• October 9, 2018

Mold/Fungus

Mold/Fungus

Mold/Fungus 150 150 larrybreedlove

One of the drawbacks to living in Central Texas is the fact that this area has high levels of molds nearly all year. When it’s rainy, we have wet mold. When it’s hot, we have dry mold. Many of my patients have remarked that when they leave the Austin area, they feel great, and when they come back, they feel bad again. I believe our moldy environment is responsible for this phenomenon.

This brings us to the issue of chronic sinusitis and allergies. In 1999 the Mayo Clinic did a study on chronic sinusitis and found that over 90% of the people with this condition had a fungal infection. Fungi love warm, moist, internal surfaces in humans. Areas like the digestive tract, the genitourinary tract and the respiratory tract are fertile ground for cultivating these unwanted creatures. Once established, they become a constant irritant to the tissue and make you more susceptible to viruses, bacteria and allergies. When secondary bacterial infections set in, the common treatment is antibiotics. While this usually handles the bacterial infection, it does nothing to solve the primary fungal infection and often makes it worse.

To make matters more complicated, this same Mayo Clinic study found that there are three types of people. There are people who are not allergic to mold; people who have a regular allergy to mold and people who have an exaggerated hyper-immune response to mold. It is estimated that one in six people fall into this last category. Their response to mold is thousands of times greater than other people. In the medical world, their condition is referred to as  Eosinophilic Fungal Rhinosinusitis (EFR).

While the regular mold allergy causes typical allergy symptoms of the nose and eyes, EFRS causes a systemic hyper-immune response in the entire body. The systemic symptoms of this include the following:

  1. Chronic Sinusitis
  2. Asthma
  3. Esophagitis (often misdiagnosed as GERD)
  4. Secondary bacterial sinus infections
  5. Chronic fatigue
  6. Fibromyalgia
  7. Chronic ear infections in children
  8. Digestive complaints
  9. Sleep disturbance
  10. Psychiatric problems

People with EFR are often the hardest patients to figure out. Their immune, nervous and endocrine systems are a jumbled mess and they rarely respond well to adjustments or nutrition.

The signs that you might have EFR are fairly simple. Do you experience sinus swelling and irritation most of the time? Do you seem to have chronic immune, neurological or hormone problems that do not respond to treatment? It should be noted that EFR, by itself, does not cause sneezing or runny mucous.  If any of this sounds like you, then you may be one of the 17% of the population with EFR. Fortunately, there is a good nutritional protocol which can make life in Central Texas much more pleasant. If interested, ask for further details.

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