Table Of ContentLife in the Era of
Dangerous Buildings
RITCHIE C. SHOEMAKER, MD
Copyright © 2010 by
Ritchie C. Shoemaker, MD
All rights reserved.
Permission to reproduce in any form
must be secured from the author.
Please direct all correspondence and book orders to:
Ritchie C. Shoemaker, MD
500 Market Street
Pocomoke, City, MD 21851
Library of Congress Control Number 2010940299
ISBN 9781609849603
Published for the author by
Otter Bay Books, LLC
3507 Newland Road
Baltimore, MD 21218-2513
Printed in the United States of America
Dedication
Surviving Mold is dedicated to all Mold Warriors who have pulled
together to help others in the ongoing search for a cure. The advances in
clinical medicine and research you will read about here are a result of a
group effort that brought support from those who have needed support
themselves, participation from those who were too ill to join in at one
time and hard work from those who were disabled before. To those who
joined in the effort, I salute your courage and tenacity.
To those who want to be a part of this exciting field of medicine,
politics, public opinion and legal battles, the road for you has been
blazed. Now that so many scientific mysteries about the devastating
illness caused by exposure to Dangerous Buildings are unveiled no one
needs to suffer without hope and no one needs to stay ill with no one to
turn to. Since 2005 when Mold Warriors was published, there is now
fulfillment of old dreams and attainment of new goals. The role for those
affected by Dangerous Buildings can now turn to opening the legal
injustices to the sunshine of truth and revealing to all that we will not let
a readily recognizable and readily treatable condition be either ignored or
untreated again.
This book is dedicated to the life and work of Frank Fuzzell, my
friend, and Wells Shoemaker, my father, men I will not forget.
Acknowledgments
Any book this long has a long list of those due thanks. From Editors
Patti Schmidt and Matthew Hudson to guest authors Laura Mark MD,
Pierre and Susan Belperron, Jerry and Loretta Koppel, Erin Culpepper,
Tom Jones, Erik Johnson, Greg Weatherman, Dr. Tom Harblin, Lee
Thomassen and David Lasater, Surviving Mold became a group effort.
Comments from Margaret Maizel, Jonathan Wright, Cheryl Wisecup,
Bruce Nichols, Don Malloy and JoAnn Shoemaker have strengthened this
book immensely. Ellen Shoemaker provided a poignant sidebar for
“Blood in the Sink.” Dennis House was always willing to lend a statistical
ear to knotty problems.
Debbie Waidner, Debbie Bell and Barbara Gray continue to set the
professional standard for what patient care in a mold illness practice
requires. While mold patients can be demanding and difficult, the
emotional rewards of seeing them return to a normal life creates a
satisfaction different from the joys of primary care medicine.
A special thanks to Matthew Hudson, the Professor, a man of
extraordinary depth of understanding and competence.
My greatest thanks are for my bride, JoAnn, who has supported this
effort for two years.
Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Ch 1 Survival: There Is So Much to Learn
15 Things All Mold Patients Need to Know
Ch 2 How Mold Warriors Evolved to Surviving Mold
2
Ch 3 Assuming Assumptions Are True: Ass Medicine
Ch 4 Don't Assume: Use Data to Show the Way
Ch 5 Blood in the Sink
Ch 6 Follow That Oxygen!
Ch 7 Shannon's Story: Courage and Perseverance by Dr. Laura
Mark
Ch 8 The Belperrons: A Family Adrift in a Sea of Ignorance
Ch 9 Jerry Koppel: The EPA Cost Him His Hypothalamus
Ch 10 The Oliff Syndrome: Erin Culpepper Regains Her Life
Ch 11 Benomyl: Mankind's Worst Self-Imposed Environmental
Disaster?
Ch 12 Frank Fuzzell: My First Mentor and My Friend
Ch 13 Big Tobacco Leads the Way for Big Mold
Truth Negates the ACOEM and AAAAI Consensus
Ch 14 Liana Jones, My Wife: Churchill Said “Never Give In” by
Tom Jones
Ch 15 Laura's Story: When Mother/Physician Becomes Patient by
Dr. Laura Mark
Ch l6 VIP: Just What the Doctor Ordered
Ch 17 The Novice Pilot: CFS and Other Medical Mistakes by Erik
Johnson
Ch 18 Spouses, Choice and HLA DR
Ch 19 After Katrina: Mold, Politics and Government in St. Bernard's
Parish, New Orleans, Louisiana
Ch 20 Teaching in a Water-Damaged School: Fighting for Our Lives
by Lee Thomassen
Ch 21 A Tourists’ Guide to Moldy Washington, DC: Where NOT to
Visit
Ch 22 Black Blizzard: A Lesson From History
Ch 23 Battling Mold: Policy and Politics by Thomas B. Harblin,
Ph.D
Ch 24 Testing and Remediation by Greg Weatherman
Ch 25 David's Bubble: How He Plans to Keep Susan Safe
Ch 26 Legalized Medical History
Ch 27 Lawyers, Lawyers, Lawyers
Ch 28 Darwin and Us: Is Unnatural Selection Changing Our
Adversaries Faster Than We Can Adapt?
Ch 29 Six Years On: A Patient's Personal Perspective
Epilogue: Roswell, New Mexico 9/21/10
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Generally Involved with Remediation
Appendix 1 What Do I Do?
Appendix 2 Rosetta Stone
Appendix 3 ERMI
Appendix 4 References for Benomyl
Appendix 5 Guide to Pronunciation
Appendix 6 Haefner/OWCP Decision
Appendix 7 St Bernard Parish Report
Appendix 8 Specificity Slides
Foreword
We are not born defenseless. We arrive into the outer world already
well equipped with the most sophisticated bio-hardware known to man.
Indeed the most advanced military programs and our best scientists and
billions of dollars cannot buy anything approaching this technology. The
design of our inflammation-producing immune response system has
survived intact for billions of years; it permits us to survive during those
first hours in a hostile world - and for decades thereafter. Our personal
nano-army is not passive. Once activated by news of intruders it is
proactive and so aggressive that if its targeting software has a design flaw
or has been programmed incorrectly then it doesn't stand down if it
cannot find the enemy. Instead it begins targeting friendlies. The
“friendlies” thus targeted are then attacked by the immune system's
warriors, the monocytes, macrophages and T-killer cells. But the host is
the only friendly that this aggressive system can harm - and so it does.
That is us. As the attack continues, vasoactive intestinal polypeptide
(VIP) and alpha melanocyte stimulating hormone (MSH) our self-
defenses to this aggression are overwhelmed and their production is
destroyed. By then our health is likewise in ruins. As Dr. Shoemaker
observes in a later passage - like Pogo - “we have seen the enemy and he
are us.”
This is our innate immune system. It is very sophisticated, very
complex and neither sleeps nor relaxes for as long as we live. It is a self-
starter and is fully automatic. We cannot coach or control it. We can help
it teach because it enables the acquired immune system (think
vaccination). The recognition and targeting equipment (immune response
genes) used by this guardian is so important that we have 2 sets of it, one
from each parent. There are not so many of these software packages
available to humans. Only 54 main versions (with some sub-groups) have
