74 | Mold: The Great Masquerader. Is It Behind Your Chronic Illness?

Aubree Felderhoff: Mold actually by the World Health Organization as the great masquerader of the 21st century, meaning that mold has the ability to mimic and look like many other diseases, disorders, and infections. It has the ability to affect every single system in your entire body and every cell. So if it's able to do damage to every single system and every cell in your body, of course it's going to be hard to diagnose because it's going to present a little differently in everybody. It has been shown in studies. to be linked to illnesses such as chronic fatigue, thyroid disorders, chronic Lyme disease, MS, autism, mast cell activation, POTS, hormonal dysregulation, fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, POTS, chronic Epstein-Barr virus, leaky gut, eczema, vision disorders, gum disease, parasite infections, Alzheimer's, ALS. Lou Gehrig's disease, even cancer, guys, there are actual studies out there that show the link between mycotoxins and mold and these disorders and so many more. Before we jump in, I know a lot of you are dealing with weird symptoms and you're not sure what's causing it. So before we get started on today's episode, I wanted to mention that I have created a free mold symptom assessment that takes just a few minutes and you'll get a detailed breakdown of whether your symptoms could actually be mold related and what to do next. Just scroll to the bottom of the show notes and click free mold symptom assessment. I remember the day vividly when I first discovered that mold was behind all of my mystery symptoms. And I felt so overjoyed and also so terrified to have an answer that felt so heavy. I spent the next few years and another hundred thousand dollars doing exactly what my shoemaker trained mold specialist told me. I also remember the day that I decided to quit that practitioner because I was $100,000 more in the hole. It had been another two years that felt wasted off of my life and I truly didn't feel much better. It was then that I started my search for real answers on how to actually heal from mold. I thought everything going on with me in those next few years, the anxiety and depression that seemed to swing from one spectrum to the other, the constant joint muscle body ache pain just from getting up in the morning or sitting down to eat and then all of a sudden having things lock up and cause me issues for weeks at a time, the constant headaches, the cyclical nausea. the chronic leaky gut and parasite infections that I seemed to fight forever, the hormone issues that despite all the treatment in the world never seemed to resolve, I thought they were all due to damage from the mold exposure that I had lived in for seven years before I even knew that that was an issue. I had no clue, no clue that I was still dealing with mold because I hadn't addressed it. I had no clue that it was colonized in my body, that it was still active and causing me more issues, despite the fact that I was in a brand new clean home. My home did not have mold. I took no possessions with me. I had no sort of exposure that I knew of. It seemed highly unlikely. And so the thing that made the most sense to me was that this was just leftover damage. Mold is a toxin and toxins can be super damaging, just like if you were to live in a room that had bleach rotating through the air, you would have some damage from it. My assumption was that all of these symptoms that continued for me was just the leftover damage and not much could be done to help my body because it had been so broken for so long. The day that I discovered that all of these unresolved symptoms that I thought was damaged into my body was actually the result of mold still present, I was overwhelmed with relief because it meant I wasn't crazy. It wasn't in my head. I wasn't just not strong enough to handle these what seemed to be out of nowhere attacks of anxiety and depression or not doing a good enough job on my diet. in order to fix these hormonal imbalances and Hashimoto and thyroid disorder and all of the things I was dealing with that so many other people would tell me, I fixed that by cleaning up my diet or drinking more water or doing this celery cleanse. Guys, I had tried it all and it really boiled down to me starting to believe that I wasn't doing enough. And so this was a huge relief for me. What followed next was a massive dump of frustration, guilt, shame that I didn't know better. Of course it was due to molds and I was absolutely frustrated and embarrassed and felt, to be honest, stupid that I hadn't picked up on the fact that I could still be dealing with actual mold in my body. I felt duped by the doctors who were supposed to be my allies and my partner in getting me well. I felt scammed. I felt immense grief. And it took a little bit for me to get through those feelings of grief of realizing five more years had passed that I could have had my life back. And instead, I was much better being out of that house. But I wasn't at my best. I was still struggling with a lot of things that other people seem to heal from just by doing what made sense. So today's episode is for those of you out there who maybe are like me and you haven't stopped fighting. You know in your gut something is going on. It's not just a bad luck situation or as a lot of doctors told me this is just the way it is when you get older. This is what it looks like when you're a mom with multiple kids. This is what it's like as you age. I knew that wasn't right. Especially when I was in my early 20s and 30s. The absurdity of that just blew me out of the water. So I wanna start off by explaining why I had missed mold for so long and why I have seen so many others miss mold for so Mold actually by the World Health Organization as the great masquerader of the 21st century, meaning that mold has the ability to mimic and look like many other diseases, disorders, and infections. It has the ability to affect every single system in your entire body and every cell. So if it's able to do damage to every single system and every cell in your body, of course it's going to be hard to diagnose because it's going to present a little differently in everybody. It has been shown in studies. to be linked to illnesses such as chronic fatigue, thyroid disorders, chronic Lyme disease, MS, autism, mast cell activation, POTS, hormonal dysregulation, fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, POTS, chronic Epstein-Barr virus, leaky gut, eczema, vision disorders, gum disease, parasite infections, Alzheimer's, ALS. Lou Gehrig's disease, even cancer, guys, there are actual studies out there that show the link between mycotoxins and mold and these disorders and so many more. Now, it's highly, highly individual, depending on your genes, your exposure, and your overall health at the time of exposure. So just like in any other... Disorder or any other virus you think about if you've had the COVID virus You may have symptoms such as loss of taste or smell where someone else in your family may have symptoms such as a severe sinus infection and someone else might have flu like symptoms and it often just has to do with how we are genetically wired where we are weaker where we are more vulnerable in our genes and the same is true with mold So it often is going to attack and show areas that you might be more vulnerable or more susceptible just in your genetic makeup, which makes it incredibly hard to diagnose. Because for some of us, we might have the fatigue and the hair loss and hormonal dysregulation. And others of us may have chemical sensitivities and as they call it mold rage or angry outbursts and anxiety and depression. and it strictly looks like more of mental illness. It's really hard to be able to link mold when it can look like anything. Now a clue that you might be dealing with mold is if you have more than one thing going on and more things keep popping up. That's what happened for me. It started with fatigue and then it went into hormone dysregulation in my 20s and Hashimoto's, thyroid disorder that popped up. Then it moved into this chronic Epstein-Barr and immune dysregulation and continued to move down the line. It became where I lost a lot of my vision. My hair started falling out. I started having severe vertigo and not being able to remember. I actually got tested for early dementia because I would drive and basically black out. I had no idea where I was going. It was like this odd amnesia, this scary thing. I lost my ability to recall words. I would read something and I would stare at the word and I could see the word. but I couldn't tell you what it was. I knew what it was. I knew it was an apple as I looked at it, but I couldn't recall it. But the main thing was for me, I continued to collect diagnoses. I continued to have more and more things go wrong. And with each thing that went wrong, and this happened with myself, with my children, with my husband, with other people that I've worked with, it just continues to, wreak havoc on your systems and your body, And you will continue to, because you don't know better, treat the symptoms. So I started with going to see a thyroid specialist thinking that thyroid was my big issue. And I treated and I treated and we did all the things and I did the natural approaches and I did the unnatural approaches and I tried the medication, nothing worked. No matter what, I couldn't get my thyroid stable. The same thing with Epstein-Barr, the same thing with as I just continued to collect these diagnoses, I would do the things that doctor recommended whether they were natural or not natural. Sometimes I did pharmaceuticals. But no matter what, the treatment did not resolve the symptoms. And that was because I was treating the wrong thing. I was treating the symptom, but the root cause was mold. And so the more that I worked on treating these symptoms that my body was having damage and cell die off and all of these issues that mold was causing, the more that I was having side effects, of course, from some of the treatments. and the more damage that was done because I wasn't treating the right thing. It's like if you break your arm and you go to the doctor's office and they give you a prescription for migraines. Maybe it helps with the pain a little bit but you know, it's obviously not going to help your broken arm because the root cause was you broke your bone. You need help in that department. And so that's what happens with mold symptoms. And when we continue to try to treat things, Maybe we have some progress and some support, but overall our health is still very affected and we continue to rack up more and more diagnoses, more problems, or just unresolved symptoms despite working hard to treat them and quote unquote do all the right things. It's very frustrating. So let me ask you this. Have you been where I was? Have you tried treating a lot of things and not gotten results or gotten very weak results? This may be a sign that you were either treating the wrong root cause or you're using the wrong tools. Even after I knew that mold was my problem, I did the treatment that these doctors told me would fix me and it did not fix me. And it wasn't because, as I had concluded in my head for a long time, that you can't fully heal from old. You're just too broken and too damaged. And some of these doctors told me my brain, I had brain scans that showed I had brain atrophy and brain damage. Maybe I did, but it doesn't mean I can't come back from it. And that's what I was led to believe. And that's what so many of us are led to believe is that you might get better and you'll get some resolve. But mold damages you to the point where you just can't come back. And that's absolutely not true. If you're not getting well, if you've been doing something for a long time and you're not seeing a resolve, it's not because your body is meant to hurks and die off for years and months. It's not because you're meant to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars like I did and spend years in these lengthy treatment protocols. It means your body has not been given the tools to heal. You're missing something. That's what it means. Because the body is beautiful. It was created to heal. It is meant to heal. And if given the right tools, it will. We see that every time we fall down, or if you have kids and your kids fall down and scrape their elbow, the body doesn't bleed out forever. It was beautifully designed to heal itself. We've been given all of the right tools inside our body. And when we're hurting with mold, if we're not healing, it's because we're not giving it the right tools to heal. Now you may be listening and you may be nodding along and thinking, makes sense, of course. But I have no clue if mold is actually my issue. So many doctors, so many specialists have told me that it's my Hashimoto's that's the issue, or I just have the genetics for anxiety and depression and I may just need to do medication and that will fix it. And no matter what I do, I'm just not seeing the results. Nothing seems to be working. But I have no clue how to test for mold. I just had someone recently reach out to me asking who I could recommend for them to test their house because their spouse was struggling with some long-term. chronic sinus issues and they thought mold might be the issue. And I responded, you don't start with your house. I mean, you can, but that's gonna cost you a lot of money. You wanna start with testing your body to see if you even have mold and the mycotoxins in your body? So you start with testing. And we don't start with testing, this is what I was given for a long time from practitioners. We don't start with testing. by doing urine mycotoxin testing. We start with testing the toxin load that is actually inside the body. We do not want to test the toxins that are exiting the body. Now let me tell you why. Healthy people eliminate toxins through poop and pee. That's what our bodies are made to do. So just because we are peeing out mycotoxins does not mean that we have mold illness. In fact, that's a good sign. It means our body is reading itself and eliminating itself of toxins. Now we may have a massive amount coming out. That might or might not indicate that we have an issue. But wouldn't you rather know for sure what's going on in your body? So many people do the urine mycotoxin test and they say, I peed out this much and this must mean I'm sick. And then next time that they take it, They pee out less or more and they assume, well, if I peed out more, I must still be in exposure or I'm getting sicker or maybe I'm getting better and so I'm able to eliminate more. It's confusing. It doesn't lead to any scientific evidence. There is not any proof behind the pudding. What you wanna do is test what is actually the toxin load inside your body. And that is done through a blood serum test to antibodies for mycotoxins. Now we're gonna talk more in depth about this on another episode, but if you are thinking, okay, maybe I need to start there and you wanna take that first step, go take my free mold symptom assessment as your first step. It's free, it takes just a few minutes and it's gonna give you a good indication. on if you should even explore if mycotoxins could be your problem. It's an easy next step that you can do right now. It's linked at the bottom of the episode and it will give you really good insight into what is actually going on and what specific next steps I would recommend you take so that you begin to have a roadmap because I know what it's like. to be in the middle of chronic illness, to be in the middle even when you know the name of your chronic illness. For me, it was mold. And still, it is so overwhelming. There is so much circulating information. You have no idea who to go to, what to do, who to trust. So I hope that the free mold symptom assessment that I've created will help you to be that first step to begin to give you that roadmap. Alright everybody, I hope that this was helpful. Remember that you are not broken. You can get your life back. You just have to be shown how. We'll see you next time on Mold Free Mom.