdown histamine in the gut. So that would be something for
your client because she had extra histamine and she might
have had an insufficiency of theDAO enzyme, which is one of the
(21:12):
ways that we metabolize histamines.
And sometimes it's trial and error.
Honestly, I know it sounds really out there, but I muscle
test now because if I have 100 things I can give somebody I
don't want it They and they wantto feel better yesterday.
I don't want to make them go through the trial of every
(21:35):
single H1 blocker on the market,every single H2 blocker on the
market, you know, and then go through the supplements and then
the medications and because it takes too long and I'm not right
100%. I'm not saying that I am, but I
would say I'm batting about 80%,which gets them on a regimen of
(21:57):
things that helps. So we're calming down the mast
cells themselves. And now we really have to work
on the nervous system. So we have to work on the vagus
nerve. Most of the time people are in
fight, flight or freeze all the time, right?
So we have to help them learn. What is parasympathetic feel
like? How do you get to that, that
(22:19):
relaxed state to start to heal? And we can use devices, we can
use exercises. There's all sorts of things out
there in the market like an Apollo Neuro, which is a a vagus
nerve device that you wear. It has a little vibration
machine in there and you set it with your phone to a certain
(22:44):
pattern of vibration that stimulates the vagus nerve.
It's great for sleep, it's greatfor anxiety, things like.
That in something similar to that, I'm not seeing that one,
but I've seen like people will wear certain patches on their
body at different trigger points.
And I guess what I've heard fromthem is that they'll be a
different vibration frequency based off of the vibe or energy
(23:07):
they're trying to target. Whether they're, you know,
trying to get amped up to go speak on the stage or relax and
chill out for the evening. That has different frequencies
for the mood that's desired. Yeah, those are more subtle
frequencies. This is literally vibrating.
OK. So you can actually feel it in
your hand or you know, on your body.
(23:30):
And there are other ones where the they might, it might look
like a little. I can grab them if you want, but
might look like a little. It's kind of like this and it
stimulates the vagus nerve. There are a whole host of
different devices out there thatcan help stimulate the vagus
nerve and get you into that parasympathetic ventral vagal
(23:52):
state. And then we often need to work
on the central nervous system, right?
So the limbic system, which is the ancient part of the brain
that turns emotions into memories, is often stuck or
(24:13):
activated in people who have hadtrauma and then in people who
have have mass activation. And there are a number of
different programs that help guide patients to retrain their
brain. There's a program that's been
(24:35):
around for a long time called DNRS.
And then there's one by a gentleman out of England named
the Gupta program. There's one that I have found
very helpful called Primal Trust.
And they work a little bit differently, but generally the
idea is to help, again, quiet that nervous system and calm,
(25:00):
calm things down. And that's usually the first
step, is that we have to get people to be able to eat a few
more foods, feel a little bit better, feel a little bit more
comfortable in their bodies. And then simultaneously, while
we're doing all of those things that I'm investigating, you
know, is it mold in your home? Are you having exposures?
(25:23):
Do you have Lyme disease or other chronic infections?
Are you EMF sensitive that I'm going through that list?
And then at some point, if they seem open, then we start to have
those like deeper spiritual conversations.
It's probably safe to say that none of this conversation would
(25:46):
take place if someone's walking into their local primary care
physician and, you know, illustrating the symptoms
they're experiencing. I mean, in in that context, like
they're none of this conversation would take place.
They're just going to be prescribed some type of
antidepressant or anti-inflammatory drug, I would
assume, right? Right.
(26:07):
And they may react to that, right.
So you know, one of the one of the keys to me when patients are
struggling with mast cell is they've already self prescribed
an antihistamine. Or when I see that they have a
long list of allergies, you know, they're allergic to
(26:29):
amoxicillin and to sulfa and to garlic and to this and that.
And the other thing, more often than that they have mass cell
activation. And yeah, if you go to your
primary care, they will probablysend you if it, if it's allergic
enough in presentation. So some people have mass cell
(26:50):
and it's more inflammatory, whereas some people will have
more allergy symptoms like they have food, they eat a food and
they get a rash or they have more like upper respiratory
illiteral allergy symptoms or even asthma breathing issues.
They'll get sent to an allergistand the allergist would do
(27:13):
allergy testing and you know, 9 times out of 10 they won't have
any allergies. These are sensitivities and
they're mast cell reactions. If the allergist is a little
savvy, they may they may consider the possibility of mast
(27:34):
cell activation. But unfortunately, just like in
the Lyme world, there's a big divide in the mast cell world
between the conventionally trained allergists who have a
very narrow, rigid diagnosis, diagnostic criteria for mass
cell, and then what we like to call consensus to mass cell
(27:57):
practitioners who recognize thatmass cell activation can be a
clinical diagnosis. That is here.
Here's your clinical diagnosis. Multiple symptoms of allergy,
inflammation or even unusual growth patterns like cysts in
(28:18):
multiple systems, probably more than four or five in the body.
And you know, so people have like headaches and anxiety and
palpitations and diagnosis like interstitial cystitis and
fibromyalgia and migraines. That's probably enough systems
(28:43):
to, you know, consider that theymight have mass cell activation.
Did it seem as though there's more people being diagnosed as
such and dealing with these symptoms?
Or like, is there something going on environmentally or
traumatically that's creating this influx in people with these
(29:05):
symptoms? Because it seems like I'm
hearing about it much more, especially from a mold toxicity
standpoint. Or has it always been pretty
much around in the same, you know, quantity as it is now?
It's just now people kind of know what to put a finger on, so
to speak. Now it's a good question.
The first medical literature that mentioned mass cell
(29:27):
activation as a its own diagnosis diagnosis was 2007 and
Doctor Lawrence Afrin wrote the 1st.
His wrote his first paper on it in 2008.
He's my mentor. He wrote a book called Never Bet
Against Occam. Occam's razor is an idea in
(29:47):
medicine that if you have all these different symptoms, the
what there will be 1 unifying diagnosis.
And that's definitely the case with with mass cell activation.
But in environmental medicine, which has been around for much
longer, and these are the doctors who would see patients
(30:08):
with multiple chemical sensitivity.
And there's a PhD researcher named Claudia Miller and she
actually got together with Doctor Afrin and they did some
research to look at the overlap between muscle activation and
multiple chemical sensitivity. And, and basically, I, you know,
(30:30):
they overlapped about 80%. I mean, people who have multiple
chemical sensitivity, it's usually because of exposure to
pesticides or different kinds oftoxins, solvents, you know, and
those things would trigger this chemical sensitivity.
And they had many symptoms that were similar to mass activation.
(30:52):
We've had patients like this formany, many years.
I'm on the board of a professional organization called
the American Academy of Environmental Medicine, and
they're celebrating their 60th year anniversary as a
professional organization in 2026.
(31:13):
So people have been suffering from these sorts of things.
They just called it different things.
But to answer your question about increased prevalence, I'd
say absolutely it is skyrocketing.
And I think it's in part becausethe number of environmental
(31:34):
chemicals is also skyrocketing. You know, when I first started
learning about this in the early2000s, it was there's 82,000
chemicals in the environment, there's 85,000 chemicals.
There are hundreds of thousands of chemicals in the environment
today that we're exposed to on aregular basis.
It's impossible to live your life without being exposed to
(31:57):
plastics or salates. And in many instances the the
forever chemicals like PFA, S&P,Foss, 50% of the water supply in
the United States is contaminated with PFASS.
That's a lot, right? Guess what, They we don't have
any way to get them out of the body.
(32:20):
Holy crap, no way. You can't sweat it out.
You can't detox it out. You can't get it out unless
you're going to do plasmapheresis.
So, so this is a huge problem and one reason, you know, to all
your listeners, be sure you filter your water.
So I think, I think a huge part of this is the skyrocketing of
(32:41):
the environmental chemicals. And you know, it's interesting
about the mold because I've beendoing mold for a long time too.
And mold is a huge issue in Southern California where I
live. I've lived in 12 houses in
Orange County. Luckily I've been renting and
(33:01):
all of them have been moldy. Every single one has been moldy.
Three of them were so moldy I had to move out of, But the
other ones are they have some degree of mold.
I don't know if it's because we've been using fungicides in
the soil, and this used to be farmland and orange Groves.
And so there's lots of really bad molds in the soil that get
(33:26):
into the buildings. And, you know, there's also
building science issues. I think the way that we build
things now is not well constructed.
What's interesting on the building because like I don't
know what year where they started using like Tyvek wrap,
but like now everything has an impermeable Tyvek wrap around
(33:50):
the exterior. You know, between the total
exterior and like the framing and from like a energy cost
efficiency standpoint makes perfect sense.
Like your house stays cooler in the summer, stays warmer in the
winter, and your utility bills much lower, but like the house
cannot breathe and as a result of that you're getting a lot
more moisture and condensation build up.
(34:12):
Very true. The other thing that we find
here is that, you know, they throw up the sheetrock and
they're supposed to be about an inch and a half of space between
the slab and the sheetrock. And the slabs are chronically
moist because we spring, we, youknow, water and irrigate our,
(34:34):
our beautiful flowers and whatnot around the houses.
But if any part of that sheetrock is touching the slab,
the moisture just Wicks right upthe sheetrock and it may be
enough to cause an issue. And then a lot of the builders
are putting luxury vinyl flooring, which is toxic, by the
(34:57):
way, you know, that's PV season and plastic.
But they put the luxury vinyl flooring right on the top of the
slab without enough room to breathe.
Same kind of issue with the Tyvek.
And it's a, it's a source of moisture and mold growth.
If there's a little bit of dust or sawdust and you've got food
(35:18):
for the molds to grow and it just, it just blossoms.
So mold is a huge issue. It's one of the biggest drivers
that I see of mast cell activation.
And you know, as I mentioned, it's like this total load.
So say somebody goes to a trip, they go to Cape Cod, they get
(35:38):
bit by a tick, but they don't know it.
Or even if they do know it, theyget treated, you know, with the
standard of care, like 10 days of doxycycline and they say
you're good. But what if you have Babesia in
that tick? What if you had Bartonella in
that tick? You're not getting treated.
Maybe you're not symptomatic until, you know, 10-15 years
goes long and now you move into a super moldy house and you get
(36:00):
sick and you're like, what happened?
I was healthy before. Well, your immune system was
navigating and managing that infection and now you've added
something to it and it just can't keep up.
I think it's the same thing withlong haul COVID people like I
was healthy before. Well, your immune system might
have been managing something, but now it can because it got
(36:22):
this huge thing. So what I see is people are
doing OK and then when they falloff the Cliff, it's just the
straw that broke the camel's back.
It's not. It's not the only thing.
Got you. That makes total sense. 2
selfish personal questions. So like my house, you know, I've
(36:43):
got, it's not a very big house. It's out in the country, like in
my bathroom, here's a lot of condensation in the bathroom.
I was just taking a hot shower and whatnot.
So I've got like some surface mold.
What I could tell to be surface mold, like little specks on the
ceiling because that's somethinglike, I'm assuming not all molds
are created equal. So that may not be like a deep
(37:04):
rooted issue necessarily, right?How would you even test to see
the extent of it all? Correct.
Yeah, no, very good questions. Moisture is potentially a
problem. I'll just speak to that.
I have one of these little, I think they're called
hydrometers. I don't know.
It's a little moisture meter. So you can always check what
(37:25):
your moisture reading is and youideally want it to be less than
50%. So you know that would be one
thing to do is get a moisture meter and get a dehumidifier.
But you're right, not all molds are created equal.
Not all molds produce mycotoxinswhich make people sick.
And you can have a mold allergy,which is a different
(37:51):
immunological problem versus a mold toxic illness because the
mycotoxins are only produced by certain molds.
Imagine that the molds are in a war and they're fighting for
resources. Their resources are, you know,
(38:13):
food and water. And they need to develop a
warfare or, you know, a mechanism of killing other
molds. So they create mold toxins or
mycotoxins. Mycotoxins are metabolites.
They're not alive, but they are used to like, try and kill each
(38:39):
other and be the dominant species.
We just happen to be innocent bystanders in their mold war
over resources, right? So the mycotoxin producing molds
are going to be the ones that are problems.
So how do you test? There's a couple different ways
and it depends on the degree of concern and you know, your bank
(39:04):
account. So the best thing is to have a
indoor environmental professional who understands
molds and how people can become sick with from mold and mold
toxins to come out to the house and do an inspection.
You know that's going to set youback.
A couple $1000 might not be worth it in your instance.
(39:25):
There are a couple of do it yourself tests that you can
order called an ERMI, ERMI or a Hertzme, which is a more
abbreviated test. The ERMI test looks at molds
that produce mold toxins. So there are two categories.
(39:48):
They split them into category one, which are all the mycotoxin
producing molds and look at about 36 molds.
And then there is, I don't know,a dozen plus of the not bad
molds and then they look at the numbers.
Using PCR, so it's APCR test usually obtained with taking a
cloth like a Swiffer cloth and just wiping an area or a vacuum.
(40:13):
And then you send off the specimen to be counted by PCR
and you get a score and you alsoget individual numbers.
So for example, if you see a lotof certain kinds of Aspergillus
or Penicillium species, some of them are mycotoxin producing,
some of them aren't. Stachybotteris tartarum is a
(40:36):
terrible mold that always produces mycotoxin.
So if you see that, that's a huge problem.
So then you can evaluate based on the score and the numbers of
the tox, the toxic producing molds versus not.
So that's one way to evaluate it.
(40:58):
It's not always straightforward though, because the score
doesn't always reflect the totalburden of the house.
Additionally, you know, it depends on what's the sample.
You know, if you're sampling in the living room where no one
spends any time and all the molds are in the kitchen or the
(41:19):
bathroom, and that's kind of a useless test, right?
So it's really important to pay attention to what would be the
most likely places where you're going to find more molds that
produce mold toxins. And then there there is a
company that does mold plates. So if if money is a real issue
or you rent, you know, somebody rents and they're trying to
(41:41):
decide is this place moldy or not, You can set out a mold
plate, like literally old fashioned mold plate, put it
down, let it collect some dust and then you, you know, send it
in to the company and they kind of do an analysis for you.
So those are some options. Yeah, I should probably test
(42:02):
those specs on the ceiling, but my my plan of actually just to
hit it really good with some alcohol, you know like just rub
it down really good with alcohol.
But that may not be the the longterm solution there.
No, yeah. Bleach is not going to bleach
alcohol. They're not going to help.
They actually can cause more issues because then you may kill
(42:23):
the molds, but you don't get ridof the mold toxins and now
you've got. Remember I said that you can
have an allergy to molds. So now you've killed them and
you've like broken them into little pieces and parts and now
these can be very what we call antigenic.
So they can be very stimulating to the immune system and you can
(42:44):
start to develop allergies to the molds.
So you don't really want to necessarily do that.
If you do find that there is a amycotoxin producing mold
problem, it really needs to be remediated properly because if
you open up a wall or try and treat it yourself you can really
(43:05):
spread the molds in the mycotoxins everywhere and
contaminate your whole space which is really problematic.
Yeah, I mean, I feel really good.
So like, I don't know, there maynot be any mycotoxin in that
specific strain, but I just needto like test it to see for sure.
That'll kind of dictate the the path I take as far as the
(43:26):
mycotoxins go. Like knowing what you know about
mol, do you? Are you pretty specific on like
where you source your coffee? I am, yeah.
I mean, it's kind of funny. It's like, are you jittery from
the caffeine or are you jittery from the mycotoxins in your
coffee? Yeah, I'm particular about my
(43:48):
coffee. I think it's relevant to people
who are sensitive. Not everybody's super sensitive,
but you know, I think given our conversation about environmental
chemicals, it's really importantthat we, you know, choose,
choose our coffees carefully. Yeah, totally.
(44:11):
Other question. And it kind of blades to the
lime. You know, people typically think
of, you know, tick bite when they think of Lyme disease.
Again, I'm out in the country. I mean, I've been, I've had
ticks on me. Like I can't even begin to tell
you how many ticks I've had. Like I just don't think anything
of it. I just pick it off and go on
about my business. Like how much emphasis should
people put on ticks? Like is there, is there like a
(44:33):
underlying predisposed issue andthen that ticks carrying
something and then it causes that to flare up?
Or should people pay much attention to any time they get a
tick on them, as long as they'repicking it off within a
reasonable amount of time? Yeah, If you can pick it off,
you can actually have the tick tested for not that much money.
If the tick is not infected, it's not going to be an issue.
(44:56):
But if the tick is infected, it could potentially be an issue.
And I think that the the challenging part is it may not
be for an an issue for you now, but it could be an issue if
something else happens, right? COVID, you get in a car
accident, you have a surgery like some other sort of
(45:17):
inflammatory event that you might not ever anticipate.
And your immune system is managing it just fine right now.
But in 10 years, it might not be.
And then, you know, circling back to the conversation about
spirituality and where symptoms manifest, you know, women seem
to manifest their symptoms in a different way than men do.
(45:39):
That's why when a family is in amoldy house, mom will often have
like chronic fatigue. She'll get an autoimmune
condition. Dad might have a lot less
symptoms, apparently not always.But, you know, this is kind of
like, you know, classically. And then one or two, the kids
will be differently affected as well.
(46:03):
I had, you know, one family thatwas the case.
One of the daughters had a seizure disorder was terrible.
And then the other, just the other daughter had some like
allergies and food sensitivitiesand she wasn't that bad.
Mom had an autoimmune condition.But now, you know, years later
(46:24):
after they're out of the mold and they're, they're healthier.
Dad is having more cardiovascular issues that
weren't really identified because I think he's got some,
you know like expression of loveissues.
So it could it be that cardiovascular disease and men
(46:46):
is a long term sequelae of environmental toxicant exposure.
Well, we know that lead can leadto cardiovascular disease.
We know that other environmentalchemicals are associated with
increased risk for different kinds of diseases, Parkinson's
and pesticides for example. So is it possible that the
(47:09):
damage is being done potentially, but the symptoms
are not showing up right away? I know that's a scary thought,
but, you know, we're on a planetwhere everyone is a vote is
exposed to environmental chemicals no matter how pristine
your diet. We're all affected at some
(47:32):
level. And then I think really thinking
about resilience as more than just physical resilience, but
mental, emotional, spiritual resilience is a way of
protecting yourself. So when you live your life in
(47:54):
alignment with who you like you really are, and you're as
authentic as you can possibly be, and you find, you know, the
things that bring you joy, I think a lot of this stuff
doesn't stick as much. Yeah, I mean, this is totally
(48:14):
anecdote on my part, but I feel supremely confident in who I am
as a person, and I'm incredibly passionate about the life that
I'm living and how I'm spending my time.
And for whatever reason, I literally never get sick.
And I feel like there's probablysome, you know, parallels synced
together in that. I mean, I literally, I've been
sick once or I guess twice in myentire life.
(48:36):
And that's pretty atypical, it seems.
Right. And I would be really curious to
have a conversation with you about those two times that you
got sick. What were the circumstances that
were going on in your life? Because sometimes it's just
like, you know what, I need a holiday.
I need I need a time out and I can't take one any other
legitimate way. So I'm going to get sick.
(48:57):
I don't know. Be curious.
Yeah, I mean, I was, I was pretty young both times.
First, first time I was really young, like, like, I don't know,
probably less than five years old.
And then second time was when I was like in high school and had
no clue who I was as a person. So yeah, there's some, there's
some common ground there for sure.
(49:20):
When it comes to environment toxins, we're definitely
inundated with them more so thanever.
How much emphasis do you put on like the clothes that we're
wearing? Because like, obviously we want
to try and be mindful of the soaps that we're using, the, you
know, conditioners, shampoos, all of that, our dish chemicals.
But like when it comes to actualclothes that we're wearing, if
the skin is absorbing whatever it's in contact with and you
(49:44):
look at clothes now and primarily all of them are
produced out of the country trying to improve, you know,
margins. They're pretty much all recycled
plastics, polyesters. Like that's probably going to
have a compounding effect I would assume.
Yeah, you're right, it does. And then think about when you
(50:04):
launder those clothes, you throwthem in the washer and they
break down in the washer. And now you've got microplastics
and nanoplastics in the water. And then you throw them in the
dryer and they break down a little bit more.
And now you have microplastics and nanoplastics in the dust in
your house that you're breathingand that your, you know, pets
(50:26):
are walking around and and your children are breathing because
they're closer to the ground. So yeah, not only is it an
absorption problem, it's also a problem with the like when we
start to really think about the entire exposure of all the
(50:49):
things, it gets really completely overwhelming.
And So what I would counsel yourlisteners and you know, tell any
patient is you got to start where you are, right?
So you got to start with clean food and then you work on your
clean water and you filter your water after what you've learned
(51:09):
today about the PFA s s, right? And then you got to filter your
air because of air pollution andwhat not.
And then you need to clean your house like simple things.
Don't wear your shoes in the house like, but don't worry,
don't wear your shoes in your house.
You'll track in pesticides and God knows what else.
(51:30):
And and then we have, we need tovacuum, we need to clean and we
need to make us healthy choices as we can.
I, I do not have a perfect wardrobe.
I'll tell you right now, it's really hard to try and be a
fashionable woman and have a perfect organic wardrobe.
And we look like I wear a sack, right?
(51:52):
And there are definitely companies out there that are
making some high, higher qualityorganic cotton, you know,
clothing. And there's some really cool
sportswear companies that are not plastic out there.
But yeah, it's it's definitely awork in progress and you just
(52:15):
have to do the best that you can.
Yeah, it's it is very daunting when you.
Start peeling back the layers. One of my good friends, Anthony
J, he wrote Astro titeration andhe's like talking about all
these endocrine disruptors and just the, the day-to-day
consumption stuff that we use. And it's like people pay no mind
to this. You know, they go to Walmart,
(52:35):
they go to Target, they get, youknow, the shampoos, the dish
soaps, they heat their food up in plastic, you know,
Tupperware, which I'm guilty of doing all these things.
But like you look at you look athormone levels, testosterone
levels, the decline in testosterone over the past 50
years, it's, it's bonkers. And it's like, OK, we got to
start taking action somewhere orelse we're just going to implode
(52:59):
as a species. And you're starting to see this
unfold. I mean, like the, the
infertility rate is through the roof.
Birth decline is rampant. I mean, yeah, it's, it's pretty
much going to be an implosion point between the people that
are actually able to function asa species versus those that
aren't. And I feel like a lot of that
can be mitigated by simply the day-to-day choices that we make
(53:21):
and the environment that we livein.
Yeah. And it starts with education.
You know, if you don't know, youdon't know, right?
And I, I see this in a lot of myyoung male patients, you know,
they're in their 20s, maybe evenearly 30s and their testosterone
levels are like 2 or 300 and they've never been normal,
right? So if you have a young man whose
(53:42):
testosterone level is 200, he doesn't have drive, He, he
doesn't have motivation for, youknow, like life really.
And and then what happens? They play video games and they
hang out and they're, you know, they're not going to procreate
because they're attached to their computer because they
(54:03):
don't have the motivation to go out and like exercise and find a
woman because who cares? My testosterone is solo.
Like they don't, they don't recognize the difference.
Whereas when I talk to, you know, a 55 year old man or a 60
year old man, they had normal testosterone levels in their, or
at least they were better than they are now, right?
(54:25):
And they can tell the difference.
They can tell the difference. You know, I just it it is, it is
an existential crisis on a certain level.
Yeah. And I remember when I first
started learning about all of these chemicals and all of these
conditions and I and this was 15years ago, right?
(54:47):
It was depressing as hell, but but you know, I really don't
want your listeners to feel depressed.
I want them to feel empowered because once you have this
knowledge, you can't forget it, and then you can only start
moving forward and making healthy choices for yourself and
your families. That's the key.
(55:09):
I mean like for me, the catalyst.
All this was, you know, learningwhat I learned about nutrition.
But then when you start recognizing how much better you
feel when you're eating the right food, like you start
looking towards the next thing. So like, OK, what's the quality
of the water that I'm drinking? How can I improve my exercise
and movement and longevity from a, you know, skeletal
musculature standpoint? And then you start looking at
(55:29):
everything else and it just becomes another rabbit hole
after the next. But then it becomes exciting
because it's it's tangible. You can grasp, but you're
excited to get better and make progress.
But like, you got to take, you know, one step and then once you
know better, you do better. It's just it's not easy, but it
is relatively simple in that regard.
Yes. Yeah, you can't.
(55:50):
You, you just have to make like 1 incremental change over time.
If you did something every some new change every week for a
year, well that's 52 changes. You know that's huge.
Even if you take a couple weeks off vacation and you don't make
a change, it's still a huge amount of progress in making
(56:11):
different choices for yourself. Totally.
What about sleep? Like I feel like when we're
looking at all these societal ailments that we're experiencing
these days, I feel like sleep and just hyper awareness as a
result of the ability to view a screen and be stimulated through
technology that didn't exist notthat long ago.
(56:34):
I feel like that is very foreignto us, you know, naturally
speaking. So that's probably going to have
a very negative impact, impact on our parasympathetic state.
All in all, yes. And you know.
Guilty as charged too, for me. So not that I'm scrolling, you
(56:55):
know, social media, I'm completing charts and answering
patients emails and things like that at night.
But yeah, it's a huge issue. And I definitely know from
personal experience, if I spend time on the computer at night,
even if I'm wearing my blue blocker glasses and I've got the
lights turned down and I've got my blue blocker light bulbs in
(57:16):
the room and you know, all the things and my red light on and
my feet, I still don't sleep as well as if I just read and go to
bed. So it's absolutely.
Impacting. Us and all, a lot of all of
these chemicals too. And the molds are they're
neurotoxins and they, they causea lot of brain inflammation.
(57:40):
And so sleep is an issue. And I think it's, it's driving
like the mental health disorders, the
neurodevelopmental disorders, autism, ADHDI mean how you know,
all of those, all of these environmental chemicals are
crossing the blood brain barrier, which is not very
(58:03):
robust in, in people who have leaky gut, who have
environmental toxin exposures. And they're, you know, my, my
primary symptom when I was mold exposed was insomnia.
And this was way back, you know,when I was talking about when I
lived in Oregon, I would just wander my house at night because
(58:24):
I couldn't sleep because my brain was so inflamed from the
mycotoxins and I had no idea what was happening.
So yeah. And sleep is critical.
It's so restorative. And it definitely because of our
culture and our choices, it can definitely cause a it is placed
(58:46):
on the backseat and that's not ideal.
Yeah, I'm totally. I mean, that's my Achilles heel.
I don't get enough. Sleep.
And I know that I would perform better on all levels if I got
more sleep. I feel like the quality of my
sleep's pretty dialed in, but the quantity is leaving much to
be desired. But yeah, yeah, I mean, there's
so many things that every singleone of us listening to this can
(59:07):
like do today and implement to get better, and it's just a
matter of making it a priority and taking action.
Yes, only 24. Hours in a day, gosh darn it.
Yeah, well, let's let's end withthis.
What is? One like non negotiable that you
create for yourself to kind of just like put the right foot
(59:29):
forward in mitigating against these toxins, mitigating these
environmental, you know, adverseissues.
What what is something tangible that's like lesser known, so to
speak, Like we all know when youdid drink clean water, eat good
food. Like what's something that you
do that's very practical that you've, that you've found to be
creating a meaningful differencefor you?
(59:53):
Honestly I think, well what I would say is how about?
I'll give you 2 ideas. I think plastic like really,
really looking at your plastic exposure in your home and your
(01:00:15):
life would be the one thing and I know, you know, we know, don't
heat and and microwave. No, don't microwave and plastic
and don't drink out of plastic water bottle, stuff like that.
But really looking at all the plastic in your life and, and by
that I also mean like your TV, your stereo system, your
(01:00:36):
computer, all these things are breaking down and contributing
to the, the toxins in your in the dust.
So maybe the thing that I would say is vacuum more and I hate
vacuuming. So vacuum more.
No shoes in the house. And then and then I would really
(01:01:00):
encourage people to start to think about how how to engage
with their own spirit, with their own authentic self as much
as possible. And it doesn't have to be
religious. I mean, if you believe in God,
great for you. It's your relationship with God.
(01:01:23):
But whatever you call it, we allhave the capacity to have
amazing intuition about what whowe are and what's good for us.
And the more that we can tap into that and start to live from
that place of heart, you know, you, you know when you hang out
with somebody who makes you feelgood, right?
(01:01:45):
You know what? Everybody knows what flow is
when you're doing something thatyou love and time just passes by
and really like dialing in thosethings in your life and living
from that place, you start to feel more connected to yourself
or connected to your purpose, more connected to life in your
(01:02:10):
community. And I think that that is one of
the ultimate ways of building resilience for yourself and your
physical world reality because you're living in alignment with
yourself. Yeah, no, I totally, totally
agree. I love it.
I. Love it.
Do you have like I'm rambling now, but do you have like a
protocol for how you kind of like relax your physical and
(01:02:33):
mental state to connect more on a spiritual basis?
Like is there a way that you candisconnect from the stressors of
your day-to-day and just like get into that zone more readily?
Well, the more. You do it, the more you get into
that zone really, right? So it can be as simple as like a
broth, I think. So my next big project is
(01:02:57):
actually this topic. Exactly.
It's called the Unforgetting project.
And what I mean by that is our capacity to access that
authentic self, our true nature,our intuition.
It's right there. It is like it's right there all
(01:03:17):
the time. It always was there.
That's the unforgetting part. So we're not remembering our
true selves. We have forgotten and we are
unforgetting to connect with that part of ourselves.
I have to connect with that partof myself every day, multiple
times a day seeing patients because that's how I'm I'm
(01:03:40):
figuring out what it is that is going to be best for them.
So I have to have it right thereat my fingertips.
So what I encourage people to dois, you know, whether it's a
meditation process or a prayer process, something that just
(01:04:01):
brings them to their center place.
And then really start to learn what feels good in your body,
what feels, you know, kind of isthis the right thing to do?
I, I started actually muscle testing everything like should I
(01:04:25):
not just should I take this supplement or should I take that
supplement or eat that food or whatever, but like, should I
work with this person? Should I pursue this?
Is this the right name for this thing that I wanted to like
everything. Ask yourself and then see what's
(01:04:45):
the answer that you get inside of yourself?
Is it a hell yeah? Is it a, is it a no?
And then follow that. And the more we do that and the
more that we practice, the more we dial in.
I mean, you already do that, right?
You do that intrinsically and naturally.
That's why you love your life. You know, you've built this
(01:05:07):
great life for yourself. And then for people who are not
quite sure you, you practice just like we practice
everything. Yeah.
The world will be a better placeif we had more people that were
self. Aware and had more hell yeah
decisions throughout the day then yeah, you know, like we
just got a type of things with intensity and passion and
(01:05:29):
purpose and you do that by knowing who you are and what
you're called to do. So totally totally agree, this
is awesome. Where where do people go to find
out more about you? Dive deeper into your world and
and follow along. I have a brick and mortar
practice. In Southern California, the
website isthespringcenter.com. We're currently close to new
(01:05:50):
patients, but we have a preferred wait list.
So if that is calling to you, people do have to come to
California to see me. And you do have to live in a
state where I can see you as a telehealth patient if you're not
in California. So you can check the website for
information there. You can find me on Instagram at
(01:06:14):
Doctor Kelly, Dr. Kelly McCann. And I also have my personal
website, doctorkellymccann.com, where there's blogs and webinars
and other resources for people. And eventually we'll be
launching a a website for the Unforgetting Project.
Awesome. That is super exciting.
(01:06:35):
You had all kinds of good. Stuff in the pipeline on the
horizon. I'll be following along for
sure. Doctor Kelly, truly appreciate
the time and the inside. If there's everything I can do
for you, just let me know. Thank you so much, Robert.
It's been great. Take care.
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