The Power of Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA) with Dr. Rick Malter

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 here with Dr. Rick Malter and Amy Arp. Thank you for joining us, Rick. It's great to finally get to meet you. I read your book some time ago, Strands of Health. For anyone who hasn't read it, it's a great primer on hair tissue mineral analysis. And I like to always start by asking people— Yeah, there it is. I like to start by always asking people what their origin story was, who they are, where they come from, and how they decided to get into health and wellness.

Well, I decided to get into psychology when I was going to a, uh, camp up in, uh, Wisconsin. I was born and raised in Chicago, and I was going to this camp, and the camp director had been at the University of Chicago. And this is from 1949 through 1956, 7 summers. And he raved about the University of Chicago and especially about Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, who survived being in Dachau before the war and got out and came to the University of Chicago. And he was from Vienna, so he had a very interesting Viennese accent. And all of his courses were, of course, very Freudian about the id, the ego, and the superego. And that influenced me to transfer from the University of Illinois-Chicago, where I did my first 2 years, to the University of Chicago to complete my bachelor's and then do a master's under the Committee on Human Development, which was supposed to be a multidisciplinary thing with psychology, sociology, and biological science.

What was it about psychology that really captivated you?

Well, it was very intriguing and, um, Uh, in my family, uh, we had our dysfunctions and psychological issues. And so the thought is, well, if you have psychological and emotional issues, uh, you go study psychology and you can fix yourself.

I have a friend who used to say that everyone in the psych or psychology or whatever profession was trying to unscramble their own eggs.

Uh, yes. They're really cooks at heart, making omelets. So anyway, I did the Master's in Human Development and it was really a hodgepodge where they tried to bring together specialists in sociology, psych, and the biological sciences. And I think each professor was really still interested in their own specialty., and they reluctantly decided to participate. And I didn't feel I came out with a very strong background, but I got introduced to psychology academically, and I was accepted into the school psychology program under Dr. T.E. Newland at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He was a brilliant professor. And he linked me up with another professor, Dr. David Ausubel, an MD-PhD, who is an absolutely brilliant professor, wrote big thick books on child and adolescent development and all kinds of research. And I felt that, uh, that program turned out to provide a very solid professional and graduate education for me, and I got my PhD in 1971 after my wife and I had 4 kids. So all 4 of my little kids surrounding me on the campus after the graduation. I love that. We still have a picture. And so my daughter was born in 1970, my youngest, and so my wife is holding the baby in 1971 on campus. She now just turned 54. So a few years have passed since then, but I came out—

You've been around the sun a few times.

Yeah. So, uh, I, I felt I came out with a very, very solid school and, uh, clinical psychology background and educational psychology background. And, uh, But working in school psychology and having gone through the stresses of graduate school and raising a family of 4 kids, by 1980 I was very, very stressed and burned out. Just prior to that though, we had met Dr. John Cooper, a brilliant clinical psychologist who went from Northwestern University where he got his PhD out to the West Coast to study with people like Fritz Perls and Gestalt therapists. And both of us were ready and willing to break away from Freudian psychology.

Was Freudian psychology— you talk about it like it was very mainstream, very dominant as a paradigm.

Oh, it was very, very dominant before behavioral psychology caught it.

Would you say that it was— what would you say its main flaws were and what would you say its main strengths were?

Oh, it was a very, very interesting psychological theory. But practically, because it was so verbal, it really didn't break up underlying trauma and emotional issues very effectively.

So you could build a very successful practice that was very unsuccessful.

In helping people. Yes. And the psychoanalysts were really dominant in psychiatry and in clinical psychology after World War II. Uh-huh. And people like Bettelheim had a very strong influence. But I almost got out of psychology after I got my master's at the University of Chicago because I didn't have a Viennese accent. Like Dr. Beldheim had. I convinced myself, how could I be a legitimate psychologist without a Viennese accent? So I dropped out for a couple years and went into the Air Force Reserve where they deemed me capable and talented enough to go to cook school. So my service in the U.S. Air Force wasn't being trained as a cook and serving as a cook. As a matter of fact, my unit in the Air Force Reserve was called up during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And I think when Khrushchev heard that I was cooking for the pilots of the U.S. Air Force, that's when he decided to turn the fleet around. I'm sure. To bring them all the way to Cuba.

Um, so, um, a couple things you said there, interesting, are interesting to comment on. So you describe being really burned out before this moment when you decided to break away from what you'd been schooled in. Fair, right? What do you think? Because people talk a lot about burnout. They talk about burnout in health and wellness on the patient side. We talk about it on the practitioner side. And I'm always curious to talk to practitioners who will cop to or admit to having ever been burned out. What do you think caused you to be burned out, and what do you think you could have done differently to have avoided it?

Um, stress is the primary factor, uh, that impacts the mind-body system. We know stress as physiological component. We know stress also has a psychological component, the fight-or-flight aspect of stress. Fight is anger and rage, flight is anxiety and panic. There's a reciprocal relationship between stress and magnesium. Stress intensifies and is prolonged, it will deplete a person's magnesium. And magnesium, of course, is a vital mineral. And you also need magnesium in adequate amounts in your cells in order to regulate stress properly. If you are depleted in magnesium, that will cause very serious blood sugar regulation problems. Which I had by 1980. Hmm. When my chiropractor did a 6-hour glucose tolerance test on me, the fasting blood sugar, uh, came out 45. He gave me the glucose to drink, got the glucose readings up over the next few hours to 160 or 165.. And then toward the end of the 6 hours, my glucose came crashing down. Uh, the last blood draw was 35. And of course I had all of the awful reactive hypoglycemic, uh, reactions as all this was going on. So I knew I had a blood sugar problem. Fortunately for me, I was working, uh, with a PhD educator. Dr. Ken Candelaria, who had established an outpatient clinic in the Chicago suburbs for kids who were given an ADHD diagnosis or who had learning disabilities. And Ken asked me to be the, the psychologist for his group. They were doing multifactorial assessments of kids. Psychologically, educationally, optometrically, nutritionally, with nutritional biofeedback and with hair analysis. So Ken Candelaria already was familiar with hair analysis. Interesting. And he saw what bad shape I was in. This is 19—

what year was this in?

1980.

Okay.

44 years ago.

But we skipped, I think there was a 9-year— what was it, '71 you said you got your PhD?

And so then it was 9 years later, you wind up crashing.

But what I'm really curious about, Rick, is this: we talk about stress, and I, I sometimes talk about stress as being one of the ultimate scapegoats. You can't touch it, taste it, feel it. It's 100% subjective. And you can say, okay, well, we can see it in the test, this test, that test. We can see it in like Oura Ring data or fitness tracker data like HR. There's a lot of ways to to, to quantify it. But what I find so interesting about it is when I'm counseling patients, when I'm talking to other doctors and stress comes up as something they're struggling with— and I mean, who isn't struggling with it in our modern world— what I find is that there's a lot between identifying it as a problem and actually taking steps and taking action in order to either mitigate it or reduce it. And I think a lot of people struggle with that, just like a child would struggle swimming if you just threw them into the deep end of the pool. What are your thoughts on that?

Well, interestingly, Dr. Joe Mercola posted a recent article about mental resilience.

Hmm.

And he quotes a current researcher who's looking into it and, uh, coming up with all kinds of data and interestingly is using HTMA to assess cortisol levels.

Good.

Uh, but I wonder if this researcher, if he's collecting HTMA data, is looking at it, uh, the way, uh, I learned to look at it from Dr. Pawlak and Dr. David Watts after Candelaria found my magnesium level was at 0.9 milligrams percent.

Truly an impressive low.

Wow. And what he did, what Candelaria did, he put his thumb and forefinger close together like that and said, Rick, your magnesium is so low, you are this close to a heart attack. Mm-hmm. Of course, that got my attention.

Yes.

Because at age 43, I wasn't ready to check out.

Especially with 4 kids, right?

4 kids. Mm-hmm. After, uh, but it turned out that the, that HDMA, uh, detecting a critically low magnesium level, uh, uh, accounted for my reactive hypoglycemia and my, uh, utter fatigue and exhaustion. That got my attention. And then Candlaria gave me a booklet,, of an interview with Dr. Ek, uh, and Ek was talking about HTMA, hair tissue mineral analysis. So that intrigued me. And then, uh, I started, uh, flying down from Chicago to Phoenix to attend weekend seminars with Dr. Ek and Dr. Watts in the early to mid-1980s. After they made their breakthrough research, uh, figuring out how to properly interpret, uh, HTMA test data and linking it to stress, because they knew of Dr. Hans Selye's, uh, formidable research, uh, covering the stress response. They knew about Dr. Mildred Seelig, an MD, who studied stress, magnesium deficiency, and heart attacks. Dr. Candelaria knew about Seelig's work too. That's why he made that connection for me. And then of the work of Dr. Karl Pfeiffer, another MD PhD, who in 1975 wrote his book Mental and Elemental Nutrients. And in his book, he had a chapter on copper toxicity because he was seeing some female patients who presented with psychosis or schizophrenia and who would use the birth control pill or a copper IUD after they were introduced in 1960. And so all of these pieces were coming together, and Eck and Watts was able— were able to pull them all together in advancing their understanding of HDMA data. Uh, and then they also knew about the work on fast and slow oxidizers, and they saw very clearly two distinct HTMA mineral patterns, the fast oxidizer and the slow. Hmm. Hmm. But there was a turning point, and I like to refer to the book of Dr. Fritjof Capra called The Turning Point that he published in 1982. Capra was a brilliant physicist. And he traced the history of health and disease and healing through the shamans and the spiritual practitioners up through Descartes, who gave us the mind-body split, which still influences so much of medical and psychiatric and healthcare practice today. And, uh, and then, uh, Copper brings us up to the influence of modern physics focusing on dynamic natural energy systems. And I said, voilà, that's a good description of the phenomena revealed in the mineral patterns of HTMAs. Stress and energy in a dynamic system with intricate feedback loops and mechanisms.

Absolutely. So I'm very— I don't wanna, I don't wanna move on until I get a good answer from you, from my question, which is really, what do you think you could have done differently to have had less stress in your life? Because it must have occurred to you that there's many people with 4 kids and a wife and a psychology practice who didn't wind up with a magnesium of 0.9, right?

Yeah. Well, if I had moved down to Arizona to where I live in Cottonwood, Arizona, near Sedona, our nice small town with beautiful views, a wonderful, unstressful setting. So I probably have much less stress over the last 23 years since I retired. Yes, than in the previous years and in the Chicago area.

Yeah, so setting, environment.

And if I had been introduced to magnesium in graduate school or afterwards, and if I had been introduced to, uh, HTMA 'Cause HDMA, uh, data gives us an excellent perspective on the degree of, uh, the intensity of stress a person is impacting with.

What was your experience when you started your first protocol in 1980?

My experience? I was still alive.

Tell us, tell us with all the details. Don't just say, You know, they won a baseball game in 9 innings.

I began to feel much more relaxed, much calmer, much more confident.

Immediately?

Well, this is 44 years ago, so a lot has intervened, but I definitely had a progressive set of steps of improvement. Calming down, lowering my blood pressure.

So you had high blood pressure as well as these hypoglycemic episodes?

Yeah, 'cause I, I've always been a fast oxidizer. Hmm. With the low calcium and magnesium and the high sodium and potassium.

That's interesting that you say always. It, it almost implies that you, after everything, I assume you've tried to fix that or normalize that. Maybe you have some kind of predisposition to that. Is that fair?

Yeah, I think, uh, we can say some people may be genetically predisposed to it, to strong adrenal reactions. But then, uh, life situations and family history plays a role. Mhm. Mhm. And, uh, Interestingly, when I saw a PBS program that covered the development of the Fiddler on the Roof story, and seeing the scene of the wedding that's broken up by an attack by drunken Cossacks, and it struck me, what was it like for the Jews of Eastern Europe to be living under constant threat like that. Talk about a high-stress condition. Mm-hmm. And so what I came up with is what I call the Fiddler on the Roof syndrome. And this not only applies to the Jews of Eastern Europe and the rest of Europe, as it turned out with the Nazis and the Holocaust, But you can think of what happens to the Irish under the British, what happens to the Black Americans in the South. So there are different groups that have lived under very, very high-stress conditions. And I think that conditions, uh, the individuals and the family members and the members of those groups to have very strong stress reactions. When you think of strong stress reactions, you think of magnesium deficiency. And just think of the alcoholism and drug addiction, in these different communities and the diabetes and the heart conditions and the cancers related to magnesium deficiency.

So you learned, yeah.

So there's a, there are historical factors that are important to consider about why certain people are much more prone to high stress responses. My family's history is from, Eastern Europe, Jewish communities.

Interesting. Yeah. It is interesting. Hmm. So you started doing mineral balancing, and I'm assuming the protocols you used right off or right out of the gate, were they similar to the protocols that Ek, later taught to Wilson, which is really what I learned from my friend Clark who taught me HTMA?

No, um, yeah, so Dr. Watts, uh, was collaborating with Dr. Eck from about 1975 through 1984 when they split up.

Why did they split?

They split over the fact that Watts was observing that whenever clients of Dr. Ek started to dump off excess copper. They were copper toxic slow oxidizers. When they would dump off excess copper, you would see a rise in the copper level reflecting the, uh, release from the cells excreting the excess copper, not only through the liver and the bowel in the feces, but also through the hair. While that was occurring, Ek observed that the potassium would go up. And as the potassium went up over sodium, that would lower the sodium-potassium ratio and put it into an inversion.

Yes.

And Ek was obsessed with copper toxicity on the one hand, and sodium potassium inversions on the other. So whenever he would see an inversion of sodium to potassium, he would give megadoses of supplements to drive down the potassium, which he was— he assumed was a true retention of potassium. But Watts observed that as Eck was doing this protocol, with people, they were getting worse. Interesting. Okay. More and more stressed, more and more exhausted. And Watts figured what was really happening is with copper dumping, the cells were losing potassium, becoming deficient metabolically at a cellular level. And what was showing in the hair analysis was simply another pathway of excretion of the lost potassium. So instead of giving potassium-lowering supplements like calcium, vitamin D, and copper, Watts, uh, came to conclusion, you give potassium and vitamin A. To stop the loss of the potassium and to, uh, rebalance the minerals that way. Ek could not hear of that. Hmm. As brilliant as Ek was, that was a blind spot for him.

So I'm, I take it you sided with Watts based on your clinical experience trying both approaches.

Yeah, there's no doubt in my mind about that.

Fascinating. Why do you think there's a camp over here following X recommendations to this day and Watts over here using different protocols, uh, and never the twain shall meet?

Well, it's, um, psychological with the egos involved.

Back to Freud.

It's also the fact that, uh, Ek was always a super fast oxidizer.

Interesting.

There were times when he and I would, uh, uh, meet for lunch when I came down to Phoenix for the seminars and we'd compare our most recent hair analyses. There were times where his sodium level was 5 or 10 times higher than mine, and mine was high.

Wow.

Wow.

Did he ever balance it?

No. Isn't that interesting? And he became diabetic. Hmm.

Type 1, type 2, or some—

It must have been a type 2.

Hmm. What is your opinion on that?

That he never was able to stabilize the loss of magnesium and potassium. From the cells. That's why in the most recent version of my book, I put in a graphic to illustrate, to illustrate the loss of magnesium and potassium from inside the cells. Leaving a person metabolically deficient. But the lost mineral goes into the bloodstream to the kidneys and out the urine, but the hair picks it up also. Interesting. So it's furiously high magnesium and potassium, inverting not only sodium and potassium, but inverting calcium and magnesium. As brilliant as Eck was, and there was no doubt he was brilliant, he could not grasp and accept that interpretation of lost minerals like magnesium and potassium from the cells that appeared high temporarily in certain HTMAs. Okay. And In the early days, 40 years ago, I was still dependent on X recommendations with some of my clients. And there was a young woman who, um, came from a very, uh, uh, highly stressful family and she tended to have a high N/A to K ratio. But in, uh, some of her retests, she was showing a calcium-magnesium inversion, which would be a low calcium to a, a much higher magnesium. And Ek read that as a valid inverted ratio and recommended calcium. So I suggested to the woman, no, go on calcium, you have a low calcium-magnesium ratio. Couple days later, she calls me in excruciating pain and discomfort. Feet and toes curled under in severe cramping. So we talked about it and we realized she had a high NADK, high stress causing her to lose a lot of magnesium, which was becoming deficient in the cells. So metabolically, instead of having a low Ca/Mg ratio. She really was already high Ca/Mg ratio metabolically, and given calcium, simply raised that high Ca/Mg ratio to the point where she cramped up even more.

Interesting.

So, uh, hearing Watts' interpretation of the potassium loss, And, uh, my experience with this client with the, uh, magnesium loss, that led me to realize in so many HTMAs that show inverted ratios, like an inverted CalMag and inverted, uh, Na to K, you're really dealing, uh, with an underlying reversal. Instead of a low NADK metabolically, the person is, uh, experiencing a high NADK. And when Ek would give potassium-lowering supplements, their NADK would go higher, their stress would intensify, they would become more emotional, more fight or flight, more inflammation and pain. And the higher NADK would also trigger the loss of magnesium 'cause the minerals are all interrelated in this intricate dynamic mineral system. Hmm.

So it sounds like you had mixed results with Axe protocols, but would you say overwhelmingly that people did better on them than worse?

Oh yeah. Look, he could not have built his reputation and ARL the way he did if a lot of people were not getting better.

What would you say the, um, what proportion of patients would you say would really fare poorly on a traditional Dr. Ek ARL interpretation compared to a Watts interpretation? Give us a number out of 100 and don't feel like you have to be, uh, I would say 30 to 50%. That's a lot.

Yeah. Yeah.

What surprises me about that is that, that, that hasn't been my experience. I've been very happy with the results with the Endomet supplements, but it's also, and the protocols from ARL, but I also have a healthy respect for the fact that, you know, practices have funny ways of attracting similar people. And when you're dealing with a lot of very similar people, I guess, you know, you use the word psychographically, psychologically, however you want to call it, let alone metabolically. If you're using those protocols in those people, then you may see only successes, right? And then one thing I've also learned is that if patients don't feel like they can share with you that your protocol is not working because you know, many doctors let their egos get in the way of good feedback. You never find out who's not doing well, which has been a, uh, something I've really tried to impress on my patients, that when things are not going well is when I most want to hear from them so that we can troubleshoot them.

Yeah, I, I hear, uh, positives and I hear some negatives, and with the negatives I know we have to fine-tune what they're doing. And with many of the negative results, invariably there's a traumatic history. There are very intense relationship, psychological, uh, and emotional issues and problems with what Dr. John Cooper taught us about the psychological judge. And everybody has a psychological judge that's closely related to the stress response. When people are highly stressed, their judge inflates like a balloon and takes them over psychologically and emotionally.

And you wrote extensively about this in your book for people who want the full story.

On the judge. There's the book that my wife and I, uh, both wrote, Shrinking the Judge. We wrote this 30 years ago before I wrote the, uh, Strands of Health book. So the Strands of Health book covers, uh, the explanation of minerals and the HTMAs with the focus on stress and energy. And then the Shrinking the Judge book focuses on the psychological and emotional components. So they go together very well in helping people understand and deal much more with their stress and being able to use the supplements and the psychological work under Judge to provide themselves with much more resilience in dealing with stress. They're still gonna have stress.

Sure.

Mm-hmm. But the issue is how do you establish stronger resilience in dealing with it?

What was it like bringing HTMA into your already, I'm sure, busy psychology practice, and what was your experience with it as the years wore on? This, and I'm really curious if you have a— because I know in my practice, I got into HTMA as kind of like, this is the next thing I'm gonna figure out. I've done tons of blood testing, I'd done urine testing, I'd looked at mold and Lyme and co-infections and EMF and light, and I was looking for yet another thing to understand and integrate into my practice. That's why the podcast is called Integrative Medicine with Dr. Stillman, because it's about integrating all of the best you know, East and West, old and new, uh, into one, you know, framework. And what I'm really curious about, because in my practice I found that there were, there were a few cases where, for example, I found very high aluminum levels, or I saw this copper dumping phenomenon, and I was in— I was amazed at the power of the minerals to provoke the metals from the body. And that's when I became convinced that I had a test that was worth far more than the average clinician was ascribing its value. What was your experience? Were there any key cases where you thought, oh my gosh, I've really got something amazing here?

Well, early on, as I was attending Ek and Watts seminars in Phoenix, Ek always started off talking about copper toxicity. Hmm. So early on when I started to use HTMAs in my practice, I was beginning to see copper toxic mineral patterns. And, and over the years, uh, as I worked with so many copper toxic individuals, usually women who had used the birth control pill or copper IUDs or both Mm-hmm. There was another turning point in 1960 when they introduced the, the pill that began to cause a lot of women to shift from fast into copper toxic, slow oxidation.

Hmm.

And over the years it wound up destroying women's health. Both psychologically and physically.

Now, if you walk into a meeting of, say, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and you get up on a stage and you say that, they might throw every piece of food in the room at you before you have a chance.

I wouldn't have to break my shield.

I think for a lot of people, when they hear that, they think, okay, how can Dr. Stillman and Dr. Malter say that on a podcast. How can they say that? How can that be true when all these experts over here— Because we have the data.

We have laboratory data.

Tell us the story, Rick. How do we know this is true?

Because when you have a list of the symptoms related to copper toxicity, and again, it comes back to my book. In my book, I have, uh, I have the symptom list. I compiled that list from interviewing copper toxic women who described what they were struggling with. And when I compiled that list after talking to X number of copper toxic women. And then I show this list to a new person. They look at it and they say, how did you know I have all this stuff? Hmm. That's called validating a test. Hmm. And all of, uh, your medical colleagues who see themselves as experts in OB-GYN or what psychiatry or whatever it is, they don't have the lab data. And they are not concerned about validating lab data that's very accurate and precise, despite what the AMA said back in 1985, uh, when they attempted to attack— when they did attack HDMA and nearly put HDMA labs out of business.

I did not know that.

Yeah, interesting. August 1985.

I'm not surprised. Yeah. And I have been fascinated when I, when I started to, to do this, I, you know, hair testing. I mean, I was already doing a lot of blood testing. I continued to do, I continue to this day to do mineral levels, zinc, copper, serum magnesium on patients, uh, in part because they're very affordable with my lab pricing. And in part because I find fascinating patterns that to this day I am intrigued by. You know, I had a gentleman recently, he had a high hair copper and he had a low serum copper. And is that noise? Could he have a high serum copper the next day? Or does he, is he chronically copper depleted and he's still pushing it out? If so, why? Likewise, I've had cases where we had extremely high blood copper levels that were very consistent with copper toxicity and low hair levels that I expect to rise once we put them on the right protocol. But I have had to do hundreds of these levels of tests in order to have a real feel for what the data tends to be. And also, I don't think that many people see high copper on the hair test until they've seen enough patients, done enough protocols to get people to mobilize that copper into the hair, because in my experience, it's almost always hidden on that first hair test. What are you your thoughts on that?

That the buildup of the excess copper in most people winds up getting stored tightly in liver and in brain tissue primarily. So it's tightly stored, and you need a certain amount of energy and metabolic activity to support the wisdom of the body to decide when and how much of the excess toxic metals and excess copper to release. And this is why you don't want to know— you don't want to overwhelm the kidneys, right, uh, with an aggressive detox that pulls out way too much toxic, uh, metal all at once when the body's not ready for it, right?

And the other thing I, I explain to patients is that and I, this is largely my suspicion based on my reading of the literature and knowledge of inorganic chemistry, is that until you have the right nutritive mineral to replace either a toxic metal or a nutritive mineral, like say zinc replacing copper or manganese replacing copper, how are you going to get that copper out of the cell? Which is why it makes sense to me that when I give someone the right protocol, I'll often see the copper shoot up. And what I've done is I've driven in manganese, zinc, various other trace elements, and now the copper is coming out. Yep.

And then you have the data to show for it. So I'm curious, you have to be able, you have to be able to explain the shift from a low to a high copper.

Mm.

In scientific and clinical terms, which is easy to do. When we consider the cellular level, the blood level, and the excretory pathways. And the hair, of course, under certain conditions becomes an excretory pathway as well as the urine and feces primarily.

Although I actually will now explain to patients, you know, I don't look at the hair the same way I look at the urine and the feces. And the reason why is that No one looks at what they leave in the toilet and says, that is an expression of myself, even though it might technically be true. But you look at your hair, it is an expression of your body in a very different way. It has a link to our health, our well-being. And the way I explain this to patients is that the hair, the hair that you're seeing coming out of your, your head or your other— the rest of your body your body is making that. It's not just excreting it. It's an expression. And right, I don't view that as the same way, therefore, as urine, feces. And I haven't had time to really dig into the differences in excretory patterns in the body, but to me— and I don't know how you feel about having maybe looked at the literature in more detail— there is so much complexity to how these things are trafficked around the body And just when you exactly look at the minerals, there's over a dozen that are clinically relevant. This is an incredibly complex system trying to subject it to the sort of reductionistic thinking that is the norm in science.

The reductionist thinking in science is not gonna work well with HTMA data and the metabolic and psychophysiological phenomena that are reflected in HTMA data. And that's why, uh, in my book I have a section on chaos theory and dynamic systems with natural feedback loops that are very complex. And then one of the ways that I approach things is we can generalize about, uh, different aspects of HDMA, fast and slow oxidizers, copper toxicity, magnesium deficiency, stress, energy breakdowns in the mitochondria. So we can generalize at one level But we also need to come back to biochemical individuality. So for example, with a group of, uh, young women who go on the birth control pill or have a copper IUD and each one starts to build up excess copper, there's gonna be an individual variation in how much copper will be built up in each one. How much of the excess copper gets stored in the liver?

Can we unpack this for one second? Because I want to make sure people who are listening know that, you know, we've mentioned birth control pills and copper toxicity in the same breath many times now. And the reason for this is the affinity of estrogen with copper. The higher a woman's estrogen levels, generally speaking, the higher her copper levels are going to run. And what this means is when you start playing with hormones without having a respect for how they how they affect minerals, you can take people to some, to some bad places, for lack of a better term. Is that fair, Rick?

That's a good summary of it.

Thank you.

That the hormones are very powerful and they are very strongly connected to the mind-body's mineral system that's reflected in, in the hair analysis. And one of my students, Rick Fisher, up in Vancouver, who's got an excellent website called coppertoxic.com— he's been doing that for 10 years now— and he just compiled a book pulling together the key points that he's accumulated on his website and put it into a book for So there's a lot of good information that's been compiled and pulled together relating, uh, hormones and copper toxicity and the cascade of changes in the mineral system that Eck and Watts discovered with their hair analysis research. That is, the copper builds up It triggers a loss of potassium from the cells, creating the low potassium level you often see in the copper toxic slows. So, and building up the calcium, the soft tissue calcification.

I wanna share that, you know, there's another element to this that I think is very important for people listening in 2024, which is that many of the chemicals we're exposed to in our environment have estrogenic qualities. Equality. So even if you're not on a birth control pill, even if you're not a woman, you can wind up with this copper toxicity. And the last point, I'm really curious how much you've looked into this, Rick. Just so you know, I came at this having years ago found out about Morley Robbins.

Yeah, and well, at least one of my students.

Yeah. And, uh, he impressed upon me the importance of giving people copper, getting them to eat enough copper. I tried this in my practice was not happy with the results because I did not feel that the one-size-fits-all protocol was appropriate. And I ended up digging into, well, how much copper? Because I think anyone coming at this might say, well, you're basically just demonizing copper. Copper toxicity this, copper toxicity that.

It's not demonizing copper.

No, I know, but I'm— I want to set this up for people because the other reason that I'm very interested in copper dynamics, or the other thing I look at as a potential serious issue, is the use of copper sulfate in agriculture. Because, you know, I did the numbers, and the numbers are that about 60 to 70 milligrams of copper sulfate are sprayed on our food every year for every man, woman.

Yeah, Rick Fisher talks about that. Yeah.

And so there's this huge influx of copper from our diet that's not necessarily included in nutritional data and tables from, say, the USDA, and that we really can't quantify. So we're set up to have high, high intakes of— and exposures to copper. And the question I want to ask you is this: is there a difference between copper sulfate that is entering my body on, say, organic grapes— because it is an organic pesticide, for those of you wondering why I said organic— and so people who eat organic may have a higher intake than people who don't, ironically. Is that different, and does the body treat that differently than copper that's been complexed in organic grass-fed beef liver?

Those are good questions. I haven't looked into those specifically. 'Cause I got introduced to copper toxicity, uh, over 40 years ago by Eckenwatz. Hmm. And, uh, uh, that's where my focus has been and that's where I have seen the evidence of copper toxicity. Now you give a good example of trying to give copper, uh, according to Morley Robbins' viewpoint. Now, uh, Rick Fisher, who's got the coppertoxic.com website and wrote this book, he and I agree that copper is a vital nutrient mineral. Copper toxicity does not deny that fact metabolically. Mm. But the buildup of copper toxicity wound up messing up normal copper metabolism in millions of teenage girls and women as they became more and more copper toxic. So they were no longer able to metabolize and utilize vital copper metabolically in a proper way. That's why when you try to follow Morley giving these people copper, they have usually a bad outcome. They're not ready for it. Now, Morley read my book many years ago and then contacted me, want to learn more about HDMA. So we went over individual HTMAs and in doing so, not only did he see the slow oxidizer patterns as a dominant pattern, up 70 to 80% of the population, but he saw the vital importance of magnesium. And then it clicked for him. This magnesium mineral is very important. Mm-hmm. See, that's when he created his Magnesium Advocacy Group and did a great job with that Facebook group in educating literally thousands of people worldwide about the importance of magnesium. And then when it came to copper, he never took my course and learned systematically the low copper and the buildup of copper toxicity. And there were gaps in his understanding of copper, uh, in the HTMAs. And then he read about ceruloplasmin needing to be bound to copper, and then ceruloplasmin needing to be bound to iron. So that led him to iron toxicity.

Yes.

And that's where he's been at. And then he came up with the root cause protocol, the one, one size fits all. So Morley has done a fabulous job, in my view, about magnesium and magnesium deficiencies.

Yes.

And educating people about magnesium. Uh, I have a lot of questions about what he's done with copper and copper toxicity and iron toxicity.

What I observed, and I don't know how to what degree you and your practice, you know, took very detailed dietary histories, but I started to take very detailed dietary histories when I realized that patients had no idea what they were eating. And this, I, mea culpa, this was me. I didn't think, I didn't think that I could possibly be as wrong as I was about what I was eating. And I say that as at the time I was a 29, 30-year-old doctor. I'd been following guys like Chris Masterjohn for years, Weston A. Price Foundation. I thought I'd read all the books. I thought I, I thought I knew enough to know what I was eating. And then I finally put my data into this app called Cronometer that we use. We use it extensively to counsel patients. And part of why we do that is that I saw in my data how all over the place I could be and how little of some things I was getting. And then as I worked more and more and more with that, uh, application, it became more and more apparent to me, as especially as I, as I saw patient data roll in, people's mineral ratios can be wildly different one from another depending on very small, seemingly inconsequential changes in their diet. And to your point about copper, Obviously it's an essential mineral. I don't tell people to limit it in their diet. What I'm wary of is when they do extreme things like say eat an ounce of beef liver a day or take 6 beef liver capsules every day, particularly when they don't have something like say manganese or zinc to balance it out. We rarely will you see high manganese intake in someone who's eating, say, you know, not eating say nuts and seeds or, or certain grains, sometimes root vegetables. Uh, likewise with zinc, it tends to be chronically low in people who avoid meat. And honestly, a lot of people have to eat quite a lot more meat than they're used to eating in order to have anywhere near an ideal zinc intake in my book. And so I felt that many people were missing this level of complexity in their thinking about minerals right from the get-go, which partly explains why there's such a variability in my view to why people do well or, or, or or better or worse on different protocols?

Well, again, we come back to biochemical individuality.

Yes.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. People's, uh, uh, HTMAs may have certain, uh, general commonalities, but there are also significant differences. And, uh, people have different toxic loads. That their bodies are carrying. They have different stresses, uh, they have different dynamics in their relationships, in their jobs, in their education, in their exercise, in their exposure to toxic metals and other toxins in the environment. And I had talked to Dr. Watts many years ago about the nutritional value of different foods. And he emphasized the variability in the nutritional content of foods depending on where they're grown, what's in the soil or what's left in the soil, uh, what kind of nutrients are added to the soils and the environment that the foods are grown in. So it's important to keep in mind the generalities that are valid and useful give us an understanding at a general level, but always keeping in mind the biochemical individuality. And the feedback loops and mechanisms and how soon or how long it takes before a person goes into a copper dump or other metal detox. So you have all kinds of variations. So just imagine what that's going to do to research.

Right. I'm curious.

Yes. And what is research gonna, uh, be doing without HDMA data and at least having, uh, a basic understanding of fast and slow oxidizers and understanding the turning point that occurred with the introduction of female birth control.— that had a profound effect on the under— system. I'll give you an example. My mother was born in 1906. She had my brother in 1935. She had me in 1937. So, by the time the birth control pill and IUDs came out, she was done having kids and worrying about contraception. She remained a fast oxidizer till she died at the age of 90. Hmm. You will not find very many, wow, female fast oxidizers anymore. So basically our society going back to 1960 as a major turning point. With the birth control changing the vast majority of females from fast to slow oxidizers, who then gave birth to copper-toxic babies, both female and male. So in the younger generations, you find many, many more males who are copper toxic than in my generation.

Hmm.

So have you seen, so we have to keep in mind historical perspectives.

So, so, and, and on that note, you've got, I, I, I don't know, I wonder if you're the oldest actively practicing hair tissue mineral analysis practitioner.

Leland Stillman. Ek died 30 years ago. Do you know how he died?

No. Mm-mm.

Eck was always obsessed with sodium-potassium inversions.

Yes.

And he was always a super fast oxidizer. And he found himself with sodium-potassium inversions. And being the owner of ARL, he could run a hair sample anytime he wanted. So he was always seeing the high potassium and low sodium and low Na/K ratio. And what I had heard is that over a period of time, 30 years ago, he began to get nauseous. And of course he was getting retests every month or so. And seeing the sodium potassium inversion, and he kept driving down the potassium, never recognizing that he was losing loads and loads of potassium, so that instead of having a true Na/K inversion, he was creating a higher and higher Na/K ratio. And one of the major symptoms of a high Na to K is nausea. And the more he drove his potassium down, the higher his Na to K ratio went, and the nausea got more and more severe and out of control on a reflex level.

What would you have changed about his protocols if he'd come to you for advice?

I would have told him, uh, you're losing potassium. You need to take more magnesium and potassium and zinc and just focus on stabilizing the intracellular minerals.

Mm.

And Stop inflating your Na to K ratio by driving your potassium down further and further. Keeping it simple. You don't need a, a broad protocol to correct that dynamic. Hmm.

Very interesting. Yeah, very, yeah.

Now, an interesting aspect of Beck's work is he was always looking for dramatic changes and improvements in HDMA retests. And he would get very frustrated with the fact that with truly burned out low oxidizers, that it was very hard to pick up the extremely low sodium and potassium levels, no matter what mega doses of sodium and potassium raisers he gave. Hmm. And that's when he came to the conclusion that it was probably because so many of these people were in such adrenal burnout that they weren't ready for adrenal stimulation. To raise the sodium level that, uh, he decided he's got to put their adrenals to sleep. So he reached for Paramin. You know why it's called Paramin?

No.

Because Paramin was his formula for fast oxidation, which had all the ingredients it currently has but it also had parathyroid glandular in it.

Okay.

To raise the calcium in a fast oxidizer. Hmm. But he knew he couldn't leave parathyroid glandular in piramine, giving it to slow oxidizers who already had high calcium. So he took out the parathyroid glandular. And so what, uh, the piramide has the effect of keeping sodium and potassium low in a lot of the, um, burned-out slow oxidations. Interesting. Hmm.

We've run over.

What I can, what I can do is bring kind of an historical viewpoint, because I, I've been at this for 44 years.

Yeah, it's been really incredible to hear your story, and I would love to chat with you again and, and dive more. You know, two of our listeners have asked us to, to dive into copper toxicity, its relations to thyroid and the calcium shell, but unfortunately I don't— I've got a hard stop here and I've gotta run cook some dinner, but we'd love to have you back and chat about more of the intricacies in a part 2.

But I'd love to do that, but also feel free to contact me personally by phone or Zoom or whatever, and, uh, we can talk further.

Thank you. Yes. Um, do you want to tell everyone where they can find your book and what the title is, and also your course that you alluded to?

Well, my books are on Amazon. Uh, they, they can be printed on demand. And, um, and what is it called?

Tell everyone.

The Strands of Health is the hair analysis book, and, uh, Breaking the Judge: Freeing the Inner Child is a psychology book. And they go together very well because what links them together is stress, the mind-body connection.

Yes, yes, we deal with that a lot in the practice because we've obviously seen the power of it.

So I think you, I think you'll find that the judge concept will really make a lot of sense to you and make a lot of sense out of your experience in the medical field.

It did, and it does. And what about your HTMA course?

They can sign up for my course on my website.

Which is?

There are 6. The website is malterinstitute.org. M-A-L-T-E-R institute.org.

Okay, great.

Wonderful.

Thank you for joining us. It's been a real pleasure.

It's been a pleasure. Thank you. And I assume that you use ARL?

Yes, we do.

Keep up with that because they have retained the original norm for HTMAs. In our copper toxic society— and I've got a slide program on that if you'd like to see that— our copper toxic society has produced 75 to 80% of the population being slow oxidizers with high calcium. Mm-hmm. You can't generate new norms of healthy people in that kind of society.

I'm with you.

Mm-hmm. It's been a pleasure.

Likewise. We look forward to seeing you again. Yes.

Okay. Thank you, Dr. Malter. Have a great week. Thanks so much.

Thanks everyone for tuning in. Tune in for the next episode.