Hi!
I’ve got another podcast treat for you today! Dr. Donald Dennis, world-renowned Ear, Nose and Throat, and head and neck surgeon and creator of all of the MicroBalance Health Products that I use and write about on this blog, was recently featured (again, as a matter of fact) on a “Know the Cause” podcast. If you don’t know about “Know the Cause,” I encourage you to check it out. Chances are, if you are reading this blog, you either have or have had issues with mold and fungal-related illness. Well, “Know the Cause” was created with you in mind.
“Know the Cause,”both the nationally-syndicated television program and podcast version, is the brainchild of Doug Kaufmann. (I actually just featured an article from Oncology News that was co-written by Kaufmann in my post, Mold and Oncology: An Article Explores the Claim that Mold Mycotoxins Can Trigger Cancer.) Kaufmann was a U.S. Navy Medical Corpsman and was deployed to Vietnam in 1970. Upon his return to the States in 1971, he battled intestinal issues with an array of strange symptoms that he thought were all food-allergy related. While reading all he could to help his own health, he was exposed to a medical paper that would later change his life. The paper was written in 1980 and entitled, “Antigenically Intact Food Macromolecules Exiting the Gut Lumen.” That paper led him to question the reasons behind gut leakage, which, in turn, led him to identify fungus as the root cause of creating the holes in the intestinal lining that allow food to “leak” through. He went on to hone his focus on fungus as the prevailing cause of systemic inflammation, illness or disease. From there, Kaufmann threw himself into studying and dissecting all the many ways in which fungal elements in our diets and lives contributed to or caused most illness and disease.
Since that time in the 1980’s, Kaufmann has written 9 books on the subject of fungus, ill health and anti-fungal diets. He also began his media career, first in radio, with a local Dallas, TX, talk show that later became syndicated and helped to launch his television career. In 1998, he hosted his first health-related, fungus-focused television show, called “Your Health”—which today is called “Know the Cause.” “Know the Cause” is now the most widely watched television show of its kind.
(Note: Since writing this post, Dr. Dennis has also been featured on the “Know the Cause” television show. I will be posting links to those feature programs in a later blog post. Stay tuned!!!)
Pretty cool, right? The “Know the Cause” website alone provides myriad articles, resources and product suggestions for diagnosing, treating and healing yourself from fungal-related illness. The related podcasts and namesake television show allow Kaufmann to dig a little deeper with individual guests and subjects, giving more focused and specific information on all topics analogous to fungus and health.
Back to the podcast with Dr. Dennis….
This particular podcast is not a long one, but is so so informative. In it, Kaufmann introduces and interviews Dr. Dennis about the points in his medical career that led him to look more closely at fungus as the root cause of first chronic sinusitis, but later on, as the wider cause of many seemingly unrelated conditions, like Fibromyalgia, joint pain, leaky gut, etc.
What Dr. Dennis has to say is fascinating. He starts with a story about a patient with chronic sinusitis, who just never seemed to get better, no matter what treatments they did. Dr. Dennis had already identified mold in many of his patients with sinusitis, but hadn’t yet honed in on the mold as the actual cause of the sinusitis. Then, after being at the beach on vacation for 2 weeks, the same chronic sinusitis patient arrived at his office totally clear of all sinus symptoms. At that point, Dr. Dennis started to really see what he had been hypothesizing for a long time: this patient’s sinus symptoms and the mold that was causing them were environmentally triggered. From there, Dr. Dennis went on to be able to realize that even with maximum therapy that addressed the mold in the sinuses directly, these “mold” patients didn’t get better if they were returning to the environments where they were inhaling the mold. In other words, there could be no long term results without treating and cleaning the environmental air. This doesn’t seem so profound now, but at the time, not even the Mayo Clinic had published its research study concluding that mold caused 93% of chronic sinusitis—this was 10 years prior to that!
With Kaufmann’s deep knowledge of fungal illness, he leads Dr. Dennis through his subsequent development of methods in which to TAP test his patient’s clothing, and later to help them air test their homes, cars and work environments to find the source of their mold “trigger.” Once they had the test results, they could march forth with the information they needed to clean that distinct environment for mold, so that they could finally get well. Dr. Dennis later developed the EC3 line of environmental products (the candles, the laundry additive and the mold cleaning solutions), the CitriDrops Dietary Supplement, the CitriDrops Nasal Spray, Sinus Defense and CellTropin to further help those patients get well.
The part of the podcast that really captivated me the most occurs towards the end when Dr. Dennis is describing some of his more recent work. He describes culturing some of the sinus tissue from these mold patients, to see if they could find out more about the types of mold affecting the sinuses, and what it did to the tissue. While the patients had no visible mold present in their sinus tissue anymore, because his treatment protocols had worked to effectively kill off the mold, what was still present, were mycotoxins that the mold had left behind. The mycotoxins created a brownish sort of halo all around the cultured sinus tissue. This halo, when sent to the lab, was actually find to be a neurotoxin. Pretty scary stuff. The good news, though, is that once the mold is removed from the environment, and removed from the nasal passages, targeted detox protocols can be employed to get rid of the leftover mycotoxins, affecting the body’s tissues, systems and organs. This is precisely why prolonged mold exposure can take so long to fully heal and recover from, and also why some folks are never quite the same and will continue to have chemical sensitivities, neurological symptoms, and extreme fatigue.
Whew. It is a lot, for a less than 20 minute podcast, but that is exactly why you should listen. So, I’ll leave you to it!
Enjoy!
