alt Hacker News> At the risk of ...
Any decent person would take that risk, for their mother's health.
At least in the US, there's a fairly large industry built around mold testing & remediation. Laboratories need to be inspected & certified, and you can do your own home air testing and receive the results directly from the lab.
Compared to a family member's health, testing is very cheap.
Vs. if you're testing to make sure the house isn't rotting - that's trickier. Many sorts of mold can be underachievers at releasing spores (which is what the common air tests look for). Or the spores could be released in a wall cavity or something, where air doesn't circulate and carry them to where you're taking samples.
I've no idea what the situation is in Spain.
Changing topic - my mother's mental health & vision were destroyed by an undiagnosed case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_cell_arteritis . America's health care system burned through incredible amounts of money for fancy high-tech scans and tests. It did not bother with having a competent doctor sit down, and really think about what might be causing mom's slowly-worsening symptoms. That would not have been hard - mom was in the very highest-risk demographic for that disease. And after it was too late - my optician was able to diagnose her in seconds, sight unseen, from just my in-passing mention of her eye-related symptoms.
(Yes, I also got the clear feeling that the health care system did not care at all about an elderly woman's declining health);
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Thanks for sharing that experience, it means a lot.
Sometimes it feels like the health system is just about keeping you alive, and they don't dig enough in different posible root causes, they focus on treating the symptoms, specially with elderly.
> That would not have been hard
I understand the feeling, and it inspires me to look for a second opinion and someone more involved in finding a root cause. I'm sure in your case you did what you though it was best with the information you had, the reality is that the system does not invest in prevention and education of us patients and relatives. Knowing certain demographic is high risk should be somehow automated to raise flags when certain symptoms are mention even if they are in-passing mentioned as you said, because we as regular people are not educated to weight the importance of symptoms, and often doctors get defensive if you come with a theory.
The other day I was at the doctor, he was asking me many things, trying to figure out my stomach problems, I though I had a stomach flu, then really at the and by chance I mentioned I was at the dentist the week before and they gave me antibiotics for 7 days, it was only then with that small comment that I almost forget to say that the doctor could have the explanation, he said some antibiotics wipe out the gut microbiota, and it just gave me some probiotics and I was fine the day after, with a big improvement. I don't know how much time would have take me to recover if I would have forgotten about that detail.
When I think about it after the fact, duh! of course antibiotics kill gut bacteria, I heard that a million times in podcasts, but I did not make the connection.
My point is that we have enough in our plates and our profession is already quite complex, we deal with tons of complexities and it shouldn't be our job to know the right questions, or the right doctor to go for, but I wish there was a system that focused more on preventions, and finding the root cause with a more multidisciplinary approach rather that specialized niche knowledge doctors that ignore other causes, or symptoms if they are not present if their knowledge map.
> At least in the US, there's a fairly large industry built around mold testing & remediation
Be aware that's there's also a very large industry built around selling people unnecessary or non-standard mold tests (which always come back positive) along with "expert consultation services" and then refer you to local remediation companies for a very large kickback.
Mold scares are big business. If you visit a company's website and they have long lists of non-specific illnesses or make claims that nearly every disease could be caused by mold, don't engage with them. If you contact them at all or buy their services you're likely to end up in their leads database and be marketed to until the end of time. There is a lot of money in scaring people into unnecessary mold testing and remediation services.