Low Testosterone Associated With Mold

hi everyone I am dr. Nicole and we are on week three of our mold webinars this month so today we are actually talking about how mold affects male hormones testosterone being the specific one that we're touching on but in addition to that we have a special little treat of having a wonderful addition to our webinar and we have Gina here who is actually my personal mold inspector that works very very closely with integrated Wellness Group so we're actually gonna have the opportunity to pick her brain a little bit about where mold is hiding in our homes the difference between the tests that exists and also some of these simple tools that we can use to potentially even clean it up in our homes but obviously if the problem is bad enough of knowing you know how you can access even her services or similar to her services if you're not local to here and really understand how to navigate that world of finding a really good mold inspector andr mediator so we're gonna have her on in just a minute but as we get rolling I really wanted to just give a brief introduction as to who I am for those of you that are new to the webinar and then we're gonna dive right into our subject so I think it's really important for us to talk about specifically how mold affects all different aspects of the body this month we've covered just kind of an introduction to mold and how it affects our our systems and can actually make us quite inflamed and sick but we also talked about female hormones and how that is affected by mold and today I really wanted to dive in to have men understand a little bit more about testosterone and how it can be affected by mold because when we're dealing with a testosterone issue a lot of times this goes asymptomatic until men start lose their muscle mass or they have a low libido or even are dealing with a reptile dysfunction and then there are getting told that they have a low testosterone and then they are just getting simply put on injections and sometimes these injections are going to give them benefit while they're doing it but as soon as they stop the injections their testosterone plummets back down to a very low level so it's really understanding about the root cause and how we can actually resolve it once and for all by really fixing the foundational problem so I'm going to bring up my lovely PowerPoint that I do every week because again as I always say I will completely derail if I don't do that but today we're definitely going to be touching on understanding you don't know what you don't know when it comes to not only finding mold in your home but also how you can test your body and know if this is truly part of your puzzle and if it is causing hormonal issues and then of course we're gonna talk about different solutions on how we can actually work on resolving this so a little bit about our practice integrative Wellness Group and just kind of the difference is that we have really challenged most of the things that are being put out there when it comes to conventional medicine and even functional medicine and this actually really you know brings us to this topic of mold is most of you that have been following along in the series you have been you know coming back and giving feedback saying wow I never knew that because really at the end of the day it's about leveraging better testing and asking better quality questions that can give us more information and allow us to piece the puzzle together because when we start to have these mystery symptoms and we end up end up having to be our own health advocate you know we get on Google University and we start researching you know our symptoms and sometimes we come across something like mold toxicity and we go oh my gosh that's totally me that describes all of my symptoms and then we go to this place of being like it's mold mold mold mold mold I need to fix the mold and you start following all the mold expert and reading about all the best mold protocols but really what it comes down to is that maybe mold as part of your puzzle but maybe there are other things that are also causing your symptoms or are also causing the mold to be exacerbated so the biggest thing is understanding that usually it's not one thing it's a conglomeration of things and being able to work with a physician that's gonna piece it together so you understand the bigger picture so for myself on you might be on here because like oh she's the mold expert yes I know a lot about mold um but at the end of the day it's not about you know classifying you as a mold patient it's about understanding what is the root cause to your symptoms so maybe mold as part of that puzzle maybe there are other things but I work with all different types of conditions and I work with all different types of conditions because I have the ability to leverage the different tests that we do and we're able to really understand the bigger picture and from there we obviously are all about integrative medicine and putting you on a regimen that's going to work on all of those acts aspects but also give you results in a fraction of the time so for myself I'm not sitting here on this webinar talking about moles because I was terribly like toxic with mold and finally some doctor figured it out and I was able to finally heal honestly my story is because what I realized over time and I was felt guilty about not having that story I remember my colleagues saying you know how did you get into this and you know like how did you get into this field and I was like I don't know I guess I was just kind of interested and I didn't have that story I didn't have that story that I was super sick and then I finally got better using functional integrative medicine but what I realized is that my story is probably more relatable to most people and all of my symptoms that I had just became my normal I settled for crappy sleep I settled for feeling bloated I settle for abnormal bowel movements I settles for occasional sinus issues I settled for stomach aches i settles for all those things because they were my normal and they didn't necessarily happen all the time so what I find interesting is that when we are sitting here and doing our consultation and I'm working with a client I have to dig dig dig dig dig because there are so many things that they have also settled for and there are so many things that you have settled for because when we go out into a social environment and we talk to our friends and we talk to our family everyone feels like crap nobody's sleeping well everyone's foggy everyone's memory is you know everyone's got some level of a stomach complaint and it's really become the normal to not feel well and then to maybe say oh it's because I'm anxious oh it's because I'm stressed oh it's because I have a lot going on at work and really it's us not knowing the signs of our own body and that's one of the reasons why I do these webinars is that to allow you to know the signs and to allow you to be preventative before you get to a place of really really not feeling well so I know that we are well past seven and there are a million different distractions going on in our homes but I want to give you guys the opportunity to kind of shut down your email browsers and you know give me the next you know twenty to twenty-five minutes of your time because I'm going to go into information that is not your traditional information it's going to be able to allow you to walk away being like holy crap I had no idea and now I feel so much more empowered to take that first step in my house so first and foremost you will learn this from myself and also as we bring Gina on is that it is not your fault it is not your fault that you don't know there's mold in your house it's not your fault that you have no idea that this was linked to testosterone issues it's not your fault that maybe your marriage is now compromised because you have had you know an inadequate sex life because you have erectile dysfunction or testosterone decline it's not your fault it's impossible to know say not know these things because you need to leverage better testing and unfortunately most of conventional medicine is using better testing and if anything they're actually looking down upon it saying that it's not real medicine so you don't know what you don't know and it's not your fault that you haven't been able to get yourself on track because it's a lot of information and it's understanding that what you need is very different than someone else it doesn't matter if you both have mold toxicity your needs of how to work with that and resolve it it's gonna be very different from somebody else who technically has the same diagnosis so it's all about strategy and it's all about knowing your body's needs so before we bring on Gina one of the foundational pieces that you need to know about the whole premise of this webinar and the whole premise of why we do what we do is that my personal opinion is that the biggest detriment in medicine right now is specialties and subspecialties and some of you might be disappointed when I said that I am NOT sitting here telling you I'm the mold expert I know a lot about mold and I successfully work with people to get rid of mold but the thing is is that when we're always seeking out the expert or the specialist this is what gets us in trouble because we are assuming that mold is only the only part of the puzzle or we're assuming that our gut is working independently from our brain and our brain is working independently from our heart and at the end of the day every single thing is working together and you can easily have a variety of different types of infections or toxicities that are all compiling together and causing you to be symptomatic and this is really basic physiology at the end of the day when we sit here and talk about you know somebody who's suffering with irritable bowel syndrome and someone who's also dealing with depression but maybe the irritable bowel is not bad enough to be treated or to be medicated for but you know we go on an antidepressant to deal with the depression ninety to ninety five percent of your serotonin is actually made in your gastrointestinal system so if we're dealing with an unmanaged gut issue and trying to palliate depression we're going to hit plateaus and we're going to hit roadblocks because this is physiology it's about everything being connected and understanding how to best work with a patient because everything is connected so the other big thing too is that these specialties subspecialty is seeking out the experts is usually what doesn't always allow us to understand the root cause which then gets us into trouble in this idea that one pill is going to fix all of our problems and honestly this comes back to mold as well because there are mold protocols out there that are pretty much saying just take this one binder like cholestyramine and it's gonna fix all of your problems I've worked with those patients that have been there done that and they still ended up through my doors because they didn't get better so overall again is mold truly the root cause or is it something else or is it a collaboration of different things so some of the big things when it comes to how we are being exposed to mold so water damaged buildings is definitely one which Gina is going to elaborate a lot further on but also there is a lot of exposures that we get from food and these are all of the lovely foods for those of you on the webinar for those of you on Instagram we have oats gluten wheat grains nuts seeds wine cheese and coffee all of our favorite foods are some of the foods that are exposing us to different types of mycotoxins so it's very very important to know that this is not necessarily always just about the exposures from the environment but this can very much be due to the things that you're eating on a day to day basis oh when I forgot peanut butter and peanuts peanut butter and peanuts is one of the highest mold foods that's out there and very much can contribute to mold that actually gets into the gastrointestinal system and causes a lot of bloating gas as well as Candida issues I'm saying it in quotes because it's not always really just Candida it can also be mold another big one is antibiotics so when people come in and they say oh absolutely not I've never been exposed to mold not even passable we lived in new houses etc and I'll ask them do you have an allergy to penicillin and they'll say oh yeah I've had an allergy to penicillin since I was five and I was like well you've been moldy since you're five and they usually look at me with you know a funny face and when you're dealing with these antibiotics penicillin amoxicillin ampicillin all of these antibiotics are made from Penicillium mold so you can easily have a mold toxicity from overuse of antibiotics especially if you come from the era that they were using a lot of penicillin so these are definitely some of the major major exposures that we get the interesting things - about moles is that it looks many different ways it has many different faces it can cause everything from pain to inflammation sinus issues respiratory issues testosterone decline brain fog gut issues and the list goes on so if you're sitting here and you're thinking like well you know I don't really think mold is part of my puzzle it has many phases you could easily be the person who has eczema or hives and the root cause of that is actually mold toxicity so an interesting case that we had was in relation to a male patient he came in to us he had a lot of joint pain joint pain brain fog and low testosterone levels that he was actually being treated for through testosterone injections and he was that same story of he was doing the injections he came off of them and his testosterone plummeted back down so this patient was very interesting because not only was he actually dealing with a very significant mold issue but he was also dealing with Lyme disease and he had two pieces to his testosterone decline here is that the mold that he was dealing with was actually coming from his job but it was also coming from the massive amounts of antibiotics that he was given for Lyme disease so he had a lot of this mold overgrowth that was in his lymph system and when we were starting to talk through his consultation he stated that he had a lot of bumps in his groin which was actually reflective of congested lymph nodes in his groin so not only was he dealing with a lot of lymphatic and immune system congestion that was affecting the reproductive organs but in addition to that he also had suppression of his pituitary land in his brain because the fungus was actually all throughout his sinuses and it was starting to create a lot of inflammation in his neurological system so testosterone is can definitely be a sprint also be stress on the actual reproductive organs okay so when it comes to mold and talking all about mold and how we can get exposed and then how can we actually do better testing so number one is when it comes to testing for the body you can go a lot of different ways but really at the end of the day one of the best labs right now is actually real time labs and this it is allowed that both Gina and I are using for different reasons let's squeeze in but we I'm using it primarily to get testing on the body because they offer something called a urinary mycotoxin test so as we can test the urine we can actually figure out if somebody has mycotoxins that are negatively impacting their health and Gina has been using she was the one who introduced me to the environmental mycotoxin test which is something that I'm going to allow her to elaborate further on but with that being said for those of you that are here right now with us on Instagram as well as on the webinar I want to make sure that you guys pop questions into the chat box in relation to anything that you have for Gina when it comes to you know if mold is in your house how to get it tested how to clean it up we're obviously going to dive into some of this but if you have questions as we go definitely shoot those messages into the comments area or into the chat box if you're on the webinar and we will definitely answer those as we go and you'll be seeing the questions questions yes so Gina why don't you introduce yourselves my name is gina Deemer and i am the principal owner of environmental health consultants which was started three years ago out of a need for going into people's homes to help them determine if their home is potentially the cause or contributing factor to their their health yes and Gina the nurse and she had a lot of scenarios that got her exposed you got her exposed to mold and it piqued her interest and she realized this is a big problem I worked in people's homes instead of the hospital I used to work in the hospital then I worked as a hospice nurse and immune globulin therapy nurse were people with autoimmune diseases and I came across a young boy in 2013 with multiplicity as his diagnosis and I was fascinated by and ferment on I just started to learn about mold and how it contributes to health and started to apply it well I think that's been something that really you know allowed our relationship to flourish is that you were able to come in and say you know I know how this is negatively impacting the body and then we were able to use you as an amazing resource for someone who's truly understanding how this affects people's lives and affects people's health and being able to know what you're looking for in the house because Gina was able to know you know what strains of mold are and what are they doing in the body and how are they negatively affecting someone so I think that that's just so significant as you're walking in you kind of already know what you're looking for because we're collaborating on the case together saying hey these are the major symptoms of the person so with that being said I one of the things that I want to you know clarify is that I we say moles not visible if you knew it was there you'd probably do something about it so Jeana you've been in so many people's homes at this point so where is the mold hiding what were you seeing the most we're seeing in hiding in the heating and air conditioning systems whether those heating and air conditioning systems are housed in your attic or in the basement or office within the system's if within ductwork however ductwork is made of metal so mold doesn't grow on metal however a lot of ducts duct systems are inside insulated with a material that is a breeding ground for mold to grow and the reason they insulate ducts inside is for Fermoy protection of god that's not noisy however that can be an issue a lot of times HVAC systems particularly air-conditioning systems are oversized for the home and when you have an oversized system the system doesn't work properly in cycle on and off appropriately so you end up having more humidity in your house then you should otherwise because the air-conditioning should be doing the job because it's oversized it ends up not cycling properly and you're done with with mold within the system also behind walls that's very common that you obviously can't see but it's there behind sheet rockets can be under wood floors it can be behind anything and we have tools that help us to gauge whether or not there is something happening and one of the main gauges are the main things that we do is baseline testing and that may slight testing is mycotoxin testing it's a like dr. Niccole had said that she uses the urine mycotoxin test for her patients we use as a baseline test for our clients is a dust collection sample from their vacuum cleaner not their remaining services back later from their vacuum cleaner and that will tell us are there mycotoxins being produced in your home mm-hmm presently and if so that means there's water damage mold somewhere in your house and then our job is to kind of find that there is you talked about the early yeah so I want to touch on that because some of you that are listening are probably here because you may be suspect mold you've read about it you're trying to understand more about it and I know one of the personal questions that I get a lot is in relation to the army tests or really just how the heck do I test my home or why did I get an air sample or why did I get Mol air sample or even a home inspection and they told me everything is normal so I definitely want you to elaborate further on that but even when we were just talking before you were saying how mycotoxins are present in the home when it's an active mold problem and that was like the big difference between testing that versus the early so I'll let you elaborate more on that so so mycotoxins are only produced when there's active mold in the house and and that's what's harmful to your health so so mycotoxins are the byproduct of mold spores so if my hand is a piece of sheetrock and there's water on it based on how much water's on it will determine which molds are going to grow the more water activity present the worse the mold is black mold is the last mold that shows up that's when I'm almost ninety percent saturated black mold shows up so as the molds are growing and eating the food because as we know Mo's don't produce their own food that sheetrock is their food source and if there's Aspergillus and Penicillium mold here and then black mold starts to come in or whatever other molds come in the Aspergillus Penicillium says listen get out of here this is my food and they're territorial so they like they off gas to say get away from here this is my food and that on gassing is the mycotoxin so if we're picking up my nose toxins in your home it means there is an active problem yeah mycotoxins really aren't just hanging around to hang around they're only produced if mold is actively seeking food well I don't know your opinion on this but from my understanding from many of my mentors and research is that the Wi-Fi and all the radiation is a catalyst for this growth so the experiment that I'm familiar with is that they have Petri to two different petri dishes of mold one of them they isolated from all of the you know Wi-Fi Bluetooth all the wireless radiation and then the other petri dish they put in the regular environment which I call Wi-Fi suit and that one in the regular environment actually multiplied by 600% in a week I know about that as well and I'm not an expert on EMF sore electric magnetic feelings but if it's any indication that you're you're hearing and seeing on the news that schools are closing schools are closing libraries whatever it is there have a lot of mold in them and they are not a Wi-Fi so that now they know some correlation there 100% and one of the things that I really want you to touch on because I think that you know our philosophies are so similar as we were talking is Gina has a really really unique technology that she uses to get a baseline of information when she comes into people's homes and you know one of the biggest reasons why we do such specialized testing nowadays is because we were trying to figure out ways to save people money up front because when you get into doing stool samples nasal swabs you know urinary test neurotransmitter testing it gets very very very pricey and it doesn't always work so we worked really hard on kind of really establishing some amazing and advanced medical technology is to slim down that price so that we you obviously allow people to spend money on the important stuff which is getting better and I know she shares such a similar principle with this amazing technology she's introduced into her practice so I'll let you talk about that so um in I don't know how many people have had indoor air quality assessments or not they're not common they seem to be a luxury for the rich and a necessity for the sick but traditionally when you go to somebody's home you there's only so many sample tight sample types you can take you can take air samples or you can take bulk samples and what I mean by both samples you can take a swab and swab an area that you're concerned about you can take a piece of sheetrock that's your bulk sample oh you can take a dust collection sample that's a bulk sample or there's air so those are really the the only samples that you're taking air samples traditionally are small cassettes about the size little about the size of a half dollar and they go on to a pump and they run for about five minutes and they pull in 15 liters of air per minute and they only do a particular area say you know a room you can't do this room and the room across the way you have to do individual samples so if you have a room a house with ten rooms in it if you want to know what the error is in every room in that house it's going to cost you and you know samples can run anywhere from 75 to 150 dollars that's yeah usually the ballpark so if you do ten rooms at a hundred dollars that's a thousand dollars however Assessors don't test every room in your house because it's gonna cost you a lot of money on top of the base the base fee and the other sand I think that's what can allow people to then sometimes get results that say mold is not part of the problem and it is so so yeah I mean your traditional that when you go into somebody's house you're looking at who's sick who is it where is where where does the family spend most of their time are there any concerns and this or that room that helps you determine which rooms are going to sampling so that two years ago I decided that it would be best if I knew or if we knew environmental health consultants if we knew the air in your entire house and doing it a fraction of the cost of ten air samples so we use this technology it's a it's a pretty big piece of it's a big piece of it's big machine and it's sixty five pounds so it's not necessarily conducive to every house after we fill out our intake form we can determine are we going to use it aren't we going to use it if we're doing a four-story townhouse in Brooklyn we're probably not going to take it because it's sixty five pounds but for the most part seventy-five percent of the jobs we can bring it into and we can test the entire air in your house in real time traditionally samples take you have to Center to it to a lab these this type of air sampling allows us to tell you instantly are there scores in your home or aren't there it doesn't tell us the type of scores it just tells us if there's an elevation of scores isn't there also it has the feature to look at VOCs as well nobody else sees but it looks at a particulate matter ten microns and below 2.5 microns in below and just to give you a little background on that a micron is the diameter of something so if you take a piece of your hair and the diameter of your hair the and Filatov your hair is 90 microns and so 10 microns obviously is a lot smaller yeah I'm not so visible to the naked eye but it's dust dander you know when you take a blanket and you yeah shake it in sunlight that's all pm10 particle matter 10 microns and below it'll tell it'll tell us the dirtiest room in your home which is interesting and then so it tells us PM 2.5 which is is gases such as cooking gas we it'll tell you if there's a plumbing gas leak if you're you know in the area and it'll show up as 2.5 as an elevation and it also all the things that we're not necessarily thinking about are looking for no exactly it helped us pick up a plumbing leak in somebody's home that was coming from their Island Foster island sink in the kitchen it didn't have a proper vented we picked up on on PM 2.5 elevation in the entire house and it was a pretty significant so that was very helpful but also one of the things we use it for and it's not traditionally used for this which mainly used for the air but we can test content with it so we test your carpet we can test your your furniture or stuffed animals clothing and that's always really helpful for people we find in our practice that majority you know what happens is the mold if there's mold in your home and it's coming through your duct system it's airborne initially but it attaches to dust particles and then settles so the dirtiest place in somebody's home is their floor yeah whether it's carpet or you know if it's not part but then you're cleaning it regularly but if it's carpet it de stuff's living in there for for a long time you know well and also to I know one of the things that I brought up on the last webinar was you know when you when you have a mold problem you obviously have to weigh out you know is this something like is this something that you have to bring in a team to help you with you know do you actually need a full remediation do you need the assistance of someone like Gina do you need your HVAC system cleaned out and then there's obviously smaller problems that sometimes we can actually clean up ourselves and someone was asking about it last webinar and I could not remember the product but I was talking to Gina prior to getting started today and I wanted her to share just a little bit about the the products that are good for helping to eradicate some molds out safely sure and I'm bringing this up because many people think bleach is a great option and it is not and I've actually had a young woman who hast put herself in the hospital by dumping bleach on black mold in her basement so please don't do that I mean we always thought bleach work I mean it works for everything but bleach is what 90% odor and what does mold need to grow the water yes so bleach just doesn't work but there's a there's a company that I like called ec3 Edward Charlie 3e c3 and they have a really nice product line they have a laundry additives that you can add to your laundry and a side yard on that too is that when it comes to the laundry because when you're talking about mold in people's homes if it's bad enough you know there are things you can wash like if you found mold in the basement where maybe you put all your summer clothes like you can take those clothes out and wash them properly but if you have like a cloth recliner chair in the basement next to mold you probably to get rid of them yeah I mean you can have a vacuum with a high end have a vacuum cleaner but then you're going to want to test it afterwards you can come in and certainly test the content but you know it's always best to refrain from having carpet in your home unless it's you know you take you know you get it clean regularly there isn't any mold in your home or there hasn't been any mold of your own and there won't be any mold of your home but you want to keep up on you know using things that are are as non-porous as possible yeah you know and also we find in a lot of people's homes in the content in in children's rooms is a stuffed animals and we find a lot of mold spores on these animals for obvious reasons you know just because it's totally going to show on them you know and you can always wash stuff like that in the ec3 products then there's also something that I really like it's a fogger and you can buy a father anywhere also ec3 product sells the fogger along with the solution but if you have a father or you can get one cheaper somewhere else buy a father and buy this solution and it you put it in the father and you can miss all the stuff in your house so we had a client about a year and a half ago who has significant mold in their home and after the remediation was done and we went back in to do the testing i remember initially that the the content was very elevated and the the woman of the home took amazing care in very diligent about taking care of everything after the foam did she washed everything and ec3 products i believe she used which he used this father for all their clothes and when we went back with the insta scope I think we found two spores in the whole house oh my gosh thought it was really uh she was she was very good at what she did so it's just definitely helpful and we don't think about you know a lot of times we may be huh losing both if we come home and we're wearing the same clothes yes you know we could if we were doing the you know the testing in your home we could test your clothes and they may come up elevated but you may not have any mold in your house and it could very well just be coming from your yeah and I think that's an important point three guys to is that there are many times that I've worked with clients and the mold was not in their home it was actually at their workplace so it's definitely important to not ignore that and it's also important to you know one of the questions that I ask my clients all the time is you know these are a lot of people at your job complaining are they sick do they have sinus issues are they saying they have headaches you know are they sneeze and so those are things to look for if everybody has those types of complaints in your office there might be a bigger problem there but why should what should you do if you have some of that sometimes mentioned earlier but you don't seem old so what I would do with that I would I would do a baseline test of your home not me personally unless you hired us to come out but you can do a baseline test of your home a real-time lab which was mentioned earlier about a year and a half ago two years ago they made the environmental can't kick it available to consumers so all you do is you go to the real time lab website and it's on there somewhere it's under environmental and you can order the environmental kit from them they'll send it to you you don't pay for them to send it to you you only pay when you return it and I think it's about $300 for yeah for them I mean that's going to specifically test for mycotoxins which are again the ones that are toxic to us into our health so this is something that if you have no idea where the mold is you can actually take your vacuum through your home swab the vacuum filter send that out and then that will give you an understanding if there is mold in your home but again if you've been on the whole time if that comes back clean then the mold exposure or the mold affecting your health can easily be from past use of antibiotics and it can also be food exposures as well the food exposures I think are very overlooked and people do not realize how abundant this is in our food one of the stories that I told last week was in relation to when I was in France and when I was in France there was a segment about Agrotech so it was how they were using artificial intelligence in the vineyards so primarily they had these drones that hovered over the vineyards and they would snapshot different images of the vines in order to monitor for for moles for fungus and as soon as they found fungal invasions they went in and ripped out that vine so it didn't spread so this really brought it to my awareness of how big of a problem this really is and it's affecting wine and it's also affecting a variety of other crops as well so yes mold can be inside of you and it's more so mold hat mold is water and fat soluble so it can really go wherever it wants in the body it can get into joints it can get into the connective tissue it can get into your gastrointestinal system and it can even get into your bloodstream as well so mold is definitely something that has a tendency to have a myriad of different symptoms it's not one thing by any means so that's usually where it gets the most confusing but I want to start talking about testosterone and how mold affects that so Gina if you want to tell everyone where they can find you this would be amazing the website is WWE can salts calm short for environmental health consultants eh consults with an S dot-com and you can always I think there's the email on there info at eh consults calm you can reach me there if you have any questions and if you do end up deciding to do a baseline test of your home which I would recommend contact us and we'll we'll have real time lapse send it out to you and then we'll send you a sheet that will tell you how to fill out the chain of custody form how to go about taking your collection we'll walk you through it and that'll be helpful for you if you have any questions when the results come back you can always let us know yeah I can help you in any way yeah I don't know we think you should learn thank you so we hope the information was really valuable for you guys because I know that navigating this whole you know checking your home and knowing where to turn and being able to get good quality information has been a struggle for some of the patients that I've worked with that have gone through that before coming to our practice so I thought it was really important to have Gina be part of this this month but as we get back in I really want to have you guys understand a little bit more about you know how mold is potentially causing a lot of issues with testosterone levels but what I initially was putting together this presentation you know a big thing that I wanted to talk about was more so in relation to how the mold can cause low testosterone but in reality if the mold is affecting your neurological system or affecting your reproductive system you can actually see a decline in testosterone but if mold is actually affecting your gastrointestinal system which then starts to throw off your pancreatic blood sugar functioning you can actually start to see issues on the flip side of having an elevation in your estrogen levels as well so when it comes down to testosterone being affected and really dealing with hormonal imbalance in men is you can have the low testosterone but you can also have this elevation in your estrogen which compromises your testosterone levels as well so first and foremost like what is low testosterone or testosterone issues even look like so number one is it's going to be low libido fluctuation and mood it actually really really affects your brain function and your mood memory focus loss of muscle mass having random sweating attacks and then at its peak is erectile dysfunction so a couple of things to understand is that testosterone is going to be controlled by your adrenals as well as your pituitary function so when we're talking about adrenals adrenals can easily be affected by stress not sleeping burning the candle at both ends I say that because so many people especially in the New Jersey New York area they're just like oh yeah well I I can handle stress like this is just my life I just like you know I just power through at the end of the day your adrenals don't know the difference but of you powering through and being burnt out just so you know but secondary to that is your testosterone is also controlled by your pituitary function and when we are talking about how mold can affect the body is it can actually really compromise how well you are getting proper blood flow to your brain and neurological system and if that starts to happen that can actually cause your pituitary to function not function optimally which can then start to compromise your testosterone production and then in addition to that your testosterone is very very affected by blood sugar and with your blood sugar this goes back to what I mentioned if mold starts to actually affect your gastrointestinal system which then starts to affect your pancreas because technically your pancreas is part of your gastrointestinal system so this is very very much correlated because out of the blood sugar becomes imbalance it starts to compromise the frontal lobe of the brain and the frontal lobe is where you have most of your testosterone receptors so you can easily start to have a lot of issues with how well your testosterone is being regulated when your blood sugar is out of range and then in addition to that is testosterone is affected by circulation so this goes back to what I said about circulation to the pituitary gland but it's also circulation to the actual testicles and gonads if you are not getting proper blood flow to those areas because mold is affecting your lymph nodes in your groin or you have a hernia or you have scar tissue from some type of surgery that is also going to cause a lot of problems with how well your testosterone can be produced so as I mentioned when we are talking about testosterone there's such a trick down effect that happens because if you start to have mold that is compromising your testosterone production or it's actually compromising your blood sugar so you start to have blood sugar issues which then compromises how well the testosterone receptors on your frontal lobe are working so if you start to have testosterone decline because of this you will then also start to have acetylcholine decline which is all about memory and learning so at its complete extreme and peak is testosterone and can actually be late to mean levels and your acetylcholine levels which can then lead you down a road of Parkinson's so if you are someone who has gone got your testosterone checked and they're like oh it's low and you are starting to notice that you are very foggy and that your memory is not good as it used to be and maybe even your long-term memory is being compromised you really need to figure out is mold part of this puzzle is blood sugar part of this puzzle or is it volts because a decline in your testosterone is a sign that you are potentially going to have different imbalances in your neurological system which at its extreme can lead you down a road of developing Parkinson's or even Alzheimer's so this is no joke guys you can't just sit here and say oh testosterone you know it's all about muscle mass or it's all about you know how to high libido there is a big big neurological connection here so when we're talking about testosterone fluctuations again we're talking about if your insulin is not being produced properly and you start to have this really really baki blood sugar by the way wacky blood sugar is the person that wakes up in the morning and they're not hungry or they can't really think so they have to drink their coffee in the morning so they can like their brain can work those are blood sugar issues we're not talking diabetes pre-diabetes we're talking about even low blood sugar because if your blood sugar is low as soon as you eat you spike and crash and you're on a blood sugar roller coaster all day long the longer that goes on the more you will start to have a decrease in your testosterone but you are also going to have an upregulation of your estrogen so what does that mean for you men man boobs that's pretty Kings also known as gynecomastia in addition to that you can also start to notice that men their body shape is looking more like a female they're starting to have fatty deposits in their abdomen they're having funny deposits in their hips and they're developing this like pear shape so this is definitely something to keep your eye out for because if you're developing that type of shape this is definitely a major sign that you have blood sugar issues it is also a sign that you are having a decrease in sperm sorry decrease in testosterone and an elevation in your estrogen levels don't get me wrong when you're talking about estrogen you can easily have influence from things you're eating there are many many foods that are in our diet that can up regulate estrogen levels especially our non-organic non rice and meats so and also dairy as well when we're not eating necessarily the clean non hormone treated foods we're definitely getting exposed to excess estrogen through our diet it's not just about soy guys it's definitely about animal protein as well so the other big one has to do with mold affecting the brain yes mold can affect the brain you can actually get fungal invasion of the brain they actually just came out with research that they've been working out for many many years through FRA labs fr why they just presented it at the brain conference that I was at earlier this year and what they found is that they actually did research with 500 multiple sclerosis patients MS patients and in every single patient they had fumble invasion of their neurological system and the on the flip side the people that actually they did two studies the other study was for ALS Lou Gehrig's disease and what they actually found is that all of those patients had algae invasion of their neurological system so this is not uncommon this is not whew this is not you know some random you know bogus study like this is a real thing and fungus is something that we are being exposed consistently like I said before we're being exposed to antibiotics we're being exposed through mold in water damaged buildings and we are also being exposed by the foods that we eat like the wine the cheese the coffee the the wheats all of the grains the peanut butter so this is a big deal guys and if you are having a lot of issues neurologically maybe you have memory issues maybe you're having constant headaches maybe you have terrible brain fog this is a sign that something is affecting your neurological system I'm not gonna sit here and say that every person that has brain fog has mold issues that's definitely not accurate because there could be a lot of things going on but if you're having tons of neurological issues in addition to having testosterone decline it's time to get checked for mold to figure out is this part of your puzzle so this is just digging into a little bit more about this estrogen connection so again the big pathway that is going to be affected as aroma taste so the big thing about it that I want it to make sure that you're aware of is that if you are a male that is dealing with an S or I'm sorry a testosterone issue and you are getting tested and oh you have a chest for an issue but this pathway is compromised this aroma taste pathway what's gonna happen is you're gonna get testosterone replacement and all of that is actually going to convert into excess estrogen so what happens is is that you're taking testosterone and you are now starting to develop that pear shape and those fatty deposits in the hips belly etc so you have to definitely make sure that you know what is the big picture in your body opposed to thinking that you just need testosterone replacement because you can start causing a lot more issues and also to for those of you that are listening that have potentially used you know some type of testosterone replacement for bodybuilding in the past and now you feel like you have really abnormal muscle tone and you also feel like it's very difficult for you to get you know your get your muscles back to where they used to be or tome your muscles you potentially are dealing with this pathway being compromised so this pathway can definitely be corrected but you have to figure out where is the kink in the chain and there is a lots of ways that you could test for where those kinks are definitely a tip is that you can start to improve on these pathways by consuming cruciferous vegetables there is a supplement called cruciferous complete and then also grapefruit seed extract those are definitely some really good tools to start correcting this as well so this is kind of piggybacking off of what we've talked about already but I think that this is important if you understand how testosterone issues can translate into day to day behaviors so when we're talking about testosterone starting to impact your dopamine so low testosterone means you have low dopamine so low dopamine can start as having issues with your memory short-term memory I should rephrase as that progresses you will have issues with your long-term memory you also might find that you have a lot of impulsive daredevil behaviors you like to speed you like to gamble you like to bungee jump you like to do extreme sports you might even have a tendency for violent behaviors you might also have a tendency to cheat on your spouse or significant other these are all signs of dopamine being compromised which can definitely stem from your testosterone declining from the mold exposure so there is a lot of different manifestations because unless you have a reptile dysfunction or you're having really really abnormal changes in your muscle most then don't know they have testosterone decline but if you start to see the bigger picture behind testosterone being connected to dopamine you might be like oh my gosh I definitely feel like my memory isn't good or I definitely feel that I'm having trouble with concentration or I'm definitely finding myself you know having these daredevil compulsive gambling behaviors these are all signs that the testosterone is now impacting your dopamine levels so again testosterone as has a big big connection to dopamine and also learning so you can find that you're snapping easily you also could and this is actually why they call when people are on steroids they say that they have roid rage is because the steroids will start to compromise these pathways so you can have a neat or easily triggered temper you can definitely find yourself you know like resorting to violence and things like that so again there is a way bigger picture behind testosterone and how it is negatively impacting your neurological system when it is declined so some of the other things that can expose us on a day-to-day to these different hormones that can affect our testosterone levels is the estrogen so like I said before is that there are a lot of estrogens that we get exposed to juror or diet so one primary my co estrogens is called zero Lennon which is actually on corn so if you're the person who just went gluten-free and you're eating tons of corn chips and tortillas and everything else you need to also be cautious with consuming that because this is the primary crop that there is myko estrogens maiko is think of mold and fungus these are molds that actually will negatively impact your estrogens by raising them which will then decrease your testosterone levels so there are many ways that we can start to compromise our testosterone pathways and it's not just necessarily about mold in our environment but it also can be these molds that are on our foods as well so jeana's still hang with me and i don't know if you know this but one of the things that constantly comes up is when I have a family dynamic and I have the woman comes in the wife the mom etc and she is sick and we find out that mold is part of her puzzle and then what happens is the husband says there's no possible way there's mold in our house I'm not gonna pay to get it tested because I feel fine I have no symptoms so there is an actual reason for this and I remember thinking in the beginning maybe it's cuz men ignore their symptoms but I realized that that is not true and not necessarily scientific but it actually has to do with blood volume so men or I should say females and children have a lower blood volume compared to men and in addition females have lower oxygen bearing red blood cells and they also have lower iron levels because of menstruation so all of those components are actually playing a very significant role in why women and children tend to be more symptomatic when they are being exposed to mold so men will easily go and fly under the radar because again if you have the early stages of low testosterone you don't really know you don't have very specific symptoms until it's low enough that you might have a reptile dysfunction and now you know all of the mood changes that you can also see in relation to low testosterone but women will definitely have more symptoms and they can have symptoms that resemble rheumatoid arthritis they can have bad headaches they can have their our own hormonal issues they can have gut issues really the list goes on with how mold can affect you but just because the male figure of the family is not symptomatic does not rule out mold being in your home so seeking erectile dysfunction we had a 5th year old male he came in with erectile dysfunction kind of nicking his cream thing because his wife dragged him in but um he didn't have a past the use of steroids from weight training he was you know this was a long time ago in his 20s he had a pretty poor diet lots of sugar lots of carbohydrates in his diet which was a pretty big extreme because back in the day when he was you know weight training and bodybuilding he was on the you know grilled chicken and broccoli like no oil no butter nothing like very very different type of diet so you know it was a pretty pretty big extreme from then to now but in addition to that you'll saw a lot of antibiotics for Lyme disease treatment that he had an Inc in his 30s so when we were really talking and getting into it what really happened is that we we started to piece the puzzle together and a big thing was is that Lyme and mold were still part of his puzzle affecting his body in a negative way so the mold actually ended up being partly an environmental exposure from job that he had for about 20 years but in addition he also had mold that was from a lot of the antibiotics from the Lyme disease but the biggest thing that we were seeing is that the mold a lot of these Penicillium strains were compromising his liver his gut and his limbs so for those of you that have been listening to other webinars by myself is that deliver the gut in lymph those are the major filters of your body the liver filters out most of your toxins that get into your system it filters them out through your gut by eliminating things through a bowel movement and then your limbs is one of well it's it's your immune system and it's also a major filter of literally your entire body it helps to assist in the filtration of your blood as well as your neurological system so if you have issues with your liver your gut and your lymph then pretty much the only pathway that's left that's potentially still working as your kidneys so that's a lot of burden for your kidneys to have to deal with you know being the major pathway to filter all the bad stuff out so in addition to that he was also dealing with a lot of blood sugar issues and this was partly due to poor diet so the blood sugar instability was then creating a lot of issues in the frontal lobe which was compromising how well his brain can actually use the testosterone that he was producing then on top of it he also had circulatory issues so the circulatory issues especially in the groin area had to do with all of the lymph node congestion so if you start poking around in your groin area a lot of men think Oh ever hernia or have a little Greek hernia a lot of times it's not a hernia and it's actually a boatload of congested lymph nodes so if you have a lot of congested lymph nodes you can start to really compromise the blood flow to the reproductive organs and then when you have a compromised liver you're not only going to have issues with detoxing but you're only going to have a lot of issues with getting rid of excess estrogen because we're all being exposed to estrogen through food that we eat animals have hormones so even if you are eating you still will be exposed to some level of hormones so it's very important that our liver is working to get rid of the excess so overall the biggest thing to understand of how this all comes together is that this was a patient that was dealing with issues in the his detoxification pathways these pathways were compromising how well his body can detox it was also compromising how well his blood and circulatory system was working and then on top of it his blood sugar issues were compromising how well his body and brain could use testosterone so this was not one thing this was a conglomeration of different things that were causing the erectile dysfunction and I think that this is so important because men are usually being prescribed a quick-fix pill and if you actually fix the root cause not only will you obviously resolve the erectile dysfunction but secondary to that you're going to negate a lot of other symptoms that are gonna trail along because if you have a compromised liver gut lymphatic system there's gonna be other things that are gonna pop up and not only are you gonna be dealing with the hormonal issues but all of a sudden oh I'm so foggy oh I'm having mood issues oh I feel depressed oh my stomach is off oh I'm losing muscle tone and it's literally a snowball effect that starts to happen so if you haven't figured it out yet I'm here to tell you you don't know what you don't know it's impossible for you to know these things without having someone to piece the puzzle together but also in addition to have better testing because most of the time we are looking at something like an erectile dysfunction as just being oh you just have a reptile dysfunction we don't really know why it happens it just happens so here's your pill to fix it but at the end of the day there are many many things that can be the root cause so it's really about stop accepting your new normal stop blaming it on bad genes stop blaming it on being old it's there's always a reason for why you're feeling the way that you are and we have gotten to a place right now that we think that it is normal for our health to with age and obviously we're gonna have some ups and downs as we age but we can't sit here and say that you know because I'm aging I have you know this laundry list of different symptoms and now I just have to deal with it because those symptoms are there to tell you that something is wrong and it's to pretty much allow you to be proactive and to do something about it but unfortunately nobody nobody's taught us that nobody has given us those tools but that's why I'm here and that's why I'm doing this but also too is that you need to know that not everything looks like the textbook and this is why doctors more and more often are saying we don't know we don't know what caused it we don't know why this happens there is no cure and there is you know no magical remedy for this and they're saying this because you don't match the textbook never know I don't even think once my patient has ever truly matched the textbook so what I started to realize very early on in my practice is if you don't match the textbook how the heck am I going to treat you as the textbook tells me to treat so this is really what has allowed me to keep learning and growing and evolving is because I hit roadblocks with my patients and I didn't settle for that I was like I have to figure this out because there has to be more to the story x-book told me and going through so much training over the past few years I literally can't even tell you how every single person is so different and we need to move into this realm of personalized medicine and doctors need to leverage better testing because when I have a person who has you know a testosterone issue and I have two people you know technically their blood work looks similar when we do further testing their needs that were supplements their protocols are completely different based off of what their body needs so it's very very fascinating you need to know that you need to know what your body needs so that you can stop wasting time and money so with that being said you know this is what brings me to this point of the old model versus the new some of you here might be brand spanking new to this world of functional integrative medicine some of you don't even know the difference between functional integrative medicine so overall there's obviously conventional medicine we have conventional medicine which relies on a lot of chemistry they look at blood work that's the most common thing that your doctor is doing and then if your blood work looks normal they pretty much disregard your symptoms and say well you look healthy maybe you're depressed maybe you're anxious here's a pill then there's functional medicine social medicine does a lot more elaborate testing and really has the ability to give you answers and say hey I really think that this is the root cause to why you feel the way you do I have moved away from functional medicine and I moved into integrative because I was finding that there was a lot of limitations with the toolbox and functional medicine and what I mean by that is the tools were diet and supplements and I found that a lot of the people that came to me been there done that they already did a supplement regimen they already changed their diet if anything they were still on the elimination diet so I need it to figure out the bigger picture I needed to have more tools to help these people to not just give them a different version of supplements and a different diet so as I moved into this integrative medicine model I really wanted to understand has the neurological system work with the gut how's the gut work the kidney is how you know what are the better protocols out there to piece the puzzle together and also to give people changes that last and I say that because when I was doing more of this diet supplement approach I was very very frustrated because I felt like I feel great on my diet I feel great on my 45 supplements but as soon as I come off I don't feel good again and that wasn't medicine to me that was a different version of a band-aid so I wanted to figure out a way that we can actually give people answers and give people solutions that were going to allow them to get to a place that it was sustained and it was sustainable so when we're doing this you know we have to spend time it is so important that we give you the time that you deserve and we choose to serve you we choose to be detectives we choose to ask their questions and we do not choose to serve your insurance providers so the great thing about it is obviously people use their out of network coverage and all of your blood work and all your tasks can go through your insurance but I really think medicine is going in a better direction but right now if we were truly in that in network realm we would only be able to spend 15 minutes and you know unfortunately this is you know why people are watching these webinars because they're not getting answers they're tired they're exhausted and they've spent a boatload of money on their co-pays with no results so we choose to serve you and we choose to spend the time dig deeper do better testing so that you can actually have a solution to get yourself a tract and one little side note and I always put this in my webinars because I think it's so important and this is partly me just thinking I'm funny as well but when you know I always find it interesting it's like you go to dinner you go to a social environment and you know if you say like oh I'm you know doing this new thing or I'm you know I just went to this integrative medicine practice I'm embarking on this protocol or I'm changing my diet or I'm gluten-free people are like so quick to judge they love to throw out their opinion but oh why are you doing that that sounds stupid or why don't you spend your money on that oh that sounds like a waste of time but every laughs because if I go into somebody's house and I like see all these like you know crazy technology or like all these like fancy things that I would not normally spend my money on I don't like walk in and be like oh what a bad idea what a stupid way to spend your money and I always just find it funny because everybody values something different if you value your house don't let anybody tell you you can't invest in it and it's just so important for us to like be able to know that you know walking into those types of environments and getting those judgments of being able to just kind of you know stand our ground and say listen this is what I value this is what I'm going to spend my money on and you know and then the best part is is the people that are like spending their money on other things and don't value their health they're the ones that always just want to sit there and talk about like oh I'm tired oh I'm sick oh my stomach hurts so really at the end of the day I put this in here because I hear it over and over again and I think it's just important for people to know that you're not selfish you're not doing a disservice to your family you're not any of those things because you want to invest in your health if anything you being a healthy individual allows you to show up better in your life in your job to your families to your spouse and that's really one of the things that I don't think you can really put a value on another thing too is we've really settled for the idea that you know nobody's gonna ever really be able to give us answers you know we forget that health care is supposed to be about getting answers and then getting a solution unfortunately most of the time is I don't really know what's wrong with you your blood work looks good or our solution is the the one size fits all pill surgery protocol we need to know that it's all about what is customized to us and we need to stop settling for no answers and really cookie cutter solutions so you may be curious okay how do you figure all this stuff out how do you figure out how people have mold toxicity how do you figure out if they have other pieces to the puzzle so we have evolved our technologies over time and we have an onboarding process that we do there are onboarding process we do some really really customized testing so one of them is the bio resonance technology this is something that actually has the ability to look down to the DNA level as to what is dis functioning in your system secondary to that it picks up on foreign DNA so the foreign DNA can be from mold fungus bacteria parasites all different types of organisms so we actually have in real time information about what is stressing your system in addition to what types of organisms might be in your system causing problems we test for chemical sensitivities environmental allergies food allergies heavy metals minerals vitamins our blood work gives us autoimmune markers mold markers immune system markers hormonal markers literally the list goes on we test for so many different things you will learn so much about yourself probably more than you even want to know but it's all in a good way because there is always a solution it's not about here's the laundry list of things that are going on with you luck out there it's about obviously having a solution and I always say that I know that I did my job when my patient says oh my gosh that makes sense I finally feel like I know what's going on with me one of our coolest tests though is called autonomic response testing so I've mentioned this before that it is all about your needs and what is personalized to you so we do not guess we test so with our autonomic response testing we can actually test your DNA to know what is good for you from a supplement perspective what types of herbs are good homeopathic remedies what types of detox that detox therapy is neurological therapies physical therapies what type of diet should you be eating all of these things are tested it is not my educated guess it is not my cookie cutter approach all for testosterone issues it is exactly what your body says is good and that is really really one of the most amazing things that allows us to get the results that we do in a fraction of the time so as we said earlier is one of the big reasons we do this unique onboarding process is number one I was tired of running into roadblocks with other very expensive tests that didn't always give me what I was looking for and number two is that I really didn't love having someone come in and having them walk out of my office with two three four thousand dollars worth of kits from stool samples to nasal swabs to hormone tasks and they were thousands of dollars deep before they even knew what was wrong with them so I knew that I wanted to figure out another solution and that was why we kept learning about these new technologies so that we could really streamline this process and save the money on the testing so you can actually spend money on getting better which is obviously why you're all here so again when we're doing this testing and we're able to figure out what you can and cannot eat when you've been dealing with debilitating stomach issue ears or big to mold experts and doing all these random protocols and you're still not better you know depending on your goals and what you can achieve is priceless when you have this type of customized testing so when it comes down to our whole onboarding process what does it cost how does it work is it's 1425 this is gonna cover all of those tests that we talked about earlier so it's everything from your bio resonance to your food allergy testing the blood work the autonomic response testing all of the things that I listed earlier but of course we always want to make sure that you are a fit for us as we are a fit for you so we do actually recommend for you to do a strategy call with one of our client care team members which you can see the link to the right on this allows you to just understand a little bit more about the process and we can understand what are your goals to make sure that we are the best fit for you because it's all about you know being an environment that is going to be optimal for your healing process also too if you are long distance you can work with us from a distance because you have DNA in your hair so simply by sending us a hair sample we can actually do all of your testing from a distance and in addition to that if you decide that you do want to seek out care with us you can actually come for an immersion week we offer an immersion of treatment over the course of a week I'm gonna just check to see if there is any other questions so two stops or a replacement therapy no I do not offer that because I do not find it to be effective sometimes when we are going through the process of starting to balance out the way that the pituitary is talking to the thyroid and the thyroid is talking to the adrenals and the gonads we sometimes will use different types of adaptogenic herbs we might use thyroid support etc but I do not do testosterone replacement therapy because I have never seen it to be successful in the past I should say I should rephrase that it's not about it not being successful in the moment it helps people in the moment but when they come off of it their testosterone goes back down so my practice and my approach is all about creating sustainable changes and I find that hormone replacement is not always creating those sustainable changes so we date to find the root cause and then we create a strategy to fix that ultimately all right guys I really thank you for being here with me I hope you enjoyed it I hope you gained so much information from Sheena as well again I put her resource in the comments as well if you do want to access her for any type of mold testing she is one of the very few people with the insta scope and also you know when you're going through this webinar the biggest thing is this is all about education this is all about you know walking empowered and really being able to you know know wow this might be part of my puzzle but once you are able to get your testing and obviously embark on your own healing journey that's when this becomes a breakthrough experience so I really hope that you know this was helpful for you and I really hope that you can access this testing and obviously get your health back and be able to resolve the root cause of what you've been struggling with so thank you guys again for being here next week we're going to be talking all about breast infant illness and how that is actually tied to mold but if you are looking for any additional information about hormones testosterone as well as multiplicity check out our website we have tons of podcasts and I did do a podcast specifically about testosterone and the mold connection just digging into a little bit more than we did tonight so definitely check that out and I thank you guys for being here and I will see you next week