Host: Dr. Ryan Cole | Guest: Dr. Daniel Stock
Could mold exposure be affecting your health without you realizing it?
Dr. Ryan Cole is joined by Dr. Daniel Stock for a practical discussion about chronic mold exposure and what Dr. Stock describes as biotoxin-mediated illness. Dr. Cole and Dr. Stock break down this complex and often confusing topic and discuss what patients should know when investigating possible mold-related illness.
Some of Dr. Daniel Stock’s patients arrive having already spent $50,000 on mold remediation, and some of them can no longer afford their own health care. A lot of that work, he tells them, didn’t need to be done, because the usual source of trouble is a humid basement or crawl space.
Mold illness is a subject most physicians never ask about, and the clinicians who do treat it still disagree on how to measure it. Patients caught in that gap often spend their savings on contractors, testing, and detox products before anyone takes a full history.
In our first episode on mold, Dr. Ryan Cole hosted Dr. Stock, a family physician whose own illness led him into what he calls biotoxin-mediated illness. Dr. Cole calls him “one of the few honest ones,” and the hour bears that out with plain talk about where a patient’s money and hope will actually pay off.
Meet the Expert
Daniel Stock, MD
IMA Senior Fellow, Family Medicine. Dr. Stock is a family physician with more than 32 years of experience and a diplomate of the American Board of Clinical Lipidology, with a focus on cardiovascular prevention, functional medicine, and chronic inflammatory response syndrome. He founded a direct-pay family practice to preserve independence in the physician-patient relationship.
1. Why Mold Illness Is Really Biotoxin Illness
Mold is everywhere, from the grout in most showers to the air on any walk in the woods. So why do only some buildings make people sick?
Dr. Stock starts by renaming the problem. Mold was simply the first organism caught making biotoxins, and certain bacteria make them too. Our cells answer biotoxins with an inflammatory alarm, the same one that makes you put down a slice of moldy bread. If a building exposes you all day, the alarm never switches off, and in his view that chronic inflammation does more damage than any direct poisoning.
And there’s another layer our guest is quick to point out:
“These critters only make biotoxins because they think they’ve hit the environmental jackpot, and they want to defend a food source and an environment from competitors.” — Dr. Daniel Stock
The jackpot takes four things at once:
- Dead plant material to feed on, such as lumber or the paper backing on drywall
- Humidity above about 55%
- Temperatures above about 40°F
- At least 24 to 48 hours of all three
That rules out shower grout, which has nothing to feed on, and the open air, where sunlight breaks biotoxins down. It points instead at basements, crawl spaces, and walls with hidden leaks.
As for black mold, the one everyone has heard about, color tells you nothing. The black growth on shower tile isn’t making biotoxins, and “black mold” (Stachybotrys) always grows alongside other species, a mix he reads to find where the water is getting in.
The problem lives inside buildings, which is also where the fix starts.
2. Most Biotoxic Homes Have a Humidity Problem
Before anyone tears out a wall, there’s a cheaper question to ask: how humid is the basement or crawl space?
“Biotoxic” is Dr. Stock’s word for a building that’s actively making biotoxins. Every side of the field agrees, he says, that if you’re still breathing biotoxins, you probably won’t get well. The good news is how ordinary the usual culprit is.
“I would say probably half of the affected homes just have humid basements and crawl spaces. This can be as simple as seal your crawl space and throw a dehumidifier in it, throw a dehumidifier in your basement.” — Dr. Daniel Stock
His order of operations looks like this:
- Test the building: a HERTSMI-2 runs about $145 and scores DNA from five mold species in a sample of settled dust. He looks for a score of 10 or less, and by around 16, “everybody’s sick.”
- Dry it out: run a large enough dehumidifier at 45% or lower and seal the crawl space vents.
- Retest after a month.
- Fix leaks with a carpenter before calling a remediator, and skip spore tests, which in his experience track poorly with the tests that predict illness.
That order is meant to spare patients a $50,000 bill, because he treats a patient’s budget as part of the treatment:
“If I run you out of hope or money, you don’t get well. And if I run you out of money, you’re already out of hope.” — Dr. Daniel Stock
3. Who Accumulates Biotoxins, and How to Tell
Two people can share a moldy house for years, and only one of them gets sick. When they’re married, the healthy spouse may start wondering whether the sick one is imagining it.
Most people make antibodies that neutralize biotoxins. According to both doctors, about one in four carry variations in their HLA immune genes that make that response hard to mount. In those people, biotoxins build up and cycle between the liver and the gut, keeping the whole body inflamed.
This is where the clinicians who treat mold illness split into two camps. One camp measures antibodies to biotoxins. Dr. Stock’s camp argues that an antibody test can read clean in exactly the people who can’t make antibodies, so it relies on HERTSMI-2 for the building and a vision test for the body. When one spouse fails that test and the other passes, his message to the skeptic is direct:
“Hey, they’re not making it up. All right, this is real. They’re loaded with something and they’re not going to get rid of it.” — Dr. Daniel Stock
The vision test is the visual contrast sensitivity test, or VCS, about $15 online. It asks you to pick out patterns as images fade in contrast, and he reads a failing result as a sign of stored biotoxins. Two other tests impress him far less: urine mycotoxin panels, which have never shown him validation and can light up after a moldy meal, and blood biotoxin levels, which have no known threshold for illness.
The building and the body are separate questions, and he tests both.
4. Biotoxins Are One Source of Inflammation Among Many
Dr. Stock has lost count of the patients who arrive certain their house is the culprit, with a HERTSMI-2 score of 14, a negative VCS, and a mouthful of infected root canals.
Inflammation adds up. When enough inputs stack together, the body can tip into chronic inflammatory response syndrome, or CIRS, a condition first described by Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker in people exposed to water-damaged buildings. His tell for CIRS is brain fog and fatigue together, and before he spends a patient’s money on the house, he takes a full history.
“We got to take care of this house eventually. But dude, your teeth are where the money’s at right now.” — Dr. Daniel Stock
Part of that history is three questions every new patient answers:
The inputs he watches for include:
- Biotoxins from a water-damaged building
- Dental infections, such as infected root canals and unsealed crowns
- A poor diet
- Infections like Lyme disease
- Prolonged inflammatory hits, which he says can include three COVID-19 mRNA shots
Dr. Cole pointed out why so few patients ever hear those questions:
“Very infrequently do the physicians or health care providers ask about your environment, and so we’re not taught this.” — Dr. Ryan Cole
5. Getting Well After the Exposure Ends
Fixing the house stops new exposure, and the biotoxins already stored in the body still have to come out. Left alone, Dr. Stock says, that can take around eight years.
The shortcut is a binder, which catches biotoxins in the gut before they’re reabsorbed. His go-to is okra extract, taken three times a day, since no one could eat enough okra to matter. Cholestyramine, the cholesterol drug Dr. Shoemaker used first, also works, but he finds it harder on patients, with four daily doses and more stomach side effects.
With a binder, the timeline shrinks from years to months:
“The vast majority of people in a month or two, I can have their accumulated biotoxins completely gone.” — Dr. Daniel Stock
One of his patients, a 28-year-old woman, had fixed her diet and hormones and still had stubborn acne and 25 extra pounds. She failed her VCS, started a binder, and within three months both were gone.
Clearing stored biotoxins is half the job. For patients already in CIRS, the other half is rebooting the system by correcting what chronic inflammation knocks off balance, such as hormones, vitamin D, and thyroid function. Charcoal and zeolite clay, he warns, bind biotoxins poorly, and a binder does nothing for someone with nothing stored. And he’s blunt about the part only the patient controls:
“You can eat yourself into disease. I can’t get you out of it.” — Dr. Daniel Stock
Be Your Own Advocate
If this conversation sounds familiar, Dr. Stock’s advice is to start with the inexpensive tests: a VCS online and a HERTSMI-2 on your home (and on a humid workplace) before spending on anything else. Then find a clinician who understands biotoxin illness and will take a full history. In his experience, most doctors have never heard the term “biotoxin,” so that may take persistence, but it costs far less than a gutted house. He sees patients from as far away as Hawaii through his direct-pay practice, Pure Health Functional Family Medicine, though Indiana law requires one in-person visit a year.
