36. Less Is More: Why Over-Treating Mold & Food Intolerance Makes Things Worse

In this episode of the Histamine Well Podcast, Joanne speaks with Rachel Scott, who developed severe food intolerances, intense histamine reactions, and unexplained chronic symptoms following mold exposure.

After years of misdiagnosis and treatments that failed to address the root cause, Rachel’s health continued to deteriorate — until a simpler, more balanced approach was introduced. Rachel shares how targeted support using sulforaphane, digestive enzymes, and Epsom salt baths helped stabilize her system and gradually restore tolerance to food.

Joanne explains the biochemical drivers behind mold-related illness, including sulfur metabolism, detoxification pathways, and nervous system load, and why aggressive protocols, heavy supplementation, and herbal overuse can often worsen symptoms in sensitive individuals.

This conversation highlights the importance of gentle, well-timed interventions, practitioner guidance, and understanding the body’s capacity before pushing detoxification.

Topics covered include:

• Severe food reactions and histamine intolerance
• Mold exposure and chronic illness
• Sulforaphane and detoxification support
• Sulfur metabolism and nervous system balance
• Why “less is more” in complex healing cases

Show Notes: 

🌐 Official Program Links

1. The Gupta Program – Brain Retraining

This is the main site for the limbic retraining and neuroplasticity program designed to help calm the nervous system and support recovery from chronic and sensitivity-related conditions.

2. Irene Lyon – Somatic & Nervous System Work

This is the official site for Irene Lyon, a nervous system expert who provides somatic-based exercises and education to help regulate the nervous system body-mind connection.

3. Cell‑Logic – G.E.M.M. Protocol for Patients

This page explains the G.E.M.M. Protocol (Gut Ecology & Metabolic Modulation) — an approach focused on restoring cellular health and gut-immune balance.

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📘 New to this journey? Buy The Ultimate Bundle for Managing Histamine Intolerance—your step-by-step guide to manage your histamine intolerance effectively.

 🧪 Curious about your methylation status? Try our at-home Methylation Test! In just 15 minutes, discover if you're over-methylating or under-methylating and receive targeted supplement recommendations to help rebalance. Use code HISTAMINEWELL10 for 10% off.

🎓 Practitioner or student? Join the waitlist for the Histamine & Methylation Online Group Coaching Course starting early 2026!

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Transcript

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Hi, it's Joanne. What if the reason you are not getting better is because you are doing too much. Too many supplements. Too many protocols. Too much killing when your nervous system and immune system are already overwhelmed. Today's episode is about what happens when we stop attacking the body and start regulating it instead. If this sounds like you, if your body is reacting to everything and nothing seems to be working, stick around. You are going to learn a lot. I'm speaking with my patient, Rachel Scott about her journey through chronic skin flares, extreme food intolerances, and what finally helped her turn things around. Welcome to the Histamine Well Podcast. Designed for practitioners and patients alike. This is your trusted source for insights on histamine intolerance, methylation, gut health, women's hormones, and much more. I'm Joanne Kennedy. Your host, naturopath, author, and educator. Passionate about breaking down complex science into clear, accessible knowledge. Whether you are a health professional or navigating your personal wellness journey, the Histamine Well Podcast bridges the gap between cutting edge research and practical understanding to empower you with the tools to thrive. Hi everyone. Welcome back to the Histamine Well. Today, I'm joined by a patient of mine, Rachel Scott, who kindly agreed to come on and share her story. Rachel first came to see me in February last year with really severe food reactions. Almost everything she ate caused her skin to flare into pretty intense rashes. Before working with me, she'd seen functional medicine doctors in the US for over a year and wasn't getting anywhere. She had a history of mold exposure and had done a mold detox program along with a huge number of other things, brain retraining, therapy, acupuncture, sauna, supplements, you name it. So I wanted to bring Rachel on today to talk about what was actually going on for her, what we did differently, and how she was able to get such a good result with some fairly simple changes. Rachel, thank you so much for your time today. Yeah. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be here. Excited to share my experiences and just hoping that maybe it helps somebody else who's feeling a little bit stuck as well. Yeah, that's exactly why I get patients on, because people can get really stuck with. Just go down rabbit holes with the wrong treatment for them. And so I think that's what happened with you essentially. It's so great that you're gonna share your experience with us today. So Rachel, I'll just start with like, what was your health like and your symptoms like before you came to see me? Before we started working together, I had been dealing with really severe and unexplained health issues for about two years. During this time, my body had become really reactive. I was down to about six safe foods that I could tolerate, and almost everything I tried seemed to make things worse. I was constantly exhausted. My skin was a mess, and my day-to-day functioning was pretty limited overall. I think looking back, the toughest part was just getting through a normal day, right? I had such a full active, fun life before, so it was really tough knowing what I had lost, you know, not being able to go to social events with friends or enjoy dinner out freely, or participate in family gatherings like I used to. And honestly, even at work, I didn't feel like I could be kind of fully present. You are right before finding you, I had seen multiple functional medicine doctors in the US. Try countless diets, supplements, and protocols, but nothing really improved. Plus the advice I got felt pretty surface level. It was things like, Get more sleep or drink more water, try to stress less. So I think overall it felt maybe a little bit frustrating and isolating. I think I was starting at that point to lose some confidence that I would ever kind of really come to the answers. I luckily came across your information online and just on a whim decided to reach out. There was something about your approach that felt different. You were already treating patients with similar symptoms, so I thought it probably couldn't hurt to reach out and maybe see if you could help me too. Yeah. No, I'm so grateful that you did, Rachel. I do remember meeting you. You look like Reese Witherspoon. Did I tell you that? No, you didn't. I'll take that all day. Thank you, Joanne. Yeah, yeah. Pleasure. Pleasure. So, Rachel, from seeing all these practitioners for over a year, how long did it kind of take you to get a diagnosis? That was really kind of correct. And then what happened post that diagnosis? Yeah. So I think what made the mold especially challenging for me was that I couldn't pinpoint one clear source. So my condo did flood at one point, which may have worsened things, but my symptoms had begun before then. A previous functional medicine doctor had tested me for mold. The results did come back positive, so we knew it was part of the big picture, but we weren't able to sort of connect all the dots, right? So all the dots to all your, all of your symptoms. That's right. I think what I noticed most was how reactive my body became. So there was inflammation, sensitivity, and fatigue. It just always felt like I was, my body was always compromised. And I think as the months went on, I became kind of increasingly reactive to foods and supplements and small changes. Losing more foods and kind of staying stuck in this fight or flight state. The symptoms also felt really persistent. So once something triggered a reaction, it was really tough for my body to recover. Yeah, it's interesting. That's what mold illness does. It disrupts not only the immune system, but the nervous system. And they become hyperreactive together. Which is why, you start to have multiple, multiple food intolerances and become really reactive to supplements. So Rachel, I just wanna ask you, going back, do you remember some of the treatments that were given that were sort of flaring you, and some of the supplements? Did you have any adverse reactions to supplements, and told to keep pushing through? Yeah, absolutely, I did. Yeah. So as you might imagine, I tried a wide range of approaches, everything from a strict candida diet to taking 20 to 30 supplements spaced out every few hours. We tried binders, nasal sprays, antivirals, mold protocols, various herb remedies. And once in a while, maybe, you know, every few weeks I'd see some relief. You know, like being able to eat a single meal off of the, the special diet food. But overall, most of what we tried was either frustrating or completely ineffective. Looking back now, I think we were trying to kill or eliminate things without really strengthening my support system. So my body stayed irritated and reactive instead of actually doing the healing that it needed. I'm really, really glad you brought that up. Mold patients are the patients that usually should get minimal supplements, right? And definitely avoiding antimicrobials unless there's a really good reason why not to. Well, a lot of the species are penicillin and what's penicillin is the original antibiotic. So it really disrupts the microbiome, which causes even more immune dysfunction. And then what starts to happen when you take herbal medicine, it's strong and it goes in and it eradicates more and more and more of your beneficial bacteria. And beneficial bacteria do many things including regulating your immune function. What can also happen when you have really low levels of good bacteria is you can start to get an oxalate problem. Which is something that is really, really common with mold and then with mold, because it inflames the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is the nerve that runs from the brain right down into the gut. It's got many branches into your stomach, your intestines, your large colon and pancreas everywhere. And when it's dysregulated, you are in fight and flight. You're not in rest and digest essentially. And then so your body becomes hyper reactive to many, many foods. And then many, many supplements. So it's kind of pointless to be pushing all these supplements into a nervous system that's disrupted from the mold. And so that combination, when you are putting more supplements into an already heightened irritated system, it starts to self perpetuate and create more immune dysfunction and more nervous system dysfunction. So the body becomes like, don't eat that. Don't take that. Even though it's meant to be good, because it's so in such a heightened state, it starts to react. And we see this all the time with our mold patients whereby symptoms get worse and worse and worse, the harder they try, the more things that they take. So I think that's definitely what happened with you, Rachel. Yeah, I think that really resonates with me. Especially what you said about the penicillin piece because around the two year mark, I developed a severe case of pneumonia and had to go on antibiotics and steroids. The medicine was so tough on my system and I was right back to square one after taking those. And I think at that point the doctor that I had been working with was just completely out of answers. And that's really when I started to realize that a completely different approach was needed. Is this kind of when the food, the, the food restrictions became really severe. They did. They were leading up to this. They were severe. They started to get just a little bit better. And then it's when I took those different medicines and it was just kind of all back to starting from scratch again. Yeah. Okay. The antibiotics, well, you had to, that's another thing that mold does. It makes you really susceptible to infections. Yeah. Interesting. And so Rachel, when we first started working together. I think I did mention to you that we needed to rebuild and reestablish your immune function rather than go in and kill things. And so it really was a one supplement. And guys, I'm gonna explain how this supplement works, which was just so helpful for Rachel, which was sulforaphane. So I'm just gonna let get Rachel to give you a bit of a rundown of what started to happen as soon as we actually added the sulforaphane into her supplement regime every day. Yeah, I think once the solver became part of the conversation, it definitely helped explain why certain things were causing problems for me, and then why other things felt supportive. But I could immediately tell how depleted my levels were because it was almost like my body couldn't get enough of it. Whether it was in the form of an Epsom salt soak or sulphur skincare, like face washes and face masks for my skin. My skin took the biggest hit and it became a clear reflection as to what was happening internally. Just constantly signaling that something deeper was off. Yeah, it's interesting. I remember when you started taking the Enduracell is the one I gave her. The broccoli sprout powder. I remember our first consult,'cause I was always worry that things aren't gonna work and you're like, oh my God. Like I had the sulfur fame with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I'm starting to eat more foods. Yeah. I think what I noticed immediately was how my body responded. The digestive enzymes helped right away, which was surprising in a great way. But from there that broccoli sprout powder, what I can describe as only a sort of life changing shift. I could feel it right away. Same day. It kind of gave me a calm that I hadn't felt in years. My system was less reactive. It was less inflamed. I think around this time we also slowly started adding foods back in, and my skin started to improve as well. So I was beginning to notice these subtle, meaningful changes, increases in energy. You know, feeling more regulated. Able to go out and spend time with family and friends again. As we introduced the sulfur, I felt as a result. For the first time in about two and a half years that I was finally catching a break with all of this. Yeah. Before we talk more about Sulfur,'cause I know there were some other sulfur supplements you were taking that were helpful for you. I just wanna talk about what Sulforaphane actually is. So, funnily enough, sulforaphane from Broccoli Sprout Powdered it's not that it has a lot of sulfur in it. It does have some sulfur. It is useful in that regard. But it actually does a remarkable job at regulating immune signaling rather than just suppressing it. So in Rachel's case, her immune system was essentially stuck in an overactive inflammatory state, which is why her skin was flaring so dramatically in response to food. And Sulforaphane works by activating something called the NRF two pathway, which is a major antioxidant and anti-inflammatory pathway in the body. And when NRF two is switched on, it helps calm, excessive immune responses. And it improves the body's ability to deal with oxidative stress and supports healthy detoxification. All of which are incredibly relevant for inflammatory skin conditions. A key thing here is that it regulates immune signaling and it doesn't suppress it. And it also doesn't ramp it up. The thing with herbal medicine that I've seen clinically, it upregulates your immune system. Like it can do that so beautifully. And that is great. When someone comes to me with a pretty simple SIBO case, right? They've got food poisoning or they've been a bit stressed, they've got SIBO. And they have bloating, and they might feel a bit fatigued, a bit of brain fog. They come to me and it's like, this is kind of like an acute thing. We can go in with herbal medicine and just help eradicate that in like two or three months, and then they're on their way. Because it just helps the immune system cope, deal with things, kill things off, get rid of them. But when your immune system has been stuck in this overreactive response where it freaks out with every single supplement and food, you don't want to put more herbs in which increases immune function. You don't wanna just like dull it down or suppress it. You need to help regulate it, and that's what sulforaphane can do. So listeners, if you're interested in sulforaphane, just have a look online. Just to get more explanation around what Sulforaphane can actually do, because it actually really does regulate the immune system in a myriad of different ways. The one we use is Enduracell and it's part of the GEMM protocol. Which is G-E-M-M from Cell Logic. I think is the company that developed the GEMM Protocol. So I actually put that information in the show notes. So this is what we see clinically all the time is this is overactive immune response. And then people getting given supplements that ramp up the immune system and it just flares. And this is why Sulforaphane is so beautiful, because it can just really help calm down that overactive immune response. We see this clinically all the time with our super sensitive patients, and there is a lot of talk in naturopathic circles at the moment, or for the past several years around how we don't go in and just eradicate candida or bad bacteria to try and get a change in our patients because it's just fundamentally not working for our chronic people who have chronic illness rather than these acute kind of easy SIBO cases. So that's one thing I wanted to touch on. Now, the other thing I wanna separate is just the sulfur part. So what happens with mold is that because mold is so inflammatory. It causes so much inflammation and oxidative stress to sequester all the free radicals that occur with that oxidative stress. Your body needs a lot of glutathione. Your body's major antioxidant and glutathione is a sulfur molecule. So your body is trying to give all of this sulfur to glutathione amongst many other things like sulfur's the second most abundant element in your body. It has many, many, many roles. It also helps create mucin in the gut, which is a protective lining in the gut. It helps a lot with your joints and your cartilage. It's also really, really important for a detoxification pathway called sulfation. Which deals not only with mold mycotoxins. It deals with your body's own endogenous waste products like your hormones as well as many environmental toxins. So the body can become really deplete of sulfur. And Rachel was saying, I think you're saying Epson salt baths are really helping you. Yeah, that's exactly right. So I started with those at a really kind of small or low pace, and then worked my way up. But I noticed that as I increased the volume of the Epsom salt my body was overall feeling better. A sense of healing and it just felt better overall. It's really important. So how Epsom salts work is that they bypass the gut and they get into the bloodstream and they provide the sulfate that you need for the sulfation pathway. Which as I said, a really major player when it comes to detoxification. So, Rachel, what sort of symptoms did you see kind of lift first? Do you remember when you started those Epsom salt baths? Yeah, I definitely felt like there was like a calming sense that kind of came over my body when taking the salt baths and in the days even following that baths. I noticed my skin was far less reactive, so there was a lot of breakouts, a lot of blotchiness, redness, itchiness, sensitivity that all calmed down. I also had different rashes kind of down the trunk of my body. Overall, those seem to subside as well. It was almost like the absence, how bads just gave my body or my system an overall calming experience that it had been sort of desiring or needing for some time. Yeah, so I love this because what we can clearly see is that Rachel's intolerances were driven mainly by an impaired detoxification pathway, not a gut microbiome issue. And so this is why using herbal medicine the way it was prescribed was just not going to be useful because it's actually killing off a lot of the beneficial bacteria, as I said. And also it's when you're killing off even bad guys, it can create toxic waste products that also need to go through the liver. And her, she wasn't able to process that. So when you kill off bacteria and candida, it does need to go processed through the liver. And her liver was so taxed that it couldn't actually deal with that. And so this is a really, really common thing that we see in our mold patients. Or just patients with chronic illness or patients that have really taken a lot of antibiotics or even been prescribed herbal medicines for a myriad of different reasons throughout their health journey. Before we go any further, I want to speak directly to the practitioners and students listening. If you're intrigued by histamine and methylation and eager to expand your knowledge in this fascinating area we offer the Histamine and Methylation online group coaching course. The only program of its kind. It covers everything you need to know about histamine and methylation, providing both the theory and guidance you need to treat these issues effectively in clinical practice. We cover sibo, hormonal imbalances, oxalates, M-T-H-F-R, the four pathways of methylation, including the folate pathway, methionine pathway, tetrahydrobiopterin pathway, and the all important transsulfuration pathway and much more. The program is delivered by detailed online webinars and handouts for you to keep. And for eight weeks you'll meet with me for live coaching calls in a private community space with other practitioners from all over the world dealing with histamine and methylation issues in their patients every day. Together we learn so much. To learn and apply, visit joanne kennedy naturopathy com. So guys, I do have all of my notes from Rachel's appointments in front of me, so I can clearly see a lot of the supplements that she reacted to. It's not about the brand, it's what's in it. So Rachel, you had a supplement micro defend. It actually contained thyme, clove, and orano oil. Beautiful herbs, right? Lovely for a acute kind of gut infections. But as I was saying, taking herbal medicine like this with serious compromised nervous system, gut microbiome and liver detoxification pathway. Caused you to have adverse reactions. Do you recall taking that and what happened? Yeah, absolutely. That really resonates. I think the reactions that I was having were mostly skin, so luckily I didn't have too many of the GI reactions, but what would happen was my skin would flare in in different hives and different breakouts, and I would get some sort of redness patches around my mouth or my forehead, and it would take anywhere from, you know, five to seven days. For all of that to calm down. So it's almost like as soon as I became triggered, my system became triggered. It was another five to seven days before I could get things to really calm down and kind of subside. Yeah. So this is what some practitioners say, oh, it's a herx reaction. You just lower the dose or push through. Maybe for a SIBO case, but not for a case like Rachel, because all of that inflammation, oxidative stress, that those herbs are causing, it's causing more tissue damage and it's causing more and more sulfur depletion. And then, as I was saying, these bugs produce toxic metabolites and they're trying to be processed through the liver. And of course, they come out in your body's biggest detox organ, which is your skin. Gosh, if you wanna keep a patient happy, you don't give them herbs for their skin. Like, that's definitely one thing I've learned in clinic from my 15 years now. So yeah, we can really see what that actually happened. And you also were taking probiotics. Did you take lots of different probiotics? Several different kinds, from several different companies. But all of them had the same reactions where it's just my body would be a mess for days at a time and my skin would overreact to the fullest. A few things with probiotics. First of all, many, many strains are high histamine. Most lactobacillus strains are high in histamine. And also when you've got a compromised gut, what can often happen is they can just break open in the small bowel when they're not meant to. And if you have SIBO as well, which is so common with mold, it can just flare SIBO symptoms. So that just doesn't surprise me. And what Rachel really needs more long term. It's not probiotics, it's prebiotic fibers.'cause prebiotics help restore and grow back your own gut bacteria, your own microbiome. It's so interesting, Rachel. I mean the food intolerance goes, I wanna sort of talk to people why these food intolerances start. So when you have mold right, it drops a microbiome, and this can just start your gut is just, microbiome is the immune system. So it's like, oh, I'm not really sure what this food is. Mold inflames a vagus nerve, which really puts you in fight and flight. When you're in fight and flight, you're not in rest and digest. The first thing that goes is your hydrochloric acid. And when you've got low hydrochloric acid, you're just not breaking down your food properly. And this, again, is going to cause your immune reaction to think, I don't know what this food is. It doesn't matter what it is. It just doesn't understand. So that starts to happen. And then because you can't break down your food, it sits rots and ferments in your gut, and that's gonna cause big histamine reactions. And then you put two and two together from Dr. Google or Dr. chat GPT the fact that this tomato you're eating is high in histamine. And then you start to understand that. And then what happens when your body becomes so deplete of the sulfur that I was telling you about is the gut microbiome can start increasing the production of sulfur producing bacteria'cause it's so desperate to get sulfur. And then what happens is when you eat sulfur foods, particularly brassica vegetables or cruciferous vegetables. You will start having adverse reactions to sulfur. Now that sulfation pathway is telling you about it actually detoxifies, salicylates. So you can see that these food intolerance starts to become really, really broad and at the same time, the nervous system is becoming hypervigilant. So it's like, do not eat anything because everything you are eating, I'm reacting to. And so it, this is where we get our patients coming to us with a list of four or five, six foods. That's kind of how it works. So you can see like going in and just like fixing the gut microbiome is not what we need to do with these patients. So it's really interesting. So with Rachel, the real key things that help turn this all around for you was the digestive enzymes that you really needed.'cause your body had been so stressed out for such a long time. And the sulforaphane, which is really helping just modulate your immune system really gently and getting that sulfur in for your liver detoxification. Yeah, that's exactly right. The three things that really helped. Totally. And I think early on when I started losing kind of all of my favorite foods, everything, you know, from sweetss to carbs, to nuts, dairy, I even had to give up coffee at one point, cut out most fruits and vegetables. I think over the first six months I noticed my list of safe foods kind of shrinking until I was only down to a handful of options that I could tolerate, like, you know, ground beef and, and rice pasta, and frozen blueberries and broccoli. I think losing the foods one by one was obviously exhausting. Because for two years I had to kind of stick to those same limited number of foods because of everything kind of going on in the background. I think it was also stressful trying to get enough variety in so I didn't feel like I was eating the exact same three meals or same meals three times a day. I was always concerned of introducing something new because that risk me starting back at Score one again. So every meal I had had to be planned out carefully, and to some degree it felt like my day revolved around just keeping my body nourished without triggering some sort of heavy reaction. It's really stressful. It's really stressful, isn't it, Rachel? Like this is the thing, like these conditions, when we are seeing patients, aside from the mold disrupting the nervous system that it does, the knock on effect causes the body to become so stressed that you become caught in this loop. Right? So, just patience, listening. I just, I really wanted to get Rachel on just to go through this and just. I don't know. I know that, you know, I feel like I'm sort of telling people what to do, but if you've been given a list of 20 supplements from a practitioner. When you have multiple food intolerances, they dunno what they're doing. It's going to cause you way more harm than good. Because if you are reacting to all these foods, you're gonna react to all the supplements and then the immune system and the nervous system talk to each other and they become hyper hypervigilant together. And then you just zoom out and you just have food intolerances that you can't put in buckets because they're all of them. And so just a warning to people out there'cause we see patients like this all the time. You can see Rachel ended up with three supplement, not even a, like Epsom Salt Baths are like a bath, two supplements that were really key for her, you know, and it might be a few different ones for you. It's really not a list of 20. You know, it's never that and never all at the same time. When I give my patients, like some of them, if they get six or seven, eight supplements, it's normally because they're actually pretty healthy and they just need a bit of vitamin D, some magnesium. We need to do a few SIBO things and they can have up to 10 supplements. I'll say to them, you're lucky to get that many supplements'cause it means that you're not that unwell. But when you are unwell, it really is less is more. And Rachel's a classic example of this being true. Another thing I wanna touch on is there is some really good limbic training. The limbic system does get really knocked around from mold. The Gupta program is limbic. And then you can also do somatic training. Irene Lyon, I really recommend her. Rachel I think did some of this stuff. But if you are doing that stuff without getting your biochemistry right then you are not gonna get a really great result. So Rachel, did you do any of that nervous system work I'm telling you about? Yep, exactly. Yeah, that's correct. So I did the Gupta training. As well as the work with Irene Lyons. And I think both of those contributed to the overall success that I'm having now. Along with everything else we've implemented. But those both programs were extremely helpful in getting me to this point. Yeah. They were helpful. I remember talking to you about this in our first appointment. Were they helping you before you made these changes or not really? Can you recall how that went? I think it's, as we were making the changes and I was diving into these programs almost simultaneously. Yeah. But everything was sort of coming into fruition at the same time. It was almost like the perfect storm of us trying a few things. Me trying these programs and us ultimately getting that positive result that we were looking for. Yeah. Yeah. That's great. So had you done any of those programs before you were working with me? I had not, no. Okay. That was the first time that I had tried either of the programs and we did them simultaneously. I think they were both different enough to where they would compliment each other. So we worked on'em simultaneously along with the different enzymes and the different medicines and things. Yeah. Okay. I am glad that's what happened. So listeners, we're always encouraging our patients to do a combination of limbic retraining, which is Gupta program. You can find that online. We'll link to in this, the show notes. And Irene Lyon is somatic work. To really get started on that when we are working with our patients. And it's not just for mold. Well, particularly the somatics. It's for anyone that's had some stress driving illness. And so it comes down to what we did with Rachel. Limbic retraining somatic experience, her nervous system work, just regulating her immune function gently with the sulforaphane. Getting her digestive enzymes in so she can actually break down her food. That's pretty simple. And getting those Epson salts in to like really support detoxification. So two supplements and then the rest are Yeah, not supplements. Yeah, it's great that we had such a great result with Rachel. I mean, just to be honest guys, when I have patients like Rachel come to me, sometimes it can be overwhelming when they've done so many things and they're not eating many foods. The last thing you want is to have more foods removed from your diet. Melanie, who works for me, guys. She's done some podcasts on mold. She was telling me about how the Sulforaphane works and the GEMM protocol works is it's really about not taking any foods away from these patients. You know, like it's so important to just start to reintroduce foods and not to become reductionists, like reductionists. And then people do this because they listen to podcasts like mine of course, because, you know, like I do a case one on SIBO when oxalates, but that is just SIBO or just oxalate. But when it's all these food intolerances, like people will just try and treat the sibo, treat the oxalate, treat the sulfur, and then there's no foods and 25 supplements. So that's a very reductionist approach. And look, I'm not saying it doesn't work in certain circumstances, it can. But when it's not, we need to zoom out. And we need to zoom out. And when we do that, particularly the sulforaphane, just understanding how it gently modulates your immune system. And getting that sulfur up, getting the nervous system stuff done, is like really fundamental for turning these issues around. So Rachel, everything is on the up and up for you. So how are you feeling about everything now and how's your sort of overall health at the moment? Yeah, it's been really exciting. So I think what stands out to me most now is just my sense of stability. My body finally feels more predictable. It feels resilient, and definitely less reactive. I'm not constantly on edge, you know, waiting for something to go wrong. So I do trust my body again, which is something that I don't think I've realized I had lost until it came back. There's definitely less fear around food, around making plans around day-to-day life. And I'm not as concerned if something doesn't go perfectly, I know that I can recover, and I think that makes all the difference, having that extra confidence. I would also say that my wellbeing feels more balanced and more sustainable long term. I think with everything that my body has been through, the sense of calm and confidence has been incredibly meaningful. Yeah, it is. That's just hard when you don't understand what your body is doing. It's very anxiety provoking. And socially difficult. Did it affect your work, Rachel, like I haven't asked you that. Yeah, so it absolutely did. That's such a great point. So I just don't think I had the capacity. I'm working in a fast-paced sales world. And I just didn't have the capacity to keep up with everyone else. I was constantly tired. I was fatigued by the afternoon. I was having to go home and rest. It wasn't at all like things had, you know, been previously before getting sick. So, it's a night and day change to where I was. Even six months ago to where I am today. Yeah, no, it's great. It's super, super exciting. I think it's the use of this GEMM protocol and what we are looking at with that is, becoming really efficacious for a more complex patients. So again, guys, just we'll put links in the show notes to what GEMM actually is. But I highly encourage you to work with a practitioner because it does need to be done in steps. And some of the supplements can flare you if not done in the correct sequence. Rachel, thank you so much for your time today. I'm sure that many people out there will really appreciate you sharing your story with them and we can hopefully encourage people to look outside the box of sort of the allopathic heavy herbal medicine kind of root that I have to say, some practitioners are still heavily reliant on for these chronic, let's say multiple food intolerance systemic, symptoms that you are suffering with. So thanks so much, Rachel. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me today. I think the only thing I'll add is that I think you're right. If someone's struggling or feeling discouraged, you know, my hope is that they don't give up. There are answers out there, and I think sometimes it's all about finding the right approach and the right support, like I did with you. Thanks so much, Rachel. Thank you. So thank you for joining me. I hope you found this episode beneficial. Be sure to subscribe to the histamine well so you don't miss an episode. Leave a review and you can also share this episode with someone who could benefit if you have any questions you'd like answered. Or have a topic you'd like me to discuss, please go to my website, joanne kennedy naturopathy.com, where you can provide us with that information. Until next time, take care and be well.