Testing Your Home
How to test your home
Patients can’t improve if they are constantly putting more mold toxins into their bodies. Even if you live in a home with no visible mold, no moldy smell, and no history of water damage, you need to test anyway. Mold is sneaky. It can be behind a wall where you can’t see it or smell it, but it can still be making you sick.
Most people want to do air testing or put out mold plates to test for mold in a building or home. These methods can miss many types of mold. Truthfully, no mold test is completely accurate. In my clinic, I have people start with an ERMI test. This stands for Environmental Relative Mold Index. (See www.mycometrics.com to order). It is a dust test that checks for DNA of many mold species, both outdoor and indoor mold types, to identify what’s in your space and how much of it there is. Mold breaks apart in the air and falls to the ground (and on other surfaces) as dust; collection is done by you with a swiffer-type cloth and mailed in to the lab (I use Mycometrics, www.mycometrics.com). For people who are sick, we try to keep ERMI levels under 2 and a secondary score, called a HERTSMI-2, 8 or lower.
If levels are high, I often have people consult with one of the IEP’s (Indoor Environmental Professionals) around the country who have experience with helping people who are sick be able to stay in their homes. These professionals come to our medical conferences and do research of their own that has helped many of my patients. They can look at the ERMI test and make recommendations, and may even recommend air testing or other types of testing to get more detail to figure out and fix the problem. They can work with your local remediation company and make sure they are using safe practices during remediation so that you don’t get more sick during the process. I have many patients who only get worse during remediation because tearing out walls and carpet liberates mold spores into the air. Sectioning areas off, using air scrubbers and negative air pressure, amongst other methods, will save you a lot of pain. Please don’t try to do this on your own!
Finally, please be aware of remediators who also do testing. The person testing should not be the same one who does the fixing. There is a conflict of interest here, and another reason to use an IEP familiar with mold illness to evaluate your home.
Dr. Robin Thomson
