Practitioners cannot heal people of mold-related
medical problems if the environment in which people work
or live is not corrected. For this reason, I have gone
into quite a bit of detail regarding
the nature of the mold abatement
measures. Here, I want to discuss my own symptoms
and progress in restoring my own health.
Ingrid's
Mold-related Health Problems
Symptom |
Percent Improved |
23
Nov 2005 |
16
Feb 2006 |
Sept 2012 |
| Dizziness |
90% |
95% |
100% |
| Feelings of blacking out |
75% |
90% |
100% |
| Exhaustion, enervation |
65% |
75% |
100% |
| Slurring |
100% |
100% |
100% |
| Memory and recall problems |
95% |
95% |
100% |
| Disorientation |
95% |
95% |
100% |
| Itchy Eyes |
55% |
75% |
90% |
| Burning nostrils |
50% |
75% |
100% |
| Itchy feet , sometimes with redness |
60% |
85% |
100% |
| Mucus, runny nose, expectoration |
70% |
80% |
90% |
| Sneezing |
80% |
85% |
95% |
| Coughing |
60% |
75% |
95% |
| Vomiting |
75% |
95% |
100% |
| Odor emitting from body |
85% |
95% |
100% |
| Skin tags |
75% |
80% |
90% |
| Brown spots on skin, especially face |
85% |
90% |
90% |
| Achiness, especially in knees |
35% |
60% |
100% |
| Weight gain |
0% |
0% |
35% |
| Emotional frustration |
0% |
10% |
80% |
| Death of pets |
0% |
0% |
30% |
| Financial stress |
0% |
0% |
30% |
| Loss of productivity |
40% |
45% |
60% |
I have listed the issues that
I feel are directly connected to the mold problems. Since
we know that stress, such as inability to have control over
my living situation, is a real health issue, I have included
the subjective as well as objective symptoms. The total
erosion of my life savings, loss of momentum in my professional
life, absence of anything remotely resembling a personal
life, and chronic illness are serious matters that no one
with a mold problem should underestimate.
My story is half good/half
bad so I want to share what worked, rather what I believe
has made the most difference. People have all sorts
of advice, like "breathe fresh air." Frankly,
while this feels good, it doesn't work if the moment one
opens the door to the house, one is assailed by bizarre odors
and almost instant recurrences of allergic reactions.
Fatigue
The fatigue symptoms were very
severe, almost completely incapacitating. Moreover,
they were unrelenting, constant, and beyond anything I have
ever known before. They were, however, for the most
part painless so it was very difficult to understand the
precise nature of the enervation. Keep in mind that
in the beginning, I did not understand mold at all. I
spent months and then years learning to understand it.
Because I work at home, I did
not have the benefit of comparing how I felt at work versus
at home. Therefore the first clue came when I gave
a seminar in Portland, Oregon, and realized that I felt better
and slept better in a hotel than in my own home. I
then understood that I was not ill with some chronic disease
that had yet to be diagnosed; it was my house, not me. More
and more, I appreciated that if I was out of the house for
a few hours, I started to feel like a normal human being;
however, I only had to be in the house for 10-20 minutes
before I thought I needed to take a nap. Sometimes,
I barely had time to put groceries into the refrigerator
before the enervation overcame me. The naps were often hours
long. When
I got up, I was all right for a few minutes and then usually
wanted to go back to bed.
I experimented by moving to
different rooms of the house, sitting by open windows, turning
off the heat, using only electric space heaters instead of
forced air. Nothing really made all that much difference. I
tried closing the house up tight; opening windows; closing
windows downstairs, opening them upstairs. You name
it, I tried it.
Then, we had some power failures. I
realized I was much worse when the power went out because,
I believe, the UV light in the HVAC system was helping a
bit. It did not, however, help enough to relieve the
symptoms significantly. Where it seemed to make the
biggest difference was with vomiting. If the power
went off and the HVAC went off, the dogs started vomiting
within half an hour. It took me more like four hours
to heave. Suffice it to say that despite countless
measures to combat mold through air filtration methods, the
fatigue did not go away.
In the beginning, when the
problem was worst, I spent about eight months feeling that
nothing at all was helping. In
short, the work the insurance did cover and the countless
air filtration and ventilation measures failed to relieve
most of the symptoms. What helped the most were the
herbs, and these were not discovered until more than a year
after moving into the house.
Jatobá
In February 2001, I was introduced
to jatobá, a tropical herb
with amazing antifungal properties. Its taste put me
off, but I soon came to love this herb. What is perhaps
most brilliant about this herb, shown on the sidebar, is
that it combines its antifungal work with adrenal support. As
an herbalist and herbal formulator, I could only marvel at
how much smarter Nature is than people because anyone with
a fungal problem is exhausted. As I mentioned elsewhere,
I believe I owe my life to jatobá. After
some months of steady use, the slurring went away completely. I
was still a little dizzy at times, almost always when standing
at the top of the stairway, but I did not feel I was reeling
or that one day someone would find me at the bottom of the
stairs with my head gashed.
I continue the use of jatobá to
this day. I love it, treasure it, and respect its power.
Memory
I had had serious memory problems. The
more familiar something was, the harder it was to remember. There
were times when I drew a total blank. I knew I knew,
but the words wouldn't come. This also corrected almost
completely with jatobá.
To be honest, I have an herbal
pharmacy with several hundred different formulas so it was
rare that I was taking only one herb, but I am totally certain
that none of the other herbs addressed the truly serious
mold symptoms, not the allergies or the deeper consequences
of mold exposure.
Health in General
As one might expect of anyone
in my circumstances, I felt I was losing my grip on life. I
value my work and service so much that incapacity, especially
incapacity characterized by a practically comatose existence,
was not like a much-needed vacation with a book one has wanted
to read. This was like a void, a black hole grabbing
all one's life force and trapping one in an endless maze
of complications and complexities. I was very often
doubtful that I could hold on, but there was always a new
something or other to try, usually soundly recommended but
recommended by people who have not actually experienced the
dangers of mold. For instance, I do not know whether
people lie or not when they claim their devices will remove
all mold; I just know they are wrong. Nothing worked
as promised except jatobá.
With all my margins gone, I
became more fanatical about health than ever before. I
bought a water distiller and water oxygenator and Willard
Water to replace the minerals lost in distillation. I
tried many brands of bottled water, including some that were
several times more expensive than gasoline. I knew
I had to flush toxins out of my system. I drank aloe
vera juice, countless liver and blood tonics, kidney tonics,
you name it, hundreds of dollars of herbs every month just
to try to protect the margins that seemed so eroded. I
cannot say any of this hurt me, but it did not cure me. I
believe it is impossible to overcome the challenges to health
without first correcting the environment in which we spend
our time.
Ingrid Naiman
23 November 2005
Continued,
toxicity and skin problems 
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