So many of you are asking me to be even more specific about the herbs and formulas I have mentioned on moldmisery.com.  It's difficult to add to what I have already said, but I am going to try.

First, let's make some very important distinctions.  Mold can be ingested or inhaled.  It can also enter through an open wound.  I think all these infections are potentially dangerous but they do not behave in the same way once entering the body.  Likewise, not all symptoms are the same.  People react differently to the same molds; some people are far more allergic than others.  If you happened to watch Extreme Home Makeover tonight, you saw a situation in which a man died very quickly after exposure to mold in his home.  It sounded almost like anaphylactic shock.  Moreover, contrary to what you see on some of the really dreadful mold pictures on the Internet, the contamination did not look all that extensive.  I am very sorry for the loss to the family but I am glad this program is getting the word out.

I am acutely aware of how dangerous mold is.  I am also quite scholarly and tend, if anything, to overresearch everything.  For instance, before remediating, I not only discussed strategies with mold inspectors and contractors, but I took a seminar.  Then, I researched all the options and the products used.  If I am careful with property issues, imagine how much more thorough I have been with health.  This is my field.  As I said earlier today, I am reasonably comfortable on my own turf and confident there is a cure for everything.  This said, I did not claim to have a cure.  I am realistic and cautious.

Mold loves moisture, warmth, and darkness so the body provides ideal conditions for it to flourish.  Viable spores have been found in the tombs of pharaohs so, honestly, I have no illusions about what people are up against.  Therefore, I want to explain what I have found and the way I understand the herbs and their actions.  You then decide for yourself whether this sounds like it could be helpful for you.  I am a professional herbalist and have my own line of herbs, mostly for people suffering from cancer, but I have spread out a bit so as to address parasites, immunity, and now mold.  This said, I never put profit ahead of health, but you would have to know me for a long time to believe this.

Adaptogens

There are herbs that are called adaptogens.  They extend the ability of people to cope with stress.  All stress affects the adrenals and there are stages of stress that are acute and those that are chronic.  The adrenals can become exhausted.  This happens often with highly sensitive people, people who live more by their wits than stamina.  Some of these people have multiple allergies and/or chemical sensitivities. In Chinese medicine, licorice is added to many formulas to reduce the risk of an allergic reaction to one of the other herbs in the formula.  I feel jatobá works a little bit like licorice but it feels far more clever to me.  Though not officially classified as an adaptogen, I believe that once it is understood better, it will be revered as such. 

My experience with jatoba was that it restored my energy.  Before I started taking it, I nearly blacked out the moment I entered the house.  Mind you, there never was black dripping stachybotrys, but all the mold experts who came into the house immediately recognized that distinctive, sort of acrid odor.  I could be feeling quite all right and become dizzy and exhausted before getting groceries into the refrigerator.  This is exactly what my best friend is complaining about now.  Ordinary tasks seem to require superhuman effort.  Once I was introduced to jatobá, I was able to perform all such tasks normally.  All the slurring stopped but not all my memory came back.  I will try to provide a time line that makes sense.  Jatobá was given to me after a lecture I gave on music therapy for a seminar organized by Dr. Dietrich Klinghardt.  There was a dinner party that evening and the hostess heard my cough and gave me the jatobá.  That was February 2002, more than a year after moving into the brand new house.

I am sure that every single person who has been through a mold experience appreciates what it feels like to regain function.  This said, I don't think jatobá is really such a strong antifungal.  It obviously has marvelous properties as an herb, but a super potent antifungal would have eliminated all symptoms, and I still had many symptoms, including tremendously itchy eyes, blurry vision, and stiffness.  I was still sneezing and coughing and sometimes vomiting.  So, let's say jatobá is wonderful but not complete.

Antifungal Properties

Myco is a formula and it was the next major aid to my recovery.  Keep in mind, I am networked with hundreds and hundreds of practitioners, many of whom were facing similar challenges.  Remember also that I dedicated this site to Helena Stevens.  She did not realize she had mold infection.  She thought she had cancer so her protocols were all based on a limited understanding of her issues.  She knew she had had mold exposure, but the dots weren't connected.  She died.  I never met her in person, but I felt she was a great human being with a powerful connection with her soul.  She did not believe cancer could kill her.  I now understand that it probably did not kill her; mold killed her.

When I first moved here, I went on an herb walk with a charming herbalist in Olympia, Washington.  She also discovered she had been exposed to mold.  Just like Helena, it was behind the headboard of the bed and they hadn't realized this until rearranging furniture.  Elise began investigating African herbs at about the same time I was looking to the Rain Forest for support.

Once I realized that I could see mold with my microscope, I began to observe its behavior in the blood.  In live blood examinations, the blood is moving.  People who are not familiar with this work have all sorts of misconceptions about blood and movement.  I won't address all this right now, but I want to say that I am able to see yeast as well as mold.  Yeast can be inside a red blood cell or in the plasma.  Mold and the hyphae that mold generates are in the plasma.  They are very toxic so both red and white blood cells run away.  If they are quick enough, they escape; but if they are slow, they die very quickly.  They are dematerialized by the mold.  I have seen a faint mist and then nothing.

	"Ghost Town" in middle of blood sample.  On the outside of the desolate area, a fairly normal distribution of red and white blood cells can be seen. The patient has lived for more than 20 years in a rented apartment in Switzerland. Note the arrow and see the enlargement below.
	Here, you see a fairly clear image of the object at the bottom of the above picture.  You can see hyphae running several directions and a very well formed example of mold in the blood.

The best thing for me to do would be to shoot some video so others can see what I have seen.  If blood makes contact with an inorganic toxin, like a pharmaceutical drug or mercury, the red and white blood cells die, but they ghost and disintegrate and you can see the breakdown.  It takes several minutes or hours, depending partly on the vitality of the blood cells and partly on the extent of the toxicity.  Mold works much faster and more thoroughly.  You might say, "Poof and it's over."  This is as explicate and visual as I can be.  The hyphae are just as toxic as the mold itself and it's very hard to photograph the hyphae because they are so bright.  Dr. William Croft says the hyphae contain oxalic acid and this is why they are so bright.  It's rare to get a good picture.

Anyway, if the mold is viable and feeding, the white blood cells will try to avoid contact.  However, what I observed with Myco is that only hours after megadosing, half an eyedropper, that is about 30 drops, every half hour during waking hours, the hyphae fragmented and then the white blood cells attacked right at the places where the hyphae were broken.  This was an astonishing observation but I was using someone else's scope at the time and was not able to keep the pictures.  Nevertheless, I was truly over the moon with excitement, and I upped my own use of Myco for a long time.  What I discovered was that more symptoms abated:  stiffness, brown spots, some skin tags but not the ones on my eyelid, but not all the symptoms disappeared.  I was still coughing and sneezing and my eyes still itched.

Fungal Lung Formula

I had a discussion with the owner of the lab that produces my formulas, explained how important it is to develop something that takes the cure one step further.  He sent me one of his formulas.  I took a normal to somewhat high dose and after six ounces of this, the coughing stopped completely.  Before that time, I had coughed blood; for a long time, it was just a little blood, but once I coughed up something the size of a golf ball and it totally freaked me out.

I asked if we could produce this for others and he agreed on the condition I came up with my own label.  I named it after Helena, but there are many dots to connect to explain how Helena became Sun's Soma.  That story can wait.  I started to feel really good once the cough stopped.  I was talking more and more about life after mold, but I was also aware that the idea that one could eliminate every single spore is really a stretch.

Stay with me here.  If you have an orange and a little spot begins to turn green, the orange gets dustier and dustier every day.  If you move any air in vicinity of the orange, the mold disperses and may begin to colonize somewhere else.  The mold does not have mobility.  It depends on air movement or some animate object to relocate it.  Wherever it is, it waits until conditions are opportune and then it becomes active.  This is what we know from all observations.  The mold is already in the building materials in our homes so all it requires is water and the right temperature to flourish.  No one had to create the growth the way one makes Roquefort or Camembert cheese.  With cheese, one jabs a skewer into a starter and then infects the next batch by poking the contaminated skewer into the "clean" milk. 

With your home, no skewer is needed, just the moisture and warmth.  Most molds are dormant in cold temperatures but mold is so adaptable that some are viable in extreme temperatures.  In any event, neither freezing nor boiling destroys mold.  This is an important point to keep in mind.  If freezing killed mold or if mold could not thrive in the cold, you would not have to clean your refrigerator.

Now, after this hefty dose of realism, let's go back to our bodies.  In theory, to eliminate mold, we would have to have a method of destroying the mold or capturing it and pulling it out.  I feel from what I have seen in the blood of people being treated for mold that mold can be rendered inactive, but the next step would be to find something that bonds with the mold and then is eliminated.  I have listened to many theories and have even heard of patients who are spending as much as $65,000 a month in treatment to beat mold.  In comparison to almost everything I have heard about, the herbs are the most affordable; and they have the fewest side effects.  This said, I don't know if anyone is really curing mold.

Sometimes, when I hear such claims, I think people are mixing yeast infections, like Candida albicans, with aspergilliosis or stachybotrys, and I don't think this is fair because yeast is not nearly as toxic.  I am absolutely sure of this because I have watched live blood for countless hours.  Yeast infections are nasty but they are only a fraction as lethal as mold.

The Learning Curve

So, where am I now?  I keep referring to a learning curve.  At the bottom of that curve, you have to see there is a mountain and you die at the bottom or start climbing.  I don't know what I will see if I get to the top because I am not there yet.  So, happy as I am to have some energy again, I am cautious and I do not want to mislead anyone.

I feel that I am maybe midway in this vast exploration.  The next steps will be to be sure that the blood does not revert to the former state in which there was zero microbial activity.  This, I mentioned before, was initially achieved by using one of my formulas, Whale's Tears.  Then, there is the issue of detoxification of the chemicals, chemicals that some people are still excreting years after moving from a contaminated space.  The next would be to regenerate all the organs that were damaged by the mold.  I do not know if it is possible.  Some organs would be scarred from constant exposure to harsh chemicals.

For instance, with inhalation infections, the mold plunges the hyphae into the tissue lining the lungs.  The hyphae is the feeding tube for the mold and it contains caustic chemicals and enzymes.  The lungs would be irritated if millions of spores had taken up residence and colonized the breathing apparatus of the unwilling host.  I don't have a valid way of determining damage much less recovery from such infections.  Moreover, some people have holes because of the mold.  There was a challenging article about a 12-year old Nepali girl who died of mold infection.  Her brain was autopsied; it had enormous holes.  I do not know what will regenerate and what will not regenerate.  Most tissue will regenerate unless it is very badly damaged.  For instance, if you burn the palms of your hands, you will have new skin quickly unless the burn is deep.

Trust me that I am experimenting.  One of the herbs in the Myco formula is Sangre de Grado, blood of the dragon.  It's actually a reddish brown resin that stops bleeding and builds new skin.  I don't know how it would work on a perforation of the stomach wall or a hole in the brain.  I don't know if it will cross the blood-brain barrier, but I am sure Nature has a cure for everything so I will keep looking and sharing.  Do not feel any obligation to buy anything just because I share information.  Of course, if you do want to try something, I am happy to facilitate this.  One thing I might say, however, is that underdosing may not be wise.  With fungicides, inadequate treatment irritates and then the mold comes back with a vengeance.  I think the same thing happens inside the body so if you decide to try the things that have helped me, try to psych yourself up to really go for it . . . and then, of course, let me know what happens.

I know I have deluged you this weekend.  I apologize.  I also apologize for the errors that are sneaking into the html emails.  The emails  read  properly on my screen but something is happening during transmission and letters are being lost, often resulting is strangely spelled words or words that are missing letters and spaces.  No one has been able to figure out why this is happening, but it only seems to happen with the html version.

Many blessings,

Ingrid

2 October 2006

	Jatobá, 1 oz., $
	Jatobá, 2 oz., $
	Jatobá Jungle Chai , 4.8 oz., $ Approximately 30 servings Contains: Qat tea, jatoba, SolcanaT dried cane juice, cinnamon bark, orange peel, cloves, allspice, fennel seed, cardamom, and licorice root.
	Kolorex, 60 softgels, $
	Pau d'Arco, 2 oz., $
	Sun's Soma, Lung F ormula, 2 oz., $
	Tulsi Ear Oil, 1 oz., $

 

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