The Four Foundations of Recovery from Mold Illness

Opening Message and Podcast Intro 0:00

The only message I want to leave people with is to believe in yourself. I think that's the biggest thing that I've gotten out of working with both practitioners and with patients. Sometimes they set goals of, I just want to be able to reduce this one medication. Or if my energy went from a two to a four, I'd be happy. And with practitioners, I just want to be able to not have people laugh me in the face when I'm meeting with them. And one of the things that really fuels my work in both of these businesses is helping people to reach their potential.

If you have been sick for a long time and been dealing with health issues for a long time, and you say, I've already addressed mold, you might not have addressed it thoroughly enough. There might be still mycotoxins in your environment. You've tried everything. You've changed your diet. You've detoxed. You've 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 if it's your environment? Welcome to Mold Microtoxins and More.

I'm John Bode. Each week, I sit down with experts uncovering how mold, microtoxins, and 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, or the Mold Pros.

The content shared should not be used as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. And always seek the medical advice of your physician or qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding the medical condition, potential mold exposure, or health concerns. Never disregard professional medical advice 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, or suitability of all the information discussed.

Katie Garrettu2019s Background and Functional Medicine Journey 2:00

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. By listening to the Mole Pros podcast, you acknowledge that you understood this disclosure. Welcome to the mold mycotoxins and more podcast with the mold pros, John Bodie and me, your host Josh Graham at the mold pros. We provide a better way to remediate mold and indoor air quality issues.

And the mold pros is the natural choice for indoor environments. Be sure to listen to the end today to get a special promotion code to get a hundred dollars off a mold inspection when you use the code Katie. And we say hello first to my co-host John Bodie, vice president of the mold pros. How's it going today, John? It's going great. Glad to be here. Excellent. Well, let's tell the listeners about today's guest, Katie Garrett from VivaWise Functional Wellness in Fort Worth, Texas. She's a functional medicine expert, nutritionist and health coach.

And the mission of VivaWise Functional Wellness, Katie's practice is to give people the knowledge, encouragement and tools they need to be the best version of themselves and helping people achieve their optimal wellness. Katie has a master's degree in human nutrition and functional medicine from the University of Western States. And she's also earned a CNS board certification, which is the highest credential a nutritionist can achieve. And she was part of one of the very first classes in the country to graduate with a degree in functional medicine.

She's had her own practice, VivaWise functional wellness in Fort Worth, Texas since 2019. And we say hello to Katie Garrett. Hi, so great to be here. I love getting to talk with mold experts. It's such a complex topic. Excellent. And it sounds like you and John have worked together a lot, you and the mold pros. And it sounds like you refer clients to him and you guys have a great relationship that's been going for a while, huh? Yes, I've heard him speak on multiple summits and conferences and enjoyed the pleasure of getting to meet him in person at a function medicine conference this year.

And unfortunately, I've also used their services personally in my own home as well as with my clients. So that's a real testimonial right there. Excellent. Well, let's start with you, Katie. I think you have an interesting story, how you came to functional medicine. And it's a very personal story about you having to do with Hashimoto's and mold illness and chronic fatigue, but maybe more importantly about your experience with your mother. Can you tell us these stories and how you came to dedicate your career to functional medicine and start your practice?

Yes, I grew up in a very small home that had seven people in it. And my mother came down with fibromyalgia, but we didn't really know exactly what it was. This is like the mid 90s and people weren't really talking about that condition very much yet. And so she just was sick all the time, all over the place. The rest of us five kids also developed illnesses even during our childhood. So my older sister was diagnosed with Hashimoto's as a teenager. And then I got diagnosed with Hashimoto's in college.

So now all five of us kids do have autoimmune disease. And we've also had a plethora of other chronic health issues as well. So in my childhood as a teenager trying to figure out my mom's health issues, because I'm the middle child, so I'm a good, you know, let's keep the family together and solve this. I started doing a lot of reading about alternative medicine because functional medicine wasn't too much of a thing yet. So I was reading Mark Hyman and Chris Kresser before they were really part of the functional medicine movement trying to solve her health issues.

I later learned when trying to figure out my own health issues that our house actually did have quite a bit of mold in both bathrooms. And enough where it was very visible, growing through the wall, growing through the floor, and that we were all exposed to that, including my mother. And we now know we're going to talk about in a little bit how histamine is an issue for those with fibromyalgia. Excellent, excellent. And you talk about, you know, there's four pillars that your practice has, the four foundations, I guess.

Could you talk about those? Yes. So we have a practice called VivaWise functional wellness, and it's for helping patients to be able to heal from chronic illness and just symptoms and not feeling as well. And we start all of our patients with the four foundations of wellness. So this is nutrition, stress recovery, movement, and sleep. everyone is going to make sure that they've got some good habits. No one's going to be perfect ever with any of these, but we've got some good habits set around these such that the body can start to feel safe.

When its basic needs, which are in these four foundations, are not met, the body doesn't feel safe and therefore we don't have the ability to move it closer to healing. We have to get out of this stress state or fight or flight state where the body's like, I need something in order for me to be well.

The Four Foundations of Wellness 7:00

We have to get out of that first before we can move on to anything more complex like mold. Right. So it's important to sort of meet the body's basic needs of what they need before starting in on a real plan and cleaning the environment. That's also part of it, right? Yeah, so those are the four foundations as those four components. But then, of course, there's so much else that goes into health as well. So there is things like social health and mental emotional well-being that's not just related to stress recovery.

There's genetics. There's the environment. There's finances. There's your culture that you live in. So there are definitely other aspects. The thing is that when you have healthy foundations, you are more resilient to handle those other aspects. So we have one family living in a really moldy home, every single family member has a totally different reaction to that mold. Some people's bodies are healthy enough that the immune system isn't flagging anything crazy, the body's detoxing the mycotoxins really quickly, and their general health isn't changing a lot.

Whereas you have others that are so sick they can barely get out of bed living in the same environment. And the biggest difference between those two is do you have all of your physical needs met? Do you have that resilience that comes from those four foundations? Yeah, almost like you serve as sort of a counselor first, sort of like you counsel the person first to kind of figure out when I say environment, sort of their broad environment, their mental health and everything. I think that's really interesting.

We do in the initial evaluation, we ask them if they are socially connected, if they're spiritually connected, who's at home with them. So yeah, we do ask those broader environmental questions. It's not just biochemical. You know, one of the things we hear so much about Katie is kind of that, that teeter totter or fulcrum where we're okay. We can handle a certain amount of stressors in our life. Then all of a sudden, once it tilts this way, then all of a sudden that's when kind of the wheels fall off the wagon.

It sounds like, like that's exactly what you're talking about. Yes, exactly. So everyone's resilience is so different. If you have a large amount of resilience, you can handle a large amount of challenge. So there's people, you know, living in Texas, I'm here in the DFW region, we're in the top five places of allergies every single year on all the lists. and we have low air quality and we have a lot of mold here and other issues, but we can have ragweed be super high and you have half the population with itchy eyes and ears and sinuses and the other, you know, you have a small portion of population that can't tell that ragweed is elevated.

right? Because they have resilience to that. A small part of your resilience is your genetics. So there's a small part of resilience that you're not going to change ever, but the majority of your resilience is going to be based off of your lifestyle and, you know, what's happening internally, externally. So that's always our goal is we don't people will say, Oh, I don't want to eat, you know, gluten free for the rest of my life, or I don't want to have to cut out alcohol to have good labs or things like that.

I always let people know if you're in a healing season, you have low resilience. So you need low challenge. So even though this way of eating that we're asking you to do is not maybe sustainable for the rest of your life, it is exactly what you need in this moment. Yeah, that's a great approach. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you mentioned mycotoxins, of course, in there. And in my experience, being not an expert in the field, but working within this field. And I've worked with Dr. Dennis Hooper at Realtime Labs and his new company, Silver Gene.

And that's one thing I hear a lot about is how mold triggers a lot of negative health conditions because of mycotoxins and things that, you know, I guess get missed by, I guess we could say a traditional doctor. They miss a lot of these causes. So how do you help cut through that noise and determine, you know, where those interventions fit in and how you introduce some of these concepts that I would think a lot of your clients and patients don't have never heard of mycotoxins before.

Assessing Mold Exposure and Patient Resilience 11:00

Mm-hmm. Yes, exactly. And you can have a high toxic burden and have totally normal liver labs. Majority of people who are diagnosed with fatty liver on an ultrasound have not only normal liver enzymes but even optimal liver enzymes. So you can't look at your standard lab panels in order to determine if you're well or not, if you're toxic or not. So you don't want to be like, okay, I've been exposed to mold, but I don't have to worry about the mycotoxins because all my labs look good. That's not going to be an accurate assessment.

Instead, we start with always getting the patient story. Everything starts with the patient story. That's way more valuable than any lab tests out there. That may change in 50 years with the advent of technology and AI, but for now, the patient story is definitely the best thing. From there, if we start to hear some things that we're suspect of, either their history, the amount of sinus infections or asthma that they have, Or if we can tell just from common exposures, you know, places like military housing and even odd schools have a lot of issues with mold.

So if we start to suspect it, we'll start with questionnaires. We use Dr. Jill Krista's mold questionnaire. We found that to be very accurate. It pretty much always correlates with the further testing that we do. We also use the NSAIDs questionnaire by Dr. Horowitz, which is used for Lyme and related infections. And we use VCS, which is visual contrast sensitivity testing. We do this simple, easy version using vcstest.com that is actually very well validated in the scientific literature with thousands of people and their population sample.

So if they start to show up abnormal on some of these questionnaires, now we really have some grounds to talk with them about, hey, we want to look into testing your environment. We're going to always rely on the scientific evidence for these things. So in functional medicine, and a lot of people kind of lose this aspect of functional medicine, everything we do is supposed to be evidence-based. And kind of the waters have gotten a little bit muddied on that. So sometimes your evidence is having thousands of patients who all improve with this thing.

So don't discount that. But majority of it, we would want to come from the scientific literature, peer-reviewed trials. And that's another thing that we're going to use. So if we are like, OK, you have this condition that there's research showing that having more than two sinus infections in a year could give you up to a 95% risk that you have fungal overgrowth in your sinuses. You know, that's when we're thinking, okay, there might be mold here because we have the scientific literature showing that this person's at high risk.

So we use questionnaires, and we use the research, and then we use the body's response. Sometimes we have people that just have financial limits. They're easily overwhelmed. When we establish care with them, they let us know they want baby steps. And so even if we have all these things that we're now suspecting, we still might not go to the mold yet because we're going to see how their body responds. What is their resilience? You know, we don't have a test for that. So I don't know if their body is going to be able to get rid of any exposures that they have on its own.

So we might sometimes even go through the four foundations, address gut health, and if they're not responding, how we would think they would normally respond and let them know, hey, I think there's something big going on here that your body's not going to be able to handle on its own. Let's really do the testing now. And there are a lot more on board because they're like, okay, you're right. I've done all these things and I'm not significantly better. What's next? Excellent. Sounds like a lot of that.

I see your head nodding, John. A lot of that resonates with you as well. It does. And working with a lot of clinicians that we work with, Katie being one, there is sometimes a hesitancy or resistance actually. No, there's no way I could have environmental contaminants or mold in my home because I keep a clean house and they just don't think that that's even plausible. And so sometimes it takes going down that path, a journey for they're not getting the results of the deed or they're more open to doing that environmental testing.

As we know, if you don't address the environment when you have these environmental exposures, the road to wellness is a tough one because you're constantly going back, regardless of how effective the treatment may be, if you're constantly getting re-exposed, you're not going to get the results that you need. So we mirror our philosophies in that we try to be very data-driven and evidence-driven in our approach environmentally, the very same thing that Katie and her practice does clinically. Great.

And one thing that you talked about just reading through some of your blogs and some of the things that you've written about has to do with histamine. And let's talk about how histamine disorders, how those look in symptoms and health conditions and how mold can trigger that. And how do you address that? Kind of circling back to what we were just talking about. If I'm allowed to say this, there was one good thing that came out of COVID-19, and that was an explosion of research on histamine because COVID-19 triggers a massive flooding of histamine, which then triggers all kinds of symptoms and even the creation of health disorders or even diseases.

So we now know a lot more about histamine than we used to. We always knew it was a big problem, and now we have a lot of that evidence that we need to really discuss it with our patients. And it's going to continue to be discussed. One of the most common histamine disorders is mast cell activation syndrome, or MCAS. This is still in the process of figuring out how to diagnose it, how do we know how to address it. So we're going to know a lot more than whatever I say today. That's the cool thing about medicine, you know, a quarter of this interview is going to be outdated in five years and we get to constantly learn and upgrade what we're doing.

Histamine, MCAS, and Mold-Related Symptoms 17:00

But we know at this point that histamine does some things that you would never expect. When you hear histamine, you think of allergies, right? You take an antihistamine. That's what histamine does is does the things that you take an antihistamine for. However, histamine is something that is released by all different cells throughout your body, by the immune system, by your nervous system, and so it can create all kinds of issues systemically. Heart palpitations are a sign of excess histamine. Shortness of breath.

headache or migraines, and not just not talking sinus migraines or sinus headaches. We're talking about histamine-based headaches. Anxiety, right? Think about how people use things like Benadryl or Unisom to go to sleep. you get a much slower calmer brain that can go to sleep. So sometimes people's anxiety issues are actually due to their mold exposure. And this is something that a lot of people are missing you wouldn't normally think of. But the more of these histamine-related symptoms a person has, the more we can now say, learning from their story, OK, this is on our radar.

Let's start doing some assessments to figure out what's going on. And we also have heartburn. There's medications like pepsid that is actually an antihistamine. It's a histamine antagonist in the gut. Histamine binds receptors in the gut that triggers acid release. So if you have too much heartburn, it could be because you're having a histamine response to the food that you ate. And we were talking about resilience and being able to be challenged. We have basically like a histamine bucket and it's only when that bucket is overflowing that we get symptoms, which is what makes it so difficult because if you're not in your moldy environment or the allergies are low outside, you can eat the high histamine food and not get a headache from it or not get sweating after your meal.

But if your histamine is already elevated, your bucket is almost full, now eating that high histamine food makes you overflow. And so you're never going to identify the food as the problem because you're like, I ate it fine two days ago and I didn't have any symptoms. And it was actually because it's the whole combination, the net total of the different sources of histamine. By far, the biggest source of histamine is fungus. That can be Candida in your own gut or even in your sinuses, or that can be mold in your environment.

For most of our patients with histamine issues, it's both. And that makes you less resilient to other triggers. So you end up with things like eczema or hives because your bucket's already full and now you get exposed to that laundry detergent or grass when you go outside and now you're having skin reactions. So hopefully that helps you understand kind of the underlying component of histamine. We can go more into some of the conditions it's associated with. Excellent. Yeah. Again, the benefits of having, you know, a functional medicine expert speak to you, because again, so many things that you don't think of and there's just normal anecdotes everyone thinks causes certain symptoms.

And so, you know, that's why another great advantage of talking to someone like you. That's great. Here's another thing that maybe you could talk about is the relation to mold exposure and how it influences estrogen. And we talked about, you know, gut and endometriosis maybe too. So can you talk about the relation there? Yes, histamine will actually bind to uterus receptors that causes more period pain, so the periods can become more painful, and that's also usually associated with endometriosis.

So endometriosis is an estrogen-dominant condition where the amount of endometrial tissue is too thick and is overgrown, grown to other places other than the uterus. And there's some research showing that this is an autoimmune process and is also highly influenced by mold. And the reason is not just the histamine connection, but the mycotoxins. So there's a group of mold called fusarium. So mold is the living organism, right? It's a spore and it produces toxins which are not alive. Toxins are things like mercury or arsenic.

And so you have both issues when you get exposed to mold. You have this whole immune, immunological response, but then you also have this whole toxin response, and that's why it's just a double whammy. It really hurts the body so quickly. So the toxins can bind to estrogen receptors. They are weak estrogens. So if you have fusarium exposure, which is one of the most common molds in water-damaged buildings, and you have an excess amount of this mycotoxin, John, do you know how to say it? It's ZEA, Z-E-A.

Is it really known? Oh, there you go. So that's the microtoxin that has the most research on it. And research shows that it does increase the thickening of the uterine lining, which means you get more pain and heavier bleeding, increases estrogen. So you have shorter cycles and you also get early menarche, meaning women will start their periods sooner when they're exposed to this mold. And I wanted to highlight one of the studies, which really illustrates this point. There was a study that was done in patients showing that those who had endometrial hyperplasia, so too thick of a uterine lining, or adenocarcinoma, so they actually were having cancerous cells grow in their iris, the ZEA level were measured at 48 and 167 nanograms per milliliter of the biopsied tissue, whereas in all of the controls, there were no detectable levels.

So these toxins can get stuck in your tissues, and that's going to activate estrogen in those tissues. And now you're going to have all kinds of hormonal disorders come from that, even to the point where it can increase the risk of cancer. Whereas people who haven't had the mold exposure don't have any abnormal, mutual problems.

Mold, Estrogen, and Hormonal Disruption 23:00

They didn't have any mold toxins in their body. 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, and 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. There's a great, just to add to that, there's a great study, it's a Danish study, and it talks about just because certain moles like Fusarium can produce that nasty Z-word, and then, you know, Stacobotus can produce the trichophysines, and so on and so forth.

Just because a certain mole species can produce those toxins doesn't mean that it will. It takes the right environmental conditions, and that's when these certain species have developed the ability to, once they feel threatened and they need to stake out their territory, that's when they start producing, right? And it's environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, and food source, as well as other microbial organisms that are competing for that food source. And so we just happen to be kind of collateral damage when these species start producing to kill off everything else that's taken over their drywall or sheet rock or whatever they're trying to feed on.

You know, then we get that environmental exposure. So it really, the molds and mycotoxins are really fascinating. It can get way deeper, way longer than what we'd ever have for this particular podcast, but it is fascinating. That's a great point. Mold doesn't always equate to a high mycotoxin burden. That's right. But it does put you at much higher risk. Great. I want to remind people who are listening to the Mold Microtoxins and More podcast with John Bodie and our special guest today, Katie Garrett.

And I want to get to eventually how Katie, your practices worked with John and maybe some client stories. But a couple of the other foundational pieces that you work on is movement and sleep. We haven't talked about that as much. So tell me how you work with patients and clients on altering what they're doing in their their movements and at night and things like that to help their health. Yep. So one of the great components of functional medicine is that it does individualized, personalized care.

Even though I talk about how everyone goes through these general steps, the way that someone goes through the steps is totally different for each person. Exercise that I might recommend to one patient could be harmful to another. So I'm going to always, we're going to adapt what kind of recommendations we give based on the person's goals, their physical capacity, their ability to recover and heal, their preferences, all of that will change. And so for exercise, we're going to, you know, recommend strength training and cardiovascular exercise.

Some people are, you know, it's going to be just, you know, dozens of permutations of how that's going to actually look for the patient to implement. But we do have really good evidence from science from all kinds of different conditions, whether it being dementia or cardiovascular disease or weight or blood sugar, showing that we do need five days per week, at least 30 minutes. Some people are doing that as Pilates and fast walking in their neighborhood. Others are doing that on cardio machines and strength training machines at the gym.

So it doesn't really matter how you get it in, it just matters that you do. A big part of that is every time that you squeeze your muscles, you're releasing anti-inflammatory compounds into your body. And every time that you get your heart rate up and you've been increasing the circulation, your good bacteria increase. That together means more resilience. You can handle more challenges without getting as sick. Same thing with sleep. If we are sleeping at the right time, we're getting the right amount and we're getting good quality.

Those are the three big things that we look at. Then we're going to have greater resilience. We're going to be able to clean out the inflammation from the day rather than bring it into tomorrow and start the next day with a bucket that's already a little bit more full. If that makes sense. So we do talk to our patients about, yeah, we want to get that seven to nine hours, but if you are more inflamed and you're mold toxic, you need on the higher end, right? You need more time to recover than someone who is really healthy and really resilient.

Movement, Sleep, and Recovery 28:00

And we'll also talk about the timing because we are controlled by the circadian rhythm and there's nothing we can do to change that. Research shows shift workers have been doing it for 30 years, don't have any adaptations. They still have the same damage as someone's been doing it for one year. So unfortunately, because I'm a night owl, I would really love to see the science saying that that's okay, but I can't find it. So we've got the timing and we also have what we do before we go to bed and that's going to impact our quality.

You know, if we're caffeinated or we're stressed or we're exposed to a lot of light, we're not going to actually get the deep and REM where all that recovery happens, even if we go to bed at the right time and we get the right amount of hours. So the wind down is just as important as the actual sleep itself, the working toward going to sleep. Yeah. Interesting. Great. Well, again, you and John at the Mold Pros have worked together for a long time. It sounds like you've, you know, referred a lot of clients over to John.

So tell us why you trust John and the Mold Pros and his team to take care of some of the issues that you see with your clients. Yeah, like he said earlier, it's evidence-based. So whenever we ask questions, we know that we're getting responses from people who have really looked at the science and they're not going off of, well, you know, these last 10 patients had this experience and so you'll likely have this. I don't want my patients to be guinea pigs. They all want to be going off of thousands or tens of thousands of data sets to know what we should be concerned about, how we need to address something.

So that's one component. And of course, what really drew me into the Mold Pros is their focus on not exposing you to any additional toxins. A lot of the mold remediation process is going to release volatile organic compounds or BOCs from other companies because they're going to use barriers and they're going to use things that can seal that actually have chemicals in them. And these can be released into the air for the next months or even year. And when we breathe them in, they're worsening our health.

I didn't want to try to make someone better and just so happens, oh, that person is actually sensitive to this chemical. Whoops, now they're not any better and I spent all this money. Right? So let's use things that the body already is familiar with that's been around for thousands of years. Things like essential oils or citrus-based extracts that can be effective, that have been shown with evidence to be able to kill the mold spores, maybe even degrade the mycotoxins and won't add to that challenge of my patient's immune system or detoxification system.

Yeah, we find a lot of, to Katie's point, a lot of these individuals that are immunocompromised, they're also chemically sensitive. I was on a phone call probably Thursday or Friday of last week with one of our Florida clients who had a remediation done by another company about six months ago. And the product that they use, she still smells that product and sense of that product when she goes to her house six months later. And so now it's, okay, so how do we get rid of what cured the mold problem?

You know, it's a whole nother, you know, what's the old saying? You know, the cure is sometimes worse than the disease and, you know, can be. So yeah, we use a nature versus nature approach enzymes and citrus based botanicals. Yeah, exactly. And of course, we also have great customer service as well. So anytime we have a question or a patient has a concern that they're bringing to us and we want to, if we vouch for you guys, we don't want that to reflect poorly on us, right? So we need to be able to reach out to you to clarify something because this is a really complex process.

And sometimes to a patient, it can look like something's going wrong or something wasn't done right because they don't understand the whole process. And so to be able to reach out and quickly get answers and then respond to our client and let them know, actually, this is how it goes. This is OK. And kind of calm everything down and keep it going and stay having a good relationship with our client. That's really important. So I do love how responsive you guys are. Thank you. That's great to hear.

Yeah, and it sounds like part of this is knowing that it's important the order to go into a home that is experiencing some of these mold issues. And when you're addressing that and not going in the right order can create a lot of other reactions and issues. John's team sees that quite a bit. That sounds like what you were talking about about making sure you do everything in the right order as you approach, you know, remediating, I guess you could say. Yes. So let me go back and just kind of summarize what that order is.

And then I can highlight that with one of the clients that we've had that has worked with the mold pros that went through this order with. So we start with assessment, right? We get the client story. If we see some concerning things in there, we're going to check the labs. You know, oftentimes things don't show in labs, but sometimes you can see high levels related to histamine or high levels of things related to gut or detox issues.

Why Katie Trusts The Mold Pros 33:00

For example, GGT is a marker of glutathione. It's a super cheap lab that you can run in anyone. It's very common for it to be normal in people with mold problems, but some of my patients who have had very significant chronic mold issues, it will be elevated. So we'll look at labs, and then we look at the questionnaires as the main thing to give us an idea. So we have started them off on our four foundations of wellness, and then we start getting in the results of these questionnaires and labs. And if everything comes back abnormal while they're working on the four foundations, now we're going to do some more assessment of their home and their work environment, their car, or anywhere that could be a concern.

I know there's a lot of controversy on this, but we like the mold plates specifically from a specific company. So we do like to start there as a screening test. It gives us an idea of does this have to be addressed before we do anything else? How severe is it? How serious do you need to be about convincing your partner or taking out that money to get the inspection? and consider remediation. So we will do that assessment and then we have all this information that we can put together. And they've already been a couple of follow-ups in and they're already starting to see that what we do is helping them, but there it's not going to be like a miracle cure on its own.

And so at that point now it's, okay, go get your inspection. And then if it's abnormal, you know, get your remediation. So while they're doing that, we are, if we know that they are going to be making steps and they're going to have a clean home fairly soon, we will already start on rebalancing their gut because that's typically a couple month process. So, we want to be done with that around the time that they're done with their home being cleared. And we will use citrus-based products in the meantime to bring down their daily mold level.

So, that doesn't treat the cause, but it can treat the symptom, right? So, it can treat the levels that are in the air that day along with air purifiers. It's just that's going to come back if they don't address the cause of it. But it does help to provide a safer environment, you know, short-term. So we work through their gut issues and once we get the all clear from the mold pros, then we start doing the deep detox. That's when we start trying to push things out of the body, bind things out, get them out.

Because if you start sooner and we get these patients who have started with another functional or integrative doctor and then come to us, they are going to react. You're going to see all kinds of stuff. I mean, sometimes it can be pretty significant. really bad rashes throughout the body or palpitations and shortness of breath that makes them go to urgent care. We don't want to put anyone into a higher stress state when we're trying to heal them. So we need to meet the body where it's at and address these things in a more methodical order and not try to use glutathione and acetylcysteine and milk thistle or all these other intense binders when their body still doesn't feel safe because it's seeing mold every day.

And plus, you're not going to be able to sustain the results, right? If they're still being exposed to fungus, which is increasing histamine, and or they're being exposed to mycotoxins, which is suppressing their immune system and their detoxification system, you're not going to move the needle by trying to detox them. You could prevent them from getting significantly worse, but you're not going to get them better. And that's pretty frustrating to a patient when they feel like, I've spent you know, all this money, all this time, and I don't really have a lot to show for it." And he just tried to tell them, well, it could be worse.

That's not going to go well. So let me give you an illustration of this. So we had a patient who developed type 1 diabetes, which is an autoimmune condition after delivering her child. This is one of the times in a woman's life when we're most prone to be triggered to develop autoimmunity, but that's the trigger. There were predisposing factors going on in her body that made her able to develop type 1 from the delivery, from the process of having a child. So she also had infertility, endometriosis, gut symptoms.

We talked about these things earlier. She started on the four foundations, but still struggled to regulate her hormones. And so we're noticing, okay, then there might be something going on other than the body's internal regulation contributing to these hormonal imbalances. And she was also getting infections frequently. and so was her son and they were both having mood swings and this is one of the symptoms sometimes people call it mold rage because these uh the histamine we talked about in the brain right creates anxiety and so you're gonna end up with all of these mood swings and you can get uh irritable quickly so we started to put those pieces together and our nutritionist tisa was suggested to the patient, hey, you might have a mold issue.

Testing, Remediation, and Detox in the Right Order 38:00

We've already tried the four foundations. You're still getting sick. You still have the hormones. Let's just check for a mold in the environment. Ran the mold plates, and they came back quite high in several different areas of her home. So she then suggested that the patient go see the mold pros. They got an inspection done, and sure enough, they did have some significant mold issues. The patient also, we could see on the plates candida, which is an internal fungus, not water damage building related.

So we knew, okay, she's getting histamine from the environment and inside. No wonder she can't regulate those. So she helped to support the patient's gut. And we use oftentimes just charcoal as just a easy single binder. so that the body doesn't reabsorb toxins, but charcoal itself doesn't get absorbed. So we're not really going in and detoxing the patient. We're doing the same thing fiber does. We're just helping to, you know, anything the liver already detoxed, make sure it's eliminated. So we'll use that.

While she was working with the mold pros, the mold pros ran the EMMA test, which is mycotoxins in the home, and that was positive. So then our nutritionist ran mycotoxins in her body, and that was positive and matched the molds. And so we knew we had a lot of detox work to do. So after the remediation was done, she then went through three to five months of detox work. And now her hormones are balanced, her mood is balanced, her kid's mood is balanced, and they are feeling so good that they are trying to have another baby.

That's great. That's great to hear. The happy path is when, like, we'd have that clinical side, or sometimes it's the environmental side, we get that testing back first, and then you run the clinical. And then we say, oh, okay, hey, we're positive for okra toxin A in the urine, and then we're positive environment. Now we know how we can help work to solve that problem, right? So that's always good to hear that love hearing those success stories. That's what makes it all worthwhile, right? So that's fantastic.

Yeah, and really all about following that process even though it can take a while, but just making sure you're setting those expectations properly at the beginning of that process that we're going to go through all of this, but it's important because you never know which one of those is going to be the trigger. That's right. Yeah, that's kind of one of the more common bits of feedback that we get. After we've helped the patient reach their goals, we give them a testimonial and feedback form, and every once in a while we'll get that.

bit of feedback that says, hey, I would have been really good to have known how long this was going to take. Or maybe if you provided a roadmap of what to expect. It's like, we don't have that level of knowledge yet. I don't have a way to assess you one day and to know what your next year is going to look like because I don't know that mold is a big issue for you at your initial evaluation. When we created your treatment plan, we're just listening to your body. Your body is the main thing that's telling us we need to keep looking for other things or you're not done with something yet.

So, unfortunately, we do set the expectation of, you know, in general, we're probably looking at six months to a year for someone with autoimmune disease and endometriosis is probably an autoimmune disease, maybe two. We let them know more on that year side, but just let them know. So, general recommendation and just depends how resilient you are and how many root causes we need to find in order to get you to your goals. That's great. Well, we're getting to the end of our time, but I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about this.

You started a functional practitioner class, the functional practitioner academy, a three-part course. Tell us about that. And when did you shift from not just helping patients to, I guess, lay people to training future functional practitioners? Can you talk about that real quick? Sure. Yeah. So Functional Practitioner Academy has a knowledge base, which is awesome because it helps you to see all the evidence with just one second. So you can type in endometriosis and mold, and you'll get a little snippet in the search bar that lets you know these are the studies showing how mycotoxins increase estrogen.

And so it allows you to kind of be like, oh, I think I heard that one time. I'm right here with the patient. Is this a thing? And then later on, you can go and read the studies because it has all of the research for anything that we recommend. So it provides this easy to access base of knowledge that shows you what the root causes are, what the different ways that you can address something is, and even how to work with a patient and more of developing that relationship kind of way while always giving all of the research, almost all are going to be PubMed.

studies. So that's one component. And then we also have a community and we have an online course that talks more about how do you strategically make these decisions with a client? How do you know how to adapt the plan to meet them where they're at? Because if you don't, you either make them worse or you make them feel like you don't get them and they just leave. So if you can't retain the client, you can't get them to your goals. So it's talking about these things because we do see clients that come to us from other providers.

And we also listen to other providers on YouTube and podcasts. And there's just kind of this prevailing idea of using labs and supplements as your main treatment protocols. Pretty much anything that you find on a lab is not going to be the most upstream root cause. Those things are always going to come down to the four foundations that I mentioned earlier and the patient's environment. So if you find candida on a stool test, that candida, there's a root cause for the candida, right? It is a root cause, sure.

And if you need to treat it in order to make them better, but if you don't treat why the candida was there, it's just going to grow back. And then you didn't really help the patient. can't tell you how many times we've evaluated a client who came from another function provider. And when we started, we asked them, OK, so what were your root causes that you discovered? I don't know. What do you mean? They have no idea that their delayed sleep timing and their highly stressful job with excessive work hours and their diet soda with artificial sweeteners were actually predisposing their body to be susceptible to these other triggers.

So I wanted to help get the practice of functional medicine back to the core foundation of what functional medicine really stands for. We actually look at the Institute for Functional Medicine statements because then that's always going to serve the patient the best and it's going to allow their results to be sustained. And with how expensive it is to get functional medicine care, we really need to have sustainable results. We don't want these things lasting three months or six months or even just a year.

So we wanted to help to elevate that patient care and make it easier because I'm sure a lot of providers would like to practice the way IFM has it set up, but it's just hard, it's chaotic, it's complex, it's messy, it's humans, you know, and we don't have great diagnostics yet. So I wanted to streamline that, make it easier, do all the work for everyone else so that they could just jump in and work with patients.

Functional Practitioner Academy and Training Providers 45:00

That's great. That is a fantastic thing. And here's what we should circle back after, of course, this recording. Let's see how we can help support you on the environmental side of that for that knowledge base. Yeah. Yeah. Happy to contribute and help move that forward. OK. Thank you. I love that. And that's a great, that's a great opportunity for you. So tell us where people can find the course. Tell us where people can tell us your website so people can find all of that great information. Yep. So we have, so I've got, you know, VIVAWISE functional wellness, which is the clinic side.

So that's where we see patients. And then we have Functional Practitioner Academy. The website is fxpractitioner.com. And there's free resources on there. So we have published some of the pages in our knowledge base so people can just get in and start seeing the research and the protocols right away. And I also have a free course as well that starts talking about how to get to that true core foundation of functional medicine, how to think differently about your patient's root causes. And both of those websites have all the YouTube and Facebook and Instagram and all those things.

Excellent, and we'll add all of those links to the show notes after, so everyone can see that. And we are wrapping up, but we wanted to let the listeners know about today's promotion with The Mold Pros. If you go to themoldpros.com right now, you can get $100 off a mold inspection when you use the promo code KATIE, K-A-T-I-E. And you get $100 off inspections through the end of the year, through December 31st of this year. use that promo code Katie and get $100 off. And the best way for people to get that promotion, John, I believe they should go to the contact page of the mold pros and put that into the their email.

Is that right? Yeah, just go to it's really easy. Go to the mold pros.com The upper right hand portion, you'll see contact and there's a contact form. Just fill that out with your information, name, email, phone number. And underneath the message, put Katie and the promo code for your inspection and you'll get a hundred dollars off of that inspection. Excellent. Excellent. And Katie Garrett, thanks for joining us today on the Mold Pros, Mold Microtoxin and More podcast. Anything else you want to discuss before we get off?

Anything we missed or a message you want to give to our listeners? The only message I want to leave people with is to believe in yourself. I think that's the biggest thing that I've gotten out of working with both practitioners and with patients. Sometimes they set goals of, I just want to be able to reduce this one medication. Or if my energy went from a two to a four, I'd be happy. And with practitioners, I just want to be able to not have people laugh me in the face when I'm meeting with them.

And one of the things that really fuels my work in both of these businesses is helping people to reach their potential. If you have been sick for a long time and been dealing with health issues for a long time and you say, you know, I've already addressed mold, you might not have addressed it thoroughly enough. There might be still mycotoxins in your environment. You might want to reach out to the mold pros to get an inspection and see is it really been fully addressed. Or if you've already worked with a functional provider and they ran a SIBO test and gave you antibiotics for it, but you're not better still.

You don't have to accept where you are, that there is still more abundance of life for you available. There's pretty much never a time we run out of a list of root causes that we can address and look for. There's so many exposures that we have. And same thing with practitioners. If you're frustrated with how your patient's results are, or you are frustrated in your ability to bring in enough clientele, there is still opportunity for you. There is resources available, even if it's not through Functional Practitioner Academy, but someone else that I want you to stick with it because people need your care.

And it's just a matter of being able to get the right resources to support yourself and then getting enough experience under your belt to show that you

Final Advice and Closing Remarks 49:00

can do it. And so if you're finding that you're running into a roadblock, don't let that stop you or tell you that you're not good enough for it. We need more functional providers out there. And I've seen it with my own staff. Two of the staff that I have right now, had asked me at one point years ago to quit. They said, I just can't do this. It's just too much. I'm not good enough at it. And here they are years later, and they have dozens and dozens of patient testimonials of people's lives that they've changed because they stuck with them and allowed that friction to lead to growth rather than to make them quit.

So I just want to leave that with you guys to fulfill your potential. There's usually a lot more life available for us. That's great. And one more time, the website address, Katie, one more time. fxpractitioner.com. Excellent. Great. Anything else to add you want, John, that you want to add here at the end? No, Katie, just, I really appreciate you carving out time. The work you do is so important. I always enjoy the time we have together. If I were to describe Katie in one word, it would be effervescent.

I mean, she's just always a joy to speak with and that her care transcend. You can see it. It's really apparent. So anyway, thank you so much. The work you do is fantastic. I look forward to working with you in the future. Some more. Thank you for having me. All right. Thanks. Well, Katie Garrett, thanks again for joining us today on Mold Mycotoxins and More. And thank you, the listener, and be sure to add and like us on your podcast listening platform of choice. And if you're really feeling generous, give us a review, which always helps us rank on those platforms.

Thanks again for listening to Mold Mycotoxins and More today. And for John Bodie and The Mold Pros, I'm Joshua Graham. And talk to you again soon. You've been listening to Mold Microtoxins and More with John Bodie. 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.