Heavy Metals And Health: The Untold Story

We know there's a connection with lead and other heavy metals and hypertension, cardiovascular disease, digestive issues, and the immune system, which I think is so fascinating. Welcome to Doctor's Pharmacy.

I'm Dr. Mark Hyman, and that's Pharmacy with an F, F-A-R-M-A-C-Y. And today we're having a special episode of the Doctor's Pharmacy called House Call with my colleague and friend, Dr. Elizabeth Bohan, the medical director at the Ultra Wellness Center. She's on the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine. She teaches physicians and providers all over the world about how to implement what we're doing here at the Ultra Wellness Center. And she's just an awesome human being and is whatever doctor should be, an MD who's got a specialty in nutrition and a nutritionist, a dietitian with her RD and an exercise physiologist. So she's kind of like a triple threat and she's an awesome human being.

So welcome back to the Doctor's Pharmacy list.

Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me. Okay, today we're going to talk about something heavy. Heavy metals, heavy metals, lead and mercury to start. There's lots more, but those are the two most common metals that are in our environment that we're exposed to. And I don't know about you, but the only thing that I learned about toxicology in medicine and medical school was acute poisoning. We didn't even learn about chronic low-level toxicity. Now, there was some awareness that lead was a problem and that lead in kids caused behavioral issues, developmental issues, impaired cognition and all kinds of stuff. But we really didn't learn much how to treat it. We didn't learn how to evaluate it. We didn't learn how to test it. And yet, in my experience, and I'm curious to hear your experience, it's one of the most important and unappreciated factors in solving the puzzle of chronic disease for so many people with autoimmune disease, with depression, with dementia, with ADD, with autism, with digestive issues, with so many things. And it manifests in so many different ways and people just are not aware of it and doctors don't even think about it. They might check your mercury level or they might check your lead level in your blood, but that's not really that helpful most of the time.

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, we did learn about lead and high levels of lead and lead toxicity, like you mentioned, but one of the things we really didn't focus on in conventional medical school training was the concept of toxic load, right? And all of these toxins we're getting exposed to, and that sometimes small levels of multiple different toxins are really what pushes the body over the edge. So we know that a lot of lead is bad and a lot of mercury is bad, but what we also know, right, is a lot, you know, a little bit of a lot of different toxins can be really detrimental for some people and can make that that level of lead that isn't crazy off the charts, but be really damaging to their health. And like you said, we see it connected to all sorts of different neurological diseases, developmental diseases. You know, for kids, it's, you know, they're just doing so much growing and development. And if there's a toxin that their body has to deal with, it really impacts that growth and development. So we see it associated with autism and kids with ADHD and kids with other developmental disorders. Even hypertension, we know there's a connection with lead and other heavy metals and hypertension, cardiovascular disease, digestive issues, and the immune system, which I think is so fascinating. Heavy metals and other toxins have been associated with causing depression of your immune system, so getting more frequent infections, and also, like you mentioned, autoimmune disease. So we know that heavy metals can be associated with triggering. One of those things we think about When somebody's got autoimmune disease and we're wondering what's going on, what is triggering.

This, it may be some toxin. Yeah, I remember this guy when I was at Kenyon Ranch years ago, he had ulcerative colitis and he was wasting away and I tried all my functional medicine tricks and elimination diet and a gut repair and the five R program and this and that and it just wasn't working. And I'm like, God, okay, I'm gonna go back to the basics. You know, what are the five things that cause all disease? What am I missing? What have I not tested for? Well, heavy metals, they can be immunotoxic. Turned out his mercury levels were off the chart. We chelated him, got the mercury out of his body, and his colitis went away, gained weight, and was fine.

This is absolutely what you have taught me over the years of working with you is when somebody's not getting better, you've got, okay, what am I missing? And so often it's toxins and a lot of times it's heavy metals. When somebody's not getting better, And I remember when you told me, you looked in my mouth after having cancer at the age of 30, and you looked in my mouth and you're like, you have to do something about those amalgams. And I dragged my toes for a little while, but it was really helpful for my health.

He wants to go to the dentist, right?

Right, right.

I mean, now the FDA has finally come out and said dental fillings are not safe for pregnant women and children, which begs the question is, why are they safe for the rest of us?

Right, absolutely.

And in many countries, they're banned. In Europe, they're banned, and in Canada, they're recognized as not safe. And so I think, you know, we are in this sea of toxins, like you said, and it's the total load. So one cookie may not be bad for you and give you diabetes, but if you eat 30 or 40, you're gonna get diabetes. And the same thing with these toxins, and it's not just one toxin, like you said. And these low-level toxins that were exposed to the plastic, the flame retardants, the pesticides, the, you know, BPA, phthalates, parabens, all this stuff that we're constantly exposed to. does put a wear and tear on our detox system. But the one thing that I found is that these heavy metals are not necessarily low level toxins. They can actually be extremely high given a patient's exposure and what's going on. So for me, and I don't know what it's like for you, but for me, you know, we we see a lot of chronically ill patients here at the Ultra Wellness Center. And for me, it's like checking someone's blood pressure. I it's just everybody gets a heavy metal test. I mean, unless there was one patient recently, I'm like, I just saw her and I'm like, did not order a heavy metal test on her. Although I probably should have, because she had no fillings and she was a vegetarian her whole life and she never ate fish. So I'm like, oh, she's not gonna have any mercury. But then I was like, wait, she was in the military. Maybe I should have checked because she could have lead. And she didn't do a lot of blast or gun stuff, but she probably was shooting guns. And I've had, you know, patients. One guy was a king who used to shoot guns all the time and.

He had really high lead levels and he had diabetes and all these other issues. Yes, I had a hunter as well who had high levels of lead and mercury. I'm assuming the lead came from the guns, from the shooting, right? Yeah, absolutely.

The fumes from the shooting of the bullets, for sure. So, you know, I remember I had a young student once who wanted to do a research project with us, and I asked her to work with lab that we use to check heavy metals, because we've done like 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 heavy metal tests over 20 years. And I had them pull all my patients, I had them analyze the results, and we found that 40% of those patients who showed up with some chronic illness who we tested had significantly elevated heavy metal levels.

I believe it. I believe it.

That may not mean the general population. We're talking about people who come in who have stuff wrong.

Who are sick.

But this is called selection bias. But still, if you're going to the doctor and you got a problem that no one can figure out, It's gotta be right at the top of the list, gluten, metals, like gut, it's like these are the functional medicine things that tend to get ignored with traditional medicine.

Yeah, so we should talk a little bit about how we check, right? You were just mentioning that. I mean, we can check heavy metals in the blood, which is good to check for, especially for acute toxicity or acute exposure, but the blood turns over every three months, every 90 days. So when you're checking for heavy metals in the blood, you're really mostly looking at recent exposure to heavy metals. We can check heavy metals. There's a great test we look at a lot. We'll talk a little bit more about it that looks at the comparison of blood, hair, and urine, and it looks at not only mercury levels in each of those three components, how is the body mobilizing it, and also tells us a little bit more about the comparison of inorganic and methyl mercury. We'll talk more about that. We also can do a provoked heavy metal metal challenge test where we give a chelator and collect urine for six hours. And that tells us about stores of heavy metals in the body. So if you're wondering if somebody got exposed, you know, two years ago or five years ago, because the body will hold on to heavy metals, you know, we know that lead gets stored in the bones. And so, you know, you, you, you know, you get a sense of what's, what exposure somebody's had in the past.

With doing that provokes heavy metal challenge test. And it's really important what you're saying because, you know, most traditional doctors will check your blood level.

Yes.

Now, if you haven't eaten fish in three months, your level is probably going to be zero for mercury. And if you don't have any acute onion exposure to lead, it might be very low. But, it may be something that you accumulate over your lifetime that gets stored in your organs, your bones, your muscles, your tissues. And it's not going to come out unless you provoke the body to pull it out.

Yep.

Now, traditional medicine doesn't actually do this test, and they don't even know about this test, and they often are highly skeptical and questioning of this test because, well, what's the normal reference range? You know, you hear all these criticisms. The normal reference range for mercury is zero. The normal reference range for lead is zero. These are not biologically necessary compounds that we should have in our blood. at all ever.

Less is more there, right?

And we used to do these lead levels on kids. 40 was considered normal. Then it was 20. Then it was 10. And now we're knowing that even down to levels of one, that there's significant impairment in neurologic and cognitive development. In heart disease, and this study blew me away, Liz. There was a study looking at heart disease and lead, and they found that any blood, this is just blood lead levels, any blood lead levels, greater than two, which is about 39% of the population, were highly correlated with heart attacks, strokes, and death. Far more than cholesterol. Which is amazing. And yet, how many cardiologists are checking LDL levels?

Yeah, and we think that's because of the process of oxidative stress and inflammation that the heavy metals can cause, and maybe because they're damaging the endotoxin and impacting blood pressure. It is really an interesting correlation. And so it is something we really want to look at. The other thing we sometimes look at is antibodies against heavy metals. So if somebody's had exposure to heavy metals or toxins in their lifetime and you're wondering could this be triggering an autoimmune disease in their body, we can also look at antibodies against those toxins and heavy metals. And so there's a bunch of different ways we can assess what somebody's toxic load is. We also look at oxidative stress markers, we look at genetic factors, you know, some different SNPs or variations in your genes may impact how well you can mobilize and detoxify from heavy metals. So there's a lot of things we look at when we're trying to assess somebody's toxic burden.

It's true, and I've noticed, and these are things that, you know, well described or written about, but I'm sure you've seen the same thing. You see patients who have heavy metals and their bodies are trying to get rid of it. So, you see all these depleted levels of things. You see depleted levels of amino acids. You see low selenium, low zinc. You see low glutathione levels. You see all these phenomena that are consequences of this constant burden on the system and the body's trying to handle it. And, when we start to talk about these things, then we're going to talk about lead and mercury. we've been sort of focused on lead. But, you know, if you have any chronic illness, whether it's depression, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, I mean, diabetes is highly correlated with arsenic levels, for example, and pesticides and chemicals. You know, whether it's neurodevelopmental issues, neurocognitive issues like Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, whether it's autoimmune diseases, whether it's chronic digestive issues, whether it's chronic fatigue. These all need to be triggers for you to think about heavy metals.

Yes.

And your doctor is just not gonna do that unless they are a functional medicine doctor.

That's true.

And we do something different, which is this provocative test, which is an invasive test. It's sort of like taking a glucose tolerance test, right? When you drink two Coca-Cola equivalents and then you check your blood sugar, well drinking two Coca-Cola is not a great idea, but it's helpful to diagnose how your body responds, or like a cardiac stress test. You provoke someone on a treadmill and see if their heart is working or not. And we have to provoke the body to pull these metals out with a chelator, which binds to these metals, and you excrete it in your urine, you collect your urine for six hours. And you can follow it over time and see people's levels improve, and you see that correlate with clinical improvement. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And we're gonna get into it, but the way I got into functional medicine was 'cause I had mercury poisoning, and I've told the story a little bit, but we'll get into it. when we talk about mercury. But let's sort of get into a little bit about lead. So what makes you think that someone has lead poisoning and how big of an issue is this in America today?

There's always been lead around in our environment. There's a lot less now than there used to be. You know, I mean, some people feel that the fall of the Roman Empire was because of lead poisoning and that that caused such disorders in the emperors that they were all crazy. They were all crazy, right?

Lead pipes. It was the plumbing and the advance of technology And sanitation essentially, they kill them.

Yeah, it's so interesting. And so we do have less exposure to lead now than we used to, but we still are getting exposed. It was in 1978 that we finally said in the United States, no more lead in paint. So for a lot of people, they have a house that was built before 1978, depending on the situation and they still might be getting their children, and they might still be getting exposed to some lead through the dust from the paint. Lead pipes, as you mentioned, there's still some lead in solder, especially in the older pipes. And then in gasoline, it was in the 1991, where they finally took all the lead out of gasoline. So we have less exposure to lead than we used to, but we still see some issues with lead toxicity.

Where is it coming from now?

Well, so, you know, in the, in older homes, so homes that are built before 1978 or who, or newer homes, but still have some older pipes in them. Yeah. So it can still be in the water. That's why we always recommend people run their, you know, water.

Flint, Michigan, when they started messing around with the pipes and the water, all these kids got lead poisoning. And in Cleveland, you know, the kids there have higher lead levels than in Flint. and because of all the old paint and all the old houses, I mean it's prevalent. We also have the coal burning and cement plants which use coal and release tremendous amounts of lead and mercury into the environment.

Absolutely, so lead can be in soil, you know, depending on what was happening around that home that your house was built in, it might be deposited in the soil. And we do find situations where kids are playing, I mean we want them playing in the dirt and in the soil, but that can be a source especially if their toys or their hands are then going in their mouth. And of course, if they're, you know, kids are always putting stuff in their mouth, so that's where a lot of times they will pick up some of that dust from old paint, you know, at the house.

I remember this one kid who had severe ADD, behavioral issues, and he lived actually near Albany, and they had this big cement plant there.

Yes.

And it was right next to the school, and every day, the cars in the parking lot would be just covered with dust. And it was basically lead and mercury dust. And this kid had really high levels of lead and mercury from being in a school that was next to a cement plant. So we don't think of that.

No, and hobbies. We were talking about shooting guns and the bullets and stuff, but also stained glass. And there still is unfortunately lead in some ceramics and depending on where pottery and ceramics are coming from, there still can be some levels.

And also wine glasses.

Yes.

And water glasses that are made of crystal. I remember once walked into this store to buy wine glasses and they were $5 glasses and they were $50 glasses. And I'm like, why are these Rydal Crystal $50? He said, well, they have lead in them and it makes the wine taste better.

They're a little sweeter, right?

Oh my goodness, yeah, lead tastes sweet. So, it's a serious problem.

It is, it is. And you know, if a mom has had exposure to lead, you know, we do know it can cross the placenta. So that can be a source for children as well. So many times when we're evaluating a child who has developmental delays, we're also thinking about the mom and what was her exposure like? What are her levels like? Because that is obviously impacting the child.

Absolutely. And I think the prevalence and the issues of this really got exposed by Dr. Phil Andrian and others, Needlemen in the 70s, where they took dental samples of kids' teeth that fell out, baby teeth. They analyzed the teeth and they looked at the lead levels and they found that there was an incredible correlation with the lead levels in the teeth and these neurodevelopmental issues with kids, whether it was dyslexia, ADD, violence, behavioral issues, academic performance, Juvenile delinquency all increase with higher levels of lead.

Absolutely, as your blood level goes up, your IQ goes down. I mean, that correlation is significant.

And pediatricians do check for it, right?

It's interesting, I think there's some state to state requirements, like in terms of some states it's required to check at age two, but then I think in other states it's only the high risk population. that were checking at age two. So there may be some variations in state to state requirement. But when in my training in New York, we were checking everybody at age two. But what did the doctors do?

They're like, oh, don't eat lead paint and don't, I mean, they didn't treat them.

Unless it was crazy high, right? Like these mild elevations where we were really watching. I mean, that's how you were trained in conventional medicine. Just if it was a mild elevation to watch and look to make sure there was not a continued source of lead exposure.

But the beauty of functional medicine is that we actually can treat it and help the body eliminate the metals.

And as you were mentioning earlier, these mild levels of exposure can have significant impact on a growing developing child. So we also always focus about high fiber. We know fiber will bind to lead and will help eliminate it. So we're always talking to moms and about giving their children lots of fiber, lots of vegetables. We talk about making sure their iron levels are sufficient because if iron levels are low in a child, then the lead has an easier time getting absorbed into the body and getting into the brain. We know we want to make sure all mineral levels are sufficient. And as you were mentioning earlier, we always focus on nutrition, right? Because you need to have enough amino acids and protein to detoxify. You need to have enough phytonutrients to detoxify. enough of those good minerals helps prevent that lead from being as detrimental for that growing and developing child.

I mean, people don't realize that your body has a built-in detox system. It's designed to help your body get rid of crap. And there are very specific ways to optimize that system. And we've had a podcast on this, but it's something that we really focus on in functional medicine, which is foods that upregulate your detox pathways. All the things we're mentioning, the right amino acids, the right mineral-rich foods, things with lots of glucosinolates and things that build glutathione in the body, fiber to help bind the metals and get them out. So we have a real strategy. And then there's a lot of nutrients and supplements that we use to also help upregulate these pathways in addition to getting rid of the source. You've got to get rid of the source. Absolutely. And then sometimes we even use medication to help chelate or bind the metals to get them out.

And these are FDA-approved medications that are used for lead treatment in kids, but.

They don't usually use it.

Unless the levels are really, really high in the blood, right? Right.

So, if a level of one is bad, why wouldn't you treat that? If you wait until the level is 40 or 50, it doesn't make any sense. Hey, everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into the Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements to gadgets to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a week on Fridays. Nothing else, I promise. And all you have to do is go to drhyman.com/picks to sign up. That's drhyman.com/picks, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter. and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Now back to this week's episode. So let's talk about a case that you had of a young boy with lots of issues.

Yeah, so the mom brought him to me when he was four and he was having developmental delay, he was having language he was having behavioral issues, he was hard to control, he had some attention issues, and his language was significantly delayed. He had a few words, but he was having a very difficult time communicating, and he was diagnosed mild to moderate autism. And so she brought him to me to see what else can we do. And he's somebody, which was kind of interesting, he didn't have a blood lead level that was ever checked. with screening when he was two, which I was surprised about, but maybe where he was born or it just never happened. And his blood lead level was 25 micrograms per deciliter. And as we were talking about, we want to be under two. 25 is definitely elevated. We did that Provoked Heavy Metal Challenge test.

Where was he getting this from?

It's interesting, we never found the source. We've been looking for the last few years and we did not find the source. Now, he had moved, his family had moved right prior to coming to see me. So it's probable that the source was at the old apartment house. I think it was an apartment, but I think that's where it was, or maybe some overseas travel, but because a couple of the other, his brothers had some elevated levels, you know, mildly, not as high, but elevated levels, and they weren't as impacted by them. Maybe because of the age of exposure. But we unfortunately didn't find the actual source. But luckily, we have been successful at bringing it down. We did a provoked heavy metal challenge test, and his level was like 170.

Which is-- okay, over three is like you worry about it. Over three, you worry about it.

170 was very high.

I maybe have seen two or three of that in my entire 30-year career with tens of thousands of tests. This is very high.

This was very high. And we did-- testing on oxidative stress that was high. His glutathione levels were low based on organic acid testing. And he also was low in iron, which as we mentioned, that makes the lead even more dangerous for him in his developing brain. And so, you know, he was, we got some history about his diet. The family was vegetarian, so he was a little low in protein. So that's something we needed to work on as well. And so we really worked to support his diet first and foremost, we increased his protein. They were okay with adding in some animal protein which helped this child, so we did do that and we gave.

Him some- Wait, wait, before you- yeah. So animal protein, the reason we need animal protein is very high in sulfur containing amino acids and other amino acids, they're part of these pathways that the body uses to get rid of junk, these detox pathways, acetylation, methylation, glucuronidation, glycine conjugation, and they all need these various amino acids to regulate these pathways. And you do need sometimes higher levels of protein to get these kids detoxed. And you'll see depleted levels when you test them.

Absolutely. And it's not like everybody needs higher levels of protein, but when the body's under stress like that, it is very necessary, as you mentioned. And so his levels were low, and he he needed some extra support. We gave him N-acetyl cysteine, which helps the body with production of glutathione. We gave him sulforaphane, which helps with the body's production of glutathione. We gave him a good multivitamin, a good multi-mineral. And because of his levels, I also did give him some chelation. So we used with him a rectal suppository because of his age of EDTA, of calcium EDTA. and then made sure, you know, when you do chelation, you have to make sure you're really repleting somebody. You have to make sure they're getting enough minerals back because it will bind to some minerals. So it's not something you just, you definitely want to be working with a physician.

Yeah.

And you have to be doing it carefully because you don't want to deplete them of nutrition as well. So you need extra nutritional support. We also gave him a lot of omega-3 fats for his brain and brain health. we took him off of gluten and gave him a good multi and we worked to really decrease his toxic load in general. You know, one of the things we see with heavy metals and toxins is we, as we were mentioning earlier, that toxic load. So, a lot of times parents, you know, are using other toxins which they don't even realize. For example, Tylenol, you know, when kids get fevers or mild fevers, A lot of parents are quick to use Tylenol because they want their child to be comfortable and that makes sense. But we have to recognize that that needs to get detoxified through the liver. And- yeah. It depletes glutathione.

It depletes the glutathione. Which is the main detoxifier in the.

Body that gets rid of metals. So, you know, this family was using a lot of it. You know, he was, you know, he's a normal kid in terms of having a lot of low-grade fevers at times, but unfortunately, they were using a lot of Tylenol and using it around vaccinations. And I really try to cut that down with parents and only use it if their child has a high, high fever, where if they don't need it and their child can sleep comfortably and they're able to stay hydrated, then we try not to use that too much because of the toxic load.

So what happened to him?

Yeah, so after like six months, we got the blood lead, level down to six. From 25, still high. But, you know, I figured we weren't still getting continued exposure and his provoked heavy metal challenge test, his lead level came down to 40. So we needed to continue the process. So we did another six months of it and then he was down to like three in terms of his blood and then the urine toxic metals down to 10.

The great news- 170 to 10, that's impressive.

Yeah, we did a good, pretty good job. They were very compliant.

And how did you- How was this- The great news.

Yeah, so, you know, his language skills were going up, he was getting, his language was increasing significantly, he was able to go to a regular school, he was interacting with kids well, he was learning well, the teachers love having him in class, he's still a little more disruptive than his brothers, but, you know, he's got a little attention issues still, so we're still working on that, but he's really improved significantly.

Yeah, I mean, it's incredible when you start treating these people, it's one of those massive blind spots in medicine. I mean, nutrition is a blind spot, but it's kind of obvious. People know, yeah, yeah, food plays some role in disease. But metals, it's just absent. It's just really interesting how absent it is from any traditional medical training, understanding, evaluation, treatment. And it's really what we do here at the UltraWellness Center and in functional medicine. I just, you know, You just remember reading this study and this is published in I think in JAMA or the New England Journal of Medicine. These are the top medical journals in the world. And there were a number of articles published. One was about kidney failure. And they found that in those kidney patients who had high levels of lead, if they chelated them with IV EDTA, which is one of the things you use with this young kid, rectally, but they give it intravenously. They literally could stop and even reverse the progression of the kidney failure and prevent dialysis. Now, considering dialysis is one of the biggest drains on our healthcare system and it's a huge personal inconvenience and it's not a fun thing and waiting around for a kidney transplant is not a fun thing and nobody's doing it. It's in this major peer-reviewed medical journal and a well-done randomized controlled trial on thousands of patients. Of course, it wasn't done in here, I think it was done in Taiwan or somewhere else, but it was published in a major journal and yet nobody's checking that. It's just striking to me. So we really are in this moment where we are seeing a transformation of medicine, where these ideas are emerging, that our toxic load is now a thing, that a microbiome is a thing, that gluten and leaky gut is a thing. So I think we're kind of opening things up, but it's still too slow for my taste. So, yeah, I think that lead is one of those unseen causes of so many chronic illnesses. And I always think of it, and I always take a good history. As long as you can't tell just by the history, you have to look, you have to test.

You have to test.

And there's an incredible study where they had to dig up bones from an old church 300 years ago, and they found there was 300 times more lead in the bones of people today than 300 years ago in industrial humans. because of all the coal burning, the pollution, the chemicals in our environment. I mean, I just think we're so inundated and some of us are more susceptible than others and I personally am one of those.

Me too.

And so, I'm not so good at detoxing. I have to make sure I kick up my system all the time. So, we are going to come back to Mercury in a much longer podcast because this is a very important topic. I think Mercury toxicity is probably even more prevalent than lead because we have removed a lot of lead from the environment. Yes, we have cement plants and coal burning and people who live close to those are higher risk. But we've taken out of gasoline, we've taken it out of the paint, although if you're drinking out of crystal glasses, and I had a very wealthy patient with all crystal glasses and crystal wine glasses and crystal water pitchers, and she was just fully lead toxic from it. It was pretty amazing. But mercury is still so prevalent because not only have coal burning and cement plants and all that, but also because of the fish we consume, and we'll talk about that later, and the dental fillings, the amalgams, we call them silver fillings, but they're not, they're mercury fillings, over 50% mercury. And we're going to get really deep into this in another podcast we're going to do, but I just want to touch briefly on mercury and some cases and talk about the main things that we tend to see. So talk about this case you had of this patient who was getting sick all the time, this young woman who, while young to me, she's 42, but I'm 61 next week. So how did this patient present and what was her story and how did you address this?

You know, I mean, I think that, you know, one of the things like what I was mentioning earlier in this podcast that you taught me so well with years and years of working with you is we've got to think about heavy metals when somebody is, you know, their immune system's not working well. When their not getting better. And this woman was 42 when she came to see me and she was just somebody who always got viruses. She always got colds and flus and, you know, she was she was sick multiple times a winter and she she got a lot of sinus infections too. So it ended up that she was on multiple antibiotics for sinus infections and she was frustrated with the fact that she was always getting colds and flus. And so when she came in to see me, I did a really good history with her, as we always do, and a physical exam. And I noticed she had multiple silver amalgams or mercury amalgams in her mouth, right? And she had a lot of cavities as a kid and she was, and a lot of them were filled with the silver amalgam. And so we said, okay, let's just see, let's see, Could these silver amalgams still be releasing mercury into your body? So we did a blood, hair, and urine mercury test on her, the tri-test. And what we saw-- what is this tri-test? Yeah, so it's by a company, Quicksilver, and it looks at, it helps distinguish in the blood if the mercury that you have, it gives us total amount of mercury, how much is methyl mercury, which is typically coming from our fish. How much is inorganic, which a lot of that can be coming from your amalgams. And then how much is in the urine and in the hair, which is important to let us know how the body is mobilizing whatever mercury it's getting exposed to every day. Because some people, you know, they get exposed to mercury, their body just sort of mobilizes it and, you know, they're fine with it. And there's other people, and I think that's really important is that we're all individuals. and really that's what we focus on in functional medicine is that we have to treat the person as an individual. And a lot of times research may not, because it doesn't focus on putting high-risk people in a group that they're studying. So let's say if there was a bunch of people with some of the genetic variations that you and I have in some of our glutathione producing genes, you may have really different outcomes and different, you know, the amount of toxin that may cause ill health for them. may be lower than in the general population because some people can handle some of the toxins that they're exposed to and other people don't handle it as well for a variety of reasons, whether it being genetic.

That reminds me of a fascinating study that was done based on this large research project looking at dental amalgams in kids and seeing it putting silver fillings or mercury fillings in these kids cause harm. And they looked at, you know, thousands and thousands of kids and they looked at the whole array and they didn't really see a huge change.

Yeah.

And then they stratified the population based on certain detoxification genes where they were not great at getting rid of metals. And those kids who had these impairments in getting rid of metals like mercury, they had essentially a seven-year developmental delay. So like if they were 17, they were developmentally 10. That's terrifying. And that's what we miss when we look at these big population studies without personalizing the story. And that's what's so great about functional medicine, is we individualize it.

Yeah, that's a great example. So for her, for this woman, we did that tri-test and we saw that we got the indication that her inorganic mercury was high, which can say, okay, I bet you some of this, her total mercury was high and the inorganic was high, and it made me concerned that these amalgams were still releasing mercury into her body. And in addition, it didn't look like she was mobilizing it very well. And we looked deeper, we found that she did have signs of oxidative stress, low levels of glutathione, and a bunch of the testing we did, we saw genetically she wasn't the best detoxifier. And so, you know, that is something I worked with her on. I said, you know, I think to work to support your immune system, we need to have you safely have these amalgams removed. And I think that's the key, is the safely part of them. You don't want to just if you're worried about your amalgams, you don't want to just go and have them. Rip them out, no. Yeah, exactly. And you know, you want to have a dentist who will remove them in a safe way, use a dam so that an oxygen so the mercury doesn't get back into your body.

Swallow it, high-speed suction.

Yeah.

Exactly. Dentists should be wearing a filter, like a hazmat suit, basically. Because it's serious, the vapor gets out.

And causes huge problems. And we also work to support the person prior to having that procedure done. If we feel that it's a necessary thing, and not everybody has to have them replaced, but if we feel that it's necessary, we work to support them nutritionally and with some supplements to make it so it's a safer procedure for them. And so she did that, and when we repeated that tri-test, her levels came down beautifully. And then I did the Provoked Heavy Metal Challenge test, and I realized I needed to do more work to help release some of the mercury from her body. So we did a detox protocol that included glutathione, liposomale, vitamin C, some binders, and extra support for her body. And we did that for three to six, I think it was more like six months with her. And the following winter, she did so much better. She didn't get sinus infections, she didn't get coldS or flus. I think she said she had one little cold and it got better. And so I think that's important in this world of COVID that we're living in is, what can we do to support our immune system so it is doing what it needs to do?

That's so true, Liz. These things are just stresses on our system. We want to unload our body from things that are necessarily stressing us, whether it's poor diet, whether it's heavy metals, environmental toxins, you can't be perfect, obviously, but you want to do the best you can. And the story is very important because when you want to test someone who has fillings and see if there's an issue, you can't just do a regular blood mercury test because the inorganic mercury is in very low doses and it's hard to detect, but it's extremely toxic. And you have to fractionate the mercury to look at the inorganic versus the organic. The organic is the methyl mercury that comes from fish, and the inorganic is the stuff that comes either from pollution or is from your fillings. And people say, oh, they're stable, they're put in there for years. You're chewing all the time and they vaporize. And if you chew gum, if you.

Grind your teeth, whatever.

Drink hot liquids. Drink hot liquids. It's a problem. Now, if your dentist says, oh, there's no data that mercury is an issue and that fillings are safe, and ask him a simple question or her a simple question, says, why is it okay to put this stuff in my mouth? but if you remove it from my mouth, you can't throw it in the garbage. You have to expose of it as a toxic hazardous waste according to the EPA. I was like, ask your doctor to answer that. Now, we've been doing this for decades and we've been ridiculed for saying that these fillings are a problem. There's no data on this. You're putting people at risk by having them go to the dentist to remove their fillings. It's not safe to do it. And there's all this negative blowback. but September 24, 2020, the FDA, after many decades of data that they pretty much ignored, finally came out and they said, the agency, after finding that certain groups may be at higher risk for potential harmful effects of the mercury vapor released from the fillings, they recommend that certain high-risk groups avoid getting these dental fillings whenever possible. Of course, they don't say take them out, but they say, guess who these people are? Pregnant women and their fetuses are at risk. Women who are planning to become pregnant, nursing women and newborn infants and children, any children, especially under the six, should never have one. People with neurologic diseases like MS, Alzheimer's, or Parkinson's. People with kidney function problems, data to ignore this. And it's not safe and we shouldn't be using these, even in people who don't have issues like Alzheimer's or kidney failure or trying to get pregnant. And I also think it brings up the question of what do you do if you have these fillings? You need to make sure you don't just rip them out with an average dentist because you can get very sick. And I had a doctor friend who should have known better who had a mouthful of fillings. He took his fillings out and he got heart failure and he did a heart transplant.

Right.

So it's no joke. You can't do it just willy-nilly. with any dentist. You need to go to a special dentist and there's a website you can go to I-A-O-M-T.org which is a dentist who are trained in this method of dentistry that help remove it safely so you don't get in trouble. But the good news is you can treat it and you see like with this woman, she didn't have a really serious problem. She was getting frequent infections, her immune system was suppressed. But whether you're just having something as annoying as that or something as serious as Alzheimer's or autism, or diabetes, you can address these problems. And we're going to cover this in much more detail in a follow-up podcast on mercury because I personally had mercury poisoning. It's what really got me into functional medicine. And I have become unfortunately an expert in this where I wish I wasn't. But I had to learn really how to address this seriously and what to do about it. And the good news is from functional medicine perspective, there's so much we can do. So if you've been listening to this podcast and you have feelings, don't freak out, but you might want to get checked. You might want to see a functional medicine doctor. You certainly can come see us here at the Ultra Wellness Center. We are seeing patients virtually now. You go to ultraWellnessCenter.com to learn more about our practice. We'd love to see you. If you are concerned that you may have heavy metal or someone else might, you know, just start to investigate for yourself because it is a real issue. It's ignored by most traditional doctors. and this is really where functional medicine shines. If you like this podcast, please share with your friends and family on social media. We would love to hear from you if you've had any issues with heavy metals, what you've done to deal with it, leave a comment and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And of course, we'll see you next week on the Doctors Pharmacy.

Thank you, Mark. [Foreign language].