Rebekah Kelley: Welcome to the Humanized podcast, all about personalizing your health. I’m your host, Rebekah Kelley, and today our topic will be Mold Illness, the Great Masquerader: Offering a New, Simple, Effective Solution, with Dr. Bruce Rind. Before we get into today’s topic, I want to remind everyone to subscribe and get all the other varieties of casts in audio, video and transcription at HumanizedHealth.com. I’d also like to thank our lead sponsor, Village Green Apothecary, at MyVillageGreen.com.

So, to introduce today’s guest, Dr. Bruce Rind is a leading holistic and functional medicine doctor who wants to support you in your journey to regain or maintain optimal health and well-being. He sees you as an integrated being whose body systems are linked together and influenced by environment and genetics. He works with you to discover the root cause of problems and not just address symptoms. Dr. Rind is certified by the American Board of Integrative Holistic Medicine and has been practicing holistic medicine since 1985. He started his medical career as an anesthesiologist, then moved into pain management, and finally into holistic medicine.

Dr. Rind thanks so much for being with us.

Bruce Rind: Thank you for inviting me.

Rebekah Kelley: So I just want to jump right in there and say, first off, how did you get into treating mold and fungal issues with patients?

Bruce Rind: I actually never had any interest in it. It sort of grabbed me and pulled me in. I had a 16-year-old patient about 18 years ago that was literally dying of mold illness, and nobody was able to treat him and he couldn’t even tolerate swallowing one teaspoon of water. I had to keep him alive with an IV. His mother brought him to me for that. And after 2 weeks I was going crazy. I couldn’t figure out what to do, and it just drove me crazy. Make a long story short, you know, you think about a problem a lot and sometimes the solution shows up. I realized at that point, suddenly a light bulb went on, that mold requires moisture, warmth, and organic material in order to thrive. And, wait a minute, that describes every plant on earth. Every plant should be prime real estate. Why aren’t they dying? And the reason, it turns out, must be because they have something in them that protects them. And when the plant dies, that something isn’t there. And it occurred to me what that chemistry would be and how to access it without destroying it. And I literally went immediately to Whole Foods and got a whole bunch of some substances from their produce department and I made this stuff at night, all night. And my wife was very kind. She saw me working in my kitchen as my laboratory, and she looked around and she said, next time, honey, would you please cover the blender? So I did put it together in the way that I understood, and I brought it to this young man, and I gave him, I offered him, he said, maybe one drop because I’m afraid I’ll throw up. I give him a drop. Nothing happened. I gave him another drop of this special oil and again, nothing happened. I give it again. That day he was able to drink a glass of water without throwing up. The next day, I said here, take a whole bunch more. And he did. And that day he was able to drink a quart. The next day he called me up. He said, I’m not coming in. I’m able to drink a light soup. And 2 weeks later he was on full diet, no problem, everything was good. I thought, wow, this stuff really worked well for him. Maybe it’ll help somebody else. And I brought it into the office and I offered it to my patients. The first lady to come in had a neuropathy, arm was on fire. I said, would you like to try this? And she said, sure. So she took a few drops. Two minutes later she says, you know what? My arm is starting to feel normal. In another minute, she said, it’s normal, first time in 5 years. So I said, here’s the bottle. Take it, and keep taking it. And by the way, you have a mold problem. Look in your house for mold. She found it, remediated. Her husband, who had an arrhythmia and was scheduled for cardiac ablation and had muscle cramps, couldn’t exercise anymore, suddenly that disappeared when the mold was gone. Her son had ADHD. That disappeared when the mold was gone. The dog had psoriasis. That disappeared when the mold was gone.

I suddenly started realizing that mold affects a lot of things. I started offering this to a lot of my patients and all kinds of problems started to disappear or improve. And I’ve been playing around with it ever since. In working with it, it gave me a tool, it gave me a handle that I was able to turn the mold off like a light switch. Later I learned that I can irritate the mold with oregano and make the mold release more toxin and suddenly everything cramped up again or became worse. And sometimes the changes are subtle, but if you know how to look and examine, you could see these subtle changes and I could turn these subtle changes on and off at will. That gave me a very good insight into mold and a new perspective on how to treat the mold literally by turning it on and off with these oils. And, by the way, the stuff is patented, and the process is patented. So far, I’m the only one using it. I wish I could have a thousand people using it. But that’ll come eventually.

Now what I discovered was this. I will tell you very quickly what part of this patent is about and how to treat mold.

Rebekah Kelley: Dr. Rind before you get into that, because we definitely want to hear about that, since the title of this was “The Great Masquerader,” can you just talk about what, just in case there might be someone else out there who, maybe they’ve got some weird symptoms and they just can’t seem to get them alleviated. I mean, could it be that they have mold issues and it’s masquerading as something else? Like, what do those symptoms look like? You mentioned some of them that you notice, but what do those symptoms look like?

And, whenever you have patients come in every day, you said that you didn’t mean to get into this, right? You said that it was kind of an accidental thing. Like, what percentage of people do you find that you’re dealing with every day that you find actually you’re treating for mold issues, and maybe they didn’t even know it because it’s masquerading as something else?

Bruce Rind: What I found, because I’m able to turn it on and off so easily, I can show the patient a lot of times that there’s a mold problem, and it turns out that at least 95% of my patients have a mold problem, but 99% of them don’t know they have it until I show them that you can turn something on and off so quickly and easily. And, and then they go, oh my god, I have this. So then we just fix it. And the fix is rather simple. And we’ll go into that.

The kind of symptoms that I normally see? Remember the mold toxin can affect any type of cell in the body because it affects the cell membrane, lowers its energy. That’s what the toxin does. So if it’s a nerve, you can have anxiety, you can have numbness, you can have neuropathy. You can have brain fog, you can have, I’ve seen a lot of times dementia and you just clear the mold and suddenly the dementia is just gone. But not all dementias are mold. Maybe 25, 30% of them are mold. But if the doctor doesn’t know it, then they say, well, you have this incurable disease. There are other causes of dementia too, you know, vascular, et cetera. Now, if it’s a muscle, that’s the most common and it’s the most easy to demonstrate, I demonstrate this with virtually every patient that walks in. And that is, I can show them the muscles are tight, whether it’s straight leg raising, or the arms moving back and forth. And we measure how many degrees and we could see a profound change. I then give them my little bit of oil and suddenly there’s a profound improvement and we can see the big difference and they say, oh my god, all this muscle tightness, all these muscle aches and pains and cramps, back pain, whatever, neck pain, migraines. Turns out that they have a common origin that you can easily address and at least alleviate or make it much better or much more easily treatable. It can have pain, all kinds of pain syndromes, because the nerves fire too easily. And you put this cream on – it’s an oil or cream, whichever way you want to do it – and it stabilizes the cell membrane, you might say, so that the nerves don’t fire so easily. So what we’ve done actually is raise the threshold of pain. So it takes a lot more signal for the brain to receive the pain signal. And suddenly it’s like, oh wow, this is like an anesthetic. The pain is gone, but how come I’m not numb? And you’re not, because you have normal sensation. The pain nerves are very different nerves, and they simply… we raise the threshold of pain. There are so many, you know, a lot of people have sinusitis, very common, allergies, seasonal allergies. A lot of people that came to me with what’s called rosacea. A lot of times the rosacea is something else, you know, mites or something. But very often it’s just nothing more than an allergic reaction because our immune system is hypersensitized because of the mold toxin. It can really mess up any cell type that you have in your body. I’ve seen a lot of hair loss, alopecia hair loss, alopecia areata, where you have patches of hair loss. That’s mold. That’s easy to fix, easy to fix.

Rebekah Kelley: Wow. So this, obviously, as you said, it’s the great masquerader, so obviously it can look like one thing, but behave as another. And if you’re seeing, you said 90 something percent…

Bruce Rind: At least 95% of my patients do have a mold issue.

Rebekah Kelley: You know, we hear so much about buildings being so airtight, right? So I can just imagine if someone’s somehow exposed to mold in a building and it’s airtight, that’s going to constantly be something that they’re being exposed to. So how do you test and treat? Is there an easy way to test and treat, and I know you started sharing about your creams, but also is there a protocol maybe that you know, that you initiate? Because my assumption is if they’re continually being exposed to mold, they’re not going to get better, despite that. So it seems like you probably have a protocol of what you have them do. And then, I don’t know if you have an example of one of your creams that you can show us maybe in the podcast.

Bruce Rind: I do, actually. I have one here. It’s right here. Thera Creme. And it’s available at Village Green, by the way.

Rebekah Kelley: Perfect. [Smiles.] Because Humanized Health is sponsored by Village Green, so that’s good. We know where people… Or I’m sure they can come to you, if they need some help with the protocol, and get some help there.

Bruce Rind: Yeah.

Rebekah Kelley: So that’s great. So maybe you can tell us how you test, how you treat, what does that look like?

Bruce Rind: First of all, the environment has to be clean because if it isn’t, there’s no point in treating the body. The old saying is, before you try to dry up with a towel, you need to get out of the shower. And once they are in a clean environment, it makes all the difference in the world. By the way, a lot of homes or buildings have mold hidden. Basement is the most common place. The washing machine area is very common. Bathrooms, shower. Bedrooms. A lot of times it’s the bedroom because we spend a lot of time there, and you have the moisture, the humidity, warmth, dust, skin cells… a lot of bedrooms have that problem, and beds, sometimes. The vents are important, the ducts are very important both in businesses and in homes. People very often have that as a source. They don’t even know they have it. Schools almost uniformly have mold problems because, it’s by definition, because when you hire, when the city has to hire the cheapest bidder, and here’s the cheapest materials, and you have a room full of kids, warmth, moisture, et cetera, it’s, it’s a perfect recipe for disaster.

Now, assuming that you don’t have the concerns, the way I approach it is like this. I used to do all the urine tests and the lab tests for mold. I don’t do them anymore because I don’t find them to be as accurate as the simple free test, which costs nothing really, that I do in my office, and it tells me how much of a fungal burden we’re dealing with. And if somebody just had exposure when they come in and I test them, and I test every time, takes one minute, I test them every time and I’ll tell them, oh, you just had a mold exposure, because your muscles are tight again. And you could see literally, by the number of degrees change, you could almost tell what percentage, by what percentage the problem is worse. And similarly, when I give the treatment, I could see by what percentage there is improvement and the patient can see it and after a while they don’t even need me anymore because they can figure it out and see, and they see by their symptoms, and they can also test themselves. I teach them how to do that.

So, number one is feedback. If you don’t have feedback, if you can’t test, you can’t treat. Because then you’re just playing around with theory and that doesn’t take us anywhere. The treatment that I give is, like I said, environmental, and then the body, through feedback. And what I do is I give them, it’s a combination of a couple of creams that I use to trick the mold into surrendering, basically, into giving up its weapons. And I can share with you about that, what the mechanism is. It’s a very, very simple mechanism. There’s an old saying when they talk about paradigms, that when the paradigm shifts, all the rules change. And right now, the standard way that we tend to treat mold is very lengthy and expensive. You have to do a tremendous amount of cleanup – I have some cheap tricks to clean the house – and there’s a product called EM-1, which is really great. The company that makes it is TeraGanix. And you diffuse it in the area. And this is a probiotic that eats mold. So I use that a lot. There are other things. Sometimes, with ozonation, you’ve got to know how to use the ozone, it has to be below smell level, and it’ll keep the air very, very clear.

But the way I work with it is like this. I learned about 10 years ago that I can trick the mold into giving up its toxin. Think of a skunk, the mold and a skunk, very similar. A skunk has six packets of toxic gas that it can release as a defense. It takes two days to build up one of these packets. So it takes, actually in about 10 to 12 days, you can replenish six packets. If the skunk gets attacked, he’ll give up one of those packets of toxic chemical. You come back 2 hours later, you bother the skunk again. He’ll release another packet. You could do this, let’s say six times today, and by the time you get to time number six, he’s empty. There’s no more bullets in the gun, and it’ll take 2 days to get at least one bullet. You just wait for the air to clear. The next day you come and it’s completely defenseless. There’s no fight. It’s a hands down victory.

The mold is the same, but I found that the mold has about four releases of toxin that it can release. And the toxin weakens the cells, lowers our mitochondrial function or ATP production. And when the white blood cells are coming around and they want to gobble it up, they get weaker and weaker and weaker as they get closer because the toxin is making them weaker and using up their ATP. It’s sort of like Superman and kryptonite. It gets closer, weaker, closer, weaker, dead, you know? So the trick is, you get the mold to think it’s being attacked and it releases the toxin. Then you wait for the air to clear a little bit, there’s a couple of tricks you could use like glutathione and the Thera Cream, and the air clears a little bit. Maybe take 10, 20 minutes, go back, bother the mold again. It says, oh my god, I’m living inside a moron. Okay, I gotta teach him a better lesson. Release the toxin. And again, toxin is released and air gets cleared after 20 minutes again, and then again after about four times, mold doesn’t have any more toxin to deal with.

Rebekah Kelley: It’s used, basically, it’s used up all its defense, it sounds like. So then therefore you’re able to go in and treat it, I think is what I hear you saying, right? Like a skunk…

Bruce Rind: No, even better than that. Even better than that.

Rebekah Kelley: Better than that?

Bruce Rind: I don’t have to go and treat it at all. No. I simply trick it into giving up its toxins and that allows the white blood cells to get real up close and personal and gobble it up and nothing’s holding them back anymore. There’s no more kryptonite. So they can do their job. And all I’m doing is allowing the body’s defenses, the body’s immune system to do its job more efficiently. That’s all it is.

Rebekah Kelley: I love that, Dr. Rind. Those are really valuable insights. Dr. Rind can be found at www.DrRind. I’m going to spell that. That’s D R R I N D.com. Let me remind you to subscribe and get access to all Humanized videos, podcasts and transcriptions from all of our other thought leaders like Dr. Rind on personalized health at HumanizedHealth.com. Thanks for being with us. Please come back.