Exclusive Dr. Hyman+ Ask Mark Anything: Heavy Metal Toxicity

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You also get access to my monthly Ask Mark Anything Q&A where I answer the Dr. Hyman Plus community's biggest health and wellness questions. and this Q&A is only accessible with a membership. Because I'm so excited to share this platform with you, I'm releasing a teaser of my brand new Ask Dr. Mark Anything episode. And I hope you enjoy it and I hope you head over to drhyman.com/plus that's drhyman.com/plus for more information.

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Hey everyone, and thank you so much for tuning in to the second ever episode of Dr. Hyman Plus Exclusive Ask Mark Anything. My name is Darcy and I'm one of the producers of the Longevity Roadmap docuseries. Ask Mark Anything, exclusive for Dr. Hyman Plus, is an episode where we collect all of your deep questions to be answered by our expert, Dr. Mark Hyman. This is something that is only available exclusively to the Dr. Hyman Plus community. We've collected some of your top questions for Dr. Hyman in this special Ask Mark Anything, and we're excited to get the answers from the doctor himself. So without further ado, let's get started with the first question. All right, Dr. Hyman. So there's this topic that-- hi, everybody.

Hi, Darcy. Hi.

Awesome. So there's this question that's really prevalent in the functional community, but it seems to be kind of ignored a little bit in the conventional community. And it's all about this topic of heavy metals and essentially the role that heavy metals have in impacting our health and exactly where they come from and really how much they affect us. And so the first topic is essentially how do you approach heavy metal toxicity in your practice. But of course with that, if you could just kind of talk a little bit about what the exact issue is with heavy metals, where you get them from, how you test for them and things like that.

So unfortunately, I'm an expert in this topic. I wish I wasn't, because when I was 34, I lived in China for a year and got mercury poisoning and I didn't know it. But it led to just total collapse of every single one of my body systems. And it really led me to the discovery of functional medicine, to healing myself and to understanding the role of environmental toxins, particularly heavy metals like mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, and others in our health and disease. And I think when I went to medical school, we learned about acute toxicity. In other words, if it was something you got an acute exposure to, you can get poisoned, but other than that, wasn't really an issue. And what's really striking for me is that when I began to learn about this, I discovered a whole world of science that has just been completely ignored by traditional medicine. Most physicians learn again about acute toxicology in medical school, but don't learn about chronic low-level exposures and how those impact our health. And it's interesting to look at the history of this, particularly in terms of heavy metals. The thing that has actually caught attention and actually become part of mainstream medicine is lead poisoning or lead toxicity in children. And so most pediatricians know to check levels of lead in their patients to see if they're exposed to lead paint or if they live in industrial areas to lead that comes from cement plants or coal burning factories. And, and they've been able to test for that. And there is even FDA approved treatment for chelation using dmsa for these children who have high levels of lead. What we've learned over time is that there is no safe level. So when you look at your blood test, if you get a blood sugar, there is a normal level of blood sugar, between let's say 70 to 90 is your optimal level. If it's over that, you're at risk, if it's low, it's not good. What's the normal level of blood level of mercury or lead? Zero, like zero. You should have no heavy metals in your body. It's not part of your biological requirements and there is no really safe level. If you look at the data, we used to say a level of 40, for example, of lead was normal, then it was 20, then it was 10. And studies have shown even down to a level of one, we see significant neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental effects on children. So even at very low, low, low, low, low levels, there is significant toxicity. And in lead particularly, they discovered this by looking at the dental lead, by measuring lead in kids' teeth and seeing how it correlated with behavioral issues, attention issues, learning and academic issues. This is really quite significant and lead poisoned kids really struggle. They have academic performance issues, they have behavioral issues, they're violent, aggressive, and so this has really become part of mainstream medicine. And I have no idea why they've ignored the other metals. And I also don't think that we really think about how to appropriately test for these things. And we'll talk about the testing. So lead toxicity is common. It's actually not as common these days as mercury toxicity because we've gotten lead out of paint, we've gotten lead out of gasoline. But if you live near an industrial area, if you live in an urban environment, if you live in a developing country where they don't deal with the emission controls from factories, you can be exposed to quite a lot of lead from these coal burning power plants or cement plants that are producing huge amounts of these effluents in the air. Mercury is the other one that is really important. And I discovered this through my own challenges with mercury poisoning. And I lived in China and I was told I should clean out my air filter every every day, I'd have an air filter in my apartment because it was so polluted. And of course, I did that, but I was stupid and I didn't realize that I probably shouldn't wear a filtered mask in order to clean the air filter. If I banged it out over the balcony, all this black soot would come out. And it was just concentrated pollution. And in China and Beijing at that time, they were 10 million people heating their homes with raw coal. that was what they used. And that coal has tons of metals in it, and that was getting out into the air, into the filter, and then right into my system. And so I personally was pretty strong and healthy. But after I came back from China, I all of a sudden had total system collapse. I ended up having a digestive thing. I don't know what it was. I must have gotten food poisoning or something, but it just sort of was the tipping point and my entire system collapsed into total breakdown. I developed severe gut issues and digestive problems and diarrhea for years. I developed autoimmune symptoms and autoimmune abnormalities and tests. I've got rashes everywhere. My tongue was swollen. I couldn't eat anything without being totally bloated. I had raccoon eyes just every time I ate food. I would have severe exhaustion and fatigue and cognitive dysfunction. I couldn't sleep. My muscles were being damaged. Something called CPK, which is a muscle enzyme. was, was really high indicating that my body was essentially eating itself. The muscles were being damaged. I, I really was a mess. My immune system, my energy system, my detox system, my gut, my hormones, my adrenals, my thyroid, my sleep, everything just totally screwed up. And so I began to understand, and I'm really in personal basis, just how nasty these metals are and what they do across a wide range of biological systems. So if you look up the symptoms of mercury poisoning or lead poisoning, they can be a wide ranging set of things. everything from depression to autoimmune disease, to Alzheimer's, to cancer, to diabetes. Arsenic has been linked to diabetes in many countries. In arsenic, in the drinking water, for example, in India is very common and they have high rates of diabetes. They throw all the batteries and all the kind of waste products from technology and then into the rivers and here in the dumps and it gets into the water supply. So we really, our environment is just loaded with tons of heavy metals in ways that we really hadn't before the Industrial Revolution. I mean, there was a volcano that erupted and there was mercury deposited or led. But now, for example, in Seattle, you can actually increase your mercury levels simply by living in Seattle, not because there's mercury in Seattle, but because China releases so much mercury from coal burning that it goes into the atmosphere, floats across the Pacific Ocean and ends up in Seattle. So we really have a pandemic of low-grade heavy metal toxicity from lead and mercury. And I've seen this cause everything from, you know, like I said, Alzheimer's to autism, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, heart failure. I mean, I'll just share some of the stories, and then it's going to talk about what to do, how to diagnose it. But, you know, it can be anything from a patient, for example, who had heart failure for no reason. And when we did a mercury test, it was just off the chart. And, you know, when I started looking at the literature, there was an article in the American Journal of Cardiology that found that if if you looked at what we call idiopathic cardiomyopathy, which means you have heart failure, but you don't know why. You can't identify the cause, not from a heart attack or high blood pressure or something or a virus or something else. And he goes, we don't know. And in those cases, when they did muscle biopsies, there was 22,000, 22,000 times the amount of mercury as the control group who didn't have, who had a cause, a known cause for heart failure, right? I think there was like 12,000 times the amount of arsenic. So we basically got rid of her mercury and chelated her and her heart failure was fixed and she's doing great. And now heart failure just doesn't reverse. You just don't get that unless you get a heart transplant. You can manage it with medications. Another patient I had who had ulcerative colitis, and I did all the normal functional medicine stuff. It just wasn't getting better. This was years ago. It turned out he had very high heavy metal poisoning and mercury levels, and we chelated the mercury out and his colitis went away. I've had a patient with Alzheimer's who was living in Pittsburgh, which is where they have the steel plants and they put coal which is full of mercury, he was severely mercury toxic and had Alzheimer's. And by getting rid of the metals from his system, he was able to improve his memory and mood and function and was able to go back to work. So we see case after case of these. The other thing to note is it's not just a direct poison, but it's also an immunotoxin. And there's a whole field of research called autogens. Autogens are toxins. that cause autoimmunity. And so when anybody has any kind of autoimmune issue, neurologic issue, anything that really is a source of disease. It's really important. I think from a functional medicine perspective, you know, dealing with people's gut, addressing heavy metals, you know, and gluten, are those are really big, big wins in why we have so much success because we go for the root causes. So you can have a myriad of symptoms. It can cause insomnia, anxiety, depression. Another patient had been depressed for years, was struggling, and again had heavy metals. We got rid of them and she got better. Another woman was a trainer and worked out all the time and ate a great diet. And she was 40 pounds overweight, nothing she could do. We know that heavy metals can interfere with metabolism. These are called obesogens. So it can cause a wide array of all sorts of symptoms. So anybody comes in my office with any real chronic disease, it's one of the first things I think about. and I want to test, and I almost check it like a blood pressure for most people, if I have any suspicion that there might be an issue. And the problem with traditional medicine is that, you know, we just do regular blood work. Oh, we'll check your blood work. And if you're mercury or lead or arsenic or high in your blood, okay, we'll look at it. Oh, it'll tell you to eat less fish or, you know, try to identify the source. But the problem with those blood tests is, one, they're, they're really only indicating any current exposure. So let's say you ate a can of tuna fish every day or two cans of tuna fish every day for 10 years, and then you stop for 10 years. Well, your blood level could be zero, but your body would have stored all that mercury from all that tuna over the decade that you ate the tuna. It just wouldn't show up in your blood test. And as a funny, there's a funny joke in medicine when we talk about in functional medicine. So this guy's, you know, drops his keys in the street, and he's looking for him. And his friend sees him looking for his keys under this lamp post. He says, hey, what you doing? He says, well, I'm looking for my keys. He's, well, where'd you lose them? He said, well, I lost them down the street, but the light's better over here. So the problem is that, is that we tend in medicine to look where we're used to looking. And I even read an article on, on lead toxicity or Mercury lead. I'm like, well, we're going to check the blood because that's what we can check. Well, that's not where the problem is. You know, it's like, so, so. For functional medicine doctors, we look at heavy metals in a multitude of ways. You can look at hair, blood, and urine. You can even look at stool metals too. And the most, I think, effective test, and one that needs to be more scientifically validated, but I can tell you I've done probably 20 or 30,000 of these tests over 30 years. I mean, just a lot of them. So I understand what they mean in the context of the overall population in terms of what's normal. We even did a survey of all these patients. So we found that over 40% had levels that were considered pretty significantly harmful of all the patients we screened were heavy metals. So that's a high number of the population. Of course, it's people who are sick and coming to me, but I think it's really a big deal. So what we do to test for mercury, and my favorite test is I check blood for sure, because you want to see if people are having acute exposures. Two, you can check a urine. Doctors will do this. Doctors will check a 24-hour urine test. But that only, again, will look at results from people who have had ongoing current exposure. So if you're working in a factory or a smelting plant and you want to see if you're toxic, okay, you can check a 24-hour urine. But if you haven't had exposures, it's going to be negative because what happens is the metals clear from your blood every 90 days, for example, mercury just clears out from your blood, goes in your, you excrete some of it if you're good at excreting it, which I'm not, and half the population probably isn't good at getting rid of it. And second, it causes all these, you know, challenges because you're not looking at the body stores. Because when you, for example, eat tuna, where's the mercury? It's in the meat. What's your meat? It's muscle, it's organs, it's brain. Right. They, for example, have done studies on sheep, but they'll put in dental fillings and they'll, and they'll go in and then do autopsy later, and they'll find that their mercury in the brain is correlated directly with the amount of fillings they have in their mouth. okay, so we understand that, that we're looking in the wrong place. And the best way to test, and I think it's, it's imperfect, but the best way to test for now, for, for example, Mercury, is using, using a challenge test. So it's where we take a chelating pill medication, usually dmsa, sometimes dmPS, and there's also EDTA for lead. And you, you basically give this to a person and have them collect their urine afterwards. what that'll do is it'll pull out the metals from any storage spots and that will allow you to see what the overall load is coming out in the urine. And, you know, it can, it should really be zero, but if it's anywhere under 10, it's probably okay. If it's over 20, it's getting high. If it's over 100, you're in big trouble.

And mine was 187.

So that's just to give you a perspective of how, how bad it was. And I think that, that this test, you know, I'd love to see validated through, through better methods. But I can tell you from the functional medicine community, this is. something that is real and we see a lot. The other thing we look at is we call the QS Tri Test, which is a test that looks at hair, urine and blood and we can look at speciation of mercury. Not all mercury is the same. For example, you can have inorganic mercury, which comes from pollution or from fillings or methyl mercury, which is also known as organic mercury, which comes from fish. Now all the mercury ultimately was inorganic to start with and then it gets from coal and pollution goes into the oceans. The fish, you know, eat the algae that's got the mercury in it, and then the little fish get eaten by the bigger fish, and the bigger fish get eaten by the even bigger fish. And so by the time you get the tunas and sharks, and you're in big trouble. And so I think the, the, the, the, the, the test is beautiful because one test whether, where it's coming from, if it's fillings or if it's you know, pollution or if it's from fish. And two, it shows how your body excretes it. Are you, are you good at getting rid of it in your urine or hair? And so that's a really, really helpful test. And, and so we can look at, we can look at that as well. So that just looks at mercury, but the challenge test looks at all metals, arsenic lead, mercury, cadmium. And you can see, you know, people are smokers or cadmium levels are high or people, you know, for example, are doing, you know, things with, with lead, for example, drinking a lot of lead from Crystal, leaded Crystal wine glasses, leaded Crystal. you know, serving dishes. I mean, these are, these are often have led enough glazed plates. I had a woman who was drinking, eating off these glazed plates from expensive plates from Europe, full of, full of lead. So you have to be kind of a detective and listen to their lifestyle and what's going on. Well, I hope you enjoy that teaser.

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Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their Find a Practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.