A patient's $5,000 blood panel came back normal despite severe symptoms like erratic body temperature and thyroid problems. Standard tests miss chronic mercury exposure because mercury doesn't stay in the bloodstream. A chelator challenge test revealed elevated mercury and heavy metals the routine tests had completely overlooked.
I was a Mad Hatter. It's like, so I went and got a blood test like anyone else would do, I think. And it came back normal. Matter of fact, that day I ran like $5,000 worth of blood work. All of it came back normal, which was really heartbreaking, honestly. I mean, if he would've told me you have XY disease, I'd have been like, okay, now I know what I'm up against. I'm okay with that. But even the mercury came back within normal. Here we are. A year or so later, and I'm working with a very bright endocrinologist because my thyroid was— even though my blood work was normal, my thyroid was definitely malfunctioning, and there's a solid reason for that. And so he was helping me with some of those things, and he said, Dan, you know, I do— I think you have mercury toxicity because your body temperatures are up and then really low, and amongst some other symptoms, right? And I said, yeah, I thought so too. "but I did a blood test, came back normal." He said, "Wrong test." That would be if you were using mercury every day like a Mad Hatter, it would show up in the blood. But if it's a chronic exposure, it's not going to show up in the blood. So he had me challenge it out with a water-soluble chelator, challenge it out. And not only did I have odd mercury, but I had a lot of odd metals that were super high, meaning it— you could see my detox pathways to metal were challenged and shutting down.
