HealthMattersBlog.com

Mercury is a neurotoxin.

So what does that mean exactly? It means that if you have it in your system, it can/will affect your nerves/nervous system…adversely.

Doesn’t sound like fun does it? Folks are stressed out already these days even without a neurotoxin in their system.

So what might be the symptomatic effects of mercury on your nervous system? Well, I’m not a Doctor, but I have read about these effects and they include: tremors, personality changes, nervousness and dementia.

Not my idea of a good time.

If you’ve experienced these symptoms or know someone who has, you may want to suggest mercury as a possible culprit to consider.

Problems always have a cause. The trick is figuring out what that cause is.

Mercury is often overlooked as a culprit because of the “professional” use and thus endorsement of mercury in fillings. Nevertheless, many people have had these symptoms abate upon the removal of these fillings and for others the taking of an additional step cleared the problem.

That step is chelation.

I’ve written quite a bit about chelation (getting out heavy metals, etc.) and about mercury in earlier posts. If you are interested in reading more on these subjects, please know that those posts are available to you.

If you have a specific question about Mercury Poisoning, please leave it here…

http://app.sgizmo.com/surveybuilder/preview_survey.php?id=46782

The first 20 people to leave a question for me there, will receive the first chapter of my mercury book entitled: “Mercury Poisoning: A Story of Survival”. And thanks for participating!

Pleasant topic, no doubt.

But the fact is, there are lots of dear people that are struggling desperately with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), Crohn’s Disease and Colitis.

Am I positing that these are all the same thing. Not exactly.  I’m not saying they’re not either.  Truthfully, I am not sure one way or the other.   I am sure that most Doctor’s don’t know the cause of any of them.  These terms are convenient labels for a set of symptoms for which conventional medicine knows no cause.  They only know medications that temper some of the symptoms.  Sometimes at great risk to the entire body.

Now let’s see. What would be a source of mercury that could end up being utilized in our intestinal wall?

Fish? Amalgam Fillings (which constantly methylate? Given that both sources go primarily into your digestive tract, they are certainly two potential significant sources of mercury that your body might unwittingly use in constructing your gut wall.

How much research is there to back this up? Frankly, I don’t know. But I do like following a logical path. If you ingest a substance, isn’t it highly probable that your body will try to utilize it? Sure thing! Now shouldn’t your body know better than to use mercury to construct body parts? Well yes, but from the reading I have done, some forms of mercury can trick your body into thinking it is usable where it is in fact not healthful.

Mercury interferes with the enzymatic processes of digestion. So if your gut has a lot of mercury in the lining, how well do you think you will digest your food?

“Not well” is my conclusion.

First of all, let me define anhydrosis for the non-medical readers. Simply put, anhydrosis is the inability to sweat.

Thus by my title, I am positing that mercury in your body can be a cause of anhydrosis.

This is a given where I am concerned. Thus, I am not trying to prove anything.

However, as many readers of www.healthmattersblog.com are aware, I have mercury poisoning. From June of 2002, until June of 2007, I was unable to sweat more than for just a fraction of a second. From 2005 until now, I have been doing some level or another of mercury chelating (to get the mercury out of my system). Thus, at some point, my body was able to begin sweating normally again.

Most healthy folks don’t like the effects of sweating. But I can tell you, I am thrilled with having the ability to sweat restored.

Dogs are air cooled.  That’s why they pant like crazy when it’s hot.

People are water cooled.  That’s why they sweat when the temperature rises.

Without the ability to sweat, my internal temperature would soar and I would go limp, like a rag doll in July.

Now, I can tolerate some heat. I don’t push it yet, but someday soon, I will.

That’s been my experience with anhydrosis. My ability to sweat has been restored as I have removed mercury from my body through chelation (DMSA and ALA primarily).

I’d be interested to hear what other people’s experiences with anhydrosis have been.

Provocative title I suppose.

Well, not chock full o’ mercury, no. But many popular types of fish do have a significant quantity of mercury.

Tuna Fish.

And what a shame too. Tuna fish was one of my favorite lunches when I was a kid. Confession: with plenty of unhealthy mayonnaise.

When I eat fish now, as often as every few days, I eat it plain. Nearly plain that is, just with a wee bit of salt. And it is delicious.

My preference would be to eat less fish and more vegetables, but I have learned, by experimenting, that I am at my best and feel my best if I make sure to eat a fair amount of high protein foods. I suppose that means I am a protein type.

Anyway, I eat veggies and I eat one kind of fish that has been tested for mercury. The mercury levels are so low that, as my chemical engineering friend says “it nearly amounts to nothing”. I probably get more from walking down the street a few blocks than I do from eating this particular Salmon.

Back to the question: Are Fish Full of Mercury?

The short answer is no. But we ought to ask another question after we answer this one…

Fresh or Frozen Tuna Fish contains 0.38 ppm of mercury on average

Canned Tuna Fish contains 0.20 ppm mercury on average

Swordfish and Shark contain much higher levels.

So, perhaps the average person doesn’t have to be overly paranoid about mercury levels in the average fish. However, some folks are more sensitive than others, I being one of them.

So, while I do eat fish, I am highly selective about which type and from where I get it.

The other question, we should probably ask is: Just How Much Mercury Do You Want In Your Body Anyway?

That will be good for another post.

If you want to know what fish I eat, it is Wild Alaska Sockeye Salmon. If you want to know where I get it, click here and you can help support my blog and if you do, thank you very much.

1 Mercury levels came from http://www.fda.gov/fdac/reprints/mercury.html

First, we ought to understand what chelation is. Chelation is, generally speaking, the act of taking an agent (orally or intravenously) to aid in removing toxic metals from your body.

As promised in my last post, not only will I talk about DMPS, EDTA & DMSA, but I will also talk about ALA.

Secondly, we ought to know what these acronyms stand for. Ready?

DMPS stands for 2,3 dimercaptopropane sulfonate sodium.

EDTA stands for ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid. Boy, I sure hope you can say that better than I can.

That reminds me of a large word that denotes other large words that have little or no meaning. The word? Floccinaucinihilipilification. My English 1 Professor would be proud. Back to the work at hand…

DMSA stands for meso-2,3 dimercaptosuccinic acid.

And now for the bonus. ALA stands for Alpha Lipoic Acid. This is probably the one that the most number of people are already familiar with.

DMPS doesn’t pass the blood-brain barrier. DMSA and ALA both do.

EDTA is generally used to chelate lead out of the body.

From my experience, DMPS was administered first and my test results showed that the DMPS “teased out” a substantial quantity of mercury from my body. DMPS is generally considered a reasonably chelating agent to use first, since it does not cross the blood-brain barrier.

Initially, when you first discover you are mercury poisoned, there is a lot of mercury that is what could be considered “low hanging fruit” or easy to get. It is preferable to gently go after that mercury while minimizing the possibility of redistributing some of it to your brain. DMPS seems to serve that purpose well.

After several months of slow DMPS pushes (10 or so minutes of a slow release of DMPS intravenously), we switched or ‘graduated’ to DMSA taken orally. That meant that I didn’t need a Doctor or Nurse to assist me with the chelation any more.

This process was an ‘up and down’ exercise, between the stress at work, the stress of not being well and the stress of life and then the chelation itself, it was tough. It reminds me of something that Doctor Lorraine Day said “if you want to get well, quit your job”.

A couple years into that chelation routine and I finally decided that it was best to work from home and focus on getting well. I have not regretted that decision and I believe that God is making a way for me to do so. I am working on my website at crimsonbooks.com and letting people know about the resources there. Nothing is more exciting or rewarding for me than to help people learn information that can save or otherwise improve their lives.

For the last many months, I take both DMSA and ALA simultaneously, both of which do pass the blood-brain barrier. Another way to say this is that we are now pulling mercury out of my brain.

There is a dosage amount that I do not exceed as if I do it makes me feel awful. If I stay under that amount, the chelation itself is relatively easy.

However, my body does seem to have a bit of a back-lash days after the chelation is over. I just have to roll with the punches on that one. Being alive and having lots of good days sure beats being dead or ill the way I had been.

There’s some of my experience with mercury chelating elements.

I did experience EDTA once as well.

It made my lungs feel strange and that was a sign that it was “working”. Since I was on an I.V. where the EDTA was dripping in, the Doctor tapped in some magnesium which relaxed my lungs and made the time in the Doctor’s office enjoyable again.

Wishing you the best of health.

One last thing, if you have had an experience with chelation, please use the comment feature to share your perspective and experience.