How To Prevent Mold And Strategize Against Re-Exposure

Ann Shippy, MD

Welcome to Mold, Mycotoxin, and Chronic Illness Summit. I’m your host Dr. Ann Shippy. Today I want to talk about some of my strategies for travel and exposure, because initially, after getting pretty sick from mold, you are very, very sensitive and need to be careful about where you go and where you stay. But as things get better, you get more robust and can even go to places like Bali and Hawaii, where it’s very humid and there’s it’s much more difficult to avoid mold. So in the planning process, even if you’re going to a place that you feel might be high risk, sometimes booking for a newer place can be helpful. I also like to get on higher floors at the hotel because since the water goes downhill, it’s just less likely that the higher floors are moldy. So the first thing I do when I get to a place is just look around before I unpack. I look to see, are there places in the bathroom that might be affected. I look at the air vents and if there are then I move. Either move rooms or move hotels because I don’t want to knowingly put myself into a situation. 

The next thing, sometimes it’s just not visible. Like you can’t see it, you can’t smell it. So if I start to get any of the symptoms that I have had before that are associated with mold. So every once in a while I’ll get that muscle fasciculation will come back. The muscle cramps are usually my first symptoms. So I get these charley horse kind of tetany holding on, won’t let go cramps. I can also feel muscle and joint pain. I wrote a note. Sometimes I’ll return, which is just even if things are just a little bit cold, I’ll get white fingers, fingertips are painful. And the second I get one of those symptoms, I make a plan to make a change, to get out. The things that really help me the most with those situations, I always carry with me so that I can start them right away or be taking them preventively. So I find that there’s a product called Quintin Hypertonic that are just minerals, concentrated seawater that are the best thing for getting those muscle cramps to go away quite, quite quickly. But I do have to take some high doses so I take a good amount of those with me. The other thing is liposomal glutathione, I just don’t leave home without it. The binder that I take the best is the PectaSol, which we cover in a couple of lectures and a couple of speakers because it’s just so important. It’s such a great tool to have in our toolbox. Magnesium, several different kinds of magnesium are just so, so important. Neo40 to help with nitric oxide and then the mitochondrial support. How do you keep your mitochondria working robustly? So things like MitoQ, CoQ10, and NAD, and then I love to have a prevention with me. So even if a place might be a little bit moldy if I used the home biotic probiotic spray in the bathroom and around the windows, that can be really helpful. And then if I feel like my immune system, if my detox system has been challenged a lot lately, I’ll even travel with our clear and restore bath and try to get a room with the bathtub and then my desert island supplement, other than the liposomal glutathione that I just think is amazing for supporting my body is called Phosphorylcholine. 

Then I want to keep my home environment really, really clean. I run IQ air filters in multiple rooms in the house. Just our air quality is so affected in so many parts of the country, but especially this year in Austin with different fires coming through, even up from Mexico and around the state, it’s been a really, really hard air quality year for us. So I know at least when I’m at home or in my part of the office, that the air is as clean as possible and then I monitor the humidity. I want to make sure that the humidity stays less than 55% and then I do some inspection regularly, really making sure I just let somebody come out and double look at my coils on my air conditioning system and make sure that there’s no mold there. Because especially with all the air pollution that we’ve had. Any mold that’s there thinks that it’s getting attacked.

And so it gets more virulent and makes more mycotoxins. So I really wanted to make sure that everything was still good in the AC system. 

And then I keep, I do some maintenance things to really help those downstream parts of my body detoxify. So I love infrared saunas. I try to do a hyperbaric at least once a month, and then I’m fortunate enough to have some ideas in my office that also really help me with Phosphatidylcholine and NAD. So what I can handle now from environmental exposure is very different than when I had my ALS-type symptoms or my severe asthma in 2009 and 2016. My body’s so much more resilient and able to handle things, but it is this ongoing process that I, you know, really check in with my body and see what it needs. And then I do the prep, I carry the things with me on the trips too, to make sure that my body has what it needs, that it doesn’t keep me from doing the things that I really want to do, which is see the parts of the world that I’m curious about and go, visit family and friends. So I hope that helps you to have hope that even if you’re pretty sick now, there will be some tools in your toolbox that you’ll have, that you can resume a life and a high-quality life that you’re getting to do the things that really matter to you. Thanks for joining me and enjoy the lectures today. There’s so much great information.