Full Transcript 0:00 I had this patient, brand new house. 0:01 It was a spec house in the neighborhood. 0:03 They kind of sniffed around and like something smells funny out of this plug-in, the outlet. 0:09 And they put it off and, like, you know, pull it and there's some water behind there. 0:13 Then when they actually take the brick off, water literally pours out because they originally installed the flashing backwards. 0:21 Welcome to My MD Unscripted, where healthcare gets personal and the script gets tossed. 0:26 I'm Dr. 0:27 Clint Carter, ER doctor turned direct primary care freedom fighter on a mission to challenge how our healthcare system treats patients in America. 0:35 In every episode, my expert guests and I dive into real conversations about what's broken and how we can fix it by making healthcare about people, 0:43 not just managing disease. 0:45 It's time to rethink what healthcare should be and Hey y'all and welcome back to the my MD unscripted podcast. 0:57 I'm your host, Dr. 0:58 Clint Carter. 0:59 And today we're going to be talking about a topic that has had momentum over the last few years, I guess, but I still can't wrap my brain around. 1:09 how to take care of patients start to finish. 1:12 And we're talking about mold here. 1:14 So I'm super excited to introduce Dr. 1:17 Eric Potter. 1:20 Dr Eric is a conventionally trained medical doctor out of Tennessee that then found his way one way or another to the Institute for Functional Medicine. 1:35 He now combines both of those in his private practice called Sanctuary Functional Medicine and still in the Tennessee area. 1:43 So Dr. 1:44 Eric, thanks for coming on, man. 1:45 Tell us a little about yourself and how we ended up here. 1:48 Yeah, thanks for having me. 1:50 I appreciate you working. 1:52 And I've looked at some of your podcasts and just enjoy the fact that you're trying to get out a better way of doing medicine, 1:58 which kind of is what I'm trying do here. 2:02 It started out in direct primary care. 2:05 Kind of dabbled and played around in functional medicine thinking I would build a primary-care practice, but it turned out the primary supported me until 2:15 the functional medicine practice took off. 2:17 So I've been doing this for a little over 13 years, got fed up with the conventional world, both the business side and just also the clinical side of not 2:27 being able to help a lot of people who had come to me with these weird symptoms and complaints and they had tried all the specialists, 2:34 they tried A family member came and started asking me questions saying, Oh, I've been bumped to this specialist, that specialist this specialists that 2:42 specialists and they just keep passing the buck. 2:44 So when that I was at a point where I. 2:48 Moving out of the conventional world, looking for what I went. 2:52 Learned about medicine from a country medical doctor, my hometown in Kentucky, where he did the old fashioned, had x-ray, 2:59 traded for services, bartered for things, and knew all his patients. 3:04 He's still seeing patients into his 80s, homebound patients, so that was my model, the Norman Rockwell look, This is not what I kind of went to medical school, 3:15 you know, push through MedPeds training for. 3:18 But I went through that system for a while. 3:21 And then when I was coming out, family member was seeking help. 3:23 I said, okay, let me look into this thing called MTHFR. 3:27 Another hot topic of years past. 3:30 Right. 3:30 And I dug further into that. 3:32 I was like, there's some things here that answer some questions. 3:36 Kind of led me next to the functional medicine side of things where I started taking courses with IFM. 3:42 As I learning that, taking care of patients, opened my own practice, learned about how to do direct permanent care that it wasn't illegal to see patients 3:52 outside of the insurance industry. 3:54 Kinda grew up thinking you'd be locked away if you tried to bypass Blue Cross. 4:00 With that, once I started going down that rabbit hole, started seeing people get better as we address different nutritional issues, 4:07 gut issues hormone issues. 4:09 And then I kind of started running across the patients who were having these weird symptoms that caught what we call the multi-symptom, 4:16 multi system issues and it's like, all right, what's going on here? 4:20 And started looking into the mold and realizing this kind makes sense. 4:26 started with the shoemaker approach, kind of now incorporate Neil Nathan, another doctor known in that world, bringing those together, 4:35 helping people who can't get answers. 4:39 Their doctor said, oh, well, I think you might have this, but your tests don't show it. 4:42 Or well you've got 10 different symptoms and we kind think, you got something, we just don' know what it is and here just take some medicines and hopefully 4:52 you get better. 4:53 So as I started turning over those rocks, looking in the dark places that others didn't want to, I realized there's a lot of people out there and we were 5:02 able to help them going through a detox, helping them figure out where the mold was in their life, and being also able help my family. 5:10 My family has dealt with it, which has been a Makes it a little more personal. 5:15 I say it's one of the things I like to talk most about the thing I hate the most because of some effects it has had on some family members. 5:23 So this way I get to help others escape from what my family was able to escape too. 5:31 I mean, that's, yeah, I think so many of us have that are a little bit outside the system have a story of like frustration and then either personal or 5:41 close family members kind of just not being well helped in the. 5:47 I love that you were direct primary care. 5:50 That's awesome. 5:52 that that what I do obviously. 5:56 And then to get deeper into the rabbit hole of functional medicine and into world specifically of mold is kind of what I think we ought to focus on because 6:06 I really think it's a hard topic. 6:12 Kind of give us mold 101. What is mold toxicity? 6:18 What exactly are we talking about here? 6:22 And then let's kind of walk through, you know, how to sort of like take a big 30,000 foot view of the problem and then we can dive in. 6:32 So 30,000 foot view is where I have to start with patients. 6:36 But I do say because mold affects so many body systems, we kind of go in and out, kind zoom in, and then come back out. 6:42 We do have start a big picture of saying patients like, why did I get sick or why now? 6:49 Is it mold everywhere? 6:50 Or, you know, isn't that just the latest fad that everybody's talking about mold? 6:54 It's been around for a long time. 6:57 The mold, people say, well, why am I sick? 7:00 My spouse is not sick or the other guy in the office space is sick. 7:04 So with that first, it's like a lot of things. 7:06 You know there's people who I tell my patients, there is this guy down the road. 7:10 He smoked two packs of cigarettes every day for 50 years and He's running around doing 5Ks and racing in his 60s, feels great. 7:18 But then you got this other guy over here that smoked a half a pack a day for maybe five years and he's huffing, puffing on oxygen, 7:25 maybe even have lung cancer. 7:27 All our genetics are different. 7:29 Our bodies, some people can handle toxins better than others. 7:32 And then, you combine in the fact we live in a more toxic world and the food supply, there can be some debate, but in reality, 7:39 our food supplies not quite quite as nutrient dense as it used to be with the industrialized big food industry. 7:47 So with that, you've got people who less resilient bodies because of the nutrition is not as great, they're eating more processed foods. 7:55 You throw that in with a little genetics that means their body's slower to get rid of these toxins. 8:01 And then you get exposure. 8:03 So in the construction industry right now, hopefully they don't listen to this, but I know what they're doing. 8:08 They're building houses faster. 8:10 In our neck of the woods, they are putting up houses, faster because everybody in world wants to move to Tennessee apparently right. 8:16 Now, I think number four. 8:19 Texas I think was number two, and we're number four. 8:23 So with that, they're throwing up houses left and right, because some of my patients dig into these things. 8:30 Let's just say that they may pass codes, but they are not always as... 8:37 quality. 8:38 And then the fact is, what do you want? 8:40 You want a house that you don't pay a high electric bill, high heating bill high cooling bill. 8:44 So they tighten that house down to the effect that every bit of air gets trapped. 8:49 Then with all this, the humidity gets high risk of humidity issues that get trapped in there. 8:59 Sooner or later, something's going to grow. 9:01 And you're in a house where all that air stays in one place. 9:05 So you are breathing that area. 9:06 You know, and then past post 2020, when so many more people work from home, we see a lot more of this where people, oh, I'm spending 24-7, 9:14 my job is at home. 9:15 A lot of those got sick. 9:20 because the amount of toxins they were breathing in just went up. 9:24 And once those toxins, we breathe those in. 9:26 Yes, you can get a little bit through food. 9:28 Most of the time though, our food supply does remove enough of that that most people are not going to get mold toxic from eating something unless it's 9:36 pulling out of a pantry with the stuff growing on it. 9:39 But for those that are breathing that in, workplace, home, whatever it may be, eventually that kind of builds up. 9:46 We kind have a threshold. 9:48 Once that builds past that threshold and our body's not able to drain, it starts triggering inflammation. 9:54 And then once that inflammation kind trickles down, I say the domino effect is the other thing, one domo hits two, two hits four, 10:01 four hits eight, and pretty soon you have bunch of symptoms. 10:05 And people are scratching their head. 10:06 Well, you know, I moved into this house and we had a water leak or we have a storm issue or We found a leak in a bathroom and all of a sudden I started 10:15 getting sick Yeah, they think it's coincidence. 10:18 But when we kind of sort through the weeds, we actually find out Yeah You've got elevated mold toxins your body's inflamed and you're gonna have to do 10:26 some remediation. 10:26 You know the big picture from from the therapy standpoint, 30,000 foot view is one, you got to get away from it. 10:34 It's got get out of outside, away, from, it two, whatever's in your body. 10:38 You've got, to turn that down, get rid of that, help your, body excrete it and three, You got turn off those inflammatory processes because even though 10:47 it's gone, the body gets stuck in those, inflammatory states. 10:51 So when you're coming at it from those three standpoints, people get better. 10:56 And we see them go back to life enjoying work, not sleeping 12, 14 hours a day, and not having what was once called fibromyalgia, 11:05 chronic fatigue, headaches, gut issues. 11:09 So that's kind of the big picture. 11:12 Obviously I can drill down further, but that is the 30,000 foot view. 11:15 Yeah, man, that's perfect. 11:18 What are the most common symptoms? 11:20 It sounds like it hits a lot of different systems. 11:22 So I'm sure the system, the symptom sets vary somewhat, but what are some of the more common things that patients come in complaining of that we, 11:31 you know, over time you end up figuring out is a mold thing? 11:35 So, on one hand, I would say, and I tell patients this, that just about any weird bad symptom could potentially be linked to it. 11:43 So it overlaps with so many other things. 11:45 But there are a few things where we say yeah, these are the things that make us think. 11:49 One, it's not exactly a single symptom. 11:52 It's more like you've got several body systems. 11:55 You've some skin rashes, you got some headaches, some pain issues that don't make sense. 12:00 You don't heal as well, you're feeling more tired. 12:04 So those are kind of the collection of things that don' fit into any one single box. 12:11 Fatigue is probably a big thing. 12:13 Another thing, immune issues. 12:14 They've either got a hyperimmune where they've got autoimmune, they got allergies acting up, or they're like, listen, I moved into this house and we had 12:22 a water leak and I've been getting sick every other week. 12:26 And yes, we all know that, seems like since 2020, People feel a little more sick more often, but this is where like, no, 12:32 I had like two colds, two bronchitis, to sinusitis whatever a month. 12:37 And you're like yeah, that's not normal even post COVID days. 12:41 So the immune, the fatigue, and then a lot of patients come in. 12:46 I mentioned earlier just the fact my doctor, they know I have something but they can't find a test that actually connects that diagnosis to these symptoms. 12:55 So it's kind of things that are almost a conventional diagnosis but doesn't quite fit. 13:01 Often those come in and we'll find, oh, yeah, you got mold. 13:05 Let's work through all these things and over a number of months they get better and like, yep, that's what it was in the first place. 13:10 Yeah. 13:10 I love it. 13:11 You know, anytime I, you know I'm talking with a patient and I'll make, well, so you have a XYZ syndrome. 13:18 And they're like, what's a syndrome? 13:21 Oh, it's when the doctors don't know what it is. 13:23 So they just, they throw a bunch of symptoms that run together a lot and then they call it a. 13:28 Yep. 13:28 Um, So, if you, have fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, um that's you know doctors going i don't know but uh i see it a lot so let's try some things 13:41 um and you to be able to dig down past that and to Fixable thing like syndromes aren't fixable things. 13:50 They're something you may try to manage, but you don't know what it is. 13:53 So you can't. 13:54 Fix it. 13:55 Um, But if you could find out the cause that's a holy day, you know, getting down to root cause medicine as we will. 14:01 I mean, that really the, the if, if functional medicine had another name, it would be root caused medicine. 14:07 And so I love that. 14:10 You know? 14:10 And if. 14:11 Move into a. 14:13 a foam envelope house and you have a known leak. 14:16 That's one thing, but I suspect most folks like don't come in given that story. 14:23 They're like, I don' know. 14:24 House seems fine. 14:25 It's relatively new. 14:26 Everything's great. 14:27 I keep a clean place. 14:28 Um, so, you know, unless they have the classic story of known water in the house, um, when should someone kind of suspect their environment as part of, 14:39 part So, if you moved, you've changed jobs, and you're like, man, ever since I moved in this, within a month to say three or four months after, 14:53 all these symptoms start coming up. 14:55 And again, the regular PCP can't really answer what those are. 15:00 that's when you kind of start thinking, okay, there's a little something more, or they go away, oh, I went away on vacation for a week or two, 15:07 and man, that felt better. 15:07 You know, within a day of coming back, man my headaches came back. 15:11 I'm not sleeping. 15:12 Oh, feel like I am coming down with a flu again. 15:16 It could be more than just the fact that yeah, you're going to feel better when your on a vacation, when there is a very stark contrast and even you know 15:24 you maybe go way for Holidays is in the next couple of months and you're gone for four or five days and like, man, I'm feeling great. 15:32 I am doing energy, hiking, doing all these things, and then you come back and get sick. 15:38 Or people at workplace, you work Monday through Friday. 15:41 You're like man must be my work. 15:44 It's just don't like my works because I feel great on the weekend. 15:47 But those things where there's some kind of time pattern that keeps happening over and over again, Those are one of the big things when you're thinking, 15:56 yeah, I need to look a little deeper. 15:58 But yeah we've got a lot of people who will just say it takes a bit more convincing than others. 16:05 We have some coming in, oh, we found mold and we have been sick ever since this and I think this is what it is. 16:09 I'm like, okay, let's confirm, do the testing, make sure. 16:12 Sure. 16:13 Now, house brand new, no way. 16:17 Then we go back and I tell patients, well, there's this story of I had this patient, brand new house. 16:23 It was a spec house in the neighborhood and they were doing a little better. 16:27 They started getting sick. 16:28 That already moved out of one house from old, but they kind of sniffed around and like something smells funny out this plugin, 16:35 the outlet. 16:37 and they pull it off and there's some water behind there. 16:41 So they go around, they take some of the, around the window, the flashing, and then there is water all in there and when they actually take the brick off, 16:51 water literally pours out because they originally installed the flash backwards. 16:58 Basically they had water built up from several weeks every time it rained to catch or the some patients who had basically the fact that they didn't bolt 17:10 their house down to the foundation correctly. 17:12 And when there was stiff winds, instead of being a nice square, it shifted to a parallelogram, and suddenly you've got a leak in the corner. 17:23 So, I tell people, yeah, you can have a new house, but a house poorly built, poorly constructed. 17:30 You just have few things. 17:31 Somebody drills a hole through a wall that happened to have, they forgot the water pipe drain was behind it. 17:37 And then you've got to drip, drip. 17:40 A few drips a day is going to be enough to feed the mold, especially say it was coming from your upstairs bathroom, some dirty water. 17:48 You're going, you know, had people open up those cavities in the walls and find out, oh, the whole thing was covered in mold and you would have never known 17:58 it just because somebody stuck a nail or screw through there. 18:01 So let's say you've got somebody you suspect, you know, they've gotten the symptoms said it's weird. 18:06 It's hard to nail down. 18:07 Um, the time is suspicious as well for one reason or another. 18:12 Where do you start? 18:13 Like what do, what, You know. 18:16 As the provider, as the doc, um, What's the next step? 18:21 So, first of all, like any good physician is going to do, we're going take the history. 18:26 We're gonna make sure that we are not blaming mold immediately for something that something else is doing. 18:31 Oh, they actually had Lyme. 18:32 They actually have some other illness that's not anything fancy or functional. 18:38 It's just they got something. 18:40 Vitamin deficiency, so forth. 18:42 So we want to go through there, check those things, kind of check off the boxes. 18:46 And then if we're like, yeah, I think there's still some possibility of mold, then we are looking at testing. 18:51 I'm not a magician that I can look at somebody and tell you, yep, they've got mold 100%. I've had some patients that thought were, 18:59 and it ended up being something completely different. 19:02 So, we wanna make sure we doing tests that confirm one way or another. 19:07 Now, this is where it starts getting a little, heated under the collar in the mold world because there's some different camps. 19:15 There's the Dr. 19:16 Shoemaker camp, there was a Dr Nathan camp and now Dr Campbell. 19:22 And now we have one more, a four party battle it out with Dr Heyman. 19:27 So all of them kind of have a little different approaches. 19:31 Neil Nathan and Richie Shoemaker have been two of the older ones in world of mold. 19:37 Shoemaker likes to use blood where he's looking at literally immune markers in the blood that show your body's reacting to what we call biotoxin. 19:47 Biotoxins means some natural toxins and those are helpful. 19:51 The problem is not everybody responds in those ways. 19:56 And there's some I've had where they clearly had mold and those were completely normal. 20:00 So I also incorporate Neil Nathan's urine mycotoxins. 20:05 A lot of debate around there. 20:06 There's a lot people say that we don't have good validated data, but I can tell you I have seen patients who those levels are high. 20:13 We treat them, we remediate their house. 20:15 Those levels go down. 20:17 And they get better, and they're going back and living life again. 20:20 So I know it is a tool. 20:22 Now, you've been doing medicine for a while. 20:24 You know, no test is perfect, which is why I like to approach it from both ways. 20:30 And on a rare occasion, I will use the Dr. 20:32 Campbell uses antibodies against mycotoxins. 20:36 That's another area of debate, whether that mycotoxin is the chemical actually produce an antibody. 20:42 I think the mold talks into itself. 20:45 I'm not convinced, so I am not wholly bought into his approach, but we've been using Aspergillus fumigatus antibodies for severe Aspargillas infections 20:56 in the lungs. 20:58 There's some other fungal antibodies, for the spores, the proteins that we will use. 21:03 And I've had a few patients where, yeah, they've have had huge exposures from penicillium or Aspirgilla. 21:08 where the urine and the other shoemaker approach was negative. 21:12 So I like to have plenty of tools in my toolbox so that way I can make sure I'm picking up on all the ones because everybody responds a little differently. 21:22 And I want to be able to catch as many of those as I Can and not just depend on one tool detecting. 21:28 Well, you know, I think that brings up a good point too that like, like a lot of people assume that, that it's like an infection, 21:36 like a bacterial or viral infection and you need to get the mold to stop growing in your body and that's while you can get fungus infections in the lungs 21:49 or the sinuses or obviously toenails and skin but for the most part we're talking about Spores released by mold in your walls that just flow right through 22:01 sheetrock and everything else and that you know you breathe in and then once it gets to the bloodstream causes responses from your immune system more than 22:13 it is that is going to get. 22:15 You know, you can take antifungal medications to kill mold and mold spores and that kind of thing, but that's oftentimes not at all what's going on. 22:28 And I think that an area of confusion for the patients a lot of the time. 22:33 Why don't we just take mold medicine and get one of their lives, Yeah. 22:37 Yeah, and so there are a few people who it does get colonized or get low grade infections. 22:43 I would say it's probably less than 5%. I've had a handful of people that had bronchoscopies where they found aspergillus growing in their trachea and 22:52 they needed antifungal therapies for that. 22:55 had a few patients where we've cultured their fungal nasal passageways, where they've had fungual balls shown up on CT. 23:02 But again, that's probably less than 5%. Most people, it's what the breathing, and it even not even the spores, just the toxins those spore release. 23:11 Because a lot of those spores will not travel as far, but those toxins are, I tell people if you took a glade plug-in, stuck it in your crawlspace with 23:20 smelly stuff, you know, VOC stuff that we probably shouldn't be sniffing anyway, But you put it there, sooner or later, You're going to smell it up in 23:28 the first floor, just because our houses, air moves through there. 23:32 So those molds, mold growing in our walls, is going to seep out through every light fixture. 23:39 Every outlet you have, every lights switch, Every light in the ceiling. 23:44 There's going be a little bit as the air pressure changes in your house. 23:48 It's gonna come in and out. 23:50 So you're breathing these. 23:51 I mean, just the same way you breathe nicotine if somebody's smoking, you are getting that in. 23:56 That's building up, getting into bloodstream. 23:59 If you want to get a medicine in really quick, probably almost as good as an IV, is you let them inhale it. 24:05 So they're seeing those patients do that. 24:08 It's rare. 24:09 Now this gets back to some of the mold world debates. 24:13 There are those out there that believe every single person who has mold has it growing in them. 24:18 I just haven't seen that, so I can't... 24:22 Some will argue with you on that but that's okay. 24:25 I see patients get better without having to give them an antifungal. 24:28 So why give something if you don't need it? 24:31 Yeah, I think I've seen it on most of the protocols where it's like, well, a little antofungals not going to hurt. 24:36 Let's get that covered. 24:37 You know, as I could see that approach, but most the time we're not talking about being colonized. 24:42 And quite frankly, if do find a mold You know, it's kind of like our bodies don't function without bacteria, viruses, parasites, 24:52 and likely some level of mold intermixing in the different, you know whether it is gut or elsewhere. 24:58 And so, not every bacteria is. 25:03 Bad for you anyway. 25:05 Same thing with mold likely. 25:08 We've got a list of bad guys. 25:11 If it's not just treat with antifungals, then what does treatment kind of look like? 25:19 You know, like I said, the first thing we want to get them out of their exposure. 25:23 Now, while they're doing that, sometimes remediation can take a few weeks or if you're waiting in line for, you know after a big flood. 25:30 We've had some different floods here in the middle Tennessee area. 25:34 You may be waiting for two or three months or it may take awhile to a contractor in there that you trust. 25:39 So we'll start people on detox. 25:41 So detox is basically trying to get your body to do a better job. 25:46 I tell them it's like a parking lot after a big sporting event. 25:49 There's just two or three exits. 25:51 They were single lanes. 25:52 You've got all the, you know, 300 cars waiting to go out and go home so they can get to bed. 25:57 We want to widen those, make them move faster, keep things from getting junked up in there. 26:06 their natural body's ability. 26:07 So a lot of that is the glutathione pathway using some vitamin C to augment that using glutothione itself. 26:14 Sometimes if someone's sensitive because sometimes when you're moving those cars fast out of the parking lot they get a little rattly and people feel a 26:22 little worse before they feel better. 26:24 So sometimes we'll use N-acetylcysteine that helps make glutathione. 26:28 And then we look at things called binders that basically help your bind those toxins. 26:33 A lot of the things when we excrete from our liver get reabsorbed. 26:38 That's what bile does. 26:40 The liver uses that bile to try to carry out some toxins. 26:44 If nothing else happens, those things just kind of go in a circle. 26:48 Giving something like a charcoal, the clay, there's some probiotics, or some fibers, some different things that you can give. 26:55 So you get to stop that enteropathic, a fancy name, circulation. 27:00 As long as they have good bowel movements, pretty soon you start dripping that out. 27:04 Over time, that's lowering. 27:06 the same time you're doing other things to lower inflammation, other nutrients, making sure B vitamins are good, in binding things, 27:15 you are not causing other vitamin deficiencies. 27:18 And over time, the inflammation levels go down, we remeasure things. 27:24 Yes, urine levels goes down. 27:25 If we're using Shoemaker Labs to follow the responses, I say there are the alarm bells. 27:30 We want to make sure alarm bills go off because Just because the fire is out, the mold is gone, doesn't mean that your body shifts back into complete normal. 27:39 So sometimes you have to do a little extra work to kind of finish that up. 27:42 And then we help their body kind go back and start functioning normal because some of these patients have been, you know, 27:49 a year, 10 years, 20 years or more where they've been debilitated in some fashion and then helping to ease them back in to conditioning, 27:58 getting back to shape again, enjoying life again. 28:01 after we get the toxins out of the way. 28:05 Yeah, man, so you know, I mean, you've got to treat the source. 28:09 You've gotta give your body the ability to get rid of downstream after effects of it and try to turn that inflammation down. 28:20 Off would be great, but get to body working as smooth as possible. 28:27 I guess my thought is, is like, there's kind of, I mean, there's mold. 28:32 There is kind of mold everywhere. 28:33 Once, once your body's all revved up and freaked out about this, like how delicate is it then how, you know, our bodies are learning machines. 28:48 I tell people they're like, You're immune to every strain of flu you've ever had and every flu shot you ever have. 29:01 It's just that the flu changes and you get something new every time. 29:04 But your body is able to learn and respond and react. 29:08 So are there, you know, someone who's been, their body's been freaked out about mold toxins and they've felt bad for years and we get them feeling better. 29:18 How delicate of a balance is that? 29:21 Can they build up a little more resistance? 29:25 So it depends. 29:26 There are those who are hypersensitized. 29:29 Think about it, maybe a biological PTSD where they're always going to have a low threshold and they are going be very sensitive. 29:38 You know, they can walk in a building and with a few minutes, yeah, there's some old here. 29:42 I feel weird. 29:43 and they decide they're going to walk out. 29:45 There's other people, once you kind of empty their barrel, you get their toxins level down, and you turn the inflammation off. 29:51 They can be around it. 29:52 Yeah, they want to be careful. 29:53 they are not going buy a house with mold in it, They're not gonna start a new job in a building, a 1900 building that's over 100 years old, 30:02 but they can go about their day without having to worry about every little thing. 30:07 It's a different I tell patrons they need a mold radar. 30:11 Some people's radar needs to be super sensitive, and we help them figure that out. 30:15 And other people, oh yeah, you just need to go in general. 30:18 If you go and just don't stay in there. 30:21 Don't spend two weeks in an Airbnb that was from the Civil War, just because it's a cool historic house. 30:30 You're gonna wanna go there, visit, get out, Maybe take some glutathione afterwards, but it kind of depends. 30:37 So that's part of what we do is help people know how far away from old, you know, do you have to be? 30:42 Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. 30:45 And, there's no right answer to that question. 30:48 Either people are so individual. 30:50 But, so, To kind of wrap it up too, you know, let's say you've got a listener. 30:59 They've gotten some strange fatigue, achy, weird symptoms. 31:03 No one's been able to figure it out. 31:04 Maybe they've been diagnosed as a syndrome patient of some kind. 31:13 You know, they're going to go a thousand different directions, right? 31:16 Like, is it mold? 31:17 If so, where's it coming from? 31:19 Does it time with all this stuff? 31:21 What is the first step that a listener right now, after kind of getting that overview, what are like the 1, 2, or 3 things someone should do if they are, 31:31 like, maybe I have mold. 31:35 you know, what's next. 31:37 So the first thing, if you don't already have a physician that's open to discussing that with you, a lot are not. 31:45 First thing you're going to do, okay, I've been, like you said, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, other doctors I have been to several, 31:52 they haven't answered. 31:53 Setback. 31:54 Walk through your house. 31:56 You're not a professional, but you can walk through house, check your underseas, potentially if you're able to look in your crawlspace. 32:04 Do you have water sitting in there? 32:07 You can look up in you attic, you know, sign a flashlight around looking for things, see if got some water leaks. 32:13 If you do, then you kind of can start going down that road. 32:18 Besides that, just looking if you actually have in your house or workplaces, the other thing. 32:24 Then you kinda start looking, okay, we've done all the conventional tests and no answers have really come from any of this. 32:32 So then your start, looking okay. 32:34 Do I go out, find a doctor who is more comfortable with that, a provider who can dig into that a little bit more? 32:40 Now I will say, one of the things I don't want you to do is to go and just say oh, I just want to find mold doctor. 32:48 If you go to somebody that everything is mold, They may miss some other things, and that is one thing we are always trying to do. 32:55 Mold B, I call it one of the gorillas in the middle. 32:58 It's one big thing that's causing a lot of problems. 33:01 But, mold also opens a lots of other doors. 33:04 Gut dysbiosis, yeast overgrowth, EBV reactivation. 33:09 There's a lof of things that kind of hitch a ride with mold. 33:12 If you got somebody, and we see a lot of these patients because they say, oh, well, my doctor said all my mold was gone, 33:18 I had it, but it's gone. 33:20 But it was like, did they treat these other things? 33:21 Well, no, they just said treat the mold. 33:24 We've got to do a few, you know, second level of steps in there. 33:28 So you want to find somebody who is not going to blame everything on mold. 33:33 And we try not to that. 33:34 I actually tried not too, because the pain of remediation, I've been through that with my own family. 33:41 It's a lot of work. 33:42 Don't wish that on anybody. 33:45 Man, it's just so much. 33:47 You know, partner of mine, Dr. 33:50 Smith, this is with Miami Select and Aca-Doches, his son or his wife brought home a stray puppy. 34:00 And he was like, we don't need a new dog. 34:03 And so they were like well, obviously he lost, they won. 34:06 Yeah. 34:07 Um, and his son is now like a, uh, in the process to become a firefighter and you know, has graduated and is doing some things. 34:14 So they took that dog and they sent it to mold sniffing school, whatever you want to call it. 34:21 Right? 34:21 So now he's a mold dog, he even named the dog Asper for aspergillus, which is the kind of mold. 34:27 If you want Asper to come to your house and sniff around and try to find mold, that's another way of trying to figure out maybe where it's coming from. 34:37 Because to me, I've had several patients, it has been hard, vague, complicated. 34:43 We did some mold testing. 34:45 They hit red on several big ones. 34:51 And then there's just kind of like this, now what? 34:56 Finding the source is super hard. 34:58 Could be home, could be work, it could a lot of things. 35:00 It's a frustrating journey. 35:02 And a lotta the times, you know, I, as the physician, kinda keep, like you said, making sure it's not something else, treating the second level things, 35:10 because the more mainstream things for me as a direct primary care, functionally friendly doc to do. 35:20 But I think the mold part is just hard, man, especially the remediation. 35:26 It's an easy word to say it's a hard thing to Yeah. 35:29 Yeah, because you're treating, for the person, you are treating it's a little different. 35:33 It's like a kaleidoscope, it keeps changing. 35:35 Treating all these different things, not just the mold. 35:38 And then we're dependent as providers, I am not going to go into someone's house to inspect. 35:45 I will look in my own crawlspace, my old attic to make sure all that's good. 35:49 But I'm not, You don't want me. 35:50 You need a professional in that. 35:52 Right. 35:52 but I'm dependent, yes, on someone to clean up the house because if that house has still got mold in it, I can do all these binders. 36:01 It will knock the symptoms down, but we're not going to get to the place that the person really wants to be unless I've got those. 36:09 We've got some good ones in the middle of Tennessee, but I take care of some people across the state and I'm licensed in some surrounding states. 36:16 And sometimes people live two, three, four hours away from someone that's good. 36:21 Yeah. 36:23 It can be pretty challenging. 36:24 I've had some patients that are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place trying to find somebody who can actually clean their house and remediate it. 36:31 Yeah, and you know, I mean, what do you move? 36:33 And if you moved, What are the odds the next place has got us? 36:35 You know? 36:36 It's just everything is big and hard with that. 36:38 However, for those patients that are suffering and there aren't other answers and it's likely, as likely as not that we're going to need to go down this pathway, 36:50 then they need go to the pathway. 36:53 And for folks that that they don't have a mold-friendly doctor in their area and, you know, who can reach out to you? 37:04 How do they get ahold of you, where do you have licenses, how does all this work? 37:08 Yeah, so we're in Franklin, Tennessee, just south of Cool Springs. 37:12 Well, right in the middle of cool springs, really sanctuary, functionalmedicine.com. 37:16 So we are taking patients. 37:18 I am training a team. 37:19 One of the things I do besides care for patients myself is I have providers that come in who want to learn how to do functional medicine. 37:26 I'm having them do the IFM classes like I did, but I basically treat it like a residency. 37:31 So doctors, NPs, PAs spend a year or two with me, depending on how fast they go through things. 37:38 And we can take care of more patients that way, and then they're trained to take of these crazy things that are hard to find somebody out there. 37:46 But we take here the Tennessee, we've got Kentucky, Indiana, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, kind of going around North Carolina, 37:56 Virginia, Ohio, Texas, Florida. 38:02 That's Pennsylvania. 38:04 Yeah. 38:04 So a lot, uh, around and people, we do require patients to be able to come to us at least once a year. 38:11 Uh, I do not want to just practice soul telemedicine, just because we need to lay hands on people. 38:18 Because just, because somebody has a mold illness doesn't mean they don't have some other conventional diagnoses. 38:25 And we want make sure again, not blaming mold for everything and making sure they're getting the best of both worlds functional and commercial medicine 38:33 with that and i just believe that the old fashion medicine that senior patient doing physical exam lease at that beginning point enables us to know are 38:42 we doing the right thing for that patient. 38:44 And so many of the problems are downhill autoimmune inflammatory things that that absolutely could use, you know, keep looking under the hood and keep 39:00 And most of it really honestly could be done virtually but I do like laying hands on my patients once a year as well. 39:08 I got some I can't keep out of the office and I love them too. 39:10 But there's some people I like, I cant get them in. 39:12 They're like no I'll call you if I need you. 39:14 No, that's not me taking good care of you, like you... 39:18 let's go, can I get some, you know, labs? 39:22 Can I do an exam every once in a while? 39:24 But so yeah, so we'll get your website in the show notes. 39:32 And yeah I'd love for people to be able to reach out and talk to someone who's, been down this road with family members. 39:39 I think that's one thing that makes you an expert as much as anything else is that That it's really easy to say, yeah, remediate the house. 39:48 Let's do a cleanse, you know, but someone who's been down that road, that just makes you a more empathetic doctor. 39:54 I say. 39:55 You know God allowed me to get, low T and, and bad depressed and burnout and all the things partially so that I would. 40:04 kick conventional medicine to the curb and do something different. 40:07 But also it makes me a more empathetic provider to have suffered with, you know, the things that people struggle with that, 40:16 um, that oftentimes aren't well taken care of inside the system. 40:19 So, uh, I'm sorry you went through it, but I kind of glad for your patients that they've got a guy who understands, man. 40:26 God works in mysterious ways and uses the craziest things in life. 40:31 And so, like I said earlier, I'm glad I can help people escape something and put that experience to good use. 40:37 Yeah, man. 40:38 I did a glance at your website on the way through. 40:41 A, it's beautiful. 40:42 B, he's got big pictures of Tennessee lakes, so you can't go wrong. 40:46 But at the bottom, you're not shy about your faith and being the hands and feet of God to the ones he brings. 40:56 Every day here at our clinic, we have a group meeting where we meet with everybody about the patients from yesterday, today, 41:03 and tomorrow, make sure we're on top of it. 41:05 We close in prayer and it is an honor to be able to take care of the ones that God brings. 41:12 That's how we start our day, starting with prayer. 41:16 If that's not there, we're not going to be able to do much the rest of the day. 41:20 This is us on our own, man. 41:23 It's a dumpster fire. 41:24 But it's fun just being a part of a bigger plan, a big picture. 41:31 I think there's going be some people that want to reach out. 41:33 Thank you, Dr. 41:34 Eric, for coming on. 41:35 Appreciate it. 41:35 Really appreciate it, that was fun. 41:37 And I am better at taking care of patients with mold now than I was 30 minutes ago. 41:41 If nothing else, doing this podcast, it makes me a better provider, right? 41:50 It makes a more empathetic and more understanding, a smarter doc for my patients, my family, and my teammates. 41:58 And I really appreciate you coming on and I look forward to talking to you again sometime soon. 42:03 Yep, look foward to it. 42:04 Thanks for joining me today on My MD Unscripted. 42:06 I hope today's conversation opened your mind and inspired you to imagine a If you found value in this episode, be sure to subscribe, 42:16 leave a review, and share it with someone passionate about transforming healthcare. 42:20 Real change starts with real conversation, so let's keep on going. 42:24 Until next time, stay well, Stay curious, And never stop pushing for better.
Comments