Environmental Toxicity: The Overlooked Driver of Chronic Symptoms

Introduction to Mold Detox and Nutrition 0:00

Well, majority of people don't understand that these detoxification pathways run on particular micronutrients. So nutrition really has to be your baseline of everything, because if you don' have the nutrients to run them, which include amino acids and B vitamins and glutathione and whatnot, you're going to struggle to clear all kinds of things. And so that's not particular to mold, it's heavy metals. It's even just processing your medications that you take, right? Your hormones. So, I think because again, we don't learn this in school.

We don' learn it from traditional appointments. So it's not something people generally have a lot of awareness on, nor do they know the specifics. You've tried everything, you've changed your diet, detoxed, even moved homes, and yet you still feel sick. Headaches, brain fog, fatigue that no one can explain. What if it's not you? What is your environment? Welcome to Mold Microtoxins and More. I'm John Borden. Each week I sit down with experts uncovering how mold, microtuxins, environmental exposures affect your health and what real recovery looks like.

Let's get into today's conversation. The information provided on the Mold Pros Podcast is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Listening to the podcast does not create a doctor-patient or professional-client relationship between you and the Podcast host, guest, and Mould Pros. The content shared should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advise, diagnoses, treatment, And always seek the medical advice of your physician or qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding the medial condition, potential mold exposure, or health concerns.

Never disregard professional medical advise or delay in seeking it because of something you heard on this podcast. And while we strive to provide accurate and up-to-date information, we make no representations or warranties of any kind, expressed or implied, about the completeness, accuracy, reliability, and suitability of all the information discussed. A guest's experience and outcomes discussed on this podcast are individual cases and should not be considered typical results. Your situation may differ significantly.

As always, if you think you have a medical emergency, call your doctor or 911 immediately.

Podcast Disclaimer and Episode Setup 2:12

By listening to the Mold Pros podcast, you acknowledge that you understood this disclosure. For those suffering from the effects of mold exposure, it can sometimes feel like your health is falling apart. But what if that's not the case? What if you just need the right support to heal? If you've ever felt that way, today's episode is just for you. We'll talk about why healing is possible even after years of symptoms and how supporting your body's detox systems can unlock recovery that goes far beyond mold.

Welcome back to Mold Microtoxins and More, the podcast where we dig into the science, stories, and the real-life solutions behind mold exposure, microtuxins, complex chronic illness. I'm your host, John Bodie, co-founder of MOLD Pros. And today's episode is an important one because we're zooming out beyond mold. Our theme today is why detox work is vital for mold illness and why it often ends up addressing much more than mold alone. I'm joined by Dr. Eric Wood, a naturopathic doctor with nearly two decades of experience in environmental medicine, detoxification, integrative oncology, and complex chronic illness.

Dr. Wood is known for doing deep detective work with his patients, looking at the full health story to uncover what's really going on and what keeping them stuck. He's taught at multiple universities across North America. His authored or co-authored five books, served on multiple medical advisory boards internationally and founded Visionary Health, where his focus includes mold illness, environmental toxicity, gut health, hormones, and cancer support. Dr Wood, welcome to the show. Nice to be here, John.

Good to see you again. Nice. I was trying to think prior to today's episode, we've known each other for a long, long time, you know, back from your days in South Florida and that you sent me back to Minnesota. It was the first time it's been over a decade, I think since, since we first met. First a patient and a customer. That's kind of good and bad. I think the first time, we actually worked on a couple of projects for you in your home. You had some issues, some hurricane damage perhaps and some other things, and we were able to get those taken care of for years ago.

Yeah, I always try and lead with this with patience. I'm not immune to everything else that happens to everybody else as well, right? We all live in the world, which seems to be more crazy than ever.

Dr. Eric Woodu2019s Background in Environmental Medicine 4:46

And as you well know, mold is so much more pervasive than most people realize. depending on the part of the country, the age of buildings, 10 to 50% of building are estimated to have water damage at some point. So you're literally talking about millions of structures across the county. And while Florida is very mold-centric because it's warm and humid in their storms, it is also up here. Like even before we moved into our house in Minneapolis, The chimney had a mold problem because the flashing had come loose and so we treat the house here, do a very thorough clean out of the chimney.

So, unfortunately, because it's not something we learn in school, it is not traditional medicine really has on their radar. people usually learn about it from their own suffering and their mishaps. And so, I was really no different in that. We got baptized, so to speak, by going through the process and learning about and having some suffering, not nearly as much as some of my patients, but it really opened my eyes to just the widespread nature of this problem and the fact that many, many people have a lot of health related problems to mold and they don't even know it.

Yeah. You know, I think that that perspective, because you have lived it, so you've seen both sides, you know what your patients are going through and also as a clinician, how to guide them through that. So that's a unique perspective that certainly helps out. Before you and I met, You were already familiar with, obviously, detoxification and mold illness. If we start at the beginning, what pulled you into that space? Patient need and personal experience, honestly. It wasn't something that the outside of when I graduated in 2008 from naturopathic medical school that I really had on my radar and also back then.

Bold had really only been being talked about for about a decade. You know, Richie Shoemaker was a real pioneer in the late nineties and sort of bringing it to attention in his Mold Warriors book. And, you know he was really a seminal figure and raising awareness, but it still was very much on the periphery of medicine. Like I don't remember it ever being iterated. medical school classes and whatnot. So it was really after graduation and then getting into practice and consulting. And as you know, I worked for the Life Extension Foundation for about four years.

I did a lot of consulting on complex cases for them, mainly beginning in integrative oncology. But then I had done some tick-borne illness training through the iLADS Foundation. Then I also learned about just the really common comorbidities of lime and tick-borne stuff and mold. And so it was kind of through some of these other areas and experiences that brought me into the mold world. Was there a moment after going through all those different sort of conditions and treating different things like mold and lime, et cetera, was there time when you realized that detoxification was the missing piece?

Yes. And I got that education pretty early on. So when I did my all-ets fellowship in 2009, I trained with three very prominent New York lime littered docs. I will not name names. You know, very busy practices, really trying to help people. But it was a bit jarring to talk with some of the patients because they were suicidal left and right. And. The treatment was worse than the illness for them. And in sitting in the clinics, I was there for two weeks, if I recall. I was like, there's got to be a better way.

And so in kind of hearing what they were doing and that what weren't doing, and because of my training as a naturopathic doctor where we work more on nutritional physiology and biochem and understanding the mechanics and not just treating symptomology, but also trying to get to the root of the problem. I kind of made a personal commitment to like, we're going to make it an easier go for people than this because I could see some of the shortcomings of approach. And so that's where the first sort of light bulb went off with the importance of detoxification.

Then I'd had some family medical issues come up as well that I had to get involved in, even though the number one rule in medical schools is don't treat

How Detoxification Became the Missing Piece 9:35

your family. Right. When there aren't the right people around and it's just certain circumstances, like you either just choose to care or you choose ignore. And I choose care even though it was rough. But discovered, you know, this particular family member had major mercury toxicity. It was causing all kinds of problems and also had undiagnosed Lyme disease. So I saw it again through that and how important the mercury issue was there. And then wondered about myself, did some testing, also found quite elevated levels of mercury.

And then eventually decided, like I had done some reading, but nothing formalized, and then about five years ago decided to do and commit to a year-long fellowship in detoxification through EMEI International, which is run by two naturopathic doctors. And it just kind of codified and deepened a lot of what I had already come across and then, you know, clued me into even more. And then I got an opportunity to actually teach for one of the naturopathic colleges for three years, environmental medicine and detoxification.

which I never had. Like, we didn't have those courses even, you know, 20 years ago when I was in ND school. We talked about detox, but it certainly wasn't to the depth that I got to teach these fourth-year students. And so I think that's great because we are at least in an ND School getting more graduate and degreeing health professionals aware of that you must be looking at detox. You must look at toxicity. It is underlying so many different types of conditions. And then again, in the 18 years I've been working with people since, I just see it come up left and right.

Anecdotally, about 80% of my cancer people are poisoned with mold. Really? That doesn't surprise me. Yeah. So, and again, it's not anything that traditional medicine is looking at at all because it is not even considered an illness at this point. Like that's part of the problem is people hear about mold and they know it isn't good. And if they've got a mold problem, they should deal with it in their house. But they don't really understand the ramifications of having a significant mold burden and then what that can do to your health, your relative risk of other conditions and much more as you know.

Yeah, One of the biggest things that we hear from folks is that one is mold's everywhere. I grew up in a moldy house, et cetera. And it's true, molds are ubiquitous. I think one of the things that we try to focus on is the toxicity component of that. Obviously, there's different things molds can do. If you're able to speak on some of them, that'd be great. There's obviously the histamine response, right, for individuals that have a mold allergy, you know, myself, maybe yourself included, and then there is also this mycotoxin exposure that I think that's about 300 species now that are capable of producing mycotoxins.

So if you can kind of go down that path and share your thoughts on the differences on different types of mold exposures and those those. Yeah, I think the first thing I would say is, you know, people hear the term black mold and that's the one that they think of as bad. But as you said, there are many species that produce mycotoxins and some of them are not black in appearance, some are whitish gray, right? So it's not just black mode. Really, if there is a mold overgrowth problem, You should not ignore it because odds are, Some of them are probably bad and some of the potentially producing mycotoxins and also as you know depending on the environment that the mold is growing.

that can influence how much mycotoxin output it creates, depending on if it's feeling threatened from other microorganisms and such. And so every house and every building is a microcosm of variability and difference. So you really can't assume that it is or isn't a problem. You must test. Sometimes symptoms kind of clue us in. As you had alluded to, I lived in South Florida full-time for about 15 years. our house had multiple rounds of mold problems for different reasons. But in a couple of the latter incidences, it was allergies that alerted me that something was, again, a problem.

Because normally, I have a little bit of a right weed allergy and I don't really have anything else when I'm not mold exposed.

Understanding Mold Exposure and Mycotoxins 14:32

When I was getting mold-exposed, all of sudden, As somebody who doesn't take a lot of pharmaceuticals, I was having to reach ResurTech pretty much every day, on occasion, two a day. And, you know, historically I'd take few in August if I were up north, and otherwise didn't really have to do a whole lot. So that clued me in because one of the things mold can do is upregulate the inflammatory response and allergic response by TH2 immunity being essentially pushed into hyper response and so if you're having symptoms like that where all of a sudden your allergies are considerably worse than they've ever been or you are having new symptoms or your starting to develop asthma that you never had.

You want to think about what is the back story behind that because the symptoms are just the clues. But you don't want stop at the clue, you want go beyond the clues and look at why. And I think that's the beauty of functional medicine, right? It's really getting to that root cause, taking a holistic approach, as opposed to some of the more, I hate to say conventional MDs. We do work for a lot of conventional MDS as well. And, and I that light bulb is starting to open up and shine a little bit more for those folks as, well, but taking that naturopathic approach.

That's the first discipline, I think, that's really queued in on all of these things, right? You know, get to the root cause right from the get-go. In a holistic approach, it's not just the body, its the mind, the holistic approaches. Yeah, and here's like I love to kind of connect the dots. For example, mold is perceived by the bodies as a threat. And so it does become a nervous system issue just as much as it is other systems and so that's where the mind and body really become inseparable. And one thing that I see with a lot of mold people is many times there's upregulated anxiety.

There's issues with sleep, right? Because the body is sensing these toxins, like we have thousands of years old biological systems and yes, mold has been around for forever. But the way we build buildings and spend time in them and how they are constructed has changed a lot in the last hundred years. And that is part of the issue where now people very easily can get much more concentrated doses of this. versus how buildings were in the 80s or, you know, when people spent a lot of time outside, like it never concentrates to the same degree.

Or in climates like Minneapolis, for many months of the year, there's nothing blooming or nothing growing because it's too cold. So I think all those variables need to be on people's radar. Yeah. There's a common misperception. Everybody thinks that we do work in old moldy buildings and the majority of our work is in newer construction. just because we've changed the way that we construct homes. That's a pretty important point that you brought out. You're going on two decades now of helping individuals with detoxification.

What unexpected insights have you developed from seeing so many patients over that length of time? People are getting worse. You've cleaned, repainted, and replaced filters. And still, you're not getting better. Headache, fatigue, brain fog? The doctors can't explain it, but your environment can. At The Mold Pros, we specialize in uncovering what's hidden in plain sight. Our environmental testing looks beyond surface mold, identifying bacteria, volatile organic compounds, even microtoxins in the air that you breathe.

Then we correlate those results with your clinical data, showing how your space may be affecting your health. Next, we use our patented remediation process to safely remove toxins, restore balance, and prevent them from returning. It's more than just a cleanup. it's a science-based system designed to help your body heal by healing the environment first. If you're ready to breathe freely again, visit themoldpros.com and schedule your free consultation. Because wellness doesn't start in the doctor's office, it starts where you live.

Overall, people are getting worse. There's, and there's many reasons for that. But to summarize relatively quickly. Stress is a major player for a lot of people and there are many things stressing many people on the micro and macro levels nowadays. We don't sleep enough. Sleep is our, you know, major time of when we do a lot of our detoxification. The food supply is compromised. So the more you're getting in through compromised food, it just adds to the, the ball of garbage, I call it, inside of you that you have to attend with, right?

Mole just goes into that garbage pile, but so do heavy metals, so to forever chemicals, bisphenols, So there's too much chemical influx into our lives, and there are not enough long-term safety studies and regulation around the introduction of them. So you go to the EU, there is a lot more stringent guidelines around many things than there in Canada and the US.

Why Chronic Toxic Load Keeps People Sick 19:48

And because of that, 500 to 1,000 new chemicals on average get introduced into the marketplace every year. Most of the have no long term safety study, most people are now clued into how much These can be problematic and add to that all garbage and all the ways that they're going to bother you. So, you know, and that's the shortlist on latent infections, dental issues, not enough activity and exercise. Like the list is very long. You know? And from the Midwest, originally my mother's parents were farmers.

My father, my grandfather read Reasons in Silent Spring in the sixties when that came out, which is a seminal environmental medicine work and was scared shitless to use my French. He didn't want to do all the chemicals. Like, so he really vowed for a very, very long time that he wasn't going to that. So my mother and her sisters and brother grew up on an organic farm and my grandma canned everything. And it was basically like they had an Organic Food Store on their farm, which was amazing. You know, and I remember going down into their fruit seller and just shopping for all the stuff that grandma had made and picking plums along the side of the road.

But that time has largely disappeared. You know, like industrial farming and the pressures to, you know get yields on crops per acre and whatnot. It's just, it's untenable for most farmers to farm like that anymore. And then of course, big agra runs most of the farms. So they're just spraying left and right. and so certain parts of country are just getting decimated with pesticide residue. you may have heard about Iowa and sort of cancer rallies that they are in Iowa now. from all the agriculture, but it's a different time.

And so we're having to deal with a lot of things and so now more than ever, you can't just rely on sort of luck of the draw and hopefully relatively good genetics to end up healthy because what our grandparents and great grandparents did, it was not enough anymore. Hopefully, the tide is turning and as education's out there and we start learning more about, I think, you know, getting more to that farm to table, or getting to more sustainable agriculture. Hopefully we can get back to value. Starting to see some of those stirrings and I would think that would be a great spot for us to be.

Go back the basics, right? The stuff that your grandparents did and our grandparents' did as well. A lot of your work, which I've always found interesting, is around autoimmune disease, and you spoke about cancer as well. You know, one thing people don't realize is how often that mold exposure overlaps with that serious illness. So are there any other conditions that that, that mould can impact and overlap with these chronic illnesses besides those two? I mean, there's so many, you know, because mold, it just weakens the immune resistance, It dysregulates it, up regulates inflammation, and disturbs the hormonal access, any problems.

So, honestly, John, There's not a lot that it can impact negatively, You know? And that's what I see a lots of times with people is You know, until you really address the issue, you don't know 100% of what it is or isn't all doing. But don' underestimate how many problems it can cause. You now, I mentioned the asthma, but gut health, gut problems, when you're getting chronic mold exposure, many times you get collateral gut issues with Candida overgrowth and other dysbiotic bacteria overgrow, just like you find if you assay a moldy building area, like where you other pathogenic bacteria and stuff that you guys sure know.

It just causes a lot of dysregulation. Hormonal problems could be or couldn't be, gut problems, could or could not be autoimmune quite often. You know, I mentioned the oncology connection before. So you want to think about what's causing the immune dysregation, what could behind it, right? Like I had a consult with a gentleman yesterday who's had chronic autoimmune issues and now is having kidney IgA nephropathy and going to go in for a kidney transplant. And we were talking about, cause he's seen some other practitioners before and I was like, well, why though?

Like, does anybody talk to you about why are you having all this breakdown? Cause he is not eating crap every day. He's trying to take care of himself, he's doing nutraceuticals and on low dose naltrexone and other things, right? But why is his body chronically attacking itself and to the point where he is going to have to his kidneys replaced? So, you always want to ask the question why and then don't stop there, like do the detective work, Diagnoses are just labels of convenience to understand

MARCoNS, Sinus Issues, and Hidden Infections 24:58

the symptom collection, but it doesn't usually tell you about why. That's a great point. As we deal with environmental illness, one of the biggest challenges that we see from our perspective, and I would like to get yours as well, is that individuals really have hesitancy to go back and they think, I can't have a problem in my home. It's not that. They don't want to get the data to validate whether they do or do not have an issue. And so they kind of put that side away. They'll go years taking nutraceuticals, getting treatment and therapy, but they don't get them back to addressing the root cause.

There seems to be sometimes a head setting for that. Do you see the same thing? Well, it's an enormous nuisance. Let's just call it, you know, spade a spate, like to deal with all the house stuff. And, some people have more to do with than others, but it is not a convenience, right? I mean, sometimes you have to move out of your house. You have do extensive remediation, throwing stuff away, wiping stuff down, fogging, repairing the damage that's there, there's many aspects to the problem sometimes.

The only real solution is to move. So that is not something easy for a lot of people to swallow. And I get it, you know, because it's uprooting your life and some people are also not in the condition where they can move or they cam remediate because they cant afford it. You know or to do it at least to the extent that they should. But in my experience, if you don't address the space that you're spending a lotta time in, You will not get well. You know, it's kind of like continuing to eat the poisoned apple.

You can take all the milk thistle and stuff that you want to try and detox the poison, but you're still eating poison. In this case, you are still breathing in poison right. So you can't circumvent that. you just have to deal with it and. at the speed and budget and timeframe that you can. But I think that's a big part of it. It's just, you know, and people, like I was alluding to before, people are already so busy and overwhelmed a lot of times and stressed and it's one more thing, right? So it is not something that they're jumping on because yet it was another project to have to develop.

Well, we always believe that everything should first start with good data. And so if we do have individuals that are listening that our concern or think maybe their environment is part of that toxic exposure, there's some things that we can do with even some DIY testing that homeowners can determine the toxicity in their homes. That'll be something that we'll want to address a little bit later on. You know, mark-ons come up a lot in mold conversations, but still I think flies underneath the radar.

So if you could kind of explain to the listeners, what are markons and how do they actually impact detoxification and recovery? Well, one of the things that's perplexed me for a while is why ENT medicine doesn't culture more because marcons, as you allude to, is a sinus infection collection of potential sorts and types that's very common or what we would call comorbidity with mold exposure, where you get these antibiotic resistant groups of bacteria that can really create just sort of a festering sinus infections that go up and down, right?

And that could stay with people for years and years. from mold exposure. And so they just think that they've got sinus problems or they think they got bad allergies, which may be true.

Mold, Lyme, and Tick-Borne Illness 28:58

But again, what is behind the label, right? So marcons is another thing you should be screening for because it's that again probably in about, I'd say about 80% of mold exposed people is my best kind of estimate of what I see it kind co-occurring as. You don't want a lingering sinus infection. I mean, just for You want to feel better, right? But all these bacteria produce endotoxins, which just adds to the burden of something in your body. Your chronic re-dealing with congestion or post-nasal drip or sinus headaches or, you know, all of the above, just depending on the severity in the person.

But yeah, it's just something that doesn't often get tested. And the testing for it is not particularly expensive nor hard. So I really, when I'm talking to patients, have the vast majority of people do that, especially if there's any sinus related clues. Because otherwise you're just not being thorough. Why would you skip that? Right? So, I am glad that you are testing and looking for that. Um, why do you think so many practitioners miss it? could certainly be dependent on education. It could also just be they're trying to just do one thing at a time.

But this, relatively speaking, is not that hard to deal with. What I will say is they do need to have a clean space, because otherwise they can just come right back. So I don't know, I'd have to kind of, take it by case-by-case, but I think it could be education and familiarity, underestimating its impact for people, under estimating the prevalence of it, overwhelm, you know? Probably a bit of all. You mentioned before Lyme, and that's kind of how you started down this path in a lot of ways. And we've worked with ILADS, the National Lymen Associated Disease Conference, for well over a decade.

It's a great organization. We do work with a lots of clients that are Lyne patients or have other tick-borne illness. When mold enters the picture for Lyme disease and other tick-borne illness, how do you kind of untangle all that or do do need to? Well, this is something I've kind have learned through a combination of experience as well as training, but generally I will start with the mold. You'll start working on opening up the detox pathways and trying to get them moving and mobilizing toxins out.

Of course, trying address the home environment so that they're really dramatically dropping the exposure from there. Because, you know, we co-evolved to deal with lots of viruses and infections, but when you add something as potent as mold toxins, which I know you how potent they are, they really can suppress the immune system. And so when your then dealing with collateral infections and the system is hobbled, It only makes sense that they're gonna be a lot worse and a little more difficult to treat.

So if you start to clear away any toxic brush, let's call it, of the mold exposure and drop down the inflammatory response and regulate the immune system to be more balanced between TH1 and TH2. Then usually what I see is the treatment for the tick-borne stuff isn't as rough. Occasionally, they may not even need to treat certain things because the body is able to come back online. The immune system's able come to back on line enough where it's not as tough. And then they're also not getting triggered by the mold toxins and upregulating a lot of the symptomology that's coming with those conditions.

That's what I've sort of discovered over time is generally I'll go after the mold first and we'll prep and work on the detox systems and what we call the

Core Detox Principles for Healing 33:08

biotransformation pathways and optimize the nutritional baseline so that those pathways are running on nutrients that they often are deficient in. Start helping excrete and do binders and all the things that you guys are sure know and aware of. And then work enough for a while before we kind of tackle the tick-borne ball of wax Got it, got it. We hear so much, oftentimes it's kind of like a teeter totter or the fulcrum, right? So once you get such a toxic load that it tilts this way, then all of a sudden the wheels just fall off.

So it sounds like maybe it is a matter of trying to balance those scales out a little bit, get into where you address the mold side of it and then other things can happen to get you back on the road to recovery. Yeah, you got to restore some degree of homeostasis or that balance internally because it's really thrown off by these open toxins and infections and such. Got it. So if someone's feeling stuck, maybe, down this path, the fried treatments and supplements and certain protocols, but they're just not improving.

Are there a couple of bullet points that you'd want them to understand about detoxification and healing? If you had maybe like the top one, two or three things that can lead folks with, what would that be? Well, the majority of people don't understand that these detoxifications pathways run on particular micronutrients. So nutrition really has to be your baseline. of everything, because if you don't have the nutrients to run them, which include amino acids and B vitamins and glutathione and whatnot, You're going to struggle to clear all kinds of things.

And so that's not particularly to mold, it's heavy metals. It's even just processing your medications that you take, right? Your hormones. So I think because again, we don't learn this in school. We don' learn it from traditional appointments. It's not something people generally have a lot of awareness on, nor do they know the specifics. So starting with really getting the diet cleaned up, you know, as you probably also I'm sure know gluten, dairy and refined sugar are major inflammatory triggers with biotoxin mold illness.

so getting those inflammatory foods out of the working on the gut, probably doing some microbiome assessments, seeing what's going on down there, making sure they're hydrating enough, flush a lot out, supplementing accordingly with aminos, B vitamins, whatever they need. A lot of times glutathione, which is that major antioxidant that so many of these toxins depend on to process them, is really depleted. from mold, but heavy metals too. Like it takes two molecules of glutathione to deal with one of mercury.

So it's kind of a bad deal for us biologically. Again, with all these things that people are contending, the stores are too depleted, attention to the diet isn't enough, that gut health needs to be improved. I would start there for people and then they need to work with a good practitioner, you know, to give them guidance, because it's like trying to piecemeal it together and chap GPT and stuff on the internet. Like you can find tidbits, but when you're trying put it all together in a cohesive plan that's specific to you, that has relevance, good luck without a lot of guidance and detail kind of implementation.

Because if you've got holes in your plan, well, then it is probably not going to work so well. It's interesting that you say that this morning I had a conversation with a client that is a patient of several doctors. In fact, she rattled off the four or five doctors that she's seen trying to address her issues, and she has a clinical microtoxin test showing that positive for, I think it was ochratoxin A, gliotoxins, et cetera. And so her approach has been to go out to all these different practitioners to try to find a path to wellness.

That's why I really like the functional medicine approach and to have someone who's knowledgeable about environmental illness that can manage that overall care for somebody. I that's extremely important.

Finding the Right Practitioner and Closing Thoughts 37:48

I think sometimes it can be overwhelming to patients and it could also be confusing if you have too many cooks in the kitchen, so to speak. Because you're trying to do this plan and then this person has other things and people can only do so much. And I that's important to recognize that everybody has a bandwidth limitation. So you want to try and work on the biggest fish to fry, and build a foundational baseline and solid platform to which, you know, to heal from. Yeah. Well, this is Dr. Wood. This has been incredibly valuable.

Thanks for bringing clarity to a topic that's still widely misunderstood. And hopefully it helps people understand that mold illness is often part of just kind of a bigger picture. If someone would like more information on how you can help, what's the best way for them to contact you and what areas now do you cover geographically? Yeah, so I'm licensed in Minnesota, in Wisconsin as a naturopathic doctor. I do continue to work with people in Florida as health consultant. Florida does not license natropathic medicine, but I work as the health consultants there.

They can go to my website drericwoodnd.com. And they can book a free 15 minute discovery call if they're not sure if this is what they need or just want to ask questions about things. Then of course call the office. whatever is easiest for them. For listeners, we'll include the links for the show notes, as well as more about Dr. Wood and his practice at Visionary Health. If you know someone who could benefit from learning about the effects of mold exposure, please share this episode with them, if you'd like to give us a five-star review, it helps us with the work that we're doing.

As always, healing does not happen in a vacuum. Your body, your environment, those things both matter. I'm John Bodie and this has been another episode of Mold Microtoxins and More. Thank you for listening. You've been listening to Mould Microtoxins & More with John Bode. If you're ready to take the next step towards a healthier home, follow the show and visit TheMoldPros.com for your free consultation. Because clean air is the first step to true healing.