Black Mold Symptoms
Written by Dr. Diane Mueller
Black Mold Symptoms can be quite severe, in fact all pathological mold symptoms can be severe. While black mold is what people are the most aware of, it is not the only mold that can cause illness.
Also of note is that just because a mold is a black color, does not mean that the mold is the “dreaded black mold,” which is technically known as Stachybotrys. This type of
black mold tends to take 3 weeks of a continuous water source in order to grow.
Most of the time, the black mold that is found in showers is not stachybotrys, but there is no way to tell without testing.
Stachybotrys releases a widevariety of toxins. While these toxins are not healthy for anyone, certainpeople have a genetic predisposition for these toxins being extra harmful.
People with this genetic predisposition (which is common-effecting 24% of the population) have an immune issue, where the immune system does not appropriately recognize the toxin from black mold (as well as other pathologic molds). Because of this, the toxins released from biologically toxic
molds will build up in the body causing a wide variety of symptoms.
Mold toxins can cause such a wide variety of symptoms, that they can be looked at as great mimickers. This means that when mold toxins have built up in your body, you may have been diagnosed with a wide variety of other types of diseases because mold toxicity causes such widespread inflammation and tissue destruction to organs and glands all over the body.
In addition to this, the genetics that make us susceptible to mold toxins building up are similar genetics to the ones that cause toxins from Lyme Disease to build up. Therefore, it is quite common to have both Lyme Disease as well as mold toxicity. If you are looking for testing and help to diagnose and treat mold illness, please visit our home pageHERE
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Mold Illness causes so many different types of disease that often times it is misdiagnosed.
Common symptoms that we see with Mold Illness include:
- Fibromyalgia
- Headaches/Migraines
- Joint Pain (any joint, but especially smaller joints such as finger, wrists and ankles)
- Chronic Fatigue Syndrome
- Alzheimer’s Disease
- Hallucinations and Depersonalization
- Irritability/Anxiety/Depression
- Brain Fog/Memory Changes/Cognitive Dysfunction
- Post Nasal Drip and Sore Throat
- Peripheral Neuropathy (numbness/tingling)
- Nausea and digestive disturbances
- Neck pain
- Tinnitus
- Vision Changes especially at night
- Chronic Infections
- Neurological dysfunction
- Hormonal Alterations
- Rage
- Insomnia
- Night sweats and heat intolerance
- Hormonal Imbalances
- Thyroid and Adrenal Problems
- POTS (postural orthopedic tachycardia syndrome)
- Allergies/Histamine Intolerance
- Mast Cell Activation Syndrome
This is a pretty big list and does not even include everything. Therefore, symptoms are often misdiagnosed because the way mold toxins effect one person to another varies. Most people will mold will check off quite a few symptoms from this list. If you only have one or two of these symptoms, it is less likely that mold toxicity is truly a problem. Because of the large amount of neuroinflammation that occurs with mold illness, the symptom picture can affect many organs and glands in the body. Mold illness is perhaps one of the most overlooked root causes for disease.
Mold illness is still not accepted by much of the medical community. If you have not been told about it before by your doctor, this is probably why. There is still a lot of education that needs to continue to occur in order to get the medical community aware of how problematic these molds can be to the human body.
If you have mold symptoms, it is important to get this really checked out. Many people are living in mold and think their home is fine because of a mold inspection that was conducted at the time of purchase of a house. This is problematic because the mold inspections conducted for house sells are not very thorough. They generally consist of nothing more than air samples and humidity tests. Black mold is heavy. It does not suspend in air. This means that air samples will miss the presence of black mold most of the time. Dust samples are needed (sometimes called swatch samples) in order to truly identify if black mold is present or not. Unfortunately, most mold remediators are not well versed on the way to thoroughly test for mold in the house for someone that is genetically susceptible.
Some molds such as aspergillus will grow in less than 24 hours. Therefore, if you have any leaks in the house, attending to them quickly is essential.
It is also important to realize that not all molds are bad. Just like with bacteria, there are pathogens as well as types of bacteria (think about the gut microbiome) that are incredible parts of our health. The fungus family is the same way. There are good fungi and pathological fungi. Mushrooms such as lion’s mane, reishi, shitake and cordyceps are examples of fungi that have amazing health promoting properties.
For more information on the topic of Black Mold Illness see our other blogs:
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