DR.A Q&A: How do chelators remove heavy metals?

Hey, it's Dr. A. Thank you, you new subscribers. Thank you, you old subscribers, or former ones. You may not be old. Thanks for all of the likes and shares and all that. Today I have a question that came in, and by the way, you can put the questions in the comment area or you can just make comments if you want to. But this was a really good one because it's a term that gets used a lot. Some people know a lot about it, some people kind of passing understanding, and some people really don't know what it means. And this one came from somebody, I think, in the third category. They said, you know, I heard a friend of mine is going to get something called chelation therapy. What in the world is that? This backstory on the message was their friend was going to a doctor somewhere, and they were diagnosed with something, and they wanted to add chelation therapy as part of their treatment. So first thing to start out with is the word chelation or chelate. The word chelation in English comes from a root that essentially means claw. You can look at it as meaning grab, claw, some— something like that, right? So then the next question ought to be, what are we grabbing? Chelation is clawing or grabbing. What are we doing there? Well, normally to chelate means to have a chemical That grabs onto a metal, and metals can be toxic. In a couple of our videos, we've talked about, you know, environmental medicine and environmental toxins, toxic chemicals, toxic metals. In this case, it's a metal that we don't want inside of our body. That sounds bad. Let's get the metal out of our body. But a lot of people ask, well, chelation is a medical treatment to remove metals from the body. Right. Why doesn't my body just remove the metals? Couldn't that be simpler? Well, yes, that would be a lot simpler. And one of the problems is that your body apparently has not developed in a way— human physiology doesn't have a lot of use for things like heavy metals, which are often the subject of chelation. So your body has no natural need for lead or mercury, right? It doesn't do a whole lot with arsenic. A number of other things. Your body then would be presented with these, but your body also does not have an incredibly well-developed system of removal of those metals, especially when you get exposed in a larger amount than the body might normally be used to. Now, we talked in the video about, you know, is it worth eating organic and filtering my water and all that stuff? One of the reasons is to decrease our exposure. We're not going to eliminate exposure. The toxic metals, we can decrease it. Breathing the air will give you toxic metals, being around, you know, environments will, but you don't have to have them in your food, or you can lower them in your food by eating cleaner and drinking cleaner. So what happens if you get exposed to those? Some of the metals, most metals go to a lot of parts of your body, but will try to get out through the kidneys. Now, this is great, Unless a couple of things happen. One is your kidneys have different amounts of excretion they can do for metals. So for example, there are certain metals that go out easier than other ones just naturally. But the bottom line is if you get exposed to a lot or you're exposed over time, what happens is some of the metals will sit in the filtration apparatus in the kidney and they'll actually start to slow the kidneys down as well. Which is not good. The body cannot naturally eliminate all of the metals coming into it. There's also a phenomenon where some people— and you literally can see this in, in households if you test people— and maybe they all have well water that was contaminated with a metal, but you'll see that they're all drinking the well water, and you got 5 people, and 1 or 2 of them will have way higher levels in their body of the metal than the other people. That can be because they probably, for kidney reasons, but for other reasons in the body, might be slow excretors of those metals. There's other reasons people will build up metals. Bottom line is our body doesn't like metals, these heavy metals. Now, minerals are technically in the metal world, and we use a lot of magnesium in our body and calcium and zinc and stuff like that. But, you know, lead and mercury and arsenic and other Things we don't need a whole lot of or any. So chelation comes in where we put a medicine in the body that then grabs, chelates, claws onto the metal and helps it go out. Now why would the chelated metal go out and the plain metal gets stuck? Part of that has to do with the structure of the metal, maybe its ion state, and versus the chelate going around it and making a complex. The chelate— when the chelating drug goes in, it binds onto the metal, and usually it sort of inactivates the metal from an electrochemical point of view, and then that complex has an easier time going out, usually through the kidneys. Now there are some metals that are kind of unique in that they get a lot of Uh, circulation, they'll go through the liver, and then the liver will dump them into the bile, which goes into the digestive tract. And in that case, you're not just chelating, but you also have to bind up the bile in the digestive tract so it leaves and goes out through the body. There are particular radioactive and non-radioactive agents that have to be bound up that way, and there's— it's not technically chelating, but it's akin to chelating. Chelation may be done for a number of reasons, but the main reason, and certainly the approved reason for using a chelation drug, is to remove metals from the body. Now, in metals and metal diseases, you've got sort of 2 trajectories. One is the acute illness where you get a whole lot all at once. You know, a child's eating a bunch of lead paint, or someone breaks a mercury thermometer and eats it. Or any number of things have happened, or someone poisons you. Those are big levels that go on, and you have to— life and death, and they're treated very rapidly. Chronic exposure, we often don't see the effect, but you can look, for example, as your blood lead levels rise, your IQ drops, but also your blood pressure goes up. Sometimes you see these chronic things that go on. To chelate in an acute instance, you're going to be in a hospital, you're going to be given one of these type chelating drugs. It's— we've done very, very specifically and cautiously because it's a life or death thing when you have an exposure to something that could kill you. Now, the other time I've seen chelators used in a hospital acutely was, uh, working in emergency room a long time ago. We had somebody was exposed, uh, to a chemical at their work that got blasted into their eyes. And of course, chemicals in your cornea, your eyes together with the clear part of your cornea you look through, chemicals don't go well on the cornea. This is the type of chemical that was very difficult to get out of the eyes. We were rinsing the eyes out and all that. We called the ophthalmologist and they said, get this drug and use it as an eyewash and it will grab the chemical and take it out. Well, turned out to be One of these chelating drugs, we got it sent over by taxi cab from the bigger hospital, and we started to use it in that way. So those are ways that chelators are used acutely. Most of the time, when someone says I went to my doctor and they said I metal exposure, I'm getting chelation. Most of the time, it's not for an acute problem, so it's not in the hospital. Then you go to outpatient chelation, and that divides up into two different types of. Chelation, sometimes which are used together. One is intravenous, so literally putting an IV line in and running the chelation drug through your vascular system. That's something that's done by people specially trained to do that. That might be what your friend is getting. The other is the use of an oral version of the chelation drugs, which many of the chelation drugs can be given intravenously but also orally. And/or a form of them can be given orally. And your friend might be going through that where they're being given certain types of pills or a liquid that's a chelator, and they take it on a certain schedule. Now, even though they're in the outpatient setting of chelation medicine, you're not going to probably die tomorrow, you know, from the metal exposure like the people in the hospital with arsenic or other problems. Over the long term, you may be being told to do chelation at a lower, slower rate, whether it's intravenous, oral, or both, to help you lower levels of lead or mercury or a mixture of metals that are in the body. So my suspicion would be that if someone is going in, they've been prescribed chelation, whether it's intravenous or oral, that chelation is being implemented, uh, to help them with a body burden of a heavy metal. That obviously the body is not set up for. It's not healthy for the body. No, you won't probably die tomorrow, but it's better to get the metal levels lower. Now, one thing about metals, heavy metals in the body, they also like to go to your bone, a lot of them. So if you've been exposed over a very long period of time, your bones may have a big reservoir as well, which is a whole other thing for your doctor to sort out and deal with. But chelation basically is a pharmacologic— it's a drug therapy, and it's something that is made to go and grab onto an ionic structure, a metal usually, and take it out of the body. And it has 2 forms that it's generally done in: acute medicine for poisoning, usually done in the hospital by a toxicologist, And then outpatient, that can be either intravenous, oral, or a little of both that are done for chronic environmental exposure to toxic metals. And the chelation is used to help lower the level of the toxicant, the metal in the body. Well, I hope that answered the question. Thanks again, everybody. Do the— do all the stuff, like, share, subscribe, hit the notification bell. Really happy and pleased with everybody who subscribed. I want to thank you so much, and I'll be here answering questions. Thanks.