Intranasal Essential Oils for Mold Remediation

I just had my bedroom remediated for mold.

My entire bedroom ceiling was infested and I didn’t even know.

It’s an old house that has been remodeled and the previous owner put drywall and wallpaper (yes, wallpaper on the ceiling) over the original hardwood and plaster. The wallpaper began to peel and I noticed something that looked like mold, so I had it tested. The results came back positive so I scheduled a remediation for what I thought would be a small segment of my ceiling.  

The remediation company found that the mold – most of it long dormant – had spread through every layer of the ceiling – the wallpaper, the drywall, the plaster, and the wood. So they demolished the entire ceiling. It took three days.

Not knowing what I was getting into, I stayed in the house during the remediation. While I slept on a couch in the basement and mostly stayed away from the top floor where my bedroom is located, I still felt the impact of the mobilized mycotoxins.

It was a hard hit and a great opportunity to lean into my essential oil remedies and learn firsthand what really helps, including our new Emotional Detox Kit™ which allowed me to stay calm and collected even in the face of intense and unexpected home remediation.

I also personally experienced the profound benefits of Intranasal essential oil usage to support sinus health with Sinus Support™.

How Mold Impacts Your Health

Living through the remediation process exposed me to airborne mold toxins, despite intense containment efforts. If you need to remediate mold in your home, I highly recommend you make plans to live elsewhere during the remediation.  

Mold spores are often inhaled through your nose and throat, impacting your sinuses, eyes, throat, lungs, and gut and contributing to symptoms like:

• Fatigue and lethargy that doesn’t otherwise make sense 
• Unexplained mood changes, anxiety, or depression
• Trouble sleeping
• Slowed thinking or brain fog
• Unsettled feeling, unquieted mind, overwhelm
• Increased Thirst
• Stubborn weight gain
• Frequent or strong static shocks
• Fatty liver
• Itchy or burning skin
• Histamine intolerance
• Sensitivity to EMFs
• Chronic sinusitis, nasal and sinus inflammation or congestion, runny nose
• Ear ringing, feeling itchy, plugged, clogged, or in pain
• Respiratory problems, such as wheezing and difficulty breathing, chest tightness
• Persistent coughing or difficulty breathing
• Eye irritation; red, itchy, and watery eyes
• Sneezing / Sneezing fits
• Skin irritation or rash
• Headaches
• Chemical sensitivities
• Acute sense of smell for mold
• Chronic sore throat
• Shortness of breath, air hunger, or yawn/sigh often
• Easy bruising

The toxic byproduct of mold, known as mycotoxins, can damage your brain and your nervous system.  Mycotoxins are known neurotoxins and can alter your brain activity by disrupting or even killing neurons.  Mycotoxins have been linked with several serious brain-related health conditions including brain fog, learning disabilities, gastrointestinal disturbances, heart problems, cancer, Lyme disease, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, problems with thyroid regulation (both excess and deficiency), and several neurological concerns and autoimmune diseases.

Mold can mutate rapidly, affecting your immune system and even preventing it from working altogether.  Once exposed, it can be challenging to eliminate the mold in your environment and detoxify the mold from your system. In fact, as many as 30% of us may have a genetic susceptibility to biotoxins like mold, where the immune system fails to recognize the mold as a toxin and cannot flag the toxins or make antibodies necessary to clear the mold from the body. This allows the toxins to build up in the body unchecked with symptoms that build with each exposure.

Combating Mold with Essential Oils

Mold starts in the nose, with the inhalation of tiny fungi, known as mycotoxins, through the nasal passages that contribute to sinus inflammation and congestion.

The inhalation and intranasal application of antifungal essential oils can help make sure that mold also ENDS in the nose by helping to reset your nasal microbiome. 

Since your olfactory system, the neural pathway for the sense of smell, directly communicates with your brain via your olfactory neurons, it can pose a health challenge in the case of toxins that you might inhale or smell, like mold. Just as toxins like mold can cross directly into your brain through the olfactory neurons, so can essential oils.

Essential oils serve as part of the plant’s immune system and contain therapeutic properties that protect plants from fungus including mold, bacteria, and viruses. Essential oils are comprised of different chemical structures, including aldehydes, phenolics, and terpenes, making them more effective against a diverse range of pathogens. The more diverse, the more effective. This is why blends of different essential oils are more effective for combatting mold. Blends combine the antifungal, antibacterial, antiparasitic, antiviral, and antimicrobial properties of several individual oils and are therefore more effective than single oils used in isolation to fight mold.

How to use Intranasal Essential Oils?

Essential oils can be used as intranasal treatments to clear up nasal passages and relieve sinus pressure and other congestion symptoms. The best way to relieve sinus congestion and alleviate nasal mold exposure is through inhalation. 

You can inhale oils in a number of ways:

• Direct Inhalation: Direct inhalation refers to inhaling the essential oil right from the bottle. You may also add a drop of oil to a tissue, cotton ball, or small plate of salt, and breathe it in. More on inhalation HERE.
• Intranasal Inhalation:  You can apply essential oils to a cotton swab to swab inside the nose in a circular motion. You can also leave cotton swab inside of nasal passageways for up to 20 minutes for more intense treatment.
• Diffusion: Diffusers disperse essential oils throughout the air, allowing them to dilute before being inhaled. This is a less potent method of inhalation. More on Diffusing Oils HERE 
• Steam inhalation:  Involves combining essential oils with hot water to create therapeutic steam. You can add three to seven drops of essential oil to boiling water in a large pot or heatproof bowl. Use a towel to cover your head, and breathe through your nose. You can also make use of steam inhalation by adding essential oils to a therapeutic bath, add a few drops of diluted essential oil to your bathwater. More on Healing Baths HERE.

Research on the Effect of the Use of Intranasal Spray of Essential Oils endorsed intranasal essential oil application as “a new and natural option in the management of nasal symptoms” as they have “shown an anti-inflammatory” and seem effective especially where antihistamines and intranasal corticosteroids have missed the mark. Additional research found that an intranasal essential oil blend reduced symptoms significantly — by 40.2% after using an essential oil nasal spray. The average percent improvement in symptoms included: runny nose (44.7%), cough (37.2%), loss of smell (32.4%), thick nasal discharge (31.9%), difficulty falling asleep (31.9%), sneezing (29.7%), post-nasal discharge (29.1%), lack of good night’s sleep (28.9%), nasal obstruction (26.5%), ear pain (25.4%), reduced concentration (25.0%), waking up tired (22.7%), and reduced productivity (21.3%).

Essential oils possess healing constituents produced by aromatic plants during their secondary metabolism, characterized by the presence of monoterpenes and sesquiterpenes, with other important aliphatic compounds, including terpenoids, alcohols, ethers, esters, ketones, and aldehydes For example, research found that 1.8 cineole, which is the main component of eucalyptus oil, is an effective and safe remedy for sinusitis that doesn’t include antibiotics. The constituent 1.8 cineole is believed to help clear your airways of mucus and act as a natural cough suppressant. Additional research extolled the antiviral qualities of several essential oils — including eucalyptus and peppermint which contains menthol — as effective tools against respiratory infections and mold toxins. Sinus Support™  blend contains all the oils noted in research — eucalyptus, thyme, lavender, and peppermint.

Intranasal Essential Oils

My two favorite oils for Intranasal use are:

Sinus Support™ 

Mold is often a root cause of chronic sinus issues. When mold enters the sinus cavity, a suppressed immune system is likely to have a strong adverse reaction, the result being fungal sinusitis. Since fungi love damp, dark conditions, the sinus cavity is a perfect growing place, making it difficult to eliminate them once they are in place.

Your sinuses are a connected system of hollow cavities in the skull that drain into your nose. Normally, the sinuses are empty except for a thin layer of mucus. When your sinuses are inflamed from exposure to mold, thick mucus fills the nasal cavity causing your tissue to swell and blocking drainage openings into your nose so fluid can no longer escape. This then leads to the common symptoms of sinusitis: headaches, facial pressure, and even toothaches from surrounding nerve impingement.

Essential oils can easily travel into the small holes to loosen mucous and promote drainage. Sinus Support™ works as local decongestants that break up mucus, stimulate drainage of the nose and sinuses, and relieve head pressure. Essential oils are also antimicrobial, to help resolve infectious organisms such as bacteria, viruses, and fungus in the sinuses and nasal cavity.

Sinus Support™ is designed to help clear and open the nasal passages and relieve sinus pressure from chronic sinus infections and/or sinus issues related to allergies. Formulated with essential oils with known antifungal, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and antiseptic properties that penetrate the nasal lining for rapid relief when inhaled –  like Peppermint™, which is high in the constituent Menthol which is known to relieve sinus congestion and pressure and Eucalyptus which is high in antibacterial, antispasmodic, and antiviral properties (including  1,8 cineole) which help open airways and relieve congestion naturally.

Sinus Support™ can be inhaled or topically applied. Apply 2 – 3 drops to a cotton swab and swab the inside of the nasal passages 2 – 6 times daily. For optimal effectiveness, you can leave the cotton swab in the nasal passage for up to 20 minutes. Try to relax and focus on breathing through the nose.  

Histamine Balance™ 

One of the reasons mold is such a powerful toxin relates to its ability to cross directly into your brain through the olfactory system. Anything you inhale, including essential oils, can travel directly into your brain via your olfactory neurons. I suspect this is one of the reasons that some of us are so sensitive to smells like perfume, cigarette smoke, and gas fumes. Conversely, why does inhaling, topically applying, or diffusing Histamine Balance™ seem to help modulate the immune response to mold so quickly?

As you may know, Histamine is a chemical compound released by the cells in response to injury, allergic or inflammatory reactions, causing contraction of smooth muscle and dilation of capillaries. While the release of histamine is a normal defense mechanism, an exaggerated histamine response can bind to cell receptor sites, causing irritation and chronic inflammation. This inflammatory response can cause sneezing, runny nose, watery, red, itchy eyes, rashes, breathing troubles such as wheezing, severe coughs, asthma, or hiccups.

Histamine levels are designed to be kept in balance by two enzymes that break down excess histamine and prevent allergic reactions. One of these enzymes lives in the lining of our intestines and must be present to maintain balanced histamine levels in the gut. A damaged gut lining compromises the production and secretion of this enzyme allowing histamine to build up and wreak havoc throughout the body.

The goal is to balance, not block, the histamine response as histamine performs critical functions in the body, contributing to HCL production and neurotransmitter signals. The essential oils in the Histamine Balance™ blend are uniquely suited to help modulate excess histamine excretion, balancing histamine levels and helping to reset the immune response and reduce allergic reactions. Blue Tansy, in particular, is known for neutralizing histamine and helping to control allergic reactions.

Histamine Balance™ may help modulate the immune response to mold. For intranasal application, coat 2 cotton swabs in Histamine Balance™ blend, and either swab or gently insert the cotton swabs into your nose. You can also topically apply 1-2 drops on the bottom of the feet. For allergic reactions, smell or apply 1-2 drops behind your ears, on the back of your neck, or on your sternum to open airways. For the gut and food intolerance support, apply in a clockwise direction around the belly button. For brain congestion, apply 1-2 drops at the base of the skull on the back of the head. For Aromatic Usage, hold the bottle under your nose for 3 or 4 breaths.

To learn more about balancing the Histamine Reaction to mold, CLICK HERE.

Featured Oils:

• Emotional Detox Kit™ available here
• Sinus Support™ available here
• Peppermint™ available here
• Histamine Balance™ available here

References:

• https://vibrantblueoils.com/why-inhalation-is-the-most-effective-method-of-consuming-essential-oils/
• https://vibrantblueoils.com/why-i-dont-recommend-diffusing-essential-oils/
• https://vibrantblueoils.com/essential-oils-for-healing-baths/
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7949223/
• https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(21)01900-X/fulltext
• https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1097/00005537-200404000-00027
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9159739/
• https://vibrantblueoils.com/essential-oils-for-mold/