In this patient‑education video Dr. Anderson explains medical chelation therapy, a prescription‑only treatment used to bind and eliminate toxic heavy metals from the body. He begins by defining chelation (from the Greek for “claw”) and describing the basic mechanism: a chelating drug forms a complex with a metal ion, which is then excreted via the kidneys. The video reviews the major families of chelators—EDTA variants (calcium‑disodium, disodium, magnesium‑disodium), dithiol agents (DMSA, DMPS), and other agents such as BAL, penicillamine, tetrathiomolybdate, desferoxamine, and the nuclear‑accident chelator DTPA—detailing their typical routes (IV, oral, suppository), absorption characteristics, and regional availability. Dr. Anderson emphasizes that dosing must be individualized to body weight and renal function because chelators are cleared renally; overdosing can cause acute kidney injury, cardiac dysrhythmias, or death. He warns that chelators are non‑selective and can also bind essential minerals (iron, copper, zinc, etc.), leading to depletion if not monitored. Consequently, he outlines a safety protocol: baseline testing for heavy‑metal burden, electrolytes, and kidney function; ongoing lab monitoring during therapy; and proactive repletion of lost minerals and vitamin cofactors (e.g., glutathione). He notes modern practice uses lower dosing and sequencing of different chelators to target multiple metals while minimizing toxicity. A special case discussed is DTPA, used for radioactive metal exposure and gadolinium‑based MRI contrast toxicity, which follows the same safety rules. The video concludes with a call to action for viewers to subscribe and support the channel.
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This specifically is under the category of human detoxification, but this is medical detoxification, meaning chelation therapy. Hey, I'm Dr. A. Welcome to my channel. I've been involved in teaching and researching in the world of integrative naturopathic medicine for 30 years now, and I use that background to try and answer questions on this channel. Might have heard of it, you might not have, but to chelate comes from the Greek root word for claw or grab. So chelation therapy is specifically a detoxification therapy for heavy metals. The idea being, I put a drug into you, it has the biochemical ability to grab something, and because of the structure of that drug, what it grabs is metals. Herein lies the benefit and also the potential risks of chelation therapy. Now, I keep calling it a medical therapy, and why would that be? Because for the most part, it is, in North America anyway, illegal to buy a chelating drug without a prescription. And the reason for that is there's a lot of safety issues with chelation drugs. But first, let's start out with how do they work? Why would they help me? And then what would I need to be cautious about on the end of safety? So first off, what are the main categories of chelating drugs? So you can divide them up and we're going to talk about some of the more common ones. So first is the family of EDTA, and that's ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid. So it's a 4-part Pure EDTA and other forms are used commonly in food science and food stabilizing and nuclear reactors and all kinds of stuff. But in medicine, we tend to use a form called calcium disodium EDTA. The drug used to be called versinate or versine, and that is literally the EDTA claw, which has a sodium and then there's calcium to stabilize it, let's say. Now that drug does not absorb orally very well. Well, like less than 5%, unless it's treated in a particular way, such as they make it in a liposomal product from a compounding pharmacy, or suppositories. It's absorbed, of course. And that's one. Its cousin is just plain disodium EDTA without the calcium. And this one is a sort of an orphan drug, off-label drug in the United States. And its primary use is for high calcium. So say your calcium is too high because you have metastatic cancer, or I've seen it used in emergency department some years ago for somebody got a calcium-based toxin in their eye and it was washed out with that. There's other reasons that it's used, but it's also used intravenously as well. There is a form called magnesium disodium EDTA, which is the same as calcium, only it's got magnesium instead. That one is more common in Canada, less common in the U.S., but in the U.S. the approved drug is calcium disodium EDTA. So that's EDTA family. Now There's others, but they're mostly used in food science, like I said. Then there is the category called the thiol, the dithiols. And so that means that a thiol is a sulfur molecule. These smell really sulfury, and dithiol means they have 2 claw arms. So EDTA has 4, dithiols have 2. They work differently. The dithiols that we mostly use medically are either DMSA, the drug name that used to be called Succimer or Kemet, and then an orphan drug until recently called DMPS. So the DM, DMSA, DMPS, those are the dithioles. And these 2 can absorb orally, and so they are used orally. They can also be made as a suppository. And in the case of DMPS, it can be used as an intravenous substance. So that's the dithioles. Then there are relatives like BAL, British antileucocyte, which is a very old chelating drug. It's not used as much anymore, and it's not nearly as effective in actual poisonings that we've seen. If you use BAL versus DMPS, like in arsenic poisoning or something, the DMPS way outperforms the BAL. But I don't know that I've— I've used thousands and thousands of doses of chelators with patients and don't know that I've ever used BAL just because DMPS was available. Then there's an old drug which is kind of available called penicillamine. It's not penicillin, it's penicillamine. It's a chelator used mostly for copper toxicity. That one is kind of hard to get and it's got a lot of side effects. There is another drug called tetrathiomolybdate, which is another copper chelator that's used in cancer research or copper excess. But that has to be in a study. It's not an approved drug right now in the US. And then there's some specialty ones like Desferox or desferoxamine, which is made to reduce high levels of iron and other metals and stuff, which is still used, but not again quite as much. So that's what the drugs are. What's the good side of them? If you have too much metal in you that's toxic, it'd be wonderful to send these drugs in with their little claws, either the 4 claws of the ADTA family or the 2 claws of the thiol family, and grab up these metals. And then what happens? They make a complex around the toxic metal, goes to your kidneys, and you urinate it out. So get rid of it. Keep that in mind, that pathway through the kidney. Why are these by prescription? Because you can literally kill somebody by misadministering any of these chelating drugs. And of course, nobody wants to do that. First do no harm, right? Now, what could be the negative sides of chelation drug therapy? The main negative side is not the drug itself, like with most drug problems. It's improperly administered drug. So as I said, you can kill somebody with a chelation drug, and that's generally done when you overdose the person. So the drug, whether you're using an EDTA form or a dithiol form or one of the other ones, has to be dosed within its dose range. But those dose ranges are set for your body size. Your body weight and your kidney function. Why kidney function? Because as I said, they carry the metal out through your kidneys. So if I overdose you, one of the things I can do is put you into kidney failure, which of course we don't wanna do that. But the other thing is, if you have a normal-sized person but very poorly functioning kidneys, you have a mismatch. And what that means then is if I give you a normal-sized person dose of the drug, but your kidneys don't function very well, you're gonna gobble up all that metal, then get to your bad kidneys and they may overwhelm your kidneys, even though I gave you the right dose for your body size. Same would happen if you had maybe a smaller person or a larger person and you adjust the dose for their body size, but you don't take into account their kidney function. This happens with other drugs too. You have to adjust the dose of other drugs because of kidney function. Now, can you chelate people with poor kidney function? Yes, you do it very carefully, but yes, you can. And this would be a place where you really want to go to somebody who's done this a lot. What are some other things that happen? Well, think about the way these things work. These are not like little, you know, nanobots going through that, you know, have some sort of logic circuits in them or whatever. They just chemically react to metals, and when their little 2 or 4 claws find that metal, they grab to it. Your body has a lot of metals that you use for good things. Iron is a mineral, which is a metal. Copper, zinc, many other things. These drugs don't discriminate. So if they're floating through your blood, and let's say it's something like EDTA, it has a high affinity for copper or zinc and a high affinity for lead. If it finds copper first, it's going to grab the copper. Maybe you don't need the copper to go out, but it's going to grab the zinc. Maybe you needed that zinc today, and it's going to then ignore the lead because it's already got a high affinity metal. Now, if it's attached to a low affinity metal, say potassium or something, and it bumps into lead, it gets all excited, probably drop the potassium, grab on the lead. So another problem beyond shutting your kidneys down, if it's not dosed appropriately and managed appropriately, is it will deplete your nutrient minerals over time. Now, each of them do this differently, and so there's a different depletion with with disodium EDTA than there is with calcium EDTA, for example, because of the presence of calcium. Different depletion with DMPS and DMSA, all of that. What that means also is, in addition to your practitioner needing to know about body weight dosing and body maximums regardless of body size and kidney function and all this business, practitioner also needs to know how to replace the good minerals that were in your body may have gone out. But what would come even before that? What would come before that? That would be testing you before you start to give anybody a chelating substance. In addition to testing you for the heavy metals you're toxic with that I'm giving you the chelation drug for, we also want to look at your baseline electrolytes, the minerals that operate your body, and your kidney function, and all this other good stuff. And as we chelate you, we want to look at those again. So yes, we want to replete you with nutrients, minerals. We want to replete you with vitamin cofactors, other goodies, but we also want to check up on them as we go. So it's not just a plug-and-play thing where you come in, you get one test done, it shows you've got some metals, And we just put you on X number of chelation treatments with no follow-up testing. That's just as dangerous as overdosing someone with poor kidney function. And there's many other ways this can go badly. So punchline is you have a very potent tool. It works really well. And we often mix, you know, we'll sequence chelation therapies to cover different metals and add supports like glutathione and things. But what we want is we want to maximize the good of the drug therapy and we're going to minimize the danger from the drug therapy, which is what What you do with all drugs, but these are drugs that can immediately change the minerals in your body in a way that if we overdosed you, for example, might have a bad outcome beyond kidney failure, such as a cardiac dysrhythmia or some other thing we don't want. So this is why in modern times we have much lower dosing strategies than there were 40 or 50 or 60 years ago. We have much better protection strategies for the organs that are trying to eliminate, and we have much better strategies as far as putting the good minerals. Minerals and all of the good stuff back in to keep these things safe. Now, I'll just say as a footnote, because some people hear about this and some don't, but it follows all the same rules. There is another one. It sounds like EDTA, but it's not. It's called DTPA. And DTPA is another chelator type that prior to what I'm about to tell you was pretty much reserved for nuclear accidents and things like that, because it's really good with, you know, nuclear types of radioactive metals. The The reason you might be offered or proposed DTPA chelation can be from toxicity from gadolinium that may have been used in a, you know, as an MRI contrast agent tracer. And why might you use DTPA? DTPA is specific for a certain group of metals that EDTA will grab onto, but not as efficiently. Beyond that little thing where they might use it for gadolinium toxicity, DTPA has to follow all the same rules. Make sure you do your testing ahead of time. Make sure the kidneys are functioning. Make sure you do follow-up testing. Make sure your dose is appropriate to the human size, and on and on it goes. All right. I hope this answers a question about medical chelation therapy and why it's very good, but we have to administer it very carefully and in a very whole person sort of a medical setting, so that we don't engender any of the negatives that come along with chelation therapy, and then it can be a very, very effective therapy over time. I'm Dr. A. Thanks for listening to the channel. Thanks all you new subscribers. Please do like, share, subscribe, do the notification bell, and we really appreciate your support for this patient education channel. So thank you, and I'll see you on the next video.
