What is mold illness?

Mold illness, also called Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome (CIRS), is a multi-system, multi-symptom illness triggered by exposure to biotoxins produced by mold in water-damaged buildings. It affects the immune, neurological, hormonal, and gastrointestinal systems and is frequently misdiagnosed as fibromyalgia, lupus, multiple sclerosis, or chronic fatigue syndrome.

What are the symptoms of mold illness?

Mold illness symptoms span multiple body systems and include fatigue, brain fog, memory problems, headaches, joint pain, muscle aches, shortness of breath, chronic sinus issues, sensitivity to light, mood changes, anxiety, depression, digestive problems, and sleep disturbances. Symptoms often worsen in water-damaged environments and improve temporarily when away from them.

Why do most doctors miss mold illness?

Most conventional physicians are not trained in Environmental Medicine and are unfamiliar with mycotoxin testing or CIRS diagnostic criteria. Symptoms overlap with many other conditions, and standard lab panels often miss mold illness entirely. Specialized testing including urine mycotoxin panels, inflammatory marker panels, and HLA-DR genetic testing are required for accurate diagnosis.

How is mold illness diagnosed?

Mold illness is diagnosed through a combination of a detailed patient history, environmental exposure assessment, and specialized laboratory testing including urine mycotoxin testing, inflammatory markers (TGF-beta, MMP-9, C4a), HLA-DR genetic susceptibility testing, and visual contrast sensitivity testing. At Deeper Healing, diagnosis begins with a comprehensive intake questionnaire and is confirmed through targeted lab panels.

How is mold illness treated?

Effective mold illness treatment requires first removing the patient from the source of exposure, then systematically reducing mycotoxin burden in the body using binders, detoxification protocols, IV nutritional therapy, cellular cleanse therapies, and immune system support. At Deeper Healing, treatment follows a sequenced protocol that addresses each phase of recovery — elimination, detoxification, and rebuilding — in the correct order.

Do I have to live in Charleston to become a patient at Deeper Healing?

No. Deeper Healing serves patients from across the United States. Many travel to Charleston for the Stay + Heal program, an immersive multi-day treatment experience designed specifically for patients who cannot access this level of care locally. Mycotoxin home test kits can also be shipped to your location before your first visit.

What is mycotoxin testing and do I need it?

Mycotoxin testing is a urine-based laboratory test that measures the presence and levels of specific fungal toxins in your body. It is one of the most direct ways to confirm biotoxin exposure. Deeper Healing offers both in-office and mail-in home testing kits. If you have unexplained chronic symptoms — especially fatigue, brain fog, or immune dysfunction — mycotoxin testing is an important diagnostic step.

Does insurance cover mold illness treatment at Deeper Healing?

Deeper Healing is a self-pay practice. Most environmental and functional medicine services are not covered by conventional health insurance. However, financing options are available to make treatment accessible. Patients frequently find that the investment in root-cause treatment reduces or eliminates the ongoing costs of managing symptoms through conventional care.

Can mold illness cause autoimmune disease?

Yes. Prolonged mycotoxin exposure and the chronic inflammatory response it triggers can activate or worsen autoimmune conditions. Mold illness is frequently misdiagnosed as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and sarcoidosis. At Deeper Healing, we assess environmental toxin exposure as a root cause in all autoimmune presentations.

How long does it take to recover from mold illness?

Recovery from mold illness varies significantly depending on duration of exposure, mycotoxin burden, genetic susceptibility, and whether the patient has been removed from the source. Some patients experience significant improvement within weeks of beginning a targeted protocol. Others with longer-standing illness and higher toxin loads require months of treatment. At Deeper Healing, patients typically report meaningful progress during and shortly after their initial treatment period.

Watch on DrTalks

Reversing Arterial Aging: Drea’s Life-Saving Journey

Arterial aging can happen silently — even in young, healthy people with no obvious symptoms — and standard heart tests often won’t catch it until the damage is already severe.
Heavy metals like mercury, lead, and arsenic accumulate in the body over time and are a direct driver of accelerated vascular aging — toxin load is a cardiovascular risk factor most doctors never discuss.
With the right targeted interventions — including chelation and phosphatidylcholine IV therapy — it’s possible to not just slow arterial aging but actively reverse it, as Drea’s decade of restored arterial health proves.

About the Expert

Danielle Howley

Patient Advocate and Founder of Deeper Healing

Danielle Howley co-founded Deeper Healing by literally stalking Dr. Bauerschmidt. She was on a mission – determined to create an innovative, compassionate healing center she desperately searched for but could never find during the ten years her husband was chronically ill and bedridden (healed for years now and the inspiration behind Deeper Healing). Danielle holds a Bachelor of Science from Drexel University with a Minor in Psychology and attended graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, where she focused on Education, Culture and Society. She's spent her entire career at the intersection of marketing and health/wellness. For twenty years, she ran a marketing consulting firm building campaigns for major clients including Aetna U.S. Healthcare, University of Pennsylvania Medical School, Novartis, Chester County Hospital, and Vanguard. Her personal journey into environmental medicine began when her firstborn arrived prematurely, pushing her to create a safe, non-toxic home environment. That commitment intensified when her husband became mysteriously, severely ill. Eventually, she combined her professional expertise with her hard-won personal experience to help others heal naturally through Deeper Healing—a dream come true.Through the years, Danielle became intimately connected to so many patient recovery stories that she wanted to create a platform for them to share their healing journeys in their own words. That vision became The Deeper Healing Podcast.

Guest

Dr. Michael Bauerschmidt

Founder and Medical Director of Deeper Healing

Dr. Michael Bauerschmidt is a leading Environmental and Functional Medicine Physician and Founder of Deeper Healing Medical Wellness Center in Charleston, South Carolina. After his own health crisis pushed him beyond the limits of conventional medicine, he trained in environmental medicine and has since helped hundreds of patients uncover the hidden root causes behind their chronic illness — including mold exposure, toxin overload, and immune dysfunction. His approach is simple: find what's wrong, reduce the burden, and give the body what it needs to heal.

If you just kill the cancer, you may win the battle, but you're going to lose the war. So if you get a 52% kill rate with ivermectin and a 50% Kill rate, with curcumin, But you know, a 10% rate kill with phenbendazole.

Why bother with Phenbendeazol? But be sure I'm going be doing curicumin and IV vitamin C or ibermctin, and whatever. You know if I get anything that has over a 40-45% percent killrate, I am going pay attention to.

Welcome to the Deeper Healing Podcast. I'm your host, Danielle Howley. This is for everyone who's been dismissed, misdiagnosed or told to just live with it and refuse to accept that answer.

You're going to hear amazing patient recovery stories, raw and real in their own words. People who found answers after everything had failed them. you're gonna hear from medical experts we trust that are pioneering new approaches to healing the body because we deeply know we're designed to heal.

Let's dig in. Hi, it's Danielle here at Deeper Healing and I'm here with Drea and she's got a crazy health story. And when I heard that I was like, is that even possible?

So this is what happened. She basically in the last year took 10 years off her vein health. So what does that mean? And all of her other doctors are like, wait a minute, this isn't even possible.

So let's talk about, first of all, you're young, and you are beautiful. You're very healthy. I would not look at you and go, well, Toria really needs to worry about her heart health.

That is not something that I, or your vein health, I will not have said that. So what even made you think to look into this in the first place? So it's been about eight years now that my mom had a triple bypass and she didn't actually have a heart attack, but she had triple a bypass.

I was already concerned that it could be something inherited or whatnot. so I had an heart cath score test, which tests, basically if you're going to have heart attacks, it predicts those kind of things.

and the ideal number is zero, which is what mine was. So it was absolutely perfect. But then, fast forward a few years later, my friend, who was a doctor, actually started living with me and had an ultrasound where he could ultrasound the carotid artery.

And I love any kind of numbers, so I was like, sure, let's do it. And when he got the result back, my arterial age and my carotid artery was 10 years older than my actual age.

So I started getting concerned. And talking with him, he was like, you know, it's related to cholesterol, blah blah, so I cut out all meat at supper base.

and I was like, it's gonna be better, It's going to be great. About a year later, I retested and i was 20 years older in my arteries than my actual age, so I really started getting freaked out.

So then I went down this whole rabbit hole and in the meantime, i had already scheduled an appointment with Dr. Bowersmith. I hadn't met with him yet.

Um, I didn't even know about the carotid artery thing. I was just looking at overall health when I met him. So when i started researching it, i found this thing out in California called Plaquex.

And it was the only thing that I could found with any semblance that could reverse this arterial beginning, other than maybe like this thing called the Ornish diet, which was extremely strict diet that may at least stop the aging of it, but not reverse it to this extent.

So I like mostly I'll hear people talk about just like preventing it getting worse. But you don't actually hear about like a dramatic like healing it making it better.

When I went to retest it most recently, he was like, if you haven't progressed, that's a win. But that's how to win for me because I was already 20 years older.

And again, in every other way, shape, or form, I feel like I'm physically much younger than my actual age. So yeah, it really scared me. Yeah. Especially after my mom had this triple bypass and she did not have a heart attack.

It's me that was a direct correlation to where I headed. Yes. There's got to be something you can do about this. We just have too much technology. I found the single plaque at the Californian And so then I started researching, well, who near me could do that?

And again, I already had this appointment with Bowers that scheduled, but I had not been. And sure enough, Deeper Healing had the ability to do this. I think it's phosphatidylcholine is what the IV is.

Anyway, so even before I met with him, or right around then when I first met him and we started scheduling the BlackX, and I actually I did 36 rounds because the best ideal treatment they say is between like 20 or 40 to get the most bang for your buck and I knew I wanted to go all in because I needed a substantial reversal.

So I 36 round and in between then I was traveling and stuff and so I didn't want to give up my travel plan so i did a phospholipid on the go kind of in the two months in-between the series of 10 or 26 or whatever it was.

So then when I retested, again, my mainstream doctor said, if you just don't move any forward, we'll consider that a win. But I actually reversed my arterial aid 10 years.

So again that's life-changing and life saving. Literally life-saving. So when I asked Dr. V about your case, he was like, the key thing that she did was the chelating with the PTC.

The PPC is the possibility of colon. It was that combination. I also just did a heavy metal decox during that time. He said that was key. And it was actually only, the window that I did it, was about eight months.

Again, I was traveling out of the country for two months, so in that time I just did some kind of maintenance things. So I didn't stick it all in one chunk, but I do the full IV chelation, and I'd do DMSA, then Metapur, whatever.

Yeah, you were doing IV and oral pilating. Correct. And then you're kind of also doing that with the PDC too. Absolutely. We're doing the IV on the oral.

But you were basically consistently kind-of like pulling it down over, but you think about a short period of time. Yeah. Eight months, nine months. to go from I think your your day I was looking at your test it was like an arterial age of 74. Yeah, and you're in your 50s and your super healthy like this is a super Healthy girl.

So yeah, you are in a really bad path. This is one of those silent suffering kind of things where Yeah, I wouldn't have known until it was 2A. You never would have been in until 2. And I would not have even thought to have the test, except for again my friend had it and so it's accessible and I was like, let's do it.

I wonder if you didn't had your mom. Like I… I wondered if I had been as concerned because immediately after she had that triple bypass I went and did all the things like EKGs and again the heart cath score and everything was perfect.

Yeah. So it did make me more at least content about paying attention. So I think your story is extreme because you're so young, so healthy, and it was so severe.

But imagine how many people are out there that have that. have that high, what did Dr. B said? He's like, it's just like when you're soaking the pan and you have all that hard stuff on the edge.

And then you are like it is softly coming off and then it going down the drain. That's pretty much what's happening. She cleared out her vein, that improves your entire circulation system, the oxygen delivery, this cell health, your blood health your energy level.

I mean everything, every part of your body is improved by having healthy veins and healthy blood flow. So, I mean, it sounds like, oh yeah, that's great 20 years, but it is literally life-saving and life extending.

For sure. By doing that. And as we age as women, we lose the estrogen, which keeps our arteries more pliable. So it's things you don't really, again, notice that are happening internally.

Yes. And you know, it's funny, I think chelation gets a bad rap, because if you start researching it, there's so much pro and con, and then people get confused about what to do.

And one thing no one ever really talks about is vein health. I hear a lot about even my own chalation story, like I have very high lead. My thing is I'm all about preserving my brain.

Look at all these memory care facilities. They're packed with people that are losing their minds, early dementia, Alzheimer's. Everyone you meet in their 40s is like, I can't think of the word.

It's toxins, people. Its toxins. This is, and I have no doubt that that was a big contributing factor to your story. My numbers, especially mercury and lead were very high, but a lot of them were high.

My mainstream doctor told me not to worry about it, because even by mainstream standards, my arsenic was very high. I'm still not sure if it was from a sea salt or where it's coming from, but it is astronomically high and again my mainstream doctors was like, don't worry it out.

It's organic. But to have all those things building up in my body and because I am pescetarian, it may have added to the mercury lead levels. Now they're back in a much healthier range, but I'm still knowing what I do now and how much I can sift things.

I will still work on getting those down further and my arterial age down. I had an 80-year-old woman here. She would come in and she would do a chelation.

And I was like, how often are you going to do this? She's like when I stop coming, I'm done. I said, oh my God, because she said I know it's great maintenance for me.

It was kind of my first epiphany of like oh, this is something that is like a constant You know, if it's constantly coming in. So doing some like, I feel like what you did was you just hit the reset button.

You just kind of like pulled it way down, got yourself back to kind like where you should have been at your age. And, you know just adding quality and adding, quality years of health to your life.

Amazing. I hope somebody out there hears this story and is inspired or sent. It's funny, it was talking to someone in here today, doing a really cool recording today.

They're like, oh my gosh, I know some people that need that. You can do better than just not making it worse, right? What if you could actually heal and get actually better, improve your health?

That's what we want to do in deeper healing. We want find out what's the culprit and go after it. As Dr. B says, put out the fire, but also find the arsonist and arrest them.

And I'm really, really excited for your results. Thanks for sharing it, sharing these stories are huge for people. You don't get this kind of information anywhere.

Hi everybody, I thought it would be really awesome because Dreya's story is so amazing. I want to hear medically, because I know there's people out there that geek out about the stuff, like how did that even work?

So how Let's be clear on a couple of points first, Danielle. Okay. I think I screwed something up. Yeah, she did. One, we're talking about arterial age, not vein age.

The tests that Drea was referring to is called carotid Doppler or carotted ultrasound, where they actually measured the thickness of the lining of wall of artery.

OK. Thicker it is, the more advanced the age because we are all kind of like we aren't getting any younger. So what she did is she reversed that age from going 10 years older than her biological age back to her biologic age, which is phenomenal in and of itself.

There's no reason that was clearly evident that she should have had that advanced aging other than maternal history. So that aside, why did that work?

Plaquex is actually the trademark name for the IV that the Anazale company uses to describe their IV product or IV formulation of phosphatidylcholine.

Phosphatidylocholene is a very important component of our cell membranes. we actually use it to repair our cell membranes. And by its nature, phosphatidylcholine is actually, it's fatty.

Okay. Believe it or not, if someone calls you a fathead, thank them. because over half your brain is lipid. We are really fatty organisms. Everything we have has to be fat soluble.

It has be able to transferred across the cell membrane. The phosphatidylcholine is one of the big reasons that we can because our cell membranes aren't just like one continuous border like you would see in a garden or on a map.

It's actually a lattice work of interconnected strands, and the phosphatidylcholine is an important part of that strand work that allows molecules to slip through those holes and be transferred across into the cytoplasm of the cell where all the work takes place.

The cytoplasm of the cell is in and of itself a huge place. But bottom line, what we're doing here was helping her dissolve the plaque with the use of phosphatidylcholine, because it will rebuild cell membranes and also transport lipids and cholesterol.

So it can work in the way of rebuilding damaged cells, which is why you started developing the plaques to begin with. OK. And also it helps remove the plaque, helps dissolve the pla and return it into your circulation.

So was that, so the metals were almost like the sticky part, like because she had it, she was doing them with chelation. Yeah. And so as she's taking her metal level down, then the phosphatidylcholine is like the grease that's kind of like letting it come out?

Well, kind sort of, you know, and let's back up a little bit historically. Phosphatidylcholene was kind happened on accidentally by a German physician years ago and healing one of his, I think it was a family member actually.

that had a heart attack, and I don't know the circumstances around it, but the phosphorylcholine seemed to help improve their health. Initially, it was primarily used in addition to chelation.

Why? Because the metals are the irritants that cause the cell membrane. Actually, as has been shown in animal models, that things like mercury and lead interfere with an enzyme that we need to prevent plaque deposition.

Okay. So the metals actually permit the plaque deposition and whether that's a direct toxic effect to the cell or not, I can't tell you, but we know that if we eliminate the metal, that enzyme comes back in the thing and we reduce plaque.

Okay, so getting rid of the, in this case, the the medals are the arsenis that started the fire. The plaque is the fired. We get rid the we get the arsonist.

put out the fire. And so that's why that was working well together, and that is why she was doing those kind of back to back in a regular way. Exactly.

Now, if someone's out here going, okay, can I do this orally? You can. It takes a lot longer, of course. I mean, in general, it's generally conceded that around 20 IV treatments is pretty much what you need.

In general, if you were trying to rebuild your cell membranes orally, you're looking at a three-month period before you notice any kind of changes and six months before, I probably got my maximum benefit.

Anything you take IV is certainly you get 100% absorption. Orally? Who knows? Depends on what shape your gut's in. Because I was thinking they wouldn't be able to do it oraly because I Would you still do it the metals the metal removal and the phosphatidylcholine?

Oh, yeah Yeah, I think that that is that isn't and for many years it was that was they were done in conjunction with one another. Okay? We know that they both work independently as well Okay I haven't um, you know the there is this trial to assess chelation therapy to look at people that had a heart attack and they receive chalation and there was a decided benefit if you had chelasin in terms of reducing your chance of another heart Attack The Fosatile Choline has clearly also been shown independently to also help remove plaque and rebuild cell membrane loss in that respect, because it can help the body detoxify because as you break down the cell wall or rebuild a cellwall, things are being let loose and back into the circulation.

So there's other benefits besides the plaque removal that Fossatilcholine can provide. But I'm not aware of any study that said that we get X amount with chelation, X mount with plaque X, but we got 5X with using them combined.

OK. That's really cool. I mean, what's great is like so many of the doctors I've talked to and obviously patients are like, I didn't even know this was possible.

So it's like I think this is one of those things where we had some wisdom and we maybe lost it on the way. Oh, there's lots we've lost along the way. I know.

So I love sharing stories like this because I think Dre is a perfect example of someone who is the picture of how takes really good care of herself and was told there was nothing that could be done.

Now she's like, There was so much that can be died. And I'm so excited and I want more people to know about it. And that is literally the purpose of this podcast.

My hope is that the right people find this, but I wanted you to kind of explain. Obviously, I botched that. I thought it was vein health, vein, artery, all the same.

But, you know, also, like I know I'm dealing with my metals, more I've more concerned about my neurological symptoms. She's getting all of the benefits.

of getting those heavy metal loads down. But then the direct benefit to her artery problems. That's the demonstrable benefit. Yes. I mean, this is something that's really easy to do.

It's a simple outpatient test. Any hospital and a lot of outpatient radiology places can do carotid Dopplers and just measure that thickness. There was another interesting, just looking back, there was an article out of Japan that looked at carotted artery thickness and they did, they measured after 10, 20 and 30 chelations.

And each time they do another set of 10 that arterial improved, that artery health improved. So by itself it's effective as well. Is that only preventing heart attacks?

Oh, gosh, no. I mean, this is cleaning all your arteries. It doesn't just go to the carotid artery. Well, that's what I was thinking. No, I guess that was when I said vein health.

That's improving your circulation in every way. These are your main highways that you're clearing up. Your arterial health is the stuff that gets plugged up and deprives the body of oxygen.

You quit making energy, you quit make an energy and start dying. OK, all right. And for someone so young, so I mean, that's the surprising part. Most people, I means, she's my age.

I'm not out here checking my artery health. That's just not something I've doing. Mm hmm. Not thinking about that. So it was interesting. The only reason she had the thought to do that was just from her her family history.

But we've had plenty of people in here who are like, oh, very worried. And often they're just getting on a stat. You know, they are just doing the prophylactic thing of like, I'm going to get on the statin and pull down my…

You brought this up. Now you got to listen to the story. Okay. 1992 or 93. I am running the ER at Imperial Point Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

And a drug representative from Eli Lilly walks in, and drug rep never came into the ER, because they got nothing to sell me. I mean, I'm like, going to treat you in the street chair, or I'll treat in a vet.

OK, one of those two things. And I don't write a lot of prescriptions. He comes in and he says, listen, Doc, the next heart attack patient you have, you've got to give them my statin drug.

I'm going, what in God's holy name do I want to give somebody that's having a heart attack something to prevent a hear attack? He says, no, it doesn't work by reducing cholesterol.

It works through an anti-inflammatory effect like aspirin. And I went, that interesting, I might want do that then. I checked the emergency medicine literature and there were a few articles about it actually at the time.

Then all of a sudden those articles disappeared. And I often wondered why. And then I thought about it and I said, if people were reasoning that if it works like an aspirin, why not just give them an asprin?

And the drug companies, so they buried the articles, which they can do, and they do on a regular basis when things don't go to their bottom line. Because at one point, just the Lipitor was a $9 billion a quarter profit maker.

So bottom line is inflammation is the enemy, it's not the cholesterol. It's the oxidation of the LDL which happens as a result of inflammation that makes it sticky.

Okay. There you go, folks. That's straight from the medical director of Deeper Healing. And now you understand what happened with Drea's story, which is an incredible healing story that many, many people need.

Thanks for listening. We hope this episode inspired you. Here's how to go deeper. Visit deeperhealing.com to become a patient. Online we have loads of courses and a free toxin quiz.

Subscribe and please, please share this episode with someone who needs it. It's always that one-on-one support that really gets people to find deeper healing.

Remember, this is educational content, not medical advice. The information shared here should be discussed with your own personal healthcare provider.

If you're excited by listening to the medical experts or the personal recovery stories on here and you want to start your deeper healing journey, go to deeperhealing.com and start the process.