My daughter Mia was hospitalized several times at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital to treat her severe eczema in past years. She would go in for four to five days for lengthy treatments that really got her down. She would stop talking and be in tears. We felt so helpless to make things better for her. It was not like a broken arm that would be healed in a number of weeks. She was dealing with a chronic illness that seemingly had no end.

A music therapist came to her room one day and brought a guitar and keyboard and Mia got to sing along. It was like someone flipped the happy switch back on and Mia was able to forget all of her troubles and just be a kid again. The picture above is Mia performing at the hospital (to other sick kids and their families). More on the power of music therapy later.

Thankfully, Mia is better now as we later discovered that the source of her chronic eczema was mold in our basement which we had remediated.

Mia’s Eczema

Mia had suffered from chronic eczema rashes for three years that covered 90% of her body and face. She had had very mild eczema as a baby and throughout her childhood with a few dry skin patches here and there on occasion. In the summer of 2013, Mia suffered a severe eczema flare-up like we had never seen before. She had eaten two bags of oranges in the last couple weeks so we thought maybe she had a food sensitivity to oranges or citrus. We later learned that sugars (natural or added) feed mold toxins and often made Mia’s eczema rashes worse.

Thus began a 3-year odyssey of trying to figure out what was causing her skin to itch 24 hours/ day. We went to many doctors to try to figure out what could be causing her eczema skin rashes: pediatrician, dermatologist, allergist, Osteopathic Physician and other natural medicine practitioners. Most prescribed steroid creams, bleach baths, food elimination diets, nutritional supplements but none of them suspected that toxic mold could be the cause. So this story is an important one, not only for eczema sufferers where mold might be the cause, but also for health practitioners to learn about the link between toxic mold exposure and eczema skin rashes.