Dr. Andrew Campbell’s Mold Treatment: Does it Work?
Note: This is part 3 of 4 of a series of blogs where I map the major thinkers in CIRS and mold-related illness: what each one believes, where each one excels, and where each one breaks down.
Introduction: I argued that the four major camps of CIRS treatment aren’t actually contradicting each other. Each one is answering the same question in a different way: Where is the illness?
Part One: Does the Shoemaker Protocol Work? This post looks at the camp that addresses the question through scientific inquiry.
Part Two: Addressing the needs of the CIRS patient. We took a look at Dr. Neil Nathan and Dr. Jill Crista, two clinicians who focus on the most sensitive patients.
Part Three: This post discusses Dr. Andrew Campbell, a clinician with a genuinely different answer from either Dr. Shoemaker’s viewpoint and the viewpoint shared by Dr. Nathan and Dr. Crista.
*Note: this blog was written by me, Mark Volmer. All spelling mistakes, misquotes, errors, and omissions are my own doing. It is not AI generated. *
Of the four camps in this series, Dr. Andrew Campbell is the one I’d guess most patients have never heard of. His position on mold illness is often misunderstood, including, I’ll admit, by me when I first started this series. However, once you understand what he’s really arguing, his viewpoint is quite interesting.
Dr. Campbell is known as the guy who “just measures the toxins”. He isn’t. In fact, he’s one of the sharpest critics of the most popular method of mycotoxin testing for mold illness. His real argument is about something more specific, and to understand it, you have to start with who he is.
Expert Recap: Dr. Andrew Campbell’s Mold Treatment
Dr. Andrew Campbell believes that the secret to mold illness treatment lies in the immune system. He tests for antibodies in the blood, which tells him if the immune system is reacting to a toxin exposure. When the patient is getting better, the antibodies will decrease. However, there are many areas that this diagnostic method does not hold up. The key weakness is that there is only one blood test that confirms this diagnosis, the blood test is run through a lab owned by Dr. Campbell, and there is no independent way to verify the results.
Measuring the Immune Response: Dr. Andrew Campbell’s Approach
Dr. Campbell is an MD whose career has been built on the study of the immunity (immunology) and measuring toxins in the human body (toxicology). He did not study mold specifically. Instead, his studies were focused on toxic exposures, including:
- Industrial chemicals
- Pesticides
- Silicone breast implants
- Mold
Dr. Campbell says he’s treated well over 10,000 patients with illness from toxic exposures. His publication history on antibodies found in people exposed to water-damaged buildings goes back to the early 2000s, much of it co-authored with immunologist Aristo Vojdani.
This background in immunology is the key to understanding his viewpoint on mold illness. Dr. Campbell doesn’t look at mold illness and see an inflammatory syndrome like Dr. Shoemaker, or a colonization-and-tolerance problem like Dr. Neil Nathan and Dr. Jill Crista. He sees mold illness as an immune reaction. Therefore, he wants to measure it the way an immunologist measures any immune reaction: by looking for antibodies.
An explanation of the immune system
Your immune system is the way your body is protected against foreign invaders. It fights off viruses and bacteria and keeps you healthy.
There are two parts of the human immune system:
- The Innate Immune System
- The Adaptive Immune System
The innate immune response occurs immediately after a bad guy invades your body. The mucus and swelling that accompanies a head cold were general inflammatory responses that are meant to slow down the invading virus/bacteria.
The innate immune system is non-specific, which means it reacts the same way regardless of the intruder. It also does not provide long-lasting immunity. It doesn’t remember anything about the invader and how to best defeat it. Once it creates the first defence against the invader, it passes off responsibility to your adaptive immune system.
The adaptive immune system is specific. This means it makes a specific recipe to kill the invader. In ideal conditions, your adaptive immune system takes a look at the invader and creates antibodies to mount a specific response attack. It then creates a memory of those antibodies. If you ever encounter the invader again your adaptive immune system knows exactly what antibodies to produce to get rid of it.
Where Dr. Campbell says mold illness lives
Back to Dr. Campbell’s viewpoint on mold illness. Recall the framing question of this series: Where, exactly, is the illness?
For Dr. Shoemaker, the illness is the body’s inflammatory response (the innate immune system), and the genetics that prime it. For Dr. Nathan and Dr. Crista, the problem is the patient’s tolerance level.
Dr. Campbell’s answer: The illness is in your immune system’s reaction to mycotoxins.
Not the toxin itself, and not the downstream inflammatory cascade; the antibody response your body mounts when it encounters mold’s toxins.
He believes that when mycotoxins enter the body, the immune system either reacts to them or it doesn’t.
If the immune system reacts, it produces antibodies. Antibodies can be measured. Dr. Campbell’s lab, MyMycoLab, tests blood serum for antibodies to fourteen different mycotoxins.
In his model the pattern of antibodies tells you both that the person is reacting and how they’re reacting.
Dr. Campbell’s underlying belief is that the immune system is like a fingerprint, unique to every person, which means there can be no one-size-fits-all protocol.
This is in direct opposition to Dr. Shoemaker’s standardized, sequential approach.
Rejecting urine mycotoxin testing for mold illness
Dr. Campbell is also in direct opposition to the viewpoint of Dr. Neil Nathan and Dr. Jill Crista, in that he rejects urine mycotoxin testing.
His reasoning is logical: urine is how the body excretes things.
Therefore, a high mycotoxin level in the urine might mean the person is successfully clearing the toxins out. This is evidence the body is doing its job, not evidence of disease.
Instead of measuring what toxins the body is excreting, he measures how the body reacts to the toxins.
In addition, Dr. Campbell claims that antibodies to a toxin don’t generate a lasting memory. Instead, the immune system only makes them while the toxin is present.
So if your mycotoxin antibodies fall over time, that means your exposure is resolving. This is how he claims to prove his patient has been cured.
How Dr. Andrew Campbell treats mold illness
Dr. Campbell’s published material focuses more on diagnosing mold illness than treating mold illness, so I am not able to examine his treatment methods as closely as other practitioners in this series. But the shape of his approach is consistent:
- Identify and remove the exposure source
- Work to rebalance and stabilize the immune system
- Support the body’s own detoxification and repair
These steps are all individualized to the patient’s antibody pattern rather than run from a fixed protocol.
One important nuance separates him from Dr. Shoemaker. Dr. Campbell distinguishes actual fungal growth in the body, or colonization, from a pure toxic/antibody reaction. Where there’s evidence of colonization, he will use antifungals.
So unlike the strict Dr. Shoemaker position that antifungals have no place in a toxin illness, Dr. Campbell reserves them for a demonstrated fungal component. While certainly better than the use of blanket antifungals by Dr. Neil Nathan and Dr. Jill Crista, the use of antifungals still has risks. Dr. Campbell is only depending on his own interpretation to determine if colonization is present.
Where Dr. Andrew Campbell’s mold treatment breaks down
Up to this point, Dr. Andrew Campbell’s mold diagnosis is scientifically based. I will now dive into the flaws in his process.
Conflict of interest
Dr. Campbell is the medical director of MyMycoLab, which is the laboratory that sells the antibody test upon which he has based his entire diagnostic approach. The lab markets itself as the only laboratory performing serum mycotoxin antibody testing. So the situation is this: The test that he created and that he bases his diagnosis on is sold by the company he directs, which is the only lab that runs this test. That means that patients working with him must purchase their test from his company, and there is no way to independently verify the results.
When the person defining the diagnosis, selling the test, and interpreting the results is the same person, the line between science and profit can be hard to distinguish.
The test isn’t validated
Describing it as “the most accurate and precise testing for mycotoxins” is a claim, not a fact. Testing for mycotoxin antibodies faces the same fundamental problem every test in this field faces: no one has established an antibody threshold that can predict who is sick and who isn’t. Without a scientifically proven and replicated threshold, a “positive” result only tells you the immune system encountered something. It does not tell us that it’s the cause of the patient’s suffering.
The logic doesn’t hold up
Dr. Campbell argues that mycotoxins in the urine might be the sign of a healthy, normal detox, which is why he doesn’t use urinary mycotoxin testing. But following that logic, why isn’t an antibody response to mycotoxins also just normal? The body mounts immune responses to countless harmless things every day. If finding the toxin in urine doesn’t prove illness, why does finding antibodies prove it? The same skepticism that is behind his critique of urine testing can be used on his own test.
The reasoning can run in a circle
When asked what he would conclude if a patient had a positive urine test but a negative antibody test on his own panel, Dr. Campbell essentially said that situation has never come up. That’s a revealing answer. If a test will always come back positive, it’s functioning less like a scientific measurement and more like a confirmation of what was already assumed.
‘Always’ doesn’t exist in science
Dr. Campbell’s lab states flatly that toxic molds are always present and always producing mycotoxins in water-damaged buildings. Biology rarely cooperates with words like “always.” That kind of categorical certainty, in a field this genuinely uncertain, is a yellow flag for the evidence-minded reader.
What I take from this camp
While I find Dr. Campbell the most intellectually interesting of the four, in a clinical sense, it is the one I lean on least.
What he gets right is important:
- The immune response is real
- Every immune response is individual
- Each mold patient is different
His critique of urine mycotoxin testing is, in my view, basically correct. In addition, it’s useful precisely because it comes from inside the mycotoxin-focused world rather than from Dr. Shoemaker’s camp. When someone who clearly believes mycotoxins make people sick tells you the most popular test for them is misleading, that’s worth hearing.
However, what keeps me from building on his approach is that his alternative to the flawed urinary mycotoxin test is a blood test whose validation and independence can’t be verified, sold by a lab he runs, defended with faulty reasoning. The antibody idea may well contain some truth. But “may contain some truth” is not enough to stake a complex patient’s recovery on.
Confirming immune system involvement in mold illness
Notice that Dr. Campbell, for all his differences with Dr. Shoemaker, has quietly confirmed that it is the immune system that is at the heart of mold illness. Not the inflammation downstream, not the toxin, but the immune machinery itself. He’s not the only one.
The last camp in this series takes that idea much further, and much more aggressively: it argues that the immune system isn’t just where you measure the illness — it’s where you treat it, and that fixing it directly can replace much of what the other three camps do.
Next in the series: Dr. Kent Holtorf, peptides, and the argument that the real problem was a broken immune system all along.
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Mark Volmer has attained the highest level of Shoemaker Protocol certification, and is one of only two of Canada’s Shoemaker Protocol practitioners. The Shoemaker Protocol is the only scientifically proven method of treating CIRS.
