Pat Sullivan Blog: Mold: A Health Disaster, Part 4

Fourth Installment: The Genetic Connection (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)

In my last installment, I talked about how Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker happened onto his important discovery. Basically, he found that the one thing that his newly sick patients all had in common was that they had been in the Pokemoke River during the time when there was a huge fish kill from a major Algal bloom of an algae called pfiesteria.

The thing that puzzled Ritchie was that there were a lot of other people who had also been in the river at the same time who did NOT get sick. Why did only some people get sick??

This is actually a major problem in medicine. Everyone is different biochemically and genetically. Not everyone responds the same way to the same thing. This is true with cigarette smoking, exposure to heavy metals like mercury from dental amalgams, petrochemicals, peanut butter, and even HIV. There are many people who are HIV positive who never develop the symptoms of AIDS. It makes a doctor's job hard to do, especially when they either don't have time or they don't make time to really devote thought and attention to a patient's underlying issues. It makes it easy to simply prescribe a drug to mask a symptom but not try to uncover the underlying problem that someone has.

That is the major theme of my book, Wellness Piece by Piece. Chronic conditions are a PUZZLE that have to be patiently pieced together. It can be done, but is hard. A goal of Jigsaw Health is to help people unravel their puzzles more quickly than it took me.

To his credit, Ritchie wanted to know and understand why these people got sick and others did not. He read everything he could get his hands on. He began to run tests on all the people he encountered who had a Biotoxin related illness. He began to identify a number of tests that could help determine the biomarkers or patterns of his sick patients. He also began to see that there were many more organisms that produced the type of toxins that caused his original set of patients to get sick. He learned that mold was the most common toxin forming organism that people were regularly exposed to. He became an expert on mold. He testified in mold cases and helped to win several large settlements from insurance companies. He won because he had data. Lots of data!

He gradually uncovered the fact that there was a definite genetic link to biotoxin-related illness. Ritchie now knows the genetic types of most, if not all who are susceptible to biotoxins. He uses a Labcorp test for HLA DR genes. These are groups of immune response genes that control the attachment of an HLA "tag" to antigens. He has found about 26% of the population lack this ability to recognize biotoxins, tag them, and then eliminate them. Without this ability, the toxins continually circulate within the body. They constantly cause the immune and inflammation response to turn on and never turn off since the toxins never leave the body.

Some of the toxins may slowly be excreted through feces since the toxins are eventually dumped into the intestines in bile, dissolved in cholesterol. The body reabsorbs most of the cholesterol because the body considers cholesterol to be very valuable. Some does get excreted however. Therefore it is possible to get well very gradually if you are not exposed to new or continued sources of biotoxins like mold. The problem is that it is common to be continually exposed.

A good way to think of the inflammation response is what happens when you get the flu. The tired, wiped out, achy, even delirious feeling that you get is your bodies inflammation response. When the bug causing the flu is gone, you start feeling better because the body turns off the inflammation response.

People with chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia and other "fatiguing" types of conditions feel like they have the flu all the time! The inflammation response never turns off. Ritchie can measure most of these biochemical responses. There are patterns. He can tell whether you are responding to mold, or Lyme tic toxin for instance.

This is a critical observation for people with these conditions. Almost 100% of doctors are totally baffled by these chronic conditions. The myriad of diagnoses are simply buckets that doctors throw people in when they have NO CLUE what is wrong with you. They have NO CLUE what to do for you. Dr. Shoemaker is really the first that I have come across in all my reading, studying, and going to doctors who does really know what is going on and is able to do something about it.

When I first met Ritchie, there was a news crew from Baltimore (3 hours away) there doing a story trying to answer the question, "Why are people coming from all over the world to Pokemoke to see a family practitioner?" The reason is because he has figured out much of the puzzle of numerous chronic conditions.

Still more to come...