Lead Poisoning
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LEAD POISONING www.drhyman.com 6 Tips to Help You Get the Lead Out Luckily there are steps you can take to help you heal from lead poisoning if you have been exposed. Try the following: 1. Find out if you are lead-toxic. The easiest test is a simple blood lead test. Be sure the lab can measure VERY low levels of lead accurately. Anything higher than 2 micrograms/deciliter is toxic and should be treated. Unfortunately, the blood test only checks for current or ongoing exposures, so you must also take a heavy metal challenge test with DMSA, EDTA, or DMPS, which can be administered by a doctor trained in heavy metal detoxification. (See www.functionalmedicine.org or www.acam.org to find a qualified doctor.) Consider undergoing chelation therapy if your lead levels are high. 2. Reduce your exposures by having a “no shoes in the house” policy. A great deal of lead can be tracked into your house in the dust on the soles of shoes. Leaving your shoes at the door helps reduce the amount of contamination in your home. 3. Test your water for heavy metals. There are a number of home test kits available online. If you prefer to have a professional test your water, call your city water provider or look for labs in your area that will perform this kind of test. 4. Buy a carbon or reverse osmosis water filter for your drinking water. These filters remove lead and other toxic substances like PCBs. They are my favorite kind of filter and the type I use in my home. 5. Take 1,000 milligrams of buffered ascorbic acid (vitamin C) a day. This helps remove lead from the body. 6. Take 2,000 to 4,000 IU of vitamin D3 a day to prevent your bones from releasing lead into your bloodstream. Even though many of us have toxic levels of lead in our bodies, there is a lot we can do to prevent it and treat it. Doing so is an essential step to healing your body and achieving lifelong vibrant health. 9 Steps to Reversing Dementia Start by looking hard for correctable causes of memory loss. They include: • Pre-diabetes or metabolic syndrome • Low thyroid function • Depression • Deficiencies in B vitamins, especially vitamin B12 • Omega-3 fat deficiencies • Mercury or other heavy metal toxicity • Vitamin D deficiency • High cholesterol • Unique genes that predispose you to nutritional or detoxification problems Doctors who practice Functional Medicine and follow the principles I talk about in UltraWellness can help you find these problems. Once you identify the underlying causes of the imbalance, here are a few things that can help your mind get a tune-up: 1. Balance your blood sugar with a whole foods, low glycemic diet 2. Exercise daily — even a 30-minute walk can help 3. Deeply relax daily with yoga, meditation, biofeedback, or just deep breathing 4. Take a multivitamin and mineral supplement 5. Take an omega-3 fat supplement 6. Take extra vitamin B6, B12, and folate 7. Take vitamin D 8. Treat thyroid or low sex hormones 9. Get rid of mercury through a medical detoxification program This is just a start, but it can go a long way to giving your brain the chance to heal and recover if you have memory problems. Even if you aren’t suffering from cognitive decline, you should take these steps because they can help you prevent the aging of your brain and obtain lifelong health. I have always been interested in vitamin C and its many possible uses. A few years back, a farmer from New Zealand was in an extended coma and doctors wanted to take him off life support. Quite a story unfolded, but the long and short if it is this: His three adult sons insisted that he be given intra venous vitamin C. He came out of the coma, went back in when the vitamin was withdrawn, and came out again when it was given again. Eventually he got off the vitamin C and got out of bed. He is now back home farming. The farmer was hositalised due to a case of swine flu. He also had leukemia, which had somehow disappeared throughout his hospital stay.I have heard other stories about vitamin C being very helpful with blood cancers. Intravenous vitamin C delivers far higher doses to the blood stream than we can achieve from oral consumption of tablets, but very few doctors in Australia, NZ or US are willing to give this treatment. Many people can build up their tolerance for oral vitamin C to around 12,000mg, or 12 grams, daily, whereas IV treatments use as much as 50 - 100 grams daily with slow delivery. However, a new development might help overcome this. A unique bonding with liposomes (a type of fat) apparently enables the vitamin C to be absorbed much faster into the blood stream, without causing intestinal distress. This is called Lyposomal Vitamin C. Some serious infections have responded well with 5 sachets per day, costing around $5 daily. The NZ farmer ended up using this form of vitamin C when he was not allowed access to the IV form. Others make their own home version using and ultrasonic jewelery cleaner, lecithin, vitamin C powder and pure water. There is some debate as to the effectiveness, but price is better. Have you been told that vitamin C has not been "proven"? If one cares to look, there are huge amounts of vitamin C research published in journals. One doctor who uses vitamin C says that asprin is the only other thing around with more research to support its use! If you want to follow this further, take a look at the Vitamin C Foundation. Diagnosing and Treating Mercury Toxicity The first thing to understand is that identifying mercury problems and detoxifying from them (or any other kind of heavy metal poisoning) has to be done VERY carefully and under the supervision of a physician trained in the techniques of metal detoxification, but it can be done safely and effectively with an educated doctor’s assistance. What follows is a three-step plan to find out if you are suffering from mercury poisoning and detoxifying from it. Understand that this approach has to be done carefully and systematically to make sure you get your body ready for removing the metals. Step 1: Getting Ready for Detoxification This process can take a few months, and I can’t stress enough how important this preparation step is. It is accomplished by optimizing your nutritional status and detoxifying ability. Once this is done you will begin mobilizing and binding the metals in your body and excreting them through your urine, bile, stool, and sweat. Here is what I recommend to my patients. 1. Optimize your gut function. Eliminate the common food allergens (dairy, gluten, corn, eggs, etc.), taking probiotics and enzymes for one to two months before detoxifying. 2. Optimize your nutritional status for detoxification. Use healthy fats (omega-3 fats, olive oil, and flax oil), amino acids (which boost all your liver’s detoxification capacity), and minerals, particularly zinc and selenium (which help your body detoxify metals). 3. Enhance your liver’s detoxification pathways. Take folate and vitamins B12 and B6 and eating sulfur- containing foods such as broccoli, collards, kale, daikon radish, garlic, onions, and omega-3 eggs. 4. Start sauna therapy. Make sure you take adequate electrolyte and mineral replacements to prevent dehydration and mineral loss from the sweat. 5. Optimize elimination routes for metals including your urine, stool, and sweat. Use fluids, fiber, and saunas. Step 2: Integrate Additional Steps to Support Detoxification At this stage you can integrate the following to support your liver detoxification pathways even more: • Alginate from seaweed (this binds to metal in the gut) • Selenium, zinc, n-acetylcysteine, lipoic acid, milk thistle, and garlic Step 3: The Metal Detoxification Period • Find a biological dentist to evaluate the extent of your mercury fillings and options for replacing them. This can be done slowly over time, but must be done VERY carefully and only under a trained biological dentist’s supervision to avoid burdening yourself with more mercury during the removal process. • Get a test to assess your total body load of mercury. This is called a challenge or provocation test. This is done with a doctor’s prescription and under a doctor’s supervision. The easiest and safest way to do this is to take 500 mg of DMPS in one dose first thing in the morning after emptying your bladder, followed by a six-hour urine collection. DMPS is a prescription drug and is not FDA-approved in the US, although it has been approved and used for decades in Europe. • The other option is to use DMSA, which is FDA-approved. It pulls out a lot less mercury and needs to be taken at a dose of 30 mg/kg for the challenge test. I find this is not as effective to get a true reading on what is in the body. • Use binding agents to pull the mercury out of your body. There is a lot of controversy about the best way to do this. But after helping people detox from heavy metals for 10 years, I’ve found the safest and most effective treatment is oral DMSA. It is taken as follows: One 100 to 250 mg capsule of DMSA orally three times a day before meals. Take it for three days. Then take 11 days off. Do this for six months.