- Discover how toxic mold exposure can manifest in unexpected ways, including autoimmune flare-ups, anxiety, depression, skin reactions, fatigue, and even symptoms in pets before they appear in humans.
- Understand why removing yourself from the source of mold exposure is often the most important step in recovery, and why remediation decisions can become emotionally and financially complex for families.
- Learn how nervous system support, detoxification strategies, environmental awareness, and therapies such as EMDR can play important roles in recovering not only physically but also emotionally from mold-related illness and trauma.
Full Transcript
Introduction and Personal Mold History 0:00
I was literally feeling drugged, like I could not get out of bed. And I had a dog who was 13 years old at the time, and she literally started having incontinence out the entire thing and I can speak to going through mold as a single person. I could speak going to mold going as married person with a child. So I have experience in all three of them. This is Dr. Talks. Welcome to Mold Microtoxin and Chronic Illness Summit. I'm your host, Dr. Anne Shippey, and today we get to talk with one of my dear friends, Doctor Amy Myers.
She's a New York Times bestselling author and she's internationally acclaimed functional medicine physician specializing in autoimmune thyroid digestive issues and so much more. she has such an incredible wealth of information. Thank you so for joining us, Amy. so much. God, I did not think this is how I would start this interview at all. Well, thank you so, much and I had so many things going on right now and this precious time with you. Oh no, it's just thinking about all the history that you and i have together through our It's been a lot.
So let's start with where you first learned about mold. How did you know it was a thing and medicine that we were missing all the time? Well, that is actually from you because I used to think everything was mercury toxicity. So for those that don't know, I'm classically trained as a conventional physician as are you in ER medicine and then went into functional medicine. And through my own health history with Graves' disease and started practicing along, you know in the same city as you and you, and I became friends.
You know, I had many things going on with me, SIBO, Candida, had been a vegetarian forever, Graves' disease, you name it. I hadn't leaky gut and mercury overload. And so I went through that detox that I do think that we see things from a certain lens. So you kept telling me all about mold and I thought, oh no, no. There's nothing going here. You know, kind of like lime. I mean, you know until I met Darren Ingalls, nothing was lime either. Now there's so much that's all three of these things. You know, it wasn't until my own experience that I was getting sick again.
I had helped myself recover. Um, I have my thyroid ablated, so I couldn't get that back. But my autoimmune markers had gone negative and I. Was in an office and. Had bought an older in. An older office in Austin and had bought. Older home in, Austin. And I felt drugged in the house when I moved in and my dog pretty fast, if I remember correctly. Yeah, very fast. Like, boom. It was. I'm, I clearly was sort of tolerating my office to some degree. It wasn't great either. No, it wasn' but I think the house was the big problem because I moved into this house, started going through renovation while I was living there and I just felt drugged.
I mean, like I, you know, am a person, if you can't tell I have high energy. You know I never. I don't generally drink caffeine and I just wake up with a lot of energy. And I was literally feeling drugged, like I could not get out of bed. I had a dog who was 13 years old at the time, and she literally started having incontinence out-of-nowhere. Well, of course, you know, long story short, uncover that it's mold to go through the entire thing. And I can speak to going through mold, as a single person, I could speak going to mold as married person.
I speak mold going with a child. So I have experience in all three of them. Having known you and known how sick patients can get and having been sick, I just literally moved out, went and stayed with a friend. And the very interesting thing, obviously my fatigue stopped immediately, but my dog, the first night there, didn't have incontinence. I never put her on the medication and her incontinence went away immediately. Literally. That's amazing and that's such a good point because a lot of times our animals get sick even before the humans do and so they're really the canaries sometimes.
Right. So once I got triggered, I now am, very similar to you, that I can feel it a lot of places. I had patients coming in to see me who, without doing anything, would just say, look, i'm just going to tell you straight up, you got toxic mold, and I could feel that all over you. You know, what I imagine some people, I don't know who you've had on the summit, but I mean, got rid of everything, literally everything. I moved into a brand new apartment with my dog and I bought a mattress and slept on.
And brought nothing with me other than my. and so, you know I have that experience of get, uh, You, know where you want me to go with this, But I had the experience literally getting rid everything and starting from ground zero recovering and then meeting my now husband and dating him and. Again, I'd gotten all my autoimmune markers negative and everything. And then I started dating him and suddenly I'm having these hand swellings and my hands are turning like red and white. I was like a kid in a candy store because I had my own clinic.
So I would check my labs all the time and I saw some pretty scary auto immune markers, which were negative. But you know, as you and know I mean, they weren't zero, but they were negatively, were creeping up. Again I just went on this search. He was in brand new house. know, certainly that can't be a problem. Literally brand new had just moved in.
First Mold Exposure and Recovery 6:00
And again, just kind of looked under every rock, every under rock. Didn't want to believe it again and, you know discovered that it was back in his house. The interesting thing this time is, I remember it in February and our anniversary is the beginning of March, and I looked at him and just said, ''I'm moving out. I'm finding a brand-new apartment. You can come. But these autoimmune markers are so scary, I have to get out of here and again, like leave everything behind. And again started over with a mattress on the floor.
That time I actually got really sick afterwards, which was interesting. I had all kinds of digestive issues. I started having panic attacks. I got hyperthyroid again. That seems to be a thing for me that my, you know, even though I don't have a thyroid and I'm on the same dose, I get hyperthiroid. But again, started over.I mean,I was so sensitive. At that point,i also get chemically sensitive and so,you know the walking in the target and the, just everything, the laundry aisle. Of course, i don t really care for that on a given day when I m in a good day.
Yeah. You know, I mean, like couldn't even smell new clothes kind of stuff. And I was literally on our one year anniversary sleeping on a balcony. I wasn't so sick. Couldn't tolerate anything but being outside. Again, you know just went through my program, the things you do, to get the mold out the glutathione, charcoal. Really the biggest for me has always been just removing the exposure. So many people don't want to do that because they're so tied And this is where I'll start getting emotional again when it comes to my daughter.
But they're so tied to their things. And I wasn't tied anything, so it was pretty easy for me. So I just got rid of things and just moved. I mean, having worked with so many sick patients for mold, I knew how bad it could get. The hope in it all is I also know how you can recover from it. Because I've had other patients that couldn't tolerate things and were sleeping on balconies as well. And, you know, I know you can recover from this, but you've got to get. Even though you, know. You can. Oh my God.
Yeah. Very scary. So, and of course, when you're trying to find. another doctor to try to take it out of your hands, it's so difficult because there's few that really understand it. And anyway, so my husband and I, or mostly me, went on a quest to, we bought some land in Austin, outside of Austin a couple of acres, because it was one of those things like if something happens to the house, I don't want to have a neighbor next to me. I want be able to go camp outside. It's terrible that you have to be thinking these ways, but that's how I was thinking because I thought I can't go through this ever again.
And then I realized, why am I buying land in the allergy capital of the world? Why am doing this? So we went on a quest of high deserts and went to Bend, Oregon, went two places in Colorado, came to Santa Fe and settled on Santa fe because I still have my company in Austin and we still our home there. And, you know, it was a way to be able to go back and forth very quickly, but the humidity here generally is low. the most bomb-proof, mold- proof house on the face of this earth. It's beautiful, too.
Well, thank you. I achieved it, except for the fact that the builder didn't follow the architect's plans. And it was one area that nobody consulted me on and I wasn't involved in. that I had a problem with. So we built a house out of pumicecrete and steel, so I would have no wood in the house. We used dens glass instead of sheetrock. I mean, you have to have something for a ceiling, So, we had dens glasses as our ceilings, but all the walls are pumiccretes, and if they couldn't do a pumiscrete wall, then it was steel and dens class, But the requirement was every wall that had plumbing in it had to be pumiscrate.
Um, so I don't know, eight, 10 leaks later, um, thank God I had built the house the way that I. Built the House because you had, you literally had. Yeah, I literally cannot count the number, but there are six bathrooms and there was in every single sink or toilet in the entire house. So, when they turned on the water, there were three leaks behind the wall in, the plumbing just from nails from the people that put in. We then had plaster. It was pumicecrete walls with plaster over it and plaster has a cage, so to speak, a metal cage and then they'd nail it into the plaster and it nailed through the piping, which is a very normal thing to happen, not normal, but a common thing in quick construction, all this kind of stuff.
But in a custom home that took multiple years to build, didn't think it was happened. The worst part of it is, and Builder didn t even tell me that it happened, or the architect, until there was a weeping leak that then the plaster was wet all up the wall and they had to call to tell that there s going to be a delay in the build and then all trust was lost at that point and I had you know, my mold inspector up and everything. And luckily at that point all was, well, we don't know about the cabinets, but we just threw those out and my builder.
Anyway, I was okay. Then this was the place that I thought I've done it. I have done everywhere else. I don't know about your house, but everywhere else I had lived since losing everything from mold was furniture from Target and inexpensive stuff because I always had that fear that it would happen to me again, and I never wanted to invest in clothes or art. Literally, our house in Austin doesn't have a single thing on the wall. I mean, it's kind of a horrible way to live, to have nice furniture or to hang anything on the wall because I was always in fear that something was going to happen, I would have a leak and lose everything.
Everything would be disposable. Yes, right. And I bought things like pleather sofas and pleether chairs, things that you could wipe down and that were kind of bulletproof. Here I took the other, like, I've built this house, done it, mastered it. I had all these leaks and I managed to get through it all without having issues. So I, you know, bought nice furniture and things were porous and bought, very different things to buy when you're decorating. Yeah, I mean, just the normal things that most normal people buy, new furniture, the hang art.
And on Christmas Eve, we had a few drops of water. It was pouring down rain, it was freezing cold, and we add a couple of drops water dropped down on the floor. You know, I thought, well, what could this, this has to be coming from the roof. And it wasn't. and the builder said, Oh, no, No,no. I think it's coming, from, the drier air duct, because I noticed it condensating during the build. You what? And he said yeah, but I just, you know I, thought I was like, and what you thought once you closed the ceiling, it would be okay.
So it was actually quite humorous that. They noticed this, I mean, it's not humorous. I can only laugh at this point. But anyway, they installed the dryer vent instead of as the architect had drawn it. They installed, the drier vent, and with these very, very tall ceilings, First of all, if you're building a house, you always want your laundry room to be on the outside of the house. I did not know that at the time and nor should I have needed to, but certainly my architect and builder should have confirmed that knowing who they were building this house for.
So our laundry was in the middle of house and so it came out and then went up. And right at this bend, it had been condensating because the air differential in that space was hot to cold with this hot air blowing through. And then over time, as it was continuing to condensate, every time we did laundry, likely, it eventually broke down. It had this mastic around it and then water dripped. And they opened up the cavity saying, like, you've built this house in a way that there can't possibly be mold, so they didn't contain it.
Of course, never want to believe that after everything I've done at this point to never be exposed again to believe that this could be happening to you again. And so I go along with it and no, there's water with dryer lint coming through. Now I have mold spores all over my house and I started breaking out in a rash.
Building a Mold-Safe Home 15:00
My hands started swelling and getting red like they normally do. We were on our way out of town. So we just went on the trip and again, I just tried to like, this isn't happening me again this, isn' happening And I walk in the door when we get home and I just looked at my husband and said, shit, excuse my language, but you have a problem. I could feel it immediately. Immediately. I mean, I started reacting before we left, but it was like we laughed like 24 hours later or something. But it like being away from it and walking in.
It was, like, so, and that was something really hard for me to grapple with, with everything that, you know, that I had been through. And the interesting thing is that my mold, my Ritchie Shoemaker labs were all positive. very quickly, which was so interesting. And the interesting thing is I had just done them in October because I was thriving and I doing so well and all my autoimmune markers were negative again and i was literally like celebrating with my functional medicine physician like I'm great you know in october and then this happens in january and you now the the labs are all elevated so I mean luckily I have the you know, the negative and I was thriving.
And anyway, I can't, as you can imagine, in a large lawsuit over this now, but yeah, it was back to, we had to move out, got rid of everything that I had just bought. This time it really, really difficult with the child because I don't care about anything I own, it's stuff. But when you have a five-year-old that's asking, where is this stuffed animal? Or mommy, mommy can you go back to the house and I want these princess shoes and that costume? And she's like, and if you don' know where they are, I'm going to tell you exactly where the are mommy.
And meanwhile I know that they're not there. I in the garage in a bag. And so it was extremely difficult. Or when we finally were able to come home, you know, the most important thing to me was salvaging as much of her stuff as I could and not having this be a part of memory or history. I mean, obviously I cared about getting well, but my exposure time this time was only a week. And so I didn't physically get as sick, but mentally, I mean, i got diagnosed with PTSD. I was unable to work for almost a year.
i just took my first flight that had a layover with my daughter and however long that's been now because it's manifest and flying for me. So, the ripple effects this time were so much greater than the physical. And then coming home and Ella asks you, well, where is this or where's that? And you're like, oh, I don't know. Mom, you know, this stuffed animal's hair didn't look like this before. Why does it look that? I mean, anything that I could just buy another of. So she didn' t notice. I did. But there were certain things, that Santa had brought her that, I couldn't find, new ones.
And so I washed them and then they didn t turn out the same and I have an observant child, who's like, what's wrong with this? She moved on, but for me, it was the biggest dagger in the heart. And it, you know, was just devastating for, me that I even had to, go through that with her. So. Well, the good news is that she's in a clean environment and that, she doesn't have to make she really is healthy. She's so healthy Yeah, of course. So yeah, so I don't know where you want to go from here, but I can talk about it from a medical perspective, from personal perspective from, you know, how do you do it as you're alone with somebody without somebody, I had always told people you need to flee and there's no way you can remediate your house.
And it was a difficult concept for me to think that this home could be remedied. But given how I built the house and the humidity levels here and just the types of surfaces with steel and with the plaster and things like that, you know, we felt like it could be cleaned. But I mean, I got rid of everything again. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about, let's keep with a relationship side of this because it's really, it is such a big part of the relationship with ourselves and how we talk to ourselves about our situation, our decisions.
You have an amazing husband that really respects your opinions and wants to support you in such a great way. But even then, it's challenging for him, right? Oh, yeah. I was thinking if you needed another interview, you could probably interview him of the trauma of all of it. Probably this time around, the hardest, and I can't speak for him, but I think the hard is, I am so strong and can do anything. For him to see me so incapacitated, that was the most difficult. For the most part, I was able to hide that from my child, but there were times that I couldn't, and that was very difficult for me as a parent and as woman and a strong woman.
Why do you think the key things happened to really help you? I did EMDR therapy. I mean, that truly was. for very old childhood stuff and I didn't find it helpful, but in such an acute, that and lots of Xanax, you know, I am a very controlled person in the sense that I don't even barely ever drink. And so, You know I remember one day calling my doctor in tears saying that, had had to take three Xanox in a day. And that was the most difficult thing for me because... I do believe that I can get through anything and I could do anything.
And this was so out of my control and had affected me emotionally so much. I mean, it's a fundamental, you know, Mavlov's hierarchy of needs, having a safe place to live. If this home wasn't safe, how was I ever going to have a home that was safe? After everything that I mean, everybody on this job knew who they were building this house for and why they we're building the house and everybody knew. I met with everybody. The roofer, I don't want any seams. How are you sealing the seams? If a penetration has to go through the roof, what are we doing at the windows?
Every Friday for Almost three years, there were conversations about how are we going to handle this? How are going handle that? I was involved in everything. And then I'm kicking myself because the one thing that nobody asked me about was literally the only way I could have had mold in my house. It happened and they didn't ask me. Not only did they not ask about it, they did not follow the architect's plans. So, you know, I mean, there's nothing you can do when they're just, bad people doing, not following instructions, but I wasn't involved.
But anyway. Yeah, we were so vigilant about every detail and then to have this one. Yeah, I mean, so it's just back to, yeah, it affected me so to the core, because if you don't have a place to sleep and a space to live that's safe, and now the ante was so high. I now had a child. It wasn't me again where I could just do it, or even my husband who begrudgingly yet did the other things. I had a child now, the stakes were so high and I have spent so much time and money and energy to build this house.
The stakes could not have been higher for me. And then I was having this literally like a nervous breakdown over the whole situation. Having to take, you know, prescription medication to get through a day, which was just frightening on so many levels for me. So, I mean, the only two other times in my life I've ever had Xanax were when I had hyperthyroidism and I was literally, they created my thyroid and had dumping. I had moments when my thyroid was dumping and I would have spikes of hormones. And then the time I was sleeping on the balcony.
So, I mean, it's not something... I'm not taking prescription medication. I am getting to the root cause. I drink a few times a year, that's it. So, yes, it was very difficult for me to be in that situation to have to take those kind of drugs to get through a day. You decided to try EMDR for people who don't know what that is. Yeah. I mean, what does EM DR stand for? Do you know? What? Oh, you've never done it? Okay. Patients that have done. Yeah. Sure. I mean, like I said, for, I had done before and it had not done anything for me.
So I don't know if this was the difference with the practitioner. Or I think it was that it this highly emotional and very specific event that was also highly acute, that is was very easy to trigger and to get into the thing. So what happens is you get in to, you start thinking about whatever it is and then you can either do rapid eye movements or have a sound in your ears,
Family Impact and Emotional Trauma 25:00
alternating in ears that resets the neurological pathways in your brain to, you know, basically to reprogram your brains as if the situation was different. And so that was very helpful. It was so helpful that I had the woman who helped me out. She didn't live in-state, she got licensed for me, which was kind and amazing. I flew her to the house and I walked through every room with her, to try to re-program me. so that I could live in my house. I mean, I can physically live You know, there was anger, sadness, anxiety.
There was this whole emotional component that I can't say is even 100% gone because clearly I'm literally in my office staring out at the house and you asked me about mold and I broke into tears. I mean, please go look on the internet of the times that i've ever had an interview where I am like bawling, crying. You will not find one. And all I do is crying this entire interview. Clearly I am still triggered by this, but not in a way that I, you know, I'm able to work. I do have to take a half a Xanax if I have the fly, But that's the only time, You know I need it at this point.
So, I've made great strides in overcoming the situation once again. I bought new furniture, I hung some art, and I still have my moments in the house for sure. And I should still my moment of questioning and things like that. someone like you and me can go through the world and not have those moments when we've gone through what we'd gone though. So I now can speak to the emotional component. Yes, I mean, it was lots of EMDR, lots EM DR. I don't know. And then the whole two days, she was here at my house for two straight days of emdr to walk around the house.
it's something that I just got to a place where I'm functioning. And so, you know, I've stopped, but, there are things that come up that literally I have just had some stuff going on that, anyway, that i need to probably go back to it too, just as a like tuna all the time, i would say. You know, just to conventional medicine, that there is a time and a place, and I would not have made it through without Xanax. I mean, I wouldn't have. And, you know I think probably something for me to tell people is there's a And I told that to my patients all the time, right?
I mean you don't want to be on immunosuppressive drugs, you want get to the root cause, but in an acute moment there is a time if you are sick and you have a bacterial infection and need antibiotics. I had a situation that I mean, it took a while for the EMDR to take hold and to work and for this situation to unravel itself and get better and somebody to come in and clean the house. I was the big unknown for me was getting on somebody's schedule and getting it cleaned. And I don't even want to get into the whole botch thing where I hired one company and they actually made everything worse.
And so I then had to have another company come in. And, so there was the unknown of knowing whether I was going to be able to get back in the house was so anxiety producing that, you know, once I got over that hurdle and they started cleaning and I, was, able, to enter the House. I mean, I didn't enter my house for. There's plastic up, containment up everywhere. I don't know how many months it was before I was able to actually go into the house without a hazmat suit. And so conventional medicine, I guess what I want to say is as hard as it is for me to take it and as broken as I felt I need to have to I mean, I could not have gotten through if I didn't have that.
So I think taking things in acute situation and not using it as a long-term crutch or using as, you know, some long term solution for yourself. If I had never gotten to the root and never done the EMDR, and I just thought Xanax was my solution to this anxiety and PTSD, that's not the route that I was going to take, right? And so I think that is an important thing for people to know that it's okay to need to, you know, do conventional methods and means in a acute situation. Absolutely. And it really is fascinating how I see anxiety being a barometer for a lot of people for what their environmental exposures are.
So anytime people are feeling like, oh, okay, I need to address the anxiety again, we have to look deeper. Because I would say pretty much always there's an underlying trigger I had a family, a woman comes to me and her daughter and the daughter had depression, she was a teenager, but some other things that easily could just not be explained by mold. But of course I tested her and everything and it came back that it was mold and she didn't want to hear it. It's fine. You have to be ready to here it, you have be to ready act.
it's not something that you can sort of do half-hearted or otherwise it wasted efforts in a lot of cases. And, you know, it was a few years later, she wrote me back and said that they finally realized it, did something about it. It was like the mother had anxiety, the daughter had depression, and the newborn had something else. And it's like it all went away. So, I'm sure you or others have talked about this, that it can manifest in people in so many different ways. And that is why it is so tricky unless you're working with a physician like yourself or when I was practicing, someone who's been through it, somebody that really understands it because it can be anything.
I mean, for me, it's this hand swelling, redness, white, almost like a Reynolds, but it' not cold and they're swelling and then it really doesn't. Then it a fine rash that my skin feels like it burning but nobody else can see it. Or people will say, oh, you look like you've been out in the sun or something. But I would always be like, Javier, can you see it? Can you? He's like no, I can't see. My skin is on fire. I just felt like my skin was burned. And then it really, the only other thing it is, is my autoimmune markers, ones you do not want to have, start creeping up.
So on the outward surface, my symptoms are not debilitating or even overt to anyone, but what is going on in the inflammatory response inside of me that unless I'm checking my labs, you would never know is really scary. And, okay, so, you know, back to the things, I have an infrared sauna, and I'm very lucky. I've a hyperbarics machine. You know I, have a supplement company, glutathione, charcoal, to get the stuff out. Glutathion, Charcoal, of course I wasn't doing hyper barics or that in the acute stage.
But later I was doing those things and I kind of do them on a regular basis. And those are things that I certainly did back when it was way more physical and my exposure had been longer. This time, like I said, I think the biggest thing that helped me was A, getting the house cleaned and retesting and knowing that there wasn't something here and then the EMDR. And then, you know, this is added reassurance of our special. Safe, yeah. So the sauna, the hyperbarics, glutathione, charcoal are your most important things to keep your head further above water so that the other kinds of exposures that we get all the time that, we can't control that your body zips them through.
Yeah. I mean, as you can imagine, owning a supplement company, I take all kinds Just a little bit more because you're such a wealth of knowledge on that. What are your... Let's talk about a few other things. Well, my Myers-Way Multivitamin, which is our number one top seller, we have pre-methylated B vitamins in it. So for the average person, that's going to be amazing. I mean, it's six pills, so it is chock full. People even just taking three a day can generally feel something from it in terms of energy.
more difficult for me to clear certain toxins such as mercury, which is why I had mercury overload. I don't think we know yet if that has any aspect in terms of clearing molds. So I have other genetics that don�t allow me clear molds, and so... We get so commonly with people affected by mold and it seems to accelerate the detoxification, so I think it's critical actually. Right. Then I take methylation support, which is additional pre-methylated B vitamins. I try to take glutathione every day. and just, you know, hotels and Airbnbs and all kinds of things.
Fish oils, vitamin D, probiotic. I mean, I say the four essentials are a multivitamin, fish oils vitamin, D and a probiotics. You know I take some things for mitochondrial support. Absolutely, because they're so affected by the micro toxins. I'm trying to think of what else I, I mean, you know, the box is chock full of things. Those are, those are really my main go-tos. I make a product, Leaky Gut Revive, and I also don't travel without that.
Treatment, EMDR, and Acute Support 35:00
We have a strawberry lemonade flavor that's delicious, so I just, when I want something refreshing, We have a paleo protein powder that, you know, I don't do these things every day, but, and then a reds and a greens. And so I just kind of, as I want them, getting them in my diet and I go through phases of I'm doing this every single day to, just by me sort of craving them. I get them three, four times a week kind situation. We're still aligning with our diet too. Like I know your diet is foundational.
You want to share a little bit about that? Sure, I mean, it's also, you know, was a vegetarian for 27 years and when I found out about functional medicine and really, although I'd had my thyroid ablated, just knew as a person with autoimmunity I was three times more likely to get another autoimmune condition. And so, excuse me, looking at ways to stop that fire and to hopefully prevent me from ever getting another Autoimmune Condition, which so far I've been able to do. And so, you know, I really worked to heal my gut.
I told you I was eating grains and legumes. So I had SIBO, Candida. You know? I mean, i was doing the, medical school, the Tofurkey, The Tofu Cheese, all this, tofu, everything. And Ezekiel, sprouted whole wheat bread because that, was healthy. so I, had to make some dramatic dietary changes from the sense that I you know, a vegetarian and a vegan at times, and I was eating all these whole grains. Now, I wasn't going out and eating Oreos because I grew up with parents that, you eating, you know, my mother made yogurt when we were little because she knew about the microbiome.
She made homemade wheat bread. We never had sugar cereal as a kid. So I didn't have to make dramatic shifts from Oreos and M&Ms to, real whole foods, but I had to a shift from whole grains and no meat to meat. I first started with meat and I thought I was going to have a bad reaction. And the first time I'd had meat, I literally woke up the next day like I need another burger. So it was like, I never looked back. Now I am particular about my meat and I have texture things and, you know, so I'm still picky about meat.
And of course eat grass fed, pasture raised and things like that. But I was still doing grains until I met Dr. Anne Shippey, who suggests I also give up grains. And even I resisted that for quite some time and then did and really saw a huge difference in me and started doing it with my patients. And so, I mean, probably what you're recommending to people is what I recommend. Now, as I've gotten better, I will eat some grains. I mean, I have a child, she eats a lot of white rice. Or I'll eat like a keto bread that's mostly resistant starch, things like that.
But I find that I can, it's the times where I'm sick with mold. That's really the only thing that hit me in the last 10 years has been mold three times. I've got to dial it in is what I tell people. I mean, I coined the phrase, the autoimmune spectrum back in 2015 when my first book, The Autoimmune Solution came out. And it really is, you know, when you're high up on the spectrum, When you are dealing with something, You've Got To. strict about it. Then as you're getting well, you can branch out.
I mean, I don't sit and eat corn chips every day or corn. My breakfast this morning was I can eat eggs. So I have a huge garden.I had Swiss chard from the garden, some sheep's cheese and egg, a little omelet on a siete tortilla.So I choose a Siete. But if we're out at Mexican because that's what my daughter wants,I'll either not eat one or sometimes I'll eat And I can do that now and be okay. Um, you know, whereas others prefer to just stay really strict on the no grains and whatnot, I've found that, that uh, in terms of the diet, as long as I'm not doing something every day.
Now I never eat gluten and I don't do cow's dairy or even really goats dairy. I could only do sheep dairy of like a hard cheese. And that's the only, dairy that I eat, but I, don' do any. regular dairy and a don't do gluten ever, ever. We're on a very similar path. I can do some occasional rice now and definitely do eggs. I don't know. You might want to stay away from it. It's so delicious because all of the, you know, fake cheeses out there are just filled with things and they don''t melt and you, know...
Well, I think the K-Morphine these that make you crave dairy. Okay. So it's probably a slippery slope for me. Yes, probably. But it is so nice to just like, okay, as long as I'm gluten-free, dairy- free meticulously, if I have a little bit of these other things, it''s doable, but still keep the core pretty clean. Yeah. So let's talk about travel. Yeah, I mean, travel, and this does not certainly mean that you're going to be Scott clean or that it's going be okay, but I just opt for new places. If we don't generally do Airbnbs, unless it is really clear that you can tell that is brand new place.
I mean, that it's, you know, and that, because nobody tells you what it is, I guess you could try to ask them or whatever. But I look for a newplace, but I tend to go for it. There's a, You can literally Google newest hotels and whatever, And there is a website that has an article. And I'm sure they get money off of you clicking the link and you don't need to do that. but in most major cities, there's an Article and it will tell you all of the newest Hotels. So even,you know I was just in New Orleans and You know, there are two hotels that I have gone to and stayed in and been okay.
So my criteria is really, is it new? How nice is hit? So I mean, literally I can be on one. We took a road trip and it was, you know looked a little schizophrenic of the places that we stayed from like Uber nice to, I always like a good residence in, because then you have a kitchen. If you can find a new residence in, they give you a kitchen. They generally have mini splits in there, so you're not sharing the air of everybody else. they don't use air fresheners now. Yeah, and then they have a refrigerator and a Kitchen.
So it just makes, depending on what kind of travel you are doing, certainly with a child, it makes eating, continuing to eat healthy, pretty easy. I mean, I do like to make smoothies when I travel. And so, you know, It's always nice to have There are also hotels now. I can't remember which chain it is, but things, I'm going to say a loft. Now they don't even have carpet. They just have the flooring in it. So I kind of look for that. Least carpeting, least amount of curtains. You know, just things that if there's a problem can get moldy.
And then if you're dealing with a place that has many splits instead of air conditioning units, then you hopefully prevent, if it was a leak somewhere else, it getting into your room. I didn't mention that about my house, but we did many split in our house for the very reason, right? I mean, I did not have an AC unit with duct work that needed to be cleaned. And the way that the mold spread around our house was just natural, but mostly from us walking around the house, right? It wasn't from a big AC system and air duct system, and all that kind of stuff.
So that's something else that we did in our houses that, well, when last summer none of them but one worked, all the pipings in the pumice crete walls, that was a headache. But generally speaking, yeah, I won't get into that part of the mess I got left with it. I had to get myself out of with these problems with the house, irregardless of a leak.
Diet, Supplements, and Travel Strategies 43:00
So yeah. Mini splits are also good. All you can kind of do in travel is look for the newest place. Again, you might be dealing with off-gassing of carpeting or flooring or paint or things like that, but I personally can deal with that better than I can with mold. I'll take off gassing, I mean, don't love it, But I will take that any day over mold and just know that if you go in one room, we have a thing in our family, all the bags stay right where they are. I make sure that the room is okay, and then if not, we ask to change rooms.
Oh, I forgot my whole mold exposure in Mexico, but that's a different story too. I just had a major situation where I wish I had left the bags there because I was in a really big hotel. It took forever. Finally in the third room. And then if they change your rooms, if we have brought our bags up, I'm like, leave the bags here, let me go check the other rooms. So my husband kind of knows, he kind looks at me like is it okay to unpack now? Are we okay? And then, of course, when I travel, I do things to just minimize my toxic burden.
We always carry our own unscented Dr. Bronner's soaps. Even if I'm going to a residence inn, i'll bring unsented dishwashing soap. So I traveled with this stuff so that I've not been getting hit in so many other ways as well. Because as I am sure you've talked about, it really is this drip system that as you're getting this and that and maybe you can tolerate something just fine and then you get this hit. I mean, for me, when I get hit with mold, all bets are off. It just goes out the window and I am then uber sensitive to foods that I was able to tolerate, I suddenly can't tolerate.
Smell, scents, the whole system just breaks. The dam opens for But when I'm not being hit with mold, I can tolerate the, which is one of the things I found in Santa Fe. I could tolerate more sense. Not that I am advocating for sense in your life, but I would tolerate different foods here that couldn't tolerate, say, in Austin. It was truly a breath of fresh air. I mean, the air is cleaner here than it is in Austin. And so I just found that my whole burden and my full load was lowered and I can tolerate more things.
So when you're traveling, you just typically not eating as well, not sleeping as, so you want to just do the things that you can do. Be sure to take your supplements. To the best of your ability, stay on your diet. Take unscented products, non-toxic products with you, just so that you're minimizing all of that as much as possible. And don't be afraid to ask for another room. Fifth your room, because you and I have stayed in a hotel before where we're like, something's wrong with this floor. Then down the hallway, we see the carpet wet and the big air blower trying to draw the carpets.
There can be a leak on a certain floor or something happened in certain room and then two doors down or a few floors up or down, it could be five. Yeah, that's so important to not, you know, really regret your stay. Yes, lost everything on a trip to Mexico. Yeah. And the last conference you missed was the perfect one to miss. And, and I, you know, already looking at IFM for next year, like, where am I going to stay? I typically, if there's another hotel that's newer or smaller near wherever it is, I do that and then just Uber over or whatever.
It's less convenient, but I you're very interesting. You stay and tolerate stuff way. longer than I do. I mean, I'm like, uh-uh, or I just don't even, and I know that that's a 3,000 room hotel and it was built in 1980. There's no way in the world I am staying, you know? So we just went to Disney World and there's a brand new, uh, the Swan Reserve is a new hotel there. You know, we, so, I mean, just if you Google places, you know they're, at least until the interest rates have changed recently, there have been a lot of construction in a lotta cities.
And so there are things that have opened up in the last few years. That's a great tip. One other area I'd love to segue back to are labs. So just like for people listening and they're like, okay, I kind of wonder where I am with lab testing and knowing my progress. What they look like when I feel really great and I know I'm clean versus not. What are your favorite things? Just because of the, if we can pause on this one, the lawsuit, I don't want to get in as being the person like, you know, because I have labs and stuff and don t want anything to be used against me.
That's okay. Got it. Yeah. I mean, do you have somebody that covered that? Yeah, we talked about different things. Okay. You're talking about using the autoimmune markers. Well, okay, well, But I don't want to do anything that you don' feel comfortable with. Okay, what is it that want know? Your favorite labs that somebody can like know where they are on the spectrum of autoimmunity or where there on spectrum exposure and you can even just say it as far as when I because treated patients are what I write in my box and nothing to do with it.
So the autoimmune panel that I get on myself and that i got on all of my patients, if you're local to Texas, there is an auto immune panel through CPL. That's the lab that, I preferred to use over Quest or our lab for for certain labs. And I do find it valuable to not only go to the same lab, you know, the brand, company, but also even going to same, same time of day, actual same Lab Center. I mean the more you can do these things because there is variability in lab testing, so that you're always comparing an apple to an Apple.
So if you are somebody, and I don't know if your familiar with it, I dont remember the code, or I think they created it specifically for me. Yeah, it's the same one that I use and my staff does the code, I don't know, but it is a full spread. Full autoimmune panel. So, that's a great way to do it and have it go through your insurance. I, of course, have done the Cyrex lab looking at different autoimmunity in tissues. What do I want to say? That's not really sustainable to keep doing that at the rate that was doing this other lab.
It can go in once a month if I wanted to. Things don' t change generally that quickly, so every couple of months. But, you know, paying out of pocket at Cyrex probably isn't, what do I want to say? I'm blanking on the word, cost-effective. We'll just can't do that. So, but if you don't know what's going on or you're having odd symptoms, I mean, certainly that's a lab I've run on myself. I run many, many patients. You know in terms of checking for mold, multiple things that you can do and they all have their pros and cons.
Check to see if you have certain mycotoxins in your system through the urine test, through real-time labs. The upside of that is it tells you if have you certain micotoxin. that they're not testing for. I mean, they just don't have the capability yet. It could be that you don�t detox well, so you're actually not able to actually excrete them when you�re doing the test, you could get a false negative. There are people who say that can get false positive through eating grains and drinking coffee. So many of my patients were grain-free.
Virtually all of them, particularly after you write a few books. People have read the book and done the program, and I had such a long waiting list. They were following all that by the time they got to me for six months or a year. And so I argued with the lab that I don't believe that because so many of my patients, and I imagine yours as well, not drinking coffee and not eating grains. So I do not believe. That and. I had so. Many patients that had elevated levels, so it correlated done with environment.
Yeah, of course. So yeah, I just didn't believe that. But it doesn't tell you where you've been exposed. Yeah. Right. Working and living at home. You know, then it, you know. Then you got to assume it's the home, but if it somebody who's going half their time to the office, half, their, time, to home. How do you, if the, home or the. And, I have things that I would do with patients to help kind of sort that out. But, as with anything, the pros and cons to all of it. Richie Shoemaker has a whole host of labs.
that can track, those are the labs that I was using to track me for my mold exposure. And, you know, that has been helpful because they are things that when I've been in a clean environment have been negative. When I'd been a toxic environment, they did elevate. So what else would I do? And I'm sure there's more that's come along, but because I am so sensitive, You know, certainly if it was a patient that, you know... I had a patients that was very, very complex and I went over to her house. I mean, I, went to several of my patients' houses, more than several to try...
Since you're such a good canary. Yeah, to see if, if I could feel it in their homes and tell them where it is or just, yes, it's definitely in your house and so... Um, you know, when it was so profound on somebody, like I told you, I could feel it on them. And I would just say, of course that takes a lot of convincing for somebody to get rid of all their stuff, just based on me saying I've just broken into a rash. I'm telling you it's toxic mold, but. Some of them did, some of him wanted backup stuff, and some resisted when other places called me years later and told me I was right.
It's run the gamut of things. I mean, it's got to be a very highly toxic environment for people to come in and need to immediately react.
Labs, Sensitivity, and Closing Reflections 53:00
That's, of course, what I would explain to them. But I do have a dear friend who I went to her house and I was like, it's here. It's in this wall. In that ceiling. I didn't realize, you know, I really remember doing that. And she told me later, she's like you were totally right. Those are the places I opened up and that's exactly where it was. So I have been that sensitive in my life. Would like to think that I could not be sensitive, but. Much less sensitive. I think, you know, getting more time and space in your beautiful home and let your nervous system settle down and you're going to be a lot less.
Yeah. Well, Amy, Dr. Myers. I so appreciate your vulnerability. Heck, I am just overwhelmed that you shared at such a soul and heart level. Well I did that because you, Anne. Anne has been to my house. Ann and I typically go through mold at the same time together, ironically or whatever. So I just have such history with you. And I don't think that I would have been this way if there had been any other hostess. You're so in my heart and you know, I really, you're the effort that you put into building this beautiful place and it's a safety place to really thrive and we'll just really love your family.
I'm just wishing you a smooth sailing from here so that can really enjoy what you've built and the beautiful members of your families. There's so much love there. Well, thank you. You know, because of the situation with the lawsuit, I really have not spoken about this. In fact, turned down every interview to talk about mold, but knowing that it's you and the history that we have and you know how many people I hope that this will help. I, of course, said yes. And eventually, once this is all over, I will have...
I do have articles on my website and everything, but we'll have an ebook and just a lot more resources around this for people. I try to take anything that I've been through and that i've learned something from, and I certainly have learned even...I thought I knew everything and iIve learned You know, really, that's all I can do. These are our core values to be of service and to give back to other people to help, you know. If I could prevent anybody from going through what I've been through or to get out of, if they're going to through it, to, get it out it or have hope to know that they can get of it.
I mean, it's really why I do it and so there will be more resources available on our website as well, but I just need to go through this current situation. So let's let people know where to find you because there is so much information there already. Books, your website, social, let us let you know. Everything is just Amy Meyers MD. Website is Amy Myers MD, Social Amy Myers MD and it is myers. So amyersmd.com. Well, thank you so, much and I can't wait to see you soon. I know, me too. Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks.
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