Dr Neil Nathan: Toxic

welcome back to another episode of christian natural health today i'm very excited to have dr neil nathan with us

dr nathan has been practicing medicine for 50 years and has been a board certified been board certified in family

practice and pain management and is a founding diplomat of the american board of integrative holistic medicine he's

written several books including healing as possible new hope for chronic fatigue fibromyalgia persistent pain and other

chronic illnesses and on hope and healing for those who have fallen through the medical cracks he's hosted

an internationally syndicated radio program and podcast on voice america called the cutting edge of health and

wellness today he's been working to bring an awareness that mold toxicity is a major contributing factor for patients

with chronic illness and he lectures internationally on this subject which led to the publication of his ebook mold

and mycotoxins current evaluation and treatment in 2016 which is now updated

and then to his best-selling book toxic heal your body from mold toxicity lyme disease multiple chemical sensitivities

and chronic environmental illness his new book out winter 2021 is energetic diagnosis a discussion of the value of

intuition and energetic devices as an aid to both diagnosis and treatment of medical illness dr nathan has been

treating complex chronic disease medical illnesses for over 25 years now and lyme disease for the past 15 years as his

practice has evolved he finds himself increasingly treating the patients who have become so sensitive and toxic that they can no longer tolerate their usual

treatments and his usually his major current interest is finding unique ways of helping them to recover welcome dr

nathan thank you so much for joining us thanks lauren thanks for having me yeah absolutely all right so

um most of the questions that i have for you are kind of based on your book toxic can you review some of the dead giveaway

symptoms for mold toxicity sure i think i want to start by

helping your listeners to understand what a big problem this is that is very

under appreciated by the medical profession generally the it is now estimated that up to 10

million americans currently suffer with some symptoms of mold toxicity we're not

talking mold allergy we're talking mold toxicity right well it's estimated that up to 50 of all

buildings in this country have some degree of mold in them so it would not be

that much of a stretch to think that a lot of people are being affected by it yeah i guess that's true my goodness i

wasn't aware that it was quite that high uh sometimes it's hard for me to tell because i such a huge percentage of my

population that's my demographic and yours but that's that's an amazing statistic

wow so so first of all it's really common

then within that context mold toxicity causes such a wide array

of symptoms that it's very easy to not really jump to the immediate

conclusion but if someone has a wide array of symptoms you know

the the the array would be um cognitive issues difficulty with focus

memory concentration brain fog word finding psychological issues intense anxiety or

depression or ocd or mood swings respiratory difficulties things like

asthma like symptoms shortness of breath air hunger cough

intestinal system abdominal pain diarrhea constipation gas bloating

headache um joint pain muscle pain paresthesias which is numbness and

tinglings in different parts of the body fatigue

[Music] and sensitivity to just about everything

and the

onset of a new autoimmune process so

when someone comes into a doctor's office with a lot of those symptoms if that physician doesn't know anything

about this there are very likely to say nobody can have all those symptoms so

this is in your head and the vast majority of people that i see have been told that repeatedly and unfortunately

that's a travesty it's simply not true those people aren't aware of mold or

another condition that can that does similar things lyme disease

those two categories of illness mold toxicity and lyme disease

are very common it's estimated there there are 400 000 new cases of lyme disease every year by

the cdc so it's not rare either we're talking two different epidemics which have not

yet been embraced by the medical profession as being as

big an issue as it is and those patients unfortunately are often being told by

one physician after another you just need psychological help because nobody could have all of that

and the problem is you can and both of these are treatable

so we're missing an opportunity to really help people who are suffering because we're telling them this is in

your head and that's not the case so that's my overview lauren

there are specific symptoms that are an immediate tip-off to mold okay

one of them is patients will complain of the perception of an internal vibration

they're not vaporizing vibrating on the outside you can't see a tremor you can't see that vibration but they feel it

and again that's the kind of thing when they tell a physician about it they go well right okay now i know you need

an ssri or an anti-anxiety medication but no the things that cause that are mold

toxicity or bartonella which is a co-infection of lyme disease

ice pick type pains electrical sensations or pains

those are classical for mold toxicity when someone has a new onset

of anxiety or depression and then they've they've been a solid citizen all their life never had that

and all of a sudden they're anxious for reasons that aren't related

to having an irs audit or the in-laws over for the weekend

it's not situational it just comes out of the blue think mold toxicity

also by the way think bartonella if you have been diagnosed

with a condition that is called by the specialist atypical

atypical rheumatoid arthritis atypical als atypical alzheimer's a typical ms

atypical parkinson's disease but i hear the word atypical in my specialists

comment they're aware that the features of this illness don't really match their usual

diagnosis but they don't always know what that is so if you hear the word atypical then

okay maybe we should be thinking about mold toxicity yeah yeah start going down that path so um and one of it's

interesting that presents so similarly and yet there's also similar like biotoxin testing that

can present for both so the the biotoxin markers tgf beta 1 c4ac 3a are those

pretty much dead giveaway that we're dealing with mold or one of the co-infections or lyme or are there other things that you sometimes think about as

possibilities there those markers are helpful in telling us that there's

inflammation but it doesn't tell us what the source of that inflammation is

so if you have elevated markers it tells us something is going on this is not in

your head but it doesn't identify the source right right okay so and then where do you go

from there once you have somebody present with these symptoms you have maybe the biotoxin markers come up and

by the way how often do you use the other biotoxin markers like mmp9 msh vip

vegf those kinds of things too i don't use them much at all i did years ago when i started working

with dr shoemaker who put a lot of this on the map

back then we didn't have the tests that are available now and so i did a lot of that testing in the early

days but it became very clear that we have better testing separately for mold

toxicity or for lyme disease or for co-infections so the best testing in my

opinion for mold toxicity is the urine mycotoxin test simple test you just

collect a morning urine you mail it in for analysis and if there are top

mycotoxins or mold toxins in your urine they don't belong there so we have our

diagnosis right not only do we have our diagnosis but we also have outlined our treatment because

the different toxins are treated and differently we can go over that in some more detail

later so we have the diagnosis and we have the treatment laid out with a

simple urine test that anybody can do that's my starting point gotcha gotcha

and then what about lyme so what is what is your favorite lyme test at the moment which one do you usually use

the two best labs in the country from my perspective are igenex or infecto labs

they use it's a it's a laboratory in minnesota

that is derived from the armen labs from germany and basically someone from the armen company

moved the test to minnesota where it's now available it's a somewhat different test than hygienics but

i think equally accurate there's a number of other tests on the market that i don't think are very accurate at all

okay so so do you typically i guess depending on the presenting symptoms then you'll decide which of those tests you begin

with in order to see which direction we go plus the story i'm sure correct how likely that we're doing

okay so um how do you tell the difference or is it important to tell the difference between somebody who has

actual fungal organisms still in them versus leftover mycotoxins from a previous exposure would you treat those

cases differently or does it matter it does matter

if you catch if someone is living in a moldy environment there is a window in which

they have toxins in their body but they haven't colonized where the mold

actually starts growing in their gi tract or sinus area or both

look at that window if you can treat them in that window with what we call binders

alone you may be able to cure them without doing anything else so

that's great unfortunately the vast majority of people who have mold exposure

don't get the diagnosis until years later because they they go to their doctors

and they say oh mole doesn't do that or no that's not possible or it hasn't even dawned on

anyone to ask someone about mold so i can't count the number of times

when i bring the subject up someone says well i i don't think i i'm living in a

moldy environment nor have i been right and but the seed is planted they'll come

back for their second visit and they'll go you know i did live in a basement two years ago

and there was black stuff growing all over the walls and it's super common for people once they start thinking about it

to realize you know i really have had mold exposure in the past

but then the second comment is oh but i'm not now so that's certainly not a problem

no if you were exposed in the past that mold may have started growing in you

which we call colonization and you're carrying it with you so you may move to a safe environment and you still can

have mold toxicity and still needs to be treated so to come back to your original question

not everyone needs to be treated in my experience again in my practice

i would say that 90 95 of people have colonized so that most people will need

to have anti-fungal treatment for either the sinus or the gut area or both if

they're going to get well yeah so and how can you tell if somebody's complication versus do you

just try binders and if that's insufficient then you go with the anti-fungals as well yep there's a couple of ways to tell none of them

being particularly good but there are ways to tell one is

there is a weak test that great planes have which they call an oat test or the

first section of the old test is called the mult test which is specifically the fungal elements

and some of those are metabolites of mold that strongly

suggest that they have colonized that it's growing in you but it's a weak test

it will occasionally show it but if it's negative by no means does it means that

it ruled it out but that's helpful if those things are clearly positive it points us definitely

in that direction another component of the of that test is a metabolite called arabinose which

if that's elevated that's strongly indicative that there's candida in there along with mold okay

other than that we have virtually no tests that can tell us with scientific clarity

that you colonize what i typically do is i'll start people on binders

if they are profoundly better in a short period of time i may not put them on

antifungals i may just let the binders work and that may completely clear up a small

percentage of the people that i've worked with which is great if i don't need to go to antifungals we're not going to antifungals okay but for most

people they will do the binders they'll get a little bit better

or they will tread water they'll they'll stabilize at i don't know 30

50 better but still nowhere near where they want to be and it's really clear that

something is impeding their ability to get well and often it's because they've colonized and we need to treat that

gotcha okay and what about the nasal swabs when you're doing the fungal swab with that basically is that the way you

determine if it's in the nose as well no very very weak test um ent physicians forever have been

reluctant to do nasal swabs for culturing mold or fungus because the

yield is so low in patients with known fungus in their sinuses the yield is

less than 10 so it's so it's just not a good test

and it gives people the wrong impression if they do insist on it being

done you need to know that if it's positive great we have information to work with

but it's very likely to be negative and so if somebody gets marcon's kind of

going down that road a little bit uh marcon's the bacterial overgrowth in the nose that's connected with with mold and

biotoxin for the listeners um do you automatically treat the fungi assuming

it's there then typically is part of the same you watch me shaking my head here

yeah i don't think that marcon's matters at all ah okay

okay when i first started working with dr schumacher um he believes that it's super important

and i know that he and dr heyman teach that as a major part of how they approach mold as an issue

i worked very closely with him we did super aggressive treatment of marcons for

years in the early days and what i observed is that even with

two years of aggressive antibiotic and nasal spray treatment

most people you couldn't eradicate it and if it did if you did clear it

if you checked it again it came right back

so dr shoemaker admitted to me after a few years i came to him and i went ritchie

i can't eradicate this stuff and i don't even see any clinical improvement

when i try and he said you know yeah he said that's correct that's the same

thing marcon's is not an infection per se it's what's called

a commensural meaning it just lives there yeah and

although on theoretical grounds he believes that it interferes with mold treatment the majority of us who work in

the field have not had the same experience so years ago i stopped looking for it

and i stopped treating it specifically because honestly i don't think it matters

um and but you didn't still use the nasal antifungals at times though oh yeah i do okay because the two major

areas of colonization are the sinus and gut areas one of the things um early on

that dr joe brewer discovered joe was an infectious disease specialist from

kansas city who wrote some of the top-notch early papers on

how to approach mold toxicity and how to treat it and joe found that many patients wouldn't get well

until we treated the sinus and gut areas and he wrote a couple of papers showing

the improvement that he got by treating a hundred consecutive patients with

amphitericin b as a nasal spray and nystatin as a nasal spray and in both

cases and with the amphotericin b there was a 94 cure rate

and with the um nystatin there was an 89 cure rate so that the vast majority of patients

when when they do get anti-fungal treatment makes a profound difference in

their treatment um and so for other people that maybe you'll be doing binders and they don't

totally get well how does genetic susceptibility play into this again

that's an issue that dr shoemaker thinks is very important but i

don't again i did a ton of those when we first started working with them

and what i saw was the people who had the supposedly bad

genes that predisposed to having mold toxicity it didn't change one bit about their

response to treatment the people with the supposedly bad genes um often responded really well and

quickly to treatment and some people who didn't have the genes um really languished

so it became clear to me and again the vast majority of people who work in this field don't agree with

dr schumacher that that's important there are some who do i'll grant you that but i haven't seen that as

clinically relevant it's sometimes used an excuse to well

you can't get well because you're genetically messed up oh yeah and i hate that because it's not true

in my in my experience um having treated three or four four thousand people this way successfully

it doesn't matter if you treat someone correctly they're going to get well

so back to the binder question you mentioned that different binders apply to different mycotoxins so can you give

us a quick rundown like when would you use uh cholesteramine or welcome and when

would you use charcoal when would you use saccharomyces all those kind of things that's a bit

much probably for the audience but um those tables are listed in my book by

the way toxic if you want to explore that in more detail but for okra toxin which is one of the

most common the best binders are either cholestyramine or welcome which are

prescription medications activated charcoal does work but it's weak

four trichothesine and aflatoxin the best binders are bentonite clay

activated charcoal and chlorella for gliotoxin and xeralinone the best

binders are bentonite clay and the good probiotic yeast saccharomyces boulardii

so that by knowing what you're dealing with you can make up a comprehensive

binder program to know that you're pulling out of the body everything that's there

if you don't have that information and you simply give a binder

then you're just hoping that that's the one that's in their body and it's going to work

and to what degree have you found mycotoxins in food to be an issue like are you a proponent of the low lectin

diet or anything like that no i i'm not um

mold toxin messes with with leptin so that um going on a low leptin diet

doesn't make much difference until you get what's causing it out of the body which is the mold toxicity once you get

that out of the body then people who've been gaining weight in a way that is very upsetting to them can can lose it

again and go back to being that healthy weight that they were previously

i don't think that mold in food matters much at all

there are reported cases which some people point to

of epidemics of mold toxicity and people who've got into moldy batches of peanuts

or things of that nature or grain but

to the to the largest extent i don't think that food affects it much again i know that there are physicians who make

a big deal about it i did a study a small one we didn't have the funding

for it with great planes two years ago in which we had people

uh and by the way this is the only study i know that's ever been done and on this subject

we took patients who had mold toxicity and we had them avoid all the foods that we

know could contain mold for 10 days and we then measured the urine mycotoxin

test then we had them pig out on those foods for 10 days

and see how it affected their their mycotoxin levels somewhat to our surprise

seven of the eight people in the study their mycotoxin levels dropped on eating

supposedly moldy food wow one patient had a slight increase in okra toxin only

in doing so so with the little bit of data we have and with a ton of clinical experience i

don't think that mold and food is the issue it's mold and it's mold in your living environment that is the issue

and so for testing uh before doing mycotoxin testing do you feel it's important to do something to pull the

mycotoxins out of the system sauna nac glutathione something like that

that's helpful in treatment but i think the the basics of treatment are simply

threefold number one you want to be sure that the patient evaluates their environment

home work car sometimes to be sure that there isn't any mold toxins in their in their

environment if there is they won't get well you can get better but you cannot get

well if you're living in a moldy environment it's absolutely not possible i would say that

that's the one thing that all people who treat mold completely agree on you know non-negotiable

is that a problem for a lot of people a huge one many people are not in a position to move

to get a new home or even afford remediation so it's a huge problem but

it is one that is must be addressed because otherwise

we're not going anywhere second we use the correct binders

so that we're pulling toxins out of the body and third we then use antifungals

different patients have different needs to improve their ability to detoxify

which is what i think you're addressing here so how hard do people need to work on it it

varies people who have a strong constitution are often able to do that without

focusing on that particularly people who are more sensitive often have to do a lot of preparatory work to get

their body detoxifying better so that they function better virtually everybody who has mold

toxicity will benefit from a sauna say so it is a great way to get toxins out

of the body yeah but so you don't necessarily recommend doing sauna or glutathione

prior to testing in order to feel like the test okay sorry i missed that part of it so

when people have mold toxicity mold toxin interferes with their ability to

detoxify what that means in english is that if you have

a boatload of mold in your body mold toxin will prevent you from excreting it into your urine so that

what shows up in the urine will be a small piece of what's really there

so the first test we get on a urine mycotoxin test is going to be what i

call tip of the iceberg it will show it it'll tell us what's there but not to the extent it's there

so the vast majority of people over 80 percent when they're getting better when they're

getting treated when you repeat their tests they will get higher numbers the next time

and if i don't warn them about it they're going to get freaked out they're going to go oh come on neil i'm doing everything you asked me to do how

how is that possible and the answer is this is great now you're detoxifying better you're

able to get more of this into your urine this is great not a problem and by the way

you did notice by the way that you are a lot better right so not a problem yeah okay

so given that what what dr brewer and i discovered early on when we began using the urine

the new urine mycotoxin test when it first came on the market was that

our really sick patients and they were living in mold they had every

symptom of mold they had every reason to believe they had mold toxicity and they sometimes had completely negative urine

tests and we went you know what um

what we realized was it was about this aspect of detoxification

so realizing that we were missing the diagnosis

we then added glutathione and a sauna to the tree to the testing

so that for most people and i'll come back to that in a second taking glutathione

500 milligrams twice a day for a week before they collect their urine gives us

a much more accurate answer if they will also do a sauna or a hot

bath or a hot tub sweating the night before they take their urine also will get better answer

both is best either is excellent because some of our very sensitive

patients can't take a sauna without getting really sick and some of them can't take glutathione without getting

really sick because it mobilizes toxin

faster than their body can process it that's what that's actually what we're using it for

but when that happens that means uh oh this is not going to work so if someone

is taking glutathione as a part of doing the test correctly and they get a clear

exacerbation of their symptoms then it's like okay stop the glutathione collect

your urine now i i i know we've already provoked this adequately because you're worse right

right yeah so and speaking of the sulfur metabolism concept so you mentioned in your book that your sulfur metabolism

can shift from using cysteine to make glutathione to instead shifting it to make hydrogen sulfide and taurine so

how does that kind of play into this and how do you reverse it that's

a very good and somewhat tricky question so part of

through dr navio's model of the cell danger response which is a brilliant way of understanding

chronic illness of almost every type one of the first things that happens

when cells recognize danger in the form of a toxin or an infectious

agent one of the first things they do is they shut down methylation

which is the process by which we make glutathione now they do it

giving you example if you had a viral infection viruses

need to hijack our chemistry to replicate to grow and so they have to

hijack methylation to grow so one of the things that human

beings have evolved over the centuries is shutting down methylation to prevent

an infectious agent from hijacking our chemistry and working with it so we

intentionally shut down methylation in order to survive in order to deal with whatever is

affecting us but when the process doesn't go away when we have an

inflammatory process like mold or lime that just keeps cranking along because we haven't cured it

then we have methylation shut down for a long period of time if that's the case

we can hopefully support that by taking

b12 and folate uh my preferred methods are to use hydroxy b12 and

5-methyltetrahydrofolate to support methylation and improve our ability to methylate and if someone can do that

that's great and something i like to do early on so you heard me say if

in my sensitive patients at least 50 of them when they

improve methylation they're again mobilizing toxin faster

than they can process it and it makes them worse often much worse

so well over 50 of the people that i treat my sensitive patients

can't support methylation until we're further along in treatment

so once we get the toxin levels down once they're beginning to move into the healing phase at that point then we can

address methylation so it's a tricky question it isn't the simple everybody needs to support it it's

is my patient capable of supporting it at the right timing

so is there anything i have not asked you that you want to make sure that you leave with our audience

gosh we could talk about this for days i often do it really depends on what your listening

audience wants to know i think we've covered some of the basics about how

prevalent it is the kind of symptoms to look for how we diagnose it

how we treat it how we look at mold in the environment how we test for it

i think those are really the basics that i think not everyone needs to know but if you

have a family member a loved one or yourself you're dealing with an issue that hasn't

been diagnosed then the key is yes we can do this

and my take home message is this is treatable absolutely

so where can people go to learn more about you my website

neil nathan md.com has information

i've got bunches of newsletters blogs um if

you want to consult with me i'm still consulting but i do

require that you have your own physician to work with me on the console so that they can

be taking care of the day-to-day issues i i i'm currently consulting with about 500

people and i can't answer everybody's email the way you might like me too

another thing that i offer for those of you out there who are physicians is they do have a mentorship program where

with a fabulous naturopath named jill krista we teach

physicians to how to approach this in the in the comprehensive way it's not

just about mold it's about mold lime other infections

environmental toxicities helping people to put this all together so that they can

more effectively treat their patients and we currently have

maybe 150 physicians in our mentorship group anyone who

is a physician is welcome to join us we always have room for it

um so if you're interested there is information on the mentorship program on

my website and we're happy to share what we know um like we're doing right now

fantastic well i will link to that in the show notes and thank you so much for all of your time and wisdom dr nathan

really appreciate it okay you're very welcome lauren thanks for having me

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