 and hey everybody it's so good to be back with you on Facebook live thank you guys all for joining us today I have a friend and a really incredible guest and I know so many of you who follow me deal with mold and that is our topic today so you're in for a treat and you're in with one of the neatest human beings that I know today Jeff book out I will formally introduce him in a minute just a few housekeeping things I will be watching the feed here so if you have questions or anything you'd like to ask be sure and type them in to the comments I would love if you'd share this with friends family people you know who are maybe dealing with a mold situation and have questions and we will be sure and post resource links on the live and the recorded so if you missed this or you catch us halfway this is recorded it'll be on our Facebook page and it will also be on my YouTube channel so I'd love for you to subscribe there as well the same videos are all recorded in on YouTube one last thing I've gotten a lot of requests for updates on upcoming Facebook lives and things that we're doing and you can stay tuned with that by subscribing to my newsletter it's super easy if you have your phone out all you need to do is text to to a number and you'll sign right up free to that newsletter it's free we never share your information with anybody and in order to do that all you need to do is just type in the number 66866 and in the subject line just Dr. Jill doesn't matter lowercase or uppercase and hit send and then it'll ask for your email and you're on the list and then you'll get all my content which is all free Jeff it is so awesome to have you here and you know so far it's just been friends and people that I love and respect that I have here because it's so fun just to have a conversation and even today we don't have an agenda so we're just gonna wing it and talk about mold but I really think we're gonna hit on a lot of important things I want to hear your story and I don't have a formal written bio from you but I think I can introduce you as I don't know how many years ago we met but I've been in the business of helping people physically in the office with mold but I cannot do what I do without people like Jeff book out and he has come to be so loved and respected and trusted by myself my colleagues and so many of my patients what's funny is I'm in Denver and Jeff's in Oklahoma but he spends about half his life in Colorado and we're so grateful out here because what I told him before we started the call is this industry of mold remediation is kind of like used cars and I hate to put you in that category Jeff because you're the opposite but what I find is there's a lot of unsavory and untrustworthy people that take advantage and my patients that have this and myself years ago they're suffering there they're mentally having trouble with brain fog and it's a really difficult situation the way it is and then to have someone who takes advantage of that is so hard you are the exception to the extreme you're a man of integrity a man who does the right thing who's really really good at what he does and you know just like for myself and medicine there's the science in the knowledge base and you have that in spades but what you also have is you have an intuitive sense and you have kind of a special smell and you have some of these gifts that you were just God-given to be what to do what you do and do it well but I'd love to hear a little bit about how you got interested in this industry and kind of your story of where you arrived where you're at now in the mold remediation business or actually mold inspection business you bet so thank thank you Jill extremely humbled you're right it's a God-given talent but and I think trials and tribulations always bring your life a reason and where to learn from those so the strange thing is is I have two 18-year-old daughters right now they're eight and a half months apart but my youngest daughter she was getting sick from mold exposure and it was funny because it was in the house I grew up in so my parents house down in the basement would show up you know stay the night anywhere from four hours to four days later boom she's hit with a hundred four degree fever by 2 a.m. at strep throat strep throat ends up going on this goes on 16 20 times a year take her tonsils out strep attacks the side of her face well my first reaction is what's wrong with you I slept in the same place you did ate the same things that you ate and which happens with a lot of people that I see and luckily it was my child and not my wife because I don't think I would have been so compassionate and caring if it wasn't which taught me another lesson I should love my wife more and I love my kids so so then it's break down the data okay I have a lot of friends that are doctors ear nose and throat and some other specialties and and sure enough it was a mold reaction and it ends up being the HLA gene in her particular case liver wasn't producing little fine to remove those toxins and they were staying trapped inside of her body so going through this journey with her and finding out why she was sick and I wasn't one that that obviously helped from this aspect and sitting down and talking with people because there's a lot of people going to their properties and the husband's not on board the wife's not on board why are you sick I'm not sick and it helps me because I've gone through that situation so that's kind of how I got started into this but it was this is it was everything kind of fell in my lap all at once I had a couple ear nose and throat doctors asked me they knew what I did for a living in the past and things were going great working 80 hours a week not had two babies at home not spending time with the wife and kids things weren't going well so you know I decided I'm gonna put God first in my life and let everything else fall where it may and when I did that this door opened up and I was asked Jeff there's this company that was founded in Colorado has done wonders for an ear nose and throat patients that are exposed to mold will you bring something like that to Oklahoma no don't even sound fun to me but but a long story short or making it short as possible I ended up going to a seminar met with a lot of property management groups and I was fascinated from that aspect because we went to Keystone and Beaver Creek and I'm I love skiing so we're in Beaver Creek condemned condominium unit and the guy who owned the units was there and it was not rocket science to me you look in the master bedroom closet of each one of these units there's where stack your mattresses growing all behind the wall and at the time I just knew his black mold right but if you look on the outside of the house that's where they ventilated these units and it's just a hole inside the wall I'm not a rocket scientist but it snows up there quite a bit snow goes right behind that wall water equals mold there we go so then they got to the doctor portion of it which I was doodling on my notepad and and I look up and there's this young nurse taking this 80 year old guy in my mind to the next room over and I'm okay look now look up there's a 40 year old guy same nurse going to the same room they said it was the same guy wait that's that's impossible and that's what got my attention that was an 80 year old guy I saw and he was dying it was a country music star got exposed on his tour bus and couldn't get him better and he goes to these doctors and that there he was not day better so that's kind of how I got introduced into this to make a long story short and it's greatly benefited my family because now I'm to a point Kinsey my youngest is fixing to go off to college and she's stayed in dad's bubble for you know the last 17 18 years and now it's okay it's off to college and kind of you have some story to this you go off places and get exposed somewhere else so it's those learning tools that I'll be able to talk about later that will help her along her path and journey growing up and going to college and going to an apartment going into a new house so some things and tips that I can give her jeff I love that and you could take all day with your story and I'm sure we'd be I mean really truly those are the things that really matter and you know I always say I didn't choose mold mold chose me and it sounds like you have a very similar story like I really feel like God like like my experience with mold was so horrific and you see me now I'm healthy overall doing great but I was not like that if I would show you photos of how scarred with acne and how swollen and how full of highs I mean I was in horrible shape and physically exhausted and brain fog and I literally don't know that year that I got exposed the stache about you said the worst I don't really know how I survived and I did but part of that journey just like yours was because I really feel like God was like you know what I'm going to teach you and the best teachers experience right and struggle you've been there just like me and again that's why I recognize you jeff that's why I recognize your heart because you go into every single house every single patient you talk to and you bring that heart and that's so rare in this industry and yet with these people that are suffering I mean I don't know if I've seen any other illness that's quite like mold and the fact that it affects the amygdala which is the fear response and it affects the brain and it affects so it's not just someone who has fatigue that's struggling with an issue with a physical body it affects the mind I've even had experiences where there was a church I used to attend that was moldy and every time driving home I'm not a depressed or anxious person but I would drive home and the world was ending and I could see how people would be depressed or suicidal and that's not me but the mold would sabotage my brain for several hours and I really understood how it affects the mind and the judgment and all these things so you're when you're going in there you're dealing with these people who are already compromised and they what they mean most is love and compassion and I think both of us hopefully bring that to them because they're in a really dark spot and then there's so few people who really understand it on the level that you and I do and that's an important thing too because like you said whether it's their parents or their siblings or their people in their household their partners most people think they're a little crazy right yeah you're exactly right yeah and sometimes that sometimes you have to play play margherita a little bit when you're in there but at the end of the day it in in I make people cry for two different reasons uh one is coming in in the first 15 minutes we sit down at the table and we go over history of the house and history of them and in some of that and I don't know how many times I see the tears start to flow right then you understand yes I understand I've been there I've done this so yes in the other part of the tears yeah go ahead no go ahead the other part of the tears yeah the other part of the tears is sometimes in my job I have to be brutally honest sometimes and I am extremely compassionate but sometimes people need to hear what they need to hear and it is what it is with me and so sometimes and it's when this x y z has to be done in your house because if not you're living in this toxic mold environment this has got to get done and when you're talking someone's livelihood their money and everything else and then the tears start coming I still love you but you got to hear this information that is so true because I took me a few maybe a year to really understand how um same thing as a physician I'm asking them questions when did this I just had a patient the other day chronic cough been to ent pulmonology best in the world no one can figure this out so all I did was say well when did this start and how long have you been in that house well within a week of moving into this rental house the cough started you know both you and I are going of course right and then of course I see mycotoxins in the urine that are metabolites of aspergillus penicillin I see it does sample because at that time they didn't have an inspector yet of aspergillus penicillin and I put all the pieces together and clearly that's a trigger to a chronic cough so we put the puzzle together but no one they'd seen dozens of doctors no one had put that together no one had asked them about their environment so it's so key so tell me what you do when you first go in when you talk to people what are the questions you ask so what I want to do today is kind of give people some tools to think through if they're suffering from symptoms how they might involve someone like you and what kinds of some of the common questions that people have so the first thing let's start with is like what are you asking people what kind of questions where are you looking at in their house you bet and I'll come back and I'm going to put something in front of this too but when I finally arrived at the house obviously somebody suspect there's a problem whether it's the doctor that you've looked at c4a msh levels whatever the case is army testing some some for some reason we suspect something in the house so we we number one go over history of the property past water leaks backups floods what type of moisture intrusion because moisture equals mold whether that is an ongoing leak a past leak water up against the foundation a swamp cooler things that are allowing moisture or even humidity humidity in my opinion this is a debatable number above 50 so once you get at a 50 humidity level so i'm in colorado every other week basically and i hear it all the time jeff we're so dry here colorado is you're not uh i'm in your basement you're 65 humidity well at 50 humidity i know there's going to be pockets of higher humidity and once you're to the 60 65 range mold to start growing on surfaces just thriving off the high humidity and dust in the air went to a church uh not too long ago 70 humidity mold was going all over the back of the vinyl chairs well it wasn't a water leak roof leak it was because we shut up the church everything got hot in oklahoma humidity gets that high mold starts to grow same thing with a lot of schools do the exact same thing uh so it's always moisture intrusion that i'm looking for so when we sit and talk i want to hear past history now sometimes we don't i don't interrupt but it's so important because i think what you just said with covet and things closing unoccupied buildings this lady with a cough they moved into a building a home two years no one occupied it what's the risk there is there's something you mentioned the humidity and the condensation but would you be more concerned about a building that had been unoccupied uh from a general standpoint of view yes real estate transactions this house hasn't been occupied for a year depending on where you're at in the nation i used to travel the country so obviously here in oklahoma humidity outside today is 85 90 percent you're 30 you know where you're at so in in these hotter environments texas oklahoma uh even coastal states it's more of a concern uh general let's say without a water intrusion closing that envelope uh generally you're going to have high levels of microsporum cladosporum it can get all the way up and start going to aspergillis penicillin but if you had a water intrusion there to start with so there's a mole problem underneath the sinker in the bathroom it just magnifies that by a thousand yeah it just allows that to spread okay so back to sources i interrupted you but i thought that might be important because people you know the back to where else do you look um you're talking about different so and a lot of times people don't know this information or jeff i moved here a year ago uh so a lot of that is the instrumentation that we use uh so there's a lot of ways to test for mold and that's kind of the precursor so a lot of times doctors such as yourself you like to ermie there's ermie testing sda auger plates there's aerosol cassette a lot of different ways to test the air i i i look at them all because it's data and i love data but incomplete data does not complete the picture so unfortunately there's not a tool out there that i'm able to pick up and say there's mold behind this wall it's a combination of a bunch of tools put together air testing one which i love whether that's qpcr the dusty and a analysis i have a lot of people that do the sda auger plates or p-traditions they're a snapshot in time but every tool has its flaw those flaws are let's say you have a water problem behind this wall mold works like a dandelion out in the yard as soon as you kick it blow it disturb it thinks it's going to die throws it small sports to regenerate somewhere else so behind this wall is my master bedroom so if that master shower has a link behind the wall it's that happy content back there it can still be releasing mycotoxins and mbocs to make me sick but the spore count may not necessarily be high so that's kind of one of the flaws of that tool there's infrared cameras if it's not wet right now infrared cameras not going to find it but it does do a good job like in colorado there's missing insulation well if there's missing insulation there there's more than likely a condensate issue there got it moisture meters yeah foam better than the old fiber glasses or anything with insulation where you'd recommend one over the other for people either building or i do so i see crawl spaces a lot so in a if i was building a house from scratch i'd love to have this conversation because it's it's rock wool insulation it's foam board insulation it's not fiberglass insulation that's full of chemicals petroleum but most importantly especially in a crawl space environment which we have a lot in colorado let's say it's in a crawl space water's gotten into the crawl space contaminate the soil all those mold spores and mycotoxins dirt dust debris get trapped into that exposed insulation so it's a problem so if i was doing an attic okay if you want to use regular insulation bag it use plastic back to insulation nothing exposed closed cell and foam cell insulation uh depends on the usage sometimes if it's below grade i don't like to use it uh in the attic is generally okay as long as somebody doesn't have super chemical sensitivities but it does give off vocs so foam board insulation rock wool insulation they're good got it so back to sources and i want to talk because colorado swamp coolers crawl spaces i want to talk about those two particular and anything else in particular in our environment we might not have the humidity but we still have massive issues so what do you see in a dry climate like colorado that you might not see in miami like what should we be aware of in our patients what's your most common like five sources so number one reason why people get sick from mold exposure is a crawl space by far and that's not just in colorado but it's that silent hidden killer everybody wants me to come in and show them that big black hairy spot all over the wall if it was that simple you don't need me all right so so it is that's the the thing that people don't see contaminated soil if there's a lot of excess of mold growth in the insulation if it's on the subfloor they're not in that crawl space if they smell a musty odor yes you have a mold problem that's mboc's mold vault organic compounds mold is feeding it's active you have an issue now let's find the source so crawl space is number one second place swamp cooler there again it's hidden starchy is usually growing in the water itself or up the sides of the filters so they don't see it it is blowing those those toxins into your environment three at least in colorado a lot of stucco and some of the houses i get to see are straw hay bale insulation behind the wall so if a lot of cracks in stucco where it cracks over time once you get into that there's hay back there okay what grows as soon as that hay gets wet it's it's mold uh in a lot of it so i always say crawl space air attic air air behind the walls those areas will contain five to ten times higher mold contaminants that's normally in your breathable air without a water intrusion so it's sealing off those outlets light switches things like that so if there is a problem back there that's not recognized or not very large it just keeps that from coming into your breathable air and i know because i've been to your website biobalancenow.com we'll talk a little bit about your products but um you have videos on they're teaching people very simply how to seal outlets how to seal vents and these things are really simple i am so not mechanically inclined but i think i could probably do it and that's saying a lot so and jeff has the videos on his site that's explaining it and if again i love that you say that because that's houses that don't have a massive mold issue but they just have this can um you describe it best but it's basically the airflow that should not be into your living space right and it's leaking in there and causing you always call it scooby-doo gas explain that just a little bit for our listeners yeah so let's so uh you know having all girls uh in my household at scooby-doo green gas so now you get a visual of this gas uh so it's not always the spores making you sick and be the mycotoxins in the mbocs so now imagine that a scooby-doo green gas so now you can see it so you have all this mold contamination in your crawl space well underneath your crawl space where your kitchen is you have pipes that go up into your kitchen for your kitchen sink there's a hole around that pipe well when your h-fax system comes on your heating or your air conditioner it creates so much negative air pressure it's like a vacuum and it sucks that scooby-doo green gas from those cavities and brings it up into your breathable air so and which goes to you know one of those points a lot of times you'll find someone's small problem in their house they fix just that area and if you don't address the entire building envelope that scooby-doo green gas is all over that building envelope and if you don't address that you're missing a lot of the picture yeah so let's talk about practical things so we got uh crawl spaces swamp coolers the attic air the crawl space air the intra wall air whatever you call that all of these sources um and then there's common things if you don't think about i had a small little eight inch circular leak under my sink from a garbage disposal that was improperly installed not a big deal right well no um and so the things like washer leaks and um improperly uh connected hose from a refrigerator under the sink and bathrooms and showers um nowadays gosh i've seen so many brand new beautiful multimillion dollar homes where the tile was improperly installed the grout wasn't sealed tell us a little about master bathrooms because there's so many things that can go go wrong with construction master bath the tiles what do you see in master bathrooms and bathrooms in general yeah and i'll use two analogies because i love analogies and one of them you actually know the person but i'll use somebody else uh we get through most of the house and the house is actually looking pretty good and the guy is uh he had just put in a brand new shower uh well he used travertine highly absorbent and excessive moisture is getting behind the tiles that's one of the things that a moisture meter is great for in scan mode it tells me how much moisture is back there and there's a certain point where i'm pulling tiles and there's a certain point where i'm just resealing tiles but in his case you know it's maxing out my meter and and unfortunately the shower is brand new and he just built it he did not want to hear it but at the end of the day let's go back to a story that you do know i go into her her home and sure enough she's got excess of moisture same thing behind those those tiles now you don't see that visually sometimes you'll see some cracks in the grout or some things where water is getting back there but you don't always get to see that so in her particular case it was maxing out my moisture meter and not even a thought on my part this has to come out a minimum of this high and and so sure enough we saw the pictures afterwards and full of mold growth all underneath that that cavity not just into the sea through the subfloor so this entire floor was black like and you see that all the time but i was like wow no wonder there this is an interesting story no details but the husband had been sick for years it's funny because i talked to her and i had heard his story and it didn't make sense with what they were putting it together with in my mind so i i wonder about mold but then honestly because i'm the mold doctor the mold expert i was like it can't be mold mold isn't everywhere right jill like i actually pull back sometimes and don't think because i really um i know about mold i hear same with you you probably see it everywhere because you know so many details about the potential and it's amazing i i would guess one in four houses has issues maybe more what do you think about that the commonality of this so so with without a doubt and i get asked that question all the time jeff how many houses you go into and you don't find mold it's a loaded question because i was hired from a medical perspective so more than likely there's mold there uh before i walk in the chances are pretty high but every house even my own home jeal this is funny i do this for a living i had three major water intrusions in the last year in my house one of them flooded uh at least a third of my house i do this for a living we're all gonna have problems it's can i dry it out within 48 hours and if not i need to remove those damaged materials treat the air and as long as everyone kind of understands that protocol you jeff how do i get in a mold proof house good luck well uh you have water to it uh so so there's always a moisture intrusion you're gonna have it happen it's let's do things to help prevent it like putting those little water bugs underneath your kitchen sink in your laundry room things like that to alert you to those areas that that could have leaks without you knowing it for a long period of time yeah so let's switch gears just a little i like that because people are even in the same way for me i have this little water leak under my sink which i still haven't taken out the wood jeff but i promise you i will every time you come over you're like um jill cut it out bad bad jill but i will um but um some practical things so i have a rubber mat which again i need to actually take that sink it's under the sink i'm going to actually cut it out replace it but if i had done that first which is the first step a rubber mat can be helpful and then what you do is do buy a little water meter that sits on that mat so if there's a few drops of water it'll start to alarm because what happened before was a week or two went by and i didn't know that there was a leak under my sink super common because you don't hear it you don't see it you don't smell it and that leak could be going for a year or two before you notice the wet or the moisture um wash or dryers again you you can chime in here but i got i finally got a front i still have a front load but i got one from LG has the widest rubber gasket and they're tilted nowadays a lot of the front loads are tilted and they're very specifically designed to be anti-mold i still run a botanical product through there every month to kind of be sure and i make sure and replace my gaskets every year too so i still have the front load which is not recommended but i feel like i've done enough things with the style and the gaskets and the i did a lot of research on it i feel pretty good about my front load washer if you want to be sure top load's going to be safer always than a front load because i'm sure you see a lot of mold in the gaskets right what are the representative things could we do with windows or with attics or we talked about the the the sealing off the airflow but is there anything else you'd recommend as prevention for for baths or kitchens yeah so in a perfect world what grows mold sheetrock right so if i'm underneath my kitchen sink and i'm replacing anything that's going to be hardy backer board or concrete board instead of sheetrock kind of take away my building materials on master showers and this goes for every single person out there if you have a tile shower you need to use a tile grout and pregnator probably every two three four years to redo the seal on that grout if not over time water keeps hitting that grout and breaking down its waterproof barrier that it has and you need to reseal it every few years so there's a lot of things that it's talked about addicts well addicts you need to have a way for air to get into your attic and a way for air to get back out of your attic i was in a guy's house i was there last weekend it was 75 humidity in his attic because it's so hot he had very little airflow so humidity equals mold so let's let's make make sure we have airflow in those addicts then the second thing is making sure that my attic air does not communicate with my breathable air so little little tips like that around the house are always great because everywhere's basically everywhere you have a water source is a source for mold so humidifiers attached to the HVAC i see that a lot in colorado that filter has to stay clean the filter housing has to stay clean the drain line that that sends that condensate down to the to the sewer drain needs to remain clean because if not every time your HVAC system comes on it goes in there okay i'll get so many questions on my mind that i think people want to know so let's talk about filtration system in your how often should you change air filters what kind of merberating if possible what would you do with your furnace and HVAC system as maintenance and then also what you would do if there had been an issue to clean it you bet so there's five things in my own house that i always suggest everyone do and i'll get to the two at the very end because we haven't talked about that but merberating of 11 filters everything will have a merberating on it sometimes HVAC companies don't like a lot of air restrictions so if you have a real old unit sometimes they're not good to use but in my own home that's what i change out at least every three months a merberating of 11 filter in my HVAC system number two a good air purifier austin air is what i have in my own home if we're on a budget put it in the area that you're spending the most time in that's generally your master bedroom and they're portable you can move it if you wish in my house we have three different ones i'm not trying to cover my square footage all of it but i want a good air purifier in my home number three dilution is the solution so sometimes airflow is the the big key in colorado you open your windows and doors a lot but what about the basement a lot of times that gets missed uh so an hrv system in the colorado area for warmer climates it's called an erv system heat recovery ventilation you're basically bringing fresh air in taking all their out because you have this little building envelope anything that happens in there stays in there mold right on lysol hairspray bleach ammonia perfume all those allowed this toxic little pit that you live in so get proper airflow in there and get everything diluted back down the other two that we didn't talk about which is on my website which is i dry fog my own house once a year and we're getting dive into the dry fog in a little bit or some of those solutions but it's gse base grapefruit seed extract uh what do i want to use in my house that is safe for my medically sensitive daughter so it's a true dry fog form stays in the air from 30 minutes to two hours being able to capture all the excessive dust dirt debris mold virus bacteria get it back out of the air i do that once a year in my own home no matter what there's a liquid version of it that's a mist we use that once a month throughout the house and that's how i maintain my environment and how kenzie will when she goes off to college so it's those little things that help maintain your own house then if you do strategic things around the house like the water bugs walk around your house once a year pretend you're jeff you're you're you know this not not a lot of its rocket science hey if there's water there i'm going to open it up take a look at it smells funny i may need to holler at somebody or it looks funny yeah no and i love so the fog you must stop there real quick because you have it's just a repeat it will list it biobalancenow.com i've used this product personally and what i always get from patients is i'm super sensitive what can i do so i know jeff's told me and you back this up you could have a bowl of cereal sitting out and you could fog and you could eat that cereal now i use gsc in patients all the time to treat bungle overgrowth i use it as nasal spray i use it as oral drops i even put it in my dog's water so this is a very very safe botanical and it treats candida it treats mold and so to me it makes perfect sense i typically recommend as you do jeff that if you're really sensitive that while you maybe have someone else do the fogging and you get out of the house for 12 hours you know right after is that what you'd recommend but it's not harmful it's only if the patient's sensitive they might have actually die off from say they have sinus candida or issues in the gut you might when i know when i treat patients with gsc i'm like go slow because you might have a headache or you might have brain fog because they're killing off this toxic organism so it's not that it's toxic but if you are colonized and you are breathing in that fog my friends the ones we just talked about they did the fogging they both had a little bit of headache they were fine but because they're colonized it's not because the product is an issue so tell us exactly like how would this fog work they can get it at your website they can buy the fogger themselves and that's what i did because i actually have all of your products because i'm going to plan on doing my office in my house at least once a year and then have i have the travel version i have it all tell us real quickly though the basic fogging of what people would do and how that would work in their home but you know i'm going to preface it a little bit so so let's start with in a perfect world i want three things to happen when we have mold contamination one is i need to find the moisture source and make sure that it's removed so whether that's high humidity and ongoing leak water against the foundation moisture has to stop number two is finding and identifying those mold damage materials and making sure they're removed and replaced or proper corrections are made there is not a substitute for that then number three we treat the air to get all those excess of mold spores and mycotoxins back under control so in a perfect world it's always removing that source make sure nobody misunderstands anything if there is mold colonization it has to go now can i buy you time uh because we had this question earlier uh can i buy you jeff i'm in an apartment complex i have two three or four or five months left on my lease i can't get out they're not going to fix the problem for me what can i do let's fog let's treat that air and let's immediately at least buy you some time it's not the perfect thing and i've also heard this as a negative comment coming back from a few uh sources that if you are treating the mold and there's still a colonization in there they'll be putting out more mycotoxins that is never found in my case i've done this for 17 years uh treating people's houses i have never seen that and i've never heard of that so i always believe in at least i can buy you time clean your air as best i can until you can make those right decisions or jeff i can't afford to make all those remediation yet so i'm going to fog first do all the steps then fog afterwards and that's fine at least it gives you an alternative always say people like jeff and iep or a mold inspector is always the best to have an environment not everybody can afford to have me out i understand that so i want to be able to appeal to everyone what can you do if you can't have me there one is is jwb avid immunolytics labs they have come up with a medical scale for sda auger plates test your air yourself for a fraction of the price it's the cheapest way to do air testing uh that i've ever seen and it's reliable and it's accurate as long as you don't have mold behind the wall cavity you know so so then they also get a consult from them somebody like me that is in the field calls them and goes over those results uh so it's not as good as having somebody like me there but at least we have another solution out there um it's always best to have a professional remediation guy remove and replace your damaged materials a lot of times that doesn't happen i understand that so let's i try to educate them on go to home depot get a zip wall system contain that room rent and negative air pressure and air scrubber machine and use it while you're taking out those damaged materials so there's ways that we have allowed you to do it yourself i treat properties all the time with that fogging there's also the do-it-yourself kits at bio balance now dot com so that is not rocket science it is it's to me in my house it's halloween time uh so or fall festival time so if all the kids love me we fog up the house my kids play in the middle of it there again i know i know my kids is breathing habits and everything else if you go on the website there's precautions stay out for at least 24 hours wear a little n95 mask while you're using it tsa tsa made me put it in my mouth and in my eye to get it on a flight to salt lake city before wow great like it's okay i'm on the plane yeah wow me on the plane so so so let's talk about or dive into a little bit of what the dry fog is why we use a dry fog because every other way on the market is some people say it's a dry fog but basically it's a wet mist that goes up in the air imagine taking a windex bottle spray it up it's a real fine mist falls out of the air extremely quickly so if i have imagined mold sports is got balls so now i can see them into the air if you take water and throw it up into the air you're going to capture some of those golf balls but not a lot of them so dry fog staying in the air from 30 minutes to two hours it's able to flocculate everything together and get it back out of the air which is another perfect point because you'll see on our website afterwards i want you to do a good general wipe down of all your horizontal surfaces afterwards because if there are dead mold spores virus bacteria dust dirt debris that has fallen out because of that fog do a good general cleaning of your horizontal surfaces in a perfect world gel if you could do a small particulate clean have a company there's a company in colorado that does that great that's about six to eight thousand dollars and if you can afford it man i love it let's do it but if not do the fog do a good general cleaning to get rid of and start over with new dust dirt and debris so we talked about gsc grapefruit seed extract lemon lime tangerine extracts the dry fog uses a food grade propylene glycol as the carrier so it's allowed to stay into that air i want it into everything your your cabinet so you're opening doors opening everything you can so that this actually gets on like in your clothing drawers and in your closet and in your yeah yes because it is not wet based go ahead i'm going to try to recap from kind of layperson and you tell me if i got anything wrong for people listening so say you have a mold issue first of all ideally you get an inspector but what jeff and i are understanding is some of you you can't afford it or you need to find a way to get by initially and there are things to get little ideas of what might be going on nothing's perfect those are plates those are ermie dust sampling there's um there's actually myco toxin uh dna sampling so there's ways you can do i agree with jeff none of these are perfect because i'm the same way in my office needing data but i don't always have an inspector to help me like jeff i often ask the patients for ermie because i've seen enough of them now let me talk real quickly about ermie and you correct me if you feel differently i think we're on the same page i don't even look at the score at the bottom the validation of that test has been kind of thrown out the window so the ermie score itself i mean i look at the number i don't make too much out of it but what i do do is i run down the individual numbers because i know which molds are really nasty if i see above five of stackie batteries or ketomium those are such nasty molds they cause immune compromise kidney dysfunction lung dysfunction and brain neurological disorders that if i see about five of those i'm concerned whereas aspergillus penicillin it might be above a hundred or above 50 that i'm i'm still concerned right but those are the guys that i won't i don't even want to see one but if it's about five i'm concerned so i'm actually looking at the numbers i do a hurts me score none of these are perfect but i found when i look at the individual species and sometimes i'll see some random thing like clasporium at 200 000 well that's not a common mold that causes massive toxicity it does cause respiratory irritation but with the level of 200 000 there's going to be an issue somewhere so then we know cross there's probably a cross space yeah exactly so so um so i do like the ermie because again a patient can do it on their own but optimally inspection so then we find a root cause say it's a shower tile issue say it's an under sink issue where some particle that has been porous food for the mold has gotten damaged no amount of fogging will take care of that problem but it might buy you time so you ultimately have to take out the material get remediation or like jeff said we don't recommend doing it yourself but if you have no other options at the very least understand contamination um uh containment because what happens i've seen too many times someone tries to do it themselves a husband who means well and they don't contain it and they get way worse they make their wife way sticker because they blow it up and again so you take that material you clean it up you um you contain it um and then the fogging and i usually recommend patients get their HVAC system clean would you recommend that jeff before or after the fogging um for the clean always after uh and the reason why is if there is a lot of excess of mold spores that are up into an HVAC unit uh we're taking care of those with the fog before we get in there with a rotor and spread everything worse got it and i think i have some personal experience with this i did some sort of treatment that wasn't the dry fog i won't mention any names it made me way worse and um what happened was i had a very dirty HVAC system i think it dissolved it kind of spread everything around and it didn't really take care of the issue your system worked so that to me there was a really big difference and it was partially my problem was a really dirty HVAC system that needed cleaning afterwards um so now funny my dog is is whining and i want to talk about pets so what do we do with pet so he was perfect he must have heard me and known that we're gonna you know talk about pets what do we do with these guys you bet so so i always look at two different things elephants and red flags inside your house now generally your red flags your pet isn't always the thing that's making you sick but it contributes to your toxic toxic barrel and i don't know if the plan is is real up there on the right hand side of where i'm looking to your left on the wall okay good so plants plants are red flag so what can we do with pets uh there is a company called Citra safe it is spelled c i t r i then the word safe s a e f s a f e dot com uh they make uh a pet kit so it is shampoo some stuff you can spray on and drops gsc drops that you can put in the water things like that to help maintain my pet because i'm not gonna get rid of my it's it's not a dog it's a yorkie it's four pounds you have to be more than four pounds to be a dog so but i can treat that or the same way with carpeting i do not like carpet uh so i didn't win the battle in my own house so i have most of the carpet gone but i'll use the haven miss from bio balance now dot com with the haven clean to clean my my carpeting with um and again on citra safe website they have laundry detergent which is another thing that comes up a lot uh i looked at a mold report which is the sda auger plates from immunolytics dot com i was looking at those and everything in the house looked fine except the blue bedroom closet and if she hears me on this i'm talking about you the the blue bedroom carpet or the blue bedroom closet had excess amounts of penicillin in it and my first thought is okay is there damaged carpet in there or something behind a wall cavity or is it just the clothes uh which is very possible so uh uh you know treating it or washing your stuff in that laundry detergent would be a great idea oh so you just hit on the last few things we'll talk about so much about items in your house what to do if you really have a big issue what can you say what can you not save and then another thought uh came to me standing water that's always a problem right because people are like oh well i have this um pump that has standing whenever there's standing water whether it's a plant that's over watered whether it's a some pump that's flooded whether it's a crawl space that's always going to be an issue right jeff you're exactly right because what grows in standing water uh after 48 hours uh microbial growth you know uh bacteria uh mold virus bacteria are all going to grow in there and if you look at how a sump pump works there's always standing water in the bottom of that sump pump if you have a water issue then as soon as it gets to a level high enough then it pumps it out but there'll always be standing water in there get a plexiglass cover to completely seal it up uh or they they make fully enclosed units but that air in that pump can or that pit cannot communicate with the breathable air fish tanks a problem waiting to happen you open up the lid and you see all the mold and algae growing on the bottom of it i don't mind the flowers that you got for valentine's day that's okay those are in and out but permanent things that have standing water in them it's a mold problem waiting to happen yeah no i love that you say that because i had this beautiful water feature in my office and we don't have water in it it's a it's like a oh i don't want to tell you the cost it's a full marble of fountain that's so beautiful and i don't run water because of my patients and i'm okay with that but i had to understand that it's standing water not going to work in my office for sure so last thing i want to touch on is items in the house i'll talk a little and then you add in where i might have missed things but people are always asking about what can i so first of all let's assume there was a big mold issue in a home or environment it's been remediated the area's been fogged so you've done everything you need to do what do you do with your books with your in my experience paper tends to be difficult now sometimes we'll have scrap books and things that are precious what i tell patients is if there's stuff that you don't want to get rid of put it in plastic bins stored away from your breathable air in your garage until you get well and then you know it's safe because for me i had all these medical books from my office and they were precious to me i stored them but two years later i opened it up and i got sick i got rid of them so i knew that those books were not going to be in my house now i've heard patients that do ozone treatments on certain things but i would not count on that if you're very sick from mold you want to be careful so books paper can be an issue i also always tell the story i moved to a new office after my office was filled with mold and i took nothing with me except my patient charts i stayed sick and i had labs that proved it for three months until i scan those charts so that paper was literally the only thing left from there but it kept me not feeling well clothing i found you can wash and i know a citrus safe has a botanical product you can use in laundry and there's a few other things out there i would try to use a diluted borax solution or a citrus safe or something along those lines to wash your clothing i in my mold experience had no clothing that i had to get rid of but there can be things like leather goods or stuff that's not very washable that you may have to part with or be cautious but again in my experience clothing can be usually washed mattresses that you're sleeping on i would not take a chance i say get rid of your mattress i'm sorry to say that but that to me is non-negotiable same with pillows the linens on your bed could be washed but i'm just like don't mess with it i had a beautiful family of four i think you worked with them too two darling little kiddos they had completely remedied their house done everything and around the holidays they were going to get a new mattress and they had still not been feeling well well for fun on their way out they all took the mattress down the stairs like just let's play on the mattress and like slide down the stairs they were so sick they all four called me the next week and it was all because that mattress had puffed its mold spores and boc is all the way down the stairs and the entire family got sick i'm like well that teaches you not to play on a moldy mattress but it was a funny story but the truth is mattresses are are bad what other things would you think about warning people in a home that they'd have to be careful after a mold exposure with re-exposure so you hit everything on the head and probably you know your top four things books papers they're they're horrible absorb a lot of mycotoxins my number two is mattresses as well i always tell everybody new pillows every two years no matter what it's amazing how much you drill and sweat now if you had a protected cover over your mattress it may make it a little bit better but especially if it's over eight years old get rid of it because you use that analogy then going down and it hit me in my mind i was in around fort collins and sweet lady she was awesome uh and luckily i'm a redneck but we were up on the top floor in her master you said jeff every time i sit in this chair i get sick i know that chair because my grandma had a chair just like i said it's like carpet you just get over time so much dust dirt debris mold spores it just accumulates in there's no way to get rid of it well jeff can you get rid of it for me no i'm sorry i don't do that you can throw it over the balcony i'm a redneck so i pick up this chair throw it over the balcony but i wish i had the camera on because when it hit the cloud of stuff that came out of that that chair was horrendous oh they're all looking at i'm like oh how nasty well that's the perfect analogy yeah what what happens to mattress there's a mattress down the stairs in the family that got i know it's just like a great story because it's so relevant um and it just made me think about you know that's one reason why i love books i love libraries i love old bookstores guess what i'd never go into anymore if i'm on vacation i see an old bookstore never never never with my history and if you're listening out there and you've had mold issues i'm sorry but old bookstores are not your friend libraries also could be an issue even if they're new and clean because they have old books and then the other thing um second hand stores and craigslist furniture be careful you know we all want to save a buck and i'm all for that i used to love you know second hand finds and cool things i don't do that anymore because you just don't know where they've been yeah so a general rule of thumb on all belongings no visible mold growth no visible water damage most importantly no mal odor my i have one of those god-given given gifts as a nose uh it smells like either the musty old basement urine or the old antique smell but if your nose is different if it smells funny get rid of it uh jeff it's an item i want to keep okay there's some things that we can do to help that and we'll get to that in a minute uh so it's no mal odor then four if you still have a reaction to it so uh that salt lake city story uh so long story short i still have my backpack my gear on my back or on my back go down their basement the wall look funny put my hand on the wall my hand goes through the wall oh no stack you bought just all behind there because of a sprinkler cavity but i remember seeing all are closed in in the unfinished basement hung up on string it's like man there's no way all this stuff's going to be contaminated but after treatment the only thing that she wasn't able to salvage was a couch wow no visible mold no visible water damage no mal odor but she still had a reaction to it so if you fall into those four category best to get rid of it jeff it's my wedding dress okay we can try the citrus safe laundry detergent we can set it out in the sun uh there's some things that we can do to try to salvage it but if it still has that mal odor get rid of it or put it put it in a seal plastic container get it outside of my breathable air yeah good good good good gosh we covered a lot um any other last tips or things that you can think of that might be important for people listening who maybe don't have access to you or i did link um if you guys are listening or looking through the feed i put bio balanced now i put citrus safe i put oh and i'll mentioned my new product at the end here jeff i'll tell you about i think you know about that but tell me any other tips or things that you would like to tell everybody who's listening any last things yeah i think the two biggest things that and we've gone over them but it's the three things looking for stop moisture remove damaged materials make proper corrections treat the air those three things are a must then the five maintenance tips that i have fog once a year haven't missed which is the wet based solution once a month because it's cheap and easy the merbrane 11 filters proper air exchange and austin airs uh so it's kind of staying in that maintenance routine uh going forward all your patients they're sensitive they have hla gene mth fr there's some some reason why why they're getting sick they need to stay on that maintenance protocol yeah gosh i love it and thank you for being available because again think of for every person you can see there might be a thousand people who watch this that can't see your eye and i know that there's pearls here that are so powerful i wish i would have known all this five years ago but we were both kind of chosen to do this work and so here we are um i just wanted to add the end for any of you listening same thing as jeff i developed a product it's called the miracle mold detox box and this is for people who can't see me it's not perfect just like anything else but it's a great great tool for those of you who are suffering and want to get started and maybe don't have a physician to kind of guide you on the journey um what i would say is start slow i literally have so i put the link in there it's mold detox box dot com and today is actually the official launch i didn't plan that but i wanted to be sure and mention it because the website's up it's got so much information it's got testimonials interviews information about all the products and of course any of you who um know me or see me are in our ingredient reader label readers so it's got everything listed there's no gluten there's no soy there's no g there's nothing toxic in it at all and the basic is we're mobilizing toxins with glutathione and liver support we're helping your body excrete with binders and then we're replenishing your body with electrolytes and nad which is a cellular energy source so i've put a ton of thought into this over the last several years and it's in combination with quick silver scientific who makes really great liposomal products i'm so excited to have this launch because i know it's going to help many many people who can't see an expert like jeff and i to get started what i'd recommend if you do purchase the product start slowly but it's a great great kind of all-in-one it's a 30-day mold detox box and i'm so excited so thank you for letting me mention that because today's the launch so it's out no i'm excited i actually looked it up the other day because i was sending somebody to to to get that and it's like i don't know if it's available yet but here's where you need to go to get it so that's awesome it's going to be great love that we can collaborate because again i can't do what i do without you jeff you are just a gem you're so wonderful what you do you're so generous with your time today i know that's valuable but i know both of us together today hopefully have answered questions and helped a lot of people so thank you from the bottom of my heart for being here with me no thank you jill that's been phenomenal uh anything i can do to help along the way that's what i'm here for awesome we'll talk soon