Heavy Metals and Autoimmunity: Uncovering the Immune System Connection with Clark Engelbert

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode.

Good afternoon, everyone. Dr. Stillman and Clark Engelbert here today to talk about the links between heavy metals and autoimmune disorders. Clark, how are you today?

Pretty good. Pretty good. How about you, Dr. Stillman?

I'm great. You're good except for your aluminum elimination that you're going through right now.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Still kind of going through that. My last test I think my aluminum was at like, you know, 6.63 or something, kind of off the chart. So feels like that's been intensifying in the last month or so. So I sent in my own hair test yesterday and we're gonna see what's going on with that.

Clark's getting rid of all the aluminum that they're geoengineering the world with.

Yeah, exactly. And speaking of aluminum, pretty immunotoxic, highly reactive.

Yeah.

Potentially implicated in a lot of autoimmune diseases, so.

But let's, let's start at the beginning. So this is such a deep topic. Autoimmunity has exploded in the last 100 years. It really, though, if you really want to go back to the history of this, allergic and autoimmune diseases started to increase in prevalence and severity around the time of the Industrial Revolution when heavy metals started to be put into the environment in higher Quantities and concentrations as a result of the burning of petroleum and other fossil fuels. What's interesting about this is that you'll always find in the toxicological literature that the petroleum products are mentioned in the same breath as the heavy metals, or the heavy metals don't even get mentioned at all sometimes. And this may lead a lot of people to underestimate the effects of the metals. Hmm. Which I think is, is interesting. You know, when I look back on my time in the environmental medicine world, which is where all this knowledge is, they don't talk as much. I mean, they do talk about heavy metals, but it's very much, and in a way there, there is a, you know, all these different toxins that we're exposed to combine to derail normal physiology and lead to immune system confusion and dysfunction, which is how I think of autoimmune disorders. It's really not about the strength of the immune system. It's about is the immune system smart enough to go after what it's supposed to go after and leave alone what it's supposed to leave alone. And I think more, the more I've learned about autoimmunity as I've, as I've gone on in my career is it's, you know, Russell Jaffe told me once, he said it's more about repair deficit than it is about your body being confused and attacking things, which is an interesting way of looking at it. And that's where the heavy metals are so interesting. Heavy metals are trash and the body's trying to take out the trash. It's trying to repair the body from this massive insult, which is why we routinely see people coming to us who have autoimmune conditions, who have significant abnormalities in their mineral analysis, and who have significant burdens of heavy metals that as we see them flow out of the body, there are, there can, there problems start to disappear. Just did a testimonial last week with a young lady who came to me with, you know, it was like 10 years of myasthenia gravis, in and out of the hospital, very severe. She got on the quantum biology bandwagon, did the Applied Quantum Biology certification, which I strongly recommend to people. We've had a number of people come from that to our HDMA program who've really enjoyed the program because they already had that foundation. And she went through this massive aluminum elimination. It was like 8.4 on her second test, and it was all because we knew what to go after. We knew that we needed to go after aluminum, uh, and she also eliminated mercury and lead and a huge amount of copper. So this link is massive. It's so underappreciated, particularly in the conventional medical world, but even in the integrative, natural, functional medicine world, I don't think people really appreciate how deep the metals are in terms of their triggering of autoimmunity.

Hmm.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple ways that we can kind of start in on this conversation, but metals structurally become a part of proteins in certain metalloenzymes, and they can actually change the structure of many of these proteins, immune proteins in some instances, and, and make it look like these proteins are foreign, basically. So that's at least one potential mechanism wherein most of the metals actually have this potential to trigger autoimmune reactions, which, if that goes on for long enough, I think if you have these autoimmune reactions over a longer period of time, that's when you end up with full-blown autoimmune diseases, um, of which there are, you know, dozens now that have been identified, basically. So metals are also extremely inflammatory. So triggering activation of the immune system just by virtue of their presence, um, in the body happens. Um, so on a foundational level, metals not only can change the structure of certain proteins, but by their inflammatory nature, they're activating the immune system and detoxification pathways whenever they get into the body. So a couple different, you know, sort of foundational ways that metals can trigger these reactions. And then if you have these reactions for long enough, that can wear down the system and lead to, you know, what we think of as like a vicious cycle where the, uh, the immune system can't shut itself off. And that's where I think that interesting theory of, um, what you just described kind of comes into play.

Right. And in a very real sense, you know, when heavy metals get into the body and get into cells, get into tissue, they begin to create oxidative stress. They can replace nutritive minerals, a la ionic mimicry, which then sets up the cell for essentially failure of normal biochemical pathways and functions. So you have this loss of function and then you have this damage being done to the cell by the heavy metals. You have these proteins that are self, but they have potentially heavy metals incorporated into them, so they look like non-self. Those I think would technically be called haptons, and that would be like a type 4 hypersensitivity. I mean, this is, this is why when you just look in the literature, you'll see all over the place that the heavy metals go hand in hand with autoimmunity.

Right.

And you know, it's, One of the sad things in the literature that we talk about, or at least we talk about cautiously because of the way the censorship is going, is that, you know, it's really clear from the literature that metals in the human body that are not of nutritional value trigger and go along with autoimmunity. And that raises the question of, well, what's a safe exposure, exposure level to any of these metals? Right? How do we drop your exposure level to zero and still have a modern world and civilization such as it is? And that's a really big question. But you know, the, the thing is that people come to us and they're like, well, what can I do? And the answer is you can do a hair tissue test to quantify what is going on in your mineral system.

Right?

And then you can nourish your body with the minerals that you need in order to push out the heavy metals, and then you can do things to purify the body, myriad things in order to get those heavy metals out. And that's why we see people getting these huge improvements in how they feel, how they function. And honestly, that's regardless of what I see happening in things like antibody testing. People often want to look at antibody testing. It's a very poor, uh, thing to trend. Uh, I'm much more concerned about do you feel better? Do you function better? Because ultimately, that's really a better test, I would say, of how your terrain, how your cells, your organs, your system overall is functioning and feeling.

Yeah. And I think maybe one of the more famous autoimmune conditions, what we would think of as leaky gut, can lead to this. And maybe it's not technically an autoimmune condition, but it can lead to, I think, a lot of autoimmunity. But that story of leaky gut to me is a mineral and metal story when we understand that the structural integrity of those small intestinal villi cells are maintained by calcium and zinc, right? Okay, so to the extent that heavy metals like lead, aluminum, cadmium, mercury can substitute for those can substitute for those minerals, like structurally on, on those small intestinal enterocyte cells, that can cause massive amounts of inflammation locally, and that can lead to leaky gut. And then you have all of these different undigested food particles getting into the bloodstream, triggering immunity as well.

And that is why we will often see people responding, of course, to elimination diets because they get rid of something that they're— we've had some interesting cases in the last year. We've had people who reacted to coffee, rice, chicken, and we've seen some profound improvements in how they felt and how they function when we got that testing done and we actually got them to remove that thing from their diet. But at the end of the day, it all came back to the metals. Why did you have this total body burden of heavy metals that was creating this picture, right? And this is where we, we really wanna get into the root cause. What's really causing all of these problems? What's really causing people to be sick in the first place? Nobody is born with, or nobody should be born with, you know, coffee or gluten or whatever intolerance you develop over time. And then the question is, why did you develop it? And that's where we see the mineral balancing approach that we take having such a profound impact on people, which we might as well talk about the fact that we are now enrolling the next cohort of our HTMA Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis Secrets. This is a 3-month program, 12 weeks, 12 weekly coaching calls, 1 hour. Those calls will go over hair tissue tests. You will actually learn how to interpret them, understand them, and then also create supplement protocols based on them in order to help people get well. We've got lots of different coaches, practitioners of all kinds coming through the program, doctors, dentists, nurse practitioners, PAs, You name it. We've had a lot of people come through now and we are excited to be enrolling another cohort. And we should mention too that we're going to be taking a, a, a break after this cohort, uh, because we've got some babies coming on the team. So people are going to be on maternity leave.

Congrats to everyone there. Absolutely. But we've been doing this now for about a year and a half. Um, a year and two months. Year and two months. Well, we're getting there.

I think at the end of this, it'll be a year and a half when we wrap up this cohort in late fall.

How many cohorts have we done? 5 or 6 now, I think.

I don't even know. I think it's 5.

All right.

I think it's 5 because we took 1 or 2 month breaks in the middle.

Right, right. Exactly. So we've had a lot of people come through, a lot of different professionals who want to improve their HTMA interpretation skills. That I think is really where we're looking to take people is upgrade their their HTMA, HTMA interpretation skills and, and use that so that they can set up mineral balancing programs basically.

Right. And help people using this because we see a huge demand, right? We, we are looking at our numbers all the time and it's, we get 80 to 150 people asking us for help every month. I don't know what your numbers are like, Clark, but I mean, there's just so many people out there looking for someone to help them understand what supplements should I take, what should my diet look like? It's all about having a good paradigm to share with them so that they get results and then they refer you their friends and family and then they refer you their friends and family and then you have your own happy, healthy, sustainable business, which, you know, we, we constantly find people, meet people who are, you know, I want to get into health and wellness, I want to start a business, I want to do that. This is the best thing you could start with in my book.

Yeah, if you're really, if you're looking for the best HTMA program on the market, I, I think it's that part in part because a lot of these other programs and no shade on them, but they're sort of like, um, learn on your own type of thing where like we kind of have that as part of our program with the video module and like the actual course. But I think really learning on the job and getting feedback from people that are experts in HTMA interpretation consistently over time. That's really where you're actually going to learn how to do this at a high level. Right. And so the group coaching on top of the course that we all get people results. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And ultimately, that's what this is really all about. There are tons of coaches, there's tons of gurus, there's tons of doctors, and they are not necessarily doing very good work. And that includes— I hate to say it, but that includes people who've been through real training programs with real degrees. You know, we get tons of people who, you know, we're the, we're the last stop. They've already seen everybody, they've already tried everything, nothing worked for them. And, you know, I've come to mineral balancing after 20 years in the integrative health space, 10 years practicing. I'm now, yeah, 10 years out of med school. I've tried it, all kinds of different things in this space. HTMA is by far my favorite for the results that it gets for, for seeing the things that are actually making people sick. You know, there's all this functional medicine testing out there and I've done, I feel like I've done all of it, but just wait, someone will come up with a new test that I haven't done.

Right.

But I've done so much of it and I cannot find a test that pound for pound punches heavier than the HTMA. Can I get more testing and maybe get some use out of it? Sure. But I don't need it. And that, and long-term, this is my favorite approach, hands down.

Yeah. And why don't we talk a little bit about, um, like who this is for. We, you know, we've kind of been tweaking the program, um, as we have gone over the last like 5 or 6. And for practitioners who want to get certified to do this, who are not already certified, there's sort of this pathway to certification that we offer.

Yes.

Where we have the group coaching that you go through. It's a 12-week program. But then we offer the HTMA Mastermind, which is practitioners only, exclusively practitioners who, you know, basically want more follow-up interaction with us to go over difficult cases that they have, their own case that they're dealing with. And that's another 3-month program. So it's essentially 2 3-month cohorts for practitioners if you're not already certified to become certified. So basically 24 weeks and then we have an exit exam that you pay for, you know, and we really wanted to with this new pathway to certification, make it pretty rigorous because a lot of other programs out there are not that rigorous. They're not giving you any interaction with the people who developed the course. And really there's no hands-on learning.

You might graduate and be terrible.

Exactly.

Or if you're okay with being terrible, don't sign up to work with us.

Right, right. This is— yeah, this is definitely— we try to design this with, um, you know, wanting to be great.

And on that, on that note, you know, we actually see there's the first HTMA Secrets that people take. If you're already a practitioner, you can jump straight into the Mastermind. If you do the Mastermind for 3 months, there's a minimum of 3 months You can then pay to take the exit exam, but if you stick around for 6 months, the exam is complimentary. And that's because we just want you to stick around for long enough for us to really, really, really teach you and make sure that you're really good. Because like, you know, we've seen a lot in this space. People come to us, they've been getting really mixed results. They've seen a lot of things. They've tried a lot of things. But then if they come into working with us, generally speaking, they are blown away by how much more powerful what this is than what they've been doing. Right. And like, we'll go to higher doses, which is part of the, the, the secret sauce to that. And we want people to graduate and be really great. We don't want them to be mediocre.

Right, right. Exactly. So there is that pathway to certification for practitioners that want to sign up. That aren't already certified. The Mastermind as well serves as sort of like— it's, it's for practitioners, but you don't necessarily have to have been through that Level 1 program. You can come and hang out and look to get some feedback on the difficult cases that you're dealing with as well. So, you know, we're trying to keep things a little fluid with that program. But, um, in Level 1, you know, if you're someone that's just kind of really interested in HTMA and you want more face time with us as well, and you want to sort of feel like you're a part of a group that's doing this every week, right, for 12 weeks, you know, you come and you interact with everyone in the group, with us included. You get to see your case interpreted and a lot of other people's cases interpreted.

So it is a whole hour.

Right, right. Every single week for 12 weeks, for 3 months. So, you know, for that first, like, I guess we're calling it Level 1, for that first cohort, you have to go through that if you're a practitioner that wants to get certified. But you can— we have a lot of laypeople signing up for that as well that are just really interested in learning more about HTMA, getting things, getting their own test interpreted at a high level. So there is sort of a little bit of a mishmash that we have there as well.

So that's the program. That's the course. Join, sign up. You will love it. You will enjoy it. Back to metals and autoimmunity.

Like what's, what's initially happening when metals get into the body, right? And we know through like acute phase lead poisoning that lead can disrupt those tight junctional gaps in the blood-brain barrier, right? It— lead has that same capacity at the level of the small intestinal tight junctional gaps. And we sort of touched on that a little bit before, but in my own case, like, I developed autoimmune reactions that were pretty significant.

Like what?

You know, just hyperreactivity in the immune system. Skin issues was a big one for me.

What kinds of rashes were you having?

You know, what you might think of as like eczema or even dermatitis in certain—

And where were you at this time? Give us some context.

Yeah, this is a while ago.

This is, uh, gosh, this was because you've been doing mineral balancing for 10 years and this was before that, right?

Right, exactly. It was well before that. So things started to go off the rails for me a little bit in, um, you know, 2006, 2007, started to have some panic attacks out of nowhere. Yeah. Um, after the chronic stress from those panic attacks and not getting really good answers from medicine, You know, I felt like I was in fight or flight for a good year and no one really knew what was going on. So I started to have these food intolerances develop. That, that was in my mind, it was sort of where things started for me was these panic attacks that I had out of nowhere, no resolution or no explanation from modern medicine.

Yeah.

Then it was like after this really stressful period of time, I started—

where were you living at the time?

I was in Arizona at this point. I was in Tucson.

Tucson?

Yeah.

Arizona. What were you doing?

Um, I was at the University of Arizona at that point. Um, okay.

But, uh, did this derail your academic career? Did you have to drop out because of this?

Yeah, exactly. Wow. Yeah. So I was in school. I was working in a lab actually. Um, what kind of lab? It was the— gosh, what was it? It was a psych lab. It was, um, we were doing— I can't remember the experiments that we were doing, but it was, uh, it was in the psychology building. And, um, so yeah, I started to have these awful panic attacks and really had to drop out because it was like they spiraled out of control. Um, and, you know, maybe 6 months or a year into it, I started to have these really bad food, uh, reactions to things that I had always tolerated before.

Like what?

Uh, like gluten and dairy primarily.

Got it. How did you figure it out?

Uh, well, it took a while. It took a lot of research on my, on my own time. Um, no doctor or anyone was able to really give me any info, but I started to just notice people started to talk about gluten intolerance at that point. It was like, you know, in its infancy.

Leaky gut hit the scene at some point in that early 2000s.

Right.

And it just went crazy.

Bonkers.

Bonkers. Yeah. And you know, fun fact, they just legalized GMO, uh, wheat, Clark.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Well, I think they started actually using it in like the mid-'90s, like 1990.

Do I have to say it?

No. Uh, GMOs were actually introduced in the mid-'90s.

Um, was it then? I don't remember, but yeah, it was sometime back then.

I think it was '96.

Crazy.

Anyway, so I, you know, I kind of went through this really stressful period, started to develop these food intolerances and didn't really know what was going on for about like another 6 months to a year. And then I started to have these really bad immune reactions and the skin rashes and those sorts of things. I had some thyroid problems as well, right? You did. I did. Yeah.

I don't think we talked about this. Did you have low or high or both?

No, I had really hypothyroid. My TSH was pretty high. Um, I didn't test for the antibodies, TPO antibodies, but, um, you know, sometimes that can be a consequence. The activation of the immune response can sometimes cause TSH to be elevated.

Yes.

Also stress response.

So, right, right.

It's a terrible test. We make very few decisions based on the TSH.

Right, right, exactly. But all to say, like, I started to go down this road of having the— these food intolerances. That was kind of like after the panic attacks, right, in that shred— the full period of time, um, you know, that was sort of the gateway for me into a lot of these autoimmune reactions. And so I do think, you know, saying everything starts in the gut I think is a little reductionistic and not really accurate, But a lot of these autoimmune issues, I think, are being triggered by either really stressful events and metals building up in place of the minerals structurally on those cells and really causing leaky gut. Because at that time, at that same exact time that I was kind of starting to have these food intolerance issues, I was exposed to lead.

Why?

How?

Actually, I had done a project with an ex-girlfriend, um, over the, uh, about a week. We were chipping away this old lead paint that we— on her bathroom wall, and we wanted to put in some new paint into her bathroom. Um, and so for about a week, we were just in there chipping away at this old— it was an older home. Yeah, older lead paint. I got exposed to it, inhaled a lot of it, and things sort of went off the rails. Around that same time.

How about that?

So a lot, you know, this is all me putting the pieces of the puzzle together after the fact. Yeah. Right. But, you know, just having that stress reaction, being exposed to lead, and then, you know, since discovering the fact that lead can disrupt the tight junctional gaps, you know, in either the small intestinal cells or at the level of the blood-brain barrier,, you know, and can substitute for minerals that are supposed to maintain those structural integrity of those cells. It's like, it, it's a chain of events basically that, that base that you have to kind of track. And, but I do tend to think of autoimmunity, a lot of it is sort of starting at, at the level of the gut.

And so you wound up then going through tons of different treatments, therapies, Tried everything.

Name it. Name it.

Yeah.

Tried to kill things at the level of the gut, which is what a lot of people do nowadays.

Right. And a lot of people will see short-term results with that. What we observe is that they wind up scratching their head after 6 months, a year saying, why, you know, why am I, why do I have to live this way? Why do I have to not ever eat gluten? Why can't I ever get away with eating ice cream?

Right.

And it's always because your total toxic burden and your stress bathtub have not been emptied. And that's a big part of the metals. So, so then you, you went on to, to get into finally the mineral balancing and how quick was it for you to see these problems resolve?

The food intolerances took a while. It, it basically, I had to go through some pretty significant copper and lead eliminations on the program before I started to even attempt to reintroduce like dairy as an example. I kind of waited a little longer for gluten because it's a little more inflammatory, especially the modern wheat, you know, so, but having come from this place of doing the GAPS diet, you know, all the probiotic foods, the bone broth, the glutamine, the Marshall herbs, everything under the sun to try and heal my gut. Yeah, it was pretty remarkable after going through these eliminations, especially of copper and lead, noticing, okay, let's try and reintroduce dairy here and see what happens. And I was able to tolerate dairy again. How about that? Slowly over time. Same thing with gluten. I don't go out of my way to eat a lot of wheat now, but if I'm at a restaurant with friends over the weekend, I get a burger or something with a bun, that's not the end of the world. But since eliminating those metals, especially lead and copper, I noticed a sort of return of the fidelity of that system, and I could handle these foods again, which, you know, is pretty remarkable in my opinion.

Oh yeah. I mean, there's a— there's— you'll see people who don't get into mineral balancing get results like this. But if you're asking me what's the best system to most reliably produce this result, this is the answer. And we get tons of people coming into us from the, you know, the mitochondria, circadian biology, light as medicine world. They've done the phototherapy, they've done the sauna, they're waking up, getting red light, infrared light, they're doing all this stuff. They've tried everything, the GAPS diet, the paleo diet, the carnivore diet, the keto diet. They're still either having to be very, very strict to control their symptoms, like really extreme diets, or they are, you know, in and out of these problems when they're more lax with their choices. And this is the reliable way, I think, to get people out of these problems. So you got, I mean, complete resolution from all these supposed or formally diagnosed autoimmune things, right, Clark? How long did it take you to do that?

It took a couple years, right? And I went through a lot of nickel eliminating, which can sometimes be associated with like dermatitis.

Yes.

Um, you know, but, uh, it took a couple years, 2 or 3 years for me to fully resolve that problem. And there was a— the thing is, is that there was a lot of other things along the way that resolved sort of before that issue. So I was pretty happy with the results of the program. It wasn't like I was waiting around.

No, no, no. I would say that most people, it's pretty rare for them to not feel significantly better within the first 3 to 6 months. I think then it's a matter of, you know, managing expectations of— because it's not just all better in 3 to 6 months. First of all, it's a long-term commitment if you want really next-level results and resiliency. And on top of that, there's people who go straight into detoxification and feel bad. And there's people who go from honeymoon phase, 6, 8 weeks, 12 weeks max, in my opinion, uh, into then, you know, detoxification and they're feeling sometimes pretty horrible. And so there's a lot of ups and downs with this, but it's, I mean, it's, there's a reason people stick with it for years, like doing it for 10 years, right?

Right, exactly. And that's the thing I think that's really critical to know about our program as well, is that there— we're going to give you a lot of tools to deal with, um, the ups and downs that occur on this program with your clients, right?

How to deal with— how to deal with them, how to manage them.

Yes, right. Because I think if you're a practitioner, it's good to know all of this theory and the, you know, underlying mechanisms for how metals cause disease and all that. And we can talk about that until we're blue in the face. But as a practitioner, really dealing with people and managing how they feel and their progress on the program is probably the most important thing for practitioners. Right. Not only, not only for the benefit of themselves, but their clients, right? You know, we don't want to overwhelm people with detoxification symptoms, and that can lead to overwhelm on the practitioner side of things. I've sort of dealt with that myself. So there's a lot that we can sort of pinpoint and discuss in the group coaching about how to manage that stuff because, you know, mineral balancing is a long-term approach. And, you know, in that longer period or interval of time, you're going to go through a lot of ups and downs. And how good you are as a practitioner is largely determined by how you manage those periods of time with your clients. And that is probably the single most important thing that you could gain or glean from our, our program.

Right. So yeah, I, I never dealt with autoimmune issues unless you count, you know what I would say. I always noticed when I was younger that I had, I didn't feel well when I ate a lot of gluten and dairy. I had some positive allergy tests, but nothing crazy. Never really had any serious health crises. But I got interested in autoimmunity because it was such a, it was such a big topic. It was exploding. And, you know, I saw everyone coming in and sort of piling onto the topic, you know, all the big names in functional medicine. And I thought, well, this is really interesting. I'd really rather go deeper than just their work on the topic, which is where I think most people, you know, today really wind up starting, and sometimes they just kind of bounce around that world and never go deeper to something like this. But, you know, I was fascinated by it, and I got into the literature. I got into— there's just— there was this great book that I read called, uh, The Autoimmune Epidemic. I can't remember the, the, the author. I think she had MS, and that was what triggered her to write the book. And there were some other great ones like The Epidemic of Absence. But until I started to actually work with patients, you know, in the functional integrative world, there's a lot of talk about what sounds good and what can work. And then there's the realities of what actually work reliably, consistently, and in a significant durable way. You know, so many people feel better on the GAPS diet plus or minus some herbs, some supplements, but like I said, they just stay where they are and they have to live within this little range and they can't, Basically, um, right, it's not full restoration of function.

It's kind of just like dealing with the symptoms of, of that disease.

Exactly. Yeah, they don't get real resolution and they don't ever really get better. They don't get, um, what's the word I'm looking for? They don't achieve what I would call optimal wellness. Right. And I've always wanted that personally. And for my patients. And so as I got deeper and deeper into the literature, it just became clear that a lot of it was heavy metals. Then the question was, well, how much of it is like petroleum toxins, mold toxins, other toxic exposures, stress? All of that plays a role, but the reality is all of that comes down to coaching, you know, and you coach someone into the right diet and lifestyle choices. Some of it's functional medicine testing, but I don't find that testing to be that helpful clinically because it doesn't necessarily change what I'm going to do. And for the most part, doing things empirically, like trying remedies, is actually going to be a lot more affordable and easier than constantly getting more testing to try and direct treatment. The hair test, I can't replace. The hair test is awesome. I don't feel comfortable going to high, high doses of certain things without it. Someone asked if I get blood labs. I do enjoy getting blood labs. You will find some weird things. In people's blood, and that can be very helpful, but it is nowhere near as helpful in terms of determining a supplementation protocol as the hair is.

Hmm. Yeah. And on that note, do we wanna start taking questions?

Sure. Yeah. If people have questions, drop them in the comments. We're happy to answer them. And again, we are enrolling our new HTMA Secrets cohort. You can go to the link below. Sign up. We look forward to meeting lots of you on the group coaching calls. This has been a phenomenal program for so many people, and we're also really excited to have the Mastermind now where we meet weekly to go over interesting cases and answer people's more advanced questions. And that, of course, is open to people who've been through HTMA Secrets, uh, or who are already a practitioner and are ready to just jump right into the Mastermind because they've already got some clinical training and experience.

Right, exactly. Exactly.

Yeah.

Clark, any closing thoughts?

Hmm. Not, not necessarily. I mean, there's one thing I, I think we should probably touch on is that mercury seems to be a really important metal for very important autoimmunity. MCAS.

I see a ton of mercury in most of the people I take care of who've got an autoimmune problem.

Right. So that I think would be, you know, loath to not mention that. But yeah, mercury seems to be one that's associated with that. There's certain, sometimes even HTMA mineral patterns that we can correlate with autoimmune disease. They're not necessarily reflecting the diagnosis or anything. We can't take like the mineral patterns and say that you have autoimmune disease because of this mineral pattern, right? There are strong associations between autoimmunity and some of these mineral patterns, in particular fast oxidation, that can lower cell permeability and allow a lot of things into cells that should not be there. Mm-hmm. Right. So sometimes fast oxidation, really high sodium potassium ratio, really low calcium potassium ratio. And I would say mercury is probably the most famous metal that's associated with autoimmunity, a lot of different autoimmune conditions.

But, um, so that's partly because of the historical bias, because of the use of thimerosal in so many products for so many years.

True.

And that's why, of course, they took that out of the various products that it was in and replaced it with aluminum, which we will— I'm hoping to get Chris Exley on my podcast to interview him this fall, but that would be epic. We will see if we can get him on the, on the phone.

That would be totally— yeah, um, you'll be invited, don't worry.

Okay, good. On that note, everyone, thank you for watching. Thank you for tuning in. We look forward to meeting lots of you in HTMA Secrets. On that note, take care, have a great day. Don't forget to get outside.