Tools to Take You Beyond Mold

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

Well, you know, it’s a funny thing. I live in the Northwest and so I think of it with pretty much every patient. And so I’ve worked with a lot of people from all over in different places. And the thing that I find so interesting is that mold and lime and heavy metal toxicity look very, very similar. And I don’t think I have a single patient that doesn’t have one if not all of that trifecta. And yet I noticed that anytime I ask, “Hey,” like I saw two new people yesterday and both of them were adamant, “I absolutely could not be exposed to mold.” But then you start digging into the questions, “Oh, well, yeah we have standing water every year “in the basement.” And you’re like, “Oh, okay. “Do you live in a house that was built after 1970 “and they’re hermetically sealed?” So it’s one of those, it’s in the background of my thought process for everybody. I kind of think about it as guilty until proven innocent, you know . 

And so I look at a lot of symptoms to start with though. So things that, I like to touch people a lot, so I like to put my hands on like pressing on people’s foreheads, and if it’s squishy, that’s not normal. You know, when they have this puffy lymphatic kind of congestion, then I’m gonna think about looking towards mold. I like to have people do what’s called the Hayward Test and it’s a free online test. It takes about half an hour. It’s dozens and dozens of questions that make you think about, do you have standing water around your house? Have you had water damage in your house? Do you have a front loading washing machine? Because unless you’re drying it out every time and cleaning it out once a month, chances are if you open it up there’s mold in it. 

I look at some of these cars that people are driving and they’re like slimy green, you know that person is getting complete mold toxicity. And I think about things like history, I think history is so vital, ’cause, were you always sick or were there certain things that then it, “I moved into this new church,” or “I started work in a new office,” or “I got into a new school,” or “I moved into a new place.” And so those are some of those kind of things that I’m like, “Aha, and then you started having this strange neurological “buzzing that makes it feel like you’re vibrating inside, “or you started having memory loss,” you know. We see a lot of neurological changes. We see a lot of psychological changes. 

We see a lot of fatigue with folks, you know, their poor little mitochondria just can’t make energy. And so those are some of my go-to starts, and I love questionnaires. Like I have a bunch of just free questionnaires people can take to see like, “Hey, does this look like “it might possibly be a mold exposure,” kind of like the Hayward Test? There’s certain things that we can see in folks that are gonna make it easier for them to wanna explore, look in deeper.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Sure. No, that makes sense. So you mentioned some of those tools. Could you tell the audience, you know, where they can maybe find some of those questionnaires easily, that if they’re just, you know, looking to screen themselves maybe in the future.

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

Definitely, so you can put in “Hayward Score,” which is, I believe if they originally developed it for the military families, because a lot of folks in the military barracks in particular are completely toxic. Like some of these places are just, it’s amazing that anyone could live there, let alone people that are serving our country so dedicatedly. And so you can plug in just “Hayward Score” and it’ll take you to the questionnaire test. I’m one of those, Mitchner’s kind of ADD people where I put a gazillion free online questionnaires in my library section of nurseandi.com. And those are some of the first go-tos. 

I also like to do the visual contrast testing, which is Dr. Shoemaker’s original way of looking at, “Can my eyes determine “contrast of black and white lines?” And so that’s a question I ask people a lot of times, “Do you ever have trouble driving in the twilight hours? “Do you notice your change of your vision “where at one point in time I could read the water bottle, “but later in the afternoon I might not be able to.” Like vision should kind of stay pretty steady, you might be having declining vision as you age, but it shouldn’t come in and out. That ability to focus or not focus is a pretty good indicator of some kind of biotoxin. You know, we don’t know if it’s infection or if it’s mold? Because that’s the other thing, too, in a lot of these buildings there’s different kinds of bacterium growing with the mold, so it’s not just straight up mold. 

And there’s a difference, I think people get confused sometimes about between mold allergy, mold exposure and mold toxicity. So you could become allergic, which means you don’t need much contact to it because you’ve already become hypersensitized to it. We see this a lot with mass cell activation, we see it a lot with that person who, you know, walks past a door that had a mycotoxin and start having rashes and reactions and, you know, and so when you become allergic to mold, we have to downregulate, we have to reintroduce tolerance, which is a slow, steady process that you and I’ve had fun with low-dose antigen, low-dose immunotherapy.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Oh, yes.

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

And it’s a great way of kind of working with that allergy aspect of it. But then there’s also, you know, just the exposure, some people genetically are, there’s about 25% of the population that has a hard time detoxing mold, so they have a hard time being exposed because once they’re exposed they can’t get rid of it, and then that builds up and eventually becomes toxicity. Like if you’re sleeping on a moldy mattress, eight hours a day, you’re breathing that in and it’s accumulating. And that’s where sometimes you’ll have people tell you, “I’ve had this weird weight gain, but my diet’s the same, “my hormones are the same, “my exercise is the same, “I’m not really understanding this.” So that, you know, unexplained weight game, especially with that sort of sponginess to the tissue where you just kind of hold onto water as well. 

And you’ll see, that is another sign is people will be with their jugs of water, sucking it down the whole time. And no matter how much water you drink, you just never quite feel like you’re satisfied. Like those are very classic mold symptoms. And sure they’re symptoms of other things too, but it’s one of those things that says, “Hey, wait, let’s make sure that we rule out “this potential issue.” Anxiety is another very common, depression and anxiety, we see that a lot with folks that have been exposed to mold. We also see changes in your sleep, whether some people will sleep all day, other people won’t sleep at all. So it’s not like there’s a set way that it changes, but it’s just that overall change then. And if we don’t sleep, our bodies can’t repair, we can’t heal and it affects so many other things. 

So those are kind of some of the like hallmark things, as well as energy levels, you know, like, “Oh, I used to be able to, you know, “go for a two hour walk with my dog and chase my kid “and I could keep up.” And there’s some funny things that you’ll see where folks with mold toxicity often will get short of breath when they’re walking on an incline, but they can tolerate just walking on flat ground. So these are things that you’re gonna have to tease out of people, ’cause most people aren’t gonna be like, that’s not gonna necessarily be on their list of symptoms they’re telling you. 

But as you start to ask them, you can kind of get some of these different components about that from them. And then also just strange neurology things, or anytime someone comes to you and they’re like, “Well, I went to the neurologist and they say “I had an atypical,” fill in the blank, you know. “It looks like Parkinson’s, “but we can’t really see any of the lesions.” Or, “It looks like MS, but the spinal tap is clear.” You know, like some of these different, weird neurological kind of things. And it’s tricky ’cause a lot of people mold, isn’t always the enemy, you know, a lot of folks get into that mind set of, “Oh it’s bad,” and it’s like, “No, if you’ve watched “Paul Stamets’ recent ‘Fantastic Fungi’, “you know, he’s kind of claiming-

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Oh yeah, that was a good one. We evolved from mold.

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

Right.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

So, you know, there’s a certain thing where I don’t like to kind of get too crazy into, you know, bad and good, because when we start to war within our bodies with anything, they war back. And so there’s a certain degree of how can we make peace, which is the tolerance? How can we kinda lower down that allergic reaction and hyperactivity to the thing? And then how can we gently, you know, persuade it to go live somewhere else and bring back in the good microbes? Because when we have good flora, you know, and good, there are some kind of fungi that are good. If you think about medicinal mushrooms, you know, they’ve been used for thousands and thousands of years, very effectively. And mushrooms are interesting, like fungi are interesting, they’re very territorial. 

So part of the problem with toxic fungi is it doesn’t want anything else to come into its environment. And if you think of our beautiful bodies, like we’re warm, we’re moist, we’ve got great food sources, like we’re the perfect host, so why would they not wanna be inside of us? So it’s that way of, how can we clean up our environment? So it’s kind of looking at all those little ways of, “How can I even think to look at this?” And nobody wants to look at it, really. Nobody wants to think their house is moldy. Their car is moldy. Their work is moldy. Their, you know, house, their church, their, you know, places like thrift shops, , you know, like_

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

Yeah, they’re safe spaces.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

You know, places you like to go, nobody wants to stop and think, “Oh, I can’t go there.” So it’s like, “Okay, we’ve gotta like very systematically “look at this.” So if you start to see that you physically, mentally and possibly hormonally, because one of the organs that’s very affected by mycotoxins is the pituitary. So that’s when we start seeing, you know, a lot of folks have these, you know, thyroid. Thyroid dysfunction is the, you know, thyroid medicine is the number one prescribed medicine in the country, which is amazing to me because the thyroid tests are, you know, it’s like, you could see people that have wonka-doodle thyroid tests and feel fine, and other people that feel awful and their labs look perfect. 

So, you know, so that’s when you also start thinking, “Okay, wait a second. “Is there maybe an upstream factor with the pituitary “going on here?” And, you know, and so that’s another, like when you start to see pituitary hormone changes, I think about that. And the other neurological problem I see a lot of people get is either constipation and or diarrhea. You know, diarrhea is a hassle for sure, but at least you’re getting stuff out. It’s when people start getting constipated, we start having concerns. So those are some of the physical and mental things that make me like, “Hey, what’s going on here? “We’ve gotta look at this deeper.”

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

So if you have all that in your, you have a pretty good idea that it’s probably, you know, mold related in some way. What are your favorite, what are your favorite like confirmatory or objective testing strategies too? And it’s always a good question ’cause I know there’s not, you know, different answers vary and nothing’s perfect I know out there in the world as it stands, but, you know, personally, what are your favorites?

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Well, you know, there’s several, and it’s kind of funny because I remember, you know, Dr. Shoemaker’s been one of our great layout of people and Ritchie Shoemaker is very unique personality. I remember bringing him in for a conference that we were holding and he got to speak at, before he wrote “Mold Warriors”, you know, and Patricia Kane had just found him and, you know, and so I have gone through a phase of, I do like the Visual Contrast Test.

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

Yeah you mentioned that.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

I don’t particularly,

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

Yeah, I don’t like it online as much as the one in person. And I do notice, you know, you go to buy this little tiny metal frame with a cardboard box, you know, with the lines on it at $800. So you don’t be shocked when you’ve got one, but, you know, it’s a one time, and the in-person works much better than the online. That’s what I’ve found. I like to use different kinds of environment, like whether you’re doing an ERMI test where you’re actually either using a little Swiffer rag or you’re vacuuming up the dust because you can that in each room or in a car, et cetera, and you can send that to Mycometrics and you could get what’s called HERTSMI-2. So it not all molds that we’re exposed to cause illness. 

So it gives you a whole variety of different mycotoxins and whether they’re, you know, gonna cause problems or not. I also have a lot of people just use the porous filters that they can put out, and then if there’s something growing, you’d wanna ship that into, you know, have it evaluated. Sometimes people just start at Home Depot ’cause, you know, again, it’s one of those things, people don’t wanna mess with this. And a lot of times, as you remember, you know, we live, I live in the land of Microsoft, Google and Amazon, so I have a lot of minds that are like, “Prove it to me.” And I’m like, “Sure, I can prove it “to you twice on Saturday. “Let’s go for it.” So ImmunoLytics is one of the companies that does the pore filter. 

Or even if you just start with the ones from Home Depot, if stuff’s growing, it’ll usually make that person a little bit more willing to go deeper. You know, the problem with a lot of folks is they will have a remediation specialist come in and the gold standard for them is an air sampling, which is often useless. And so I kind of say, “Well, just because that’s showing up, “I invite us to go through these other deeper levels.” So that would be one way of kind of looking at the house or the car, or the environment that way. Then I also like to have people do urine tests. And the two main urine tests that I’ve used historically is RealTime Labs has been around forever and ever, and basically they do more of an ELISA-style test to see, do you have mycotoxins which are the components that make you feel sick in your body, that you are able to excrete from your urine. 

Now the caveat though is, able to excrete. If 25% of the people can’t excrete them, then they’re gonna have trouble getting it out of the body. But also the body is very wise, it’s kind of like, I think about the college student in the dorm and they see their parent out the window coming up and they haven’t prepared, and they just grab everything and shove it under the bed or in the closet. Our bodies do that, it tries to wall this stuff away and protect us from it. Problem is mycotoxins are lipophilic, so they like to get into the cell and they like to get into the spinal cord, they get into areas and they stay there. 

So looking at, is your body able to release these toxins, so RealTime was around forever in a day, and then Great Plains also came out with another test as well. And most of them test, you know, you’re forming, aflatoxin, ochratoxins, Trichotheciums, gliotoxins. But they’re different, you know, so RealTime looks different than Great Plains, and they use different methodologies to screen them out. So that’s another way of doing it. The problem is, they’re expensive, you know. There are some times when, you know, we’re looking at it and this is where some Shoemaker’s blood work came in is, he was looking at blood tests that were very specific for inflammatory markers. Which was great if your insurance would cover it, but if it wasn’t, you know, we’re looking at nine, $1,200 a test and most people can’t do that. 

So another test I like to look at and I also like to find things that people can order themselves because I have a lot of folks that aren’t in Washington State. And so the more I can help them order their own tests and then I help them understand what it means, that helps me. So there’s another test I like to look at, which is Chronic Inflammatory Laboratories. Gordon Ens was originally a coagulation specialist and this new urine test, well, it’s not new it’s been around quite a while, looks at the how arachidonic acid goes down through that , COX-1 and COX-2 pathway, and then thromboxane is like the end product, and that’s a great indicator for intracellular inflammation. 

Because a lot of times what I’m noticing with people is, it’s not how many mycotoxins are in your body, it’s how much inflammation is being created by the intolerance to those mycotoxins or the allergy to those mycotoxins, or just the buildup. So I find that, you know, for 80 bucks I can measure this inflammatory marker and it’s urine. We work with a lot of kids and they don’t really like getting blood drawn. And with some of these things too, like I’m not having to make ’em, so with RealTimes and Great Plains, it is better if you use glutathione and NAC preemptively, as well as sauna and heavy exercise, because we’ve had folks we know are mold toxic and they do the test and nothing shows up. 

And that always is frustrating ’cause then, like, there’s this desire to say, “Oh look, I’m not actually toxic.” And it’s like, “Oh no, you probably are “of the genetic type that can’t release this.” Or, “Your body is so overwhelmed, it can’t release this.” And so I also like to warn people that, you know, “Hey, don’t feel that because your tests get worse, “the first couple of times we test. “You might have a baseline to begin with, “we’re doing treatment and you look worse. “It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being exposed again, “it means your body’s finally starting to be able to release “these different toxins out. “And so let’s also look at how you feel “because it’s very easy to lose hope. “And when you’re already kind of struggling with anxiety “and depression anyways, as a side effect of the illness, “we wanna really keep the hope factor going.” So those are some of my, you know, kind of ways that I’ll look at it. 

And if, I will go back, what’s kind of nice is you can go back with your ERMI and recheck the environment after remediation too. But for me it’s because people are not just in one spot, that’s where I like to look at what their cellular inflammation is doing, ’cause it’s a more likely of how they’re gonna feel. And for me that’s the most important. How do you feel? Are you feeling better? Are you thinking better? Are you able to go back to work? Are you able to care for yourself and for your family and resume your life, versus what does this lab number say? Because there’s an OCD, there’s a certain OCD tendency of some of those details that can come up with this exposure also. And it’s very easy to get fixated on that versus quality of life.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Sure. So you do a lot of counseling, I imagine you’re probably meeting with these patients a little more frequently in the beginning to kind of, you know, work them through some of this because there’s a lot of challenges, of course, that come up in, you know, presenting mold as a possible cause of their illness. As we mentioned, if it’s in their safe spaces like their home or their car, or, you know, other areas like this, how do you get through some of those blockages? I know that you had sort of mentioned a few methods like some people want data, so might give them data to do that. 

Some people may, you know, simply not want to go down that road because of everything that kind of comes up with it. But if you feel very strongly that this is a part of their, you know, current health condition and that it does need to be addressed, what are some of the ways you navigate some of these blockages with patients, too? Or what eases their mind to try to work with something this heavy, or what feels heavy at first, let’s just say?

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

I think that’s an adequate description, it’s very overwhelming. And so I’ve had the great pleasure of getting to work with Peter Levine and Somatic Experiencing, and I’ve got, you know, and through him and some other avenues, Stephen Porges in the Polyvagal, you know, he has, what’s called Safe and Sound. And although I know Annie Hopper and the Dynamic Neural Reintrainment System or DNRS, I haven’t had a lot of people. I’ve had a few people that really enjoyed it, but it’s a big commitment. So I try to find ways of helping that patient self-soothe to get through it. And sometimes that’s like, “Okay, let’s just take step one, “you know, we don’t have to.” I think the hard part is there’s been a lot of very big personalities in the field that kind of are like, “We can’t treat you “if you don’t get out of this house.” Well, not everybody can afford to burn all their “precious items and, you know, shut the door and walk away “from their home and go build a new one.” 

So I think that part of it is making very step-by-step pieces that are a little bit more realistic. There’s a lot of ways you can use, you know, hypochlorous has been a cool new thing that’s come out where you can fog your house. You can use chlorine dioxide, you know, to, basically it’s like a bug bomb that you put off in your house and then obviously you’re gonna have to clean up and, you know, there’s air filters. I love some of the new hydrogen peroxide-based air filters, so basically it’s taking the moisture in the air, converting it into hydrogen peroxide and then blowing it over and on everything. So, I mean, this is the kind of antimicrobial technology they use in space and that they use at the Pentagon, so it’s safe to breathe unlike ozone, you know When you try ozonate your house and you come back in, you’re like, ’cause it’s hard on your lungs. So, you know, there are ways of, sort of, remediating. Now things like your car, that’s a little harder to do ’cause a lot of times the problem is, it gets into like the HVAC system or the heating system. So you’re gonna have to kind of clean all of these things out or it’s just gonna keep growing and spreading it into you. So it’s a little easier to say, “Why don’t we look at maybe getting a different car “versus a different house?” Also making a safe room in your house where, you know, “Okay, like, hey, this is to be the spot.” Where you sleep is pretty critical because that’s eight hours, hopefully, six to eight hours, you know, a night. 

So like no moldy mattresses or pillows, which is, you know, that’s what I love about latex is that it’s, you know, just so much easier. I found at Costco, this amazing charcoal infused latex, you know, pillow. So I, kind of, I don’t know that the charcoal’s actually detoxing anything, but it makes me feel like it is. You can put covers on them too, so it’s fine to do that. There’s the allergy stores have actual covers that you can cover your beds with, but with the latex mattress they don’t grow things. So it’s also looking at, you know, the fact that you don’t want to be attracting a lot of electromagnetics, ’cause that’s another thing that we don’t. 

With mold, mold usually thrives in a heavy metal situation, and heavy metals work as an antenna, so you’re kind of also bombarded with more electromagnetics. And if you ever like go around like a telephone pole and you look where places grow mushrooms, like there’s a ton more because they thrive in that environment. So it’s simple things like reducing your electromagnetic exposure, working to keep your heavy metal load down or at least, you know, kind of getting it down as you’re getting down your microbial load. You know, I do a lot with air quality, I think quality is so important. And so it’s a very simple thing that you can start to clean the air quality of your house. Oftentimes if it’s porous things you need to get rid of ’em, you know, if you can’t ozonate them. There’s EC3 is like another, kind of, laundry additive type of thing that you could use. A lot of the people will, you know, wash all your clothes and your different things with, people will use peroxide, they’ll use the Oxy-Boost and also chlorine. 

So you often have to kind of do more, not all molds respond to the same things. So it’s kind of a mixture of cleaning up that way. Many times patients are too sick to do that, so you might have to hire someone to do that, that’s not having those kinds of problems. You know, it’s important to wear like, you know, an N95 mask, you know, you wanna wear protective gear as you’re getting into some of these areas. ‘Cause that’s one of the things I’m always amazed at, it’s like, “Oh, well we went in there and tore that off.” And it’s like, “what are you doing you’re already sick. You can’t clean that.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Right, don’t do your own remediation.

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

‘Cause you’re already are sick and you just expose yourself. Simple things, too, like Ritchie Shoemaker’s “Mold Warrior” book does talk a lot about, you know, taping off areas. And so that, that is in containment, you know, so if you know, you’ve got a water damage area, contain it and don’t go there till it gets worked out. Simply I always have, I love this tool, this is a hygrometer. It’s gonna tell me how much moisture is in my air, and it’ll tell me what’s the low and what’s the high, how warm is my house and how much moisture. And if it’s, you know, if you get too much moisture, that’s an indicator. Like I run dehydrating, you know, what do you call it?

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Dehumidifier.

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

Dehumidifiers, in all of my different spaces to keep my, you know, ratio under 30 so that I’m not, you know, missing it somewhere because you don’t always see and smell the mold. So those are simple things to just kind of start with. And then, you know, I love essential oils. So a lot of times I will diffuse or I will have people do steam inhalation ’cause that’s a super gentle way of at least clearing out your sinus cavity. ‘Cause your sinuses are so moist and warm, that’s where a lot starts at. You know like cedar oil, rosemary, frankincense, lavender, lemon eucalyptus, holy basal, tea tree. Those are some of my favorites. And you know, it used to be that Wise Women Herbals used to have a lovely mixture of many of those that you would actually put on a Q-tip up your nose as a treatment, and it would kind of open up the turbinates so that you can breathe a little bit better. 

So, you know, having that diffusing those in the air is a gentle easy way of kind of helping your air quality happen. And, you know, simple things like when you look at a beam of sunlight coming into your house, which we remember what that is in the Northwest, it’s been a while . If you see a whole bunch of particulates, you know, you might need to do some cleaning up of the air and filtration. So, you know, starting with some of those just simple, basic things can make a huge difference in, you know, quality of life. And a lot of times you just have to get well enough that you can think again, so you can contain what’s doing all the things, ’cause it’s very easy to just feel like, “Ugh, this is so much.” 

Because mold is so, you know, it tends to hit that, all of those fatty tissues, which is like our nerves, our brain, our cell walls, you know, I really like people to make sure that they’re getting good, essential fatty acids in and you know, your phosphatidylcholine, you know, your essential fatty acids. And you know, of course, we like to do that if we can. I’m thinking like chias, and I’m thinking, soaked chias are great, you know, form of essential fatty acids. Some of the chlorellas are really great, you know, of course, you want it to be lab grown or glass grown, you don’t want pond scum chlorella because it’s so good at mopping up heavy metals, it can be toxic if you’re not getting it. You know, if you’re paying $2 for a pound, it’s probably not the highest quality. So, you know, some of those like seaweeds and chlorellas can be really good, like just adding into your diets. A lot of the nuts and seeds, you know, can go both ways, they’ve got a lot of the good, I like the smaller seeds and nuts to be honest. 

Trying to do some of those food-based things as well as, you know, a lot of people do really well, Patricia Kane introduce the phosphatidylcholine, IV infusions, which can be miraculous for folks. Because instead of trying to kill anything, ’cause when you start to kill, they’re gonna least mycotoxins and you’re gonna feel worse. So if you can just start by gentle things like adding the right fats to protect your nervous system , and then maybe adding in like food-based binders, which is kind of where things like, chia’s a double-edge sword because if you take chia seeds and eat them with a out soaking them, they’re very constipating ’cause they grab all the water from around them. I love the fibers. Basically asparagus has been, you know, asparagus extract has always been a pretty powerful binder. 

Dried strawberries the fiber in that, beans are, you know, simple things that people can add into their diets. And, of course, you know, the flip side of that is you wanna be kind of avoiding your more histamine foods, alcohol, sugar are kinda like your go-tos, but also gluten and dairy. You know, it’s kind of surprising, but meat is a really high histamine food too. So if you’re already inflamed, you can still have meat, but you kind of wanna have, when you get meat, you freeze it until you’re getting ready to eat it and then you pull it out, you cook it, you eat it. And leftovers, leftovers are a medium for things to grow in. 

And that’s another way of checking your house, too, is like how quickly does fruit mold on your countertop? That’s an indicator of toxicity in that area. Because in a low humidity and non-moldy house, you can often leave fruit on the counter for a week or so. Whereas if there’s more of those in the air mycotoxins, they’re gonna hop onto that sugar and they’re gonna start breaking it down, ’cause that’s what they’re meant to do in the universe is, you know, they biodegrade things. We just don’t want ’em biodegrading our host body that we have to be in.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Clearly, clearly. So I have a question for you, too, here in regards to some of these patients that I’ve seen and you’ve probably seen as well can develop some pretty intensive sensitivities when they’re in these environments for a period of time, and it may be difficult to even make changes to their diet sometimes because they may only have a couple foods that they feel like they can safely eat or, you know, if you bring in even nutrients from the outside or definitely not killers, you know, like you’ll trigger them even further. You mentioned LDI is maybe one of those tools. Do you have some other, do you have other tools or ways that maybe you navigate some of the more sensitive manifestations of this illness and whether it be, MCS, multiple chemical sensitivities or other, you know, sort of variations of, or mass cell activation or, you know, as they all sort of interrelate to each other, as it stands. What type of tools do you use in those situations?

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

Well, I think of it all as inflammation, you know, so I do love the low-dose immuno therapy, especially with histamine and histidine as a start point. And then I’ll often layer in the mold, the environment, the inhalants. A lot of times I make remedies from the person, you know, I have them take samples from their house, like, “Go get me some of your mold, you know, “go in your window seal, go underneath your bed, “go in all the areas, put it on a cute tip, bring it in, “we’ll put it in 10 mls of sterile water.” So nothing should grow in that. And then when you have this disgusting cocktail of things that grow, and I use that sometimes to show people like, “If you do a nasal swab and then black mold “is growing on it, you know, within two weeks, “that’s a good indicator we need to look deeper at this .” And they can see that, you know, it’s not like you have to convince them of it. 

So I do that, but I also think about just general anti-inflammatories. I love, you know, if they’ll tolerate glutathione, you know, that’s a great one, you know, and there are some great glutathiones that don’t taste like rotten eggs out there. And NAC is another important one, kind of, also really encouraging the gallbladder, because if our gallbladder’s not really, if you’re not making bile and storing it and pumping it out, it’s very hard to get those mycotoxins to come out of your liver. And so liver support, I like to do a lot of like artichokes and cruciferous vegetables and, or even just manually pumping your liver, you know. And if you don’t have someone that can help pump liver for you, you can roll onto a yoga roll or you can, you know, cut a Nerf Soccer Ball in half and roll, your liver’s that big right hand side. If you kind of go by where your ribcage is, it’s that whole right-hand side. And if you push on your liver, it shouldn’t be tender, you know, so palpating and showing them, “Look, your liver is really cranky here.” I do a lot with lasers, you know, it’s been pretty amazing looking at ultraviolet light and blue light with riboflavin has a very synergistic effect. 

Most people tolerate riboflavin, it’s just a B vitamin, and you can rinse your mouth, you can rinse your nose and then laser that, so that’s another pretty simple, easy way to kind of calm, you know, that inflammatory process down. And of course I like, you know, vitamin E, I like, A and D. I love melatonin and I love high, high dose melatonin as an amazing anti-inflammatory, vitamin D is a little tricky, ’cause if you have other infections like Lyme sometimes because it kind of boosts your immune system in a certain way, there can be some reactivity with that. I also like different, like CytoQuel from Researched Nutritionals. I like quail eggs. You know, quail eggs are very anti-inflammatory and most, if you have a, we have a Asian market here, so we could go to the Asian market and buy them by the dozens. 

They’re a little hard to crack open, but they’re a great tool that way. The other big thing I do is binders, you know, so get as much of the inflammation down, we all have our favorite anti-inflammatory thing. Because they are so sensitized, that’s why I tend to go to the least, you know, altering of those anti-inflammatories. And then binders, you know, I love to do food binders, which we talked a little bit about the fibrous kind of foods. But you know I still do like just straight up charcoal, it’s cheap, it’s easy, most people can tolerate making it, I have made charcoal lemonade where they’re gonna add the charcoal into water with lemon juice and, you know, if they need to sweeten it, they could use like a monk fruit or Stevia, you know, has whole leaf or whole plant Stevia has other antimicrobial effects too. 

So it’s a simple way of just gently kind of binding throughout the day with it, and it’s, you know, it looks like black sludge, and so the kids love that. Charcoal will turn your poop black, so warn your people that that’s gonna happen, and it’s nothing to be shocked of. You don’t really wanna take it when you’re taking essential fatty acids or nutrients. You wanna take it away from your food, which gets to be kind of a hard thing to do. And I also love like GI Detox is another great one. If people tolerate chlorella, I like chlorella and spirulina both just because they are so jampacked full of nutrients as well. Many people don’t tolerate digesting it, and so they need like a cellulose type of enzymes so that they don’t get the gas and bloating. But sometimes the gas and bloating is also because they didn’t take enough of it. 

So it’s a little bit tricky with binders of finding that level of enough to do the job without creating constipation. And because so many of these folks have altered neurology because of the mycotoxin they lose the movement, the peristalsis of their intestines. So we really want to, I do a lot of castor oil packs, you know, whether that’s on your, I have ’em do their entire abdomen because many times it’s not just the liver, it’s also that they need to, kind of, get that colon and moving too. Some people do, enemas are very helpful for people, but a lot of people, it seems to not be the American love.

So it’s like, okay, you know, and I personally, it’s not my favorite modality either. So, you know, I find acupuncture to be super helpful to really look at some of the master points. And what I’ll do is I’ll actually put beads or seeds on them. I don’t use the tacks as much ’cause I mostly am working with little ones. But you can laser, seed, bead, magnet, specific acupuncture points to help with the lungs and the kidney and the liver and the gallbladder. And that could really make a gentle difference without having to be one more thing. And they just have to reach up and stimulate it a couple times a day. So those are some of my favorite ways to just, kind of, quiet, and then quiet it down and not forget things like the lymphatics too. Are you on a rebounder? 

Okay, jumping on a rebounder is too big, get a little Chi Machine, you know, you put your feet in it and it shakes it back and forth. That movement is gonna be very beneficial to kind of getting things moving and draining. And I like foot baths, but I don’t like the water grossness of dealing with it. So I often will use the radio frequency foot detox instead, ’cause you can just slip your foot on it, do the radio frequency and it’s basically stimulating all those meridians through your acupuncture, giving you more energy to do the different things. So I like to feed the bodies so the body can kick back into doing what it’s supposed to do. ‘Cause our bodies are pretty miraculous at making it through.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Sure. So let’s say you get all this boarded or, you know, we got a nice plan together, looks good, people are doing it for several months, maybe longer, but, you know, but maybe they’re still sick too. Do you find that sometimes there’s maybe like an emotional connection to the inability for people to get over mold or there’s some other, sort of, you know, blockage in their system that may not be as well addressed by just, you know, overloading, not to overloading, but just loading them up with supplements or, you know, chemicals or drugs or whatever it may be. Is there something else to mold that you see that may keep people from getting better?

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

Definitely. I mean, and I think it’s not just with mold, I think it’s with all illnesses. We it’s so funny to me that in a lot of medical settings we wanna separate the mind and the body, which I think as time goes on, we all know we can’t. And so there’s a couple little handouts that I like to use. I like a lot of the five elements, concepts of following, what season are we in, and what organs are gonna kind of have a little bit more front stage during those seasons? Because you’ll see there’s season issues with a lot of our mold folks, like here in Washington, spring and fall tend to be the worst for a lot of my people. 

So I’m looking at, “Okay, what organs are gonna be needing “to kind of kick into gear here?” But also, how do you put it? All of this kind of comes into, I look at where we’re having trouble. If we keep having skin problems, right, skin problems I think about is just as a first step of boundaries, it’s our boundary between our bag of cells and the rest of the world. And it’s also our, “Okay, that’s too much indicator.” You know, usually our liver, our kidneys, our colon, our lungs can handle the detox process, but when they, when somebody’s not able to do their share of the detox process and it’s gotten to that point where it’s too much, then we start having crazy skin things ’cause it’s like, it’s just gotta come out one way or the other. 

So then I look at having that conversation of “How are your boundaries in general?” “Cause it’s not like, I mean, I can’t speak for anyone other than my own family and household, but it wasn’t like, “Hey, we’re gonna have boundary workshops this weekend “so that you can be you and I’ll be me, “and we’ll all be great in our own unique individualness “separate from each other.” So like it’s kind of digging into, “Well, what is your persona? “How have you been trained?” You know, I look at a lot of people who have, you know, digestive issues, with the small and large intestine. And you know, I think about the emotions that often go with that, small intestine is often related to not feeling at home or not feeling homeless. So has there been migrations? A lot of this was based on the German practitioner, Dr. Hellinger, you know, who was a Jesuit priest who was very inspired by, you know, Shapiro and psychodrama and the Zulu African. So, you know, I’ve been kind of instilled with this thought process of, if you’re doing all of the physical things and it’s not moving the way you would expect it to do, let’s look deeper at some of those underlying themes that may be happening for this individual or this individual’s system. 

Because no matter how you connect or don’t connect with your family, you’re part of that system and you are affected by that system energetically. And I love that, you know, Lynne McTaggart’s done some great work on this. Rupert Sheldrake’s done some awesome work on this. And I feel like Rusty Roy’s water work is, whereas Jerry Pollock’s water work kind of ties in with this, you know, where, what are we 80% water? And Emoto has shown us also that water imprints, and so all of these things, whether you’re, you know, in utero or a being in a household, you’re being imprinted by everything around you and it’s telling your body how to work. So if you’ve had a lot of fear issues in your life, your kidneys might not function the way they were designed to function. 

And may not be your fear issue. If you grew up with, you know, a loss, and a parent had to carry the fear of survival, that’s gonna affect everybody in the household. The same goes with anger and the liver, you know, resentment in the gallbladder, grief in the lungs. So sometimes what we’ll do, one of the things that I like to do with people is just called trauma writing, and it’s super interesting. We had a surgeon here in the Seattle area that before he would do surgery, he would have people do this trauma writing. And it’s a pretty simple thing. You make a list of everything that you consider a trauma. And what I consider a trauma might be totally different than, you know, it might be, “Oh, Susie was, you know, “mean to me on the bus,” versus it doesn’t have to necessarily mean some huge horrific, you know, trauma, but if you experience it as a trauma, that’s your trauma. 

So it’s making a list of all those kinds of losses and things that have created, you know, damage for you, and then writing for 20 minutes. You set an egg timer or timer on your iPhone, whatever, and you write whatever comes to mind. The key factor is you don’t stop writing. And I have people like, “Oh, Nurse Andi has me doing this stupid exercise “and I don’t think it’s real, , you know whatever it is.” So you do that for three days in a row, you don’t go longer, you just do 20 minutes. You do whatever you wanna do. You burn it, you shred it, you throw it away, whatever it is. 

But it’s amazing how this simple connection of the brain and the consciousness to these different things that we tend to wanna push away will often shift the body’s ability to actually do what it’s supposed to do, which is really an intriguing thing. And then, you know, if you feel like things are more systemic, there are tools like, you know, Family Constellation work where you can, you know, providers can help with walking you through a more systemic thing. Let’s say, you know, your family immigrated and, you know, a loved one was lost. You know, there’s all these different pieces that you wouldn’t necessarily think affect you so much. You don’t even really know about them from your family history, but the reality is it resonates in you still. So it’s like, of course, do your own conscious pieces of release and reset. 

And then there’s also if you need to sometimes these systemic pieces. And this is that part also of like, one thing I see with patients a lot is, you know, we have a 60% divorce rate, which is terrible, and children are very torn between loyalty. And, you know, when you are made up of two beings, you carry them in every cell of your body. So if you have to pick a side with your parents, that’s a perfect setup for autoimmune dysregulation. And so, you know, so these are these unconscious things that can have a huge effect on our overall wellbeing. So it’s, you know, trying to kind of bring it to consciousness and give it loving support in the best way possible. And sometimes it’s, you know, thanks for life and let’s leave it there. But there’s a lot of different ways that you can kind of work with that, that can really create a lot of freedom and a much easier way for the body to recuperate from whatever illness, mold illness, or whatever else is going on.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Yeah. No, that’s very insightful, thank you. Very good ideas too. Well, we’re about near the end of our timing for today. There’s a lot of really good information though, so you might have to all listen to this one twice or three times to get it all, . I appreciate, I appreciate your answering our questions for today and providing information for our audience. And yeah, it was really good to talk to you. Any, you can add any last minute farewells if you like, but I appreciate everything that you’ve offered for us today.

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

I just wanted to say thank you Dr. Kunkle. It’s so nice to see you again, just being able to just walk over and have a nice adjustment and get some acupuncture from you.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Yes, I miss those days for sure, yeah. Andi and I worked together.

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

That was a good times. And just, I just wanna say thank you to all of the people, all of the practitioners out there that are digging deeper and thank you to all of the patients that are hopefully finding, you know, resolution, relief, help, vitality, and that, you know, to remember this is gonna get better. You will get better, you can get better, there’s lots of us that wanna help. And just, you know, thank you all for having me on, I so appreciate it.

Dr. Jamie Kunkle

Thank you very much, Andi. And you can find Andi at www.nurseandi.com, Andi with an i at the end, A-N-D-I. And she has a lot of really good information. We’ll try to post some of the handouts that, sort of, mentioned some of the elemental theories as she mention some of the emotional techniques and this kind of thing. There’s a lot of good handouts here too, that we’ll try to, you know, put on the connect to the Summit here. So, all right, well we’re done for today. Take care until next time. Farewell. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Andreanna Rainville, RN, LMP

Thanks.