Hey guys, today we’re going to talk about mold exposure and treatment options in Chinese medicine. We’ll talk a little bit about what is meant by mold exposure, whether it really causes significant health problems, and how I treat patients who come into the clinic for mold exposure.
As always, I’m your host, Dr. David Cherryon. I am a board-certified MD practicing medicine in the state of Texas and am also a licensed acupuncturist. My expertise is at the nexus of medicine between the East and the West. How can we use the best of both of these medical philosophical systems to provide the best possible results for our patients?
We take an integrative approach that’s really patient-centered, and we see a lot of chronic illnesses across the spectrum. We also do a lot of environmental medicine. How environments influence people and shape our health is a big part of the thesis of Chinese medicine, but it’s something we tend to downplay in Western medicine.
What I’m going to do today is help you build a framework to think about your home environment, the possibility of mold exposure, reasonable steps to take if you are in that situation, and my clinical approach to treating patients with mold exposure.
Mold Identification & Environmental Context
So let’s start off with the basics. What is mold? Mold is a fungal organism. It’s a fungus that reproduces by releasing spores into the air.
If you remember back to your high school biology class, you learned about the different kingdoms in biology, right? There’s the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, the bacterial kingdom, and there’s also the fungi kingdom. Mold belongs to the fungi kingdom.
Mold thrives in environments where there are three key conditions:
- Moisture
- Organic material that it can ingest and use to grow
- Poor ventilation
Let’s start with the first one—moisture. This is a big problem in Houston. Houston has so much moisture. It’s such a humid city. We’re built on the bayou system. There’s a lot of swamps. The humidity levels are consistently high.
In other parts of the country, you might have basements that trap more moisture and humidity. We don’t really have basements in Houston. Here, it’s the natural environmental humidity that’s the main problem. We also have periodic flooding, which is a big driver for mold infestations. So, because Houston is damp—because it’s humid—we see a lot of mold cases and a lot of mold exposure in our clinic.
The second thing indoor mold needs is organic material. These are things like drywall, carpet, wood, and insulation—especially when there’s dampness or moisture. These materials are readily available food for fungi. In Houston, whenever there’s flooding, everyone knows the routine: they go in and rip out all the drywall and carpeting that got wet from the flood.
And then lastly, having good home ventilation is important to reduce mold growth. When there’s poor ventilation in the home—like lack of air conditioning or no exhaust fans, especially in bathrooms or kitchens—or when there’s not much natural ventilation, this causes a lot of stagnant air, and it can contribute to mold growth.
There are a couple of common ways people recognize that there’s a mold problem in the home. The first way is by visually seeing it. You might see black patches or green or white patches on the walls, drywall, or furniture. You might also smell a musty smell in the house or in that area. So that’s one way people can tell there’s mold.
The second way—and this is probably more common, but harder to pinpoint—is when you feel symptoms of mold exposure. The difficult part is that it could be a wide variety of symptoms. If you look online, the classic symptoms attributed to mold exposure are coughing, wheezing, or sinus congestion. But the reality is, we probably don’t fully know the entire spectrum of symptoms mold exposure can cause.
We’ve had patients come to our clinic with all kinds of problems—ranging from mental fog to extreme fatigue to muscle aches. In fact, very few patients just come in with the classic cold-like symptoms of headache, coughing, and sinus congestion.
But the way we know it’s probably from mold is that the person gets better when they leave the environment. When they leave their house for a week to travel or go on vacation, everything gets better. Maybe they used to be fine and in good health, and then they moved to a new apartment or house—and their health started deteriorating. Or they were having a lot of health problems, and then they moved out of that house—and things improved.
There’s usually some clear connection between the environment and the person’s symptoms. And usually, the patients themselves recognize this. A patient will come in and tell me they noticed a connection between the place they were living and the onset of their symptoms. And then we’re able to make the connections.
Now, does it necessarily have to be mold that caused it? Could it be something else environmental related to the house? It could be. But from my standpoint—in terms of Eastern medicine and what we’re going to do—it’s kind of irrelevant.
From a Western standpoint, where you’re trying to find a specific pathogen and give a specific antifungal medicine, yes, that could make more of a difference. But in the Eastern perspective, we use our medical analysis—what we see in your health, based on your tongue, your pulse, your history. Those are the clinical factors that drive the treatment plan.
And actually, many patients—once we simply support their own body and immune system—their body is able to naturally fight back the mold they’re suffering from.
Now, there are a lot of different mold species that can be found indoors, and not all of them cause problems for everybody. Some of the common ones that can cause mild symptoms—at least in the Western literature—are molds like Cladosporium and Alternaria. Then there are more pathogenic molds like Aspergillus. There’s also a mold called Stachybotrys chartarum, commonly referred to as black mold, and that one can even cause neurologic symptoms and fatigue. That’s recognized in the Western system.
But again, from my perspective, I’m cautious about drawing hard lines between what’s dangerous and what’s not based solely on what we know in the literature. I think it’s entirely possible that there are more symptoms than we currently recognize.
The most important thing is whether you’ve noticed an association between your environment and the development of whatever health issues you may be going through.
Health Symptoms & Risk Factors
So what are common symptoms of mold exposure? I want to make a distinction here because what Western medicine attributes to mold exposure—and the symptoms that occur—is very limited compared to my experience with patients in the clinic.
In Western medicine, mold exposure is primarily thought to cause symptoms like sneezing, coughing, red eyes, nasal congestion, and in more serious cases, wheezing or shortness of breath. It can also trigger asthma exacerbations or hypersensitivity pneumonitis, but it’s still quite a limited set of conditions that Western medicine recognizes.
I think one of the reasons for this is that, a lot of times in Western medicine, we don’t take a thorough history to identify all the various symptoms that patients are feeling. And sometimes patients themselves don’t recognize that the way they feel—or symptoms they’ve had—might be connected to an exposure in their environment. So a lot of times in the history taking, these details are missed.
But the amount of symptoms that I’ve seen from my clinical experience with mold exposure is myriad. Over the years, I’ve seen everything from extreme fatigue to GI symptoms, cramping, pain, blurry vision, nerve pain and nerve disorders, brain fog, chronic diarrhea, joint pains, joint disorders, headaches—even just flare-ups of chronic conditions that could be related to mold exposure. And we see that when the patient either (1) leaves the environment or (2) goes through our treatment process, a lot of these symptoms will resolve.
For a lot of these symptoms that we see, the most important connection is the environmental connection. Again, that means if you are in a specific environment—like your home—and you frequently get these symptoms, and then you’re away from the home for a few days or a week and you notice that these symptoms get better, that’s a really important environmental link to know. Whether it’s something in the home that’s causing these symptoms is key.
Eastern Medicine Treatment
This brings up a common question: if there’s an environmental problem—like you do have mold in your house or something in your home that’s triggering your health—what do you do?
It would be nice if everyone could just pick up their bags and leave, and move to a new location, but that’s not feasible for everyone. And not only that, oftentimes it can be unclear whether it is an environmental problem or not.
So first of all, moving just may not be an option for you. You may be in a lease that you can’t break. You may be connected to a job that requires you to be in a particular location, and you can’t afford to move. Additionally, like I said, it might not be clear exactly what the environmental condition is.
For me personally, there were segments of my life when I lived in a particular house or apartment and my health was worse during that time. I knew there was some connection, although I couldn’t exactly pinpoint what it was. But I also noticed that over time, after doing Chinese medicine and herbal medicine, my health improved. I was able to tolerate some of those environments better.
Or you may have lived in one place your whole life and haven’t really noticed what it’s like to be in a different environment—or noticed any clear change in your body. So for a lot of different reasons, it’s hard to be 100% sure whether it’s something environmental or a mold exposure in your particular house that may be causing your symptoms.
Now, there’s a whole space around home testing for mold and environmental testing, and that’s outside the scope of what I do. I do have patients who’ve gone down that route.
And then the third comment I’d like to make about mold being in your particular environment—and the relative importance of testing and identifying it—is even if you were to find out that your home had mold and you moved out, the question remains: is the new place you’re going to move into going to have that same problem? How will you know until you’re actually there, once you’ve already either purchased the home or signed the rent agreement?
Because sometimes the only way you’re going to find out is by having the symptoms reoccur after exposure. And that exposure may take time—it may not be instantaneous. For example, if you live in a city like Houston, where there’s so much dampness, so much humidity, and so many flooding problems that have happened—and a lot of homes have been affected by mold—necessarily moving out from your current house may not fix the problem if the new place you go to also has mold.
So when I talk to patients who have mold exposure about the environmental risk they’re facing, and it comes time to discuss whether it’s worth it for them to move out of the home they live in, it’s a very nuanced conversation. It’s very individually specific. We don’t give a one-size-fits-all blanket approach.
Some general guidelines: for example, if you have severe symptoms—severe pain or severe fatigue—I mean, we have patients who are no longer able to work because of mold exposure. If you’re in a case where you have severe symptoms and you have a means by which you can at least temporarily do a trial of living in another space and seeing if you have that same problem—say, if you have a family member you can stay with and see if your symptoms get better, or you’re able to leave and stay at a hotel or be out of town for a week and see if your symptoms improve—that’s one way to know whether leaving the environment is going to benefit you.
Now, one caveat on that: sometimes, once you’ve developed symptoms from mold exposure, they may not go away just by leaving the environment. Meaning, you might have symptoms that persist even after you’ve left. So going away or leaving doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get better without doing anything else. But it may be a necessary step for you to get better—if that makes sense.
We also have a lot of situations where either our patients’ symptoms are relatively milder, more tolerable, more manageable, or there’s uncertainty about whether it’s a case of mold exposure or something else environmental going on. A lot of times in those situations, we’ll just go ahead and start treatment right away without worrying about trying to get the patient out of the environment they’re in.
A lot of times, the treatment itself is enough to help the patient’s immune system handle the environment they’re in and overcome the adversities of the mold exposure.
One important thing to understand about my experience with mold exposure in our clinic is that the vast, vast, vast majority of the time—I mean, 99% of the time—we’re seeing patients where we don’t have a clear identification of what type of mold they’re exposed to, or what type of mold is explicitly present in their environment. Most of the time, when we’re treating patients with mold exposure, we’re doing so without a lot of the home testing that’s been done.
And I emphasize this because, from an Eastern perspective, the specific type of mold you’re exposed to is less important than what your actual symptoms are and what your clinical signs are—meaning, what is your pulse like? What does your tongue look like? And what do we see on the physical exam?
Those are the main things we’re looking for in my clinic when we need to determine a treatment strategy for mold exposure. And this is, of course, different from Western medicine.
I do take care of patients who are hospitalized. And when I see patients who are hospitalized—and in that setting, when I’m doing Western medicine—in select cases, I do fungal testing. That’s because, in a Western medicine perspective, being able to identify the specific fungal cause does make a difference in what type of medication you use, especially when you’re prescribing antifungals.
Now, you have to keep in mind, those are a different type of patient population than what I’m seeing in the clinic. The patients we’re often doing fungal testing on in the hospital are patients who are coming in because they’re in respiratory failure, their lungs are severely ill, they’re on oxygen support, and the antifungal medications we’re prescribing are also medications with side effects and certain risks associated with them.
But oftentimes in the clinic, we’re not in an emergency, life-threatening situation. We’re usually dealing with chronic symptoms, and we’re also dealing with scenarios where patients are trying to get back to having a functional lifestyle. A lot of them have done testing and even tried Western medical treatment options to no avail.
I would say, from experience, that a lot of the patients who come to see us in our clinic have had various testing done before. They’ve even had treatment done before. But their symptoms have continued to persist. So simply identifying a fungal reaction that your body may have—and taking a Western medicine-style treatment for it—doesn’t necessarily give resolution for the symptoms you may be having.
So if you have questions about mold exposure or are interested in getting treatment, please see the show notes for how you can connect with us. You can reach us through email, phone, or through our website at houstonacupuncture.com.