Could Mold Be Making You Sick? Understanding Mycotoxins with Dr. Monica Jauregui

Julia Ward, MD with Monica Jauregui, MD, IFMCP

About the Expert

Julia Ward, MD

Dr. Julia Ward

Dr. Julia Ward is a compassionate and forward-thinking physician with over a decade of experience in functional medicine, known for her systems-based approach to healing chronic illness. She is the founder of Balanced Body Functional Medicine, where she helps patients uncover the deeper drivers of disease and restore health by addressing the body as an interconnected whole.
After earning her medical degree from the University of Southern California, Dr. Ward served in the U.S. Navy, practicing general, urgent, and emergency medicine both domestically and abroad. Her own personal struggle with unexplained fatigue led her to question the limitations of conventional medicine and ultimately guided her toward functional medicine.
While she initially focused on identifying root causes, Dr. Ward’s approach has continued to evolve. She now emphasizes the importance of how and when the body is treated—not just what is treated. Through her Balanced Body System Reset™ framework, she focuses on restoring nervous system balance, improving mitochondrial function, reducing inflammation, and addressing root causes in the right sequence to create lasting and meaningful healing.
Dr. Ward integrates advanced diagnostics, personalized care plans, and innovative therapies such as hyperbaric oxygen and ozone therapy, while also emphasizing foundational elements like nervous system regulation, lifestyle, and patient engagement. She believes that healing is not a one-size-fits-all process, but a guided journey that requires both strategy and active participation.
A lifelong learner, Dr. Ward continues to expand her expertise in areas such as precision genomics, brain health, and complex chronic illness. She is deeply committed to helping her patients not only feel better, but truly understand their bodies and take ownership of their health.
A devoted wife and mother of five, Dr. Ward brings both clinical expertise and personal insight to her work, with a mission to transform the way chronic illness is understood and treated.

Guest

Monica Jauregui, MD, IFMCP

Board-Certified Internal Medicine Physician

Monica Jauregui, MD, IFMCP originally from Monterrey Mexico is a practicing and board certified Internal Medicine physician as well as certified through the Institute for Functional Medicine and International Lyme and Associated Disease Society. She graduated top of her class at the medical school of Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey and proceeded to obtain specialization in Internal Medicine through Louisiana State University at Shreveport. Before turning to Functional and Integrative Medicine, she was immersed in the hospital medicine world working with the most acutely ill patients in East Texas including ICU work. In 2019 she broadened her knowledge base to include training through multiple renowned functional medicine training programs including the above mentioned and many others such as Kalish Institute, A4M, Lyme Disease Practitioners Certification to name just a few.

Dr Jauregui’s initial clinical experience in Integrative Medicine was the first practice she founded, Salud Óptima, which focuses on lifestyle medicine and holistic solutions to the chronic medical problems that are prominent in the Hispanic population of Texas. Her most recent clinical venture has been founding Truly Healthy MD which focuses on the treatment of the medical mystery patient who has been unable to find relief of their complex problems despite prior attempts in the health care world. Her patients describe her as a compassionate and caring physician who can also be characterized as a “medical detective”.

Her leadership roles include being a founding member and sitting on the board of directors of the emerging College of Integrative and Functional Medicine Physicians where she currently leads the education committee with her passion to bridge the gap between conventional and functional medicine.

I can’t teach them about the disease. They’re not going to be able to get better and start thriving. So I do have a lot of structured programs in my in my practice where everybody who comes in, even if they think they know how to live a healthy lifestyle, we still go through the entire education.

Again, we talk to them about nutrition, like we were talking about, but all the other components of healthy lifestyle. We have to make sure people are having appropriate sleep hygiene.

They are managing their stress appropriately. They’re exercising, educating people on the, foundation of health is really what’s going to help them make their bodies healthy enough to be able to start healing from mycotoxins.

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Welcome to the Functional Edge podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Julia Ward, medical director and founder of Balanced Body Functional Medicine. Today, we’re honored to welcome Dr.

Monica Haurage to our show. In this episode, Dr. Haurage will be sharing insights on mold and mycotoxin illness and offering expert guidance to help you navigate your health journey with the latest advancements in functional medicine.

Stay tuned for an engaging conversation that promises to empower and inspire your path to wellness. So, Dr. Monica, please just give us a little introduction about yourself and then we’ll launch into some questions.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. It’s nice to be here and inform people about this super important topic. So, I, like you, I’m a medical doctor and I trained conventionally first, went to medical school, then got my a degree from LSU to internal medicine.

That’s my specialization. I worked in the hospitals, ICUs for about a decade. And then I decided to do something different with my career. I pivoted, went into the whole integrative space.

As I was doing that, my family started getting sick and we couldn’t figure out why my family was getting sick. And so that is when we found out that my house had had this big leak and we had some mold growing, had some mold toxicity.

And so I learned from personal experience about this whole mold journey. So that’s one of the main things that people seek me out for is for treatment for mold toxicity.

I also treat people for a lot of chronic complex issues, chronic infections like Lyme disease. A lot of times I’ll get people that say, I’ve seen 10, 15 doctors, nobody’s been able to figure it out.

So that’s what I’m coming to you for. And so that’s what my practice is mostly based on. My practice name is Truly Healthy MD. I am in the Dallas area.

I do mostly telehealth. I can see anybody in all of Texas because I do telehealth. I’m licensed in all of Texas and I also want to educate the world and about these things.

So on my website, there’s some educational things that even if you can’t be my patient because you don’t live in Texas, you can definitely go to my website, which is truly healthy md.com and I have some educational resources for people to learn about these things.

Wonderful, wonderful, thank you. Well, let’s just sort of jump right in, you know, spotting the signs of mold. So mold illness can often fly under the radar or be mistaken for something else.

So what are early indicators or patient experiences, you know, what experiences typically prompt patients to consider mold as an underlying cause? Yeah, that’s a great question because There’s a lot of people out there with mole toxicity and they just don’t know that this is the reason for their symptoms.

In part because there is just not enough awareness in our community and because mainstream physicians haven’t really adopted, they haven’t read the latest research about this so they don’t know that this is a problem that is a big problem.

So it’s important for people to be aware that this may be a problem. This is not something that most doctors will be literate in. You will have to definitely find a physician who has done some extra training and understands this.

The best way to find a physician is by going to, for example, The doctor that I trained under is Dr. Neil Nathan. If you go to his website, it lists all the doctors that he’s trained.

And that’s a good place to find a doctor that is literate in mold toxicity because you go to a primary care doctor or somebody in conventional medicine, you say you might have a mold issue and they’re like, well, do you have allergy to mold?

Do you have a fungus ball? Aspergillus is growing in your lungs. And those are the only things they recognize as far as how mold can affect our body. But we now know, and this is pretty cutting edge, it’s only been described in last decade or so, that mold can affect our body in other ways.

That’s not just the allergies that we know about, or the invasive type of fungal infection, right? a fungal ball in the sinus cavity or in the lungs. There’s another way in which mold can affect our bodies and it’s because molds they put out into the environment, what we call mycotoxins.

And so these are things like ochratoxin, zirelinone, trichotocin. I know these are kind of complicated words. There’s not going to be a test. But what these toxins are is that’s the way that molds kill off other molds.

So they’re made to be toxic. They’re made to kill other molds. Yeah. So that the mold can grow. And if you think of a petri dish, right? Like all the little mold colonies are kind of like invading each other.

So they’re each putting off these mold toxins to try to kill off the other molds. Unfortunately, when us as humans, when we’re exposed to these same mycotoxins in large concentrations, they can also affect the human body.

These mycotoxins are very, very, very, very small. They’re not the spores, which are a little bit larger. They’re very, very, very small. We think that the main ways that people are exposed to them are through the respiratory tract, people who live in water damaged buildings mostly.

But sometimes people are exposed in their car. If their car has a mold issue and the vents, there’s different places where people can be exposed to these.

Let’s say you’re living in a water damage building that has a lot of mold. Even if you can’t see it, it might just be behind the drywall. It’s releasing these toxins, trying to exert its dominance right into space.

And so you might be inhaling these things. Thank you for tuning in to Doctor Talks. We hope today’s episode has enlightened and inspired you on your path to optimal health.

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Could Mold Be Making You Sick? Understanding Mycotoxins with Dr. Monica Jauregui

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