Toxic Mold: Uncover Its Hidden Dangers

Amy Myers, MD

Thank you. I am already tearing up, and you and I have been through so much. God, I did not think this was how I would start this interview at all.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well, thank you so much. I have so much going on now. This is just precious time with you.

Amy Myers, MD

I was just thinking about all of the history that you and I have together through our

Ann Shippy, MD

It has been a lot. We can start with the very first time you learned about mold. How did it become a thing and a medicine that we were missing all the time?

Amy Myers, MD

Well, that is actually from you, because I used to think everything was mercury toxicity. For those that do not know, I am classically trained as a conventional physician, as are you and E.R. medicine, then went into functional medicine through my own health history with Graves’ disease and started practicing in the same city as you. You and I became friends. I had many things going on with me: SIBO, Candida, and having been a vegetarian forever. Graves’ disease, you name it; I had leaky gut and mercury overload. I went through that detox, and I do think that we see things through a certain lens. You kept telling me all about mold. I thought, No, there is nothing going on here with that, Lyme. I mean, until I met Darren Ingles, nothing was Lyme either. Now there is so much that is all three of these things, but it was not until my own experience that I was getting sick again that I helped myself recover. I had my thyroid ablated, so I could not get that back, but my autoimmune markers had gone negative, and I was in an office, and I had bought an older office in Austin, and I had bought an older home in Austin, and I felt drugged in the house when I moved in, along with my dog.

Ann Shippy, MD

It happened pretty fast, if I remember correctly.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes, very fast. I mean, yes, it was; I clearly was tolerating my office to some degree, and then

Ann Shippy, MD

It was already there.

Amy Myers, MD

No, it wasn’t. But I think the house was the big problem because I moved into it and it started going through renovations while I was living there. I just felt drugged. I mean, I am a person. If you cannot tell, I have high energy. I am, I never, and I do not generally drink caffeine. I just woke up with a lot of energy. I was literally feeling drugged; 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. I took her to the vet, and they said she was 13 years old. Well, of course, long story short, uncover that it is mold and go through the entire thing. I can speak to going through mold as a single person, I can speak to going through mold as a married person, I can see mold going through, or I can speak to going through mold as a married person with a child. I have experience with all three of them. Having known you and knowing how sick patients can get and having been sick, I just literally moved out and went and stayed with a friend. The very interesting thing is, obviously, that my fatigue stopped immediately. But my dog, the first night there, did not have incontinence. I never put her on the medication, and her incontinence went away immediately, literally overnight.

Ann Shippy, MD

That is amazing. That is such a good point because a lot of times our animals get sick even before humans do. They are really the canaries sometimes.

Amy Myers, MD

Once I got triggered, I am now, I think, very similar to you in that I can feel it in a lot of places. I had patients come in to see me who, without doing anything, I would just say, Look, I am just going to tell you straight up, you got toxic mold. I can feel it all over you. I became that sensitive. But I mean, I did. I imagine some people—I do not know who you have had on the summit—but I mean, I got rid of everything. Literally everything. I moved into a brand new apartment with my dog, and I bought a mattress and slept on the floor. I brought nothing with me other than my dog. I have that experience of getting there, but I am not sure where you want me to go with this. But I have had that experience of literally getting rid of everything and starting from ground zero. Recovering, and then meeting and dating my now-husband. Again, I had gotten all my autoimmune markers negative and everything, and then I started dating him, and suddenly I was having these hand swellings, and my hands were turning red and white. I was a kid in a candy store because I had my own clinic. I would check my labs all the time, and I saw some pretty scary autoimmune markers that were negative. But, as you and I know, they were not zero; they were negative, but they were creeping up.

Again, I just went on this search. He was in a brand new house. I thought, Certainly that cannot be a problem. Literally, brand new had just moved in again, looked under every rock, did not want to believe it again, and discovered that it was back in his house. The interesting thing this time is that I remember it being in February, and our anniversary is at the beginning of March. I looked at him and just said, I am moving out and finding a brand new apartment. You can come or you can go; I do not know. But these autoimmune markers are so scary. I have to get out of here again, leave everything behind, and start 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 hypothyroid again. That seems to be a thing for me that, even though I do not have a thyroid and I am on the same dose, I get hypothyroid. But again, I started over. I mean, I was so sensitive at that point. I am also chemically sensitive. So, the walking in the target and the, uh, just everything—the laundry aisle, of course—I do not really care for that on a given day when I am going.

Ann Shippy, MD

To get day. Yes.

Amy Myers, MD

I mean, I could not even smell new clothes. I was literally on our one-year anniversary, sleeping on a balcony. I was so sick that I could not tolerate anything. But being outside again, I just went through my program. The things you do to get the mold out—the glue that I own, the charcoal—have always been the biggest for me. So many people do not want to do that because they are so tied down. This is where I will start getting emotional again when it comes to my daughter. But they are so tied to their things, and I was not tied to anything. It was pretty easy for me. I just got rid of things and moved. I mean, having worked with so many sick patients with mold, I knew how bad it could get. But the hope in it all is that I also know how you can recover from it because I have had other patients who could not tolerate things and were sleeping on balconies as well. I know you can recover from this, but you have got to get

Ann Shippy, MD

Away from it, even though you can recover, it is…

Amy Myers, MD

Yes. Very scary. When you are trying to find another doctor to try to take it out of your hands, it is so difficult because there are so few who really understand it. Anyway, so my husband and I, mostly me, went on a quest. We bought some land in Austin, outside of Austin—a couple of acres—because, if something happens to the house, I do not want a neighbor next to me. I want to be able to go camping outside, and it is terrible that you have to be thinking this way. But that is how I was thinking, because I thought, I cannot go through this ever again. Then I realized, Why am I buying land in the allergy capital of the world? We went on a quest of the high deserts and went to Bend, Oregon; we went to places in Colorado, came to Santa Fe, and settled in Santa Fe because I still have my company in Austin and we still have our home there. It was a way to be able to go back and forth very quickly. But the humidity here is generally low. Then I went on a quest to build the most bomb-proof, mold-proof house on the face of this earth.

Ann Shippy, MD

Beautiful too.

Amy Myers, MD

Well, thank you. I achieved it except for the fact that the builder did not follow the architect’s plans. It was one area that nobody consulted me on and that I was not involved in, and it is the one area that I had a problem with. We built a house out of pumice-crete, and steel, so I would have no wood in the house. We use dense glass instead of sheet rock. We had something for a ceiling. We had dense glass as our ceilings, but all the walls are pumice-crete, and if they could not do a pumice-crete wall, then it was steel and dense glass. But the requirement was that every wall that had plumbing in it had to be pumice-crete. I do not know; eight or ten leaks later, thank God I had built the house the way that I had built the house.

Ann Shippy, MD

Because you literally had it, or at least you do.

Amy Myers, MD

I literally cannot count the numbers. But there were six bathrooms, and there was every single sink or toilet in the entire house. I mean, when they turned on the water, there were three leaks behind the wall in the plumbing, just from nails from the people who put in the plaster. It was pumice-crete walls with plaster over them. Plaster has a cage, so to speak—a metal cage. Then they had to nail it into the plaster, and it is nailed through the piping, which is a very normal thing to happen. Not normal, but a common thing that happens in quick construction—all this stuff. But in a custom home that took multiple years to build, I did not think it was happening. The worst part of it is that a builder did not even tell me that it happened or the architect until there was a weeping leak, and then the plaster was wet all up the wall, and they had to call to tell me that there was going to be a delay in the build. Then all trust was lost at that point.

I had to fly my mold inspector up and everything. Luckily, at that point, all was well. We do not know about the cabinets, but we just threw those out. My builder, anyway, was okay, and then this was the place that I thought, I have done it. I have done it everywhere else. I do not know about your house, but everywhere else I had lived since losing everything to mold was furniture from Target and inexpensive stuff, because I always had that fear that it would happen to me again. I never wanted to invest in clothes or art, literally. Our house in Austin does not have a single thing on the wall. I mean, it is a horrible way to live. But I never felt safe having nice furniture or hanging anything on the wall because I was always in fear that something was going to happen. I was going to have a leak and lose everything.

Ann Shippy, MD

Everything would be disposable.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes. I bought things like leather sofas and leather chairs—things that you could wipe down and that were bulletproof. Here I took the other: I have built this house, I have done it, and I have mastered it. I had all these leaks, and I managed to get through them all without having any issues. Then, I bought nice furniture, things that were porous, and things that were very

Ann Shippy, MD

Difficult to buy when you are decorating. Yes.

Amy Myers, MD

I mean, just the normal things that most normal people buy—new furniture that hangs art—and on Christmas Eve we had a few drops of water. It was pouring down rain, and it was freezing cold. We had a couple of drops of water drop down on the floor, and I thought, Well, what could this have to be coming from the roof? It wasn’t. The builder said, No, I think it is coming from the dryer air duct because I noticed it condensing during the build. I was like, What? He said, Yes, but I just thought it was what you thought—once you closed the ceiling, it would be okay. It was actually quite humorous that they noticed that something was not humorous. I can only laugh at this point. But anyway, they installed the dry air vent instead of the dryer vent, as the architect had drawn it. We have these very, very tall ceilings, and they had dryer vents. First of all, if you are 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 I should not have needed to. But certainly my architect and builder should have confirmed that, knowing who they were building this house for. Our laundry room was in the middle of the house. So it came out and then went up. At this bend, it had been condensating because the air differential in the space was too hot. Then, over time, as it continued to condensate, every time we did laundry, it eventually broke down. It had this mastic around it, and then water dripped. Then they opened up the cavity, saying, You have built this house in such a way that there cannot possibly be mold. They did not contain it. Of course, you never want to believe that after everything I have 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 know there is water with dryer lint coming through, and now I have mold spores all over my house and started breaking out in a rash. My hands started swelling and getting red, as they normally do. We were on our way out of town, so we just went on the trip. Again, I just tried to, and this is not happening to me again. This is not happening to me again. I walk in the door when we get home, and I just look at my husband and say, Sh*t, excuse my language, but you have a problem.

Ann Shippy, MD

You could feel it immediately.

Amy Myers, MD

I could feel it immediately. I mean, I started reacting before we left, but we left 24 hours later or something. But it was being away from it and walking in. It was, No, and that was something really hard for me to grapple with, with everything that I had been through, and the interesting thing is that my molds, my Ritchie Shoemaker labs, were all positive very quickly, which was so interesting. The interesting thing is that I had just done them in October because I was thriving and doing so well, and all my autoimmune markers were negative again. I was literally celebrating with my functional medicine physician, I am great, in October. Then this happens in January. The labs are all elevated. I mean, luckily I had the negative and I was thriving, and anyway, I cannot, and as you can imagine, I am in a large lawsuit over this now. But yes, I mean, it was back to when we had to move out and get rid of everything that I had just bought. This time, it was really, really difficult with the child because I do not care about anything.

I own it. But when you have a five-year-old who is asking, Where is this stuffed animal? or Mommy, mommy, can you go back to the house? I want these princess shoes, and I want that costume. She is, and I am, and if you do not know where they are, I am going to tell you exactly where they are. Mommy.  Meanwhile, I know that they are not there. I know that they are in the garage in a bag. so it was extremely difficult. Or when we finally were able to come home, the most important thing to me was salvaging as much of her stuff as I could and not having this be a part of her memory or history. That is, frankly, all. I mean, obviously I cared about getting well, but my exposure time this time was only a week. so I did not 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 in however long that has been now because it manifested in flying for me. I mean, the ripple effects this time were so much greater than the physical, and then coming home, I will ask you, Where is this or where is that? You are, oh, I do not know, or, mom, this stuffed animal’s hair did not look this good before. Why does it look like that? I mean, anything that I could just buy another of, she did not notice that I did. But there were certain things that Santa had brought her that I could not find new ones for. So I washed them, and then they did not turn out the same. I have an observant child. What is wrong with this? She just moved on. But for me, it was the biggest dagger in the heart. It was just devastating for me that I even had to go through that with her anyway.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well, the good news is that she is in a clean environment and that she does not have to look; she really has. She is so healthy.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes, of course. yes.  I do not know where you want to go from here, but I can talk about it from a medical perspective, from a personal perspective, and from a perspective of, How do you do it as you are alone with somebody without somebody? I had always told people you need to flee and there is no way you can remediate your house. It was a difficult concept for me to think that this home could be remediated. But given how I built the house and the humidity levels here, and the types of surfaces with steel and plaster and things like that, we felt it could be cleaned. But I mean, I got rid of everything again.

Ann Shippy, MD

Now let us talk a little bit about, well, let us keep with the relationship side of this, because it is really such a big part of this. The relationship with ourselves and how we talk to ourselves about our situation and our decisions you have an amazing husband who really respects your opinions and wants to support you in such a great way. But even then, it is challenging for him.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes, I mean, I was thinking that if you needed another interview, you would probably interview him about the trauma of all of it. I mean, I think this time around is probably the hardest, and I cannot speak for him, but I think the hardest is that I am so strong and I can do anything. For him to see me so incapacitated, I think that was the hardest.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes.

Amy Myers, MD

For the most part, I was able to hide that from my child. But there were times that I could not. That was very difficult for me as a parent, as a woman, and as a strong woman.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes. How do you think you can keep things from happening to really help you find yourself?

Amy Myers, MD

I did EMDR therapy. I mean, that truly was. I have tried EMDR in the past for very old childhood stuff, and I did not find it helpful, but in such an acute way and with lots of Xanax. I am a very controlled person, in the sense that I do not even barely ever drink. I remember one day calling my doctor in tears and saying that I had had to take three Xanax in a day. That was the most difficult thing for me, because I do believe that I can get through anything and do anything.

Ann Shippy, MD

It gets so much.

Amy Myers, MD

This was so out of my control and had affected me emotionally so much. I mean, it is a fundamental, mad-love hierarchy of needs to have a safe place to live. I felt that if this home was not safe, how was I ever going to have a home that was safe after everything that I had done? I mean, everybody on this job knew who they were building this house for and why they were building it. Everybody knew. I mean, I met with everybody, including the roofer. I do not want any seams. How are you sealing the seams? The penetration has to go through the roof. What are we doing with the windows? I mean, every Friday for almost three years, there were conversations about how we were going to handle this and how we were going to handle that. I was involved in everything, and then I am 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 did not ask me about it, and not only did they not ask me about it, they did not follow the architect’s plans. I mean, I guess there is nothing you can do when they are just bad people not following instructions. But I was not involved. But anyway.

Ann Shippy, MD

That is so vigilant about every detail, and then to have this one.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes, I mean, so it is just back to Yes, I mean, it affected me so to the core because if you do not have a place to sleep and a place to live that safe, and now the ante was so high, I now had a child, it was not me again, where I could just do it. Or even my husband, who, begrudgingly, did the other things. I had a child. Now the stakes were so high, and I had spent so much time, money, and energy to build this house. I mean, the stakes could not have been higher for me. Then I was having this, literally, nervous breakdown over the whole situation and having to take prescription medication to get through a day, which was just frightening on so many levels for me. I mean, the only two other times in my life I have ever had Xanax were when I had hypothyroidism. I literally had my thyroid dumping, and I had moments when my thyroid was dumping and I would have spikes of hormones. Then, by the time I was sleeping on the balcony, it was not something I was taking; other than my thyroid, I am not taking prescription medication. I am getting to the root cause: I drink a few times a year, and that is it. Yes, it was very difficult for me to be in that situation and have to take those drugs to get through a day.

Ann Shippy, MD

You decided to try EMDR for.

Amy Myers, MD

The EMDR.

Ann Shippy, MD

What that is

Amy Myers, MD

Yes, so it is. I mean, what does EMDR stand for? Do ?

Ann Shippy, MD

I forget.

Amy Myers, MD

Okay, I will have to look it up. What? You have never done it. Okay, well, so.

Ann Shippy, MD

It is these patients who have done it.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes, I said,

Ann Shippy, MD

It is.

Amy Myers, MD

Sure. Yes. I mean, I said, for I had done it before and it had not done anything for me. I do not know if this was the difference of the practitioner, or I think it was that it was this highly emotional and very specific event that was also highly acute, that it was very easy to trigger and to get into the thing. What happens is that you get into it, you start thinking about whatever it is, and then you can either do rapid eye movements or have a sound in your ears, alternating in your ears, that resets the neurological pathways in your brain to, basically, reprogram your brain as if the situation were different. That was very helpful. It was so helpful that I had a woman who helped me out. She did not live in the state. She got licensed for me, which was so kind and amazing. I flew her to the house, and I walked through every room with her to try to reprogram me so that I could live in my house. I mean, I could physically live in the house, but mentally, there was anger, sadness, and anxiety.

There was this whole emotional component that I cannot say is even 100% gone, because clearly I am 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 for the times that I have ever had an interview where I was bawling and crying. You will not find it. All I am doing is crying through this entire interview. Clearly, I am still triggered by this, but not in a way that I am able to work. I do have to take half a Xanax if I have to fly, but that is the only time I need it at this point. I have made great strides in overcoming the situation once again; I bought new furniture and hung some art. I still have my moments in the house, for sure. I still have my moments of questioning and things like that. I do not know how someone like you and me can go through the world and not have those moments when we have gone through what we have gone through. But now I can speak to the emotional component. Yes, I mean, it was lots of EMDR. Lots of EMDR. I mean, it was a lot.

Ann Shippy, MD

Of ten sessions. 20 sessions.

Amy Myers, MD

I do not know. I mean, I really do not know. the whole two days—I mean, she was here at my house for two straight days of EMDR to walk around the house. I mean, it is something that I just got to a place where I am functioning, and so I have stopped. But, there are things that come up that I literally have just had some stuff going on that anyway I need to probably go back to, just as a reminder—not all the time, I would say—just to conventional medicine that there is a time and a place. I would not have made it through without Xanax. I mean, I would not have. I think probably something for me to tell people is that there is a time and a place for it. I tell that to my patients all the time. I mean, you do not want to be on immunosuppressive drugs. You do not want to be on these things. You want to get to the root cause. But in an acute moment, if you are sick and you have a bacterial infection, you need antibiotics. 

I had a situation where it took a while for the EMDR to take hold and work and for the situation to unravel itself, get better, and get somebody to come in and clean the house. That was the big unknown for me—getting on somebody’s schedule and getting it cleaned. I do not even want to get into the whole botched thing where I hired one company and they actually made everything worse. I then had to have another company come in. The unknown of knowing whether I was going to be able to get back in the house was so anxiety-producing that once I got over that hurdle, they started cleaning. I was able to enter the house. I did not enter my house because there is plastic and containment everywhere. I do not know how many months it took before I was able to actually go into the house without a hazmat suit and a respirator.

With conventional medicine, I guess what I want to say is that, as hard as it was for me to take it and as broken as I felt I was to have to take it, it saved me. I mean, I could not have gotten through if I did not have that. I think taking things in an acute situation and not using them as a long-term crutch or as 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 was not the route that I was going to take. I think that is an important thing for people to know: that it is okay to need to use conventional methods and means in an acute situation.

Ann Shippy, MD

Absolutely. It really is fascinating how I see anxiety as a barometer for a lot of people’s environmental exposures. Any time people are feeling, Okay, I need to address that anxiety again, we have to look deeper because there is, I would say, pretty much always an underlying trigger.

Amy Myers, MD

I had a family member come see me and her daughter, and the daughter had depression, and she was a teenager. But there are some other things that cannot be explained by mold. But of course, I tested her and everything, and it came back that it was mold, and she did not want to hear it. Fine. You have to be ready to hear it. You have to be ready to act. It is not something that you can do halfheartedly or otherwise. It is wasted effort in a lot of cases. It was a few years later when she wrote me back and said that they finally realized it and did something about it. It was that the mother had anxiety, the daughter had depression, and the newborn had something else. It was like it all went away.

I am sure you or others have talked about how this can manifest in people in so many different ways. That is why it is so tricky, unless you are working with a physician yourself or, as I was practicing, with someone who has been through it, somebody who really understands it, because it can be anything. I mean, for me, it is this hand swelling, redness, and whiteness, almost Raynaud’s, but it is not cold. They are swollen. Then it really does not. then it is a fine rash that my skin feels is burning, but nobody else can see it. Or people will say, You look like you have been out in the sun or something. But I would always be like, Hey, Xavier, can you see it? Can you see it? He is. No, I cannot see it. My skin is on fire. I just felt my skin was burned, and then the only other thing it was was my autoimmune markers, ones you do not want to have start creeping up. On the outside, 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 am checking my labs, you would never know is really scary.

Okay, so back to the things. I have an infrared sauna. I am very lucky. I have a hyperbaric machine. I have a supplement company: glutathione and charcoal to get the stuff out. glutathione and charcoal, of course; I wasn’t doing hyperbaric oxygen or anything like that in the acute stage, but later I was doing those things, and I do them on a regular basis. Those are things that I certainly did back when it was way more physical, and my exposure was longer this time. I said, I think the biggest thing that helped me was getting the house cleaned, retesting, knowing that there was not something here, and then the EMDR. This just added reassurance that our special clinic is great.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes, so the sauna, hyperbaric, glutathione, and 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 cannot control that your body zips them through.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes. As you can imagine, owning a supplement company means I take all kinds of things.

Ann Shippy, MD

A little bit more because you are such a wealth of knowledge on that. What are your assets?

Amy Myers, MD

What am I going to do? Well, in my Myers Way Multivitamin, which is our number one top seller, we have three methylated B vitamins in it. For the average person, that is going to be amazing. I mean, it is six pills. It is chock-full. I mean, people, even just taking three a day, can generally feel something from it. In terms of energy, I have mutations at MTHFR, which also do not help me clear or make it more difficult for me to clear certain toxins, such as mercury, which is why I had mercury overload. I do not know. I do not think we know yet if that has any aspect in terms of clearing mold. I have other genetics that do not allow me to clear mold.

Ann Shippy, MD

They are commonly given to people affected by mold, and they seem to accelerate detoxification. I think it is critical, actually.

Amy Myers, MD

I then take Methylation Support, which is an additional pre-methylated B vitamin. Those are the reasons that I try to take glutathione on my own every day. I do not take charcoal every day, but I do not travel without glutathione and charcoal because you never know. I can get into a whole thing about travel, hotels, Airbnbs, and all kinds of things. Fish oils, vitamin D, and probiotics: I say the four essentials are a multivitamin, fish oils, vitamin D, and a probiotic. I take some things for mitochondrial support.

Ann Shippy, MD

Absolutely. They are so affected by the mycotoxins.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes. I am trying to think of something else. I mean, the box is chock full of things like those, and those are really my main go-tos. I make a product called Leaky Gut Revive. I also do not travel without that. I just drink that whenever we have a strawberry lemonade flavor. That’s delicious.  I just, when I want something refreshing, I drink that we have a paleo protein powder that, I do not do these things every day, but then a red and a green. So just as I want them, I am getting them in my diet, and I go through phases of doing this every single day just by craving them. I get them in three or four times a week situation. Try not to be too strict with our diet, too.

Ann Shippy, MD

I guess your diet is foundational. You want to share a little bit about that.

Amy Myers, MD

Sure. I mean, I think it is also because I was vegetarian for 27 years, and when I found out about functional medicine, although I had had my thyroid ablated, I just knew that as a person with autoimmunity, I was three times more likely to get another autoimmune condition. I was really, excuse me, looking at ways to stop that fire and hopefully prevent me from ever getting another autoimmune condition, which so far I have been able to do. I really work to heal my gut. I told you I was eating grains and legumes. I had SIBO and Candida. I was doing the medical school: the tofurky, the tofu cheese, the tofu, everything. Ezekiel Sprouted Whole Wheat Bread because that was healthy. I had to make some dramatic dietary changes since I was a vegetarian and a vegan at times. I was eating all these whole grains. 

Now, I was not going to eat Oreos because I grew up with parents who grew up eating brown rice, tofu, and yogurt. My mother made yogurt when we were little because she knew about the microbiome. She made homemade wheat bread. We never had sugary cereal as kids, so I did not have to make dramatic shifts from Oreos and M&Ms to real Whole Foods. But I had to make 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. The first time I had meat, I literally woke up the next day saying, I need another burger. I was, and I never looked back. Now I am particular about my meat and I have texture preferences, but I am still picky about my meat, and, of course, I eat grass-fed, pasture-raised, and things like that. But I was still eating grains until I met Dr. Ann Shippy, who suggested that I also give up grains. Even I resisted that for quite some time. then did it and really saw a huge difference in me, and then started doing it with my patients. I think what you are recommending to people is probably what I recommend. 

Now that I have gotten better, I am not as strict as you. I do. I will eat some grains. I have a child. She eats a lot of white rice. But, or I will eat keto bread that is mostly resistant starch, things like that. But I find that I can; it is the times when I am sick with mold. I mean, that is really the only thing that has hit me in the last ten years—mold three times. I have got to dial it in, is what I tell people. I mean, I coined the phrase autoimmune spectrum back in 2015, when my first book, The Autoimmune Solution, came out. It really is, when you are high up on the spectrum, when you are dealing with something, you have got to, I mean, I have got to, I think most people have to really dial it in, and you have got to be super strict about it. 

Then, as you get better, you can branch out. I do not sit and eat corn chips every day, and I go for a walk. My breakfast this morning was eggs. I have a huge garden. I had Swiss chard from the garden, some sheep’s cheese, and a little egg omelet on a tortilla. I mean, I choose this day; I do not choose corn, but if we are out at Mexican, that is what my daughter, Charlie, would not eat. Or sometimes I will eat one. I can do that now and be okay, whereas others prefer to just stay and are really strict on no grains and whatnot. I have found that, in terms of the diet, as long as I am not eating something every day, I never eat gluten, and I do not eat cows, dairy, or even really goat’s dairy. I can only do sheet dairy with hard cheese. That is the only dairy that I eat. But I do not eat any regular dairy, and I do not eat gluten, ever.

Ann Shippy, MD

On a very similar path. I can do some occasional rice now and definitely do eggs. I have not touched any of the cheese yet, but that is next. I do not know.

Amy Myers, MD

I do not know. You might as well stay away from it. It is so delicious because all of the fake cheeses out there are just filled with things, and they do not melt.

Ann Shippy, MD

I go take the cases of morphine antibodies that make you crave.

Amy Myers, MD

Okay.

Ann Shippy, MD

It is probably a slippery slope.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes, probably.

Ann Shippy, MD

It is so nice to just say, Okay, as long as I am gluten-free and dairy-free, meticulously, if I have a little bit of these other things, it is doable. But still keep the core pretty clean. Yes. Let us talk about travel.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes, I mean, travel is something I opt for. This does not certainly mean that you are going to be scot-free or that it is going to be okay. But I just opt for new places if we do not generally do Airbnbs, unless it is really clear that you can tell that it is a brand new place. I mean that it is, and because nobody tells you what it is, I guess you could try to ask them or whatever. But I look for a new place, and I tend to go for; you can literally Google the newest hotels wherever, and there is a website that has an article. I am sure they get money off of you clicking the link, and you do not need to do that. But in most major cities, there is an article that will tell you all of the newest hotels. Even though I was just in New Orleans, there are two hotels that I have gone to and stayed in that have been okay. My criteria is, really, is it new, not how nice is it? I mean, literally, I can be on one.

We took a road trip, and despite looking a little schizophrenic in the place where we stayed, it was uber nice. I always like a good Residence Inn because then you have a kitchen. If you can find a new Residence Inn, they give you a kitchen. They generally have many splits in there. You are not sharing the air with everyone else. They do not use air fresheners now. They have a refrigerator in the kitchen. It just depends on what kind of travel you are doing. Certainly, with a child, it makes eating and continuing to eat healthy pretty easy. I do make smoothies when I travel. It is always nice to have a blender. There are also hotels, and now I cannot remember which chain it is, but things I am going to say aloft, I do not know if that is one of them, that now they do not even have carpet. They just have that.

Ann Shippy, MD

That one.

Amy Myers, MD

The flooring in it. I look for the least amount of carpeting and the least amount of curtains—just things that, if there is a problem, can get moldy. If you are dealing with a place that has many splits instead of air conditioning units, you can hopefully prevent a leak somewhere else from getting into your room. I did not mention that about my house, but we did many splits in our house, and, for that very reason, I mean, then I did not have an AC unit with ductwork that needed to be cleaned. The way that the mold spread around our house was just natural, but mostly from us walking around the house. It wasn’t from a big AC system, an air duct system, and all that stuff. That is something else that we did in our house when, last summer, none of them but one worked and all the piping was in the pumice-crete walls. That was a headache, but it is a general thing. Yes, I will not get into that part of the mess I got left with that I had to get myself out of with these problems with the house.

Regardless of a leak, yes, many splits are also good. I mean, all you can do in travel is look for the newest place. Again, you might be dealing with the off-gassing of carpeting, flooring, paint, or things like that. But, personally, I can deal with that better than I can with mold. I will off-gassing. I do not love it, but I will take that any day over mold. Just know that if you go in one, I mean, we have a thing in our family. All the bags stay where they are. I go up, I check out the room, and I make sure that the room is okay. Then,  if not, we ask to change rooms. I forgot my old home in Mexico. But that is a different story, too. 

Ann Shippy, MD

I just had a major situation where I wish I had left the bags there because I was in a really big hotel.

Amy Myers, MD

But yes.

Ann Shippy, MD

It took forever. That is our thing in the third room, it was better.

Amy Myers, MD

Then, if they change rooms, if we have brought our bags up, I will leave the bags here. Let me go check the other room. My husband knows. He looks at me. Is it okay to unpack now? Are we okay? Of course, when I travel, I do things to minimize my toxic burden. We always carry our own unscented Dr. Bronner’s soaps. I mean, even if I am going to a Residence Inn, I will bring unscented dishwashing soap. I travel with this stuff so that I am not getting hit in so many other ways as well. Because, as I am sure you have talked about, it really is this drip system that, as you are getting this and that, which maybe you can tolerate just fine, 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. I became extremely sensitive to foods that I previously could not tolerate. I suddenly cannot tolerate smells or scents—all these things. It is just like the whole system broke the dam open for me.

But when I am not being hit with mold, I can tolerate it, which is one of the things I found in Santa Fe: I could tolerate more scents. Not that I am advocating scents in your life; I could tolerate different foods here that I could not tolerate, say, in Austin. It was truly a breath of fresh air. I mean, the air is cleaner here than it is in Austin. I just found that my whole burden and my whole load were lowered, and I can tolerate more things. When you are traveling, you are just typically not eating as well or sleeping as well. You want to just do the things that you can do. Be sure to take your supplements. Be sure, to the best of your ability, that you stay on your diet, take unscented and nontoxic products with you, and minimize all of that as much as possible. Do not be afraid to ask for another room if yours is full because, since you and I have stayed in hotels before, something’s wrong with this floor. Then, down the hallway, we see the carpet wet and the big air blower trying to draw the carpet. There can be a leak on a certain floor or something happen in a certain room, and then two doors down or a few floors up or down, it could be five.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes. That is so important to not really regret your stay.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes. I lost everything on a trip to Mexico.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes. What was that one? The last conference you missed was the perfect one to miss.

Amy Myers, MD

I am already looking at IFM for next year. Where am I going to stay? Typically, if there is another hotel that is newer or smaller near wherever it is, I do that and then just Uber over or whatever; it is less convenient. But I find you very interesting. You stay and tolerate stuff way longer than I do. I mean, I am or I just do not even know that that is a 4,000-room hotel, and it was built in 1980. There is no way in the world I am staying; we just go to Disney World, and there is a brand new hotel there called the Swan Reserve. If you Google places, at least until the interest rates have changed recently, there has been a lot of construction in a lot of cities. There are things that have opened up in the last few years.

Ann Shippy, MD

That is a great tip. Another area I would love to segue back to is our labs. Just where people are listening and they are, okay, I wonder where I am with lab testing and knowing my progress, yet what they look like when I feel really great and I know I am clean versus not. What are your favorites?

Amy Myers, MD

Yes, I just want to say that, if we can pause on this one, the lawsuit I do not want to get into is being the person, because I have labs and stuff, and I do not want anything to be used against me.

Ann Shippy, MD

If that is okay. Got it. Yes.

Amy Myers, MD

I mean, do you have somebody to cover that?

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes, we talked about different things. I just want to say again, Look, you are talking about using the autoimmune markers and

Amy Myers, MD

Well, okay.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well, if I do not want to do anything that you do not feel comfortable with,

Amy Myers, MD

Okay, what is it that you want to know?

Ann Shippy, MD

What is your favorite lab so that somebody can know where they are on the spectrum of autoimmunity or where they are on the spectrum of exposure? You can even just say that when I was treating patients or when I wrote in my books, it had nothing to do with you.

Amy Myers, MD

The autoimmune panel that I get on myself and that I get on all of my patients—if you are local to Texas, there is an auto-immune panel through CPL. That is the lab that I preferred to use over Questar or Labworks for certain labs, and I do find it valuable to not only go to the same lab, the same brand, the same company, but also go to the same time of day, the same actual lab center. The more you can do these things because there is variability in lab testing, the better. that you are always comparing apples to apples. If you are somebody and I do not know if you are familiar with it, I do not remember the code, or I do not think they created it specifically for me.

Ann Shippy, MD

Yes, it is the same one that I use, and yes, my staff knows the code; I do not know. But it is a full breadth of

Amy Myers, MD

All autoimmune panels, so I mean, that is a great way to do it and have it go through your insurance. I, of course, have done the Cyrex Lab, looking at different types of autoimmune autoimmunity in tissues. That is not what I want to say. That is not really sustainable to keep doing that at the rate that I was doing this other lab. I can just go in once a month if I want to. Things generally do not change that quickly, so every couple of months. But paying out of pocket at Cyrex is probably not what I want to say. I am blanking on the word cost-effective. Well, I just cannot do that. But if you do not know what is going on or are having odd symptoms, I mean, certainly, that is a lab I have run myself. I have run on other patients, and I have run on many, many patients, in terms of checking for mold. I mean, there are multiple things that you can do. They all have their pros and cons.

You can check to see if you have certain mycotoxins in your system through a urine test in real-time labs. The upside of that is that it tells you if you have certain mycotoxins. The downside is that there are so many mycotoxins that they are not testing for. They just do not have the capability yet. It could be that you do not detox well, so you are not able to actually excrete them when you are doing the test, so you could get a false negative. There are people who say that you can get a false positive by eating grains and drinking coffee. Many of my patients are grain-free; virtually all of them are, particularly after you write a few books. People have read the book and done the program. I had such a long waiting list. They were following all that. By the time they got to me, it had been six months or a year. So I argued with the lab that I do not believe that because so many of my patients, and I imagine yours as well, are not drinking coffee or eating grains. I do not believe that. I had so many patients with elevated levels.

Ann Shippy, MD

It was then correlated with the environment.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes, of course. Yes, I just did not believe that. But did not tell you where you had been exposed. I mean, nowadays, with remote working, yes, if you are working and living at home, then you have to assume it is the home, but if it is somebody who is going half their time to the office and half their time to home, how do you know if it is the home or the office? I have things that I would do with patients to help sort that out. But, as with anything, there are pros and cons to all of it. Ritchie Shoemaker has a whole host of labs that can track. 

Those are the labs that I was using to track my mold exposure. That has been helpful because they are things that, when I have been in a clean environment, have been negative, and when I have been in a toxic environment, they have elevated. What else would I do? I am sure there is one that has come along, but because I am so sensitive, certainly if it was a patient that, I had a patient that was very, very complex, and I went over to her house. I mean, I went over to several of my patients houses—more than several—to try to

Ann Shippy, MD

Since you are such a good canary.

Amy Myers, MD

Yes. To try to see if I could feel it in their homes and tell them where it was or just say, Yes, it is definitely in your house. When it was so profound on somebody, I told you, I could feel it on them, and I would just say, I mean, of course, that takes a lot of convincing for somebody to get rid of all of their stuff just based on me saying I have just broken into a rash. I am telling you that it is toxic mold. But some of them did. I wanted backup stuff. I resisted when other places called me years later and told me I was, so it runs the gamut of things. It has got to be a very toxic environment for people to be coming in and needing to immediately react, and that is, of course, what I would explain to them. But I do have a dear friend with whom I went to her house, and I was on tier two, and this wall and that ceiling, I did not realize; I did not really remember doing that. She told me later. You were totally right. Those are the places I opened up. That is exactly where it was. I have been that sensitive in my life. I would think that I could not be sensitive, but

Ann Shippy, MD

Much less sensitive. I think that by getting more time and space in your beautiful home and letting your nervous system settle down, you are going to be a lot less sensitive. Yes. Well, Amy; Dr. Myers, I so appreciate your vulnerability. I am just overwhelmed that you shared at such a soul and heart level, I think.

Amy Myers, MD

Well, I did that because of you, Ann. Ann has been in my house, and I typically go through mold at the same time, ironically or whatever. I just have such a history with you. I do not think that I would have been this way if there had been any other hostess or host.

Ann Shippy, MD

You were so in my heart, and I really know the effort that you put into building this beautiful place, and that is a safe place to really thrive and just really love your family. Just to give you smooth sailing from here so that you can really enjoy what you have built and the beautiful members of your family. There is so much love there.

Amy Myers, MD

Well, thank you. Because of the situation with the lawsuit, I really have not spoken about this. In fact, I have turned down every interview to talk about mold. But knowing that it is you and the history that we have and how many people I hope that this will help, I, of course, said yes. Eventually, once this is all over, I will have an e-book and just a lot more resources around this for people. I do try to take anything that I have been through and that I have learned something from, and I certainly have learned even though I thought I knew everything. I have learned even more from this experience; really, that is all I can do. These are core values: to be of service and to give back to other people to help. If I can prevent anybody from going through what I have been through or to get out of it, if they are going through it, to get out of it or to have hope to know that they can get out of it, that is really why I do it. so there will be more resources available on our website as well. But I just need to get through this current situation.

Ann Shippy, MD

Let us let people know where to find you because there is so much information there already. Books, your website, your socials. Let us let people know everything.

Amy Myers, MD

Is just Amy Myers, MD. The website is AmyMyersMD.com. Social is Amy Myers, M.D. M.D. It is M-Y-E-R-S, and M-D dot com.

Ann Shippy, MD

Well, thank you so much. I cannot wait to see you soon.

Amy Myers, MD

I know, me too.