Unraveling CIRS: Mold, Inflammation, and the Path to Recovery with Jenny Johnson

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:00:03 Hi and welcome to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond, and I am so thrilled to have you here as we dive into today’s episode. As always, innovating and integrating in the world of women’s health. And just as a reminder, the content in this podcast episode is no substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment from your medical or licensed health care team. While myself and many of my guests are licensed healthcare professionals, we are not your licensed healthcare professionals, so you want to get advice on your unique circumstances. Diagnostic recommendations treatment recommendations from your home medical team. Enjoy the episode. Let’s innovate and integrate together. Hi, and welcome back to the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. I’m your host, Doctor Jessica Drummond. Today I’m excited to introduce you to a fellow physical therapist and health coach, Jenny Johnson of Simplified Wellness Design. And she has a really interesting subspecialty. So if you like working with complexity, and especially if you like working with families, a lot of times the canary in the coal mine is either the mom and the child or just the child.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:01:41 This is a really interesting subspecialty. It’s called sirs c I s chronic inflammatory response syndrome. And it can be triggered or cause MCUs. It’s similar to MCAS or it actually is one of the kind of potential underlying causes of MCAS, although it could cause other immune dysregulation. But it’s similar to a lot of these invisible, complex, chronic illnesses that we’re all seeing all the time. But the root trigger could be any number of things, could be viral, could be trauma, could be emotional. But what’s most often talked about is the underlying bio toxin illness related to mold, heavy metals. We’ve got lead and water like things like that, all kinds of bio toxins. And we’ll get into the nitty gritty in this conversation that can basically just regulate the immune system. The immune system eventually is unable to keep cleaning up when there are more and more toxins piled on. And so I want you to meet Jenny because I think she has such a unique but really important role in the environmental health space. That could be really inspiring for your career.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:03:01 So let’s dive in. Listen to her story, and then we’ll have some action steps on the other side. Welcome back to the podcast Diving Right In. I want you to meet Jenny Johnson. And she’s going to share with us her story and how she transitioned, or how she still integrates physical therapy and health coaching with a unique lens and a unique, although I would imagine growing niche. So welcome, Jenny.

Jenny Johnson 00:03:40 Thank you. It’s great to be here, and I look forward to connecting with you through your show.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:03:46 So let’s start off with your story. I think right now there’s a sway between integrative health and conventional health. And I’m hoping for and I am actually seeing more collaboration, more true integration. But let’s start with your story of your career, because so many of our listeners are health and wellness professionals themselves, and it can be so inspiring to hear your journey.

Jenny Johnson 00:04:14 Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll try to spare your audience from the long version, because I know we all have a short version and a long version of our story.

Jenny Johnson 00:04:21 I graduated with a master’s degree in physical therapy in 2000, right at the turn of the century, and I got into pediatrics right away. I just loved working with babies and with kids in schools, and I did that for 16 years when I had babies of my own. I kind of went part time, but I loved it. And one of the interesting things that I did not connect at all during these 16 years is I would come home on the days that I would go to certain homes where babies lived and even certain schools, and I would just be so tired. And at the time, I thought it was just the nature of the work, you know, chasing little kids. And you’re putting yourself out there and you’re driving around and using your brain and, you know, just being a professional all day long. And then you come home and you’re kind of just exhausted. But I was more than that. I would crawl into bed at the end of the day after being in certain buildings.

Jenny Johnson 00:05:20 And again, I didn’t really put it together. I just know that I was tired all the time. But I continued to do this for 16 years.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:05:27 So you always worked in like a home health kind of setting or a direct to the client?

Jenny Johnson 00:05:32 Yeah, I was doing early intervention birth to three babies. So working in their homes. And you just go where you’re sent, right? You know, and it might be a trailer or any kind of home. And I didn’t really think anything of it at the time. And then also working in schools, so itinerant going from school to school, working with school kids and helping to accommodate for their needs in the school system. Little did I know at that time that a lot of schools are water damaged. This is heartbreaking to think of. How many of our kids are being exposed to bio toxins from water damaged schools, water damaged buildings. I didn’t know it at the time. I know it now. I don’t get tired like that anymore. I have figured out the root cause for myself.

Jenny Johnson 00:06:17 But back to the story of the 16 year mark. What was happening at that 16 year mark is my family had actually moved from the suburbs to a little homestead. We bought some land in the woods, and we kind of added on to this little cabin that was there, and we built out this really beautiful, organic farmstead, and our kids were selling kale and organic eggs at the farmers market. It was really, really sweet. We were homeschooling part time, and then I was doing PT part time, But our whole family started getting really, really sick. So that fatigue that I was feeling on the days that I worked turned into just chronic fatigue that I felt often a lot of insomnia, a lot of anxiety, odd mental health stuff that I’d never felt before. My friends in college always called me sunshine because I was just that kind of annoying. Always happy, you know, just sunny disposition. I completely lost that. And it was all of a sudden kind of working on this farmstead and living in this little build in this little cabin.

Jenny Johnson 00:07:19 And I began having suicidal thoughts, like, out of the blue, really strange desires to just walk in the woods and not come back. I was feeling poorly enough and so was my husband, interestingly, that we had to put our kids into a little part time school, stop homeschooling them, and my son started feeling really poorly and he started having gut issues severe anxiety. Insomnia. Dizziness, chest pain, all kinds of stuff. And, you know, as a pediatric physical therapist, you know, I knew something. I’m not a doctor, but I was trying to figure out. This seems multi systemic, like an allergy. Or maybe it’s a food or it doesn’t just seem like a cold or flu kind of thing. We started really with him because his symptoms were the worst. And we took him to his pediatrician and she said, when did his symptoms start? And I said, well, on the first day of school at this little building, the school was meeting kind of a defunct church that was undergoing renovations.

Jenny Johnson 00:08:18 And she said, I know that building. That building has so much going on with it. I don’t know if it’s radon or lead paint or some kind of chemical or mold something. I think something’s bothering his whole body and it’s probably in there. So we went through a battery of tests on that school, and it turns out the toxic black mold was really high, this lattice down kind of a rabbit hole. We tested our home because I was like, well, why am I sick too, if that’s the school. Well, it turns out our home had some issues too. Again, won’t get into the long details of the story, but our whole family was basically being poisoned by bio toxins. And this led us to functional medicine because a lot of allopathic doctors, you know, haven’t been trained in this kind of thing. And there were some more functional medicine doctors that had. And at the time, they were most of them trained by Doctor Richie Shoemaker, who was really the first clinician to coin the term bio toxin illness and kind of piggyback on the idea of sick building syndrome.

Jenny Johnson 00:09:18 So we went down the path with him of testing our whole family and testing our home and figuring out what we needed to do. And the combination of the Shoemaker protocol to basically get out of the exposures that we were in, and then to do some detoxing to get rid of those bio toxins that we had accumulated and that our bodies weren’t able to detox. Well, the addition of functional medicine. On top of that is what brought me and my family not just to 100%, but actually to like 150%. So I got really curious about things that I didn’t learn about in physical therapy school. You know, when I graduated in 2000, I wasn’t really taught the importance of nutrition and sleep and stress management and clean air, the connection between like lifestyle and environment and mindset with our physical symptoms, our physiology. My program didn’t teach me, and I’m sure that there are a lot of other clinicians who really didn’t get that instruction, especially if we went to school, you know, in the previous century. So I dug into functional medicine, and it just made so much sense for me, for my family.

Jenny Johnson 00:10:28 And now I am a functional medicine health coach, and I still wear my physical therapy hat. And I am serving folks who also have environmental bio toxin exposures, trying to kind of combine the detox with the clean living and with the functional medicine that was so meaningful to my family.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:10:44 So the bio toxin that you were dealing with was essentially mold toxins. Correct? Or were there others?

Jenny Johnson 00:10:51 Yeah. Well, we know now it’s more than mold, but primarily most people think of it as mold. But when a building has been water damaged, there are lots of different microbes and byproducts that get produced. It can be bacterial. It can be volatile organic compounds like gases degrading building materials that just off gas, different things depending on what kind of paints were used, and then mold and microbial VOCs and mycotoxins and even the cell wall of a mold spore when it’s broken. There are beta glue cans inside. There are inflammatory components inside the cell wall that may not be like a mycotoxins, but are very inflammatory and can lead to this condition.

Jenny Johnson 00:11:35 Chronic inflammatory response syndrome where we’re just exposed to the toxic soup of things that can be in our air when there’s water damage.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:11:44 Yeah. And so it’s essentially a combination of PFAS, other chemicals, mycotoxins, bacteria, just a whole mess. And here’s the challenge. I work with a lot of patients with MCAS related to endometriosis or long-covid or other post-viral conditions. And I wonder what the difference is between chronic inflammatory response syndrome. Sears, as we call it, or Sirs or MCAS mast cell activation syndrome, essentially. It’s like two sides of the same coin, right?

Jenny Johnson 00:12:25 Yeah. Very similar. I mean, they’re both disorganized immune reactions to things. They’re both signs that our immune system is upset and not responding as we want it to. They’re both pro-inflammatory states that can have very similar presentations. A lot of people that I come across with MCAS would say they are in exposure, meaning they know they have some mold in their house, and they felt like that came first and they didn’t address it maybe as early as they should have.

Jenny Johnson 00:13:00 And MCAS is like an additional layer of an angry or disorganized immune system that ensued. It’s not always mold, but like maybe it started with endometriosis or a food sensitivity or even a trauma, something that maybe wasn’t organized and dealt with as it should have been. And then it’s like that extra layer of MCAS. A lot of my clients, we need to address that first kind of get the immune system at least organized a little bit before people can even tolerate binders or, you know, medical therapy to remove toxins from their body, but they are very similar. Very similar presentations. And there’s a lot of crossover there as well.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:13:40 And I think essentially they’re both an issue where like Sears are dealing with the environment is the trigger, if you will potentially of MCAS or any other immune dysregulation, I guess. So Sears, you’re saying, okay, the environment is the clear trigger, and I think MCAS is the result of that. Related to it could also be a viral trigger. It could be a trauma trigger.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:14:06 And usually it’s multiple of these triggers over time like an underlying genetic predisposition. Say you’re hypermobile or you have EDS or you have endometriosis or other sort of pre genetic predisposition, then you you’re like fine for the first x number of years no matter what. And then you start your period or then your high school has mold, or then you move into a new house that has mold or lead or some other toxin. So over time, I think if we look at these timelines, people just are like, hit a point where their genetic vulnerability makes it hard for them to tolerate that environmental stress. Does that make sense?

Jenny Johnson 00:14:51 Yeah, I would so agree. And you see a lot of the stacking, the layering over time when we just can’t handle it anymore becomes too much.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:14:59 And I think it’s so interesting that in your family, your whole family sort of presented at the same time. Do you find that normally because I often see that, like there’s always one person who’s like, I’m fine.

Jenny Johnson 00:15:12 Yeah. So spouses are more likely to have different genetics than like one of the parents in the kids.

Jenny Johnson 00:15:19 So I do often see like mom and son or dad and daughter or kids, but less often the husband and wife, because they might not have the same genetics. But with Sirs, about 24% of the population actually has susceptible genetics for this condition, meaning once the genes are upregulated, so we may be born and they are in their normal position, they’re off some kind of trigger up regulates them. And it could be another illness. It could be Covid, it could be just a trauma. It could be a really big mold exposure. Something up regulates this genetic susceptibility. And then we are no longer able to create antibodies to bio toxins that we inhale. And so we’re inhaling maybe the same bio toxins that we have been all of our life. But all of a sudden we can’t detox them the way that we always have our bodies. Not recognizing them as foreign, or at least our adaptive immune system isn’t creating the antibodies. Our innate immune system, the pump out inflammation at anything foreign type immune system does recognize them as foreign and just.

Jenny Johnson 00:16:23 That’s where the chronic inflammatory response ensues. But 24% of the population. So there’s a chance, you know. Both, like mom and dad have it. And that’s what happened with my husband and I. We actually both have the most. I hate this term, but the dreaded genes, like the kind of the most susceptible, if you will. Great, great. I always happen to be in that two person. And so our kids were as well. So they were doubles, you know. And so our whole family was in this highly susceptible camp. Interestingly, my daughter was actually the one who she was only eight at the time and her gene had not been upregulated. And so she was in the same home in the same school as my son and all of us. And she didn’t get sick. And we were able to check some, you know, objective labs. And all of her inflammatory markers were fine. She had no signs that she had been kind of triggered into this illness. But the rest of us, we kind of dropped like flies.

Jenny Johnson 00:17:18 Again, there’s usually a priming event or a trigger that turns this whole process on. And I think we triggered each other like the stress of one person getting sick and then the rest of the family having to deal with it. Learning a little bit about this, the trauma of the medical condition in a family member can trigger another one. And I see that often in moms where they’ll come to me and they’ll say, I think my 16 year old daughter might have this. And the more she’s caring for her daughter, and the more she’s not caring for herself that regulates her own genes. And within a year she’s saying, I think I have this now. It’s like, oh no.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:17:57 Yeah. And I think that’s a very interesting analogy for practitioners to really lean into. So like you’re looking at that timeline of what your client dealt with, like they had mono, they have an endometriosis diagnosis. They had a rough puberty. They had painful periods. Even if they didn’t have a Dimitrios diagnosis, they lived in moldy areas or they moved a lot, or they started feeling sicker when they went to the dorm and college and there was a divorce or and there was some kind of emotional trauma, or there was medical gaslighting or a birth injury.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:18:33 Like, I think we have to look at all of these things over time as stacking. And like you said, that genetics at various levels predisposes people. They can tolerate it until their adaptive immune system stops sort of finishing the job of cleaning it up. So the innate immune system is activated. And so it keeps up regulating the chronic inflammatory reactivity. But it doesn’t ever get turned off. Right. And so that’s why I think it’s so important to look over time. Now here’s the challenge that I always feel like people run into. 80% of the buildings in the United States have mycotoxins and 60% of the homes. And having had this experience, I lived in a home near the beach when I got Covid, and that was one of the like, straws that broke the camel’s back, if you will. Potentially, you know, we renovated all of the mold, but doing that like perfectly. I never even really tested for mold. I was just like, let’s just tear it all down and maybe there’s something in here, build it back up.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:19:46 And we did. And I never really noticed a difference. Like, how do you do that perfectly. Even if you move, you don’t know what you’re moving into. Like, how do you figure out how to actually clean up the exposure? Or for people that have chronic viral syndromes, your body doesn’t actually get rid of the virus. So what do we do?

Jenny Johnson 00:20:10 So then you’re carrying that around with you, right? That chronic inflammatory response or that Post-viral syndrome, it’s not so much the environment, but you’re taking it with you. And it’s the same thing with leaky gut or gut issues and the chronic inflammation that can happen from that. There’s a lot of crossover. Anything that’s an inflammatory response. But I think considering the external environment, if someone is in a chronic inflammatory presentation and we’re wondering is it internal? Could it be external? It’s always good to ask is it external? And there are some tests that I like to use MSK, PCR, mold specific quantitative polymerase chain reaction. The same kind of test that we would use to look for Covid, but looking for DNA of mold bits in our dust.

Jenny Johnson 00:20:58 For people with chronic inflammatory response syndrome due to their environment, it doesn’t have to be a live mold spore. It can be like that cell free cell wall fragment that is pro-inflammatory. And so looking for any byproducts of even dead mold structures in the home is really helpful. And Doctor Shoemaker actually came up with a scoring system that’s based on clinical recovery. And so this is really helpful for people who’ve been diagnosed with Sirs. We know that we need to do this dust sample, this qPCR mold dust sample. And if we get a score of a ten or less on the hurts me test, then we have a 98.5% chance of recovering in that home as it is. So a lot of research has gone into, well, what are the cleaning solutions that help us get to that score? So it’s all data driven. It’s not perfect. And you know, we’re learning more all the time. But at least we have some data to know. Here’s our target. Here’s the test we’re using that is clinically relevant.

Jenny Johnson 00:21:59 And okay. It’s looking like if we actually clean with soap and water just as surfactant, that’s doing a better job than all of these fancy enzymes and biocides that might be killing the spores or denaturing the mycotoxins. But we know that matter can’t be created or destroyed. Like, where do the little crumbs go? The little crumbs. The little cell wall fragments are still in the dust. Making is sick. So the surfactant solution of cleaning up. And now this is assuming the remediation is done. Like we’ve actually cut away the water damage or removed the moldy structures, drywall, you know, from our wall or from our home. But then cleaning up the sequelae, cleaning up the invisible aftermath with soap and water and air scrubbers. We want to remove the debris rather than denature or kill it. That’s the way we know that we’re going to get that hurts me score of a ton or less. So in the Shumaker community, there’s tons of crossover between environmental like home specialists, mold inspectors and mediators, and microbiologists who are partnering with the clinicians so that they can come up with these protocols on both the environmental and the medical side.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:23:09 Okay, great. So you have some resources to help people really actually clean up their homes or choose a home that is tested. Test the home periodically to see you know what stuff came from your old home that was still a little contaminated. That’s just one of those things that I think we have to simplify for people as much as possible, because, you know, when you’re that sick, you’re really overwhelmed to be able to have the capacity to move or renovate your house or whatever. And knowing that it’s not actually a very simple process. But if there are like more structured tools for people to use, I think that can take off the pressure. It’s an interesting balance because for me, I was able to recover quite well in the house. Now, we did a lot of work in renovation and I still don’t know for sure if, you know, mold was driving it. But I think one of the ways that I was able to do that was to really just do a lot of nervous system regulation, and I feel like there’s a really delicate balance.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:24:16 I don’t want people to be scared of mold or even chronic viruses, because at some level, there has to be almost like a relaxation into the reality of it, if that makes sense.

Jenny Johnson 00:24:28 Yeah, we live on planet Earth. We can’t avoid it completely. So I usually encourage my clients to try to do what they can to clean up their air as much as possible, and if their primary home tests out really high, that’s going to require a lot of nervous system work to bio hack your way out of. So that’s tough. You know, sometimes we’ll create a sanctuary room. Let’s see if we can find one room in the house where you feel really good, where we know the air there is better. It’s farther away from maybe, you know, the sink that had the water damage. Get some good air purifiers in there. Practice your nervous system work. Really focus on lifestyle and mindset. And there’s a lot that can happen when we do focus on what we have control over. But sometimes I tell people, not necessarily if they’re stuck in that position, but if they have some other alternative like, well, I could move in with my in-laws.

Jenny Johnson 00:25:21 Like their house is brand new. It’s never had water damage. We tested it, had a Hertz Me score of a four. We could move there. I said, you know what? Like maybe if you move there even temporarily, let’s give yourself maybe 3 to 6 months of breathing clean air and working on the nervous system stuff there and detoxing. You may get your body to a point where it has that resilience and capacity, where you could move back home, maybe just do a little bit of cleaning to your primary home, but you’ve healed enough to where now you can tolerate it. But it’s hard to get to that level of healing if you’re still in significant exposure. So it’s really individualized. You know what really is available to a client, what they can do. So we look for those things and we do those things.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:26:06 I like all of those ideas. I like that idea of finding maybe some local resources, like you’re moving to a family’s house or your in-laws house, but also just that sanctuary room, places where you actually are physiologically safer.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:26:23 That makes it easier, I think, to tap into the nervous system regulation healing piece of it, because it’s like we can’t just trick our brains once we know there’s a certain amount of mold or whatever, it’s going to be harder to utilize those tools if it’s one of the key triggers. All right. So you go into work with a family. Talk a little bit about your process and how you’re implementing this whole process of it’s just like pediatric PT in the sense that you kind of have to heal the whole family, the environment, the stressors take us through it. Like a case study, if you will.

Jenny Johnson 00:27:03 Yeah, yeah, and I do work 100% virtually now because I know that I’m sensitive to a relapse, and I can’t go into babies, homes and schools and even clinics. I’ve chosen to work from home, and I’m not a doctor. And so I collaborate with clinicians who are doing more of the medical side. So I get the majority of my referrals from doctors who have identified that somebody in the family does have Sirs.

Jenny Johnson 00:27:29 They meet the diagnostic criteria and they’re starting medical treatment, and maybe the doctor is determined they could really use some nervous system work along with the medical, or they’re really overwhelmed by testing their home and figuring out, do we need to move or remediate or clean our stuff or buy air purifiers? Those kinds of things don’t require a, you know, a medical license, and you’re going to pay a lot of money to work with a doctor on some of the environmental stuff. And I’ve gone through a lot of training, and I’ve worked with a lot of environmental colleagues to become a specialist in that area, too. So I’ll get referrals from doctors to coach people on limbic system retraining. On how do we clean up the environment and get things to a statistically safe, even if it’s within just one sanctuary room? How do we get you in a safe, you know, breathing safe air so that your medical treatment is going to work? And then I love bringing in the lifestyle and mindset. People usually are more ready for that.

Jenny Johnson 00:28:29 Once they are feeling safe, you know, they feel like they’re breathing clean air. Maybe they’ve done some limbic work to have some inner safety. And then we start to work on diet and sleep and mindset. Sometimes we worked on mindset already and some of the limbic stuff. There’s spiritual stuff, there’s trauma, and I’m not a trauma specialist. But for people who have the trauma of the condition, maybe the the losses that they experienced, the invalidation that you mentioned, we can process some of those traumas in a safe space. There’s a lot of invalidation between family members. And so having a safe space to kind of process that, helping people develop the language to explain their illness. So I kind of come alongside on all of the non primary medical aspects. And so I’m not wearing my physical therapy hat as much and really doing more functional medicine health coaching. I am a shoemaker proficiency partner. So I’m formally trained in the Shoemaker protocol, but I’ve chosen to use it more in a consulting and coaching role.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:29:32 Yeah. So what are some of your favorite limbic system retraining strategies?

Jenny Johnson 00:29:39 Oh, there’s so many. So I like to customize this for my clients who need it. There are some who do great with programs, and if that works, by all means. There’s so many great programs out, but there are some who just want something a little bit more customized. And so this kind of when I put on my physical therapy hat a little bit, I’ll create a treatment plan for them and we’ll meet more frequently and check in. How is that practice going? Oh, that one made me more anxious. Okay, well, I wonder why. Let’s dig into that. Maybe let’s just replace that one with something else. Let’s try something different. And so we’ll kind of come up with a plan or a diet for maybe in the morning someone’s going to wake up and do some tapping. And we’ve come up with certain affirmations that they’re going to use when they go through a tapping routine. Maybe we’ve come up with a certain practice for every time they feel a fear response, or kind of some anxiety, or they feel a symptom coming on and they kind of they want to reel it back.

Jenny Johnson 00:30:37 We’ll come up with a practice, we’ll try several and try implementing, you know, see which one works the best for them. But it might be just prolonged exhales, maybe doing 5 to 10 slow breaths where we make the exhales a little longer than the inhales. Something that simple, you know can be so powerful for more advanced cases. Advanced meaning people I’ve been working with for a little while and are ready to bring in more kind of expansive or positive emotions to replace some of the fear or anxiety or negative thoughts. We’ll work on heart math. So I’m a certified heart math practitioner. And so we actually cultivate favorable emotions and see how long we can hold on to something like joy or beauty or love. We can picture ourselves at the beach or picture snuggling with our grandkids or whatever it is, savor that emotion and breathe that in, and we can create an energetic shift and a vibrational frequency shift by using hard math. Sometimes it’s top down stuff. There’s some people who need to do some reframing that a lot of their issues come in from thoughts like, that’s going to make me sick, I’m going to throw up or I’m never going to get well.

Jenny Johnson 00:31:53 And they have these kind of unsupportive thoughts that are not their allies to their healing. So for some people will identify what those unsupportive thoughts are. What could we replace that with? And then we come up with a practice of reframing every time that thought comes in. We say cancel. Flip it over. Others have gotten well from this, and I can too. We learn to replace that thought, replace it, replace it multiple times throughout the day. And what happens is, over time, the new affirmation, the new thought that we’ve trained our brain to have becomes the dominant one. So those are just some examples. And we bring in some somatic stuff like weighted blankets and some things that worked for my sensory kids. As a pediatric PT works great for limbic retraining for people who are in a trauma or a freeze response. So it really depends on whether it’s more body based issues or mind based issues and how people respond to things. But we come up with a diet and we tweak it over time, and that’s usually more of a coaching relationship where we might meet every week or every other week, you know, for several months, and really work on empowerment.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:33:04 I love that, and I think this is just as a subspecialty needed more and more because we are living in an increasingly toxic environment. There are new, unfortunately viral and other pathogens related to climate change that we’re going to be continuing to encounter. So I think that this work is so important because our physical bodies are sort of struggling to keep up. And I think not just the actual pathogens and environmental toxins, but also the overexposure to being on your phone, like bad news and that kind of thing. Like there’s a lot of sort of 24 over seven input that our immune systems were not adapted. And our nervous system sort of that connection connective tissue between the two. were not adapted to handle this much stocking of stress over time. So I think what you’re talking about here, this real collaborative relationship between environmental medicine medical specialists, nutritionists and physicians and nurse practitioners and Pas and so forth with the actual implementation, because even if a person gets a list of here are the binders to take, and here are the supplements to take.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:34:27 They’re often very sensitive to those. So they have to move really slowly. I think that it’s such a great role for a health coach, and so many of our health coaches are well trained in working with complex cases that I think this is such a nice specialty, because people need a lot of hand-holding through this process, because it’s not like a quick and easy solution. It’s a process of you might have to move. You might have to completely renovate your home. You might have to take extended detoxification protocols for periods of time that don’t generally make people immediately feel better. You know.

Jenny Johnson 00:35:06 A marathon, not a sprint. Yeah.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:35:09 So how do you now take care of yourself and your family and any of your clients who are sort of there on the other side? They’re feeling really well. How do they live now? One of the things I’ve really been exploring since, you know, doing this recovery from long Covid is we now really understand that there’s no binary of health and wellness. Healthy people can get super sick overnight.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:35:33 Super sick people can have moments of being really well and really connected. This isn’t a binary. And so how do you help people step into the, you know, quote unquote maintenance phase? Because it can be really a big shakeup for someone who is maybe really healthy and then went to college and got really sick all of a sudden in a dorm. It’s hard to kind of accept that shift into quote unquote, disability or illness.

Jenny Johnson 00:36:04 Yeah. Yeah. I’m glad you asked that question. And I think I have a hopeful answer to that because, like I shared, my family has the worst genetics for chronic inflammatory response syndrome, at least the susceptibility to having a relapse. And we’ve been through this once and it was ten years ago. We got well about eight years ago. And we have been well ever since. There’s more going on than just that one bad gene that we have. Because if it was all about that one gene, we would get sick every time we go into the grocery store, in the movie theater, in the church and wherever.

Jenny Johnson 00:36:40 And we’re not. And so it’s more complicated, but in a good way than just looking at, you know, our genetic susceptibility. So I’ve actually developed a program that I put myself on called Sally eugenics. So you talked about the word pathogen. You know, we’re trying to eradicate pathogens and identify pathogens, and there’s some importance to that. And for people who’ve had environmental illnesses, we know to a certain extent it’s not a bad idea to maybe test our home for pathogens like mold or bacteria once a year, just to kind of make sure we’re breathing clean air, put in some air purifiers to reduce the pathogens. But then let’s focus on the solutions. So a pathogen is something that makes us sick. Sally who is wellness and Jen is, you know, Genesis. So things that create and sustain wellness, why don’t we just do more of those things. And maybe that’s what’s balancing out our inevitable exposure to pathogens. And I think it’s worked for our family. So we’re really digging into the integrative functional medicine, the lifestyle stuff.

Jenny Johnson 00:37:46 I think we should all learn as kindergarteners that these are our are superpowers. We haven’t been shown, I think to the degree that we deserve that our mindset, our diet, our movement, our access to nature, our relationships, dealing with our trauma, we kind of take these things for granted, but they are so powerful they can actually keep us well, or maybe help prevent more exacerbations of chronic illnesses, or help us be a little bit more resilient. Bounce back from something like Covid a little quicker for our family. Is prevented a relapse for the last eight years despite having the worst genetics. So there’s something to lifestyle and diet and mindset for sure.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:38:29 I really love that because I think that’s exactly how we approach things. It’s sort of that upward spiral of healing where you’re essentially not aiming to immediately squelch symptoms necessarily. Although I do like some of the thought rewiring and all of that and the nutritional supplemental medical impact to heal underlying root causes and suppress symptoms. Because it’s much easier to do all of this work when you don’t feel absolutely terrible.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:38:58 And so but I think then there turns a corner at some point. Or you can even start this fairly early on in your recovery journey. The word of solution of like thinking about what can I do today to start building wellness? So if I’m in a flare instead of distracting with social media, can I do some breathwork? Can I just go sit outside? Can I call a friend? Can I make myself a nourishing soup? There are all these options to help people, I guess, take care of themselves and take care of their community. You know, wear masks if they’re sick or not, go out if they’re sick, wear masks. In general, being mindful of cleaning up damaged water situations or reporting them quickly. I think we can think about this in a very community supportive mindset when we’re thinking about protecting ourselves, but everyone else too.

Jenny Johnson 00:39:58 Yeah. Yeah. So. Well said. Absolutely agree.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:40:02 So I think when we’re healing from something that’s so complex, there’s that back of the mindset fear.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:40:10 And yet it sounds like your clients are really responding to, you know what? It is strongly possible over a long periods of time to live in health, even with vulnerability, even with some risk factors. As long as I maintain my focus on the things that I can do and I can control to keep my resilience.

Jenny Johnson 00:40:33 Yeah. Yeah. Very true. And, you know, minding our environment. I don’t want to make it sound like that. Doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. And we are much better homeowners than we ever were before because we now know, you know, we don’t want the water pouring out of our gutters the wrong way and landing on our foundation, and I don’t think I noticed things like that before. I now notice, you know, building maintenance and things like that. And we’re better at maintaining our own and testing our own. We do labs on our bodies. You know, we run the surge labs just to see what our inflammatory markers are looking like. We don’t want to be and find ourselves in a full flare before we’re like, oh, I think it’s come back.

Jenny Johnson 00:41:14 And so we do monitor. We test our environment, we test our bodies, and we take good care of our homes. It’s kind of like if you find out you have an allergy, you know, you kind of know there’s this thing that you kind of have to tend to, but we’re not living in fear. It’s more of an empowered sense of, oh, I have this thing. And, you know, I have tools that I know are helpful to protect me. I use the tools and then I forget about it. And I live like a normal person and I focus on solutions.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:41:41 Yeah. That’s lovely. So it’s really just another form of preventative medicine. You know, it’s just like getting your mammogram or something like that doing your annual bloodwork. I like that. So are you still living in the same little farm? No.

Jenny Johnson 00:41:57 No, we did move away from that house and we didn’t know a lot at that time. We made every mistake in the book. We tried to remediate our house ourselves and we made every mistake.

Jenny Johnson 00:42:09 It was awful and we kind of made a mess of it. We were living in a place that was very humid, got sideways rain. I think almost any house, you know, is going to probably be above that safe threshold for healing from sirs. And when we learned that our kids had the genetics, we just thought, what if we moved to a place in the US that maybe give us a little better chance of success? And, you know, our kids can make connections and maybe go to college there and that’s their home rather than this part of the country that is a little more challenging. So we moved to Colorado, where things dry out. You know, if you spill a glass of water on the carpet, you’re not worried about the carpet pad underneath it growing mold the next day. I sop it up, maybe put a dehumidifier on it and it’s dry in an hour. So where we were living before, you would hang a bathing suit out in the garage to dry, and it never dried.

Jenny Johnson 00:43:04 It actually turned into a Chia pet. So environment can be helpful. You know, it’s not perfect. Water damage can happen anywhere. You know, a dishwasher leak or a toilet overflow. Things like that can happen anywhere. So we still need to be vigilant about how we handle, you know, homeowner type things. But whether it can be our friend too.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:43:23 So there definitely are less risky environments, if you will, in those dryer locations.

Jenny Johnson 00:43:30 I believe so because I’ve lived in two very different and I’ve seen things be very different. So yeah.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:43:36 Yeah. Really interesting. Thank you so much, Jenny. This has been really educational and really, I think, hopeful, especially for people that are really struggling, because I find that this is a conversation that can feel very overwhelming without that coaching support, because it’s just like, you know, you see an environmental toxin doctor and they’re just like, oh no, everything’s a mess. Burn down your house. You know, it’s just like that.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:44:01 Can, I think, sometimes make it worse if they don’t have someone like you to help them navigate the journey? So if people do want to work with you, where can they find you?

Jenny Johnson 00:44:12 Yeah, thanks for asking. You can find me at Simplified Wellness Designs. Jenny at is my email or you can just go to the website. I also have a cell eugenics website for folks who are ready for more of the inner terrain optimization after dealing with the outer terrain. About a year ago, I launched a course that we’re hoping to get C approval for for physical therapists, other allied health professionals, health coaches. It’s a 22 hour certification course in SaaS coaching and consulting is what we called it, so that allied health professionals would be considered, I guess, a consultant. But for folks who maybe don’t want to be a specialist or certain medical specialist, but want to know enough to recognize this in their population, to appreciate some of the evidence behind Doctor Shoemaker’s work. And then what are we doing on the structural side? Gut health side, nervous system side environmental? What are those environmental standards and protocols and best practices? It’s all laid out in there.

Jenny Johnson 00:45:14 So if any of your listeners are wondering, hey, maybe there’s a cool C program that would help me be more equipped to help people who may have sirs, it is out there. It is at sirs.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:45:27 Excellent. Yes. Thank you so much for that. I think this is one of those kind of quiet, invisible illnesses that it’s just not well understood by the vast majority of the health care community. So the more people are understanding it, they can spot it in their clients, and they actually have tools and resources and other colleagues to connect with. So thanks for sharing that and creating it. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks so much for your time.

Jenny Johnson 00:45:57 Well, thank you for inviting me. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:46:05 That was such an informative conversation. Can you believe poor Jenny? She and her husband moved their whole family to this idyllic farm homestead, and that’s where they end up getting sick. I think to me, it’s so fascinating to really take a step back and look at all of the different stressors on people’s bodies now.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:46:29 And, you know, it’s actually, to me, almost a wonder that, like, not all of us have singers. Like, I think some of us have genetic robustness, which is really lucky. And, you know, some people, I think, tolerate more discomfort without seeking help. And other people, I think, keep trying to seek help. And there’s not enough for them, because in this day and age, with the stressor of constant news cycles, emotional stressors, traumas, medical gaslighting, you know, the physical symptoms and the physical exposures to both environmental toxins and viruses and other pathogens, bacterias, you know, there is a lot that people’s bodies and minds are trying to navigate. And then you throw in puberty, pregnancy, perimenopause, menopause. And I really believe that we’re not underestimating how much need there is for support and coaching for people trying to navigate getting healthy from complex, chronic illness that really can take them out of their goals, of their vision, of their lives.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:47:41 And I think Jenny’s tone is just so hopeful. And I think all coaches have the capacity to step into a role where they’re the one person on the health team that’s like, you’re going to be great. You’re going to feel so much better day by day. And we’re going to start right now with exactly how you can feel better now. So that’s the little nugget I want you to take from this conversation. Also we’re going to list this in the show notes. But after our conversation Jenny and I were talking about this website, surviving Worldcom. There’s like a 98% diagnostic rate from just doing a little 15 minute screening to see if you are being triggered by mold. It may or may not be valuable for your clients to even know that, depending on how many triggers there are being stacked in their history, so use that information wisely. But the little nugget I want you to take is that health and illness are not a binary. A person is not sick or well. It’s a continuum of which, no matter how they are feeling in that moment, they can enhance their own health and wellness by taking little micro actions.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:49:00 And one of the things that Jenny and I discussed, which I think is so important, is these these things like mindfulness and movement and sunlight and nutrition that are kind of seen as like, oh, these little side things, you know, sleep. Those things are the foundations of health. It’s not supplements. It’s not medications. Now, supplements and medications are important and really valuable and can really change the game. And I think we need to be very careful of underestimating these sort of day to day habits. And I think one of our roles as coaches is to help make those accessible for people. Some people are really busy. Some people are really overwhelmed. Some people are addicted to other things because they didn’t learn how to self-regulate or how to help self nourish or self-support. So we have a really valuable role in helping people feel better, even if they’re deep in the depths of their surs or other chronic illness where they’re like literally in their dark sanctuary room with their heated weighted blanket. In those moments, we have little tools to help people start right now, moving towards their vision of health.

Dr. Jessica Drummond 00:50:32 I want those tools to be more accessible, and that’s one of the key roles of coaching. So I hope you can take that little nugget, apply it to your practice, and I’ll see you next week. Thank you so much for joining me today for this episode of the Integrative Women’s Health Podcast. Please share this episode with a colleague and if you loved it, hit that subscribe or follow button on your favorite podcast streaming service so that we can do even more to make this podcast better for you and your clients. Let’s innovate and integrate in the world of women’s health.