YOU’VE JUST DISCOVERED YOU HAVE MOLD: HOW MUCH SHOULD YOU PANIC?
Ahhhh, mold illness. Simultaneously so under-appreciated and under-recognized and yet often so overblown.
So what is mold, why does it exist, and why does it hate us so much? Just kidding, it doesn’t hate us. Its job is to recycle dead and dying organic matter. And if you’re dead or dying, then it will try to recycle you. It’s nothing personal.
The short and skinny is that it is important to minimize your exposure to mold, something that humans have been aware of since we started leaving with greater exposure to it since the dawn of agriculture. Like many things, that important understanding has been largely lost in modern societies with our derision of all things “traditional” and our reverence for all things “newly discovered.”
However, if you discover mold overgrowth in your environment, I think we can triage this a bit and figure out who needs to panic and who has the luxury of a bit more time . . .
If someone has been smoking for decades, there isn’t that big of a difference if they quit today or in a few months.
Unless smoking is causing the person asthma attacks. Then the person should stop yesterday.
When understanding mold exposure and its potential to cause illness for us, we need to break this down to better understand what we’re looking at.
- How much are you exposed to and for how long?
- How good are you at excreting mycotoxins?
- How is your immune system responding?
- What else do you have going on?
