For those who were inattentive that day long ago in high school chemistry, the “heavy metals” refer to a group of especially dense metals or metal-like substances (called metalloids) found in our environment. Best left outside and not inside our bodies.
These metals–specifically lead, mercury, arsenic, cadmium, and aluminum–unfortunately can all be absorbed by your body and stored there. Our environment is already quite toxic enough (now doomed to worsen under Trump-2 dissolution of EPA regulations and drilling/mining everywhere except perhaps the White House lawn).
Believe me, whatever toxic load you’re now carrying will likely get worse…
Not that toxicity is new. Here’s someone you might have seen in a 150 year old children’s book long ago. The expression “mad as a hatter” came because mercury was absorbed during the manufacture of felt hats. Did I mention Trump’s rollback of mercury safety regulations?
We tend to think that heavy metal toxicity happens to other people and not us. This is pure NIMBY (not in my backyard) logic. You protest that lead poisoning occurs when poor half-starved children munch on sweet-tasting paint chips because their welfare Moms couldn’t afford nice healthy Pringles like your kids. Heavy metal issues could only occur in neighborhoods and cities not as nice as yours.
Sorry, but of three cities reviewed for lead exposure (New York, Boston, and Chicago), we fared the worst! Lead exposure is mostly related to the age of housing and how much lead in old buildings is stirred up during renovation.
Heavy Metal Accumulation
As heavy metals accumulate in our bodies, any of them can cause multiple and mystifying symptoms—both physical and mental. When conventional physicians encounter a patient with longstanding and seemingly unrelated symptoms, they virtually never screen the patient for heavy metal toxicity.
The most common symptoms linked to heavy metal toxicity are:
- fatigue,
- headaches,
- depression,
- brain fog (with measurably lower IQs in children),
- diminished memory and cognitive ability,
- peripheral neuropathy (numbness/tingling in extremities).
Also, because toxic metals can make their way into the millions of metabolic reactions throughout your body, these metabolic processes start shutting down—triggering susceptibility to damage from free radicals, destroying delicate cellular membranes, and causing functional decline of brain, kidneys, heart, and bone marrow, in addition to increasing susceptibility to certain cancers.
Scientists know for certain that heavy metal exposure/accumulation accelerates the aging process. One study linked the aging body’s cadmium levels to walking speed (a common measurement of premature aging). Another to declining grip strength.
Your susceptibility to toxic metals is likely genetic, with some people more susceptible to accumulating (or clearing) them than others. For example, a single meal of sushi can cause a measurable increase in blood levels of mercury in one person, but not another.
There Are Two Good Reasons to Get Tested for Toxic Metals
First, if you’re pretty sure you have a history of exposure, get tested. For example:
- You once lived near a factory whose smokestacks were visible from your bedroom window.
- You’ve been living in an old house (pre-1950) for years.
- You do craft work with metals in an unventilated area.
- You really like sushi and eat it a lot.
However, concerning dental amalgams, know that the Dental Amalgam Wars have been ongoing for 150 years (!) since amalgams were first introduced. The question: do dental amalgams, which are 40% mercury, actually release enough mercury to be a health hazard?
The FDA says no, but if you’re worried you can ask your dentist for porcelain—or, if you’re flush with cash, which is probably pretty high these days with the price of gold skyrocketing. Think $2,000 a filling.
Remember, toxic metals remain stored in your fat deposits. If, as you look back on your life, you remember:
- playing with those fascinating little beads of mercury for hours on end,
- volunteering to clean out an abandoned paint factory (cadmium),
- or your hobby was making stained glass windows (lead in the solder),
—you should probably get tested.
Second, if you’ve got some of the chronic symptoms I listed earlier (fatigue, muscle/joint aching, brain fog), and you endlessly hear: “We can’t find anything wrong with you and all your tests are normal,”
—get tested.
In addition, consider testing if you have any premature chronic health problems (heart, lung, or kidney disease or cancer anywhere in your body) that seem inappropriate for your age. Listen up: when you care for your body correctly, your vital organs should last well until your late 80s or early 90s. If you learn that you’re falling apart prematurely, it’s possible you’re being poisoned by toxic metals you were exposed to long ago.
Getting Tested
Getting tested for toxic metal exposure should be straightforward and fairly easy. But when patients want to explore testing, they meet with some interesting barriers.
Except for the blood tests offered to children being screened for lead poisoning or to worried sushi devotees for mercury, most conventional physicians are taught little about toxic metal testing.
As a start, ask your doctor for a “toxic metal screen”. This is a blood test that should include lead, mercury, arsenic, aluminum, and cadmium—all of which are troublemakers.
It’s worth noting that testing hair samples, popular several years ago, went into very justified disfavor when hair from the same single volunteer was sent to four different testing labs and doctors received four different test results.
If a routine blood screening of your toxic metals is found to be virtually zero, you’re probably out of the woods. This screening test is usually covered by your insurance. However, low blood levels indicate you’re still in the trees.
If any of your scores are not zero, consider the next step, called a “provoked urine challenge”. With this test, you’re given oral DMSA (dimercaptosuccinic acid), a chelating compound that literally pulls a sample of the toxic metals from storage in your body and sends them into your urine.
If the first test showed the tip of the toxic metal iceberg in your body, the provoked test reveals the iceberg.
You then mail some of your urine to Doctor’s Data Lab in St. Charles, IL, which has been testing for toxic metals for over a half century. This test almost always returns some positive results, which can look quite alarming to the uninitiated.
The provoked challenge is considered controversial because most doctors don’t know what to do with the results.
Because the chelating medication (DMSA) requires a prescription, if you’re interested in getting a provoked urine challenge, you’ll need to register with WholeHealth Chicago, asking for toxic metal testing. You’ll get a DMSA prescription that you’ll mail or fax to a compounding pharmacist, and an invoice from Rupa Health, which mails out all our functional tests.
Doctor’s Data 24-hour Urine Toxic Metals kit was reasonably priced at $79.
Once you complete the steps, you’ll be able to access your test results and schedule with one of our practitioners for heavy metal detox.
Next week: how we treat heavy metal toxicity at WholeHealth Chicago. As you can guess, the main treatment is intravenous chelation therapy which we have been doing for over 25 years.
Be well,
David Edelberg, MD