 Dr. Mary Ackerly, we are live on Facebook and I know we have a lot of our ICI friends watching and we have other people and we'll repost this on ICI websites or the Facebook page and then it'll be on my YouTube page so I know we'll get a lot of viewers because everybody wants to hear from you. I want to introduce you formally but just a little bit of housekeeping. If you have questions you can put them in the chat. I will try to keep a little bit of tabs as we're talking on those questions and answer them as we're going. We've got lots of new and exciting things to talk about today that you maybe haven't heard yet and then if you want to watch replays you can watch them here or I have a YouTube channel. It's just under my name JillKarnhand.com, all free content and interviews and we're going to have a lot of the ICI board members on those so be sure and check back there for reruns and other videos if you're interested. So I first want to introduce my guest Dr. Mary Ackerly. I just have such great respect for the hard work and effort that she's put in. She is the co-founder and former president of ICI that's ISEAI for International Society for Environmentally Acquired Illness of which we're both been on the board and of course she's been the former president really, really has taken a great leadership role in this group and today I can't wait to talk about some of the directions where we're going, some of the new treatments and some of the new ideas that are coming out of this group. She's a classically trained board certified psychiatrist. She graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, studied at NIMH, finished her residency at John Hopkins and was certified in psychiatry and neurology. She holds an active medical license in Arizona and Florida and she's a gifted speaker on many different avenues has been on the board of the certified integrative and holistic medicine and as I mentioned she was co-founder of the ICI and just recently retired president still on the board, still incredibly active. Mary, Dr. Ackerly, we are just delighted to have you here. So welcome first of all. Thank you. Thank you. And then second of all I always like to start with story so I'm going to just be quiet and let you dive in and kind of how you got to where you're at especially with interest to mold and linemen some of the more complex chronic diseases that we're seeing so much of nowadays. That's a really long story I think and it's a story of a journey and some of it I've talked about before about how I some have stumbled into mold beginning to treat some of Dr. Gray's patients who we all know is wonderful doctor and Benson for psychiatric illness that wouldn't get better and I realized wow it's not all psychosomatic that mold is real and that that is you know beginning like 2010-2011 where I saw mold is absolutely affecting their brains and it's real and it's not psychosomatic so I've talked about that. I think my journey begins like any healer really much much earlier and as you go and begin your own journeys then these things come and you do find them because I think like you Jill we're both curious it's the things that get me most curious in life tend to be the things I don't know the things I haven't solved so if I have people I'm seeing and I can't get them better I begin very focused on what don't I know because I really do feel like we can get most people better if you know if you ask the right questions so that's an important part I think of my journey of this curiosity but I think another part of my journey has been as part I don't talk about that much is that my father died when I was seven and it was very sudden and I was the oldest of four children and my oldest of like what was going to become 26 grandchildren I was actually the second and yeah so it's Irish Catholic and it's a very big loving family and my father died of melanoma and worked for two years during Korea in a metal van and he did the x-rays that shielding probably so there's no surprise he developed melanoma and in thinking about that one day I realized well I think I had a very early interest in the environmental impact of toxins on people so it was a very big shock of the sudden he was evidently in an experimental trial and the shock of learning this I was really was daddy's girl yeah has been with me for a long time and my mother's shock and trauma was I learned hypervigilance at a very early age of learning to expect only bad news and you know I kind of stumbled through childhood and adolescence trying to figure out what happened why did this happen and also trying to deal with my own anxiety what we now call I was looking for vagal balance and maybe in some of the wrong ways some of the right ways of learning to there must be some way to kind of feel whole again the way I know I used to feel the way I knew my family was and so I think that brought me through a lot of journeys in college I worked with Danny Goldman and Richie Davidson and was of course on consciousness and it's a sophomore in college it was the most exciting thing I'd ever heard it's like they were talking things I wanted to know about about God and spirit and consciousness and how our brains worked and this was very early since the 70s so Danny Goldman went on to write emotional IQ books and get everyone interested in emotional as well as intellectual IQ and Richie Davidson who is my thesis advisor is really well known for EEGs and monks and mindfulness and in fact I actually studied mindfulness like in 1976 I was in Barry one of the first mindfulness retreats and I can't say I fully appreciated where it would go but I've been doing mind-body balance forever not understanding the words but just knowing it wasn't normal to always go like this whenever you drove a car or the bell rang unexpectedly so you know I fast forward through medical school residency and getting board certified is the journey has been spiritual for me I have done a lot of spiritual teachings in Tibet and they were pretty special and come back and then sort of my own illnesses that not surprisingly when you look back with autoimmunity and thyroid feeling tired and depressed and people are sometimes surprised and say you know you don't have mold why are you interested in treating it and it's it is because I just saw it was real but if you I look back as like my residency I was kind of tired and depressed but you know I was living in a hundred year old home oh yeah we're renovating at the same time it had a basement for stories you know there was dust all over I found out later I'd had high lead probably from that renovation is very reasonable to think I was living in mold for a few years and that was part of my being tired and feeling depressed so I just grew up at a time when you know there weren't manuals for like how do you tell your daughter her father just died there weren't manuals like you're depressed in residency you know suck it up and get through not go look at your basement and do a dust test and send off a sample this was not the approach no that wasn't it um so and I think you've gone through that too is that we now take for common was not even thought of at this time yet you're experiencing things that you're trying to fix so um there've been certainly attempts and that's how as I learned with Hashimoto's lots of stuff about diet gluten functional medicine homeopathy is that I wanted to talk about something really my story which I find interesting is that last year or so I started something called vision therapy and it was um my eyes are really bad and I just assumed you know you have bad eyesight it's what you're born with yes you know bad eyesight and it goes with big hands and big feet and um morphine and stuff just assumed that's who I am and I um my progresses weren't working and some of my patients have done really well in vision therapy with Amy Thomas who is a member of ICI she's listening give a big shout out yes and they healed in ways I didn't understand their anxiety was getting better with getting new glasses so that really interested me but mostly I was hoping my glasses would work better and I went to Sear and she does some very unusual testing um she explains it as basically we have a visual map of the world in our brain and we have an auditory map of the world and they're supposed to line up and when they line up your eyes work together and both eyes are sending the same image to the brain and everything's fine and then not surprisingly in my case she found and she has you close your eyes and she rings little bells and you're touching at the minute it was done it will go laugh because it is so weird but you can just hear something and you can't touch it and you know it's real and then she puts on glasses and all of a sudden you can with your eyes closed and hearing it touch it but the glasses and my eyes are closed it's this whole idea of mapping and things working together is she said you know whatever is there there's some sort of trauma there and I got the glasses and I was on the way home wearing them and all of a sudden the whole trauma came and I remembered the story of of course it was my father's casket yeah and the death and it was just vivid and then I remembered that I was diagnosed as being really myopic after my father's death and it was you know I want to put this in perspective not to shock people whatever but it was a really pretty bad year it's two months before my father died Kennedy had been assassinated and I got off a bus and my mother and all the mothers are in a bus stop looking really scared of looking around for something that's going to happen and hustling us home and kind of telling us Kennedy had been shot and there was no like drone following Kennedy nobody knew what had happened it was just incredibly frightening then two months later my own father died very suddenly and then a couple of months later um my second grade teacher evidently went home from school and hung herself so it was you know significantly worse year for me than 2020 was to be honest been through this is it was traumatic and it was a great chuck to my nervous system and I remember that the school nurse called after all this happened and said you know your daughter's black and blue we didn't talk about abuse or something in these days just you know she's black and blue and she's kind of stumbling around and falling off things you should get her eyes checked into my mother was another one of those calls something's wrong and with great anxiety I was taken to the doctor who found you know I needed glasses and they were like coke bottles yeah but when just all this happened with visions area just you know you wear glasses you go to the doctor you fix it is when I realized my eyes weren't working and she has one pair of glasses and all of a sudden this whole trauma the whole memories are coming back is wow I had some enormous trauma to my nervous system because I was not nearsighted before this happened and to realize that you've affected your brain by trauma and that you can actually start to work with it has been very profound for me to realize you realize me why I had that much especially at this doctor under the healer yeah yeah I love that you're saying this because just recently I've done some work with a brain integration therapist which is again kind of in this strange realm of not allopathic medicine and she recommended the exact same thing and I have an appointment in Chicago with another expert that has done exact same thing in January and I'm going to have that exact same experience of what you're talking about and I know intuitively it's going to help I didn't understand I didn't know your story and I'm so glad what you just shared is beyond profound because we're going to have people listening and realizing these things that happen to us in childhood we were tough we kind of push them off but they affect our lifelong trajectory of our career of our passion for life and of our illnesses and I love that you're bringing that attention and sharing of your heart because I can't even imagine having like you said it doesn't this year to compels in comparison to that year for you yeah right when people ask how can you treat mold you didn't have mold is oh you're like yeah yeah and honestly I love that because it's trauma mold is trauma in another way same thing so it is and and that is one of the things we'll talk about because it is a trauma and I do have suggestions but there was I've been through about four different lenses and I think I may have to get another one but I think during lockdown in May I had just gotten another pair and again I'm having this kind of strange feeling of warmth really right here between my eyes and stuff and all of a sudden with these glasses I just had this memory of telling my father there's something wrong see a doctor wow and I'm sick he's laughing at me saying oh don't worry there's nothing wrong dear I'm fine it's totally well I know I saw there was something wrong and the experience of being laughed at and not taken seriously had just really shut me down and so to my own intuition in that area and it certainly has been coming much more forward of my recognizing it so I wanted to say yes do the vision I love what you're seeing here literally wrote an article recently about positions and training and how it's so brutal we almost have to shut down that part of our intuitive sensitive self because it is you know how it is the work hours the abuse that happens it is it is literally an abusive situation I think it's gotten better since we trained but I remember back and I blocked out some of those memories but all that to say a lot of the science we love science you and I I see I the group that we're in we are all and we've got some exciting news to share about science and research so I am a scientist first but the truth is we are also intuitive spiritual souls on a journey and that part when I've tapped into that part of myself that's where I get profound insight and wisdom for my patients and direction for my life and just like you're saying but we were told and taught from a very early age that that's not valuable and that's not okay and that's not legitimate and we were made ashamed of that part of ourselves and what's happening is you and I and many other doctors are starting to rise up and say no guess what this intuition that we have guides us and we use great science too we're not we're not you know saying one is better than the other but I find as I embrace that intuitive side I get these brilliant insights that only come from that place and same with you completely completely and I think learning I've the intuition never got fully shut off but I seem to manage to shut off both my normal and you know psychic eyesight pretty effectively at an early age um is that the intuition for me has always kind of been there but I feel my life as I use the word stumbling on stumbling through there's an intuition that guides me and it's something that I tell patients we're going to talk about you know the science and getting people to better but when I people ask me you know it's bad last week I've had like three people discover who are old time old people another leak and that's you know the first one's really bad but the second or third it it starts to get really pile up and lots of stresses we talk about and someone's asking me it's like I you know I can't do this is and she had at least you know decided to go into therapy and I said that's really really good because I've found in my own life and life of people that I watch go through these journeys is that if you can just find some way to listen to there's a small voice always that is guiding you to better help yeah and is looking out for you in some ways and has an idea of why this is an experience that you're learning something here that you need to learn and she was very open I don't say it to everyone but there she was someone who was open and just started crying of like you know it's like the possessions it's so heartbreaking to give away my children's toys at Christmas and stuff and she said but I know we are not material things we're not material in this event I said yeah I've said that to a lot of people that I don't remember any any religion ever saying that you take your you know Christmas tree with with you exactly and it's something you're learning experiencing and can let go of that's a profound gift and but that is the gift I think that you or I or people who are letting ourselves say yeah we have intuition we have psychic gifts how do you think we know mold is important going it's because of the research no the research isn't there and I'll tell you that it's because we have actually felt and seen this is important this one is is common and real and it's really getting a lot of people and probably got me and I know Jillian said it did get you is is it and it really knocks you because you're not looking for mold when you're depressed and tired so that is one of the gifts I think that when you ask how do people get through this and only we can show this is get over the fear of where there's a little bit more than we think we know that goes on and if you can just kind of listen to the part that's guiding you is is working with you and hoping you see a more spiritual approach to sometimes you're going to make it yeah make it this and you'll be in better shape exactly and you'll learn some important lessons well let's talk a little I see I you've been like I said the co-founder at the very beginning you've been president you've really shaped this great organization that's now starting to shift and change I want to talk a little bit about what's happening the exciting giving Tuesday share a little bit about what's happening and the research so we've said a couple of times yes the intuition is important but so is science right and I've shifted into chairman of the research department which is something I really wanted to do and at first I thought my thought it would be sort of more the grandiose brain you know I love the neural quantum brain and that's my interest long time and there has been some started along those lines but a couple of weeks ago it's just really it's been very fast we were having yet another long discussion on our forum about urinary mycotoxin testing and protocols for it and what it meant and how you would use these results and then which one was the best one and I just looked at it and I thought in a more free position because I'm not doing all the president duties and I just thought I'm so tired of everyone guessing at this and listening we have to listen to how people feel about these things is I just would like to know myself personally are any of these tests reliable right has anyone done split samples of any of these tests which is totally common in medicine is you have to be reliable and I have no idea if we send off split samples whether they're reliable at a very basic level I started thinking what do I want to know on what I call a consumer reports approach just sort of an independent verification by we are in professional society we are non-profit and we are in the best position to independently assess a test that I I've never seen more controversy yes over a test by various parties involved pretty nasty things said things done you know it's like wow in the absence of data and information there's a lot of emotion and so just to clarify really I've devised a I was going to say just for you listeners especially your lay persons the bottom line here is we rely on test in our clinical practice and we base our decisions on results and so if our assumption that a test is valid is not valid it changes everything so I just want to frame that and then let you talk about it because it really matters because we trust and we've had labs before the office and we find out totally bogus and it changes everything and it's really difficult to tell the patient this lab said they were legit and there's something that came out that it's not legit so back to you but I just wanted to share that what the results that we rely on do make a difference in our practice and we're talking about a test that is controversial even though we think that they're legit it looks so legitimate it looks so real and we base so many assumptions on it well if you show this that this has happened and this is in your environment and then you're hearing now this is the binder you should use its assumptions on assumptions and I am despite intuition very practical of life I know that it's very murky at the bottom and so the test that we've devised and we're working with the University of Arizona School of Public Health there and have been working with them actually for a year with the neuroquants to devise a you know well designed study that essentially is just going to send off what we call split samples from all the major labs and we're going to be doing more is we're going to be sending off essentially the same urine sample to all the different labs from our subjects meaning probably be you know great planes real time my maybe my Michael labs we have the money but the vibrant one too and we're going to in the same people show what the results are and to me that's another really important part of what I'm proposing is really open and transparent research is all the data will be available is when we get it we'll make correlations ourselves and make it available as graphs but we want to make it available to everybody because one of the things that's bugged me for a long time is you hear studies referred to all the time this is clinically shown to do this or in my study I found this and this is true and when you actually go looking for the data you may never find it or evidently it exists but you're not going to be given it or somebody did it there's just all these reasons you don't get to see the data and that's not great research so we want it to be open we wanted to be transparent and that's really important what I see eyes really about is just transparency of not pretending we know more than we know and trying to get people to think critically so essentially we're going to have five or six subjects not necessarily ill but not not ill mostly reliable people who will follow whatever protocol our membership votes on if they want to provoke with Glutathione and sauna that's what we're going to do if they don't want any provocate we're going to vote on what's the most popular most common and we're also then just going to add the diet piece because that is always you know why they're distored you know well it was food well how much food or how long did it stay so there'll be the food component everyone's going to do exactly the same but we're going to add at the same time for all these people is we're going to collect dust samples correctly with the garbage bags for 30 days so and send those off to two labs that do it so that at the same time we're sending off the urine we send off the dust samples and we get those back and checked these labs even agree we really think these must be clean it's dust right check those and then see is there any agreement at all with what is in their environment with what's coming out in their urine and that's the study it's pretty simple one it's really an observational study and we just want to do it cleanly correctly and be open and transparent and let people see for themselves is the are these things really reliable should we make all these conclusions is there only one that works here is it totally random and we're you know not seeing is to just give some factual basis for an area in which we kind of freely spend our patients money all the time I just want to shout out that you if you're listening to your practitioner you want to know more you can donate I mean I as a board member donated just because I believe in this and so you can go to ici.org and I'm assuming you could donate right from the website right Mary that correct yes you can and I want to say though is that I was overwhelmed at the response this is the lab you know what we've described this is what I'd like ICI to be is just transparent and open and giving information the best we can is last year we collected $450 which we're excited about yes you know this year we've actually collected so far and donations are still coming in $27,000 for $27,400 wow it's like ICI is here yes the need for this kind of information about the environment is overwhelming is there is what we were once saying in small you know corners yeah I think you might have mold it's kind of a woo-woo thing I know now we're like no this is oh and I see so many people yeah jumping on the train and talking about and then they'll reference you or I or would I mean so it's neat to be because then when you're the first few talking about it you risk sounding pretty crazy but it's valid in what's happening I don't know if you've seen this I'm sure you have now that people are sequestering their homes there's epidemics I don't know if it's just the isolation and the stress as well but I'm seeing more and more and more cases even more than last year it's just becoming I'm seeing it both ways for some people it's been really really nice it's been a COVID blessing in that their homes were clean yeah and they had made them clean and the problem was work and they're getting so much better in a clean environment where they have the time to devote so I want to point out there I have a number of patients this has been a complete gift is to be able to live in their home yeah others who have been on the fence because we both know the idea that your home it's going to require a ton of money for something that you're not sure is real it's not really popular and people who've been on the fence who now were forced to spend much more time in it who are getting sicker and sicker it's not the way anyone really wants to learn about this but it's become very clear it was real so yeah I have seen it both ways and a shout out to everybody is just realizing the people who got better like my clean environment has been so important the people got worse unfortunately is there's really a problem to do more well that's one of the things I wanted to talk about with some of the kind of new cutting edge things that you're really have been read up and shared with all of us on so I want to talk about VIP and then we will dive into cranial cervical instability which you seem you've definitely really really understand this probably more than most clinicians let's talk first about VIP so this is way back into your maker days we all learned about VIP and the value I'm just going to say my clinical experience has been mixed when it works it works but it doesn't always work so that there's a little I would love to hear everything you have to say about VIP and then I definitely want to talk about we both saw this recent study you've been following her longer than me because there's drug status from Israel on a VIP that is being used for COVID so let's talk about that Dr. Akeli. Right so I've been using VIP since I think 2013 and I've actually had really pretty good experiences with a lot of people if you and I'm going to say if you choose them correctly is first of all the lung issue is very real and VIP has been known to help with that since the 70s where when you relax the smooth muscle in the lung people can take deeper breaths blood pressure pots like blood pressure will go down but mostly more oxygen is going to get through the lungs and into the brain and it's very noticeable and so I've used it for a long time to help people where we think they've had subclinical pulmonary fibrosis or even clinical unfortunately pulmonary fibrosis and I've said you know I've had one person waiting for a lung transplant a couple more with very severe fibrosis who've all been helped tremendously by VIP the cognitive part can be a little more iffy and what I found is two things one in which someone who I was talking to today has been a long-term patient said you know when I took it it's like a window opened up and suddenly my brain was working again I could feel and see you know everything that had gone on but then you remember I got really pretty rageful and you know I sort of hit the wall which was surprising and I had you know this kind of weird gut issue that nobody quite figured out so I stopped it I said yeah let's get you back on because I think I know some of it now so I was the person who despite it always being said there were no side effects I'd say yeah you know I certainly have a population of people who get suicidal irritated dizzy nauseous with it with even one or two dosages it was right around that time I started finding out 2016 about mast cells and VIP yes and it was very clear VIP could make mast cells the hard days say worse and the people who were getting worse tended to be the mast cell elders downloads hypermobility potz patients so my experience was more histamine again years ago when I was still very if my experience was I had more histamine issues with it and I bet now if I would try it it wouldn't be the same but thanks for clarifying because there is someone just asking or chat other any side effects and it's just like anything there's there's two edges even though it has great potential so I told this woman you know oh yeah I have I used to talk about this sensitive people and I haven't seen these issues in a long time and why some treating mast cells much faster and putting people on ketotaphane or neuro protect or recognizing and it diets all the things we do for mast cells for histamine issues so when we do VIP they're not having this and I think in my mind I've proved it it was a histamine issue mostly in the brain and I wouldn't put people on it who have mast cell issues until they're feeling stable in which case they tend to often benefit the most again because of the pots like this autonomia issues it can tremendously help so I wouldn't be afraid of it I would just be working with somebody who doesn't go oh my god you know it's because not an oh my god situation at all um it stops within usually an hour or two especially if you know it's gonna could happen and it really can you can basically pretreat and I have followed it because I've had so many people on it through the FDA suddenly deciding they didn't have enough data to do to work with this and it's very insulting so one of the reasons I can get cynical is I have a patient who's waiting for a lung transplant three years off of it with VIP who went to the White House she you know really made a fuss as did the petitions and everything else the FDA didn't care about what all these thousands of patients with mold said um same thing but an Israeli drug company and you know I think recognizing as being very smart new VIP started using it right away for COVID which was a smarter response I think IV and they were getting people off the respirators right away with it so they got VIP vast tracked in about March I call it another COVID blessing where all of a sudden VIP went from almost the do not compound list where I had stopped recommending so we always knew it was going to be taken off to fast track yeah like overnight it's the same drug and it's not that's not rational okay that's drug money and very insulting all Americans who did pour their hearts out all the research which wasn't quite perfect you know so I'll get off my soapbox but it gets me angry that it happened so I've kept the number of people on it through this knowing the research was going on the use did research just came out it is still quite available as VIP what's being studied is a synthetic compound which of course you can do and make money off you can't make money off exactly so just to clarify because we have a few questions on you mentioned pretreatment I'm assuming neuro protect Corsatin catatophen you would either get them stabilized or pretreat before you do yeah yes okay and then and there's people who probably have to be out of mold yes you know it's always said if you're in mold you can't do it not really true and the whole thing about mark-ons if you still have mark-ons you can't do it well we'll be waiting forever for some people right right and then like you said it's kind of just the criteria that kept the the people that had the muscle activation which makes perfect sense now I have not seen the case or amylase be a big issue either which was originally the thing we were told do you check pancreatic enzymes yeah I don't yeah I do I'm you know I'm not going to miss it you know and mostly I think every time it's I've caught it before we went on it and it's been a diet issue an alcohol issue it's usually a clean issue I've never had to do some sort of work up for cancer or anything so that's the VIP story but it's a big one it's it is available and for mold patients I'm sorry it's gone through more drama than almost urinary mycotoxins and I sometimes wonder where where did I find myself in this land where you know crazy things to be crazy in rational sense happen to but let's talk about the we've got about 15 minutes left and I definitely want to talk about cranial and cervical instability this I've had a few patients you definitely are more of an expert in this than myself or probably anyone else on the ICI group but let's talk a little about what is it what you see with that how would you treat it how would you recognize it let's dive in a little bit to that issue yeah and again that's kind of when you say why are you interested it's like well that's really interesting isn't it had you thought about that before right so I think I've always been interested in the hypermobility and it came from the early VIP days which was you know I definitely had the most patience of the group of shoemaker I was working closely with shoemaker I had the most patients by far who were quote having bad reactions I could not get away with saying my patients didn't have side effects right and why was that for whatever reason and I think it's because I'm a psychiatrist perhaps because from my own history of trauma I'm okay with people not being totally rational it's it's not something that floors me at all is that people would be attracted and that's why they've been coming from Michael Gray and we continue to come as they figured I was sympathetic and I am and so the people that tend to have more of what we're going to call in the neuro psychiatric realm also we're going to have hypervigilance from their own you know elder's downloads soft college and issues and you begin to see as I did in others how often that's connected to mass cells to pots and dysautonomia how incredibly common dysautonomia is when you start to recognize it and so I've been following that for a long time and it's I've had a couple of patients before it was known who did get cervical instability operations you know you get basically steel put back here and I wasn't incredibly impressed at the results it's a very scary thing is to have a big piece of metal put there is essentially if you don't understand is that our brain you know and our skull ends right on the top top of our basically our cervical spinal cord but our brain stem runs right through and that's what carries the messages our brain stem from the brain to the rest of the body and that's where the bagel nerve is we all talk about but that's only one of 12 cranial nerves and they all have to do really with survival breathing things you don't think about sweating very affected in dysautonomias and all of us think about mitochondria nobody's thinking hey there's a structural issue here too is if it's really a very narrow passage way here that's coming from the brain to the spinal cord and you have a lot of impingement if I could show you of the spinal cord the little fat processes sticking out you have blood vessels running you have the bagel nerve coming out you have a bunch of other cranial nerves and a lot of people not just people with EDS but people who've had whiplash have a tendency to get a displacement of there what we call C1 and C2 which are supposed to be kind of really nice and straight is it tend to slide and they slide into the nerves and slide into the blood supply so as a doctor who is thinking about that it's it's not something we don't think like that and I think we should but I think I saw a couple of videos of people with dystonia where they're pretty normal looking you know like you or I and then they're asked to just turn their head and their blood pressure their blood flows being measured and as they turn your head you stop hearing the sound of the blood flow it's it's getting fainter and fainter and then all of a sudden they start they're shaking and the dystonia is like this and then they're asked to put their head up and it stops and really like pulls one off for me because the first thing was of course yeah of course that would happen and then I thought I've seen this a number of times it's always called it's a pseudo seizure it ends up in a psychiatric basket there's no nothing known to neurology that goes like that and then stops like that just by turning the head although if they thought yeah you realize it so that is the essence of what CCI is it's a weakness in some ways in the human body of this junction here between the brain and the brain stem and the spinal cord a lot of like data wires are being transported here through a narrow area and a lot can go wrong with the neck and mold seems to contribute to the ligament laxity trauma certainly contributes to it Ehlers-Danlos people are born with softer collagen and it's being more recognized and I've been trying to teach people like on the ICI list is to not call functional med functional neurological stuff is basically the new word for psychosomatic neurologists know they're not they're not supposed to call people histrionic meaning just all in the brain so they call functional and they treat them kindly and people get better and it doesn't seem as bad as you know saying it's all it's all histrionic but you have to remember MS was considered histrionic for many many years is that was a histrionic the psych stuff that you have dealt with as a psychiatrist now that we know mold and the effect on the brain and I mean chemicals mold environmental toxins how much of this is really like at the I don't know that there's any true depression without some trigger to brain inflammation and dysfunction of neurotransmitters right like it's so I think that a couple of other a couple of other psychiatrists who work the way I do have the same impression is the more you do this the more you test the more you work with patients wonder what is true psychiatric right is you I watch neuroquants they're so inflamed or we see the atrophies you see how common Lyman infections are and causing psychiatric illnesses and you really wonder you know is there a quote true psychiatric illness I have a story about that so I have a we have a colleague we both know I won't make any names lived in a home with massive mold her and her daughter got sick and and came to me to get improved and later they found out in that home that had stackie batteries there was two parts a newer part an older part there have been two homicides and a suicide separately in that home and they wondered like I did we don't know but we were thinking there has to be some correlation to this behavior and the mold in that house now certainly there could have been predisposed but that many in that type of framework and they found this later this history of this older home and and then we think about like our government buildings and our prisons and our schools and how many of these flat roofs are affected by mold and and you think about some of the society like again I think about prisons especially because they already have the hits against them with trauma and difficult childhoods and I have a lot of compassion because they're probably in multi buildings too and that's actually I have a few prisoners I've I've treated and paranoid quotes schizophrenic who turned out to be mold and is you know now maintained really nicely and and I wrote brain on fire like 2014 and probably twice a year some mother calls about their kid being hauled off for some sort of murder really violent crime and said there was mold involved is that would be on my more you know advanced research list is with the neuroquants the inflammation I see when I say that there's limbic dysregulation that's a nice word from sort of like the nervous Nelly and and things are bad all the time to feeling homo to rage real rage and rage can be homicidal and certainly we see it in marriages and people interacting and you know so that's there it's it's real and the fact that you can quiet it the hell by climbing down inflammation is is definitely another treatment approach and in some place I would eventually like I mean my vision has always been in someone's I'd like other psychiatrists to just know this is common knowledge and stop getting people in five psychiatric meds before the age of 20 treating something that should have been fixing the roof in the bedroom right I find that at the option right because you and I use medication we use psychiatric meds there's no problem there but we have to have we have to educate our colleagues to look for root cause because sometimes it's not a medication deficiency actually most of the time right well we just have a few minutes no and they're like oh go ahead that medicine made them worse yes it's got a powerful effect it's like a whole lot of neuro inflammation it went down the wrong pathway because of the massive inflammation and we can explain it to you so that is where eventually I think I'd like to you know be going with ICI and and I probably do have some good news to announce here that yeah is a little bit new but ICI it's kind of obvious this year we arrived I mean I'm taking some pride here and all of us the board we should have a nice Christmas party here is this is so far from where we started and so heartwarming to know that our vision has been shared by so many people now is is that I think there's we are working already with the School of Public Health at the University of Arizona and that's who's been working with the neuroquants we have one of the professors there who's also a member of ICI and who's going to be supervising what we do here is that I've been told recently that there probably is a big donor or push to be putting a full center for environmental illness at the University of Arizona which would be a center of excellence so ICI as a non-profit would be working very closely there to really train professionals including psychiatrists and neurologists too and that would just be you know giving a real twinkle in my eye here like yeah we can just like kind of get people and it's not just mold it is really you know the metal band with no shielding and x-rays it is the fire the smokes you and I were both expected uh affected by smoke this summer and smoke and how much that affects the brain and all the toxins and the super fun sites I mean it's just so overwhelmingly enormous how we expect people to be normal and function when their bodies their DNA their brains have been so affected by toxins without their knowing nobody ever really knows that they're being hit by a toxin I don't know which is why you don't even know what to do about it except what we'll call the psychiatrist and they'll give us something to quiet her down yeah this is such a great discussion we just have like two three minutes left but what are some things on the horizon I know we talked a little bit before we got on here about peptides anything else you see as like appending things that could be instrumental in our practices in changing patients lives that you're seeing coming up for us to watch and and look at on the horizon I think there are a lot of things I think peptides certainly have a ton of potential and people are using them and it is very helpful I think BPC I've you know we can talk about its effect on collagen and that's really something to think about with ligament laxity working to strengthen the immune system peptides I tend to like biohacking tools so I think methylene blue is a really really interesting med and being used by some of our colleagues to help Alzheimer's and seeing improvement now I think everything that we can talk about with what I call structural integration body work has the potential we've talked about visual therapy lymphatics manipulation which is what osteopathic manipulation craniosacral I think you're going to see a huge growth as people realize that feeling good is really a good thing for the body but there was much more going on so the fascia and how it's affected by toxins is is important in some ways almost everything we look at can probably be helpful because toxins just go like mold everywhere in the body and like you I'm very interested in trying to figure out what's the best thing we can do the most efficient the most helpful but I have to say in some ways some of the most helpful that I can do for patients and probably you is to just help them understand hey many many people have been on this journey and it is a journey and people have different journeys and there are support groups Tucson has the longest running support group and I make jokes because the founders who have been really faithful and have really really helped in the beginning there were some of my young you know newest patients there had a lot of what we call marital you know discord had set the stage for me understanding this was totally common 10 years later they're incredibly successful running company I like to tell people this is not permanent what you're going through and that's probably the point of all of this is if you're getting appropriate help and you can get an attitude of more than an attitude of gratitude but gratitude doesn't hurt an attitude of what am I learning what am I doing you know and not feeling like how horrible how victimized am I by this happening you're probably going to successfully navigate it because so many other people have is I think is really a take home here and there are going to be many things and many things we haven't even talked about yeah that continue to really help we're going to have to do part two because we just started scratching the surface this has been fantastic and first of all I want to thank you for sharing your heart and your story and that really touched me Mary just for what you've been through and it doesn't matter mold or not it's common to all humanity the suffering and when we bring that that vulnerability to our practice and say you know what we may not have exactly what you have but we are here to love and support and give you hope because we've been there we know what it's like to suffer and you and I are in the journey too so we're just doing our own thing and seeking healing so thank you thank you for all your insights thank you for your leadership with ICI I mean it would not be where it's at without you and it's only going to continue thank you for taking on the role of the research director I am just honored to have had this time with you and thank you thank you for all that you've done thank you Jill for helping get the word out because publicity and getting the word out to people is everything of just making it aware again and again hey there really is a group here that we're trying to do things um in a really just kind of respectful transparent way of we know this is real of trying to give you the best information give our clinicians the best information and teach people to distinguish between good information and okay information that might work and really poor information so all of which exist at the same time right right and for that for that that is a journey and you've certainly been on it you know you were on the board for a very long time it's like you know as and we are here and this is a glorious moment to just say you know the beginning gratitude from me to you but to everybody listening and we'll listen for having the faith in us to donate like this and to keep going when you know the last meeting someone said oh do we have the money to have you know our our staff who we um do this or something and I just looked in them said you realize we put out a whole conference and announced it with no money yeah really yes we can take this risk with donations and I love it thank you it was a lot more risk then yeah so uh and again thank you for your welcome and again uh we will post links of the things we mentioned you can find us on youtube and thanks again dr acoly I will sign off for now