Welcome to our podcast, where I Kealy Severson, Alicia Swamy, and Erik Johnson are exposing mold. Today we are discussing the late Dr. Cheney and his pivotal role in helping create the 1988 Holmes definition of chronic fatigue syndrome. He was one of the doctors that called the CDC in to investigate the Lake Tahoe outbreak when a group of teachers all got sick in the same room. Erik, can you tell us how you met Dr. Cheney?
Erik Johnson:Yeah, the epidemic among the teachers occurred in November of 1984. Well, I had been teaching hang gliding down on the coast and living in an RV, and as told in Dr. Shoemaker's, books, mold warriors and surviving mold, I had been seeing a strange illness of people getting sick in certain buildings. And then I got sick myself from mold growing in my RV. I got progressively sicker and sicker and because I had already tangled with mold from early childhood, I was able to go into the places where these people were getting sick, and feel that they were being affected by the same substance. So by late summer of 1984, I had become so sick, that I actually had to stop my job of teaching hand gliding, a few weeks earlier than the season normally would have lasted. Returned to Lake Tahoe where my family lives and I was staying with my brother barely able to move. And my mother and my brother basically carried me across the street to a local doctor's office, who happened to be Dr. Paul Cheney. And this illness, this type of illness presentation completely mystified him. He'd never heard of people getting sick from mold before. And although he was a really super nice guy, and didn't doubt a word I said, he could find no explanation for it. So after several months of doing testing, he told me, we are at an impasse, I'm completely stymied, there is no medical explanation in the literature for what you're describing, so I suggest that you go down to the big clinics in Reno, where maybe they've heard of your type of illness. So in essence, after Cheney threw me out of his practice, because he had no answers, which was a good and honest thing to do, because he was sincerely trying to help me. Well, a month later, a strange flu started passing through Lake Tahoe, and everybody was scared to death of this flu. We did everything we could, all the same type of avoidance behaviors that people are doing now for COVID, social distancing, nobody was wearing masks at that time. But people were staying home, restaurants were closing, it was a really scary time. A co worker got this flu, and he decided to go home and sleep it off. And within a couple of weeks, he didn't show up for work. And people went to check on him, and he had passed away. So this flu was really a devastating hardcore type of flu. I managed to stay out of its way for quite a while. But eventually, I did catch this flu. And that's what really laid me out good. So I returned to Dr. Cheney, because I heard that he and Dr. Peterson, were seeing patients with this kind of flu, and he welcomed me back and in this way, I became a part of the original 160 at Lake Tahoe, otherwise known as the original chronic fatigue syndrome cohort. I reminded Dr. Cheney, how my precursor illness was actually initiated by toxic mold. And this didn't seem to bother him, because in his view, the long term illness the chronic malady was triggered by many different factors. So this didn't really interfere with his concepts, or with the CDC's view of what was going on at this time. But then Dr. Cheney and Dr. Komaroff who came to investigate the Tahoe outbreak noticed that all the clusters were occurring in sick buildings. The original cluster at Truckee high school that caught their attention, where 10 teachers got sick in the same room. This defied all explanation. So Dr. Cheney reported to the local newspaper that perhaps a reason why Incline Village High School had escaped this illness, while hit so hard in the other schools and casino had to do with the sick building syndrome. But at this time, they had no idea what was causing sick building syndrome. They thought it was chemicals. Mold wasn't even on the radar. So when Dr. Cheney asked me if I would assist him in putting out evidence that would help him get the CDC to take this seriously. He told me an interesting story. He said there was a flu like illness that had been traveling across the United States for several years, was called the EBV syndrome. And this is what he had Dr. Peterson were testing people for and many were showing up positive, but I was negative for EBV. Yeah, I had all the same signs and symptoms, the same immune deficiencies, everything on a test, except for the EBV. So his plan was to find as many people as possible who are EBV negative, to get this Center for Disease Control to reconsider their EBV driven hypothesis, and factor in some of these other things, other viruses, or environmental factors, which might be a contributor. So I initially said, Well, we know that the Center for Disease Control is trying to disregard the EBV illness by saying, well, it's caused by many other things. It's caused by stress, it's caused by pesticides, it's caused by poor nutrition, cigarette smoking, alcohol abuse, any number of things. If I agree to help you start the syndrome, and they find out that I'm a toxic mold sufferer, they could use this as an excuse to ignore the viral component. Dr. Cheney said, Well, that doesn't matter. Good researchers will come, they will take all these factors into account and we'll settle this matter. So I finally agreed. And in this way, that's how I became the first prototype for what was eventually called chronic fatigue syndrome.
Kealy Severson:So Dr. cheney was aware of the sick building component?
Erik Johnson:Yes, very much so. This is documented in the papers that he and all the researchers were extremely aware of this, but at the time, toxic mold of any kind, had not been discovered and entered into the medical literature. So as far as they were concerned, mold was just an allergy. And there was no evidence for anything in addition to that.
Kealy Severson:I have a question about Dr. Cheney looking into this EBV syndrome before this outbreak, does this mean they were looking at a similar set of illness presentation, and they were calling it EBV syndrome thinking that's what it was? And then this came along and presented similar so they were trying to see if it was the same?
Erik Johnson:Absolutely.
Kealy Severson:So that's really interesting, because that would mean in the history, he was looking at the same illness presentation before he even really knew that he was looking at any of it.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, the only difference immunologically between the epstein-barr virus syndrome, and what happened at Lake Tahoe was, first of all, epstein-barr virus has a very long incubation period more than a month. The Tahoe flu, the strange flu that was so deadly, went through with a four to seven day incubation or lag time, so it could not possibly have been epstein-barr virus. But still, it left us with a reactivated state of epstein barr virus. Those people who had EBV to be reactivated, certainly came down with it. But if you had another virus like cytomegalovirus, or the newly discovered human herpes six virus, that would show up. So my proposition to Dr. Cheney was perhaps rather than the illness starting with the virus, it may be that something is going on with the mold and the mold is the precursor condition that we really need to look into. Dr. Cheney told me Well, in order for your hypothesis to be correct, that means that all these buildings must be getting worse and that's impossible. I said, Well, let's try a thought experiment. What if they were? What if the mold was getting worse? What would that look like? We will be seeing an epidemic of people complaining of sick building syndrome and doctors will be completely baffled and they won't know a thing about toxic mold until eventually this will start to cross their radar. And we will go from nobody knowing that toxic mold to 1000s of people all complaining about the same thing and doctors will be mystified. So that is my prediction for what is happening. If it's truly the mold getting worse, as I saw down in the Bay Area prior to getting so sick myself, and returning to Lake Tahoe and seeking his help. And overtime, that's exactly what happened. We saw sick buildings lighting up, left and right and in every case, doctors were completely mystified. They blamed every chemical in the book, and they never bothered to look into the mold.
Alicia Swamy:At this time when this was happening, did you ever bring up the idea of the cloud seeding being an issue of the rising toxic mold with Dr. Cheney?
Erik Johnson:No, I never did. That idea just seemed so ludicrous since all the experts were assuring us that the cloud seeding was harmless, that I didn't really think that it was that much of a factor. I didn't begin to really blame the nanoparticles or the ultra fine particles as they were known back then, until I learned more about them and that was several years later. But what I did bring up was the fact that we were having an algae bloom. People were windsurfing. They were swimming in the water, they weren't dropping in droves from the algae bloom. So even though we were concerned about it, we didn't really think of it as a cause. I'd gone down to the beach to try to get some fresh air, I felt the burning sensation, felt I was affecting me, realized that something was going on there. But there again, it seemed like if other people aren't complaining about it, then it's probably just me. I didn't realize at the time that algae blooms are capable of intermittent production of various things like microcystin, and a toxin, anatoxin-a, BMAA,-Methylamino-L-alanine and other potent neurotoxins that can damage the immune system, damage the neurological system, and leave people unable to recover. So there again, I really didn't learn these details unitl later. But my hope was that when researchers came to investigate the chronic fatigue syndrome, they would learn about the sick buildings, they would study the toxic mold, and then I could tell them about the fact that algae bloom and ask them if it was possible that whatever stimulated the algae bloom to produce these toxins, was similarly affecting the toxic mold and causing them to produce more powerful toxins.
Kealy Severson:Where did Dr. Cheney go from here with his understanding of looking into sick buildings? I mean, it sounds like his understanding kind of maxed out at well, the buildings can't be connected to this because they couldn't all go bad at once? Is that where his understanding in relationship to this potentially being an environmental issue, is that where his understanding kind of halted?
Erik Johnson:Exactly. It completely locked up at that point, because without a mechanism to explain a whole bunch of buildings or lakes all producing potent toxins at once, there's no reason to look into it. Now when researchers came to look at the Tahoemystery illness, such as Dr. Komoraff, Seymour Grufferman, the cancer specialist, Chester and Paul Levine, who did write abstracts about the sick buildings, and said that these were a center for sickness and they deserved further research. When they all descended on us each came armed with their own preconceived notions, their own ideas, their own theories. And as they failed to find a common denominator, they left and went off and promoted their own ideas about whatever chronic fatigue syndrome was. But these were conflicting ideas because everybody had a different idea. And this initiated what I call the hijacker principle. Now imagine if a zoologist were called to the zoo to investigate an animal in the zoo that nobody can figure out, one animal. Well et's say it's a zebra. So they're called to investigate the zebra. It's like, I don't know what it is? It's got stripes. We'll just call it an animal in the zoo. And then they call other researchers and they go, Well, I'm not going to go to your zoo, I'm going to look at my own zoo. And I find that there's many animals with stripes. So it might be a tiger, who knows. So they develop their own concept of what animal in the zoo syndrome is, and they don't match. So once you depart from the original investigation, and somebody comes up with something similar, it's not precisely identical, and there's no reference standard to go back and check. They remain in eternal conflict with each other with no means to ever resolve this. So this is what all researchers did, they all branched off, they went into their own little worlds, followed their own pet theories, and because they're all in conflict with each other, without a reference standard, there is no means to ever reconcile their differences. And this is clearly to be seen in the new ME/CFS construct. Now myalgic encephalomyelitis is based on Dr. Melvin Ramsey's outbreak of the 1955 Royal Free hospital disease, where a flu like illness, just like at Tahoe, spread through the population affected a bunch of nurses, all the nurses at this hospital, failed to recover. And Dr. Ramsey wanted to know what would happen in a single hospital or there were actually some other outlying hospitals, what would happen that would affect these particular individuals? But it was a sudden on outbreak, sudden onset style illness. Well, when other researchers started looking at various pathogens, such as Lyme disease, they go, Oh, ME must be Lyme disease. Lyme disease can't spread through a group of nurses like that, it cannot do it. So you wind up with this irreconcilable conflict. Now chronic fatigue syndrome, same thing, it was based on a different data set. So it's a different animal. Even though it might look the same, in order to solve ME or CFS is you have to remember that each has their own particular discrete data set. And unless you agree on where they mesh, there's no way to ever solve anything. So it's really a dead end. If you use ME/CFS as a mechanism, as a instrument to compare the Royal Free disease and the Lake Tahoe outbreak, then it's possible to find out where they overlap and what each one of them is. But researchers aren't doing that. They're treating ME/CFS as Oh, something that follows a viral illness, or maybe a pesticide exposure, or even a concussion on the head. Well since a concussion on head can't possibly match the chronic fatigue syndrome outbreak, are the Royal Free disease, ME, you can never solve. You can never solve anything that way. The best you can do is go, Well, it looks like this can be caused by anything and everything. It's like starting out with an animal in the Zoo or the animal in the zoo and saying it's any animal in the zoo, total chaos, total confusion. So that's where they get with the hijacker principle. And if they don't use science, and go back to the original data set, nothing can ever be solved. And this isn't just for ME/CFS. This is a basic scientific principle that applies to any investigation that they ever undertake. They have to start out with a discrete data set, and an identifiable reference standard, or you're dead in the water, you're spinning your wheels from then on. And I believe that all these researchers who try to take over chronic fatigue syndrome, to try to take over these names. They know this. And that's why when they get to a certain point, and realize they're up against a wall, and they can go no further, they create a new name and try to start over. It's a way to hijack the paradigm draw attention to their own data set and that might be good in some circumstances, but not when it gets rid of the original animal because that leaves it forever, in doubt, forever unsolved, and that is not have science is done.
Kealy Severson:They do it in a manipulative way, where they're not being honest about the history, and just switching the focus. And for those people who are really sick and who don't understand why this is such a big problem. Those people are cheering these institutions, cheering for these doctors in the name of progress. And when you break it down to analyze all of the information behind this, you actually see a game of change the name, hide the truth, jockey for position at the expense of the patient, because now all these years later...
Erik Johnson:Now all these years later, we are proceeding into further confusion. You're absolutely right. And I really believe that the idea of check your premise, go to the beginning is so basic to science. It's such an inherent rule of how science is done that when a researcher is conspicuously setting aside the investigation, creating a new name, but acting as if they're trying to solve it. I think they should be regarded as hijackers until they are proven otherwise. I think they need to demonstrate a willingness to revisit the original animal before they should be allowed to create a new name.
Kealy Severson:And I think we need to hammer this home on the patient side too because they need to stop cheering for progress when they're still sick and their kids are still sick.
Erik Johnson:This clue, this one about how mycotoxins, biotoxins, the mold or affecting people actually goes back 1000s of years. It goes all the way back to Hippocrates. And as it turns out, when Dr. Cheney was pursuing his viral theories, in good faith, I believe that Dr. Cheney was doing the best he could, but he wasn't in these sick buildings. He wasn't seeing this pattern. But amazingly enough, the NIH researcher Dr. Stephen Straus saw this pattern and he wanted to look into environmental factors and when that HBLV, later called hhv six virus was discovered Stephen Strauss did his own investigation, and found that similar to the epstein barr virus, this HBLV or hhv six alpha as it's called now, was reactivated and at that point, Strauss got into a pretty good argument, just as I did with Dr. Cheney saying, you've got to look into the environmental factors. There may be something in addition to the virus that's making people sick, something environmental in the workplace. And at the time, I thought, well, Dr. Straus has ruled out all viruses. He's trying to disregard viral involvement completely, in order to look into environmental factors. And I go, that is not science, you cannot do that. It won't make sense because everybody can look at this outbreak and go, it was the Tahoe flu, it started with a virus, you have to look at all the factors, or it's not going to make sense. So I cursed Stephen Straus and I thought he was a really bad guy. But I realized now, in fact, this was included in his own writings, that the virus theorists are so unstoppable that the only way to discredit them and get back on track to looking at this change in the weather. The mold clue, the environmental clue is to defeat people who are clamoring for chronic fatigue syndrome to be a virus vote. And I was wrong. I misinterpreted Straus's motives. I thought he was a bad guy for trying to break the rules of science in this way. But I realized now that he was correct and he perceived that once people walk onto a theory, there's no stopping.
Kealy Severson:Yeah, that reminds me of a previous talk we did about Straus, and you're like, just wait for the kicker. What if he did all those bad things for a great reason and all that the pre story leading up to it? It's such a plot twist on Straus. Really it is.
Erik Johnson:It's like he was the good bad guy.
Kealy Severson:Yeah.
Erik Johnson:He was made out to be the ultimate villain, when if we analyzed what he was trying to do, it may be that he actually had good intentions. And I believe that if he had had his way, he wanted to look into all manner of fatigue. And we now know that biotoxins cause fatigue in a really big way that this could have been followed to the environmental factors, the sick building syndrome, the toxic mold could have been discovered. And despite the way he tried to hijack it, it could possibly have paid off. That being said, there was another way, a quicker way. And that is if researchers had just looked at the original chronic fatigue syndrome cluster, the Truckee teachers, the North Tahoe High School, the casino workers, they could have found out about the toxic mold in minutes, not hours, minutes, they could have found out about it so early, that by the time toxic mold entered the literature in 1986, the matter could have been settled two years before the Holme's 1988 chronic fatigue syndrome was published. In essence, there would have been no need for the CFS syndrome at all and all this CFS confusion for all these years would never have happened.
Kealy Severson:I heard you say that if Cheney wouldn't have gotten chased out of town, you think he probably could have solved this mystery?
Erik Johnson:Absolutely. Dr. Cheney was brilliant. But he was headstrung by the reliance of the academic mind on peer-reviewed literature. If they didn't see it in the literature for them. It did not exist. They looked in the literature and they saw a complete lack of toxic mold. They were fully aware that mold was an allergy. So they said, Well, there you go. If you're complaining about mold, it's an allergy. So when the Truckee teachers asked for help, initially, they and I asked for help with moldmand were told Well, that's just an allergy. So we couldn't ask for mold. Gerald and Janice Kennedy, they tried to get directly to Dr. Holmes, to put this information in Dr. Holmes hands and ask him to please look into what was in that room at Truckee High School. But since we couldn't ask for mold, they got a little clever about it. Gerald kennedy said, just please look into the air filters, whatever you find in the air filters is what is making us sick, look into it. And Dr. Holmes looked at him like they were lunatics. So the idea of saying mold was off the table, because that was an allergy. So you say look into the filters. Well, gee, what do you want us to find in the filters? Mold? We already told you that's an allergy. So we had no way to break past them and really, if you understand that a bunch of people getting sick in a single room is too big of a clue to ignore. You would continue to look in that room until you found whatever was in there. And that is what researchers completely failed to do because they were subjected to what I call the blindness of the peer reviewed mindset. A form of functional academic insanity.
Kealy Severson:I was just nodding and agreeing with you because yes, if you need to get all of your scientific literature from a peer reviewed journal, that means you can never know anything that hasn't been undiscovered yet. It's a contradiction. The ultimate catch 22. We can never know anything, because it's not already in our literature.
Alicia Swamy:So do you think that if they actually did go and they did connect that and they looked, do you think that would have helped save so many people countless days, months, years of suffering from these debilitating illnesses that is caused by mold?
Erik Johnson:Well, after the chronic fatigue syndrome researchers left and the CDC gave up and all the so called researchers, which I call hijackers, took off and went in their own direction, the school hired the best remediation, best experts in the business to come test the school, they identified the Stachybotrys, the toxic mold. They remediated and the school ceased to be a problem. So yes, if this had been disseminated if the researchers had followed through, as researchers are supposed to do, and instead of chronic fatigue syndrome being coined the mold related illness, or biotoxin illness, whatever you want to call it, if this had been disseminated into chronic fatigue syndrome, everybody who got sick from toxic mold, in the last 35 years, would have been able to go to their doctor and have instant answers. There would have been no doubt, no confusion, no delay, and they could have gotten effective treatment, or at least been told to evacuate instantly, rather than all these 1000s and 1000s of stories of people who go from doctor to doctor and are unable to find any help. So yeah, all that could have been avoided.
Alicia Swamy:So yeah, so basically, you're saying that because of the malfeasant behavior, and the deliberate ignoring of this major problem, has costed probably 1000s of lives, and countless countless years of suffering amongst people.
Erik Johnson:I think that's undeniable. And people are really confused as to why I criticize mold experts so harshly. It's because once I explained to them that this was at the center of the creation of the chronic fatigue syndrome, they should have done what a researcher ought to do, which is tell their colleagues, put the pieces of the puzzle together, solve this controversial syndrome, and let all mainstream researchers know about the mold factor and chronic fatigue syndrome. So people are no longer in doubt over this issue. But each and every one of them so far, has completely failed to do this. They turn themselves into a mold expert. They triple their prices, they force all their patients to come to them. They've formed all these various Institute's claiming to be thought leaders in mold and yet somehow each and every one of them after reading Dr. Shoemaker's books, and the story of biotoxins at ground zero for chronic fatigue syndrome is in four, four of Dr. Shoemaker's books. So they could not have failed to come across it. They somehow managed to never connect toxic mold to the syndrome. They seem to create this interesting little diversion of Well, of course, mold causes chronic fatigue, it causes, now wait a minute, they know what a syndrome is. It's a research instrument to solve a famous mystery. That's why it says Holmes 1988 chronic fatigue syndrome. Its an official medical tool to resolve a mystery and by pretending that they don't know the difference between chronic fatigue syndrome and chronic fatigue, I believe they're being just disingenuous for their own personal profit.
Alicia Swamy:You're right, because I mean, we interviewed a ME/CFS researcher who didn't deny that mold is a factor in those illnesses. But he did minimize those issues and kind of threw out and said, well, it could be anything. What you just said, right? It could be anything, it could be Lyme, it could be a virus, and it's just so maddening to me that, you know, these people call themselves experts. You know, like you said, we're seeing all these symposiums of toxic mold, and they're telling you to buy this air purifier, and they're telling you to take these binders and all this shit, instead of just being real and honest and saying, Look, just get out of the situation, you know, we're even seeing people in our own mold avoidance communities, telling people to go to hotels, telling people to go into hot tubs, you know, it's like, just get out of the fucking toxicity, go to a pristine area, stay there for a little bit and get better. You're gonna have some detox situations, this is a complex issue, it's not binders and air purifiers that are gonna keep you healthy. It's getting out of the fucking toxicity and I don't know why you need a fucking symposium with 20 million people to talk about this stuff because the solution is fairly simple. Of course, it's not easy to implement because people have lives and people have children and people have jobs. But to withhold this information, or to just say like, Oh, yeah, mold is just a little piece of the puzzle. It's just it's lying and
Erik Johnson:It's a deliberate diversion is what it is. it's a...
Alicia Swamy:Yea, it's a big fucking mess. And the more that I research the issue of toxic mold, I mean, to me, everything that I'm seeing people get sick with, it's like, fuck is the mold the fucking issue at the center of all these things? Because it's literally, when you look at all the evidence compiled, you see that exposures to mycotoxins cause, basically everything that we're seeing people suffering with these days.
Erik Johnson:Yes and I realized that it's not feasible for everybody to run to the desert, or do mold avoidance. It's hard. And my request is that doctors and researchers should do proper research so that people can make better educated decisions for themselves as to what they need to do. Now, you asked me about Dr. Cheney, if he'd remained, would he have discovered this? I believe that there's no way he could have failed to, because his research was so good. His analysis of cardiological abnormalities lead directly to what people are experiencing with toxic mold. So you put his research together with the autonomic dysregulation that everybody who's beeing in a Stachybotrys building experiences, and he would have had to inevitably put this together. Now we've discussed the existence of a syndrome called CARPA, complement activation reaction, pseudo allergy, where exposure to ultra fine particles induces anaphylactoid reaction, which is difficult to measure, because it's not a classic toxicological syndrome, it's something that stimulates the immune system, the complement activation system so directly that the antibodies, there's none to be found. The primary effect of CARPA is a cardiological phenomenon. And I can't wait to find out if it turns out that Dr. Cheney's findings, mesh completely with toxic mold and this CARPA syndrome.
Kealy Severson:Yeah, I found the video about diastolic dysfunction that you shared with Alicia and I really interesting, because I wondered if that was the bigger picture here. Was he actually finding the heart changes that are associated with your theory of CARPA?
Erik Johnson:Yeah, we we haven't had enough research into specifically how Stachybotrys affects the autonomic system to be able to make that direct correlation. But I believe it's coming soon. Now, I believe that Dr. Cheney was absolutely brilliant. He did fantastic work. But I still can't help but point out that when he became aware of toxic mold, after reading Dr. Shoemaker's books, he could have come back to Lake Tahoe at that point, or at least told people that their original chronic fatigue syndrome cohort was describing this exact phenomenon to at this time. Now, Dr. Cheney, even though he's passed on, there's still enough circumstantial evidence that anybody who wants to find out can still analyze the existing documents, the newspaper records, the anecdotal accounts, the books that describe this incident and the videos, which talk about the Truckee teachers, the manner in which they got sick in that single room, and there's enough circumstantial evidence to still build a case that sick building syndrome plays an essential role in the chronic fatigue syndrome and factor in how expert remediators, the best in the state, in the United States identified Stachybotrys in that exact location. And we can make a really good case for how toxic mold and its relationship to chronic fatigue syndrome should be pursued.
Kealy Severson:We're here begging for this to happen. I mean, we're out here dying every day that this isn't happening, watching ourselves or our families get sicker. And I know all of our listeners are also struggling with their health. And I just, I just want to put this out as like an SOS call because if you're a healthcare provider specializing in toxic mold, or mold injury or chronic fatigue syndrome, or saying that you treat chronic fatigue, and you're not interested in this history, and you think that you can just ignore it, like we're coming for you. We're going to, we're going to put this all on blast because people are literally out here dying and it's the doctors and it's the researchers who think that they can just come in and reinvent the wheel that are allowing medical abuse, gaslighting, misdiagnosis, it's literally killing us. I'm overly emotional about this right now, because I've had a really rough week environmentally, and it's literally as a result of this failure in research. I should have never gotten to this point of my illness. If these doctors would have done their job. I'm so frustrated and I'm so sick and I'm so sick of being sick. And I've never in my life identified as a sick person. I've never identified as a sick person. I've always thought, I'm lazy, I'm tired, I'm a piece of shit, everything that I couldn't do because of my health I judged myself for because I didn't understand what this was and how many people, how many of our listeners think that they're lazy tired pieces of shit because they don't understand chronic fatigue syndrome is caused from their moldy basement? This is all of us, this is affecting our ability to parent, this is affecting our ability to function in society. I can't even do my work from home. Look at me, I'm a mess. Look at, this is how I'm doing my job a complete disaster because of my health. People are functioning like this all over. I'm sorry, you guys, I just I I've had it. That's the most honest, honest way to present this as. This is just so horrible. It's reality is how it is.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah, and I definitely agree and even though we're here doing this, like we struggle with this stuff, on a daily basis, and it just blows my mind the malfeasance of these physicians, these researchers, these institutions that like to portray themselves as having the best interest of people in America, when really they only have their own best interests at hand, their best financial interests, going along with that with insurance companies and not having regulations on buildings or not regulating, just pollutants, things that heightened this toxic mold and cause it to be much more virulent than what it usually is. It's just it's disgusting and that's why we started Exposing Mold because we are tired like Kealy said, we're just tired of being tired and sick. And we want to expose all of these people who are not doing their jobs, and who are going against their mission statements, and their promises and everything that they like to show everyone and make it look like a perfect institution that's really having people's backs when all these people obviously there's a history wrought with special interests and money being exchanged and like this stuff has to stop and the way it's going to stop is if people like me, like Kealy, like Erik, like you that are listening, that are watching to refuse this to say no, to expose them, to demand better, to fight for better because we're just going to keep being thrown under the fucking bus if we don't.
Kealy Severson:That's the other thing is that these institutions that all want to just start an institution and have a prestigious institution and not work with the next institution, and they all do the same thing and they're all chronic fatigue, and they're all environmental and they're all mold, and they all work with Shoemaker and CIRS doctors. The fuck are you guys doing? You'll study Stachybotrys later when you get to it. Oh, so you're gonna look into it later, but we can't look into what we already know. Got it. Thanks for your help.
Erik Johnson:Yeah, the discovery of Stachybotrys' evil twin chlorohalonata, as we go along Stachbotrys gets more incredible, more amazing, more deadly, more insidious than we ever dreamed. And these researchers were shown evidence of this, evidence! That rather than saying Stachybotrys that's one of many molds, this is one that you could really hone in on and get some useful data out of and they go the opposite way. It really shows that their intention is not scientific.
Kealy Severson:It's like they just want to have a reality show in the form of their little Institutes so they can just be a little stars in their little created environment. And do they even care about science in the chronic fatigue syndrome population, because I can't see any evidence that they do when they're recommending people get ERMIs for court, and I could go on and on, I won't, I'll stop.
Erik Johnson:At the 2019 Mold Congress, John Banta put on an incredible presentation about PCR testing is to be defeated by common substances which people use to clean mold. And not only that, but PCR might not show up all the chemical fragments that have become dissociated from the structural elements of Stachybotrys. There is no possible way that PCR testing can be an accurate reflection of your exposure. It's impossible. We know that. It's a suggestion at best, but it doesn't rule it out, by any means.
Kealy Severson:Well, you know that Erik, but the average person who purchases a test and the average testing person they're not well versed, or they're not admitting this.
Erik Johnson:And the people who attended the Mold Congress did not say a word.
Kealy Severson:Some of them owned mold remediation companies and just went right back to business as usual like they didn't just hear earth shattering information.
Erik Johnson:Exactly. Not a word, not a word. So they could sell their ERMI tests. So they could reassure their clients that we know what we're doing, we've got a handle on this thing. And we'll take care of it. The bottom line is we are on our own, and we have to live by our senses and if anybody tells you otherwise, they're full of shit.
Kealy Severson:100% live and die by your senses.
Alicia Swamy:Amen. That was probably the most important piece of information and advice for everyone out there.
Kealy Severson:People who don't understand their senses in their environment are the same people who are gonna think they have 12 autoimmune conditions and allergies, because they're not, they've never taken time to understand what their environment is doing to them and how they can feel different in different areas. Just because you feel something, doesn't mean it's you. You can feel something from an external source. And I know that's really confusing, but that's why Erik recommends mold avoidance to go to a new source to feel that new thing. Because then when you're not as sick, you can clear your senses. You cannot out medicate poison. The tests that we have aren't full picture and every doctor and organization and researcher who's not doing the honest work with integrity and discussing Stachybotrys at ground zero for chronic fatigue syndrome is part of the problem because it's stopping us from getting research that proves what we're saying to actually advance this and in a way that's meaningful for health. Because what they're doing is advancing it in a way that I don't believe has any integrity or meaning in health. And if the patients disagree, I would like to do a health questionnaire with them to see just how healthy you and your kids are. Because people have Stockholm Syndrome for their doctorsm, like idolizing them, protecting them saying they're trying in the name of progress. It's medical fraud to just change the definition of a syndrome so if your doctors committed medical fraud, they're not trying in the name of progress. That's just medical fraud.
Erik Johnson:That's it. It's medical fraud.
Alicia Swamy:Yeah. How do we get justice for medical fraud? How do we as patients that have gone through this, who are fighting every day just to feel normal. How do we fight against this?
Kealy Severson:Find out in our next episode!
Alicia Swamy:Donate to Exposing Mold because clearly, no grants exist. It's going to be virtually impossible to get any researcher as Erik has been finding for the past 35 years to look into this and do some decent studies. Donate to our foundation, so we can go ahead and try and do those studies ourselves. Thank you, everyone for joining us today. It was definitely probably one of our most emotional episodes because we're just tired. We're exhausted. We're fed up like every single one of you listening dealing with this because we're tired of the bad behavior of the people that are coined experts, the people that are supposed to help us, and they're doing the exact opposite. They are failing us, they are failing science and in essence, they're failing themselves. Doctors, researchers, if you're listening to this, please do something different. Stop following this malfeasant narrative, stop acting badly, and start acting in accordance of the Hippocratic Oath that you took when you went into this profession. Do something of value, actually help people, because the more that we help others, the better we all become. So thank you again for listening. Please link, share, comment on our content, go to our GoFundMe and Patreon pages and donate please if you can, if you have it, donate to our foundation, because we are trying to get this science off the ground and running. It is very clear that w are on our own here and we definitely need some answers so that we can get some help. Thank you again, and we'll see you next time.