When you suspect or receive a diagnosis of mold illness, you need to perform tests to determine the next best steps for you. You were uniquely created. Mold is tricky, very invasive and affects everyone differently. It’s critical to do your homework so you don’t inadvertently make yourself worse when trying to heal like I did at first.
2 Quick Reminders About Mold
First, please don’t think that your home is too new, too newly renovated, or too clean to have a mold problem. In hundreds of cases, mold has shown up in places no one suspected.
Second, by the time you can see mold with the naked eye, it has already grown to a colony of millions of cells growing together. And by that time, it has already metastasized into the air to create colonies in other places.
But also remember, you can take back control of your environment and your health. Here’s how to get started.
Home Mold Tests to Determine Your Place of Exposure
Mold can create health problems long before you ever see it. It can also hide in places you can’t see – in large quantities. This includes places like dust, carpet, in wall or ceiling cavities, HVAC/air conditioning systems, crawl spaces, subfloors, or basements.
1 As a cheap test, you can get a petri dish mold test for around $10 from Home Depot or your local hardware store. This will test for mold in the air and for around $40, can usually be sent into a lab to see what type of mold it is. However, most of those don’t test for the molds that will really harm you.
2 A better test is the ERMI test (Environmental Relative Moldiness Index test). With an ERMI test, you will order a kit that gets shipped to you, collect a dust sample and send it to a lab that specializes in this type of test, such as Mycometrics in New Jersey. The ERMI test costs considerably more, but typically tests for 36 different species of mold.
You can perform an ERMI mold test 2 ways – either with a vacuum attachment or a Swiffer anti-static cloth. You will collect dust from your master bedroom or living room, or in less traveled areas.
Your ERMI score depends on the distribution and types of mold present. An ERMI score of 5 is moldier than 75% of American homes. If you are genetically a sensitive person, your score should always be below +2. If you are extremely sensitive, it should be below -1.
3 You can also do a mold test called a HERTSMI-2, which only detects 5 mold species and can also be done one of two ways. You can order a HERTSMI-2 test kit, like you would the ERMI test kit, and send it to the lab. Or you can perform an ERMI test and calculate your HERTSMI-2 score, which should be below 11.
You can calculate your HERTSMI-2 score from ERMI test scores by adding up the scores from these 5 mold species:
- Aspergillus penicillioides
- Aspergillus versicolor
- Chaetomium globosum
- Stachybotrys chartarum
- Wallemia sebi
The total score for these should be below 11.
When you identify which molds you’ve been exposed to and the amount of spores for each one, you will have better information to plan smarter next steps. You will better see the extent of damage in your environment, a clearer picture of your source so you can remediate as needed and which molds you need to especially avoid (since you also get exposed through foods) so you can heal.
Functional Mold Tests That Will Guide Your Next Steps in Healing
Next, you can perform functional mold tests on your body that will determine which mold mycotoxins you need to detox out so you can heal.
4 You can do a Visual Contrast Sensitivity (VCS) test (survivingmold.com or vcstest.com) on your eyes to check your ability to detect contrast – that is, the degree to which light and dark areas of an image differ in brightness. This only costs around $15 and is a good way to get a baseline result and see if you are making progress in your treatment as you go.
5 You can do the Mycotoxin test at home and send it to the lab to identify which mycotoxins are in your body. This just involves taking some glutathione about 24 hours or more before testing through a urine sample.
6 My favorite test to do is the OAT. It does have fungal markers, gut dysbiosis, as well as it shows if your detox pathways are having troubles.
If you have mold illness, you will likely also have gut problems such as Leaky Gut. For this reason, I also recommend the Gut Zoomer. This takes a close look at the microbial world that exists in our gut, and how it affects our daily functions. And the Cyrex array #10 test for food intolerances. Parasites and food intolerances can quitely cause more inflammation and damage to your immune system. With mold illness, you need to give your body all the support you can while minimizing potential harm (removing the layers of toxins).
7 The Gut Zoomer is an easy, albeit icky, stool test. I recommend taking a biofilm reducer for a few days to a week before you take your stool sample and send it to the lab. This tests for a bunch of different parasites, and in most cases, you can use natural remedies to get rid of them. It also tells you the condition of your microbiome, if you have leaky gut, and a host of other things.
8 Cyrex labs array #10 is a blood test and tests for food intolerances. However, you must eat the foods as a general rule to see if there is an intolerance to it.
9 A comprehensive thyroid test will also help you identify proper next steps to heal, because it provides a thorough, more detailed evaluation of your thyroid function. This blood test evaluates your free t4, free t3, rt3, TSH, and antibodies.
You can do many other tests to help with your healing journey, but these are the best ones to do in the beginning. If you can only do one, do the OAT, because knowing if your detox pathways are open is the most important.
It’s important to remember that you will not likely heal if you are in the moldy environment that made you sick. If you skip the homework on your environment, your attempts to heal may be a waste of valuable time and money, not to mention delayed good health.
So perform your environmental tests and your initial mold tests to get a clear picture of what’s going on with your body. As you wait for the lab results for your body, look for and move into a healthy space so you can heal.
These beginning steps can be the most difficult to navigate because in mold illness, your emotions tend to run wild anyhow. If you’d like professional help determining the right next steps for your mold illness healing, Click here to set up a complimentary Breakthrough call to see if we could work together.
