Mold and Lyme can look like the same monster showing up in your life.
Both mold and Lyme can affect men and women. One day you are a normal productive person, and then suddenly, you are tired, achy, fatigued, getting headaches/migraines, neurological problems plague you and more. Lyme and mold are neurotoxic to the system, and an absolute monster popping up in your life. They can be incredibly debilitating so, we are left with the question of: Is my problem Lyme, or could it be coming from mold? Mold and Lyme frequently get missed so, lets looks at 3 test we use in our clinic to help determine if Mold is the culprit.
Test #1 – Visual Contrast Test for Mold and Lyme
If you’ve ever been in the mold world, you may have come across this test called a visual contrast test.
This is what a VCS test looks like
We use this with many different patients because with any kind of neurotoxin present, you will likely fail this test. It is most famous for mold, but you’ll also fail it for Lyme, Bartonella, heavy metal toxicity, and many other reasons. This test checks for neuro inflammation and is one we like to use in our office. There is about 8% who will pass no matter how sick they are, so we can’t use It for 100% accuracy, but 92% is a pretty good screening tool for a very inexpensive test.
If you’re wondering if your illness might be coming from mold, Lyme, or heavy metals, you should pop on to this website, www.VCStest.com , and take the test! It is very inexpensive and very easy to do. If you fail, then it’s probably worth going and looking harder at tick borne illness, mold, or some kind of neurotoxin that you’ve unfortunately been exposed to.
“92% of people exposed to a neurotoxin will fail the visual contrast test.”
Test #2 – MycoTOX Screening
The test we like in our office to definitively check for mold is called a MycoTox Profile through Great Plains Laboratories. This is a urine test to see your bodies detoxification of mold toxins. It tests for Aspergillus, Penicillium, Stachybotrys (this is the famous black mold), Fusarium, and Chaetomium. However, the most common one you’ll find is Ochratoxin A.
There are a couple of caveats with this test, for example it is not checking for the mold directly, it is checking for your body’s detoxification of that mold. This is an important distinction because if you can’t detoxify, you won’t see mold in the result. When you have chronic illness, you can get significant impairment of your detoxification pathways. For this reason, we find you need to be taking a detox support supplement in order to get a better result with this test. The easiest thing to use is Glutathione; it’s not the only thing to use, but we will have you take glutathione for a couple days prior to doing this test so that you’ll see better results.
You must stop taking all binding supplements before taking the MycoTOX test.
Another thing to consider before taking this test is, you cannot be on any binders for 2-3 weeks prior to taking the test. If you’re on a binder
The Mycotox tells us if there’s mold in YOU.
If you fail this test, the next step is to look at testing your home for mold.
Test #3 – ERMI
After testing yourself for mold toxicity the next step is the find out where the mold exposure is coming from. For environmental testing we really like to run an ERMI.
This a copy of an ERMI test. The EMRI Tests for 36 different types of mold and they will give you a score as you can see in the red box. We like this number to be below 5. You can see here this persons score is 15 and its it’s red.
Here’s their scoring index. We’d like your score to be less than five so, you really don’t want to be in Q4. Q1 and Q2 are safe, Q3 is kind of iffy, but Q4 is a slam dunk Problem.
This test helps us determine if the mold is just inside your body, or if we must clean up your environment as well. It can be very hard to get the mold out of your body if you are constantly walking back into your house and breathing in mold. You’re going to have to clean your own system out either way, but you do want to make sure that the environment you’re in is fairly mold free. I want to stress that this is a big mistake people will make; they will remove the mold from their environment, and they won’t spend time getting the mold out of themselves!
It’s not just as simple as getting out of the moldy environment
If you clean out your environment, you’re going to stop the source of the mold, the problem is you’re not going to clean out what’s already
“You are your own mold factory”
inside of you. In chronic mold cases the mold could be colonizing in your gut and sinus passageways. In that case you’re just carrying it aroundwith you and not getting out of the environment; you are your own mold factory at this point and cleaning that out is going to be necessary in helping your body detoxify! It’s not just as simple as if you get out of the moldy environment and it’ll all go away. If you get out of the environment fast it can work that way, but if you’ve missed this for several months or years, it is often a little more complex than simply moving out of the moldy environment and it all gets better.
What influences me to run Mold tests sooner on patients?
We will often test for Mold if you find water damage in your home.
I’ll run mold testing right away if you’re “multiple chemical-sensitive” . I’ll also run mold if the patient history uncovers that we had a problem after water damage in your residence, you moved into a new location, or something along those lines. If I can track it back to a specific location, we’ll run mold immediately. If you’re not getting the results you want in Lyme disease, we’ll start to check for mold to see if mold may be blocking me from getting the results I want from a Lyme protocol. These two monsters will empower one another, they will hinder the body and make each one harder to address. They’ll hurt the detoxification of both pathways, so when we’re dealing with Lyme and we’re not getting the results we want, it’s always a good idea to look into mold.
The same goes if your trying to address mold. If you’re looking at mold and you’re not quite getting the readings or results you want, it might be a good idea to also look at Lyme and see if that’s present, and inhibiting some of the progress you’re trying to make on the mold in your body.
There is no “right way” to fight Mold and Lyme!
I know some people will feel that “you have to do mold and then you have to do Lyme,” other people will say “you have to do Lyme and then you have to do mold.” I consider two of the best doctors on this Lyme and Mold subject to be Dr. Nathan Neal author of the book Toxic and Dr. Richard Horowitz author of the book How Can I Get Better? I’ve had the privilege of doing multiple seminars together(they do a combined seminar) and speaking with how they approach these tough, chronic cases. They both agree that you can’t always do them In a certain order. Some people will need to do Lyme first. Some patients will need to do mold first. If you have both, then you’ll require an Individualized approach with someone who track and watches how you respond In order to get you well.
So, if you’re struggling and you don’t know why, I recommend that you hop onto WWW.VCStest.com and take the test. If you fail, consider contacting our office so we can figure out why you failed. The top reasons we find in our office are heavy metals or other toxic chemical exposure, Mold and Lyme.
