Medical Hypothesis
By Bryan Rosner
Peer-reviewed by Lisa Petrison, PhD
Introduction
I have been studying Lyme disease and reporting on my findings in various books as a full-time journalist for 16 years now, since I founded BioMed Publishing Group in 2003. Since that time, I have written 5 books on the topic and spent thousands of hours studying under many mentors. As well, I am a recovering Lyme disease patient myself.
I am writing this article because I believe I have new, critical information to contribute to the scientific community about one of the primary, underlying causes of not just Lyme disease, but many seemingly unrelated chronic illnesses.
It is well-known and well-accepted that mold toxicity plays an important role in the severity of Lyme disease. In fact, many clinicians now believe that mold is the number one factor in healing from Lyme disease. However, I believe there are additional factors which substantially add to the narrative.
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Mold Reactivity
Many Lyme disease sufferers eventually discover that they “react” to mold, meaning that they experience significant symptom flare-ups when they are in the presence of mold, even very small amounts of mold.
This began to happen to me, personally, in the Fall of 2016 (I chronicled this experience in my latest book). What I didn’t realize at the time was that this occurrence, and the knowledge I would later gain, would propel me on to a much deeper level of understanding of Lyme disease, and to observations about how “Lyme disease” itself is just one of many manifestations of a deeper problem: parasite infestation.
If someone would have told me at an earlier time that Lyme disease itself was not a core problem, and that there was a deeper root cause of the syndrome, I would never have believed them. Because the experience of Lyme disease is such a dramatic and engrossing one, and because all of the Lyme disease doctors who I followed were so absolutely focused on Lyme disease itself.
Of course, these doctors did recognize the role of toxicity, diet, genetics, and other factors in a person’s susceptibility to Lyme disease. But these predisposing variables were nevertheless highly vague and inconclusive, so it was mostly concluded that Lyme disease itself was the primary problem. In addition, none of the Lyme disease patients I have spoken with (and I have spoken with thousands) reported any considerable improvement from altering their lifestyle in the ways in which doctors suggested they do so.
However, my own reactivity to mold became so great and debilitating that I was forced to explore the role of mold in Lyme disease to an extent that I would never have voluntarily chosen. I had always believed simply that mold was one of many environmental factors which could influence the severity of Lyme disease. Now, however, I believe that mold is special; that it is the primary driving factor in Lyme disease.
A Life-Changing Experiment
As an experiment, I chose to pursue a course of action known as extreme mold avoidance, in which even tiny bits of toxic mold are avoided to a highly impractical degree, based on an individual’s mold reactivity as the gauge for when exposures were occuring. While other schools of thought promoted various forms of “brain retraining” to overcome mold reactivity, I was drawn to mold avoidance after extensively researching both philosophies.
I observed that many people with extreme versions of some very debilitating illnesses (especially Lyme disease and ME/CFS) were recovering a great degree of their health by pursuing “mold avoidance.” What intrigued me the most was that seemingly unconnected illnesses were responding in dramatic fashion to mold avoidance. This interesting observation is, as you will soon see, at the core of the hypothesis discussed in this article.
Now, when I set out to experiment with “mold avoidance,” I was very skeptical of this course of action. And, I realize that most of my readers here are also very skeptical, as well. However, I pursued this only as an experiment, to see what would happen. During the experiment, I couldn’t help but notice that long-standing, deep-seated problems in my body – problems which had never yet been helped by countless other therapies – began to recede and improve in near-miraculous ways. In fact, mold avoidance alone led to more improvement in my health than any other therapy. It turned out that mold avoidance was much, much more helpful than avoiding other bad things, such as chemicals, certain foods, Electro Magnetic Fields (EMF), etc. The more I avoided mold, the more resilient I became to all of the things which previously seemed to negatively affect me.
It is well-established and accepted that a person will undergo spontaneous detoxification of mold from their system when they are removed from a mold-toxic environment. And, in fact, this did happen to me. After just a few weeks of being highly diligent about living and sleeping in a very carefully planned, low-mold environment, my bedding and clothing began to reek of mold. Even my family members could smell it. It was like my body was dumping years worth of stored-up mold toxins, all in the span of a couple of months. And, commensurately, I began to feel just all-around much better, and my previously horrendous symptoms of Lyme disease and co-infections came under control without the need for the dozens of supplements and therapies I used to need to just to remain stable.
Additionally, I noticed that mold avoidance seemed to cause my “Lyme disease” to become only the top layer of a much deeper, more complex problem.
A New Look At Mold – Is There More To It Than We Thought?
But, my story so far is nothing new. Lyme disease doctors are already aware of the importance of mold detoxification.
As well, the story of those who have been pursuing “extreme mold avoidance” and regaining their health has been written many times by now, by many people, for over three decades. And I am not writing this simply to add my story to the heap.
Instead, I am writing this article to present a hypothesis which addresses the most important question pertaining to mold toxicity and reactivity: WHY does mold avoidance have such a profound effect on the healing process? Of course, mold itself can be quite toxic, and can do significant damage to the body on its own. But why does avoiding mold seem to be so much more beneficial than avoiding other environmental insults which are also proven to be extremely harmful?
Mold Reactivity: The Key to Surprising New Insights?
As I pursued mold avoidance, I realized that my so-called “mold reactivity” actually caused me to do something that most Lyme disease patients do not do. Many well-guided Lyme disease patients do, in fact, spend a great deal of effort to find a clean living environment. Many move out of moldy homes and move into homes which test reasonably well for low mold levels. And, many of these patients do, in fact, recover. However, the sickest patients do not seem to recover, even with these efforts.
But what I chose to do was to go much further than this. I continued not just to try to live in a clean environment. Instead, I continued to try to avoid even tiny amounts of mold which I reacted to. While many people would consider this to be strange, maybe even OCD behavior, I was simply driven to continue to do this. The more I pursued mold avoidance, the better I got. Yet, while mold avoidance had helped me recover a great deal of my health, I was by no means completely well. But I continued to avoid mold, and I undertook many additional detoxification therapies, because doing so led to continued improvement.
My pursuit of an unusual and extensive degree of mold avoidance lead to an observation which I would never have otherwise been equipped to make. After pursuing avoidance for some time, something changed. Something profound and significant, and something which I don’t think has been discussed before in the scientific community, and which I would like to share with you now as a novel medical hypothesis.
Because this change only began to occur after a great deal of very intentional mold avoidance, I realized that my reactivity to mold may in fact have been a blessing in disguise. I would never have been motivated to even get to this point at all, had I not had such unpleasant reactions to mold. But more importantly, even if I had wanted to, it would have been impossible to do so without the reactivity giving me a heightened 6th-sense about where mold existed – a sense which seemed to be much, much more accurate and sensitive than even the best environmental testing used by folks to test their homes for mold.
But why was avoiding even tiny amounts of mold so important and helpful? What could explain this strange phenomenon?
The Discovery That Changed Everything
During my experience with mold avoidance, I kept feeling a creeping suspicion that this mold must in fact be playing a much bigger role in the body than one might guess. It just seemed that mold was kind of like a puppet-string, controlling some kind of much larger, more malicious, more intelligent beast, deep below the surface of the obvious. And, further observations indeed seemed to confirm this. This fact would also explain why mold was the “king toxin,” and why it was so much more important than the other toxins and common environmental insults.
Since I have worked as a full-time journalist in the medical community for almost two decades, I have always been aware that parasites are considered to be a contributing factor in many diseases. This is discussed by many of the leading experts who regularly lecture at conferences I attend, and who write books about chronic illness. In fact, many top physicians and researchers believe that parasites may be a root cause of many, or most, of the conditions plaguing our modern society. However, despite best efforts, there seems to be a dearth of curative results even when anti-parasite treatments are applied to these illnesses. As a result, parasites have sort of been put on the back-burner in researchers’ minds, and other hypotheses have taken center stage, with regard to the “most important thing” to treat in difficult illnesses.
In 2014, I wrote a book called Freedom From Lyme Disease. In that book, I included a chapter on the role of parasites in Lyme disease. However, as usual, people still failed to gain remarkable benefit from anti-parasite treatment.
Personally, I have experimented with anti-parasite treatments since I myself contracted Lyme disease in the early 2000’s. However, when I have experimented with various parasite herbs and drugs (and I have used nearly all of the drugs that are available in the USA and abroad), while I noticed that they were helpful, they never seemed to provide dramatic healing results. Parasite treatment seemed to be “just another one of those things” which Lyme disease sufferers try, benefit from to some degree, and then move on from. The drugs and herbs seemed to help me feel better for a short time, and then just entirely stop working. This situation makes it very easy to just go look for something else as an underlying cause of chronic Lyme disease, or to assume that the Lyme infections themselves are in fact the underlying cause.
But the intentional pursuit of long-term mold avoidance changed that. On a whim, after avoiding mold for quite some time, I re-introduced these parasite treatments into my treatment regimen. Only this time, the drugs and herbs began to have profound, almost unbelievable effect.
As I experimented with these parasite treatments, all of a sudden, I could feel my entire insides cramp up in knots, and I began to have dramatic intestinal symptoms and almost unbelievable sensations. I also began to notice profound and very core-level improvements in my health, which I had never before experienced.
At first, due to the profound change in how these drugs affected me, I was sure that I must have picked up a new parasite infection somehow. Yet, many of the areas of my abdomen which the drugs were affecting, were areas that I have long had discomfort. One area, just below and to the right of my belly button, had been bothering me for almost 20 years. Over those 20 years, there have been times when the discomfort was a low-grade ache, and other times when the discomfort had been so severe that I visited the ER (I visited the ER approximately three times due to this pain over the years, thinking that what I was experiencing was appendicitis. Each time in the ER I was given a clean bill of health).
When using the parasite drugs now, however, the pain in this area would wax and wane like never before, and even disappear entirely for periods of time, which had never happened before.
Furthermore, my entire intestinal tract would become inflamed when I took the drugs, and my illness morphed into what felt a lot like Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Of course, the same parasite drugs and herbs did just about nothing for me, before mold avoidance. But now, I even began passing visible worm remains, and having all kinds of dramatic changes in how my body felt to me.
Commensurately, I began to notice that when I was using the herbs and drugs, all of my Lyme disease and co-infection symptoms just seemed to melt away like never before. It was as though the drugs were somehow stunning the parasites for long enough that they were no longer able to exert whatever effect they had been exerting, and that the absence of this effect allowed my immune system to almost instantly recover and deal with Lyme disease and co-infections.
Parasites: The Mysterious Underlying Cause of Intractable Lyme Disease?
So, I did what I’ve always done: I researched. I contacted knowledgeable experts, and began to study the effects that parasites have on the human body.
And, it turns out, that according to the experts, parasites do in fact alter the immune system. Intestinal worms secrete special chemicals which neuter the immune system’s ability to effectively fight off infections. Does this sound familiar to you? Of course it does – people with Lyme disease and other debilitating illnesses often have infections which just won’t go away, no matter what treatments are used. Could it be that the immune-neutralizing effects of these intestinal worms could be keeping the human immune system suppressed to the point that these other infections never come under control? Could this be the missing link in Lyme disease treatment, which we have been waiting for? I think, in fact, that this is exactly the case.
Why Hasn’t Anyone Discovered This Yet?
This is the primary question everyone will be asking, after reading this article to this point. Parasite treatment is really nothing new, and many physicians treat their patients with parasite drugs and herbs. So, why haven’t other patients, physicians, and researchers, noticed such a dramatic connection between parasitic worms and Lyme disease?
Well, this is where The Parasite-Mold Connection, and my hypothesis, enters center-stage.
The Parasite-Mold Connection
After doing mold avoidance for a long time, and then using anti-parasite drugs, I noticed that the dying worms would release ENORMOUS amounts of toxins, including, especially, mold and heavy metals. You may be wondering how I know this. Well, with regard to metals, I have been experimenting with chelation therapies since 2001. I very much recognize the symptoms of circulating heavy metals. And, killing parasites resulted in precisely these symptoms.
Killing parasites and worms also resulted in the sensation of great amounts of mold being released into my body, from the dying parasites. I recognized this sensation after having done mold avoidance for so long and becoming keenly aware of what mold exposure feels like.
Nothing I am saying so far is contradictory to modern medicine’s understanding of parasites. We already know that parasitic worms accumulate toxins and other materials to use as defense mechanisms against the host immune system.
It is believed that parasitic worms are capable of adapting to utilize whatever toxins are available to them, in order to survive and defend themselves. They can even intentionally accumulate these toxins from their environments, kind of like a magnet. Many people pursuing mold avoidance have described the experience of feeling like their bodies are actually attracting mold toxins to themselves. The presence of certain parasites may explain this observation.
Eureka! Lyme disease sufferers are particularly burdened with biotoxins. In fact, many experts in this field now refer to it not as Lyme disease, but as “biotoxin illness.” We don’t know exactly why, but people suffering from Lyme disease seem to have a really hard time detoxing environmental and endogenous toxins. There are probably many reasons for this, including inoculation with Borrelia and co-infections, genetic susceptibility, exposure to modern environmental toxicity, electromagnetic pollution (EMF), dietary habits, etc. But these people just seem to store up toxins in unbelievable quantities, rather than detoxing them like healthy people do.
And, if someone lives in a moldy environment (and mold is now gaining recognition in the national news as affecting a high percentage of housing infrastructure), then mold just becomes one more biotoxin that builds up in the tired, overburdened, toxic bodies of people suffering with biotoxin illness.
So, mold is one of many toxins that seems to accumulate in these sick people. But what if this mold was a tool used by intestinal worms to grow unchecked, and uninhibited, to levels which promote extreme disease and treatment failures?
This seems to be exactly what is happening. Various species of intestinal worms seem to be capable of capitalizing on the opportunity presented by the accumulation of mold toxins in biotoxin illness patients. The worms seem to be able to use this mold to form thick, impenetrable biofilm, to such an unimaginable extent that almost all anti-parasite treatments, even the strongest drugs, have very little or no effect at all in reaching the worms.
And, even the very well-intentioned and valiant efforts of biotoxin illness physicians to remove their patients from mold exposure are sometimes inadequate to starve these parasites of their “mold fuel,” such that anti-parasite treatment is often not effective, and the presence of these parasites will remain unnoticed. As for me, I only noticed that the parasites became vulnerable to anti-parasite treatment after I pursued extended mold avoidance. Their entire presence was a mystery to me, before mold avoidance.
It is conceivable that even small, seemingly sub-clinical exposures to mold might provide just enough raw material to the parasites to continue their entrenchment and evasion of the immune system – especially if they have already had the opportunity to establish themselves in a prior, much more moldy environment. This may explain why extreme avoidance of even tiny amounts of toxic mold may have a more pronounced effect than merely moving into a less-moldy house.
And, even when efforts to avoid environmental mold are successful, these parasites are very reluctant to reveal themselves and leave the body, although they do tend to leave eventually if given enough time in a low-mold environment. However, using active anti-parasite treatment in the context of effective mold avoidance can greatly accelerate the process, but should only be considered if the patient is well-supported and ready to deal with the incredible amounts of toxicity that the parasites can release when in fact they are effectively killed.
Of course, it could still be argued that Borrelia and co-infections themselves are the underlying cause of Lyme disease, and not mold and parasites, since Borrelia and co-infections are what burdened the system in the first place to become vulnerable to toxic mold accumulation, and the resultant parasites.
However, the observation that toxic mold accumulation and the resultant parasite superinfection leads to not only Lyme disease, but also other types of chronic infections, and symptom presentations, implies that mold and parasites are higher in the hierarchy of causation than are Borrelia and co-infections.
https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2016.00014
Implications for Further Research and Clinical Application
If in fact there are stealthy, cloaked, unreachable parasites that are able to persist due to the presence of mold toxicity, and these parasites are constantly releasing immuno-suppresive chemicals into a patient’s system, then I see several implications of this hypothesis for research and clinical application:
- Patients and physicians who deal with biotoxin illness, Lyme disease, ME/CFS, and other related conditions, should consider the possibility that there is still too much mold in the body to effectively reveal, uncloak, and render vulnerable, intestinal parasites, unless great efforts are undertaken to remove mold.
- We need to develop novel and more effective ways to detox from mold toxicity, because active and extreme mold avoidance is not always practical or attainable.
- If anti-parasite drugs and herbs do not produce profound results in these illnesses, it should not be assumed or concluded that intestinal worms are not the core problem.
- Symptoms of reactivity to mold should not be considered to be of the same importance as reactivity to other insults such as chemicals, EMF, foods, or other stressors. Instead, mold reactivity could be a clue that there is a much more dangerous beast beneath the surface.
- More research is needed to understand why patients with mold toxicity and colonization with intestinal parasites experience extreme symptoms when they are exposed to mold. Perhaps this “reactivity” is caused by intestinal and/or systemic infections which move into “aggressive growth and proliferation mode” when they have access to mold. In other words, mold reactivity is the result not simply of the mold itself, but of the mold feeding these infections. If this is in fact the case, then people who are actively avoiding mold are not merely paranoid or obsessive, but they are instead experiencing dramatic infectious progression inside their bodies when exposed to mold, and the situation should be treated with commensurate seriousness.
- Mold illness patients who recover some degree of their health by employing various therapies and by living in a clean environment, but who cannot seem to overcome their reactivity to mold, could be missing the parasite connection, and hence not progressing in their healing. These intestinal parasitic worms do not seem to leave easily, even when mold toxicity is reduced. Through my research and communication with patients, it is apparent that there is a very large number of people who are in this situation, and whose lives are greatly restricted by their mold reactivity.
Conclusion
I have presented the hypothesis that intestinal parasites use mold as a building blocks for creating and maintaining advanced biofilm and defensive systems that allow them to be unreachable by the immune system, and untreatable by anti-parasite drugs and herbs. And that the immuno-suppressive chemicals secreted by these parasites are largely responsible for the persistence of many different kinds of chronic infections and syndromes, which include, but are not limited to, ME/CFS and Lyme disease. The harmful immunomodulatory effects of these chemicals may also be responsible for other chronic illnesses and neurodegenerative conditions.
I am also suggesting that in some cases, especially with regard to the most severe patients, the standard procedures for removing people from moldy environments and ensuring that they are in “good enough” environments to heal, may be inadequate to reduce mold exposure below the threshold which causes these parasites to become adequately vulnerable to allow for treatment and recovery. This is especially true when the parasites have been given time to establish themselves and “set up shop” in a considerably moldy environment, prior to treatment.
Furthermore, I am suggesting that this possibility may have profound implications in our understanding of the etiology of numerous seemingly unrelated illnesses. While these illnesses may seem separate due to the varying pathology and diversity of chronic infections (and their diverse symptoms and effects), underlying immunosuppression by mold-cloaked parasites may be their common root cause. Because different people may be exposed to a wide variety of opportunistic infections, a common immunosuppression could easily present superficially as a wide range of seemingly unrelated diseases. For example, if a person has mold toxicity and parasitic worms and they become exposed to Borrelia, their presentation will be “Lyme disease.” On the other hand, if a person has the same mold toxicity and parasitic worms but they become exposed to Epstein-Barr Virus, then their presentation will be “ME/CFS.”
Furthermore, due to the many different species of parasitic worms (some known, some certainly still undiscovered), there are conceivably endless possibilities of illness presentation.
However, in all cases, the commonality remains: mold toxicity and the presence of cloaked intestinal (and possibly systemic) parasites, which utilize the mold to remain undetectable and untreatable.
Accordingly, this hypothesis presents the very novel implication that many illnesses, such as Lyme disease, ME/CFS, and others, may in fact be superficial illnesses which are fooling doctors and researchers into missing the underlying cause and chasing countless other possible explanations.
If this hypothesis turns out to be accurate, then the parasites have indeed outsmarted us all, and have successfully utilized the materials in their environment (mold) as a cloaking technique to divert the attention of even the smartest and most well-intentioned physicians, researchers and patients. The implications are unimaginably wide-reaching and touch on every single disease which involves immune dysfunction.
A leading, nationally recognized physician, once whispered to me, “Humans and parasites are on a crash course, and one day, the parasites will win.” He appears to be correct.
Special Thanks
I would like to acknowledge Lisa Petrison, PhD, Executive Director of the organization Paradigm Change, for her contribution to this hypothesis.
Further Resources
- If you are curious about mold avoidance, you may wish to join the closed Facebook Discussion Group Practical Mold Avoidance which is co-run by Bryan Rosner.
- For more information on pursuing mold avoidance, start here.
- To read more about Bryan’s experience with mold avoidance, read his newest book.
- Read a chapter on parasite treatment from Bryan’s book, Freedom From Lyme Disease.
Copyright 2019 • BioMed Publishing Group
