The Power of Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. This show is for men and women who are exhausted, inflamed, living with brain fog, gut or skin issues, and who won't settle for answers like your labs are normal or just take this pill. Here we focus on the root causes of disease and on what I call repair deficit, the gap between what your body needs for optimal health and performance and what it's actually getting. This podcast is not personal medical advice. It is education to help you ask better questions so you can make better decisions about your health. Thank you for joining us and welcome to today's episode. Hello everyone, Dr. Stillman here. I'm joined today by our amazing team member Amy Arp, and today we're talking about my story of hope, story of healing, and we're going to focus on HTMA, which has become our favorite test in the practice, and I'm gonna stop talking and let Amy take it away because she's interviewing me today.

This is fun. So as Dr. Stillman likes to start out with origin stories, I felt like it would be appropriate if we started out with an origin story of how he, as a medical doctor, got into the HTMA, the hair tissue mineral analysis test. So Dr. Stillman, how did you get into this test? Because some people might say it's not as credible or clearly scientific. So how did you get into it and what do you think about it?

Well, it all starts with who I am and where I'm from, which is my favorite two top questions to ask guests on the podcast. So I was born in New York City to a family with roots in New York, going back to the 1800s and New England in the 1600s. I'm the 7th generation American in my family. And one thing I've found testing people from New England is that there's very high levels of heavy metals in their hair. That's a historical matter. New England was very heavily industrialized and we see that in my own family. We had a very severe seizure disorder in my great uncle. Also named Leland Stillman Stillman. He took his own life because it was so disabling to him. You know, other than that, everyone's been pretty healthy, but I was born in '88. My sister was born in '86. We had a lot of the bread and butter illnesses of kids, ear infections, sore throats. I was sick 21 days of first grade, all kinds of different things that, you know, our parents didn't really know what to do with. So I became a sort of underweight, weak, unathletic kid, which in retrospect was a lot of, you know, if I'd had just like the right coach or the right whatever, maybe it would've been different, but I got to adulthood and really was like, why am I sick? And I wasn't sick. Like a lot of our patients are like this. They're not sick enough to be sick. They're not in and outta the ER, but they don't feel like they're thriving. You know, they're somewhere stuck between, I like to say 0 and 70%. And a lot of them wind up in a place where suddenly they have a health crisis. They move into a moldy building, they, you know, take a medical treatment that ends up going wrong. They have an adverse event reaction. I could name a dozen different medication categories that can go horribly wrong in terms of either immediate acute side effects or long-term side effects that I see causing havoc on people's health. And so I became fascinated by health and wellness. My mom was very much in the integrative health world because it was the thing that was working for my sister and I. And so my dad was very conventional, got his flu shots and COVID boosters right up until the year he died. He got like 7 COVID boosters. I mean, I was like, Dad, what, what are you doing? Like, you had to like stop. But anyway, so that was kind of the, I don't know, my medical landscape as a young man was very broad. It was everything from traditional East Asian medicine, right? I don't call it traditional Chinese medicine cuz like that's not really fair to the Vietnamese and the Koreans and like, like Southeast Asia's a huge place and they use a lot of the same tools cuz those countries are all kind of close together and connected by water. Imagine that. To, you know, traditional European medicine, which I could go on and on about. So I just loved all of it. I wanted to learn all of it. I sometimes like to joke that subspecialization is for doctors who are not ambitious enough to try to know everything, and that's not my problem. So I do want to know everything, even if it's not possible. And we, we do refer out appropriately because I can't possibly know everything, but I just love and am passionate about being a generalist. So I then found mentors and mentored with them for years and traveled all over the country and arguably all over the world. Went to China to study traditional Chinese kung fu, and which is part of traditional Chinese medicine, which many people don't appreciate. And you know, then I, found a mentor in the United States who, well, it's really a series of mentors and I just learned so much about blood chemistries and toxin panels and ran thousands and thousands of lab tests. And I got to my early thirties and heard about HTMA and thought, you know, this is interesting. I should, I should run these tests and figure out what they're about. And so that was how my HTMA journey began because I got my first test back and I had no idea what it meant because it didn't make any sense to me. Now I want to put this in context. I had just finished 2 or 3 years of running my own practice very successfully, very happy patients, lots of repeat, you know, care going on, lots of great testimonials and happy outcomes and a very, very fast-growing social media presence that was kind of fueled by the— I was just sharing observations from the practice on social media. People found them helpful and interesting and they would sign up and they would become patients and that's, you know, here we are. So at that time I'd been using protocols that were based on urine and blood testing, which we still do sometimes in edge or difficult cases. But the cost of that test was between $400 and $500. And for many patients, that was not that big of a deal. But when you really understand how to get people well, you understand that you actually need quarterly lab testing. Now you're not talking about $400 or $500 once, you're talking about $1,600 to $2,000 a year to make really significant, durable progress. Now you have, like, imagine the other day I was looking at the chart of a family of 11. How are you going to do $2,000 $10,000 worth of lab testing for 11 people.

That would be a lot of money. That would be a lot of money.

That's $22,000 a year for testing.

Yeah. So supplements, protocols, any of that stuff.

So, you know, and like 10 years ago, eggs were $4 a dozen for the really hoity-toity pasture-raised, local, cruelty-free, non-GMO stuff. And now they're like $13. So I was like, this is ridiculous. And then I got the HTMAs back and I was like, oh my gosh, this is a whole new window on physiology. And I started to get better results or the same with the HTMA than I was getting with this $400 or $500 test. And the HTMA is $100. And I said, oh wow, this is way better for a lot of reasons. The sample doesn't go bad in the mail. If there's an ice storm in Memphis and FedEx is derailed, you're going to recollect everybody's sample. You're going to be weeks behind. I hate that. This stuff doesn't go bad in the mail. So it also isn't, you know, people would, would collect it wrong. They'd put the urine in the wrong tubes. Don't ever, don't ask me how that happened. So it was just a very clunky test, which is a great test. Test, but it was clunky. The hair is easier, it is simpler, and it gives me analytes that I don't have in the blood. And it also gives me analytes in the blood over time rather than a snapshot. So I'll give you an example.

So tell us more about that. Tell us the difference between blood testing and hair testing. I think that's just a first distinction, and then you can go into what you're going to say.

So the best analogy I have for people is that blood testing is a little bit like looking at someone's checking account. You know, maybe some of you are blessed and have never been in a position where your checking account got overdrawn, but I've done that. And you know, you have that moment of, oh no, the checking account's overdrawn. What happened? And you're like, oh, I forgot. Oh, that check bounced. You know, I didn't do the math right. Okay. So blood can bottom out. And you also have probably had— hopefully you've had this experience— you've looked at your checking account and been like, wow, I worked really hard this month and that meant I didn't have time to spend any money. Great. I should do that more often. So the blood's that way. You're gonna get these crazy highs. You're gonna get these crazy lows. I always— and like, honestly, in the practice now, we will do this regularly. I do this probably 2 or 3 times a month at least. The lab tests do not agree with the clinical presentation of the patient. I repeat the lab test. I usually complicate them because I want the data. I tell them I don't, I don't charge them for the lab.

Mm-hmm.

Because I find that data to be some of the most important data that I get and I just care about getting it so we can get a better outcome. So we're doing the right thing for the patient. Not always, but a lot of the time. And so the great thing about the hair is the hair's not a snapshot in a moment. You know, you eat mahi-mahi or tuna 2 or 3 days before a lab draw for mercury, it will be elevated. That's, you know, part of the deal. But if you are consistently consuming mercury-rich fish, you will get a significant elevation in your hair mercury. And there's some caveats to that, and this is one of the things people end up not liking or criticizing about the HTMA, but we'll get into it. And on that note, I think we should just get into the test. What do you think, Amy?

Yeah, let's do that. Let's talk about the test, what things you can see on it, and then share a little bit about your experience.

So if you're listening to this as a podcast, I'm going to do my best to tell you what we're looking at, but a picture's worth a thousand words and a video is worth at least a hundred thousand. So I encourage you, if you're really curious and you really want to learn what this is, go watch the video sometime because I just can't capture everything on audio. But I also don't, don't want to leave you hanging if you're in the car and you already downloaded this or you're doing the laundry and you are otherwise engaged. I'm going to do my best to tell you what I'm seeing and what it means. So this is the first test I ever did, August 2022. Let me zoom in on this a little bit so people can see it better. And I didn't even order it myself. I just ordered it through the internet. Someone who was just selling them, whatever. Very elevated levels of calcium, magnesium, sodium on the left of the test, and then a low potassium level and then low trace elements through the rest of the test. Very little, if any, heavy metals coming out. This is a moderate mercury level at 0.072. And for the sake of simplicity, I'm not going to give you guys the actual levels on the audio version. I'm just going to say high, low, moderate, and you guys can go look at the numbers later. A whole chapter on this is in my upcoming book in September, The End of Autoimmunity. Buy it. It's great. I'll walk you through more of this in the book. So I looked at this and thought, I don't know what this means. So I called my friend Clark Engelbert, who I knew had been deep in on this for, at that time, probably 8 years. Now he's over a decade into HTMA full-time. It's all he does all day. He's seen, I don't know, seen how many thousands and thousands of tests, and he kind of walked me through, here's what you're looking at, here's what it means, et cetera. This is a classic stress pattern. 3 highs with calcium, magnesium, sodium being very elevated is someone who's got a lot of stress in their life. And that stress, what we see in the hair is we see these elevated levels of minerals in different ratios and different quantities. And you're going to see how this progresses over time because what you find is when you treat people with supplement and diet lifestyle programs that bring the minerals into balance, they feel and function better. Now I want to be really clear. I said balance. So for example, if you look at my first test, my calcium potassium ratio is very high. So we don't necessarily just want to bring the calcium down into the optimal range. We want to bring the potassium up into the optimal range so that the ratio is better. And truthfully, even if you keep the calcium high and the potassium just comes up to meet it and the ratio is better, that's better than one being in the ideal range and the other one being much higher and the ratio being off. This is what I think fools people about HTMA. They think Oh, the levels are high, the levels are low, I should eat more of this or less of this based on the level, and that will bring my system into balance. Not so. You want to bring them into balance with each other, and that's when energy generation is optimized in the system and people feel better.

People think that because oftentimes they get blood tests, they go to a doctor, their blood says I'm low in zinc, the doctor says take zinc. So they're used to that. And so it is a different paradigm here with the HTMA test versus the blood test. So tell people a little bit about what was going on at the time in your life. You said you're seeing a stress pattern on the HTMA test. Did that correlate with what was going on in your life?

Yeah. So I started my practice sort of out of frustration with my training and I didn't have any really solid mentorship at the beginning. I had some great clinical mentorship, but, and I got some okay business training, but I had to kind of figure it out on my own. And I was a solo operator. I had no VA, no assistants. It was just me and I didn't know how to manage or build a team. And at this time I was getting into the, into the world where I was starting to need a team and it was very stressful. The amount of people I was taking care of, the amount of articles I was writing, content I was producing, it was just stressful. And so, you know, what I see here is young professional with hair on fire running around frantically trying to keep it together. And, you know, I over-delivered and did really well for my patients at the time. I remember working, you know, like sort of I'd get up I'd have a quick sort of morning to myself and then it was just emails, calls, back to back to back to back to back. And then I'd usually quit around 5 or 6 o'clock and usually I'd get back to work at 6, 7, 8, wrap up emails, notes, you know, whatever I had to do. So it was not a healthy lifestyle. And a lot of patients I see now are in that same pattern and I know exactly what they're going through. And I, I wanna share something that I tell every patient in the first HTMA constantly, often tell them, reiterate it later cuz it's easy to forget. This test is not a marker of intake. It's a marker of intake, absorption, and excretion. And the excretion is the wild card.. And when I say it's the wildcard, what I mean is you'll see a 10, 15, 20x delta in the number you see based on the body's ability to excrete. And the other thing that I want you to realize is these minerals have different masses. So if you look in this initial test, what's low? Iron, copper, manganese, chromium, selenium. These are heavier elements than calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium. The heavier the element, the harder it is to move into the hair. Lead is one of the heaviest elements. I mean, lead is literally used in nautical, the nautical world, like sailing. I grew up sailing. Lead is the old way to determine the depth you're in is you use a lead line and you drop the lead and you see how fast it goes to the bottom. Cuz lead's very dense. When you see an elevation of lead in someone's hair, it really means something. We know the body is starting to get rid of lead that's been stored in bone and tissue for decades in many cases. So when you see that the lead is low, but the body's moving calcium, magnesium, sodium out, you know the body has some energy, but you also know it doesn't have enough energy to really eliminate or mobilize lead. So that's really important as a take-home from this test. Don't be fooled by the low levels of metals or minerals. It doesn't just mean you need to take more of the minerals, it means you need to think what's imbalanced in the mineral system that's impairing energy generation, that if I fix it, the iron will, will come out, the copper will come out, the manganese will come out, and so on.

And explain how the minerals are related to the heavy metals, because in our minds it makes sense, but let's kind of bridge the gap there?

So heavy metals have no— they are pure poisons. There's no use in the body, and I'm talking about mammals in general and humans in particular. So lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum are the primary heavy metals that we see in mammals today that, that are very, very dangerous to their health. And you have to understand, people are not coming into the ER with acute mercury poisoning. Most cases, what's happening is these metals accumulate in the body over time and gradually and insidiously cause disease. And this looks like more and more and more fatigue, brain fog, inflammation, insidiously kind of eating away at your quality of life until finally there's nothing left. So, you know, if you ask me like, how did I feel, for example, a year before I started this HTMA journey, when I was using similar protocols based on the blood and urine tests that did work really, really well, I was feeling kind of frantic, anxious, scattered, uncertain. I was not a happy, you know, well-adjusted person, let's say. And I made a lot of progress that year towards being more grounded, stable, et cetera. But when I started to do HTMAs, and we're going to go through the rest of my HTMAs, we got about 2 years lined up here. I don't know if we'll get through them all today. That was one of the things that I was really impressed by with HTMAs. I started to feel more grounded, more in control of my life, more focused. And I, I hear this from patients regularly. I'm more driven. I'm less overwhelmed. I'm less intimidated by things. I'm more even-keeled. I have more patience. I'm more even like forgiving, loving. It's not all the minerals. I will say that the hormones have a lot to do with that, but we use them together because they're all related. So I saw this happen in myself, even though I wasn't that sick, I was also very similar to a lot of the people who come to me who just say, I'm old enough and successful enough now that I know I should optimize instead of waiting until I'm, you know, 50, 60, 70, and I'm coming to you with a serious diagnosis or, you know, God forbid a health crisis like heart attack, stroke, cancer, right? I want to optimize now so that I don't call you in 10 or 20 years with something worse. Right.

That's great. So, you know, as far as the toxic metals, so you also, you know, The relationship between the minerals and the metals, you kind of explained that. Also, um, can you explain a little bit about how metals can possibly substitute for the minerals in the body, and that is another mechanism of how they get embedded in different tissues and organ systems?

Yeah, so metals and minerals are related to each other on the periodic table, and they compete with one another for binding sites. You have to imagine the— imagine that your enzymes and your cells in your body have hands that try to reach into your gut and reach into the extracellular space and into your blood and grab The tools that the, that the cells need. Henry Schroeder, one of the fathers of mineral biology, he said minerals are the spark plugs of life. And it's a very good analogy. And the way I would explain it to you is that think of them being like, if enzymes and different organelles of your body are like workshops and drills, then minerals are like the drill bits. So you have a drill, but if you have no drill bit, it doesn't work. So minerals are responsible for the vast majority of metabolic activity in your body in general. So what that means is that like even just a 10% drop in mineral concentrations in a cell can have a massive impact on cellular efficiency, resiliency, performance, longevity, you name it. And this also means that if you have a toxic metal that interferes with that mineral, because remember what I said, imagine your cells and, and organelles have hands that are trying to find these drill bits, the minerals. They can't necessarily tell the difference easily between a silver atom and a lead atom and a copper atom and an iron atom. So what you'll see is that if someone's got an excess amount of mineral coming in that's similar to other minerals. I'm gonna use copper as an example because I see copper toxicity all the time. And oh my gosh, it drives me nuts when I hear people saying, you all need to take more copper, you all need more copper. It's not true. We have a significant proportion of the practice who have very severe copper toxicity, sometimes because some well-meaning influencer said you need to drink or eat or otherwise get more copper into your body. I mean, I can't tell you how crippled some of these people have been or become by this, this advice that may be good for some but is also not good for others. So copper toxicity, high levels of copper intake, it will or it will push manganese and zinc in particular out of the body. And, you know, copper will also interfere with or, or compete with the heavy metals. So you actually will tend to see lower levels of the heavy metals in people with really extreme copper elevations. Now, the reality that you'll generally see is you'll see high elevations of minerals that, and we have a lot of questions about this that I won't get into today that are more academic in nature, but you'll tend to see high elevations in a lot of modern people of copper, manganese, and then the toxic elements. And this, this seems to accompany a lot of the pathology, a lot of the illness that we see. And what we'll often see is that the heavy metals will really come out as people feel and function better. So, you know, on that note, I showed you I have this moderate mercury level in my hair in this first test. That's August of that year. Here's the September of that year. So about a month later, I'm a man, I have very short hair. You're going to see in my tests a 1 to 2 month window of my metabolism in most cases. Ladies, if you cut the volume of the quantity of hair that we recommend, and men as well for that matter, but our our hair is often so short you don't see this. Uh, if you cut the quantity of hair we're recommending that you cut, we should see 3 to 4 months of your metabolism. And I like that because it means that if I'm getting a 3 to 4 month length sample every time we run the test, I don't miss any eliminations of metals or minerals from your body. And so I always kind of know what's been going on the last 3 to 4 months, which is how often we retest the hair. So here's my second test.

Quick clarifying question. Were you on a mineral balancing protocol between your first test or your second test? Okay. Okay. So it was not, no, no protocol here. So this is showing what just has happened naturally in your life.

Let me back up actually and qualify that. I didn't yet understand HTMA. And so what I did was I ran the blood urine test I'd been using, and I would've done a protocol for that. And there, the protocols I learned for blood and urine were very similar to the HTMA protocols once I learned them. And that led me to one of my chief conclusions, which was I can come up with a similar, if not the same quality supplement protocol with the hair as I was getting with the blood and urine. And therefore I'm cutting my testing cost by 75%. This allows more people to work with me for longer and spend more money on supplements or services that will then help them get better results faster. And if we have an edge case where they need the extra testing, we just order that on a case-by-case basis. What I did do based on the first HTMA is I started to use adrenal cocktails, and I'll talk about what that means in a moment. And I think I was adding more potassium than sodium to my food, and sure enough, what ended up happening was, you know, you see in the first test You may not be able to see this, but I had a high magnesium, high calcium, high sodium, low potassium levels. My sodium dropped significantly, my potassium 10x'd, and my calcium dropped. So these are huge swings, and this is one of the criticisms that clinicians will launch at this test. They'll say, well, the swings are so big, the noise outweighs any kind of signal. Fair enough. But the real test of the test is, can you come up with a protocol that moves the needle for the patient? Not, can you just say there's too much noise for this to be useful? You know, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The proof of the test is when you make treatment decisions based on it, do patients feel better and come back for another test because they saw the difference, which, you know, we've got years of HTMA testing on patients now because they see the value. Quick pause. If you're listening to this and thinking, "He's talking about me. I'm tired, foggy, inflamed, and it feels like no one can figure out why," then your next step is not another random protocol. It's a structured assessment. With myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Pick a time that works for you and add it to your calendar. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care and it's not a promise of cure. It's a calm, structured way to stop guessing and see whether our approach is right for you. We We have a limited number of these appointments each month. If this conversation is hitting close to home, visit stillmanmd.com now and book a call with myself or a member of my team. Thank you for listening. Now back to the episode.

So anyway, you said, you said earlier that it's not just a test of intake, but you did increase your potassium intake and you decreased your sodium intake. So explain that a little bit for people because it still is about intake, absorption, and excretion. But in this case, your lifestyle did impact it.

If you make extreme shifts in your intake, intake, particularly with supplements, you will see potentially extreme changes in the hair, but don't count on it. Like I just got off the phone a couple weeks ago with a guy who added a gram and a half of potassium citrate to his diet and didn't increase his hair potassium level. So that tells you it's not just about intake. For me, when I did that with a, with adrenal cocktails, adrenal cocktails, the formula I would've been using at the time would've been, you know, quarter teaspoon, half a teaspoon of, of cream of tartar, which is potassium bitartrate. I was using that once or twice a day. So you can change it. But it isn't just, you know, simple like one adrenal cocktail increases potassium in the hair by 10%. And I, I just, I don't want people to get lost in the details here because I think this can all be a little bit overwhelming. I want to keep coming back to sort of my point here, which is this test is complicated and nuanced. It takes a smart practitioner who can ask you the right questions to figure out a protocol based on the test. And if you do that and you do it right, you can get some great results, which is what I made me really passionate about this test. So I'm scrolling down now and I'm showing people on the video the heavy metals panel. Where you can see that my mercury has almost tripled, more than doubled. It went from, you know, 72 microgram percent to 179 microgram percent. Now I've seen significantly elevated blood mercury levels around this hair level. So, and I, by the way, have a test and I go over this in my flagship course, which is available in our community online. If you want more information about that, book an evaluation with Kenna or Amy, or like get in touch with us somehow. We're happy to give you access to community. It's a simple low monthly fee. It's an amazing course. I packed all my best information into it, and I've got more videos there about stuff like this. If you like this kind of content, it's there. So I know that I had significant elevations in mercury, and I don't just say that. I have the mercury level to prove it. The health department called me and said, Dr. Stillman, your hair mercury level is very elevated. Are you aware of that? Yeah, you can't make this up. And I've had more than one mercury level phoned into me by the health department. Hey, your patient So-and-so's name, very high mercury level. We wanted to make you aware. So, you know, these people out there saying like, like, heavy metals are fine, you don't need to worry about this, only pregnant women need to avoid mercury-rich food. Look, we have a healthcare crisis because those idiots are in charge, and they're in charge, and their stupidity is ignoring all of this. And so that's why we have a lot of happy patients who keep coming back to us and sending us their friends and family, because they see the metals coming out in the hair, they see their performance improving, they see their health improving. And they say, we want more of this. And that's also why, you know, confidence in America's healthcare institutions has just cratered. It's dropped by 50% in the last few years. So people are waking up to the flawed paradigm, and this is the new paradigm that we're enthusiastically championing for many reasons.

So tell people a little bit more about the metal eliminations. Yeah, even today I had someone in a consult say, oh, I was concerned that my aluminum level was rising, and I was explaining this is actually a really good thing. Yeah, so explain, you know, how we see that in practice, what we often see and what results can look like.

So what you'll see in practice is that heavy metal eliminations are highly variable, and there's a lot of reasons for this that I— maybe if people want us to do another podcast on this, I'm happy to. But there's so much to this that it's a lot of— it's practitioner-level kind of material. But the bottom line here is that metals will kind of choose their own timing to come out when you give the body what it needs. And you can be more aggressive and you can be less aggressive. The more aggressive you are, the more likely you are probably to get an elimination. The less aggressive you are, the more likely you are to tolerate rate your supplement protocol better, but the lower or the slower your pace of healing is going to be. So we have some cases where we don't see eliminations for months or even, I dare say, years at a time. Usually there's some kind of diet lifestyle problem there. Sometimes it's that the doses were not high enough for long enough. Sometimes that's because side effects were too significant. It becomes sort of a case-by-case basis. But if you give someone the right supplement protocol, what ends up happening is the cells and tissues that are hanging onto toxins, including heavy metals, begin to get rid of them. And as they get rid of them, what you're gonna see is levels in the hair rise. So I share this case in my upcoming book. I'm gonna pull it up on screen here in a moment. And we have this patient's permission to, to share. I got her permission for the book and I won't talk too much about the case here, but if you look at this first test, it's on the screen now, low mineral levels in the first hair test except for a copper and a zinc that are barely in the ideal range. Magnesium and calcium are barely in the ideal range there. And then her heavy metals down below, you have very, very, very low levels of heavy metals. But if you go to her second test, you see that copper's more than tripled from 2 to 6.4, and her mercury has tripled almost from 0.037 to 0.093, and her aluminum went up by 21-fold. 21-fold. The stories of—

off the charts.

Yeah, so I mean, it's 8.57 from 0.39. These are massive increases. This is the first test that I got in a, in a patient that made me think, wow, first of all, not measuring aluminum when it's the most ubiquitous heavy metal in the modern patient is crazy because you are missing maybe the most abundant toxin. Now, it's not as toxic as mercury, but it is very toxic. I mean, toxic in any dose too. So, and I saw her go through this transformation. If you want the story in her own words, look up Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing. Her name's Emily, and we talk about her journey from, you know, really struggling with her health to exactly where she wanted to be. And I checked in with her this past fall when I was wrapping up my book and said, hey, is it okay with you if I share all this in the book? Your tests before and afters, what you did. She says, yeah, she wants people to know. She wants people to know what worked for her because of the impact it had on her life. So I was floored by that result.

Absolutely. And so in this case, they had a metal elimination, she had symptom relief, she got better. And so that is not the only thing that this test does, but that is one of the things that this test does. Yes, because you were talking about before, we're balancing the minerals.

Yes.

And we're eliminating heavy metals in the body.

Yeah. And so I'm gonna go through in the next couple of minutes. This is my— I said this before— this is my September 2022 test. And then I get a, you know, I think I'm missing a test in this sequence, but this is March 2023 as I started to do mineral balancing. And you can see now, if you're watching the video, a test where my high calcium, magnesium, sodium levels have come into the ideal range. My potassium went up and then it came down again. And my trace elements are still low through the rest of the test. And my mercury elimination continues. It's still, it's moderate. It's 89 microgram percent. %. And then I go back up into a high magnesium sodium level, but my calcium potassium in the next test, this one is September 2023, remain in the ideal range. The trace elements remain low and the rest of the test, I'm still eliminating some mercury. I push out a little bit of arsenic.

And what was happening in your life over the course of this time?

So my life was getting more and more stable, consistent, predictable. My wife and I have been married for 2 years, so we would have gotten married in the spring of 2024, we met in 2023. She specifically remarked to me in the fall of 2023 between when I had this crazy 3 highs, well, 2 highs we'll call it in September and December where I got into a much more balanced picture. She said, you became much more grounded, much more mature, just you really matured a lot. And I think that was a lot to do with the minerals. Now I will say at the time I also did neurofeedback and later on I did EMDR, but this is where it gets, I think, even more interesting. So we will regularly have people come to us who are doing some kind of therapy, EMDR, neurofeedback, or we'll have people come to us who we recommend go do that, whether they do it with— while they're also working with us or they do it outside of working with us. And I've had people come to me who are in that therapy space and say, when you put these things together, you have some pretty profound results. Because one of the things that I don't think people realize is their brain is limited in its creative potential and their expression of themselves by the mineral energy in their cells. And that might sound kind of hokey or weird, and if you told me that 10 years ago when I was in my, like, the throes of my medical training, I would have been like, that sounds really out there and woo-woo. But patients come back to you and say things like that. And, you know, that's one of the reasons why we have Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing. Go listen to people talk about this process. JD's the first one I've had where someone talked about their HTMA journey with us specifically over a my podcast with Clark. We did the same thing. He had very profound changes in who he was, how he behaved, what he thought about himself in the world. And sometimes I'm hesitant to invite patients on the podcast because I feel like it's a little bit too intimate, you know. But the details I get in consultations from patients are really very moving, and it's part of why I'm so convicted that I have to share this with people, even though this is very much like— I would call it the cutting edge of integrative medicine. I have a lot of uncertainty about this test. I have a lot of uncertainty about— I know what protocols work, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement. I'll say it that way. I I also want people to understand that when you start to look at the mineral system, you begin to understand how much variability there is in terms of people's diets and lifestyles. Give you a couple real examples. The one paper I've been able to find on the effects of stress and magnesium excretion showed, if I recall correctly, that if you're exposed to 100 decibel noise, which would be a moderately— like, not even a very loud, but a moderate volume at a concert, which is not an unusual thing for people to go and listen to, right? 100 decibel noise exposure for 4 hours increases magnesium excretion by something like 4, 4 doubled, 400%, for like 3 days. If that's what I'm— I know. And so guess what? I don't know, but I'd like to know what effect does using your cell phone for 4 more hours a day held up to your head or on speakerphone or whatever have on your mineral balance? What effect? And this is what you're gonna find if you actually— if actually people were to do these kinds of studies, here's what they would find. They would find that the effects are all interconnected, and so there's no predictability. But what I can tell you is the patients who get the best results in the practice do everything they can to minimize recognize the stresses and toxic exposures that cause mineral losses and that interfere with mineral metabolism. And they look at their diet in such a way that they fix the mineral inputs and balances, plus fatty acids, protein, carbs, fats. They fix these things. They optimize these ratios. It isn't rocket science. It's also not brain surgery. It is intimidating for a lot of people, but I have to tell you, when you learn how to do it and then you see what's possible, you can't help but be enthusiastic about about it because I've been practicing for 12 years now. I've had a lot of different mentors. The average patient in our practice has seen 4 to 5 doctors before they came to see us. The most is 30, the least is 1. I know what my colleagues are doing. I know a lot of it's not working for a lot of you, and this paradigm helped me understand why. The mineral system is the most basic fundamental layer of biology. And in a very real sense, if you look in nature, what determines what comes up out of the ground, the minerals in the ground determine the pH, the salinity, what plants can grow, what plants can grow well. It will determine the soil microbiome. It will determine the insects and other flora and fauna that live in the ground, which creates the soil fertility. You hear people talking about all kinds of different things. You may feel overwhelmed by biohacks and wellness gear and whatever. Let me give you a shortcut. The stuff that works the best works on the mineral system. It also has the most potential pitfalls and perils, which means that you can make people really sick with minerals. And you, you know, if you're asking me me like, like, you're limiting my toolbox. Like, what am I going to use? I'm always picking things that affect the mineral system in some way. And if we went through, say, like the core supplements we use in the practice to get people great results— and we usually try to target 5 to 10 products to keep it manageable and sustainable, because we understand that this needs to be sustainable for people to really get great results over the long term— they all work on the mineral system, all of them. And they work on it in various different ways. And I've honed the practice over and over and over again, case after case, based on feedback from patients. Treatments, that's where I ended up. You have to focus on the minerals first because everything else is downstream from that.

Absolutely. I 100% agree with that. Yeah.

Let me give people like a really quick— particularly if you're watching the video, like, you can see this is basically a couple years of HTMAs all lined up in sequence. There's lots of changes in the ratios, there's lots of changes in the levels. I haven't had a particularly impressive elimination since the mercury elimination in 2022-23, but this is, you know, where I also— I also bring this up for patients. You also can't control what happens in your life, and if you've followed my media for any period of time, you probably know that in December 2024, about 9 months after I got married, my son was born and he was very sick. He was— he had suffered a very severe birth injury. And so I haven't had a big elimination, but my minerals have stayed balanced in the last 18 months. But I had to put kind of my own healing on and my own optimization on hold because I'm too busy and consumed taking care of my son. So we have that conversation with patients because you may be looking at my minerals and saying, well, they're not perfect, Dr. Stillman. Leland Stillman. Yeah, stuff happens and sometimes you have to decide to take the off-ramp on your own health journey so you can help somebody else. Sometimes that's, you know, meeting a financial goal for you and your family. Sometimes that's, you know, your kids need your help with something, whether it's their health or their career or their life. Sometimes it's a spouse or a parent. Part of why I say we're a family practice is that I think as much as telling patients what minerals and vitamins and bioidentical hormones and biohacks and products to use for their wellness, I think having a dialogue with them about what are the priorities in your life right now now and how much time and energy and money and mental bandwidth should you put into your wellness is our responsibility to them in terms as stewards of their health just as much as just the nuts and bolts of like what protocol is best for you right now. And that's, I will say, that is one of the things I find most discouraging about integrative medicine. I see people just like throwing things at patients, these crazy supplement lists, these crazy medication regimens without any kind of respect for this person have the time to do all this. Does this person have a healthy diet lifestyle in the first place? Does this person have have, you know, for example, like a terrible family illness that they're also trying to manage. And now you just handed them an hour-long self-care plan a day that they're not going to be able to do. And now they're going to feel discouraged and disheartened and conflicted about, well, do I steal time from taking care of my spouse, my elderly parent, my child to take care of me? Or, you know, do I, do I need to take care of me in order to be the best for them? I have those conversations all day and there's not a— some patients stick with this process for years and are very happy. Other patients, it's a quick 3, 6-month process, get them back in the saddle, get them back to work, clear their brain fog, get them functioning better, and then, you know, we take it quarter by quarter and we put the time and energy into their healing however they're able to. Is that fair, Amy? Anything you wanna add to that? Absolutely.

I think that's great. I absolutely agree with you. I do think it is gonna be, again, individualized just as much as this test is. I think one of the things I love talking to patients or prospective patients about is how individualized this protocol is. Mm-hmm. The HTMA test is not just a blanket protocol where We're not saying a one-size-fits-all, oh, everybody gets this specific thing, or there's a couple patterns. It is very complex, lots of things that we consider, you know, the minerals all work together. And so this is a very, very individualized protocol, as you saw even in Dr. Stillman's case, very individualized. And then his supplement protocols, we didn't even have time to get into that, but your supplement protocols were very individualized based on the test results that you saw. And so I think that is something that, it just speaks volumes because that is what gets people better is when you give them actually what their body needs, then their body's able to heal, which is something that very few practices actually do. I feel like there's like a step-by-step protocol that most practices have of we do step 1 and step 2 and step 3, and maybe they'll throw in some testing and say, oh, there's a few things that are, you know, specific to you. But this is so individualized and everything about it from the testing to the results, to the protocol. Calls, very individualized for each person, and we see great results. So yeah, I know we're about out of time here, but can you wrap up with just a couple quick inspiring last-minute things you want to say about HTMA in practice that you've seen?

You know, I always go back to Emily's case because it was the first case where I saw a gigantic elimination of aluminum in a before and after and a profound shift in someone's health. It's by no means the most significant or the only, I should say, case that I've seen that happen in, you know, Jay-Z, JD Azavari, who was on the podcast recently. She had these significant cadmium elimination over the last year with some very significant improvements in her health that I'll let you guys go listen to the podcast for more details on. I'll also say, you know, Kenna was on the podcast recently as well. You know, Kenna's our BA who's training now to be a health coach on the team. And Kenna was interesting. Her H2MA didn't have a giant elimination. It didn't have huge shifts in her ratios or her absolute numbers, but you know, you go out and listen to Kenna in her own words, she felt much, much, much better over a 5-month period of time. So, you know, and I will say also, you know, people probably may be listening to this, have questions. Well, what about Lyme? What about mold? What about glyphosate? What about all these other things? Yes, they're relevant. And sometimes I wonder, you know, patients, for example, will feel terrible, like they're having a detoxification reaction, but we don't see any metals coming out in the hair. What are we missing? Are they eliminating these other toxins that are not measured in the HTMA? I don't know. But what I do know is that I've done a lot of different tests over the years, mentored with with some very sharp and also very different people. And I've worked in conventional hospitals, worked in little outpatient clinics that nobody's heard of. I've done, had a really wide-ranging practice and my mentors combined experiences, lifetimes. And this test gets the job done and it gives you a window that in one test you cannot get any other way. And I've tried it every which way, hair, urine, blood. I will say I've never gotten into fecal testing of heavy metals, but that's largely because no does it as far as I know. So yeah, I mean, it's not a panacea, it's not a silver bullet. And I do want to, you know, reiterate, you know, one of the reasons why we're so into working with patients one-on-one, you know, Amy and I had this conversation years ago. We tried a program where people just got a supplement protocol based on an HTMA. And a lot of people are out there doing this. I think they're well-intentioned, but I also think they're terribly misguided because we found that the people who just did a supplement protocol did not get the same results as people who did some diet and lifestyle coaching. Because what you'll find if you actually look at the numbers and the data is that your diet is going to have a massive impact on your nutrient loads in your diet. So we might give you 500 milligrams of supplemental magnesium, but your diet could supply another 500 to 1,000 milligrams. Well, the difference for you might be the 500 to 1,000 that you get or don't get from your diet, depending upon if you know what foods are right for you and why and what you're allergic to and all these other things. You know, I, I just want a process that's as airtight, as high likelihood of success as possible. And so I basically put together this diet lifestyle nutrition program centered around HTMA and blood testing where we do this deep dive into who are you, where are you from, what are you dealing with, what is your diet, what does your lifestyle look like, and just be really clear with you. Like, here's what you need to change about your daily routine. Here's what you need to change about your diet because that's the secret. And every Stories of Hope, Stories of Healing that you're going to hear, because, you know, I asked them at the at the end, like what made the difference? And I'll ask them in consults and you can read these testimonials and case studies on my Substack, drstillmanuncensored.com. You know, it was the vitamin C, you know, for 10%, or it was the MSM for 15%, or it was the mineral balancing, the supplement protocols you came up with for 30 or 40 or 90%. And then it was the sauna or the 10-minute walks. And so, you know, again, it's not just a silver bullet. It's not a one-size-fits-all program. And when you put all these things together and you're consistent with them, that's when you see really remarkable changes and improvements over months.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I 100% agree. That is so true. Well, on that note, thank you so much for sharing, Dr. Stillman. Very insightful as always. Any last words you want to say?

Yeah, you know, I think maybe I should have made more of a point of this, but you know, I mentioned that my mercury levels were my highest levels along the way in the HTMA. And you know, after about a year or maybe a little bit more than that, maybe a little bit less. Yeah, I'm looking at my July 2024, you know, my mercury levels were 0.04. I've been avoiding mercury fish since the high elimination I'd had fall, I think, a year prior or so. And so, you know, over a year plus, I detoxed mercury, and I see that in the hair very clearly. They were not crazy levels, but again, I wasn't crazy sick, you know. And I've had cases where, like, I've had patients, like, calm, their mercury levels so high and their mold toxicity so high, they're telling me that they have intrusive thoughts about throwing themselves off the balcony or driving into this divider in the highway, and they're very distressed by this, right? So I didn't have high enough levels to have some crazy testimonial for you all, but you also have to remember I was at the time like running a very high-intensity solo practice with pretty sick people doing very high-touch medicine. So, you know, I was operating at a high level and I was still getting better.

And I still think it's fascinating to see your, your trends over time, just even with your lifestyle, not necessarily, you know, following the protocol 100%. That's fascinating in itself. That's like a whole nother— we could do podcasts on that. It is very interesting. So anyway, Anyway, thank you so much, Dr. Stillman. We appreciate it.

Yeah, we will talk soon and make sure that you're on the lookout for the book. It's coming out September 2026, The End of Autoimmunity. Pre-orders available now. I encourage you to pick it up now for a better price and buy a copy. Lots on HTMA in there. Thanks, Amy, for interviewing me today. And thanks everyone for joining us. Take care. Have a great day.

Bye.

Thank you for listening to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. If this conversation felt uncomfortably If this sounds familiar and you're ready for someone to take your story seriously, your next step is to book a call with myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Choose a time that works for you and confirm it. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care and it's not a guarantee of results. .com structured assessment where we'll create a plan to help you achieve your health goals. We have a limited number of calls available each month. So if you see a time that fits your schedule, book it right away. Again, the link is stillmanmd.com. If you find this podcast helpful, subscribe, leave a review, or share this episode with a friend or family member who needs help getting their health back. I'm Dr. Leland Stillman. Thank you for listening. And until next time, be well.