Avoid Lead Exposure Risks You May Not Realize, with Dr. Lyn Patrick

Foreign. Hello and welcome back to the five Journeys Feel freaking amazing podcast. Ed can't be here today but I. He's missing out actually because we have Dr. Lynn. Patrick Lynn is a licensed naturopathic physician who has been in practice for 39 years. She specializes in environmental medicine, treating exposure to toxins and toxicants and trains physicians and primary healthcare providers in environmental medicine in a year long training program@emiglobal.com super excited to have this conversation because Lynn, this is near and dear to my heart. Welcome and thanks for being here.

Oh, I'm excited to be here Wende. You know it was such a pleasure to meet both of you in person at a 4M coincidentally. Right. We didn't even know that both of us were, all three of us were going to be in the same room at the same time. And there you are, I'm about to go on stage. I had no idea they were going to. How can we say this? Use the bright lights on you on the big stage.

And I'm fangirling on the other side like there's like Patrick, oh my God.

Well but here's the thing. I usually speak in to teaching, you know, groups like physicians that I'm lecturing to and I'm really interested in interacting with my audience. Right. Because that's the thing that helps people learn is when you tell stories and when you interact with them. So we'll tell some stories.

With the bright lights you can't see anything.

And I was like, you guys, are you out there? And I know the recording probably looks like who is this? Who has never been on a stage before but you know, it, it matters more to me that I get to connect with my audience than the optics I guess.

So let's dive in.

Never be an influencer. What?

I have a question for you Lynn, because one, we have a whole bunch of questions to review. But yeah, how did you get into this? Like why environmental medicine?

That's a story. Okay. So I went to school with a gentleman named Walter Crinian. He was in the class ahead of me. This was in 1983. Two he graduated, I graduated in 1984.

Is this Bester University?

Bester University? Yep. It's the more well known nature pathing medical school. So he went off and did his thing and he got very interested in toxic and exposure back then. Right. So Fast forward to 1999. I hadn't had much contact with him but he was giving an all day seminar on toxicants and health. And so I went, sitting next to me was My dear friend, Dr. Saram Khalsa, who's an internist that practices in Hollywood. Beautiful, beautiful man who now has been practicing environmental medicine along with me for the last 20 years. And Dr. Cranin was up there on the podium and he kept telling story after story after story about these patients that he had seen that had chronic illnesses due to environmental toxic and exposure. And Dr. Kahlson and I were sitting there, back there going, oh my God, I saw that patient. I saw that patient. I saw that patient. I had no idea that's what was really going on with them, right? So I had been in practice, you know, since 1985. And that point I had some patients under my belt. I realized I didn't get this crucial information in my education, nor did anybody teach me afterwards. So the seminar's over. Dr. Koss and I are elbowing our way up to the front of the, the huge group of docs. There was probably about 100 docs there who were fervently trying to get more information from Dr. Crinian. And we said, we're taking you out to dinner. And we basically, we strong armed, we're.

Going to feed you, you know, well.

Who'S going to teach this after you're gone? You're not going to live forever, sorry to say.

Geez.

And. And he said, gosh, I don't know, I don't really have any proteges. And I said, all right, here's what we're going to do. You're going to teach a postgraduate class. It's going to take a year. And he goes, yeah, it's going to take a year. Dr. Koss and I were in the first class that was taught at Southwest College of Naturopathic Medicine. There were probably about 30 doctors in that class. We learned environmental medicine by testing ourselves. So here's what happened is we actually did fat bio back in the day when we were really looking at toxicants that accumulated that we call body burden, right? What we are hanging on to, we did fat biopsies on each other, sent them into the lab. I was the third most toxic person in the class. Dr. Crinian pulled me aside afterwards and he said, are you okay? And I was like, well, you know, I'm not perfect, but I'm able to work. And he said, want to show you this? So he showed me that I had extremely high levels in my fat tissue of several pesticides and a termiticide that I had picked up unknowingly by living in a house in Tucson, Arizona.

Hold on, wait, Lynn. My tagline is because you live on this earth.

Because I live on.

You live on the earth and, and, and you're sensitive soul. So you pick it up, right?

Oh yes. I have several what we call snips that kind of guarantee that I would have been a yellow canary. So coincidentally at that time I was traveling, teaching and practicing full tilt boogie. Right. You know, 40 hours to 60 hours a week. I still had some adrenal function. But when I traveled, I could not sleep in hotel rooms. So I had to literally have an extra suitcase that had an air purifier in it. I would have to go in a day early, put the air purifier on in the hotel room so that I could sleep that you know, the morning of and then that evening I could get some sleep. But you know, not very much. And then I had to lecture on like four hours of sleep. Not very good. So I think Dr. Crinian saved my life because I can kind of see the trajectory of where that would have gone. You know, that particular pesticide, Myrex is the name of it, is a carcinogen. And I have a family history of breast cancer. So.

You know, pile it on.

Without understanding how that toxicant is eliminated from the body, I would have held on to it.

Lynn, I want to interrupt you here because you just highlighted something that I always say to people, which is you can't study yourself because you don't have two of you to say what would have happened if you hadn't done something or if you had. But you understand the impact of removing the risk of cancer and removing all of the things that cause genetic malformations and inflammation and ultimately lead to disease. And it's very impactful. So I want to highlight. You don't know what you would have gotten, but you're pretty sure you would have.

Yeah. So I'm 68 years old. I'm the healthiest I've ever been in my life. But I'll tell you, I practice a full tilt boogie detoxification lifestyle.

So tell me about that. What does that look, what does that mean to you?

Tonight, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, I have a six person sauna and we have girls night three nights a week, which is girls detox night. So we go.

Okay, wait, what do you wear? Like I wear, I wear a tank top and underwear. So are y' all naked or you just like, is it let it all hang out?

How does it's. It's, you know, it's each to their own.

Okay. So you show up as you are and how Long do you spend in the sauna and how hot is it?

So the science about sauna. I just did two podcasts on my podcast about sauna and the science on sauna. But I'll tell you because I didn't have a study to back this up, but clinically, between 20 and 30 minutes you're going to plateau out in terms of what you're getting rid of. So a good full on sweat for 20 to 30 minutes is what you want. So it's not like from the moment you step into the sauna, it's from the moment that you know that you are sweating because you're not eliminating until you sweat. So we use a loofah or a dry brush and we get our entire bodies sweating. And just fun fact, the most elimination occurs in the scalp area. The scalp area has more of the sebaceous glands that we call the detox glands, right? So these are special sweat glands from which we excrete this stuff called sebum. You know, you can call it oil or whatever you want, but that's what comes out of the scalp. So very important to wash your hair after you sauna. You know, my patients never wanted to do this and we explained to them if you want to get better, you have to use an oil based soap and you have to clean your entire body. So after that we jump in the cold plunge. Now that's not necessarily specifically for detoxification, but it's great for the autonomic nervous system, right? There are all kinds of benefits for alternating hot and cold. So in there, in the cold plunge, it depends on the temperature and the season. So in the winter when we have to chop holes in the ice to get in gold plunge, it's in and out. I'm not Wim Hof. I can't stay in there very long, but at least I get in right? I give myself 5,000 gold stars for that. In the summer when it's warmer and the temperature is in the high 40s, low 50s, then I can stay in for several minutes. And really that's all you need. So that I think, you know, if we're talking about what can we all strive for to adopt, to really try to decrease our body burden of things that we are hanging on to. Sauna is a wonderful tool. Now I know that not everybody can have a six person sauna or even an outdoor sauna or anything more than a little zip up sauna, but I'll tell you another great story is that I was on my way to a conference environmental Medicine conference. I live in a small town near a small city. They fuel the plane with the doors open. So I got on the plane at five o' clock in the morning. Little tiny plane, they were fueling it and the fumes were just coming right in the door. And I thought, this is not good. There's nothing good about this. They should have the oxygen masks down for everybody. And I talked to the stewardess and she's like, you know, get over it. This is what we do. So I got to the conference and I felt, oh, I am one of those canaries for solvents. And the jet fuel has a lot of solvents in it. So I was feeling terrible and I had to talk the next day. And the gentleman who was there with his little zip up sauna said, take it up to your room, use it please. And I don't really, you know, I'm not a great fan of the zip up saunas. I think there's some issues with the material. But I was desperate. So I brought up to my room, got in it for an hour, got out, took a shower, soapy shower with whatever Soap I had. Dr. Bronner's I think is a great soap. And I got up in the morning and I felt like a hundred dollars. I mean, well, these days I felt like a billion dollars. So I have to say I think there is. And that that's not the only time that's happened to me, but it's the most impactful for me. It was like, okay, sauna really does work.

So everything is better than nothing, right? Like everything you do, anything you do is better than not doing anything. Get in the game, even if it's not a perfect game.

Oh, I'll tell you, I have worked with lots and lots of folks who have no disposable income at all. I used to run an AIDS clinic that was fully funded, right? We had grant money to treat 100 AIDS patients a year. My folks who don't have disposable income, I teach them how to get a small heater, go in their bathroom, put a towel under the door, turn the heater on, get the heat up to 100 degrees or whatever temperature it is that they can sweat and do it and then get in a sauna and shower up with some Dr. B's and do that every day. And I've gotten a lot of multiply chemically sensitive patients better. Not just through that mechanism. Of course. There are other things they have to do, but that was, I think, one of the main ones. So anybody can Sweat. You don't have to have the money to buy an expensive sauna.

Let's back up like 20 step because I was so fascinated by what it had to be personal. Right. And so thank you for sharing your story. Let's back up and talk about for the listeners. What do they need to pay? What are the, you know, I always think of toxins as metals, mycotoxins and that other massive bucket which includes the flame retardants, the nail polish, the phthalates, the plastics, the styrenes, the gasoline fumes. So we're probably only going to have time to focus on one today and we could bring you back and talk about another. So what's the one you want to talk about? Is it metals? Is it mycotoxins or is it other?

Oh, this is so, you know, it's.

Like your favorite kit.

My specialty area is in metals. So that's the one that I talk most easily about. But I do not, not in any way, shape or form want to minimize the rest of the bucket because that bucket is really important. And the problem with that bucket is that we are today exposed to a myriad of toxicants that are endocrine disruptors and carcinogens and immunotoxicants, especially pesticides, as well as the rest of the things like some of the acrylics that are in nail polish, etcetera, etcetera.

So death by a thousand cuts, Lynn. That's what I call it.

Right.

So we'll focus on metals.

It's crucial, though. I just want to say it's crucial for everyone to really reevaluate your personal care products and the cleaning products that you use in your home and to really come, you know, have a come to whomever, talk with yourself about how just something as simple as vacuuming with a HEPA filter in your vacuum, as well as wet mopping and wet dusting can significantly impact the daily exposure that you get to chemicals that are carcinogens and endocrine disruptors.

I want to pop on that because I was horrified when I read there was a study in 1989 from Massachusetts. Go Boston, that that found that one in every six deaths was actually due to air or water quality. Now this is in 1989, okay. So it's only gotten worse since there. So even filter your water and your air to the best of your budget.

Right.

Is going to take you.

And we're at that point. You know, I've been heavily involved in what happened in East Palestine, and now I'm equally horrified by what Happened on the island of Maui. And I think we're at that point now. You know, Dr. Crinian always used to say, it's no longer voluntary to have air filtration in your home. And I was like, oh, come on, Walter. You know, we've got mercury, we've got lead, we've got all these other things that we have to worry about. And he would just look at me with his beautiful compassionate smile and say, I've read the literature on this. I feel confident on this. And I now, having educated myself in the last 25 years, feel the same way that we all have to have some form of air filtration. And water filtration is absolutely critical. So be that as it may, you know, those two now necessary inputs into our lives. Yes. Let's talk about metals.

Okay, so we'll set that to the side. So tell me, what are the most harmful heavy metal toxicants? Like, what should people. You know, because there's a whole list of them you test.

Yeah, well, I'll tell you what the government says, so.

I don't want to know what the government says.

Oh, no, no. The one thing I. The government about. Yeah, I know the EPA has. There's regulatory capture there. I know that all too well. But there's another agency that is a sub agency of the center for Disease Control, and they're called the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the atsdr. You probably never heard of them, but they actually do the research that. The actual research that is the foundation upon which the EPA creates regulation. So they know everything. And they have monographs for over 200 toxicants. Each monograph is over 300 pages long. So that's what, you know, we train our doctors. That's the information that we rely upon to really understand toxicants. So what they have created is called the priority list of toxicants. And this is literally a list from 1 to 200. I don't have it up on my desktop or I'd show it to you, but I know it by heart of the chemicals that you're, you know, you speaking to the consumers of healthcare out there and the doctors you are most likely to made to be made sick by. And to be killed by. Okay, now how do they know that? Well, they actually have done the research and they have identified which toxicants you're most likely to be exposed to. And that's based on something called the Superfund research. Which Superfund sites. Everybody pretty much knows what they are. Right. So Superfund sites as well as the actual rating of the toxicity of the toxicants. So we actually have a big mathematical algorithmic formula by which we decide how toxic toxicants are. So guess what the first three are. Lead. Arsenic is number one. Let's go by the numbers. Arsenic is number one dot Mercury and lead are number two, and number three, cadmium is number seven. So those four metals, arsenic, lead, mercury, and cadmium, are literally the top metals that A, we're exposed to, and B, are most likely to make us sick and kill us. So where do they come from? Right, we want to know so we can avoid them. Lead comes from a myriad of places. Some of the sickest people that I have ever treated were made sick by lead because they were taking herbal medicines that were manufactured outside of the United States, either in. I didn't name names or anything, but yeah, Ayurvedic medicines. So Ayurvedic medicines, Ayurveda or Ayurvedic medicine, is a particular practice of medicine from Southeast Asia, India in particular, that utilizes botanical medicines, but also purposefully sometimes adds metals to those medicines. So why purposeful?

What do you get out of it?

I have talked to Ayurvedic doctors here, like Dr. Vasant Laud in the United States, and he said, we no longer do that. And I said, well, here's a paper from the New England Journal of Medicine that shows that the, you know, know that they did an assay of these medicines and found thousands and thousands and thousands of times higher than allowable levels of lead and mercury in them. And he said, well, you know, that's. That's an older practice that's no longer used, and it's illegal in the United States to do that. But if those medicines are imported, people can end up with serious acute metal intoxication.

I'm not usually. I'm not brand conscious, typically, Lynn. But I always say to people, for supplements, you want to know that comes from. Because, you know, we. We make supplements ourselves and we test it for metals, mycotoxins, contaminants, and then we test to make sure it actually has what it's supposed to have. It's sort of a dual track. And so this is the kind of thing where if it's coming from some other place and it's not made in a GMP facility and it's not being tested, you have no idea what you're taking in?

None. We only have the current or the recent experience of the contamination of lead and other metals in baby food and in chocolate to understand how common this is. Right. The chocolate contamination was because it was lead in the soil. The cadmium came from the fertilizer used in the soil, which came from mine tailings, which is where the cadmium came from. So we know that this is all too common. And I'm working on a current article looking at lead in spices and herbs, which is also a common contaminant. And I'm sad to say this, but especially in turmeric, as well as some other botanicals. Right.

What about the live. Live root? Do you find it in the root itself? Is it being absorbed from the soil?

It is absorbed from the soil, yeah. Now, I have to say, because I'm a geek and I look at this stuff, the turmeric that we get here in the States is mostly grown in Hawaii. And in Hawaii, they do not have the same problem that they in India, in Bangladesh, in Southeast Asia, where a lot of the turmeric that gets into the marketplace as a processed powder comes from. So even though Hawaii's got its own problems, right, with the volcanic emissions, the vog, it is cleaner than the fresh root, the powdered turmeric that comes from other parts of the world.

So this is the third point, which is make a better choice. You might not be able to be perfect, but level up in some way and make a choice that's going to raise you even if it's not perfect. Get better, right? Right. Don't focus on how you're failing. Focus on where you can improve.

So the other place that lead comes from, since we're talking about lead, is that. And this is another story. Right. Got to tell the stories, because that's how we implant this stuff in our brain and go, oh, right. That's where I heard that. So I had a patient who worked in the penal, Worked in the prison system, so she had access to all kinds of interesting connections. And she was sick with multiple issues. She was hypertensive. She had autoimmune disease. She had autonomic nervous system problems, like we think about with mold exposure as well as with chronic fatigue exposure. She was a sick puppy. We tested her, and she had extremely high levels of lead in her urine and in her blood. What we surmised from that is that she was exposed to lead because we tested her bones and we found her bones were okay. She wasn't leaching that lead from her bone. She didn't have osteoporosis, but she was exposed to lead currently. So we explained that to her. We wanted to treat her, but we most particularly wanted to find out where she was being Exposed because if we didn't deal with that, we would be treating her, we would be chelating her forever and ever and ever. Right.

Wait, can we pause for a second, Lynn? Because, you know, the training that I had was that you can evaluate stores based on provoked urine, that you cause it to come out. So for the listeners, when you're testing the blood, if it's positive, it's because it's an active exposure. Because you're going to sequester that, you're going to put that away. The body knows it's toxic, you're going to have it floating around the bloodstream. So if it's positive, it's now, it's not an old exposure.

So to distinguish that, the one exception to that is if you have active osteoporosis or you have active breakdown of your bone, which sometimes women will after being treated for breast cancer with cisplatin or any cancer for cisplatin. That use, that cisplatin is used for is that that can be a source of lead. Your own body can be a source of lead in your blood. So but we, in this particular woman, we figured that out. So she went to town. I mean, she tested everything. And guess where she found the lead. She had some beautiful imported ceramic dishware from Portugal, I believe she had got at American Home Furnishings. She had an industrial hygienist. I said she had a lot of connection. She had a connection to a really good industrial hygienist who tested this plate for lead. It had about a thousand times over the allowable level for lead. Now there are ongoing two class action suits right now with both Pottery Barn and American Home Furnishings. I think, actually, I take that back. They've been settled by now due to lead poisoning from that imported, you know, it's, it is legal to use lead as part of the glazing of this imported ceramic pottery. So that's the reason I bring this up is because it is honestly a more common source of exposure than you would think. Right.

What do you think of the 3M testing strips for lead?

The ones you get at Home Depot.

Or Lowe's, they come in a pack. I got, I got them from my boyfriend who sends me everything.

Yeah. Is the trade name Lead Check? I think you know the trade name because I can't remember who makes Lead Check. But Lead Check is the ones that we suggest they are sold in any, you know, they're sold all over the.

Place like an eight pack of sticks, right? It's little sticks that you.

They're more like strips, but yes, so. So these are strips. And the 3M product may be good as well, but the Consumer safety. Consumer Product Safety Commission has checked them, and that's what the EPA actually recommends, and they are good. Now, they are specifically for dust. So you can't use them for toys, you can't use them for plates, you can't use them for Ayurvedic medicines, as far as I know, because they're specifically made to be able to identify and quantify the lead and dust. And that's what they're made for and used for is if you have a home that was built before 1978, there's probably some lead paint at some point in one of the layers of that house. And speaking of exposure sources, the most common exposure in the adult population in United States of America is home renovation.

Because Weekend Warner warriors, right? You cut a hole in the wall and bam, you've just released lead.

How would you know if.

If your home is built before 19? I have Lynn, I have that patient. She showed up in my office, and her lead level provoke testing was 95. I was like, girl, you're doing like, first of all, do you live in an old house? She goes, yeah, I live in. In Victorian. Okay. Did you do any home DIY project? She goes, yeah, we stripped the paint off of. Blah, blah, blah. I'm like, okay, no more DIY projects for you. Because her lead level has been consistently bumping every time she does a project. Yeah, so you can't do it.

And this was in her urine leveling.

Yeah, I provoked urine.

Very interested to know what her blood level is.

You know, I never even did it. I should do it. I'm going to say to her, every time you do a DIY project, go get your blood drawn and see if you have lead. Because she doesn't have osteoporosis. So, right.

There is a certain percentage of blood lead that is from bone. There is a consistent turnover in a certain superficial layer of bone that does contain lead lead. So there's some, but not. All right. It's a smaller percentage. I think it's around. I can't remember. I don't carry all this stuff around in my head, but 25%, 30%, something like that. So that is another common source of lead because lead was used in gasoline and lead was. And it's still used. And I have to say, this lead is still allowed to be used in gasoline for small aircraft and for certain boats or so for certain marine use, we still allow leaded gas. Now we just Had a case of a young girl who lived near a small craft airport. And the planes took off, went right over their house, came in, landing right over their house. The airport was small, so they didn't, there was no legal need for mitigation. You know, in large airports they actually have to help mitigate the homes in a certain area of the airport. But this was a small craft airport. This kid had a blood lead level that was so high that she might as well have been living back in the 60s or the 70s in the summer, you know, when we had thousands of kids who actually died of acute lead toxicity, this really, you know, didn't make the news, but it was a phenomenon because of the lead that was in the atmosphere from leaded gasoline. So we've made great strides in taking it out of standard automobile gas, but we haven't finished yet because it's still in small aircraft fuel.

I think it gets even more horrifying, Lynn, because think about it. When you're pregnant, you give 50% of your body stores to the baby. And then if you nurse, you give even more. Now I'm a huge proponent of pregnancy and nursing. I had four babies, but I, it's so funny to watch because each one, the oldest, has more medical issues than the youngest. It's just so interesting to me to watch that, you know, I cleaned out myself and I had very high body burden back to like, how are we getting exposed? How are my 15 year old patients getting lead? I'm like, well your mom has lead, so she generously donated it to you. So there's so many ways. And 10 million homes in the United States still have lead pipes. Correct.

You know, I was just speaking with a family practice doc outside of Flint, Michigan and you know, that's not resolved. There's nothing resolved about Flint, Michigan. And they also have very high levels of arsenic in their water. Oh, by the way, I'm going to be talking about arsenic next. And she said that she is now seeing women of reproductive age, right. Who are younger when they were living in Flint 10 years ago and their blood lead levels are 15, 25, 30. What's going to happen when they get pregnant, it they're going to pass that burden on to their growing fetus. So I think that, you know, in the medicine that you and I want the world to practice, especially here in the United States, that needs to be a standard part of preconception care, right? You know, we need.

And not six months before you're going to get pregnant, right? I'm like, that's not enough Runway for me to actually help you. We need a couple. I mean, I've been in the. I've been trying to get rid of.

My stupid metals for four years.

So I'm particularly loyal. I have terrible detox. And so I'm always like, give me two years at least to get the body burden down enough to make it meaningful.

Right. So that number, number one metal that's on the list, the ATSDR priority list, is arsenic. There are at least conservative estimates. According to the EPA scientists, 11 million people in the United States that are potentially exposed to levels of arsenic that can cause cancer. It is a human carcinogen. It also is responsible for such bizarre things as gout. And we think that now, looking at the epidemiological literature, that there are many more conditions, health conditions, that are related to arsenic. Peripheral neuropathy, a good case to illustrate that. So I had a nurse in my practice who, luckily for her, worked in a law firm and was the environmental kind of researcher for cases that involved environmental toxicity. I live in southwest Colorado, ground zero for gas and oil, historically, always has been, might as well be Texas, right? So lots and lots of cases of exposure from there, there. So she came in and she said, I have this peripheral neuropathy. So numbness, tingling and pain in her hands and her feet that was climbing up to her elbows and her knees. And she'd had it for a year. And she said, I went to see a neurologist and he checked me for arsenic in my blood and I didn't have any. So he said, that's not the problem. But I know she even knew, knew that this one of the symptoms of arsenic exposure was peripheral neuropathy. And I said, tell me about what happened to you. And this is where environmental medicine is really like, let's talk about what happened coincident to the onset of the symptoms, at least within the last year. And she said, well, I was helping my husband build a deck in our backyard, a big old deck.

And.

I said, did you wear gloves or a mask? And she was like, what? No, why would I have done that? Why would I?

Why would I have done that, right?

So I asked her, is this treated wood? Is this outdoor treated wood? Now, this was a while ago, before they took arsenic out of the process of treating what was called cca, Copper chromic arsenate used that the, the wood was actually dipped in. So it was in a tank. That's how they made outdoor wood. Now they just use copper chromate, which is not exactly safe either. But they took the arsenic out because they had had some fatal exposures of kids to the arsenic contaminated dirt and wood that the decks were made out of, right? And the dirt that was underneath the deck. So I said to her, you know, was this CCA wood? And she said, well, well, yeah, it was, you know, it's copper chromic arsenate treated wood. And I said, did it rain while you were building the deck? And she said, yeah, we had great rainstorms in the summer, you know, because we have monsoons. And so I said, okay, let's check your urine arsenic levels, which is where you're supposed to look according to the government. According to the atsdr, that's the place you're supposed to look provoked.

Which I thought was so interesting. Just literally go pee.

Go here, go pee in a cup, right? So I had her go pee in a cup. We sent it into the lab, and she had arsenic levels still because, and this is the part of the mystery that, you know, an astute listener will get right, she still had high levels of arsenic in her urine. Now, arsenic has a very short half life in the body. Ours to days in and out. It does its damage very quickly. But there's some potential evidence that it might be stored in the body, in the tissues, but not stored in the blood. That's why you have to look in the urine. But I thought, oh my gosh, what if that's not the only place she's getting the arsenic? What if that was the main exposure? But she's still got urine levels in her. Arsenic levels in her urine because she's still exposed to. And sure enough, she had a well and private wells. As you know, if you have less than 25 people on a well, nobody comes out to check your metal levels in your well. They don't have to, right? It's not municipal water. So I said, have you checked your well water? And she was like, oh, no. She was very embarrassed. But not everybody has the time to go out and check their well water levels. And sure enough, she had more arsenic that she was continually getting exposed to through her well water. What did we do? Number one rule of toxicology is you remove the exposure from the person or the person from the exposure. So we had her get just a basic reverse osmosis charcoal filtration water filter for her well to get the arsenic out. And then because we suspected and we knew it would not hurt her, we gave her a chelating agent, dmsa, which is a prescription drug to help remove arsenic from her Body, if there was any there. The good news is she recovered from the peripheral neuropathy. Within a month, it went away. And remember, this woman had had this terrible numbness, tingling and pain for over a year. Kept her from sleeping, you know, she was kind of a mess. And within a month, she started getting better. Now, I didn't know all this stuff when I first started practicing medicine, and who knows how many cases of arsenic exposure I missed because, you know, medical schools, we don't learn this stuff.

We don't learn that stuff.

You didn't learn it in your medical school, I didn't learn it in naturopathic medical school. That needs to change. That's part of my mission. But know that your doctors are not going to have the neurologist know he's practicing neurology, right? He's supposed to know that arsenic is not measured in the blood, it's measured in the urine. He didn't even know that. And I cannot tell you how many doctors I've seen make that mistake in the last 20 years and tell their patients, oh, no problem, you know, no arsenic here. Maybe not at the moment. But what about historical exposure that's already caused damage to the peripheral nerves.

So this is so profound, Lynn, because you and I have the same philosophy, that we're meant to be vital, vibrant, healthy, alive, able, interested in intimacy until you're at least 100 and that every decade gets better than the one before. You and I are on that same wavelength. But the majority of people go when you start to get a symptom, they go, well, I'm just getting older. Or my family all has that, or that's in my genes. It's sort of an expectation of failure. And so my first convers comment to the fourth point that we're making is these are not just from getting older. You're not just getting older, you're getting sicker. And that's why you're getting worse, because you're getting environmental exposures that are making you sick. Like, God, I have hearing loss, and I wish I knew about mercury and hearing loss two years ago.

They have found early hearing loss in adolescents at blood lead levels considered perfectly safe. Safe, you know, far under three and a half mics per deciliter in the blood in adolescents who are exposed to lead. So, yeah, I knew, right? Yeah, so. So mercury, I mean, that's a whole. We could talk. I could talk about Mercury for 150 years.

I think I want to drill into.

This point is I want. I want to underscore your Point, if you look at the data from the Environmental Protection Agency, they did a study called the N HAT Study. National Human Exposure to Toxicants Study. No, that's wrong. National Human Adipose Tissue Study where they took 20,000 adipose tissue samples and looked at what was in them. Now this has been so deeply buried by the epa, I can't tell you how hard it is to find it. But I found it and I have it and I use it to teach my docs. Because guess what was in that adipose kinds of solvents, metals, pesticides. I mean, we carry a body burden in our adipose tissue. And the EPA has admitted that as we age that body burden increases. And it is a fairly linear increase. Right. So you and I know that because we see it in our older patients. And that is absolutely. I totally agree with you that the phenomenon of chronic disease getting worse as you get older has nothing to do with aging. It has everything to do with the oxidative stress effect of the toxicants and the body burden that is accelerating as we age because we hang on to so much of that stuff. And I now think, Wendy, I'll tell you, after reading the N HAT study and other studies, I do believe I used to say this was not true. But I've changed my mind. I do think that Mercury and Arsenal Nick are sequestered in the adipose tissue. We hang on to them. We know they're in our tissue.

They got to go somewhere. Lynn. Right. So your, your fat, your bones, your organs, your brain. But so one, my request is that you send me that study. That would be amazing if you send that to me. I do. Well, you know, ignorance is bliss. Knowledge is power.

It was printed on a typewriter. Oh geez, that's how old it is. But yes, I'll send you the whole thing. You can. It is a mind blowing lower.

That's one. But two, this is 0.5. I've been counting the points that you've made because they're all brilliant. If you do everything right, you aren't losing weight. It's because you are storing toxins in your fat and you need to get rid of the toxins so you can lose the fat. The body's smarter than you are. You're not going to lose weight until you get lose the toxins. So for all these women listening who are like, I eat right, I exercise, I sleep enough, I'm not a stress ball and here I am, I can't lose it.

Yes. To stop victim blaming, we have got to do that. I mean Our culture is so bad at victim blaming it, you know. Yes. We have to take responsibility for what I put in our mouths, you know, and what we drink and all that stuff. We've got to do that. But we have to stop blaming ourselves for the intoxicants that we are exposed to unknowingly, that we hang on to without our knowledge.

Yes. So, so, okay, so that was point 5. So let's, I want to drill into for people, listen. Listening what? And by the way, we're not going to finish. Like I haven't even gone near the questions that you gave me because this is such a huge topic. Yeah, we're going to do this. We're going to do more of this. But when you were looking at arsenic, lead and mercury, let's limit it to those three and cadmium maybe. Now let's go for arsenic, lead, mercury. What are the clinical things that the listeners would go, oh, maybe I had an exposure. Aside from living on this earth having mercury fillings, having osteoporosis and eating rice advice, what are the things that people are going to notice in their life? Well, that they're, that they might wonder, are, are. You can track it back to.

I mean, here's the.

For me.

Yeah, let's go metal by metal. So I have a friend, wonderful, brilliant internist in San Francisco. Her name is Jane Hightower. If you guys have not read Diagnosis Mercury, if you've not read this book, this will blow your mind. Because it's her story about how she started out getting a call call from a dermatologist friend of hers who said to her, I just heard this bizarre thing on the radio as I was driving to work. This is how this all started, that women who are losing their hair, it's because they're eating too much tuna fish. And she said, I have never heard that before. They didn't teach us that in medical school. That's bizarre, right? And so. She decided, after much kind of headbanging and trying to figure this out, that there might be a connection between those two things. And it led her to do an in office study. She had a high end, meaning her consumers had lots of money to spend on fish. High end practice of internal medicine in San Francisco. She ended up publishing one of the first studies looking at, at that demographic of men, women and children and their symptomology and their blood mercury levels and the amount of fish they ate. And so she actually calculated their fish intake. So if they were eating a tun, if they were eating sushi, if they were eating Swordfish, if they were eating mackerel. And now we know other fish, like bass, you know, even lake and stream fish. And she had calculated that they were at risk. She looked at their blood mercury levels and, you know, the safe level, according to the EPA, is 5 micrograms per liter of blood. She was finding levels of 40, 50, 70. And these patients had. And these are the five symptoms. They had insomnia, fatigue, headaches, muscle pain and joint pain and difficulty concentrating and memory loss. Right. So those were the five things. They might not have all of them, but they at least had one of them. And so she was able to identify the source of the problem, get them to stop eating fish. And then she continued to check their blood mercury levels as time went on. And it took anywhere from. And this is where we get to the. Some people are good at detoxifying mercury, some people are terrible at detoxifying mercury. Anywhere from a couple of months, months to over a year to get their blood mercury levels back down to normal. Now, just because their blood mercury levels went down to normal doesn't mean their body tissue levels of mercury went back down to normal, because we hang on to mercury in our tissues. The second largest reservoir of mercury in the body after the kidneys is actually the liver. Everybody thinks it's the brain, but it's the liver. So we actually hang on to mercury in our liver. And that's one of the reasons that people might have elevated liver enzymes. When they don't drink, they eat pure food. Maybe they don't have amalgam fillings, but they are eating fish. Right. So she really, she really broke the mold.

Yeah.

You know, I have a question about.

Mercury, Lynn, because with all of these wildfires, forests sequester mercury, and when forests burn conifers, out comes the mercury. Do you know of any studies going on that are. Are looking at the levels of mercury in our food as a result of wildfires? Because it's, it's. Oh, it's heavy, so it falls.

Yeah, we're not there yet. The University of Washington, actually, they had some brilliant researchers who put a. There's a specific sensor that you can use. And I'll talk about where that's been used in human research. They used this sensor and they went up in the air there and flew above the wildfires in. On the Pacific Coast, 2017-2020, when we had those wildfires. And I believe they're still doing the same thing now with the wildfires in British Columbia, which are, of course engulfing forests with needle trees. With needles. So the trees with needles, all the pine trees, all the conifers have a.

Very.

I want to say, ingenious and useful capacity to sequester mercury from the environment. Right. They're doing us a big favor. But when they are burned and the soil, too, there's some mercury in the soil. All of that becomes airborne and it becomes part of the pollutome that we're all exposed to from wildfire smoke. So we won't talk about wildfire smoke today, but what you're thinking is the next step, which is, is where does that wildfire smoke land? And do plants that are not, that don't have needles actually sequester mercury as well? I'm not a botanist. I don't know the answer to that. I would imagine, no, because they did do some studies in the area around Minamata. So for those of you that don't know the Minamata disaster that was in Japan, the Bay of Minamat Minimata became heavily contaminated with mercury as a result of a company there flushing mercury into the bay. And many thousands of humans were affected with acute mercury poisoning as a result. To this day, they still have people who are sick from Minamata disease, it's called. And it's so bad because in Japan, you're not supposed to marry people with Minamata disease because you might have children that have some form of mental retardation. So. So back to the food question. I don't think so, but I have not seen any studies actually looking at that. You know who the person to talk to about this is, who would know the answer. And you should have her on her show because she is amazing. Colleen Kavanaugh used to work in Washington, D.C. on food policy and got so fed up with it that she started her own company with transparency. We just had her in our grand rounds for our physicians training program where she actually assays all of her food that she sells for pesticides and soon including glyphosate and metals with total transparency. So you can actually look at the results of that test.

I've heard her name, so we'll have her on. Thank you.

Check her out. She is amazing. She's doing. She's making real change in the food world because where she goes, everybody's going to have to follow eventually, right?

Yeah. So I have a question for you, Lynn. You know, we've talked about removing the exposure or removing the person from the exposure, but when people. So if you live on this earth, you're exposed and we have scratched the surface of the exposure. Are there Some things that you can say to the audience, okay, do these four or five things. Aside from sauna and dry brushing, are there some things that people can do that is like a pick list? Here's, here's your top five. Pick a few. Do them every one to three days or whatever. Like what is it prescriptive? Do you have something like that?

No. Prescriptions every. Well, it's stuff that I would put on a prescription pad.

I more mean, you know, like is it, is it sort of put in a nice little package for people that they can go, okay, I'm going to do these three things, you know.

Well, here are my go tos. Water filtration is no longer voluntary. No longer. We have two of my colleagues that I work with, Dr. Tina Bowden and Dr. Ann Marie Fine have done, done an excellent job of lecturing. It's free on YouTube. Just look up the national association of Environmental Medicine. Their recordings of their lectures are on. There it is, the down and dirty about water contamination. So water filtration necessitates a reverse osmosis type with activated charcoal filtration type filter. If you are on a budget and you cannot afford it, I would suggest something like zero water, which is a pitch, right, that you pour water into through a filter. And that technology is actually very good for arsenic and lead. And they have been checked out. They actually have gotten approval from the NSF organization for the efficacy or the efficiency of their filter. The only problem is the more arsenic you have in your water and the more lead you have in your water, the more frequently you're going to have to change that filter. Filter. So fortunately they do sell bulk filter packs. So the Zero water filter, I've actually looked into them. We just need a webinar on this. We're doing a course for consumers on how to survive a chemical disaster. And I talked about the zero water filter. So that's number one. Number two, if at all possible, if you do have the budget for an air filtration system system, get an air filter for your indoor environment. Unfortunately, the good ones, the good air filters are expensive. The Austin Air, which is the one that the Cancer Free Economy Network, which is a wonderful group of scientists that I support, they recommend the Austin air and the EPA recommends the Austin air filter because it has 12 pounds of carbon in it and it's actually very good at getting stuff out of the air. Know the other air filters? We could talk about them for 100 years. But air filtration I think is a real necessity, especially for people who May be exposed to urban air, wildfire, smoke, or the people of East Palestine. You know, if you live near a railroad track, you should probably have an.

Air still an issue for them. I was just reading about that in the New York Times. It's still an issue.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I've been intimately informed evolved there. Dioxin has a half life of decades in the human body. So, yes.

Okay, so filter your water, filter your air, do a sauna if you can. What else?

Number three. Dr. Russell Jaffe, who's a friend of mine, used to be a senior research fellow at NIH and now has his own research laboratory, has shown that given the average number of toxicants that we are all exposed to, we have to get into our bodies at least least 3,000 milligrams of vitamin C, better known as mineral ascorbate, every day just to filter out the kind of ambient air and water toxicants that we're exposed to. So that's 3 grams. Most people think of that as a high dose. I don't think of that as a high dose at all.

We do 50 for cancer. So I'm like, yeah, whatever.

Yeah, yeah, well, yeah, yeah. 60 IV. So orally. Orally, it's hard for people to get that much in orally. But 3,000 milligrams, please. At least 3,000 milligrams. We know that buffered mineral ascorbate is kind of the scientific term that we use. It's vitamin C attached to a mineral. So that mineral is either going to be magnesium, potassium or zinc or maybe sodium. It's cheap. It's something that everybody can do every day. And if you can double that dose without getting loose. Stool. Stool, do it. You may need to split that dose up into two or three or four different doses. We metabolize vitamin C very, very quickly in the body. So that's number three. Everybody needs to be. You know, there are many supplements we can talk about, but there's, there's good data on pregnant women taking vitamin C and losing significant amounts of lead in their urine and having perfectly normal and healthy outcomes comes after that. So we're talking about, I think that was a thousand or two thousand milligrams of vitamin C daily throughout their pregnancy. So it's safe even for pregnant women.

And I always say to, I mean, I'm an ob gyn. I'm like, we don't touch you if you're pregnant. I don't want to do anything to you because it's going to write into.

The baby my one exception because it is documented in the medical literature. I can say this does appear to be safe. This cohort had, all of them had normal, healthy to term outcomes.

Right.

Okay.

Okay. So top three, filter your air, filter your water. 3,000 milligrams or 3 grams of buffered ascorbic acid daily.

Yep. Buffered mineral ascorbate. Yeah, sorry.

Okay. I think we should stop there, Lynn, because there's so much more to talk about. But this is a good sort of.

Of place. I'm happy to come back.

Yeah, let's have you back in. And where can people reach you?

So I have a company called emei, stands for Environmental Medicine Education International, but it's a lot easier to say EMEI global.com and that's our teaching platform. So mostly, you know, I teach to physicians. And we are now just getting ready to launch our consumer course. So this is for, for everybody because East Palestine really did it for me. It's like, okay, there was no guidance there. No guidance was given to those people. It was a failure of public health. So we're teaching consumers about risks for chemical exposure and how to mitigate those risks. So talking about air filtration, water filtration, simple supplementation, things like that.

Okay, great. So emeiglobal.com, we'll put that in the show notes so people can reach out to you. Thank you. And I'll close out the show by saying thank you so much. Mean, I love what you're doing. I honor what you're doing because it resonates so deeply with me. And thank you for being a champion for our health.

Well, you and I need to clone ourselves times a million. Right? That's our job and that's our mission.

Well, if you're listening to this and this kept your attention, follow like pass it along. Because it's the passing along part. It's our commitment is to reach a hundred million people and that's going to be a big job. Right. So we can do it, we can get there, but it's going to take passing it along. So if you're listening, pass it along to someone who this would be valid, valuable for. So.

Absolutely.

Thanks for joining us, Lynn. Thank you for being here. Our guest is Lynn Patrick. She's amazing. Huge resource. And thanks for listening to another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I'm Wendy Trubo, this is Lynn Patrick and pleasure, honor.

And I'm happy to come back whenever.

Awesome. Thank you, Lynn.