Episode 89 - "Know The Cause" with Doug Kaufmann

Doug Kaufmann, the host of the popular TV show, "Know The Cause," became interested in the subject of fungus as it pertains to disease while working in the area of food allergy. Doug worked in clinical nutrition with various physicians for 22 years and has authored 12 books on the subject of fungus and ill health. Today his show airs in every zip code in America via WGN America and other networks and independent stations. In February 2019, "Know the Cause" became a global TV show, currently available in 200 countries and approximately 400,000,000 global households. His production team always finds ways to enlighten and educate viewers on the wide range of health problems associated with fungi''

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Chapters

• 0:53 Doug's Experience As A Vietnam Vet, Discovery of Fungal Issues, and Use of Antifungals
• 4:57 Kaufmann Diet and Mold Hypersensitivity
• 17:21 Two Different Mold Injured Populations
• 31:11 Eliminating Exposure Always #1
• 37:53 Addressing Stress
• 46:39 When Exposure Causes Chaos
• 53:33 Mold Hypersensitivity: Permanent Immune System Damage
• 59:39 Immunoparasitology and Immunotoxicology
• 1:08:58 Are We Creating Fungal Resistance With Use of Antifungals?

Transcript

Kealy Severson: 0:06

Welcome to our podcast. My name is Kealy Severson and I'm here with my co host, Erik Johnson and Alicia Swamy and we are Exposing Mold. Today we are here with Doug Kaufmann from "Know The Cause." Welcome, Doug.

Doug Kaufmann: 0:23

Nice to see you all. Thank you for allowing me to, to get all of this off my chest.

Kealy Severson: 0:29

Thank you so much for joining us. I was scrolling through YouTube and just familiarizing myself with some of your past videos so that I could discuss with you on your terms of your work and I found something so interesting. But I have a question about the Kaufmanm diet. Was this always a diet that was aimed at treating mold illness?

Doug Kaufmann: 0:53

So back up a little bit up? I first, Erik, you know, I first learned this decades and decades ago, I came home from Vietnam 51 years ago now is trained in emergency medicine. I was a Navy Corpsman assigned to the Marine Corps. What a fascinating year. We didn't know in 1970-71, what post traumatic stress was, that wasn't three words thrown together yet. And I came home with the most bizarre symptoms. I worked with Dr. Hughes at USC Medical School, and I couldn't ride up to the eighth or ninth floor in the elevator with anybody else or my heart would start just beating out of its chamber, I was so nervous. I would sweat, I was losing my hair on the back of my head, I had horrible stomach problems I had and I still have traces of jungle rot on my skin and so forth and I didn't know what all of this was. And Dr. Hughes told me one day, Doug, you're still suffering? And I said yes. And he said, Why don't you change your diet? And my diet at that time was you know, beer and cookies and tacos and so forth. And so I said, Okay, I will and I changed my diet to exclude those things. And I'll be darned if I didn't feel a little bit better, until Friday night I go out with my friends have beer. And so I realized there's a correlation between the consumption of beer and cookies and tacos and cereal and my symptoms. It was a few years later, I began, I came across a parasitology book at USC, circa 1953. And it had an entire chapter dedicated, it was a parasitology book dedicated to yeast and fungi. And I thought, wait a minute, I know about worms, nematodes. I know these parasites. But can jungle rot, which we call a mycobacterium, myco meaning fungus. Could jungle rot, have allowed yeast to get inside my body? I'll never know the answer to that. But the more I studied this, the more I saw a dietary component to it. And so in the mid 1970s, I get began to put a diet together that made me feel better. I worked for an ear nose and throat physician by the name of Howard Gottschalk in California. And Howard had patients that would come get allergy shots for me, he trained me, because I was an emergency med tech, he trained me to do allergy work. And one day a aeronautical engineer brought in a bowl of what looked like cottage cheese and he said, you know my mom ages milk. And when I eat this and he took some saran wrap off it and he said when I eat this, I don't need your allergy shots. So I began to study what that was bacteria isn't going to kill himself eating this stuff. Today, of course we know that is lactobacillus acidophilus, strong antifungal properties. And there were just pieces. It was like God tapping on my shoulder over and over and over again. To wear this diet became a paramount importance not only to me, but I shared it with all of Howard's allergy patients rhinitis, sinusitis, and so forth. And I'll be darned if they didn't begin to get better. I began to think fungus and I asked a pharmacist downstairs in the medical building we worked in, if he would grind up with a mortar and pestle, some Nilstat and put it in a bottle of saline, and let me spray people with chronic sinusitis, offer this to them, and I think he sold it for $2 or something. And more and more people left the practice. This isn't good for an allergy practice in Los Angeles. But I began to see that when they'd follow a certain diet and use an antifungal drug up in their sinuses, that they didn't need as much intervention. They didn't need as many allergy shots. And so this was my introduction of this whole field. I'd say 74-75 Somewhere in there, I started getting it and I've never let off, I'm still working.

Kealy Severson: 4:57

I was just quite taken aback at how early on in, you know, 1977 is what I did my math at watching a video that you posted in 2017 about the Kauffman diet for reducing mycotoxins I thought, wow, that that puts him looking at mycotoxins as a cause of illness from 1977. So that's a pretty, that's a pretty amazing timeline in history considering like when things kind of played out historically, with mold illness being recognized. So I thought it was pretty fascinating that you had an insight into this in the Vietnam history actually is interesting, because as a licensed acupuncturist. This is something that we see in the Vietnam population, people will come back from Vietnam, sometimes they'll have nerve damage in their feet, or fungal infections in their toes that are not healing. We call them damp heat pathologies, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's wet, but it it means that it's usually fungal related somehow. So it sounds like your war history kind of opened the door for you to understand some of the gut stuff, but there's still a difference between like colonization of Candida and actually treating like mold toxicity or a mycotoxin induced illness. How do you see the same results for your Kaufmann diet when people have like SIBO or Candida the same results that those people get to like a severe hypersensitive mold toxicity case?

Doug Kaufmann: 6:36

So to answer that question, you have to understand their their layers. I got impregnated with this stuff in 1970-69. And well, 70 and 71. And I let it stew for years. Who knew? You know? Nobody? Nobody. I was the biggest quack working Yeah, I agree with you clinically, that's what I also with all these doctors. I'll never forget Dr. Hughes ask me did you eat raw fish? It's called Nick mom in Vietnam. And when I got back to the hospital in Danang, a corpsman works out on the field with the Marines for months and then goes back and works in the hospital and I was an operating room tech. So I got back to the hospital. I began to see just what you're saying, Kealy. I began to see that as we'd cut boots off, a helicopter would arrive we put a chest tube in and get them started breathing and stop the bleeding. But as I cut boots off and pull them off, everybody had onychomycosis head tone 100%. We just didn't know that monsoon weather. You don't wash your clothes in Vietnam every month you get a new pair of underwear and a new pair of socks. And so you're dripping wet in your body just breeds mold, because it's 110 degrees during the day and then wet all night. There are layers of this, there are people today who suffer from chronic sinusitis that 22 years ago the Mayo Clinic said is all linked to fungus. There are people today who get ringworm and jock itch and and you know Taenia problems dermatophyte fungal problems on their skin, a layer but if let go long enough and I was one of the so I can speak from experience. This becomes life threatening. We talk about systemic mycosis that which enters the pericardium that which enters the bloodstream and I believe mimics blood cancers and so forth. The key here is what the Center for Disease Control will tell us again in a few weeks and has told us the last five years and that is think fungus doctors are missing the diagnosis look twice my IQ brilliant people. I have a lot of respect for doctors. But if you don't learn mycology in medical training, you're never gonna get this. You think everything is a cortisone deficiency, and I believe that's where we are today. So the important thing is the CDC says, is to accurately and quickly diagnose fungal condition. So every patient walking into a doctor's office with cancer with diabetes, with onychomycosis with sinusitis with dermatological problems, with tummy problems, we need a differential diagnosis. Okay, this is SIBO. Yeah, but what causes small intestinal bacterial overgrowth? Gee antibiotics can do wait a minute, antibiotics or mycotoxins wasn't penicillin, but Fleming found and didn't its derivative, its natural byproduct degradation product become called penicillin and penicillin is a mycotoxin? How many of you patients have been on penicillin in your lifetime? It doesn't seem that when you swallow penicillin, it initiates a problem immediately. It's the death of the good bacteria that erodes the intestine small or large over an extended period of time that the symptoms begin to ensue. And we've got names for it, Crohn's, ulcerative colitis, you know irritable bowel, we've got plenty of names for it, but I think much of it Kealy boils down to mycotoxin induced if you type that into PubMed, you get 10s of 1000s of papers that come up. Nobody's typing that in. And so my answer long way of answering your question, we know that ringworm, rashes on your body are fungus. Minor, probably. We know that separate dermatitis or dandruff is a fungal condition. We know that jock itches and toenail fungus is, but we don't get no hepatic toxicity and tumors that can grow in the liver in the lungs, in the heart in the breast and the prostate, can also be mycotoxin induced diseases and that's after almost 50 years. That's what I've concluded and that's what I have published thus far. see Candida and SIBO. A lot of times these names will get blamed as the primary thing causing the symptoms. But when you look a little deeper, well, what's going on in the environment that would allow the gut biome to get so out of balance. So I guess I'm still wondering about the question. Do you find people with mold hypersensitivity are improved with the Kaufmann diet? Or is it specifically when people have like these pathogenic overgrowth that can be caused from the immune deficiency from the exposure? Sometimes when there's what I call tiny overgrowth like ringworm, the Kaufmann diet, we've had dozens of physicians who have been on my television show through the years who have said, Look, I follow your instructions. I put these people on antifungal medications for a couple of weeks. I put them on your diet Kaufmann one diet for a couple of weeks, and I demand that they come back and see me at 14 days. I only say that because a very prominent Johns Hopkins doctor moved me and my family in 1986, from LA to Dallas, and I was there to teach him how not to lose his psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis patients. Everyone went on diflucan or Sporanox and Nystatin. Everyone went on my diet and at the end of two weeks, they'd come back. I learned from that Kealy that we that an incredible yet very credible science has been totally overlooked. Of being hypersensitive, they say that the medical community says oh no, Doug, you might be right because fungus can causal sniffling. Oh, headache, a little dry eye. They're talking about the inhalation of the pathogen mold as opposed to bacteria or viruses, etc. That's not where my concern is. It never has been. My concern is the pasta that has had Aspergillus growing on it, that can be burned off in 220 degrees Fahrenheit, boiling water. But if it has impregnated, say, aflatoxin into that pasta, you can't burn it off. I worry about reusable endotracheal tubes. If that patient had a bad Candida or fusarium or Aspergillus problem, and we pull it out and autoclave the endotracheal tube. If the mycotoxins have done their job, you're never getting it off that endo tracheal tube. That's what I worry about. Not so much fungus. Fungus is here as the sacrifice to eat dead or decaying material, or is the parasite and this is what Medical School doesn't teach. It can parasitize us off gas it's poisons and we're stuck. Man we are running from psychiatrists to gastroenterologist to gynecologist and we don't understand it. To make matters worse, they don't understand it either. The Kaufmann diet can interfere abruptly or a Keto type diet can interfere abruptly with symptoms. I've seen it for 40 years. Can you surmise after a couple of months good. We're gonna cut you loose now. Everything's fine. Congratulations hugs. You probably had a non serious fungal growth. If it gets into the bloodstream, deep into the gut where it's causing sores, into the lungs, into the eyeballs, the vitreous humor, you've got a problem our doctors have no clue about these and that's not true Richie Shoemaker and some you've interviewed David Strauss, one of my heroes do understand this, but all of the doctors I've taught in CME classes have a lot of them have gotten back with me and said, Look, I'm prescribing diapers, you can off label. And the insurance companies want to know if my patient has AIDS, you know, or a horrible vaginal yeast infection. We're telling doctors don't use off label All antifungals nobody has a fungal problem that deep mycoses can initiate and mimic everything from SIBO to cancer. And this is where all of my publications lie in 2014 I was asked to publish in oncology news. I'm really proud of that one. So a couple of friends of mine who were physicians and I wrote an article got it published, and it says, we're getting cancer wrong. 33 fungal metabolites, mycotoxins can induce genetic mutations, we're getting this totally wrong. Cancer can grow in a lump form, to elude phagocytosis from white blood cells, by same of cancer to oh, well, this one can live anaerobically and grow. Same with cancer tumor. We wrote that up and I think it was one of my greatest works ever and lots of doctors have downloaded that. I think when I'm long gone, I think we'll start discovering that mycotoxins are a huge problem.

Kealy Severson: 17:21

I think what I'm starting to gather through this conversation is we really have our finger on the pulse of two different areas of the mold population. It seems like there's a population that's exposed, that's going to have systemic skin rashes, systemic digestive problems, allergy problems, maybe some sinus problems, you know, if their gut biome is off, or something has been colonized, or the immune system suppressed, probably more likely allowing something to overgrow, I think is probably more accurate. But there's this other aspect to mold hypersensitivity that doesn't seem to really respond to diet that seems to be more of an immune system reaction. And I think that's more the type of illness that I had and Erik and Alicia also. And that's also the kind of people who come to me specifically for help are people who have literally like, tried every diet, and they just aren't going to get better. Interestingly, I at my sickest was unable to tolerate a keto diet and this is something that we see in Chinese medicine if there are symptoms of like a kidney or bladder pathology, and that doesn't, people might not know that they have those symptoms, they could have completely normal kidney labs, they could have no urinary tract showing on a screening. But they could have subtle symptoms, they could have itching going down their legs, they could have fluid retention, they could have frequent urination, there could be subtle symptoms. These people, they don't digest animal proteins well, and sometimes I wonder if it's because of molds ability to disrupt protein synthesis internally where they physically can't digest proteins, but it can cause severe kidney damage. And I actually narrowly avoided a kidney surgery, because my urine was 100% blocked trying to stick to a keto diet during my mold illness. And I had to take specific herbs to clear mucus out of my ureters and then go plant based. And I'm just wondering, are you seeing any of this new version of mold illness this extreme hypersensitivity, that's not necessarily just a skin or a sinus or a digestive thing. But this hypersensitivity, where it's like, these organs are not working, this diet is not applicable. There's something so much bigger going on here and this isn't fitting in this this specific pattern. Have you seen mold illness evolve through the 50 years that you've been on the scene to something kind of treatable and manageable to Holy Cow what's happening here?

Doug Kaufmann: 19:55

Yeah, both by the way. The fact that we brought a encourage the doctors at Medical City to bring that patient back in two weeks and I'm telling you, Kealy, we saw some a bill raise patients, you know, they were living in metal trailers. They were very, very sick. They had kidney ureter problems. They had heart problems, a-fibs. And we began, all of them and it would vary. If we felt this was a yeast. We'd put them on die if we can, if we felt it was Aspergillus or another fungus. We'd put them on Sporanox or lamisil. So which was kind of all we had back then and my diet, not all of them got better that wouldn't be fair to say he was a dermatologist. His partners were dermatologists. And they were there specifically for psoriasis or any number of skin disorders. We became fascinated months into this when I taught them what I had learned in LA. And that was how many people you can help their skin psoriasis get better, some of them without steroids. And we even had some skin patients who didn't get better, but they lost 20 pounds the first week, their migraines went away, their kidneys began working. The differentiation you hear must be is this a mold? Is this Aspergillus causing my symptoms? Or is this a mold mycotoxins that's causing symptoms? And let me just lay that field out for you have the 2 million they believe are out there species of fungi? We have classified 80,000 of them. And of those 80,000, 325 are pathogenic to man so it's extremely rare 2 million all the way down to 325. But how many mycotoxins Kealy, are we missing? There are 10s of 1000s of mycotoxins that we don't know about yet. We don't know if they're pathogenic or not. So the way I approached it with all of the doctors, I have taught, and I have had the blessing of working with is, let's see if this is a mold related problem. How are we going to do that? Let's starve it. We know that virus doesn't have food pattern, but fungi and mold think we're using that the same word meaning fungi and mold off gas, a secondary metabolite and that secondary metabolite, I believe is causing the problems. How are we going to know that? You know, I had to sit down with these meetings with all of these doctors. Give me two weeks. Let's see if we can help them get better. But before that, could you do me a favor? I want to five day diet diary. So when the patient calls to make an appointment, we send them out two pages that I drafted. You write everything that goes in your mouth from the corn and toothpaste, tell us the brand of toothpaste to your snacks your breakfast, lunch, dinner and night snack, and then we would start them when we met them. It'd be a one hour meeting with one of the doctors in me. We'd start them on an antifungal, all of them, and probably two antifungals nystatin is a good gut antifungal. It is fungistatic, unless used in larger doses, maybe a few million units, big twice a day, then it becomes fungicidal. So we had to figure out with each patient how deep do we go was this pediatric patient was a geriatric patient how deep do we go? And I can tell you that when we saw these people again is when Dr. Weekley my boss David Weekley began bringing in other doctors from the hospital and showing them this is unbelievable. This was a suicidal psychiatric patient, who a month later, is now following a diet. We always tried to get them off of antifungal medicines because they were hepatic toxic potentially. So we'd get them off. And I'd started mostly on caprylic acid, resveratrol, B3, D3, etc. And we had good luck doing that. It's not fair to say that every psoriasis, every depressed patient, every dermatological patient has a fungal etiology to their health problems. I believe we ended up in the five year contract I had with them. I believe we found more poly symptomatic patients whose health improved more than their skin improved using an antifungal approach to prolong starve it and kill it. Does that help?

Kealy Severson: 24:37

I understand the concept of the diet and other mold diets. I just also see mold illness in the bigger context of a permanent immune system injury that doesn't respond to dietary changes. So you know those are the people that kind of find us the ones who have tried everything and it's just not cutting it or they do try antifungals. And they don't respond well, they have a bad reaction, it didn't change their symptoms, I don't personally find that every case that I work with is a colonization case. I personally find that it's usually like a heavy exposure or secondhand exposure or even contaminated items that are keeping someone residually flared in the state of hypersensitivity. And what I've been seeing in my office is just a lot of people who don't respond well to antifungals. In general, even when they're mold sick. So I'm just wondering if this is an observation that you've also seen change and progress and evolve through the years, because the understanding of mold also has and the injury that it can cause also has, it didn't use to be looked at as an a potential immune system reprogramming event that could be permanent, it used to just be looked at as a fungal infection. And the severity of this symptom presentation in patients does seem to be evolving to match something more severe. So I guess I was just wondering about any cases where someone so hypersensitive just can't be cured by this, because this is the reality of what I see clinically. And also, the reality of, you know, not everyone being a good candidate for antifungals, because it seems like they're just really generally use now, even in herbal medicine. So many of the herbs will just have an antifungal property, but they're not chosen for their antifungal properties. They just also happen to have that. So I'm not saying antifungals aren't used in herbal medicine, but we don't create formulas to specifically be antifungal. So I'm just wondering, I guess, to dig to really press into this issue is like, are you seeing people who sometimes don't respond well, to the antifungals, or the diet because of the severity of this illness progressing in a way that we didn't see previously?

Doug Kaufmann: 27:05

Clearly, I think those remember I was brought in because David's practice, he was one of 11 Board members of the American Psoriasis Foundation. He was editor of cutis, a big circulation dermatologic magazine, he was an important guy at Johns Hopkins. And I jumped at the chance to go in with him because he didn't understand this and I had an opportunity to teach him and then see for the first time, the validity of what I was doing. But remember, he was losing patients. We got his practice built up with people telling their friends and there are patients who fail. I believe that the death certificate says diabetes it says, you know gut disease, it says cancer. I think these are often our mycotoxin induced patients that we failed. One of the things that struck me was how many of these skin patients with various and sundry I don't know if you're familiar with who was that? 1977, Jack Thrasher. Did you know Jack?

Kealy Severson: 28:15

Yeah, I don't know him personally but Erik is familiar.

Doug Kaufmann: 28:19

Jack and others wrote an article they took polysymptomatic patients. And they either gave them placebo, there's only 200 of my belief, either a placebo or Nystatin and every day, and then I stopped and group did much, much better, 100% better than the placebo group that got me thinking many of these patients the reason we asked them to come back in two weeks was because they had some of them would call us on day five and say I think I'm dying. I feel horrible on this diet. I feel horrible on these medications. I learned the loading of medications. I have no pharmaceutical background other than in emergency medicine. But I told them immediately talk to the doctors took them off their medications and gradually the next two days, they'd get better still on, you know our diet. But the medication seemed to push a herx or a healing crisis in these patients. That much I do know. I tiptoed into Alzheimer's with this because the doctor had a friend who had Alzheimer's. I went over to the care clinic and very exciting results with imposing my diet on his friends, dad. I dabbled in this we had failures. And I think a lot of these failures, see us far too late. And I'll circle back then with what the CDC says. Doctors are unable to diagnose fungal problems because they're just not aware of them or they learn of them too late. Let's try antibiotics, mycotoxins themselves further impregnating your tissue with mycotoxins. Let's try cortisone. Same. Then finally, oh, I took a little, we did a bronchoscopy and I took some tissue out of your lung, your left lung, and it grew out, you know, fusarium. Now let's try antifungals. We had failures, and I don't know where they weren't happy. So they went on to other clinics, every clinic has failures. But I tried in stopping the medication that seemed to help a lot of them. I don't think we had patients who couldn't tolerate the diet yet. I'm sure we did. I just never heard that the nurses never got back back with me and told me that there are people who can't tolerate the diet and do better on some carbs, apples.

Kealy Severson: 30:46

Do you have a structure of recommendations in terms of order, where, you know, you're addressing someone understanding their environment, or a possible current or residual exposure, that should be addressed before diet, or can anyone in any situation kind of start antifungals and the Kaufmann diet?

Doug Kaufmann: 31:11

There's no structure that I have written down. I will tell you what I talked about. We had a one of Walt Disney's artists, who was a patient of ours in California, who suffered so bad from lung and chronic sinusitis. That one day I read an article and I told Dr. Gottschalk he lived in gorgeous home, look out the ocean in Palos Verdes, California. And I told Dr. Gottschalk, could I ask this guy to move to go up to Big Bear, rent a cabin and get out of his home. We didn't have cell phones back then. But he would call Dr. Gottschalk every day and say, I'm getting better. I'm getting better. I'm getting better. Doug told me not to drink wine. I love wine. Yesterday, I had a glass of wine, no symptoms. This must always be considered. If you're living in a sick home, all the Kaufmann diet, all the antifungals aren't going to help you because you continue to impregnate the viscous tissue in your body with this mold. So where I've gone through the years, and certainly my live events, which I'll do today, another one of them is, "Are you sick because of your work or your home environment? If so, you must leave it for a week. Preferably get up high go up to the mountains. And what are the chances you find a mold free cabin, you know, up in the mountains." So yeah, that's that's usually step one. But we didn't do that. Kealy, that we remember, I was the pioneer, you know, 50 years ago, I didn't know it was after we sent him up. And Dr. Gottschalk was so proud of me for helping that man that I began knowing oh my gosh, homes are impregnated then David Strauss and Dave Holland, a couple doctors came into my life and taught me that I, sometimes I give my email out and I try and help people who are absolutely desperate who have been to, they have to have been to at least four doctors. And the first thing I now tell them is your home moldy? I don't think so. It's totally clean. People believe that cleanliness and anti mold are one in the same. Has your home ever leaked? Let's start there. Has the toilet seal ever broken? Do you have grandkids? Did they fill up the bath too full? You know, we go down that aisle. How old is your carpet? Tell me about your drapes. The one thing I really been on recently is, How old is your pillow? Well, I don't drool, everybody drills, we're unconscious, you know, for eight hours, or we sweat our heads when it's if it's too hot. So that's definitely an area. And that's where Will Rea and I became friends many years ago is in discussing the environmental factors that contribute to mold illness, he would literally take all that away in his trailers and help a lot of people that way. Then they leave the trailers and I spoke to many of them and go home. And few people could put one on one together. Within a week of going home. All their symptoms are gosh, I spent$20,000 I'm so angry. A sick home will guarantee you the inhabitants sickness. I tell people if you have a cat or a dog, how is it because it's this big and you're this big? Is it sick? Is his hair falling out? Is it vomiting? Is the skin falling out? Think mold.

Kealy Severson: 34:28

Yeah, my cat actually had all of those things wrong with it. And I thought about that I thought about okay, the amount of poison I'm consuming and how sick I am. And my cat is 10 pounds. And I'm 14 times that, you know, how is my cat even alive? And I also wonder if that's part of what we're seeing with some of these new emergence of all these kids disorders. I mean, pans and pandas that wasn't even a diagnosis way back when and now these issues are just exploding. They seem to be really common in water damaged buildings, so.

Doug Kaufmann: 35:03

Luke Curtis, I don't know. Do you know Dr. Curtis?

Kealy Severson: 35:06

I do not.

Doug Kaufmann: 35:07

I grabbed him 20 years ago, I got into medical school, he got his master's got into medical school. And he's been writing for us on our website for I don't know, John, what do you think? 20 years, Luke 20-25 years, something like that. But he is both a CIH certified industrial hygienist and a physician, one of 11 Apparently in America, but this case deep. I mean, he's written over 100 papers on indoor mold, inhalation and we've had some very deep conversations. Sometimes, Kealy, we have to factor in stress, we have to factor in so many things. We're seeing an explosion of these mold related problems. Ironically, since COVID came on the market now as a germ co-contaminate his RNA shared with DNA genetic fusion happen, or are we just so stressed, our dormant conditions have surfaced. It's funny to sit down with a mold patient, I promise I keep promising my wife, I'm not going to do this anymore, because these patients take so much time. But it's so fascinating as a scientist to work with them. But unless you this is what I taught a group of doctors in my last lecture, unless you do this, I put up a graphic that doctors now have 11 seconds to talk to the patient, okay, what's wrong? Okay, we're gonna give you this, and then it's over. Before they interject. Unless you know this key you're in this field, unless you just take notes quietly for half an hour. Listen to the patient. You can't poke and prod, a fungal problem. They have to expound on it themselves. They have to tell you when I get out of the shower, my skin is horribly itchy. What's in that water may not be the water. It's just the moisture tends to make this underlying mold problem come out on the dermal layers and that might be why the itches. You literally have you do you drink alcohol? No, because when I do, I get really really sick. A-ha, neurotoxins. Okay, so you know what I'm saying? I don't think the future medicine lies in sitting down with a patient for 45 minutes, and just zipping this and opening these and letting the patient talk. But I know you'd learn the etiology of their health problem rule out mold, or indicate mold if doctors would do that.

Kealy Severson: 37:30

Yeah, we like to have a lot of those predictor questions on the health questionnaire where you can kind of look at the questionnaire and you just you can just tell, based on how they answer about their house or what their answers are to certain questions. It's just, it's so obvious.

Doug Kaufmann: 37:44

I bet you you can walk through an airport, you guys and see people.

Kealy Severson: 37:49

I can walk through an airport and tell you which ones are moldy.

Doug Kaufmann: 37:53

Which airport is moldy, what people are moldy. I mean, it's just so interesting to me, where did all this thrush, and this ruddy skin and so forth, where what happened there saying global warming, is the reason these fungal problems are so bad 1000s of years ago, was written in the Bible, in the Old Testament, that mold was going to be a problem. It was analogous to sin in Leviticus, it's always been here, as doctors recognize it and hit a home run, treating one patient and then realizing, gosh, maybe the other patients with the same bronchial problem could benefit from this mold is leaking out as a pathogen as a concern. And I think it's about time, you know, that's been the epicenter of my work for so many years and all the courses I've attended and all I've learned about it. It's fascinating. What I've learned with the Strauss's and the Shoemaker's and the Holland's and Luke Curtis, there isn't one authority, how I wish we even Fauci, there isn't one authority that can sit down and say, oh, yeah, here's why. Everyone's a thumbprint, temperament, DNA, RNA, distress, everything plays a role in your immune system and how it will handle mold and or their mycotoxins.

Kealy Severson: 39:16

I think the stress is such an interesting one to point out for a few reasons. But specifically, I find a hyper reactivity to stress goes hand in hand with someone whose immune system is completely wrecked from an exposure. And a lot of times people don't understand the way that their environment is essentially frying their nervous system making them unable to cope with stress. So a stressor that prior to an exposure that could hit your body like a level one or level two, and you can kind of just brush it off and not even really think much about it. That same exact situation to an exposed hypersensitive individual is like, could throw them off the deep end could feel life ending, could set them into a rage. Because there's such a fine line in terms of, we have to admit that life can be stressful and stress is real, but also cautious to not reinvent the branding of the hysterical woman by saying, These people are just stressed and this is why they're reacting. When I first started diving into hypersensitivity, and I didn't understand how items that were in a long term, moldy building could residually affect my system, I came off to my family, like I was very stressed all the time, or angry, or overwhelmed. And in fact, these were actual reactions to items that were upsetting my nervous system and my immune system. And when I removed the items, I'm magically not stressed out anymore, nothing about me has changed. I haven't gone to therapy, I haven't done brain retraining, I haven't taken any stress medications, but I am removing this contamination or removing myself from an exposure. And my family, they don't need to commit me anymore. I'm just wondering, you know, are you seeing are you seeing that play out? Or do you ever wonder, you know, is this stress a symptom of the severity of their illness, instead of just just stress?

Doug Kaufmann: 41:24

And it's not stress, we all have it. It's how we internalize it, and you hit the nail right on the head with that little dissertation. So within months of getting back from Vietnam, they called a bunch of us in California to go do biofeedback number is, I don't know if biofeedback still here. But it's really nice. They put you in an easy chair. And they say, you know, are you having now seemed to have any stress. Now my skin is bleeding. My stomach, bowels aren't working my hairs. I mean, I got all these symptoms. No, I'm fine. Generally fine. Everybody, my age 22 goes through this. And they hook you up. And they put these little things all over your body. And I remember the woman saying, Okay, now, I want you to relax, they had soft music laying and go to your happy place. So I used to surf out in the Pacific Ocean in California. So I went back to my happy place. I'm sitting on a surfboard, you know. And now I want you to travel back to Vietnam and you could peripherally I could see this little needle. And it's going like that when I was back to Vietnam. And so she surmised after a couple days of testing, listen, you know, maybe you have some stress over the war, keep your happy place in mind. And clearly, I've got to tell you, I've worked with some of these patients who are going through divorce, loss of a loved one, something and recommended that they get counseling. And part of that those who did and there were only a few I can recall, really benefited, really benefited now was stressed the etiology of their problem? I don't think so. But it really benefited them. They could veer away from the diet and get away with that. Or they can stop the supplements that I would recommend the herbs I would recommend and so forth and get away with that. There is no doubt that stress plays a role, but it isn't your stress. It's your interpretation of your stress. And that's why I brought out these past couple of years. I mean, you know what has been going on, we still don't know what the world's happening to America, we still don't know. And that's very, very stressful. So with my history of having what I perceived was systemic mycoses many years ago. I just handled it. My biggest stress reduction is click off the TV, right? Go for a swim right do a little exercise on my Maxi climbermand that really seems to help me so let the world go by without me.

Erik Johnson: 43:55

I've got kind of a story about stress. You know my story is in four of Dr. Richie Shoemaker's books, desperation medicine, mold warriors, surviving mold, art and science of cirs. And in mold warriors, my chapter molded ground zero for chronic fatigue syndrome. I tell the story of how I got sick in Hitler's bunker back in 1975. I was stationed in the army in northern Germany had a sick building incident where my unit, nuclear missile unit got horribly sick. In fact, we kind of made history for being the first nuclear missile unit to be removed from the active duty roster for rate of illness and nobody can figure it out. We'd had a flood in the basement armory, this bunker had flooded and there was black mold growing all over the cardboard boxes, and my unit just went wild. Everybody was sick with fungal infections, if they got a flu was the worst flu anybody had ever seen, every virus. I mean, it just went crazy. Everybody's immune system crashed, and nobody could figure it out. My commanding officer was so concerned that he called the biological warfare division to come check it out. They went all over the place. They thought we were being poisoned by the terrorist Baader Meinhof gang, that maybe they got some biological weapon, and it poisoned my entire unit and he couldn't figure it out. And I confirmed with my commanding officer, and I told him about the mold down in the basement that was affecting us. They went down and examined the mold and for some reason, they didn't think much of it. They said it's an allergy. They couldn't hurt to clean it up. But they had no awareness of mold as a toxic hazard at this time, specifically not an inhalation hazard. They were concerned about the fungal infections, but they never thought about it as something that could be airborne that could make you sick. So my commanding officer told me, I don't know what it is. But we're going to clean up that mold and if the rate of illness doesn't abate, I'm going to order an emergency evacuation of the unit. Well, unfortunately, for me anyway, I was detailed to go down and clean up that mold and I got so sick, that within a few hours of handling the mold, I could barely walk. And I had asked my commanding officer, if we could use our M 17 one gas masks, you know, while we were cleaning it up, and he actually thought that was a good idea and said, Well, I conferred with headquarters and they said, No, those those filters are for warfare. We can't waste them on a mere allergy. So a whole bunch of us got sick by handling that mold and never recovered. So this carried over into my later exploration of this toxic mold as an inhalation problem and it turns out that the black mold, it was completely unknown to medical science back in the 1970s. It wasn't until 1986 when Dr. William Croft with the grant from the United States Army studied a family in Chicago and found out the trichothecene producing toxic molds, black molds like Stachybotrys produce these T2toxins, which could actually make oeople so violently ill. So it was curious to watch the transition of seeing this as something that was only an infection hazard transition into an inhalation problem without doctors becoming aware of it. Now, I've realized that I was getting better every time I was away from the unit back in 1975. So I did everything I could to stay out of the building. In fact, I would even sneak out to the motor pool and hide under the camouflage nets, just to get a break from the building. And when I talk about my story was stress, my entire unit went crazy. Everybody was fighting, we were having knife fights. I mean, clubbings, we didn't have any shootings. But I mean, people were just murdering each other in this unit. And they said, We don't know what's wrong with you people. But if you don't tone it down, we're just going to send you out to the field. So this is what happened over and over again, after a couple of weeks of being in the unit, everybody would start fighting so badly, they would send us out to the field, where we'd spend all of our time digging foxholes, and performing fire missions. And people would start to settle down, the fights would decrease. And we people would start to act normal again. And then they'd bring us back into the garrison and within a week, everybody's fighting each other again, it's like, Oh, if only we could figure out why everybody's going so crazy. We

Doug Kaufmann: 51:11

Erik. I wish we to talk. I wish we had cell could calm this thing down, and we wouldn't have to spend all phones back then. Hey, Erik, Doug, are you having this our time out in the field. And finally, finally, about a year after the mold was removed, the rate of illness decreased, and problem? It was lonely in the 70s and I remember I had a things started to go back to normal. But for quite a while there, my unit was completely incapacitated by that black mold, and nobody could figure it out. friend out here in a moldy home and he and his wife and their kids had horrible health problems. And I recommended they call their insurance company and get it remediated the home at the time, 25 years ago, it's probably $100,000 home. It costs 280,000 to remediate it. Soon thereafter, insurance company said nobody has mold. That's quackery, mold isn't a problem. It's so sick, when you've been in my shoes and your shoes, Kealy's shoes, and Alicia's shoes for so long to see the sweeping under the carpet that has gone on politically. And yet I see moms and dads saying goodbye to their kids at college and these dorms, it's hospitals, nosocomial infections, people go there when they're sick. They're exhaling a lot of mold and all sorts of organisms that are pathogenic. And it was 86 that they started work. Was this the Cleveland? Erik was this the Cleveland study where the kids bled from the lungs?

Erik Johnson: 53:07

No, that was much later. That was in 1994. Ruth Etzel and Dorr Dearborn.

Doug Kaufmann: 53:12

Etzel, is she a friend of yours?

Erik Johnson: 53:14

No, we've communicated but not very much.

Doug Kaufmann: 53:19

Amazing. I mean, I'm so proud of her. And if I can ask Alicia you also had or have this currently?

Alicia Swamy: 53:26

What do you mean? You mean hypersensitivity to mold? Yeah, yeah. Very hypersensitive.

Doug Kaufmann: 53:31

How did you how did you first get it?

Alicia Swamy: 53:32

Um, so I think it was maybe a concurrent exposure throughout life. I always had strep infections growing up, took a lot of penicillin. Bought a moldy home lived in a moldy city, San Francisco probably worked in moldy buildings. And for me, it's pretty unique because I've always been hyper healthy my entire life because I've always had extreme health issues. So I was always on the best diets, always ate the best quality foods was a CrossFit athlete, an athlete my entire life. And when I got really sick, I mean my diet was extremely superb. I was getting my milk from the farmer, my eggs from the farmer, my meat from the farmer, Farmers Market vegetables, you name it, everything was extremely clean, pure, taking all the supplements, and I was still dying. I got to the point where I was only able to eat, tolerate three foods because my mast cell issues were so bad that if I ate anything else, I would be in the ER with anaphylaxis. And so the only thing for me that worked and I've tried to antifungals as well. The only thing for me that worked was getting out of that environment and that was the basis for me to get well after that. I went from this crazy you know Oh hyper/super healthy person to kind of eating a normal diet, I don't really shy away from food anymore because I don't have any sensitivities anymore. And I find that when my body is in a good environment and pure air, that I don't have any of these issues at all. And so, I know this is not a reality for everyone. But like, I had to go to this level of extreme because it seemed like everyone wanted to put me on a special diet. Everyone wanted to put me on antifungals, antibiotics, I had every infection in the book you can think of I mean, h pylori, like just gut dysbiosis from hell and you know, luckily, I found Erik, and I was able to give him a call. And he, he told me, you know, mold avoidance is really the way to go. And just seeing from his success, and other people who have been doing mold avoidance thought, this seemed to be the way for me. I didn't have a choice, I felt like I was really on death's door, I was starting to have really bad heart problems. And so once I got out to, you know, a really clean environment and not around this stuff, my immune system was able to calm down, and I was able to, you know, sort of go back to normal. I mean, my life is not completely normal because now I have this immune system reprogramming that I have to deal with now that I'm a walking biosensor. I always have to be careful where I go. But at least I'm not dead, right. And I'm here and I'm with Kealy, I'm with Erik, and we built this podcast, and we're progressing the word of Exposing Mold. And we're doing a lot of in depth dive research and to kind of mold because I think everyone is going up mold as if it's a toxicological issue, as if it's like a colonization issue, but we're really bringing to light Dr. Marinkovic's his work, Dr. Harding's work where this is, there's a level of immune system reprogramming that happens with I don't know, prolonged exposure, chronic exposure, that we're seeing exploding, and it's getting really scary, right? And so we're like, how can we help push this message, help doctors and researchers build a curiosity into this, because it's only going to get worse, as you said, climate change is on the rise. I just saw a huge issue in Pakistan this morning. I mean, 30 million people I think, are having issues with flooding, and they're being affected by flooding in Pakistan. I mean, this is just gonna keep growing and I think we really need to take a broader perspective of mold illness and look at it as a hypersensitivity issue. Because, again, not everyone gets the hypersensitivity issue, some people can get better through diet, and, you know, taking antifungals or whatever, because they do have that colonization, but I think number one is getting out of that poor environment and staying away from this bad stuff.

Doug Kaufmann: 57:50

Can I ask you, Alicia, good dissertation that was good. Hypersensitivity, when I work in allergy work, you know, we would, we would hyposensitize people to ragweed and so forth. Mold hypersensitivity, how would you define that?

Alicia Swamy: 58:09

So according to Marinkovich and Cheryl Harding's work from what we see is the immune system is basically being reprogrammed. So it's not even about a toxicological, infectious issue. But it's basically there's something, some switch and the immune system that's going off that through even minor exposure or whatever, it's causing the immune system to go awry. I don't know if I'm explaining this correctly, Erik Kealy please feel free to jump in and correct me at any time. But it's another aspect to this is the fragments of the mold spores, you know, you're talking a lot about mycotoxins and mycotoxins being a big issue. But what what needs I guess to bring more light here is the particular issue of the mold too, because we and that's something that we really talk about is nano pathology and or toxicology because we're seeing how this is used in the lab setting, and how it's able to get through to the blood brain barrier, getting to the organs, do all these different things. But maybe this is the missing element to that hypersensitivity. Maybe it's these particulates that are so tiny, that can get into the blood and brain that is actually delivering these mycootoxins into the body and causing a lot of problems.

Doug Kaufmann: 59:41

You're talking about something I lectured on. Let's see what was it called? Brain hacking mycotoxin induced brain hacking, I lectured to ACIM Lee Cowden you guys probably know Lee and his group, neural parasitology we have watched the last week this Cricut without any guts walking around, fungi gotten his brain he's dead. But there his locomotion we have before tie in Charleen Ballinger at whatever the cancer thing I lectured. I demonstrated this with the ants crawling up the tree, and then they get into the fungus and it takes over their brain, and they end up crawling and committing suicide, but after they do they sprout fungus up through their brain. This is called neuro parasitology. Most mycotoxins are immune suppressants. And you have to wonder if this has fascinated me, Olivia. And I know this is such a blessing to meet and talk with you three, if they can, if they are neuro parasites. They are that's been demonstrated over and over again. Can they be immunoparasites? Can they alter T in the cell function? Can they alter the DNA of the white blood? You bet they can. 33 of them are mutagenic and so I see now my definition of hypersensitivity goes back to what I used to tell the patients 50 years ago and Dr. Gottschalk's clinic. Look, you become hypersensitive to ragweed, didn't mean much. They were just words, big words that I threw out. I now get better what you guys are going through. And that is this doesn't seem to leave us alone. It's like the next month it's something else that's going on. Or if I go to church and I with mold in that church, I totally change. This can best be described with this neuro parasitology and immuno parasitology new word. I don't know if anybody's talking about it. But immuno parasitology might just be what this hypersensitivity reaction is all about. We know they're neuro parasites, could they be immuno parasites? Their job is to parasitize man, or break down debt or to gain materials sacrifice. Fungi have certain fungi or neurotoxic, certain or hepatic toxic certain are carcinogenic. Can those fungi off gas neuro or immuno toxic byproducts? Sure, well documented. It's the field of mycotoxicology. Can they alter your immune system forever and ever, Amen? That would be to beg the question, can we get into the immune system and stop this from going on? Is there an herb, is there with two months of voriconazole you know, fix this. I don't like medications. But we used medications because all the doctors I work with got it. They were all pharmacologist and I used medication to show them that if you kill and simultaneously starve, you could help a lot of people get better. But I could have several of these doctors on this set have told me you know, Doug, I put them on the antifungals initially, like you said, Then I took them off the antifungals I'm worried about pedotoxicity. And I just kept them on your diet and they did wonderfully just on your diet. Do I have to use antifungals? I mean, we can use antifungals come what we call Herxheimer or massive die off in the case of nystatin and others in you always have to wonder are you doing more harm than good? You know, with the use of medications, pharmaceutical medications? Are you explaining though immunoparasitology is that a new word? Can these mycotoxins hop on board the immune system and alter your immune cells documented?

Erik Johnson: 1:03:41

I was fascinated that Dr. Marinkovich back in the 1990s was routinely applying Sporanox to his mold illness patients, even without signs of infection. He just did this experimentally and he actually got a really good track record of results. So we don't know exactly why but this does seem to tie in with your your theory that there is some kind of low level fungal infection going on here.

Doug Kaufmann: 1:04:10

And then Erik, if you step back, I'm doing a story this week on Saw Palmetto indeed, it does tend to shrink a swollen prostate. Why? It is tremendously antifungal and so Kealy would understand that when we find an herb that really seems to work via D-limonene is a chemical phytochemical that really seems to work. And what did we learn through COVID? Those on zinc did really well, those on d3 did even better. Both of those are potent antifungals and it all points back to me. And I like where you're going with that Erik, it can't be Sporanox, can't be griseofulvin. But can it be long term caprylic acid? That doesn't seem I mean, we're going to figure this out later, but it sounds like hypersensitivity what your defining, might be immunotoxicology and the toxicant in this case, we know that is your history with antibiotics. Doug, I was a sick little girl. I took lots of antibiotics. I mean, this field is going to continue when I'm gone. But I find it fascinating how one person can get well so quickly and just give you a hug 60 days from then, and another one with the identical symptomatology sometimes living in the same home doesn't get better.

Erik Johnson: 1:05:32

This hypersensitivity phenomenon. I did know Dr. Jack Thrasher and he investigated this specific clusters that I was involved with, as told in Dr. Shoemaker's books after leaving the Army. I happen just by chance to get involved with starting a new syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome. In fact, I was the first prototype for chronic fatigue syndrome. So I got to watch the development of this based on the sick building syndrome, which all doctors were overlooking. They blame the viruses and let me say that Kealy, Alicia, and I are doing our own informal experiment by taking people diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome back to the specific places where the clusters of illness caused the CDC to become so baffled that they wrote up this new syndrome because these were all Stachybotrys infested buildings. And lo and behold, all people diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome react severely to Stachybotrys. And since I've always had this particular interest in the toxic black mold ever since my experience in Hitler's bunker, I wanted to find out if there was something special about Stachybotrys, in particular, and our anecdotal testing of just taking people to these buildings shows that there is there's something deadly about that stuff.

Doug Kaufmann: 1:06:53

There is and yet, it seems to be, you know, in everyone's grade, you know, up in their ducting system. I mean, I've Ruth and I, the kids grew, we sold our house big on acreage, and we bought a nice house. But before we bought that 12 years ago, we went looked at really nice homes out here where we live. And I'm telling you, the realtors had no problem, you know, walking ins, and we'd hit at the door. And I'm sure Alicia knows this, you'd hit it that front door and go, I'm not going in there. I can't go but it's a beautiful home. And these were expensive homes. It's a beautiful home, it's big, it's got the pool, it's everything. I'm sorry, but can't you smell that, you know, to the realtor? And the realtor has I'm trying to help her through the years with all our health problems. No, I don't smell thing come on in.

Erik Johnson: 1:07:42

The curious thing is you describe this so well, I mean, it's so obvious and yet, the circumstances of chronic fatigue syndrome are very well described sick teachers and sick buildings. It's in books, it's in videos and documentaries and newspaper articles. People have bought over this for years and yet to this very day, no researcher has looked at Truckee High School, the original clusters and said, I think I know what that is not a single one.

Doug Kaufmann: 1:08:10

Insurance companies, American medical, pharmaceutical, look, I named my show a quarter of a century ago know the cause. And that drove off advertisers. You know, I want to sell vitamins. I don't know, the cause, you know the cause is what the four of us are all about understanding the etiology. So we can take steps to avoid further contact with this and immune enhancement supplements, beta glucan, and so forth. That that might really help us. But know the cause spells danger for a pharmaceutical industry we don't want, why would we want to know the cause of high cholesterol when our pills are saving billions of lives? You know, so it's just diametric to what goes on in insurance and the politics of medicine.

Erik Johnson: 1:08:55

Right. Fascinating stuff.

Doug Kaufmann: 1:08:57

It is.

Alicia Swamy: 1:08:58

Yeah, I just have a question for you, Doug. So I know that we're kind of in the age of massive antibiotic resistance, you know, antifungal resistance. Do you think maybe the use of continued use of antifungals actually harming a patient more than helping them like even though it's helping them in the immediate time, maybe it might be harming them in the future if they get something that's more life threatening, and, you know, antifungal may not work to save their life? And we see this through Dr. Joseph Hartman's work at a Duke where he says that, you know, antifungals, or whatever that are used on produce can actually be building this resistance to it's not just doctors pushing pills, but even in agriculture. You know, do you see this as a concern? Is that something that you've seen personally, with people that have taken a boat load of antifungals and all of a sudden they have this crazy, fungal infection, they can't fight off and, you know, to their demise? This is what happens. Have you noticed any of this stuff?

Doug Kaufmann: 1:10:00

I think it's incumbent upon us to be careful. antifungal is broccoli, sulfur ofan, D limonene, and so forth, the things we've talked about. So prescriptive, prescriptive antibiotics, were a breakthrough. If you and I were living in the 40s, you know, and dad dropped a tire on his toe and broke it and it got him on antibiotics were life saving because of that, they have become massively abused that all the journal Pediatrics I just read, Journal of Internal Medicine, they're all asking for the breaks be put on an antibiotic stewardship MRSA and a host of other antibiotic resistant problems going around. Abuse is abuse. Antibiotics should be reserved for known bacterial infestations for a period of time, they can save lives. Antifungals in my humble opinion, I taught doctors to use them experimentally. I will tell you that antifungals systemic blood breaking blood brain barrier, boom, in three days, you're gonna know, then I taught doctors put them down. I'm afraid of pharmaceuticals. I'm a 72, 73 year old guy who isn't on any medications. I don't go to it. I don't have a doctor. But I wake up like you guys do and go oh, my hip, or Wow, why is my body working or what's? What's going on here. And I always think back to a grandkids birthday, cake and ice cream. I haven't done that for years. So I can equate that but we are abusing antibiotics. And we're admitting what we're not admitting is that antibiotics increase the risk of every cancer, we know, well documented, I had to present this. I'm not a physician. So before they would let me present CME credit at an oncology meeting, I had to present every slide and they had to look up my reference, you know, and I think that's fine. We're in trouble with medications, they're not going to quit. But we're in trouble with medications, but they can be life saving. If I go to a doctor sit naked on his metal table freezing, and my blood pressure is 250 over 200. Most people would go on an anti hypertensive medicine for a period of time until they could figure out why it went up. And yes, I believe inhaling mold can constrict blood vessels and cause hypertension. We're abusing them. If I had my 50 years to do over again, I would utilize certain herbs, certain nutrients, certain phytonutrients and the diet. But this was the only way I could convince dozens of doctors, hundreds of doctors to get involved with this. They knew the name I trachoma is oh, that spore knocks that's the toenail fungus. And as you know, 2015, 2016 hydrocodone is all was repurposed as a cancer drug. All it does is kill dermatophytes on the skin. Could cancer be determined, but don't go that deep dog stay shallow, stay shallow. I think we're abusing all drugs. I think we're abusing statin drugs. Remember what happened with hormone replacement therapy, the Women's Health Initiative, the brakes went on in the year 2000. We said oops. We told women their libido would be up their wrinkles would be gone. stroke risk was gone. Cancerous was gone. And in fact, it did just the opposite. Had a nice 40 year trillion dollar run. But we're going to put the brakes on it that's coming for the statins and other drugs too. We can't continue this four to six hour symptom relief instead of knowing the cause and you guys are right. I'm so proud of you. You guys are right on the cause. You're right on the cause.

Alicia Swamy: 1:13:48

Yeah, thank you so much. Again, you know, I just I wish doctors would surveil their patients for environmental exposures. I think that that's step number one. Before any diet before any pill before anything like that. I wish a doctor would have told me to say hey, maybe you should leave your house, go back and see if that's a problem for you because I we're doing such a disservice for patients, clients, whoever we serve, if we're not looking at that environmental cause and environmental exposure in the forefront, it's pills, it's drugs, it's diets, all in the beginning and then let's see how you do and if you know you're dying, then leave it should should be leave first or or figure out what's going on in your house fix that and then you know, if that didn't work, then maybe let's move on to the diet, the pills, you know, the herbs and all that.

Doug Kaufmann: 1:14:47

Three physicians have been in here in my studios here on the campus in the last 100 days. All three wanted to know they'd been guests on my show, and all three want to know if I would hire I'm getting out of medicine, I can't stand it anymore. I hate it. I'm fighting with insurance companies, and look at your organization. And look at me, little old me, on the air for 23 years, we're in 200 countries with a TV show. I have been totally blessed. They're leaving doctors in droves. They're learning thank God for COVID. Their learning, trust may be an issue. You know, a lot of them are having trust issues with going back to their doctors, we would I mean, we've been down that road. And now others are learning. So I see the halls of science going like this, while simultaneously your organization's signing up more and more and more people. And that's a good thing it's going to take this change is going to take another decade or two. But eventually Erik and I'll be gone. But it's the onus is on the two of you then to make this go big. And I'm I can't tell you Kealy, how long I've watched you how proud I am of all three of you, and how much I just have thank God because it was lonely out there. From the 70s I didn't I wish I had known Erik and I had his phone number. We could have shared some stories. It was so lonely. I've had so many doors slammed. I've been called every name you guys have. And yet, Alicia, we're right. And what's right eventually prevails. And what's wrong, eventually fails.

Erik Johnson: 1:16:27

The National Institute of Health just did a briefing on ME/CFS and long COVID. And they had a lot of people to get into their chat and into their q&a and ask questions. And you should have seen Alicia go hammering on them for their failure to look into mycotoxins. She was nailing them. I mean, what a dozen messages like we're going to expose you you have not looked into this. You have not acted responsibly. She was just hitting them as hard as she could. And I think they could tell because you look at the expression on their faces and it's like they realized they were in trouble.

Doug Kaufmann: 1:17:03

Hey, you guys remember when SARS COVID 2 came out? I have studied because my cancer work I have studied genetic fusion. And gain of function is when a person can behind the hood over hood with a sterile mask on takes DNA and mixes it with RNA. And so we're but this happens naturally. And it's called genetic fusion. It is gain of function only a person doesn't do it, white blood cell might see a fungus. And they're both eukaryotic organisms. And they both have DNA. And if I say wow, that is a good looking fungus. I want to date this fungus. And eventually, I want a hybrid. I want a child. These Wuhan scientists went into caves lining the intestine of bats is Histoplasma capsulatum. It's a yeast that breaks down their stool. Right? They walked into these dark, dingy bad caves all, you know, booty, hats and so forth gloves to, to do rectal screening on all these bats for Histoplasma. I'm sorry for COVID. They went out pulled off all their outer linings and exhaled and talked, they had inhaled all this Histoplasma and RNA from this virus merge genetically with DNA from histo and formed a hybrid. And I I wanted to contact Fauci and I said, I know how to get you off free and clear. This is how it happened. And I really think that when you began Erik looking at some of the things nutritionally or even some of the things medically I mean, they were using Colchicine, The Gout drug, which is an antifungal. I think we have a pretty good chance that this little hybrid called COVID is half RNA from SARS, and half DNA from histo. It's fascinating to study all this. I gave a CME lecture on that to a group in San Diego a few years ago, but this is deep what we're doing. The people who get involved with this, I've never met one shallow person to get involved with this because the four of us know the cause we don't know all the parameters, but we know the cause. Congratulations. Excellent.

Alicia Swamy: 1:19:19

Well, thank you so much, Doug. I hope we didn't harp on you too much today.

Doug Kaufmann: 1:19:24

You guys, you guys are amazing. We all have to work together to try and figure it out. I'm honored.

Alicia Swamy: 1:19:29

Yeah, absolutely. And that's all that we that we really want to do is help people at the end of the day, right? We really want to get to the cause and figure out what's going on. So you were a wonderful, wonderful guest and we really appreciate you. Now if our audience members wanted to find you or I don't know if you're doing consultations or anything like that faded wanting to buy your books. Were can they do that?

Doug Kaufmann: 1:19:50

Knowthecause.com

Alicia Swamy: 1:19:52

Awesome, super simple find and great information. Thanks. Good to see you guys.