Joining the conversation on Fully Alive, Zack Gurick sits down with Dr. Neil Nathan, a world-renowned physician and author of Toxic, to explore the hidden epidemics behind chronic illness recovery. Dr. Nathan shares his 50-year journey as a “medical detective,” diving into the role of the limbic system, mold toxicity, and the deep need for safety in the healing process. Together, they outline a roadmap for those often dismissed by conventional medicine, shifting the focus from simply treating pathogens to helping the whole person move from toxic to truly thriving.

The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.

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From Toxic to Thriving: Rethinking Mold, Lyme & Chronic Illness With Dr. Neil Nathan

Welcome back to the show. I’m honored to welcome Dr. Neil Nathan, who is a leading voice. He’s a physician who spent more than five decades practicing medicine, but even more importantly, practicing healing. Dr. Nathan has quietly become one of the most trusted voices for people suffering from chronic and environmental illness, especially those often labeled as too complex, too sensitive, or too difficult to treat.

His work has helped thousands of patients reclaim their lives after years, sometimes even decades, of being dismissed. He’s the author of the groundbreaking book, Toxic, where he explores mold toxicity, Lyme disease, multiple chemical sensitivities, and chronic environmental illnesses. What makes Dr. Nathan’s approach so unique is that he does not just treat pathogens or toxins. He treats the whole person, including the nervous system, emotional health, and the body’s deep need for safety.

His work represents a powerful shift in how we think about chronic illness, resilience, and what true healing actually requires. This is a hopeful and deeply validating conversation, especially if you or someone you love has felt unseen or unheard in their health journey. I’m sure you’ll end up loving Dr. Nathan as much as I do after listening to this one. Take a deep breath, settle in, and join me for a powerful conversation with Dr. Neil Nathan on what it really means to heal and how to move toward a life that is not just longer, but more fully alive.

  

  

Dr. Nathan, thank you so much for being with us. You are a guru in this space. You’ve been doing this for many decades, longer than I’ve been alive. I’m really excited to learn from you, our listeners, and our audience, to learn from your amazing expertise and experience. Thank you so much for being with us. I’m really excited.

Thanks for having me.

I’d love to start. You’ve been practicing medicine, and I love how you talk about it, as if you really want to be practicing healing as much as practicing medicine, or more so. You’ve explored beyond conventional medicine with all kinds of other additional modalities of healing. I’d love to just hear a little bit of your background, your story. How did you get into the space that you’re in? What led you to be where you are today? What’s the journey been like for the last 50 years?

From Medical Education To Holistic Healing

As you already commented, when I went to medical school, I really wanted to be a healer when I grew up. I thought that’s what medical school would teach me. I was actually disappointed that they were going to teach me to be what I will call a medical technician. For example, I would ask my professors, when I was going through medical school, all kinds of questions. Some of my professors thought that I was wonderful, and some wanted to drum me out of medical school because I was, for them, annoying because of the questions that I asked.

Back then, the word holistic was not even a word. What I realized later was that what was missing for me in my medical education was integrating the physiological aspects of medicine with the emotional, energetic, and spiritual components of being a human being, which are totally connected to it. When I got out of medical school, that was when I began to explore all those things. I explored, I do not know, basically anyone who suggested they had some sort of healing to teach, would spend literally every cent I ever made.

In my early years, I would go to workshops or weekends all over the country. Some of those were a waste of time, and some of those were fabulous. I never knew in advance which ones would be which. Over time, I eventually got to study osteopathic manipulation, including cranial work, homeopathy, therapeutic touch, Reiki, and emotional release techniques. I got more and more into biochemistry as functional medicine began to evolve.

I was at the forefront of that. Prolo therapy, injection techniques of almost every type, hypnosis, all of those were fair game. All of them taught me some things that I could bring back to my practice to help people who were not being helped by my colleagues. I began to get a reputation for being interested in those people who had fallen through the medical cracks. Those people who had gone to my colleagues or gone to major medical centers and were told, “I’m not sure what you have. I’ll give you this label. I’m not sure it’s accurate.”

I became a medical detective. That’s what I’ve really done for almost all my career. That’s what I bring to the table, which is to really listen to what someone is talking about and to try to understand if it fits into any of the knowledge bases that I’ve acquired over the years, in terms of whether I have a tool in my toolbox that can help this being? I can actually help most people these days. Not everybody. I have not gotten that far. I do not think anyone has. It’s been a wonderful, joyous experience just learning.

That’s amazing. It kind of reminds me of the show House or something. As you said, a medical detective. You’ve explored everything that there is to explore. I love that you said you help people who’ve fallen through the cracks that no one else could figure out.

People who know me say that I’m a nice House.

That’s a good reputation to be known for. Can you tell us some of the things that you’ve done that maybe there’s a case or two that stick out over time that no one else could heal this person, and then walk us through what you do to determine which path to take and what modalities to use?

Listening As A Form Of Medicine

The simple answer to that question is that I spend more time listening to people than most. I believe that most people will tell me what direction I should start looking in if I ask them enough questions. Now, most folks who have come to see me have grown up in this managed care world in which they have had a very limited period of time to spend with a doctor, to tell them what’s going on, and they’ve really never had the time to tell their whole story. The simplest thing is, I want to listen to the whole story. As I’m listening, that will bring up asking them more detailed questions so that I can hone in on what might be going on with them.

Most people will tell me what direction I should start looking in if I ask them enough questions.

I imagine a doctor visit for you is very different than the typical seven minutes.

Most people would say that. What I get a lot of is many people who’ve come to see me will sometimes cry and say, “No one’s ever listened to my whole story. Even if you do not help me, it really helped for me to be able to tell you my whole story.” There’s healing in people being able to share the full picture of what they’ve been wrestling with.

There’s a release that happens there, even as we have those things. You’re an expert on healing from mold toxicity and other toxins as well. I’d love to dive into that a little bit and hear your perspective on, obviously, you have the big book, Toxic, 2nd Edition: Heal Your Body from Mold Toxicity, Lyme Disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and Chronic Environmental Illness, and your other book, The Sensitive Patient’s Healing Guide, as well. Could you tell us what led you into writing each of the books you’ve written so far?

I am trained as a board-certified family physician. Because of my interest in helping people who had fallen through the medical cracks, I eventually began to gain a lot of skills in helping people with different kinds of pain. I became board-certified in pain management. For many of my years, I ran pain clinics of different kinds, including hospital-based units. Back in the mid ‘80s, we began to see an odd condition in which people had pain that moved all over their body, and they had fatigue, cognitive impairment, and irritable bowel.

The name we used back then was fibrocitis and eventually became known as fibromyalgia. At first, nobody quite knew what it was. Whenever that happens in medicine, people think it’s in your head. Those folks were either given antidepressants, anti-anxiety agents, or sent to psychiatrists. That did not help these folks much at all. It became clear to me that that wasn’t the issue. It was something much more specific.

Chronic Fatigue And The Discovery Of Mold Toxicity

Eventually, I wound up seeing a lot of patients with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and recognizing that there were multiple causes for that condition, and began to categorize them in terms of deficiencies in magnesium, thyroid, adrenal, sex hormones, food allergy, dysbiosis, mold toxicity, Lyme disease, and dental issues. It was a grouping of things that, when combined, would cause fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and we began to treat them very effectively.

Back in the early ‘90s, mid ‘90s, I was getting some very good results by doing that. I became friends with Jacob Teitelbaum, who wrote some books on the subject. Jacob and I were seeing the same things. We found that the same things that we were working on would help cure people who were being told by the conventional medical care that they cannot cure chronic fatigue or fibromyalgia. Most of the people we were working with were getting much better, in fact, cured.

However, over time, as more and more complicated patients were referred to me, we began to realize that we were missing something. It became really apparent that Lyme disease and some of the co-infections were major players here. Back in 2005, we began to learn that mold toxicity was a major player here, along with other environmental toxins. We began to put together a body of information to help these people get well when they were being told by conventional physicians.

There’s healing in people being able to share the full picture of what they’ve been wrestling with.

“I do not know what’s wrong with you. It’s in your head. Go away.” That was the patient population that I was working with back in those days. It evolved so that many people who did have mold toxicity and Lyme disease, and we can talk about this in more detail, which are much more common than people realize. They had developed extreme sensitivity.

Extreme sensitivities to light, sound, smells, chemicals, touch, food, electromagnetic frequencies, so that they had gotten so affected that they could barely leave the home or function in the world as we know it. That started with very few of them and has now become an epidemic in the same way that mold toxicity and Lyme disease are now viewed as an epidemic. That’s how I got to where I am.

That’s only been since 2005, but that was really something that was commonly diagnosed as mold toxicity?

Back then, no, it was not commonly diagnosed at all. I had a patient who came into my office, and she took Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker’s new book, Mold Warriors. She puts it on my desk, and she says, “Read this.” I said, “Great, I love reading. If you’ve ever seen any of my desks, they’re loaded with books I’m constantly reading.” She said, “No, I do not think you understand. I’m paying for this visit for you to sit and read this book right now.”

I said, “This is fabulous. You’re going to pay me to read. This is a job I can really get behind.” Fortunately, in that book, fairly early on in the book, Dr. Schoemaker lays out what he called the biotoxin pathway, which is a very detailed understanding of how mold toxicity was triggering all of the very different symptoms that people got. I read that, and I literally called him up from the office that day and said, “Can I come visit you?”

At the time, he was a little bit suspicious. He said, “Who are you and why do you want to come see me?” I said, “I’ve just read your book, and it’s fabulous, and I want to study with you.” He said, “Okay.” Literally a weekend later flew out to Pocomoke, Maryland, and spent some time with him. He was one of the first people to put our understanding of mole toxicity on the map.

I worked with him for several years. Eventually, our paths diverged. I did not feel like he was embracing some of the newer methods of diagnosing and treating. Although I think we’re still friends, we have a very different approach to how to look at and treat mold toxicity and some of the other related conditions.

You mentioned that people who have a severe sensitivity to things could be stemming from one of these, mold toxicity or Lyme disease. If someone has just even a light sensitivity to light or to sounds or smells, is that the beginning stages? Is this something that progresses?

It can be. What any sensitivity means by definition is that a part of their brain called the limbic system has become hypervigilant. That does not happen overnight. It tends to happen throughout our lives. From the time we’re born, we’re faced with a variety of stressors. Nobody had a perfect childhood. Depending on what kind of stresses you might have had in childhood, maybe you had recurrent ear and throat infections.

Maybe you had surgery, maybe you had parents who were inattentive or worse, abusive, or maybe you were in an environment where you were picked on, whatever it happens to be. Our limbic systems from all of those stressors are becoming more and more hypervigilant to really notice that, so it can keep us safe, because the job of the limbic system is to keep us safe by scrutinizing the stimuli we’re being exposed to from the perspective of safety.

  

  

The Role Of The Limbic System In Safety

Any form of sensitivity is limbic. Now, the good news is we can treat that. There’s a whole bunch of new ways of quieting the limbic system so those people with those sensitivities can get better. If someone were sensitive, you would need to work on the limbic system, and you’d need to work on another part of the brain that does the same thing, called the vagal system. Even more important, you need to look for what else is making this system so hypervigilant.

In this particular case, we have discovered that mole toxicity is by far the most common thing that is triggering these sensitivities. Lyme and Bartonella can trigger it as well. EMFs can trigger it. Again, you need to play medical detective to look for what is making this person so sensitive, because we now know so much more about this. We can literally pinpoint why you’re sensitive, and we can come up with a way of treating you to cure it. The vast majority of people who have been limited by their sensitivities, we can help them.

That’s really good news. Where does one start, then, if someone is experiencing some sensitivity? You can start with an EMF blocker, for example, to try to eliminate the EMFs, or what is step one? You get a mold test for the home or workplace.

Pinpointing The Source Of Toxicity

Step one for everything in medicine is a good diagnosis. You can shoot in the dark. You can try to play pin the tail on the donkey with a blindfold on, or you can start to dig into their history to help understand why this is happening. For example, if someone is sensitive and they’re telling you that they have some EMF sensitivity. The first thing I want to look at is what kind of EMF exposure they have.

You can buy a relatively inexpensive, which is called a smog meter, which you can literally have a little meter that you can literally hold right up against your body, and see what kind of EMFs are impinging on you everywhere in your house. You can hold it when you’re next to your computer, you can hold it next to your refrigerator, your electric clock at the bedside, any electrical device, you can hold it up that might tell you about cell towers that are pinging on you or impinging on you.

There are three main EMFs, and that meter has three different settings so that you can figure out, “What am I getting exposed to?” When you know that, then you can start to block those waves so they can affect you less. That’s immediate. You want to go deeper, like, “Why did my body get EMF sensitive in the first place?” I would always say, “Look for mole toxicity as the first most common thing, and then look deeper for different kinds of infections.” I’ve heard it said many times that we’re swimming in toxins in our environment, we’re consuming microplastics in our food and in our water.

The job of the limbic system is to keep us safe by scrutinizing the stimuli we’re being exposed to from the perspective of safety.

It seems a little bit overwhelming sometimes to just try to figure out how to block all this stuff. How do I get the cleanest water and the best clean food, and it feels almost impossible at times? Are some people just more sensitive than others? Do some people just deal with those different chemicals and toxins better than others? Does it build up in us over time? How do we begin to combat these?

All of the above. Yes, we live in a very toxic world to the point that if you were paranoid, and I urge people not to be, you could literally go, there are hundreds of thousands of new chemicals in our environment that weren’t there 70 years ago that we have not studied, that we have no idea how safe they are for human beings, and we do not know how to measure most of them. Yes, that’s true. Our bodies have evolved to deal with that well.

We have organs that can help us detoxify. Our liver, our gut, our kidneys, our skin, our lymphatic system, all can help us get rid of that. For health, which is what we’re talking about here, we need to optimize how well those detoxification organs work. That just seems logical. Keep in mind, all of these medical conditions, like mold toxicity or Lyme disease, are really related most strongly to how robust someone’s immune system is.

The Impact Of A Robust Immune System

If you have a robust immune system, you can be bitten by a tick, and you can be exposed to Lyme, and you may have limited to no symptoms from it for a very long time until your body takes a hit to your immune system. For many people, that hit was COVID. It was a major hit to the immune system. Any virus, any flu, depending on how severe it is. A surgical procedure for women, menopause or childbirth, or emotional upheaval of any type, the loss of a loved one, betrayal by someone, any of those things.

If they are a strong enough hit to your immune system, it will lose containment, and then whatever is there, be it mold that was in your body, be it lime that was in your body, now comes to the fore, and we’ve lost containment and it profoundly affects our body and creates a long, profound, difficult to treat inflammation. It’s really all about inflammation.

That’s very interesting. It makes a lot of sense then. If we have a robust immune system, we can fight that off for a long time, but eventually everybody’s going to take a hit, or many of us took a hit during COVID, as you said.

It depends on how lucky you are and how much God loves you.

Obviously, there are things that we can do to continue to bolster and boost our immunity and our immune system. There are things that we can do to fight inflammation within our bodies, such as antioxidants and all kinds of other modalities to ward off inflammation. Eventually, something that could be in there if we have a mold toxicity or, like you said, Lyme disease or Bartonella living in us, it could come out. What are the things for people tuning in to look for? I imagine there are a lot of people listening to this that either feel like, “Man, I’m tired all the time. Maybe this is what’s wrong.” I know someone who feels tired all the time. Maybe they need to look into some of these things.

  

  

Let’s take a couple of very common symptoms that people tend to minimize. Fatigue being one, cognitive impairment being another one, or joint pain or muscle pain or headaches, are common symptoms that many people go, “I’m just getting older,” or “I do not need to take that into account.” All of those could be the tip of the iceberg, telling us that, “I’m not really operating at full capacity. I really want to go check that out.”

The Hidden Epidemic Of Environmental Illness

I know I’m talking about mold toxicity and Lyme disease, and some of your audience is thinking, that’s rare. Why should I think about that? I want to let the audience know that the CDC now recognizes that there are 675,000 new cases of Lyme recognized every year. We’re talking millions of people in this country who have Lyme disease. Most are unaware of it. It is recognized that there are ten million Americans who have mold toxicity currently, but are unaware of it.

We’re not talking about something rare. Particularly like you’re in Florida, and Florida is, sorry, it’s the second moldiest state in the country, secondary to Texas. I know you want to be Tufts, but you’re not. However, the common issue there is that you both get hit by hurricanes coming off the Gulf that deluge the area with water that’s being thrown at buildings at 80 to 100 miles an hour. Buildings are not really made to take that punishment.

Buildings begin to get water-damaged, and that’s what allows mold to grow. It’s not just Florida and Texas. I live in the Pacific Northwest, which gets heavy rainfall with winds. We’ve got plenty of mold here. There is not a state in the country that does not have mold. To make it, I do not want to scare people, but the government recognizes that in studies that have been done, 47% of all homes and houses were found to have visible or smellable mold present.

We’re not talking about something rare, unique, or that does not happen to anybody. We’re talking about something that if you do have fatigue or cognitive impairment or joint pain or muscle aches or anything more specific, the mold toxicity and Lyme can directly affect the limbic system and vagal systems that we talked about to directly cause anxiety, depression, OCD behaviors, mood swings, and is a direct inflammatory effect on the brain that creates those symptoms.

A lot of symptoms that people attribute to something else could be due to something that is much curable, mole toxicity. We know now how to get the mole toxin out of the body. You do not have to be fatigued, you do not have to be anxious, you do not have to be depressed, and your brain could work better. In the cognition area, I wanted to comment on the work by Dale Bredesen, who is a neurologist who has done some groundbreaking work on Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive impairment.

It is recognized that there are ten million Americans who have mold toxicity currently, but are unaware of it.

When Dale first started publishing his work, he found that 60% of those patients had mold toxicity. The longer he’s been doing it and studying it and researching it, he now finds that 90% of people with Alzheimer’s may have mole toxicity. We’re not talking rare. The really good news is that if you catch it early, it’s treatable.

This is not something you should blow off and go, “I just cannot remember some of those names of that actor on television when they come up or I am having trouble remembering some names and some words.” This may be something you want to take a look at. There’s a very simple test you can do. It’s a urine test. It’s free for Medicare patients that will allow you to know whether there’s mold in your body. This is something that people should be looking at much more because it’s treatable.

Can you share the name of that test?

Multiple tests are out there. There are actually four laboratories in the country that do it. The one that’s covered by Medicare, which is my favorite lab, is Real-Time Laboratories. They’re located in Houston. The test is also done by Vibrant Health, by Mosaic, and there’s a blood test called MyMyco in which all of these can be measured.

If somebody has any of these, as you said, cognitive impairment or cognitive issues or fatigue, for example, those are just two symptoms, but they could take the MyMyco test or one of these urine tests. If they are covered by Medicare, it would be free. That would let them know, yes, you have some mycotoxins in your body built up. Do we need to have a certain level of mycotoxins or above a certain level to say, “That’s causing the issue?”

The way that the real-time lab lays it out, it will literally say present, equivocal, or not present. If you have equivocal or present, it’s there. Just forgive me, this is not rocket science. If you are peeing out of your body, mycotoxins, mold toxins, and we can measure it. It’s in your body. It’s coming from your body. From my experience, and that of most of the people who work in this field, that is by far the most accurate, simple way to make the diagnosis.

You cannot tell if the number is low. That does not necessarily mean that there’s not much in your body because one of the things that mold toxin does is it messes with your body’s ability to detoxify. It literally poisons the organs of detoxification. You could have a boatload of toxins in your body, and you will not be able to pay them out. If you even have what they call an equivocal or a quote light level of mold toxin in your body.

That may mean that there’s a whole lot more of that. As we improve your ability to detoxify later testing, those numbers will shoot up because now you can eliminate into your urine the toxins that are in your body, and we get a much clearer idea. It’s a mistake that people make when they get the test pack and go, “There’s only a little bit in there.” Maybe, and maybe there’s a lot in there. This is the tip of the iceberg. We really need to take that seriously, even from the beginning.

That’s super helpful. That’s something that people who are tuning in, who maybe have brain fog or fatigue, can get this test done. Let’s say they have it. You mentioned just a little while ago that you can actually get the mold toxins out of the body. What are the steps to do that?

There are three main steps to get it out of the body. The first is that you need to identify where it’s coming from. Now that means we need to test your home or workplace for the presence of mold because if you are living in it or working in it, you can do every treatment known, you will not get better. You cannot get better if you’re being exposed to it. Number one, and this is the most common difficulty, is figuring out where it’s coming from.

Now, where you’re living might be okay. You might have picked it up elsewhere earlier in your life. Mold can colonize. That means when you are being exposed to it, mold can start growing in your sinus and gut areas, so that even if you move or you now move from an unsafe location to a safe location, your body is still making mold toxins. The three components are number one, find out if you are currently being exposed, and if so, you either have to remediate it or get out of there.

The Four Pillars Of The Detoxification Process

There’s no compromising with that. Number two, we have now learned that there are very specific binders that can pull the specific mycotoxins out of the body. Thirdly, once the binders are on board, then we’ll use antifungal treatments like nasal sprays for the sinuses and oral treatment for the gut to get out the mold that’s colonized.

Now, in my books, I have tables that lay out which binders work on which mycotoxins. You can literally take your report of what you’ve got in your urine, and it will say, “You’ve got this toxin, this toxin, and this toxin. You can literally look at the table as an example.” Okra toxin is very common. You can literally look in the book, and it’ll go, okra toxin, what binds it?

What binds okra toxin are the medications call esteramine and well coal, charcoal to a lesser extent, and to a lesser extent a fiber called propylmannin. “I know how to do that.” You can look at the next thing. You’ve got trichothecene. What binds that? Trichothecene is bound by charcoal, bentonite clay, and chlorella. You can pinpoint how you want to treat what’s in that person’s body by knowing which binders are going to work on which toxins are coming out of their body.

I’m looking in the book here. I have it in front of me. I’m looking at that chart so I can see. There are things in here like humic acid, zeolite, or cholera, other things that I’ve heard of in the past. I guess that leads me to a question. I want to come back to those specific binders, but it does lead me to a question of whether there are things that we can be doing that prevent the toxins from building up? If I took zeolite on a daily basis or weekly basis to prevent these from building up, is that possible too? Not really.

If you’re living in it, that’s tough. If you’re just being exposed to it, like let’s say you go to a relative’s house that smells moldy, or let’s say you go to a hotel and you get a moldy room. If you took binders at that time, it could help enormously in not having you get any issues from it. When I travel, I carry binders with me wherever I go in case I get exposed somewhere along the line. If you take that one step further, many of my patients who have had mold toxicity, and I will take a little bit of binder every day to help my liver get rid of toxins I’m exposed to.

I believe that, and there’s reason to believe that, taking chlorella, charcoal, and clay a little bit every day will help me from that exposure, and I do that. It’s when I hold my liver out a bit. You can help your liver out by doing something that will get you to sweat, like a sauna, a hot tub, a hot bath, or even a shower. Anything that will get you to sweat will help you get rid of toxins. Those are just basic things that you can do to minimize the effect, not just of mold toxin on your body, but other toxins as well.

What about going for a run? I live in a hot place with a lot of mold. If I run outside in the summer, I’m sweating a lot.

It’s a good way to get rid of toxins.

I guess I’m curious, too, if two people are living in the same home. One is experiencing brain fog, fatigue, and some sensitivities. The other is not at all or does not notice it. Is it possible that one person could really react and have significant issues from mold toxicity, and another person is just dealing with it perfectly okay?

Yes. Not only can it. It’s very common for like 1 or 2 members of the household to be sick and others not. Now, some of that is genetic. To a greater extent, it may have to do more with how that person has coped with stress, so that it has to do more, as we talked about, with how robust that immune system is. However, the natural human tendency is, “I’m fine, and you’re sick, so there’s something wrong with you.” It is not to think, “I’m lucky, and you’re not.” People do not really think that way.

It helps people to begin to grasp the fact that one of their family members or loved ones, or in a classroom, for example, schools are notoriously moldy, government buildings are notoriously moldy, and military bases are notoriously moldy. You’ll have some people sick and some people not. Most of the people who are well are going, “We live in the same environment, and I’m fine. This must be in your head.” It’s not. That does great harm to the person who’s having a difficult time. This is not in their head one bit. This is a diagnosable treatment for congestion, and it’s super helpful to know that.

That’s very interesting. If someone deals with stress, I guess that would make sense. If I’m describing like the couple I’m describing or something in one person, your stress does not really get to them in the same way that it does the other person. Maybe they’re going to that person who doesn’t cope with stress as well or has higher levels of cortisol as a result of their stress. Is going to have more inflammation, is going to have more issues as a result of the mold in there.

We can add another piece to this puzzle, which is mold toxin, and Lyme and Bartonella affect the pituitary’s ability to regulate our hormones. Some people who have adrenal issues or thyroid issues or sex hormone issues, some of that may be coming from mold toxicity, which is preventing their hormones from being in balance, and then getting the mold out obviously can allow their body to get back into balance again.

That’s another puzzle piece that is linked in here and fits together then. If your tuatara or your bioregulators are off, then you’re not dealing with stress. You’re not able to deal with the stress that comes with it as well. That, like the cortisol level, for example, might be elevated, and we cannot regulate it. That’s going to, so it’s a compounding effect.

The more you study it, sorry, the more conflict you get.

When you’re working with your patients, I imagine you have a background in hypnosis and other emotional and spiritual modalities, healing modalities. Do you ever recommend also like meditation or other stress relief?

I’m more specific than I used to be. I personally meditated for 30 years. I have done all kinds of things to learn how to manage my own stress, but we’ve learned that there are specific ways of rebooting the limbic system and the vagal system that are a bit more specific than meditation. Yes, big fan of meditation, big fan of things like Tai Chi and yoga, or anything that helps the body to relax. The word relaxation is not as specific as we need it to be in this context.

We need to specifically go after the limbic and vagal systems, which are being put out of joint by these medical conditions. For example, there are several well-known methods for rebooting the limbic system. There are no hoppers, a dynamic neural retraining system. There’s Ashok Gupta’s amygdala retraining program, and then there’s Cathleen King’s Primal Trust.

These are online programs where you can literally be led step by step on how to reboot that limbic system. Because it’s a package deal, we have to work on our vagal system as well. Now, meditation is more in the vagal category. There are a bunch of new devices on the market that are vagal nerve stimulators that are very helpful. Sound-based healing treatments are safe and sound.

This electrical device, called frequency-specific microcurrent, can reboot the vagal system. There’s another light sound method called brain tap. A whole bunch of ways that are more specific about how to reboot the vagus, how to reboot the limbic system, so that you can really get that person’s nervous system settled down in a much more specific way than we’ve talked about in the past.

That’s really interesting. We have to first take care of the limbic system. If I were just doing brain tap, for example, that’s going to be helpful to some extent. If I still have these neural pathways that need to be retrained through something like primal trust or dynamic neural retraining, that has to happen in conjunction with a brain type.

It’s a package deal. Both the vagal and limbic systems are out there scrutinizing the world for potential threats to safety, if you will. If both systems are hypervigilant and you only acquire one of them, you’re going to stay hypervigilant. You have to work on both. If you want a little more complexity, another system, which also works on safety, called mast cell activation, gets thrown into the mixture here. It is all three systems that are really responsible for patients who become hypersensitive, and they’re all intertwined.

I did read about that in your book, in the One of the most specific symptoms of mast cell activation book, the mast cell activation, but it’s not something I’m super familiar with. Can you kind of break that down? What does mast cell activation mean?

I just cannot. Mast cell activation is much more common than people recognize. Years ago, was thought to be so rare that I had never heard of it until 2016. In 2016, Larry Afrin wrote a book called Never Bet Against Occam: Mast Cell Activation Disease and the Modern Epidemics of Chronic Illness and Medical Complexity, in which he wrote about how many symptoms can be caused by mast cell activation. We have subsequently learned that seventeen percent of the population is prone to it.

Identifying Mast Cell Activation Syndrome

Now, in our patients with mold and Lyme, we’re talking 70% or 80% of them will get mast cell activation. The symptoms of mast cell activation are really similar to the symptoms of Lyme and the symptoms of mold. Teasing it apart can be a little tricky. One of the most specific symptoms of mast cell activation is if you get any symptom that comes on immediately during or after eating, that’s mast cell activation until proven otherwise.

For example, if you get sweating, lightheadedness, palpitations, abdominal cramps, hives, rash, itching, immediately after eating, bloating, or distention, if it comes on immediately, that’s not a food allergy. Food allergy comes on later. Mast cell activation is almost immediate. If that’s the case, then we have to include looking at treating mast cell activation to quiet the system so that our patient will be able to take the things they need to take to get the mold out.

It’s another puzzle piece, like you said.

It is what it is. Again, if your audience has not heard of mast cell activation, you’re going to. Again, 2016. Nobody was talking about it. Ten years later, every major medical center in this country has a mast cell activation clinic. It’s become much more aware in our consciousness that this is a major player that’s keeping a lot of people sick.

I just want to circle back on one thing. The third step, or really the fourth step in getting rid of the mold, mycotoxins, is antifungal treatments. That’s just an oral treatment, or can you give us a couple of examples of that?

Oral for the gut and nasal for the sinuses, like a nasal spray. Examples of that would be most of the people who have mold toxicity will also have Candida. Normally, we have to treat both. That might include medication-wise taking nystatin and or Diflucan for the Candida and taking itraconazole for the mold. In addition, we’ve also learned that mold and candida make a thick layer of glop called biofilm, and it surrounds itself with biofilm so that our immune systems and the medication cannot get at the candida and the mold.

We need to dissolve the biofilm using these biofilm-dissolving agents. There are several products that we like a lot. I use some MCBFM1 from Beyond Balance, and I use some Interphase Plus, which are very good for dissolving biofilm in the gut. If I were going to use nasal sprays, I would typically use colloidal silver as a nasal spray, along with a biofilm dissolving agent and either itraconazole, amphotericin B, or ketoconazole as a mold killing agent in a spray.

These molds are really protected within our bodies, it sounds like. Hard to get at.

Molds are evolutionarily much older and more sophisticated than we are. We’ve only been around for millions of years. They’ve been around for billions of years. Their chemistry is designed to keep them safe, and they do not worry about us very much at all. If you think about it, if mold has colonized in your gut or sinuses, it’s very happy there. It does not just leave because you want it to go. The temperature is perfect. The nutrients abound. It’s moist. It’s damp. Perfect for growing mold and candida in those areas. We have to be really proactive to get it out of there. It typically takes a year or more to get mold out of the body once it’s established.

Molds are evolutionarily much older and more sophisticated than we are.

That’s helpful to note, too, that if someone’s dealing with this, they need to think about a year-long process. It sounds like they could be potentially resolving many other issues, like you mentioned, anxiety or depression, or some of those other issues that people may think are completely unrelated, or actually.

Shifting The Mental Health Narrative

I have a very strong suspicion that a huge percentage of people who are being diagnosed with depression and anxiety are completely unaware of this and are taking medications that will help them feel a bit better, but it’s not getting at the cause. If you can cure and we can do this, we can get rid of the mold or Bartonella or Lyme, whatever it is we’re trying to get rid of, you do not have to be anxious or depressed. It’s not inherent to that person as a being. It’s being triggered by toxins that have been released into that person’s body.

This is super fascinating, so helpful, and so practical for so many. I’m sure there are so many people. I can think of people in my own life that I cannot wait to share some of this with. I’m curious, you’ve been doing this, you’re practicing medicine, you’ve become the healer that you dreamed you would be for 50 years now,

When you think about the future, as you project out over the next 10, 20, 30, maybe even 50 years. What does the future of practicing healing look like? What do you think is on the horizon for the future of medicine? What excites you about what’s ahead for us as we think about extending our health span, living longer lives, living healthier for longer? What do you think is possible and what’s coming?

You’re not going to like my answer. I am an optimist personally, but I look objectively at the world that we’re living in. We have polluted it to an extreme degree, not only with chemicals but with electromagnetic frequencies. We’re not taking global warming seriously. I do have children and grandchildren, and I fear for their future.

What I believe is that we need to wake up and grab hold of our environment and make it safe so we have a future. What I’m looking at now scares me. I’d love to give you a more sanguine, hopeful life is wonderful, and this is great. I know how to help a whole lot of people, but this planet has to come to its senses so that these things become less of an issue.

I have a very strong suspicion that a huge percentage of people who are being diagnosed with depression and anxiety are completely unaware of this.

It is this toxic planet that we live in that’s causing this epidemic of chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and mold and Lyme and cancer and heart disease, you name it. Our bodies are really not designed to live in this toxic environment. My plea is for anyone tuning in to this to talk to whoever you need to talk to, to get our legislators to take this seriously. Big pharma, the chemical industries, and the electrical industries are running the show, and they are not taking the threat to the world seriously, and they must. I usually give a more hopeful answer.

That’s an important answer, though, in what we need to do. If we can do that, clean up and take care of some of these things, then you said you’re an optimist, but we have some work to do.

I believe that we can come to our senses and make these changes, and make this world safer and more livable for our future. We have to do it now.

The time is now. I really appreciate you sharing your wisdom, your experience, and your expertise, which is so deep. We could probably spend many hours diving into all the different fields that you’ve explored. Where can people find you, read more about your work, and connect with you and your work? I know, obviously, your books are available. Can you tell us just where we can connect and get more information?

My website’s simple. It’s NeilNathanMD.com. My books are all available through Amazon. The two books we’ve been talking most about here are Toxic, 2nd Edition: Heal Your Body from Mold Toxicity, Lyme Disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and Chronic Environmental Illness and the Sensitive Patient’s Healing Guide. If those books are not too boring, I’ve got a whole bunch of others, and they’re all on Amazon.

That’s great. NeilNathanMD.com, they can find you. Are you still treating people so that people can come and meet with you?

After 50 years in practice, I retired from practice, but I am consulting. I do a lot of consulting with physicians and their complicated patients, and the information to connect with me is on the website. I have a mentorship program for over 300 physicians where I’m teaching them what I know so that more people can do this.

That’s fantastic. Dr. Nathan, thank you so much for putting in the work over 50 years to become the healer that you are, and now passing that knowledge, wisdom, and expertise onto hundreds and thousands of others. Thank you for the way that you’ve diligently explored to find answers to heal and treat people that no one else could heal or treat. It’s truly a gift and a privilege and an honor to learn from you and to spend this time with you. Thank you so much for just being an amazing inspiration, and thank you for the work you’re doing.

You’re welcome.

Thanks so much for joining us, Dr. Nathan. As I said, true honor and a privilege. I appreciate it. We will have to have you back next time, another time in the future here, when the next book comes out.

The next book I’m working on is much done. We just have to get it to the editor, and off we go.

Sounds good. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Nathan.

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What a fascinating conversation with Dr. Neil Nathan. I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did and learn something new. We live in a very toxic world, and we do not have to settle for living with things like chronic fatigue or brain fog or some of these other symptoms that really can be healed. Even anxiety and depression. He mentioned that 47% of the homes in the United States have been found to have some level of mold in them.

This is a widespread thing that can really be devastating for many people and can really be limiting and hold us back from living our best lives. We talked about some of the steps that can be taken. Step one is to evaluate your environment. You’ve got to find the source if something is going on. You can take the Mycotoxin test. The one that he recommended there was real-time laboratories out of Houston.

That one is covered by Medicare if you happen to be covered there. He has some other specifics around that in his book, Toxic, on page 75. You can look at that. Step three is add a binder that’s specific to the mycotoxins that you have. Something that it’s going to bind to those, breaks down that biofilm, first of all, and then helps your body flush those out. Step four is adding the oral or nasal antifungals to treat the mold that you might have colonized in your body.

Those are the four steps to really deal with this to get it out. Let’s start with maybe getting a test done. If that is you or someone that you know, they can test my mycotoxin test or the real-time lab test and evaluate there. He also mentioned 90% of people who have Alzheimer’s probably have some form of mold toxicity, which is just amazing. It’s something that we really want to deal with.

He mentioned that at the end, we do live in a world that has become heavily polluted in many ways with mycotoxins and others. We need to all do our part to care for one another and to care for our environment, and really to get this cleaned up, so that we can no longer suffer from these things, but we can continue to thrive and grow as we move into the future.

I hope that you will check out Dr. Nathan’s work, NeilNathanMD.com. His book Toxic, 2nd Edition: Heal Your Body from Mold Toxicity, Lyme Disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and Chronic Environmental Illness, and his other books are also available on Amazon. Check out his work, connect with him. He’s obviously a deep wellspring of knowledge, expertise, and wisdom. Thanks so much for tuning in. We’ll see you back here next time on the show. Have a great day. 

  

Important Links

• Dr. Neil Nathan
• The Sensitive Patient’s Healing Guide
• Mold Warriors
• Never Bet Against Occam: Mast Cell Activation Disease and the Modern Epidemics of Chronic Illness and Medical Complexity
• Toxic, 2nd Edition: Heal Your Body from Mold Toxicity, Lyme Disease, Multiple Chemical Sensitivities, and Chronic Environmental Illness