When being diagnosed with an illness, (especially chronic) you will find that doctors use a combination of tests and symptoms to give you diagnoses. Think of these diagnoses simply as labels of those results in shorthand, Moving forward it will be a lot easier for the doctor and healthcare complex to regard your list of 10+ symptoms with a one or two word label, and this ease of language and understanding is meant to improve communication about the patient and their heath issues.
When facing mold illness or biotoxin illness, it is astoundingly easy to rack up diagnoses: autoimmune diseases, dysbiosis, co-infections, co-conditions, etc. Then each of those has it's own breakdown of sub-categories that can be further diagnosed.
End result: you wind up with about 20 diagnoses of health conditions that you have.
I currently am assigned at least 12.
It becomes scary, and overwhelming, and the while doctor may know what symptoms, outlook, and treatments these diagnoses warrant- we don't always have time to become educated in a doctor's office at our visit.
We turn to Dr. Google in search of education and understanding, for any tidbits on how to make sense of this new world we are being thrust into.
We want to help ourselves get well, we want to know why we are using the treatments recommended for us, we want to understand how we got to this place of so having so many health labels. It is a very well- intentioned idea, but one whereby we forget that Dr. Google is a public forum that just about anyone can contribute to.
I'm going to tell you something that changed my outlook on my diagnoses, and afterward spearheaded a change in my mental outlook on my ability to recover:
"Of course you are going to have all 'the things'!
(-Lauren Keller of Two Purple Carrots. Taken from "The Chronic Comeback" podcast episode in Feb. 2021.)
She later goes on to elaborate on her Instagram account:
When I heard that, a switch went off inside of me.
My understanding of how I gathered so many labels (from previously being so "healthy") became clear.
Mold illness and co-conditions and co-infections are all interconnected.
Toxicity, inflammation, and oxidative stress play a major factor in all of these conditions, and they all affect the immune system.
The immune system is the regulator of our body.
If it becomes compromised or dysregulated- of course all sorts of other body systems are going to do the same.
Symptoms will begin showing all over.
We are going to rack up labels of diseases, autoimmune issues, and dysfunction all over the body.
The diagnostic labels will keep expanding and growing until we do something about removing the root toxicities, inflammations, and stressors that allowed for all of this to start in the first place.
When we begin work on tackling mold toxicity, there often ends up being an overlap in us having additional toxicities: heavy metals, other environmental, emf, plastics, parasites, chemicals, etc. A quality doctor will have us working on protocols to address all of these. As you move through treatments and protocols over time, your symptoms will change and lessen, your immune system will become stronger, your blood work will begin to correct, and you will begin to loose some of those labels...Those labels that seemed so fretfully powerful when you began your journey.
We can recover.
Your body can heal if you remove the things that do not belong in it
and you flood it with the healthy things it does need.
Don't get fixated on the labels.
All of those labels do not give you your identity. They are a snapshot of your symptoms for a moment in time. Taking action to remove mold and toxicities from your body will change the diagnostic labels you are given, and change your health for the better.
Don't allow fear to take over. Fear stunts us, and puts our bodies into fight-or-flght mode.
If you are in that condition, you body can not possibly work on recovery. You must be in the parasympathetic response for your body to be able to switch into recovery mode.
Abandoning the fear that comes with getting the labels is one of the best things you can do for yourself on this journey.
Don't get fixated on the labels- focus on the next step toward recovery.
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