I have had this on and off for about 8 years, and after seeing 70+ doctors - even at very prestigious medical centers of excellence like the Mayo Clinic and Cleveland Clinic - I finally found a physician that could explain (using lab results) why this was happening to me. My physician is trained in the Ritchie Shoemaker, MD protocol called CIRS (chronic inflammatory response syndrome). Dr. Shoemaker found that, by being exposed to mold, some people’s body’s can’t detoxify/clear the mold and abnormal adrenaline/cortisol zaps can occur. Roughly 20% of the population cannot detox mold because their detox pathways are blocked. It turns out that the basement in my office has tons of mold due to my company having had multiple floods over the years. I’ve been with my company for 11 years and for the first 3 years I experienced very weird symptoms which I couldn’t explain. Then I began awakening multiple times each night with jolts of adrenaline/cortisol for about six months. After about six months I started to have lots of other symptoms that felt like MS, however MRIs did not reveal MS. For two years I went from specialist to specialist trying to get help. I then saw an integrative internist that identified that I was hypothyroid and had a TPO of about 1000 (so I had Hashimoto’s). When we began to treat with thyroid hormone, I did much better for about 5 years, but they my symptoms returned when my internist put me on low-dose Naltrexone (to try to eliminate the Hashimoto’s). Mold and other toxins suppress thyroid function so some of the zaps/jolts can be caused by insufficient thyroid hormone production, but according to Dr. Shoemaker, adrenaline surges can also be caused by an accumulation of toxins as they throw off the body’s normal processes. The Shoemaker protocol revolves around taking cholestyramine and other binders to remove toxins to get the body working again. Check out surviving mold dot com to learn about this and then either find a recommended practitioner on Dr. Shoemaker’s site or ask around to see if any practitioners in your area follow the protocol but just maybe are not Dr. Shoemaker-endorsed. By the way, Dave Asprey, the founder of Bulletproof, had Hashimoto’s and other scary symptoms similar to ours due to toxic mold exposure and he, too, used the Shoemaker protocol to cure himself. He's got lots of information about this on his website, bulletproof dot com as well as interviews with Dr. Shoemaker and other healthcare practitioners that understand how to actually cure it. I hope this helps!

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