Episode 71: Dr. Wright Ain't Wrong!

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Mold Matters podcast. Whether you are looking for help for covering for Moldilness or just want to learn more about creating a safe environment for your family, this podcast is the place for you. - Hello everybody and welcome to a special episode of the Mold Matters podcast. I'm your host, Jeremy Evans, along with co-host Mike Adams. - Jerry, how you doing? - Excellent, how are you? - I'm great, we have one of our favorite guests ever. Dr. Jeff Wright with us today. - Welcome Jeff, right? - Dr. Jeff Wright. - Jeff actually got here about, I'm sorry Jeff, you got here about nine and a half ago and we just started talking and we thought, "What are you gonna do with a podcast?" - You know we could have recorded that whole thing too and done an extra add-on bonus edition of the podcast. - Yeah, you know what I was trying to send someone an old podcast 'cause they were, they think they're sick from Mold. And I was flipping through all the old thumbnails. And I saw one with you and me and Mike in the old building, three and a half years ago or something. Anyways, I just had this flashback right now. Here we are now. - And this studio is definitely longer, not wider but longer. - Yeah, yeah. So how have you been, Dr. Wright? - Fantastic, life has been pretty great. Are you still seeing lots of people that are Mold sick? - Unfortunately. - What's the sound? - I mean, it's good for business, but I like my business when I can find somebody to help them to get well and then they graduate. - Yeah, they graduate from meeting with you anymore. - Yeah. - It kinda reminds me, we had a guest speaker at a conference trying to talk to us, all of us licensees about how to get return business and Jeff and I run the back like, we don't want return business. - Yeah. - We don't have to come back. - You know, there's a level of the return business that we want. It's called, we do such a freaking awesome job that then we make these, then we create these and start raving fans who tell everybody, and you get one or two or three of those. And then they also screen people for you. They'll be squeezing the peaches or something and somebody says, "Well, I'm doing this for this," and you go, "Oh, you need to go and see this person." And then you go, "Wait, will you do like, are you willing to do weird stuff like, you know, drink water or do like baking soda baths?" And they go, "Ah, no, no, no, no, no, no." Don't waste this time and you don't want to go see him because he's going to make you do a whole bunch of lectures up besides swimming or pill every day. - Dr. Wright, it's been a while and so, if someone like listens to the podcast regularly, they actually made, you know, they may not remember who you are exactly. Will you give us a quick 30 second bio? - Just to keep it to 30 seconds. I went to a naturopathic medical school, that's a four year medical school. Went to Portland, came home, did a residency with a medical doctor and family medicine, and started a maln practice. And when you start your own business, you have to do what walks through the door, not necessarily what you think you want to do. And so I started seeing the world's most sensitive patients because they would find me, because they weren't getting the care, the results that they were looking for with their insurance cover doctor. And so I started studying environmental medicine, which was not what I wanted to study, and spent some time with some doctors and they said, "Well, if it's mold, we basically tell them to leave their house naked and never go back." Not never really sat well with me. And I met one of your stark raving fans, who keep her, "I hold her in a place of honor." And I was already studying mold, learning the shoemaker protocol, which was basically leave naked, and then we have this whole medical profile for you to get you well. And so I never felt comfortable with the leave naked part. And so this patient, who could be-- - Mostly depending on who it is. - Yes, yeah. You don't want to see me leave naked. That's just just not a, not something you can ever burn out of your brain. You're trying to do a naked free protocol. - I was trying to do a naked free protocol. You know, I kind of like my house. I like my bed. I got cool pictures on the wall. I've got books that I really care about. And I like my kids too. And so it's like leaving naked just because it was never really sat well with me. Anyway, and so I was super skeptical because coming from the rich issue maker protocol, it was like, there's no way to sterilize your house. And so this was a patient who came in and told me what for. And so then when Mike and Jeff came to my office, I still remember this and they probably do, too. I was not polite to them. I was not very graceful. I kind of gave them what for. But they treat, they caught my mind with a couple of things like over the chemical we're using. That was working with chemically sensitive people where everything makes them sick. So that was one of my big deals. Like, well, you're going to poison the people who were trying to get the house clean. They said, no, it's just a combination of peroxide and vinegar. And I went, wait, I remember that from medical school. How that's a really great sanitizer. I still wasn't very polite to them. Fast forward months, years, and advance. I started giving out their business cards with my business partner. And all of my patients came back, wow, I can't believe how much better I feel since they fogged my house. And so we've developed this relationship. I continue to work with the sickest of the sick because they find me because they're not getting the care, the success that they're hoping for from their standard medical doctor. And I'm a little bit on the ADD side. And so I'm not interested in seeing somebody for the rest of their life. I want them to graduate. If my body is the one in front of a doctor, if I'm the patient, I want them to give me information that's hard to swallow so that I have truth that I can live with and count on to be able to graduate and not need to keep seeing this doctor. And so that's the way I run my practice. That's the way we work together. As we, like you said, we're hoping to get them well so they don't need us anymore. Because ultimately, if I'm the patient, that's what I'm looking for. So that was a little more than 37. That's a little great though. But yeah, it's been awesome to build that relationship with you. And actually, what's your opinion just real quick before we launch into the topic? Is, in your opinion, is mold becoming a bigger thing amongst our population? Is it the same? And you're just becoming more aware? I think we're becoming more aware of it. But I do think that it's getting worse than it used to be. In the '70s, they started using formaldehyde insulation. There was a whole subset of people that got really sick from that. So now, anytime you're building a house, they go, we have from aldehyde-free insulation. It's a known thing we've moved in other things. I think that mold has always been a problem. But because of legislation, because of laws, because of building codes and so on, the energy efficiency is kind of the king of building a home well. Well, that's really wonderful. And I love not having to spend more on my electric bill or gas or water bill. The problem is the flip side of that is if it's so energy-efficient because it insulates so well, now you don't have a home that breathes very well. I'm sure you've got air coming in and out. But the problem is, if it doesn't breath very well, and you get that water damage problem, which, for those of the listeners that never have water damage, they are in the minority. Because home ownership is the end of your problems. It's usually the front end, not the back end. And so once you have ownership or you're renting, the problem is, is it's not a matter if you have water damage, it's a matter of when you have water damage. Our first flood in our house was because my mom left the window open in the basement. And just what? All the water from the sprinklers came on. Some of the water went in. Thankfully, we were able to clean it up before anything messy happened. But it's, again, it's a matter of when it happens. And I'm going to push buttons. I'm one who likes the truth. And so I'm going to poke at anything that might be the truth. And so what's happened over the last 20 years? Well, over the last 25 years is we went from 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G. And I've seen illnesses that used to be straightforward, for example, of depression and anxiety. I graduated from medical school. We could treat that with some amino acids. And most people would get better, where they felt like they were managing. Now when I see people who have depression and anxiety, those amino acids just don't do the job anymore. They still are part of the equation, but there's more going on. And so maybe it's because I have a ton of experience in this. And so I'm used to seeing the really sick people. Or maybe it's that there are more sick people, which I think is the latter. There are more sick people who are getting sicker and sicker and sicker because of mold. And I think part of it is the electromagnetic. We have so much more electromagnetic now. Everybody and their cousin has 1, 2, 3, 4 Wi-Fi devices in their home, which my experience is that makes things grow. And it makes them grow faster. And it makes them grow more cranky. And so that's one of my theories. And so can we get away with that? Let me rephrase, can we get away from all that? Well, you can turn it off in your home. You can leave your home unaffected. But how many people live close to their neighbors? It's not that we-- nobody lives on our aunt's anymore in the cities. We all have neighbors. And I have a Wi-Fi detector. It's called my cell phone. I turn on the Wi-Fi, and I can get 25 signals from my front door. And so you can't really get away from it without an active god or an active terror or moving off the edge of the earth. Speaking of things getting worse, I also have a theory. I've never run this by you, Dr. Wright. But I believe that the cardboard backing on sheetrock is almost always used-- they use recycled cardboard. I think that's full of mold. And so I think sheetrock ends up being delivered to the builder, pre-annoculated with mold on it. Well, I would go-- I would say yes, that's likely. But there's one thing I'd go even further. What does paper come from? Comes from trees. So what grows on the bark of trees, mold? So just the act of making paper board is going to have it as well. And if you take that and oculate it more with cardboard, then you have an increase amount. And so when we built them all the free home, well, do you have drywall? Well, then how's that mold free? Because that comes from wood. I actually have that. I go with that theory where I think all paper is subject to this, especially recycled. I like recycling in theory. And we should do a podcast on recycling. But the more I'm sensitive, I've gotten Jeff. I notice recycled materials aren't friendly to me sometimes. I can feel-- oh, well, it makes sense. You throw all your garbage, essentially. And then they mash it together. The thing about those big dumpsters that have, you know, recycled your cardboard here. And they just sit out in the weather. And then they come dump it. And they get all chewed up in the grinder. And they make paper out of it. And even if there was no cardboard that was already contaminated, what was in that dumpster-- right-- and then you have a perfect-- it gets warm, it gets wet. And so now all you have to do is add some fuel there, or some food there, called the cardboard. That's a perfect petri dish to be able to grow lots of mold. Yeah. In fact, it just came up just a couple of days ago. I was talking to Luke. And his question, it was actually a customer head. He says, why is stackly so prevalent when you have water damage in a home? But we don't hardly ever pick it up outside. And that's the best I can come up with. I think it's pre-annoculated on it. Yeah, maybe not that it's already. Yeah, because we've asked many technicians lab-- Yeah, and you don't have the answer is, well, you know what you're on me, mold is you pick with us. That's not an answer, that's just a-- Yeah, that's-- sorry, now I kind of say that's kind of a cop out. You just didn't want to do the research to find out why that might be. There are, anyways. But Dr. Wright, we should do a podcast just where we just shoot the breeze, which is what we're still doing. That's what we've been doing for less than a minute and a half. Almost two hours. But we do want to get into a topic. And the topic that we're going to talk about is how to test in our own bodies, whether we might have mold in us or maybe our symptoms or illness is from mold. And let me give you a little backstory. When Mike and I and all the mold professionals throughout the world, when we go into a house, we're trying to determine if the house has mold. As we've talked about exhaustively in the podcast, the test methods are often insufficient. So you have to be a really good professional. You have to know what you're looking for. There's a lot of things that you have to have in place to be a performer successful inspection of a home. And testing is part of that. I'm just saying it's not the best. And so-- and I would say, I don't know, what, 50%, 60% of the time, a moldy home won't have obvious visible signs of mold. So there won't be the big, classy black patch of mold in it. Yeah, yeah. So then you have this homeowner who you come to their house, and they're like, OK, this professional, he's going to take some tests. He's going to do some look around in the crawl space and fill out this inspection form. And I don't see any mold. And even Mike and I, I think when we're-- nowadays we're so confident in our end of things, we can often help the homeowner see, there's mold in here somewhere. But in some cases, that homeowner's left in this position where they're like, the testing didn't really show mold. My symptoms seem to align with mold, but I don't know if I am sick from mold. Basically, that's a very common question. And I had one just a couple of months ago when I texted you about this topic, and I thought, we really need to maybe arm some of our listeners with the tools, at least. And I know there's pros and cons, even in the tools of testing your body. But I thought, let's arm the listeners with the tools they need to figure out. How do I know if my body is sick from mold? And then that can go into the equation. So let me answer that question. And I want to give you a lot more information, especially for the listeners, because nowadays, everything is run based on a legal opinion. Doctors now can look at a piece of paper that says, you are diagnosed with XYZ thing. And the clinical experience is not irrelevant, but is now treated almost irrelevant. So there are certain diseases that are a clinical diagnosis, which means it looks like a horse. It smells like a horse. Winnie's like a horse. And we call it a horse, except that it's got black and white stripes. And so we can't say it's a zebra, because it looks like a horse. So therefore, it's a horse. And so the clinical diagnosis is not used as often, because doctors are so worried. And this is my profession, but doctors are so worried by getting sued that they can't say my gut feeling says that this is the problem. And I can't prove that. And unfortunately, when it comes to mold, a big chunk of the diagnosis is a clinical diagnosis. It's a clinically experienced. So let me do a high level. Here are the testings that are available. And then I'll kind of go over each piece and tell you the pros and the cons of doing that test. Because no test ever-- well, death tests, maybe. If somebody's not breathing in their horse and not going and they have no electrical activity, then we can say that for absolute certain, they're dead. But that's pretty much the only way of testing that is actually-- I think I can do that test. Yeah, I can do that test. OK, that guy's dead. Yeah. So there are three-- let's go with basically three types of testing that we would do for to make a diagnosis of mold illness. The mold illness has, as per Dr. Richie Schumacher, he's the guy who did most of the research that tells us what mold illness is. Before we go, you have mold. I think you're sick from it. You need to get out of the house. But he's really done a ton of the research to find out what biochemically is wrong so that we can say you have serrs or chronic inflammatory response syndrome. A lot of syllables in that. So I'm going to say mold illness, because that's easier to say. And I have a lot of honor for Dr. Schumacher. And while I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, he's got the foundation. And so the first test is an eye test. The second test is I would call a urine test. And third test is blood testing. The reason I put them in that order is because of cost and ease. So blood testing is the best that will tell us the most information on what's going on. I use the other testing to tell me-- because it's cheap and easy-- to tell me, do we need to run all these tests for blood testing? And even before I do all those blood tests, I'm going to do a thorough history. And I do this in questionnaires because it stays the patient's money. But a diagnosis isn't made based on a questionnaire. It's based on thorough history questionnaire and getting finding out what's going on. So the eye test. The eye test is called the VCS or visual contrast sensitivity. I send everybody to Richie Schumacher's website, which is surviving mold.com. And I do that because this is a very robust website where you can get-- for the science geeks out there, they can do a really deep dive and get credible information. Everybody knows that Google knows everything, but you have to ask the right question to get the right answer on Google. So this is a place where people can start. And they can do as much research or as little research as they want. And they'll get credible, youthful information there. My experience says that there's always holes in everything, but that's a really solid place. So that can set up. So that test is actually getting used to the screen of your computer, right? Yep. Thank you. And so answer the questions based on the images on this. So on that website, they're going to give you kind of a questionnaire, which is going to look at the history. And do you have a history that says you may have a serves problem or a mold problem. And then you do the eye test, and you have five columns, and you're what you're looking at. And this is where you'll want to show the video of this podcast, not just the video is. So you have basically lines that are shades of gray. And so if you have black and white lines, they're really easy to tell the difference between the black lines and the white lines. And so it has lines going up straight up and down or leaning to the left or leaning to the right. And if you can't see the contrast between the shades of gray, all you're going to see is a gray spot. So you could guess-- but eventually, you're going to get some wrong. Unless you're an extraordinarily good guesser, you're going to get some wrong. And so based on which ones you get right and which ones you get wrong, we can extrapolate that you have inflammation in your brain, which then extrapolates probably we should look into serves. Now, the eye test is something like 92%. I'm going to be wrong. It might be wrong. Is that right? It's about 90% accurate for this person probably has a mold illness. Now here's the problem. If somebody has other toxins in their brain, it's going to affect how they conduct how the eyeball sees and how you perceive it. So if they have a lot of other toxins in their brain or they have a brain injury or something else, that can cause them to be a false positive because they've got other things. So it's a great test. On the website, it's $15. And if you fix the problem, if you fix the toxins, the test will come back-- it'll actually change. So it's a good biomarker that people can do on their own that can monitor their own results. And so I use that first because it's cheap and easy. So is that a yes or no, or does it kind of give you a score? It's a yes or no. But when they print it off, you can print off the result. And I can look at it and go, wow, you failed spectacularly. Or wow, you were just on the wrong side of normal. And so you'll see the changes. And people will see the ones that they missed. And they can go, well, before I missed these three, and now I didn't miss those three. Yeah. I took it. Maybe three years ago. I passed. You should take it. No, I did take it. Oh, you took it. About a year ago when I failed. You failed? Yeah. Mike. OK, we've got to do some work here. So and I send people there. I have one like if I'm visiting with a patient, I have one that I can take. But if I'm working with somebody virtually, or they're out of state, or consulting with somebody else, get on there, take the test, you'll have the results. Can I probe on that? So is it testing only for like, we talked about this before, serves like really severe, I have the HLA, DR gene type of thing, or someone who's just mildly sick. It's testing for, can you, your eyes pick up the like, your eyeball is kind of like the lens of the camera. Whereas the back of your brain, the occipital lobe, is where the visual cortex is. So you have to physically see it with your eyeball and conduct it through your brain so that your brain can interpret it. So if your brain is swollen, you're going to get that messed up. Yeah. So if someone takes that, I guess I'm getting it, if they take that, and they pass, they shouldn't write off mold, right, per se. But if they, if they get it and they fail, they shouldn't eat plus percent chance, it is mold, okay. So, and, but it's a toxin in the brain affecting how you see. So that's the upside and the downside. And that's why I start with it because cheap and easy. But I'm also taking that in conjunction with what is the clinical picture looking like, where have they lived, what are they going to get exposed to. And all of my paperwork, I have little things plugged into my, hidden in my paperwork that make me think serves as a problem. But it's, it's, it's a, it's a diagnosis of the whole person, not just, oh, they get static electricity shocks all the time. Oh, they have serves. No, there's more of the things that can do it. But that leads me in that direction of, we need to check this. So that's the first test, okay. The second test I run is a urine test. It's not a perfect test, like we were talking about in the pre-podcast information is, there are doctors who I think are phenomenal. Excellent what they do, who say, well, we don't know if this is mold in you or mold that you were inhaling from your sick house. I totally agree. And I know some people who are incredibly infected as the wrong word, but have a lot of mold in them, and they are very sick from it. And so if they were to take the test, they will flunk it. But what I'm looking for, if a home is sick and we go into your home and we do a terrible job of inspecting, which happens more than I would like to hear, but I hear it a lot, then the biggest problem is, is they go, they leave and they say your home is mold-free, now that person is going to go everywhere, do everything else over the course of months to years, and they're never going to get well because the inspector did a credit job and told them that you can check off this box. And so I don't trust all of the testers. I don't trust the, like there's, you know, the Ermian hurts me both, they're excellent, but they also have a false negative, a lot of false negatives. Meaning you have it, but we didn't find, or we say that you don't have it, so therefore now you write off the house is safe. Now if it's positive, you have a problem with your house, but if it's negative, I still would say we need to keep looking there and don't run it off yet. And so I like, and so if that comes back and says your house is clean, well, I don't care. I'm not a mold inspector. I think that's the exact right thing to do. And so I look at this, says you don't have it, but, or it says you have it, but not high enough to be a problem. Well, the people who say that is the, yeah, everybody's different and the people who say it's not high enough to be a problem, those are, you know, state run or federal run agencies that say we have to have a positive and negative. And to me, zero is the number I'm looking for. And if you have 102, well, if you're a super sensitive person, that 102 could be lethal to you. Whereas somebody else is not sensitive to it. It could be 10,000 and they're still not having a problem. Right. So I've issues with the testing. I think it's useful, but what I want to know is, do you have toxins in you from the house? And so you, well, may or may not be from the house. Good for work and from the car. Could be your neighbor's house. You spend a lot of time because you're helping out. I mean, so we don't, but the clinicians of the world extrapolate that since the house is clean, you can't have mold. Yeah. That makes no logical sense. I agree. So I still think people should do as much testing as they feel appropriate to do, but don't write this off just because it didn't show up there. So I want to know, do they have a problem in them? And so that's why I do urinary microtoxin testing. And we can put the information in there. Okay, so I have a quick question on that. I can't remember where I read it, but some where I read where the clinician or the healthcare practitioner said, sometimes those urinary microtoxin tests are just telling me what your body is good at getting rid of. It may not tell me what your body is. Absolutely. So the next problem is, is this actually saying that this is your problem? Well, no, I interpret it along with the rest of the picture. And if they have, you know, a weak positive on one of them, does that mean it's in their house? Maybe? Now, if it's in their house and we have a toxin from mold A, and you just tested your house and found mold A, then I would extrapolate, yep, that's from there. And there's another urine test called a organic acid test that looks at other things. So this is where the urine testing comes in is it looks at other things that your body is going to dump when there is mold or Candida or other things going on, but it's not looking at the actual biotoxin, it's looking at body chemistry, this changing from a biotoxin or from a mold. And that gives more information along. So all the tests are useful, but they're useful in a certain context. So I have one patient that has mold and or that flunked the urinary microtoxin test, spectacularly flunked it. And she has been so neurotic about not having mold since 20 years ago, or I was 25 years ago. But she lived in and all of her symptoms started in that house when she lived there for those three years when there was a lot of mold. Well, she hasn't been exposed ever since. So is she getting it from someplace now? I don't think so. I think that she is one of the recyclers who was never able to fully get rid of it, and her body is still trying to get rid of it. And so it doesn't tell me when, where, why, or how you got it, it just tells me that it's present. So when you say a recycler, are you saying that they still have active mold colonization in their body? Either that or their body. So the way the body, two ways you ever get rid of mold, there's two physiologic methods. The way number one is your immune system sees it and goes, oh, bad guy. So it gets hot and bothered and flamed, and then goes and finds it, kills it and removes it. That's plan A. But the part of the reason for the blood testing is we want to know if you're only able to do plan B, which is the genetics of it, and this comes from the Schumacher research protocol, is if you don't have the genetics to be able to see it, identify it, get inflamed, kill it, and remove it, you can only see it and identify it and get inflamed. That's where the chronic inflammatory response syndrome is, you've got this inflammatory response over and over and over that's causing you problems. But what happens is that's plan A, you can't do plan A very well. So plan B is all these toxins circulate, they get to the liver, the liver sees it and removes it, dumps it into the bile, which then goes into the bile, and then you create it when you go to the bathroom. The problem is, is these biotoxins are so biochemically small that when they come up against the test and wall, they just get reabsorbed, and then the body sees, I mean, gets more inflamed and so you have this self perpetuating problem. And so the treatment for that, we can do that, and we've talked about it here before, but it's basically take a binder that acts like a sponge that grabs it to ensure that it does not get reabsorbed or recycled. So with the urine test, you were going to say, so the DCS, you can do it online, urine test, how do you do it, and how much is it? You can have a doctor order, there's a lab that does that, the other lab does not require a doctor's order, the mosaic diagnostic is one of the labs that does it. They require a doctor's order. The other one is from real-time lab, and you can get that through a doctor order, or you can just order it online and get it done. And the price on that? In the ballpark of $300. I mean, the cash price is in the ballpark of $300. Sometimes survivors are charged more than that because they're trying to cover other costs. So remember if you're just saving yourself, urine, around $300, you're in it. The other blood, or the other urinary test, which is the organic acid test is in the $350 to $4. Okay. Okay. So that kind of gives you, okay, now are we there yet? So if the history, the presentation, the symptom picture, and/or the eye test, and/or the urinary microtoxin test is, and if somebody comes to me and they say, here's my Ermi test, and I see that Stachybotras is off the chart, I'm going to have them do the eye test just for fun, because that's also going to give them a biomarker for how are they getting better. The urinary microtoxin test, we're just going to ignore that one, because it's not useful, because I already know that they have Stachybotras in their house. And yeah, the urinary, you know, the urinary organic acid test might be helpful just to see how far down that sick rabbit hole things are, but it's extraneous as well. Now I'm going to go straight to blood testing, and blood testing is looking at number one genetics, how easy or hard is it going to be for you to remove it? And that doesn't tell me anything about the treatment protocol from now on. It just says, you have genes, you can't remove this, minimize or avoid all mold exposure for the rest of your life. Is that, are you talking to HLA? Yeah, HLA B27. Oh no, HLA, DR. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's part of the Schumacher Protocol, he's got a test called the genie, which I've been doing his protocol testing, which wasn't called genie, but it's all the same testing. And cost on that one, if I go through my cash lab, that one is typically like the cheapest price I can find for the whole protocol is in the $900 range. Okay. How many different things are you testing for? I'm you doing like 20-ish analytes. And so that test is AD of the genes, B are their hormone imbalances in your body, C are there inflammatory markers that are going on. And it's each piece of the service protocol that can be corrected. So we're looking at all the things that can be corrected, and there's an order to it. And once you correct it all of it, and to summarize the whole protocol, it's number one, you gotta get out of it, you can't get exposed anymore. And number two, you gotta get it out of you, which is where the binders come in. And then number three through 12 is all the other stuff that goes along with it, that have to be found and corrected, and when you correct them all, people go, "Well, wow, that's an amazing, comprehensive," kind of just, you laid out the, I mean, three main tests, but you mixed in the acid, whatever that one's called. Your organic acids. Now there's another set of blood tests that doctors will often do. I do not, because of the, and the reason I don't do those are like looking at IgG or IgE markers, like O, and IgE, like elephant, is where you're looking at am I allergic to peanuts? Therefore, if I had a peanut, I'm going to go on to anaphylactic shock, or am I allergic to grasses or pollen? That's more of an antibody. Yeah, it's an antibody test. But one says, "Are you allergic to penicillium?" And if you are, you're going to have an anaphylactic or allergy response to that. But if you can't see it and make an antibody to it to kill it, will it show up on that test? The answer is maybe, maybe not. And so, and to me, I'm not interested as much in, "Are you allergic to it?" I'm more interested in, "Is it present? And how can we call your body down from it?" So a lot of doctors, they're used to, "Okay, you have strap infection, let's run an antibody test, you have a strap, or do you have f-steam bar, or do you have a side of maglia virus, you run an antibody test to that, or a Lyme disease, and so on. But if your body can't make the antibodies, that's the weakness of the test. Is if for some reason, your immune system can't do that, or has been suppressed from something else, like vitamin D deficiency causes immune suppression, you know, immune system can't do the job, then we'll run the test and say, "Oh, you don't have X, Y, Z. But if there's an immune suppression, which is a lot harder to test for, then we're going to go, "You don't have this," and then, again, you're going chasing down a different rabbit, down a different rabbit hole, and never getting better, because the antibody test had that small margin there. Yeah. So, IgG is, "Can you make cruise missiles to this thing to kill it?" And so that's where we're looking at a more long-term infection of that. But, again, if your body can't make the antibodies, then it's going to come up as negative. So what we're asking is, "Are you infected with this as opposed to being poisoned by this?" The antibody testing is looking at, "Are you allergic or infected from this?" And that has less clinical relevance in my world. Right. It's still a good test. Doctors still do it. But you have to look at it. What is this test telling me? And if you don't have IgG or IgE to, you know, Stekybautress or Penicillium, okay, we would extrapolate, "Oh, you don't have this problem," when, in fact, all it's saying is you are not infected by it. Your body's not trying to remove it with that method. Yeah. Tell me one more thing, because I texted you, you know, what was it, a couple, I don't know, a month or two ago, about the hair follicle test? Mm-hmm. And you had mentioned that it has some value, but also it has its limitations. Again, what, and the hair follicle test is- Let's get to the root of the hair. The hair? And some of us have more roots than others. So the hair follicle test is looking at, again, what's coming out in, what is in the hair, so that it looks at excretion, so urine is excretion as well. And it's really nice to know if you find it in the hair, that's good, but hair only will show up what has been excreted. And again, if you can't excrete it, then it won't show up. Okay. So do you ever use that one in your own practice? Not yet. And when I see a new test, I'm kind of one who wants to hold off and go, is this useful? And if it is, I want to see it in multiple places that yes, this really made a clinical difference. Because in our world, I don't build insurance. And so I'm looking for the things that are most useful now. A lot of other doctors are building insurance, and I will send the lab to an insurance-covered lab. Because if they're going to do the whole service protocol, that's at the entry point cash price, $900. Yeah. And most of the people I see have already been there done that with a whole bunch of doctors and haven't gotten better. And usually they've spent much of their life saving, trying to get better. And so I'm really conscious, probably overly so, but really conscious about running a blood test, if it's not going to make a clinical difference. Yeah. Okay. So you pretty much stick to the three tests you mentioned. Yeah. The visual sensitivity, what is it? Visual contrast sensitivity. Yeah. I had no idea that was that accurate. You're in. And then the third test. Yeah. That's great news. Yeah. So you laid out a scenario where you might, you know, if they come, if they get like a really higher or positive result on the VCS, you might even skip the urine test, right? Yeah. What are you saying? Are there scenarios where, I don't know, can you play a couple other scenarios where, okay, so they don't, they don't get a, you know, nothing comes through on the VCS. So then you go to number two, which is urine, is that typically what you're always going to do? Yep. Then you go to the urine. In fact, find nothing alarming, then you go to the blood, right? Yep. So this is more complicated than that, but let me give you a little, so I'm a whole person doctor. And so as part of my, my questioning and my quizzes and so on, I'm also looking for a number of other things. So for example, if they have chronic Lyme disease, which is highly debated, I'm going to look at that too. And you know, and if I have, I have a lot of paperwork that I've already asked them a lot of questions to kind of get ball parks to where they are. And so if somebody's lab tests come back, or if somebody's paperwork comes back, and their only problem is there's just a lot more tired than they should be, then I'm also going to look at, are they anemic? Because that can cause some of the symptoms. Is there thyroid or there are adrenals needing some work? Is there something else in their house that's making them sick? Is there, you know, is there a potential heavy metal problem that they have an overload that they can't get rid of? So I'm looking at all these things. And even though I look at mold and I look for it very carefully, I'm also looking at, is there something else going on that we missed that, because if the bodies are logical, it makes a lot of sense. And the body wants to heal itself. So if you're having a symptom, it means that your body is trying to deal with something. And so if you can name that and/or support the response to that, then bodies will get better. And so is mold always a problem? I find that probably the foundation reason why most people do not get well is they've got mold in their body or have been exposed to mold that's causing the problems. That's probably one of three major things that causes people chronic illness. And so finding it is important. But if it's not there, if the lab testing comes back negative, then it may not be mold. Maybe mold is fuel on the proverbial fire, but it's not the primary problem. And then kind of going back to the urine test. So is there a good way to, you know, you talked about, you know, is the, is the, are the microtoxins that are in your body and coming up your urine, are they from you breathing it in your house or environment, or are they from the corn and stuff you ate, from the moldy corn or whatever? Do you have any good ways to like determine if it is environmental or if it's food or something else? The test usually if it's like one marker or it's weak markers, they're just not very high, I would extrapolate probably this is from something you ate or something you walked in and got some exposure. But I take the urine test in conjunction with everything else and I have a lot of experience there. And so I kind of have an experience of what this looks like is probably this. You know, is there a tip and a trick with that? No, it's looking at the whole picture, not just what you want to find. And in our society, everybody, you know, you guys are mold guys, I'm a mold guy and so what do we want to find? We want to find, well, actually, what do we not want to find? We do not want to find mold, but we have enough experience to have an idea of what mold looks like. So yeah, actually, I really relate to what you're saying in the sense that my mind wants to just have compartments and say just do A, B and C, it's going to be fine. You really have to incorporate all this other information to understand A, B and C. Yeah, that's exactly what a mold inspection is at a home, a home is for the wisdom I'm saying. Yeah, you could, a test could be interpreted in many different ways depending on the same result in two different houses could be interpreted to, I've often, I've often taught this concept. Probably the worst thing we could do as mold guys or fun guys, mostly mold guys is, is go in and tell somebody their house is healthy when it's not. Yeah, yeah. That's, that's not good. And, you know, the old outages you get which pay for, and you can spend a ton of money on something and not get anything because there are shifters out there too, unfortunately. And I find the reality is, is if it looks too good to be true, it usually is. Yeah. Yeah, I get, maybe, unless Mike, you have anything else to say, I guess, I was thinking in conclusion, maybe, talk to you right. So the digital contrast and stability test they can take online, you've reckoned to get the Schumacher website. As far as you're in, you said they could order it online, real-time labs or other places. And then, blood tests, you need to have a doctor order of those, right? Yeah. Okay, that's great. Now, the interpretation, like you can interpret them, and is, is that kind of your recommendation? Okay, say they want to do a little bit of DIY testing, you know, on their own bodies. Okay, great. But, they're probably going to need some help interpreting those. I've looked at a lot of urine tests. I'm going to be biased when I say this. You need to have a clinician that's been doing it a minute. And one of the things that I find in, I don't like the term alternative medicine because it means it's better or worse than something else. I like, I like, all medicine has a place and all medicine is good in the right context. So I like integrative medicine. Capital medicine was amazing and you can find some really good practitioners. But my experience is, is you want a doctor-level person interpreting? There are nurse practitioners who are excellent and there's nurse practitioners who are newbies. And it's not always easy to find one. The training of a mid-level provider, chiropractors, physical therapists, physical physicians, assistant and nurse practitioners, you can find amazing ones. And then you can find ones that are doing it, but a chiropractor doesn't have a prescriptive license. And sometimes rarely, like I can count on fingers, like how many times I've needed to prescribe a drug, the best binders are drugs. My preference is not to use them because they have more side effects, but the best ones are drugs. So if a person can't prescribe a drug, they're going to use the next best ones. And those are the ones I use. They work really well most of the time. But there's times and places where people need the prescription, not just the natural binder. Now 99 times out of 100, I would prefer the natural one. But you need to understand that when you're walking in and looking at the clinician, if the person who's the serr's protocol person is a chiropractor or then you might not be able to do the full protocol with that clinician, they still might be excellent. But people need to know that there's different levels of serr's certified people. Now I am not a serr's certified doctor, mostly because I didn't feel like that was going to make enough of a difference in my practice to go and get the certification, and so that's why I've chosen not to do it. But I still go, I still study from those people who are certified to learn all the newest latest greatest things. But getting the certification to me is just a piece of paper on my website and to me it means nothing. No, it means that somebody's done a minimum amount of work to get there. So finding somebody like that would be excellent. But also make sure that the person you're seeing can do all of the tools that need to be done. And if not, it might be that they'll say you need this drug, go find a doctor who will prescribe that. That's great too. But then you have to find a doctor who can prescribe it. And depending on where you are, your doctors might not be amenable to taking a prescriptive recommendation from a less licensed or non-licensed practitioner. So I just want to put that out there so that the listeners will understand that there's grades of them. And somebody might see me and go, "Well, you're not certified. I want to go see somebody who's great. You should do that." And as an anthropathic doctor, there are certain set of drugs that I cannot prescribe. I do not want to. But if you need one, I'm going to refer you to somebody and say, "Look, you need this one. I can't prescribe it or I don't feel comfortable doing it. You need to talk to a doctor who's the blood test that says, "This would be good for you. I take it in there. I'm happy to chat with them." So just recognize that there are levels of practitioners out there, and you want to make sure that the person, for your illness, you want to get the practitioner that's going to be at the level where you are. When I first graduated from medical school, I was a much lower level than I am now. Because after almost 25 years of experience, I know way more of a stuff that I didn't know back then. Yeah. Now out of that, knowledge that comes from experience, right? Yeah, absolutely. Are you available if someone wanted to do these tests and get your consultation or your advice or prescription or whatever? My current office is I do virtual consultations. I've done virtual consultations with people all over the world. In another country, I can't prescribe anything. I can only make health coach style recommendations. Ultimately, if I'm seeing somebody in Florida, I'm like, "Look, I'm not licensed in Florida, so there's a certain bunch of stuff I can't do." And so I would recommend you find somebody who is local to you that you can get it. But I also have tools where, you know, I have a system where I can order lab tests through a doctor's license to be able to be sent to a place where I'm not licensed. So there are workarounds. Like, if you have zero people around you and I've already looked, there are workarounds for it, but they can't go through insurance. So to look you up, can they go to, is it right, medical? They're right. They're right. What is it? It's spelled like my last name, W-R-I-G-H-T. I think my wife, she's brilliant, she's a wordsmith, you know what I'm talking about? The right medicine.com. That's easy to remember. Yeah. Okay. And they can sign up for a consultation. Usually I just have people fill out their contact form, and they'll get an email saying, "Hey, this person has this and this and this." And then usually, either my assistant, Amber, or I will call and just, you know, feel amounts. See if I'm a good fit for. And usually I'll do a five or ten minute free consultation with them, I'll charge for that. Because ultimately, if there's somebody right down the street who's excellent, I'm going to send them there. They'll get better care. Yeah. That's true. Well, I often have customers talk to me about, you know, the medical say, "You need to talk to somebody smart, not me." Yeah. We have a surface noise that we just kind of regurgitate all the time. But with inspecting homes, I know a smidgen, you know, not enough to very much get me in trouble. You talk to somebody who does this for a living. They're physically in your home, and they can tell you, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, teamwork." I know we've, like in our organization, we have a lot of licensees, and we offer your services to them and to their customers, to have mold in their house, and you've, I don't know, how many you've consulted over the years, but many, many people have helped. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, we're fans of what you're doing, Jeff. I'm a huge fan of what you guys do, too. Reach out to Jeff, we just were talking before this, we need to do, we used to do this a little more regularly. We need to get you back on the regular schedule with us. Indeed. Every couple of months or something, haven't come down. We're about an hour apart from each other, so it's not like we're next door a little more than an hour, maybe. Anyway, it was a pleasure, Jeff. Thank you so much. Thanks Jeff. Pleasure to be here again. I am excited to send this podcast out to people. I just referred someone to you maybe a month ago, I don't know if they call you, but this question all the time is like, what do I do for me? How do I know if I'm sick? And I want to just say, well, now I'm going to send them this podcast and say listen to this. Yeah. Decide what you want to do from there. Well, I need to put this on my website, too. It's like, look, if you think there's a mold problem, do this. And for the DIYers, there's a lot of things you can do on your own, which is why I send them to the Shoemaker Protocol, because it explains why we do these tests and what the therapies are. And there's a lot of things that people can do for themselves. And I see the people I lovingly refer to them as medical rejects, and people aren't getting the care that they want. It's because the doctor who's caring for them doesn't have the knowledge that is necessary for that. It's not that they're stupid or bad doctors, they're brilliant and they really want to do help. They just don't have, they just don't have that part of their toolbox. Really? And we look at that exact in the same way with other remediators, you know, it's not like they're trying to do a bad job, you know, they just don't know. Yeah. Totally true. Well, thanks Jeff. You're the next time. Pleasure. Thanks for everyone listening. Thanks, Janice. On the other side of the glass there. So we're filling in. Thanks Janice. Thanks for listening to The Mold Matters Podcast. Be sure to subscribe for more in-depth information on mold illness and recovery.