Detox Decoded: Unraveling the When, Why, and How of Body Cleansing

Hi, everybody. I'm Dr. Sandhya Moldovan, periodontist and nutritionist. Welcome to the Holistic Dentistry Podcast, the show that gives you the tips and tools to detoxify your mouth for a healthier body as we explore together the root cause of disease. Remember, you're not healthy until your mouth is healthy, so take care of it in the most natural way. Thank you everyone, for joining us on today's show. I'm very excited to talk to Dr. Howard Lebowitz about detoxification. January is the month of detoxification. We all think about how can we live healthier, how can we let go of toxins? So I can't think of anybody better to be here with us today to talk about this. So, Dr. Leibowitz, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Nice to see you. Dr. Moldovan, as always, your shining smile.

Thank you. Yes, we know each other now for a little bit. We have mutual patients in common, and it's nice that we have the same philosophy on health so we can work together. Now you started integrating traditional training and internal medicine, your decade long ER experience with studies in functional medicine. For those of you that are not aware, functional medicine is a discipline that strives to reverse the course of a disease rather than treating the symptoms. The typical approach of traditional medicine is just treating the symptoms. Sadly, you have this individualized approach to healing and longevity that takes into account all relevant factors, including the patient's environment, diet, lifestyle, habits, and of course, the genetic components. How did you start even to go from traditional medicine into functional medicine? How did you discover functional medicine?

Well, it's a long journey and I have to give some credit to my ex wife because she was a gynecologist who became interested in bioidentical hormones, and she started attending bioidentical hormone conferences and anti Aging conferences, a 4M, which you're probably aware of. And she joined ACAM, which is the College of Alternative Medicine, and she started going to all these very interesting conferences. And then we decided occasionally to make a weekend vacation out of some of these conferences. And I would tag along and then out of curiosity, I would sit in on some of the meetings. And I found these conferences and lectures were just amazing because I was a full time emergency room doctor over at Cedars, and little bells would go off in my head. I would hear about a case. I was like, oh, my God, I just saw someone like that in the emergency room. And there's nothing we've been able to help him with. I bet you this could help him. And little by little, I actually started integrating some of these modalities to my patients in the emergency room. And instead of having them come back over and over and over again with the same problem and never getting better, little by little, I realized that people were actually getting better. So at some point my ex wife decided that we should join forces and open a clinic together, which we did back in 2005. And that's when I left the emergency room full time, open this clinic. And we opened a really beautiful integrated clinic where we were doing the hormones and vitamin drips and colon therapy. We had detox programs, we had bodyworkers, we had massage therapists, private yoga instructors. It was a full on head to toe kind of alternative approach to health.

Like the ideal setup. Howard, that's really ideal you just described.

Yeah, it was great. People would come there basically and spend the whole day and they would go from treatment to treatment to treatment and get like a full package of. Of cleansing treatments and vitamin treatments and hormone treatments and colon therapy. And we had an infrared sauna for detox. And it was very comprehensive. And then, unfortunately, we went through a divorce and I went off on my own, and she went off on her own. And you just start meeting people when you go to these conferences and you start networking. Someone started introducing me to ozone, which I'd never heard of before. And I went and did a few of the ozone conferences and again became just immersed in the incredible stories I was hearing about the healing abilities of ozone. So I bought an ozone generator and started doing ozone. And I integrated that into the practice. And that's become a big mainstay of what I'm doing right now, because it's so healing for so many different things. But I still look at the functional medicine. I look at the gut, of course, which is very important in nutrition, which you know very well. And you have to start sort of at the basis, at the foundation, and then you kind of fill in all the. All the missing blanks.

Yes. And how functional medicine helped you in your life. I know, you know, you're a lifelong athlete. You know, you yourself are like a picture of health. And, you know, you're living what you're preaching pretty much. Have you seen it make a difference in your life?

Well, I've always been interested in diet and nutrition. And mostly it evolved for me out of a point of performance because I was an athlete. I did triathlons, I did the Ironman. I don't know if you remember the Pritikin center in the 1980s. So Nathan Pritikin was a Pioneer in nutrition because he was really one of the first people in the country, I believe, who started to treat medical illnesses with a diet. And he was treating heart disease and high blood pressure and diabetes, basically with his low, low fat, very low fat, ultra low fat diet. And people were getting better, they were losing weight. And exercise, Exercise was a big component of this. So I worked there at the pritikin center for about two or three years, and I became an advocate of the pritikin program. And I actually did my first ironman when I was working there. And the diet became the foundation of high performance athletes. Because it's a very high carb d diet, I wouldn't recommend it today for everybody, but for exercise and athletics, it can be very helpful. It lowers cholesterol incredibly. But anyway, going back to those early days in the 80s, I became very interested in what diet could do for our health.

Yes. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. But going back to ozone, are there a lot of doctors using ozone generally for healing or. It's still not as well known as it should be.

It's not well known here in America. It's very popular in Europe and South America and other countries. It's very sad that it's almost blocked here. And it's very sad the fda doesn't recognize it. They don't approve it. They have a statement about ozone that hasn't changed in 20 years. They call it a toxic gas with known medical benefits, which is completely erroneously wrong. And it's been shown to heal so many things, including Covid. There was a study in Italy. I don't know if you saw this, but 20 hospitals got together in Italy and they were giving their COVID patients ozone. And they reported that when they gave their ICU patients ozone every eight hours around the clock, they only had an 8% mortality. 92% of those patients got better and left the hospital. That's compared to 80% mortality in New York.

Oh, my God.

I was writing my newsletter and I would just. I had to pass this information on to my patients. This is in. This was in pubmed. This is published. This is not a secret. You could google ozone and Covid and you'll see thousands of articles, right? So I published this in my newsletter. I got a call from a lawyer at the federal trade commission accusing me of false advertising. And he threatened to shut my practice down.

Oh, my gosh. That's so crazy.

And this is a. This is a. This is a treatment that we have known about for over 100 years. Ozone has been used in People, before penicillin, we know more about ozone in the human body than any medication on the planet. And yet the FDA and the Federal Trade Commission are pushing vaccinations and all these treatments that they've only been out like a year and they won't let us use ozone, which we know works. It has been out for 100 years. I can't understand that.

I'm with you on that one. I can't understand it either. And in our practice, I'm an ozone user myself and we were using ozone during the COVID peaks and we didn't have people get sick because as we're ozonating the mouth and we're having them, actually we had everybody swish with ozone water in the waiting room and swallow it. We really didn't have issues.

Incredible. My COVID patients, I've treated a number of people with ozone for Covid. And in my experience, I tend to use very high dose ozone. There is what's called the 10 pass, which you've probably heard about, the high dose ozone. And I've gone, I've gone higher. I've gone to 20 bottles on some of my patients. And they will literally, they'll have sweats all night and they wake up in the morning and Covid is gone. One day.

That's the one. You should. You're a miracle worker.

It's a miracle. And I mean, we could be treating people in the emergency room with this and the hospitals wouldn't be overwhelmed, but they won't allow, the FDA won't allow it. It's crazy. People are dying as a result. I mean, there's so many people that could have been saved with ozone treatments who died. It's very, very sad.

Yeah, I agree with you. And it's hard because we feel helpless. Especially you. You could do something about it.

Yeah, exactly. I almost, I'm not even allowed to talk about it. I have to keep it a secret.

Podcast like this and we could talk about anything we want so we can educate people. And I remember going to the first.

I hope there's no knocks on the door at the end of this podcast.

You know, I went to the American Academy of Ozono Therapy started by Shallon Berger. And I remember I was so shocked of how much research there is at ozone, especially coming from Europe, from Italy, the Bocce Group group. So much research on the, you know, the dosage that we give and you know, the fact that it's, it's safe, so it's not talked about. And I don't know about medical school, but at dental schools, nobody talks about it.

They don't talk about it because it's not FDA approved, it's non pharmaceutical. And if it's non pharmaceutical, it's not part of American medicine. You were talking before about treating the symptoms. That's what pharmacology mostly is, is about it's treating the symptoms. You know, you have pain, you take a pain pill, you have an infection, you take this antibiotic to kill the bacteria. But, you know, you're not really getting to the root of the problem. Where are these problems coming from, especially in dentistry, in the mouth? Because there's so much connected, as you know, about our health with our dental health, and a lot of. A lot of people don't believe that.

Yes, absolutely. And, you know, now you're cueing me right into our topic today, which is detoxification. And there's so many toxins in the mouth, so many toxins that unfortunately we as dentists put there, you know, without even knowing, such as mercury fillings. Sadly, you know, there's tons of mercury, you know, being dumped, you know, in the patient's mouth. Still in United States, I know some countries in Europe still have banned mercury, but I don't think it's going to happen in this country because it's just way too political. I think if the American Dental association will come out and say, oh, you know, now mercury is toxic, which we know it is, they're just afraid of lawsuits, so they continue to put mercury in people's teeth.

Well, I've had some incredible toxic mercury cases. I mean, I could tell you a case report that I had. It was a young woman in college at nyu and her mother brought her to see me because she had no energy. She was extremely fatigued. She could barely get out of bed and go to class. And she couldn't lose weight. She was about 20 pounds overweight and couldn't lose weight. So I did a workup on her. Not the traditional workup, but a functional medicine workup. And one of the tests that I had her do was a provoked heavy metal test where I give the patient a chelator and then we measure the urine for eight hours and we see how much toxic metal is coming up. Her mercury was so high, it wasn't measurable. It was off the charts.

Oh, my God. Wow. So when you want to do this test, like, does mercury not hang out at the blood? This is for people who are listening who have never heard of this, you know, so I just want to kind of dig a Little deeper into the testing.

Well, most of the heavy metals are stored in fat and bone and muscle. They're not floating around in the blood. So oftentimes, patients will tell me, oh, I had a mercury test, and then nothing showed up. It's because the doctor did a blood test and it's not in the blood. You have to do a provocation where you give the patient a mild chelator, and it forces the mercury out of the storage places where it's hiding, and then it comes out in the blood, and then it'll go through the kidneys and come out in the urine, and we can collect it in the urine, and then you can really see how high it is because you can tell there are ranges for where even. Even when you give a chelator, there are ranges for how high it should go. And we can measure it and analyze it, and we can determine if it's too high or not. So this woman had this mercury level off the charts. And she'd been to many doctors and specialists, and every. People thought she was crazy. That's what her diagnosis was. They thought she was crazy. They were going to put her on. They thought she was depressed. They were putting her on antidepressants because, again, they were treating the symptoms right. And nobody really knew what was wrong with her. I told her, I said, you're mercury toxic. And she had had fillings, she had had them removed, but nobody measured her after the removal. Anyway, to make a long story short, I couldn't treat her with intravenous chelation because she was living in New York. But I put her on an oral protocol, and she was taking dmsa, and I think we did maybe two rounds. They're like six weeks each of chelation. And then I do a test, and then we do another six weeks, and then I do a test. After the second round of chelation, she felt. Every time I gave her the chelation, she felt better and better and better and better. By the time we were done with the second chelation and I ran her test, she was out of the toxic range. She had normal energy, and her weight came off. Like, miraculously. She didn't even have to diet. The weight just dropped off her body and she became normal. She was back to normal.

That's great. Like, what other symptoms that she had besides depression?

Well, it was overwhelming fatigue. That was the big one. Overwhelming fatigue, depression, and an inability to lose weight, overweight and inability to lose weight. And she was dieting and exercising, trying everything, you know, that should work and couldn't lose weight.

And why is that? Why can't we lose weight when we have such high level of toxins? Is it. Well, like what. What actually happens? Is it that the body's trying to like the metal?

The metal gets into all the cells of the body and it poisons your mitochondria.

Okay.

Your mitochondria, which are the energy generating parts of your cell, don't function. It's. It's kind of like putting glue in your engine, in your car engine. It just doesn't run. Your body just doesn't run. And that's what the toxicity does. It poisons the body. And the body just can't turn over the energy. That's why she was so fatigued, because she wasn't able to generate ATP and all the things that her muscles needed for energy. Even though she was eating healthy and exercising and everything, the body just was. It was poisoned. She was basically poisoned and couldn't function normally.

So do you see chronic fatigue as a common symptom of heavy metal toxicity?

I have. And when I hear about somebody who has chronic fatigue, that's one of the first tests I do on them is a toxic metal test. And I found this with mercury. I've also found it with lead.

Yes. Things are heavy metals, like, so mercury, lead. What are the other.

There's a whole list of them. I mean, a lot of the heavy metals were actually are being used for tests. Like when we go for an X ray and we're given contrast, you know, there's dyes that are heavy metals and some of them hang around for a long time. There's a heavy metal. I'm trying to remember the name of was a. It's a. It was a wacky something like cadmium or something like that. And I had a patient who had fatigue and all this. And I ran a test on her and it came back very high. And I couldn't understand where it came from because that's the other thing we try to figure out is where did you get this exposure? And after doing an in depth interview with her, I found out that her hobby was refurbishing antique dolls.

Oh my goodness, she must be something.

She would sand off the old paint on these dolls that were like 100 years old. And then she would repaint them and make them look like new dolls. And she was inhaling these toxic metals from the paint.

So it's probably full of lead because back then a lot of the paints had lead. Yeah.

And. But there was this wacky one I'm trying I can't remember the name of the metal, but it was a metal I'd never seen before, and I just could not figure out where it was coming from. And anyway, I chelated her, and then I had her wear a respiratory mask when she was doing her work, and she became normal.

Perfect. Yes. That's great. I mean, you have to stop the toxins coming in because if you're detoxifying them. Yeah, makes sense.

Well, she was sitting there sanding. Sanding dolls faces and inhaling dust every day.

Hazards, for sure. So you mentioned chelation, you mentioned the iv, and then you mentioned the oral. So I want to go into what is the best way to detoxify? Okay. Now, somebody has a test. They know they have heavy metals. What's the best way to detoxify?

Well, that's a question I get asked a lot, and I really don't think there is a best way to detoxify. I think whatever the person decides to do that they're comfortable with will work. There's also a big misunderstanding about, like, the rate that needs to be done. Like, a lot of patients, they kind of freak out when I tell them they have toxic levels of metal in their body and they want to get it out, like, immediately. And you don't really have to do that. You could be. You could do a very gentle detoxification. Because sometimes if you do a very aggressive detoxification, especially for heavy metals, what you're going to end up doing is you're going to mobilize metal from where it's being stored in the body, and you're going to get a very high level in the blood. And a lot of people don't tolerate that. That makes them very, very sick.

That's exactly what happened to me because I actually had high. I had 16 large mercury fillings in my mouth. I was so toxic, and unfortunately for me, I had them removed unsafely. So I developed all these headaches and fatigue, and, you know, I went to get some chelation, and it made me feel. I felt like the whole room was spinning with me for, like, hours. I didn't feel well at all.

And that can happen from a very aggressive chelation because it mobilizes too much metal too fast. So you can do a very gentle chelation. You could. There's no specific time frame. You have to do a detoxification. You could take your time. And basically what I do is I try to. I try to adjust the treatment plan to the patient's tolerance. Some people can tolerate aggressive chelation a lot of people can't. But there's nothing wrong with going slower as long as you keep working on it. And then at some point you do another test and you see if you're out of the toxic range. When you're out of the toxic range, you stop.

Yeah. Makes sense. What do you think about oral chelation or.

Chelation is great. It's great. You know, one of the most important areas with oral chelation is the gut, because a lot of the heavy metals will end up in the digestive tract. They get excreted there through the liver, through the. Through the bile, and they end up in the gut. And then you have to do things in the gut like binders and you want to have good, frequent, you know, easy bowel movements, because otherwise these metals, when they end up in the gut, if they don't pass through the digestive tract quickly, they actually get reabsorbed and go right back into the body.

Yeah.

So part of the chelation or part of the detoxification also involves working on the gut and making sure the digestive tract is working very efficiently also.

Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I mean, if you have a plugged drain and you're trying to throw stuff down the drain, such as the heavy metals, they're going to get stuck there. Back right up.

Yeah, exactly where they started. Exactly.

Now, do people need to see a doctor when they do a detox or. I mean, obviously for the IV chelation, they will need to see you and. But now there's all kinds of services online. I know now they could, you know, do blood spot testing for vitamin D. There's all these companies out there, you know, is that an accurate test? If somebody would offer something online, like.

Maybe hair, I wouldn't rely on a blood spot test for heavy metals. Like I was saying before, the heavy metals mostly aren't in the blood. You're going to miss them.

What about the hair? I have some patients that do hair hair testing.

That's very interesting and I've looked into this because a lot of people do that and it's actually. It's actually inversely related to your hair. And there was a study done in the UK because. The uk, it was done because of autism, because there was a. There was a lot of concern about mercury in the vaccines. You know, the femursol that's put into the vaccines as a preservative for vaccines in little children, causing high levels of mercury and autism. So they did a study in the uk because in the uk, I didn't know this before. I don't know if you do, but it's traditional in the UK to save a piece of hair from your child's first haircut.

I have that, my inaugural Romania. So my mom actually saved a piece of my hair for my first haircut. Yes.

So they do this in UK too. I guess maybe it's a European thing. I don't know.

Maybe. So yeah. So they were actually testing, it was.

A great way to test hair. Lots and lots of hair because you have all these hair samples and then you could see which kids are autistic and which kids are not artistic and, and you could compare the hair results to the autistic kids and the non autistic kids. So they studied this and you know what they found? There was an inverse relationship. The kids who had a lot of toxic metals in their hair were not autistic and the kids who had no toxic metals in their hair were autistic. And the reason they explained the reason why is that the kids who had high mercury in their hair were, were rapid excreters so they could detoxifiers. And the kids who had no mercury in their hair were not able to excrete it. So it built up in their body and it made them toxic.

So, so this brings us to the point where, you know, you know, I know about the MTHFR gene and some people are good detoxifiers, some people are for detoxifiers. So how do you connect that in your treatment and how do you test for that?

I haven't really done genetic testing for detoxification for people because to me, if I'm treating, if I find someone who has toxic metals and I'm going to treat them and I'm going to do chelation, the chelation is going to work whether they're a rapid excretor or not. It doesn't really change what I'm going to do.

Makes sense.

So I just go ahead.

Would that be?

Well, if they're in town and they can come to my office, you know, I would do the intravenous chelation.

Okay.

And that's with edta. And it's, it's a fairly aggressive form of chelation because it's, it takes a lot of heavy and it takes all different heavy metals out. It's not just for mercury. It'll take mercury and lead and palladium and you go down the list and it like chelates almost everything. It's incredible. It's like passing big sponge through your body and sucking up all these metals. And I've had people do that, but you know, they have to come in probably, and there's no time frame either. You know, I have a lot of patients who come once a week or once every two weeks. But some people get sick when they do that because it mobilizes too much metal. So they'll slow it down. They'll come once a month. There's no, there's no reason to have to do it at a certain pace. You just do it to the point that it's comfortable for you. But the intravenous chelators are very, very strong, and you can get equally good results with the oral chelators. And I prescribe pills and people will start taking these pills and they'll mobilize a lot of metals too. And sometimes that makes them sick and we sometimes have to cut that back. Sometimes I give them less pills. Sometimes we just go with a slower course where we take more days between treatments and things like that. And then simultaneously with that, I work on their digestive tract. So I have what I call a detox smoothie. I have them drink.

Oh, nice.

It keeps the gut moving, you know, briskly, so that the heavy metals get into the gut and then they get excreted from the body readily. And then of course, you want to be well hydrated because the kidneys are involved in excreting toxic metals too.

Would you tell us your. What's in your smoothie or is it a secret?

It's not really a secret. I have things in there, like I put chlorella, I use cilantro. It has a lot of fiber, a lot of digestible fiber like psyllium, psyllium husk, things like that. And then there are some of the really good vitamin companies, make a detox protein powder like Ultra Inflammax by Metagenics and things like that. So I usually put them. And it also flavors it and makes it taste better.

So, you know, a lot of people this month of January, they're. They're like, okay, I'm with a detox. So they just go on like maybe like a limited cal diet and they just do maybe some chlorella. Does that do anything at all? Does that help? Is it helpful?

You can accomplish a lot by doing things like that. You know, the big toxins that we face almost every day are alcohol, caffeine, you know, smoking, things like that. These are, these are non healthy additives to our food. They're not health promoting. You know, there's nothing health promoting about alcohol. Alcohol is toxic. Caffeine is toxic. These are toxins. That the body has to work to excrete. So if you want to go on a detox diet, stop those. That's a really simple thing to do. You stop those and you drink a lot of just fresh water, get off of sugar. That's a great detox as well. And then you could add, make cilantro tea, have, have a cup of cilantro. Just take fresh cilantro and steep it in hot water and drink that. Cilantro is a natural detoxifier. Or make one of these smoothies with chlorella or spirulina. You know, some of these, they're called power greens. You can do that, but you need to do it together with an elimination of the other toxins, you know, so if you're going to go on a cleanse, it should be a real cleanse, not just a half assed cleanse, you know?

Exactly.

But it's amazing how good you feel when you do something like that. You know, you get off of sugar, caffeine, alcohol, stop smoking and eat really healthy natural foods and fiber and vegetables and fruits and stay away from sugar and you'll feel like a new person almost overnight.

Yeah, that's really great advice. I recommend detoxing twice a year. And January is my time also to cut down all these things. Alcohol, sugar, coffee, and just elimination diet, I think is one of the best ways to stay healthy. Eliminate the processed foods and the toxins.

Exactly. And it's interesting because I do a lot of hormone balancing, as you know, for my male and female patients. And very commonly in the men, I see that they have a rise in their PSA from we don't know what. But you know, the concern is that they're potentially developing prostate cancer. Well, the first thing I do when I have men PSA go up is I take them off of alcohol and caffeine because alcohol and caffeine is toxic to the prostate.

Oh, I didn't know that.

And many, many, many times, many times the PSA goes back to normal.

Oh, that's pretty amazing. But that's a hard thing to do for a lot of men it is.

Well, I had a man who came into my office, I was working with him for years, he was on testosterone and all of a sudden his PSA like tripled. And I was like, oh my God. You know, I got nervous, I said, oh my God, I hope you don't have prostate cancer. I said to him, is there anything new you've been doing lately? Is there anything different you've been doing? And he says, well, the only thing I've done is I started doing coffee enemas to cleanse myself. Well, you know how absorptive the colon is. The colon absorbs everything. It's where most of our nutrients get absorbed in our diet. He was absorbing like massive amounts of caffeine through his colonial through the coffee enemas. And I had him. I had them stop the coffee enemas. I had them come back in three months. I repeated as PSA and it had gone back to normal.

You know, I heard about coffee enemas. I've never done one myself. And I just don't know how they even is a thing to do a coffee enema. Is there any benefit at all to that?

Well, the coffee is very absorptive, you know, so I believe, you know, there's a lot of toxins that come down in the colon, but by the time it gets to the area that you're going to do an enema, you know, the feces is almost out of the body already anyway, so I don't see any point in it, you know, I mean, it doesn't clean your whole colon. It's just the lower portion of the colon. And if you're going to use regular coffee, you're going to get a huge dose of caffeine.

Exactly. Now speaking, and now we're talking about enemies. So a lot of people do colonics for detoxification. What's your thought on colonics?

Colonics, I think can be very good because they clean the whole colon. I mean, they really will flush out the entire colon. And when I had my clinic with my ex wife, we had a detox program and part of our detox program was colonics. And they're really good because, you know, you'll get all the stool out that has a lot of toxins in it. And then if they start eating a very clean diet at that point, it's a. It's a great way to start a clean, sort of a clean starting point on your new program.

Yes. I remember the first time I did colonics. It's been already maybe, I don't know, 10, 15 years ago when I started looking into nutrition after maybe the third colonic, my mind was so clear. It was incredible. I didn't expect it to get that kind of side effect, I guess, from the colonics, but it was pretty incredible.

I also love the feeling, you know, after a colonic, your belly gets so flat. Right. You get all cleaned out and you're. You just feel like really empty. I love that feeling.

Yeah. Me too. I love it. I feel so light. Yes, right. Because there's such a strong relation, you know, also between the gut and the brain. So I can't imagine having all these heavy metals, the toxins in our body, how they affect the brain.

Well, you know, the gut is even more important than that because 70% of our immune system lines the gut, the liver, the spleen, all the lymph nodes. 70% of the immune system follows the gut. And it makes sense because the gut is our biggest interaction with the outside world through our food. We put all this food into our body. How else are you going to get toxins into your body? You could get it from amalgams and things like that, but most of it comes through our food. So it's the biggest interaction our body has with the outside world is through our diet. And that's why the immune system is there. And that's the big connection where we talk about autoimmune diseases and things like that, because it's where the immune system just gets overly stimulated and then starts attacking the body itself because it just can't handle the level of toxicity it's being exposed to.

Now, what are some of the conditions or diseases that are connected to heavy metal toxicity?

Toxic metals can cause all sorts of brain disorders. If they get really toxic, you can get heavy metal infestation into the heart, muscles, basically any organ in the body. If you get toxic enough with metal and the metal infiltrates organ tissue, those organs will start to fail and you can get liver failure, kidney failure, all sorts of brain disorders, dementia type problems, autism problems. I mean, the organs that are affected will just stop functioning normally and deteriorate. I mean, they find a lot of toxic levels of lead and bone. You know, they've done studies on skeletons. They find all these toxic levels of lead in people. Lead is a big, nasty one. Because my generation, I'm older than you are, so you may not have been.

Exposed to this.

But in my generation, you know, lead was everywhere in the environment. It was in paint, it was in gasoline, you know, and as kids growing up, you know, we didn't have these, these cars today that are lead free. You know, lead was being belched out into the air everywhere. So a lot of people my age, my generation, have heavy levels, levels of lead in their body and sometimes they don't know it and they have all sorts of symptoms that they can't pin down to anything. And when I test them, I, I often find high levels of lead.

And let's not.

Lead's not easy to get out of the body. It's one of the tougher metals to get rid of.

Even tougher than mercury?

Yeah, it gets stored in the bone, and it's harder to mobilize it out of bone. Mercury is more in soft tissues. You can mobilize it easier, but lead gets into bone, and it's very hard to get it out of bone because I've had people I've chelated. Like, I had a man, he was probably 75 years old, and he just had overwhelming fatigue. And he saw all his doctors and they said, well, you know, you're 75 years old. That's normal. You're old, you're going to be tired. I did a heavy metal test on him. His lead level was off the wall, off the charts. I chelated him and he said it was like lifting a curtain off of his eyes. He felt like 20 years younger in a couple of weeks. But the problem was it came back. And the reason it came back is because when we got all this metal out of the easy areas, you know, the body will equilibrate and the metal started coming out of the bone, and then the level went up again. So I actually had to keep chelating him. It's a tough one to get rid of if the levels are high.

So for somebody like him, like, is he months in treatment? It's not something that you do, obviously, just one month, or could it be a year?

It could be months to years, depending on how fast he can tolerate it. Because sometimes, like I said, when we're chelating, people, they feel really sick, and then I have to slow down. So it varies.

Besides the, you know, the. The feeling sick, you know, that I had. Is there any risks associated with chelation, let's say IV chelation, long term? Like, if it's. Can it be overly done?

I. I don't think so. I think as long as the gut is cleansing regularly and the kidneys are flushing well regularly, you know, you'll keep the metals moving out of the body. What you don't want to happen is you don't want to get high levels of metal that are then going to get stuck and reabsorbed. That would be bad. Yeah, but you want to keep things flowing and moving, and then, you know, you. You can get rid of it and. And people just get better.

Now with chelation, I know you're also chelating some minerals out of the body. Are you replenishing that for your patients? Are you having them take daily minerals?

Well, actually, I put them on like a Complete mineral supplement at the time. There are some supplements that I recommend people take while they're chelating, and one of them is. Is a comprehensive mineral supplement. Like a good. I recommend. There's a couple I recommend. I don't even know. Some of these companies have gone out of business, but sometimes I have people just go to a good health food store and buy a comprehensive mineral supplement and just take that at the same time. The big concern with the chelation is calcium, because these chelators will suck up calcium. And if your calcium gets too low during chelation, you start to get symptoms. You get, like, muscle spasms, you know, tetany and. And things like that. So we have to watch the. The calcium. Actually, when I have people in the office, when I give them the intravenous chelation, I have them eat Tums.

Yes.

Because the TUMS has calcium and it'll replace their calcium at the same time as I'm chelating it.

Oh, that's perfect.

That prevents any of those symptoms. Yeah, yeah.

Now I want to go back to ozone and kind of, you know, come full circle here. Do you. Do you ever connect the ozone treatment as part of the detoxification or is like a separate thing that you do?

I. Well, I like to connect it to the chelation and the detoxification because ozone has the ability to do what we call upregulating liver and kidney function. So it'll actually help excrete toxins faster. But for some of my patients, adding the ozone on to the chelation treatments becomes financially prohibitive. It gets kind of expensive. So a lot of those people don't opt to do it. But, you know, if you can afford to, it's like a nice piece of adding to a comprehensive detox program. When I had my clinic, we had far infrared sauna, which was amazing. And we used to have people, you know, the far infrared sauna heats your core. It doesn't heat your skin like a typical sauna. It actually heats your core. So your body becomes, like, hot on the inside, and the pores open, and you sweat toxins out through your sweat glands. And people would come out of there, and we had white towels at the center, and they'd wipe the sweat with the white towel. And the towel would be black.

Wow. From heavy metals.

From all the metals that came out of their sweat.

Wow. That's crazy. What temperature do you go really high in order to experience that?

It's not really a temperature setting. You just go in the thing and you turn it on, and you don't Feel. It doesn't even feel that hot. It's a wavelength of infrared that just penetrates through the body, and it kind of heats the core tissues in the body. And you don't feel that hot in there. It's not like a Swedish sauna. But you start sweating profusely. And sweat is another excellent way to detox. As a matter of fact, I've seen people who are athletes who exercise on a regular basis, and they're sweating a lot and they're drinking a lot of water. And you can detoxify yourself from that, just from exercising.

See, I love it.

Yeah, you can sweat out your toxins.

It's really good. I just hope I'm not around that person, sweating out the toxins.

Well, a lot of people, they, you know, they don't like sweating. They're like, oh, I get so sweaty and I hate it and everything. It's actually a good thing for the body to do. And sometimes people can't sweat. Like, I've talked to people who. And you may have two of you go, I never sweat. Oh, I never sweat. I never sweat. I could do anything. And I just don't sweat. A lot of those people, they're iodine deficient.

Interesting. Okay.

And when you, when you're. If you're iodine deficient, you won't sweat. And if you don't sweat, you can't detoxify your body.

Yeah, that's a bad, bad problem. So maybe they should try and farm for a sauna, because at least they're just sitting there and eventually there must be sweating.

Yeah, they'll start to sweat in the far infrared sauna. So when I. I used to give people. We used to give people these vitamin drips. We used to chelate them. We used to give them colon therapy, clean out the colon. And then they used to spend an hour in the infrared sauna.

And that's like a full circle detox.

That's a total body detox. That's a great way to detox.

One thing that's new for me, that I've never heard is actually, and I love it and I want to try it, is to do the diveculation and then do the ozone right after. And I know there's a lot of people listening that I've tried maybe ozone in a biological dental office, but they've never done an IV ozone. So tell us a little bit about what that process is like.

Well, the IV ozone is very simple. We start an IV in the arm, and then blood will go up the tubing into a bottle, small bottle. It's about a pint, I guess. And then the machine has another tube that connects it to the generator which generates ozone gas. And the ozone gas goes in the bottle and blends with the blood. And then we give that blood back to the person. So the blood actually carries the ozone down back into the person. And then that blood mixes everywhere in their body. And then we Repeat the process. 10 or 15 or 20 bottles, as many bottles as they want in terms of how much ozone they want to get. I've. I've given people up to 20 bottles of ozone, usually when they're very sick. Like, I had a lady, I had a lady who had really bad Lyme disease. And we started at 10, we went to 15, and then we went to 20. And when she got to 20, she started to feel better. And then I've had very sick COVID patients that I've given 20 and that tends to get them better very quickly.

Yeah, I have a lot of patients that have lyme disease and a lot of other co infections actually. So I know they love ozone for sure.

Yeah, ozone's great because it, it non specifically upregulates the immune system, which can help fight the infections. And then the ozone itself is toxic to viruses, bacteria, mold and other organisms. I could give it rectally, I could give it vaginally. I've given it in the bladder, I've given it in joints. I use it as prolozone, injecting it into joints because it's also very anti inflammatory. It decreases inflammation.

Yeah, plus I know there's always, you know, joints, people that have inflammation of the joint, they could have microbes in the joints, sometimes even coming from the mouth, just leaching through and establishing the joint.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pretty amazing molecule, ozone. And it's a great detoxifier from microbes.

It's excellent. It's. It's one of the best.

Yeah, I love that you're giving everybody listening. You know, if you're booking an appointment with Dr. Leibowitz and we're going to put your contact information for your clinic down at the bottom of the notes. You're so generously giving everybody 15% discount on their first ozone treatment. Where are you located? Where's your clinic?

Oh, I'm in Santa Monica. I'm on 7th street in Santa Monica. 1321 7th Street. Yeah. If they google my name, you'll see the address. And also if you google my name, if you put in my name and ozone. I have a series of ozone YouTube videos.

We're actually going to add a link here as well at the bottom with your YouTube videos. And we'll.

And you can watch. You can watch the process of how I give somebody an ozone treatment.

Excellent. Any last words that you want to add about anything that we didn't talk about?

I think one thing I'd like to leave with people about detoxification is that there's no right or wrong way to do detoxification. And there's no speed. You have to go. There's many, many, many different ways to do detoxification there. A lot of different modalities are very successful. And I think, you know, if. As long as you're serious about it and you continue it till you're out of the toxic range, there's lots of different ways to get good results. And I think it's important that the blood is tested correctly, like I said, with the provocation. And I think it's also important to test the blood periodically to the point that, you know, you're not toxic anymore.

Yes, absolutely. Those are great words. Basically, just do it. Just detoxify. Because pretty much everyone needs to detoxify. We're all gathering toxins as we go through life.

Oh, it's getting worse. You know, I. I'm very concerned about the microplastics in the environment. You've been reading about that.

I read about it this morning, as a matter of fact. Yeah. Because it's. They did a study in Turkey in the toothpaste, and it's all over the toothpaste.

It's very scary. Very scary. They talk about it being in the air, like dust. We're all breathing it in.

Oh, my goodness.

They find it in lungs, in autopsy samples.

Yeah. Plastic is going to be.

It's in our food. It's in the soil. It's everywhere.

Yeah.

I don't know.

And not just microplastic. They were also saying nanoplastics.

Nanoplastic.

Yeah. Even smaller.

Yeah.

That's a big problem.

So really scary.

Our next topic of conversation is going to be like, once we figure out how we detoxify from microplastics.

That would be a good one.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. Great.

Dr. Levi, this was so informative. I learned a lot. So thank you for spending time with me today.

Yeah, my pleasure.

Thanks, everyone for watching.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for joining me this week. Please make sure you check out the show notes for any links mentioned in the show. If you like today's show, please invite your friends to listen as well. That would mean a lot to me. Do you have a question you'd like me to answer? Message me on Instagram @Dr. Sanda. This is Dr. Sandha. And remember, your mouth is the gateway to your health. So take care of it in the most natural and best way possible.