From Mercury's Mad Hatter's Disease to a Message of Hope, with Dr. Dan Pompa

The biggest reason why people don't feel well, have hormone problems, can't lose weight anymore. It's a toxic issue. You don't see fat people in Italy. It's like. And they eat 20% more carbs than we do. But the toxin levels there are massively different. Because glyphosate is outlawed, most of the chemicals that we're dealing with in a lot of our food is outlawed.

If you want to live like you matter, ditch the pills, look great and feel freaking amazing. You're in the right place. I'm Dr. Wendy Trubo.

And I'm Dr. Ed Levitan. Welcome to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast.

Where we empower you to live a vibrant and healthy life by optimizing your structural, chemical, emotional, social and spiritual lives.

Hold on to your hats.

Welcome to the five journeys Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. I've got Ed today. So we have a celebrity sighting. And we have another celebrity sighting because we have Dr. Dan Pompa here. He is an author, speaker, media personality with degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Life University. He's considered an icon in the alternative health and wellness industry and has spent more than 20 years educating practitioners and the general public on the root causes of inflammation driven diseases. We'll get into it. His mess became his message. He's the founder of pompa program healthcenters.com cellular solutions and the author of Cellular Healing Diet and Beyond Fasting. Welcome, Dan. We're super psyched to have you here.

Yeah, I love this conversation. Two people who really love, love detox, getting to the real cause of why people don't feel well. That's why we're here, right?

Exactly. So tell me, you kind of alluded before we hit record that you got your life back. So what does that mean? What happened for you?

Yeah, this was back in 1999.

So Dark Ages, right?

Exactly what the Internet was like. You know, there wasn't like what it was out there today. Right. I, you know, just some research articles on PubMed or, you know, all the sexy stuff wasn't around. But needless to say, it was still enough to, for me to find things. You know, by the way, when I was searching to get my life back, it started like, you know, I mean, like so many fatigue and I was like running a very busy practice at that time and training on my bike, very, you know, busy. Two young boys at that time, five kids now. But yeah, I mean, life as I know just came to like a screeching halt. But starting with fatigue, then it went to like Just like, weird anxiety. Never had that before. Then it went to these weird headaches that I never had a headache like that, right. Lasting. And I thought I was over training. My adrenals were fried, so I would. I backed off. My training that I was doing on the bike didn't get better. I actually. I was getting worse. And then it was like these weird gut issues that started. Never had that before. Then it was insomnia, panic attacks, sound sensitivity, irritability. I literally became someone I wasn't. My wife and I were going, like, what is going on? Like, most people, you're searching and searching. I went to. I read books back then. Like I said, there wasn't as much Internet, but anyone that I thought knew something, I read their book, and I would go see them fly across the country. We remortgaged our home. I mean, I. I, like, you know, literally tanked our income trying to figure this thing out. You know, I became a bit unfunctional. You know, I. I hid it for most people because I was the guy who was healthy. I was the guy who was supposed to be the healthy one, took care of people. I hid it from my family, started not showing up at family events. Right. Was very, you know, uncommon for me, and making excuses, you know, and I. They could tell something wasn't right. They just didn't know what wasn't right. But, you know, everything I teach today has come out of that pain.

What was that moment, Dan, when you were like, searching and searching and searching, and then you found something that you're like, I'm on the right track. Do you remember what that was?

A few times. You know, I mean, I. I literally. You kind of feel like you're on the right track a lot sometimes, right. And then it. That. That what helped you then didn't last. Right. So I, you know, I knew my adrenals were fried, but of course, at one point, I thought that was the answer, right? And it's like, hey, start supporting my adrenals. I think that was it. I think I was. Yeah, not so simple. Thyroid. My hair was thinning. I had these thyroid symptoms. Blood work was normal, even though I did have all the thyroid symptoms. But thyroid conditions are subclinical for 10, 20 years, you know, so. Yeah, but again, I was addressing the thyroid, the adrenals, my hormones, all the stuff that most people I would say would do, thinking I was on the right track many times, you know, and then I. I thought I was online, and I found Mad Hatter's disease.

We have it in our book? Actually, yes.

Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. Most people probably don't even know what it is, but people making felt hats, I'll simplify. Use mercury as part of the process. They were known as mad Hatters. And I had every symptom. I did. And so I went and got a blood test that I found. The head of toxicology, Allegheny General Research. I. This guy was known, you know, in Pittsburgh. And I ran $5,000 worth of blood work that day, and my insurance didn't cover any of it.

Oh, so painful.

I needed an answer because at this point, I was saying to my wife, too, you know, maybe I am just crazy. You know, maybe this is just my outcome, right? And of course, she was the rock and said, you know, you're not crazy. But anyways, that day I ran a mercury test, too. Came back negative. Matter of fact, that doctor came in and he looked right and said, son, you're healthier than me. That's what he said. He looked at my blood work. You're healthier than me. Meaning, like, I just wanted to find something. And of course, the mercury was in normal range a year or so later.

Wait, can we pause there? Can we please pause there for the listeners? Because I get this question a lot. People are like, can't you just do a blood test? Why are you doing these specialty tests? My insurance will cover a blood test for mercury. And my response is, unless you have an acute exposure to a heavy metal, like if you live in Flint, Michigan, your blood test will be positive for lead. But otherwise, within four to six weeks, it's stored away. You're not going to see it in the bloodstream. So for the listeners, it's good if you had something happen, but it's useless if you've been sick like I was, and like, you were right, it's a useless test.

Absolutely. And the Mad Hatters, of course, their blood tests were positive because they were getting a daily exposure using mercury, right? So anyways, he said this. I was working with this bright endocrinologist, read his book, and, you know, because I again, I was still chasing the thyroid. I knew my thyroid, my body temperatures were so low, I had all the symptoms. And he said to me, I think you have mercury toxicity. You know, just some of the symptoms. You have, the low body temperature. And I said, oh, yeah, I thought so too, but I. The test was negative. What test did you. Blood test. He told me what you told me, you know, wrong test, wrong test. You know, try to challenge it out. But he said something wise, too. He said, you know, even on a challenge, it's not perfect because it could be in the brain and deep enough. Sometimes it doesn't show, but start there. But I, I got a very bizarre pattern and it, you know, there was some that showed. And so that led me on a different road. I said, you, where do you think I got it? He said, do you have any dental work done around the time this all came about? And I said, I may have because I got these two fillings, silver fillings out, which contain 50% mercury. And I had gold filling put in. I still had about six fillings in my mouth. Anyways, I looked back because I was cycling. I had the one. My symptoms logged when they started. It was days after I had that, done that dental work. So I was like, oh, wow. Like, I, I remember that not feeling. I just thought it was the anesthetic. I thought it was something. Who knows, right? Here I am, how many years later putting that together. But, you know, it was a perfect storm. I also was living in a low grade moldy home that I was adapting to. You know, mold's not good for anybody. But, you know, because my bucket was full with the metal, I was the one in the house that, you know, was not dealing with it. And, you know, I learned that because it was like, once I started getting the mercury correctly, we're going to get here, folks, of how to do it correctly out of my brain, which that was the problem. And then I still was like, okay. Certain symptoms weren't going away haphazardly. When we moved out of that home, it was like, oh, my God, another level cleared. Because now even if the mold wasn't what made me sick, it was definitely keeping me from getting well and kept me, you know, because once sensitive to one neurotoxin, you become sensitive to another. Another part of my journey was I had, you know, infections in my jaw that I didn't know I had. My body was dealing with it. But once I got challenged and my bucket was full, overflowing, so to speak, right? I, when I got rid of this infection that I happened upon a whole nother story. It was like, oh, my gosh. It's like that was like another world had opened up. Like all these other bizarre symptoms. My gut that I was like, still not well. Even though I was getting rid of certain things all of a sudden got better. I mean, like, just like that. And when someone's not well, we want it to be one thing, but it's never that way again. I. I'll say it again, even if it wasn't the thing that made you sick. Now it could be the thing keeping your bucket full, keeping your immune system from regulating, not attacking itself. You know, keeping you in a state of inflammation. You have to then start emptying that bucket down and you have to start getting rid of these things. And typically it's three big ones. Like, all toxins aren't the same. You know, I, I know there's a lot about plastic right now, and I know humans are ingesting at least a credit card size of plastic a week. That's a true figure. All the forever chemicals, all these chemicals. And I educate people on social media about them. But look, it, it's, it's when you get hit with these big ones, which I call super toxins, that decimates your cellular detox pathways. And that's really where real detox is. That's how I got my life back. That's what I teach for. Taught for 20 years, still teaching it.

So let's talk about that. There's some, I think he was a pediatrician and he died. And he said, if you're sitting on a tack, all the Motrin in the world is not going to help until you take the tack out. But if you're sitting on 10 tacks and you take one tack out, that's not really going to help. You're still sitting on nine tacks. So you have to actually systematically remove all of the pain points. And when you get to, you know, 50 to 60% or more, then you start to tip the balance towards health.

That's a great analogy though. Right? But here's the problem. I would argue even with alternative medicine, the shift it's taken, they're not even removing tax anymore. Right. It's, you know, alternative medicine, it's kind of made this shift maybe even in the last five years. I don't know, it seems to just be evolving worse to where all they're doing is, you know, they're running fancy tests and giving people a lot of fancy stuff instead of focusing on the cause. Every seminar I have the privilege of speaking at, I, I hit that. It's like, let's get back to why. Truly, if you remove the interference, the body will heal. And again, I, you know, yeah, you know, vitamins and things like that. But it's not deficiencies that really most people are really sick from. It is too much of these absolute devastating toxins that are really causing the epidemics. And again, there's, I talk about, you know, five deficiencies that Many people have today. And, and so I'm not throwing that out.

Yeah, I was good. I was going to challenge you a little bit. Like if you have a methylation issue, if you have a detox genetic issue, that's partly why you build up the toxins. So we do have to deal with that.

And by the way, it's one of my five R's of how you fix and detox a cell. R number five is re establishing methylation. Right. Because it is a problem. But let's back up there. I think that's a great point. So what are doctors doing? Alternate doctors. They're saying here, take this better form of B12 folate. Right. Maybe even supporting the methylation chain or you know, in other ways. I do it too. Okay, this is good. However, let me use my wife as an example. We did. My wife started getting hormone symptoms. Okay. Bizarre things. We did a urine, a 24 hour urine hormone test which showed a buildup of a something, a dangerous form of estrogen, estrogen metabolite called 4 hydroxy estrone that leads to breast cancer, which her mother had. So that's pretty scary when you see that, right? And she had very high levels on the test. It showed her methylation was tanked. Okay. So we spent a year doing everything. I researched methylation, learned a lot. It was good. I did. We spent everything. We could never get that methylation to truly come up or it would come up and seem better and then go down. We then discovered that she had extremely high lead levels like her mother who ended up not dying of the breast cancer. She treated that 10 years later, ended up with uterine cancer, never got to the cause, died of the uterine cancer. So my wife was heading in that same direction, did a lead test. I was just looking at probably general things, trying to help her out. Her lead was literally off the chart at that time. Under 5 was normal, hers was 110. What the heck? How, where did she get that? She got it from her mother. The number one source of lead is mom because it's normal to lose bone during pregnancy. But out comes the lead. Most lead is stored in volume in the bone. And by the way, I always, in some of my lectures, I show my kids lead because they had digestive issues. That happened young. Blah, blah, blah. Anyways, their lead levels off the chart, just like hers. But the point I want to make is that the lead was crushing her methylation. Methylation is an adaptation to all stress. I mean you need a methyl group to turn on cortisol, anxiety and turn it off. And you need methylation to get rid of toxic hormones. You need methylation to drive detox pathways. It parallels glutathione in the cell. So when you have a lot of physical, chemical, emotional stress combination, methylation gets depleted. So, I mean, yeah. And I mean, I, of course, I utilize all these things because we have to build up these levels, but if we don't get to the cause, and that's where alternative method, alternative medicine is kind of like ignoring. It's like, man, you have to figure out the cause. If you're not asking these patients what their home environment's like and, you know, are they in a mold? And what if you don't know what that fingerprint looks like? These people are just going to go on and on and on and on. Right. And if you're not asking, you know, if they have silver fillings, you know, how many people go to the best alternative doctors, like, and I won't mention names, and I'm like, do this again. They have silver fillings in their mouth. It's like, do you know those are vaporizing mercury into your brain every day? Every day. Oh, and you know where the mercury goes into the hypothalamus, pituitary. At least studies show that's where most of it goes. You can go to any place in the brain and manifest different symptoms and diagnoses. But, you know, when I was getting. When I was downstream and trying to figure out the adrenals and the thyroid, one of the things I backed into, it's the control tower.

It.

There's something my pituitary, hypothalamus. Because that's why when I do this for my adrenals, that with my thigh, and it was like. So I realized it's here. But the problem was I just didn't know what it was. I didn't realize mercury had built up over years since the time I was a kid. Oh, I wore contact lenses in the 70s, 80s, and guess what? Thimerosal was in solution going right into my brain.

I used to. I didn't know that was mercury, Dan, But I knew back in the 80s and 90s, I was actually reactive to timerosal. And I would say, I can't get a vaccine if it has timerosal in it, because I'm reactive. I didn't know that that was a nice name for mercury at the time. You know, I was like 20 years old. I just knew that when I got these vaccines, I mean, I blew up. And the common denominator was Tamerosil. So I knew for a long time I was reactive. I just didn't know that's what it was.

That form of mercury in there is called ethylmercury, and they used to call it the safe mercury because they couldn't find it in the blood. You know why they couldn't find the blood? Because it went so quickly into the brain.

So for, for our listeners, I want to go back to something you talked about because, I mean, I only see women in my practice, and a bunch of them want to reproduce. And I'm like, okay, well, let's get you optimized before pregnancy, get rid of as many toxins as we can. But as soon as you're pregnant and when you're nursing, that's automatically a detox event for you. So we're not going to amp that system up while you're pregnant or nursing, because you're already doing that. You're already giving your baby a legacy that they don't want. So let's not make it any more powerful. So for anyone listening who's thinking of getting pregnant, you want to do as much as you can because a portion of what you have is contributed to the baby. Your generosity. Right. Inadvertent generosity. So. And think about it. All of our moms grew up, no matter how old you are, essentially you grew up in lead paint, lead pipes, lead gasoline. And that was phased out in the 60s and 70s. So if you came from someone who came from those times, they had lead.

Yeah, I caught the lead generation. Right. Yeah, I was in the lead generation. Right. But. And then, you know, there's the mercury generation, too, which kind of goes on, of course. Yeah. But, you know, we all had silver fillings. Our parents had silver fillings. The drash study, a German study, was the first study. There's others now that showed, ladies, the number of silver fillings that contain 50% mercury in your mouth on the study was proportional to how much mercury they found in the baby's brain. Now, that was autopsy studies. Very, very accurate way to assess brain mercury. And that's a scary thing. So where did we get our first mercury load in utero? From the womb to the tomb. Oh, and then we start putting silver fillings in. Right. Innocently enough. And by the way, my dentist, who is our friend, you know, back then, it's like, you know, that's a pretty deep cavity or crevice in your tooth. We're just going to fill that. Yeah, that's what they do.

The more, the more, the better.

And Then don't forget the wildfires.

Yeah, good money.

Don't forget about the mining and the wildfire mining of, mining of the forest which releases the mercury and then the wildfires which releases the mercury. So travels for thousands of miles potentially. And then you get it.

Well, the thing that I really don't get is that there are still tons of dentists that still use the mercury fillings. The Malcolms. That, that just, just blows my mind.

Like Ed, because the ADA still says they're safe. They, and they've changed their story, their song. How many times before they would say, okay, you know, the mercury is bound and it doesn't release. They couldn't say that anymore. It was just, you know, so easy to disprove that. Then they said it's too little to matter. Then they said it stops leeching anyway. I can, I mean it was like, you know, what are they going to say next? And they just make these blanket statements and you know.

Well, the challenge is most, if you think about it, most of the upper class people don't get it and then you have lower class people that are get most of the amalgams and then they pass that on and become such a legacy of a vicious cycle that's.

Just, you know, they estimate four generations of inheritance of that back bad lead. Oh, and it turns on genes that inherited three or four generations. Right. So. But yeah, you're right about that because see, insurance companies will pay for silver fillings. Why? They're cheap and they last long, so they'll pay for those, but they won't pay for the white stuff that the rich kids get. Right? The composite or the ceramic. No way they'll pay for that. So those cheaper insurances will just pay that. So that's why dentists that serve those communities are just, it's an insurance, you know, they don't have the money to upgrade to the white, of course, so they're just getting what their insurance pays for something. Think about that. And who's even talking about that? Who's even talking about that?

Nobody.

We are. Come on.

Yeah. Is there anything we haven't asked you that we should ask you?

Well, I think someone in this conversation right now could be like, oh my God. It's like what you said makes so much sense, but I still don't know what to do. I mean, I get that, right? I mean there's, I, you know, it's, that's. This is tough, right? This is tough stuff. One thing I would say, you know, to oversimplify it, think about Us all having a bucket, right? Genetically, some of us have bigger buckets, some of us have smaller ones, right? That's our ability to hold stress. Not just physical toxins. But I'll call this the stress bucket. We mentioned in utero, this bucket starts filling, right? We mentioned mercury, lead, such others, right? This is where it starts, right? Then we move into a moldy home, right? We start makeup. All the things we're putting in are all these forever chemicals, plastics, right? I mean, all these exposures today, which by the way, if you look at, I did a, a video on this, I showed people from 1931, you know, even like 1950s, right? And just these are random pictures in cities. And I said, what don't you see? And some people got it. I don't see fat people. I'm like, nope, you didn't. Now, was it because they were eating less carbohydrates? No, not really. I would argue they had better oils. They were eating with lard, they were eating with butter, right? So I absolutely get that. But when we look at when all of the hormone problems started, weight loss problem, the chemical revolution occurred after World War II, right? And give it 20 years after that, and then you start seeing all of it happen. And it's like the biggest reason why people don't feel well, have hormone problems, can't lose weight anymore. It's a toxic issue. I can prove it further. I go to Italy a lot, and again, you don't see fat people in Italy. It's like. And they eat 20% more carbs than we do. Now, I am all for eating, you know, non processed food, but they eat a ton of carbs, right? But you know, the, the toxin levels there are massively different because glyphosate is outlawed, most of the chemicals that we're dealing with in a lot of our food is outlawed. But anyways, the point is though, I don't want to lose the point. This bucket one day overflows and that's when the symptoms start, right? When the bucket finally overflows. And, and of course we start.

Wait, wait, wait. You have symptoms before your bucket overflows. But I would say it's not bad enough. You haven't hit the bad enough level, right? You went off the cliff 20 years ago, but you had signs. They just didn't, they didn't register as a problem until it was like, oh my God.

It's like you said earlier, right? Normal. Is it normal? So you're right. Symptoms start, but boom, that's when the bottom falls out. That's when we typically start reaching for medications, right? And then maybe that doesn't work. Then we move on to natural things, right? Then we're so clever. Now we end up in the biohacks, right? We end up doing a lot. And I. People criticize me because they think I'm critical of biohacks. I do them, I do them. But what, you know, but it's. It's fractional to. Compared to what we're talking about here is like getting to these big causes, right? It's like all the biohacks in the world, and I love most of them, honestly. It's really. It's not getting. Get people's health back. It's not. It's just fun.

I say that to people. Do you say, I don't know if you. I don't know. I don't know if you say this. I say to people, look, I have the best supplements in the world. Like, we've vetted all of them, but they're useless. If you're going to abuse yourself, if you're not going to sleep, if you're going to be a stress ball, if you're going to do all kinds of things that don't work for your body, the best supplements in the world are not going to keep up with that. It's just. It's too big of a gap.

But, you know, until someone, boom, overflows, that message doesn't resonate. You just said, because they would rather live the life they're living, drink the alcohol, whatever amount they're doing, stay up late, it's not bad enough until the bottom really falls out. Then they go, okay, I'm willing to give up this. I'm willing to do that, right? You know, but then, you know, then it becomes complicated, okay? Ultimately, to disconfuse the conversation, how do we get wealth? We empty this bucket. And you have to do that in every cell of the body. If we can just get those cellular pathways functioning again, the body starts to do what it does, and we can't. We're not clever enough doctors, you know, or anybody. It's. The body's innate intelligence, has to work. And the only way to get that working for us is to empty those buckets. You know, imagine if I had two glasses here, one filled near the top and the other one barely filled. If I stress this, one filled near the top, little bit of stress, symptoms overflow. Oh, Anx can't handle it. Oh, my God. Right? It's like, you know, or just headaches, whatever it is. More pain. This one, if I empty out and bring it down to this level, I can stress it like this. No symptoms. That's where we need to be. That's where I am now. But I was this guy, right? But that's it. I mean, so to over simplify it, we just have to empty our buckets, but we have to do it at the cellular level. We have to open up the cellular pathways, you know, and, and that's what I teach. And, and that's, you know, that's why I actually taught this, this concept of looking for my cap for 20 years to doctors. And I, my, My children were the ones who said, dad, you need to take it directly to people looking for the answer. And then that's how Pompa program was born. It's a. It's basically saying, this is what I've taught for 20 years. Here's somebody looking for an answer that hasn't found one. This is what you do. And it educates them with a coach who I've trained to go through this process of cellular detox, cellular healing.

Is that the best way? Because that's actually.

That was our next questions. How do people. How do people find you? And we'll put all this in the show notes so they can click on it. But how do. How do people reach out, get in touch. What should they be doing?

Yeah, I mean, two ways. If you go to pompaprogram.com there's a great webinar. I did teaching training on this. Watch it. That'll help you. And then you can, you know, speak to someone even about the program that I was just speaking about. If you're interested in being, like, certified in this, which I for, you know, 20 years, just certified doctors last year. It's the first time that I'm certifying the average person, pain to purpose, like me, right? Who's been through it and goes, I want to do this now. You know, and coaches, you know, I'm certifying coaches in what I do, but also people who are just want to do it. That's healthcenters.com if you want to be certified, which is a new thing for me. I'm trying to. Obviously, my impact is to, you know, take this message to the world. By the way, I'll end here. I said in the beginning, you know, I didn't choose this. You know, it chose me when I was real. At my worst, my wife, true story, she literally was on her knees praying for not just me, for our whole family. Well, I only had two boys at that time. And God spoke to her heart that not only is he going to get me well, but I'm going to take a message to the world. And when my wife would tell me that, I never wanted to hear it. My exact words were, I can't even get myself better, you know, how dare you put this on me. And here I am today, you know, through that, the prophetic word, and, you know, everything I learned out of it. Pain to purpose is what I'm teaching today. So I always like to go from there's pain to purpose. But there's a promise, that promise my wife held on to that he was going to get me. Well, she held on to it. At a certain point, maybe I did. But, you know, there's a promise out there for everyone looking for an answer. I believe it.

Yeah. Really don't give up hope because there is a future that moves, touches, and inspires you in which you feel well.

So 100% well, we can be doing this forever.

I know. But I would say for the listeners, thank you for listening and for Dan, thanks for being here and sharing the message and the really a message of inspiration and hope. Right. And possibility. So thank you for joining us.

Yeah. Thank you for being here.

Thanks for being here. And then again, thanks for joining us for another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. Ed Levitan, Wendy Trubo, and Dan Pompa. You heard it from the source. Don't go it alone.

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