Is Mold Making You Sick? Symptoms, Testing, and the Path to Healing

So let's talk first about what are the some of the common symptoms and conditions that help me to start to identify mold toxicity for my patients.

The most common symptoms are headaches and sinus congestion.

Now, there's a lot of things that can cause headaches and sinus congestion, but if it's something where it's coming brand new, right? Usually, it's out of nowhere, or it's g- been going on and it's not getting better, right? You get a sinus infection or allergies causing congestion, and you treat it, and yet it keeps coming back, keeps coming back.

Uh, that would be a common sign that we should be looking for mold exposure.

I also very often hear patients talk about having a rash.

Now, this could be any kind of rash, and oftentimes it's a rare rash.

Like, yes, it could be eczema.

Yes, it could be psoriasis.

But a lot of times it's a rash that most times a dermatologist is like, "I don't know what to call that," except for an inflammatory rash, and you're getting treated with usually a hydrocortisone or some sort of topical steroid, and yet the r- actual rash is not going away.

It could also be hives.

A lot of patients with mold exposure experience hives that are not going away.

But it could literally be just random red splotches that are coming up on your hands or your face or anywhere on your body, and that could be a sign that you've been exposed to mold.

But not always.

Not everybody gets headaches, not everybody gets rashes.

But the other common scenario that I see is autoimmunity and allergies.

Not necessarily both, right? Some people may have been diagnosed with an autoimmune condition, whether that's Hashimoto's or psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis or any other kind of autoimmune pattern.

Or a person might be experiencing allergies, like lots of increased allergies during spring and fall, pollen season, as well as allergies in their day-to-day life, where there's either sneezing, congestion, hay fever, uh, uh, just more than usual, or even an aggravation of asthma.

So if you're seeing an increase in your allergy symptoms, we need to start thinking about mold as well.

Um, as well as any other increase in infections, whether that's a sinus infection, to a bladder infection, to a digestive imbalance like overgrowing yeast, mold, or the candida, or SIBO, for example, right? Like, if you start noticing overgrowth of bacteria and yeast in your gut, then we need to be thinking about is there some mold exposure that's behind the scenes.

Also, vaginal infections, vaginal yeast, vaginal HPV, or let alone HPV anywhere else in your body, low-grade HPV or high-grade HPV.

Because what happens is the mold lowers your immune function, so you become susceptible to other infections, whether those are viral infections, bacterial infections, yeast infections, or all of the above.

So if you start going, "Why am I keep getting some sort of infection?" We have to be thinking, is there underlying mold exposure? Also Could be that you're experiencing sleep issues, like not, not being able to get to sleep, not staying asleep, not getting good sleep ongoing night after night.